English drama from its origins to the present day

Drama was introduced to England from Europe by the Romans, and auditoriums
were constructed across the country for this purpose. By the medieval period, the mummers'
plays had developed, a form of early street theatre associated with the Morris dance,
concentrating on themes such as Saint George and the Dragon and Robin Hood. These were
folk tales re-telling old stories, and the actors travelled from town to town performing them
for their audiences in return for money and hospitality.*The mystery plays, vernacular drama
with its roots in liturgical drama, usually represented biblical subjects. In the 13th century,
craft guilds began producing mystery plays at sites removed from the church, adding
apocryphal and satirical elements to the dramas. In England groups of 25–50 plays were
later organized into lengthy cycles, such as the Chester plays and the Wakefield plays. In
England the plays were often performed on moveable pageant wagons, while in France and
Italy they were acted on stages with scenery representing heaven, earth, and hell. Technical
flourishes such as flying angels and fire-spouting devils kept the spectators' attention. By
1600, the genre of the mystery play had fallen somewhat into decline.
An engraving depicting a mystery play in Chester
*The period known as the English Renaissance, approximately 1500—1660, saw a
flowering of the drama and all the arts. The most famous example of the mystery play,
Everyman and the two candidates for the earliest comedy in English, Nicholas Udall's
Ralph Roister Doister and the anonymous Gammer Gurton's Needle, all belong to the 16th
century. During the reign of Elizabeth I in the late 16th and early 17th century, a London-
centered culture that was both courtly and popular produced great poetry and drama

Perhaps the most famous playwright in the world, William Shakespeare from Stratford-
upon-Avon, wrote plays that are still performed in theatres across the world to this day. He
was himself an actor and deeply involved in the running of the theatre company that
performed his plays. There were various categories or types of play, predominantly the
histories, the comedies, and the tragedies. Most playwrights tended to specialize in one or
another of these, but Shakespeare is remarkable in that he produced all three types. His 38
plays include tragedies such as Hamlet (1603),Othello(1604), and King Lear (1605);
comedies such as
A Midsummer Night's Dream(1594—96) and Twelfth Night (1602); and history plays such
as Henry IV, part 1—2. Some have hypothesized that the English Renaissance paved the
way for the sudden dominance of drama in English society, arguing that the questioning
mode popular during this time was best served by the competing characters in the plays
of the Elizabethan dramatists Other important playwrights of this period include Christopher
Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and John Webster. Jonson, for example, was often
engaged to write courtly masques, ornate plays where the actors wore masks. In an effort to
combat the dramatic excesses of his English contemporaries, Jonson addressed classical
principles and sought to bring back the practices of the ancients in his own plays. Notable
among Jonson's 28 plays are The Alchemist and
 Bartholomew air
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 Marlowe,
Thomas Kyd, John Lyly, and Robert Greene. Kyd wrote
The Spanish Tragedy, the most popular play of the 16thcentury. He constructed a well-
planned plot which made for a very interesting play. The Cambridge-educated Marlowe was
important in the development of chronicle plays such as Edward II
. He also wrote the well-known play Doctor Faustus.
Lyly was another member of the University Wits who wrote primarily pastoral comedies in
which he used mythology along with English subjects.Campaspe, Endimion, and
Love's Metamorphosis are just a few examples of Lyly's work. Greene, meanwhile, wrote
pastoral and romantic comedies, taking many different aspects and pieces and combining
them into a single play. Two of his adventurous works are Friar Bacon &Friar Bungay and
James IV. After 1610, changes started to occur in English drama . There was an increase in
technical skill, playwrights handled exposition better, they began to compress action to
fewer episodes, and they built startling climaxes to surprise audiences. With these changes
came a new breed of play wrights who created a drama more focused on thrilling and
exciting subject matter than complex characterization or tragic emotion. 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 subsequent Restoration period, Fletcher's plays were
performed more frequently than Shakespeare's or Jonson's.*During the Interregnum (the
period in which no monarch reigned, namely from the Civil War and the fall of Charles I in
1649 to the ascent of Charles II in 1660), English theatres were kept closed by the Puritans
for religious and ideological reasons. A law was passed in 1642 that suspended
performances for five years. After the law expired, Oliver Cromwell's government passed
another law declaring that all actors were to be considered rogues. Many theatres were even
dismantled during these eighteen years of stasis. When the London theatres opened again
with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, they flourished under the personal interest and
support of Charles II, a huge patron of theatre who helped breathe new life into British
drama. Wide and socially mixed audiences were attracted by topical writing and by the
introduction of the first professional actresses (in Shakespeare's time, all female roles had
been played by boys). New genres of the Restoration were heroic drama, pathetic drama ,and
Restoration comedy. Notable heroic tragedies of this period include John Dryden's
All for Love (1677) and (Aureng-Zebe) (1675), and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved
(1682).

