1680s: Political Spectacular
There was no investment in spectaculars during the political unrest of 1678–1684 with the Popish Plot and the Exclusion crisis, lean years for theatre. In 1682, the companies merged, making Dorset Garden's technical resources available to Dryden, who rapidly got over his principled objection to the superficiality of "spectacle" and "empty operas". The orgy of machinery and extravagant visuals that he went on to write, Albion and Albanius (1684–85), is quoted in the "Introductory" section, with the cave of Proteus rising out of the sea. Here is Juno in her flying peacock machine:
The Clouds divide, and JUNO appears in a Machine drawn by Peacocks; while a Symphony is playing, it moves gently forward, and as it descends, it opens and discovers the Tail of the Peacock, which is so large, that it almost fills the opening of the Stage between Scene and Scene.
Unusual visual allegory in this Tory panegyric of Charles II and the House of Stuart includes a figure representing the radical Whig leader Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury "with fiend's wings, and snakes twisted round his body; he is encompassed by several fanatical rebellious heads, who suck poison from him, which runs out of a tap in his side." In an investor's nightmare, while Dryden's propaganda piece was in preparation, Charles II died, James II succeeded him, and the Monmouth Rebellion which Shaftesbury had fomented broke out. On the very day of the premiere, June 3, 1685, the Duke of Monmouth landed in the west. "The nation being in a great consternation", recollected Downes, "it was performed but six times, which not answering half the charge they were at, involved the company very much in debt." This traumatic fiasco ruled out all further operatic spectacle investment until the calmer times after the Glorious Revolution of 1689.
Read more about this topic: Restoration Spectacular
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or spectacular:
“A human being is a naturally political [animal].”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)