Theater Pictorial: A History of World Theater as Recorded in Drawings, Paintings, Engravings, and Photographs

By George Altman, Ralph Freud, Kenneth Macgowan and William Melnitz

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520351714

Book preview

Theater Pictorial

George Altman Ralph Freud Kenneth Macgowan William Melnitz

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

PICTORIAL

A History of World Theater as Recorded in Drawings) Paintings, Engravingsand Photographs

Berkeley and Los Angeles 1953

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles

California

Cambridge University Press

London, England

Copyright, 1953, by

The Regents of the University of California

Manufac tured in the United States of America Designed by Adrian Wilson and John B. Goetz

Preface

The past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theater of everlasting generations with her harmony. SHELLEY

THIS IS the story of the theater, not the story of drama. It is the story of an institution, not the story of a literature. It deals, first of all, with the dramatic impulse that we call theater, and then with the forms it has used.

There is, to begin with, the playhouse—from a dancing floor in Greece or a temple courtyard in Egypt to the Paris Opera and Drury Lane, to Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus and theater-in-the-round. Then comes what we call production—from the three-sided prisms on which the Greeks painted scenic suggestions, to the stage machines of the Renaissance and the sky-domes and the revolving and sliding and elevator stages of the German theater, from rushlights and gaslights to limelights and incandescent spots. The director—who was most important in the time of Aeschylus and is now important again—and the actor, and even the actor-manager, have their part in the story, but only as they break new paths or reach new heights by their artistry or their creative ideas. Without the playwright, the theater is not the theater; yet this is the story of the playwright only when he becomes the dramatist, when he pushes the theater ahead in a significant way. Our history is a history of the many things that make up the theater, not the history of just one of these.

We have tried to tell the story of the theater through pictures more than through words. These pictures are of many kinds. The oldest is a drawing by a caveman, the rarest record of the prehistoric theater. Otherwise, the primitive ways of the theater are illustrated by drawings and photographs of what savage tribes have done from 800 A.D. in Mexico to 1900 A.D. in the American Southwest and the South Seas. For Egypt we have carvings on stone, and for the classical world a few ruins and the drawings of scholarly

restoration. With the Middle Ages and the Renaissance we enter the time when an artist shows us what the setting for a mystery play or the interior of a theater looked like. He leaves us his sketches and plans. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries his paintings and engravings record stage scenes and famous players. Though photography is more than a century old, it provides a spotty record until 1900 and a full and atmospheric picture only since 1920. Today we have a wealth of scenic designs and theater plans to choose from, but we must still depend on astute guesses so far as Shakepeare’s Globe theater is concerned.

As with all history, the arrangement of our material has been a sore problem. We can be chronological only in the broadest sense. Sketches by a caveman and by an explorer of Indian territory a hundred years ago, as well as photographs of contemporary Balinese dancers, tell us how primitive man produced theater. The sequence from Egypt to Greece to Rome to Medieval Europe and to Renaissance Italy is clear and straight. After that we must dodge back and forth from country to country and, therefore, from century to century.

Of the 516 illustrations almost 100 have never before appeared in any book on the theater; an additional 150 have not previously been published in England or America; many of the rest are from books now out of print and only accessible in libraries. We are especially indebted to the Yale and Harvard library staffs for making source material available for photographic reproduction. For some areas that have been thoroughly illustrated—the Greek and Roman, for instance—we have included only a limited number of pictures. Also, we have put relatively less emphasis on the theater since 1920, when photographs began to be made with correct stage lighting and were widely published.

Finally, we must explain for the benefit of the foreign reader, particularly the English reader, that we have used the word producer to signify the management of a production or of a theater, and not, as in England, the director who stages the play. We have used director in the way that is common in the United States and Canada and the way that it is more widely used in motion pictures.

Contents 1

Contents 1

I World Sources 20,000 B.C. to 1950 A.D

2 The Middle Ages

3 From the Renaissance to the Baroque

Index

I

World Sources

20,000 B.C. to 1950 A.D

THE THEATER is twenty-five hundred years old—if we mean by the theater a written drama played by actors on a specially arranged stage. But if we think of the essence of drama instead of its trappings, then we must go back to the Old Stone Age to find its beginnings. Primitive man made theater before he made magic. The hunter dressed himself in the head and hide of an animal and imitated its movements as he closed in on his prey. When he returned to camp, he put on his disguise again and acted out the drama of the hunt. Later on, the hunter gave the same kind of performance before the hunt. This was magic—sympathetic magic,—for it insured much game and good hunting. And it was an extension of theater. When primitive man invented agriculture, he continued to use magic and make theater. He poured water from a tree or devised dances that were even more certain to bring rain. As he came to depend on the fertility of nature, he began to invent gods and to impersonate them. The animal mask turned into the mask of deity. Rain gods are only a few of the celestial beings that the Pueblo Indians of the southwestern desert still mimic in their elaborate dance-dramas. Comic performances must have mingled with the religious impersonations of ancient man, for we find crude comedy among the primitive peoples of Africa, southeastern Asia, the Americas, and even Australia. Entertainment jostled religion.

