Restoration spectacular
Encyclopedia
The Restoration spectacular, or elaborately staged "machine play", hit the London
public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration
period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery
, baroque illusionistic painting
, gorgeous costumes, and special effect
s such as trapdoor
tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks
. These shows have always had a bad reputation as a vulgar and commercial threat to the witty, "legitimate" Restoration drama; however, they drew Londoners in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted.
Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court
masque
, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera
, the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera". However, the variety of them is so untidy that most theatre historians despair of defining them as a genre
at all. Only a handful of works of this period are usually accorded the term "opera", as the musical dimension of most of them is subordinate to the visual. It was spectacle and scenery that drew in the crowds, as shown by many comments in the diary of the theatre-lover Samuel Pepys
. The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits. A fiasco such as John Dryden
's Albion and Albanius
would leave a company in serious debt, while blockbusters like Thomas Shadwell
's Psyche
or Dryden's King Arthur
would put it comfortably in the black for a long time.
The distinction between "legitimate" Restoration drama and the Restoration spectacular, or "musical spectacular," or "Dorset Garden spectacular," or "machine play" is one of degree rather than kind. All plays of the period featured music and dancing and some scenery, most of them also songs. Restoration heroic drama
, for all its literariness, relied on opulent scenery. However, the true spectacular, of which Milhous counts only eight over the entire 1660–1700 Restoration period, was produced on a whole different scale. The spectacular is defined by the large number of sets and performers required, the vast sums of money invested, the potential for great profits, and the long preparation time needed. Milhous calculates a likely requirement of at least four to six months of planning, contracting, building, and rehearsing, to be compared with the four to six weeks of rehearsal time a new "legitimate" play would get.
Previous generations of theatre historians have despised the operatic spectaculars, perhaps influenced by John Dryden
's sour comments about expensive and tasteless "scenes, machines, and empty operas". However, audiences loved the scenes and machines and operas, as Samuel Pepys
' diary shows. Dryden wrote several baroque machine plays himself. The first, The State of Innocence
(1677), was never staged, as his designated company, the King's, had neither the capital nor the machinery for it: a dramatisation of John Milton
's Paradise Lost
, it called for "rebellious angels wheeling in the air, and seeming transfixed with thunderbolts" over "a lake of brimstone or rolling fire". The King's Company's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
was not up to lakes of rolling fire; only the "machine house" at Dorset Garden was, and that belonged to the competition, the Duke's Company. When the two companies had merged in the 1680s and Dryden had access to Dorset Garden, he wrote one of the most visual and special-effects-ridden machine plays of the entire Restoration period, Albion and Albanius
(1684–85):
How were such effects produced, and how did they look? The crocodile etc. obviously used the floor trap, but was it an illusionistically painted
figure worked with sticks, or a man in a crocodile suit? Unfortunately there are no extant drawings or descriptions of machinery and sets for the Restoration theatre, although some documentation exists for court masques from the first half of the 17th century, notably the work of Inigo Jones
and his pupil John Webb. One reason for the lack of information for the public theatres is that stage effects, and particularly machines, were trade secrets. Inventors of theatrical effects took great pains to hold onto their secrets, and the playhouses guarded their machine workings as zealously as a magician
guards her or his tricks.
What the technology and the visual experiences were can only be tenuously inferred from stage directions. Milhous concludes from a review of Dorset Garden performances that "at a conservative estimate" the theatre was equipped to fly at least four people independently, and had some very complex floor traps for "transformations" such as that of Proteus. The plates printed in the first edition of Elkanah Settle's Empress of Morocco (1673) (see detail, top right) are the only pictures of actual Restoration stage sets. Pepys' mentions of stage effects in his diary, 1660–68, give the modern reader some help in visualising what audiences saw in the 60s, and even more in entering into their enthusiasms, but the 1660s were still early days. There are scarcely any descriptions or reactions preserved from the heyday of the machine play in the 1670s–1690s, although a general idea of its technology can be gathered from the better-documented French and Italian opera scenery which inspired Thomas Betterton
at Dorset Garden Theatre.
In the early 17th century, moveable "scenes"—painted wings and backdrops—and technical "machines" or "devices" for flying and other special effects were used in the masque
s produced for and by the court
of Charles I
. In William Davenant's Salmacida Spolia
(1640), for instance, the last of the court masques before the Civil War
, Queen Henrietta Maria (pregnant at the time) makes her entrance "descending by a theatrical device from a cloud." As early as 1639, Davenant had obtained a royal patent authorising construction of a large new public theatre with technology that would allow such effects and accommodate music, scenery, and dancing. Such an invasion of court-drama technique in the public theatre met opposition from "legitimate" dramatists, and before the opposition could be overcome, the war had closed down the theatres in 1642.
The public stage ban 1642–1660 imposed by the Puritan
regime represents a long and sharp break in dramatic tradition, but was still never completely successful in suppressing the ideologically hateful make-believe of play-acting. Performances in grand private houses were not unusual, and could have quite elaborate sets, as can be seen from the extant drawings for the original performance of Davenant's opera The Siege of Rhodes
(1656) at his home Rutland House
. This was public theatre in all but name, as Davenant charged 5 shillings for admission. Some professional actors also managed to scrape a living and evade the authorities in stealth acting companies in London, such as that of Michael Mohun
at the Red Bull playhouse
. Professional writers from the previous era were growing middle-aged, biding their time, and hoping for the monarchy to be restored. By the later 1650s, it was becoming obvious that that time was at hand, and William Davenant, for example, stepped up his theatrical activities.
When the public performance ban was lifted at the Restoration
of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II
immediately encouraged the drama and took a personal interest in the scramble for acting licenses and performance rights which followed. Two middle-aged pre-Commonwealth playwrights notable for their loyalty during Charles' exile emerged from the struggle with royal Letters Patent
for new, or refurbished, patent theatre
companies: Thomas Killigrew
and William Davenant
. Killigrew was able to take over Michael Mohun's skilled veteran troupe for his "King's Company
" and to start with "what was essentially a going concern" (Hume), with the added advantage of the traditional performance rights Mohun brought with him for practically the whole classic repertory of William Shakespeare
, Ben Jonson
, and the Beaumont and Fletcher
team. The competition, Davenant's "Duke's Company
", seemed doomed to a secondary position with its young, scratched-together troupe and scarcely any performance rights; however, Davenant, "a brilliant impresario" (Hume), was soon able to turn the tables on Killigrew by realising his old pre-Civil War dream of music, dance, and spectacular visual effects on the public stage.
During the autumn of 1660, while the Duke's Company was still getting financed (mostly by means of the actors buying company shares) and having temporary quarters set up, the King's Company offered a string of well-received productions. Their new albeit traditional theatre in Vere Street
was already fully operational. The devoted playgoer Samuel Pepys
called it "the finest playhouse... that ever was in England" in his diary, a sentiment he would need to revise many times over the coming decade, and recorded his awe at seeing Michael Mohun, "who is said to be the best actor in the world", act on its stage. Davenant was far behind, but daringly put all his capital into the outfitting of a new superior playhouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields
(simultaneously, with great foresight, prying loose the rising young star Thomas Betterton
from the King's Company), and perfectly hit public taste.
