Dorset Garden Theater

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Dorset Garden Theater
South facade, taken from the libretto of The Empress of Morocco (1673). Dozens of other depictions exist, but these date from the 19th century, 100 years after the demolition, and cannot be used as a reliable source.
location
Address: Dorset Gardens
City: London
Coordinates: 51 ° 30 '43 "  N , 0 ° 6' 20"  W Coordinates: 51 ° 30 '43 "  N , 0 ° 6' 20"  W.
Architecture and history
Construction time: 1670-1671
Opened: November 9, 1671
Spectator: 850 seats
Architects: Christopher Wren (uncertain), Robert Hooke (uncertain)
Named after: Location
Demolished: 1709

The Dorset Garden Theater in London was built on the banks of the Thames in 1671 and was one of the first major theaters in the Stuart Restoration . It was initially known as the Duke of York's Theater or as the Duke's Theater . Charles II died in 1685 and his brother, the Duke of York , was crowned king as James II in the same year . At the same time, the name of the theater changed to Queen's Theater in reference to James' second wife Maria Beatrice d'Este . The name was also retained as Wilhelm III. and Maria II ascended the English throne in 1689.

It was the fourth venue of the Duke's Company , one of the two theater companies with a theater patent in London during the restoration period and was still used by the latter after the two companies merged in 1682 to form the United Company . The building was demolished in 1709.

background

In the reign of Oliver Cromwell , theater largely came to a standstill in England. After the Restoration, Charles II granted patents for “spoken drama” to two actors: the King's Players from Thomas Killigrew , who played at the Drury Lane Theater from 1663 , and the Duke's Players from William Davenant , who later (1671) moved to the new Dorset Garden Theater should pull. The patents were designed so that they could be passed on to the heirs.

The patron of the Duke's Company was the Duke of York (later James II); the other Patent Theater Company, the King's Company , had the patronage of his brother, Karl II. From 1660, both companies initially found their venues in an old theater of the Jacobean era (1603-1625), the Cockpit Theater (also known as the Phoenix Theater) in Drury Lane . After a brief stint at Salisbury Court Theater , the Duke's Company moved to Lincoln's Inn Fields Theater in 1662 , a former ballroom on Portugal Street. There the army by 1671. In the meantime played drew the King's Company permanently in the Theater Royal Drury Lane .

The founder of Duke's Company (and Poet Laureate ), Sir William Davenant , was a fan of changeable sets and stage machinery , which he was the first to bring to English theaters. However, he died before the foundation stone for the new theater was laid in 1670 and so Dorset Garden was built under the auspices of the Davenant family, who continued to run the Duke's Company with the help of a lead cast, Thomas Betterton .

The beginning

The Duke's Theater at Dorset Garden

The construction site of the new theater was a little above the Thames and west of the New Canal , part of the (now underground) River Fleet . This location near the river also allowed visitors to come to the theater by water, which allowed them to travel through neighboring Alsatia , a place of refuge and residence for criminals of all kinds, who were successfully able to evade the law here for decades , could avoid.

Property in Dorset Garden was leased and prepaid for £ 130.55 annually for 39 years. It is an area that was on the ground of a former Carmelite monastery ("Whitefriars"). Later there was the "Dorset House", the seat of the Earl of Dorset in what is now the City of London , which was destroyed in the Great Fire of London . There was already a children's theater there in the earl's time. In 1629 the Earl leased “stables and toilet houses [...] behind his residence, facing the river, in order to build a theater for the children of his festival guests.” (“To make a playhouse for the children of the revels.”)

Before the newly built theater house was opened (1671), Betterton traveled to France. It is believed that the purpose of his trip was to look at the current state of theatrical technology there, which he was keen to bring to England. This assumption is largely based on the fact that Betterton, who was William Davenant's deputy, traveled to France for this purpose at the behest of Charles II in 1661 and later, in 1683, an opera and a dance company in France on behalf of the king obliged to maintain the court.

The operation

The new Dorset Garden Theater opened on November 9, 1671. It was almost twice the size of the former Duke's Company Lincoln's Inn Fields . They produced a number of increasingly lavish performances, as well as opera adaptations of Shakespeare's Macbeth in 1673, The Tempest in 1674 and the play Pysche in 1675, which was written by Matthew Locke Thomas Shadwell . Characteristic for these productions from the restoration period was their modern stage equipment with flying backdrops and floating actors, instrumental music, singing and extensive casts.

All the big names of that time appeared in the theater: In addition to Thomas Betterton, Elizabeth Barry , Anne Bracegirdle , Aphra Behn , Thomas d'Urfey , Henry Purcell and many other actors, musicians, dancers, authors and composers worked there. When the Dorset Garden Theater staged The Dutch Lover by Aphra Behn in 1673 , critics sabotaged the play on the grounds that the author was a woman.

The theater became the premier performance venue in London. After the Theater Royal burned down Drury Lane in January 1672, the Dorset Garden Theater faced stiff competition from the Theater Royal, which was then rebuilt and opened in March 1674. When the Duke's Company merged with the King's Company to form the United Company in 1682, the Dorset Garden was mainly used for opera and musical performances, along with a few plays. From the 1690s, however, also for other spectacles, such as weightlifting . The Dorset Garden Theater was demolished in 1709 after the 39-year lease expired in 1670.

A number of important people live nearby: for example Aphra Behn in Dorset Street (which at that time was still near the theater), John Dryden in Salisbury Square from 1673 to 1682 or John Locke in Dorset Court, 1690 and Thomas Betterton in an apartment ("upper floor") on the south side of the theater.

Architecture and stage

The interior of the Dorset Garden Theater: part of the fore stage with doors and balconies on either side; the proscenium arch with the musician's chamber above. Libretto illustration from 1673.

