English Renaissance Theatre

English Renaissance Theatre

English Renaissance theatre, also known as early modern English theatre, refers to the theatre of England, largely based in London, which occurred in 1567, when the first English theatre 'The Red Lion' was opened; and the closure of the theatres in 1642. It includes the drama of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and many other famous playwrights.

English Renaissance theatre is sometimes called "Elizabethan theatre”. The term "Elizabethan theatre", however, covers only the plays written and performed publicly in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558–1603)."English Renaissance theatre" or "early modern theatre" includes 3 periods: Elizabethan theatre, Jacobean theatre (associated with the reign of King James I, 1603–1625), and Caroline theatre (associated with the reign of King Charles I).

Origins

English Renaissance theatre derived from several medieval theatre traditions, such as the mystery plays The mystery plays were complex retellings of legends based on biblical themes. Other sources include the morality plays that evolved out of the mysteries, and the "University drama" that attempted to recreate Greek tragedy. The Italian tradition of Commedia dell'arte as well as the masques also played a part in shaping of public theatre.

Companies of players attached to households of leading noblemen became the foundation for the professional players that performed on the Elizabethan stage. The tours of these players gradually replaced the performances of the mystery and morality plays by local players, and a 1572 law eliminated the remaining companies lacking formal patronage by labelling them vagabonds.

Along with the economics of the profession, the character of the drama changed toward the end of the period. Under Elizabeth, the drama was a unified expression as far as social class was concerned: the Court watched the same plays simple people saw in the public playhouses. With the development of the private theatres, drama became more oriented toward the tastes and values of an upper-class audience.

Theatres

The establishment of large and profitable public theatres was very important factor in the success of English Renaissance drama—once they were in operation, drama could become a fixed and permanent rather than a transitory phenomenon. The crucial development was the building of The Theatre by James Burbage, in 1576. The Theatre was rapidly followed by the nearby Curtain Theatre (1577), the Rose (1587), the Swan (1595), the Globe (1599),

Theatre had an unsavory reputation. London authorities refused to allow plays within the city, so theatres opened across the Thames in Southwark, outside the authority of the city administration.

Shakespeare

The first proper theatre as we know it was the Theatre, built at Shoreditch in 1576. Before this time plays were performed in the courtyard of inns, or sometimes, in the houses of noblemen.

After the Theatre, further open air playhouses opened in the London area, including the Rose (1587), the Swan (1595),the Fortune (1600), and the Red Bull (1604)..The most famous playhouse was the Globe (1599) built by the company in which Shakespeare had a stake.

The Globe was only in use until 1613, when a canon fired during a performance of Henry VIII caught the roof on fire and the building burned to the ground.

These theatres could hold several thousand people, most standing in the open pit before the stage, though rich nobles could watch the play from a chair set on the side of the stage itself.

Theatre performances were held in the afternoon, because, of course, there was no artificial lighting.

The public theatres were three stories high, and built around an open space at the centre. Usually polygonal in plan to give an overall rounded effect (though the Red Bull and the first Fortune were square), the three levels of inward-facing galleries overlooked the open center, into which jutted the stage—essentially a platform surrounded on three sides by the audience, only the rear being restricted for the entrances and exits of the actors and seating for the musicians. The upper level behind the stage could be used as a balcony, as in Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra, or as a position from which an actor could harangue a crowd.

With no curtain between the audience and the stage, the setting was far more intimate than the larger theatres of today despite the fact that 2,000 to 3,000 patrons could attend a production at one time.

Indeed, audience participation was an integral factor in Elizabethan productions. Furthermore, sets were kept to a minimum with the production relying primarily uponthe inherent surroundings of the stage and courtyard.

A different model was developed with the Blackfriars Theatre, which came into regular use on a longterm basis in 1599. The Blackfriars was small in comparison to the earlier theatres and roofed rather than open to the sky; it resembled a modern theatre in ways that its predecessors did not. Other small enclosed theatres followed, notably the Whitefriars (1608) and the Cockpit (1617). With the building of the Salisbury Court Theatre in 1629 near the site of the defunct Whitefriars, the London audience had six theatres to choose from: three surviving large open-air "public" theatres, the Globe, the Fortune, and the Red Bull, and three smaller enclosed "private" theatres, the Blackfriars, the Cockpit, and the Salisbury Court.

Around 1580, when both the Theatre and the Curtain were full on summer days, the total theatre capacity of London was about 5000 spectators. With the building of new theatre facilities and the formation of new companies, the capital's total theatre capacity exceeded 10,000 after 1610. [6] In 1580, the poorest citizens could purchase admittance to the Curtain or the Theatre for a penny; in 1640, their counterparts could gain admittance to the Globe, the Cockpit, or the Red Bull—for exactly the same price. (Ticket prices at the private theatres were five or six times higher).

Players/Companies

Companies of players attached to households of leading noblemen became the foundation for the professional players that performed on the Elizabethan stage.The acting companies functioned on a repertory system; unlike modern productions that can run for months or years, the troupes of this era rarely acted the same play two days in a row. For example, over the course of a 16 week season, a company would play six days a week, perform 23 different plays, (some only once, and the most popular up to 15 times), never play the same play two days in a row, and rarely the same play twice in one week. This was a tremendous workload for the performers. Furthermore, one distinctive feature of the companies was that they included only males. Until the reign of Charles II, female parts were played by adolescent boy players in women's costume.

Costumes

Since Elizabethan theatre did not make use of lavish scenery, instead leaving the stage largely bare with a few key props, the main visual appeal on stage was in the costumes. Costumes were often bright in color and visually entrancing. Costumes were expensive, however, so usually players wore contemporary clothing regardless of the time period of the play. Occasionally, a lead character would wear a conventionalized version of more historically accurate garb, but secondary characters would nonetheless remain in contemporary clothing.

Playwrights

During the 1580's a group of men formed a group called "The University Wits." These were men who were interested in writing for the public stage. The "wits" included Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, and Robert Greene.

John Fletcher was one of these new playwrights who became very successful writing jointly with Francis Beaumont. Together they wrote about 50 plays including The Maid's Tragedy, Philasta, and A King and No King. Fletcher also wrote plays on his own after Beaumont retired. A Wife for a Month and The Scornful Lady are two of his most famous solo works. Interestingly enough, during the Restoration, Fletcher's plays were performed more frequently than Shakespeare's or Jonson's.

Thomas Middleton, Philip Mossinger, John Webster, John Ford, and James Shirley were also strong dramatists who helped shape and encourage theatre during this time. With Mossinger's A Way to Pay Old Debts, Webster's The White Devil, Ford's The Broken Heart and Shirley's The Cardinal, these men became well-known playwrights who made a great impression on the world of theatre.were also strong dramatists who helped shape and encourage theatre during this time.

The growing population of London, the growing wealth of its people, and their fondness for spectacle produced a dramatic literature of remarkable variety, quality, and extent. Although most of the plays written for the Elizabethan stage have been lost, over 600 remain extant.

The men who wrote these plays were primarily self-made men from modest backgrounds. Some of them were educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, but many were not. Although William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were actors, the majority do not seem to have been performers, and no major author who came on to the scene after 1600 is known to have supplemented his income by acting.

Not all of the playwrights fit modern images of poets or intellectuals. Christopher Marlowe was killed in an apparent tavern brawl, while Ben Jonson killed an actor in a duel. Several probably were soldiers.

Playwrights were normally paid in increments during the writing process, and if their play was accepted, they would also receive the proceeds from one day's performance. However, they had no ownership of the plays they wrote. Once a play was sold to a company, the company owned it, and the playwright had no control over casting, performance, revision or publication.

A playwright, working alone, could generally produce two plays a year at most; in the 1630s Shakespeare produced fewer than 40 solo plays in a career that spanned more than two decades; he was financially successful because he was an actor and, most importantly, a shareholder in the company for which he acted and in the theatres they used. Ben Jonson achieved success as a purveyor of Court masques, and was talented at playing the patronage game that was an important part of the social and economic life of the era. Those who were playwrights pure and simple fared far less well; the biographies of early figures like George Peele and Robert Greene, and later ones like Brome and Philip Massinger, are marked by financial uncertainty, struggle, and poverty.

Playwrights often combined into teams of two, three, four, and even five to generate play texts; the majority of plays written in this era were collaborations, and the solo artists who generally eschewed collaborative efforts, like Jonson and Shakespeare, were the exceptions to the rule. Dividing the work, of course, meant dividing the income.

Genres

Genres of the period included the history play, which depicted English or European history. Shakespeare’s plays about the lives of kings, such as Richard III and Henry V, belong to this category, as do Christopher Marlowe's Edward II and George Peele's Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First.

Tragedy was a popular genre. Marlowe's tragedies were exceptionally popular, such as Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta. The audiences particularly liked revenge dramas, such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.Comedies were common, too. A sub-genre developed in this period was the city comedy, which deals satirically with life in London after the fashion of Roman New Comedy.

Though marginalized, the older genres like pastoral (The Faithful Shepherdess, 1608), and even the morality play (Four Plays in One, ca. 1608-13) could exert influences. After about 1610, the new hybrid sub-genre of the tragicomedy appeared , as did the masque throughout the reigns of the first two Stuart kings, James I and Charles I.

 

The rising Puritan movement was hostile to the theatres, which the Puritans considered to be sinful for several reasons. The most commonly cited reason was that young men dressed up in female costume to play female roles. Theatres were located in the same parts of the city in which brothels and other forms of vice proliferated. When the Puritan faction of Parliament gained control over the city of London at the beginning of the English Civil War, it ordered the closing of all theatres in 1642 — though this was largely because the stage was being used to promote opposing political views. After the monarchy was restored in 1660 the theatres re-opened.