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- Pierre Béhar / Helen Watanabe O'Kelly (Hg.):Spectaculum
Europaeum: Theatre and Spectacle in Europe.
(Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 31) Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 1999. 818 S. Kart. DM 298,-.
ISBN 3-447-04039-4.
Brief description | General aims and
policy | Individual articles–Pan-European surveys
| France | Crete |
Italy | Spain | England |
The Netherlands | The Holy Roman Empire |
Scandinavia | Poland and Hungary |
Conclusion
Brief description
Charles de Gaulle once remarked that Europe consisted of
festivals and
pageants. Studying this splendid anthology of dramatic forms in early modern
Europe, readers may be inclined to agree. The editors, Helen Watanabe
O'Kelly, Oxford, and Pierre Béhar, Saarland University, modestly call
Spectaculum Europaeum a "handbook". Both the physical weight and
intellectual scope of this gargantuan volume inspire awe.
The collection of 39 illustrated essays by 19 contributors
falls into four
main parts: drama, opera, ballet, tournaments, and lastly, entries and other
festivals. The various countries appear under subheadings; the quality of
individual chapters is uneven (for example, regarding Italy). Funerals,
coronations and religious ceremonies have mostly been left out for reasons of
space. The articles (English for Northern regions, French for Neo-Latin drama
and Romance cultures) differ in length, from a two-page miniature
description of English pageants to a 74-page survey of Neo-Latin theatre.
They concentrate on facts and figures; their appeal might at times be
compared to that of Kindler or the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Each article is followed by a brief survey of essential literature with
suggestions for further research. The book ends with a name and subject index
which excludes secondary matter and twentieth-century critics.
"If the specialist in Polish drama could learn about
Italian fireworks
or Danish drama, if the pervasive influence of Dutch or Spanish or Latin
drama or of the commedia dell'arte were realised, [...] how much this
would enhance our understanding of all forms of theatre and spectacle in the
period under review", thus the editors' mission statement (p.VII). In this,
Spectaculum Europaeum claims to be a pioneering collection:
"there is to date no over-arching account of what theatrical experiences
were on offer to contemporaries at the beginning of the modern age" (p.VII).
A nod to worthy precursors is missing here, for example, to Jean Jacquot's
two-volume Dramaturgie et Société: rapports entre l'oeuvre théâtrale, son
interprétation et son public aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions
du CNRS, 1968). Jacquot and his collaborators had already written on Poland,
Austria, Holland, Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Scandinavia, England and
the Jesuit theatre.
What George Bush likes to call "Yurp"
is a tricky
object of study. The early seventeenth century seems to have had a flexible
understanding of Europe's boundaries. In a more expansive 1640s map of
Europe, the cartographer Willem Blaeu included generous helpings of the
Ottoman Empire and what is today's Russia. With similar flexibility the
problem has been handled here. Spectaculum Europaeum describes a
compromise between the geopolitical status and cultural nexus of European
countries at the time. In this way, the headings balance seventeenth-century
states such as "The Empire" (i.e. the Holy Roman Empire) with
nineteenth-century developments such as "Italy". It would be asking too
much to demand complete coverage of all regions between the Bosphorus and the
Orkney Islands; some of the areas charted here remain >terra incognita<.
Scotland and Ireland have been left out in what ought to be a comprehensive
British section. The Tsarist Empire gets one page in the book. The Swiss
Confederation seems an entertainment-neutral zone. The concept of Europe
expounded here is – probably unavoidably – caught up somewhere between the
union of Portugal and Spain in 1580 and the treaty of Nice.
The editors have considered a two-page text sufficient to
introduce their
enormous undertaking. This leads to cryptic critical shorthand:
The eyes and ears of these contemporaries absorbed all types
of spectacle equally, as one phenomenon, within which various forms and genres, of greater
or lesser distinctness and fluidity, manifested themselves. Subsequent
critics have tried to make sometimes quite artificial distinctions between
these genres and forms, and, following aesthetic principles which were often
anachronistic, to place them in an artistic hierarchy (p.VII).
Did spectators from Naples to Åbo really form one like-minded
community,
regarding all types of spectacle as one phenomenon? Nowhere in the volume
does the testimony of a contemporary back up such views. A collection which
intends on challenging genre boundaries within the entire canon of European literary
criticism might need a more genrous preface.
