The Emergence of English Public Theatres: A Historical Overview - Prof. Goicoechea de Jorg, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

¡Descarga The Emergence of English Public Theatres: A Historical Overview - Prof. Goicoechea de Jorg y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! The Beginning of English Public Theatres During the 16th century, the theatre firmly establishes itself in England as a form of entertainment that is liked by all social levels. As we saw last week, at the very beginning the theatre was something for the commons. Mystery plays, which were part of religious festivals and represented biblical scenes, or the morality plays, which recreated stories which provided the audience a particular moral guidance, were performed in the streets as something everyone could enjoy. Lately the foundation of companies of players that performed seasonally took place, resulting in the professional players that performed on the Elizabethan stage. So occurred that the mystery and morality plays were slowly substituted by those tours and in 1572 a law definitely stopped the work of those companies that lacked formal patronage by labeling them vagabonds, as a measure against the plague. Between 1580-1642, we find more than 1000 plays. Playwrights often work together in the same production, comedy and tragedy are often combined. In 1567, James Burbage built the first public theatre in London. As I mentioned in a previous class, before James Burbage built the first public theatre the first public building dedicated exclusively to theatrical performances, comedians used to perform in the inn patios, among the coming and going of travellers, servants, grooms and horses. It was this uncomfortable situation, together with the proverbial rudeness of the innkeepers that forced Burbage and his colleagues to look for an independent location. Burbage theatre hall reproduces the form of the patios, with the open corridors that led to the rooms, together with the round shape characteristic of the round enclosures reserved for the gruesome shows with bears, bulls and dogs, which the Elizabethans liked so much. The building was able to accommodate roughly 3,000 people. Other theatre halls were built in subsequent years imitating Burbage’s. The Rose, where the most famous actor of those times, Edward Alleyn (1566-1626), reaped success, The Swan, The Fortune, and the legendary The Globe, they all followed the same structure. The authorities disliked those public performances and this led the local players to the PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT1 suburbs, especially to the liberty of Southwark, to which dwellers could access but which remained outside the jurisdiction of the city of London. The performances were publicized along the streets of London, showing some hint about the themes of the play that was been announced. The beginning of the representation was marked by lifting a flag in the roof of the theatre; a trumpeter would also announce the impending play in song. And it was finished with time enough to allow the people to return to their houses before dark, (remember that these buildings were located outside the city limits). By the end of the 16th century we find eight theatres in a city of 200,000 inhabitants. Under Elisabeth everyone watched the same plays at the playhouses, the court enjoyed the same performances as the commons, but later on, with the development of private theatres, drama became more refined, focusing on the tastes and values of an upper-class audience, as it became a business. Actors: The career of acting was considered as exclusively masculine. As I told you the other day in France and Italy there were numerous examples of women on stage, but England so nothing of that until 1660, when, for the first time, an actress interpreted the role of Desdemona in Othello. So the famous roles of Juliet, Portia or sweet Cordelia were interpreted by young men, normally sons of actors, who were apprentices to the trade. This custom was, of course, not very pleasing neither aesthetically nor for the sake of verisimilitude, but it fulfilled a very prosaic purpose. The social position of the actors, with some exceptions, was not a very respected one, and when they were on tour in the provinces, they normally lived all together in the big halls of the inns. This arrangement allowed them to leave their wives and children in London, simplifying to a great extent the lodging problem. Moreover, the life of the actor was meant to be so exhausting that women were not considered fit for it. The majority of the plays required them to be in constant movement, jumping, falling, climbing, fighting with swords, as well as playing several roles at once. Each actor was supposed to play at least four or five different roles in each performance, given the enormous PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT1 intended to be performed by his pupils. However, it was not published until 1567, eleven years after its author's death. The plot of the play centres on a wealthy widow, Christian Custance, who is engaged to Gawyn Goodluck, a merchant. Ralph Roister Doister is prompted by a friend to woo Christian Custance but his pompous attempts do not succeed. Ralph then tries with his friends to break in and take Christian Custance by force but they are defeated by her servants and