English drama from
its origins to the present day
Drama was
introduced to England from Europe by the Romans, and auditoriums were
constructed across the country for this purpose. By the medieval period, the
mummers' plays had developed, a form of early street theatre associated with
the Morris dance, concentrating on themes such as Saint George and the Dragon
and Robin Hood. These were folk tales re-telling old stories, and the actors travelled
from town to town performing them for their audiences in return for money and hospitality.
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The mystery
plays, vernacular drama with its roots in liturgical drama, usually represented
biblical subjects. In the 13th century, craft guilds began producing mystery
plays at sites removed from the church, adding apocryphal and satirical
elements to the dramas. In England groups of 25–50 plays were later organized
into lengthy cycles, such as the Chester plays and the Wakefield plays. In England
the plays were often performed on moveable pageant wagons, while in France and
Italy they were acted on stages with scenery representing heaven, earth, and
hell. Technical
flourishes such as flying angels and fire-spouting devils kept
the spectators' attention. By 1600, the genre of the mystery play had fallen
somewhat into decline.
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The period known
as the English Renaissance, approximately 1500—1660, saw a flowering of the drama
and all the arts. The most famous example of the mystery play, Everyman,
and the two candidates for the earliest comedy in English, Nicholas Udall's Ralph
Roister Doister and the anonymous Gammer Gurton's Needle, all belong
to the 16th century. During the reign of Elizabeth I in the late 16th and early
17th century, a London-centred culture that was both courtly and popular
produced great poetry and drama. Perhaps the most famous playwright in the
world, William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote plays that are still
performed in theatres across the world to this day. He was himself an actor and
deeply involved in the running of the theatre company that performed his plays.
There were various categories or types of play, predominantly the histories,
the comedies, and the tragedies. Most playwrights tended to specialise in one
or another of these, but Shakespeare is remarkable in that he produced all
three types. Some have hypothesized that the English Renaissance paved the way
for the sudden dominance of drama in English society, arguing that the
questioning mode popular during this time was best served by the competing characters
in the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists. Other important playwrights of this
period include Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and John Webster.
Jonson, for example, was often engaged to write courtly masques, ornate plays
where the actors wore masks. In an effort to combat the dramatic excesses of
his English contemporaries, Jonson addressed classical principles and sought to
bring back the practices of the ancients in his own plays. Notable among
Jonson's 28 plays are The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair. During
the 1580's a group of men formed a group called "The University
Wits." These were men who were interested in writing for the public stage.
The "wits" included Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Lyly, and Robert
Greene. Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy, the most popular play of the 16th
century. He constructed a well-planned plot which made for a very interesting
play. The Cambridge-educated Marlowe was important in the development of
chronicle plays such as Edward II. He also wrote the well-known play Doctor
Faustus. Lyly was another member of the University Wits who wrote primarily
pastoral comedies in which he used mythology along with English subjects. Campaspe,
Endimion, and Love's Metamorphosis are just a few examples of Lyly's
work. Greene, meanwhile, wrote pastoral and romantic comedies, taking many
different aspects and pieces and combining them into a single play. Two of his
adventurous works are Friar Bacon & Friar Bungay and James IV. After
1610, changes started to occur in English drama . There was an increase in
technical skill, playwrights handled exposition better, they began to compress
action to fewer episodes, and they built startling climaxes to surprise
audiences. With these changes came a new breed of playwrights who created a
drama more focused on thrilling and exciting subject matter than complex characterization
or tragic emotion. John Fletcher was one of these new playwrights who became
very successful writing jointly with Francis Beaumont. Together they wrote
about 50 plays including The Maid's Tragedy, Philasta, and A King and
No King. Fletcher also wrote plays on his own after Beaumont retired. A
Wife for a Month and The Scornful Lady are two of his most famous
solo works. Interestingly enough, during the subsequent Restoration period, Fletcher's
plays were performed more frequently than Shakespeare's or Jonson's.
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During the
Interregnum (the period in which no monarch reigned, namely from the Civil War
and the fall of Charles I in 1649 to the ascent of Charles II in 1660), English
theatres were kept closed by the Puritans for religious and ideological
reasons. A law was passed in 1642 that suspended performances for five years.
After the law expired, Oliver Cromwell's government passed another law
declaring that all actors were to be considered rogues. Many theatres were even
dismantled during these eighteen years of stasis. When the London theatres
opened again with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, they flourished
under the personal interest and support of Charles II, a huge patron of theatre
who helped breathe new life into British drama. Wide and socially mixed
audiences were attracted by topical writing and by the introduction of the
first professional actresses (in Shakespeare's time, all female roles had been
played by boys). New genres of the Restoration were heroic drama, pathetic
drama, and Restoration comedy. Notable heroic tragedies of this period include
John Dryden's All for Love . The Restoration plays that have best
retained the interest of producers and audiences today are the comedies, such
as George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676), William Wycherley's The
Country Wife (1676), John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696), and William
Congreve's The Way of the World (1700). This period saw the first
professional woman playwright, Aphra Behn, author of many comedies including The
Rover (1677). Restoration comedy is famous or notorious for its sexual explicitness,
a quality encouraged by Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish aristocratic
ethos of his court.
