Decorum - in Theater

In Theater

In continental European debates on theatre in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance, decorum is concerned with the appropriateness of certain actions or events to the stage. In their emulation of classical models and of the theoretical works by Aristotle and Horace (including the notion of the "Three Unities"), certain subjects were deemed to be better left to narration. In Horace's Ars Poetica, the poet (in addition to speaking about appropriate vocabulary and diction, as discussed above) counseled playwrights to respect decorum by avoiding the portrayal, on stage, of scenes that would shock the audience by their cruelty or unbelievable nature: "But you will not bring on to the stage anything that ought properly to be taking place behinds the scenes, and you will keep out of sight many episodes that are to be described later by the eloquent tongue of a narrator. Medea must not butcher her children in the presence of the audience, nor the monstrous Atreus cook his dish of human flesh within public view, nor Procne be metamorphosed into a bird, nor Cadmus into a snake. I shall turn in disgust from anything of this kind that you show me. "

In Renaissance Italy, important debates on decorum in theater were set off by Sperone Speroni's play Canace (portraying incest between a brother and sister) and Giovanni Battista Giraldi's play Orbecche (involving patricide and cruel scenes of vengeance). In seventeenth-century France, the notion of decorum (les bienséances) was a key component of French classicism in both theater and the novel (see French literature of the 17th century), as well as the visual arts - see hierarchy of genres.