Professional playwrights
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
The first generation of professional playwrights in England has become known collectively
as the university wits. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but their drama was
primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred subjects were historical or
pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and love interest. At times, plot virtually
evaporated; George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (1600) are simply popular shows, charming medleys of comic turns, spectacle, and
song. Peele was a civic poet, and his serious plays are bold and pageantlike; The Arraignment of
Paris (1584) is a pastoral entertainment, designed to compliment Elizabeth. Greene’s speciality
was comical histories, interweaving a serious plot set among kings with comic action involving
clowns. In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and James IV (1598), the antics of vulgar
characters complement but also criticize the follies of their betters. Only Lyly, writing for the
choristers, endeavored to achieve a courtly refinement. His Gallathea (1584) and Endimion
(1591) are fantastic comedies in which courtiers, nymphs, and goddesses make rarefied love in
intricate, artificial patterns, the very stuff of courtly dreaming.
Marlowe
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic potential
inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering
ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation,
their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of
the societies they disrupt. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II
(c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c. 1589;
published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him
unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the
overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God.
The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious
sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an
age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister,
ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was
damned as atheist, homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’ sympathies on
the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the spectator with dilemmas that can
be neither resolved nor ignored, and they articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their
time. There is a similar effect in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas
Kyd, an early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in an
unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s use of Senecan
conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian setting expresses a genuine
conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once triumphant and horrifying.
Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare's First FolioTitle page of the First Folio, the first published edition (1623) of
the collected works of William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.
Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is
impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains
elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology
finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part,
Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his
tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with
the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.
The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance
without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist,
and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theater at
every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest
literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully
realized.
The early histories
Henry V: John GielgudHenry V rallies his comrades-in-arms, “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends” (Henry V, Act III, scene 1, line 1), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording
made about 1930.
Richard II: Edward de SouzaJohn of Gaunt reflects on England, “This royal throne of
kings” (Richard II, Act II, scene 1, line 40), performed by Edward de Souza; from a 1991
recording.
Shakespeare’s early plays were principally histories and comedies. About a fifth of all
Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his
own, dramatizing the whole sweep of English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-
play sequences, an astonishing project carried off with triumphant success. The first sequence,
comprising the three Henry VI plays and Richard III (1589–94), begins as a patriotic celebration
of English valor against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned
understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the devastating portrayal of Richard III—
probably the first “character,” in the modern sense, on the English stage—who boasts in Henry
VI, Part 3 that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school.”
Richard III ostensibly monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but
its realistic depiction of the workings of state power insidiously undercuts such platitudes, and
the appeal of Richard’s quick-witted individuality is deeply unsettling, short-circuiting any easy
moral judgments. The second sequence—Richard II (1595–96), Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2
(1596–98), and Henry V (1599)—begins with the deposing of a bad but legitimate king and
follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions
of authority, obedience, and order that it raises. (The earl of Essex’s faction paid for a
performance of Richard II on the eve of their ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601.) In the
Henry IV plays, which are dominated by the massive character of Falstaff and his roguish
exploits in Eastcheap, Shakespeare intercuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those
who are ruled, thus creating a multifaceted composite picture of national life at a particular
historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pessimistic, and in Henry V a
patriotic fantasy of English greatness is hedged around with hesitations and qualifications about
the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these
plays runs a concern for the individual and his subjection to historical and political necessity, a
concern that is essentially tragic and anticipates greater plays yet to come. Shakespeare’s other
history plays, King John (1594–96) and Henry VIII (1613), approach similar questions through
material drawn from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.
The early comedies
As You Like It: John GielgudJaques philosophizes “All the world's a stage” (As You Like It,
Act II, scene 7, line 138), performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.
The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but
overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of
comedy’s fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously
and imaginatively at play. The plays of one group—The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94), The
Taming of the Shrew (c. 1589–94), The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), and Twelfth Night
(1600–01)—are comedies of intrigue, fast-moving, often farcical, and placing a high premium on
wit. The plays of a second group—The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–94), Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1589–94), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), and As You Like It (1598–1600)—
have as a common denominator a journey to a natural environment, such as a wood or a park, in
which the restraints governing everyday life are released and the characters are free to remake
themselves untrammeled by society’s forms, sportiveness providing a space in which the
fragmented individual may recover wholeness.
All the comedies share a belief in the positive, health-giving powers of play, but none is
completely innocent of doubts about the limits that encroach upon the comic space. In the four
plays that approach tragicomedy—The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97), Much Ado About
Nothing (1598–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1601–05), and Measure for Measure (1603–04)
—festivity is in direct collision with the constraints of normality, with time, business, law,
human indifference, treachery, and selfishness. These plays give greater weight to the less-
optimistic perspectives on society current in the 1590s, and their comic resolutions are openly
acknowledged to be only provisional, brought about by manipulation, compromise, or the
exclusion of one or more major characters. The unique play Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02)
presents a kind of theatrical no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy, between satire and
savage farce. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Trojan War pits heroism against its parody in a
way that voices fully the fin-de-siècle sense of confused and divided individuality.
