Drama and Society

1580-1630Golden Age

Middle Ages• Strong and vital tradition.• Unfied world picture. Theatre served the orhodoxy of the church.• Popular entertainment• XIII.Liturgical drama

– Dialogue between celebrants– Dramatized scenes to instruct

• XIV cem.Miracle plays. Religious indoctrination but also amusement: comical characers, clowns.

• Corpus Christi festivity: Guilds responsible for the presentation of scenes from the Old and New Testament. Collective creation .Street performances. Pageants.

• XV cent. Morality plays by theatrical companies. Courtyards of inns and taverns. Banquet Halls.

Early Modern Age

• Term preferred over Renaissance.• Embraces the Elizabethan (Queen Elizabeth I’s

reign) and Jacobean (King James I’s) ages.• No idea of awakening from the dark ages.• Looks forward to modernity: the beginning of

many modern institutionalized practices (including the modern state).

An Age of change and transitions

• An Age of change from feudal baronial power to centralized monarchy (Henry VIII and Elizabeth)

• From warring knights to courtiers.• Cultivation of graces, including literary ones

rather than military ability.• Italy with its courts and its culture an obvious

model. Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano translated in 1561 by Thomas Hoby.

An Age of religious change

• From Catholicism to Protestantism.• Reformation proclaimed 1536 by Henry VIII• Violent persecution of Catholics under

Protestant sovereigns and Protestants under the Catholic Queen Mary I (called Bloody Mary)(1553-58)

• Puritan dissent.• An age of controversy.• Italy an obvious adversary.

Economics

• Growth of trade. Beginnings of financial ventures, banking.

• Navigation. Colonial expansion.• Affluence.

Drama between classical models and medieval elements

• As a consequence of the Reformation and Renaissance, center place to the individual.

• Plays about people. Search for answers to questions raised by contemporary human life

• .A remainder of features of medieval theatre:– Popular culture– Carnivalesque elements– Witches, magic

Early Modern Age Drama

• 1580-1630 an explosion of great theatre and great actors.

• Age of affluence.– Patronage of companies.– Entertainments at court and in noble houses.– The populace itself could spend money on

entertainment.• Drama is called to play a role in the great season of

change.• It becomes itself an agency of change.

Drama and Society

• Not simply an aesthetic objet.• Represents (indirectly) society and its problems and

concerns. But not simply a passive reflection of history• Intervenes in history. Performs an important socio-

political action• It is a tool to fashion and contain.

– Helps consolidate dominant order• or

– Helps subvert dominant orde• orr

– Contain subversion

Relationships with the past

• Enriched by humanistic translations.• Imitations of classics adapted to English

society.• Ties with vital tradition of Middle Ages.

Venues

• Elizabethan theatres:• Open air. Standing room. Groundlings.

– No verisimilitude. Tree for forest• Globe Theatre• Jacobean and Caroline London. Roofed theatres. Banquet hall

formula.– Pictorial realism. Backdrops. Inigo Jones

• Warmer but more expensive. Rules out groundlings.– More academic, literary theatre.– No ranting. – More ballets, music. – Masques, new genre.

The closing of theatres1642-1660

• Puritans objected to entertainment.• The stage was robbing the pulpit of its role.• Plays represented indecent and subversive

subjects.• Questioned state ideology.• 1642 theatres were closed.• 1660 reopened but in a dfferent form and a

different spirit.