Italian Drama Research Articles

On Noh Drama

The current popularity of the Japanese arts in this country has extended only in a very limited way to what is perhaps the most beautiful of those arts: the Noh drama. The reasons for this are simple. One is the inaccessibility of the Noh. Unlike the Kabuki, it has never been performed in this country and probably never will be, at least in its pure form. Only once in its history, in fact, has the Noh been performed outside of Japan, at an Italian drama festival in 1954. Another reason for this relative neglect is the esoteric quality of the Noh. A Noh play is about as difficult for a Westerner unversed in Japanese culture to understand as, say, a medieval mystery play or Jacobean court masque would be for a Japanese who knew no English.

The Influence of Italian Drama on Pre-Restoration English Comedy

The Influence of Italian Drama on Pre-Restoration English Comedy

The Italian Drama in the past Five Years

The Italian Drama in the past Five Years

South Italian Vases and Attic Drama

Professor Webster's attempt (C.Q. xlii, pp. 15 ff.) to prove that south Italian vases of the middle of the fourth century can be used as evidence of Athenian theatrical arrangements of half or three-quarters of a century earlier leaves me unconvinced. It, is true that, as he says, ‘the plays’ which the vases illustrate ‘come from Athens'— at least, most of them probably did: but (1) a number of scenes on the vases are not scenes presented in the plays at all, but are scenes suggested to the painter by descriptions in messengers’ speeches, or, quite possibly, by the story dramatized in the plays, but not by the Athenian poet's particular treatment of the story; (2) the plays —and the stories made popular by them—had been the common property of the Greek world for more than half a century, and there is no reason why Italian producers should have gone back to the original production in Athens, still less why Italian painters should have done so, even if they knew what the original production was like. (It is clear that Italian theatres of the fourth century were in various ways not like the fifth-century Athenian buildings.)

Slave Costume in New Comedy

The article by Professor Webster on ‘South Italian Vases and Attic Drama' in C.Q. xlii, pp. 15–27, raises problems for the reader of Roman comedy. Professor Webster takes the view that the Latin plays are good evidence for the costumes worn on the Greek stage; he even says (p. 20) that ‘the Greek original of Sceparnio in the Rudens (429) certainly wore the phallus’, thus reviving a suggestion of Skutsch which Marx (Rudens, ad loc.) thought sehr k's argument that ancient works of art, in particular Italian vases and terra-cottas, afford faithful representations of the costumes worn on the Attic stage. ‘It is certain’ (p. 26) ‘that the actors in Eubulus’ Auge looked like the figures on the vase' (in Leontini).

South Italian Vases and Attic Drama

In The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens Dr. Pickard-Cambridge includes a most useful and convenient collection of south Italian vase-paintings which have been held to throw light on the stage-settings of Greek tragedy. He concludes that they give no evidence for Athens in the fifth century and in particular do not justify the assumption that interior scenes were played in a porch in front of the central door. The second conclusion is true, but some of the vases do show that the central doors could be thrown wide open to display an interior scene. The first conclusion is formally correct, but it should be remembered that the “plays came from Athens, and it is at least possible that the south Italian producers modelled themselves on Athenian producers. In any case these vases are worthy of further consideration.

Chorus in Samson Agonistes

Milton writes in his preface to Samson Agonistes that “Chorus is here introduc'd after the Greek manner, not antient only but modern, and still in use among the Italians”; that “In the modeling therefore of this Poem … the Antients and Italians are rather follow'd, as of much more authority and fame.” It is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect to find in Italian drama of the seventeenth century these evidences of classical usage to which he refers. Milton is here concerned, it would appear, only with the use of chorus, and he implies that there was common in Italy in his day an imitation of Greek drama which differed from similar efforts in other countries in the handling of the chorus. He is not writing of dramatic criticism, but of dramatic practice. An interest in Minturno and Castelvetro does not explain so direct a statement. Furthermore, the phrase, “still in use,” cannot be accepted as a reference to drama of the sixteenth century, however convenient it would be to fall back upon proved relationships. Trissino's Sophonisba, for example, so close a copy of Sophocles and Euripides, presents many parallels to Samson Agonistes, but it was written more than a hundred and fifty years earlier (in 1515), and presented in 1562. Certain sixteenth-century Italian pastoral plays, such as the Aminta, show interest in the use of chorus which is derived from Greek tragedy, but the Aminta, in spite of its classical ancestry, and Milton's known admiration for its author, was written in 1573, and can scarcely answer for chorus “still in use among the Italians.” Even the seventeenth-century revivals of it would be too infrequent to account for a statement as broad as Milton's. Much the same may be said of the Pastor Fido. Moreover, at the same time, between 1550 and 1590, Jodelle and Garnier in France were writing tragedies at least as much after the Greek manner as were Tasso and Guarini. We must return to the fact that Milton is concerned with a trend in his own century.

An Italian Drama on Henry the Eighth

An Italian Drama on Henry the Eighth

Italian and English Pastoral Drama of the Renaissance

Italian and English Pastoral Drama of the Renaissance

Italian and English Pastoral Drama of the Renaissance

Italian and English Pastoral Drama of the Renaissance

Italian and English Pastoral Drama of the Renaissance: Source of the "Complaint of the Satyres against the Nymphes"

Italian and English Pastoral Drama of the Renaissance: Source of the "Complaint of the Satyres against the Nymphes"

The Relations of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Plays

The revenge tragedy, a distinct species of the tragedy of blood, may be defined as a tragedy whose leading motive is revenge and whose main action deals with the progress of this revenge, leading to the death of the murderers and often the death of the avenger himself.This type, as thus defined, probably first appeared on the Elizabethan stage in the Spanish Tragedy and the original Hamlet.2 Of these two plays the old Hamlet is not extant and can only be reconstructed conjecturally; the Spanish Tragedy represents, therefore, the origin of the type. Just what the ultimate sources of the type may have been, is not a question which enters our discussion. In the Spanish Tragedy the influence of Seneca is marked as in much early English tragedy,1 and there may be some indebtedness to contemporary French and Italian drama of the Senecan sort.2 We are not, however, to examine the Spanish Tragedy in connection with the influence of Seneca but in connection with a long succession of Elizabethan revenge plays; and for such an investigation it serves well enough as a starting point. Thomas Kyd was the author of this play and probably, as Dr. Sarrazin 3 has shown, of the old Hamlet. He may safely be taken as the introducer of the revenge tragedy upon the English stage, and his work may be considered one of the many dramatic innovations of the Elizabethan period.