Here are a handful of videos to give you a better taste of kunqu and jingxi
1) This is a promotional video from one of several productions of the kunqu opera, Peony Pavilion that took place earlier this decade in response to a UNESCO project focussing on the form as a world cultural treasure. There is a narration by UC Berkeley professor Pai Hsien-yung who emphasizes such typical elements of the form as its exquisitely decorated costumes and beautiful poetry. Kunqu is a very high and refined form that translates easily to elite contemporary global touring venues.
2) A scene from Peony Pavilion performed in a more traditional style on a traditional stage. If you find this harder to watch or less interesting than the clip above, think about the fact that the one above has been marketed for Western audiences. What have they done to make it more attractive for us?
3) A scene from a jingxi performance with various jing and wu sheng characters engaged in a battle sequence. As with kathakali, note that it isn't really about the narrative story so much as the performers displaying the essence of the experience of battle. In this sense, think of it more like dance.
4) Another video collage of a jingxi performance on a proscenium stage featuring some of the characteristic acrobatic fight scenes and the ever-popular "monkey" character. This is what all that intense physical training accomplishes!
5) Rare footage of Mei Lanfang at the age of 60 performing the dan role from the jingxi play, Farewell, my Concubine.
Wednesday, February 18
Monday, February 16
Chinese "opera": kunqu & jingxi and their actors
17th century painting of a private stage in Peking where kunqu might have been performed (left) and a mid-19th century Chinese stage showing the clear influence of Western proscenium scenography (right)
* * * * *
Historical overview
The Sung Dynasty (906-1279) saw the development of institutions and practices crucial to the emergence of a professional, commercial Chinese theater. An emergent middle class built numerous permanent theaters. The nanxi theatrical style, which developed at this time in South China, made extensive use of regional folk music styles and sophisticated typological systems of characterization. But the strongest evidence appears under the Mongol rulers of China in the late 13th and 14th centuries. This Yuan drama was patronized by the court of Kublai Khan, and many of the plays that are performed in all the forms of Chinese theatre were first written during this time. Chinese theatre artists look back on the Yuan drama as the golden age of Chinese playwriting when the most sophisticated and refined (that is, the most courtly) plays were written. These plays are more literary and have a more linear plot structure than most later Chinese opera and concentrate on a single protagonist who is the only singing character (somewhat like the first Greek tragedies which only had one “actor”). However, unlike the Japanese who revere the golden age of Noh or Westerners who revere Shakespeare, Chinese feel free to change these Yuan plays to adapt them to whatever new forms they want. The words of the playwright are not sacred in China.
During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and the first century of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1910), Chinese theatre drawing from folk traditions and the Yuan drama developed differently in the different provinces. During the 16th and 17th centuries, a very refined form of Chinese Opera known as Kunqu developed in the Northern cities. Kunqu drew from the literary Yuan dramas, developed refined music and became the Chinese national theatre form. But unlike in Japan where refinement brought Noh greater respect, refinement destroyed Kunqu. Chinese audiences demanded something more exciting.
In 1779 (at a point when Kunqu was practically dead) for the Emperor’s seventieth birthday (and again ten years later for his eightieth birthday) troupes of a more popular, more spectacular form called clapper opera came to Peking from the province of Anhui. They were so successful that many of them remained in Peking and spawned a new school of performance that developed into Jingxi (Peking/Beijing Opera), and influenced the development of similar regional operas all over China.
Chinese opera clearly started in more popular venues even though it first became a sensation in the North as part of a courtly celebration. Performances of Chinese opera were and still are given in the streets as well as in lavish theatre buildings. However, probably the most typical place to see Chinese opera is in a teahouse theatre. Similar to our “dinner theatres,” these are places where people go to drink tea, eat, socialize, gamble, and (up through the nineteenth century) smoke opium. Teahouses varied in how exclusive they were, and could house a wide variety of different kinds of theatre from puppet shows to Chinese opera.
* * * * *
Acting in Chinese Theatre
As we saw in the extracts from the film, Farewell, my Concubine, training of boys for Chinese opera was similarly rough and rigorous as for kathakali performers in India. Boys in acting schools (who typically came from impoverished backgrounds) were treated as property of their teachers. This could certainly be abusive. At the same time, the life of an actor offered the opportunity for fame and success otherwise unimaginable for poor Chinese children with no education.
