6 - Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Summary
I love the quality of playing, ay; I love a play with all
My heart, a good one, and a player that is
A good one too, with all my heart.
Brome, The Antipodes, 1.5.72–4.That the theatre of Alleyn, Burbage, Lowin, Perkins, and Taylor established a tradition is evident from Restoration attitudes to the stage of half a century earlier. The gap between the old theatre and the new was roughly the same as that between the work of contemporary playing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, say, and the legendary foundational period under Peter Hall in the early 1960s, but without the unbroken continuities we might observe if we were telling that particular later history. Some older playgoers can vividly remember the players and productions of the early RSC, a blank, or at most a collection of written and photographed records, to modern playgoers in their twenties. Even the RSC has seen considerable change in personnel, artistic policies, and playing spaces over fifty years, but evidently without a radical change in national government, a damaging civil war, and an authoritarian ban on the art it exists to practise, all of which were experienced by theatre people and theatre lovers in the middle of the seventeenth century. The recovery of the theatre after 1660 was marked on the one hand by the presence of some significant figures who had known the older conditions, including the new managerial leaders Sir William Davenant and Sir Thomas Killigrew, and the actors Michael Mohun, Charles Hart, Theophilus Bird, and George Jolly, among others, and on the other by the absence of the theatre-based tradition of training boys for playing.
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- Actors and Acting in Shakespeare's TimeThe Art of Stage Playing, pp. 174 - 187Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010