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142-527: The Jealous Wife is a 1761 British play by George Colman the Elder . A comedy , it was first performed at the Drury Lane Theatre on 12 February 1761 and ran for 19 performances in its first season and 70 by the end of the century. It was translated into French and German . Colman was indebted to Henry Fielding 's novel Tom Jones as an inspiration for several characters and incidents and

284-495: A 1 ⁄ 6 -shekel per day freight rate for a 60-gur vessel. A type of guild was known in Roman times. Known as collegium , collegia or corpus , these were organised groups of merchants who specialised in a particular craft and whose membership of the group was voluntary. One such example is the corpus naviculariorum , a collegium of merchant mariners based at Rome's La Ostia port . The Roman guilds failed to survive

426-604: A Variety Club Award for Best Actress and Laurence Olivier Award nomination. Samuel Beckett wrote a number of short radio plays in the 1950s and 1960s, and later for television. Beckett's radio play Embers was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 24 June 1959, and won the RAI prize at the Prix Italia awards later that year. From the 1840s there was a demand to commemorate serious theatre, with

568-409: A monarch or other ruler to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials, but most were regulated by the local government . Guild members found guilty of cheating the public would be fined or banned from the guild. A lasting legacy of traditional guilds are the guildhalls constructed and used as guild meeting-places. Typically

710-458: A moral theme. Morality plays are a type of allegory in which the protagonist is met by personifications of various moral attributes who try to prompt him to choose a Godly life over one of evil. The plays were most popular in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. The reign of Elizabeth I in the late 16th and early 17th century saw a flowering of the drama and all the arts. Perhaps

852-642: A 'tramping' allowance for those needing to travel to find work. As the guild system of the City of London declined during the 17th century, the Livery Companies transformed into mutual assistance fraternities along such lines. European guilds imposed long standardized periods of apprenticeship , and made it difficult for those lacking the capital to set up for themselves or without the approval of their peers to gain access to materials or knowledge, or to sell into certain markets, an area that equally dominated

994-421: A 2-shekel wage for each 60- gur (300- bushel ) vessel constructed in an employment contract between a shipbuilder and a ship-owner. Law 275 stipulated a ferry rate of 3- gerah per day on a charterparty between a ship charterer and a shipmaster . Law 276 stipulated a 2 1 ⁄ 2 -gerah per day freight rate on a contract of affreightment between a charterer and shipmaster, while Law 277 stipulated

1136-584: A Scottish playwright and journalist, wrote during the second Edinburgh International Festival : ‘Round the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to be more private enterprise than before ... I am afraid some of us are not going to be at home during the evenings!’. The artistic credentials of the Fringe were established by the creators of the Traverse Theatre , John Calder , Jim Haynes and Richard Demarco in 1963. While their original objective

1278-696: A Spanish play, was produced in London to amazement that a Scot could write such excellent English. Scottish poet John Ogilby , who was the first Irish Master of the Revels , had established the Werburgh Street Theatre , the first theatre in Ireland, in the 1630s. It was closed by the Puritans in 1641. The Restoration of the monarchy in Ireland enabled Ogilby to resume his position as Master of

1420-423: A corporation without a charter, such adulterine guilds, as they were called, were not always disfranchised upon that account, but obliged to fine annually to the king for permission to exercise their usurped privileges. Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto also criticized the guild system for its rigid gradation of social rank and what he saw as the relation of oppressor and oppressed entailed by this system. It

1562-427: A decline in women's labor in south German cities from the 16th-18th centuries to both economic and cultural factors; as trades became more specialized, women's domestic responsibilities hindered them from entering the workforce. German guilds started to further regulate women's participation at this time, limiting the privileges of wives, widows, and daughters. It also forbade masters from hiring women. Crowston notes that

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1704-651: A form of early street theatre associated with the Morris dance , concentrating on themes such as Saint George and the Dragon and Robin Hood . These were folk tales re-telling old stories, and the actors travelled from town to town performing these for their audiences in return for money and hospitality. The medieval mystery plays and morality plays , which dealt with Christian themes, were performed at religious festivals. The most important work of literature surviving from

1846-516: A journeyman and entitled him to travel to other towns and countries to learn the art from other masters. These journeys could span large parts of Europe and were an unofficial way of communicating new methods and techniques, though by no means all journeymen made such travels — they were most common in Germany and Italy, and in other countries journeymen from small cities would often visit the capital. After this journey and several years of experience,

1988-401: A journeyman could be received as master craftsman, though in some guilds this step could be made straight from apprentice. This would typically require the approval of all masters of a guild, a donation of money and other goods (often omitted for sons of existing members), and the production of a so-called " masterpiece ", which would illustrate the abilities of the aspiring master craftsman; this

2130-471: A large number of theatres, particularly centred around Shaftesbury Avenue . West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres of London 's "Theatreland". Along with New York 's Broadway theatre , West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. Seeing a West End show

2272-524: A late Victorian and Edwardian theatre building boom in the West End. At the end of the century, Edwardian musical comedy came to dominate the musical stage. Irish playwrights George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and J. M. Synge (1871–1909) were influential in British drama. Shaw's career as a playwright began in the last decade of the nineteenth century, while Synge's plays belong to the first decade of

2414-430: A lifetime progression of apprentice to craftsman , and then from journeyman eventually to widely recognized master and grandmaster began to emerge. In order to become a master, a journeyman would have to go on a three-year voyage called journeyman years . The practice of the journeyman years still exists in Germany and France. As production became more specialized, trade guilds were divided and subdivided, eliciting

2556-466: A man who was not a member, she usually lost that right. The historian Alice Clark published a study in 1919 on women's participation in guilds during the Medieval period. She argued that the guild system empowered women to participate in family businesses. This viewpoint, among others of Clark's, has been criticized by fellow historians, and has sparked debate in scholarly circles. Clark's analysis of

2698-505: A network of cottagers who spun and wove in their own premises on his account, provided with their raw materials, perhaps even their looms, by the capitalist who took a share of the profits. Such a dispersed system could not so easily be controlled where there was a vigorous local market for the raw materials: wool was easily available in sheep-rearing regions, whereas silk was not. In Florence, Italy , there were seven to twelve "greater guilds" and fourteen "lesser guilds". The most important of

2840-479: A new genre in English literature theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy. Its plot contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters a personification of Revenge . The Spanish Tragedy was often referred to, or parodied, in works written by other Elizabethan playwrights , including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe. Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy, such as