Modern drama and the modern theater stem back through Greek tragedy and Egyptian rituals to three religious concepts of ancient man. These were fertility rites, the initiation ceremonies by which the boy became a man, and the deification of culture heroes. Ritual dances dramatized the death of nature in the fall and its rebirth in the spring, often through the destruction and the resurrection of a local god. Even today in certain initiation ceremonies the boy appears to die and then return as a man. The stories of the deified culture heroes of Greece were chanted and danced at their graves. Some part of these three concepts animated the passion plays of Osiris in Egypt, of Adonis in Syria, of Thammuz in Babylonia, of Attis in Phrygia, and finally—and most importantly—of Dionysus in Greece.

The theater has ancient roots in other countries than those of the eastern Mediterranean, and these roots, also, are magical, religious, and legendary. Today in China and Japan, in Tibet and India, in Turkey and Cambodia, in Java and Bali, gods, heroes, and witches still play their roles in popular and sacred drama, the mask and the dance still hold their ancient place. Magic has become theater—and theater, magic.

The theater begins in many places—under the sky and under a roof, in forest clearings and on the shores of the sea, in snow huts and in deep, dark caverns. On a wall of the Cave of the Three Brothers in the French Pyrenees we find the oldest document in the history of the theater—this drawing, retouched in black, of a man disguised as an animal. Made 15,000 to 25,000 years ago, when glaciers still covered northern Europe, it shows a medicine man wearing the antlers and skin of a deer and probably taking part in some imitative animal pantomime designed to increase the supply of game. Today primitive peoples still honor and lure in similar fashion the wild animals they live upon. A hundred years ago the Mandan Indians danced buffalo on the Great Plains, as the Swiss artist Charles Bodmer recorded in the painting below.

Since Indian corn is more vital than meat in the economy of the Hopi and other Pueblo tribes of the Southwest, these people dramatize colorfully certain legends connected with agriculture. In the Great Serpent Drama, puppet snakes that symbolize floods try to destroy a miniature cornfield. Below, the snakes are overcome by Mudheads,

masked representations of the ancients who have supernatural power to cause the corn to grow. Besides such dramas, acted out in underground ceremonial rooms called kivas, the Pueblo Indians present numerous masked dances in the open air. Sometimes Christian symbols invade primitive fertility rites, as in the Corn Dance that the Taos Indians of New Mexico give in front of their magnificent adobe skyscraper built hundreds of years ago. The bower at the left is the resting place, in turn, of San Antonio, Santiago, and San Juan.

The Indians of the North Pacific Coast from British Columbia to Alaska still use dramatic pantomime to gain supernatural power. In the Cannibal Society ceremonial of the Kwakiutl a new initiate comes out of the mouth of the Raven—servant of the Great Cannibal Spirit—painted on the background. Attendants seize him by his neck- ring and bring him forward to show in pantomime the supernatural powers that he has acquired from the Cannibal Spirit.

The War Dance of the American Indians used dramatic pantomime as a martial stimulant. In the Charcoal Dance of the Osage the warriors were painted black from head to foot, a detail the artist has omitted. He shows, however, the chief holding in one hand a war hatchet and in the other a fan made of an eagle’s wing, while he boasts of one of his exploits. Such dances, exciting the young men to valor, were repeated for four days, and then the war party started out for combat. As late as 1875, the natives of an island in Torres Strait, between Australia and New Guinea, initiated their youth in a ceremony in which culture heroes impersonated by Shark Men in masks danced while the tribe sang of their adventures. Between the two Shark Men a sort of stage manager guided them by means of a rope.

The use of masks is widespread today among the Negroes of Africa, and they serve both sacred and profane purposes. Most of them cover the face, but those in the picture above are worn on top of the head. They represent ancestral or supernatural spirits in a women’s ceremonial dance in Cameroon.

With the passion play of Osiris, deified ancestor of Egypt, we pass from prehistoric and primitive origins of the drama to its beginnings among civilized peoples. The demise and resurrection of Osiris—forerunner of Dionysus—were symbolic of the death of nature in the autumn and its reawakening in the spring. This sculpture, carved about 1300 B.C. at Abydos, where the most famous passion play was given, records a scene that may have been first enacted five thousand years ago. Below, we see Osiris’ dead body with his wife-sister Isis at his head and, opposite her, a masked priest or king impersonating his son, the solar divinity Horus, who with a conjuring gesture reanimates his father.

A part of the many Egyptian plays dealt with Horus and his revenge upon Set, brother and murderer of Osiris. Above, in a drawing of a Ptolemaic relief, we see Horus, wearing the mask of a hawk, standing in a boat with Isis, and plunging a spear into Set, who has transformed himself into a hippopotamus. The king who reigned during the time of the play’s performance attacks Set from the river bank. The play was probably written and staged by Imhotep, vizier of King Zoser about 2980 B.C.

The oldest plays that are produced today sprang from similar ceremonies at the tombs of the ancient Greeks, ancestral rites that were probably blended with the cult of Dionysus, god of fertility. By introducing spoken verse into the choric hymns, or dithyrambs, of the antic satyrs, the musician Arion laid the foundations of Greek drama in the seventh century B.c. In the following century, Thespis—dramatist as well as prototype