Isidore and the Theater

Abstract

Modern readers of Isidore's works have difficulty reconciling what they know about ancient drama with the accounts of theatrical matters extracted from the Visigothic bishop's Etymologies. ' seems to say, for example, that a play, or at least an ancient play, was always recited by one person while mute actors gesticulated; that theaters served as brothels when the audience had left; that the Song of Solomon is a drama; that Horace was a dramatist; and so on. Such notions were actually widespread in the Middle Ages, surviving well into the sixteenth century, and scholars from the Renaissance to the present, with their ever-increasing knowledge of Antiquity, have blamed for perpetuating a distorted view of, among other things, Classical drama. Isaac Casaubon, for instance, in a 1605 essay on the satyr play, says with Olympian condescension that poor Isidore or his sources entirely misunderstood Greek comedy and satire.2 Nevertheless, both the learned bishop's views and his sources are worthy of respectful consideration, and for untold numbers of students from the seventh to the