Recreation in the Renaissance

64 Recreation in the Renaissance
Although, among the meanings of ludus/jeu/play, I do not regard
the specifically theatrical as the main direct object of this book, it
will appear evident from my examples that in the medieval and early
modern usage this was hardly distinguishable from the more general
linguistic value of ‘pastime’ and ‘entertainment’. One implication of the
family relations between these fields of human activity is particularly
relevant to my topic here since it formed the grounds for a category
under which they were jointly grouped by several medieval authors. Its
name was theatrica. As Glending Olson put it, ‘the idea of theatrics, a
science of entertainments (scientia ludorum), appears first and fully
developed in Hugh of St Victor’s Didascalicon, written in the late
1120s’. 37 The term defines one of the seven mechanical arts, a list that
mirrors that of the liberal ones – the remaining six being fabric making,
armaments, commerce, agriculture, hunting and medicine. Altogether,
the mechanical is one of four kinds of human knowledge, together with
the theoretical, the practical and the logical. Theatrica represents, therefore,
a family of works of human labour. Although critics have related
its appearance to the emergence of medieval liturgical drama, Hugh
himself speaks of it in the past tense, as if he was providing a comprehensive
list of trades, where a class of activities that had not survived
beyond late Antiquity could be accommodated. Its inclusion is itself
a proof of some degree of tolerance. Theatres lend their name to the
category by metonymy, as a part to the whole: Hugh specifies that
they were not an exclusive place for ancient entertainments, which
could be held elsewhere. Dance, music-making, athletic contests and
dice-playing are mentioned as well as drama. The rationale of the whole
category is medical, with the physiology of emotions justifying those
activities both for performers and for their audience.
At the opposite end of the spectrum of tolerance we find the
thirteenth-century Dominican (and subsequently Archbishop of
Canterbury) Robert Kilwardby, who regarded the whole world of theatre
as morally unfit to constitute an acceptable field of human trade, and
retained only some forms of musical practice, by classifying them under
medicine. From the ‘anti-theatrical prejudice’ a specific and well-known
campaign against the world of the performing arts developed in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe across the confessional
barriers, with recourse both to the printing press and to attempts
to introduce express regulations and prohibitions by law (see below,
Chapter 5).
In seventeenth-century France, theatre- and operagoing developed as
leisure practices of high significance, thus attracting the concentrated