Italian Drama during the Medieval Period Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Italian Drama during the Medieval Period - Essay Example The medieval drama initially came into being as an incident of service on certain special days and occasions of the ecclesiastical year in an illustrative manner. Until it grew strong, medieval drama was confined to the interior walls of the church (Theatre History.com). But once it grew strong and started gaining fame, the medieval drama lasted for very long with religious intent. Almost throughout the entire continent of Europe, the history of the medieval drama is more or less the same. "The religious drama of England is very like that of France (from which, indeed, it is in some measure derived), just as the religious drama of Italy is like that of Spain, although neither of these had any appreciable influence on the other (Theatre History.com)." For instance, if a miracle play is considered the same native treatment is given for life as it is given in a mystery. Even the story construction is equally panoramic in both kinds of plays. In addition to these, even the mixture of the comedy incidents, apparent irreverence and also the circumstances of the performances are also one and the same in both kinds of plays.â€Å"The middle ages had an appetite for allegory quite as vigorous as the liking for legend; and after the saintly biographies had been set on the stage as miracle-plays, allegory was also cast into dialogue, and thus we have the moral-plays (Tebyan.net).† The morality was considered as a medieval forerunner of today’s modern novel and can be defined as an attempt for the modernization of a sermon whereas a mystery is a simple dramatization of plain and simple text. During the medieval period people never used to make a distinction between two different kinds of plays. People in the medieval period were not trained enough to make a distinction between the "canonical books and the Apocrypha, or even between the Scriptures and the legends of the saints (Tebyan.net)". Towards the end of the seventeenth century and during the early eighteenth century, improvised comedy which is named as commedia dell' arte began to decline. Despite this decline, the various characters which were represented by different types of masks and other situations of conventional comic still had a pace and a place on stage. The major reason for this decline in the fame of the Italian comedy was because of the then popularizing yet preposterous entertainments along with the new art of opera (Theatre Database). It was a person name Carlo Goldoni, who brought back life to the then declining comedy in Italy. He was born in the year 1707 and was a native of the city of Venice. Almost all of his writings are depicted with liveliness which describes all of the comedians who were born in Italy with a light-hearted temperament that too in a remarkable and respectable manner. Though his first attempt of a melodrama named Amalasunta was not very successful, his second attempt was quite successful. Carlo Goldoni is credited with one hundred and sixty comedies. Out of these, twenty works were in prose and the rest were prose. The prose penned by him was either Venetian dialect or in