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court plays |Sir Henry Herbert |office-book |James I |Charles I |Queen Henrietta Maria |King’s Men |Lady Elizabeth’s Men |Queen Henrietta’s Men |Beeston’s Boys |Caroline theatre |royal taste |“Elizabethan revival” |insolence of plays

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The office-book of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–1642, is a key document for our understanding of early modern English theatre. It contains details of many of the plays which he commissioned from professional players for performance at the courts of James I and Charles I—details we often do not have from other sources, including titles, which members of the royal family were present, and which plays were liked or not liked by his royal masters. These have never been systematically examined to see, for example, how they related to the current repertoires of companies under his authority or whether he arranged them in what we would recognize as extended events, as in the staging of The Taming of the Shrew and its sequel, The Tamer Tamed, a day apart; Thomas Heywood’s two parts of Fair Maid of the West; and Herbert’s multiple showings of the now neglected two-part plays of Lodowick Carlell. We can also trace something of court taste correlating with the play-buying of the day, especially in the choice of works from the “Elizabethan revival” of the 1630s. Only parts of the office-book have survived, so there are large gaps in all of these narratives. But they do show us something of how the commercial side of 1620s and 1630s court theatre complemented the much more widely studied masques, ballets, etc. of the era which the court generated for itself.

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hospitality |intertextuality |The Tempest |Odyssey |Aeneid |decorum |court performance

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Building on the well-known connections between The Tempest’s opening storm scene and Juno’s storm in the Aeneid and Neptune’s storm in the Odyssey, this essay finds a special link between meetings of Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest and those of Ulysses and Nausicaa in the Odyssey and of Aeneas and Dido in the Aeneid, particularly their shared observance of the (ethical) proprieties of hospitality, courtship, betrothal, and dynastic marriage. That The Tempest was performed at Whitehall in 1612–1613 sometime during the betrothal and nuptial celebrations of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick, the Elector Palatine, resonates with and validates emphasizing the dynastic overtones of the play’s royal betrothal.

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French court ballet |saraos |máscaras |comedias |saraband |pastoral plays |Queen consort |motherhood |beauty |dependence |submission |Salic law

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This paper investigates the ballets danced by Queen Anne of Austria at the French court in the years 1615–1635 to show how their form and content were less the result of personal preferences, but had more to do with the queen’s naturalization and “domestication.” Anne was constantly reminded of her duties of loyalty and submission to her royal husband and made to pay homage to her mother-in-law in a show of subservience without precedent.

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Prince Ladislas Sigismund |Medici |Florence |festivities |barriera |Andrea Salvadori |Jacopo Peri |Giulio Parigi |diplomacy

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When Prince Ladislas Sigismund of Poland visited Florence in January–February 1625 as part of his Grand Tour, he was presented with a long series of entertainments comprising a sacra rappresentazione (Andrea Salvadori’s La regina Sant’Orsola, with music by various Florentine composers), Ferdinando Saracinelli’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola di Alcina (set by Francesca Caccini), and a run of comedies, tournaments, and balli. Typically, the Medici involved various leading Florentine patricians in these events. No less typically, these patricians took advantage of the occasion to demonstrate their loyalty to the two Medici women who currently held most power as regents for the young Grand Duke Ferdinando II: his mother, Archduchess Maria Magdalena of Austria (widow of Grand Duke Cosimo II), and grandmother, Grand Duchess Christine of Lorraine (widow of Grand Duke Ferdinando I). One of the entertainments offered to the prince, the tournament La precedenza delle dame (text by Andrea Salvadori; music by Jacopo Peri; scenery by Giulio Parigi), might seem to fit the pattern, although it is not quite so straightforward. Moreover, the hitherto unnoticed complexities of handling his visit—the Medici were hosting other distinguished guests as well—prompts careful thought about such entertainments not just as a conventional display of conspicuous consumption, but also as part of an intricate etiquette of diplomatic engagement.

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Naples |diplomacy |Florence |Ladislas Vasa |Maria Magdalena of Austria |Don Antonio Álvarez de Toledo |Duke of Alba |Jan Hagenaw |Stefan Pac |Albrycht Stanisław Radziwiłł |Vincenzo Vettori |Dimurgo Lambardi |tournaments |court festivals |court studies |incognito travel

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Through an in-depth analysis of known sources and newly discovered documents, this article reconstructs the Polish Prince Ladislas Sigismund’s visit to Naples at the beginning of 1625, before his arrival at the Medici court in Florence. This article presents detailed descriptions of the events and equestrian spectacles given in honour of Ladislas by the Duke of Alba in Naples. A series of letters and two reports, redacted for the ducal secretaries of the Medici court, informed Archduchess Maria Magdalena about the quality and costs of the festive events prepared in Naples. The documents demonstrate the importance of the Tuscan agent Vincenzo Vettori to ensure the success of the Medici court festivals. Once Ladislas left Naples, he moved to Florence, where the famous spectacles given in his honour did indeed surpass the magnificence of the Neapolitan celebrations.

