Why drama flourished
How did English literature, slight through the long stretch between Chaucer and Spenser, rise to the level of Shakespeare? Perhaps through growing wealth; perhaps through a long and fruitful peace, or an exciting and victorious war; perhaps through foreign literature widening English horizons. Writers learned comedy from Plautus and Terence and tragedy from Seneca, and Italian actors played in England (notably in 1577). All kinds of experiment went on: between 1592 and 1642, according to the book, 435 comedies were staged in England. Farces and short interludes between acts shaped comedy. Religious plays and morality plays, as people lost faith in sacred legend, turned into secular tragedies.
In 1553 Nicholas Udall produced the first classical English comedy, Ralph Roister Doister. In 1561 lawyers of the Inner Temple staged the first English tragedy in classical form, Gorboduc. For a time it seemed that this inherited Roman mold would settle the form of Elizabethan drama.
The three unities
University men like Harvey, poets like George Gascoigne, and classically trained men like Sidney wanted the 'three unities' observed: one main action, in one place, within a single day. As far as we know, Castelvetro first announced the three in his commentary on Aristotle's Poetics (1570). Aristotle himself asks only for unity of action and suggests that the action fall within 'a single revolution of the sun'. He also wants what may be called unity of tone: comedy, the representation of lowly people, should not be mixed with tragedy, the representation of heroic acts. In the Defence of Poesy Sidney agrees with the unities but mocks the stage of his day: Asia on one side, Africa on the other, so many little kingdoms that the actor must tell us where he is as he enters; as for time, a prince and princess fall in love, after several meetings she conceives and bears a handsome child, who grows to manhood, falls in love and is about to become a father, all within two hours.
France followed the classical rules and produced Racine; England rejected them, built its tragic dramas on natural principles and produced Shakespeare. The Renaissance ideal in France was order, reason, proportion and good manners; in England it was freedom, will, wit and life. Elizabethan audiences, a mixture of petty gentry, middle classes and common folk, loved varied and substantial plays and wanted action; they cared little for long reports of deeds not shown on stage. They were ready to laugh, and did not mind gravediggers debating philosophy with a prince. Their untrained imaginations could travel from place to place, crossing a continent at the mention of a sign or a line. Elizabethan drama expressed the English people of its day, not the Greeks of Pericles or the French of the Bourbons, which is why it became a national art, while arts that followed foreign models did not take root in England.
The Puritan attack
Before it could produce Marlowe and Shakespeare, English drama had one more obstacle to remove. The new Puritanism held the Elizabethan stage to be a center of idolatry, indecency and irreverence, and objected to the presence of loose women among the spectators and to the nearness of disreputable houses to the playhouses. In 1577 John Northbrooke wrote a fierce tract against dicing, dancing, plays and interludes, in which he argued that the devil had no quicker means or better school for teaching his will, drawing men and women into lust and foul desires, so that magistrates should close the playhouses just as they close such houses and stop the players.
Gosson's School of Abuse was somewhat milder and called some plays and players blameless. But when Lodge answered him, Gosson no longer distinguished good from bad and in Plays Confuted in Five Actions blamed plays for wickedness, corruption and adultery, calling actors masters of sin and teachers of licentiousness. In the critics' view comedies were corrupting pictures of vice and tragedies incitements to murder, treason and rebellion. In the early years of Elizabeth's reign Sunday was the usual day for plays; as the church bells called people to afternoon prayer, a trumpet announced the start of a play, and clergy were horrified to see churches emptied for the playhouses. One preacher cried that when a trumpet sounds, a filthy play can draw a thousand, while the bell cannot gather a hundred to a sermon. Northbrooke argued in the same way that if you learn how to deceive your husbands or wives, and learn flattery, lying, killing, blasphemy and vile songs, then after seeing such interludes will you not practice them?
Dramatists replied with pamphlets and mocked the Puritans in plays such as Twelfth Night. There Sir Toby Belch asks the steward whether, because he himself is virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale, and the fool answers that yes, by St Anne, and ginger will be hot in the mouth too (a proverbial retort meaning that those who enjoy such things will go on enjoying them). Dramatists, Shakespeare among them, did include tales of violence, rage, incest and adultery, and in Pericles he showed a disreputable house, which I leave to the reader's imagination.
The authorities of London, some of them Puritan, thought the critics right. In 1574 the city council barred plays that had not been censored and licensed, which is why Shakespeare wrote that art is tongue-tied by authority. Fortunately Elizabeth and her Privy Council enjoyed plays. Several lords kept companies of actors, and under the queen's favor and a censorship that was not severe, six companies were allowed to play in the city.
The playhouses
Before 1576 plays had been performed on temporary platforms in the yards of inns. In that year James Burbage built the first permanent playhouse in England, known simply as the Theatre, and to stay outside the City's jurisdiction he put it beyond the walls, in the suburb of Shoreditch. Others followed soon: the Curtain (about 1577), the Blackfriars (1596) and the Fortune (1599). In 1599 Richard and Cuthbert Burbage pulled down their father's Theatre and built the Globe in Southwark, across the Thames. Its outside was octagonal, its inside apparently round, which is why Shakespeare called it 'this wooden O'. Until 1623 all London playhouses were of wood, and many resembled large amphitheaters. About two thousand spectators could sit in the galleries running around, and another thousand could stand in the yard round the stage. These were the 'groundlings', whom Hamlet scolds for their dumb shows and noise. In 1599, standing room cost a penny, a seat in the upper gallery two or three pence, and a place on the stage a little more.
The stage was a broad platform backed against one wall and jutting into the middle of the yard. Behind it was the tiring-room where actors dressed, and the property master prepared the equipment: coffins, skulls, box trees, flowering bushes, small chests, curtains, cauldrons, ladders, weapons, various instruments, bottles of stage blood and a few heads. There were machines for lowering gods and goddesses from the 'heavens' and raising 'spirits' and 'witches' from the floor; a kind of rain was poured by drawing a string, and a 'sun' was hung in the 'sky'. These props made up for the lack of scenery, since the open stage without curtain prevented quick changes of setting. In return the action unfolded among the audience itself, who almost felt they took part in events.