Theatrical Unrest

Ten Riots in the History of the Stage, 1601-2004

Sean McEvoy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317428596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en el arte dramático

Shortlisted for the 2017 Theatre Book Prize

What is it about theatre, compared to other kinds of cultural representation, which provokes such a powerful reaction? Theatrical Unrest tells the compelling tales of ten riots whose cause lies on stage. It looks at the intensity and evanescence of the live event and asks whether theatre shares its unrepeatable quality with history.

Tracing episodes of unrest in theatrical history from an Elizabethan uprising over Shakespeare's Richard II to Sikhs in revolt at Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's Behzti, Sean McEvoy chronicles a selection of extreme public responses to this inflammatory art form. Each chapter provides a useful overview of the structure and documentation of one particular event, juxtaposing eyewitness accounts with newspaper reports and other contemporary narratives.

Theatrical Unrest is an absorbing account of the explosive impact of performance, and an essential read for anyone interested in theatre's often violent history.

1 Raising the dead The Essex Rebellion of 1601 and Shakespeare’s King Richard II

DOI: 10.4324/9781315690933-1

One afternoon in the summer of 1601 the greatest actor in England stood at the front of the stage at the Globe Playhouse and looked his whole audience squarely in the eye.

Richard Burbage played all the lead roles in Shakespeare’s company and was at ease and at home. From his central position, if he gazed over his right shoulder and scanned leftwards, looking up and down, he could meet the gaze of three thousand spectators crammed into the amphitheatre. They surrounded him in an arc of some 270 degrees and were ranked in three levels, from the pit to the upper gallery nine metres above him (Gurr 1992: 128). Burbage, in the role of Prince Hamlet, addressed his audience.

‘I have heard’, he began, perhaps with a faint chuckle, ‘that guilty creatures sitting at a play…’ (perhaps he paused again here, and the caught the eye of an individual in the pit or in the middle gallery, to the amusement of those around the unfortunate spectator) ‘…Have by the very cunning of the scene/ Been struck so to the soul that presently/ They have proclaimed their malefactions’ (2.2.520–4).¹ There may have been laughter. There may have been some teasing between friends amongst the audience. But some playgoers may have recalled some recent events, of deadly seriousness, when the theatre’s supposed power to inspire its audience to reflection and then action had been an important element of an attempted coup d’état aimed at Queen Elizabeth herself, led by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. They would have recalled a notorious performance earlier that year of Shakespeare’s Richard II commissioned by the insurgents as a provocative signal for their rebellion.

Queen Elizabeth I never married. In the final years of her reign there was considerable disquiet over who would be her heir. Elizabeth was the last of the Tudors, and many feared that without a clear successor to the throne England might be plunged back into the civil wars which marked the decades before her grandfather, Henry VII, seized the throne in 1485. Now any conflict might quickly become a savage religious war. On the mainland of Europe the struggles between Catholics and Protestants had been, and would continue to be, bloody and protracted. Essex had been the Queen’s favourite but when he fell from power he also became a standard-bearer for some who were disaffected with the declining Queen and felt that a strong warrior-leader might be the answer to England’s problems. Essex’s second-in-command was Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and former patron to William Shakespeare. In Hamlet – written at about the time when Essex’s rebellion occurred – Shakespeare would explore both rebellion against a monarch and the power of theatre to inspire political action. The rebels themselves had sought to employ an earlier play of his, Richard II, to their particular ends.

In Hamlet, the later scene where a company of actors, the ‘Tragedians of the City’, perform The Murder of Gonzago at the court of King Claudius of Denmark, is where Shakespeare examines the power of the stage to provoke political violence: the very issue at the heart of the story of Richard II and the Essex Rebellion.

In the first Act of Hamlet the Prince is visited by the ghost of his recently dead father, who claims that he was murdered by his brother Claudius, who is now king. At the end of the second Act, which is when Hamlet talks to the audience about the reactions of the guilty spectator, Hamlet is still afraid that the ghost may be a demon sent to trap him. He therefore asks the actors who have recently arrived at the court to re-enact on stage the murder of his father precisely as described by the ghost. Hamlet makes his intentions for Claudius clear to the audience: ‘I’ll observe his looks/ … if he but blench,/ I know my course’ (2.2.528–30). He also shares his plan with his friend Horatio.

Thus when The Murder of Gonzago (or ‘the Mousetrap’, as Hamlet calls it, 3.3.205) is performed on stage, the audience in the theatre auditorium are not only watching the on-stage play, but are also watching (along with Hamlet and Horatio) King Claudius for his reaction to the events of the play. But the off-stage audience are also paying close attention to Hamlet’s reactions to Claudius’s reactions. ‘The very cunning’ of this scene in Hamlet is designed to make the audience ask themselves about the effect that watching Hamlet is having upon them. Having been induced into these reflections, the 1601 audience may well have been especially self-aware when two later scenes plausibly re-enacted certain recent events in the life of the recently executed Earl of Essex. The Globe audience would also recall how the very company they were watching, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, had been implicated, through that performance of Richard II, in the failed rebellion that ended in Essex’s execution. They would note that the ‘Tragedians of the City’ in Hamlet are on a provincial tour because of a ban on plays brought about by ‘the late innovation’ – a provocative line which is often taken to refer to Essex’s rebellion itself: ‘innovation’ in 1601 could have the sense of ‘revolution’ (2.2.302; Shakespeare 2006: 259).

Teasingly, Hamlet offers no clear endorsement of the theatre’s capacity for genuine moral and political impact. Even if modern directors have often made the King’s guilty reaction to the on-stage murder obvious, Claudius offers not a word in response to The Murder of Gonzago. As the play progresses, Hamlet feels the need to spell out the key events to the king (‘he poisons him i’ th’ garden for his estate … You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago’s wife’; 3.2.226–7). But, plausibly embarrassed by the Prince’s constant disruptions, the King merely calls for lights and leaves the stage, never to mention the play again, not even when he admits to the audience in soliloquy soon afterwards that he did indeed kill his brother Old Hamlet (3.3.39–41). Shakespeare’s script allows Horatio no corroboration of Hamlet’s belief that the King’s reaction to the play has convicted Claudius beyond doubt (3.2.250–2).

In refusing to confirm that Claudius’s secret guilt is flushed out by watching his crime re-enacted on stage Shakespeare is subtly undermining ‘a commonplace of the age’ (Shakespeare 1936: 189). Modern editors of the play cite the case, amongst others, of a woman in King’s Lynn in Norfolk, who had confessed to the murder of her husband after attending a tragedy, Friar Francis, in which a wife committed a similar crime. The incident is mentioned in a play which Shakespeare’s own company had performed as recently as 1599, A Warning for Fair Women (Shakespeare 1982: 482; 2006: 60, 278).

In Hamlet it is not initially a play, but a ghost, risen from the dead, who reveals the murder to the Prince and provokes violent action. But the theatre itself was a place where the dead could walk again in order to provide guidance, admonition and provocation to the living. These were arguments used by contemporary writers who sought to defend the theatre against its Puritan opponents. Not only did the Puritans believe (correctly) that the theatre was a place where drunkenness and prostitution flourished, but they also condemned playhouses for providing spectacles of sin and immorality which would encourage spectators to emulate what they saw. One defender of the theatre, Thomas Nashe, claimed the opposite: that one of the virtues of the playhouse was its capacity to bring great men out of the grave in order to provide an inspiration to martial deeds for audiences in ‘these degenerate, effeminate days of ours’. In his Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil (1592) Nashe writes of the history plays then fashionable. These dramas displayed the English heroes of the Hundred Years’ War against France alive on stage once more. In particular, Nashe considers the representation of Sir John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, the distinguished warrior who appears in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI Part One:

How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who in the tragedian [actor] that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding!

(Nashe 1972: 113)

Talbot is only an ‘imagine[d]’ presence on the stage, but he is sufficiently present to enjoy his triumph and to have his wounds soothed (‘embalmed’) by the tears of the audience. The actor here becomes a kind of living ghost come back from the dead.

In considering the idea that the early modern theatre could have a direct influence on the actions, violent or otherwise, of those watching, it is worth pausing to look at how they saw the relationship between what happened on stage and what happened in the auditorium and beyond. In the early modern theatre the audience did not think of the on-stage world as a separate universe regarded at a distance by detached observers. Neither did the actors pretend that the audience were not present, as if their world ended at the front of the stage. When the Globe audience listened to Richard Burbage playing Hamlet that afternoon in 1601 they did not ‘suspend their disbelief’ and somehow believe that they were watching a real prince in distant Denmark. The evidence we have suggests that the audience were constantly aware that they were watching Richard Burbage performing Hamlet, but at the same time felt that the figure of Prince Hamlet was in some sense really present amongst them, and talking to them (Kiernan 1996; Weimann 2000; Hawkes 2002). Not only when characters spoke in soliloquy on the early modern stage were they directly addressing the audience. Recent scholarship has persuasively argued that all performers on the early modern stage regarded the audience as people whose approval their character required – both as actors, and as characters in the play. As Bridget Escolme puts it, ‘Shakespeare’s stage figures have another set of desires and interests, inseparable from those of the actor. They want the audience to listen to them, notice them, approve their performance, ignore others on stage for their sake’ (Escolme 2005: 16). Actors on stage are liminal figures like ghosts, half-in and half-out of the audience’s reality.

