Supposes

The Italian Renaissance writer Ludovico Ariosto is most famous for his verse epic Orlando Furioso. However, he also wrote plays, including the highly influential comedy I Suppositi, notable for a 1566 English translation by George Gascoygne called Supposes.

Ariosto's first comedy, La Cassaria (The Coffer), premiered in 1508 at the court of Cardinal Ippolito in Ferrara. It was a hit, and the next year Ariosto premiered I Suppositi at the palace of the duke. Both plays were originally in prose, though Ariosto later wrote verse versions of them.

Both plays are also examples of commedia erudita, the learned comedy of scholars, which differed from commedia dell'arte, which was produced by professionals. Commedia erudita looked to classical Roman drama for inspiration. I Suppositi borrows in part from Terence's comedy The Eunuch and even more from Plautus's play The Captives.

In the first act, we learn that the young scholar Erostrata has switched places with his servant Dulippo. (Gascoygne spells the names Erostrato and Dulypo.) This is similar to the way Philocrates switches places with his slave Tyndarus in The Captives, but in Ariosto's play the motive is different. The false Dulippo (really Erostrata) uses his servant disguise to sleep with the beautiful Polinesta (Polynesta in Gascoygne's spelling).

Polinesta's father Damon, who is similar to the parsimonious Pantalone in commedia dell'arte, wants to marry her off without having to pay a dowery. That's why he favors a match with the old doctor of law Cleandro (Cleander as Gascoygne has it). Cleandro is like the Dottore figure in commedia dell'arte, and similarly has some long, rambling monologues. In the first act, he says (in Gascoygne's translation):

It becometh not a man to praise him selfe; but, indeede, I may say, and say truely, that my knowledge hath stoode me in better steade at a pinche than coulde all the goodes in the worlde. I came out of Otranto when the Turkes wonne it, and first I came to Padua, after hither, where by reading, counseling, and pleading, within twentie years I have gathered and gayned as good as ten thousande ducats.

That incident in Otranto, which the Ottoman Turks seized in 1480, putting much of the population to the sword and enslaving the rest, will become important later. First, however, we get a plot where the false Erostrata convinces a gentleman traveling from Sienna to pretend to be his father. Things get complicated when the real Erostrata's father arrives from Sicily. If this sounds a lot like the subplot in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, now you know where the Bard picked up some of his ideas.

Of course, Ariosto was borrowing from others as well. The parasite character in I Suppositi, Pasifilo (or Pasyphilo according to Gascoygne), is based of Ergasilus from The Captives. Like Ergasilus, Pasifilo is always on the lookout for a free meal. When told he should supervise what is prepared for supper, he replies:

By the masse, if you should have studied this sevennight you could not have appointed me an office to please me better! You shall see what dishes I will devise.

Ariosto's borrowings from The Captives goes far beyond just the parasite character.  We learn that Cleandro's son was sold as a slave to Erostrata's father, just as Hegio's son was stolen and sold as a slave in Plautus's play. In the end, Erostrato married Polinesta (without Damon having to pay a dowery) and Cleandro is content having recovered a son and heir. All ends happily.

Ariosto went on to compose other comedies, including Il Negromante (The Necromancer) and La Lena (Lena). He left another play, I Studenti (The Students) unfinished at his death, though it was completed by his brother Gabriele. It is I Suppositi, however, that has had the most influence of his comedies, at least in the English-speaking world.

Ajax

I returned tonight from seeing Theater of War's presentation of the ancient Greek tragedy Ajax by Sophocles live in Four Freedom's Park on Roosevelt Island.

The character of Ajax was well known in the classical world, and was mentioned in comedies as well as tragedies. For instance, in the Roman comedy The Captives by Plautus, the wily slave Tyndarus says of someone he accuses of acting crazy, "Dress him up in the proper costume and he'd be mad Ajax to the life."

The insanity of Ajax was a key incident in the Trojan War. After the armor of his friend (and cousin) Achilles was given to his enemy Odysseus instead of him, Ajax decided to kill the Greek generals who had made the decision based upon speech-making rather than prowess in battle. When he got to the generals' tent, however, the goddess Athena made him blind with rage.

Athena led Ajax to a herd of sheep and cattle, and then made him turn his anger onto innocent beasts rather than men. According to Sophocles's play, in a translation by Ian Johnston:

          He launched his attack against those animals

          and kept on chopping down and slaughtering

          the ones with horns by slicing through their spines,

          until they made a circle all around him.

When Ajax emerges from his madness and realizes what he has done, he is overcome with grief over the fact that he has disgraced himself. Actor Bill Camp played Ajax in the reading, generating an enormous amount of sympathy.

Equally moving was Amy Ryan, who played Tecmessa, the "war bride" Ajax captured in the siege of Troy, and who later bore him a son. Have lived and slept with Ajax for nine years, she cannot help but sympathize with him when he is brought so low that he contemplates suicide.

Though Ajax promises to bury his sword, he buries only the hilt, leaving the blade pointed up so he can fall upon it. In killing himself, he hopes to avoid dishonor, but causes tremendous grief to his half-brother Teucer, who was played by Ato Blankson-Wood. Teucer and Ajax share the same father, but Teucer's mother was enslaved in war like Tecmessa. He naturally protects Ajax and Tecmessa's young son, insisting that he shall be given his father's famous shield.

One of the remarkable moments in the play is when Ajax's mortal enemy Odysseus stands up to the generals and tells them that the warrior deserves an honorable burial in spite of everything he has done. As Odysseus, Jesse Eisenberg expressed regret over the death of his fallen rival and even offered to help bury him. Teucer declines this offer out of consideration for his brother, but still thanks Odysseus for the gesture.

