In the course of time
however, the writers of dramatic pieces were forbidden to use the names
of the persons, whom they proposed to censure. But we find them still
adhering to the same great object, the exposure of vice; and they
painted the vicious character frequently so well, that the person was
soon discovered by the audience, though disguised by a fictitious name.
When new restrictions, were afterwards imposed upon the writers of such
pieces, they produced a new species of comedy. This is that which
obtains at the present day. It consisted of an imitation of the manners
of common life. The subject, the names, and the characters, belonging
to it, were now all of them feigned. Writers, however, retained their
old object of laughing at folly and of exposing vice.
Thus it appears that the theatre, as far as tragedy was employed,
inculcated frequently as good lessons of morality, as heathenism could
produce, and as far as comedy was concerned, that it became often the
next remedy, after the more grave and moral lectures of the ancient
philosophers, against the prevailing excesses of the times.
But though the theatre professed to encourage virtue, and to censure
vice, yet such a combination of injurious effects was interwoven with
the representations there, arising either from the influence of fiction
upon morals, or from the sight of the degradation of the rational
character by buffoonery, or from the tendency of such representations to
produce levity and dissipation, or from various other causes, that they,
who were the greatest lovers of virtue in those days, and the most
solicitous of improving the moral condition of man, began to consider
them as productive of much more evil than of good.
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