Richard Flecknoe Research Articles

Theater Reform and the Masque in Marvell's Upon Appleton House

The signature scene shifts, pastoral settings, and perspectival instabilities of Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House squarely align the poem with the theatrical tradition of the court masque, a tradition that was effectively moribund at the at the time of the poem’s composition in 1651.  The influence of the masque on Upon Appleton House (and other Marvell works) has been widely noted, but the significance of his poem in the longer history of English theater—specifically, in the discourse of theatrical reform—has not been fully considered.  In Upon Appleton House, Marvell not only applies the strategies and techniques of the masque, but he also engages with ideas central to the ongoing debate between opponents and defenders of the stage.  As such, his poem anticipates the reforms and innovations attempted by William Davenant, Richard Flecknoe, and others who campaigned to revive theater in Interregnum England.  However, Marvell’s appropriation of masque theatrics is not tethered to the goals of reform.  His poem is distinctly the product of the post-regicide, pre-Protectorate imagination, when the theaters are shuttered, dramatic performance is driven underground, and the fate of the Commonwealth is precarious.  Accordingly, his method is not to establish a mode of theater palatable to republican interests, but instead to defamiliarize theatrical representation in a way that responds to the uncertainty of the moment.

Andrew Marvell and Constantijn Huygens: Common Grounds and Mutual Contacts

This paper compares the somewhat parallel lives of Constantijn Huygens and Andrew Marvell, but it also examines their differences and asks whether there may actually have been encounters between the two of them. One of their mutual contacts was the English priest Richard Flecknoe, who was an agent in the service of Beatrix de Cusance, Duchess of Lorraine, in which capacity he came into contact with both Huygens and Marvell. This essay also explains the context around Flecknoe’s poverty, which Marvell writes about in his satirical poem ‘Flecknoe an English Priest at Rome’.

The Caroline Grotesque in Verse: Robert Herrick, Richard Flecknoe and John Taylor

The Caroline Grotesque in Verse: Robert Herrick, Richard Flecknoe and John Taylor

The Caroline Grotesque in Verse: Robert Herrick, Richard Flecknoe and John Taylor

The Caroline Grotesque in Verse: Robert Herrick, Richard Flecknoe and John Taylor

Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England by Ellen MacKay (review)

Reviewed by: Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England by Ellen MacKay Tessa Morrison MacKay, Ellen , Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010; hardback; pp. 242; 9 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$40.00; ISBN 9780226500195. Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England examines the long history of disaster in the English Renaissance playhouse. Ellen MacKay argues that the various disasters that afflicted the English theatre during this period were no accident but were an anticipated end to a practice built on disappearance and destruction. She reveals how the Elizabethan playwrights added plague and punishment to their preoccupation with 'soundrie slaughters and mayheminges of the Quenes subject' caused by 'engynes, weapons, and powers used in plays' (p. 11). The catastrophes that led to the demise of English Renaissance theatre were persecution, particularly by the Puritans, plague which decimated the theatres' audience, and fire that destroyed the theatres' buildings. Each disaster seemed to offer a metaphor that gestured towards a decline in the influence and effectiveness of the theatre. Fire was the most absolute of the theatres' practices of obliteration and the number of theatrical fires - such as those that destroyed the Paris Garden, the Globe, the Fortune, and Whitehall in the Renaissance and Restoration - suggests that theatre buildings were particularly vulnerable. But these structures were never built for longevity and were under constant change and repair. There is very little documentation that surrounds the early theatre and MacKay does not add to it but instead builds her argument on well-known material, from theatre scholars such as E. K. Chambers and A. M. Naglar, and from collected anecdotes, such as that related in a letter from the English courtier Philip Gawdy to his father in 1587. From Gawdy's anecdote - a [End Page 276] mother and baby in the audience were shot and killed by an actor on stage whose gun was loaded with live ammunition - she claims that although there is no such thing as theatre history before Richard Flecknoe's Short Treatise of the English Stage in 1664 'it is certainly not the case that there was no such think as theatre history in the age of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and their cohort' (p. 3), the 'golden age' of early modern theatre. Gawdy's anecdote reveals the long-standing tendency for stoppage and loss; it also was a fulfilment of the early modern England's anti-theatrical prejudices of the time. The end of the 'golden age' came with the eventual closure of the theatres by Oliver Cromwell in 1642, the ultimate anti-theatrical act. Seven years after these closures, William Prynne lamented the removal of the players from the theatres claiming that the wicked and tyrannical army of Cromwell had acted inhumanly, cruelly, roughly, and in a barbarous manner. MacKay points to the difference 'between the unresolved nature of the theatre that comes down to us and the history made of it' (p. 196). Both pro- and anti-theatre critics agreed that the theatre could not remove guilt or impress faith; it could not make judgements for either man or God. The re-enactment of crimes on stage could prompt an impulsive confession or some acknowledgement of their offence from anyone in the audience who witnessed their own crime. Although in Hamlet the play-within-a-play established the evidence of Claudius's guilt, MacKay suggests that by using a play-within-a-play, Shakespeare was challenging the effectiveness of such a device for detection, and that he was undermining the moral claims of the theatre. The foisting of this role of judgemental advocate onto the theatre only led it further down the path of disaster. Persecution, Plague, and Fire is an immensely interesting book but it has problems. First, it is by no means an easy read. The language can be dense and unnecessarily complex, making it difficult to follow. In many cases the analysis does not stand up to close scrutiny, particularly 'think as theatre history' which appears to rely on the anecdotes rather than the facts that stimulated...

Margaret Cavendish, Richard Flecknoe, and Raillery at the Salon of Beatrix de Cusance

This essay explores the distinction between “gentil” and piquant raillery as found at the salon of Beatrix of Cusance, Duchess of Lorraine, as described in two volumes written by Richard Flecknoe ( A Treatise of the Sports of Wit and Additional Epigrams of the Year 1674), and as transformed in Margaret Cavendish's The World's Olio, Nature's Pictures , and Sociable Letters. Piquant raillery involved semi-serious personal attacks and mild bawdry, while “gentil” raillery was more tame. Both sorts of raillery, as Flecknoe explains, are not railing; that is, raillery does not betray anger. While Cavendish mostly engages in raillery, she does slip into railing in her prefaces on occasion.

English Character-Books of the Renaissance: An Anthology (review)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article.This book presents examples of cameos or miniatures written by Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline wits, epigraphers and churchmen. It contains 'characteries' or character sketches and comprises selections from the large surviving body of this type of literature. Editors Peter Groves and Geoffrey Hiller have selected them from collections published in the first half of the seventeenth century. The original authors include bishops Joseph Hall and John Earle, Richard Flecknoe, Nicholas Breton and Sir Thomas Overbury. In most cases, the authorial identity of the passages is secure, although some passages attributed to Webster are of doubtful authorship.Although an abundance of these characteries survive, edited collections have appeared only rarely since the early twentieth century. The selections from these seventeenth-century writers present a wide-ranging account of personality types, including men and women, different ages (in fact the transition from childhood to youth to old age was a major theme in the character books), different professions, different social layers and persons from the country and city. Foreign nationalities are also represented, such as a French Dancing Master, with curiously, the Welsh also considered to be foreign from the point of view of the characteries' writers

Hamlet's dramatic arras

The suspense of Hamlet 3.4 has everything to do with what is behind the arras. Summoned to Gertrude's closet after staging The Mousetrap, Hamlet hears a noise behind the arras and, assuming it to b...

Lost In The Valley

Looking at neohistoricism and criticism of it as an approach to some Renaissance prose, this essay notes the current inattention to most of that prose and specifically instances of the genre of the ‘character.’ The character was a frequent topic of such authors as John Donne, Joseph Hall, Thomas Dekker, John Earle, Thomas Fuller, and Richard Flecknoe. The character depicts both a stereotyping (often with satiric intent) and a cultural analysis of the times, telling us much about the people and society of that age. Examined are particularly the ‘characters’ written by Donne, Earle, and Dekker. Relationships within those writings to drama and poetry of the period not only point up their appearance, but also yield interpretations that have often been slighted.

Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History (review)

Reviewed by: Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History Christopher Cobb Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History. Edited by WorthenW. B. with HollandPeter. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. xvii + 240. $26.95 (paper), $79.95 (cloth). Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History begins a projected five-volume series, Redefining British Theatre History, to be edited by Peter Holland. Following this introductory volume, the series will proceed chronologically through the history of British theatre from its origins to the end of the nineteenth century, undertaking "a significant review" (xvii) of the state of the discipline. This introductory volume, however, eschews chronology. It aims to contribute to the project of redefining theatre history by theorizing the discipline's practices: approaching the historiographical problems of the field with the same degree of theoretical sophistication that has been brought to bear on problems of studying performance over the last twenty years, during which the field of performance studies has gained definition as a discipline. The editors have gathered eleven essays dedicated to theorizing some aspect of the practice of theatre history and arranged them according to the methodological problems they examine. The essays in the opening "Historiographies" section trace the history of theatre history, constituting the discipline as a discipline through the history of its practices. The essays in the next section, "Objectivities," challenge claims of objective, neutral knowledge in the discipline, making the case for more fully theorizing performance studies. The essays in the "Dis/continuities" section deal with issues of periodization, questioning the ways in which knowledge in the discipline has been organized. The essays in the closing "Absences" section deal with the problems of using texts to study unrecoverable, non-textual performance events; these essays identify problems of methodology in theatre history that touch directly upon problems in performance studies. Although the essays are grouped by methodological problem, they do not (aside from the historiographical essays) take these problems as their primary subject. Instead, each undertakes a specific interpretive project that raises such problems. Much livelier than straightforwardly theoretical essays would be, all are fine examples of "state of the art" theatre scholarship, probing and polished, sophisticated and elegant, according to the conventions of contemporary scholarly prose. Even though they do not all contribute equally to the collection's goal of redefining theatre history, they all amply reward attentive reading. [End Page 143] The quality of the individual essays bears particular emphasis for two reasons, the first being that the Shakespeare scholar may need some extra incentive to read them. Because the volume does not have a chronological focus, the essays range across the history of British and American theatre from the early modern period to the present; only four essays are directly concerned with early modern theatre history or Shakespearean performance. Peter Holland's "A History of Histories: From Flecknoe to Nicoll" surveys the methods and the publication history of the earliest historical accounts of pre-Restoration English theatre: Richard Flecknoe's 1664 "A Short Treatise of the English Stage," the anonymous 1699 Historia Histrionica, and John Downes's 1708 Roscius Anglicanus. The essay traces the development of theatre history as a discipline from these originary texts to the work of the great theatre historians of the early twentieth century, E. K. Chambers, G. E. Bentley, and Allardyce Nicoll. The reprinting of these early works in collections of documents on the history of the stage, in collections of drama criticism, and in undifferentiated antiquarian anthologies shows, Holland argues, enduring uncertainties about the disciplinary identity and methods of theatre history. In a similar vein, Thomas Postelwait's "The Criteria for Evidence: Anecdotes in Shakespearean Biography, 1709–2000" examines the allure of anecdotes in Shakespearean biography from Rowe to Schoenbaum and the interpretive challenges created by the impossibility of firmly separating "'legendary anecdotes from ascertainable facts'" (50). He deftly demonstrates that Shakespeare's biographers have both criticized the practice of using unauthenticated anecdotes and nevertheless done so themselves. Barbara Hodgdon's "Photography, Theater, Mnemonics; or, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Still" examines methodologies for using photographs as evidence, taking the photographic record of several recent RSC productions as its main case study. She treats the photograph much as Postelwait treats the anecdote: as alluring evidence whose...

The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama: Cultural Exchange and Intertextuality by Michele Marrapodi Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries by Michele Marrapodi , Giorgio Melchiori (review)

