Berkeley Talks: How 17th-century moveable scenery shaped modern theater
UC Berkeley Professor Julia Fawcett discusses how Restoration-era stagecraft and London’s post-fire rebuilding mirrored each other, together redefining performance and urban life.
From the book cover of Moveable Londons
March 20, 2026
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When William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600, the power of London’s theater lived almost entirely in language. The stage was mostly bare and the scenery imagined. To mark a shift in setting, an actor might simply declare, “This is the Forest of Arden.”
But by the mid-17th century, this mode of performance began to change.
Following decades of civil war and Puritan rule, King Charles II’s 1660 restoration of the monarchy reopened public theaters that had been closed for nearly two decades. It marked the beginning of the Restoration era, when movable scenery debuted — massive painted flats slid along wooden grooves, transforming the stage in seconds — and women, immigrants, servants and enslaved people first moved across it as performers and stagehands. The English stage became a space of motion, a vivid counterpart to a London rebuilt after the 1665 plague and the Great Fire of 1666.
In this Berkeley Talks episode, UC Berkeley Professor Julia Fawcett discusses her 2025 book Moveable Londons: Performance and the Modern City, which traces how this mechanical innovation echoed a deeper cultural one. It was, she says, a “revolution in English performance” that redefined movement, agency and belonging in a rapidly changing city.
And that revolution, she contends, provided the template not only for modern theater’s moving sets, star actresses and illusionistic stages, but also for ways of moving through — and belonging in — the modern city.
Fawcett’s talk, which took place on Feb. 11, 2025, was part of a Berkeley Book Chats event hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities. She was in conversation with Joshua Gang, an associate professor of English at Berkeley.
Watch a video of the discussion.
(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)
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Stephen Best: Hi, everyone, welcome to the Townsend Center. We’re really pleased to host Julia Fawcett of the Departments of English and Theater Dance and Performance Studies for a discussion of her recent book, Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City, and joining Julia is our English department colleague, Joshua Gang. The Townsend Center is proud to sponsor this event because, in addition to hearing from two great faculty in the English department, Movable Londons was also a book that we sponsored as part of our manuscript conference program, so we’re really, really glad to see the book in the world and excited to hear Julia discuss it.
Next week, the Townsend Center will be holding a two-day symposium on the way we read now called “Close, Distant, Embodied, Artificial: Modes of Reading Today.” This symposium was organized by Yael Segalovitz, who’s a visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Jewish Studies.
Our next book chat happens the week following on Wednesday, Feb. 25 when Winnie Wong of the Rhetoric Department will be here to discuss her publication, The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade, a book that challenges the norm in Western art history of attaching singular names to individuals and their works by examining the artists of the Qing Empire, these artists shared names, created works in multiples and signed their pieces with different names or none at all. Winnie will be in conversation with Shannon Jackson, one of her colleagues from Rhetoric.
So, Julia and Joshua, we really look forward to your conversation, so thanks.
Joshua Gang: Thank you, Stephen. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining me to talk about Julia’s book which, if I can offer a bit of just out-of-pocket praise, is a really fantastic book. I think it’s one of the best things on theater I’ve read in a while and you can get it from the University of Michigan’s website. But I’m also bringing this up because, in addition to paying for it, you said it was through UC Berkeley that you got open access funding, it’s also available for free as a high quality download so it can be shared and quoted but cited without difficulty, without a paywall.
So, thank you for this book, there is too much to talk about but I was wondering could we start by talking about the transition from your first book to your second? So, your first book, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696 to 1801 was, as the title might suggest, about the intertwined development of theater, privacy and celebrity in the 18th century. How do we get from celebrity in the 18th century to the aftermath of the disaster of the 1665 plague, the fire and then changing ideas about movement and place and property?
Julia Fawcett: Yeah. I think I ask myself that question all the time, what is the connection between these two books and I think there wasn’t something consciously happening at the time that made me decide to pursue this but I think that there were a couple of things that … There are a couple of connections that I see. One is the first book came out of my interest in privacy and the rise of different ideas of privacy that were coming about in the 18th century and I was interested in part because of my own … I was coming of age in a social media generation, I was interested in what do you do when you’re all over the place in the media or in social media and still have to protect your privacy which brought me back to 18th century celebrity.
So, I was interested in privacy but then I started thinking about all of the people who don’t have access to privacy, all of the people for whom privacy seems like a real luxury that comes out of having the privilege to purchase property, to purchase that space that allows for privacy. The celebrities I was interested in my first book had the purchasing power for that privacy even if they didn’t have it in other ways and so I wanted to think about folks who didn’t have those privileges.
But I think the other connection is just … My ulterior motive always in anything I write is to convince people who study the 17th and 18th century that drama is cool and it’s not just about the novel and people who study drama that the 17th and 18th century is cool and it’s not just about Shakespeare or Brecht.
So, I think my two arguments for why the 17th and 18th century is such an important era in English performance is, OK, let’s be honest, the plays are … I think they’re really fun and interesting, they’re not literary masterpieces, I think you compare them to Shakespeare and they don’t really hold up.
However, the 17th and 18th century has two things going for it and this maybe will get into some of your other questions. But there are two things that happen in the 17th and 18th century in England when the theaters reopen after the restoration of Charles II. One is that women are on stage for the first time. And so, because of that and related to that, you have a burgeoning of celebrity culture and so that’s what I was interested in my first book. And that revolution in English performance at that time has been investigated in a lot of different scholarly work from the 1960s onward especially.
But there was this other revolution that I think hasn’t gotten as much attention which is that you have moveable scenery for the first time in the public theaters. You have scenes, painted flats that can be moved on the stage and then off the stage on grooves and so it takes 30 seconds to move them on and off and you can have scene changes in theater, in the public theater for the first time.
This has not been really examined all that much in scholarship, I think it’s really significant and so I was interested in thinking about that as another revolution that was shaping theater and performance at this time and that might help me make the argument that this is a really cool time to study theater and performance.
Joshua Gang: I begrudgingly accept your argument that it’s not about the novel or Brecht all the time.
Julia Fawcett: The English department. (Laughs)
Joshua Gang: And so, a couple things to respond to that. First, I think also one of the things that’s really striking about your two books next to each other is that you go from the first book which is literally about celebrities to, this book, it’s groups of people who, thus far, have often been left out of the narrative entirely.
So laborers, women, less influential, non-conformist sects, Irish immigrants and, of course, enslaved persons. But in terms of movable scenery, could you give us a big picture of how the stage changes from let’s call it 1600, 1700 and then close to 1800? So, what does theater look like at this moment that is similar or different from periods we might know a little better?
Julia Fawcett: Mm-hmm, yeah, OK. So, I’m going to give you my micro theater history of 200 years. So, most people I think are familiar with Shakespearean theater. When I teach this stuff to students, I always start with the Shakespearean theater and so this is around 1600 and, the public theaters, some of them are outdoors, some of them are indoors but you have basically one set that is used for all of the performances and it’s a balcony sometimes with musicians on it and it’s colorfully painted. It looks really pretty but it doesn’t change, it always stands for the same thing. So, you have characters coming out on stage and saying, “This is the Forest of Arden,” and that’s how you’re scene setting.
So, in the 1640s, the English Civil Wars happened, Cromwell’s government took over and beheaded Charles I, all of the aristocrats or many of the aristocrats were in exile in the continent and, because Cromwell was very influenced by puritanism and puritans, did not approve of the theater. The public theater was outlawed during this time, so there were no public theaters for about 20 years.
