Would You Splash Out on a Ticket to Molièe's Palais Royal?

Abstract

Little by little we are building up a reliable picture of what a seventeenth-century Parisian theatre looked like. In Theatre Research International we published an important article by Graham Barlow's on the Hôtel de Bourgogne in our first volume, and we return to the subject with the eye-opening reconstruction of the Palais Royal by Christa Williford in this, our last issue. In the intervening twenty-five years we have published articles on the problem of law and order in the auditorium, on actors and acting in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France; on the interaction between tragedy and the emerging opera, on theory, on dramatic literature, on the morality of actors and actresses, even on publicity; but nothing, specifically, on the identity of the spectator. And without a clearer impression of who patronized the Parisian theatres, we are in danger of missing important clues, not only concerning the theatrical performance, but also in our reading of the dramatic text—which will inform our theatrical decisions.