English Renaissance theatre, also known as Renaissance English theatre and Elizabethan theatre, refers to the theatre of England between 1558 and 1642.
The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was built in 1599 at Southwark, close to the south bank of the Thames, by Shakespeare's playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. It was destroyed by fire on 29 June 1613. A second Globe Theatre was built on the same site by June 1614 and stayed open until the London theatre closures of 1642. As well as plays by Shakespeare, early works by Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and John Fletcher were first performed here.
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.
Sir Harbottle Grimston, 2nd Baronet was an English lawyer and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1640 and 1685 and was Speaker in 1660. During the English Civil War he remained a Parliamentarian but was sympathetic to the Royalists.
}} Sir Hardress Waller, c. 1604 to – 1666, was born in Kent and settled in Ireland during the 1630s. A first cousin of Parliamentarian general William Waller, he fought for Parliament in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, becoming a leading member of the radical element within the New Model Army. In 1649, he signed the death warrant for the Execution of Charles I, and after the Stuart Restoration in 1660 was condemned to death as a regicide.
George Gillespie was a Scottish theologian.
West End theatre is mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres in and near the West End of London. Along with New York City's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. Seeing a West End show is a common tourist activity in London. Famous screen actors, British and international alike, frequently appear on the London stage.
Mrs. Warren's Profession is a play written by George Bernard Shaw in 1893, and first performed in London in 1902. It is one of the three plays Shaw published as Plays Unpleasant in 1898, alongside The Philanderer and Widowers' Houses. The play is about a former prostitute, now a madam, who attempts to come to terms with her disapproving daughter. It is a problem play, offering social commentary to illustrate the idea that the act of prostitution was not caused by moral failure but by economic necessity. Elements of the play were borrowed from Shaw's 1882 novel Cashel Byron's Profession, about a man who becomes a boxer due to limited employment opportunities.
The Committee of Both Kingdoms,, was a committee set up during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms by the Parliamentarian faction in association with representatives from the Scottish Covenanters, after they made an alliance in late 1643.
The Salisbury Court Theatre was a theatre in 17th-century London. It was in the neighbourhood of Salisbury Court, which was formerly the London residence of the Bishops of Salisbury. Salisbury Court was acquired by Richard Sackville in 1564 during the last seven years of his life when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Queen Elizabeth; when Thomas Sackville was created Earl of Dorset in 1604, the building was renamed Dorset House.
William Beeston was an English actor and theatre manager, the son and successor to the more famous Christopher Beeston.
Theophilus Bird, or Bourne, was a seventeenth-century English actor. Bird began his stage career in the Stuart era of English Renaissance theatre, and ended it in the Restoration period; he was one of the relatively few actors who managed to resume their careers after the eighteen-year enforced hiatus (1642–60) when the theatres were closed during the English Civil War and the Interregnum.
John Saltmarsh was an English religious radical, "One of the most gentle tongued of controversialists", writer and preacher. He supported the Covenant and was chaplain in Thomas Fairfax's army. The Dictionary of National Biography describes his theology as "Calvinistic in its base, but improved by practical knowledge of men". William Haller called him "that strange genius, part poet and part whirling dervish". He preached Free Grace theology, and published on the topics of Peace, Love and Unity.
John Rhodes was a theatrical figure of the early and middle seventeenth century. He rose to a brief prominence in 1660 when the London theatres re-opened at the start of the English Restoration era.
Thomas Pollard was an actor in the King's Men – a prominent comedian in the acting troupe of William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage.
Henry Parker (1604–1652) was an English barrister and political writer in the Parliamentarian cause.
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. It is the oldest form of drama, though live theatre has now been joined by modern recorded forms. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Places, normally buildings, where performances regularly take place are also called "theatres", as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον, itself from θεάομαι.
Antitheatricality is any form of opposition or hostility to theater. Such opposition is as old as theater itself, suggesting a deep-seated ambivalence in human nature about the dramatic arts. Jonas Barish's 1981 book, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, was, according to one of his Berkeley colleagues, immediately recognized as having given intellectual and historical definition to a phenomenon which up to that point had been only dimly observed and understood. The book earned the American Theater Association's Barnard Hewitt Award for outstanding research in theater history. Barish and some more recent commentators treat the anti-theatrical, not as an enemy to be overcome, but rather as an inevitable and valuable part of the theatrical dynamic.
Sir Thomas Saunders (1593–1653) was an English knight and Buckinghamshire landowner. He was a Member of Parliament, Deputy Lieutenant for Buckinghamshire, High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire and a Parliamentarian army officer during the English Civil War. His surname was often written as Sanders.