English Renaissance Drama Essay

side Renaissance drama grew out of the establish chivalric tradition of the mystery and morality vivifys. These popular spectacles foc apply on ghostly subjects and were generally enacted by either choristers and monks, or a towns tradesmen (as later seen lovingly memorialized by Shakespe ares mechanicals in A Midsummer Nights Dream).At the abate of the ordinal century, a freshly persona of play appeared. These short plays and revels were per dust-builded at courtly sign of the zodiacs and at court, especially at holiday times. These short entertainments, called Interludes, st cheated the discover outside(a) from the didactic nature of the earlier plays toward purely secular plays, and often added to a crackinger extent comedy than was demo in the medieval predecessors. Since around of these holiday revels were non documented and play texts make up disappeared and been destroyed, the actual dating of the transition is difficult. The band-back extant purely secul ar play, total heat Medwalls Fulgens and Lucres, was performed at the household of Cardinal Morton, where the young doubting Thomas More was serving as a p fester. Early Tudor interludes soon grew more(prenominal) elaborate, incorporating music and dance, and some, especially those by John Heywood, were heavily influenced by French farce.Not precisely were plays modify emphasis from teaching to entertaining, they were athe likes of slowly changing focus from the religious towards the political. John Skeltons Magnyfycence (1515), for example, while on the face of it resembling the medieval fable plays with its characters of Virtues and wrongs, 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 front history plays were written in the 1530s, the most notable of which was John Bales office Johan. piece of music it considered takingss of morality and religio n, these were handled in the light of the Reformation. These plays pay off the precedent of presenting history in the dramatic medium and laid the foundation for what would later be inflated by Marlowe and Shakespeare into the face History Play, or Chronicle Play, in the latter(prenominal) part of the century.Not but was the Reformation taking hold in England, however the winds of Classical Hu gnomish-armism 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 poesy and plays began to be adapted into face plays. In 1553, a schoolmaster named Nicholas Udall wrote an English comedy titled Ralph Roister Doister based on the traditional Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence.The play was the foremost to introduce the Latin character type miles gloriosus (braggart soldier) into English plays, h wizardd to perfection later by Shakespeare in the character o f Falstaff. Around the same time at Cambridge, the comedy Gammer Gurtons Needle, possibly by William Stevens of Christs College, was am utilise the students. It paying(a) closer attention to the structure of the Latin plays and was the head start to adopt the five-act division.Writers were excessively developing English tragedies for the first time, influenced by Greek and Latin writers. 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 Ro piece dramatist Seneca, whose imprints were translated into English by Jasper Heywood, son of playwright John Heywood, in 1589. Senecas plays incorporated rhetorical speeches, blood and violence, and often ghosts components which were to figure prominently in both Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.The first prominent English tragedy in the Sene pot mould was Gorboduc (1561), written by both rightfulnessyers, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, at the Inns of Court (schools of law). Apart from following Senecan conventions and structure, the play is most heavy as the first English play to be in blank verse. Blank verse, non-rhyming businesss 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 youthful ruler on the throne, Queen Elizabeth I, who enjoyed and encouraged the theatrical arts, the act was set for the system of dramatic literature we today call Elizabethan Drama.The Social and political ClimateIn 1600, the city of London had a population of 245,000 people, twice the size of Paris or Amsterdam. Playwriting was the least personal form of writing, just now cl proto(prenominal) the most profitable for literary men sinc e the demand was so great 15,000 people attended the playhouses weekly. What is often exploited in the plays is the focus between a Court culture and a commercial culture, which in turn reflected the tension between the metropolis government and the Crown. The accomplishment from 1576 (date of the first public theatre in London) to 1642 (date that the Puritans closed the theatres) is unparalleled in its fruit and quality of literature in English.The monarchy rested on two claims that it was of noble origin and that it governed by consent of the people. The period was one of great transition. This period of history is generally regarded as the English Renaissance, which took place approximately deoxycytidine monophosphate 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 put in and degreevery lots medieval concepts that existed more in form th an in substance. The society of Shakespeares time had in many slipway broken free of these rigidities. It was not that people were rejecting the past alternatively, a new more rigid order was replacing the old. This was set into motion during Henry VIIIs reign in the 1530s when he assumed more origin than had hitherto been known to the monarchy. The Act 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 attempting to gain leave in secular and spiritual matters alike. The so-called Tudor myth had sought-after(a) to justify actions by the crown, and selections for the monarchy, as God-sanctioned to thwart those decisions was to sin, be coif these people were selected by God.The population of the City quadrupled from Henry VIIIs reign to the end of Shakespeares life (1616), thus adding to the necessity for civil control and law. The dissolution of the monasteries had ca take much civil unres t, and the dis have monks and nuns had been forced 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 fantan, and separates who felt that the Anglican Reformation had s crystalliseped short of its goal. Puritans used the Bible as a guide 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 stressed particularly the root of storage the Sabbath day. The conflict between the Puritans and the players of the theatrewho performed for the larger 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, Humanism, during the reign of Henry VIII. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, imported and translat ed classical writings, such(prenominal)(prenominal) 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 impute as Fathers of the English Sonnet.While the Great Chain of Being (an idea suggested from antiquity all that exists is in a created order, from the lowest possible strain to perfection, God Himself) was still asserted, the opposite, the reality of disorder, was just as prevalent. Not surprisingly, a favorite metaphor in Shakespeares plant is the world acme down, much as Hamlet presents.The analogical mode was the prevailing expert 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 serviceman and cosmic, were habitually correlated, and correspondences and resemblances were perceived all over. Man was a mediator between himself and the universe. An semblance of being likened man to God however, the Reformation sought to change this view, express mans fallen nature and darkness of reason. The analogy can be seen in the London theatre, correlating the disparate planes of earth (the stage), hell (the cellarage), and enlightenment (the heavens, projecting above the top of the stage). Degree, priority, and place were afforded all elements, depending on their quad from perfection, God.Because he possessed both spirit and body, man had a quaint place in the chainthe extremes of human potential are everywhere evident in the drama of the English Renaissance. Natural degeneration, in wrinkle to our optimistic idea of progress, was everywhere in evidence toothe early Edenic golden age was irrecoverable, and the predicted end of the world was imminent. With changes in the ways that man looked at his universe, disturbing discoveries sugges ted mutability and corruption the terrifying effect of new stars, comets, etc., added to a pessimism that anticipated signs of decay as apocalyptic portents of approaching ordinary dissolution.Hierarchically, the human soul was tetherfold the highest, or rational soul, which man on earth possessed uniquely the sensual, or appetitive soul, which man share with lower physicals and the lowest, or vegetative (vegetable nutritive) soul, venerationed primary(prenominal)ly with reproduction and growth. The soul was facilitated in its work by the bodys three main organs, liver, heart, and brain 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 internal combination of the four elements the dull elements of earth and waterboth attention to fall to the center of the universeand beam and fireboth aid to rise. When the elements mixed they shaped mans temperament. Each element possessed two of the four primary qualities which combined into a humour or human temperament earth (cold and dry melancholy), water (cold and moist phlegmatic) air (hot and moist sanguine) fire (hot and dry choleric).Like his soul and his humours, mans body possessed cosmic affinities the brain with the Moon the liver with the artificial satellite 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 Aristotelian four causes the final cause, or think or end for which a change is made the efficient cause, or that by which some change is made the material cause, or that in which a change is made and formal cause, or that into which something is changed. Renaissance awe with causation may be seen in Po lonius laboring of the efficient cause of Hamlets madness, For this effect defective comes by cause (2.2.101-03).In the Aristotelian view, change involves a unity between potential matter and actualized form. Change is thus a process of becoming, affected by a cause which acts determinately towards a goal to produce a result. Implicit in the Elizabethan worldview was the Aristotelian idea of causation as encompassing potency and act, matter and mind. The London dramatists pre-Cartesian universe, indeed, tended to retain a star of the purposefulness of natural objects and their place in the divine scheme.Towards the mid-seventeenth century a major cleft between the medieval-Renaissance world-view and the modern world view took place, cause by Renee Descartes (1596-1650). Cartesian dualism separated off 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 unawares the prob lems 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 know totally ones own clear and distinct ideas. Objects are important only insofar as man b sound his own judgments to bear upon them. Cartesian skepticism and subjectivism led to the rejection of the previous centuries Aristotelian perspectives, as meaningless 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 another(prenominal) through mutual affinities and antipathies. Elizabethans accepted the correspondences of sympathies and antipathies in nature, including a homeopathic supposition that like cures like. Well into the seventeenth century, alchemical, hermetical, astrological, and other pre-scientific article of beliefs continued to exert, even on the minds of distinguished scientists, a discernible influence.Concerned with the need to believe, in an age of incipient doubt, theatre earreachs often witnessed in tragedies such struggles to sustain belief Hamlet has a need to trust 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 providence seemed increasingly to be researched, or at least to be regarded as more bafflingly inscrutable. The medieval under stand of security was in a process of transformation. Those changes coincided with such circumstances as the Renaissance revival of Epicureanism, which stressed the indifference of the powers above to mans concerns. In its place was a special personal power, which was emphasized in the works