STUDY MATERIAL on Generic Elective (ENGLISH) Paper TEXT AND PERFORMANCE
“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.” – Oscar Wilde
WESTERN THEATRE
Classical Greece and Rome
Both Greek and Roman theatres were open-air municipal structures for very large audiences. Every Greek city of any size possessed a monumental space, often dug into a hillside, for theatre, and the ruins of these can still be found throughout Greece and its colonies. The excavated area was a semicircle of stone benches, providing seating for the audience. This sloped down to a flat circular area, the orchestra, where the chorus performed. Beyond the orchestra was the structure built for the actors, the skene, from which comes the modern word scene. The area in front of the skene house, at first level with the orchestra, but later raised to a higher level more suggestive of a modern stage, was the proskenion, from which comes the modern word proscenium, for the arch surrounding the modern stage.
Although the great age of Greek playwriting was confined to the 5th century bce, the theatre continued to be an important part of Greek life, and indeed with the conquest of Alexander the Great in the next century, this tradition was carried further around the Mediterranean and as far east as Syria and Iraq. The theatres of the Hellenistic period did not radically change in form, although by that time a raised proscenium was universal and some stages had become more elaborate, containing two or even three storeys. Plays of the classical period continued to be performed, although the fanciful comedies of Aristophanes lost their popularity to a new style of comedy, diminishing the role of the chorus, and moving away from satires of particular living targets to depictions of more general or stock characters. Hellenistic scholars divided comedy into old, middle, and new styles, the old represented by Aristophanes and his contemporaries, the middle by the changes just noted, and the new by a group of dramatists of the late 4th and 3rd centuries bce, the best known of whom was Menander.
Greek theatre at Epidauros
No examples of middle comedy survive, but one complete play by Menander, Dyskolos, was discovered in the mid 20th century. New comedy was primarily characterized by its focus on contemporary bourgeois life. Its basic plot structures and stock characters were picked up and utilized by the major Roman comic dramatists, Plautus and Terence, and through them were disseminated by Renaissance dramatists throughout Europe. As a result, these stock characters and plot arrangements have remained an important element of the European comic tradition into modern times. The most common plots concerned a pair of thwarted young lovers, struggling against recalcitrant members of the older generation and grotesque would-be rivals and aided by an array of servants, some clever and some not, in attaining an eventual happy union.
As the works of Plautus and Terence, the pre-eminent Roman dramatists, suggest, Roman drama drew heavily upon the Greek, and followed the Greek style of dividing drama into comedies and tragedies (the satyr play completely disappeared). Although tragedy was popular in Rome, only ten tragedies have survived, all from the time of the Empire. Nine are by the stoic philosopher Seneca and the author of the other, Octavia, is unknown. The ornate rhetorical style and occasional gruesome scenes have led many historians to suggest that these plays were meant only for reading and never staged, but they have in fact had a respectable modern stage history and were highly influential among Renaissance tragedians. During the later years of the Roman Empire, literary drama declined, in favour of circuses, gladiatorial combats, and spectacular shows like the mock naval battles, the Naumachiae, staged in massive public spaces like the Roman Colosseum. Somewhat closer to a theatre tradition were the pantomimes, often with chorus and dancers, and the mimes, farcical comedians, who carried on something of the characters and situations of new comedy, and, some historians have argued, formed a bridge to the improvised comedy, the commedia dell’arte of the Renaissance.
Although the original stages used by Plautus and Terence appear to have been rather simple platforms with a back wall containing the doors to the houses of the various characters, much larger permanent theatres were later built throughout the Roman Empire, from Spain to the Middle East. The first of these, the largest, and the model for those that followed, was the Theatre of Pompey, built in Rome in 55 bce, almost a century after Plautus and Terence. Although based on Greek models, the Roman theatre had distinctive features. It was free-standing, not built into a natural slope, the Greek orchestra was reduced to a semicircle, while the Hellenistic skene house was made larger and more elaborate and its projecting side wings joined to the auditorium seating so as to create a single architectural structure. These monumental buildings were found in every Roman city of any size and still today are the most distinctive features of Roman archeological sites around the Mediterranean and as far north as England.
As Christianity arose, the theatre in general, and the irreverent and salacious popular mimes in particular, were often the object of attack, but the conquests of northern invaders during the 5th century essentially put an end to theatre in the Western Empire, although wandering players are thought by many to have carried on some of its traditions through the following centuries. In the year 330 ce, however, the Emperor Constantine rebuilt the Eastern city of Byzantium and made it his capital. When Rome was captured, the eastern part of the Empire survived for another thousand years, as the Byzantine Empire. Popular classical forms like the mimes, pantomimes, and street entertainers continued into this Empire, as did great popular spectacles, such as gladiatorial combats and chariot races, but despite sustained efforts, historians have found no solid evidence of a continuing theatrical tradition, in the classical sense, in the Byzantine Empire.
