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The Drama Dictionary THE DRAMA DICTIONARY COMMITMENT 73 pulls down the screen in artistic *Brighella, the young, unmasked, handsome *Lovers, and a le begins to crack, variety of *Zanni or servant figures, instantly recognizable to the peare in As You Like It audience. The plot, location, sequence of entrances and the d makes reference, are characters sharing the stage varied from performance to perform- concerned with good nature. In this way they arguably rise above ance as can be deduced from the 'canovacci' or synopses which were the limits of a *genre which implies at times that all standards are pinned backstage. Presumably much dialogue was improvised, matters of social convention. See SENTIMENTAL COMEDY. though no doubt actors had set pieces to fall back on. We have only the canovacci, a number of illustrations and the testimony of a few Comic man/Comic woman. Actors in the Victorian *stock com- spectators to witness the immense appeal of a theatre whose pany who took the comic roles. influence was felt perhaps more than we know by the Elizabethans, and was certainly very strong in Paris where the troupes settled. Commedia dey/'Arte/jImprovised comedy performed by various Here, Moliere, and later Marivaux, developed their work. In Italy, troupes of highry"professional Italian actors who toured Europe in Goldoni (1709—93) and Gozzi (1720—1806) also assimilated and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The troupe varied adapted their style and structures. Today, modern Italian troupes, between ten and twenty in number and their plays were based on a such as the Tag Teatro of Venice, give formidably professional set of widely known *type characters operating within a varying acrobatic song, dance and spoken performances with Commedia scenario to which the actors brought a repertoire of jokes, acrobatic dell'Arte characters, in what must be a close approximation to their feats, set speeches and comic *business. Each actor would specialize style. Recent emphasis on the value of ""improvisation has meant a in a particular role — the aged, avaricious and amorous *Panta- resurgence of interest in the Commedia dell'Arte. loon, the fat and pedantic black-clad *Doctor, the vainglorious and DUCHARTE, P.-L., The Italian Comedy: the improvisation, scenarios, Lives, cowardly Spanish *Captain with the bristling mustachios, the shy attributes, portraits and masks of the illustrious characters of the and acrobatic servant *Arlecchino, the deceitful, crooked-nosed, Commedia dell'Arte, Harrap, 1929. HERRICK, M.T., Italian Comedy in the Renaissance, Illinois University Press, 1960. OREGLIA, c., The Commedia dell'Arte, Methuen, 1968. NICOLL, A., The World of Harlequin: A critical study of the Commedia dell'Arte, Cambridge University Press, 1963. Commedia erudita. 'Learned comedy'. The written comedy of Italy in the early sixteenth century, as compared with the improvised * Commedia dell'Arte. A realistic and sardonic form of comedy, best represented perhaps by La Mandragola (c. 1518) by Machiavelli and / Suppositi (1509) by Ariosto. It derived from the Roman *farce of Terence (c. 190 or 0.180—159 B-c-) anf^ Plautus (0.254-184 B.C.). Commitment. The acceptance of an ideology. A term associated in particular with a group of French writers, headed by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), who were deeply marked by their experience of war. This, together with a reading of Marx, convinced them of the political nature of most forms of writing and the economic processes of production on which they depend. Thus Sartre, in What is Literature? (Qu'est-ce que la Litteraturet, 1948), argues that writers of value commit themselves to the cause of the less fortunate and oppressed, even if it means working against or 5 Two Commedia dell'Arte characters (etching by Jacques Callol). Note the stage subverting the system of aristocratic (or state) patronage, or the in the background paying middle-class audience or reading public. The writer, in the THE DRAMA 406 TRAGEDY DICTIONARY I TRAGEDY 405 pastness of the past ,im an awareness of Terry Hodgson an American he had sd to acquire in order The historical sense compels a man to write not only with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer, and within it the whole of the literature of his own country, has a simultaneous existence. Eliot saw a sense of tradition as necessary to creativity. His view can be supported by examining the way he himself used traditional patterns, as in his employment of the Orestes story in The Family Reunion (1939). His practice relates to that of major dramatists, from the Greeks to Jean Giraudoux (1882—1944), who studied and reworked such traditional subject matter as the Orpheus legends and the Trojan wars. Traditionalism, (a) A respect for *tradition. (b) A method of production developed by Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874—1940) in about 1910. Plays were revived and presented with elements of their original staging. Calderon's Adoration of the Cross, set in thirteenth-century Siena, was not given a thirteenth-century 29. Greek statuette of a tragic actor. ^naturalistic setting but staged in a seventeenth-century style. A Note the mask and the rich costume contemporary *pantomime, The Veil of Pierrette by Arthur Schnitz- ler (1862—1931), was reworked in the *grotesque style of E.T.A. the complexity of the form, or cover the differences between Hoffmann (1776—1822). Such 'traditionalism' achieved distancing *classical, *medieval, Elizabethan, *neo-classical, *Romantic, effects, and recovered a sense of pre-naturalistic styles. *absurdist and nineteenth-century *social tragedy. Philosophers from Aristotle to modern *existentialist writers have built up a Tragedian, (a) Any player or writer of *tragedy; (b) Leading man formidable body of theory on the subject. The analysis of tragedy in the nineteenth-century *stock company. involves discussion of fundamental concepts such as fate, *chance, *causality and free will. It involves, too, a consideration of why and Tragedy. Pftiys predominantly concerned with human suffering, how the representation of suffering makes an appeal to an mally involving the decline and death of a *hero. Brief definitions audience. Aristotle's Poetics still provides a vocabulary of basic normally compare it with *comedy. W.B. Yeats (1865—1939) terms, such as *hamartia, *peripeteia, ^disclosure, and *beginning, defines them by distinguishing their effects. Tragedy induces a loss middle and end. Discussion of tragedy involves a consideration of of individual identity in the spectator: 'At the height of tragedy all *taboo and *sacrifice, and the *origins of drama. It leads one into is lyricism'; comedy, on the other hand, 'is built on the dykes that historical considerations of why tragedy occurs at particular separate man from man'. John Arden (1930— ) neatly defines periods, and whether its expression in, say, fifth-century B.C. their contrasting subject-matter. Comedy is about 'the indestructi- Athens, late Elizabethan England, seventeenth-century France or bility of the little man' whereas tragedy is about 'the necessary nineteenth-century Scandinavia, shares common elements. destruction of the great'. J-L. Barrault (1910— ) contrasts their The collapse or weakening of a strong system of belief and its differing strategies. We are all of us on a tightrope, he says, and sudden or gradual replacement by a different set of values sooner or later we all fall off. Both comedy and tragedy depend on (associated with the rise to *power of a new social group) seems to our knowing this but comedy 'looks away' whereas tragedy relate to the value conflicts in much tragedy. The growth of 'confronts' the situation. national feeling and national and imperial power, together with the Such brief definitions, though valuable, cannot hope to suggest simultaneous rise of a deep pessimism, seems to link the worlds of.
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