Shakespeare's "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," "Macbeth" and "Othello" are among the most popular and produced Renaissance dramas. Shakespeare's canon runs from comedies to tragedies to historical dramas. Other works of the period include Christopher Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta" and "Doctor Faustus," Thomas Dekker's "The Shoemaker's Holiday," and John Ford's "'Tis Pity She's a Whore." Some of these plays saw French translation soon after their publications in England.
Renaissance dramas began in the Tudor era of the 16th century and continued through the Jacobean era in the early 17th century. Shakespeare started writing his first play, "The Comedy of Errors," around 1589, but his first published play wasn't released until 1593. "The Jew of Malta" was probably written around 1589, and "'Tis Pity She's a Whore" was not published until 1633.
Shakespeare and Marlowe are considered Elizabethan playwrights, while Ford and Ben Jonson are Jacobean. Tudor playwrights include John Skelton and Nicholas Udall. It is hard to tell exactly when many of these dramas were written.
Many of the Renaissance dramas are concerned with the "tension between a court culture and a commercial culture, which in turn reflected the tension between the city government and the crown" in London, according to Wayne Narey of Arkansas State University. Because of links to Classical Greek tragedies, these plays often have a sense of fate determining the outcome of the characters, but most have more free will than the god-imposed worries of the Greeks.
Different playwrights favored different ways to set up their scenes. Many preferred to stick with a more classical approach in which three acts are practically long scenes and the setting does not shift. Common settings include large entrances to mansions, storerooms, kitchens and country homes. Other playwrights, like Shakespeare, would include more scene changes within acts, moving the focus of attention a great deal within a short amount of time.