Comparative Drama

Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse supplies a comprehensive and nuanced study of the Blackfriars. Drawing inspiration from the recent inauguration of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (modelled on what may be John Webb’s drawing of a Jacobean indoor playhouse from the Restoration), this elegant collection of essays sheds new light on how the material conditions of the Blackfriars may have influenced the ways in which plays were performed there, as well as on the historical circumstances that may have led The King’s Men to move into that playhouse in 1609.

In Part I, “The Context of Hard Evidence,” contributors explore the conditions of playing in England in the early seventeenth century, consider evidence for the construction and decoration of an indoor Jacobean playhouse, and decipher staging possibilities at the second Blackfriars. In Part II, “Materiality Indoors,” [End Page 104] contributors focus largely on the material conditions of indoor playing, stage practice, and audience response. In Part III, “The New Fashions for Indoors,” contributors address the following thorny question: what shaped the repertory of Shakespeare’s company from the early years of the seventeenth century onwards?

Regardless of these foci, all the contributors take up basic questions relating to indoor stage practice and repertoire composition. Rather than challenging conventional wisdom about the material conditions of the Blackfriars Playhouse (Harbage 1952 and Gurr 2009, for instance), several contributors consider, in interesting and varied ways, whether the move indoors in 1609 (during the winter months) impelled Shakespeare’s company to develop a unique style of performance. In fact, concentrating on matters such as the Blackfriars’ smaller stage with its stool-sitting gallants, the breaks in performance required to trim the candles, the use of a consort of musicians, and the tastes of coterie audiences, they reach the consensus that the “indoor style” was unlike the Globe’s: “private not public; coterie not populist; intimate not rowdy,” as Paul Menzer puts it (170).

For instance, Farah Karim-Cooper (chapter 10) demonstrates the effects cosmetic face paint could produce in a candlelit playhouse attended by lavishly attired patrons, and also how cosmetics along with other aspects of indoor dramaturgy created an atmosphere of intimacy (produced at the Globe by other means). She likens the experience to a modern fashion show, where actors and wealthy audience members competed for attention. Although coterie audiences at the indoor theaters (some of whom attended performances to see and be seen) were less diverse than the Globe’s, due to the higher admission fee, does KarimCooper’s “fashion show” analogy threaten to occlude the broader theatrical event at the Blackfriars?

Tiffany Stern’s “The Second Blackfriars Playhouse as a Place of Nostalgia” (chapter 5) argues that the plays performed by Shakespeare’s company sometimes allude to the history of the Blackfriars’ building, in its various incarnations (and uses). In a section entitled “Parliamentary Nostalgia,” Stern repeats the well-known fact that in Henry VIII Shakespeare alludes to that theater’s “past life” as a legatine court, where the annulment trial of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon took place about 80 years before Shakespeare dramatized that event. Soon after, she concludes, “the urge to re-enact Henry VIII’s divorce story in the very space where it happened is surely behind Shakespeare’s choice to write a play on that subject in the first place” (105). Plausible though it is, Stern’s broad conclusion relies on a single brief reference to the Blackfriars: “For such receipt of learning is Blackfriars” (Henry VIII, 2.2.137). Furthermore, her point echoes one already made in Gordon McMullan’s Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death” (2007): [End Page 105]

More to the point, the historical resonance of performance in the Blackfriars space was considerable, since the very same building had been used for the 1529 divorce hearing of Henry and Katherine of Aragon dramatized in 2.4, and the play makes sure nobody misses the connection: “The most convenient place that I can think of / For such receipt of learning,” says King Henry, unnecessarily, at the end of 2.2, “is Blackfriars” (2.2.136–7), making it hard to deny that the play was written with a view to performance in that space.

(98)

Stern and most other contributors agree that the late plays (i.e., The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Cymbeline, Henry VIII [with Fletcher?], and The Two Noble Kinsman [with Fletcher]) were written specifically for the Blackfriars Playhouse, a subject this review will address next.

