Nothing but Thunder

Last night, I saw Duncan Pflaster's new play Nothing but Thunder, which is currently showing at Theater for the New City as a part of the Dream Up Festival.

Much like The Frogs by Aristophanes, the play depicts a descent into the underworld by the Greek god Dionysus. Like in The Frogs, the god is accompanied by his slave, Xanthias, and in fact some of the dialogue is taken word-for-word from Aristophanes (though translated into English, of course).

In his biography in the program, Pflaster states that the piece is a tribute to playwright Charles Ludlam, whose Ridiculous Theatrical Company used many of the same methods, blending high and low culture, and frequently stealing whole scenes from dead writers and inserting them into new plays to the bemusement of audience members who recognized the gag.

What I found most interesting about Nothing but Thunder is that in spite of having all of the materials for a farce like the Frogs, Pflaster tends to avoid the ridiculous at times, and creates moments of genuine pathos amidst a sea of absurdity. (This is something Ludlam tended to do as well.) Spencer Gonzalez, who plays Dionysus, has an emotional journey as he undertakes his literal journey down to the underworld and back.

Matt Biagini, who plays Xanthias, tends to keep the tone of the show light and comic, but he, too, has moments of emotional insight. As he oils up his master and some maenads for a steamy orgy, we think we're in for one sort of play, but when Dionysus must get aid from the shepherd Prosymnus (played by Kenny Wade Marshall), we appear to be in very different territory. This mirrors the situation of Dionysus himself, who doesn't know how to act when people don't immediately fall down and worship him.

There are few surviving texts that give a complete, flushed-out story of Prosymnus, so Pflaster provides some details of his own, giving him a dear sister named Adelpha, played by Katrina Dykstra. We first see Adelpha carrying a cute stuffed sheep named Tasso, a clear reference to the Italian poet who wrote what many people consider to be the definitive pastoral drama about shepherds. As you can see, the play rarely passes up an opportunity to make a clever literary reference.

After a rather... interesting bargain with Prosymnus... Dionysus gets to the underworld, and specifically to Tartarus, a land of eternal torment and suffering. There he meets Sisyphus (played by Eric Hedlund) eternally pushing a rock up a hill. He also runs into his own dead ex-wife, Ariadne. Olivia Kinter, who plays Ariadne, delivers one of the more nuanced performances in the show, in spite of the relatively small size of her role. Dionysus, it turns out, went to the underworld not to rescue his ex, but his mother Semele, played by Alyssa Simon.

Aliza Shane directed the production, which--be warned--contains no small amount of nudity. For this reason, everyone entering the theatre must turn off their cell phones and place them in special pouches provided by Yondr. The pouches ensure that the phones stay locked up and unable to take photographs until the audience leaves the theatre and has their pouches unlocked by the staff. Sadly, this is what we have to do when certain irresponsible people continue to take photos during plays.

If you do want to be a horrible person and take a nude photograph of an un-consenting individual, though, I recommend you not try to photograph any Greek gods. If you do, pushing rocks for eternity might be the least of your problems.

Aminta

Written in 1573, Torquato Tasso's play Aminta is perhaps the quintessential pastoral drama of the Italian Renaissance.

The play begins with a prologue in which the God of Love, disguised as a shepherd, relates how his mother Venus wants him to dwell (according to Leigh Hunt's translation) "Among mere courts and coronets, and scepters." He, however, wishes "To lodge in the green woods" and shoot his arrows "In bosoms rude."

Love's point here is that romantic passion should not be just for the upper classes. He wants to dwell among the simple shepherds and bestow feeling upon the lowly as well as the exalted. There is one person in particular he'd like to target, too. She is Sylvia, "the cruelest nymph, / That ever followed on Diana's choir." The shepherd Aminta has been in love with Sylvia, but up until now, she has not returned his affections.

We meet Sylvia in Act I, where she tells her friend Daphne:

          Let others follow the delights of love,

          If love indeed has any. To my taste

          This life is best. I have enough to care for

          In my dear bow and arrows.

