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About 3,000 plays were written for the Elizabethan stage, and although most of them have been lost, at least 543 remain. [54] [55] The people who wrote these plays were primarily self-made men from modest backgrounds. [g] Some of them were educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, but many were not.
- Elizabeth I & The Arts
- Professional Actors & Theatres
- William Shakespeare
- Other Playwrights & Actors
- Challenges & Legacy
The Elizabethan age saw a boom in the arts in general but it was the performance arts that perhaps made the most lasting contribution to English and even world culture. The queen was herself an admirer of plays, performances, and spectacles which were frequently held at her royal residences. Elizabeth carefully managed her image as the Virgin Queen...
The first professionally licensed troupe of actors belonged to Elizabeth's court favourite Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester (l. c. 1532-1588). Called 'Leicester's Men' they gained their license in 1574 and toured the country's stately homes giving performances. Naturally, actors needed a suitable stage on which to impress and so the first purpo...
William Shakespeare has become one of the most celebrated authors in any language. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, it was not until 1592 that William became known in theatre circles. Two years later he joined Chamberlain's Men and then, as mentioned above, became an important member of the Globe Theatre's permanent staff, a position he held th...
Under the Stuart kings, it became fashionable and profitable to print the scripts of plays, even if they were always originally written with performance in mind. Some 800 play scripts survive from the 16th and 17th century, although this is only a small proportion of those produced at the time. After Shakespeare, the next most celebrated Elizabetha...
The new theatre was not without its critics. Puritans, who were ever-more prominent in Elizabethan society from the 1590s, objected to such frivolous entertainments as plays. They considered their subject matter - especially plots with vengeance, murder, and romance - unsuitable for commoners and likely to corrupt their minds, much like some modern...
- Mark Cartwright
May 10, 2010 · The drama of Renaissance England was truly remarkable and not just because William Shakespeare wrote during that era. Among his colleagues as dramatists were Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, all of whom wrote plays of lasting greatness.
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.)
The first history plays were written in the 1530's, the most notable of which was John Bale's King Johan. While it considered matters of morality and religion, these were handled in the light of the Reformation.
Oct 21, 2024 · While all the innovations seemed to originate in Italy and then spread through Europe, the plays that were first performed on the new stages in Italy were extremely dull. Far from liberating the creative mind, the Classical ideals had only constricted it.
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In 1429, the humanist Nicholas of Cusa rediscovered twelve plays by Plautus, and in the years that followed, Italy's growing ranks of literary scholars pored over these documents. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the printing press permitted scholars to print editions of the classical plays.
