Related Research Articles
Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe, was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. Based upon the "many imitations" of his play Tamburlaine, modern scholars consider him to have been the foremost dramatist in London in the years just before his mysterious early death. Some scholars also believe that he greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was baptised in the same year as Marlowe and later succeeded him as the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright. Marlowe was the first to achieve critical reputation for his use of blank verse, which became the standard for the era. His plays are distinguished by their overreaching protagonists. Themes found within Marlowe's literary works have been noted as humanistic with realistic emotions, which some scholars find difficult to reconcile with Marlowe's "anti-intellectualism" and his catering to the prurient tastes of his Elizabethan audiences for generous displays of extreme physical violence, cruelty, and bloodshed.
English Renaissance theatre, also known as Renaissance English theatre and Elizabethan theatre, refers to the theatre of England between 1558 and 1642.
The morality play is a genre of medieval and early Tudor drama. The term is used by scholars of literary and dramatic history to refer to a genre of play texts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries that feature personified concepts alongside angels and demons, who are engaged in a struggle to persuade a protagonist who represents a generic human character toward either good or evil. The common story arc of these plays follows "the temptation, fall and redemption of the protagonist."
The Master of the Revels was the holder of a position within the English, and later the British, royal household, heading the "Revels Office" or "Office of the Revels". The Master of the Revels was an executive officer under the Lord Chamberlain. Originally he was responsible for overseeing royal festivities, known as revels, and he later also became responsible for stage censorship, until this function was transferred to the Lord Chamberlain in 1624. However, Henry Herbert, the deputy Master of the Revels and later the Master, continued to perform the function on behalf of the Lord Chamberlain until the English Civil War in 1642, when stage plays were prohibited. The office continued almost until the end of the 18th century, although with rather reduced status.
Drama was introduced to Britain from Europe by the Romans, and auditoriums were constructed across the country for this purpose.
Anthony Munday was an English playwright and miscellaneous writer. He was baptized on 13 October 1560 in St Gregory by St Paul's, London, and was the son of Christopher Munday, a stationer, and Jane Munday. He was one of the chief predecessors of Shakespeare in English dramatic composition, and wrote plays about Robin Hood. He is believed to be the primary author of Sir Thomas More, on which he is believed to have collaborated with Henry Chettle, Thomas Heywood, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Dekker.
Liberality and Prodigality is a morality play by an unknown author from c.1567. Its title page also reads: "As it was played before her Maiestie. London Printed by Simon Stafford for George Vincent, and are to be sold at the signs of the Hand in hand in Wood-street over against S. Michaels Church."
The World and the Child is an anonymous English morality play. Its source is a late 14th-century or 15th-century poem The Mirror of the Periods of Man's Life, from which the play borrows significantly while reducing the number of characters. It is thought to have influenced William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1.
The Shakespeare apocrypha is a group of plays and poems that have sometimes been attributed to William Shakespeare, but whose attribution is questionable for various reasons. The issue is separate from the debate on Shakespearean authorship, which addresses the authorship of the works traditionally attributed to Shakespeare.
The Birth of Merlin, or, The Child Hath Found his Father is a Jacobean play, probably written in whole or part by William Rowley. It was first performed in 1622 at the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. It contains a comic depiction of the birth of the fully grown Merlin to a country girl, and also features figures from Arthurian legend, including Uther Pendragon, Vortigern, and Aurelius Ambrosius.
Sir John Oldcastle is an Elizabethan play about John Oldcastle, a controversial 14th-/15th-century rebel and Lollard who was seen by some of Shakespeare's contemporaries as a proto-Protestant martyr.
A Yorkshire Tragedy is an early Jacobean era stage play, a domestic tragedy printed in 1608. The play was originally assigned to William Shakespeare, though the modern critical consensus rejects this attribution, favouring Thomas Middleton.
William Hunnis was an English Protestant poet, dramatist, and composer.
