Download ELIZABETHAN PLAYS They show the influence of

ELIZABETHAN PLAYS
They show the influence of Medieval tradition in:
-the scenes of vivid caricature and realistic comedy
-the mingling of comedy and tragedy
-the idea of man's place inside an ordered universe( the Renaissance man inherited from
the Middle Ages a system of beliefs based on a conception of order, according to which
he pictured the universal order under the form of a chain; the chain stretched from God to
the lowest inanimate object and man, thanks to his double nature of matter and spirit, had
the function of linking together all creation)
-the concept of the mutability of fortunes and the influence of the stars (e.g. in the
prologue of 'Romeo and Juliet' the two lovers are described as 'A pair of star-crossed
lovers'
The medieval heritage merged with the classical influence promoted by Humanism.The
English theatre drew from:
-the works of Machiavelli in the display of horrors, unnatural crimes, vice and corruption
-Greek theatre in the public, nationalistic celebration of English history
-the Latin poet and philosopher Seneca in the division of the play into five acts, in the
tragic and blood incidents, in the taste for revenge
-Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy which mixed the typical Senecan revenge play full
of horror and ghosts with Machiavellian ingredients such as intrigue and lies.Kyd also
added 'the play within the paly'(the plot includes the staging of the play whose audience
is composed of the actors) as a device to verify the truth of a message, as Shakespeare did
in Hamlet.
DATING SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS
Shakespeare did not bother to publish his plays, which circulated in unauthorized copies,
later called 'bad quartos', put together from notes taken in the theatre or reconstructed
from memory by one or more actors; in 1623 two former actors and friends of
Shakespeare published a 'First Folio', where the 36 plays were printed in 3
sections:comedies, histories and tragedies, with no date or chronological order.So, in
order to give a precise date to each play, the critics usually take three types of evidence
into consideration:
internal references: passages or sentences of the plays referring to contemporary events;
external references:references to Shakespeare's plays contained in the works of other
writers of the time;
literary evidence: that is the style, the characterization, the plot and the metrical skill of
different plays.