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  • “Trying television by candlelight”:Shakespeare’s Globe’s The Duchess of Malfi on BBC4
  • Andy Kesson

The BBC’s recorded screening of Shakespeare’s Globe’s The Duchess of Malfi in May 2014 was an important event for both companies. The production opened the first season in the Globe’s new indoor theater, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, whilst it also formed the early flagship event for the BBC’s announcement of the “greatest commitment to arts for a generation.” This announcement was linked to the launch of BBC Arts Online, which then hosted the Malfi video after its broadcast on TV. The Malfi production was so important to this announcement that the play’s star stood alongside the BBC Director General as he made it (BBC Media Centre). The production thus had an important place in the innovations of these two companies and their accompanying rhetoric of theatrical reconstruction and televised theater. This article argues that these new ventures for both companies were often confronted by the creative challenges to the observation of dramaturgical space encoded in Webster’s play. It further attends to the intersections between Webster’s dramaturgy and language, the Wanamaker’s necessarily two-way contemporaneity as a modern building evoking an early modern prototype and the BBC’s screening by exploring the consequences of the play’s distinctive focus on its own performance for this televised production.

Directed by the company’s then artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole, and designed by Jonathan Fensom, the production starred Gemma Arterton as the Duchess, David Dawson as Ferdinand, James Garnon as the Cardinal, Sean Gilder as Bosola and Alex Waldmann as Antonio. The BBC screening, which was a multi-camera recording for BBC Four, the television channel on which the arts has the strongest presence, was [End Page 609] presented by Andrew Marr and directed by Ian Russell. An accompanying documentary, The Mysterious Mr Webster: BBC Arts at the Globe, made clear the BBC’s commitment to this production.

At the same time, the BBC’s promise to bring TV audiences into the Wanamaker playhouse involved an engagement with the Globe’s rhetoric of reconstruction. For Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, two academics closely connected to the research underpinning the Wanamaker, the theater was intended to “invoke a version of the indoor playhouse Shakespeare’s company occupied,” and the problematic nature of such invocations are captured in the cautious claim that the playhouse was “somewhat based” on the contested evidence represented in the drawings for a playhouse discovered at Worcester College, Oxford (1). The BBC was therefore trying to capture a performance at a venue that was itself an attempt to reconstruct a previous theatrical space or a previous idea of theatrical space.

The BBC’s presentation of The Duchess of Malfi in May 2014 was a complex cultural event that teamed a publicly-funded television company with a commercially and corporately-funded theater company (compare Holderness 30–31) at a moment when both were launching new ventures in the form of a new theater and a new arts strategy. In addition to televising the production, the BBC were also televising and advertising the Globe’s new auditorium, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. In Aebischer and Prince’s terms, “the framework for […] productions [at the Globe] is often, literally, Shakespearean” (7). The BBC was hosting Shakespeare hosting Webster. The opening of the Wanamaker together with the renewed commitment of the RSC Swan auditorium to the early modern canon heralded a new era for Shakespeare’s contemporaries onstage. Thus when Aebischer and Prince ask “what is being forgotten when Shakespeare’s contemporaries move into spaces—whether on shelves or on stages—hitherto reserved for Shakespearean performances” (10), we need to remember that though the Wanamaker playhouse, in its first two seasons, was explicitly reserved as a space predominantly for plays contemporary to but, crucially, not written by Shakespeare, it was nevertheless a playhouse built by a company named after Shakespeare himself.

The challenges associated with this filmed early modern archetype were most clearly articulated by the program’s attempts to frame the production’s candlelight. In introducing the program, Andrew Marr reflected,

Now it’s bold, and perhaps crackers, to be...

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