As in India, young actors training in China would be selected early for their physical qualities and talent to specialize in specific role types. There are four basic character types in Chinese Opera: sheng (male archetype roles such as old men (lao sheng) and warriors (wu sheng), tan/dan (female characters, played in all-male troupes by men), ching/jing (painted face male characters – often kings or mythological figures) and ch’ou (clown characters)
As in India, Chinese actors portray their characters through a complex system of codified gestures (although Chinese acting gestures are generally symbolic rather than a complete sign language like Indian mudras), movements, styles of walking, styles of speaking and singing, costumes and make-up. The most famous of Chinese acting conventions are the hua lien (painted faces). Although painted faces may be quite simple as for the Dan roles (usually just white make-up with blush highlights), they can be quite elaborate for the ching/jing characters, using symbolic lines and highlights and different symbolic colors to indicate character complexity.
In Qing Ding Pearl, the fisherman's daughter is obviously a dan role, famously played by Mei Lanfang, the most celebrated Chinese actor of the twentieth century. The character is a model of the kind of filial piety expected of daughters towards their fathers in Confucian social philosophy. Her father is a typical lao sheng. His friends, the fighters, are most likely wu sheng. The diabolical magistrate is a jing character, and the comic "boxers" are chou clowns, similar to braggart soldier characters in numerous world theatre traditions.
(Left to right, top to bottom) A lao sheng character, four different jing characters, a "flower dan" (an innocent girl role), a ch'ou clown character
Wednesday, February 11
Indian kathakali overview
“It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen.. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”
From Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
* * * * *
Chronology
1645-1716 Reign of Kottayam Tampuran who writes a set of 4 plays based on stories from the Mahabharata, which become the elite repertoire of kathakali. With the addition of the Kottayam plays to the repertoire, there was a shift of emphasis from narrative to more refined aesthetics. This attracted more Namboodiri patronage. During this period, masks were first replaced with facial make-up for demons and monkeys and the convention of singers for the text and actors restricted to hand gestures began.
Late 18th c, System of hand gestures expanded based on kutiyattam (a dance-drama with close links to the ancient Sanskrit drama) and Hastalaksanadipika, an important Sanskrit manual of gesture language. Princes of two of Kerala’s three most powerful kingdoms patronize and write for kathakali. There is a rise in popularity of rajasic (knife-type) anti-hero characters. Close study of the Natyasastra leads to a growing emphasis on subtlety of expression.
1815-61 Utram Tirunal Maharaja reigns. Under his patronage, Nalanunni develops the Kidangoor style in Travancore, southern Kerala, which emphasizes rasabhinava (the expressive use of the face in performance). The importance of this is reflected in the emphasis placed on such expressiveness in kathakali training, which includes intensive training of the eye and face muscles and mastery of 9 basic facial expressions connected to different rasas.
1850 Unnir Panikkar, under the patronage of the Olappamanna Mana household in central Kerala, develops the Kalluvayi composite style, which placed an emphasis on the “technical virtuosity” demanded by the four Kottayam plays. With this style, there is also considerable emphasis on ilakivattam (interpolations that the performer elaborates into the text of the play, such as the elaborations of Simhika grooming herself in scene 8 of The Killing of Kirmira.)
1930 After 7 years of fundraising (including a national lottery) led by the Malayali poet Mahakavia Vallathol Narayana Menon, the Kerala Kalamandalam opens, a government-sponsored institution initiating “a new institutional and patronage framework to support traditional kathakali teaching and performance.” (30) The Kerala Kalamandalam adopted the Kalluvayi style and kathakali began to be marketed among Malayalis as a marker of their identity and at a national level as a marker of a distinctive Indian national identity.
* * * * *
Rasa/Bhava and the non-duality of kathakali
As students from World Theatre 1 will hopefully remember, rasa is the flavor, taste or sentiment that a spectator is supposed to experience as a result of the actor’s performance. The word bhava is used to describe the actor’s experience, what the actor does and feels to produce in the spectator a corresponding experience of rasa. Whereas Aristotelian theatres are justified by their moral social function, theatres of the Sanskrit tradition are typically described as providing the spectator an “experience” that he can savor like the many different flavors in a good meal. For this reason, theatres of the Sanskrit tradition use rasa and bhava to make a distinction that is often unclear in European theory: the experience of the actor is not the same as the experience of the audience. The actor does not experience sadness to make the audience feel sad. Instead, he performs the appropriate bhavas that generate the experience of sadness in the audience. This leads many critics to understand Indian acting as ‘external’ in its approach compared to Western ‘internal’ acting. Phillip Zarrilli, however, argues that it isn’t as simple as that.
