The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema

Robert Greene's Theatre of Attractions

J. Sager

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137332394
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137332400
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Examining the work of the Elizabethan playwright, Robert Greene, this book argues that Greene's plays are innovative in their use of spectacle. Its most striking feature is the use of the one-to-one analogies between Greene's drama and modern cinema, in order to explore the plays' stage effects.

1
The Aesthetics of Spectacle

It all starts in Oxford; in the middle of Greene’s most famous play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589). In Brasenose College, an academic disputation is taking place between an Englishman, Friar Bacon and an arrogant German called Vandermast. But these men are not just academics, they are also magicians. Ironically, for a disputation, not a lot of disputing takes place; the emphasis of this scene is on the visual not the verbal. The magicians try to outdo each other by conjuring up a series of increasingly impressive spectacles: people vanish, a ‘tree appears’ with a ‘dragon shooting fire’ and ‘Hercules’ materialises ‘in his lion’s skin’ (FB ix). With his royal ‘audience’ looking on ‘amazed’, Bacon wins the day with his ‘strange necromantic spells’ which ‘work such shows and wondering in the world’ (FB ix.155, 118, 47–8). In a way, that final quotation – ‘work such shows and wondering in the world’ – encapsulates the focus of this book. This book aims to examine the way in which ‘shows’ – theatrical spectacles and attractions – provoke both ‘wonder’ and ‘wondering’; in short how, and for what purpose, early modern spectacle astonished and intrigued audiences.

Needless to say, this is not the first literary critical study to declare an interest in early modern special effects. If a modern theatre practitioner wanted to reconstruct these various spectacles, they need look no further than Philip Butterworth’s scrupulously researched Theatre of Fire (1998), where they could find out precisely how Bacon’s ‘dragon’ might have been made to ‘shoot fire’.¹ By contrast, this book is less preoccupied with the ‘how?’ than with the ‘why?’ Why did early modern playwrights use spectacle? As the Records of Early English Drama (REED) testify, these ‘cheap thrills’ were in fact far from cheap. REED documents substantial payments for the construction, decoration and maintenance of various dramatic special effects. For instance, the early sixteenth-century records of guild dramas at Coventry record various payments for the construction and repairs to a hell mouth.² Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth also record substantial payments made for stage tricks involving a fake sword or ‘a hollow knife of plate’.³ Similarly, the City Chamberlain’s Accounts at Canterbury for the years 1528–30 catalogue the purchase of ‘a new leather bag for the blood, vj d’, to assist with their gory special effects.⁴ Meanwhile in London, Henslowe records the payment ‘for pulleys and workmanship for to hang Absolom … xiiijd’ for a production of George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (1599).⁵ Given the expense of theatrical special effects, it seems more than a little naive to assume that spectacle was merely a frivolous way of entertaining the groundlings. Spectacle was not just a decorative bauble designed to dazzle the ignorant, there was also an intellectual ‘strategy’ behind these ‘cunning shows’ (JB 735).

Spectacle was in high demand in early modern theatres. In 1602, Richard Vennar advertised a spectacular public performance at the Swan theatre of a play called England’s Joy.⁶ Printed by John Windet, the plot or argument details the action of the play’s nine spectacular scenes. Depicting Queen Elizabeth’s rise to power, the play is reminiscent of a public theatre masque. The plot promises everything from lurid sexual titillation as a ‘beautiful lady’ has her ‘garments and jewels’ torn from her, ‘music’, sword fights between ‘twelve Gentlemen at barriers’ and a spectacular finale as Elizabeth herself is:

taken up into heaven, when presently appears a throne of blessed souls, and beneath under the stage set forth with strange fireworks, divers black and damned souls, wonderfully described in their several torments.⁷

But when the expectant crowd gathered at the Swan, the performance turned out to be a hoax. Vennar gave a rather brief prologue, before beating a hasty retreat, taking the money with him. He was later arrested and, as a consequence of the public outcry, forced to publish an apology.⁸ The episode lived on the public’s imagination for some time. As Tiffany Stern has documented, both Chamberlain and Manningham record ‘the cozening prank of one Vennar’ in letters and diary entries.⁹ Twenty years later, in Jonson’s Masque of Augurs (1622), a sarcastic reference is made to ‘three of those Gentlewomen, that should have acted in that famous matter of England’s Joy’.¹⁰ The story of England’s Joy testifies to the public’s fervent desire for visual spectacle. The crowd had been prepared to pay twice the normal entrance price to see this theatrical extravaganza.¹¹ Spectacular drama was evidently a money spinner.

Before outlining the central argument of this chapter, one or two myths must be debunked. The assumption that spectacle is an indicator of poor artistry, an attitude which we have established is Aristotelian in origin, has fuelled one of the biggest misapprehensions of early modern theatre criticism, that the Shakespearean stage ‘was essentially bare’.¹² Historical evidence, however, seems to contradict this assumption; Philip Henslowe’s inventory, compiled in 1598, lists an intriguing array of spectacular stage properties and costumes, such as the ‘tomb of Dido’, a ‘rainbow’ and a ‘frame for the beheading in Black Joan’.¹³ The myth of the bare stage was concocted by Romantic critics who reviled the illusionistic proscenium arch theatre, whose spectacular nature they believed only distracted audiences from truly appreciating Shakespeare’s poetic genius. Revelling in a misconceived nostalgia, Samuel Coleridge contended that the early modern stage ‘had no artificial, extraneous inducements – few scenes, little music’. According to Coleridge, this state of affairs meant that Shakespeare had ‘to rely on his own imagination’, and was encouraged to ‘speak not to the sense, as was now done, but to the mind’.¹⁴ Demonstrating an even more explicit anti-theatricalism, Charles Lamb expressed a bitter hatred of performances of Shakespeare, concluding that the stage’s visual spectacles could only appeal to ‘the weaker sort of minds’.¹⁵ The genius of Shakespeare lay in his words, not his images; according to Coleridge and Lamb, Shakespeare needed to be heard and not seen. But even the most cursory glance at Shakespeare’s plays demonstrates precisely the opposite. In Titus Andronicus (per. 1588–93), a messenger presents Titus with the gruesome spectacle of the ‘heads’ of his ‘two noble sons’ and his own ‘hand’ (Tit III.i.237–8). In Julius Caesar (per. 1599), Mark Antony mourns over the ‘savage spectacle’ of Caesar’s corpse (JC III.i.223). In Cymbeline (per. 1611), the god Jupiter ‘descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle’, throwing ‘a thunderbolt’ (Cym V.iii). Spectacle is crucial to Shakespeare’s dramaturgy.

This leads me to yet another myth: it is still widely believed that while Shakespeare was a poetic genius who only needed language to ignite his audience’s imagination, less gifted playwrights had to rely on garish visual effects to entertain their spectators. Andrew Gurr’s dismissive attitude towards spectacle is a direct consequence of his belief that playwrights divided playgoers ‘according to the priority of eye or ear’, hence:

‘Audience’ harks back to its judicial sense of giving a case a hearing. ‘Spectators’ belong at football matches where the eye takes in more information than the ear.¹⁶

Thus, according to Gurr’s argument, the ‘audience’ – those who hear – are imagined as wise judicial intellectuals, while the ‘spectators’ – those who see – are demoted to the status of the mob who react only as members of the collective mass. This intellectual snobbery can be traced back to Ben Jonson who, embroiled in his debate with Inigo Jones, vehemently maintained that the power of his masques lay in his poetry not in Jones’s scenic design.¹⁷ Consequently, Jonson had a vested interest in valuing ‘[w]ords, above action’ and in deriding spectacle, which he claimed excited the eyes and not the mind.¹⁸ According to Jonson, drama should be:

offered, as a rite,

To scholars, that can judge, and fair report

The sense they hear, above the vulgar sort

Of nut-crackers, that only come for sight.¹⁹

It is Jonson then who bequeathed us the pervading assumption that early modern audiences went to ‘hear, not to see a play’.²⁰

This is simply not the case; there are arguably just as many references to ‘spectators’ as there are to ‘audiences’ in early modern drama. Indeed, as Gurr’s own endnotes demonstrate, the term ‘auditor’ seems to have run parallel to ‘spectator’ up to the closure in 1642.²¹ Most of the references to ‘spectators’ in early modern plays appear in prologues and are on the whole not pejorative.²² Numerous early modern plays venerate spectators, emphasising their ‘genius’, their ability to ‘judge and censure’ drama and describing them as ‘gracious’, ‘heroic and benevolent’.²³ In his short religious poem On the Life of Man, Sir Walter Ralegh states:

Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is,

That sits and marks still who doth act amiss²⁴

While in The Fair Maid of the West (1631), Thomas Heywood goes so far as to claim that even the ‘Gods themselves’ act as ‘spectators’.²⁵

This brings us to the final myth: the widespread assumption that early modern audiences were made up of an uneducated rabble of pickpockets, thieves and whores. In 1941, Alfred Harbage produced a book-length study on the estimated size and social composition of early modern theatre audiences. He concluded that ‘Shakespeare’s audience’ represented a ‘cross section of the London population of his day’ but that ‘it was predominantly a working-class audience because of the great numerical superiority of the working classes in the London area and because theatrical tariffs had been designed largely for them’.²⁶ Harbage also made a distinction between the citizens and artisans who frequented the outdoor amphitheatres and the coterie audiences at the indoor playhouses. But, as Ann Jennalie Cook argues, Harbage’s perspective on audience demographics was somewhat clouded ‘by a sentimental faith in the common man’.²⁷ Determined to prove why ‘the private theatres begat no second Shakespeare’, Harbage had a vested interest in distinguishing between the public theatres, which supposedly produced crowd pleasing masterpieces, and the private theatres, which were apparently forced to produce elaborate but ultimately second-rate drama in order to pander to the elite.²⁸ Taking a different stance, Ann Jennalie Cook has argued that theatre spectators came predominantly ‘from the upper levels of the social order’.²⁹ More recently in his book Playgoing in Shakespeare’s Londo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Conventions
• Introduction
• 1 The Aesthetics of Spectacle
• Part I Stage Properties
• Part II Stage Conventions
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index