Chapter 12 Origins Of The Modern Theater

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neoclassicism

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The dominant form of theater in the 18th century. It demanded strict adherance to classical structure, and was a reaction to the creative freedom enjoyed by rennaisance dramatists.

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Age of Reason

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The Age of Reason really began with Isaac Newton during the second half of the seventeenth century. During this Age scholars expected that all problems would be solved by the acceptance of a few axioms worked out from careful observations of phenomena, and the skillful use of mathematics. It was not to prove to be as easy as all that, but for the eighteenth century, at least, man gloried in a new intellectual optimism that he had never experienced before and has never experienced since.

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Voltaire (Francis Marie Arouet)

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Voltaire (1694-1778) was truly a shining light of the Age of Reason. He took Newtonian thought as far as it could go. He believed that ethics could be written in mathematical language.

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Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

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René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer who has been dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which continue to be studied closely to this day.He is credited with the introduction of rationalism.

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Rationalism

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Rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" In more technical terms it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"

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Romamticism

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Between 1750 and 1800, Romanticism took hold, and flourished between 1789 and 1843 in Europe. The French writer Victor Hugo is considered the guiding light of romanticism.

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Naturalism

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Naturalism is a movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theatre that attempts to create a perfect illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies. Romatic playwrights preferred prose to poetry.

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Realism

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The achievement of realism in theatre was to direct attention to the physical and philosophic problems of ordinary existence, both socially and psychologically. In plays of this mode people emerge as victims of forces larger than themselves, as individuals confronted with a rapidly accelerating world.