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History, Myth, and Early Modern Drama

History and myth have been rubbing shoulders ever since the first Renaissance humanists revived classical, regular tragedy: scarcely had Gian Giorgio Trissino composed his Sofonisba (1515) before his friend, Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai, wrote Oreste and Rosmunda. Trissino’s historical tragedy dramatizes a minor episode in the Punic Wars recorded by Livy and Appian. Rucellai’s plays reanimate Euripides’ mythic Iphigenia in Tauris and Hecuba. Trissino’s decision to dramatize an episode of Roman history is striking because we know of only three plays from the fifth century BCE that dealt with verifiable history (as opposed to legendary material): Phrynicus’ Capture of Miletus and Phoenician Women, and Aeschylus’ Persians.1 Only the last has been preserved for posterity. To be sure, the third-century BCE Latin poet Naevius did introduce a species of tragedy based on Roman history that was known as the fabula praetexta – thus founding a tradition to which Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius contributed. The existence of this genre was attested by Cicero, Horace, Tacitus, Diomedes, Evanthius, and Donatus,2 not to mention their Renaissance commentators, so it might have emboldened some humanists to write tragedies based on history, whether Rome’s or their own. But it would be hard to imagine that authors from Miguel de Cervantes to William Shakespeare to Joost van den Vondel would not have dramatized national histories but for the classical imprimatur of the fabula praetexta: the impulse to dramatize history needed no impetus from the ancients. The more important distinction on the early modern stage, I would argue, is not between myth and history but between material that is treated as if it were myth – distilled into a fable – and material that is treated as if it were history: composed of a series of events and happenstances, of individualized, even idiosyncratic, manners and dispositions, of recalcitrant particulars. The locus classicus of this distinction is Aristotle’s Poetics, where the Stagirite asserts that “the poet’s task is to speak not of events which have occurred, but of the kinds of events which could occur, and are possible by the standards of probability or necessity.” That makes poetry “both more philosophical and more serious than history, since poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars.” “A ‘universal’ comprises the kind of speech or action which belongs by probability