Theatre

THEATRE. - I. DEFINITIONS: ELEMENTS OF THEATRICS. THE COMPONENTS OF THE SPECTACLE. RITE. MIME. DRAMA. - T. means spectacle: a thing seen, and a thing ordered toward being seen by others; and it means the place where the spectacle is arranged, so that people may gather there. In the memory connected with the word, each of the facts that belong to it now rises, now declines; nor would a history of the t. be possible without taking into account this ceaseless changing of proportions and of things: sometimes only the action being remembered of the apparatus, sometimes only the word. T. is, in the current metaphor, a spectacular game: t. was dramatic poetry, with literary dramaturgy prevailing, and the musical language of opera, and the art of dance; even the perspective of trees and foliage, in Italian-style gardens, was called t., even when empty, even when not intended for a stage, as if the pure imagining, without the aid of words but prompted by the picture, were part of the pleasures of memory. And such was the efficacy of the theatrical fact in the imagination and in custom, that in certain epochs everything becomes spectacle, everything is arranged and remembered according to the modes of that composite art: if "book" had been the most illustrious and most frequented metaphor of medieval culture, the Baroque age uses and abuses the metaphor "t.": in Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Gran teatro del mundo the World itself is called by the author to stage the spectacle. The word is not without suspicion, among the moderns, whether they be zealots of the pure image of poetry or merely heirs of the rigorism of certain strata of nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie (or of the Puritan condemnation, among the Victorians of England); but, contaminating art and science, "anatomical t." was the name given to university halls arranged for dissection so that it might be clearly visible from every point.

Meanwhile, these albeit summary indications allow us to fix the elements of what, with a scholastic term, might be called "theatrics": the technique of theatrical performance. And just as every art entails a reflective justification and a norm, so theatrics has its own theory and history. Of the theory we speak briefly (as of everything kept in view: theory and theater are words that descend from the same etymology); but a history all the more extensive will come to our aid.

A display of fireworks is called a spectacle, and a beautiful landscape is called a spectacle, especially if caught at a certain hour of the day; amplifications foreign to our subject: nor is everything that one attends a theater, although this is never entirely foreign to such metaphors: indeed, through the theater a habit of reflection takes shape; and an emotional attitude there became a habit. And if this or that building used for performance is called a theater, the Theater of Dionysus in Athens or the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, too many times the modern custom of open-air theater has demanded an active collaboration with the suggestion exercised by places and monuments, the colonnade of the Parthenon or the courtyard of Ansperto: too many times symbolism and intimism have been doubled and converted to suggest reducing to the extreme, or even abolishing, the most showy scenographies: or any proscenium other than the ideal one of a people united in listening. And in epochs of more inventive and more daring culture, when literature sought the way to become more readily active among people, a literary genre was called theater: the Elizabethan English theater or the German Romantic theater; where the creative word of the poets passed onto the stage and molded, weak or robust, always perishable forms of scenic tradition: but it resounded far beyond, and opened a far vaster course of men in history. Essential to the theater, then, is not the place, even though it needs a place in which to gather; and it is not even the word, understood in its most usual semantics, as it crystallizes and is learned in the formal and historical codifications of literature, although something is always said there, even in silence, and the word remains the densest and most fecund of expressive and communicative forms: essential is the transmission of the proposal that an invisible author, of a theatrical image, myth or mime as it may be, makes to a public concretely gathered to receive it, by means of artists who impersonate it in the act.

Author, actors, public. These are the essential elements; and from their varied encounter, now one prevailing, now the others, with the third omnipresent and in its corporeal reaction decisive, come the innumerable possibilities of the theater, and the range of different experiences. Let this also be observed: the author-playwright, having made his proposal, disappears; and if criticism, tracing backward along a tradition, or more readily resorting to the text, which in the marked substance of the word reveals the most and the best of his soul, can identify him, if it can retrace the course of a fable, his own, which no sooner has it left his mind than it undergoes so different a fortune, it remains true that the fable no longer belongs to the author. Gradually descending to the public, the presences acquire weight: it is the public that decides how much of the ideal truth of a poetic message launched by an author, with or without the intention of accompanying it along the parabola of the drama, becomes trite certainty. The author disappears behind the veil of his image and the public, I would say, comes to life: it recognizes itself, at least, learns to discern which zones of its memory open most, which chords of its sensibility vibrate most. It decides; and it calls itself satisfied, unsatisfied, sated; but it always believes it receives confirmation of itself, that it pronounces judgment as much as it needs; the multorum capitum belua, as it was called by one who did not perceive the profound moral life of the many converging upon the message of the word (indeed, of the parable: for the fable is a metaphor of a new being, truth that becomes), can ignore what is in reality decided at the theater: whether to remain in the torpor of a satisfied sensuous inertia, or truly to live: which means to be transfigured by the word. Laboriously hidden, then, is the author; and corporeally present is the public, which serves as chorus to the fable; but the interpreters, the intermediaries, are the actors. The center and pivot of theatrical life is the person of the actor; for the mimetic suggestion is exercised first in him; and in order that it be operative in the many, it falls to him to experience it in himself, to suffer it (and, if he is capable, to redeem it). And here is the importance of the theater not only in a poetics, but in a moral doctrine of the person: because, given this mimetic condition of theatrical art, whereby the matter of the art is a human creature, the actor can feign himself different from himself, but in reality, as always happens with poetry, he rediscovers his authentic self in the veil of fiction and thus makes the fable true, or else he denies himself in it and imprisons himself there, obscenely lending himself to the senses and to falsehood. Rediscovery of the person: such is the justification of the art and the touchstone of the aesthetic, and therefore moral, validity of a work of theater, by virtue of this authentic presence of the man who listens, and communicates with his whole self, bending his whole body to expression, in the instantaneousness of the scenic action and of the concentric attention of the many, in the commotion and the transvaluation of the chorus intent and aware and responsible even if silent. And the Latins called persona the theatrical mask, the false face upon the true face: such is the fortune of a word.

Mimetic art, then. If the spectacle becomes an end in itself, rather than the necessary and insufficient complement of the rediscovery of the person and of the choral transvaluation, the theater will be nothing but exhibition and dissipation: vices that denature it, upon which the concerns of moralists have always fastened. And yet the word "mime" denotes only one chapter, albeit a very vast one, of theatrics: when, and precisely in contradiction to that rediscovery and that transvaluation, the fable stiffens and postures comically, when the character isolates himself and closes himself off and becomes fixed, when the person becomes a mask again and the fiction encrusts itself upon the living substance of the man. At the opposite pole from mime stands the rite; whereby the fable unfolds along a line of transfiguration and transvaluation not merely moral, but religious, and declaredly so, indeed so arranged as to become the offering of a tribute, an officiating to the Divinity, a liturgy. Between mime and rite is disposed the drama: this name, which means "work," assumes the scenic action when it is observed not in the kinesis of a gesticulation, but in the dynamics of a force in motion; and the drama traces its parabola from the servitude of the practical relation to the freedom of the moral life.

II. PARA-THEATRICAL FORMS: RITES AND MIMES OF PRIMITIVES. POPULAR SPECTACLES. THE DANCE. THE PROCESSION. PUPPETS. - Thus observed in its elements, the theater presupposes such dignity and awareness as to justify its ambition, so frequently repeated through the centuries, of being the artistic work par excellence, the animated poetic synthesis that reflects the whole history of man and predisposes his action; but where one of the constitutive elements prevails over the others, that very encroachment reflects a decline and fossilization of custom. In this paragraph we shall indicate certain forms precisely where the equilibrium is disturbed, and above all those where the chorus, having rejected the intervention of the poet, or that of the liturgists intent on making a rite of the spectacle, overflows to become itself, orgiastically, actor and, introducing paraphrases or extemporaneous variations of the prearranged theme, substitutes itself for the author: the three elements of the synthesis in one. Such forms were observed everywhere with extreme interest; and often considered as the origin of the most complex and most individuated works: both because every historical and encyclopedic understanding of human reality tends to arrange itself in the perspective of reception rather than of suggestion, of response rather than of proposal, and in a word of the chorus rather than of the author, and such was the method with which Aristotle, the first and most profound historian and theoretician of dramaturgy, looked upon the Greek theater; and because these researches received a modern impetus beginning with Romantic culture, and this readily started from the presupposition not only of the custody but of the exclusive popular genesis of all poetic forms.

In reality, tradition means custody and transmission; and a text, a "libretto," an original indication, even if not fixed in a written document, must always be postulated at the origins of a form which, repeated through the centuries and millennia, and gradually losing its primordial meaning, has by now become so crystallized in habit as to appear connatural.

The social life of primitives is much more circumspect, more attentive and more bound to traditional forms than the social life of groups organized with a greater complexity of relations (between "primitives" and "evolved" peoples one sees, as far as concerns our subject, no other proportion than this: excluding any idea of progress, and renouncing also, because too often contradicted, the hypothesis that assigns a fixed time and a historical necessity to the process of organization). The primitive social group willingly operates by placing on the same plane of collective participation practical necessity, its emotional reflection, its religious propitiation; this is why the tribe, before setting out to hunt a dangerous beast, attends and participates in the rite of the hunt; where men masked some as hunters, others as game, anticipate reality, make it true, in the actuality of the mimic fiction, before it exists; and this is why, even in far more complex societies, the military parade preludes, as a warrior rite, to battle. Whether it comes before or after, whether it be the "libretto" of what is to be done, or the "document" of what has been done, the text naturally splits into poetry and stage directions (it is evident that not all the words put into the mouths of the characters are poetry: the text also "teaches" the words; and not all scenographic and mimic indications are stage directions: even a gesture can be highly significant: provided, precisely, that it reveals the authentic truth of the human person who provisionally surrenders himself in it). A "book of ceremonies" of the court of Byzantium, where ritualism was always superimposed, with its crystallized language, upon the immediate exigencies of courtly and political society, is precisely all stage direction; but the Paleolithic paintings of the caves of south-western Europe, which probably reflect subjects already filtered through a choreutic interpretation (not the hunt as it actually unfolds, in the unforeseeable accidents of reality, but the hunt mimetically configured and arranged and summarized) are masterpieces of such power that the stage direction disappears before the poetry. We shall not dwell on these rites and these mimes of primitives, which can be adequately studied (and are) within the ambit of ethnological science: we wish only to call attention to their connections with the theater, and to underline, among the most frequent occasions, those that are connected to the change of seasons and those that have death as their subject. The cycle of the year, allegorized (it is evident that the spectacle is always a form of allegory; as, moreover, art is always a form of metaphor), is composed in a succession of deaths and resurrections; let us say better: in instituting the integral relation, that is, not merely practical but integrally human, between man and the year, the poets of primitive liturgies humanize the year in its seasons, and naturalize man: the year, the life of trees, the light of the sun, declines, disappears and rises again; and so too the life of man. The festivals connected to the cycle of the seasons always maintain this allusive relation; and they evoke the infernal life, when they re-enact the decline of the sun toward the winter solstice, and the demons of the underworld; and they sing hymns to the supernal life, when the sun mounts to the summit of its arc. Of such festivals of the seasons the most lasting and frequent survival among us is that of Carnival: which can give an idea, with its masquerades, of what the popular celebration of the rite of the year was, with its alternating exorcism and hymn. Even more binding are the rites of the dead: because, the body having been returned to the earth, perhaps composed in the attitude the fetus had in the maternal womb, within the funerary urn, or the ashes dispersed after the rite of purification of the pyre, the funeral masks preserved a sensible indication of the survival of the soul: whether by enchanting it, wandering, in the fixity of the features it had in life, or by recalling to the piety of the survivors its human treasure and its faults, its pains and its hopes.

Poetry continually comes to the aid of and destroys what it itself proposes, in search of a more deeply felt and soaring participation of the whole being; but language preserves the words of a former time. Thus popular performances remember the old themes and ancient myths, and certainly do not do this out of archaic dilettantism; the masks of the Commedia dell'Arte, the most observed, most disciplined and best crystallized form of popular myth, preserve the memory of the bestiary disguises frequent everywhere and documentable throughout the Indo-European territory during carnival festivities; but the burlesque processions of ancient Attica remembered them no differently, especially in the vintage festivals. The songs of Christmas night take their place within the traditional rites of the winter solstice; and the bonfires of St. John's night within the rites of the summer solstice: games and processions presuppose them, even when they do not remember them. Yet even in this summary sketch, alongside ritualistic survivals we must place properly dramaturgical survivals: sacred dramas that are repeated everywhere, at yearly or multi-year intervals (from Sordevolo to Oberammergau), with a scrupulously preserved libretto or with continual alterations; and figured processions, from Sicily to Flanders, which recall, in the summary of the living picture carried around the village, often on a cart, the more articulated representation of former times. Figurative art is never entirely extraneous to this broader theatrical integration, which regards it as the crystallization of a story that would more naturally unfold in drama, making explicit the intervention of the poet and the chorus.

And always seeking the relations of the various expressive forms with that fundamental one, explicit or implicit, of the theater, one sees how dance constitutes a projection and an isolation of a moment and of a figure essential to the dramaturgical synthesis: the actor. A dance is always a "figured dance," that is, it establishes a relationship between the person of the dancer and a subject; and insofar as it is observed, it is public: here is the chorus of spectators, whether they remain motionless, or repeat, as often happens in popular festivities, the mimetic motif of the dancer, re-establishing the dramaturgical ternary. Sacred dance mimes the relationship between the faithful and the divinity, or, better put, and leaving aside pathological or profane forms that do not interest us here, it expresses the sensory preliminaries of the encounter; and it is, even if reduced to its most shy and sober form, as in Christian rite, intrinsic to the liturgy. Profane dance can extend to all subjects: as dance demonstrates insofar as it is theatrical art, whether it is summed up in the closed rhythm of a choreographic and musical indication, such as classical ballet, with its rigorous repertoire of figures sometimes acrobatic and gymnastic rather than choreographic, or whether it is extended prosaically to mime a "part" of a comedy or drama; but the most widespread and celebrated themes, and those most readily understood and repeated by the chorus, are the theme of love (the invitation, the refusal, the offer: figures frequent in so-called popular dances, and more or less implicit also in ballroom dance) and the theme of war.

The most frequent and most elementary collective projection of dance is the procession: it will be called a procession when its intention is more explicitly liturgical. The chorus, in that case, ceases to assist at the mimetic modulations of the actors and becomes an actor itself: or, if it arranges itself processionally behind a mimetic action, it underlines with its movement, and often with gestures and words, the subject of the actor (as in the funeral rite of the Romans: a mime, with a mask reproducing the features of the dead man, repeated his most customary gestures; and the mourners lyrically lamented the loss: the funeral expressed, with garments and with composed bearing, the memory of the dead and the piety). Even a political procession, a "demonstration," contains, in nuce, a dramatic action: which can transform itself immediately into political and warlike action; and can institute a commentary, choral and mimetic precisely, on the speech of an orator. There would remain to be studied certain forms of negative and retroverted expression that occur, perhaps unbeknownst to those who order and tolerate them, when a group is constrained into a collective order without a purpose, a meaning, a shared emotion transcending practical necessity being attributed to that order: a school class, for example, moving about, emptied of the disciplined animation of its usual life; or a "queue" waiting in front of a window or a shop; but let such indications serve to underline how there is a gap between the naturalness with which primitive peoples express their coexisting, and the uncertainty with which modern society seeks, and fails, to justify itself in its every moment. Aesthetic beauty is, in that case, an index of a fullness of life, and ugliness is the denunciation of an absence, of an incompleteness, of a fracture.

As for marionettes, it suffices to indicate that they are the cipher, and projection, of a mimetic expression: they presuppose, as human figures summed up in plastic form always do, the relationship, established in memory, between the figure and living reality. The voice that doubles over them and accompanies their movements helps to define that relationship. They are more frequent where the authentic synthesis of the theater is more widespread and understood; and they demand either a childlike abandonment to illusion, or an aptitude for ironically perceiving a distance.

III. GREEK THEATRE: THE ORIGINS. THE DITHYRAMBIC DRAMA. AESCHYLUS. SOPHOCLES. EURIPIDES. DECLINE OF TRAGEDY. OLD COMEDY: ARISTOPHANES. NEW COMEDY: MENANDER. THE MIME. — Greek culture did not like to give itself a historical perspective, but a mythological one: as if the excellence to which it aspired were either a perfection of nature itself or the gift of a benign god; and even of tragedy it fixed an evolutionary line entirely contained within the Hellenic, indeed Athenian, circle. In reality the rites and mimes that are observed everywhere, everywhere, aided by favorable occasions, as culture grows in them and from them, evolve into more autonomous spectacular forms; nor can it be excluded that Greek spectacles, just as they referred to mythologies and liturgies proper to all Indo-European stocks, may thus have been stimulated by the interferences of other spectacular forms common to the Mediterranean East. But it is a peculiar trait of Greekness to intend to make the faithful, by participating in the rite, aware of what he owes and can do, to liberate him, to exalt him: far from submerging the human and predisposing the faithful to an empty automatism of gestures, which deliver him inactive and impersonal to his destiny. Such is the active content of the mystery cults: but above all within the circle of the religion of Dionysus, or at the meeting between the currents of ancient theological meditation and the new orgiastic myth and rite, that truth becomes common property, indeed the most richly shared. Dionysus, the hero son of a god, in his passion, death and resurrection, beyond the fable of every naturalistic mythology, which celebrates the perpetual renewal of earthly life, already foreshadows, up to a certain point, deeper truths; and the dithyramb, the choral hymn in honor of Dionysus, which celebrated his deeds and those of the heroes, remains the nucleus of Greek tragedy. Aristotle speaks of a process of improvisation by which the coryphaeus, becoming a character in the fervor of liturgical, indeed orgiastic, reminiscence, detaches himself from the chorus; but the antiquarian investigation of the moderns, while recognizing that the dithyrambic rite remains at the center of Athenian tragedy, which is staged always and only in the solemn civic festivities dedicated to Dionysus, observes that other cults and other customs converge there: principally the funeral rites in use among the Peloponnesians (the origins of the cult of Dionysus were instead Thracian), which celebrated the illustrious dead man by molding his portrait in a mask, and mimically repeating his sayings and gestures. A most ancient custom, and widespread in many places, also among the Romans, who gathered in the lararium the portraits of the deceased, and to it was referred, more or less attenuated by a more active religious consciousness, the belief that it was fitting for the living to withdraw from the envy of the dead by enchanting their wandering souls in a simulacrum of life.

If the two rites and the two cults were doubled one upon the other, the one remained exorcism and pitiless horror, the other purification and justification; and it is true that the two opposite modes, the horror of the fatal tragedy, and the purification of guilt through suffering, coexist in the rich thematic of Hellenic tragedy.

The chronicle that the ancients traced is quite uncertain in fixing the data of the development; in any case, it seems that it fell to the Athenian Thespis to introduce, beside the coryphaeus who led the troop of fifty choreutae, an actor (the protagonist: first actor); and to Aeschylus to introduce a second (deuteragonist): both ready to take on more than one part. And it was certainly Pisistratus who in 534 B.C. regulated the Dionysian festivities, so as to ensure for the tragic rites a religious and liturgical and civic character: the whole city participating in the tragic re-enactment with its contribution, with its engaging in the rite, with the availability, indeed vocation of an attentive people, a many-souled and concordant chorus around the composed though noisy and sumptuous execution of the dithyrambic tragedy. The hymns prevailed, from the "parodos", when the chorus made its solemn processional entrance into the orchestra (the space around the altar of Dionysus reserved for its evolutions), to the "exodos", when it exited. The dialogic action unfolded in the intervals of the choruses, almost a concrete illustration of that event which the chorus commented on: the other chorus, mute and many-souled this one, of the people, being moved behind the singing chorus. But gradually over time the action prevailed over the chorus, overturning the relationship, and the characters became more independent, and the chorus, lowering itself from its primitive liturgical dignity, participated in the action, became itself a character.

Behind the altar of Dionysus, to close the space of the orchestra, rose the skené: which originally was a "tent"; where the actors withdrew and disguised themselves (the etymology alludes to a technical necessity more professional than liturgical; the same one that tradition hands down, speaking of Thespis as head of a company of wandering actors); and later it meant in our sense "scene", that is, an architectural element arranged to illustrate the place where the action is feigned. The public disposed itself around the orchestra looking toward the altar and the scene. When the architecture of the theatre, at first provisional and in wood, was fixed in stone, the theatre resulted like a great shell open toward the scene, under the clear sky.

Every structural, architectural and scenic element of Greek tragedy refers back to its liturgical inspiration; and every modification of its animating spirit is reflected in technically modifying the apparatus and the acting. The masks that covered the faces of the actors and amplified their voices were one with the oratorical robe, sumptuously draped, the high buskins, the very tall and complicated headdress. Realistic elements were not lacking, especially in the mute characters, and gradually descending from one to the other of the three great tragedians; but Aeschylus himself reduced from fifty to twelve, after the Suppliants (490-80 B.C.), the number of the choreutae, instead populating the orchestra with the retinue of Agamemnon, in the Oresteia, when the king returning from the war reaches his palace. More important than following the event along the play of the mo-

external modifications, is to fix from within its line of evolution: Aeschylus, the patrician of the sacred city of Eleusis, documents for us in the seven surviving tragedies the religious spirit and the civic dignity of the generation of the fighters of Marathon, to which he belonged. He animated tragedy with the breath of the Dionysiac cult and of the dithyramb; and this with a bold and sorrowful spirit of human piety, with a trusting and severe reverence. In the Oresteia (458 B.C.), which accompanies in three tragedies, Agamemnon, Choephori, Eumenides, the fate of the descendants of Atreus, amid the fires that from mountain to mountain announce the fall of Troy and the torches of the sacred procession in Athens, the fate of the Atreidae is sung with an austere passion and with a meditation of incomparable moral force: the chain of murders is halted only before the altar of the divinity who re-establishes and seals justice, and calls vengeance back to himself. In Prometheus Bound (undatable), a long theogonic monologue of the demiurge benefactor of men, bound to the rock of the over-powerful and yet fearful dominion of the hostile god, Zeus, the lofty imagination rises to attempt the destinies of humanity. And in the Persians (472 B.C.) recent civic history, still fresh with blood and victory, is understood as universal history. Enormous is the poetic animation of Aeschylus, and over-powerful his genius. But Sophocles, not much younger than he, reflects a more balanced spirit in a more modulated art: his humanism attempts a more serene meditation with more pathetic effects in the luminous melancholy with which he surrounds his creatures. Possessed by a power that sweeps them away, the heroes (Ajax, Oedipus) in defeat redeem themselves and in sorrow are redeemed. Less theological and theogonic than the great creator of tragedy, Sophocles nevertheless touches the imposing themes of human law set against civic law (Antigone goes to her death because, if it is just that the city punish the rebel who has assailed it, it is just that beyond the pyre no enemy wrath should live). And in the limpid harmony of the choral and monodic song, in the transparency of the wondrous words, tragedy placates horror and rises like his Oedipus (Oedipus at Colonus was composed by the poet in his nineties and performed [401 B.C.], five years after his death) in the shadow of the sacred grove of his native "deme." With Euripides the parabola is completed: Athenian civilization tests itself and shatters in sophistic culture, the austere rigor of the ancient sacral meditation appears distant, the dramaturgical liturgies say less to the new people. Euripides is the poet of new and declining times, and of tragedy he makes a more extrinsically varied composition, more shrewd in structure, more loose in its connections: which ceases, or almost, to be choral tragedy, since the chorus disperses into the scenic adventure, and becoming, as has been said, a character, it ceases to be the officious interpreter of the moral life of the audience. The intervention of a propitious divinity, suspended from a scenic device (deus ex machina), to resolve the tragic entanglement is nothing but a hasty and detached and sometimes ironic homage to the ancient conception of a providential intervention in human affairs. More shrewd the structure, and more loose the technique: dialogue is conceived as mimetic contrast, rather than as a lofty judicial or philosophical debate. Monody willingly escapes into song from the pressures of the plot. The staging becomes lively and spectacular. Tragedy (by now almost a musical work, made of dialogues, monodies, songs) opens to a life certainly more varied, but far less rich; and its deep source dries up. Tragedies were performed in a trilogy followed by a satyr play: the intervention of a comic mode to loosen the tragic tension. The text of Euripides' Cyclops survives, and that, mutilated, of Sophocles' Trackers. Comedy was elaborated upon the carnival processions which, at the changing of the seasons, saw men disguised as beasts (the myths of the satyrs and Centaurs derive from this) spreading through the streets of the villages. Eupolis, Cratinus and Aristophanes made the old modes topical, inserting them into a political satire. The chorus of Aristophanes is a masquerade that for the most part gives its name to the comedy: Clouds, Wasps, Frogs, Birds; and, parallel to the masquerade, a brief plot developed mimetically: names of contemporaries, Socrates or Cleon, are directly called into question there. In his last comedy, Plutus, he turns to a documen-

abstractive documentation typical of the milieu; the path by which the middle comedy and the new comedy with Menander would come in, ensuring the passage from Greek to Latin comedy. But first something must be said of the mime: a rapid composition that in its icastic brevity summed up the lesser everyday reality: attested by the papyri; literarily summarized by Econda and Theocritus: the foundation of Plato's dialogues. The inevitable fragmentariness of the mime marks the decline of comedy, just as the pantomime does, in which a mute actor dissipates a fabulous reality in order to amuse himself and escape.

