Harlequin Empire

Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment

David Worrall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317315483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Under the 1737 Licensing Act, Covent Garden, Dury Lane and regional Theatres Royal held a monopoly on the dramatic canon. This work explores the presentation of foreign cultures and ethnicities on the popular British stage from 1750 to 1840. It argues that this illegitimate stage was the site for a plebeian Enlightenment.

1 The Theatrical Network

DOI: 10.4324/9781315653242-ch-1

The network of theatres in Georgian English market towns, cathedral cities and newly industrial regions is indicative of the pervasive presence of drama. It represents the tangible physical infrastructure providing the precondition for drama’s dissemination. Unlike the circulating libraries, the playhouses could influence those who were illiterate or, in the case of pantomime, didn’t understand English. Outside of London, the provincial playhouses and players accumulated exponentially larger audiences. The social and built environment of towns and cities provided the means by which actors could engage in their profession and present the contemporary dramatic repertoire to the general population. By 1800, in Georgian England a network of provincial playhouses had developed, often in places now little visited by drama. It is important to remember that, certainly as far as the built environment is concerned, there were probably far more Georgian playhouses than there are regular theatrical venues in Britain today. Very few of today’s market towns can boast a theatrical season of between one and three months entirely dedicated to live drama performed by a regular company. However, the vestiges of these theatrical environments are fairly easy to find. In a few cases, such as Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, Stamford in Lincolnshire and Richmond in North Yorkshire, much of the Georgian interior or exterior – and even some scenery – has survived intact. Elsewhere, as at Grantham, Lincolnshire, the basic structure of the building survives but has been adapted to a modern purpose. The towns named thus far indicate some of the main differences between the modern and the Georgian dramatic world. Playhouses existed not only in the principal cities and embryonic conurbations, but also – overwhelmingly – in the English market towns. The single most comprehensive record of these playhouses comes in the form of an unpublished manuscript at the Houghton Library, Harvard University: a commonplace book compiled by James Winston, later manager of the Haymarket and Drury Lane.

Shortly before he became involved with the Haymarket, Winston assembled two volumes of prints and drawings plus a substantial commonplace book, probably put together between 1802 and 1805, listing and annotating provincial theatres – mainly covering England but with some remarks on Scotland, Wales and Ireland.¹ Winston probably compiled this document as part of a project to establish (or purchase) a provincial touring circuit, an idea he abandoned when his London career flourished. The immediate published outcome was the part work, The Theatric Tourist (1805), a series of etchings portraying a number of provincial theatres accompanied by notes describing the playhouse buildings, their history, ownership and current circumstances.² As well as being a book of theatrical topography, Winston intended it to be a guide wherein ‘Theatrical Professors … May Learn How To Chuse And Regulate Their Country Engagements’ and it should be considered as a precursor to Rede’s more functional, The Road to the Stage. Crucially, Winston’s commissioning of the topographical artist, Daniel Havell (d. c. 1826) produced a series of watercolours and prints which, together with Winston’s manuscript, provides a remarkable archive moving beyond the playhouses featured in the Theatric Tourist.³

Winston’s manuscript amounts to a ‘Domesday Book’, or census, of Georgian theatre. Not only did he carefully note the existence of theatrical circuits and touring companies moving between towns, he also recorded how and when theatres had been built, their current state of repair, admission prices and social environment. Winston was probably targeting Thomas Robertson’s circuit for purchase, which ranged from East Anglia up to North Yorkshire. Winston’s manuscript provides a comprehensive overview not only of Georgian theatre in provincial England but also of its economic and social background. The picture he presents illustrates the extraordinary distribution and tenacity of provincial theatricals. He notes that Lewes, Sussex, was a ‘Bad Town. Mostly Methodists’, and that in 1802 there had been ‘an execution on the Prem[i]s[es]’ of the theatre. If Lewes’s Methodists represented drama’s traditional enemies, at Yarmouth in Norfolk, English dissent was sufficiently varied for the seasonally rented theatre to be located in ‘A Chapel of or merely belonging to the Dutch Congregation’.⁴ Clearly, anti-theatrical religious sentiment was unevenly distributed across the country and possibly regionally differentiated. Elsewhere in Norfolk, Norwich’s White Swan playhouse, when superseded by a new theatre in 1758, was thereafter licensed by the Diocese of Norwich for use as a Dissenting meeting house.⁵ Audience enthusiasm varied too. Although the Rochdale theatre in Lancashire was housed ‘in a Woolpack Room at the Bottom of the Bridge’, Winston noted that the populace were ‘A[ll] theatre mad here’ and he similarly recorded that in Scarborough, Yorkshire, ‘Theatricals [are] much folld [sic] here’.⁶ The comedian Joe Cowell, recalling his career in England before his emigration to America, also remembered ‘Scarborough[’s] exclusively fashionable’ audience.⁷ On the other hand, although Winston thought Leeds in Yorkshire, ‘well situated for a summer Theatre’, it was ‘not hitherto (the Leeds people) [have] been used to a Decent Theatre’, and visits by touring companies were clearly unevenly spread.⁸ Louth in Lincolnshire was visited only ‘Once in two years’ (but with ‘Good Business’) while further up the coast at Whitby there were gaps of a year or more between visits.⁹ Perhaps the only features common to all these provincial playhouses were the comprehensive attempts at theatrical provision and the unpredictable patterns of its delivery.

