What were the main characteristics of Elizabethan drama?

Answer 1

In the Elizabethan Times, Drama became the truly national literary manifestation of the time, thanks to a series of reasons that may be summarized as follows:

1. the theatres were open to everyone, as there was no distinction between the taste of the court and that of the general public, and admission prices were relatively low.

2. the plays could be understood even by people unable to read or write,

3. The theatre-going habit, which can be traced back to medieval performances, was widespread;

4. a new interest in classical drama had been introduced by Humanism;

5. the number of talented playwrights was great;

6. theatre made good business;

7. the theatre was patronized by the Court and the aristocracy;

8. the language used was more alive and direct than that of poetry and prose;

9. the theatre was, both inwardly and outwardly, the true mirror of society (like in Dante's Divina Commedia).

Elizabethan society hosted a wide variety of people: Catholics, Puritans, necromancers, nobles, merchants, peasants and each class played a part strictly connected with its individual social status. This role, according to medieval notion, had been allotted to everyone at birth and it was sinful to rebel against it. The need for order and stability in the Elizabethan Age made the old conception even more necessary. Society had to mirror the divine order of the universe (the macrocosm), inside which man (the microcosm) had to respect a precise hyerarchy or ladder, at the top of which was God followed, in descending order, by angels, men,animals and inanimate objects. This model was reproduced in every kingdom of life, in each of which there was a "God": the king among men, the sun among celestial bodies, the lion among animals, the rose among flowers, gold among metals, etc. This idea of a social order in imitation of the divine one was the basis of the world view present in the Elizabethan Theatre. Drama as such, then, derived in the first instance from the breaking of this order, since any action, comic or tragic, that disturbed the harmonious balance of the universe was "dramatic" in itself. This theory had previously formed the basis of medieval drama, too, but new techniques now made it easier to present on the stage. The new Elizabethan Hero, full of passions and doubts, replaced the old allegorical character and provided new material for drama. The strict relationship between the laws of man and those of nature was strongly emphasized. Storms and other prodigious phenomena (symbolizeing disharmony and chaos in the universe) were now presented as a consequence or presage of criminal actions which brought chaos and anarchy to society. Even the language was affected by the concept of hierarchy. To compare a monarch to the sun (as in Marlowe's Tamburlaine), or to a lion (as in Shakespeare's Richard III) not only meant stressing his power, but above all underlined his precise, unique, irreplaceable role. The use of metaphors was widespread in the Elizabethan Theatre which, being normally in verse rather than in prose, had borrowed them from poetry along with blank verse, which became in turn the verse form most frequently used for plays. Thanks to such devices as the use of stichomythia and more natural rising and falling inflections, blank verse came to sound more and more like real living speech. This was of the utmost importance because, unlike the French and Italian plays of the time (those by Aretino, Ruzante, Machiavelli), which were mostly written to be read, the English ones were written to be performed, and performance required great verbal skill and convincing language. Up to 1576 plays were acted above all at inns, on a platform raised in the yard which , being surrounded by galleries, made a wonderful auditorium. These performances were so successful that, in 1576, the actor and carpenter James Burbage decided to build the first public playhouse outside the town walls, calling it "The Theatre". Within a few years Burbage's theatre was followed by many others, the most famous of which was "The Globe"

The age of Shakespeare-and of Marlowe, Kyd, Chapman, Ben Jonson and a host of other dramatists-extends roughly from 1590 to 1625. During this period London probably had more theatre space in ratio to its population than at any other time. Excluding informal theatre spaces such as the great halls of the nobility and such organizations as the Inns of Court (where England's lawyers were trained), there were seven open-air theatres and four indoor theatres. The open-air theatres could accommodate audiences of 2000 to 3000 spectators. The indoor theatres were much smaller and could accommodate 300 to 400 spectators.

The outdoor theatres relied on natural light. They used few stage propsand no stage sets in the modern sense of the-term. These seeming limitations encouraged several of the most brilliant features of Elizabethan drama. The lack of stage sets allowed the dramatists to create rapid, extremely fluid actions. Scenes succeeded each other without interruption, somewhat in the manner of twentieth-century movies. The lack of stage sets forced the Elizabethan dramatists to create what might be called atheatre of imagination. Since the scenes were not presented visually, they had to be evoked by poetic language. When we speak today of Shakespeare's magnificent poetry, we are referring to an element of his dramas that resulted from this absence of scenery.

Answer 2

The printing press made written works widely available.

The Reformation had an enormous impact.