I saw William Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST.

To try and answer some of your questions:

The Golden Age of British Theatre (which lasted about 75 years, one lengthy lifetime) began in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and continued through her successor, King James I.

The plays of that time were free-wheeling affairs. There were often scenes alternating between serious business or restrained courtly love among nobility and separate scenes – and subplots – featuring working class, servants, rural folk, etc. Shakespeare was an important innovator in how he integrated the “high and low” comedy elements. Witness Dogberry and his Night Watch in “Much Ado About Nothing.” They bumble around trying to keep the peace but, almost by accident, become the ones who uncover the villain’s plot and save the day. The culmination of Shakespeare’s art in this regard is The Fool (court jester) from his greatest tragedy, “King Lear.”

Whereas the ancient Greeks and Romans, so admired by the educated of Shakespeare’s time, kept very strict rules on what could or could not be in a play (e.g. the unities of time and place), Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights did pretty much what they wanted as long as they didn’t step on powerful people’s toes.

Music and singing was always part of Shakespearean writing. I have read that “As You Like It” has the most songs of any of his plays (I haven’t personally gone through all the Plays and counted the musical numbers). Also, at the beginning of the period, it was common for the acting companies’ comedian to come out after the play was over (even a very serious tragedy) and do a “jig” – a comic dance routine that involved singing and reciting bawdy songs and poems. Again, there is evidence that Shakespeare had something to do with reforming this practice while integrating the comedy with the more serious.

About 1599, the star comedian of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men (Shakespeare’s company), named Will Kempe, sold his shares in the company and parted ways with them. Around that same year, “Hamlet” was first performed. In that play, Hamlet instructs the band of roving actors to “let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.” A lot of people see a breach there between Kempe and Shakespeare’s new approach. In Shakespeare’s work into the 1600s, the purely comic relief drops out more and more. Yet, in “The Tempest,” in sort of a retro way, the funny guys are again alternating scenes with the main plot, although Trinculo and Stephano do have a part to play other than showing comical terror.

I’ve probably gone on too much but I hope these ramblings give a better picture of what plays were like in the Early Modern period.

mf

Trust me. I’m The Doctor.

Thanks!