run away. The merchant Gawyn arrives shortly after and the play concludes happily. The play is probably best described as a farce. • George Gascoigne (1530-1577), Supposes (1556). Based on I Suppositi (1509), by Ariosto (who combined elements by Plautus and Terence). Ariosto is most famous for his Orlando Furioso, published in its final version in 1532. Ariosto's work was the most celebrated narrative poem of the Italian high Renaissance. Numerous artists have used its characters and incidents for paintings and musical works. At that time Chivalric epics, such as Pulci's Morgante and Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, and traditional tales of knights, were highly popular. Orlando Furioso presented a rich variety of characters, mixed romance, epic, and lyrical poetry, and made fun of outmoded chivalric manners, but not in the spirit of Don Quixote, which appeared much later (1605-1615). The leader of the Moors, Rodomonte, is cruel and treacherous, but otherwise the Christian knights and the Moors ride together in French woods in their search of adventures. Ariosto also wrote seven satires, beginning in 1514, and five comedies. As a member of a group organized to produce plays by Plautus and Terence at the court of Ferrara, he became especially familiar with their approaches to comedy, and their work provided the model for his own dramas. I suppositi (The Pretenders) was based on Terence's The Eunuch and Plautus's The Captives. George Gascoigne (c. 1535 – 7 October 1577) is the translator of two important Italian comedies, Ariosto's Supposes and Euripides Jocasta, which were performed in 1566 at Grays Inn, the most aristocratic of the renaissance London Inns of Court. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT1 Gascoigne was an English poet, soldier, artist, and unsuccessful courtier. He is considered the most important poet of the early Elizabethan era, following Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and leading to the emergence of Philip Sidney. He was the first poet to deify Queen Elizabeth I, in effect establishing her cult as a virgin goddess married to her kingdom and subjects. His most noted works include A Discourse of the Adventures of Master FJ (1573), an account of courtly sexual intrigue and one of the earliest English prose fictions; The Supposes, (performed in 1566, printed in 1573), an early translation of Ariosto and the first comedy written in English prose, which, as I mentioned at the beginning, was used by Shakespeare as a source for The Taming of the Shrew; the frequently anthologised short poem “Gascoignes wodmanship” (1573); and "Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English" (1575), the first essay on English versification. The original author, Ariosto was an Italian writer of the Renaissance who died in 1533 and was best known as the author of the romance epic Orlando Furioso (1516). I Suppositi was fist acted in Ferrara and ten years later in the Vatican. A prose edition was published in Rome in 1524, and the first verse edition was published at Venice in 1551. Gascoigne’s near-translation of Ariosto’s lines reveals certain qualities which in later development characterise the romantic comedy. The “University Wits”: This is the name that receives a group of writers educated at Oxford and Cambridge who chose to write plays for an educated public. They mark the emergence of the professional playwright. The “university wits” will exert a crucial influence in the evolution of English theatre. They began to write in the decade of the 1590’s, just before Shakespeare started his career, and they radically transformed popular drama, bringing their knowledge of the classics, their wit and poetic power to the public stage. The group was composed by: John Lyly (1554-1606) PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT1 Thomas Lodge (1558-1625) Robert Greene (1560-1592) Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) George Peele Some authors also include in this group Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), and Thomas Kyd. The primitive English Tragedy: During the years 1551 and 1590, the English stage lived dominated by the influence of the Latin author of tragedies called Seneca (Cordova a.C.- Rome, 65, tutor of emperor Nero), as can be appreciated in the more important tragedies of this period: Gorboduc by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville (the first theatrical work based on the English chronicles). Jocasta by George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh. Gismond of Salerne The Misfortunes of Arthur by Thomas Hughes and Francis Bacon The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kid The most important aspects of Seneca’s theatre that were adopted by the English theatre can be summarized in five points: 1. The focus of dramatic value is shifted from the words expressed to the rhetoric, or how they are expressed. In Seneca’s tragedies the monologues and speeches are very long and the action nearly non-existent. These plays were not written to be performed but to be recited in front of the emperor. 2. The language: The resource introduced by Seneca was called stichomya, the dialogue in alternative rhymed lines. Speeches were meant to be declamatory rather than performed. It therefore becomes bombastic, very PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT1