Pre-English Civil War (1616-1642)

Content Group

Overview

From Shakespeare's death in 1616 to the closing of the theatres in 1642 by the Puritan Parliament, the London actors continued to perform in the open-air theatres such as the Globe, but more attention was progressively given to the so-called private indoor theatres such as Blackfriars, which charged more and addressed more prosperous and sophisticated audiences. The tastes of the royal court also became more influential, favoring elaborate settings designed by Inigo Jones. Indoor theatres had better acoustics and their less open stages facilitated the use of such scenery. These changes encouraged a subtler, lighter style of production, as illustrated by the vein of Shakespeare's successor as dramatist to the King's Men, John Fletcher. However, the late Shakespeare of the romances such as The Tempest already showed similar tendencies, confirmed by the two dramatists' co-operation on tragicomedies such as The Two Noble Kinsmen. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's earlier plays continued to be performed by many of the same actors who worked with him, such as John Lowin, whom Shakespeare supposedly directed as Hamlet and Henry VIII in All Is True, according to Shakespeare's godson, Sir William Davenant. There was no clean break in the stage tradition at this point such as followed for almost two decades after theatres closed in 1642.

Images
"Don Juan de Austria" as mocked by Velázquez, when re-enacted by a Court Clown, 1635-1645
Slideshows
Productions from the 16th Century to The Present Day
Bibliography

Adams, Joseph Q. Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theatres from the Beginning to the Restoration. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917.

Astington, J. H. English Court Theatre, 1558-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Astington, John H. "Actors and the Court after 1642." Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 15 (August 2007): 6.1-23

Bentley, Gerald E. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941-68.

Bentley, Gerald E., ed. The Seventeenth-Century Stage: A Collection of Critical Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Bowers, Fredson. Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940 [reprint 1966].

Brown, John Russell. Shakespeare in Production Through Six Major Plays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976.

Butler, Martin. Theatre in Crisis 1632-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Corbett, Margery, and Ronald Lightboon. The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550-1660. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.

Diehl, Huston. Staging Reform: Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and the Popular Theatre in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Edwards, Philip, Gerald Eades Bentley, Kathleen McLuskie, and Lois Potter. The Revels History of Drama in English, Volume IV, 1613-60. London: Methuen, 1981.

Farley-Hills, David. Jacobean Drama: a Critical Study of the Professional Drama 1600-1625. London: Macmillan, 1988.

Fordyce, Rachel. Caroline Drama: A Bibliographic History of Criticism, second edition. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992.

Fotheringham, Richard. "The Doubling of Roles on the Jacobean Stage." Theatre Research International 10 (1985): 18-32.

Frost, David L. The School of Shakespeare: the Influence of Shakespeare on English Drama, 1600-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Gooch, Brian N. S. and David Thatcher. A Shakespeare Music Catalogue, [5 vols.] Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Graves, R. B. Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567-1642. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.

Grebanier, Bernard. Then Came Each Actor. New York: Davis McKay, 1975.

Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hazlitt, William C., ed. The English Drama and Stage Under the Tudor and Stuart Princes 1543-1664: Illustrated by a Series of Documents, Treatises and Poems. Roxborough Library, 1869.

Ioppolo, Grace. Revising Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Jonson, Ben. "Timber or Discoveries." In Ben Jonson's Literary Criticism, edited by James D. Redwine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

Kastan, David S., and Peter Stallybrass, eds. Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Leach, Cliffors and T. W. Craik, eds. Revels History of Drama in English, Volume 5: 1613-1660. London: Methuen, 1975-81.

Leggatt, Alexander. Jacobean Public Theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Limon, Jerzy. Masque of Stuart Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Matthews, E. G. Anglo-Spanish Cultural and Literary Relations 1598-1700. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938.

Munro, Lucy. Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Nungezer, Edwin. A Dictionary of Actors and Other Persons Associated with the Public Representation of Plays in England Before 1642. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929.

Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Price, Joseph G., ed. The Triple Bond: Plays, Mostly Shakespearean, in Performance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975.

Raddadi, Mongi. Davenant's Adaptations of Shakespeare. Uppsala: Almquist and Winksell, 1979.

Salingar, Les. Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Shepherd, S. Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Drama. Brighton: Harvester, 1981.

Slack, Paul. The Impact of the Plague in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Sypher, Wylie. Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955.

Taylor, Gary, and John Jowett. Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606-1623. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Scribners, 1971.

Urkowitz, Steven. "'I am not made of stone': Theatrical Revision of Gesture in Shakespeare's Plays." Renaissance and Reformation 10 (1986): 79-93.

Waith, Eugene. The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952.

Wells, Stanley, Gary Taylor, et al. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Wickham, Glynne. Early English Stages, 1300 to 1660. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959 [vol. 1]; 1963 [vol. 2, part 1], 1972 [vol. 2, part 2].

Wooding, Barbara, John Lowin and the English Theatre,1603-1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013.

Wrzbach, Natascha. The Rise of the English Street Ballad 1550-1650, translated by Gayna Walls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Yates, Frances. Theatre of the World. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

Zesmer, David M. Guide to Shakespeare. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976.

  • 1425 reads

Please offer comments and suggestions on any aspects the site to: Director Hugh Richmond at richmondh77@gmail.com. See samples at the site Blog.

Except where otherwise specified, all written commentary is © 2016, Hugh Macrae Richmond.

Please report any accessibility issues to http://dap.berkeley.edu/get-help/report-web-accessibility-issue