George Peele

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George Peele (* 1556 in London ; † 1596 ) was an English playwright .

life and work

George Peele belonged to the first generation of playwrights and playwrights in commercial Elizabethan theater who significantly shaped the expectations of the public.

He was probably born in London in July 1556, the son of a respected administrative officer who was himself a writer, and was baptized on July 25, 1556. His father, who appears to come from a family in Devonshire , worked in the administration of Christ's Hospital in London and wrote two essays on bookkeeping in addition to several texts for festivals and parades in London .

George Peele began his studies at Pembroke College , Oxford in 1571 . In 1574 he moved to Christ Church College , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1577 and his master's degree in 1579 . Around 1580/81 he moved to London and devoted himself to writing.

Peele was one of the so-called University Wits , those academically trained, learned poets who greatly influenced the development of Elizabethan theater, especially in the 1580s and 1590s.

He probably died impoverished in 1596. Shortly after his death, he came to the reputation of being an all vices dilapidated bohemian to have been. However, this assessment could not be confirmed in recent research.

Peele left five plays and wrote around 1589 The Turkish Mahomet and Hyron, the fair Greek , which was never printed and has been lost, and various occasional poems.

The first recorded stage work of Peele's The Arraignment of Paris , a arisings 1581-1584 lyrical pastoral play that with a tribute to Queen I. Elisabeth closes. Peele then wrote various pieces for the London folk theaters , including The Battle of Alcazar (around 1590), David and Bethsabe (probably between 1594 and 1599) and The Old Wives' Tale (probably between 1588 and 1594).

Peele was highly valued among contemporary fellow writers; his work has been compared with that of Christopher Marlowe , whose dramatic art of language he almost reached. The versatility of his dramatic works was praised: he dramatized various myths of Ovid , imitated Seneca after, wrote biblical and historical pieces and processed local legends substances . The episodic structure is characteristic of his dramas: the individual episodes are often only loosely linked and achieve their effect in particular through their mixture of lyrical and cruel scenes.

Peele shaped the character of the English folk theater significantly through his carefreeness with which he opened up the most diverse sources for the drama and mixed motifs and moods. The breadth of his linguistic register, which brought the elegant tone of the court onto the stage as well as the coarse language of the rural figures, was equally characteristic.

In addition, like his father before, Peele wrote allegorical history games for the medieval pageants in London in 1585, 1588 and 1591 for at least three occasions.The texts of two of his pageant plays , the games The Pageant before Woolstone Dixie from the year, have been preserved 1585 and Descensus Astrææ , which was performed in 1591 on the occasion of the inauguration of Lord Mayor William Web of London .

Peele's works were first published in a collected form by Alexander Dyce (London 1828, further editions 1829–1839, 3 vol., New edition 1883), Henry Morley (1889?) And Arthur Henry Bullen (Boston 1888, 2 vol.).

Others

Polyhymnia , a blank verse portrayal of courtly ceremonies from 1590, which ends with the sonnet A Farewell to Arms , is one of Peele's occasional poems . William Makepeace Thackeray , one of the most important English authors of the Victorian era , quotes this same sonnet in the 76th chapter of his novel The Newcomes (Eng. The Newcomes , 1855); This sonnet is also the title of the famous novel A Farewell to Arms by the American writer Ernest Hemingway , published in 1929 and which has been made into films several times.

Plays (selection)

  • The Arraignment of Paris (printed 1584)
  • Edward I, Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First (1593);
  • The Old Wives' Tale (1595);
  • Love of King David and Fair Bethsaba , his main work (only printed after his death in 1599)
  • The Battle of Alcazar (performed 1588–1589, printed 1594), published anonymously, with a high degree of probability attributed to George Peele

Work edition

literature

  • Terence P. Logan, Denzell S. Smith (Eds.): The Predecessors of Shakespeare. A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE 1973, ISBN 0-8032-0775-1 , ( A survey and bibliography of recent studies in English Renaissance drama 1).
  • Werner Senn: Studies in the dramatic construction of Robert Greene and George Peele . Francke Verlag, Bern 1973.
  • Kevin J. Donovan: Recent Studies in George Peele . In: English Literary Renaissanc e, Vol. 23, No. 1, (Winter 1993), pp. 212-220.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 313.
  2. ↑ See the information on Lost Plays Database Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek, The  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved July 20, 2017.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.lostplays.org  
  3. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 313. See also the information on Poetry Foundation George Peele 1556–1596 . Retrieved July 20, 2017.
  4. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 313. See also the information on Poetry Foundation George Peele 1556–1596 . Retrieved July 20, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Peele, George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English playwright
DATE OF BIRTH before July 25, 1556
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 1596