Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes movedto the end of the article. Table of contents has been created for the HTML version.
HISTORY OF THE STAGE.
BIOGRAPHY.
LIFE OF WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.
SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF THE LATE MR. HODGKINSON.
MISCELLANY.
SPORTING INTELLIGENCE.
DRAMATICUS.
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE.
THE FREE KNIGHTS.
ACT I.
ACT II.
ACT III
In proportion as the Romans yielded to the habit of imitating theGreeks, they advanced into refinement, and receded from theircharacteristic roughness and ferocity. Their pace, however, was veryslow, for imagining rudeness and brutality to be synonimous withindependence, they indulged and prided themselves in an adherence totheir original coarseness and despised the manners of the Grecians, asthe latter did those of the Persians, for their extreme refinement andeffeminacy. Of the drama there is not to be found a trace on the recordsof Rome till more than three hundred and fifty years after the buildingof the city. The people had revels and brutal debauches at which rudecompositions filled with raillery and gross invective were sung,accompanied with indecent action and lascivous gestures. But theraillery they used was so personal and calumnious that riots constantlyensued from the resentment of the injured parties, in consequence ofwhich the senate passed a law, in the three hundred and second year ofthe city, condemning to death any person who should injure the[Pg 432]reputation of his neighbour.
It was a full century after that law when, on occasion of great publiccalamity, they, in order to appease the divine wrath instituted feastsin honour of the gods, and those feasts for the first time exhibited asort of irregular theatrical performances, composed wholly of imitation.The actors in those may in all probability be placed on a level withthose called Mummers in Great Britain, and Livy describes them asBalladines who travelled to Rome from Tuscany. Though their merit couldnot have been great, they were very much applauded. Applause producedimprovement, and they soon formed themselves into companies calledhistrioni, who performed regular pieces called satires. These, whichwere at best entitled to no higher rank than bad farces, kept exclusivepossession of the public regards for a hundred and twenty years.
It was at the end of that period, and about two hundred and forty yearsbefore the Christian æra that the first play performed after the mannerof the Greeks, was brought forward in Rome, by Livius Andronicus, theearliest of the Roman dramatic poets. He turned the personal S