Transnational connections in early modern theatre

M. A. Katritzky, Pavel Drábek

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526139191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume explores the transnationality and interculturality of early modern performance in multiple languages, cultures, countries and genres. Its twelve essays compose a complex image of theatre connections as a socially, economically, politically and culturally rich tissue of networks and influences. With particular attention to itinerant performers, court festival, and the Black, Muslim and Jewish impact, they combine disciplines and methods to place Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the wider context of performance culture in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Czech and Italian speaking Europe. The authors examine transnational connections by offering multidisciplinary perspectives on the theatrical significance of concrete historical facts: archaeological findings, archival records, visual artefacts, and textual evidence.

Part I

West

1

If the shoe fits, or the truth in pinking

Natasha Korda

Among the ‘small finds’ unearthed in the Museum of London’s archaeological excavations of the sites upon which early modern English playhouses once stood – theatrical ephemera including fragile filaments of costume-wire, bits of lace and fringe, bent dress-pins, tiny glass beads, scattered hooks, buttons and buckles, shards of ceramic tobacco-pipes and drinking vessels, broken combs and cosmetic implements – lies an unusually intact artefact found at the Rose Theatre, namely, a slip-on left shoe (see Figure 3), just over twenty centimetres in length, or slightly larger than would fit in the palm of one’s hand – or my hand at least – and roughly the size of an Elizabethan adolescent boy’s or woman’s foot (Bowsher and Miller 2009: 138–57, 191–2, 200–8).¹

Figure 3Slip-on left shoe, with zigzag slashes across the vamp and pinked patterning on the heel, found in MoLA excavation of the Rose Theatre. Length 20.5 cm. Photograph: Andy Chopping. Museum of London Archaeology. Reproduced by permission.

While holding the shoe, as I did at the Mortimer Wheeler House in London where it is stored, I asked myself the question that is the focus of this chapter: what are we to make of the material remains of early modern theatrical production and commerce, which have endured in spite of Prospero’s prognostication that ‘the great [G]‌lobe itself’ would merely ‘dissolve’ and ‘Leave not a rack behind’ (The Tempest, 4.1.153–6)?² The surprising survival of such stage ephemera, all too easily dismissed or disregarded as insignificant, challenges us to recall and attend to the ‘stuff’ that theatrical dreams are made of – but how, and to what ends?

What, if anything, might a shoe tell us about the plays performed at the Rose, a repertory that notably included Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, or The Gentle Craft, first performed there in 1599, around the time that this shoe might have trod the boards on the foot of an actor, or the pit or galleries on the foot of a spectator?³ The methods of material culture studies, adopted by the ‘material turn’ in Shakespeare studies, would seem ideally suited to the task of studying what a play about the ‘gentle craft’ of shoemaking might tell us about the Rose shoe, and vice versa. Indeed, if ‘[o]‌ne of the attractions of the historical investigation of material culture is the very materiality of things’, which promises to put us ‘in contact with the past’, as Giorgio Riello maintains (2010: 41), shoes would seem to cry out for such investigation as their very lowliness – their proximity to terra firma – turns our attention to the seemingly solid, tangible world of substance. Situated at the point of contact between the actor’s body and the stage, shoes continually call to mind, with each strut, step, stride or stomp of the actor across the boards, the material substrate upon which theatre, that most ephemeral of art forms, is grounded.

Insofar as the methods of material culture studies are ordinarily focused on static historical artefacts, however, we might well ask: to what extent are these methods useful in illuminating the material artefact animated by the actor, when taken up or trodden upon in performance? In what follows I consider what the study of material culture, and of shoes in particular, may tell us about plays in performance, while also addressing where the traditional methods of the discipline find their limits. Finally, I suggest the need for a broadened approach to the study of the material culture of the stage, one that would allow us to consider material forms of translation within transnational networks of commerce and exchange, by tracing not only costumes and properties as they move across borders into various cultural contexts and markets across Europe, but also the travelling feet of embodied actors as they move from stage to stage, transporting and transmuting technologies of footwear and foot skills in the process.

That the epithet treading the boards (or the stage) has long been synonymous with the actor’s art suggests the reliance of that art upon foot skills and footwear, despite the fact that this phrase is often invoked as a deliberate (and literal) understatement.⁴ Yet theatre historians have devoted far more attention to analysing the ‘manual eloquence’ of chironomy, or what the actor conveys through hand-gestures, than they have to fancy footwork or -wear (see Bulwer 1644). This tendency may be attributed to what Tim Ingold, in an evocative article entitled ‘Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived Through the Feet’ (Ingold 2004: 321), terms the ‘imagined superiority of hands over feet’, which may be traced back to classical antiquity. According to this view, bipedal locomotion’s primary purpose is to liberate the hands to become agents of the intellect, thereby subordinating the feet; whereas the feet merely ‘undergird and propel the body within the natural world, the hands are free to deliver the intelligent designs or conceptions of the mind upon it’, and in so doing to enable ‘man’s mastery and control over his material environment’ (Ingold 2004: 317–18, emphasis in original). As Ingold demonstrates, this triumph of the head and hands over the heels was reinforced by ‘a wider suite of changes that accompanied the onset of modernity’, including everything from Darwinian science to ‘modalities of travel and transport […] the education of posture and gesture […] the evaluation of the senses [… and] the architecture of the built environment’. Now ‘deeply embedded in the structures of public life in western societies’, this hierarchy has likewise shaped ‘mainstream thinking in the [academic] disciplines’ (Ingold 2004: 321, 330). This is true not only of theatre history, as noted above, but of material culture studies, which, construed as a vehicle for putting us ‘in contact’ or touch with the past, conceives of this touch in manual rather than pedestrian terms through its focus on the handwork or artisanal skill manifested in the crafted object.

Ingold’s essay challenges us to consider the slow and uneven historical processes through which ‘the arts of footwork’ came to be subordinated to those of handwork by studying everything from changes in modes of transportation and the built environment to the history of foot etiquette, bodily postures and techniques, and technologies of footwear, as they ‘mediate a historical engagement of the human organism, in its entirety, with the world around it’, including the engagement of the actor with the stage (Ingold 2004: 331). Although this wide-ranging approach would of necessity draw on the traditional methods of material culture studies, it also challenges these methods to attend to foot skills as well as hand skills, worn shoes as well as crafted shoes, and the haptic interface between the two. It reminds us that if theatre is without borders, it nonetheless requires boards upon which to tread, and other material forms of support: theatre does not float magically above the material world, but rather is defined by its points of contact and modes of interaction with that world.

A survey of Dessen and Thomson’s Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (1999) reveals just how much attention was paid to actors’ foot skills in early modern playtexts, although the precise nature of those skills is not always clear, as when an actor is instructed to ‘Practise footing’ in Brome’s The Court Begger (Dessen and Thomson 1999: 96; see also 64–5).⁵ Not surprisingly, this and many other stage directions for feet concern dancing onstage: there are almost 350 examples of stage directions to ‘dance’, some of which indicate a particular manner of dancing, such as ‘Dances looking on his Feet’. Other stage directions specify the technical name of the dance, including both native forms (such as ‘The two dance a gig devised for the nonst [i.e., nonce]’, ‘Hobbinall and the Shepherds dance a Morris’ or ‘Dances Sellenger’s round’ [65]) and foreign imports (such as ‘The Spanish Pavin’ [209], the French ‘Coranto’ [56], the German ‘Almaine’ [235] or the Italian ‘Lavolta’ [142]). In performing the latter, actors translated foreign foot skills for native theatregoers’ eyes and ears, as well as for their feet. Anyone who has witnessed a post-play jig in the wooden O of the reconstructed Globe will have experienced the quite visceral effect of such onstage dances, where the vibrations of the trodden boards resonate not only acoustically in the ears, but up through the feet and bodies of the ‘Audients’.⁶

The sophisticated foot skills upon which actors relied were by no means limited to dance. Stage directions reveal a diverse lexicon of expressive foot movements, comprised of leaps, runs and reels (as in ‘leaps over the stool and runs away’ [130], ‘Here she runs about the stage snatching at every thing she sees’ [185], and ‘Exit reeling’ [178]), scuffles and skirmishes (as when Hamlet and Laertes ‘In scuffling […] change Rapiers’ [189] or when Iachimo and Posthumous ‘enter againe in Skirmish’ [202]), and marches and stands (as in ‘the soldiers march and make a stand’ [138] or ‘They march about the Stage’ [140]), to name just a few. Such choreography and blocking are suggestive of the ways in which actors used their feet to take possession of stage space, and deployed foot skills as vehicles of power or status. Whereas assertive or graceful footwork conveyed status, staggering or stumbling conveyed weakness or subordination (in stage directions such as ‘staggers on, and then falls down’ or ‘staggers with faintness’ [213]). Such ungainly movements required no less skill on the part of the actor, however; indeed, they necessitated what we might call a kind of sprezzatura of the feet, through which the actor dissimulated the practised skill required to make footwork appear spontaneous.

Clearly, the actor’s skill involved not only speech uttered ‘trippingly on the tongue’ (Hamlet, 3.2.2), but the nimbleness of foot with which he ‘trip[ped] about the stage’ or ‘tripped up [the] heels’ (Dessen and Thomson 1999: 237) of another actor to assert dominance. In order to ‘o’erstep not the modesty of nature’ (3.2.19) actors thus had to be decorous of foot as well as of voice, as Hamlet himself recognises when he excoriates players who ‘strut’ as well as ‘bellow’ onstage (3.2.32–3). Stage directions further reveal that the arts of footwork were put in service not only of motion, but of a wide range of ambulatory emotion, as when actors were instructed to ‘walk passionately’ or ‘fearfully’, ‘sadly’, ‘fantastically’ or ‘discontentedly’ (Dessen and Thomson 1999: 245). Moreover, just as particular hand gestures were associated with particular emotions – as when ‘we clappe our Hands in joy, wring them in sorrow, [or] advance them in prayer and admiration’ (Bulwer 1644: A5v) – so too were gestures of the feet. Stamping one’s feet, for example, was commonly associated with anger, as in stage directions indicating ‘She reads the letter, frowns and stamps’ or ‘chafing and stamping’ (Dessen and Thomson 1999: 213).⁷

With so much attention paid to footwork and foot skills on the raised platform of the thrust stage, it is not surprising that actors were known to wear eye-catching and fashionable footwear, including chopines with raised cork soles, which originated in the Orient and came to Europe via Venice and Venetian courtesan culture, and eventually to England where they were more commonly known as pantobles or pantofles (Semmelhack 2009: esp. 26–80; see also Semmelhack 2013). By the early seventeenth century, actors were also wearing shoes with wooden heels and laces fastened with decorative shoe roses or ribbons, innovations from France (Semmelhack 2009: 80–96). There are many references to such foot attire in playtexts and stage directions, which sometimes make them focal points, as when a servant enters ‘with Shooes, Garters and Roses’ in Massinger’s The City Madam (1632, sig. B3r),⁸ or when characters are instructed to take them on and off, or kiss them, or further draw them to our attention by asking, for example, ‘See yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I West
• Part II North
• Part III South
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index