2982-597: A play from the 18th century is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Theatre in the United Kingdom Theatre was introduced from Europe to what is now the United Kingdom by the Romans and auditoriums were constructed across the country for this purpose (an example has been excavated at Verulamium ). By the medieval period, theatre had developed with the mummers' plays ,

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3124-610: A playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1932), Present Laughter (1942) and Blithe Spirit (1941), have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. In the 1930s W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood co-authored verse dramas, of which The Ascent of F6 (1936) is the most notable, that owed much to Bertolt Brecht . T. S. Eliot had begun this attempt to revive poetic drama with Sweeney Agonistes in 1932, and this

3266-509: A schooling period during which he was first called an apprenticeship . After this period he could rise to the level of journeyman . Apprentices would typically not learn more than the most basic techniques until they were trusted by their peers to keep the guild's or company's secrets. Like journey , the distance that could be travelled in a day, the title 'journeyman' derives from the French words for 'day' ( jour and journée ) from which came

3408-420: A set of self-employed skilled craftsmen with ownership and control over the materials and tools they needed to produce their goods. Some argue that guilds operated more like cartels than they were like trade unions (Olson 1982). However, the journeymen organizations, which were at the time illegal, may have been influential. The exclusive privilege of a guild to produce certain goods or provide certain services

3550-591: A significant number of women members. John, Duke of Berry documents payments to female musicians from Le Puy, Lyons, and Paris. In Rouen women had participated as full-fledged masters in 7 of the city's 112 guilds since the 13th century. There were still many restrictions. Medieval Parisian guilds did not offer women independent control of their work. Women did have problems with entering healers' guilds, as opposed to their relative freedom in trade or craft guilds. Their status in healers' guilds were often challenged. The idea that medicine should only be practiced by men

3692-571: A small proportion of plays written and performed were actually published, and the smaller production in Scotland meant that a much less significant record of Scottish drama remains to us. The ribald verse play in Scots, Philotus , is known from an anonymous edition published in London in 1603. Drama in Wales as a literary tradition dates to morality plays from north-east Wales in the second half of

3834-629: A theatre company, which evolved into the National Theatre, and a ballet company, which eventually became the English Royal Ballet . The Royal Shakespeare Company operates out of Stratford-upon-Avon, producing mainly but not exclusively Shakespeare's plays. The RSC was formally established on 20 March 1961 with the royal announcement that the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre would henceforth be known as

3976-664: A theatre in Bloomsbury . This work was interrupted by World War I. Finally, in 1948, the London County Council presented a site close to the Royal Festival Hall for the purpose, and a "National Theatre Act", offering financial support, was passed by Parliament in 1949. In July 1962, a board was set up to supervise construction of a National Theatre on the South Bank site and a separate board

4118-572: A town's place in global commerce — this led to modern trademarks . In many German and Italian cities, the more powerful guilds often had considerable political influence, and sometimes attempted to control the city authorities. In the 14th century, this led to numerous bloody uprisings, during which the guilds dissolved town councils and detained patricians in an attempt to increase their influence. In fourteenth-century north-east Germany, people of Wendish , i.e. Slavic , origin were not allowed to join some guilds. According to Wilhelm Raabe, "down into

4260-419: A trend towards more contemporary and rural stories in preference to the usual historical or fantastical melodramas. James Sheridan Knowles and Edward Bulwer-Lytton established a "gentlemanly" drama that began to re-establish the former prestige of the theatre with the aristocracy . For much of the first half of the 19th century, drama in London and provincial theatres was restricted by a licensing system to

4402-663: A true 'cycle' of plays and most likely performed around the Feast of Corpus Christi probably in the town of Wakefield , England during the late Middle Ages until 1576. The Ludus Coventriae (also called the N Town plays " or Hegge cycle ), now generally agreed to be a redacted compilation of at least three older, unrelated plays, and the Chester cycle of twenty-four pageants, now generally agreed to be an Elizabethan reconstruction of older medieval traditions. These biblical plays differ widely in content. Most contain episodes such as

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4544-401: Is a common tourist activity in London. Craft guild A guild ( / ɡ ɪ l d / GILD ) is an association of artisans and merchants who oversee the practice of their craft/trade in a particular territory. The earliest types of guild formed as organizations of tradespeople belonging to a professional association . They sometimes depended on grants of letters patent from

4686-512: Is an early example of a dramatisation of a popular novel. An Advertisement preceding The Jealous Wife in Colman's Dramatick Works of 1777 reveals that he also developed ideas for the play from The Spectator , The Connoisseur and The Adelphi of Terrance . David Garrick helped Colman to work on the draft and cut down its length. This British theatre–related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article on

4828-523: Is famous or notorious for its sexual explicitness, a quality encouraged by Charles II personally and by the rakish aristocratic ethos of his court . Although documented history of Irish theatre began at least as early as 1601, the earliest Irish dramatists of note were: William Congreve (1670–1729), author of The Way of the World (1700); late Restoration playwright, George Farquhar (?1677–1707), The Recruiting Officer (1706); as well as two of

4970-455: Is most famous for Rumpole of the Bailey a British television series which starred Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, an aging London barrister who defends any and all clients. It has been spun off into a series of short stories, novels, and radio programmes. Other notable radio dramatists included Brendan Behan and novelist Angela Carter . Novelist Susan Hill also wrote for BBC radio, from

5112-465: Is sometimes nicknamed the "Age of Shakespeare" for the influence he held over the era. Other important Elizabethan and 17th-century playwrights include Ben Jonson , Christopher Marlowe , and John Webster . The English playwrights were intrigued by the Italian model as a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London. The linguist and lexicographer John Florio (1553–1625), whose father

5254-678: The BBC Light Programme . But he made his debut as an original playwright with The Dock Brief , starring Michael Hordern as a hapless barrister, first broadcast in 1957 on BBC Radio 's Third Programme , later televised with the same cast, and subsequently presented in a double bill with What Shall We Tell Caroline? at the Lyric Hammersmith in April 1958, before transferring to the Garrick Theatre . Mortimer

5396-731: The City of London . The RSC was closely involved in the design of these two venues. Since 2002 the RSC has had no regular London home, concentrating its work in Stratford at the Swan Theatre and the redeveloped Royal Shakespeare Theatre (re-opened in 2010). An important cultural movement in the British theatre that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s was Kitchen sink realism (or kitchen sink drama ), art (the term itself derives from an expressionist painting by John Bratby ), novels, film, and television plays . The term angry young men

