Restoration spectacular

17th century elaborately staged machine play

The Restoration spectacular was a type of theatre production of the late 17th century Restoration period, defined by the amount of money, time, sets, and performers it required to be produced. Productions attracted audiences with elaborate action, acrobatics, dance, costume, scenery, illusionistic painting, trapdoors, and fireworks. Although they were popular with contemporary audiences, spectaculars have earned a reputation from theatre historians as vulgar in contrast to the witty Restoration drama. The spectacular has roots in early 17th century court masque, though it borrowed ideas and technology from French opera. Sometimes called "English opera", spectaculars were so varied as to give reluctance to theatre historians to define them as a genre. Spectaculars became increasingly expensive for their theatre companies; a flop could leave a company deeply in debt, while a success could leave a sizeable profit.

The distinction between "legitimate" Restoration drama and the Restoration spectacular, "musical spectacular," "Dorset Garden spectacular," or "machine play" is one of degree rather than kind. Many plays of the period featured music, dancing, scenery, and songs. However, the true spectacular, of which Milhous counts only eight over the entire 1660–1700 Restoration period, was produced on a different scale. The spectacular is defined by a large number of sets and performers required, the vast sums of money invested, the potential for great profits, and the long preparation time needed. Milhous calculates that they likely required at least four to six months of planning, contracting, building, and rehearsing, compared to the four to six weeks of rehearsal time a new "legitimate" play required.

Previous generations of theatre historians have criticized the operatic spectaculars, such as John Dryden's comments about expensive and tasteless "scenes, machines, and empty operas". However, audiences reportedly enjoyed the performances, as Samuel Pepys' diary shows. Dryden wrote several baroque machine plays himself. The first, The State of Innocence (1677), was never staged, as his designated company, the King's, had neither the capital nor the machinery for it: a dramatization of John Milton's Paradise Lost, it called for "rebellious angels wheeling in the air, and seeming transfixed with thunderbolts" over "a lake of brimstone or rolling fire". The King's Company's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane was unequipped to stage such effects. However, the "machine house" at Dorset Garden was appropriately equipped, though it belonged to the King's Company's competition, the Duke's Company. When the two companies merged in the 1680s and Dryden had access to Dorset Garden, he wrote one of the most visual and special effects laden machine plays of the entire Restoration period, Albion and Albanius (1684–85):

The Cave of PROTEUS rises out of the Sea; it consists of several arches of Rock work adorned with mother of pearl, coral, and abundance of shells of various kinds. Through the arches is seen the Sea, and parts of Dover pier; in the middle of the Cave is PROTEUS asleep on a rock adorned with shells, &c. like the Cave. ALBION and ACACIA seize on him; and while a symphony is playing, he sinks as they are bringing him forward, and changes himself into a Lion, a Crocodile, a Dragon, and then to his own shape again; he comes forward to the front of the stage, and sings." There is dispute amongst theatre historians as to how such effects, such as crocodiles, were actually produced. There are no extant drawings or descriptions of machinery and sets for the Restoration theatre, although some documentation exists for court masques from the first half of the 17th century, notably the work of Inigo Jones and his pupil John Webb. One reason for the lack of information for the public theatres is that stage effects, and particularly machines, were trade secrets. Inventors of theatrical effects and playhouses took great pains to guard their techniques from their competition. The exact technology of the plays can only be tenuously inferred from stage directions. Milhous concludes from a review of Dorset Garden performances that "at a conservative estimate" the theatre was equipped to fly at least four people independently and had some very complex floor traps for "transformations" such as that of Proteus. The plates printed in the first edition of Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco are the only extant depictions of actual Restoration stage sets. Pepys' mentions of stage effects in his diary help in visualizing what audiences saw in the 1660s, but the information remains incomplete. There are scarcely any descriptions or reactions preserved from the "golden era" of the machine play in the 1670s–90s, although a general idea of its technology can be gathered from the better documented French and Italian opera scenery which inspired Thomas Betterton at Dorset Garden Theatre.

In the early 17th century, moveable "scenes"—painted wings and backdrops—and technical "machines" or "devices" for flying and other special effects were used in the masques produced for and by the court of Charles I. In William Davenant's Salmacida Spolia (1640), the last of the court masques before the Civil War, Queen Henrietta Maria (who was pregnant at the time) makes her entrance "descending by a theatrical device from a cloud." As early as 1639, Davenant had obtained a royal patent authorizing the construction of a large new public theatre with technology that would allow such effects and accommodate music, scenery, and dancing. Such an invasion of court drama technique in the public theatre met opposition from "legitimate" dramatists, and war closed down the theatres in 1642. The public stage ban from 1642 to 1660 imposed by the Puritan regime represented a long and sharp break in dramatic tradition but was never completely successful in suppressing the theatre industry. Performances in grand private houses were not unusual and could have elaborate sets, as can be seen from the extant drawings for the original performance of Davenant's opera The Siege of Rhodes at his home Rutland House. Davenant charged 5 shillings for admission. Some professional actors managed to evade the authorities in stealth acting companies in London, such as that of Michael Mohun at the Red Bull Theatre. By the later 1650s, the restoration of the monarchy was imminent, and playwrights such as William Davenant, began to resume their theatrical activities.

