The British drama

I think it is nobody all over the word who has never heard about the English drama. Because the names like William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde or J. B. Shaw are so famous and they are important for our life too because they had sometime the same problems we have. And you read the books and you say: yes! He is right! This is a beauty of the English drama. It is timeless.

The biggest name of the English drama is William Shakespeare. Somebody says he was nothing in his time because there were better writers like Christopher Marlow who lived in the same time and was murdered. Some of the Shakespeare´s play could be his. But this is only a theory and the history doesn´t know words like maybe.

We can sort Shakespeare´s work in three parts. His earlier plays include histories, comedies and tragedies. For example, Richard III, Comedy of Errors or Romeo and Juliet are the most famous.

His climax works are mainly “problems plays” and the great tragedies. Everybody knows Hamlet, which is an artistic expression of the crisis of humanism and Renaissance optimism. Humanism and Renaissance thinking, that had offered so much hope, was facing failure and defeat. The ideals of human dignity and equality did not materialise – society was still corrupt and people were still evil. Well-know part is: To be, or not to be: that is the question. I think this sentence is important to understanding the age when Shakespeare lived.

Shakespeare´s later works consist of romances and “reconciliation” plays based on utopian visions, fairy-tale fantasy, and miraculous solutions of conflicts, for example The Winter´s Tale. There is literary beauty in these works which had crystallized from the chaos and conflict of the times.

But in fact Shakespeare is a mystery for us. Because he didn´t graduated the grammar school and then he wrote about stories form antiquity. How could he know it? Was he so brilliant? Many people say it is not possible that some pure man without education could do it. And so are many theories about Shakespeare. Who was he? Was it one man or a group of poets? And one really wild theory says that all plays and sonnets wrote the Queen Elisabeth I. Because she loved theatres and culture and poems in her era was called Elisabeth´s drama. There were specials round theatres with balconies and the actors were played in the middle.

At the beginning Shakespeare was pure. But he earned a lot and in the end he had his own theatre called Globe. It was situated near the river Thames and it all burned down on 29^th June 1613. A second Globe Theatre was built more or less on the same place by June 1614. It stays to this day and there is still a group of actors which play only Shakespeare´s plays.

During the time another very famous man lived in England too. His name was Oscar Wilde. We can say he was a genius because everybody loved him. He was amazing. He came in a room and every time said something unexpected. He had an idea to everything and his very famous hero Dorian Gray become to life and influenced other people. But Oscar Wilde was a gay and it was fatal for him. He lost a case and he must have gone to the jail. Then he left England and the end of his life he lived in France. Many people didn´t like him and he lost his ideal. He thought the beauty will always win. But it was not a true.

Quit everybody knows some quotation by Oscar Wilde. The most famous are about women so I am sorry but this is quite truthful. A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.

But he wrote really nice drama too. It suffices to say: The Importance of Being Earnest or Salome. Primarily the first play is famous in all Europe and in the US.

Georg Bernard Shaw is another really memorable person of the English drama. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and his play Pygmalion shocked the English public because of the phrase bloody arse which said the heroine. It was the first time somebody heard it on a stage in England. This drama is about a bet between two mans from the high society. One of them has to teach flower girl good manners. In the end it shows that the flower girl could have a better character than both this men.

I think the English drama had influenced poets all over the word. And it is good to read it because these authors deserve it.

Other British dramatists:

Thomas Kyd (Arden of Feresham, The Spanish Tragedy)

Christopher Marlowe (Eduard II., The Massacre in Paris, The Tragically History of The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus)

John Galsworthy (Justice, Joy, The Silver Box)

Lord Byron (Cain, Doge of Venice)

Alan Ayckbourn (Countdown, Family Circles, Absent Friends, Ten Time Table)

Women:

Pamela Hansford Johnson (Family Party, Six Proust Reconstructions, To Murder Mrs Mortimer)

Julia Darling (Eating The Elephant And Other Stories)

Kate Atkinson (Abandonment)