"The play's the thing..."

-Hamlet

Without conflict there is no drama, the word the ancient Greeks used to describe their theatrical art. In 5th century BCE Athens, theater was not merely an entertainment, but a civic institution.  The annual City Dionysia Festival was a city-wide contest, best understood as a cross-pollination of literary competitiveness, catharsis, high Pagan religion, mythology, and law. Thus one of the great gifts that theater gives us is a propulsive narrative art based in character and conflict. In addition to leaving us with many magnificent and enduring exemplars of the genre, the Greeks bequeathed us its two primary modalities, its masks of drama: comedy and tragedy.

While the collapse of the Classical Age significantly curtailed the writing and practice of the theatrical arts in the western world, during the Medieval period, the development of Morality plays, whose action reflected a simplified explication of mankind’s ethical dilemmas, and which were typically populated with characters named “Vice,” “Sloth,” “Cheerfulness,” “Avarice,” and the like, brought stage work back to western consciousness and prompted the development of the early Modern stage. 

By the Elizabethan era, the playing of plays had become a tacitly accepted, if rather blue form of civic entertainment, while the public found great pleasure in it, and many thespians heard the call of the stage and the quill, actors tended to be grouped in with brigants and prostitutes, as part of the underbelly of London life, and in fact, during this time no theaters were allowed to be built within the “City of London,” an area which may be thought of as a tight circle in the center of London that dated back to the Roman times, and indeed, which was proscribed by the remnants of ancient Roman walls, when the city was known by its original name, Londinium.

Theater-making in the western world would be forever changed in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign with the rise and maturity of two incredible stage writers, born in the same year, 1564, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Marlowe, a writer of immense power and insight whose subject matter and great dramatic monologues shifted the sense for what was possible in theatrical arts, found as much drama, shall we say, in his personal life as he found on stage. After a white hot early career for which he would later be acknowledged as one of the great progenitors of humanism, Christopher “Kit” Marlowe was killed in a tavern, a victim of a stabbing wound to the eye (incidentally, his death is shrouded in great controversy, as Marlowe likely worked as a clandestine spy for Her Majesty’s government). He was only twenty-nine years old. His great and enduring achievements, including several wonderful poems, include the plays Edward II, Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus.

This brings us to William Shakespeare, the surpassing poet and dramatist of the Modern era. That's right: Shakespeare was a Modern.