The Dutch Courtesan Online

In June 2013, the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York staged John Marston’s Jacobean city comedy, The Dutch Courtesan (1605).¹ Directed by Michael Cordner, the production marked the second early modern play staged in the new Department’s Scenic Stage Theatre, and extended an established series of explorations of early modern drama at York, which has seen seldom-performed plays returned to the modern stage. Since moving in to the Department’s new building in autumn 2010, the combination of colleagues’ expertise and well-equipped theaters and TV production facilities has made it possible to capture these performances on film. Following the success of the performances and recording of the Department’s inaugural production of Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters!, staged in June 2011, the Dutch Courtesan project sought to expand the ambitions of the former. The result was the creation of a new project website, www.dutchcourtesan.co.uk (Cordner and Jones). This site was envisaged as a vehicle by which to track the preparation of the play from script to performance and to offer a range of contextualizing information about the play’s history. Ultimately becoming host to the film of the performance, the website extends the duration of the production beyond its short three-day run and offers the user a version of what an audience saw in the theater, “remediated,” in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s term (qtd. in Aebischer 144), and presented among an assemblage of supporting materials ranging from scholarly theater-historical and literary essays to rehearsal blogs and films, and interviews with cast, creatives, and visiting industry professionals. The purpose of this essay is to explore the rationale of the project and the website’s creation, and to consider how viewing The Dutch Courtesan through the website lens shifts the way in which we might approach early modern texts in performance and on screen.

Rarely played: The Dutch Courtesan on the modern stage

While this may be the most active period of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater-making since Shakespeare and his contemporaries wielded quills (Lopez, “Seeds” 35), one such contemporary, John Marston, has yet to enjoy the modern popularity of some of his peers. Against the works of Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, and the inevitably omnipresent Shakespeare, Marston’s plays have rarely made it to the modern professional stage. In Karin Brown’s extensive list of 50 years of professional productions of early modern theater in the UK and USA since 1960, only four out of 341 were of Marston’s plays (200-01). While we can add further productions to the list (see Douglas and Jones; Brown makes no claims to being completely comprehensive), a representation of a little over 1% of fifty years of early modern productions does not immediately suggest a hearty endorsement of Marston’s work.

Nevertheless, the first production on Brown’s list might suggest that such circumspection was not always so strongly felt; for in 1964, in its second season, the National Theatre staged Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, directed by William Gaskill and Piers Haggard, at Chichester and the Old Vic. To choose the play for the theater’s first foray into non-Shakespearean drama from before the Restoration, out of the full range and richness of the known repertoire, suggests that the powers at the newly formed company saw Marston’s work as being exemplary classical drama, which drama had long been advocated as being a “vital” component in the remit and duty of a national theater to stage (Elsom and Tomalin qtd. in Cordner, “The Dutch Courtesan, 1964” 1). It was the success of two earlier productions of the play, directed by Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in 1954 and 1959, that led Kenneth Tynan to propose the play for inclusion the National’s second season (Cordner, “The Dutch Courtesan, 1964” 3-4; Tynan 507). However, Littlewood’s success was not replicated by Gaskill and Haggard. Branded “An Inhibited Booby” by the Times’ correspondent (“Inhibited”), and “depressing” and “ponderous” by Bamber Gascoigne, Tynan’s successor at the Observer, both the production...