Tudor Drama

1. Medieval Drama
In Medieval times a wave of Christianity was sweeping Europe, including Britain. The Church wanted to teach more and more people, however the common man on the street back then was illiterate. This, hence, brought about Medieval drama. There were three kinds of plays: miracle plays, mystery (corpus) plays and morality plays. The miracle and mystery plays were mainly concerned with teaching the Christian about the mystery of salvation. They were concerned with real characters from the Bible.

1.1.

The Miracle Plays

A miracle play presents a real or fictitious account of the life, miracles, or martyrdom of a saint. The genre evolved from liturgical offices developed during the 10th and 11th centuries to enhance calendar festivals. By the 13th century they had become vernacularized and filled with unecclesiastical elements. They had been divorced from church services and were performed at public festivals. Almost all surviving miracle plays concern either the Virgin Mary or St. Nicholas, the 4th-century bishop of Myra in Asia Minor. Both Mary and Nicholas had active cults during the Middle Ages, and belief in the healing powers of saintly relics was widespread. In this climate, miracle plays flourished.

1.2.

The Mystery Plays

The mystery plays, usually representing biblical subjects, developed from plays presented in Latin by churchmen on church premises and depicted such subjects as the Creation, Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, and the Last Judgment. In the 13th century, craft guilds began producing mystery plays at sites removed from the church, adding apocryphal and satirical elements to the dramas. In England groups of 25 50 plays were later organized into lengthy cycles, such as the Chester plays and the Wakefield plays. In England the plays were often performed on moveable pageant wagons, while in France and Italy they were acted on stages with scenery representing heaven, earth, and hell. Technical flourishes such as flying angels and fire-spouting devils kept the spectators' attention. The genre of the mystery play declined by 1600.

1.3.

The Morality Plays

A form of medieval drama that developed in the late 14th cent. and flourished through the 16th cent. The characters in the morality were personifications of good and evil usually involved in a struggle for a man's soul. The form was generally static, but it contributed significantly to the secularization of European drama. The first known moralities were called the Paternoster plays. The greatest English morality is Everyman. Justice and Mercy are personified as the daughters of God in these plays. Mercy always won in the end, as the Church wanted to teach the peoples about Gods merciful ways.

2. Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was born in early 1564. At Corpus Christi College, Cambridge he received his BA degree in 1584 and went on for a MA degree, though the university authorities would have withheld it because of his extensive absences had it not the Privy Council intervened on Marlowes behalf. They asserted that he had been engaged in matters touching the benefit of his country for which he was defamed by those that are ignorant in the affairs he went about. Marlowe was granted his MA in 1587, at the same time (15878) that both parts of Tamburlaine were first performed in London. He then moved to the vicinity of the London playhouses, and at one point shared a writing chamber with his fellow playwright Thomas Kyd. Between 1588 and 1592 he wrote Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II for the Lord Admirals men. In 1593 an atheistic lecture was found in Kyds residence; under torture, Kyd claimed that the seditious papers were Marlowes. Marlowe was posthumously accused of atheism, treason, and holding the opinion that they who love not tobacco and boys were fools. A warrant for Marlowes arrest was issued on 18 May, but before he could appear before the Privy Council, Marlowe was murdered, apparently in a brawl, on 30 May.