Theatre, stage and screen: medieval to Victorian
Viking Sagas and Anglo-Saxon Performance
Long before permanent theatres existed in Britain, sagas and epic poems provided entertainment in the great halls of the early medieval period. Travelling performers — known as scops in Anglo-Saxon culture — recited long narrative poems from memory, accompanied by a harp. The Old English epic poem Beowulf, composed some time between the seventh and tenth centuries, is the most famous surviving example. It tells the story of a Geatish hero who defeats the monster Grendel, and its performance context was the communal hall.
Viking culture brought its own tradition of saga performance to Britain. Norse sagas combined heroic narrative, mythological content and genealogical history. Performance was communal, participatory and central to identity. There were no buildings dedicated to performance: the hall, the church, and later the market square served as informal venues.
Medieval Mystery Plays
Mystery plays were the dominant form of popular drama in medieval England. They dramatised stories from the Bible, from Creation to the Last Judgement, in a cycle of short plays performed by the town guilds on wagons in a sequence of stops around the town centre. The York Mystery Plays and the Chester Mystery Plays are the best-documented surviving cycles. Performances took place on the feast of Corpus Christi, providing religious instruction through entertainment.
The guilds took great pride in their performances: the shipwrights typically played the story of Noah’s Ark; the bakers, the Last Supper. Costumes and props became elaborate, and performances could draw large crowds. Mummers also provided dramatic entertainment, particularly at Christmas: troupes of masked performers enacted folk dramas, often involving a symbolic death-and-resurrection narrative.
Medieval mystery plays were performed on wagons by town guilds on the feast of Corpus Christi. The York and Chester cycles are the most important surviving examples. They combined religious instruction with popular entertainment, making Bible stories accessible to people who could not read.
The Elizabethan Playhouse
The opening of the first permanent public theatre in London — simply called The Theatre — in Shoreditch in 1576 marks a decisive moment in English cultural history. Within two decades, a thriving commercial theatre industry had emerged in the suburbs of London, outside the jurisdiction of the city authorities who disapproved of theatre as immoral and disruptive.
The most famous of the Elizabethan playhouses was the Globe Theatre, built in Southwark in 1599 by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company that included William Shakespeare as both playwright and sharer. The Globe was a large, open-air, three-tiered circular structure accommodating perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 spectators. Admission was as little as a penny for standing room in the pit, making theatre genuinely accessible to ordinary Londoners — apprentices, craftsmen and servant girls attended alongside the wealthy in the galleries.
The plays performed in Elizabethan theatre ranged from Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories to the comedies of Ben Jonson and the tragedies of Christopher Marlowe. Performance depended on spoken language, elaborate costume and convention rather than scenery, because the open-air stage had no ability to change lighting. Cross-dressing was necessary because women were barred from the stage — all female roles were played by boy actors.
The Puritan-dominated Parliament closed all public theatres in 1642 as ungodly and disruptive. They remained closed for eighteen years. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he brought back a taste for European theatrical culture, including painted scenery, indoor candlelit theatres and, for the first time, professional women actors on the English stage. Restoration theatre was initially an elite affair, attracting the court and the fashionable classes, but it gradually spread to broader urban audiences.
Victorian Music Halls
The music hall was the defining entertainment venue of Victorian Britain. Growing out of pub concert rooms in the 1840s, dedicated music hall buildings were constructed across British towns and cities. By 1866, London alone had around 30 large music halls and over 200 smaller venues. The entertainment was fast-paced, populist and participatory: comic singers, acrobats, jugglers, magicians and sentimental balladeers performed in rotation before audiences who ate, drank and sang along.
Star performers became the celebrities of their age. Marie Lloyd, whose career reached its peak in the 1890s, was one of the most famous music hall entertainers in Britain, known for comic songs with risqué undertones that commented on working-class life. Albert Chevalier and Dan Leno were equally celebrated. Music halls provided the model for later variety theatre, the circus, and ultimately the format of television light entertainment.
Alongside music halls, glee clubs represented a more respectable strand of musical entertainment. They originated in the eighteenth century as male singing societies, performing harmonised part-songs. By the nineteenth century the tradition had broadened: choral societies proliferated across industrial towns, particularly in the north and Wales. The Huddersfield Choral Society, founded in 1836, is one of the most famous surviving examples. Choral singing gave working-class people a respected cultural activity that crossed religious and political lines.
Music halls were Victorian variety entertainment venues that grew from pub concert rooms in the 1840s. By the 1860s London had over 200 such venues. Stars like Marie Lloyd became nationally celebrated. Music halls were the dominant popular entertainment of the late Victorian period until the rise of cinema.