If this sounds a little paradoxical and mystical to the modern ear – that there is no real divide between the on-stage and off-stage world, and that the actor is both fully themselves and fully in role at the same time – we should not forget that for many in England, very possibly including Shakespeare, the world-view of Catholic humanist thinking was still very influential. In this way of understanding reality rationalism fought with a more ancient way of thinking which saw nothing to be simply itself. One thing could exist in the material substance of another in the guise of something else, or even be a sign of something else altogether at the same time. After all, the many Catholics in England believed (and still believe) that the communion bread and wine were both food and drink and the body and blood of Christ and a sign of the divine sacrifice that brought salvation.

The power of theatrical ritual to ‘deny rigid boundaries’, including the divide between the visible and the mystical (or merely represented) worlds, can be seen in the well-known anecdote about Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr Faustus (1592). Faustus has learned how to summon devils in order to barter away his soul. During one performance, according to William Prynne, ‘in Queen Elizabeth’s days (to the great amazement both of the actors and spectators)’ the show was interrupted by ‘the visible appearance of the Devil on the stage’ (Hopkins 2008: 51). From that time onwards Edward Alleyn, when he played the role, always wore a cross on stage in case he were successful in conjuring a real devil who would come to claim his soul.

More scientific and rationalist ways of seeing the world were certainly present and would eventually triumph, yet the old ways of thinking were still clearly extant. The theatre was a place where the old needs were met, where the devil and the departed could really be present in some sense. Stephen Greenblatt has argued that since the suppression of Catholic ritual by the Protestant state in the 1530s the theatre itself became a place where popular longings and needs to connect with the dead, for whatever reason, found some emotional fulfilment.

For the state church now denied that the living were able to aid the dead by their prayers, and claimed that ghosts out of purgatory were no more than a papist superstition. The presence of the ghost in Hamlet, Greenblatt writes, ‘immeasurably intensifies a sense of the weirdness of the theatre, its proximity to certain experiences that had been organized and exploited by religious institutions and rituals’ (Greenblatt 2001: 253). The theatre summons up the dead. But why would a ghost wish to return?

In the first scene of that tragedy Horatio addresses the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and offers a reason why it was believed a ghost might come back to this world:

If thou art privy to thy country’s fate –

Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid – O, speak!

(1.1.124–5)

The dead have a special knowledge which, if it can be accessed, can save the nation from political disaster. Their appearance in the world of the living can also be ominous, marking the imminence of a crisis. In the 1604 Second Quarto version of the play, this is the interpretation which Horatio himself puts on the ghost’s appearance, recalling how just before Julius Caesar’s assassination ‘the squeaking dead did gibber in the Roman streets’ (Shakespeare 2007: 2000).

So when, on the afternoon of Friday 6 February 1601, certain lords who were known to be close associates of the Earl of Essex went to Shakespeare’s Company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, at the Globe Playhouse and asked for a special performance of the play ‘of King Harry the IV, and the killing of King Richard the Second’, they were deliberately summoning certain ghosts from two hundred years previously, who might be seen as ‘privy to’ their ‘country’s fate’, so that England, ‘happily, foreknowing may avoid’ it. Essex’s political opponent, the royal minister Fr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Raising the dead: The Essex Rebellion of 1601 and Shakespeare’s King Richard II
• 2 Passion and revolt: Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv’d and the 1795 Westminster riot
• 3 ‘The Drama’s laws the Drama’s Patrons give’: The Covent Garden Old Price riots of 1809
• 4 ‘The most important occasion of the century’: Victor Hugo and the 1830 Battle of Hernani
• 5 Theatre’s bloodiest night: The New York riots of 1849
• 6 Stand-off at Primrose Hill: The Shakespeare tercentenary of 1864
• 7 Representing a nation: The 1907 Playboy of the Western World riot at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin
• 8 ‘You have disgraced yourselves again’: The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 1926
• 9 The French Republic under siege: Coriolanus in Paris, February 1934
• 10 Dishonour and sacred space: Behzti in Birmingham, 2004
• Chronology
• Index