Renaissance Theater

The Renaissance theater is the union of dramaturgical genres and different forms of theater written and practiced in Europe in the late Middle Ages and the beginning of modern age.

In this period there is a phenomenon of rebirth of the theater, prepared by the long medieval theatrical tradition that was manifested in the courts, squares and universities in many forms, from the sacred representation to the cultured fifteenth-century comedies.

The late medieval theater
The Renaissance saw the desire of sovereigns to better control subversive popular entertainment, including the sotties that ridiculed regular members of the royal family and the Church, sometimes with a particularly partisan political content. It is however the Church, scalded by the Reformation, which will promulgate the first complete prohibition: it is that of the mysteries, in 1548. The same year, the first ” regular comedy “, in imitation of the antique, is presented before King Henry II in Lyon: it is about La Calandria, to which the king and the queen make a triumph, as well as to its instigator Maurice Scève, showing well the preference of the power for the “noble” genres inherited from the antique, and especially without a contemporary social referent. Several royal representations will subsequently install the tragedy as court entertainment, putting on the occasion directed the royal family itself. The comedy will not know the same honor, and after some royal representations, sometimes glorious and sometimes calamitous of the shows of Etienne Jodelle in particular, all the types of comedies were prohibited by edict of the Parliament of Paris from 1588 to 1594thus sealing the fate of the medieval and popular theater. This period, however, revived the art of mime comic, it is not subject to the new law, and the farce continued to exist in more or less clandestine forms.

The dramaturgy
In 1549, Joachim du Bellay encouraged writers to restore the ancient model. If the text of the medieval theater was the product of an order placed by an organizer to an anonymous writer (for example for the mysteries), then the literary relation is reversed: what becomes prime is the work, the the dramaturgical writing, but also the playwrights, who are no longer anonymous and assert themselves as writers, occasionally brandishing their portrait at the head of the book, a frequent habit among the poets of the Pleiades.

This new theater renews the subjects, this allows it to open up to new horizons sometimes neglected by the medieval theater, where the mystery invited only the believer to abandon the sin and to reintroduce a philosophical universe.

At the time, three books are known by scholars, the Poetic Art of Horace translated in 1541, the Art of grammar of Diomedes and the Treaty From the tragedy and comedy of Donat. The principles of Horace are generally applied: pieces from 1500 to 2000 verses, mainly in verse, divided into five acts with in the tragedy interventions of choirs that mark lyrical breaks with multiple variations. Greek dramatists such as Sophocles and Euripides are translated but it is especially Seneca whose style and rhetoric are admiredwhich will be imitated by the first tragic ones. For comedy, it is above all Terence that will serve as a model, before Plautus.

Tragedy
It is the tragedy which occupies the essential part of this theater whose aesthetic will be constituted as and when production, tragedy showing the misery of the great and their reversal of fortune.

The action is tiny, it is a theater of the word where the character acts little, laments, he is the suffering victim and passively laments the disaster hence the importance of rhetorical value in the speech and tirades consecrated to the complaint and the lamentation. The subjects are drawn from the Bible through great figures brought to the scene such as Moses, Abraham, Esther but also the Greek myths: we see appearing biblical tragedy uplifting where, in times of trouble, writers write to the persecuted Calvinists and refer to the historical condition of their time. History (essentially the History of Rome and at the end of the century, especially the closer, modern history) and fictional fiction, tragedies of love and revenge. Theodore Beza with Abraham sacrificing writes the first French tragedy that is not an adaptation and a translation of an ancient work and Stephen Jodelle with Cleopatra captive writes the first real French tragedy to the ancient, which will exert a strong influence on the development later of the genre by setting up a dramaturgy that will continue for a long time. Robert Garnieris one of the most illustrious representatives of its kind: he was the most played, his works have been reprinted many times and enjoyed great success in bookstores. We can also mention Antoine de Montchrestien whose conception of tragedy is very close to him and which directs his themes towards the moral and religious edification of which the choir is the bearer.

Renaissance theater in Italy
The Renaissance was the golden age of Italian comedy, also thanks to the recovery and translation in the various vulgar languages, by the humanists of numerous classical Greek and Latin texts (both theatrical texts such as the comedies of Plautus and Terence and the tragedies of Seneca that theoretical works such as the Poetics of Aristotle, translated for the first time in Latin by the humanist Giorgio Valla in 1498).

The genres developed and proposed were the comedy, the tragedy, the pastoral drama and, only later, the melodrama, which had a considerable influence on the European theater of the century. But it also continued in the medieval tradition of the Sacred representation which had many exponents even during the Renaissance.

The comedy
One of the most representative playwrights of the Renaissance theater was Niccolò Machiavelli; the Florentine secretary had written one of the most important comedies of this period, La mandragola (1518), characterized by an expressive charge and an inventive sap hardly matched later, inspired by satirical references to the daily reality of the characters and no longer necessarily linked to the types of classical tradition.

Florence
Among the earliest playwrights were many Florentines, starting with Agnolo Poliziano with L’Orfeo (1480), a pastoral-mythological comedy. But in the following century established themselves as real professionals of comedy Anton Francesco Grazzini said the Roach, Giovan Battista Cini, Giambattista Gelli, Giovanni Maria Cecchi, Benedetto Varchi and Raffaello Borghini and the young Lorenzino de ‘Medici, who wrote one comedy L ‘Aridosia (1536) before being assassinated by the assassins of the Grand Duke Cosimo as a tyrannicide for the murder of his cousin Duke Alexander.

The Rome of the popes
In the Rome of Leo X Pietro Aretino will rage with his pasquinades but also with comedies such as La Cortigiana (1525), in which he will violate many linguistic and scenic conventions.
In Rome the theater was rediscovered and, for the first time, endorsed by the popes, who understood the possibility of exploiting it for political ends. The Renaissance theater in Rome had no representatives like the other Italian courts, with the sole exception of Francesco Belo who wrote Il pedante (1529) and the aforementioned Annibal Caro (originally from Civitanova Marche, but always in Rome at the service of the Farnese family).

Curiosity. Among the very few pieces that have as their setting the Rome of the Popes, indeed, to be precise, the Rome of the Jubilee of 1525, worthy of mention the most important Croatian and Slavic theatrical Renaissance comedy in general: “Dundo Maroje” (Padron or Uncle Maro), written in 1550 by the raguseo Marin Držić, also known as Marino Darsa (1508-1567).

Farsa cavaiola
The farce cavaiola was a fortunate dialect literary genre, a member of the “last great season of the 16th century comic theater […] that flourished in and around Naples “, linked above all to the name of Vincenzo Braca. The genus had to know a remarkable flowering between the end of the fifteenth and the sixteenth century, but of this conspicuous production, over a span of a century and a half, it has survived very little.

Gender is focused on ‘ archetype farce of Cavaiuolo, or an ignorant and foolish peasant Cava (ie an inhabitant of the city of Cava), imagined by the citizens of Salerno in the crudeness of his dialect, and in its gross traits and caricatures: examples are the ” Farza de lo Mastro de scola” and the ” Farza de la Maestra” by Vincenzo Braca, in which the cavalry character becomes the archetype of the typical “foolish people”.

Among the surviving farce, the only ones that precede Vincenzo Braca are the ” Cartello di sfida cavajola ” and the ” Ricevuta dell ‘ Imperatore “, dating back to the beginning of the 16th century, both by authors who remained anonymous. The Receipt of the Emperor (anonymous, but for some ascribable to the Braca) is the oldest of the far caverns, burlescally refers to the reception received in Cava by Charles V, who passed by returning from Tunis in 1535.

The only professional theatrical edition of the farse cavajole in contemporary times is that produced by the Study Center on the Medieval and Renaissance Theater, directed by Federico Doglio, which was staged at the Teatro Valle di Roma in 1986 with the adaptation and direction of Giuseppe Rocca.

The farce caveman in the Renaissance literary context
The ‘farce cavaiola’ was one of the «capital moments of the history of farce in Renaissance Italy », alongside the onset of other literary events such as the Sienese Strascino, a century Niccolò Campani, (prior to the Congregation of Rozzi), the Venetian comedy of the buffoons Zuan Polo and Domenico Tajacalze, and the mariazzi padovani del Ruzante. Previously also Andrea Calmo was a frequent visitor of the genre mariazzo so much that his comedy La Rhodianait was attributed to the Ruzante until recently. Compared to these other manifestations, however, despite the lively linguistic expressiveness, the work of the Braca, presents itself with essentially macchietistic inflections, of a more local and campanilistic scope. The smaller width of the satirical horizon, for example, does not allow Vincenzo Braca to access the incisive levels reached by the Ruzante.