IV. ROMAN THEATRE: CULTURAL SITUATION AND SCENIC HABITS. TRAGEDIES. THE COMEDY OF PLAUTUS AND TERENCE. THE ATELLANA AND THE MIME. THE PANTOMIME. SENECA. - In a few years the creative genius of the great Athenian theatre culminates and declines; but when one speaks of the Roman theatre, if referring, by the name, to a circumscribed place, Rome, though metropolis of the Mediterranean world, may suggest a comparison from city to city, one alludes to a span of centuries, from the 3rd century before Christ to the 6th after Christ, and to an immense territory, from Britain to Africa, and from Asia Minor to Noricum. In reality, this term amounts to an encyclopedic allusion; and if the Mediterranean politeia, politically organized into unity by Rome, continuing along the line of Hellenistic culture accepted the hegemony of the Athenian tradition, many contributions of diverse origin were mingled with it; and certainly an infinite distance separates the poetic dignity of the Athenian authors from the vulgar and commonplace demands of the Roman theatres, especially of the imperial theatres, in the capital and in the provinces: all the more striking if one considers the zeal with which the political authority provided for theatrical life, taking care that the urban plebs should never lack spectacular entertainments, often spending enormous sums on scenic apparatus, and building everywhere the most sumptuous theatres: during the Empire, in fact, the theatre, together with the Baths and the Basilica, sums up whatever of public life is deemed worthy of expression in the architectural ritualism of the most solemn edifices. This was reached gradually: the first stone theatre is that of Pompey, in the last century of the Republic. But the political direction of the spectacles, the concern, not productive but hedonistic, to offer the urban plebs, which moreover constituted the electoral mass, an adequate amusement, is of every age. At first religious concerns seem to be mingled with it: when Etruscan histriones were imported for certain ceremonies of purification on the occasion of a pestilence. But it is certain that this was not the ground of understanding; and besides, the urban plebs of Rome was ethnically and culturally a hybrid mixture; nor did there exist in Rome a religious aristocracy that proposed to seek elsewhere than at the lowest tolerable level a choral concord. When the magistrates and the candidates for public office organize the spectacles destined to give lustre to their name and their magistracy, they willingly have recourse to eloquence and solemnity, even at the expense of a more sincere or more profound human interest. Another ground of understanding was comic play, the grotesque violence of a verbal or mimic satire, directed not, as in Athens, against persons or institutions, which would have been harmful and dangerous, given the interests of that ruling class which promoted and financed the spectacles, but against generic types and masks; and here it was fairly easy to trace back, behind the Hellenistic models, to an original comic typology, in which diverse ethnic strata could recognize themselves. Eloquence, then, on the one hand, and grotesque icasticity on the other: such are the most frequent characteristics of Roman theatricality. The scenographic and spectacular element could gain the upper hand; and certain re-enactments of victories were derived from triumphal processions where what counted most, to impress the plebs, was the quantity of the masses and the wealth of the spoils: and to this tragedy is reduced, apart from its literary continuations, to which illustrious political men also devoted themselves. Comedy, by contrast, makes use of its very poverty: the actors' stage is soon raised in the corner of a square, often through the care of an impresario who received the commission from a politician; and the gathering is assembled somewhat at random, seated on benches or standing, amid the noises of traffic, and with the mobility of idle and curious minds, which a mere nothing stirs and a mere nothing disperses, for instance the announcement of a tightrope-walkers' show: the prologues of the comedies are pleasantly full of these allusions to such lamentable inconstancy, and most anxious about every disturbance. The houses that the scene feigns, open onto the public street, served at the rear, one imagines, by a back alley, and the conventions easily proposed and accepted (for example, the actor who entered the stage from the spectators' right was supposed to come from nearby places and from the forum; but whoever exited from the left was supposed to be going to remote places, the fields or the sea), everything contributes to give rise in the spectators to the idea that it is a matter, for them, of stopping a moment, in the street, and watching as curious onlookers the happenings of common life; and even the time of the performance, toward midday, the hour of the crowded market in Mediterranean cities, avoids the sense that the theatre is a rare event and such as to suspend common life.

A more precise discussion, for tragedy and comedy, in Rome, of the republican centuries, would involve an examination of the texts (of tragedies only fragments remain) and a comparison with the Greek models. Urged on by certain authoritative and decorous recommendations, the authors (Livius Andronicus, Quintus Ennius, Marcus Pacuvius, Lucius Accius; but add to the canon the political amateurs, such as Quintus Cicero) must on the one hand obey the solemnity of the political and national program, and solemnize events, and introduce moved allusions to Roman current affairs, even when this was not at all required by the Greek model they were following (the praetexta, that is the tragedy of Roman dress and historical subject, overcame this hindrance); on the other they must capture the audience's attention, and therefore reduce the plot to its most elementary and most showy structure, setting aside precisely the supreme spiritual intelligence of the Athenians, the search, through word and image, for the truth, which is divine. A disparate organism, then, witness to that profound fracture between morality and custom, between politics and religion, between the certainties of history and the truths of the spirit, which had accompanied the long Hellenistic crisis: to which the Romans are able to offer an external remedy, their universal political organization, and to recommend it with eloquence sometimes austere (hence the sententiae, such as the famous oderint dum metuant of Accius; which is due in part to the fact that the tragedies were often preserved as school texts). And one will see in Seneca the tradition summed up of a literary dramaturgy that accompanied the tradition of the theatrical stage.

Far different was the fortune of comedy through the work of two great authors: Plautus and Terence: and yet even in them, which, by the power of poetic individuation, so far surpass the external circumstances of custom and time, it is possible to discern the conflict between the immediate demand for a mimetic realization and the superior dominion of the intelligence. Plautus, the older of the two, is actor and director; he knows he cannot renounce the farcical vividness that the public wants and on which his success, and his bread, depend: he accepts the themes of Attic comedy, certainly not reworking them through a textual confrontation, as translator and imitator, in the manner of the tragic poets: to his audience the precious play of reminiscences, meditations and paraphrases means nothing: it is enough for them to seize upon the farcical motif, to rise a hand's breadth above the misunderstandings of the twins (Menaechmi), to mock the frantic anxiety of the poor wretch who discovers a treasure (Aulularia), and in the Mostellaria to pretend that his audience consists of strong spirits who do not believe in ghosts. From the constraints of the mimetic play he frees himself now with a human pity rich in sympathy and fervour (in the Rudens, for instance, or in his most nobly austere comedy, the Captivi, where the spirit of self-sacrifice of a slave is exalted, one who does not know, in saving his master from captivity, that he is ransoming his own father) and always with the rich vein of his songs, the melodic abandon, the pure harmony of a lyrical image superimposed upon the mediocrity of trite things. Terence the African is closer to Menander; he investigates with composure the hidden folds of character, withdraws from clamorous scenes, expresses more deeply than his own words; and a vague melancholy is nobly suspended over the figures of his Heautontimorumenos, his Hecyra, his Andria. Plautus is of Italic plebeian stock, and, paradoxically, to understand him in comparison with forms closer to us in time, he behaves like a poet of comic-opera music when he welcomes the opposing indications of comic mockery and eloquent sentiment: Terence, a freedman whom his culture and his genius make worthy of being received in the aristocratic circles of Rome, obeys an international programme of elegant refinement and literary comedy.

Thus we return always, from century to century, to the same situation: on the one hand the grotesque comic spirit of the plebeian tradition, on the other the demand of an international Hellenizing culture that required refinement and elegance; and poetic genius is a gift that descends upon both, without the observance of the culturalistic canon deserving it any more or less than the observance of the rules of the plebeian game. In Rome, from century to century, the tradition of the Atellan masks persists (from Atella: an Oscan city of Campania; not without some duplication of meaning alluding to the black mask: atella is also a diminutive of aira): a grotesque comedy, with strongly characterized types; Bucco the glutton, Macco the buffoon, Manduco the ogre, Dossennus the hunchback and Pappus the doting old man; and through the work of Pomponius and Novius the Atellan fabula acquires a stability and a literary reflectiveness. At the same time (the last century of the Republic) the work of Decimus Laberius, and later of Publilius Syrus (here too the origin of the two authors must be borne in mind: the one a Roman knight, the other an Asian freedman) reduces to literary form the mimetic tradition, the representation of a fragmentary reality that is composed into a unitary justification through formal invention and a minimum of logical coherence (the Atellan, like every grotesque comedy, escapes from reality and takes no interest in it).

With the imperial age, which favours theatrical performances in every way, without an authentic life corresponding to the multiplicity of occasions (rather: a dissipation corresponds to it), the two truly important voices of theatrical culture are Seneca and the pantomime: the one opposed to the other. Seneca, even if he was performed, does not aim to establish a dialogue with an audience: what matters to him, if he wishes to give a theatrical resonance to his word, is the effect it exercises on that select company of friends, admirers and acquaintances that the literary author gathered in the acromata, the audition halls arranged in libraries or baths or private palaces. The pantomime, which was imported to Rome from Magna Graecia (but under the empire of Augustus two Oriental actors, Pylades and Bathyllus, became famous), consisted in the representation of a myth entrusted to a single actor, who without speaking, and sometimes without the accompaniment of chorus or music, depicted the entire action. Predominance of the literary word in the theatre of the auditoriums, and predominance of the actor's art in the theatre of the pantomime; and a fracture of that unity which Greek theatre had proposed: a fracture all the more serious because the audience of the popular theatres, those that have an immediate effect on social custom, was in a condition of total passivity. The play of transfigurations attracted the spectators and estranged them from themselves; thus the actor was now the cloud pregnant with golden rain of Danae, now the sun that denounces the adultery in the tale of Venus and Mars. But one would not say, in order to establish the customary and necessary parallel between the extreme tendencies of Roman theatre, that Seneca's own tragedy did not indicate as much: it too an extreme, a fearful one: the pantomime signified the dispersal of the actor's active and moral personality into an irremediable multiplicity of disinterested attitudes; the tragedy of Nero's age makes the proposal of a tragedy of pitiless horrors that terrify and sweep away every intent of human dignity, that limit and crush every freedom. And if the dramaturgical composition of the Senecan corpus does indeed indicate a cathartic process and a possibility of redemption, from the Hercules furens to the Hercules Oetaeus, the tragic images remain as exemplars of an extreme tendency: inoperative, at the time, when they were written, or at least devoid of resonance in the spectacular sphere: but after fifteen centuries they proposed anew to the tragedy of the sixteenth century the ne plus ultra of evil that awaits, even in its inertia, to be justified. The answer proved positive, and from there a great history began, because between that age and this the Christian centuries intervened.

V. THE SACRED DRAMA: MIMIC SURVIVALS AND LITURGICAL CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES. CHRONOLOGY. THE LITURGICAL DRAMA. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION. REPRESENTATIVE FORMS OF PARENETIC LITERATURE. THE MYSTERY PLAYS. LAUDA AND SACRA RAPPRESENTAZIONE IN ITALY. — That fracture of Greek-Roman theater, whose extreme indices are mime and literary dramaturgy, was not truly reconciled spontaneously: a new culture was needed, a renewed depth of thought, and the recovery, in the new Christian civilization spread among the new peoples of Europe, of the perfection of that perennial philosophy which the Athenians had intuited naturally by living (which does not mean philosophizing naturalistically), which their mystery-cult circles had suggested to the tragedians, which their philosophers had distilled into theoretical propositions. The theatrical buildings were either transformed into fortresses, or filled in, or became quarries of cut stone; and the mimes, once gathered into urban theatrical companies, returned to wandering, persecuted when they were not tolerated, welcomed at markets and fairs, confused with jugglers. The great themes of tragic theater remain in the custody of high culture, but losing almost entirely the memory of what tragic performances had actually been (tragedy and comedy become terms of new meaning); and the inveterate themes, once placed within the framework of classical comedy, dissolve again into vulgar tradition, or are repeated amateurishly, or collected in anthologies of facetiae, or sometimes, unconsciously, reconnected to the most remote carnival traditions. Thus the Church as well as the new military aristocracies emerging from the dissolution of Roman society and the swarming of barbarism look askance at theatrical forms: profane amusements for the one and immoral; unworthy amusements, for the others, of a rigorous conception of the dignity of the free man, that is, of the warrior who knows how to defend himself and to attack. And yet, while mime disperses again, an intention of the highest significance, and of great future, also for the purposes of a unitary reconstruction of society, allows tragedy, transfigured, to survive: for Christian liturgy welcomes, while celebrating the Passion, Death and Resurrection of the God-Man, his human and divine life. Certainly Greek tragedy, like every dramatic intuition, con-

feels only a mediated actuality; the fact is true only in the poetic transfiguration of the acts and in the receptivity of the chorus; whereas at the center of the liturgy there is not merely the re-evocation, but the actual presence (and let this suffice to distinguish between liturgy and drama in this paragraph, which insists on the idea of a liturgical dramaturgy); but the Christian liturgy, while it places the Sacrifice at the center of the liturgical building, by no means excludes that the whole of human life, words and works, should be arranged around that point; and that the words which mark precisely the passage of the faithful from the natural sphere of worship to the supernatural sphere of faith should correspond to the Eucharistic reality.

Such are the premises of a story that unfolds over a millennium, from the sixth century precisely, when every trace of organized theater ceases, to the sixteenth century, when the theater becomes the center of an ideal and total transfiguration of civil society in the nations of the West. A story, one says; but we shall not claim that we are witnessing a coherent and continuous process of sacral integrations: nor that profane forms gather of themselves into more complex organisms. Indeed the chronological boundaries, amid such vastness, say less: and there persists among historians a tendency to backdate the beginning of the new times, the so-called Renaissance, whenever they document, or believe they do, the existence of those presumed autonomous forms. The historian can register a more or a less, if he attempts to set against each other the two worlds of sacrality and profanity, which both contribute to integrate a single reality: a more declared presence, or a more loudly proclaimed absence of one or the other sphere, divided only for the dialectical convenience of discourse, a plenitude of sacred officiation, or a restless insurgence of the profane. And it is the Middle Ages that sees this integrative exigency continually reasserted: we are far from believing that the Renaissance, whether understood as the rediscovery of antiquity or as an immanentistic investiture of a human absoluteness, can truly be considered as plenitudo temporum, perfection: which is a clumsy polemical and political inference applied to history. Indeed, to anticipate the conclusion, the compromise solution proposed by the culture of the Italian sixteenth century remained valid, or was believed to be so, only within the circle of an academic philologism, which believed it could recover the sense and the actuality of ancient tragedy, but was contradicted both by the profound religious intuition of the musical language that replaced the literary language in tragedy, and by the inevitable technical limitation encountered by the wholly comic and profane solution of the Commedia dell'Arte: the other great theaters of the West pursue a meditation that becomes moral and religious even when, and especially when, it attempts the test of absolute human freedom.

