English Literature for Boys and Girls by H. E. (Henrietta Elizabeth) Marshall
page 226 of 806 (28%)
page 226 of 806 (28%)
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YEAR 8
Chapter XXXII ABOUT THE BEGINNING OF THE THEATER MANY of you have, no doubt, been to the theater. You have seen pantomimes and Peter Pan, perhaps; perhaps, too, a play of Shakespeare, - a comedy, it may be, which made you laugh, or even a tragedy which made you want to cry, or at least left you sad. Some of you, too, have been to "Pageants," and some may even have been to an oratorio, which last may have been sung in a church. But did you ever wonder how plays and theaters came to be? Did you ever think that there was a time when in all the length and breadth of the land there was no theater, when there were no plays either merry or sad? Yet it was so. But at a very early time the people of England began to act. And, strange as it may seem to us now, the earliest plays were acted by monks and took place in church. And it is from these very early monkish plays that the theater with its different kinds of plays, that pageants and even oratorios have sprung. In this chapter I am going to talk about these beginnings of the English theater and of its literature. All plays taken together are called the drama, and the writers of them are called dramatists, from a Greek word dran, to act or do. For dramas are written not to be read merely, but also to be acted. To trace the English drama from its beginnings we must go a long way back from the reigns of Henry VII and of Henry VIII, down to |
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