The Dramatic Lessons of History

By Sir Guillaume de la Belgique
Copyright Scott Farrell, 2005

When my book This Sovereign Stage was published recently, I was thrilled by the response among the SCA’s academic community. Several of the most respected historical experts in the kingdom, including Mistress Maria-Theresa and my own mother, applauded my scholarly observations of theater in the Middle Ages with comments like: “Danny Kaye’s The Court Jester is not a primary resource,” and “Hamlet wasn’t a Scandinavian breakfast sandwich,” and “Don’t you think you should have done some actual research before writing this book?”

Clearly, I realized, they had missed the point of my writings about the medieval theatrical tradition. My book wasn’t about painstaking research and historical detail. It was based on one overarching premise that served as both a philosophical thesis and an analytical presupposition, thereby creating de facto donnée for my belles-lettres, which was this: Medieval theater was really bad.

Thus, in order to dispel any rumors that my research into thespian history was either faulty or, God forbid, fabricated, in this chapter I would like to present an overview of theater and drama from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Then, when I get finished, I’m going to go eat my Hamlet and bacon.

Classics on the Boards

Experts have a hard time agreeing on when the art form we know as theater began. (That’s primarily due to the fact that “experts” tend to be a bunch of self-important blowhards who would probably have a hard time agreeing on what kind of pizza to order for lunch.) Most believe that the origins of drama are lost in the mists of time, probably around 30,000 years ago when one Neolithic caveman accidentally hit another with a mastodon bone and a crowd of onlookers laughed themselves silly.

One of the earliest documented theatrical presentations began in Egypt around 2500 B.C. when priests created the Memphite Drama. This multi-part ritualistic show, performed on the first day of spring, was a re-enactment of the murder of the god Osiris by his brother Seth. (Thus creating a form of theatrical interaction that can be seen today on The Jerry Springer Show.) The Memphite Drama was staged annually for more than 1,900 years — a record for continual performance that was only recently surpassed by the Broadway run of Oh! Calcutta!

Theater as we know it, however, began in Greece in the 6th century B.C. There, presentations of tragic drama were performed as part of the City Dionysia, a festival whose name is derived from the fact that naming a festival after a mythological god sounds much more sophisticated than calling it, “six days of drunken riots.”

Although early stage productions focused on themes of death, betrayal, horror, sacrifice and grief, the Greeks soon invented the concept of “comedy” when audiences, having sat through several hundred hours of suicides, incest, betrayals and anguish, realized that they needed to (as theatrical scholars say) “lighten up.”

The greatest of all Greek comedy writers was Aristophanes, whose works include The Clouds, The Wasps, The Frogs, The Dingoes, The Police, The Rolling Stones, and that cult classic, The Thesmophoriazusae. But undoubtedly the greatest of all Aristophanes’ work is The Birds, which includes such brilliant comic scenes as the two main characters being startled by a slave jumping out of a thicket and, in response, defecating on stage. (As God is my witness, I’m not making that up!)

Roman Around the Theater

Greek theater came to an end in 404 B.C. when the Spartans invaded Athens after learning that matinee tickets for Miss Saigon were sold out. After this, theatrical performance moved to Rome where it took on a very different aspect.

In Rome, dramatic productions were staged as part of the Imperial festivals, which took place approximately every 48 minutes. This was good in the sense that there was lots of theater in Rome, but it was bad in the sense that stage plays had to compete with other forms of entertainment, such as gladiators, chariots, prisoners being fed to wild animals, exotic dancers, NAASCAR races, and Britney Spears concerts. And lets face it, when you have a choice between watching people in masks mince around a stage for three hours or seeing someone get eaten by a bear … well, let’s just say there’s a reason that PBS has to beg for donations while guys with names like A-Train and Ultimo Dragon get paid millions of dollars to appear on the WWF Smackdown.

The most popular type of Roman theater, however, was called mime — a form of comedy that, as we would say today, was “intended for mature audiences only.” In mime performances, viewers laughed at such delightful, humorous presentations as simulated sex on stage, obese people eating massive quantities of food, fist fights, actual sex on stage and public executions. Mime performances also included jugglers, acrobats, tightrope walkers, dancers and clowns — just to make sure the audience didn’t get bored if there was a slow spot in the sex and violence.

In Roman theater, however, nothing could compare with the most popular target for comedic ridicule: Christianity. Many mime performances featured distorted parodies of baptism and mass, which is undoubtedly why playwrights and actors suddenly began to find themselves out of work when Christian emperors rose to power in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. At the Trullan Council of 692, when Pope Sergius placed a ban on all forms of theatrical performance, His Holiness is said to have proclaimed, “Let’s see thou laughest at excommunication, vile stage monkeys!” ...

(Guillaume continues his theatrical look at history into the Middle Ages and Renaissance with moralitiy plays, Shakespeare and special effects in his new book.)