5538-1121: The Fall of Lucifer , the Creation and Fall of Man , Cain and Abel , Noah and the Flood , Abraham and Isaac , the Nativity , the Raising of Lazarus , the Passion , and the Resurrection . Other pageants included the story of Moses , the Procession of the Prophets , Christ's Baptism , the Temptation in the Wilderness , and the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin . In given cycles,

5680-511: The Gaiety Theatre inspired further demands, including: a structure in the capital that would present "exemplary theatre"; that would form a permanent memorial to Shakespeare; a supported company that would represent the best of British acting; and a theatre school. A London Shakespeare League was founded in 1902 to develop a Shakespeare National Theatre and – with the impending tri-centenary in 1916 of his death – in 1913 purchased land for

5822-518: The Interregnum 1642–1660, English theatres were kept closed by the Puritans for religious and ideological reasons. When the London theatres opened again with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, they flourished under the personal interest and support of Charles II (reigned 1660–1685). Wide and socially mixed audiences were attracted by topical writing and by the introduction of

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5964-550: The Royal Court Theatre . Joe Orton 's dramatic debut in 1963 was the radio play The Ruffian on the Stair , which was broadcast on 31 August 1964. Tom Stoppard 's "first professional production was in the fifteen-minute Just Before Midnight programme on BBC Radio, which showcased new dramatists". John Mortimer made his radio debut as a dramatist in 1955, with his adaptation of his own novel Like Men Betrayed for

6106-678: The Royal National Theatre in London: Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh language national theatre of Wales, founded 2003), National Theatre of Scotland (founded 2006), National Theatre Wales (the English language national theatre company of Wales, founded 2009). Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru attempts to shape a distinctive identity for drama in Welsh while also opening it up to outside linguistic and dramatic influences. The West End of London has

6248-805: The Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the company as the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1962 the RSC established the Aldwych Theatre as its London base for productions transferred from Stratford to London, its stage redesigned to match the RST's apron stage. In 1982, the company took up London residence in both the Barbican Theatre and The Pit studio space in the Barbican Centre under the auspices of

6390-521: The Savoy Theatre in 1881 to present their joint works, and through the inventor of electric light Sir Joseph Swan , the Savoy was the first theatre, and the first public building in the world, to be lit entirely by electricity. The success of Gilbert and Sullivan greatly expanded the audience for musical theatre. This, together with much improved street lighting and transportation in London led to

6532-593: The Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough in its three different locations. The Stephen Joseph Theatre was the first theatre in the round in Britain. Other playwrights whose careers began later in the century are: Caryl Churchill ( Top Girls , 1982), Michael Frayn (1933-) playwright and novelist, David Hare (1947- ), David Edgar (1948- ). Dennis Potter 's most distinctive dramatic work

6674-720: The Worshipful Company of Tax Advisers , have been formed far more recently. Membership in a livery company is expected for individuals participating in the governance of The City , as the Lord Mayor and the Remembrancer . The guild system reached a mature state in Germany c.  1300 and held on in German cities into the 19th century, with some special privileges for certain occupations remaining today. In

6816-757: The collapse of the Roman Empire . A collegium was any association or corporation that acted as a legal entity . In 1816, an archeological excavation in Minya, Egypt produced a Nerva–Antonine dynasty -era (second-century AD) clay tablet from the ruins of the Temple of Antinous in Antinoöpolis , Aegyptus that prescribed the rules and membership dues of a burial society collegium established in Lanuvium , Italia in approximately 133 AD. Following

6958-505: The play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance, appear in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the hypothetical Ur-Hamlet that may have been one of Shakespeare's primary sources for Hamlet . George Chapman (c. 1559–1634) was a successful playwright who produced comedies (his collaboration on Eastward Hoe led to his brief imprisonment in 1605 as it offended

7100-677: The rise of satire in 1960s Britain . The Chichester Festival Theatre was Britain's first modern thrust stage theatre. It was inspired by the Festival Theatre of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival launched by Tyrone Guthrie in the Canadian city of Stratford, Ontario . The inaugural Artistic Director of the Chichester Festival was Sir Laurence Olivier , and it was at Chichester that

7242-470: The trade secrets — the guilds' power faded. After the French Revolution they gradually fell in most European nations over the course of the 19th century, as the guild system was disbanded and replaced by laws that promoted free trade. As a consequence of the decline of guilds, many former handicraft workers were forced to seek employment in the emerging manufacturing industries, using not closely guarded techniques formerly protected by guilds, but rather

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7384-404: The "Shakespeare Committee" purchasing the playwright's birthplace for the nation demonstrating a recognition of the importance of 'serious drama'. The following year saw more pamphlets on a demand for a National Theatre from London publisher, Effingham William Wilson. The situation continued, with a renewed call every decade for a National Theatre. In 1879 the residency of the Comédie-Française at

7526-418: The 15th century, Hamburg had 100 guilds, Cologne 80, and Lübeck 70. The latest guilds to develop in Western Europe were the gremios of Spain: e.g., Valencia (1332) or Toledo (1426). Not all city economies were controlled by guilds; some cities were "free." Where guilds were in control, they shaped labor, production and trade; they had strong controls over instructional capital, and the modern concepts of

7668-549: The 15th century. The development of Renaissance theatre in England did not have great influence in Wales as the gentry found different forms of artistic patronage. One surviving example of Welsh literary drama is Troelus a Chresyd , an anonymous adaptation from poems by Henrysoun and Chaucer dating to around 1600. With no urban centres to compare to England to support regular stages, morality plays and interludes continued to circulate in inn-yard theatres and fairs, supplemented by visiting troupes performing English repertoire. During

7810-454: The 1860s, French operettas, continued to be popular, together with Victorian burlesque . Scottish "national drama" emerged in the early 1800s, as plays with specifically Scottish themes began to dominate the Scottish stage. The existing repertoire of Scottish-themed plays included John Home 's Douglas (1756) and Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (1725), with the last two being the most popular plays among amateur groups. Douglas elicited

7952-405: The 1950s and 1960s, many major British playwrights either effectively began their careers with the BBC , or had works adapted for radio. Most of playwright Caryl Churchill 's early experiences with professional drama production were as a radio playwright and, starting in 1962 with The Ants , there were nine productions with BBC radio drama up until 1973 when her stage work began to be recognised at