In 1660, Charles II comes back into power, comes back from France. He loves the theater, so he brings with him two of his aristocrats William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew and gives them royal patents to start public theaters, the only two public theaters allowed in London. All of the public theaters that were pre-Civil War theaters, many of them have been torn down or dismantled and so they set up shop in tennis courts for the most part and they …
Thomas Killigrew has all of the good playwrights and performers and so, William Davenant, to make up for that is like, “Fine, I’m going to do movable scenery. I’m going to have these really elaborate stage machines and stage spectacles including these scenes that could be pulled on and off the stage.”
This was not the first time that people had seen moveable scenery, movable scenery was very well-known in Italy and France at this time. And even in London, Inigo Jones, before the Civil War had been this architect, urban planner and stage designer who worked with Ben Jonson and brought a lot of these technologies from Italy but he brought them to the court theaters, to the private theaters and they weren’t available more widely to the public.
So William Davenant was the first to bring these stage machines and movable scenery into the public theater and, eventually, this led to the building of these larger purpose-built theaters with larger and more elaborate backstage areas that became a tourist attraction in and of themselves.
So we have all of these references in The Diary of Samuel Pepys who was a restoration secretary of the Navy and playgoer and man about town, and he loved going backstage and hobnobbing with the actors and actresses, hobnobbing being a G-rated word for what he was doing back there. But it became this real tourist attraction, there was this fascination, not only with what was happening on the stage, but what was happening backstage because it was all of these machines and elaborate technologies that were being used to create these illusions.
And I guess what happened after that, I’m going to fast forward here and just say they became more and more elaborate, they became more and more, I think, removed from the audience. So the apron of the stage got smaller, the actors and the sets retreated back behind the proscenium and, at the same time, the technologies developed including lighting so you could create these stage illusions.
Eventually, in the 19th century, the stage was lit but the audience was in the dark which had not been the case before that. So, you had this emergence of an almost immersive experience that culminated in Wagnerian opera in the 19th century but we’re not quite there yet around 1700. And one of the things that is interesting to me about this period also is the curtains were open for all of the scene changes.
I think the way that the scenery has been talked about before is it was all about creating these exotic illusions that people could watch these tragedies and feel like they were in London but they were actually in Istanbul, there was a lot of Orientalism happening. But in fact, I think that ignores the fact that these illusions were being broken all the time by the scene changes happening themselves.
You could see that machinery actually … And I think hear, too, I’m sure it was very loud and clanky and then you could also see the stagehands who were employed to move the scenery. And so, you had a huge uptick in the number of stagehands who were employed in the theater during this time as well because you had to have people who could construct these scenes, who could move them during the performance, who could then lift them out of the grooves and move them off the stage and into storage when you had a different performance coming in.
So I think that this is a really interesting time to study, not only how those illusions were created, but all of the backstage and labored goings on that created them.
Joshua Gang: Right. All those different ruptures in the illusion. If only there were a German playwright in the 20th century who had written about alienation effects. Sorry, sorry, I …
Julia Fawcett: All right. Well, so what you’re saying is William Davenant did Brecht before Brecht.
Joshua Gang: OK. And to turn to a point you just made, movable scenery become, and this is really the heart of the book, movable scenery ends up being the perfect way of capitalizing new attitudes towards moving through space which of course you seize on through these figures that are both moving the sets on and off stage as in chapter one but then also capitalizing on, in say chapter four, how an Irish immigrant would know their way through the city in ways that others might not, different by means of class, by means of technology, all that kind of stuff.
But it’s not just space that’s changing in this book also because part of what’s going on here is can we say it’s the emergence of maybe a more modern understanding of what a prop is on stage versus a body? Is that also emerging here or do you think that’s different?
Julia Fawcett: Yeah. So the moment where my book starts is this moment … I mentioned William Davenant being part of the building of these purpose-built theaters. The first, or it was actually the second purpose-built theater, but it was the first for the Duke’s Company which was managed by Davenant, and it was the most elaborate theater in London when it was opened and that was Dorset Garden Theatre in 1671 it opened its doors for the first time. And it opened with this production of Sir Martin Mar-all which I’m sure you all know. No, OK. It’s a London comedy by John Dryden who might be a little bit more familiar to folks but what happens in the first moment of that performance is a man comes out on stage dressed in livery, so dressed in the uniform of a servant.
