Lit N 9 ELizabethan Drama
Lit N 9 ELizabethan Drama
Lit N 9 ELizabethan Drama
- most playwrights used the so-called cumulative plot (see Tamburlaine, Macbeth)
which allowed a single direction of development and was based on a gradual accumulation of
events underlying and leading to the denoument
- the plots involving peripeteia (a turn or change of fortune) were more complex but in these
cases the order of events was unimportant and strained coincidences and an extraordinary use of
qui pro quo [equivocation] dominated
- the Elizabethan theatre also had a taste for allegory
3. Scenes
- pre-Shakespearean drama made use of typical dramatic episodes, which were developed within
rather rigid limits.
Typical dramatic episodes were:
the judgment scene
the triumph scene
the siege scene
the council scene
the farewell scene
the conversion scene
the wooing scene
the deathbed scene
4. Characters
- characters were rather simplified, mostly stock characters classifiable into types
- they were expected to behave accordingly, using specific poetical and rhetorical modes
- the villain, who set the play in motion and was ultimately defeated,
the noble harlot,
the chaste heroine, usually colourless
the bluff soldier
the pathetic child.
- they were accompanied by subsidiary stock-characters, less important for the development of
the play
- with few exceptions, before Shakespeare, characters did not really develop on stage
- all change was a sudden reversal, which was artificial, like the repentance of the villain.
- slander and credibility complicated the action.
- these contraries were held up by the strength of the playwright, mostly through the poetic
discourse