Episode 44 of the Renaissance English History Podcast was on the Elizabethan Theater.
Books
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro
The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro
Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson
Listen
HistoryExtra podcast that includes the Theater midway through:
http://www.historyextra.com/podcast/romans/mystery-and-drama-romans-and-elizabethans
Blogs and Websites
Elizabeth I’s Working Holiday at Kenilworth
http://kuratory.com/2015/10/02/elizabeth-in-kenilworth/
Shakespeare the Rabble-Rouser (aka How to Screw your Landlord)
http://kuratory.com/2015/11/20/shakespeare-the-rabble-rouser-aka-how-to-screw-your-landlord/
The History Girls interview James Shapiro
http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2015/10/shakespeares-1606-interview-with-james.html
Watch
Shakespeare in Love
Streaming on Amazon or Netflix
A YouTube Playlist of Shakespeare and Elizabethan Theater videos
https://youtu.be/ufkQk0E0SjY?list=PLY0HG7j1maOgQtZFBKuQTT0tmq2H3nelp
Music
Music for Shakespeare’s Theater
https://open.spotify.com/album/4bLMPaRW5aC7RMdhpcyWeG
Measure for Measure: Music of Shakespeare’s Plays
https://open.spotify.com/album/3z1iWfXdTdwFZA6PH7UlIv
Very Rough Transcript of Episode 44: The Elizabethan Theater
Speaker 1: (01:19)
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English history podcast. I’m your host, Heather Tesco, since Shakespeare’s birthday is coming up in April, I’m going to start doing a few episodes this month and next on that great Elizabethan institution, the theater, the theater, this episode will be on the history of Elizabeth theater in general. And then the next episode will be on Shakespeare specifically. And I also want to do some honorable mentions for like Marlo and kid. And you know, some of the other playwrights who aren’t Shakespeare who get overlooked sometimes, but before I start a few reminders first, I’m so happy to announce that I’m going to start working in partnership with the good people at tutor times, which is tutor times.co.uk. And I’m going to be creating some original podcasts with them. You will have noticed that last month I interviewed Malita Thomas on lady Margaret Beaufort, and you will see more content like that coming jointly between us and they are an incredibly well-researched site, a repository of all things, tutor and Stewart.
Speaker 1: (02:30)
So please check them out. Also, I have a book coming out on April 15th. It’s a book, it’s my book. It’s a novel, it’s called sideways and backwards. A novel of time travel and self discovery. And it’s about a contemporary woman who lives in London and she accidentally travels to Cambridge circa 1539. So there’s, you know, time travel involved and she has to try and figure out how to get, if she can get back and figure out how she wound up there. Anyway, it’s very, it’s, it’s sort of like chiclet beach read mixed with historical fiction mixed with Saifai time-travel anyway, it’s my first novel and I’m so, so, so excited about it. And the ebook version is only, only two 99. And here’s the deal. If you preorder it before April 15th, when it’s released, you will also receive a free copy of the audio book narrated by yours, truly.
Speaker 1: (03:35)
So it’s like a deal, right? You get, you pay two 99 for the ebook and you get the audio book from me for free. So I would love it if you would check it out and, you know, buy it, preorder it, especially, and you can go to www.sidewaysandbackwardsbook.comoryoucanfollowthelinkfromtheenglandcastsiteatenglandcast.com. And also I have a really great giveaway going on right now, a tutor historical fiction book bundle with five paperbacks there’s romance, there’s mystery. It’s a really great collection, so you can enter to win. Like I said, tutor historical fiction, there’s Philippa Gregory, but there’s also CJ. Samson. There’s the Matthew shard Lake novel. If you haven’t gotten into Matthew shard Lake, I highly recommend it. So head on over to England cast.com and enter the contest for the tutor book bundle. And finally, finally, I promise finally, this podcast is a proud member of the Agoura podcast network and the Agoura podcast of the month is pretty famous.
Speaker 1: (04:42)
It barely needs an instruction because I’m really positive that if you listen to my podcast, you totally listened to this podcast already, but here we go. Anyway, in case you haven’t discovered this podcast, it’s the history of England by David Crauther. And he’s just now getting through the Wars, the roses, and he’ll be into the Renaissance period soon. So it’s a great time to start listening to him if you haven’t already. But as I said, I’m sure most of you have. So with all of that said, let’s start our talk on the Elizabethan theater, shallowly, the Elizabethan theater, like so much of the uniqueness of Elizabeth and culture, like the music, like I’ve talked about stems from the Protestant reformation, and it’s kind of ironic that it was the same Protestant reformation that helped to form the Elizabethan theater that would wind up sort of being the end of it, bringing it down after the Puritans took power during the English civil war.
