HOME
Executive Committee
Institutional Members
International Directory
Congresses
National Collections
Research Sites
Partner Organisations
WHAT'S NEW
FORUM
|
Callot's Etchings and
Illustrations of the English Stage in the Seventeenth
Century
John H. Astington
(Toronto)
Documentation et art de
l'acteur
Records and images of the art of the performer
18ème Congrès
International, Stockholm 3-7 septembre 1990
18th International Congress, Stockholm 3-7 September 1990
Editor: Barbro Stribolt (Drottningholms Teatermuseum).
Stockholm : 1992, p. 49-51
Theatrical illustrations
up to fairly recent times have frequently been less of a
realistic record and rather more of a decorative schema
governed by convention. I am interested particularly in
the ways in which seventeenth-century graphic artists
used sources, as a builder might use a pattern book, in
composing illustrations which are generic and derivative
rather than specific and original. Thus the title page to
Scarron's Roman Comique has very little to do with
the theatrical conditions described in the book, drawing
as it does on the etching by Abraham Bosse, published in
1630, of the players of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, in
itself a composite display scene rather than a record of
one particular moment on stage, and copying details of
costume and gesture from Jacques Callot's pictures of commedia
players.
At about the same time there appeared in England a little
engraving of a theatrical stage, the significance of
which has always been a matter of controversy in theatre
history, but which has from time to time been claimed as
a genuine representation of English stage conditions. We
now know that one of its features, the tapering stage
frequently distrusted as an improbable fiction, was in
fact exactly matched by the shape of both stages - that
from 1587 and that from 1592 - at the Rose Playhouse.
Equally, however, it seems that the Roxana
engraving, as it's usually called, after the play to
which it serves as decorative title page, was composed
with traditional motifs in mind. The engraver of the
picture can be identified as the English craftsman John
Payne, who was responsible for many title pages and
engraved portraits in the 1620s and 1630s, and who, like
most of his professional colleagues, composed pictorial
schemes by copying and recombining elements of other
pictures - both his own prior work and that of other
artists. His own stage picture was in turn copied by the
engraver Thomas Rawlins in a title page illustration
eight years later.
The stages shown in both these pictures are tiny, and
their scale does not suggest theatres like the Rose, but
the invented stages and curtained booths in the famous
Treschel edition of Terence's plays, published in 1493.
The play which is prefaced by Payne's little picture is
in Latin, and has no connection with the commercial
theatre. It seems quite likely that a visual allusion to
the "Roman" stages of Renaissance Terence
editions is being made. So with the foreground audience -
later Terentian illustrated editions include this
pictorial detail, while they transfer the plays to a
scenic stage.
But the actors in Payne's picture do not seem to draw on
such sources, and they are rather a puzzle in that they
are quite eclectically costumed. The athletic figure with
the sword on the left of the picture seems to be composed
from the version of Roman dress in representation of Sejanus,
another title page by Payne from 1632. The bowing man and
the standing woman are derived directly, I believe, from
this vignette on a title page by Payne's colleague
William Marshall, published in the year before the Roxana
picture. Both the dress of the man and details of his
gesture have been changed by Payne, but other parts of
the composition - particularly the beard of the man, the
general forward-moving inclination, and the relative
position and stance of the woman - all match this
picture. What is odd in the Roxana picture is the
ruff and long supported skirt of the female character
when the men are loosely classicised.
This source explains the oddity, yet it is itself a copy,
far more directly, of two plates from Jacques Callot's
series La noblesse lorraine, published in the
1620s. Marshall simply reverses the bowing gentleman in
bringing the two figures together in a scene of
courtship, and Payne took the composition as the
substantial basis for two of his actors. In exactly the
same year as Marshall was copying Callot, 1631, Inigo
Jones first drew on the French artist in his masque
designs, and over the course of the next decade used both
figures and landscapes for costumes and settings.
He too used the series La noblesse lorraine, as
well as the famous Balli di Sfessania, and the
grotesque Gobbi. That Callot's work was known in
England, therefore, is not in doubt, and John Payne
perhaps also knew the Balli series directly, as
well as deriving figures from Callot at second hand.
Certainly the athletic gesture and general liveliness of
the Roxana picture suggest the inspiration of
Callot's depictions of the cavorting commedia
players.
What we can be sure about is that the actors on Payne's
stage are not illustrations of contemporary English
performers, nor is their costume a reliable guide to what
was worn on the stage in Charles I's reign. We might
therefore be inclined to think that the details of his
theatre are equally fictional. Rawlin's copy of the
little stage, published on the title page of the play Messallina
in 1640, removes both actors and audience from the
composition, and changes the details of the tiring house
- the space behind the stage.
