Restoration Theatres

When the British monarchy was restored in 1660, two acting companies received royal patents. The King's Company set up by Thomas Killigrew ultimately settled at a theatre on Drury Lane, while the actors using the rival patent granted to William Davenant eventually found a home at Covent Garden.

The road to Drury Lane and Covent Garden was a long one, though. In Neoclassical France, plays were sometimes performed in converted tennis courts, so perhaps fittingly the King's Company initially set up shop in Gibbons' Tennis Court, which had its main entrance on Vere Street. The Duke of York's Company at first performed at the Salisbury Court Theatre, though they occasionally used the Cockpit Theatre, sometimes called the Phoenix.

Soon, however, the Duke of York's company converted Lisle's Tennis Court in Lincoln's Inn Fields into a state-of-the art performance space. There, Davenant introduced to public stages in England for the first time moveable scenery that had perviously only been used in court masques. He opened the new theatre in 1661 with The Siege of Rhodes, which had previously been performed under the Protectorate period as an opera to get around rules against drama.

Seeing the success of the Duke of York's Company at Lincoln's Inn Fields, Killigrew couldn't afford to be outdone. In 1663 he opened a new theatre on Drury Lane with an entrance on Bridges Street. Visitors admired the theatre's decorations, but complained about the narrowness of the passages to the main seating area, known as the pit. Fashionable ladies avoided the pit and kept to the boxes in the back, but these were too far from the stage to clearly hear the play, so there was much grumbling. A cupola on the roof might have admitted light for daytime performances, but it leaked when there was rain, causing even more discontent.

Dorset Garden Theatre

The Duke of York's company continued to use their playhouse at Lincoln's Inn Fields until 1671, when they moved into a new building at Dorset Garden. We know a good deal about this theatre and even possess an illustration of its proscenium. The inaugural production at Dorset Garden was Sir Martin Marall by John Dryden. The theatre later premiered Aphra Behn's The Rover, among other works. Though the rival company possessed the king's name, the Duke of York's Company enjoyed a reputation for superior quality, largely due to its star actor, Thomas Betterton.

The original Drury Lane Theatre on Bridges Street survived the Great Fire of 1666, but it burned down in 1672. Since the Duke of York's Company had vacated their playhouse at Lincoln's Inn Fields the previous year, the King's Company took it over. Killigrew set about building a new theatre on Drury Lane, which opened in 1674. The following year, the theatre premiered William Wycherley's comedy The Country Wife. Nathaniel Lee's tragedy The Rival Queens appeared at the theatre a couple of years later.

Following a series of bad seasons with poor attendance, both patent companies merged into the United Company in 1682, using the Drury Lane Theatre for most plays and the Dorset Garden Theatre mainly for opera. In 1685, King Charles II died, and all theatres closed for a period of mourning. Few new plays were performed by the United Company, and Betterton chafed under the management of Christopher Rich, who took the company over in 1693. The following year, Betterton left with other senior performers to start their own company.

The breakaway actors set up shop at Lincoln's Inn Fields where they scored a hit with William Congreve's play Love for Love in 1685, shortly after King William III had officially authorized the new company. The departure of experienced actors from Drury Lane provided an opportunity for the young Colley Cibber to excel both as performer and dramatist there. His Love's Last Shift premiered at Drury Lane in 1696, with Cibber himself appearing as the fop Sir Novelty Fashion.

In 1705, a new theatre was built to house the company at Lincoln's Inn Fields. This was known at the Queen's Theatre and was located in the Haymarket. The Queen's Theatre is where George Farquhar's The Beaux Stratagem was first performed in 1707. Shortly thereafter, the two companies were reconfigured, with the best singers sent over to the Haymarket to perform opera while the actors who specialized in spoken drama returned to Drury Lane to form a new United Company.

In the early 18th century, the whole patent situation had become murky. The two rival companies had merged, split apart, then merged back together again. Meanwhile, other groups of actors were setting up their own companies both in London and in the countryside, touring from town to town. All this was put an end to by the Licensing Act of 1737.

First Covent Garden Theatre

Five years prior to the act, the actor John Rich, eldest son of the infamous Christopher Rich who had alienated Betterton, used the patent originally assigned to the Duke of York's Company to establish a new theatre at Covent Garden. (His company had previously been at Lincoln's Inn Fields.) The timing was fortuitous, since the Licensing Act effectively repressed all London theatres performing without a royal patent.

This left two theatres in London performing spoken-word drama: Drury Lane operating under the patent originally granted Killigrew, and Covent Garden operating under Davenant's patent. A third patent was later issued to a theatre in the Haymarket that focused on musical drama, but that patent confined spoken drama there to just the summer months.

That remained the situation of London theatre until the passage of the Theatres Act in 1843, but that's another story.

The Rival Queens

Nathaniel Lee's Restoration-era tragedy The Rival Queens tells the story of the death of Alexander the Great through the lens of the women in his life.

Wait... Alexander the Great... and women? Well, yes. Many of the stories about Alexander that circulated in early modern Europe linked him to various women he was alleged to have loved.

For instance, in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus the Emperor asks to see the paramour of Alexander. This paramour is presumably Thais, a courtesan who allegedly convinced the conqueror to burn the famed palace of Persepolis.

While Thais is name-checked in The Rival Queens, the play focuses instead on Roxana, his first wife, and Statira, a Persian princess he married as part of a plan to unify Greek and Persian civilizations. When the play opens, Statira is distraught because Alexander had promised her he would never bed Roxana again, but he seems to have broken that promise. Statira's opening lines show her in a conventional state of grief:

               Give me a knife, a draught of poison, flames!

               Swell, heart, break, break, thou stubborn thing!

               Now, by the sacred fire, I'll not be held!

               Why do ye wish me life, yet stifle me

               For want of air? pray give me leave to walk.

When Alexander hears how upset Statira is, he blames his hook-up with Roxana on beer goggles, claiming she seduced him while he was drunk. He professes his undying love for Statira and asks her mother and sister to help him win her back again. If he cannot, he vows to renounce his empire and live out the remainder of his life in the countryside, forsaking worldly glory.

The third act introduces Statira's rival queen, Roxana. She is determined to not have to share Alexander, and proclaims:

               Roxana and Statira, they are names

               That must forever jar; eternal discord,

               Fury, revenge, disdain, and indignation

               Tear my swoll'n breast, make way for fire and tempest.

Well, that's just fine with Alexander, who doesn't want anything to do with Roxana anymore, anyway. Celebrating his reconciliation with Statira, he invites his faithful soldiers to a feast. It is at that feast that a group of conspirators plans to poison Alexander, and they attempt to gain the aid of Roxana. Instead of helping them slay her lover, she resolves to murder her rival.

That murder occurs in the play's climactic fifth act. The two rival queens meet, and Roxana kills Statira while Alexander himself is also dying of poison. And what of Hephestion, the notorious male lover of Alexander? Well, he appears in the play, but as a suitor for the hand of Statira's sister. Lee also banishes Hephestion from the fifth act of the play, having his death merely reported.

The emphasis on the female characters might be linked to the fact that they were played by... well... women. The play's epilogue threatens to return boy actors to the stage in women's roles if the audience does not leave the professional female actresses alone. Lee wrote The Rival Queens sometime around 1676 or 1677, so women on the professional English stage were still a relatively new phenomenon. Perhaps, then, it should be unsurprising that a Restoration-era tragedy about Alexander focused on his relationships with women.