work develops. In particular, I would urge him to engage more thoroughly with recent trendsin Englishhistoricallinguistics,notablylexicological study. UNIVERSITY OFGLASGOW JEREMYJ.SMITH TheItalianWorld ofEnglishRenaissance Drama:Cultural Exchange andIntertextuality. Ed. by MICHELEMARRAPODI.Associate ed. A. J. HOENSELAARS. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press;London: Associated University Presses. I998. 370 PP. ?39.50. Italian Studiesin Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Ed. by MICHELE MARRAPODI and GIORGIO MELCHIORI. Cranbury,NJ:University of Delaware Press;London: Associated University Presses. I999. 299 pp. ?37. These studies disclose considerable editorial versatility. Michele Marrapodi has respectivelyedited and, with Giorgio Melchiori, co-edited two collections of essays that demonstrate divergent approaches to Renaissance drama and its Italian connections. TheItalianWorld ofEnglishRenaissance Dramais broadly historicist,as Marrapodi in his introduction applies Stephen Greenblatt's concept of 'social energy' to denote interculturaldiscourse between literatures.Focusingon a range of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline plays, international contributors to the volume explore intertextualmatriceswith the Italian drama and, more nebulously, suggestions of cultural exchange. ItalianStudies appears in the series International Studies in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries and as such reflects the present critical and theoretical perspectives of Italian scholars writing about English, principallyShakespearean,drama. The two partsof TheItalianWorld ofEnglish Renaissance Drama,'CulturalExchange' and 'Intertextuality',provide a useful structureto the volume, although the lines of demarcation are not alwaysclear-cut. Culturalexchange is an evocative but loose term for the multifariousborrowingsfrom and resonances of Italian literarytexts, in additionto denoting the gripItalyheld on the imaginationof Englishplaywrights for nearlya century.In an opening essay,David Bevington describesthe process of Italian influence on Renaissance drama, ranging from the translationof Ariosto's I Suppositi in George Gascoigne's Supposes in 1556 through to the Italianatesettings of the late plays ofJohn Ford,as developed in a subsequentessayby Lisa Hopkins. The narrative, of course, does not finish there, as both Richard Flecknoe and William Davenant appealed to the Italian scenic theatre and its use of recitativein their attemptsto revive theatreduringthe commonwealth. A. J. Hoenselaars is the sole contributor to extend the period of analysis when he cites, among earlier examples, the influenceof Machiavelli'snovella Belfagor in the anti-parliamentarian playlet, TheDevill,andtheParliament (I648). The figurationof the Italian court in Jacobean drama is a given of Renaissance dramacriticism.There is, however, scope for furtherinvestigationof the politics of specificlocations. In this context, J. R. Mulryne explores the representationof the Florentine setting in Middleton's Women BewareWomen as a 'working model of a possible futurefor London and England'. In other essaysin the section, classicalor Italianliterarytexts become the focal point of interpretation:Castiglione's TheBook oftheCourtier helps to define Othello's 'otherness'and the myth of Procne pervades successiveEnglishRenaissancerevenge tragedies. In her introduction to the section on intertextuality, Louise George Clubb concedes that, in the absence of specific textual contacts, 'the conduit carrying knowledge of the Italiantheatricalsystemremainsunidentified'.With thispremise, work develops. In particular, I would urge him to engage more thoroughly with recent trendsin Englishhistoricallinguistics,notablylexicological study. UNIVERSITY OFGLASGOW JEREMYJ.SMITH TheItalianWorld ofEnglishRenaissance Drama:Cultural Exchange andIntertextuality. Ed. by MICHELEMARRAPODI.Associate ed. A. J. HOENSELAARS. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press;London: Associated University Presses. I998. 370 PP. ?39.50. Italian Studiesin Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Ed. by MICHELE MARRAPODI and GIORGIO MELCHIORI. Cranbury,NJ:University of Delaware Press;London: Associated University Presses. I999. 299 pp. ?37. These studies disclose considerable editorial versatility. Michele Marrapodi has respectivelyedited and, with Giorgio Melchiori, co-edited two collections of essays that demonstrate divergent approaches to Renaissance drama and its Italian connections. TheItalianWorld ofEnglishRenaissance Dramais broadly historicist,as Marrapodi in his introduction applies Stephen Greenblatt's concept of 'social energy' to denote interculturaldiscourse between literatures.Focusingon a range of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline plays, international contributors to the volume explore intertextualmatriceswith the Italian drama and, more nebulously, suggestions of cultural exchange. ItalianStudies appears in the series International Studies in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries and as such reflects the present critical and theoretical perspectives of Italian scholars writing about English, principallyShakespearean,drama. The two partsof TheItalianWorld ofEnglish Renaissance Drama,'CulturalExchange' and 'Intertextuality',provide a useful structureto the volume, although the lines of demarcation are not alwaysclear-cut. Culturalexchange is an evocative but loose term for the multifariousborrowingsfrom and resonances of Italian literarytexts, in additionto denoting the gripItalyheld on the imaginationof Englishplaywrights for nearlya...

