Kevin Elyot’s Forty Winks (2004) by Samuel Adamson

This blog post is by Samuel Adamson, the 2023 recipient of the Kevin Elyot Award; an annual award given to support a writer-in-residence at the Theatre Collection. It is given in memory of the renowned playwright, screenwriter and Bristol Drama alumnus, Kevin Elyot (1951-2014) and the influence he has had on writing and the Arts. The award has been generously funded by an endowment given to the University by members of Kevin’s family.  The endowment was gifted along with the Kevin Elyot Archive, which is held at the Theatre Collection, and comprises scripts, correspondence, manuscripts and publicity material detailing Elyot’s working process from initial idea to finished product.


A year or two ago I spent some time as writer-in-residence at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection researching the work of the playwright Kevin Elyot (1951-2014). Here is another article in response to Elyot’s archive. It’s about his play Forty Winks, which premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2004.

A general reflection on Elyot is here.

I’ve also written about Coming Clean (1982), My Night with Reg (1994), The Day I Stood Still (1998) and Mouth to Mouth (2001).


A sinister whisper

Forty Winks was the last of Kevin Elyot’s plays to be produced in his lifetime. The writing is typically arresting: Elyot’s dialogue thrums with menace, innuendo, resentment, and desire. But it is his oddest and most troubling work. Ian McHugh, whose play How to Curse I love, gets to the heart of the thing in an email he once sent to me:

Almost all the other plays have a capacity for really gutsy humour, but Forty Winks is like a sinister whisper. […] I like that it’s so chilling – that the protagonist’s transgressions are no longer ambiguous as in the previous two plays, that Don [the protagonist] really is beyond all forgiveness.1

I like the play less than McHugh. Ambiguity is central to much drama. I love a sinister whisper, but what do I do with it when it comes from a protagonist whose transgressions are unambiguous, from a man I cannot forgive?

Theorem

Elyot was an allusive writer, and Forty Winks has a key intertext in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema or Theorem (1968), that surreal, beautiful, almost wordless film about a Rimbaud-reading outsider played by Terence Stamp, who seduces and existentially transforms the father, mother, son, daughter and maid of a bourgeois Milanese household. Ambiguity gives the film its tension: are the characters’ transformations/epiphanies good or bad? When Stamp leaves the household, we are left with the disquieting images of the father screaming into the desert, the mother cruising young men, the son making paintings from his own urine, the daughter in the grip of a prolonged fairy-tale sleep, and, indelibly, the maid levitating then immolating herself. Our moral certainties are challenged.

The plot of Forty Winks resembles Theorem’s in that it has at its centre a charismatic and enigmatic visitor to a well-off family who seduces – or in this case has already seduced – each family member. Unlike Emerald Fennell, whose enjoyable film Saltburn (2023) has an identical premise, Elyot acknowledges Theorem as a source: he makes a showing of the film the formative event in the life of his outsider figure Don, who, untypically for Elyot, is heterosexual, and, typically, cannot let go of the past. The play is set largely in 1987, seventeen years after Don’s intense relationship with Diana when they were teenagers. Visiting her in her Hampstead garden, they recall their first ‘serious snog’ in ‘the back row of the Continental,’ the cinema at which, during ‘some Italian movie,’ they experienced an indefinable ‘something,’ an epiphany, perhaps, just like the characters in the film:

DIANA: […] Of course, I didn’t see most of it, but there was some nice Mozart and a dishy guy in tight trousers –

DON: Terence Stamp.

DIANA: – and a maid who levitated.

DON: Theorem.

DIANA: That’s the one.2

Elyot’s plot turns on a consequence of this cinema outing: Don got behind in his studies, shoplifted a book from which he cribbed to get an essay in on time, and was ratted on by a bully prefect, Howard Cape, who lied to their headmaster that Don was part of a gang of shoplifters. In 1987, Howard is married to Diana, and they have a fourteen-year-old daughter, Hermia, a narcoleptic who one afternoon a year earlier may or may not have been molested on Hampstead Heath as she slept.

Don arrives in the Capes’ garden bordering the Heath one Sunday just as they are preparing to go to a lakeside concert. We learn that Don is still inside Howard’s head as much as Howard is inside Don’s; that Diana still loves Don; that Howard’s gay younger brother Charlie, who suffers from angina and has dropped out of the family business to become – or fail to become – a playwright, has always held a torch for Don; and that Hermia has just returned from the hill on Hampstead Heath where the mysterious incident a year ago took place.

At first, Don seems charming. His inability to let Howard’s betrayals of him go is irrational, but many of us know the residual pain of schoolroom bullying, and Diana’s reignited desire for him, Charlie’s unrequited love for him, the names ‘Diana’ and ‘Hermia’, and the pastoral setting (garden, Heath) combine to fuel what seems at first a comedy of manners about misplaced love in the style of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or perhaps something darker, like A Winter’s Tale.

But at the end of the Scene Two sequence in the Capes’ garden, Don and fourteen-year-old Hermia are left alone when the others go to the concert. As, tellingly, Rossini’s Overture from The Thieving Magpie is heard from the Heath, Don stares at the sleeping Hermia. In the next scene, Scene Three, we make sense of the play’s short and mysterious Scene One, set some weeks after Scene Two, in which Diana visits Don in a hotel room after a funeral wanting to have sex with him, but leaves when she hears the sound of a thud from the bathroom, presuming it to be another woman.

