Restoration Staging, 1660-74 by Tim Keenan (review)

The first controversy of Tim Keenan's book is in its title. Restoration Theatre scholars usually signal the end of their period with death (John Dryden in 1700, Thomas Betterton in 1710, Queen Anne in 1714), sometimes revolution (The Glorious one in 1688), and on rare occasions legislation (the Licensing Act, 1737). For Keenan, the outer limit is the building of a theatre: the Drury Lane playhouse that rose from the ashes of a fire that had killed the unfortunate King's Company actor Mr Bell. Rightly concerned to break up any monolithic concept of Restoration Theatre practice, Keenan seeks to identify a distinctively early phase in which playwrights were challenged to use new scenic technology that was yet to acquire the sophistication it gained in Thomas Killigrew's 1674 theatre. Why that date when the uber-technic theatre at Dorset Garden had been open since 1671? Simply because the evidence Keenan uses suggests it took playwrights a while to catch up. This is one of many subtle and useful points in his book.

Keenan's evidence is, as in the work of Dawn Lewcock, mainly focused on published stage directions. From an electronic corpus of 72 plays written between 1661 and 1674, Keenan extracts a wealth of data that challenges three longstanding tenets of Restoration Theatre studies: that four sets of backshutters were located upstage of the proscenium; that there were two doors on either side of the forestage; and that the forestage alone was used for performance, with actors discouraged from straying up into the scenes. Whether you believe those really are conventional wisdoms depends on whose work you read. A great deal of feminist criticism of Restoration Drama, for example, refers to the visual relationship between actresses and scenery, taking it for granted that the two new attractions interacted intimately.

Tight in focus, this is very much the book of a thesis. It is to Tim Keenan's credit that he has homed in with such precision on a very particular set of problems and used strictly compiled evidence to solve them. There is a strong initial interrogation of the scanty visual records of Restoration playhouses and scenery. One wonders whether Keenan's expectations of what they might prove are over-literal; his documentation of "stock" as against "excessive" scenography is meticulous and well argued. It is debatable whether enough account is taken of the way Restoration plays were transported, like any other, to the other theatres specified by the royal patents. By extension, the role of theatre managers in determining scenic effects is underplayed in the interests of pleading for high-quality dramaturgy, as though the theatres of 1660-74 were merely canvases for authorial intention. The contingency of Keenan's key evidence, the stage direction, upon textual production processes is lightly sketched. Here, a study such as Hardin Aasand's Stage Directions in Hamlet (2003) would have added depth to the discussion. It is not part of Keenan's brief to consider the cultural dimensions of the scenery he describes, which means that a discussion of London locales passes without mention of Cynthia Wall's groundbreaking study of 1998, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London. More generally, it may be asked whether the claims made for the period up to 1674 can be valid only if there is closer scrutiny of the period after that date, not least when Betterton's company retreated in 1695 to the relative technological simplicity of their former Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre.

When Keenan does make claims for the broader significance of his findings (one suspects under pressure from the publisher), he can sound a little like Montague Summers, praising the craft and popular appeal of neglected works. It is a forlorn hope indeed that better understanding of the backshutter could redeem early Restoration Drama for modern audiences. Like others before him, Keenan believes that Restoration Theatre studies have reached stagnation point, but does not diagnose that...