لخّصلي

The Playwrights:

During the Middle Ages nobody is known who could be referred to as a professional English playwright. Pageants and Church plays were often written by members of the Clergy and the writers of plays for touring companies were largely anonymous and few of their works have survived. In the Tudor period, and a little before it, men who earned their living as writers and poets began to be recognisably connected with plays. The earliest professional playwright of whom we know may have been Henry Medwall who wrote a Morality Play and an Interlude, that survive, for performance in the house of his master, John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury. John Heywood, during the reign of Henry VIII, wrote a large number of Interludes for performance at the Court, but when Elizabeth's reign began most plays were still written by people we would regard as amateurs or occasional playwrights. The increasing professionalism of the acting companies, however, meant that they increasingly needed to employ professional dramatists to provide them with the large and continually changing repertory that they required. The first wave of professional playwrights were mostly University educated men who earned a living from their pens. These men were incredulous and envious when subsequently confronted by less well educated playwrights such as Shakespeare, the son of a glover, who seems to have learned his skills as a member of the acting profession and became a writer without being educated in the great Universities, who became rich through his connection with the theatre while many of the better qualified University playwrights lived and died in poverty, given only a few pounds for each of their plays. Shakespeare earned money as a Sharer in the Theatre Company (given a proportion of the Theatre's profits for every production rather than just a wage), a position that he probably gained largely 7 because of his acting background.

The form which Elizabethan plays took was still developing at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign.) Elizabethan Universities studied Greek and Roman plays in the original language, and the students sometimes performed them within the University. During Elizabeth's reign translations of these Greek and Roman plays became widely available and began to have a heavy influence upon English playwrights. Greek and Roman Plays were largely divided into two genres, Comedy and Tragedy. The first full length English Comedy, written in about 1553, was Ralph Roister Doister - written by Nicholas Udall, former headmaster of Eton - in which Ralph, a character based on the Roman Dramatist Plautus' stereotypical Braggart, pursues a widow who is betrothed to an absent sea captain, until the widow finally drives him off with the help of her maids armed with mops and pails. The first full length English Tragedy was Gorboduc - written in 1561 by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville - which tells the story of a mythical English King in a style in imitation of the Roman Dramatist Seneca, complete with choruses and long rhetorical speeches. Gorboduc also influenced the later creation of a peculiarly English dramatic genre, not based on Classical examples, the Chronicle or History play which was neither Comedy nor Tragedy, but told the story of a genuine Historical period - usually the reign of a particular English Monarch. It is not known which was the first English History play, but early examples included Shakespeare's Henry VI (eventually a trilogy of plays) and Marlowe's Edward II. Originally English Tragedies and Comedies tended to be written in close imitation of Greek and Roman models and much was made of the Classical rules of writing plays rules which Renaissance writers took from Aristotle's Poetics and expanded upon. These rules included the assumption that Tragedy and Comedy should never mix and that a play should take place according to the Unities of Time and Place meaning that the stage should represent a single place and all of the play's action should take place within a single fictional day at most. Fortunately English playwrights increasingly rejected the restrictions of slavishly following Classical models and began to write Tragedies and Comedies in a much looser and more relaxed style. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, for example, a bloodthirsty tale of murder and revenge, generally ignored the Classical rules and strongly influenced many subsequent Elizabethan plays including Shakespeare's early Titus Andronicus and his later Hamlet (it is even suspected that Thomas Kyd may have been the author of an early Hamlet play that existed before Shakespeare's). It also became traditional for comic characters to appear in even the most serious of Tragedies, like the comic gravedigger in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

At the same time that the genres of English plays were becoming fixed and accepted, a particular form of dramatic poetry was discovered to be ideal for dramatic composition. This was blank verse - first used in Gorboduc. Blank verse was usually unrhymed (except for occasional couplets in significant places) and used ten syllables a line divided into five iambic feet of alternately unstressed and stressed syllables. The main advantage of blank verse was that despite being regular and poetical it could be made to sound very much like natural English speech. Early blank verse was very regular, with all sentences end-stopped (finishing exactly at the end of the blank verse line) and with very little variation in the stresses and pauses in the lines. As time passed Marlowe, Shakespeare and other dramatists began to use blank verse in a much more flexible and inventive manner - allowing sentences to run from one line into the next and finish wherever in the line was necessary, breaking the blank verse rules when it suited them to allow extra syllables in the line or irregular stresses and pauses. Generally speaking the later a blank verse play was written the more natural its language sounds. Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists often used a mixture of blank verse and prose, usually giving the unstructured prose (following no poetical rules and without line endings) to their comical or rustic characters or those who for some other reason were considered more casual in their speech than the significant or serious characters who routinely spoke verse. The majority of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were written in blank verse after Gorboduc, but some were written in other forms, such as prose or rhyming couplets.

