7 Backgrounds to the Study of Renaissance Drama

Dr. Anna Kurian

 

Lesson Plan

  • Introduction
  • Travel and Exploration
  • The Other in Early Modern England
  •  Historical antecedents of Renaissance Drama and Main forms and features
  • The Theatre and the Playing Companies
  • The Major Playwrights of the Age
  • Conclusion

The late 16th and early 17th century, (till about 1612, when Shakespeare retires to Stratford upon Avon), called variously Elizabethan and Jacobean England (as also Tudor England, Renaissance England and Shakespearean England) is one of the ‘golden’ periods in the history of English Literature, one which saw an unparalleled outpouring of drama and poetry. Among the major literary figures were stalwarts such as Spenser and Sidney in the realm of poetry, Sir Thomas More, Lyly, Nashe and Greene in the area of prose and dramatists such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and of course, William Shakespeare. It was not just the realm of literature that England was achieving renown in: England became a known power in terms of its navy, its voyages of exploration and discovery, in terms of its commercial and economic enterprise.

 

In this module we will learn about the impact that travel and voyages of exploration and discovery had upon the everyday life of the English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then proceed to a study of the theatre and dramatic conventions in the time before concluding with a brief introduction to the significant playwrights of the period.

Travel and Exploration

 

The latter end of the fifteenth century and the initial decades of the sixteenth century was the time when the largest number of voyages of exploration and discovery took place from Europe to the New World. While Henry VIII had an interest in outfitting a navy and enlarging the naval prowess of the English nation it was during the reign of Elizabeth that England achieved renown in the matter of global navigation and exploratory voyages. With better ships and the expansion of the borders of the known world English sailors such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh set off on voyages which were to open up new vistas for English trade. English sailors and explorers circumnavigated the globe; explored regions of North America and travelled to Africa and the South Pacific. These voyages served many purposes: for one, they opened up the world to Englishmen, another was that they introduced new cultures and peoples to the English, new items of consumption were now available as new countries and their products came to the notice of the English (tobacco and cocoa being examples), and finally trade flourished, trade in produce as well as humans (as the slave trade from Africa was immediately set in motion).

 

Many gentleman-sailors went on to become hugely prosperous and influential during this era, the foremost example being Sir Walter Raleigh. In addition the sea-faring route was an avenue for social mobility as people from the middle classes took to the sea to gain prosperity and fame. Sailors who voyaged into new lands and returned with valuable cargos were granted audiences by the Queen and also advanced in society as the wealth that they gained was shared with the Queen and purchased them a place in court circles. But these men of the sea were also known as pirates, as they often took over the ships of other nations which were also engaged in these voyages. It is also essential to remember that these sailors were the ones primarily responsible for the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the consolidation of Elizabeth I’s reign at that perilous moment.

 

The voyages of exploration which began in this era were a continuation of those which had begun in the previous century especially in Spain and Portugal. England was a late starter but in Queen Elizabeth’s reign English sailors were motivated by the desire for gold, praise and glory, as Raleigh phrased it. They explored the Americas and discovered new sea routes which were then turned to profit. The English sailors and explorers returned from their travels with both material objects and human captives: the former to be sold, the latter to be displayed as curiosities to the eyes of the English stay-at-home audience. Thus along with spices and fabrics, with tobacco and cultural artifacts the voyagers also brought back animals, Eskimos and American Indians. These latter usually perished, unable to deal with captivity and the changed new environment, but even in death they were still exhibited as objects of curiosities. In addition these voyages spawned a large corpus of literature: travel chronicles and journal accounts were published and circulated as an audience hungry for knowledge and sensation, newly literate with the establishment of grammar schools in the realm, took on board the tales of strange peoples, ways of life, cultures, objects and plant and animal life. Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, first published in 1589 and later expanded in 1599, is an example of such accounts.

