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Elizabethan Theatre

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Elizabethan Theatre , sometimes called English Renaissance theatre, refers to that style of performance plays which blossomed during the reign of Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558-1603) and which continued under her Stuart successors. Elizabethan theatre witnessed the first professional actors who belonged to touring troupes and who performed plays of blank verse with entertaining non-religious themes.

The first purpose-built permanent theatre was established in London in 1576 and others quickly followed so that drama simply to entertain became a booming industry. Theatres showing plays daily led to permanent acting companies which did not have to tour and so could invest more time and money into wowing their audience of both sexes and all social classes. The most celebrated playwright of the period was William Shakespeare (1564-1616) whose works were performed at the famous Globe Theatre in London and covered such diverse themes as history, romance, revenge, murder, comedy and tragedy.

Elizabeth I & the Arts

The Elizabethan age saw a boom in the arts in general but it was the performance arts that perhaps made the most lasting contribution to English and even world culture . The queen was herself an admirer of plays, performances, and spectacles which were frequently held at her royal residences. Elizabeth carefully managed her image as the Virgin Queen who had sacrificed her personal life to better concentrate on the good of her people. Theatre was, therefore, just one of the media she used to project her own glory and that of her family, the Tudors. The queen actively sponsored artists and playwrights.

Naturally, the Elizabethans did not invent theatre as plays have been performed ever since their invention by the ancient Greeks of the 6th century BCE. Medieval England had witnessed the performance of morality plays and mystery plays, there were even dramas performed by actors during religious ceremonies and holidays. There were also Masques, a type of mime where masked performers sang, danced, and recited poetry, wearing extravagant costumes, and stood before painted scenery. Finally, towns across England had long funded public shows, which involved musicians, acrobats, and jesters, and these continued even as theatre became popular.

The Elizabethan period saw these public performers become a professional body of entertainers. The first professional troupes of actors were sponsored by the queen, nobles, and anyone else who had the money for such entertainments. Plays were performed which, perhaps thanks to the English Reformation , were now entirely free from religious themes and not connected to public holidays or religious festivals. Secular plays presented a new challenge, though, and the influence of popular art on politics and public minds was recognised by Elizabeth, who banned performances of unlicensed plays in 1559. In the 1570s, religious play cycles were also banned. The royal control of theatre continued in 1572 when only nobles were permitted to sponsor professional acting troupes. From 1574 all troupes had to be licensed, too.

The move away from divisive religious topics had led writers to explore other themes, and their imaginations knew no bounds. Historical topics were especially popular with the new playwrights in a period when a sense of English nationalism was developing as never before. This combined with a Humanist interest in Greek and Roman antiquity. Royal patronage of theatre would continue during the reign of Elizabeth's successor, James I of England (r. 1603-1625) who funded three professional actor companies (aka playing companies).

Professional Actors & Theatres

The first professionally licensed troupe of actors belonged to Elizabeth's court favourite Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester (l. c. 1532-1588). Called 'Leicester's Men' they gained their license in 1574 and toured the country's stately homes giving performances. Naturally, actors needed a suitable stage on which to impress and so the first purpose-built theatres soon arrived. In 1576 London received its very first purpose-built and permanent playhouse, founded by James Burbage (c. 1530-1597), himself an actor, and simply known as the Theatre (although there were earlier adapted buildings with temporary scaffolding such as the 1567 Red Lion). Located on Holywell Street in Shoreditch, the Theatre was a wooden enclosed building with no roof in the centre, and it welcomed audiences of both courtiers and commoners. The Theatre was such a success that other theatres were built, starting with the Curtain. Burbage opened a second theatre in London, Blackfriars Theatre, by converting a disused Dominican monastery. There was also the Rose (1587) and the Swan (1595) as the theatre business positively boomed and Elizabeth's encouragement of her nobles to stay at court and have residences at the capital guaranteed a ready audience. Other towns soon followed the fashion and acquired theatres, too; early adopters being Bath, Bristol, Norwich, and York. By the time of the Stuart kings, many theatres were offering a performance of a different play every day, typically in the afternoons, to a knowledgeable audience of men and women expecting to see novel entertainment. Even the most popular plays were only performed a handful of times each year as theatres strived to entertain regular theatre-goers.

