Staging the 18th-Century Prostitute for
the 21st-Century: A Dramaturgical Approach to Teaching Cowley’s The Belle’s
StratagemMelinda C. FinbergThomas CrochunisRomantic CirclesGeneral Editor, Neil FraistatGeneral Editor, Steven E. JonesTechnical EditorLaura MandellPedagogies EditorKate Singercommons4.2011.finbergRomantic Circles, http://www.rc.umd.edu, University of
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Staging the 18th-Century Prostitute for the 21st-Century: A Dramaturgical Approach to Teaching
Cowley’s The
Belle’s StratagemMelinda C.FinbergTeaching Romantic Drama: A Romantic Circles Pedagogies Commons VolumeRomantic Circles, http://www.rc.umd.edu, University of
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Staging the 18th-Century Prostitute
for the 21st-Century: A Dramaturgical Approach to
Teaching Cowley’s The
Belle’s StratagemMelinda C. FinbergSwarthmore College
The Classroom Dramaturg
In most theater survey or dramatic literature classes, plays are
treated as literature. The term “dramaturgy” never comes up, either as a
theatrical discipline or as a critical tool for helping our students
understand drama. I propose changing this situation, and I will use Hannah Cowley’s comic masterpiece,
The Belle’s Stratagem (1780), to demonstrate how
looking at plays from a dramaturgical perspective can provide both students
and teachers with a more dynamic relationship to Romantic dramatic
texts.
As a dramaturg, scholar, and teacher working with historical
playwrights, I seek to bridge the worlds of the academy and the professional
theater. I find my scholarly background imparts a rigor to my dramaturgy and
my dramaturgical perspective colors my approach in the classroom. The job of
the dramaturg, when working on an historic play, has many facets. The
dramaturg must advocate for the necessarily absent author, educate the
director, cast, designers and audience about the language and historic
background of the play, and keep the production true to the integrity of the
work, while at the same time keeping in mind the artistic, physical, and
economic realities of the theater. As a dramaturg, I consider it most
important that my students be aware that drama is a form of literature not
meant primarily to be read but to be heard and seen.
Theater is, by its very nature, a collaborative art. The text of a play
is the skeleton, the bones of the work of art, that must be fleshed out by
the joint efforts of actors, directors, designers, and even dramaturgs. The
final collaborator is the audience. Every performance is individual and
unrepeatable. Living, breathing actors embody a text and connect with a specific living, breathing audience, making the
performance both a public and an intimate event. Part of a dramaturg’s
function is to facilitate that connection. The dramaturg must always be
asking, “What is the play’s relationship with the audience?” For those who have never worked on a
historical production with a dramaturg, I wish to clarify some of the
differences between the roles of director and dramaturg. The director
chooses what the overall interpretation of the script will be and the
dramaturg, actors and designers all serve the director to achieve his or
her vision. By having a dramaturg keeping track of the story and making
sure all the elements are clear to the audience, the director is freed
to focus on the details of each scene and the moment to moment
relationships between the characters. In addition to providing
historical research the dramaturg may take notes during a rehearsal and
pass them on to the director to help make sure the overall narrative
doesn’t get lost in the development of a particular scene.
To understand what that relationship is, more questions must be asked.
What is left unsaid in the play? Are there assumptions the audience is
supposed to make? Are these assumptions culturally or historically specific?
If so, what can theater artists do to recreate the appropriate receptivity
on the part of the audience? What are the silences in the play, the blanks
in the script we must choose either to fill or elide, that will color our
entire interpretation? (Whether we fill or elide these silences, we are
making an interpretational choice, so we might as well make a conscious
choice, while recognizing at the same time that other choices are equally
possible.) How do we recognize the silences? All these are dramaturgical
questions that broaden our understanding of a play beyond the simply
literary perspective and lead us to a multidisciplinary approach to this art
form that requires our active participation.
I propose to look at teaching Hannah
Cowley’s comic masterpiece
The Belle’s
Stratagem (1780) from a dramaturgical perspective, and that
means that the first task is to shatter the preconception that a Romantic
play is a dusty period piece from a quaint and less sophisticated time. I
want to get our students to recognize that the script is alive and subject
to multiple interpretations. This can be demonstrated by showing how
portraying a minor aspect of the play from different perspectives will
change the resonance of the play for today’s audience, while remaining true
to the integrity of the text.
On the Margins of The Belle’s Stratagem
While
The Belle’s Stratagem is set firmly in
the fashionable society of late eighteenth-century London, and its style is reminiscent of Cowley’s Restoration and Augustan predecessors, Cowley’s comedy demonstrates concerns about
the laboring classes and their relationship to the moneyed elite. The title
of Cowley’s comedy pays homage to one of her
favorite Augustan playwrights, George
Farquhar (1677-1707), and his The Beaux’s
Stratagem (1707), and like many of these earlier comedies,
The Belle’s Stratagem juxtaposes two story
lines: Letitia Hardy’s ingenious plot to win the heart of her betrothed,
Doricourt, against the marital problems of jealous Sir George Touchwood and
his wife, the naïve Lady Frances. Both plots concern men learning to respect
the women in their lives both before and after marriage, and are further
connected by questions regarding the nature and fluidity of identity.
Interwoven with these plots are transitional scenes among servants,
tradesmen and con artists who make their livings off the excesses of
fashionable life.
The title plot revolves around Letitia Hardy and her fiancé Doricourt,
who have been engaged since childhood, but who have not seen each other in
years. Doricourt, back from his tour of the continent, has returned to London as its most fashionable and seemingly
eligible bachelor. Abroad, he has learned to appreciate continental beauty
and manners and he disparages Englishwomen (much to the disgust of his good
friend, Saville). Letitia finds herself captivated by the man Doricourt has
become, but dashed by his apparent indifference to her. She vows to “win his
heart or never be his wife.”Hannah Cowley, The
Belle’s Stratagem (1780), in Melinda C. Finberg, Eighteenth-Century
Women Dramatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
225 (1.4.145). All citations from play taken from this volume.
Her stratagem, as she confides to her doting father and her cousin, Mrs.
Racket, is based on the maxim that it is “easier to convert a sentiment into
its opposite than to transform indifference into tender passion” (p. 227
[1.4.225-26]). Letitia plans to disgust Doricourt by posing as an ignorant,
vulgar rustic and later to enchant him in masquerade as a cosmopolitan lady
of mystery. In many ways, this plot is a reversal of Goldsmith’s
She Stoops to
Conquer, in which Kate Hardcastle wins her lover by abasing
herself. Kate is building up the confidence of a man too insecure to address
women of his own class; Letitia, on the other hand, cuts Doricourt down to
size and makes him acknowledge his own naïveté.
Cowley’s secondary story line is a
retelling of the Pinchwife plot of Wycherley’s
The Country Wife. Sir
George Touchwood, a man of the world and former avowed bachelor, has married
the lovely but sheltered Lady Frances. He has been compelled to bring her to
London to be presented at court, but aspires
to keep her all to himself and away from the pernicious pleasures of the
town that once made up his own life. While Sir George lacks Pinchwife’s
overt cruelty, Cowley uses his character to
question whether jealousy and the concomitant infantilization of the beloved
is not cruelty in and of itself. Cowley’s
character Courtall, a rewrite of Wycherley’s Horner, the man out to seduce the naïve bride, is a
rake in the wrong century. His seduction plots backfire and sexual
humiliation is his to receive, not to inflict.
Bridging the two stories are Mrs. Racket, a merry widow, and Villers, a
debonair bachelor – a witty sophisticated pair who egg on the mischief, and
each other – as well as Flutter, a gossipy fop who can be counted on to get
every story wrong, and loyal Saville, Doricourt’s best friend, who still
pines for Lady Frances.
The major plots of
The Belle’s Stratagem can
be staged as an effervescent confection – fast-paced, intricately
choreographed and filled with sparkling repartée. The transitional scenes
ground the plot by revealing the sordid underpinnings of frivolous
fashionable life. Cowley gives us our first
glimpse of laboring life in the second scene of the comedy, among
Doricourt’s servants. A tabloid reporter bribes Doricourt’s porter for
information on any romantic liaisons involving his quasi-celebrity master.
They dicker over the value of the porter’s possible information. Their
tète-á-tète is interrupted by the entrance of a horde of servants and
tradesmen, who have bribed Doricourt’s valet for a view of the gentleman’s
haute couture Parisian fashions with an eye to copy
them for their masters and customers. Later there is a scene between an
auctioneer and his shills. These lower-class hirelings pose as people of
fashion, bidding on items to help drive up the prices.
Each of these scenes serves as a precursor to the later grand
masquerade. Below stairs at Doricourt’s and at the auction house, we see the
lower classes masquerading as the elite for various motives. In the first,
they are creating a parallel world to those of the upper classes: just as
Doricourt is preparing to attend the king’s levée and people of high fashion
hang around the court to stay current on the latest gossip and trends, so
the servants and the less socially prominent attend the households and
servants of the fashionable. At the auction house, the auctioneer, Mr.
Silvertongue, prepares his “puffers” to drive up the bids at the upcoming
sale. He coaches them on jargon and the details of artists and items and he
criticizes their clothing. They must appear like people of fashion to fool
people of fashion. A female puffer complains Silvertongue doesn’t pay her
enough to afford appropriate clothes and they argue about wages, comparing
them to soldier’s wages. The behind-the-scenes scrapping reminds the
audience that London’s fashionable life is based
on a teetering economy: everyone at the auction is there to ogle or buy
items seized to settle debts of those financially ruined by gambling and
extravagance.
These scenes stand out from the general effervescence with their ugly
glimpses of the economic realities behind the glamour. They have grit. They
rub our noses into the fact that this is a society of many degrees of haves
and have-nots. And some of these have-nots are finding and taking every
opportunity to exploit their oblivious masters. They call our attention to
the cannibalistic nature of this society, as we watch different classes prey
upon each other and even on the remains of members of their own class who
have fallen into financial ruin.
These transitional scenes present us with dramaturgical choices: how
much attention should they be given in comparison to the scenes of the major
action? Are they casual moments the audience catches in passing, or are they
moments that deliberately stop the forward motion of the plot? How much do
they infiltrate or color our perception of the fashionable society that
dominates the plot? In some productions, historically as well as today, they
are cut entirely.
There is no right or wrong answer, but whatever choice we make will
color the audience’s understanding of the text. We can compare a dramatic
work to a diamond: letting different facets catch the light changes our view
of the stone itself – its color, its reflective capacities, even its beauty.
In teaching a play, examining several of the different facets and their
coloring of the interpretation of the piece will give students a richer
understanding of how a dramatic text comes to life.
Furthermore, to understand the possible choices, we will need to
encourage our students to do multidisciplinary research. In the case of
The Belle’s Stratagem, such research will
involve cultural and economic history of the period. What did the people
look like? Who are the servants to the upper classes? What are their
backgrounds? What was a levée? How is a levée being parodied? What were the
gossip columns of the day like? How do they compare to today’s tabloids?
What was the role of the auction houses? What was being auctioned? Where and
how did classes mix? There are so many topics that could be explored to shed
light on the life the play assumes its audience will know that it is
impossible for a teacher to cover them all in a class. One possible way to
involve students in unearthing the social assumptions of the play would be
to have them do individual reports or papers on different topics and then
share them with the whole class. Once everyone has a substantial background
in the social world of the play, discussions can take place about how to
incorporate this new understanding into the staging of the play.
To demonstrate how a class might go about this process, I will use the
example of one marginal character within
Belle’s
Stratagem and the questions that are raised by Cowley’s employment of her. Kitty Willis comes
to play an important role in one of Cowley’s
major plots, although Kitty has very few lines. Courtall, the supposed rake,
has taunted Saville, Doricourt’s best friend, over Saville’s chaste passion
for Lady Frances Touchwood. Saville insults Courtall by casting doubts on
Courtall’s self-proclaimed successes with women. An enraged Courtall plots
his revenge by planning to deceive and abduct Lady Frances at the
masquerade, but Saville gets wind of the plan and decides to outplot the
plotter. Saville confides in Doricourt that he has found a woman “whose
reputation cannot be hurt” (p. 256, [4.1.155]) to masquerade as Lady Frances
and deceive Courtall. That woman is Kitty Willis. This is the only
description we are given of Kitty. As Shakespeare would say, “The rest is silence.” (Hamlet, 5.2.360) But for drama to live, the silence has to be
filled. How do we discover how to fill it?
Staging the Prostitute
Oh… to be Hamlet! Ahhh …to be Juliet! To be St. Joan, or Eliza
Doolittle, or ’Enry ’Iggins for the few hours allotted by the
playwright! If you really want to be, you’d better know who you are
when the play begins, and how you got to be that way!Uta Hagen, Respect for ActingUta
Hagen, Respect for Acting
(New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 1977), 152.The purpose of analysis should be to study in detail and prepare
given circumstances for a play or part so that through them, later
on in the creative process, the actor’s emotions will instinctively
be sincere and his feelings true to life.Constantin
Stanislavski, Creating a
RoleConstantin
Stanislavski, Creating a
Role, Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, trans. (New York:
Theatre Arts Books, 1961), 9.
