CHAPTER II

ENGLISH DRAMA FROM ITS ORIGINS

TO THE PRESENT DAY

600-1642 1660-1830 1831-1880 1881-1920 1921-1945 Method

 The Beginnings of English: Old and
Middle English 600-1485

Jugglers, Folk−Plays, Pageants

Social outcasts, festival occasions as the harvest

seasons, religious ceremonies etc.

St. George, Robin Hood, Maid

Marian,and The Green Dragon

Stages of Drama
 The Middle Ages

Interludes, Tropes, Liturgical Plays, Morality Plays

Liturgical Plays: The Fall of Lucifer, The Creation of The World and The Fall of Adam,
Noah and The Flood, Abraham and Isaac and the Promise of Christ’s coming, A
Procession of The Prophets, and Foretelling Christ
Morality Plays: The Seven Deadly Sins, Contemplation, Raise-Slander, God and The
Devil, Virtues and Vices, Perseverance and Repentance, and Everyman

Stages of Drama
 The Renaissance

The Influence of Classical Comedy and Tragedy

The Chronicle−History Play

John Lyly, Peele, Greene, and Kyd, Christopher

Marlowe, William Shakespeare , and Ben Jonson
Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet,
Venus and Adonis, Othello, King Lear,
and The Rape of
Lucrece
Macbeth, and Shakespeare’s
Anthony
Development Period and Cleopatrae Serenity or Calm Period Four
Experiment Period Richard II, Henry IV, Henry Sorrow and Depression Cymbeline,
V, Midsummer’s Night’s Period The Winter’s Tale, Divisions
Dream, The Merchant of and The Tempest
Venice, Much Ado About
Nothing, As You Like it,
Twelfth Night, and Romeo
and Juliet
 The Restoration

John Dryden, Sir George Etherege and William Wycherley, William Congreve,
Sir John Vanbrugh, George Farquhar, and Jeremy Collier

Stages of Drama
 The Early Eighteenth Century

Comedy and 'comedy of manners

Dealing mostly with love−actions in the setting of the Court
or of fashionable London life
Deliberately ridicule moral principles and institutions,
especially marriage, and are always in one degree or another
grossly indecent

John Gay, Colley Cibber, Swift, Pope, Tory and, John Arbuthnot
The Romantic Period

Goldsmith and Sheridan: The New ‘Comedy of Manners’.

Laughing and sentimental comedy. Full of action, reversal,
confusion, and verbal wit. Politic satire.

Richard Cumberland, Tom Jones, and Joseph Surface

 High Victorian Period

Drama and melodrama

Fluid and inventive comic style

Charles Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, Dion Boucicault,

Thomas William Robertson, Charles Reade,
William Wilkie, Collins, GWM Reynolds, and
Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
 Late Victorian and Edwardian
Literature

‘Our Theatre in the 90s’: London and Dublin

Oscar Wilde, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, Shaw, Ibsen,

Harley Granville-Barker, John Galsworthy,
W.B. Yeats, Synge, Samuel Beckett, and Harold
Pinter
Late Modernism and Its
Alternatives
Inter-War Drama: Sean O’Casey, Noel Coward, John
Boynton Priestley, and Robert Cedric Sherriff

Post- War : Christopher Fry, Terence

Rattigan Samuel Beckett
 Post- War and Post-Modern

The New Theatre Drama since the 1950s

National Theatre in July 1962, Royal Shakespeare

Company, and BBC
Alan Ayckbourn, Christopher Hampton, Beckett,
Pinter, Stoppard, Alan Bennet, and Dennis Potter
Thank
You