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English Renaissance theatre, also known as early modern English theatre, refers to the theatre of England, largely based in London, which occurred between 1567, when the first English theatre [1] 'The Red Lion' was opened; and the closure of the theatres in 1642. It includes the drama ofWilliam Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and many other famous playwrights.

Background
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 the commoners 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. By the later part of the reign of Charles I, few new plays were being written for the public theatres, which sustained themselves on the accumulated works of the previous decades.[2]

[edit]Permanent

Theatres

The establishment of large and profitable public theatres was an essential enabling 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. Their construction was prompted when the Mayor and Corporation of London first banned plays in 1572 as a measure against the plague, and then formally expelled all players from the city in 1575.[3] This prompted the construction of permanent playhouses outside the jurisdiction of

London, in the liberties of Halliwell/Holywell in Shoreditch and later the Clink, and at Newington Butts near the established entertainment district of St. George's Fields in rural Surrey.[3] The Theatre was constructed in Shoreditch in 1576 by James Burbagewith his brother-in-law John Brayne (the owner of the unsuccessful Red Lion playhouse of 1567)[4] and the Newington Butts playhouse was set up, probably by Jerome Savage, some time between 1575[5] and 1577.[6] The Theatre was rapidly followed by the nearbyCurtain Theatre (1577), the Rose (1587), the Swan (1595), the Globe (1599), the Fortune (1600), and the Red Bull (1604).[7] Archaeological excavations on the foundations of the Rose and the Globe in the late twentieth century showed that all the London theatres had individual differences; yet their common function necessitated a similar general plan.[8] 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 stageessentially 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, as in Julius Caesar.[citation needed] Usually built of timber, lath and plaster and with thatched roofs, the early theatres were vulnerable to fire, and were replaced (when necessary) with stronger structures. When the Globe burned down in June 1613, it was rebuilt with a tile roof; when the Fortune burned down in December 1621, it was rebuilt in brick (and apparently was no longer square).[citation needed] A different model was developed with the Blackfriars Theatre, which came into regular use on a long-term basis in 1599.[9] 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.[10] Audiences of the 1630s benefited from a half-century of vigorous dramaturgical development; the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare and their contemporaries were still being performed on a regular basis (mostly at the public theatres), while the newest works of the newest playwrights were abundant as well (mainly at the private theatres).[citation needed] 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.[11] 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 Bullfor exactly the same price.[citation needed] (Ticket prices at the private theatres were five or six times higher).[citation needed]

[edit]Performances
The acting companies functioned on a repertory system; unlike modern productions that can run for months or years on end, the troupes of this era rarely acted the same play two days in a row. Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess ran for nine straight performances in August 1624 before it was closed by the authoritiesbut this was due to the political content of the play and was a unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable phenomenon. Consider the 1592 season of Lord Strange's Men at the Rose Theatre as far more representative: between Feb. 19 and June 23 the company played six days a week, minus Good Friday and two other days. They performed 23 different plays, some only once, and their most popular play of the season, The First Part of Hieronimo, (based on Kyd'sThe Spanish Tragedy), 15 times. They never played the same play two days in a row, and rarely the same play twice in a week.[12] The workload on the actors, especially the leading performers like Edward Alleyn, must have been tremendous. 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.

[edit]Costumes This section may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. (January 2012)

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. Otherwise, costumes would be recycled and used in multiple different plays multiple times until it was too worn to be used. Occasionally, a lead character would wear a conventionalized version of more historically accurate garb, but secondary characters would nonetheless remain in contemporary clothing.

