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Drama provided another perspective on English life. While epic depicted the grander aspirations of the nation, its human character was expressed in stage plays, masques or speaking pageants, and dramatic processions. These forms exploited the material of chronicle so that it illustrated not only the virtues of heroes, but also their foibles and limitations; history's villains warned viewers that evil was punished, if not by civil authority then by providence. Writing tragedy based on history and legend, Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare complicated the direct moralism of medieval drama. Rather than portraying characters who became victims of their own misdoings, rising to power only to fall to disgrace, the early modern stage showed virtue and vice as intertwined—a hero's tragic error could also be at the heart of his greatness. The origins of evil were seen to be mysterious, even obscure. Some sense of this moral ambiguity can be traced to the tragedies of the Roman philosopher Seneca, which were translated into English and published in 1581. English drama reproduced many of their features: the five-act structure; rapid-fire dialogue punctuated by pithy maxims; and images of tyranny, revenge, and fate illustrated by haunting dreams and echoing curses. Shakespeare's Richard III, the most frequently performed of his plays in his own time, and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, the first tragedy in English by a woman, powerfully exemplify the qualities of early modern tragedy. If tragedy turned away from straightforward piety, so did comedy. The medieval drama of Christian salvation, in which the hero's struggle against sin was ended by his acknowledgment of grace, was replaced with plays about the wars between the sexes and between parents and children. Much of this material was modeled on the comedies of Plautus, a Roman playwright, and on the tales or novellas of contemporary Italian writers. Playwrights such as Ben Jonson also found a wealth of material in the improvisatory Italian commedia dell'arte, with its stock characters of the old dotard, the cuckolded husband, the damsel in distress, and the mountebank or quack. An even more topical form of comedy combined some of these continental traditions with themes and figures specifically drawn from London life: Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's The Roaring Girl dramatizes the urban culture of guildsmen, shopkeepers, city wives, and coney-catchers (con artists) as they encounter the city gentry and their servants. The social critique implicit in these plays was, of course, one reason why they were so popular; their pointed criticisms of various kinds of behaviors, including religious practices, appeared in various genres from city presses, and their popularity showed just how ready audiences were to imagine a reform of their society. The end of the century saw a brilliant example of satire in a series of pamphlets secretly published by an anonymous author, known as Martin Marprelate, who disparaged all aspects of the episcopacy and promoted in its place a frankly Presbyterian church, in which authority would reside in Scripture and in congregations rather than in a church hierarchy. These expressions of a new kind of self-consciousness revealed an understanding of the whole social order that appeared anarchic to some, particularly moralists opposed to stage plays. As Stephen Gosson wrote in Plays Confuted in Five Actions: If private men be suffered to forsake their calling because they desire to talk gentlemen-like in satin & velvet, with a buckler at their heels, proportion is so broken, unity dissolved, harmony confounded, that the whole body must be dismembered, and the prince or head cannot choose but sicken. The fear was not only that the tricksters of drama would be the objects of emulation rather than scorn, but also that the actors' masquerade of identities would spur social instability in the public theater's audience from the "groundlings of the pit" (crowded in front of the stage) to the gentry in the higher-priced seats. Only in 1633 did Parliament repeal the strict sumptuary laws that determined which styles and fabrics were allowed to nobility but denied to everyone else. Although some, like the playwright Thomas Heywood, praised plays as a form of instruction of the unschooled, others, like the Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbes, asserted that plays "maintain bawdry, insinuate foolery, and revive the remembrance of heathen idolatry." Londoners enjoyed two kinds of theater: public and private. The public theaters were open to all audiences for a fee and were generally immune from oversight because they were located outside the City of London in an area referred to as the Liberties, notorious for prostitution and the sport of bearbaiting. London's two biggest theaters were located there: the Fortune and the more famous Globe, home to Shakespeare's company. Private theaters—open only to invited guests—were located in the large houses of the gentry, the Inns of Court (the schools of common law), and the guildhalls; the best-known, Blackfriars, was housed in an old monastery. Their performances were acted almost exclusively by boy actors. The popularity of these companies was short-lived; James I, annoyed by the send-up of the Scots court in Eastward Ho!, a play that Ben Jonson had a part in writing, dissolved his queen's own company, known as the Queen's Revels Children. The most private and prestigious stage of all remained the royal court. Shakespeare's Othello was first acted at James's court in 1604. Of exclusive interest to this audience was the masque, a speaking pageant accompanied by music and dancing, staged with elaborate sets and costumes, and acted by members of the court, including the Queens Anne (wife of James I) and Henrietta Maria (wife of Charles I). But in 1649 a Puritan Parliament, disgusted by what it considered the immorality of the drama, banned all stage plays, and the theaters remained closed until the Restoration in 1660.
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