However, the cumulative picture presented by Winston’s manuscript is one of a theatrical presence in every reasonably sized town able to boast a regular fair, marketplace or racecourse. The theatrical season was an enduring feature of provincial life. Fairs, markets and horse racing schedules were major factors deciding the provision of drama. Croydon in Surrey, now a London suburb, had a ‘Regular season [which] opens on the fair day – [for] about Two months’, while at Stamford in Lincolnshire, Winston commented ‘business at Races & fair is very good’ but not as lucrative as York recorded as taking ‘[£]518–10–6’ during one 1792 race week.¹⁰ Nevertheless, the York season was long, from the 1760s running from the first week of January until the third week of May and only contracting slightly in the 1790s, perhaps as a consequence of war.¹¹

While the York races and its Theatre Royal still thrive today, the agricultural fairs have disappeared from Croydon and Stamford, but they were important in starting theatrical careers. The tumbler or acrobat James Pack, who later played pantomimes at venues as varied as Drury Lane, Astley’s Amphitheatre, Richmond (Surrey) theatre and London’s Royalty Theatre, learned his trade in equestrian troupes visiting fairs across the whole of southern England, from Sudbury in Suffolk across to Nottingham, Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich and Worcester, as well as London’s Bartholomew Fair.¹² However, if the players at the agricultural fairs were transient, by the end of the eighteenth century provincial theatrical seasons were more regular and of longer duration. In a context where the two London patent houses ran so-called ‘winter seasons’ lasting from September to the end of June, even by the early 1800s, at the height of the war with France, seasons at some of the provincial playhouses were quite substantial.¹³ Croydon’s two-month season was at the upper end, but Huntingdon’s was for six weeks beginning in May, Boston’s for six weeks from the end of January, Peterborough’s for ‘7 weeks com[mencin]g in June’ and Spalding’s for one month in August. Wisbech’s ran for six weeks beginning from March but ‘theatre mad’ Rochdale accommodated a three month season.¹⁴ However, in parallel with these established circuits, including Tate Wilkinson’s substantial Yorkshire circuit based on York and Hull, there were concurrent layers of less formally organized theatrical enterprise.¹⁵

The existence of strolling players, a phenomenon persisting from Elizabethan England, substantially increased the availability of drama in Georgian England. At the lowest level were the puppeteers. In the late 1730s, a young adventurer such as James Wyatt could join a puppet-show in Plymouth merely on the promise of learning the trumpet, travelling all over England for four years before leaving to work in a touring menagerie and, thereafter, joining a naval privateer.¹⁶ But perhaps the most itinerant of all the performers were the troupes who aimed to coincide with the pattern of agricultural fairs. Leman Thomas Rede omitted ‘theatrical troops [sic], such as Richardson’s, Scowton’s, Holloway’s, &c. that visit fairs’, although Richardson’s show, at least on its visits to Bartholomew Fair, performed Tom, Logic, and Jerry, one of many adaptations of Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1820), and presented it together with a painted ‘panorama of the metropolis’.¹⁷ In embryonic form, Richardson’s company fulfilled the two main contentions of this book in that it disseminated the dramatic repertoire and coupled it to a simple didacticism. Such touring companies played a considerable role in introducing rural audiences to contemporary drama. One of their rare surviving playbills shows them playing ‘an entire new Melo Drama’ called The Italians; or Days of Yore (probably an adaptation of Richard Cumberland’s Days of Yore of 1796) played in tandem with Harlequin and the Dwarfs; or, Giants Castle and a ‘Grand Panorama’ of Lake Como.¹⁸ A caricature print from 1815 of Fairlop Fair, a boisterous gathering in Hainault Forest, Essex, founded in 1683 and continuing until its suppression in the nineteenth century, shows a booth belonging to ‘[?Richa]rdson’ with a playbill announcing the ‘new grand Farce L’Operatical … Pantomime call’d Hot Roll or Harlequin Dumplin [sic]’, illustrating the harlequin (complete with his slapstick) on the stage alongside the traditional pantomime Chinese character.¹⁹ However, perhaps a more reliable idea of the repertoire of the theatrical fairground companies is provided by the testimony of the comedian Peter Paterson who recalled his time playing Mathew Lewis’s, The Castle Spectre (1798) in a fairground booth near a ‘manufacturing town’, playing it as ‘the shape of an essence [of the original]… in twelve or thirteen minutes’, scenes which ‘in regular play-house … [would] take nearly three hours’.²⁰ It is clear from Paterson’s account that, although The Castle Spectre was heavily abridged, the company repeated it throughout the day, enormously multiplying the audiences encountering at least a smattering of Lewis’s Gothic. That such shows were important in the formation of actor’s lives and careers is confirmed by the actor Paul Bedford who was taken as a child to Lansdown Fair, Bath, where, he later wrote, ‘I first beheld the wonders of Richardson’s Show, and I believe it was then I imbibed the love of the art dramatic’.²¹ Like James Pack, Bedford’s first encounter with drama occurred at England’s rural fairs.