We learn the funeral was Charlie’s. When he returned to the garden from the concert to collect his angina spray, he saw something that triggered a fatal heart attack: Don and Hermia together. The revelations continue: Don was there on the Heath a year earlier when something happened to the sleeping Hermia. And the thud from the hotel bathroom that Diana heard was the narcoleptic Hermia, falling to the floor as she fell asleep …

Diana does not know that Don’s lifelong obsession with her has led him to her daughter.

Play text published by Nick Hern Books

Don Juan

Forty Winks has a second key intertext, the legend of Don Juan, which surely inspired Pasolini and Fennell: the Terence Stamp and Barry Keoghan characters in Theorem and Saltburn are archetypal Don Juans to whom seduction is (or becomes) second nature. Again, Elyot makes the reference explicit: his Don is, well, named Don. In a Mouth to Mouth notebook, he told himself to ‘[l]oosen shoulders to write a bitchy bitter-sweet comedy about a bastard’ – and by the time he had started to plan Forty Winks, the legend was in the forefront of his mind:

Don Juan an inveterate liar – he takes EVERYONE in. As the play progresses, we GRADUALLY realize what a MASSIVE liar he is.3

In the same notebook, he quoted from Camus’ The Fall:

‘Above all do not believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them. If you should find yourself in this situation, do not hesitate: promise to be truthful + lie as best you can.’

He then asked himself if he should ‘[l]ink’ this

with a Don Juan type, a Teorema type? It transpires no-one knows who the Don Juan/Teorema person is, even tho’ he seems to be part of the group. This fact gradually becomes apparent.4

Plays arise from characters double-dealing and lying, to themselves and each other, and like all brave and exciting writers, Elyot dramatised such human defects without judgement, since judgement is the enemy of dramatic tension. When asked if he agreed that there was ‘a disturbing apparent absence of a moral standpoint on the central character, Don, and his dangerous obsession,’ Elyot answered,

Yes […] The protagonists in my earlier plays have been easier to identify with. With Don I wanted to get the audience on his side, and then reveal the truth about him.5

Such objectivity was the playwright’s dogma. He said to doctoral student Laurence Bathurst in 2001 that My Night with Reg ‘probably is about infidelity in general, in dishonesty and lying,’ and when asked whether there is any ‘judgement’ upon the ‘sexual activity of gay men’ in the play, was forthright: ‘I hope not. I hope that is something I have never done.’ He even schooled Bathurst on the difference between the creation of drama and its interpretation by academics and critics: ‘I find when I am writing this thesis,’ Bathurst said, ‘I am constantly thinking – am I making a judgement here? From what angle am I coming? Everybody comes from a particular angle.’ Elyot retorted: ‘But you have to draw conclusions because of the nature of your work. Maybe I don’t.’6

The Don Juan legend challenges an audience’s moral certainties when there is no authorial moral standpoint on a character whose pleasure-seeking is – this is the very point – self-serving and taboo-busting. In its more successful iterations, the audience is seduced: as Christopher Hampton says of his 1974 translation of Molière’s Don Juan, ‘The actor playing Don Juan should set himself a task: to seduce the audience. He should fail, but he probably won’t.’7 Byron’s poem has no trouble doing this because, wittily, he turns the seducer Don Juan into a naïf and makes him the seduced; George Bernard Shaw does something similar to his Don Juan, a comically harassed marriage-avoider, in Man and Superman. In Theorem and in Saltburn, the filmmakers diligently keep the audience seduced by the seducer – even as his seductions multiply and get more outrageous, even as Keoghan penetrates someone’s grave.

But Elyot’s Don is not Molière’s audience-seducer, Byron’s sexual innocent, Shaw’s commitment-phobe, Fennell’s grave-shagger or Terence Stamp at his most dishy. Given what he does to Hermia, this Don is more akin to the Don Juan in the founding text of the legend, Tirso de Molina’s The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, who as the play opens has disguised himself as Isabela’s husband to, in his word, ‘seduce’ her: our word can be, must be, ‘rape’.8 He is more like the Don in Thomas Shadwell’s 1675 treatment, who ‘fire[s] the hive’ of a nunnery to rape the fleeing nuns.9 Forty Winks is a deeply disturbing version of the legend, as there is no moral position on its Don Juan, yet he breaks society’s greatest taboo. (The play is cryptic, but there can be no doubt about it: it is even suggested in a climactic scene set sixteen years after the events in the garden and hotel room that Don’s obsession extends to Diana’s granddaughter).

