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Domenico Lovascio
Università degli Studi di Genova
Domenico Lovascio teaches English Literature at the University of Genoa. He is author of John Fletcher’s Rome: Questioning the Classics for the Revels Plays Companion Library series and editor of Fletcher and Massinger’s The False One for the Revels Plays series, both published in 2022 by Manchester University Press. He is the Italian advisor to the Oxford edition of The Complete Works of John Marston, a member of the editorial board of the journal Shakespeare, a contributor to the Lost Plays Database, and a contributing editor to the forthcoming editions of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd and The Collected Plays of Robert Greene. He also edited the Arden Early Modern Drama Guide to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, a special issue of Shakespeare on ‘Shakespeare: Visions of Rome’, and the collection of essays Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. In 2020 he received the Ben Jonson Discoveries Award for outstanding contribution to The Ben Jonson Journal. He is currently editing Thierry and Theodoret by Fletcher, Massinger and an unidentified collaborator for the Revels Plays.
John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The False One: A Blackfriars Play?
9 Giugno 2022
Sala Convegni - Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne
Despite the stage popularity of the plays of John Fletcher during the seventeenth century, no information concerning early performances of Fletcher and Massinger’s The False One (1620) survives, aside from its mention in a 1669 document enumerating a series of plays known to have been acted at the Blackfriars by the King’s Men.
This piece of information on its own, however, cannot qualify as cogent evidence that The False One was first staged as the Blackfriars: between 1608 and 1642, the King’s Men were as likely to stage plays at the Globe as at the Blackfriars, a performance duality testified by the versatile nature of the plays in their repertory, which had to be liable to be staged both outdoors and indoors. Yet, despite the lack of unambiguous evidence pointing towards one hypothesis or the other, this paper presents sufficient clues, both internal and external to the play, to argue confidently that Fletcher and Massinger probably envisioned the Blackfriars as the venue for the first performance of The False One.
This might seem counter-intuitive against a stereotyped notion of early modern Roman plays as specimens of theatrical entertainment seeking to offer playgoers spectacle on a grand scale, with a full apparatus of large armies, noisy onstage fights, long trains of people following the main characters, and loud sound effects. Yet The False One features little of all that: the scope of the play is narrow, as the scene remains in Alexandria throughout, mostly inside the royal palace; the final battle is announced and described but has little bearing upon stage business, and there is no resort to loud sounds.
Fletcher and Massinger seem to have emphasized elements of performance that can be more readily connected with the Blackfriars, the most important one being the masque of Nile, which would have leveraged the specific power of the Blackfriars more effectively than that of the Globe by virtue of the possibility to use props and lighting in more flexible and creative ways. In particular, the light of candles might have rendered the display of gold and glistening wealth in the masque all the more dazzling for both Caesar and the audience, thereby enhancing the effect of the scene and making wealth appear as a much more credible distraction from Cleopatra’s beauty for him. In addition, the decision to have a white Cleopatra may be explained partly on the grounds that the light of candles in an indoor playhouse would have had an unsatisfactory effect on artificially blackened skin: Cleopatra’s facial expressions would have been less easily intelligible, thus compromising her connection with playgoers.
Although it is impossible, in the absence of direct evidence, to establish with certainty where the play was first performed, this paper persuasively argues that Fletcher and Massinger probably penned The False One with the Blackfriars primarily in mind. By doing so, the paper provides an effective example of how the interplay between text and image and the dramatic uses of the visual and of props can be fruitfully explored to retrieve crucial information about the history of English drama.