Medieval Europe
During the period of the Song dynasty, while the puppet theatre and the opera were becoming established as major theatrical forms in China and the Noh theatre was evolving in Japan, the first known post-classical dramatic works were being created in Europe. Surprisingly, given the opposition of the Christian Church to the last classical theatre, these developed within the now-dominant Catholic culture. In the mid 10th century a Saxon nun, Hrosvitha, wrote six plays modelled on Terence, but, like Buddhist shadow plays of her Chinese contemporaries, devoted to didactic religious subjects. During this same period, sections of church ritual began to be converted into short religious plays, and a key document from England, the Regularis Concordia, written about 970, gave detailed instructions for the performance of such dramatic events within the church. During the following century, these liturgical plays spread throughout most of Europe, with the important exception of Spain, then a Muslim territory. Even there, theatre was apparently not absent, however. There are records of live performers in the Islamic world even before this time, and shadow puppetry, reportedly brought from China by way of Egypt, had reached Muslim Spain while the liturgical drama was spreading in the north.
At first performed within cathedrals and as part of liturgical practice, religious plays in Europe expanded and often moved out of doors. The Mystery of Adam, created about 1150, contains stage directions that show it was performed in open air. Until the 13th century, there is no record in medieval Europe of a secular drama, although there are ample records of travelling performers who may have presented dramatic offerings like simple farces. The French city of Arras became the first city in Europe to produce significant secular drama. Jean Bodel’s 1200 religious drama, Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas, already contains significant secular elements, and later in the century Adam de la Halle created fully secular plays, most notably the 1283 Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, which also introduced music to the French secular theatre. Coincidentally, at the very time that Adam de la Halle was making major innovations in the European theatre in Arras, Ibn Daniyal, his contemporary in Cairo, was producing the most important and innovative works in the long-established Arab shadow theatre, three plays that rival or surpass those of Bodel in literary sophistication.
In 1311 a major new impetus for the development of drama, especially in England, was given by the establishment of the Corpus Christi festival, celebrating the transubstantiation. It soon became customary for the English guilds, associations of craftsmen, to present a series of biblically based plays on this occasion, the clergy having been forbidden to perform on a public stage by a papal edict of 1210. By the 1370s records show the regular performance of the groups of plays, called cycles, in a number of British towns, and during the next century they expanded across England and into Europe, becoming major civic events lasting several days and often covering the entire Christian history of the world, from the Creation to the Last Judgement.
These epic works were performed in different spaces in different countries, but all were out of doors. Sometimes they were presented on platforms arranged around town squares, as in Lucerne, Switzerland, other times a row of small stages were lined up behind a large neutral acting area, as in Valenciennes, France. The best-documented arrangements were the pageant wagons, utilized in Christian Spain and England. Each play was performed on a wagon, similar to modern parade floats, and these would either be moved to different locations in the city or be used in sequence at a single gathering point. Four complete or nearly complete cycles and parts of others survive from England, developed during the mid 14th century and performed regularly until the 1570s, when they were banned by the Protestant Queen Elizabeth due to their long association with the Catholic Church.
Renaissance theatre in Italy
While religious dramas were flourishing in northern Europe in the 15th century, the rediscovery of classical learning called the Renaissance was taking place in the Italian courts. For theatre this had major implications for both the drama and the stage. In the drama this began with the rediscovery of classical theory, most importantly Aristotle, whose writings, interpreted in various ways, has remained the bedrock of Western dramatic theory ever since. Upon readings of Aristotle and to some extent Horace, Renaissance Italian and later French theorists built the doctrine of neoclassicism, which dominated Western theatre until the early 19th century. This doctrine insisted upon the strict separation in tone, characters, subject matter, and arc of action between comedy and tragedy (although even in the Renaissance a few writers, most notably Guarini, argued for dramas of mixed tonality, which he called tragicomedies). Equally important were the so-called three unities, of time, place, and action, meaning a plot should ideally take place in a single location, within at most 24 hours, and not involve any secondary actions. Renaissance Italian dramatists looked to these instructions, and to the models of the recently rediscovered classical dramatists, in constructing their own comedies and tragedies, but in fact produced little lasting theatre. Their French successors did much better, producing, at the height of neoclassicism in the 17th century, their three greatest dramatists, Corneille, Molière, and Racine.
A quite different result of the attempt to recreate classical theatre was the invention of opera, the first example of which was Dafne, created by Jacopo Peri in Florence around 1597, and based on the assumption that classical theatre was a musical as well as dramatic form, with singing actors and chorus. Although of course far from actual Greek practice, the taste for opera rapidly spread, especially in the courts and among the aristocracy of 17th and 18th century Europe. In the West it has traditionally (if somewhat arbitrarily) been considered a genre separate from theatre proper, and so I will, reluctantly, not trace its developments and contributions here.
16th century Europe
The impact of the Renaissance upon the concept of the physical theatre was equally revolutionary, but even further, in fact, from actual classical practice. Most importantly, the Italian Renaissance theatre, created for the Renaissance courts, was from the beginning primarily an intimate, indoor activity, far different from the huge, open-air democratic classical performances. The first permanent theatre built during the Renaissance, the Teatro Olympico, built in 1585, attempted to recreate a small Roman stage and auditorium within an enclosed building, but it inspired no imitations. Subsequent theatres developed the familiar plan still sometimes called the ‘Italianate stage’, which traditionally involves an interior, rectangular space, divided between audience and performance space (essentially the same as the traditional Sanskrit theatre), and the stage elevated and framed by a proscenium arch (first used at the 1618 Teatro Farnese in Parma, Italy). Closely associated with the development of this new indoor theatre was the use of perspective scenery, derived from the keen interest of Renaissance artists in this technique. The production of the first new comedy of the Renaissance, Ariosto’s Cassario, in 1508, utilized perspective scenery. The single-point perspective remained the basic design for proscenium theatres in Europe until around 1700, when Fernandino Galli-Bibiena, connected to two of Europe’s best-known design families, introduced multiple perspectives. A century later Romanticism introduced more complex and dimensional stage arrangements, but the basic proscenium style arrangement remained and is still today the most familiar architectural form of Western theatre; during the period of European colonization, it was spread by the European colonial powers to other theatre cultures around the world, where it is now often spoken of as the ‘Western’ or even the ‘modern’ stage.
The 16th century also saw the rise in Italy of a major non-literary theatrical form, the commedia dell’arte, first recorded in 1551. This theatrical form, perhaps distantly related to late classical mimes, contained stock characters—the miserly merchant, the young lovers, the braggart soldier, the pedant—and created improvised comic plots peppered with short physically comic routines, the lazzi. Over the next two centuries, commedia companies travelled through much of Europe and exerted a great influence both on the visual arts and on European comic drama.
Although neoclassicism eventually exerted a strong influence in dramatic writing and staging throughout Europe, its influence was never as great in Spain and England as in Italy and France, and in the latter part of the 16th century these countries both developed major theatres that differed sharply from the neoclassical model. In England, Queen Elizabeth banned the still popular medieval religious dramas in 1568, but she enjoyed and encouraged secular drama, and during her reign England produced some of the world’s most honoured dramatists. Short dramatic entertainments, called interludes, had been popular at court during Elizabeth’s childhood, and in the early and middle 16th century other secular forms developed: political allegories, history plays, even a few imitations of classical comedy and tragedy.
The main line of English drama, however, did not follow the classical model, but created works that defied the unities, and though it generally kept the traditional divisions of comedy and tragedy, introduced elements of each into the other and created works that could not properly be labelled either. The outstanding example of such drama was, of course, the work of Shakespeare, but a remarkable group of other major dramatists surrounded him, headed by Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and John Webster. London had a thriving theatre culture for most of the last half of the century, but did not have a permanent public theatre until 1576 and saw almost all of its most significant dramas created in the brief period from 1590 to 1615. Public theatres on the whole were as different from those in France and Italy as were the plays. Although there were a few important indoor theatres more in the continental style, like Blackfriars, built in 1599, most were open-air structures, modelled upon the inn-yard courts that were used by players before the first theatres were built. These buildings were three storeys high, surrounding an open central court into which the stage projected so that audiences could stand on three sides of it.
A somewhat similar stage, the corrale, was created in Spain at the same period, based upon Spanish open courtyards surrounded by buildings. The development of Spanish theatre followed a similar trajectory to that in England, the first secular plays in the early 1500s, a professional theatre developing by mid century, and a generation of master dramatists at the turn of the next century, headed by Lope de Vega, Caldéron, and Tirso da Molina. Unlike Protestant England, however, Catholic Spain retained and developed the tradition of medieval religious drama and its major dramatists wrote both secular dramas and religious plays, called autos sacramentales.
