The moralities, however, on the whole, made little advance, either in escape from conventionality, or in creation of structure, or in dramatic expression of the conflicts of will. They clung in the main to the dominant and already conventionalized allegory of the Middle Ages, the presentation of life as a conflict of body and soul, although they made interesting excursions into the fields of pedagogy and religious controversy. This allegory they treated with intense didacticism, sacrificing all dramatic interest to enforce the lesson, though in their later days the sermons were very generously mixed with farce. Their importance and explicit contribution to English tragedy arose from their historical position just at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. They then served as a transition species, conforming, by a reduction in length and in the number of actors, to the conditions of performance which marked the change from the medieval stage to the Elizabethan theatre; amalgamating under humanistic influence now with this type of play, now with that; and imposing for a time their distinctive form and methods on the emerging types of comedy and tragedy. Some of the earliest tragedies, as we shall see, were direct developments from the moralities, and the influence of the peculiarities of the morality was for a while definite and considerable. But it soon disappeared under the demands of a new theatre and the innovations of a new art.
The inheritance of tragedy from the Middle Ages includes an important legacy from literature entirely apart from the drama. In the separation of the medieval world from the classic, the terms tragedy and comedy ceased to be connected with scenic presentation, and were extended to cover all forms of narrative, whether in dialogue or not. The distinction between the two, though varying somewhat in the different lexicographers and encyclopedists, gradually arrived at an agreement which continued to affect ideas throughout the Renaissance. There was some insistence on the restrictions that tragedy dealt with history, and comedy with fiction; tragedy with exiles, murders, important and horrible deeds, and comedy with more domestic themes or with love and seduction. There was more general agreement that tragedy dealt with persons of rank and importance, kings or great leaders, and comedy with persons of low or middle rank, and that tragedy required a more elevated and ornamented style than comedy. The most important difference, however, was held to lie in the distinction that comedy begins unhappily and proceeds to a happy conclusion, while tragedy begins prosperously and ends miserably and terribly. Thus Dante's poem was a Divine Comedy, and Chaucer in the Monk's Prologue summed up the accepted opinion of the scholarship of his day.
"Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,
As olde bokes maken us memorie,
Of him that stood in greet prosperitee
And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly."
These criteria for tragedy were fixed in the consciousness of the sixteenth century; and, though gradually correlated and amalgamated with criticism based on the newly found "Poetics," they continued to influence the theory and practice of the drama. Fitting these definitions and greatly increasing their importance and vogue, collections of tragedies attained wide popularity during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Boccaccio's "De Casibus Illustrium Virorum et Feminarum," Chaucer's "Monk's Tale," and Lydgate's "Falls of Princes" are examples, and, far the most influential on English tragedy, "The Mirror for Magistrates." This collection, first printed in 1559 and later frequently re-edited and enlarged, suggested many themes for the historical drama. Elizabethan playwrights seeking for tragic stories turned naturally to this most famous collection of "tragedies" in the medieval sense. Consequently, the very idea of tragedy continued to carry the connotation of a sudden reversal of fortune, the fall of princes. Tragedy, indeed, has always remained very largely devoted to themes "de casibus illustrium virorum et feminarum."
Turning now from the influence of medievalism to that of humanism, we may remember that in the drama even more than elsewhere humanism denotes a revolution in the spirit of the age, an emancipation of the individual mind from the fetters that had bound intellect and imagination through the Middle Ages. But we must deal first with one of the factors in accomplishing this emancipation, the reawakened knowledge of classical literature. There was some slight acquaintance with the Attic drama from the time that Greek was first taught at Oxford; the doughty Roger Ascham learned from his master Sir John Cheke to prefer Euripides to Seneca; and at the time when the study of Sophocles and Euripides was occupying the Italian dramatists, there must have been some similar response in England. Specific instances of this, however, are few and uncertain. The Greek dramatists seem to have exercised no appreciable direct influence on English tragedy of the sixteenth century; nor can their influence at any time during the seventeenth be said to have been considerable. For England, even more exclusively than for the Continent, the classical influence on the origin and early development of tragedy was confined to the ten plays which Renaissance scholarship attributed to the philosopher Seneca.
Seneca's plays, probably not intended for stage presentation, were literary exercises following the models of Greek tragedy and more especially of Euripides. By the humanist, after he had acquired some slight knowledge of the classical theatre, they were naturally accepted as plays actually performed, and their artificial and elaborate diction, which is their most conscious departure from Attic standards, was eagerly appraised as a merit. Their themes, with the exception of that of the pseudo-Senecan "Octavia," are borrowed from Greek mythology, with a strong preference for the most sensational and bloody stories of adultery, incest, the murder of parents by their children or of children by their parents. Whatever the revolting and bloody details, crime and its retribution make up the burden of each story. The plays present only the last phase of an action, and consequently open with lengthy exposition of preceding events. Much happens behind the scenes, little on the stage; there are many narrative and lyrical scenes, comparatively few dramatic. In comparison with the Athenian tragedies, they seem like prolonged rhetorical discussions of the familiar legends. Their structure involves a division into five acts, which had probably been earlier adopted in Latin tragedy and is noted in the "Ars Poetica," and the exclusion of the chorus from any participation in the action. It appears usually after each of the first four acts and indulges in philosophical reflections, hymns in praise of some deity, or lamentations. In each play a chief person or hero can be distinguished in conflict with one or more chief opponents; and each of the leading persons is accompanied by an adviser or confidant, usually a faithful friend for a hero and a nurse for the heroine. In addition to mortals, supernatural visitants, furies, gods, and especially ghosts, have a prominence that stirred Elizabethans to imitation. Though the presentation of character is not humanly vital, the long speeches and soliloquies display an elaborate analysis of moods of passion, with an absence of Athenian religion, a pagan cosmopolitanism, and an almost modern introspection. The style and philosophy were the chief recommendation of the plays to the Renaissance taste. Artificial, with constant use of antithesis, stichomythia, and hyperbole, oratorical, sonorous, bombastic, and thickly sprinkled with aphorisms and sentiments, the style seemed to the humanists to reach the height of tragic elevation and philosophic sententiousness.
The reasons for the almost exclusive adoption of Seneca as a model seem to have been not only the comparative ignorance of Greek, but also the preference of Renaissance taste for the qualities just enumerated. Moreover, these lifeless and undramatic mixtures of rhetorical verbiage, melodramatic situations, and endless declamations had the advantage of being easy to imitate. In their encouragement to imitation and their absorption of interest away from the models of Greek tragedy, there was a danger of humanistic endeavor resulting in mere copying, a danger not altogether escaped in Italy and France, but happily averted in England.
When, on the other hand, the characteristics of these unpromising models are considered in comparison with the conventionality of the miracles and moralities, they clearly offered much provocative of literary endeavor and the development of the genre of tragedy. Through them secular stories, real persons, and dramatic plots took the place of the allegories and the abstractions. While they encouraged the selection of such stories as resembled the sensational myths favored by Seneca, they opened the door to history, romance, and the whole world of classical fable. Though their particular structure proved in the end impossible on the English stage, they enforced the division into acts already familiarized in comedy, and suggested the possibility of a dramatic fable in distinction from the miracles' adherence to a narrative one. Again, their presentation of character brought new persons, new motives, and new methods, calling attention to drama not as an exposition of events or as an allegory of life, but as a field for the study of human emotion. Their brilliant if bombastic rhetoric aroused enthusiasm for the drama as literature and poetry; and their reflective and aphoristic style encouraged an effort to elevate tragedy above its too familiar converse with comedy into the realm of austere philosophy. These influences, however, were general. Every particular of Seneca's plays had its sixteenth century imitators.
The first signs of an intelligent interest in these plays appeared almost simultaneously at the very beginning of the fourteenth century in the commentary of the English Dominican, Nicholas Treveth, and in the study of the circle gathered about Lovato di Lovati at Padua. One of this school, Albertino Mussato, about 1314, wrote his "Eccerinis" on the fate of the Paduan tyrant, Ezzelino, of the preceding century. This first of the Latin tragedies of modern times aroused the admiration of scholars, and was followed by many other neo-Latin imitations of Seneca. These, while keeping to the Senecan form, often went beyond the stories of classical mythology and chose their subjects from the Bible or from ancient or modern history. Meanwhile neo-Latin comedy had had a beginning and was largely stimulated by the discovery, in 1427, of twelve hitherto unknown comedies of Plautus. All these neo-Latin plays were read and not acted; and the actual acting, either of the classical plays or their humanistic imitations, was not established until the close of the fifteenth century.
The knowledge of the classical drama spread after a time across the Alps, and Terentian comedy in particular exercised a wide influence upon the drama. Of especial interest in relation to tragedy is the new school of neo-Latin comedy which arose about 1530 in Holland and spread over Germany and into France. It applied Terentian style and structure to many of the stories in the Old Testament and to the parable of the prodigal son. To its original purpose of substituting for Terentian immorality themes edifying for youth, it soon added a Protestant tone, and in Kirchmayer's "Pammachius" (1538) entered the field of violent religious controversy. As the number of these plays rapidly increased, there resulted a secularization of treatment and the admission of Senecan as well as Terentian influence. The stories of Judith, Susannah, Goliath, and others gave opportunities for recourse to Senecan imitation; and in the "Jephthes" and "Baptistes," which about 1540 George Buchanan wrote at Bordeaux for his students to act, we have the first tragedies north of the Alps written in distinctly classical form,—a form, it should be said, derived from his study and translation of Euripides as well as from Seneca.