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The themes were almost always religious. The most famous examples are the English cycle dramas, the York Mystery Plays, the Chester Mystery Plays, the Wakefield Mystery Plays, and the N-Town Plays, as well as the morality play known as Everyman. One of the first surviving secular plays in English is The Interlude of the Student and the Girl (c ...
The culture of England is diverse, and defined by the cultural norms of England and the English people.Owing to England's influential position within the United Kingdom it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate English culture from the culture of the United Kingdom as a whole. [1]
Other Important playwrights whose careers began later in the century are: Caryl Churchill (Top Girls, 1982) and Alan Ayckbourn (Absurd Person Singular, 1972). An important new element in the world of British drama, from the beginnings of radio in the 1920s, was the commissioning of plays, or the adaption of existing plays, by BBC radio.
Early Modern English as a literary medium was unfixed in structure and vocabulary in comparison to Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and was in a constant state of flux.When William Shakespeare began writing his plays, the English language was rapidly absorbing words from other languages due to wars, exploration, diplomacy and colonization.
The English grammar schools, like those on the continent, placed special emphasis on the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric.Though rhetorical instruction was intended as preparation for careers in civil service such as law, the rhetorical canons of memory and delivery (pronuntiatio), gesture and voice, as well as exercises from the progymnasmata, such as the prosopopoeia, taught theatrical ...
Pantomime plays a prominent role in British culture during the Christmas and New Year season. [93] Music hall evolved into variety shows. First performed in 1912, the Royal Variety Performance was first held at the London Palladium (pictured) in 1941. Performed in front of members of the Royal Family, it is held annually in December and ...
The Feast of Fools was especially important in the development of comedy. The festival inverted the status of the lesser clergy and allowed them to ridicule their superiors and the routine of church life. Sometimes plays were staged as part of the occasion and a certain amount of burlesque and comedy crept into these performances. Although ...
Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and is one of the most splendid ages of English literature.In addition to drama and the theatre, it saw a flowering of poetry, with new forms like the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as prose, including historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first ...