The Restoration spectacular, also known as a machine play, was a type of theatre prevalent in the late 17th-century Restoration period. Spectaculars were elaborately staged, comprising such setups as action, music, dance, moveable scenery, baroque illusionistic painting, costumes, trapdoor tricks, and fireworks. They have endured a bad reputation as a vulgar contrast to the witty Restoration drama.
About Restoration spectacular in brief
The Restoration spectacular, also known as a machine play, was a type of theatre prevalent in the late 17th-century Restoration period. Spectaculars were elaborately staged, comprising such setups as action, music, dance, moveable scenery, baroque illusionistic painting, costumes, trapdoor tricks, and fireworks. Although they were popular with contemporary audiences, spectaculars have endured a bad reputation as a vulgar contrast to the witty Restoration drama. The spectacular is defined by the large number of sets and performers required, the vast sums of money invested, and the long preparation time needed. There are no extant drawings or descriptions of the theatre, although some documentation exists for court masques from the first half of the 17th century, notably Inigo Jones and his pupil John Webb. Inventors took great pains to hold on to their secrets, the playhouses guarded their machine workings as zealously as a magician or magician guards his tricks. What can be inferred from the visual experiences were only tenuously inferred from stage directions and stage directions. What was the floor trap, but was it an illusionistically painted figure worked with sticks, or a man in a crocodile suit? The crocodile etc. obviously used the floor Trap, but did it have a man working with sticks as well? The floor trap was used to trap the crocodile, or was it a man dressed as a croc? The trapdoor trap was also used to catch the crocodiles, but it is not clear if it was a man or a woman working as a man. The trap trap was a trapdoor to trap a large crocodile or a large man, or even a woman, working as an illusionistic painted figure.
The stage was equipped to fly at least four people independently, independently of each other, and had some very complex floor traps for such as Proteus, a lion, and ACACIA, a dragon, and so on. Theatre historians have despised the operatic spectaculars, perhaps influenced by John Dryden’s sour comments about expensive and tasteless \”scenes, machines, and empty operas\”. However, audiences loved the scenes and machines and operas, as Samuel Pepys’ diary shows. All plays of the period featured music and dancing and some scenery, most of them also songs. The true spectacular, of which Milhous counts only eight over the entire 1660–1700 Restoration period, was produced on a whole different scale. The first, The State of Innocence, was never staged, as his designated company, the King’s, had neither the capital nor the machinery for it: a dramatisation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The King’s Company’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane was not up to lakes of rolling fire; only the \”machine house\” at Dorset Garden was, and that belonged to the competition, the Duke’s Company. When the two companies had merged in the 1680s and Dryden had access to Dorset garden, he wrote one of the most visual and special-effects-ridden machine plays. The Cave of PROTEUS rises out of the Sea; it consists of several arches of Rock-work adorned with mother-of-pearl, coral, and abundance of shells of various kinds.
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This page is based on the article Restoration spectacular published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 11, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
