Tradition, Innovation, and Experimentation: The Dramatic Stage and New Modes of Performance in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples

Naples in the last thirty years of the eighteenth-century was characterized by a fervent climate of theatrical experimentation. Although too often viewed as the last stronghold of Metastasian dramatic principles and traditions, the city was deeply influenced by the “reform culture” of Northern Europe. These exterior influences were bolstered by the contributions of local practitioners, whether composers, performers, and theorists. This essay is a brief consideration of how the ideas of “reform culture” affected contemporary Neapolitan theatrical practices and the emergence of new works in the city. A critical source for “reformed” theatrical philosophy was the work of Antonio Planelli (1747–1803), whose treatise Dell’opera in musica (1772) is a significant exploration and commentary on the dramatic stage of the Bourbon capital. Progressing from theatrical philosophy to existing practice, I will consider how the prevailing conditions animated the creation of the largely unknown cantata/pastorale/opera, La pietà d’amore (1782) by the singer, composer, and Calzabigi protégé Vito Giuseppe Millico (1737–1802), created expressly for Naples under the sway of reform principles and his direct collaborations with the poet of Orfeo, Alceste, and Paride ed Elena. My study concludes with an examination of the emergence of the so-called “Lenten tragedy” or azione sacra per musica, a theatrical form created in the exclusive environs of the Teatro di San Carlo, the royal theater of the Bourbon capital, yet imparting a new theatrical aesthetic and modes of representation for contemporary sacred genres consistent to select ideals of reform culture.

“Thoughts that Flash like Lightning”: Thomas Holcroft, Radical Theater, and the Production of Meaning in 1790s London

During the 1790s, political speech in London's public spaces and commercial sites of leisure came under intense governmental surveillance. Fearing revolutionary infection from across the channel in France, the Pitt ministry sent spies into popular organizations such as the London Corresponding Society and turned more attention to other sites as well, including coffeehouses, taverns, debating-club rooms, and the street. Recently, historians too have explored the ways in which radicals manipulated the ludic vocabularies of urban sociability to critique the regime, protest persecution, and argue for reform. In this article I address a site that figured prominently as a place for radical speech in the 1790s: the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden. Although it was a site whose content was strictly regulated by the state through the office of the Examiner of Plays, the royal theater was, like other eighteenth-century theaters, a place where performances multiplied: viewers watched the play, but in the well-lit and noisy pit, boxes, and galleries, they watched other viewers intently. All were engaged in a complex process of performance, reception, and counterperformance. Indeed, as scholars have shown, theater audiences in late Georgian London were highly skilled at appropriating a theatrical grammar by which to demand their perceived rights as English subjects. Such strategies revealed the potency of theatrical representation in a society where, as Gillian Russell notes, “performance, display and spectatorship were essential components of the social mechanism.”

Molière's Theater in 1672–1673: Light from le Registre d'Hubert

Le Registre d'Hubert is the only known document concerning Molière and his theater which has not yet been the subject of the most careful study. It is the book of accounts kept by the treasurer of the Palais Royal theater for 1672–73, preserved in the archives of the Comédie-Française since its foundation. I have been able to make a leisurely examination of this Registre, and I am presenting in this place all the items found in Hubert's records that are of interest to the historian of the French stage.