Rawlins may be creating a third-hand fiction - a copy of
a copy of a Terentian illustration - but what complicates
this theory is that he was a successfully produced
dramatist at the time he made the picture. He knew what
Stuart indoor playhouses looked like, and he didn't alter
the essential details of Payne's design. Yet the power of
convention in illustration is so great in this period
that Rawlins's dramatic experience may have meant
precisely nothing when he came to compose a title page
for his friend Nathanael Richards's play; at best he is
an ambiguous witness.
A third title-page engraving, published just after the
Restoration and the consequent resumption of officially
sanctioned English theatrical life accompanies a
collection of comic episodes, many drawn from old plays,
which bears the title The Wits. The picture
contains the first representation of Falstaff and
generally it is a parade of dramatic types rather than an
illustration of a given theatrical moment.
The oddly elongated thrust of the stage may be dictated
by the pictorial needs of displaying the four ranks of
comic characters, rather than a desire to report the
dimensions of any actual theatre, or of a room adapted
for playing in the late commonwealth period - one
hypothesis about the nature of the playing space
depicted. Certain details of the picture are convincingly
theatrical, and are not shown in any other illustration
of Tudor and Stuart playhouses - the hanging chandeliers,
and the footlights - while other elements, although they
may indeed reflect theatrical actuality, may equally be
drawn from pictorial traditions: the hangings, the
audience facing the stage and in the balcony behind it,
and the mobile gesturing actors are all to be seen in the
Roxana picture.
The Wits illustrator also shows an audience at the
sides of the stage, but these shaded figures wearing hats
are very similar to those shown at the sides of Callot's
little stage in the title etching to the Balli, as
is the detail of actors entering, or at least watching,
through the hangings at the rear of the stage. If Callot
was a source for these details, did his figures also
suggest the prancing pose of the "French Dancing
Mr", and the curiously caricatured face of the
"Hostes", which seems nearer to a mask than it
does to an actor's grimace?
Other Callot etchings might be cited as possible sources
for other figures in the picture. Falstaff - half elegant
gentleman and half grotesque - himself sports elements of
Callot's favourite motifs. The bearded head with large
hat and collar, the breeches, boots, and sword are too
similar to those of other figures from the noblesse
series, while the fat paunch with buttons running down it
is a common grotesquerie in both the Balli and Gobbi
pictures.
The figure of "Clause", a character from
Retcher's play Beggar's Bush seems also to have
gained some inspiration from Callot's extravagantly
ragged individuals in the "Beggars" series of
etchings: the arm bound in a sling, the bare foot and the
bound limping foot, the beard, crutch, and large ragged
hat. Evidently the sources are not as direct as in the
case of the Callot-Marshall-Payne borrowing, and there
are other influences at work also.
The remaining figures on the stage don't seem to be drawn
from Callot material, but two of them copy other English
engraved plates published before the restoration. My
research on the sources of the picture is continuing, and
I hope I will be able to report more fully on them in the
future. I think it is beyond doubt, however, that an
important source of pictorial material for theatrical
illustration remained the etchings of Jacques Callot.
Pictures of actors in particular in published English
engravings of the seventeenth century should be looked on
with some caution in drawing conclusions about the actual
appearance of contemporary performers. Many pictorial
details were copied from other pictures, among them those
of a notable French recorder of the Italian popular
comedy. Callot had been sufficiently naturalised as a
visual source in the sixteen thirties and forties that it
should not surprise us that a picture produced
immediately after the interregnum, and which refers back
to theatrical conditions before the wars, should also use
his prints extensively.
The vigour, energy, and grace of his work particularly
recommended him as a source for comic figures, and one
may contrast the relative life of the figures on the
stage in The Wits engraving wlth the gloomy
woodenness of the stiff figures in the audience. The
anonymous English craftsman's talent does not shine
through, making it all the more likely that he would have
looked for a dependable pattern of vigour and lively
gesture.
Unlike the Roxana picture, which, it was pointed
out many years ago, does not illustrate any episode from
the play it prefaces, the picture in The Wits does
show a number of the more famous comic characters from
the anthology - although, as Ihave said, they would not
all have trod the stage at the same time. The picture is
not necessarily more reliable in reflecting theatrical
conditions, however, in that it seems to be assembled
with the same principles of eclectic copying of earlier -
and not exclusively theatrical - visual sources. All
seventeenth-century engraved pictures purporting to show
English playhouses of the pre-scenic type should be
suspected as primary evidence, and approached with great
care. We know that in some respects they are not original
depictions, and we have no way of ascertaining the limits
between actual record and fanciful or decorative
invention.
18th Congress
Sibmas Home Page
URL:
http://www.theatrelibrary.org/sibmas/congresses/sibmas90/sto_11.html
Information about
this site: Claire Hudson, Secretary General
Last modified:
November 21, 2000
|
