Elizabethan Theatre (1562-1642)

Queen Elizabeth I of England and Ireland reigned from 1558 to 1603, during the time when
Europeans were starting to break out of the cultural constraints imposed by the mediaeval Church.

The Reformation—the sixteenth-century religious movement that aimed to reform the Roman
Catholic Church and resulted in the establishment of Protestant churches—created an altogether new
environment for drama. During the reign of the Catholic Mary I (1516–1558; reigned 1553–58),
mystery and morality plays had been popular, and the Bible was viewed as the most appropriate
source for drama. When Elizabeth took the throne and made Anglicanism (a form of Protestantism)
the national religion, she was concerned that religious plays would be used to stir English Catholics
against the Anglican church and herself. In 1559 Elizabeth prohibited all plays that were not licensed
by the crown. Drama quickly became more secular. In accordance with Protestant beliefs, in the
1570s she banned all mystery plays in which men played the role of God, which were considered by
Protestants to be idolatry, or the worship of religious icons (sacred images, statues, objects, and
monuments).

The roots of Elizabethan drama lie in cycles of Mystery plays and the later Morality plays. Theatre
was lodged in a network of social and religious relationships. The revolutions of the sixteenth
century had the effect of dislodging it. The reformed church, purified of its corruptions and relieved
of much of its wealth and scope, was no longer worldly enough to embrace all these social and
cultural functions. The church was to become unambiguously sacred, and the theatre profane. The
fundamentalist Protestants, the Puritans were uneasy about plays, and were fearful of the
unpredictable nature of large gatherings. Plays were condemned as morally corrupting. The players
built their own houses because they had been evicted from the house of God. The effect of
Protestanism upon the theatre was to make it irreligious. The actors were forbidden to engage
seriously with sacred matters.

In 1574 Elizabeth placed her Master of the Revels in charge of licensing all plays performed in
England. The Master of the Revels was an officer of the state who worked for the Lord Chamberlain,
the chief officer of the royal household. The queen's Master of Revels had the authority to censor all
English plays. He could ban entire plays or delete parts of plays that were considered objectionable,
and it was his job to eliminate anything that seemed to be critical of the queen or the Anglican
church.
From around 1570, playhouses appeared in various parts of London. Some were open-air
amphitheatres, others were existing buildings converted for use as indoor playhouses. These were
the first buildings since Roman times designed specifically for the performance of plays. They were
both the cause and sign of the new age in English drama. Nearly all public theatres were outside the
territorial limits of the jurisdiction of the magistrates of the City of London, who were consistently
hostile to plays and theatres. The Rose was built in 1587 in Southwark, and the Globe in 1599. Up
till that time, professional actors had been servants, performing in someone else’s space. They might
literally be household servants, mounting occasional shows for their masters’ feasts, or they might be
touring players brought in for a special occasion. Theatres were not the only context of drama
writing in the period. Poets wrote so-called ‘closet’ drama – plays written not for public
performance, but for reading, or perhaps for private recitation in noble households. Some favored
players were technically made servants of the high nobility, who would perform at Court and nobles’
houses. Thus, there were Pembroke’s Men, the Lord Admiral’s Men, the lord Chamberlain’s Men (to
which Shakespeare belonged), Prince Henry’s Men and so on.

While in the private theatre shows took place in the early evening, in the public theatres plays took
place in the afternoon. A flag raised in the morning on the theatre indicated that there would be a
performance. Plays had to be performed by daylight and the scenery had to be kept simple: a table, a
chair, a throne, perhaps an artificial tree or two to suggest a forest. But these limitations were in a
sense advantages. Elizabethan playgoers had to imagine and the playwright had to make the scene
vivid for them by means of language. Costumes could be elaborate, and there could be musical
accompaniment and sound effects such as gunpowder explosions. The stage itself was remarkably
versatile. At the back were doors for exits and entrances and a curtained booth or alcove useful for
hiding inside. Above the stage was a higher acting area – perhaps a porch or balcony – useful for a
Juliet to stand upon and a Romeo to raise his eyes to. And in the stage floor was a trapdoor leading
to a ‘hell’ or cellar, especially useful for ghosts or devils to appear and disappear. The stage itself
was a rectangular platform that projected into a yard enclosed by three-storied galleries. The
building was round or octagonal. The audience sat in these galleries or else stood in the yard in front
of the stage and its sides. A roof or awning protected the stage and the gallery from sudden rain.

Within two decades of the building of the first major theatre in the mid-1570s, a huge and varied
body of Elizabethan comedy, tragedy, revenge plays, and history chronicles arose. Rising
Elizabethan dramatists like John Lyly (1554–1606), Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), and
Thomas Kyd (1558–1594) surpassed the limits of known drama—European theatre and the classical
drama of ancient Greece and Rome—by portraying complex political, psychological, and historical
themes. The most noted playwright of the English language, William Shakespeare (1564–1616), was
only twelve years old when the first theatre was built in England. With his plays Shakespeare
brought Elizabethan drama—and English culture in general—to unexpected new heights.

Playwrights wanted to amuse their audiences rather than preach to them. They added farce (comedy
that presents absurd characters and scenes in order to make the audience laugh) or current political
events, thinly disguised in order to avoid trouble with the authorities. Some plays incorporated the
local events of the village in which they were being performed, presenting hastily written plots about
the latest scandal or catastrophe. This timely, relevant subject matter appealed to the villagers. Often
the characters the largest roles so that they could create more chaos on stage in the spirit of fun. The
plays in the early years of Elizabeth's reign blended different types of drama: morality play, farce,
English history play, and pastoral drama, which idealized country settings. The plays were often
secular (non-religious) and much shorter than the morality plays of the past. They were rarely
written down, however, so today we know about them only from descriptions in letters and journals
from the time.