Download General Characteristics of the Renaissance

General Characteristics of the Renaissance
"Renaissance" literally means "rebirth." It refers especially to the rebirth of learning that
began in Italy in the fourteenth century, spread to the north, including England, by the
sixteenth century, and ended in the north in the mid-seventeenth century (earlier in Italy).
During this period, there was an enormous renewal of interest in and study of classical
antiquity.
Yet the Renaissance was more than a "rebirth." It was also an age of new discoveries, both
geographical (exploration of the New World) and intellectual. Both kinds of discovery
resulted in changes of tremendous import for Western civilization. In science, for example,
Copernicus (1473-1543) attempted to prove that the sun rather than the earth was at the center
of the planetary system, thus radically altering the cosmic world view that had dominated
antiquity and the Middle Ages. In religion, Martin Luther (1483-1546) challenged and
ultimately caused the division of one of the major institutions that had united Europe
throughout the Middle Ages--the Church. In fact, Renaissance thinkers often thought of
themselves as ushering in the modern age, as distinct from the ancient and medieval eras.
Study of the Renaissance might well center on five interrelated issues. First, although
Renaissance thinkers often tried to associate themselves with classical antiquity and to
dissociate themselves from the Middle Ages, important continuities with their recent past,
such as belief in the Great Chain of Being, were still much in evidence. Second, during this
period, certain significant political changes were taking place. Third, some of the noblest
ideals of the period were best expressed by the movement known as Humanism. Fourth, and
connected to Humanist ideals, was the literary doctrine of "imitation," important for its ideas
about how literary works should be created. Finally, what later probably became an even
more far-reaching influence, both on literary creation and on modern life in general, was the
religious movement known as the Reformation.
Renaissance thinkers strongly associated themselves with the values of classical antiquity,
particularly as expressed in the newly rediscovered classics of literature, history, and moral
philosophy. Conversely, they tended to dissociate themselves from works written in the
Middle Ages, a historical period they looked upon rather negatively. According to them, the
Middle Ages were set in the "middle" of two much more valuable historical periods, antiquity
and their own. Nevertheless, as modern scholars have noted, extremely important continuities
with the previous age still existed.
The Great Chain of Being
Among the most important of the continuities with the Classical period was the
concept of the Great Chain of Being. Its major premise was that every existing thing in the
universe had its "place" in a divinely planned hierarchical order, which was pictured as a
chain vertically extended. ("Hierarchical" refers to an order based on a series of higher and
lower, strictly ranked gradations.) An object's "place" depended on the relative proportion of
"spirit" and "matter" it contained--the less "spirit" and the more "matter," the lower down it
stood. At the bottom, for example, stood various types of inanimate objects, such as metals,
stones, and the four elements (earth, water, air, fire). Higher up were various members of the
vegetative class, like trees and flowers. Then came animals; then humans; and then angels. At
the very top was God. Then within each of these large groups, there were other hierarchies.
For example, among metals, gold was the noblest and stood highest; lead had less "spirit" and
more matter and so stood lower. (Alchemy was based on the belief that lead could be changed
to gold through an infusion of "spirit.") The various species of plants, animals, humans, and
angels were similarly ranked from low to high within their respective segments. Finally, it
was believed that between the segments themselves, there was continuity (shellfish were
lowest among animals and shaded into the vegetative class, for example, because without
locomotion, they most resembled plants).
Besides universal orderliness, there was universal interdependence. This was implicit in
the doctrine of "correspondences," which held that different segments of the chain reflected
other segments. For example, Renaissance thinkers viewed a human being as a microcosm
(literally, a "little world") that reflected the structure of the world as a whole, the macrocosm;
just as the world was composed of four "elements" (earth, water, air, fire), so too was the
human body composed of four substances called "humours," with characteristics
corresponding to the four elements. (Illness occurred when there was an imbalance or
"disorder" among the humours, that is, when they did not exist in proper proportion to each
other.) "Correspondences" existed everywhere, on many levels. Thus the hierarchical
organization of the mental faculties was also thought of as reflecting the hierarchical order
within the family, the state, and the forces of nature. When things were properly ordered,
reason ruled the emotions, just as a king ruled his subjects, the parent ruled the child, and the
sun governed the planets. But when disorder was present in one realm, it was correspondingly
reflected in other realms. For example, in Shakespeare's King Lear, the simultaneous disorder
in family relationships and in the state (child ruling parent, subject ruling king) is reflected in
the disorder of Lear's mind (the loss of reason) as well as in the disorder of nature (the raging
storm). Lear even equates his loss of reason to "a tempest in my mind."
Though Renaissance writers seemed to be quite on the side of "order," the theme of
"disorder" is much in evidence, suggesting that the age may have been experiencing some
growing discomfort with traditional hierarchies. According to the chain of being concept, all
existing things have their precise place and function in the universe, and to depart from one's
proper place was to betray one's nature. Human beings, for example, were pictured as placed
between the beasts and the angels. To act against human nature by not allowing reason to rule
the emotions--was to descend to the level of the beasts. In the other direction, to attempt to go
above one's proper place, as Eve did when she was tempted by Satan, was to court disaster.
Yet Renaissance writers at times showed ambivalence towards such a rigidly organized
universe. For example, the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola, in a work entitled On the
Dignity of Man, exalted human beings as capable of rising to the level of the angels through
philosophical contemplation. Also, some Renaissance writers were fascinated by the thought
of going beyond boundaries set by the chain of being. A major example was the title character
of Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus. Simultaneously displaying the grand spirit of
human aspiration and the more questionable hunger for superhuman powers, Faustus seems in
the play to be both exalted and punished. Marlowe's drama, in fact, has often been seen as the
embodiment of Renaissance ambiguity in this regard, suggesting both its fear of and its
fascination with pushing beyond human limitations.
Political Implications of the Chain of Being
The fear of "disorder" was not merely philosophical--it had significant political
ramifications. The proscription against trying to rise beyond one's place was of course useful
to political rulers, for it helped to reinforce their authority. The implication was that civil
rebellion caused the chain to be broken, and according to the doctrine of correspondences, this
would have dire consequences in other realms. It was a sin against God, at least wherever
rulers claimed to rule by "Divine Right." (And in England, the King was also the head of the
Anglican Church.) In Shakespeare, it was suggested that the sin was of cosmic proportions:
civil disorders were often accompanied by meteoric disturbances in the heavens. (Before
Halley's theory about periodic orbits, comets, as well as meteors, were thought to be
disorderly heavenly bodies.)