Apart from the illustrations in the libretto for The Empress of Morocco , there are no contemporary images of the interior. Due to the rivalry between the two theater companies (Duke's and King's), however, the prologues to the respective performances, as well as various verses of praise, contain references to the external conditions of the theater.

It is not known who designed the theater; it is generally attributed to Sir Christopher Wren . However, this seems unlikely for both practical and stylistic reasons. Robert Hooke, an employee of Wren, may have had something to do with the architecture of the theater. The external dimensions were 48 meters by 17.4 meters, including a three-meter-deep veranda.A foreign visitor reported in 1676 that the theater contained a central pit in the form of an amphitheater , as well as two rows with seven boxes each, each with space for 20 people and a gallery . The house could accommodate approx. 850 visitors. The theater represents a large investment by the Duke's Company and was richly decorated inside. The proscenium arch, for example, had carvings by Grinling Gibbons .

The Dorset Garden Theater had a large front stage, a typical English development. In a reconstruction, Edward Langhans calculated the fore stage to be over six meters deep and 9.3 meters wide at the height of the proscenium arch. According to other information, it should have had the dimensions 7.6 meters by 9.2 meters.

The well-lit fore-stage noticeably expanded the space for actors, musicians and dancers to perform. It served as an important link between the audience and the performers, the auditorium and the stage, the theater goers and the play. With the curtains closed, the performers gained access to the fore stage through permanent proscenium doors, probably two on each side of the stage. Over these doors were balconies that could serve as a stage component as well as theater seating.

The stage itself was probably around 15.4 meters wide and 9 meters high. The stage, including the front stage, was inclined towards the audience. The small room above the proscenium arch probably housed eight to ten musicians who accompanied the individual scenes. The actual orchestra was, as usual, in a trench in front of the stage.

The Duke's Company had already successfully used movable backdrops in their previous venues. They were first used by Davenant at Rutland House on Aldersgate Street, who converted the former home of the Dukes of Rutland into a private theater in the 1650s. The technology in the new Dorset Garden Theater was now able to make at least four people levitate at the same time. Objects that were just as large as a cloud that covered the entire width of the stage and also carried a group of musicians (as in the piece Psyche in 1675). There were also numerous sinkings in the ground. The Dorset Garden Theater was the only playhouse in London where all the effects were achieved that the new and lush plays of the Restoration era required.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The London Stage (Part 2), p. 194, The Daily Courant of June 1, 1709 is cited there. At that time a new Queen's Theater was being built on the Haymarket.
  2. ↑ See Patent theater . On: Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved July 28, 2015.
  3. ↑ At that time called Bridges Street Theater , because the entrance was on that street
  4. ^ John Downes “Roscius Anglicanus”, 1987, p. 51, editors: Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, first edition 1708
  5. ^ William van Lennep "The London Stage 1660-1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment, part 1, 1660-1700", 1965, p. Xxix, other authors: Emmett L Avery Emerett, Arthur Scouten 9
  6. ^ Letter from Sir George Gresley to Sir Thomas Puckering dated October 24, 1629, quoted in OL Brownstein, "New Light on the Salisbury Court Playhouse," Educational Theater Journal 29.2 (May 1977: pp. 231-242) p. 232.
  7. ^ Philip H. Highfill Jr., “A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, vol. 1, Belfort to Byzand “, 1973, p. 79, other authors: A. Burnim Kalman, Edward A. Langhans
  8. ^ Philip H. Highfill Jr., “A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, vol. 1, Belfort to Byzand “, 1973, pages = 76, 82, other authors: A. Burnim Kalman, Edward A. Langhans
  9. ↑ Judith Milhous “British Theater and the Other Arts, 1660–1800”, 1984, pages 41–66, chapter “The Multimedia Spectacular on the Restoration Stage”, from the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington)
  10. ^ Judith Milhous, 1979, p. 70.
  11. ↑ Diana de Marly, 1975
  12. ^ Morgan & Ogilby's map of London, 1677.
  13. ^ Edward Langhans, 1972, with reference to François Brunet (1676)
  14. ↑ Robert Hume, 1979, the calculation is based on receipts from the box office.
  15. ^ Edward Langhans, 1972
  16. ^ Frans Muller, 1993, with a reconstruction of the stage and scene in Dioclesian ,
  17. ^ Frans & Julie Muller, 2005, with a reconstruction of the stage and scene in The Fairy-Queen . on-line
  18. ^ Edward Langhans, 2000

literature

  • Hume, Robert D. The Dorset Garden Theater: a Review of Facts and Problems , Theater Notebook , vol. XXXIII / 2 (1979), pages 4-17 . London: Society for Theater Research.
  • Langhans, Edward A. The Dorset Garden Theater in Pictures , Theater Survey , vol VI / 2 (November 1965), pages: 134-46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Langhans, Edward A. A Conjectural Reconstruction of Dorset Garden Theater , Theater Survey , vol XIII / 2 (1972), p. 74.
  • Langhans, Edward A. The Post-1660 Theaters as Performance Spaces , A Companion to Restoration Drama , Susan Owen (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. ISBN 0-631-21923-4
  • van Lennep et al. [eds] William, The London Stage , Parts 1 (1965) and 2 (1959), Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
  • de Marly, Diana The Architect of Dorset Garden Theater , Theater Notebook , vol. XXIX (1975), pp. 119-24 London: Society for Theater Research.
  • Milhous, Judith. Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695-1708 . Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979.
  • Morgan & Ogilby's map of London (1677), British Library, Maps, Crace II, 61 online
  • Morgan & Ogilby map of London (1681/2), including a view of London by W.Hollar, British Library, Crace collection Port. II, 58

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