Whitefriars Theater
| Whitefriars Theater | |
|
|
| location | |
| Address: | Water Lane (now Whitefriars Street) and White Friars (now Bouverie Street) |
| City: | London |
| Coordinates: | 51 ° 30 '48 " N , 0 ° 6' 27" W |
| Architecture and history | |
| Opened: | 1608 |
| Spectator: | (roughly estimated) 500 seats |
| Spectators without seats: | 0 places |
| Named after: | Location (former monastery) |
| presumably passed after 1621 | |
The Whitefriars Theater was a London-based Jacobean-era theater from 1608 to the 1620s. Little information is available about this house, some of which is contradicting itself.
place
The Whitefriars area was west of the medieval walls of London . The name comes from an open monastery of the Carmelites , whose monks wore white robes (English white friars for: white brothers; from French: frère, or Latin: frater). The monastery existed until the dissolution of the English monasteries by Henry VIII , which took place between 1536 and 1541. Until 1608, the Whitefriars district was beyond the jurisdiction of the City of London , which attracted people who wanted to evade authority, such as criminals, free spirits and artists, including writers and actors.
The House
In 1608, Michael Drayton and Thomas Woodford, the nephew of the playwright Thomas Lodge , leased the abbey mansion from Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, for a period of seven years. In the former dining room they set up what was later to be known as a “private” theater. The first of its kind outside the city. In other words, a closed, higher-priced venue in contrast to the large, thoughtless “public” theaters, such as the Globe and the like. a. According to various sources, the size is given as 26 m long and 10.6 m wide. The schedule of the Whitefriars performances shows that the stage was set up roughly the same as in other theaters, both inside and outside: a play platform accessible through two doors from the Green Room , a curtain-fronted stage and an upper level. Since the stage was built into a smaller existing space than in the Blackfriar's house, the depth seems to have been reduced to create more space for the paying audience.This led to striking changes: a smaller platform, a proportionally larger fore stage, entrance doors on Edge of the stage and a smaller upper playing area, on which only three actors could be seated. Climbing the platform took just under a minute.
The organization of the theater business was, completely unusual for this time, not structured hierarchically, but the management was carried out in a kind of cooperative, just as authors and actors held shares in the theater. Young actors were given the right to have a say and together they also wrote on plays.
The ensembles
First, the King's Revels Children 's theater company occupied the new theater. After their disbandment in 1609, their place was taken by another boy actor troupe, the Children of the Queen's Revels ; they performed premieres such as "A Woman is a Weathercock" (by Nathan Field , 1609); "Epicoene, or the Silent Woman" (by Ben Jonson , 1609), "The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois" ( George Chapman 1613); "The Insatiate Countess" (by John Marston , 1613) and Robert Daborne's "A Christian Turn'd Turk" in 1612.
The public
The Boy Actors playgroups who performed here often brought homoerotic allusions to their performances, which also attracted a corresponding audience. There were literally pieces written only for the typical Whitefriars audience. For example, the legacy comedy "Epicoene, or the Silent Woman" by Ben Jonson (Children of the Queen's Revels) in which a boy plays a woman willing to marry. Homosexual relationships with pleasure boys and the like are also mentioned here. a. m. indicated.
"Epicoene has a" fascination with gender, a category of signification which, through stage conventions of crossdressing and the deployment of boy actors to play women's parts was represented as protean and ambiguous "
In the prologue to this play, the author Ben Johnson addressed the "men and daughters of Whitefriars", where he could have addressed the homosexual visitors with "men" and with "daughters" (daughters) the prostitutes of the nearby red light district, who were often in the theater looking for customers.
In "The Turke" (in full: "An Excellent Tragedy of Mulleasses the Turke, and Borgias Governor of Florence") written by the co-owner of the Whitefriars Theater, John Mason and performed by the King's Revels Children, a. addresses homosexual encounters.
The End
The Queen's Revels Children merged with the Lady Elizabeth's Men in 1613 . The reason could be that the Whitefriars was to serve as a winter theater and the Swan Theater as a summer theater, while the competing King's Men played the Blackfriars Theater (winters) and in the summer the reckless Globe. When the seven-year lease of the Whitefriars Theater expired in 1614, the head and main shareholder of the theater company, Philip Rosseter , was unable to renew it. So the troupe split up and in October 1614 the Lady Elizabeth's Men appeared in the newly opened Hope Theater , south of the Thames.
In 1615 the remaining troupe of the Queen's Revels moved briefly into the new house of Rosseter, the unfinished and shortly afterwards forcibly demolished Porter's Hall Theater in Blackfriars and ended their existence here. Hereafter the story of the Whitefriars Theater becomes imprecise; Prince Charles's Men may have used the theater, but there is evidence that they also played at the Hope Theater. A description from 1616 shows the house as with little remaining interior and with weather damage. A record from 1621 states that the new landowner, Sir Anthony Ashley, "turned out the players".
On the site of the former Whitefriars Abbey, the extensive office buildings of the Freshfields law firm now stand ; part of the abbey cellars was excavated and moved to a basement, which is accessible from the pedestrian passage Magpie Alley ("Whitefriars crypt").
Succession
In 1629 the Whitefriars Theater was replaced by the Salisbury Court Theater , which was on the other side of Water Lane (now Whitefriars Street). Confusingly, the Salisbury Court Theater has also been called the Whitefriars Theater at times; B. in the diary entries of Samuel Pepys '.
literature
- FE Halliday : A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964 , Penguin, Baltimore 1964
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Leech, Clifford, and TW Craik, eds. The Revels History of Drama in English. Volume 3, 1576-1613. London: Harper and Row, 1975.
- ^ Jean MacIntyre, "Production Resources at the Whitefriars Playhouse, 1906-1912", Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 1-35
- ↑ a b Mary Bly. Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
- ↑ Munro, Lucy. The Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theater Repertory. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 25
- ↑ Michael Shapiro “Audience vs. Dramatist in Jonson's Epicoene and other Plays of the Children's Troupes. "English Literary Renaissance 3 (1973): pp. 400-417.
- ↑ "Introduction. Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage ”, Ed .: Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell. Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 1999. 1-22.
- ^ Mary Bly: Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
- ^ "Playhouses and players" by RA Foakes, in Braunmuller, AR and Michael Hattaway, eds. The Cambridge Companion the English Renaissance Drama. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003. p. 30.
- ↑ "" the rain hath made its way in, and if it be not repaired it must soon be plucked down, or it will fall. " Online in" Old and New London "Volume 1. First edition by Cassell, Petter & Galpin, London , 1878. "Whitefriars" at pages 182-199
- ^ Edmund Kerchever Chambers The Elizabethan Stage. (4 volumes), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923. Volume 2, pages 515-517.
- ^ AW Clapham, "The topography of the Carmelite Priory of London" Journal of the British Archaeological Association New Series, 16 Part 1 (March 1910), pages 15-32 with illustrations.