Glossary
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.
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.
Pantomime
Originally a genre of virtuoso solo performance invented by the ancient Romans. It is usually used today to refer to a type of spectacular entertainment that emerged in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century, featuring commedia dell'arte characters, magical special-effects wizardry, music, dance, and fantastical episodic plots. It remained very popular into the nineteenth century, when it picked up certain features of melodrama and developed into the form it usually takes today, the "Christmas Panto," which involves some audience participation, often of children. Also used in the sense of "to enact silently," or mime.
Proscenium
A Latin architectural term derived from the Greek proskenion, the front-most section of the theatre building (sk¯en¯e) as it developed in the post-Classical, Hellenistic period. During the Renaissance, when theatres were built indoors, artificial lighting, perspective painting, and changeable scenery were adopted in scenography. To hide the scene-shifting equipment and lighting instruments from view of the spectators, a single archway was constructed at the front of the acting area. (The first proscenium of this type was built for the Teatro Farnese in 1618.) Stages on which a pictorial illusion is created with the help of a three- or four-sided border or frame are called "proscenium arch," or "picture-frame" theatres, and they reached their heyday during the nineteenth century, the age of realism.
Romanticism
A widespread movement in art and culture, beginning in the later eighteenth century, that aimed to throw off the shackles of neoclassicism. Rejecting all rules and rational principles, Romantic art emphasized feeling, stark contrasts, extreme or abnormal psychological states, as well as the inner world of dreams, fantasies, and the supernatural. Natural and untutored "genius" was prized over technical mastery, untamed and "sublime" nature over civilization. Some Romantic poets did produce works for the stage, such as Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and Shelley, but Romanticism in the theatre more often took the form of violently emotional acting, particularly the kind made famous by Edmund Kean. Romanticism also manifested itself throughout nineteenth-century theatre in melodrama and Gothic plays, with their intense villains, brooding heroes, spooky vampires, and dark medieval castles.
Sturm und Drang
German for "Storm and Stress." A literary movement that took its name from the title of an F.M. von Klinger play of 1776, and which was one of the earliest manifestations of Romanticism. It is associated particularly with the work of Goethe and Schiller.
Tableaux
Plural of tableau, French for painting or picture. It is used in drama to refer to a visually pleasing and emotionally compelling arrangement of actors' bodies on stage. First recommended for wide use by theorist and playwright Denis Diderot in the eighteenth century, such consciously contrived stage pictures did gain prominence in the centuries that followed, particularly in melodrama, which often called for them in the stage directions.
Tragedy
A Greek word believed to mean "song of the goat-singers". Originating in the sixth century b.c.e., tragedy is the oldest dramatic genre and remains for many the "highest" form of poetry. Our knowledge of it derives mainly from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as from the little we know about the manner of its performance. Our understanding of it has also been shaped by Aristotle, whose description of Athenian tragedy in his Poetics remains a touchstone for tragic theory and practice to this day. According to Aristotle, tragedy is the imitation of an organically unified, serious action in which the plot, or arrangement of incidents, elicits the audience's pity and fear and then effects a catharsis, or purgation, of these and similar emotions. Tragic plots generally take the protagonist from a condition of good fortune to bad, often to his or her destruction, involve mental and/or physical suffering, and ideally take place within families, usually of a socially elevated or prominent type (royal families, for example). In Aristotle's view the most effective tragic plots also involve a simultaneous "reversal and recognition," a moment when the character's fortune turns for the worse, and when he or she is suddenly able to grasp a truth that was unavailable before. Tragedy has been reconceived by every subsequent age that has practiced it, beginning in the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century, it was reinvented according to the principles of neoclassicism; in the eighteenth according to those of the Enlightenment ("middle-class" or "bourgeois tragedy"). Romanticism in turn created its own tragic forms, often inspired by Shakespeare.
Weimar Classicism
The style of playwriting, acting, and scenography associated with the Weimar Court Theatre during the late eighteenth century, when Schiller and Goethe were playwrights-in-residence and artistic directors there. Following their Sturm und Drang periods, both adopted an approach to writing and staging plays that was noted for its greater fidelity to Classical Greek culture than was common in neoclassicism.
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