Renaissance literary theory and practice

Revival of drama is not a Renaissance achievement. The Renaissance has no drama distinctively its own. Even the sixteenth century prolonged a period of transition. Elizabethan comedy found new ways only in its last decade; Elizabethan tragedy, French tragedy and tragicomedy, matured in the seventeenth century. Medieval sacred plays continued, and the moralities proved too feeble dramatically to survive. Court shows of various kinds and degrees did, indeed, experiment dramatically with mythology, pastoral, and even rustic realism; but quite generally they lingered in allegory and pageantry, and their dramatic successes did not widen dramaturgy till 1590. While it practiced popular drama in mystère and miracle, the Middle Age had repeated that definition of drama which made it not so much a distinct form of composition as a style. This conception persisted through the Renaissance, especially in tragedy. Tragedy was still the fall of a prince; and it was rather a dialogue in high style than a sequence of action on the stage. Renaissance tragedy was classicized, indeed, in style; but in composition it remained as immune to the example of the Greek tragedians as the poetics[41] to the theory of Aristotle. It still imitated Seneca and quoted the “Ars poetica” of Horace. Often it was not even intended for the stage.

Comedy had better auspices and somewhat earlier development. Plautus and Terence, already familiar to the Middle Age, had the great advantage of being acted. Latin school plays, translations, imitations, kept before the Renaissance the pattern of Latin Comedy. Narrow and conventional, but definite and stirring, this had been found adaptable to the fabliau situations of medieval farce, and was still active. Indeed, it was the starting point of many a Renaissance dramatist. Until Greek tragedy finally became active in dramaturgy, the only classical model for play composition that went beyond Seneca was Latin Comedy.

1. SACRED PLAYS

The most widespread stage drama of the fifteenth century was medieval. Mystère and miracle, sacre rappresentazioni, continued, indeed, well into the sixteenth century. The Annales d’Aquitaine of Jean Bouchet is quite specific.

This description applies in essentials to the English Corpus Christi cycles, which we have in fifteenth-century texts, and to the general European tradition. What was that tradition in terms of drama? Typically a saint’s legend (miracle) is less available for a play than a Bible story. The external life of a saint represented as a series of trials may be unwieldy or monotonous. The great moments of the Magdalen, indeed, have as clear stage possibilities as the sacrifice of Isaac; but generically the miracles yielded less effective drama than the mystères. The distinction between the two soon ceased to be current in England; there the word miracle came to be applied to either. Mystère, applied as above to Incarnation, Nativity, Passion, and so forth, refers more properly to a series than to a single play. Was there drama, then, in a whole series of sacred plays?

Yes, abstractly in idea, as when we speak of the drama of the Terror in France. But the dramatic values of a whole period can be only suggested; they are rather pervasive than controlling. The suggestion was heightened for the medieval audience by familiarity with the habit of conceiving the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New and by typical characterization. In sculpture, glass, or poetry the Baptist is not only the immediate forerunner; he is the last of the prophets. The burning bush is not only a portent for Moses; it prefigures the Virgin kindled but intact. Piers Plowman, besides being a particular person in a poem, is typically the bon laboureur; and on the higher plane he is the Good Shepherd. The medieval audience, alive to such suggestions, more readily saw in a given play the larger drama behind the particular action, felt the communal emotion, and took the typical experience to itself.

The series as a whole, however, sacred history presented as a scheme of divine providence, offered no specific training to a playwright. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac should suggest the great sacrifice; but that would not make it a play. The immediate task was the realization of the immediate dramatic values: Isaac’s growing fear, Abraham’s cumulative struggle. Though the series included items intractable to representation, it offered many situations worthy of the highest skill. These the medieval dramatists had abundant practice in handling as distinct plays. The unknown authors show real dramatic experience and sometimes clear dramatic achievement. The English evidence is especially convincing. The guild, of course, keeping the scrip of a given play along with the costumes and properties, was free to revise or even to supersede. Some of the devices, such as the comic struggle with Noah’s wife, evidently arose from the actual performance. None the less certain plays stand out as dramatically composed: the admirable progress of the Brome Abraham and Isaac, the diction of both Mary and Joseph so purely answering the action of the York Nativity, the rapid, direct, free handling of the Towneley Secunda Pastorum. The sacred plays, then, constituted within limits an important dramatic tradition; and that tradition was still active in the sixteenth century.

