The significance of the prologue from ancient to modern drama in France and England

This study traces the differing critical understanding and variant practice of the prologue text from its ancient origins in Greek and Roman tragedy and comedy to the Renaissance imitations of France and England through the end of the nineteenth century; subsequently, it describes how modernist poet-dramatists in France, England, Ireland and the United States revived the convention as an historicized theatrical syntagm, referring metonymically to long-past dramatic traditions, and reimplemented in three ways: (1) to theatricalize theater signs, (2) to retell ancient stories for a modern audience and (3) to mythicize aspects of modern life. These dramatists include Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau, Andre Obey, W. B. Yeats, John Drinkwater and Thornton Wilder, all prior to 1937.;This largely historical survey demonstrates the disjuncture between Aristotle's notion of the integrated prologue as an essential part of the dramatic text and the Late Classical view of it (Evanthius and Donatus) as a separable text from the main play. It explains how Scaliger's reformulation of the sequence of quantitative parts favored the Latin view, reducing it to a vulnerable accessory text, for which the French neoclassical critics Mairet, d'Aubignac, Corneille, and Le Bossu, as well as Jonson and Dryden in England could not reason a defense. Practical adaptation of the theater prologue, however, developed in almost diametrically opposite directions in the two countries. French native prologue tradition began in the mysteres and moralites, flourished briefly under classical imitations of Latin comedy but not in tragedy, where the first-act protasis absorbed the prologic content. The prologue speech found a niche in the French subgenres of Biblical tragedy, pastoral tragicomedy, the Hotel farceur speeches, the baroque play-within-a-play, machine plays, fairground theater, early opera and finally dialogic prologues before becoming simply an ornate dedicatory poem to celebrate new theaters and companies. The English allegorical character prologue of the morality play and interlude evolved into a neutral Terentian text, deployed half the time in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, only to resurge in the Restoration and up to the mid nineteenth century as a heavily codified, witty and provocative entree to the play.