Transcript Drama - Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e Culture

Drama and Society
1580-1630
Golden Age
Middle Ages
•
•
•
•
Strong and vital tradition.
Unfied world picture. Theatre served the orhodoxy of the church.
Popular entertainment
XIII.Liturgical drama
– Dialogue between celebrants
– Dramatized scenes to instruct
• XIV cem.Miracle plays. Religious indoctrination but also
amusement: comical characers, clowns.
• Corpus Christi festivity: Guilds responsible for the presentation of
scenes from the Old and New Testament. Collective creation .Street
performances. Pageants.
• XV cent. Morality plays by theatrical companies. Courtyards of inns
and taverns. Banquet Halls.
Early Modern Age
• Term preferred over Renaissance.
• Embraces the Elizabethan (Queen Elizabeth I’s
reign) and Jacobean (King James I’s) ages.
• No idea of awakening from the dark ages.
• Looks forward to modernity: the beginning of
many modern institutionalized practices
(including the modern state).
An Age of change and transitions
• An Age of change from feudal baronial power
to centralized monarchy (Henry VIII and
Elizabeth)
• From warring knights to courtiers.
• Cultivation of graces, including literary ones
rather than military ability.
• Italy with its courts and its culture an obvious
model. Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano
translated in 1561 by Thomas Hoby.
An Age of religious change
• From Catholicism to Protestantism.
• Reformation proclaimed 1536 by Henry VIII
• Violent persecution of Catholics under Protestant
sovereigns and Protestants under the Catholic
Queen Mary I (called Bloody Mary)(1553-58)
• Puritan dissent.
• An age of controversy.
• Italy an obvious adversary.
Economics
• Growth of trade. Beginnings of financial
ventures, banking.
• Navigation. Colonial expansion.
• Affluence.
Drama between classical models and
medieval elements
• As a consequence of the Reformation and
Renaissance, center place to the individual.
• Plays about people. Search for answers to
questions raised by contemporary human life
• .A remainder of features of medieval theatre:
– Popular culture
– Carnivalesque elements
– Witches, magic
Early Modern Age Drama
• 1580-1630 an explosion of great theatre and
great actors.
• Age of affluence.
– Patronage of companies.
– Entertainments at court and in noble houses.
– The populace itself could spend money on
entertainment.
• Drama is called to play a role in the great season
of change.
• It becomes itself an agency of change.
Drama and Society
• Not simply an aesthetic objet.
• Represents (indirectly) society and its problems and
concerns. But not simply a passive reflection of history
• Intervenes in history. Performs an important sociopolitical action
• It is a tool to fashion and contain.
– Helps consolidate dominant order
• or
– Helps subvert dominant orde
• orr
– Contain subversion
Relationships with the past
• Enriched by humanistic translations.
• Imitations of classics adapted to English
society.
• Ties with vital tradition of Middle Ages.
Venues
• Elizabethan theatres:
• Open air. Standing room. Groundlings.
– No verisimilitude. Tree for forest
• Globe Theatre
• Jacobean and Caroline London. Roofed theatres. Banquet
hall formula.
– Pictorial realism. Backdrops. Inigo Jones
• Warmer but more expensive. Rules out groundlings.
–
–
–
–
More academic, literary theatre.
No ranting.
More ballets, music.
Masques, new genre.
The closing of theatres
1642-1660
• Puritans objected to entertainment.
• The stage was robbing the pulpit of its role.
• Plays represented indecent and subversive
subjects.
• Questioned state ideology.
• 1642 theatres were closed.
• 1660 reopened but in a dfferent form and a
different spirit.