Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise (Volume 2 de 5)

The author examines English Renaissance theatre, reconstructing its audiences, venues and staging to explain how popular tastes shaped dramatic form. He describes crowded open playhouses, a lively, often rowdy public, and sparse scenery that forced spectators to supply illusion. He traces the rise of thirty to forty dramatists—notably Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster and others—and outlines how their plays combine expansive naturalism with energetic, sometimes violent passions, larger-than-life characters, and mixed genres from comedy to tragedy. He contrasts classical restraint with a Germanic imitative impulse, and analyzes theatrical techniques, character types, and moral-physical correspondences that made the period’s drama uniquely vivid.