17th- and 18th-century Productions of The Tempest

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The interior of the Swan Theater, London 1595.
By Abbey Santoro
Much like the name of the play suggests, The Tempest had a surprising and tumultuous experience on the stages of London in the 17th and 18th centuries. The first recorded performance of The Tempest was in the court of King James, on November 1, 1611[1]. Throughout its history on the stage, this Shakespearean comedy about a sorcerer, Prospero, attempting to condition the marriage between his daughter, Miranda, and the Prince of Milan, Ferdinand, has been performed numerous times for the royal court. In fact, its success on the royal stage as well as the staging contained within The Tempest have led some theatrical and Shakespearean scholars to consider that the play was written specifically with the thought of an indoor theater in mind[2].
Indeed, during the early 17th century, many of Shakespeare’s plays were starting to be shown in the Blackfriars, an indoor theater with patrons typically more affluent and influential than
Figure 1. A depiction of the Blackfriars Theater in the 17th Cent.
those that attended Shakespeare’s Globe. This indoor theater helped increase the drama of the play, making the eavesdropping moments within the play differ greatly from what occurred in the Globe. Actors could now ascend to the musician’s gallery and be seen eavesdropping more inconspicuously, where the Globe simply saw the actors step back and hide behind one of the structural pillars[3]. The indoor showings of this play further call into question the opening scene of the play, where the stage direction makes mention of “thunder and lightning heard”. While the outdoor theaters typically utilized fireworks and thunder-sheets[4], the indoor theaters may have been hesitant to use fireworks indoors due to the danger and smell that would potentially mar the experience of the more affluent members of the audience watching the spectacle[5]. Instead, a cannonball may have been used in order to generate the illusionary noise of thunder that is called for in the opening scene[6].
The original performances of the play in the early 17th century would have been fairly
Figure 2. The frontispiece of the 1709 edition
of The Tempest in
           Rowe's Works of William Shakespear 
faithful to Shakespeare’s language and intent despite the change from performance mostly in the Globe to indoor theaters such as the Blackfriars. Male actors were used for both male and female roles, with a young boy usually playing the female roles, such as Miranda in The Tempest. Until the 1660s, Shakespeare’s plays were often performed with the wit and lightheartedness usually associated with them, though there was still some exploration of the social and political debates of the time[7]. Though not yet changing the language or attitude of plays such as The Tempest, the middle-of-the-century Shakespearean productions did see at least one dramatic change. In 1629, the first woman was allowed to perform on the English stage, changing the nature of performances for centuries to come. Before his execution in 1649, King Charles I allowed for the employment of professional actresses as part of licensing arrangements[8]. By 1660, Shakespeare’s plays began including women in their casts, as the first woman to play Desdemona in Othello appeared on the English stage. This innovation, so striking to the English accustomed to seeing all male casts, would set the stage for later productions of The Tempest, especially the production recently performed at St. Anne’s Warehouse using an entirely female cast.
By the 1670s and 1680s, some of the directors of these plays sought to use scenery and
Figure 3. Ferdinand Courting Miranda by William Hogarth, 1735
alter the language of Shakespeare in order to explore and metaphorically portray the social fracture that existed due to the English Civil Wars[9]. Though the 1660s were not a particularly tumultuous time politically, the social and political tensions still existed that allowed Shakespeare adaptors to take more liberties and become bolder in their adaptations. During this period, the plays of Shakespeare were split among two acting companies headed by William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew: the Duke’s Company and the King’s Company. Davenant, who was more connected than Killigrew and even claimed to be the love child of Shakespeare[10], seemed to be granted the Shakespearean plays now seen as Shakespeare’s best, including Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest; Killigrew’s haul included Shakespeare’s histories and Othello[11], which some scholars argue are the “better” stock of plays[12].
Figure 4. An example of a woman in a
                   "breeches role"
With the introduction of female actresses on the stage, these adaptors even sought to dramatically alter the nature of Shakespeare’s plays, with Davenant including an entirely new couple in The Tempest in his incredibly popular 1667 production. This couple, Hippolito and Dorinda, has been suggested as a distortion of the innocence of the primary female character, Miranda, as the Restoration adaptors sought to capitalize on the newfound conceptions of sexuality coming into the social discussions of the 17th century[13]. Specifically, the role of Hippolito, a male character that had never seen a woman before, was considered a “breeches role”, or a role in which an actress might play a male character in order to exploit the gender-bending inherent in Shakespearean works, such as Twelfth Night, and the English fascination with the female body and sexuality[14]. Furthermore, a young female actress named Moll Davis played the role of Ariel in this popular production[15], altering the usual gender of Ariel’s character and capitalizing on the newfound fascination with actresses on the English stage.
By the 18th century, the Restoration attitudes had dulled and adaptations of Shakespearean plays followed Shakespeare’s writing far more faithfully than the 17th century productions of Davenant and Killigrew. Though the English public was still fascinated by the inclusion of women on the stage, the breeches roles and the faithfulness to the original versions of Shakespeare’s plays may have allowed women to play more developed roles and to experiment with their abilities as actors, rather than merely novel spectacles[16]. It is this revolutionary turn from the male-domination of the English stage that seems to metaphorically set the stage for later productions of The Tempest – even productions with an all-female cast, unfathomable in the 17th and 18th centuries.



[1] Royal Shakespeare Company. “Stage History: The Tempest.”
[2] Ibid.
[3] McMullan, Gordon. “The First Night of the Tempest.” The British Library.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Jones, Gwilym. “The Tempest and Theatrical Reality.” Shakespeare's Storms, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2015, pp. 125–150.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Murray, Barbara A. Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice.
[8] Dickson, Andrew. The Globe Guide to Shakespeare: The Plays, the Productions, the Life.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Krueger, Misty. "From Davenant to Duffett: Staging Shakespeare’s The Tempest during the English Restoration." Academia.edu.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ritchie, Fiona. “Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Actress.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. 10.1, Summer 2016.
[15] Murray, Barbara A. Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice.
[16] Ritchie, Fiona. “Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Actress.”

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