Jacobean Drama

5 Key excerpts on "Jacobean Drama"

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  English Literature

  A Student Guide

  • Martin Stephen(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama

       

  The literary and historical background

  No one has ever really explained why the thirty years from 1580 to 1610 saw one of the greatest flowerings that has ever taken place in English literary history, and probably in the history of world literature. Shakespeare, dealt with in the following chapter, was only part of this literary and dramatic boom, and perhaps not even the most highly thought-of by the age in which he lived. As with any intense flowering of literature, the reasons are historical, political, social, and economic, as well as literary. It is tempting to see a link between great outbursts of creativity in literature and social upheaval. English society in the Jacobean period had to come to terms with the Renaissance (the end of medieval thinking in Europe), the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign and the accession of a Scottish King (James VI of Scotland) to the throne of England, as James I, as well as the aftermath of its own battle with the Roman Catholic Church.

  As far as the Elizabethan and Jacobean period goes the flowering in the theatre was brought to an abrupt end by the English Civil War in 1642, when theatres were closed. They remained closed until 1660 and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. However, signs of decadence in the theatre had been visible much earlier than 1642, possibly even as early as 1615; certainly from the mid-1620s drama seemed to have little new to offer.

  The Theatre

  The Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre was the first fully professional theatre in England, in the sense of professional actors performing in purpose-built theatres. There certainly had been acting before, with a religious and a secular input from the medieval mystery, morality, and miracle plays, and wandering troupes of performers putting on acts with no religious content. A favourite place for performing any travelling theatre or entertainment was the yard of an inn. These were often built on three sides of a square, the fourth being open for access by horses and wagons. The inn was a natural meeting point for the locality, could offer accommodation for the players, entertainment for guests, and presumably an increased profit for the innkeeper. By mounting a portable stage at the far end of the inn yard, more expensive seats could be sold for the galleries and rooms that overlooked the yard, whilst cheaper viewing positions could be offered on the floor of the yard itself, at ground level.

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  A Brief History of English Literature

  • 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.

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  Renaissance Hybrids

  Culture and Genre in Early Modern England

  • Gary A. Schmidt(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5Jacobean Absolutism and the Rise of Tragicomedy

  Crisis and Compromise

  In 1616 the poet-sovereign King James I of England published his collected Workes ; in the same year, the esteemed jurist Sir Edward Coke was dismissed from the King’s Bench and the Privy Council for repeatedly invoking common law to hedge the King’s absolute power. In 1616, finally, the great Royalist poet and author of Jacobean masques, Ben Jonson, published his own Works ; the frontispiece of this audacious volume featured the figure of Tragicomoedia at the top of a Romanesque architectural façade, standing above (and therefore superior to) the lower figures of Satyr, Pastor, and the muses of Tragoedia and Comoedia.1 Linking these three contemporary events may at first seem a rather aimless exercise in ‘connect the dots’; however, as I shall argue here, the rise of tragicomedy in the early Stuart period owes its force and relevance to the political developments, philosophy, and contestations of the period. Tragicomedy emerged in the early years of James’s reign, in part, to mediate between the demands of the King’s absolutist philosophy and a society that had increasingly to account for the emerging interests of the landed gentry and radical groups such as the Puritans and Levellers.

  From the conservatism of the court masque to the festive misrule of city comedy, Jacobean literary genres consciously attempted to register and adapt to new social reorganizations and contemporary political developments. The pastoral tragicomedy inaugurated by Giambattista Guarini, in particular, emerged in its English incarnation as an ideal vehicle for such considerations. Franco Moretti maintains, for example, that ‘the ‘mixed’ form of tragicomedy embodies in its dramatic structure that compromise between the sphere of the state and civil society that was one of the great Elizabethan aspirations’ (61). Moretti emphasizes the essential conservatism of tragicomedy, seen in works that stage the monarch’s ability to effect an ‘organic restoration of hierarchy and meaning’ by satisfying nostalgia for a feudal worldview in which ‘man is what his sovereign makes him’ (67, 60).2

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  A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture

  • Michael Hattaway(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Basingstoke: Macmillan. Ellis-Fermor, U. (1958). The Jacobean Drama . 4th edn, rev. London: Methuen. Felperin, H. (1977). Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Findlay, A. (1999). A Feminist Perspective on Renais-sance Drama . Oxford: Blackwell. Friedenreich, K. (ed.) (1983). ‘Accompaninge the Players’: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580–1980 . New York: AMS Press. Heinemann, M. (1980). Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts . Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press. Hogg, J. (ed.) (1995). Jacobean Drama as Social Criticism . Lewiston, NY and Salzburg: Edwin Mellen. Holdsworth, R. V. (ed.) (1990). Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies . Basingstoke: Macmillan. Ide, R. (1980). Possessed with Greatness: The Heroic Tragedies of Shakespeare and Chapman . London: Scolar. Kastan, D. S. and Stallybrass, P. (eds) (1991). Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama . London: Routledge. Lever, J. W. (1971). The Tragedy of State . London: Methuen. McAlindon, T. (1986). English Renaissance Tragedy . Basingstoke: Macmillan. McLuskie, K. (1989). Renaissance Dramatists . Hemel Hempstead: Harvester. Morris, B. (ed.) (1970). John Webster . London: Benn. Neill, M. (1997 ). Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Con-temporaries. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ornstein, R. (1960). The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sturgess, K. (1986). Jacobean Private Theatre . London: Routledge. Tricomi, A. H. (1989). Anticourt Drama in England 1603–1642 . Charlottesville: Univer-sity of Virginia Press. Wymer, R. (1995). Webster and Ford . Basingstoke: Macmillan. 46 Caroline Theatre Roy Booth Caroline drama is crossed by long shadows.

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  Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage

  From Shakespeare to Webster

  • R. West(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The dramas are the site of a tension between these two ways of representing cultural and geographical otherness. 35 Thus there was a disparity between, on the one hand, Jacobean dis- courses of travel, which, by the mid-century, had taken up a prominent Travelling Thoughts 189 place in the public imagination to such an extent that they could be parodied, for instance, in Jonson’s Eastward Ho! or Brome’s The Antipodes; and, on the other hand, the sober realities of what was actually possible to do in terms of overseas expansion in Jacobean England, given the constraints imposed by royal foreign policy, the financial mechanisms and institutions available to London merchants, the superior mercantile power of competitors such as the Dutch, or the skills available to mariners. It would be absurd to attempt to establish a rigid causal link between the slow progress of English overseas interests, and the similar gap in the aspirations of the travel drama and the material resources at the disposal of the theatre. None the less, this disparity reflects to some degree a similar contradiction between material possibilities and discur- sive aspirations at the level of real commercial practice. And it is surely significant that when, after the Restoration, English overseas trade did burgeon at an explosive rate, a new form of theatre better equipped to portray expanses of space in a pictorial, naturalistic mode was also coming to the fore. It is unsurprising, then, that the travel drama of the Jacobean period was not so much concerned with portraying an overseas world as yet lit- tle appropriated for English commercial power, as with using travel as a foil for reflections of the English nation itself. Typical of this specular (and clearly didactic) function of the drama is Greene and Lodge’s Nineva play, unsubtly entitled A Looking-Glass for London and England.

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