8094-516: The European guilds was tied to the emergent money economy, and to urbanization . Before this time it was not possible to run a money-driven organization, as commodity money was the normal way of doing business. The guild was at the center of European handicraft organization into the 16th century. In France, a resurgence of the guilds in the second half of the 17th century is symptomatic of Louis XIV and Jean Baptiste Colbert 's administration's concerns to impose unity, control production, and reap

8236-511: The King with its anti-Scottish sentiment ), tragedies (most notably Bussy D'Ambois ) and court masques ( The Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn ). David Lyndsay 's Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1552), is a surviving example of a Scots dramatic tradition in the period that has otherwise largely been lost. James Wedderburn is recorded as having written anti-Catholic tragedies and comedies in Scots around 1540 before being forced to flee into exile. Although

8378-509: The Lord Chamberlain in Great Britain. James Planché was a prolific playwright. He revolutionised stage productions of Shakespeare and the classics by introducing the use of historically appropriate costume design , working with antiquarians to establish what was known about period dress. Dion Boucicault (1820–90) made the latest scientific inventions important elements in his plots and exerted considerable influence on theatrical production. His first big success, London Assurance (1841)

8520-402: The Medieval era was an ever-changing, mutable society—especially considering that it spanned hundreds of years and many different cultures. There were multiple accounts of women's participation in guilds in England and the Continent. In a study of London silkwomen of the 15th century by Marian K. Dale, she notes that medieval women could inherit property, belong to guilds, manage estates, and run

8662-407: The Middle Cornish period is An Ordinale Kernewek ("The Cornish Ordinalia "), a 9000-line religious drama composed around the year 1400. The longest single surviving work of Cornish literature is Bywnans Meriasek (The Life of Meriasek), a play dated 1504, but probably copied from an earlier manuscript. There are four complete or nearly complete extant English biblical collections of plays from

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8804-400: The Patent theatre companies, and all other theatres could perform only musical entertainments (although magistrates had powers to license occasional dramatic performances). By the early 19th century, however, music hall entertainments had become popular, and provided a loophole in the restrictions on non-patent theatres in the genre of melodrama which did not contravene the Patent Acts, as it

8946-415: The Revels and open the first Theatre Royal in Dublin in 1662 in Smock Alley. In 1662 Katherine Philips went to Dublin where she completed a translation of Pierre Corneille 's Pompée , produced with great success in 1663 in the Smock Alley Theatre, and printed in the same year both in Dublin and London. Although other women had translated or written dramas, her translation of Pompey broke new ground as

9088-420: The Waverley novels, largely first performed in minor theatres, rather than the larger Patent theatres, included The Lady in the Lake (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1819), and Rob Roy , which underwent over 1,000 performances in Scotland in this period. Also adapted for the stage were Guy Mannering , The Bride of Lammermoor and The Abbot . These highly popular plays saw the social range and size of

9230-444: The Word"), in 1982. It is "a play about language and only about language", but it deals with a wide range of issues, stretching from language and communication to Irish history and cultural imperialism. Friel responds strongly to both political and language questions in modern-day Northern Ireland. In 1970, American actor and director Sam Wanamaker founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust and the International Shakespeare Globe Centre, with

9372-400: The acquisition of craft skills required experience-based learning, he argues that this process necessitated many years in apprenticeship. The extent to which guilds were able to monopolize markets is also debated. Guilds were often heavily concerned with product quality. The regulations they established on their own members' work, as well as targeting non-guild members for illicit practice,

9514-490: The ancestors of the English music hall . These forms flourished at the expense of legitimate English drama, which went into a long period of decline. By the early 19th century it was no longer represented by stage plays at all, but by the closet drama , plays written to be privately read in a "closet" (a small domestic room). Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron were the most important literary dramatists of their time (although Shelley's plays were not performed until later in

9656-481: The apparent exceptions of stonecutters and perhaps glassmakers, mostly the people that had local skills. Gregory of Tours tells a miraculous tale of a builder whose art and techniques suddenly left him, but were restored by an apparition of the Virgin Mary in a dream. Michel Rouche remarks that the story speaks for the importance of practically transmitted journeymanship. In France , guilds were called corps de métiers . According to Viktor Ivanovich Rutenburg, "Within

9798-439: The armourers were divided into helmet-makers, escutcheon-makers, harness-makers, harness-polishers, etc. In Catalan towns, especially at Barcelona , guilds or gremis were a basic agent in the society: a shoemakers' guild is recorded in 1208. In England, specifically in the City of London Corporation , more than 110 guilds, referred to as livery companies , survive today, with the oldest 869 years old. Other groups, such as

9940-410: The audience for theatre expand and helped shape theatre going practices in Scotland for the rest of the century. In 1847, a critic using the pseudonym Dramaticus published a pamphlet describing the parlous state of British theatre. Production of serious plays was restricted to the patent theatres , and new plays were subjected to censorship by the Lord Chamberlain's Office . At the same time, there

10082-521: The benefits of transparent structure in the shape of efficient taxation. The guilds were identified with organizations enjoying certain privileges ( letters patent ), usually issued by the king or state and overseen by local town business authorities (some kind of chamber of commerce ). These were the predecessors of the modern patent and trademark system. The guilds also maintained funds in order to support infirm or elderly members, as well as widows and orphans of guild members, funeral benefits, and

10224-522: The binding oaths sworn among the members to support one another in adversity, kill specific enemies, and back one another in feuds or in business ventures. The occasion for these oaths were drunken banquets held on December 26. In 858, West Francian Bishop Hincmar sought vainly to Christianise the guilds. In the Early Middle Ages , most of the Roman craft organisations , originally formed as religious confraternities , had disappeared, with

10366-454: The century). Shakespeare was enormously popular, and began to be performed with texts closer to the original, as the drastic rewriting of 17th and 18th century performing versions for the theatre (as opposed to his plays in book form, which were also widely read) was gradually removed over the first half of the century. Melodramas, light comedies, operas, Shakespeare and classic English drama, pantomimes , translations of French farces and, from

10508-466: The decline thesis has been reaffirmed in the German context by Wiesner and Ogilvie, but that it does not work in looking at the matter from a larger scope, as her expertise is in French history. There were exclusively female guilds that came out of the woodwork in the 17th century, primarily Paris , Rouen , and Cologne . In 1675, Parisian seamstresses requested the guild as their trade was organized and profitable enough to support incorporation. Some of

10650-726: The early 1970s. Irish playwright Brendan Behan , author of The Quare Fellow (1954), was commissioned by the BBC to write a radio play The Big House (1956); prior to this he had written two plays Moving Out and A Garden Party for Irish radio. Among the most famous works created for radio are Dylan Thomas 's Under Milk Wood (1954), which was later adpated into the 1972 film starring Richard Burton and Glynis Johns , Samuel Beckett 's All That Fall (1957), Harold Pinter 's A Slight Ache (1959), Robert Bolt 's A Man for All Seasons (1954), and Terence Rattigan 's Cause Célèbre (1975), which earned starring actress Glynis Johns

10792-488: The economic marginalization of women in the 17th c., and has highlighted that domestic life did not organize women's economic activities. The research has documented women's extensive participation in market relations, craft production, and paid labor in the early modern period. Clare Crowston posits that women gained more control of their own work. In the 16th and 17th centuries, rather than losing control, female linen drapers and hemp merchants established independent guilds. In

10934-529: The eighteenth century no German guild accepted a Wend." In the Russian Empire , from the reform of Peter the Great (beginning of the 17th century ) until 1917 , these were corporations of wealthy merchants, with their own rights. They therefore constituted an Order which was divided, according to property, into three classes: merchant of the first Guild, of the second Guild, and of the third Guild and

11076-407: The entire economy but because they benefited the owners, who used political power to protect them. Ogilvie (2011) says they regulated trade for their own benefit, were monopolies, distorted markets, fixed prices, and restricted entrance into the guild. Ogilvie (2008) argues that their long apprenticeships were unnecessary to acquire skills, and their conservatism reduced the rate of innovation and made

11218-626: The expanding British Empire. Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer was the first play to be staged in New York City on December 6, 1732. It was also the first play to be staged in the Colony of New South Wales , which is now Australia . The age of Augustan drama was brought to an end by the censorship established by the Licensing Act 1737 . After 1737, authors with strong political or philosophical points to make would no longer turn to

11360-503: The family business if widowed. The Livre des métiers de Paris (Book of Trades of Paris) was compiled by Étienne Boileau , the Grand Provost of Paris under King Louis IX . It documents that 5 out of 110 Parisian guilds were female monopolies, and that only a few guilds systematically excluded women. Boileau notes that some professions were also open to women: surgeons, glass-blowers, chain-mail forgers. Entertainment guilds also had

11502-440: The famous "Whaur's Yer Wullie Shakespeare Noo?" jeer from a member of one of its early audiences, and was also the subject of a number of pamphlets for and against it. It also arguably led to James MacPherson 's Ossian cycle. Home was hounded by the church authorities for Douglas . It may have been this persecution which drove Home to write for the London stage, in addition to Douglas' success there, and stopped him from founding

11644-671: The first National Theatre company was formed. Chichester's productions would transfer to the National Theatre's base at the Old Vic in London . The Theatres Act 1968 abolished the system of censorship of the stage that had existed in Great Britain since 1737. The new freedoms of the London stage were tested by Howard Brenton 's The Romans in Britain , first staged at the National Theatre during 1980, and subsequently

11786-509: The first professional actresses (in Shakespeare's time, all female roles had been played by boys). New genres of the Restoration were heroic drama , pathetic drama , and Restoration comedy . The Restoration plays that have best retained the interest of producers and audiences today are the comedies, such as William Wycherley 's The Country Wife (1676), The Rover (1677) by the first professional woman playwright, Aphra Behn , and John Vanbrugh 's The Relapse (1696). Restoration comedy

11928-415: The first rhymed version of a French tragedy in English and the first English play written by a woman to be performed on the professional stage. Aphra Behn (one of the women writers dubbed " The fair triumvirate of wit ") was a prolific dramatist and one of the first English professional female writers. Her greatest dramatic success was The Rover (1677). Theatre began to spread from the United Kingdom to

12070-407: The focus of an unsuccessful private prosecution in 1982. The height of Alan Ayckbourn 's commercial success included Absurd Person Singular (1975), The Norman Conquests trilogy (1973), Bedroom Farce (1975) and Just Between Ourselves (1976), all plays that focused heavily on marriage in the British middle classes. Throughout his writing career, all but four of his plays were premièred at

12212-689: The governing body of a town. For example, London's Guildhall became the seat of the Court of Common Council of the City of London Corporation, the world's oldest continuously elected local government, whose members to this day must be Freemen of the city. The Freedom of the City , effective from the Middle Ages until 1835, gave the right to trade, and was only bestowed upon members of a Guild or Livery. Early egalitarian communities called "guilds" were denounced by Catholic clergy for their "conjurations" —

12354-422: The great range of intellectual issues which he tackles in different plays. Both Pinter and Stoppard continued to have new plays produced into the 1990s. Beyond the Fringe was a comedy stage revue written and performed by Peter Cook , Dudley Moore , Alan Bennett , and Jonathan Miller . It played in London's West End and then on New York 's Broadway in the early 1960s, and is widely regarded as seminal to

12496-513: The greater guilds and the lesser artisanal guilds, which depended on piecework . "In Florence, they were openly distinguished: the Arti maggiori and the Arti minori —already there was a popolo grasso and a popolo magro ". Fiercer struggles were those between essentially conservative guilds and the merchant class, which increasingly came to control the means of production and the capital that could be ventured in expansive schemes, often under

12638-472: The greater guilds was that for judges and notaries, who handled the legal business of all the other guilds and often served as an arbitrator of disputes. Other greater guilds include the wool, silk, and the money changers' guilds. They prided themselves on a reputation for very high-quality work, which was rewarded with premium prices. The guilds fined members who deviated from standards. Other greater guilds included those of doctors, druggists, and furriers. Among

12780-509: The guild itself there was very little division of labour, which tended to operate rather between the guilds. Thus, according to Étienne Boileau 's Book of Handicrafts, by the mid-13th century there were no less than 100 guilds in Paris , a figure which by the 14th century had risen to 350." There were different guilds of metal-workers: the farriers, knife-makers, locksmiths, chain-forgers, nail-makers, often formed separate and distinct corporations;

12922-632: The guild meetings and thus had a means of controlling the handicraft activities. This was important since towns very often depended on a good reputation for export of a narrow range of products, on which not only the guild's, but the town's, reputation depended. Controls on the association of physical locations to well-known exported products, e.g. wine from the Champagne and Bordeaux regions of France , tin-glazed earthenwares from certain cities in Holland , lace from Chantilly , etc., helped to establish

13064-595: The guilds in Cologne had been made up almost entirely of women since the medieval period. Early modern Rouen was an important center of guildswomen's activity. By 1775, there were about 700 female masters, accounting for 10% of all guild masters in the city. A survey that circulated in the late 18th century listed that the Rouen ribbonmakers had 149 masters, mistresses, and widows, indicating its mixed gendered composition. A tax roll of 1775 indicated that their total membership

13206-679: The guilds in France. In 1803 the Napoleonic Code banned any coalition of workmen whatsoever. Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (Book I, Chapter X, paragraph 72): It is to prevent this reduction of price, and consequently of wages and profit, by restraining that free competition which would most certainly occasion it, that all corporations, and the greater part of corporation laws, have been established. (...) and when any particular class of artificers or traders thought proper to act as

13348-451: The guilds of dyers, cotton-weavers, and guilds in the leather industry. They did enjoy full rights in some wood-working guilds, the guilds of coopers and turners. Women also seemed to have extensively engaged in the fish trade, both within and outside of the guild. The butcher and cattle-trade guilds also listed women among their ranks. In practically all of these guilds, a widow was allowed to continue her husband's business. If she remarried to

13490-439: The guilds' concerns. These are defining characteristics of mercantilism in economics, which dominated most European thinking about political economy until the rise of classical economics . The guild system survived the emergence of early capitalists , which began to divide guild members into "haves" and dependent "have-nots". The civil struggles that characterize the 14th-century towns and cities were struggles in part between

13632-658: The inaugural Edinburgh International Festival in 1947. Seven performed in Edinburgh, and one undertook a version of the medieval morality play "Everyman" in Dunfermline Abbey , about 20 miles north, across the Firth of Forth , in Fife. These groups aimed to take advantage of the large assembled theatre crowds to showcase their own, alternative, theatre. The Fringe got its name the following year (1948) after Robert Kemp ,

13774-415: The key "privilege" was that only guild members were allowed to sell their goods or practice their skill within the city. There might be controls on minimum or maximum prices, hours of trading, numbers of apprentices, and many other things. Critics argued that these rules reduced free competition , but defenders maintained that they protected professional standards. An important result of the guild framework

13916-557: The late medieval period ; although these collections are sometimes referred to as "cycles," it is now believed that this term may attribute to these collections more coherence than they in fact possess. The most complete is the York cycle of forty-eight pageants. They were performed in the city of York , from the middle of the fourteenth century until 1569. There are also the Towneley plays of thirty-two pageants, once thought to have been

14058-520: The late 17th century and onward, there was evidence of growing economic opportunities for women. Seamstresses in Paris and Rouen and flower sellers in Paris acquired their own guilds in 1675. In Dijon , the number of female artisans recorded in tax rolls rose substantially between the years of 1643 and 1750. In 18th c. Nantes , there was a significant growth in women's access to guilds, with no restrictions on their rights. Historian Merry Wiesner attributed

14200-409: The lesser guilds, were those for bakers, saddle makers, ironworkers and other artisans. They had a sizable membership, but lacked the political and social standing necessary to influence city affairs. The guild was made up by experienced and confirmed experts in their field of handicraft. They were called master craftsmen . Before a new employee could rise to the level of mastery, he had to go through

14342-424: The middle English word journei . Journeymen were able to work for other masters, unlike apprentices, and generally paid by the day and were thus day labourers. After being employed by a master for several years, and after producing a qualifying piece of work, the apprentice was granted the rank of journeyman and was given documents (letters or certificates from his master and/or the guild itself) which certified him as

14484-408: The most famous playwright in the world, William Shakespeare , wrote around 40 plays that are still performed in theatres across the world to this day. They include tragedies, such as Hamlet (1603), Othello (1604), and King Lear (1605); comedies, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream (1594–96) and Twelfth Night (1602); and history plays, such as Henry IV, Part 1 . The Elizabethan age

14626-498: The most outspoken critics of the guild system were Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith , and all over Europe a tendency to oppose government control over trades in favour of laissez-faire free market systems grew rapidly and made its way into the political and legal systems. Many people who participated in the French Revolution saw guilds as a last remnant of feudalism . The d'Allarde Law of 2 March 1791 suppressed

14768-502: The most successful playwrights on the London stage in the 18th century, Oliver Goldsmith (?1730–74), She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), The School for Scandal (1777). Anglo-Irish drama in the 18th century also includes Charles Macklin (?1699–1797), and Arthur Murphy (1727–1805). Thomas Sydserf was behind the establishment in Edinburgh of the first regular theatre in Scotland, and his 1667 play Tarugo's Wiles: or, The Coffee-House , based on

14910-559: The new Scottish national theatre that some had hoped he would. Walter Scott was keenly interested in drama, becoming a shareholder in the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh . Baillie's Highland themed The Family Legend was first produced in Edinburgh in 1810 with the help of Scott, as part of a deliberate attempt to stimulate a national Scottish drama. Scott also wrote five plays, of which Hallidon Hill (1822) and MacDuff's Cross (1822), were patriotic Scottish histories. Adaptations of

15052-454: The objective of building a faithful recreation of Shakespeare's Globe close to its original location at Bankside, Southwark. Shakespeare's Globe opened to the public in 1997. Performances are engineered to duplicate the original environment of Shakespeare's Globe; there are no spotlights, plays are staged during daylight hours and in the evenings (with the help of interior floodlights), there are no microphones, speakers or amplification. During

15194-676: The other hand, Ogilvie agrees, guilds created "social capital" of shared norms, common information, mutual sanctions, and collective political action. This social capital benefited guild members, even as it arguably hurt outsiders. The guild system became a target of much criticism towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Critics argued that they hindered free trade and technological innovation , technology transfer and business development . According to several accounts of this time, guilds became increasingly involved in simple territorial struggles against each other and against free practitioners of their arts. Two of

