LECTURE NOTES IX

RENAISSANCE LITERATURE IN ENGLAND [2]

RENAISSSANCE DRAMA
Sources:
Primary Sources:
Marlowe, Ch., Dr. Faustus in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, ed. Kermode, F., J.
Hollander et al., (Oxford: OUP, 1973), pp
Secondary Sources:
Baugh, A.C., ed., A Literary History of England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948),
pp.476-471;508-518
Bradbrook, M., Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, [1935]1994), p.1128
Daiches, D., A Critical History of English Literature, vol.1 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1969)
pp.216-245
Day, M.S., A History of English Literature to Sixteen Sixty (Doubleday, 1963), pp. 237-268
Fletcher, R.H., A History of English Literature (Boston: Badger, 2007 [1919]), pp.152-166
Moody,W.V.,Lovett, R.M., History of English Literature (New York:Scribner,1918), pp. 111-123
A. General characteristics of Elizbethan drama
I. Historical development:
1. Origins:
- Elizabethan theatre was largely a product of a confluence of diverse elements held in fruitful
tension inherited both from the Middle Ages as well as from the ancient theatre.
- Elizabethan theatre was a combination of several traditions:
(i) the classical tradition of Greek and especially Latin theatre: tragedy, permeated by violence,
by appetite for political power, and by a tragic feeling of human destiny [the major, decisive came
not from the Latin stoic Seneca, whose theatre was a combination of old Greek myths, violence,
murder, cruelty and lust]; comedy concentrated on everyday matters [major influences were
exercised by the Latin theatre of Plautus and Terence}
(ii) the medieval morality plays, which focused on the fight between good and evil;
(iii) popular festivals: the May games, which showed a marked taste for carnivalesque and the
world upside down (topsy-turvy)
2. General characteristics: Tudor and Elizabethan theatre
Elizabethan theatre showed:
- a new attitude towards man, the world, and God, which was considerably influenced by the rise
and development of humanism.
- a new awareness of the discoveries of new worlds and of the emergence of a new mentality.
In terms of formal conventions, Elizabethan theatre owed a lot to the classical theatre: the
convention of five-act tragedy, the symmetrical pairs of characters in comedies
- Elizabethan theatre eventually came to skillfully combine
the high style, often artificial patterns of Senecan tragedy with
the low style of vulgar language and gross humour characteristic of Greek and Latin comedies,
but also of the popular theatre

3. Theatres and Companies:

- Elizabethan theatre was an institution, had its own buildings and theatrical companies:
There were:
- public theatres, like The Globe, The Rose, The Swan,
- private theatres owned by the inns-of-court or members of the aristocracy
- the royal theatre
(i) The theatre had:
- a round auditorium
- a main stage which retained the medieval three-level division, with a facade with two
doors, through which the actors would enter
- the first level: the ground for the general action
- the second level: usually for intimate scenes, bed chamber or closet scenes
- the third level balcony: public speeches
- a flag indicated the performance was on
(ii) Theatrical companies were of two kinds:
- companies of adult actors
- companies children (often more successful than the other)
II. Conventions of presentation [see especially M. Bradbrook, pp.
The plays consisted of combinations of:
- passages of declamatory speeches
- action and violent scenes
- dumb shows very often symbolic.
1. Locality:
- the Elizabethan stage was characterized by a certain neutrality and flexibility.
- the actors had a major role in locating the scene, by induction [in the Prologue or
in the course of the play]
- the setting was minimal, place was marked by boards, titles and in a symbolic manner:
- a bed was represented by a bed chamber
- a church by a tomb and altar
- rivers were presented on painted boards
- the city gates by a central door etc.
2. Time:
- temporal sequence was not really important, the audience was interested mostly in the speeches
and action
- time could be accelerated or double (in a plot and subplot)
3. Costumes and stage effects:
(i) Clothes
- were particularly remarkable, yet they were conventional and had no historical accuracy
(Cleopatra could be wearing a farthingale)
- disguise was current, with allegorical but also more ordinary meanings
- colours were also conventional, revolving around a black and white scheme: black representing
mourning or evil and white standing for purity, innocence; yellow was assimilated to jealousy, red
to blood, etc.

