Renaissance Solos:12 Plays

Since Elizabethan theater did not make use of lavish scenery, instead leaving the stage largely bare with a few key props, the main visual appeal on stage was in the costumes.

Costumes were often bright in color and visually entrancing. Costumes were expensive, however, so usually players wore contemporary clothing regardless of the time period of the play. Occasionally, a lead character would wear a conventionalized version of more historically accurate garb, but secondary characters would nonetheless remain in contemporary clothing. The growing population of London, the growing wealth of its people, and their fondness for spectacle produced a dramatic literature of remarkable variety, quality, and extent.

Although most of the plays written for the Elizabethan stage have been lost, over remain extant. The men no women were professional dramatists in this era who wrote these plays were primarily self-made men from modest backgrounds. Some of them were educated at either Oxford or Cambridge , but many were not. Although William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were actors, the majority do not seem to have been performers, and no major author who came on to the scene after is known to have supplemented his income by acting. Not all of the playwrights fit modern images of poets or intellectuals.

Christopher Marlowe was killed in an apparent tavern brawl, while Ben Jonson killed an actor in a duel. Several probably were soldiers. Playwrights were normally paid in increments during the writing process, and if their play was accepted, they would also receive the proceeds from one day's performance. However, they had no ownership of the plays they wrote. Once a play was sold to a company, the company owned it, and the playwright had no control over casting, performance, revision, or publication. The profession of dramatist was challenging and far from lucrative.

This was probably at the low end of the range, though even the best writers could not demand too much more. A playwright, working alone, could generally produce two plays a year at most; in the s, Richard Brome signed a contract with the Salisbury Court Theatre to supply three plays a year, but found himself unable to meet the workload.

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Shakespeare produced fewer than 40 solo plays in a career that spanned more than two decades; he was financially successful because he was an actor and, most importantly, a shareholder in the company for which he acted and in the theaters they used. Ben Jonson achieved success as a purveyor of Court masques, and was talented at playing the patronage game that was an important part of the social and economic life of the era. Those who were playwrights pure and simple fared far less well; the biographies of early figures like George Peele and Robert Greene, and later ones like Brome and Philip Massinger , are marked by financial uncertainty, struggle, and poverty.

Playwrights dealt with the natural limitation on their productivity by combining into teams of two, three, four, and even five to generate play texts; the majority of plays written in this era were collaborations, and the solo artists who generally eschewed collaborative efforts, like Jonson and Shakespeare, were the exceptions to the rule. Dividing the work, of course, meant dividing the income; but the arrangement seems to have functioned well enough to have made it worthwhile. A solo artist usually needed months to write a play though Jonson is said to have done Volpone in five weeks ; Henslowe's Diary indicates that a team of four or five writers could produce a play in as little as two weeks.

Admittedly, though, the Diary also shows that teams of Henslowe's house dramatists—Anthony Munday, Robert Wilson, Richard Hathwaye, Henry Chettle, and the others, even including a young John Webster—could start a project, and accept advances on it, yet fail to produce anything stageworthy. Modern understanding of collaboration in this era is biased by the fact that the failures have generally disappeared with barely a trace; for one exception to this rule, Sir Thomas More.

Genres of the period included the history play, which depicted English or European history.

There were also a number of history plays that dealt with more recent events, like A Larum for London, which dramatized the sack of Antwerp in Tragedy was a popular genre. Marlowe's tragedies were exceptionally popular, such as Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta. Comedies were common, too.

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A sub-genre developed in this period was the city comedy, which deals satirically with life in London after the fashion of Roman New Comedy. Though marginalized, the older genres like pastoral The Faithful Shepherdess, , and even the morality play Four Plays in One, c. After about , the new hybrid sub-genre of the tragicomedy enjoyed an efflorescence, as did the masque throughout the reigns of the first two Stuart kings, James I and Charles I.

Only a minority of the plays of English Renaissance theater were ever printed; of Heywood's plays noted above, only about 20 were published in book form. Larger collected editions, like those of Shakespeare's, Ben Jonson's, and Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, were a late and limited development. Through much of the modern era, it was thought that play texts were popular items among Renaissance readers that provided healthy profits for the stationers who printed and sold them.

By the turn of the 21st century, the climate of scholarly opinion shifted somewhat on this belief: A very small number of plays from the era survived not in printed texts but in manuscript form. The rising Puritan movement was hostile to theater, which the Puritans thought promoted immorality.

One of their most common complaints was the practice of boys dressing as women to play female roles. Politically, playwrights and actors were clients of the monarchy and aristocracy, and most supported the Royalist cause. The Puritan faction, long powerful in London, gained control of the city early in the English Civil War , and on September 2, , ordered the closure of the London theaters. The theaters remained closed for most of the next eighteen years, re-opening after the Restoration of the monarchy in The re-opened theaters performed many of the plays of the previous era, though often in adapted forms; new genres of Restoration comedy and spectacle soon evolved, giving English theater of the later seventeenth century its distinctive character.

English Renaissance theater is sometimes called "Elizabethan theatre. As such, "Elizabethan theatre" is distinguished from Jacobean theatre associated with the reign of King James I , — , and Caroline theatre associated with King Charles I , until the closure of the theatres in New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.

The Fantaisie in F minor, Op. According to the musicologist Donald Francis Tovey , "the term Fantasia would adequately cover all post-classical forms of concerto" Tovey , From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Fantasia. Retrieved from " https: Western classical music styles Italian words and phrases Fantasias music.

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