Theatre
In 1559, Catherine and Henry II attended a performance of the tragedy Sophonisba by Trissino, adapted earlier by the poet Mellin de Saint-Gelais to Catherine's commission. The performance style of the day inserted musical interludes unrelated to the plot between the acts, devoted to praise of the royal court. Princesses and other high-ranking ladies performed on this occasion, which celebrated royal and noble marriages. Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, claimed in his memoirs that having seen Sophonisba shortly before her husband's death, Catherine refused to watch any more tragedies, believing the play had brought him bad luck. Tragedy went out of fashion at the court soon afterwards, replaced by the new genre of tragicomedy, though the change in taste may have had less directly to do with Catherine than with the revulsion of the court against the violence of the times. Genevra, staged at Fontainebleau on 13 February 1564, adapted into French from an episode of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, was the first tragicomedy known to have been performed for the French court.
Catherine enjoyed comedy and risqué humour. She drew the line at obscenity, however: in 1567, after seeing Le Brave, an adaptation of Plautus's Miles Gloriosus by one of her official poets Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Catherine told the author to cut the "lascivious talk" of the classical writers. In the 1570s, the Italian commedia dell'arte rose to popularity in France and became all the rage. Catherine was not, as has sometimes been supposed, the first to bring Italian comedy to France: Louis Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, himself an Italian, was the first to invite high-quality Italian players to France in 1571. The following year, two companies called I Gelosi appeared in Paris, and a performance was given to the court in Blois. A year later, I Gelosi performed during the celebrations for the marriage of Catherine's daughter Marguerite de Valois and Henry of Navarre. Further groups appeared under the same name in the reign of Catherine's son Henry III (1574–89).
Read more about this topic: Catherine De' Medici's Patronage Of The Arts
Famous quotes containing the word theatre:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Compare ... the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Mankind’s common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.”
—William James (1842–1910)