chapter 10 Syncopated Time: Staging the Restoration Tempest Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch When performance historians today analyse musical scores and dramatic texts from the early modern period, we face the challenge of interpreting notes first sung and words first spoken more than three centuries ago. In trying to understand historical performances as performances – as embod- ied events, not lifeless documents – we might conjure up the legendary ghosts of theatre history, just as Colley Cibber’s Apology (1740) tried to conjure in words the flesh-and-blood acting of the deceased Thomas Betterton. But as Cibber himself reluctantly admitted, it was easier to know ‘what’ Betterton spoke than to know ‘how Betterton spoke’.1 Cibber understood that the theatrical past can never fully escape the past; it must always remain somewhat mysterious to the present. Instead of recalling the absent past, perhaps we are wiser to look for how the past survives in the present. What insights might emerge if we stud- ied historical performances not through archival fantasies but through the embodied and material realities of performance practice? In such study, our goal would be not to abandon performance history but rather to put it in creative tension with the present moment. As Rebecca Schneider has explained, a temporal telescoping occurs in every performed instance of ‘replaying’ and ‘reenactment’. Schneider argues that such moments invoke what Gertrude Stein called syncopated time – the instantaneous collision of past and present, that moment of temporal disruption when ‘then and now punctuate each other’ as the ‘prior moment’ touches the ‘very fin- gertips of the present’.2 For us, cultivating a syncopated time in which the past and the present would be simultaneously ‘in play’ gave us a new scholarly paradigm for investigating the rich and complex (yet still under- appreciated) historical performance genre of Restoration Shakespeare. 1 Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian …, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by John Watts for the Author, 1740), 83. 2 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 2. 180 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Syncopated Time: Staging the Restoration Tempest 181 Despite having been popular in the theatre, Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare have been long maligned by literary and theatre histori- ans, going all the way back to F. J. Furnivall’s 1895 variorum edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Generations of scholars have objected to what they regarded as the mutilation of Shakespeare’s sacred texts by Restoration adapters, the unfortunate reliance in the adaptations on the strict dual- ism of Manichean morality, the illicit addition of new scenes and even new characters, and, perhaps most destructively of all, the brazen inter- polation of scenes rich in music, dance, and visual splendour. Much more recent scholars like Barbara Murray have been willing to study Restoration versions of Shakespeare as dramatic works in their own right.3 But even scholars more sympathetic to the value of these play texts have tended to overlook or to play down the essential fact that those texts were the basis for intermedial performance events that appealed to audiences for decades and even centuries. By deliberate contrast, a fundamental principle of our research has been that Restoration Shakespeare cannot be properly under- stood apart from its life in performance. Indeed, Restoration Shakespeare as a performance phenomenon reveals meanings that elude any purely tex- tual or musicological analysis. In this way, performance can make mani- fest to contemporary observers the reasons why Restoration Shakespeare appealed to its original audiences. Our first opportunity to test this thesis with professional artists and the general public occurred in the summer of 2017, when we collaborated with Shakespeare’s Globe to perform scenes and songs from Thomas Shadwell’s 1674 operatic version of The Tempest at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the indoor Jacobean-style theatre within the Globe complex. The pub- lic workshops, which were preceded by scholar–artist developmental rehearsals, were the first major event in our research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’ (2017–2020), generously funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).4 The entire week-long event involved a team of fifteen international scholars chosen for their collective expertise in theatre history, Shakespeare studies, and histori- cal musicology; Globe research staff, led by Will Tosh; an ensemble of five singers and five instrumentalists; a company of five actors, all with experience of performing at the Globe; and a ticket-buying audience who 3 See Murray’s Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice (Madison, NJ: Farleigh-Dickinson ­University Press, 2001). 4 For further information, please see the project’s website (www.restorationshakespeare.org). Richard was the project’s Principal Investigator and Amanda was the Co-Investigator. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  182 Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch attended our performances over two days. For this week-long event that progressed from scholar–artist collaborative rehearsal to public workshops in which we presented selected scenes, Amanda served as musical director and choreographer and Richard served as stage director. Before discussing the research findings that arose from the rehearsals and public workshops, we want to provide some theatre history background. In 1667, a year before his death, Sir William Davenant, founder and manager of the Duke’s Company, joined forces with the young playwright John Dryden to adapt Shakespeare’s The Tempest, one of just nine Shakespeare plays for which the Duke’s Company possessed the performance rights. In revising Shakespeare’s play, Davenant and Dryden expanded its musi- cal elements. They retained the ballads sung by Caliban and others and Ariel’s songs but then added two different types of musical performances: a duet between the characters Ferdinand and Ariel (‘Go thy way’) and an elaborate Masque of Devils that is performed before the frightened audi- ence of Alonzo, Antonio, and Gonzalo. It is erroneous to think of the Restoration Tempest as a static or bounded work; indeed, new productions during the period adapted this adaptation, adding spectacle, new dances, and new settings of the songs by popular composers of the day.5 Such an adaptation was made by Shadwell in 1674, when he transformed Davenant and Dryden’s Tempest from a highly musical play into an opera. He added machine