The English Drama Before Marlowe

The English Drama Before Marlowe, Short and Best Notes.


The Origin and Liturgical Plays:

  • The drama in England developed from the liturgical play to the miracle play to morality, from the morality play to the interlude, and from that to the "regular' drama of the Elizabethan age.
  • The story of this development is, however, not so simple as it may wrongly appear. 
  • There are over-lappings, aberrations, and missing links.
  • As in Greece and many other countries, the drama in England had a religious origin.
  •  It sprang from church service as the ancient Greek tragedy had sprung out of the ceremonial worship of Dionysus.
  • In England, the church was, in the beginning, actively hostile to drama and all along during the Dark Ages.

The Miracle and Mystery Plays:

  • The next stage of development comes with miracle and mystery plays.
  •  The first representation of a miracle play took place in Dunstable as early as 1119.
  •  In England, the "miracle plays" and "mystery plays" are often considered synonymous. but technically, there is a difference between the two.
  • The miracle plays dealt with the lives of saints, whereas the mystery plays handled incidents from the Bible.
  • They had an element of entertainment, too.
  •  There are four "cycles" of miracle plays extant today. These are  York, Towneley, Chester, and Coventry cycles.
  • Each of these cycles embraces the main events of biblical history, from the Fall of Satan to the Day of Judgement.

The Morality Plays:

  • The next stage in the secularization of drama comes with the morality plays which developed out of the miracle and mystery plays.
  • The morality play, as David Daiches observes, "has more direct links with Elizabethan drama."
  • The Morality Plays deal with the personifications of various vices.
  • The personified vices and virtues are generally shown as fighting among themselves for man's soul.
  • The moralities intended to convey moral lessons for the better conduct of human life. 
  • The writer of the morality play enjoyed greater freedom than that of the miracle of a mystery play.
  • The best known among morality plays are The Castle of Perseverance and Everyman.
  • Interludes:
  • The interlude signifies the important transition from symbolism to realism.
  •  It appeared towards the end of the fifteenth century.
  •  An interlude signifies, in the words of W. H. Hudson, "any short dramatic piece of a satiric rather than of a directly religious or ethical character, and in tone and purpose far less serious than the morality proper."
  • The most notable writer of interludes was John Heywood.

The Beginning of Regular Tragedy:

  • Between 1530 and 1580 the drama in England underwent a "dramatic" change. 
  • With the dawn of the Renaissance in this period, English dramatists started looking back to the ancient "Greek and Roman dramatists.
  •  It is interesting to note that they were more influenced and impressed by the work of Roman dramatists than that of the Greeks.
  • The tragedies of Aeschylus. Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes influenced them less than the tragedies of Seneca and the comedies of Plautus and Terence.
  • The tragedies of Seneca are "closet-tragedies", that is, they are meant to be read-only, not to be acted.
  • The first English tragedy based on the Senecan model was Gorboduc, written by Thomas Sackville.

The Beginning of Regular Comedy:

  • Plautus and Terence influenced English comedy to a lesser extent than Seneca the English tragedy.
  • The first regular English comedy was Ralph Roister Doister written about 1550 by Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton.
  • It is written in rhyming couplets and divided into acts and scenes after the Latin plays. 
  • The plot is laid in London, and with some humorous dialogue and a tolerable variety of characters, affords a representation of the manners and ideas of the middle classes of the time. 
  • Greatly inferior to Roister Doister is the comedy Gammer Gurton's Needle dated about 1553, and generally ascribed to John Still. 
  • It is a crude presentation of low country life. 
  • It does not have a well-organized plot, which turns on a single incident-the loss of her needle by the country housewife Gammer Gurton.

Conclusion:

From such works as Gorboduc, Ralph Roister Doister, and Gammer Gurton's Needle it is evident how far the drama has advanced from its state of the liturgical play. We find in the progress of the drama, especially comedy, gradual gravitation towards the realities of the life of the day. What is lacking still is not arresting vitality but literary power and grace. These qualities were to be supplied later by "the University Wits"