The First Frame: Theatre Space in Enlightenment France by Pannill Camp (review)

Pannill Camp’s The First Frame explores the stylistic proliferation of plays, theories, and especially buildings that marked the eighteenth-century French theatre. Drawing on a vast archive of texts and figures—from Molière to Beaumarchais in the playhouse and from d’Aubignac to Diderot outside of it—Camp’s book recalls Jeffrey Ravel’s magisterial The Contested Parterre (1999) not only in its fine historical analysis, but also in its methodology. Camp too understands the theatre as a space of encounter for artists, philosophers, social reformers, and spectators; he identifies lines of thought that brought them into dialogue with one another, and he honors his period by avoiding anachronistic distinctions among types of inquiry. Indeed, even the demarcation between rationalism and empiricism, rigidly enforced in our intellectual histories, here reveals itself to be notional or at least constantly navigated in both theory and practice throughout France’s “century of the theatre.” We see traces of rationalist theory even in the most sensational accounts of natural philosophy, just as we see an emphasis on perception and experience in the work of that most rational of philosophers, Descartes.

To offer an “interpretation of the evolving spatial ideology beneath a profound mutation in theatre aesthetics” (6), Camp begins by focusing on the immediate prehistory of this mutation. His first chapter describes the spatial logic of the dominant theatre style in seventeenth-century France, the rectangular jeu de paume, which struggled to accommodate both forced-perspective scenery and bodies increasingly given to the perspective-defying movement. In the second chapter he maps these two phenomena onto competing pressures in neoclassical dramatic theory: on the one hand, an understanding of the stage as a mirror, containing a discrete world; and on the other, an understanding of the theatre as a window, a transparent field affording sensational encounter between actors and audience. As the eighteenth century progressed, the latter view became more dominant, and its relationship to Lockean empiricism grew more reciprocal. Camp details in his third chapter how French theatre spectator-ship and natural philosophy became drawn into a “discursive and spatial convergence” exemplified in the Théâtre de Nicolet, a fairground space whose varied scenic attractions included physics demonstrations (95). This remarkable section is the book’s center of gravity. The author demonstrates how ideas from drama and dramatic theory found their way into natural philosophy, with researchers (and, no doubt, some quacks) turning their experiments into theatre. Meanwhile, French playwrights turned increasingly to an empiricist understanding of stage action and character psychology, and décorateurs—the multitasking designers and technical directors who managed French theatres—turned to new understandings of physics.

The book is not organized chronologically, nor does it develop its argument in chapter-by-chapter increments. Rather, the first three discussions—of pre-reform theatres; of a dramatic theory torn between reflection and transparency; and of the mutually reinforcing scenes of drama and natural philosophy—ground and make possible the analysis suggested by the book’s subtitle and offered by the fourth chapter. Here, Camp focuses on the theatre space itself, a space undergoing conceptual and literal renovation in eighteenth-century France. The science of optics, in important ways initiated by Descartes in his 1637 Dioptrics, had flourished a century later, providing rationales for new theatre designs: abandoning the rectangular shapes and perspective sets, architects and designers increasingly looked to circular or oblong spaces that were better disposed to the spectator’s sensory perception. Reflecting the cultural currency of empiricism, these theatre reformers abandoned vanishing-point perspective in favor of more natural blocking whose patterns they arrayed under wider proscenium arches and therefore broader fields of sensory perception. In other words, the preoccupations of contemporary dramatic theory, optical theory, and natural philosophy constellated in the theatre reformers’ understanding of spectatorship as a “largely visual activity predicated on innate sensory and mental capacities that playhouses could either help or hinder” (131). Consequently, Camp argues, the French theatre abandoned the rationalist proofs and Vitruvian geometries that had...