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Ladislas Sigismund Vasa |Ferdinando I Gonzaga |Mantua |music |theatre |dramma in musica |fireworks |Alessandro Striggio Junior |Ercole Marliani |Francesco Dognazzi |Ferrante Agnelli Soardi

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The visit to Mantua of Ladislas Sigismund Vasa, son of Sigismund III, King of Poland and Sweden, was announced, expected, and prepared well in advance. Ladislas stayed in Mantua at the end of February 1625. Duke Ferdinando I Gonzaga mobilized the best musical and artistic resources at court for the prestigious guest, offering a comprehensive programme of events. Despite the lack of sources, it is clear that the festivities planned for Ladislas’s three-day stay replicated, on the one hand, well-tested Mantuan traditions for similar occasions, while also emphasizing or adapting some elements deemed appropriate for the concurrent jubilee year. Ladislas’s short sojourn in Mantua came at a troubled time in the life of the Gonzaga court, caught in the middle of reorganizing its artistic collections and, contrary to appearances, economically weakened and close to political decline and the irreversible depletion of its artistic and musical resources. The present contribution combines known documentation with new details and contextual evidence, in an attempt to arrive at a better understanding of both the role of the artists involved and the function and meaning of the venues visited by Ladislas and the objects presented to him.

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Mantua |Baroque theatre |Warsaw |Nicolò Sebregondi |Guglielmo Viani |Alfonso Amorotto Andreasi |Annibale Gonzaga |Sigismund III Vasa |Ladislas IV Vasa |Giovan Battista Bertazzolo |Gabriele Bertazzolo |Antonio Maria Viani

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Some documents in the State Archives of Mantua provide new information about the identity of the “ingegnere mantovano,” who was the scenographer of the first dramma in musica in Poland, i.e., the staging of La Galatea in Warsaw in 1628. He was not the engineer Giovan Battista Bertazzolo, as it has been believed until now, but probably the architect Nicolò Sebregondi, assisted by the painter Guglielmo Viani, both employed in Mantua, whose presence in Central Europe is documented after the deaths of the dukes Ferdinando and Vincenzo II Gonzaga.

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Rome |Venice |Warsaw |Ladislas IV |Virgilio Puccitelli |Agostino Locci |Benedetto Ferrari |Teatro San Cassiano |1637 |Andromeda |La Santa Cecilia |Barberini |opera and theatrical architecture in the early seventeenth century

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In 1637, a dramma musicale entitled La Santa Cecilia was performed in Warsaw for the royal wedding between Ladislas IV, king of Poland, and the Archduchess Cecilia Renata of Austria. The sovereign himself had previously been an avid theatre-goer during his trip to Italy in 1625, when he met Claudio Monteverdi and other musicians. In the same year 1637, the Teatro San Cassiano opened in Venice, marking the birth of modern business of opera. For the first time since the genre emerged from courts and private palaces it became a form of public entertainment. Through a close examination of various documents, the aim of this study is to propose an innovative comparison between the court theatre of Ladislas IV and contemporary early playhouses in Italy—from Rome to Venice—with reference to spectacles set to music. The findings of this study will help us shed new light on the Royal Castle theatre in Warsaw during the reign of Ladislas, which may have been designed to accommodate more people than generally assumed, according to the most up-to-date construction principles of that time. Moreover, the paper makes use of recent historical enquiries on the San Cassiano for which an ambitious reconstruction project, following the model of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, has recently been presented.

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opera |musicology |history of ideas |Robert Haas |Edward J. Dent |Donald J. Grout

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In the first half of the twentieth century, Robert Haas, Edward J. Dent, and Donald J. Grout studied the history of the term “opera.” Based on the study of some libretti, they underlined its marginal place in the seventeenth century, stressing that other labels, such as favola in musica or dramma per musica, were preferred by librettists and composers. They also concluded that “opera” was only commonly used after 1637, and then only in a very limited way. From them derives what we tend to think about this puzzling term, which certainly deserves further study. This article revises the genealogy of the word. It considers its connection with the Latin term opus, widely used in music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when it was adjectivized in various ways until it became the name of a genre. The operatic meaning was more widespread, began earlier, and was much more significant than the aforementioned scholars thought, both in Italy and other countries. Certainly, it was used in very different ways depending on the institutional context, but its development in various European countries shows its richness rather than its ambiguity. For this reason, the history of the term could help solve both lexical and ontological problems.