The need for strong political rule was in fact very significant, for the Renaissance had
brought an end for the most part to feudalism, the medieval form of political organization.
The major political accomplishment of the Renaissance, perhaps, was the establishment of
effective central government, not only in the north but in the south as well. Northern Europe
saw the rise of national monarchies headed by kings, especially in England and France. Italy
saw the rise of the territorial city-state often headed by wealthy oligarchic families. Not only
did the chain of being concept provide a rationale for the authority of such rulers; it also
suggested that there was ideal behavior that was appropriate to their place in the order of
things. It is no wonder then that much Renaissance literature is concerned with the ideals of
kingship, with the character and behavior of rulers, as in Machiavelli's Prince or
Shakespeare's Henry V.
Other ideals and values that were represented in the literature were even more significant.
It was the intellectual movement known as Humanism that may have expressed most fully the
values of the Renaissance and made a lasting contribution to our own culture.
Humanism
A common oversimplification of Humanism suggests that it gave renewed emphasis to
life in this world instead of to the otherworldly, spiritual life associated with the Middle Ages.
Oversimplified as it is, there is nevertheless truth to the idea that Renaissance Humanists
placed great emphasis upon the dignity of man and upon the expanded possibilities of human
life in this world. For the most part, it regarded human beings as social creatures who could
create meaningful lives only in association with other social beings.
In the terms used in the Renaissance itself, Humanism represented a shift from the
"contemplative life" to the "active life." In the Middle Ages, great value had often been
attached to the life of contemplation and religious devotion, away from the world (though this
ideal applied to only a small number of people). In the Renaissance, the highest cultural
values were usually associated with active involvement in public life, in moral, political, and
military action, and in service to the state. Of course, the traditional religious values coexisted
with the new secular values; in fact, some of the most important Humanists, like Erasmus,
were Churchmen. Also, individual achievement, breadth of knowledge, and personal
aspiration (as personified by Doctor Faustus) were valued. The concept of the "Renaissance
Man" refers to an individual who, in addition to participating actively in the affairs of public
life, possesses knowledge of and skill in many subject areas. (Such figures included Leonardo
Da Vinci and John Milton, as well as Francis Bacon, who had declared, "I have taken all
knowledge to be my province.") Nevertheless, individual aspiration was not the major
concern of Renaissance Humanists, who focused rather on teaching people how to participate
in and rule a society (though only the nobility and some members of the middle class were
included in this ideal). Overall, in consciously attempting to revive the thought and culture of
classical antiquity, perhaps the most important value the Humanists extracted from their
studies of classical literature, history, and moral philosophy was the social nature of
humanity.
"Imitation"
Another concept derived from the classical past (though it was present in the Middle Ages
too), was the literary doctrine of "imitation." Of the two senses in which the term had
traditionally been used, the theoretical emphasis of Renaissance literary critics was less on the
"imitation" that meant "mirroring life" and more on the "imitation" that meant "following
predecessors." In contrast to our own emphasis on "originality," the goal was not to create
something entirely new. To a great extent, contemporary critics believed that the great literary
works expressing definitive moral values had already been written in classical antiquity.
Theoretically, then, it was the task of the writer to translate for present readers the moral
vision of the past, and they were to do this by "imitating" great works, adapting them to a
Christian perspective and milieu. (Writers of the Middle Ages also practiced "imitation" in
this sense, but did not have as many classical models to work from.) Of course Renaissance
literary critics made it clear that such "imitation" was to be neither mechanical nor complete:
writers were to capture the spirit of the originals, mastering the best models, learning from
them, then using them for their own purposes. Nevertheless, despite the fact that there were a
great many comments by critics about "imitation" in this sense, it was not the predominant
practice of many of the greatest writers. For them, the faithful depiction of human behavior-what Shakespeare called holding the mirror up to nature--was paramount, and therefore
"imitation" in the mimetic sense was more often the common practice.
The doctrine of "imitation" of ancient authors did have one very important effect: since it
recommended not only the imitation of specific classical writers, but also the imitation of
classical genres, there was a revival of significant literary forms. Among the most popular that
were derived from antiquity were epic and satire. Even more important were the dramatic
genres of comedy and tragedy. In fact, Europe at this time experienced a golden age of
theater, led by great dramatists such as Shakespeare.
The Protestant Reformation
Finally, as it developed during the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation was a
movement that had profound implications, not only for the modern world in general, but
specifically for literary history. Just as Renaissance Humanists rejected medieval learning, the
Reformation seemed to reject the medieval form of Christianity. (It should be noted, however,
that both Catholics and Protestants were Humanists, though often with different emphases.) In
the early sixteenth century, the German monk Martin Luther reacted against Church
corruption, the sort depicted, for example, by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales.
Many Catholics like Erasmus wanted to reform the Church from within. However,
Luther's disagreements with Church policy ultimately led him to challenge some of the most
fundamental doctrines of the Church, which in turn led him and his followers to break away
from the Catholic Church in protest; hence they were known as Protestants. The Reformation
had significant political ramifications, for it split Europe into Protestant and Catholic
countries which often went to war with each other during this period. Protestantism broke up
the institution that had for so long unified all Europe under the Pope (though there were also
national struggles with the Papacy that had little to do with Protestantism).
Among the most important tenets of Protestantism was the rejection of the Pope as
spiritual leader. A closely related Protestant doctrine was the rejection of the authority of the
Church and its priests to mediate between human beings and God. Protestants believed that
the Church as an institution could not grant salvation; only through a direct personal
relationship with God--achieved by reading the Bible--could the believer be granted such.
Many scholars argue that this emphasis on a personal, individual connection with God
spawned the modern emphasis on individualism in those cultures affected by Protestantism.
On the other hand, some Protestants also believed that after the Fall of Adam in Eden, human
nature was totally corrupted as far as human spiritual capabilities were concerned. (Early
Protestantism's emphasis on human depravity distinguishes it sharply from Renaissance
Humanism.) Humans therefore are incapable of contributing to their salvation, for instance
through good deeds; it could only be achieved through faith in God's grace. Overall, there is a
good deal of ambivalence regarding many of the Protestant positions, and in fact the
disagreement among the many Christian sects may be precisely what distinguishes
Renaissance from Medieval religion.
