Renaissance Drama

Introduction

The Renaissance means many things about an amorphous period in political, economic, scientific, and above all cultural history, involving a number of Western countries at various stages in their development. The scholarly attempts to block it off with dates, however roughly allocated, confuse more than they clarify because the phenomenon made itself felt at different times in different places. The single fact of which one can be sure is that it all began in Italy, sometime in the fourteenth century, and then later—more than a century later—spread to other parts of Europe and eventually penetrated deep into the seventeenth century, where it commingled and fused with the Baroque.

Rinascimento, or rebirth—an idea popularized by Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kulture der Renaissance in Italien (1860; Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1878)—has to do with a spirit of self-rediscovery whereby human beings, putting aside the medieval scholastic cloak, engaged in energetic exercise of mind and limb, viewing themselves as creatures of this world, as they had in antiquity (hence the pagan presence in the lap of Christian belief—an admixture that Dante had promoted in no uncertain terms as early as the very beginning of the fourteenth century). It was self or inner discovery that made possible outer discovery, that of a Christopher Columbus on the seas or a Galileo in the heavens. Rinascimento was a confident state of mind that made human beings the measure and the center, with their own reason for being, and that urged individuals to sign their names to their creations.

Although science acquired fresh vitality in this atmosphere, it was the arts that fostered the vita nuova, or at least that symbolizes it for modern civilization. The rise of the middle class and the Maecenaean prosperity of the ruling families of the city-state—Sforza, Visconti, Malatesta, Este, Medici, Montefeltro, Della Rovere, Baglioni, Gonzaga, and others, as well as popes such as Pius II, Alexander VI, Leo X, and Julius II, or cardinals such as Bibbiena (Bartolomeo Dovizi), Giulio de’ Medici, Girolamo Riario, Ottone Colonna, and Ippolito d’Este, who nourished their appetites with art as they endeavored, even in their villainies, to convert life into a form of beauty and pleasure—made the ebullience possible. More than ever before, the arts developed qua arts with a “reborn” inspirational freedom: nature and the open air, the ornate palazzo and the gilded cabinet, the magic of inlaid wood and tinted glass, the comeliness of the human body, the lasting splendor of marble, the radiance of color, the freed dynamics of secular sound, the splendid intricacies of polyphonic textures—all aesthetic delights for the eyes and ears—the magnificent artifice of drama and theater, complete with the appurtenant playhouses, stages, machineries, costumes, and sets. The world was a stage, and life a drama—meaning also an art. This is what made the French citizens under King Charles VIII marvel at and loot the Italian peninsula in 1494 when they crossed the Alps, and the Germans and Spaniards of Emperor Charles V plunder it during the 1527 sack of Rome; this is what the English imported zealously even after King Henry VIII broke from the Papacy, for to its credit the Reformation made no attempt to obstruct the pagan revival.

The self-rediscovery stemmed in large part from an aesthetic view of the self, and humanism, absorbing and refashioning the intellectual visions of ancient Greece and Rome or simply reproducing and imitating their accomplishments, kindled a new desire for learning for its own sake. Raphael’s Vatican fresco La scuola d’Atene (School of Athens) reproduced in spirit what the earlier Platonic Academy of Marsilio Ficino in Florence had cultivated in research and philosophy, the reconciliation of antiquity with Christianity. In the glorious Trecento, Petrarch starred as the first humanist, the supposed author of several comedies, and the poet very much in love with life and fame. The Middle Ages, far from being gloomy—intellectually or otherwise—as often depicted, had distinguished itself with directed learning, dominated by concerns of religion, morality, and the Hereafter. The windows of the cloister tended to close to other vital manifestations of living. Now, after Giotto di Bondone had left behind the impersonal Byzantine manner and injected personality and blood, as it were, into his paintings, Leonardo da Vinci (and also Piero della Francesca, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Leon Battista Alberti, Bramante, and Filippo Brunelleschi in their respective arts) opened those windows to the geometries of perspective, thereby embracing a limitless worldly range, while madrigals and frottole opened music to novel, secular dimensions of tone and expressiveness. To adapt words from Alfred North Whitehead, the new climate “altered the metaphysical presuppositions and the imaginative contents of our minds; so that now the old stimuli provoke[d] a new response,” to which one should add: The opportunity for new stimuli lay almost unrestrictedly everywhere. It was natural for drama and theater, then, to make full use of the humanized idioms and fecund inspirations galvanizing the Western world.

Stage and Theater

Though Italy (like France until its Age Classique) cannot boast of the copious and genial drama that characterized Elizabethan England and the Spanish Golden Age, Italian influence shaped dramatic production all over Europe, not only by virtue of its humanistic spirit derived from the classical tradition but also by virtue of how it developed the actor’s craft (the actors for medieval religious dramas were guild members—students, academics, scribes, and the like—but not the professionals they became later: attori di mestiere, comici d’arte, trained in mime, voice, acrobatics, choreography, and other essentials), the stage on which he performed (very often medieval sets were nothing more than wooden scaffolding in various shapes for multiple staging possibilities), and the buildings inside which he exercised his art (much medieval drama was mounted outdoors, in public courtyards or squares, performances not moving indoors until the sixteenth century).

These influences were not, however, always absorbed speedily. By the sixteenth century, for example, Europe beyond Italy still lacked a playhouse as it is known today. Apart from costuming, pictorial scenography, when performance was not at court, remained primarily an Italian craft, which eventually included sophisticated mechanisms for scene changes and the revolutionary discovery of perspective that allowed the set painting of countless fantasies and optical illusions. In time, tragedy, comedy, and pastoral each had its own established setting: scena tragica, scena comica, and scena satirica. Vitruvius’s ten-volume De Architectura (c. 27 B.C.E.), discovered in 1484, helped to shape the stage in imitation of antiquity (the Roman scaenae frons of access doors in a row) and to arrange the auditorium and the orchestra. Sebastiano Serlio’s Sette libri dell’architettura (1537-1551) stressed perspective (book 2) and large, fixed edifices as best suited to the peripeteia of great personages in tragedy. Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the “most beautiful theater in the world” (completed in 1584 by Vincenzo Scamozzi, who then built another, more intimate theater for Duke Vespasiano Gonzaga at Sabbioneta), with its semielliptical auditorium and the raised perspectives of its long, narrow stage, main lateral roads, and central archway, all in wood and stucco, fulfilled a dream of reproducing a Roman theater that welcomed anything tragic, from the classical Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 B.C.E.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715) to the modern La Sofonisba (wr. 1515). Commissioned by one of many humanist academies, the Accademia Olimpica di Vicenza, the Palladio-Scamozzi structure housed more than two thousand spectators, and its fine perspectives greatly impressed all travelers, among them Josef Furtenbach, who in 1619 brought its architectural ideas back to Germany with him. The modern playhouse was born in 1618 with Parma’s Teatro Farnese—an elongated auditorium that had a sculpted proscenium arch. Indeed, some of the most renowned artists contributed over the years to the scenic splendors of Italian stages: Brunelleschi, Baldassare Peruzzi, Raphael, Leonardo, Bramante, and the Sangallo brothers (Francesco and Antonio Giamberti). Thus drama was transferred from the great halls of the palazzi of princes, such as that in Florence’s Palazzo Pitti, or even more impressively the court stage built by Bernardo Buontalenti in 1585 for the Medici in the Uffizzi, or from outdoors, such as the Piazza del Campidoglio’s ad hoc theater, covered by an awning for Tommaso Inghirami’s production of Terence’s Poenulus in 1513, to the veritable teatri abetted by the academies and sponsored by noble patrons.

The move encouraged free inventiveness along all lines, not the least of which were theatrical machinery and decorative effects. The typical Italian stage was characterized by simplicity and classical severity, but the Roman scaenae frons, adopted and adapted by the humanist theater, was superseded by more sophisticated elaborations. Buontalenti’s contributions to scene transformation (leading later to sliding flat wings), building on the revolving wooden prisms of his predecessors—Giacomo Barozzi Vignola, Sangallo, Daniele Barbaro, and Giulio Danti—were to be magnified by the Baroque theater. Similar innovations took place with decorative effects. In 1518, in Rome, for Leo X, Peruzzi converted the backdrop, or wall, into an “acting area” of perspective by providing a decorated proscenium. The idea grew out of Girolamo Genga’s stage set at Urbino for Bibbiena’s La Calandria (pr. 1513; The Follies of Calandro, 1964) five years earlier. Perspective provided the most challenging potential for effect. Into it the Quattrocento poured much of its mathematical and artistic imagination. Vitruvius’s book 5 deals with theater; its various editions (1486, 1521, 1556) underlay subsequent treatises on the subject, such as Vignola’s Le due regole della prospettiva pratica (1583) and its suggestions for distant stage entrances, wooden prisms turning on pivots, and other technical equipment.

By the seventeenth century, scenographers had a full catalog of technological possibilities, and the best were much in demand. Alfonso Parigi could set a stage afire for Prospero Bonarelli Della Rovere’s Il Solimano (pr. 1619), Gaspare Vigarani and his sons brought heavenly apparitions down from above clouds in mythological scenes that amazed Parisian audiences, Francini managed rapid and stupefying set changes in the Louvre in 1617, and in Venice’s Teatro Vendramin, in an anonymous Dario, in 1671, thirteen changes were effected by those who had learned Francini’s lessons. Giacomo Torelli di Fano, called “the great wizard,” could handle forty scene changes; Ludovico Ottavio Burnacini’s very drawings for sets in Vienna are marvels of sumptuousness (now available in the Nationalbibliothek); and the Bibbiena family established a veritable dynasty that covered four generations (two Giovanni Marias, a Ferdinando, Francesco, Alessandro, Antonio, Giovanni Carlo, and two Giuseppes) that combed Europe: Vienna, Prague, Mannheim, Belgrade, St. Petersburg, Lisbon, Paris, Amsterdam, and London. Much of their work benefited opera when melodrama set in and when other architects carried on the work of their colleagues: Andrea Pozzo, Filippo Iuvara, Giovanni Bernini, and Giambattista Piranesi.

