Edward Ecclestone's The Cataclysm: New Engravings of Restoration Stage Scenery?

We are not so well supplied with images of Restoration stage scenery that we can afford to ignore any images with possible connections to restoration theatre practice. Tim Keenan's careful and thorough survey, in his excellent study of Restoration Staging, 1660-74, covers the familiar printed images, from william dolle's five engravings in Elkanah settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673) and the frontispiece to louis grabu's Ariadne (1674) to Joe Haines's Prologue riding an ass (A Fatal Mistake (1692)) and the frontispiece to John Eccles's Theatre Musick (1698), before turning to John webb's drawings for sir william davenant's The Siege of Rhodes and for Roger Boyle's Mustapha (Keenan 11-33). Keenan offers a single European example as a parallel, from the schouwburg theatre in amsterdam (18), just as cary diPietro turns to an engraving by charles-nicolas cochin the younger after giacomo torelli's design for francesco sacrati's La Finta Pazza (Petit Bourbon, 1645), when he wants to find an image that might suggest what a set description in the 1674 version of Shakespeare's The Tempest looked like for a design "compos'd of three Walks of Cypress-trees, each Side-walk leads to a Cave . . . The Middle-Walk is of a great depth, and leads to an open part of the Island" (DiPietro 179, quoting Shadwell 5).

DiPietro also offers, for an image of the opening storm, "which represents a thick Cloudy Sky, a very Rocky Coast, and a Tempestuous Sea in perpetual Agitation . . . [with] many dreadful Objects in it, as several Spirits in horrid shapes flying down amongst the Sailors, then rising and crossing in the Air" (Shadwell 1), the frontispiece to the play in nicholas rowe's 1709 edition, designed by françois Boitard and engraved by Elisha Kirkall, an image "which may have recalled, however imperfectly, Betterton's settings of the same period" (DiPietro 182).

None of the array of images that Keenan and DiPietro assemble is new to the discussion of restoration staging. I want to offer five engravings–or "sculptures", as they and the dolle's ones for settle's play were described on their respective title-pages¹–that seem to me to have some kind of relationship to the restoration stage, images that have been ignored and which, given the paucity of other materials, seem worth thinking about. Their connection to actual staging practices is at least as strong as many of the ones that Keenan and DiPietro use. This article is intended simply to put them into play and to let others start to weigh in on their significance–or lack thereof.

I begin with a brief publication history. Edward Ecclestone's opera Noah's Flood or The Destruction of the World was first published in 1679 (Arber 1:370). In 1685, the sheets were re-issued with a new title-page describing it as The Cataclysm or General Deluge of the World now "adorned with various sculptures" (Arber 2:114). Gerard langbaine wryly wondered "whether the various sculptures took more with the ladies of Pal-mall, than the sence did with those who frequent Paul 's church-yard" (langbaine 186), an intriguing suggestion of the gender demographics of the 1685 marketing ploy. Ecclestone and/or his bookseller were clearly not ready to give up, for the same sheets appeared yet again, under yet another title, now to be sold by yet another bookseller, as The Deluge in 1690 (Arber 2:322). All three are versions of the same animal.

So much for the printing history. Of the author nothing is known for sure, beyond langbaine's description of him as "a gentleman now living" (185). The most likely Edward Ecclestone or Eccleston alive in the 1670s and still alive in the 1690s was the son of Thomas Eccleston of Kentish town, Middlesex. Thomas was listed as a gentleman and hence passed the rank on to his son. Edward matriculated at st John's college, oxford on 15 July 1669 at age 17 (Foster 2:443). He entered Middle temple on 31 January...