Comedies in Venetian dialect
A special case is represented by the figure and the work of Angelo Beolco called il Ruzante from the name of the Paduan peasant protagonist of his works. The particularity of the Ruzante theater, anticipated a few years by the work of Andrea Calmo, was to introduce into Italian theater, which until then had used the Florentine vulgar, the use of dialect. Ruzante worked at the Paduan court of Alvise Cornaro who built a special set in his villa in Padua that was called the Loggia del Falconetto named after the architect Giovanni Maria Falconettothat he conceived it, a space suitable for the representation of the Ruzantian comedies such as Betìa (1525) and the Anconitana (1535) to mention the most famous comedies of Beolco.

Of 1535 – 1537 is an exemplary comedy in Venetian dialect, with an unequivocal title: La Venexiana which even if by anonymous author demonstrates the maturity of the theater of the city of Venice, until then linked to the authors of the mainland.

In the case of Ruzante the dialect with which he expressed his dramaturgy was the sixteenth-century Paduan of the Venetian countryside: the onomatopoeic sounds of the difficult language were inspired, after many centuries, by contemporary artists such as Dario Fo, who drew inspiration from Ruzante’s language for his grammelot.

The theater in dialect began to develop during this period with the Commedia dell’Arte, its masks, such as the Bergamasco Arlecchino (which later assumes the Venetian language), the Neapolitan Pulcinella with his mimic and gestural inventions and the old Venetian merchant Trousers among the most famous. Other frequenters of the Veneto-Po Valley theater were the Piacentino Girolamo Parabosco and Ludovico Dolce who wrote two comedies and two tragedies.

The sacred Renaissance representation
During the Renaissance, the production of sacred theater, which came from the sacred representation of medieval ancestry, did not stop but had an important flowering that ferried religious themes even in the Italian courts between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although widespread throughout Europe this genre was established mainly in Florence with the presence of important authors such as Feo Belcari and Lorenzo de ‘Medici in the fifteenth century and with Giovanni Maria Cecchi in the sixteenth century.

In spite of this, the majority of the sacred Renaissance representations remained anonymously as it was in medieval custom. Thus the authors (or the author) of the Ascension, recited in the Church of the Carmine of Florence and that of the Annunciation in the Florentine Church of San Felice in Piazza prepared for the Council of Florence (1438 – 1439) and apparatuses of Philip remained anonymous. Brunelleschi in his unusual role as a set designer, as testified by Vasari in the Life of the same architect.

These representations were written for the Florentine confraternities of the young, the most famous was the Representation of Saints John and Paul written by the Magnificent in 1491 for the entry of his son Piero in the Compagnia del Vangelista and recited in the courtyard of the Convent of the Old Trinity or Convent of San Giusto ai mura, later became Teatro dell’A Via Water. For the same Company, Cecchi, almost a century after 1589, wrote The Exaltation of the Cross; testifying that even at the end of the Renaissance this sacred genre was still vital appreciated by the people and the Medici court.

The mime
If on the one hand the birth of Renaissance comedy allowed the development of an autonomous form of theatrical prose, on the other the tradition of the jesters and the guitti did not go lost, allowing the perpetration thanks to court buffs and mimes. Their works were not inspired in any way by the Latin tradition, thus detaching themselves from the forms of contemporary show and presenting modules that will in part flow into the Commedia dell’Arte. It is wrong, however, to consider the antics and the burlesques as the counterpart of cultured theatrical literature: the themes of the fifteenth – century jesters and mimes are the same as their ancestors, stuck in amodest and short script, in which the themes of the city are compared with those of the villain, which becomes a reference point for the prank and mockery.

The Jewish theater in Mantua
A particularity of the Renaissance theater was the presence of a figure like that of Mantua Leone de ‘Sommi, of Israelite religion led, on behalf of the Duke of Mantua, the theater of the Jewish Company from 1579 to 1587, composing himself a drama, entitled Magen Nashìm, who provoked a scandal among the Italian sixteenth-century rabbis, who accused him of having used the language of the ancestors for the amusement of gentile princes (ie non-Jews). After the Counter-Reformation, this type of contamination will no longer be possible.

The birth of the melodrama
Also during the sixteenth century the first experiments were made which would have led to the birth of the most revolutionary genre of Italian theater: the melodrama.

In the Florentine palace of Giovanni de ‘Bardi, a group of intellectuals gathered and took the name of Camerata dei Bardi. Trying to exhume the ancient typology of recitar singing attributed to the classical Greek theater, they gave birth to that style that will be established over the following centuries thanks to the genius of authors such as Claudio Monteverdi, Metastasio up to the great nineteenth-century opera by Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini.

The first experimenters of the Florentine dormitory, born around 1573, were Jacopo Peri, Giulio Caccini, Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo), Emilio de ‘Cavalieri, Jacopo Corsi and the poet Ottavio Rinuccini who wrote the first librettos.

In 1589, with the staging, at the Teatro degli Uffizi in Florence, of the comedy La Pellegrina by the Sienese Girolamo Bargagli, the members of the Camerata were called to play the intermezzi of the comedy which were the first practical applications of the musical theory of recitar-singing and birth of the melodrama. The Intermezzi della Pellegrina had wide resonance for the apparatus built by the architect-painter-scenographer Bernardo Buontalenti who anticipated with this work the large and complex sets of Italian baroque theater.

The new recitative spaces
At the beginning of the fifteenth century the representations took place in private places such as gardens, convents’ courtyards and halls of buildings decorated for representations as in the case of the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence adapted to the theater by Vasari. With the re-enactment of the Greek-Latin texts, it began to build spaces to contain scenography, sometimes very complex: in this period new theatrical spaces were built, starting from the Loggia del Falconetto di Padova. But the most striking example of the renaissance scenographic application was the Teatro Olimpico by Andrea Palladio, aVicenza, which still today preserves the original sixteenth-century scenography by Vincenzo Scamozzi of the Edipo re di Sofocle, a work with which the theater was inaugurated in 1585. Later, in 1590, to the same Scamozzi the Gonzaga entrusted the construction of another theater for the Palazzo Ducale di Sabbioneta which took the name of Teatro all’Antica.

In Rome, thanks to Pomponio Leto’s activism, which was meant to rediscover the Latin theater, the Forum and Castel Sant’Angelo became places for representations, usually performed during holidays and celebrations; in Castel Sant’Angelo there is a theater shaped courtyard used in the days of Alexander VI and the even more pleasure-loving Leo X.

The rediscovery and exploitation of the ancient classics by the humanists allowed the study of the works concerning the theater not only from the dramatic point of view (in 1425 Nicolò di Cusa discovered, for example, nine plautine comedies) but also from an architectural point of view: architects, painters and treatises such as Sebastiano Serlio who adapted the classical Greek-Roman models of the scenographies to the theater of the sixteenth century: comic, tragic and pastoral, tripartition that was respected in the works of the Renaissance theater. The complex sets were in Girolamo Genga, Baldassarre Peruzziand Pellegrino da Udine (in the Ferrara area) his best representatives. While the treatise writers such as Leon Battista Alberti and Serlio himself sought inspiration in Vitruvius in the theatrical aspects of his treatise on Roman architecture

A new type of theater was affirmed at the end of the 16th century: private pay-to-play theaters, open to every social class and no longer the exclusive amusement of the aristocracy. In Venice, more than elsewhere, began this business, but that will be established in the following century with the long season of the comedy of art. The spread of these theaters also in the rest of Italy made sure that they were born of special Academies born to manage these new theatrical spaces, no longer for the exclusive use of the courts.

The Renaissance theater in Great Britain
In the period from the end of the fifteenth century to the middle of the next, coinciding with the development of the English Renaissance, interludes, dramatic forms of entertainment acted at the courts of the nobles deriving from the moralities but of non-religious subject, had wide resonance: on the contrary of the classical morality, the role of the protagonist was of the lord who hosted the show, and who saw it not in search of the eternal salvation of the soul, but of earthly happiness, thus diverging so enormously from the aims of religious theater. Not infrequently contained in them was a political propaganda since taking inspiration from contemporary times, it happened that the author might speak out against an occurrence such as King John of John Bale, in which the author declared the thesis of ‘ murder of Giovanni Senzaterra by the archbishop of Canterbury. In the dramaturgy of interludes there is also the possibility to see elements of classical derivation, especially of Latin authors and Italian novelistic, which will remain a point of reference for the subsequent dramatic production.

The stage presentation of interludes was characterized by the dialogue of several actors with a musical accompaniment often composed of a pipe and tambourine. Of the interludes we own about 80 fragments of scripts that cover a time span from 1466 to 1576. Among the major authors of the genre we must first mention John Heywood, John Rastell, Henry Medwall, John Redford, Nicholas Udall. Just Udall is remembered as the author of the first comedy in English: it was the Ralph Roister Doister of 1535, a modified version of Plaut ‘s Miles Gloriosus.

The interludes, due to their politicized and cultured character, were addressed to a specific public: in the same style, but with a comic and light subject, there were the farces, represented in the squares for the people.

Of medieval origin was the masque, a theatrical genre born in the beginning from a carnival parade of masks that, accompanied by music, enlivened the evenings of the nobles and then turned into a real theatrical work years later by Ben Jonson, who he built dramaturgical installations that made him famous for these performances.

Iberian Renaissance Theater
Even in Spain and Portugal the theater in the late fifteenth century and the beginning of the next century, takes a new direction and is detached from that of the sacred representations of die medieval while remaining the sacred subject the main topic of the Iberian playwrights even this period. The most important character of this genre was Margaret of Navarre (1492-1549) who continued in full XVI the experience of the theater of mysteries. Also in Spain it was important to rediscover the texts of the Latin Comedy. Among the most important authors of this period: Juan del Encina, Lope de Rueda, Juan de la Cueva, Juan de Timoneda and Luis Fernández.

For Portugal there are two names that must be made: that of Gil Vicente and António Ferreira. The latter wrote the most important tragedy, in the Portuguese language, of this period: Ines de Castro.

The theater spaces were very important for the maturation of the theater, which, from the classical road systems and the interior of the churches, passed to have their own conformation, the spaces inside the noble buildings and the universities. The so-called Teatro de salon was born, interior spaces that are no longer external and exclusively used by the nobility. While in the mid-sixteenth century the corrales were born, scenic spaces open also to the popular public upon payment of a ticket. If the comedy had its maturity passing through the classical ancient theater, other works were based instead on the myths of the history of Spain. This was one of the most important differences between the Spanish Renaissance theater and that of other European nations.

Among the most important theater writers of this kind stands out the figure of Juan de la Cueva who, at the end of the 16th century, wrote historical dramas: The Seven Infantes de Lara (1579) and The Death of King Don Sancho (1588). But the true initiator of the Renaissance theater was Lope de Rueda. De Rueda was influenced by Italian style, having witnessed their performances at the Spanish court. He was the first to insert the natural language and his subjects were first detached, by originality, from the Greek-Latin models, inserting glimpses of popular life. He made, in a certain sense, the same path of Nicolò Machiavelli withThe mandrake. Juan de Rueda wrote pastoral, five comedies and some scenic interludes that imposed him as one of the most important Spanish theater men before the Siglo de Oro. In fact, during the seventeenth century, the most famous Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca and others were affirmed, which would put the authors of the Renaissance in the background, for celebrities at European level.

Among the authors of the transition, late compared to Italy, between the medieval and Renaissance theater the most important was certainly Fernando de Rojas. His tragicomedy La Celestina, from 1499 is perhaps the first exemplary text of Renaissance theater.

But the real initiator of the Renaissance theater was Bartolomé de Torres Naharro. His long stay in Italy, put him in touch, especially during his stay in Rome, and after 1517 Neapolitan, with Italian novelties, from which he drew inspiration for his works (still rhyming) in Castilian. Many of his comedies also have an Italian ambiance, but his influence on the theater of his homeland was important but not yet fully recognized.

French Renaissance Theater
The Renaissance theater outside of Italy suffers a certain delay. Both in France and in Great Britain, the legacy of medieval sacred theater is more important and widespread than elsewhere. In France the fame of the Renaissance authors is then completely obscured by baroque tragedians such as Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille, and the Italian-style comedy by Molière, pupil of the famous art comedian Tiberio Fiorilli, creator of the famous Scaramouche mask (or Scaramuccia).

The French Renaissance theater, as in other European countries, receives an important boost from the rediscovery, and the relative diffusion, of classical texts of Greek-Roman origin. In fact, many of these comedies come directly from works of Plautus and Terence translated, more or less faithfully, into French. Among these is the case of Jean Antoine de Baïf and his comedies: L’Eunuque from the Eunuchus of Terence and Le Brave, translation of the plautino Miles gloriosus. The same author also wrote the tragedy Antigone, obviously inspired by the homonymous textsofocleus. In France, tragedy and comedy live together. Many tragediographers of this period are also playwrights, as is the case with Jean de La Taille who wrote many important tragedies such as: Saül le furieux, Daire and Alexandre. At the same time he also wrote two funny comedies such as: Les Corrivaux and Le Négromant.

An important variant that distinguishes the French situation, compared to other countries such as Spain or Italy, is that of religious wars, which influenced, not a little, the theatrical environment. The choices of many authors reflect the political and religious climate of the time in the texts. For example, tragedies often reflect the fears of a world in conflict and in crisis. But even in the play you can not escape the attempt to make an allusion to reality until you get to texts, such as L’Eugène by Etienne Jodelle that becomes a real text of political-religious propaganda.

