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He was the greatest Renaissance Playwright ever. He wrote Apprentice
Plays, Romantic Comedies, History Plays, Tragedies, Problem Plays or
Bitter Comedies, Political Plays, and Romances.
Few authors can match William Shakespeare for broad appeal and sheer
endurance.
For centuries he has entertained readers and theatregoers, helping us
see our commonalities and revealing our humanness.
His tender scenes of reconciliation, such as that between Lear and
Cordelia, continue to break hearts in the 21st century, though they were
written centuries ago.
The themes of his love stories, such as Romeo and Juliet, are as fresh and
universal today as they must have been when he wrote them. Teenagers
still memorize his lines.
Words he coined are an intrinsic part of the English vocabulary.
His works are translated worldwide.
Comedies
History
Tragedies
All's Well That Ends Well‡
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Love's Labour's Lost
Measure for Measure‡
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Pericles, Prince of Tyre*†
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest*
Twelfth Night
The Two Gentlemen of
Verona
 The Two Noble Kinsmen*†
 The Winter's Tale*
•King John
•Richard II
•Henry IV, Part 1
•Henry IV, Part 2
•Henry V
•Henry VI, Part 1†
•Henry VI, Part 2
•Henry VI, Part 3
•Richard III
•Henry VIII†
•Romeo and Juliet
•Coriolanus
•Titus Andronicus†
•Timon of Athens†
•Julius Caesar
•Macbeth†
•Hamlet
•Troilus and Cressida‡
•King Lear
•Othello
•Antony and Cleopatra
•Cymbeline
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Lost plays
Poems
Shakespeare's sonnets
Venus and Adonis
The Rape of Lucrece
 The Passionate Pilgrim
 The Phoenix and the Turtle
 A Lover's Complaint
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Love's Labour's Won
Cardenio
Apocrypha
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Arden of Faversham
The Birth of Merlin
Locrine
The London Prodigal
The Puritan
The Second Maiden's Tragedy
Sir John Oldcastle
Thomas Lord Cromwell
A Yorkshire Tragedy
Edward III
Sir Thomas More
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Christopher Marlowe, (baptized Feb. 26, 1564, Canterbury, Kent, Eng.—died May 30,
1593, Deptford, near London), Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare’s most important
predecessor in English drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic
blank verse.
In a playwriting career that spanned little more than six years, Marlowe’s achievements
were diverse and splendid.
Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts, both performed by the end of 1587; published 1590)
translated Ovid’s Amores (The Loves) and the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia from the Latin
he also wrote the play Dido, Queen of Carthage (published in 1594 as the joint work of
Marlowe and Thomas Nashe)
No other of his plays or poems or translations was published during his life. His unfinished
but splendid poem Hero and Leander—which is almost certainly the finest nondramatic
Elizabethan poem apart from those produced by Edmund Spenser—appeared in 1598.
Faustus followed Tamburlaine and then Marlowe turned to a more neutral, more “social”
kind of writing in Edward II and The Massacre at Paris.
His last play was The Jew of Malta, in which he signally broke new ground.
It is known that Tamburlaine, Faustus, and The Jew of Malta were performed by the
Admiral’s Men, a company whose outstanding actor was Edward Alleyn, who most
certainly played Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas the Jew.
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He was the one who was most compared and contrasted with
Shakespeare.
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He wrote humour comedies, intrigue comedies, and satiric comedies, all
of which are marked by a characteristic blend of savagery and humor, of
moral feeling and the grim relish of the monstrous absurdities of human
nature. He also produced two tragedies on Roman themes.
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Among his major plays are the comedies:
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Every Man in His Humour (1598),
 Volpone (1605), Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (1609),
 The Alchemist (1610),
 Bartholomew Fair (1614).
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George Chapman (1559-1634),
John Marston (d. 1634),
Thomas Heywood (1570-1641),
Thomes Dekker (1575-1626),
Cyril Tourneur (1575-1670),
Thomas Middleton (1570-1627),
Frances Beaumont (1584-1616),
John Fletcher ( 1579-1625),
Philip Massinger (15B3-1640),
John Ford (1596-1666),
James Shirley (1596-1666).
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Katherine of Sutton
Lady Jane Fitzalan Lumley (c. 1537-77)
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621)
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The first recorded woman playwright in England was Katherine of Sutton, abbess
of Barking nunnery in the fourteenth century. Between 1363 and 1376 the abbess
rewrote the Easter dramatic offices because the people attending the paschal
services were becoming increasingly cool in their devotions (' deuocione frigessere').
Wishing to excite devotion at such a crowded, important festival (' desiderans …
fidelium deuocionem ad tam celebrem celebracionem magis excitare '), Lady
Katherine produced unusually lively adaptations of the traditional liturgical plays.
Particularly interesting is her elevatio crucis, one of the few surviving liturgical
plays that contains a representation of the harrowing of hell.
In the visitatio sepulchri that follows, the three Marys are acted not by male clerics,
which was customary, but by nuns.
The Barking plays are not unique, however, in showing the participation of nuns. In
religious houses on the continent women sometimes acted in church dramas, and
Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim and Hildegard of Bingen wrote Latin religious plays.
