THEATRE. — I. DEFINITIONS: ELEMENTS OF THEATRICAL ART. THE COMPONENTS OF THE SPECTACLE. RITUAL. MIME. DRAMA.
Theatre signifies a spectacle: something seen, and something arranged for others to see; and it also signifies the place where the spectacle is arranged so that people may gather there. In the memory associated with the word, each of the elements that belong to it now rises to prominence and now recedes; and a history of the theatre would be impossible without taking into account this constant shifting of proportions and elements: sometimes only the action is remembered, sometimes only the word. In current metaphor, the theatre is a play-like spectacle: the dramatic poem was theatre, with literary dramaturgy prevailing, and the musical language of opera, and the choreographic art; even the perspective of trees and foliage in Italian-style gardens was called theatre, even when empty, even when not intended for the stage, as if it were part of the pleasures of memory to imagine the pure image, without the aid of words, but stimulated by the tableau. And the theatrical fact had such efficacy in the imagination and in custom that in certain epochs everything became a spectacle, everything was arranged and remembered according to the patterns of that composite art: if the “book” had been the most illustrious and frequented metaphor of medieval culture, the Baroque age made excessive use of the metaphor of “theatre”: in *The Great Theatre of the World* by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, the World itself is summoned by the author to stage the spectacle.
The word is not without suspicion among moderns, whether they are zealous advocates of the pure image of poetry or merely heirs to the rigorism of certain strata of nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie (or to the Puritan condemnation of Victorian England); but, by contaminating art and science, an “anatomical theatre” was said of university halls arranged for dissection, so that it could be clearly visible from every point.
THEATRES — Tree of illustrious men of the Order. At its feet: St. Cajetan of Thiene with Gian Pietro Carafa (Paul IV) and Bonifacio De’ Colli with Paolo Consiglieri, co-founders. Engraving from the second half of the 17th century, preserved in the Archive of S. Andrea della Valle — Rome.
Meanwhile, these summary indications allow us to fix the elements of what, in scholastic terms, might be called “theatrical art”: the technique of theatrical spectacle. And just as every art entails a reflective justification and a norm, theatrical art has its theory and its history. The theory is briefly discussed (as is everything kept in view: theory and theatre are words that descend from the same etymon); but a more extended history will assist us.
A fireworks display is called a spectacle, and so is a beautiful landscape, especially when viewed at a particular time of day; these are amplifications foreign to our present concern. Not everything witnessed is theatre, though theatre is never entirely absent from such metaphors: indeed, a habit of reflection is outlined through theatre, and an emotional attitude has become habitual within II. And if this or that building used for spectacle is called theatre — the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens or La Scala in Milan — modern custom has often demanded an active collaboration from the suggestive power of places and monuments, the intercolumnation of the Parthenon or the courtyard of the Palazzo Aspetti: symbolism and intimacy have often doubled and transformed one another to suggest reducing, or even abolishing, the most striking scenography, or any proscenium other than the ideal one of a people united in listening. And in epochs of more inventive and daring culture, when literature sought ways to become more immediately active among the people, a literary genre was called theatre: Elizabethan theatre in England or Romantic theatre in Germany, where the creative word of poets passed onto the stage and shaped, whether weakly or robustly, always ephemeral forms of scenic tradition; yet it resounded far beyond, opening a far vaster drama of human history.
Essential to theatre, therefore, is not the place, though it requires a place where people may gather; nor is it the word, understood in its most common semantic sense, as crystallized and learned in the formal and historical codifications of literature, though something is always said, even in silence, and the word remains the densest and most fruitful of expressive and communicative forms. What is essential is the transmission of the proposal that an invisible author of a theatrical image — whether myth or mime — makes to a concretely gathered public, through the mediation of artists who embody it in action.
Author, actors, public. These are the essential elements; and from their varied encounter — now one, now another prevailing, with the third always present and decisively corporeal in its reaction — arise the countless possibilities of theatre and the spectrum of different experiences. It is further observed that the dramatic author, having made his proposal, disappears; and if criticism, tracing backward through tradition or more readily consulting the text — which in the substance marked by the word reveals the most and the best of its soul — can identify him, if it can retrace the story of a fable, his own, which once it leaves his mind undergoes such a different fate, it remains true that the fable no longer belongs to the author. As it descends to the public, the presences acquired along the way: 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 vanishes behind the veil of his image, and one might say that the public comes to life: it recognizes itself, or at least learns to discern which zones of its memory open most widely, which strings of its sensibility vibrate most deeply. It decides; and it is called satisfied, unsatisfied, sated: but it always believes it is receiving confirmation of itself, of its sentiment, of what suffices for II. The *multorum capitum belua*, as it was called by those who did not perceive the profound moral life of the convergence of many upon the message of the word (or rather, of the parabola: for the fable is the metaphor of a new being, a truth that comes into being), may ignore what is truly decided in theatre: whether to remain in the torpor of a satisfied sensual inertia, or to live indeed — which means to be transfigured by the word.
Thus the author is operatively hidden, and the public is corporeally present, acting as the chorus to the fable; but the interpreters, the intermediaries, are the actors. At the centre and pivot of theatrical life is the person of the actor; for mimetic suggestion is first exercised within him; and in order for it to be effective for many, it falls to him to experience it in himself, to suffer it (and if capable, to redeem it). Hence the importance of theatre not only in poetics, but in a moral doctrine of the person: because, given this mimetic condition of theatrical art, in which the matter of art is a human creature, the actor may feign himself to be other than he is, but in reality — as always happens in poetry — he rediscovers the authentic within the veil of fiction, thus fulfilling the fable, or else he renounces and is steeped in it, lending himself obscenely to the senses and to falsehood. Rediscovery of the person: such is the justification of art and the touchstone of the aesthetic — and therefore moral — validity of a theatrical work, by reason of this authentic presence of the human being who listens and communicates with his whole self, bending his entire body to expression in the instantaneity of scenic action and the concentric attention of the many, in the commotion and transvaluation of the chorus intent, aware, and responsible even when silent. And the Latins called the theatrical mask *persona*, the false face upon the true face: such is the fortune of a word.
Mimetic art, then. If the performance becomes an end in itself, rather than the necessary and insufficient complement to the rediscovery of the person and the choral transvaluation, the theatre will be nothing more than exhibition and dissipation: vices that distort it, upon which moralists have always focused their concerns. And yet the word “mine” tells only one chapter—albeit a vast one—of the theatrical: when, precisely to contradict that rediscovery and that transvaluation, the fable stiffens and assumes a posture.
Comically, when the character isolates and closes in upon itself, becomes fixed, when the person reverts to mask and fiction encrusts itself upon the living substance of man. At the opposite extreme from mime stands ritual; through which the fable unfolds along a directive of transfiguration and transvaluation that is not merely moral, but religious, and explicitly so, indeed so arranged as to become the performance of a tribute, officiated before the Divinity, a liturgy. Between mime and ritual lies drama: this word, which means “work,” assumes the stage action when it is observed not in the cinetism of gesticulation, but in the dynamics of a force in motion; and drama traces its parabola from the servitude of practical relationship to the freedom of moral life.
II. PARATHEATRICAL FORMS: RITES AND MIMES OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLES. POPULAR SPECTACLES. DANCE. PROCESSIONS. PUPPETS. — Thus observed in its elements, the theatre presupposes such dignity and awareness as to justify its ambition—so often reiterated through the centuries—to be the artistic work par excellence, the poetic synthesis that reflects the whole history of man and predisposes his action; but where one of the constituent elements prevails over the others, the same intrusiveness reflects a decline and fossilization of custom. In this section, we shall indicate certain forms precisely where balance is disturbed, and above all those where the chorus, having rejected the poet’s intervention, or that of the liturgists intent on making a ritual of the spectacle, overflows to become itself—orgiastically—the actor, introducing extemporaneous paraphrases or variations on the prepared theme and thus substituting itself for the author: the three elements of the synthesis fused into one. Such forms were observed everywhere with great interest; and often considered as the origin of the most complex and individualized works: both because every historical and encyclopedic understanding of human reality tends to adopt the perspective of reception rather than suggestion, of response rather than proposal—in a word, of the chorus rather than the author, and this was the method by which Aristotle, the first and most profound historian and theorist of dramaturgy, viewed Greek theatre; and because these studies have recently gained momentum beginning with Romantic culture, which readily proceeded from the premise not only of the preservation but of the exclusive popular genesis of all poetic forms.