Now, what’s important to know at this point is that there were a number of stagehands running around the theater at this point and they would dress in livery also because they would double as, when they weren’t moving scenery on and off the stage or even as they were, they would stand in the background and play the role, the non-speaking role of the servants in the house where the play took place.
And so, basically, the theater was training us to ignore these people in livery, to see them as part of the set and, yeah, and then they would move the tables or chairs or whatever on and off the stage and we were supposed to think like, “Oh, yes, those are just servants that we can ignore, they’re silent as servants should remain.”
That’s not what happens in Sir Martin Mar-all though. You have this man who comes on the stage, he’s dressed in servant’s livery, we are tempted to ignore him, I think, if we have been trained in this idea of mise en scène in the restoration theater. But instead he steps forth onto the apron of the stage and he begins the play by saying, “Where in the devil is this master of mine?”
And so he’s an actor who it turns out is actually the manager of the theater so a director effectively, director-producer so he’s quite powerful in the theater company at the time. He starts out dressed in livery but then he steps forward and he announces himself as an actor playing the servant character.
And, in fact, the role that the servant character serves in Dryden’s play is he is the servant of Sir Martin Mar-all, the title character, who is a landowner from the country who does not know how to navigate the city and is an idiot it turns out and the servant helps guide him around the city and helps to create all of these schemes that will help him to win his love and navigate the city.
So, what I see in that moment is this reminder that these servants who are running, not only around the stage, but around London itself, it’s a reminder that they have important knowledge about the plot of the play, about the way to get around the city and that, seeing them in livery, we’ve been trained to see them as part of the set or as part of the background of the city but, in fact, if we would just listen to them speak, they could help us plot our way around the city, yeah.
Joshua Gang: Right. And I think one of the things … That moment you’re talking about where this person that we, at one point, might have assumed was part of the background is now front and center, that seems to be a gesture that is going on at many different levels throughout the book. I think most movingly in chapters two and five so the chapter about The Rover which has really one of the best close readings of a play that I can think of but also about sexual assault and then you’ll forgive me if I forget the play you discuss in the third part of that chapter …
Julia Fawcett: The Luckey Chance.
Joshua Gang: Yes. Is that where you talk about how a woman must navigate the idea of it being her bed and yet someone else is in it, right?
Julia Fawcett: Mm-hmm.
Joshua Gang: And then, of course, in chapter five, enslaved persons. And so, throughout this book, you have people, literally and figuratively, emerging from the background and … It seems like inaugurating maybe a new kind of theatrical agency or not. I defer to you.
Julia Fawcett: Yeah. I think a new kind of spectatorial attention maybe. Because I think what is important is that these people have always had agency …
Joshua Gang: Of course, of course.
Julia Fawcett: … in the theater and in the city but that maybe spectators in the theater but also scholars have not always recognized that agency in maybe the ways that we should have. So, one of the most moving examples for me, and I can go back to The Rover and The Luckey Chance if you want, but in chapter five which is focused on enslaved people in the theater and in London, there’s been … There was early on a lot of scholarship that said enslaved people were not a significant part of the London population at this time and, if you want to ask questions about enslaved people and their lives, you’ve got to go to the colonies, they’re not in London, they’re not … I think that’s untrue …
Joshua Gang: Yeah, not true.
Julia Fawcett: … I think they’re both there and visible and I think there’s a lot of evidence for that in the documentation but also in the plays. And so, I focus on this play, The Gentleman Dancing-Master, which has an enslaved character who’s described as a boy and he comes out onto the stage and he performs a dance that is a European dance and he teaches the Europeans on the stage how to dance it and they are not very good at it and so there’s a question there about who’s mastering whom I think.
