Theatre as tournament: Idealisation of the observed body

Apology of Colley Cibber, 1740: curiosity (natural and permissible) of audience into lives of actors, blurring of real/ideal as he constructs an identity for public perusal.

I avoided mentioning courtly romance in the last post, though it’s something of an elephant in the room when it comes to gender roles in depictions of mediaeval tournaments.  But I had decided that I’d rather look at that as an element of the idealisation of the observed object, common to both the Restoration stage and depictions of tournaments.


The image of women looking down on the action of competing men, of men competing for the approval of women, necessarily involves a tension of desire.  Elaborate social construction goes into increasing the tension on both sides: increasing the desire through idealisation and conditioning, while increasing the obstacles to attaining the ostensible object of desire. Desire then becomes its own end: satisfied, it dies.


The tension between the construction and gratification of desire is a central paradox of courtly romance.  A knight may long for, serenade, adore Eleanor of Aquitaine, but his lust must be abstracted so far as to become quasi-religious: if he ever actually gained access to her bed and body the illusion would be shattered, the idealised body worthless. Dante finds Beatrice easier to adore after her death.


The audience, therefore, must be set at a certain distance from the performers, and vice versa – detachment becomes necessary for desire, distance enough for wrinkles and fine gradations of expression to merge into flawless skin and a conventional “smile or frown”.


Stage makeup and conventions would help, no? And of course, not only is almost every play’s plot built around the development, obstruction and gratification of desire, but the experience of theatre itself is constructed around a desirable idealisation of life, in which the irregular wrinkles smooth out into a gratifyingly regular pattern.


The audience is necessarily detached from the action, as the women at a tournament – if either descended to the stage, not only would it look rather more messy than it does from above, but the action would come to a stuttering, appalled halt.  which assumes consturction of female audience. but how is it complicated by the female performers? or more, playwrights? how is desire constructed/perpetuated between viewer and viewed if gender roles do not permit?


Of course, the trouble with the term ‘idealisation’ is that virtually every depiction (literal or literary) we have of mediaeval tournaments is filtered through an idealising glass.  I can’t think of any first-hand accounts of tournaments - nor, for that matter, of genuine battles, but the convergence in description between them in the writings of Froissarts and Malorys is indicative of the the extent to which what is described is the idea in the head, not the event in question.   


and the actor is not performing in his own self, but presenting simultaneously himself, the character and the author


Duality/consciousness of performance.  Idea vs. fact of tournament/character/performance. Less to control in limited medium (writing, illustration) vs action of tournament, theatre – does that make that limited medium more of a performance – more perfect in its conscious duality?


Collier’s problem with mirrored gaze in restoration theatre. squeaking cleopatra – losing control of self-representation. Caviness 20.


“The ladies”, a homogenous construction without recourse to individual opinions or differences, within which individuals who happened to be female fit often uneasily, or sometimes not at all.
The question must also arise of how far we can know what actually happened in tournaments, and how far the record we have is simply the idea of the tournament.  Certainly literary descriptions and manuscript images are highly idealised, and information about actual events must inevitably be scanty.  On the other hand, real tournaments were designed around the idea of the tournament, especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – I seem to recall Henry VIII designing several around Arthurian themes, complete with costuming.  And of course, if we are comparing Restoration theatre with Restoration conceptions of mediaeval tournaments, all that remains to them is that idea.


Still, in either case, if I were to take this further I’d want to look in much greater detail into both mediaeval literary and pictorial depictions of tournaments and how they compared to what facts we can glean, and sixteenth-century reincarnations and and reinventions and reminiscences of the idea.  Many of which would, inevitably, bring me back to that centre of community visual spectacle, the stage.

Theatre as tournament: Gendered gaze – arbitration or participation? (2/2)

Continued from previous post.

In January 1669 Lady Castlemaine bribed Elizabeth Corey, an actress in the King’s Company, to play the part of Sempronia in Jonson’s Catiline in imitation of an enemy at court, Lady Elizabeth Harvey; it is said that when the line was uttered, ‘But what’ll you doe with Sempronia?’, Lady Castlemaine, wishing on her enemy the fate of her ambassador husband, Sir Daniel, cried out, ‘Send her to Constantinople!’ The actress was duly imprisoned, then released at Lady Castlemaine’s bidding; when the play was given again she repeated the performance only to have oranges flung at her by men hired by Lady Harvey. (Roberts 97)  

Observation turns to participation.  Castlemaine and Harvey enter the field from the boxes and tilt in public with the audience as their arbiters; or perhaps we could say, more conventionally, that the ladies select and observe their champions.  But one champion remains spatially in the audience, while the other is herself female.  As the lady assigns a knight her colours, Castlemaine blurs the line between herself and Corey when she hires the actress to play her part (as it were); but more so when she herself enters the lists, while remaining in the audience, by throwing her own voice into the fray. 

At the same time, the effectiveness of the insult involves eliding Corey/Sempronia’s identity with Harvey’s, metaphorically drawing her onto the stage herself – perhaps with an implicit slur on her virtue, given the reputation of theatrical women.  And while Harvey does retain her own physical distance from the stage, she nonetheless is drawn into it, to strike against Castlemaine as embodied in the actor/champion – who paradoxically bears Harvey’s own ‘colours’, and, incidentally, her Christian name. Like Lancelot, Corey allows herself to appear to disadvantage and suffer the consequences, day after day – and like Lancelot, she is rescued from shame and receives due reward from that lady. Like Guenevere, however, she languishes in captivity until rescued by her gallant. 

The movement in this case between the roles of knight and lady, performer and spectator, has a fluidity that makes such conventional divisions very problematic – at least as they relate to gender. And yet the savour of the tournament field remains: the determination of all three women to maintain their dominance of that socially central space insists on it as an essential site of ongoing social jockeying and proof.  Yvain could relate.
I said “gender” in the post title, but have said very little specific to masculinity.  I mentioned earlier the idea of masculinity as the true trophy of a tournament, embodied in a woman; but despite the jostling of literary shoulders for social acclaim, despite the ongoing ‘duels’ between various figures in which the pen stood in for the sword, despite the occasional eruption of stage competition into physical violence (as Kinaston and Dryden’s battered sides could attest), I think it would be driving the analogy too far to suggest that proving masculinity was the central concern of the Restoration stage.

But why wasn’t it? Perhaps, in part, because the gender roles it offered for assertion were more ambiguous.  As a masked woman could be a noble lady, a prostitute or an actress (who might herself be the mistress of a duke, or a king), a man in the theatre might be anything from a poet, to a discerning (or foolish) cit, to a lord and rake – or a poor actor who mimics one and is (in his own person or his assumed one) cuckolded to the laughter of the public.  Cross-dressing (in both genders) and the effeminisation of fops further blurred gender lines, as Marsden points out (188).

Certainly, as a spectacular public space, the theatre was potentially as perfect a vehicle for assertion of a public-centric identity as the tournament field. Is that it, perhaps? that identity was becoming less invested in the public? In qualities of the mind rather than the body?  Or more in the everyday reputation than the spectacular proof?


Cited:
Marsden, Jean. “Rape, voyeurism and the Restoration stage.” Broken boundaries: Women and feminism in Restoration Drama. Ed. Katherine M. Quinsey. Kentucky: UP of Kentucky, 1996. 185-199.
Roberts, David. The Ladies: Female patronage of Restoration Drama 1660-1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.