Criticism has long studied the dramatic elements of the liturgy, and particularly the offices of the Roman Breviary, in order to observe them at the center of a new evolution of dramatic language. But it is not a matter of distinguishing different substances within a conglomerate: the liturgy is a unitary poem, which has an upper, charismatic limit and a lower, theatric limit; and the same words can be received in their transcendental virtue, operative of supernatural reality, and in their spectacular evidentness. This better explains the history of medieval dramaturgy, which refers entirely to the liturgy; and it avoids the naturalistic prejudice of forms germinating one from another, spontaneously; and it better declares the attitude of the Church, which, having condemned the profanities of the decadent pagan theater, does not reject the collaboration that the persuasiveness and evidentness of the representational form can illustratively bring to the sacral itinerary; and which, when the illustrations threaten to superimpose themselves upon the rite, in the flowering of the Renaissance arts, recalls itself to the austerity of pure liturgy, freeing it from the efflorescences that threatened to suffocate it, or to deviate toward profanity. The relationship that is established between theatrics and the liturgy is ultimately no different from that which exists between the liturgy and the figurative arts: a mosaic or a fresco that formally seals a moment of sacred history establishes the same point of understanding as the theatrical figuration of that same moment, between history precisely and sacrality, between witnessing a fact, which may also be inert, and participation. And the history of such theater oscillates between iconoclastic rigorism, which would presume to remove every aid of the senses, and profane crystallization, which makes the spectacle an end in itself, content with its own evidentness. The culminating moments of the rite, just as they receive confirmation in the stories that illustrate the walls of the temple, can likewise receive it from fragments of mimetic illustration that prolong the ritual allusion: more easily in the joyous and glorious expansiveness of the Nativity and the Resurrection; the office of the Crib and the Office of the Sepulchre. Where the sacral intention remains purer, the liturgical drama is barely a figurative variation proposed in sacred vestments, with a minimum of staging (the dialogue between the Pious Women and the Angel at the Sepulchre, who asks, Quem quaeritis? and answers Non est hic, surrexit, etc.; or the dialogue of the Nativity, sometimes, as in the Paduan ordinary, before an altarpiece placed a little below the altar, representing the Virgin and the Child, between «duo canonici cum duobus pluvialibus qui vocantur Obstetrices» and the «magistri scolarum et Cantor... qui dicuntur Pastores»). Where the figurative intention increases, the variation assumes a greater breadth, descends from the altar to the churchyard, passes from the clerics to the laity. There is no limit to these extensions, if from the scanty lines of the «trope» of St. Gall (musical variations from which it was thought the verbal variations derived, in time increased by a mimetic evidentness: this is the thesis of Léon Gautier: valid if one does not assign it an exclusive character) one passes to the twenty-five days of the Passion of Valenciennes, and from the ninth century to the sixteenth; but always a thread binds the illustrative fragment (no matter how extensive and how mimetically prominent and how indiscreet in its encamping within the play of evidentness) to the liturgical text, indeed to the liturgy itself, ready to sum up in itself the course of time and the history of men, with its cycles of the year and of the saints.

From the ninth century to the sixteenth, we said: certainly not to establish a law of evolutions tied to time, but only to fix the chronological frame. That is to say that, for a more precise historical notion, we shall place before that a quo limit the iconoclastic heresy, which those impersonated figurations contradict even more violently than statues and paintings; and we shall observe, after that ad quem limit, the immanentistic heresy, which would presume to restrict within the sphere of the human every itinerary toward the divine implicit in the celebration of the Word. This observation on the temporal distribution must be extended to the geographical distribution; to speak of a St. Gall origin (Gautier), or a Byzantine one (La Piana) or a Roman one (Toschi) means irre-

to rigidly fix a poetic intention that aims above all to withdraw from place and time: although the theses retain an authentic meaning when one wishes to study the Byzantine texts as a conscious reaction to the superfluous and exclusive intellectualism of that culture (the most important text is in fact the Christos paschon, once attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus, but most probably datable to the 11th century: a cento of the Greek tragedians; but no one will believe that its Christocentrism is extraneous to the polemic against antitrinitarian monotheism, and that its form was elaborated by chance, out of a taste for erudite pedantry, without any thought at all of that classical-Christian humanistic syncretism which aimed at reading in the ancient texts a glimmer of natural revelation of supernatural truth); when the St. Gall tropes are traced back to Benedictine culture, which is likewise conciliatory and activist and historicist; when "Roman" is understood as "Catholic," rather than as a prevalence of national intentions. This said, and having overturned the search for the genetic process from chronicle-like occasions to religious intentions, the distribution of the forms of sacred drama in Europe, from the Byzantine East to the French West, can become something more than an erudite catalogue.

A process of local definition is perceptible also when the sacred drama remains within the sphere of Latin linguistic expression; the liturgical pluralism that permits the variations collected and preserved in the ritual books of the churches does not fail to work upon that fundamental concern which has been observed, of soliciting the participation of the choir in the rite. And of the extent of these interferences let the example suffice of the recently discovered Cassinese drama which contains the so-called Officium quarti militis, first preserved by a votulum (role), the part of a single actor transcribed as a projection of the chivalric legend of the drama of the Passion (De Bartholomaeis). When, then, the language becomes vernacular and is set alongside Latin, at first leaving the sung parts in Latin, this is a sign that the liturgist becomes a dramatist and that he recognizes in the vernacular community the maturity necessary for a more active and conscious participation. The direction, be it well noted, remains with Latin; and the stage directions are in Latin (just as in the Italian sphere the stage directions of amateur comedies are in the literary language); but even in this field the religious and ecclesiastical direction of popular life takes care, far more than political and feudal direction does, to ensure a full process of individuation for the lay group that takes part in the rite and that willingly mirrors itself in it in its dress and customs. This happens over a vast territory and in the most diverse forms: from the bilingual Unguentario (where the charlatan's mime mingles with the Officium Sepulcri and the Latin chants of the Three Marys), to the Provençal St. Agnes, where the characters, even the saintly characters, intone words to well-known musical motifs of profane songs. The texts are numerous and highly significant, nor only as imposing testimony of a custom, or as a linguistic document: the whole range of poetic possibilities unfolds in them: that is, the active intervention of a word to illuminate and therefore to shape a milieu: French texts, first of all, and Provençal and English, Iberian texts, with an intensely flourishing poetry, down to the masterpieces of Gil Vicente; and German ones; and Slavic ones from Bohemia, Croatia and Poland.

A separate mention is required by what happened to sacred theater in Italy. Through the direct influence of Franciscanism, indeed personally of St. Francis of Assisi, to whom the beginnings of the Lauda and the founding of the Presepe at Greccio are linked, the concern of vernacular dramaturgy was less with illustration than with edification. Elsewhere the spectacular element could prevail: while the story of the dramatic Lauda unfolds in central Italy, throughout the territory, including the Italian, where the style of the French Mystères extends (the word doubled the sense of mysterion upon the etymology ministerium) one witnesses elaborate stagings, interminable spectacles: immense historiographies that disperse in an invasive illustration (and in the end irrelevant, from the liturgical point of view) the spiritual concentration, the proper sense of the mystery. But in Italy, indeed in Umbria, history counts less than the reflection that is recommended, and remote events less than the preeminent and concrete fact that matters to the assembly—to become aware of its supernatural destiny by celebrating all together the event of sacred history and the recommendation of the liturgy. At the basis of this there is evidently a confraternal mentality: group life, understood as much as charitable assistance as for religious edification, which is inserted into the broader city life, yet still preserving an autonomy of its own: not properly conventual life, but life of a sodality, with its own rules and feasts, under the guidance of ecclesiastical assistants. And one prays in Latin, but sings in the vernacular; and because of this preeminent concern, of building the spiritual life of the community by weaving it of prayers and works, both choral song and sacred representation, both the lyric lauda and the dramatic lauda serve the same purpose. Whoever studied these dramatic forms of the Umbrian disciplinati could take pleasure in looking at them without forgetting the scheme proposed by Aristotle for the origins of the dithyrambic drama: a process of spontaneous objectification, which detaches the character from the chorus in the fervor of mimetic suggestion. Although remaining doubtful before the creative possibilities of orgiastic tumults, and knowing how intelligence and the aid of reflection prevail, even in 13th-century Italy, over ingenuous exaltations, it is certain that here ingenuousness and choral quality are awaited as the point of arrival. Music has a great part in it; and the word sustains it, often as indication rather than as poetic definition, leaving it to the musical tone, as more eloquent, to define the collective feeling and the characters. And it is also true that it was the ambitious desire of the confreres to pass from the oratory to the piazza, and to secure civic importance for their feasts: as the Orvieto collection demonstrates, in comparison with the laudari of Urbino, for example, and of Perugia. But the foundations of the new dramaturgy, which develops and makes concrete the premises contained in the liturgical drama, are laid; and the life of the new theatricality, which suddenly abandons the continuation of the Mystères and the Rappresentazioni, through the influence that the forms of theatricality exercised on the new theater of Europe, links back to this fundamental intuition of the Umbrian lauda.

VI. PROFANE THEATER: CARNIVAL FESTIVITIES AND OUTLAW COURTS. JESTER MIMES. TRIUMPHS, ECLOGUES AND ALLEGORIES. — The medieval sacred drama always includes a relationship between the human and the divine; and its range, upon reading the texts, appears far more varied than is suggested by those who, starting from a most partial historiographical schema, presume to see the entire epoch rigidly dominated by an exclusivist theocracy, and art deduced according to logical schemas (without counting that even then there was a good and a bad rhetoric; and that the excellent method of philosophical inquiry then helped, more than it did later, to distinguish them). Even the most solemn moments of the rite, those that would seem of necessity to bow to the most rigid intransigence, open themselves to the festival of comic inventions: thus in the Officium Nativitatis the scenes of the Obstetrices and of the Shepherds; thus in the Officium Sepulcri the theme of the Unguentarius; thus in the Officium Peregrini that of the Inn; and when the late vernacular compositions prove abundant in such characterizations, one must not forget that the original framing of the mixture was proposed by older texts: indeed, by most ancient traditions, if they are found even in the apocryphal gospels, which the Church sometimes welcomed in the vulgar and less demanding manifestations of the rite: almost a pious contribution of legends. And besides (as the musical language many times demonstrates, being freer from a precise conceptual notion, and more ready to echo vulgar emotion) precisely in the most solemn festivities merriment allowed itself the easier jests of the imagination. The important thing, in order to judge that world, is always to keep that relationship in mind; and the distinction adopted here in two paragraphs must indicate rather an assiduous interference than a parallelism, and still less an antagonism. Besides, the distinction is semantic and catalogical.

not intrinsic and categorical; and in every authentic form of poetry, no matter by what occasion it is prompted, sometimes even satirical and mocking, the touchstone is always truth; and truth is not divided.

The rite, too, therefore opened itself to laughter; and the liturgical celebration of the Innocents gave rise to the election of the Episcopus puerorum, and the feast of the Epiphany to the popular uproar against Herod, and, with a too understandable confusion of characters, against Herodias, who became the she-devil Redodesa of so many merry and fearful rites. It was fairly easy, given the syncretism of the conception prevailing in Catholic countries, for this or that survival of most ancient customs to be placed in these pauses of the rite: such as the memory of the Saturnalia in the feasts of the winter solstice. The important thing was to establish a relationship and to emphasize it in time. Thus it was with Carnival: to look closely, it received from the rite and from the liturgical order in which the seasons of the year were composed an investiture, almost an indirect justification: and therefore it came to form part of a rigorously ordered discourse (Carnival does not disappear where a stricter moral judgment intervenes to forbid it; but where the ideal sense is lost, the rhythmic and spectacular order that the liturgy suggests to the year: it no longer has meaning, if the sacral suggestion fails). The same may be said for a relationship that, outside the liturgy, came to be established between the hierarchy of the clergy and the hierarchy of the laity: political life too, in its most elevated and reflective forms, whether through Byzantine influence (and the court of Constantinople remained exemplary for all of Europe, for that complex of ceremonies that would liturgically express the sacral investiture of the emperor: caesaropapism, we call it; and that ceremonial passed to the West, from the court of Burgundy to the court of Spain, and through the "Spanish etiquette" to the court of the Habsburgs), both because it modeled itself on the exalted language, namely the liturgical one, and because of the dominant religious and unitary conception of life, it assumed a theatrical, spectacular posture, and according to a rigorously established norm, from the "acclamations" that greeted the monarch to the rights of precedence. The pluralism of Western society after the year 1000, and above all the prodigious flexibility of communal civilization in Italy, which preserved the strictest religious unity in order to multiply human experiences in every direction, stands opposed to that hierarchical regulation; but in its exceptional or excellent manifestations, even the "courts" of the West repeat that intention: especially in the "courts bandied" (corti bandite), which this or that political authority, and even the communal republics, proclaim on solemn occasions. Then the whole of society was distracted from its occupations (but also war, when it did not become a judgment of God and was not limited to being a slaughter, remembered the tournament and the rite of knighthood) and one arrives at the festival: power contemplated and celebrated itself, poets and jesters solemnized and gladdened it, the festive pause presumed to renew the golden age. These solemnities were themselves spectacle; but within them found a setting chivalric and courtly games, convivial mimes (such as the very ancient Coena Cypriani, which had one witness a parade of biblical characters: a parade of more or less rich costumes, a pretext) and finally the jests of the jesters: who for once paused in their wandering life and were welcomed into an illustrious society.

