Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education of the Republic of Uzbekistan Jizzakh state pedagogical institute English Faculty

Chapter 2 The Renaissance of trgedy

The Renaissance is a period in the history of Europe beginning in about 1400, and following the Medieval period.
"Renaissance" is a French word meaning "rebirth". The period is called by this name because at that time, people started taking an interest in the learning of ancient times, in particular, the learning of Ancient Greece and Rome. The Renaissance was seen as a "rebirth" of that learning. The Renaissance is often said to be the start of the "modern age".
Influence of Greek and Roman
Classical Greek drama was largely forgotten in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 16th century. Medieval theatre was dominated by mystery plays, morality plays, farces and miracle plays. In Italy, the models for tragedy in the later Middle Ages were Roman, particularly the works of Seneca, interest in which was reawakened by the Paduan Lovato de' Lovati (1241–1309).His pupil Albertino Mussato (1261–1329), also of Padua, in 1315 wrote the Latin verse tragedy Eccerinis, which uses the story of the tyrant Ezzelino III da Romano to highlight the danger to Padua posed by Cangrande della Scala of Verona.[45] It was the first secular tragedy written since Roman times, and may be considered the first Italian tragedy identifiable as a Renaissance work. The earliest tragedies to employ purely classical themes are the Achilles written before 1390 by Antonio Loschi of Vicenza (c.1365–1441) and the Progne of the Venetian Gregorio Correr (1409–1464) which dates from 1428 to 1429.

In 1515 Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) of Vicenza wrote his tragedy Sophonisba in the vernacular that would later be called Italian. Drawn from Livy's account of Sophonisba, the Carthaginian princess who drank poison to avoid being taken by the Romans, it adheres closely to classical rules. It was soon followed by the Oreste and Rosmunda of Trissino's friend, the Florentine Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai (1475–1525). Both were completed by early 1516 and are based on classical Greek models, Rosmunda on the Hecuba of Euripides, and Oreste on the Iphigenia in Tauris of the same author; like Sophonisba, they are in Italian and in blank (unrhymed) hendecasyllables. Another of the first of all modern tragedies is A Castro, by Portuguese poet and playwright António Ferreira, written around 1550 (but only published in 1587) in polymetric verse (most of it being blank hendecasyllables), dealing with the murder of Inês de Castro, one of the most dramatic episodes in Portuguese history. Although these three Italian plays are often cited, separately or together, as being the first regular tragedies in modern times, as well as the earliest substantial works to be written in blank hendecasyllables, they were apparently preceded by two other works in the vernacular: Pamfila or Filostrato e Panfila written in 1498 or 1508 by Antonio Cammelli (Antonio da Pistoia); and a Sophonisba by Galeotto del Carretto of 1502.[47][48]

From about 1500 printed copies, in the original languages, of the works of Sophocles, Seneca, and Euripides, as well as comedic writers such as Aristophanes, Terence and Plautus, were available in Europe and the next forty years saw humanists and poets translating and adapting their tragedies. In the 1540s, the European university setting (and especially, from 1553 on, the Jesuit colleges) became host to a Neo-Latin theatre (in Latin) written by scholars. The influence of Seneca was particularly strong in its humanist tragedy. His plays, with their ghosts, lyrical passages and rhetorical oratory, brought a concentration on rhetoric and language over dramatic action to many humanist tragedies.

The most important sources for French tragic theatre in the Renaissance were the example of Seneca and the precepts of Horace and Aristotle (and contemporary commentaries by Julius Caesar Scaliger and Lodovico Castelvetro), although plots were taken from classical authors such as Plutarch, Suetonius, etc., from the Bible, from contemporary events and from short story collections (Italian, French and Spanish). The Greek tragic authors (Sophocles and Euripides) would become increasingly important as models by the middle of the 17th century. Important models were also supplied by the Spanish Golden Age playwrights Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina and Lope de Vega, many of whose works were translated and adapted for the French stage.

The chief characteristics of Renaissance drama are its adherence to genre, most notably comedy, tragedy, and history. It was also very much derived of the history of both the drama, from the Greek theater to morality plays, and interested in the literature of the past. It was also a form of theater that appealed to a wide audience and was, more so than now, a popular art.
Though far from being a godless age, the Renaissance was a transitional epoch from the Middle Ages to the Age of Reason that began in the 17th century. Tragic heroes in Renaissance tragedy, such as Faustus, point towards a time when secular morality came to supplant Christian teachings in the minds of the educated elite.
Renaissance drama emerged and flourished in the 1500s and 1600s. Emerging out of medieval drama, which was heavily focused on morality, mystery, and miracle plays, the English theater of this period produced some of the greatest and most influential plays in literature. One of the earliest plays from the period is Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, a revenge play, which would influence Shakespeare. The dramatists of this era primarily worked in three genres: comedy, tragedy, and history. The genre lines often blurred between the three, with history frequently overlapping the other two. Aside from Shakespeare, Marlowe, Johnson, Webster, Ford, and Middleton were other major playwrights.

Renaissance, of course, means "rebirth" and there was a rediscovery, starting in Italy, of classical arts and culture. While some of the English writers could read these texts in the original Latin, many came to these sources in translation or second-hand. Plutarch's Lives provided many writers with historical material from the Roman period, while Ovid's Metamorphosis was a key source for mythology. Shakespeare, for example, used other sources, like the writings of Plautus, for all of his plays; originality was not as highly prized as it is now.

In terms of conventions of the stage, only men were allowed to act. Boys played women's parts. Many of the theaters, most famously the Globe, were round and open air. Seating was dependent on status and money, with the best seats in the balcony. Those who paid the least and stood in front of the stage were known as the groundings. During the Renaissance, theater appealed to a cross-cultural audience. The theaters were closed several times due to plague and were considered dens of iniquity and immorality by the Puritans, who shut them down when they took power.

A final characteristic of the plays of the time is the highly wrought, allusive, and poetic language the writers used. Many authors, such as Shakespeare, used blank verse in some of his plays, when he didn't use iambic pentameter. Marlowe, who influenced Shakespeare, also experimented with the new, less structured form. The language was, overall, very stylized and theatrical. In the best of these writers's work, the language transcends the period they were writing in and brings a psychological depth and introspection that had heretofore been absent in drama.

As Susan Wise Bauer explains in The Well-Educated Mind, the chief characteristic of Renaissance tragedies was personality. Medieval mystery and morality plays had emphasized universal concepts such as virtue, vice, and humanity; they did not focus on the individual. (The most popular morality play, for instance, was titled Everyman.)

The Renaissance—influenced by humanism—emphasized "a free individual with power to act in the world and change it." The main character in a Renaissance tragedy was a person "full of complexities, ambitions, and potential" (Wise Bauer, 248). In short, Renaissance drama got rid of "flat" characters and reintroduced "dynamic" ones.

Since the Renaissance was optimistic about humanity's plight, one might have expected Renaissance dramas to exhibit primarily happy endings. However, the major Renaissance playwrights—specifically William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe—seemed somewhat skeptical of humanism. Tragedy flourished during the Renaissance.