The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits. A fiasco such as Dryden's Albion and Albanius would involve a company in serious debt, while blockbusters like Thomas Shadwell's Psyche or Dryden's King Arthur would put it comfortably in the black for a long time.Restoration Spectacular, Wikipedia, last modified 17:31, 3 February 2006.
There are more parallels:
Previous generations of theatre historians have despised the operatic spectaculars, perhaps influenced by John Dryden's sour comments about expensive and tasteless "scenes, machines, and empty operas". However, audiences loved the scenes and machines and operas, as Samuel Pepys' diary shows. Dryden wrote several baroque machine plays himself.One of Dryden's plays was Paradise Lost, based on the epic poem by that arch-Puritan, John Milton:
...it called for "rebellious angels wheeling in the air, and seeming transfixed with thunderbolts" over "a lake of brimstone or rolling fire". The King's Company's playhouse in Drury Lane was not up to lakes of rolling fire; only the "machine house" at Dorset Garden was, and that belonged to the competition, the Duke's Company.I wonder if the audiences got the irony of a special effects production by people of the party Milton had opposed for many years, any more than they get the irony of Hollywood doing religious blockbusters. It's not clear that particular production ever got produced, but it seems that producers back then would produce anything that paid, just like today.
The one part that seems missing is attempts by the producers to game the legal, communications, and copyright systems to ensure themselves profits. Possibly that was more difficult back then, when there was no way to copy a production short of spending the money to produce it yourself. Or maybe they just weren't as creative in that direction as Hollywood and the music industry currently are.
Restoration theatre eventually died out, partly due to a change of political period, and perhaps even more due to the ever-increasing costs of competition. One of the last of these plays involved a twelve foot tall fountain and six dancing monkeys (not actors), but it didn't bring in much profit anyway.
Hollywood will either adapt eventually to some form of production that doesn't involve ever-higher costs for ever-larger blockbusters, or people will stop buying them and Hollywood will have to adapt. There's no reason we should continue letting copyrights be extended to save the mouse nor let broadcast flags be mandated for our computers to save the blockbuster when times will change anyway. It's not even good business risk management for Hollywood: a reaction to such measures will set in.
-jsq
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