Literature
English Renaissance Theatre
English Renaissance Theatre refers to the theatrical productions and performances that took place in England during the Renaissance period, roughly from the late 15th to the early 17th century. It was a time of significant growth and innovation in English drama, with the works of playwrights like William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe becoming iconic examples of the era's theatrical achievements. Theatrical forms such as tragedy, comedy, and history plays were popular during this time.
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6 Key excerpts on "English Renaissance Theatre"
eBook - PDF- John Peck, Martin Coyle(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
5 Renaissance and Restoration Drama Renaissance Drama and Christopher Marlowe Renaissance drama is a term that embraces Elizabethan drama, Jacobean drama (works written during the reign of James I), and the plays written during the reign of Charles I. It involves three main kinds of theatre: public, private and court. The first public playhouse, the Red Lion, was built at Whitechapel in 1567, in the courtyard of a farmhouse. Regular playgoing in London, however, began in the 1570s. The Red Lion provided a model for the building of other Renaissance public theatres. It had a raised stage with a trapdoor; above it or near it was a high turret, while around the stage, which thrust into the audience, were scaffolds or galleries for other playgo-ers. This design was followed for theatres both in Shoreditch, where the Theatre, which replaced the Red Lion, opened in 1576, and in Southwark, where the Globe, built out of the timbers from the Theatre, opened in 1599. The Globe, a public playhouse able to hold up to 3,000 spectators, is the theatre most commonly associated with Shakespeare. Like the Red Lion, it was essentially an amphithe-atre, with tiered galleries: those who paid a penny stood before the stage (‘the groundlings’), while the seats higher up cost more, the audience, as such, being separated by wealth rather than by social sta-tus. The growth of public theatres provides very clear evidence of an expanding economy and the rapid growth of London as a modern capital city to rival those in Europe. There are, however, other considerations we need to take into account in any discussion of the context of Renaissance drama. Although commercial drama was essentially London-based, the the-atres were closed by the authorities during times of plague, leaving 73 the actors without income; as a response, smaller touring companies formed out of the main companies played in the provinces.
eBook - PDFEnglish Renaissance Tragedy
Ideas of Freedom
- Peter Holbrook(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- The Arden Shakespeare(Publisher)
5 Going to the Theatre in Shakespeare’s London So far we have been considering some of the ways English Renaissance tragedies take up questions to do with power, tyranny, lack of freedom, equality and injustice. I have suggested tragedy is on freedom’s side. But the question still remains, why theatre? What was it about this particular insti-tution that encouraged writers to address such questions? Perhaps the first thing to notice is that the English Renaissance stage fused profoundly different worlds. Writers for the stage were by and large trained in the elite literary traditions flowing from the poetry, drama and prose works of ancient Greece and Rome. Dramatists were the self-conscious inheritors of an illustrious tradition of eloquence rehabilitated in the libraries, schools, universities and courts of Renaissance Europe. The theatres themselves, however, are frequently represented as rather notorious places. Moral critics of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras associated plays with debauchery and condemned the theatres as places of sexual promiscuity, in which prostitutes picked up customers and lovers made assignations. It is easy to dismiss such commentary as puritanical hysteria, but a reading of the plays themselves suggests the stage’s opponents had it broadly right. The theatre really was a site of intellectual, moral and psychological freedom. For example, one of the most 76 ENGLISH RENAISSANCE TRAGEDY prominent features of English Renaissance tragedy was its frank depiction of sexual desire. 1 Take this exchange between the villain Ithamore, Barabas’s sidekick in The Jew of Malta , and the courtesan Bellamira after they kiss: BELLAMIRA Come my dear love, let’s in and sleep together. ITHAMORE O, that ten thousand nights were put in one, that we might sleep seven years together afore we wake! BELLAMIRA Come, amorous wag, first banquet and then sleep.
No longer available |Learn moreThe Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Volume A - Third Edition
The Medieval Period - The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century - The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
- Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Wendy Lee, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls, Jason Rudy, Claire Waters(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
The range of the drama in the early years of the seventeenth century is, if anything, even broader than that of the 1590s. This is the era of Shakespeare’s great tragedies and of his dark comedies as well as his late romances; of many of Ben Jonson’s finest comedies; of a group of violent “revenge tragedies” by Webster and Tourneur; and of a group of “city comedies” concerning London society by Dekker, Middleton, and others. Overall, the tone of the Jacobean drama is darker than that of the Elizabethan stage—the satire more biting, the tragedy more bleak. This is also the era of the masque, a form of court drama that stands in marked contrast to that of “theater in the round.” Masques were The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century 591 From the frontispiece to William Alabaster, Roxana Tragedia (1632). This is one of the earliest printed representations of an English dramatic performance. as much spectacle as drama. They were astonishingly expensive productions performed for the aristocracy by a mixture of professionals and members of the court itself; they typically drew on pastoral or mythological themes; they often involved interaction between performers and spectators; they usually featured elabor- ate costumes, painted scenery, special effects, and set- piece displays; and they always included a good deal of song, music, and dance. As the seventeenth century wore on, the theater came more and more frequently under attack by Puritans. Since the late 1580s dramatists had walked a fine line, desiring always to give to those elements of the crowd that were entertained by displays of bawdiness and violence a good deal of what they were looking for, while still insisting that such displays fulfilled a didactic purpose. The description of the action of the domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham (c. 1585–90) gives some- thing of the flavor: The lamentable and true tragedy of M.
