Dawn Lewcock

Introduction

This book examines why, when, how and where the scenic stage began in England. Little has been written about the development of  theatrical scenery and how it was used in England in the seventeenth century, and what is known about the response to this innovation is  fragmentary and uncertain. Unlike in Italy and France where scenery had been in use since early in the century, the general public in England did not see plays  presented against a painted location until Sir William Davenant presented The Siege of Rhodes at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1661.  Painted landscapes or seascapes, perspective views of cities or palaces, lighting effects, gods or goddesses flying down on to the stage in a chariot, all these  had only been seen before on the masque stage at court or in the occasional private play performance.
This study argues that Sir William Davenant (1606-1668) was involved almost from the beginning of the process  and that his influence continued after his death; that, although painted scenery as such would undoubtedly have appeared on the public stage after 1660, it would not have been in the same way  for Davenant  made particular positive contributions which brought about certain changes in both the presentation and reception of plays which would not have happened as they did without his work and influence.
The first part of the study draws together information from many sources to give a picture of Davenant’s overall importance to theatrical history, from how he gained his place in the pre Commonwealth theatre and at court; to the dramatic knowledge he learnt about structuring plays from writing for and having his plays professionally presented on the platform stage; to the technical knowledge he absorbed of the ways of staging scenery from being involved with the masque stage and the work of Inigo Jones;  to the earliest use of scenery before a general audience in the Interregnum with John Webb.
It considers the fitting out of the theatres after the Restoration, and discusses Webb’s work on the Hall theatre at Whitehall and his  likely influence on the theatres at Lincoln’s Inn  Fields and Bridges Street and suggests  that  Killigrew’s theatre at Bridges Street had basically the same stage fitments but  used the masque stage techniques of characters ”flying” and transformation scenes to embellish the heroic drama by Dryden and others as spectacle, whereas Davenant was contriving to present plays with which the scenery was integral.
The Restoration theatre stages had to accommodate  sliding side and back shutters, cut-out relieve pieces, an upper stage and various mechanisms,  as well as the stage-hands required to move and control the scenery, which meant that staging practices would have changed substantially from those of the thrust platform of the pre-Commonwealth theatres to the scenic stage of the Restoration public theatres. Playwrights would have found there were technical needs and timings to be allowed for in their texts for the management of the stage but, more importantly, that many of the conventions of the platform stage of location and spatial relationships could no longer apply.  Most obviously the entrance doors moved from the rear tiring house façade on to a forestage which, with the painted locations set behind it, gave visual information about the action being performed. This immediately set up certain connotations for the audience which would affect the ways in which the audience  began to perceive the plays and which the dramatist would need to consider. 
The published texts of Davenant’s masques show that he understood that the visual interpretation of the underlying meanings of the court masques could implicitly enhance and influence  the perception of the content  shown before it., that is, he realised  how the integration of the visual interpretation of a text could enhance and influence the aural, and that therefore plays presented with scenery could gain in meaning and comprehension. 
He understood the relation of scene development to dramaturgy, genre and performance, and, it is suggested, that he actively used  this relationship in productions of plays after the Restoration and encouraged other dramatists to understand the ways in which the scenic stage could affect the reception of  their plays by adding elements in ways not possible on a bare stage, especially in using the sliding shutters to enable discoveries and disclosures. It is argued that  by doing so he brought about changes in the theatrical conventions by which audiences perceived and apprehended the happenings on stage. 
The second part of the study considers  the legacy of experimentation Davenant’s  work at Lincoln’s Inn Fields left to those who followed him, particularly in the work of Betterton in exploring different ways of integrating the scenery. The two fairly simple scenic theatres opened in 1660/1 were superseded by two new ones with larger and more elaborate stages in 1671 and 1674 respectively.  In both these theatres more elaborate settings were possible, and it is argued that both companies saw the possibilities of spectacular staging in the larger theatres with more elaborate stage fitments. Detailed dramaturgical analysis of certain productions suggests both what these fittings must have been and the ways in which the two companies gradually developed more sophisticated methods of using them to involve the scenic stage with the dialogue and the action in all genres.  It argues that the experimentation in staging drama, that Davenant  had encouraged, continued and broadened after his death,  and that both companies then began to stage elaborate spectacle which increased in complexity  when the companies were united, when experimentation with the various ways in which the scenic stage could now be used  made for especially lavish productions towards the end of the century.
The study  also considers how this experimentation with staging was eventually affected  by discord and mismanagement in the companies. It concludes that financial and  commercial considerations restricted  the companies’ repertoire and thus the scenic stage never attained its full potential in the seventeenth century, although many  elements persisted into the eighteenth century.  Nevertheless theatre practitioners  had learnt to use the  stage craft and mechanical techniques of the masque stage to integrate the visual with the aural aspects of  a production, and dramatists concerned with the aural expression of their theme had become playwrights allowing for the visual elements in their texts.. Something which might not have happened in the way it did without the original inspiration of Sir William Davenant.

Introduction

Good, Sweet, Honey, Sugar-candied reader,
(Which I think is more than anyone has call'd you yet,) I must have a word or two with you before you do advance into the Treatise; but 'tis not to beg your pardon for diverting you from your affairs, by such an idle Pamphlet as this is, for I presume you have not much to do, and therefore are to be obliged to me for keeping you from worse imployment, and if you have a better, you may get you gone about your business: but if you will mispend your Time, pray lay the fault upon yourself; for I have dealt pretty fairly in the matter, and told you in the Title Page what you are to expect within. 

So Aphra Behn (1640-1689) begins her Epistle to the Reader, published with her play The Dutch Lover in 1673. It gives a flavour of the teasing irony which threads through most of her writing, and suggests something of the fascinating personality who is the subject of this study and seems an appropriate opening to my own introduction.
Usually recognised as the first professional woman writer Aphra Behn (1640- 1689) has become a popular subject for academic study. Most scholars have concentrated on her poetry, her short stories and her one full length novel, finding fuel for arguments that suggest she was an early  feminist or a proponent of  anti-racism. Although there have been examinations of individual plays, the prefaces and epistles, and studies which examine her plays against aspects of the cultural context of the time and the  political background, these have usually been used as examples supporting a particular argument,  in relation to certain events of the time. No one has  considered her simply as a dramatist, and one of the most prolific and popular amongst her contemporaries,  working in the theatre at a particular time in theatrical history, nor discussed how  her plays reflect and use the changing staging methods to convey their themes. Moreover, because of her comparatively enormous output and her exceptionally detailed stage directions Behn can be considered as an exemplar of the changes that occurred in the ways of staging on the Restoration stage. This is not something which has been done before.
The study considers the ways in which Behn has constructed her plays and used their staging to ensure the perceptions and apprehensions she wants from that audience. It  considers the ways in which her use of the scenic stage developed from contemporary staging, acting styles and changing stage conventions  and how she used these to contribute to the reception and understanding of her plays by the audience. That is, the study considers the theatrical impact on the audience in the use of painted settings, discoveries and disclosure, disguises and dark scenes. The audience’s reactions to events on stage are as much part of the theatrical experience as the dialogue and actions of the players, and are based on their implicit understanding of the relationship of their own life experiences to those shown on stage. And in almost all her plays Aphra Behn was showing the restoration audience their own lives and behaviour writ large.
This study therefore first considers her direct addresses to her readers  in the Prefaces and Epistles to the published editions of her plays, especially The Epistle to the Reader quoted above,  to gather not only a sense of her own preoccupations and ways of thought but also those of her contemporaries, which is often confirmed by their own writing. The first chapter  argues that she may have been less educated in the classics than the men, but is, nevertheless, someone who has read and understood a great deal of contemporary commentary and philosophical writing, allusions to which appear in her Epistle  to the Reader and in other writings by her, as well as in her plays. The diaries by Samuel Pepys and Jeffrey Boys are examined to consider how the thinking and responses, tastes and attitudes to the theatre, of the society which made up the audience for her plays, had been formed by the intellectual, social and cultural environment. It finds the influence of the King was of paramount importance in setting the ways in which people behaved and hence how the theatre was used. It attempts to let her speak for herself without the interpretation of a twentieth or twenty first century gloss on her words.
A theatrical study cannot consider Behn in isolation and the second chapter discusses the theatrical background using comparisons and examples from other dramatists as and when appropriate. It argues that the debates and experiments amongst the dramatists at the time, illustrate the beginnings of the development of a theoretical structure, which included painted scenery in the acceptable conventions of the illusion of reality for the audience. Behn was writing her first plays just as the debates were at their height, when the dramatists were becoming playwrights through their growing consciousness of theatricality, and was  writing at the time when the theatres began to use painted scenery to give an illusion of real or actual locations, and sliding shutters which gave opportunities for discoveries and disclosures for the first time on the public stage. The second consideration therefore, has been the ways in which the theatre had changed and  adjusted from the platform staging to encompass the scenic stage and hence how the implicit conventions, codes and signals from the stage became structured into the play texts. This was probably one of the most important changes in the history of the theatre, and would affect the visual perception of any play in various, often subtle, ways. This also contributed to the way the  style of play preferred by the audience moved way from tragedy and towards comedy.
The third chapter examines what seems to have been the basis for humour in the Restoration audience, what types and styles of comedy were popular and  argues that  public taste was veering towards the mock heroic and the comic, that there was a satirical ambience which predisposed audience tastes towards comedy and away from tragedy, and thus set the style in which Behn wrote.
The fourth  chapter discusses what the actors, brought to a performance in the way of technique and style of acting, costume and disguise, and especially from the actresses,  the impact of their own personality and reputation. It argues that Behn intentionally incorporates these attributes to affect and alter the relationship between the audience and the actors and in their attitudes towards her characters’ motivations and behaviour.
The fifth chapter suggests that the dramatists at the time exploited varying styles of dialogue with other signifiers of meaning,  particularly social connotations, and thus deliberately changed the aural and spatial dynamics of the total theatrical experience,  making the audience as much a part of the performance as the action on stage. It argues that Behn was especially adept and manipulates the audience in these ways, by making them in turn confidant, spectator or voyeur, in order to obtain the particular response she wants to any one scene.
The sixth  chapter concludes that Behn, although not an outstanding literary writer, is more important theatrically to the period than has yet been allowed. She wrote more plays than anyone other than Dryden: her texts have more explicit, implicit and specific stage directions than most and appear to allow for what was technically and mechanically possible for both the actors and the staging. She exemplifies the change from dramatist to playwright through the growing consciousness of theatricality. But she also clearly shows the social as well as the spatial relationships between the stage, the actors and the audience in plays which were written in, about and for a particular social context. She illuminates many of the cultural attitudes and behaviours of the time in which she lived as no other writer does. The study concludes that Behn’s plays demonstrate a writer with an instinctive feeling for the ways in which an audience will respond to what they see on the stage, and  who deliberately manipulates both certain social and cultural beliefs and attitudes in her texts with the practical staging of those texts to ensure the response she expects, and a dramatist who is more important to the history of Restoration theatrical practice  than has been acknowledged.

This article examines the re-establishment of theatre in England after a gap of eighteen years. It discusses the influences at work on the kinds of play shown and considers the changes that occurred from 1660 until 1689 when William and Mary took over the throne.

This article is an overview of the development of English verse from its beginnings to the end of the twentieth century. It discusses the origins and structure of the major traditional forms of ballads, blank verse, sonnets, odes, elegies and modern free-verse. Examples referred to are taken from The Norton Anthology of Poetry 4th Edition (1996)

Across the centuries dramatists have implicitly demonstrated the ways in which people present themselves to others. That is, dramatists depict characters who knowingly or not, consciously or unconsciously, inhabit a certain persona and the drama consists of the ways in which these various characters interact with each other. This is similar to types of psychological games-playing or behaviour, what Berne termed “the games that people play” in their interactions with others. However what differentiates one dramatist from another, what makes one dramatist possibly more complex or profound than another, is in the ways in which they present these relationships and in the ways in which they choose to involve the audience’s apprehension of the play, and affect their perception of the characters’ behaviour. The discussion here is about the effect on the audience of drawing on inbred cultural lore in the dialogue and how this affects the audience’s understanding of the theme of the play.

The artistic and cultural changes, informed by the growing interest in classical literature, that occurred in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, happened much later in England and even then not to the same extent. England’s political and cultural development had not followed the same pattern as most of the continental nations. This meant that as well as the later development of an appreciation of renaissance visual imagery, there was a cultural difference in attitudes towards humanism in general and drama in particular. This paper discusses this different cultural development and its effect on the resulting drama.

Towards the end of 1864 Mr Francis Drake offered to lend his sister-in-law, Marie Wilton, £1,000 to set herself up in theatre management. This study discusses how she used the money to set herself up and employed the dramatistTom Robertson., and how between them they changed the then conventional ways of presenting plays towards a more natural style of setting and acting.

The English Christmas Pantomime is the quintessential entertainment involving the audience and encouraging their active participation in the happenings on stage. It has been presented for the past two and a half centuries and has, of course, changed in both form and content over that time, yet still attracts and holds its particular audience. This chapter explores why and how the audience has influenced and participated in the show across the years, causing changes in both presentation and casting while continuing to expect traditional elements. Paradoxically there is little evidence for the ways in which audiences join in a pantomime performance yet there is a tradition of particular kinds of behaviour and modern presenters know they need to include certain characters and dialogue which appear to be rooted in particular actions or ways of presentation in the past. In order to examine audience responses today it is necessary to give some description of the origins of the genre in order to understand the traditions that the present day audiences expect to find honoured. The chapter, therefore, examines the historical background and follows through those links from the past to see both why they have endured and what the expected response is to each manifestation. This can only be relative and conjectural since no direct academic study has been made in this field.

The paradoxical way in which we regard Sheridan is oddly typical of way he has always affected public opinion. We admire The School for Scandal as one of the greatest witty comedies, we enjoy The Rivals as a better-than-average lighthearted romp, we appreciate the implicit theatrical irony in The Critic. Yet we tend to patronise the man and his work, as if those plays were an aberration on his part for which he could not have been fully responsible because he died as a reprehensible drunken profligate. I believe we do not take sufficient account of his real and serious concern with the moral ethics underlying contemporary society, shown first as a writer of satirical essays and then in his behaviour as an MP. I suggest that his best plays are so good simply because they reflect his concern and are thus rooted in some kind of real truth about human nature. This article is an outline of the exploration of each play in chronological order against his current social preoccupations, political views and contemporary national events, in which I find a deepening moral sense demonstrated as much in the plays as in his political articles and speeches.

Introduction
The word drama comes from the Greek meaning “to act, do or perform”, and it is in the several subtle and diverse meanings of “to perform” that drama can be said to have begun.
All communities accept that their later drama has roots in pre-history. Anthropologists have shown that primitive societies used (and in certain cases still use) role-playing in teaching the codes and behaviour required to live and survive in that society; for example, to teach the skills needed in knowing what and how to hunt, the making and use of weapons and the rules of warfare. Performance could be involved in oral repetition to teach the laws and social customs, while enactment of mythical or historical episodes perpetuates and transmits what is thought important to maintain in the race-memory of the tribe.

Conversing with the Audience in the Restoration Theatre.

Summary
This article argues that the Restoration theatre audience were partners in an ongoing conversation, using conversation in the way that Thompson suggests when writing of Wycherley’s plays.
He emphasises the importance of conversation at the time and says,

We need to understand Restoration concepts of discourse in their terms, not ours, for though we judge characters by their words, the criteria for what can or ought to be done with words are too often those of the twentieth century and not those of the seventeenth.

He points out that at this time conversation still had the meaning of ‘living amongst people’ or ‘mode of life’ and not its more specific modern sense of ‘talk’.

This article explores this idea, and suggests that the dramatists at the time exploited varying styles of dialogue with other signifiers of meaning, particularly social connotations, and thus deliberately changed the aural and spatial dynamics of the total theatrical experience, making the audience as much a part of the performance as the action on stage, and causing the audience to react to, or perceive, the play in ways particular to the period 1660-c 1700.


Key words. Conversation. Wit. Repartee. Aside. Soliloquy. Perception. Confidant. Participant.

"Introduction Good, Sweet, Honey, Sugar-candied reader, (Which I think is more than anyone has call'd you yet,) I must have a word or two with you before you do advance into the Treatise; but 'tis not to beg your pardon for diverting you from your affairs, by such an idle Pamphlet as this is, for I presume you have not much to do, and therefore are to be obliged to me for keeping you from worse imployment, and if you have a better, you may get you gone about your business: but if you will mispend your Time, pray lay the fault upon yourself; for I have dealt pretty fairly in the matter, and told you in the Title Page what you are to expect within. So Aphra Behn (1640-1689) begins her Epistle to the Reader, published with her play The Dutch Lover in 1673. It gives a flavour of the teasing irony which threads through most of her writing, and suggests something of the fascinating personality who is the subject of this study and seems an appropriate opening to my own introduction. Usually recognised as the first professional woman writer Aphra Behn (1640- 1689) has become a popular subject for academic study. Most scholars have concentrated on her poetry, her short stories and her one full length novel, finding fuel for arguments that suggest she was an early feminist or a proponent of anti-racism. Although there have been examinations of individual plays, the prefaces and epistles, and studies which examine her plays against aspects of the cultural context of the time and the political background, these have usually been used as examples supporting a particular argument, in relation to certain events of the time. No one has considered her simply as a dramatist, and one of the most prolific and popular amongst her contemporaries, working in the theatre at a particular time in theatrical history, nor discussed how her plays reflect and use the changing staging methods to convey their themes. Moreover, because of her comparatively enormous output and her exceptionally detailed stage directions Behn can be considered as an exemplar of the changes that occurred in the ways of staging on the Restoration stage. This is not something which has been done before. The study considers the ways in which Behn has constructed her plays and used their staging to ensure the perceptions and apprehensions she wants from that audience. It considers the ways in which her use of the scenic stage developed from contemporary staging, acting styles and changing stage conventions and how she used these to contribute to the reception and understanding of her plays by the audience. That is, the study considers the theatrical impact on the audience in the use of painted settings, discoveries and disclosure, disguises and dark scenes. The audience’s reactions to events on stage are as much part of the theatrical experience as the dialogue and actions of the players, and are based on their implicit understanding of the relationship of their own life experiences to those shown on stage. And in almost all her plays Aphra Behn was showing the restoration audience their own lives and behaviour writ large. This study therefore first considers her direct addresses to her readers in the Prefaces and Epistles to the published editions of her plays, especially The Epistle to the Reader quoted above, to gather not only a sense of her own preoccupations and ways of thought but also those of her contemporaries, which is often confirmed by their own writing. The first chapter argues that she may have been less educated in the classics than the men, but is, nevertheless, someone who has read and understood a great deal of contemporary commentary and philosophical writing, allusions to which appear in her Epistle to the Reader and in other writings by her, as well as in her plays. The diaries by Samuel Pepys and Jeffrey Boys are examined to consider how the thinking and responses, tastes and attitudes to the theatre, of the society which made up the audience for her plays, had been formed by the intellectual, social and cultural environment. It finds the influence of the King was of paramount importance in setting the ways in which people behaved and hence how the theatre was used. It attempts to let her speak for herself without the interpretation of a twentieth or twenty first century gloss on her words. A theatrical study cannot consider Behn in isolation and the second chapter discusses the theatrical background using comparisons and examples from other dramatists as and when appropriate. It argues that the debates and experiments amongst the dramatists at the time, illustrate the beginnings of the development of a theoretical structure, which included painted scenery in the acceptable conventions of the illusion of reality for the audience. Behn was writing her first plays just as the debates were at their height, when the dramatists were becoming playwrights through their growing consciousness of theatricality, and was writing at the ...