To understand how to teach our students how to approach the dramatic
text as the framework for a performance, I suggest starting with the
language of theater practitioners. One of the first tasks a director, actor,
designer, or dramaturg undertakes when beginning to work with a script is to
to determine the “given circumstances” of the text or of an individual
character. These “given circumstances” are the facts the author has provided
for us through the words and actions of the play. They are the theater
artist’s point of departure in analyzing the text, and they will vary
depending on whether one is examining one specific character or the entire
play. One character’s given circumstances will differ from another’s by
virtue of what the character knows about the rest of the plot
or characters, as well as who the character is. Differences
about what each character knows are often the basis of comedy and farce.
Differences about who characters are provide depth and variety to the life
of the play.
What are Kitty Willis’s given circumstances? Cowley provides us with minimal information. Kitty: has a distinctive, diminutive name.is a woman whose reputation cannot be hurt.doesn’t believe many women can sustain a character of virtue
throughout a masquerade.is not believed by Saville to know much about women of
virtue.is in the plot for reward.is able to deceive Courtall into believing she is Lady
Frances.is immediately recognized by all the men when she unmasks in
Courtall’s rooms.is addressed merely as “Kitty” by the men.teases Courtall about his former adoration of her. From these given circumstances, we must make deductions and begin
our research.
Kitty appears to be a publicly known woman whose reputation seems to
be beyond being able to be damaged, written by a publicly known woman who
was always having to defend her respectability from damage. (By 1780 women
novelists could be respectable, while actresses were still considered not
much better than prostitutes. As a playwright, Cowley found herself in disputed territory: did the public
confer upon her the respectability of the novelist or the opprobrium of the
actress/prostitute? Although she asserted her respectability – even when
writing the words of disreputable characters – critics challenged “whether
Mrs. Cowley ought so to have expressed
herself?”)Hannah Cowley, A School
for Greybeards; or, the Mourning Bride (London: G. G. J.
& J. Robinson, 1786), Preface vii. In this preface, Cowley defends herself from attacks from
her critics based not on her talent and the realism of her character
creations, but on her gender and whether she should write such
characters so well. Janet Todd (in The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660 –
1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) traces the
woman writer’s concern with being a public woman, and thus being equated
with the disreputable prostitute, back to Aphra
Behn’s character of Angellica Bianca, in The
Rover, who hangs her picture with her price outside her door
and tries to claim the same sexual freedom as men. Kitty’s very
name suggests animality, sexuality and lack of will. Her circumstances
suggest that she is some kind of prostitute, courtesan, or actress, but what
kind? Research into the topic of eighteenth-century British prostitution
yields many different possible answers to this question, each of which
provides us with different approaches to staging Kitty. Any production must
make one strong choice about Kitty and allow that choice to influence the
staging of her relationships with each of the characters she encounters,
including the effect her presence brings to the central masquerade scene.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prostitution was the
subject of much public debate and fascination. It not only played a part in
many of the novels of the day, but prostitute narratives, purported to be
the true histories or memoirs of real prostitutes and courtesans,
proliferated and were vastly popular. In her recent study,
Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British
Literature and Culture, Laura
Rosenthal points out that these novels and narratives took
primarily two different approaches to the profession. The first took the
form of libertine narrative in which a woman rises through her labors to
fame (or infamy) and fortune. There is a quality of entrepreneurship to her
profession and ownership of her body. Such narratives describe a woman
rising from the brothel to the life of celebrity as a courtesan; sometimes
they show her fall back into degradation and poverty, but still she remains
a sympathetic representative of upward mobility, using what she has to
succeed. For this discussion of
prostitute narratives, I am indebted to Laura
J. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce:
Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Culture and Fiction
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 97-105. Future
references are cited in the text.
The second type of prostitution narrative shows the prostitute as
tragic victim. She is driven by economic necessity to degradation and her
feelings are sentimentalized. As one such writer describes, There are
not perhaps on Earth greater Objects of Compassion; all Sense of
Pleasure are lost to them, the whole is mere Labour and Wretchedness,
they are Slaves to, and buffeted by every drunken Ruffian, they are the
Tools of, and tryrannized over by the Imps of Bawds.The Vices of the Cities of London and Westminster, (Dublin: Printed for G.
