Abstract
Like other outstanding creative achievements, the English theatre of the Renaissance was the product of a confluence of diverse elements held in fruitful tension. Elements, both popular and intellectual, inherited from the Middle Ages survived to play an important part in the outlook of the dramatists and in their understanding of their craft. They existed side by side with the new attitudes promoted by continental Humanism and, beyond these, with a growing sense that the traditional world view developed through a thousand years of medieval development and expressed in a majestic conception of universal law was being largely undermined by new attitudes and new discoveries: that, in the words of Shakespeare’s contemporary, the poet John Donne, “New philosophy calls all in doubt,” and that the traditional foundations of certainty no longer stood unchallenged in the face of a world subjected to rapid and disconcerting change.
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Reading List
1. Bibliographies, handbooks, etc
Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols., 1923.
Bentley, G. E., The Jacobean and Caroline Stage7 vols., 1941–68.
Greg, W. W., A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration 4 vols., 1939–59.
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Ribner, Irving, Tudor and Stuart Drama, 1966.
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2. General histories
Schelling, F. E., Elizabethan Drama 1558–1642, 2 vols., 1908.
Brooke, C. F. T., The Tudor Drama, 1911.
Spens, Janet, Elizabethan Drama, 1922.
Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols., 1923.
Schelling, F. E., Elizabethan Playwrights: A Short History of the English Drama to 1642, 1925.
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3. Themes, topics, short periods, etc
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Welsford, Enid, The Court Masque, 1927.
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Farnham, Willard, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy, 1936; revised edition, 1950.
Spencer, Theodore, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy, 1936.
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Craik, T. W., The Tudor Interlude, 1958.
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Ornstein, Robert, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, 1960.
Galloway, David, editor, The Elizabethan Theatre 4 vols., 1960–74.
Brown, John Russell, and Bernard Harris, editors, Jacobean Theatre, 1960; Elizabethan Drama, 1966.
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4. Anthologies of primary works
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Adams, J. Q., editor, Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, 1924.
Schelling, F. E., editor, Typical Elizabethan Plays, 1926; revised edition, 1931.
Brooke, C. F. T., and N. B. Paradise, editors, English Drama 1580–1642, 1933.
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© 1980 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Traversi, D. (1980). Introduction. In: Renaissance Drama. Great Writers Student Library. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16424-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16424-0_1
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