We spent a lot of time on Shakespeare last lecture, but while he is
the most important he was hardly the only dramatist working at this time.
There was in fact a lot of competition in London. The University Wits
preceded Shakespeare and one man could have become Shakespeare’s chief rival,
had he lived – Christopher Marlowe.
Ben Jonson is
Shakespeare’s most famous contemporary, and is still regarded as one of the
“big three” of Elizabethan playwrights
(along with Marlowe and
Shakespeare). Jonson wrote poetic tragedy based on classical models that
failed on the stage, though Sejanus
(1603) and Catiline (1611) were
respected for their poetry. He’s much more important for his comedy, much
of which is called “humours” comedy, because he relied on character types based
on medical science of the day, the four bodily humours (blood, phlegm, yellow
bile and black bile). Since the days of ancient Greece it was thought that a
person is healthy when these four fluids were in proper balance in one’s
body...but! When you’ve got too much of one running through you it can
affect not only your health but also (and for Jonson more importantly) your
character. Too much blood? it rushes to your head and makes you act too quickly
and rashly – like Hotspur. Too much phlegm? it can slow you down, make you
lazy, slothful – like Falstaff (note that Jonson wasn’t the ONLY writer who
made use of humours). Too much yellow bile? It makes you irritable and
cranky – any number of old father types – like Shylock. Too much black bile?
It makes you melancholy – like Hamlet, Orsino, Jaques. These humours focus on a
single trait in a character, and are thus a variation on stock
characters.
Jonson gave us a vast array of humours characters in Every Man in his Humour (1598) and he
mixed humours comedy with a prototype of the comedy of manners (a comedy that
critiques a given era by lampooning people, often wealthy people, of the era).
Another popular play, still frequently produced today is The Alchemist, but Jonson’s best-known play Volpone
(1606). Volpone pretends to be dying in order to trick the
“vultures” that are trying to get his fortune when he passes away. The
different characters exhibit “humourous” behavior, but Jonson also makes each
of them like an animal. One of them, for example, is named Corvo, for crow, and
like a crow he waits for something to die and then picks at it. Volpone is a
fox – sly, but not sly enough for his assistant Mosca, the fly, who tricks his trickster
master in the end. Volpone, by
the way, was updated to the gold rush days in The Sly Fox, written in the early 70s by Larry Gelbart. It enjoyed
a long run and both George C. Scott and Robert Preston played the lead.
Jonson’s ego landed him in jail on occasion, but also spurred him
to publish his plays, unusual at the time, but not any more! He also had
a temper. He once killed an actor in a duel. He was an important poet,
smart and eloquent, and he was the first poet to be given a royal stipend for
life, which made him the first “poet laureate” of England. We’ll get back
to Ben when we talk about the Stuart court masques, for which he was the
primary writer.
Thomas Middleton began as a writer of clever comedies, such
as A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.
He also wrote a play called The Witch,
which some scholars say is where Act III scene 5 of Macbeth (a scene that most scholars say was NOT written by
Shakespeare) comes from. But Middleton is mainly known for his later
writings with William Rowley. The
Changeling (1622) is one of the darkest of tragedies, in which Beatrice
meets up with a great over-reaching villain named De Flores -- true to his
name, he “de-flowers” her and murders her lover, which drives her to the depths
of madness.
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| Over the top Young Vic Production of The Changeling, 2011 probably the best way to approach the play today |
This dark, rather ugly sort of tragedy, in which it is difficult
to find anyone with morals or goodness, is the product of the Jacobean
(1603-1625) and Caroline (1625-1642) periods. King James I and King
Charles I, from the house of Stuart, ascended the throne and proceeded to
alienate most of the kingdom, especially the parliament and the Puritans.
Some scholars argue that much of the dramatic writing during the reigns of
these two monarchs reflects increasingly unhappy time for England, and that the
style becomes
more sensational and melodramatic than tragic. John Fletcher and
Francis Beaumont wrote as a team at this time whose plays were nearly
unbeatable and highly popular. They collaborated on The Maid’s Tragedy and A King
and No King, in which an incestuous story of a brother and sister in love
is happily ended when it’s discovered that they’re not really related.
Fletcher worked alone at times, and at the Globe he was the rising writing star
as Shakespeare moved towards retirement. He collaborated with Shakespeare
on The Two Noble Kinsman and Henry VIII in 1613.
Perhaps the finest Jacobean tragedian was John Webster, who
wrote
some very dark but well crafted plays, The
White Devil (1609-12) and The Duchess
of Malfi (1613-14), in which the duchess’s brother is so in love with her
that he kills her lover, has her killed, and devolves into a lycanth – a
wolfman. His other brother, a cardinal, is equally as corrupt. The Duchess of Malfi is one of the most
frequently revived plays from this period, other of course than Shakespeare’s.
.JPG) |
| John Webster, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery |
John Ford’s Caroline play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1629-33) features yet another brother/sister incest relationship – and they live in the midst of such a dark, corrupt world, that by comparison they’re the only slightly sympathetic characters in the play.
