The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787–1832: The Road to the Stage

273 Pages·2007·67.87 MB·English

by  David Worrall (auth.)

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
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Titles illc/llde:
Scott Black
OF ESSAYS AND READING IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN
Claire Brock
THE FEMINIZATION OF FAME, 1750-1830
Brycchan Carey
BRITISH ABOLITIONISM AND THE RHETORIC OF SENSIBILITY
Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807
E. J Clery
THE FEMINIZATION DEBATE IN 18TH_CENTURY ENGLAND
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Adriana Craciun
BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Citizens of the World
Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson (editors)
LAND, NATION AND CULTURE, 1740-1840
Thinking the Republic of Taste
Ian Haywood
BLOODY ROMANTICISM
Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776-1832
Anthony S.Jarrells
BRITAIN'S BLOODLESS REVOLUTIONS
1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature
Mary Waters
BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE PROFESSION OF LITERARY CRITICISM,
1789-1832
David Worrall
THE POl.lTICS OF ROMANTIC THEATRICAl.ITY, 1787-1832
The Road to the Stage
Pa1grave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
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The Politics of Romantic
Theatricality, 1787-1832
The Road to the Stage
David Worrall
© David Worrall 2007
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007978-0-230-51802-5
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ISBN 978-1-349-35569-3 ISBN 978-0-230-80141-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230801417
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library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Worrall, David.
The politics of Romantic theatricality, 1787-1832 :the road to the stage1
by David Worrall.
p. cm. - (Palgrave studies in the Enlightenment, romanticism and
the cultures of print)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Musical theater-England-London-18th century. 2. Musical
theater-England-London-19th century. 3. Music and state
England-London-History. 4. Music-Social aspects-England
London. 5. Romanticism-England-London. I. Title.
ML1731.3.W672007
792.09421'033-dc22 2006052972
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
Transferred to Digital Printing 2008
Contents
Preface vi
Introduction 1
Busby, Burletta and BarnweIl: Music, Stage and Audience 19
2 Dramatic Topicality: Robert Merry's The Magician No Conjurer
and the 1791 Birmingham Riots 48
3 Blackface and Black Mask: The Benevolent Planters versus
Harlequill Mungo 68
4 Belles Lettres to Burlctta: William Henry Ireland as Fortune's
Fool 107
5 Tile Libertine Reclaimed: Burletta and the Cockney Presence 135
6 The Royal Amphitheatre and Olympic Tom and Jerry Burlettas 166
7 Moncrieff's Tom and Jerry and its Spin-Offs 190
Conclusion: The Canadian Tom and ferry Murder 206
Nores 211
Bibliography 244
Index 257
Preface
I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for research
leave in 2001-2002 which, together with a fellowship at the Hunt
ington Library, California, enabled me both to write Theatric Revolution:
Drama, CetlSorsllip and Romantic Period Subcultures, 1773-1832 (2006)
and complete the first half of Tile Politics of Romantic Theatricality,
1787-1832: The Road to tile Stage. Throughout, the British Library has
been a wonderfully functioning resource. I am also grateful to Lynda
Pratt for introducing me to the Hallward Library, Nottingham Univer
sity, where 1 first chanced across Leman Thomas Rede's extraordinary
Tile Road to the Stage, and to Stuart Sillars for supplying a photocopy of
the COll(essiollo(Charles French, the misguided Canadian who went to see
Tom and Jerry.
Nottingham Trent University and all my colleagues there provide
an ever supportive and encouraging environment. Through sun at the
Huntington, snow at the Houghton and spring at the Beinecke, Mei-Ying
Sung continues to be my loving companion in our journey through life.
,j
Introduction
The subtitle of this book is drawn from Leman Thomas Rede's TI,e Road to
the Stage; or, The Performer's Precepror(1827). Rede'sextraordinary volume
was not merely an acting manual of gesture and speech but offered
would-be players 'Clear and Ample Instructions for Obtaining Theatrical
Engagements,' together with details of the principal Georgian touring,
metropolitan and provincial companies, all supplemented with histor
ically invaluable advice about contemporary make-up and wigging. I It
is a remarkable work, bringing to light many forgotten performance
practices from a period of drama still relatively neglected by modern
scholars.
My purpose is to elucidate t he structural conditions of Romantic
period drama and to argue that - despite censorship and the imposition
of burletta - the playhouses managed to remain extraordinarily vital in
the midst of the oppressive conditions affecting writing for the stage.
Although not a primary concern, by contrast, a number of the canon
ical Romantic poets encountered - with amazing naivety - the legal,
institutional and regulatory mechanisms which impaired or even oblit
erated their efforts to find theatrical production on the London stage.
A principal aim of this book will be to show that drama outside o f the
two royal patent theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane developed
within what had virtually become a separate public sphere of drama,
an essentially popular or plebeian network of intricate intertextuality
largely cut off from the heritage of English spoken drama as exemplified
by Shakespeare.
Rede's The Road to the Stage, posthumously revised by his brother
in 1836 and republished in revised New York editions of 1858, 1859,