See: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/
Early modern theatre
1.
Drama Before Theatres
When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558 there were no specially designed theatre
buildings in England. Companies of actors toured the country and performed in a wide
variety of temporary acting spaces, sometimes building stages and scenery for a particular
series of performances, and sometimes simply using an unaltered hall or open space. There
are records of actors performing in churches, in the great halls of Royal Palaces and other
great houses, in Inn Yards, in Town Halls, in Town Squares and anywhere else that a large
crowd could be gathered to view a performance. Acting companies were usually small and
mobile. Records suggest that an average touring company consisted of five to eight players,
often consisting of four adult men and a single boy to play all the female parts. Although we
are mostly concerned with the larger companies that inhabited the large theatre buildings that
were built later in Elizabeth’s reign, touring companies of this kind (using temporary acting
spaces throughout the country) continued to perform throughout Elizabeth’s reign, and even
the major companies could be forced to tour to the Provinces when Plague shut the London
theatres or money was low.
Soon after Elizabeth came to the throne laws began to be passed to control wandering
beggars and vagrants. These made criminals of any actors who toured and performed without
the support of a member of the highest ranks of the nobility. Many actors were driven out of
the profession or criminalised, while those who continued were forced to become officially
servants to Lords and Ladies of the realm. Touring was increasingly discouraged and many
of the remaining companies were encouraged to settle down with permanent bases in
London. The first permanent theatres in England were old inns which had been used as
temporary acting areas when the companies had been touring - the Cross Keys, the Bull, the
Bel Savage and the Bell were all originally built as inns. Some of the Inns that became
theatres had substantial alterations made to their structure to allow them to be used as
playhouses. The Red Lion in Stepney, in particular, had a rough auditorium with scaffolding
galleries built around the stage area - a design that may have influenced the building of later
purpose built theatres such as the Theatre and the Globe.
2. The First Theatre
The first purpose built Theatre building in England - originally and solely intended for
performance - was called “The Theatre”, eventually giving its name to all such buildings. It
was built in 1576 by the Earl of Leicester’s Players who were led by James Burbage - a
carpenter turned actor. The design of the Theatre was based on that of bull baiting and bear
baiting yards (where crowds of spectators watched animals torn to pieces for sport) which
had sometimes been used by actors as convenient performance venues in the past. Not much
is known about the design of the Theatre, but it appears to have been wooden and polygonal
(with many straight sides making up a rough circle of walls) and may have had three galleries
full of seating stacked one above another. The main area of the theatre was open to the sky,
with a large yard for spectators to stand and watch the action if they could not afford a seat.
In 1599 Burbage’s sons became involved in a dispute over the land on which the Theatre
stood and solved their problems by secretly and suddenly tearing down the Theatre building
and carrying away the timbers to build a new playhouse on the Bankside, which they named
The Globe. By this time the Burbages had become members of the Lord Chamberlain’s
Company, along with William Shakespeare, and the Globe is famously remembered as the
theatre in which many of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed.
Although the Globe is the most famous Elizabethan Theatre, and the building which we will
concentrate upon, there were many other theatres built during this period - each one different
from the others in the way in which it was designed and built. The theatres fell into two main
types, however, the “public” amphitheatre buildings (such as the Theatre, the Globe, the
Curtain and the Swan) which were open to the air, and the smaller and more expensive
“private” theatres (such as Blackfriars and the Cockpit) which were built to a hall design in
enclosed and usually rectangular buildings more like the theatres we know today. The private
theatres had a more exclusive audience since they charged considerably more - the cheapest
seat in a private theatre cost sixpence, while public theatres like the Globe charged twopence
for a seat in the galleries or a single penny to stand in the yard. The adult companies did not
start to use the private hall theatres until after Elizabeth’s death - which technically puts them
beyond our consideration of Elizabethan Theatre - but they were used by the boy companies
(made up entirely of child and teenage actors) in Elizabeth’s reign and were used by
Shakespeare’s Company - by this time the King’s Men - and other adult companies in the
Jacobean period, so we will consider them in passing.
3. The Globe
The original Globe Theatre was built in 1599 with a thatched roof above the galleries
(covering the seats: the yard - where poorer spectators stood - was still open to the air). This
roof caught fire in 1613 when cannon fired off during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry
VIII sent sparks into the thatch and the whole theatre burned to the ground. A second Globe
was built with a tiled roof, and this was finally demolished in 1644 when all plays had been
banned by the Roundhead Parliament during the Civil War. In modern times several replica
Globe Theatres have been built around the world, including the new Shakespeare’s Globe
Theatre in London, which was completed in 1997. Although the modern Globe Theatre is an
inexact imitation of the real Globe - with many of its characteristics based on guesswork, and
others altered to pass modern fire regulations and accommodate a modern audience (taller,
fatter and expecting more luxurious surroundings than their Elizabethan ancestors) - the
design, building and use of the new Globe has given much useful information about how an
Elizabethan Theatre works and how it affects the performances of actors who use such a
stage.
The size and exact shape of the original Globe can only really be guessed at, but surviving
records about the Globe and other Elizabethan theatres (including some very rough drawings
of the outside of the Globe in drawings of the city) together with archaeological examination
of parts of the Globe’s remains (most of which are unfortunately buried under modern
London buildings and cannot be examined) have allowed the people who built the modern
Globe Theatre reconstruction to make what they hope is a faithful reproduction of the
original theatre. The modern Globe is a hundred feet (30 metres) in diameter. Instead of
being circular, as some early scholars believed it to be, the building is a polygon with 20
straight walls. There are three layers of seating in galleries on all sides of the stage except
directly behind it. Directly in front of the stage is a large yard nearly 80 feet (24 metres) in
diameter for the groundlings (standing spectators who pay a cheaper entry price than those
who have seats). The stage itself is unusually wide by modern standards - 44 feet (13.2
metres) wide, 25 feet (7.5 metres) deep, and 5 feet (1.5 metres) high. There is roofing over
the gallery seating and over the stage itself, the stage roof being held up by two huge pillars
that stand on the stage - obstructing the view of audience members from various angles - but
the yard is open to the air. Behind the stage there is a curtained “discovery space” - a small
room behind a curtain - which allows characters to be suddenly revealed by opening the
curtain (as Ferdinand and Miranda are suddenly revealed in Shakespeare’s The Tempest,
playing chess). There are two other entrances in the upstage wall, on the left and right.
