Chapter 4. Renaissance Drama

Drama is the most natural of the arts, being based on one of the most fundamental of the human faculties - the faculty of imitation. It is through imitation that children learn to talk and to perform a great number of complicated human functions. This imitative faculty or the mimetic faculty makes us all actors almost from the cradle. The imitation we play from the beginning of our life is not yet drama. Drama is a more complicated activity through which art communicates, this communication constructed in the linguistic medium artistically arranged within a complex but fixed, or complete, structure of circumstances and succession of concepts, making a piece an artistic whole. It is believed that the first drama was not a play, but a serious activity performed by men expressing man's highest interest - religion.

Many people believe that the first drama was based on four things: the mimetic faculty, sympathetic magic (a life of the human being is in sympathy with some external things that are idolised by some people - the image of a person is supposed to be in sympathy with the person himself: a wax figure or a tree, for instance; whatever happens to the image must also happen to the person it symbolises), a belief in gods, and a fear of starvation. Agriculture was the elemental thing in a primitive society. It grows rice and corn and relies on the products of the earth for the bulk of its food supply. Having no science, ancient people tend to think that their lives were in the hands of certain natural forces beyond their control. As they cannot think, like scientists, in terms of abstractions, they think instead in terms of personified forces - in other words, gods. In a climate with clearly defined seasons they will be aware of a living time of the year - when things grow - and a dead time of the year, when nothing grows. There is no science to teach them about the turning of the earth, the regular appearance of spring after winter. When winter comes it must seem to them that the god of life has died, killed perhaps by the god of death. How can the god of fertility - the life-god, the corn-god, the rice-god - be brought back to life again? Obviously by sympathetic magic.

And so come magical ceremonies (rituals). If a wax or wooden image represents a man, a man should represent a god. And so a man - a member of the community - pretends to be the life-god and another pretends to be the death-god. They fight and the life-god is killed. But then the life-god miraculously rises again, kills the winter-god, dances over the corpse in triumph. Now, according to the law of sympathetic magic, what has happened in mere representation must happen in fact. The real god of fertility must come back to life. And, in fact, he does. The earth turns, and the earth is fruitful again. Magic has triumphed. Here we see acting, here we see a plot. The action (fighting) leads to a climax (death of the god) and the climax leads to a happy denouement - resurrection. This is drama, but it is also a religion.

In the European anthropology religion and drama are closely connected as we have just seen ourselves. They two closely mix throughout the early history of the art in Europe. With the Greeks, two thousand five hundred years ago, drama had reached a more sophisticated stage of development than the mere representation of the death and resurrection of a god, but it had its beginnings in very crude village ceremonies: tragedy comes from tragos, the Greek word for a goat, and perhaps the first tragedies were merely dances round a sacrificial goat, or songs from a chorus dressed as goats. The Нebrews used, symbolically, to load a goat with their sins and drive it out into the desert. Comedy comes from komos, meaning a revel, the sort of rough country party which honoured the god Dionysus - 'a god of vegetation, a suffering god, who dies and comes to life again, particularly as a god of wine, who loosens care'.

The great Greek dramatists - Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides - wrote religious dramas which were concerned with the moral relation between gods and men and usually had an instructive moral purpose. Performances of these plays were less an entertainment than a religious ceremony: the vast amphitheatres were crowded, the actors, wearing masks, went through stately movements, mouthed noble lines, while a chorus cut in occasionally to comment on the story and point the moral. The story was rarely original; it was usually taken from a myth already well known to the audience. A tragedy deals with the fall of a man from power, a fall brought about by some unsuspected flaw in his character or by some specific sin. At a tragedy we feel pity for the hero as well as horror at the situation he finds himself in, we do not protest at what seems an unfair trick played by gods, instead we accept it as the pattern of fate, and at the end of a story we feel resigned to the will of gods rather than angry and resentful. We feel 'purged' of emotion, in a state that Milton describes as 'calm of mind. All passion spent'. The word 'purge' is a significant one. Аristotle, the Greek philosopher, said that the function of tragedy was purgation of the feelings through the arousing of pity and terror. The technical term (invented and employed by Aristotle) is catharsis, the Greek word for 'purgation'.

The first (modern) European dramatists took up Roman tragedy as a model not the Greek one, for the hero in the Greek tragedy had no choice, whilst in the Roman counterpart the hero was more attractive - he had a free will and a great deal of choice. What was attractive was the work of a Roman playwright Seneca (4 B.C. - 65 A.D.). He modelled his tragedies on the great Greeks, but his plays are no mere copies, either in language, form, or spirit. The gods are still in complete control, but man, though he must accept the divine rule, does not necessarily have to think that it is right to do so. The gods have the monopoly of power, but that does not mean that they have also the monopoly of virtue. The gods can defeat a man, crush him, but the man can still feel, somewhere deep inside, 'I am better than they are. They can kill me, but they cannot kill the fact that I am their moral superior. Whatever they say or do, I have done nothing wrong - I, not they, am in the right'. This stoicism had a great attraction for Shakespeare and his fellows. The language of Seneca is fuller of activity than that of the great Greeks - it has a violence, sometimes bloodthirstiness, that appealed to the Elizabethan dramatists far more than the calm dignity of Euripides or Sophocles could have done.

One admirable thing about the Greek tragic dramatists is their sense of form. Their main concern is to tell a story and to emphasise the moral significance of that story; everything is subordinated to that end. The Greek tragedian does not want any distractions - no comedy, no secondary plot - and he wants his action to be a continuous whole, which means no spreading of the story over several weeks, months, or years, for weeks, months, and years cannot be realistically portrayed on the stage. Hence we have the traditional unities of Greek drama - one plot, one day. In the Renaissance period, admirers of the Greek dramatists sometimes took all this a stage further, adding a third unity, that of place. Ben Jonson, for instance, sometimes wishes to move from city to city (as Shakespeare so often does), but he really prefers to set his action solidly in London or in Venice and stay there for the whole play.

