17th-century plays (Book Guide)

Source: Wikipedia. Commentary (plays not included). Pages: 68. Chapters: Restoration spectacular, The Witch, Wit at Several Weapons, The Bloody Banquet, The Rehearsal, The Fair Maid of the West, The Parson's Wedding, The Wild Goose Chase, The Devil's Law Case, The Queen's Exchange, A Very Woman, The Double Marriage, The Little French Lawyer, The City Wit, Thierry and Theodoret, Women Pleased, The Island Princess, The Woman's Prize, The Thracian Wonder, Four Plays in One, Appius and Virginia, Love's Cure, A Shoemaker a Gentleman, A New Trick to Cheat the Devil, The Maid in the Mill, Beggars' Bush, The Faithful Friends, The Magnetic Lady, The Country Captain, The Laws of Candy, The Mistaken Husband, The Custom of the Country, The Gypsies Metamorphosed, The Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn, The Renegado, Lust's Dominion, Cupid's Revenge, Saint Patrick for Ireland, The Masque of Blackness, Perkin Warbeck, The Platonick Lovers, Grim the Collier of Croydon, Rollo Duke of Normandy, The Nice Valour, Caesar and Pompey, The Noble Gentleman, The Opportunity, Lord Hay's Masque, A Tale of a Tub, The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France, The Fortunate Isles and Their Union, The History of Timon of Athens the Man-hater, The Captain, Egerton 1994, The Maid's Tragedy, Honoria and Mammon, The Maid's Revenge, Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery, The Fairy Knight, La Sylvanire. Excerpt: The Restoration spectacular, or elaborately staged "machine play", hit the London public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery, baroque illusionistic painting, gorgeous costumes, and special effects such as trapdoor tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks. These shows have always had a bad reputation as a vulgar and commercial threat to the witty, "legitimate" Restoration drama; however, they drew Londoners in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted. Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court masque, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera, the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera". However, the variety of them is so untidy that most theatre historians despair of defining them as a genre at all. Only a handful of works of this period are usually accorded the term "opera", as the musical dimension of most of them is subordinate to the visual. It was spectacle and scenery that drew in the crowds, as shown by many comments in the diary of the theatre-lover Samuel Pepys. The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits. A fiasco such as John Dryden's Albion and Albanius would leave a company in serious debt, while blockbusters like Thomas Shadwell's Psyche or Dryden's King Arthur would put it comfortably in the black for a long time. A longitudinal section through a Restoration playhouse drawn by Christopher Wren. It is believed by some scholars only to represent Wren's plan for the second theatre on the Drury Lane site, which opened in 1674 after the original Theatre Royal had burned to the ground in 1672. . 1: Proscenium arch. 2: Four pairs of shutters across the stage (=the moveable scenery). 3: Pit. 4: Galleries. 5: Boxes.The distinction between "legitimate