Behind the entrances is the tiring house, for actors to dress, prepare and wait offstage. There
is a balcony above the stage which was sometimes used in the performance (it was probably
Juliet’s balcony in Romeo and Juliet), sometimes housed the theatre musicians and was
sometimes used for more audience seating. There is a trapdoor in the centre of the stage and
the Elizabethans had simple machinery to allow ghosts, devils and similar characters to be
raised up through the trapdoor and gods and spirits to be lowered from the “heavens” in the
stage roof.
Visiting the reconstructed Globe is a magical experience, but it is important to remember that
it does not exactly resemble the conditions of the original theatre. The modern Globe can
hold 1500 spectators: the original Globe (which had smaller and less comfortable visitors)
packed twice as many people into the same space. Modern fire regulations force the modern
Globe to have four six foot wide entrances. The original Globe had only two narrow
doorways. Similarly the modern Directors did not like the original positioning of the two
obstructive stage pillars and insisted that they should be further back on the stage and closer
together than the architects, builders and historians thought they really should have been. The
modern reconstructed stage is designed to allow two columns of soldiers to march abreast in
front of the stage pillars. The pillars in the original theatre were probably further apart and
much closer to the front of the stage, restricting the number of actors passing in front of the
pillars and causing more frequent obstructions to audience sightlines.
4. The Players
The number and type of actor involved in Elizabethan Theatre varied from one performance
to the next, but there were invariably many more parts than actors. The London companies
with their fixed theatres tended to use many more actors than the touring companies we
considered earlier. In a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, for example, a spectator
remembered that he had seen “about fifteen” actors perform the play. There are 40 named
roles in Julius Caesar along with an unspecified number of extra “Plebeians” and “Senators,
Guards, Attendants etc.” all played by members of the fifteen strong cast. Elizabethan
Theatre, therefore, demanded that an actor be able to play numerous roles and make it
obvious to the audience by changes in his acting style and costume that he was a new person
each time. When the same character came on disguised (as, for example, many of
Shakespeare’s female characters disguise themselves as boys) speeches had to be included
making it very clear that this was the same character in a new costume, and not a completely
new character.
All of the actors in an Elizabethan Theatre company were male. There were laws in England
against women acting onstage and English travellers abroad were amused and amazed by the
strange customs of Continental European countries that allowed women to play female roles at least one Englishman recorded his surprise at finding that the female actors were as good at
playing female parts as the male actors back home. One woman - Mary Frith, better known as
Moll Cutpurse - was arrested in the Jacobean period for singing and playing instruments
onstage during a performance of a play about her life (Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring
Girl) and some suggest that she may actually have been illegally playing herself in the
performance, and women sometimes took part in Court Masques (a very stylised and
spectacular sort of performance for the Court, usually dominated by singing and dancing),
but otherwise English women had no part in the performance of Elizabethan plays. The male
actors who played female parts have traditionally been described as “Boy Actors”, but there
is now an academic controversy about exactly how old these actors would have been. Some
academics are convinced that very young actors could not possibly have played such
important, complex and emotionally difficult parts as Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights
wrote for women, and argue that references to “men” playing women’s parts prove that these
actors were in fact fully grown adults. My friend Dave Kathman, however, has researched
this issue and points out that whenever we know or can guess the age of an actor who was
known to be playing a female part in a particular performance, that actor was a teenager most between the ages of roughly fourteen to nineteen. Because of differences in diet and
upbringing, boys’ voices broke much later in the Elizabethan period than they do now, which
made it possible for boys to play women’s parts convincingly for much longer than some
modern scholars assume possible.
The rehearsal and performance schedule that Elizabethan Players followed was intense and
demanding. Unlike modern theatres, where a successful play can run for years at a time,
Elizabethan theatres normally performed six different plays in their six day week, and a
particularly successful play might only be repeated once a month or so. There were
exceptions to this rule, such as Middleton’s immensely successful Jacobean play A Game At
Chess which played for nine days in a row before being banned for political reasons, but runs
of this kind were reserved for plays which were an immense success and were viewed as
extremely unusual. In a typical season Henslowe’s Company performed thirty-eight different
plays, twenty-one of which were entirely new and seventeen of which had been performed in
previous years. The Elizabethan actor did not have much time, therefore, to prepare for each
new play, and must have had to learn lines and prepare his blocking largely on his own and in
his spare time - probably helped by the tendency of writers to have particular actors in mind
for each part, and to write roles which were suited to the particular strengths and habits of
individual actors. There were few formal rehearsals for each play and no equivalent of the
modern Director (although presumably the writer, theatre managers, and the most important
actors - who owned shares in the theatre company - would have given some direction to other
actors). Instead of being given full scripts, each actor had a written “part”, a long scroll with
nothing more than his own lines and minimal cue lines (the lines spoken by another actor just
before his own) to tell him when to speak - this saved on the labourious task of copying out
the full play repeatedly by hand. There was a bookholder or prompter who held a complete
script and who helped actors who had forgotten their lines. The bookholder usually also had a
“plot” or a brief summary of the play, scene by scene, listing the various entrances and exits
and telling which characters and properties were required upon the stage at any one time.
Surviving plots have a square hole to allow them to be hung upon a peg in the playhouse.
