How did William Shakespeare's works differ from works written during the middle ages?

Answer 1

One of the difficult things about the middle ages is that nobody came along and said, "Hey! the Middle Ages are over!" Therefore it is difficult, in tracing the development of English drama from its medieval roots to the Elizabethan professional theatre to draw a line and say that this is medieval and that is not. Certainly the earliest recorded dramas in English were the acting out of scenes from scripture, usually by the members of trade guilds who were given the traditional privilege of acting them. A song from one such play is still sung regularly at Christmas time (The "Coventry Carol") and Shakespeare has Hamlet refer to hammy actors playing in such nativity pageants ("It out-Herods Herod"). These gave way, in the later fifteenth century, to "Morality Plays", still quite religious in character, in which the actors portrayed vices, virtues, or other abstract concepts. The most famous of these is Everyman, which discusses in anthropomorphised form, what it is that people get to take with them to the grave, which is answered when Everyman leaves for his death accompanied only by his Good Deeds, having been abandoned by all else. The first recorded purely secular play is Fulgens and Lucrece, by Henry Medwall, written just before 1500. This extraordinary play was written to be performed at the house of the great cleric Archbishop Morton. Other plays throughout the sixteenth century were written to be performed at schools (Udall's Ralph Roister Doister, ca. 1550), the Temple Law Schools (Gorboduc, 1561) or Cambridge University (Gammer Gurton's Needle, 1567), and reflected an increasing understanding of theatre craft. The scholarly environments which gave rise to these plays meant also that their authors and producers were aware of Latin (but unfortunately not Greek) playwrights, and the techniques of the Latins affected these scholarly playwrights. In the early professional Elizabethan theatres, most of the playwrights continued to be drawn from University men; we first become aware of Shakespeare because Robert Greene did not consider him to be well-educated enough. Over this history we have a slow transition from amateur to professional, from didactic to dramatic, from religious to secular, from purely local to strongly influenced by Classical Latin drama.