Further, as theatres developed so actors and playwrights were freed from the obligations and restrictions that sponsorship by nobles brought. It was the Theatre, though, which was to become world-famous, especially after 1599 when it was relocated to the south bank of the River Thames and given a new name: the Globe Theatre.

The Globe Theatre opened for business in 1599 and was owned by Burbage's sons and some members of the professional acting company known as Chamberlains' Men. One of these investors was William Shakespeare, and he and other actors and playwrights shared half of the profits from the theatre while the other half went to pay secondary actors, musicians, costumes, and maintenance costs. Crucially, then, the establishment of theatres meant that previously travelling actors could now form a more solid financial base which allowed them to produce more plays and give them a much higher production value. Theatre companies could boast twelve or more permanent main actors and a number of bit-part players, boys and apprentices. Also on the staff were musicians, writers, artists, and copyists.

The Globe Theatre was made of wood, more or less circular in form, and open to the skies in the centre. Rising to a height of 12 metres (40 ft.) and measuring 24 metres (80 ft.) across, inside were three tiers of seating providing a capacity of around 2,000. The theatre got its name from the globe on its roof, which carried the legend in Latin of Shakespeare's famous line 'All the world's a stage.' The Globe's own stage was rectangular, measured some 12 metres in length and was protected by a thatch roof. Around 12 actors could perform on the stage at any one time. Behind the stage was a gallery which could seat more viewers or be used as an important part of the play (e.g. Juliet's balcony in Romeo and Juliet ). The audience could be surprised by such technical tricks as lowering actors on wires or having them appear or disappear through a trapdoor in the stage floor.

In the second half of the 17th century, some important developments arrived. Women played women parts (previously boys had done this) and large flat painted scenes, often with perspective incorporated into them, were moved on sliding rails on and off stage. Another change was that now plays had extended runs with the same performance being repeated each day, a development that actors with short memories must have greatly welcomed. The pattern of performance plays was set and would remain in place right up to the present day.

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William shakespeare.

William Shakespeare has become one of the most celebrated authors in any language. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, it was not until 1592 that William became known in theatre circles. Two years later he joined Chamberlain's Men and then, as mentioned above, became an important member of the Globe Theatre's permanent staff, a position he held throughout his writing career. William produced on average two plays every year, writing 37 in all. The dating of Shakespeare's works is problematic as none have surviving original manuscripts and so historians have looked to their content and other documentary evidence. The plays are usually divided into four groups and illustrate the broad scope of Elizabethan theatre in general. These categories are: comedies, romances, histories, and tragedies. The works, like many plays of the period, combine wordplay and in-joke references to contemporary politics with tales of love, dark deeds of revenge and murder, historical events, historical fiction, and a big dollop of jingoism.

Shakespeare's first play is usually cited as Henry VI Part I , written around 1589. His most popular plays include A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1596) which revolves around the wedding of the Greek hero Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyte, Henry V (1599) which includes a fictionalised version of that king's rousing speech at the Battle of Agincourt of 1415, Hamlet (c. 1601) which tells the revenge of the Danish prince of that name against his evil uncle, and Macbeth (1606), titled after the Scottish king who descends into madness after embarking on a rampage of murder.

Other Playwrights & Actors

Under the Stuart kings, it became fashionable and profitable to print the scripts of plays, even if they were always originally written with performance in mind. Some 800 play scripts survive from the 16th and 17th century, although this is only a small proportion of those produced at the time. After Shakespeare, the next most celebrated Elizabethan playwright is Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). In 1587 his first play was performed, Tamburlaine the Great . The play was a smash hit and told the epic tale of Timur, the founder of the Timurid Empire in central Asia (1370-1507). Other successes followed such as The Tragedy of Dido , Queen of Carthage but, like many playwrights and poets of the period, Marlowe was prone to drinking bouts, and it was a brawl in a tavern that ended in his death . As Marlowe also worked as a spy for the government, some have speculated that his death was actually an assassination.

The third great playwright of the period was Ben Jonson (1572-1637). Escaping an early career path as an apprentice bricklayer, Jonson's first play, Isle of Dogs (1597), was successful but got him into trouble with the authorities who regarded it as inciting rebellion. After a short term in prison, Jonson soon found himself back in confinement after he killed an actor in an argument. Out for a second time, Jonson concentrated on what he was good at and wrote a string of hit plays, many of which were performed at the Globe Theatre. Jonson's other works included poetry, masques, and a huge body of literary criticism.

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Accomplished actors, of course, made a name for themselves in the new genre. One famous figure was the comic actor Richard Tarlton (d. 1588) who was also a court jester who made Elizabeth I titter until his jokes went too far and ridiculed some of her noble favourites. Multi-talented, Tarlton co-founded the Queen's Men company and wrote many successful plays, his most popular being Seven Deadly Sins (1585). Tarlton's most famous character was a little Chaplinesque: a small man with baggy trousers and carrying a large stick.

Challenges & Legacy

The new theatre was not without its critics. Puritans , who were ever-more prominent in Elizabethan society from the 1590s, objected to such frivolous entertainments as plays. They considered their subject matter - especially plots with vengeance, murder, and romance - unsuitable for commoners and likely to corrupt their minds, much like some modern critics of violent cinema proclaim. In addition, Puritans thought of theatres as wholly undesirable places where only the idle, immoral, and criminal elements of society gathered.

Local residents were often not happy to have a theatre in their neighbourhood because of the noise and low class-associations with such a venue; this was one of the reasons why the Theatre was moved to become the Globe Theatre. Even some business owners deplored the theatres as their employees went to watch the plays which were usually held during the daytime and so working hours . This concern led to petitions being sent to mayors who then lobbied Members of Parliament to restrict the theatre performances. It also explains why the early theatres were built in city suburbs away from the direct jurisdiction of the mayors. Drama was very cheap (starting at 1 penny a ticket, about $1 today) and very popular, though, and so very difficult to repress even when the Puritans gained prominence in the mid-17th century and temporarily closed all places of public meeting from 1642. In 1660, with the return of the monarchists, theatres opened up again and acting companies were immediately reformed.

Another challenge was public health. When a new wave of the Black Death plague hit London in 1592, all theatres were closed for a year. Many mayors sought to avoid public gatherings and even paid acting companies not to perform if a new outbreak of plague was present. Theatres, being wooden structures, were also susceptible to devastating fires. The Globe Theatre, for example, had to be rebuilt in 1614 when a cannon shot fired during a performance for dramatic effect set fire to the thatch roof.

Despite the threats, Elizabethan theatre seems to have quickly established itself as an important and lasting part of England's popular and literary culture. As early as 1623, for example, 36 of William Shakespeare's plays were collected together in print in the First Folio. More editions would be printed throughout the 17th century and a first properly edited collection was published in 1709. Shakespeare continues to be read across the world, of course, and his works continue to interest modern filmmakers. As fellow author Ben Johnson noted in his preface to First Folio, the star of Elizabethan theatre was "not of an age, but for all time" (Wagner, 275).

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Bibliography

• Elton, G.R. England Under the Tudors. Routledge, 2018.
• Ferriby, David. The Tudors. Hodder Education, 2015.
• Guy, John. Tudor England. Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Morrill, John. The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor & Stuart Britain. Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Phillips, Charles. The Complete Illustrated Guide to the Kings & Queens of Britain. Lorenz Books, 2006.
• Wagner, John A. Historical Dictionary of the Elizabethan World. Greenwood, 1999.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section English Tragedy

Introduction.

• Anthologies
• Performance
• Influences on English Renaissance Tragedy
• Revenge Tragedy
• Tragedy of State
• Domestic Tragedy
• Tragicomedy
• Major Critical Works
• Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, Gorboduc
• Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
• Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
• Anonymous, Arden of Faversham
• Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam
• Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy
• John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
• Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling
• John Ford, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

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English Tragedy by Garrett Sullivan , Tanya Pollard LAST REVIEWED: 23 March 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 23 March 2022 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0214