We know little more about most Elizabethan actors than their name, when this has happened
to survive on theatrical records, in cast lists, or elsewhere - but there were a few star actors
who have left a more detailed reputation behind them. The two most famous Elizabethan
actors normally played tragic and romantic heroes. They were Edward Alleyn, lead actor of
the Admiral’s Men, and Richard Burbage who was the lead actor in Shakespeare’s Company
(belonging at various times to Leicester, Lord Strange, the Lord Chamberlain and finally
becoming - in the Jacobean period - the King’s Men). Alleyn was probably the most famous
Elizabethan actor, who was best known for his performances in Christopher Marlowe’s plays
- playing Tamburlaine a shepherd who became a mighty military leader and conquered vast
swathes of territory, Doctor Faustus who made a pact with the devil, and Barabas the
villainous Jew in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. Alleyn made so much money from his acting and
his share in the theatre company to which he belonged that he was able to buy the Manor of
Dulwich on his retirement (costing £10,000 - an unbelievably huge sum of money at the
time) and established Dulwich College, where the papers of his father-in-law, the famous
theatre manager Philip Henslowe, were stored - the most important cache of theatrical
documents to have survived the Elizabethan period. Richard Burbage is now probably better
known than Edward Alleyn because of his connection with Shakespeare and he originated
most of Shakespeare’s famous lead roles including Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, Richard III,
Henry V, King Lear and others. It is suggested that the contradictions in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, where the lead character is apparently a young student at the beginning of the play
but is referred to as “fat” and aged thirty towards the end of the play, were particularly added
to suit the middle-aged and portly figure of Burbage himself. Burbage also became wealthy
on the profits of his profession, although not nearly so well off as Alleyn. Both were admired
and remembered by numerous Elizabethan writers. The other actors to become household
names were the Clowns or Fools, and we will consider them later.
The income of actors varied enormously according to their position in the Company, and the
type of Company to which they belonged. The least well paid actors were the boys, who were
apprenticed to adult actors and whose small wage (the Admiral’s Men paid one boy player
three shillings a week) was paid to their masters. In return they were given board and lodging
and a very meagre allowance to spend on themselves. Next lowest in the acting hierarchy
were the hired men, adult actors who were paid a fixed wage for each working day. Actors in
Henslowe’s London Company received ten shillings a week, but those performing in smaller
companies or touring outside London could receive half that. The most important actors in a
theatre company, however, were taken on as sharers - owning a particular portion of the
theatre company or its theatre building and subsequently earning a proportion of the
Company’s profits from every performance. Shakespeare earned enough from his share in the
Globe Theatre to buy the second most expensive house in his home village of Stratford and to
invest in lands and property, and he was also able to buy himself a coat of arms and the right
to refer to himself as a Gentleman (an important step up the social ladder in class conscious
Elizabethan times).
5. The Playwrights
During the Middle Ages nobody is known who could be referred to as a professional English
playwright. Pageants and Church plays were often written by members of the Clergy and the
writers of plays for touring companies were largely anonymous and few of their works have
survived. In the Tudor period, and a little before it, men who earned their living as writers
and poets began to be recognisably connected with plays. The earliest professional
playwright of whom we know may have been Henry Medwall who wrote a Morality Play and
an Interlude, that survive, for performance in the house of his master, John Morton,
Archbishop of Canterbury. John Heywood, during the reign of Henry VIII, wrote a large
number of Interludes for performance at the Court, but when Elizabeth’s reign began most
plays were still written by people we would regard as amateurs or occasional playwrights.
The increasing professionalism of the acting companies, however, meant that they
increasingly needed to employ professional dramatists to provide them with the large and
continually changing repertory that they required. The first wave of professional playwrights
were mostly University educated men who earned a living from their pens. These men were
incredulous and envious when subsequently confronted by less well educated playwrights such as Shakespeare, the son of a glover, who seems to have learned his skills as a member of
the acting profession and became a writer without being educated in the great Universities,
who became rich through his connection with the theatre while many of the better qualified
University playwrights lived and died in poverty, given only a few pounds for each of their
plays. Shakespeare earned money as a Sharer in the Theatre Company (given a proportion of
the Theatre’s profits for every production rather than just a wage), a position that he probably
gained largely because of his acting background.
The form which Elizabethan plays took was still developing at the beginning of Elizabeth’s
reign. Elizabethan Universities studied Greek and Roman plays in the original language, and
the students sometimes performed them within the University. During Elizabeth’s reign
translations of these Greek and Roman plays became widely available and began to have a
heavy influence upon English playwrights. Greek and Roman Plays were largely divided into
two genres, Comedy and Tragedy. The first full length English Comedy, written in about
1553, was Ralph Roister Doister - written by Nicholas Udall, former headmaster of Eton - in
which Ralph, a character based on the Roman Dramatist Plautus’ stereotypical Braggart,
pursues a widow who is betrothed to an absent sea captain, until the widow finally drives him
off with the help of her maids armed with mops and pails. The first full length English
Tragedy was Gorboduc - written in 1561 by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville - which
tells the story of a mythical English King in a style in imitation of the Roman Dramatist
Seneca, complete with choruses and long rhetorical speeches. Gorboduc also influenced the
later creation of a peculiarly English dramatic genre, not based on Classical examples, the
Chronicle or History play which was neither Comedy nor Tragedy, but told the story of a
genuine Historical period - usually the reign of a particular English Monarch. It is not known
which was the first English History play, but early examples included Shakespeare’s Henry
VI (eventually a trilogy of plays) and Marlowe’s Edward II. Originally English Tragedies and
Comedies tended to be written in close imitation of Greek and Roman models and much was
made of the Classical rules of writing plays - rules which Renaissance writers took from
Aristotle’s Poetics and expanded upon. These rules included the assumption that Tragedy and
Comedy should never mix and that a play should take place according to the Unities of Time
and Place - meaning that the stage should represent a single place and all of the play’s action
should take place within a single fictional day at most. Fortunately English playwrights
increasingly rejected the restrictions of slavishly following Classical models and began to
write Tragedies and Comedies in a much looser and more relaxed style. Thomas Kyd’s The
Spanish Tragedy, for example, a bloodthirsty tale of murder and revenge, generally ignored
the Classical rules and strongly influenced many subsequent Elizabethan plays including
Shakespeare’s early Titus Andronicus and his later Hamlet (it is even suspected that Thomas
Kyd may have been the author of an early Hamlet play that existed before Shakespeare’s). It
also became traditional for comic characters to appear in even the most serious of Tragedies,
like the comic gravedigger in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
At the same time that the genres of English plays were becoming fixed and accepted, a
particular form of dramatic poetry was discovered to be ideal for dramatic composition. This
was blank verse - first used in Gorboduc. Blank verse was usually unrhymed (except for
occasional couplets in significant places) and used ten syllables a line divided into five
iambic feet of alternately unstressed and stressed syllables. The main advantage of blank
verse was that despite being regular and poetical it could be made to sound very much like
natural English speech. Early blank verse was very regular, with all sentences end-stopped
(finishing exactly at the end of the blank verse line) and with very little variation in the
stresses and pauses in the lines. As time passed Marlowe, Shakespeare and other dramatists
began to use blank verse in a much more flexible and inventive manner - allowing sentences
to run from one line into the next and finish wherever in the line was necessary, breaking the
blank verse rules when it suited them to allow extra syllables in the line or irregular stresses
and pauses. Generally speaking the later a blank verse play was written the more natural its
language sounds. Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists often used a mixture of blank
verse and prose, usually giving the unstructured prose (following no poetical rules and
without line endings) to their comical or rustic characters or those who for some other reason
were considered more casual in their speech than the significant or serious characters who
routinely spoke verse. The majority of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were written in blank
verse after Gorboduc, but some were written in other forms, such as prose or rhyming
couplets.
