Theatre Restoration

The heroic tragedy help mold itself as aesthetic genres

Almost every culture offers an audience pleasure - paradoxically - through an art based on human suffering. In Western culture a significant form of such art is tragedy, a word the meaning of which is changes with time and place of text or performance. Through the centuries, too, the very word 'tragedy' has acquired a valorizing resonance, which is unique for an art form. Ancient and modern critics have contrasted tragedy with comedy; and more recently with melodrama. Early critics - pre-eminently Aristotle focused on tragic action, whereas recent critics dwell on tragic vision. After centuries of commentary on Greek elements of tragedy see Greece, ancient, more recent approaches have shifted to abstruse semiotics and ideological codes of tragedy (Johnson, 2000).

The Restoration Theater was preceded by the Elizabethan theater, "form of public theater, peculiar to England from the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century." It is sometimes subdivided, according to the reigning sovereigns, in Elizabethan theater itself (1558 - 1603) of Elizabeth I, in Jacobean theater (1603 - 1625) of Jacques I. This way of naming the various theaters carries verbatim, the explicit trace of the complex interrelationship between drama and power. The reporting relationship and took concrete symbolic: the Elizabethan theater owes its existence to the physical protection afforded to actors by the monarch. This link will remain as strong at the Restoration, and will be manifested, for example, when establishing new theater companies in 1660 by handing over royal patents. The reigning monarch remains the ultimate master of theatrical activity (Lisa, 2003).

The theaters were closed down by order of September 2, 1642, from the Parliament at the beginning of the Civil War, shortly after the uprising against King Charles I. On the pretext of disorders of this period, the order decreed as well as popular entertainment are unsuitable time of public calamity, and the plays performed in public are unseemly time of humiliation, therefore it was deemed appropriate to order that these public cease and be dropped. This order was never fully respected, yet the severity firmed in 1647 and 1648: new orders threaten any player caught giving a representation to be not only stopped, but publicly flogged (Gould, 1964).

Any theatrical production was stopped, and the actors and playwrights had to find another job. Fleeing the military dictatorship of Cromwell , much of Lords, the image of the future King Charles II, left England and took refuge in Holland, in France and Italy , where they lead a miserable existence if not, at least difficult. Attending the European courts, they imbue their atmosphere. In the theater, they discover new things, in France the presence of professional actresses on stage, the use of sets driven by complex machines, and the first comedies. When the Lords return to the Restoration, they were a frenzy of enjoyment of life, their cynicism and frivolity driven partly by their unhappy youth (Susan, 1996).

When theaters were allowed to reopen in 1660 after a hiatus of ...