"A
Glimpse of Theatre History"
Dramatic Neo-Classicism
With the rise of humanism in the Renaissance, and as artists and scholars
looked to the ancient world for inspiration and guidance, a debate began
among a new class of critics, first
in Italy and later taken up in France, about the proper way to write a
play. The sides soon aligned themselves as apologists and interpreters
of either Aristotle or Seneca. Some cited Horace
as the ultimate authority. The resulting prescriptive, and often inconsistent
and sometimes counter-intuitive, theories are lumped under the label of
Neoclassicism, whose guiding principles are these:
I. Verisimilitude "the appearance of truth" (Scaliger) The central unifying principle of Neoclassicism in the minds of most critics was verisimilitude. Notice it does not say merely "truth" but only the appearance of truth. Things that were true but were not intuitively so, would not be suitable subjects for Neo-classic art and certainly not for the theatre. Verisimilitude was seen as possessing three telling characteristics:
A. Generality or Abstraction: Truth is found not in a spate
of empirical details, but in archetypes or "norms."
Thus norms define truth and deviations from the "norms"
were accidental. Truth could be discovered by rational and systematic
examination of phenomena, natural or man-made, but since norms were
immutable and led to the highest form of truth, they were to be accepted
as the basis for literary creation and critical judgment. Hegel would
have objected that this notion is based on a correspondence theory
of truth, and he'd be right. But the Neo-classic critic would counter
that a small number of examples from nature could lead to false conclusions
about the Truth if they deviated from the norms.
B. Morality: must teach moral lessons-Therefore a dramatist was not merely to copy real life, but to "reveal its ideal moral patterns;" God was omnipotent and just so poetic justice must always be done, i.e. wickedness must be punished and good rewarded; Stories in which something else occurred were regarded as unsuitable since they did not reflect the ultimate truth of morality and justice but reflected some part of God's plan that mere mortals could not comprehend.
C. Reality: Thus a playwright was to eliminate anything that could not happen in "real life"; thus, he should eliminate fantastic or supernatural occurrences unless they were already part of the story (Greek myth or Bible) and even then, they should be minimized. Soliloquoy and chorus were likewise discouraged since both were regarded as unreal and were replaced by Seneca's confidante. Violence was offstage because of the difficulty of making it look real, and because many (mistakenly) believed the Greeks had insisted on putting it offstage. |
II. 5 Act Form: Horace first stated the demand for five acts in
his epistolary Ars Poetica and the Neoclassicists adopted it on
his authority.
III. Unities: Time, Place, and Action
| A. Time: Castelvetro (Italy 1570) argued that an audience
knows it is in the theatre for only a few hours, so the dramatist
cannot convince them that several days have passed; therefore, the
duration of a play should equal the time which passed in the play.
No critic allowed more than 24 hours! B. Place: Castelvetro argued further that the audience knows it has been in only one place; therefore the locale of a play cannot change from Rome to Athens or other wildly separated places. Others allowed other locations provided they could be reached within 24 hours. C. Action:
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