CLASSICAL THEATRE UNIT: SHAKESPEARE THEATRE RESEARCH

Classical Theatre Unit:

                                    ROYAL SHAKESPEARE THEATRE 

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre is a 1040  seat stage theatre owned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and  dedicated to William Shakespeare. The location is in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace which is in the English Midlands, beside the River Avon. The Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres re-opened in November 2010 after undergoing a major renovation known as the Transformation Project. The Globe was built in a similar style to the Coliseum, but on a smaller scale - other Elizabethan Theatre's followed this style of architecture, they were called amphitheatres. The Theatre was built by a carpenter called Peter Smith together with his workforce. 1597 they started building and it was finished in 1598.

The Theatre opened on 23 April 1932 on the site adjacent to the original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (opened 19 April 1879), which had been destroyed by fire on 6 March 1926, whose name it took. The architect was Elisabeth Scott, so the theatre became the first important work erected in this country from the designs of a woman architect. It is now owned and managed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and was renamed Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1961.

In 2011 they celebrated the 50th anniversary of the RSC, but the history began long before 1961 and the idea of a theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon was not new in 1875 when Charles Flower donated the building site. His radical suggestion was that it should have a permanent subsidised ensemble company of actors.

Yearly performances

April 1879 when the Shakespeare Memorial opened it held annual festivals. Between 1888 and 1917 Frank Benson's touring company appeared every spring. In 1911 a consortium led by Archibald Flower, the Memorial's Chairman, took over Benson's management. For the first time the theatre almost had its own company. 1919 marked a turning point as new directors and companies were invited to perform and on that autumn a resident company was opened, directed by William Bridges-Adams who stayed in post until 1934. When  the Second World War ended, a new way of work began. Barry Jackson employed a completely fresh company opening eight plays across the summer, each with a full month's rehearsal.

ELIZABETHAN ERA/HISTORICAL CONTEXT/THEATRE CONVENTIONS

During the Elizabethan Era many actors, playwrights and theatres were constantly busy. This was the high culture of the Elizabethan Renaissance which was best expressed in it's theatre due to the historical topics, they were especially popular but not to mention the usual comedies and tragedies. Plays were performed in the the courtyards of the inn, they were referred to as 'inn-yards''. 500 people would attend play performances and there was clearly some considerable profit to be made in theatrical productions.

ROMEO & JULIET HISTORICAL CONTEXT: 

During Queen Elizabeth 1st reign, England was still suffering from the aftershocks of the War of the Roses. As her father, King Henry VIII had been forced to deal with a long bloody civil war of his making, she found herself inheriting a new civil conflict that her father had created. This was also partly due to a question of succession but was greatly complicated by a ''holy war'' between the traditional Catholic church and the upstart Protestant sects. Throughout Elizabeth's reign, this uncivil fighting was perhaps less bloody but more pervasive as to a '' witch hunt'' type of persecution of Catholics who refused to convert to the new religion of the realm.

According to many scholars, one of those stubborn Catholics was John Shakespeare- a self-made man who lost virtually all of his position and fortune during the latter period of his life. His son, William also suffered personally from Elizabeth's anti-Catholic policies. As William later became a famous and wealthy member of the entertainment community in London, he was in a position where he could use his intellect and access to the public to voice many of his social and political thoughts. However, as Elizabeth could easily decide to imprison or execute anyone who voiced their opposing viewpoints too loudly and too directly (and did exercise that power on many occasions), William was intelligent enough to make most of his opinions behind the thin curtain of the stage.  In his “Response to Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel”, E.A.J. Honigmann points out that “Shakespeare’s two greatest rivals, (Christopher) Marlowe and (Ben) Jonson, both were Catholics with underground contacts, and both experienced interrogation and imprisonment—and in Marlowe’s case probably murder.

'Romeo & Juliet' was a veiled warning to Queen Elizabeth I of the dangers and evils of continuing this policy of allowing persecution of her own citizens to go on in her name because of a difference in the way people chose to worship Christ. This was a rather none sense feud and if Elizabeth did not end this civil strife in some way that would show that all of her subjects were truly one nation, then all would be ''Punished''.

During that era as Elizabeth I came to power, England was still suffering from the aftershocks of the War of the Roses. As her father, Henry VIII, had been forced to deal with a long and bloody civil war not of his making, Elizabeth found herself inheriting a new civil conflict that Henry had created.

JULIUS CAESAR  HISTORICAL CONTEXT:

Julius Caesar is set in ancient Rome in 44 BC ,conspiracy against the Roman dictator Julius Caesar, his assassination and the defeat of the conspirators at the Battle of Philippi. Rome suffered from constant infighting between ambitious military leaders and the far weaker senators to whom they supposedly owed allegiance. The empire also suffered from a sharp division between citizens, who were represented in the senate, and the increasingly underrepresented plebeian masses. Later on a succession of men aspired to become the absolute ruler of Rome - but only Julius Caesar seemed likely to achieve this status. Citizens who favored more democratic rule feared that Caesar’s power would lead to the enslavement of Roman citizens by one of their own. After that a group of conspirators came together and assassinated Caesar. The assassination, however, failed to put an end to the power struggles dividing the empire, and civil war erupted shortly thereafter.


The plot of this play includes the events leading up to the assassination of Caesar as well as much of the subsequent war, in which the deaths of the leading conspirators constituted a sort of revenge for the assassination. Shakespeare’s contemporaries, well versed in ancient Greek and Roman history, would very likely have detected parallels between Julius Caesar’s portrayal of the shift from republican to imperial Rome and the Elizabethan era’s trend toward consolidated monarchal power. 1599, when the play was first performed, Queen Elizabeth I had sat on the throne for nearly forty years, enlarging her power at the expense of the aristocracy and the House of Commons. As she was then sixty-six years old and her reign seemed likely to end soon, yet she lacked any heirs (as did Julius Caesar). Also a lot of people feared that her death would plunge England into the kind of chaos that had plagued England during the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses.