Because of its now notorious failure on the occasion of its first performances by the King’s Men at the Blackfriars Theatre in 1629 – when, by Jonson’s own account, the audience hissed at the chambermaid’s original name of ‘Cis’ – the stage history of The New Inn is brief. After those initial performances the play remained unperformed until 1903, when the Old Vic Theatre company staged a production at the Chelsea Arts club. The director was C. R. Ashbee, but no further details can be traced (H&S, 9.252) . However, in 1987 the Royal Shakespeare Company revived the play as part of the second season in the recently built Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. The director was John Caird, who had also directed Every Man In His Humour in the Swan’s opening season the previous year, and who was at that point establishing a reputation as an admirer of Jonson’s work. Caird’s production has received considerable attention from critics and theatre practitioners interested in how Jonsonian drama fares on the contemporary commercial stage, although the play continues to divide critics, performers, and audiences alike.

Caird placed The New Inn in an overtly Caroline context. The set and costumes were designed by Sue Blane, with whom he had collaborated on Every Man In His Humour. Costumes for The New Inn carefully recreated the laced corsetry, frills, and ruffs of Caroline high fashion (visible in the photographs from this production provided in the Performance Archive), a feature of which Jonson himself makes rich theatrical play in scenes such as 2.1, where Lady Frances Frampul struggles to lace her chambermaid Prudence into one of her own cast-off dresses. Detailed attention was paid to the dress and attire of élite characters such as Lady Frampul and Lord Lovel, but also to the parade of innworkers and guests who vividly populate the play in any performance. Sue Blane’s original designs for several of these are reproduced in Mulryne and Shewring (1989) , 18, 60, 92, 138.

Blane’s set for the Swan was a loving recreation of the interior of a 1629 inn, the walls and staircases of which were suggested by the cherrywood interior of the Swan Theatre itself. The main feature of the set was a large staircase positioned centrally on the stage, directly fronted by a small raised area which was self-consciously deployed at several moments in this metatheatrical production as a stage within a stage. John Carlisle, who took the role of Lord Lovel, commented on the ‘brave . . . staging’, in that this arrangement not only confined parts of the central performances to a limited playing area but was ‘set quite a long way back from the middle of the stage’, going against the grain of the actors’ preference for the use of the forestage (Mulryne and Shewring, 1989, 124) . However, the visual impact of the set was considerable, and dominated several reviewers’ responses to the production.

In response to the ‘busy-ness’ of Jonson’s plays (which Caird observes in Mulryne and Shewring, 68 ), Blane used sparing but suggestive props, such as tables and chairs that could be easily moved around, and utensils and vessels for the food and drink that was constantly carried on and off the stage by the inn workers. These contributed to a production with a highly active sense of spatial and social mobility. In addition, Blane provided visual signifiers responding to specific references within the play, such as the ‘rebus’ or ‘device’ of the inn-sign mentioned in the Host’s opening speech, which appeared both on the back wall of the Swan and as quasi-heraldic shields placed on the railings of the first gallery’s balconies. The Swan balconies partly face partly out onto the audience and were frequently used by actors for the delivery of lines down to or over the heads of actors on the main thrust stage, and the heraldic references were a subtle visual preparation for the later revelation of the Host’s aristocratic origins. Blane also noted that, in an effort to capture Jonson’s complex picture of Caroline society, the director used the full spatial scope of the Swan, taking advantage of its height and of the trap (Mulryne and Shewring, 88) . Actors appeared from all angles: from the top of the central staircase, from the sides, in upper galleries, and from rooms both offstage and ‘downstairs’. To further emphasize the metatheatrical resonances, the Host (Joseph O’Connor) at one point sat among the audience as he delivered the lines about The Light Heart being a theatre ‘where I imagine all the world’s a play’ (1.3.127-8).

The RSC’s voice-coach Cicely Berry felt that a ‘light touch’ was needed in handling Jonson’s language (Mulryne and Shewring, 155) . The real revelation for her in working on the play was how easily Lovel’s long neoplatonic ‘courtroom’ speeches flowed in performance, proving far more stage-worthy than cold readings of the play tended to imply. Unfortunately Caird’s production only had a limited run at the tail-end of the Swan’s second season. Although it was seen during the Newcastle-upon-Tyne season in 1988, it never transferred to London. Fiona Shaw comments that, in the Newcastle transfer, the impact of Sue Blane’s remarkable set was considerably reduced (Mulryne and Shewring, 131) .

