Roman Drama (Article)

A succession of writers adapted Greek originals to the Roman taste for rhetoric, spectacle, and sensationalism, buffoonery, homely wit, and biting repartee. Comedy almost certainly arose from a blending of the bawdy extempore joking by clowns at harvest festivals and marriage ceremonies with the performances of masked dancers and musicians who came from Etruria. From Etruria also came such theatrical terms as histrio for actor and persona for the person indicated by the mask. By the 3rd century BC Roman audiences would have been familiar with the secular entertainments of other Italian peoples—the phlyax comedies of Tarentum, for instance, and the Oscan fabula atellana, which were not unlike the comedy of mainland Greece. Although mime may well have been international from its inception, it was not until the beginning of the 3rd century that the spread of Greek drama led to the emergence of an organized Roman theatre, particularly after 250 BC, when plays were produced at the public festivals as part of the general celebrations. The advance to true drama was made by Livius Andronicus who was the first to produce at a public festival a fabula palliata, or Greek play in translation. From then until the end of the Republic adaptations of Greek tragedies and comedies predominated in the Roman theatre, together with a very few examples of the fabula praetexta, on a historical Roman theme, and a considerable number of the new-style fabula togata, or play on everyday Roman life. Among Roman dramatists there was no invention of plot or character on a grand scale. They were mainly concerned with supplying a non-reading public with live entertainment which blended a well-known story with topical allusions and a plentiful supply of comic business. Only in Terence is it possible to discern a conscious artistic impulse to improve on his Greek model. Other dramatists following Andronicus, among them Plautus, were content to adapt what was offered by the Greeks to the demands of a Roman audience, with the proviso that since dramatic performances were provided free by the authorities nothing should be said or indicated which might reflect on them. With moral and religious matters the censorship was less concerned, though in general the extant Latin comedies are fairly free from indecency.

At first Rome had no permanent theatre. The simple wooden buildings required for a production could be put up as and when required. Interior scenes and changes of setting within a play were unknown, and the absence of a front curtain made it necessary for every play to begin and end with an empty stage. The characters in comedy were types rather than individuals—old gentlemen, usually miserly and domineering, young gentlemen, usually extravagant and spineless, jealous wives, treacherous pimps, intriguing slaves, boastful captains—and custom prescribed the appropriate costume, wig, and mask for each type. Since respectable women were not supposed to appear in public, the unmarried heroines of Greek New Comedy and its Latin derivatives were somewhat less than respectable—courtesans, or maidens separated by some mishap from their parents and brought up in humble circumstances. If marriage was to be the outcome of the hero's wooing, then it was necessary to show that the girl he wished to marry was not only chaste but the long-lost child of respectable parents. It is hardly surprising that in general the plots of Roman comedies turn on intrigues, attempts to raise money, and swindling and deception of many kinds.

The use of costumes and masks enabled small companies of five or six actors to perform almost any play by doubling of parts. The leading actor was probably also the director. Such actors, such as Roscius Gallus, could rise to fame and fortune, since the theatrical profession was not yet regarded as degrading in itself. There is no mention of slaves acting until Roscius, near the end of his career, trained a slave to appear on stage. Revivals of old plays were rare, since audiences would naturally be attracted to a new work. This would be bought from the author by a manager authorized by the festival authorities to hire the necessary actors and costumes and settle all business matters, his profit arising from what he could save on the fixed sum allotted to him.

Though tragedy seems to have attracted fewer writers than comedy, the popularity and influence of the leading tragic writers appear to have been great. In general they selected as models the more melodramatic of their Greek originals. Exciting plots, flamboyant characters, gruesome scenes, were apparently more attractive to Roman crowds than the poetic qualities for which Greek tragedies are admired today. In substance the plays underwent little alteration, the chief difference between the Greek original and its Latin adaptation being the development of rhetoric at the expense of truth and naturalness. In comedy, on the other hand, the free-and-easy methods of the early writers seem to have been succeeded by greater fidelity to the originals.

With the end of the 2nd century BC a fundamental change came over the Roman theatre. Few new plays were being written, and those mostly not for production. Theatres, which had for some time been permanent buildings, the first, in stone, dating from 55 BC, became more and more elaborate as the level of entertainment presented in them sank. Rustic farce (fabula atellana) and mime predominated. Such plays as were staged were marred by tasteless extravagance. The introduction of a curtain led to elaborate scenic effects and quick changes of settings, to the detriment of the spoken text. A divorce thus set in between the drama and the stage. It is true that under the Empire many plays were written, and many fine theatre buildings were erected in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the ruins of which still stand; but the plays and the theatres had very little to do with each other. Popular taste was all for mime and pantomime, and the stage was given over to these and other forms of light entertainment, while the writing of plays became the prerogative of educated literary men. The tragedies ascribed to Seneca and such works as the anonymous Octavia were closet dramas, intended to be read among friends. Though full of clever rhetoric, they were not written with the limitations of the stage in mind, and were probably never performed. Yet as the only examples of Latin tragedy to reach the modern world they were destined to exercise an immense influence on the playwrights of the Renaissance.

It was not only the degeneration of public taste which led to the disintegration of the serious theatre in Imperial Rome. There was the added problem of the constant hostility of the Christian Church. No Christian could be an actor, under pain of excommunication, and all priests and devout persons refrained from attendance at theatrical performances of any kind. In the 6th century the theatres in Europe finally closed, the much-harassed actors being forced to rely on private hospitality or take to the road. From then until the 10th century there was nothing but an undercurrent of itinerant entertainers—mimes, acrobats, jugglers, bear-leaders, jongleurs, and minstrels—who kept alive some of the traditions of the classical theatre, while the Church quietly absorbed such pagan rites as the folk play and the mumming play into its own ritual, unconsciously preparing the way for the revival of the theatre it had tried to suppress.