The history of drama in England goes back to medieval genres like the religious ‘Mystery Plays’ and other forms of public drama that told Biblical stories about the creation and the saints. Later, in the 14th and 15th centuries, Ancient Greek drama saw a resurgence in Italy, in what is known as the Renaissance (meaning ‘rebirth’ in French) and in the 16th century, these classical forms of drama came to reformation England and started blending with, or taking over from, the old, Catholic and medieval style of public theatre. Because of the reformation, Mystery Plays were no longer tolerated, while at the same time whatever came out of Italy became highly fashionable.
The high point of English Renaissance drama is at the end of the Elizabethan period (the 1580s and 90s) and the beginning of the Jacobean period (1600s-1610s). Playwrights such as Thomas Dekker, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson were active in this period, but the most famous of them all was William Shakespeare (1563-1616), who is arguably as important as the Ancient Greeks, not just for the development of English-language drama, but for the history of the theatre on a global scale.
We might understand Shakespeare better if we look at him from an alternative perspective, such as that of the French. In the 17th century, Shakespeare was not valued very highly by the French neo-classisists, who wrote their plays under the patronage of powerful French kings like Louis XIV. As their name suggests, the French neo-classisists (‘new classisists’) used classical theatre, legends and mythology (Greek and Roman) as sources and models for their own plays. But why did they dislike Shakespeare and English drama? The answer is simple. The French read Aristotle’s Poetics as a rule-book and they considered that someone like Shakespeare either didn’t know about Aristotle (which may be true) or that he didn’t care (which is probably true).
In England, in other words, the rules of the genres were known, to lesser or greater degrees (some basic information about comedies and tragedies came in the English translation of the works of the Roman playwright Terence), but they were ignored or used, bent or turned upside-down, according to whatever worked best. And English playwrights did not care for the unities of time and place. A typical English play from the renaissance often spans years or even decades, and takes place in multiple locations.
In addition, this time period saw the emergence of new genres, such as the Romance and the tragi-comedy. The latter mixture would have been an abomination in the eyes of the French neo-classisists. To them, mixing tragedy and comedy must have seemed as absurd as mixing red wine with beer.
A typical Renaissance play, then, may contain elements from different genres, and may therefore defy audience expectations. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, initially starts out as a comedy (lovers versus proscriptive society and parents), but famously ends up as a tragedy (lovers die). The act of writing for the theatre became further removed from the elitist domain of university-educated experts on Greek and Roman mythology, or playwrights would intermingle the classical world with English history or even English every day life. There was, in other words, an Englishing of the drama form.
By and by, English drama would spread to what was to become the English-speaking world, through the development of the British Empire. The first performance of Hamlet outside of England took place on a ship off the coast of Africa. John Wilkes Booth, who shot President Lincoln in a theatre was an actor and brother of the (then) more famous and successful Shakespeare actor Edwin Booth. But the future of English-language theatre was to contain much more than Shakespeare and Classical genres.
Next: Modern English Drama (W-I-P)