Casting is often central to people’s responses to a performance, and this production was distinguished by a cast with considerable strength in depth. Lovel was played by RSC stalwart John Carlisle, and his counterpart in affection, Lady Frances Frampul, was Fiona Shaw, an equally high-profile casting. The significance of their pairing was emphasized as both also appeared in the same Swan season in James Shirley’s Caroline comedy Hyde Park, 1632 (full cast lists, which enable a cross-reading of the actors in both performances, are in Mulryne and Shewring , 170, 174). Different audience members for the 1987 performances have distinctly different memories of which parts were central. Some recall the Lovel-Frampul pairing as crucial, while others, including Richard Cave (in Cave et al, 1999 , 2), remember Prudence’s role as queen of the day’s revels as pivotal (Prudence was played by Deborah Findlay).

Almost all critics concur on how vividly the inn’s downstairs community was depicted, the workers who supplied the aristocratic guests with their food, drink, and gossip. This gave genuine point to scenes such as 3.1 which can seem confusing on the page. Once again, the cast list is instructive, since parts such as Ferret, Fly, and Pierce were played by actors of considerable ability (Peter Polycarpou, Clive Russell, and Sean Pertwee respectively). Many of the performers went on to build major reputations at the RSC and elsewhere, especially Richard McCabe, who gave a virtuoso, deliberately histrionic performance as Sir Glorious Tiptoe, and Gregory Doran, who played Lord Beaufort but is now better known as an RSC Associate Director.

Another defining aspect of the production was its music, by Guy Woolfenden. Woolfenden has commented on the importance of music to the play, and especially that with Lovel’s lyric poem, ‘It was a beauty that I saw’, the audience sees a song ‘written before our eyes’ (Mulryne and Shewring, 148) . He remarks that ‘It would be unthinkable to have a production of The New Inn without music’ (148). This production ended with the singing of the madrigal called for by Lovel in the closing lines (5.5.149-52). This was a conscious echo of Caird’s production of Every Man In, which had ended with a madrigal by the Elizabethan poet Richard Edwards. Here, though, the effect was significantly enhanced: performed by the whole company, Lovel’s song suggested a re-established social order and harmony. This ensemble creation of a ‘happy ending’ proved too sentimental for some, and at odds with Jonson’s more reserved judgement, but the directorial decision contributed to the debate about whether modern assumptions about Jonson are resistant to acknowledging the sentimental, and indeed the humanist, in his plays (see, for example, Potter, 1999 , 198).

By opting for the lace collars and Cavalier costumes, Caird’s production endorsed the critical view of The New Inn as an essentially Caroline play, embedded in neoplatonic discourse and themes. However, some of the costumes had an Elizabethan aspect, in particular Prudence’s attire for the ‘Court of Love’ scenes and the dress she unwittingly shares with Pinnacia Stuff, which Sue Blane described as a ‘deliberate allusion’ to Elizabeth I (Mulryne and Shewring, 88) . In this the production echoed current critical re-readings of the play as a dramatic exhibition of nostalgia for Elizabethan values (Barton, 1984, 300-20) . Critics have long commented on the centrality of costume to the play’s dynamics (for example, Partridge, 1957 ), and Blane’s designs reinforced this understanding of the semiotics of clothing. Blane remarked on the dramatic economy achieved by the fact that the glorious dress designed by Nick Stuff for Prudence as queen of the sports is purloined by him and his wife for fetishistic purposes, enabling one spectacular dress to serve two functions (Mulryne and Shewring, 88) . To emphasize the theatrical aspect of the day’s sports, Lady Frampul and Pru arrived carrying a significant stage prop: a dressing-up trunk.