The Spanish discovery and colonization of the New World meant that this century also saw the exportation into that world of European-style theatre. Shortly after Cortez conquered Mexico, Franciscan friars arrived to convert the Aztec people. One of their major tools was religious drama in the Spanish model, although they found that a rich performance culture already existed in the New World. Certain parts of this culture accorded well with the European idea of theatre, and European defenders of the sophistication of the inhabitants of the New World sometimes mentioned their theatrical gifts among their qualities. The complex cultural mixtures of dance, ritual, theatrical representation, and public ceremonies far exceeded the capacity of a European concept of theatre to describe. Indeed, such activities still challenge theatre historians today, although the strategies of performance studies have provided important new analytic tools.
As with other cultural elements, secular and religious, the theatre that developed in the wake of the conquest was in fact a mestizo theatre, mixing indigenous and Spanish elements. As time passed, however, the European model, as in other parts of the colonized world, came to be seen as the standard form of theatre as a cultural expression.
17th century Japan and Europe
The opening years of the 17th century, when Spanish and English drama were at their peak of achievement, saw also the appearance of one of the best-known Asian theatrical forms, the Kabuki, in Japan. This new form of dance drama was first performed in 1603 by a female performer, and remained a solely female form until 1629, when it was banned as immoral. After a brief and no more successful attempt with boy actors, the Kabuki by mid century had become a form for adult males, playing both genders, as it has remained ever since. The Kabuki entered its period of greatest flourishing in the late 17th century, but still remains a significant part of the Japanese theatre, while the Noh is today a respected but much more infrequently presented form.
The third great Japanese theatrical form appeared later in the century, in 1684, when a Kabuki playwright, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, collaborated with a professional storyteller, Takemoto Gidayu, to create a new style of puppet theatre, which became known as Bunraku. From this point on, Chikamatsu wrote primarily for the Bunraku, creating the first serious plays in Japan dealing with the merchant class. He is generally considered Japan’s greatest playwright, although the great age of Bunraku was during the first half of the next century. The puppets became larger and more elaborate until after 1734 each puppet, about two-thirds life size was manipulated by three puppeteers, who carried the figure about the stage. At its height, the Bunraku theatre quite eclipsed the Kabuki, but the two forms then and after borrowed both effects and stories from each other.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, French culture, including the theatre, set the style for much of Europe. Playwrights across the continent looked to Molière and Racine as models, as in the Renaissance they had looked to Terence and Seneca. Even the British theatre, long resistant to continental influence, shared this orientation, particularly after 1660. The Puritan triumph in the Civil Wars 20 years before had temporarily ended the monarchy and officially closed the theatres. Many leading royalists fled to France, and when king and theatre were restored in 1660, a good deal of French influence returned. The English drama of the late 17th century, dominated by the free-spirited Restoration comedy, shows this influence, but even more clear is the effect on the production of plays. For the first time women appeared on the English stage, and the open-air theatres of Shakespeare’s time were not reproduced, theatre now moving definitively indoors in the continental manner.
18th century Europe
Although the 18th century in Europe did not produce dramatists of the stature of Shakespeare, Racine, or Caldéron, interest in theatre expanded in the continent and important contributions were made. In Italy, Carlo Goldoni built upon commedia dell’arte traditions to create a modern literary Italian drama. In Denmark Ludwig Holberg’s comedies helped to lay the foundations of modern theatre in Scandinavia. In Germany Caroline Neuber founded a company dedicated to establishing a German literary theatre instead of the crude farces that had dominated the German stage before. The scattered German states struggled to establish a significant German theatre, a project finally realized at the end of the century by Goethe and Schiller at Weimar. The late 17th century also saw European-style theatre established on two new continents, in Australia for the cultural improvement of the British convicts deported there, and, more respectably, in the British colonies in North America, creating a new world theatre on the British model.
Another development of the later 18th century was an increased interest in moving the subject of serious theatre from the kings and heroes of the past to middle-class subjects. George Lillo anticipated this trend with his 1731 The London Merchant, which inspired the German Gotthold Lessing at mid century both as a theorist and dramatist. In France such leading dramatists as Voltaire, Beaumarchais, and especially Diderot produced examples of this new form, which they called the drame. None of these European innovators would have known that on the other side of the globe their Japanese contemporary Chikamatsu was engaged in a similar change in the subject matter of theatre, but the impetus for both was essentially the same, the decline of the old system controlled by warriors and kings and the rise of the bourgeoisie in society in general as well as in the theatre.
19th century Europe and Asia
The rise of romanticism in Europe in the early 19th century theatre effectively ended the previously dominant neoclassic system. It did not result in major changes in theatre architecture, but profoundly affected almost every other aspect of the art. Acting, scenery, and playwriting became more ‘realistic’, but it was on the whole a rather flamboyant and emotional realism, against which the ‘realists’ of the later 19th century would react. Playwrights sought situations of extreme emotion, most notably in the melodrama, a highly popular form developed at this time. Actors move from neoclassic restraint to specialize in scenes of madness and frenzy. Scenic designers left the simple classic interiors of Racine to move out into nature, presenting erupting volcanos and other spectacular phenomena.
During the romantic era Europe also saw the rise of modern nationalism, to which theatre made a major contribution. As previously subordinate linguistic and cultural communities in Europe from Albania to Norway sought to solidify their cultural identity and in many cases to go on to establish independent states, the establishment of a theatre devoted to their language and history was often a key part of the project. As European colonialism spread around the globe, it not only took with it the concept of Western theatre but also that of the theatre as an expression of national culture, an idea carried on as former colonies sought independence, with the result that national theatres, founded on the European model, can be found throughout the world today.
Around the world, countries with little theatre tradition in the European sense began to create such theatre, but often blended European methods and plays with indigenous practice and materials to create the huge variety of hybrid forms found today. Leading dramatists like Derek Walcott in Trinidad, Ola Rotimi and Wole Soyinka in Nigeria, and Sa’dallah Wannous in Syria are important representatives of this process.
Even the centuries-old theatres of Asia were not immune from this influence. In the mid 19th century wealthy citizens of Calcutta began to create private theatres in the British model and to write Western-style plays. Rabindranath Tagore, working in this tradition, become its best-known example, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. The forcible opening of Japan to the West by Perry in the 1850s involved not only trade but culture. In the 1880s an East–West hybrid theatre, the shinpa, developed, which somewhat resembled Western melodrama but with distinct kabuki elements. A decade later Soyo Tsubouchi introduced the shingeki (new theatre), directly drawn from Western models, especially Shakespeare. At the beginning of the new century, these Western theatre models were exported to Korea and China, where again they became the basis of modern theatre in the far East.
In mid 19th century Europe, the exuberant romantic drama gave way to more subdued and realistic drama of every-day life, as can be seen in the so-called ‘cup-and-saucer’ plays of Tom Robertson in 1860s England. Domestic realism was taken to new depths in the 1880s with the works of Henrik Ibsen, which are generally considered to initiate modern theatre in the West, and thanks to Western global influence he was known even as far away as Japan by the 1890s and his plays presented around the world in the early years of the new century. These helped to solidify the domestic middle-class drama, performed in realistic style in domestic settings, as the standard Western theatre form, which indeed it remains today, especially in the United States.
The 20th century
Many of the major Western dramatists of the next century, among them Anton Chekhov, Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Miller, worked in this form, but despite its dominance Ibsenesque realism was almost immediately challenged by non-realistic forms. The most important of these in Europe were symbolism at the turn of the century, expressionism during and after the First World War, both inspired in part by the works of Ibsen’s major contemporary, August Strindberg in Sweden, the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht, and the theatre of the absurd, led by French dramatists Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Another important counter-force to modern Western realism was the search in many former European colonies for indigenous theatre forms to blend with or counteract this dominant European style.
Each of these challenges to realism brought with it stage designs that sharply departed from Ibsen’s realistic living rooms, but the staging of even Ibsen underwent a radical change in the 20th century with the rise of the director. At least since Max Reinhardt, at the opening of the 20th century, modern directors, except in England and the United States, have experimented widely with the interpretations and visual styles of their plays, so that the dominant figure in the modern European theatre is no longer the actor or the playwright but the director.
Moreover by the late 20th century as theatre became international, leading directors like Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Ong Keng Sen, Peter Stein, Giorgio Strehler and Tadashi Suzuki became as well known around the world as in their native countries. They have developed no international style however, each reflecting the hybridity of modern world theatre by combining local and global materials in unique ways. All, for example, have presented major Shakespeare works, but in styles so totally different that any informed viewer could easily distinguish them.
Actors and companies have travelled about for centuries, but only in the late 20th century, thanks to ever-increasing ease of communication and travel for both audiences and performers, did theatre become truly international. This internationalism and hybridity extended from great international festivals, like Avignon and Edinburgh, which presented theatre artists from around the world, to the work of individual companies, like that of Peter Brook, whose International Centre for Theatre Research gathers actors from multiple traditions, sharing no common language, training or concept of theatre, to create works in a new, hopefully more global style.