Quotes & Sayings About Elizabethan Drama

It is immensely rewarding to work carefully with Shakespeare's language so that the words, the sentences, the wordplay, and the implied stage action all become clear - as readers for the past four centuries have discovered. It may be more pleasurable to attend a good performance of a play - though not everyone has thought so. But the joy of being able to stage one of Shakespeare's plays in one's imagination, to return to passages that continue to yield further meanings (or further questions) the more one reads them - these are pleasures that, for many, rival (or at least augment) those of the performed text, and certainly make it worth considerable effort to "break the code" of Elizabethan poetic drama and let free the remarkable language that makes up a Shakespeare text. — William Shakespeare

Comedies are fit for common wits:
But to present a kingly troop withal,
Give me a stately-written tragedy;
Tragadia cothurnata, fitting kings,
Containing matter, and not common things. — Thomas Kyd

I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain. I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success. — James Lee Burke

The Federal Building's large Ceremonial Courtroom, reserved for show trials, is veneered in executive teak. Bench, counsel tables, jury boxes, entrances, and exits
all are as formally arranged as an Elizabethan stage. Only the drama is shapeless, at least to those of us who have never seen a trial before. We see only random movements, sequences, comings and goings, no form or agenda apparent. To us the action is less like watching a play than watching an aquarium. — Shana Alexander

Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of any value has been added since. — James Fenton

Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers' breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. — Virginia Woolf

All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat of rebellion, of the overturning of established order, was forcefully brought home to the Elizabethan public by the revolt of the Earl of Essex, once the Queen's favourite. The contemporary debate questioned the relationship between individual life, the power and authority of the state, and the establishing of moral absolutes. Where mediaeval drama was largely used as a means of showing God's designs, drama in Renaissance England focuses on man, and becomes a way of exploring his weaknesses, depravities, flaws - and qualities. — Ronald Carter

we find in the characters of the Elizabethan drama not types and qualities, but individuals strongly projected, with all their idiosyncrasies and contradictions. These dramas touch our sympathies at all points, and are representative of human life today, because they reflected the human life of their time. — William Shakespeare