Kneeling, Dancing, and Disappearing: Stage Directions in Marriage a la Mode and The Tempest

Between November 7th, 1667, and January 21st, 1669, Samuel Pepys, noted diarist of the 1660s, mentions having watched performances of John Dryden and William D’Avenant’s The Tempest, a revision of Shakespeare’s play from forty-five years prior, no fewer than eight times0F[1]. Pepys, after his first watch, remarked that it was “the most innocent play that ever [he] saw,” that though “the play [has] no great wit, [it is] yet good, above ordinary plays” (Pepys 7 November, 1667). During his seventh watch, in May of 1668, Pepys was so enchanted with the performance that he attempted to write, in pencil, the lyrics to one of the songs and, upon realizing that he was unable to read his own handwriting, “went out to Mr. Harris,” Pepys long-time actor friend turned Duke’s Company manager, “and got him to read [Pepys] the words of the [song],” and, during intermission, “had the pleasure to see the actors in their several dresses, especially the seamen and monster, which were very droll” (Pepys 11 May, 1668; Roberts 29-30). Pepys thoroughly enjoyed seeing The Tempest seven out of the eight times he mentioned it in his diary. The closest he comes to describing the actions occurring on stage, though, surround his fascination with the music added in D’Avenant and Dryden’s revision, particularly with the “echo” of “half sentences repeating the former half, while the man goes on to the latter, which is mighty pretty,” and his description of character’s costumes as “droll” (Pepys 7 November, 1667). In the corresponding playtext, the music accompanying the lyrics is reduced to the stage direction: “he sings” (The Tempest 43)1F[2]. Though playtexts aim to re-present the narratives often first presented on stage2F[3] in Restoration England, the text often flattens out the experience of watching a theatrical performance in favor of creating a serviceable re-presentation for readers of the playbooks. Stage directions act as the mediator through which readers of playtexts might better imagine what could have happened on Restoration stages. Much like the plays which house them, stage directions underwent a dramatic transformation because Restoration playbooks, Tim Keenan argues, began to be “treated more seriously by readers and publishers alike,” signified by the textual inclusion of “greater ornamentation and more elaborate stage directions, which now were also more likely to include a descriptive, or even literary, element usually absent in the more professionally oriented pre-Civil War play books” (Restoration Staging 50-51). This essay aims to explore the ways in which stage directions reflect the cultural and theatrical shifts of the early Restoration.

There are several ways to interpret stage directions. There is, of course, the standard understanding of what stage directions are: a record of what movements might have occurred on stage for a given play, or, as Bernard Sobel suggests in the 1959 New Theatre Handbook and Digest of Plays, “instructions in the script of a play concerning all movements and arrangements on the acting platform during a performance” (Sobel 617). This is, to me, an ultimately unsatisfactory explanation of the work of stage directions for several reasons. It doesn’t fully consider the relationship between stage and page, pen and printer, or between the printed text and the reader. That there are, generally, far fewer stage directions in a published play than there are movements on stage in a corresponding performance (with several exceptions) means inherently that stage directions cannot act as a complete archive of the movements on stage. Stage directions alone cannot act as a one-to-one textual reproduction of the inherently ephemeral nature of theatrical performances. This is a nature often, as Bess Rowen argues, culturally and temporally contingent: “because,” Rowen argues, “stage directions are the site of an encounter between written language and the nonverbal, embodied aspects of performance, they provide one of the most expansive ways for an individual’s specific cultural experiences to become a part of the play” (Rowen 3). Though Rowen is focused here on individual readers and production teams, I posit that this works in the opposite direction, too—stage directions, as parts of the play, also contain aspects of the cultural experiences of the people who originally wrote the directions; they also, when examined broadly, contain hints of the writers’ writing tendencies. Even those stage directions that have been textually recorded do not contain all of the information created by a movement on stage. The direction “Pointing to Melantha, who swiftly passes over the Stage,” from II.i of John Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode, for instance, does not prescribe (or describe) the direction from which Melantha passes swiftly over the stage, nor does it describe, beyond “quickly,” the manner in which she does so (Marriage 20).  For these reasons, the assertion that stage directions are merely a means by which to convey “information with regard to where, at what time, etc., the given represented story takes place, who exactly is speaking, and also what he is doing at a given moment” falls short (Ingarden 208).