In his book on kathakali dance-drama, Zarrilli analyzes a famous passage from the Abhinayadarpanam, a medieval Sanskrit text frequently cited as the most important commentary on the Natyasastra, the foundational work of Indian Sanskrit dramatic theory. Like all the neoclassical commentaries on Aristotle and Horace we’ve been mentioning, the Abhinayadarpanam tries to clarify the key terms of its ancient source to make them more useful in describing contemporary theatre practice. It contains a famous passage often described as the best description of the concepts of rasa and bhava. Zarrilli translate the passage as follows:
Where the hand is, there is the eye;
Where the eye is, there is the mind;
Where the mind is, there is the bhava;
Where the bhava is, there is the rasa. (91)
The student actor begins by learning where to put the hand, where to focus the eye and how to direct the mind. Insofar as it has not yet become natural to him, his actions are always intentional, always “moving towards” the goal. For the master actor, there is no experience of a separation between body and mind, nor between craft and genuine experience. The master’s gaze follows his gesture. He is breathing and feeling the emotions fueled by the breath. He is crafting the performance and experiencing the performance all at the same time.
This is not, however, what the ideal spectator experiences. The ideal spectator is involved enough to savor the experience of the actor’s performance, and at the same time detached enough to appreciate the artistry and skill of the performer. He experiences delight while never really forgetting that he is watching a play.
The kathakali actor does “become” and “represent” the character, but these terms mean something a little different than our assumptions rooted in Stanislavsky and Aristotle.
* * * * *
General characteristics
Katha (story) + kali (dance/play) . A style distinctive to the state of Kerala in South India. Developed in the 16th and 17th centuries and is still popular today.
Most of the stories are adaptations either from the Mahabharata or Ramayana or from the puranas (encyclopedic collections of traditional stories or knowledge)
There is an active repertoire of approximately 60 plays out of about 500 that have been written (think about this in comparisons to the conditions of French renaissance acting troupes). Most of these plays were written by royal author-patrons or other authors working under their patronage, though a small number of plays have been added in the past century. Traditionally, performances would last all night.
The acting companies were traditionally all-male. Boys would train traditionally from the age of 7, nowadays they start at around 10. They would undergo an intensive training in a kalari, a family compound where they would learn the kathakali repertoire and basic acting techniques alongside basic physical training based in the martial art form known as kalaryipayattu, which was once a proprietary skill of the Nayar soldier caste. Thanks to this connection, kathakali is based in a high degree of athleticism and such basic concepts of martial arts as centering and connection of action to breath. As in many of the other forms we’ve talked about, there are stock characters and specific actors are chosen by their teachers to train for specific types because of their natural looks and aptitude and many actors become famous for specific types and roles.
There have been female kathakali troupes and foreign women have studied at the official institutes, but there is still resistance to training Indian women and accepting the legitimacy of female performers.
Since the 18th century, musicians sing the poetic dialogue, whereas actor-dancers express emotion through facial expressions and verbal language through sign language (mudras). The hand-gestures and physical movements are so demanding, as are the precise movements of the facial features, that it would be hard for actors to speak as well. Spectators always see a split image of performer and musicians who are speaking.
Traditionally, beginning in the 17th century, patronage of kathakali depended on the caste system (jati) with the high caste Namboodiri Brahmins and Nayars taking it as a duty and privilege to write plays, sponsor and support performances and sometimes even to perform themselves. The base-unit of “house and its land” defined the relationship. Royal Namboodiri patrons were expected to be protectors of the social order and to patronize the arts as one of many ways of acquiring “good fruits” for family and kingdom, and ensuring general prosperity. (21)
At the same time, members of the Nayar soldier caste trained in the indigenous martial art, kalaripayattu, which was closely tied to the sentiment of vira (heroism) and became a major cornerstone for kathakali actor training. Under the early patrons, “actor/dancer” became a new social role associated with the middle-ranking Nayars. And so acting became a jati-specific activity for the Nayars, supported by the Namboodiris. The heroic state embodied by the paccha (green) make-up type became a central concern of kathakali. The paccha style reflects “basic moral uprightness, inner refinement, and calm inner poise, the ‘royal sage’ of Sanskrit drama whose task as a Ksatriya is to uphold dharma” (23-4).
