A középkor és a reneszánsz angol drámairodalma [antikvár]

AUTHOR' S NOTE In writing the following lecture notes I had a strictly practical aim: to introduce the Hungarian student to a complex literary subject and acquaint him or her with some of the results of modern research. The inclusions and omissions have been determined by the scheme of studies followed at the Hungarian universities. I have not hesitated to quote statements and findings by scholars, either in inverted commas or without them. My debt to previous treatments of the subject is enormous and has only partly been recorded in the bibliography. My chief indebtedness is to a great teacher. Professor A. A. Jack, of Aberdeen University, who first taught me, many years ago, to appreciate the human and artistic values of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists. September 1965 N. J. Szenczi I. MEDIEVAL DRAMA Popular character of English medieval and Renaissance drama There was an unparalleled outburst of imaginative energy, of poetic creation during the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth in England. The age of the Renaissance still represents the summit of English literature and drama is the chief glory of a great age. There was a flourishing dramatic activity in several West European countries at the time - in Italy, Spain, and France, with some more modest beginnings in Germany, Hungary, and the Slav countries - yet there is nothing to equal the poetic drama of Shakespeare and his major contemporaries and successors such as Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Webster, Middleton, and Ford. The only valid comparison is with the masters of ancient Greek drama. In spite of the vast difference in social and historical background, the Athenian and the Elizabethan drama have one feature in common: they are essentially popular in character and appeal, they express the taste and deepest aspirations of the whole national community. Greek tragedy, throughout its brief but glorious career, remained an integral part of popular religious festivals, a fact that accounts for its elevated tone and its interest in problems of divine justice and fate. The immediate origin of English drama must also be sought in religious rites and observances; in fact, religious subjects predominated until the sixteenth century, although well before that time the production of plays had been taken over by the rising class of town burghers and their guilds. But while the subject is elevated and religious, there is a strong admixture of popular, realistic, even comic elements in some of the earliest extant specimens of medieval English drama. In the later phases of development secular subjects became predominant under the impact of Renaissance thought. English drama, although it ultimately depended on aristocratic patronage, became the fullest expression of the national mind in a revolutionary age, the period of transition from feudalism to capitalistic economy. In the period of its highest development, Elizabethan drama was communal in character and popular in appeal, addressing itself to all classes of society. Conversely, the decay of English Renaissance drama, the narrowing of its range of themes, the decrease in poetic power must be attributed to social changes and a new political constellation. In the first - 7 -