Though focusing on drama more recent than my own object of study, theatre scholars have posited stage directions—or, in their preferred terminology, didascalia3F[4], from the Latin root didascalicus, for “to teach”—as a form of semiotics, as “a sign-system operative in parallel to the dialogue” (Aston and Savona 123). This conception is useful in my work for several reasons, primary among them is that it offers a vocabulary and system through which stage directions, generally, might be understood textually. Some semiotic scholars interested in didascalia begin by “differentiat[ing] between what is dialogue and what is not, the latter being all utterances not intended to be spoken on stage… includ[ing] stage directions as well as any indication (such as a name) identifying speakers and place of utterance” (Issacharoff 16). Michael Issacharoff suggests that stage directions—didascalia—are inextricably bound to “the spoken text that they complement, explicate, or clarify,” and that didascalia “provide a link between playscript and narrative text” (Issacharoff 16-17). Under this conception, stage directions are signs signifying the actions occurring on a stage imagined by the reader and which offer readers “the opportunity to read performance action from the text, and so to stage the play in a theatre of her/his imagination” (Aston and Savona 73). Though this understanding of stage directions is rooted in an examination of plays more modern than my focus, I find this framing productive in understanding how a reader might conceive of a stage direction indicating that a character “passes over the stage,” even in plays for which the stage no longer exists, or, as is the case in some—though notably not all—closet dramas, plays for which no stage ever existed. Stage directions, then, serve as a framing device calling attention to the playtext as predicated on readers interpreting the actions occurring on two levels; within the narrative of the play, such as the opening scene descriptions of some plays indicating where the narrative occurs (“Scene, SICILIE,” from Marriage a la Mode, for instance); stage directions are also predicated on the reader imagining themselves watching a play on a stage, imagining that the stage represents Sicily (Marriage “Persons Represented”).

I, in this essay and beyond, aim to offer a different, shifted model for interpreting stage directions, a model that considers not just the political and historical context of the plays in which the stage directions are contained, but also the context, both within and outside of the narrative frame, of how each stage direction could have been read, interpreted, and internalized. In considering the wider patterns of stage directions in a given play—the amount of entrances and exits; the dialogue modifiers indicating asides, altered speech patterns, directed addresses; the descriptions of movements on stage; the types of interactions between characters; audio cues; and stage descriptions—as well as the social, historical, and theatrical contexts, I examine the ways in which stage directions serve as sites at which complex social dynamics, both within and outside of the theatre system, are enacted, performed, inscripted, and contested in dramatic texts from the Restoration.

In this examination, then, I examine the stage directions in two plays—John Dryden and William D’Avenant’s Shakespeare revision in The Tempest, or, The Enchanted Island and Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode—considering the ways in which they implicate social, political, and theatrical conventions on the early Restoration page and stage.

To do so, though, I must first explain my own understanding of stage directions—what they are, how they interact with the dialogue of a play, what work they do for a given Restoration play, and to what extent their provenance matters.

Assumptions and Methodology

There are several ways to pay close attention to the nuances, implications, and suggestions within stage directions; my work approaches stage directions from several different angles, including close and distant reading; quantitative and qualitative examinations of the texts in question; and consideration of the historical, cultural, and technological contexts in which the stage directions were written. I aim to attend to all of these facets in various capacities, beginning with providing a quantitative model through which patterns of Restoration stage directions become evident before focusing on a smaller subset of those stage directions to better show how and where those “elaborate” and “literary” stage directions come, as it were, into play.

I follow, generally, in the work of scholars such as Tiffany Sterne, who provides in her chapter for Book Parts “the history of what have come to be called ‘stage directions,’” from before stage directions were called as such, as marginal notes in hand-written medieval morality plays, to hand-written notes in the first printed plays, such as Fulgens and Lucrece, from the standardizing of the stage directorial vocabulary in the late sixteenth century to their usefulness for prompters and readers alike over the next several centuries, as well as their evolution into the complex stage directions in theatrical texts from today (Sterne 179-189).

My work begins by collating all of the explicit stage directions in each of the texts to which I attend and separating them into five main categories, three of which have subcategories. In doing so, I aim to show what types of stage directions authors choose to include so that, in my analysis, I can instead focus on how, where, and why they might include those directions in the ways in which they do. I limit my discussion here to explicit stage directions with the understanding that many stage directions are embedded within the dialog—intra-dialogic didascalia—for several reasons, primary among them being time and space constraints. My five main classifications are: dialogue modifiers, with subcategories including asides, speech types (adverbs and speech modifiers etc.), directed speech (“to [character]”), and miscellaneous dialogue modifiers singing, etc; movements on stage, with subcategories including entrances, exits, and movements across stage; interactions between characters, separated into positive actions (acts of love, embracing, kissing, hugging, etc.), negative actions (characters threatening violence, drawing swords, etc.), violence (characters striking each other, fighting on stage, etc.), and neutral actions (characters noticing, looking at, or pointing at other characters, etc.); audio cues, including those indicating violence off stage, alarums, noises coming from on or off stage, etc.; and stage descriptions, including descriptions of scenes, props, and lighting adjustments.

