English Renaissance theatre, also known as Renaissance English theatre and Elizabethan theatre, refers to the theatre of England between 1558 and 1642.
Dame Alice Ellen Terry was a leading English actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Royal Opera House (ROH) is a historic opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply Covent Garden, after a previous use of the site. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. The first theatre on the site, the Theatre Royal (1732), served primarily as a playhouse for the first hundred years of its history. In 1734, the first ballet was presented. A year later, the first season of operas, by George Frideric Handel, began. Many of his operas and oratorios were specifically written for Covent Garden and had their premieres there.
Sadler's Wells Theatre is a London performing arts venue, located in Rosebery Avenue, Islington. The present-day theatre is the sixth on the site. Sadler's Wells grew out of a late 17th-century pleasure garden and was opened as a theatre building in the 1680s.
The King's Men was the acting company to which William Shakespeare (1564–1616) belonged for most of his career. Formerly known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, they became the King's Men in 1603 when King James I ascended the throne and became the company's patron.
Bristol Old Vic is a British theatre company based at the Theatre Royal, Bristol. The present company was established in 1946 as an offshoot of the Old Vic in London. It is associated with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which became a financially independent organisation in the 1990s. Bristol Old Vic runs a Young Company for those aged 7–25.
Lewis Thornton Powell was an American Confederate soldier who attempted to assassinate William Henry Seward as part of the Lincoln assassination plot. Wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg, he later served in Mosby's Rangers before working with the Confederate Secret Service in Maryland. John Wilkes Booth recruited him into a plot to kidnap Lincoln and turn the president over to the Confederacy, but then decided to assassinate Lincoln, Seward, and Vice President Andrew Johnson instead, and assigned Powell the task to kill Seward.
The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, commonly known as Drury Lane, is a West End theatre and Grade I listed building in Covent Garden, London, England. The building faces Catherine Street and backs onto Drury Lane. The present building opened in 1812 is the most recent of four theatres that stood at the location since 1663, making it the oldest theatre site in London still in use. According to the author Peter Thomson, for its first two centuries, Drury Lane could "reasonably have claimed to be London's leading theatre". For most of that time, it was one of a handful of patent theatres, granted monopoly rights to the production of "legitimate" drama in London.
Christopher Beeston was a successful actor and a powerful theatrical impresario in early 17th century London. He was associated with a number of playwrights, particularly Thomas Heywood.
The Dorset Garden Theatre in London, built in 1671, was in its early years also known as the Duke of York's Theatre, or the Duke's Theatre. In 1685, King Charles II died and his brother, the Duke of York, was crowned as James II. When the Duke became King, the theatre became the Queen's Theatre in 1685, referring to James' second wife, Mary of Modena. The name remained when William III and Mary II came to the throne in 1689.
Lisle's Tennis Court was a building off Portugal Street in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. Originally built as a real tennis court, it was used as a playhouse during two periods, 1661–1674 and 1695–1705. During the early period, the theatre was called Lincoln's Inn Fields Playhouse, also known as The Duke's Playhouse, The New Theatre or The Opera. The building was rebuilt in 1714, and used again as a theatre for a third period, 1714–1732. The tennis court theatre was the first public playhouse in London to feature the moveable scenery that would become a standard feature of Restoration theatres.
Richard Baxter, or Backster, was a seventeenth-century actor, who worked in some of the leading theatre companies of his era. His long career illustrates the conditions during the difficult years of transition from the period of English Renaissance theatre, through the English Civil War and the Interregnum, and into the Restoration era.
Jane Hippisley, subsequently Mrs. Green (1719–1791), was a British actress.
The Old Orchard Street Theatre in Bath, Somerset, England was built as a provincial theatre before becoming a Roman Catholic Church and since 1865 has been a Masonic Hall. It is a Grade II listed building.
Thomas King (1730–1805) was an English actor, known also as a theatre manager and dramatist.
The King Street Theatre was the first purpose-built theatre to open in Birmingham, England. The town had had earlier theatres, but the Theatre in Smallbrook Street, whose origins dated back to 1715, and Theatre in New Street, which was in an existence a few years later, were both makeshift structures; and the more substantial Moor Street Theatre, which opened in 1740, was a conversion of an existing building. King Street was a much more ambitious undertaking, being based on the examples of the established London patent theatres.
William Powell (1735–1769) was an English actor.
William Haviland was a British actor-manager specialising in the works of Shakespeare who during his long stage career performed with some of the leading actors of his time including Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
John Hippisley was an English comic actor and playwright. He appeared at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden in London, and was the original Peachum in The Beggar's Opera. He opened a theatre in Bristol, the Jacobs Well Theatre, where he and his daughter Elizabeth Hippisley appeared.
