The Theatre

Abstract

Abstract Of the age ‘s many forms of representation, drama was the most vital, fully responsive both to general human emotions and experiences and to the particular pressures, ideas, philosophies, and attitudes of the day. Though audiences, as well as their language, culture, and religion, have altered substantially, Renaissance plays are still performed and enjoyed today. Their vigour was largely due to their commercial character: the need to please London audiences allowed the drama to reflect contemporary problems and behaviour with few constraints, and freed it from voicing establishment views (unlike the literature that sought for court patronage), so that it could respond to wider and, on occasion, more critical or subversive social forces. There was a price to be paid for such freedom: the Lord Chamberlain, through the Revels Office, imposed censorship on plays, and this might range from the excision of a few words to cutting passages and scenes, and sometimes to the suppression of an entire play, as seems to have happened in the case of Sir Thomas More (1595), where the ‘Evil May Day ‘ riot of apprentices against aliens was too topical to be acceptable to the Master of the Revels.