A follower of the virgin goddess Diana, Sylvia delights in "following the chase" as she hunts in the woods. She has no desire to enjoy the love of a man, though Daphne promises her that "Darkness, and one short night" has "the long luster of a thousand days."

Aminta has his own friend to confide in, named Thyrsis. Not only has Thyrsis been in love before, but he actually went mad with love, and went around writing poems on the barks of trees. (This detail, taken from Ariosto's poem Orlando Furioso, would later find its way into Shakespeare's As You Like It.) Sensing his own impending doom, Aminta asks Thyrsis to record his death "Upon a beech tree near where they will bury" him.

The second act opens with a satyr pledging to rape a nymph who rejected him. That nymph, we later find out, was none other than Sylvia. The satyr ends up tying her to a tree in order to have his way with her, but Aminta arrives just in time and chases him away with a lance. After Sylvia is cold to him following her rescue, Aminta goes off more depressed than ever. Thyrsis begins to fear his friend might even attempt suicide.

Aminta does seem to be on the point of killing himself when Daphne snatches away his lance. It's at this point that a nymph named Nerina runs on with even more bad news. After the whole satyr incident, Sylvia went out hunting with Nerina, and ran off in pursuit of a wolf. When Nerina caught up, all she found was a pack of wolves licking blood off of some bones, and Sylvia's hair net among them.

Fortunately, Sylvia isn't dead. She meets up with Daphne and tells her of her escape from the wolves, but Daphne relates how upon hearing that Sylvia was killed, Aminta ran off in desperation. At this point, Sylvia is overwhelmed with pity, crying:

          Ah me! And thou not follow him! Let us go;

          Oh, let us find him! If he would have died

          To follow me, he must live now to save me.

The implication here is that Aminta's love has moved Sylvia. She now cannot imagine life without him, and if he has killed himself for her, she herself will no longer be able to live. Still, Sylvia claims that her tears for Aminta are not for love, but pity. A messenger arrives and announces that Aminta is dead, having leapt into a chasm in despair, leaving only a scarf behind. Picking up the scarf, Sylvia vows to use it to kill herself. First, though, she will go and bury the body of her beloved Aminta.

As the final act begins, the wise Elpino enters, calling Aminta fortunate. Everyone thinks this means Aminta is fortunate to be dead, and in death to have finally won his lover's affections. Elpino explains that in actuality some bushes broke Aminta's fall, and he was stunned, but alive. Seeing the limp body of Aminta, Sylvia embraced her lover, and revived him with kisses.

It's a beautiful story, and perhaps too naïve for our cynical era. On the other hand, perhaps it's just what we need as we wait for the election returns to slowly come in day by day. Aminta teaches that if we are patient, love will conquer hate, and though we might have to wait in fear and trembling, hope can lead at last to joy.

Notes on Italian Renaissance Drama

In the past, I've written about commedia erudita and commedia dell'arte, but not all drama during the Italian Renaissance fell neatly into these two categories.

Take, for instance, the actor and playwright Angelo Beolco, better known as Il Ruzzante. He wrote outrageous comedies related to commedia dell'arte, but like the commedia erudita plays, his were written down rather than improvised.

Ruzzante traveled around the area near Padua, and wrote in the dialect of that region. Around 1521, he published his first play, La Pastoral, a comedy about shepherds in love. Unlike Torquato Tasso's refined drama Aminta, Ruzzante's play was filled with coarse vulgarities. While Tasso's play ends harmoniously, La Pastoral resolves the plot by having the protagonist's father poisoned by an incompetent physician.

Ruzzante's plays typically feature a character named Ruzzante, whom he himself would play. One of his best known pieces is called The Parliament of Ruzzante, sometimes known as Ruzzante Returns from the Wars. In it, Ruzzante comes home from years of battle to rail against the evils of soldiers and warfare. The playwright himself seems to have been popular with the rural nobles who opposed the city of Venice in the Cambraic Wars in the early 16th century. Perhaps for this reason, his plays tended not to be staged in Venice later in his career, in spite of their dialect becoming closer to the one spoken in Venice.