Diverging from the collection practices of the Seville Restoration Comedy project, who decided, in their cataloging of stage directions from specifically Restoration comedies, to “exclude from [their] count those [stage directions] signaling entrances and exits only” for practical reasons, I follow Tim Keenan’s assertion that, though “in most cases the presence or absence of bald exits and entrances… will have little import for researchers,” Keenan and I believe “they can suggest more than simple stage traffic” (Gómez-Lara and Rosso 85; A Database 70). A core assumption of this inclusion is that entrances and exits are the stage directions that most directly resemble the actions occurring on the stages these plays purport to represent. So, by tracking these entrances and exits by act between a broader corpus plays, patterns emerge about the pacing of events on stage. If my early models hold, stage directions indicating entrances and exits increase as the narrative of the plays progress, suggesting more interactions between characters, suggesting in turn a more frantic pace on stage. From my early models4F[5], this holds relatively true; stage directions in the plays in my corpus indicating entrances and exits increase by, on average, 10% from the first to second acts, 6% from the second to third, 32% from the third to the fourth acts, and actually decrease by 38% from the fourth to fifth acts.

I elide from my taxonomy several didascalic aspects of playtexts, most notably speech attributions, excepting when, as is the case in several moments in The Tempest, stage directions are embedded within the speech attribution—where Dryden alone might separate and, along with his printer, typographically distinguish “to Mir[anda]” from “Ferd.,” by justifying the former  opposite to the latter, as happens in many instances in The Conquest of Granada, Dryden and D’Avenant together conjoin these two aspects, writing “Ferd. to Mir.” (The Tempest 69). Speech attribution is, with few exceptions, standardized within dramatic texts. Additionally, these speech attributions offer little substance for examination due to their general simplicity. I also elide from my classification system act and scene divisions, choosing to focus instead on didascalia that informs a reader’s understanding of the actions on imagined stages rather than text that calls attention to the framing structure of the narrative within the play itself. The exception to this elision comes when stage descriptions and character entrances are included in the scene divisions, which does occur occasionally in printed Restoration plays.

I classify these stage directions in these categories for several reasons. First, I aim to separate the standard “Enter/exit [character],” aside, and minor dialogue modifiers from the more substantial stage directions (such as the following, also from Marriage a la Mode: “They walk contrary ways on the Stage; he, with his hands in his pocket, whistling: she, singing a dull melancholly Tune”), as the former does fall into Ingarden’s definition of “stage direction,” and provides little substance for analysis but the latter, more complex, particularly within the context of its scene, allows for a much more full exploration (Marriage 31). Second, these categories allow for an analysis of the broader patterns Restoration plays produce; creating a database broken down like this shows which plays explicitly have their characters speak to each other, rather than towards the audience, which plays contain more on-stage violence, on-stage amorous interactions, and even which plays have characters enter and exit the stage more often, showing the pace of action. By breaking these directions down by act, we can see where, precisely, playwrights, printers, and other writers of didascalia5F[6] believed stage directions could help readers better grasp the actions on an imagined stage. By breaking the stage directions down by type, however, we are better able to see not just where playwrights, printers, and the occasional actor saw fit to append dialogue with didascalia, but also what type of additional information they saw fit to include.

In doing this, I aim to show that the ways in which playtexts began to target a reading audience more concretely than pre-Civil War England are echoed and reflected in the stage directions within these playtexts. Cyndia Clegg argues that the targeting of readers began early in the seventeenth century when, “between 1560 and 1642, printers apparently believed that there was a sufficient number of readers… interested enough in drama to warrant regularly printing plays performed… on the London stage… otherwise, they would not have invested in the labor and paper necessary to produce the quarto playbooks that appeared with some regularity” (Clegg 24). As David Kastan argues, the closure of the theatres in 1642 did not actually stop the dissemination of plays, it just forced a change in the form in which these plays were spread (Performances and Playbooks 173-181). Where, before 1642, going to the theatre would not have been, for many in at least London, an altogether difficult chore, during the English Interregnum, watching a play would have been much more challenging, if not completely unviable. This is not to say, though, that there were no plays performed between 1642 and 1660, just none publicly, legally, and sanctioned by the government (excepting The Siege of Rhodes, by William D’Avenant)6F[7].  Thus, people interested in consuming plays turned instead to reading them, rather than watching them. Kastan argues that, during the 1650s, “printed drama thrived. Playbooks were readily available in the book stalls, and readers were directed to them not only by the title pages… but increasingly by booksellers’ notices and catalogues that often appeared in their published books” (Performances and Playbooks 174).

