Chronicle Plays | Irving Ribner (essay date 1965)
Irving Ribner (essay date 1965)
SOURCE: Ribner, Irving. “The Emergence of a Dramatic Genre.” In The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, pp. 30-64. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965.
[In this essay, Ribner traces the roots of the Renaissance chronicle plays back to medieval morality plays and the classical tradition of Senecan drama.]
To trace the history play to its ultimate source would be, from one point of view, to go back to the very origins of drama itself. For drama is a narrative art, and the earliest subjects for narrative in every civilization have been the heroic achievements of peoples, the exploits of popular heroes, those events which a nation seeks to perpetuate for its own glory. This is true of Homeric legend, of Old Testament narrative, of Germanic heldenlied. The folk legendry of a people is based ultimately upon events which at some time occurred, and many of our most primitive folk practices...
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