ELIZABETHAN ERA-HISTORY



The era called the Elizabethan England was a time of many developments and was considered as the Golden Age in English history. This era was led by Queen Elizabeth I, the sixth and the last ruler of Tudor. The great developments and advancements that happened during this time can be partly attributed to the leadership of the Queen. For many, Queen Elizabeth I was England's best monarch. Many considered the Queen as a wise and just Queen and chose the right advisers and never let herself get dominated by these advisers. She ruled the era for 45 fruitful years.The Elizabethan era which Queen Elizabeth I ruled and led for 45 years was the height of the English Renaissance and the time of the development of English poetry and literature. When Queen Elizabeth I was the Queen, Nicholas Hilliard was considered as the most widely recognized figure in the field of fine arts.

Nicholas Hilliard

 Also George Gower also started to make making his mark in fine arts. The 1580s of the Elizabethan era also saw the emergence of the writings of the University Wits composed of Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Kyd and Peele. Their work defined the London Theater during the Elizabethan era. Their collective work was based and grounded on medieval and Jacobean roots, but that didn't stopped and the group eventually produced new dramas and comedies and made use of Marlowe's blank verses. The group's work was commendable, but of course, I was combined the Elizabethan drama with classical sources.

THE ELIZABETHAN ERA-DAILY FAMILY LIFE

 

Elizabeth I

 The Elizabethan period in England had a daily life based on social order: the monarch as the highest, the nobility as second rank, the gentry as third, merchants as fourth, and laborers as fifth. The queen was believed to be God's representation here on Earth. They also believed that God had formed these social ranks and had showered blessings on each rank. Their Parliament had also regulated the clothes that can only be worn by each rank. For a laborer to wear clothes of the rich was not allowed and considered to be a defiance of the order. The Elizabethans had a high regard for family in a community. They believed that families were role models for the community.



They were standardized and followed a deep respect for the importance of hierarchy. They had customary rulings for the behavior of children that were taken from Bible passages. These passages were explanations on the duty of parents in properly raising their children and likewise the responsibility of children to respect and obey their elders. The Westerners ate at least two day meals, which are dinner and supper. The middle and low ranks ate vegetables and grains. The nobility class ate sweet food and meats. Generally, life expectancy reached until 42 years old, but of course the richer rank had lived years longer than that. All the more Elizabethan problems with sickness and diseases were worsened by the town's low sanitary measures. The treatment and procedures for medical attention were unorganized and fell short to complete the need; even people who were able to seek medical help had to go through painful procedures and other medication problems. Worst, the poor ranks had to undergo their medication through the traditional form of healing that was solely based on superstitious beliefs.

PLAYS

There were many plays that I have written throughout my life. I wrote comedies, tragedies, and historical plays. For comedies, I wrote The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, Love's Labour Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, The Merchant of Venice,  As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, All's Well that End's Well, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, Pericles the Prince of Tyre, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Some of the historical plays I had written throughout my life were King John, Richard II, Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, Henry V, Henry VI Part I, Henry VI Part II,  Henry VI Part III Richard III, and Henry VIII. The tragedies that I wrote include Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet was written in the early years of my life. It was about two star crossed lovers who's deaths ultimately united their feuding families. It was one of the most popular archetypal stories of young, teenage lovers. Macbeth  was a tragedy that I had written for King James I, who had come to visit Queen Elizabeth. It related to the tragedy of King James I and  was fictious compared to the actual Macbeth of Scotland, who was admired and was an able monarch. This tragedy had nothing to do with real events that had happened in Scotland. Over the years, this play had attracted some of the greatest actors and actresses to play the role of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

