Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (18 page)

Among the nocturnal spectacles and pleasures of the court, those of the theater deserve special attention. Nocturnal performances and entertainment consolidated new uses of darkness in both the politics of spectacle and in everyday court life. In the seventeenth century, ministers of state, artists, and architects brought the lighting
and scenery techniques of the Italian court stage into performances north of the Alps, and darkness was essential to this new stage technology. The establishment of the baroque perspective stage can thus serve as a rough index of nocturnalization. The use of darkness in court performances unfolded in three phases: first, the use of lighting effects without a fixed perspective stage, as in the early French
ballet de cour
and the English court masque; second, the use of temporary perspective stages with movable scenery and illusionist lighting; and third, the establishment of permanent baroque perspective theaters.

These theatrical techniques arrived in England in the rarified atmosphere of the Stuart court masque, the counterpart to the French court ballet. Ben Jonson’s first court masque,
The Masque of Blackness
, presented on Twelfth Night, 1605, was described by Sir Dudley Carleton: “At Night we had the Queen’s Maske in the Banqueting-House, or rather her Pageant.” Music and dancing were primary to the masque, and the addition of speeches from characters on stage probably led Carleton to use also the term “pageant.” These court masques, with theatrical designs by Inigo Jones, “brought the full resources of Italian theatrical machinery into use for the first time on an English stage.”
⁴⁷
The Stuart masques were performed in the multipurpose interior of the Whitehall Banqueting House from 1622 until 1637, when a semi-permanent “Masquing Room” was built. The fall of the monarchy prevented Charles I from building a permanent court theater.
⁴⁸

In France, the
ballet de cour
developed under Catherine de’Medici and the last Valois kings. The first great example, the
Ballet comique de la reine
of October 1581, was performed from 10 p.m. to 3.30 a.m. in the Petit-Bourbon with an extraordinary range of lighting effects. Its scenery was scattered throughout the hall, however, with spectators on three sides.
⁴⁹
The Grand Théâtre of Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) in the Palais Cardinal (inaugurated in January 1641) was the first French baroque perspective stage using “a formal proscenium and an elevated stage where scenery flats could be changed to suggest different lighting effects.”
⁵⁰
A remarkable grisaille shows the performance of the ballet
La Prospérité des Armes de la France
in the Grand Théâtre on February 7, 1641 (
Figure 4.6
). We see Louis XIII
watching a darkened baroque perspective stage from the ideal central point of view, illuminated by the light from the stage, with Cardinal Richelieu to his right, and Queen Anne of Austria and the young future Louis XIV on his left.
⁵¹

Figure 4.6
Oil on panel (grisaille) by Juste D’Egmont, “The ballet ‘La Prospérité des Armes de la France’ at the Grand Théâtre du Palais Cardinal as viewed by Louis XIII and the royal family,”
c
. 1641. Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France. Photograph: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

Richelieu and Mazarin both sought out the most advanced theater designers and technicians from Italy. The correspondence of Cardinal Mazarin with his agent Elpidio Benedetti in Rome during the ministry of Richelieu shows especially clearly the political interest in the darkened baroque perspective stage. Through his patronage of Roman baroque artists, his relationship with Pietro da Cortona, and his contact with Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Mazarin put into motion the artistic policies he would later pursue as minister. Bernini was important to Mazarin not only for his talents in sculpture and architecture, but also for his skill in theater technology. The cavaliere’s Roman comedies of the 1630s were legendary for the “special effects”
he brought to the stage. Despite their modest budgets, these performances all featured extraordinary illusions, such as the setting of the sun, the flooding of the Tiber, or a house that burst into flames (safely!) onstage. After negotiation with Mazarin and Benedetti in 1640, Bernini agreed to show Niccolò Menghi, a sculptor of his studio who was making the trip to France, how to stage some of his renowned theatrical illusions. The one that most interested Mazarin and Benedetti was “the way in which one illuminates and in which one makes the sun and the night.”
⁵²
The techniques were developed and disseminated by men like Bernini and Torelli, who installed new stage machinery in the theaters of the Petit-Bourbon (1645) and the Palais-Royal (1647) and made possible Richelieu’s court ballet described above, and the
Ballet de la Nuit
which began the age of the Sun King a dozen years later.

In the Holy Roman Empire some of the earliest nocturnal court theatricals (analogous to the court ballet or masque) were performed in Darmstadt (1600), Stuttgart (1609, 1616–18), and Salzburg (1618). The darkened perspective stage is first documented at the Dresden court in 1650, and at the Munich court of the elector of Bavaria in 1651; the first performance of an Italian opera in the Empire came in Dresden in 1662, when Giovanni Bontempi’s
Il paride
was presented at the wedding celebrations for the daughter of the Saxon elector.
⁵³
The performance began on the evening of November 3 at 9 p.m. and lasted until 2 a.m.
⁵⁴
In Munich and Dresden permanent baroque perspective theaters were opened in 1657 and 1664 respectively. At the imperial court in Vienna, Leopold I (1658–1705) staged an extraordinary number of operas or “dramme per musica” during his long reign, using the main ballroom of the Hofburg and the Hoftheater auf der Cortina, built in 1666–67. These nocturnal spectacles were the favored mode of self-representation of the emperor and his court.
⁵⁵