On the topic of attribution and provenance of stage directions, while I find it valuable to consider what the playwrights claim, I am generally more interested in what the text itself says. Dryden, for instance, in his “Preface to Albion and Albanius,” though published in 1685 is still relevant to my investigation, states that he outsourced “the descriptions of the scenes and other decorations of the scene… from Mr. Betterton,” who was “the most prominent Restoration actor and [Dryden’s] friend,” “who has spared neither for industry, nor cost, to make this entertainment perfect, nor for invention of the ornaments to beautify it” (Essays 278; Roberts 6; Essays 278). Though Dryden through this posits the printed texts—prefaces were only really to be read, not performed—as “perfect” representations of the performances they record, this exact representation is practically impossible. So, for my purposes, I take this to mean that the stage directions in Dryden’s printed plays, regardless of the author—Dryden, Betterton, or otherwise—aim to textually represent an ideal performance.

I find it important to also contextualize the plays central to my examination of Restoration stage directions both theatrically and historically. By taking into consideration the theatrical context in which these plays were performed and written, new dimensions to stage directions are made visible. Didascalia highlighting stage technology, for instance, increased with the introduction of spectaculars, and the evolved theatrical technology therein, into the British theatre. As Keenan suggests, stage directions calling attention to theatrical devices such as the use of flying machines (one of which, Keenan claims, D’Avenant was in possession) “are clearly intended to help the reader visualize theatrical performance and specific theatrical resources, rather than to imagine the fictional situations in their respective play;” Keenan also argues that since, “by the Restoration[,] the basic format and textual conventions of the published play had already been established,” the increase in, “in terms of both nature and number, theatrical indexicality,” that is, references in stage directions to stages, “exceeds that in its pre-Civil War equivalent” (Restoration Staging 49-50).

Though it is impossible to know exactly how these stage directions were interpreted even by actors, let alone readers of these playtexts, Nicola Glaubitz argues that even in Elizabethan England the existence of stage directions in printed plays “presuppos[es] their readers’ familiarity with [stage] conventions” (Glaubitz 35). This presupposition, along with Gómez-Lara and Rosso’s assertion that stage directions are “expressive of… performance, either as it was really acted… or as it was imagine by the playwright,” and that they “may be viewed as based on actual stage practice,” in line with Tim Keenan’s argument that, though “by 1660 a tradition of play writing by non-professional authors writing with the reader in mind ha[d] been established… [which] emphasizes theatricality while simultaneously enhancing the reader’s experience by making that theatricality easier to visualize,” stage directions still “had to be credible to readers who… were also likely to be playgoers” (Gómez-Lara and Rosso 85; Restoration Staging 51). Through this understanding, we can extrapolate some of the ways in which these stage directions might have been interpreted and understood by readers of Restoration playtexts.

Subservience and (unknowingly subversive) kneeling

John Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode, first performed at Bridges Street by the King’s Company in 1671, is concerned, along with its comedic plot surround dual cuckoldry, with questions of authority. With a high plot about a usurper to the Sicilian throne, Polydamas, being deposed from the throne in exchange for a rightful monarch whose family was forced into exile, this play’s premise echoes the English Civil War and the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy. Paulina Kewes argues that this echo “attests to the desirability of lower-class support, for it shows a party of Sicilian citizens assisting the legitimate heir Leonidas to regain his throne” (Kewes 64). This, along with the multiple depositions in both parts of Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, as well as the wider cultural anxieties surrounding coups and governmental overthrows—particularly coups at the hands of the military, as happened, of course, multiple times throughout the mid-1600s—reverberate in many early Restoration literary texts7F[8]; Dryden, though, had a penchant for discussing political overthrows and overtones, and not just in his narratives. The prologue also calls attention to this anxiety, referring to the ways in which the Franco-Dutch War, which began in 1672, “ha[s] swept the town so clear” of “all our Braves and all our Wits,” Derek Hughes claims “emptied the theatre of young men,” causing “political tension, and materially [changing] the theatrical representation of royalty” due to the “widespread feeling that, in combining with an absolutist Catholic regime against a Protestant country, [England] had picked the wrong ally and the wrong enemy” (Marriage; Hughes 132). Though the title page labels this play simply a comedy, many have classified it as a tragicomedy. Robert Hume suggests that, though the play is generically a comedy, by making “the principal plot heroic in kind… Dryden is making a deliberate attempt to “raise” comedy by emphasizing the “admiration” he had once considered proper to tragedy,” and that it “can be seen as part of a deliberate attempt to raise the social tone of comedy;” so, for those reasons, I limit this account to the “high plot” of this play (Hume 310).

