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Notes on video lecture:
1500s: The Beginnings of Modern Theater in London
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on March 25, 2015 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
Thames, Lion, Whitechapel, bear, unsavory, sizable, 1600, four, authority, commercially, Hollywood, traveling, throng, Theater, patronage, scatological, wagon, lowbrow, vagabonds, transformational
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The Red          Theatre, 1567
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first theater in London
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Elizabethan playhouse located in                        just outside the City of London
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owners decided to build a new theater called "The               "
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The Theater, 1576
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the building of this theater was a                                  event in theater history
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before the building of the theater
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professional actors were legally classified with                   , vagrants, and other disreputable types called "masterless men"
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people who were not under control of an                    figure
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these players were                    players
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used makeshift stages such as the courtyard of an inn or a pub, a scaffold or a back of a            to perform popular often sub-literate pieces
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brought together drama, song and dance, mime, and                          humor
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what the theater did was provide a very impressive,                and permanent home
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made a theater company                          viable
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within two decades of the building of this theater there were          such buildings in London
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so the last two decades of the 16th century in England were very similar to the early days of                    when the film industry was created and exploded in popularity
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around         , London passed laws suppressing theater companies and restricting them outside the inner are of the city
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laws also required                    of theater companies
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this ensured that somebody in position of power were responsible for them
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eventually the theater district established itself on the south bank of the              called in southern part of town called Southwark
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but this was the                  entertainment district
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pubs, brothels and          baiting
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theater was always something unsavory,               , and something that should be kept away from polite society
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Sir John Davie's on plays
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"We see at all the playhouse dores, when ended is the play, the daunce, and song, a thousand townsemen, gentlemen, and whores, porters and serving-men together             ."
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at the end of plays, the actors would often get up and do a song and dance

Vocabulary:

scatological, adj. of language or literature, dealing pruriently or humorously with excrement and excretory functions ⇒ "In 16th century England, traveling actors used makeshift stages such as the courtyard of an inn or a pub, a scaffold, or a back of a wagon to perform popular often sub-literate pieces which often brought together drama, song, dance, and scatological humor."

Spelling Corrections:

travelling ⇒ traveling

Ideas and Concepts:

On the beginning's of modern theater, via tonight's Shakespeare class: "In 1576, the construction of a building in East London called "The Theatre" is considered by theater historians to be the most significant transformational event in theater history. Before the building of this theater, professional actors were legally classified along with vagabonds, vagrants, and other disreputable types as "masterless men", people who were not under control of an authority figure. These actors were traveling players who used makeshift stages made from a scaffold or the back of a wagon in places such as the courtyard of an inn or a pub, to perform popular and often sub-literate pieces which brought together drama, song, dance, mime, and mostly scatological humor. What the building of The Theatre did was provide an impressive, sizable and permanent home to actors, and it set a trend that made theater companies commercially viable within London's economy. Within two decades of the building of this theater, four such buildings appeared in London, a phenomenal growth for this time period, which suggests that the last two decades of the 16th century in London were similar to the early days of Hollywood when the film industry was created and exploded quickly in popularity."
Entertainment in the Elizabethan era via tonight's Shakespeare class:

"Bear baiting was a popular form of public entertainment in sixteenth century England. In its best-known form, arenas for this purpose were called bear-gardens, consisting of a circular high fenced area, the "pit", and raised seating for spectators. A post would be set in the ground towards the edge of the pit and the bear chained to it, either by the leg or neck. A number of well-trained hunting dogs, usually Old English Bulldogs, would then be set on it, being replaced as they got tired or were wounded or killed. In some cases the bear was let loose, allowing it to chase after animals or people.

Interestingly, a form of bear-baiting run by the United Kennel Club and the American Kennel Club in South Carolina was practiced until 2013, when the humane society was successful in its campaign to put an end to it."
1500s: The Beginnings of Modern Theater in London