Jacobean Private Theatre

Keith Sturgess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315301976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

In this scholarly and entertaining book, first published in 1987, the author tells the story of Jacobean private theatre. Most of the best plays written after 1610, including Shakespeare's late plays such as The Tempest, were written for the new breed of private playhouses – small, roofed and designed for an aristocratic, literary audience, as opposed to the larger, open-air houses such as the Globe and the Red Bull, catering for a popular, 'lowbrow' audience. The author discusses the polarisation of taste and the effect it had on literary criticism and theatre history. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.

I. Introduction: Jacobean Private Theatre

On 4 February 1596, James Burbage completed the purchase of rooms in the Upper Frater building of the old Blackfriars monastery in the south-west corner of the city of London. He paid £600 and his intention was to convert his new property into an indoors playhouse for the Lord Chamberlain's company whose lease at the Theatre (their regular playhouse in Shoreditch from 1576) was shortly to expire. The conversion was begun but in November inhabitants of the Blackfriars area sent a petition to the Privy Council asking that the project be stopped. They maintained that a playhouse in the precinct would be a general inconvenience and they rehearsed the time-honoured objections that playhouses attracted riff-raff and criminals and were a health hazard in times of plague. Particular to their case, they noted,

the same playhouse is so near the Church that the noise of the drums and trumpets will greatly disturb and hinder both the ministers and parishioners in time of divine service and sermons.¹

(The church was St Anne's and the trumpets and drums were presumably those customarily played outside a playhouse to draw patrons and signal the imminent beginning of a performance.) Then the trump card was played. The petitioners claimed

that there hath not at any time heretofore been used any common playhouse within the same precinct, but that now all players being banished by the Lord Mayor . . . they now think to plant themselves in Liberties.

A 'liberty' is an area outside municipal authority and the Blackfriars was one by virtue of having been religious ground; in fact very shortly the city would control the area, but meanwhile the petitioners necessarily turned to the Privy Council.

The petition was evidently successful. In any case, the Lord Chamberlain's Men failed to get permission to perform at the new house and, shortly after, the company set about building the Globe on Bankside where they performed from 1599. Meanwhile the Blackfriars playhouse stood empty. James Burbage had died in 1597 and eventually, in 1600, his sons, intent on wresting some profit from the so far abortive venture, leased it at £40 a year to Henry Evans, manager of a children's troupe, the Children of the Chapel. The lease was to run for twenty-one years, so evidently the Burbages had given up hope of using the playhouse themselves in the short term. Evans's boys played there until 1608, presumably tolerated by the Blackfriars residents who had reacted so vigorously to the threat of an adult company in their midst.

By 1608, Evans's operation had run into severe difficulties and he was willing to let the Lord Chamberlain's Men, now prestigiously restyled the King's Men, repossess the Blackfriars. This time, perhaps because of their royal patronage, the company overcame any opposition to their occupancy of the playhouse and, having carried out repairs and refurbishment, they began playing there. Probably, because of interruptions through plague, their first full season was in 1610. From then until the closure of the theatres, they played the winter season each year at the Blackfriars, from October until March or April, and then transferred to the Globe for the summer, thus running the two houses in tandem.

With the King's Men finally installed at the Blackfriars begins the story proper of Jacobean Private Theatre and of this book.²

'Private' is a term that stands some scrutiny. It is absent from the Black-friars petition, but one of its opposites is there – 'common': 'there hath not heretofore been used any common playhouse within the same precinct.' (Common's synonym is 'public'.) In fact, there had been a playhouse in the precinct, a first Blackfriars playhouse constructed in 1576, which was also an indoors conversion of an existing building. Its occupying company was the forerunner of Evans's troupe and either the 1596 petitioners were being disingenuous or they were ignoring it because, being an indoors, children's house, it was not 'common' but (though they do not use the word) 'private'.

Distinctions between 'private' and 'public' are clearly made in another petition of the Blackfriars residents against the playhouse, this one of 1618–19. Now, of course, the players are the adults of the King's Men and so the petitioners draw attention both to the Privy Council ruling of 1596 and to another, more general, directive of 1600 that there should only be two London playhouses in toto; and they then complain that 'contrary to the said orders, the owner of the said playhouse [the Black-friars], under the name of a private house (respecting indeed private commodity only) convert the said house to a public playhouse'.³

No conversion was then in hand; the deed had been done a decade before, if this 'conversion' was the installation of the King's Men. But 'private house' evidently means what it says – in law, the domestic premises of a private individual, dedicated to his private advantage ('commodity'). But already, 'private house' also meant a private playhouse of the Blackfriars kind. Originally, perhaps, it denoted the playhouses occupied by boys and it first appears in print in that manner when Webster uses it in his 1604 Induction to The Malcontent where the Black-friars itself is referred to. Dekker's The Seven Deadly Sins (1606) talks of a 'private playhouse' and quickly the term appears in regular usage to refer to the Blackfriars type of playhouse whether occupied by boys or adults and means, therefore, a small, enclosed playhouse as distinct from the larger, unroofed playhouses like the Globe.

W. J. Lawrence suggested that the managers of the boys companies first used 'private' to camouflage the fact that they were making capital out of the companies of choirboys under their charge by giving infrequent but profitable performances to paying customers.⁴ The discretion of the operation and the fact that the boys played to a kind of club audience in enclosed premises allowed the authorities to turn a blind eye to the infringement of the Act of Common Council, 1572, which in fact allowed the performance of plays 'in the private house, dwelling, or lodging of any nobleman, citizen or gentleman . . . without public or common collection of money of the auditory'. Be that as it may, by the second decade of the seventeenth century, private/public meant primarily indoors/outdoors, and the King's Men had demonstrated the commercial viability of the indoors playhouse. British theatre would never be the same. The outdoor playhouse was not defunct – the Globe was worth rebuilding after fire in 1613 and the Fortune in 1621; and the Hope was a new theatre building in 1614 (though built, significantly, to double as an animal-baiting arena). But Beeston's Phoenix, converted from a cockpit in 1616 and the Salisbury Court playhouse of 1629 belonged to the new spirit of playhouse design and they would provide the model, with important refinements from the court theatre, for the Restoration playhouse building.

After the King's Men's move to the Blackfriars we can make a broad distinction between the 'private' and 'public' play. Many plays in the company's repertoire transferred easily from the Globe to the Blackfriars and vice versa according to the time of the year; and both acting personnel and, no doubt, commercial and artistic policy were broadly the same. Also, other companies found themselves first in a public house and then a private one and were dependent on largely the same repertory for both. But there rapidly were generated two kinds of audience, a process the boys companies had begun, and an essential difference developed between what we might see as a West End Theatre and a Bankside Theatre, and between a play aimed at an aristocratic and literary audience and a play aimed at a popular and low-brow audience. In effect, the audience determines the play, and the private playhouse became a club, an academy and an art-house, while its public counterpart became notable for rowdy behaviour and, on stage, an over-dependence on jigs, fighting and horseplay.

Such a polarizing of taste marks the cultural divide between an art or elitist theatre and a popular one, and it has been fashionable amongst drama historians to deplore that such a thing ever happened. Only in a truly popular theatre, received opinion would have it, might a great dramatist like Shakespeare develop, for cultural specialisation or class division in a social art-form like theatre leads to etiolation and decay. Alfred Harbage's seminal investigation of the private theatre's repertory, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York, 1952), makes much of this in demonstrating the loss in Jacobean drama of the robustness and clear-eyed, moral vigour which a popular culture alone promotes (where 'popular' means heterogeneous).

However, in the last twenty years, the stock of the 'decadent' Jacobean drama, specifically the 'private' plays (for few genuinely popular plays got into print), has risen enormously, particularly amongst theatre-makers and theatre-goers (the only true arbiters, dare we say it, of dramatic taste). Primed by lessons learned from 'Epic', 'Cruel' and 'Absurd' Theatre, actors and directors have found ways of playing the private theatre repertory and audiences of watching it, so that it constantly strikes us as aptly modern as well as challengingly ancient. This theatre, with its dramaturgies of discontinuity, its grotesque mixing of comic and tragic, its teasing strategies of characterisation and its existential preoccupation with problems of identity and authenticity, strikes us as a kind of dramatic expressionism we feel at home with. The playwrights that wrote it have all but extinguished the 'popular' Elizabethans, apart from Shakespeare, on the modern stage.

Our particular vantage point, then, enables a theatrical re-assessment of the group of plays – by Webster, Jonson, Middleton, Ford – that make up this alternative tradition to that which we associate with the Globe. Consequently, in this book our twentieth-century touchstones of theatrical style and practice – Brecht, Artaud et al, – are drawn on where appropriate and without apology to 'place' the theatrical events under discussion.

Primarily, though, the approach is necessarily historical: to rediscover the 'private' play-in-performance by treating it as an historical object. To that end, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 deal with the plays' auspices: audience, playhouse, performing company. There is no extended consideration of acting style here, largely because we still know little about it, though there are attempts to speculate about the changes in style imposed by the indoor playing conditions. In the chapters on the plays themselves (6, 7, 9 and 10) much use is made of the terms 'mannerist' and, to a lesser extent, 'baroque'. 'Mannerist' here is an epitome of the matrix of ideas, intuitions and aesthetic judgments prevailing in educated circles in Jacobean London which provided the intellectual climate in which the private theatre flourished. Some definitions of its usage here, and indeed a justification for it, seem called for.

Mannerism is a twentieth-century term used to describe the art of the post-Renaissance artists who flouted the rules deduced from classical art. Much of the rule-breaking, which presupposed an audience able to perceive the breaking itself, was an attempt to come to terms with a universe suddenly less explicable or less easily understood, for the old certainties were everywhere being challenged by new discoveries and new ways of thinking. For example, in 1610 when the King's Men played their first full season at the Blackfriars, Galileo published his earth-moving Sidereus Nuncius. This book described astronomical discoveries made with the telescope which demonstrated, by empirical observation, that the Ptolemaic model of the universe was wrong. (The idea was not new; the demonstration was.) On publication day, England's ambassador in Venice bought a copy, saw immediately its shattering import and promptly sent it to the English court. Within months Donne alluded to Galileo and his discoveries in his anonymous book Ignatius his Conclave (and the next year would write the famous lines beginning 'and new philosophy calls all in doubt'). In The Duchess of Malfi, played in 1613, Webster refers several times to Galileo, enigmatically but not at all casually (see p. 97), and a dozen years later, another Blackfriars play, Fletcher's The Elder Brother, can, this time with the casualness born of familiarity, make a passing joke about 'Galileo, the Italian star-wright'.

Thinkers like Machiavelli and Montaigne, similar in their scepticism and naturalism, turned metaphorical telescopes on the worlds of politics and moral values, making empirical discoveries as profound if less dramatic. These are thinkers of the 'Counter-Renaissance', that transitional stage in the general reformulation that would turn the old world into new,⁵ and they occupied the thought-processes and even passages of the dialogue of the Jacobean playwrights. Shakespeare borrows Gonzalo's plantation speech in The Tempest from Montaigne, ideas relevant to Caliban, and, most strikingly, Prospero's reasoning that 'the rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance'; while whole sequences in Webster are excerpts from Montaigne lightly cast as dialogue. 'Que sais je?' the French essayist took as his motto, and the habit of introspection and self-analysis, together with a relativist cast of thought, became the hallmark of every Jacobean hero.

Mannerism is the art equivalent of Counter-Renaissance. Montaigne's essays, unclassical, apparently spontaneous and improvised, catching the present moment, focused on the writer rather than on the nominal subject, are quintessentially mannerist. The term comes from Vasari, first biographer of the Renaissance painters, who used maniera to mean something like stylishness and an emphasis on style or a refined elegance is one aspect of the modern usage. The other is an emphasis on the artist's personal, often agonised, perception of reality and on an art which ignores or deconstructs conventional images of external nature. So mannerist art is often an art of imbalance and distortion: in painting, the human form is elongated, unrealistic and discordant colours are used, the canvas is crowded, often the nominal subject is displaced or not given a central accent and there is a tendency towards abstraction. Always, the mannerist perspective assumes an educated audience ready to respond to a challenge to its sensibility or to enjoy the flattery of a reference to its cultivation. For mannerism is not a popular but a coterie art; it developed at court and it asked questions and assumed standards of taste far different from those that prevail in popular art.⁶

The Reformation ensured that England had little sixteenth-century contact with mannerist pictorial art in its early phase in Italy, though Hilliard developed a genuine, native mannerism of his own in his miniature portraits with their jewel-like workmanship and the private, spontaneous expression of their sitters. Later, Inigo Jones copied mannerist fine-drawing from the Italian engravings he assiduously collected. But already by then the English experience in the fine arts had caught up apace.

Earlier, the 'metaphysical' poets, with their 'hard lines' and conceited style and their love of paradox and irony, had created a brand of literary mannerism which translated quickly and relatively easily into dramatic expression in the plays written by the likes of Marston and Middleton for the boys. The boys companies' whole endeavour was a paradox and a conceit: child actors aping the adult world and so twice removed from reality. Marston in the Antonio plays (1599) and in The Malcontent (1604) could exploit this to fine, ironic effect. But even on the adult stage, in Jonson's satires and Shakespeare's 'Problem Plays' (particularly Troilus and Cressida), a 'metaphysical' theatre was emerging which Fletcher's sense of style could refine into the characteristic Jacobean play, the tragicomedy (see Chapter 5).

In the Induction and parts of the play proper of Bartholomew Fair Jonson sniped away at the bold abstractions of Shakespeare's Late Plays, those 'tales, tempests and such like drolleries' which are themselves, in their unrealism, mannerist. (Prospero's best-known speech about transience, in its content and form, is a locus classicus of mannerist expression.) But Jonson's classicism is only skin-deep and his debasing, cartoon theatre is a vehicle for the playwright's deeply pessimistic view of the social world which is also mannerist. In Bartholomew Fair he can create no character within the play with the moral authority to guarantee an ordered existence; the play's self-appointed moralists are simultaneously and justifiably restrained in the stocks.

In Webster's The Duchess of Malfi there is a continuous exercise in grotesque art and the cultivation of 'horrid' laughter learned from Marston. This is the highest reach of mannerist tragedy; the heroic notes of conventional tragedy have gone, for a pervasive irony forbids or deflates them; and we are left with a species of melodrama which mixes farce and sentiment in a challenging way.

At one point, in a passage often misunderstood, the heroine and audience see dead bodies which turn out to be mere artistic representations, a trompe l'oeil and so a joke played on the spectator. (It is the opposite effect of a similar passage in A Winter's Tale; where Shakespeare's t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Jacobean Private Theatre
• PART ONE Private Theatre: Audiences, Buildings and Repertory
• PART TWO Blackfriars Plays
• PART THREE The King’s Theatre
• Notes
• Index