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Elizabethan England

• Life and Times

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Queen Elizabeth

• Daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, took
  the throne after her half-sister Mary died
• Well-educated
• Spoke English, French and Italian fluently could
  read Latin and Greek, too.
• Personal image problems
• Young (25)
• Female
• Virgin

1546
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Queen Elizabeth
Queen Elizabeth ruled England from 1558 to 1603.
1588
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Elizabethan Times

• Time of exploration and discovery
• Lots of new inventions being created
• Renaissance in art, music, literature

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But things weren't always so great
Elizabethan Times

• Improvements in education
• England gains importance
• The English language, too
• Drama, theatres, and
• Shakespeare!

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London in the 1500s

• Was a maze of tiny streets, with only one route
  across the Thames River, which divides the city
• 200,000 people lived inside the city walls
• The population had increased 4 times over in 50
  years!

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Life and Death

• 1 in 20 babies died within the first week of
  life.
• 1 in 100 births killed the mother.
• 40 of children died before age fifteen.
• The average lifespan was about 40 years.
• Queen Elizabeth lived to be 70!

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• Life was very stinky.
• Medicine and hygiene were crude.
• Average folk bathed about once a year.
• Fleas and lice were everywhere.
• The Thames river was used as an open sewer.
• Household waste was tossed out the window into
  the street.

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• Mostly because of the fleas and rats, people
  became sick with the plague almost every year.
• The plague ran through London and the English
  countryside, killing 80,000 in 1563 alone.
• Whole families would be quarantined, or boarded
  up in their homes until they died or got better.

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Love and Marriage

• Wealthy families arranged their childrens
  marriages.
• Poor and middle class families had more freedom
  to choose.
• Wives and children belonged to their husbands and
  fathers.
• When they got married, the bride promised to obey
  her husband.

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• The average age of marriage for most English men
  and women was around 25.
• Men usually waited until they had enough money to
  support a family before they hooked up, and a
  woman usually needed a dowry to get married.
• Rich families used marriages to make political
  ties.
• Marriage at Juliets age of 13 or 14 was very
  rare in England.

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Womens' rights?

• If someone died, their lands, property, and money
  all went to the oldest male relative.
• If the oldest child was a girl, she would be
  skipped her younger brother would be the legal
  heir. UNFAIR!
• Even Queen Elizabeth had to survive a younger
  brother AND an older sister before she could
  inherit the throne.

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Entertainment
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• Bear
• Baiting

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Elizabethan Theatre

• For centuries before, plays were almost all based
  on Bible stories and other religious issues.
• That changed when King Henry VIII broke away from
  the Catholic Church and formed the new Church of
  England in 1533.

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Elizabethan Theatre

• New playwrights were inspired by the Roman
  theatre and writers like Seneca, who wrote about
  crime, revenge, witches, and ghosts.
• Elizabethan writers introduced theatre audiences
  to horror, the supernatural, stage violence, and
  comedy!

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Costumes

• Costumes were very important in the theatre.
• Actors wore colorful and elaborate costumes that
  would tell the audience the characters status,
  family ties, or profession.
• Even for historical plays, actors would wear
  current fashions.

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Costumes

• The emphasis that was given to a characters
  clothing made the theme of disguise a common
  convention of Elizabethan theatre.
• In order to exchange places with another
  character or conceal his identity, all an actor
  needed to do was to change his costume.

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• Women were not allowed to act because it was
  considered unladylike.
• We think this is silly, but back then it was
  completely normal.
• Teenaged boys played female roles.
• Diet and lifestyle differences made boys mature
  more slowly then than now, so they could fake it
  better.

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• Playhouses were round or octagonal with 3 levels
  of seating. Higher levels cost more.
• Plays drew large, loud crowds, especially in the
  lower levels.
• The bare dirt floor in front of the stage was
  called the pit. This was where the poorer
  people stood. They were called groundlings.
• Those willing to pay the most money could even
  sit on the stage!

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• There was very little scenery available for
  theatres, so the writers often used dialogue to
  explain to the audience where the scene was
  taking place.
• There was no stage lighting, so performances were
  all during the day.
• At the top of the building, they had a flag to
  let people know when there was going to be a
  show.

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• Actors performed on a platform stage with trap
  doors scattered all over the stage.
• The Heavens a fancy decorated ceiling to
  resemble the night sky.
• Balcony a second story above the stage to be
  used as an acting area, but was most often used
  for the musicians.

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Globe Playhouse, London

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The Globe
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William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

• Born April 23rd, 1564 in Stratford on Avon,
  England
• Third of eight children
• Attended local school until age 13
• Apprenticed as a glove maker with his father
• In 1582 married a farmers daughter, Anne
  Hathaway
• They had 3 children
• Then the lost years-- no one knows what he was
  up to until he started writing.

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Shakespeare

• Greatest playwright EVER.
• He wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets.
• None of his plays were published until after his
  death.
• Some people think that his plays were changed by
  other people, so they may not be entirely pure.
• Most famous plays Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and
  Macbeth.

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New Words from Shakespeare

• Solidified the English language
• Over 2000 new words
• critical, aggravate, assassination
• monumental, castigate, countless
• obscene, forefathers, frugal, hurry
• majestic, homicide, summit, reliance
• Phrases he invented
• Its Greek to me own flesh and blood
• tongue-tied laughing stock
• played fast and loose in a pickle
• in one fell swoop vanished into thin air
• dead as a doornail and many more

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• "Shakespeare had a huge vocabulary. In the
  collected editions of his works--the first folio
  that was published seven years after his
  death--there are 27,000 different, individual
  words. In the King James translation of the
  Bible, which was published twelve years earlier,
  there are 7,000 words."
• --Excerpt from Professor Peter Saccio's course
  "Shakespeare The Word and The Action"