effects, expanded and rewrote the Masque of Devils, and inserted a new Masque of Neptune.6 Today, we think of opera as a dramatic work set entirely to music and performed by singers and instrumentalists. But Restoration audiences and performing artists had a more capacious understanding of opera. For them, ‘opera’ meant primarily a play with significant musical sequences and spec- tacular effects, such as The Tempest, Thomas Shadwell and Matthew Locke’s Psyche, or John Dryden and Henry Purcell’s King Arthur. Less frequently, the term also referred to a fully sung dramatic work, such as Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Thus, in the Restoration theatre, 5 David Lindley discusses this desire for musical newness, although he overstates the persistence of the Restoration settings of The Tempest music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; most of the 1674 music was jettisoned by then. However, an early eighteenth-century score, probably by John Weldon, but commonly misattributed to Purcell – an error repeated by Lindley – was performed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even as new songs were added by Linley and Arne; see David Lindley, ‘“Sounds and Sweet Airs”: Music in Shakespearean Performance History’, Shakespeare Survey, 64 (2011): 59–73 (64–7). 6 For a concise summary of the musical changes between the Dryden–Davenant and Shadwell ver- sions of The Tempest, see Andrew R. Walkling, English Dramatick Opera, 1661–1706 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 122, 138–9. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Syncopated Time: Staging the Restoration Tempest 183 a work called an ‘opera’ usually was a work that combined speech, song, dance, and spectacle in a mutually constitutive way.7 This chapter focuses on how our experience of staging two scenes from Shadwell’s operatic version of The Tempest – the Masque of Devils and the Masque of Neptune – illuminates both the aesthetic appeal of Restoration Shakespeare as a distinctive genre of historical performance and the tensions that inevitably arise when performing Restoration Shakespeare, tensions between historical knowledge, the practical realities of theatre-making, and the expectations of artists and audiences. Performing Shadwell’s The Tempest conjured an often-challenging instance of syncopated time, when the past punctuates the present. Yet that experience of temporal disloca- tion was also productive, identifying parallels in how Restoration and con- temporary audiences responded to particular scenes and, more broadly, revealing staging solutions that respected the original work’s dramaturgy while also making the work appealing to an audience today. The Implications of Space As with any type of theatrical performance, the space where we worked framed and affected the reactions of both artists and audiences. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is a radically different space than Dorset Garden, the theatre for which Shadwell’s version of The Tempest was written and where it was first performed. Opened in 1671 as the new home for the Duke’s Company, Dorset Garden featured a proscenium stage with a large forestage, the customary shutter-and-groove system that allowed for per- spectival scenery and quick scene changes, enough harnesses and wires to allow four separate performers to fly across the stage simultaneously, machines for special effects, multiple trapdoors, and a substage area large enough to accommodate actors and musicians.8 In every respect Dorset Garden was a marked improvement on the smaller theatre at Lincoln’s 7 Amanda Eubanks Winkler, ‘Opera in England’, in The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera, ed. Jacqueline Waeber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 224–47; and Amanda Eubanks Winkler, ‘The Intermedial Dramaturgy of Dramatick Opera: Understanding Genre through Performance’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, 42.2 (2018): 13–38. 8 On the Dorset Garden Theatre see Robert D. Hume, ‘The Dorset Garden Theatre: A Review of Facts and Problems’, Theatre Notebook, 33.2 (1979): 4–17. For the ways music was staged in the theatre, see Mark A. Radice, ‘Sites for Music in Purcell’s Dorset Garden Theatre’, The Musical Quarterly, 81.3 (1997): 430–48; Frans and Julie Muller, ‘Purcell’s Dioclesian on the Dorset Garden Stage’, in Performing the Music of Henry Purcell, ed. Michael Burden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 232–42 and Frans and Julie Muller, ‘Completing the Picture: The Importance of Reconstructing Early Opera’, Early Music, 33.4 (2005): 667–81. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  184 Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch Inn Fields (itself a converted tennis court) where the Duke’s Company had been performing since 1661. Indeed, at the time of its opening, Dorset Garden was the largest and most technologically sophisticated theatre that had ever been built in England. Though it would be surpassed by even more elaborate successors, Dorset Garden set the standard for the next 200 years of what a major London theatre should look like. As is well known, the San Wanamaker Playhouse, which opened in 2014 and is named after the Globe’s founder, intentionally recalls the scale and architectural style of a Jacobean indoor theatre like the Blackfriars, the winter home of the King’s Men (Shakespeare’s company) from 1608 to 1642. It was never intended to reconstruct the Blackfriars, let alone to incorporate features of a Restoration playhouse like Lincoln’s Inn Fields or Dorset Garden. The sketches used to construct the Wanamaker date from 1660 and are the work of John Webb, who designed the changeable scen- ery for Sir William Davenant’s private production of The Siege of Rhodes (1656) at Rutland House.9 Despite Webb’s close association with one of the lions of Restoration theatre, the 1660 drawings are wholly nostalgic, recalling pre-Civil War theatrical architecture. In short, Webb’s sketches look like an early seventeenth-century indoor theatre. But as Richard told the Wanamaker audience on the first day of our public workshops, several features of the space they occupied would have been familiar to a Restoration playgoer like Samuel Pepys: a totally indoor theatre lit by candles; tiered seating for the audience on three sides, including private boxes on the sides of the stage; an upstage gallery for musicians; a trapdoor leading to a substage area; and above all, a strong feeling of intimacy between performers and spectators. When we staged the Masque of Devils, having room beneath the stage where unseen per- formers could be heard and having a trapdoor for stage entrances from below proved advantageous.10 