The pages that follow are the fruit of a seminar held in the Scuola per Interpreti e Traduttori at the University of Trieste between February and May 1993. They are dedicated to the students who lent their patients ears, to those at the Instituto  Shakespeare and at the University of Valencia who provided encourangement and financing, and to Professoressa Giusseppina Restivo, who made it all possible with her unconditional support.
 
 

The seventy years stretching from 1572 to 1642 were rife in England with theatrical activity.

Before 1572, plays were performed either at Court, Universities, Inns of Court and Lords’ halls, for learned and aristocratic audiences, or at inn-yards and market places for the more popular sections of society. But the decade of the 1570s brought about important changes to the theatrical world, reflecting necessarily the growing complexity of the sociological situation: these were the years in which acting became an organized profession and theatre became established as the first precedent of the ‘modern’ entertainment business. Plays, of course, continued to be put on at Courtand aristocratic circles, for the entertainment and celebration of royalty and nobility, and at Universities and Inns of Court to cater for more academic and intellectual tastes and interests. But the irruption in the sociological scene of a new, incipient, bourgeois class, the citizens of the flourishing urban centres, was to have a corresponding reflection in the theatrical scene: leisure started to be a commodity, bought and sold, and theatres began to be built as venues for the supply of entertainment on a commercial basis. And the tight control exercised by the Court and the authorities over the new leisure industry was of course indicative of the powerful ideological possibilities laid open by the new theatrical situation.

In 1572, an ‘Acte for the punishment of Vacabondes’ was passed, laying the foundations for the establishrnent of the first professional acting companies. This law meant in fact that all players, and all ‘fencers, bearewardes, juglers, pedlars, tynkers and petye chapmen’, who could not prove to be licensed for the practice of their craftby sorne noble of the realm were inimediately hable to prosecution as ‘roges vacaboundes and sturdy beggers’.

The patronage of the Earl of Leicester was granted in that same year to James Burbage’s company. In 1574, this same company was granted the explicit protection of Queen Elizabeth, and Burbage and his fellow actors performed at Court for the Christmas festivities.

By 1577, James Burbage had built the first commercial playhouse in England, called the Theatre, just outside the city limits.

The period ends abruptly in 1642, when civil war between the Royalists and the Puntan parliament broke out. London came very soon under the control of parliamentary forces, and the long-standing struggle over theatrical activifies between the Court and the Punitans ended momentarily with a resolution from the Parliament prohibiting the performance of ‘spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lacivious Mirth and Levitie’. The ordinance was intermittently defied, and the players continued to perforrn surreptitiously. But during the eighteen years of Cromweil’s rule of the Commonwealth, the tradition of outdoor theatre performing definitely died out, and when the Restoration of Charles II opened the public theatres again in 1660, a new period of the history of the theatre had already begun.

The following pages attempt a historical description of the playhouses of the period, and of the companies, actors and playwrights who used these stages.

The second part of the study deals in detail with the structure of the playhouses and the conventions observed by contemporary stagecraft as exemplified in the plays of William Shakespeare.

A third section amis at providing a picture of the playwright at work, focusing on his use of the source material and on the use of verse on the stage.

The fourth chapter purposes to establish criteria for the study and practice of Shakespearean translation.

The last pages of the present work are devoted to a comparison between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Calderón’s La vida es sueño.

Finally, a bibliography is provided for discussion and further reference.

Back to the top