The Namboodiri patrons came to be known as rasika (connoisseurs, or those who experience rasa). “Namboodiri interest and patronage brought gradual changes to kathakali, strengthening its movement towards literary, poetic, and aesthetic refinement.” (23)
From Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
* * * * *
Chronology
1645-1716 Reign of Kottayam Tampuran who writes a set of 4 plays based on stories from the Mahabharata, which become the elite repertoire of kathakali. With the addition of the Kottayam plays to the repertoire, there was a shift of emphasis from narrative to more refined aesthetics. This attracted more Namboodiri patronage. During this period, masks were first replaced with facial make-up for demons and monkeys and the convention of singers for the text and actors restricted to hand gestures began.
Late 18th c, System of hand gestures expanded based on kutiyattam (a dance-drama with close links to the ancient Sanskrit drama) and Hastalaksanadipika, an important Sanskrit manual of gesture language. Princes of two of Kerala’s three most powerful kingdoms patronize and write for kathakali. There is a rise in popularity of rajasic (knife-type) anti-hero characters. Close study of the Natyasastra leads to a growing emphasis on subtlety of expression.
1815-61 Utram Tirunal Maharaja reigns. Under his patronage, Nalanunni develops the Kidangoor style in Travancore, southern Kerala, which emphasizes rasabhinava (the expressive use of the face in performance). The importance of this is reflected in the emphasis placed on such expressiveness in kathakali training, which includes intensive training of the eye and face muscles and mastery of 9 basic facial expressions connected to different rasas.
1850 Unnir Panikkar, under the patronage of the Olappamanna Mana household in central Kerala, develops the Kalluvayi composite style, which placed an emphasis on the “technical virtuosity” demanded by the four Kottayam plays. With this style, there is also considerable emphasis on ilakivattam (interpolations that the performer elaborates into the text of the play, such as the elaborations of Simhika grooming herself in scene 8 of The Killing of Kirmira.)
1930 After 7 years of fundraising (including a national lottery) led by the Malayali poet Mahakavia Vallathol Narayana Menon, the Kerala Kalamandalam opens, a government-sponsored institution initiating “a new institutional and patronage framework to support traditional kathakali teaching and performance.” (30) The Kerala Kalamandalam adopted the Kalluvayi style and kathakali began to be marketed among Malayalis as a marker of their identity and at a national level as a marker of a distinctive Indian national identity.
* * * * *
Rasa/Bhava and the non-duality of kathakali
As students from World Theatre 1 will hopefully remember, rasa is the flavor, taste or sentiment that a spectator is supposed to experience as a result of the actor’s performance. The word bhava is used to describe the actor’s experience, what the actor does and feels to produce in the spectator a corresponding experience of rasa. Whereas Aristotelian theatres are justified by their moral social function, theatres of the Sanskrit tradition are typically described as providing the spectator an “experience” that he can savor like the many different flavors in a good meal. For this reason, theatres of the Sanskrit tradition use rasa and bhava to make a distinction that is often unclear in European theory: the experience of the actor is not the same as the experience of the audience. The actor does not experience sadness to make the audience feel sad. Instead, he performs the appropriate bhavas that generate the experience of sadness in the audience. This leads many critics to understand Indian acting as ‘external’ in its approach compared to Western ‘internal’ acting. Phillip Zarrilli, however, argues that it isn’t as simple as that.
In his book on kathakali dance-drama, Zarrilli analyzes a famous passage from the Abhinayadarpanam, a medieval Sanskrit text frequently cited as the most important commentary on the Natyasastra, the foundational work of Indian Sanskrit dramatic theory. Like all the neoclassical commentaries on Aristotle and Horace we’ve been mentioning, the Abhinayadarpanam tries to clarify the key terms of its ancient source to make them more useful in describing contemporary theatre practice. It contains a famous passage often described as the best description of the concepts of rasa and bhava. Zarrilli translate the passage as follows:
Where the hand is, there is the eye;
Where the eye is, there is the mind;
Where the mind is, there is the bhava;
Where the bhava is, there is the rasa. (91)
The student actor begins by learning where to put the hand, where to focus the eye and how to direct the mind. Insofar as it has not yet become natural to him, his actions are always intentional, always “moving towards” the goal. For the master actor, there is no experience of a separation between body and mind, nor between craft and genuine experience. The master’s gaze follows his gesture. He is breathing and feeling the emotions fueled by the breath. He is crafting the performance and experiencing the performance all at the same time.