Philip Massinger exemplifies the sensational and melodramatic in
plays such as his A New Way to Pay Old
Debts (1621-22). The main character, Sir Giles Overreach, was a role that
major actors placed in their repertoires well into the 19th century.
Massinger was the leading dramatist of the King’s Men after Fletcher.
Massinger himself was succeeded in the King’s Men by James
Shirley, who wrote some dark tragedies, such as The Cardinal (1641), but who was better known for his comedies
about fashionable London society, such as Hyde
Park (1623) and The Lady of Pleasure
(1635). These plays were forerunners of the comedies of manners that
would become the major form when the theatres re-opened during the English
Restoration.
The Theatres
While there is a good supply of evidence available concerning the
Elizabethan theatres, much about them remains conjectural. And as new
discoveries are made, old theories give way, but not always easily. There have
been many discoveries recently, very importantly the foundations of the Rose
theatre and a bit of the Globe foundation, less than 15 years ago, and more
recently still the foundation of the first public theatre, The Theatre.
There were two basic kinds of theatre in Elizabethan England:
public, including the three noted above, and private. Public theatres
were open-air, private theatres were indoor. No one was barred from the
so-called private theatres, but the price of admission for them was so much
higher than at the public theatres that poor citizens were automatically
excluded.
How did the public theatres evolve? It used to be thought
that the yards of inns were the prototype, and there is no doubt that some
inns were used on occasion. An open courtyard was enclosed on
three sides
by the inn itself. If you put a platform in the yard, you’d have a stage,
places for people to stand, and also 2 or 3 levels of balconies on the inn
itself, from which the play could be seen. An inn called the Red Lion was
used regularly for performances and has been called the first public theatre,
though that appellation should probably be saved for purpose-built spaces. The
George Inn, on the South Bank not far from the site of the Globe, is the only
inn that remains from this period. You can have a fine ale there while you
debate whether it’s a good model or not.
Another prototype was a circular arena with galleries built into
it, used for the most popular sports of the day – grisly blood sports,
like bull and bear baiting. Place a wooden platform against one part of
the arena wall, and an audience could see from the galleries, while more could
stand in the arena. The most recent theories have argued that the first
purpose-built theatres were attempts to reconstruct a Roman theatre. There’s
evidence for the first two prototypes as well, so I leave the rather dry
academic debate to scholars.
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| The South Bank, showing bull and bear-baiting arenas |
The first important purpose-built theatre, called, as luck would
have it The Theatre, was built to the northeast of the city in an area known as
Shoreditch, on a major road into town in 1576 by John Brayne and a partner
named James Burbage. Shortly after The Theatre began its business, other
theatres began to spring up, either not far from The Theatre in the north of
the city, or just across the river Thames, south of the city proper. Several of
these spaces are important for several reasons:
The Theatre, for being
the first. It lasted from 1576 to 1598, and when it was torn down, its
timbers were used to build the Globe; also, one of its builders, James Burbage,
had two sons, Richard and Cuthbert, who were among the shareholders of the
Globe, along with Shakespeare. In 2008 the remains of The Theatre were found
while workers were digging the foundations for guess what? A new theatre!
The Curtain (1577 - c.1627)
was built shortly after the Theatre, not far from it, probably as its
competitor; it is said that Shakespeare may have acted here during his early
days in London. In 2012 remains of this theatre were also found, and as
of early 2013 it is hoped that an amphitheatre will be constructed above these
remains. Below the ground a museum exhibiting the remains will also be built.
The Rose (1587 - c.1606)
was the first theatre on the South Bank, built by Philip Henslowe, who produced
plays for the Lord Admiral’s Men, which company became the chief competitor of
Shakespeare’s.
Edward Alleyn was one of the most popular actors of the day, and probably
played the lead in Dr. Faustus
here. Henslowe kept assiduous records, including lists of properties,
which has been helpful in understanding Elizabethan staging. Perhaps most
importantly, the foundations of the Rose were rediscovered in a 1989 excavation
for a new building. Despite major protests, the building was finished,
but the foundations have been preserved and protected, and can be seen today,
in an underground chamber of the new building.
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| The Rose site is open for occasional performances and on Saturdays throughout the year |
The Swan (1595-c.
1632) is the only theatre for which there exists a copy of a contemporary sketch
of the interior. Although this picture has been much debated, it’s
tremendously important. It seems a visitor to London, the Dutchman
Johannes deWitt, sketched the interior in 1596, and also described it in a
note. His friend Arend von Buchell did not get to go to London, but made
copy of the drawing. DeWitt’s sketch was not found, but Von Buchell’s
copy was in 1888.
