Shakespearian History

Shakespeare

In 1576 James Burbage bought a lease and built “The Theatre” in Shoreditch London. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were the company in residence from 1594 1596 and were lead by Richard Burbage.

Theatre Shakespeare Style:

Writers present their ideas for a plot.

The actors and managers decided whether they want to fund it.

Writers create their characters with certain actors in mind.

Rehearsals were used to sort out the details such as Entrances, costumes, and songs.

1593 London Theatres close due to the bubonic plague.

From 1596 to 1597 the city of London banned public performances within the city limits of London.

In 1597 The owner of the land 'the theatre' was built on, Giles Allen Disapproved of the theatre and refused to re-new the lease.

1597, Shakespeare Company of actors moved to the Curtain Theatre.

1599 The globe theatre is opened.

1603 The return of the bubonic Plague kills 33,000 people. In 1608 Theatres closed once again.

In 1613 June 29th a Fire broke out at the globe during a performance of henry VIII

1614 The Globe is rebuilt

After Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, King James took the throne. This is known as the Jacobean period and ran until 1625.

Jacobean theatre was extremely dark and gritty.

In 1642 The English civil war broke out and Parliament pulled down the Globe Theatre and replaced it with council houses

A new law was passed and all actors were arrested and anyone who went to see a play was fined.

For the Shakespearian unit we were all split into two groups and given two different scenes from the shakespeare play 'A midsummer night's dream' and were told to try and use the Shakespearian style to show the scenes. My group got the scene were Bottom and his company decided who is going to play which part and how we should play it. This scene highly focuses on Bottom and Peter Quince. As such the actors who were not playing those two characters would not have many lines and would have to interact with each other a lot to keep the audiences attention. Because we were focusing on shakespeare we decided that we should not have a set list of interactions that we would take part in, in shakespearian plays the actors would not rehearse with each other, so we thought that if we rehearse together then we would not get a sense of what it was like to be an actor in shakespeare's time. We came up with a rough idea of what we wanted to happen but we would all improvise around that. This worked out a lot better than I thought it would, because we were playing characters who were considered 'dim witted' it worked quite well that we didn't really know what we were going to do and it looked more genuine overall.