Entering the court, the jester ceases to be a fragmentary and occasional performer of buffoonish antics and comic or acrobatic games: he too can insert his part into a coherent discourse. One may be disposed, for the sake of emphasis in a historical survey, to isolate the figure and make it representative of a process of validation: the fact remains that every comic moment receives meaning and relief and even justification and investiture and the possibility of proving effective and active within a circle precisely from the fact that it is observed and understood within a broader order. And the buffoni and jesters ex lege, who in theory were banished from society, thus came to be reconciled with it, and on such solemn occasions. Much satirical poetry of the Middle Ages, from the carmina of the goliards to the beast epic, can be observed in its jester-like connections; and the jester himself, depending on the prevalence of a separatist mentality or of a unitary and hierarchical mentality, could be seen now in the perspective of the miles de curia, a courtier who assisted the prince with sound advice, sometimes concealed beneath the mask of the natural wisdom of the feigned madman, now in the perspective of the buffoon. Documents of this remain both in the traditions collected by novellieri and historians (to the most famous of these jesters it is explicable that a repertoire, or even a comic legend, was attributed: they became characters of a comic mythography, after having been actors: such are the figures narrated by the Novellino and Giovanni Boccaccio and Franco Sacchetti), and in the texts of vernacular mimes. More distinctive personalities, among the authors, are Rutebeuf, who touches all the themes offered to his profession as a Parisian trouvère, and extends from the mime to the lament to the sacred legend, Adam de la Hale, of Arras, who concludes his cycle in Naples, and defines himself in a theatrical organism more solidly linked and more autonomous (Jeu de la Feuillée, Robin et Marion) and Cielo d'Alcamo, with the mime Rosa fresca, set in contrast to the courtly poetry of the curia of Frederick II.

But the court needs to celebrate itself in its supreme tasks; nor can it be content to serve as a setting for the inventions of the technicians of spectacle, such as the jesters were. The court, by virtue of the character of sacredness that, as has been said several times, all social life assumes in that circle of thought and custom, also wishes to be remembered in its most authentic function: not as a technical organism for political action, but as a ladder to a transcendental transfiguration. Here is the Triumph. And let us also keep in mind, in reconstructing this form and participating in it ideally, the illustrious texts of literature and painting: first and most demanding, the Trionfi of Petrarch, which openly declare the ladder by which man ascends to the divine; and constitute an ideal scenography arranged for the many individual representations, and also proposed to the understanding of the ancients. In the sarcastic Florentine mentality the triumph soon becomes a theme of carnival revelry; but where princely courtliness is more solid or more disposed to self-apology, as at the court of Burgundy and the court of Milan, the triumph remains the pertinent form of courtly celebration; and allegorical representations are mixed into it, often in the form of pastoral eclogues, which recall great or supposedly great political and dynastic events under that veil of fabulous and arcane echoes that classical literature loved. Politics and literature, the one disposed to homage, the other eager to bestow it, accept a part in that theatrical idea of the court. The Italian Quattrocento celebrates its events there: not without suggesting, in the long run, authentic possibilities of a more concrete dramaturgy.

VII. THE COURT THEATER: SYNCRETISM OF THE EARLY ITALIAN CINQUECENTO. IN SEARCH OF A CONTEMPORANEITY OF ANCIENT COMEDY. THE REPERTOIRE OF THE NEW THEATER. THE COURT OF FERRARA. FROM COURT THEATER TO NATIONAL THEATER. - The early Cinquecento, in Italy (since at the turn of the century the culture of the Baroque age begins here, before elsewhere in Europe) sees all tendencies converge in a tumult of superimposed forms, the most ancient mingling with the new and the less new, what had been and what would be drawing together into a knot: laude are sung and performed, in which the confraternal spirit descended from the religious spirituality of the Duecento often finds expression; great spectacles are staged in the city squares, or at the sanctuaries, which fill the stage with characters and draw crowds of people, often, with the vulgarized taste of the Quattrocento, dispersing into space and innumerable gestures every concentration of moral life; the buffoons invade the markets and the lordly halls, they are in the taverns and in the palaces of princes, they gather up the old jests of the trade and the new fastitiae of the Latin compilations; in the universities and academies the learned recite classical compositions or works modeled on them; in their solitude men of letters try their luck with words, and in the cells of the monasteries the monks annotate the sacred texts and the codices of classical wisdom, considered as not hostile to Christianity, but rather as the itinerary of a single human search which the truth of revelation does not submerge but rather confirms and exalts. The political catastrophe heightens the tumult and spurs on adventure; and the words that are spoken, all words, in whatever form expressed, in paintings and in music, in books and in buildings, go beyond their occasion, welcomed as they are by an intelligence that is flexible and strong, clear-sighted in weighing circumstances and at the same time bold in discerning consequences, wholly disposed to welcome, not only in the secrecy of meditation but in the open play of manifold attentions, and to judge freely, disposed to the human and therefore, by an inference which in its enthusiastic sincerity does not always save itself from the precipices of pride and from facile improvisations, to the divine.

Already, laboring to define precisely the meaning of the terms "tragedy" and "comedy," which in antiquity were so important and so clearly complementary, but giving precedence to literary documentation over the notion of scenic realization, the learned had reduced both to narrative forms, distinguishing tragedy, which begins with the illusion of good fortune and ends in mourning, from comedy, which begins badly but ends in the unfailing happy ending: definitions far more thoughtful than what later appeared to a polemical perspective, agreed; and the classifications of literary genres fulfill a task of systematic reflection as well as of cataloguing; but the reading of ancient texts, retraced with a spirit of contemporaneity and in the concreteness of a human relationship, revealed ever better what their substance was. Commedia was the title of Dante's poem, with a title encompassing so much life past and pregnant with so much history to come, and tragedy the Latin Ecerinia of his contemporary Albertino Mussato. It is above all along this path of Latin imitations that work proceeds in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The tragedians aim at Seneca, with laborious approximations, until Senecanism is assimilated in its substance as a moral proposal. The comedians, with readier success, aim at Terence. Already the Terentian manuscripts reveal with how much attention editors seek a relationship between the ancient theater and new spectacular customs: it is known that analogy is the basis of historical knowledge; and let it not be a marvel that a Latin text which had already prompted the dramatic inventions of the Saxon nun Hrotsvitha in the tenth century, for her sacred legends, is now invaded by the troop of jesters. Even the organizer of the new study of classical antiquity, Petrarch, composed Latin comedies, now lost; and on his example they are written, and—trusting more than he did in the validity of imitation and in the dignity of realization—performed, from the end of the fourteenth century onward: Pier Paolo Vergerio, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Ugolino Pisani. The universities become the place where naturally these inventions and these performances are arranged; and since the Italian universities are a center for the gathering of the whole life of the West, these university comedies too are imitated almost everywhere, and above all in Germany through the Paduan Studium. Their custom persists well beyond the sixteenth century, and flourishes again in the college theater of the Jesuits throughout the centuries of the Baroque age.

Amid such pressing and dispersing of lives, the theater, which is also reflection and gathering, must seek a place for itself. The place of religious theater was the church, with its appurtenances: the churchyard and the "schools" of the confraternities. The university can open itself to performances by amateur actors as long as the humanistic Latin of the students can repeat the intentions set in motion by the ecclesiastical Latin of the clerics. But what assures a place for the new profane theater, and the transformation of actors from amateurs into professionals, is the court, with its appurtenances of the patrician hall and the academy. It is in the perspective of the court that the new texts are to be read: of the court that wishes to be the center of civic civilization, extending almost to infinity, adventurously, the correspondences of this civilization beyond the circle of walls: toward the fields, which are regarded with a new eye, not always lingering in the Arcadian idleness of a feigned and artificial earthly paradise; toward the countries of Europe, which participate with new responsibility in the common life, in new languages that define themselves in new literatures; toward the new continents opened by the voyage of Christopher Columbus. And into the court converge all forms and all currents: the court confirms, even if only in words, the religious inspiration of communal civilization, and puts a good face, even when it is decorously bored, on the rediscoveries of antiquity. The most important novelty for the historian of the theater is this: that a preeminent social group, the one that gathers around the prince, accepts putting to the test the present-day correspondences of ancient representational forms and proposing new ones. The ancient texts already known, those that are discovered to enrich the old catalogues (Plautus takes the place of Terence, in the fortune of Latin comedy) and the new texts, which authors compose on precise commission, form the repertoire. There is a passage from the Latin language to the vernacular: because, if in the universities the student-spectators understood the learned language of the student-actors, at court it was necessary to express oneself more concretely in the vernacular; and therefore the ancient comedies are translated, adapting them to the sententiousness and allegorism of courtly performances, or interspersing them with spectacular or choral scenes, better liked by the public. All the Italian courts of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries prepared themselves for this task of a theatrical culture; but preeminent and exemplary was that of Ferrara, with the dukes Ercole and Alfonso: where not only were all the forms of spectacle assiduously experimented with, from sacred representations, in the piazza, on religious feast days, to triumphal processions for solemn entries, to allegorical celebrations for this or that political or dynastic event; but understanding and intelligence were promoted and therefore a custom: favoring the formation of a habit and the establishment of a spoken and figurative language: in turn favored by the very particular conditions of Ferrarese culture, where there reigned a dynasty long entrenched in civic government but for centuries most open to chivalric culture and not long since renewed by humanistic culture. And Ludovico Ariosto, the greatest of the court poets, gives beginning to the new comedy.

Mythological fables, allegorical eclogues, Terentian and Plautine comedies, mimic comedies follow one another in the princely halls; and the example is soon taken up: if the court of Ferrara, and those connected to it by more frequent political and family ties, Mantua and Urbino, long remain exemplary, and promote a fashion that will be imitated by the courts of Spain, France, England and Germany, even the capitals where no court properly exists, Florence and Venice and Rome, welcome the same festivities in their patrician palaces, and spread the spectacular language that had been tried out and recommended at Ferrara, each city in its own way, with its own rethinking, its own style. The intrinsic quality of the texts rarely matches the impressiveness of such events. But the court is rather intent on making a spectacle of itself than on opening itself to the message of a revelation of the spirit. Civic civilization reaches its conclusion and leaves to the national civilization that succeeds it a stupendous instrument of expression and participation. The t.[theater] becomes, from then on, the mirror of national life, caught in its salient manifestations and in its most spirited suggestions, and from the t.[theater] are proclaimed the words that will acquire the greatest value in the historical life of the peoples of Europe.

VIII. THE T.[THEATER] OF THE BAROQUE AGE: THE T.[THEATER] IS CALLED TO REFLECT THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE AND TO CELEBRATE ITS RELIGIOUS AND NATIONAL TASKS. THE T.[THEATER] IN ITALY: TECHNICAL AND LINGUISTIC DISCOVERIES; THEATRICAL BUILDINGS, PROFESSIONAL COMPANIES, THE PAYING PUBLIC. THE COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE. THE OPERA T.[THEATER]. THE T.[THEATER] IN ENGLAND. THE T.[THEATER] IN SPAIN. THE T.[THEATER] IN FRANCE. THE T.[THEATER] OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

mother of nations, or those arrayed with her to protect her usurp it; beaten, stripped, torn, overrun, Italy has forces sufficient only to let her survive. The theater becomes, especially in the Atlantic nations, a place far vaster than the unassuming appearance of that enclosure reveals — closed around a stage that juts out into the very midst of the audience and is exposed to the elements, as in England, or like the corral in Spain; people from every quarter and of every condition flock there, and there words of immense destiny are spoken, destined for voyages more daring than those of discovery upon the oceans. But he errs who sets this national theater against the ecclesiastical theater of the Middle Ages, as though it were prompted by a polemical spirit, as though it sought immanentistic and secularist affirmations in opposition to a religious dramaturgy. The process of integration by which the laity, throughout the history of the new Christian centuries, had moved to seek its own freedom and its own dignity by attempting concreteness and perfection of life not against, but within the Catholic fold, is not broken now that peoples — first those most firmly gathered under the banners of the national monarchies — participate in the common work with the immense weight of a unified life. This life of the Baroque age is a life of a people, in a religious and national conception; and the theater is the place where this unified rediscovery is celebrated, where daring words are heard, where the cold calculation of reason is overwhelmed by a visionary enthusiasm, where the creative image of poetry draws around itself intact forces of feeling, of will, of social life; it is, of a tumultuous rising of the multitude to take awareness of itself as a people, now the occasion, now the mirror. Of the five major nations of Europe, three — England, Spain, and last though not least France — between the 16th and 17th centuries found and propose a memorable example; but the choral debate of their dramaturgy concerns immense themes, with a profound meditation, theologically grounded, on religious and moral values. Germany, swept away by the wars of religion, remains almost extraneous to the theater: certainly not to the sacral debate, fiercely shaken and arrogantly fought, concerning the dignity and religious freedom of the people. Italy is the only one in which culture takes up a position of flanking, where it elaborates without converging: nor could we consider this separatism (which a polemical historiography traces back to indifference in religious matters, to moral decadence, to the dimming, even among the people, of those great religious concerns that had brought even the works of beauty back to the work of faith) wholly extraneous to a fundamental concern for reform, to the resolve to save the sacred patrimony from the attacks of profanity, and to a cautious, but not skeptical, distinction of the sacred from the profane; and the Church proves equally diligent in repressing the excesses

IN EUROPE

Thus the custom of a profane theater became established; and representational art was withdrawn from ecclesiastical responsibilities, freeing the liturgy from too many superstructures; and the pinnacle of dramaturgy was secured for the new literature. The enterprise is barely underway, and behold the great crisis of sixteenth-century life reverberates within it: the discovery of America overturns the old order of Europe from its foundations; nations are swept up in the vertigo of world dominion, peoples either break away from Rome, of immorality of the Commedia dell'Arte, which in removing from religious festivities many survivals of the sacred popular theater of the Middle Ages.

One should begin with the Italian theater: because it is first in order of time, as has been seen; but also because, thus confined to seeking its reasons within itself, it matures and develops a most expert technical proficiency: precisely all that will make it suspect to the Romantics. Let us begin with technique as well: it is the Italian theater that fixes the most observed models and customs: the Italian architecture of the building, the Italian organization of companies, the Italian custom of the audience: later or gradually, the others, perhaps renouncing a treasure of poetry, like Restoration England, which accepted being Italian and French, after having been Shakespearean. The theater imitates the hall of the princely palace, where the first comedies and the first operas in music had been given: adding later the tiers of boxes, a compromise between an ancient model echoed by Palladio's Teatro Olimpico and the Spanish corral. Professional companies take the place of amateurs: certainly less open to new inventions, certainly bound to profit, an economic relationship that weighs and sometimes degrades, but far more expert in expressive means and masters of popular appeal. And the public, for the first time in the history of the new theater, is a paying public, whether in the room of the Commedia dell'Arte players or in the opera house at Venice. Singers and actors are at the center of the Italian theater of the Baroque age, and they remain there, and they teach it to others, even at the cost of overpowering the poetic text, or of diverting the moral life of the audience toward the allurements of the senses or spectacular escapisms.

The three Atlantic nations, Spain, England, France, as free toward the open sea, remain faithful to the dignity of the word: which, like every other form of art, indicates a total commitment of life, but more boldly declares and comments upon it in its rational and moral relationship. Italy evades it: the forms of Italian theatricality of the Baroque age, even while they continue, often with admirable inventions (Tasso, Bruno, Della Valle...), the traditions of the literary theater, are the Commedia dell'Arte and opera in music. The technical skill of the actors triumphs in the Arte: the schema of the Commedia is permanently fixed, derived from the long reflection conducted by men of letters around Latin texts, in the complementary groups of the Servants, the Old Men and the Lovers: the characters with fixed costume, mimicry and language (the Masks) become rigidified, the modes of carnival are brought onto the stage, the coarse plebeian jest, the play of dialectal mixtures (popular Italy is still regional and dialectal: although this too of the Arte is a way of looking down upon this fragmentariness and, by ridiculing it, overcoming it): the dialogue is improvised following an action summarily indicated in a scenario or canovaccio, introducing lazzi (comic skits, these, lines extraneous to the action), one duels in jest with the wooden spatulas that have replaced the aulic jester's scepter, one dances, sings, plays music. The Zanni (generic and traditional name of the servant; but soon they become specified, and the parts of first and second Zanni are divided: one is Brighella, Buffetto, Pedrolino etc., the other Arlecchino, Truffaldino, Pulcinella etc.) continually interrupt the action with their comic inventions, mocking the old men (Pantalone, the Dottore) helping or parodying the Lovers (Orazio, Flaminio, Livio; Isabella, Lidia, Lavinia, etc.) who also reduplicate themselves in pairs.

Quite another is the world of opera: as meditative as it is ethereal, as intimate as it is effusive, in the forms of musical language, capable of overwhelming with their poetic impetus the poor customs of the histrionic trade; and a sphere of sentimental transfiguration opposed to the mimic play of the Arte. Even here the tradition intrinsic to the historical life of the form exerted its weight: because the Arte had gathered from medieval jesting the mockery and brawl of buffoons; but music had first been dramatically defined in the Landi, and before the pathos and ethos of drama it had accompanied the Fedeli toward the meditations of sacred drama. Even when the Florentine Camerata dei Bardi had eruditely justified the proposal to revive Greek tragedy in the new encounter of words and music, there had been recollections of the ancient dramatic lauda (Emilio del Cavaliere); and Claudio Monteverdi had intended to scrutinize the secret of the deep soul, giving to scenic creatures (Arianna, Ulisse, Nerone) the revelation of the musical word: an austere and sorrowful nature, his, intimately religious: until the new scenic language receives its Roman investiture in the theater of the Barberini. From then on it develops, enriching itself throughout the Baroque age: its most active centers are Florence, Rome, Venice. The advent of the opera composers of the Neapolitan school marks a turning point: and just as the Neapolitan comedians of the Arte (Pulcinella, Scaramuccia) impressed upon the Commedia an audacious exuberance of mimic forms, different if not opposed to the moralistic bite of the Lombard comedians, so the Neapolitan musical comedy, opera buffa, expressed a more cheerful sentiment of the world, a vaguer condescension to the festival of a gentle nature, the idea of a serene land, populated by human creatures reconciled with their lot.

The cycle of Baroque-era theater was different, and elsewhere. England, in the brief, dense and prodigious decades of Elizabethan theater, traced a parabola worthy of Greek theater. Here too one begins from a humanistic experimentation with antiquity; but Italy had already cleared the path; and the university wits, who promoted the first understandings with the new theatrical culture, rapidly passed beyond the wary limits of academicism. Seneca offered his models, and the idea of a theater of horrors, of a pitiless and unredeemed tragedy (Gorboduc by Norton and Sackville, 1562); but a popular drama, mingled of tragedy and comedy, of kings and buffoons (such was the reproach that Sidney leveled at it), stood alongside it and imposed a prompt response to the expectations of many. A bold genius, Marlowe, pushed it to an extreme condition, toward the idea and image of a more than human deciding of one's own fate in comparison with the absolute (Tamburlaine). A prodigious genius, Shakespeare, through a long, daring, highly mobile meditation, an inexhaustible invention, an absolute responsibility before the truth of the word, recomposed it into the image of a universe; and of a universe open to the message of God: among the last words of Shakespearean creatures are prayer, compassion, penitence, humble reconciliation with man as brother after titanic wandering. A tragedian of immense speculative force and a comic playwright of soaring, iridescent fantasy; but in no one as in him is the human horizon, traversed by the light of the word, more vast, nor divine destiny probed more deeply. Around him a pleiad of authors: Kid, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, Shirley, Marston, Webster, Tourneur, Middleton... A flowering soon interrupted by the Puritan revolution that closed the theaters. The Restoration, which reopened them, wanted pleasure rather than truth, pleasing but superficial forms, varied and clever, sometimes still harsh to the taste. Until the eighteenth century, turning now to the comedy of manners (Steele, Goldsmith, Sheridan...), now to opera in music of Italian importation, now to a satirical mixture of both (The Beggars' Opera by John Gay), proposed a consequent course of events.

It seemed to Romantic criticism that the fortune of Spanish theater, like that of English theater, had lain in not allowing itself to be diverted toward classicizing formalism by the Greco-Roman imitation promoted by the Italians. The modern perspective is quite different: culturalism and technical expertise, learned in Italy, do not stifle the new inventions but rather permit them; and the vigor of religious and national spirits is by no means stifled, but rather becomes aware of itself, with the growth of experience. Juan del Encina had clearly marked the passage from the old to the new; and a crisis had been announced, at the turning point of the new times, by the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, the famous Celestina of Fernando de Rojas. A new scenic language forms slowly throughout the sixteenth century: and the Portuguese Gil Vicente assures it inventive genius. Lope de Rueda, who was impresario, actor and author, technical prowess: while in Madrid, Valencia, Seville the first permanent theaters are founded. The traditionalism of the Iberian spirit causes the old themes to persist alongside the new, and the chivalric fidelity of ancient times alongside the modern imaginative spirit of adventure: such is the work of Juan de la Cueva. Such are the dramatists of the Siglo de Oro: Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón; and, to close the cycle and the century, Calderón de la Barca. They worked with prodigious activity (more than two thousand "comedias" were attributed to Lope de Vega), but always bringing their prodigies back to a tradition that relinquishes or abandons nothing, the sacred drama alongside the buffoonish games of the gracioso, the patriotic drama alongside the absent-minded enchantment of the "intermezzi" that mime realistic themes in dance. A resounding and generous task pervades that theater; and the dominion of the word gathers into the sumptuous trappings of eloquent discourse all possible adventures. The concord of author, actor and public is obtained by remaining faithful to the past that is known and devoting oneself with inexhaustible impetus to a destiny of luminous adventure, always great, whatever the setting in which it takes place.

Of such a spirit of Spanish theater the French beginnings are reminded; and the Cid of Corneille. But France transferred into oratorical and forensic debate the wandering inspiration of the Iberian theater: through a prevalence of classicist inspiration and rational rigor, in welcoming the inventive freedom of the word; through the gravitation of France toward Paris, and of Paris toward the Court; through an inheritance, finally, of Italian-style literary tragedy, which had kept itself all the more composed the more unbridled was, in Italy, the experience of theatrical performance. Indeed, French cultural hegemony found support in the theater; and that theater, even in comparison with the theater of England, seems worthy of representing the accord between word and spectacle, and of emulating ancient tragedy and comedy. Corneille, Racine, Molière, ever more obedient to the extrinsic indications of society and of custom and of theatricality, are in their innermost being strenuous and compassionate investigators of the human drama, great moralists, well worthy of being placed at the center of an arduous and fruitful debate, engaged with the most decisive problems of life and custom. Both the tragedian of heroic will, Corneille, and the poet of passion and of the shipwreck of the soul swept away by a terrible and dear obsession, Racine, and even the comic playwright, Molière, who accepts entering into dialogue and conflict with a reality that seems to impose on him, by weight of social evidence or by force of scenic custom, themes and development, translate the theater of the Baroque age into terms of literary dramaturgy, exceedingly rich in echoes and prodigious in surpassing all inveterate or mediocre conditions, driving away the old and perennial scenic games, composedly summing up in strophic perfection the texture of scenic action. The inheritance of literary humanism, which had made ancient tragedy and comedy current again, and which had elsewhere been overwhelmed by mimetic and melodic evasion (in Italy) or by the very inventive inspiration of the poetic word (in England and Spain), here recomposes itself into a dominion of intelligence, and let us even say of literature, as the place of the word reflectively received and intellectually elaborated, without anything being lost of that concreteness of scenic action, of music, of dance that the culture of the Baroque age had restored to the theater, and to which it no longer wished to renounce.

In this sphere of words suggested and immediately reflected, and in the French custom of a guarded abandonment to the suggestions of image and sense, the dramaturgy of the eighteenth century is to be observed, in that phase which historically can be isolated as the culture of the Enlightenment. The seventeenth century had adventurously mixed all theatrical forms, superimposing music and dance, mime and prose, art poetry and folk poetry; but the new culture, in all the countries of Europe, passes every form through the sieve of criticism, makes of it history and reason. In the century of encyclopedic erudition everything is accepted, but everything is placed in a reasonably ordered catalogue; and in the hierarchy of spectacular forms the first place belongs to dramatic literature; leaving it to begin from there the varied course of the theatrical proposal to which the public responds around the concrete availability of the actor.

The text is therefore gathered into a more circumspect attention and a constant propensity to respect the the plausible: actors abandon or soften their declamatory tones in favor of a more natural diction and acting (the actress Clairon); the public itself, now that the bourgeoisie prevails over the aristocracy in the direction of social life, asks to be moved and persuaded rather than carried off into a world of supersensible wonders. In France, which throughout the century maintained a theatrical primacy, sending tragedies, comedies and companies everywhere in Europe, this evolution is perceived and documented better than elsewhere. The tradition of high tragedy continues through Crébillon and Voltaire, rivals for the public's favor; but Voltaire sometimes opens himself, as an ever-curious spirit, to the novelty of the larmoyant drama, also called bourgeois tragedy, which runs from La Chaussée to Diderot: while France preserves a "place" of its own devoted to pure fantasy or reverie in the Comédie Italienne, where the Italian commedia dell'arte players, by then Frenchified, linger on this side of the rational vigilance and intellectual commitment of the other theaters; and Marivaux is their poet. In Italy the same concern, having manifested itself through criticism and polemics from the beginning of the century, and through illustrious interventions in the discussion on poetry, such as that of the great Muratori, sets in motion a tradition of tragic and comic literature not always validly connected with a total renewal in the technique of staging, but always attentively followed: the name of Scipione Maffei, among the tragedians, will suffice.

Carlo Goldoni re-established the union between dramatic literature and scenic art, with assiduous work, passing through all the experiences of forms, and always maturing his inventions in a most concrete and rich sense of theatrical actuality: for, after the youthful attempts at a theater lowered from on high by a proposal that was only externally dignified, he set to work maturing the search for the valid word through the customs of the commedia dell'arte players. He spoke of a "reform," and obeyed the intellectualistic concerns that authoritatively sustained him even outside Italy: in reality his is a long and ingenious labor to discover what remained alive and what was dead in the improvised theater, and to restore a sense of industrious and moral actuality to the life of the people: thus it unfolds, fortunate and modest, from the Baroque age to Romanticism. Its effectiveness was very great in many parts of Europe, even if not perceived in that profound truth: and it helped the renewal of the Spanish theater, which was by then dominated by adherence to the French theater, through the work of Moratín the younger, at the turn of the new century. On fairly common ground, that is, practical morality and observation of manners, which replace the escape of fantasy, work is being done almost everywhere in Europe: from there, from the comedies of Holberg, the Scandinavian theater begins; and along a not distant track the English theater unfolds, ever richly original and insular, through Lillo, Steele, Goldsmith, Sheridan and Congreve; until the actor Garrick concludes, with the rediscovery of Shakespeare, soon to become the salient fact of European dramaturgy, a story that had begun with the classicizing and moralizing historicism of Addison's Cato. Russia too appears in this shared story of the theater of Europe, and the tragedies of Sumarokov, conducted according to French rules but drawn from Russian history, and entrusted to the young cadets of the Cadet Corps, constituted the first nucleus of the national theater. But it is Germany that enters into a more intimate dialogue and contrast with French hegemony, passing from Gottsched to Lessing, who with his work as critic and author secures the poetic and cultural foundations of the new dramaturgy. When Goethe appears, the way is open in every direction.

