Seeing places: The Tempest 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.