 

The establishment of companies such as the East India Company (1600) and the Virginia Company (1607) gave a further impetus to these voyages and also changed their character: from being primarily voyages of discovery and exploitation they now began to exhibit a colonizing tendency as well. The Charters of the Companies made it clear that the company officials were in the service of the monarch of England and they recognized the legitimacy of only Christian princes/kings. Thus it became possible for Englishmen to see large tracts of land as not under  any governance as they were not ruled by Christian kings. The Virginia Company Charter also makes it clear that one of the tasks of the travelers was to spread the knowledge of the Christian God. The road to a colonizing mission is thus already prepared in these documents, wherein the spreading of the Christian religion and the establishing of ‘civilized’ farming and trade life is seen as possible in these areas. The early steps towards colonization are consequently apparent in this period of exploration, with the failed attempt at setting up a colony by Walter Raleigh and the comparatively more successful settlement of Jamestown in 1607.

The voyages of discovery and the incipient colonial enterprise had consequences in the mother country as well: wealth poured in and the merchant classes were prosperous due to the trade with the newly discovered lands. In addition the horizons of the ordinary people were themselves broadened as they learnt about new civilizations and cultures. An element of fantastic wonder touched the lives of the common people as they were acquainted with worlds such as those described by Othello:

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven (. . .)

And of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. (I.iii)

In addition to hearing about such wonders they could also see captives, taste strange new items of food and marvel at the exotic that was brought into England. But the exotic and the marvelous was only one aspect of the everyday life of the people, even if an aspect that broadened their horizons and helped them to know a wider world than what they saw around them. Even as the drama and literature of the time brought the newly discovered lands and strange peoples on to the stage it also brought Europe closer to the common people as the plots of Renaissance drama were often located in European towns and cities, whether the Spanish court in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedyor Malta in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta or Italian towns such as Amalfi in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. The English stage during this period was where the English people regularly encountered strangeness, whether in terms of locations, peoples or customs. Thus the plays demonstrate an awareness of those whom the English considered foreign, strange and ‘other’ as opposed to the Englishman.

The Other in Early Modern England

 

England saw the representatives of various people groups as the Other during this period. While those who were obviously so, such as the racial other, distinct in terms of physical appearance and social and cultural practices were instantly recognizable there were others who were less so. But those whom the Englishman considered as Other included the Jew, the Moor, the Indian, the Ethiop, the Turk, Europeans who were distinct in terms of language, religion and dress, the Welsh, the Irish, the Scot, and even women who transgressed the many norms that were laid down for them! At any given point in time any category could be seen as irreducibly ‘Other’, as defined by their appearance, dress, language, religion, cultural and social practices, etc. The ordinary English folk encountered the Other in various forums: in print, if they could read; on the stage, in dramatic productions; as members of embassies that came from foreign lands to their monarch’s court as seen in London streets and public fora; as exhibit items brought back by sailors and travellers, put up for public viewing as a spectacle; and other similar spaces and locales. Unsettled conditions in Europe due to religious upheaval also brought refugees into England and these were also objects of curiosity to the Englishman. Given these categories it is possible to see that the drama of the time represented several of them on stage, sometimes in some detail, sometimes in passing references.

 

The Jew and the Moor are the most obvious examples of the Other as they appeared on the Early Modern English stage, in addition to figures such as Tamburlaine or Caliban. The Jew as a contemptible figure, stereotypically imaged as a miserly usurer and a hoarder, given to evil and with few sympathies towards his fellow man is the stock figure of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta as well as Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. The evil Turk is seen in The Jew of Malta, Ithamore, Barabbas’ helper, while it is the Moor, Aaron, who is evil in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Other figures on the fringe include Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias in Jonson’s Alchemist who are mocked as extreme Protestants, but also as greedy and irrational, as also Malvolio in Twelfth Night who is stereotyped as puritanical.

 

But while the Other was seen on stage in stereotypical ways an interesting feature of the times is that even when vilified they were still capable of eliciting some sympathy from the audiences, witness Shylock who evokes considerable sympathy in the course of the play and is also given a speech that posits him as possessing a similar humanity to that of the Venetians. This feature is seen also in the travelogues of the time where the travellers point out the differences between the English norm and the newly discovered lands and their inhabitants but also indicate the positives that the new peoples had in their cultures and societies. Writers such as Thomas Hariot also note that difference does not always indicate inferiority and if it is portrayed thus it is because those travellers and writers are searching for their own cultures (English cities, customs and habits) in alien lands.