Faulkner and R. James, 1751), 21-22. This sentimental view was pervasive in the mid-eighteenth century,
as is evident in the wide public support given to the founding, in 1758, of
the famous London Magdalen Hospital for Penitent
Prostitutes, dedicated to restoring these victimized women to their natural
virtue. For a full discussion of
the founding of Magdalen Hospital and the varying views of its inmates,
see Mary Peace, “The Magdalen Hospital and
the Fortunes of Whiggish Sentimentality in Mid-Eighteenth-Century
Britain: ‘Well-Grounded’ Exemplarity vs. ‘Romantic’ Exceptionality” in
The Eighteenth Century: Theory and
Interpretation 8.2 (Summer 2007): 125-148.
That two seemingly disparate views of prostitution could be held
synchronously reflected the ambivalence with which the British viewed the
institution. Contemporary travel writer J. W.
Archeholz commented in his
A Picture of England:
Containing a Description of the Laws, Customs, and Manners, that
the British had no real stake in ending prostitution. While English laws
“are not favourable to the fair sex,” successful prostitutes enjoy
independence and add glamour to London.J. W. Archeholz, A
Picture of England: Containing a Description of the Laws, Customs,
and Manners, (London: Edward Jeffrey, 1789) 2:90, as quoted
in Rosenthal, 99. While social
reformers might call attention to the degraded streetwalker, abandoned by
her family to the horrors of poverty and violence, the courtesans of the day
were the objects of insatiable voyeurism, much like celebrities in our
tabloids today. Hogarth painted the former
in his scenes of London life; Reynolds glorified the latter.
In fact Sir Joshua Reynolds
painted several magnificent portraits of Kitty Fisher (d. 1767), who may
have been the namesake of Kitty Willis. Kitty Fisher was one of the most
famous courtesans of the 1760’s and a great favorite of Reynolds.
Nathaniel Hone also painted her in 1765 in
a portrait which made a visual pun on her name. In Hone’s portrait of Kitty Fisher, he seats her next to a kitten trying to fish a goldfish out of its
bowl. Kitty had begun her career as an actress, but found more lucrative
work and celebrity as a courtesan. Her narrative reflects the typical view
of both reformers and libertine writers that some young women believed their
beauty and accomplishments made them eligible to rise socially and turned to
prostitution as a business to make the most of their talents. Kitty Fisher
was one of those who succeeded.
Hogarth, on the other hand,
portrayed
The Harlot’s Progress in a series of
paintings dating from 1732 in which the painter satirizes London corruption by tracing the history of a young country girl
who is accosted by a bawd upon her arrival in London to seek work. She rises as high as a kept mistress, but
then is reduced to a common prostitute, an inmate in debtor’s prison, and
finally she dies of venereal disease. Such a degraded woman is also
described by The Spectator: I could observe
as exact Features as I had ever seen, the most agreeable Shape, the
finest Neck and Bosom, in a Word, the whole Person of a Woman
exquisitely beautiful. She affected to allure me with a forced
Wantonness in her Look and Air; but I saw it checked with Hunger and
Cold: Her eyes were wan and eager, her Dress thin and Tawdry, her Mein
genteel and childish. This strange Figure gave me much Anguish of Heart,
and to avoid being seen with her I went away, but could nor forbear
giving her a Crown. The poor thing sighed, curtsied, and with a
Blessing, expressed with the utmost Vehemence, turned from me. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 2:534 – 535; no. 266, Friday, January 4, 1712.
Even some of the libertine narratives show how the most successful
and celebrated courtesan can be vulnerable to a fall into want, degradation,
and decrepitude. “Simon Trusty” wrote a public letter to Kitty Fisher
herself to warn her of such a possibility:
You, Madam, are become the Favourite of the Public and the Darling of
the Age…Your Lovers are the Great Ones of the Earth, and your Admirers
among the Mighty: they never approach you but, like Jove,
in a Shower of Gold….Say, Madam, for surely Experience inables [sic] you to do
it, what Satisfaction there is in receiving to your Arms one you
secretly loathe; the very Reflection makes you sigh: You press him to a
joyless Bosom; the Night is tedious and irksome; the Morning comes to
your Deliverance, and finds you dejected, and that Eye which should be
filled with Joy, ready to start with a Tear…. Tell me then, in the Name of Beauty tell me! Was that fair Form made
for Pollution, for the ruffian Embrace of the Great Vulgar, and, ’ere
long, perhaps, of the Small? To be for a While what
Shakespeare callsThe cull’d Darling of the World,And, at last, the hackneyed Prostitute of every Passenger?Simon Trusty. An odd
letter, on a most interesting subject, to Miss K---- F--h--r.
