Theatre Cultures within Globalising Empires

Looking at Early Modern England and Spain

Joachim Küpper, Leonie Pawlita

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110612035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

This volume presents the proceedings of the international conference "Theatre Cultures within Globalising Empires: Looking at Early Modern England and Spain", held in 2012 as part of the ERC Advanced Grant Project Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net (DramaNet). Implementing the concept of culture as a virtual network, it investigates Early modern European drama and its global dissemination. The 12 articles of the volume – all written by experts in the field teaching in the United Kingdom, the USA, Russia, Switzerland, India and Germany – focus on a selection of English and Spanish dramas from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Analysing and comparing motifs, formal parameters as well as plot structures, they discuss the commonalities and differences of Early modern drama in England and Spain.

Part I: Transnational Aspects of European Drama

M. A. Katritzky

Stefanelo Botarga and Pickelhering: Fishy Italian and English Stage Clowns in Spain and Germany

Note: My thanks to the organisers and participants of events at which earlier versions of this work were presented and discussed: Martin Procházka: Renaissance Shakespeare/ Shakespeare Renaissances, International Shakespeare Association 9th World Congress, Prague, July 2011 (ISA Seminar 17: Shakespearean Players in Early Modern Europe, co-chaired with Pavel Drábek); Volker Bauer and my Herzog August Bibliothek and Theater Without Borders friends and colleagues: Borders and Centres: Transnational Encounters in Early Modern Theatre, Performance and Spectacle, Theater Without Borders Annual Workshop 2012 at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, May 2012; Friedemann Kreuder: Cartographies of the European Past: Nation, Region, Trans-Nation (The Presence of the Past: European Cultures of Memory, International Summer Schools 2010–2012, IPP Performance and Media Studies, keynote: “Transnational Discourses on Travelling Stages: Fishy Funny Business with Mediterranean Botarga and North Sea Pickle Herring”), Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, July 2012; Hiram Kümper and Vito Gironda: Gleichheit/ Ungleichheit (220023-2. Teil-GK-SoSe 2012: “Equality/ Inequality: On and Around Early Modern European Travelling Stages”), Universität Bielefeld, July 2012; Joachim Küpper, Gautam Chakrabarti, Leonie Pawlita and Madeline Rüegg: Theatre Cultures within Globalising Empires: Looking at Early Modern England and Spain, DramaNet, Freie Universität Berlin, November 2012: this text version submitted 25 March 2013). For supporting this research, my thanks also to The Open University Arts Faculty Research Committee and the Herzog August Bibliothek and its staff and Fellows, most especially Ulrike Gleixner, Jill Bepler, Volker Bauer, Ulrich and Birgit Kopp, Asaph Ben-Tov, Bob and Pauline Kolb, Cornelia Niekus Moore and Charlotte Colding Smith (Herzog August Bibliothek Visiting Fellowship, Summers 2011, 2012).

Juliet’s wishful pronouncement on the name of the rose applies even less to comic stage names than to flowers.18 Cultural expectations shape every aspect of our perceptions, and the funny business of early modern travelling actors is enhanced by well-chosen stage names; even more so if they have strong regional associations. With reference to new textual and iconographic evidence, this article focuses on the origins, transnational diffusion and significance of two stage names based on fish specialities with specific regional associations: as names, as Italian and English stage roles and as popular stock festival costumes, both within their Spanish- and German-speaking host regions, and beyond.

Widespread opportunities for long-term co-ordinated professional acting were developed only during the sixteenth century, by actors who introduced many of the significant features of organised professional drama as we know it today, including year-round availability of performances, the participation of female as well as male actors, and above all the trans-regional mobility of performing groups. Theatre was an important part of medieval life in every European region. But the profession of wandering minstrel was economically challenging. Such entertainers faced widespread civic and church disapproval, expressed in harsh, unpredictable legal restrictions. Not least, these restrictions reflected strict calendar regulations prohibiting the year-round performance required by professionals wishing to earn their living on the stage. Court-, community- and above all Church-controlled feasts and fasts, of diverse length and type, punctuated and defined the early modern festive year. They restricted the activities of performers to specific dates and seasons, centred around the major Church feasts. Although the exact dates and regulations varied from one region to another, these excluded Lent and the other fasting days on which it was compulsory to eat fish rather than meat. During the medieval period, organised theatre largely consisted of amateur performances. Their actors were men and boys who belonged to schools and universities, city guilds, church congregations or courts. They returned to their studies or occupations when the performance was over. Increasingly, some of these amateur actors thought about ways of making performing a more economically secure long-term career prospect. By the mid-sixteenth century, musicians and entertainers were signing contracts to band together in formal groups with ambitious cultural and economic aims.

Although no European region was without its own characteristic amateur performance culture, not every region was equally successful in exporting professional players. By the late seventeenth century, actors of many nations routinely toured Europe. During the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, the situation was very different. Viable transnational brands of professional theatre were then mainly exported from two European language areas, to audiences in two broadly overlapping geographic host regions. Firstly, from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the commedia dell’arte developed by male and female actors speaking the conglomerate of regional dialects that form the basis for the modern Italian language was performed in the Mediterranean regions. Secondly, from the 1580s onwards, itinerant professional all-male acting troupes from the English-speaking islands started touring European countries in the North Sea regions. Despite the disruptions of the Thirty Years’ War, they exported their “English comedy” to mainland Europe for over a century.

Long expensive journeys required considerable financial incentives, and players who travelled had to be flexible enough to accommodate local regulations, confessional practice and linguistic barriers. For all these reasons, the Italian actors generally travelled to France and Spain, performing a repertoire addressing Catholic audiences, while the English actors favoured the German-speaking regions, mostly offering Protestant repertoires. Both Italian and English troupes developed innovative promotional strategies for challenging the traditional restrictions of the Christian festive year, and for encouraging prominent court and civic patrons to finance their travel expenses. Patronage was key. Wealthy French, Italian and Habsburg rulers recommended Italian players from one court to another with Habsburg family connections. Close relations between Queen Anne (wife of King James of England and sister of King Christian of Denmark) and the rulers of many northern European courts provided a ready-made patronage network for travelling English players. Troupes also modified their travel plans to accommodate lucrative non-performing economic activity. Many smaller commedia dell’arte troupes used free outdoor performances of the type that flourished in warm, dry southern climates to promote medical goods and services. English actors, especially those enjoying court patronage, often had diplomatic duties, or dealt in arms, musical instruments, luxury goods or cloth, either between courts or at the large trade fairs.

Germany’s reputation as an attractive, lucrative hub for international itinerant performers, established in the late sixteenth century, was increasingly damaged by the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated central Europe from 1618 to 1648.19 The Mediterranean and North Sea regions were linked by the Habsburg lands. Strenuous political attempts to bring England into the Habsburg fold repeatedly foundered. In 1558 following the childless death, after four years of marriage, of King Philip II of Spain’s Catholic second wife, Queen Mary I of England (daughter of Henry VIII and Philip’s great-aunt Catherine of Aragon), his suit was rejected by Elizabeth I, Mary’s half-sister and Protestant successor. In 1623, continued Spanish insistence on Prince Charles’ conversion to Catholicism finally led King James I to abandon his decade-long negotiations to marry his heir to Philip II’s granddaughter, the infanta María Ana. During the early modern period, Spain and Germany imported rather than exported professional drama. Through its wealthy courts, Europe-wide cultural contacts and international business centres, the Habsburg Empire established itself as the great early modern contact zone for professional Italian and English travelling troupes. The Inquisition’s persecution of actresses made Spain an increasingly unattractive destination for mixed gender Italian troupes after 1586, and women were definitively banned from Spanish stages in 1596.20

Stefanelo Botarga and Pickelhering, the two fish-inspired comic stage names of early modern itinerant actors under consideration here, both have very specific regional associations. One derives from the Mediterranean delicacy botargo, the other from the North Sea speciality Bückelhering or pickle herring. Stefanelo Botarga is a stock role created around 1570 by an Italian actor in Spain. Pickelhering, the most popular stage clown of the early seventeenth-century English actors in the German-speaking regions, was created somewhat later.21 The Oxford English Dictionary documents two definitions of the term “pickle herring.”22 Since the fifteenth century, it has denoted a specific type of preserved herring, a popular fish speciality in North Sea regions of The Netherlands, England, Germany and Scandinavia. A second meaning, of “a clown, a buffoon,” recorded in Germany from c. 1610, officially entered common English usage only in the eighteenth century. Rare but notable much earlier occurrences linked to this second usage occur in the works of several prominent English dramatists and writers, such as Gabriel Harvey (1593),23 Thomas Dekker (1607)24 or William Shakespeare, whose eponymously windy and flatulent old drunkard Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, written around 1601, robustly curses “these pickle herring.”25

As well as the meanings of “fish” and “clown,” a third definition was explored by John Alexander, in an article of 2003 linking the expression to a particular type of heavy social drinking in early modern Holland.26 My researches interrogate ways in which disputed pre-eighteenth-century English usages of the expression “pickle herring” relate to its adoption as a stage name. Using this third definition as a key to their interpretation, I draw on previously unconsidered archival documents to support “pickle herring” as a term associated with heavy drinkers. But I identify this usage’s origins not in seventeenth-century Holland but in a quite specific sixteenth-century English location, Southwark in the 1580s.

The earliest undisputed English use of Pickelhering as a generic comic stage name is in 1656, by Richard Flecknoe, who may have seen professional English actors during his 1650 visit to the Brussels court of Beatrix of Lorraine.27 In the German-speaking regions it occurs already in two instrumental medleys transcribed in a Linz organ manuscript of c. 1611. The initial bars of one, “Tantz Pückelhäring,” are based on music for “Nobodyes Gigge” composed by Richard Farnaby, an English lutenist employed at the North German court of Wolgast in the 1620s.28 The Wolfenbüttel court’s close family connections with English royalty made it a favoured destination for English players, who were based there for many years from the 1590s. Wolfenbüttel archival court records of around 20 May 1615 confirm Pickelhering as the stage name of the English actor George Vincent.29 Pickelhering is named and depicted as a clown role in a collection of play-texts based on performances by the English players in Germany, published in Germany in 1620,30 and in two German broadsheets of 1621,31 and Netherlandish Pekelharing performers are also recorded from 1621.32

Updated renaming perhaps accounts for the Pickle Herring role of the Revesby sword play, cited by some s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• The Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net: Some Basic Hypotheses
• Part I: Transnational Aspects of European Drama
• Part II: Intercultural Connections between English and Spanish Drama
• Part III: Images of Spain on the English Stage
• Part IV: Between Europe and the Colonies
• Notes on Contributors