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Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage. Ed. Paul Menzer
REVIEWED By: Arnold Preussner, Truman State University
This collection brings together some twenty essays based on presentations delivered at the first two Blackfriars Conferences (2001 and 2003) held in Staunton, VA, at the reconstructed Blackfriars Playhouse, a theater modeled on the indoor venue where Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, began performing in 1608. The essays are varied in both length and content, and are divided into two basic sections: "The Blackfriars Playhouse and the Indoor Stage" and "Plays and Playing' While the first section mainly addresses issues pertaining to the Blackfriars itself as the first indoor site in Renaissance London to be owned and utilized by a professional adult theater company, the second cluster ranges somewhat farther afield to cover a variety of topics pertaining to the staging and textual interpretation of Shakespearean drama, both then and now.
An introductory essay by Paul Menzer and Ralph Alan Cohen (the Blackfriars' executive director) orients the reader by, among other things, noting the relative paucity of scholarship on the indoor theaters, as opposed to the vast amount of scholarly energy expended upon the Globe. Andrew Gurr then succinctly summarizes how it was that Shakespeare's company, under the leadership of the Burbages, came to purchase, remodel, and (eventually) occupy a significant playing space in a former Dominican monastery near the north bank of the Thames. (The structure itself was destroyed during the great fire of 1666; its former location has been since 1670 occupied by Apothecaries Hall.) A number of details about this history are well known, such as, for instance, the relatively small size of the 600- seat Blackfriars as opposed to the much larger Globe and the resulting inflation of ticket prices and establishment of a more upscale clientele at the smaller theater. Even so, Gurr's essay is well worth perusing, if only for its emphasis on the Blackfriars as the theater that established the vogue for indoor viewing, with the best, highest-priced seats toward the front, a custom that persists, of course, down to the present day. As Gurr notes, in a comment perhaps meant to challenge our conventional notions of Renaissance English theater history, "From roughly 1615 onward, the Blackfriars became the place to see [Richardi Burbage play Shakespeare, while the new Globe [constructed after the fire of 16131 for all its alleged splendor was the secondary venue" (29).
Several articles in the collection expand upon Gurr's theatrical history of the Blackfriars or provide parallel examples of theatrically related activity. Most notably, Jeanne H. McCarthy provides an extensive treatment of the origins and development of the venue as a site for children's theater between 1576 and 1608, and places the relatively small stature of the boy actors in the dual context of Elizabethan politics and the concurrent aesthetic vogue for miniaturization. As Mccarthy notes, the two interests worked perfectly together to further Elizabeth's need for self-assertion, for "by offering 'pictures in little' of heroic male elites, the children's plays and their doll-like, miniature aesthetics served to enhance the Queen's authority not only by representing the ruler as godlike, but by suggestively representing the Elizabethan subject.. .as a child" (105). lan Borden's essay traces the venue's function from 1540 onwards as the location of a fencing school, assuring us that the stage combat called for in Elizabethan and Stuart drama owes much to the skills of the "Masters of Fence" who plied their trade at the Blackfriars. And Michael Shapiro, in a brief essay, uses the presentation of an obscure Latin play, Sapientia Solomonis, to Elizabeth by the boys of Westminster School in 1566 as a vehicle for analyzing the complex relations between theater as a royal "gift offering" and theater as an emergent commercial enterprise in the later sixteenth century.
Of the various issues addressed by the collection's contributors, that of whether the Blackfriars, once it became occupied by the King's Men, generated a site-specific repertory or merely (but very importantly, from an economic perspective) provided a winter venue for plays that were equally well suited for presentation at the Globe, seems especially important. Tiffany Stern argues strongly for Shakespeare's late plays, the tragicomic romances, being written very much with the Blackfriars in mind, while Roslyn Knutson counters with the question, "What If There Wasn't a 'Blackfriars Repertory'?" and notes a number of practical considerations militating against the development of such a repertory. Some fine detail work on productions that we either know or assume to have been staged at the Blackfriars is done by both Leslie Thomson, with regard to Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), and Melissa Aaron, with regard to the initial staging of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1610). Walter W Cannon thoughtfully ponders possible connections between the drive toward interiority of character development in Twelfth Night and the ways in which the Blackfriars' intimate playing space may have aided this process, once the play began (presumably) to be performed indoors. And Barry Gaines, fast-forwarding chronologically more than three-hundred years, notes how an impromptu performance of Hamlet in 1937 at a hotel in Elsinore (Helsingr), Denmark, gave further impetus to the desire of Tyrone Guthrie and others to abandon proscenium-style acting in favor of the more interactive, thrust-stage variety now practiced at London's new Globe and Staunton's revivified Blackfriars theaters, among others.
Other topics covered in the volume include doubling of parts in Richard II (Alan Armstrong), the use of "black-face" for stage Africans (Virginia Mason Vaughan), theatrical performances outside of London, including those in Stratford-upon-Avon (Alan Somerset and Elza C. Tiner, in separate essays), directing the blinded Gloucester (David Richman, himself a blind director), Twelfth Night and the sport of bearbaiting (John R. Ford), stage directions and textual issues in Hamlet (William Proctor Williams and Albert Braunmuller, respectively), and verbal patterns in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Stephen Booth). In a brief "Afterword," Paul Menzer warns against taking the "laboratory" status of theaters such as the new Globe and Blackfriars too literally, lest theater historians and researchers become entrapped within an inappropriate, overly scientific model that may promise more than can actually be delivered. Obviously, this volume presents a rich and varied set of responses to the movement, begun on London's Bankside and continued in rural Virginia, to reconstruct Shakespeare's playing spaces in historically authentic fashion and to use these spaces as sites of ongoing theatrical activity. It is to be hoped that more volumes will follow the present one, as the Blackfriars continues its joint venture of entertaining and enlightening students of English Renaissance drama.