Unambiguous

This unsettling and in my view flawed play had the worst notices of Elyot’s playwriting career. With its darker and more heterosexual landscape, it in fact represented a change in direction for Elyot, but few critics recognised Theorem as an intertext, none recognised Don Juan, and several saw a dramatist repeating himself – something Elyot feared, as evidenced by the insecure/blocked playwright characters in his plays, and by several poignant signs of vulnerability concerning this matter in his notebooks (though towards the end of his life he was unapologetic: ‘I’m beginning to believe now that you just end up writing different versions of the same play. I don’t think there’s anything bad in that’).10 Charles Spencer in The Daily Telegraph was unforgiving: ‘Elyot seems to be endlessly rewriting the same play, like a composer working endless variations on the same theme’.11 In The Observer, Susannah Clapp suggested My Night with Reg had ‘changed the theatrical ecology’ but that Elyot’s subsequent plays, with their ‘Reg-like themes’, were more of the same so less important.12

Other critics were dismayed not so much by Elyot’s subject – around this time there were many plays about child sexual abuse including Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, Alan Bennett’s The History Boys and Lucy Prebble’s The Sugar Syndrome – as by what they saw as Elyot’s reticence concerning his subject. In the New Statesman, Michael Portillo found the plot implausible, something he lamented because the play had ‘the makings of a really disturbing evening’ about the ‘shocking subject of paedophilia’.13 In the Financial Times Sarah Hemming wondered, ‘Although Elyot suggests the sickly desperation of obsession, he does not explore the true impact of it. Is Don just a deluded fantasist or is he a serious sex offender? There is a difference.’14 And a Times Literary Supplement review by Maria Margaronis is fascinating, because it recalls the disappointment expressed by the literary agent Peggy Ramsay about Elyot’s first play Coming Clean – Ramsay identified in Elyot a fear of ‘NOT fac[ing] the truth, right down to the lowest depths’.15 ‘[I]n the end,’ Margaronis wrote,

Elyot runs away from the complexities he has conjured up, slamming the door on them with a crude Hitchcockian revelation. The emotional suspense, the tissue of hopes and delusions are all undone with a kind of callousness, as if, like one of his ruefully self-critical characters, he wanted to smash what he had made, as if he thought he had to choose between clichéd irresolution and cool cynicism. He is a much better writer than that, at home like no other contemporary British playwright in the vertiginous space between lyricism and black humour. Next time, perhaps he will take risks instead of refuge.16

Sadly, except for one fascinating but perhaps unfinished, posthumously produced play, there was no next time.

I admire much about the writing in Forty Winks, not least its spareness – it is almost as laconic as Theorem. But it is the only one of Elyot’s plays that I think fails as drama – I tend to agree with Portillo, Hemmings and Margaronis that we do not really get into the mind and soul of the play’s abuser, and we certainly don’t see much of the consequences of his actions upon his victim(s). Don and Diana’s epiphany at Theorem, and the ways Don consumes each member of Diana’s family, lend a satisfying, Theorem-like ambiguity to proceedings – are their meetings with Don good or bad for them? But where Hermia is concerned, surely we have to conclude that her meetings with Don are unambiguously bad. Her narcolepsy gives her a whimsical quality that recalls the daughter’s catatonia in Theorem, the sleep and dreams of the quartet of lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the sixteen-year ‘death’ of Hermione in A Winter’s Tale (Hermia was played by Carey Mulligan in the original production, and I remember her being affecting and other-worldly). But this is a contrivance that makes her a mere fairy-tale child of the Heath, with no internal life, protected from the brutal reality of what is done to her by the romantic idea of ‘forty winks’.

Elyot wrote the plays he wanted to write. Once he’d delivered them, he rarely rewrote anything, because he’d chiselled his themes, characters and structures into the shapes he wanted over a long – and if the notebooks in the archive are anything to go by, torturous – writing process. Its original director Katie Mitchell argues that Forty Winks is not about child molestation, which she calls a metaphor for Elyot’s true subject:

how some people cannot escape the past, and are diminished by it, and do not live a full life because of it […] It is also about the family, death, and frustrated desire.17

This is surely true – Elyot was a Proustian, and My Night with Reg and The Day I Stood Still are masterpieces about the raptures and tyrannies of the past and their impact on the present. But Mitchell’s point only speaks to my objection that Hermia is a cog in the playwright’s engine. As an audience member at the Royal Court in 2004, and as a reader today, I was and remain vexed and frustrated by a play in the Don Juan tradition whose Don doesn’t challenge my moral certainties but supports them.


Forty Winks is published by Nick Hern Books. Other Kevin Elyot plays are available in this excellent collection. I prefer the stage play of My Night with Reg to the BBC film, in which the time tricks are less effective, but the film is an important document of the original production and its superb cast, and can be found on YouTube.


This work was inspired and developed through the generous support of the Kevin Elyot Award at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.


1 Ian McHugh, email to me, 1 May 2024.

2 Kevin Elyot, Forty Winks (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004), pp. 10, 15.

3 University of Bristol Theatre Collection (UBTC) KE/3/26/1, 1 of 3, p. 1 (– from the back); UBTC KE/3/29/2, 1 of 6, p. 32.

4 UBTC KE/3/29/2, 1 of 6, p. 22.

5 Elyot, quoted in Mireia Aragay and Pilar Zozaya, ‘Kevin Elyot’, in British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, ed. by Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte, Zozaya (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 71.

6 Elyot, Interview 20 August 2001, in Laurence Bathurst, ‘Contemporary Gay Drama: The End of a Modern Crusade?’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leicester, 2005), pp. 244-5.