Lincoln's Inn Fields opened on 28 June 1661, with the first "moveable" or "changeable" scenery
used on the British public stage, i.e. wings or shutters that ran in grooves and could be smoothly and mechanically changed between or even within acts. The production was a revamped version of Davenant's own five-year-old opera The Siege of Rhodes. It is not known who painted the scenes or shutters, or whether continental craftsmen were responsible for the technical construction, but the result was such a sensation that it brought Charles II to a public theatre for the first time. The competing King's Company suddenly found itself playing to empty houses, as Pepys notes on 4 July:
The Siege of Rhodes "continued acting 12 days without interruption with great applause" according to the prompter John Downes
in his "historical review of the stage" Roscius Anglicanus (1708). This was a remarkable run for the limited potential audience of the time. As four more acclaimed Duke's Company productions "with scenes" followed at Lincoln's Inn Fields in the course of 1661 (including Hamlet
), all highly admired by Pepys, the King's Company had no other recourse than to hastily commission a changeable-scenery playhouse of their own. Bowing to the inevitable just seven months after the opening of Lincoln's Inn Fields, Killigrew and his actors signed orders for a new, even more magnificent, theatre in Bridges Street. This theatre, the first step in the war of spectacle
escalation of the 1660s, was so full when Pepys and his wife went to see an opera there that "they told us we could have no room". The large, yet compact, Restoration playhouses, with audience capacities from 700 (Bridges Street) to upwards of 2,000 (the next house on the same site, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
, finished in 1674), were enormous investments, financed through selling shares in the companies, which were thus bound to make more and more money from ticket sales. Not only the theatres and their technical equipment, but the flats painted for a single performance, the special effects, and the elaborate stage clothes, were extremely expensive. Audiences appreciated both luxury and appropriateness of décor and costume: Pepys was quite capable of going several times to see a play that, as such, he disliked, purely for the pleasure of viewing striking and innovative scenery like "a good scene of a town on fire". The companies struggled to outdo each other in catering to these expensive tastes, with precarious finances and the ever-present consciousness that the investments could literally burn to the ground in a few hours. When the theatre in Bridges Street did burn down in January 1672, with its entire stock of scenery and costumes, it was an economic blow from which the King's Company's never recovered.
The Duke's Company, operating smoothly under what soon became Davenant's and Thomas Betterton's joint management, consistently led the way while the King's lagged further and further behind, moving only in forced response and suffering from chronic management conflict between Killigrew and powerful actor shareholders like Michael Mohun and Charles Hart
, who insisted on actor-centred "talk" drama. The difference can be traced in Pepys' regular preference for performances at the Duke's, and in his ever-renewed admiration for Betterton's acting. In December 1667, the King's Company even ceased acting for some days because of a quarrel between Mohun and Hart. With the escalation of expense, days with zero takings were a very serious matter. The crowning grand investment of the Duke's Company was totally beyond the King's means to respond to: the "machine house" at Dorset Garden.
An era came to an end in 1668 with two events: Davenant died suddenly, leaving a messy ownership situation for the Duke's Company, and Pepys' eyesight forced him to stop keeping a diary. Thomas Betterton, though formally a minority shareholder, continued to run the Duke's Company, and, in the spirit of Davenant, commissioned the most elaborate of the Restoration playhouses, the theatre at Dorset Garden (or Dorset Gardens), with a flat for himself on top. Although the Dorset Garden Theatre
quickly became a famous and glamorous venue, very little is concretely known about the building and outfitting of it: a vague and undocumented tradition ascribes its design to Christopher Wren
. The absence of Pepys' record means that performance data for the next decades are only patchily known.
The machines at Dorset Garden and several of the most flamboyant production concepts realised through them were strongly influenced by the French opera and tragédie en machines. Paris was home to the most elaborate visual and musical stage productions in Europe, and Betterton travelled to Paris in the summer of 1671 to learn from the sensation of the season, the comédie-ballet Psyché
by Molière
, Corneille
, and Quinault
, to music by Lully
. "For several things concerning the decoration of the play, I am obliged to the French", acknowledged Thomas Shadwell in the introduction to his own Psyche
in 1674. Even more directly influential were the French operatic visits to London, which sparked off a new interest in opera proper in London audiences. In a brilliant move, the King's Company, all but bankrupt after the crushing blow of the fire in Bridges Street, invited the French musician Robert Cambert
to perform his opera Ariadne as one of the first productions at their new playhouse in Drury Lane. The Duke's Company responded to the visual gorgeousness of this guest appearance with a Shakespearean extravaganza
at Dorset Garden: Shadwell's adaptation of Davenant's and Dryden's version of Shakespeare's Tempest, a piece designed to show off the new machinery:
This multiplication of effects at the very outset of the play served as a shock and foretaste of what the audience would find farther along.
The technical capacities of Dorset Garden were little used for Restoration comedy
, and, while most heroic drama
included some scenes that showed off the perspective stage or used some of the simpler machines, spectacle on this limited scale could be just as well staged at Drury Lane. The plays for which Dorset Garden was built, the "machine plays" of the 1670s and '80s and the operas of the '90s, were a category to themselves, different from ordinary serious drama: more static, more mythological, much more gorgeous, infinitely more expensive. So elaborate was the scale of these productions, and so long each preparation time, that only five "machine plays" were produced during the 1670s; yet they were hugely important for the finances of the Duke's Company, mostly in a positive sense. They were Davenant's version of Macbeth (1672–73), Settle's Empress of Morocco (probably 1673), Shadwell/Dryden/Davenant's Tempest (1673–74), Thomas Shadwell's long-awaited Psyche (1674–75), and Charles Davenant's Circe (1676–77).
Psyche had not one, but two, extremely elaborate sets for each of five acts. This is the setting for the beginning of Act 3:
(The gold cupids on the columns are due to come to life and jump off.) The use of perspective scenery and many arches is evident here, creating an illusion of the first court being "at a good distance" and the next "at a mighty distance". This creation of fake depth was a favourite device, repeated when the scene changed halfway through the act:
The numbers of performers used, mainly dancers, is clearly staggering compared to the regular comedy or serious play, where the norm was something like 10–15 actors plus a few extras. Although actual numbers are generally vague in these mass scene stage directions, dance scenes like that of the cyclops, and all the cupids who will join them on the floor minutes later, rely on coordination, choreography, and generous collective effects. Of course the many highly-paid dancers would be busy in many roles, returning as townspeople after the scene change of Act 3 with most of the gold paint hastily washed off, and entranced looking upwards to see "Mars and Venus meet in the air in their chariots, his drawn by horses, and hers by doves".
