| Roman actors while adopting new socio-economic conditions channeled off to “barbaric” countries, and returned back to their original way of life-vagrancy. By their means deformed bits and pieces of Roman mime percolated lower strata of town and village population and absorbed country folklore in which mimes found exceptional stability. Along with that traditions of Roman mimes undoubtedly combined, in new barbaric countries, with the art of native Germanic singers. Then only as a result of understanding and remaking of cultural legacy of Roman mimes by indigenous saltimbocca,
here appeared jugglery typical for feudal Middle Ages, which was fully framed up in IX century and used experience of Roman mimes in revised, “taken off” way, but not in the way of direct transplantation on a soil completely alien to the social and ethnic scenario in Romano-Germanic countries.
This is a sharp contradiction to the famous theory of Emile Reich, who stated that all folk comedy arts are derived from medieval and new Europe and also from Asia and Africa.
Reich, while observing origin of comic presentation of everyday life which is same in any country because of uniformity in everyday life of social gutters, claimed that this folk- comic element lies at the heart of all world drama, because this drama is not “classical”, i.e. not based upon conscious imitation of literary drama in Antiquity
Retrograde essence of Reich’s theory lies in his claim of eternal littleness of ideas among social gutters of all countries, at all times and all people, who are fatefully bound to roll in the circle of one and the same primitive subjects, patterns and motives.
While rejecting bourgeois- idealistic theory of Reich, we should provide correct elaboration to the fact of undoubted similarity of mimes with medieval farce and also with commedia. In both cases we deal with socially heterogeneous events: if medieval farce was bred by social lower orders of the feudal society, then commedia frames up ideology of ruling class. Hence is the different character of relation of these genres to that of mimes.
In the first case authors of farce-artisans of a medieval city - for their own vocational comic art used traditional technique of saltimbanco folklore which absorbed cultural legacy of Roman mimes; simultaneously along with this some elements of mimes penetrated from medieval peasant folklore where these elements were brought in by the same jugglers of early Middle Ages.
In the second case (commedia dell’ arte) we deal not with the penetration of folk- actable elements into the comedy, but with conscious usage of these elements of bourgeois- aristocratic amateurs towards pastiche of “popular” comic, usage permeated by the trend of absorbing ancient genres for satisfying their own ideological demands. Commedia looks about atellana and mimes not less consciously than “scholarly” comedy focused in the plays of Plautius and Terentius.
Although bourgeois philological criticism rebutted theory of Reich, nevertheless it could not put an end to the illusion of “any sort“ of prevalence of mimes as original form of people’s comedy.
|
