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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III PEPYS AND THE RESTORATION THEATRE Historically, the decade covered by Pepys's Diary is one of the most important in the development of .the English theatre. During the first few years after the Restorati... More

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III PEPYS AND THE RESTORATION THEATRE Historically, the decade covered by Pepys's Diary is one of the most important in the development of .the English theatre. During the first few years after the Restoration, improvements were introduced that took from the stage its essentially Elizabethan aspect and gave it those general features by which it is known today. From this standpoint, Pepys may be said to have witnessed the virtual modernization of the English theatre. To be sure, the stage itself, as in the pre-Restoration period, still projected in the shape of a platform into the pit. But on account of the regular employment of actresses for the women's parts, the general use of movable scenery, the elaboration of costumes and mechanical devices, the illumination of the stage by chandeliers of candles, and the cutting off of the front of the stage at the proscenium by flats or curtains, the Restoration theatre resembles that of our own day more closely than that of Shakespeare's. The placing in front of the pit of a regular band of musicians, with the growing tendency towards more ambitious music both during and between the acts, also contributed to "this transformation," as Professor Thorndike has called it, "from a half-medieval to a nearly modern stage."1 As for the auditorium of the Restoration playhouse, its plan was in general similar to that of the typical London theatre of the present time. - There was the pit- somewhat curtailed, to be sure, by the protrusion of the stage; above it the first tier of boxes with the King's box occupying the centre; then the so-called "middle gallery" with a few boxes also, perhaps, in the centre; and finally above that the shilling gallery with benches for the poorer class of playgoers. On nearly every one of the essential feat...

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