Introduction

The early history of drama is more difficult to chart accurately even than that of fiction or poetry, not least because there are so few English examples before the ‘mystery plays’ of the Middle Ages and a lack
of clear ‘movements’ even after that. Furthermore, during certain periods, theatre has been marginalised or censored which hardly assists continuity. Barren periods in theatre have been more common and
lengthy than in any other art form. Acting has been deemed at times to be unchristian, idolatrous and depraved or, worse, boring. Actors themselves have frequently been seen to be one of the humbler
classes, and only towards the end of the 19 th century did their status start to improve. It is only since the 16 th century, in fact, that plays and players have been settled in theatres in England and that drama,
as we know it, has taken shape.

Unlike the theatre-based entertainments of the ancient world - where an audience would gather to watch plays looking down from the raised semi-circular viewing platforms of an amphitheatre - English
drama was less fixed and grew up on the road. Travelling companies of players would arrive in a town or the court and put on one or more plays: some serious, some light, and often with religious subjects.
Moreover, there was clearly much improvisation. For the uninitiated, an interesting and enlightening (albeit fictional) account of the medieval player’s lifestyle and art can be found in Barry Unsworth’s novel,
Morality Play (1995).

The Mystery Play

It is the mystery play, in medieval times, that forms our first record of English dramatic art. Taken around nearby towns by actors made up of people from craft guilds, these plays were popular from the 13 th
to the 16th century. It was from the trade (or "mestier") of the performers that these plays take their "mystery" name, although initially the term "miracle play" was also given to them (strictly, though, those are
plays depicting saints’ lives). These plays did not only surface in England, but were common in Ireland and on the continent too: in France, Italy and Germany. Many different plays would be performed at
festivals or pageants in the towns, forming "cycles" taken from Biblical sources and stripped down to their core narrative elements – each one to be played by a particular guild (shipmen for Noah’s story,
ironically enough, in York). The four complete surviving play cycles show that the plays alternated between the serious and devout (for the Passion etc.), and the humorous or absurd (frequently involving
Satan making a fool of himself or profane husband and wife arguments). It is no surprise that even during their time, these extremely popular plays caused certain controversy due to their apparent idolatry
and the Church’s distaste for religious pageantry. In fact, the plays were spreading the knowledge and understanding of Christianity and Biblical stories at a time when books were not commonly available.
However, they were finally repressed out of existence at the time of the Reformation.

The Morality Play

Morality plays were popular in the 15th century and for some time after. They saw contrasting human qualities and emotions personified, debating and acting as if they were human. Most famous of these
works was Everyman (c.1509-19), which has regained popularity and respect in the 20 th century and features characters such as Fellowship, Knowledge and Good Deeds. John Skelton’s Magnyfycence
(date unknown) is another famous example, probably from approximately the same time and involving the eponymous character’s suffering due to bad advice, and his salvation by characters called Good-
hope, Perseverance and the like. The morality plays faded from existence via the similar and sometimes indistinguishable "Interludes" and a new desire on the part of audiences, playwrights and actors to
find realism in drama.

The Interlude

The so-called interludes – popular in the 15 th and 16th centuries - were still to a large degree allegorical, but they were considerably shorter and more commonly performed by professional actors. This was
made possible by their small casts. Further, these plays moved away from the religious or moralistic and towards comedy - farce particularly – and humour centred on social stereotypes. John Heywood
was an exponent of the form (see A Play of Love and The Play of the Wether (both 1533)), and served under Henry VIII and Queen Mary. John Rastell, brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More, was also a
writer of interludes, including Four Elements (c.1520). The most well known example of an interlude is the play-within-a-play during Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595) where various
hopeless amateurs perform "Pyramus and Thisbe" for the entertainment of the principal characters.