Of the comedies of the Greeks and Romans can be said very little indeed. The main purpose of a 'classical' comedy is to make the audience laugh at the follies of mankind and, perhaps, correct those follies in themselves. The greatest comedians deal with the eternal qualities of mankind: a Greek or Roman. The names of Aristophanes in ancient Greece, Plautus and Terence in ancient Rome are very important for the development of the comic drama in Europe, setting excellent examples of artistic entertainment, humour and comedy. English comedy owes much to these ancient comic playwrights.

In the run of history the Church got unfriendly towards the drama. If we go back to the last days of the Roman Empire we can understand why. The plays presented to a jaded, perverted public in the reigns of the last Emperors were marked by a love of sheer outrage and horror that seemed hardly credible. Condemned men were executed as part of the action; copulation took place on stage. The Church condemned such a prostitution af art and the theatres were soon closed. When drama came back to Europe, it did so very shyly and modestly, in the service of the Church itself. Dramatic presentations on religious themes were performed at Christmas and Easter. Drama became a part of Church ceremonial. The language of all these dramatic pieces was Latin.

It is certain that no religious dramas of this type existed in England before the Norman Conquest, and that it was the Normans themselves who introduced sacred drama to England. This drama became very popular in England. Plays about the Gospel characters and the miracles of the saints were the most exciting. In fact, such dramatic presentations moved out of the church building, into the churchyard, and then into the town itself, where the process of secularisation began. The clergy still performed for a time, but then citizens of the town took a hand, and sometimes also wandering actors, singers and jugglers.

In 1264 Pope Urban instituted the feast of Corpus Christi (Body of Christ). It should be celebrated with all due ceremony. This day - the longest of the northern summer - was chosen by the tradeguilds of the towns of England for the presentation of a cycle of plays based on incidents from the Bible, plays which we can call Mystery Plays (the term 'mystery' means a craft, skill or trade; compare the French metier and the Italian mestiere). These trade-guilds, or craft-guilds, were organisations of skilled men, men banded together for the protection of their crafts, for the promotion of their general welfare, and for social purposes. This presentation of plays on the feast of Corpus Christi became one of the most important of their social activities.

All these plays are anonymous, but they have a certain art in language and construction, a certain power of characterisation, which no minor poet need have been ashamed to put his name to.

The secular subjects are slow in coming, but they make their way into drama through a new kind of religious or semi-religious play - the Morality. The Morality was not a guild play and it did not take as its subject a story from the Bible. Instead, it tried to teach a moral lesson through allegory, that is, as in Piers Plowman, by presenting abstract ideas as though they were real people. A fine example of the Morality tradition is Everyman. This is a translation from the Dutch Elkerlijk, and it tells, in simple, dignified language, of the appearance of Death to Everyman (who stands for each one of us) and his informing Everyman that he must commence the long journey to the next world. Everyman calls on certain friends to accompany him - Beauty, Five-wits, Strength, Discretion - but they will not go. Only Knowledge and Good-Deeds are ready to travel in his company to the grave. Everyman learns that the pleasures, friends and faculties of this world avail a man nothing when death comes; only spiritual strength can sustain him at his last hour. This is a simple moral, but it is made extremely forceful by being given dramatic form. This is always a sign of good art. It was composed in the fifteenth century but printed in the sixteenth. It comes towards the end of the religious morality tradition.

The story of Elizabethan drama begins not in the theatres but in the Inns of Court of London. It begins with tragedies written who practise law and try to copy Seneca. The influence of Seneca on the Elizabethan dramatists was very considerable. There was something in this Roman philosopher and playwright, that appealed to the Tudor mind. The first true English tragedy owes everything to him (except the plot). The first tragedy is Gorboduc - by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville - produced at the Inner Temple of the Inns of Court in 1562. The story of Gorboduc tells us of the quarrel between Ferrex and Porrex, sons of King Gorboduc and Queen Videna, over the division of the kingdom of Britain. Porrex kills Ferrex and Queen Videna kills Porrex. The Duke of Albany tries to take the country over himself, and civil war breaks out. The violent actions are not shown on the stage but only reported. Later dramatists, including Shakespeare, are to show us, on-stage, all the horrors they can. But Norton and Sackville respect the Senecan tradition, which is to reserve the horror for the language and never for the visible action. The influence of Seneca is also felt through the language of the Elizabethan tragedy - in the use of blank verse.

The Elizabethan tragedies made on the Senecan tradition and produced in the Inns of Court, or in the Universities, or in the noble houses, seem to pave the way for the first tragedy capable of holding the public stage - The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. The story concerns the murder of Horatio - who is in love with the beautiful Belimperia - by agents of his rival in love. Hieronimo, the Knight-Marshal of Spain and father of Horatio, spends the rest of the play contriving revenge. Like Hamlet after him, he delays, he talks rather than acts, but again like Hamlet, he makes use of a play about a murder to effect his vengeful purpose. The play ends in horrors - murder, suicide - and, before the end, Hieronimo performs an act whose horror never loses its absurd appeal - he bites his own tongue out and spits it on to the stage. The language of the play is curiously memorable, showing that Kyd was no mean verse-writer. Kyd is important, for it seems likely that he wrote the earlier version of the Hamlet story upon which Shakespeare based his own masterpiece, and certainly a memory of The Spanish Tragedy makes Hamlet say: