The Theatre of the Italian Renaissance I: Background, Plays and Playwrights, Theory, and the Opera

Florence, Italy - where the Renaissance was born

Renaissance literally means “rebirth” – a rebirth of the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, a rebirth of the classical age.  And while a new, vigorous study of the classics was undertaken, we’ll find that the great figures of the Renaissance did more than merely look back. They invented something new, derived from the classical era, yes, but blended with the more recent past, the Medieval era.  And while it would be nice to be able to accurately pinpoint the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the Renaissance, it would also oversimplify a very complicated mixture of eras.  Dante, who was among the first 

writers to blend medieval religious ideas with classical ones; Giotto, who humanized and sometimes “classicized” religious paintings, both worked in the early 1300s, the first years of the fourteenth century, while some of the greatest medieval drama was not created until long after that time.  Everyman was written in 1500, nearly two centuries later; the Valenciennes passion play continued to be produced till 1547.  This is NOT a simple transition.

However, for the purposes of this course we’re going to oversimplify and draw a rather arbitrary line at the mid fifteenth century (the middle of the 1400s, yes? The Italians call it quattrocento).  But remember that there are many years of overlap, and that the best of the Renaissance depended on Medieval work as well as classical.

      

Having said all that, in the mid 1400s a number of events in all areas of life conspired to create a revolution, among them:

    1. The medieval structure of feudalism was dying, gradually replaced by the rise of cities and a new “middle” class.   

    2.  The printing press was invented c 1455 which allowed more and more of the increasingly literate middle classes to read – more information than ever before imagined (until the computer age...) began to be widely disseminated.

    3. Constantinople was taken by the Turks in 1453, but not before Orthodox monks and scholars brought many classical manuscripts back to Italy. More ancient manuscripts began to be translated, printed and distributed. Manuscripts of Terence had been known throughout the Middle Ages, but ”In 1429 twelve newly discovered plays by Plautus were brought to Rome, and between 1470 and 1518 printed editions – some of them illustrated – were published of all the extant Roman drama.”

    4. The Christian (Catholic) Church, as we have seen, was somewhat weakened by corruption.

The above events and others produced an interest in a “golden age” that had apparently existed the classical world.  It began to be 

said again what Protagoras the ancient Greek had stated: “Man is the measure of all things.”  This agreeable notion, a very simplified form of the new philosophy called “humanism,” begins to replace the medieval notion that we toil under harsh conditions on earth only as a penance, but when we die we’ll get a heavenly reward. In humanism, eternal rewards were certainly still believed in, but now people can begin to live for today – and the possibilities seemed limitless!

One of the manifestations of living for today and limitless possibilities are discoveries.  The printing press is only one of many. ”In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Not only were new lands found, it was also discovered that the world is round!  Other scientific discoveries abounded, as did philosophical, cultural discoveries. New discoveries taken from ancient ones about art, and yes, also about drama.

Humanism, the belief that man is the measure of all things, is the most important aspect of the Renaissance.  And while “rebirth” offers a good literal definition, the ancients weren’t merely taken literally; they were utilized and in a sense re-invented to begin a new world.

Italy is the center of this re-invention. Geographically it’s the bridge from the Middle East to Europe, but it’s also a bridge OUT.

The Ponte Vecchio, Florence

 Merchants, chiefly from Venice, began trading with the near and far east.  Trade brings wealth and wealth, among other things, supports the arts.   Italy is also the center of the Catholic Church, which, though weakened, is still very powerful.  And Latin, the language of the Pope, is also the language of Plautus, Terence, Seneca, Horace.   So, with Italy as bridge and base, classics are studied again, reborn, yes, but in a new or NEOclassicism.

 

Renaissance symmetry and the Church

For the purposes of the drama, Renaissance thinkers had two primary sources:  Horace’s Ars Poetica, and Aristotle’s Poetics. Horace’s work had been available (if not always used) since ancient times; Aristotle was less accessible until 1498, when the Poetics was translated into Latin.  It became more widely disseminated in 1549 when it was translated into vernacular Italian.  Gradually a combination of Horace and Aristotle, twisted, blended and re-shaped, became the theory of how to write plays, following what has often been called the “neoclassic ideal.”  This interpretation of Aristotle and Horace, shaped by many different Renaissance theorists including Scaliger, Minturno and Castelvetro, was vital not only to Renaissance drama.  The extent to which writers and theorists used or discarded the theories set out in the Neoclassic ideal determined the shape and style of plays in later eras right down into the twentieth century.  

a "Neoclassic ideal" in architecture - Michelangelo
designed the complex on the Capitoline Hill,
another example of Renaissance symmetry

A quick note: not all Neoclassical scholars were in lock step on the rules for drama. What follows is a brief survey of the most prevalent tenets of the Neoclassical ideal as it dealt with drama, focusing on those that created the most resonance for later eras.

      

In Ars Poetica Horace had set the five-act structure, based loosely on Aristotle’s comment that most plays had from 3 to 6 “episodes.”  So from proper Roman drama forward, plays were written in 5 acts. Horace said that there should be no mixing of genres:  a comedy should be comic, a tragedy tragic – no so-called “comic relief” in a tragedy, for example. Horace had also prescribed what a good play (or poem, or any work of art) should do:  it should, he said, “teach as well as delight.”  Plays, according to Horace, were about more than entertainment.  There needed to be moral lessons in these works as well. 

      

Add to Horace Aristotle, who was somewhat misread by the renaissance critics.  They used Aristotle as a rulebook, and in places where his writing was vague, they “improved” his words by giving them a narrow and overly specific interpretation.  For example, from the Poetics, the Renaissance concocted the three unities: of time, place and action. While Aristotle had observed that most plays took place “within one revolution of the sun,” Renaissance critics decided that no play should take more time than 24 hours.  Indeed, one critic argued that plays should exist only in “real time,” meaning that if the audience watched for three hours, all the action in the play should last no more than that time.

      

Aristotle had not written about “place;” but in ancient Rome Vitruvius had written of and

A Renaissance set based on
Vitruvius

described one “tragic” setting, one “comic” setting, and one “satyric” setting, so the Renaissance critics derived from the single settings a “unity of place.”  All the action in a play should occur in one place, without change of scenery.

      

Aristotle had written of a unity in the action of a play, saying that good plays featured this, and that weaker ones wandered from it.  Renaissance critics took this literally and called for one plot only, with no subplots.

   

While you may think all this a bit ridiculous, please note that some of the finest plays in the world have been crafted according to these rules, not so much in the Renaissance, when most of the plays written were rather weak, but since then. On the other hand, note also that other great playwrights down n eras since the Renaissance were very happy to break most of these rules. Read Shakespeare, for example.

      

The three unities supported the single most important element of Renaissance theory: verisimilitude, or the appearance of truth.  This rather complicated word can be defined in an even more complex manner, but for this blog I’ll try to keep it simple (read Brockett for much more!):  events on stage should be events that could happen in real life.  First, ghosts and other supernatural beings don’t normally appear in real life, so they shouldn’t appear onstage. Interestingly, exceptions were made. Gods, as long as they were Greek or Roman, were allowed to appear, because they had in classical dramas (it’s very good to be Greek or Roman…and a god).  Second, there’s no place in a verisimilitudinous (why not further complicate the word?) play for choruses of 12-15 who comment on the action.  Instead the Renaissance came up with a character called a “confidante,” who expressed and shared the main character’s fears or joys.  Third, you can’t put a battle on stage effectively and realistically ("stage" armies are usually made up of more than four or five soldiers on a side), so most scenes of death and violence were messengered in, as they had been in ancient Greek theatre.

      

The appearance of truth had a moral aspect as well.  Here’s where Horace comes back into the act: his statement that theatre should teach as well as delight leads to a Renaissance concept called “decorum.”  Certain things were appropriate to show on stage, morally speaking, certain things were not. Later, in seventeenth century France the writer Pierre Corneille was taken to task for his play Le Cid, which featured a marriage between his two main characters after the male had killed the female’s father. Of course, because of unity of time, the marriage took place within 24 hours of the murder!  Along with the concept of decorum goes the term “poetic justice” – at the end of the play the good should be rewarded, and the evil punished.

      

It takes a poetic and dramatic genius to make wonderful plays out of so many rules, and even though there were a few happy exceptions, we don’t see many wonderful plays coming out of Renaissance Italy at this time.  Nevertheless Renaissance writers penned some important pieces historically, in that they set examples that led to better plays in years to come.  

      

At first the plays imitating classical style were written in a classical language, usually Latin.  Achilles, by Antonio Laschi in 1390 has been called the first Renaissance tragedy; and Vergerio’s Paulus, also in 1390, is thought of as the first Renaissance comedy.  Paulus, by the way, was a satire on contemporary student life.  This is natural enough, because Renaissance tragedies and comedies were usually the product of learned academies. These organizations were prevalent at this time throughout the Italian peninsula, and they began to spread throughout Europe.  They were set up to re-create the “political and celebratory qualities of Roman practice” in the theatre, played in Renaissance festivals conducted by the academies.  University trained humanists usually wrote these new pieces, and the stories as well as the tone were often...academic. 

Occasionally, however, someone with a sense of humor livened things up a tad:  Leon Battista Alberti, one of the great Italian “Renaissance” men (in that he had strong abilities in a number of separate areas of study) perpetrated a theatrical fraud, by writing a Latin comedy called Philodoxus, which he passed off as the work of “Lepidus,” a non-existent ancient Roman poet concocted solely by Alberti. Good for him!

