Elizabethan drama: theatre, language, audience

Drama: Language
and writing styles

• Thou/Thee
à Casual version of “you”
à Friends, lower class

• Thy/Thine
à “your”

• You/Ye
à Formal version of “you”
à Upper Class

Verb

• Ending with “T”
à art, hast
à Used for 2^nd person (thou)

• Ending with “Th”
à hath, doth
à Used for 3^rd person (he/she)

• Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great; Art not without ambition; but without The illness should attend it. --Lady Macbeth, Act I, scene V

• "What thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win." --Lady Macbeth, Act I, scene V

Shakespeare's plays contain prose and rhymed verse, but he chiefly used an unrhymed, rhythmical form of poetry called iambic pentameter.

Iambic Pentameter (Example)

Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland

In such an honour named. What’s more to do,

Which would be planted newly with the time,

As calling home our exiled friends abroad

That fled the snares of watchful tyranny;

Producing forth the cruel ministers

Of this dead butcher and his fied-like queen,

Who, as ‘tis thought, by self and violent hands

Took off her life; this, and what needful else

That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace,

We will perform in measure and in place.

This is an example of a Blank Verse, and is said in a tick-TOCK rhythem
eg.

da

DUM

da

DUM

da

DUM

da

DUM

da

DUM

Imagery in Macbeth

• Bloody knife before Macbeth
àforeshadow the brutal cold hearted murder that immediately follows.

• Blood
àused to denote guilt.

Symbolism

• Sleep.
à represents innocence

• Blood
à represents guilt

Drama: Audience

• Elizabethan Theatres attracted people from all classes – from the Upper Class nobility and the Lower class commoners.

Theatregoers

• Royalty – Plays for the royals were generally performed in indoor playhouses as they would not have attended the plays performed at the amphitheatres.

• The Nobles - Nobles would have paid for the better seats in the Lord's rooms.

• The Commoners (the Groundlings or Stinkards) would have stood in the theatre pit. They put 1 penny in a box at the theatre entrance - hence the term 'Box Office'

Seating

• The Commoners would stand in the 'Pit' of the Globe Theater.

• The nobles would pay to sit in the galleries often using cushions for comfort.

• Rich nobles could watch the play from a chair set on the side of the Globe stage itself.