Mademoiselle Clairon

The 18th-century French actress Hippolite Clairon was famous for her portrayal of classic heroines, but she also inspired contemporary dramatists to write parts specifically for her.

According to the biographer Frederick Hawkins, "Many tragedies were written in the hope that she might appear in them, and nearly all of those in which she did appear received at least a temporary vitality from her disciplined art and intensity of passion."

Voltaire was a particular admirer of hers, and he penned the role of Idamé in L'Orphelin de la Chine expressly for Clairon. That play was based on a Yuan-era zaju play from China, but ended up being re-adapted by dramatists all over Europe, including Arthur Murphy.

The admiration between Voltaire and Clairon was mutual. Hawkins claims that in Clairon's eyes Voltaire "had always been a sort of demi-god. On his side, the aged philosopher was quite prepared to view her as a demi-goddess, especially after witnessing in his little theatre the superb combination of art and truth which her acting had presented."

Clairon began her career at the Comédie Italienne, debuting in a small role in a play by Marivaux. She became famous, however, at the Comédie-Française, playing many of the parts exalted by the neoclassical French stage, including Racine's Phèdre.

One reason for Clairon's success might have been her comparatively physical style of acting. The writer Denis Diderot claimed her "acting sometimes has a pathos beyond all the resources of the art of oratory." Clairon was able to declaim with the best of her rivals, including the notorious Marie Françoise Dumesnil. In addition to that, though, she moved with a naturalness rarely seen before on the French stage.

With Clairon's new style of acting came a new style of costume design as well. Traditionally, French actors wore a mixture of ancient and modern dress when appearing in plays on Greek and Roman subjects. Clairon strove for a new level of authenticity in historical costuming, and the rest of the French theatre followed.

She survived the French Revolution, but like many artists who were associated with the old regime, she fell on hard times after the change in government. Her economic need became a boon to historians, and she published her memoirs in 1799, quickly selling out the first edition.

The Orphan of China

When I was visiting the Tate Britain a couple years ago, I came across Tilly Kettle's portrait "Mrs. Yates as Mandane in The Orphan of China." The piece captures a nearly forgotten moment of transcultural drama in the 18th century.

Beginning in 1731, zaju drama from China began being translated into European languages, causing a burst of excitement in the West. The first translation of a Chinese drama to be published in Europe was a French version of Ji Junxiang's The Orphan of Zhao.

Though The Orphan of Zhao was written in the 13th century, like most zaju plays, it takes place in the distant past, telling the story of how the Zhao clan was almost wiped out, but one child was saved and hidden away from the family's enemies. After many sacrifices are made to preserve the child, the orphan returns to avenge the Zhao clan and restore their authority.

In 1741, William Hatchett published the first English adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao, but it was seen as an attack on the British Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, so it was never performed. The most famous version of the story was the one the French dramatist Voltaire penned in 1753. Known as L'Orphelin de la Chine, this version reset the play during the Mongol period. The adaptation quickly spread across Europe.

Voltaire's play adheres to unities of time, place, and action, something zaju drama rarely if ever did. In his version, the orphan is already grown, and everything takes place in the same imperial palace. All of this was done to comply with the rules of neoclassicism. The rules were supposed to make drama more realistic, though to us neoclassical plays often feel ridiculously improbable. In any case, it was Voltaire's version of the story that inspired the British dramatist Arthur Murphy to write his own adaptation in 1756.

"Enough of Greece and Rome," Britain's poet laureate William Whitehead wrote in the play's prologue, remarking:

     On eagle wings the poet of to-night

     Soars for fresh virtues to the source of light;

     To China's eastern realms: and boldly bears

     Confucius' morals to Britannia's ears.

Thus, the play's Chinese-ness was one of its main selling points. That's probably apparent, too, in the costume Mary Ann Yates is wearing as Mandane in Kettle's portrait. Is the costume authentically Chinese? Of course not. However, it attempts to evoke an idealized East that is "the source of light" and that upholds morals the decadent West had forgotten. That moralizing can sometimes make the play's dialogue feel stilted, as when Mandane's husband Zamti praises "sacred laws by hoary elders taught."

Zamti has raised the heir to the throne as his own son, while sending his biological son Hamet to Korea. This serves to distract Timurkan, the Emperor of the Tartars, from the real heir. David Garrick played Zamti in the original production of Murphy's play. Echoing the values of the Age of Reason, he declares in Act II: "Priestcraft and sacerdotal perfidy / To me are yet unknown: religion's garb / Here never serves to consecrate a crime..."

In the play's third act, Zamti reveals to his adopted son Etan that the boy is actually Zaphimri, heir to the throne of China. Being naturally good, however, the boy refuses to allow Zamti's biological son Hamet to die in his place. This is a big change from the original zaju drama, where tons of people are sacrificed in order to protect the young orphan. Though Murphy's play is staunchly monarchal, it looks for a justification beyond the mere Divine Right of Kings. As Zamti puts it:

                                   Tho' rufian pow'r

     May for a while suppress all sacred order,

     And trample on the rights of man, the soul

     Which gave our legislation life and vigour

     Shall still subsist, above the tyrant's reach.