And he’s an unnamed character and he is not really discussed in much of the scholarship though that’s starting to change so I think he is a character who I’m interested in stepping out of the background. But what’s so interesting is thinking not only about the role that he plays in the script but also in the performance and thinking about the casting.
Because, in the same year that this play was performed, we don’t know who played this boy, it could have been a white actor in blackface. I think it is probably more likely that it was an actor, one of the actors who was employed in the Lord Mayor’s Day Parade, which was this big spectacle that was performed every year in London.
There was one performed the same year as The Gentleman Dancing-Master in 1672 which featured individuals, performers from Afro-diasporic countries who were posed to look like the cartouches of maps, they were posed … It was a parade around London, they had these individuals who were posed in certain ways to look like these drawings and maps that would label this is Africa, this is Asia, this is … you know.
I think the point of that from the point of view of the Londoners who were orchestrating these Lord Mayor’s Day Parades was to sort of claim those bodies and also those spaces as part of the English empire. Look at how powerful we are, we’ve claimed this space and we’ve brought this person to London and we’ve forced them to stand still in this way and we’ve made them part of a prop or a part of our set design.
But what I think is so interesting about that is the subtlety of the resistance that can happen. Because if you’re posed in a certain way to look like the cartouche of a map, and if the point of that is the English empire gets to claim you, all you have to do to suggest the fragility of that English empire is just move your head in a different way, to step out of that pose.
And so, I think that there’s all of these examples of these individuals … Of the authorities trying to force these individuals to be parts of the set design or to be in the background and there’s all of these examples of the individuals refusing to do that and stepping out of the background and demanding our attention.
Joshua Gang: Can I ask you, as I’m hearing you talk about this, the head tilt, as you say this, I’m picturing these things on stage in part because I have to, these plays aren’t staged very often these days, right?
Julia Fawcett: No.
Joshua Gang: And so, I was wondering, I’m not going to ask why that is, time moves forward, more plays are written. But when these things have been staged, have dramaturges and directors registered these ideas essentially through the original play texts and the stage directions or have they found new ways of trying to make these things resonate with contemporary audiences?
Julia Fawcett: Yeah, both.
Joshua Gang: Yeah.
Julia Fawcett: So, I’m going to put in a plug right now for some colleagues who have organized what they call the R18 Collective which is a group of scholars and artists who work together to try to bring some of these plays onto the stage and to think about what kinds of questions they raise.
They have not performed and I am sure will not perform The Gentleman Dancing-Master. I think it’s totally fine if that one just stays unperformed forever. I think it’s quite interesting as a moment of history, but probably not to be staged.
I think one of the questions that the R18 Collective is answering or is trying to answer is, yeah, how do we stage these plays in a way that is relevant but also can help us to understand how we got here in terms of colonialism and empire and sexism and the Me Too movement but also how can we stage them responsibly in a way that doesn’t reenact that trauma.
And so, that’s my plug for the R18 Collective, they’re doing really interesting things. I will say I’m trying to think if I’ve seen any of the plays that I talk about in this book actually performed live. I don’t think I have.
Joshua Gang: I think I saw The Rover in college.
Julia Fawcett: The Rover is the one that’s most frequently performed.
Joshua Gang: But I have no memory of it. I have a factual tidbit it is the case you saw The Rover and that’s …
Julia Fawcett: Yeah, yeah. There are lots of scholar discussions of recent performances of The Rover and of some of the others. I will say, every time there’s an 18th- or 17th-century play being performed, I rush to go see it.
I have seen not the plays that I talk about in the book, but other plays performed, and I think one of the things that has always struck me about these plays is how dead they seem on the page and then how amazing they are in performance. I can’t really describe it, but there’s something … It’s partly the celebrity appeal, there is something so charming about the characters when we see them embodied and we can see exactly how these plays worked through this flirtation between the audience members and the characters and I think that speaks to … to go back to your first question, one of the things I was interested in my first book about celebrity.
But I think the other thing that we forget when we read them on the page is how much they depended on movement. And not just the movement of the set but the movement of the characters around a stage that was bigger than it had been before and also dancing so the … Many of the acts would end with a dance, all of the plays ended with a dance, and dances are written into many of the plays as well so effectively you had …
If you’ve ever been charmed by a Broadway musical, and I’m in the theater department, we’re very snotty about Broadway musicals, so we’re not supposed to admit that we’ve been charmed by them but, come on, they’re pretty charming and I think that that’s one of the things that makes these plays so alive, too, when you see them, and that is so easy to forget when we’re reading them.
And so partly what I wanted to do in this book, particularly in thinking about the word “moveable” and all of the valences it has throughout the book, which also has to do with movable property and movable people, but I also wanted to think about the importance of motion both in the plays and in the city itself, and how we can use performance studies and performance theory to remember that motion even though it’s not always evident in the archive when we’re reading these things as texts.
Joshua Gang: We could keep going but we only have about 15, 20 minutes left and so I’d love to turn it over to everyone who’s gathered here for questions for Julia about the book, about Brecht.
Julia Fawcett: I taught Brecht last semester so I can answer questions about Brecht.
Audience 1: I’m curious as to whether or not the plague and the fire had a dramatic impact on what happened afterwards.
Julia Fawcett: Oh, yeah, thank you for bringing up the fire. We didn’t actually talk about the fire.
Joshua Gang: I mentioned it.
Julia Fawcett: Yeah, I forgot to mention it. So, yeah, another thing that’s happening at this time that’s very important and was an impetus for the book is the Great Fire of London. So, this happens in 1666 and, actually, I’ll go back a year. So in 1665 was one of the deadliest plagues of London. There are different estimates for how many people it killed, but one estimate is that it killed about a third of the population. I think the more reliable estimates are about 12% of the population died because of this, and also many people left to escape what they thought was a contagion spread in the air.
And then, shortly after that or, actually, during the plague epidemic, in three days in September, four-fifths of the city buildings, the central city burned to the ground, or were destroyed, as part of the firewall.
And so it was one of the most dramatic things to happen to the geography of London until the Blitz in the ’40s, and it really shaped how London was rebuilt or rather how that rebuilding was conceptualized.
So immediately after the fire, the authorities, instead of saying, “Oh, no, our whole city is destroyed,” they said, “This is great. We didn’t like that city anyway. We’re going to rebuild it, and let’s invite all of these proposals for rebuilding, plans for rebuilding the city, and let’s get rid of all of this illogical, medieval, twisty-turny lanes and things that don’t make any sense to us now that we’re so logical and mathematical and geometric.”
And so some of the most famous architects that you might have heard of submitted plans, the plan that was eventually chosen was Sir Christopher Wren’s — you can still see his churches if you walk around London now. So the authorities were like, “Great, we love this one, it’s all geometric and logical and so ordered,” and they were like, “Let’s raise the money to do it,” and that took a while. And then they’re like, “OK, let’s actually implement that,” and then they went out into the streets and everybody, of course, who had their homes burned down had already rebuilt their homes and they had done it on the geography, on the layout that London initially had because that’s what they remembered.
So, in fact, these plans were never implemented in the way that Wren and these other folks imagine them. A lot of people, a lot of scholars have written a lot of scholarship about these plans and how they’re so symbolic about how the Londoners thought of themselves and what they valued and all these things and they’ve written brilliantly about it and, also, they didn’t happen, they weren’t implemented and so I was interested in that failure and in how Londoners dealt with that failure.
And so what does this have to do with the theater? Well, the theaters are being rebuilt at exactly the same time and sometimes by the same people. So, one star of the show is Robert Hooke, who was a scientist with the Royal Society but also submitted a plan for the redesign of London and also probably, we think, designed Dorset Garden Theatre.
