A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment

Mechele Leon

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350135444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, 'the general effect of the theatre is to strengthen the national character to augment the national inclinations, and to give a new energy to all the passions'. During the Enlightenment, the advancement of radical ideas along with the emergence of the bourgeois class contributed to a renewed interest in theatre's efficacy, informed by philosophy yet on behalf of politics. While the 18th century saw a growing desire to define the unique and specific features of a nation's drama, and audiences demanded more realistic portrayals of humanity, theatre is also implicated in this age of revolutions. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment examines these intersections, informed by the writings of key 18th-century philosophers. Richly illustrated with 45 images, the ten chapters each take a different theme as their focus: institutional frameworks; social functions; sexuality and gender; the environment of theatre; circulation; interpretations; communities of production; repertoire and genres; technologies of performance; and knowledge transmission.

CHAPTER ONE

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Institutional Frameworks

The State, the Market and the People in the Age of Enlightenment

JOHN O’BRIEN

In a 1771 letter, David Garrick, in every imaginable way the central theatrical figure of the Enlightenment-era theatre in Britain, urged his correspondent, a young writer who wanted his feedback on the draft of a play, that ‘If Your inclination leads You to the Stage, the Study of the frame-work will be absolutely necessary for without that Mechanical part all ye Wit, humour &c Character, Which we know You are possess’d of, will be thrown away’.¹ ‘Frame-work’ here constitutes a play on words; Garrick is critical of the play’s plotting and character relationships, what we might think of as its framework in a conceptual sense. But he also puns on the literal sense of framework as a ‘Mechanical part’, associating plotting with the other material aspects of the stage that his correspondent has to learn as well: scene construction, costuming, lighting – all of the elements of a production that, as Garrick testifies here, are essential to the success of a play. Garrick’s pun is testimony to the way that theatrical performance at once takes place in the physical world and seems to transcend it, to reach for abstraction. Given the broad scope of the topic, and the fact that the mechanical structures of the eighteenth-century stage have for the most part disappeared, this chapter on the institutional frameworks of the Enlightenment theatre will of necessity have to be fairly abstract, but I invoke Garrick here to underscore how one of the unique things about theatre is how its abstractions are in the service of live, embodied performance. Following Garrick’s lead in proposing a trio of ideas that the material and the conceptual framework of the stage supports (‘wit, humour and character’), this chapter will plot out the frameworks of the theatre of his age by attending to a triumvirate of concepts: the state, the market and the people.

In most European countries, the state gradually took over the role of patron from the monarchs and wealthy noblemen who had sponsored, protected and subsidized theatrical companies in the major cities. Well into the eighteenth century, the princes and monarchs of nation states licensed theatres. Most theatres in Europe, even when they called themselves ‘Theatres Royal’, were not, however, owned by the prince or the state; they were typically private institutions, owned by individual entrepreneurs, partnerships or joint-stock companies. Theatres created and then served a market for performance, one that was fully a part of the emerging capitalist economy. What is more, both the state and the market addressed themselves to new conceptualizations of the people, who were at this point both the population to be managed and an audience whose desire for entertainment called out to be served. Attending to the topics of state, market and people will enable us to compare the various ways in which these elements were combined in different national traditions over the period. It will also help us see how this is when theatre began to take its modern form throughout Europe, where it became on the one hand a symbol of each nation’s distinctive culture and on the other hand a part of the entertainment industry. Theatre companies spread widely throughout Europe and its colonies, with hundreds of theatres opening in provincial cities. By 1789, there may have been as many as 120 provincial theatres in the British Isles and seventy-two in France.² Colonial cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Williamsburg, Kingston, Port-au-Prince and Calcutta (among many others) all boasted purpose-built playhouses. Theatre was for many Europeans the central institution of their culture, linking them to the classical past while also creating a way for them to imagine distinctiveness of their own nations.

In this chapter, I will attend primarily to the English-language theatre from the 1660s to the 1790s. This was a theatre that had its base in London but that would in these decades radiate out to provincial cities and towns in the British Isles and then to the larger cities in the colonies of the Americas and then India. Britain is useful as a place from which to survey the Enlightenment theatre, in part because it is a well-documented example, in part because the tensions between the state and the marketplace were felt and often articulated in particularly acute ways, and also because English performance traditions were widely known and recognized on the Continent from the Renaissance onward. Travelling groups of ‘English comedians’, small companies of actors, dancers and acrobats from England toured Germany and Scandinavia beginning in the late sixteenth century; the name was then used for many decades to describe indigenous companies even when there were no longer any English-born performers among them. I will also pay some attention to the French theatre, both in its own right as an interesting and contrasting case study, but also for the way that it informed the English-language theatre as a prominent counter example. As a more autocratic realm, in France, particularly early in the period, the institutionalized theatre was particularly strongly associated with the monarch and the court. English playwrights mined French (and also Spanish) plays for raw material, plots and characters that became the basis for many popular works. English critics also drew extensively upon French literary theory. The trajectory of the theatre in Germany and Scandinavia offers useful points of contiguity and divergence. Theatre in Scandinavia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, for example, was strongly modelled on the theatre of the French court. As in France, many performances were staged at the behest of the kings and other aristocrats, and the repertoire in the early decades of the eighteenth century consisted largely of works by French playwrights like Corneille, Racine and Molière. Starting in the 1720s, when Ludvig Holberg wrote an extraordinary series of comedies for the royal theatre in Copenhagen, Danish theatre developed its own trajectory as an institution that attempted to represent the fundamental characteristics of the nation and its people to itself. In Germany, theatre similarly became one of the institutions through which writers would advance and help create the conditions for a national literature and culture. Because Germany, divided into multiple principalities, did not have a central city on a par with Paris or London (or for that matter Copenhagen or Stockholm), it developed several regional theatrical centres: Hamburg, Weimar, Mannheim, Berlin. None of these cities was large enough to sustain multiple companies at the same time, or, for that matter, to train many professional performers, and early in the century, many performances were undertaken by amateurs.³ This meant, however, that extraordinary figures like Gotthold Lessing, Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were able to manage theatres in those places, and the comparatively small size of the enterprises with which they were associated may have meant that they were freer than their peers in London or Paris to introduce innovations in performance practices and critical theory. Lessing, for example, in effect invented the role of the dramaturg, the critic who works within the theatre, shaping a theatre’s repertory according to the best principles of the art, when he worked for the Hamburg National Theatre in the late 1760s. His Hamburgische Dramaturgie, probably the most influential treatise on the drama written in German in the eighteenth century, derived directly from that experience and, in creating the discipline of dramaturgy, gave a name to the practice of studying play texts with a new kind of professionalism. Goethe directed the Weimar Court Theatre from 1791 to 1817, raising it from an amateur troupe in a small town to become one of the most important centres of theatre in Europe. In each of these places, the theatre had a different trajectory and developed different performance traditions. There is much common experience as well in this period, however, and the British stage is a useful case study, offering lessons that can be extended to understanding the institutional structure of other national theatres. Throughout the period of the Enlightenment, the theatre as an institution was thus never just one thing, but the name we assign to a dynamic cultural process, an interaction between the state, the market and the people.

THE STATE AS LICENSOR

Throughout the eighteenth century there were many performances in Europe offered by itinerant companies who set up for a few days at a time in a market town, or a place such as Smithfield in London, that held annual fairs at harvest time in which performers, sometimes from a professional theatre, staged performances on temporary platforms erected for the duration of the fair. The vast majority of such performances have left no trace in our records because they flew, in effect, under the radar of any official authority. But a permanent acting troupe performing in a purpose-built playhouse was something else entirely. For a group of investors and performers to establish such a thing was understood to be a right derived from a sovereign, much like the right to form other companies that operated mines, lent money or traded in defined regions of the globe, like the Royal African Company or the East India Company. Because they had been authorized by a monarch, many theatrical companies in this period in Europe denominated themselves a ‘theatre royal’, and often performed in a building that carried that name as well.

