Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre

P.A. Skantze

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134447268
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century Theatre provides a comprehensive examination of this aesthetic theory. The author investigates this aesthetic history as a form of artistic creation, philosophical investigation, a way of representing and manipulating ideas about gender and a way of acknowledging, reinforcing and making a critique of social values for the still and moving, the permanent and elapsing.
The book's analysis covers the entire seventeenth-century with chapters on the work of Ben Jonson, John Milton, the pamphletheatre, Aphra Behn, John Vanbrugh and Jeremy Collier and will be of interest to scholars in the areas of literary and performance studies.

1 Permanently moving

Ben Jonson and the design of a lasting performance

THE ARGUMENT

Ben Jonson articulates his pursuit of literary renown made in and through print. In his careful attention to the publication of his writing, Jonson demonstrates the tensions at work near the beginning of the seventeenth century between renown in print and renown in playing. Jonson looks both backwards and forwards, using his poetry and his plays to revere (and amend) the ancients as well as to collect and scrutinize new ideas in circulation among his contemporaries. As a collector, Jonson pursues his craft with an attention to distinguishing those things worthy of display on stage, while he uses delay to manipulate the power of the author as an expert showman. In Epicoene; or, the Silent Woman the allied practices of collecting/showing and devising/performing are represented through a controlled demonstration of motion and stillness communicated through the signs of gender. In this play, the “secret” for Jonson operates as a correction for an audience too wedded to theatrical illusion as well as a gift offered to a reading audience not participating in the temporal unfolding of the theatrical performance. In The Gypsies Metamorphosed, Jonson is again at work as collector, but this time within a form, the masque, whose very nature is to combine stillness and motion in performance. Yet, here in this masque, as to a lesser extent in Jonson's plays for public theatre, the text for performance bears traces of Jonson's wistful desire to lay claim to both the power of the performed piece and the longevity of the printed poetry and to have that claim last, embedded somehow in the very language left in print.

Collecting, timing, and display

The culture of collecting exhibits instances of the interchange between the permanent and the performed: a group of objects collected, enumerated and shelved, remain unknown unless shown, demonstrated, or paraded before an admiring public. While power and recognition depend upon display, the efficacy of display depends upon timing. The collector must educate the spectator about an object's rarity, often by a progression of less exquisite, less perfect samples until the “palate” is trained to appreciate the subtleties of the verifiably unique. Like the Renaissance collectors Paula Findlen describes in Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, Ben Jonson participated in the cultural appetite for erudition and exhibition: “through the possession of objects” [in Jonson's case ideas and words displayed as if part of a collection of objects] collectors “physically acquired knowledge, and through their display … symbolically acquired the honor and reputation that all men of learning cultivated” (1994: 3).

According to Marjorie Swann, author of Curiosities and Texts: the Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England, writing itself reflected the practice of collecting in the seventeenth century, having a “collector-function during the early modern era” (2001: 152). Swann suggests Jonson “could innovatively construct author-functions which were conceived as activities of collecting and cataloguing” (152). If in his “1616 folio Workes, Jonson becomes the collector of his own texts, removing them from their earlier contexts of use-value and recontextualizing them within a printed book,” he continues his work of cataloguing on the stage as well (149).

Small differences in modes of display on the part of various collectors serve to stage a collection for an audience, from whom the collectors seek to elicit responses of awe and wonder.¹ For example, to place a large amphibious animal under glass at the level of a beholder's waist offers a different relation, evokes a different first response, than would the same animal if suspended from the ceiling. As in the theatre, so in these halls of wonder: sixteenth-century libraries and cabinets of curiosities generally provided a communal space for the practice of “show and admire.” For example, reports from John Dee's library depict men in conversation, responding, asking questions, and comparing as part of the process of being spectators to a display of richness and rarity.²

In the venues in which Ben Jonson collected and displayed—the theatre and the Court—he was accustomed to seeing his work played, often to active spectators. He could watch audiences respond, and he might know the satisfaction, however infrequent, of hearing laughter or sighs of wonder.³ The practitioner of theatre whose instincts are to collect and display presents evidence for the sensuous perception of his or her spectator in markedly different ways than one whose intentions are simply to communicate. While the temporal demands of live performance force playwrights to acknowledge the prerogative of motion in time's relentless passing, a playwright, director or actor can use techniques to delay or to awaken an audience's attention to time and its passing. For actors who cannot resist their own power of rhetoric, such a technique might involve slowing down the delivery so that all eyes and all ears are fixed on the speaker, often to the great frustration of the other actors and to the detriment of the play's momentum. But the playwright also has methods of adjusting speech, creating confusions in grammar and playing with accents or speeches in broken sentences that add to the sense of stopping and pausing before surrendering again to the push of time. Many playwrights in the seventeenth century indicate pauses or tableaus in their stage directions as well as actions to be taken by actors to still the movement and then set it going again.

Manipulating moments of stillness and motion on the stage, Jonson's drama of collecting took many forms: he loved neologisms, archaic words, and idiosyncratic contractions. He anatomized the follies of the society around him as well as the language the society used to enact such follies. Timothy Murray charts Jonson's course toward authorhood through his catalogues and compilations in Jonson's The English Grammar and Timber; or Discoveries. Where other authors might organize usage and then clarify, Jonson concentrates on the history of usage, Murray argues, understanding “stable semiotic meaning to derive from syntactic and orthographic order and stability — achieved by consent of the learned” (1987: 46). Murray connects Jonson's attention to history and order to the production of theatre and compares the goals of “Renaissance theatre” with Jonson's own: “Renaissance public theatre valued the transient, spectacular moment over the history of dramatic texts, authors and their ideas … Jonson's thought process … is predicated on the conservation of literary history; the recovering and ordering of lost masterpieces and their author's intentions” (47). By collecting all of Renaissance public theatre under the sign of a love of the transient, Murray neglects the play of the still and the moving within the plays of the Renaissance period. In fact, the spectacular, often placed in motion alongside invocations of the value of the permanent, was a form of dramatic language itself, as this book seeks to show. Further I would amend Murray's statement to suggest that Jonson's purpose was not simply to “conserve” literary history, in which case print and library would be enough, but to ‘animate’ literary history, to stage spectacles that reinforced the teachings of the lost masterpieces.

The influence of the profound effect of the technological changes in the nature of the seventeenth-century printed word has claims on our attention here, not least because it represents a crucial collaboration of stillness and motion. In recent studies of print culture, Jonson has become an exemplar of the early modern writer who fashions himself as an author. However, the give and take between old and new forms of production and reception made his task less one of jettisoning the non-printed in favor of the printed than of importing the power of the aurally received into the evolving mode of reception, the silently read (see Brady and Herendeen 1991; Chartier 1994). Because books could be bought, held, and shelved, they became participants in the intertwined worlds of the circulating and the conserved.

Richmond Barbour, correcting a common critical lapse in treating an author's career as if it all took place simultaneously, suggests we look more closely at Jonson's earliest efforts to have his works printed. Barbour finds the young Jonson's desire for printed fame includes the establishing of an intimate relation between author and reader. The ideal state of this relationship would be similar to an equally idealistic one between those men of learning congregating in libraries and museums, whose engaged passions create an atmosphere of exchange, dispute, and admiration. “Though the quartos of Every Man Out and Poetaster display firm literary aspirations, Jonson conceives their publication to serve personal relationships — speech and human presence — which must compensate for the defects of his text” (1992: 323).⁴ The “defects” of the text include not only the incomprehensible — which requires the author's explaining presence — but also the inapprehensible, the lack of an immediate exchange between the body reading and the body writing.

Because writers and readers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not conceive of the site of reading as private (i.e., one person with one book in hand) it should not surprise us that the language used to address readers suggests a corporeal relationship between author and reader.⁵ Barbour aligns an instance cited in Natalie Zemon Davis' work on early modern print alongside Jonson's offer to the reader in The Poetaster: “Davis notes one Bernard Palissy, a potter who tells his readers, ‘If you don't believe what my books say, get my address from the printer and I will give you a demonstration in my own study’ … [and from the quarto of Poetaster] ‘hee praies thee to think charitably of what thou hast read, till thou maist heare him speake what he hath written’” (322–3). Barbour goes on to speculate whether Jonson expects his readers to hear him at the theatre or to meet him expostulating at his favorite tavern.

Notice the temporal nature of Jonson's request; the explaining author begs his reader's generosity “till” the reader may hear the author. The temporal world of reception and of acknowledgment in print might offer the author control in that he makes the words on the page without interference from players, but the reader controls the time of reception. And the work requires charity, readerly largesse, until the voice of the author makes all clear. Whether Jonson promises a delayed explication or a certain tone and inflection of meaning as he “speake[s] what he hath written,” Barbour by way of Davis and Jonson reminds us this is a corporeal and adjacent world of book to hand, of body holding the book to body writing it.

Jonson often compared the disquieting vicissitudes of the experience of theatrical performance to the comfort he gained by imagining the reader receiving his work in print.⁶ On the title page of the late play The New Inn (1631) Jonson declares, “I do trust myself and my book” to the reader rather than bear “the disdain of a scornful spectator” (1692: 721).⁷ Perhaps it is always easier in the imagination to hope for the generosity of the auditor/reader; Jonson's “scornful” spectator probably came from memory not imagination, the memory of hearing the spectator's scorn first hand at the playhouse. Scornful readers, however, are mercifully absent from the writer's view.

Answering hoped for readerly generosity with writerly generosity, Jonson offers with his printed text his own self. In one of the many metaphors for the relation of author to book, Jonson here acknowledges a dependence upon the reader that he would often portray as distasteful when that dependence was one of a playwright on the reception of a theatre audience. Alternating between demanding understanding as an equal and demanding protection as if a widow and an orphan (“myself and my book”), Jonson puts his trust into the hands of his reader. But Jonson also claims status through the object of the book that is himself. “Stepson to a master bricklayer, dropout from Westminster school,” Jonson must represent himself to his audience without pedigree or a nod to relatives in the inner circle (Barbour 1998: 505). In “Jonson and the Motives of Print,” Barbour argues that the object of “Jonson's ownership, whatever the property's value, is himself; and his book makes such possession credibly visible and therefore possible” (503). While Barbour and I differ on whether this act could be construed as a generous one as well as a self-interested one, we both see Jonson anticipating Locke in Jonson's insistence on his work as his property, his work circulating in some sense as a piece of himself.

In contrasting his reader to a spectator at his play, Jonson implies a further distinction between comprehension and apprehension. Collecting in the seventeenth century, as with print and performance, dwells at the juncture of comprehension and apprehension. Though the instinct to collect may partly be the desire to be comprehensive, to know all by possessing all, the reception the collector seeks for the collection is one of apprehension, hoping to induce in the spectator an experience of wonder and awe rather than a static, satisfied certainty.⁸ To have Jonson's book and discover the essence of Jonson contained there, a reader would by logical extension comprehend his meaning. Jonson's wincing response to his spectator(s), “bearing” disdain, suggests he seeks to claim an intimacy of participation in giving and receiving, likening it to the apprehension of watching.⁹ In fact, for Jonson the “gift” of himself and his book (however mitigated by his bad temper) participates in a cycle of what he hopes to be an exchange, though the circle of communal reception is less immediate than in the public theatre. Of course this dynamic of printed give and take between author and reader takes place in a commercial world, and some critics suggest Jonson reluctantly continued writing for the public stage only for financial reasons.¹⁰ That Jonson made money from printing does not, however, erase his extra-financial desires for fellowship and understanding.

While Jonson's preoccupation with the printed self follows Foucault's definition of “the author function” (1977: 125), it bears remembering that such a term was impossible, as Roger Chartier argues, without the organizing principle of print and publishing through which scattered diverse writings transform into “unification and coherence” (1992). Further, Jonson and other poets of the century were transforming the medium of oratory and persuasive address into a printed form quickly and widely dispersed among readers and listeners. At the crux of a crucial technological transition between screen and page ourselves, late twentieth-century scholars must think backwards to when print was the untested, unrefined form.

As I suggested in the Introduction, one must begin with the premise that the stage offered something print did not. And that that “something” marked an absence that spurred writers to try and use the power of one medium to enhance the other. Many writers including Jonson and John Milton, I argue, agonized not simply over fame and presentation, but over the perceived limitations — a lack of animation — in the book, over how to incorporate the immediacy of spoken address into the relation of poet to reader. The enhanced power Jonson implies possible in the relation of author to reader, the intimacy of “his book/his body” entrusted to the reader, was not a flat, unmoving intimacy. Where the performed version of a work disperses among the bodies who manage the stage, change the scenes, play the music, inhabit the characters, the printed work might concentrate performed elements brought to life in the reader's imagination without mishap or “bad acting.”

As the title of this book suggests, fixing words in print or objects in a collector's cabinet does not, paradoxically, signal an end to the fixer's task. Neither obscurity nor inertness will win for the fixed works the fame such meticulous crafting seeks. Since Jonson is both maker and collector he sits in the eye of this paradox. Jonson in his oft-cited remarks about his masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue describes the power of producing sensation in spectators: a “power to surprize with delight, and steale away the spectators for themselves … Onely the envie was, that it lasted not still, or (now it is past) cannot by imagination, much lesse description, be recovered to a part of that spirit it had in the gliding by” (Demaray 1968: 30). Jonson's formulation of the “gliding by” is normally used to acknowledge his grudging recognition of the power of performance and even more often used to suggest the grandeur of the masque. Yet I see in it an unguarded moment of wistfulness for Jonson, a wanting to make that part manifest in the “gliding by” companion to the fixed words that fueled the power even as it elapsed in performance.

In fact, Jonson describes the bittersweet conjunction of the still in the moving in his description. Though the work cannot “last” unless “still,” made permanent by some form of memorialization, it cannot last still because what it was, was made in motion and the elapsing nature of performance results in a stillness at the end. No word is perhaps more wistful than “still” in its two meanings, “still” as in continuing an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre
• Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Prologue: Making sense
• 1 Permanently moving: Ben Jonson and the design of a lasting performance
• 2 Predominantly still: John Milton and the sacred persuasions of performance
• 3 Theatrically pressed: Pamphletheatre and the performance of a nation
• 4 Decidedly moving: Aphra Behn and the staging of paradoxical pleasures
• 5 Perpetually stilled: Jeremy Collier and John Vanbrugh on bonds, women, and soliloquies
• Epilogue: Making space
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index