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

It was shown at the Blackfriars in April 1638 before the queen. This was not unique, for there are other mentions of the queen going to the Blackfriars before this. She had seen The Tragedy of Cleander by Massinger in May 1634 and had taken the king’s nephew to see Alphonso, Emperor of Germany in May 1636³¹ and then saw Davenant’s play in April 1638. It is assumed these were private performances, as the records show the company was paid as if for a performance at court. Nevertheless, it shows the high regard in which the company was held at court. The company performed The Unfortunate Lovers again at the Cockpit-in-court in May and then at Hampton Court in September. The play became a stock piece after the Restoration, and Pepys saw it four times, although he was never very satisfied with it. The company performed The Fair Favourite at the Cockpit-in-court in November 1638 and again in December.³² The Distresses, which is thought to be the same play as The Spanish Lovers, was licensed in November 1639 and appears in the list for the King’s Men, but little is known of where or when it was shown.

What Davenant’s plays suggest is that he was experimenting with style and content to find a popular vehicle. He was not a dramatist with a message but rather one looking to earn his living through the theatre. Nevertheless, he would have been absorbing what worked in visual and theatrical as well as in popular terms, learning how to structure a play for performance, how to place and pace the action for maximum impact, how to depict characters in dialogue to which actors could relate and language which they could speak comfortably, as well as discovering the mundane needs of staging in not giving impossible timings for entries or exits. He would have been absorbing the ways in which the public theatres worked and what it was the companies expected from a dramatist.

The Companies and Their Theatres

When Charles I ascended the throne on the death of his father in 1625, he gave a new patent to the King’s Men stating that they continued to have the right to call themselves the King’s Servants and to present their performances “within these two theire, most usuall Houses called the Globe within Our County of Surrey, and their private Houses scituate [sic] within the Precinct of the Black Fryers within Our Citty of London”.³³