The English Renaissance 1

The English Renaissance brought with it startling change in drama. Its three great heroes: Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson all wrote plays which far outdid moralities and
interludes with their extravagant style, wit and substance. Marlowe seems to have been a violent and even criminally inclined man, and something of this temperament (which finally led to his death in a
Deptford tavern quarrelling over the bill!) shows through in his plays (see Tamburlaine particularly). Typically for the later 16th century 1 , Marlowe wrote historical drama, and was a great influence upon the
young Shakespeare. Particularly powerful were his enormously successful Tamburlaine part 1 (written before 1587 and performed many times a year in London), its sequel (1588), and Edward II (1594)
that has much in common with Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595) in its depiction of a king facing rebellion with a combination of frustration, anger and dignity. The bloody and horrific ending of Tamburlaine
part 1, while hardly typical of Elizabethan drama, shows the extent to which playwrights could now serve up a potent combination of violence and poetry. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608) especially
seems to follow the horror of Marlowe’s play. Most famous of Marlowe’s other plays is Dr. Faustus (first performed 1594). This sinister but enduringly popular play, based on the German Faustbuch of 1587
follows the medieval fable of a man literally selling his soul to the devil. Besides the compelling dialogues between the devious Mephistopheles and Faustus, the play is notable for its occasional use of
humans-made-bestial visual jokes (again, see A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and extravagant conceits that it is still impossible to stage accurately.

The English Renaissance 2

Shakespeare and Jonson

There is space elsewhere for a full discussion of Shakespeare, whose plays form the centre of all theatre from this time onwards. It is worth mentioning, however, that his early plays were quite conventional
and historical or in some cases comic, and it was only with the success that they brought him that he started to write exceptionally: his later histories ( Henry V (c. 1599) especially), middle period comedies
(e.g. Twelfth Night (c. 1600), Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1600)) and tragedies (King Lear (c.1605), Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606 etc.). Even in Shakespeare’s case, however, there is dispute about
authorship and dramatic qualities. ‘Problem’ comedies such as Measure for Measure (1604) are so- called because of their subject matter and tone, which do not quite fit either the comic or tragic
categories. The later plays, or ‘romances’ (e.g. The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest (both c. 1611)) present similar problems of classification but seem more playful and therefore more easily ascribed a
different genre entirely. However, Shakespeare like his contemporaries was working with theatres rather than merely presenting street-features of the sort common a century before. As Andrew Gurr states,
"One partial answer to the paradox of Elizabethan playwriting must lie in its novelty. Writing for regular London audiences in custom-built theatres with famous players was new, and the possibilities raised
were boundless" 2. Indeed, by the end of his career Shakespeare famously had his own theatre, The Globe, and could work around its physical limits (c.f. The Tempest). Shakespeare was certainly an
innovator, especially linguistically (he added more new words to the English language than any other individual in history). However, the debt he owes to his sources (Holinshed etc.) for his stories, and to
Marlowe and the Greeks for his form is not to be underestimated. Nor, of course, is the input of his actors. We do not have a single text written in his own hand, and must assume that certain revisions were
made with the assistance of the players themselves.

Another of Shakespeare’s sources was Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592), which influenced Hamlet. (c.1599-1601) not to mention other ‘Revenge Tragedies’ of the period and the work of
JohnWebster. Ben Jonson was paid to add to the text of Kyd’s play and, like Shakespeare, was a player himself. Jonson’s plays, of which Volpone (1605-6) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) are the most
famous, are characterised by their repugnant casts (see The Alchemist (1610) particularly) and biting satire. A friend of John Donne, Francis Bacon, and Shakespeare among others, Jonson was the toast
of the literary scene during the reign of James I but managed to get himself imprisoned for his and his co-writers’ comments about Scots in Eastward Hoe (1605) and has been cruelly underrated since
1700 due to the snowballing fervour for Shakespeare’s plays.

The Seventeenth Century

The 17th century was a time of considerable upheaval for the English theatre. After reaching its heyday during the 1600s, it saw its great Elizabethan and early Jacobean exponents dying with no obvious
followers. Worse, plays were overtaken by masques as the court entertainment of choice and banned for a time causing the closure of theatres. These were a combination of poetry, music and spectacle.
Beaumont and Fletcher, together and separately, greatly influenced the theatre of the time with Four Plays in One (c.1608), Philaster (1609), The Maid’s Tragedy (1610-11) and others. These plays
showed ever more sophistication in dialogue, inflated sentiment and a general steering away from the reality-chic of the Elizabethan age. Where in the 16 th century there had been a truly varied audience for
theatrical performances, in the mid-17 th century this had been replaced by an aristocratic set. Plays were made more self-consciously refined and structurally complicated to suit their new audience by the
playwrights of the day, while type-casting created actors who suited certain parts only. This was the time of heroic drama as catalysed by the works of Roger Boyle and Robert Howard, followed up by
Elkanah Settle and Thomas Otway, and made in quantity and with some finesse by poet laureate and populist John Dryden (see Tyrannic Love (1669) etc.). However, with the exception of his blank verse
tragedy, All for Love (1678) that he derived from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (c.1606-7), heroic drama was a strange and ephemeral beast. Evans suggests that only psychologists are likely to
find these plays interesting "for they suggest that an audience whose life was governed by cynicism found some relief in this dream-world picture of a fantastic conception of honour" 3. Certainly, the plays
are little performed now, and seem likely to linger in footnotes of literary textbooks.

