Tea at Trianon: Elizabethan Theater

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Elizabethan Theater

From author Dean Hamilton:

It seems strange, but the boisterous, bustling, familiar precincts of London that Shakespeare trod have mostly vanished from sight. The Great Fire that devastated London in 1666 swept the core of the City into ash and ruin. Almost every building or church of note that lay west of the Tower, with the exceptions of the areas around Bishopsgate and Aldgate, were laid to waste. From the Tower to the Fleet, Tudor London was mostly devastation. The London we see today was built on its bones.

To understand the London of the playing troupes, you must first seek the roots of the city, the ebb and flow of its tides, particularly the torrent of change that was engulfing it throughout the reign of the Tudors....and what London meant for players, playwrights and theatre.

Rooted in commerce & trade, fed by the river Thames, inculcated with a sense of purpose and centrality and commercial drive, London was the dominant metropolis of Britain. 400 years later Disraeli coined it well when he described the City as "that great cesspool into which all the loungers of the Empire are irresistibly drained”.

Prior to the 15th century London had not been a large or overly populous city in a thousand years. London in the Tudor era had a dense, noisome population estimated between 160,000 and 200,000 people, all crammed into a few square miles of buildings. This density of population achieved during the Tudor era opened up the opportunity for a more robust and permanent situated forms of entertainment rather than the opportunistic and transactional formats previously used. In short, an audience was now waiting. (Read more.)