15336-493: The other hand, most trade and craft guilds were male-dominated and frequently limited women's rights if they were members, or did not allow membership at all. The most common way women obtained guild membership was through marriage. Usually only the widows and daughters of known masters were allowed in. Even if a woman entered a guild, she was excluded from guild offices. While this was the overarching practice, there were guilds and professions that did allow women's participation, and

15478-560: The passage of the Lex Julia in 45 BC, and its reaffirmation during the reign of Caesar Augustus (27 BC–14 AD), collegia required the approval of the Roman Senate or the emperor in order to be authorized as legal bodies . Ruins at Lambaesis date the formation of burial societies among Roman soldiers and mariners to the reign of Septimius Severus (193–211) in 198 AD. In September 2011, archeological investigations done at

15620-435: The period is that things change during the early modern period, specifically the 17th century, and become more stifling for women in guilds. She also posits that domestic life drove women out of guild participation. Many historians have done research into the dwindling women's participation in guilds. Studies have provided a contradictory picture. Recent historical research is usually posed in rebuttal to Alice Clark's study on

15762-432: The plays came to be sponsored by the newly emerging Medieval craft guilds . Having grown out of the religiously based mystery plays of the Middle Ages, the morality play is a genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment, which represented a shift towards a more secular base for European theatre. In their own time, these plays were known as "interludes", a broader term given to dramas with or without

15904-616: The propaganda value of drama in the Scottish Reformation was important, the Kirk hardened its attitude to such public entertainments. In 1599 James VI had to intervene to overturn a prohibition on attending performances by a visiting theatre troupe from England. Scottish drama did not succeed in becoming a popular artform in the face of religious opposition and the absence of King and court after 1603. As with drama in England, only

16046-408: The quality of the wig, making it too thin to style. Guild officers pointed out that if the consumer discovers the bad quality, the guild would be blamed, and the consumer would search elsewhere to purchase goods. Women's participation within medieval guilds was complex and varied. On one hand, guild membership allowed women to participate in the economy that provided social privilege and community. On

16188-557: The responsibilities of some trades toward the public. Modern antitrust law could be said to derive in some ways from the original statutes by which the guilds were abolished in Europe. The economic consequences of guilds have led to heated debates among economic historians. On the one side, scholars say that since merchant guilds persisted over long periods they must have been efficient institutions (since inefficient institutions die out). Others say they persisted not because they benefited

16330-472: The rules of guilds of their own. German social historians trace the Zunftrevolution , the urban revolution of guildmembers against a controlling urban patriciate, sometimes reading into them, however, perceived foretastes of the class struggles of the 19th century. In the countryside, where guild rules did not operate, there was freedom for the entrepreneur with capital to organize cottage industry ,

16472-535: The site of an artificial harbor in Rome, the Portus , revealed inscriptions in a shipyard constructed during the reign of Trajan (98–117) indicating the existence of a shipbuilders guild. Collegia also included fraternities of priests overseeing sacrifices , practicing augury , keeping religious texts, arranging festivals , and maintaining specific religious cults . There were several types of guilds, including

16614-400: The society poorer. She says their main goal was rent seeking , that is, to shift money to the membership at the expense of the entire economy. Epstein and Prak's book (2008) rejects Ogilvie's conclusions. Specifically, Epstein argues that guilds were cost-sharing rather than rent-seeking institutions. They located and matched masters and likely apprentices through monitored learning. Whereas

16756-465: The squabbles over jurisdiction that produced the paperwork by which economic historians trace their development: The metalworking guilds of Nuremberg were divided among dozens of independent trades in the boom economy of the 13th century, and there were 101 trades in Paris by 1260. In Ghent , as in Florence , the woolen textile industry developed as a congeries of specialized guilds. The appearance of

16898-732: The stage as their first hope of making a living, and novels began to have dramatic structures involving only normal human beings, as the stage was closed off for serious authors. Prior to the Licensing Act 1737, theatre was the first choice for most wits. After it, the novel was. In the 18th century, the highbrow and provocative Restoration comedy lost favour, to be replaced by sentimental comedy , domestic Bourgeois tragedy such as George Lillo 's The London Merchant (1731), and by an overwhelming interest in Italian opera . Popular entertainment became more important in this period than ever before, with fair-booth burlesque and mixed forms that are

17040-669: The stage. Again in the 1950s, the absurdist play Waiting for Godot (1955) (originally En attendant Godot , 1952), by the Paris-based Irish expatriate Samuel Beckett profoundly affected British drama. The Theatre of the Absurd influenced Harold Pinter (1930-2008), (The Birthday Party, 1958), whose works are often characterised by menace or claustrophobia. Beckett also influenced Tom Stoppard (1937-) ( Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead ,1966). Stoppard's works are however also notable for their high-spirited wit and

17182-491: The standardized methods controlled by corporations . Interest in the medieval guild system was revived during the late 19th century, among far-right circles. Fascism in Italy (among other countries) implemented corporatism , operating at the national rather than city level, to try to imitate the corporatism of the Middle Ages. Guilds are sometimes said to be the precursors of modern cartels . Guilds, however, can also be seen as

17324-618: The twentieth century. Synge's most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World , "caused outrage and riots when it was first performed" in Dublin in 1907. George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate about important political and social issues, like marriage, class, "the morality of armaments and war" and the rights of women. In the 1920s and later Noël Coward (1899–1973) achieved enduring success as

17466-784: The two main categories of merchant guilds and craft guilds but also the frith guild and religious guild. Guilds arose beginning in the High Middle Ages as craftsmen united to protect their common interests. In the German city of Augsburg craft guilds are mentioned in the Towncharter of 1156. The continental system of guilds and merchants arrived in England after the Norman Conquest , with incorporated societies of merchants in each town or city holding exclusive rights of doing business there. In many cases they became

17608-613: The war. James Bridie , the pseudonym used by Osborne Henry Mavor (1888–1951), was a Scottish playwright, screenwriter and surgeon, considered to be a founding father of modern Scottish theatre, following his involvement with the founding of both the Citizens Theatre and Scotland's first college of drama, now known as the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama . The Edinburgh Festival Fringe started life when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to

17750-600: Was Italian, was a royal language tutor at the Court of James I , and a possible friend and influence on William Shakespeare, had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. The earliest Elizabethan plays includes Gorboduc (1561) by Sackville and Norton as well as The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again , Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592. Highly popular and influential in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established