Theater of War employed actual combat veterans for the chorus, with Eduardo Jany and Latoya Lucas portraying the sailors who traveled to Troy with Ajax. The fact that many of our nation's own combat veterans suffer from mental health issues, episodes of violence, and even thoughts of suicide was not lost on members of the audience.

The character of Tecmessa also provided an analogy for the family members of veterans, who have to deal with the repercussions of trauma experienced by their spouses and loved ones. The event was live-streamed, and if a recording was made, you might be able to watch it in the future.

Old Comedy

Classicists often refer to the philosophical and political plays of Aristophanes as "Old Comedy" to distinguish them from the more situational "New Comedy" of Menander, whose works influenced the later Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence.

However, Aristophanes was not the only playwright penning philosophical and political comedies during the Golden Age of Athens. He is the only comic dramatist of his era for whom whole scripts survive, but we do have fragments of plays by other writers who appear to have written in a similar vein.

One writer whose plays have only survived in fragments is Metagenes, who wrote Homer or the Athletes and Thurio-Persians. While The Persians is a famous tragedy by Aeschylus about the defeat of the splendid Persian Empire, the comedy Thurio-Persians seems to combine the luxuriousness of Persia with the Italian city of Thurii, which likewise had a reputation for opulence.

How opulent was life in Thurii? According to the play, the city had a river with food just floating on it, including barley loaves, cakes, and meat. According to one translation, "Fish slices that barbecue themselves fly from above right into the mouth." However, pescatarians should be cautioned that in a play by the rival comic poet Archippus, there are political negotiations between Athenians and the fish to establish a truce between them.

Another author of Old Comedy whose plays survive only in fragments is Crates, who acted in the comedies of Cratinus before writing his own works. In his play The Knights, Aristophanes praises the writings of Crates, who in Wild Beasts depicted animals objecting to being eaten (perhaps like the fish in the comedy by Archippus). The play depicts inanimate objects performing labor all by themselves, including automatically pouring pitchers and self-rinsing cups.

According to Aristotle, Crates turned away from making personal attacks on individuals. This was not true of Aristophanes, whose play The Clouds directly satirizes the philosopher Socrates. The few fragments we have of plays by the contemporaries of Aristophanes seem to indicate that Old Comedy was quite diverse in both its themes and its comic methods.

Mandragola

One of the most famed practitioners of commedia erudita--or learned comedy--in Renaissance Italy was the statesman and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli.

Though Machiavelli is most famous today for writing the cynical (or perhaps merely realistic) handbook The Prince, he also created quite a stir in the dramatic world by penning a cynical (or perhaps merely realistic) comedy Mandragola, or The Mandrake.

Machiavelli had already translated Terence's comedy The Girl from Andros when he wrote Mandragola, and he would later adapt Plautus's play Casina as the Italian comedy Clizia. However, his most famous play doesn't adapt a classical source, but instead comes up with something entirely new.

In the first act of Mandragola, we meet Callimaco, a young man in love with the married woman Lucrezia. She is too virtuous to return his affections, though, so he confides in his servant Siro a plan to win her. To make his plan work, he needs the services of the rascal Ligurio, who is quite... well... Machiavellian.

The second act shows Ligurio getting Lucrezia's husband to visit Callimaco, who poses as a doctor who can end the couple's childlessness. He tells the husband that there is no better way to ensure fertility than to have a woman drink a potion made from a mandrake root. The problem is that the next man to sleep with her is sure to speedily die.

Since the husband believes the story, the trouble is in convincing Lucrezia that the best way to honor her marriage is to sleep with a man other than her husband, thus ending the couple's childlessness and sparing her husband's life. In the third act, Ligurio and Callimaco enlist the help of both the corrupt Friar Timoteo and Lucrezia's own mother, Sostrata, who ultimately prevail with her.

The fourth act presents a complication when Callimaco realizes that he has offered to help the husband to kidnap an unsuspecting young man they can put in bed with Lucrezia. The problem is he himself wants to be that young man, so how can they get around this? Ligurio comes up with a plan to disguise the friar as Callimaco and have Callimaco make a funny face and put on ragged clothes so that he looks like a different person. The plan is so ridiculous, it actually works.

If you expect the dishonest characters in a Machiavelli play to get their comeuppance in the end, you will be sorely disappointed. All ends happily for the scoundrels, and they even exit going into church together. That last element might seem scandalous today, but the play's first documented performance in 1526 was during the carnival season, when licentiousness was winked at by authorities.

For that 1526 performance, Machiavelli composed four songs to go in between each act. The songs cover up the passage of time between the acts, and also comment upon the themes of the play. Mandragola is not for everyone, but it certainly had an influence on Renaissance drama.

Roman Theatre

If you've ever wanted to see a theatre where the ancient Romans put on plays, Spain is actually a pretty good place to go.

I've been in Cáceres‎ for the Shaw Conference, and today a few of us took a brief trip to Mérida, which has some very well preserved Roman ruins.

Mérida was founded by the Romans as Emérita Augusta, since it was meant to be a home for some of the greatest veteran soldiers of the Roman army.

In order to keep the veterans entertained, in 15 B.C.E. a son-in-law of the Emperor Augustus built a theatre there. It held about 5,000 spectators, and was decorated with an elaborate scenae frons, filled with statues.

The original statues are now housed in a nearby museum, but you can see copies of the statues in their original locations. Right in the center is a statue of the Empress Livia in the guise of the goddess Ceres. To the side is a Muse, though some people think she might represent another goddess, Proserpina.

