Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage 1500-1700 by Bruce R. Smith (review)

Reviews287 subject of the second volume of The Complete Works. It will be followed by four volumes of essays and reviews and two volumes of poetry. EDWARD CALLAN Western Michigan University Bruce R. Smith. Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage 1500-1700. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Pp. xii + 289. $34.00. One of the most significant events in the history of Western civilization occurred in a Roman square in the mid-1480's when, on an open platform five feet high, the students of Pomponius Laetus staged Seneca's Hippolytus . For "However natural the division may seem to us," Bruce R. Smith writes in his Prologue to a pioneering, compelling, and authoritative study of the revival of classical drama in Renaissance England, " 'comic' and 'tragic,' unlike the taboo and the sacred, are not categories of experience that we find in cultures all over the world" (p. 4); they are peculiarly Western, and moreover, when these conceptual means of the human experience were revived some 1500 years after they were first written and performed, the works of Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus, and Terence suffered a sea change that transformed them so as to embrace the accumulated experience of European Christianity. "Sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury playwrights, actors, and audiences may have given classical comedy and classical tragedy increasing sovereignty over how characters speak and how events fall out," Smith continues, "but playwrights, actors, and audiences alike were disposed to understand ancient drama in their own anachronistic terms, even when supposedly 'classical' ideas held sway after the Restoration" (p. 6). No one seems to have paid sufficient heed to the adaptation (as well as the revival) of classical drama as a means of identifying, understanding , and measuring Renaissance attitudes, but that is precisely Smith's aim. What he finds is that the development of Renaissance drama, through classical scripts and precepts, is not linear or progressive but fluctuating and dynamic; and he amends his reading of early printed plays with manuscripts of revived classical dramas, headmasters' and students' notes, and contemporary descriptions of performances. What unfolds is a rich, informative, and memorable account—an essential if previously undervalued chapter in the history of English drama. For one thing, the Renaissance knowledgeably inherited two quite dissimilar theories of drama—Horace's play-as-rhetoric and Aristotle's play-as-object. For Horace, taking his cue from the political works of Cicero and Quintilian's educational treatise, drama is an act of imitado which raises rhetorical questions such as the message—usually one of morality, of the style of speeches, and of the nature of the speakers; for Aristotle, drama is a process imitating an action, often an interior choice, and seeing its consequences in ways which arouse emotion as well as thought in the audience. When the Renaissance scholar Robortello came to read Aristotle with Christian eyes, he translated "choice" into "fault," not unlike the wrongdoing of medieval morality plays, while another 288Comparative Drama translator, Theodore Goulston, interpreted the series of dramatic actions as anticipations of the medieval sense of the wheel of fortune. Both, then, saw man suffering a fall; Dryden, in time, will term this a tragic "flaw." To such moralizing of classical concepts, quite different in their origins, Smith also notes that in adding "admiration" to pity and terror as an outcome of drama the Renaissance added a new feature wholly its own. This is a rather crude attempt to summarize a sophisticated and subtle argument by which Smith traces classical terms etymologically to show how, at the start, Horace and Aristotle were at odds and how the Renaissance , unable or unwilling to develop their differences, tried instead to blend them in a way that would admit later cultural history as well. But this discussion is of immense importance to our understanding of Renaissance drama, and much of Smith's study builds on it. Subsequent chapters of tracing conceptual changes note the awkwardness of translating works of antiquity written for huge amphitheaters to the halls of schools and great houses; other chapters note how the medieval staging intervened to give "places" and means of presentation in a more limited playing area to a more confined audience. The trapezoidal arrangement...