The Elizabethan theatre

• Elizabethan drama

  • Indebted to the morality plays of the medieval theatre
  • Indebted to classical models
• Influences of the medieval theatre


  • Tendency to think of a play as a kind of animated sermon where the characters and situations are allegorical
  • Scenes of vivid caricature and realistic comedy
  • Mix of comedy and tragedy
  • Idea of man's place inside an ordered universe
  • Changeability of fortune and the influence of the stars
  • Avoidance of Aristotle's 'three unities' of action, place and time
• Influences of the Renaissance and Humanism


  • Italian commedia dell'arte
  • Works of Niccolò Machiavelli
  • Greek theatre
  • Latin poet and philosopher Seneca
• Seneca's influence


  • Division of the play into five acts - Act I: introduction; Act II: development; Act III: crisis or turning point; Act IV: complications; Act V: denouement
  • Taste for revenge
  • Insistence on tragic and bloody events
  • Use of rhetoric about conflicting emotions and passions
• The Elizabethan age was characterised by a wide range of interests and a vitality of language, and so drama became the main form of art
• Entertainment was rooted in the communal life of towns and villages, and was presented to a mixed audience who were more used to listening than to reading
• London was the city of entertainment
• Public performances were illegal in the City of London, so theatres were built in Southwark, on the South Bank, which was easily accessible across the Thames
• The newly built theatres soon prospered as commercial enterprises