And the stage still gets used today! The annual Festival of Classical Theatre is held there in June and July, presenting works in that amazing venue. This year, they will be presenting William Shakespeare's Julio César, Menander's El misántropo, and Miles Gloriosus by Plautus, among other plays. The festival will also be presenting dramas at an indoor venue, including work by Miguel de Cervantes.

I wish I could see some of the plays there this summer. Perhaps I'll be able to return sometime in the future. I sure would like to see the theatre being used the way it was meant to be!

Kleist's Amphitryon

The Roman playwright Plautus turned the story of Hercules's conception by Jupiter into a comedy, but the mingling of gods and heroes in a comedic form must have seemed odd to contemporary audiences, since the play's prologue refers to the drama as a "tragicomedy"--the first known use of that term.

Since that time, numerous other dramatists have adapted Plautus's play, perhaps most famously Moliere, but Moliere's version was taken even further by the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist. In his Amphitryon, Kleist kept Moliere's introduction of a wife for the servant character Sosa. (She is named Cleanthis in Moliere's text and Charis in Kleist's version.) However, Kleist also added a philosophic complexity lacking in both Plautus and Moliere.

According to myth, the god Jupiter took on the form of the Theban general Amphitryon while he was on a military campaign. Jupiter then slept with Amphitryon's wife Alcmena, conceiving on that night the great hero Hercules. Yes, there are consent issues here, but this is resolved in Plautus's version of the story by the fact that Jupiter is--you know--a god. In the court of Louis XIV, belief in pagan deities couldn't excuse Jupiter's deceptive sexual practices, which meant that some critics interpreted Moliere's play as a satire on the king's numerous affairs.

Instead of drawing attention to the dubious sexual practices of the powerful, Kleist focused on issues of identity that are raised by the story. When Jupiter appears with Alcmena in the first act, he tells her that he is an Olympian who descended to earth as a "sacrifice to love." But when he tries to tell her the truth, she doesn't understand him. Rather, she trusts her eyes, which tell her he is her husband. Jupiter asks her to cherish him as her true beloved, and not merely as her legal spouse. Alcmena responds that he is both, but the god presses on, saying to her:

     Alcmena dearest, what I feel for you

     Outsoars, you see, as far as to the sun,

     What any husband owes you. Disaccustom

     Yourself, beloved, to your spouse,

     Make a distinction between me and him.

Though she doesn't quite understand what the god means, Alcmena does agree to cherish the night she has just spent with him above what Jupiter calls the "humdrum days of further married life." When he leaves, Alcmena declares that he must be drunk, but then so is she. Presumably, her drunkenness is not from alcohol, but the intoxication of having loved a deity.

The play's second act goes into further detail about the nature of love between mortals and gods. After a tense confrontation between Alcmena and the real Amphitryon--who has been out in the field of battle, and has no memory of the sweet encounter she believes to have been with him--poor Alcmena is about at her wit's end. Jupiter returns, once again in the disguise of her husband, and attempts to comfort her. Though Alcmena has been loving Jupiter in the guise of Amphitryon, the god contends that in her religious devotions, she has always loved Amphitryon in the guise of Jupiter. He asks her:

     Who is it that you pray to at his altar?

     Is it to him up there above the clouds?

     Can your engrossed mind ever comprehend him?

     Or can your feelings, in their wonted nest

     There spread their pinions in such flight? And is

     It not Amphitryon, your beloved, always,

     Before whom you bow to the dust?

Alcmena protests that she cannot pray to "white marble walls" but must envision someone's features when she prays to Jupiter. The god accepts that she must have someone to picture when worshiping a deity, but gets her to promise that she will only envision the man who took her on the previous night. In a further promise, Alcmena swears to stay beside him and cling to him as a god, even if Amphitryon should appear before her.

This is precisely what happens in the third act. The general returns again, and meets Alcmena in the company of Jupiter. Since both Amphitryon and Jupiter appear identical, the assembled citizens ask Alcmena to declare which one is her true husband. She chooses Jupiter, who has been standing beside her. This sends the general into a fit, but when Jupiter reveals himself, he proclaims a divine blessing, saying:

     Let your black woe and care be now dispelled,

     And open up your heart to triumph.

     What you, in me, did to yourself, will not

     Harm you before my everlasting nature.

     If you find your reward amid my fault,

     Then I hail you in friendly words, and leave you.

     Your fame shall henceforth find, as my world finds,

     Its boundaries and limits in the stars.

The awe Alcmena feels before such infinite majesty goes beyond words. The last line she has (which is also the last line of the play) is simply: "Ach!" Kleist's reverence for Jupiter is not found in his pagan source, which gives the last line to Amphitryon. Instead of crying out with inexpressible emotion, the general in Plautus's play simply asks the audience for applause.

What we get in Kleist's version is not paganism as it was, but rather paganism filtered through German Romanticism. While Plautus saw the myth of Amphitryon as an opportunity to get laughs, Kleist viewed it as a window into the sublime.

Amphitryon

We generally think of the Greeks and Romans as dividing their plays into clear examples of comedies and tragedies, but Plautus's play Amphitryon turns that idea on its head.

In the prologue, we have Mercury, messenger of the gods and patron of thieves and tricksters, tell us the performance will be a tragedy, but then he quickly walks back that declaration:

What? Frowning because I said it's tragedy!

I'm a god. I'll change it for you:

Transform this selfsame play from tragedy to comedy and never blot a line.