Another playwright of the 16th century who is difficult to categorize is Leone Ebreo de' Sommi. A member of a prominent Jewish family in Mantua, de' Sommi wrote about 15 plays. Though most of them are in Italian, one, A Comedy of Betrothal, is the earliest surviving play of its kind in Hebrew. He is even better known, however, for writing a treatise on theatre production called Four Dialogues on Scenic Representation. Besides discussing acting practices, the work also delves into costumes, scenic design, and how to achieve lighting effects with specially colored glass.

While staging serious commedia erudite plays, the Italian Renaissance delighted in producing elaborate spectacles in between the main play's five acts. Such a spectacle, which could become more popular than the play itself, was generally called an intermedio. A drawing by the artists Buontalenti and Andrea Boscoli shows a famous intermedio performed in 1589 at a play honoring a wedding involving the powerful de Medici family. The beautiful stage picture represents the harmony of the spheres, but also shows an allegorical figure of Necessity and the three Fates. Buontalenti, though from the artisan class and not a noble, was given a remarkable deal of control over organizing events for the wedding, and his designs were so praised they were recorded in engravings so they could be shared and remembered long after the event was over and the costumes and sets dispersed.

The intermedio of the 16th century influenced a new art form that told narratives but focused on music and spectacle. This new form, which came to be called opera, grew out of the Renaissance's desire to revive the musical nature of Greek drama. Jacopo Peri's 1597 composition Dafne is now lost, but descriptions of it lead most theatre historians to consider it the first opera. Some of Peri's later works, such as Euridice, do survive, but the first opera to make it into the standard repertoire is L'Orfeo by the composer Claudio Monteverdi. The poet Alessandro Striggio wrote the opera's text, known as the libretto, but opera came to regard composers as the real artists, and the libretto as secondary to the music. First performed in Mantua in 1607, L'Orfeo tells the story of the Greek poet and musician Orpheus who allegedly went down to the underworld to try to bring his deceased wife back into the world of the living. The story has proven to be remarkably enduring, recently being reborn in the Anais Mitchell musical Hadestown.

Innovations in Design

The architect Baldassare Peruzzi created a new standard of excellence in set design when he helped stage Cardinal Bibbiena's La Calandria for the pope. Peruzzi added a raked stage that slanted upward behind the main playing area. In addition to having a main backdrop, Peruzzi also added smaller backdrops on the sides known as wings. His predecessor Girolamo Genga had used one set of wings, but contemporaries were impressed by Peruzzi's use of multiple planes placed in front of the backdrop. These multiple levels of flat scenery added to the illusion of depth created by linear perspective. Peruzzi left many of his designs to his pupil, Sebastiano Serlio, who included many of his master's ideas in an influential work known as the Seven Books of Architecture.

Written around 1545, Serlio's treatise became enormously influential in spreading Renaissance ideas of scenic design not just throughout Italy, but throughout all of Europe. The book describes how to set up a performance space and how to create illusionary scenic effects. Three of its most famous illustrations show hypothetical designs for tragedies, comedies, and pastorals. The tragedy design shows stately, ordered buildings, while the design for comedy shows a tavern, a building that might be a brothel, and structures beginning to decay. The design for a pastoral play shows trees and rustic cottages. Though Serlio's choice of three genres is influenced by the comedies, tragedies, and satyr plays of ancient Greece, his designs are pure Renaissance.

Later King Francis I of France invited Serlio to help build an elaborate chateau at Fountainebleau. It was in Fountainebleau that Serlio died, after helping to spread Renaissance aesthetics to France. His work in Italy, however, influenced another theorist of theatre design, Nicola Sabbatini. Sabbatini's Manual for Constructing Theatrical Scenes and Machines published in 1638 deals not just with the artistry of how to create beautiful designs, but also with the practical methods of achieving special effects on stage. In it, Sabbatini describes how to use iron or stone balls to imitate the sound of thunder and how to quickly change wings and backdrops. Some of Sabbatini's more fantastic effects included waves of water that appeared to move and dolphins that appeared to jump out of the water.

