Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface: an outline of approaches taken
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and editions
- Introduction: Brick, lime, sand, plaster over lath and ‘new oaken boards’: the early modern playhouse
- Case study A Richard III at the Globe
- Case study B An outdoor theatre repertoire: the Rose on Bankside
- Chapter 1 Tragedy
- Case study C Opening scenes
- Case study D Staging violence and the space of the stage
- Chapter 2 Revenge drama
- Case study E ‘Here, in the Friars’: the second Blackfriars indoor playhouse
- Case study F The social life of things: skulls on the stage
- Chapter 3 Histories
- Case study G Title pages and plays in print
- Chapter 4 Comedy, pastoral and romantic
- Case study H The boy actor: body, costume and disguise
- Chapter 5 City comedies
- Case study I The dramaturgy of scenes
- Case study J Collaborative writing or the literary workshop
- Chapter 6 Satire
- Case study K Topical theatre and 1605–6: ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November’
- Case study L ‘Little eyases’: the children's companies and repertoire
- Chapter 7 Tragicomedy
- Case study M The visual rhetoric of dumb show
- Conclusion: The wind and the rain: the wider landscape of early modern performance
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Introductions to . . .
Case study E - ‘Here, in the Friars’: the second Blackfriars indoor playhouse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface: an outline of approaches taken
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and editions
- Introduction: Brick, lime, sand, plaster over lath and ‘new oaken boards’: the early modern playhouse
- Case study A Richard III at the Globe
- Case study B An outdoor theatre repertoire: the Rose on Bankside
- Chapter 1 Tragedy
- Case study C Opening scenes
- Case study D Staging violence and the space of the stage
- Chapter 2 Revenge drama
- Case study E ‘Here, in the Friars’: the second Blackfriars indoor playhouse
- Case study F The social life of things: skulls on the stage
- Chapter 3 Histories
- Case study G Title pages and plays in print
- Chapter 4 Comedy, pastoral and romantic
- Case study H The boy actor: body, costume and disguise
- Chapter 5 City comedies
- Case study I The dramaturgy of scenes
- Case study J Collaborative writing or the literary workshop
- Chapter 6 Satire
- Case study K Topical theatre and 1605–6: ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November’
- Case study L ‘Little eyases’: the children's companies and repertoire
- Chapter 7 Tragicomedy
- Case study M The visual rhetoric of dumb show
- Conclusion: The wind and the rain: the wider landscape of early modern performance
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Introductions to . . .
Summary
The second Blackfriars playhouse (the first had been a venue for the Children of the Chapel Royal in the 1570s and 1580s) was initially the home of the Children of the Chapel from about 1600 onwards until the King's Men took it over around 1608 and staged plays there right up to the outbreak of the English Civil War. This indoor theatre gained a reputation for cutting-edge drama and innovative theatre practice and attracted work from the top playwrights of the day, including Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Shakespeare and Chapman. It is a fascinating exercise to consider how particular plays written with the Blackfriars space in mind as at least one likely site of performance reflect and respond to the challenges and opportunities of the indoor playhouse with its smaller audience and therefore its greater intimacy, and with its candlelit interior and use of music between the acts to enable the trimming of the wax on the aforesaid candles.
The Induction that Webster is believed to have added to the performance script of Marston's The Malcontent when it was adapted for playing by the King's Men in an open-air amphitheatre, having initially been a children's company play, suggests that the use of music between the acts in the so-called ‘private’ or indoor theatres was an innovation that those older outdoor arenas could not match:
SLY What are your additions?
BURBAGE Sooth, not greatly needful; only as your salad to your great feast, to entertain a little more time, and to abridge the not-received custom of music in our theatre.
(The Malcontent, QC additions, Induction, 99–102)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014