HISTORY OF ENGLISH THEATRE 

The history of theatre charts the development of theatre over the past 2,500 years. While performative elements are present in every society, it is customary to acknowledge a distinction between theatre as an art form and entertainment and theatrical or performative elements in other activities. The history of theatre is primarily concerned with the origin and subsequent development of the theatre as an autonomous activity. Since classical Athens in the 6th century BC, vibrant traditions of theatre have flourished in cultures across the world. 

Prehistory

Drama of a kind was present in the rituals of primitive tribes. While musical instruments provided a compulsive rhythm, and members of the tribe joined in a communal dance, there was often also a dramatic figure who was the centre of attention. In mask and costume, strikingly fierce or mysterious, an unseen actor impersonated a spirit which either threatened or secured the fortunes of the tribe.

While such an encounter is undoubtedly dramatic, it does not involve theatre in the conventional sense. Theatre requires the addition of a sung or spoken text - a development which first occurred, like so many others, in ancient Greece.

The Birth of Greek Theatre

The origins of Greek theatre lie in the revels of the followers of Dionysus, the God of fertility and wine. In keeping with the God's special interests, his cult ceremonies were exciting occasions. His female devotees, in particular, danced themselves into a state of frenzy. Carrying long phallic symbols, known as thyrsoi, they tore to pieces and devoured the raw flesh of sacrificial animals.

But the Dionysians also developed a more structured form of drama. They danced and sang in choral form depicting the stories of Greek myth.

 In the 6th century BC, a priest of Dionysus, by the name of Thespis, introduced a new element which can be validated and marked as the birth of theatre. He engaged in a dialogue with the chorus. He became, in effect, the first actor. Actors in the west, ever since, have been proud to call themselves Thespians.

According to a Greek chronicle of the 3rd century BC, Thespis was also the first winner of a theatrical award. He took the prize in the first competition for tragedy, held in Athens in 534 BC.

The First Theatrical Contests

Theatrical contests became a regular feature of the annual festival in honour of Dionysus, held over four days each spring and known as the City Dionysia. Four authors were chosen to compete. Each must write three tragedies and one satyr play.

The performance of the plays by each author took a full day, in front of a large number of citizens in holiday mood, seated on the slope of an Athenian hillside. The main feature of the stage was a circular space on which the chorus danced and sang. Behind it a temporary wooden structure made possible a suggestion of scenery. At the end of the festival a winner was chosen.

The beginning of Greek comedy

From 486 BC there was an annual competition for comedies at Athens - held as part of the Lenaea, a three-day festival in January. Only one comic author's work had survived from the 5th century. Like the first three tragedians, he launched the genre with great brilliance. He was Aristophanes, a frequent winner of the first prize in the Lenaea (on the first occasion, in 425 BC, with the Acharnians).

Eleven of his plays survived, out of a total of perhaps forty spanning approximately the period 425-390 BC. They relied mainly on a device which became central to the tradition of comedy. They satirized contemporary foibles by placing them in an unexpected context, whether by means of a fantastic plot or through the antics of ridiculous characters.
 

Roman Theatre

Western theatre developed and expanded considerably under the Romans. The Roman historian Livy wrote that the Romans first experienced theatre in the 4th century BC, with a performance by Etruscan actors. Beacham argues that Romans had been familiar with "pre-theatrical practices" for some time before that recorded contact. The theatre of ancient Rome  was a thriving and diverse art form, ranging from festival performances of street theatre, and acrobatics, to the staging of Plautus's broadly appealing situation comedies, to the high style, verbally elaborate tragedies of Seneca.

Roman comedy: 3rd - 2nd century BC

In most cultural matters Rome was greatly influenced by Greece, and this was particularly true of theatre. Two Roman writers of comedy, Plautus and Terence, achieved lasting fame in the decades before and after 200 BC - Plautus for a robust form of entertainment close to farce, Terence for a more subtle comedy of manners. But neither writers invented a single plot. All were borrowed from Greek drama, and every play of Terence's was set in Athens.

Middle Ages:

Liturgical drama: 10th century

During the centuries of upheaval in Europe, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, theatre played no part in life. But with the approach of the first millennium, in the late 10th century, Christian churches introduced dramatic effects in the Easter liturgy to enliven the theme of resurrection.

From these small beginnings there developed the great tradition of medieval Christian Drama. More and more scenes were enacted during church services, some quite boisterous. 

Mystery plays: 12th - 16th century

In about 1170, priests somewhere in France decided to move a performance to a platform outside their church and to give it in the language of the people. Their French play, the Mystère d'Adam ('Mystery of Adam'), introduced some very popular characters in medieval imagination - the wicked devils, who can be vividly enacted in the street but not inside the church. The play ends with devils arriving to tie Adam and Eve up in chains, before dragging them off with a great clatter of pots and kettles. They and their victims vanish into a hole from which smoke belches forth.

The flaming mouth of Hell was set to become a standard and increasingly spectacular element in the mystery plays. 

Over the centuries the narrative of such plays extended from Adam and Eve to encompass the entire Bible story, from the Creation to the Last Judgement. The lives of saints were also much performed, in what are known as miracle plays. The torments suffered by saints in their martyrdom gave these stories a special appeal for medieval audiences.

Processional plays: 14th - 17th century

In parts of Europe, particularly Spain, the players performed on carts, each with its own scenery, moving through the town to appear before a succession of audiences. It was an ingenious way of bringing drama to more spectators than can be gathered in one place. These Spanish plays were known as autos sacramentales, 'eucharistic plays'.

