Introduction

Introduction

•The Elizabethan Age come some of the most highly-respected plays in Western drama

•These play include those from William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe

•These plays were patterned on numerous previous sources including the Greek tragedy, Seneca's plays, Attic drama, English miracle plays, morality plays, and interludes

•Elizabethan tragedy dealt with heroic themes, usually centering on a great personality who is destroyed by his own passion and ambition.

•The comedies often satirized the fops and gallants of society.

•The period began at the commencement of Queen Elizabeth I's reign in 1558

•The ending date is an uncertainty

•Some consider the age to have ended at the queen's death in 1603

•While others place the end of Elizabethan Drama at the closing of the theatres in 1642.