Культурология. Горелова А.В - 41 стр.

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4.THEATRE
4.1. Theatre and Drama in Great Britain
There were fine works of poetry and prose in the Elizabethan age, but the
greatest heights of literature at that period were reached in drama.
Types of Performances. The Middle Ages knew religious drama; the
Mysteries, Miracles, and Moralities as they were called. The Mystery plays
dramatized episodes from the Bible; the miracle plays, episodes from the lives
of saints. Morality plays were allegorical, and dedicated to the struggle of the
various virtues and vices for the human soul; more often than not, the vices and
even the devil himself were shown in such plays in a comic aspect. Between the
episodes of these plays, comic scenes were usually acted that bore almost no
relation to the story; these were called interludes.
There was another type of performance in English cities, the pageants;
these were pantomimes re-enacting episodes from the history of that particular
city. These pageants were the source of the histories (historical plays) for which
the English Renaissance drama is famous.
Sixteenth century England also knew a third type of performance: plays
staged by university students; they were plays by Roman dramatists, Seneca
(tragedies) and Plato and Terence (comedies), acted in Latin. Later on, original
English plays written in imitation of these authors began to appear.
Such were the foundations of the glorious English drama of the
Renaissance.
The First Regular Playhouses. By the middle of the 16th century there
were companies of strolling actors who, performed in town squares, inn-yards-
and in the manors of the nobility. In the 1572 Queen Elizabeth passed a decree
against vagabonds; by this decree traveling actors were also to be considered as
vagabonds and treated as such, that is, with the utmost barbarity. The only
exception made was for those that were in the service of some nobleman.
Many of these companies enlisted as servants of some peer, of course
only nominally, and began to settle down. In 1576 the company of the Earl of
Leicester's Men built the first regular playhouse, designed specially for
performances, and called it, appropriately enough, “The Theatre” (a Greek word
never used in England before).
The Theatre was the name of the first playhouse built by Burbage, a
carpenter and an actor in 1576 and pulled down in 1583 because the landowner
did not wish to renew the contract.
The Theatre was open to the sky, except for a sheltered gallery on three
sides, and the stage was a large raised platform that came out into the audience
like a sort of peninsula. No women were allowed to act, and boys took all the
female parts in plays. (The first actress in England appeared after the
Restoration of 1660).
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