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The Latin Drama of the Renaissance (1340-1640)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Leicester Bradner
Leicester Bradner*
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Extract

The Latin drama of the Renaissance and Reformation has been studied mostly in Germany. Bahlmann and Bolte laid the bibliographical foundations in the 1890s, and at the same time Creizenach was publishing the volumes of his great Geschichte des neueren Dramas, which still contain the most comprehensive survey that we have of neo-Latin drama up to 1550. Rossi and Sanesi have dealt to some extent with the Latin drama in Italy, but their treatment is superficial compared with Creizenach's. In French there is no significant scholarly work in this field. In England J. A. Symonds gave a good account of the humanist drama in his Renaissance in Italy (1875) twenty years before Creizenach, but it was not until the appearance of Boas’ University Drama in the Tudor Age in 1907 that any work on Anglo-Latin dramatists was available.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 4 , 1957 , pp. 31 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1957

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References

1 Bahlmann, Paul, Die lateinischen Dramen von Stilpho bis zur Mitte des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (Münster, 1893)Google Scholar, Die Erneuerer des antiken Dramas (Minister, 1896); Bolte, Johannes, ‘Die lateinischen Dramen Frankreichs aus dem 16. Jahrhundert’, Festschrift Johannes Vahlen (Berlin, 1900), pp. 589–613 Google Scholar.

2 Rossi, Vittorio, Il Quattrocento (Milan, 1933)Google Scholar; Sanesi, Ireneo, La commedia (Milan, 1935).Google Scholar

3 See Creizenach, II, 518n., for mention of plan by Giovanni Manzini della Motta in 1388 to use recent history for the subject of a tragedy

4 See Creizenach, I, 530.

5 See Poliodorus comoedia humanistica desconocida, ed. J. M. Casas Horns (Madrid, 1953).

6 Bruni began but did not complete a revised version of this play. It is printed without author or title in Hilarius Drudo's Practica artis amandi (Amsterdam, 1651), pp. 149

7 This statement takes no account of Thylesius's Imber aureus (printed 1529), which is a tragicomedy and in no sense an imitation of Plautus and Terence.

8 These plays are not mentioned in any account of early Spanish drama I have seen. I am indebted to Professor Joseph E. Gillet for calling attention to them and to Professor Revilo P. Oliver for sending me a synopsis of the action.

9 Still another historical drama or dialogue by Locher has been found in a Paris manuscript. It deals with the Pope's attempt to promote a European peace in 1513. See L. Geiger's article in Zeitschrift für vergl, Litteraturgeschichte und Ren. Lift., I (1887).

10 For an account of the Antichristus see Chambers, E. K., Medieval Stage (Oxford, 1903), II, 62–64 Google Scholar.

11 M. T. Herrick, in his Tragicomedy (Urbana, 1955), devotes a whole chapter to the influence of Latin Biblical plays on the growth of tragicomedy as a genre in the Renaissance.

12 Bahlmann says that Quintianus Stoa wrote fourteen tragedies in Latin on classical subjects. If they ever existed they have presumably been lost. Bahlmann refers to A. Chassang, Essais dramatiques (1852), p. 181, and R. Prölss, Geschichte des neueren Dramas (1881), II, 15. Neither book gives any source for the statement.