Later, Mercury says that instead the play will be a tragicomedy, since you don't have kings and gods in all-out comedy. Thus, the genre of tragicomedy was born, blending together the conventions of two different genres. Later authors who wanted to mix genres could point back to Amphitryon as a model for their own experiments.

In the first act, the conquering general Amphitryon has returned from a war against the Teleboians on behalf of the king of Thebes, Creon. He's brought back with him his faithful servant Sosia, but little do they know the god Jupiter has just spent the night with Amphitryon's wife Alcmena. Jupiter has disguised himself as Amphitryon, and Alcmena is ignorant of the deception. What is more, Mercury has disguised himself as Sosia, who gets beaten up by his own doppelganger.

When the real Amphitryon shows up, Sosia doesn't know how to explain what has happened. Things get even more confused when the general sees his wife for the first time in months, but she assures him that they just parted. Sosia compares Alcmena to the same type of ecstatic women who appear in Euripides's play The Bacchae:

These raving maenads when they're raving--

You mustn't cross them... 

Or you'll make the crazy things still crazier 

And get yourself torn in two. 

Alcmena isn't about to tear anyone in two, yet she has been possessed by a god... though in a different way from the maenads who worshipped Bacchus. She shuts herself up in her house, and when Amphitryon tries to get inside, Mercury as Sosia mocks him and dumps water on his head. This scene provided the model for the first scene of Act III in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, though most of that play is inspired by another Plautus work, Menaechmi.

Amphitryon gets resolved when Jupiter miraculously reveals to the general and his household what has been going on the whole time. Alcmena gives birth to two sons, one biologically Amphitryon's, while the other is the child of Jupiter and destined to become the great hero Hercules. The general doesn't mind being cuckolded as long as it was by a god, and he accepts his situation, sending away the prophet Tiresias, who had been called in to sort out the matter.

So many of the characters--Creon, Tiresias, Hercules--appear in other ancient tragedies we have, and apparently the tragic dramatist Sophocles even wrote a play about Amphitryon, though it is now lost. Overall, though, Plautus's Amphitryon presents the action in a decidedly comic manner.

commedia erudita

One of the first playwrights in Italy to try to copy classical drama was Albertino Mussato, who wrote a Latin tragedy called Ecerinis around 1315. Though modeled after the plays of Seneca, Ecerinis was based on the life of a tyrannical Italian nobleman who had only been dead for about 50 years. Other authors, such as the fifteenth-century noblewoman Antonia Tanini Pulci, wrote religious plays in the vernacular Italian. Pulci's miracle plays recall the lives of saints in the medieval tradition, but unlike medieval dramatists, she had her plays published. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, people in Italy were seeing plays as literature, and not just as outlines for performance.

Because these plays were aimed primarily at scholars, they came to be known as commedia erudita, or learned comedy. (This term distinguished such plays from the improvised dramas of professional actors known as commedia dell'arte.) The churchman Bernardo Dovizi, known as the Cardinal Bibbiena for the town where he was born, wrote a play called La Calandra based on Plautus's Menaechmi. The play premiered in 1507 and was later performed before the Pope, in spite of (or perhaps because of) some rather scandalous scenes. More famous than Cardinal Bibbiena was Ludovico Ariosto, who wrote epic poetry as well as drama. Ariosto's most famous play, I suppositi (or Supposes), was later translated into English and influenced William Shakespeare.

Perhaps the greatest writer of commedia erudita was Niccolo Machiavelli. Though Machiavelli is best known today as the political theorist who wrote the cynical analysis of power The Prince, he was also instrumental in reviving Roman comedy. Around 1517, he translated Terence's The Girl from Andros into Italian, but Machiavelli was not content just translating the works of others. His play The Mandrake draws upon Roman drama, but takes place in the author's home city of Florence. Later in life, Machiavelli wrote another comedy, Clizia, inspired by Plautus's play Casina. In it, a father and son fight over the titular character, a beautiful woman who never actually appears on stage.

While Machiavelli excelled at comedy, Giovanni Battista Giraldi, known as Cinthio, wrote one of the great Italian tragedies of the sixteenth century. First performed in the city of Ferrara in 1541, Cinthio's play Orbecche sought to recreate the tragedy of Seneca, complete with violence and gore. The play's heroine, after being presented with the head of her husband and the bodies of her children, resolves to achieve revenge, which she accomplishes with great bloodshed. Other writers, such as the scandalous poet Pietro Aretino, attempted tragedy as well, but none as successfully as Cinthio. The dark mood of Orbecche was not popular, however, and Cinthio gave his later plays happy endings.

It seems that while audiences of commedia erudita did not need their plays to be all-out comedies, they also wanted to avoid the bloodshed of tragedy. The playwright Torquato Tasso achieved a perfect compromise by inventing a new genre: pastoral. Tasso's play Aminta, first performed at a garden party in 1573, embodies the aesthetic of this new form. The title character is a shepherd in love with a nymph named Silvia who at first does not return his affections. After much back and forth, and both characters falsely believing that the other had died, the two end up united in love. Imitations of Aminta include Giovanni Battista Guarini's The Faithful Shepherd, which also portrayed shepherds in love in an idyllic country setting.

