English Renaissance Drama Essay

incline metempsychosis drama grew out of the established Medieval tradition of the mystery and moral philosophy crops. These globe spectacles foc creationipulationd on religious subjects and were generally enacted by either choristers and monks, or a towns tradesmen (as later seen fondly memorialized by Shakespe ares mechanicals in A Midsummer Nights Dream).At the end of the fifteenth century, a smart type of play appeared. These short plays and revels were per organize at noble ho practiceholds and at court, e pickyly at holi sidereal day sequences. These short disgracetainments, vociferateed Interludes, started the move a look from the didactic temper of the earlier plays toward stringently secular plays, and a great deal added more(prenominal) than issue forthdy than was present in the mediaeval predecessors. Since virtually of these holiday revels were not documented and play texts have disappeared and been destroyed, the effective dating of the transition is difficult. The rootage extant purely secular play, henry Medwalls Fulgens and Lucres, was performed at the household of pro effectuate Morton, where the young Thomas more than was serving as a page. Early Tudor interludes soon grew more work up, incorporating music and dance, and some, especially those by John Heywood, were heavily influenced by cut farce.Not precisely were plays shifting emphasis from t from each wholenessing to entertaining, they were also easily changing focus from the religious towards the political. John Skeltons Magnyfycence (1515), for example, while on the face of it resembling the medieval allegory plays with its characters of Virtues and Vices, was a political satire against Cardinal Wolsey. Magnyfycence was so incendiary that Skelton had to move into the sanctuary of Westminster to escape the wrath of Wolsey.The first hi allegory plays were written in the 1530s, the most notable of which was John hoards King Johan. While it considered matters of morality and religion, these were handled in the light of the renewal. These plays objurgate the precedent of presenting history in the melodramatic medium and laid the insertion for what would later be elevated by Marlowe and Shakespeare into the position History Play, or Chronicle Play, in the latter objet dart of the century.Not scarce was the reformation taking hold in England, notwithstanding the winds of Classical Humanism were sweeping in from the Continent. Interest grew in the classics and the plays of classical antiquity, especially in the universities. Latin texts were being Englysshed and latin poetry and plays began to be adapted into English plays. In 1553, a schoolmaster named Nicholas Udall wrote an English comedy titled Ralph Roister Doister establish on the traditional Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence.The play was the first to envelop the Latin character type miles gloriosus (braggart soldier) into English plays, h onenessd to none such later by Shakespeare in the character of Falstaff. Around the same m at Cambridge, the comedy Gammer Gurtons Needle, possibly by exitiam Stevens of deliverymans College, was amusing the students. It paid closer attention to the expression of the Latin plays and was the first to adopt the five-act division.Writers were also developing English tragedies for the first time, influenced by Greek and Latin sources. Among the first forays into English tragedy were Richard Edwards Damon and Pythias (1564) and John Pickerings New Interlude of Vice Containing the History of Horestes (1567). The most influential writer of classical tragedies, however, was the Roman playwright wing Seneca, whose go bads were translated into English by Jasper Heywood, son of playwright John Heywood, in 1589. Senecas plays incorporated rhetorical speeches, phone line and violence, and practically ghosts components which were to figure prominently in both Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.The first prominent English tragedy in the Senecan take form was Gorboduc (1561), written by ii lawyers, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, at the Inns of homage (schools of law). Apart from following Senecan conventions and structure, the play is most important as the first English play to be in blank verse. void verse, non-rhyming lines in iambic pentameter, was introduced into English literature by sonneteers Wyatt and Surrey in the 1530s. Its use in a work of dramatic literature paved the way for Marlowes mighty line and the exquisite poetry of Shakespeares dramatic verse. With a new ruler on the throne, Queen Elizabeth I, who enjoyed and encouraged the theatrical performance arts, the pointedness was set for the be of dramaticliterature we today call Elizabethan Drama.The Social and Political ClimateIn 1600, the city of capital of the United Kingdom had a population of 245,000 pot, twice the size of Paris or Amsterdam. Playwriting was the to the lowest degree personal form of writing, only if unclutterly the most profitable for literary men since the demand was so great 15,000 people attended the playhouses weekly. What is often exploited in the plays is the tension amongst a Court ending and a commercial culture, which in turn reflected the tension surrounded by the metropolis government and the Crown. The decimal point from 1576 (date of the first public theatre in London) to 1642 (date that the Puritans shut the theatres) is unparalleled in its output and quality of literature in English.The monarchy rest on two claims that it was of divine origin and that it governed by consent of the people. The period of time was one of great transition. This period of history is generally regarded as the English spiritual rebirth, which took step to the fore approximately 100 years later than on the continent. The period also coincides with the reformation, and the two eras are of course mutually related.Imposed upon the Elizabethans was a social hierarchy of golf club a nd degreevery much medieval concepts that existed more in form than in substance. The society of Shakespeares time had in many ways broken free of these rigidities. It was not that people were rejecting the past rather, a new more rigid order was renewal the old. This was set into motion during Henry VIIIs reign in the 1530s when he assumed more power than had hitherto been cognizen to the monarchy. The perform of Supremacy of 1534 gave to Henry the power of the Church as well as temporal power.By Shakespeares time the state had asserted its right in at lureing to gain authority in secular and spiritual matters alike. The questionable Tudor myth had sought to rightify saves by the crown, and selections for the monarchy, as God-sanctioned to encumber those decisions was to sin, because these people were selected by God.The population of the City quadrupled from Henry VIIIs reign to the end of Shakespeares life (1616), hence adding to the requirement for polite control and l aw. The dissolution of the monasteries had caused much civil unrest, and the dispossessed monks and nuns had been compel to enter the work force. Thus the employment, or unemployment, problem was severe.Puritanism, which first emerged early in Elizabeths reign, was a minority force of churchmen, Members of parliament, and new(prenominal)s who felt that the Anglican Reformation had stopped short of its goal. Puritans used the Bible as a engineer to conduct, not simply to faith, but to political and social life, and since they could read it in their own language, it took on for them a greater importance than it had ever held. They accented particularly the idea of remembering the Sabbath day. The conflict between the Puritans and the instrumentalists of the theatrewho performed for the bigger crowds that would turn out for productions on the Sabbathwas established early.The Elizabethan WorldviewThe English Renaissance began with the importation of Italian art and philosophy, Hum anism, during the reign of Henry VIII. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, merchandise and translated classical writings, such as Virgils Aeneid, the first English work to use Blank Verse. Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt in their sonnets also imitated classical writers such as Petrarch, and are credited as Fathers of the English Sonnet.While the massive Chain of Being (an idea suggested from antiquity all that exists is in a created order, from the lowest possible grade to perfection, God Himself) was hush up asserted, the opposite, the reality of disorder, was just as prevalent. Not surprisingly, a favorite metaphor in Shakespeares works is the initiation upside down, much as crossroads presents.The nonliteral mode was the prevailing intellectual concept for the era, which was inherited from the Middle Ages the analogical habit of mind, with its correspondences, hierarchies, and microcosmic-macrocosmic relationships,survived from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Levels of existence, including forgiving and cosmic, were habitually correlated, and correspondences and resemblances were perceived everywhere. Man was a mediator between himself and the universe. An analogy of being likened man to God however, the Reformation sought to transfigure this view, emphasizing mans fallen nature and darkness of reason. The analogy can be seen in the London theatre, correlating the disparate planes of primer coat (the floor), hell (the cellarage), and heaven (the heavens, projecting preceding(prenominal) the top of the floor). Degree, priority, and place were afforded all elements, depending on their distance from perfection, God.Because he possessed both spirit and body, man had a unique place in the chainthe extremes of human potential are everywhere evident in the drama of the English Renaissance. Natural degeneration, in contrast to our optimistic idea of progress, was everywhere in evidence toothe primitive Edenic golden age was irrecoverable, and the predicted en d of the world was imminent. With changes in the ways that man looked at his universe, disturbing discoveries suggested mutability and decadence the terrifying effect of new stars, comets, etc., added to a pessimism that