Five Plays of the English Renaissance

Bernard Beckerman's, 5 Plays of the English Renaissance, includes three of the plays that were required reading for my level 400 English Renaissance Literature class this semester. I am a senior at a University in Southern California, and we read the plays, Doctor Faustus, Volpone, and The Dutchess of Malfi. All three plays were put together using proper stage direction and footnoting. This allowed us students to read the plays easier and come to a better understanding of the literature of the Renaissance. The editor, Bernard Beckerman points out in his introduction that Shakespeare was the the most widely known playwright at the time. He compared the playwrights in this book with Shakespeare by mentioning that they should not be overshadowed by Shakespeare. He argues that each author in this edition simply wanted to be a storyteller(xviii). At the time, there was such a demand for plays that Renaissance playwrights came up with anything as a topic for a play. Most of the authors in this edition, says Beckerman, based their play on their own personal experiences. The playwrights in this edition, unlike Shakespeare, mixed comedy with tragedy. Beckerman recognizes these authors for the amount of variety they brought to the English Renaissance playhouses. I admire the fact that the author chose to compile these 5 plays into one edition and label it as being plays of the English Renaissance. I must admit, at first glance, I was shocked to not find one of these 5 plays to include Shakespeare. William Shakespeare has always been seen as the cornerstone for Enlish Renaissance Literature, and so I was a bit amazed to have not found his name among the pieces chosen for this edition. Why Beckerman chose these five plays, I do not know. I think that none of them is like the other, yet all of them paint a picture of the common, everyday playwright of the time. The time that these five plays were written was, according to the editor, a time of growth, fulfillment, and decay(xx). I am not sure why the Renaissance was seen like this, but perhaps this is why these five plays combine tragedy with comedy. These five plays tell the story of real life occurances mostly experienced by the playwrights themselves.