Princes to act
Subtitle: royal audience and royal performance, 1578-1792
By: Matthew H. Wikander.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 1993
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 348
Subjects: Theater -- Europe -- History.; Theater -- Great Britain -- History.; Theater -- Political aspects -- Europe.; Theater -- Political aspects -- Great Britain.; European drama -- History and criticism.; English drama -- History and criticism.; Theater audiences -- Europe -- History.; Masques -- History and criticism.; Europe -- Court and courtiers.; Great Britain -- Court and courtiers.
Description: In Henry V, Shakespeare describes a royal performance - with "princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene"--That would have been impossible in England's public theaters. Such was not the case in court theaters, however, where monarchs sponsored and participated in a wide range of theatrical activities. The close association between monarch and actor, kingdom and stage, was "no noveltie" to Castiglione, who warned that princes who act would run the risk of never being taken seriously. A conspicuous example was Sweden's Gustav III, who wrote, acted in, and personally supervised the production of plays - and was murdered, in costume, at a masked ball.

In Princes to Act, Matthew Wikander explores royal court performance from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, when plays with monarchs as characters were typically performed before royal audiences. Focusing on the courts of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I of England, Louis XIV and Louis XV of France, and Gustav III of Sweden, Wikander finds that the close and complex relationships between professional theaters and royal patrons infused imperial politics with irony and theatricality - as actors and audiences learned the secret that playing the king and being the king were surprisingly similar.

Princes to Act describes how theater and monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries existed in mutual dependency and mutual mistrust, leading to performances that both affirmed and challenged the social boundaries between monarch and actor, audience and performer. Treating each dramatic work both as script for a specific occasion and as a literary text that outlives performance, Wikander explores selected plays by Shakespeare, Davenant, Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Voltaire, and others. Transformations in the political institution of the monarchy, he concludes, were anticipated and imitated in the dramas of the age. At the beginning of the period, the people kept their eyes on the monarch.

By the end of the period, the monarch would need to keep his eye on the people. Moving beyond new historicist criticism, this imaginative study stresses the complexity and persistence of theatrical art beyond the conditions of its original performance.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [315]-338) and index.