Historical antecedents of Renaissance Drama and Main forms and features

 

Elizabethan/Renaissance/Early Modern drama grew out of early English dramatic forms such as the mystery, miracle and morality forms. The mystery and miracle plays were forms of drama that were performed in churches and cathedrals, the former depicting Biblical incidents while the latter dramatized the lives of the saints. The morality plays were latter forms of drama which arose out of the earlier Christian miracle and mystery plays and were more secular: instead of Biblical incidents or saintly lives they were allegorical, showing personifications of virtues and vices battling for the life/soul of a human protagonist. In addition to antecedents such as these Elizabethan drama also built upon other early forms such as the interludes, a form characterized by dance and song and the masques, which were characterized by music and spectacle. By the late 1570s and early 1580s when Elizabethan drama was beginning to flower it had integrated elements from each of these forms in addition to certain features from Greek and Latin drama traditions. Far more than the Greek the Early Modern English were familiar with Latin drama and with texts such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Stock figures and situations from classical drama, plot lines which owed their beginnings to Greek and Latin myths and an awareness of the structure of the drama that was based upon the examples they were familiar with, as well as Aristotle’s pronouncements are some of the ways in which the classical languages influenced Renaissance drama. Thus what we know today as English Renaissance drama is actually a composite form incorporating select features from a multitude of dramatic forms which had preceded it.

 

The main forms within English Renaissance drama include of course, tragedy and comedy, but there are also sub categories within these. Thus there were tragedies such as those by Shakespeare, which are often deemed Aristotelian, there were the revenge tragedies of Kyd and Webster, domestic tragedies such as Arden of Faversham, etc. But none of these were exclusive categories: thus a play such as Hamlet is a revenge tragedy as well as being Aristotelian, while apart from the fact that its characters are of elevated stature it might well qualify as a domestic tragedy too! Similarly a play such as Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, though called a “Tragical History” is neither a domestic tragedy, nor a revenge tragedy nor does it feature characters who are royal or noble. Indeed its mixing of comic and tragic elements set against its undoubtedly tragic ending have caused some confusion as to its classification. In the realm of comedy too there are sub classifications: these include the romantic comedies of Shakespeare and city comedies, such as some of Jonson’s work as also Dekker’s and Middleton’s. A third category within Elizabethan drama was the history play: a form practiced by both Marlowe and Shakespeare, it dealt with historical incidents and dramatized the lives, reigns and deaths of English kings. But there were other kinds of history plays as well: one example is Shakespeare’s Roman histories which include Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and so on. In addition to the tragedy, the comedy and the history play there were also the romances or the tragi-comedies, plays that pulled together elements from both the forms, the tragedy and the comedy and thus made a new form, also sometimes called the romance.

 

The drama of the period used blank verse mostly: a form of verse that closely resembled the speech of the time. It consisted of unrhymed iambic pentameter: five iambic feet (each consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable) together made up a line of blank verse. As drama developed and practitioners such as Marlowe and Shakespeare began shaping the line to their own uses it changed and developed: from each line being a self-contained sentence, it became possible to use run-on lines, the stops occurring in the middle of the line sometimes, etc.

In addition some plays were written in a mixture of blank verse and prose and Shakespeare occasionally used rhymed couplets to end scenes. Though sometimes plays were written in prose and occasionally in rhymed couplets, the largest number of plays was in blank verse during this period.

 

Whether in prose or verse some features were common to all, or most, of the drama produced in the time. The one convention of Elizabethan drama that most students are familiar with is that all roles were acted by men: women were not allowed to act in the theatre troupes of the time. This convention is now seen as having the potential to increase the complexity of many of Shakespeare’s comedies, in which he creates sequences wherein the female characters dress as males as part of the plot (examples can be found in As You Like It; Twelfth Night; etc.). But this was not the only convention regarding actors that is remarkable in the time: the theatre companies were limited in number, thus each player might play several roles in the course of a play’s performance. Though the main actors played the major characters and did not play multiple roles, the other actors did, signaling the changes by changes in costumes and ways of speaking and behaving. It is also interesting to remember that in those times plays were not repeated daily. Given the demand for new entertainment it was imperative that every day a different play was staged. Added to this was the necessity that the plays that were enacted could not be seen as offensive: writing and enacting plays was a risky venture and the censorship mechanism of the court meant that anything that gave offence to the royalty and higher nobility was taboo.