Restoration Comedy

Restoration drama is best known, then, not for its tragedies but for its comedies: bawdy and immoral or amoral depending on your point of view they satirise 17 th century society with verve and hilarious
panache. While mere shadows of the comedies of Jonson or Shakespeare, the plays of William Wycherley, George Farquhar, Sir George Etherege and William Congreve are far superior to the works of the
next century. Their characters reel about the stage with exaggerated extravagance and ridiculous affectation: the best example of this being Sir Fopling Flutter in Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676).
Congreve’s Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700) are similar and extremely amusing in their portraits of love and the social strain of marriage. The relatively realistic but somewhat ham-
fisted Farquhar is best known for The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707), while the rather different and morally fierce (in the Jonsonean sense) Wycherley achieved renown for The Country Wife (c.1675). These
comedies, especially The Country Wife caused great controversy for their apparently licentious subject matter, and gave comedy something of a bad name (or perhaps a rightful notoriety that it now lacks
to its cost). Predominantly prose-based, they were so cynical and bawdy as to offend the new audience of the theatre with frivolity and sexual innuendoes, sexually charged widows and absurd fops.
Jeremy Collier’s attack upon these plays, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), led to the prosecution of Congreve and generally shook up the theatrical world.
Though now the best known, it was not the only savaging of contemporary theatre by any stretch of the imagination. These attacks did nothing for drama, however. The plays of Farquhar and the rest
turned out to be the dying gasp of the great period of theatre that had begun one and a half centuries before. Not until the 20 th century would new dramatic works be written with such success conceptually
and artistically.

Sheridan and Goldsmith

In TS Eliot’s A Dialogue of Dramatic Poetry, we hear the claim that "There is no precedent for a nation having two great periods of drama". After Restoration comedy had faded out, one could have been
forgiven for presuming that England was going to fail absolutely to buck that trend. It is hard to find any real continuity in drama at the best of times, it being a form moulded around (fickle) popular tastes to
a greater degree even than fiction. As Raymond Williams claims, "Drama often shows more clearly and more quickly than the other art, the deep patterns and changes in our general ideas of reality" 4.
However, even despite the lack of continuity and the inevitable changes in popular taste, it is strange how neglected drama became after the 1700. The situation was not helped by the second-rate work of
Colley Cibber who was much more concerned about spectacle and fame than literary worth: see The Careless Husband (1704) and the work of contemporary Richard Steele (The Tender Husband
(1705) etc.). Only with Richard Sheridan’s fame after The Rivals (1775) and his later acclaimed work, The School for Scandal (1777), was there some kind of resurgence in the quality of new theatrical
writing. However, these were not plays of any great gravity or depth, and did not actually stretch comic theatre far from Congreve and all (although by this time the Restoration comedies were playing in
toned-down versions leading to a situation in the 19 th century where they were ignored completely). Even Sheridan came to drama by accident when hit by poverty in the early 1770s due to various
difficulties concerning his marriage to Eliza Linley. A satirist who wrote with wit and an easy sense of how to captivate the audience while mocking the hypocrisy of the world, Sheridan was effectively ruined
by drama itself, sent into debt by the purchase of a theatre and payment of actors’ wages.

Other than Sheridan, only Oliver Goldsmith genuinely merits a mention as a significant dramatist of the time. Primarily, Goldsmith was a novelist (see The Vicar of Wakefield) but in the late 1760s took to
writing plays, starting with the well-received comedy The Good Natur’d Man in 1768. He reacted strongly against the playwriting of the period (see Richardson, Sterne etc.): what "London Magazine"
termed, "that monster called Sentimental Comedy", and was therefore considered a literary hero of sorts for a while. She Stoops to Conquer (1773) was a particular success with its amusing premise of a
man mistakenly staying at a private house under the impression that it is an inn and, under this illusion, making love to the daughter of the ‘landlord’, thinking she is a servant girl.

