Decorum

Horace says, for example: "A comic subject is not susceptible of treatment in a tragic style, and similarly the banquet of Thyestes cannot be fitly described in the strains of everyday life or in those that approach the tone of comedy.

Although in the Middle Ages religious subjects were often treated with broad humour in a "low" manner, especially in medieval drama, the churches policed carefully the treatment in more permanent art forms, insisting on a consistent "high style".

In Horace's Ars Poetica, the poet (in addition to speaking about appropriate vocabulary and diction, as discussed above) counseled playwrights to respect decorum by avoiding the portrayal, on stage, of scenes that would shock the audience by their cruelty or unbelievable nature: "But you will not bring on to the stage anything that ought properly to be taking place behinds the scenes, and you will keep out of sight many episodes that are to be described later by the eloquent tongue of a narrator.

Medea must not butcher her children in the presence of the audience, nor the monstrous Atreus cook his dish of human flesh within public view, nor Procne be metamorphosed into a bird, nor Cadmus into a snake.

The precepts of social decorum as we understand them, as the preservation of external decency, were consciously set by Lord Chesterfield, who was looking for a translation of les moeurs: "Manners are too little, morals are too much.

"[5] The word decorum survives in Chesterfield's severely reduced form as an element of etiquette: the prescribed limits of appropriate social behavior within a set situation.

The use of this word in this sense is of the sixteenth-century,[6] prescribing the boundaries established in drama and literature, used by Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570) and echoed in Malvolio's tirade in Twelfth Night, "My masters, are you mad, or what are you?