A level below the touring companies were the ‘Sharing Companies’, troupes who simply assembled under a manager and went ad hoc strolling. Although the scale of their presence is impossible to recover, they were clearly a widespread feature of the mid-Georgian cultural landscape. Rede observed that by the1820s, such outfits ‘once numerous in England … are, happily, becoming extinct’.²² Rede had misgivings about the lack of security and uncertain touring routes of such troupes, but these companies were perfectly adaptable to players’ needs since their ‘shares’ were simply proportions of the takings.²³ Mark Moore, an ex-naval officer who had served extensively overseas and returned to civilian life, married a woman who ‘sung well, and [had] … an excellent figure’, realized ‘the stage would be the best means of support’ and promptly joined a sharing company in Sudbury, Suffolk, with his ‘share’ designated in the proportions of ‘one for my music, one for my wife’s singing and acting, and one for my own acting’.²⁴ A memoir of one of these companies run by a manager called Lace comes in the form of a poem, William Johnson’s, The Effects of Strolling Playing; or, A Lesson to Dramatic Maniacs (1797), based on the author’s own experience of being a stroller or ‘mumper’. Although laid out as a poetical warning to others about the hardships of this way of life, particularly about privation and hunger, Johnson recalls its camaraderie with affection. The hardships were real enough. James Pack related that the company he was with was once so destitute ‘Our dog was starved, and his skin was taken off and sold to pay the turnpike on our way to Billericay Fair’.²⁵ Mark Moore’s shares only earned him and his wife four shillings a week (‘We endeavoured, however, to vegetate [sic] on this scanty allowance for the space of six weeks’).²⁶ At one point the company was forced to dine together on ‘one hearty feast – a sheep’s head boiled’.²⁷ The actress Ann Catherine Holbrook’s The Dramatist; or Memoirs of the Stage (Birmingham, 1809) recounted the effects of the incessant ‘journies’ necessitated by touring, the costs of which were borne by the players rather than by the manager. She reckoned that her own and her actor-husband’s salaries were reduced from £2.10s. a week to £1.6s.8d. because of the necessity of travelling in a post-chaise. Holbrook toured accompanied by her children, causing her to remark that ‘An Actress can never make her children comfortable; ill, or well’. Incredibly, at the beginning of their careers, the Holbrooks undertook ‘a very fatiguing voyage of six weeks’ from Bristol to a new engagement at Lancaster.²⁸ William Johnson’s fellow players were ‘tailors, cobblers, weavers, and the like’, several working under aliases, and if they arrived at a town without playbills, they simply got the local bell-man to announce their performances ‘“At the New Theatre,” perhaps a barn, / Or antique stable, built a century back, / Now ruinous, and crumbling into dust’.²⁹ Amongst the repertoire identifiable in Johnson’s account are Shakespeare’s Richard III, George Colman the Elder’s Haymarket play, The Manager in Distress: A Prelude (1780), Robert Dodsley’s Drury Lane farce, The King and Miller of Mansfield (1737) and John O’Keefe’s Haymarket comedy, The Prisoner at Large (1788), a piece whose date implies that Johnson was recollecting experiences as recent as the early 1790s.³⁰

Of course, such touring companies often encountered resistance from the authorities. While the theatrical network was comprehensive, drama was a cultural form local magistrates and religio...