Restoration Spectacular
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Term 4 – Theater After the Renaissance After public stage performances had been banned for 18 years by the Puritan regime, the re-opening of the theatres in 1660 signaled a renaissance of English drama. With the restoration of the monarch in 1660 came the restoration of and the reopening of the theatre. English comedies written and performed in the Restoration period from 1660 to 1710 are collectively called "Restoration comedy". Restoration comedy is notorious for its sexual explicitness, a quality encouraged by Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish aristocratic ethos of his court. For the first time women were allowed to act, putting an end to the practice of the boy-player taking the parts of women. Socially diverse audiences included both aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on, and a substantial middle- class segment. Restoration audiences liked to see good triumph in their tragedies and rightful government restored. In comedy they liked to see the love-lives of the young and fashionable, with a central couple bringing their courtship to a successful conclusion (often overcoming the opposition of the elders to do so). Heroines had to be chaste, but were independent-minded and outspoken; now that they were played by women, there was more mileage for the playwright in disguising them in men's clothes or giving them narrow escape from rape. These playgoers were attracted to the comedies by up-to-the- minute topical writing, by crowded and bustling plots, by the introduction of the first professional actresses, and by the rise of the first celebrity actors. To non-theatre-goers these comedies were widely seen as licentious and morally suspect, holding up the antics of a small, privileged, and decadent class for admiration. This period saw the first professional woman playwright, Aphra Behn. As a reaction to the decadence of Charles II era productions, sentimental comedy grew in popularity. This genre focused on encouraging virtuous behavior by showing middle class characters overcoming a series of moral trials. Restoration spectacular The Restoration spectacular, or elaborately staged "machine play", hit the London public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery, gorgeous costumes, and special effects such as trapdoor tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks. These shows have always had a bad reputation as a vulgar and commercial threat to the witty, "legitimate" Restoration drama; however, they drew Londoners in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted. Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court masque, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera, the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera". It was spectacle and scenery that drew in the crowds, as shown by many comments in the diary of the theatre-lover Samuel Pepys]. The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits. Theatre in the 19th century is divided into two parts: early and late. The early period was dominated by Melodrama and Romanticism. Beginning in France, melodrama became the most popular theatrical form. Melodrama is known for appeals to emotion and excitement. The characters are exaggerated and overly sentimental-often called tear jerker plays. An example of melodrama in America which greatly impacted the issue of slavery was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. August von Kotzebue's Misanthropy and Repentance (1789) is often considered the first melodramatic play. Such works established melodrama as the dominant dramatic form of the early 19th century. In Germany, there was a trend toward historic accuracy in costumes and settings, a revolution in theatre architecture, and the introduction of the theatrical form of German Romanticism. Influenced by trends in 19th-century philosophy and the visual arts, German writers were increasingly fascinated with their Teutonic, or ancient German past and had a growing sense of nationalism or love of country. The plays known as Sturm and Drang (Storm and Stress) inspired a growing faith in feeling and instinct as guides to moral behavior. In Britain, the Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron were the most important dramatists of their time (although Shelley's plays were not performed until later in the century). Romanticism was popular between 1780-1840 and was known for its worship of nature and the importance of emotion and instincts over reason. The later period of the 19th century saw the rise of two conflicting types of drama: realism and non-realism, such as Symbolism, which are plays with a greater or deeper meaning than what appears on the surface and Expressionism, which focuses on spiritual awakening and the ecstacies and agonies of the protagonist. Realism began earlier in the 19th century in Russia more than elsewhere in Europe and sought to portray real often brutal life rather than fantasy or sensation. Beginning with the plays of Ivan Turgenev (who used "domestic detail to reveal inner turmoil"), Aleksandr Ostrovsky (who was Russia's first professional playwright), Aleksey Pisemsky (whose A Bitter Fate (1859) anticipated Naturalism), and Leo Tolstoy (whose The Power of Darkness (1886) is "one of the most effective of naturalistic plays"), a tradition of psychological realism in Russia culminated with the establishment of the Moscow Art Theatre by Konstantin Stanislavski. Naturalism, a theatrical movement born out of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) and contemporary political and economic conditions, found its main proponent in Émile Zola. In Britain, melodramas, light comedies, operas, Shakespeare and classic English drama, continued to be popular. So successful were the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, such as H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) and The Mikado (1885), that they greatly expanded the audience for musical theatre. This, together with much improved street lighting and transportation in London and New York led to a late Victorian and Edwardian theatre building boom in the West End and on Broadway. The development of more significant drama owes itself most to the playwright Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen was born in Norway in 1828. He wrote twenty-five plays, the most famous of which are A Doll's House (1879), and Ghosts (1881) evoke a sense of mysterious forces at work in human destiny, which was to be a major theme of symbolism and the so-called "Theatre of the Absurd.” After Ibsen, British theatre experienced revitalization with the work of George Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet. Unlike most of the gloomy and intensely serious work of their contemporaries, Shaw and Wilde wrote primarily in the comic form with much wit and sarcasm with the intent of shocking audiences. Edwardian musical comedies were extremely popular, appealing to the tastes of the middle class. .