United States or Antigua and Barbuda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Both plays owed their style and plot to the same tradition the tradition created by Kyd's Spanish Tragedy in which ghostly promptings to revenge, terrible crime, and a feigned madman waiting his opportunity are the elements of tragedy. Nothing could be more fruitful in an understanding of the relations of Shakespeare to his age than a comparison of the two.
Why would Shakespeare's plays have been impossible if the evolution of the drama had stopped with Gorboduc? Pre-Shakespearean Dramatists. Selections from Lyly, Peele, Green, Lodge, Nashe, and Kyd may be found in Williams's Specimens. Morley and Oxford Treasury also contain a number of selections. Peele's The Arraignment of Paris and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy are in Temple Dramatists.
In addition to the above types were several others, the Classical Plays, modeled upon Seneca and favored by cultivated audiences; the Melodrama, favorite of the groundlings, which depended not on plot or characters but upon a variety of striking scenes and incidents; and the Tragedy of Blood, always more or less melodramatic, like Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, which grew more blood-and-thundery in Marlowe and reached a climax of horrors in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.
In Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and in Ben Jonson's The Case is Altered, mention is made of the Italian improvised comedy, and a few of the well-known types of character in the dramatic literature of the time bear distinct traces of having been influenced by Italian masks, e.g., Ralph Roister Doister in Udall's comedy of that name; as well as the splendid Captain Bobadill and his no less amusing companion, Captain Tucca, in Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour and The Poetaster, all of which are reproductions of the typical capitano.
My conjectures are amply confirmed by Mr. Collier's notices of the intercourse of our players with the Italian actors. Whetstone's Heptameron, in 1582, mentions "The comedians of Ravenna, who are not tied to any written device." In Kyd's Spanish Tragedy the Extemporal Art is described:
All the so-called blood tragedies of the Elizabethan period, from Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy down, however much they may condemn the brutal taste of the English audiences, are still only so many search lights thrown upon a history of horrible darkness. Middleton is best known by two great plays, The Changeling and Women Beware Women.
In the case of a new play, or rather a new theme, the choregus or manager would call the company together, read out the plot, sketch the scenario, explain all business, and leave the dialogue to the humour and smartness of the individual performer. Their aptitude was amazing. In Kyd's Spanish Tragedy we find Heironymo, who wishes to have a subject mounted in a hurry, saying:
But it would have been dangerous to encounter heavy weather in her. A new ship, called the Hopping Castle, had been built by Captain Kyd's father-in-law, expressly for him. She was a stout large vessel, and promised to sail well. The officers wore all transferred to her; but most of the old Lascars refused to ship, on account of a quarrel with the boatswain.
Word Of The Day