Chapter VI: Drama

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

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

1. SACRED PLAYS

The most widespread stage drama of the fifteenth century was medieval. _Mystère_ and _miracle_, _sacre rappresentazioni_, continued, indeed, well into the sixteenth century. The _Annales d’Aquitaine_ of Jean Bouchet is quite specific.

The King of France, by his letters patent issued the 18th day
of January, 1533, commanded all the nobles of Poitou ... to
appear with such [troops and equipment] as they owed for his
service in the following May; and the review (_monstres_) was
before the Seneschal of Poitou in the city of Poitiers....
On the 14th of July the mayor, échevins, and bourgeois of
Poitiers also gave their review for the king’s service in
the aforesaid city. And on the morrow were made joyous and
triumphal presentations (_monstres_) of the mysteries of the
Incarnation, Nativity, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension
of our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the mission given by the
Holy Spirit, which mysteries were played for a fortnight in
the old market of the aforesaid city, in a theater built most
triumphally around it (_en un théatre fait en rond, fort
triomphant_). And the aforesaid play began on Sunday, the 19th
day of the aforesaid month, and lasted continuously for the
eleven days following, wherein were very good actors and richly
costumed.... The Passion and Resurrection were played also
three weeks afterward, or thereabouts, in the city of Saumur,
where I saw excellent acting (page 473 of the edition of 1644).

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

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

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

2. TRAGEDY

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

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

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

Quum, te jubente, pigra moles aequoris
Posuit procellas, mobilis stupuit liquor
Cursu coacto, et vitreus crystallino
Muro pependit pontus hinc et hinc, viam
Praebere jussus (p. 5).

Serial iteration is sharpened by antithesis.

Ut trudit undas unda, fluctus fluctui
Cedit sequenti, pellitur dies die;
Sempee premuntur praeterite novis malis;
Dolor dolori, luctui est luctus comes (p. 2).

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

Occulit falsus pudor impudentem,
Impium celat pietatis umbra,
Turbidi vultu simulant quieta,
Vera dolosi (p. 19).

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

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

The argument of _Porcie_ (1568) closes thus:

“Here, then, is the summary of the history on which I have
planned this tragedy. You will find it in Dio’s 47th book,
in Appian’s 4th and 5th, and in Plutarch’s lives of Cicero,
Brutus, and Antony. I have also interwoven the fiction of the
death of the Nurse, to involve it further with gloom and sorrow
and make the catastrophe more bloody.”

Act I consists of (1) a monologue by the Fury Mégère, a fine
piece to say, and (2) a chorus of six rhymed stanzas. It is
rather a prelude than an act.

In Act II Portia’s monologue is followed by a chorus imitating
Horace’s second Epode, and the Nurse’s monologue by their
dialogue and another Horatian chorus. There is no action. The
dialogue gives a hint of characterization when Portia in her
doubt and fear regrets the death of Caesar.