There are, in the 1673 printing of Marriage a la Mode8F[9], roughly two hundred and sixty-eight explicit stage directions. Included in this number are thirty asides, thirty-nine tags directing speech towards other characters, fifty-nine entrances, and forty-seven exits9F[10]. Using the methodology outlined above, I have graphed the stage directions within Dryden’s play by both act (Figure 1) and by type (Figure 2)10F[11]. These graphs depict the patterns of stage directions throughout Marriage a la Mode, indicating a general upwards trend in the amount of stage directions over the course of the play, suggesting a positive correlation of actions depicted in stage with the events within the narrative frame of the play. Though this might sound obvious, I think it valuable to quantitatively show the connections between dialogic/narrative events and the stage directions that accompany them.

Figure 1

In separating the stage directions by act, it becomes evident that though act three contains the most even mix of my classifications, acts four and five contain more “action”—more entrances, exits, movement on stage—than the rest of the play. This suggests that, as the narrative of the play progresses, characters move on and off stage at an increased rate. This trend makes sense for several reasons. As plays progress, more characters are introduced to the narrative, accounting for more entrances and exits. The narrative format of plays—rising actions, climaxes, falling actions, denouements, etc.—also demand this type of structure; as more plotlines are introduced, developed, and concluded, more action must occur on stage. The fourth act is the culmination of the narrative events within the play. In Marriage a la Mode, for instance, the fourth act contains four differentiated scenes—the only act to do so—with each progressing the split plots through, in turn, disguised characters being discovered fighting offstage, masquerades, cheating spouses being discovered and reconciling, and the planning/discovery of a coup.

Figure 2

Notable, for a play predicated on multiple coups, is that there is very little on-stage violence in this text. This is not to say that this play is non-violent, but rather that most of the violence is pushed to the sides, both figuratively, by being only heard from off-stage, and literally, by being relegated to stage directions indicating audio cues. There are, in Marriage a la Mode, four instances in which “clashing of swords” are heard off-stage, suggesting that Dryden, in this play premiered eleven years after the restoration of the crown, did not find it necessary to portray that violence on stage. There is, in fact, only one semi-violent interaction between characters on stage—as Argaleon attempts to stop Leonidas from declaring himself the true heir to the throne by “stopping his mouth,” Leonidas physically struggles against Argaleon, “getting loose a little” (Marriage 82). That a play about militaries installing their own government is hesitant to perform violence suggests that the violence associated with what has been deemed a “mostly unwanted civil war” was still relatively fresh in the minds of the populace and not particularly appropriate in this specific context (Worden 23).

I want in this section to focus on a specific subset of stage directions difficult to categorize: characters kneeling. There are several reasons for the difficulty in classifying characters kneeling, primary among them is that kneeling carries with it different connotations in different contexts. Where a character kneeling at the feet of their monarch, for instance, carries connotations of subservience and loyalty, a character kneeling over the body of their dead lover carries connotations of grief, sadness, and occasionally anger. Characters being forced to kneel, bound in chains, for instance, carry connotations of subjugation and violence. There are also echoes of the Protestant Reformation involved with the action of kneeling—King James, who “believed in jure divino episcopacy… wanted to make the Scots kneel for communion,” but Charles II, more amenable to religious freedom, “exempted [Presbyterians] from kneeling at communion” (Harris 626; Abernathy 76)11F[12]. There is, of course, a different, more lascivious type of kneeling, briefly mentioned in a quiet conversation between Leonidas and Palmyra, in which Palmyra states that Leonidas “kneeled; and, in my lap, your head laid down / I blush’d, and blush’d,” but, as this is only mentioned in dialogue, I wish to focus here on the former types of kneeling, depicted primarily through stage directions (Marriage 28). The gesture of kneeling, though, would have carried much significance on the Restoration stage.

In Marriage a la Mode, explicit stage directions detail characters kneeling no fewer than ten times; implied stage directions, embedded within the dialogue, suggest that there are at least two other instances in which characters kneel on stage. The first occurs early in the play, when Palamede, a courtier with whom Polydamas had served as “fellow-soldiers / in the last Civil Wars,” (an oblique reference to the English Civil Wars, further allegorizing the coup of Charles II), approaches the usurper “and kneels to kiss the Kings hand,” in a show of subservience (11). As Palamede kneels willingly, I classify this as a “positive interaction,” neither coerced nor forced, and additionally not a particularly neutral interaction. That a courtier would kneel to kiss the hand of the King—even a false king—would have been standard court decorum. Thomas Elyot in 1531 states that one should behave, in the presence of royalty, “in honourable and sober demeanure;” some aspect of which, argues Ted Vallance, included, even for those approaching James II, one hundred and fifty years later, “fall[ing] to [one’s] knees to kiss the hand of [the] monarch,” which was seen as a “sign of loyalty and submission” (Elyot 66; Vallance 854). This first stage direction indicating kneeling, then, would have been interpreted as a signifier of respect, loyalty, and subservience, even between two who were, before one’s usurpation of a throne, fellow soldiers in the same wars.