Shadwell in Acrostic Land: The Reversible Meaning of Dryden's Mac Flecknoe

Shadwell in AcrosticLand: The ReversibleMeaning ofDryden’s Mac Flecknoe DAVID M. VIETH We need a new way to read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe. My thesis is that Dryden wrote his poem as a work of the Absurd in the twentieth* century sense, and that we go wrong if we do not read it that way. As an “absurdist” work, Mac Flecknoe was not alone in its time. Among the many analogues are Butler’s Hudibras, Buckingham’s The Rehear­ sal, Rochester’s poems, and Swift’s Tale ofa Tub. Nor was this kind of “absurdist” writing new during the Restoration period. Behind “Father Fleckno ” Buckingham’s Mr. Bayes, Swift’s “modern” author, and Rochester’s “fine lady” in Artemisia to Chloe stands the figure of Stultitia in the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus.1 Strange things have happened to Mac Flecknoe during the past three decades. When I began teaching shortly after World War II, Mac Flecknoe virtually taught itself. Students in sophomore survey courses willingly agreed that the poem was very funny and that it demolishes Thomas Shadwell. As the years passed, however, and stu* dents were encouraged to read closely for such things as imagery, they found Mac Flecknoe progressively more difficult and less amus* 503 504 / DAVID M. VIETH ing. Today, I encounter entire classes, including graduate students, for whom the poem is a puzzle and not at all funny. My experience is paralleled in the academic publication on Mac Flecknoe during the same years. Between the two World Wars, the relatively meager publication dealt with scholarly matters such as when Dryden wrote Mac Flecknoe and what event or events occa­ sioned the poem.2 After World War II, however, although scholars continued to ask such questions as what Richard Flecknoe might have done to annoy Dryden,3 the really significant effort went into a search for image-patterns and systems of allusions that were assumed to give the poem “organic unity.”4 By the mid-1960s—roughly the time of the unfortunate demise of the New Criticism—the discoveries resulting from this close reading began to engender feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration. The image-patterns and systems of allusions, while undeniably present in Dryden’s text, had multiplied to the point where the poem became almost unreadable and certainly not very amusing.5 This widespread sense of frustration spawned two extreme reac­ tions, which might be termed the “solemn” and the “facetious.” The “solemn” school of criticism has tended to drive New-Critical ap­ proaches into the ground—inventing, for instance, the notion of an “anti-poet” whom Dryden grimly satirizes in Mac Flecknoe as the arch-enemy of true “Augustan” values. The critical enterprise, as these “solemn” people see it, is to turn the anti-poet” upside-down and inside out in order to define Dryden’s positives.6 Not explained is why, if we want to know Dryden’s positives, we do not go to the di­ rect statements of values he was never reluctant to provide in volumi­ nous prefaces and dedications. Taking an opposite tack, the “face­ tious” school has de-emphasized the more intricate imagery and allu­ sions, concentrating instead upon what might be called Dryden’s sewage symbolism, his manure metaphor, or as one critic put it, his “fecal vision.”7 Another critic protests that because we have been mesmerized by “Sh---- ” (the abbreviation used in the textus receptus), we have underestimated the true character of Shadwell as a Restora­ tion dramatist. The complaint is justified, but most of us continue to find Shadwell less fascinating than “Sh---- .”8 Despite their self-conscious diffidence, or defensive brashness, or Reversible Meaning in Mac Flecknoe / 505 occasional lack of a sure touch, the “facetious” critics constitute a healthy rebellion against the misdirected ingenuity of the “solemn” school. Our knowledge of images and allusions in Mac Flecknoe has indeed enlarged to the point where no reader could take in all of them in terms of the self-contained, self-referential unity demanded by the New Criticism. Mac Flecknoe must be read differently—as a version of the Absurd, I contend. Its structure, instead of being “closed” and autonomous, is “open” and centrifugal. It expands...

ANDREW MARVELL AND RICHARD FLECKNOE IN ROME

ANDREW MARVELL AND RICHARD FLECKNOE IN ROME Get access P. H. BURDON P. H. BURDON London, N.W.3 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 19, Issue 1, January 1972, Pages 16–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/19-1-16 Published: 01 January 1972

Richard Flecknoe and the Man of Mode

Research Article| June 01 1968 Richard Flecknoe and the Man of Mode R. S. Cox, Jr. R. S. Cox, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (1968) 29 (2): 183–189. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-29-2-183 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation R. S. Cox; Richard Flecknoe and the Man of Mode. Modern Language Quarterly 1 June 1968; 29 (2): 183–189. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-29-2-183 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1968 by Duke University Press1968 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.