7 Christopher Hampton, Introduction to Molière, Don Juan, trans. by Hampton (London: Faber, 1974), p. 18.

8 Tirso de Molina, The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, trans. by Gwynne Edwards (Oxford: Oxbow, 1986), pp.5-7, 11.

9 Thomas Shadwell, The Libertine, in Four Restoration Libertine Plays, ed. by Deborah Payne Fisk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 11, 74.

10 Elyot to Aragay and Zozaya in Aragay, Klein, Monforte and Zozaya, p. 70.

11 Charles Spencer, ‘A dramatist recycling himself’, Daily Telegraph, 5 November 2004, p. 22, UBTC KE/3/29/5.

12 Susannah Clapp, ‘Perchance to dream’, Observer, 7 November 2004, Review p. 10, UBTC KE/3/29/5.

13 Michael Portillo, ‘Friends reunited’, New Statesman, 15 November 2004, p. 44, UBTC KE/3/29/5.

14 Sarah Hemming, Financial Times, 17 November 2004, p. 15, UBTC KE/3/29/5.

15 Margaret Ramsay to Elyot, 17 November 1982, UBTC KE/3/5/13.

16 Maria Margaronis, ‘As happy as they’ll ever be’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 November 2004, p. 21, UBTC KE/3/29/5.

17 Katie Mitchell, quoted in Maria Shevtsosva, ‘On Directing: a Conversation with Katie Mitchell’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 1 (2006), pp. 3-18 (p. 16).

We’re Getting There – a belated update from the Firestarters team

In 2021, the Theatre Collection successfully applied for a Research Resources Award from Wellcome for the ‘Firestarters’ project to make available the archive of the arts organisation, Welfare State International (WSI). The project was developed in response to demand to explore WSI’s innovative methodologies from a broad spectrum of researchers and practitioners and the archive will provide evidence and inspiration for future research and practice.

Hello from the Firestarters (Welfare State International archive) team!

We are storming ahead to our ever-closer project deadline. We’ve been working hard cataloguing, digitising, rights management-ing, and we’re excited to reveal all – in time…

Taking up most of our time is the bulk of the task here – cataloguing – and so naturally our biggest news is that we have a full catalogue structure.

The overall catalogue structure

A large proportion of the Welfare State International archive – around 40% by our calculations – will be under WSI/5, or material related to the company’s productions. The widest range of material formats will also be available in this class, from handwritten and hand-drawn development notes to correspondence to scripts, scores, lyrics and technical drawings, as well as publicity material, press coverage, evaluations/reports and photographic/audiovisual material, providing a breadth of source material for understanding what it takes to run a complex arts organisation for so long, often reflecting changes in the financial, geographic and artistic landscape of British theatre since the 1960s.

Some of our team of volunteers working on cataloguing the collection

Alongside our team of volunteers, without whom this would not be possible, we are well on our way through our list of productions and have been able to publish(!) the catalogue entries for the first over-120 productions (see here). We’ll be adding more progressively as we go through the almost 500 productions on the catalogue. The vastness of WSI’s work meant that we, in consultation with and guided by John Fox and Sue Gill, developed a list of what we’ve called our “Key Productions” – 23 productions that we hope are most representative of WSI’s output, from large-scale pyrotechnics to sculptural exhibitions, cross-country tours to long residencies. For these productions, we have chosen to catalogue in greater detail than the others, with more records at item and file level, allowing for more in-depth search and greater scope for digitisation.

Poster for the Wild Windmill Gala (Haverhill, August 1982) WSI/5/3/37/4/1, available now on our Digital Archive

Joining the team last summer as our project Digitisation Officer, Simon Goldstein has been working through our catalogued material, making digital copies of photographic material (prints, slides, negatives) alongside documents we’ve selected for digitisation from our productions series – at last count, 3860 physical items have been digitally preserved. This will allow us not only to conserve vulnerable material but create copies accessible from around the world, unlocking the collection to researchers worldwide and bringing in a wider audience to the collection and work of the entire Theatre Collection. By the end of the project, anyone will be able to access these digital copies where they’re available through the online catalogue, with some material already available – especially noteworthy are the vibrant array of posters already uploaded onto our Digital Archive. As the archive catalogue grows, so too will the amount of digital material accessible.

Greater access to the collection through cataloguing has also kept us busy helping with archival engagement, with two notable groups from earlier this year being the different interdisciplinary research groups funded by the Brigstow Institute Seedcorn Awards and BA Graphic Design students from the University of the West of England – with both sets of groups responding to both the work of Welfare State International as well the materiality of the archival collection.

So – for the lowdown – we’re getting there! There’s much more to do, but we’re excited (if also a bit daunted) by the not-so-distant prospect of a full catalogue that will bring more people into the world of the Welfare State.

Till next time,

Billy Harvell-Smith, Archive Assistant, Firestarters (the Welfare State International archive)

Student Placement at the Theatre Collection: From Archive to Absurdity – Developing a Clowning Script

This academic year we have welcomed two 3rd year Theatre students to the Theatre Collection. They have each been researching in the archives in order to create an original script. This latest blog is by Keir, who has been inspired by the work of artist, performer, artistic director, and self-proclaimed ‘Art Gangster’ and mischief maker, Ian Smith.

Man wearing decorated black top hat and glasses, with  with large curved sideburn, fake pointed nose and exaggerated pointed eyebrow
Ian Smith as the ‘Vagabond King’ c.1985

As my placement with the Theatre Collection has progressed, my research has begun to take a more focused and creative direction. Building on the archival work I began in the first month, I’ve now started developing a clowning script inspired by Ian Smith’s darkly comic piece Christopher Chappell Kill to Live.

Smith’s work, subtitled ‘A Project Exploring Credibility of Cult Dogma’ was devised during his Expressive Arts course when he was a student at Brighton Polytechnic, so it’s a very early example of him working out his own practice of subverting genres. It was presented as a live pseudo-documentary with slides and music; the audience sat in the gallery as if they were the jury and Smith playing a murderer (Chappell). Smith used anecdotes based on composites of real events to maintain the premise of credibility even though the character was completely fictitious. The Ian Smith Archive contains evidence of his preparatory work, such as slides, documentary style notes and a project sketchbook, but there is no dramatic script as such. Smith’s characters relied on improvisation and his work emerges in equal parts surreal, subversive, and satirical. It struck me immediately as a compelling foundation for creative reinterpretation.

Using the different archival aspects of Smith’s 1980s performance, I chose to approach his work through the lens of clowning. This has meant embracing exaggeration, physicality, and the absurd in order to explore the piece’s darker themes of violence, disillusionment, and fanaticism in a way that is both playful and unsettling. The central character, now reimagined as Christopher Gigglegrave, blends Smith’s interest in cult leader charisma with my invented grotesque clown logic. This has allowed me to draw from traditional clown archetypes while responding to the specific tone and themes in Smith’s work.

Working with the archive has been more than a source of inspiration, it has become a dialogue. I’ve found myself questioning how to ‘respond’ to the material rather than replicate it. For instance, how do you adapt the rhythm and tone of Smith’s writing for a modern clowning context? How can archival materials be used to trigger moments of physical comedy, or inform the tempo and structure of a scene?

This process has also made me consider how the clown can act as a vehicle for confronting uncomfortable truths. In the world of Christopher Gigglegrave, laughter and violence sit side-by-side; a tension I’ve leaned into through both the writing and proposed performance style. The clown’s naivety and conviction allow space to explore dangerous ideas without endorsing them, using humour to create critical distance.

As my script continued to evolve, I became excited to keep mining the archive for ideas – whether it’s a throwaway line in a performance note, a stage direction that sparks an image, or an old flyer that suggests a tone. The placement has shown me how archival work can be a catalyst for new performance-making, not just a source of information, but a playground of possibility.

Into the Archive. Part 2: Chaos, Furies and Rebellion in the Antimasque

Hannah Dow is an English graduate who is interested in literature of the English Civil War. She has carried out research on Inigo Jones’s designs in the Richard Southern Collection at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection to further her own understanding of the role of the court masque in 17th century politics. She hopes that her posts will inspire others to delve into the fascinating materials held in the Southern Collection.

Over the course of February and March I made many trips to view the materials relating to Inigo Jones at the Theatre Collection hoping to understand what went through the minds of those who were lucky enough to witness the 17th century masque. In my previous post, I considered how the proscenium in Florimène channelled ideas which were of interest to the monarchy, whether personal or political. It is clear that the masque facilitated the celebration of the sovereign; by showcasing the idyllic harmony that could result from presiding authority, Inigo Jones’s stage designs reinforced the monarch’s perceived God-given right to rule. Though there is something more to be said about the masque’s dramatisation of the return to order after disorder. To have goodness, light and the reinstation of peace, there needs to be an initial source of evil, darkness and chaos. The triumph of good over evil seems simple (as indeed it was in earlier productions), however in this blog post I want to unpack this duality with the intention of revealing sources of rebellion which threatened to unravel the fabric of the Caroline masque.

This conflict between order and disorder is most vividly illuminated in the Queen’s masque Luminalia or The Festivall of Light (1638), written by Sir William Davenant. I must admit that it was this masque which dazzled me the most after reading about its production, for example, in the text for Luminalia we are provided with an enchanting description of the first scene: ‘the curtaine in an instant disappear’d discovering a Scene all of darknesse, the neerer part woody, and farther off more open with a calme River, that tooke the sha­dowes of the Trees by the light of the Moone, that ap­pear’d shining in the River’ (3). This description is brought to life in Jones’s set design which depicts a woodland landscape shaded in darkness, except for the light of the moon that is reflected in the river below. (Fig. 1.)

Fig. 1 Inigo Jones, Scene 1: Night in Luminalia (RS/018/0069)

The implementation of innovative lighting techniques was integral to the immersive feel of Luminalia. Jones used candles to mimic the light of the moon, making the audience feel as if they had just stepped into a painting. Though this scene may be alluring in its beauty and supposed tranquillity, we soon learn of rebels who lurk in the night as we are introduced to thieves, witches and even a ‘Devill in the shape of a Goat’ (11). These characters formed a section of the performance known as the antimasque, a brief period of disorder that was isolated from the main plot. Although these rebels rarely interacted with the masque’s main characters, they could still invoke a sense of unease in the audience, largely due to the fact that they took the form of monsters, witches, clowns and fools.

