Yes, abstractly in idea, as when we speak of the drama of the Terror in France. But the dramatic values of a whole period can be only suggested; they are rather pervasive than controlling. The suggestion was heightened for the medieval audience by familiarity with the habit of conceiving the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New and by typical characterization. In sculpture, glass, or poetry the Baptist is not only the immediate forerunner; he is the last of the prophets. The burning bush is not only a portent for Moses; it prefigures the Virgin kindled but intact. Piers Plowman, besides being a particular person in a poem, is typically the bon laboureur; and on the higher plane he is the Good Shepherd. The medieval audience, alive to such suggestions, more readily saw in a given play the larger drama behind the particular action, felt the communal emotion, and took the typical experience to itself.
The series as a whole, however, sacred history presented as a scheme of divine providence, offered no specific training to a playwright. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac should suggest the great sacrifice; but that would not make it a play. The immediate task was the realization of the immediate dramatic values: Isaac’s growing fear, Abraham’s cumulative struggle. Though the series included items intractable to representation, it offered many situations worthy of the highest skill. These the medieval dramatists had abundant practice in handling as distinct plays. The unknown authors show real dramatic experience and sometimes clear dramatic achievement. The English evidence is especially convincing. The guild, of course, keeping the scrip of a given play along with the costumes and properties, was free to revise or even to supersede. Some of the devices, such as the comic struggle with Noah’s wife, evidently arose from the actual performance. None the less certain plays stand out as dramatically composed: the admirable progress of the Brome Abraham and Isaac, the diction of both Mary and Joseph so purely answering the action of the York Nativity, the rapid, direct, free handling of the Towneley Secunda Pastorum. The sacred plays, then, constituted within limits an important dramatic tradition; and that tradition was still active in the sixteenth century.
2. TRAGEDY
The tragedies of Seneca are so oratorical as to suggest rather declamation than acting.[42] The great persons of Greek tragedy, Oedipus, Medea, or the house of Atreus, are revived not to interact toward their doom, but to make speeches. Nevertheless the vogue of pieces so inferior as drama, holding over from the Middle Age, had long and wide Renaissance authority. There is no clearer example alike of the preoccupation with oratory and of the habit of conceiving poetic as rhetoric. The printing of the great Greek plays, and even their translation, were slow in counteracting Seneca. Nor was Seneca altogether a hindrance. Encouraging the fustian or dullness of lesser men, he invited the magnificence of Marlowe. But he delayed the progress of dramaturgy by confirming the Renaissance neglect of composition for style.
“There is no one in France,” says Turnebus in a note[43] to his friend’s tragedies, “with any pretensions to the humanities but knows George Buchanan.” The humanists, lest after all their eminence in Latin should not be ratified by posterity, prudently praised one another. Joseph Scaliger called Buchanan the first Latin poet of Europe (ommes post se relinquens in Latina poesi), as Heinsius was to call Joseph Scaliger the greatest scholar and man of letters. The complacent certitudes have suffered so much from the irony of time that we should be careful to give the sixteenth-century humanists their due. The type of international scholar for whom Latin was the literary language persisted in Buchanan (1506-1582). Spending some thirty years in France, he may have been more familiar with French than with his northern vernacular; but all his writing was in Latin. Such a humanist might well sustain his rank in Latin poetry not only by lyric verse and didactic, but also by dramatic (Georgii Buchanani Scoti ... opera omnia, ed. Ruddiman, Edinburgh, 1715; Vol. II, “Poemata,” dated 1714), and is quite typical of Renaissance tragedy in Latin.
His Latin translation of the Medea of Euripides seems to have been presented by students at Bordeaux in 1543.[44] His Jephthes, printed at Paris in 1554, recalls the passage of the Red Sea classically.
Quum, te jubente, pigra moles aequoris
Posuit procellas, mobilis stupuit liquor
Cursu coacto, et vitreus crystallino
Muro pependit pontus hinc et hinc, viam