An introductory essay by Paul Menzer and Ralph Alan Cohen (the Blackfriars' executive director) orients the reader by, among other things, noting the relative paucity of scholarship on the indoor theaters, as opposed to the vast amount of scholarly energy expended upon the Globe. Andrew Gurr then succinctly summarizes how it was that Shakespeare's company, under the leadership of the Burbages, came to purchase, remodel, and (eventually) occupy a significant playing space in a former Dominican monastery near the north bank of the Thames. (The structure itself was destroyed during the great fire of 1666; its former location has been since 1670 occupied by Apothecaries Hall.) A number of details about this history are well known, such as, for instance, the relatively small size of the 600- seat Blackfriars as opposed to the much larger Globe and the resulting inflation of ticket prices and establishment of a more upscale clientele at the smaller theater. Even so, Gurr's essay is well worth perusing, if only for its emphasis on the Blackfriars as the theater that established the vogue for indoor viewing, with the best, highest-priced seats toward the front, a custom that persists, of course, down to the present day. As Gurr notes, in a comment perhaps meant to challenge our conventional notions of Renaissance English theater history, "From roughly 1615 onward, the Blackfriars became the place to see [Richardi Burbage play Shakespeare, while the new Globe [constructed after the fire of 16131 for all its alleged splendor was the secondary venue" (29).
Several articles in the collection expand upon Gurr's theatrical history of the Blackfriars or provide parallel examples of theatrically related activity. Most notably, Jeanne H. McCarthy provides an extensive treatment of the origins and development of the venue as a site for children's theater between 1576 and 1608, and places the relatively small stature of the boy actors in the dual context of Elizabethan politics and the concurrent aesthetic vogue for miniaturization. As Mccarthy notes, the two interests worked perfectly together to further Elizabeth's need for self-assertion, for "by offering 'pictures in little' of heroic male elites, the children's plays and their doll-like, miniature aesthetics served to enhance the Queen's authority not only by representing the ruler as godlike, but by suggestively representing the Elizabethan subject.. .as a child" (105). lan Borden's essay traces the venue's function from 1540 onwards as the location of a fencing school, assuring us that the stage combat called for in Elizabethan and Stuart drama owes much to the skills of the "Masters of Fence" who plied their trade at the Blackfriars. And Michael Shapiro, in a brief essay, uses the presentation of an obscure Latin play, Sapientia Solomonis, to Elizabeth by the boys of Westminster School in 1566 as a vehicle for analyzing the complex relations between theater as a royal "gift offering" and theater as an emergent commercial enterprise in the later sixteenth century.
Of the various issues addressed by the collection's contributors, that of whether the Blackfriars, once it became occupied by the King's Men, generated a site-specific repertory or merely (but very importantly, from an economic perspective) provided a winter venue for plays that were equally well suited for presentation at the Globe, seems especially important. Tiffany Stern argues strongly for Shakespeare's late plays, the tragicomic romances, being written very much with the Blackfriars in mind, while Roslyn Knutson counters with the question, "What If There Wasn't a 'Blackfriars Repertory'?" and notes a number of practical considerations militating against the development of such a repertory. Some fine detail work on productions that we either know or assume to have been staged at the Blackfriars is done by both Leslie Thomson, with regard to Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), and Melissa Aaron, with regard to the initial staging of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1610). Walter W Cannon thoughtfully ponders possible connections between the drive toward interiority of character development in Twelfth Night and the ways in which the Blackfriars' intimate playing space may have aided this process, once the play began (presumably) to be performed indoors. And Barry Gaines, fast-forwarding chronologically more than three-hundred years, notes how an impromptu performance of Hamlet in 1937 at a hotel in Elsinore (Helsingr), Denmark, gave further impetus to the desire of Tyrone Guthrie and others to abandon proscenium-style acting in favor of the more interactive, thrust-stage variety now practiced at London's new Globe and Staunton's revivified Blackfriars theaters, among others.
Other topics covered in the volume include doubling of parts in Richard II (Alan Armstrong), the use of "black-face" for stage Africans (Virginia Mason Vaughan), theatrical performances outside of London, including those in Stratford-upon-Avon (Alan Somerset and Elza C. Tiner, in separate essays), directing the blinded Gloucester (David Richman, himself a blind director), Twelfth Night and the sport of bearbaiting (John R. Ford), stage directions and textual issues in Hamlet (William Proctor Williams and Albert Braunmuller, respectively), and verbal patterns in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Stephen Booth). In a brief "Afterword," Paul Menzer warns against taking the "laboratory" status of theaters such as the new Globe and Blackfriars too literally, lest theater historians and researchers become entrapped within an inappropriate, overly scientific model that may promise more than can actually be delivered. Obviously, this volume presents a rich and varied set of responses to the movement, begun on London's Bankside and continued in rural Virginia, to reconstruct Shakespeare's playing spaces in historically authentic fashion and to use these spaces as sites of ongoing theatrical activity. It is to be hoped that more volumes will follow the present one, as the Blackfriars continues its joint venture of entertaining and enlightening students of English Renaissance drama.
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Last Reviewed on 11/24/2008 by Nabin Mulepati | SU Press (570)372-4175/fax (570)372-4021 | Email: baileys@susqu.edu | Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, PA 17870