Theatrical Buildings

In addition to innovations in scenic design, architects made tremendous changes in theatre buildings during the Italian Renaissance. Many of the first theatres were built inside great houses and palaces. The powerful Medici family in Florence, for instance, built a theatre inside the Uffizi Palace of that city. An engraving by Jacques Callot portrays a production there in 1617. The engraving shows the audience arranged in a horseshoe fashion with dancers descending from an elaborately decorated stage.

Other theatres, such as the Teatro Farnese in Parma, were created as freestanding structures. Built by the architect Giovanni Battista Aleotti in 1618, the Teatro Farnese is sometimes cited as the first purpose-built theatre with a permanent proscenium arch. Though it is built out of wood and plaster, the theatre was painted to look as if made of marble. It contains the same horseshoe layout for the audience, and was likely modeled after the Medici theatre.

The development of permanent proscenium arches was vital to the creation of Italian scenic design. Though the name "proscenium" derives from for the Latin term proscaenium, the proscenium is not the stage itself like in a Roman theatre, but rather the fixture around the stage, functioning like a window or picture frame containing the action. The proscenium arch places the scenery and performers on one side, and the audience on the other. The audience shares essentially the same view of the action. Because that is the case, elaborate stage machinery can be hidden behind the proscenium arch--either to the sides, above it, or below the stage--and painted scenery can easily be moved on and off the playing area. This set-up, which is essentially the same as most Broadway-style theatres today, later became the standard for most playhouses in Europe, and later, the world.

Changing the Scene

As the scenery in these new purpose-built theatres became more elaborate, the question arose of how to change the scene as the play moved from one locale to another. Sabbatini described how changeable wings could be constructed to allow stagehands to pull one set of wings to the side, revealing a second set of wings behind them. This required all of the wings to be two-dimensional and facing directly out to the audience. Another set designer, Joseph Furttenbach, who relocated to Italy from Germany, came up with a different solution. Inspired by the periaktoi described by Vitruvius, Furttenbach designed three-sided wings that could be rotated to have different sides facing the audience.

The backdrop was usually constructed of two panels known as shutters that met in the middle. By sliding the shutters apart or sliding together a new pair of shutters in front of them, technicians could change the backdrop as well as the wings. The only drawback of this method is it often left a visible crease in the center of the backdrop. Sometimes a three-dimensional set piece might be placed in front of the center of the stage to try to minimize the crease's visibility. Three-dimensional set pieces could not be changed as quickly as the shutters, however, which could be quickly pulled back with ropes.

A particularly effective method of changing two-dimensional scenery was the chariot-and-pole system. Drawings frequently attributed to the stage designer Giocomo Torelli illustrate how this method worked. A large winch beneath the stage moved poles attached to the scenery, shifting it either on or off the stage. Torelli improved this method by adding a system of counterweights that allowed a single person to move multiple wings and shutters simultaneously. Using Torelli's systems, technicians made fluid set changes that seemed almost magical.

Like Serlio, Torelli spent a portion of his career in France. While there, he helped to spread the innovations he and others had developed in Italy. The Renaissance was reaching out across Europe, and the theatre helped to spread the new ideas and new aesthetics of the Renaissance movement.

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.

German Romanticism

The year 1789--when Parisian mobs stormed the Bastille, breaking into the prison than symbolized the old feudal order and setting its prisoners (and by extension, themselves) free--is an important marker in the history of Western civilization, as well as for Western drama. However, even before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the stirrings of a new outlook toward art began in Germany in the form of the so-called "Storm and Stress" movement. Friedrich Klinger gave the movement its name with his play Sturm und Drang (German for "Storm and Stress"), which premiered in Leipzig in 1777. The previous year, Klinger had submitted his play The Twins to a contest at a theatre in Hamburg, winning first prize and gaining an appointment at the Seyler Theatre Company. The Twins depicts a man who kills his weaker twin, claiming his brother will not allow him to fully develop his own nature. Whether or not Klinger actually embraced such a viewpoint, this type of thinking seemed something entirely new and different to audiences of the day.

