HISTORY OF DRAMA

   

Terence, who wrote c195BCE, was a much more literary writer. He came to Rome as

a slave from Carthage and became the protégée of a literary circle for whom he wrote.

His master freed him and gave him his name, Terentius Afer. He aimed for the smile

rather than the guffaw and his characters were usually the elegant men about Rome,

conscious of their manners and annoyed by their elders old fashioned ideas. Although

the setting might be elsewhere. For his plays differed from his Greek sources in that

the manners and behaviour were Roman with Roman attitudes to women and slaves,

with lots of sentimental posturing. He used the same repertoire as Menander and the

same stylistic conventions but he aims for greater realism and has less flamboyance

than Plautus, with what we see as psychological analysis. His prologues also show

him more at home with his master's friends, or at least with a more literate and

thoughtful audience than Plautus. Perhaps not surprisingly his plays were not very

popular with the general public in his lifetime but they have since become most

influential in the development of European drama.

Seneca was the other Roman dramatist whose work has come down to us. He was

born around 4BCE in Spain and lived under both Tiberius and Caligula. He offended

Claudius and then later became tutor and adviser to Nero. He shows some

inconsistencies in his writings and seems to have swayed with the current political

wind. His plots are taken from Greek sources but there is no balance in his

treatments, they are sensational and rhetorical rather than poetic, bathetic rather than

pathetic, with little motivation or development of character. Nevertheless, some

academics refuse to dismiss his work out of hand and suggest that he was deliberately

writing grotesque parodies even travesties of the Greek models in a philosophical

commentary on the sordid world in which he lived. It is thought his plays were not

written to be performed but read and perhaps thus able to be more thoughtfully

considered than would be the case in performance. Like Terence he has helped to

form later European drama and was particularly influential on the Renaissance dramatists.

The term Renaissance is usually attributed to the nineteenth century Swiss art writer

Jakob Burckhardt in his book The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy of 1860 and people have accepted his definition in hindsight. He set out the idea that there was an

almost spontaneous re-birth in interest about the classics, in classical art and

literature. But an earlier writer, in the sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari, often seen as

the Medici PR man for artistic affairs, wrote in his The Lives of the Painters,Sculptors and Architects around 1550:- about

“the rise of the arts to perfection, their decline and their restoration or renaissance.”

Historians are noT agreed that one can set any specific dates for the Renaissance but it

is usually agreed that a rural Medieval feudal society gradually changed to an urban

mercantile society with more centralised political institutions, a commercial economy

and growing lay patronage of the arts and music, sometime around the 14th century

in Italy and this spread to rest of Europe through 16th and 17th centuries, and that

this was a period of renewed interest in the arts of the classical past.

There had been drama before this. There are records of popular comic theatre

 presented by traveling troupes, and of religious plays and theatrical celebrations at

Christian festivals, although many clergy thought plays as such sinful. But much of

the Latin literature survived in the monasteries and in education, and some of the

 plays written as a religious didactic tool used Roman forms. The Gandersheim nun,

Hrotswitha c960 AD, modeled her plays on Terence, while other religious plays have recognizable language from Latin writers. There were also theatrical representations

or kinds of tableaux on a feast day or other special occasion. In Italy these were

known as sacre rappresentazioni and were often given by a confraternity. These used

very elaborate staging effects of all kinds long before such settings were used in

staging secular entertainments.

However the start of an academic classical interest in theatre seems to have begun

with the find of a manuscript copy in 1427 of some of the comedies of Terence and

Plautus which led to attempts to present these and other classical plays in what was

thought to be the original manner. An Academy was formed in Rome by the scholar

Julius Pomponius Laetus (1425-1498) a leading humanist, specifically to study and

 present ancient Latin plays, mainly those of Plautus. Oddly the most irreverent and

 bawdy of the Roman dramatists. Laetus was fanatically devoted to what he

understood by the customs of ancient Rome and even was said to refuse to learn

Greek in case it spoilt his Latin. The Academy was suppressed by Pope Paul II in

1468 for its political aims and pagan spirit and Laetus and his companions were

imprisoned and tortured. But the interest in classical arts and literature continued and

the translations into English of many Latin texts in the sixteenth century brought the

 plays to England, where the Elizabethan dramatists such as Marston plundered the

 plots of Seneca., or like Jonson tried to emulate his style.

T.S Eliot wrote about Seneca’s influence on Elizabethan thought and said “Seneca’s

influence upon dramatic form, upon versification, and language, upon sensibility and

thought, must in the end be all estimated together.” And asserted that “when an

Elizabethan hero or villain dies, he usually dies in the odor of Seneca” by which he

seems to mean that, like Seneca, the Elizabethan heroes do not often have an

honourable death but include disgrace, violation even dismemberment whether

  

deserved or not. Aristotle taught that tragedy should purge humankind through pity

for the protagonist and fear of our own weaknesses, but Seneca and his heirs showed

that we are all guilty and we live in a world of cruelty and suffering. The gods could

no longer be placated by dramatic ritual and ceremonies as in the origins of drama.