The beginning of the drama in England is not sure. The earliest records of acting in the Middle Ages are concerned not with plays but with individual players. Of these the most important is the minstrel who sang long poems in the honour of great heroes. Officially, the church was against him but must have realised that the stories of minstrel encourage pilgrims.
The English priests had to find some ways of teaching the people the principles of Christian doctrines. The religious services were conducted in Latin. Very few people could read the Bible. So, in very early times the Gospel stories were shown as a series of living pictures in which the performers acted in dumb shows.
At first the liturgical plays were merely a part of the church service but by the thirteenth century it had grown. Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the dramas became secularized. The words were not spoken in Latin but in English. These early plays were known as Miracles or Mysteries. The Mysteries were acted by priests and the Miracles by the trade guilds of the cities. These plays were performed on cars or scaffolds in open spaces.
Later the Morality plays came into existence, in which the characters were abstract vices and virtues.
Apart from the Morality play, there exist short plays named Interludes. They were comedies which were rude and clumsy.
When the nobility began to develop a taste for the theatre, works of higher quality were demanded. Very few of them survived as most of them were not printed. Now when the nobility became interested in the work of the playwright, the latter had to write with special skill and the favorite plays were included in the libraries. Now the dramatist was also regarded as an artist.
The Latin influence in the plays can be seen in Ralph Roister Doister, by Nicholas Udall, the first English comedy. Meanwhile in 1561, the first English Tragedy, Gorboduc by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Nortan was enacted.
Kyd and Marlowe came next. Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy, a master piece. He discovered how the blank verse can be converted into a theatrical medium.
Christopher Marlowe wrote some great works in English drama such as Dr. Faustus, The Jews of Malta, Tamburlaine and Edward II.
In comedy there were dramatists like John Lyly, the author of Euphues, Robert Greene and George Peele too.
By 1592, when Shakespeare began to build up his personal reputation, a set of traditions had developed. The body of traditions gave the Shakespeare the basic material with which to work.
At first the plays were held in inn-yards. The actors were considered rouge and vagabond. This profession was not respected.
The other very important dramatic tradition was that of tragedy. The Elizabethan audiences liked spectacular scenes. The plays were full of action and colour. There were too much bloody scenes in those plays.
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