Part One

The Hôtel de Bourgogne: Paris’s first theatre

Christa Williford

Part One Images

The first purpose-built public theatre in Paris was called the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Its name can be slightly confusing for English speakers. The term ‘Hôtel’, rather than indicating a place for visitors to stay a night, refers merely to a stately home, in this case the Parisian house of the noble family of Burgundy. This home once occupied the land on which the theatre was built, and so the theatre was named for it. By the time the theatre was erected on the site [SLIDE 1], it stood on the edge of the urban metropolis, not far from the city’s busy market district.

The religious fraternity called the Confrérie de la Passion (or Confraternity of the Passion) built the Bourgogne theatre in the year 1548 in order to have a place in which to produce religious drama. Unfortunately for them, in the same year, the French king banned the production of religious plays in Paris. In exchange for the inconvenience of being unable to use their theatre for the purpose for which it was designed, the king granted them a monopoly on the production of French language drama within the city.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the group had stopped producing their own work in favor of renting out their theatre to travelling companies. All troupes playing in Paris during this time were required to either rent the Bourgogne theatre from the Confraternity, or else pay them for the right to produce elsewhere.

What started as a frustrating enterprise turned out to be a long-term and very lucrative arrangement for the group, so it is not surprising that they used all the political pressure they could muster to hold their monopoly on French language theatre in Paris for as long as possible. The Confraternity never produced religious drama at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, but, as you will shortly see, Mediaeval religious theatre definitely influenced what took place on its stage well into the seventeenth century. For this reason, it is a good idea to understand a little bit about what Mediaeval French theatre was like.

Coincidentally, in the same year the Bourgogne theatre was built, a 25-day religious dramatic spectacle took place in the small French town of Valenciennes. This production has given us one of the very few illustrations of what Medieval staging was like in France [SLIDE 2].

You can see in this picture a series of ‘mansions’--small sets--erected on a low stage by the city walls. These structures established locations for various dramatic episodes drawn from Biblical tradition. The actors would have performed in the open space in front of the mansions [ANIMATION 1]. The mansion on the extreme left traditionally indicated heaven and the last mansion on the right was hell. The mansion for hell usually featured a scary 'hell mouth' into which actors playing the ‘damned’ would enter, accompanied by loud wailing and pyrotechnic effects. The mansions between heaven and hell were placed on stage as required for each day’s group of plays.

As is generally the case with Mediaeval art [SLIDE 3], there was no attempt in Mediaeval scenery to represent scale accurately, and newer ideas, such as representing distance through the use of perspective, were inconsistently applied. Just as with Mediaeval art, however, the conventions weren’t simplistic at all: the simultaneous representation of heaven, hell, and all sites in between, arranged in accordance with their relationships to one another on a scale of godliness to worldliness, was a constant visual reminder through performance of the theological concept of the universe the plays sought to depict.

While religious plays weren’t staged at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, a Mediaeval style of staging nevertheless remained influential there even into the seventeenth century. Numerous French and foreign troupes continued to rent the theatre temporarily until 1629, when the troupe that would later be known as the Comédiens du Roi (the King’s Players) was able to establish itself permanently at the theatre. It is in the records of this troupe of actors that we can see the continuing influence of Mediaeval ‘mansion’-style staging.

This company’s production manager, or décorateur, was named Laurent Mahelot, and he kept an assiduously illustrated account of stage sets for plays in the company’s large repertory. [SLIDES 4-8] His record, which we call the Mémoire de Mahelot, contains over forty illustrations of stage sets. Scholars believe that most of the drawings depict sets from around 1634.

In the Mémoire‘s drawings, one can see a curious blend of Mediaeval-style mansions with perspective painted backdrops. Set pieces representing homes, shops, towers, forests, mountains, and even bodies of water are arranged around a space. The audience could view all—or nearly all—the required set pieces for a single play simultaneously. One can imagine that an actor surrounded by so much scenery squeezed onto the theatre’s cramped stage would have struggled to have room to move about. Still, among the advantages of this convention was that neither significant backstage space nor the masking of a proscenium arch was required.

The innovations of Italian-style perspective scenery and machine-controlled simultaneous set changes, although not unknown in France at this time, would likely have been well beyond the means of even the troupe known as the King’s Players, who derived far more income from ticket sales than from royal patronage.

While they may have been conservative, it would be a mistake to dismiss the staging conventions at France’s first theatre as simplistic. The drawings and the accompanying descriptions in the Mémoire show that the Bourgogne actors, just as in the Mediaeval theatre, employed special effects.

The Bourgogne company used moveable set pieces and an upper stage similar to one employed in the English Elizabethan theatre. Also as in the English theatre they concealed and revealed areas upstage to heighten dramatic effect. As an example, here is a computer reconstruction for the set for Durval’s Agarite [ANIMATION 2]. During this play, stagehands raised a curtain to reveal a bed upstage, and this moved downstage on casters for one scene. Later in the play, a character made an escape by boarding a boat and being transported offstage.

While Mahelot’s Mémoire and a few other sources offer some evidence for staging practices at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, very little is known about the rest of the theatre’s early years, particularly in regard to the arrangement of its auditorium.

Sixteenth-century documents do make clear that like most urban buildings the theatre was rectangular in shape. The stage and auditorium together comprised 103 feet, 4 inches in length by 44 feet, 4 inches in width [SLIDE 9]. Even through this is a relatively small space for a public theatre, its auditorium was designed to achieve maximum capacity [SLIDE 10]. The raised stage at one end was small— the area for actors was particularly cramped given that the stage space also included dressing rooms and mansion-style scenery —but the floor level of the auditorium—denoted the parterre (or pit) was reserved for standing patrons.

As you might imagine, the parterre could be a rowdy place. Standing in the parterre meant that you jostled for position underneath the dripping chandeliers and sconces that remained fully lit throughout an evening’s performance: this was not the most comfortable situation in which to hear a play. Still, just as in the English theatre it was a popular place to be, particularly with young men.

[ANIMATION 3] Around the parterre were arranged at first possibly one gallery, then later two rows of boxes and above these a raked gallery, or amphitheatre, at the back. Women could be most respectably accommodated in the most expensive seats in the boxes, although there is some evidence that they frequented the upper galleries and amphitheatre as well, occasionally wearing veils or masks to conceal their identities.

While scholars have published differing views about the exact arrangement of the three main sections of the Bourgogne auditorium, the reconstruction you have just seen represents one widely held view of what the theatre looked like. Others have suggested that the original theatre’s boxes might have been curved or angled, providing better sightlines [SLIDE 11]. Unfortunately there is not enough evidence to support a definitive reconstruction.

After the 1630s, as theatre’s popularity grew in Paris, it became increasingly popular for the most well to do male patrons to take seats on the stage itself [SLIDE 12], restricting even further the space for the actors. It is important to remember that the Hôtel de Bourgogne--like the other, later public theatres in Paris such as the one shown here, the Guénégaud--was as much a place to be seen as it was a place to see a play.

This would have been especially true whenever King Louis XIII reserved use of the Bourgogne theatre for a command performance, such as is depicted in this illustration [SLIDE 13]. On this more genteel occasion you’ll note that wooden benches occupied the standing pit. You’ll also note that the advantage of comfort on the benches still did not guarantee the audience’s attentiveness to the play. Theatre—then as now—was a tough business.