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Drama before Shakespeare
69
What then should let, but I aloft should reare
My Trophee, and from all, the triumph beare?
Other critics might argue that his reflections on history, Puritanism,
poetry and colonial development make him central. It is perhaps
Spenser’s historical misfortune that it was the dramatists who brought
the issues of the age into clearest focus.
DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE
All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players
(Shakespeare, As You Like It)
The move from self-conscious literary awareness to a broader-based popular
appeal is in part due to the work of the ‘university wits’: Christopher Marlowe,
Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Lodge, the
generation educated at Oxford and Cambridge universities who used their
poetry to make theatre, breathed life into dead classical models and brought
a new audience to the issues and conflicts which the stage could dramatise.
The earliest plays of the period, in the 1550s and 1560s, establish
comedy and tragedy as the types of drama. Both were derived from
Latin sources: comedies from the works of Terence and Plautus,
tragedies largely from Seneca, with echoes from Greek antecedents in
both cases. The mediaeval miracle and mystery plays, and the kind of
court ‘interludes’ played for the monarch, also contributed to the
development of Renaissance drama. Its broad humour, its use of ballad,
poetry, dance and music, its tendency towards allegory and symbolism
flow from this native English source. Thus, although drama went
through rapid changes in the period, its historical credentials were
rich and varied as indeed were its range and impact. It was an age
when the need for a social demonstration of an English nationalism
and Protestantism climaxed in the public arena of a diverse and
energetic theatre. This was the golden age of English drama.
One clear link between late mediaeval morality plays and sixteenthcentury
theatre is The Four PP, by John Heywood, which dates from
the early 1540s. The four speakers are a palmer, a pardoner, a ’pothecary,