Romeo and Juliet

Macbeth

STYLE OF WRITING

My first writings were in the conventional style of the day. I wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally fromthe needs of the characters or the drama. The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborated metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical-written for actors to declaim rather than speak. However, later on, I began to adapt the traditional styles for my own purposes. The opening soliloquy, which is a scene when the character is talking to himself, has its roots in the slef-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of the play. No single play marks a change from the traditional style to the freer style. I combined the traditional style and the freer style and one of the best examples of this mix is Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy about two lovers who were forced to keep their love affair a secret because Romeo's family, who was the Montegues, was opposed to Juliet's family, who were the Capulets. In the end however, they both die because of their love for each other. After their deaths, the Montegues and the Capulets are able to live with each other in peace. This is one of many tragedies that I have written. My standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. Thsi means that my verses were usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of my earlier pla ys is quite different from that of my later plays. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of the lines, with the risk of monotony. Once I was able to master the traditional blank verse, I began to interrupt and vary the flow of it. This technique relases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays like  Julius Caesar  and Hamlet . For example, I used this technique to convey the turmoil that went around in Hamlet's mind.

"Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting

That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay

Worse than that of mutines in the bilboes. I lay

And prais'd be rashness for it-let us know

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well..." Hamlet Act 5, Scene 2, Lines 4-8



Petrarch

After Hamlet, I varied my poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. Much later throughout my life, I adopted many techniques to achieve run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length. Like all other playwrights of the time, my dramatised stories came from sources such as Petrarch and Holinshed. I reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest because different people had different tastes, and show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. As I got better at writing these plays, the characters of my plays had a clearer and more varied motivation and distinctive pattern of speech. I preserved aspects of my earlier style in my later plays, so that in my later romances, I deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.

WHO WAS SHAKESPEARE?

 "To be or not to be. That is the question." Hello. My name is William Shakespeare. My parents were John Shakespeare, who was a successful glover and alderman originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, who was the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer. I was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and was baptized on April 26^th, 1564. I was educated at the King's New School in Stratford, which was a free school that was chartered in 1553 and about a quarter mile away from my home. The school was expected to provide an intensive education in Latin grammar and the classics. At the age of 18, I married a 26 year old woman named Anne Hathaway and had three children: Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith.

 


Shakespeare and his Family

 Unfortunately, Hamnet died at the age of 11 of an unknown cause and was buried on August 11, 1596. Some of my plays were performed on the London stage by 1592. I was well enough known that I was attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene, who accused me of reaching above my rank in trying to match university-educated writers, such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Greene himself. My plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which soon became the leading play company in London. After Queen Elizabeth's death however, King James awarded the Lord Chamberlain's Men with a royal patent and the Lord Chamberlain's Men's name was changed to the Kings Men. In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of Thames, which they called the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. The investment and purchases of the property made me a very rich man. In 1597, the New Place, which was the second-largest house in Stratford came into my possession. 
    I also invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford in 1605. By 1598, my name became a selling point and began to appear on the title pages. I continued to act in the plays that I wrote and other plays as well after my success as a playwright. In the 1616 edition of Ben Johnson's Works I was casted  in Every Man in His Humor (1598) and Sajanus, His Fall (16o3). However, later, I decided that I did not want to continue in these works. I went back and forth between London and Stratford throughout my life. Before I bought the New Place as my family home in Stratford, I used to live in the parish of St. Helen's which was located at Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames. However I moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, which was the year my company and I constructed the Globe Theatre there.    But by 1604 I moved north of the river again, into a place north of St. Paul's Cathedral that had many fine houses. When I got there, I rented a room from a French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear. I continued to visit London and in 1612, I was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary. I was asked to resolve a dispute regarding the amount of dowry that I offered when I acted as a "go-between" to negotiate a marriage in 1604. The case could only resolved by myself and I became the spotlight of the stage. However, I honestly did not remember because it had been such a long time and plus, why should I have had to remember such a thing? Technically, I did not have a personal stake in the matter. Anyhow, after this event, I bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory in the year of 1613. My last three plays were collaborations with John Fletcher, who was to succeed me as the house playwright for the King's Men. In my will, I left most of my large estate to my oldest daughter, Susanna. It was instructed that she pass it down in full to the first son that she was to bear. In the will,  I did not mention anything of my wife, Anne, however I did pass down my second best bed to her.

Globe Theatre, 1600's