Drama 6 Spring Lecture 3

The English repertory in the early decades of the 18th century was ahodgepodge of new and old plays as well as political burlesques and balladoperas, pantomimes and fairy plays, and satirical revues and history plays,many with underlying political messages.

The most popular play of the 1720s was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, a satirical “balladopera” that set politically charged lyrics to popularballads, church hymns and folk tunes, and contained veiled attacks on thegovernment’s espousal of mercantilist morality. It had the longest run inhistory at the time.

Acting with impunity in a politically-charged partisanenvironment, unlicensed theaters like the Little Theatre in the Haymarket andthe Theatre on Goodman’s Fields offered political parodies and satirical revuesattacking the king, the government, and leading Londoncelebrities.

Manager of the Little Theater at the Haymarket. Wrote plays including "The Author's Farce" and "Tom Thumb"

When Colley Cibber’s daughter was disowned by her fatherin 1736, she joined the company of her father’s sworn enemy, Henry Fielding atthe Little Theater in the Haymarket, acting a parody of her father in severalof his signature roles, including Lord Foppingtonin Fielding’s Pasquin, ADramatic Satire of the Times.

•Criminalized thepublic performance of any play not licensed in advance by the office of theLord Chamberlain

•Restricted authorizedtheaters to the City of Westminster in London (Drury Lane and Covent Garden)

Theoutspoken freedom enjoyed by theaters since the Restoration was not only villainizedas unruly but criminalized as seditious and dangerous to the public welfare.

During the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714),theater was promoted as both a “public institution” and a “moral institution”that should serve the needs of citizens by offering proper moral instruction.

•Curbed politicallypointed plays and burlesques

•Diminished the numberof new plays

•Eliminatedcompetition for the two licensed houses

•Shifted emphasis fromputting on new plays to reinterpreting old ones

•Abolishedroyal-theater patents ending the monopoly on spoken drama enjoyed by Drury Laneand Covent Garden

•Limitedthe powers of the Lord Chamberlain to forbid the performance of plays unless it “is fitting for thepreservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace so to do”

•Extendedthe laissez-faire principle of “free trade” to theater, making it an“irrefutably commercial” venture

At the Restoration, the plays of Shakespeare continuedas a regular part of the repertory, but Shakespeare himself was not consideredthe pre-eminent playwright of the age. He was a distant third behind JohnFletcher and Ben Jonson. His plays were modified with the addition of songs, made into operas/

Between 1700 and 1728 Shakespeare wasn’t known as thewriter of great plays; he was known as the writer of great tragic roles: Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caear, King Lear and Othello were most oftenstaged, along with spectacle-plays like TheTempest.

Rowe regularized spellings (Shakespeare) and erased obscurities so theplays could be enjoyed by middle class readers.

He also included lists of dramatis personaeand preserved as stage directions a number of playhousetraditions told him by Thomas Betterton.

In the brief biography included in Rowe’s edition,Shakespeare is presented as a good middle-class citizen, kind in his habits andorthodox in his beliefs, and as prone to wise financial investments as goodmoral advice.

As a poet not a dramatist, Pope suppressed theatricalityin favor of readerliness.He “improved” Shakespeare if he felt the originalfaltered, purging bad grammar, bad logic, bad meter, and bad manners.He suppressed lines thathe judged “spurious,” and moved “low passages” (ofbad poetry or bad manners) to the bottom of the page.

Pope presented Shakespeare as a great poet (likehimself)

It wasn’t until the mid-18th century that Shakespeare emerged as the “immortalbard,” an epitaph that David Garrick popularized, promotingan image of Shakespeare as the greatest natural poet and genius of all time

•Mosthighly regarded actor of his age

•Innovativemanager of the Royal Theatre in Drury Lane

•Studentof Samuel Johnson, friend of the philosophes, collector of quarto and folio editions of Shakespeare

•Leda revolution in scenic design

Throughout his career, Garrick wasidentified with Shakespeare and particularly with therole of Hamlet, spurred to action by the ghost of his dead father to restorehonor to the kingdom.