In reality, tradition means preservation and transmission; and a text, a “libretto,” an original indication—even if not fixed in written form—must always be posited at the origins of a form that, repeated over centuries and millennia and gradually losing its primordial meaning, has now become so crystallized in habit as to appear innate.
The social life of primitive peoples is far more circumspect, attentive, and bound to traditional forms than the social life of groups organized with greater complexity of relationships (between “primitive” and “evolved,” as concerns our subject, no other proportion is seen than this: excluding any idea of progress, and renouncing—since too often contradicted—the hypothesis that assigns a fixed time and historical necessity to the process of organization). The primitive social group willingly arranges practical necessity, emotional reflection, and religious propitiation on the same plane of collective participation; hence the tribe, before setting out on the hunt of a dangerous beast, attends and participates in the hunting rite; where men masked as hunters and others as prey anticipate reality, render it true in the actuality of mimetic fiction, before it occurs; and hence, even in far more complex societies, the military parade precedes battle as a warrior’s rite. Whether it comes before or after, whether it is a “libretto” of what is to be done or a “document” of what has been done, the text naturally splits into poetry and stage directions (it is evident that not all words put into the characters’ mouths are poetry: the text also “teaches” the words; and not all scenographic and mimetic indications are stage directions: even a gesture can be highly significant, provided it reveals the true essence of the human person temporarily entrusted to it). A “book of ceremonies” from the court of Byzantium, where ritualism—with its crystallized language—always superimposed itself upon the immediate exigencies of courtly and political society, is entirely stage direction; but the Paleolithic cave paintings of southwestern Europe, which likely reflect subjects already filtered through a choreutic interpretation (not the hunt as it unfolds in reality’s unpredictable accidents, but the hunt configured and arranged and summarized mimetically), are masterpieces of such power that stage direction vanishes before poetry. We shall not dwell on these rites and myths of primitive peoples, which can be adequately studied (and have been) within the scope of ethnological science: we merely wish to draw attention to their connections with the theatre, and to emphasize, among the most frequent occasions, those linked to the changing of the seasons and those concerned with death. The story of the year, allegorized (it is evident that spectacle is always a form of allegory; as indeed art is always a form of “malafiora”), is composed of a succession of deaths and resurrections; or rather: in establishing the integral relationship—not merely practical but fully human—between man and the year, the poets of primitive liturgies humanize the year in its seasons, and naturalize man: the year, arboreal life, the light of the sun, declines, disappears, and is reborn; and so too does human life. The festivals linked to the cycle of the seasons always maintain this allusive relationship; they evoke the underworld when they reenact the sun’s decline toward the winter solstice and the demons of the earth; and they hymn the upper world when the sun reaches the peak of its arc. Among such seasonal festivals, the one that has most enduringly survived among us is Carnival: which, with its masquerades, may give an idea of what the popular celebration of the year’s rite was like, with its alternating incantations and hymns. Even more profound are the rites of the dead: because, once the body is returned to the earth—perhaps arranged in the fetal position within the funerary urn, or the ashes dispersed after the purification rite of the pyre—death masks preserved a tangible indication of the survival of the soul: either by enchanting it, wandering in the fixity of the features it bore in life, or by summoning the survivors’ pity for its human treasure and its sins, its sufferings and its hopes.
Poetry continually sustains and destroys, in search of a more deeply moved and uplifted participation of the whole being, which it itself proposes; yet language preserves the words of a bygone time. Thus popular representations recall old themes and ancient myths, and they do not do this out of archaizing dilettantism. The masks of Art, the most observed, most disciplined, and most crystallized form of popular myth, preserve the memory of the frequent bestial disguises found everywhere and documented throughout the Indo-European territory during carnival festivities. Yet the burlesque processions of ancient Attica, especially during the vintage festivals, recalled them no differently.