The antimasque, first introduced by the renowned poet and dramatist Ben Jonson in The Masque of Queens (1609), served a singular purpose as disorderly characters were only introduced so that they could ‘be dispelled, as if by magic, in the “discovery” action of the masque proper’ (Craig 181). In Luminalia, the antimasquers are dispelled by the light of the rising sun: ‘the Heaven began to bee enlightned as before the Sunne rising, and the Sceane was changed into a delicious prospect’ (13). Then suddenly, to the amusement of the audience, Aurora, played by Queen Henrietta Maria herself, descends from the heavens ‘in a Chariot touch’d with gold’ (13). Jones’s clouds (Figs. 2 and 3) were a product of complex stage engineering which allowed the Queen to literally descend from the painted heavenly realms above the stage. The combination of ethereal imagery and intricate stage machinery functioned to showcase ‘the innate capacity of the monarch to establish peace’ (Jenkinson 109), while also pointing to their ability to restore light after a period of darkness.

Fig. 2 Inigo Jones, Cloud Machines and Chariots (RS/017/0128)
Fig. 3 Inigo Jones, Cloud Machine in Luminalia (RS/018/0077)

When we get to Davenant’s Salmacida Spolia in 1640 however, this dazzling portrait of royal power would begin to fade in the eyes of spectators. Salmacida Spolia was the last of the court masques, before the events that culminated in the English Civil War (1642-1651) and the execution of King Charles I in 1649. So, it’s safe to say that tensions were high, especially since members of the parliamentary party were cast in the masque alongside the King in a rather awkward attempt at improving relations.

When the curtains parted, the audience were faced with the malicious Fury, Discord, appearing ‘in a storme, and by the Invocation of malignant spirits, proper to her evill use, having already put most of the world into disorder, endeavours to disturbe these parts, envying the blessings and Tranquility we have long enjoyed’. This depiction of unruly femininity is captured through Jones’s costume designs for the Furies (Fig. 4). Anne Daye compares these images to Jonson’s description of the original antimasquer in The Masque of Queens who appears ‘naked armed, barefooted, her frock tucked, her hair knotted and folded with vipers; in her hand a torch made of a dead man’s arm, lighted and girded with a snake’ (65, Orgel 125). It is unsurprising that monstrous women reoccur throughout antimasque iconography as, like the antimasquers, the female body was viewed as unruly due to its close alignment with the unrestrained forces of nature. By presenting women with snakes for hair, the costumes did a lot of work in rooting the masque’s disorder in an embodied vision of demonised femininity.

Fig. 4 Inigo Jones, Design for the Furies (RS/018/0113)

The storm which Discord inflicts is troubling for the masque as it leads to chaos and uproar amongst the people of the world. Arguably, the storm also held symbolic value beyond the stage as it represented the political turmoil that was brewing in England due to increasing tension between Charles and parliament. The masque was rather controversial in its execution of political symbolism; instead of following the convention whereby the antimasque’s disorder is attributed to a monstrous gang of rebels, the chaos of the storm becomes symbolically intertwined with the fury of civilians. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, then enters King Charles I in the role of Philogenes, ‘the lover of his people’, to save the day. In the masque, Charles’s character is admired for his ability to ‘endure/ To live, and governe in a sulleine age,/ When it is harder far to cure,/ The Peoples folly than resist their rage’. Although one could argue that Charles was reaching out a hand to his enraged parliamentarian opposers by seeking to resolve the conflict at hand (Butler 344), the word ‘cure’ here suggests an authoritative administration of order rather than democratic negotiation between the King and his subjects. It is likely that audience members would have been disillusioned or maybe even sceptical of Charles’s performance and the implied attempt at dispelling public uproar.

The resolution to the masque would be a difficult pill to swallow for audience members and parliamentarians alike, as it is through the commendation of Philogenes’ fortitude for enduring the wrath of his people that grants him help from the allegorical figures Genius and Concord. After Genius persuades Concord to assist the ‘great and wise Philogenes’ the stage is transformed through song and dance, symbolising the restoration of peace and harmony. The celebration of Philogenes’ ‘kingly patience’ promoted Charles’s peaceful approach to conflict and suggested that he would rather conciliate with than avenge his opposers (Butler 345). Such a message may have been more effective if it wasn’t accompanied by the usual theatrics of the masque where royal power is reinstated by Queen Henrietta descending from the heavens ‘with her martiall Ladies; and from over her head were darted lightsome Rayes that illuminated her seat’ (Fig. 5). Unfortunately, the light that emanated from this spectacle would not be enough to dispel the darkness that was awaiting beyond the stage as a civil war was brewing amongst the nation.

Fig. 5 Inigo Jones, The Cloud Open and the Queen’s Seat in Salmacida Spolia (RS/017/0128)

 

The prints I have presented to you in these two blog posts are only a glimpse into the Richard Southern Inigo Jones boxes at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection. There is much more work to be done into how these designs could illuminate political perspectives in interesting ways, and I hope I have inspired you to take a look for yourself. While finishing this post, I had the pleasure of meeting Elise, a PhD student in the Theatre Department at Bristol, who is researching ballet designs in the Julia Trevelyan Oman Archive at the Theatre Collection. We discussed how studying the materials of theatre, and the designers who made them, could bring innovative research methodologies to academic study in the arts. This conversation made me consider how the masque stands as a testament to the collaborative efforts of theatrical production as it draws our attention to all the different puzzle pieces that make up the stage. When researching early modern drama, whether it be on the court stage or the playhouse, we must not forget how the artistry of the set designer could enhance ideas or even reveal hidden meanings beyond the words of the playwright.

