Thursday, April 22, 2010 - Richard Armitage as a Cavalier?? Quotes from RA on the topic...
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=LQJccq1fq2JM71vMWfvvCTpg26vtkp0ypvFyZTWTwvVcyJkxqZhn!-937560419!253925131?docId=5007672641
Magazine article by Lucy Worsley; History Today, Vol. 54, September 2004
Excerpt See below...
Reining Cavaliers: Lucy Worsley Discusses the Importance of the Art and Discipline of Horsemanship to the Men Who Became Known as the Cavaliers..........by Lucy Worsley
EVERYBODY HAS A MENTAL picture of the Cavaliers, the gorgeously-dressed supporters of Charles I. We see them through the eyes of Sir Anthony Van Dyck, as his portraits of the aristocrats of the Stuart court suggest a coherent group linked by their clothes, behaviour and ideology. However, the technical art of horsemanship from which they take their popular name is not widely understood. Manege, or the art of teaching horses to dance, was a spec tator sport requiring high expenditure and enormous specially-built riding houses, some of which survive to this day. Manege had a political significance that goes beyond its image as courtly pastime. Horsemanship was seen as a metaphor for the self-control of passion necessary for a courtier to make a graceful appearance in a life where an audience was never absent.
The popular impression of a Cavalier has as much to do with his clothes, courtesy and King Charles spaniels as it does with his politics. Macaulay described the 'courtesy, generosity, veracity, tenderness and respect for women' of the courtiers of Charles I. The group we call today the Cavalier poets--Richard Lovelace, Andrew Marvell and John Suckling--were a literary set writing about love and loyalty. They took an enthusiastic but informal "cavalier' attitude towards life. combining sensitivity and versatility with a love of beauty. 'To Amarantha, That She Would Dishevel Her Hair' is a title by Richard Lovelace, while Andrew Marvell pondered on 'The Definition of Love'. The careless, stylish arrogance of courtly Cavaliers such as the dashing Prince Rupert of the Rhine, seems all the more romantic if their later losses and sufferings are considered: many died on the battlefields of the first Civil War or in continental exile.
The term 'Cavalier' was originally one of abuse. It began to appear in the late 1630s, and came into common currency in about 1641 as the Civil War became imminent. It was widely used in Parliamentarian propaganda, along with the term 'Royalist' which was coined in 1643. Both sides sought to simplify the complicated conflicts of the Civil War by calling each other rude names. However, it has been many years since historians have seen the English Civil Wars as struggles between well-delineated parties of courtly Cavaliers versus Roundheads, opposing each other across a clearly defined ideological divide. Politically speaking, the Cavalier party did not exist, and the term is just a shorthand for a set of shared social attitudes.
Yet the horsemanship from which the Cavaliers take their soubriquet was more than a useful skill on the battlefield or an enjoyable one for the hunting field. It also included the more specialised art of manage (or 'mannage' as it was known in England), ancestor of the modern sport of dressage. After daily arduous training, the true seventeenth-century Cavalier's great horse could perform the astounding manoeuvres of an ariel ballet, the 'airs above the ground' (still practised by the white stallions of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna).
The greatest Cavalier of all was William Cavendish (1593-1676), Marquess (and from 1665, 1st Duke) of Newcastle. He perfectly matches the Cavalier's popular image: courageous, cultured, generous and doomed to failure in battle, He loved both the arts and women so much that his enemies criticised him for 'fornicating with the Nine Muses, or the Dean of York's daughters' when he should have been lighting during the Civil War. He impressed the Stuart court with his horsemanship, taught the future Charles II to ride and was general of the King's army in the north when war broke out. Famously defeated at the battle of Marston Moor in 1644, he spent the next fifteen years in continental exile. Here he married the remarkable Margaret Lucas, better known as the writer Margaret Cavendish. Samuel Pepys summed her up by saying 'the whole story of this lady is a romance, and all she doth is romantic'. He described 'her footmen in velvet coats, and herself in an antique dress' while John Evelyn, less sympathetically, found her dress so extravagant that 'She looked so like a Cavalier, But that she had no beard'.
In 1660, William and Margaret Cavendish returned to England in triumph at the restoration of William's former pupil, now Charles II, to the throne. Read this entire Magazine Article and more with a FREE trial.
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From Stage Magazine, link below : Spooks star Armitage plans return to stage
Published Thursday 22 April 2010 at 11:52 by Matthew Hemley
Spooks actor Richard Armitage is set to return to the theatre after a hiatus of almost a decade, with plans for the performer to appear in a new production of Restoration comedy The Rover.
Armitage, who started his career in theatre, made his last major appearance on stage in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2000/1 production of The Duchess of Malfi at the Barbican.
He subsequently took part in a rehearsed reading of a new play presented by the Operating Theatre Company in 2002, but has spent the last eight years focused on television.
Armitage is now hoping to make a return to the theatre and he told The Stage he was particularly keen to do some comedy, because his most recent roles have seen him appear in action-based TV dramas, such as Spooks and Robin Hood. His latest is the Sky One series Strike Back, which is based on Chris Ryan’s book.
The LAMDA-trained actor said he wanted to have a “bit more of a laugh” and revealed that one of the options he is considering is a new production of Aphra Behn’s The Rover.
He said: “I did it at drama school and it’s something that has come back on the horizon for me. It would be a great big bawdy romp through a carnival, with lots of sex and naughtiness. It would be very different for me.”
The actor revealed that the production is in the “early stages of development” and added he was looking to take a theatre role when the ninth series of Spooks finishes recording in July.
However, he ruled out an imminent return to musical theatre, where he started before his professional training at LAMDA. He said: “Things do come up occasionally, but I have not quite explored enough of classical theatre. And there are so many things I would like to do before I go back to it [musical theatre].”
http://www.thestage.co.uk/news/newsstory.php/27965/exclusive-spooks-star-armitage-plans-return
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Above was followed in April by this post entitled "Does RA Have an Affinity for Rakish Roles?"
http://allthingsrarmitage.blogspot.com/search?q=aphra+behn%27s+the+rover
http://allthingsrarmitage.blogspot.com/search/label/interview
RA mentioned in a recent interview the possibility that he might appear in the following restoration comedy. Is there another libertine in Richard‘s professional future? The male lead is indeed another rake…
The Rover or The Banish'd Cavaliers is a play in two parts written by the English author Aphra Behn. It was a very popular Restoration comedy.
Behn had famously worked as a spy for Charles II against the Dutch. However, Charles was slow to pay her for her services and slow to meet his promises, if he ever paid her at all, and Behn sought to make money first with her poetry, and then with plays and novels. The Rover appeared on the stage in 1677, and it was popular enough that a second part appeared in 1681. The play appeared for a long run, enabling Behn to make a fair income from it (the author received the proceeds from the box office every third night the play ran).
The "rover" of the play's title is Willmore, a rake and naval captain, who falls in love with a young woman named Hellena, who has set out to experience love before her brother sends her to a convent. Complications arise when Angellica Bianca, a famous courtesan who falls in love with Willmore, swears revenge on him for his betrayal. In another plot, Hellena's sister Florinda attempts to marry her true love, Colonel Belvile, rather than the man her brother has selected. The third major plot of the play deals with the provincial Blunt, who becomes convinced that a girl has fallen in love with him but is humiliated when she turns out to be a prostitute and a thief.
Contemporary feminist scholars often focus on the play's many instances of women vulnerable to rape, and the tragic results of Angellica's being jilted by Willmore. They see in these plot elements a protest against the powerlessness of women in Behn's time.
Willmore (who may have been a parallel to Charles II or John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester) proved to be an extremely popular character, and four years later Behn wrote a sequel to the play. King Charles II was himself a fan of The Rover, and received a private showing of the play. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rover_%28play%29
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http://thisgaudygildedstage.wordpress.com/category/restoration-and-18thc-sex/
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Aphra Behn: still a radical example: Three and a half centuries on, the Restoration's Mae West makes many of today's women writers look distinctly genteel. Whenever Aphra Behn is written about, Virginia Woolf's entreaty is usually pulled out to act as the opening line: "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
Behn had a few female contemporaries but, unlike her, they were aristocratic and certainly not doing anything as vulgar as writing for money. These hobbyist writers would also usually warn potential readers with a notice that the following work was written by a member of the "fair sex", as though apologising in advance. Aphra Behn made no such apologies. She did not ask for permission or acceptance - and it was because she did neither that she proved to be so popular among the ordinary playgoers whose opinion so often goes unrecorded. Operating with striking success outside gender conventions, it was she who paved the way for other women to do the same. What's more, she included as much wit and bawdiness as she could muster, along with a sharp insight into both sex and politics. She was the Restoration's very own combination of Dorothy Parker and Mae West.
...She had worked as a spy for King and country, served time in debtors' prison, and been called a slut as a writer, not just in her own time but by a whole series of (male) critics since. Here was a woman who did not just appease and beg to be allowed to write to earn a living.
On a previous blog on literary time travel, Aphra Behn was mentioned as someone whom it would be an adventure to visit. But what if we could bring her here, to the present, just for the day? What would she think of a traipse around the bookshops and the writing of noughties women; booksellers' tables groaning under the weight of pastel book covers that, far from defying convention and questioning and confronting, actually conform to the oldest patriarchal conventions? I'd like to think that her answer would be so bawdy and cutting that, even today, it would be unprintable.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/nov/13/aphrabehnstillaradicalexa
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The Rover - Southwark Playhouse, London: During the Restoration, the plays of Aphra Behn were as popular as those of Wycherley and Congreve. Now they are often perceived as curiosities despite Virginia Woolf's assertion that: "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn‚ for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
Review: The Rover - Southwark Playhouse - London
The women in The Rover use the carnival in Venice as an opportunity to win their heart's desire. Helena, whose brother has decided that she must enter a nunnery, dresses up as a Gypsy and then a page to win the love of the rover of the title, the philandering Willmore. Her sister, Florinda, defies her father and brother to marry the man she loves. It is an astonishing play for a woman to have written at that time, although there are limits to the women's agency: the courtesan Angellica remains a loser in this game of love and money, and you wonder how these lively women will fare within the confines of marriage. Behn wrote out of need, not because she was some kind of 17th-century proto-feminist, and her plays reflect the society of the time.
It would be good, however, to see a production of one of Behn's plays that subverts 17th-century theatrical and social convention, rather than playing to it. This isn't that production, although Naomi Jones's production has charm and freshness, particularly in the early intimate scenes that are played in the theatre's galleried bar area. Once in the theatre, the show never quite recovers its momentum, and the long traverse staging is hard on the audience and actors, many of whom do not have the technique to deal with the noise and a space that leeches energy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/09/the-rover-review
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Synopsis: In a collaboration between the BBC and the Women's Playhouse Trust, this is an opportunity to see the stage production of Aphra Behn's restoration comedy on video. The play chronicles the adventures and misadventures of a group of British cavalier mercenaries in Naples at carnival time. A robust, dynamic and sometimes brutal look at relationships, sexual desires and sexual favours.
http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/aphra+behn/the+rover/4157974/
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