In a Storm and Stress play like The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller, the action produces a series of spectacular events that seem beyond the realm of moral judgment. Schiller's villain, Franz Moor, tricks his father into disinheriting Franz's elder brother, Karl. Egged on by his libertine friend Spiegelberg (whose name indicates he is a mirror--"Spiegel"), Karl leads a band of robbers who wage war on civilization. In the forests of Bohemia, he urges his followers on to victory over a surrounding army, convincing them to fight rather than turn him over to the authorities in exchange for pardon. Karl then returns home to claim his promised bride, only to discover that Franz has imprisoned their father, who was long thought to be dead. During the final act of the play, recognitions and reversals happen with dizzying speed. Though the final moments of The Robbers suggest a return to the rule of law, the play's original audiences were more struck by its compelling action than any putative moral.

Like Schiller, the poet Johan Wolfgang von Goethe began as a Storm and Stress writer, penning such plays as Götz von Berlichingen and Egmont. Heavily influenced by Shakespeare, Egmont marks a turn toward a new style, one that celebrated powerful emotions and political freedom. This new movement, born around the same time as the French Revolution, came to be known as Romanticism. Instead of looking back just to the classics for inspiration, Romanticism valued the vernacular literature of the middle ages and the Renaissance, especially the tales of chivalry and adventure that had come to be known as Romances. No longer valuing just popular sentiment or cold reason, Romanticism sought to remake the world through powerful, intense feeling.

Feeling is never lacking in Schiller's mature Romantic plays Don Carlos, the Wallenstein Trilogy (Wallenstein's Camp, The Piccolomini, and Wallenstein's Death), and Mary Stuart. The plays' skepticism about any type of absolute values can be seen in their ambivalent relationship with religion. In Don Carlos, Catholicism is the symbol of repression while Protestantism represents liberation, while in Mary Stuart the roles of those two religions are reversed. Wallenstein, though it takes place during the religious wars of the seventeenth century, remains aloof from religious questions. Schiller seems less concerned with what people actually believe than with how those beliefs shape them as human beings.

Schiller's later plays, The Maid of Orleans, The Bride of Messina, and William Tell, all reflect the influence of his friend Goethe. Goethe's play Torquato Tasso romanticizes the life of the sixteenth-century Italian poet who--following a difficult relationship with his patron the Duke of Ferrara--was imprisoned in a madhouse. Though Goethe began the piece during his Storm and Stress period, he was ultimately able to reach a higher level of poetic sophistication in the play, marking his entrance into the new style of Romanticism. While working on Torquato Tasso, he was also engaged in writing the drama that would become his masterpiece. In 1808, he finally published the first part of his massive poetic drama Faust.

Faust, Part I is the archetypal Romantic drama. Instead of being divided into acts, the play simply has a succession of scenes, with each scene written in a different verse style. Goethe carefully matches the meter and rhyme scheme of each scene to the emotions he is trying to convey. The poetry reaches a crescendo during Walpurgis Night, when Faust joins a group of witches and fantastic beasts celebrating a Bacchanalia in the Harz Mountains. In a dream, Faust witnesses the wedding of the Fairy King and Queen, Oberon and Titania. The following scene, written entirely in prose, shows the gloomy letdown from the event, as Faust realizes he has forgotten his precious Gretchen, the woman he loves. With the aid of his demonic companion Mephistopheles, Faust rushes to free Gretchen from prison, only to find she prefers to die there and be redeemed in the next life rather than to live with Faust and lose her soul.

Other German Romantic playwrights include Johann Ludwig Tieck and Heinrich von Kleist. Like many Romantic writers, Tieck was enthralled by fairy tales. His play Puss in Boots stages the popular children's story in a meta-theatrical manner, with characters constantly commenting upon the action. Kleist was far unhappier, both in his life and his art. His tragedy Penthesilea gruesomely depicts the fatal love of an Amazon queen. Though Goethe thought Penthesilea could never be staged, he himself put on a production of Kleist's comedy The Broken Jug. Kleist's most famous play, The Prince of Homburg, was not staged until after the author's suicide in 1811

After completing Faust, Part I, Goethe underwent a conversion of sorts and renounced Romanticism. Faust, Part II, not published until the time of Goethe's death in 1832, embraces the classical world. Faust convinces the bankrupt Holy Roman Emperor he can raise all the funds he needs by claiming an ancient treasure that has been buried since classical times, hinting at a revival of Germany through an embrace of the values of ancient Greece. The play uses a classic five-act structure, and includes a re-staging of the Walpurgis Night scene, but this time with motifs from Greek and Roman mythology. The third act of the play is a virtual hymn to classicism in which Faust wins Helen of Troy.