Enthusiasts of these new, highly literate plays needed a place to stage them, as well as to put on the classical plays they were rediscovering. While plays could be performed in great halls of nobles or in the open air, many people wanted purpose-built theatres like the Romans had enjoyed. In 1580, the architect Andrea Palladio designed and began work on just such a building. Inspired by Roman theatres, Palladio's Teatro Olimpico in the town of Vicenza contains a scenae frons through which the audience can peak to see an elaborate stage set with linear perspective. The wood and plaster scenery designed by Palladio's successor Vincenzo Scamozzi, has been preserved up to this very day.

commedia dell'arte

In Renaissance Italy, commedia dell'arte referred to theatre performed by professional actors, skilled artisans rather than the scholars who performed more "serious" plays. Instead of performing from scripts, commedia actors used loose scenarios outlining their plots, but improvised most of their dialogue and stage business. Fortunately, many of these scenarios survive, several of them recorded by Flaminio Scala and published in 1611. The scenarios recorded by Scala and others exhibit highly elaborate plots, often rather bawdy in nature. Though they mostly revolve around young lovers trying to get together in spite of intransigent parents, they can explore more serious issues as well.

Because commedia shows had to be improvised anew with each performance, company members tended to specialize in certain stock characters. Actors might perform the same character throughout their entire careers, sometimes bequeathing a role to a family member when they retired or died. The companies tended to be based around families, and the most celebrated commedia troupe, known as I Gelosi (or "The Zealous Ones") centered on the Andreini family. Francesco Andreini, who took over the troupe in 1589, was famous for the role of Captain Spavento ("Captain Fright"), a braggart soldier descended from the miles gloriosus of Plautus. Other troupes also had captain figures, usually Spaniards, who sometimes went just by the name Il Capitano.

Even more famous than Andreini was I Gelosi's leading lady, Isabella Canali, who married Andreini in 1578, solidifying their artistic partnership. She played a sexy young widow whose love for a man frequently drove the plot. Fluent in several languages, she showed off her abilities in a scenario called Isabella's Madness, in which she spoke in a variety of languages and accents. Known for both her beauty and her wit, she entered a prestigious sonnet contest, and famously came in second only to Torquato Tasso, widely considered to be the greatest poet of his day. She also wrote a pastoral drama, Mirtilla, though she is better known for her improvised works.

Isabella used her own first name on stage, and she was so successful that many companies subsequently adopted the name Isabella for their heroines. Silvia and Flaminia were also used as names for heroines (sometimes known as inamorata), though those names tended to be used for young virgins rather than for widows. These women could be witty, but generally were not quite as shrewd as Isabella, who, being a widow, also possessed an independent fortune. The name of the male romantic lead varied, but popular first names included Cinthio, Flavio, Oratio, and Lelio. The male romantic leads frequently seemed as interchangeable as their names.

Another popular character was a greedy old man known as Pantalone. Since Pantalone was supposed to be a rich merchant, he would speak in a Venetian accent, as Venice was the center of commerce in Italy. He tried to disguise his age by wearing a tight-fitting Turkish outfit with red breeches, but the effect was purely comic. Pantolone usually got in the way of the lovers, either trying to marry the heroine himself or trying to marry her off to his friend, Dottore. This character was not necessarily a medical doctor, but a learned man schooled in law, philosophy, or other matters, so he spoke in the accent of the university town of Bologna. Dottore frequently tried to speak Latin, but one of the jokes was that he spoke Latin terribly. Audiences could quickly see that his learning was largely a sham.

Though the lovers usually performed without masks, Il Capitano, Pantalone, Dottore, and other characters wore grotesque masks covering most of their faces. Though actors could not use their facial expressions, the masks allowed them to use outrageous voices and twist their bodies into comic poses without seeming incongruous. Because comic business was improvised rather than written into the scenario, performers could use interchangeable bits known as lazzi ("jokes") they could reuse in different performances. Lazzi could be either verbal or physical, but were always designed to be highly entertaining. Specific lazzi could be written into scenarios, but they were also brought in whenever the energy of the piece began to sag.

Particularly adept at lazzi were the zannis, servant characters who engaged in rough, physical humor. Arlecchino was the most famous of the zannis. He wore a tight-fitting suit with multi-colored diamonds, which originally represented patches, but became more stylized over time. Other zannis included Brighella (a violent and cynical libertine), Pedrolino (an energetic simpleton who sometimes pretended to be mute), Scaramuccia (a quarrelsome braggart), Pulcinella (a pot-bellied rascal), Mezzetino (a valet in a striped costume who combined good traits with bad ones), Scapino (a schemer with a taste for fashion), and Coviello (a musical acrobat).

The zanni who was servant to the female lead was usually named Colombina. She frequently dressed like her mistress, but also wore a small apron. Another popular servant character was a country girl named Franceschina, who was sometimes played by a man. Franceschina was sexy, but could be grotesque, as opposed to the charming Colombine. An old woman, Pasquella, was sometimes friends with Isabella and could cause lots of comic mischief. In some scenarios, Pasquella could be a witch or a bawd.

Later on, the characters evolved and became popular figures in the theatres of other countries. Shakespeare refers to Pantalone as Pantaloon, and the popular mischief-maker Harlequin comes from Arlecchino. Pulcinella became Mr. Punch of Punch and Judy shows. In 17th-century France, Moliere adapted the character Scapino as Scapin, and his contemporary Tiberio Fiorilli became famous as Scaramouche, a version of Scaramuccia.

Early Tudor Drama

As the middle ages in England came to a close, the Plantagenet dynasty split into two factions: the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The two sides repeatedly clashed in the long conflict known as the Wars of the Roses, with the young Henry Tudor ultimately triumphing and establishing a new Tudor Dynasty.