Many scenic
innovations developed during the Restoration. One of the most innovative and
influential
designers of the 18th century was Philip Jacques de Loutherbourg. He was the
first
designer to
break up floor space with pieces of scenery, giving more depth and dimension to
the stage. Other designers experimented with lighting by using candles and
large chandeliers which hung over the floor of the stage.
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In the 18th
century, the highbrow and provocative Restoration comedy lost favour, to be
replaced by sentimental comedy, domestic tragedy such as George Lillo's The
London Merchant (1731), and by an overwhelming interest in Italian opera.
Popular entertainment became more dominant in this period than ever before.
Fair-booth burlesque and musical entertainment, the ancestors of the English
music hall, flourished at the expense of legitimate English drama, which went
into a long period of decline. By the early 19th century, the drama was no
longer represented by stage plays at all, but by closet drama, plays written to
be privately read in a "closet" (a small domestic room). Two notable
eighteenth century writers of comedy were Richard Sheridan (The Rivals) and
Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer). John Gay authored the popular The
Beggar's Opera, updated in the twentieth-century playwright by Bertolt
Brecht in The Threepenny Opera.
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A change came in
the later19th century with the plays on the London stage by the Irishmen George
Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, all of whom influenced
domestic English drama and vitalised it again. Bernard Shaw had the unique
honour of being awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar (the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1925, and the Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay in
1938 for Pygmalion). Wilde (Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Importance
of Being Earnest), a playwright, novelist, poet, short story writer, was
known for his barbed and clever wit, and was one of the most successful
playwrights of late Victorian London, not to mention one of the greatest
celebrities of his day. As the result of a famous trial, he suffered a dramatic
downfall and was imprisoned after being convicted of the offence of "gross
indecency," which also included homosexual acts. W.B. Yeats, though born
to an Anglo-Irish mother and father, was perhaps the primary driving force
behind the Irish Literary Revival. Yeats also served as an Irish Senator. He
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for what the Nobel Committee
described as "his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form
gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation". Yeats was a co-founder
of the Abbey Theatre, also known as the National Theatre of Ireland, located in
Dublin. The Abbey first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904 and,
despite losing its original building to a fire in 1951, it has continued to
stage performances more or less continuously to the present day. The Abbey was
the first state-subsidised theatre in the Englishspeaking world; from 1925
onwards it received an annual subsidy from the Irish Free State. In its early
years, the theatre was closely associated with the writers of the Celtic
revival, many of whom were involved in its foundation and most of whom had
plays staged there. The Abbey served as a nursery for many of the leading Irish
playwrights and actors of the 20th century. In addition, through its extensive
programme of touring abroad and its high visibility to foreign, particularly North
American, audiences, it has become an important part of the Irish tourist
industry.
John Millington
Synge was another Irish dramatist, poet, prose writer, and collector of
folklore. He was also a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was,
together with Yeats, one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best
known for the play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots
in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey. Although he came from a
middleclass Protestant background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with
the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw
as the essential paganism of their world view.
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Postmodernism
had a profound effect on English Drama in the latter half of the 20th Century.
This can be seen particularly in the work of Samuel Beckett (most notably in Waiting
for Godot). Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and,
according to some interpretations, deeply pessimistic about the human
condition. The perceived pessimism is mitigated both by a great and often
wicked sense of humour, and by the sense, for some readers, that Beckett's
portrayal of life's obstacles serves to demonstrate that the journey, while
difficult, is ultimately worth the effort. Similarly, many posit that Beckett's
expressed "pessimism" is not so much for the human condition but
for that of an established cultural and societal structure which
imposes its stultifying will upon otherwise hopeful individuals; it is the
inherent optimism of the human condition, therefore, that is at tension with
the oppressive world. Beckett, in turn, influenced subsequent writers such as
Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Pinter, a British playwright, screenwriter,
poet, actor, director, author, and political activist, is best known for his
plays The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming,
and Betrayal, and for his screenplay adaptations of novels by others,
such as The Servant and The French Lieutenant's Woman. The
recipient of scores of awards and honorary degrees, Pinter received the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 2005. In its citation, the Swedish Academy states that
"Harold Pinter is generally regarded as the foremost representative of
British drama in the second half of the 20th century."[
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Today the West
End of London has a large number of theatres, particularly centred around
Shaftesbury
Avenue. A prolific writer of music for musicals of the 20th century, Andrew
Lloyd Webber (Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, The
Phantom of the Opera), has dominated the West End for a number of years,
and his works have travelled to Broadway in New York and around the world, as
well as being turned into film. The Royal Shakespeare Company, meanwhile,
operates out of Stratford-upon-Avon, producing mainly but not exclusively
Shakespeare's plays.
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