Recommended to the perusal of the ladies of Great Britain. By
Simon Trusty, Esq.
(London, 1760), Eighteenth Century Collections
Online, Gale Group,
http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO . Gale Document
Number:CW3305850508
So into which of these categories will we place Kitty Willis? Is she a
well-known courtesan? A former courtesan or kept woman, known to all the men
as last season’s fashionable face, but now down on her luck? Is she
destitute and desperate? Or is she an actress? And once we have decided what
kind of public woman she is, how will we stage her and how will she fit into
the ensemble of other characters?
As is typical of many skilled dramatists, Cowley provides us with information that can be interpreted in a
number of ways. On the one hand, Kitty’s name recalls the late famous Kitty Fisher, but on the other hand, another
famed “Kitty” was the great actress Kitty
Clive (1711-85). Both Kitty Fisher
and Kitty Clive were well-known celebrities
and women of wit, intelligence and ambition, but Cowley’s Kitty is “Willis” or perhaps, “will-less,” that is
without inner strength or ambition, a woman who has simply “fallen” into her
line of work because of her lack of discipline or fortitude. Cowley even makes a subtle allusion to the
desperation of this latter kind of prostitute when she has the fop Flutter
entertain Lady Frances with the description of a family at the masquerade:
In the next apartment there’s a whole family, who, to my
knowledge, have lived on watercresses this month to make a figure here
tonight; but, to make up for that, they’ll cram their pockets with cold
ducks and chickens for a carnival tomorrow. (4.1.82-86)Cowley here alludes to Henry Fielding’s
poetic description in his
The Masquerade: Below stairs hungry whores are pickingThe bones of wild-fowl and of chicken;And into pockets some conveyProvisions for another day.Henry Fielding,
The Masquerade (London, 1728.
Reprinted in Henry
Fielding, The Female Husband and
Other Writings, ed. Claude E. Jones, English
Reprint Series, 1960), p. 32 (lines 191-94). Might Kitty be a desperate woman eager to take this job for the
free food at the masquerade, like the provident family and hungry whores, in
addition to her pay for the deception at Courtall’s?
And how precisely do the men “know” Kitty? They are all on familiar
enough terms with her to address her simply as “Kitty,” when they discover
her in Courtall’s rooms, while they address none of the women of their own
class so informally. Is she communal property? As a whore or as a celebrity?
Is there anything particular about her relationship with Courtall that might
add to her enjoyment of the joke?
Again, I reiterate, there is no one right answer to this question,
only choices – although some choices are more interesting than others. These
are more places where Cowley is silent and
where the script must be fleshed out. This is where actors and directors
ask, “What if?” What if Courtall was Kitty’s original seducer? Or what if he
had formerly kept her? How would such possibilities contribute to deepening
Courtall’s sense of humiliation in mistaking Kitty for Lady Frances when he
has her in his bedroom? What would such an interpretation add to the
significance of Kitty’s line to Courtall after he has damned those present
for humiliating him, “What! Me, too, Mr. Courtall? Me, whom you have knelt
to, prayed to, and adored?” (4.2.61-62). Is Kitty just adding to the banter
or is she getting her own revenge?
Applying Dramaturgical Theory
When staging a performance of
Belle’s
Stratagem, one has to make one choice and commit to it. All
further choices build upon those that have gone before. How should Kitty be
costumed? If she is wearing a domino, as Cowley describes, do we see her own clothes under it when she
unmasks? If so, will they be the equivalent of the society women’s we have
seen. More ornate? Will they be shabby or dirty? Who is revealed when Kitty
unmasks? A proud woman of the world or one closer to the prostitute
described by the uncomfortable Spectator on an
evening in the early part of the century? Kitty’s unmasking prefigures
Letitia’s unmasking at the conclusion of the play. How do they connect to
each other?
Understanding who prostitutes were in the London of the late eighteenth century as well as understanding
who the women of high society were and what was expected of them, gives
students a grasp of the visceral reaction an audience would have to seeing
both respectable and disreputable women in the same public place or
confusing them. It calls their attention to questions the play is raising
about how women are categorized and about the fluidity of anyone’s identity.