Though drama under Henry VII still maintained a medieval sensibility, times were changing. The printing press had already been introduced, and Renaissance ideas that had flourished in Italy were finally reaching England. Under the reign of the king's son, Henry VIII, secular drama gained considerable ground, with the gifted English playwright John Heywood providing such interludes as The Play of the Weather and The Four P's.

Another important playwright from Henry's reign was John Bale. His play King Johan tells the story (from a decidedly Protestant standpoint) of a notorious medieval monarch's conflict with the Pope. King Johan is notable both for its unique verse structure and its mixing together of historical and allegorical figures. The play exists in multiple versions, and a reference in one to "our late kynge Henrye" could indicate it was performed during the reign of Edward VI as well. Bale was highly regarded under Edward, and the young king appointed him as a bishop.

Sometime around the end of Edward's reign, the schoolmaster Nicholas Udall wrote the comedy Ralph Roister Doister. The play focuses on the dramatic descendant of the Miles Gloriosus character in Plautus, depicting a braggart who tries to woo a virtuous widow but ends up running away from her maids. The play appears to have been intended for performance by Udall's students, though it may have been performed before Mary I as well. By the time Elizabeth I took the throne, there was already a healthy tradition of secular plays in England.

That proved to be fortunate, as Elizabeth set about banning all religious drama. The mystery, miracle, and morality plays of the middle ages advocated a Catholic theology, and Elizabeth's legitimacy depended on Henry VIII's ability as head of the church to obtain an annulment without the consent of the Pope. As Elizabeth began the long, slow process of repressing religious plays, more and more writers turned to secular themes. Two men, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, collaborated on a play in 1561 called Gorboduc. The tragedy is the first drama in English written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, which subsequently became the standard verse form for Elizabethan plays.

Elizabethan drama did not truly come into its own, however, until the 1580s. One of the first plays to capture the imaginations of mass audiences was The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. The play, about a father who must avenge the murder of his son, established the popularity of revenge tragedy. Kyd provided ghosts, mad scenes, a play-within-a-play, and a final bloody slaughter. All of these became staples of later Elizabethan revenge tragedies, and Kyd might even have written an early version of the most popular of revenge tragedies: William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Kyd was overshadowed in 1587, though, with the appearance of a young playwright from Cambridge University named Christopher Marlowe. That is a post, however, for another day.

Notes on Roman Drama

A picture of Roman drama does not begin to emerge until the 3rd Century BCE. It was likely influenced, as all Roman culture was, by the Etruscan civilization to the city's north. Little is known about Etruscan drama, but it seems the Etruscans performed short plays as part of their religious festivals, a tradition borrowed by the Romans.

To the south of Rome was the city of Atella, which became known for its short comedic plays known as Atellan farces. Though none of these farces survive, they reportedly featured stock characters, such as the quarrelsome peasant, the wily servant, and the doddering old man. They were known for their licentiousness and low humor.

These and other theatrical traditions in Italy were brought to Rome as that city came to dominate the entire peninsula. By the end of the First Punic War in 241 BCE, Rome controlled all of Italy and Sicily. The city included plays in many of its official festivals, including the Ludi Romani in honor of the god Jupiter, the Ludi Florales in honor of the goddess Flora, and the Ludi Plebeii, which celebrated the political liberty of the common people.

Roman actors had to compete against a variety of other entertainments available at festivals, including acrobats, dancers, and even gladiatorial combats. During the Republican period, they performed on temporary wooden structures, and the audience likewise sat on temporary wooden bleachers raised for the occasion. Usually, all of the plays for a festival were performed in a single theatre, but at very elaborate celebrations there could have been as many as three theatres erected for plays.

Dramatists could be political, but at their own peril. One Roman playwright, Gnaeus Naevius, was supposedly imprisoned for plays that attacked the powerful Metelli family. Credited as Rome's first native-born dramatist, Naevius wrote both comedies and tragedies, but only fragments of his work have come down to us today.

Plautus

            By the beginning of the 2nd Century BCE, a new dramatist was attracting attention. He was Titus Maccius Plautus, and not only would he become the most famous playwright of his age, but his works would have a lasting impact on subsequent drama down to the present day.

            Plautus adapted the plays of Menander and other Greek dramatists into Latin, but he seems to have given them his own distinctive stamp. He apparently took to playwriting later in life, but he became wildly popular with more than 100 plays attributed to him.

            Twenty plays by Plautus survive more or less intact, with another, Vidularia, remaining only in fragments. They all follow the model of Menander's New Comedy, or situational comedy. Typically, a young man wants to marry a beautiful woman, who might be falsely enslaved, but he is thwarted by an old fool or pompous hypocrite who blocks his way. A clever servant helps the young man foil the bad guys and get the girl, often winning his own freedom in the process.

            A proto-typical Plautus play is Miles Gloriosus, the story of a braggart soldier who has kidnapped a beautiful young Athenian woman. The soldier fancies himself the envy of every man and desire of every woman he meets. One slave fawns all over him, but another helps the woman to escape with her sweetheart, and then arranges for the soldier (who is actually a coward) to be swindled and beaten. A long tradition of bragging soldiers, from commedia dell'arte's Il Capitano, to Shakespeare's Falstaff and Parolles, to Major Frank Burns in M*A*S*H, all trace their ancestry back to the title character of this play.

            Another standard element in Plautine comedy is mistaken identity. This shows up memorably in The Menaechmi, which concerns twin brothers, both named Menaechmus. The twins are separated when they are young, and as adults they both end up in the same city unbeknownst to each other. The play became the basis of numerous twin comedies, including Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, which Rodgers and Hart turned into the musical The Boys from Syracuse.

