The period known as the English Renaissance, approximately1500-1660, saw a flowering of the drama and all the arts. The two candidates for the earliest comedy in English Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1552) and the anonymous Gammer Gurton's Needle (c. 1566), belong to the 16th century.
During the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and then James I (1603-25), in the late 16th and early 17th century, a London-centred culture, that was both courtly and popular, produced great poetry and drama. The English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London. The linguist and lexicographer John Florio (1553-1625), whose father was Italian, was a royal language tutor at the Court of James I, and a possible friend of and influence on William Shakespeare, had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. He was also the translator of Montaigne into English. The earliest Elizabethan plays include Gorboduc (1561) by Sackville and Norton and Thomas Kyd's (1558-94) revenge tragedy The Spanish Tragedy (1 592), that influenced Shakespeare's Hamlet.
William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the 'univers'rty wits“ that had monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and incredibly versatile, and he surpassed 'professionals' as Robert Greene who mocked this 'shake-scene' of low origins. He was himself an actor and deeply involved in the running of the theatre company that performed his plays. Most playwrights at this time tended to specialise in, either histories, or comedies, or tragedies. but Shakespeare is remarkable in that he produced all three types. His 38 plays include tragedies, comedies and histories. In addition, he wrote his so-called 'problem plays', or 'bitter comedies', that includes, amongst others, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, A Winter's Tale and All's Well that Ends Well.
His early classical and Italianate comedies, like A Comedy of Errors, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 15903, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar, based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, which introduced a new kind of drama.
Though most of his plays met with success, it was in his later years, that Shakespeare wrote what have been considered his greatest plays: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear. Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. In his final period. Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.
Other important playwrights of this period include Christopher Marlowe. Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher Francis Beaumont, Ben Jonson, and John Webster.
Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), Thomas Dekker (c. 1572 1632), John Fletcher (1579-1625) and Francis Beaumont (1584-1616). Marlowe (1564-1593) was born only a few weeks before Shakespeare and must have known him. Marlowe's subject matter is different from Shakespeare's as it focuses more on the moral drama of the renaissance man than any other thing. Marlowe was fascinated and terrified by the new frontiers opened by modern science. Drawing on German lore, he introduced the story of Faust to England in his play Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), a scientist and magician who is obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man's technological power to its limits. At the end of a twenty-four years' covenant with the devil he has to surrender his soul to him. Beaumont and Fletcher are less-known, but they may have helped Shakespeare write some of his best dramas. and were popular at the time. One of Beaumont and Fletcher's chief merits was that of realising how feudalism and chivalry had turned into snobbery and make-believe and that new social classes were on the rise. Beaumont's comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), satirises the rising middle class and especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all.
Ben Jonson (1572/3-1637) is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair.[12] He was also often engaged to write courtly masques. ornate plays where the actors wore masks. Ben Jonson's aesthetics have roots in the Middle Ages as his characters are based on the theory of humours. However, the stock types of Latin literature were an equal influence.[13] Jonson therefore tends to create types or caricatures. However, in his best work, characters are 'so vitally rendered as to take on a being that transcends the type'.[14] He is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. Jonson's famous comedy Volpone (1605 or 1606) shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist, vice being punished by vice, virtue meting out its reward. Others who followed Jonson's style include Beaumont and Fletcher, whose comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (0. 1607-08), satirizes the rising middle class and especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much about literature at all. In the story, a grocer and his wife wrangle with the professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in the play.
A popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, which had been popularised earlier in the Elizabethan era by Thomas Kyd (1558-94), and then subsequently developed by John Webster (1578-1632) in the 17th century. Webster's major plays, The White Devil (c. 1609 1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1612/13), are macabre, disturbing works. Webster has received a reputation for being the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatist with the most unsparingly dark vision of human nature. Webster’s tragedies present a horrific vision of mankind and in his poem 'Whispers of lmmortality,‘ T. S. Eliot memorably says, that Webster always saw "the skull beneath the skin'. While Webster‘s drama was generally dismissed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there has been 'a strong revival of interest' in the 20th century.[15]
Other revenge tragedies include The Changeling written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Atheist's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur, first published in 1611, Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois by George Chapman, The Malcontent (c. 1603) of John Marston and John Ford's ’Tis Pity She's a Whore. Besides Hamlet, other plays of Shakespeare's with at least some revenge elements, are Titus Andronicus. Julius Caesar and Macbeth.
George Chapman (?1559-?1634) was a successful playwright who produced comedies (his collaboration on Eastward Hoe led to his brief imprisonment in 1605 as it offended the King with its anti-Scottish sentiment), tragedies (most notably Bussy D'Ambois) and court masques (The Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn), but who is now remembered chiefly for his translation in 1616 of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, a closet drama written by Elizabeth Tanfield Cary (1585-1639) and fitst published in 1613, was the first original play in English known to have been written by a woman.
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