Wiki of the Wooden O

The reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) produced an unprecedented flourishing of English literature, drama, exploration, and national self-mythology, framed by religious anxiety, foreign threat, and a population doubling in size.

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The Globe, opened on Bankside in 1599 by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, was a roughly circular open-air timber playhouse with a capacity of around three thousand, in which most of Shakespeare's mature plays received their first performances.

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William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright, poet, and theatre shareholder whose thirty-odd plays became, in the centuries after his death, the most widely performed and translated body of secular literature in the world.

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An acting company formed in 1594 under the patronage of Henry Carey, Lord Chamberlain, and refounded in 1603 as the King's Men under James I. It was the most successful theatre company of its age and the one for which Shakespeare wrote.

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Patronage was the system by which noble or royal sponsors granted protection, legitimacy, and occasional money to artists and performers in exchange for prestige, propaganda, and entertainment.

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The Master of the Revels was the crown official who licensed plays for public performance. From 1581 his approval was a legal precondition for any play to be staged in England, making him the single most important censor of Elizabethan culture.

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The standing audience in the open yard of an Elizabethan playhouse, who paid one penny — the cheapest admission — and stood for the duration of the performance, often three or more hours, in any weather.

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Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, published in 1623 by his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, is the collection that preserves 36 of Shakespeare's plays, 18 of which would otherwise be lost.

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A successful Elizabethan playhouse was a high-volume, low-margin commercial enterprise: short runs of many plays in rotation, supported by daily standing-room admissions and supplemented by court performances and tour revenue.

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Women were legally barred from the English public stage until 1660. All female roles, including Juliet, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra, were performed by male apprentices, typically aged twelve to twenty-one, trained for years within an acting company.

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Modern fandom — the organized, participatory, and often para-canonical engagement of audiences with a shared body of media — has structural ancestors in the playhouse audiences of Elizabethan London. The differences are largely technological; the social form is older than the medium.

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