Caricature

An exaggerated and simplified depiction of character; the reduction of a personality to one or two telling traits at the expense of all other nuances and contradictions.

Carros

The wheeled parade floats on which religious plays were performed in Spain; similar mobile stages were called pageant-wagons in England.

Catharsis

The infamously obscure medical term used by Aristotle in his Poetics to describe the purpose of tragedy: to stimulate pity and fear in the audience, and then to bring about the purgation or purification (catharsis) of these and similar emotions. Since Aristotle, the term has been widely adopted to refer to the healthy and pleasurable effects of releasing strong emotions, not only by watching a play, but in life generally.

Choral Lyric

A poem performed by a singing, dancing chorus; one of the early genres of Greek poetry out of which drama developed. See also dithyramb.

Choral Speech

Text in a drama that is spoken simultaneously by a group of characters in a manner comparable to that of the ancient Greek chorus.

Chorus

Originally, the choir of singing, dancing, masked young men who performed in ancient Greek tragedy and comedy. Treated in tragedy as a "character" within the story, the chorus often represents aggrieved groups (old men, foreign slaves, victims of the plague). The chorus berates, implores, advises, harasses, pursues, and sometimes even helps and commiserates with the main characters, but mostly bears witness to their doings and sayings. In Old Comedy, the chorus serves at times as the mouthpiece for the poet. It gradually disappeared from tragedy and comedy, but many attempts have been made to revive some version of it, notably during the Italian and English Renaissance, under Weimar Classicism, and by such twentieth-century playwrights as Jean Anouilh, T.S. Eliot, and Michel Tremblay. The singing and dancing chorus appears today most commonly in musical theatre, opera, and operetta.

Collective Creation

A theatrical work not written in isolation by a single author but created jointly through the rehearsal process by a group of performers, with or without the help of a writer to record and synthesize their ideas.

Comedia Capa y Espada

Spanish "cape and sword" plays, popular during the seventeenth century. Often featuring macho heroes who must sacrifice their love to preserve their honour, such works combined comedy, violence, and adventure in a mix not unlike that of contemporary action films.

Comédie Française

The oldest state-funded theatre company still in existence. The company was formed at the command of King Louis XIV in 1680, through the amalgamation of the two remaining French-language troupes in Paris, one of which was Molière's. Called the Comédie Française to distinguish it from the Italian company then resident in the capital (see commedia dell'arte), it was granted a monopoly on the performance of French drama. It is a symbol today of national conservatism.

Comédies Rosses

Plays most closely associated with André Antoine's Théâtre Libre in late-nineteenth-century Paris. Comédies rosses featured sordid revelations of the depravity and bestiality of outwardly respectable but hypocritical upper- or middle-class characters.

Comedy

A play written to induce joy or laughter in the audience. Unlike tragedy, which generally takes characters from a condition of prosperity to a state of destruction or loss, comedy usually begins with a problem, and ends with its happy resolution. Comedy ranges from laughing genres such as satire and comedy of manners, parody, farce and burlesque, to such weepy genres as sentimental and romantic comedy (see also situation comedy).

Comedy of Manners

A type of comic play that flourished in the late seventeenth century in London, and elsewhere since, which bases its humour on the sexual and marital intrigues of "high society." It is sometimes contrasted with "comedy of character," as its satire is directed at the social habits and conventional hypocrisy of the whole leisured class. Also called Restoration Comedy; exemplified by the plays of Behn, Wycherley, and Congreve.

Commedia dell'arte

A species of partly masked, highly physical, and almost completely improvised comic performance that emerged in Renaissance Italy and remained popular all across Europe for the next three hundred years. Its name, which essentially means "professional acting," distinguishes it from the scholarly amateur theatre that emerged at the same time (commedia erudita). Its characters were few in number and always more or less the same (see stock characters), but some remain in use today: Harlequin, Pierrot, Pulchinella, and others. See also lazzi.

Commedia Erudita

The theatre of the scholarly academies that flourished in Renaissance Italy. Its practitioners, who were "erudite" or well-read, wrote plays in imitation of Greek and Roman tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies, staged them in new experimental indoor theatres, and in the process invented many aspects of post-­classical theatre: the proscenium arch, illusionistic, changeable scenery, theatrical lighting, pastoral drama, and opera.

Company

Used to refer both to the members of a theatre-producing organization (including all creative and technical personnel), either travelling or resident in its own theatre building, and to the cast of an individual play.

Convention

A device, technique, habit or practice that, through long usage, has come to be accepted as normal and expected regardless of how illogical or inappropriate it might otherwise seem. See, for example, asides.

Corrales

Name for the outdoor courtyard theatres of Spain during the Renaissance and beyond; similar in many ways to the public theatres of Elizabethan England.

Cross-Dressing

The wearing of the clothing of the opposite sex, either on stage or in life, is typical of many single-gender theatrical traditions, such as those of ancient Greece and Shakespearean England, in which only men performed. See also breeches roles.


toc | return to top | previous page | next page