Arden of Faversham is an Elizabethan play, entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 3 April 1592, and printed later that same year by Edward White. It depicts the real-life murder of Thomas Arden by his wife Alice Arden and her lover, and their subsequent discovery and punishment. The play is notable as perhaps the earliest surviving example of domestic tragedy, a form of Renaissance play which dramatized recent and local crimes rather than far-off and historical events.
Mankind is an English medieval morality play, written c. 1470. The play is a moral allegory about Mankind, a representative of the human race, and follows his fall into sin and his repentance. Its author is unknown; the manuscript is signed by a monk named Hyngham, believed to have transcribed the play. Mankind is unique among moralities for its surprising juxtaposition of serious theological matters and colloquial dialogue. Along with the morality plays Wisdom and The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind belongs to the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. as a part of the Macro Manuscript.
Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester, is an Elizabethan-era stage play, a comedy written c. 1590. It was bound together with Mucedorus and The Merry Devil of Edmonton in a volume labelled "Shakespeare. Vol. I" in the library of Charles II. Though scholarly opinion generally does not accept the attribution to William Shakespeare, there are a few who believe they see Shakespeare's hand in this play.
Thomas Preston (1537–1598) was an English master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and possibly a dramatist.
Horestes is a late Tudor morality play by the English dramatist John Pickering. It was first published in 1567 and was most likely performed by Lord Rich's men as part of the Christmas revels at court that year. The play's full title is A new interlude of Vice containing the history of Horestes with the cruel revengement of his father's death upon his one natural mother. It has been proposed that John Pickering is likely to be the same person as lawyer and politician Sir John Puckering.
The Macro Manuscript is a collection of three 15th-century English morality plays, known as the "Macro plays" or "Macro moralities": Mankind, The Castle of Perseverance, and Wisdom. So named for its 18th-century owner Reverend Cox Macro (1683–1767), the manuscript contains the earliest complete examples of English morality plays. A stage plan attached to The Castle of Perseverance is also the earliest known staging diagram in England. The manuscript is the only source for The Castle of Perseverance and Mankind and the only complete source for Wisdom. The Macro Manuscript is a part of the collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.. For centuries, scholars have studied the Macro Manuscript for insights into medieval drama. As Clifford Davidson writes in Visualizing the Moral Life, "in spite of the fact that the plays in the manuscript are neither written by a single scribe nor even attributed to a single date, they collectively provide our most important source for understanding the fifteenth century English morality play."
The Interlude of the Student and the Girl is one of the earliest known secular plays in English, first performed c. 1300. The text is written in vernacular English, in an East Midlands dialect that suggests either Lincoln or Beverley as its origin, although its title is given in Latin. The name of its playwright is unknown. Only two scenes, with a total of 84 lines of verse in rhyming couplets, are extant and survive in a manuscript held by the British Library, dated to either the late twelfth or very early thirteenth century. Glynne Wickham provides both the original text and a rendering in modern English in his English Moral Interludes (1976). In tone and form, the interlude seems to be the closest play in English to the contemporaneous French farces, such as The Boy and the Blind Man, and is related to later English farcical plays, such as the anonymous Calisto and Melibea and John Heywood's The Foure PP. It was most likely performed by itinerant players, possibly making use of a performing dog. In Early English Stages (1981), Wickham points to the existence of this play as evidence that the old-fashioned view that comedy began in England with Gammer Gurton's Needle and Ralph Roister Doister in the 1550s is mistaken, ignoring as it does a rich tradition of medieval comic drama. He argues that the play's "command of dramatic action and of comic mood and method is so deft as to make it well-nigh unbelievable" that it was the first of its kind in England.
References
- Tucker Brooke, C. F. 1911. The Tudor Drama: A History of English National Drama to the Retirement of Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Chambers, E. K. 1923. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Southern, Richard. 1973. The Staging of Plays Before Shakespeare. London: Faber. ISBN 0-571-10132-1.