When Cowley dresses Sir George, Lady
Frances, Courtall, and Kitty in interchangeable costumes, she suggests with
the different pairings that result in the course of the ball, the ease with
which the rake can be confused with the devoted husband and the harlot with
the virtuous wife. Does Kitty becomes Leah to Lady Frances’s Rachel, sisters
under the veil, in some ways indistinguishable? Does Courtall’s inability to
distinguish between the masked Kitty Willis and Lady Frances reflect on
Doricourt’s inability to distinguish the real Letitia behind her many masks?
If so, how?
When teaching the play in class, however, I advocate exploring as many
of the choices as time permits. Asking our students to look at a variety of
perspectives increases their understanding of a play as a living art. Each
choice is an interpretation of the play. How do we come to see how examining
a particular facet of a play from a particular angle reflects throughout the
whole gem of the play? How do we consciously lead an audience to view a play
based on a particular interpretation? For this, I recommend further readings
about the art of dramaturgy and ideas and theories about how to connect
audiences with classic productions.
One of the best texts for introducing students to dramaturgy as a
discipline is
Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source
Book, a collection of essays on various aspects and uses of
dramaturgical theory and practice. Selected essays from the section entitled
“New Contexts” are especially appropriate for teachers and students of
Romantic Drama. In her essay, “Aiming the Canon at Now: Strategies for
Adaptation,” Susan Jonas examines “how
theatermakers can employ the canon to reveal its own biases” Susan Jonas, “Aiming the Canon at Now:
Strategies for Adaptation,” in Susan
Jonas, Geoffrey Proehl, and Michael Lupu, Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book. (Orlando,
FL: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1997), 244. Future references are cited
in the text. (emphasis hers). One technique Jonas suggests to amplify marginalized voices
from an historical text is one she terms “simultaneity” (255). Simultaneity
refers to seeing a silenced aspect of the play at the same time as the play
proceeds as scripted. Such a technique encourages the audience to view the
play from the perspective of the less-privileged characters and thus
critically comments on the actions of the central characters and expands our
understanding of the world of the play. I will use this technique to suggest
one possible way of exploring Belle’s Stratagem
dramaturgically.
While there are several scenes of lower-class characters used as
transitions in Cowley’s comedy, there are
also public scenes for which little description is provided. The play opens
with Saville arriving with his servant at Lincoln’s Inn, one of the inns of
court where lawyers keep offices. Courtall describes the place as “the most
private place in town” (1.1.39-40) of a morning because no fashionable
person would be seen there – unless on legal business. But Lincoln’s Inn is
inhabited by lawyers, their families, their servants and their clients.
People indeed may be coming and going during the scene, just not people of
high society. Saville begins the scene at a loss for where to go and is
talking with his servant before he sees Courtall. What if before he sees
Courtall, the audience sees Courtall being accosted by or in conversation
with Kitty – perhaps trying to extricate himself from her; perhaps giving
her money? If we have made the choice that Kitty has seen better days, how
will this contribute to their later confrontation? There is nothing in the
script to prevent such a meeting. Might Courtall be a poseur? Are his
vaunted relationships with “women of quality” really only assignations with
prostitutes or seductions of young girls? How might such a choice play out
over the production? Or is Kitty some relic from his past? Is he in her
debt? Does he owe her money? No dialogue needs to be spoken, yet questions
can be raised in the audience’s mind.
Other public scenes include the auction and the masquerade. Are there
possibilities for simultaneous actions in any of these? Cowley provides dialogue for the auctioneer
and his puffers before the gentry enter, yet she doesn’t account for the
actions of the shills once the fashionable characters arrive. What are they
doing? Are they interacting? Pickpocketing? Are they successful in
impersonating the visitors? Does Kitty Willis make an appearance? Is she the
celebrated, wealthy courtesan, shunned by the women but fawned over by the
men? Or is she, like the puffers, trying to appear fashionable, but coming
up short? Does she make any connection with Courtall here? If so, what kind?
What about the masquerade? What is Kitty’s relationship to Saville? Is he
hiring an impoverished whore, a moderately successful one, a kept woman, or
a courtesan out for a lark? Do we recognize any of the servants or tradesmen
at the masquerade? Is the tabloid writer lurking there (or at the auction,
for that matter)? Simultaneous actions fill in the world of the play.
