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A Thousand Years of British Theatre History (Part 3b)The Seventeenth CenturyThe Growth of Puritanism As time passed and Charles I succeeded James in 1625, the divisions between the two types of theatre - the very elitist, masque-based theatre of the court and the more robust public theatre - grew. The city fathers, as we noted earlier in this series, were always suspicious of the theatre, which is why Burbage and his successors built their theatres without the city, and, growing increasingly suspicious of the court, they tended to ally themselves with the growing band of puritans. This is not to say that they did not make use of theatre, however, for many of the pageants which they paid for to celebrate the inauguration of the Lord Mayors of London took their inspiration from the theatre as it was seen at court. In the reign of Charles, playwrights began writing more for the private than the public theatres, but when the Civil War broke out, all theatres in London, public and private, were closed. It is popularly believed that the Puritans kept the theatres closed because of an ideological objection to theatre, but this is not strictly true. They did, even under Cromwell, allow plays to be performed in schools and even private houses: it was theatres which they would not permit to be opened. This tends to suggest that it was large public gatherings - after all, many of the public theatres could hold upwards of 2000 people - that they objected to, rather than plays themselves. This idea that their objection might be more political than moral or religious is, I believe, supported by the fact that most actors and theatre people supported the Royalist cause rather than the Parliament. So the theatre was not totally dead during the Civil War and the Parliament. In fact, there was even some innovation. In 1656 the playwright Sir William Davenant presented the first English opera, The Siege of Rhodes, at Rutland House. Important though that was in terms of the development of music theatre, it was even more significant because it was the first time that Inigo Jones' scenery innovations for court masques were used in the theatre. Complex and "mechanised" scenery, indeed, was to assume a great importance in theatre for the rest of the century. The Restoration Two important things happened after the restoration of the monarchy: not, as one might imagine, the enthusiastic rebirth of theatre, when actors, playwrights and producers rushed to take over the old theatres which had been empty for so long, but the restrictions that Charles II put into place, which would have an effect for almost 200 years, and another, which we will come to in a moment. Advised that unrestricted theatre could be dangerous, and worried about the stabilty of the monarchy, Charles decided that only two people should have the right to produce plays within the City of Westminster. To achieve this, he issued Letters Patent to Davenant (whom Charles I had knighted for services to the Royalist cause) and Thomas Killigrew, as rewards for their loyalty. These Letters Patent were to bedevil British theatre until 1843. The King's Men, under Killigrew, went to a newly-built theatre in Drury Lane, and the Duke's Men with Davenant to a converted tennis court (real, or royal tennis, not the modern game) in Lincoln's Inn Fields. This latter had a new staging innovation: it was the first theatre in England to have a proscenium arch. The second development was the increasing involvement of women in professional theatre: actresses such as Elizabeth Barry, Anne Bracegirdle and - of course! - Nell Gwyn, and playwrights like Aphra Behn. Restoration Comedy The content of plays changed too, reflecting the mood of the times. Through all the work which had preceded them - the tragedies of Shakespeare, the bitter satire of Jonson, the grand guignol of Webster - there was a strong moral underpinning, which totally vanished in the new work, where the only sin was being found out. These "comedies of manners" reflected a society which prized wit, accepted (barely concealed) adultery, and feared banishment from society. True, these plays ended in marriage, but the picture painted of that state in the rest of the play hardly qualified it as a happy ending, or even a moral one. The reason for this was a total change in the audience for theatre. In Elizabethan times going to the theatre was a pastime shared by all of society, from the most noble to the poorest. Even in the Jacobean period this was generally true, but the closure of the theatres during the Civil War, when performances were only mounted in the haunts of the rich and powerful - schools and private houses, meant that the lower classes got out of the habit of play-going and little effort was made to attract them back, especially since the middle classes were now intent on sharing their "betters'" habits. A reaction against this loose morality was inevitable, and it arrived in the person of Colley Cibber, a name synonymous with philistinism, whose 1696 play Love's Last Shift signalled the beginning of a new preference for sentimental comedy. His approach was given some support two years later with the publication of A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage by Jeremy Collier, which led to a war of words and pamphlets between him and Congreve, which ended by Congreve giving up writing for the stage. In fact, by the end of the century there was only George Farquhar left writing in the genre, and when he died in 1707, it died too. Restoration Tragedy We still talk of Restoration Comedy, but who has even heard the phrase "Restoration Tragedy"? This is hardly surprising, given the quality of the work being produced. "Heroic", over-classical, virtually none of these plays are read today, except perhaps Dryden's, and those only because of his status as a poet, not as a playwright. Based essentially on the works of the French neo-classical tragedians Corneille and Racine, the English playwrights unerringly imitated their faults and totally missed their great strengths. This was the time of rewriting Shakespeare to fit with the contemporary taste: Nahum Tate's King Lear, in which Lear and Gloucester live and Cordelia marries Edgar, pushed Shakespeare's off the stage for almost 150 years! So ended a century of turmoil in society and theatre. Links Move on to the next page, The Eighteenth Century
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