The Business of English Restoration Theatre, 1660–1700

So what went wrong? Why did theatre not prosper in the new environment? Why did it limp along?In the old days, the answer would have been that the technical and social advances of the theatre were undermined by the paucity of good plays, but in recent decades we have not only seen performances of the familiar classics of Restoration drama but learned to appreciate the stagecraft of Aphra Behn, Thomas Shadwell, and John Dryden. Mary Pix has been performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. A rich theatrical culture is being rediscovered. Why, commercially, did it falter the first time round? Deborah Payne provides an exhaustive and persuasively argued answer.There were accidental and external factors. In the 1660s, the theatres had the advantage of a uniquely theatre-loving monarch, but by the 1670s, the king’s financial difficulties meant that support from the court dried up. And Charles was whimsical, spending on French and Italian companies, yet doing nothing to save the King’s Company from collapse.In addition, there was increased competition for disposable income—from, for example, the exotic goods that poured into London. On visiting an India ship in 1665, Samuel Pepys was astonished by the profusion of exotic goods. There were spas and racecourses. Coffee houses grew hugely in number; from sixty in 1663 to over two thousand by the end of the century. Some provided focal gathering points for theatre fans, but they were also cheaper ways of passing leisure time. So were the music meetings that proliferated. Restoration comedies mirror all these developments. Epsom-Wells (1672) and Tunbridge Wells (1678) are set at spas, Man of Newmarket at the races (1678). Act 3 of Tarugo’s Wiles (1667) is set in a coffeehouse. Several comedies feature music gatherings. Thomas Southerne’s The Maid’s Last Prayer (1693) has a scene in Siam’s India shop, in which the customers try to cheat her out of her exotic goods. One might add that, in The Wives’ Excuse (1691), the fool Friendall bores his guests by listing the varieties not only of wine but also of snuff and tea in his collection. The drama reflects, digests, and represents the worlds with which it competes, but those worlds could be enjoyed more cheaply firsthand.The fundamental defect, however, was the nature of the duopoly. Its priorities “not only placed theatre out of the reach of most people but also inclined management toward aesthetically brilliant but financially ruinous choices” (5). Theatres were situated in upmarket areas, inconvenient for those who were not well off, and even for rich merchants, who avoided the new residential developments of the West End. Performance times were also unsuitable for the Sir Jasper Fidgets among the potential audience. The management sought to keep prices high through “engineered scarcity” (passim), failing to reckon with the flood of new rival attractions. The attempt to elevate prices by rationing the product was one of many factors which made life difficult for playwrights. There is repeated contrast with the way in which things were done before the Restoration. Acting slots declined from between three hundred fifty to five hundred in 1600 to thirty-five in 1660. In 1600, artisans could walk to the theatre and see a play for a penny; after 1660, they needed to pay a boatman or cross London Bridge.The duopoly was not inevitable. As Payne shows, alternative models were proposed by rival, unsuccessful petitioners, and it was only at the beginning of his reign that Charles II followed the earlier Stuart practice of granting monopolies: the duopoly would not have been granted ten years later. But its restrictive practices shaped and limited the theatrical marketplace.In Dorset Garden two-thirds of seats were set apart for the wealthy. In the Globe, it had been the other way round. We are veering away from the revisionist model of the audience proposed by Harold Love in 1980 (but not cited here). If not a court coterie theatre, this was a theatre of the gentry and for the gentry. The realistic indoor scenes now possible on the stage reflected the life of the aristocracy and gentry, catering for the aspirational desires of those less prosperous spectators who did make it to the theatre. Of the productive dramatists, only Elkanah Settle, Thomas Durfey, and Behn lacked class, and all three claimed it one way or another: Settle (an Oxford dropout) awarded himself the title of “Servant of His Majesty,” Durfey upgraded his name to D’Urfey, and Behn gave herself a noble ancestry in Oroonoko. Her fictitious self-ennoblement in that work is typical of the socially insecure writer.Like many men of their time, Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant believed in historical progress: a culture of improvement, embodied in the Royal Society, was also reflected in the theatres’ advances in stagecraft. But technology was expensive, and so was the manpower required to operate it. In a false economy, the theatres chose the old system of John Webb and Inigo Jones, rather than the new continental technology. The old system was cheaper to install but more expensive to operate.Visual splendour of dress and scene took priority over the dramatic text. When John Downes praised The Man of Mode (1676), he praised the clothes, not the dialogue. But the new scenic resources did affect the structure of dramatic text. The abrupt changes of discovery scenes are fundamental both to sex comedy and the horror play, in the sudden switching to scenes of sexual intimacy or political conspiracy. In the 1690s, however, when the lavishly equipped Dorset Garden was allowed to slip into decline, the limited scenic capacities of the reopened Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre encouraged “heavily plotted and linguistically dense” plays, like The Way of the World (1700; 124).“The crushing expenses associated with a theatre predicated on luxury and improvement left little working capital for dramaturgy” (177). Payne returns time and again to the plight of the dramatist in a culture reluctant to invest in new plays and allocating adequate rehearsal time only to established playwrights. The degrading of the writer was counterbalanced by the rise of the actor, who “enjoyed a cultural authority that seventy years earlier would have been unthinkable” (216). Players were now painted by leading artists. Thomas Betterton earned in the region of £800 per year. Actresses were not whores: only a few became mistresses, and that to men of high rank. Players had a tantalising and provocative combination of proximity and remoteness, and they became focusses for the resentment of the socially marginal. Pepys resented Henry Harris until his own professional position had improved, when his envy changed to admiration. He was eventually thought worthy of an invitation into Harris’ dressing room, but even then he was not included in the conversation: Harris talked only with the acknowledged “Witts.” Robert Gould, who attacked Elizabeth Barry in his satire “The Playhouse,” was “a servant with pretensions to poetry” (224). Charles Mohun, who assisted Richard Hill in the murder of William Mountfort, was “an aristocratic second son saddled at birth with his father’s gambling debts” (224). And Sir Hugh Myddleton, who had excrement smeared in the face and hair of Rebecca Marshall, is otherwise unknown to history.This is a work of meticulous statistical analysis, but the world that yields the statistics is always vividly imagined; Payne brings great psychological acuity to her account of human motives—as in her account of the fascination of marginal figures with the stage star. She of course builds on the work of other scholars, including Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Juan Antonio Prieto-Pablos, and Tim Keenan. But, as wide-ranging and original historical analysis, the book stands on its own.I noted only a couple of typos and errors: Clopate for Clodpate (145), Skipworth for Skipwith (73, 216), and Salust for Sallust—who was a historian, not a poet (208).