Other possible dramaturgical approaches might be to create framing
devices or to utilize Brechtian alienation techniques. In the first
transitional scene in the play, Cowley shows
us servants and tradespeople actively observing and feeding off the lives of
the fashionable. Might these working-class people observe, judge and/or
profit from their masters throughout the play? Might they be watching
everything from the sidelines or margins? Might we see their reactions to
the stratagems and counter-stratagems of those who live the high life? Cowley embeds many metatheatrical elements
within the comedy of various characters performing for others. Could we
expand on the metatheatrics and create a variation of the Shakespearean
conceit of one set of characters watching and reacting to another set
performing a play for them? When she is not part of the action, could Kitty
be watching and forming her own judgments that color her responses within
her scenes?
Might some, or all, of the actors be playing their lines to the
audience by calling attention to their own judgment of the characters? This
type of approach deliberately distances the audience from the action of the
play rather than draws it into a suspension of disbelief. It is part of the
technique Bertolt Brecht uses to create
what he calls the “alienation effect,” and its purpose is to call attention
to the economic, political and class issues inherent in a dramatic text.
Brecht does not want the audience to
“feel” for the characters so much as to “think” about them and the
significance of what they do. Brecht lays
forth his theories in
The Messingkauf Dialogues.Bertolt
Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues
(London: Methuen, Ltd., 1965). A useful assignment to
help students understand how Brechtian theory can be applied to historical
drama, is to have them read and compare John
Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) to Brecht’s adaptation of it, The Threepenny Opera (1928). What if the actress playing Kitty
plays her as if she is an observer commenting on her character and the
actions of the scene in Brechtian fashion?
All of the questions I have suggested derive from the initial question
of how to stage the character of Kitty Willis, a character who appears in
only two scenes of
The Belle’s Stratagem and who
only speaks five lines in those scenes, and yet the choices we make about
this character color the interpretation of the entire play. Such
dramaturgical questions must be asked about every character and every scene
in every production of a dramatic text, and so infinite interpretations are
possible and valid. Each staging must simply be consistent within itself.
Teaching our students to approach Romantic Drama dramaturgically
teaches them to work in a multidisciplinary fashion and create a dynamic
relationship with the text. It encourages them to perform primary research
into the period and to track down images, music and cultural artifacts of
the period, including gossip columns, broadsides, and other records of
popular culture. Understanding what connected and still connects an audience
to a play helps them to make personal connections as well. Our goal is to
help students see Romantic Drama as a multi-faceted art form as alive and
open to interpretation today as it was two hundred years ago.
Bibliography/Suggested Reading
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Laws, Customs, and Manners of EnglandLondonEdward Jeffrey17892 volsBrecht, BertholdThe Messingkauf DialoguesLondonMethuen1965Castle, TerryMasquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in
Eighteenth-Century English Culture and FictionStanfordStanford UP1986Cattaneo, AnneDramaturgy, An Overview3-15Cowley, HannahThe Belle’s StratagemEighteenth-Century Women DramatistsFinberg, Melinda COxfordOxford UP2001Defoe, DanielRoxanaOxfordOxford UP1964Fielding, HenryThe MasqueradeLondon1728The Female Husband and Other WritingsJones, Claude ELiverpool1960English Reprint SeriesGay, JohnThe Beggar’s OperaRoberts, Edgar V.LincolnU of Nebraska P1969Hagen, UtaRespect for ActingNew YorkMacmillan1977Jonas, SusanAiming the Canon at Now: Strategies for
Adaptation244-265Jonas, SusanProehl, GeoffreyLupu, MichaelDramaturgy in American Theater: A Source BookOrlando, FLHarcourt Brace1997Mandeville, BernardCook, Richard I.A Modest Defence of the Public Stews1724Los AngelesWilliam Andrews Clark Memorial Library1973Mazer, Cary MRebottling: Dramaturgs, Scholars, Old Plays, and Modern
Directors292-307Peace, MaryThe Magdalen Hospital and the Fortunes of Whiggish
Sentimentality in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain:
'Well-Grounded' Exemplarity vs. 'Romantic'
ExceptionalityThe Eighteenth Century: Theory and
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British Literature and CultureIthacaCornell UP2006Shakespeare, WilliamHamletThe Complete Signet ShakespeareNew YorkHarcourt, Brace, Jovanovich1972Stanislavski, ConstantinHapgood, Elizabeth ReynoldsCreating a RoleNew YorkTheatre Arts Books1961Steele, RichardNo Vice or WickednessThe Spectator2266Friday, January 4, 1712[vol. #?]534–535Todd, JanetThe Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction,
1660-1800New YorkColumbia UP1989Trusty, SimonAn odd letter, on a most interesting subject, to Miss
K---- F--h--r. Recommended to the perusal of the ladies of Great
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