The Early Nineteenth Century

The first half of the 19th century was notable in drama for being a time when numerous great poets were writing, almost none of them wanting to write for the theatre. One exception was Shelley, who wrote
The Cenci – a verse melodrama much indebted to Shakespeare - in 1819. It was not to be performed in his time, though, because its main concerns were incest and atheism. These were not popular or
accepted subjects for the wealthy middle-classes who attended plays and possessed far less enthusiasm and intelligence than those of the Elizabethan or Jacobean ages.

One of the greatest problems faced by playwrights during the nineteenth century was the fact that where once the stage had represented on some level a version of life in court or home, now it bore little
resemblance to the society it intended to portray, let alone the individuals within it. Therefore, with no contemporary drama to speak of, even versions of older plays were unremarkable. Certainly, there
existed at this time fine critics such as William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey writing about drama, but there was little modern for them to focus upon. Even the great Lord Byron, writing in Italy, could not
raise the standard with his poorly received plays from 1821 such as The Two Foscari and Cain. For a man of his time, Byron was surprisingly interested in the field of drama, but could do little to restore it
to greatness, remaining best known for his verse.

The Later Victorians

Thomas William Robertson was initially an actor and only turned to writing for the stage upon his retirement at the age of thirty-five. He was to be one of the few figures of dignity in 19 th century theatre.
Realising the lack of realism and contemporary feeling in plays, he attempted to spin a natural and life-like web around his comedies. Best known now for his play Caste (1829-71), Robertson began with
reasonably well-received works such as David Garrick (1864) and Ours (1866). Though slightly crude and artless to read, the plays seem less cripplingly sentimental or melodramatic when presented on
stage. This argument would not have convinced WB Yeats, though. Defining the bookish era of the Modernist – he proclaimed, half a century later, "We do not think a play can be worth acting and not worth
reading".

To put Robertson’s mediocre achievements in perspective, at this time the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was writing Peer Gynt (1867) and was only a decade away from his great play The Doll’s
House (1879). It was Ibsen and none of the mid-19 th century English writers who came to influence the development of the play in the 20 th century. Possessed of a greater poetic style by far than that of his
British contemporaries, he has (unusually for a Scandinavian) been wholly accepted in England. This is perhaps because he wrote during this appalling vacuum of quality drama in England, just as
Boccaccio is accepted as the greatest storyteller of the medieval world before Chaucer partially for sheer lack of competition.

Wilde and Bernard Shaw

With the background of Gilbert and Sullivan’s English comic operettas, which set the tone for turn of the 20 th century drama 5, the brilliantly witty Oscar Wilde shot to fame briefly before finding himself
imprisoned for his then-illegal homosexual activities. His first two plays (Vera (1883) and The Duchess of Padua (1891)) shared much with the drama of the earlier half of the century in that they were dull
and insignificant. However, due to his considerable powers of satire, his eye for society’s details, and his peculiarly wonderful way with insults and aphorisms, Wilde achieved great success with A Woman
of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). These followed the initial popular triumph of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and have become
popular again in the 1990s and 2000s.

At the start of the 20th century, a new group of playwrights emerged combining wit and thought in a way (Wilde aside) unheard of in England since the early 18 th century. William Butler Yeats tried his hand at
drama, adding his Irish mysticism and a lyrical element to The Countess Cathleen (1892) and The Land of the Heart’s Desire (1894). Far greater in a dramatic sense was Yeats’s friend and fellow
Irishman John Millington Synge who wrote a controversial but honest comic account of the Irish character in The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Various other plays by Synge have lasted well and
are worth investigation, including the tragedy Riders to the Sea (1904) and his late success Red Roses for Me (1946). In the late 1910s and 1920s, W. Somerset Maugham – already famed for his prose
fiction – was inspired by the new vogue in dramatic writing and indulged with two refined comedies: Caesar’s Wife and Home and Beauty (both 1919) and various other ever more cynical and Restoration
comedy- like plays.

However, it was the work of George Bernard Shaw that truly astounds and at the time re-enlivened the stage. In an extraordinarily long life and writing career, Shaw went from working as a notable critic of
the theatre to being its best author with Man and Superman (1903), Pygmalion (1913), Heartbreak House (1919) and vast swathes of other exceptionally intelligent and idea-based plays in the vein of
Ibsen (who he greatly admired). He wrote with ease on subjects that made others uneasy such as prostitution and narcissism, but with brave honesty expressed in the unrepressed voices of his characters.
A difficult man with strong opinions, Shaw used his comedies as ammunition in his personal fight against the foolish assumptions of the masses.