6. Politics and Religion
Elizabeth began her reign in a fast changing and dangerous period for the English nation.
Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had broken off from the Catholic Church and established the
Protestant Church of England. After the death of Henry and his sickly son Edward the throne
had passed on to Elizabeth’s older sister Mary, a Catholic - who had brought England back
into the Church of Rome, and had married the firmly Catholic King of Spain. When Mary
died without children the Protestant Elizabeth inherited the throne and England became a
Protestant Nation once more. Each stage in this process involved bloody trials and executions
of those following the wrong religion - and Elizabeth had to consider the fact that a large
proportion of her population had been or still was Catholic. While some Catholics continued
their religion secretly and otherwise supported Elizabeth, others were openly rebellious.
Elizabeth was excommunicated by the Pope who encouraged all Catholic Kings and subjects
to work to assassinate Elizabeth and overthrow her regime. Elizabeth managed to resist the
Northern Rebellion - where Catholic Lords and subjects in the North rose up against her - and
escaped a number of planned assassination attempts. She also fought off the Spanish Armada,
an invasion force blessed by the Pope.
In times such as these, plays, which gathered huge crowds and exposed them to a particular
view of the world - which could be an excellent form of propaganda - were viewed with a
great deal of concern. This is hardly surprising since a single performance at a playhouse
could attract 3000 spectators when the population of London was only 200,000. This meant
that one and a half percent of the London population were gathered in one place and exposed
to the same influence at every performance - enough people to begin a riot or even a
rebellion. To protect against these threats, the Elizabethan authorities imposed a range of
laws and systems to ensure that they could control just about every word that was spoken
onstage. The official in charge of this control was the Lord Chamberlain, but most of the real
work was carried out by his subordinate, the Master of the Revels. Before the performance of
any play, the script had to be submitted to the Revels Office for checking and the Master of
the Revels made any alterations in the script that he felt necessary - making sure that the play
remained morally and politically safe and did not trespass into religious matters or use
inappropriate blasphemies. The punishments for writers whose works were felt to be
seditious or offensive could be extreme, including imprisonment, torture and mutilation - but
in fact the Elizabethan Censors were more lenient than is sometimes suggested and did not
come down heavily on many actors or dramatists during this period.
One of the major incidents of suppression during the Elizabethan period was prompted by the
production of Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson’s The Isle of Dogs. The exact content of this
play is not known, as it was ruthlessly suppressed and never printed, but it has been
suggested that it may have been a satirical attack on Elizabeth’s courtiers. After the play had
been performed in 1597, the players - Pembroke’s Men - and the playwright Ben Jonson were
arrested and imprisoned while Thomas Nashe fled to Yarmouth. Nashe’s house was searched
for papers and Jonson was questioned and then secretly imprisoned with two informers who
encouraged him to betray himself to them. The Privy Council was so outraged by the
performance that it went as far as to ban all plays in London and its surroundings for much of
the rest of the year. After having failed to incriminate himself, however, Jonson was released
and his imprisonment did not damage his future reputation or prospects in any significant
way.
Another major scandal involved Shakespeare’s Richard II, a performance of which was
specially commissioned by followers of the Earl of Essex, who - unknown to the Players were planning to stir up support in London for a rebellion against Elizabeth the following
day. The Earl, who had lost the Queen’s favour and been discredited, led a small band of
armed followers through London with the intention of capturing the Queen, but they were not
supported by the London populace and the rebellion failed. The reason for choosing the play
was that it showed the decline and fall of Richard II, a weak King closely connected to
corrupt favourites, who was overthrown by a rebellion led by the Earl of Bolingbroke who
had the King murdered and took his crown. Elizabeth was vastly upset by the rebellion and
particularly commented upon the attempts to compare her to the corrupt and successfully
overthrown Richard II of the play. “I am Richard II, know you not that?” she told Francis
Bacon and complained “This tragedy has been played forty times in open streets and houses”.
Augustine Phillips, one of the leading actors of Shakespeare’s Company, was called in and
interrogated about the actors’ role in the affair, but he maintained that they had known
nothing about any seditious intent and that they had simply been encouraged to reprise an old
play - so old that they didn’t expect much of an audience - and had been paid ten shillings
over the ordinary to perform it. The authorities treated the actors leniently and no punishment
seems to have been forthcoming. On the day before Essex was executed Shakespeare’s
Company, perhaps as a sign of forgiveness, was invited to perform before the Queen.
More typical of the censorship of Elizabethan plays was the suppression of Sir Thomas More
- a play which was written and then amended by a large group of different playwrights,
possibly including Shakespeare - who may have written scenes in his own handwriting in the
manuscript. It was an odd choice of a subject for a play, since Thomas More was a Catholic
Martyr who had been executed by Elizabeth’s father for opposing his divorce and
establishment of the Church of England. The Master of the Revels disliked many of the
scenes within the play and sent it back repeatedly for alterations - particularly to a scene in
which More talked with poor rioters, which was seen as particularly dangerous in its
presentation of More himself and its dangerous sympathy with rebellious poor people who
opposed the Tudor regime. Despite many such alterations the play was never considered
acceptable and so was never granted a licence to be performed or published. We know the
play only because the original manuscript survives.
