“Let all the dukes and all the devils roar!” Mad Skills and Madwomen

The wildly popular star scene of female derangement enriched the stock of theatergrams deployed by playwrights across the map. Isabella Andreini’s triumph playing La Pazzia (“Madness”), featuring her skills in singing, impersonation, languages, and improvisation, spurred many imitations. On the English stage female madness took several forms. Bereaved madwomen leap from deep mourning to subversive songs and jokes, as with Ophelia in Hamlet and Cornelia in Webster’s The White Devil. Others express furious grief cut off by showy suicides (Isabella in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and Zabina in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine). Sapho in Lyly’s Sapho and Phao and Dido in Marlowe’s The Tragedie of Dido, Queen of Carthage suffer comic and tragic erotomania. Most distinctive are the comic virtuosas: Pandora in Lyly’s The Woman in the Moone and the Jailer’s Daughter in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen amuse and astonish with multiple prolonged pazzie and prodigious displays of skill.

Andrew Bozio, Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp 240.

Review of Andrew Bozio's Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage by Randall Martin.

The Court Culture in France, Italy and England in 16-17th Centuries: Interaction and Mutual Influence

<p>The article examines the traditions of French court ballet, which are rooted in early medieval Italian musical and theatrical performances, as well as the traditions of the medieval carnival. The functional features of the French court ballet are revealed. French ballet is viewed through the prism of a synthesized art form: dance, music, poetry and complex scenography. It is specified that French ballet as an independent genre was formed in the era of Queen Catherine de Medici.</p><p>It was revealed that thanks to the skill and professionalism of choreographers of both French and Italian descent, the French court ballet reached its peak in the first half of the seventeenth century.</p><p>It was determined that the court ballet was becoming a cultural and political instrument that raised the status of France in Europe, served to strengthen the authority of the French monarch, and was a means of uniting the French monarchy and the people. Despite significant financial costs, the political and cultural feasibility of staging court ballets exceeded the economic feasibility.</p><p>An analogy is drawn with the English court Мasque. It is substantiated that the English court Masque was based on the traditions of Italian intermedio and French court ballet. Thus, English stage designers adopted the experience of Italian stage designers. Dances of Italian origin were an integral part of Masque in England. Choreography in Masque was created by French and Italian choreographers.</p><p>It has been proven that English culture was influenced by continental culture, which contributed to the formation of a common cultural space.</p><p>It is substantiated that the genre of French ballet, Italian intermedio and English Masque were not a high art, but over time, having undergone a transformation, they evolved into new forms and genres.</p>

“Sardoodledom” on the English Stage: T. W. Robertson and the Assimilation of Well-Made Play into the English Theatre

The article discusses a vital figure in the development of modern English theatre, Thomas William Robertson, in the context of his borrowings, inspirations, translations and adaptations of the French dramatic formula pièce bien faite (well-made play). The paper gives the definition and enumerates features of the formula created with great success by the French dramatist Eugène Scribe. Presenting the figure of Thomas William Robertson, the father of theatre management and realism in Victorian theatre, the focus is placed on his adaptations of French plays and his incorporation of the formula of the well-made play and its conventional dramatic devices into his original, and most successful, plays, Society and Caste. The paper also examines the critical response to the well-made play in England and dramatists who use its formula, especially from the point of view of George Bernard Shaw, who famously called the French plays of Scribe and Victorien Sardou—“Sardoodledom.”

All Roads Lead to Rhodes

This chapter explores the reopened theater with particular attention to William Davenant. He transformed English theater in significant ways. Restoration theater artists not only intensified onstage explorations of an increasingly interconnected global network, but also defended the revived theater as more sophisticated than a posited barbaric past. Further, they understood theater as a mechanism for national refinement. Davenant became the most successful advocate for this vision, arguing for the positive effects of theater through its capacity to help England emerge from its crude provincial past and match the more advanced European and Asian empires. The Siege of Rhodes transformed theatrical possibilities, featuring moveable scenery, a new genre (the heroic), and the professional actress. At the moment of the Stuart restoration, after defeat and exile, it also marked the first English stage representation of an admirable Ottoman Empire. Davenant's production flattered, but also revealed the vulnerabilities of the restored monarch's cosmopolitics. Even though the play features the defeat of Christians at the hands of Ottomans, The Siege does not promote fear or hatred, but rather envy of this empire's sophistication and power. Ottomanphilia became fashionable in the Restoration. Charles II wore Eastern clothing to the opening of Roger Boyle's play Mustapha. Davenant's immensely popular Siege of Rhodes inaugurated, a new form of cosmopolitanism that promoted the widespread consumption of global objects and ideas as signs of sophistication.