17892-491: Was a burgeoning theatre sector featuring a diet of low melodrama and musical burlesque ; but critics described British theatre as driven by commercialism and a 'star' system. Kotzebue's plays were translated into English and Thomas Holcroft 's A Tale of Mystery was the first of many English melodramas. Pierce Egan , Douglas William Jerrold , Edward Fitzball , James Roland MacLaren and John Baldwin Buckstone initiated

18034-671: Was a comedy in the style of Sheridan, but he wrote in various styles, including melodrama. T. W. Robertson wrote popular domestic comedies and introduced a more naturalistic style of acting and stagecraft to the British stage in the 1860s. A change came in the late 19th century with the plays on the London stage by the Irishmen George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen , all of whom influenced domestic English drama and vitalised it again. The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre

18176-578: Was a required regulation of the yarn-spinners guild. The guildswomen of the gold-spinners guild were often wives of guildsmen of the gold-smiths. This type of unity between husband and wife was seen in women's guild participation through the medieval and early modern periods; in order to avoid unpleasant litigation or legal situations, the trades of husband and wife often were the same or complementary. Women were not restricted to solely textile guilds in medieval Cologne, and neither did they have total freedom in all textile guilds. They had limited participation in

18318-677: Was accompanied by music. The passing of the Theatres Act 1843 removed the monopoly on drama held by the Patent theatres, enabling local authorities to license theatres as they saw fit, and also restricted the Lord Chamberlain's powers to censor new plays . The 1843 Act did not apply to Ireland where the power of the Lord Lieutenant to license patent theatres enabled control of stage performance analogous to that exercised by

18460-502: Was constituted to run a National Theatre Company and lease the Old Vic theatre. The company was to remain at the Old Vic until 1976, when the new South Bank building was opened. The theatrical landscape has since been reconfigured, moving from a single national theatre at the end of the 20th century to four as a result of the devolution of cultural policy. National theatre companies were founded in Scotland and Wales as complements to

18602-486: Was followed by The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Family Reunion (1939). There were three further plays after the war. Saunders Lewis (1893–1985), writer in Welsh, was above all a dramatist. His earliest published play was Blodeuwedd (The woman of flowers) (1923–25, revised 1948). Other notable plays include Buchedd Garmon (The life of Germanus) (radio play, 1936) and several others after

18744-539: Was often applied members of this artistic movement. It used a style of social realism which depicts the domestic lives of the working class, to explore social issues and political issues. The drawing room plays of the post war period, typical of dramatists like Terence Rattigan and Noël Coward were challenged in the 1950s by these Angry Young Men , in plays like John Osborne 's Look Back in Anger (1956). Arnold Wesker and Nell Dunn also brought social concerns to

18886-558: Was often retained by the guild. The medieval guild was established by charters or letters patent or similar authority by the city or the ruler and normally held a monopoly on trade in its craft within the city in which it operated: handicraft workers were forbidden by law to run any business if they were not members of a guild, and only masters were allowed to be members of a guild. Before these privileges were legislated, these groups of handicraft workers were simply called 'handicraft associations'. The town authorities might be represented in

19028-458: Was opened in Shakespeare's birthplace Stratford upon Avon in 1879; and Herbert Beerbohm Tree founded an Academy of Dramatic Art at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1904. Producer Richard D'Oyly Carte brought together librettist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan , and nurtured their collaboration. Among Gilbert and Sullivan 's best known comic operas are H.M.S. Pinafore , The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado . Carte built

19170-533: Was produced for television. Translations by Brian Friel was first performed at the Guildhall, Derry , Northern Ireland , in 1980. An Irish-language version of the play has been produced. The play has also been translated into Welsh by Elan Closs Stephens . The Welsh version has visited a number of venues in Wales and was first published by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch , under its Welsh title Torri Gair ("Breaking

19312-508: Was similar in spirit and character to the original patent systems that surfaced in England in 1624. These systems played a role in ending the guilds' dominance, as trade secret methods were superseded by modern firms directly revealing their techniques, and counting on the state to enforce their legal monopoly . Some guild traditions still remain in a few handicrafts, in Europe especially among shoemakers and barbers . These are, however, not very important economically except as reminders of

19454-484: Was supported by some religious and secular authorities at the time. It is believed that the Inquisition and witch hunts throughout the ages contributed to the lack of women in medical guilds. In medieval Cologne there were three guilds that were composed almost entirely of women, the yarn-spinners, gold-spinners, and silk-weavers. Men could join these guilds, but were almost exclusively married to guildswomen. This

19596-453: Was the 18th and 19th centuries that saw the beginning of the low regard in which some people hold the guilds to this day. In part due to their own inability to control unruly corporate behavior, the tide of public opinion turned against the guilds. Because of industrialization and modernization of the trade and industry, and the rise of powerful nation-states that could directly issue patent and copyright protections — often revealing

19738-658: Was the emergence of universities at Bologna (established in 1088), Oxford (at least since 1096) and Paris ( c.  1150 ); they originated as guilds of students (as at Bologna) or of masters (as at Paris). Naram-Sin of Akkad ( c.  2254 –2218 BC), grandson of Sargon of Akkad who had unified Sumeria and Assyria into the Akkadian Empire , promulgated common Mesopotamian standards for length, area, volume, weight, time, and shekels , which were used by artisan guilds in each city. Code of Hammurabi Law 234 ( c.  1755–1750 BC ) stipulated

19880-496: Was to create a standard of work that the consumer could rely on. They were heavily concerned with public perception. In October 1712, the Lyon Wigmaker Guild petitioned the local police magistrates. According to this petition, guildmasters required guild officers to step up policing of statutes forbidding the use of bleached hair or wild goat and lamb hair. The real concern that they had was that bleaching hair destroyed

20022-703: Was to maintain something of the Festival atmosphere in Edinburgh all year round, the Traverse Theatre quickly and regularly presented cutting edge drama to an international audience on both the Edinburgh International Festival and on the Fringe during August. Sadler's Wells , under Lilian Baylis , nurtured talent that led to the development of an opera company, which became the English National Opera (ENO),

20164-467: Was transmissible hereditarily. Ogilvie (2004) argues that guilds negatively affected quality, skills, and innovation. Through what economists now call " rent-seeking " they imposed deadweight losses on the economy. Ogilvie argues they generated limited positive externalities and notes that industry began to flourish only after the guilds faded away. Guilds persisted over the centuries because they redistributed resources to politically powerful merchants. On

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