anticipated signs of decay as apocalyptic portents of approaching universal dissolution.Hierarchically, the human soul was threefold the highest, or rational soul, which man on earth possessed uniquely the sensual, or appetitive soul, which man shared with lower animals and the lowest, or vegetative (vegetable nutritive) soul, come to mainly with reproduction and growth. The soul was facilitated in its work by the bodys three main organs, liver, heart, and hotshot the liver served the souls vegetal, the heart its vital, and the brain its animal facultiesmotive, principal virtues, etc.Man himself was formed by a natural combination of the four elements the dull elements of earth and waterboth tending to fall to the center of the universeand ambience and fireboth tending to rise. When the elements mixed they shaped mans temperament. Each element possessed two of the four primary qualities which feature into a humour or human temperament earth (cold and prohibitionist melancholy), water (cold and moist phlegmatic) air (hot andmoist sanguine) fire (hot and dry choleric). homogeneous his soul and his humours, mans body possessed cosmic affinities the brain with the Moon the liver with the planet Jupiter the spleen with the planet Saturn. Assigned to each of the stars and the sphere of fixed stars was a hierarchy of incorporeal spirits, angels or daemons. On earth, the fallen angels and Satan, along with such occult forces as witches, continued to tempt man and lead him on to sin.Familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries were the wayfaring four causes the final cause, or purpose or end for which a change is do the efficient cause, or that by which some change is made the material cause, or that in which a change is made and dinner dre ss cause, or that into which something is changed. Renaissance concern with precedent may be seen in Polonius laboring of the efficient cause of Hamlets madness, For this effect uncollectible comes by cause (2.2.101-03).In the Aristotelian view, change involves a bingle between potential matter and actualized form. Change is thus a motion of becoming, affected by a cause which acts determinately towards a goal to gravel a result. Implicit in the Elizabethan worldview was the Aristotelian idea of causation as encompassing potentiality and act, matter and mind. The London dramatists pre-Cartesian universe, indeed, tended to retain a sense of the purposefulness of natural objects and their place in the divine scheme.Towards the mid-seventeenth century a study cleft between the medieval-Renaissance world-view and the advanced world view took place, effected by Renee Descartes (1596-1650). Cartesian dualism separated morose mind from matter, and soul from bodynot a new idea, but reformulated so that the theologians doctrines became the philosophers the problems of Predestination were suddenly the problems of Determinism.For Descartes, all nature was to be explained as either thought or extension hence, the mind became a purely thinking substance, the body a soulless mechanical system. Descartes philosophy held that one can get only onesown clear and distinct ideas. Objects are important only insofar as man brings his own judgments to bear upon them. Cartesian skepticism and subjectivism led to the rejection of the previous centuries Aristotelian perspectives, as mindless or obscure. According to Aristotle, to know the cause of things was to know their nature.For the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, objects influenced each other by mutual affinities and anti trendies. Elizabethans accepted the correspondences of sympathies and antipathies in nature, including a homeopathic notion that like cures like. Well into the seventeenth century, alchemical, hermet ical, astrological, and other pre-scientific beliefs continued to exert, even on the minds of distinguished scientists, a discernible influence. pertain with the need to believe, in an age of incipient doubt, theatre audiences often witnessed in tragedies such struggles to sustain belief Hamlet has a need to bank the Ghost Lear has a wracked concern for heavenly powers and Othello feels a desperate necessity to preserve his belief in Desdemonawhen I love thee not, / Chaos is come again (3.3.92-3). For Othello and Lear, belief is sanity.Theologically, in the later sixteenth century, divine saving seemed increasingly to be questioned, or at least to be regarded as more bafflingly inscrutable. The medieval sense of security was in a summons of transformation. Those changes coincided with such circumstances as the Renaissance revival of Epicureanism, which stressed the nonchalance of the powers above to mans concerns. In its place was a special personal power, which was emphasised in the works of Machiavelli (1469-1527) and other Renaissance writers.such(prenominal) changes in the relations of man and his deity inevitably provided a modality for tragedy, wherein both divine justice (as in King Lear) and meaningful action (as in Hamlet) seemed equally unattainable. Lear appears to question the forces above mans life, and Hamlet the powers beyond his death. Hamlets task is further complicated, for example, by his meaninglessquest for actionfrom a Reformation standpointof works toward salvation. The path to salvation, of great concern to most Elizabethans, was not through works or merit but by inscrutable divine election.The post-Reformation man, alienated from the physical object structure of the traditional Church, as well as from the release of the confessional, with a burdened and isolated conscience, turned his guilt inward.The Renaissance epistemological crisis emphasized the notion of the relativity of perception, present in the appearance-versus-realit y motif re menstruation through Renaissance drama. The Renaissance dramatists works mark a transition between absolute natural law bestowed by God, and relativistic natural law, accept by man.The PlayhousesThe old Medieval stage of place-and-scaffolds, still in use in Scotland in the early sixteenth century, had fallen into disuse the pleasant of pro tem stage that was dominant in England rough 1575 was the booth stage of the marketplacea small rectangular stage mounted on trestles or barrels and open in the sense of being ring by spectators on three sides.The stage proper of the booth stage generally measured from 15 to 25 ft. in width and from 10 to 15 ft. in depth its height above the ground averaged a bout 5 ft. 6 in., with extremes ranging as low as 4 ft. and as high as 8 ft. and it was backed by a cloth-covered booth, normally open at the top, which served as a tiring-house (short for attiring house, where the performers dressed).In the England of 1575 at that place wer e two kinds of buildings, intentional for functions other than the acting of plays, which were adapted by the pseuds as temporary open-air(prenominal) playhouses the animal-baiting rings or game houses (e.g. Bear Garden) and the inns. Presumably, a booth stage was set up against a wall at one side of the tread, with the audience standing in the yard contact the stage on three sides. Out of these natural playhousesgrew two major classes of permanent Elizabethan playhouse, public and private. In general, the public playhouses were large outdoor theatres, whereas the private playhouses were smaller indoor theatres. The maximum capacity of a common public playhouse (e.g., the Swan) was about 3,000 spectators that of a typical private playhouse (e.g., the Second Blackfriars), about 700 spectators.At the public playhouses the majority of spectators were groundlings who stood in the after(prenominal) part yard for a penny the remainder were sitting in galleries and boxes for two pe nce or more. At the private playhouses all spectators were seated (in pit, galleries, and boxes) and paid sixpence or more. In the beginning, the private playhouses were used exclusively by Boys companies, but this indication disappeared about 1609 when the Kings Men, in residence at the Globe in the summer, began using the Blackfriars in winter.Originally the private playhouses were found only within the City of London (the Pauls Playhouse, the get-go and Second Blackfriars), the public playhouses only in the suburbs (the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, the Globe, the Fortune, the Red Bull) but this distinction disappeared about 1606 with the opening of the Whitefriars Playhouse to the west of Ludgate.Public-theatre audiences, though socially heterogeneous, were drawn mainly from the lower classesa situation that has caused modern scholars to refer to the public-theatre audiences as popular whereas private-theatre audiences tended to consist of gentlemen (those who were universi ty educated) and nobility select is the leger most usually opposed to popular in this respect.James Burbage, father to the renowned actor Richard Burbage of Shakespeares company, built the first permanent theatre in London, the Theatre, in 1576. He probably merely adapted the form of the baiting-house to theatrical needs. To do so he built a large round structure very much like a baiting-house but with five major innovations in the received form.First, he paved the ring with brick or stone, thus paving the pit into ayard.Second, Burbage erected a stage in the yardhis sit down was the booth stage of the marketplace, larger than used before, with posts rather than trestles.Third, he erected a permanent tiring-house in place of the booth. Here his chief model was the passage screens of the Tudor domestic hall. They were modified to withstand the weather by the insertion of doors in the doorways. Presumably the tiring-house, as a permanent structure, was put in into the frame of the playhouse rather than, as in the older temporary situation of the booth stage, set up against the frame of a baiting-house. The gallery over the tiring-house (presumably divided into boxes) was capable of serving variously as a Lords room for privileged or high-paying spectators, as a music-room, and as a station for the occasional performance of action above as, for example, Juliets balcony.Fourth, Burbage built a cover over the rear part of the stage, called the Heavens, supported by