7. Costume, Scenery and Effects
Some modern companies consider the Elizabethan performance style to have been very close
to what we now call Minimalism. Companies like the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express
claim to be closer to the original Elizabethan performance style because they perform in
modern dress, with no scenery and few props, and without using modern lighting, sound or
stage effects. Although Minimalist performances of this kind may be closer to the
Elizabethan originals than, for example, the spectacular Victorian performances of
Shakespeare’s plays (with detailed painted backdrops and archaeologically correct costumes
and stage designs, and sometimes even real horses, real boats and real canals) they are still
very far from Elizabethan performances. In reality the Elizabethans used far more
sophisticated props, costumes and stage effects than is sometimes assumed.
Elizabethan costuming seems to have been a strange combination of what was (for the
Elizabethans) modern dress, and costumes which - while not being genuinely historically or
culturally accurate - had a historical or foreign flavour. A famous picture of a performance of
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (one of the few pictures of Elizabethan actors at work)
shows Titus in a breastplate and a supposedly historical garment, very loosely based on the
Roman toga, while one of his guards (in a play set in Roman times) wears the familiar
armour of an Elizabethan soldier and another wears a foreign looking, possibly Turkish
influenced, suit of armour. Many of the authentic Elizabethan garments owned by a Theatre
Company had been passed onto them, secondhand, by members of the nobility. Strict laws
were in force about what materials and types of clothes could be worn by members of each
social class - laws which the actors were allowed to break onstage - so it would be
immediately obvious to the Elizabethan audience that actors wearing particular types of
clothes were playing people of particular backgrounds and types. Extensive make-up was
almost certainly used, particularly for the boys playing female parts and with dark make-up
on the face and hands for actors playing “blackamoors” or “Turks”. There were also
conventions for playing a number of roles - some of which we know from printed play
scripts. Mad women, like Ophelia, wore their hair loose and mad people of both sexes had
disordered clothing. Night scenes were often signalled by characters wearing nightdresses
(even the Ghost of Hamlet’s father appears in his nightgown, when Hamlet is talking with his
Mother in her chamber).
The Elizabethans did not use fixed scenery or painted backdrops of the sort that became
popular in the Victorian period, but those who claim that the Elizabethans performed on a
completely bare stage are wrong. A wide variety of furniture and props were brought onstage
to set the scene as necessary - ranging from simple beds, tables, chairs and thrones to whole
trees, grassy banks, prop dragons, an unpleasant looking cave to represent the mouth of hell,
and so forth. Such props often played a major part in the play, as in The Spanish Tragedy
where a man is spectacularly hanged by the neck from an arbour, apparently a complex
wooden frame with a bench and leaves - a scene illustrated in a published copy of the play.
Death brought out a particular ingenuity in Elizabethan actors and they apparently used
copious quantities of animal blood, fake heads and tables with holes in to stage decapitations
(an illustration of an Elizabethan conjuring trick shows a table with two holes in it, one boy
sitting hidden under the table with only his - apparently decapitated - head above it another
lying on the top of the table with his - apparently missing - head hidden below it: tricks of
this kind were almost certainly used on the Elizabethan stage). Heads, hands, eyes, tongues
and limbs were dramatically cut off onstage, and probably involved some sort of blooddrenched stage trick.
A number of other simple special effects were used. Real cannons and pistols (loaded with
powder but no bullet) were fired off when ceremonial salutes or battles were required.
Thunder was imitated by rolling large metal cannon balls backstage or by drumming, while
lightning was imitated by fireworks set off in the “heavens” above the stage. Shakespeare’s A
Winter’s Tale calls for a man to be pursued across the stage by a bear and there is much
academic argument about whether a real (tame) bear would have been used or whether it
would have been a man in a bear costume (probably a real bear skin). Some plays bring dogs
onstage, although it has been suggested that Shakespeare only once used a dog in his plays
because the animal proved to be more trouble than it was worth.
One thing that Elizabethan theatres almost completely lacked was lighting effects. In the
outdoor theatres, like the Globe, plays were performed from two o’clock until about four or
four thirty in the afternoon (these were the times fixed by law, but plays may sometimes have
run for longer) in order to take advantage of the best daylight (earlier or later performances
would have cast distracting shadows onto the stage). Evening performances, without
daylight, were impossible. In the hall theatres, on the other hand, the stages were lit by
candlelight - which forced them to hold occasional, probably musical, breaks while the
candles were trimmed and tended or replaced as they burned down. Elizabethan actors
carried flaming torches to indicate that a scene was taking place at night, but this would have
made little difference to the actual lighting of the stage, and spectators simply had to use their
imagination. The nearest that the Elizabethans came to lighting effects were fireworks, used
to imitate lightening or magical effects - the devils in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus apparently
cavorted around the stage with squibs, small exploding fireworks, held in their mouths.
8. Performance Techniques
We know very little, unfortunately, about how Elizabethan actors actually played their roles.
Performances probably ran continuously without any sort of interval or Act Breaks.
Occasionally music may have been played between Acts or certain scenes, but scholars think
this was quite unusual except in the hall playhouses, where candles had to be trimmed and
replaced between Acts. We do not even know how long Elizabethan plays usually ran. The
law (mentioned above) expected plays to last between two and two and a half hours, and
Shakespeare talks about “the two hours traffic of our stage” in Romeo and Juliet, but some
plays - such as Hamlet, which in modern times runs for more than four hours - seem much
too long to have been performed in such a short time. It is possible that the scripts which
have been passed down to us are the playwright’s first draft and that they would have been
cut considerably for performance. It is also possible that Elizabethan actors performed at a
much faster speed than modern actors without so many pauses and without speaking slowly
for emphasis. What props and scenery there were in the Elizabethan Theatre were probably
carried on and off while the scenes continued, which means that there would have been no
need to wait for scene changes - something which could double the length of a spectacular
Victorian performance.
Some idea of the sort of hand gestures that an Elizabethan actor may have used may have
been preserved in a peculiar book called Chirologia or the Naturall Language of the Hand.
This was supposed to explain hand gestures used to show emotions or give emphasis in
normal conversation rather than in stage performance, but if gestures of this kind were used
offstage then they were almost certainly used on it as well. Some of the gestures seem very
odd and extravagant to modern eyes, but may well have seemed perfectly natural to an
Elizabethan.