Each production was a gamble. The aspect of the machine plays that posterity knows most about is their economics, as this was what the old prompter Downes most vividly recalled when he wrote his Roscius Anglicanus in 1708. The scenery alone for Psyche cost more than £800, which can be related to the entire annual box office takings for the company of £10,000. Ticket prices for these performances would be raised to up to four times normal. Both Psyche and The Tempest actually complained of the production costs in their epilogues, hinting pointedly that the public ought to reward the "poor players" for their risk-taking and for offering splendours that had so far been reserved for royal masques:
The audience apparently agreed, transfixed by such sights as Venus ascending into the heavens and "being almost lost in the clouds", whereupon "Cupid flies up and gets into her chariot, and brings her back", followed by Jupiter appearing on a flying eagle. Psyche turned out highly profitable. It is altogether a pattern that the '70s productions did make money, while those of the '80s and '90s barely broke even or were actual economic disasters.
s or parodies
of them, written by Thomas Duffett. The records for the mid-1670s are particularly incomplete, and neither exact dates nor the public reaction to Duffett's pieces are known, but even the printed versions, pale shadows of Duffett's travesty spectacles, have proved highly amusing to modern critics. The first of them, The Empress of Morocco, caricatured simultaneously Settle's Empress of Morocco and the sumptuous new Dorset Garden production of Davenant's Macbeth
adaptation, with Duffett's three witches flying in over the pit on brooms at the high point of the action, followed by the descent of Heccate over the Stage "in a glorious chariot, adorned with pictures of hell and devils, and made of a large wicker basket". The Mock Tempest improves on the shower of fire over the audience in the Dorset Garden pseudo-Shakespearean tempest scene with a rain of "fire, apples, nuts".
and the Exclusion crisis, lean years for theatre. In 1682, the companies merged, making Dorset Garden's technical resources available to Dryden, who rapidly got over his principled objection to the superficiality of "spectacle" and "empty operas". The orgy of machinery and extravagant visuals that he went on to write, Albion and Albanius
(1684–85), is quoted in the "Introductory" section, with the cave of Proteus
rising out of the sea. Here is Juno
in her flying peacock machine:
Unusual visual allegory in this Tory
panegyric
of Charles II and the House of Stuart
includes a figure representing the radical Whig
leader Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury "with fiend's wings, and snakes twisted round his body; he is encompassed by several fanatical rebellious heads, who suck poison from him, which runs out of a tap in his side." In an investor's nightmare, while Dryden's propaganda piece was in preparation, Charles II died, James II
succeeded him, and the Monmouth Rebellion
which Shaftesbury had fomented broke out. On the very day of the premiere, June 3, 1685, the Duke of Monmouth
landed in the west. "The nation being in a great consternation", recollected Downes, "it was performed but six times, which not answering half the charge they were at, involved the company very much in debt." This traumatic fiasco ruled out all further operatic spectacle investment until the calmer times after the Glorious Revolution
of 1689.
While the monopoly United Company's takings were being bled off by Davenant's shyster sons, one of whom, Alexander, was forced to flee the country in 1693 and other predatory investors, Thomas Betterton continued to act as de facto day-to-day manager and producer, enjoying a budget on the scale of Cecil B. DeMille
. In the early 1690s, he staged the three real operas of the Restoration spectacular genre, or the shows usually so designated: Dioclesian
(1689–90) by Massinger
/Fletcher
/Betterton; King Arthur
(1690–91) by John Dryden; and The Fairy-Queen
(1691–92), adapted from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
by perhaps Elkanah Settle, all of them graced by music by Henry Purcell
, and together perhaps a sign of the coming 18th-century vogue for Italian opera
. The lavish variety entertainment Dioclesian, adapted by Betterton, with many monsters, dragons, and machines, from Massinger and Fletcher's History of Dioclesian, was very popular throughout the '90s and made a lot of money for the United Company. So did Dryden's much more serious King Arthur, the first operatic entertainment that Hume is prepared to consider an artistic success, with Purcell's marvellous music a major part of the entertainment and the songs "for once well integrated into the play".
At the very end of its history, the economics of the Restoration spectacular spiralled out of control with the magnificent production of The Fairy Queen in the 1691–92 season. It was a great popular success, but so stuffed with special effects and so expensive that it nevertheless proved impossible to make money from it. As Downes recalls: "Though the court and town were wonderfully satisfied with it ... the expenses in setting it out being so great, the company got little by it." Its twelve-foot-high working fountain and six dancing real live monkeys have become notorious in theatre history.
The spectacular play died out with the Restoration period, but spectacle would continue on the English stage as the splendours of Italian grand opera
hit London in the early 18th century. The dangerous Restoration economic spiral of the ever-more-expensive machine plays would teach 18th- and 19th-century theatrical entrepreneurs to dispense with playwrighting altogether and minimise the cast, utilising any number of surprising effects and scenes in the dumbshow
of pantomime
and Harlequin
, without attendant costs in music, dramatists, and cast.
There have been a small number of attempts to resurrect the Restoration spectacular as a background to modern cinema: Terry Gilliam
's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
features at its start perhaps the most accurate reconstruction, with painted scenery, mechanisms and lighting effects typical of the period.
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration
English Restoration
The Restoration of the English monarchy began in 1660 when the English, Scottish and Irish monarchies were all restored under Charles II after the Interregnum that followed the Wars of the Three Kingdoms...
period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery
Theatrical scenery
Theatrical scenery is that which is used as a setting for a theatrical production. Scenery may be just about anything, from a single chair to an elaborately re-created street, no matter how large or how small, whether or not the item was custom-made or is, in fact, the genuine item, appropriated...
, baroque illusionistic painting
Baroque illusionistic painting
Illusionistic ceiling painting, which includes the techniques of perspective di sotto in sù and quadratura, is the tradition in Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo art in which trompe l'oeil, perspective tools such as foreshortening, and other spatial effects are used to create the illusion of...
, gorgeous costumes, and special effect
Special effect
The illusions used in the film, television, theatre, or entertainment industries to simulate the imagined events in a story are traditionally called special effects ....
s such as trapdoor
Trapdoor
A trapdoor is a door set into a floor or ceiling .Originally, trapdoors were sack traps in mills, and allowed the sacks to pass up through the mill while naturally falling back to a closed position....
tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks
Fireworks
Fireworks are a class of explosive pyrotechnic devices used for aesthetic and entertainment purposes. The most common use of a firework is as part of a fireworks display. A fireworks event is a display of the effects produced by firework devices...
. These shows have always had a bad reputation as a vulgar and commercial threat to the witty, "legitimate" Restoration drama; however, they drew Londoners in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted.
Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court
Court
A court is a form of tribunal, often a governmental institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance with the rule of law...
masque
Masque
The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio...
, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera
French Opera
French opera is one of Europe's most important operatic traditions, containing works by composers of the stature of Rameau, Berlioz, Bizet, Debussy, Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen...
, the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera". However, the variety of them is so untidy that most theatre historians despair of defining them as a genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
at all. Only a handful of works of this period are usually accorded the term "opera", as the musical dimension of most of them is subordinate to the visual. It was spectacle and scenery that drew in the crowds, as shown by many comments in the diary of the theatre-lover Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys FRS, MP, JP, was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man...
. The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits. A fiasco such as John Dryden
John Dryden
John Dryden was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden.Walter Scott called him "Glorious John." He was made Poet...
's Albion and Albanius
Albion and Albanius
Albion and Albanius is an opera, closely resembling a French tragédie en musique, by Louis Grabu with an English text by John Dryden.The words were written by Dryden in 1680...
would leave a company in serious debt, while blockbusters like Thomas Shadwell
Thomas Shadwell
Thomas Shadwell was an English poet and playwright who was appointed poet laureate in 1689.-Life:Shadwell was born at Stanton Hall, Norfolk, and educated at Bury St Edmunds School, and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1656. He left the university without a degree, and...
's Psyche
Psyche (psychology)
The word psyche has a long history of use in psychology and philosophy, dating back to ancient times, and has been one of the fundamental concepts for understanding human nature from a scientific point of view. The English word soul is sometimes used synonymously, especially in older...
or Dryden's King Arthur
King Arthur (opera)
King Arthur or, The British Worthy , is a semi-opera in five acts with music by Henry Purcell and alibretto by John Dryden. It was first performed at the Queen's Theatre, Dorset Garden, London, in late May or early June 1691....
would put it comfortably in the black for a long time.
Introductory: "A lion, a crocodile, a dragon"
Heroic drama
Heroic drama is a type of play popular during the Restoration era in England, distinguished by both its verse structure and its subject matter. The sub-genre of heroic drama evolved through several works of the middle to later 1660s; John Dryden's The Indian Emperour and Roger Boyle's The Black...
, for all its literariness, relied on opulent scenery. However, the true spectacular, of which Milhous counts only eight over the entire 1660–1700 Restoration period, was produced on a whole different scale. The spectacular is defined by the large number of sets and performers required, the vast sums of money invested, the potential for great profits, and the long preparation time needed. Milhous calculates a likely requirement of at least four to six months of planning, contracting, building, and rehearsing, to be compared with the four to six weeks of rehearsal time a new "legitimate" play would get.
Previous generations of theatre historians have despised the operatic spectaculars, perhaps influenced by John Dryden
John Dryden
John Dryden was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden.Walter Scott called him "Glorious John." He was made Poet...
's sour comments about expensive and tasteless "scenes, machines, and empty operas". However, audiences loved the scenes and machines and operas, as Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys FRS, MP, JP, was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man...
' diary shows. Dryden wrote several baroque machine plays himself. The first, The State of Innocence
The State of Innocence
The State of Innocence was intended to be performed as an opera, with the libretto written in 1674, by John Dryden. It is basically a musical stage adaptation of John Milton's epic poem Paradise lost, a tribute to Milton rather than a satire of the poem. That Dryden was an admirer of Milton's is...
(1677), was never staged, as his designated company, the King's, had neither the capital nor the machinery for it: a dramatisation of John Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
's Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...
, it called for "rebellious angels wheeling in the air, and seeming transfixed with thunderbolts" over "a lake of brimstone or rolling fire". The King's Company's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane is a West End theatre in Covent Garden, in the City of Westminster, a borough of London. The building faces Catherine Street and backs onto Drury Lane. The building standing today is the most recent in a line of four theatres at the same location dating back to 1663,...
was not up to lakes of rolling fire; only the "machine house" at Dorset Garden was, and that belonged to the competition, the Duke's Company. When the two companies had merged in the 1680s and Dryden had access to Dorset Garden, he wrote one of the most visual and special-effects-ridden machine plays of the entire Restoration period, Albion and Albanius
Albion and Albanius
Albion and Albanius is an opera, closely resembling a French tragédie en musique, by Louis Grabu with an English text by John Dryden.The words were written by Dryden in 1680...
(1684–85):
The Cave of PROTEUS rises out of the Sea; it consists of several arches of Rock-work adorned with mother-of-pearl, coral, and abundance of shells of various kinds. Through the arches is seen the Sea, and parts of Dover-pier; in the middle of the Cave is PROTEUS asleep on a rock adorned with shells, &c. like the Cave. ALBION and ACACIA seize on him; and while a symphony is playing, he sinks as they are bringing him forward, and changes himself into a Lion, a Crocodile, a Dragon, and then to his own shape again; he comes forward to the front of the stage, and sings."
How were such effects produced, and how did they look? The crocodile etc. obviously used the floor trap, but was it an illusionistically painted
Baroque illusionistic painting
Illusionistic ceiling painting, which includes the techniques of perspective di sotto in sù and quadratura, is the tradition in Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo art in which trompe l'oeil, perspective tools such as foreshortening, and other spatial effects are used to create the illusion of...
figure worked with sticks, or a man in a crocodile suit? Unfortunately there are no extant drawings or descriptions of machinery and sets for the Restoration theatre, although some documentation exists for court masques from the first half of the 17th century, notably the work of Inigo Jones
Inigo Jones
Inigo Jones is the first significant British architect of the modern period, and the first to bring Italianate Renaissance architecture to England...
and his pupil John Webb. One reason for the lack of information for the public theatres is that stage effects, and particularly machines, were trade secrets. Inventors of theatrical effects took great pains to hold onto their secrets, and the playhouses guarded their machine workings as zealously as a magician
Magic (illusion)
Magic is a performing art that entertains audiences by staging tricks or creating illusions of seemingly impossible or supernatural feats using natural means...
guards her or his tricks.
What the technology and the visual experiences were can only be tenuously inferred from stage directions. Milhous concludes from a review of Dorset Garden performances that "at a conservative estimate" the theatre was equipped to fly at least four people independently, and had some very complex floor traps for "transformations" such as that of Proteus. The plates printed in the first edition of Elkanah Settle's Empress of Morocco (1673) (see detail, top right) are the only pictures of actual Restoration stage sets. Pepys' mentions of stage effects in his diary, 1660–68, give the modern reader some help in visualising what audiences saw in the 60s, and even more in entering into their enthusiasms, but the 1660s were still early days. There are scarcely any descriptions or reactions preserved from the heyday of the machine play in the 1670s–1690s, although a general idea of its technology can be gathered from the better-documented French and Italian opera scenery which inspired Thomas Betterton
Thomas Betterton
Thomas Patrick Betterton , English actor, son of an under-cook to King Charles I, was born in London.-Apprentice and actor:...
at Dorset Garden Theatre.
1625–1660: Court masques and stealth performances
Masque
The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio...
s produced for and by the court
Noble court
The court of a monarch, or at some periods an important nobleman, is a term for the extended household and all those who regularly attended on the ruler or central figure...
of Charles I
Charles I of England
Charles I was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles engaged in a struggle for power with the Parliament of England, attempting to obtain royal revenue whilst Parliament sought to curb his Royal prerogative which Charles...
. In William Davenant's Salmacida Spolia
Salmacida Spolia
Salmacida Spolia was the last masque performed at the English Court before the outbreak of the English Civil War. Written by Sir William Davenant, with costumes, sets, and stage effects designed by Inigo Jones and with music by Lewis Richard, it was performed at Whitehall Palace on January 21,...
(1640), for instance, the last of the court masques before the Civil War
English Civil War
The English Civil War was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians and Royalists...
, Queen Henrietta Maria (pregnant at the time) makes her entrance "descending by a theatrical device from a cloud." As early as 1639, Davenant had obtained a royal patent authorising construction of a large new public theatre with technology that would allow such effects and accommodate music, scenery, and dancing. Such an invasion of court-drama technique in the public theatre met opposition from "legitimate" dramatists, and before the opposition could be overcome, the war had closed down the theatres in 1642.
The public stage ban 1642–1660 imposed by the Puritan
Puritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...
regime represents a long and sharp break in dramatic tradition, but was still never completely successful in suppressing the ideologically hateful make-believe of play-acting. Performances in grand private houses were not unusual, and could have quite elaborate sets, as can be seen from the extant drawings for the original performance of Davenant's opera The Siege of Rhodes
The Siege of Rhodes
The Siege of Rhodes is an opera written to a text by the impresario William Davenant. The score is by five composers, the vocal music by Henry Lawes, Matthew Locke, and Captain Henry Cooke, and instrumental music by Charles Coleman and George Hudson...
(1656) at his home Rutland House
Rutland House
Rutland House was the name of at least two London houses occupied by the Earls and Dukes of Rutland.-Rutland House, Aldersgate Street:Rutland House on Aldersgate Street, near Charterhouse Square in the City of London, close to Smithfield Market was leased by the playwright and impressario Sir...
. This was public theatre in all but name, as Davenant charged 5 shillings for admission. Some professional actors also managed to scrape a living and evade the authorities in stealth acting companies in London, such as that of Michael Mohun
Michael Mohun
Michael Mohun was a leading British actor both before and after the 1642—60 closing of the theatres.Mohun began his stage career as a boy player filling female roles; he was part of Christopher Beeston's theatrical establishment at the Cockpit Theatre, "eventually becoming a key member of Queen...
at the Red Bull playhouse
Red Bull Theatre
The Red Bull was a playhouse in London during the 17th century. For more than four decades, it entertained audiences drawn primarily from the northern suburbs, developing a reputation for rowdy, often disruptive audiences...
. Professional writers from the previous era were growing middle-aged, biding their time, and hoping for the monarchy to be restored. By the later 1650s, it was becoming obvious that that time was at hand, and William Davenant, for example, stepped up his theatrical activities.
William Davenant, impresario
English Restoration
The Restoration of the English monarchy began in 1660 when the English, Scottish and Irish monarchies were all restored under Charles II after the Interregnum that followed the Wars of the Three Kingdoms...
of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II
Charles II of England
Charles II was monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.Charles II's father, King Charles I, was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War...
immediately encouraged the drama and took a personal interest in the scramble for acting licenses and performance rights which followed. Two middle-aged pre-Commonwealth playwrights notable for their loyalty during Charles' exile emerged from the struggle with royal Letters Patent
Letters patent
Letters patent are a type of legal instrument in the form of a published written order issued by a monarch or president, generally granting an office, right, monopoly, title, or status to a person or corporation...
for new, or refurbished, patent theatre
Patent theatre
The patent theatres were the theatres that were licensed to perform "spoken drama" after the English Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Other theatres were prohibited from performing such "serious" drama, but were permitted to show comedy, pantomime or melodrama...
companies: Thomas Killigrew
Thomas Killigrew
Thomas Killigrew was an English dramatist and theatre manager. He was a witty, dissolute figure at the court of King Charles II of England.-Life and work:...
and William Davenant
William Davenant
Sir William Davenant , also spelled D'Avenant, was an English poet and playwright. Along with Thomas Killigrew, Davenant was one of the rare figures in English Renaissance theatre whose career spanned both the Caroline and Restoration eras and who was active both before and after the English Civil...
. Killigrew was able to take over Michael Mohun's skilled veteran troupe for his "King's Company
King's Company
The King's Company was one of two enterprises granted the rights to mount theatrical productions in London at the start of the English Restoration. It existed from 1660 to 1682.-History:...
" and to start with "what was essentially a going concern" (Hume), with the added advantage of the traditional performance rights Mohun brought with him for practically the whole classic repertory of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
, Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
, and the Beaumont and Fletcher
Beaumont and Fletcher
Beaumont and Fletcher were the English dramatists Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, who collaborated in their writing during the reign of James I ....
team. The competition, Davenant's "Duke's Company
Duke's Company
The Duke's Company was one of the two theatre companies that were chartered by King Charles II at the start of the English Restoration era, when the London theatres re-opened after their eighteen-year closure during the English Civil War and the Interregnum.The Duke's Company had the patronage of...
", seemed doomed to a secondary position with its young, scratched-together troupe and scarcely any performance rights; however, Davenant, "a brilliant impresario" (Hume), was soon able to turn the tables on Killigrew by realising his old pre-Civil War dream of music, dance, and spectacular visual effects on the public stage.
Gibbon's Tennis Court
Gibbon's Tennis Court was a building off Vere Street and Clare Market, near Lincoln's Inn Fields in London, England. Originally built as a real tennis court, it was used as a playhouse from 1660 to 1663, shortly after the English Restoration...
was already fully operational. The devoted playgoer Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys FRS, MP, JP, was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man...
called it "the finest playhouse... that ever was in England" in his diary, a sentiment he would need to revise many times over the coming decade, and recorded his awe at seeing Michael Mohun, "who is said to be the best actor in the world", act on its stage. Davenant was far behind, but daringly put all his capital into the outfitting of a new superior playhouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields
Lisle's Tennis Court
Lisle's Tennis Court was a building off Portugal Street in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. Originally built as a real tennis court, it was used as a playhouse during two periods, 1661–1674 and 1695–1705. During the early period, the theatre was called "the Duke's Playhouse", or "the...
(simultaneously, with great foresight, prying loose the rising young star Thomas Betterton
Thomas Betterton
Thomas Patrick Betterton , English actor, son of an under-cook to King Charles I, was born in London.-Apprentice and actor:...
from the King's Company), and perfectly hit public taste.
Changeable scenery
Theatrical scenery
Theatrical scenery is that which is used as a setting for a theatrical production. Scenery may be just about anything, from a single chair to an elaborately re-created street, no matter how large or how small, whether or not the item was custom-made or is, in fact, the genuine item, appropriated...
used on the British public stage, i.e. wings or shutters that ran in grooves and could be smoothly and mechanically changed between or even within acts. The production was a revamped version of Davenant's own five-year-old opera The Siege of Rhodes. It is not known who painted the scenes or shutters, or whether continental craftsmen were responsible for the technical construction, but the result was such a sensation that it brought Charles II to a public theatre for the first time. The competing King's Company suddenly found itself playing to empty houses, as Pepys notes on 4 July:
I went to the theatre [in Vere Street] and there I saw Claracilla (the first time I ever saw it), well acted. But strange to see this house, that use to be so thronged, now empty since the opera begun—and so will continue for a while I believe.