This is not, however, what the ideal spectator experiences. The ideal spectator is involved enough to savor the experience of the actor’s performance, and at the same time detached enough to appreciate the artistry and skill of the performer. He experiences delight while never really forgetting that he is watching a play.
The kathakali actor does “become” and “represent” the character, but these terms mean something a little different than our assumptions rooted in Stanislavsky and Aristotle.
* * * * *
General characteristics
Katha (story) + kali (dance/play) . A style distinctive to the state of Kerala in South India. Developed in the 16th and 17th centuries and is still popular today.
Most of the stories are adaptations either from the Mahabharata or Ramayana or from the puranas (encyclopedic collections of traditional stories or knowledge)
There is an active repertoire of approximately 60 plays out of about 500 that have been written (think about this in comparisons to the conditions of French renaissance acting troupes). Most of these plays were written by royal author-patrons or other authors working under their patronage, though a small number of plays have been added in the past century. Traditionally, performances would last all night.
The acting companies were traditionally all-male. Boys would train traditionally from the age of 7, nowadays they start at around 10. They would undergo an intensive training in a kalari, a family compound where they would learn the kathakali repertoire and basic acting techniques alongside basic physical training based in the martial art form known as kalaryipayattu, which was once a proprietary skill of the Nayar soldier caste. Thanks to this connection, kathakali is based in a high degree of athleticism and such basic concepts of martial arts as centering and connection of action to breath. As in many of the other forms we’ve talked about, there are stock characters and specific actors are chosen by their teachers to train for specific types because of their natural looks and aptitude and many actors become famous for specific types and roles.
There have been female kathakali troupes and foreign women have studied at the official institutes, but there is still resistance to training Indian women and accepting the legitimacy of female performers.
Since the 18th century, musicians sing the poetic dialogue, whereas actor-dancers express emotion through facial expressions and verbal language through sign language (mudras). The hand-gestures and physical movements are so demanding, as are the precise movements of the facial features, that it would be hard for actors to speak as well. Spectators always see a split image of performer and musicians who are speaking.
Traditionally, beginning in the 17th century, patronage of kathakali depended on the caste system (jati) with the high caste Namboodiri Brahmins and Nayars taking it as a duty and privilege to write plays, sponsor and support performances and sometimes even to perform themselves. The base-unit of “house and its land” defined the relationship. Royal Namboodiri patrons were expected to be protectors of the social order and to patronize the arts as one of many ways of acquiring “good fruits” for family and kingdom, and ensuring general prosperity. (21)
At the same time, members of the Nayar soldier caste trained in the indigenous martial art, kalaripayattu, which was closely tied to the sentiment of vira (heroism) and became a major cornerstone for kathakali actor training. Under the early patrons, “actor/dancer” became a new social role associated with the middle-ranking Nayars. And so acting became a jati-specific activity for the Nayars, supported by the Namboodiris. The heroic state embodied by the paccha (green) make-up type became a central concern of kathakali. The paccha style reflects “basic moral uprightness, inner refinement, and calm inner poise, the ‘royal sage’ of Sanskrit drama whose task as a Ksatriya is to uphold dharma” (23-4).
The Namboodiri patrons came to be known as rasika (connoisseurs, or those who experience rasa). “Namboodiri interest and patronage brought gradual changes to kathakali, strengthening its movement towards literary, poetic, and aesthetic refinement.” (23)
Monday, February 9
Indian kathakali dance-drama videos
Map of the states of India. Kerala, where kathakali comes from, is on the southwest coast.
In class, we watched a video of 'some guy' trying on kathakali makeup and practicing a few of the facial expressions. A brave attempt, given the long and intensive training Tommy described, which professionals feel is necessary before an actor can be seen onstage. Here are a few videos of professionals performing. Of course, there's not enough time in one week for you all to become rasika (connosieurs of the art)! But see if you can start to get a sense from these of what the major character types look like, what the major features of their makeup and costumes are, and how their acting styles differ. What kind of 7 or 9 year old boy might be selected to train for each specific character?