16th – 18th Century

Roman revivals and intermezzi: 16th century

In the spirit of the Renaissance, Roman plays were performed on festive occasions at the courts of Italian princes. Perhaps they proved a little heavy going for some of the guests. It became the custom to have rather more lavish musical entertainments (intermezzi, or intermediate pieces) between the acts, with spectacular stage effects, beautiful costumes and much singing and dancing.

London's theatres:1576-1599

The theatres built in London in the quarter century from 1576 are a notable example of a contribution made by architecture to literature. In previous decades there were performances of primitive and rumbustious English plays in the courtyards of various London inns, with the audience standing in the yard itself or on the open galleries around the yard giving on to the upper rooms. These were ramshackle settings for what are no doubt fairly ramshackle performances.

In 1576 an actor, James Burbage, built a permanent playhouse in Shoreditch - just outside the city of London to the north, so as not to require the permission of the puritanical city magistrates. 

Burbage gave his building the obvious name, so long as it was the only one of its kind. He called it the Theatre. It followed the architectural form of an inn yard, with galleries enclosing a yard open to the sky. At one end a stage projected beneath a pavilion-like roof.

In about 1594 a fourth theatre, the Swan, was built close to the Hope. There were now two theatres to the north of the city and two south of the river. But soon the balance shifted decisively to Bankside.

James Burbage, builder of the original Theatre, died in 1597. Two years later his two sons dismantled the building and carried the timber over the river to Bankside, where they used it as the basis for a theatre with a new name - the Globe. This name resounds in English theatrical history for two good reasons. It was where Richard, one of the Burbage brothers, developed into one of the first great actors of the English stage. And it is where many of Shakespeare’s plays were first presented.

The structure of the Globe and the other London theatres has a significant influence on English drama at its greatest period, because of the audiences which these buildings accommodated. Ordinary Londoners, the groundlings, stood in the open pit to watch plays for a penny. Others paid a second penny to climb to a hard seat in the upper gallery. A third penny gave access to the two lower galleries and a seat with a cushion. A few places in the first gallery, to left and right of the stage, were reserved for gentlemen who could afford a shilling, or twelve pennies.

This was a cross-section of nearly all the people of London, and the audience was vast - with four theatres giving regular performances in a small city.
 

It was calculated that during Shakespeare's time one Londoner in eight went to the theatre each week. A city of 160,000 people was providing a weekly audience of about 21,000. There was only one comparable example of such a high level of attendance at places of entertainment - in cinemas in the 1930s.

The range of Shakespeare's audience was reflected in the plays, which could accommodate vulgar comedy and the heights of tragic poetry. The occasional performances in the Athenian Drama Festivals must have had something of this effect, involving much of the community in a shared artistic experience. In Elizabethan and Jacobean London, it happened almost every night.

Marlowe: 1587-1593

The year 1564 saw the birth of two poets, Marlowe and Shakespeare, who between them launched the English theatre into the three decades of its greatest glory. Marlowe made his mark first, in a meteoric six years (from 1587) in which his life and his writings were equally dramatic.
Marlowe's first play, acted with great success in 1587, was an event of profound significance in the story of English theatre. Tamburline the Great introduced the supple and swaggering strain of blank verse which became the medium for all the glories of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

From his time as a student at Cambridge Marlowe seemed to have been involved in the Elizabethan secret service. This dangerous work, combined with a fiery disposition, brought him into frequent clashes with the authorities. He was in prison in 1589 after a street fight. He was deported from the Netherlands in 1592 for the possession of forged gold coins. He was arrested for some unknown reason in London in 1593. And twelve days later he was murdered. 

Shakespeare: 1564-1616

The mysterious death of Marlowe, the Cambridge graduate, and the brilliant subsequent career of Shakespeare, the grammar-school boy from Stratford, caused some to speculate that his secret service activities made it prudent for Marlowe to vanish from the scene - and that he used the name of a lesser man, Shakespeare, to continue his stage career.

The truth is that William Shakespeare is not such an unknown figure, and the education provided in England's grammar schools of the time was among the best available. Shakespeare's baptism was recorded in Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564 (this was only three days after St George's Day, making possible the tradition that England's national poet was born, most fortunately, on England's national saint's day).

There is then a gap of several years in the documentary record of Shakespeare's life, but he was involved in the London theatre - as an actor trying his hand also as a playwright - by at least 1592, when he was attacked as an 'upstart crow' in a polemical pamphlet by Robert Greene. In 1593 he published a poem, Venus and Adonis, following it in 1594 with The Rape of Lucrece. Meanwhile he performed the three parts of Henry VI and, in the winter of 1592, Richard III.

The London theatres were closed for fear of the plague during 1592 and 1593 apart from brief midwinter seasons, but in 1594 things returned to normal and Shakespeare's career accelerates. He was now a leading member of London's most successful company, run by the Burbage family at the Theatre. Patronage at court gave them at first the title of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. On the accession of James I in 1603 they were granted direct royal favour, after which they were known as the King's Men.

Shakespeare's share in the profits of this company, operating from the Globe on Bankside from 1599, made him a wealthy man. Most of the subsequent documentary references relate to purchases in his home town of Stratford.
 
In 1597 Shakespeare paid £60 for a large house and garden, New Place in Chapel Street. By 1602 he had enough money to purchase an estate of 107 acres just outside Stratford, and he continued over the next few years to make investments in and around the town. In about 1610 he began to spend less time in London and more in New Place, where he died in 1616. He was buried in the chancel of the Stratford parish church.

Shakespeare had shown little interest in publishing his plays, for like others of his time he probably regarded them as scripts for performance rather than literature. After his death two of his colleagues, John Heminge and Henry Condell, gathered the texts of thirty-six plays which they published in 1623 in the edition known now as the First Folio.