When the public performance ban was lifted after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II immediately encouraged the drama and took a personal interest in the scramble for acting licenses and performance rights which followed. Two pre Commonwealth playwrights, Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant, notable for their loyalty during Charles' exile emerged with a royal Letters Patent for new, or refurbished, patent theatre companies. Killigrew was able to take over Michael Mohun's skilled veteran troupe for his "King's Company" and began with "what was essentially a going concern" (Hume) , with the added advantage of the traditional performance rights Mohun brought with him for practically the whole classic repertory of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the Beaumont and Fletcher team. The competition, Davenant's "Duke's Company", was relegated to a secondary position due to its young, scratched together troupe and scarcely any performance rights. They were only allowed to put on abridged and modernized versions of Shakespeare plays, and a few that Davenant had written. However, Davenant, "a brilliant impresario", was soon able to turn the tables on Killigrew by realizing his old pre Civil War dream of music, dance, and spectacular visual effects on the public stage. During the autumn of 1660, while the Duke's Company was still seeking financing (mostly by means of the actors buying company shares) and having temporary quarters set up, the King's Company offered a string of well received productions. Their new theatre in Vere Street was already fully operational. The devoted playgoer Samuel Pepys called it "the finest playhouse that ever was in England" in his diary, a sentiment he would need to revise many times over the coming decade, and recorded his awe at seeing Michael Mohun, "who is said to be the best actor in the world", act on its stage. Davenant was far behind, but chose to put all his capital into the outfitting of a new superior playhouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields (simultaneously, with great foresight, prying loose the rising young star Thomas Betterton from the King's Company), which was received positively by the public.

Lincoln's Inn Fields opened on 28 June 1661, with the first "moveable" or "changeable" scenery used on the British public stage, (i. e., wings or shutters that ran in grooves and could be smoothly and mechanically changed between or even within acts). The production was a revamped version of Davenant's own five year old opera The Siege of Rhodes. It is not known who painted the scenes or shutters, or whether continental craftsmen were responsible for the technical construction, but the result was such a sensation that it brought Charles II to a public theatre for the first time. The competing King's Company suddenly found itself playing to empty houses, as Pepys notes on 4 July:

I went to the theatre [in Vere Street] and there I saw Claracilla (the first time I ever saw it), well acted. But strange to see this house, that used to be so thronged, now empty since the opera begun—and so will continue for a while I believe. The Siege of Rhodes "continued acting 12 days without interruption with great applause". This was a remarkable run for the limited potential audience of the time. As four more acclaimed Duke's Company productions "with scenes" followed at Lincoln's Inn Fields in the course of 1661 (including Hamlet), all highly admired by Pepys, the King's Company had no other recourse than to hastily commission a changeable scenery playhouse of their own. Bowing to the inevitable just seven months after the opening of Lincoln's Inn Fields, Killigrew and his actors signed orders for a new, even more magnificent, theatre in Bridges Street. This theatre, the first step in the war of spectacle escalation of the 1660s, was so full when Pepys and his wife went to see an opera there that "they told us we could have no room". The large, yet compact, Restoration playhouses, with audience capacities from 700 to upwards of 2,000, were enormous investments, financed through selling shares in the companies, which were thus bound to make more and more money from ticket sales. Not only the theatres and their technical equipment, but the flats painted for a single performance, the special effects, and the elaborate stage clothes, were extremely expensive. Audiences appreciated both luxury and appropriateness of décor and costume: Pepys was quite capable of going several times to see a play that, as such, he disliked, purely for the pleasure of viewing striking and innovative scenery like "a good scene of a town on fire". The companies struggled to outdo each other in catering to these expensive tastes, with precarious finances and the ever present consciousness that the investments could literally burn to the ground in a few hours. When the theatre in Bridges Street did burn down in January 1672, with its entire stock of scenery and costumes, it was an economic blow from which the King's Company never recovered. The Duke's Company, operating smoothly under what soon became Davenant's and Thomas Betterton's joint management, consistently led the way while the King's lagged further and further behind, moving only in forced response and suffering from chronic management conflict between Killigrew and powerful actor shareholders like Michael Mohun and Charles Hart, who insisted on actor centered "talk" drama. The difference can be traced in Pepys' regular preference for performances at the Duke's, and in his ever renewed admiration for Betterton's acting. In December 1667, the King's Company even ceased acting for some days because of a quarrel between Mohun and Hart. With the escalation of expenses, days with zero takings were a very serious matter. The crowning grand investment of the Duke's Company was totally beyond the King's means to respond to: the "machine house" at Dorset Garden.

