Elizabethan Drama
From the Elizabethan Age come some of the most highly respected plays in Western drama.Oscar Brockett observes in "Theatre and Drama in the Late Middle Ages" that "Elements of the morality play persisted into Shakespeare's time. But as the morality play was increasingly secularized during the sixteenth century, the distinctions vanished between it and the type of play commonly labeled 'interlude."'.He began to write plays, and it was during this time that Kyd had his greatest theatrical success, with the production of The Spanish Tragedy, which was wildly popular with Elizabethan audiences and established Kyd as the founder of a new genre of Elizabethan Drama known as "Blood tragedy." The exact date of the first production of The Spanish Tragedy is unknown. While the Elizabethan audiences appreciated the story of Tamburlaine, it was the poetry that really set this play apart from other plays. As R. C. Bald notes in his introduction to Six Elizabethan Plays, "Before his time dramatic verse had usually been rhymed, but Marlowe's sense of style gave the new measure a strength and dignity previously lacking in dramatic verse."Elizabethan Drama provides a window into a wide spectrum of that society because it appealed to all walks of life, and the plays dealt with citizens of all walks of life.