THE2000:Notes:3-21-07

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Commedia dell' Arte

• "comedy of professional artists"
• Improvisational theater with no set text
• Based on 'scenarios'
• Companies:
  • Traveling troupes (7men, 3 women)
  • Most successful were families

Commedia Stock Characters

• Pantalone: miserable Venetian man, lecherous, drunkard
• Dottore: foolish scholar
• Capitano: cowardly, braggart soldier
• Zanni: foolish servants; Arlecchino & Harlequino
• Lazzi: repeated bits of comic business; usually physical and often obscene

Italian Dramatic Rules: Neoclassical Ideas

Highly Prescriptive Criticism

1. Verisimilitude: drama should be true to life
2. 3 unities: time, place, & action
3. Function of drama: tragedy=royalty, comedy=common people; no mixing; to teach moral lessons.
4. Other rules: no violence, no chorus, no soliloquies

Theater Production in Italy

• Pit, box, & gallery
• Use of perspective drawings
• Pole and Chariot System � innovative scene shifting system created by Torelli

The English Renaissance

• Often called the Elizabethan Period
• Christopher Marlowe (1564 � 1593), iambic pentameter
• William Shakespeare (1564 � 1616)
  • Married Anne Hathaway
  • 3 kids
  • The Lord Chamber group
  • Use of metaphors
• Public Theatres � outdoors
• Private Theatres � indoors

Spain

• Spanish Golden Age: 1550-1650
• World power (exploration & conquest of the new world)

Spanish Drama

• Secular dramas flourished between 1550 & 1700
• Usually dealt with love and honor
• Main characters were royalty

Major Spanish Playwrights

• Lope de Vega: wrote 1500 plays; 470 survived; The Sheep Well
• Calderon de la Barca: Life is a Dream
• A number of female playwrights

Theater Production

• Corrales � open air public theatres
• Corral de la Cruz and Corral de Principe: most famous corrales located in Madrid
• Patio � used for standing
• Cazuela � gallery seating for unaccompanied women, carefully guarded
• 2000 seats

French Drama: The Neoclassical Era

Comedic French Playwrights

• Moliere: most important 17th cent. Dramatist; noted for his comedies.
  • Actor and leader of a theatrical troupe
  • Influenced by Italian commedia dell'arte
  • Tartuffe, The Miser, The Misanthrope, and The Imaginary Invalid

Tragic French Playwrights

• Pierre Corneille: began writing comedies and later wrote tragedies
  • The Cid
• Jean Racine: plays adhered to neoclassical ideas
  • Phaedra