The Protectorate Playhouse: William Davenant's Cockpit in the 1650s

Abstract

Recent work on the history of the theater during the decade of republican experiment in England (1649-59) has revealed a modest but sophisticated performance culture, centering on the entrepreneurial and politically wily figure of Sir William Davenant. Despite the ban on stage plays enforced in various forms from 1642, by the mid-1650s Davenant, poet laureate to Charles I and Royalist aid during the civil wars, succeeded in gaining the Protectorate's approval to produce a series of "Heroick Representations" (Davenant, Proposition 2) for public audiences, first at his private residence of Rutland House and later at the Cockpit theater in Drury Lane. These "Representations" embody a unique corpus in the history of English theater. They were radically innovative productions, introducing the proscenium arch, painted, perspectival scenery, and recitative music to London audiences. The Siege of Rhodes even boasted the first English female performer to appear on a professional public stage. Davenant's 1650s works were not strictly plays in the usual sense-what John Dryden would later term "just drama" (sig. a2v)-but rather hybrid works that drew on a vast array of styles, modes, and traditions for their inspiration, most notably the court masque and the Italian "opera." They would, as one historian has remarked, "transform the cultural life of interregnum London" (Capp 199).