Blane designed Pru’s outfit as mistress of the revels to evoke the spectacular attire of Elizabeth I’s portraits (Mulryne and Shewring, 88) . The recycling of Elizabeth’s dresses in the Stuart courts, specifically in the context of Christmas games and theatricals, was not uncommon: Clare McManus (2003) , 4 writes of the ‘ghostly discursive presence’ of Elizabeth I at the courts of Queen Anne and Henrietta Maria. Blane’s design thereby had historical precedents that gestured tantalizingly towards the possibility that the original Blackfriars performance could have played with Elizabethan sartorial iconography. Jonson had fallen foul of the authorities in representing Elizabeth onstage in Every Man Out of His Humour, and made similar comic play in Doll’s performance as the Fairy Queen in The Alchemist (Ostovich, 1992, 315-32) . Helen Ostovich argues that Every Man Out appropriates the conventions of Inns of Court revels in its creation of a ‘saturnalian fantasy-world; a mock-state with its own prince and court, proclamations, edicts, and progresses’ (Ostovich, 2001, 28-36, esp. 31) . The revels and Court of Love debates of The New Inn revisit the comical satires’ saturnalian world, although now with a feminocentric twist.

As well as signalling connections to Elizabethan humours drama, The New Inn displays an interest in romance conventions more familiar from Shakespeare’s late plays. Anne Barton’s 1984 study Ben Jonson, Dramatist explored these connections, suggesting that The New Inn responded to Jonson’s reading of the Shakespearean first folio. Barton’s theories were influential in the 1980s: they shaped the critical account of the play in Michael Hattaway’s 1984 Revels Plays edition (1984) , which drew parallels between the Host and Prospero, a connection which passed into the RSC revival. The romance elements of Caird’s production were acknowledged by director and critics alike. Caird said The New Inn ‘is much more personal than the rest of his plays, it’s really Jonson’s Tempest’, and Michael Billington described it as ‘The Tempest translated to a Barnet pub’ (Mulryne and Shewring, 68, 55) .

The choice of a Caroline setting further highlighted the play’s neoplatonic contexts and the questions they raise about élite female agency. Sue Blane’s concern that on paper ‘the Caroline setting and the platonic game playing . . . [were] very heavy handed’ (Mulryne and Shewring, 88) was answered by the play’s internal energies in performance. As Lady Frampul, Fiona Shaw resembled the female aristocrats painted by Van Dyck and Rubens around the time of the original production. However, Shaw’s experience of the role was far from positive. In an interview she declared: ‘I loathe Jonson’s work and have no wish ever to do any of his plays again’. She was dissatisfied with the role:

It’s fantasy. Unexplored fantasy. The play should have explored the neurotic situation of Lady Frampul far more. You are talking about people who have got so far away from themselves that the metaphor really works, they really don’t recognize each other. A man lives with his wife and doesn’t recognize her.

(Mulryne and Shewring, 133)

Despite Shaw’s frustrations, for many spectators the production successfully evoked the contained, highly literary, and aestheticized world of Caroline neoplatonism. English 17th-century neoplatonism was strongly influenced by French salon culture, where élite women were ‘worshipped’ in poetry by male ‘servants’ or suitors in a cerebral and non-sexual way (Veevers, 1989; Maclean, 1977 ). Although this production opted to expunge the word ‘servant’ from the text, preferring the more neutral ‘suitor’, John Carlisle’s Lovel was clearly one such melancholic servant of Lady Frampul. (This change is evident in the promptbook, now in the Shakespeare Institute Library, Stratford.)

Fiona Shaw does not dispute Jonson’s skill as a writer, but she dismisses The New Inn’s handling of romance: ‘It’s an old man’s play about a young man’s world. I really dislike the play. I can see absolutely why it was a failure when it first came out’ (Mulryne and Shewring, 132-3) . Richard Cave notes that although Shaw’s view has dominated the understanding of women in Jonson’s late drama, the story might have been different had Deborah Findlay been interviewed about her experience as Prudence, given her ‘sensitive playing’ of the part (Cave et al, 1999, 2) . Jonson’s representation of women has long been a site of critical debate, but the chambermaid is a strong female role in a play distinguished by its range of women characters, a feature of Jonson’s Caroline drama that suggests a changing theatrical context in the era of Henrietta Maria. Certainly, for many who saw the 1987 production, Prudence proved a role equally important to Lady Frampul’s.

Cave felt that the production underscored both Prudence’s ‘remarkable authority’ in the text and her function in Jonson’s exploration of social hierarchy, making her ‘a radical challenge to contemporary class distinction’ (Cave et al, 1999, 44) . In this respect, the inn setting functions in a manner similar to Jonson’s other mixed social spaces, such as the fair in Bartholomew Fair, providing a place for the ‘commingling of categories’ central to the Jonsonian carnivalesque (Stallybrass and White, 1986, 27) . The inn is a metatheatrical site, as the theatrum mundi references make clear (1.3.132-5, 2.1.39), and as Caird made evident in positioning the Host in the audience and self-consciously using a stage within the stage. This onstage stage was a raised dais where Prudence sat in state during the Court of Love sessions and where ‘the characters could severally be drawn in the final act as the various unmaskings, discoveries and revelations took place, as if to stress the deliberate theatricality of this series of possible closures to the play’ (Cave et al, 1999 , 51; see also Cave, 1991 , 168-71).

Lois Potter echoes Cave’s socially-inflected reading of the play’s ‘experiments with the blurring of social and theatrical hierarchy’, but qualifies his utopianism with the reflection that the most obvious moments of social blurring were also those of greatest hurt: ‘Fly’s embarrassment, the humiliation of Stuff and his wife whom even Pru refuses to save, Pru’s own suffering from her lady’s tongue-lashing, Beaufort’s cruelty to Laetitia’ (Potter, 1999, 200-1) . Blane’s grand staircase acted as a spatial marker that differentiated the play’s social groups. Elite characters retreated upwards to separate themselves from low elements in the inn; Lovel’s rooms, where he conducts his amateur scientific experiments (1.1.24-42), were offstage from the upper gallery, and he withdrew there in pain after the dissolution of the Court of Love. The world of the inn workers and the coach drivers was ‘downstairs’: they never ascended the grand staircase. Prudence and the Host, the play’s two transitional characters, were regularly placed halfway up the stairs as if to reinforce their mediatory role. Where characters stood often served as a signifier of their status or a prefiguring of their mobility (Prudence rises up the social ladder in her performance as a queen and through marriage to Lord Latimer), but it also served to mark intransigent, potentially cruel attitudes – from Beaufort’s haughty response to his new bride when he suspects she is of low birth (he had hitherto been only too anxious to ascend the staircase with her to bed) to the rough justice meted out to the Stuffs (who, in a more benign reading, had only been indulging in theatricals of their own). In one of the play’s more troubling versions of an onstage audience, ‘Lady Frampul’s entourage could survey the baiting of Pinnacia’ from the upper gallery (Cave et al, 1999, 51) .

Stage space was, then, highly significant, and the imaginative use of trapdoors further demarcated the off-stage spaces of elite characters from the inn workers’ cellars and kitchens (Sanders, 2003b) . Cave (69) describes this as an ensemble play, in which eye-contact between characters proves as revealing as speech. Stage-blocking proved equally revealing. Where characters were positioned told the audience much: the Host sitting with the spectators in Act 1 created an identification that endured throughout the performance. Lovel’s expositions on love and valour were delivered from the raised dais centre-stage, and the time-limited hearings of the court of love were underscored by the presence of an oversize hourglass. In the same scenes, Tiptoe, despite his egotistical dreams of governing the ‘citizen militia’ (2.4.31), found himself increasingly sidelined.

Critical responses to the production were varied, with the national press being more responsive than the local Stratford papers (the Shakespeare Institute Library carries the complete press cuttings). In The Financial Times, Michael Coveney suggested the play was ‘The Winter’s Tale meets Nicholas Nickleby’, noting the ‘Jonsonian intellectual tension between learning and hedonism’ and describing the speeches in the Court of Love as ‘among the finest things Jonson wrote’ (Mulryne and Shewring, 28- 9) . Irving Wardle enjoyed the ‘upstairs-downstairs’ staging. Critics were unanimous response in their regard for Sue Blane’s set. Michael Billington wrote: ‘I don’t think I have ever seen the Swan better used, in that the setting and the theatre became one’ (Mulryne and Shewring, 55) . Wayne Dowdeswell’s golden lighting further enhanced the continuum between play and theatre (Potter, 1999 , 198 notes that there had been a parallel mellowing in recent critical accounts of Jonson). Blane’s ingenious and deliberately busy wooden steps, stairs, tables, and trenchers melded seamlessly with the Swan’s cherrywood space, leading some to believe it was an integral part of the theatre rather than a temporary addition (Mulryne and Shewring, 26) . Critical opinions may have differed, but the use of different theatrical levels suggested perfectly the ‘upstairs-downstairs’ community of the inn, involving the audience in the action in a manner Jonson must have wished had been the case in the Blackfriars in 1629.