AN INTRODUCTION TO FAMOUS PLAYWRIGHTS

RENAISSANCE DRAMA

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

He was the greatest Renaissance Playwright ever. He wrote Apprentice Plays, Romantic Comedies, History Plays, Tragedies, Problem Plays or Bitter Comedies, Political Plays, and Romances.

Few authors can match William Shakespeare for broad appeal and sheer endurance.

For centuries he has entertained readers and theatregoers, helping us see our commonalities and revealing our humanness.

His tender scenes of reconciliation, such as that between Lear and Cordelia, continue to break hearts in the 21st century, though they were written centuries ago.

The themes of his love stories, such as Romeo and Juliet, are as fresh and universal today as they must have been when he wrote them. Teenagers still memorize his lines.

Words he coined are an intrinsic part of the English vocabulary.

His works are translated worldwide.

Shakespeare’ Works

Comedies All's Well That Ends Well‡ As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Love's Labour's Lost Measure for Measure‡ The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night's Dream Much Ado About Nothing Pericles, Prince of Tyre*† The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest* Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of

Verona The Two Noble Kinsmen*† The Winter's Tale*

History

•King John •Richard II •Henry IV, Part 1 •Henry IV, Part 2 •Henry V •Henry VI, Part 1† •Henry VI, Part 2 •Henry VI, Part 3 •Richard III •Henry VIII†

Tragedies

•Romeo and Juliet •Coriolanus •Titus Andronicus† •Timon of Athens† •Julius Caesar •Macbeth† •Hamlet •Troilus and Cressida‡ •King Lear •Othello •Antony and Cleopatra •Cymbeline

Shakespeare’ Works

Poems

Shakespeare's sonnets Venus and Adonis The Rape of Lucrece The Passionate Pilgrim The Phoenix and the Turtle A Lover's Complaint

Lost plays Love's Labour's Won Cardenio

Apocrypha

Arden of Faversham The Birth of Merlin Locrine The London Prodigal The Puritan The Second Maiden's Tragedy Sir John Oldcastle Thomas Lord Cromwell A Yorkshire Tragedy Edward III Sir Thomas More

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

Christopher Marlowe,  (baptized Feb. 26, 1564, Canterbury, Kent, Eng.—died May 30, 1593, Deptford, near London), Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare’s most important predecessor in English drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank verse.

In a playwriting career that spanned little more than six years, Marlowe’s achievements were diverse and splendid.

Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts, both performed by the end of 1587; published 1590)

translated Ovid’s Amores (The Loves) and the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia from the Latin

he also wrote the play Dido, Queen of Carthage (published in 1594 as the joint work of Marlowe and Thomas Nashe)

No other of his plays or poems or translations was published during his life. His unfinished but splendid poem Hero and Leander—which is almost certainly the finest nondramatic Elizabethan poem apart from those produced by Edmund Spenser—appeared in 1598.

Faustus followed Tamburlaine and then Marlowe turned to a more neutral, more “social” kind of writing in Edward II and The Massacre at Paris.

His last play was The Jew of Malta, in which he signally broke new ground. It is known that Tamburlaine, Faustus, and The Jew of Malta were

performed by the Admiral’s Men, a company whose outstanding actor was Edward Alleyn, who most certainly played Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas the Jew.

Ben Jonson (1573-1637) He was the one who was most compared and contrasted

with Shakespeare.

He wrote humour comedies, intrigue comedies, and satiric comedies, all of which are marked by a characteristic blend of savagery and humor, of moral feeling and the grim relish of the monstrous absurdities of human nature. He also produced two tragedies on Roman themes.

Among his major plays are the comedies: Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone (1605), Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair (1614).

Other Playwrights George Chapman (1559-1634), John Marston (d. 1634), Thomas Heywood (1570-1641), Thomes Dekker (1575-1626), Cyril Tourneur (1575-1670), Thomas Middleton (1570-1627), Frances Beaumont (1584-1616), John Fletcher ( 1579-1625), Philip Massinger (15B3-1640), John Ford (1596-1666), James Shirley (1596-1666).

Female Playwrights

Katherine of Sutton Lady Jane Fitzalan Lumley (c. 1537-77) Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

(1561-1621)

Katherine of Sutton

The first recorded woman playwright in England was Katherine of Sutton, abbess of Barking nunnery in the fourteenth century. Between 1363 and 1376 the abbess rewrote the Easter dramatic offices because the people attending the paschal services were becoming increasingly cool in their devotions (' deuocione frigessere').

Wishing to excite devotion at such a crowded, important festival (' desiderans … fidelium deuocionem ad tam celebrem celebracionem magis excitare '), Lady Katherine produced unusually lively adaptations of the traditional liturgical plays.

Particularly interesting is her elevatio crucis, one of the few surviving liturgical plays that contains a representation of the harrowing of hell.

In the visitatio sepulchri that follows, the three Marys are acted not by male clerics, which was customary, but by nuns.

