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The Rise of Secular Drama in the Renaissance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Leicester Bradner
Leicester Bradner*
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Extract

The revival of the drama was not one of the accomplishments of the Renaissance. This revival had already taken place during the later Middle Ages, and by the twelfth century the plays connected with the festivals of the church had reached a considerable degree of complexity and dramatic effect. By the end of the fourteenth century the cycles of Biblical plays were well established, and in the fifteenth century they reached their greatest development. The rise of the moralities—those plays in which personified virtues and vices struggle for the possession of man's soul—also took place in the later Middle Ages, although the earliest references to them go back no further than the last quarter of the fourteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 3 , 1956 , pp. 7 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1956

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References

1 For Antichrist see Chambers, E. K., The Medieval Stage (Oxford, 1903), ii, 62.Google Scholar For the medieval background in general see also Young, K., Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford, 1933)Google Scholar; Craig, H., English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1955)Google Scholar; Frank, G., The Medieval French Drama (Oxford, 1954)Google Scholar; and Apollonio, M., Storia del teatro italiano (Florence, 1943).Google Scholar Almost nothing seems to be preserved of medieval Spanish drama. For this whole field, and for the early Renaissance also, W. Creizenach's monumental Geschichte des neuren Dramas (Halle, 1893-1903) is still worth consulting.

2 Recent scholarship on the use of pageant wagons suggests that they may often have been backed up to a wall, with the audience on three sides instead of four.

3 In the very late medieval Mystère du vieil Testament there are plays on a great many Biblical characters, but this was not true of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

4 For an account of the humanistic Latin drama see Creizenach's Geschichte des neueren Dramas and P. Van Tieghem's Litterature latine de la Renaissance (Paris, 1944).

5 The best accounts of Italian Renaissance drama in English are found in Symonds, J. A.' Renaissance in Italy (London, 1875)Google Scholar and Charlton, H. B.'s Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy (Manchester, 1946).Google Scholar

6 The only comprehensive account of these tragedies is found in Boas, F. S., University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1914).Google Scholar

7 See Crawford, J. P. W., Spanish Drama before Lope de Vega (Philadelphia, 1937).Google Scholar