English Dramatick Opera, 1661–1706

Andrew R. Walkling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138696549
• eBook ISBN: 9781315524191
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

English Dramatick Opera, 1661–1706 is the first comprehensive examination of the distinctively English form known as "dramatick opera", which appeared on the London stage in the mid-1670s and lasted until its displacement by Italian through-composed opera in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Andrew Walkling argues that, while the musical elements of this form are crucial to its definition and history, the origins of the genre lie principally in a tradition of spectacular stagecraft that first manifested itself in England in the mid-1660s as part of a hitherto unidentified dramatic sub-genre, to which Walkling gives the name "spectacle-tragedy".

Armed with this new understanding, the book explores a number of historical and interpretive issues, including the physical and rhetorical configurations of performative spectacle, the administrative maneuverings of the two "patent" theatre companies, the construction and deployment of the technologically advanced Dorset Garden Theatre in 1670–71, the critical response to generic, technical, and ideological developments in Restoration drama, and the shifting balance between machine spectacle and song-and-dance entertainment throughout the later decades of the seventeenth century, including in the dramatick operas of Henry Purcell. This study combines the materials and methodologies of music history, theatre history, literary studies, and bibliography to fashion an entirely new approach to the history of spectacular and musical drama on the English Restoration stage.

This book serves as a companion to the Routledge publication Masque and Opera in England, 1656–1688 (2017).

1 Machine technology and diegetic supernaturalism on the English public stage, 1661–71

It would, of course, be perverse to locate the beginnings of machine technology on the English stage in the reestablishment of theatrical culture following Charles II’s restoration in 1660. The extraordinary series of court masques crafted by Inigo Jones between 1605 and 1640 represent a high-water mark for elaborate stage spectacle, and Jones’s legacy was by no means forgotten in subsequent years, although the dearth of theatrical activity between 1642 and 1656 would have offered scant opportunity to put that legacy into practice.¹ The earliest attested examples of such activity in the post-Jones era can be found in two masques by James Shirley. The first, The Triumph of Beautie, “was personated by some young Gentlemen, for whom it was intended, at a private Recreation” sometime in the mid-1640s, and seems to have deployed a simple wire and pulley mechanism at the beginning of the main episode.² The second, Cupid and Death, was presented in March 1653 for the Portuguese ambassador and then in a more musically elaborate version in 1659. Both productions of this work—the former at an unknown location, possibly in the Inns of Court, the latter in a public hall situated “att the Military Ground in Leicester ffields”³—appear to have used a similar wire effect in the fourth antimasque entry, in which Cupid “is discover’d flying in the air”, but also a more complex machine at the commencement of the main masque, where “a solemn Musick is heard, and Mercury seen descending upon a Cloud”.⁴ Unfortunately, we know nothing about the production teams that mounted any of these masques, apart from the fact that the London dancing master Luke Channell was somehow involved in the earlier of the two Cupid and Death performances.⁵ However, it is possible that the machines might have been the work of John Webb, Inigo Jones’s pupil and successor as both an architect and a stage designer, who was active in the former capacity working for a number of leading personalities of the Commonwealth regime throughout the 1650s.

1 Jones died in June 1652, but had ceased creating theatrical works in 1640.

2 James Shirley, The Trivmph of Beavtie (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1646); the quotation is from the title page. See pp. 13–14, where the main masque begins with “Musicke . . . heard; and Mercury descending” and the end of Mercury’s speech is marked “Ascendit”. I am grateful to Amanda Eubanks Winkler for pointing out that this work was probably performed at the school Shirley ran in Whitefriars during the Civil War and the Interregnum.

3 For a discussion of the performances, see Robert Thompson and Andrew R. Walkling, eds., Cupid and Death (Musica Britannica 105: London: Stainer and Bell, forthcoming); the location of the 1659 performance is stipulated in Matthew Locke’s score, British Library, Add. MS 17799, f. 2^r.

4 J[ames] S[hirley], Cvpid and Death (London: J[ohn] Crook[e] and J[ohn] Baker, 1653), 13 and 10 bis [recte 18], and Cupid [/Cvpid] and Death (London: John Crooke and John Playford, 1659), 15 and 22.

