A Thousand Years of British Theatre History (Part 3a)
The Seventeenth Century
Dateline: 01/16/00
In spite of what the millennium hype of the last twelve months would have us believe, history doesn't arrange itself neatly into nice divisions which coincide with the somewhat arbitrary dating of our calendar, useful though it would be if everything was so tidy!
The end of the sixteenth century did not draw a line underneath the theatrical developments outlined in our last feature. On the contrary, what had begun essentially (if we have to have a significant date) in 1574, continued well into the next century. Many of Shakespeare's greatest plays were first performed between 1600 and 1611, including Hamlet (1602), Measure for Measure and Othello (1604), King Lear (?1605), Macbeth (?1606) and, of course, The Tempest (?1611).
It was in the last year of the century that Shakespeare's company moved to the newly-built Globe. It had a massive stage - 43 feet wide and 23 feet deep - and was intended purely as a theatre. It was burned down in 1613 but was immediately rebuilt.
Shakespeare was a member of one of the two leading companies, the Chamberlain's Men, and in fact had bought a share in the company when it was formed in 1594. He was not, however, their only playwright, for they also performed plays by Ben Jonson, Marston, Dekker, Webster, Middleton, Tourneur, and Beaumont and Fletcher. He was clearly very commercially-aware, for he produced plays to meet the taste of the time. For instance, his response to the revenge tragedy exemplified by Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy was to out-revenge them all with Hamlet, and after Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday proved so successful, Shakespeare replied with The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which he gave a further outing to one of his characters who had proved so popular with audiences, Sir John Falstaff.
James I
When James I came to the throne in 1603 after the death of Elizabeth, he "took over" the Chamberlain's Men, renaming them the King's Men, and his heir, Prince Henry, took over the patronage of the other leading company, the Admiral's Men. It was fortunate for Shakespeare's company that he did so, for there was, initially, no work for them. The theatres had closed in March as a sign of respect on the death of the Queen, and then the plague struck: 30,000 people died of the plague in London between May 1603 and April 1604. As a result, the theaters were closed for that whole period.
In 1608 the next significant step in the development of theatre took place: the King's Men, although continuing to work at the Globe, took possession of the Blackfriar's indoor theatre, the first of the leading companies to play regularly in an indoor venue after the demise of the Boys' Companies.
Perhaps the most significant effect that James I had on the development of theatre arose from something which was, essentially, non-dramatic. He and his wife, Anne of Denmark, were particularly fond of masques, the more elaborate the better. To further this enjoyment, in 1604 Prince Henry appointed Inigo Jones to his household and he was the first in England (he had first-hand experience of Italian theatre) to use a proscenium arch and perspective scenery in The Masque of Blackness in 1605. He also experimented with the use of scenery that could be changed, by using decorated shutters which ran in grooves across the stage.
In fact, scenery began to dominate in subsequent masques and the text began to take second place, particularly since the court was willing to spend lavish amounts of money on these entertainments. Inevitably this eventually had an effect on theatre, leading to the complexities of modern scenery.
Playwrights
A new generation of playwrights was springing up and working alongside older men such as Ben Jonson. Foremost among these new writers - or, at least, best known to us now - were Massinger and Ford. One of the lesser lights of the period was one Richard Brome whose 1635 contract with Queen Henrietta's Men has survived. In it we learn that he was to:
- write three plays a year;
- not publish any of them;
- write or rewrite parts of old plays: prologues, epilogues, songs and scenes;
- not write for any other company.
For this he was to be paid fifteen shillings a week.
Playwrights were seen as journeymen - like carpenters! - rather than artists, and it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that their names began to appear on playbills. Since the beginning of "modern" theatre in the mid-sixteenth century very few - probably only one, in fact - complete copies of a script existed. The actors were given their parts and that was it. The idea, of course, was to stop rivals pirating plays paid for by a company. It was all the more surprising, then, that Jonson published his plays in a folio edition in 1616, and - even more so - that the King's Men published a folio edition of Shakespeare's plays in 1623.
Go to Part II of British Theatre in the Seventeenth Century
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