What did "European Spectacle" mean to contemporaries, if
the geographic
term alone could mean all sorts of things? According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, the adjective "European" occurs for the first time in
1603 in English usage. Was made it so special to be living – and performing –
in Europe that the vocabulary changed in this period? Was there any early
modern consciousness of a specifically "European" dramatic culture? A
volume which ambitiously addresses the cross-currents of European dramatic
culture might also ask these questions.
Ruprecht Wimmer's study of Neo-Latin drama from about 1550 to
1750
demonstrates that calling for a pan-European survey makes sense. Jesuit
tracts such as the Ratio Studiorum (1599) quickly established a
certain uniformity in the organisation of drama throughout Europe.
Ménéstrier, Mambrun and Le Jay established a coherent theory of acting and
spectacle. The anthology Selectae Patrum Societatis Jesu Tragoediae
(Antwerp, 1634) included tragedies by French, Italian and Dutch members of
the Society; booklets often provided explanations to non-Latinate audiences.
Such examples attest to a truly polyglot policy of spectacle. In passing,
Wimmer refers to music; for him, Neo-Latin theatre is mainly verbal. He
concludes with an intriguing outlook on anti-Jesuit Latin plays and the way
national languages could be employed to protest against Latin, the official
language of the Catholic church. Thus, the Protestant author Johannes
Micraelius writes in a prologue to his play Agathander (1633):
"Soll unser runde Zung nur sein der Römer Knecht?" (p.48). This
article is a magisterial survey with an immense bibliography.
Christopher Cairns's essay on commedia dell'arte in
Europe has a fine
section on Bavaria as an early centre of the art (ca. 1568). Other extended
themes include the >gelosi< in sixteenth-century France and the
expulsion of Italian artists from French territory in 1697.
Watanabe O'Kelly's Tournaments represents a highlight with
splendid
illustrations from Swedish sources; some of the material here derives in
updated form from her excellent book Triumphall Shews: Tournaments at
German-Speaking Courts in Their European Context 1560-1730 (Berlin:
Mann, 1992). Not only does she offer a comprehensive history of dressage and
martial disciplines in various European centres, but an expanded view on
genres, for example, the tournament-opera, or the "toros", a bullfight
still found in modern Portugal which includes horses trained in the "haute
école".
In La tragédie et la comédie en France, Pierre Béhar
wonders whether
the unity of space demanded in classical theory was a dramatic necessity,
given the spatial constraints of mid-seventeenth-century theatres in Paris.
Other intriguing reflections concern the political appropriation of
Corneille, whom revolutionaries and reactionary forces alike claimed as their
ideological ally (Napoleon reportedly said that he would have made him a
prince, had he lived in his age). Béhar also returns to the point raised in
the preface: it is indeed unhelpful to press Molière's comédie-ballets
into the straitjacket of Aristotelian definition.
Paulette Choné's article, too, stresses the fluidity of
genre, discussing
fêtes à programme: Les Plaisirs de l'Isle enchantée
(1664), which combined a tilt, a visit of the menagerie, a lottery, and
Molière's Les Fâcheux, defies conventional classification.
Jérôme de La Gorce presses on with French opera since 1645,
featuring
Charpentier's shocking Médée (1693), whose dissonances confused the
audience. Other themes include the use of popular tunes in operas, and the
development of a score for bass voices.
Marie-Claude Canova-Green's book La Politique-Spectacle au
Grand Siècle:
les rapports franco-anglais (Tübingen: Biblio 17, 1993) has been an
eye-opener. With equal expertise she here writes on French >ballet de cour
<, striking a balance between Paris and other centres. The article also
offers insight into Jesuit ballet, political court ballet under Richelieu,
>travesti< roles, the emergence of the >port de bras<, and the way
Molière planned the entries of dancers in his comédie-ballets.
Béhar maps Crete, then under Venetian rule until 1669. The
strong Italian
influence on local culture becomes apparent in his survey of drama and the
tastes of leading families; there are interesting asides at anti-Ottoman mock
battles.
