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The Sound of Theater: Crowds, Acoustics, Oration Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680– 1793 • Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 The Sound of Theater: Crowds, Acoustics, Oration Juliette Cherbuliez Published on: Oct 07, 2020 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680–1793 • Databases, Revenues, & The Sound of Theater: Crowds, Acoustics, Oration Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 One of my first impulses in examining the Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP) and in perusing the registers’ digitized pages, was to imagine a performance. The impulse to imagine came from the peculiar way the registers’ printed categories work with the manuscript numbers that were added to each page on a daily basis. Like any form, the general categories—Billets à repeated at the top; Frais journaliers… Pensions, Gages, &c… following reliably below—visually anchor the numbers that change regularly: tickets sold, price of places, dates of performances. Balancing the impulse to attempt a close reading of them with a fear of the perils of calculation, I instinctively took something like a formalist-performance approach to understanding the pages and pages of digits which danced, lightly shifting and transforming themselves, with each flip of the page. The performance assigned each piece of information a role in the greater meaning of each sheet. I flip through R69: 1715-1716. [Fig. 1] Visit the web version of this article to view interactive content. - Figure 1. Register R69, 1715-16 Season. Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française - CFRP Flipbook. The visualizer tells me I’m on page 541 of this volume; the register notes that it’s that season’s 264th day: du jeudy 5e jour de mars 1716, première représentation d’Athalie. I imagine the crowd jockeying in front of the Théâtre des Fossés Saint- Germain, buying seats: 4 loges basses à 40 livres; 5 loges hautes à 20 livres; 56 billets à 7 livres 10 sous; 26 billets à 5 livres; 66 billets à 3 livres; 19 billets à 2 livres; 280 billets à 1 livre 5 sous. Is this a big crowd? Bigger, one might assume, than the day before, when a double billing of Molière brought a total of 97,10 to the company. The double of this register, R70, tells me the same thing, this time on p. 575: this performance of Racine’s 1691 tragédie sold tickets to a public that paid a total of 1396 livres, 10 sous that day. What else could that total tell us about the performance that evening? What does such a sum of seated, standing, crowded, spacious parts tell us? What do its constituent characters—whether relative price or sheer quantity— contribute to the dynamics of this whole experience? What kind of an audience was constituted by 1396 livres, 10 sous, and what can we know about it? What did its presence mean for the performance which its members not only attended but, by virtue of their very bodily presence, helped create and shape acoustically? 2 Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680–1793 • Databases, Revenues, & The Sound of Theater: Crowds, Acoustics, Oration Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 Ticket-holders make their way into the building. This is the first performance of Athalie at the Comédie-Française. (Was this an anticipated affair, and so the reason for which Athalie was the sole performance on offer that evening? Might audiences nevertheless have expected a double billing, a one-act comedy which accompanied so many tragedies? Or was a late seventeenth-century Christian tragedy with machinery worth as much as one regular tragedy and a one-act comedy?). They exchange their tickets for the appropriate contremarque (Did they know what was playing, did they care, or was the theater a destination for reasons entirely distinct from what the actors were offering?). Some make their way down toward the parterre or up the stairs to the loges (How much better were the tickets at 3 livres than those at 2? How many loges were there and were any empty?). Candles are lit, money is counted, perhaps a baton is pounded on the floor to announce the beginning of the spectacle. What then happens? In my experience with the CFRP, mediated through my laptop’s monitor and trackpad, a click of the mouse makes time advance. The registers are an archive of daily records, so a turn of the page enforces a respect of Aristotelian unity of time; the sun rises and begins to set again. For each click, the page flips and the vision disappears: audiences for that performance of Athalie are gone. Vendredi, 6 mars 1716: two comedies are up: Les Ménechmes and Le Médecin malgré lui; no loges and just over 200 tickets sold for a total that day of 288 livres. A smaller crowd than the day before (Do comedies garner fewer sales than a tragedy, or is it Regnard and Molière who are not so attractive? Are Fridays slower than Wednesdays? Is there another event enticing a public away from the theater that same afternoon?) Click