Among the most prolific authors of the Renaissance in France, we should mention at least: Jacques Grévin, also tragic and comic, Jean Heudon, Robert Garnier, Nicolas Filleul, Aymard de Veins, Jean Bastier de La Péruse over the aforementioned Jodelle, de La Taille and de Baïf and other minors.

At the same time the spectacular form of the ballet, imported from Italy by the two French queens of the Medici family, was born in this period: Caterina and Maria. The dawn of the Baroque, and its giants, completely darkened, or almost completely, the humanistic theater of the sixteenth century.

The Renaissance theater in the Germanic area
The German theater, or of the whole Germanic area, takes a different path from the rest of Europe. Compared to France and its wars of religion, which tore the country with evidence even in theatrical texts, Germany is absolutely upset. Just as the countries bordering the German Electorates are also upset: Austria, Switzerland, Bohemia and Hungary.

But not for this the theatrical authors were affected too much. Even Germany had a great legacy of medieval theater and its Sacred representations, with the arrival of the Reformation, soon replaced the farce in the vernacular. The importance of this laicizing aspect of representative art and poetry is fundamental and makes it a prominent feature of the German Renaissance theater. It could happen that the latter was sometimes also erotic but revised in a sacred sense by Luther himself.

Catholic ecclesial chants, exclusively in Latin, are replaced by vernacular chants, often taken from previous songs of non-religious origin. German theater accentuates this profane vein that had already been spread by the Meistersinger (or Meistersänger) of fourteenth-century origin. From this tradition, and inside it, the most important playwright of the fifteenth-sixteenth century is born: Hans Sachs (1494 – 1576).

Hans Sachs
Hans Sachs is a giant among his contemporaries, also relying on a particular genre present only in the German area: the Fastnachtspiel. This type of theater comes from carnival parties, already present in the Middle Ages it is even traced to druidic rituals of Celtic origin.

The Greco-Roman theater, brought to light and readapted by the humanists, has a very relative influence in the Germanic area. For this reason, in the German 16th century theater, the tradition of the popular farce continues. This is how we move from dance to mime and finally to dialogic texts like those of Fastnachtspiele. Hans Sachs wrote as many as 85. Other such representatives were: Hans Rosenplüt, Hans Folz and Jörg Wickram.

Other authors turned to the erudite theater as: Nicodemus Frischlin (1547 – 1590), Johannes Reuchlin (1455 – 1522) and Bartholomäus Ringwaldt (1530 – 1599) who wrote an interesting work entitled Speculum Mundi in 1592.

The birth of Hanswurst
Within this theatrical typology one of the first German comedy masks is born, that of Hanswurst (or Gian Salsiccia). This character was taken from the satirical poem ” Narrenschiff” (The Ship of the buffoons) by Sebastian Brant in 1519. For modern criticism this character was the equivalent of the Italian Zanni, even if the latter will be born with a few decades of delay compared to Hanswurst.

Switzerland
Still on the subject of political-religious satire, we must point out the presence of the Swiss painter-playwright Niklaus Manuel. Although his works are mostly satirical comedies and religious propaganda, those of Manuel can be considered among the best expressions of the Swiss Renaissance theater. The inspiration of the Bern playwright comes from his deep friendship with the reformer Huldrych Zwingli.

Also in the style of the Fastnachtspiele there is the work of Pamphilus Gengenbach of Basel, in particular: Die zehn Alter der Welt of 1515, Der Nolhart of 1517 and Die Gouchmatt der Buhler of 1521.

Hungary
In the Hungarian area, the patronage of Mattia Corvino was fundamental. The king of Hungary had continuous exchanges with the Italian humanists, who in the Renaissance were often called in the court of Buda. This environment so fervent with novelty influenced the society and the Hungarian arts and also the greatest dramatist and poet of the period: Bálint Balassi (1554 – 1594), considered the initiator of literature in the Magyar language, especially in the poetic field, which represents his greater commitment.

In the Hungarian environment, the staging of the comedies of an Italian author such as Pandolfo Collenuccio who exported the Italian scholarly theater in Hungary should not be underestimated. In the wake of the erudite theater stands the figure of the dramatist Péter Bornemisza, who wrote the tragedy in Hungarian (Tragoedia magyar nyelven, az Sophocles Electrájából) in 1520 which is a translation of Electra by Sophocles.

Source from Wikipedia