The Siege of Rhodes "continued acting 12 days without interruption with great applause" according to the prompter John Downes
John Downes (17th-century prompter)
John Downes worked as a prompter at the Duke's Company, and later the United Company, for most of the Restoration period 1660—1700...
in his "historical review of the stage" Roscius Anglicanus (1708). This was a remarkable run for the limited potential audience of the time. As four more acclaimed Duke's Company productions "with scenes" followed at Lincoln's Inn Fields in the course of 1661 (including Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
), all highly admired by Pepys, the King's Company had no other recourse than to hastily commission a changeable-scenery playhouse of their own. Bowing to the inevitable just seven months after the opening of Lincoln's Inn Fields, Killigrew and his actors signed orders for a new, even more magnificent, theatre in Bridges Street. This theatre, the first step in the war of spectacle
Spectacle
In general, spectacle refers to an event that is memorable for the appearance it creates. Derived in Middle English from c. 1340 as "specially prepared or arranged display" it was borrowed from Old French spectacle, itself a reflection of the Latin spectaculum "a show" from spectare "to view,...
escalation of the 1660s, was so full when Pepys and his wife went to see an opera there that "they told us we could have no room". The large, yet compact, Restoration playhouses, with audience capacities from 700 (Bridges Street) to upwards of 2,000 (the next house on the same site, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane is a West End theatre in Covent Garden, in the City of Westminster, a borough of London. The building faces Catherine Street and backs onto Drury Lane. The building standing today is the most recent in a line of four theatres at the same location dating back to 1663,...
, finished in 1674), were enormous investments, financed through selling shares in the companies, which were thus bound to make more and more money from ticket sales. Not only the theatres and their technical equipment, but the flats painted for a single performance, the special effects, and the elaborate stage clothes, were extremely expensive. Audiences appreciated both luxury and appropriateness of décor and costume: Pepys was quite capable of going several times to see a play that, as such, he disliked, purely for the pleasure of viewing striking and innovative scenery like "a good scene of a town on fire". The companies struggled to outdo each other in catering to these expensive tastes, with precarious finances and the ever-present consciousness that the investments could literally burn to the ground in a few hours. When the theatre in Bridges Street did burn down in January 1672, with its entire stock of scenery and costumes, it was an economic blow from which the King's Company's never recovered.
The Duke's Company, operating smoothly under what soon became Davenant's and Thomas Betterton's joint management, consistently led the way while the King's lagged further and further behind, moving only in forced response and suffering from chronic management conflict between Killigrew and powerful actor shareholders like Michael Mohun and Charles Hart
Charles Hart (17th-century actor)
Charles Hart was a prominent British Restoration actor.A Charles Hart was christened on 11 December 1625, in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate, in London. It is not absolutely certain that this was the actor, though the name was not common at the time...
, who insisted on actor-centred "talk" drama. The difference can be traced in Pepys' regular preference for performances at the Duke's, and in his ever-renewed admiration for Betterton's acting. In December 1667, the King's Company even ceased acting for some days because of a quarrel between Mohun and Hart. With the escalation of expense, days with zero takings were a very serious matter. The crowning grand investment of the Duke's Company was totally beyond the King's means to respond to: the "machine house" at Dorset Garden.
Dorset Garden Theatre
Dorset Garden Theatre
The Dorset Garden Theatre in London, built in 1671, was in its early years also known as the Duke of York's Theatre, or the Duke's Theatre. In 1685, King Charles II died and his brother, the Duke of York, was crowned as James II. When the Duke became King, the theatre became the Queen's Theatre in...
quickly became a famous and glamorous venue, very little is concretely known about the building and outfitting of it: a vague and undocumented tradition ascribes its design to Christopher Wren
Christopher Wren
Sir Christopher Wren FRS is one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history.He used to be accorded responsibility for rebuilding 51 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including his masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710...
. The absence of Pepys' record means that performance data for the next decades are only patchily known.
"Obliged to the French"
Psyché
Psyché is an opera in a prologue and five acts composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully to a libretto by Thomas Corneille adapted from Molière's original play for which Lully had composed the intermèdes...
by Molière
Molière
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...
, Corneille
Pierre Corneille
Pierre Corneille was a French tragedian who was one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine...
, and Quinault
Philippe Quinault
Philippe Quinault , French dramatist and librettist, was born in Paris.- Biography :Quinault was educated by the liberality of François Tristan l'Hermite, the author of Marianne. Quinault's first play was produced at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1653, when he was only eighteen...
, to music by Lully
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Jean-Baptiste de Lully was an Italian-born French composer who spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France. He is considered the chief master of the French Baroque style. Lully disavowed any Italian influence in French music of the period. He became a French subject in...
. "For several things concerning the decoration of the play, I am obliged to the French", acknowledged Thomas Shadwell in the introduction to his own Psyche
Psyche (Locke)
Psyche is a semi-opera in five acts with music by Matthew Locke to a libretto by Thomas Shadwell with dances by Giovanni Battista Draghi. It was first performed at Dorset Garden Theatre, London on 27 February, 1675 by the Duke's Company with choreography the French dancing-master Saint-André. Stage...
in 1674. Even more directly influential were the French operatic visits to London, which sparked off a new interest in opera proper in London audiences. In a brilliant move, the King's Company, all but bankrupt after the crushing blow of the fire in Bridges Street, invited the French musician Robert Cambert
Robert Cambert
Robert Cambert was a French composer principally of opera. His opera Pomone was the first actual opera in French.Born in Paris in 1628, he studied music under Chambonnières, His first position was as organist at the church of St. Honor in Paris...
to perform his opera Ariadne as one of the first productions at their new playhouse in Drury Lane. The Duke's Company responded to the visual gorgeousness of this guest appearance with a Shakespearean extravaganza
Extravaganza
An extravaganza is a literary or musical work characterized by freedom of style and structure and usually containing elements of burlesque, pantomime, music hall and parody. It sometimes also has elements of cabaret, circus, revue, variety, vaudeville and mime...
at Dorset Garden: Shadwell's adaptation of Davenant's and Dryden's version of Shakespeare's Tempest, a piece designed to show off the new machinery:
The Front of the Stage is open'd, and the Band of 24 Violins, with the Harpsicals and Theorbo's which accompany the Voices, are plac'd between the Pit and the Stage. While the Overture is playing, the Curtain rises, and discovers a new Frontispiece, joyn'd to the great Pylasters, on each side of the Stage... Behind this is the Scene, which represents a thick Cloudy Sky, a very Rocky Coast, and a Tempestuous Sea in perpetual Agitation. This Tempest (suppos'd to be rais'd by Magick) has many dreadful Objects in it, as several Spirits in horrid shapes flying down amongst the Sailers, then rising and crossing in the Air. And when the Ship is sinking, the whole House is darken'd, and a shower of Fire falls upon 'em. This is accompanied with Lightning, and several Claps of Thunder, to the end of the Storm.
This multiplication of effects at the very outset of the play served as a shock and foretaste of what the audience would find farther along.
Dorset Garden specials
Restoration comedy
Restoration comedy refers to English comedies written and performed in the Restoration period from 1660 to 1710. After public stage performances had been banned for 18 years by the Puritan regime, the re-opening of the theatres in 1660 signalled a renaissance of English drama...
