Medieval Drama in the Elizabethan Age

Abstract

Abstract: The English cycles of Corpus Christi plays continued to be acted well into the reign of Elizabeth I, and Shakespeare almost certainly had some acquaintance with them. They off ered a form of drama radically at odds with the prescriptions laid down by Aristotle, Horace and their humanist followers, comparable in its independence to that recommended on commercial grounds by Lope de Vega. Shakespeare not only adopted many of his theatrical principles fr om the cycle plays, but also derived an explicit theory of drama fr om their model of stagecraft to rival the humanists’: a theory he spells out in the Prologue to Henry V. This “apology for the stage” was taken up in similar terms in the introductory poem of Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors, so called in response to the attack on English stage practices in Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry.

Keywords: William Shakespeare, dramatic theory, English medieval drama, Spanish medieval drama.