Another aspect of Elizabethan performance that we know a little about was the use of clowns
or fools. Shakespeare complains in Hamlet about the fact that the fool often spoke a great
deal that was not included in his script, and in the early Elizabethan period especially it
seems to have been normal for the fool to include a great deal of improvised repartee and
jokes in his performance, especially responding to hecklers in the audience. At the end of the
play the Elizabethan actors often danced, and sometimes the fool and other comic actors
would perform a jig - which could be anything from a simple ballad to a quite complicated
musical play, normally a farce involving adultery and other bawdy topics. Some time was
apparently put aside for the fool to respond to challenges from the audience - with spectators
inventing rhymes and challenging the fool to complete them, asking riddles and questions
and demanding witty answers, or simply arguing and criticising the fool so that he could
respond. One of the famous clown Tarlton’s jokes, for example, was given in response to a
woman in the audience threatening to cuff him. She should only reverse the spelling of the
word, he told her, and she could have her will immediately. It has been suggested that the
first fool in Shakespeare’s company - William Kempe - was famous for improvisational
humour of this kind and for rejecting Shakespeare’s scripts in order to make his own jests,
and that his replacement Robert Armin may have been more of an actor and less of an
improvisational comedian, respecting the words that Shakespeare had set down for him.
Performances by modern actors at the reconstructed Globe have given us some insight into
aspects of performance on a stage of this kind which may help us to reconstruct the behaviour
of Elizabethan actors, but may sometimes be misleading - since the modern Globe actors are
a 21st Century company performing for 21st Century audiences. Modern Globe actors have
found the Globe to be an excellent performing space which actors find very appealing, but it
is also very different from the modern stages that they are used to and requires a very
different style of performance to make use of the theatres strengths and alleviate its
weaknesses.
Companies performing on the Globe stage have to take into account the strange positioning
of the audience. The Globe seating almost completely surrounds the stage, with audience
members at the extreme ends of the circle almost behind the upstage corners of the stage and
looking at the action from the back forwards - and with the views of all parts of the audience
occasionally blocked by the obtrusive stage pillars. The modern Globe Directors have found
that, as a result, they need to keep their actors in constant motion. They also need to have
actors facing in as many different directions as possible during a scene. When I went to see
King Lear this Summer I was surprised to find that despite sitting in the worst position, at the
most extreme upstage left corner of the stage, behind the actors, I was always able to see at
least one actor’s face throughout the performance and was therefore included in the play’s
action and not frustrated by seeing only backs. The actors also found that even when
conversing privately the Globe stage encouraged them to stand at a distance from one
another, in a long diagonal, rather than standing close together as they would on a more
intimate modern stage. Similarly while modern stages encourage actors giving soliloquies to
step to downstage centre and address the audience, the more powerful positions on the Globe
stage turned out to be in the front corners of the stage rather than downstage centre, or best of
all upstage centre - which turned out to be the most powerful position on the stage. Before
performing on the stage it had been assumed that the actors would need to use big voices and
broad gestures, but they found that clarity of speech and movement was more important than
volume or size, and much more subtle acting was possible. The acoustics of the stage (once
all of the genuine oak had been installed) turned out to be excellent, although actors tended to
misjudge the effect of their own voices at first and were tricked into shouting when they
didn’t need to.
Oddly, when casting male actors to play the female role of Princess Katherine in Henry V, the
Globe casting directors felt that teenage actors’ voices didn’t carry well in the Globe space
and selected an actor in his early twenties. The historical records seem to show that the same
view was not held in Shakespeare’s day since Dave Kathman’s research suggests that teenage
boy actors were the norm. The modern Globe staff were very satisfied by audience reactions
to the cross-dressing boy actor, however. Some failed to realise that the actor was male and
apart from knowing laughs at lines about being a woman, the audience seemed able to
suspend its disbelief and view the character as a normal and convincing female even when
the actor was not.
Naturally, the set up of the Globe encourages intimacy with the audience and it has been
found that Globe audiences are enthusiastic to take part in the production in ways that the
actors sometimes find distracting. This may in part be explained by the atmosphere of the
Globe itself - the Globe’s Artistic Director actively encouraged audiences to shout back at the
actors before the first performance was given - but it is also probably explained by the great
visibility of the Globe audience. With no modern stage lighting to enhance the actors and put
the audience into darkness, Globe audience members can see each other exactly as well as
they can see the performers and the Groundlings in particular are near enough to the stage to
be able to touch the actors if they wanted to and the front row of the Groundlings routinely
lean their arms and heads onto the front of the stage itself. The Groundlings are also forced to
stand for two or three hours without much movement, which encourages short attention spans
and a desire to take action rather than remain completely immobile. This means that the
Groundlings frequently shout up at the actors or hiss the villains and cheer the goodies.
During King Lear the audience were quick to offer their advice when Edmund (Gloucester’s
bastard son) asked himself which of Lear’s competing daughters he should accept as his
lover. Elizabethan audiences seem to have been very responsive in this way - as their
interactions with the Fool suggests - and were particularly well known for hurling nut shells
and fruit when they disliked an actor or a performance. The Elizabethan audience was still
more distracted, however, since beer and food were being sold and consumed throughout the
performance, prostitutes were actively soliciting for trade, and pickpockets were busy
stealing goods as the play progressed.
It is important to remember, however, that the opinions of modern actors may bear little
relationship to the way in which Elizabethan actors viewed their stage and gave their
performances. One hint that Elizabethan audiences may have viewed plays very differently
gave us the origin of the word “audience” itself. The Elizabethans did not speak of going to
see a play, they went to hear one - and it is possible that in the densely crowded theatre obstructed by the pillars and the extravagant headgear that richer members of the audience
were wearing - the Elizabethan audience was more concerned to hear the words spoken than
to be able to see the action. This idea is given extra weight by the fact that in the public
outdoor theatres, like the Globe, the most expensive seats were not the ones with the best
views (in fact the best view is to be had by the Groundlings, standing directly in front of the
stage), but those which were most easily seen by other audience members. The most
expensive seating was in the Lord’s box or balcony behind the stage - looking at the action
from behind - and otherwise the higher the seats the more an audience member had to pay (a
seat in the Lord’s Room cost one shilling or twelve pence, a seat in a Gentleman’s Room cost
sixpence, a seat in the galleries cost twopence and it cost only a penny to stand in the pit) .
Some Elizabethan documents suggest that the reason for this range of prices was the richer
patron’s desire to be as far from the stink of the Groundlings as possible.
See http://shakespearean.org.uk/elizthea1.htm