Greater elaborateness signaled a commensurate attention to costuming , especially for tragedy, in which costumes were expected to be rich and sumptuous (as compared with common but neat costumes for comedy and humble but graceful ones for pastoral). Special occasions required special paraphernalia, such as Leonardo’s fancy costumes to clothe divinities and his fantastic animal masks for Bernardo Bellincioni’s setting of Lodovico Sforza’s allegorical masque of 1490. The new interest in science together with the obsession for artifice in the good sense—in other words, the conversion of life into art—inspired technological apparatuses designed to facilitate sensational effects. Traps and hoisting machines that would have gratified Euripides’ use of the deus ex machina were devised, contraptions to be much welcomed by William Shakespeare and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. As might be expected, again Leonardo, in his capacity as inventor and military engineer for the court of Milan, contributed his genius to such enterprises, in one instance a movable planetary system and, for a circling paradise, the world’s first revolving stage. He did the same in France in 1518, at the Château Cloux by Amboise, as a guest of King Francis I. As similar ideas carried over to the stages in playhouses, Italian ingegneri became more and more ingenious and were hired for many European productions. Lope de Vega Carpio saw machinery as an interference, believing that “carpenters” detract from the spirit of drama. Yet there was no stopping technology. The cardinal rule was always observed, in all the arts: no awkward overlappings. It was not long before these masters of optical illusion, the directors of production pursuing the same “scientific” inclinations, hit on the notion of practiced positioning and choreographed movement by the actor—in other words, blocking—another contribution to the ever expanding craft of performance.

Not to be outdone, comedy borrowed many of the ideas, such as expanding—as in the production of La Calandria in 1513—to a rich, urban background of domes and towers to supplement the traditional scaenae frons square bordered by a few houses. This was true mainly for learned comedy, for the popular plays of the commedia dell’arte were performed originally on open, undecorated platforms capable of only crude scenic changes. With time, however, they, too, changed. With the pastoral, the setting shifted to a somewhat ornate naturalism: trees and rocks, hills and flowers, bowers and brooks. Whatever the dramatic category, any performance was well lighted: A bright stage sparkled in a dimmed hall, varied appropriately according to the moment in the action. Indeed, lighting by candle, oil, and reflectors received careful attention.

In France , popular theater, as in the case of the parades, remained outdoors in squares and fairs on improvised stages for some time, serving as a crowd grabber for hucksters selling their potions and remedies. Actors such as Tabarin (Jean Salomon, possibly an Italian) and Gille le Niais were successful plebeian performers with no particular training. Only toward the end of the sixteenth century did some professional groups form—troupes that moved indoors, as in the jeux de paume buildings, taking account of Italian innovations. In time, some groups acquired high visibility, such as the Théâtre du Marais and Molière’s Illustre Théâtre. Performances took place inside palaces and halls, but no theater structure as such favored their enterprises. Paris had only one theater—the Hôtel de Bourgogne in the early seventeenth century—when London had six. The public was mixed and segregated by class or means (some dignitaries sat onstage—a custom that hampered French productions well into the eighteenth century), and the premises were often dirty; yet activity there was, primarily in the gallery, not always edifying but activity nevertheless: drinking, arguing, dice rolling, and other “social” pastimes.

The Hôtel de Bourgogne was in the hands of the Confrérie de la Passion , a corporation of theater managers the origin of which went back to 1402, when the organization of amateurs performed religious drama (as the name suggests), biblical plays that events of the religious wars forbade in 1548, when the Confrérie de la Passion began renting the premises to various troupes and visiting companies. There Spanish and English actors were welcomed; there the renowned Italian comedians, the Comici Gelosi, introduced the French to dramatic improvisation. In the following century, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, under Valleran Le Conte, housed a permanent group for popular comedy, Les Comédiens de Roy (Italian comici), including the public’s favorite stereotypes: the fat clown Gros Guillaume, the amusing and clownish old man Gaultier-Gargouille, and the wily servant Turlupin. The stage, at first a simple platform, imported Italian refinements to supplement the medieval carryovers (such as separate mansions): scene painting and other types of stage setting, backcloth, perspective side-wings, variations of foreshortened space that allowed locations separated by distance to appear simultaneously, and other devices noted by seventeenth century scene directors Laurent Mahelot and Michel Laurent in their Mémoire. The first performances of Jean de Rotrou’s Les Occasions perdues in 1633 demonstrated some of these novelties. Yet in France, drama became more important later in the seventeenth century because genuine dramatic interest centered on the court, where a more restricted and more select class of spectators assembled, headed by the king, who often prescribed and proscribed. After the heyday of Pierre Corneille, drama belonged to Molière and Jean Racine, whose genius did not need the supplement of stage elaborations. Nevertheless, the expert scenographers imported from Italy, such as Torelli di Fano, were certainly no liability.

A similar evolution, again heavily Italianate, may be traced in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, except that there a broader segment of the public concerned itself closely with theater, and the courtly emphasis was not as pronounced as in France. This meant that standards of performance as well as behavior, to the woe of intellectuals, left something to be desired, despite Miguel de Cervantes’s efforts to remove drama from the plebs and give it a more sophisticated, classical setting. Actors tended to be adventurers (for example, the “Carro de la muerte” in El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, 1605; The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha, 1612-1620; better known as Don Quixote de la Mancha), often of questionable ethics, who pilfered what they could if gate receipts got low. Roving companies performed on platforms, erected for the occasion with rickety supports, in courtyards called corrales (such as the Corral de la Pacheca, mounted by Italian comici in 1574) or out on the squares.

Two coarse wooden theaters existed in Madrid shortly thereafter, the Corral de la Cruz and the Corral del Príncipe. The windows overlooking the courtyard were the “box seats” for the privileged, while on the ground stood a less distinguished audience, some gentlemen sitting on a few tiers of far benches above which was constructed a wooden gallery, the cazuela (stewpan), for less affluent women. In another arrangement, the persons of means or standing sat forward, the commoners behind, armed with anything that they could throw at the stage: hence Cervantes’s call to imitate the Italians (meaning the humanists) and their balanced Greco-Roman art, which in turn would invite a sense of decorum. Some improvement, though, did occur when his rival Lope de Vega dominated the theatrical scene, and after him, Calderón. Unhampered by concerns with classical tenets, and given its fundamentally popular orientation (Fernando de Rojas’s Comedia de Calisto y Melibea, 1499, rev. ed. 1502 as Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea; commonly known as La Celestina; Celestina, 1631, with its open forms and shifting settings related to medieval multiple staging, remained a strong influence), Spanish drama at its apogee developed along freer, less academic lines, incorporating many popular themes, and with them came increased audience attentiveness to the plays.

Across the Channel, when the Tudors (1485-1603) opened England to the splendors of the Rinascimento, along with Italian books and scholars came Italian actors; Drusiano Martinelli, for example, gained great popularity at the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Under her father, Henry VIII, the theater was looked down on (part of his decree of 1531 labels actors “vagabonds”) because of the unsavory character of many of its practitioners, but in the new atmosphere, actors managed to take advantage of the prevailing interest in drama and seek the protection of court lords, indeed also of sovereigns. Not even the Puritan clergy could prevail. Previously outlawed, strolling players became respectable, enjoying legal protection together with other benefits. King Richard III, Henry VIII (his decree notwithstanding), and Elizabeth I through Lord Leicester (Robert Dudley, who was more interested in players than was the queen) kept companies, some of which might actually go on tour.

Like Molière and Lope de Rueda, Shakespeare too acted, until 1603. Many other companies, like guilds, became “recognized,” and a 1572 law, making the recognition exclusive by “privilege,” encouraged James Burbage four years later to establish the first public theater at Shoreditch: The Theatre, built circularly of timber. A white flag flown aloft indicated comedy; a black one, tragedy. Also round and unroofed was The Curtain (London, 1577), and this was followed a decade later by Philip Henslowe’s The Rose, then The Fortune (Finsbury, 1600), and The Hope (1613), the last unroofed London playhouse. More theaters, to attest Elizabethan passion for drama, were Francis Langley’s The Swan (1595), the Globe Theatre (1599), and The Red Bull (1605). After 1620, all playhouses were roofed. With companies flourishing in them, the theaters increased in number from eight to twenty between 1600 and 1616, when Shakespeare died. Theatrical activities took place everywhere, from private homes and public squares to universities. Italian scenography was put to use, imported directly from Italy or later from France, though originally the stages were occasional, placed in courtyards as in Spain, or even in circus structures, following other types of entertainment. As usual, the upper class sat separately from the others, either in lower balconies (the gallery remained for the commoners) or, when French habits encroached, directly onstage. All in all, though the actors had to shout their lines (Hamlet inveighs against the performer who would “split the ears of the groundling [and] out-herod Herod”), English enthusiasm for the theater made the event not as obstreperous as it tended to be in France or Spain. Still, Hamlet could wish for a calm, cultured audience over a low public. From the pit, the “groundlings” would shout their approbation or lack of it, regardless of whether the majority of spectators thought differently. No doubt the actors raised their voices to compete, and the open roof did not help matters acoustically. Accordingly, gestures became broader and more expressive—a positive result of the conditions, along with greater clarity of diction. Another positive development was the “spoken decor,” the stylistic feature whereby the scenery was explained in the play’s text. In the aggregate, then, the shortcomings were few in comparison with other conditions that, one notes in retrospect, favored the flowering of one of the most significant dramas of the Renaissance, one that elicited creative responses from enthusiastic audiences.