 This act of subservience is unintentionally subverted later in the play, when Leonidas, rightful heir to the Sicilian throne, kneels in front of Polydamas after the latter first forbade him from marrying Palmyra, then, upon being informed that they were still continuing their dalliance, sentencing Palmyra to public humiliation in front of “all the Boys attending on her Triumph,” then to be set to death at sea, forbidden from being rescued, on a boat with only three days’ worth of bread water (Marriage 39). Leonidas then kneels in front of Polydamas not out of a sense of loyalty, but rather as an act of defiance. “Here,” he claims, “presenting his sword to his father upon his knees,” “take it, sir, and with it pierce my heart… you have done more, in taking my Palmyra” (40). The construction of this stage direction is intriguing for several reasons. First, it typographically separates Leonidas’s lines, lending it, to the reader, higher emphasis. Second, this stage direction names Polydamas Leonidas’s “father;” even though at this point in the narrative neither characters know Hermogenes lied in act I, the “Persons Represented” lists Leonidas as “the Rightful Prince, unknown.” This stage direction, then, mirrors and reflects the narrative; despite the reader having known from the beginning that Polydamas is not Leonidas’s father, the stage direction continues the façade. When other characters kneel to Polydamas—or even later in the play, when Leonidas is revealed to not be Polydamas’s son—Polydamas is identified, either in dialogue or in explicit stage directions, as “King.” To the reader, then, the unintentional regicide—or rather, princepicide, as Leonidas is not yet regent—at play in a drama that is so concerned with usurpation and succession to the throne would have been starkly apparent.

Derek Hughes remarks that, after “the Catholicism of James, Duke of York, heir to the crown in the absence of legitimate royal issue, became public knowledge in 1673… there [was] a sudden shift from the final celebrations of restoration to a repeated concentration of problems of succession” (Hughes 133). I would posit, from the excess of plays surrounding usurpation and depositions of royals from thrones, that this anxiety never really eased during the 1660s, it just became even more popular in the following decade. This anxiety is evident even in the stage directions of Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode, particularly in those moments surrounding signs of deference, such as kneeling, to monarchs, rightful or otherwise.

The Tempest’s Stage, Singing, and Dancing

Similar to the ways in which the stage directions in Marriage a la Mode have few, if any, specific stage demands, Dryden and D’Avenant’s The Tempest, or, The Enchanted Island, performed at the Duke’s House, also known as the Lincoln’s Inn Field Theatre (LIF), home of the Duke’s Company, for which D’Avenant wrote most of his plays12F[13] in 1667, four years prior to the premiere of Marriage a la Mode, is also “scenically economical rather than spectacular” (Restoration Staging 174). Marriage a la Mode’s scene demands, as referenced in my printing, at least, are limited to only having multiple doors through which characters would enter and exit, auditory elements, and multiple “scenes”—that is, multiple painted elements, often moving shutters set in grooves13F[14]. For this section, I examine briefly some of the stage directions, including those depicting some of the stage elements of LIF in a 1670 printing of The Tempest. Dryden and D’Avenant’s The Tempest is a “revision” of Shakespeare’s play by the same title and general plot, though D’Avenant and Dryden expand, contract, adjust, and change many elements, creating a wholly transformed “Restoration exploration of governance and Hobbesian ‘natural’ states within a dramaturgy that interweaves narrative, staging and intellectual ideas to an extent unmatched by any other LIF play” (Restoration Staging 174). This revision of The Tempest, is, argues Richard Kroll, “a direct exercise in political theory, asking… how the civic order might arise out of a primitive and unschooled relation to human affairs,” the negotiation of which begins before the shipwreck that acts as the impetus for the events of the narrative (Kroll 200). The play also, argues Heidi Hutner, contains obvious “echoes of the… political events of the seventeenth century… [including] usurped kingdoms, rebellious lower classes, and restored thrones;” Hutner also, though not the focus of my essay, provides an excellent accounting of the ways in which this revision reifies colonial expansion in the new world (Hutner 45 and 52-54).  In this section, I examine one set of stage directions involving singing and dancing, showing the ways in which these stage directions echo and reflect these cultural anxieties as well as the way they create a direct lineage between this Restoration play and medieval morality plays.

Figure 3

An accounting of the stage directions in this play shows what Keenan argues is an economic thriftiness. Though there are some two hundred and thirty stage directions in Dryden and D’Avenant’s The Tempest,14F[15] an outsized number of them indicate entrances and exits (see figure 3). While the average number of entrances and exits in my corpus is one hundred and six, there are one hundred and twenty-nine entrances and exits in The Tempest, suggesting a higher than usual rate of movement on stage. Perhaps this is part of what drew Pepys to watch the play eight times, citing, as he did on 13 November, 1667, the “good variety that [he could not] be more pleased almost in a comedy” (Pepys 13 November). Perhaps what drew him  in was that there was, though less than, say, The Indian Emperour or The Conquest of Granada,

Figure 4

both parts, more physical violence between characters than in Marriage a la Mode. There are, in The Tempest,  twelve instances of explicit, on-stage violence, accounted for exclusively by the fourth act (see figure 4), which contains no fewer than three different fights. In this section, though, I am interested in the interactions between Alonzo, Antonio and Gonzalo, the Usurpers to the Dukedom of Mantua and a nobleman of Savoy, and the spirits guarding Prospero and “his” island.

John Dryden was, according to Nicholas von Maltzahn, “plainly fascinated… in the implications of Prospero’s supernatural powers; no clearer is this than in the ways in which Dryden and D’Avenant15F[16] employ spirits in their play. Michael Dobson suggests that one of the practical causes of this inclusion was “D’Avenant’s particular sense of how the new scenic and musical resources of the indoor playhouses might be called into play by Shakespeare’s scenes of magic and the supernatural;” thus, in the second act, when “[Music within” is heard by the usurpers and the nobleman, though not shown on stage, this presence is still portrayed in the text as clearly as possible (Dobson 49; The Tempest 15). The stage directions emphasize the ephemerality of the music; one direction, reading “[A dialogue within sung in parts,” is followed by the line “the sounds approach us,” indicating that the spirits were moving as they were singing, approaching, ominously, the stage (15). Edward Langhans posits the music room at the Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields as being “in a side box near the stage on the second level;” though he is hesitant, in Restoration Promptbooks, to say definitively on which level the music room was located, he seems firm in his positioning of the room on the horizontal axis, comparing this location to the later location of the music room at Dorset Garden, being above the Proscenium Arch (Langhans 40). The song progresses, calling overt attention to the trio’s crimes. A stage direction reading “Enter the two that sung, in the shape of Devils, placing themselves at two corners of the Stage,” calling, again, attention to the stage itself in a moment which Keenan claims highlights the “distinct emphasis on symmetry in this play” because “three directions use the ‘other door’ format and there are five instances of ‘enter/exit severally,” but this moment, with the two devils standing on opposite sides of the stage, “demonstrates how symbiotic can be the interaction between the physical features of a stage and dramatic conception (The Tempest 16; Restoration Staging 186-187). As the devils’ song progresses, terrifying the trio even more, echoes of medieval morality plays enter the stage. In turn the characters Pride, Fraud, Rapine, and Murther, spirits named after sins, a common trope in morality plays16F[17], enter the stage and join the song, creating a lineage between Dryden, D’Avenant, Shakespeare, and the morality plays that came before. This scene reaches its apex soon after their entrance, with a direction indicating “after which they fall into a round encompassing the Duke &c. Singing,” becoming a physical manifestation of the Duke being haunted by the ghosts of his past (16). Much like the corresponding characters in morality plays, these represent some of the cultural anxieties with which playwrights in the Restoration often contended. The threat of R/rapine—the violent seizure of property—would, for example, have resonated with a significant portion of the upper-class society who might have had their own property seized before and after they fled to the continent during the Civil Wars, though this analogy becomes murky when considering the ways in which these spirits are nominally “the good guys” (O’Riordan 183). The threat of F/fraud and murder are ever-present and bear no real explication. Finally, P/pride, often railed against, seems the smallest of these scenes. This incorporation is, to me, somewhat perplexing. Further analysis could, here, prove fruitful.

Then, faster than these events started, they end with the spirits celebrating that “around, around, we pace / about this cursed place, / Whilst thus we compass in / These mortals and their sin,” suggesting that they, the spirits, only exist within the narrative because of the sins of Antonio, Alonzo, and Gonzalo (16). The spirits continue, a stage direction indicates, to “Dance” before “[All the spirits vanish” (16). Though the manner in which they vanish is not made specifically evident, evidence from other plays and Pepys’s diary suggest that LIF did indeed have traps doors before this performance (Restoration Staging 82). It is not, then, impossible that they disappeared into the stage, leaving behind naught but an impression on both the characters and the audience. The stage direction, though, leaves this disappearing up to the imagination of the reader. Though none of this scene involves actual, physical violence, that the trio is faced with the physical manifestations of their actions in ways which echo long-standing theatrical conditions, that they are surrounded both audibly and, in the text, which brackets the dialogue of the trio, suggests that the authors, printers, and audience—both synchronous in the theatre and asynchronous readers of the printed texts—were still anxious about the events of the Civil War. Pepys himself remarked, on 13 November, 1667 that, though he could not be more thrilled when watching a comedy, he found “only the seamen’s part a little too tedious;” with the seamen’s part—presumably the “low plot,” with the non-noble sailors interacting with Caliban, Sycorax, etc.—taking up a substantial portion of the play, it stands to reason that he would have placed the parts of Antonio, Alonzo, and Gonzalo in that more pleased category.