1861, 1864 and 1868, records the repertoire, playhouses and acting
practices of the early decades of the nineteenth century, all set out
2 The Politics of Romantic Theatricality
for the assistance of a new generation of actors and actresses on both
sides of the Atlantic. The Londoners who visited and acted in the urban
private theatres described in Chapter 6 were only one component in
a growing-class mobility connected to theatricality. The 'little painted
Trollop' the poet John Keats observed, costumed and ready to act at
the Minor private theatre in 1818, was part of the upwardly mobile
young population of London possessed of an active appetite for acting
and theatricality. As well as being present in Catherine Street off the
Strand when Keats was present, this theatrical propensity reached deep
into the provinces. The comedian Thomas Meadows's compilation of
new and abridged songs and sketches for amateur performance, Thespian
Gleanings (1805), printed in Ulverston, Cumberland, where Meadows
was associated with the local theatre, was sold by booksellers across
the whole of the north of England but dedicated to his local 'Society
of Strangers at Home, or, Theatrical Club.' In Ayr, Scotland, a theatre
company that had originally opened in a soap factory attracted the
great Edmund Kean to their new playhouse. Ayr theatre performances of
works such as Benjamin Webster's Tile Golden Fanner; 0', tile Last Crime:
A Domestic Drama (c.1832), a tale about a corn-chandler moonlighting
as a highwayman, are good indicators not only of local anti-farming,
anti-landowner sentiment but also how provincial theatres carefully
selected their repertoire from the lesser metropolitan playhouses such as
the Royal Coburg, Sadler's Wells and Pavilion Theatre where Webster's
play had already been performed.2
Works such as Thespian Gleanings are important because they denote
the new types of social configuration initiated by amateur performance
in the Romantic period, creating definable theatrical followings right
across the country and forming new types of sociability which some
times clearly transcended demarcations of class.) In 1820 a Shrewsbury
correspondent wrote to R.W. Elliston, manager of the Olympic and
Theatre Royal Drury Lane, recommending for employment (albeit only
in 'the lower walks of the Theatre'), a 20-year-old 'poor Laborer's Son'
then working as an 'out door' servant but who had 'completed a Stage
Scenery & Figures & performed [John C. Cross'sl Black Beard [18091 in
private families.'4 These plebeian enthusiasts, exactly the sort of theat
rical precursors of the Cockney literary vanguard reviews such as Black
wood's Edinburgh Magazine most feared, were almost certainly typical
purchasers of Rede's manual of acting.
As a 20·year-old, Rede had made his first stage appearance in 1819
at the theatre in Stafford in the English Midlands, playing Wilford in
George Colman the Younger's The Iron Chest (1796), a successful Drury
Introductioll 3
Lane adaptation of William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams; or, Things
as They Are (1794), earning his living by 'perpetrating[sic) divers melo
dramatic characters in the provinces.'5 By October 1821 he had travelled
to London and performed in I.R. PlanchC's unprinted Adelphi theatre
burletta, Capers at Canterbury (1821). Unlike earlier gUides to theatrical
employment, such as James Winston's Theatric Tourist (1805), Rede's
The Road to the Stage was full of practical information.6 It passed on
to newcomers such professional tricks as keeping 'a greased napkin' in
the iron chest so that Wilford can quickly wipe off his base make-up
colour of pomatum or carmine to affect the pallor of shock upon his
discovery by Sir Edward Mortimer, Colman's substitute for Godwin's
Falkland.7 Rede must also have been one of the first professional actors
to have witnessed T.P. Cooke's Monster in the founding Richard Brinsley
Peake, English Opera House (Lyceum), adaptation of Mary Shelley's
Frallkellstein, then renamed as Presumption! or, tile Fate of Frankenstein
(1823), passing on the understated advice that 'appearance may be the
main feature of [thel part' in the context of advising on make-up.s
He also gave warnings on such practical matters as the levels of fines
imposed by managers for professional misdemeanours (,For being obvi
ously intoxicated when engaged in the performance, one guinea') as
well as the likely salaries for varying categories of actor, for example,
the different rates of pay for 'First Old Men,' 'Walking Gentlemen'
('in Dublin even, not exceeding two guineas per week'), 'Fine Ladies -
Singing Chambermaids - Old Women - and Walking Ladies.'9 His
comments on acting opportunities for female players are particularly
important. He thought 'the system of modern education' had made 'First
Singing Ladies' 'more numerous than male vocalists,' suggesting that a
good general education was the best prerequisite for a profession that
regularly required actors to adapt swiftly, retain mobility and learn lines
rapidly. According to Rede's testimony, the attractions of becoming one
of the 'First Singing Ladies' were compelling: 'Any young lady embra
cing this line, and possessed of even a moderate share of talent, could
seldom lack a provincial engagement, and would stand excel1ent chance
of metropolitan distinction:iO This, indeed, was the coad to the stage.
One of the underlying propositions Oflhis book is that burletta, drama
set to music, was the dominant dramatic mode for the majority of
Romantic-period playhouses and for the London theatres in particular.
This was because burletta was the only dramatic form to have legal
meaning. The original insight into the role of burletta in the develOp
ment of Georgian drama was convincingly laid out in Joseph Donohue's
study of over 30 years ago, Theatre ill the Age of Keall (197S), yet its