Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1976

Keywords

Dramatic unities, Drama, 16th century, History and criticism

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Comparative Literature

First Advisor

George E. Wellwarth

Second Advisor

Haskell M. Block

Third Advisor

Frederick Garber

Abstract

The world stage or, to borrow the title from one of Calderón’s plays, "el gran teatro del mundo," was a favorite metaphor of Renaissance writers. It appears in a great number of works of many different kinds, sometimes being extensively developed as a central structural device in the work itself, as in Laurentius Beyerlinck’s encyclopedic Theatrum vitae humanae (frontispiece Figure I). Another notable example is the “Fabula de homine” (c. 1518) written by the humanist scholar Luis Vives. The fable is an eloquent panegyric on the sublimity of Man, his “divine mind,” bliss-giving “powers of perception,” “handsomely shaped” body, and “nature akin to…the immortal gods." The structural device for presenting this exalted view of man is the metaphor of the world stage and the hierarchy of roles which he—by nature a participant in the entire chain of being—can play upon it. Although the fable is short, it is too long to quote here in its entirety, and familiar enough to most students of Renaissance literature to make it unnecessary. For our purposes it will be enough to refresh the reader’s memory with a short passage, the description of the creation of the stage.

To gratify…the immortal gods, Juno earnestly asked her brother and husband Jupiter, since he was all-powerful, to improvise an amphitheater and to bring forth new characters, after the manner of regular plays, lest in this respect a day which she wanted most distinguished seem deficient to the gods. Thereupon, all of a sudden, at a command of almighty Jupiter, by whom all things are done, this whole world appeared, so large, so elaborate, so diversified, and beautiful in places, just as you see it. This was the amphitheater: uppermost, to wit in the skies, were the stalls and seats of the divine spectators; nethermost—some say in the middle—the earth was placed as a stage for the appearance of the actors, along with all the animals and everything else.

The metaphoric identification of world and stage was a compelling image in the hands of Vives and other Renaissance writers; for us it is also a useful tool for examining their View of the world in its relationship with literature, especially drama. If world and stage are imaginatively thought of as one and the same, then the way a stage is built and used, and the form in which plays are written and produced should reflect in large measure how the world itself is perceived, and vice versa. This must be true to some degree in any age. But during the Renaissance and Baroque, writers were exceptionally sensitive to this relationship and intrigued by its implications.

The present paper is, in a figurative sense, written in the context of the world-stage metaphor. Although it is not addressed specifically to it, nor even to the relationships between Renaissance theater and world view, the metaphor provides a context in which the significance of the main issues involved can be easily grasped. In this lies its importance. The focus itself is on the unities of time and place and their metamorphosis in theater and criticism over the course of the sixteenth century in Italy, Spain, France, and England—the only countries during that period to develop a viable tradition of vernacular drama comparable to that of the Greeks and Romans. The paper as a whole, then, treats only a single aspect of the time-space question in theater, and must therefore be considered ancillary to the larger questions suggested by the world-stage metaphor, the questions of relationship between Renaissance theater and world view. Yet this larger context is implicit in every page. As a rule, these implications have been played down, understated. Lengthy excursions into the desacralization of the world view during the transition from the medieval to the modern period have been intentionally avoided; discussion of philosophical views on time and space have been restricted to a few minimal pages in the conclusion; treatment of the technological revolution of the High Middle Ages is limited to specific historical problems concerning clocks, astrolabes, and stage machinery; the new science of the scholastics and their Renaissance successors is mentioned only in reference to particular advances made in the fields of projective geometry, perspective, and applied optics; and the analysis of the concept of verisimilitude is focused on technical details rather than the general overview of a world picture. The primary concern has been to stick to concrete details; to provide an accurate record of the genesis and transformation of two literary precepts, stressing the data rather than elaborate interpretation. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the way to a coherent overview will be clarified by the organization of the factual details themselves, and that they and the suggestions they give rise to will prove useful to others interested in articulating a fuller and more precise picture of Renaissance theater and culture.

The unities are a rather narrow, technical issue, often associated with the worst tendencies in drama and criticism of the past. George Saintsbury, for example, personifies them as “the Fatal Three, the Weird Sisters of dramatic criticism, the vampires that sucked the blood out of nearly all European tragedies, save in England and Spain, for three centuries.” Saintsbury may well be correct in this opinion. But it is not my purpose here to evaluate the unities. Although this issue is an important one, it will be side-stepped in the following pages to focus more closely on the history of the unities and their connections with other cultural phenomena.

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