, and, while most heroic drama
Heroic drama
Heroic drama is a type of play popular during the Restoration era in England, distinguished by both its verse structure and its subject matter. The sub-genre of heroic drama evolved through several works of the middle to later 1660s; John Dryden's The Indian Emperour and Roger Boyle's The Black...
included some scenes that showed off the perspective stage or used some of the simpler machines, spectacle on this limited scale could be just as well staged at Drury Lane. The plays for which Dorset Garden was built, the "machine plays" of the 1670s and '80s and the operas of the '90s, were a category to themselves, different from ordinary serious drama: more static, more mythological, much more gorgeous, infinitely more expensive. So elaborate was the scale of these productions, and so long each preparation time, that only five "machine plays" were produced during the 1670s; yet they were hugely important for the finances of the Duke's Company, mostly in a positive sense. They were Davenant's version of Macbeth (1672–73), Settle's Empress of Morocco (probably 1673), Shadwell/Dryden/Davenant's Tempest (1673–74), Thomas Shadwell's long-awaited Psyche (1674–75), and Charles Davenant's Circe (1676–77).
Psyche had not one, but two, extremely elaborate sets for each of five acts. This is the setting for the beginning of Act 3:
The Scene is the Palace of Cupid, compos'd of wreath'd Columns of the Corinthian Order; the Wreathing is adorn'd with Roses, and the Columns have several little Cupids flying about 'em, and a single Cupid standing upon every Capital. At a good distance are seen three Arches, which divide the first Court from the other part of the Building: The middle Arch is noble and high, beautified with Cupids and Festoons, and supported with Columns of the foresaid Order. Through these Arches is seen another Court, that leads to the main Building, which is at a mighty distance. All the Cupids, Capitals and Inrichments of the whole Palace are of Gold. Here the Cyclops are at work at a forge, forging great Vases of Silver. The Musick strikes up, they dance, hammering the Vases upon Anvils. After the Dance, Enter Vulcan.
(The gold cupids on the columns are due to come to life and jump off.) The use of perspective scenery and many arches is evident here, creating an illusion of the first court being "at a good distance" and the next "at a mighty distance". This creation of fake depth was a favourite device, repeated when the scene changed halfway through the act:
The scene changes to the principal street of the city, with vast numbers of people looking down from the tops of houses, and out of the windows and balconies, which are hung with tapestry. In this street is a large triumphal arch, with columns of the Doric order, adorned with the statues of Fame and Honour, &c. beautified with festoons of flowers; all the enrichments of gold. Through this arch, at a vast distance, in the middle of a piazza, is seen a stately obelisk.
The numbers of performers used, mainly dancers, is clearly staggering compared to the regular comedy or serious play, where the norm was something like 10–15 actors plus a few extras. Although actual numbers are generally vague in these mass scene stage directions, dance scenes like that of the cyclops, and all the cupids who will join them on the floor minutes later, rely on coordination, choreography, and generous collective effects. Of course the many highly-paid dancers would be busy in many roles, returning as townspeople after the scene change of Act 3 with most of the gold paint hastily washed off, and entranced looking upwards to see "Mars and Venus meet in the air in their chariots, his drawn by horses, and hers by doves".
Each production was a gamble. The aspect of the machine plays that posterity knows most about is their economics, as this was what the old prompter Downes most vividly recalled when he wrote his Roscius Anglicanus in 1708. The scenery alone for Psyche cost more than £800, which can be related to the entire annual box office takings for the company of £10,000. Ticket prices for these performances would be raised to up to four times normal. Both Psyche and The Tempest actually complained of the production costs in their epilogues, hinting pointedly that the public ought to reward the "poor players" for their risk-taking and for offering splendours that had so far been reserved for royal masques:
- We have stak'd all we have to treat you here,
- And therefore, Sirs, you should not be severe.
- We in one Vessel have adventur'd all;
- The loss, should we be Shipwrack'd, were not small.
- ...
- Poor Players have this day that Splendor shown,
- Which yet but by Great Monarchs has been done.
The audience apparently agreed, transfixed by such sights as Venus ascending into the heavens and "being almost lost in the clouds", whereupon "Cupid flies up and gets into her chariot, and brings her back", followed by Jupiter appearing on a flying eagle. Psyche turned out highly profitable. It is altogether a pattern that the '70s productions did make money, while those of the '80s and '90s barely broke even or were actual economic disasters.
Parody: "Fire, apples, nuts"
Even after the King's Company got their new well-appointed playhouse in Drury Lane in 1674, they could not take full advantage of it, as they lacked the capital to mount competitive spectaculars. Instead, they attempted to simultaneously capitalise on and snipe at the Duke's most successful mid-'70s offerings by mounting several burlesqueBurlesque
Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects...
s or parodies
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
of them, written by Thomas Duffett. The records for the mid-1670s are particularly incomplete, and neither exact dates nor the public reaction to Duffett's pieces are known, but even the printed versions, pale shadows of Duffett's travesty spectacles, have proved highly amusing to modern critics. The first of them, The Empress of Morocco, caricatured simultaneously Settle's Empress of Morocco and the sumptuous new Dorset Garden production of Davenant's Macbeth
Macbeth
The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...
adaptation, with Duffett's three witches flying in over the pit on brooms at the high point of the action, followed by the descent of Heccate over the Stage "in a glorious chariot, adorned with pictures of hell and devils, and made of a large wicker basket". The Mock Tempest improves on the shower of fire over the audience in the Dorset Garden pseudo-Shakespearean tempest scene with a rain of "fire, apples, nuts".
1680s: Political spectacular
There was no investment in spectaculars during the political unrest of 1678–1684 with the Popish PlotPopish Plot
The Popish Plot was a fictitious conspiracy concocted by Titus Oates that gripped England, Wales and Scotland in Anti-Catholic hysteria between 1678 and 1681. Oates alleged that there existed an extensive Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II, accusations that led to the execution of at...
and the Exclusion crisis, lean years for theatre. In 1682, the companies merged, making Dorset Garden's technical resources available to Dryden, who rapidly got over his principled objection to the superficiality of "spectacle" and "empty operas". The orgy of machinery and extravagant visuals that he went on to write, Albion and Albanius
Albion and Albanius
Albion and Albanius is an opera, closely resembling a French tragédie en musique, by Louis Grabu with an English text by John Dryden.The words were written by Dryden in 1680...
(1684–85), is quoted in the "Introductory" section, with the cave of Proteus
Proteus
In Greek mythology, Proteus is an early sea-god, one of several deities whom Homer calls the "Old Man of the Sea", whose name suggests the "first" , as protogonos is the "primordial" or the "firstborn". He became the son of Poseidon in the Olympian theogony In Greek mythology, Proteus (Πρωτεύς)...
rising out of the sea. Here is Juno
Juno (mythology)
Juno is an ancient Roman goddess, the protector and special counselor of the state. She is a daughter of Saturn and sister of the chief god Jupiter and the mother of Mars and Vulcan. Juno also looked after the women of Rome. Her Greek equivalent is Hera...
in her flying peacock machine:
The Clouds divide, and JUNO appears in a Machine drawn by Peacocks; while a Symphony is playing, it moves gently forward, and as it descends, it opens and discovers the Tail of the Peacock, which is so large, that it almost fills the opening of the Stage between Scene and Scene.
