This, the third article on the progress of the | drama, like the first, will have little to do with | plays or playwrights. We hinted at the outset of the | series that the drama of Shakespeare's time owed a | debt to the Church miracle plays of the previous | century. It would, perhaps, have been better to have | said that the Shakesperian stage evolved from the | Miracle stage. The Miracle play provided the body; | for the soul we must look to the Italian | Renaissance.
| Triumphant Christianity drove the ancient gods
| from their thrones on Olympus; and so far as the
| Pagan deities were the idols of an outlived creed,
| they need never have been missed. But they were more.
| They were the living symbols of ancient art, science,
| and literature, and with their departure
|
Added to this was the fact that Europe was, for | centuries, a battlefield between Barbarian and Roman, | and war has ever been the Abortionist to | Learning.
|One case, however, in which war functioned as | midwife, stands as the exception to prove the rule. | Constantinople fell to the Turk in 1453, and Greek | scholars, who for generations had been isolated from | the West, poured over Italy, bringing with them the | priceless manuscripts of the ancients.
| And to their influence the great revival is
| largely attributed. They were the tutors of the New
| Learning; but we must not overlook its John the
| Baptists
The movement was thus started and sustained by a
| well-time series of shocks. Almost within a single
| life-time three new worlds were discovered
|
Keat's transports of joy upon first looking into
| Chapman's Homer must have been the common lot of men
| in those mighty days
|
Edith Sichel, in her able work on the subject,
| declared the great mission of the movement to be the
| reconciliation of the old gods with the pale
| Galilean. The ban was lifted and once again art and
| literature were free to paint or sing of Pallas and
| Dionysos
All nations bowed to Pallas, but as we shall see, | while Italy's chief niche was occupied by the bust of | sculpture, Germany burned incense before her sister | of philosophy, and England re-enthroned Dionysos, the | god in whose mysteries the drama had its origin.
| To pick out more than a few of the greatest of the
| men of the Italian Renaissance would be impossible.
| There was Donatello, the re-born Pygmalion, who
| endowed dead marble with life. There were Ghiberti's
| marvellous Baptistry doors, that took thirty years to
| complete; and again the first of the Moderns,
| Leonardo da Vinci, painter, antagonist, inventor, the
| creator the sybil-like Mona Lisa, and the
| unapproachable Last Supper
Not only in art, but in literature as well, was it | a time of excellence. But in Italy the spirit of the | Renaissance lived in the artists. So too, it was in | Flanders where the glorious buildings of the period | and the paintings of the Van Eycks rivalled the great | works of the Florentines. In France the arts and | literature were more evenly balanced, but perhaps the | Renaissance note rang truest in the philosophic works | of Rabelais and Montaigne.
| In Germany a different note was struck. True, the
| architecture and sculpture of the time bear witness
| to-day that art was not neglected, and the sombre
| pencils of Durer
|
In fact, the expression of the Revival in Germany | was the Reformation. Both Protestantism and | Catholicism, as we know them to-day, are the results | of the intellectual upheaval that closed the Middle | Ages. The stern philosophy and passion for abstract | right characteristic of Goethe, Ibsen, Carlyle, is | attributable to the one; the warm humanist enthusiasm | of Mazzini, Connolly and Mannix surely finds its root | in the other. On the one hand we have the avatars of | Luther and Durer; on the other the soul of the | Florentine commonwealth is re-incarnate.
|The Reformation, in England, was more political | than intellectual in character and no school of art | arose as a result of Renaissance influence. But | literature, which gave such brilliant, if brief, | indications of its existence in Chaucer's time, | flamed up like a new sun. After Chaucer's death it | suffered almost complete extinction, due to the Wars | of the Roses, but with the Tudors came peace, and | towards the middle of the sixteenth century two | Englishmen, Wyatt and Surrey, returned from an | embassy to the cradle of the Renaissance. Spencer's | first poems appeared in 1579, and Francis Bacon's |
This relatively short period comprised the Golden | Age of English literature. But the Renaissance | impulse was not exhausted. It let on to Milton, in | the realm of letters, and to the Cromwellian | revolution in the world of political thought.
|Such, in brief, was the course of the mighty | movement that put an end, for ever, to the Dark Ages. | To do the period justice, this superficial sketch | should be supplemented by the biographies of, at | least, some of its leading men, and by an | acquaintance with the works of art and masterpieces | of literature of the period. The first mentioned want | is met by Edith Sichel's volume on |
Two very readable books that give a good general | idea of that period are Reade's |