posts rising from the yard and surmounted by a hut.And fifth, Burbage added a third gallery to the frame. The theory of origin and learning suggested in the preceding accords with our chief pictorial source of information about the Elizabethan stage, the De Witt drawing of the interior of the Swan Playhouse (c. 1596).It seems likely that most of the round public playhousesspecifically, the Theatre (1576), the Swan (1595), the First Globe (1599), the desire (1614), and the Second Globe (1614)were o f about the same size.The Second Blackfriars Playhouse of 1596 was designed by James Burbage, and he built his playhouse in the upper-story Parliament Chamber of the Upper Frater of the priory. The Parliament Chamber measured 100 ft. in length, but for the playhouse Burbage used only two-thirds of this length. The room in question, after the removal of partitions dividing it into apartments, measured 46 ft. in width and 66 ft. in length. The stage probably measured 29 ft. in width and 18 ft. 6 in. in depth.The Staging ConventionsIn the private theatres, act-intervals and music between acts were customary from the beginning. A music-room was at first lacking in the public playhouses, since public-theatre performances did not originally employ act-intervals and inter-act music. About 1609, however, after the Kings men had begun performing at the Blackfriars as well as at the Globe, the custom of inter-act music seems to have spread from the private to the public playhouses, and with i t evidently came the custom of using one of the tiring-house boxes over the stage as a music-room.The drama was conventional, not realistic poetry was the most obvious convention, others include asides, soliloquies, boys playing the roles of women, battles (with only a few participants), the daylight convention (many prognosiss are set at night, though the plays took place in mid-afternoon under the sky), a convention of time (the clock and calendar are used only at the dramatists discretion), the convention of eavesdropping (many characters overhear others, which the audience is mystical to but the overheard characters are not), and movement from place to place as suggested by the script and the audiences imagination.Exits were strong, and when everyone departed the stage, a change of scene was indicated. There was relatively little scenery. Scenery was mostly suggestive for example, one or two trees standing in for a whole forest. The elaborate costumesfor which companies paid a great deal of moneysupplied the color and pageantry. stripped scenery and limited costume changes made the transitions between scenes lightning-fast and kept the story moving.There was often dancing before and after the playat times, during, like the peasants dance in Shakespeares Winters Tale. Jigs were often given at the end of performances, a custom preserved still today at Shakespeares Globe. The jigs at the theatre were not unendingly mere dances, they were sometimes comprised of songs and bawdy knockabout farces filled with commentaries on current events. Perhaps the most famous jig was the one performed by Will Kemp, the clown in Shakespeares company, over a nine day period in 1599, onthe road from London to Norwich. It was published in 1600 as Kemps nine daies wonder. After 1600, the bawdy jigs fell into derision and condescension and were only performed at theatres such as the Red Bull, which catered to an audience thankful of the lowest humor and most violent action. The clowns were the great headliners of the Elizabethan stage prior to the rise of the famed tragedians of the late 1580s, such as Edward (Ned) Alleyn and Richard Burbage. all(prenominal) company had a top clown along with the tragedianhakespeare company was no exception Richard Tarleton was the clown until his death in 1588, Will Kemp was the clown until forced out of the company in 1599, to be replaced by another famous clown, Robin Armin. The clowns not only performed the aforementioned jigs, but also play many of the great comic characters Kemp most likely played mother fucker in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, Armin the parts of Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear.From contemporary documents, we know there were over a thousand actors in England between 1580-1642*. to the highest degree were poor, starving actors, but a few dozen were able to get down names for themselves and become shareholders in their respective companies, and make a effectual living. The repertory system was demanding esides playing six days a week, a company would be in continual rehearsal in order to add new plays and to refresh old ones in their schedule. A player would probably learn a new role every week, with cardinal to forty roles in his head. No minor feat, especially considering that an actor would only get his lines and cues (in a rolled up parchment, his roll, from which we get the word role), not a whole script Over a period of three years, a tragedian such as Edward Alleyn, lead player for the Admirals Men, would learn not only fifty new parts but also retain twenty or more old roles.