All deaths are kept for the play's final fifth act, where they decorously take place offstage, out of the direct view of the audience. This might not be as exciting for us as the original, but it allowed London audiences in the 18th century to feel more comfortable with the play, since it conformed to conventions of the time. 

Perhaps it was necessary for audiences of the period to have some elements of the play rendered familiar so they could better enjoy the elements of the Chinese-inspired play that were unfamiliar and exotic to them.

Notes on Restoration Drama

With the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, dramatic production in Britain came to a virtual standstill. Drama was seen as royalist, and the members of parliament taking up arms against the king viewed it with deep suspicion. Not only that, but the parliamentary forces tended to belong the religious movement known as puritanism. Puritans wanted to "purify" the Church of England of any remnants of Catholicism, and their proposed moral reforms reached into all aspects of life. They hated the theatre not just for its association with royalty, but also for its alleged immorality.

An ordinance of parliament passed in 1642 suppressed all theatre in Britain not just due to the civil unrest, but to "avert the Wrath of God." Rather than attending plays, parliament suggested that people engage in "profitable and seasonable Considerations of Repentance, Reconciliation, and peace with God." A few plays were put on during this period, but the government tore down the Globe and other public playhouses. Companies of players were disbanded, and many acting traditions either went underground or simply disappeared. Shakespeare's old company, the King's Men, was no more, as soon the king would be, too.

In 1649, parliament charged King Charles I with treason and executed him outside the famed Banqueting House designed by Inigo Jones. A consummate actor, the king upheld his dignity on the way to the execution block. The crowd watched in silence as he was beheaded. Oliver Cromwell, a leader of the puritan faction in parliament, became known as Lord Protector of the Realm, but Britain had no king. With the king dead and the rulers of the country decidedly opposed to theatre, the drama, too, seemed to have died.

In defiance, though, a few brave groups staged private theatricals. The most famous of these was a play written by William Davenant called The Siege of Rhodes. The play utilized music and spectacle, and the producers even managed to get government permission to stage the piece as a musical performance rather than as a play. Elaborate sets and costumes proved this was a legal fiction, though. The Siege of Rhodes was clearly a play, and it was being performed right under the nose of authorities. Its success was a sign that things were about to change.

The Restoration

After Oliver Cromwell died, his son Richard became Lord Protector, but he lacked the confidence of the army. Within months, he was deposed, and Charles I's son living in exile in France made overtures of peace, offering to pardon those who had opposed the monarchy so long as they recognized him as king. Eventually, parliament invited the executed king's son to return. After years in France, he arrived back in London on his 30th birthday, May 29, 1660, and was proclaimed King Charles II. The monarchy had been restored, and soon the theatre would be as well.

Though Charles did not make good on his promises of pardon, and in fact executed those responsible for his father's death, he cultivated a much more agreeable public persona than the former king. While Charles I had seemed cold and aloof, Charles II paraded about with his pet dogs and his favorite mistresses, chatting light-heartedly with whomever he met. Some people were scandalized by the king's seemingly insatiable sexual appetite, but others were relieved that after years of civil war and puritanism, the world seemed to be getting back to normal. As part of that return to normalcy, Charles II decreed that the public theatres could be opened again. The golden age of English drama was gone, however, and when the theatres did reopen, they were quite different from what they had been before two decades of civil strife.

Within months of taking the throne, Charles II issued two royal patents granting a duopoly to a pair of companies with the exclusive right to perform plays in London. The two patent companies continued to dominate the British stage into the reign of Queen Victoria. The first patent was given to Thomas Killigrew, who had joined Charles II on the ship back from France. His troupe, known as the King's Company, set up shop in an indoor tennis court, a practice common to many French theatre companies of the time. The second patent went to Davenant, who had already made a name for himself with The Siege of Rhodes. Davenant found his own indoor tennis court in the neighborhood of Lincoln's Inn Fields. The open-air playhouses so popular with Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences were destined to become a thing of the past.

Indoor Jacobean theatres had utilized chandeliers to light the stage, but Restoration theatres also placed candles right on the edge of the stage as footlights to illuminate the action. The sophisticated stage machinery of France began to appear on the English stage, and lavish backdrops previously only been seen in masques became more common. To change the scenery, Restoration stages used a shutter-and-groove system in which two halves of the scenery slid through grooves in the floor of the stage and met in the middle. The two halves (or "shutters") could then be pulled apart again, revealing a new scene behind them. To help hide scenery not being used at the moment, the new theatres utilized a proscenium that created a frame around the stage. The proscenium had been used in Italy since the Renaissance, but British actors did not quite know what to make of this illusory staging technique. Instead of using the theatre architecture as a frame separating the audience from the action, the British put doors in the side of the proscenium and tended to act on the forestage near the audience, leaving the scenery far in the background.

The physical theatre was not the only thing to change during the Restoration. Charles II had gotten used to watching actresses in France, and though a few male actors continued to perform female roles, he let it be known that he preferred the real thing. Actresses such as Margaret Hughes and Mary Saunderson became stars, much to the amusement of the King. The actress who amused him the most, however, was Nell Gwyn. Gwyn got her start selling concessions at the theatre for Mary Megs, who was known as "Orange Moll" since oranges were one of the favorite snacks of Restoration audiences. She caught Killigrew's eye, and he gave her a chance to act on stage. Gwyn soon became one of the king's mistresses, baring two sons he acknowledged as his own.

In 1674, the King's Company moved to a new theatre on Drury Lane. Though that theatre was demolished in 1791 and its successor burned down in 1809, one theatre or another has occupied that spot since the seventeenth century, and today the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane still entertains theatre goers. The original Drury Lane theatre had an area in front of the stage known as the "pit" in which audience members who paid three shillings sat on benches to watch the show. Upper-class theatre goers could pay a couple shillings more to sit in lavish boxes, while those of lesser means could pay two shillings to sit in the elevated gallery. Above the gallery was an upper gallery available to poorer audience members for just a single shilling.

The audience for the Restoration stage was considerably smaller than that for the Globe and other outdoor theatres of Shakespeare's day. Also, the more expensive ticket prices meant the very poor were shut out entirely, and only the wealthy had the money and spare time to attend plays regularly. Consequentially, playwrights aimed at a more aristocratic audience, and aristocrats themselves began dabbling in writing plays for the stage. The styles, manners, and ethos of Charles and his court were reflected onstage at Drury Lane and at the rival playhouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The peculiar preferences of a select group had a profound impact not just on the theatre of the 1660s and 1670s, but on British plays for a long time to come.

Restoration Comedy

After the closure of the public theatres, acting companies needed short works that could be performed on small, clandestine stages without drawing the attention of authorities. They frequently turned to short sketches borrowed from popular plays of the past. These sketches, known as drolls, continued to be performed after the Restoration, and many were collected together in a book called The Wits, or Sport upon Sport, edited by Francis Kirkman. These influenced the early full-length comedies of the Restoration period, which emphasized witty dialogue and stock characters already familiar to the audience. As the stock characters developed, however, they began to reflect the tastes and prejudices of the court.

The typical Restoration comedy has as its hero a rake, a lascivious young man who--like the king at the time--was more interested in getting into the good graces of pretty women than in tending to his own business affairs. The rakish hero might be interested in one particular woman, or like the king he might be pursuing multiple women at the same time. In spite of his actions, he had a good heart. The audience could overlook his flaws because he was emotionally sympathetic. He respected those who deserved respect and disdained those who deserved disdain.

Chief among those who deserved his disdain was the fop. A fop was fashionable to a fault, caring so much about clothes, fads, and reputations as to become ridiculous. In Thomas Shadwell's 1668 play The Sullen Lovers, the protagonist is so beset with fops he longs to retire from the world and be free from those who foolishly pursue fashion and nothing else. Fortunately, he finds his soul-mate in a melancholy woman who hates such fools as much as he does. The archetypal fop is Sir Fopling Flutter, who appears in The Man of Mode, a 1676 comedy by George Etherege. So entertaining is Sir Fopling that he overshadows the rakish protagonist in the play.

If the hero's emotional sensibilities were to protect him from becoming a modish fop, his refinement was supposed to protect him from being a bumpkin, a character from the country with little idea about how the court and high society functioned. William Wycherley provided examples of rude country innocence in his comedy The Country Wife. One of the bawdiest plays to be performed during the Restoration, The Country Wife involves a naive young woman who is easily seduced in spite of the efforts of her appropriately named husband Mr. Pinchwife. One of Pinchwife's strategies to protect the innocence of his new bride is to dress her up as a man so no one will seduce her. The disguise, however, fools nobody, including the audience, which delighted in seeing actresses cross-dress in tightly fitted breeches and stockings, displaying their shapely legs.

The appearance of women on the Restoration stage was accompanied by women writing for the stage as well. While a number of women became playwrights during the reign of Charles II, the most famous was Aphra Behn. By producing plays, poems, novellas, and other writings, Behn was able to support herself financially with her writing, and is likely the first Englishwoman in history to do so. Her most famous play, The Rover, deals with English aristocrats living in exile in Italy during the period of puritan rule. The play was so popular she wrote a sequel to it (with the same name) several years later. Behn was on good terms with the actress and royal mistress Nell Gwyn and dedicated to Gwyn her 1679 comedy The Feigned Courtesans. Her last play, The Emperor of the Moon, was largely sung and showed Behn reaching out toward opera, which was a new form for her.

The Emperor of the Moon self-consciously uses theatricality, as do many of the plays of the period. Meta-theatricality probably reached its apex for the Restoration in 1671 with the staging of an anonymous play called The Rehearsal, probably written by George Villiers (who was the Duke of Buckingham) along with a group of his well-connected friends. Like Moliere's comedy The Rehearsal at Versailles, the play makes fun of the theatre of its time, but without the good humor employed by Moliere. The play was a biting criticism of Restoration drama, and many people joined the piece in rushing to critical judgment against any play they deemed inferior. After his comedy The Country Wife received multiple attacks, Wycherley employed a meta-theatrical device to defend his work. In The Plain Dealer, a comedy that appeared three years after The Country Wife, Wycherley has some particularly detestable characters attack the earlier play, showing his critics to be nothing but hypocritical snobs.