[edit]Playwrights
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. The men (no women were professional dramatists in this era) who wrote these plays were primarily selfmade men from modest backgrounds.[13] Some of them were educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, but many were not. Although William Shakespeare andBen 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, whileBen 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. The profession of dramatist was challenging and far from lucrative.[14] Entries in Philip Henslowe's Diary show that in the years around 1600 Henslowe paid as little as 6 or 7 per play. This was probably at the low end of the range, though even the best writers could not demand too much more. A playwright, working alone, could generally produce two plays a year at most; in the 1630s Richard Bromesigned a contract with the Salisbury Court Theatre to supply three plays a year, but found himself unable to meet the workload. 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 dealt with the natural limitation on their productivity by combining 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; but the arrangement seems to have functioned well enough to have made it worthwhile. (The truism that says, diversify your investments, may have worked for the Elizabethan play market as for the modern stock market.) Of the 70plus known works in the canon of Thomas Dekker, roughly 50 are collaborations; in a single year, 1598, Dekker worked on 16 collaborations for impresario Philip Henslowe, and earned 30, or a little under 12 shillings per weekroughly twice as much as the average artisan's income of 1s. per day.[15] At the end of his career, Thomas Heywood would famously claim to have had "an entire hand, or at least a main finger" in the authorship of some 220 plays. A solo artist usually needed months to write a play (though Jonson is said to have done Volpone in five weeks); Henslowe's Diary indicates that a team of four or five writers could produce a play in as little as two weeks. Admittedly, though, the Diary also shows that teams of Henslowe's house dramatistsAnthony Munday, Robert Wilson, Richard Hathwaye, Henry Chettle, and the others, even including a young John Webstercould start a project, and accept advances on it, yet fail to produce anything stageworthy. (Modern understanding of collaboration in this era is biased by the fact that the failures have generally disappeared with barely a trace; for one exception to this rule, see: Sir Thomas More.).[16] Most playwrights, like Shakespeare for example, wrote in verse.

[edit]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. History plays dealt with more recent events, like A Larum for London which dramatizes the sack ofAntwerp in 1576. Tragedy was an amazingly 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. The four tragedies considered to be Shakespeare's greatest (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth) were composed during this period, as well as many others (seeShakespearean 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. Examples are Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Though marginalised, 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 enjoyed an efflorescence, as did themasque throughout the reigns of the first two Stuart kings, James I and Charles I.

[edit]Printed

texts

Only a minority of the plays of English Renaissance theatre were ever printed; of Heywood's 220 plays noted above, only about 20 were published in book form.[17] A little over 600 plays were published in the period as a whole, most commonly in individual quarto editions. (Larger collected editions, like those of Shakespeare's, Ben Jonson's, and Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, were a late and limited development.) Through much of the modern era, it was thought that play texts were popular items among Renaissance readers that provided healthy profits for the stationers who printed and sold them. By the turn of the 21st century, the climate of scholarly opinion shifted somewhat on this belief: some contemporary researchers argue that publishing plays was a risky and marginal business [18]though this conclusion has been disputed by others.[19] Some of the most successful publishers of the English Renaissance, likeWilliam Ponsonby or Edward Blount, rarely published plays. A small number of plays from the era survived not in printed texts but in manuscript form.[20]

[edit]Termination

(September 2, 1642)

The rising Puritan movement was hostile toward theatre, as they felt that "entertainment" was sinful. Politically, playwrights and actors were clients of the monarchy and aristocracy, and most supported the Royalist cause. The Puritan faction, long powerful in London, gained control of the city early in the English Civil War, and on September 2, 1642 ordered the closure of the London theatres. The theatres remained closed for most of the next eighteen years, re-opening after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The re-opened theatres performed many of the plays of the previous era, though often in adapted forms; new genres of Restoration comedy andspectacle soon evolved, giving English theatre of the later seventeenth century its distinctive character.

[edit]List

of playwrights

William Alabaster William Alley Robert Armin Thomas Ashton William Barksted Barnabe Barnes Lording Barry Francis Beaumont Sir William Berkeley Dieter Bohlen Samuel Brandon Richard Brome Lodowick Carlell William Cartwright Allan Castellon William Cavendish Robert Chamberlain George Chapman Henry Chettle John Clavell Robert Daborne Samuel Daniel William Davenant Robert Davenport John Day Edward de Vere Thomas Dekker Michael Drayton Richard Edwardes Martin Emilian Nathan Field John Fletcher John Ford Ulpian Fulwell

Matthew Francis William Gager Steven Galvez Alexander Gough Robert Greene Thomas Greene Richard Gunnell Stephen Hammerton Charles Hart Richard Hathwaye William Haughton John Heminges Thomas Heywood John Honyman Thomas Hughes Ben Jonson Will Kempe Henry Killigrew Thomas Killigrew Thomas Kyd Thomas Legge Thomas Lodge John Lowin Thomas Lupton Steven Luxford John Lyly Gervase Markham Christopher Marlowe Shackerley Marmion Steve Marsh Isaac Martinez Philip Massinger Thomas May Thomas Middleton Anthony Munday Thomas Nabbes

Thomas Nashe Thomas Norton William Ostler George Peele Andrew Pennycuicke Augustine Phillips John Phillips John Pickering Thomas Pollard Henry Porter Thomas Preston William Rankins Timothy Read Samuel Rowley William Rowley Joseph Rutter Thomas Sackville William Sampson William Shakespeare Edward Sharpham James Shirley Mary Sidney Philip Sidney Wentworth Smith Steven Spielberg Sir John Suckling Robert Tailor Thomas Tomkis Cyril Tourneur Adrian Vaca John Webster George Whetstone George Wilkins Arthur Wilson Robert Wilson

[edit]Playhouses

Anfield Blackfriars Theatre Cockpit Theatre Inn-yard theatres Newington Butts Red Bull Theatre Red Lion (theatre) Salisbury Court Theatre The Curtain The Fortune The Globe The Hope The Rose The Swan The Theatre Whitefriars Theatre

[edit]Playing

companies

Main article: Playing companies

King's Revels Children King's Revels Men Lady Elizabeth's Men Leicester's Men Lord Strange's Men (later Derby's Men) Oxford's Boys Oxford's Men Pembroke's Men Prince Charles's Men Queen Anne's Men Queen Elizabeth's Men Queen Henrietta's Men The Admiral's Men The Children of Paul's The Children of the Chapel (Queen's Revels) The King's Men The Lord Chamberlain's Men

Sussex's Men Warwick's Men Worcester's Men

[edit]Significant

others

Susan Baskervile, investor and litigant William Beeston, manager George Buc, Master of the Revels 16091622 Cuthbert Burbage, entrepreneur James Burbage, entrepreneur Ralph Crane, scribe Philip Henslowe, entrepreneur Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 16231673 Edward Knight, prompter Francis Langley, entrepreneur John Rhodes, manager Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels 15791609

[edit]See

also
Wikiversity has learning materials about Collaborative play writing

Accession Day tilt History of theatre King's Revels Children

[edit]Notes

1. 2. 3. 4.

^ Bill Bryson, Shakespeare, page 28 ^ Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, pp. 12-18. ^

Fairman, Thomas (1899), Early London Theatres: In the Fields, London: Elliot Stock, p. 30

^ Bowsher, Julian; Miller, Pat (2010). The Rose and the GlobePlayhouses of Shakespeare's Bankside, Southwark. Museum of London. p. 19. ISBN 978-1-901992-85-4.

5.

^ Gladstone Wickham, Glynne William; Berry, Herbert; Ingram, William (2000), English professional theatre, 1530-1660, Cambridge University Press, p. 320, ISBN 978-0-521-23012-4

6.

^ Ingram, William (1992), The business of playing: the beginnings of the adult professional theater in Elizabethan London, Cornell University Press, p. 170, ISBN 978-0-8014-2671-1

7.

^ A complete roster of what the Elizabethans called "public" theatres would include the converted Boar's Head Inn (1598), and the Hope Theatre (1613), neither of them major venues for drama in the era.

8. 9.

^ Gurr, pp. 123-31 and 142-6. ^ The Blackfriars site was used as a theatre in the 1576-84 period; but it became a regular venue for drama only later.

10. ^ Other "private" theatres of the era included the theatre near St Paul's Cathedral used by the Children of Paul's (1575) and the occasionally used Cockpit-in-Court (1629). 11. ^ Cook, Ann Jennalie (1981). The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 15761642. Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp. 176177. ISBN 0691064547. 12. ^ Halliday, Shakespeare Companion, p. 374; Chambers,Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3, p. 396, reflects earlier interpretations of the identity of the Hieronimo play. 13. ^ A few aristocratic women engaged in closet drama or dramatic translations. Chambers, Vol. 3, lists Elizabeth, Lady Cary; Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Jane, Lady Lumley; and Elizabeth Tudor. 14. ^ Halliday, pp. 374-5. 15. ^ Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, p. 72. 16. ^ Halliday, pp. 108-9, 374-5, 456-7. 17. ^ Halliday, p. 375. 18. ^ Blayney, Peter W. M. (1997). "The Publication of Playbooks". In Cox, John D.; Kastan, David Scott. A New History of Early English Drama. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 383 422. ISBN 0231102429. 19. ^ Farmer, Alan B.; Lesser, Zachary (2005). "The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited". Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (1): 132.JSTOR 3844024. 20. ^ For examples, see: Sir Thomas More, John of Bordeaux,Believe as You List, and Sir John van Olden Barnavelt.

[edit]References

Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 15741642. Third edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 15641964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964. Keenan, Siobhan.Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.