Sir William Davenant, the Court Masque, and the English Seventeen ...

Playwrights would have found there were technical needs and timings to be allowed for in their texts for the management of the stage but, more importantly, that many of the conventions of the platform stage of location and spatial relationships could no longer apply. Most obviously, the entrance doors moved from the rear tiring house façade onto a forestage, which, with the painted locations set behind it, gave visual information about the action being performed. This immediately set up certain connotations for the audience which would affect the ways in which the audience began to perceive the plays and which the dramatist would need to consider.

In the fifth chapter, dramaturgical analyses of certain plays first presented at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Davenant acted as director of the plays for the mostly young untried dramatists, suggest that the use of scenery changed the conventions the audience were accustomed to and hence the ways in which they perceived and understood what the dramatist was portraying, and this affected, in particular, the understanding of time passing, spatial integrity, and simultaneous action.

The second part of the study considers the legacy of experimentation Davenant’s work at Lincoln’s Inn Fields left to those who followed him, particularly in the work of Betterton, who had worked with Davenant throughout and became comanager of the Duke’s Company after Davenant’s death. The two fairly simple scenic theatres opened in 1660/1601 were superseded by two new ones with larger and more elaborate stages in 1671 and 1674 respectively. In these theatres, more complicated settings were possible, and the sixth chapter argues that both companies saw the possibilities and advantages of the staging in the larger theatres with more elaborate stage fitments. Detailed dramaturgical analysis of certain productions suggests both what these fittings must have been and the ways in which the two companies gradually developed more sophisticated methods of using them to involve the scenic stage with the dialogue and the action in all genres. It argues that the experimentation in staging drama; that Davenant had encouraged, continued, and broadened after his death; and that Betterton in particular began to stage elaborate spectacle once he was in charge of the United Company.