And so it was a lot of the same people and I’m interested in the … I don’t think there’s a causal relationship there. In other words, I don’t think the theaters taught people how to rebuild London or the rebuilding taught people new things about the theater, but I think it’s a coincidental moment where the city is being rebuilt at the same time that the theaters are being rebuilt and at the same time that these scenic technologies are being introduced to the theaters.
I think that partly what’s happening is that the theater-makers thought about the scenic technologies as a way of articulating what was happening in the city as a whole and articulating, in the city, you have these plans that never came to fruition, you have these scripts of urban plans written by Christopher Wren and written by Robert Hooke and written by John Evelyn and people like that.
And then, in the plays, you have these creaky sets that are being moved on and off by these laborers who are destroying the illusion all the time as they’re moving through those sets and what a great way of articulating the failure of those plans and what a great way in live performance which never seems to stick to the script, what a great way of articulating what happens when our plans that are very hierarchical, delivered from high up and imposed on the land, what a great way of articulating what happens when they don’t work out. Yeah, so thanks.
Joshua Gang: Other questions? Miles, yeah?
Audience 2: Thanks. Hey.
Julia Fawcett: Hey.
Audience 2: I think my question is why are restoration dramas so bad?
Julia Fawcett: No, no. Miles, what you were supposed to take from this talk is they’re really cool and we’re all going to go out and study them now and cite the book Movable Londons.
Audience 2: What I mean is I’m fascinated by this moment you say where the one company sucks up all the performers and dramatists and then the other company goes movable scenery. And you had mentioned Jonson and Jones and their professional relationship fell apart because Jones wanted to go movable scenery route and then Jonson was all about drama and, eventually, the powers that be just threw their lot in with Jones.
And so I’m wondering if we should see the restoration theater as Jones’ [inaudible] triumph in this conflict and maybe that’s why the plays are so bad, or is there another way that we should think about the aesthetics of restoration drama?
Julia Fawcett: Yeah. I think I want to be really careful about building up that binary too much because, yes, it is true that Jones’ ideas about set design and, frankly, urban planning were very influential at this time. It’s also true that Jonson’s plays were being performed again and again and again at this time, and Jonson was the Shakespeare of the Restoration.
In other words, all of the playwrights at the time were like, “Shakespeare, who’s that? We’re interested in Jonson.” So his plays were very important at the time and many of, especially the city comedies that were being written in the Restoration in the early 18th century. So I think both Jonson and Jones could argue that they had the upper hand.
Oh, the other thing is, so I set up this binary of the King’s Men was the playwrights and the good performers, the Duke’s Men was the set design, that was true for about two years and then … So, in 1661, Davenant opens Lincoln’s Inn Fields where he introduces changeable scenery. In 1663, Killigrew, who was part of the King’s Men the other theater company, builds the first post-Civil War purpose-built theater in … It was called Royal Theater Bridges Street, but it eventually became Drury Lane. Bridges Street and Drury Lane are like this and it depends on which side the door opens onto.
Anyway. So, I think Killigrew very quickly adopted some of these ideas from Davenant. The other thing is, I think Davenant also got all the good playwrights and performers as well, or rather he developed some good playwrights and performers.
Thomas Betterton, for instance, who’s arguably the most famous Restoration performer, he played Hamlet when he was limping around with gout, just to give you an idea and he was part of the Duke’s Men. So I think, yeah, I think that that binary gets mixed up very quickly.
But I guess if your question is why are the plays so bad, I’m like, “You should perform them instead of reading them.” Maybe, again, maybe they’re bad because we’re just reading them and they’re not meant to be read; they’re meant to be performed.
But if the question is: Is Jones not getting enough credit in the post-Restoration 18th-century scholarship, the answer is yes. I think Jones shaped that era and shaped theater afterwards arguably as much as Jonson. Jones also laid out the plan for Covent Garden Square as well, so he also was influential on the urban plan for London. Wren was interested in Covent Garden Square and how Jones had laid it out, and they all wanted to have these nice squared-off places in London which, like I said, didn’t work out for them but, yeah.
Joshua Gang: I saw your hand was up, yeah?
Audience 3: Yeah.
Joshua Gang: Yeah.
Audience 3: Oh, yes. Earlier in the talk you touched on, I think it was chapter three where you alluded to, I think it was a metaphor of a woman saying that she has to find out how to cope when there’s another man in her bed. And I just wanted you to elaborate on that, I thought it was pretty interesting.
Julia Fawcett: Yeah. Like Josh said, the way that the book is structured is each of the chapters deals with a different community that either does not or cannot own property. So the focus of chapter two is women who were legally barred, most women were legally barred from owning property at the time. And I look at the plays of Aphra Behn, who was the first professional woman playwright in England and I look at ideas of personal space and how women navigate that through London.
I set side-by-side Aphra Behn’s stage directions in her plays which often have to do with how women are moving around the men in their midst and, basically, to put it bluntly, in order to avoid rape and sexual assault, which are always a threat in these plays that are ostensibly comedies but where there’s all of this discussion of that.
Her stage directions are how these women navigate those spaces in order to avoid that. And I set that side-by-side with court testimony from women moving through the city and testifying in rape trials because the rape laws are changing at this time.
One of the really important changes is, previously rape had been defined as a property crime, with the assumption that women were the property of their husbands or their fathers and, if you raped them, you were destroying the property of the husbands or fathers because they would not be able to be married off and thus would not bring money to the family. At this time, there was a change where rape was starting to be defined as a sexual crime against the woman herself. This sounds like a real advance for feminism, women actually get to own their own bodies, hooray. However, the way it actually manifested itself is suddenly women can be blamed if they are raped.
And so you have all of this elaborate court testimony where women are testifying and the men say, “OK, but where were you and what were you wearing and what were you doing and how were you moving?” And so I think that’s partly what Behn is thinking about in her plays.
A number of her plays, The Rover being the most famous, but this also happens in The Luckey Chance, there are a pair of women and one is the good, virtuous woman and one is the prostitute. In The Rover, Angelica is the courtesan and Helena, she’s destined for the convent, she’s the virginal and we’re constantly watching them move around each other and around these men in their midst and trying to evaluate: Did the virtuous woman move like a virtuous woman (whispers) or did she move like the prostitute and did the prostitute … You know?
So, I think that partly what is being dealt with in those plays is, A) If you’re a woman, how do you move around the city to avoid sexual assault? And if you’re a man, how do you read those movements of women to avoid being accused of sexual assault?
Joshua Gang: We have about three minutes left. Time for a final question. Yeah, Alan?
Audience 4: My question is: How much does London itself get incorporated in the plays of the period?
Julia Fawcett: Yeah, very much. So, I’ve just been talking about The Rover, which is the one play I talk about which is not set in London actually in the play, but all of the other plays are London comedy. And again, I think that … One of the places where set design has been talked about a lot in this period is in these plays that are … In the Restoration, they called them heroic tragedies, I think most of them we would refer to as Orientalist fantasies. So using the set design to show Londoners this place that they would see as very exotic and allowing them to immerse themselves in that exoticized place and think about the difference between that place in London.
The use of set design in the comedies has been much less talked about, but I think is really important. One of the reasons it’s been much less talked about is one of the few images we have of set design in Dorset Garden, for instance, is from this play called The Empress of Morocco, which is one of these Orientalist fantasies and people have done a lot with that, but I think we aren’t thinking enough about the role that London plays in those comedies and in the set design in particular. Yeah, thanks.
Joshua Gang: Well, we have about 90 seconds left so, to avoid getting cut off by the bell, maybe we can just have an extended round of applause for Julia.
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