6- Politics and Religion:

Elizabeth began her reign in a fast changing and dangerous period for the English nation. Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, had broken off from the Catholic Church and established the Protestant Church of England. After the death of Henry and his sickly son Edward the throne had passed on to Elizabeth's older sister Mary, a Catholic - who had brought England back into the Church of Rome, and had married the firmly Catholic King of Spain. When Mary died without children the Protestant Elizabeth inherited the throne and England became a Protestant Nation once more. Each stage in this process involved bloody trials and executions of those following the wrong religion - and Elizabeth had to consider the fact that a large proportion of her population had been or still was Catholic. While some Catholics continued their religion secretly and otherwise supported Elizabeth, others were openly rebellious. Elizabeth was excommunicated by the Pope who encouraged all Catholic Kings and subjects to work to assassinate Elizabeth and overthrow her regime. Elizabeth managed to resist the Northern Rebellion - where Catholic Lords and subjects in the North rose up against her and escaped a number of planned assassination - attempts. She also fought off the Spanish Armada, an invasion force blessed by the Pope.

In times such as these, plays, which gathered huge crowds and exposed them to a particular view of the world - which could be an excellent form of propaganda - were viewed with a great deal of concern. This is hardly surprising since a single performance at a playhouse could attract 3000 spectators when the population of London was only 200,000. This meant that one and a half percent of the London population were gathered in one place and exposed to the same influence at every performance - enough people to begin a riot or even a rebellion. To protect against these threats, the Elizabethan authorities imposed a range of laws and systems to ensure that they could control just about every word that was spoken onstage. The official in charge of this control was the Lord Chamberlain, but most of the real work was carried out by his subordinate, the Master of the Revels. Before the performance of any play, the script had to be submitted to the Revels Office for checking and the Master of the Revels made any alterations in the script that he felt necessary - making sure that the play remained morally and politically safe and did not trespass into religious matters or use inappropriate blasphemies. The punishments for writers whose works were felt to be seditious or offensive could be extreme, including imprisonment, torture and mutilation - but in fact the Elizabethan Censors were more lenient than is sometimes suggested and did not come down heavily on many actors or dramatists during this period.

One of the major incidents of suppression during the Elizabethan period was prompted by the production of Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson's The Isle of Dogs. The exact content of this play is not known, as it was ruthlessly suppressed and never printed, but it has been suggested that it may have been a satirical attack on Elizabeth's courtiers. After the play had been performed in 1597, the players Pembroke's Men and the playwright Ben Jonson were arrested and imprisoned while Thomas Nashe fled to Yarmouth. Nashe's house was searched for papers and Jonson was questioned and then secretly imprisoned with two informers who encouraged him to betray himself to them. The Privy Council was so outraged by the performance that it went as far as to ban all plays in London and its surroundings for much of the rest of the year. After having failed to incriminate himself, however, Jonson was released and his imprisonment did not damage his future reputation or prospects in any significant way.

Another major scandal involved Shakespeare's Richard II, a performance of which was specially commissioned by followers of the Earl of Essex, who - unknown to the Players - were planning to stir up support in London for a rebellion against Elizabeth the following day. The Earl, who had lost the Queen's favour and been discredited, led a small band of armed followers through London with the intention of capturing the Queen, but they were not supported by the London populace and the rebellion failed. The reason for choosing the play was that it showed the decline and fall of Richard II, a weak King closely connected to corrupt favourites, who was overthrown by a rebellion led by the Earl of Bolingbroke who had the King murdered and took his crown. Elizabeth was vastly upset by the rebellion and particularly commented upon the attempts to compare her to the corrupt and successfully overthrown Richard II of the play. "I am Richard II, know you not that?" she told Francis Bacon and complained "This tragedy has been played forty times in open streets and houses". Augustine Phillips, one of the leading actors of Shakespeare's Company, was called in and interrogated about the actors' role in the affair, but he maintained that they had known nothing about any seditious intent and that they had simply been encouraged to reprise an old play - SO old that they didn't expect much of an audience - and had been paid ten shillings over the ordinary to perform it. The authorities treated the actors leniently and no punishment seems to have been forthcoming. On the day before Essex was executed Shakespeare's Company, perhaps as a sign of forgiveness, was invited to perform before the Queen.

More typical of the censorship of Elizabethan plays was the suppression of Sir Thomas More a play which was written and then amended by a large group of different playwrights, possibly including Shakespeare who may have written scenes in his own handwriting in the manuscript. It was an odd choice of a subject for a play, since Thomas More was a Catholic Martyr who had been executed by Elizabeth's father for opposing his divorce and establishment of the Church of England. The Master of the Revels disliked many of the scenes within the play and sent it back repeatedly for alterations - particularly to a scene in which More talked with poor rioters, which was seen as particularly dangerous in its presentation of More himself and its dangerous sympathy with rebellious poor people who opposed the Tudor regime Despite many such alterations the play was never considered acceptable and so was never granted a licence to be performed or published. We know the play only because the original manuscript survives.

