![]() | Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500-1700 Subjects: CLASSICAL DRAMA -- APPRECIATION -- GREAT BRITAIN; THEATER -- GREAT BRITAIN -- HISTORY -- 16TH CENTURY; THEATER -- GREAT BRITAIN -- HISTORY -- 17TH CENTURY; TRAGEDY; COMEDY; GREAT BRITAIN -- CIVILIZATION -- CLASSICAL INFLUENCES; Unlike the contrast between the sacred and the taboo, the opposition of "comic" and "tragic" is not a way of categorizing experience that we find in cultures all over the world or even at different periods in Western civilization. Though medieval writers and readers distinguished stories with happy endings from stories with unhappy endings, it was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--fifteen hundred years after Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus, and Terence had last been performed in the theaters of the Roman Empire--that tragedy and comedy regained their ancient importance as ways of giving dramatic coherence to human events. Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage charts that rediscovery, not in the pages of scholars' books, but on the stages of England's schools, colleges, inns of court, and royal court, and finally in the public theaters of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century London. |
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