As we have seen this
to be the case, in some measure, with respect to music, so it is the
care with respect to plays.
Dramatic compositions appear to have had no reprehensible origin. It
certainly was an object with the authors of some of the earliest plays
to combine the entertainment with the moral improvement of the mind.
Tragedy was at first simply a monody to Bacohus. But the tragedy of the
ancients, from which the modern is derived, did not arise in the world,
till the dialogue and the chorus were introduced. Now the chorus, as
every scholar knows, was a moral office. They who filled it, were loud
in their recommendations of justice and temperance. They inculcated a
religious observance of the laws. They implored punishment on the
abandoned. They were strenuous in their discouragement of vice, and in
the promotion of virtue. This office therefore, being coeval with
tragedy itself, preserves it from the charge of an immoral origin.
Nor was comedy, which took its rise afterwards, the result of corrupt
motives. In the most ancient comedies, we find it to have been the great
object of the writers to attack vice. If a chief citizen had acted
inconsistently with his character, he was ridiculed upon the stage. His
very name was not concealed on the occasion.
Pages:
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91