The affiliation with the monarchy usually meant less in practical terms than the name might seem to imply, however. Monarchs officially authorized theatre companies and some of them patronized theatres fairly frequently. Probably the monarch with the greatest enthusiasm for the stage was Gustav III of Sweden, who reigned from 1771 until his assassination – fittingly enough, while attending a masquerade ball in the foyer of an opera house – in 1792. Gustav wrote and even performed in his own plays, commissioned operas and is credited with founding the Swedish Royal Theatre, the Royal Swedish Opera and the Royal Swedish Ballet. Other monarchs also believed that supporting the theatre was an important part of their job as supervisor of their nation’s culture. Charles II, for example, saw that publicly supporting the theatre was a way of turning the clock back to the period before the unpleasantness of the English Civil War, reminding his subjects of the proud tradition of drama and entertainment that had characterized the reigns of his father Charles I and grandfather James I earlier in the seventeenth century. Yet although theatre companies needed the monarch’s support for the right to perform, this did not come with a reciprocal obligation on the monarch’s part to subsidize the theatres financially. Charles II doled out gifts to performers and playwrights here and there when they particularly pleased him, but it was impossible for those who were running the theatres to count on the court as a source of income. This was even truer in the eighteenth century. Neither Queen Anne (who reigned from 1702 until 1714), nor the three successive Georges who served as monarch from 1714 to the end of the century, cared much for the theatre. George I, for example, did not speak particularly good English, so he took little pleasure in plays. But opera boomed during his reign in part owing to the remarkable fact that George Frideric Handel had been George’s kapellmeister – director of music for the court – when George was the Elector of Hanover. Handel made London one of the great centres of opera in Europe.

In the early years of his reign, Louis XIV of France he took a great interest in the theatre. Louis founded the Comédie-Française in 1680, merging two established companies, and he provided an annual subsidy of 12,000 livres. British writers sometimes pointed jealously to France as a place where theatre received the support that it deserved.

Louis’s support waned, however, when he became influenced by religious reformers who increasingly found the theatre to be morally objectionable. He attended the theatre only rarely after the mid-1680s, although he occasionally hosted performers at court.⁴ Theatres were closed in Copenhagen entirely during the reign of Christian VI (1738 to 1746), who banned theatrical performance because he believed it to be impious. (His successor Frederick V reversed course and issued a patent for a new theatre; the Royal Danish Theatre, now one of the central cultural institutions in Denmark, has operated continuously on the same site in Copenhagen since 1748.)⁵ The title of ‘Theatre Royal’, then, conferred what were considered to be essential rights to build playhouses, hire and train actors and stage public performances. It also gave the businessmen who owned and ran the playhouses some protection from potential competitors. Monarchs did not, however, own the theatres in their capital cities, nor did they tend to subsidize them in any systematic or sustainable way. Outside capital cities, even those institutions that called themselves Theatres Royal were pretty much on their own.⁶ The benign neglect of sovereigns belied the impression they tried to convey of being active supervisors of their peoples’ entertainment.

FIGURE 1.1 The Comédie-Française, Antoine Meunier, late eighteenth century. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Even though personal supervision on the part of monarchs was uneven and infrequent, it was widely understood that the state had a role in overseeing the smooth ope...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Editor’s Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Theatre and the Enlightenment Matrix
• 1 Institutional Frameworks: The State, the Market and the People in the Age of Enlightenment
• 2 Social Functions: Audiences and Authority
• 3 Sexuality and Gender: Changing Identities
• 4 The Environment of Theatre: Power, Resistance and Commerce
• 5 Circulation: Emergent Modalities of Intercultural Performance
• 6 Interpretations: From Theatrephobia to a Theatrical ‘Science of Man’
• 7 Communities of Production: Eighteenth-Century Acting Companies
• 8 Repertoire and Genres: Cultural Logics and the Trick of Theatrical Longevity
• 9 Technologies of Performance: Architecture, Scenery, Light
• 10 Knowledge Transmission: Theatrical Intelligence and the Intelligence of Theatre
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright