PROLOGUE, a prefatory piece of writing, usually composed to introduce a drama. The Greek rp6Xoyos, included the modern meaning, but was of wider significance, embracing any kind of preface. In Attic drama, a character, often a deity, stood forward or appeared from a machine before the action of the play began, and made from the empty stage such statements as it was neces sary that the audience should hear. It was the custom to explain everything that had led up to the play, the latter being itself, as a rule, merely the catastrophe following on the facts related in the prologue. The importance, therefore, of the prologue in Greek drama was very great. With Euripides, as has been said, it takes the place of "an explanatory first act." On the Latin stage the prologue was often more elaborately written than in Athens, and in the careful composition of the poems which Plautus prefixes to his plays we see what importance he gave to it ; sometimes, as in the preface to the Rudens, Plautus rises to the height of his genius.
Moliere revived the Plautine prologue in the introduction to his Amphitryon: Racine introduced Piety as the speaker of a pro logue to Esther. The tradition of the ancients vividly affected our own early dramatists. Not only were the mystery plays and miracles of the middle ages begun by a homily, but when the modern drama was inaugurated, the prologue came with it, directly adapted from the ancient practice. Sackville prepared a sort of prologue in dumb show for his Gorboduc of 1562; and he also wrote a famous Induction (practically a prologue) to a miscellany of short romantic epics by diverse hands. In the Elizabethan drama the prologue was very far from being universally employed. In the plays of Shakespeare it is rare. After the Restora tion, prologues became de rigueur. They were always written in rhymed verse, and were generally spoken by a principal actor or actress. See also EPILOGUE. (E. G. ; E. E. K.)