Drolleries

In September 1642, Parliament ordered the closure of London's theatres, though it was mainly through the protection and patronage of the court that they had survived this long. Early 1648 brought a tougher ordinance, making the theatre closure permanent and threatening any actors flouting it with fines, whippings and imprisonment. Although the Puritan authorities did not forbid the sale of printed plays, police harassment of public playhouses persisted throughout the 1650s. (Scanlon 346). In terms of more popular drama, a new shorter form of dramatic performance appeared, called interludes or "drolls". These drolls may be said to be short sketches or playlets, both comic and non-comic, simple in plot or language (though rhetorical and bombastic on occasion,) limited in cast and easily staged. With roots lying in medieval drama and folk entertainment, the majority of them were either direct reworkings of Elizabethan jigs or abridgements from Pre-Commonwealth drama. Partly in an attempt to circumvent the law and confuse officialdom, drolls were presented with other types of popular fare, including acrobatic routines, puppet-plays, horn-dancing, performing animals and the exhibiting of human "monsters." (Scanlon 347). The most famous droll actor at the Red Bull in the early 1650s was Robert Cox. Probably a "stroller" or country player before coming to London when the theatres were suppressed, he took the leading role in several skits which he had apparently put together himself. One of his best-known farces is Simpleton the Smith (Scanlon 348).

Many pieces of drollery “were obtained with much difficulty, and at a chargeable rate.” The fortunate possessor was elated to observe their pleasure and to pocket the penny that rewarded the exhibition. (Ebsworth ii). Your ballad-monger, your inventor of “cocks,” and your penny-a-liner for the prints that circulate amidst masses yielded a determined preference to falsehood on account of it leaving them such unrestricted play of fancy as may satisfy their self-conceit. So long as such catch-pennies circulated and attracted attention, the originators did not heed what amount of adulteration may have become mingled with a semblance of truth (Ebsworth xi-xii). Not even the large collection of celebrated “rump” ballads of 1660 and 1662 could show us how men thought and acted, murmured under oppression, and cherished a hope of revenge while the iron hand of despotism tried to fetter the nation (Ebsworth xiv). Several of these folk ballads show clear signs of broadside providence and accounts of rural festivities and seductions, toper's songs, and obscene satires are scattered profusely about (Friedman 285). Even though performances of drolls were on the edge of legality, the audience comprised of possibly not only common people, but also the upper classes of the society (Škrobánková 20). Even in 1875, Ebsworth’s opinion on women performing or reading drolleries was the following: “It is not expected that this volume of drolleries will ever be seen by anyone belonging to the gentler sex. Two or three pages, here or there, are sufficiently objectionable to cause it to be ‘banned and barred, forbidden fare.’ We may as well honestly declare our intense disgust at such things; coarse, ribald, and degraded, utterly destitute of humor as of excuse” (Ebsworth xxxviii).

When reading about jigs in literature, one can expect to find a reference to sex: ‘bawdy’, ’misorders’, ‘ribaldrous’, ’amourous.’ Dekker’s horrified description is as follows: I.. . as I haue often seene, after the finishing of some worthy Tragedy, or Catastrophe in the Open Theaters, that the Sceane after the Epilogue hath beene more blacke (about a nasty bawdy Iigge) than the most horrid Sceane in the Play was.' But the jig is not simply pornographic and potentially subversive; it is those things in virtue of its links to an older carnivalesque tradition which refused any sharp distinction between player and spectator. Baskerville understands the jig as a more or less direct transposition from an older folk tradition. If the clown was downgraded in the course of the play and limited to the lines written for him by the playwright, after the dramatic finale he issued forth to conduct a jig which established a more direct rapport with the audience. But even this reduced role was anathema to those attempting to produce a neo-classical theatre. By 1600 a liking for jigs already doomed one to share Polonius’s outdated tastes and, indeed, it is the submission of the theatre to definite canons of taste from the 1590s on, which marks a very significant break with popular tradition (MacCabe 9-10).