Book Description

"The classical view, said Gilbert Murray, is "the view of a man whose training and tastes lead him to regard literature as one, and the great Greek and Roman writers as central forces in it." Now, though justice may have been done to Greek and Roman drama itself, many of us have only the haziest notion how the tradition continued. In performance it is possible that there was an unbroken tradition from ancient days to the commedia dell'arte in the sixteenth century. The commedia in turn laid the basis for modern comedy. Yet the dramas enacted by the Italian comedians remain unknown because they survived only in unreadable scenarios. For the present volume Leon Katz has made a conjectural reconstruction of the complete dialogue of one such scenario. While the players maintained the classical tradition before a popular audience, the writers revived Roman comedy for a courtly audience. Machiavelli's Mandrake is the crowning achievement of the revival. There was no Chinese wall between the popular and courtly traditions. Such a writer as Beolco belongs to both, and later the mingling of elements will be a matter of controversy. The greatest of the feuds was between Goldoni and Gozzi in the eighteenth century. The paradox is that, in retrospect, Gozzi, who championed the commedia, seems the more "literary" and "academic," while Goldoni, the supposed reformer, if not abolisher, of the commedia, can plausibly be presented by modern scholars as its restorer... The question: What is Theatre? arises at this point, and the best purpose this collection can serve is to make the reader ask such elemental questions. As in the engravings of Callot, we find in these texts the essence of dramatic art." --