Native traditions

In spite of the lack of originality shown by dramatists, there were in Italy a number of native comic traditions that helped to shape the style of Roman comedy. The Fescennine verses (fescennia locatio) were bawdy, improvised exchanges sung by clowns at local harvest festivals and marriage ceremonies. These are thought to have combined with a tradition of performances by masked dancers and musicians from Etruria to form saturae, medleys consisting of jests, slapstick, and songs. The historian Livy says that in 364 bce these Etruscan players were summoned to Rome at a time of pestilence to appease the gods with their dancing and music.

From the areas of southern Italy and Sicily settled by the Greeks came the phlyax plays in the 4th century bce. Named for the Phlyakes (literally “Gossip Players”), these were burlesques and travesties of mythology and daily life that were probably improvised. They were performed on a raised wooden stage with an upper gallery, and the actors wore grotesque costumes and masks similar to those of the Greek Old Comedy. Acrobatics and farcical scenes were a major ingredient of the phlyax. The Oscan inhabitants of Campania, in the Neapolitan region of Italy, also had a long tradition of farces, parodies, and political satires influenced by Greek models, which became popular in Rome during the 3rd century bce. This genre was known as fabula Atellana (“Atellan play,” Atella being the name of a Campanian town). The significance of the fabula Atellana is that it introduced a set of stock characters, such as Maccus and Bucco, which were thought to be the direct ancestors of many of the Italian commedia dell’arte characters. The actors wore masks, improvised their dialogue, and worked slapstick routines and other buffoonery into the plots.

Imitation of Greek models

In the literary theatre, plot invention and characters were largely taken from Greek plays. Livius Andronicus, a Greek living in Rome, was the first to adapt Greek plays (in 240 bce), and his example was followed in 235 bce by the poet Gnaeus Naevius, a native of Campania. Naevius can be regarded as the first native Italian playwright, and the genre of comedies he founded was called fabula palliata (“play in Greek dress”). His less successful tragedies on Roman history were known as fabulae praetextae (“plays in the Roman toga”). Naevius’s attempts at satire were audacious enough to land him in prison, which is probably why the noted poet Quintus Ennius, who followed him as a dramatist, limited himself to safe adaptations of Greek tragedies, mostly those of Euripides.

Britannica Quiz

A Night at the Theatre Quiz

In the 2nd century bce the two most important comic writers of the Roman theatre, Plautus and Terence (who came from lower-class backgrounds), were both influenced by the New Comedy of the Greeks, and their plays retained the Greek setting and costume. Plautus, who had few literary pretensions but a sharp sense of wit and wordplay, blended the comic style of Menander with the fabula Atellana to produce vigorous farces about mistaken identities, sexual intrigues, and the mischief of household servants. His 21 surviving plays (of a total of about 130) were in turn to inspire playwrights for centuries to come, including Shakespeare. The braggart soldier, Miles Gloriosus, became one of Plautus’s most imitated characters. Terence, who closely followed the style of Menander, aimed at a more discerning audience. His comedies are noted for their grace and delicacy, and they avoided the buffoonery that attracted Plautus.

Seeds of decay

The audience that followed Terence’s plays was a small and exclusive one. From the start Roman theatre was dependent on popular taste in a way that had never been known in Greece. If a play failed to please, the manager of the festival was obliged to return part of the subsidy from public funds. Thus, even in Republican times, there was some anxiety to give the public what it wanted, and this proved to be the sensational, the spectacular, and the crude. Huge amphitheatres such as the Colosseum in Rome were built throughout the empire as evidence of the power and grandeur of Rome, but not of its artistic life and energy. The general public preferred boxers, beasts, and mock sea battles to drama. Actors and dramatists were tempted to adapt their style of presentation accordingly. Where it had once been subtle, the acting became coarse and declamatory. The actors took to wearing built-up shoes (cothurni) and bigger masks in order to make themselves appear larger than life. Some of the small number of tragedies that were staged were filled out with long processions of animals, gaudy costumes, and elaborate effects, all emphasizing the hollowness of both theatre and audience.