Italy invites raised expectations, given the immense impact
of this country
on Europe's festival culture. Were the contributors perhaps daunted by the
difficulty of such an undertaking and the sheer richness of the material? The
combination of vivid characterisation and dry statistics, so successfully
achieved in other parts of the book, is somewhat less apparent here. The
chapters do offer, of course, a comprehensive survey and a wealth of
information. Their concise critical analysis of genre developments in drama
and opera is very helpful. Certain aspects do manage to engage the reader: Paulette
Choné's study Triomphes, entrées, feux d'artifice et fêtes religieuses
en Italie problematises the heterogeneity of Italian regions and helpfully
expounds Berns's concept of the pageant car as >Automobil<. A
captivating paragraph refers to the recycling of machines, such as a temple
to celebrate Urban VIII in Mantua (1623), used again for a Medici entry three
years later. Christopher Cairns's account of Italian drama extends from
Castiglione's production of La Calandra (Urbino, 1513) to Goldoni's
adaptation of Richardson's Pamela (1750), with an in-depth discussion
of perspective scenery. Marie-Thérèse Bouquet-Boyer's article on Italian
opera provides useful tables of productions, dates, and genres relating to
Mantua, Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples and especially Turin. She also offers
a good survey of vocal technique, singers, their career profiles and income.
Her Le ballet de cour en Italie privileges Savoy with an exhaustive
study of Philippe d'Aglié's creations between 1624 and 1660.
Still, much has been presented in a surprisingly uninspired
manner. Bernini,
the genius of sculpture, was not above designing furniture as well; as a
theatre architect and playwright he experimented with onstage audiences.
Little of his innovative spirit and versatility comes across in the bland
references to this artist. From these chapters – and from the index – one
would not gather that Italians ever celebrated carnival. Rome directed it
under papal and municipal supervision, catering for all tastes from the
elevated to the vulgar. Jews were forced to run naked in races, animals were
hurled down from Monte Testaccio and then slaughtered by the waiting crowd.
Such unpalatable aspects, too, are part of Italian spectacle. They ought to
be investigated, and they are needed to counterbalance aseptic stage
perspectives and genre diagrams. Bonnie Blackburn has shown how to analyse
such events.
A more lively account of spectacle in performance might have
informed readers
about production processes, collaboration between writers, composers and
other artists, rehearsals, technical challenges and even sabotage. Essential
primary sources by authors such as Monteverdi and Rinuccini comment on that
subject and are available in modern editions, but are not mentioned here. A
recognition of more recent standard literature might have filled such gaps,
too; for example, Irene Alm's research on Venetian opera, James Saslow's
award-winning study of the 1589 Medici wedding, and Frederick Hammond's work
on papal entertainment.
This review will dwell a little longer on Bouquet-Boyer's
essay on Italian
ballet since it demonstrates in an exemplary manner how an agenda of
emphasising cultural cross-currents and common traditions can be taken too
far. Le ballet de cour en Italie claims that >ballet de cour<
was not widely practised and quickly disappeared in Italy (p.514). So why do
we get a whole article on it? In the early modern period, a rich Italian
balletic culture had permeated all of Europe from centres such as Perugia,
Venice, Milan, and Rome. Prominent sixteenth-century >ballerini<
had published memoirs in expensive, ornate prints which extolled their soaring
career, their famous pupils and choreographies, and spectacular high-profile
events they had orchestrated. In terms of movement, stylistic varieties
maintained their distinctiveness throughout the seventeenth century while a
quite different type of >danse noble< emerged in Paris and soon
spread. Contemporaries recognised these differences (as Barbara Sparti has shown).
Instead of elucidating some of these aspects, Bouquet-Boyer dismisses all
activities outside Turin with one single page in the ballet chapter and a few
lines in the opera section. The article thus incorrectly suggests that one
particular court be representative for all Italian regions. Italian dancing
is shoe-horned into a French trajectory, with Savoy ballet de cour
forming the culmination of a dubious teleology. The bibliography lacks the
most basic references to dance and ends in 1970; nor does the opera article
provide such information.
The Spanish chapters are among the most impressive in the
book. Sylvaine
Hänsel provides a good summary of festivities to celebrate the
canonisation of St Ignatius, St Xavier and St Teresa in 1622. Her unusual
essay investigates executions (>auto de fe<), machines peopled with
inmates from the local lunatic asylums (>carros de locos<), and
flagellation as spectacle. Did such practices also occur in other countries?
The author describes processions with towering machines, such as the Jesuit
>Reconquista< (1738), a multiple-storey altar in the shape of a city.
Equally fascinating is Hänsel's account of how Seville prisoners
released pigeons with petitions to the young Philip IV of Spain during his
visit in 1624.