Unusual visual allegory in this Tory
Tory
Toryism is a traditionalist and conservative political philosophy which grew out of the Cavalier faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. It is a prominent ideology in the politics of the United Kingdom, but also features in parts of The Commonwealth, particularly in Canada...
panegyric
Panegyric
A panegyric is a formal public speech, or written verse, delivered in high praise of a person or thing, a generally highly studied and discriminating eulogy, not expected to be critical. It is derived from the Greek πανηγυρικός meaning "a speech fit for a general assembly"...
of Charles II and the House of Stuart
House of Stuart
The House of Stuart is a European royal house. Founded by Robert II of Scotland, the Stewarts first became monarchs of the Kingdom of Scotland during the late 14th century, and subsequently held the position of the Kings of Great Britain and Ireland...
includes a figure representing the radical Whig
British Whig Party
The Whigs were a party in the Parliament of England, Parliament of Great Britain, and Parliament of the United Kingdom, who contested power with the rival Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s. The Whigs' origin lay in constitutional monarchism and opposition to absolute rule...
leader Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury "with fiend's wings, and snakes twisted round his body; he is encompassed by several fanatical rebellious heads, who suck poison from him, which runs out of a tap in his side." In an investor's nightmare, while Dryden's propaganda piece was in preparation, Charles II died, James II
James II of England
James II & VII was King of England and King of Ireland as James II and King of Scotland as James VII, from 6 February 1685. He was the last Catholic monarch to reign over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland...
succeeded him, and the Monmouth Rebellion
Monmouth Rebellion
The Monmouth Rebellion,The Revolt of the West or The West Country rebellion of 1685, was an attempt to overthrow James II, who had become King of England, King of Scots and King of Ireland at the death of his elder brother Charles II on 6 February 1685. James II was a Roman Catholic, and some...
which Shaftesbury had fomented broke out. On the very day of the premiere, June 3, 1685, the Duke of Monmouth
James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth
James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, 1st Duke of Buccleuch, KG, PC , was an English nobleman. Originally called James Crofts or James Fitzroy, he was born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, the eldest illegitimate son of Charles II and his mistress, Lucy Walter...
landed in the west. "The nation being in a great consternation", recollected Downes, "it was performed but six times, which not answering half the charge they were at, involved the company very much in debt." This traumatic fiasco ruled out all further operatic spectacle investment until the calmer times after the Glorious Revolution
Glorious Revolution
The Glorious Revolution, also called the Revolution of 1688, is the overthrow of King James II of England by a union of English Parliamentarians with the Dutch stadtholder William III of Orange-Nassau...
of 1689.
1690s: Opera
Cecil B. DeMille
Cecil Blount DeMille was an American film director and Academy Award-winning film producer in both silent and sound films. He was renowned for the flamboyance and showmanship of his movies...
. In the early 1690s, he staged the three real operas of the Restoration spectacular genre, or the shows usually so designated: Dioclesian
Dioclesian
Dioclesian is a tragicomic semi-opera in five acts by Henry Purcell to a libretto by Thomas Betterton based on the play The Prophetess, by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, which in turn was based very loosely on the life of the Emperor Diocletian. It was premiered in late May 1690 at the...
(1689–90) by Massinger
Philip Massinger
Philip Massinger was an English dramatist. His finely plotted plays, including A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The City Madam and The Roman Actor, are noted for their satire and realism, and their political and social themes.-Early life:The son of Arthur Massinger or Messenger, he was baptized at St....
/Fletcher
John Fletcher (playwright)
John Fletcher was a Jacobean playwright. Following William Shakespeare as house playwright for the King's Men, he was among the most prolific and influential dramatists of his day; both during his lifetime and in the early Restoration, his fame rivalled Shakespeare's...
/Betterton; King Arthur
King Arthur (opera)
King Arthur or, The British Worthy , is a semi-opera in five acts with music by Henry Purcell and alibretto by John Dryden. It was first performed at the Queen's Theatre, Dorset Garden, London, in late May or early June 1691....
(1690–91) by John Dryden; and The Fairy-Queen
The Fairy-Queen
The Fairy-Queen is a masque or semi-opera by Henry Purcell; a "Restoration spectacular". The libretto is an anonymous adaptation of William Shakespeare's wedding comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. First performed in 1692, The Fairy-Queen was composed three years before Purcell's death at the age...
(1691–92), adapted from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that was written by William Shakespeare. It is believed to have been written between 1590 and 1596. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta...
by perhaps Elkanah Settle, all of them graced by music by Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell – 21 November 1695), was an English organist and Baroque composer of secular and sacred music. Although Purcell incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, his legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music...
, and together perhaps a sign of the coming 18th-century vogue for Italian opera
Italian opera
Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was born in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers,...
. The lavish variety entertainment Dioclesian, adapted by Betterton, with many monsters, dragons, and machines, from Massinger and Fletcher's History of Dioclesian, was very popular throughout the '90s and made a lot of money for the United Company. So did Dryden's much more serious King Arthur, the first operatic entertainment that Hume is prepared to consider an artistic success, with Purcell's marvellous music a major part of the entertainment and the songs "for once well integrated into the play".
At the very end of its history, the economics of the Restoration spectacular spiralled out of control with the magnificent production of The Fairy Queen in the 1691–92 season. It was a great popular success, but so stuffed with special effects and so expensive that it nevertheless proved impossible to make money from it. As Downes recalls: "Though the court and town were wonderfully satisfied with it ... the expenses in setting it out being so great, the company got little by it." Its twelve-foot-high working fountain and six dancing real live monkeys have become notorious in theatre history.
The spectacular play died out with the Restoration period, but spectacle would continue on the English stage as the splendours of Italian grand opera
Grand Opera
Grand opera is a genre of 19th-century opera generally in four or five acts, characterised by large-scale casts and orchestras, and lavish and spectacular design and stage effects, normally with plots based on or around dramatic historic events...
hit London in the early 18th century. The dangerous Restoration economic spiral of the ever-more-expensive machine plays would teach 18th- and 19th-century theatrical entrepreneurs to dispense with playwrighting altogether and minimise the cast, utilising any number of surprising effects and scenes in the dumbshow
Dumbshow
Dumbshow, also dumb show or dumb-show, is a traditional term for pantomime in drama, actions presented by actors onstage without spoken dialogue. It is similar to the masque...
of pantomime
Pantomime
Pantomime — not to be confused with a mime artist, a theatrical performer of mime—is a musical-comedy theatrical production traditionally found in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Jamaica, South Africa, India, Ireland, Gibraltar and Malta, and is mostly performed during the...
and Harlequin
Harlequin
Harlequin or Arlecchino in Italian, Arlequin in French, and Arlequín in Spanish is the most popularly known of the zanni or comic servant characters from the Italian Commedia dell'arte and its descendant, the Harlequinade.-Origins:...
, without attendant costs in music, dramatists, and cast.
There have been a small number of attempts to resurrect the Restoration spectacular as a background to modern cinema: Terry Gilliam
Terry Gilliam
Terrence Vance "Terry" Gilliam is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam is also known for directing several films, including Brazil , The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , The Fisher King , and 12 Monkeys...
's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a 1988 British adventure comedy film directed by Terry Gilliam, starring John Neville, Sarah Polley, Eric Idle, Jonathan Pryce, Oliver Reed, Uma Thurman, and Robin Williams.-Plot:...
features at its start perhaps the most accurate reconstruction, with painted scenery, mechanisms and lighting effects typical of the period.