Seeing places:<i>The Tempest</i>and the baroque spectacle of the Restoration theatre

Abstract This essay opens with a discussion of the two major Restoration adaptations of The Tempest, the 1667 adaptation by William Davenant and John Dryden and the 1674 adaptation by Thomas Shadwell. Both adaptations are of interest because their stage success was due in part to the new visual aesthetic of painted scenery employed by Davenant after 1660 and later the King's company led by Killigrew. The difficulty that besets the discussion of the new visual aesthetic, however, is the absence of visual records of performance, an absence, I argue, which masks an important cultural development of early modernity: the ability of new media to represent places visually as mimetic copies of places as seen by the eye. Shakespeare's play is especially relevant, even in its adapted versions, because its own sense of place, the unnamed island, is linked to early colonial encounter with the new world, the play's pastoralism combining by way of Thomas More's pun in "utopia" an idealized place (eu-topos) and its absence (ou-topos). I argue that the idealized "absent" place of performance provides one way of thinking about the theatrical representation of place as "not a place", an idealized artifice that "colonizes" theatrical space by imposing order on it. In the case of baroque theatre, the craft of perspective painting and visual order subordinate a sense of scenic place by transforming theatrical space into the "baseless fabric of a vision". The evocation of place through aesthetic artifice is thus mediated through representational forms and practices that, thinking through the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, are encoded with different kinds of social exchange in the space of the theatre. In contrast to this argument, however, I will argue alternatively that the play enables through the experience of its performance a critique of the subordination of place to colonial discourse, no less through its utopianism. This latter argument turns upon an understanding of the aesthetic as developed by the cultural theorist Theodor Adorno according to which specific kinds of art open up the possibility for a negative dialectical critique of social order. Keywords: adaptationperspective-painted scenerywonderspaceplaceaestheticsnegative dialectics Notes 1. While there is still some discussion about the provenance and authorship of the two quartos of 1670 and 1674, respectively, especially since both contain a preface by Dryden, the consensus is generally that the former is Davenant and Dryden's 1667 text and the latter by Shadwell. Shadwell's text is reproduced with authorial attribution in Spencer (ed.), Five Adaptations of Shakespeare. 2. Vaughan, in the Introduction to the third-series Arden edition (6–7), briefly puts forward this view; Orgel, in the Oxford edition, provides a more detailed discussion (1–3), concluding that the play was not written for court nor produced as a masque (2). 3. Orrell, citing A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, II (76), notes that Charles also sent Betterton to France to observe French stage machinery and scenic technique, in time for its use in the 1674 operatic Tempest. 4. Clare includes a brief introduction to the text of the play (181–93) which situates it in relation to national conflicts during the period of the Commonwealth. 5. Southern argues that the shorter spaces in between the longer ones represent the shutters rather than the spaces between them. The three sliding shutters would mean the illustration would correspond with the three surviving shutter drawings also by Webb. On this and the second design by Jones/Webb (Figure 2), see also Lewcock (esp. pp. 51–64). 6. Garland-Thomson (50–51) uses the same dichotomy between mastery and curiosity to characterize what she calls the "baroque stare". 7. Extracts of these two sources are reproduced in appendix in both Vaughan's Arden and Orgel's Oxford edition. 8. Schmid explains: "In concrete terms, one could think of networks of interaction and communication as they arise in everyday life (e.g., daily connection of residence and workplace) or in the production process (production and exchange relations)" (36). 9. Another avenue to explore is that provided by recent "place" theory, such as the work of Edward Casey and Jeff Malpas, both of whom draw on the phenomenological theory of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. I argue elsewhere – in a companion essay on The Tempest forthcoming in a volume of essays, Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now, eds. Cary DiPietro and Hugh Grady (Palgrave) – that our felt attachments to place, much like our felt responses to the aesthetic, offer an alternative to a strictly epistemological view of what happens in theatrical performance, in the case of The Tempest, engendering felt commitments to land stewardship and ecology to contrast the colonial imperative implicit in the play's use of the pastoral. 10. Marx's concerns with aesthetics are discussed by Grady in Impure Aesthetics (14). Grady writes: "Nowhere, perhaps, was the theoretical and spiritual poverty of Leninist and Stalinist Marxism more on view than in the Communist movement's dogmatic theory and tyrannical practice in regards to art and culture". The link between Kantian aesthetics and Adorno's negative dialectics explained in the following paragraphs is deeply indebted to Grady's account of the same, and to his comments on my earlier draft of that material. 11. Powell (65) makes the argument about mimed action in the opening scene. 12. This connection is made by Powell (68), who provides the illustration. 13. Webb's involvement in the redesign of the Hall Theatre is put forward by Orrell (168). 14. Rosenfeld discusses a dispute between Fuller and the King's Company over scenes commissioned for Dryden's Tyrannic Love in 1669 (42–43); she discusses Ricci on p. 61. 15. There was of course some debate about the merits of Italian scenic invention, especially during the 1670s between Dryden, now writing for Killigrew's King's Men, and Betterton, who became de facto manager of the Duke's Men after Davenant's death in 1668, but Dryden's antipathy to scenic invention was probably motivated by rivalry and the success of the operatic Tempest, revised from his own revision of Shakespeare. When the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane was lavishly rebuilt in 1674 for the King's Men following designs by Christopher Wren (the earlier structure was destroyed by fire in 1672), it certainly provided ample facilities for scenery and machines.

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