IX. THE THEATER OF THE ROMANTIC AGE: THE LITERARY THEATER OF EUROPE AND ITS EVOLUTION. IN GERMANY. IN ITALY AND IN RUSSIA. IN ENGLAND AND IN FRANCE. THE THEATER OF OPERA. SCENOGRAPHY AND ACTORS. VERISM AND SYMBOLISM. - A history of the romantic theater becomes possible and convincing through Goethe, who for almost his entire very long life meditated or wrote around Faust and experimented with every possible direction of theatrics as dramatist, as superintendent and director, sometimes as actor; and certainly no one has been able to contribute to it with greater force of genius and assiduity of work, restoring the responsibilities of the person to the center of the drama, and reopening it to a philosophical, indeed theological, meditation that for centuries had seemed forgotten, in cautious deference to conventional separatism. Perhaps less suggestive, but more thorough, would be a history that also observes the theater within the sphere of a cultural story, precisely the romantic one, which almost proposed to begin the history of the world anew, and to make present again what past ages had suffered and lived. The theater of the late eighteenth century and of the whole nineteenth century, up to the First World War, concerns itself with gathering the romantic mythographies into a single workshop; and it establishes an equilibrium, imaginative indeed and seductive, but always circumspect and reflective, between the proposal of poetry and its journey among people: no longer entrusted to the overbearing power of genial arbitrariness, as in more fanciful and perhaps more barbarous epochs (Romanticism, with all its cult of the primitive, is the epoch par excellence of culture, of intellectually meditated responsibility, only immensely widening, beyond the limits of reason and codified form, its attentions: to the whole historical world and the whole human world: thus preserving, beyond historical man, the eternal soul of man, of each man, and, on this side of history, nature), but strengthened by all the devices of shared culture. Therefore a synthesis, or even merely a notice, must gather, along with the lyrical effusions and doctrinal commentaries (more often entrusted to the theater as read; but effective on the formation of the tradition of the theater as performed, which always avails itself of literary inventions, and availed itself of them more in this age of culturalism) the myths interpreted by the theater in music, the mimetic language, not merely verbal, of the performers. To understand a history in which all the peoples of Europe appear, it is better to start from the opposition of the Italian Alfieri and the German Tieck. The Italian tradition reinserts itself, by this path, into the history of the theater of Europe: for Italians seemed to have detached themselves from the literary theater, and precisely at the time when the English, Spanish and French were entrusting to it the celebration of the most worthy values and the most daring intentions of the new peoples gathered in the States of monarchies by divine right, summarizing everything or almost everything in the mimetic forms of the commedia dell'arte and in the musical forms of opera: which likewise in the new age enjoy a new fortune, transforming themselves and overcoming a certain artisanal limit of their own. Tieck makes the most audacious proposals, and immensely expands the limits of the theater. Alfieri, to temper the audacity of his proto-romantic insurrections, seeks the profound truth of the soul through the most rigorously accepted and most humbly suffered limits, discovers behind the eloquent gesture the heroes' arrival at sacrifice and words' arrival at silence. For a long time the theater remains divided between romantic adventurousness and a traditional discipline that nonetheless reveals the profound meaning of choral concentration and of the verbal debate that accompanies the action and sets it before us. After a veristic phase, in which it supposes that the "thing" directly represented has an intrinsic operative virtue and directly attunes minds to its own evidence, dramaturgy breaks apart again into symbolism, which makes of the pure poetic presence the motor of scenic life, and translates representation into rite, and into the directorial and spectacular superimposition that degrades the text to a pretext.

Romanticism aspired to the theater as to a supreme form; and the ambitions of the poets, besieged by the myth of Shakespeare, sought to traverse in a flash, without giving time its due, indeed in a religious extra-temporality, the itinerary of the word that establishes itself among the many. This does not mean that the greater and better part of Romantic dramas found their way to the stage: Shelley and Manzoni, to note two extremes, had no direct theatrical fortune: which does not mean that the literary dramaturgy of the Romantics remained without finding acceptance: the theater has more than one entrance, and what is not entrusted to the word enters through costume, at times more responsive to the influences of lyric and of the novel, through scenography, through music. On the other hand, thus isolated from their natural seat, the poets of the theater conduct in vitro experiments all the more daring as they are not subject to the control of success, and anticipate the forms that would become commonplace in the later nineteenth century. To gather the chronicle of that fertile tumult in the different circles of the national literatures, and beginning with Germany, to which falls the greatest part of that revolution of taste, a contrast comes to be established from the very outset, while Goethe pursues his own path, between the heroic poetics of Schiller with his followers and the dramatists of the Schicksalstragödie (a "tragedy of destiny" that imprisoned human freedom and responsibility in things and in time), of Werner and his imitators. Kleist is the most fertile and the most ingenious of the poets who in isolation imagine the theater of the future: precisely while the fortune of a mediocre writer, Kotzebue, seemed to remove every possibility of imaginative life and freedom of invention on the stage. A place apart in German culture is occupied by Vienna, still, as already in the times of the Italianizing Baroque; and Grillparzer's work ranged over a broad territory of Viennese historical drama: while awaiting the moment when that theater would open itself to a current of popular dialect speech. And then Hebbel rapidly sums up all the tendencies, and closes in a knot of great dramatic efficacy words destined to unfold in the following years, in the currents both of realism (Maria Magdalena) and of symbolism (Die Nibelungen).

Slower is the history of the literary theater of Italy; for the very fortune of Goldoni in the eighteenth century had been contradicted by the success of Carlo Gozzi's fables, which restored to the Art, as its own domain, the at once puerile and popular kingdom of fairy-tale fantasy; and Alfieri's tragedies had to await from the new Risorgimento times the possibility of being at least partially understood and accepted. The phase of Napoleonic dominance, as Monti demonstrates, and indirectly even Foscolo, with his Romantic rebellions and anxieties, marked a movement of involution and academic formalism. And only with the Romanticism of Pellico and of Manzoni did tragedy return to being industrious and effective in word and in history: although the long vigil between Manzoni and Verga was too easily filled by the facile historical evocations of Giacometti, who sometimes attempted a more daring moral problematic, and by the facile costume evocations of Ferrari. In Russia romanticism, but substantially the fervor of historical life that chooses or does not choose those strongholds of its own in order to understand itself in its impetus, attends the creation of a new literature, which rapidly takes its place alongside the others of Europe; and despite the oppressive organization of theatrical life, watched over by a most limited and suspicious government, its vitality burst forth with Puškin, enormously rich in suggestions, in scenic possibilities, in continuation, and with Gogol. From Ostrovskij a new period of the Russian theater will begin; but to understand it one must always bear in mind how much of the poetics of Puškin and of Gogol, including their works not properly dramatic, passed into the tradition of that national theater.

A parenthesis of waiting, due to the separation between the theater in act and that dramatic literature which nevertheless numbered names like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, descending, in an almost uninterrupted succession, to the poets around Browning, is to be noted in England. Most observable and observed, on the other hand, even if not rich in texts to be numbered among the absolute masterpieces, is the history of the French theater, even of the romantic age. Victor Hugo is its herald, and served, with the polemics of the new literature, more to clear the field of formalisms than to define stably a new language. Brought down from the throne, and it was of papier-mâché, where a centuries-old tradition had placed it, tragedy gives way to the popular drama of Dumas père, with its ingenuous mythography and its direct efficacy; and on the other hand the comedy of Musset, most musical, unfolds its iridescent play, in a feast of adorned and elusive words, attempting the imitation of a Shakespeare not understood in his moral substance. Popularity and fictitious elegance, those two opposite forms: the crisis was resolved by the advent of the bourgeois theater, which turned to a social problematic and sought its justification outside the theater. A most theatrical theater, moreover; and now observed by a whole people, and ready to welcome the messages of every country. For this too was the conspicuous fruit of romanticism: peoples, while awaiting the replacement of the old empires in central and eastern Europe by the new national States, regard literature as their most authentic patrimony, and national theaters, in Scandinavia, in the Danubian Europe, in the Balkans, arise to interpret the mythical and historical patrimony, and to gather around popular and heroic deeds, around the life and fantasy of the humble, considered depositaries of the treasure of the spirit, the moved attention of the people, almost in a new rite lacking neither the depth of religious attention, often explicit and acclaimed.

This romantic epoch of the theater proves singular also for this: that literature there exalts itself, and while exalting itself destroys itself: never as then were the formal and technical limits that classicism had defended so far exceeded, never as then was the word understood as the testimony of a presence that transcends it. The theater becomes the trial by fire for a literature that no longer justifies itself in artistic perfection, but appeals to truth, and for that truth proclaims that it renders men free; and moreover, between Goethe of the essay Shakespeare und kein Ende and Manzoni of the Lettre à M. Chauvet, the romantic theory of drama is elaborated in the search for a spiritual center, where the extrinsic solicitations of the stage may be gathered, and the intimate unity of what is dispersed in the stage and among the spectators and in the world may be revealed. In such heroic, but doomed, tension, the chronicle of theaters, everywhere, reveals a disordered tumult of experiences, pious and desperate devotions like that of Kleist, ambitions and contradictions like those of Vigny: great poets who founder in silence or in adventure. History unfolds coherently and fruitfully only in the species of musical theater, where, it is notable, music seemed to consent to that commitment, that unexpected spirituality, and perhaps, contradictorily, to that wishful reverie that belonged to the most ambitious romanticism. Add that opera in music, even in France, where intellectualism had nevertheless won its great anti-baroque battle at the height of the seventeenth century, had not known a rationalistic regulation; the eighteenth century does indeed set forth a theory of drama in music, but resolves it in practice with Metastasio, who gathers within an Arcadian circle of nobly affectionate sentiments, expressed in most limpid and (intrinsically) most musicable verses, the experiences of a century and a half of melodrama, and with Gluck who, likewise working on the Italian tradition, composes musical dramas of austere commitment and profound truth: whereas before him, and despite the literary reform of Metastasio, that theater was a swaggering adventure, where the inspiration of the poet in music struggled against the self-sufficiency of the craftsmanlike practice of musicians and actors and dancers. Mozart encounters also this occasion as every other that offers itself to him, passes through the old and new forms of musical comedy, of baroque drama, of allegorical drama, from Italian craftsmanship to the ambitions of the German Enlightenment, and shifts the center of attention toward musical language. But he is already a genial and free spirit who believes only in inspiration and abandons himself to it: he certainly does not overload his writing with intentions, nor does he accept with the fervor of a reformer the allegories that may be offered to him: in short, the most complete summarizer of the spirits of the most Italianate opera drama is he, a German. Rossini is on this road, who begins as a genial craftsman, and always remains within the circle of the theater (Mozart lavished himself in every zone frequented by musical language: Rossini does not leave the theater except by aiming, and even if with a single and final glance, at the liturgy. This is not a moral fable: Mozart, Rossini, Verdi know and express this expectation: I would say, this final consecration of drama, which reconciles itself to its sacred origins: they pray there in their own way; even Wagner, although he cannot renounce any of his ambitions, attempts the liturgy: it is not a chapter of the history of the theater that is revealed there: it is the history of the theater itself seeking its transcendental proportions). Still the Italians, with Rossini, who summarizes the whole old history from Pergolesi to Cimarosa, make of the theater in music a consequent affair: precisely while the "prose" theater (as it then began to be called, contrasting, and it is significant, the term "prose" with the term "lyric" given to the other) dissipates in so many ambitious directions. Bellini seems to summarize the taste of classicism, in the stupendous linearity of melody: Donizetti seems to enrich itself with Romantic colors and moods: in reality they know what is so easy to forget for one who frequents philosophical discussions: that all reality, without needing to be aided by doctrine, can be traversed and summed up by poetic form, which implicitly contains within itself an entire intuition of the universal life. After them (the Italian opera of the early nineteenth century has the wonderful coherence of invention and reflection that the great epochs of dramaturgy possessed) Verdi plunges his meditation back into a religiously inspired populism, that of Lombard Romanticism, passes from choral dramas to portraits, escapes into a love-and-war adventure in lands distant in time and space, and concludes with a rediscovery of Shakespeare. Even outside this grandiose dramaturgy, the musical theater celebrates its national glories; and Wagner makes of his drama the conclusion of all German Romanticism: even the symbolist landing of the new theater is dominated by his presence in the culture of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century.

It is appropriate to summarize in separate paragraphs a unitary reality, albeit apparently dispersed across many different aspects, if one wishes to give a sufficient notion of the nineteenth-century theater. In these ambitious tumults nothing remains foreign to it: certainly not the art of dance, which forms a conspicuous chapter of it, nor the technical inventions, which multiply the possibilities of scenic illusion, until, with Symbolism, and with the very excess of illusions, it is discovered that what matters in the theater is not external verisimilitude, but the intimate truth of poetic revelation. The culturalism of so much painting and so much architecture, with the presumption of making the palaces of Babylon or medieval castles current again, invades the art of scene designers, until then dominated by the tradition of the Bibiena: when it does not even happen that the architect, naively availing himself of the facilities granted him by the new construction technique, translates into iron, brick, and cement the scenographic inventions of the theater: so easily does theatrical custom overflow from the stage into the public square, with journalism having become its interpreter and disseminator. But the organization of actors also changes profoundly: the national theaters subsidized by the State, the impresarios of the musical theater, the capocornici of the prose theater represent the salient aspects of the economic fact connected with the art of spectacle. The spread of theatrical culture, and the predominance of German culture, always eager to account for everything and to leave nothing to chance, impose a surveillance over the art of actors and singers: the actor tends to become an instrument (whether in his own hands, as Diderot had proposed, or in the hands of the director, as Gordon Craig would propose on the threshold of contemporary experiences). The Meininger, the company of a small German state which the Duke himself led in productions that were entirely in keeping with culture and art, remain exemplary in Northern Europe; but actors of quite another intrinsic effectiveness are revealed by the Italians (Gustavo Modena, Tommaso Salvini, Eleonora Duse), who place the person of the actor back at the center of theatrical life. Person, let us say: and not in order to forget that from the person as mask, ritualistic and magical as it might be, and also sometimes through a hypocritical convention (another pregnant word), the story of the theater had begun; but here person regains its full meaning: beyond theatrical technicality, the idea is proposed of a creature responsible for the truth of the dramatic fiction, and who discovers it by analogy, suffering and living within the limit of word and gesture.