The Twentieth Century

The attempts of TS Eliot to contribute to verse drama were not so much unsuccessful as unwanted. It is hard to find even an Eliot fanatic who will claim that the plays add much to the corpus of English
dramatic literature. Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a play in verse about the death of Thomas Becket, remains the best known and favourite of his dramas, coming after his ambitious fragments,
Sweeney Agonistes (1932) and The Rock (1934). The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950) and suchlike did not lack ideas – the former having something of the conceptual background of
his poem "Burnt Norton" - but failed to find an audience. He misunderstood (or more likely ignored) the nature of a theatre audience and its desires as much as he did that of poetry. But the poetic form is
more forgiving than drama and pretension less a sin in a poet than a necessity. This has never been true of playwrights. As such, like WH Auden’s plays (with Christopher Isherwood, e.g. The Dance of
Death (1935)), Eliot’s were somewhat specialist and have only been kept alive by their author’s fame in the field of poetry. It is ironic that Eliot’s greatest West End success has been Andrew Lloyd
Webber’s goldmine musical Cats (1981-) based upon the distinctly light and Edward Lear-esque Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939).

With the unstoppable rise of the cinema, the 1930s and 1940s became times that saw better actors than they did dramatists: particularly since Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and others of their ilk took to
the stage. Despite or perhaps because of their popularity, JB Priestley (An Inspector Calls (1947)) and the most witty and camp writer since Wilde, Noel Coward (notably Fallen Angels (1925) and Private
Lives (1933)), were not taken very seriously. However, Priestley is studied in schools regularly and Coward is now having something of a comeback on the stage. The latter’s screenplays from the time of
World War II, such as Brief Encounter (1944), are of equal interest however.

This is, of course, the problem with later 20 th century drama: cinema wins audiences outright with its faster, and therefore modern, pace and infinitely wider possibilities. Certainly, the theatre has its uniquely
intimate setting, and the cinema cannot compete (except with volume and visual extravagance). However, despite the positive effect of the fiercely contemporary and effective Look Back in Anger (1956)
by John Osborne, Samuel Beckett’s radical Waiting for Godot (1956) and the influence of various American writers (particularly Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and David Mamet), the 20 th century has
seen cinema and television rule over most of the Western World. The theatre, steadfastly and with good intentions, has held its metaphorical nose aloft and refused to pander to the desires of the masses. It
has therefore lost all but a narrow and specialist audience. In doing so, it has provoked some sympathy but far more of the cynicism that follows opera around and the repulsive whiff of irrelevance and
inherent snobbery. John Freeman’s recent attack upon the conventional view of theatre is shocking but rings true too often for comfort:
"We have been duped into believing that theatre is entertaining, that it is instructional, that it is celebratory, that it is cathartic… Mainstream theatre does not entertain. If it did we would go more often…
Theatre is not good for us and cinema bad. It’s a class argument and beyond contempt. Why would Pulp Fiction be harmful and Medea not?" 6

Although Freeman goes too far in writing off drama, he does summarise rather effectively the counter argument to the absurd ‘theatre is better than cinema’ stance. Further, he is correct about diminishing
audiences. We go in our hordes to musicals because they are fun and entertaining or sad and moving. We watch films for the same reason. We go to the theatre to receive a blessing from the god of high
art. This is absurd. Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare, Wycherley and the rest – even heavy-handed old Dryden – did not write for an audience of fawning zombies. Without more reaction than a polite
handclap and our suspect claims that the play ‘improved’ us, the theatre will (if it has not completely already) stagnate once again and become the immaterial minority interest it was between the
Restoration and the late 19th century. Certainly, it is true that theatre will become an irrelevance without an audience. We must not fall prey of the easy and foolish belief that sitting on an uncomfortable seat
peering at an unconvincing stage set and some actors we can barely see the expressions of is a more profound or ‘good’ experience than those to be found on the big or small screen. Instead, a new and
popular direction is needed more desperately than in either poetry or fiction. Otherwise, stage drama is likely to become the province of critics alone – a disturbing prospect if ever there was one.