The songs of Christmas Eve belong to the traditional rites of the winter solstice, and the fires of St. John’s Eve to the rites of the summer solstice; games and processions presuppose them even when they no longer remember them. Yet in this cursory overview, alongside ritual survivals we must also place properly dramaturgical survivals: sacred dramas that recur everywhere, annually or at longer intervals (from Sordevolo to Oberammergau), with a scrupulously preserved libretto or with continuous alterations; and tableau processions, from Sicily to Flanders, which recall, in the summary of the living picture carried through the village—often on a cart—the more elaborate representation of ancient themes. Visual art is never entirely alien to this broader theatrical integration, which regards it as the crystallization of a story that would more naturally unfold as drama, making explicit the intervention of the poet and the chorus.
Always seeking the relations of the various expressive forms to that fundamental one, whether explicit or implicit, of the theater, one may observe how dance constitutes a projection and an isolation of a moment and a figure essential to dramatic synthesis: the actor. A dance is always “figurative dance,” establishing a relationship between the dancer’s person and a subject; and insofar as it is observed, it is public: here is the chorus of spectators, whether they remain motionless or, as often happens in popular festivities, repeat the dancer’s mimetic motif, thus restoring dramatic tension. Sacred dance mimics the relationship between the faithful and the divinity, or, more precisely (setting aside pathological or profane forms that do not concern us here), expresses the preliminary sensible aspects of the encounter; and even when reduced to its most restrained and sober form, as in Christian ritual, it remains intrinsic to liturgy. Secular dance can extend to all subjects, as shown by dance as a theatrical art, whether condensed into the closed rhythm of a choreographic and musical indication, such as classical ballet with its rigorous repertoire of sometimes acrobatic and gymnastic figures rather than purely choreographic ones, or stretched to mime a “part” of a comedy or drama. Yet the most widespread and celebrated themes, most readily understood and repeated by the chorus, are the theme of love (the invitation, the refusal, the offering—figures frequent in so-called folk dances and more or less implicit even in social dance) and the theme of war.
The most frequent and elementary collective projection of dance is the procession: it is called a procession when its intention is more explicitly liturgical. In this case, the chorus ceases to watch the mimetic modulations of the actors and becomes an actor itself; or, if it arranges itself processional behind a mimetic action, it underscores the actor’s subject with its movement and often with words and acts (as in the Roman funeral rite: a mime wearing a mask reproducing the deceased’s features repeated the dead person’s most familiar gestures, while lamentations deplored the irreparable loss; the funeral expressed, through clothing and solemn demeanor, the memory of the dead and the sense of loss). Even a political procession, a “demonstration,” contains in nuce a dramatic action that can immediately turn into political or military action and can provide a choral and mimetic commentary on an orator’s speech. Remaining to be studied are certain forms of negative and retroverted expression that occur, perhaps unexpectedly, for those who order and tolerate them, when a group is forced into collective order without that order being attributed any purpose, meaning, or shared emotion transcending practical necessity: a school class, for example, moving in a disciplined line while drained of the lively animation of its usual life; or a queue waiting at a counter or shop. Such indications serve to highlight the gap between the naturalness with which the first groups express their coexistence and the uncertainty with which modern society seeks—and fails—to justify itself at every moment. In such cases, aesthetic beauty is an index of fullness of life, while ugliness betrays absence, incompleteness, and fracture.
As for puppets, it suffices to note that they are the cipher and projection of mimetic expression: they presuppose, as always with human figures condensed into plastic form, the relationship—established in memory—between the figure and living reality. The voice that doubles their movements and accompanies their actions helps to define this relationship. Puppets are most frequent where the authentic synthesis of theater is most widespread and understood; they demand either a childlike surrender to illusion or an attitude that can ironically perceive a distance.
**III. GREEK THEATRE: ITS ORIGINS. DITHYRAMBIC DRAMA. AESCHYLUS. SOPHOCLES. EURIPIDES. DECLINE OF TRAGEDY. ANCIENT COMEDY: ARISTOPHANES. MIDDLE AND NEW COMEDY: MENANDER. MIME.**
The Greek mind did not favour historical perspective but rather a mythological one; as if the excellence it pursued were either the perfection of nature itself or a gift from a benign deity. Even the evolution of tragedy was conceived within the Hellenic—indeed, the Athenian—circle. In reality, however, the rites and mimetic performances observed everywhere, nurtured by propitious occasions and growing in cultural richness, evolved into more autonomous forms of spectacle. Nor can one exclude the possibility that Greek performances, while drawing on mythologies and liturgies common to all Indo-European peoples, may also have been stimulated by interactions with other forms of spectacle prevalent in the eastern Mediterranean.