Although the destruction of liturgical texts in England at the Reformation makes
certainty impossible, it is likely, in view of the uniformity of medieval European
culture and the considerable authority of women who headed the medieval
nunneries, that other English abbesses contributed to the slow, anonymous,
communal growth of the medieval religious drama.
Katherine of Sutton was a baroness in her own right by virtue of her position as
abbess of Barking. Only women of similar rank wrote drama in England until the
Restoration
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The English Renaissance fostered rigorous classical training for ladies, who, like
male humanists, translated the ancients.
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The earliest extant English translation of a Greek play was the work of Lady Jane
Fitzalan Lumley (c. 1537-77), who made a free and abridged prose version of
Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis. Lady Lumley probably translated Euripides shortly
after her marriage at the age of 12.
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This precocious marvel worked directly from the Greek at a time when
secondhand translation from Latin was much more usual.The Latin tragedies of
Seneca of course found many translators.
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Even Queen Elizabeth, during the early years of her reign, sometime around
1561, translated the chorus of Act II of Hercules Oetaeus.
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Imitations of Senecan tragedy were popular in aristocratic and academic circles.
An influential figure in this tradition was Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of
Pembroke (1561-1621).
Mary Sidney studied at home with private tutors and attained proficiency in
French, Italian, probably Latin, and perhaps Hebrew.
After her marriage Mary Herbert lived at Wilton House, the earl's home in
Wiltshire, where she had four children, collected a notable library, and became
famous as a translator, patron of literature, and editor of the Arcadia.
The countess's dramatic activity grew out of her close relationship with her
brother, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86).
After Philip's death Mary translated the Marc-Antoine of Robert Garnier (153490), the most assured French Senecan dramatist, whose eight tragedies were
notable for their vigorous but polished style.
The Countess of Pembroke had Antonie printed in 1592 and thus became the first
woman in England to publish a play.
Antonie was reprinted in 1595, 1600, 1606, and 1607; although unacted, it was
widely influential.
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Before the Countess of Pembroke died, and probably because of her example, an
English-woman for the first time wrote and published a full-length original play.
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This was Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, later Viscountess Falkland (1586-1639). More is
known about Elizabeth Cary than about most figures of the period because one
of her daughters wrote a detailed biography of her mother.
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She was startlingly precocious, teaching herself French, Spanish, Italian, Latin,
Hebrew, and 'Transylvanian' (Life, p. 5). She loved to read so much that she sat up
all night.
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As a child she made translations from Latin and French and at 12 found internal
contradictions in Calvin's Institutes of Religion—upsetting behavior for a child of
good Protestants.
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Cary's first play was set in Sicily and dedicated to her husband; the title is
unknown and the play is lost. Her second play, dedicated to her sister-in-law, was
Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry.
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Aston, E. Feminist views on the English stage: women playwrights, 1990-2000. Cambridge
Univ Pr, 2003. Print.
Braden, G. Renaissance tragedy and the Senecan tradition: anger's privilege. Yale University
Press, 1985. Print.
Callaghan, D. Shakespeare without women: representing gender and race on the Renaissance
stage. Routledge, 2000. Print.
Cerasano, SP, and M. Wynne-Davies. Renaissance drama by women: texts and documents.
Burns & Oates, 1996. Print.
Cole, Douglas. "Recent Studies in Elizabethan and Jocobean Drama." Studies in English
Literature, 1500-1900 10 2 (1970): 425-38. Print.
Cotton, N. Women playwrights in England. Bucknell Univ. Pr., 1980. Print.
DRAMA, R.I.N.R.W.S. "Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama: Criticism, History, and
Performance, 1594-1998." Print.
Cotton, Nancy. "Katherine of Sutton: The First English Woman Playwright." Educational
Theatre Journal 30 4 (1978): 475-81. Print.
Bassnett, S. "Struggling with the Past: Women's Theatre in Search of a History." New
Theatre Quarterly 5 18 (1989): 107-12. Print.
Desens, M.C. The bed-trick in English Renaissance drama: explorations in gender, sexuality,
and power. Univ of Delaware Pr, 1994. Print.
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Harp, R., and S. Stewart. The cambridge companion to ben jonson. Cambridge Univ Pr, 2000.
Print.
Knapp, J. Shakespeare's tribe: church, nation, and theater in Renaissance England. University
of Chicago Press, 2004. Print.
Kuriyama, C.B. Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life. Cornell Univ Pr, 2002. Print.
Levin, R. The multiple plot in English Renaissance drama. University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Print.
Marcus, L.S. Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton. Routledge, 1996.
Print.
Murphy, B. The Cambridge companion to American women playwrights. Cambridge Univ Pr,
1999. Print.
Saunders, J.W. A biographical dictionary of Renaissance poets and dramatists, 1520-1650.
Harvester Press, 1983. Print.
Straznicky, Marta. "Restoration Women Playwrights and the Limits of Professionalism."
ELH 64 3 (1997): 703-26. Print.
Worthen, W. B. "Drama, Performativity, and Performance." PMLA 113 5 (1998): 1093-107.
Print.
http://www.britannica.com/shakespeare