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court festivals |Baroque theatre |tragédie en musique |French opera |scenography |theatre machines |Louis XIV

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Theatre machines are an integral part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century court opera and its representation of power. They contribute to the performances of the sovereign’s entry on stage and display his power over the realms of scene, court, and country. Few original machines have survived to this day, but we get a glimpse of their perceptual frame through iconographical representations such as frontispieces, scene designs, and sketches of machines. These sources often combine a rational mode of revealing with a phantasmagorical one of dazzling and concealing. Given this dual nature, researchers have often presumed the contradictory manner in which they are represented. By contrast, the author proposes an understanding of these images as a blending of representation ideals which serve as potent tools of power display and shape a specific reception behaviour.

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Giulio Parigi |continental mechanized scene change |flat wing |periaktoi |Nicola Sabbatini |Joseph Furttenbach |Giovanni Battista Aleotti |Francesco Guitti |Alfonso Rivarola (il Chenda) |Giacomo Torelli |Nicodemus Tessin de Younger

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The seventeenth-century Venetian opera, and, specifically, Giacomo Torelli, has traditionally been credited with the development of the mechanized scene change system that dominated continental theatres from the early modern courts to the mid-nineteenth century. No seventeenth-century theatre has survived with its scene change machinery. Until recently scholars have relied upon the few seventeenth-century publications such as Nicola Sabbatini’s Pratica to gain an understanding of the theatrical machinery used in early modern theatres, but this machinery was out of date when the books were published. A number of unpublished manuscripts show how the machinery used to change the scenery in Italian court productions was similar to that used in Venetian public opera houses. The comparison indicates more credit should be given to Italian court architects, such as Aleotti and Guitti, than has traditionally been the case. The article shows the elements of the scene change system that were developed in court theatre and ones that were added by designers in the Venetian public theatre. It concludes with a discussion of the modifications to the system used in surviving eighteenth-century court theatres that still retain their machinery.

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fireworks |stage lighting |stage technique |performing arts studies

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The author believes that research on the history of stage lighting is not conceivable or interesting only from the age of electric lighting in theatres, and aims to illustrate how, even for the early modern theatre it is not only possible but desirable to define a larger research field, which is still virtually unexplored. For this task adequate methodological tools are needed, starting with the identification of the many types of sources that are useful for reconstructing this side of the history of the performing arts, such as iconography, visual arts, chronicles, documentation on court festivals, or archives of historical theatres and academies; but also the history of lighting techniques and devices; and the history of light also on the social and cultural side in the broadest sense.

Far from pretending to be exhaustive in describing such a vast and diversified domain, a few exemplary sources will be quoted or noted in passing that are useful in reconstructing this branch of theatre history, in order to highlight problems and develop methodologies of research and study. Given the scarcity of sources available, the recurrence of similar information in different sources is essential to establish widespread practices and concepts.

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theatre |Rome |opera |Cancelleria palace |Francesco Barberini Senior |Pietro Ottoboni |Giulio Rospigliosi |Virgilio Mazzocchi |Alessandro Scarlatti |Urban VIII |Alexander VIII

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The Roman Cancelleria palace was inhabited by cardinals and vice chancellors Francesco Barberini Senior (1632–1679) and Pietro Ottoboni (1689–1740), both important patrons of the arts; new documents in the Vatican Apostolic Library provide information about the spaces in the palace that were transformed by the two prelates to host musical performances. At the end of 1640 Francesco Barberini ordered the restructuring of a carriage house in the Cancelleria to present La Genoinda ovvero L’innocenza difesa (1641), libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi and music by Virgilio Mazzocchi; ten years after the cardinal’s death, Pietro Ottoboni used the same space to set up his first theatre. It would seem that in the time of the Barberini, some musical events were hosted on the first floor of the Cancelleria in a room later used by Ottoboni for oratories, scenographically set up with the use of stage machinery. Several interpreters of the music in the service of the two cardinals resided in the same building. This study, through the observation of how spaces for music were transformed, focuses on some pieces of music commissioned by Barberini and on the influence he wielded over Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in the context of the transformation of musical theatre in Rome over the course of fifty years (1640–1690).