eBook - PDF- Siobhan Keenan(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- EUP(Publisher)
chapter 1 Drama All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players (William Shakespeare, As You Like It , II, vii, 138 – 9 ) W hen Jacques likens the world to a stage in his famous speech from As You Like It he rehearses what would have been a familiar trope: the metaphorical identi fi cation of life with theatre was commonplace in the Renaissance. There were good reasons for contemporaries to draw such parallels. Not only was human iden-tity increasingly perceived in terms of role-playing but many of the rituals associated with the exercise of power in Renaissance England were theatrical. A good example of this is a ff orded by the judicial system and the practice of executing felons on public sca ff olds, a show of power that drew large audiences. The same culture of theatrically displayed power is found in the pageantry and drama associated with the court. In the absence of a standing army or national police force England’s monarchs depended on rit-ualised displays of power to reinforce their authority and ensure the obedience of their subjects. The pervasive theatricality of Renaissance culture helps to explain the special currency of the ‘life as theatre’ metaphor in the period and, perhaps, informed the con-temporary fascination with drama. 60 renaissance literature THE PROFESSIONAL STAGE The Red Lion theatre, built by grocer John Brayne, is the earliest known permanent playhouse in London. Its opening in 1567 marked the beginning of a seminal era in English theatre history. By 1642 when the outbreak of Civil War led parliament to ban public stage plays, English theatrical culture had changed pro-foundly. Prior to the Elizabethan era acting companies were accus-tomed to performing in a variety of spaces, ranging from inns and churches to private houses. As a consequence plays needed to be adaptable for di ff erent venues. This tended to mean relying on a minimalist staging style.
eBook - PDF- Goran Stanivukovic, John H Cameron(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
Shakespeare also celebrates the peace ushered in by the Tudors, to the welcoming ears of his late Elizabethan audience. Critics who study the cultural impact of the Elizabethan theatre and its role as a political institution in early modern English society argue that early English tragedians were cen-tral to this role assumed by that theatre. For example, Steven Mullaney writes: When [James] Burbage dislocated theater from the city, he established a social and cultural distance that would prove invaluable to the stagecraft of Marlowe and Shake-speare: a critical distance . . . that provided the stage with a culturally and ideologically removed vantage point from which it could reflect upon its own age with more free-dom and license than had hitherto been possible. It was 62 tragedies of the english renaissance a freedom, a range of slightly eccentric or decentered per-spectives, that gave the stage an uncanny ability to tease out and represent the contradictions of a culture it both belonged to and was, to a certain extent, alienated from. (Mullaney 1988 : 30 – 1 ) Mullaney’s account of the crucial role theatres played from their new liminal locations outside the City of London is central to how we understand the development of tragedy. As Mullaney points out, theatres ‘dislocated’ outside the city limits became spaces of freedom and radical resistance to orthodoxy. Thus tragedy, which started to flourish in those theatres, became a genre particularly invested with displaying, commenting on and overturning contradictions of the age that produced them. The Elizabethan tragedy had more firmly become a kind of drama that robustly reshaped perceptions of the world its spectators lived in. It did so with politics and history, as well as with love and desire. TRAGEDY AND THE PASSION OF YOUTH : SHAKESPEARE ’ S ROMEO AND JULIET The table of contents in the 1623 Folio shows that Shake-speare wrote more comedies than tragedies.
- Siobhan Keenan(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- The Arden Shakespeare(Publisher)
51 The general absence of scenery on the Renaissance stage is probably one of the most conspicuous differences between the playhouses of Shakespearean London and those of the modern day. On the English Renaissance stage, setting and place were more usually evoked through the text, the ‘bare island’ ( The Tempest , Epilogue.8) of the stage generally becoming whatever or wherever the characters said it was. This meant that the setting could change between scenes, too, as English playwrights and actors increasingly favoured a ‘successive’ staging style (whereby the stage became different places in succession) over the ‘simultaneous’ staging style that had predominated in medieval drama (whereby different settings were represented simultaneously). Most English Renaissance plays are comparatively simple in their staging demands, too: although some implicitly require a ‘discovery’ space at the rear of the stage for moments of revelation, tableaux or the thrusting on of large properties such as beds, and some call for an acting area above and/or trapdoors in the stage and/or heavens for ascents and descents, many English Renaissance plays require only a wooden platform and two entrances. Indeed, T. J. King’s research suggests that the latter was all that was needed for as many as 86 of the 276 extant plays that he looked at written between 1599 and 1642. 52 These minimalist demands derive from the need for plays to be portable, originally between court and touring venues and later between playhouses, too. But the comparatively modest staging demands posed by the period’s plays should not lead us to conclude that English Renaissance STAGES AND STAGING 109 staging was crude. On the contrary, Shakespearean acting companies went to great efforts to present productions that were visually as well as aurally striking. The players’ rich, colourful costumes were especially memorable for many contemporaries.
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