Garrick portrayed himself as the dutiful son who sought to reclaim the honor ofhis dead father (Shakespeare) and restore glory to the kingdom.

•Altered,amended or abridged 22 of Shakespeare’s plays

•Fitthem to the conventions and expectations of his day

• Consultedwith the best scholars of his day (Johnson, Warburton, Capell)and his own collection of folios and quartos

•Continuedto perform Tate’s King Lear andCibber’s Richard III

Thought that proceeded from sensation and emotion wasconsidered sensible thought, grounded in intuitive and innate goodness and experienced in the body.

It was also considered “refined thought” (combiningintellect, emotion and morality). It was this that Garrick strove to inspire inhis audience.

Garrick combined stateliness and grace with facial expression and gestures basedon idealized emotional templates to convey a rangeand progression of emotions.

Garrick trained his body to represent emotional statesand transitions in meticulous detail and brought this to his acting.This mixture of pictorial expressiveness, fluidmobility, and stately tranquility astonished audiences.

Acting is “anentertainment on the stage, which by calling in the aid and assistance ofarticulation, corporeal motion, and ocular expression, imitates, assumes, orputs on the various mental and bodily emotions from the various humors, virtuesand vices, incident to human nature.”

Garrick studied the templates of emotionalexpression found in ancient sculpture and contemporary painting tounderstand how the emotions write themselves upon the body.

Diderot was shocked that these "train of passions" were perfectlyrendered (by Garrick) but never seemed to affect the actor.

Diderot concluded that “in order to move theaudience the actor must himself remain unmoved” because “the natural”is best represented on stage not by the thing itself (the emotion) but by thenuanced expression of the signs of the thing created through a combination oftechnique, craft and presence.He called this “theparadox of acting.”

Garrick shifted the emphasis from acting as a verbal artto acting as a “plastic art,” subject to what Aaron Hill in his “Essay on theArt of Acting” (1753) called “the plastic imagination.”

•toexpose the Ideal hidden in the real

•to bring artful focus and beauty to stage representations

•togive the audience an experience of Spirit transcending the limitations of thephysical

Became manager of Drury Lane in 1747 at the age of 30,partnering with business manager James Lacy.

•Responsibleto the government and the crown as operator of a royal theaterand a national trust

•Responsibleto the audience for helping to develop a national culture thatwas also entertaining and popular

•Responsibleto Lacy, the actors, and others employed by the theater to make thetheater profitable

•Taughthis “natural” style of acting across the company, training his actors in the “parsingof the passions”

•Marked“points” in performances for emphasis and taught them to the cast; arrangingthe cast into pleasing and meaningful stage pictures

•Paidspecial attention to scenic pictorialism; removed the audience from the stage

•Masterdesigner at Drury Lane (1771-1781)

•Amongthe first designers to build miniature maquette

•Innovationsin scene-changing and lighting effects gained him an international reputationas a designer of stage spectacles

•Scenicpictures that captured the beauty and grandeurof nature

•Transformedthe stage into a place of visually unified pictorial evocations of nature based on Romantic notions ofthe picturesque and the sublime*

Under William Pitt's leadership, Britain established itsposition as the leading colonial power with victory in the Seven Years' War(1756 -1763)

In Garrick’s hands, Shakespeare was reshaped into apatriotic voice for British greatness through colonial expansion. Following thewar, as Britain rose to inter-national prominence and France declined, thefortunes of William Shakespeare rose as well.

Miniature Mechanical Theater that represented various images from nature

“Shakespeare[in the 18th century] represented a type of the idealBriton: an adherent of liberty, scornful of rules, bold and various in hisgenius.”

In September 1769, Garrick arranged a ShakespeareJubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon to commemorate the 200th anniversary of “Theday that gave Immortal Shakespeare to this Favour’dIsle” (though the event was five years and several monthsafter the actual bicentennial of Shakespeare’s birth in April 1564)