Manfred Tietz considers the context of dramatic performance
in public
playhouses, such as admission charges, the capacity of theatres, and an
estimated illiteracy rate of 75% among the audience. We learn that female
spectators were tucked away in stifling separate compartments. There are
instructive statistics about the mass production of stock comedies, and Tietz
offers welcome information about the circulation of plays, bought by company
directors (then called "autores"), who afterwards sold them on to their
colleagues. A differentiated analysis of ecclesiastical attitudes towards the
stage reveals that, far from clamping down on festive culture, the church
sometimes actively protected and encouraged theatre until a change of
atmosphere in the mid-seventeenth century effected a more restrictive policy.
Women obtained playing permission after 1579, and dramatic activities on
Sunday were likewise tolerated. The author illustrates his narrative with his
very own models for Calderón's El divino Orfeo (1663): these miniature
>carros sacramentales<, mobile scenery on which professional actors
represented religious scenes, conclude the stimulating and scholarly
contribution.
James Knowles's fine essay on English drama is sensitive to
the way
theatrical events were mediated and produced by collaborative efforts
("page to stage to page", p.203). Next to a comprehensive account of
acting companies and genres, Knowles includes early modern literary critics
and censorship. This article conveys an excellent general impression of early
modern theatre in England. The elegance of the argument is tempered by
misspellings and misquotations.
Canova-Green's Opera in England concentrates on
Davenant's Siege of
Rhodes (1656), the Shakespeare revival, Crowne, Purcell, Händel, and
The Beggar's Opera. Her chapter on the English court masque emphasises
the role of the Stuart queens and puts much-neglected countryside
entertainments into the limelight; her careful reading of tensions within the
genre between adulation and criticism follows the tradition of Sharpean
revisionism. Canova-Green argues that the court masque came to be regarded,
despite its Italian and French sources, as specifically English; one would
like to see her expand this. Again, some slight bibliographic errors occur in
the otherwise excellent chapter; thus, the Checklist of Tudor and Stuart
Entertainments appears in Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama
, not Register of Renaissance Drama; Jonson's 1609 masque was
called The Entertainment at Britain's Burse, not Britain's Birth
.
Mieke Smits-Veldt shows the extent to which drama in the
Netherlands was a
polyglot affair, characterised by companies from abroad, Dutch versions of
English revenge tragedies and German >de casibus< repertoire. Audiences
tolerated foreign plays even if they did not understand the language. In 1707
the German-Jewish communities were granted a special theatre by Amsterdam
magistrates. Much attention in her fine study is given to the side jobs of
mid-seventeenth-century actors at the Amsterdam Theatre, employed to provide
scenery, costume and drink.
From Jochen Becker's stimulating essay we learn that festive
entries might
occasionally celebrate iconoclasm. A procession for the opening of Leiden
University (1575) was financed by the sale of church goods; catholic
vestments served as basis for costumes. Withholding festivity represented a
political weapon, when the Northern Netherlands refused to pay for a Prince
Friedrich Hendrik's funeral in 1647. Such details ensure a rewarding reading
experience in the Dutch and Flemish chapters of the collection.
All contributions on the Empire are of a high standard. The
development of
drama in the Empire, Béhar argues, suffered due to "the fact that the
Renaissance, both intellectually and artistically, became absorbed into the
controversies of the Reformation, with a corresponding clinging to Latin in
those territories which remained Catholic" (p.258). Hence, any assessment of
drama according to national faultlines only is misguided: Opitz's Deutsche
Poeterey represents not so much a national as an anti-Latin,
anti-Catholic statement; German high tragedy is a Silesian as well as
Protestant phenomenon. Apart from standard authors, Béhar discusses Czech
peasant theatre, so popular that the Jesuits occasionally appropriated its
repertoire. He ends with an intriguing outlook on Moscow, which saw the
establishment of a German acting company in about 1672.
Werner Braun's fascinating opera chapter deals with girls'
companies in
Durlach / Karlsruhe (early eighteenth century) and Dresden
"Kinderoperettchen" (ca. 1690). We read about contemporary feedback to
the "womanish voices" of castrati (Harsdörffer in 1646).
There are excellent sections on the genesis of terminology such as
"tuttiquot;, instrument combinations, and the use of stage space. Public
opera houses, especially Hamburg, and much-neglected composers such as Keiser
are given their due.
Sara Smart's Ballet in the Empire is an authoritative
study not only
of Vienna and Dresden but also many minor centres. In particular, she
investigates individual dancing masters and the gender politics of casting.
