Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in the Early English and Scottish Theatre (review)

Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in the Early English and Scottish Theatre. By Philip Butterworth. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1998. Pp. xxv+271.

In February 1613, the Master Gunner of England entertained King James and the royal party with "many skilful and ingenious arrangements with great bumbards, shooting up many artificial balls of fire into the ayre [which fell into] many diverse streams like rainebowes." There followed a masque in which "Lady Lucida, queen of the man-hating Amazones" was pursued and captured by the love-struck "Mango the Tartarian Magician." Lucida was later rescued by St. George, in a fiery siege of the magician's castle, the climax of which involved "fiery balls [that] flie up into the ayre" and numerous other pyrotechnic feats.

What this and many, many other descriptions make plain is that gunpowder had an entertainment function that paralleled its military purposes. Fireworks--literally, "works of fire"--were regarded as a major and significant aspect of public entertainment, something spiritually akin to the car crashes and other spectacular bits of mayhem that one finds at the movies today. Sometimes special displays were organized to commemorate major public events or anniversaries, spectacles that would resemble their modern counterparts, at least as they were represented by Baroque painters, for whom they were an enduring preoccupation (see Kevin Salatino's Incendiary Art: The Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern Europe, published by the Getty Research Institute in 1997).

But apart from such spectacles, pyrotechnic effects were employed in the theater on an everyday basis, to enhance dramatic moments or to establish scenes or characters, thunder and lightening, or Hell, or any one of a legion of devils. Modern audiences might think it strange to encounter a character whose hair was aflame or whose mouth spewed colored smoke, but Elizabethan audiences thought otherwise. Playgoers were enchanted by such "special effects," and playwrights seem to have included an inordinate number of fiery characters in the dramatis personae.

Recent decades have seen a substantial growth in studies of early modern theater: play texts and performance practices have been scrutinized, performances have been mounted, filmed, and televised, and scholars have been inspired to dig deeper into veins of unpublished materials to reveal more about how these entertainments worked. As they have done so, they have begun to uncover connections between the world of popular entertainment and that of the military specialist. Contemporary writers of military treatises were perfectly aware of this overlap. Peter Whitehorne's 1562 tract on Orderyng of Souldiers in Battleray contains instructions for making "Fireworks or wilde Fyre," and Robert Norton's The Gunner of 1628 is just as eager to instruct the reader on how to make "Extraordinary artificiall Fireworks." Both works were directed at the military gunner, but both authors knew their wider audience.

Philip Butterworth's pioneering study, Theatre of Fire, is rooted in theater scholarship; he takes good advantage of the Records of Early English Drama, microfilmed and published through the University of Toronto's Victoria College. Butterworth's net is cast wider, however. It includes such sources as account books, guild records, and descriptions of royal or noble processions, as well as technical authors: Biringuccio, Tartaglia, François Malthus, Siemienowicz, Bate, and Babington. The result is a delightful synthesis of history-of-theater research and history of technology.

Theatre of Fire derives from Butterworth's dissertation, completed at Leeds in 1993, and this shows at times. Butterworth is cautious, refusing to speculate even where some modest speculation might be in order. He strives for completeness of an almost encyclopedic sort, which leads at times to a rather dull text. On the other hand, the work is a treasure trove of information, and it really is indispensable for anyone working on early modern documents that mention gunpowder. The appendixes and glossary together amount to almost half the length of the main text, and these, along...