again and the page flips; Athalie is back and the recettes are higher than two days ago: 1995 livres, with 404 tickets at 1 livre 5 sous. Are we seeing the positive effect of word- of-mouth praise regarding the performance from the other night? With each click crowds move in and out, tickets are sold and sold again; there seem to be patterns to the waxing and waning crowds and the expenses associated with each day. They are drawn in by friends, rivals, habit, anticipating the declamation, the music, the pathos, the spectacularity of the stage or the public. They are propelled out by the staging of the play of course, but sometimes they are likely lured away by a different spectacle or drama elsewhere. It’s as if I can see them file in and out, trickles and waves. All this clicking and imagining creates something like a flipbook or time-lapse video, where time and action move forward at times haltingly, and otherwise quickly, like a windy beach where the tide can appear to ebb or flow more quickly. The scene is more or less the same from day to day, even if the accoutrements are different, the crowds 3 Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680–1793 • Databases, Revenues, & The Sound of Theater: Crowds, Acoustics, Oration Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 are different, the changes incremental with the season and years. In this picture the horizon is constant, any interruptions are rhythmic: each page follows the same form, exceptions barely visible. The anomalies can be jarring—when I happen to catch a glimpse of one: terrible revenues one evening (mercredi, le 18e jour de mars 1716, Molière’s L’École des femmes: 56,5) or a missing day (le mercredi 25 mars, whose absence is explained on the next page). Pages featuring Athalie always offer a slight disruption. Along with the usual additional expense of 30 livres for “lustres et decorations,” these stagings warrant another 500 livres “retiré[es] pour les frais de la piece d’athalie” (Why don’t the registers tell us more specifically what they were for, these 500 livres? We can guess: was it the machinery revealing the Temple’s inner sanctum, revealed so spectacularly at the dénouement of the play when the Christian Prince Joas emerges to be crowned and soldiers leap out to defeat Athalie? Did the crowd appreciate the effects of these extra costs?) Is this theater I am visualizing? If so, it must be observed who are the major players in this flow: they are not the comédiens on stage. The scene is of the house, its seating, its doorways, its divisions, its heterogeneity, habits, approbation and boredom. Even when the action seems disjointed, the imagination remains continuously focused on the spectacle of the public who attend, not of the players themselves—the actors appear on the verso of the pages, if at all, and in the registers of the feux and assemblées. The public imagined becomes a material participant in what might called the paraperformance: all the elements of a play that frame the spectacle, including the chaotic crowd outside waiting to purchase tickets, the finding of places, the interactions with other members of the public, as well as reactions to the theater and to the heat, cold, stench of the room itself. Then, perhaps its exits: in the middle of a performance, whether by an officer of the police; before the second play begins; at the end of the séance. It is therefore most materially the audience members I envision, even though the only trace of them that we have are the sums of money that the CFRP shows they relinquished for admission. Despite the cool rhythm that the registers’ patterns enforce, and once we think of the bodies whose movements and transactions they trace, the scenes we create of them are noisy: we fill them with the extradiagetic and ambient sound of eating, dancing, shoving, pickpocketing and brawls. Jeffrey Ravel has shown that these were constitutive of the early modern spectator’s experience—at least in the parterre. So different from that of the “quietly contemplative aesthetic event” of the modern period, they affirm that “the chaos of the pit only heightened the intellectual and emotional intensity of the theatergoing experience.”1 What was that sound like, in all its 4 Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680–1793 • Databases, Revenues, & The Sound of Theater: Crowds, Acoustics, Oration Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 moderate diversity, day after day, performance following performance? How did it apprehend the acting before it, what did it return to the players and dramaturges, how did the sounds of the crowd affect what theater meant and how it changed? All of this reminds us how much theater performances are informed and created by the collision of people with material objects: from actors with scripts to machinists and ropes, to the public with the building itself (and just as possible: actors with the building, the public with ropes, the machinists with scripts).
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