Did Shakespeare’s company develop a distinctive “Blackfriars repertoire” after 1609? Judging by The Tempest’s spectacular opening, the play seems better suited to the staging apparatus of the larger Globe Theatre, as the collection’s introduction states (11). In fact, the Folio version of The Tempest attests to its having been staged there. Nevertheless, since most of the contributors consider the late plays to be “Blackfriars Plays,” they place greater emphasis on the differences, rather than the similarities, between the playing spaces Shakespeare’s company occupied before and after 1609. Mezner (chapter 9) goes so far as to suggest that the move indoors heralded the demise of the open-air theaters and the birth of modern theater as we know it: “The Blackfriars struck the death knell not just for the Globe, not just for early English outdoor playing, but for a theatrical norm of outside theatre that was nearly two thousand years old” (171). Even though the Second Globe entertained audiences well into the seventeenth century, he adds, “in modern terms, the Blackfriars altered the ‘aspect ratio’ of spectatorship, introducing a new sensory norm” (173).

Mariko Ichikawa (chapter 4) writes, “The Two Noble Kinsmen, a tragicomedy by Shakespeare and Fletcher, was most probably written specifically for the Blackfriars during the period between the burning of the Globe in 1613 and the completion of its reconstruction in 1614” (88). To support the “Blackfriars repertoire” theory, Ichikawa and others present evidence of the material conditions of indoor playing mainly from Shakespeare’s late plays. But these, of course, were not the only Shakespearean plays to be staged at the Blackfriars after 1609. Many of the early comedies, histories, and tragedies were likely to have been staged there (especially those plays that met success in previous years at the Globe and other venues).

Andrew Gurr’s contention (chapter 11) that The Tempest was written specifically for the Blackfriars (212) is based, in part, on the assumption that act breaks are features indicative of performance at that theater: [End Page 106]

Sometimes the Folio versions of the earlier plays, such as Henry V, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, have act breaks marked (though the Folio Henry V gets them wrong). On the whole such built-in pauses were a late development. The breaks were necessary to halt the action at the Blackfriars so that the candles could be trimmed or replaced.

(203–4)

However, references to act breaks in the Folio of 1623 may attest only to the staging of Henry V, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in some indoor venue at some point during their complex performance histories. Pertinent to this assertion is John H. Astington’s observation (chapter 1) that Shakespeare’s company had performed in candlelit venues to coterie audiences long before the acquisition of the Blackfriars Playhouse. He argues with characteristic acuity that plays must have been transported from venue to venue readily; and this staple of playing was the rule rather than the exception in the early modern context: “Both The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale were performed in the winter of 1611/12: they were presented at court in early November of that year, and had probably therefore appeared at the Blackfriars beforehand, in the last weeks of October” (28).

As Martin White’s excellent analysis of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi demonstrates (chapter 6), the competitive playing markets of early modern England impelled The King’s Men to adapt plays to suit the changing material condition of performance, be it in a purpose-built theater, at court, or at a variety of venues on the touring circuit (after all, they aimed to satisfy a wide range of audiences). Therefore, to design a play for the specific demands of the Blackfriars Playhouse would have likely been counterproductive under these circumstances.

Bart Van Es (chapter 13) confirms that what separates Shakespeare’s late plays from the rest of the canon is not the physical space in which they were performed, but rather their dramatic material, which stylistically resembles seventeenth-century tragicomedy: “Recent critics of the late style (such as Russ McDonald) discover its origins as early as Macbeth of 1606” (238). In fact, through careful analysis, Van Es demonstrates the close affinity between Shakespeare’s late plays and Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragicomedies, which responded equally to the period’s changing theatrical tastes. And these generic qualities continued to be adapted well into the Caroline period, as Eleanor Collins observes (chapter 12): “Courtier playwrights appropriated the genre of romance and tragicomedy to explore new ideas about the status of women and establish new dramatic possibilities (and limits to those possibilities) for female characters on stage” (218).

Early in 2014, the new indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse opened its heavy wooden doors to the public. Due to this momentous undertaking, theater practitioners are able to simulate the “indoor experience” of the Second Blackfriars Playhouse for the first time in over 370 years. Moreover, researchers [End Page 107] can study an ornate space that approximates the material conditions of early modern indoor playhouses. Drawing inspiration from this endeavor, Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repetorie in the Jacobean Playhouse is only a prelude to what promises to be a valuable ongoing contribution to the study of early modern performance in the seventeenth century.