Shakespeare and Renaissance Theater

In the early days of the English Renaissance, around 1500, most actors belonged to touring companies that traveled from town to town with their cart of props in tow. They performed simple plays in the Town Hall or on trestles in the Market – and sometimes for kings like the anachronistic players in Hamlet (Act III, Scene 2). Sometimes they acted for large festivals, sometimes in the halls of nobles. They had to be flexible. Companies like these passed through Shakespeare’s home town when he was a boy. The movie The Reckoning, starring Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany, features this type of mobile acting troupe as does Ingmar Bergman’s classic film The Seventh Seal, starring Max Von Sydow and Bibi Andersson.

As London grew prosperous, it attracted the best actors. At first they performed in the courtyards of inns. But by the time Shakespeare became an actor, leading companies had built or rented their own theaters. Shakespeare worked at the earliest of these, which was simply called the Theatre, built in 1576. Other popular theaters of the period were The Rose, The Swan and The Red Bull. After the Theater closed in 1596, Shakespeare and the acting company to which he belonged, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, began building their own theater, the Globe (using timber and other materials salvaged from the Theater).  From the closing of the Theater until the opening of the Globe in 1599, Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men probably performed at a theater called the Curtain. Romeo and Juliet, which Shakespeare wrote around 1595, may have  premiered at the Curtain. Upon the opening of the Globe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed there exclusively (except during tours of the provinces) until 1608, when they split their performance schedule between the Blackfriars during the cold months and the Globe during the summer. When James I was crowned king in 1603, he took the company under his wing. From then on they were known as the King’s Men.

There were several kinds of English Renaissance plays (also known as Elizabethan and Jacobian dramas, depending on whether they were written during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I or James 1). Most prominent were tragedies, comedies and moralities. Tragedies, for the most part, were based on classical history and modeled on ancient Roman plays by Seneca—reflecting the Renaissance of classical culture. (The Chorus that introduces Acts I and II in Romeo and Juliet is a feature Shakespeare borrowed from classical theater.) Comedies focused on love, families and tricky servants. Moralities used allegorical characters like Luxury, Vice, Penitence and Humanity. This late medieval genre replaced the strictly religious plays of the Middle Ages, Mysteries and Miracles. The goal of Moralities was to entertain and teach a lesson, a moral. One of the most famous is the late 15th-century English play Everyman, whose characters include God, Death, Beauty, Knowledge, Worldly Goods, Kindred, Everyman and other abstractions. In the play Death takes Everyman on a pilgrimage to save all men’s souls. Everyman fears to undertake this journey alone so he invites his favorite friends to join him. But Fellowship, Kindred, Worldly Goods and the rest refuse. In despair, he turns to Good-Deeds. But he’s done so few that Good-Deeds must be summoned from its grave…etc. 

Later, playwrights often mixed various types of plays. In Hamlet, Shakespeare makes fun of the fad of mixing dramatic styles, which was sometimes taken to extremes. In Act II, Scene. 2, Polonius says: “The best actors in the world either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral…” Shakespeare himself, besides writing tragedies and comedies, invented a whole new breed of play—the English history play. Examples include his Henry plays (Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, Henry V, Henry VI Part I, Henry VI Part II, Henry VI Part III, and Henry VIII), and Richard II and Richard III. For more see “Shakespeare’s Stage” in Romeo and Juliet and the Renaissance.

by Dr. Tom Bishop © NEXUS, 1996. Updated by editor Jesse Bryant Wilder in 2019. (Tom Bishop also wrote “Seneca’s Influence on Shakespeare.”

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