Neoclassicism Overview PDF

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Alan Kreizenbeck's personal lecture notes on Neoclassicism....

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1 THTR 310 History of Theatre Alan Kreizenbeck

Neoclassicism Art was considered “artifice,” something false, created by man in God’s world. Hence it had to have rules to govern its values - what made it good or bad? There is an overriding belief in “nature” - the way things “really” are. “Nature” implies that there is a permanent, universal way that things are and that they should be that way. God made the world; God would not create anything evil or allow it to exist; therefore to show the real world (God’s) although we can show evil either caused by the devil or human error, we cannot show evil prevailing; to show evil prevailing would be to go against “nature,” therefore against God, so any work that did so would be immoral and consequently a sin. First developed in Italy during the Renaissance, largely based on interpretations of Horace’s The Art of Poetry, and Aristotle’s The Poetics. Horace’s writing was widely available, but its source -Aristotle’s - was not widely read until it was published in Latin in Italy in 1498. This was accompanied by the examination of ancient Greek and Roman plays, poetry, histories, and philosophical writings. These texts were held in high esteem. Why? They represented the truth. So, the whole concept of neoclassicism is a reverence for the past, and by its nature, can not condone innovation, for reasons that will become clear as you read on. Aristotle’s ideas gained religious authority when the Council of Trent (1545-1563), a meeting of leaders of the Catholic Church who gathered to create/reiterate doctrine to re-establish the power of the Church, drew heavily from the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who had been greatly influenced by Aristotle. After this, Aristotle’s ideas about literature became the Church’s ideas about literature - the ideas had artistic, religious, and political power. To defy or deny was to put one’s soul and one’s body at peril. The main demand in neoclassicism is for verisimilitude, which means a variety of things—like life, the appearance of truth, realistic. Verisimilitude had three aspects: -The first was that literature (for us, plays) had to be able to happen in real life. There is a concern of social reality—the communal values, ideals, and thoughts that hold a society together. Apart from questions as to what “real life” might be, for the neoclassicists it meant no supernatural characters or events, no fantasy, unless they were part of a myth, history (?), or from the Bible. No soliloquies or choruses, because “real” people didn’t talk to themselves at great length, nor did they have groups of people following them around commenting on their actions. These conventions were replaced by others, the most notable being the confidant or confidants, trusted companions who never said much, but could be trusted with the main character’s innermost thoughts. Also, most violence was kept offstage because it was too difficult to stage it realistically. The unities of time, place, and action fit into this demand for reality. Unity of time refers to the fact that the time that passed on stage had to be the same as the time that passed in the

2 audience - later modified to be 24 hours. Unity of place refers to the fact that because the audience was in one place, the play should also be in one place - the audience doesn’t move, so how could the action on stage? This was later modified to allow for places that could be reached within 24 hours of each other. Unity of action refers to the idea that a play should have only one plot - one main character who needs one thing - a thing that events and other characters in the play thwart. -The second aspect of verisimilitude was the demand for morality. The morality of the majority, the morality taught by the church, the morality that maintained the political status quo. Plays had to show goodness rewarded and evil punished. Justice did not always prevail, and that was explained as God’s long-term plan, in which justice would eventually emerge victorious. The logic is: the world is ruled by a just God: therefore, to show the world as it is, verisimilitude demands that the author must show a just world. -The third aspect of verisimilitude was universality. Normative traits and behaviors are the key. The average, the most generally practiced, a reduction of surface details and a revealing of commonality among most people, actions, etc. was expected. These norms were the truth of human nature and events, unaffected by time or place. Being true, they were real, being real they were from God, being from God, they were good, being from God they were moral. As a result, characters behave according to their type - meaning their age, their profession, their class, their sex, their general predispositions. Character types, in other words, prevail. As a side set of rules, only two types of drama were acceptable, comedy or tragedy - other forms that mixed the two were considered impure and therefore inferior. Comedy and tragedy each had their own rules, largely formulated by Aristotle. Plays were meant to educate, ennoble and enlighten. - “educate” meant educate about human behavior. - “ennoble,” showing the audience how to act in a way most pleasing to God. - “enlighten,” means “to please,” to uplift the audience, to give them a sense of the positive possibilities of human behavior - which meant acting to please God or to conform to - and thereby confirm - the rules of society. Here we also have to consider the “divine right of kings.” Kings were chosen by God, were His emissaries, so to conform to the King’s rules was morally good, to go against them was not just anti-social, but anti-God. These ideas weren’t developed right away - they came later in the Italian Renaissance, when writers had to justify writing about topics other than those purely religious. So, they could write comedies because they ridiculed bad behavior, and tragedies because they showed the consequences of mistakes. Pride is perhaps the greatest threat to all of the above. This is not necessarily a Greek or Roman concept, but a Christian interpretation of Greek and Roman writings. Oedipus is a great example of this. Pride can be seen as an individual’s self assertion against “nature” (the way things are in God’s world). Pride is the cause of bad judgment, misdeeds, and errors, which lead either to

3 comedy (if committed by low class characters) or to tragedy (if committed by upper class characters)....