Romanticism continued in Germany, in spite of Goethe's later turn toward classicism. Writing after Goethe's death in the 1830s, Georg Büchner gave a Romantic exploration of the French Revolution in Danton's Death. What matters in Büchner's vision of Romanticism is not so much what one's values are, but that individuals dedicate themselves to those values with their entire beings. Büchner's last drama, Woyzeck, left unfinished at the time of his death, looks forward to modernism and later became a staple of twentieth-century theatre.

Schooling Playwrights

In his book Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, Jeffrey Cox examines a group of writers, including John Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and their circle. A group, Cox reminds us, is not a homogenous set of people, but rather a collection of individuals brought together by a core set of common values.

What is key here is that it is a set of common values, not one single point of doctrine upon which all can agree. The "Cockney School" Cox describes included both religious believers and self-proclaimed atheists. Some wanted gradual reform, while others wanted revolution. Some gravitated toward violence, while others were avowed pacifists.

Not only that, but groups do not have to be restricted to the labels of identity politics. The second-generation Romantics that Cox writes about included men and women, English and Scots, aristocrats and commoners. They disagreed with each other adamantly, but out of those disagreements came very constructive arguments and rivalries that left us a rich legacy of writing, including some amazing dramas.

Leigh Hunt, for instance, wrote the genre-challenging play The Descent of Liberty in 1814, and published it the next year. Those two years saw Napoleon defeated, exiled, returned, defeated again, and eventually banished permanently. Hunt responds to those monumental events with a play he described as "a mask" in which he appropriates the tradition of the 17th-century masque to comment upon the political events of the 19th century.

The Descent of Liberty would not appear to be written for performance, but Cox argues that the plays of Hunt and his circle were "not a rejection of the stage but an attempt to remake it." Cox sees these plays as an attempt to reform the canon. Since the Hunt group was engaged in a countercultural activity, they needed a countercultural form, so instead of writing neoclassical tragedy or popular melodrama, they turned to other genres. These could include masque, as in The Descent of Liberty, or pastoral, as when Hunt translated Torquato Tasso's Amyntas.

"In these plays, we can see how artists work to acquire cultural influence for a countercultural message by seeking beyond established and ideologically stabilized forms for a generic site within which one can negotiate between tradition and innovation," Cox writes. Neoclassical tragedy and the comedy of manners were the standard high genres for the Georgian stage, so if Hunt's group wanted to rebel against Georgian society, authors had to find new literary forms to do so.

The stage directions of these plays often sound wholly impractical, but Cox points out that many hits of the era relied on spectacular stage effects. A play like Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound might seem unproducible today, but its stage effects are not far removed from what Georgian audiences had come to expect. As Cox observes:

It is an intriguing paradox that the spectacular staging demanded by The Descent or by Prometheus Unbound strikes us as a sign of the untheatricality of these plays -- their status as poems more than dramas -- while in the context of the early-nineteenth-century stage such theatrical techniques in other plays were seen as signaling the victory of mere stagecraft over the poetic word.

Cox later turns to the mythological plays of Mary Shelley, Midas and Proserpine. Both of these plays celebrate the world of the pastoral, which Hunt had tried to revive in his translation of Amyntas. Both Hunt and the Shelleys were turning to older forms, but in an attempt to unlock something new. In the hands of these authors, forms like the masque and the pastoral create a utopian space in which the world can be re-imagined as a better place.

"I think we should see something heroic," Cox writes, "in this attempt to create... a pastoral stage upon which to act out the possibility of community, imagination, and love."

