ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

(Elizabethan Theatre)
 English Renaissance theatre
encompasses the period between
1562 (performance at the Inner
Temple during the Christmas
season of 1561 of Gorboduc, the
first English play using blank verse)
and 1642 (ban on theatrical plays
enacted by the English Parliament).
 The phrase Elizabethan theatre
is used at times improperly to
mean English Renaissance
theatre although in a strict sense
"Elizabethan" only refers to the
period of Queen Elizabeth's reign,
which ended with her death in
1603.
 Strictly speaking, English
Renaissance theatre may be
said to encompass Elizabethan
theatre from 1562 to 1603,
Jacobean theatre from 1603 to
1625 and Caroline theatre
from 1625 to 1642.
 Elizabethan theatre and
the name of William
Shakespeare are inextricably
bound together, yet there
were others writing plays at
the same time.
 One of the most successful was
Christopher Marlowe, who many
contemporaries considered
Shakespeare's superior. Marlowe's
career, however, was cut short at a
comparatively young age when he
died in a tavern fight in Deptford,
the victim of a knife in the eye.
 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.
 The first permanent English
theatre, the Red Lion
opened in 1567 but it was a
short-lived failure. The first
successful theatres, such as
The Theatre, opened in
1576.
 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.
 A noble had to be careful
about which play he allowed
to be performed within his
home, however. Anything
that was controversial or
political was likely to get him
in trouble with the crown!
 After the Theatre, further open
air playhouses opened in the
London area, including the Rose
(1587), and the Hope (1613). 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. The site of
the theatre was rediscovered in
the 20th century and a
reconstruction built near the spot.
 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.
 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. Women attended plays,
though often the prosperous
woman would wear a mask to
disguise her identity.
 Further, no women
performed in the plays.
Female roles were
generally performed by
young boys.
 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.
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 people 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.
 Their lives were subject to the
same levels of danger and earlier
mortality as all who lived during
the early modern period—for
example, Christopher Marlowe
was killed in an apparent tavern
brawl, while Ben Jonson killed an
actor in a duel. Several probably
were soldiers.
 End of English
Renaissance theatre:
ban on plays by the
English Parliament
 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 First English Civil War, and on 2
September 1642, the Parliament,
pushed by the Parliamentarian party,
under Puritan influence, banned the
staging of plays in the London theatres
though it did not, contrary to what is
commonly stated, order the closure,
let alone the destruction, of the
theatres themselves.
Modern
Realism
Realism in the theatre was a general
movement that began in the 19th-century
theatre, around the 1870s, and remained
present through much of the 20th century.
It developed a set of dramatic and theatrical
conventions with the aim of bringing a
greater fidelity of real life to texts and
performances. Part of a broader artistic
movement, it includes Naturalism and
Socialist realism.
Russia's first professional playwright,
Aleksey Pisemsky, along with Leo Tolstoy (in
his The Power of Darkness of 1886), began
a tradition of psychological realism in
Russia. A new type of acting was required to
replace the declamatory conventions of the
well-made play with a technique capable of
conveying the speech and movements found
in the domestic situations of everyday life.
This need was supplied by the innovations
of the Moscow Art Theatre, founded by
Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir
Nemirovich-Danchenko.
Whereas the subtle expression of emotion in
Anton Chekhov's The Seagull through
everyday small-talk had initially gone
unappreciated in a more traditionally
conventional production in St Petersburg, a
new staging by the Moscow Art Theatre
brought the play and its author, as well as
the company, immediate success.
A logical development was to take the revolt
against theatrical artifice a step further in
the direction of naturalism, and Stanislavski,
especially in his production of Maxim Gorky's
The Lower Depths, helped this movement
achieve international recognition.
The Moscow Art Theatre's ground-breaking
productions of plays by Chekhov, such as
Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, in
turn influenced Maxim Gorky and Mikhail
Bulgakov.
Stanislavski went on to develop his 'system',
a form of actor training that is particularly
well-suited to psychological realism.
19th-century realism is closely connected to
the development of modern drama, which,
as Martin Harrison explains, "is usually said
to have begun in the early 1870s" with the
"middle-period" work of the Norwegian
dramatist Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen's realistic
drama in prose has been "enormously
influential.