Works Cited

Butler, Martin. ‘The Caroline Crisis.’ The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture, Cambridge UP, 2008, pp. 321–357.

Craig, Hugh. ‘Jonson, the Antimasque and the ‘”Rules of Flattery”.’ The Politics of the Stuart Masque, edited by David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 176–196.

D’Avenant, William, Sir, 1606-1668. Luminalia, Or the Festivall of Light Personated in a Masque at Court, by the Queenes Majestie, and Her Ladies. on Shrovetuesday Night, 1637. , 1638. ProQuest, https://bris.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/books/luminalia-festivall-light-personated-masque-at/docview/2240875517/se-2.

D’Avenant, William, Sir, 1606-1668. Salmacida Spolia A Masque. Presented by the King and Queenes Majesties, at White-Hall, on Tuesday the 21. Day of Ianuary 1639. 1640. ProQuest, https://bris.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/books/salmacida-spolia-masque-presented-king-queenes/docview/2240899143/se-2.

Daye, Anne. ‘The Role of le Balet Comique in Forging the Stuart Masque: Part 2 Continuation.’ Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, vol. 33, no. 1, May 2015, pp. 50–69.

Jenkinson, Matthew. ‘The ‘Understanding’ of Calisto.’ Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660-1685, Boydell & Brewer, 2010, pp. 107–133.

Orgel, Stephen. Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques. Yale UP, 1969.

Into the Archive. Part 1: Peace, Putti and Harmony in the Court Masque

Hannah Dow is an English graduate who is interested in literature of the English Civil War. She has carried out research on Inigo Jones’s designs in the Richard Southern Collection at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection to further her own understanding of the role of the court masque in 17th-century politics. She hopes that her posts will inspire others to delve into the fascinating materials held in the Southern Collection.

Not much can compare to the dazzling spectacle known as the Stuart masque. For this form of courtly entertainment was characterised by intricate set designs, extravagant costumes and intriguing characters played by courtiers, members of the royal family and sometimes, even the monarch themself (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 King Charles I in Salmacida Spolia (RS/018/0120).

Unlike many plays and pageants of the early modern period, the masque was solely performed indoors and was, for the most part, reserved for an audience made up of the élite, although such occasions were surprisingly informal as there were often reports of audiences over-indulging in the merriment of the evening and actors drunk on wine. After taking a trip to the Theatre Collection to view the various prints of costumes and set designs by the 17th century architect and set designer Inigo Jones, I could not help but picture the scenes that befell the court as they witnessed this theatrical wonder by the flicker of candlelight.

The masque played a significant role in upholding Stuart mythology. Indeed, it is certain that these productions utilised the power of spectacle to showcase the virtues associated with the monarch and reinforce ‘kingly absolutism’ (Butler 21). In the words of Stephen Orgel, the masque was the ‘expression of the monarch’s will, the mirror of his mind’ (45, Illusion of Power). Though to view these entertainments as merely theatrical forms of royalist propaganda would be to overlook how they could stage tensions that arose in the narrative of the court in the lead up to the English Civil War. This is because the masque often ‘functioned at the intersection of rivalrous political discourses’ and could scrutinise the monarch in discreet ways (Bevington and Holbrook 9). Thus, rather than viewing spectators as passive recipients of courtly spectacle, we must consider the various meanings that could emerge beyond the intended staging and acknowledge ‘the heterogeneity of [the masque’s] receivers’ (Shohet 27). This perspective prompts a consideration of the complex ideas which could be transmitted through the aesthetics of the masque, and more importantly, the different ways in which audiences would have perceived them. I hope to illuminate these possible meanings by drawing on some of the interesting materials I came across at the Theatre Collection while searching through a box of Inigo Jones set and costume designs held as part of the Richard Southern Collection (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Inigo Jones Archive Boxes from the Richard Southern Collection: 1 (RS/17/1-166) and 2 (RS/18/1-128, RS/191/1-95).

My exploration of these holdings will consist of two blog posts. Post one will explore the role of the masque in celebrating the monarchy using Florimène as a case study; then post two will uncover how the imagery of the masque hinted at its eventual downfall. As a graduate of English Literature, it was a bit daunting to open an archive box full of images rather than texts. The experience made me think about how we often privilege the written word over visual artifacts when performing research into early modern drama. This became more apparent when I came across this stage design for Florimène (1635), a masque commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 Inigo Jones, The Proscenium Arch for Florimène (RS/018/0033).

I was mesmerised by what I soon found out to be called the ‘ornament’ or ‘proscenium’, also known as the arch which framed the stage. To investigate the meaning behind the intricate design, I searched Early English Books Online  to see if I could locate the text for the masque. But to my surprise, no play-text has survived except for an English summary of the French production.