Watanabe-O'Kelly starts with Emperor Maximilian I, who
shrewdly realised that
sumptous pageants might as well take place on paper only; the splendidly decorated
festival illustrations he commissioned are still admired today. The amusing
subject of pageant machinery reveals a mechanical flapping eagle for Emperor
Matthias I in 1612. Her guide to the technical side of fireworks includes
rocket propulsion!
Mara Wade's survey of Sweden, Denmark and Norway competently
informs us about
dominating languages in drama (German, Danish, Latin), German authors abroad,
and English companies at Helsingør. Opera might demand a lot from its
audience: Les plaisirs des héros (1699), presented to Christian V of
Denmark at Amalienborg, was sung in five languages, and also offered the
first opportunity for presenting Danish on the opera stage. Her discussion of
Tragoedia von den Tugenden und Lastern (Copenhagen, 1634) acquaints
the reader with the unconventional genre of the five-act firework-drama.
It is a pity that Gunilla Dahlberg's contributions on Sweden
are generally
short, for they convey a vivid impression of how audiences and performers
behaved during certain occasions, drawing on eyewitnesses such as Johan
Ekeblad. Delays in a 1663 firework show at Stockholm severely annoyed the
spectators, exposed to the frost for five hours. The ballet Le Parnasse
triumphant (1651) came in for criticism due to its expenditure; besides,
most spectators had not understood its meaning. Presumably that was the
reason why court ballets, we learn, offered explanatory texts in different
languages; some of the French ones being ascribed to René Descartes. Queen
Christina might occasionally distribute diamonds from her own dress to
participants during banquets. Dahlberg also explains how this monarch
constructed a political persona through her roles, for example, fashioning
herself as a Virgin Queen when she danced as chaste Diana in Georg
Stiernhielm's The Captured Cupid (1649).
All contributions on Poland and Hungary are by George
Gömöri. The
essay on Hungarian drama includes a memorable discussion of vernacular
adaptations of Greek tragedy. Magyar Elektra, written by the
Protestant minister Péter Bornemisza after Sophokles, and staged in 1558 by
Hungarian students in Vienna, seems to have had a strong political
undercurrent with its emphasis on the liberation of a people.
Poland, the author reminds us, was then one of the largest
European states;
until the second half of the eighteenth century it comprised the territories
of present-day Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belorussia. Gömöri notes an
influence of Italian and German culture: Latin-German school theatre had a
strong tradition; Bach composed his B-minor mass for the coronation of August
III in Cracow in 1734. The Grand Tour of Prince Vladislaus IV (1624-25)
included the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. One would like to hear more about
M.K. Sarbiewski, a early theorist of Jesuit drama. A small section is
dedicated to plebeian theatre, by which Gömöri supposedly means
robust comedies of the mid-sixteenth-century in the Polish language, such as
the popular Peasant into King (Cracow, 1630s). The opera chapter
repeats much already mentioned in relation to drama.
Gömöri dwells on the acoustic aspects of festive
entries. A Cracow
pageant celebrating a Polish victory over Ivan the Terrible in 1583 offered
the special attraction of an azure car from which a cloud emitted terrifying
thunderclaps. It seems to have been a specifically Polish custom to dye
horses in various colours. Highlighting such idiosyncracies, the Polish
section strikes a successful balance between regional traditions and European
cross-currents.
Readers will not get a critical reflection of
>Europeanness< in drama and spectacle of the early modern period; nor
should they expect an evaluative history of current criticism. Those looking
for a Bakhtinian handbook of popular festive culture may feel a little
deprived of demotic >jouissance<. Occasionally the enthusiasm about
European cross-currents threatens to gloss over regional variety.
Readers will get a comprehensive no-nonsense account of
tournaments, opera,
dance, dramatic forms, fireworks and entries in most European countries. The
book conveys the big picture in an accessible, unpretentious and scholarly
manner, avoiding the controversial. The majority of contributions are of a
high standard; bibliographies usually extend to the mid-1990s and offer
excellent assistance to further reading and research.
The handbook will stimulate research and discussion, as the
editors had
hoped. Readers will discover many unsuspected connections and relish
memorable details. Examples such as the firework-drama or the
tournament-opera will considerably widen our understanding of genre
boundaries at the time. Spectaculum Europaeum is an enormous
achievement and should be in the reference section of any serious library.
Dr. Barbara
Ravelhofer
St. John's College Cambridge
St. John's Street
GB-Cambridge CB2 1TP
Ins Netz gestellt am 17.07.2001. Update 28.10.2001
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