Note: This is a historical research paper that I wrote in the spring of 2020 as the final for a class at Brown called Theory and History of Listening taught by Michael Steinberg.
I am writing this paper from my home. This would be unremarkable for most academic work, but it bears mention because of the circumstances that are keeping me in my apartment and out of the libraries, rehearsal studios, and theatres where I would usually generate the material that will become an MFA from Brown University in about a year’s time. I am writing this paper from my home because we are amidst the global pandemic of COVID-19, which is forcing people from their places of work and play in the name of social distancing to avoid transmission. Social distancing, according to the United States Center for Disease Control, is defined as “remaining out of congregate settings, avoiding mass gatherings, and maintaining distance (approximately 6 feet or 2 meters) from others when possible.” In this vein, on March 12, 2020, Mayor Jorge O. Elorza revoked entertainment licenses in Providence, shuttering theatres across the city in an effort to contain the disease. In the short term, these life-saving measures have left workers in the performing arts, like myself, with cancelled projects, lost income, and stalled development. In the long term, this global event has raised anxious questions about the future of the performing arts. When prohibitions against congregating are lifted, will people want to go to the theatre? Will the rows of seats in an auditorium feel too close for comfort? Will the risks of being in an audience outweigh a good night out?
As a theatre artist, worker, and scholar, my hunch is that there is change on the horizon. In an effort to shed some light onto the future, I will be looking to the past: theatre as it evolved through the 17th century in England. William Shakespeare will be our Virgil through this tumultuous journey, and his play Hamlet will be our plumb line. These hundred years saw deadly disease, civil war, and related paradigmatic shifts in the artistry and architecture of the theatre. Leading up to and throughout the century, the bubonic plague felled large swaths of the population and bred widespread fear through communities worried about contracting the disease. Government authorities periodically suspended public performances in an effort to contain the plague—a move that sounds awfully familiar. The first decades of the century also saw a major regime change with the death of Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch and the succession of King James I, the beginning of the Stuart monarchy. Theatre began a shift as well, from large, outdoor Elizabethan playhouses to smaller, indoor Jacobean theatres. The middle of the 17th century saw twenty years of civil war, suspending and subsequently re-seating the monarchy in 1660. As a result, theatres were shuttered for the eighteen years that Britain was under Puritan rule, reopening with the restoration of Charles II to the throne. I will be tracing this period of sociopolitical upheaval via the shift from Elizabethan theatre through Jacobean theatre, the dark interregna period, and reemergence in Restoration theatre. Theatrical writing changed, acting changed, the theatre buildings changed, and encompassing it all, the experience of the audience member changed. That is where my main curiosity lies. I hope that this reading of the transformations of the English theatre through the tumultuous 17th century will be an illuminating study for a theatre artist in social isolation today. Confined to my home in the spring of 2020, I am reminded to invest in theatre’s inherent capacity to change by Peter Handke, reflecting on Brecht:
The state of the world, which hitherto had been taken as intrinsic and natural, was seen to be manufactured—and precisely manufacturable and alterable. Not natural, not non-historical, but artificial, capable of alteration, possible of alteration, and under certain circumstances needful of alteration. (7)
In the seismic shifts that England experienced from 1600 to 1700, how did the ‘artificial’ theatre, which daily proposes new worlds for its audience to inhabit, evolve with and for its audience? How might practitioners of that same art evolve to face a changing world more than 400 years later?
The beginning of the 17th century saw a lively theatre scene in urban and suburban England. The English Renaissance theatre was in full swing, with multiple venues presenting matinees for audiences that numbered in the thousands (Nagler 4). William Shakespeare was producing his plays at the Globe Theatre, newly opened in 1599. (It would burn down in 1613, getting rebuilt the following year. Perhaps a harbinger for more incendiary times and a rebirth to come?) The Globe Theatre was a prime example of an Elizabethan public theatre, which stood in contrast to court halls, inn yards, and other spaces where plays (Shakespearean and otherwise) were performed in the Elizabethan era (1558-1603).
Nagler’s analysis of the “ideal” Elizabethan playhouse combines incomplete evidence from multiple examples (in particular, a 1596 sketch of The Swan made by a Dutch traveller, reproduced below) so a summary will prove useful. The Elizabethan public theatre was a large, mostly outdoor venue. Symmetrically square or polygonal in shape, high walls would commonly house three levels of galleries that wrapped around the stage area outfitted with seating. Audience members in these seats would look down at the action on stage, as well as the action in the audience below and around. The rectangular thrust stage jutted out from one side, raised between four and six feet off the ground. Standing audience members were free to mill about the ‘yard’ at ground level around the stage (hence their name, “groundlings”) with a view looking up at the performance. Actors would enter and exit from upstage through a curtain that may have been painted with scenery. The stage was kept largely bare of scenery, save key elements such as thrones. The uppermost gallery was roofed, as was the stage, but the yard was open to the elements. This segmented architecture divided the audience economically: the ticket price for a groundling was a single penny, to sit in the highest gallery cost two pennies, and to sit on cushions in the first or second galleries (where a viewer could best see and be seen) cost a total of three pennies.
Figure 1: 1596 sketch by Johaness DeWitt of a rehearsal in progress at The Swan. This is the only known contemporary drawing of the interior of an Elizabethan playhouse.
Divided into distinct spaces, but partaking in the same event, audience members of different classes had different and specific experiences of going the theatre. Imagine that it is 1601 and you’ve paid for a groundling ticket at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank of the Thames, across the river from the center of London. You’ve finished your morning’s work and arrived here in the early afternoon to see a new tragedy about some Scandinavian prince performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It’s a cool, sunny day, and you are reminded of last night’s rain by the mud sucking at your shoes as you navigate the growing crowd. You squint upwards—the circle of the sky above is a replica of the idyllic sky painted underneath the roof of the stage. It bodes well for a play watched unsheltered. You imagine that you’re in the center of a humming beehive as thousands of people take their seats in the galleries and others nudge past you in the yard, searching for a friend or a better view. You mill in the mix, pleasantly warming in the proximity of other groundlings, a benefit that offsets the unpleasant smells of your compatriots: garlic, brewers yeast, and labor (Gurr 16). Deliberate footsteps rumble through the boards and two sentinels appear—you’re standing so close to the stage that you can’t see the entrances on the back wall.
“WHo’s there?” Two words ring out from above, calling out to the imagined world above and behind. The energy of the beehive shifts—suddenly attentive and attuned. You and your comrades pressed around you are at the base of Elsinore’s wall, close and unnoticed, with a full earful but a partial view. You ask yourself what these guards are so afraid of. What might be lurking beyond the castle wall? There’s a hiss in your ear: care to buy a snack? Yes. Negotiating payment and food, you hear a new voice: “By Heauen I charge thee speake.” You look up. He is talking to a ghost[1]. The audience hushes itself, but the ghost offers no answer. “It is offended.” A chuckle rumbles the beehive back to life, the inconstant underscore to The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke by William Shakespeare.
The period of social stability, solidification of national identity, and cultural flourishing that marked the reign of Elizabeth I might be seen reflected in the large-capacity, open-air, neatly-segregated playhouses of her time. A thrust stage set up in a round house lit uniformly by the sky above ensures that the audience experiences itself in addition to the fictional world of the play. There are almost no positions in the house where the stage is the only thing in the audience member’s field of view. The players kept one wall of mysteries hidden from the audience: the upstage wall, obscurer of the tiring house, where actors would make entrances and costume changes. The raised and roofed stage is the clear focal point of the space. This architecture could be seen as a model of centralized power embraced by all classes of the public. It is not as didactic as the proscenium nor as communal as theatre-in-the-round—the Elizabethan playhouse, similar to the Elizabethan government was moderate, centralized, and tolerant. This stability would shift course, however, with the death of Elizabeth I in March of 1603. Though she died childless and never named an heir, the succession of James VI of Scotland happened smoothly, marking the new regime of King James I of England and Ireland. That same year, a particularly deadly outbreak of the Bubonic plague raged through London. The effects of both the plague and the beginning of the Jacobean era rippled through the theatre.