Fortunately, during my second trip to the Theatre Collection, I came across this text in the Southern Collection, in a simple folder that had the words ‘THE ARGUMENT OF FLORIMENE’ inscribed on the front. Inside was a transcription of the English summary which proved to be very helpful in learning about this masque (Fig. 4). Though the fact that images of the set designs were preserved while the original play-text is lost to time points to how the artistic endeavours of the set designer could be favoured over the words of the playwright, whose identity in the case of Florimène is unknown.

Fig. 4 ‘The Argument of Florimène’ (RS/018/0047).

In typical pastoral fashion, the plot summary of Florimène describes a group of shepherds and shepherdesses who are caught up in a series of romantic entanglements and misunderstandings. The masque largely focuses on Filene who cross-dresses as a shepherdess in order to get closer to his love interest Florimène. However, Florimène has already attracted the interest of the shepherd Anfrize who suffers from the pains of love. Florimène’s desire for Filene and commitment to female constancy prompts her to make a trip to the temple of goddess Diana (Fig. 5), where she prays that she may take Filene as her suitor. Diana then acts as a kind of matchmaker to Florimène and the rest of the rural folk as she couples the pairs up so that gender disorder is resolved, and heterosexual harmony is restored. Such narratives where ‘love and chastity gained their divine rewards in the harmony of marriage and peace’ served court ideology by associating these ideals with the union between King Charles I and his French wife, Queen Henrietta Maria (Orgel 136, ‘Florimène’).

Fig. 5 The Temple of Diana in Florimène (RS/018/0036).

These ideas are visualised through the imagery on the arch encompassing the stage. Jerzy Limon observes how the proscenium served a similar function to the designs on the title page of a book by framing the story that is being told within and depicting emblematic images which point to key motifs of the masque (80-81). Returning to the image of the proscenium in fig. 3, we can see that love and stability are symbolised by the shepherdess and shepherd playing ‘rural instruments’ in musical harmony as the positioning of man and woman on either side of the stage materialises the reinstation of heterosexual relations at the end of the masque. Above them are visuals of what seem to be putti, half divine and half human infants (often portrayed with wings), who appear throughout Greco-Roman art to represent love. In the English summary, the putti are depicted as celebrating the harmonious outcome of the masque:

‘over [the shepherd and shepherdess are] Garlands held up by naked Boyes, as the prize of their Victory. Above all, ranne a large Freese, and in it children in severall postures, imitating the Pastorall Rights and sacrifices. (‘The Argument of Florimène’, RS/018/0047. See fig 4.).

It is interesting to think about how the proscenium might be imitating royal hierarchy through the positioning of the rural folk at the bottom of the arch and the semi-divine beings on top. This is because the monarch was closely aligned with divinity due to their belief in a God-given right to rule. The putti surround the title of the masque and name of its female protagonist “FLORIMENE which is placed in a ‘rich compartment’ at the top-centre of the proscenium (Fig. 4). This visual glorifies the female shepherdess Florimène whose commitment to the feminine ideal of constancy prompts her to seek divine guidance from Diana. The celebration of the shepherdesses’ virtue alongside the wisdom of divine authority can be translated into the ‘mutual rejoicing’ of the subject and monarch as Inigo Jones’s design follows the ‘court masques’ characteristic fêting of royalist order.’ (Shohet 2). Although the masque praised both the monarch and the subject alike, ultimately, the designs for Florimène were crafted to elevate the Queen. John Peacock, for example, states that the proscenium’s display of the shepherd and shepherdess figures recalls the designs that were found on the title pages of French pastoral romances of the period as he notes how like Florimène’s playwright, Jones was ‘working for the Queen in a French idiom’ (158). Florimène’s proscenium is a key example of how the aesthetics of the early masque seeped into royal iconography as Jones’s evocation of French theatre functioned to align the masque’s representation of divinely ordained virtue with the Queen.

The earlier pastoral masques that were commissioned by Henrietta Maria follow this format, with the proscenium doing much of the heavy work by reminding the audience of the peace and harmony that resulted from a higher power presiding over the land. Though this constant reminder of monarchical supremacy would soon leave a sour taste for the audience, as my next post will reflect on the making and breaking of royal image in the Stuart masque as we end on the brewing tempest that is Salmacida Spolia.

Works Cited

Bevington, David, and Peter Holbrook. ‘Introduction.’ The Politics of the Stuart Masque, Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 1–19.

Butler, Martin. ‘Courtly Negotiations.’ The Politics of the Stuart Masque, edited by David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 20–40.

Early English Books Online. Proquest, www.proquest.com/legacyredirect/eebo?rd=Y. Accessed 9 Apr. 2025.

Limon, Jerzy. ‘The Emblematic Masque.’ The Masque of Stuart Culture, Associate University Presses, 1990, pp. 52–91.

Orgel, Stephen. ‘Florimene and the Ante-masque.’ Renaissance Drama, vol. 4, 1971, pp. 135–153.

Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance. University of California Press, 1975.

Peacock, John. ‘The French Element in Inigo Jones’s Masque Designs.’ The Court Masque, edited by David Lindley, Manchester UP, 1984, pp. 149–168.

Shohet, Lauren. ‘Introduction.’ Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century, Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 1–36.

Early English Books Online. Proquestwww.proquest.com/legacyredirect/eebo?rd=Y. Accessed 9 Apr. 2025.