The Imperial Free City of Nuremberg inaugurated its Nachtkomödienhaus (lit. “night theater”) in 1668 with the performance of a piece now lost, the
Macaria
of Johann Geuder, by the sons of its ruling patrician families.
⁵⁶
The Nachtkomödienhaus contained a classic baroque perspective stage with the requisite lighting, a proscenium, an elevated stage, and movable wings to create the illusion
of depth; as its name indicates, it was built to be used at night. The evening performance of
Macaria
on February 11, 1668 proclaimed the noble pretensions of the Nuremberg patricians. The city fathers sat in special boxes at the central, royal point of view while their sons declaimed the political doctrines of Justus Lipsius, affirming the hierarchy of virtuous rulers above the turbulent rabble. The play concluded with the apotheosis of the patricians:

Not one sun stands here: many suns stand still

In this crowded room: You Sun-Prince! Fulfill

What our wishes desire! Let your rays of mercy

Pour out unmerited grace upon our city.
⁵⁷

Compared with Apollo and identified as “demigods” in the play’s epilogue, we see that the ruling fathers of Nuremberg found the nocturnal display of solar majesty and authority as compelling as did Louis XIV or Augustus II. Like these sun kings, the city magistrates of Nuremberg used the darkened backdrop of the baroque perspective stage to project their magnificence.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, the purpose-built baroque perspective stage displayed the highest technological and political achievements of European court theater. This stage relied on artificial illumination for its staging and special effects, and these effects were enhanced when performances were held in darkness. A contemporary described the stage equipment of the Dresden Komödienhaus in 1671:

The excellent effects of artificial perspective, the movement and transformation [of the scenery], and the machines built into the theater can be seen better at night, when performances are held with artificial light, than during the day.
⁵⁸

When the young Scotsman John Lauder, later Lord Fountainhall (1646–1722) visited “the king’s com
dy house” (the theater of the Palais-Royal) in Paris in April 1665, he judged “the thing that most commended it was its rare, curious, and most conceity machines.” He was amazed by “the skies, boats, dragons, wildernesses, the sun itself so artificially represented that under night with candle light nothing could appear liker them.”
⁵⁹
The leading guide to theater in France,
Ménestrier’s
Des Ballets anciens et moderns
(
1682
), also emphasized the importance of darkness:

Ordinarily these performances are held at night, with artificial lighting: this is better for the machines than daylight, which reveals the theater’s artifice. Artificial lighting can also be arranged where needed for maximum effect. Some lights illuminate from a hidden location, making an object appear lit by daylight. Some are arranged so that they leave in shadow the places where stage equipment is located.
⁶⁰

In Restoration London the simple staging and open-air, daytime performances familiar to us from Elizabethan theater had been supplanted by the darkened perspective stage.
⁶¹
For a production of Shakespeare’s
Tempest
at the new Dorset Gardens Theatre in 1673, the stage directions of the poet laureate and dramatist Thomas Shadwell show the full use of these special effects:

Act I, Scene I. The front of the stage is opened … Behind this is the scene, which represents a thick cloudy sky, a very rocky coast, and a tempestuous sea in perpetual agitation. This Tempest … has many dreadful objects in it, as several spirits in horrid shapes flying down amidst the sailors, then rising and crossing in the air. And when the ship is sinking, the whole house is darkened, and a shadow of fire falls upon ’em. This is accompanied by lightning, and several claps of thunder to end the storm.
⁶²

This panoply of illusions was impossible without the ability to darken the theater.

The origins of these chiaroscuric effects take us back to the theater of the late Italian Renaissance. The Medici dukes pioneered the form, supporting their new dynasty with extraordinary displays of light and power at night.
⁶³
At the performance of Antonio Landino’s
Il Commodo
in the Medici Palace in 1539, the sun, simulated by a water-filled crystal globe, two feet in diameter, lit from behind, rose to open the play, moved across the sky, and set at the conclusion: this was one of the very first uses of a lighting effect on stage. A permanent court perspective theater, the Teatro Mediceo, was erected in the Uffizi Palace in 1589. With its proscenium arch, movable wings, single royal viewing point, and complex lighting reliant on nocturnal performances, the Teatro Mediceo was the forerunner of all the
baroque perspective theaters described above. Roy Strong described its specific political role: “this highly artificial means of creating visual experience and controlling its reception by the audience [based primarily on the use of darkness and light], evolved at a court presided over by a new dynasty ever-anxious to promote itself to new levels of grandeur to conceal its bourgeois origins.”
⁶⁴

The Italians also published the first description of modern theater techniques, Sebastiano Serlio’s “Second Book of Architecture” (1545). Serlio discussed stage lighting in some detail and described simulating sunset and night on stage, as in the 1539 performance of
Il Commodo
. The first direct reference to the benefits of darkness for the theater is in the “Dialogues on Stage Affairs” (
c
. 1565) of Leone Di Somi (
c
. 1525–
c
. 1590), the extraordinary Jewish court physician and playwright in Mantua: “It is a natural fact … that a man who stands in the shade sees much more distinctly an object illuminated from afar … Wherefore I place only a few lamps in the auditorium, while at the same time I render the stage as bright as I possibly can.”
⁶⁵
Di Somi’s advice would be expanded in theory and practice as these Italian techniques of stage illumination were brought north in the course of the seventeenth century by men like Inigo Jones and the architect Joseph Furttenbach of Ulm (1591–1667), who studied theater techniques in Italy before applying them in their native lands. In his writings on theater design, Furttenbach emphasized the utility of darkness discovered by the Italians: