Dorset Garden Theatre
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The Dorset Garden Theatre (also known as the Duke of York's Theatre, the Duke's Theatre and Dorset Gardens) was a theatre in Restoration London. It was the fourth home of the Duke's Company, one of the two patent theatre companies, from 1671 to 1682, and continued to be used by the United Company until 1695. It was renamed the Queen's Theatre in 1689, in honour of Queen Mary.
The theatre was demolished in 1720[1] and the site was used as a timber yard, and the City of London gas works. The site was the playground for the City of London School from 1883 to 1987.
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[edit] Background
After years of being banned in the Interregnum, theatre was again permitted on the Restoration of Charles II with the grant of two Letters Patent to two companies to perform "legitimate drama" in London. The Duke's Company was patronised by the Duke of York (later James II); the other patent theatre company, the King's Company enjoyed the patronage of his brother, Charles II. Both companies were briefly based, from 1660, in an old Jacobean theatre, the Cockpit Theatre (also known as the Phoenix Theatre) in Drury Lane. After a short period in the Salisbury Court Theatre, the Duke's Company moved in 1662 to Lincoln's Inn Fields, to a building on Portugal Street that was formerly Lisle's Tennis Court. The company remained there until 1671. Meanwhile, the King's Company moved to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where they stayed.
Following the death of the leader of the Duke's Company, the Poet Laureate, Sir William Davenant, in 1668, Thomas Betterton, a leading actor of the Duke's Company, took control of the company. He and the Davenant family decided to create a new purpose-built theatre, at a cost of some £9,000. Betterton had been to Paris and studied the grand baroque tragédies en machines that were the current sensation of the French theatrical scene, and the new theatre was designed to be a "machine house", capable of staging Restoration spectaculars.
[edit] The theatre
The theatre was built in the former grounds of Dorset House. The site was formerly occupied by a building owned by the Bishops of Salisbury, known as Salisbury Court; the Salisbury Court Theatre was close by. The property had been acquired by the Earls of Dorset in the early 1600s, but Dorset House was destroyed in the Great Fire. The site for the new theatre, by Dorset Stairs in Whitefriars next to the Thames, was slightly upstream from the outlet of the Fleet River. Its position by the Thames permitted the patrons of the theatre to travel to the theatre by boat, avoiding the nearby crime-ridden neighbourhood of Alsatia.
It is not known who designed the new theatre building, though tradition ascribes it to Sir Christopher Wren. It contained a central "pit", two tiers of seven boxes each holding twenty people, and an upper gallery, accommodating approximately 1,000 patrons. Betterton lived in an apartment on an upper floor.
The theatre was a great investment by the Duke's company. The interior was decorated in a very ornate style – its proscenium arch was decorated with carvings by Grinling Gibbons – but also contained many technical innovations. The Duke's Company had already been using moveable scenery to good effect in their previous playhouses, since it was first used by Davenant at Rutland House, using shutters in grooves, which could be quickly opened or closed to reveal a new backdrop, but Dorset Garden was also equipped to fly at least four people independently, and had some very complex floor traps (Milhous, p. 46). It was designed for staging Restoration spectaculars, and was the only playhouse in London capable of the effects these orgiastic spectacles required. It opened on 9 November 1671, and became the principal playhouse in London when the Theatre Royal burned down in January 1672. Its importance faded when a gigantic new Theatre Royal opened in March 1674, and the Duke's Company left in 1682 on its merger with the King's Company. Nevertheless, spectaculars continued at the Dorset Garden until the last, Henry Purcell's The Fairy-Queen (1691-1692), showed that the huge expense of putting on such productions had become impossible to recoup.
For non-musical drama, however, Dorset Garden was thought to be an inferior venue to its rival, the King's Company's playhouse at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. After the Duke's Men merged with the King's Men in 1682 to form the United Company, Dorset Garden was used for opera, music, and spectaculars exclusively, and from the 1690s it was used for other entertainments, such as wrestling, until it was demolished in the early 1700s.
A number of eminent people lived nearby: Aphra Behn in Dorset Street; John Dryden in Salisbury Square from 1673 to 1682; John Locke in Dorset Court in 1690.
[edit] Notes
- ^ One source incorrectly says 1709
[edit] References
- Milhous, Judith (1979). Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695–1708. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
