Under Construction

This page, when completed, will try to make sense of all that’s happened since the end of World War II.

Under Construction

This page, when completed, will narrate the centuries of church abolishment and resurrection between the classics and their rediscovery.

Modern Times

Too many factors are involved in the transformation that occurred in the western world over the next 200 years to cover in the context of this essay. From the enlightened writings of rational philosophers (and a crumbling aristocracy) came wars, not for land or religious faith, but for bread and freedom; then Napoleon, more revolutions, the rise of the British (and fall of the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Holy Roman) Empires, the Industrial Revolution, Freud, Darwin, and Marx, and the Great Depression, sandwiched between two world wars, at which point the Modern Era ends and Postmodern life on earth begins, with America (vs the Bad Guys) in control.

The evolution of dramatic literary art over the next five hundred years creatively reflects and helps define the phenomenal transition of western culture from the Great Schism in in the Catholic Church through the Holy Wars, Italian Humanism, and the Protestant Reformation, into the Renaissance, which led to the Enlightenment, the Modern Age, and since.

RECONSTRUCTING

Religious Roots

When prehistoric people had no answers for natural forces that controlled their existence, they attributed them to the supernatural—super-human forces, gods—and began to search for ways to influence them, among which were music, song and dance, mimicry, self-sacrifice, epic stories, spectacle—all elements of theatre—which evolved into codes of religious ritual. So popular were these rites (and festivals) that they continued to be performed even after the mysteries were solved, at which point theater emerged as a separate entity.

Or so one theory goes.

Under Construction

“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

(Drafted through the 1960’s)

DISCLAIMER: The following essay derives from what I’ve learned from life and what I’ve plagiarized from two primary sources: Oscar Brockett’s History of the Theatre, acknowledged as definitive, and
The History of Theatre According to Dr Jack (Hrkach) online, along with countless multitudes of Wikipedia articles. I beg the authors to forgive me; if I live long enough, I’ll add a million footnotes.