It is a rather remarkable fact that The Triumph of Beautie and the two Cupid and Death performances represent the only substantiated instances of the use of aerial machine technology on an English stage between 1640 and 1660,⁶ especially when we consider not only John Webb’s training and availability but, perhaps even more significantly, the profile of Webb’s theatrical partner beginning in the mid-1650s, Sir William Davenant. Davenant had been intimately associated early in his career with the creation of court masques: following Inigo Jones’s break with Ben Jonson in 1631 and the brief tenures of Aurelian Townshend (1632) and Thomas Carew (1634), he had emerged as Jones’s chief literary collaborator and remained so until the demise of the form, writing texts for some of the most elaborate masques ever produced: The Temple of Love (1635), The Triumphs of the Prince d’Amour (1636), Britannia Triumphans (1638), Luminalia (1638), and Salmacida Spolia (1640). Hence, when he reemerged on the theatrical scene in 1656, joining with Webb to mount a series of public “operatic” productions, beginning with The Siege of Rhodes⁷ and followed by The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) and The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659), Davenant might have been expected to apply the kinds of spectacular production values with which both he and Webb were well acquainted. To an extent, he did precisely this, working to develop what I have called the “technologies” of conventional opera—through-composed musical setting incorporating recitative, and, with Webb’s able assistance, a sophisticated language of visual expression through changeable scenery that worked simultaneously to inform and astonish his audiences, many of whom had never before witnessed a display of this kind.⁸

5 See Cvpid and Death (1653), sig. A2^r, where he is called “Mr. Luke Channen”, and his otherwise unidentified collaborators dismissed in an “&c.”

6 See Walkling, Masque and Opera, 155 (Table 4.2); Richard Flecknoe’s The Marriage of Oceanus and Britannia also featured a machine effect—a triumphal car consisting of “a Chariot compos’d of a great Scollop shell, drawn by two Seahorses in swimming posture; the chariot gliding on the wheels of watermils” (The Mariage of Oceanus and Brittania [n. p.: n. pub., 1659], 3–4)—but it is not clear whether this work was ever staged. In Davenant’s The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (London: Henry Herringman, 1658), 6, “a Rope descends out of the Clowds, and is stretcht to a stifness by an Engine”, two apes come on stage, one of whom “leaps up to the Rope, and there dances”, after which “The Rope ascends”; however, this conventional rope-dancing episode can hardly be categorized as a machine effect. Finally, there appears to be a trap effect in the anonymous play Lady Alimony, described on its title page as having been “Duly Authorized, daily Acted, and frequently Followed” at an unidentified location in or around 1659: in Act 3 scene v, at the end of a lengthy incantation scene, the Ghost of D. Nicholas Gallerius (who merely “Enter[s]” at the beginning of the scene) conjures up the figure of Mephistophilus, who “appeares and resolves him”, whereupon “Mephistophilus having fixed [an] Inscription on the Portal of the Gate, they descend”: see Lady Alimony; or, The Alimony Lady (London: Tho[mas] Vere and William Gilbertson, 1659), sigs. G2^r and G4^r.

7 The Siege of Rhodes was preceded by The First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House (1656), a course of debate-like speeches punctuated by instrumental airs and songs: see the discussion in Walkling, Masque and Opera, 151–52.

Thanks to the cramped quarters of Rutland House, Davenant’s first venue, the scenic technology of these operas was rudimentary by the standards of court masque: it consisted of nothing more than a set of stationary wings framing a simple mechanism housing three pairs of shutters, behind which lay a space for the installation of cutout “scenes of relieve”. These restrictions undoubtedly had an impact on the shape and character of The Siege of Rhodes as a dramatic work; yet when coupled with the sung delivery of the dramatic texts (only partially sung in the case of The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru), even such limited technological novelty appears to have enthralled much of the theatregoing public.⁹ Perhaps this is why, when they transferred their operations to the more spacious Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane in 1657 or 1658, Davenant and Webb retained this modest scenic configuration rather than attempting at the very least to upgrade to more complex, and hence more visually arresting, changeable wings, let alone seeking to introduce any machine effects.¹⁰ Indeed, not only The Siege of Rhodes (the only one of the three productions known to have been given in Rutland House’s more attenuated performance space) but also its two successor pieces evince uniformly restricted production values. It may also be that Davenant and Webb were simply concerned to keep costs to a minimum, given the venture’s speculative nature. But their inability or unwillingness to take their innovations to the next logical step should draw our attention, not simply on account of both men’s prior theatrical experience, but also because, as the exmple of Cupid and Death demonstrates, it was still eminently possible to rig up theatrical machinery in an ad hoc performance space. As we shall see, Davenant’s choice not to incorporate any stage machinery into his Cockpit operatic performances, which were being mounted at precisely the same time as the second Cupid and Death production, appears to have been a very par...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Notes to the Reader
• Introduction: Arriving at Dramatick Opera
• 1 Machine Technology and Diegetic Supernaturalism on the English Public Stage, 1661–71
• 2 “Spectacle-Tragedy” and the Shifting Fortunes of the Patent Theatres
• 3 The Rise of Dramatick Opera, 1673–75
• 4 Responses to Dramatick Opera, 1674–81
• 5 Dramatick Opera in the 1680s: Perversions and Palimpsests
• 6 Dramatick Opera in the 1690s and Beyond
• Appendix A: Instrumental Music Associated with Macbeth Found in Contemporary Printed Collections, 1666–c.1725
• Appendix B: Comparison of Texts of Royal Proclamations for the Theatres
• Select Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index