Romanticism (It's All in the Name...)

Three books, all with the same title, Romanticism, deal with the same topic. Indeed, all employ the same key word in discussing the art and philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet each of the books' three authors, Aiden Day, David Blayney Brown, and Michael Ferber, understand the term "Romanticism" in slightly different ways.

Day's work, published as a part of the New Critical Idiom series by Routledge, begins its introduction by quoting heavily from M.H. Abrams, whose book The Mirror and the Lamp helped to illuminate Romanticism for the 20th century. In his first chapter, "Enlightenment or Romantic?", Day then sets up the dichotomy between Enlightenment thinking and Romanticism that is often rehearsed by scholars. On the Enlightenment side are figures like William Godwin, who "argued that human beings act in line with reason and that it is impossible for them to be rationally persuaded by an argument without their conduct being regulated accordingly." Romanticism, by contrast, in the works of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a "celebration of subjectivity."

The second chapter looks at constructions of the term "Romantic" which first appeared in the 17th century. Thomas Shadwell wrote disapprovingly of all things "Romantick" in the preface to his 1668 play The Sullen Lovers. By 1820, debates over Romantic literature raged on the European Continent, but Lord Byron declared he saw no conflict between the "Classical" and the "Romantic" among English writers. Later critics latched on to the term "Romantic" to describe a variety of authors in Britain, but Day warns against dubbing movements in retrospect. "Literature is not" he contends "something which can be regarded as occupying a 'trans-historical' space, but something which must be read as subject to the discourses and ideologies of a particular time and place."

Day's project is best summed up by the title of his third chapter: "Enlightenment AND Romantic." For Day, these two movements are inextricably linked. On the one hand, writers of the Romantic era continued to work towards the progressive social justice championed by Enlightenment figures like Godwin, while at the same time their focus did shift to that of the interior rather than the external world. A key figure here is Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose commitment to social change informed his "study of solitary imagination." Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein can even be read as a defense of Day's "and" proposition, since the broodingly interior Frankenstein must ultimately face the consequences of the creature he has unleashed onto the world. As Day puts it, "the writings of those who have formerly been defined as Romantic are not necessarily anti-Enlightenment in any simple sense."

Though that might seem a fitting conclusion, Day includes a final chapter on "Gender and the Sublime" analyzing some of the consequences of Romantic theory first postulated in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke. Certainly, Burke genders the sublime as masculine and its companion "beautiful" as feminine. Day's point, however, is that this gendering continued to influence Romantic poets. For instance, Wordsworth gendered Nature as feminine, but the female Nature only aided him in apprehending a higher "invisible world." This higher world, Day argues, is associated with the interior mind of the poet, and is thus gendered as masculine. Such arguments break down when the author is a woman, but Day contends that female writers of the period were skeptical of feelings of the sublime and instead focused on nature herself.

David Blayney Brown takes a different approach to Romanticism. While Day focuses on poets and novelists, Brown is interested in painters. He begins his introduction with an examination of Eugène Delacroix's painting The Death of Sardanapalus. He claims the "moral vacuum" at the heart of the piece is "all the more shocking for ignoring the message of the play by the English poet Lord Byron from which he had taken his subject." Notice that Day, discussing literature, ignores drama, while Brown, examining the visual arts, pays close attention to the theatre.

Brown finds a literary parallel for Delacroix's Romanticism in Victor Hugo, whose 1827 preface to his play Cromwell "advocated a rich variety of expression and experience to reflect the complexity of the world and the self, rather than the cold formalism of classical drama, and recognized the value of the ugly or grotesque in engaging the senses, rather than beauty in winning only admiration." For Brown, The Death of Sardanapalus is a "pictorial equivalent" to Hugo's theoretical preface.

Day emphasizes the continuity between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, but Brown stresses how revolutionary the new movement was. He claims: "Not since the Renaissance had such a profound change come over the Western consciousness." Instead of incorporating a collective ideal, the Romantic artists "emphasized individual experience, feeling, and expression." This, of course, came from the French Revolution, which Day emphasizes, but also from the rise and fall of Napoleon. As Brown puts it: "Romanticism was born in opposition and sorrow, in social or national crisis and in individual trauma."