The Romantic era thus closed, after a century of tumultuous proposals: the second half of the nineteenth century brings to an end, with culturalistic encyclopedism, the schools of Verism and Symbolism. Always compelled to proceed by antitheses, it gathers from the heritage of past centuries and from contemporary literary schools, which were precisely battling each other between those two opposing terms, the tendency toward realization (it had once been mimetic realism opposed to the magniloquence of tragedy: it had been the carnivalesque escape from the ethical and religious discipline of a society organized along humanistic lines: in Italy it was a tendency toward the concrete of popular and bourgeois society, which opposed the heroic and exceptional transfigurations of drama set to music: and it was now becoming the documentation of the real, positively accepted as absolute truth) and the tendency toward transfiguration. The history of this twofold experience begins with Hebbel, passes through Ibsen, and concludes with Chekhov: who precisely reveal how Symbolism and realism, transfiguration and realization, poetry and thing are dialectically linked, even in art: a truth that in a craft civilization was very well known, and that had been forgotten amid so many perhaps presumptuous theorizations. In current journalistic reflection, however, it was easy to divide them again, and to pass from the bourgeois theater of Augier and Dumas fils to Zola, and to rediscover a naturalistic component in Italy (Verga), in Germany (Hauptmann), in Russia (beginning with Ostrovsky). Similarly for the other current, whether or not it draped itself in mysticism and aestheticism, between D'Annunzio and Maeterlinck.

X. THE THEATER OF THE CONTEMPORARIES: CONTEMPORANEITY OF THE HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE AND INDICATION OF ITS RELEVANT CHARACTERS. SACRED THEATER REAFFIRMED
RAISES ITS HEAD AGAIN AS THE DEMAND FOR A TOTAL UNDERSTANDING. ALL THE IMPORTANT FACTS OF CONTEMPORARY THEATER IN EVERY COUNTRY ARE LINKED, WHETHER IN AGREEMENT OR IN DISAGREEMENT, TO THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL. SPECTACULAR ORGANIZATION IN RUSSIA AND TEXTUAL ELABORATION IN AMERICA. - Such is the historical landscape of the theater of Europe, and it has certainly been traced in order to track down the terms of its presence among us: many of the forms that once held the field declined, but those that are reborn answer the needs of a present that cannot but accept the responsibilities of the past. The names floating on the tide of the generations that time presumes to submerge indicate the path we travel backwards toward the secret of the creativity of history and of poetry: or rather, to speak more precisely, of creativity in poetry, and, through poetry, in history. The commitment of participation and of knowledge is more immediate in the face of the words of our contemporaries; but also more difficult: because criticism and time have not yet helped to free it from the confused and mediocre solicitations of a reality that, as is its wont, appropriates the truth for itself. We shall indicate some salient aspects of contemporary dramaturgy, and some perspectives that may facilitate the choice between what is destined to live and what is destined to die, among the many voices that usurp the life of today.

One observation that in turn amounts to a summary of the past is this: the theater, in contemporary custom, is gaining in depth what it seems to lose in extension. The experience of Romantic culture has served it not only to abolish the technicistic and formalistic abstraction that could sterilize inventive genius and arrest the commitment of the moral life, but also to seek the true in time, and in the transvaluation of time the eternal. Thus, through the actuality of history, those attentions to the religious life that the Encyclopedism had disdained and that immanentism had attempted to reabsorb into itself have become active once more. It is no longer a matter of establishing two parallel lines of sacred theater and profane theater; but of observing the re-emergence of religious feeling even through the presumption of an absolute human dominion over reality. In this sense, if religiosity was perceived from proto-Romanticism onward (and the great Alfieri had concluded his work with the religious dramas of Saul and Abel), now it proves itself once more capable of pervading even thick zones of historical drama and realistic drama, more in one part and less elsewhere. The Russian theater of the nineteenth century already demonstrated this: Russian literature maintained itself in a spiritualistic insistence against positivism and especially French realism, until the new century saw it, through the overwhelming weight of politics, assume the scientific immanentism that the other peoples of Europe were abandoning. Religious anxiety pervaded not only the historicism of Pushkin, but the very realism of Gogol; and it takes concrete form, through Ostrovsky's The Storm, which symbolizes the apocalyptic horror of a final judgment, in Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness. And one can speak of a religious insistence where the veristic theater, struggling within its closed circle, grazes the limits of transcendence; and when Ibsen's poetics descends there again, that world which believed itself sufficient unto itself actually detaches itself, theleaves ambitions to sink, and delivers souls naked to judgment. More explicit, but less profound, is the religious preoccupation in the theater of François de Curel, who, educated in scientific research and having passed through the experience of Antoine's Théâtre libre (a program of spectacular totality, on the canons of the most rigorous documentarism) and echoing social preoccupations, comes to pose the metaphysical problems dramatically, without however resolving them. The so-called Knights of the Spirit, in Italy (a mention not devoid of officious irony) gather such preoccupations, and the theater variously presents them again (Fogazzaro, Bracco, Butti). These were, however, uncertain expectations, and inclined to make a drama out of that very uncertainty; until the actuality of a total religious meditation was proposed, and with magnanimous confidence allowed to come to pass, by Paul Claudel, who from the last years of the nineteenth century dominates the twilight of the now old culture and invades the new. In him not only is the heritage of the sacred theater made current again, but everything becomes sacred representation, even the comedy of manners (L'Echange, 1893) and the historical comedy (L'Otage, 1911), and the baroque comedy of adventure (Le soulier de satin, 1914-24, performed in 1943), while the explicitly religious theme (L'Annonce faite à Marie, 1912) is projected onto vast zones of historical life and of moral and social life.

At this point it is evident, and in France before elsewhere, owing to the solicitations of the poetic word and the vast movement of religious renewal, that there is a necessity for a new conception of the theater, and for a scenic organization answering to it. Jacques Copeau (1878-1949) became the interpreter of this exigency, he too having passed through Antoine's realistic conception, from which he learned the commitment to concreteness, which can become coherence and an appeal to transcendence; but moved likewise by demands of literary culture to oppose the dominion that both the veristic dogma and the exclusivity of the mere craftsmen exercised over the French stage. The restoration of aesthetic values could also obey the aestheticizing wave that in Italy, for example, coincided with the so-called "theater of poetry"; but he aims at a total establishment of perennial values; and his program is no less of truth and morality than of beauty. To promote it he composes works for the theater, gives life to the Vieux Colombier, which overturns all the customs of theatrical architecture, reduces the spectacular element, which favors dissipation and distraction, and promotes a symbolistic simplification of staging and direction, instructs the actors through a confraternal discipline. The efficacy of this program and of this example is decisive in the contemporary theater; and his disciples prolong especially in France (Jouvet) and in Italy (Costa) his technique and his inspiration. With Henry Ghéon (1875-1943) the religious current becomes a popular fact, texts of ready suggestion and of the simplest meditation multiply, and companies of parishes, of colleges, of schools: theaters are also formed for the boys scouts (Chanceret).

It is not difficult to verify in this religious revival a decisive fact for the new orientations of the theater, everywhere in the world: because by now it is impossible to attend to an inquiry pursued by isolated national circles, if ever in Europe the case of an incommunicability of national expressions had truly occurred. Equally important will be to reconnect to it, by consent and by dissent, all the important facts of dramatic literature, of organization, of direction, of historical reflection itself around the theater, naturally linked to the investigation of the primordial impulse that promoted the renewal or offered it the most evident occasions. The Spanish theater attended to this, though uncertain between the naturalistic and folkloric animation of García Lorca and the poetic effusion of Martínez Sierra; and rich in a tradition that revives the many contemporary experiences, from Benavente and the Quintero brothers, through Unamuno, to the two named and to Alberti; the English theater (almost to react against the dissolution proposed by the sarcastic and highly cerebral, but inventor of perfect scenic machines, G. B. Shaw) with the work of the American T. S. Eliot (Murder in the Cathedral, 1935) and of Christopher Fry: while the French theater gravitated more explicitly around it, whether in the apologetic and reflective continuations of Marcel and Mauriac, or in the bewildered crepuscular and intimist phase of the armistice (Vildrac, Bourdet; nor is the mythological theater of Giraudoux extraneous to this withdrawal), or in the many-souled experimentation of Jean Cocteau, or in the deliberate and arrogant negation of the existentialist Sartre, in the second armistice, which in part also links back, even through political reaction, to German expressionism. Indeed, in every country of Europe and America, observing these events and these forms led to modifying a development that within certain limits presumes to be autonomous (nor do we claim here anything other than to offer some points of reference and a few more valid perspectives). In the Scandinavian theater, for example, rich in the great tradition of Ibsen, dramaturgy seems to unfold more or less independently, linking itself to the violently negating work of Strindberg; but the Norwegians Helge Krog and Nordahl Grieg reflect emotions and speak a language more widely shared. The two countries of Europe where the crisis has been most acutely suffered are Germany and Italy. In the one, the defeat of the first war comes to give actuality of resonance and urgency to the innovating and revolutionary current that reacted to the restless presumption of Wilhelmine manners; equally and more important will nevertheless be to recall that the German cultural primacy of the nineteenth century had already attempted everything possible, and accustomed critical literature to avail itself of every suggestion, from whatever side it came: expressionism, which is the most imposing phenomenon, in the theater, of the years of the armistice, has connections with the figurative arts, from which it takes its name (a reaction to French impressionism, which submerged images in a luminous atmosphere, with the native gladness of a new discovery of created nature, and a proposal of a new evidence assigned to things and of an invading and obsessive corporeity assigned to creatures), accumulates revolutionary ferment, decomposes the mechanism of the individual or disperses it in the mass. Brecht, Kaiser, Toller are the names most frequently remembered of a large host that goes from Reinhard Sorge to Fritz von Unruh; and which concludes and transfigures itself in the poetry of Franz Werfel, destined to open himself to the religious message; and the preeminent director, in contrast to the electicism of Max Reinhardt, who attempted the expressive modes of direction and of scenic organization, and almost fixed the rules for those open-air performances, widespread throughout the world, which avail themselves of the suggestion of setting and of historical memories, was Erwin Piscator, opposed to that humanistic liberation of the actor which was the Italian message. And precisely in Italy, with a clarity perhaps unassuming, but eloquent and conscious even in the acceptance of limits, these experiences are easily summed up. The work of Luigi Pirandello must be observed not so much in its dialectical responsibilities, which are scanty, and moreover introduced as lines of a dialogue, beyond which the creature lives even only through its sorrow and its pity, but in the denunciation that he proposes, with desolate insistence, of a theatre and of a social custom devoid of valid justifications, resting on habit: thus summing up the last demands of verist theatre and going beyond the often vain and ambitious parenthesis, with its pseudo-historical preciousness, of poetic theatre. He himself proposed a final fideistic and poetic solution, in the "myths"; and it was the path, already opened, and frequented with far greater awareness, by religious theatre: it served, in the meantime, to denounce the provisionality of the invasive and corporeal solutions of expressionism, and the mechanicalness of existentialist proposals, and to abolish many of the traditional superstructures; and to propose to the word and to moral life the necessity of ultimate decisions pronounced without the aid of rhetoric.

To the east and to the west of this Europe which thus closes the cycle of romantic culture and perhaps inaugurates a culture of more ready and profound moral responsibility, a language that calls for the co-responsibility of all men and the total commitment of man to the word, almost a "theatre of the world," as the Spanish dramatist said, after the merely geographical dominion of the earth was achieved, where norms and customs subsist only to be surpassed, a benign and laborious occasion for a rediscovery of the soul, Soviet theatre and American theatre seem to have divided between themselves the task of textual organization. Already at the turn of the century Russia had witnessed the work of Nemirovich-Danchenko and of Stanislavsky and the founding (1898) of the Moscow Art Theatre: it was, the theatre, perhaps the only form of shared life that the imperial government allowed to choose its own proposals and formulate responses with a certain freedom of initiative. With the Revolution not only did organizational assistance multiply, with thousands of theatres springing up everywhere, in every articulation of the new society and in all the languages of the peoples of the Union, but the most diverse directorial experiments were attempted, still along the lines of Stanislavsky, who never rigidified in his early verism, indeed promoted the coloristic and choreographic experiments, which achieved European fame through the Russian ballets, and also welcomed symbolism and constructivism of the various tendencies. Meyerhold, Tairov, Akimov, Vakhtangov indicate the most acute and mobile attentions of contemporary Russian theatre: where the fact of interpretation as re-creation almost always goes beyond textual deepening. And among the authors of theatre we shall name, around Gorky, who accompanies it from pre-revolutionary times to the revolution, Vsevolod Ivanov, Bulgakov, and a typical figure of "producer," a function which in such a theatre necessarily comes to replace the author, Reuben Simonov.

As for America, and without excluding the multiplicity of organizational and directorial experiments, which leave no program untried, from industrial theatre to the Nationwide Theatre, from university and youth theatre to touring companies, for a humanistic and romantic tradition that reasserts the word at the center of human participations, the author maintains his preeminence: Eugene O'Neill, who likewise arrives at a religious reconciliation, after many divergent experiments (costumistic, psychoanalytic, mythographic), is the best known and most followed of a very numerous host, where the names of Howard, of Sherwood, of Rice, of Anderson appear preeminent: to conclude, provisionally, with the work most observed in Italy, and certainly most ready to propose a message that avails itself of many occasions of European history and of American life to dispose man anew at the margins of an otherworldly expectation: Thornton Wilder. - See plates CXXXII-CXXXV.

Mario Apollonio