The Isle of Gulls is a Jacobean era stage play written by John Day, a comedy that caused a scandal upon its premiere in 1606.
John Day (1574–1638?) was an English dramatist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
In a modern sense, comedy refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film, stand-up comedy, or any other medium of entertainment. The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance which pits two groups or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old." A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse in ruses which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter.
This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1606.
The play was most likely written in 1605; it was acted by the Children of the Revels at the Blackfriars Theatre in February 1606. It was published later in 1606, in a quarto printed by John Trundle and sold by the bookseller John Hodges. A second quarto was issued in 1633 by William Sheares. [1]
The Children of the Chapel were the boys with unbroken voices, choristers, who formed part of the Chapel Royal, the body of singers and priests serving the spiritual needs of their sovereign wherever they were called upon to do so. The were overseen by the Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal.
Blackfriars Theatre was the name given to two separate theatres located in the former Blackfriars Dominican priory in the City of London during the Renaissance. The first theatre began as a venue for the Children of the Chapel Royal, child actors associated with the Queen's chapel choirs, and who from 1576 to 1584 staged plays in the vast hall of the former monastery. The second theatre dates from the purchase of the upper part of the priory and another building by James Burbage in 1596, which included the Parliament Chamber on the upper floor that was converted into the playhouse. The Children of the Chapel played in the theatre beginning in the autumn of 1600 until the King's Men took over in 1608. They successfully used it as their winter playhouse until all the theatres were closed in 1642 when the English Civil War began.
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from folio, to quarto (smaller) and octavo. Historically, these terms referred to the format of the book, a technical term used by printers and bibliographers to indicate the size of a leaf in terms of the size of the original sheet. For example, a quarto historically was a book printed on a sheet of paper folded twice to produce four leaves, each leaf one fourth the size of the original sheet printed. Because the actual format of many modern books cannot be determined from examination of the books, bibliographers may not use these terms in scholarly descriptions.
The 1606 edition was unusual in several respects. It was not licensed by the Stationers Company, as it should have been. Changes were made after the press run had begun — the publisher's name was removed from the title page, and the characters of the "King" and "Queen" were altered to "Duke" and "Duchess." These changes have been described as "unsurprising" in light of the play's obvious political satire. [2]
The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, usually known as the Stationers' Company, is one of the livery companies of the City of London. The Stationers' Company was formed in 1403; it received a royal charter in 1557. It held a monopoly over the publishing industry and was officially responsible for setting and enforcing regulations until the enactment of the Statute of Anne, also known as the Copyright Act of 1710. Once the company received its charter, “the company’s role was to regulate and discipline the industry, define proper conduct and maintain its own corporate privileges.”
The play, written in prose rather than verse, draws upon the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney for its plot. The problem arose from the play's satire on the political conditions and personalities of its day. The play's Arcadians and Lacedemonians were understood to be the English and the Scots (the boy actors used Scottish accents for the Lacedemonians). The title gives an unmistakably English frame of reference: a real Isle of Gulls lies in the River Thames. The character Damoetas in Day's play represented royal favorite Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset. The "King" or "Duke" wastes public funds on himself and his "Queen" or "Duchess;" he keeps corrupt counsellors and raises unworthy men to knighthood, and generally leaves the state in chaos.
Sir Philip Sidney was an English poet, courtier, scholar, and soldier, who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age. His works include Astrophel and Stella, The Defence of Poesy, and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.
The River Thames, known alternatively in parts as the Isis, is a river that flows through southern England including London. At 215 miles (346 km), it is the longest river entirely in England and the second longest in the United Kingdom, after the River Severn.
Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, was a politician, and favourite of King James VI and I.
The play was offensive to the new Stuart monarchy, even more so than Eastward Ho, by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman, had been in a year earlier (1605). (The Isle of Gulls in fact mentions Eastward Ho as well as the plays written in conjunction with it, Westward Ho and Northward Ho . In Eastward Ho, Sir Petronel Flash and Gertrude are shipwrecked on the Isle of Gulls.) In the case of Eastward Ho, Jonson and Chapman went to jail; in the case of The Isle of Gulls, some of the juvenile cast members of the Blackfriars production were incarcerated in Bridewell prison for a brief interval. Day was questioned by the Privy Council, and may also have been imprisoned for a time. The child actors ended up under new management.
The House of Stuart, originally Stewart, was a European royal house of Scotland with Breton origin. They had held the office of High Steward of Scotland since Walter FitzAlan in around 1150. The royal Stewart line was founded by Robert II, whose descendants were kings and queens of Scotland from 1371 until the union with England in 1707. Mary, Queen of Scots was brought up in France where she adopted the French spelling of the name Stuart.
Benjamin Jonson was an English playwright, poet, actor, and literary critic, whose artistry exerted a lasting impact upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours. He is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone, or The Fox, The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry; he is generally regarded as the second most important English playwright during the reign of James VI and I after William Shakespeare.
John Marston was an English poet, playwright and satirist during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. His career as a writer lasted a decade, and his work is remembered for its energetic and often obscure style, its contributions to the development of a distinctively Jacobean style in poetry, and its idiosyncratic vocabulary.
The published text of the play includes a Prologue, in which the actor speaking the piece is interrupted by three of the audience members sitting on the stage of the Blackfriars. (The potential disruptive influence of the spectators seated at the sides of the stage is employed in other works of the era, most notably in Francis Beaumont's 1607 satire The Knight of the Burning Pestle .) Each of the three wants a different kind of play: one demands a satire, the next a love story ("a scene of venery"), and the third a "stately penn'd history." The Prologue complains of the impossibility of pleasing them all. [3]
Francis Beaumont was a dramatist in the English Renaissance theatre, most famous for his collaborations with John Fletcher.
This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1607.
The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a play in five acts by Francis Beaumont, first performed at Blackfriars Theatre in 1607 and published in a quarto in 1613. It is the earliest whole parody play in English. The play is a satire on chivalric romances in general, similar to Don Quixote, and a parody of Thomas Heywood's The Four Prentices of London and Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday. It breaks the fourth wall from its outset.
