British Drama

A survey:

1 Medieval Drama:

 The first Medieval plays told religious stories and were

performed in or near churches. These first plays were called
Miracle plays or Mystery plays.
 They were derived from the Bible and used events of religious
history as subjects for drama: The disobedience of Adam and
Eve, Noah and the great flood, Abraham and Isaac; events in the
life of Jesus Christ, and so on.
 The plays were performed by traveling groups of actors, on a
kind of stage on wheels called a pageant and that could be
moved to different places.
 Another kind of plays in the Medieval period were the Morality
plays. The characters in these plays were not persons (such as
Adam or Abraham in previous plays) but embodiments of
virtues or bad qualities (such as truth, vice, greed, revenge…).
 On the whole medieval drama was very simple in theme and
action without real plot or characterization.
2 Elizabethan Drama:

 The 16th century, or the Elizabethan Age (named after Queen

Elizabeth I) is the golden age of British drama.
 An unprecedented movement of playwriting and performing in
theatres began first reviving the classical tradition.
 For a long time, classical Greek and Roman plays (mainly
tragedies) were studied and performed in University theatres
(1560s to 1580s) and the first British plays of this period were
written by graduates from these Universities, the so-called
University Wits that include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas
Kyd, Robert Greene, Ben Jonson,… And their plays achieved
huge success and contributed to establishing drama as a popular
and dominant cultural and literary form of the period.
 How to explain this success and the importance of drama?
-The general context (the Renaissance) and spirit of the age also
explain this popularity of drama. The Elizabethan Age is a period
of deep reform and achievement in different fields. The spirit of
the age is evidenced in its interest in such fields as exploration,
navigation, geography, science but also theatre.
-In The Routledge History of English Literature we can read: ‘It
was the dramatists who brought the issues of the age into
clearest focus’.
 The 1rst Elizabethan plays were derived from Latin sources
(Seneca, Plautus, Terence) and were also influenced by Medieval
Morality plays. 1rst comedy: Ralph Roister Doyster (1552), 1rst
tragedy: Gorboduc (1561)
 Despite the adherence to classical models, there is a very important
new element in the first plays: the essential Englishness of the
characters and the settings.

 In 1592 an important tragedy by Thomas Kyd The Spanish

Tragedy, established the revenge play tradition showing the
influence of Seneca. The same period The Comedy of errors: a
reworking of a Plautus comedy by the young Shakespeare.
 Christopher Marlowe, considered as a pioneer of British drama
wrote plays of great originality and richness that were very popular
and will become masterpieces until the present, despite the short
life of the writer (he was killed in a pub raw at the age of 26).
 Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Edward
the Second… these plays explore the boundaries of the new world
and the risks that mankind will run in the quest for power and for
knowledge.
 Marlowe is also known for introducing a form of writing called
blank verse (verse without rhyme)