Brown traces the term "Romantic" to Friedrich Schlegel, who in the first issue of the journal Athenaeum in 1798, identified the Romantic with "progressive universal poetry" not based on "inherited and culturally specific forms." Schlegel was writing in the German university town of Jena, which became a hotbed of Romanticism. Though not in Jena, the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe contributed greatly to the movement as well, and Brown cites Goethe's 1789 play Torquato Tasso as an inspiration for Delacroix's Tasso in the Madhouse, painted fifty years later.

Tasso was a Renaissance poet and playwright, but more modern poets also provided inspiration to Romantic artists. Brown cites Thomas Chatterton, a poet whose suicide in 1770 inspired Henry Wallis (painting in the 1850s) to create the magnificent Death of Chatterton, now hanging in the Tate Gallery in London. The cult of Chatterton was not confined to England, either, as Brown observes that the French writer Alfred de Vigny turned the poet's story into the play Chatterton, which "was a hit in Paris in 1835."

So while Day is interested in Romanticism as a philosophical movement in dialogue with the Enlightenment, Brown sees it as an artistic movement born of political turmoil. Michael Ferber wrestles with both of these concepts in his Romanticism, which bears the subtitle A Very Short Introduction. For him, Romanticism is both an intellectual movement and an artistic movement, and while he sees both sides as distinct, he does not seem to emphasize one over the other. Both of these elements, the philosophical and the aesthetic, are present in the pre-Romantic movement Ferber identifies as Sensibility.

Sensibility is a term that was much more in use in the eighteenth century than "Romantic" or "Romantick." It was associated with such works of "storm and stress" as Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and with Gothic writers, including Horace Walpole and Matthew G. Lewis. Ferber also connects it to poets like Mary Robinson, as well as the hugely influential critic and novelist Madame de Staël.

While Ferber successfully traces elements of Sensibility into Romanticism, he definitely seems to be coming at Romanticism from a position of greatly misunderstanding the period's drama. I can overlook his calling Shelley's Prometheus Unbound the poet's "greatest work" as that is a matter of taste. Downright strange, however, is Ferber's comment that Byron's Manfred is "unperformable." Is Ferber really unaware of the many, many successful performances there have been of Manfred? Samuel Phelps was probably the most famous actor to produce the play, but Manfred became so popular that toy theatre versions were made.

For all its faults, though, Ferber's book does give a decent introduction to Romanticism. It attempts to be more balanced than either Day or Brown, gazing into the philosophical and the aesthetic alike. In the end, as Ferber suggests, neither side can be fully understood without the other.

The stage is hung with black

It is commonly accepted that in Elizabethan theatres black curtains indicated the playing of tragedies. One line in the anonymous play A Warning for Fair Women famously proclaims:

The stage is hung with black: and I perceive
The auditors prepared for tragedy.

But as Mariko Ichikawa pointed out in a recent article in Theatre Notebook, Elizabethan theatres possessed other curtains as well, sometimes with elaborate pictures on them. An inventory of the Lord Admiral's Men done in 1598 listed "a cloth of Sun & Moon" as well as a "Tasso picture" among the company's possessions. Since Torquato Tasso had introduced pastoral themes to the Italian stage with his 1573 play Aminta, this latter curtain probably depicted a scene of the countryside.

Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy has the hero Hieronimo hang up a curtain for a play-within-the-play at the end of the piece. This curtain, presumably black since Hieronimo is introducing a tragedy, might have replaced a curtain of a different sort that had been hanging earlier. Ichikawa argues convincingly that non-black curtains could have been hanging in the middle of tragedies, with the black curtains only prominent at the beginning and ending of plays. For tragicomedies, companies might have avoided black curtains at the beginning in order to keep the audience in suspense about the play's finale.

And other colors were certainly available. A lawsuit in the 1530s over the possessions used by a theatrical company listed two curtains of green and yellow. Though the Elizabethan stage could be hung with black, it could be hung in a variety of other hues as well.