French Drama

THE DRAMA

WITH the plays of Garnier and of Montchrestien the
tragedies of the Humanistic tradition cease to be of
importance. But the national drama, in spite of the monopoly
of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, acquires greater variety and freedom,
develops into varied and transformed genres, and, before long,
other temporary theatres and then a permanent rival one
appear.

As early as 1577 the Italian Gelosi had acted in Paris at the
Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon. They had as director at the passing
of the century Niccolò Barbieri or Beltrame, and a famous and
beautiful actress named Isabella Andreini. The Italian come­
dians, whose sojourns in Paris were at first temporary and not
until later permanent, gave plays in their own language and
then, as Italian became less familiar in the seventeenth century,
in French. They imported or composed specimens of the
written comedy, commedia sostenuta, and especially of the im­
provised comedy, commedia dell'arte, in which stock characters
like the pedant, the pantaloon, the bully, filled in with improvisa­
tion and horseplay a plot merely blocked out beforehand. When
Molière, during his youth and adolescence, was feeling the
dramatic impulse stirring within him it was the comedy of the
Italians that fed his hunger. There were Spanish actors off
and on during the first half of the seventeenth century, but they
were less popular, in spite of the vogue of the Spanish plays as
models for French ones.

Other actors came also from the provinces toward the end
of the sixteenth century. By 1599 the Confrérie de la Passion,

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Publication Information: Book Title: A History of French Literature. Contributors: C. H. Conrad Wright - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1912. Page Number: 292.