Speaker 1: (05:41)
So the Puritans were kind of the Protestants way, far the other direction, and like far to the other direction from Catholics. And, um, they saw anything linked to the theater, not just as sinful, but also as being part of this Catholic past, which I’m going to talk about. And so they wound up ending the theater when they took power during the English civil war. But that is a story that is beyond our time period. And while I think it’s very interesting, I don’t know enough about the English civil war to be able to talk about it. So we’ll leave others to talk about that. The first commercial theater in England wasn’t built until 1567, but plays had been watched and enjoyed for centuries. These plays were mystery plays and they told the stories of the Bible and also the lives of saints. So how it would work is that groups of actors would travel around the countryside and they would act out the stories in the Bible.
Speaker 1: (06:44)
And since these plays were so closely linked to the church calendar to feast days and to holidays, they would be performed to coincide with those feast days. And so they were really seen as, you know, religious sorts of institutions, ways to get people introduced to scripture that might not understand what was going on in church. It’s just another way of getting the story out there. So these plays would work with the troop of actors would show up in a town. They would have a decorated wagon and sometimes they would get out and they would sometimes reenact the entire Bible in a single day in the morning, they would start with the creation and then they would end with the last judgment at night. And these were like huge occasions, right? These villages and towns that were out in the middle of nowhere, that would, that would see these troops showing up from time to time.
Speaker 1: (07:38)
It was a huge occasion. It was a big festival atmosphere, um, lots of pageantry. And it was just this, this whole festival that would spring up around them. People would be selling things. There would be vendors, selling foods, little impromptu markets, all of the sort of traveling or all of the sort of, um, trappings of a festival. But all of that ended when Henry the eighth split from Rome and established the church of England because these plays were so linked to the Catholic feast days and the reformers, as they were working on dissolving the monasteries and getting rid of all of the trappings of Rome, they identified these plays, these mystery plays as one of the corruptions of the Roman Catholic religion and some of the Protestants, the way extreme ones, like I talked about the Puritans eventually would become, they wanted to get rid of the plays completely.
Speaker 1: (08:35)
And these mystery plays were suppressed during the Elizabethan period throughout England though. Interestingly, they still remained popular in some really remote places, especially in Cornwall. And in part, this was because they were performed in Cornish and they were more difficult to police, right? It was harder to, for the sensors to understand what was going on, cause it wasn’t in English. And there had always been a secular side of pageants as well. So Chronicles record monarchs entering London, you know, in Queens would enter. And they would go on this parade through the city and every couple of hundred yards they would stop. And there would be pageants that would all sort of talk about a particular theme. The Monarch being chosen by God or the queen who was going to come and be a peacemaker, whatever the particular theme was, there would be these pageants, but these events were so rare.
Speaker 1: (09:30)
They weren’t really any kind of full time employment for actors. They didn’t require any kind of regularity or they didn’t have any kind of regularity to them. And they, they weren’t available to common people on a regular basis. So with mystery plays going away, there was a gap in the market, as it were, people still want it plays. And the festivity that went along with them, but they couldn’t be religious any longer. So that left room for people like Marlo and Shakespeare and others to come in and fill this need with comedies and tragedies and histories. And also a new group of actors was needed to perform these sorts of plays. So they would travel around the countryside, just like the mystery plays people would and they would put on plays wherever they could. They would put on plays in places like public squares, churches, taverns, all the way up to private homes of Lords and nobleman, early playwrights like John Bell wrote history plays that would dramatize England’s past.
Speaker 1: (10:34)
And they weren’t so tied to the church calendar. And often the plays would be performed at NS cause ins had balconies that would overlook the in yard. And this became part of the setup of the plays. And the idea of this balcony or stage would be incorporated into the playhouses as they developed. So a note about Shakespeare and I’ll talk about obviously him more in the episode that is devoted to him, but it’s interesting. He was born in 1564 in Stratford upon Avon, and there were at least 30 visits by touring theater companies between 1568 and 1597. So it’s really likely that this would have been his first exposure to the world of drama and plays and another potential early influence, which also demonstrates the sort of pageantry side of, of plays at this time was Elizabeth the first visit to Kenilworth in 1575, Elizabeth loved the theater and she loved, you know, all the kind of trappings of theater and music and the pageantry of it all.
Speaker 1: (11:44)
And that’s one of the reasons why it survived as long as it did, despite the protests of the people in London of the Puritans. But in 1575, she went to visit the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley at Kenilworth, where he made a last ditch effort to win her heart and have her agreed to marry him. And it’s this very famous sort of two and a half weeks. She spent there where he put on several lots and lots of pageants, including a mechanical fish that emerged from a Lake with a group of musicians inside and fireworks and plays all the time and Kenilworth was near Stratford. So it was very, very possible that Shakespeare would have had an opportunity as a young boy to visit this festival that sprang up and witnessed some of these pageants. So Elizabeth welcomed the plays and she loved the theater, but not all towns were as welcoming.
Speaker 1: (12:42)
People were worried about the spread of disease and plague and also the crowds that would gather and could become unruly. So some talent. So some towns would actually pay these playing companies to leave before they even had a chance to perform, but some were lucky and would become employed by nobleman like the Earl of Lester’s men. And they would show up in a town and they would show this proclamation that they were employed by such and such. And that would give them a certain kind of recognition, like a good housekeeping seal of approval. And also the authorities wouldn’t want to anger those men by turning away, um, their players. And so they could still perform, but in 1559, a Royal proclamation decreed that all plays needed to be licensed for performance. And then in 1572, another act served her strict the way these touring players could move it labeled any players without a noble patron, as vagabonds who were to be quote, grievously, whipped, and burned through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron of the compass about an inch about that sounds really terrible. This was impart linked to the crackdown on Catholics that I’ve talked about here for a few months since doing the, the episode on Catholics and then with Mary queen of Scots.
Speaker 3: (14:13)
So there were very few,
Speaker 1: (14:14)
A few groups of people who could easily move around the country anonymously and actors, players had been one of these groups and as such, they had the potential to be sort of fronts for Jesuit priests or any others who wanted to hatch a plan to overthrow Elizabeth. So not only were the players themselves, could they be seen as suspect, but the idea of these large audiences where people could gather and talk, um, without being heard, because there were so many people around and, you know, lots of noise, so you could have kinds of conversations or start to spread sedition. And that was seen as, as a security threat, Elizabeth granted the first Royal patent for actors to the servants of the Earl of Leicester in 1574. And these servants were James Burbage. And for partners, they were given the right to play comedies tragedies, interludes stage plays, and other such like in London and in all other towns and boroughs in the realm of England, except that no plays could be performed during the time for common prayer or during a time of great and common plague.
Speaker 1: (15:30)
In our said, city of London under Elizabeth political and religious subjects were also forbidden on the stage though, people would bring them up. Obviously Shakespeare was famous for having his history plays also reflect what was going on at the time period as well. So you just had to be clever about it. So despite all of these sorts of, um, constraints plays were still growing in popularity at, at any given year in London, by the 1590s or so over 10% of the population would see a play in 1567. Like I said, the first purpose built Playhouse was built and that was called the red lion Inn. It was in white chapel. It was built by a grocer who put up scaffolding in the grounds of a farmhouse. And it would host troops of actors as they pass through. And it didn’t succeed in part because of its remote location.
Speaker 1: (16:30)
But between 1575 and 1578, nine more dedicated playhouses were built, including the famous theater in shortage. They were all on the outskirts, in the suburbs of the city. This meant that they were outside the control of the authorities and the laws that restricted large congregations. In part, like I said, because of security and also due to the fears about the plague and their location made them neighbors with bear baiting rings and brothels. So they were kind of seen as sorts of seedy sort of places. But while the authorities kept trying to outlaw theater and make things more difficult, the plays kept growing in popularity. In 1578, six companies were granted permission by special order of the queen to perform plays. They were the children of the chapel, Royal children of st. Paul’s the servants of the Lord Chamberlain servants of the Lords Warrick, Lester and Essex.
Speaker 1: (17:29)
The building of the playhouses had already really begun in the mid 1570s. And there was a poem at the time that was really popular. That said list unto my Diddy, alas, the more’s, the pity from Troy and events, old city, the alderman and mayor have driven each poor player. So they are banished from the city by the alderman and mayor this banishment to places outside the city actually helped the theater grow. So there was room for as many theaters as people demanded without having to worry about building around in a crowded city. You know, it’s like urban sprawl or suburban sprawl. People could just keep building and building all around and they were close enough, like just across the river and Southern and people could easily still get to them, but they weren’t within the city boundaries. And there was still more space. And because of all of this growth, there was this healthy rivalry between the players and between the playwrights.
Speaker 1: (18:29)
At the time, all the theaters had certain things in common. They were all three stories tall and they were pretty much a circle. They had an open space in the center and it into this open space, the stage extended that meant that three sides of the stage were open to view by the audience kind of like a fashion runway or something. And only the rear was used for entrances and exits. And there were no roofs and plays were performed during the day. So you didn’t need to have lights on the first theater with a roof was the Blackfriars theater. And it was also one of the first to use artificial lighting during productions because it had a roof. And for, for the average person, the cost to see a play in London would be as little as a penny. So it was really affordable for people to be able to go and get a cheap seat and enjoy this bit of entertainment.