7- Costume, Scenery and Effects:

Some modern companies consider the Elizabethan performance style to have been very close to what we now call Minimalism. Companies like the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express claim to be closer to the original Elizabethan performance style because they perform in modern dress, with no scenery and few props, and without using modern lighting, sound or stage effects. Although Minimalist performances of this kind may be closer to the Elizabethan originals than, for example, the spectacular Victorian performances of Shakespeare's plays (with detailed painted backdrops and archaeologically correct costumes and stage designs, and sometimes even real horses, real boats and real canals) they are still very far from Elizabethan performances. In reality the Elizabethans used far more sophisticated props, costumes and stage effects than is sometimes assumed.

Elizabethan costuming seems to have been a strange combination of what was (for the Elizabethans) modern dress, and costumes which culturally accurate - while not being genuinely historically of -had a historical or foreign flavour. A famous picture of a performance of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (one of the few pictures of Elizabethan actors at work) shows Titus in a breastplate and a supposedly historical garment, very loosely based on the Roman toga, while one of his guards (in a play set in Roman times) wears the familiar armour of an Elizabethan soldier and another wears a foreign looking, possibly Turkish influenced, suit of armour. Many of the authentic Elizabethan garments owned by a Theatre Company had been passed onto them, secondhand, by members of the nobility. Strict laws were in force about what materials and types of clothes could be worn by members of each social class laws which the actors were allowed to break onstage - so it would be immediately obvious to the Elizabethan audience that actors wearing particular types of clothes were playing people of particular backgrounds and types. Extensive make-up was almost certainly used, particularly for the boys playing female parts and with dark make-up on the face and hands for actors playing "blackamoors" or "Turks". There were also conventions for playing a number of roles - some of which we know from printed play scripts. Mad women, like Ophelia, wore their hair loose and mad people of both sexes had disordered clothing. Night scenes were often signalled by characters wearing nightdresses (even the Ghost of Hamlet's father appears in his nightgown, when Hamlet is talking with his Mother in her chamber).
Death brought out a particular ingenuity in Elizabethan actors and they apparently used copious quantities of animal blood, fake heads and tables with holes in to stage decapitations (an illustration of an Elizabethan conjuring trick shows a table with two holes in it, one boy sitting hidden under the table with only his- apparently decapitated the table with his - head above it another lying on the top of apparently missing - head hidden belowi of this kind were almost certainly used on the Elizabethan stage). Beads, hands, eyes, tongues and lines were dramatically cut off it: tricks onstage, and probably involved some sort of blood-drenched stage trick.
Death brought out a particular ingenuity in Elizabethan actors and they apparently used copious quantities of animal blood, fake heads and tables with holes in to stage decapitations (an illustration of an Elizabethan conjuring trick shows a table with two holes in it, one boy sitting hidden under the table with only his- apparently decapitated the table with his - head above it another lying on the top of apparently missing - head hidden belowi of this kind were almost certainly used on the Elizabethan stage). Beads, hands, eyes, tongues and lines were dramatically cut off it: tricks onstage, and probably involved some sort of blood-drenched stage trick.
A number of other simple special effects were used. Real cannons and pistols (loaded with powder but no bullet) were fired off when ceremonial salutes or battles were required. Thunder was imitated by rolling large metal cannon balls backstage or by drumming, while lightning was imitated by fireworks set off in the "heavens" above the stage. Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale calls for a man to be pursued across the stage by a bear and there is much academic argument about whether a real (tame) bear would have been used or whether it would have been a man in a bear costume (probably a real bear skin). Some plays bring dogs onstage, although it has been suggested that Shakespeare only once used a dog in his plays because the animal proved to be more trouble than it was worth.

One thing that Elizabethan theatres almost completely lacked was lighting effects. In the outdoor theatres, like the Globe, plays were performed from two o'clock until about four or four thirty in the afternoon (these were the times fixed by law, but plays may sometimes have run for longer) in order to take advantage of the best daylight (earlier or later performances would have cast distracting shadows onto the stage). Evening performances. without daylight, were impossible. In the hall theatres, on the other hand, the stages were lit by candlelight- - which forced them to occasional, probably musical, breaks while the candles were hold trimmed and tended or replaced as they burned down. Elizabethan actors carried flaming torches to indicate that a scene was taking place at night, but this would have made little difference to the actual lighting of the stage, and spectators simply had to use their imagination. The nearest that the Elizabethans came to lighting effects were fireworks, used to imitate lightening or magical effects - the devils in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus apparently cavorted around the stage with squibs, small exploding fireworks, held in their mouths.