THE DRAMADICTIONARY

pulls down the screen inle begins to crack,peare in As You Like Itd makes reference, are

concerned with good nature. In this way they arguably rise abovethe limits of a *genre which implies at times that all standards arematters of social convention. See SENTIMENTAL COMEDY.

Comic man/Comic woman. Actors in the Victorian *stock com-pany who took the comic roles.

Commedia dey/'Arte/jImprovised comedy performed by varioustroupes of highry"professional Italian actors who toured Europe inthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The troupe variedbetween ten and twenty in number and their plays were based on aset of widely known *type characters operating within a varyingscenario to which the actors brought a repertoire of jokes, acrobaticfeats, set speeches and comic *business. Each actor would specializein a particular role — the aged, avaricious and amorous *Panta-loon, the fat and pedantic black-clad *Doctor, the vainglorious andcowardly Spanish *Captain with the bristling mustachios, the shyand acrobatic servant *Arlecchino, the deceitful, crooked-nosed,

5 Two Commedia dell'Arte characters (etching by Jacques Callol). Note the stagein the background

COMMITMENT 73

artistic *Brighella, the young, unmasked, handsome *Lovers, and avariety of *Zanni or servant figures, instantly recognizable to theaudience. The plot, location, sequence of entrances and thecharacters sharing the stage varied from performance to perform-ance as can be deduced from the 'canovacci' or synopses which werepinned backstage. Presumably much dialogue was improvised,though no doubt actors had set pieces to fall back on. We have onlythe canovacci, a number of illustrations and the testimony of a fewspectators to witness the immense appeal of a theatre whoseinfluence was felt perhaps more than we know by the Elizabethans,and was certainly very strong in Paris where the troupes settled.Here, Moliere, and later Marivaux, developed their work. In Italy,Goldoni (1709—93) and Gozzi (1720—1806) also assimilated andadapted their style and structures. Today, modern Italian troupes,such as the Tag Teatro of Venice, give formidably professionalacrobatic song, dance and spoken performances with Commediadell'Arte characters, in what must be a close approximation to theirstyle. Recent emphasis on the value of ""improvisation has meant aresurgence of interest in the Commedia dell'Arte.DUCHARTE, P.-L., The Italian Comedy: the improvisation, scenarios, Lives,

attributes, portraits and masks of the illustrious characters of theCommedia dell'Arte, Harrap, 1929.

HERRICK, M.T., Italian Comedy in the Renaissance, Illinois UniversityPress, 1960.

OREGLIA, c., The Commedia dell'Arte, Methuen, 1968.NICOLL, A., The World of Harlequin: A critical study of the Commedia

dell'Arte, Cambridge University Press, 1963.

Commedia erudita. 'Learned comedy'. The written comedy ofItaly in the early sixteenth century, as compared with theimprovised * Commedia dell'Arte. A realistic and sardonic form ofcomedy, best represented perhaps by La Mandragola (c. 1518) byMachiavelli and / Suppositi (1509) by Ariosto. It derived from theRoman *farce of Terence (c. 190 or 0.180—159 B-c-) anf^ Plautus(0.254-184 B.C.).

Commitment. The acceptance of an ideology. A term associated inparticular with a group of French writers, headed by Jean-PaulSartre (1905-80), who were deeply marked by their experience ofwar. This, together with a reading of Marx, convinced them of thepolitical nature of most forms of writing and the economicprocesses of production on which they depend. Thus Sartre, inWhat is Literature? (Qu'est-ce que la Litteraturet, 1948), argues thatwriters of value commit themselves to the cause of the lessfortunate and oppressed, even if it means working against orsubverting the system of aristocratic (or state) patronage, or thepaying middle-class audience or reading public. The writer, in the

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Terry Hodgson

I TRAGEDY 405

pastness of the past,im an awareness ofan American he hadsd to acquire in order

The historical sense compels a man to write not only with his owngeneration in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of theliterature of Europe from Homer, and within it the whole of theliterature of his own country, has a simultaneous existence.

Eliot saw a sense of tradition as necessary to creativity. His view canbe supported by examining the way he himself used traditionalpatterns, as in his employment of the Orestes story in The FamilyReunion (1939). His practice relates to that of major dramatists,from the Greeks to Jean Giraudoux (1882—1944), who studied andreworked such traditional subject matter as the Orpheus legendsand the Trojan wars.

Traditionalism, (a) A respect for *tradition. (b) A method ofproduction developed by Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874—1940) inabout 1910. Plays were revived and presented with elements oftheir original staging. Calderon's Adoration of the Cross, set inthirteenth-century Siena, was not given a thirteenth-century^naturalistic setting but staged in a seventeenth-century style. Acontemporary *pantomime, The Veil of Pierrette by Arthur Schnitz-ler (1862—1931), was reworked in the *grotesque style of E.T.A.Hoffmann (1776—1822). Such 'traditionalism' achieved distancingeffects, and recovered a sense of pre-naturalistic styles.

Tragedian, (a) Any player or writer of *tragedy; (b) Leading manin the nineteenth-century *stock company.

Tragedy. Pftiys predominantly concerned with human suffering,mally involving the decline and death of a *hero. Brief definitions

normally compare it with *comedy. W.B. Yeats (1865—1939)defines them by distinguishing their effects. Tragedy induces a lossof individual identity in the spectator: 'At the height of tragedy allis lyricism'; comedy, on the other hand, 'is built on the dykes thatseparate man from man'. John Arden (1930— ) neatly definestheir contrasting subject-matter. Comedy is about 'the indestructi-bility of the little man' whereas tragedy is about 'the necessarydestruction of the great'. J-L. Barrault (1910— ) contrasts theirdiffering strategies. We are all of us on a tightrope, he says, andsooner or later we all fall off. Both comedy and tragedy depend onour knowing this but comedy 'looks away' whereas tragedy'confronts' the situation.

Such brief definitions, though valuable, cannot hope to suggest

406 TRAGEDY

29. Greek statuette of a tragic actor.

Note the mask and the rich costume

the complexity of the form, or cover the differences between*classical, *medieval, Elizabethan, *neo-classical, *Romantic,*absurdist and nineteenth-century *social tragedy. Philosophersfrom Aristotle to modern *existentialist writers have built up aformidable body of theory on the subject. The analysis of tragedyinvolves discussion of fundamental concepts such as fate, *chance,*causality and free will. It involves, too, a consideration of why andhow the representation of suffering makes an appeal to anaudience. Aristotle's Poetics still provides a vocabulary of basicterms, such as *hamartia, *peripeteia, ^disclosure, and *beginning,middle and end. Discussion of tragedy involves a consideration of*taboo and *sacrifice, and the *origins of drama. It leads one intohistorical considerations of why tragedy occurs at particularperiods, and whether its expression in, say, fifth-century B.C.Athens, late Elizabethan England, seventeenth-century France ornineteenth-century Scandinavia, shares common elements.

The collapse or weakening of a strong system of belief and itssudden or gradual replacement by a different set of values(associated with the rise to *power of a new social group) seems torelate to the value conflicts in much tragedy. The growth ofnational feeling and national and imperial power, together with thesimultaneous rise of a deep pessimism, seems to link the worlds of