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This chapter explores rehearsal from the establishment of the early professional theatre to its closure, covering roughly the years 1570–1640. It attempts to determine the amount of rehearsal likely for any public theatre production by a statistical consideration of the number of plays generally mounted during a season. It also investigates what rehearsal itself consisted of, in sections which discuss the two initial ‘readings’, the distribution of parts, the ‘study’ period, the group rehearsal, and performance. Throughout, the roles of those people important to the rehearsal process — the author, manager, book-keeper, and actor — are given particular attention. Finally, suggestions are made as to the ways in which performance responded to this kind of rehearsal. This includes an examination of the effect of ‘parts’ and of first-day revision (the ‘rehearsal’ of the text) on the text.

This chapter examines the role played by entrepreneurs and investors in funding and operating new public theaters in provincial France. More specifically, it considers those who paid for playhouses, such as the local entrepreneurs and investors in joint-stock companies who provided the capital and the drive to construct most of the new public theaters. The chapter first provides an overview of the role of the state in arts funding during the Old Regime before considering who built, paid for, and operated the country's new public playhouses. It shows that most provincial playhouses, like that of Le Mans, were locally motivated and privately funded. By enabling a group of civic-minded individuals to pool their money in order to build a theater deemed “necessary to the status of this city,” theater societies helped to give rise to a new form of local arts patronage. The chapter also explores the role of culture brokers in theatrical production in eighteenth-century France.

This chapter examines the role played by municipal governments in designing new civic playhouses in eighteenth-century France. It argues that municipal authorities were central participants in establishing new standards for the design, elegance, and utility of the French playhouse. The actions of municipal authorities supported an escalation in expectations in cities that influenced theater construction, both public and private. This is all the more significant because in the domain of theater architecture the royal government was not the primary trendsetter. This chapter analyzes the decisions of municipal governments to stake their city's reputation—and its funds—on public theaters within the context of the population growth and commercialism that marked eighteenth-century urban life. It also considers how the new generation of public playhouses came to function as multifaceted cultural, social, and even commercial centers, accommodating a wide variety of uses by the urban community. Finally, it discusses the controversy surrounding theater-building projects financed by municipal funds and land.

This chapter examines the role played by the state—defined as the royal government and representatives of the crown, including military commanders—in operating new public theaters in provincial France. It explores three areas of state intervention that were particularly widespread in the theater industry, first by considering the relationship of patronage that the French army and navy cultivated with acting troupes charged with entertaining their men during war as well as peace. It then looks at the symbolic displays of political authority that took place within public playhouses, along with the conflicts that they sparked. It also discusses the exercise of privilege in the domain of theatrical production, as royal governors used their authority to protect entrepreneurial directors and encourage them to expand their operations. The chapter attributes the French state's involvement in the creation of a theater industry mainly to the fact that royal officials encouraged, protected, and at times even collaborated on theater projects that had important roots in the private domain.

This chapter focuses on the establishment of public playhouses and professional acting troupes beyond the Hexagon, in the colonies of the French Caribbean. It considers how directors, patrons, and colonial administrators self-consciously portrayed the public theaters established in cities in Saint-Domingue beginning in the 1760s as direct participants in the theater culture and practices of metropolitan France. It also examines the operations of colonial theaters within the specificities of the colonial situation, with particular emphasis on the role played by the public theaters of Saint-Domingue in negotiating colonial identities and racial boundaries. Approaching theaters as cultural businesses subject to the commercial pressures of the market, this chapter highlights the issue of race in theatrical production in the French colonies by discussing the unmatched opportunities that the stage afforded free people of color, who participated not only as spectators but also as directors, patrons, and actors in colonial theaters.

This book examines the business of theater in France and its colonies during the eighteenth century. It shows how French theaters emerged as the most prominent and prestigious new cultural institutions of the century, a period that witnessed the inauguration of the first public playhouses in more than eighty provincial and colonial cities. It considers how theatrical production was transformed into big business as the public playhouse became a monument to the performing arts. In tracing the history of the making of the French theater industry in the late Old Regime, this book explores why and how professional public theaters became a regular fixture of cultural and social life for city dwellers throughout France and its colonies. It also discusses the important implications of the theater industry for our understanding of Enlightenment society, consumerism in France, and the absolutist state.

While not as immediately influential as the post-Stonewall gay rights movement, the second wave of feminism, which is the focus of Chapter 4, nevertheless had a strong impact on adult musicals. This is especially the case in terms of the genre's depictions of sexual freedom and pleasure. Myrna Lamb and Susan Hulsman Bingham's overtly polemic musical Mod Donna (1970), which was the first feminist musical to be produced commercially in New York City during the second wave, is detailed here.

A fictional letter from Madrid home to Paris, by a young aficionado of French theater who has just attended a function in Madrid’s Coliseo de la Cruz, provides the framework for a detailed reconstruction of a real performance that took place on December 27, 1766. The entire evening’s entertainment is described, so that the two tonadillas that were performed that night appear in typical context. The dialog and explanations are paraphrased from period sources throughout.

This chapter argues that the public theatre most definitely sought to feed off, and in so doing to expand, the resulting ‘post-reformation public sphere’. Not, of course, out of a principled desire to disseminate or increase political knowledge or to inculcate civic virtue, but rather because the spread of such attitudes and interests was likely to increase the appetite for a certain sort of play and thus redound to the considerable profit of those providing such plays to the viewing and reading publics. On the face of it, one might think that that essentially parasitic, secondary role would be the extent of the public theatre's contribution to the development of the post-reformation public sphere. After all, plays were precisely not pamphlets or position papers. They neither made a case nor advanced or refuted arguments; plays merely told stories, the resolutions of which represented, not successfully clinched arguments, but emotionally satisfying endings.

The first Chigi-sponsored opera in Siena took place in 1669 and was connected with the reconstruction of the city’s public theater. Carlo Fontana reconfigured the performing space, whose ceiling was decorated with the symbol of the Assicurate: the leafy oak tree. The production of Cesti’s L’Argia saw the Chigi working to activate the sociable network so that the Sienese aristocracy would collectively sponsor the renovation of the theater and cover the expenses to mount the opera. The next occasion for opera was inspired by the first visit of Agostino Chigi and Maria Virginia Borghese to Siena in 1672. Three productions, all imported from Rome, show how the Chigi called on their relationships with Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and Filippo Acciaioli in order to stage opera in their hometown.

This chapter considers the implications for literary patronage of the accession of a monarch with an already well-established print persona, contrasting the authorial careers of the poet-king, James VI and I, and the ‘King’s poet’, Ben Jonson—who achieved courtly status while remaining involved in the commercial economy of the public theatre. To the difficulties always inherent in the production of courtly literature, the Stuart accession added those of a rival court, that of the heir apparent, Prince Henry, projecting a divergent political outlook and cultivating a different literary aesthetic. By looking at the efforts of various authors, including Jonson, who attempted to bridge the divide, the discussion reveals the artistic challenges and limitations imposed by disunity and faction.

Unmasking and publicizing Catholic plots remained the standard way to respond to the libels. Initially the Lopez investigation revealed novel divisions between the earl of Essex and the Cecils, but it ended with distinct echoes of the Parry affair, as all the major players united to convict Dr Lopez, persuade (a decidedly unwilling) Elizabeth I of his guilt and then use the resulting publicity to blackguard Philip II and prevent further attempts to negotiate a peace. The Lopez affair had resonances on the public stage, and the regime can be seen moving to satisfy the passions of a London audience or public thus aroused. This, plus the fact that there are four different accounts of the affair, only one of which was printed, provides unique insight into the workings of the regime’s (still resolutely Cecilian) publicity machine, the analysis of which brings the book full circle.