      

The next step in the development of the new style was to base plays in the classical eras, but to write them in the vernacular, in this case Italian.  In 1486 the first translation of a Roman comedy into Italian, Plautus’ Menaechmi, was produced at the court of Ercole I D’Este at Ferrara where an audience of over 10,000 

attended. Then, in 1508, La Cassaria by Lodovico Ariosto, a play about lovers who are united after the discovery that the girl is the long-lost daughter of a rich father, became the first vernacular Renaissance comedy.  Better known, quite playable and funny, and still occasionally performed, is Machiavelli’s play The Mandrake (c. 1518), which, by the way, breaks from strict neoclassic form, mixing that form with medieval farce. The play illustrates the complex and clever plan of a young man to sleep with the beautiful young wife of a foolish old man.  In both his story and the way he chose to write the play, Machiavelli illustrated his principle that the end justifies the means! 

     

The first important tragedy written in Italian is Sofonisba, by Giangiorgio Trissino.  He based it on Greek tragedies in an attempt

 to keep to the concept of verisimilitude and to counter the influence of a grisly Senecan-style revenge tragedy by Cynthio (aka Giovanni Battista Giraldi) called The Orbecche. Written in 1541, it proved more popular than Trissino’s unity-dependent Sofonisba.  Along with Machiavelli, Cynthio was another rule-breaker in a rule-bound society. It’s important to remember that what Seneca wrote was

 closet drama, for reading only, whereas Cynthio was writing for the stage. The gruesome events enacted in a theatre would have pleased none of the Neoclassic critics, but they might well have pleased audiences. Most importantly, Cynthio’s play was imitated and translated, influencing later and better-written revenge pieces... Hamlet, for example.

Another good example of Renaissance re-invention is the pastoral, the Renaissance attempt to interpret the ancient Greek satyr play, and boy did they get it wrong!  Of course they had no examples (indeed, only one complete satyr play has come down to us), but what they did have was Vitruvius’ description of a satyric setting, which he describes as a woodland area.  So from that information

a "pastoral" scene based on a scene in Il Pastor Fido

 and I’m guessing an awareness of medieval folk plays, they came up with the pastoral.  This Renaissance version of the satyr play was about LOVE, and it was set in a rural, idyllic world, peopled with shepherds and shepherdesses, and naughty, randy satyrs who threatened the virginity of the young rural misses. This proved a VERY popular form.  Two of the most important are Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (1573) and Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (The Faithful Shepherd - 1590).  These are both long and tough to get through, but they are very important as historical models for greater plays that follow, eg, Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

      

Buontalenti's amphitheatre in the Boboli Gardens
where some of the Medici spectacles were staged.
The building is the Pitti Palace, owned by the Medici

Some of you must be wondering, “What went on between the acts?” Actually you’re probably not wondering anything of the kind, but I’m going to tell you because it’s mighty important.  Unlike today’s dash to the john or to the lobby bar and restrooms as the curtain descends for intermission, between each of the 5 acts of Renaissance comedy, the audience stayed in their seats and was treated between each act to intermezzi (sometimes intermedi) or

Another look at Buontalenti's amphitheatre

interludes, which featured scenic spectacle and tricks, music and dance.  The first major intermezzi were designed by Bernardo Buontalenti in Florence during the 1580s for between-act entertainments for the Medici family and their guests.  Often intermezzi had nothing to do with the play, usually they were based on mythological subjects and were allegorical in nature, and they became more and more popular, certainly more than many of the static and tedious plays themselves, probably because most people then and now love spectacle. 

      

Here’s a brief summary of the scenes that were changed at a performance of L’Amico Fido, during which the audience witnessed several scenic shifts in the intermezzi:  in the first, clouds open to reveal the allegorical figure of virtue; in the second, a horrible cave is shown, and towers on fire; in the third, a barren landscape changes into a beautiful, fertile land; in the fourth, a maritime scene is revealed; and in the fifth, there is a pastoral scene with thunderstorm.  These designs were highly complex.

   

Intermezzi became very popular, not just for themselves, but for the part they played, along with an attempt to re-create what a Greek tragedy would have looked like, in the development of a new form of theatre. Unlike Renaissance tragedies and comedies, which featured only one setting (unity of place, yes?) this new form featured scenic changes, lavish spectacle and brilliant costumes, music sung beautifully accompanied by at least some dance -- the opera.  The courts and learned societies at Florence,

 Mantua, and other Italian towns began to experiment with this form, which was not called opera at first, but “favole in musica” (plays in music).  The Camerata in Florence began meeting in 1594, and that year the first opera, Dafne, was produced in the palace of Jacopo Corsi, with words by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri. They followed thiswith Euridice performed at Florence’s Pitti Palace in October 1600.  While Rinuccini and Peri were first, a more talented

composer was Claudio Monteverdi, whose opera Orfeo was performed for the duke of Mantua in 1607. After this production courts began to vie for composers of the new form. Opera remained exclusively the property of courts and was seen only by courtiers until the 1630s, when several public opera houses opened in Venice, became a mainstay of that city’s entertainment scene. Shortly after that the new form took Europe by storm! 

Next time? Renaissance design, Venice Public Opera Houses & Commedia dell'Arte!