In the early 17th century, the Bubonic plague was still making its deadly rounds through Europe, and would intermittently continue to do so for another 200 years. In London, as Munro writes, “the plague was less cataclysm than context (242).” The persistent presence of pestilence in the city colored urban life with death, challenging the viability of the theatre business for theatre owners, actors, and playwrights. “In 1603 plague killed one in five Londoners in the space of a few months. Over thirty thousand died and thousands more fled the city, causing London virtually to stop. (Munro 241).” After this outbreak, “the privy council decreed that public playing should cease once the number of those who died every week of plague rose ‘above the number of 30’ (Shapiro).” The plague was especially deadly in the summer months, peak season for the public playhouses, where thousands of people would gather in close proximity daily to watch plays and other entertainments. Halting these crowded performances was just one of many measures the new government under James I took to enforce social distancing guidelines in response to deadly disease. In these shut-down summer months, Nagler observes that Shakespeare’s company, renamed the King’s Men in honor of James I, took their show on the road, running tours out to the provinces. However, the more significant shift for theatre as a whole arose when these companies of actors moved indoors to the Jacobean private theatres.
Shakespeare and his company acquired the lease on Blackfriars Theatre in 1608, after the children’s performing company that had been in residence there vacated it. This was during a period of frequent plague closures, and some scholars argue that Blackfriars Theatre, just outside the city limits, offered a performance venue that was not subject to the Privy Council’s closure orders. There is evidence that the King’s Men were putting on private performances for nobility during these plague closures, due to payment records in 1608-9. However, Barroll attests that there is no clear evidence as to the location of these performances: they could have been in a shuttered Globe, Blackfriars, or any other hall used for performance. Nonetheless, performances by the King’s Men at Blackfriars were in full swing by 1611, allowing the company to perform through the winter season, excepting Lent, indoors (Barroll). This significantly helped the company’s bottom line: performances at The Globe would be subject to unpredictable summer plague closures in addition to the weather, and increased ticket prices at the indoor Blackfriars brought in comparable or better sums than performances at the much bigger Globe (Gurr 22). In fact, The King’s Men were able to keep one venue vacant while they were performing in the other, an unusual move, as other companies found tenants for their unused spaces. As the reign of King James I continued, the outdoor Elizabethan playhouse declined in prominence, and Blackfriars Theatre became the most “famous and most fashionable theatre in London (Gurr 4).”
The Blackfriars audience was a decidedly more elite, affluent, and homogeneous crowd than one would find at The Globe for a number of reasons. Firstly, tickets started at 6 pence at Blackfriars (the top price for a seat at The Globe) which supported the decreased capacity, estimated at 500-600 people. Blackfriars was located on the north side of the Thames, in an affluent neighborhood just outside of the city of London (later incorporated) surrounded by the homes of affluent citizens. Lawyers, landed gentry, and the court would operate on a similar calendar as the Blackfriars season, leaving London for the countryside in the summertime. Therefore, the cool-weather performance period of Blackfriars Theatre was uniquely suited to the schedule of London elites (Gurr 27). Even in the beginning this audience was described by contemporaries as “’gentle’: that is to say not only more refined and considerate in manners but of a social rank above the common ruck, with money in inherited landholdings, one step short of the nobility (Gurr 16).” At Blackfriars, audience members did not encounter the working class, unwashed and unchanged from their labors. The attendees used the occasion of seeing a play to display the latest fashions, to see and be seen in an exclusive and intimate setting. For a premium price, seating was offered on stage, offering both a close up of the action and a prime location from which to display one’s finery. Strikingly, though the audiences at Blackfriars were on the whole more educated than the audiences at the Globe, Shakespeare continued to show his more complex plays, such as Measure for Measure, at The Globe, along with, and perhaps instead of at Blackfriars—suggesting that the playwright may have eschewed the homogeneity of the elite audience in favor of communicating with the public at large (Gurr 25).
To understand the Jacobean audience experience is to imagine the hall itself: candlelit, fitted with seating for all audience members on, around, and above a narrow thrust stage. Of the four operating indoor playhouses in Jacobean London, we have the most evidence surrounding Blackfriars, including a set of drawings found at Worcester College believed to be accurate architectural representations of the theatre, pictured at right. Since their discovery, the interpretation, authorship, and accuracy of the drawings have come under “forensic” scrutiny, but they are widely held as the earliest representation of the interior of a Jacobean theatre and an important source for replicating the Jacobean playhouse. As with Nagel’s analysis of the Elizabethan playhouse, Jones makes an estimation of the architecture of the ‘ideal’ Jacobean theatre, modeled on Blackfriars. The inside of the hall measured 66 by 46 feet. There were two galleries of steeply sloped seating arranged along the long sides of the hall, creating a faceted “U” shape as they meet in the back. These were the lowest priced seats, at sixpence. There was bench seating in the pit on the floor directly in front of the raised stage, for which the ticket price was one shilling, six pence. There was also stool seating on the stage for two shillings, and off to the sides of the stage there were boxes, which cost a half crown. The stage was smaller and much narrower than that of The Globe, requiring significant adjustments to staging for plays that were performed in both venues. On the upstage wall was a frons scenae, or hall screen, which contained doors to the “rear stage” through which actors could make entrances. There was another playing area above the doors, used by musicians accompanying the play as well as actors. The degree of decoration in the space is under speculation, as Jacobean aesthetics favored lush and ornate carving and painting, but theatre companies have notably less to spend on décor than the crown, so the decoration could have been focused on a few key areas such as the frons scenae.
Figure 2: Worcester College drawing 7c, attributed to John Webb, early 1660s
“It’s a little crowded here,” you might be thinking if you were one of the audience members seated onstage at Blackfriars Theatre. It seems most of the actors in the company are filing in—this must be a big scene and you are keen to not get your shoe trampled in the action. In the glowing candlelight, the rich colors of your new doublet are setting off the glint of the gold chain on your chest quite nicely. You shift slightly on your stool so that the pit can get a better view of your shapely, stockinged calf. “Do you thinke I meant Country matters?” Your ear perks up: did the lovely boy actor made up to be Ophelia just say what I thought I heard? “I thinke nothing, my Lord.” “That's a faire thought to ly between Maids legs” Yes, they are saying what you think they are saying. “You are merrie, my Lord?” You’d say you were having a fine night out at the theatre, as, it seems, are the characters not six inches from you. Behind you in the box, you can hear a woman’s voice murmuring, and you sit up taller just in case it was a powerful murmuring about you. One can never be too vigilant about how one is seen. Music begins to drift from above, invisible to you, as some of the candles are snuffed. “Perhaps Hamlet’s ghost father is playing the recorder,” you think, but you can barely smirk at your own joke before the dumb show begins. Perfumed by music and darkness, the players in dazzling costume and mask love, deceive, and murder each other. It is a mesmerizing spectacle—you are in the garden with them, you are an accomplice as you watch the poison tip into the ear. When you look to King Claudius’s face, you can feel the heat building underneath his skin, his lips twitch, his eyes waver, he stands, he looks like he is about to erupt--“Giue me some Light. Away.” You wipe a droplet of the actor’s spit off of your cheek. As the courtiers call for light as they file offstage, you catch a glimpse of Prince Hamlet’s satisfaction—his eyes catch yours and you could swear that the candles spontaneously relit at that very moment.
The sturdy authority of the Elizabethan era had been replaced with a decidedly more indulgent monarch. Though the rule of James I was relatively peaceful, the groundwork for the English Civil War was being laid by his mistrust of Parliament, court favoritism, lavish spending, and deep belief in divine right to rule. Over the 22 years of his reign, the theatre evolved towards elitism, intimacy, spectacle, a “‘loosening of …power’ and a new theatrical freedom: this was a moment at which playwrights were able to challenge older systems of hierarchy, authority, and institutional allegiance (Wray 544).” Shakespeare died in 1616, but the King’ Men continued performing at Blackfriars and The Globe under the patronage of James I, and after his death in 1625, Charles I. Other playwrights took up the mantle of interrogating systems of power, in particular, the role of women in society. Strong female roles (still played by men) emerged on the Carolinian stage, the indoor playhouse asserted itself as the theatre de rigeur, and lavish spectacles seen in Court Masques find their way onto the theatrical stage (Gurr 218). The King’s Men continued to play at Blackfriars, an indoor enclave where the in-crowd could get up close and personal with the glittering artifice of theatre. In contrast to the wide open “O” of The Globe, Blackfriars set the public in a rectangular audience where the most valuable seats threatened to usurp the stage. This could be seen as a model that exposes the weaknesses of a regime that would explode into civil war in 1642.
Whereas Public Sports do not well agree with Public Calamities, nor Public Stage-plays with the Seasons of Humiliation, this being an Exercise of sad and pious Solemnity, and the other being Spectacles of Pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious Mirth and Levity: It is therefore thought fit, and Ordained, by the Lords and Commons in this Parliament assembled, That, while these sad causes and set Times of Humiliation do continue, Public Stage Plays shall cease and be forborn, instead of which are recommended to the People of this Land the profitable and seasonable considerations of Repentance, Reconciliation, and Peace with God.
On September 2, 1642 the Long Parliament closed the theatres. They would remain closed through 1660, with the restoration of Charles II to the throne at the end of the Civil War. This dark period was far longer than any plague closure. Rising Puritan factions had long decried theatre as pagan ritual, related to the worship of ancient gods. “The Puritan case in this was an easy one; the origin of the drama in the worship of Dionysos-Bacchus and the introduction of plays into Rome to assuage a pestilence by order of the ‘Devill-God Iupiter Capitolinus’ were well known (Hewitt 13).” However, Parliament was more concerned with pressing political issues than religious purity. According to Staines, they were motivated by “a fear of the instability that might result when large numbers of people gathered to watch politically charged material and left the building debating the implications.” Staines goes on to argue that the discourse that had been happening inside of theatres funneled into pamphleteering, the contained spoken word exchanged for the dispersed written word. Theatricality didn’t disappear completely, however, “many pamphleteers even borrowed techniques from drama, creating play-pamphlets and using forms like dialogue and tragedy (Staines).” The free press and proliferation of pamphlets also opened up space for female writers, often publishing under pseudonyms, paving the way for women’s participation in the theatre that would follow. Imagine this wartime audience: chaotically dispersed, inundated with many points of view from obscured authors, stripped of the social, auditory, and visual pleasures of gathering. Bringing our consciousness back to the 21st century, there is a sense of resonant familiarity: gatherings outlawed, a country hotly divided, discourse taking place through the wild and powerful free press of Twitter.
As the interregnum came to an end in 1660, Charles II blinked the house lights, sounded the chimes, and ushered England’s theatregoers from the lobby back to their seats. Solidifying a royalist sentiment and inspired by continental opera, the new monarch issued two exclusive licenses to publicly perform plays for profit to Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant. Killigrew founded The King’s Company, Davenant, the Duke’s Company. At this point, the Jacobean playhouses were defunct and ill-suited to the newest fashion in theatre, imported from the continent: the proscenium arch. Following the French trend, each company leased and renovated indoor tennis courts to house the reincarnated theatre. Davenant’s theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the later to open, but dazzled audiences with the innovation of moveable scenery.
When the Duke’s Company opened its doors on 28 1660 June, the audience was greeted with a scenic stage that offered a range of scene changes via screens and shutters moved across the stage space behind the proscenium arch. A set of grooves running across the stage from a series of wing positions carried shutters that could be opened or closed on the action behind, or create a new vista further up the scenic stage. (Bush-Bailey 27)
Figure 3: 1809 Engraving of the interior of Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre
Depth of field, quickly shifting locations, and special effects framed Restoration era drama, which included performances of Renaissance repertoire along with new plays. However, many patrons and critics found old plays unsuited to new tastes. Fretz notes that Shakespeare’s plays were subject to heavy rewrites “not just in the light of the new political situation, but also because of new tastes and expectations that demanded clearer and more intelligible language, tragicomic plots, increased sentimentalism, and poetic justice.” Nevertheless, the plays were performed by both The King’s and The Duke’s companies, with changes in both the text and performance.
One of the most significant changes to the English theatre of the Restoration was the inclusion of women as playwrights as well as performers. Actresses appearing on the public stage for the first time were a scandalous curiosity, particularly when they played male characters, revealing their shapely legs in “pants roles.” New plays written by female playwrights interrogated social norms while titillating audiences with convoluted sex plots. This period also saw the first female manager of a theatre, Lady Mary Davenant, who took control of The Duke’s Company after her husband’s death in 1668. After a crisis of almost twenty years of darkness, the new English theatre returned as a place of public dialogue, entertainment, and social experimentation.
The audiences of Restoration theatre retained the elitism of the Jacobean crowd, though there is debate as to whether two theatres that needed to fill at least 200 seats per night, six nights a week to support themselves could afford an insular clientele (Scouten 47). We have a delightfully detailed account of a regular theatregoer of the era: Samuel Pepys. In his diaries, he not only recorded his opinions of the productions he saw in the latter half of the 17th century but also made note of the many people he would meet on his cultural outings. His accounts have given scholars the sense of coterie amongst the urban bourgeois attending the theatre (Scouten 47). Samuel Pepys was a notable fan of Hamlet, attending multiple productions and going so far as to commission a musical setting of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy (Bevington 91).
Imagine that you are an audience member at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields playhouse on November 27, 1661 attending a performance of Hamlet by the Duke’s Company. Coincidentally, well-known man-about-town Samuel Pepys is also in the audience. You are seated in one of the high, steep side galleries in the long and narrow hall. You can imagine watching a tennis match below, but now it is filled with a seated audience. Directly ahead, you see somewhat of a mirror image: a steep, wooden gallery filled with people, including a young woman with a concerned expression gazing at the stage. Is she that worried about the fate of the Prince of Denmark? Turning your head, it looks like staring down a narrow laneway from the street. The proscenium frames the realistic setting of a castle yard, Laertes, center, listening to something in the wings. “Hey non nony, nony, hey nony:” Ophelia enters singing, flowers in her hair and in her arms. She looks like a nymph, sad and beautiful. “And on his graue raines many a teare,” Laertes sees his sister and melts, hearing her sad song. “Fare you well my Doue.” She’s mad, you think as she gives stalks of greenery to her brother. She is wild, freewheeling, and disheveled. You wonder if she should have gone to the nunnery, but she is so beautiful, you couldn’t imagine her locked up by the Catholics. “And of all Christian Soules, I pray God. God buy ye.” She disappears into the wing, and you wonder if you will get to see that sad, lovely woman again. You look across the hall at your gallery’s mirror again: the young woman is craned in her seat, twisting towards the stage, eyes brimmed with tears—is she looking into a mirror of her own?
Through plague, through war, through puritanical protest, the English public theatre made and re-made itself though the 17th century. This is, of course, not unique to English theatre nor that particular stretch of time. This is true of theatre as an organism, as States writes: “it feeds on the world as its nourishment, it adapts to cultural climate and conditions that necessitates periodic shifts in direction and speed, and finally it exhausts itself and dies—one of its traditions, like generations, replacing another (13).”
What feeds this organism of theatre? Looking back at the examples cited above, state power is undeniably influential in the viability and the very form of theatre. The public theatre most closely resembles our contemporary theatre industry with its dependence on large crowds, ticket sales revenue, and supplemental government support. At each turn, the government’s valuation (or lack thereof) of the theatre is a large determinant in its fate. This pattern is not very heartening to a theatre artist in America in 2020.
However, there is also a more optimistic interpretation from today’s vantage point. Though the government was a huge determining factor in the fate of the theatre, artists never lost the will to create theatre and audiences continued to show up for each new playhouse’s offerings. Even during the intermission of the interregna, the desire for public discourse remained, shifting to the written word, and companies of actors began re-forming at the first sign of peace. Public space and public conversation are endemic to a society, and when either is threatened, the society suffers immeasurably. The theatre is “a place for seeing” but it is also a place for conversation, a place for multiple points of view to be heard. As long as people can hear and be heard safely, human innovation will provide a space for that conversation to happen. The show, after all, must go on. Or, in the poignant words of Horatio at the end of Hamlet:
Of that I shall haue alwayes cause to speake,
And from his mouth
Whose voyce will draw on more:
But let this same be presently perform'd,
Euen whiles mens mindes are wilde,
Lest more mischance
On plots, and errors happen.
[1] The Ghost was likely played by Shakespeare himself, haunting his own play. (Bevington)