Though Charles II was not overly tolerant of his political enemies, he wanted the nation to be tolerant of own flaws and foibles as a leader, to view him as the rakish hero with a heart of gold. Excessive criticism, whether of a play or of a protagonist, could be seen as going against the lenient attitude advanced by the court. Truly bombastic plays and outrageous fops were fair game, but writers were not supposed to attack heroes who were genuine in their affections, even if they weren't always faithful in them. How then could a rakish hero be distinguished from both an insincere fop and an ignorant country bumpkin? The answer was that an audience had to see into their hearts, and conclude that like the king, the proper heroes had right sentiments and intentions. While the protagonists of Jacobean revenge tragedies employed devious stratagems to achieve their ends, the heroes of Restoration comedies simply had to employ the correct outlook on life, and fate would guarantee for them a happy ending.

Heroic Tragedy

While happy endings were not in store for the heroes of Restoration tragedies, sentiment likewise played a key element in these dramas as well. The tragedies of the period focused on protagonists with keen senses of honor, frequently having multiple duties which contradicted one another. John Dryden, though he is better known today for his comedy Marriage a la Mode, helped to set the standard for Restoration tragedy. While comedies of the period were written mostly in prose, Dryden wrote his two-part tragedy The Conquest of Granada not just in verse, but in a series of rhyming couplets. When couplets are written in iambic pentameter (as is the case with The Conquest of Granada) they are known as heroic couplets. Thus, serious Restoration dramas became known as heroic tragedies.

Of course, rhyming couplets can sound rather ridiculous in English, which has more word endings than other languages, making rhymes sound less natural than they do in Italian, Spanish, or French. What worked for Moliere's comedies sounded absurd in some of Dryden's tragedies. For instance, Dryden wrote in the second part of The Conquest of Granada:

  So two kind turtles, when a storm is nigh,
  Look up, and see it gath'ring in the sky;
  Each calls his mate to shelter in the groves,
  Leaving in murmurs, their unfinished loves;
  Perched on some drooping branch, they sit alone,
  And coo, and hearken to each other's moan.

The anonymous play The Rehearsal picked up on the unintentional comedy of passages like this, and made Dryden a laughingstock. The Dryden-like playwright in The Rehearsal recites:

  So boar and sow, when any storm is nigh,
  Snuff up, and smell it gath'ring in the sky;
  Boar beckons sow to trot in chestnut groves,
  And there consummate their unfinished loves.
  Pensive, in mud, they wallow all alone,
  And snore and gruntle to each other's moan.

After the success of The Rehearsal, heroic couplets became difficult to recite without causing snickering, so later tragedies tended to use different verse forms.

Dryden's more mature tragedy All For Love opted for unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, instead of couplets. The play reworks Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, changing the play from a wide-ranging adventure taking place all across the Mediterranean world to a neoclassical model of restraint written in five stately acts, all taking place on a single day in the same temple. Unfortunately for Dryden, it pales in comparison to Shakespeare's original. The tragedies of Thomas Otway proved to have much greater staying power. Otway wrote his first play Alcibiades in heroic couplets, but like Dryden he later switched to blank verse. Otway's The Orphan contains some lovely passages, but its central scene, with a man sneaking into bed with his brother's wife on the couple's wedding night, has proved too revolting for many audiences. Perhaps most surprisingly, The Orphan still seeks to hew close to the heroic ideals of Restoration tragedy by having the villainous brother express remorse and die with tragic dignity.

The one tragedy from the Restoration period to most successfully work its way into the standard repertoire was Otway's Venice Preserved. First staged in 1682, it featured Elizabeth Barry, the leading tragic actress of her day, as Belvidera, a Venetian noblewoman whose father has disinherited her. Belvidera's husband Jaffeir, fed up with the corrupt aristocratic Senate that rules Venice, decides to take part in the overthrow of the government. When he tells his wife, however, Belvidera talks him out of treason and convinces him to betray his conspirators to the Senate. Jaffeir is placed in an impossible position, having saved his honor by preserving Venice, but stained it by turning on his friends. The play ends in madness and death, providing great opportunities for its leading actors to show off their talents. Venice Preserved displays tragic figures who--like Charles II--appear to be well-intentioned even if their actions are sometimes questionable. Just as importantly, it argues forcefully against the overthrow of a government, no matter how debauched and decadent its leaders might be. After the bloody English Civil War, this message must have resonated with a number of people.

Drama After the Restoration Period

Charles II died in 1685, and his brother James succeeded him as King James II. However, James was a Roman Catholic, and the protestant ruling class had no intention of seeing Britain go back to its previous religion. The king proclaimed he wanted to extend freedom of religion to all, not just to Catholics and members of the state-sanctioned Anglican Church, but to protestants who did not conform to the official church. This included the puritans who had overthrown his father, Charles I. Rather than calming fears, the king's tolerant views on religion made many people uneasy.

After two unsuccessful rebellions against his rule, James II enlarged the country's army, stoking concerns that he might resort to the strong-handed rule of Charles I. The king's relationship with parliament was strained at best, but those who opposed him could take comfort in the fact that his heir was a protestant daughter, Mary, who was married to an even more staunchly protestant Dutch prince known as William of Orange. In 1688, however, when the king and his catholic wife had a son, protestants panicked. A group of nobles invited William of Orange to invade and claim the throne for himself. When William's forces landed, much of the king's army defected to the invaders' side. The king tried to flee. Dutch forces captured him but then released him so he could travel to France.

Parliament declared that by leaving the country and abandoning his responsibilities, James II had abdicated the throne. They declared William and Mary co-rulers and the political sea-change that happened without bloodshed came to be known as the Glorious Revolution. A wave of optimism swept over the country, and this was reflected in the theatre as well. Drama flourished, but in spite of the comparatively low-key couple that had taken over the throne, it was the rake-hero given birth under the reign of the flamboyant Charles II that still held the stage.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the playwright William Congreve took the elements of Restoration comedy and wove them together into plays that surpassed most of the work by playwrights who were active during the reign of Charles II. His 1695 play Love for Love presents a lovable rake-hero who has fallen into debt, in part due to his having an illegitimate child. The heiress Angelica sees he has a heart of gold, however, and marries him anyway. An even bigger hit with modern audiences is Congreve's masterpiece The Way of the World. The play's brilliant wit and charming characters delight theatre-goers to this day.

Yet The Way of the World was a flop when it was first produced in 1700. Two years earlier, the clergyman Jeremy Collier had published a pamphlet called A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. Though certainly no puritan (he in fact still supported the exiled James II), Collier railed against what he saw as the excesses of the British theatre. He attacked the leading playwrights of the day, including John Vanbrugh, whose play The Relapse acted as a sequel to a previous play that had a happy ending. The Relapse shows a rake who had once given up his sinful ways then return to them once more. This was too much for Collier. Unlike the puritans, Collier did not attack the theatre itself, which he acknowledged was a useful tool for transmitting values. However, he found the present stage so deprived it was "but one Remove from worshipping the Devil."

At first playwrights fought back, with Vanbrugh and other dramatists publishing responses. Gradually, though, Collier's inappropriately titled 288-page Short View won over the public. After the failure of The Way of the World, plays tended to reign in their heroes. In the early eighteenth century George Farquhar gave the protagonists of plays like The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux' Stratagem rakish qualities but pulled back from making them truly sinful. Susanna Centlivre produced similarly cleaned-up comedies with The Busie Body, The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, and her 1718 masterpiece A Bold Stroke for a Wife.

At the same time, tragic writers were coming up with new ways to portray heroics that met the standards of the new morality sweeping the country. The dramatist Nicholas Rowe focused on the good deeds of unfortunate women, creating a genre that he dubbed "she-tragedy" as if women hadn't been the protagonists of tragedies before his innovations. Rowe reworked an older play called The Fatal Dowry into a modern tragedy he titled The Fair Penitent. The play's villain, Lothario, has all of the characteristics of a rake, but remains unambiguously despicable. Rowe's best play, Jane Shore, imitates Shakespeare, but takes a minor character in Richard III who doesn't even have lines and literally gives her a voice. The next year, Rowe wrote Lady Jane Grey, another she-tragedy that did not do well with audiences but solidified the author's reputation for respectability and refinement.

In 1715, the same year he staged Lady Jane Grey, Rowe became Poet Laureate to the new King George I. No longer was it acceptable to have rake-heroes whose heart was in the right place. The public expected new standards of morality, and older dramas were either rewritten to comply with the times or dropped from the repertoire. Still, the emphasis on feeling and sentiment continued. Protagonists were expected to inherently intuit good from bad. What was different was that now they had to be purely good, or suffer consequences for any sins they might commit.

Anticipating Romanticism in Jane Shore

In the prologue to his 1714 play Jane Shore, Nicholas Rowe makes some claims that end up being important to the history of British literature. Rowe begins the prologue like this:

          Tonight, if you have brought your good old taste,
          We'll treat you with a downright English feast—
          A tale, which told long since in homely wise,
          Hath never fail'd of melting gentle eyes.

There is nothing terribly new here, but that is part of the point. Rowe is looking backward for inspiration, not just to the history of medieval England for his plot (though that is true too), but to an older style of telling stories. Explicitly defending the ballad tradition, he continues:

          Let no sir despise our hapless dame
          Because recording ballads chant her name:
          Those venerable ancient song-enditers
          Soared many a pitch above our modern writers:
          They caterwauled in no romantic ditty,
          Sighing for Phillis's, or Chloe's pity.

Notice that for Rowe, medieval ballad writers are "ancient." Antiquity is no longer restricted to just the classical Greek and Roman worlds. "Phillis" and "Chloe" it should be noted are both famous names from ancient Greece. Medieval ballads did not just pine after classical heroines, but had their own artistic traditions, every bit as valid as those of classical times.

The critic Christine Baatz considers Rowe's decision to group medieval authors with classical writers (rather than modern ones) to be an important shift in how the British thought about literature. By placing medieval ballads on the same level as the classical writers held up as models, Rowe is implying that these writers do not need to comply with neoclassical rules. He makes this explicit later on in the Prologue, when he discusses Shakespeare:

          In such an age, immortal Shakespeare wrote,
          By no quaint rules nor hampering critics taught;
          With rough majestic force he moved the heart,
          And Strength and Nature made amends for Art.

Though Rowe seems to scorn the idea of a "romantic ditty" he anticipates Romanticism (with a capital "R") in imitating Shakespeare rather than the Greeks or Romans. As he writes in the Prologue:

          Our humble author does his steps pursue;
          He owns he had the mighty Bard in view,
          And in these scenes has made it more his care
          To rouse the passions than to charm the ear.

The idea of rousing "passions" being superior to coming up with clever rhymes also seems to anticipate Romantic writers later in the century. In many ways, Rowe's Jane Shore seems to be ahead of its time.

Making the Scene

In their book Making the Scene: A History of Stage Design and Technology in Europe and the United States, Oscar Brockett, Margaret Mitchell, and Linda Hardberger give a comprehensive view of the history of scenic design. The beautifully illustrated volume includes photographs of classical theatres, like this Hellenistic stage in Priene, Turkey:

It also has Renaissance scenic designs, like this illustration by Serlio for a comedy:

However, I want to talk about the books chapter on Neoclassicism and Romanticism. The authors use Mozart's opera The Magic Flute to demonstrate this rivalry of opposites. A key figure here is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who opened the Weimar Court Theatre in 1791.

Goethe first became known for writing pre-Romantic Sturm und Drang plays like Goetz von Berlichingen. He also wrote the greatest play of the Romantic Era, Faust, the first part of which was published in 1808. However, the style he developed at the Weimar Court Theatre came to be known as Weimar classicism. Here's a design he did for The Magic Flute in 1794:

The classical motifs are unmistakable, and the image's restraint is characteristic of Goethe's style. Not all neoclassical designers held with Goethe's simplicity, however. Consider this 1815 design by Karl Friedrich Schinkel done for the same Queen of the Night scene in The Magic Flute:

Everything is still perfectly ordered, balanced, and harmonized, but the lesson here seems to be that more is more.

When it came to excess, Romanticism could always do the neoclassical style one better. That pesky order went out the window, though, as emotion and drama reigned. In 1818, the Romantic scenic designer Simon Quaglio came up with this idea for a production of The Magic Flute at the Royal Theatre in Munich:

Movement replaces stasis, and feeling undoes balance. They're both lovely, but ultimately I prefer Quaglio's design.

The French Othello

In 1829, the French poet Alfred de Vigny asked the following question:

Will the French stage be receptive or not to a modern tragedy which offers the following: --in its conception, a large-scale portrait of life, rather than a narrow picture focused on a catastrophe and a plot; --in its composition, characters rather than roles, quiet scenes without drama intermingled with tragic and comic scenes; --in its execution, style which is familiar, comic, tragic, and sometimes epic?

The "modern" drama to which he referred was de Vigny's own The Moor of Venice, itself not a new work at all, but rather an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello. Certainly, Othello has a large-scale portrait of life, full-blooded characters, and alternating scenes of comedy and tragedy. All of these things were anathema to French neoclassical tragedy.

Though neoclassicism was "harmonious," de Vigny argued that the old feudal and theocratic systems in France had been harmonious, as well, Just as the French Revolution had swept away the old political order, artists of the Romantic Revolution sought to sweep away the stultified art world of the early nineteenth century.

To do this, they needed Shakespeare. Not only were Shakespeare's plays antithetical to the ideas of neoclassicism, they were also universally acknowledged as works of genius. By bringing Shakespeare to the French stage, de Vigny was engaged in a revolutionary act.

Othello's road to the French stage was not an easy one. In his preface to The Moor of Venice, de Vigny recounts how difficult it was to get the French to tolerate even the use of a simple hand prop necessary for the story: the handkerchief. Voltaire's play Zaire, which bears some resemblances to Othello, replaces the handkerchief with a letter as the vital property. Ducis, who adapted a number of Shakespeare's plays into French, wrote a version of Othello in 1792, but he used a string of diamonds rather than a handkerchief, which must have seemed much more refined.

A handkerchief did appear onstage in Pierre Lebrun's adaptation of Schiller's Mary Stuart, but when the actors referred to it, the prop was called "gauze" and "gift"--anything but handkerchief! It was not until 1829 that de Vigny finally had to nerve to call a handkerchief a handkerchief.

It was the following year that Victor Hugo's play Hernani finally cast aside the neoclassical tradition for good. The success of Hernani, however, might not have been possible without Othello conquering the French stage first.

The Tragedies of Voltaire

Voltaire understood the limits of neoclassicism, yet still had difficulty surmounting them. Beginning with a French version of Oedipus in 1718, Voltaire wrote a number of tragedies, including Zaire, which dealt with Christian-Muslim relations. Voltaire acted in that play himself, and according to one account, forgot his lines and made up half a dozen new verses on the spot.

His play Mahomet, first performed in 1741, actually portrays the Muslim prophet onstage, a big no-no in Islam, so for that reason alone, I imagine the play is un-performable today. It’s not particularly kind to the prophet, but Voltaire seems to have intended the play as an attack on the Catholic Church, using Islam as a cover to shield himself from local authorities.

Voltaire’s play The Orphan of China reworks Ji Junxiang’s classic Yuan-era play The Orphan of Zhao. Though it wasn’t the first French adaptation of the Chinese play, the fact that this version was by Voltaire no doubt brought special attention to the piece, and the Comedie Francais premiered it in 1755. Unfortunately, many people attacked it for not maintaining unity of time, place, and action.

However, Voltaire himself campaigned against critics who felt rules were more important than drama. In his “Discourse on Tragedy” he wrote:

I know very well that the Greek tragedies, besides the superior ones in English, have erred in often taking up horror for terror, and the disgusting and the unbelievable for the tragic and the marvelous. The art was in its infancy in the time of Aeschylus, as in London in the time of Shakespeare; but despite the great faults of Greek poets, and even of ours, one finds a real pathos of singular beauty; and if some French who do not know the tragedies of different standards but in some translations and by hearsay, condemn them without any restriction, they are, it seems to me, like some blind men who affirmed that a rose could not have vibrant colors, because they in considering it had felt the thorns.

Voltaire went on to say that the Greeks, and especially the English, were inclined to surpass the boundaries of decorum, but that French writers often failed to achieve the truly tragic because they were too afraid of being indecorous.

While Voltaire’s dramas were progressive for the eighteenth century, he was still too stuck in the conventions of his own time to appeal to later generations of Frenchmen. Writing in the nineteenth century, Emile Deschamps concluded that while Voltaire was inventive in his plots and original in his thinking, he was still inferior to dramatists of the Golden Age such as Racine and Corneille. As Deschamps put it:

His Turks, Chinese, Arabs, and Americans are much more French than the Greeks and Romans of Racine and Corneille, and since they are Frenchmen of the age of Louis XV, rather than of Louis XIV, their language is less grand, less pure, and less idealized. They are addressing Madame de Pompadour rather than Madame de Valliere.

Nevertheless, Voltaire’s tragedies, more than fifty in all, continued to have an impact on the French theatre well into the nineteenth century. Once Deschamps’ friend Victor Hugo had his play Hernani performed in 1830, however, Voltaire’s neoclassical plays looked quite old-fashioned, and today they are largely forgotten.

The Haunted Stage

I've been reading Marvin Carlson's book The Haunted Stage. His central thesis is that while all literary texts bring up recollections of works from the past, performance is inherently even more about memory, since every element of a performance brings up recollections of past performances.

A play like Hamlet relies on the fact that audiences have seen other plays before and are familiar with the basic concept of a revenge tragedy, and probably with the story of Hamlet as well. The actor who is playing Hamlet has played other roles before this one, and audiences have likely seen, or at least heard about, other actors playing Hamlet. The costumes, scenery, lighting design, even the blocking probably resemble elements from other plays. Finally, the physical theatre where the play is performed likely conjures up memories of other performances. Even if an audience member has never been in that particular theatre before, he or she probably has seen other theatres to compare with it.

Carlson is aware of how all texts are "haunted" by the past, but he notes that the theatre is a special place due to its physicality. There is a phenomenological element to performance that necessarily complicates and enriches it to a level far beyond that of a simple text. He calls this "ghosting" and describes it this way:

Unlike the reception operations of genre (also, of course, of major importance in theatre), in which audience members encounter a new but distinctly different example of a type of artistic product they have encountered before, ghosting presents the identical thing they have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context. Thus, a recognition not of similarity, as in genre, but of identity becomes a part of the reception process, with results that can complicate this process considerably.

The key point here is that it is "the identical thing" itself that is recycled, whether it be the script, the actors, the sets and costumes, or the theatre building. Of course, today we frequently expect sets and costumes to be used for one production and then only brought out for a new play if they have been considerably modified. Carlson points out that this is not always the case in non-Western theatre, and it did not used to be the case in the West, either.

He cites the Romantic era as the locus of this shift in the West. Specifically, he mentions Victor Hugo's preface to his play Cromwell, in which the French author rails against the neoclassical tradition of setting every play in the same neutral antechamber. For Hugo, the historical spot where an incident occurred was important, and the passionate feelings of Romantic artists, Hugo included, led to a demand that each new production make efforts to be historically and geographically accurate.

While we no longer expect every production of Julius Caesar to be set in ancient Rome or each new production of Macbeth to be costumed like medieval Scotland, we do expect new set and costume designs for a new production. Still, they will likely remind us of other designs we have seen in the past, and we cannot help but compare them to the elements used in these past productions.

Going back to the Greeks, playwrights have been concerned not simply with telling stories, but with retelling them. Here again, Romanticism changes things, placing a new emphasis on "innovation, individuality, and uniqueness," as Carlson puts it.

But what is the great Romantic text if not Goethe's Faust? And was not Faust inspired in part by the puppet plays that were performed throughout Germany in Goethe's day? And were not these plays in turn inspired by earlier plays, including perhaps productions of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus that likely toured Germany during the 16th and 17th centuries? Carlson points out that Paul Valery wrote a version of the story titled My Faust, though in a way each new telling is an author's own version of a common tale, My Oedipus, My Hamlet.

In the third chapter, Carlson remarks on an audience's ability to see not just an actor on stage, but the ghosts of all of the previous roles inhabited by that performer. He also notes the rather obvious fact that writers "ghost" actors into the texts that they write:

Goethe and Schiller conceived their productions with the specialties of Weimar actors in mind, Voltaire for the actors of the Comedie Francaise, Moliere for the company in which he was the leading player. Even a playwright like Ibsen, with very tenuous ties to his major producing organization, is revealed through his letters to be quite concerned with the specific actors that would perform his roles and with what associations and physical and emotional characteristics they would bring to the roles, certainly predictable concerns in any dramatist who writes with an eye toward stage realization.

This of course leads to the idea of the "vehicle play," which Carlson defines as a work constructed precisely to feature the already familiar aspects of a particular actor's performance." As examples, he cites Sardou's plays for Sarah Bernhardt and Rostand's plays for Benoit-Constant Coquein.

Thoughts on Corneille

            By the time Cardinal Richelieu chartered the French Academy, Pierre Corneille had already become a successful playwright. His first play, the comedy Melite, was a success when it was performed in 1629. Corneille continued to churn out a series of plays, mostly comedies, for several years. Most notable was The Theatrical Illusion, a meta-theatrical comedy in which a man seeks out the aid of a magician to find his lost son. In a series of illusions, the magician shows the man scenes from his son's life. The scenes become increasingly disturbing to the man until he finds out that his son is actually an actor and the scenes he has been watching come from plays. In the twentieth century, Tony Kushner successfully adapted the play as The Illusion.

            In 1636, Corneille began working on a new play, The Cid, based on a legendary figure from medieval Spain. His immediate source was a Spanish play that did not conform to the unities of time and place that had become increasingly important for the French stage. Undaunted, Corneille compressed events that took place across Spain over a period of years into a single town in a single day. The play features duels, invading armies, and star-crossed lovers. Confined within strict neoclassical rules, the play virtually bursts at the seams. At the end, the play's heroine Chimene agrees to marry the hero in spite of the fact that he killed her father in a dual earlier that day. Audiences were thrilled, but critics were not amused.

            Attacks on The Cid were so virulent that it became a national issue. Seeing a chance to use his new Academy to assert central authority, Richelieu asked the scholars he had chartered to give a definitive ruling on the merits of the play. Corneille agreed. The Academy gave its ruling in 1638, and the results were devastating.

            The Academy gave Corneille credit for at least nominally adhering to the unities of time and place, but it attacked him for choosing a subject in which he could not plausibly comply with those unities. The ruling found that The Cid contained no true unity of action. Even worse, it impugned not only the play's believability, but also its morality in having Chimene marry the hero on the same day he had killed her father. Playwrights should make dramas compatible with the rules of decorum, even if it is at the expense of historical truth, the Academy found.

            In some ways, what the Academy decided was not as important as the fact that it had ruled at all. In France, a government-chartered society was now responsible for deciding the artistic merits of a work of drama. This went far beyond censoring politically and religiously offensive plays, which happened everywhere. This was a challenge to the very notion that a writer knew what was best for his own play. The fact that The Cid was a hit with audiences didn't matter. The Academy had spoken, and the French establishment would now hold the play in contempt no matter how loud the applause might be in the theatre.

            After his humiliation by the Academy, Corneille abandoned drama for a while, but in 1640 he wrote two classical dramas, Horace and Cinna, both of which conformed to the neoclassical rules espoused by the Academy. Though not as exciting as The Cid, these plays still managed to contain the tremendous passion and dramatic reversals characteristic of Corneille. In Cinna, for instance, conspirators plotting the assassination of Emperor Augustus constantly shift tactics and radically alter their rhetoric, keeping the play interesting in spite of the fact that there is little on-stage action. Though Corneille called the play a tragedy, a nearly unbelievable clemency from Augustus resolves the play happily, making Cinna, like The Cid, more of a tragicomedy.

            Corneille continued to write dramas off and on into the 1670s. One notable play, the tragedy Polyeucte, which premiered in 1643, tells the story of an early Christian martyr whose death inspires his pagan wife and father-in-law to convert to Christianity. Two years later saw the first performance of Rodogune, a tragedy set in the Hellenistic period. Rodogune maintains the unities so precious to the Academy, but lays bare adulteries, poisonings, and Machiavellian political maneuverings. It culminates in a terrifying mother bringing down curses upon her one remaining son. This time, the academy did not reproach Corneille for his lack of decorum. He had proven he could play by the rules, and his tragedies would now be accepted.

            In 1647, the Academy elected Corneille to join them, a final mark of his acceptance by the establishment. Corneille's younger brother Thomas also wrote numerous plays and became one of the most successful playwrights of the 1670s. After the elder Corneille died in 1684, the Academy selected Thomas Corneille to take his brother's seat on what was now the greatest artistic fraternity in Europe.