Dramatic compositions appear to have had no reprehensible origin. It
certainly was an object with the authors of some of the earliest plays
to combine the entertainment with the moral improvement of the mind.
Tragedy was at first simply a monody to Bacohus. But the tragedy of the
ancients, from which the modern is derived, did not arise in the world,
till the dialogue and the chorus were introduced. Now the chorus, as
every scholar knows, was a moral office. They who filled it, were loud
in their recommendations of justice and temperance. They inculcated a
religious observance of the laws. They implored punishment on the
abandoned. They were strenuous in their discouragement of vice, and in
the promotion of virtue. This office therefore, being coeval with
tragedy itself, preserves it from the charge of an immoral origin.

Nor was comedy, which took its rise afterwards, the result of corrupt
motives. In the most ancient comedies, we find it to have been the great
object of the writers to attack vice. If a chief citizen had acted
inconsistently with his character, he was ridiculed upon the stage. His
very name was not concealed on the occasion. In the course of time
however, the writers of dramatic pieces were forbidden to use the names
of the persons, whom they proposed to censure. But we find them still
adhering to the same great object, the exposure of vice; and they
painted the vicious character frequently so well, that the person was
soon discovered by the audience, though disguised by a fictitious name.
When new restrictions, were afterwards imposed upon the writers of such
pieces, they produced a new species of comedy. This is that which
obtains at the present day. It consisted of an imitation of the manners
of common life. The subject, the names, and the characters, belonging
to it, were now all of them feigned. Writers, however, retained their
old object of laughing at folly and of exposing vice.