The Barking plays are not unique, however, in showing the participation of nuns. In religious houses on the continent women sometimes acted in church dramas, and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim and Hildegard of Bingen wrote Latin religious plays. Although the destruction of liturgical texts in England at the Reformation makes certainty impossible, it is likely, in view of the uniformity of medieval European culture and the considerable authority of women who headed the medieval nunneries, that other English abbesses contributed to the slow, anonymous, communal growth of the medieval religious drama.

Katherine of Sutton was a baroness in her own right by virtue of her position as abbess of Barking. Only women of similar rank wrote drama in England until the Restoration

Lady Jane Fitzalan Lumley (c. 1537-77)

The English Renaissance fostered rigorous classical training for ladies, who, like male humanists, translated the ancients.

The earliest extant English translation of a Greek play was the work of Lady Jane Fitzalan Lumley (c. 1537-77), who made a free and abridged prose version of Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis. Lady Lumley probably translated Euripides shortly after her marriage at the age of 12.

This precocious marvel worked directly from the Greek at a time when secondhand translation from Latin was much more usual.The Latin tragedies of Seneca of course found many translators.

Even Queen Elizabeth, during the early years of her reign, sometime around 1561, translated the chorus of Act II of Hercules Oetaeus.

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621)

Imitations of Senecan tragedy were popular in aristocratic and academic circles. An influential figure in this tradition was Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621).

Mary Sidney studied at home with private tutors and attained proficiency in French, Italian, probably Latin, and perhaps Hebrew.

After her marriage Mary Herbert lived at Wilton House, the earl's home in Wiltshire, where she had four children, collected a notable library, and became famous as a translator, patron of literature, and editor of the Arcadia.

The countess's dramatic activity grew out of her close relationship with her brother, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86).

After Philip's death Mary translated the Marc-Antoine of Robert Garnier (1534-90), the most assured French Senecan dramatist, whose eight tragedies were notable for their vigorous but polished style.

The Countess of Pembroke had Antonie printed in 1592 and thus became the first woman in England to publish a play.

Antonie was reprinted in 1595, 1600, 1606, and 1607; although unacted, it was widely influential.

Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Viscountess Falkland (1586-1639)

Before the Countess of Pembroke died, and probably because of her example, an English-woman for the first time wrote and published a full-length original play.

This was Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, later Viscountess Falkland (1586-1639). More is known about Elizabeth Cary than about most figures of the period because one of her daughters wrote a detailed biography of her mother.

She was startlingly precocious, teaching herself French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, and 'Transylvanian' (Life, p. 5). She loved to read so much that she sat up all night.

As a child she made translations from Latin and French and at 12 found internal contradictions in Calvin's Institutes of Religion—upsetting behavior for a child of good Protestants.

Cary's first play was set in Sicily and dedicated to her husband; the title is unknown and the play is lost. Her second play, dedicated to her sister-in-law, was Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry.

Further Reading

Aston, E. Feminist views on the English stage: women playwrights, 1990-2000. Cambridge Univ Pr, 2003. Print.

Braden, G. Renaissance tragedy and the Senecan tradition: anger's privilege. Yale University Press, 1985. Print.

Callaghan, D. Shakespeare without women: representing gender and race on the Renaissance stage. Routledge, 2000. Print.

Cerasano, SP, and M. Wynne-Davies. Renaissance drama by women: texts and documents. Burns & Oates, 1996. Print.

Cole, Douglas. "Recent Studies in Elizabethan and Jocobean Drama." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 10 2 (1970): 425-38. Print.

Cotton, N. Women playwrights in England. Bucknell Univ. Pr., 1980. Print. DRAMA, R.I.N.R.W.S. "Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama: Criticism,

History, and Performance, 1594-1998." Print. Cotton, Nancy. "Katherine of Sutton: The First English Woman Playwright."

Educational Theatre Journal 30 4 (1978): 475-81. Print. Bassnett, S. "Struggling with the Past: Women's Theatre in Search of a

History." New Theatre Quarterly 5 18 (1989): 107-12. Print. Desens, M.C. The bed-trick in English Renaissance drama: explorations in

gender, sexuality, and power. Univ of Delaware Pr, 1994. Print.

Further Reading

Harp, R., and S. Stewart. The cambridge companion to ben jonson. Cambridge Univ Pr, 2000. Print.

Knapp, J. Shakespeare's tribe: church, nation, and theater in Renaissance England. University of Chicago Press, 2004. Print.

Kuriyama, C.B. Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life. Cornell Univ Pr, 2002. Print.

Levin, R. The multiple plot in English Renaissance drama. University of Chicago Press, 1971. Print.

Marcus, L.S. Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton. Routledge, 1996. Print.

Murphy, B. The Cambridge companion to American women playwrights. Cambridge Univ Pr, 1999. Print.

Saunders, J.W. A biographical dictionary of Renaissance poets and dramatists, 1520-1650. Harvester Press, 1983. Print.

Straznicky, Marta. "Restoration Women Playwrights and the Limits of Professionalism." ELH 64 3 (1997): 703-26. Print.

Worthen, W. B. "Drama, Performativity, and Performance." PMLA 113 5 (1998): 1093-107. Print.

http://www.britannica.com/shakespeare