Prologue

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  Legends, Tradition and History in Medieval England

  • Antonia Gransden(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Prologues in the Historiography of Twelfth-Century England The medieval tradition of the literary Prologue had its roots in Greek and Roman times. 1 The classical Prologue was adapted in the early Christian era to conform to the new religious ideals. 2 In a Prologue the author introduces himself to the reader, and tries to put him in a receptive frame of mind; he informs him about the purpose and scope of the work, and demonstrates his own rhetorical skill. To achieve these ends he uses a variety of literary commonplaces, topoi. One species of Prologue was the Prologue to an historical work. However, although an historical Prologue might well have distinctive features, it had much in common with Prologues to other classes of work: therefore, generalisations about it may also be appropriate to them. It is the purpose of this paper to examine historical Prologues as a genre. The subject will be discussed in two parts. First, the characteristics of historical Prologues will be treated generally. Secondly, those w r ritten in twelfth-century England will be examined in more detail, to see how they conform to the norm. Usually a Prologue dedicates a work to some important person, and often it claims that that person, or some other named individual, ordered or persuaded the author to write. 3 Next the author may well try to disarm the reader by a declaration of modesty. 4 He is unequal to the task, unable to write good enough prose to do justice to his subject. (He may even use a 1 For the classical Prologue tradition see Tore Janson, Latin Prose Prefaces, Studies in Literary Conventions (Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Studia Latina Stockholmiensia XIII, Stockholm et al., 1964). 2 For the medieval tradition to c.1200 see Gertrud Simon, 'Untersuchungen zur Topik der Widmungsbriefe mittel-alterlicher Geschichsschreiber bis zum Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts', Archiv fur Diplomatik, iv (1958), 52-119, v-vi (1959-60), 73-153.

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  Wise King, Royal Fool

  Semiotics, Satire and Proverbs 1-9

  • Johnny Miles(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 Prologue: A C(L)UE TO (READ) PROVERBS 1-9 AS SATIRE Fools are my theme, let satire be my song. (Lord Byron) What is heard but not understood; read but not comprehended? How is a ?K2 like an introduction? Both receive scant, if little, attention. 1 Readers quickly hurry past the Prologue of Proverbs like 'a highway in the summer desert: one journeys over it as expediently as possible to arrive at his destination'. 2 And most Proverbs' commentaries do little to dissuade such 'speed' reading. But introductions serve an invaluable purpose; they preview plot, significant themes and subject content. In short, an introduction cues the reader on how to read, in a rather broad sense, what follows. For example, a reader would not read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose as anything but historical fiction after having read its Prologue. Like the trailer to a feature movie presentation, the Prologue of Proverbs projects what appear to be disconnected images while never 'giving it all away'. This elliptical quality prompts the perceptive mind to slow down and to ponder. To read the pro-logue and, for that matter, the book of Proverbs otherwise can only elicit frustration. Reading poetry demands that readers reorient themselves according to a mindset commensurate with poetry's nature: 'poetry expresses concepts and things by indirection. To put it simply, a poem says one thing and means another (italics mine). 3 This semantic indirection expresses itself through certain ungramma-1. Some scholars have focused on the grammatical aspects of the Prologue. For example, von Rad describes the introduction as a 'hypnotic piling up of nouns' that have been poetically ex-pressed with a care that 'falls little short of that of the modern scientist' (Wisdom in Israel, p. 25). Similarly, and perhaps influenced by von Rad, Crenshaw refers to the Prologue as a collection of words 'heaped' together into a 'stereometry'.

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  Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre

  Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama

  • Douglas Bruster, Robert Weimann(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Henry V —came at what appears to have been the nadir of the form’s popularity in early modern England. Like the belated publication of his Sonnets in 1609 (well after such sonnet sequences and collections had proved attractive), and like his rewriting of the ‘Hamlet’ story in 1601 (almost a decade after revenge tragedy had become somewhat passé), Shakespeare displayed his absolute mastery of a form—in this case, the Prologue—precisely when that form had passed the crest of its popularity. Second, these figures suggest that we must not conceive of the early modern dramatic Prologue as a uniform thing. Clearly Prologues, and audience expectations inflected therein, varied widely. Such variety notwithstanding, however, it is apparent that early modern dramatic Prologues possessed a family resemblance, from their composition and structure to their performance and reception. It is to such commonalities that we now turn.

  We should start by acknowledging the ‘in between’ nature of the Prologue as constituting both a literary form and a theatrical practice. On one side, the Prologue is bordered by the summarizing argumentum and by the epigraphic motto. For only one example of the latter, we could offer the quotation from Horace’s Epistles on the title page of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614, printed 1623) as a Prologue-like text that introduces and frames the playtext that follows: ‘Si quid…/Candidus Imperti si non his utere mecum’ (‘If you know wiser precepts than these, be kind and tell me; if not, practice mine with me’). An epigraph of this sort would hint, to prospective buyers, of the gnomic wisdom and sententiae to be found in the printed playtext. 15 Brief and pithy, such epigraphs could become as central to authorial self-fashioning in relation to the printed text as the Prologue was to the positioning of the dramatic performance in the playhouse itself. 16

  Less formally sententious, the literary ‘Prologues’ to two modern Shakespearean films strive for a similar resonance. Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet of 1948, for instance, begins with a subtitle taken from the play: Hamlet’s ‘So, oft it chances in particular men’ speech (1.4.23–38). Olivier famously glosses the film with a voiced-over summary simultaneously moral, psychoanalytic, and reductive: ‘This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind’. 17 In a happier but equally pedagogical way, Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Much Ado About Nothing

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  Prologue and Gospel

  The Theology of the Fourth Evangelist

  • Elizabeth Harris(Author)
  • 1994(Publication Date)
  • Sheffield Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  3 Very similar, but in relation now to a Prologue which stands on its own separate from the action (as in several of the plays of Plautus and Terence, and probably in those of the New Comedy) is the definition of Donatius, 'The Prologue is the opening speech, called by the Greeks rcpcoxoq A,6yo<;, preceding the real composition of the story'. 4 This variety of definition and terminology would seem to point to a certain fluidity and development over a considerable period, and it cannot be ruled out in advance that it could have provided something of a background for the author of the Fourth Gospel and his readers. The Greek literary sphere is the only one that furnished instances of a self-contained, concentrated poetic unit acting as an introduction to, and pre-statement of, what was to follow; there are no instances of this to be 1. In his Introduction to H. Lloyd-Jones, The Eumenides of Aeschylus (Prentice Hall Drama Series; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), p. xi. 2. In the Scholia Londinensia to Dionysius Thrax, cited by Stoessl, 'Prologos', col. 636. 3. Cited by Stoessl, 'Prologos', col. 636. 4. Cited by Stoessl, 'Prologos', col. 636. 16 Prologue and Gospel found in Jewish literature. 1 If the author of the Fourth Gospel and his readers had any acquaintance with the variety of forms and functions of a 'Prologue', they would accept that the writer was free to re-present any known account of a personage or god in terms which suited the author's choice and emphasis. They would be aware that the manifold re-presentations of the old, well-known stories in the Greek and Greco-Roman literary and religious traditions were saturated with rhetoric and philosophy, even though the plays 'are all taken from the old mythology, in accordance with the sacred traditions of the drama, which it was impossible to disobey'.

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  The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama

  'Whining' Prologues and 'Armed' Epilogues

  • Brian W. Schneider(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2‘Prologos’ to Prologue in Classical Drama

  Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light.1

  Introduction

  In 534 BC, the playwright Thespis is reputed to have won a goat in a dramatic competition: ‘his originality lay in introducing an actor or “answerer” (hypocrites ) who introduced the “play” in a Prologue’.2 If this is true, then Greek tragedy from its very origins – and incidentally all Western drama – affords the prologizing speech a position of importance as the device by which the process of dramatic development begins. Prior to this innovation, the dithyrambic Chorus presented both spectacle and exposition on the Greek stage; after this the actor – and the Prologue-style speech – became coterminous with the growth of both tragic and comic forms. However, the origins of Western drama are not as simple as this scenario implies. Thespis, of whom we know very little, may not have been the originator of the Prologue or of the idea of the individual actor – there are references to previous performances ‘when someone climbed on a table and “answered” the Chorus’.3 Nevertheless, the introduction of a single figure, separate from or detaching himself from the Chorus, was a vital step in the progress of dramatic representation towards dialogue and theatrical conflict. This figure might provide a summary of the events leading up to the current situation, a commentary on these events and, occasionally, a foretaste of what was to occur in the ensuing scenes. In a number of cases, this opening Prologue/monologue was immediately followed by the appearance of the Chorus. In a growing number of works, however, one or more dramatic scenes occurred after the initial speech and before the Chorus appeared. This introductory portion of the play, which occasionally represented as much as a fifth of the entire work, became known as the prologos , while the Chorus’s first appearance, or at least its first song or speech, was the parodos .4 What is important to keep in mind is that, for the Greek theatre, there is no suggestion that the prologos is not an integral part of the drama. It is the manner in which the Prologue speech developed from the prologos that is the focus here. George Grube warns against confusing the Greek prologos with the modern idea of the Prologue.5

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