Yet a distinctive trait of Hellenism was its aim to make the participant in the rite aware of what he must and can do, to liberate him and exalt him—not to submerge the human element or reduce the faithful to a passive automatism of gestures, surrendering them inert and impersonal to their fate. Such was the active content of the mystery cults, but above all within the sphere of the religion of Dionysus, or at the confluence of ancient theological reflection and the new orgiastic myth and rite, this truth became common property, indeed the most richly shared experience. Dionysus, the hero-god, in his passion, death, and resurrection—beyond the fable of every naturalistic mythology, which celebrates the eternal renewal of earthly life—already foreshadowed, to a certain extent, deeper truths; and the dithyramb, the choral hymn in honour of Dionysus celebrating his deeds and those of heroes, remained the nucleus of Greek tragedy.
Aristotle speaks of an improvisational process whereby the coryphaeus, becoming a character in the fervour of liturgical—indeed, orgiastic—recollection, detached himself from the chorus. Modern antiquarian research, while acknowledging that the dithyrambic rite remained central to Athenian tragedy—always and only performed during the solemn civic festivals dedicated to Dionysus—notes that other cults and customs converged upon it: notably the funeral rites practised among the Peloponnesians (though the origins of the Dionysian cult were Thracian), which commemorated illustrious dead by moulding their likeness in masks and miming their words and gestures. This was an ancient custom, widespread in many places, even among the Romans, who kept portraits of the deceased in their lararia; and underlying it, though attenuated by a more active religious consciousness, was the belief that it was advisable for the living to ward off the envy of the dead by enchanting their wandering souls with a semblance of life.
When these two rites and cults overlapped, one remained a direful exorcism, the other a purification and justification; and it is true that the two opposing modes—the horror of fateful tragedy and the purification of guilt through suffering—coexist within the rich thematic fabric of Hellenic tragedy.
The ancient chronicles are highly uncertain in fixing the stages of development; yet it seems that it was the Athenian Thespis who introduced, alongside the coryphaeus leading the band of fifty choreuts, an actor (the protagonist: the first actor); and Aeschylus who introduced a second (the deuteragonist), both prepared to take on more than one role. It was certainly Pisistratus who, in 534 BC, regulated the Dionysian festivals so as to ensure that tragic rites retained a religious, liturgical, and civic character: the entire city participating in the tragic re-enactment through its contribution, its engagement in the rite, and the readiness—indeed, the vocation—of a people intent upon it, a multitudinous and harmonious chorus gathered around the composed yet noisy and sumptuous performance of the dithyrambic tragedy. The hymns predominated, from the *parodos*, when the chorus made its solemn processional entry into the orchestra (the space around Dionysus’ altar reserved for its evolutions), to the *exodos*, when it departed. Dialogic action unfolded in the intervals between the choral odes, almost as a concrete illustration of the events the chorus was commenting upon: behind the singing chorus, another chorus—silent and multitudinous—of the people, moved emotionally.
Gradually, however, action came to prevail over the chorus, reversing their relationship; the characters became more independent, and the chorus, descending from its original liturgical dignity, took part in the action and became a character in its own right.
Behind the altar of Dionysus, closing off the space of the orchestra, stood the *skene*: originally a "tent" where actors withdrew and changed (the etymology points to a technical necessity more professional than liturgical; the same tradition speaks of Thespis as the head of a company of wandering actors); later it came to mean, in our sense, the "stage"—an architectural element arranged to represent the place where the action was imagined to occur. The audience was seated around the orchestra, facing the altar and the stage. When the theatre’s architecture, first provisional and wooden, was fixed in stone, the result was a vast shell open toward the stage, beneath the open sky.
Every structural, architectural, and scenic element of Greek tragedy is rooted in its liturgical inspiration; and every shift in its animating spirit was reflected in technical modifications to the staging and performance. The masks that covered the actors’ faces and amplified their voices were integral to their oratorical costume—elaborately draped, with high buskins, towering and intricate coiffures. Realistic touches were not lacking, especially in the mute characters, and as one descends from one of the three great tragedians to the next, Aeschylus himself reduced the number of choreuts from fifty to twelve after *The Persians* (490–80 BC), instead populating the orchestra with the retinue of Agamemnon in *The Oresteia*, when the king returns from war to his palace. More important than following the plot through the interplay of
External difficulties serve only to fix from within its evolutionary line: Aeschylus, the patrician of the sacred city of Eleusis, documents in the seven surviving tragedies the religious spirit and civic dignity of the generation of Marathon fighters to which he belonged. He animated tragedy with the inspiration of Dionysian cult and dithyramb, and this with a bold and sorrowful spirit of human piety, with a confident and severe reverence. In the Oresteia (458 BC), which unfolds in three tragedies—Agamemnon, Choephoroe, Eumenides—recounting the fate of the descendants of Atreus amid the beacon 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 austere passion and meditation of incomparable moral strength: the chain of murders halts only before the altar of the divinity that restores and seals justice, and calls vengeance to itself.
In the *Prometheus Bound* (undatable), a long theological monologue of the demiurge who benefits mankind, bound to the crag of Zeus’s overpowering yet fearful dominion, lofty fantasy rises to attempt the destinies of humanity. And in the *Persians* (472 BC), recent civic history, still fresh with blood and victory, is understood as universal history. Aeschylus’s poetic animation is immense, and his genius overpowering.
But Sophocles, not much younger than he, reflects a more balanced spirit in a more modulated art: his humanism seeks a calmer meditation with more pathetic effects in the luminous melancholy with which he surrounds his creatures. Possessed by a power that overwhelms them, his heroes (Ajax, Oedipus) redeem themselves in defeat and are saved in sorrow. Less theological and theogonical than the great creator of tragedy, Sophocles yet touches the imposing themes of human law contrasted with civic law (*Antigone* goes to her death because, while it is just for the city to punish the rebel who has assailed it, it is also just that beyond the pyre the enemy should not live). And in the crystal-clear harmony of choral and monodic song, in the transparency of his splendid words, tragedy soothes horror and rises, as does his *Oedipus at Colonus* (composed by the nonagenarian poet and performed [401 BC] five years after his death), in the shadow of the sacred grove of his native “demos.”
With Euripides the parabola is complete: Athenian civilization tests and shatters itself in Sophistic culture; the austere rigor of ancient sacred meditation recedes, and the dramatic liturgies speak less to the new people. Euripides is the poet of new and declining times, and makes of tragedy a composition more externally varied, more careful in structure, more free in its bonds—ceasing, or nearly so, to be choral tragedy, since the chorus disperses into scenic adventure and, as has been said, becomes a character, ceasing to be the official interpreter of the moral life of the audience. The intervention of a propitious divinity, suspended on a stage device (*deus ex machina*), to resolve the tragic tangle is but a hasty and detached, sometimes ironic, homage to the ancient conception of providential intervention in human affairs. More careful in structure, and freer in technique: dialogue is conceived as mimetic contrast rather than lofty judicial or philosophical debate. The monody readily escapes into song, relieved of the pressures of the plot. The staging becomes lively and spectacular. Tragedy (now almost a musical work, made of dialogues, monodies, and songs) opens onto a life certainly more varied but far less rich, and its deep source grows arid.
Tragedies were performed in a trilogy followed by a satyr play: an interlude of comic mode to relieve tragic tension. The text of Euripides’ *Cyclops* and the mutilated *Trackers* of Sophocles survive. Comedy developed from carnival processions in which, as the seasons changed, men disguised as beasts (the myths of satyrs and centaurs derive from this) paraded through village streets. Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes rendered these old forms topical by inserting them into political satire. Aristophanes’ chorus is a masquerade that usually gives its name to the comedy: *Clouds*, *Wasps*, *Frogs*, *Birds*; and alongside the masquerade, a brief mimetic plot unfolds: names of contemporaries such as Socrates or Cleon are directly implicated. In his final comedy, *Plutus*, he turns to a documen-