            The Comedy of Errors goes a step further than The Menaechmi by pairing the twins with a pair of twin servants who also share the same name. Shakespeare borrowed this idea, as well as one of the scenes in The Comedy of Errors, from another Plautus play, Amphitryon. In Amphitryon, the god Jupiter takes on the form of the title character and the god Mercury takes the form of Amphitryon's servant Sosia. Generally, New Comedy did not mix gods and heroes with lowly characters and slapstick antics, so in the prologue Mercury invents a new name for the genre: tragicomedy. Later practitioners of tragicomedy frequently alluded to Amphitryon as a classical precedent, though the play seems more like an out-and-out comedy today. The play has been adapted numerous times, most notably in Jean Giraudoux's play Amphitryon 38.

            An even more unconventional Plautus play is The Rope. The play takes its name from a scene where characters tug back and forth on a rope connected to a fishing net that has hauled up a treasure chest. While most Plautine comedies take place on a city street, The Rope is set on a seashore following a storm. Toward the end of the play, the old man Daemones comes to recognize, through the contents of the chest, that the beautiful young woman Palaestra is actually his long-lost daughter who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Unlike many other plays by Plautus, The Rope is moralistic and openly sentimental. Its non-urban setting evokes a simpler world than the schemer-filled streets typical of Plautine comedy.

Other plays by Plautus include Pseudolus, about a crafty slave, The Captives, about prisoners of war, and The Pot of Gold, about a greedy old man. (Moliere later adapted The Pot of Gold as The Miser.) Like the comedies of Menander, the plays of Plautus usually begin with a prologue summarizing the action. Likewise, they dispense with the chorus and are divided into several acts, between which there might have been short songs or dances unconnected with the plot.

Plautus displays a greater variety of language and meter than Menander, however. His comedies are filled with puns and wordplay. Much of the dialogue was likely sung, and actors might have used a fair amount of improvisation to attract audience members and keep their attention. 

The mixture of farce and song makes Plautus similar in many ways to contemporary musical comedy. The most famous musical based on the work of Plautus is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, with songs by Stephen Sondheim and a script by two masters of situation comedy, Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart. It is the one play most people in the theatre think of when they hear the name "Plautus," but in fact almost all modern comedy, from Broadway farces to television sitcoms, has been influenced by the plays of Plautus.

Later Playwrights

Plautus died around 184 BCE. We have no other Roman plays until another comic playwright, Publius Terentius Afer, or Terence, began writing a few years later. While the plays of Plautus are difficult to date, scholars are fairly confident in dating Terence's six comedies, The Girl from Andros, The Mother-in-Law, The Self-Tormentor, The Eunuch, Phormio, and The Brothers at between 166 BCE and 160 BCE. 

During the Medieval period and the beginning of the Renaissance, these were the most widely known classical plays in Europe, so they had a lasting impact on Western drama. They are similar to the works of Plautus, but more refined and with more complex plots, often derived from multiple Greek sources. Characters in Terence plays tend to be more sympathetic than the broad clowns created by Plautus, but Terence's poetry lacks the tremendous variety of his predecessor.

No Roman tragedies survive from the Republican period, but we do have tragedies from after the establishment of the Roman Empire in 27 BCE. The tragedies we have were not written for public performance, however, but as closet dramas to be read and perhaps recited at social gatherings. The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, or Ovid, wrote a closet drama called Medea that is unfortunately lost to us. However, we have a number of tragedies by the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

Seneca worked for the mad Emperor Nero who came to the throne in the year 54 of the current era. In the year 65, Nero forced Seneca to commit suicide, but prior to that, Seneca had written a number of plays based on Greek models, including Medea, Oedipus, Phaedra, and Mad Hercules. These plays established the tradition of five acts. While they had choral interludes between the acts, the chorus spoke with a single voice rather than depicting a group of people.

The tragedies of Seneca are filled with moralizing sentiments from his stoic philosophy, but they also contain gruesome scenes of on-stage violence. The tragic heroes in Seneca's plays must face that horrific violence with dignity and resolve, much as the author himself had to face Nero.

Most of Seneca's tragedies suffer from comparison to similar plays by Greek authors, but one, Thyestes, does not have any extant Greek equivalent. Possibly based on a now lost play by Sophocles, Thyestes tells the story of how Atreus killed the children of his brother Thyestes and fed their flesh to him in a bloody feast. It opens with the ghost of Tantalus, grandfather of the two brothers, being brought back from the netherworld to be tormented by a fury. The ghost scene has been much copied in Western drama, including by Thomas Kyd, whose play The Spanish Tragedy was a forerunner to Hamlet. Some plays by Marlowe and other contemporaries of Shakespeare actually quote directly from Thyestes and other Senecan tragedies.

Another Roman tragedy, Octavia, deals with the death of Nero's wife, and Seneca appears in the play as a character. Though it was once attributed to Seneca himself, it seems likely to have been written by a later dramatist.

Horace

Though not a playwright, the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, or Horace, exerted a large influence on Western drama through a verse commentary on playwriting known as Ars Poetica, or The Art of Poetry. The treatise was published in 18 BCE as a series of letters to Horace's friend Piso. It deals with many different types of poetry, but gives special attention to drama. Like Aristotle, Horace offers advice to playwrights, but he tends to me more adamant in his suggestions than his Greek predecessor. 

All plays, Horace says, should be in five acts, and they should never have more than three people speak in a scene. He cautions against using gods to resolve difficulties unless it is absolutely necessary, and he speaks of the chorus as being a single actor. The purpose of drama, according to Horace, is to favor the good and to give friendly advice. He has harsh words for Plautus, whom he considers foolish and unpolished.

Roman poets, Horace tells us, surpassed the Greeks, leaving nothing unexplored. Their main fault, he says, is in not revising their works and improving them with numerous rewrites.

Permanent Theatres

Though the plays of Plautus and Terence were originally performed in temporary wooden structures, the Romans later began building permanent theatres. The first one, the Theatre of Pompey, was built in 55 BCE as part of a larger complex that also included temples. Many Roman theatres still remain, at least in ruins. Notable examples include the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome, as well as theatres in Ostia and Verona where plays are still sometimes performed.

Roman theatres were based on Greek theatres, but they differ in many respects. First of all, the orchestra is smaller in the Roman theatre, and instead of being exclusively a playing area, it was used to seat important personages, such as senators. Most of the action appears to have taken place on the raised area behind the orchestra known as the pulpitum. The pulpitum was the equivalent of the logeion in Greek theatres, but it could be less than half the height, rising only about five feet above the level of the orchestra. This way, audience members seated in the orchestra could still view the actors.

We can glean a great deal about the first Roman theatres from the writings of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, who in the first century BCE wrote a guidebook for building called De Architectura, or On Architecture. The fifth book of De Architectura goes into detail about how to build a theatre, paying special attention to how to perfect its acoustics. Vitruvius goes to great lengths to describe how sound travels and how it can be aided by the use of brass vases placed around the periphery of the theatre. Today, we simply do not know how these vases worked, or whether they even worked at all. However, their existence seems to indicate the importance with which the Romans treated acoustics.

For Vitruvius, the structure of the theatre also had cosmic implications. In laying out the design of the theatre, he called for architects to inscribe four equilateral triangles in the same way astrologers mapped out the signs of the zodiac. The theatre was supposed to be in harmony not only with sound, but with the entire universe.

De Architectura gives valuable insights into scenic design as well. Vitruvius suggests that the middle door in the scaenae frons behind the pulpitum be decorated as a door to a royal palace, with doors to the right and left decorated as the doors for guests. Near those would be other spaces for decorations known as periaktoi. Vitruvius describes these as turning triangular machines with a different decoration on each side. The periaktoi could be turned to indicate a change in scene or the appearance of a god.

Vitruvius also indicated that there were different decorations for tragedies, comedies and satyr plays. Tragic scenes, he says, should be ornamented with columns, pediments, and statues. Comic scenes represented private buildings and had windows similar to ordinary dwellings. For satyr plays, the scene was ornamented with trees, caves, hills, and other imitations of nature.

We know from paintings that survived in tombs or were buried in the volcanic ash at Pompeii that the Romans were quite capable of skilled artistic renderings. However, it is far from certain that the periaktoi bore any resemblance to modern realistic stage designs. Designs on the periaktoi might have been largely conventional, much as masks worn by actors gave an impression of a character rather than trying to fool the eye. Still, Renaissance scene designers often interpreted Vitruvius as calling for illusionary stage effects, something the Romans likely never had.

Roman Actors

            When Shakespeare has Hamlet quip, "When Roscius was an actor in Rome," few audience members may realize that a real actor, Quintus Roscius Gallus, once entertained thousands during the first century BCE. Born a slave, Roscius became famous for his comedic performances and was freed by the Roman dictator Sulla. The famous orator Cicero took lessons from Roscius, and in turn later defended him in a lawsuit.

            While Roscius was known for comedy, his contemporary Clodius Aesopus was reputed to be the best tragic actor of the day. Both men managed to amass fortunes and to gain respectability on the stage. Later Roman actors would not be so lucky. In fact, the Emperor Tiberius later forbade actors from associating with senators and upper class Romans.

            Gradually, the literary theatre declined in favor of mime, in which actors wore no masks, engaged in acrobatic feats, and improvised much of their dialogue. Women performed in mime along with men, and the scenes they depicted frequently involved adultery and other explicitly sexual situations. The most famous mimes could win the friendship of emperors, but overall they enjoyed a low reputation. The declining status of performers mirrored a declining reputation for theatre in general.

            The sexual nature of mime, together with the pagan origins of Greek and Roman drama, led the early Christian church to oppose the theatre. The fact that mimes took to making fun of the church and its sacraments surely did not help matters. In the year 313 of the current era, the Emperor Constantine, himself a convert to Christianity, issued the Edict of Milan, which ended state persecution of Christians. When Christianity became the official religion of the empire in 380, the theatre's days were numbered. The church's Fourth Council of Carthage in 398 officially excommunicated actors, supposedly cutting them off from any chance of salvation unless they recanted and gave up their profession.

            Historians often give the year 476 as the date for the official end of the Roman Empire, but the empire did not simply disappear overnight, and neither did the theatre. In the West, a succession of emperors, many of them Germanic invaders themselves, tried to hold together pieces of the empire, though they never again possessed the far-reaching authority of their predecessors. In the East, emperors were more successful, ultimately creating the new Byzantine Empire centered in Constantinople.

            The sixth century saw attempts to revive drama. In Rome, the Ostrogoth King Theodoric ordered the restoration of the Theatre of Pompey. Drama, at least in the form of mime, flourished in the Byzantine Empire, and Emperor Justinian I famously married a former mime performer, Theodora. She came to be known as the power behind the throne in spite of her humble origins.

            Still, the days of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca were long gone. As a new civilization emerged out of the ashes of the Roman Empire, it would create its own dramatic traditions, and the theatre of ancient Rome would have to be rediscovered centuries later.