The English Renaissance produced some of the major tragic works in Western literature. While most readers associate this period with the plays of William Shakespeare, other playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster also made enormous contributions to the flowering of the genre. This entry will largely exclude Shakespeare, whose works are admirably covered in the Oxford Bibliographies article by David Bevington (see William Shakespeare ). Most of the playwrights taken up here wrote for the professional playhouses in London between the late 1580s and early 1630s, although the London theater was not the only source of tragic literature: Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc was written and performed at the Inns of Court, while Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam is a closet drama, composed with no intention of public performance. Nevertheless, the tragic masterpieces of this era—works such as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus , Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy , and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi— were produced to serve flourishing theatrical enterprises in London’s public and private playhouses. Tragedy was widely believed to be the most elevated dramatic genre, dealing as it does with affairs of state as well as issues of life and death, fate and free will, social corruption and violent retribution, damnation and the possibility (or impossibility) of redemption. The dominant literary strain was that of revenge tragedy, with Kyd’s play providing a template built upon and modified by numerous others. At the same time, the genre was also capacious and flexible. “Domestic tragedies” like the anonymous Arden of Faversham centered not upon the court but the household and seemingly had little to do with affairs of state. Other works feature comic subplots (Middleton and Samuel Rowley’s The Changeling ) or a mordant black humor that borders on self-parody (Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy or John Ford’s ‘ Tis Pity She’s a Whore ). In this regard, English Renaissance tragedy is hardly monolithic. It is instead marked by a vibrancy and experimental energy that are still appreciable today. For information on bibliographies, reference works, and comprehensive literary histories, see the Oxford Bibliographies article on “ English Renaissance Drama ” by David Bevington.

Most general discussions of tragedy trace the genre from its classical origins in ancient Greece through to the present day, Aeschylus to Arthur Miller. Hand in hand with analysis of tragedies themselves are theoretical discussions of the genre, starting with Aristotle’s enduringly influential account, which introduced readers to notions of hamartia and catharsis and emphasized the “tragic” emotions of pity and terror. Poole 2005 , Wallace 2007 , and Bushnell 2008 all offer broad discussions of “tragedy” in literature and life, while Drakakis and Liebler 1998 and Nevitt and Pollard 2019 collect major theoretical statements about the genre. Smith and Sullivan 2010 and Watson 1990 emphasize Early Modern English tragedy, while Hopkins 2010 contributes to a fine series of critical guides centered upon individual works.

Bushnell, Rebecca. Tragedy: A Short Introduction . Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

An overview of the evolution of tragedy as a theatrical genre from the classical period to the present.

Drakakis, John, and Naomi Liebler, eds. Tragedy . New York: Longman, 1998.

Useful collection of some of the major theoretical statements about the genre by the likes of Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Brecht, Freud, and Derrida.

Hopkins, Lisa, ed. ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore: A Critical Guide . London and New York: Continuum, 2010.

One of a strong new series called Continuum Renaissance Drama —other featured titles focus on Doctor Faustus and The Duchess of Malfi —that offer critical and performance histories as well as new interpretive essays.

Nevitt, Marcus, and Tanya Pollard, eds. Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory . London: Bloomsbury, 2019.

Anthology of major texts on tragedy by writers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to 21st-century critics.

Poole, Adrian. Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780192802354.001.0001

Accessible introduction to the history and conceptual breadth of tragedy.

Smith, Emma, and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., eds. The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521519373

Newly commissioned essays on broad topics—e.g., “Tragedy, family and household” (pp. 17–29), “Renaissance tragedy on film: Defying mainstream Shakespeare” (pp. 116–131)—and individual works—e.g., “ The Revenger’s Tragedy : Original Sin and the allures of vengeance” (pp. 200–210).

Wallace, Jennifer. The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

A wide-ranging introduction to tragedy that considers the relationship between tragic representation and tragic experience.

Watson, Robert N. “Tragedy.” In The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama . Edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway, 292–343. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Rich and insightful essay that offers a theory and history of Renaissance tragedy, with additional discussion of specific tragedies of revenge and theodicy, including The Spanish Tragedy , Doctor Faustus , The Revenger’s Tragedy , and The Duchess of Malfi .

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Literature and the age

In a tradition of literature remarkable for its exacting and brilliant achievements, the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods have been said to represent the most brilliant century of all. (The reign of Elizabeth I began in 1558 and ended with her death in 1603; she was succeeded by the Stuart king James VI of Scotland , who took the title James I of England as well. English literature of his reign as James I, from 1603 to 1625, is properly called Jacobean.) These years produced a gallery of authors of genius, some of whom have never been surpassed , and conferred on scores of lesser talents the enviable ability to write with fluency, imagination, and verve. From one point of view, this sudden renaissance looks radiant, confident, heroic—and belated, but all the more dazzling for its belatedness. Yet, from another point of view, this was a time of unusually traumatic strain, in which English society underwent massive disruptions that transformed it on every front and decisively affected the life of every individual. In the brief, intense moment in which England assimilated the European Renaissance, the circumstances that made the assimilation possible were already disintegrating and calling into question the newly won certainties, as well as the older truths that they were dislodging. This doubleness, of new possibilities and new doubts simultaneously apprehended, gives the literature its unrivaled intensity.

In this period England’s population doubled; prices rocketed, rents followed, old social loyalties dissolved, and new industrial, agricultural, and commercial veins were first tapped. Real wages hit an all-time low in the 1620s, and social relations were plunged into a state of fluidity from which the merchant and the ambitious lesser gentleman profited at the expense of the aristocrat and the laborer, as satires and comedies current from the 1590s complain. Behind the Elizabethan vogue for pastoral poetry lies the fact of the prosperity of the enclosing sheep farmer, who sought to increase pasture at the expense of the peasantry. Tudor platitudes about order and degree could neither combat nor survive the challenge posed to rank by these arrivistes. The position of the crown, politically dominant yet financially insecure, had always been potentially unstable, and, when Charles I lost the confidence of his greater subjects in the 1640s, his authority crumbled. Meanwhile, the huge body of poor fell ever further behind the rich; the pamphlets of Thomas Harman (1566) and Robert Greene (1591–92), as well as Shakespeare ’s King Lear (1605–06), provide glimpses of a horrific world of vagabondage and crime, the Elizabethans’ biggest, unsolvable social problem .

The barely disguised social ferment was accompanied by an intellectual revolution, as the medieval synthesis collapsed before the new science , new religion, and new humanism. While modern mechanical technologies were pressed into service by the Stuarts to create the scenic wonders of the court masque , the discoveries of astronomers and explorers were redrawing the cosmos in a way that was profoundly disturbing:

And freely men confess that this world’s spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new…. (John Donne, The First Anniversary , 1611)

The majority of people were more immediately affected by the religious revolutions of the 16th century. A person in early adulthood at the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 would, by her death in 1603, have been vouchsafed an unusually disillusioning insight into the duty owed by private conscience to the needs of the state. The Tudor church hierarchy was an instrument of social and political control, yet the mid-century controversies over the faith had already wrecked any easy confidence in the authority of doctrines and forms and had taught people to inquire carefully into the rationale of their own beliefs (as John Donne does in his third satire [c. 1596]). The Elizabethan ecclesiastical compromise was the object of continual criticism , from radicals both within (who desired progressive reforms, such as the abolition of bishops) and without (who desired the return of England to the Roman Catholic fold), but the incipient liberalism of individuals such as John Milton and the scholar and churchman William Chillingworth was held in check by the majority’s unwillingness to tolerate a plurality of religions in a supposedly unitary state . Nor was the Calvinist orthodoxy that cradled most English writers comforting, for it told them that they were corrupt, unfree, unable to earn their own salvations, and subject to heavenly judgments that were arbitrary and absolute. Calvinism deeply affects the world of the Jacobean tragedies, whose heroes are not masters of their fates but victims of divine purposes that are terrifying yet inscrutable.

