The legacy of classical drama to our world can be difficult to distinguish from the very idea of drama itself. Borges builds a famous fable around the bafflement of Averros before Aristotle Poetics (‘ Averroes’ Search’, in Labyrinths, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby ( New York, 1964)); the conclusion that a ‘tragedy’ is a panegyric and a ‘comedy’ a satire or an anathema is the best that an educated and subtle mind is going to make of that text in medieval Islam, without the nurture of an ongoing theatrical tradition to let it know just what kind of thing a play is. The numbest modern television addict would on this score be a better reader of Aristotle than the great Arab philosopher who devoted his life to studying that author. T.
G. Rosenmeyer begins his essay in the new Legacy of Greece citing Borges to this effect: ‘The tale points up the truth that the art of the theatre is not a universal possession, available to all men as part of their cultural birthright’ (p. 120).
Rosenmeyer goes on to affirm that the theatrical tradition that still most occupies us is a specifically Western tradition, not quite like any other; in the long view, the dramatic revolutions of the modern age represent not the opening to Eastern influences so fiercely announced by polemicists like Artaud–Noh theatre or Balinese dance–but a return to Western roots in clarified form. It is certainly hard to imagine such outside influences sufficing to give us even as avant-garde a classic as Beckett Endgame without the generic precedent sustained, through however many modifications, since Aeschylus and the Greek festivals. Similar claims might be made for Roman drama.
The Term Paper on Poetic Drama /Verse Drama of Modern age
... In Germany, for example, there emerged a rich new tradition of verse drama in the works of Lessing (eg. Nathan Der Weise, ... rich and mysterious «radio parable play» in verse. The tradition of verse drama has continued to attract writers, and they have continued ... not escape from the shadow of the operatic tradition). In America too, verse drama was being attempted by dramatists such as John ...
History saw to it that a Latinized version of the Greek form would be the principal means by which that precedent survived the collapse of classical civilization. The survival was at times a very tenuous one. It is highly likely that Senecan tragedy was itself written for declamation or even solitary reading rather than full theatrical performance, and by the Middle Ages Christendom as well as Islam had no particular idea of how the scripts of even such consummately theatrical technicians as Plautus and Terence were meant to be used; many assumed, not much more accurately than Averros, that they were reading narrative poems cunningly written in dialogue. Yet the theatrical context proved recoverable, and the florescence of Western European theatre is closely interwoven with the fortunes of those Latin texts; indeed, serious interest in their Greek predecessors generally awaited later centuries, when that theatre had already firmly established itself as an international institution with its own history and traditions. (No one bothers to publish an English translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King until 1715.) In so far as Western theatre has a continuous filiations, Rome provides the essential splice, and much that we might say about the influence of Greek theatre can also, and in some ways more accurately, be said about its Roman offspring. Still, to the extent that they are offspring, to the extent that the chromosomes remain recognizably Greek, the most spacious consideration of the legacy of classical drama belongs in another volume than the present one.
It is in no small part due to the deliberate conservatism of Latin literary culture that Rome is able to act as a bridge between Greece and the Renaissance. Here as in so many other areas, the Roman writers strove to be conspicuously imitative; Plautus and Terence often trouble to tell just what Greek play or plays they are working from– ‘verbum de verbo expressum’ (‘translated word for word’) in one self-description ( Adelphoe11).
The Essay on Romans And Greek Education School Roman
Education wasn't an option for Romans and Greeks; it was both a tool and a necessity. Without education, neither of these cultures would have been what they were or remembered as they are today. Without education, neither of these cultures would have experienced the fame and success that they experienced during their individual time periods. About 200 BC, a Roman system of education developed ...
And there is some justice in the tradition of evaluating them on those grounds. Our general shift of attention since the eighteenth century back from Roman to Athenian drama reflects a still forceful judgment that much of what the Latin scripts have to offer is not only available in Greek as well, but available there in more durable, varied, and interesting form. Renewed respect for Roman drama in the twentieth century has not really dislodged that judgment, though it has made clear that there is more to the story. Viewed from the perspective of the twentieth century, the heritage of Latin rhetoric over the whole span of western European history can be said to fall into the three areas of education, theory, and practice.
The Roman rhetorical schools, and their preparation in the grammar schools, provided a structured curriculum focused almost exclusively on the attainment by students of conventional and socially approved skills in written and oral composition; from the Middle Ages to the early modern period this often included some facility at Latin verse composition. Facility in Latin, as the international language of communication in public affairs, church, philosophy, science, and law was the traditional goal, but from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century attention turned gradually to analogous verbal skills in the national languages as well. Fundamental to the philosophy of the schools was the theory of imitation. The verbal arts were achieved by study of approved models, followed by an effort on the part of the student to imitate their rhetorical features. In the Middle Ages, the Bible, the Church Fathers, or the example of a particular teacher furnished models. Beginning in the Renaissance, as in Antiquity, the schools encouraged Classicism in that approved models were most often the orations of Cicero and the poetry of Virgil, but sometimes other classical models were preferred. In theory, imitation should not be a sterile copying of a model, but an imaginative application of techniques learned from study to new subjects and new contexts. The effect of the Romantic movement was to reject the imitation of models as the path to appropriate expression, and thus to question the need for any structured system of rhetoric and composition..
The Dissertation on Neoliberal in Latin America by Samir Sader
This paper examines the role of the neo-liberalism approach to development in Latin America. The paper aims to establish whether the approach has facilitated the attainment of the developmental goals of the Latin American region. Through literature review, the study finds out that the neo-liberalism approach has attained a certain degree of progress in the Latin American region. However, the ...
