The Protectorate Playhouse: William Davenant's Cockpit in the 1650s

Abstract

Recent work on the Protectorate decade has revealed a modest but sophisticated performance culture, centering on the entrepreneurial and politically wily figure of Sir William Davenant. Despite the ban on stage plays enforced in various forms from 1642 on, by the mid-1650s Davenant was producing a series of "Heroick Representations" for public audiences, first at his private residence of Rutland House and later at the Cockpit theater in Drury Lane. These works represent a unique corpus in the history of the English theatre: introducing the proscenium arch, painted scenery and recitative music to the London stage, they would precipitate a transformation in dramaturgical practice and establish a form of multimedia performance that would persist into the eighteenth century and beyond. Known by contemporaries as "operas," Davenant's entertainments -all performed at the Cockpit in late 1650s -set out to charm audiences with aesthetically spectacular productions in order to promote controversial government policies and moral reforms. While scholars have been principally concerned with uncovering the ideological and political messages encoded in these works, the importance of the venues themselves to this enterprise has been severally underexplored. By charting the history of the Cockpit into the 1650s and early 1660s, the article presents evidence that Davenant was installed there in the mid-1650s with the Protectorate's blessing in order to curb suspected Royalist activity in Drury Lane. It thus reveals how the theatre itself continued to serve as a contested site for the city's changing politics throughout the revolutionary period. By exploring how the political circumstances of the Cockpit's immediate locale intersect with the politics promoted by Davenant's operas, the article offers a new take on the playwright's activities under Cromwell's regime. Finally, the article asks that we cease to think of the Cockpit merely as the last Jacobean theater to operate in London, and to recognize it also as its first (Carolean) opera house.