The third complicating factor was the race to catch up with Continental developments in arts and philosophy. The Tudors needed to create a class of educated diplomats, statesmen, and officials and to dignify their court by making it a fount of cultural as well as political patronage. The new learning, widely disseminated through the Erasmian (after the humanist Desiderius Erasmus ) educational programs of such men as John Colet and Sir Thomas Elyot , proposed to use a systematic schooling in Latin authors and some Greek to encourage in the social elites a flexibility of mind and civilized serviceableness that would allow enlightened princely government to walk hand in hand with responsible scholarship. Humanism fostered an intimate familiarity with the classics that was a powerful incentive for the creation of an English literature of answerable dignity. It fostered as well a practical, secular piety that left its impress everywhere on Elizabethan writing. Humanism’s effect, however, was modified by the simultaneous impact of the flourishing Continental cultures , particularly the Italian. Repeatedly, crucial innovations in English letters developed resources originating from Italy—such as the sonnet of Petrarch , the epic of Ludovico Ariosto , the pastoral of Jacopo Sannazzaro , the canzone, and blank verse—and values imported with these forms were in competition with the humanists’ ethical preoccupations. Social ideals of wit, many-sidedness, and sprezzatura (accomplishment mixed with unaffectedness) were imbibed from Baldassare Castiglione ’s Il cortegiano , translated as The Courtyer by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, and Elizabethan court poetry is steeped in Castiglione’s aristocratic Neoplatonism, his notions of universal proportion, and the love of beauty as the path to virtue. Equally significant was the welcome afforded to Niccolò Machiavelli , whose lessons were vilified publicly and absorbed in private. The Prince , written in 1513, was unavailable in English until 1640, but as early as the 1580s Gabriel Harvey , a friend of the poet Edmund Spenser , can be found enthusiastically hailing its author as the apostle of modern pragmatism . “We are much beholden to Machiavel and others,” said Francis Bacon , “that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.”

So the literary revival occurred in a society rife with tensions, uncertainties, and competing versions of order and authority, religion and status, sex and the self. The Elizabethan settlement was a compromise; the Tudor pretense that the people of England were unified in belief disguised the actual fragmentation of the old consensus under the strain of change. The new scientific knowledge proved both man’s littleness and his power to command nature; against the Calvinist idea of man’s helplessness pulled the humanist faith in his dignity, especially that conviction , derived from the reading of Seneca and so characteristic of the period, of man’s constancy and fortitude , his heroic capacity for self-determination. It was still possible for Elizabeth to hold these divergent tendencies together in a single, heterogeneous culture , but under her successors they would eventually fly apart. The philosophers speaking for the new century would be Francis Bacon, who argued for the gradual advancement of science through patient accumulation of experiments, and the skeptic Michel de Montaigne (his Essays translated from the French by John Florio [1603]), who denied that it was possible to formulate any general principles of knowledge.

Cutting across all of these was the persistence of popular habits of thought and expression. Both humanism and Puritanism set themselves against vulgar ignorance and folk tradition, but, fortunately, neither could remain aloof for long from the robustness of popular taste. Sir Philip Sidney , in England’s first Neoclassical literary treatise , The Defence of Poesie (written c. 1578–83, published 1595), candidly admitted that “the old song [i.e., ballad] of Percy and Douglas” would move his heart “more than with a trumpet,” and his Arcadia (final version published in 1593) is a representative instance of the fruitful cross-fertilization of genres in this period—the contamination of aristocratic pastoral with popular tale, the lyric with the ballad , comedy with romance , tragedy with satire, and poetry with prose. The language, too, was undergoing a rapid expansion that all classes contributed to and benefited from, sophisticated literature borrowing without shame the idioms of colloquial speech. An allusion in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606–07) to heaven peeping “through the blanket of the dark” would become a “problem” only later, when, for instance, Samuel Johnson complained in 1751 that such words provoked laughter rather than awe. Johnson’s was an age when tragic dignity implied politeness, when it was below the dignity of tragedy to mention so lowly an object as a blanket. But the Elizabethans’ ability to address themselves to several audiences simultaneously and to bring into relation opposed experiences, emphases, and worldviews invested their writing with complexity and power.

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• Renaissance Drama

About this Journal

Renaissance Drama is an annual publication dedicated to the investigation of traditional canons of drama, as well as to the exploration of the significance of performance, broadly construed, in early modern cultures. Each volume presents essays that question or apply newer forms of interpretation on the study of early modern plays, theater, and performance. Articles also address works written in traditions other than the English, the discourses that shaped and were shaped by the varied institutions of drama across Europe and beyond its borders within which it was produced, and manifestations of performance and performativity both on and off the theatrical stage.

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