Barbarians at the Gates: The Invasive Discourse of Medieval Performance in Lope's Arte nuevo

Then saw I Rome, invincible to the valiant men, that day overcome with loiterers. Rome, which could never be won by the Carthaginians, is now won by Jesters, Players and Vagabonds: Rome, which triumphed over all the Realms is now vanquished by such idle persons: Finally I saw Rome, which in times past gave laws to the Barbarians, now become the slave of fools.

—I.G., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors ¹

Villainous Actors; Barbarous Theatre

Figure 1.

Title page of Lope de Vega’s Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (Madrid: Viuda de Alonso Martin, 1621). Courtesy of Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, University of Southern California.

In his now famous advice to the players, Hamlet admonishes the clowns of his acting troupe not to add more to the text than its author intended, saying that such improvisation is “villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.” ² As an attack on one of the more common performative practices of his actors, his complaints demonstrate the persistent antagonism between literary and theatrical approaches to dramatic works, a conflict that often manifests itself in a contempt for the performer who always seems intent on subverting—if not in fact destroying—the “text,” and who thus cannot be entirely trusted with something so important as literary artifacts. Why is the performer the “villain” of this particular melodrama? The term “villain,” of course, meant something slightly different to Shakespeare than it does to us today, although our current usage obviously grew out of its original meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary delineates its semantic evolution from a term originally referring to a “low-born base-minded rustic” (not unlike the Spanish villano) into “a man naturally disposed to base or criminal actions.” ³ What began as a marker of social caste has become over the course of several hundred years a marker of anti-social or bad behavior; Hamlet considers the performers “villainous” not because he regards their treatment of the dramatic text as some kind of crime per se, but because he suggests they represent a “rustic” approach to the stage. These “clowns” are not criminals who consciously undermine the literary order; rather, they are buffoons who do not understand their rightful place within that order. His pejorative adjective insinuates that they cannot be trusted precisely because they come from the intellectual rabble of society, and are thus bound to betray the text because they understand nothing of the higher values of “art” and “literature.” Inscribed within Hamlet’s term “villainous” is the age-old clash between low culture and high culture, and more importantly—as we will soon see—between the pre-modern world of medieval actors and the “renewed,” early modern world of Renaissance authors.

The term “barbarous” functions in much the same way in Lope de Vega’s Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, where the author—like Sir Philip Sidney in The Defense of Poetry—seeks to justify the literature of his own society by tying it, in part, to the authority of the classical world. ⁴ Responding to critics who had faulted his apparent lack of intellectual rigor, Lope attempts to reconcile his extremely popular theatre with the humanist philosophies which then seemed to be the measure of all things. Because the word “barbarous” was historically and etymologically connected to the Goths, Franks, and Huns who invaded the “literate” classical civilization, establishing in its place the “illiterate” culture that Renaissance humanism later sought to supplant, it cannot be understood without its pejorative connection to medieval society. Similarly, in the context of a dramatic theory like Lope’s, bent on positing Renaissance theatre as the renewed continuation of the lost, classical, literary drama, “barbarous” cannot be understood without its pejorative connection to medieval popular performance. Specifically, the adjective “barbarous” cannot be disassociated from the mimes, jongleurs, scôps, and minstrels who—long after the fall of Rome and its classical drama—continued to work their performing arts right up to the moment when...