1) Two demonstrations of kathakali eye movements (without makeup)
2) A scene of Arjuna and Krishna, two paccha (green, heroic) archetypes. This is from a performance on a proscenium stage for a Western audience, so the polished white floor, modern lighting and lack of an audience nearby are all highly untraditional. Nevertheless, there's good cinematography and some very helpful subtitles.
3) A scene of a demoness (black) archetype, grooming herself. This is a different interpretation of the character of Sidhika from The Killing of Kirmira, the text I gave you for Wednesday. Once again, this is a performance on a proscenium stage with modern lighting and good cinematography. The video we'll see in class is a worse video, but it is taken in a traditional context. Compare these performances to get a sense of what is actually codified in the form, and what the actor can improvise.
4) A clip from a 1960s documentary on India by Louis Malle with footage shot in Madras of bharatanatyam, a classical dance form also related to the Sanskrit aesthetics of rasa and bhava, and kathakali. The kathakali sequence, which is of students practicing in a course at a conservatory in Madras, begins at around 7:40. Here we see how kathakali has been taken into the national arts curriculum and incorporated into the broader performance culture of South India.
Wednesday, February 4
Behn's The Rover (1677)
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)
Aphra Behn is the first professional female playwright, as far as we know, in the world. She wrote 17 plays, of which The Rover is the most famous, now and in her own lifetime (it was so popular that she wrote a sequel), as well as poetry and novellas, the best known of which is Oroonoko, a sympathetic portrayal of an African slave in Surinam. She became quite favored in the court of Charles II, and participated in the most elite literary and societal circles until her death in 1689.
Behn specifically sets The Rovers in the Italian city of Naples at a time when it was controlled by Spain during the Puritan interregnum. The “Banished Cavaliers” or Rovers are specifically the English aristocracy who were banished from England at this time. Behn uses this context to denounce the Puritans, poke jabs at the Spanish, and extol an Italian carnival atmosphere that is analogous to Restoration London.
At the same time, she is aware of current political disputes brewing between the Whigs (mostly middle class and higher aristocracy who distrusted the King and advocated greater alliance with European Catholicism) and the Tories (mostly lesser aristocracy who allied themselves with the King and the Church of England.) In 1688, this dispute would erupt into the Glorious Revolution in which the Dutch monarch, William of Orange, took control of England and James II fled to France. In 1677, however, Behn sided firmly against the Whigs.
A note on acting in the Restoration
Despite the construction of increasingly lavish proscenium theatres like Dorset Garden, restoration comedy was still very much an actor’s theatre. The projection of the forestage into the auditorium allowed the actors a great deal of interaction with the audience, who they would often know personally. And the modern etiquette of everybody being quiet, still and attentive during a performance was not the norm (David Garrick actually enforced this kind of behavior for the first time in the mid-18th century) So actors had to not only compete with audience members for attention, but sometimes be ready to parry comments from them. For this reason, repartee (the ability to speak extemporaneously with grace and wit, particularly in exchanging insults and ridicule) was a primary skill for actors.
Fops and Rakes
These stock characters were part of the typical structure of Restoration comedy. They are versions of the typical protagonist and antagonist roles from Greek and Roman Comedy. The Fop is an Imposter character, a prating fool who doesn’t measure up to societal standards, and the Rake is the Ironist who calls his bluff. In The Rover, these characters are Blunt and Wilmore. However, one of the most striking questions for the play is just how much the female characters (particularly Florinda and Hellena) get the better of even the Rake.
This connects to another question: Does it make a noticeable difference that The Rover is the work of a female playwright? What kind of powers and constraints does Behn imagine for Florinda and Hellena? Is she critiquing the patriarchal society of the day, or does the play ultimately support the status quo?
