European Drama

Steiner notes that, following the Renaissance, European drama operated under the shadows of neo-classical and Elizabethan dramatic practice, the former “closed” and rigidly adhering to Aristotelian criteria, the other open and experimental. He discusses the theory of Thomas Rymer (a neo-classicist) at some length, concluding that the controversies that Rymer expounded upon in the seventeenth century have haunted drama ever since. Rymer’s theory, however, rests on equivocation. On the one hand, he contrasts Greek drama and Shakespearean in terms of a contrast of deliberate art v. natural effusion of talent. On the other hand, he argues that classical tragedies are realistic and Shakespearean plays are fantastic. Classical tragedy is both artificial and realistic; as Steiner explains, “It is natural to the mind because it imitates life when life is in a condition of extreme order. Its ‘rules’ or technical conventions are the means of such imitation; order in action can only be reflected by order in art.” This is intriguing on two levels: first, because the grand gravity of classical drama is being defended as realistic and reasonable; and second because tragedy is defended (as in the Sourvinou-Inwood quotes above) as the drama of order, a description that simply does not fit the tragedies of Shakespeare.

Rymer also raised the question of how Greek drama could be imitated in a Christian setting, and gave the rather weak answer that the Greeks might “also be improv’d by modern Tragedians, and something thence devis’d suitable to our Faith and Customes.” As Steiner notes, Rymer does not recognize that “the underlying conventions of neo-classical tragedy are myths emptied of active belief.” The religious and dramatic are intertwined in classical tragedy, but detached by neo-classicists. One wonders if there is a kind of lex credendi/lex orandi relationship here, with beliefs being shaped by the “rites” of dramatic practice.

Then this very stimulating thought: “since the seventeenth century, the history of drama has been inseparable from that of critical theory. It is to demolish an old theory or prove a new one that many of the most famous of modern dramas have been written. No other literary form has been so burdened with conflicts of definition and purpose. The Athenian and the Elizabethan theatre were innocent of theoretical debate. The Poetics are conceived after the fact, and Shakespeare left no manual of style. In the seventeenth century, this innocence and the attendant freedom fo imaginative life were forever lost.” He calls Dryden the first modern because of his obsession with dramatic theory and the “dissociation betwen creative and critical value.” He might have called him the first post-modern.