ABSTRACT
There were no buildings dedicated solely to the public, commercial performance of plays in England until 1576, when James Burbage built The Theatre on the south bank of the Thames and opened the doors to paying customers (Gurr 1992:31). Before that, religious theater had been performed, usually by town guild members, on wagons in the street; or traveling players had performed in the great houses of the nobility or had rented temporary playing spaces in inns and innyards. Shakespeare came to London sometime in the late 1580s from his home in Stratford and quickly-as writer and actor-became involved in what was thus a relatively new and rapidly expanding commercial theater industry. By the 1590s various kinds of plays were being written for that theater, including a number that dramatized events from the reigns of England’s former kings. Collectively, these have become known as English “history plays.” What distinguishes them from other types of drama is above all their subject matter. They deal with English history, and they typically focus on the reign of a particular monarch. The sources for many of these plays lie in the great prose chronicles written during the sixteenth century-works such as Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2nd edn. 1587) and Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548).
