Kissing in 1880s European theatre

[valancystar]

I'm writing a novel set in early 1880s in Finland, with a touring theatre troupe from Germany visiting a small regional town. I've been trying to find out whether, when there is a love story in a play, there would be any kissing between the actors on stage. I've searched with various combinations of stage/theatre and kiss/kissing, sometimes adding

Comments

[valancystar]

Yeah, the question is not so much whether it would be written out in the script but how it would actually be played on stage. I need to know what my characters are seeing, and this seems to be the difficult information to find... The material I've found seems to suggest kissing on stage was not common in the 19th century, but I have found very little information on the topic, so I don't know either how convincing the information was nor what they did instead when there was kissing in the text...

[kisforkurama]

I don't think I've ever outright kissed someone on stage, especially for something like that where it's super easy to do a "stage" kiss like this.

Which doesn't actually answer your question, but I figured it might be useful information.

[valancystar]

I'm not sure if realistic-looking kissing that is not actually full kissing on the lips is any better by the standards of proper or improper in that time, if it still looks like they're kissing. But might be useful information for future reference once I know whether kissing does happen at all or not. ;-)

[veradee]

During Shakespeare's time, props and set designs were very rare so that a lot of what nowadays would be shown was conveyed by the dialogue instead. Hence, Shakespeare's dialogues contain quite a lot of information that a modern playwright would put into the stage directions. That short excerpt you quoted reminds me of that, and I would imagine that during Shakespeare's time they didn't actually kiss but talked about it only.

Since your theatre troupe is German I've tried to think of German plays that were written before 1880 and included any kisses, but I can't think of any. I could well imagine that kisses were just alluded to but not shown during that time here.

[w_a_i_d]

That a lot of the stage business was conveyed in dialogue rather than in stage directions is true, and that is why when one character says, in effect, "I'm going to kiss you now!" and the next character's line is "Yep, you just kissed me!" as in the excerpt quoted, you can bet there was kissing.

A lot of Shakespeare scenes would not begin to work without kissing or some adequate representation of it. In this same play Juliet attempts suicide by kissing! "I will kiss thy lips; haply some poison yet doth hang on them To make me die with a restorative... thy lips are warm!" Not going to work if she's just sitting there staring at them, now is it?

Maybe 19th C Finnish audiences were too squeamish to handle even a staged kiss, but English Renaissance theatre certainly wasn't.

[technicolornina]

o/

Theatre major with interest in period theatre here.

There are several ways you can go with this:

1) Theatre as a whole has been considered "indecent" almost since it moved out of the church and the quem queritas tradition in the 10th-11th century. The concept of the "family play" to which you can take Grandma and the kids, such as Wicked or The Spectrum Six, is very new; although short plays for children existed for quite some time before the 20th century, theatre-as-we-know-it, with actors who are respected not just for their craft but as people outside the theatre, is an invention of the 1940s and 1950s (an excellent example of how women were treated in theatre prior to this, for example, is the 1930s musical-theatre number "Life Upon The Wicked Stage," which says in part: "Wild old men who give you jewels and sables/Only live in Aesop's Fables/Life upon the wicked stage/Ain't nothin' for a girl"). Realistically, your actors are not going to be going out with high-class people after the show--people will come to see them and

[valancystar]

Thank you so much! This was exactly the sort of stuff I was looking for! Those are good suggestions, I think I might go for the fan thing (and that's anyway useful to know about the modern costumes etc.).

While I know that acting was not considered all that respectable at the time anyway, the theatre director in my story has the idea that he at least tries to keep his troupe as respectable as possible - so he's going to avoid doing anything that would seem too indecent, I think. But I'll see how it plays out as I write - anyway, thanks a ton for the help!

[technicolornina]

You're very welcome ♥

Contemporary clothing onstage for period plays was starting to die out by the Victorian era, but especially for a traveling troupe, it still wouldn't be all that unusual for them to be wearing contemporary clothing (or anachronistic "period" clothing, e.g. a performance of Julius Caesar might have Portia in an actual dress or gown instead of a woman's toga), so feel free to abuse it within reason ;)

[syntinen_laulu]

you can insert a Genius Bonus by mentioning that she places her closed fan beneath her chin and looks directly at Romeo prior to the kiss. This is part of the Victorian Language of the Fan

And you can insert a bonus Genius Bonus by mentioning that the meaning of this gesture would be clear to the whole audience, as Fan Language was created by a famous 19th-century French fanmaker, Duvelleroy, who put a leaflet describing it in the box of every fan he sold, as a marketing gimmick. When a lady made a gesture with her fan, everybody else in the room would immediately register its meaning. (It is, of course, impossible that fan language can ever have been used as a means of secret communication; it would have been about as secret as semaphore or smoke signals.)