It was probably this enthusiasm that inspired the concoction of multiple mechanisms, particularly for performances at court. A Master of the Revels for Elizabeth’s private theater, such as Edmund Tilney, who during his tenure, from 1579 to 1610, could censor all public stages (the practice did not cease until 1968), could mount forests and deserts, mountains and monsters, and fires and lightning. One need only think of the culmination of all this in the way Ben Jonson’s masques were staged by that frequent traveler to Italy, Inigo Jones. Yet the bulk of the performances took place in public structures, and here too the enthusiasm inspired a very innovative stage, which may be credited with having stimulated the three-dimensionality of Shakespearean characters as contrasted with the bland two-dimensionality of so many Italian Renaissance characters. Although historical consciousness was not such then as to prescribe chronological accuracy for costumes, the Elizabethan stage indulged itself lavishly in opulent garments, and this condition affected others. The English adopted the medieval concept of a multiple stage and combined it with that of the thrust stage, whereby the proscenium protrudes into the audience, like an acting podium (and where “rounded” characters and costuming assume special importance), omitting the curtain that the Italians had devised. This stage’s versatility enhanced the creative imagination along all lines, and, among other things, like Spanish open-form staging, fostered a break with the unities of time and place. The whole occurrence was a veritable spectacle, complete with musical interludes, or even improvisations by a clown or buffoon (to Shakespeare’s displeasure), but the overall experience was wholesome and substantial and brought forth actors of true thespian stature similar to France’s stellar Montdory (Guillaume Desgilberts), such as Edward Alleyn for Christopher Marlowe and Richard Burbage for Shakespeare.

Toward the seventeenth century’s end, companies of English actors—Englische Komödianten—made their way to Germany , introducing not only their Elizabethan repertoire but also the notion of the participating spectator, the clown or fool who became the German Narr and who was to enliven the popular stage considerably under an array of different names: Hans Supp, Pickelhäring, the Arlecchino-like Hanswurst, and others. In Munich and Vienna, Italian companies, as well as French companies, appeared during the next century, the latter finally exercising the greater influence (if one does not count the comici). With each group, Germany profited by the staging and technical advances that each country had to offer, though the continuous foreign impact—let alone that of the Reformation, which tended to inhibit subject matter—did not inspire the shaping of an indigenous classical theater, authors Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius, and director Johannes Velten notwithstanding.

Not to be omitted, for its contrast, is the simple, single-set stage of planks and barrels used for religious drama in many countries, particularly in Germany, where the Lutheran revolt stimulated the use of plays for spiritual purposes. Theater was accomplished with the barest of sets, simple name shingles above doors to identify the characters’ houses, and a handful of modest props: a clergyman’s chair, a throne, a few bars for a prison, a primitive altar, a crude door—all present simultaneously in the multiple-setting tradition. Examples of striking stage effects continued to come primarily from Italy, such as Brunelleschi’s rotating spheres of the microcosm for the sacra rappresentazione at the Feast of the Annunciation in Florence in 1438. With the introduction of Italian humanist practices, greater elaborateness eventually became evident north of the Alps. Still, it was not unusual to see college quadrangles used for a religious occasion in the northern countries, where the existing trees and bushes could be incorporated to form part of a would-be wing or backdrop. The emphasis remained more on doing than on seeing.

The German Meistersinger, whose acting background dated back to the fourteenth century, worked indoors as well as outdoors, without particular regard for fancy staging. Sometimes attractive staging came about naturally. Hans Sachs , the famous cobbler poet who is often called the founder of the German theater, once employed Nuremberg’s Martakirche as a setting; his Die Enthauptung Johannes of 1550 was performed there on a podium either under the Gothic choir vault or in the nave, the church itself sufficing as scenery. On another occasion, Sachs, who, on the other hand, did not eschew technology, imitated a performance of Plautus’s Menaechmi (The Twin Menaechmi, 1595) given at the Court of Ferrara in 1486 by having a ship rolled in onstage. In the seventeenth century, in Holland, the Rederijker stage (the Rederijker Kamers was the Chamber of Rhetoric) developed considerably under humanist influences and English strolling players, elaborating a rear acting area onstage, with columns, arcades, and drawable curtains. This stage was to accommodate the decorations of processions illustrating a religious, didactic text. It climaxed in Amsterdam’s famous Schouwburg. Yet, barring a few exceptions, religious drama as a whole remained technically and aesthetically sparse in comparison with what the Master of the Revels could draw on and with what the ingegneri could assemble.

Religious Drama

Religious drama , which moved into the Renaissance from the Middle Ages, lasted up to the threshold of the seventeenth century and beyond this date in some countries. Mystery plays, miracle plays, and morality plays formed a common denominator for most European cultures because all the works were conceived with a similar fondness for didactic, abstract allegory. Germany especially, which remained relatively impervious to the aesthetic events of the Rinascimento, cultivated religious drama assiduously. In one of his Tischreden, Martin Luther made it very clear that he regarded the theater as potentially beneficial and educational. In all lands, a dramatic production sponsored by a lord or a prince often was tied to political purposes; it stands to reason that in a country politicized by the Reformation the weapon of drama was not overlooked. The Bible was explored and exploited for stories destined to provide instruction through entertainment. On the grounds of pure catechism, however, not many differences distinguished these performances along national lines; the Italian sacre rappresentazioni were akin to the French mystères, which were related to the German Passionsspiele and the English miracle plays (as well as the Cornish “guary” plays). Scores of dramatic works formed a cycle taking days to perform, such as the York or Coventry cycles, or the Passion of Jehan Michel, the Mystère du Vieil Testament, the one at Valenciennes in 1547, the 1536 Bourges Actes des Apôtres, or the texts that still in modern times shape the highly wrought productions at Oberammergau.

The French Confrérie de la Passion in Paris was royally commissioned in the early 1400’s to interpret and present mystery plays (until the Religious Wars, and also the increased coarseness of the plays, put an end to such devotional exercises). Queen Marguerite de Navarre’s humanist, allegorical, and intensely pious plays met with little success in a country riddled with intolerant religious strife, where power was divided politically about equally on both sides. Yet where, in other countries, including Germany, this was not the case and more unanimous or neutral attitudes toward Reformation and Counter-Reformation prevailed, religious drama developed more extensively. It is not surprising, therefore, that professionalism seemed a secondary concern and that, as it turned out in the sixteenth century, those in charge of middle-class education had a strong hand in developing religious (instructional) drama, namely, the Jesuits . Under the guidance of a coach, called a choragus, the fathers originally had their students perform tragedies in Latin in the school-drama context: only male parts at first, then adding males playing female roles, but no love scenes. The religious mission, however, appeared more important; more and more didactic works were performed.

Jesuit drama, as it came to be known, appeared everywhere, from Naples to Lyons and from Oxford to Vienna to Kraków. The Society of Jesus came to regard the theater as a tool to attract attention and as a weapon to safeguard people’s minds. The school dramas of the Netherlands provided excellent models. First, they emphasized word and message; second, they taught by loud declamation. In addition, a useful festive tradition existed. The sixteenth century annual festival, Landjuweel, promoted allegorical processions and Vertooninge, or living scenes, which culminated in morality performances based on chosen topics, such as “What gives a dying man most consolation?” or “What can best awaken humankind to the liberal arts?” The religious magnet was strong; Joost van den Vondel , the dominant Dutch author of this period, steeped in humanism and politics, nevertheless preferred to deal with biblical themes: He began with Het Pascha (Passover) in 1610 and triumphed with Lucifer (English translation, 1917) in 1654.

This is not to say, however, that all dramas in this context were strictly of religious inspiration, or, if religiously based, that a somber, existential cast, secularly inspired, did not approximate them more to tragedy or pastoral than to religious drama narrowly understood. Either north or south in the Alps, in Latin or the vernacular, the inspirations frequently overlapped. Giovan Battista Andreini’s tragic Adamo (pr. 1613; Adam, 1844), a sacra rappresentazione of the first half of the seventeenth century, and Jakob Bidermann’s tragedy of free thought and divine faith, Cenodoxus of 1602 (English translation, 1963), are cases in point. The works of Calderón show the same overlapping. In this category, too, may be placed the works of the earlier Jacob Grester, the English Jesuit Joseph Simeons, his follower Nikolaus Avancini, and the Sicilian Ortensio Scamacca, whose influence spread widely over the eighteenth century Jesuit stage. Gryphius derived much from this type of Jesuit drama, if his Catharina von Georgien: Oder, Bewehrete Beständigkeit (wr. 1647) is any example.

One must not assume that religious drama took the vow of poverty and was always staged sparsely and modestly. In time, as noted above, its success invited more glamorous settings in the Italian style, especially in the days of the flowering of the Baroque. The Jesuits were associated with this flowering in Italy and elsewhere, and the Baroque in turn cultivated a pomp and ornateness that infused all artistic endeavors, even religious drama, with splendor, just as it paved the way for the development of that supratheatrical genre called opera. In Italy, the sacro teatro became a cultural institution along with being a religious one, from Father Basilio Lamagna’s Baldasar of 1610 to the experiments of Giovanni Maria Cecchi, such as Il figliuol prodigo (pr. 1570), or the works of fathers Saverio Bettinelli and Giovanni Granelli one century later. The other countries followed suit, though not necessarily with the same showmanship.

