Time travel back to the age of the first Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century, four hundred years ago when there was not a single theatre in the land. This is where the story of British theatre starts, not with the religious dramas of the medieval mystery plays, but with the invention of new secular plays performed before large audiences in public spaces in an urban setting. So we go back to the 1550s, when magnificent nobles put on shows to amaze and delight their queen. Within a decade, a couple of statesmen had penned Gorboduc, the first English tragedy to be written in blank verse, and by doing so they kicked off the whole history of British drama.