(ii) Stage effects

- were generally spectacular
- involved mechanical devices: the appearance of the Blazing Star, the descent of gods and
goddesses from heaven were marked by thundering noises, etc.
- dumb shows and pageants were equally frequent, were related to the subplot, led to the
development of masques, which were highly artificial [allegorical pageants were often a tribute to
a particular event or to a particular guest]
4. Gesture and delivery:
Acting was characterized by:
- the actors used exaggerated movements, a statuesque attitude, inflated delivery, a conventional
posture
- feelings [grief or joy] were indicated by facial movement, and were underlined by physical play:
- grief was signaled by throwing oneself to the ground and joy by capering (jumping) about
- torture scenes were violently shown
- clowning was also an important part as the it provided comic relief
The actor had to be
- a good gymnast, in order to leap from walls or through trap doors
- a good duelist (the audience was extremely critical and knowledgeable in this respect)
- a good orator with a loud, stentorian, voice (like Burgbage and Alleyn)
The actors grouping was formal and consisted of battles and dances.
- battle scenes displayed processional entries but the battle itself was generally undertaken by
representatives
- dancing was used in the end, in order to underline the coming together of rivals, revengers, etc.
- the audience could feel the allegorical significance of a formal or rhythmic grouping
III. Conventions of Action
1. Heterogeneity:
- the disinterest in the causal sequence of events and the neutral background favoured the
development of the action and speech conventions
- the Elizabethan audience did not fit all the elements of a play into a logical frame of events.
The play
- was generally heterogeneous
- combined strict moral codes, jests and occasionally, topical allusions [to contemporary
events, personalities]
- much non-dramatic material was incorporated: song, dancing, swordplay, fighting
- the poetic language was the element that conferred unity to the play
2. Plots:
- narratives were generally historical
- tragedies occasionally derived their topics from life
- comedies were mostly artificial and rested on feigned plots.
- the playwright could use astounding coincidences or leave the action unmotivated without
affecting the credibility of the play
-the stories were mostly familiar narratives, belonging to a stock tradition, which combined
popular and classical elements
- their effectiveness consisted in the fact that they depicted extraordinary beings

- most playwrights used the so-called cumulative plot (see Tamburlaine, Macbeth)
which allowed a single direction of development and was based on a gradual accumulation of
events underlying and leading to the denoument
- the plots involving peripeteia (a turn or change of fortune) were more complex but in these
cases the order of events was unimportant and strained coincidences and an extraordinary use of
qui pro quo [equivocation] dominated
- the Elizabethan theatre also had a taste for allegory
3. Scenes
- pre-Shakespearean drama made use of typical dramatic episodes, which were developed within
rather rigid limits.
Typical dramatic episodes were:
the judgment scene
the triumph scene
the siege scene
the council scene
the farewell scene
the conversion scene
the wooing scene
the deathbed scene
4. Characters
- characters were rather simplified, mostly stock characters classifiable into types
- they were expected to behave accordingly, using specific poetical and rhetorical modes
- the villain, who set the play in motion and was ultimately defeated,
the noble harlot,
the chaste heroine, usually colourless
the bluff soldier
the pathetic child.
- they were accompanied by subsidiary stock-characters, less important for the development of
the play
- with few exceptions, before Shakespeare, characters did not really develop on stage
- all change was a sudden reversal, which was artificial, like the repentance of the villain.
- slander and credibility complicated the action.
- these contraries were held up by the strength of the playwright, mostly through the poetic
discourse

IV. Conventions of Speech

- though direct speech was used mostly, asides were also employed,
- asides helped explain the plot and revealed something of which the audience needed to be
conscious, were often ironic
- the soliloquy played an important part, although it had little expository function, and was mostly
a moral dramatic statement, but it displayed an non-dramatic frankness, which helped define the
character
- the dramatic episodes were made up of certain types of speeches (set speeches) which were
rather conventional
- they combined two rhetorical genres:
the demonstrativum (praise and dispraise)
the deliberativum (meant to persuade for or against the course of action)

V. Particularities of the Tudor and Elizabethan theatre

1. English tragedy
- the humanist taste for Greek and Latin classics produced a new kind of English tragedy.
- it produced a new genre since, before the classical influences were felt, there was no tragedy in
the local theatre.
- English tragedy: a popular species, best represented by so called blood and thunder tragedy
- a combination of sophistication and crudeness, with an ordered and concentrated structure
- Elizabethan tragedies displayed:
a polished, montonous verse
a strong rhetorical character
stoic moralizing
emotional crises, horror, marked by epigrams
characters dominated by their passions
Gorboduc by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton
- an academic tragedy in Senecan style, about a divided kingdom, civil war, and the consequences
of split authority in a state located in a mythical region of early English history
2.Elizabethan comedies
- were also influenced by the humanist educational and ethical dimensions, by classical themes,
by contemporary continental [Italian, French] tastes
- Gammer [old woman] Gurtons Needle was an amusing comedy with sexual undertones and
local colour
3. The first professional playwrights: the University Wits
- by the 16th c. drama became more complex
- there was a noticeable professionalization of both among authors and actors
- a new group of university students, who graduated from Oxford or Cambridge, who did not
intend to take holy orders, combined to produce a new literary phenomenon: the secular
professional dramatist
- of this group some of the most significant are: John Lyly, Robert Greene, George Peele,
Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Kyd, and Christopher Marlowe
- with their popular successes and sophisticated plays, the University Wits
- had an important influence both on public and private theatre
- contributed to making theatre into literature, especially by the dramatic effectiveness of
language itself
- as a result, drama became increasingly secular, diverse, and very popular
VI. Significant playwrights
1.Thomas Kyd (1558-1594)
- was the founder of what might be called romantic tragedy.
- adapted in an original way the main elements of Senecan theatre with melodrama.
- used themes of love, revenge, conspiracy and murder
- The Spanish Tragedy (produced around the early 1580s)
was the first and most melodramatic and powerful in the series of revenge plays, it was
good theatre in the Elizabethan times, it was sensational and had considerable impact
upon other writers

2. Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

- according to Baugh (508-518), Marlowe's major achievements are:
(i) his remarkable use of blank verse - the most expressive and grandest of the English metres
For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God must die (Tamburlaine, Part II, 4641)
Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships (Faustus, 1477)
And all is dross that is not Helena (Faustus, 1334)
A God is not so glorious as a king (Tamburlaine, 762)
(ii) his interest in life rather than living
- most of his contemporaries are interested in kinds of living: restless living and the lover's pains,
fashionable living, foolish living, evil living
- Marlowe is intrested in the complexity of living itself, which emerges in a variety of topics:
regal ambition, thirst for knowledge, hunger for gold, need of friendship, consuming fire of love all indicating the greatness of man and of his aspirations
(iii) a particular sense of dramatism in dramatic action, visible in the brilliance of effects resulting
a combination of scholarly erudition and culture, passion for truth, and a sense of poetry, drama
and intellectual disputes
Works:
Poems: Hero and Leander
- beautiful and sensuous, yet exoressed wiht great delicay and lack of impure suggestions
Plays:
- Tamburlaine the Great (Parts I, II) inspired from the life of Timur), turns thirst for power into a
form of desperate heroism
- Dido, Queen of Carthage (Aeneid)
- The Jew of Malta, Edward II
The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus is his most important achievement
- it translates the quest for pleasures, depicted in the Faustbook (1587), into a quest of intellectual
knowledge
- it is a dramatic experiment, which attempts to give stage plausibility to a passage of a great deal
of time (24 years)
- initially planned for five acts: it has a grand opening, dealing with the signing of the bond
between Faustus and Mephostophiles, a magnificent conclusion, with Faustus soliloquy, the two
linked up by a series of discontinuous and prosaic interludes
- illustrates the theme of corruptio optimi pessima [corrpution of the best is the worst]
- shows the tragedy of modern man delivered to his drives: absolute knowledge as a possible
instrument of domination
C. TEXTS
FAUSTUS. O Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damnd perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Natures eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but

A year, a month, a week, a natural day,

That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damnd.
O, Ill leap up to heaven!Who pulls me down?
See, where Christs blood streams in the firmament!
One drop of blood will save me: O my Christ!
Rend not my heart for naming of my Christ;
Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer!
Where is it now? tis gone:
And, see, a threatening arm, an angry brow!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of heaven!
No!
Then will I headlong run into the earth:
Gape, earth! O, no, it will not harbour me!
You stars that reignd at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist,
Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud[s],
That, when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths;
But let my soul mount and ascend to heaven!
[The clock strikes the half-hour.]
O, half the hour is past! twill all be past anon.
O, if my soul must suffer for my sin,
Impose some end to my incessant pain;
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be savd!
No end is limited to damned souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
O, Pythagoras metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be changd
Into some brutish beast! all beasts are happy,
For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolvd in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagud in hell.
Cursd be the parents that engenderd me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
That hath deprivd thee of the joys of heaven.
[The clock strikes twelve.]
It strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!
O soul, be changd into small water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, neer be found!
Source: Marlowe, Ch., The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, ed. Jim Manis, The Pennsylvania
State University, 1998