2. TRAGEDY

The tragedies of Seneca are so oratorical as to suggest rather declamation than acting.[42] The great persons of Greek tragedy, Oedipus, Medea, or the house of Atreus, are revived not to interact toward their doom, but to make speeches. Nevertheless the vogue of pieces so inferior as drama, holding over from the Middle Age, had long and wide Renaissance authority. There is no clearer example alike of the preoccupation with oratory and of the habit of conceiving poetic as rhetoric. The printing of the great Greek plays, and even their translation, were slow in counteracting Seneca. Nor was Seneca altogether a hindrance. Encouraging the fustian or dullness of lesser men, he invited the magnificence of Marlowe. But he delayed the progress of dramaturgy by confirming the Renaissance neglect of composition for style.

“There is no one in France,” says Turnebus in a note[43] to his friend’s tragedies, “with any pretensions to the humanities but knows George Buchanan.” The humanists, lest after all their eminence in Latin should not be ratified by posterity, prudently praised one another. Joseph Scaliger called Buchanan the first Latin poet of Europe (ommes post se relinquens in Latina poesi), as Heinsius was to call Joseph Scaliger the greatest scholar and man of letters. The complacent certitudes have suffered so much from the irony of time that we should be careful to give the sixteenth-century humanists their due. The type of international scholar for whom Latin was the literary language persisted in Buchanan (1506-1582). Spending some thirty years in France, he may have been more familiar with French than with his northern vernacular; but all his writing was in Latin. Such a humanist might well sustain his rank in Latin poetry not only by lyric verse and didactic, but also by dramatic (Georgii Buchanani Scoti ... opera omnia, ed. Ruddiman, Edinburgh, 1715; Vol. II, “Poemata,” dated 1714), and is quite typical of Renaissance tragedy in Latin.

His Latin translation of the Medea of Euripides seems to have been presented by students at Bordeaux in 1543.[44] His Jephthes, printed at Paris in 1554, recalls the passage of the Red Sea classically.

Serial iteration is sharpened by antithesis.

The capable verse rises to metrical skill in the choruses. In Baptistes (1576) the first chorus points with epigram the Sapphic familiar to the Middle Age.

Classicism is even certified by pagan phrase; but there is no classical dramatic composition. In all its declamation and debate Jephthes has little dramatic movement. The long speeches of Baptistes hardly achieve even characterization. If Buchanan had learned from Euripides what made Medea a play, he was not making one himself; he was casting Latin poetry in dialogue and dividing oratory into five acts. In this he is typical of humanistic Latin tragedy. Learned, allusive, competent in style, it is not drama.

Classical tragedy in the vernacular is sufficiently exemplified by Robert Garnier (1544-1590, Œuvres, ed. Lucien Pinvert, Paris, 1923, 2 vols.). Knowing Greek tragedy as well as Seneca, appreciative, capable in style, making some dramatic advance in his seven tragedies from 1568 to 1583, he yet stopped short of the Greek type of composition, the dramaturgy that reduces a story to its crisis in order to move the play by compelling sequence of action. For his tragedies, though some of them may have been presented, were poems written to be read.

The argument of Porcie (1568) closes thus:

Not really five acts, then, but three frame a piece without dramatic action. Though it is focused on a brief period, it does not thereby realize dramatic sequence. Consisting of oratory and lyric, it is conceived as a poem, not as a play.

The style, careful in the balances of the dialogue, has effective oratorical iteration: “C’est trop, c’est trop duré, c’est trop acquis.”

The more pervasive suggestion of internal rhyme is combined with this again in the fifth act.

Of the same type are the two tragedies of 1574, Hippolyte and Cornélie.

Marc-Antoine (1578), surer perhaps in its oratory and finer in its lyric, is no more dramatic.

In La Troade (1579) Garnier turned to Euripides.

Evidently Garnier has not grasped the composing habit of Greek tragedy. At most he has managed somewhat more interaction between such groups of persons as he had begun by keeping apart in separate acts. He is working at literature, not at drama. Hence his evident intelligence carries his experience only so far. The argument of Antigone (1580) cites the Theban plays of all three great Greek dramatists, and adds Statius to Seneca. The plot generally uses Seneca for the first three acts, the Antigone of Sophocles for the last two. The combination is rather piecing than fusion, and shows no appreciation of the dramaturgy of Sophocles. In 1582 Garnier was adventurous enough to attempt a dramatization of Ariosto. Bradamante, which he calls a tragicomedy,[45] is hardly more than a division of certain parts of the Orlando into scenes which are far from being dramatic units. As in the earlier plays, the five acts are in effect three. Some characterization is achieved in the minor persons Aymon and Beatrix. Bradamante herself is chosen, of course, for those lyric tirades with which Ariosto had delighted the century.

But Garnier lived to vindicate tragedy within his own limits. Les Juifves (1583) has more values for representation and, in the pervasive suggestion of the inextinguishable mission of Israel, a certain unity of tone. “The subject is taken,” says the argument, “from the 24th and 25th chapters of the fourth book of Kings, the 36th chapter of the second book of Chronicles, and the 29th chapter of Jeremiah, and is more amply treated by Josephus in the 9th and 10th chapters of his Antiquities.”

The persons are the Prophet, Nebuchadnezzar, Nabuz, and Amital; the Jewish Queens and Nebuchadnezzar’s Queen; a Duenna and a Provost; and the frequently appearing Chorus. Two other main persons, Zedekiah and the High Priest, appear first in IV; the Prophet, only in I and V. As in the earlier tragedies, I is a monologue of lamentation on the Captivity plus a chorus, that is, an expository prelude; and V, reporting the slaughter of the children, is an epilogue urging submission to the will of God and the hope of deliverance by Cyrus. Though the groups are somewhat better combined, there is little change in the habit of composition.

Such effectiveness as this tragedy has beyond spectacle is mainly lyric. The abundant choruses and responses are both expert as verse and inspired by Psalms and Prophets to eloquence: Adieu, native land (II. v); How shall we sing in a strange land? (III. iii); Wretched daughters of Sion (IV. i). Though there is some interaction of plea and refusal, some suspense, all the decisions have been made beforehand. There remain to animate a play the sight and sound of communal fortitude. Les Juifves is a noble poem; its literary type is still clear in the nobler Samson Agonistes of Milton.

That Garnier’s classicism is thoroughly of his time is vouched by forty editions in less than thirty years. He was classical superficially in following the custom of mythological ornament. He was classical further in imitations on classical themes with classical persons, and still further in going from Seneca to Euripides and even to Sophocles. But his classicism kept sixteenth-century limits in looking away from composition to style. As to the Middle Age, dramatic meant to his time not a distinctive movement, but a certain style. Though he was intelligent and serious enough to use Seneca in his own way, less than the Elizabethans for melodrama, more for moral urgency, he did not see beyond the Senecan conception of drama as oratory plus lyric. He found his own oratory, his own lyric; but his progress was rather in tragic diction than in tragedy.[46]

3. HISTORY PLAYS

The most distinctive Elizabethan stage experiments of the waning sixteenth century were the “histories.” Generally lacking focus, series rather than sequence, often made over, sometimes nationalistic propaganda, they still keep some of their Elizabethan stir. For the putting of great men on the stage not only satisfied a story appetite growing too fast for print; it showed prowess, as no story can quite show, in action. Thus a history play, though it might be tragedy only in the medieval sense of the fall of a prince, though it might be Senecan enough in style, might teach stage values beyond Seneca. Widening the field of tragedy beyond Greek legend to the opening East and to national history, it also opened other methods of characterization and other dramatic forms than were taught by either the Greek or the Latin tradition.

The story play, then, should not be ruled out as a priori undramatic. Aristotelian theory and classical experience exhibit dramatic movement as typically distinct from narrative, not the telling of the story, but the compelling of its crisis to an emotional issue. In this aspect the Greek tragic theater exhibits sharp contrasts to the Elizabethan: the one vast, open, removing the audience so far as to compel orotund delivery and preclude facial expression, the other small, closed, bringing the audience so near as to invite facial play and even aside; the one limited to a few persons, the other inviting many; the one unifying plot for the sake of unbroken, cumulative sequence to an inevitable issue, the other dispersing it over time and space for narrative values and for individualizing characterization; the one crisis play, the other story play. But the contrast is not absolute, nor does it establish exclusive superiority. Greek tragedy is too great in its kind to need any cult of it as the beau idéal. The sixteenth century might have progressed faster for understanding that dramaturgy; but Shakspere came before Corneille and by another road. Elizabethan drama, often bungling, sometimes sprawling at first, and slow to master the essentially dramatic method of interaction, was yet a school of various experience. Though the experience of the “histories” was valuable mainly as preparatory, it also vindicated the dramatic validity of a story play.

Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587) is poetry not only in what the Middle Age called high style, but in dramatic conception. Though his sequel failed to make it a tragedy, it is history brought home in heroic action. The fourth act, indeed, lapses into spectacle; the fifth pushes the ruthlessness beyond credibility, and the close is a formal gesture; but for three acts we are in the thick. Not sustained as a sequence, this activity is nevertheless dramatic to the extent of being typically distinct from Seneca. For all its oratory, Tamburlaine is story in action. Thus was opened the way for Shakspere’s “histories” of the 90’s. We shall do his revolting Richard III more justice if we neither excuse it as carrying over an earlier appeal of blood, nor blame it for failing to focus the monster in a tragedy. Richard III is not tragedy dulled by dispersion; it is dramatic story, dramatic in the interactions of that princely world poisoned by treachery, story in cumulative damnation. Shakspere had written the Merchant of Venice and was writing As You Like It, when he put on another “history” in Henry V (1599).

4. PASTORAL AND RUSTIC COMEDY

Before the dramatic experience of the “histories” bore its best fruit in a widening of tragedy, another sort of story enriched comedy. Dramatic training through Latin comedy had been continuous from the Middle Age through the Renaissance. As Ariosto had begun with I suppositi in 1509, so Shakspere wrote the Comedy of Errors in 1591. In Latin and in vernacular, in translation and in imitation, the quick, smart formula of Plautus and Terence[47] continued its lessons. But the abundant Renaissance pageantry of solemn entries, the court shows, and the vogue of pastoral, had yielded here and there some dramatic experience. This is evident as early as Poliziano,[48] whose Orfeo is classical in its pagan gods and demigods, specifically pastoral in its shepherds. It is also myth, both in the original story of Orpheus and Eurydice and in Poliziano’s shaping. His myth is effective spectacle; his dialogue more than conventional responses. He has action enough to conclude upon vociferous melodrama. Orfeo is a play so far as it goes; but it is too brief to make its dramatic sequence convincing. Mythological drama is rather opened than established. In 1573 Tasso, fulfilling a similar commission for a court show at Urbino, conformed his Aminta[49] strictly to unity of place and time. But its sequence, though uninterrupted, is hardly dramatic. It proceeds oftener by musical recitative than by action. Lovely to see and hear, it gives more hints for opera than for drama. Battista Guarini (1538-1612), professor of rhetoric and poetic at Ferrara, and chief court poet after the withdrawal of Tasso, spent years on his pastoral drama Il pastor fido.

Begun in 1580, finished in 1583, read aloud, revised, it was finally published at Venice 1589/90. Apparently it was first staged in 1595. The Venice edition of 1602 is the twentieth. Called tragicomedy, tragedy in its crisis of life and death, comedy in its satyr and in its happy issue, it is above all, in its persons, its scene, its mythology, consistently pastoral. A prologue celebrating Arcadia as a blest retreat of peace, and Caterina d’Este as worthy of her illustrious house, is spoken by the river Alfeo. Besides this personification, and four choruses, there are eighteen personae. Of these the majority are servants or companions serving merely as interlocutors. Three, the temple officiant Nicander, Corisca’s lover Corydon, and a messenger, are quite superfluous. No person is characterized except as a type: the hero Mirtillo as a devotedly faithful lover, the heroine Amaryllis as virtuous, Corisca as a plotter. All are duly paganized.

The play is not moved by the actions of its persons. Complication, indeed, comes through Corisca, who is the only person carried through the play; but the solution is through persons brought in at the end solely for that purpose. As with Garnier, the persons are presented in separate groups; and they are on the stage to talk. The style is expertly careful. Guarini has learned from Tasso how to modulate his verse. The notes record constant reminiscences of the classics, both Greek and Latin, and many borrowings; but the surcharging, again after the example of Tasso, is discreetly harmonized. Pastoral drama, then, rather prolonged pastoral than advanced drama. But its opportunities for spectacle, dance, music, and imaginative suggestion were among the motives finally woven into a play by Shakspere.

Meantime real rustics also, actual farmers, laborers, villagers, had long been dramatized for gentlefolk and bourgeois by amateurs and increasingly by professional companies. Angelo Beolco (1502-1542), called from one of his favorite impersonations Ruzzante, even localized them on the stage in Ferrara and Venice by Paduan dialect. As the shepherds of the Towneley Secunda pastorum, his rustics are presented realistically. Here is the essential difference from pastoral. The actual rudeness of such impersonations, may, indeed, be dramatically exaggerated; but it must always seem actual. Ruzzante’s vivid realizations transcend his Paduan dialect by the appeal of actual peasant life, rudeness, shrewdness, lewdness unveiled by the social conventions of a higher society, talking in their own terms. Such rustic drama in time helped to discover a dramatic interest beyond types in individuals. Types remain useful in comedy because they are readily recognizable, the braggart soldier or the clever rascal; and dramatic theory urges nothing more. But the stage attempts with rustic persons sometimes opened in comedy of manners the further appeal of characterization. The verisimilitude and propriety of the theorists gave way to dramatic creation. As later in the “histories,” so in rustic comedies, theory was widened by stage experience.

