A Thousand Years Ago
A Romance of the Orient
9781465629883
102 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The author, in his preface, has explained the pedigree of “A Thousand Years Ago.” It is the chief advantage of long pedigrees that they allure us from the contemplation of the present to the investigation of the past; and, for students of dramatic literature, perhaps the most important feature of this present play is that the tracing of its ancestry leads us back to one of the most interesting periods in the history of the theatre. In his quotations from John Addington Symonds, the great English authority on the Renaissance in Italy, Mr. MacKaye has already set before us the main features of the Commedia dell’ Arte Improvisata, which flourished in Italy for several centuries; but a few additional notes may be appended for the benefit of those who wish to extend their study of this type of drama. Two books upon the subject are readily accessible and may be strongly recommended. One of these is the “Histoire du Théatre Italien” by Louis Riccoboni, and the other is a volume entitled “Masques et Bouffons” by Maurice Sand, the son of Georges Sand, the famous novelist. Both of these books contain interesting illustrations of the stock characters in Italian comedy; and the pictures in “Masques el Bouffons” are reproduced in colors. The Commedia dell’ Arte attained its climax about the year 1600, but its career was extended well along into the eighteenth century by the interested activity of the very fertile and very popular playwright, Carlo Gozzi. The essential feature of this type of drama was that the lines were improvised by the actors as they worked their way through the scenes of an intrigue which had been carefully plotted in advance. Throughout the seventeenth century in Italy, the general public showed little patience with the Commedia Erudita (the phrase may be translated into contemporary slang as “High-brow drama”), in which the lines were written out by a man of letters and repeated by the actors parrotwise. Such plays, though they might have been composed by poets as eminent as Torquato Tasso, were condemned by the populace because they lacked what seemed the essential element of spontaneity. It will not be difficult for us to understand the attitude of the Italian public toward this distinction, if we apply a similar test to our own contemporary art of after-dinner speaking. We demand of our after-dinner speakers that they shall cull their phrases as they go along, and we respond with dulness to a speech that has been evidently written out and learned by rote. The president of one of our great American universities has been quoted as saying that any professor who writes and learns a lecture is merely insulting the printing-press; there can be no advantage in speaking on a subject unless the speaking be spontaneous: and this was the attitude of the old Italian public toward the actors that addressed it from the stage. A single set sufficed for most of the improvised Italian comedies. This set represented a public square in an Italian town, a meeting-point of several streets; and the houses of the leading characters were solidly built with doors and windows fronting on the square. With the action set in such a public place, the playwright could experience no embarrassment in motivating his entrances and exits; any characters could meet at any time in the neutral ground of the stage; and the practicable doors and windows of the surrounding houses could be employed by acrobatic actors in the exhibition of exciting scenes of elopement or of robbery. One of the most definitive features of the Commedia dell’ Arte was the fact that, though the plays presented differed greatly from each other in subject-matter and in plot, they invariably employed the same set of characters.
