Abstract: What ill has not been spoken of the unhappy Restoration audience ? To Dr Johnson, the playhouses of Drury Lane, Dorset Garden, and Lincoln's Inn Fields were 'mansions of dissolute licentiousness'; to Macaulay 'seminaries of vice' frequented by 'the most deeply corrupted part of a corrupted society': Alexandre Beljame speaks of'debauchees who have drunk of life too deeply', and Allardyce Nicoll of an audience that was not merely 'thoughtless and depraved' but numerically dominated by a degenerate aristocracy and its parasites.1 More recently Bernard Harris has assured us that Dryden 'prostituted his art because ... the art itself in his day depended upon prostitutes' and James Sutherland that the theatre 'was a magnet for the worst elements in fashionable society'.2 K. M. P. Burton sounds a similar note in claiming that 'the main part of the audience consisted of courtiers, hangers-on and prostitutes', while Marion Jones in a recent volume of the Revels History of English Drama dismisses the theatre of the period as 'a court toy managed by courtiers'.3 It will be our first task to enquire how such confident unanimity should have come to arise.
Publication Year: 1980
Publication Date: 1980-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 56
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