Drury Lane & Dorset Garden
Wealthy patrons of the Dorset Garden theatre would arrive at the theatre along the Thames by boat
When King Charles II gave Davenant and Killigrew warrants to form their two companies of players in 1660, he likewise gave them leave 'to purchase, build and erect or hire at their charge... two houses or theatres'. After the Puritan interregnum, the options for venues were initially limited. Killigrew's King's Company occupied a converted tennis-court (following a common French practice) whereas Davenant's Duke's Company occupied an old playhouse at Salisbury Court. However, Davenant immediately began planning a playhouse that would enable him to make use of the Italian innovations in scenery already so popular in France. The converted tennis court theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields, which opened in 1661, was the first such attempt and marks the beginning of a distinctive Restoration style of playhouse. The stage was extremely deep to allow both mid-level scenic spectacle as well as more distant 'vistas'. A deep forestage under and beyond the proscenium arch was where most of the acting took place. Everything was lit by candles and chandeliers. With boxes up both sides of the stage, the actors and audience are fairly intimate. There is no gulf between actors and audience as in later proscenium theatres. This basic approach is also evident in the Drury Lane theatre, which Killigrew opened in 1663.
As was true throughout Europe at the time, lighting by candles combined with extensive scenery of fabric and wood contributed to frequent fires. Drury Lane burned down in 1672, and a second theatre was built there in 1674. This second theatre was demolished in 1791 by Sheridan so that he could build a grander one in 1794. This theatre burned down in 1809. The fourth Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, which is still a fixture of the London theatre scene, was erected in 1812.
A performance at the Covent Garden theatre in 1674.
Elevation of second Drury Lane by Thomas Leacroft and a scene of a 1674 performance
Davenant, however, like many a modern producer, had his sights set on making theatre ever more extravagant. He died in 1668, but the Duke's Company was carried on in the same style under the leadership of Betterton. With the opening of his new playhouse at Dorset Garden in 1671, he set a new standard for scenic spectacle. The theatre was demolished in 1709, but we get some sense of its cavernous depth and height from a few surviving engravings of scenes from Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673). It is designed for a level of spectacle that would surely overwhelm most drama, and makes Drury Lane look quite cozy in comparison. Nevertheless, many of the most famous plays of the era, including Aphra Behn's The Rover, premiered there. We can only guess at what the production must have looked like!
Engravings of The Empress of Morocco (1673) at Dorset Garden
Monday, February 2
John Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668)
Portrait of John Dryden (1631-1700). Despite the prominence the painter gives a volume of Shakespeare, Dryden himself did not praise the Bard as unreservedly as many later critics would.
Here are a few highlight's from Kristy's presentation on Dryden's Essay:
The first significant part of the essay comes in the form of the definition of a play: “A just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, to the delight and instruction of mankind.” By using the term “image of human nature,” it appears that Dryden is using the word “image” to highlight the fact that the focus of theater is becoming more visually and spectacle based. Also, Dryden refers to “human nature” throughout this essay and it can be said that he is using it as a way to make the experience of theater more universal for all types of audiences.
The third argument centers on the concept of nationalism: Which country’s drama is superior – France or England’s? Lisideius defends the French and Neander defends the superiority of the English stage.
Lisideius’s arguments for the French include: Strict regard for the unities; refusal to mix comic and serious elements; economic plotting; expert narration that permits the avoidance of duels and battles on stage; well-motivated characters and skill in verse.
Neander’s arguments for the English include: that the French follow not nature, but artistic rules and achieve only an artificial beauty; that French plots are bare, passions cold, variety stifled by the strict separation of genres and believability sacrificed to a rigid adherence to the unities. Neander also defends the use of action on the English stage: “If we are to be blam’d for showing too much of the action, the French are as faulty for discovering too little of it.”
That said, Dryden struggled with the argument between classic principles and traditional English practice. He wavered between a traditional Aristotelian understanding of tragedy and a recognition that successful English works by Shakespeare and others involve subplots and some kind of mixture of comedy and tragedy that cannot be reconciled with neoclassicism. For example, in 1681 he admits to mixing serious and comic elements for “the pleasure of variety” since audiences “are grown weary of continu’d melancholy scenes.” He even argues that tragicomedy should be respected as a distinct form, as difficult to create as tragedy, “for ‘tis more difficult to save than ‘tis to kill.”
Dryden seems to be arguing for a movement towards more naturalistic dialogue. However, he stops short of advocating for truly realistic dialogue (prose) on the stage. Keep paying attention to this as we read plays that are closer and closer to our own time. It is very seductive to take the "presentist" perspective that all past practices are steps in a progression culminating in our own culture, which is the best. Obviously, we don't really believe that or we wouldn't keep performing plays written hundreds of years ago. So how do plays like Tartuffe and The Rover work even though they are not yet "realistic" in our modern sense?
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