4 - The ‘Understanding’ of Calisto

Summary

Thy falshood might support,

All the new Court,

Which shifts, and turns almost as oft as thou.

John Crowne's Calisto, rehearsed and performed at court between September 1674 and February 1675, was one of the most spectacular dramatic productions of the late seventeenth century. During this six-month period there were more than twenty rehearsals, some of which were open, and two official full-scale performances (sig. a2v). At an estimated cost of £5,000, excluding the thousands of pounds’ worth of jewels that adorned the costumes of the principal actresses, it was by far the most expensive theatrical project to grace the Restoration stage. It featured over a hundred performers, and it required the assistance of nearly 180 backstage hands. The costume for Diana featured over 20 yards of gold brocade, and even the outfit for one of the minor characters was decorated with 6,000 coloured swan feathers.

Calisto was performed in the Hall Theatre at Whitehall, which had been used for some dramatic productions under James I, and was the venue for the French pastoral Florimène (1635) under Charles I. While Calisto was described on the frontispiece to the libretto, published in 1675, as a ‘masque’, it had few characteristics in common with those masques produced by Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones and their contemporaries at the Jacobean and Caroline courts. Like these earlier productions, Calisto featured classical mythology, was acted in part by courtiers and courtesans and was staged at Whitehall. But in form Calisto was a fusion of a prologue, pastoral intermedii and an epilogue, with dances and songs interposed. The dances included ten entries performed mostly by French professionals – in the form of, among other things, sea gods, nymphs, carpenters, cupids, winds, gypsies, satyrs and Bacchuses – as well as sarabands performed by the court ladies. The elaborate and extensive physical staging of Calisto has been the subject of much informative research. Indeed, it is unrivalled among plays of the period for extant sources that illustrate the details of its production. Thus immersed, one of its first twentieth-century commentators declared Calisto to be ‘the culmination of the Court stage’; it was here that the modern reader could see the Carolean court and royal household ‘live and breathe again, going about their daily tasks and nightly pleasures’.