The Restoration plays that have best retained the interest of producers and audiences today
are the comedies, such as George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676), William Wycherley's
The Country Wife (1676), John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696), and William Congreve's
The Way of the World (1700). This period saw the first professional woman playwright, Aphra
Behn, author of many comedies including
The Rover
 (1677). Restoration comedy is famous or notorious for its sexual explicitness, a quality
encouraged by Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish aristocratic ethos of his
court
Many scenic innovations developed during the Restoration. One of the most innovative and
influential designers of the 18th century was Philip Jacques de Loutherbourg. He was the
first designer to break up floor space with pieces of scenery, giving more depth and
dimension to the stage. Other designers experimented with lighting by using candles and
large chandeliers which hung over the floor of the stage.*In the 18th century, the highbrow
and provocative Restoration comedy lost favour, to be replaced by sentimental comedy,
domestic tragedy such as George Lillo's
The London Merchant (1731), and by an overwhelming interest in Italian opera. Popular
entertainment became more dominant in this period than ever before. Fair-booth burlesque
and musical entertainment, the ancestors of the English music hall, flourished at the expense
of legitimate English drama, which went into a long period of decline. By the early 19th
century, the drama was no longer represented by stage plays a tall, but by closet drama,
plays written to be privately read in a "closet" (a small domestic room)
Two notable eighteenth century writers of comedy were Richard Sheridan (
The Rivals) and Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer).John Gay authored the popular
The Beggar's Opera, updated in the twentieth-century playwright by Bertolt Brecht in
The Three penny Opera A change came in the later19th century with the plays on the London
stage by the Irishmen George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde and the Norwegian Henrik
Ibsen, all of whom influenced domestic English drama and vitalized it again. Bernard Shaw
had the unique honor of being awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar (the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1925, and the Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay in 1938 for
Pygmalion). Wilde ( Lady Windermere’s Fan,The Importance of Being Earnest
), a playwright, novelist, poet, short story writer, was known for his barbed and clever wit,
and was one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, not to mention one
of the greatest celebrities of his day. As the result of a famous trial, he suffered dramatic
downfall and was imprisoned after being convicted of the offence of "gross indecency,
"which also included homosexual acts.W.B. Yeats, though born to an Anglo-Irish mother
and father, was perhaps the primary driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. Yeats
also served as an Irish Senator. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for
what the Nobel Committee described as "his always inspired poetry, which in a highly
artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. Yeats was a co-founder of the
Abbey Theatre, also known as the National Theatre of Ireland,located in Dublin. The Abbey
first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904 and, despite losing its original
building to a fire in 1951, it has continued to stage performances more or less continuously
to the present day. The Abbey was the first state-subsidised theatre in the English-speaking
world; from 1925 onwards it received an annual subsidy from the Irish Free State. In its
early years, the theatre was closely associated with the writers of the Celtic revival, many of
whom were involved in its foundation and most of whom had plays staged there. The Abbey
served as anursery for many of the leading Irish playwrights and actors of the 20th century.
In addition, through its extensive programme of touring abroad and its high visibility to
foreign, particularly North American, audiences, it has become an important part of the Irish
tourist industry
John Millington Synge was another Irish dramatist, poet, prose writer, and collector
of folklore. He was also a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was, together with
Yeats, one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for the play
The Playboy of the Western World , which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at
the Abbey. Although he came from a middle-class Protestant background, Synge's writings
are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and
with what he saw as the essential paganism of their worldview.
Postmodernism had a profound effect on English Drama in the latter half of the 20th
Century. This can be seen particularly in the work of Samuel Beckett (most notably in
Waiting for Go dot ).Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and, according to
some interpretations, deeply pessimistic about the human condition. The perceived
pessimism is mitigated both by a great and often wicked sense of humor, and by the sense,
for some readers, that Beckett's portrayal of life’s obstacles serves to demonstrate that the
journey, while difficult, is ultimately worth the effort. Similarly, many posit that Beckett's
expressed "pessimism" is not so much for the Human condition but for that of an established
cultural and societal structure which imposes its stultifying will upon otherwise hopeful
individuals; it is the inherent optimism of the human condition, therefore, that is at tension
with the oppressive world. Beckett, in turn, influenced subsequent writers such as Harold
Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Pinter, a British playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director,
author, and political activist, is best known for his plays The Birthday Party, The Caretaker,
The Homecoming, and Betrayal, and for his screenplay adaptations of novels by others, such
as The Servant And The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The recipient of scores of awards and
honorary degrees, Pinter received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. In its citation, the
Swedish Academy states that "Harold Pinter is generally regarded as the foremost
representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century. Today the West End
of London has a large number of theatres, particularly centered around Shaftesbury Avenue.
A prolific writer of music for musicals of the 20th century, Andrew Lloyd Webber (Cats,
Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, The Phantom of the Opera), has dominated the West End for a
number of years, and his works have travelled to Broadway in New York and around the
world, as well as being turned into film. The Royal Shakespeare Company, meanwhile,
operates out of Stratford-upon-Avon, producing mainly but not exclusively Shakespeare's
plays.