After all, devils lurk down in hell, not up in heaven. For our practice-based research purposes, the Wanamaker was ideal for exploring Restoration Shakespeare because it was a performance space that acknowledged theatre history but did not seek to recreate it. In a precise parallel, our goal throughout the entire project was never to recreate Restoration theatrical spaces or performance styles but rather to 9 Gordon Higgott, ‘Reassessing the Drawings for the Inigo Jones Theatre: A Restoration Project by John Webb?’, The Chamber of Demonstrations: Reconstructing the Jacobean Indoor Playhouse, www .bristol.ac.uk/drama/jacobean/research4.html. 10 On the Wanamaker as a venue for scholarly exploration, see Will Tosh, Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018), particularly chapter 8, ‘Music and Lighting in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Syncopated Time: Staging the Restoration Tempest 185 use our knowledge of theatre and music history to create performances of Restoration Shakespeare that are compelling and meaningful to audi- ences today. Keeping with this ethos, the Wanamaker was a place where theatre’s syncopated time manifested itself strongly. Archive and Performance Although we were fortunate to collaborate with the Globe, our project deliberately presented an alternative to original practices, the widely influ- ential scholar–artist research method that began at the Globe in the late 1990s and which sought to reconstitute in contemporary performance the style and conventions of early modern drama.11 Adopting a different (though not oppositional) approach, we regarded the early modern perfor- mance archive not as a point of return but as a point of departure: the basis for experiments that result in fresh performances rather than a normative set of instructions for resurrecting past performance styles. Indeed, we struggle to see how any conjectured period style for Restoration Shakespeare can be recreated in a contemporary performance. For exam- ple, the musical aspects of Shadwell’s version of The Tempest – the version we selected for our workshop and performances at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – are richly documented in quarto play texts, printed song lyrics, and musical scores in both print and manuscript.12 There is much primary material to study. Yet this archival plenitude reveals that the original 1674 production mounted by the Duke’s Company at Dorset Garden, far from being a static (and therefore knowable) entity, was in truth a protean event characterised more by multiplicity than singularity. 11 Some audience members who were Globe ‘regulars’ came to the performances with the expectation that our work would be in harmony with the Globe’s influential and pioneering efforts in original practices, an approach collaboratively developed in the Globe’s early years by the inaugural artistic director Mark Rylance, composer Claire van Kampen, and designer Jenny Tiramani. Through care- ful historical research, the triumvirate attempted to stage Shakespeare’s plays as they were ‘origi- nally intended’. Audience members who identified with the Globe’s founding ethos of performance reconstitution initially found our more dialectical approach to Restoration Shakespeare a bit elusive. For Rylance’s explanation of original practices and its aims, see ‘Playing the Globe: Artistic Policy and Practice’, in Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 169–76. See also the section on original practices in Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds., Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 29–126, which includes contributions by Rylance, van Kampen, and Tiramani. Although much ink has been spilled critiquing the original practices project, its promises are seductive – that by following a knowable set of historically informed practices, some- thing of the past might be reconstituted through performance. 12 [Thomas Shadwell], The Tempest, Or the Enchanted Island (London: Printed by T. N. for Henry Herringman, 1674); Songs and Masques in the Tempest (London, 1674). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  186 Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch It bears going into some detail on how the surviving documentary evidence raises more questions about performance history than it answers. Shadwell’s The Tempest quarto, published in 1674, famously includes detailed and lengthy stage directions and descriptions of the scenery used in the original production. But because there is no corroborating visual evidence, we cannot be sure that what Shadwell describes is what the Dorset Garden audience saw and heard. It may well be the case that when Shadwell, in his famous open- ing stage direction, described a sinking ship, ‘many dreadful Objects’ flying across the stage, and a descending ‘shower of Fire’, he was offering an ide- alised account of how The Tempest might one day be staged, not how it was actually staged.13 In addition to the play text, the lyrics to the sung portions of The Tempest were printed separately around the same time as the play was being performed.14 Just as the focus of modern opera audiences moves back and forth between supertitles and the stage performance, so did Restoration audiences consult song texts or libretti during performances to understand words obscured through singing. Audiences could also purchase the sheet music to Ariel’s songs, which allowed them to perform excerpts from The Tempest in their own domestic spaces.15 But much like the publication today of songs from hit Broadway musicals, these arrangements of Ariel’s songs do not necessarily reflect how they were performed in the theatre. When we consider related manuscript sources, any presumption that there was ever a fixed performance of the Restoration Tempest quickly unravels. In addition to their printed version, Ariel’s songs also exist in a concordant manuscript source dating from the same period. Copied by Edward Lowe, this manuscript contains vocal ornamentation not found in the printed version and may be associated with student performances at Oxford, where Lowe was Heather Professor of Music.16 It bears remem- bering that Oxford was one of the places where the London patent com- panies performed during their annual summer tour of the provinces. It is thoroughly plausible that the Duke’s Company performed The Tempest at Oxford University, on which occasion the singer playing Ariel added ornamentation to her songs. Such ornamentation may have been captured in Lowe’s manuscript, which then becomes documentary evidence for an evolving performance event, the fullness of which remains elusive. 13 [Shadwell], The Tempest, 1. 14 Songs and Masques in the Tempest. 15 The Ariels Songs in the Play call’d the Tempest (London, [1675]). 16 On this source, see Amanda Eubanks Winkler, ‘A Thousand Voices: Performing Ariel’, in The Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. Dympna Callaghan (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2016), 520–538 (534–5). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Syncopated Time: Staging the Restoration Tempest 187 Other musical aspects of Shadwell’s The Tempest survive in conflict- ing manuscript versions. Pelham Humfrey’s 1674 music for the Masque of Devils and Masque of Neptune survives in a manuscript now at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Arranged for a smaller number of singers than was used in the theatre, the music was likely adapted for domestic private performances, yet further evidence of the production’s popular- ity.17 One of the songs in the Masque of Devils, ‘Arise ye subterranean winds’, was actually by the Italian composer and singer Pietro Reggio. An alternate version of this particular piece survives in a manuscript copied by Daniel Henstridge that appears to record the composer’s virtuosic perfor- mance of his own song, even transcribing into phonetic spelling Reggio’s heavily accented English.18 Notably, the 1680 printed version of ‘Arise ye subterranean winds’ does not include the lavish ornamentation found in Henstridge’s transcription, a further example of how a printed document can fail to fully capture the idiosyncrasy of a performance event.19 In our workshops and performances, we grappled with these and other inconsistencies in the evidentiary record. As scholars, we wanted to be in command of the relevant documentary sources, especially when they were contradictory, partial, or inconclusive. The epistemological gap between historical document and historical event was something to explore, not something to overcome. Yet as musical director and stage director, we had to decide in advance which scenes and which versions of which songs from Shadwell’s The Tempest we were going to stage. Moreover, we knew that at some point in the rehearsal process the artistic company and scholarly team would have to commit to certain singing, acting, and staging choices. After three days of rehearsal we would present scenes before a paying audi- ence. In the great tradition of the theatre, the unalterable fact of opening night does tend to focus everyone’s efforts. As musical director, Amanda’s first tasks were to select the precise musi- cal texts for the Masque of Devils and Masque of Neptune and to decide what type of singers and instrumentalists we would use. Although the 1674 quarto of Shadwell’s The Tempest suggests that a lavish instrumental 17 See Michael Tilmouth’s discussion of the sources in Matthew Locke, Dramatic Music, ed. Michael Tilmouth, Musica Britannica, 50 (London: Stainer and Bell, 1986), 27–8. 18 On Daniel Henstridge’s manuscript transcription of Reggio’s possible performance of ‘Arise ye subterranean winds’, see Rebecca Herissone, Musical Creativity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 377–84 and Herissone, ‘Daniel Henstridge and the Aural Transmission of Music in Restoration England’, in Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England, ed. Linda Austern, Candace Bailey, and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 165–86. 19 Songs Set by Signior Pietro Reggio (London, 1680), 12. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  188 Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch ensemble was used in the original production, Amanda chose a much simpler grouping: four-part strings and a lutenist. Her decision was partly due to financial constraints but also partly due to the project’s research methodology: because we were not recreating the Dorset Garden production, we had no need for a large number of musicians. A simple band would enable us to investigate the synthesis of music and acting in Restoration Shakespeare. In a similar way, Amanda opted to use just five singers – two sopranos, a male alto, a tenor, and a bass – for all the musi- cal roles.20 As a consequence, our tenor (Ben Inman) had to sing the parts of both Aeolus and Oceanus in the Masque of Neptune. Departing from historical precedent, which suggests that boys from the Chapel Royal took some of the high-voiced roles in the Masque of Devils and possibly also in the Masque of Neptune, Amanda decided that we should cast only adult singers.21 Finally, the pressure of time stopped us from prepar- ing an edition of the two masques that incorporated Reggio’s ornaments, something we wanted to do. In the end, pragmatism dictated that we use a modified version of Michael Tilmouth’s modern edition of The Tempest music. While Tilmouth’s edition does not correspond to early twenty- first-century editorial conventions – most notably, he provides a realisa- tion of the figured bass (i.e., he writes out an accompaniment whereas the original source only provides a bassline with numbers, indicating the chords that must be played) – it provides a readable and reasonably error- free version of the musical text. Such were the material factors that came into play as we navigated the transition from academic study to collabora- tive theatre practice. From an acting perspective, the primary sources were less conflicting. The 1674 quarto of Shadwell’s The Tempest provided the basis for all sub- sequent editions of the play for well over a century, so there were no vari- ants in the dialogue portion of the script.22 In preparing the script for our workshop and performances, Richard retained original spelling and 20 Elizabeth Kenny describes her performance of Shadwell’s The Tempest (2015) at the Globe in ‘In Practice II: Adapting a Restoration Adaptation – The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island’, in Shakespeare, Music, and Performance, ed. Bill Barclay and David Lindley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 114–30. Her version featured an abridged version of Dryden–Davenant–Shadwell’s text per- formed by two actors and a similar musical ensemble to the one we used in 2017 (four-part strings + continuo and SSATB singers), although she used children instead of adults for the devils. 21 In 1674 Charles II gave permission for personnel from the Chapel Royal to sing in The Tempest, Lna LC 5/15, 3 (16 May 1674). 22 Shadwell’s 1674 version of The Tempest, which adapted Davenant and Dryden’s 1670 version of Shakespeare’s original play, was reprinted in 1676, 1690, 1692, 1695, 1701, 1710, 1720[?], 1733, 1735, and 1775. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Syncopated Time: Staging the Restoration Tempest 189 punctuation throughout, because those elements might have implications for the playing style with respect to pronunciation, scansion, and pacing. The dialogue that prefaces the Masque of Devils and Masque of Neptune appears as prose in the original quarto, even though it was clearly written as pentameter blank verse. Richard corrected the typesetting error in our script, so that it was immediately clear to the actors that their characters spoke in blank verse. Our company included four male actors, three of whom played Antonio, Alonzo, and Gonzalo in both masques and one of whom played Prospero, who in Shadwell’s The Tempest presents the concluding Masque of Neptune to the assembled characters in the play. Because our acting company was small, and also because our main concern was the interac- tion between drama and music, we cut most of the lengthy scene that leads up to the masque. As a consequence, our performance of the Masque of Neptune omitted some characters meant to be watching the masque in silence: Miranda, Ferdinand, Dorinda, Hippolito, Ariel, Stephano, Trincalo, Mustacho, Ventoso, Caliban, and Sycorax. In the public work- shop at the Wanamaker, we recruited a few audience members to play some of those parts during the Masque of Neptune to give a better sense of the scene’s meta-theatrical nature. We both felt that our script should retain the original stage direc- tions and cues, which indicate musical flourishes, voices and music heard from within the substage area, and the appearance or disappearance of singing characters within the masques proper (e.g., devils, subterra- nean winds, Neptune, and other mythological figures). Only by using this original material in our workshop and performance could we fully explore the synthesis of sound, music, and dramatic acting in Restoration Shakespeare. Although we never sought to reconstruct a Restoration performance – moreover, we were cognizant that the stage directions printed in the 1674 quarto may not have reflected what actually hap- pened in the original Dorset Garden ­production – we did seek to hon- our in our own theatre practice the d­ istinctive dramaturgy of Restoration Shakespeare. Still, there were limits to how much we could explore, because we had only a week for the workshops and performances, because the budget was tight, and because of the restrictions imposed by the Wanamaker itself. Thus, we chose not to engage with stage directions that involved onstage moveable scenery and machines, such as the spectacular moment in the Masque of Neptune when Neptune, Amphitrite, Oceanus, and Tethys suddenly ‘appear in a chariot drawn with sea-horses’, surrounded by https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  190 Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch sea-gods and sea-goddesses, Tritons and Nereides.23 As we noted earlier, the Wanamaker was designed to suggest an indoor Jacobean theatre, not a Restoration playhouse. And yet despite the inevitable limitations, the Wanamaker’s spatial affordances offered us a rich opportunity to stage Restoration Shakespeare. Dorset Garden or The Wanamaker: Staging the Devils In staging the Masque of Devils on the first day of our public workshop in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, we were immediately confronted by syncopated time. Indeed, how could it have been otherwise? On the one hand, Shadwell’s play text and the music by Humfrey and Reggio suggested how the Masque of Devils may have been staged in the origi- nal 1674 production at Dorset Garden. On the other hand, our work was necessarily shaped by present-day concerns and contexts: Could the Wanamaker’s intimate bare stage accommodate a scene written to be performed in a fully equipped proscenium theatre? Could scholars and artists deeply invested in historical knowledge find a way to utilise that knowledge in theatre practice without making historical authenticity their goal? Could the distinctive Restoration genre of dramatick opera be compelling and meaningful to a present-day audience? Such were the points of contact between past and present that defined and guided our collaborative work. As noted earlier, the Masque of Devils is replete with cues for music and sound. The dialogue that precedes the masque is interrupted three times, first by ‘A flourish of Musick’.24 This deceptively simple cue is dramatically significant, because the sound alerts Alonzo, Gonzalo, and Antonio to the invisible presence of supernatural beings. The three characters interpret the ‘flourish’ as ominous, an aural sign that they have been ‘Shipwrack’d / On the dominions of some merry Devil’.25 Indeed, they respond imme- diately to the unexpected sound in speech (they realise that unseen devils inhabit the island), in body (their fear erodes their physical strength), and in thought (the presence of devils signifies their own guilt in having forced Prospero into exile). In short, this one sound cue advances the drama and provides a rich acting challenge early in the scene. 23 [Shadwell], The Tempest, 78. 24 [Shadwell], The Tempest, 27. 25 [Shadwell], The Tempest, 27. The devil is merry because he enjoys playing tricks on the castaways, not because his flourish is pleasing or jocular. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Syncopated Time: Staging the Restoration Tempest 191 As if to make the point that performance reconstruction is impossible, there is no extant music for this flourish. But the absence of a historical source in this particular instance gave us the perfect opportunity to apply our practice-based research method, to create our own performance in a way that drew on historical knowledge but was not overly determined by that knowledge. Because we understood the music’s dramatic function, we had a basis not just for experimenting with different sounds but for adjudicating and appraising them. Our task, then, was not to replicate the sound heard in 1674, but rather to create for ourselves a sound that fulfilled the dramatic imperative at this moment in the production. To accomplish that task, we rehearsed and reflected on four different sounds: 1) The instrumentalists first improvised in seventeenth century concitato style: that is, music with rapid repeated notes (often semiquavers) to represent anger and agitation.26 2) The musicians then played chords in a concitato style but in two different keys simultaneously, producing a highly dissonant effect that would probably not have been heard in the Restoration theatre. 3) One of the musicologists in the workshop suggested an instrumental arrangement of the devils’ chorus (‘In Hell with flames they shall reign’) sung later in the scene. This corresponds to historical practice, as we know instrumental arrangements of vocal music were sometimes used in this way. 4) The musicians played dissonant harmonics on the strings and a tremolo on the continuo instruments, producing a distinctly eerie effect but in a way that was inconsistent with seventeenth-century musical practice. The least popular choice – the straightforward concitato (option 1) – was the most historically correct one. But as we soon discovered, Restoration- period style (at least for this moment in The Tempest) did not satisfy a con- temporary audience. Some audience members and some scholars liked the dissonance and agitation of the concitato played in two keys (option 2) and the musical foreshadowing of the devils’ chorus (option 3). What appealed to them was not the historical correctness of the choice but rather its dra- matic force, whether through affective intensity or anticipation of a later 26 The composer Claudio Monteverdi first described stile concitato in the preface to his eighth book of madrigals (1638). Yet as Kate van Orden notes, elements of the style can be found in sixteenth- century compositions such as Clément Janequin’s La guerre (1528). Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 26–7. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  192 Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch moment in the performance. Surprisingly, the musicians themselves and a majority of the musicologists responded most positively to the sound with the most tenuous relationship to historical practice (option 4). Despite its lack of historical fidelity, the dissonant harmonics of the strings and the tremolo played on the continuo instruments best conveyed the narrative twist and high emotional stakes of this moment in the scene. As we rehearsed and responded to the various options, we learned to appraise them not as isolated musical passages but as forceful elements within the overall performance event. We’ve gone into some detail about a brief moment in the performance – the first flourish heard by Antonio, Alonzo, and Gonzalo lasted only a matter of seconds – to document as precisely as we can how our iterative research method worked in practice, as we moved cyclically from performance to interpretation and then to an intervention that led to a revised performance, at which point the cycle began again. The Masque of Devils presented greater challenges than deciding how to play a musical flourish, mainly because the devils eventually do appear and command the stage.27 Not surprisingly, our audience at the Wanamaker expected to be frightened by the devils – much as they might be frightened by creatures in a horror film – a presumption likewise shared by the singers who played the devils and the dark allegorical roles of Pride, Rapine, Fraud, and Murder.28 As stage director, Richard felt that testing out this presump- tion was a good place to start in staging the Masque of Devils. To make their performance frightening, the singers chose menacing gestures as they crouched low with clawed hands, encircling and overpowering the terrified trio of Alonzo, Antonio, and Gonzalo. The singers and the actors did well in performing a scene where the diabolical suddenly appears to frighten the merely mortal. But as the theatre historians on the scholarly team and some audience members were quick to observe, the devils looked demonic but did not sound demonic. It was apparent to everyone involved that some of the music sung by the devils was quite jaunty, a perplexing incongruity for those who assumed (based on the conventions of popular horror films) that music for hellish creatures must always be dissonant and discordant.29 Some 27 As noted, children played some of the devils in the 1674 Tempest; but it remains unclear how Restoration audiences understood or reacted to their performances. Perhaps children playing devils was disturbing for the Dorset Garden audience, just as Damien, the boy Antichrist in The Omen (1976), terrified millions of movie-goers. 28 ‘Rapine’ is plunder or pillage, the forced seizure of another’s property. 29 On the use of dances and major-key music for spiritually corrupt or evil characters, see Amanda Eubanks Winkler, O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 27–62. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Syncopated Time: Staging the Restoration Tempest 193 scholars who initially preferred the historically informed flourish ended up wondering whether Restoration-era music could be meaningful to a modern theatre audience at all, given the radical disjunction between seventeenth- century musical conventions and twenty-first-century audience expecta- tions. Complicating this interpretive process is the distinct possibility that some singers who played devils in 1674, the children of the Chapel Royal and even the adult Pietro Reggio, were not taken seriously by the Dorset Garden audience, even though the play text clearly indicates that the antic Masque of Devils succeeded in frightening its intended audience of Alonzo, Antonio, and Gonzalo. Yet again, performance history provides us not with a stable point of origin to which we might return but rather the occasion for inserting ourselves into a creative dialogue between past and present. Divergence between the reactions of the fictive onstage audience and the actual theatre audience, whether contemporary or historical, is fully consistent with the scene’s deliberate meta-theatricality: the actual audi- ence watches dramatic characters watching a performance staged for them by yet other characters. In this sense, the actual audience are bystanders who witness a strangely musicalised incident of trauma directed at some- one else. Indeed, the dramatic richness of the Masque of Devils may well turn precisely on this difference in responses: an audience today (and per- haps in the Restoration, too) can enjoy Alonzo, Antonio, and Gonzalo’s fear of the devils emerging from the underworld. The scene’s complexity of tone, utterly invisible on the printed page, was discoverable only through our iterative performance practice. Filling the Gaps: Staging Neptune As we noted earlier in this chapter, the prodigious scenic spectacle that char- acterised the original Masque of Neptune was an aspect of performance that we simply could not tackle in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, for both logis- tical and financial reasons. But there was another aspect of the masque – the genre’s customary dances – that we were able to explore in our rehearsals and public workshops. The 1674 quarto of Shadwell’s The Tempest tells us when the various dances occur in the Masque of Neptune and makes clear that singers and dancers are separate onstage groups (hence, the repeated stage direction ‘Here the Dancers mingle with the Singers’).30 But because Giovanni Battista Draghi’s original dance music does not survive, we do 30 [Shadwell], The Tempest, 78, 80. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  194 Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch not know the duration of the dances, let alone the style, rhythm, and tempo of the accompanying music. In short, the historical record created a gap in the performance but then withheld guidance for how to fill it. Once again, the past invited the present into a syncopated time. In our initial workshop planning we decided to use Tilmouth’s recon- structed dance music for the Masque of Neptune to preserve the scene’s original dramaturgical shape.31 We never intended to fully choreograph these dances, given that our budget did not allow for a choreographer (let alone a team of dancers) and given that our schedule did not give us sufficient time to teach complicated dances to actors and singers. However, as the rehearsal process progressed, several members of our scholarly team were adamant that some kind of dance or stylised movement was needed in the Masque of Neptune. This feeling that something was missing in the staging arose not from any desire to reconstruct a Restoration performance but rather from informed critical observation, an attentiveness to what this moment in the performance required. What the performance required was a sequence of synchronised gesture and movement that worked with the music to create dramatic meaning. It was not enough for the actors to act and the singers to sing. To add in the missing ingredient, Amanda (who has a background in dance) improvised some basic choreography for the masque’s customary final dance. Because we did not have a separate troupe of dancers, we enlisted the singers and the actors playing Gonzalo, Antonio, and Alonzo to perform a simple round dance. Prospero presented the masque, and so it seemed odd for him to also participate in it. We first choreographed the dance sequence in our closed rehearsals and then performed it before the workshop audience in the Wanamaker. One of the scholars suggested that we enhance the Masque of Neptune’s inher- ent meta-theatricality – like the Masque of Devils, it was a performance within a performance – by recruiting audience members to play some of the other characters. In Shadwell’s The Tempest, Prospero arranges the concluding masque as an apology for how roughly he has treated every- one on the island. We had no trouble finding volunteers to play Miranda, Ferdinand, Dorinda, and Hippolito. To accommodate the masque’s 31 Tilmouth sometimes reuses music from elsewhere in the score (i.e., part of Locke’s ‘Curtain Tune’ for the Tryton’s Dance I) and sometimes advises that the previous chorus should be repeated in an instrumental version for the dance, a typical Restoration practice. One of the members of the scholarly team, Silas Wollston, rightly pointed out the inappropriateness of some of Tilmouth’s recycling choices (e.g., the reuse of the ‘Curtain Tune’) and did some editorial work ‘on the fly’ to replace these dances. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Syncopated Time: Staging the Restoration Tempest 195 expanded audience, we placed a row of chairs on each side of the stage, a formal spatial arrangement that underlined the ceremony of the occasion. Additionally, we modified the choreography to include the new onstage audience. To suggest the ‘mingling’ between performers that the original stage directions indicate, we had everyone on the stage exit together while dancing. Again, our collective intent was not to recover an original stag- ing – almost certainly our staging looked nothing like what happened in 1674 – but to explore the symbiosis between acting, singing, and dancing in Restoration Shakespeare. By having more actors on the stage – as, indeed, the scene required – we gained a stronger sense of how various modes of individual performance were held together by the masque’s characteristi- cally meta-theatrical frame. Audience Responses As should be evident from the preceding descriptions, we solicited oral responses as we blocked the two scenes in the Wanamaker and used audi- ence and scholar feedback to shape the staging, a democratic approach that allowed us the flexibility to investigate multiple performance options. Another part of the process involved breakout sessions at the end of each day with the performers, scholarly team, and paying audience members. We also distributed an online survey, to which some participants responded. Several themes emerged: first, the tension between historical knowledge and practical performance; and second, the gap between past and present, how it might be bridged or, in some cases, reinforced through staging. One recurring strand of commentary focused on our project’s stance towards ‘authenticity’, a preoccupation undoubtedly shaped by the Globe and its association with original practices. One audience member com- mented that they liked our low-tech approach in the workshop, deeming it ‘good’ and ‘glorious’. For this person, elaborate special effects ‘muffle’ the story onstage (in fact, the 1674 Tempest was a high-tech production, and using elaborate special effects would have been the more historically informed choice). Richard queried the desire for authenticity with his breakout group, explaining that we sought ‘to honour the Restoration theatrical form, but not to resurrect it’. One audience member strongly disliked this, indicating that it was ‘nice, but also a fudge’. The actor who played Alonzo had been involved with several original practices productions at the Globe and he remarked, ‘I’m rowing back from positions of absolute right or wrong in my old age.’ He was eager to play and experiment, and to explore what might emerge from ‘seeing it [Restoration Shakespeare] as something in its own right’. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  196 Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch Another strand directly engaged with the relationship of past to pres- ent – the anxieties produced by syncopated time. One person commented upon the temporal juxtapositions that emerge when one replays some- thing from the past, observing that ‘the two centuries [the seventeenth and the twenty-first] are converging’ in our project. One scholar noted that there was a three-way temporal tension – between Shakespeare’s time, the Restoration, and modern London. Another wondered if our goal was to ‘translate the aesthetic’ or ‘translate the audience’. Do we want to translate the Restoration aesthetic to make it palatable for modern audiences, or do we want to educate modern audiences enough that they will understand the Restoration aesthetic? For some, this act of translation seemed impossible: one audience mem- ber noted that the Restoration-era music seemed to be of a very particular time and place and another commented that the music ‘locks us into a spe- cific time period’. For this reason, some wanted us to keep the Restoration spectacle and text, but ‘change the music’. Why not pop music, if we were not doing an original practices production? Why not music that made the devils more recognisably evil for audiences today? The musicians participating in the workshop protested loudly against this sentiment, and, indeed, this moment of conflict may again reveal disciplin- ary proclivities. Opera houses regularly stage works from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries without modernising the music, transplant- ing them to whatever time period suits them, a recent example being David McVicar’s postmodern production of Handel’s eighteenth-century opera Giulio Cesare (Glyndebourne, 2005; Metropolitan Opera, 2013), set in a British colonial outpost with costuming from various periods and dance numbers of various styles, some nineteenth-century, some vaguely Celtic, and some Bollywood inflected. Very few musicians or opera directors would claim that Handel needs to be performed in an eighteenth-century setting for his music to make sense. Beyond the potential disciplinary divide, per- haps such responses have something to do with the canon. According to the logic of the canon, Handel’s music, like Shakespeare’s plays, is transcen- dent, and can be successfully transplanted to any era. Canonical works are timeless, but music by the little-known Pelham Humfrey or Pietro Reggio is not: it ‘locks us into a specific time period’. Others craved what we did not provide in a workshop setting at the Wanamaker – elaborate choreographies, scenic effects, and costuming. Several proposed ways of addressing the missing spectacle. One person wondered if projections might be used, as the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) did with its digital avatar Ariel, although such technology does not https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Syncopated Time: Staging the Restoration Tempest 197 necessarily provide budgetary savings. Some believed elaborate costuming was needed to signal the identities of the mythological characters for a modern audience. Quite a few audience members discussed the impor- tance of dance, although opinions differed. For some, Amanda’s chore- ography in the Masque of Neptune was too historical given our ‘stated goal’ to make it ‘exciting for a modern audience’. In truth Amanda’s cho- reography had very little to do with seventeenth-century dance; regard- less, the choreographies from Dorset Garden cannot be recovered as they were not written down. On the opposite end of the spectrum, one of the scholars felt that the dance was too modern and that we should have hired baroque dancers and a baroque dance specialist. Several people wanted a more stylised gestural language throughout the scene, a sentiment that was echoed by a few of the singers, because for them gestural stylisation was the equivalent of the formality in Humfrey’s Restoration-era music. Our audience’s desire for stylisation (both among the scholarly participants and the general audience) was also shaped by the notion that late-seventeenth- century acting was inherently artificial, although people at the time clearly did not find it so, as contemporary descriptions of Thomas Betterton’s or Anne Bracegirdle’s acting attest. It is only because David Garrick in the eighteenth century was thought to have inaugurated a new ‘naturalistic’ style that the previous acting style was retrospectively viewed in this way. As Richard has observed: ‘the term “naturalistic” must always be put into context because each generation of theatre audiences has a different idea of what acting “naturally” means’.32 Conclusion Staging scenes and songs from the Restoration Tempest in our workshop at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse proved to us that ‘syncopated time’, far from being a purely theoretical conceit invoked only by scholars, really does exist in the rehearsal room. Our collaboration between scholars and performing artists was a concentrated effort to put the theatrical past and the theatrical present into contact: not to resurrect the past, but to let it make demands upon the present; to let the past tell us what was important in staging a Restoration version of The Tempest. How we then undertook that staging was, as theatre practice always is, conditioned by our own 32 Richard Schoch, ‘How One Actor Forever Changed the Way We See Shakespeare’, British Council Voices Magazine, 19 April 2016, www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/ how-one-actor-forever-changed-way-we-see-shakespeare. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press  198 Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch previous experience, by the affordances of the space in which we worked, by the pressures of time, and the restraints of budgets. As we learned in the workshop, those conditions were not distractions from our pursuit of a hypothetical or ideal performance. Indeed, our work affirmed no such teleology. Rather, those conditions were the specific and inevitable context in which our creative and intellectual processes would unfold, conditions that were as unique to us as were the conditions that defined and delimited the work of the Duke’s Company when it first performed Shadwell’s ver- sion of The Tempest at Dorset Garden in 1674. The symbiosis of music, dance, and drama in the Restoration Tempest, a symbiosis broadly characteristic of the most inventive and most popular Restoration versions of Shakespeare, was for us an invitation to be atten- tive in our theatre practice. We strove to explore how seventeenth-century stage conventions could be put ‘in play’ when scholars and artists work side by side to create contemporary performances of a historical perfor- mance genre. In so doing, we were mindful of our responsibility to use theatre practice to understand in an experiential and embodied way the intermedial nature of Restoration Shakespeare in a holistic performance event. To reflect our collaborative work, as we have done in this chapter, we have used words such as ‘attentive’ and ‘responsibility’. This implies an ethical dimension to our attempt to inhabit the syncopated time of per- forming Restoration Shakespeare today. The ethical demand of our con- temporary practice-led research was neither to fetishise the theatrical past nor to disregard it, but rather to place it alongside the present, and thereby come to know each through the other. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009241212.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press