An Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance

Volume Two - From the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Age

Robert Leach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780415725163
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429873331
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

An Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance chronicles the history and development of theatre from the Roman era to the present day. As the most public of arts, theatre constantly interacted with changing social, political and intellectual movements and ideas, and Robert Leach's masterful work restores to the foreground of this evolution the contributions of women, gay people and ethnic minorities, as well as the theatres of the English regions, and of Wales and Scotland.

Highly illustrated chapters trace the development of theatre through major plays from each period; evaluations of playwrights; contemporary dramatic theory; acting and acting companies; dance and music; the theatre buildings themselves; and the audience, while also highlighting enduring features of British theatre, from comic gags to the use of props.

Continuing on from the Enlightenment, Volume Two of An Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance leads its readers from the drama and performances of the Industrial Revolution to the latest digital theatre. Moving from Punch and Judy, castle spectres and penny showmen to Modernism and Postdramatic Theatre, Leach's second volume triumphantly completes a collated account of all the British Theatre History knowledge anyone could ever need.

Part one

Theatre and the Industrial Revolution

Timeline

1 The rise of the ‘minors’

2 Gothic

3 Imperial extravaganza

4 Penny showmen

5 Drama of the Industrial Revolution

6 Acting in melodrama

7 Joseph Grimaldi and Regency pantomime

8 The struggle for a free stage

9 Blood tubs, penny gaffs and the theatre of the streets

10 Factory acts

11 Northern strollers

12 Free and easy

Select bibliography

Timeline

	Society and politics	Theatre
1760	George III accedes to the throne
1763		Half price riots: Drury Lane, Covent Garden
1764	Hargreaves’s spinning jenny
1765	Watt’s steam engine
1769		Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee
1770		The Spouters Companion published
1773	Boston Tea Party
1776	American Declaration of Independence
1779		Astley’s Amphitheatre opens
1780	Gordon Riots
1781		Stage debut of Joseph Grimaldi, aged two
1782		Royal Circus opens
1783	Pitt the Younger Prime Minister
1786	Trial of Warren Hastings
1787		Royalty Theatre opens
1789	Fall of the Bastille
1790	Third Anglo-Mysore War, India
1791	Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man Louis XVI flees, but is captured	Charles Dibdin’s Sans Souci Theatre opens
1792	Hastings acquitted	Holcroft, The Road to Ruin
1793	Execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette Committee of Public Safety Murder of Marat France declares war on Britain	Burke, The Ward of the Castle
1794	Danton and Robespierre executed End of the Terror Habeas Corpus suspended William Blake, Songs of Experience	Holcroft, Love’s Frailties
1797	Mutinies at Spithead and the Nore	Lewis, The Castle Spectre
1798	Battle of the Nile Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads	Richardson first shows at Bartholomew Fair
1799	Napoleon Bonaparte becomes First Consul Final defeat of Tipu Sultan in fourth Anglo-Mysore War
1800	Highland clearances begin
1801	Pitt resigns Addington Prime Minister
1802	Peace of Amiens	Holcroft, A Tale of Mystery
1803	War between Britain and France resumes
1804	Pitt becomes Prime Minister again Napoleon becomes Emperor of France	Sadler’s Wells first aquatic production, The Siege of Gibraltar
1805	Battle of Trafalgar	Master Betty appears at Drury Lane and Covent Garden
1806	Death of Pitt the Younger First steam-operated textile mill opens in Manchester	Sans Pareil and Olympic Theatres open Harlequin and Mother Goose, Covent Garden
1807	Slave trade made illegal
1808		Covent Garden burns down
1809		Drury Lane burns down OP Riots Elliston renames Royal Circus Surrey Theatre Death of Thomas Holcroft
1811	Regency begins First Luddite disturbances
1812	War between Britain and USA begins Napoleon invades Russia	Mrs Siddons retires
1813		Pocock, The Miller and His Men
1814	Treaty of Ghent Congress of Vienna
1815	Battle of Waterloo Treaty of Vienna Corn Laws passed	Coal Hole opens
1816		Scott, The Old Oak Chest
1817		Drury Lane Theatre lit by gas
1818	Mary Shelley, Frankenstein	Coburg Theatre opens
1819	Peterloo massacre	Mme Vestris in Giovanni in London Sans Pareil becomes Adelphi Theatre Moncrieff, The Lear of Private Life Elliston manager of Drury Lane
1820	Death of George III: George IV accedes Cato Street conspiracy	Planché, The Vampire
1821	Death of Napoleon	Moncrieff, Tom and Jerry
1823		Moncrieff, Cataract of the Ganges Joseph Grimaldi retires
1826		Ira Aldridge debut on British stage
1828	Duke of Wellington Prime Minister	Buckstone, Luke the Labourer
1829		Jerrold, Black-Ey’d Susan
1830	Death George IV: William IV accedes William Cobbett, Rural Rides	Mme Vestris manager of the Olympic Charles Kemble prosecutes Tottenham Street Theatre
1831	‘Captain Swing’ riots	Taylor, Swing, or Who Are the Incendiaries?
1832	Reform Act	Walker, The Factory Lad Parliamentary Select Committee under Bulwer’s chairmanship
1833		Dramatic Authors Act death of Edmund Kean
1834	Tolpuddle Martyrs transported Robert Peel Prime Minister
1835		Haines, My Poll and My Partner Joe
1836	Dickens, Pickwick Papers begins	Death of John Richardson
1837	Death of William IV: Queen Victoria accedes	Death of Joseph Grimaldi
1838		Polack, St Clair of the Isles Sam Wild takes control of ‘Old Wild’s’
1839	Charter rejected by Parliament	Vestris-Matthews management at Covent Garden
1840		Bolton Star Music Hall opens
1841		Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, opens
1842	Charter again rejected by Parliament	Pitt, The String of Pearls Renton Nicholson begins ‘Judge and Jury’ shows
1843		Theatres Regulation Act
1847		Covent Garden becomes Italian Opera House
1848	‘Year of Revolutions’ Charter again rejected by Parliament
1849		Canterbury Music Hall opens

Chapter 1: The rise of the ‘minors’

Britain divided

In 1810 the London theatre was brought to a standstill by rioting members of the Covent Garden audience, who demanded that the management return the prices of admission to what they had been before the catastrophic fire of 1808. After three months of bitter strife, the management backed down. The theatre gradually subsided back to normality. But the OP (‘Old Price’) Riots, as they were called, revealed a Britain – or a London – or a theatregoing public – bitterly divided into two factions: those who demanded a return to customary practice, the right of any man or woman to affect the theatre, and those who upheld a new realism, the right of the management to charge whatever price they pleased. In essence, the battle was between culture as a natural part of social life and culture as a commodity.

Only twenty years earlier the country had been more desperately split by the storming of the Bastille in Paris and the subsequent French Revolution. Those who believed in ‘the rights of man’ confronted those who argued for the right of the rulers to rule.

The division in Britain had opened gradually since 1689, when the king’s power had been counterbalanced with the interests of the people represented by Members of Parliament. But it gradually became clear that Parliament considered itself in no way bound to listen to ordinary people. In 1779 twenty people per week died of starvation in the London slums. Parliament hardly cared. MP’s interest was rooted in property, upon which the Whig notion of ‘freedom’ was founded. Those without property counted for nothing.

The Industrial Revolution and ‘the making of the working class’

The problems associated with this conviction were exacerbated as the century wore on by the unfolding Industrial Revolution. This transformed transport, with the opening of the Bridgewater canal in 1761; mass production, after the spinning jenny of Hargreaves in 1764; and energy production, after Watt’s 1765 steam engine, and, combined with the ongoing enclosure of English common land and the Highland clearances in Scotland, changed Britain utterly.

The developments were marked by ever more stormy political events, the result of the mismatch between Parliament and society. And from this whole came what E.P. Thompson called ‘the making of the working class’.

Political storms

The first signs of discontent were seen in John Wilkes’s impertinent rebelliousness in the early years of George III’s reign. In 1776 the United States declared its independence from Britain. In 1780 London was wrecked by the Gordon Riots, which did more damage to the capital in less than two weeks than the whole French Revolution did to Paris. And in 1789 came the fall of the Bastille, and the cataclysmic events which followed.

In Britain, the consequence was that the 1790s became a particularly virulent decade. Battle lines were drawn after Edmund Burke’s horrified Reflections on the French Revolution, published in 1790, was answered the following year by Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, arguing passionately in favour of the freedom sought by the Paris revolutionaries. Pro-revolution societies sprang up, most famously the London Corresponding Society, but also the Society of Friends of the Revolution, the Society for Constitutional Information, Thomas Muir’s Scottish Association of the Friends of the People and others, and for a few months the authorities seemed petrified.

The theatres became heavily involved in the arguments. In the month of August 1789 alone Astley’s staged Paris in an Uproar, or The Destruction of the Bastille; Sadler’s Wells presented a double bill of Gallic Freedom, or Vive la Liberté and Britannia’s Relief, and the Royal Circus staged The Triumph of Liberty, or The Destruction of the Bastille. The patent theatres were only stopped from staging similar pieces by the censor.

But in 1794 Habeas Corpus (the right not to be detained without charge or trial) was suspended, and leading radicals were put on trial for treason. In fact they were acquitted, to much popular rejoicing. But Pitt’s Two Acts against treason and seditious meetings, effectively broke up much of the pro-Jacobin opposition. But not all of it. In 1797 there was a run on the banks as well as a minor but frightening invasion of Wales by the French, and mutinies in the fleet at Spithead and the Nore. Richard Parker, leader of the Nore mutineers and ‘Admiral of the Floating Republic’, had connections with the French Jacobins and argued furiously for the democratisation of the fleet. In 1798 the United Irishmen, under Wolf Tone, rebelled, menacing the future of greater Britain itself.

Thomas Holcroft

Among the radicals tried and acquitted of treason in 1794 was the actor and playwright Thomas Holcroft, a singular force in the creation of a new kind of theatre. Born in 1745, Holcroft was, among other things, a stable boy and a cobbler before finding his way into the theatre, first as a strolling actor, then joining the Drury Lane company in 1777. He turned to writing, producing over the next decades large quantities of journalism, poetry, novels and plays, in which his radical opinions and democratic sentiments found expression. He was a friend of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft and was married four times.

Holcroft supported the French Girondists, though he believed also in non-violence and gradualism. He was a crusading atheist, a supporter of women’s rights, irascible and tenacious for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Part one: Theatre and the Industrial Revolution
• Part two: Romantic theatre
• Part three: Modernist theatre
• Part four: Commercial theatre
• Part five: Popular theatres
• Part six: Subsidised theatre
• Part seven: Postdramatic theatre
• Glossary
• Index