Ruzzante’s life was too short to bring his art to maturity. At forty, though he had already triumphed in single characterizations, he was still groping in the forms of Plautus. Much of his work is what is now called sketch, rather dialogue or even monologue than play.

A characteristic piece is his First Dialogue. A soldier, reminiscent here and elsewhere of the miles gloriosus, but characterized with some individuality, is returning from the war ragged and wistful, but still boastful. Catechized by an old friend, he gives his experiences, his theory of life, and something of himself. So far the form is hardly more than monologue; for the friend merely listens, questions, and comments. There is no interaction. The effect, however, even in print, is dramatic to the extent of vivid representation. The racy language has constant suggestions of manner, gesture, stage business. It differs essentially from the diction of Garnier. We come to know this man.

Then the soldier meets his wife. She is interested, not moved. Having had to shift for herself in his absence, she cannot now break off convenient relations for sentiment. Here is interaction, even a situation, and the lines given to the man and to the woman clearly suggest it; but more than lines are needed to make it a play. So Ruzzante took this second part for the motive of his Second Dialogue. He saw the situation; he gave it some complication, and closed upon violent action; but he did not sustain the interaction of man and woman, and his third person, her senile lover, remains almost separate.

So Ruzzante’s collected pieces[50] generally show less achievement than promise. He was learning rapidly from the stage itself. Imperfect playwright at his untimely death, he was already famous as a writer and actor of “parts.” These Italian stage experiments of the 1530’s were essentially like the Elizabethan fifty years later in giving to an old field new stage values. Though they had rather a local success than any general influence, they are significant now for what they opened.

In 1586 John Lyly gave the persons of his Endymion Greek or Latin names. But the myth suggested by his title does not take shape as plot. Indeed, there is hardly any action, none that is dramatically determining. The persons are on the stage to talk, the main persons in orations, the Latin-comedy servants in repartee. Endymion’s dream is presented by a dumb show in Act II, and recounted in Act IV. The close is flatly by Cynthia’s fiat. The allegory, clearer of course to the audience than to us, seems to be both personification of qualities and suggestion of actual persons, as in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. In both aspects it now makes a dull play duller.

Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale is as random as its title, adding rustics to classics and allegory to folklore. Not a story play, it is a collection of little shows, each rather for itself than for any sequence. The folklore material and the rustics are interesting; the play is not. That anything so shapeless could have gained the stage in 1590 is sufficient evidence of Elizabethan willingness to experiment. Within five years Shakspere found the dramatic solution of myth and pastoral, folklore and rustics, for court show in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. Forthwith Lyly’s pedantic encomium and clumsy dumb show, Peele’s jolly rustics and half-fairies, become as antiquated as the many Elizabethan gropings through the moralities and pastoral. The court show has arrived at fairyland. For this is all faery: the ancient heroic world from Boccaccio and Chaucer, and the sprites with classical names. The classical story of Pyramus and Thisbe is transmitted by rustics; and Bottom himself is translated. Through all hovers the authentic elfin minister Puck.

Midsummer Night’s Dream is a complete fusion, not only of style as Tasso’s Aminta, but also in dramatic movement. As Theseus, Puck, and Bottom, the lovers and yokels, are all conformed to the same world, so they all interact in a single sequence toward a uniting issue. Even the place is single. Such slight shifts as there may have been in the Elizabethan theater are negligible; for of all its many presentations the most convincing have stayed on a lawn before a green thicket. Midsummer Night’s Dream is a one-act play, Greek dramaturgy beyond Garnier’s or Tasso’s. But instead of saying that Shakspere conformed to the dramatic unities, we should rather say that he learned the dramatic importance of holding fairyland together. Sixteenth-century stage experience, then, as well as classical theory and imitation, opened the great drama of the seventeenth century. The experience of court shows with the feebleness of allegory, the escape of pastoral, the vitality of rustic realism, opened the way for both romantic and realistic comedy. The experience of the “histories” opened a new appeal in tragedy. For Corneille, as well as Shakspere, was a man of the stage.