SHAKESPEARE & THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRE

ELIZABETHAN QUIZ 1. Why do we call the age of Shakespeare the Elizabethan Age? 2. When did Queen Elizabeth reign? 3. When did Shakespeare live? 4. In which town was Shakespeare born? 5. Was Shakespeare an actor?

6. Can you name other famous Elizabethan dramatists? 7. In 1594 Shakespeare became one of the founding members of what acting company? 8. What was the name of the theatre where Shakespeares plays were performed? 9. Was acting a respectable profession in Elizabethan England? 10. Who played the role of women in Elizabethan theatre?

1. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still, while thy book doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time.

 This was the verdict of Shakespeare's great rival and admirer, the poet and playwright Ben Jonson, in a memorial poem affixed to the First Folio of

Shakespeare's plays.
Both of an age and for all time, Shakespeare is the defining figure of the English Renaissance, and the most cited and quoted author of every era since. Every age creates its own Shakespeare. Every epoch in the past 350 years from the seventeenth century English Restoration, through the early eighteenth century, the Romantic period, the Victorian and post-Edwardian eras and up to the very recent past has invented and embraced its own Shakespeare, making him comply and adapt to their own cultural, political and ideological needs

 But if we create our own Shakespeare, it is at least as true that the Shakespeare we create is a Shakespeare that has, to a certain extent, created us. The world in which we live and think and philosophize is, to use Ralph Waldo Emerson's word, Shakspearized.
I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I do say so, wrote

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Goethe thought so, too, and so did Sigmund Freud. So did the actress Sarah Bernhardt, who, having played the role of Hamlet in a celebrated production in France in 1899 declared that she could not imagine Hamlet as a man.

 Hamlet is not singular. The Macbeths have become emblems of ambition, Othello a figure for jealous love, Lear a paradigm of neglected old age and its unexpected nobilities, Cleopatra a pattern of erotic and powerful womanhood, Prospero in The Tempest a model of the artist as philosopher and ruler. Romeo and Juliet are ubiquitous examples of young love, its idealism and excess.
The plays expand their meanings as they intersect with new audiences and new circumstances in the world.

 The Merchant of Venice is a powerful example of the translatability of these plays. The first Shylock was a comic character, who may have appeared in a red fright wig and a false nose, the standard signs of Jewishness on the Elizabethan stage. Shylock was played as a comic figure until the mid-eighteenth century, when the actor Charles Macklin transformed him into a villain. Only in the nineteenth century did Shylock become a sympathetic or a tragic figure.
The early twentieth century saw empathetic productions

of the play in the Yiddish theater, as well as a monstrous Shylock performed in Weimar under the aegis of Nazi Germany.

 After the Holocaust an anti-Jewish portrayal of this character seems almost unimaginablewhich is not to say that it will not be attempted. The point is that the play has changed, along with the times. The Merchant of Venice itself has a history, a kind of cultural biography that has transformed it from its moment of origination. Although we can revisit and understand the context of production and of belief, this play, like all the others, is a living, growing, changing work of art. The role it plays for contemporary readers, audiences, and cultural observers is to a certain extent a reflection of its own history.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY William Shakespeare (1564 -1616) His birth date is said to have been April 23 which is also the date of his death, and is, in addition, Saint George's Day, the holiday of England's patron saint. He was brought up in the market town of Stratfordupon-Avon, where his father, John Shakespeare, was a glover, a wool merchant, and the bailiff, or mayor, of the town. His mother's name was Mary Arden. William was one of eight children. He was very probably educated at the Stratford grammar school, where he seems to have gotten a good classical education, centering on the study of Latin texts, like Ovid's Metamorphoses, Virgil's Aeneid, and the plays of Plautus.

 Little is recorded about Shakespeares early life; the first record of his life after his christening is of his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582; he was

eighteen and she was twenty-six years old and already pregnant with their first child, Susanna. Their twins, Hamnet and Judith- 1585. Hamnet died young, at the age of eleven, in 1596, after Shakespeare had moved to London to pursue his career. Shakespeare was an actor as well as a poet and playwright.

 He was a shareholder in one of the most successfuland

well-managed companies of his day, working collaboratively with other actors, two of whom, John Heminge and Henry Condell, would survive him and compile the First Folio of his works. Several companies of actors were in London at this time. Shakespeare may have had connection with one or more of them before 1592, but we have no record that tells us definitely. However, we do know of his long association with the most famous and successful troupe, the Lord Chamberlains Men. (When James I came to the throne in 1603, after Elizabeths death, the troupes name changed to the Kings Men.) In 1599 the Lord Chamberlains Men provided the financial backing for the construction of their own theater, the Globe.

2.EARLY MODERN VIEWS ON THEATRE

Shakespeares

plays- written and meant for

performance. Study his plays not only as literary texts but also as blueprints for a live performance understand the broader cultural context in which they were written and performed.
The Elizabethan period saw the birth and growth of Englands commercial theatres. Prominent dramatic authors such as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, C. Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Webster, Thomas Dekker, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher.

 Yet the same historical moment that saw the explosive rise of the theatre, also saw some of historys most furious attacks on the theatre. Condemnations in sermons and treatises and politicians banished playhouses to the outskirts of the city of London, and eventually closed them altogether in 1642. The Council of London Aldermen Complaints against the theatre: The crowds that gathered caused disturbance; they attracted criminals and prostitutes and they spread infectious diseases. Acting was not a respectable profession Actors - untrustworthy people.

 Female roles were played by boys confusing sexual identities Actors endangered the stability of class divisions by flouting sumptuary laws. sumptuary laws Elizabethan regulations that restricted according to social class and income the types of fabric, the colours and styles of clothing people could wear. the theatre was seen to show social rank to be conventional and, thus, to teach a subversive message.

Religious complaints:
the plays origins in pagan rituals the theatre encouraged the immorality so often dramatized in the plays contents: murder, lust, incest, and adultery. the theater competed with the church for both attendance and moral authority. the theaters claim to teach and improve its spectators, and to do so more pleasurably than preachers could, threatened to make the latter redundant.

1577- John Northbrooke - people shame not to say and affirm openly that players are as good as sermons, and that they learn as much or more at a play than they do at Gods word preached.
The theatre- both reality and pretence; it reinforced those values which it also subverted. Despite Puritan objections, theatre companies received the patronage of the court and the aristocracy. By supporting the theatre, monarchs shared in and took credit for its fame and glamour, thus protecting the institution until the Civil War broke out in 1642.

 TOPICALITY was another significant feature of early theatre, a way of exploring political issues in a time without newspapers. The most pointedly political theatre was staged at Londons law school, the Inns of Court.

The use of plays to influence audiences ideologically is part of the argument about the creation in 1583 of the Queens Men, an elite troupe of players who performed in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Europe as possible intelligencegatherers and promoters of Protestant politics.

2. OUTDOOR THEATRES
Contexts of playing
the Elizabethan theatre - a collaborative medium that involved playwrights, actors, playhouses, sets, costumes, and audiences . Prior to 1567 plays were performed in inn-yards and in the great halls of noblemen's houses, of the Inns of Court, or of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. Protestant Reformation brought about the abolishment of religious plays

Centralization of the countrys politics and finances in London actors preferred to cut down on touring in favour of city performances.

 1567 - The Red Lion in Stepney, the first known purpose-built playhouse erected by John Brayne. 1576 - The Theatre, at Shoreditch, London, built by James Burbage and J. Brayne 1576 - First Blackfriars 1577 -The Curtain

1587 - The Rose

1595 The Swan 1599 The Globe. It is here that Shakespeares company, The Chamberlain's Men, performed his plays.

THE GLOBE

3. THE STRUCTURE OF AN ELIZABETHAN THEATRE

The Groundlings - the audience that stood in the open yard around the stage (also called the pit) Shakespeare himself made reference to the form of the Elizabethan theatre in the Prologue to his play Henry V
Pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that hath dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? (Henry V)