Most didactic plays, however, obediently followed religious directives, often with a combative, partisan fervor: Agricola’s Tragedia Johannis Huss (pr. 1537), Thomas Naogeorgus’s Pammachius (pr. 1538), the Swiss Jakob Ruoff’s antipapist Weingartenspiel (pr. 1539), Sixt Birck’s Susanna (pr. 1532), Johannes Sturm’s play on Lazarus (1535), Alsacian Meistersinger Jörg Wickram’s Tobias (pr. 1550), Johann Rasser’s Spiel von der Kinderzucht (pr. 1573), and many more. The repertory was rich and enhanced with mounting professionalism. In fact, human gestures, expressions, and parts of the body used for acting and recitation were all analyzed for this purpose by Jodocus Willich in his Libellus de prononciatione rhetorica (1555). Finally, Sachs must always be remembered as a genuinely religious playwright whose very sincerity made him a companion and admirer of Luther while not engaging through his varied writings in typically anti-Catholic satire. In England, an equally rich Protestant fare came into being, with John Bale, for example, whose King Johan (wr. c. 1531) shows the pope as a usurper of power, or with Robert Greene, who wrote satiric mystery plays. The Catholics, too, marshaled their talents, usually in the form of farce or satire: John Heywood ’s The Play of the Foure P.P.: A Newe and a Very Mery Enterlude of a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potycary, a Pedler (pb. 1541-1547) and his The Pardoner and the Friar, published by John Rastell in 1533 (though Heywood’s humor often makes him sound anti-Catholic), and Scotsman David Lindsay’s morality Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (pr. 1540), which became a favorite of James V.

The religious spirit in drama reached Prague (see, for example, Susanna of 1543 by Matthias Collin, a disciple of Philipp Melanchthon), Hungary (Leonhard Stöckel’s Historia de Susanna is usually mentioned), Denmark (Peder Jensen Hegelund’s Susanna), and, during the next century, Sweden, where Johannes Messenius mounted dialogued presentations of historico-religious events. Even in Dubrovnik, in Croatia, inspired by Italian examples, a native drama flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, underscoring such names as Marin Držić and Ivan Gundulić.

Not uncharacteristically, the Iberian peninsula presented a different picture. Among his many duties as organizer of his country’s court festivities, the Portuguese Gil Vicente wrote an Auto de la fama (pr. 1515) and a devotional trilogy, a Dantean morality sequence that did much to influence religious drama in neighboring Spain: Auto da barca do inferno (pr. 1516; The Ship of Hell, 1929), Auto da barca do purgatório (pr. 1518; The Ship of Purgatory, 1929), and Auto da barca da gloria (pr. 1519; The Ship of Heaven, 1929). He was followed by auto authors António Ribeiro Chiado and António Prestés. Lope de Vega’s religious plays, such as La hermosa Ester (pb. 1621), were well received. The typical Spanish religious play, counterpart of but not identical to the sacra rappresentazione, was the auto sacramental , an allegorical play based on a religious theme, often performed after intermissions in religious processions. Those of Juan del Encina became well known. Tirso de Molina wrote a psychological one, El condenado por desconfiado (pb. 1634; The Saint and the Sinner, 1952; also known as Damned for Despair, 1986). Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo (pr. 1643; The Devotion to the Cross, 1832) portrayed all the stations of humanity (rich man, king, beggar, laborer, and so on) as allotted by the Author, or God, each properly outfitted, discoursing with abstractions such as Beauty, Discretion, or The Law of Grace on a stage symbolically decked with a cradle and a coffin. Calderón stands out as a most prolific writer of autos (he wrote seventy or more); his grave spirit lent itself well to the highly regarded form. His autos, which received regular performances on Corpus Christi Day, include La cena del rey Baltasar, La devoción de la misa, Lo que va del hombre a Dios, and La vida es sueño (the auto, not Calderón’s famous philosophical drama). These plays are not to be confused with his other (nearly five hundred) dramas, though the religious subject matter frequently links them conceptually if not formally: La devoción de la cruz (pr. 1643; The Devotion to the Cross, 1832), El purgatorio de San Patricio (wr. c. 1634; The Purgatory of Saint Patrick, 1873), and El mágico prodigioso (pr. 1637; The Wonder-Working Magician, 1959), with its opposition of the pagan and the Christian.

Many of these dramas enjoyed visual or scenographic ostentation—which Calderón liked—as well as musical background. In Spanish hands, then, religious drama took more advantage than the rest of Europe of the luxurious practices of Italian staging. It produced variations, such as the shorter forms (the jácaras, short pieces about some famous deed); the praising loas, generally prologues, used by Lope de Vega; and other free forms.

Closely related to the religious productions were the processions , or parades, theatrical forms in their own right. The Italians promoted them with all the pomp, excitement, and glitter that they could muster, thereby modifying both psychologically and philosophically the medieval processional theater. It was modified aesthetically as well, for during the Middle Ages the procession rolled past the spectators only once, allowing them but segmental glimpses, while the Italians devised seating so as to allow for the delight of a total, simultaneous viewing. In courtyards and squares, the spectators enjoyed these fifteenth century trionfi, or panegyrics, from all angles: the floats and masks, boats and dances, mythological gods and allegorical figures, planets and dolphins, angels and saints. In Florence, the music of the canti carnascialeschi of the late 1400’s, written by the finest composers, such as Antonio Squarcialupi, Heinrich Isaak, and Alexander Agricola, to lyrics by the finest poets, including Angelo Ambrogini (Poliziano) and Lorenzo de’ Medici, accompanied the festivities that took place by day (in places such as Piazza Santa Croce or the Palazzo Pitti) and by night (by torchlight in the streets).

This practice inspired less lavish but significant counterparts elsewhere in Europe. In France, apart from the less pretentious parades, they became known as entrées solennelles under King Henry III late in the sixteenth century, the dancing and pantomimes emerging eventually in an organization labeled Le Ballet Comique de la Royne. The beautiful gardens of the nobility provided excellent, if restricted, sites for such entrées. Thus was founded a tradition of dance-dramas on which Molière and his collaborating Florentine court musician, Gianbattista Lulli (commonly known as Lully), were to base a comédie-ballet such as Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (pr. 1670; The Would-Be Gentleman, 1675).

In England, these processions or revels became interludes, variations of the trionfo, such as John Heywood’s The Play of the Weather (pb. 1533). Allegorical festivals were also known in Spain and Portugal, where an auto sacramental could form part of the total event. Sometimes, too, they assumed a historical character—João Sardinha Mimoso’s Tragicomedia del descubrimiento y conquista del Oriente (pr. 1581), based on Vasco da Gama and staged by Lisbon’s Jesuit Colégio de Santo Antônio, being a noted example. Not different in spirit were the days-long Dutch Vertooninge, which ended in competitions of religious dramas, or the German-organized performance enterprises featuring floats—what in one instance Albrecht Dürer on his canvas titled Triumphwagen. The humanist Konrad Celtes, much honored along with the Sodalitas Literaria Danubiana academy by Emperor Maximilian I for his Linz production of Ludus Dianae (wr. 1501), had absorbed the best that Rome and Ferrara had to offer and, in 1501, had mounted the first example of the genre outside Italy. This custom continued in Prague and Vienna with the sumptuous Ludi Caesarei during the height of the Baroque period. Quite clearly, the religious dimension sometimes seemed lost, given the sense of pagan revelry that accompanied the more excited and magnificent productions, but in point of fact it always underlay the events somehow, historically as well as spiritually, if one takes into account the didactic nature of many of the floats and songs.

Except for the Spanish autos, one tends to overlook Renaissance religious drama because it develops as a continuum from its medieval source, as the continuing traditions of the German Meistersinger and the Dutch Rederijkers suggest. One expects to see more of a break with the past, or at least an eye-catching transformation, such as the elaborations of the trionfi and other processions provide. Yet this expectation is a mistake. School drama and Jesuit drama, even if often in Latin, and plain religious drama of a polemical, Reformational, or Counter-Reformational nature, by their very enthusiastic energy or combativeness, contributed to the spirit of rebirth and must be reckoned with as influential forces shaping new theatrical destinies alongside those shaped by the learned humanist and the popular theaters.

Humanist Drama and Derivatives

When the Italian humanists set their sights on Greco-Roman antiquity, their admiration became such as to suggest to them that, because perfection precludes improvement, the task of the modern playwright was to emulate and imitate in order to achieve the best work that could be achieved. In Aristotle, they came on the authority who provided the moral justification of tragedy, just as in Vitruvius they found the mentor who made tragedy possible onstage. The problem turned out to be the subservience of the theorists to their interpretation of the Greek philosopher’s statements, forgetting that while the Stagirite deduced his observations from a corpus of acclaimed works by the great tragedians, they were interpolating meanings and fashioning rules from those few observations to apply to what was going to be written. Moreover, when they did look into the ancient playwrights directly, they placed more emphasis on the moody Euripides and the sermonizing Seneca than on the austere Aeschylus and the profound Sophocles. Their desire to formulate laws while copying the ancient models may have coincided intellectually with the humanist orientation of the Renaissance, but psychologically it pulled in an opposite direction: The spirit of rebirth, inhibited by such rules, found itself denied the freedom it coveted—a freedom that even the medieval theater had enjoyed. As it happened, perhaps surprisingly and perhaps not, by pouring their creative energies into theaters and staging and their conceptual energies into theory, the Italians wrote next to nothing of note in the category of tragedy, but their theoretical discussions, naïvely argumentative and logical as they often sound, had a significant effect throughout Europe that was not really dislodged until the Romantic revolt in the nineteenth century. John Milton, Ben Jonson, Pierre Corneille, John Dryden, Voltaire, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—hardly a playwright was spared their influence, though the latter two writers headed in a reformed direction.