Speaker 1: (19:24)
The era of Elizabethan theater officially begins according to historians with Garba Duke, a play about civil war and succession to the throne of a kingdom. It was written by both Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. It’s famous for being the first play written in blank verse, which uses unrivaled. I am at pentameter the way it’s written, it flows. It makes it sound very musical, makes it easier for the actors to remember. And also just sounds beautiful. And playwrights like Marlo and Shakespeare also used, I am at pentameter in their poetry, three main genres dominated the Elizabethan stage. And like I said before, they were comedy and tragedy and history. I read that these can be sort of facetiously categorized as plays, where everybody gets married in the end, everybody dies in the end, or everybody already knows how it ends respectively. So comedies include some of Shakespeare’s plays like a Midsummer night’s dream, much to do about nothing.
Speaker 1: (20:33)
Ben Johnson wrote every man in his humor. And there was later a sort of sub genre called city comedy that focused specifically on life in London, on the hilarity of life, in the big city. And so that was another popular form of place. Tragedies didn’t end badly just kind of for random reasons. They always ended badly due to a character’s flaws and choices. So they also offered moral lessons to people and historical plays focused on periods of English history generally. So there was Edward the second by Marlo Richard, the third by Shakespeare that were some of the more famous ones. And they were always things where the events had happened decades or centuries before. So they weren’t necessarily referring to political themes of the time. So the censors would pass them, but they would be allegorical and they would have metaphors for what was going on at the time period as well.
Speaker 1: (21:40)
If you cared to read deeply into them, which now historians do all the time. So they also would serve to stir up patriotism at a time of war. Like Shakespeare’s plays that told of glorious military campaigns against the French at the same time, as there were big campaigns in Ireland going on, for example. So they could be used to kind of drum up the patriotic fever at the same time. And of course, everybody knows the name, William Shakespeare, but he wasn’t the only famous playwright of this period. There was also people like Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, John Webster, Thomas kid, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Haywood. They were all really popular writers at the time as well. Marlo in fact, died young in a bar brawl. He was stabbed to death and had he lived, he likely would have been serious competition to Shakespeare Shakespeare’s Rosalind quotes and unfinished Marlo poem in as you like it as a particular attribute to Marlow and writing plays at the time wasn’t considered a literary achievement.
Speaker 1: (22:55)
It was this sort of common base entertainment for regular people, sort of like these days, if you’re a literary writer and I don’t know, you start to write for reality television or something. It wasn’t necessarily seen as this great literary genre to, to be writing for the works weren’t published or publicized usually. And also the playwright himself didn’t even own the rights to the play. It belonged to the theater company who had paid the writer. It wasn’t a gig that you got into for, um, having any particular literary fame associated with your name in general. They’re still about 600 plays from this era that we still have that remain. So as the theater has got going, each would be home to a particular troop of performers and the actors perform different plays in their repertory. And so they would perform a different show that they knew each night and they rarely performed the same show twice in a week.
Speaker 1: (24:02)
And that was because they wanted to keep getting repeat crowds, um, have the same people come back night after night rate with regularity. And if you kept doing the same show, you wouldn’t get that. Interestingly, the costumes, although they were really beautiful were not specific to the show. They tended to be really beautiful contemporary clothing. They were worn for all the different putts for all the different plays, a company performed and women didn’t perform plays in this time. All the roles were played by either men or young boys. There were some brilliant young boy actors who would play, for example, really deep parts like Gertrude or Ophelia in Hamlet. They were played by young boys. I mean, can you imagine that it’s, it’s hard for me to imagine Gertrude being played by a 14 year old boy and since theaters were in such proximity to brothels and other unseemly places, as I said, it was considered really bad form for women to be actresses.
Speaker 1: (25:04)
It just wasn’t right. And some women even wore masks to attend the theater. So they wouldn’t be recognized. And Elizabethan theater officially came to an end in 1642 when, as I said, the Puritans outlawed, that theater during the English civil war. So now for the book recommendation, which is a year in the life of William Shakespeare, 1599 by James Shapiro, he is a brilliant Shakespearian historian, really interesting books. And I have a link on the site with the show notes. For this particular episode, I have links to everything and remember to enter the historical fiction giveaway on the site@englandcast.com and buy my book. And you can also get in touch on Facebook at facebook.com/england cast or via Twitter at Tesco T E Y S K O. Or you can text the listener feedback line at eight Oh one six Tesco T E Y S K O. All right. Thanks for listening everybody. And I will be talking to you again in a couple of weeks.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
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