Conclusions and areas for further research

I have aimed, in this essay, to examine the ways in which stage directions in two Restoration plays—John Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode and Dryden and William D’Avenant’s The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island—reflect a transformed theatre with different theatrical conventions from Pre-Civil War England with different political, cultural, and intellectual concerns, showing the ways in which Dryden and D’Avenant’s own politics and personal engagements with cultural touchstones entered into their playtexts. In doing so, I have argued that stage directions surrounding kneeling in Marriage a la Mode are more politically loaded and complex than might originally be thought, particularly when considering the ways in which stage directions interact with, mirror, and subvert dialogue, narrative, and paratext, and that these stage directions are made all the more relevant when considering the still-present fears of coups, government overthrows, and incompetent governmental bodies brought on by the Interregnum. I have also posited the stage directions surrounding the music, dance, and disappearance of the spirits in act II of The Tempest as not just a transformation of Shakespeare’s vaunted original play, but also as an entrance into the lineage of medieval morality plays and as a means by which D’Avenant and Dryden negotiated cultural fears surrounding the effects of the English Civil Wars

In this essay, I have also offered the beginnings of an altered model by which stage directions in Restoration plays might be understood. By considering more traditional literary criticism including contextualizing historically and theatrically, taking into account potential reader responses, and employing close readings in conjunction with more analytical, quantitative data collection, I have shown some of the ways in which broader patterns surrounding stage directions in Restoration drama become apparent. Though my models are in preliminary stages, I believe there to be value and promise in continuing this work. To do so, I aim to deepen this research by increasing my textual corpus, varying and elaborating upon my methods of analysis, and further considering the various patterns that arise from this study.

Works Cited

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Appendix 1: Stage Directions in Marriage a la Mode

Appendix 2: Stage Directions in The Tempest

[1] On the popularity of The Tempest in 1667-68, see Foster 7

[2] Printed by J. M for Henry Herringman, ed. available here

[3] See title pages for many Restoration dramas, which follow a similar construction: “[Title] as it is acted at [theatre],” suggesting that the plays were performed simultaneously with, if not prior to, their dissemination as printed texts; see also Glaubitz 35

[4] Though there are some small differences in the definitions of the terms “stage directions” and didascalia, I will, when referring to others’ work, default to the terminology they themselves use. In my own work, I will use the two interchangeably.

[5] My current sample size is, admittedly, limited, comprised of five plays in which John Dryden had a hand (The Indian Emperour, The Tempest, The Conquest of Granada, pts. 1 and 2, and Marriage a la Mode), but I aim, over the coming weeks, to significantly increase this corpus.

[6] For discussion on the provenance of Restoration stage directions, see Keenan’s Restoration Staging, particularly pp. 50-51

[7] See Gabriel Egan’s 2014 “The Closure of the Theatres” and David Scott Kastan’s Shakespeare After Theory on the closure of the theatres; Elizabeth Sauer’s chapter on the radical potential of closet dramas during the Interregnum; and Susan Wiseman’s introduction, in Drama and Politics in the English Civil War, on the topic of continued performances even after the closure of the theatres.

[8] See Bywaters 256 on the popularity of dramatic representations of usurpation, restoration, and the depiction of the interregnum

[9] Printed by Thomas Newcombe for Henry Herringman, ed. available here

[10] The difference between the number entrances and exits is explained by multiple “exeunts” in which multiple characters exit at once

[11] For a numerical breakdown on the stage directions in Marriage, see Appendix 1

[12] See Increase Mather’s 1686 and 1689 A Brief Discourse concerning the Unlawfulness of the Common Prayer Worship on the continued discourse surrounding kneeling, particularly p. 23.

[13] On the relationship between playing companies and playwrights, see Roberts 29-30 and 39-41

[14] On the introduction of this type of stage technology, see Southern 109-162 and Restoration Staging 42-73

[15] For a numerical breakdown on the stage directions in The Tempest, see Appendix B.

[16] In the preface to the play, Dryden gives priority to the work of D’Avenant for the work of revising The Tempest, claiming that D’Avenant’s work on this play was judicious. For this reason, and for the sake of ease, I treat this play as a joint venture, though I acknowledge that, likely, the work was not spread evenly between the pair.

[17] See Mankind, Everyman, etc. for more examples.