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Introduction
The drama that emerged during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I in early modern England offered a new way of exploring and evaluating human experience that continues to be of fundamental importance today.

In the wake of the establishment of permanent, professional playhouses in London,

theatre emerged as a significant national institution, attracting audiences from a wide range of social backgrounds, that expressed and contributed to cultural and intellectual change.

potentialities of the new medium emergining in late 1580s.

Theatre as a new organ of consciousness. Human possibilities envisaged with a new freedom. A new sense of individuality. Exploration of human possibility; its new visions of the human situation.

Profoundly disruptive potentiality of this imaginative freedom Theatre's participation in the new intellectual developments of the age.

Christopher Marlowe, whose artistic powers were "almost equal" to those of William Shakespeare, #offers# an amoral #presentation# blasphemous defiance, tyranny, self-idolatry, and cruelty as an heroic achievement, exulted by the poetry of his "mighty line". We're forced to participate in his heroic self-aggrandizement. pulsating energy of the poetry "Tamburlaine is a strange, anomalous work because it embodies the relase of energy characteristic of Elizabethan tragedy, but in a heroic form which puzzles our sensibilities" "compacted, rigorously theatrical explorations of power and desire"

"Marlowe's use of the theater not only develops new attitudes but permits the exploration of new knowledge. His poetic powers are freed to project a new version of human values and possibilities. The hero worship liberates mind and imagination: energy normally locked up in maintaining inhibition or repression is freed for asserting and envisaging what would otherwise be unthinkable."

Doctor Faustus is the first great English tragedy.

A new synthesis
mingle-mangle and hodge-podge (John Lyly) -- a new cultural and aesthetic synthesis.

Popular theatres
Since the twentieth century, the considerable structural / essential #contribution# of the traditions and practices of the popular theatre to the (materials, dramaturgy) structure and functions of the new poetic drama of the period has come to be recognised. The #early modern theatre in England# derived many of its themes and forms of expression from its native popular theatre.

Generations of actors Its stagecraft "a climax to centuries of mediaeval experiments rather than a new beginning of Renaissance inspiration."

Defined broadly, two major strands in the indigenous performance traditions of England contributed to the legacy that the Elizabethan commerical theatre inherited from its predecessors. Firstly and more distantly, there were the theatres of religious worship associated with the Roman Catholic Feast of Corpus Christi, which the Elizabethan State actively censored, surpressed, and eventually extinguished, that took the form of large-scale cycles of plays, performed by members of the community, that dramatised episodes in a Biblical narrative stretching from Creation, the Garden of Eden, and the Flood, through the Nativity, the life of Jesus, the Crucifiction, and Resurrection of Jesus, to Doomsday and the Last Judgment. Secondly, and more immediately and significantly, there were the theatres of social recreation, in which compact plays were performed by small casts of professional actors, whose playing had become increasingly freed from festive ocassions.

Folk culture turned into "effective conventions of dramatic speech and action." Flexibility and adaptability of nonliterary oral traditions of popular theatre source of great strength. The "experience of generations of plebian actors" assimilated and transformed into "the poetic drama of the English Renaissance."

The traditional staging practices of the native medieval theatre in England bequeathed to the Elizabethan playwrights a form of realism grounded in the perception of a double perspective that accepted "mimetic action on two levels simultaneously"--the actual, theatrical presence of the performer who was representing and the fictional, dramatic reality of the person who was represented. Mention locus and the extradramatic dimension of the platea tradition here? integrated into Elizabethan dramaturgy, affecting the dramatic structure and verbal texture of the plays. Shakespeare and his contemporaries modified, experiemented with, and refunctioned these practices

Weimann: not second level in acting or composition, but a second dramatic process or dimension tending to become integrated within the whole.

mode of performance Nonillusionistic stage. locus-centered modes of illusion platea traditions of sport and game structural effect on one another Emblematic conventions Delight in pomp. Theatrical pageantry. Employing forms of speech that recall the festive element of audience contact, rooted in "the common experience and inherited traditions of the people." genre and "mongrel tragicomedy"
 * traditional modes of aside
 * "impertinent" and proverbial speech

Academic and courtly theatres
"How to distinguish the sections. Try to avoid sources or influences. Structure and function. Is it a literary and an oral distinction? Not really by this point. Academic performances, companies of boys, performances at court, in universities, schools, and Inns of Court, John Lyly, etc. Popular theatre had texts too. Cambises, Horestes, etc. So, some other distinction? High/low?"

Literary culture of humanism, including neoclassical drama. Classical, courtly, and humanist material. Renaissance rhetoric.

Visual spectacle and verbal poetry
"poetry in alliance with mimetic action" T. S. Eliot -- poetry and dramatic action working together.

Previously, a double medium, expression in words and expression in physical gesture; M. C. Bradbrook: declaimed speech / action of a violent and conventional kind; pantomime accompanied by declamation. Words and gestures run parallel, reduplicating one another. describe the situation, their identity, and what they are doing. Redundant relation. Poetry in Tamb "not shaped to express what is but to make something happen" The "traditional conventions of speech and gesture" from the traditions of popular theatre absorbed into a "new unity of word and action"; new synthesis serving new and more comprehensive functions. Barber is good on the relation poetry--visual action. Might be able to use gold in showers or sweet fruition of an earthly crown as examples of integration of the two registers/modes of expression.

Marlowe developed new structural resources for the drama, #in which# powerful poetry puts pressure on stage action.

Self-naming in relation to objects on stage creates self out of nothing. "a play of ceremonies and prcessions"; designs his own ceremonies and rituals. aggrandizing/creating his identity. Tries them on for size (triumph through Persepolis turning-point/reversal). Crowning as consumation of aggressive pleasure.

"an immense, desperate energy was required to initiate the use of dramatic form to break apart words and things so as to make way for indefinable energies." Tamburlaine is a dynamic, disruptive energy (no arrival point) retaining indefinable quality. "In the theater, Edward Alleyn could speak the lines usurping divinity, make the gestures confirming them, and have the support, in the process, of a mesmerized audience", such that "circuits are established that curry currents otherwise blocked by conscience". A use of the theatre that develops new attitudes and new knowledge. Hero worship disinhibits.

"Marlowe's poetic powers are freed to project a new vision of human possibilities." "It thus has a satisfying heroic structure which writes large the fantasy of achieving virtual omnipotence."

Genre
There were three times as many comedies performed on the early modern stage as there were tragedies. Wickham's two chapters at the end of volume three (one on comedy to 1576, the other on tragedy) are essential here.

The disguised ruler
Several satiric Court comedies employed the device of a ruler who adopts a disguise in order to observe the current state of that society: John Marston's tragicomedy The Malcontent and The Fawn, Thomas Middleton's The Phoenix, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. The disguise places the ruler on a more equitable footing with his subjects and allows the... Alternative perspective on society that competes with that from the throne. Ironic tone. Ruler confronted with the gap between theory and practice. Miseries of oppression, as well as prevalence of vice and crime.

Wickham discusses it in vol 3 in pre-1576 drama, but I can't see where exactly (index didn't help). Henry V obviously.

The bed trick
The bed trick is a device whereby ... When the Duke Measure for Measure decides to employ it, Shakespeare acknowledges the debt to traditional dramaturgy: "So disguise shall, by th' disguised, / Pay with falsehood false exacting".

Shakespearean theatre

 * English Renaissance theatre
 * English Renaissance plays
 * Playing company & Theatre companies category
 * Boy players
 * Breeches role
 * Masque
 * Shakespeare's plays
 * Shakespeare in performance
 * William Shakespeare & his Category pages
 * List of Shakespearean characters
 * Christopher Marlowe
 * Thomas Kyd
 * Ben Jonson
 * John Webster
 * Thomas Middleton
 * John Marston
 * Thomas Heywood
 * Thomas Dekker
 * George Chapman
 * John Ford
 * English Renaissance
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 * Category:History of theatre