 

Play scripts were important and valuable and each actor did not have an entire play script, they each had a script containing their role’s lines. There was, however, a prompter who had the  entire script and also a scene by scene summary of the play. Equally interesting is the fact that most plays were not written up for publication by the playwrights themselves: Ben Jonson was the earliest to get his own work published during his lifetime. In opposition to this, playwrights such as Marlowe and Shakespeare wrote their plays, were part of their production and then seem to have abandoned them. Their plays were published from prompter’s copies; scripts put together from the actor’s partial scripts, etc. Thus what we read and study today as ‘universal’ and ‘timeless’ ‘literary texts’ were actually intended as entertainment for the space of two hours or so: they were ephemeral, meant to bring enjoyment, they mixed genres, they did not observe the classical unities and were often written quickly, in as little as three or four weeks and often in collaboration with other writers. Thus to think of Shakespeare’s or Marlowe’s work as ‘great literature’ is to forget its origins as great theatre and entertainment!

The Theatre and the Playing Companies

 

The first theatres in England were built on the outskirts of London city. These included the Theatre, the first permanent open-air, almost circular playhouse built in 1576, the Curtain (1577) the Rose (1587) and the Swan (1595). The Theatre was dismantled in 1598-9 and its materials used to build the Globe, the most well known of the playhouses of the time, due largely to its association with Shakespeare. Before the establishment of the playhouses plays were staged in public spaces such as the courtyards of inns or large rooms inside inns. The almost circular structure of these playhouses was said to have been inspired possibly by the Roman amphitheatres or the animal baiting rings of Elizabethan times. The audiences at these playhouses numbered between two and three thousand. These structures had three tiers of galleries running around the sides for audiences as also a large central portion, the yard for which one paid the least. In addition the most expensive seats were on the stage themselves so that a close-up view of the action was enjoyed by those who could afford it. The actual stage protruded into the audience’s space and an area below the stage represented ‘hell’ while the underside of the cover over the stage was the ‘heavens’. Plays were enacted in the early afternoon and so there was no need for lighting as such. Stage settings were indicated in the speeches of the actors rather than with extensive props, thus a wood might have been a bare stage transformed by the words of the actors. In fact, most stage properties were at a minimum: a turban was enough to indicate a character from the East and a sword indicated martial status. Certain conventions governed the use of these props too: thus the skull in Hamlet while referring to Yorick, the jester, also signified mortality and the temporality of life itself; the handkerchief in Othello (which is used by Iago to make Othello jealous) though seen as an exotic item was also emblematic and evocative of a woman’s chastity in that era. A certain minimalism governed the use of props on the Elizabethan stage. However this was offset by the sumptuous nature of the costumes that belonged to the playing companies: these were, along with the play scripts, the most valuable possessions of the companies.

 

The companies were under the patronage of noblemen from the court or even the monarch (Shakespeare’s company was initially called ‘the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’ and after King James came to the throne it became ‘the King’s Men’). This patronage was essential as a means of ensuring their respectability as well as their access to playing arenas other than the public playhouses: noble or royal patronage ensured that they performed at court and for the nobility. The playing companies themselves were of two types: the first had a prominent figure as organizer who ran the company and was responsible for engagements as well as the practical aspects of putting on a play. The boys companies were run on this model. The other model was more democratic and consisted of a troupe of actors, all of whom had a share in the company. Their capital consisted of their play scripts, their costumes and their props. They shared the expenses they incurred in the putting on of their plays and shared the profits out amongst themselves. Shakespeare was a shareholder in his playing company and it is well documented that he made enough money to be able to purchase land and houses as well as a coat of arms.

 

While initially there were many playing companies by the mid to late 1590s there were only two left: The Lord Admiral’s Men and The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Each of them had a strong manager, and a star who played the protagonist’s roles in the plays that were enacted. In addition there were about nine to twelve other shareholders, most of whom took part in acting but also in the other duties associated with putting up a play, from moving props about, providing sound and light effects to standing at the entrances to collect the fees that were paid by the audiences. In addition to the shareholders there were also hired men and apprentices, the latter included the young boys who played the women’s roles in the plays, boys whose voices had not yet broken and who could therefore pass off as women. Apart from Lent and Sundays plays were staged on every day of the week and thus we can understand what busy lives were led by the Early Modern playing companies.

The Major Playwrights

 

Unfortunately for most of the English playwrights during the Renaissance their reputation tends to be overshadowed by that of William Shakespeare. But in spite of this there are several names that are instantly recognizable to most English Literature students. These include Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Ford, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Middleton and John Webster. Indeed there are several who believe that if not for Christopher Marlowe’s untimely death Shakespeare would have been utterly overshadowed by him, as evidenced by the plays that Marlowe left behind him when he died at the age of twenty nine. A point of significance is that none of these playwrights lived and worked in isolation: they all knew each other and not only were they familiar with each other but also with the work that was being done and indeed many of them collaborated together on the writing of plays. Thus Jonson is said to have consulted Beaumont when writing his plays; Middleton is said to have had a hand in some of Shakespeare’s work; Beaumont and Fletcher wrote plays in collaboration with each other and Fletcher wrote parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Thus the lives of these playwrights and the others of the time were all linked and interconnected, not only as friends and acquaintances but also as colleagues and co-writers.

 

Each of the units on Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, and Webster will provide a detailed introduction to the playwright and his work so in this section we shall restrict ourselves to a brief overview of some of the features that can be read in common about the playwrights of the time. The drama of the time provided several of the prominent playwrights of the time an avenue for some social mobility during this period: Jonson was son to a clergyman, stepson to a bricklayer; Kyd was son to a scrivener; Marlowe son to a shoemaker and so on. Though some were children of the nobility or clergyman (Beaumont and Fletcher serve as examples) most of the acknowledged playwrights of the time were men who having gained some education via the grammar schools and the universities of the time came to drama as a means of making their way forward in a world which was extremely hierarchy conscious and where family antecedents still mattered. Thus the themes of social mobility that we see in Renaissance English plays are in many ways biographically and historically accurate: they endorse a trajectory that many of the playwrights had personally experienced. Even the continual struggle with poverty and the eventual fall into disgrace that is seen in several plays is emblematic of the lives of writers such as Kyd and Dekker.

 

Writing plays, while lucrative and often productive of social and other success was yet not seen as a ‘respectable’ activity: plays were not literature (the irony is significant, given that today in the literature of the age we read the plays as the prime examples of the best of the time), and as such were ephemeral. Most of the playwrights whose names are mentioned above wrote a number of plays most of which have vanished from the world. Traces survive, in the work of other playwrights (Shakespeare’s Hamlet is said to be modeled upon an earlier Hamlet by Thomas Kyd), but with little respectability and no copyright laws, the plays, once performed, often enough became common property. A playwright such as Ben Jonson is an exception in that he published his Works, in 1616, demonstrating his own confidence in the worth of this work. Most playwrights did not and thus what we have today is scattered pieces by many of the writers of the time, often in multiple versions and sometimes mention of significant plays and titles with no text to be found.

Conclusion

 

It is impossible to write an introduction to Renaissance drama and hope to cover all the salient features of the time. We have briefly summarized backgrounds related to travel, exploration, discovery and the proto-colonialism that can be seen in this period; gone on to examine the question of who exactly is the other in the society of the time; dwelt upon the antecedents of English Renaissance drama and its main forms and features, we could continue to study other aspects of the time which would be seen in the plays written during this period. Questions of family structures, gender relations, authority within the family, the development and change in learning and knowledge: these are some of the questions and aspects that have a bearing upon the drama of the time but have not been discussed herein.

 

The reading list given below will help you find more material on the time and this can be augmented by reading the separate units on the various playwrights which form the rest of this section.

Reference

  • Hackett, Helen. A Short History of English Renaissance Drama. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012.
  • McRae, Andrew. Renaissance Drama: Contexts. London: Arnold, 2003.
  • Moseley, C W R D. English Renaissance Drama: A Very Brief Introduction to Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time. Humaniities Ebooks LLP, 2007.