Even after the King's Company got their new well appointed playhouse in Drury Lane in 1674, they could not take full advantage of it, as they lacked the capital to mount competitive spectaculars. Instead, they attempted to simultaneously capitalize on Duke's most successful mid 1670s offerings by mounting several burlesques or parodies of them, written by Thomas Duffett. The records for the mid 1670s are particularly incomplete, and neither exact dates nor the public reaction to Duffett's pieces are known, but the printed versions have proved highly amusing to modern critics. The first of them, The Empress of Morocco, simultaneously caricatured Settle's Empress of Morocco and the sumptuous new Dorset Garden production of Davenant's Macbeth adaptation, with Duffett's three witches flying in over the pit on brooms at the high point of the action, followed by the descent of Hecate over the Stage "in a glorious chariot, adorned with pictures of hell and devils, and made of a large wicker basket". The Mock Tempest improves on the shower of fire over the audience in the Dorset Garden pseudo Shakespearean tempest scene with a rain of "fire, apples, nuts".

During the political unrest of 1678–84 with the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, there was little investment in spectaculars. In 1682, the companies merged, making Dorset Garden's technical resources available to Dryden, who rapidly overcame his principled objection to the superficiality of "spectacle" and "empty operas". The display of machinery and extravagant visuals that he went on to write, Albion and Albanius (1684–85), is quoted in the "Introductory" section, with the cave of Proteus rising out of the sea. Here is Juno in her flying peacock machine:

The Clouds divide, and JUNO appears in a Machine drawn by Peacocks; while a Symphony is playing, it moves gently forward, and as it descends, it opens and discovers the Tail of the Peacock, which is so large, that it almost fills the opening of the Stage between Scene and Scene. Unusual visual allegory in this Tory panegyric of Charles II and the House of Stuart includes a figure representing the radical Whig leader Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury "with fiend's wings, and snakes twisted round his body; he is encompassed by several fanatical rebellious heads, who suck poison from him, which runs out of a tap in his side." Unfortunate for the financial future of the company, while Dryden's propaganda piece was in preparation, Charles II died. James II succeeded him, and the Monmouth Rebellion which Shaftesbury had fomented broke out. On June 3, 1685, the day of the premiere, the Duke of Monmouth landed in the west. "The nation being in a great consternation", recollected Downes, "it was performed but six times, which not answering half the charge they were at, involved the company very much in debt." This traumatic fiasco ruled out all further operatic spectacle investment until the calmer times after the Glorious Revolution of 1689.

While the United Company's takings were being bled off by Davenant's sons, one of whom, Alexander, was forced to flee the country in 1693 and other predatory investors, Thomas Betterton continued to act as de facto day to day manager and producer, enjoying a budget on the scale of Cecil B. DeMille. In the early 1690s, he staged the three real operas of the Restoration spectacular genre, or the shows usually so designated: Dioclesian (1689–90) by Massinger/Fletcher/Betterton; King Arthur (1690–91) by John Dryden; and The Fairy Queen (1691–92), adapted from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream by perhaps Elkanah Settle, all of them featuring music by Henry Purcell. The lavish variety entertainment Dioclesian, adapted by Betterton, with many monsters, dragons, and machines, from Massinger and Fletcher's History of Dioclesian, was popular throughout the 1690s and proved a financial success for the United Company. Dryden's much more serious King Arthur was the first operatic entertainment that Hume was prepared to consider an artistic success, with Purcell's music playing a major part of the entertainment and the songs "for once well integrated into the play". At the very end of its history, the economics of the Restoration spectacular spiraled out of control with the magnificent production of The Fairy Queen in the 1691–92 season. It was a great success, but so stuffed with special effects and so expensive that it nevertheless proved impossible to turn a profit. As Downes recalls: "Though the court and town were wonderfully satisfied with it the expenses in setting it out being so great, the company got little by it." Its twelve foot high working fountain and six dancing real live monkeys have become notorious in theatre history. The spectacular play saw a sharp decline during the Restoration period, but spectacle would continue on the English stage as the splendors of Italian grand opera hit London in the early 18th century. The Restoration economic spiral of the extravagant machine served as a lesson for 18th and 19th century theatrical entrepreneurs to dispense with playwrighting altogether and minimize the cast, utilizing any number of surprising effects and scenes in the dumbshow of pantomime and Harlequin, without attendant costs in music, dramatists, and cast. There have been a small number of attempts to resurrect the Restoration spectacular as a background to modern cinema: Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen features at its start perhaps the most accurate reconstruction, with painted scenery, mechanisms and lighting effects typical of the period.