Into the 16th and 17th centuries
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the
commedia dell’arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding
comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia
troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion
of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the
writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character
derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As
these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the
spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia
illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Pierre
Marivaux in France, and of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama
that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as
well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its
poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible
stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied
and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in
an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy,
from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent
of Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and
the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles.
With the exception of Ben Jonson and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without
regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in
character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and
perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular
clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the
role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible
dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that
could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their
themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good
and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres
ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain’s greatest
playwright, Lope de Vega, cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal
exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes
of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in
form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular
than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre developed a
comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell’arte. The
Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, tragedies of
honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching
deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière, whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière’s work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting,
exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the
throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits
such as William Wycherley and William Congreve wrote for the intimate playhouses of the
Restoration and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed
a comedy of manners, replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—
a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English
domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite
different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and others of the
passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement tried to echo the more
romantic tendencies in Shakespeare’s plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the
discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often
degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre
across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief
that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and
was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly,
melodrama’s elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as
a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready
for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As
novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new
and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw; the
problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen; the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov;
the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg. These dramatists began
by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in
the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his
tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the well-made play, which
carefully controlled the audience’s interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later,
developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As
sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European
playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the
Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century and beyond to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent
dramatists have been wildly experimental. The contemporary playwright can adopt any dramatic
mode, mixing effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of self, beliefs, and environment.