As Joseph E. Spingarn, who made a thorough study of Renaissance literary theory, observed, the basis of the Rinascimento theory of tragedy stemmed from Aristotle ’s definition as found in his De poetica (c. 334-323 B.C.E.; Poetics, 1705): Not a narration like an epic, tragedy imitates an action that is serious (therefore, not like comedy), unified, and of a certain length; its language is lofty and includes musical elements such as song, in which the medium is not verse alone; and through pity and fear it induces a purgation of the emotions, a catharsis. Then the chain of speculations started. Without touching on Aristotelian observations, Bernardino Daniello, in La poetica (1536), distinguished between dramatic modes—tragedy and comedy, excluding ignoble incidents from being shown in the former. Tragedies express the terrible and doleful tales, historically based, of afflicted princes, usually beginning normally and ending with inevitable misfortune; comedies express familiar though invented occurrences in modest, domestic situations pertaining to meaner people, usually beginning with problems and ending happily (for this reason, Dante, finishing his famous poem with the Paradiso, was supposed to have called the whole work “La commedia,” a concept related to upward movement). The sublime language of the one contrasted with the colloquial language of the other, just as the bloodshed marring the first contrasted with the love and seduction propelling the second. Basically, the distinction had obtained in the Middle Ages as well, and it continued unaltered through the poetic theories of Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (Art poétique, 1605) and the Pléïade in France, and into the speculative works of William Webbe (Discourse of English Poetrie, 1586) and George Puttenham (The Arte of English Poetrie, 1589) in England.

To this distinction, Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio (Discorso intorno al comporre delle commedie e delle tragedie, 1543) added the dignity of the subject matter, its elevated rank that must distinguish tragedy from comedy—a favorite notion, entwined with that of decorum, that marked the whole classical period for two and a half centuries to come. The idea established itself solidly in France, from the works of Étienne Jodelle in the sixteenth century through those of Corneille and Racine during the seventeenth to those of Prosper de Crébillon and Voltaire in the eighteenth, and it appealed especially in England because of its moralizing potential. The rank of the protagonists must also be high. Francesco Robortello (In librum Aristoteles de arte poetica explicationes, 1548) referred to the hero’s fall as needing to elicit the spectator’s compassion, and another commentator, Vincenzo Maggi (In Aristotelis librum de poetica explicationes, 1550), applied the notion of rank specifically to the most highly situated men, such as kings, for the same reason. The more elevated the hero’s station, the more tragic his decline and, as the English liked, the greater the likelihood of the drama’s teaching through admiration and commiseration before the mutability of fortune. Sir Philip Sidney insisted on dignified personages, together with gravity and loftiness of elocution, as did Jonson, Webbe, and Puttenham; Milton, in his prefix to Samson Agonistes (1671), adhered to the ancient and Italian tenets and eschewed vulgar people and events in the name of decorum.

Julius Caesar Scaliger (Poetices libri septem, 1561) exerted a tenacious influence toward the end of the sixteenth century and later in France, where he lived and wrote and introduced the French to the Aristotelian canon. He stressed the illustrious, historical dimension of tragedy (as opposed to the common invention of comedy), while Antonio Minturno (De poeta, 1559, and Poetica toscana, 1563), in his paraphrase of Aristotle, stressed linguistic severity of tone to avoid the softening effect of amorous idiom. Actually, in the seventeenth century—without forgetting Minturno—two Dutch scholars promoted Scaliger’s ideas in France: Daniel Heinsius (De tragoediae constitutione, 1611), a pupil of Scaliger’s son Joseph Justus Scaliger, and Gerhard-Joseph Vossius (De rhetoricae natura ac constitutione, 1622; On Plot in Tragedy, 1971), thereby anchoring in the Italian Renaissance French poetic theory and the structural laws regarding the tragedy of the Age Classique. Much was said about the role played by Cartesian rationalism in all this; the Abbé François d’Aubignac (La Pratique du théâtre, 1657; The Whole Art of the Stage, 1684), for one, insisted that the rules had nothing to do with authority but rather were based on reason, a contention that Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux echoed in his Art poétique (1674), just as Corneille, for another, appealed to logic in his Discours (1660), aimed at removing the tyranny of the arbitrariness of unnatural requirements.

Perhaps the most significant influence, not only in France, resulted from Lodovico Castelvetro ’s publication of his Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta in 1570 (as well as other critical writings), remarkable for its subtle observations. It forms, in a way, a compendium of Renaissance dramatic theory. For alongside the usual topics, he discussed a host of related matters: among others, the fact that tragedy is written to be acted on a stage (a concept that shaped thinking about the three unities), in possibly a huge theater, demanding that attention be paid to acoustics; that verse allows not only aesthetically for delight but also functionally for projection, lest the actor have to resort to the indignity of shouting; that because plays are for recreation, all technical or erudite discussions must be avoided (later, the English, especially Jonson, spoke of “simplicity”) and action must center on humanity’s elemental interests; and that because the stage is usually not an extensive platform, violent deeds may not occur conveniently on it, or with decorum, and should therefore not be represented.

Taking a hint from Sperone Speroni and Minturno, Castelvetro gave Aristotle’s catharsis an aesthetic interpretation, relying on the theory that emotions are purified through art, through the effect of seeing the terror and sad events heaped on a great man—which leads the spectators to grieve less over their own misfortunes. When people see what happens to others and realize their common nature, it eases their emotions of pity and fear. Vittore Vettori (Commentarii in primum librum Aristotelis de arte poetarum, 1560) as well as Robortelli subscribed to this interpretation. Most Italian critics, however, embraced the ethical interpretation, attributing the function or value of tragedy to the moral lesson or example derived from catharsis. This notion follows the opinion of Giraldi Cinthio and of Giangiorgio Trissino in his La poetica (1529-1562) that tragedy and comedy both aim to inspire virtue. The former looked to the eradication of vice through catharsis by making the viewer afraid to imitate it, while the latter preferred to avoid the problematics of catharsis by noting that tragedy must admire the good, leaving to comedy the task of chastising the bad.

This ethical interpretation became a literary axiom for the rest of Europe; it is discernible in Lessing and Corneille, Dryden and Racine, and Milton and Voltaire. Unfortunately, at times the ambition to purify by fear engendered the most acute (offstage) atrocities: incest, child murder, patricide, and suicide dominate Giraldi Cinthio’s Orbecche (pr. 1541). A true descendant of Seneca and Euripides and forerunner of Crébillon, Giraldi Cinthio cultivated what he admitted was full of “horror.” Nevertheless, Giraldi Cinthio’s treatise laid the foundation for the proper French Age Classique and for Lessing’s dramaturgy (to the extent that the latter did not militate against the established form), while his tales provided seminal material for many writers after him, including Shakespeare (Othello, the Moor of Venice, pr. 1604).

Maggi and Benedetto Varchi (Lezzioni, lette nell’Accademia Fiorentina, 1590) shifted the stress, maintaining that pity and fear themselves were not purged by catharsis but that passions analogous to them were. Tragedy, in other words, afforded a liberation—again an ethical purpose. In an often quoted letter of 1565, Speroni endorsed the cathartic notion of liberation from the bondage of pity and fear, even though Aristotle had merely called for their control. The moral aim of tragedy, however, did not preclude the theorists from underscoring the factor of pleasure. For Scaliger and Minturno, drama must move and delight as well as teach, though an ethical purpose lies at the core of art, and a tragedy’s basic function is to reveal how evil invites punishment and goodness reward. Such an end may be facilitated by the use of instructive precepts—sententiae—in true Senecan fashion. The spectator learns by example and admonishment. At this point, Italian literary critics, and those beyond the Alps who followed in their footsteps, were conscious of countermanding the sacred authority of Aristotle, for theorists such as Minturno and Milton knew quite well that by catharsis the Greek philosopher implied an emotional instead of a moral effect.

Yet no instruction is possible unless the tragic hero invites sympathy. He must appear neither eminently good nor entirely bad, and his fall must stem from a tragic flaw in his character or a fatal behavioral mistake. Sometimes prosperity or misfortune guides a human destiny, so that the hero might change for the better or the worse—this was the conjecture of Daniello, though Giraldi Cinthio stayed closer to Aristotle when he claimed that the happy or unhappy ending must still inspire pity and fear for the drama to qualify as tragedy. The argument over the necessity of an unhappy ending occupied the larger part of the theorists’ discussions. Scaliger insisted on this, and so did another rhetorician, Francesco Capriano (Della vera poetica, 1555), who linked misfortune to imprudence. To this Minturno added a further refinement; in his view, calculated imprudence, such as the actions of perfect persons, Christian saints, for example, fits the weighty and admiring character of tragedy and fully deserves treatment in this mode—an argument not forgotten by Corneille when he wrote Polyeucte (pr. 1642; English translation, 1655).

In all instances, however, the protagonists remained as illustrious as the action remained grave, and any deviation from this norm resulted in a jarring, unacceptable impropriety. The Renaissance had much to say about decorum, as had Aristotle and Horace. Propriety requires that characters be realistic and consistent with their own type. An old man, for example, while he may be in love in comedy, may not be so in the serious context of tragedy; low characters may not play roles of importance in tragedy; bloody actions may not be carried out in full view of the spectator lest the latter see the monarch, say, befouling himself. As the practice gained footing, the playwrights’ freedom diminished, for an old man or a soldier or a princess or a Roman could possess only certain characteristics, and in the process social distinctions were taken for granted; that is, only those of the highest rank could figure prominently in the action. For Girolamo Muzio (Arte poetica, 1551), Daniello, and Marco Gerolamo Vida (De arte poetica, 1527; Vida’s Art of Poetry, 1725), a pleb could never pass as a king. Formulas took over despotically, even in matters of an actor’s movement, dress, and talk; Minturno and Scaliger developed the theories in such detail that the notion of personality was smothered, so that what has come to be known as character development had no opportunity to evolve, even during the later neoclassical period, when playwrights were allowed to shed some of the strictures. Jonson’s concept of “humours” (defined by Lionardo Salviati in the second half of the sixteenth century as peculiar characteristics) derives from the older formulas.

The Dramatic Unities

By far the most extensive debate centered on the question of the dramatic unities. Aristotle intimated a unity of action, referred once to a time limit, and never wrote a word about unity of place. Yet the Italians wrote tomes on the subject. Action is the only unity that can claim ancient authority; time and place were fashioned out of it by inference. One sole plot (no subplots), one sole location (hence no scene changes), and one sole day (either twelve or twenty-four hours) circumscribed and fettered the tragedians, who yet saw no reason to disparage the injunctions. In fact, they balanced off the elaborateness of scenography by catering to the taste for classical simplicity (something that endeared them to the Age Classique in particular). Thus realism juxtaposed fantasy. Trissino’s La Sofonisba was upheld as a model tragedy.

It stands to reason that for the sake of coherence a single action and not a plurality of plot lines makes sense. If Corneille, Calderón, Marlowe, or Shakespeare introduced secondary plots now and then, regardless of whether they harbored any respect for the unities, they did so with cautious reserve and never allowed the ancillary action to attain any independence. Unity of action simply means good composition.

The same may not be said uniformly about the unity of time, an artificial regulation. The Italians, however, did not see things that way. Giraldi Cinthio first enunciated it, limiting action basically to one day or very little more. Judging from the normal practice of the Greek playwrights, he stood on honored ground, but when the argument’s spirit was replaced by chronometrics, its value dissipated. Aristotle’s observation of “a single revolution of the sun” became, for Robortelli, twelve hours (because people sleep at night) for both tragedy and comedy. Bernardo Segni (Rettoria et poetica d’Aristotile, 1549) argued for a more scientific twenty-four hours (for terrible things do happen at night), a circumscription later endorsed strictly by Milton and more casually by Jonson (who favored allowing the action to grow). So it went, with thirteen Italian rhetoricians eventually joining the controversy. It was Trissino who finally approached the issue more reasonably, suggesting that time must be viewed as an artistic principle aimed at avoiding dramatic formlessness (a weakness of medieval plays).

Up to this time, the critics did not refer to the unity of place. It became recognized as a necessary derivative of action and time when duration of plot was made to coincide with time of representation onstage, all of which led to the consideration that, with time restricted, a character could not go far away from the site of the action without straining temporal credibility. This became Maggi’s concern. So with the coming of Scaliger (who made no direct allusion to time), another principle took shape, one that prevailed everywhere in classical Europe: the verisimile, the vraisemblable, or verisimilitude . The temporal and spacial constraints resulted supposedly in the kind of plausibility that Minturno and Vettori sought and that Milton was to observe, together with the laws of decorum. Such semblable reality of stage representation convinced Castelvetro, the first to fix the unity of place, of the preponderant need for a circumscribed space; he gave it precedence over the other two, and it is to him that European drama owes the final formulation of the three unities as inviolable laws of drama.

Castelvetro put the unities together in 1570; in 1572 they were voiced by Jean de La Taille (in his preface to Saül le furieux) in France, and in 1595 by Sidney in his Defence of Poesie in England. In introducing his play, de la Taille discussed the propriety of mixing good and evil, passion and sentiment in the light of drama’s imitation—a favorite Renaissance principle, especially for the Pléïade—of life, and when he came to the three rules, he attempted to solve the problem of space by reverting to the medieval practice of multiple (simultaneous) sets. For some time to come, however, the theoretical spirit in France reflected thinking south of the Alps. The refined level of Italian criticism influenced the critic Guez de Balzac, but it was Jean Chapelain (Lettres sur la règle des vingt-quartre heures, 1630) who carried the torch for the unities and imposed them on French tragedy. Furthermore, he instilled in his countrymen a respect for Castelvetro (as opposed to Annibal Caro in the controversy over versification) and Speroni, as well as for the purveyor of Italian theory, Heinsius. Chapelain promoted Racine, and he was much admired by Corneille. In France, the dramatic unities were there to stay. Clearly, unlike Corneille, the genius of Racine knew how to take advantage of them: simplicity of action, no improbabilities or digressions, and a focus not on his predecessors’ sense of heroic admiration but on love as a determining element of plot, all of which easily reduced the action to a short time frame and a single location. This is not to say that the French, like the English and Spanish, avoided the debates that kept Italy astir. Alexandre Hardy may have moved his audiences with his freely conceived adventurous dramas, but Jodelle (Cléopâtre captive, pr. 1552), Jean Mairet (Sophonisbe, pr. 1634), and most others did not circumvent the precepts upheld by the rhetoricians who wrote with such finality, such as d’Aubignac and Boileau, that spokesman for the French classical program.

Apart from Sidney , who held to the notion of the unities rigidly—he criticized Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc (pr. 1561) for not observing time and place—the English at first treated the rules somewhat cavalierly. Elizabethan dramatists such as Thomas Kyd, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Marlowe wrote independently of rules, establishing their own romantic drama, and certainly Shakespeare was above them, though, as it happened, his last comedy, The Tempest (pr. 1611), followed them strictly. Although Spanish romantic production had its theorists, that of the Elizabethans did not. With the infusion of French practices, however, the unities became law until well into the eighteenth century. Sidney, then, originated English dramatic criticism; after him, neoclassical tragedy followed Aristotelian lines, in conjunction with the oratorical and gory Senecan orientation that had inspired the playwrights from the earliest days of the Renaissance.

Sidney reacted against the formless outrages and the mixture of modes, let alone the buffooneries of clowns, in the name of gravity, lofty style, and heroic dignity—in other words, decorum. Tragedy might modify history, but not the rules of poetry. He said all this long before the Aristotelian and Horatian Boileau. Milton paid homage to Sidney’s point of view, which stressed the common end of both tragedy and comedy: namely, to teach and delight. Jonson did, too, though he behaved more laxly with respect to some of the marginal conditions, such as division into acts and scenes, number of actors, and chorus. Yet in 1603 he constructed his Roman tragedy Sejanus His Fall (pr. 1603) strictly according to the rules, and it failed, faring no better than Jodelle’s Cléopâtre captive or Mairet’s Sophonisbe. Shakespeare was right in taking no part in arguments about theoretical rules, and when Polonius announces the players to Hamlet, he calls them

the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men.

Imitation of the ancients and of the Italians conformed with “the law of writ.” Yet not all rhetoricians and playwrights were content to imitate; some preferred “the liberty.” The need to compromise when the rules gave rise to untenable situations modulated with some writers to a desire for freedom of inspiration, something with which the Elizabethans, culminating in Shakespeare, were quite familiar. Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio (Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi, 1549) and his pupil Giovanni Battista Pigna (I romanzi, 1554) had argued for an author’s intellectual independence of the sacred authorities in treating certain subjects, the romanzi, or romances, such as Matteo Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1483-1495; English translation, 1823) or Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516, 1521, 1532; English translation, 1591), whose mixture of love with the heroic diverged from the fundamental requirements of long narrative poems and so made them distinguishable from epics. Being unknown to the Greeks and Romans, the romanzi constituted a new genre, therefore not subject to the rules. (It is doubtful if historical and pastoral drama would have reached the heights that they did without the absence of many constraints.) This was the romantic “liberty” some playwrights sought. This independence gave the Renaissance proper (before the French Age Classique) its finest drama—in England and in Spain.

Apart from the Elizabethans and Shakespeare, who did not have rhetoricians championing and defending their aesthetics, the most noteworthy dramatic freedoms were taken in Spain, where literary theory was debated. Cervantes, in his theoretical writing, pleaded for a literary, noble theater, “a mirror of human life, a reflection of the customs and image of truth . . . , verisimilitude . . . , the observance of the dramatic rules.” In practice, however, Cervantes paid less attention to his learned formalism and thought of theater as an aesthetic and cultural datum; his respect for the dramatic unities was relative, as the character Comedy in his El rufián dichoso (pb. 1615) asserts: Seneca, Terence, and Plautus are admirable, but “time changes things, perfects the arts,” and they should be imitated only in part. The unities of time and place inhibit the modern dramatic vision. Despite such insights, his best drama, El cerco de Numancia (wr. 1585; The Siege of Numantia, 1870), for example, can hardly be considered a landmark.

Yet the spirit of romantic innovation and “irregular” drama took shape nevertheless. Juan de la Cueva’s Ejemplar poético (wr. 1606, pb. 1774), by a man Italianate in matters of poetics but nationalistic in matters of drama, may be read essentially as an apology for Lope de Vega’s dramatic practices, in its attempt to encourage his countrymen, because of Spain’s special position in Europe, to innovate on classical foundations. The title of Lope de Vega’s poetic work El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609; The New Art of Writing Plays, 1914) suggests unmistakably the romantic desire to branch out in new directions (albeit admiring the Aristotelian canon and the Italianized rules). Theater must please. The norms he proposed, however, were not entirely new: freedom of choice in subject matter, mixture of tragic and comic, unity of action, abandonment of the unities of time and place, separation of the work into three acts, division of the argument in two so that the second leads to a resolution without the spectator’s awareness, never an empty stage, consistency between characters and their language, avoidance of unverisimilar events, and questions of honor. One hears echoes of Scaliger, Castelvetro, Minturno, Speroni, and Trissino. Furthermore, because the people demand the plays, the people, not the literati, must be satisfied; Lope de Vega put them right into his plays, and in a work such as Fuenteovejuna (pb. 1619; The Sheep Well, 1936) they constitute indeed the protagonist. Maggi had spoken in favor of the masses mingling with princes. In short, Lope de Vega Carpio ’s “new art” lay not in his do’s and dont’s but in the relative absence of them. In this respect, he served as Spain’s Shakespeare.

The “new art” aroused traditionalists, and a series of polemical battles took place involving in the opposition people such as Fernando Nuñez Pincianus, Cascales, Cristóbal de Mesa, Suárez de Figueroa, and even Miguel de Cervantes. Torres Rámila published a libel in 1617 titled Spongia, which divided the litigants into Lopists and anti-Lopists, the former attacking the publication with their own Expostulatio Spongiae, in which context Alfonso Sánchez made his mark in 1618 by declaring that “the principal precept of art is to imitate nature because the works of poets express the nature, customs, and genius of the century in which they wrote. . . . If Spanish comedy were to abide by the rules of the ancients, it would proceed against nature and against the fundamentals of poetry.” For him, Lope de Vega surpassed all the ancient poets.

It was to this liberty—call it a romantic or naturalistic concept—to which the French looked during the seventeenth century before Molière and Racine. To d’Aubignac’s displeasure, Hardy insisted on the legitimacy of public taste with the same fervor as François Ogier emphasized the independence of manner of the romanzi, or romances. In England, too, the rules came under attack, despite Dryden’s strong defense of them; yet Sir Robert Howard (in his preface to The Duke of Lerma, 1668; The Great Favourite: Or, the Duke of Lerma, pr. 1668) and George Farquhar (Love and Business, pb. 1702) scoffed at the rules, particularly those of time and place, and at all pontificators of poetic principles. France and England (after the Elizabethans), however, went classical, after all was said and done; Spain went, or stayed, romantic; and Italy, with its firmly established classical tradition but also with its developed pastoral drama, which tended toward the romantic, kept the debate alive both in theory and in practice.

The Rules and Comedy

Some of the debate on tragedy overlapped with that on comedy or spilled into it. Because of its humbler nature, comedy did not concern itself theoretically with questions such as decorum and sometimes language (which could be colloquial). Yet most other tenets for tragedy applied to comedy as well and were taken equally seriously. The lesser mode attracted the greater audiences. Court society in general, including the Roman Curia, preferred the amusement of comedy to the terror of tragedy and did not care about the polemics of academies, literary circles, and erudite theoreticians. Whether in Florence or in London, the public liked the lucky chance that suddenly appeases distress and gathers joy, as Webbe would have it, and the easier identification with private persons closer to themselves, as Puttenham would. Jonson, for one, paid more theoretical attention to comic than to tragic arguments. Lope de Vega was a master at exploiting what Sidney saw as the common errors of life, and Molière remained unequaled in ridiculing erratic domesticities and wayward social trends.

The central requirement—a requirement that endured into the century of Carlo Goldoni and Ludwig Holberg—was delight, with or without laughter. This notion dated back to Trissino. Yet while the Latins (Italians, French, and Spanish) would accept that which simply delighted and produced laughter, though this might be provoked by sinful events, the English needed to inject the factor of delightful teaching into their conception of comedy. Niccolò Machiavelli’s La mandragola (pr. c. 1519; The Mandrake, 1911) would never do. Jonson would “sport with human follies, not with crimes,” and Sidney would use the ridiculous to improve moral life.

On the whole, however, rhetoricians had less to say directly about comedy than about tragedy. Most was by implication, and perhaps this turned out for the better, for after a very slavish beginning in close imitation of the ancients and New Comedy (Menander, Philemon, Plautus, and Terence), in which stereotyping triumphed and verisimilitude suffered, comedy from Ariosto to Machiavelli, from the commedia dell’arte to Molière, and from Lope de Vega to Jonson (Shakespeare always apart) energized itself through its own inner dynamics or resources, through its own natural irrepressibility, and as a result the Renaissance produced on the whole a better fare of comedy than of tragedy, because comedy was freer to explore new manners and new materials.

Tragedy

Learned humanist theater, called in Italy teatro erudito, developed in a threefold way: ancient Latin and Greek plays produced in the original, afterward in translation; dramas written in Latin; and tragedies written in the vernacular, adhering to the rules and in servile imitation of the classical masters, more often than not Seneca and Euripides. It was the dream of the early humanists in Italy, during the fifteenth century, to bring Latin and Greek texts back to the stage. The practice developed on a broad scale. Melanchthon, during the sixteenth century, revived ancient dramas in his academy—Euripides’ Heklabē (425 B.C.E.; Hecuba, 1782) and Seneca’s Thyestes (English translation, 1581), for example—and in France also, where Seneca’s works appeared in 1485, translations were used, such as those by Desiderius Erasmus of Euripides in 1506, before being translated in turn into French (Italian plays, too, were translated, since throughout the Renaissance Italian was considered by the Pléïade a classical language). In England, George Buchanan translated Euripides for the stage, and in Italy, some Greek works were performed in the original.

As far back as the Trecento, Albertino Mussato, a contemporary of Dante, wrote a famous (at that time) tragedy, Ecerinis (1315; English translation, 1975), a Senecan story of a recent Paduan tyrant (Ezzelino III da Romano), and by the next century Enea Silvio Piccolomini (later Pius II) was still composing plays in Latin. As professors, masters, and rectors with a school stage available, German humanists in particular did much to promote dramaturgy in Latin: Celtes, Johann Reuchlin, Jakob Locher, Jodocus Badius, Jakob Wimpheling, Philipp Frischlin, his pupil Heinrich Julius von Braunschwig, and others. In the northern countries, humanists lived in an ambience in which the vernaculars took over more slowly in learned circles. Most of them enjoyed repeated visits to Italian centers such as Rome and Ferrara, from which they garnered many useful impressions. The Accademia Romana, with the noted Pomponio Lato (Pomponius Laetus) and disciples of his, the so-called Pomponians, such as Inghirami, were especially influential. In the manner of Celtes, Locher wrote, at the very end of the 1400’s, Tragedia de Thurcis et Suldano, and during the next century both Jesuit and Protestant drama, while representing a new—religious and polemical—form of dramatic art (Bidermann’s Cenodoxus and Cosmarchia, 1617, among others), expanded the Latin practice. England, too, had its share of Latin drama—the universities of Oxford and Cambridge serving properly as sites—and while the Elizabethan writers monopolized the country’s attention, it was not impossible to run across something such as Simeons’s Zeno sive ambitio infelix and Leo Armenius sive impietas punita on the religious side, or Thomas Legge’s three-part tragedy Richardus Tertius (pr. 1573, 1579, 1582) on the recent historical. Nothing of note, however, has come down to contemporary audiences from these ubiquitous Latin compositions of the Renaissance.

More was attempted with original drama in the vernacular, though here too an inordinate reliance on ancient models, despite significant departures (by Antonio Cammelli, Giraldi Cinthio, Speroni, Cecchi, and Poliziano, to mention but a few), curbed the creative verve that lent excitement to the romantic aesthetic. Indeed, many Italian attempts did exhibit free impulses. The first tragedy in Italian, in fact, was Cammelli’s Filostrato e Panfila (1499), a Boccaccian echo of love and horror like a Senecan mystery play, if such a hybrid may be conceived. Giraldi Cinthio’ s Orbecche forty-two years later, or Speroni’s Canace the following year, outdoing their predecessor in gruesomeness, together with Lodovico Dolce’s portrayal of jealousy in Marianna (pr. 1565) and Luigi Groto’s excited crowds in La Dalida (pb. 1572), still belonged to those clumsy efforts at tragedy that Shakespeare improved on and perfected with Titus Andronicus (pr. 1594) and Othello, the Moor of Venice.

Other romancelike efforts, however, fell as flat as their “regular” tragic counterparts: Giraldi Cinthio’s adventuresome Arrenopia (pr. 1563), with its happy ending, or his sentimental Altile (pb. c. 1545) or his Cli antivalomeni (pr. 1548), with its impersonations and incognitos, reminiscent—it has been observed—of Cymbeline (pr. c. 1609-1610), or Torquato Tasso’s chivalric Il re Torrismondo (pb. 1587) and Gabriele Zinano’s flighty and affected L’Almerigo (pr. 1590). However artificially sensational or simply bland, these works at least invite one’s attention as curiosities more than the regular, imitative, rule-bound tragedies, such as Giovanni Rucellai’s Sophoclean Rosmunda (wr. 1515, pr. 1525) and Euripidean Oreste (wr. 1515-1520, pr. 1723); Trissino’s Euripidean La Sofonisba, with its stamp of Senecan moralism; or Giraldi Cinthio’s other Senecan works, Didone (public reading c. 1541) and Cleopatra (wr. c. 1543), not to mention Pietro Aretino’s prolix La Orazia (pb. 1546). This is not to suggest that the tragedies were without influence. Trissino’s La Sofonisba was highly regarded in Europe as a perfect model; typical were the French renderings by Mellin de Saint-Gelais and Claude Mérinet. This type of play of antique complexion spread throughout sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe; one may single out at random Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft’s Achilles en Polyxena (1614) in Holland and Jan Kochanowski’s Odprawa greckich (pr. 1578; The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys, 1918) in Poland.

Perhaps the only deserving work of this period’s teatro erudito belonged neither to tragedy nor to comedy, though it was superficially related to the sacra rappresentazione:Poliziano’s Orfeo (pr. c. 1480; English translation, 1879). In this secularized mystery play, the Christian allusions are paganized: An annunciation is made not by the traditional angel but by Mercury, Gabriel is replaced by Jupiter, Avernus appears, a tumultuous Bacchic chorus climaxes the action, and so on. Given its composition as an idealized sequence of scenic, lyric elegies, it is not inopportune to think of it aesthetically as a precursor of opera, its rhythmically narrated love “numbers,” popular in flavor yet humanist in inspiration, qualifying as arias. The relatively early date of the work should have augured well for humanist drama, but unfortunately it remained sui generis. The mixed genre (pagan classicism and sacred drama)—Drammi mescidati—did find many imitators immediately, such as Tebaldeo (Antonio Tebaldi) and Niccolò da Correggio, whose Orphei tragoedia and Cefalo (pr. 1487) respectively were probably more read than seen.

In fact, the teatro erudito as a whole elicited sufficient boredom for producers to start interpolating shows inside the show, between acts—originally called intromesse, that is, insertions, which became intermedii or intermezzi —s omething the spectators truly enjoyed and came or stayed to see. These were brief, burlesque, choreographed compositions, usually ending with music and ballet. In evolved form, they passed autonomously into France and England (the court revels, or interludes, such as John Heywood’s The Play of the Weather along with court masques related to the trionfi), and the French word entremets suggests their entertainment use during meals. The most noteworthy intermezzi were Cervantes’s entremeses (the Spanish cultivated the genre assiduously): satires of conjugal separations, mayors, human cruelty, courtesans, lowlife, deceived husbands, love rivalries—from El juez de los divorcios (pr. 1615; The Divorce Court Judge, 1919) to La guarda cuidadora (pr. 1615; The Hawk-eyed Sentinel, 1948), both published in 1615. If the author of Don Quixote de la Mancha enjoys a theatrical reputation apart from his theoretical stands, it is because of his eight or ten rapid sketches, the entremeses.

In France, anticipating Cardinal Richelieu, the sixteenth century Pléïade group led by Pierre de Ronsard dictated the refashioning of the stage to bring about a tragédie à l’antique, following the Italian example. Joachim Du Bellay, Antonie de Baïf, and Jean Bastier de La Péruse looked for distinguishing nobility of language and respect for the ancients and their transalpine imitators. Their delight knew no end in 1552 at the appearance of Jodelle’s Cléopâtre captive , on a Plutarchan subject, treated in Alexandrine verses by a young author (he was twenty) displaying total deference to the classical laws. Wordy, monotonous, and without dramatic effect, the play nevertheless impressed the Parisian aristocracy and influenced its entire century. Those who followed him had little more to offer the French learned stage—La Péruse (LaMedée, pb. 1555), Jacques Grévin (Le Mort de César, pr. 1561), Gabriel Bounin (La Soltane, pb. 1561), André de Rivaudeau, Florent Chrestien, and others. Antonie de Montchrestien and his Huguenot L’Écossaise (pb. 1601; Mary, Queen of Scots) and classical Sophonisbe (pb. 1596) in the early seventeenth century attracted much attention, perhaps because of his different, elegiac tone reminiscent of Poliziano, and so did Robert Garnier (Porcie, pb. 1568; Hippolyte, pb. 1573; Bradamante, pb. 1582; Sédécie: Ou, Les Juives, pb. 1583), whose eloquence and lively dialogue raises his works a notch above the others.

Another author who flirted with freedoms was the prolific Alexandre Hardy of the early seventeenth century, France’s first professional playwright, whose enormous output included examples of tragedy, tragicomedy, and pastoral. In the first category, he drew his material from Plutarch, Xenophon, and Flavius Josephus: Didon se sacrifiant (1603), La Mort d’Achille (wr. 1605, pb. 1625), Coriolan (wr. c. 1605, pb. 1625), and more, some of which remind one of Elizabethan drama, which he did not know but which did not hesitate to use multiple staging or frequent scene changes or to put aside the unities of time and place. His verve did not make up for his lack of dramatic power, but at least his romantic irregularities removed him from the sterilities of Jodelle and Garnier. Yet the drama of romance led to no florescence, and Cardinal Richelieu appointed a commission of five poets, one the well-known Rotrou (whom Voltaire praised as the founder of the French theater), to establish a disciplined, classical drama. Cervantes would have applauded. Rotrou himself catered to the prevailing taste for linear simplicity, as his Sophoclean-Senecan Antigone (pr. 1637) or his celebrated Bélisaire (pr. 1643) proved sufficiently for him to have been referred to as the unwitting herald of Racine.

Many followed the new guidelines, albeit with numerous solo declamations that held back the action: Mairet with his Sophonisbe, the first French tragedy based on the rules, and with his Marc-Antoine: Ou, La Mort de Cléopâtre (pr. 1635); Tristan L’Hermite with his La Mariane (pr. 1636; English translation, 1856); Georges de Scudéry, who wrote in various modes, though his La Mort de César (pr. 1635) and Didon (pr. 1636) are better known among the tragedies; Cyrano de Bergerac with his “libertine” La Mort d’Agrippine (pb. 1653); the precious Philippe Quinault, popular among gallant audiences, with his Stratonice (pb. 1660), among other tragedies; Théophile de Viau with his tragic Pyrameet Thisbé (pr. 1617); and Corneille, whose Médée (pr. 1635) preceded by two years the notorious Le Cid, which respects the rules but whose bold, romantic undertones, happy ending, and multiplicity of incidents strained verisimilitude and gave rise to heated debates that eventually involved the Académie Française and Chapelain. His liberties aside, Corneille then became the first great name to become associated with the return to a less fanciful and more rigid dramatic construction (Horace, pr. 1640; Cinna: Ou, La Clémence d’Auguste, pr. 1640; Polyeucte, pr. 1642; Sophonisbe, pr. 1663), and from him the step to the master of Port Royal was brief. Richelieu’s judgment proved correct for France: “instead of an irregular Shakespeare, France was to have a most regular Racine .” In many ways, Andromaque (pr. 1667, pb. 1668), Britannicus (pr. 1669, pb. 1670), Bérénice (pr. 1670), Iphigénie (pr. 1674), the brilliant Phèdre (pr. 1677), and other tragedies may be considered a fulfillment of the finest dreams of the Italian rhetoricians of the Cinquecento. Indeed, in the long run Racine represents for the whole of Europe the only classical dramatist of luminary stature.

The Italian and French attempts at departure from the fixed norms were fully realized in England (and Spain). Although the French wrote in Alexandrines, the English preferred blank verse. Beginning with Sackville and Norton’s didactic Gorboduc and on through pre-middle-class realistic dramas such as Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Part I (pr. 1604) or Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (pr. 1603) or bloody Elizabethan pieces such as Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (pr. 1585-1589), to the gory bombast of Jacobean and Caroline tragedies in the seventeenth century, disregard for classical tenets produced, if not always a decorous and cogent theater, at least a lively and pulsating series of works that the crowds, on all levels, enjoyed passionately. Regular tragedy, such as Buchanan’s attempts to revive the drama of antiquity, Jephthes, sive votum (pr. 1554) and Baptistes (pr. 1539), or Legge’s Latin Richardus Tertius, seemed too tame or esoteric; the humanist impulse had little to communicate.

Some of the playwrights who imitated classical models left their works anonymous, perhaps because of their being shaped by preexisting subject matter: Arden of Feversham (pb. 1592), for example, or A Yorkshire Tragedy (pb. 1608), or Two Lamentable Tragedies (pb. 1601). During the Jacobean frenzy, it might have been foreseeable that to return to the classical rules would have invited instant failure, as happened with Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (pr. 1603) and his Catiline His Conspiracy (pr. 1611). Attempts at revival in the eighteenth century were equally doomed: Joseph Addison’s Cato in 1713 or Samuel Johnson’s Irene in 1749 fared no better than Agustín de Montiano y Luyando’s Virginia (pb. 1750), Nicolás Fernández de Moratín’s La Hormesinda in 1770, Johann Christoph Gottsched’s Der sterbende Cato in 1732, Voltaire’s Zaïre (pr. 1732; English translation, 1736), or Crébillon’s Rhadamiste et Zénobie (pr. 1711); only Pietro Metastasio’s work stands out in retrospect—see his La clemenza di Tito of 1734—but his lyric genius was to find its way into opera.

What the public wanted was something with sweeping fantasy and bloody action in the manner of Seneca the Younger; often the name of Machiavelli, however improperly, was invoked, if not the character himself, as in the case of the introducer of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (pr. c. 1589). Before one of his plays, Thomas Nashe admonishes his audience to ready its ears and tears, for he has never presented something so tragic: hence Elizabethan drama, full of tragic terror, vengeance, dreams and the supernatural, ghosts, and the ineluctability of destiny. Giraldi Cinthio’s “Machiavellian” character Acaristo in Euphimia (pr. 1554) would have coincided with English popular taste and in a sense turned up in Marlowe’s sanguinary Tamburlaine and in so many historical dramas during the reigns of King James I and King Charles I. These dramas were more “Senecan”—and freer. For Seneca also influenced versification, declamation, and the art of repartee, to which were added the coexistence of tragic and comic elements and the mixture of noble and common language, depending on the characters.

English Renaissance theater wisely gave up the academic, humanistic fixations on the unities in favor of multiple scenes, extended time spans, and parallel plots. Older, medieval traditions were revived, and the judge of success was the people—the crowd for which Lope de Vega wrote and that glorified Shakespeare. Romantic practice created strong aesthetic similarities between Spanish and English theater; indeed, on grounds of techniques, Lope de Vega and the Bard of Stratford have often been the subject of comparisons, though the latter unifies idea and execution while the former falls short in execution.

Even the anonymous playwrights who aped classical conventions were never so servile in their imitation as on the Continent. Libertine themselves, the tavern writers had adopted an unrestricted aesthetic. The garrulous Marlowe was one of them: His Tamburlaine the Great (pr. 1587), Doctor Faustus (pr. c. 1588), The Jew of Malta, and Edward II (pr. c. 1592) capitalize on horror and grotesqueness, fantasy and sensation, but at the same time they give flexibility to blank verse and striking plasticity to the protagonists, who emerge with compelling vividness. Robert Greene , a writer of romances, was another (Orlando furioso, pr. c. 1588; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, pr. 1589; and James IV, pr. c. 1591), and still another was Kyd. Uneven as their works are, their worth can be measured by how they paved the way for William Shakespeare , for the author of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. 1600-1601), King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606), and Macbeth (pr. 1606) did not burst onto the Elizabethan scene out of nowhere. He was, rather, the culmination of a literary and cultural process that owed much to the time’s moralistic-philosophico-medieval background and to such figures as Marlowe, Greene, Kyd, Garnier, Giraldi Cinthio, Speroni, and Seneca. Still, his brilliance and mastery left all of them far behind. As in classical drama, his characters are great princes, caught in the throes of fortune’s instability and in a struggle with their own weaknesses, vices, and flaws, in a world dominated by undeterminable forces and by the eternal conflict between good and evil. Yet he is an author who defies categorization simply because he is Shakespeare.

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