Margaret J.M. Ezell
Book Review
Philip Major, ed. Thomas Killigrew and the Seventeenth-Century English Stage. Ashgate
(Surrey, UK, 2013), xii + 223 pp. ISBN: 9781409466680. $98.96 (USD).
1> First,
applause to Ashgate Press for continuing to publish important collections of
essays such as this, which bring together accomplished scholars to explore
topics in-depth and from multiple perspectives. This collection edited by
Philip Major offers a comprehensive exploration of the theatrical career of
Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683), whose long life and exploits on and off the
stages of the courts of Charles I and Charles II offer a corrective to the
standard literary history periodization which sharply divides the worlds of the
Caroline court from that of the Restoration and, until recently, largely
ignored the literary culture of the Interregnum.
2> In his
introduction, Major highlights the ways in which this neat division of history
has caused Killigrew to be viewed primarily as a Restoration figure, often in
his role as manager of one of the two patent theatres, and not usually in a favorable light. Killigrew’s “unfashionableness” as a
figure for serious study, Major suggests, stems from the perception of him as a
“shallow cavalier…a bon vivant and
court-hanger-on” and subsequently as a corrupt and inept theatre manager (2). “It
would be disingenuous…to gloss over the more unsavoury aspects of his life and
character,” Major concedes, but “for every unpalatable aspect of Killigrew’s
life and character this is…a compensatory feature, and this disrupts any easy
verdicts on him.” The essays in the collection thus look closely at courtier
culture itself as performative in addition to looking at Killigrew’s evolution
of public personas and creation theatrical events.
3> Killigrew’s
early career as a Cockpit dramatist, his first staged play The Prisoners performed when he was twenty-one, is deftly handled
by Eleanor Collins. Killigrew’s ambitions as a courtier dramatist have received
relatively little attention compared to his Restoration ones; his tragicomedies
Claricilla and The Prisoners have typically been dismissed as frivolous and
pandering to the tastes of Queen Henrietta Maria, who, also until recently, has
figured as one of the primary reasons why court literature of this period,
quoting the 1980 edition of Claricilla,
is not something “the modern reader would turn by choice” (22). Collins turns
the lens away from Henrietta Maria herself and instead resituates the plays as
part of the repertory of the acting company, Queen Henrietta’s Men--tellingly,
the only courtier plays included in their 1630s repertory were Killigrew’s, and
they would have been performed in the context of the older Red Bull commercial plays.
As Collins notes, viewing these plays in their commercial context as well as
their court one highlights not only Killigrew’s aspirations at court but also
the strategies employed by one of the leading London theatrical companies of
the time.
4> This
strategy of recontextualizing Killigrew’s plays continues in the excellent
studies by Victoria Bancroft, Marcus Nevitt, Philip Major, and J.P. Vander
Motten which focus on specific plays, The
Parson’s Wedding, Thomoso, and The Pilgrim. The first is treated by
Bancroft as an experimental foray into the Jacobean preoccupation with the
natures of theatricality and reality found in Marston, Webster, Beaumont, and
Jonson among many, staged very early in the Restoration. Theatre historians have
noted the play for Killigrew’s staging of it with an all-female cast at the
Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in 1664, usually described as a tasteless
commercial ploy. Bancroft makes a reasonable if complicated argument that
Killigrew is again linking earlier traditions with the new theatrical environment,
while continuing to explore the dialogue about the artificial and the real
which would come to characterize later Restoration comedies. Nevitt takes on
Killigrew’s most famous, or notorious, play, the two-part “comedy” Thomoso the Wanderer. As with much of
Killigrew’s writing, defining the genre has been problematic for critics—it is
typically read as autobiographical and/or a form of closet drama intended to be
read but not performed. Nevitt believes this critical confusion has obscured
what is innovative and interesting about this self-consciously constructed
two-parter, which he asserts Killigrew wrote to be staged, complete with stage
directions for how to produce blood during fights. Nevitt makes a strong case
for reading it as “separate parts in a comic dialogue rather than a chaotic
ten-act drama with a comfort break halfway through” (131). Major makes the case
for another unloved Killigrew drama, The
Pilgrim, as a political and cultural artefact of exile. Its heroic
conventions, its stress on “honour, courage, and equanimity” serve as “a
psychological handrail for a royalist audience—and playwright—whose world has
been upturned” (193). He also points to Killigrew’s personal association with
the figure of the pilgrim, and his final portrait not as a dashing cavalier or
man of the theatre, but as a bearded and repentant pilgrim of St. James. This
theme of the culture of exile is also handled in J.P. Vander Motten’s look at
Aphra Behn’s reworking of Thomoso and
Killigrew’s reworking of his public image, from the publication of his Comedies and Tragedies in 1664 to the
St. James portrait in the 1670s around the time of the performance of Behn’s The Rover. Vander Motten reads the Thomoso as a complex and unique
expression of Killigrew’s “confrontation with the experience of exile” (150).
5> Karen
Britland, David Roberts, and Geoffrey Smith reground us in the world of the
court and the power of patronage and early modern career fashioning. David
Robert struggles mightily to rescue Killigrew from the near universal
assessment of Killigrew as a failure in his management of the Drury Lane
Theatre. He highlights Killigrew’s position as a fourth son of a well-connected
family who could place their offspring in court positions while never
themselves being completely accepted within it, providing Killigrew with
wherewithal to imagine for himself before the war a “life in business and on
the fringes of the court—a life devoted to the mixed economy of
seventeenth-century theatre, to trying to make reputation as well as profit out
of royal entertainment” (66). Britland takes this theme in a slightly
different direction with her exploration of the court career of Killigrew’s
younger brother Henry, whose play The
Conspiracy was performed at York House in 1635. She highlights, too, the
insider/outsider nature of the Killigrew family’s involvement with the court, suggesting
that in the 1630s, young Henry, also, sought entrance and patronage. The patrons
Henry found, in contrast to Thomas, were with powerful women, notably the
Duchess of Buckingham, the mother of Mary Villiers for whose wedding the lavish
spectacle of The Conspiracy was
created. Geoffrey Smith takes us back to
the more familiar figure of Thomas Killigrew as the boon drinking companion of
Charles II, asking us to reconsider what it meant to be a “gentleman of Great
Esteem with the King”—“Where exactly did Tom Killigrew stand in this collection
of whores and pimps, diseased drunkards and quarrelsome debauchees who
allegedly surrounded the king?” (153). Simultaneously holding the positions of
managing the Theatre Royal with serving as a groom of the bedchamber, Killigrew
was, as Smith points out, some twenty years older that the King in a court that
as Clarendon observed did not love old men. Like Killigrew’s early biographer
Alfred Harbage, Smith feels that much of the dirt on the Killigrew reputation
came from the antics of his son “lying Harry” and had little to do with the
aging courtier’s impressive survival in a volatile and dangerous court.
6> This
volume may not salvage Thomas Killigrew’s reputation as either a dramatist or a
theatre manager, but its contents without doubt make him a fascinating figure,
one well worthy of study by all those interested in the complicated dynamics of
court culture and commercial theatre, of patronage and self-fashioning, and of
the imprint of exile on the imagination.
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Margaret J.M. Ezell is
Distinguished Professor of English and the Sara and John Lindsey Chair of
Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. Her edition of the poems of Anne
Killigrew, Thomas Killigrew's niece, was published in 2013 in the Other Voice series
by University of Toronto Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and
ITER.
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APPOSITIONS:
Studies
in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/,
ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Seven (2014): Genres & Cultures
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