Editing Prologue (section)

==Latin==
[[File:Prologue I.jpg|thumb|Artwork by [[Gustave Doré]].]]
[[Image:Every Man in his Humour title page 1616.jpg|thumb|right|180px|Title page of 1616 printing of ''[[Every Man in His Humour]]'', a 1598 play by the English playwright [[Ben Jonson]]. The play belongs to the subgenre of the "[[humours comedy]]"]]
On the Latin stage the prologue was often more elaborate than it was in Athens, and in the careful composition of the poems which [[Plautus]] prefixes to his plays we see what importance he gave to this portion of the entertainment; sometimes, as in the preface to the ''[[Rudens]]'', Plautus rises to the height of his genius in his adroit and romantic prologues, usually placed in the mouths of persons who make no appearance in the play itself.

[[Molière]] revived the Plautian prologue in the introduction to his ''[[Amphitryon (Molière)|Amphitryon]]''. [[Jean Racine|Racine]] introduced Piety as the speaker of a prologue which opened his choral tragedy of [[Esther]].

The tradition of the ancients vividly affected our own early dramatists. Not only was the [[mystery play]]s and miracles of the [[Middle Ages]] begun by a [[homily]], but when the drama in its modern sense was inaugurated in the reign of Elizabeth, the prologue came with it, directly adapted from the practice of Euripides and [[Terence]]. [[Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset|Sackville, Lord Buckhurst]], prepared a sort of prologue in the dumb show for his ''[[Gorboduc (play)|Gorboduc]]'' of 1562; and he also wrote a famous [[Induction (play)|Induction]], which is, practically, a prologue, to a [[miscellany]] of short romantic epics by diverse hands.