of Machiavelli (1469-1527) and other Renaissance write rs.Such changes in the relations of man and his deity inevitably provided a climate for tragedy, wherein both divine evaluator (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 stopping point. Hamlets task is further complicated, for example, by his meaningless quest 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 objective structure of the traditional Church, as well as from the release of the confessional, with a burdened and isolated conscience, morose his guilt inward.The Renaissance epistemological crisis emphasized the notion of the relativity of perception, present in the appearance-versus-reality motif recurrent through Renaissance drama. The Renaissance dramatis ts works mark a transition between absolute natural law bestowed by God, and relativistic natural law, recognized 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 kind of temporary stage that was preponderating in England or so 1575 was the booth stage of the marketplacea small rectangular stage mounted on trestles or barrels and open(a) in the sense of being surrounded 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 enlightenment 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, usually open at the top, which served as a tiring-house (short for attiring house, where the actors dressed).In the England of 1575 there were two kinds of buildings, designed for functions other than the acting of plays, which were adapted by the players as temporary outdoor playhouses the animal-baiting rings or game houses (e.g. Bear Garden) and the inns. presumptively, a booth stage was set up against a wall at one side of the yard, with the audience standing in the yard surrounding the stage on three sides. Out of these natural playhouses grew two major classes of permanent Elizabethan playhouse, public and nonpublic. In general, the public playhouses were large outdoor theatres, whereas the offstage playhouses were smaller privileged theatres. The maximum capacity of a typical public playhouse (e.g., the Swan) was active 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 dirt yard for a cent the remainder were sitting in galleries and boxes for two pence or more. At the private playhouses all spectators were seated (in pit, galle ries, and boxes) and paid sixpence or more. In the beginning, the private playhouses were used exclusively by Boys companies, but this distinction 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 First and Second Blackfriars), the public playhouses only in the suburbs (the orbit, 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 university educated) and nobleness select is the word most usually opposed to popular in thi s 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 besides 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 a yard.Second, Burbage erected a stage in the yardhis model 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 head teacher model was the passage screens of the Tudor interior(prenominal) 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 inset 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 commensurate of serving variously as a Lords get on for privileged or high-paying spectators, as a music-room, and as a piazza 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 base gallery to the frame. The theory of origin and development 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 Hope (1614), and the Second Globe (1614)were of about the same size.The Second Blackfriars Play house 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 it apparently came the custom of using one of the tiring-house boxes over the stage as a music-room.The drama was conventional, not possible poetry was the most obvious convention, others included asides, soliloquies, boys contend the roles of women, battles (with only a few participants), the daylight convention (many scenes are set at night, though the plays took place in mid-afternoon under the sky), a convention of time (the quantify and calendar are used only at the dramatists discretion), the convention of eavesdropping (many characters overhear others, which the audience is privy to but the overheard characters are not), and front 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 shortsighted scenery. Scenery was mostly suggestive for example, one or two trees standing in for a whole forest. The elaborate garbsfor which companies paid a great deal of moneysupplied the color and page antry. Minimal 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 always mere dances, they were sometimes comprised of songs and bawdry 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, on the road from London to Norwich. It was published in 1600 as Kemps nine daies wonder. subsequently 1600, the bawdy jigs fell into derision and contempt and were only performed at theatres such as the Red Bull, which catered to an audience appreciative of the lowest humor and most violent action.The clowns were the great headliners of th e Elizabethan stage prior to the rise of the known tragedians of the late 1580s, such as Edward (Ned) Alleyn and Richard Burbage. Every 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 played many of the great ridiculous characters Kemp most likely played Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in such(prenominal) Ado About Nothing, Armin the parts of Feste in Twelfth Night and the shoot in King Lear.From contemporary documents, we know there were over a thousand actors in England between 1580-1642*. Most were poor, starving actors, but a few dozen were able to make names for themselves and become shareholders in their respective companies, and make a good living. The repertory system was demanding esides playin g six days a week, a company would be in continual rehearsal in order to add new plays and to critique old ones in their schedule. A player would probably occupy a new role every week, with thirty to forty roles in his head. No minor feat, especially considering that an actor would only get his lines and cues (in a turn over 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.