This entry is a subtopic of Drama.
In the fifteenth century, drama in England was dominated by modes now thought of as characteristically "medieval": cycles of liturgical mystery plays, morality plays—of which Mankind (c. 1465), and Everyman (c. 1509–1519) are among the best-known examples—and secular interludes such as Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucrece (c. 1497) and John Heywood's The Four Ps (c. 1520–1530). By the end of the eighteenth century, the stage would have been almost unrecognizable to Medwall or Heywood. A tradition of performance based within communities was gradually supplemented by commercial structures; this new tradition was in its turn broken by the order that the public theaters be closed on the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642. Although dramatic activities did not cease—private and surreptitious performances continued and a wide variety of dramatic texts were aimed at readers—there was a break with the pre–Civil War stage and with many of its conventions.
Changing Theaters
In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, drama was performed mainly in the houses of the nobility, in civic venues such as town halls or churches, or in educational establishments such as schools, universities, and the Inns of Court, where law students were educated. In the later period, large-scale open-air amphitheaters or innyard conversions were developed, with which settled companies became established: the best-known include the Red Lion (1567), the Theatre (1576), the Rose (1592), the Globe (1599), and the Red Bull (c. 1604). Other, smaller, commercial theaters were constructed in indoor venues; they were used in the first place by the children's companies that had devolved from performances by the choir schools of St. Paul's and the Chapel Royal. By 1610, an adult company, the King's Men, had started to perform at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre, and by the end of the seventeenth century Continental-style proscenium arch theaters had supplanted the amphitheaters.
Perhaps the greatest change was in the nature of performers: professional actors rose from the level of vagrants to become substantial landowners and celebrities—Edward Alleyn, Richard Burbage, Thomas Betterton, and David Garrick are only the most famous. The Restoration (1660–1685) also saw the introduction of the first professional female performers, of whom the most celebrated include Elizabeth Barry, Anne Bracegirdle, and Anne Oldfield. This was also the period when women began to write for the commercial stages; the best-known of these writers include Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, and Susanna Centlivre.
Kinds of Drama
In the early to mid-sixteenth century, classical influences began to intersect with folk and morality play influences, notably in plays such as Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1552) by Nicholas Udall, and Gammer Gurton's Needle (1566), often attributed to William Stevenson. The universities (Gammer Gurton was first performed at Cambridge) and the Inns of Court saw plays in English and Latin. Particularly noteworthy is the performance of the first English blank-verse tragedy, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex, at the Inner Temple in 1562.
Tragedy. Influential tragedies included Christopher Marlowe's opulent and exotic two-part tragedy Tamburlaine (c. 1587–1589), Thomas Kyd's hugely popular revenge tragedy The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1589), William Shakespeare's romantic tragedy Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595), and Thomas Heywood's domestic tragedy A Woman Killed With Kindness (c. 1603). These models for tragic drama were developed throughout the period by writers including George Chapman, John Webster, John Ford, Philip Massinger, and James Shirley. A related line of historical drama can be traced from John Bale's moral history King Johan (c. 1539) through Marlowe's Edward II (c. 1592), Shakespeare's first (Henry VI, Part One; Henry VI, Part Two; Henry VI, Part Three; and Richard III) and second (Richard II; Henry IV, Part One; Henry IV, Part Two; and Henry V) tetralogies, Shakespeare and John Fletcher's Henry VIII (1613), and Ford's Perkin Warbeck (1634).
"Closet" tragedy (intended primarily to be read, not staged) was more closely associated with classical and continental traditions: notable examples include Mary Sidney's version of Robert Garnier's Antonius (1595), Fulke Greville's Mustapha (1596) and Alaham (1600), and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam (1613), the first original English play written by a woman. A heavily classicist form of tragedy pioneered on the public stage by Ben Jonson in Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611) was unsuccessful in its own day.
It left its mark, however, on tragedies of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries such as John Dryden's All for Love (1678) and Joseph Addison's Cato (1713). These tragedies are often also termed "heroic drama": the mode is exemplified by Dryden's Conquest of Granada (1670) and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved (1682) and parodied in George Villiers, duke of Buckingham's The Rehearsal (printed 1672) and Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb (1730). This period also saw a revival of domestic tragedy in George Lillo's The London Merchant (1731) and the revival and adaptation of many of Shakespeare's tragedies. Notable examples include Nahum Tate's versions of King Lear (1681), Richard II (The Sicilian Usurper, 1681), and Coriolanus (The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth, 1681), Colley Cibber's Richard III (1700), and Garrick's adaptations of Romeo and Juliet (1748) and Hamlet (1771), in which he also acted.
Comedy. Comedies such as Campaspe (1583) and Sappho and Phao (1584), written by John Lyly for the children's companies, combined classical settings with topical allusion to court and country in witty antithetical structures (Lyly's technique is often termed "euphuism" after the title of his bestselling prose romance, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, published in 1578). The romantic comedies of the next generation of writers, including those of Shakespeare, were heavily influenced by Lyly's work. Another important mode was comedy portraying the city, exemplified by Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Ben Jonson's Volpone (1605) and The Alchemist (1610), John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan (1605), Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613), Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625), and Richard Brome's The Weeding of Covent Garden (c. 1632). In the mid-Jacobean period, the mixed genre of tragicomedy came to prominence, largely through plays written by Shakespeare and by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Both of these modes were quickly revived in the 1660s, and they exercised a shaping influence on the comedies of Behn, Centlivre, William Congreve, George Etherege, George Farquhar, John Vanbrugh, and William Wycherley. The plays of these dramatists constitute what is usually known as "Restoration Comedy": social satires that simultaneously criticized and enjoyed excessive behavior. Famous examples include Behn's The Rover (in two parts, 1677–1681), Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676), Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1676), Congreve's The Way of the World (1700), and Farquhar's The Beaux' Strategem (1707). Later, Richard Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1722) pioneered "sentimental" comedy, reacting against the supposedly immoral tone of Restoration comedies. A return to irreverence can be found in Fielding's 1730s farces, and in Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal (1777) and The Critic (1779).
Occasional drama. The early modern period also saw a flourishing tradition of occasional drama. Court theater included lavish entertainments under Elizabeth I—such as the entertainment at Kenilworth (1575), Philip Sidney's The Lady of May (1578), and the Elvetham Entertainment (1591)—and the masques on which Ben Jonson collaborated with the architect Inigo Jones during the reigns of James I and Charles I. Other occasional drama included Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592), John Milton's Masque at Ludlow (better known as Comus, 1634), and the earliest English opera, The Siege of Rhodes (1656), with a libretto by William Davenant and music (now lost) by Henry Lawes, Matthew Locke, Henry Cooke, George Hudson, and Edward Coleman. The Siege of Rhodes is also notable for featuring the first use in England of perspective scenery, designed by John Webb, and one of the earliest appearances by a female performer, Mistress Coleman. Major cities such as London, Coventry, Norwich, and York had their own tradition of plays, shows, and pageants, many of them organized by the trades guilds to mark religious festivals, the accession or entry to a city of monarchs, or the appointment of civic leaders. Other popular dramatic modes included puppet shows and, later, pantomimes.
Social and Political Themes
Drama was throughout the early modern period a socially and politically engaged form. John Skelton's Magnificence, performed around 1519, launched a devastating critique on Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, chief adviser to Henry VIII, and on Henry's young courtiers. Nicholas Udall's Respublica (1553) was a political allegory lauding the accession of Mary I and the restoration of the Roman Catholic Church in England. A decade later, Sackville and Norton wrote Gorboduc to advise Elizabeth I about the succession. Middleton's A Game at Chess (1624), performed for nine days consecutively at the Globe Theatre, allegorized Anglo-Spanish relations and caused a public scandal by representing on the stage real people such as the Spanish ambassador, Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, marquis de Gondomar. During the Civil War (1642–1649) and Commonwealth (1649–1660), printed drama was highly prevalent in political polemic, including plays and dramatic dialogues such as A New Play Called Canterbury His Change of Diet (1641), Crafty Cromwell (1648), and Cromwell's Conspiracy (1660). These political playlets were published anonymously or under pseudonyms such as Mercurius Melancholicus (Crafty Cromwell) and Mercurius Pragmaticus (Cromwell's Conspiracy). Toward the end of the period, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) focused on the inhabitants of Newgate, the famous London prison, and the career of the highwayman Macheath. It launched a new form of socially aware drama, and, drawing on genres such as the ballad, re-inscribed the stage's associations with other areas of popular culture.
The Beggar's Opera seems to be a world away from the civic religious drama of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. However, in spite of the many changes in performance location, casting, and dramatic style, the theater continued to exist in relation to society and the communities in which it was performed.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Space does not allow an exhaustive list of primary texts. Useful anthologies of early modern English drama include the following:
Bevington, David, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen, eds. English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology. New York and London, 2002.
Canfield, J. Douglas, ed. The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama. Peterborough, U.K., 2001.
Kinney, Arthur, ed. Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments. Malden, Mass., and Oxford, 1999.
Lyons, Paddy, and Fidelis Morgan, eds. Female Playwrights of the Restoration: Five Comedies. London and Rutland, Vt., 1991.
Manning, Gillian, ed. Libertine Plays of the Restoration. London and North Clarendon, Vt., 1999.
Somerset, J. A. B., ed. Four Tudor Interludes. London and New York, 1974.
Walker, Greg. Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Oxford and Malden, Mass., 2000.
Whitworth, Charles Walters. Three Sixteenth-Century Comedies: Gammer Gurton's Needle, Ralph Roister Doister, The Old Wife's Tale. London and New York, 1984.
Womersley, David, ed. Restoration Drama. Oxford, 2000.
Secondary Sources
Beadle, Richard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
Braunmuller, A. R., and Michael Hattaway, eds. The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.
Cox, John D., and David Scott Kastan, eds. A New History of Early English Drama. New York, 1997.
Fisk, Deborah Payne, ed. The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642. Cambridge, U.K., 1980.
——. The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford and New York, 1996.
Kinney, Arthur F., ed. The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500–1600. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.
Owen, Susan J. A Companion to Restoration Drama. Oxford and Malden, Mass., 2001.
Randall, Dale B. J. Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642–1660. Lexington, Ky., 1995.
Walker, Greg. The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1998.
White, Paul Whitfield. Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage and Playing in Tudor England. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1993.
Wiseman, Susan. Drama and Politics in the English Civil War. Cambridge, U.K., 1998.
—LUCY MUNRO