The Globe (1599-1613,
1613-1644) was the home of the most famous group of Elizabethan actors, the
Lord Chamberlain’s men, and later The King’s men. Built from the timbers
of The Theatre, it lasted until 1613, when it was burnt during a performance of
Henry VIII, when the thatch roof was
ignited by the sparks from a
ceremonial cannon used in the play. A report
by a person who attended the performance gives us relief and also a bit of
humor: even though the roof was lit afire in Act I scene iv and it took
less than an hour for the theatre burn to the ground, “nothing did perish but
wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on
fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not, by the benefit of a
provident wit, put it out with bottle ale.”
The first Globe was replaced by a second, which lasted until all the
theatres were torn down. In 1989 a small portion of the Globe foundation
was found. In order to unearth more of this important landmark another
historically important building, an eighteenth century row house, would have to
have been destroyed, and so it remains buried.
The Fortune (1600-1621,
1621-1661) Henslowe built this theatre too, as direct competition for the
Globe, north of the city. Uniquely, a building contract exists for it,
which among other things lets us know that unlike nearly all the other
theatres, it was not polygonal, but rectangular.
The Hope (1613-1617)
a building contract also exists for this theatre, along with some
specifications. The stage was built on trestles, so it could be removed,
we learn from the contract, as theatrical performances alternated at the Hope
with bear baiting. Apparently the baiting was more popular than theatre at the
Hope.
There were other public theatres as well, but these briefly
described are the most important.
The shape of the Elizabethan public theatre building was usually
polygonal (so looked round, like a “wooden O”). The Rose, thanks to the
discovery of the foundations, was found to have 14 sides.
The audience areas
consisted of 3 levels of galleries around the building. At the first
level adjacent to the stage, and on the level above the stage itself were
“gentlemen’s” or “Lords’ rooms;” they were the most expensive seats (from 3 to
6 pence each), and were divided into private boxes. The rest of the
galleries were undivided, with benches for seats, which cost twopence each.
The cheapest “seats” were
not seats at all -- for one penny you could be a "groundling" and stand in the yard. The
larger Elizabethan theatres seated and stood approximately 3000. Smaller
theatres like the Rose (the ‘89 discovery made scholars aware that you could
fit the entire Rose theatre inside the Globe [snugly]), seated/stood significantly fewer. Galleries
and stage were covered by a roof. The roofing area over the stage was known as
the shadow, or the heavens. The yard, however, was open to the skies – and the
elements!
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| Three "groundlings" at the Globe Fall 2011 Anna Rothfus, Anna Barth, Kaylyn Syvret all from the IC class of 2013 |
The audience in the yard stood around a wooden platform raised
4-6’ that thrust into the yard. In the stage floor there was a trap door,
for scenes leading to the underworld, or for disappearances, such as the
witches and their cauldron in Macbeth.
At the stage level
there were two doors for entrances and exits. These
doors led to the tiring (short for “attiring”) house, in which actors changed costumes
and prepared, and in which set pieces and machinery were housed.
On the 2nd level of the playing space, which housed the Lords’
rooms, there was also a playing space when it was needed, as in, to give the
most obvious example, the balcony scene in Romeo
and Juliet.
The level above the Lords’ rooms was a musician’s gallery; it was
also used for special effects (such as the cannon that sounds in Henry VIII). The entire stage was
quite ornately painted (the heavens painted quite literally with the sun, moon,
and signs of the zodiac). At the Swan for example, DeWitt (who also drew a sketch
of the space) noted that the theatre was “magnificent” and that “ the wooden
columns [were] painted in such excellent imitation of marble that it is able to
deceive even the most cunning.”
On the main stage there was some kind of “discovery space,” an
area hotly debated by scholars of Elizabethan theatre. There are several
instances in which discoveries are called for plays of the period, one of the
most famous in The Tempest, when in
Act V “Ferdinand and Miranda are discovered playing at chess;” and in Hamlet, when Polonius is stabbed behind
the arras; and Desdemona’s bed in Othello
has to come from somewhere. Other examples of beds pulled out onto the
stage include Act V of Tis Pity She’s a
Whore: “Enter Giovanni and Annabella lying on a bed.” And “a
bed thrust out upon the stage; Allwit’s wife in it” occurs in the third act of
Middleton’s play A Chaste Maid in
Cheapside.
But HOW were these discoveries revealed? Theory after theory
has been set forth and rejected – some scholars point to the Swan drawing and
say that there was not a separate discovery space, but that when a discovery
was made, or a bed or some other object thrust on the stage, one of the two
doors was used for the entry.
Victorian scholars imagined an “inner below,” a
small proscenium arch built into the upstage wall – they also theorized about
an “inner above” on the second level of the stage, though not many of the
patrons would have been able to see either. Others have argued that when
called for a collapsible pavilion was set up center on the stage floor; if it
were sturdy enough it might be used for Romeo
and Juliet and other plays needing a second level. Once again we’ll
probably have certain proof in this matter, but that doesn’t keep the scholars
from squabbling!
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| The 'inner above" and "inner below" at the Folger - as you see, if you opened those curtains and played scenes behind them not too many would be able to see them |
Next time we'll finish the Elizabethan era by briefly examining prvate theatres, design aspects, audiences, companies and actors!
Great postt
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