Theatre buildings themselves became grander in the 1st century bce. Erected on flat ground, the raked semicircular auditorium was a freestanding structure of great engineering complexity. With the elimination of the chorus from plays, the orchēstra was no longer needed other than as a space for important guests to sit, and the action took place on a wide, raised stage backed by an imposing architectural facade, the scaenae frons, which was often two or three stories high. The audience could be protected from harsh sunlight by a huge awning. The comfort was unrivaled, but it came too late; what took place on these stages had become trivial and degrading. It is not surprising that serious people avoided the theatres and writers were alienated from them.

One reaction against the excesses of the theatre was the custom of reading tragedies aloud to select gatherings of intellectuals. It is thought that this was the purpose behind the tragedies of Seneca, a Stoic philosopher and statesman under the emperor Nero in the 1st century ce, for there is no record of any of his works having been produced. While his plays lack the craftsmanship of the Greeks, Seneca’s importance lies in the fact that he was the principal medium through which Renaissance writers became acquainted with Greek tragedy. His division of the plays into five acts, his exaggeration of the melodramatic and violent aspects of the originals, his emphasis on rhetoric, and his preoccupation with the conflict between passion and reason helped to shape the Elizabethan drama and French Neoclassical tragedy that followed a millennium and a half later.

Mime and pantomime

After Seneca, serious dramatic literature in Rome virtually ceased, and the newly erected stone theatres were taken over by mime (Latin mimus) and pantomime (pantomimus) as the level of public taste steadily fell. Pantomime grew out of the wreckage of tragedy as a kind of burlesque ballet in which a chorus chanted the story to musical accompaniment, while a solo actor silently used gesture and dance to portray the various characters in a succession of masks. Particular emphasis was placed on the erotic elements of the story.

Of more interest is the mime, which was derived from the Greek mime traditions and the fabula Atellana. By the 2nd century bce it had a large following in Rome. Mime was characterized by great diversity: sometimes the shows were tragicomic dramas, but most often they were indecent burlesques on the gods in which female performers also took part. They featured dialogue, acrobatics, songs, and slapstick routines. Companies ranged from itinerant groups of six players to the troupe of 60 actors recorded in 169 ce. Although the performers were highly skilled (some of them achieved widespread fame), mime contented itself with easy targets, pandering to the taste of the emperor. By the time of the Christian persecutions under Nero and Domitian, mimes were used to ridicule the Christian faith on stage. In Centunculus, for example, a clown was baptized and martyred, being grotesquely crucified in a way calculated to burlesque his faith. Sometimes the shows were spiced with sexual acts and real executions on stage. At the end of the Roman era, mime actors were performing throughout the empire, but after the triumph of Christianity the theatre of the day was abominated by the Church Fathers as an art so debased as to have lost any relevance to the general good of society. In the 5th century all performers of mime were excommunicated, and in the following century the theatres were closed.

The old Roman Empire was Christianized and became divided in two: one based in Rome, the other in Constantinople (modern Istanbul). There being no other outlet for the expression of the supernatural and the cycle of the seasons, semitheatrical religious festivals, magnificent rituals, and processions once again became the principal means of community celebration. These were particularly elaborate in the Byzantine church, centred in Constantinople. Meanwhile, the mimes dispersed. Though the church did its best to prohibit them through the Middle Ages, they managed to carry on their art illicitly, finding audiences wherever they could. Mime, as performed by jesters, jongleurs, bands, and acrobats, is an unbroken dramatic tradition that reaches from the Classical world to modern Europe. The texts and theoretical treatises of the Classical world were all to lie largely unused for more than 900 years. The Roman theatre failed because it had lost its seriousness of purpose; yet, in what survived, sufficient elements were present to stimulate a new and powerful theatre during the Renaissance.