Theatre from Hipocrites to Stuffing…

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Wntr, 1999

Katherine Barber editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, once again answers the Literary question, "What's in a word?"

Theatre seems to be so necessary a part of the human condition that even our word "person" has its roots in theatre. A persona was originally in Latin the mask worn by actors, before it came to mean a character in a play and then any human individual. This came into English via French in about the 1200s. Of course, the Anglo-Saxons did have a word to designate human beings of either sex, but this was the rather ill-fated "man" which is beating an ever hastier retreat in all but its strictly masculine senses in the late twentieth century as the Latinate (and theatrical) "person" takes over. At least "person" has pleasant connotations, which is more than can be said for the word English has borrowed from the Greek word for actor - "hypocrite"!

It is of course not surprising that ancient Greek has contributed many theatrical words to English, including the word theatre itself. It comes ultimately from the verb theasthai meaning "behold"; a theatre was literally a "place for viewing".

"Tragedy", meanwhile, has one of the world's most intriguing unsolved etymologies. We know that the Greek word for tragedy was tragoidia. This comes from two words, oide meaning "song" or "ode" and tragos meaning... "goat".

Yes, goat. (Frequent readers of this space will begin to think that goats are a recurring theme, since they turned up in our discussion of cabriole and other ballet words.) No one knows why on earth a tragedy was called a "goat song". One possible suggestion is that perhaps a goat was given as a prize at an ancient Greek drama festival, but this has not been confirmed.

"Comedy", on the other hand. is less mystifying. It has the same element oide meaning "song", but its first element, comos, simply meant merry-making.

A particular type of comedy is the farce, and this word has a very interesting history. In the early Middle Ages, much of the theatre was based on religious subjects and could therefore be quite serious and morally uplifting in tone. Not surprisingly, the actors, and even more likely the audience, felt the need for some light relief, so gradually comic interludes, very often made up of slapstick and buffoonery, were inserted into the serious plays to lighten things up.

The French, even then obsessed with food, equated these interludes with the stuffing in a roast chicken, and used their word for "stuffing", farce for them. Eventually, people enjoyed the comic bits so much that farces came to stand on their own as comic plays.

When speaking of the theatre, it is only appropriate to finish off with a round of applause, and this convention, which dates back to Roman times at least, has given the language a word that is now used only outside of theatrical circles. It was the tradition in the Roman theatre for the actors to say "plaudite!" to the audience at the end of a play. This was in effect an order to applaud! This word of course is the root of our word "plaudit", which originally was a literal round of applause at a play. The figurative - and now only - use of "plaudit" dates only from the nineteenth century.

And with that, I take my bow.