Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin

Out of the Natural Order

Jane Goodall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134543861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre

Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin reveals the ways in which the major themes of evolution were taken up in the performing arts during Darwin's adult lifetime and in the generation after his death.
The period 1830-1900 was the formative period for evolutionary ideas. While scientists and theorists investigated the law and order of nature, show business was more concerned with what was out of the natural order. Missing links and throwbacks, freak taxonomies and exotic races were favourite subject matter for the burgeoning variety theatre movement. Focusing on popular theatre forms in London, New York and Paris, Jane Goodall shows how they were interwoven with the developing debate about human evolution.
With this book, Goodall contributes an important new angle to the debates surrounding the history of evolution. She reveals that, far from creating widespread culture shock, Darwinian theory tapped into some of the long-standing themes of popular performance and was a source for diverse and sometimes hilarious explorations.

1
OUT OF NATURAL HISTORY

I remember the Museum of Natural History. It was full of still bodies, staring at you with glass eyes on which a light coating of dust was sometimes visible. Here, the wild species of the world – eagle, polecat, rat, fox, kangaroo, zebra, penguin, deer – had been upholstered, like the armchairs of suburbia. There was no sign of death having done its work on them, either by violence or decomposition; death comes to the living, and it was hard to believe these creatures had ever been alive, though here and there a special effort had been made to suggest as much. A badger half emerged from a replica of what might have been its hole, constructed from materials which fairly imitated dried mud and grass. Tall jars filled with brown liquid contained lizards, snakes and frogs, their stomachs and the vulnerable undersides of their feet exposed against the glass. The suffocating quiet emanating from these creatures gave the place something of the muffled atmosphere of suburban sitting-rooms.

My grandfather was an entomologist, but as a child I was never drawn to the study of natural life. The museum had given such study an image of fustiness and perhaps an edge of fear, though not the dramatic fear of some threatening agency; rather the dull fear of confinement and suspended animation. There is an obvious perversity about this association of naturalism with suspended animation, a perversity that hinges on the exclusion of the element of performance. I first visited the theatre and the circus at the age of 6, and to these I was irresistibly drawn. They seemed like the antithesis of the museum, as in obvious ways they were, but it never occurred to me then that these institutions were radically bound up with each other in their histories.

When in 1675 the philosopher Leibnitz envisaged a new Academy of Sciences that would be ‘a theatre of nature and of art’, there was nothing radically unconventional about his idea. Such an academy, he suggested, would attract ‘holiday spectators’ to learn about new advances in science by presenting displays such as rope-dancing, conjuring tricks, Italian and French clowns, an English fire-eater, dancing horses, Pygmies, shadow plays, fiery dragons and Turkish comedy performances together with demonstrations of scientific instruments, anatomy displays and collections of shells, plants and minerals.¹ Leibnitz published this idea under the title ‘An Odd Thought Concerning a New Sort of Exhibition’. What was odd and new was not the mixture of performative and academic elements, but the scale of the enterprise and its design to appeal to a popular audience in order to make money. Here, Leibnitz anticipated P. T. Barnum and was perhaps ahead of his time, but in combining science with performance he was following tradition. These two domains were not easily separable in the medieval and early modern periods. Exhibition and display were inherently performative, and those who accumulated private collections as an expression of their curiosity about the natural world often included in them living marvels such as a dwarf, a giant or a menagerie of exotic beasts. Cabinets of curiosity were theatres of nature, where portents of strange and dramatic natural events made prize possessions.

Yet there is some irony in the timing of Leibnitz’s idea of combining human and animal performances with exhibitions of new scientific technology. The academies of science founded in Europe in the later seventeenth century approached the study of nature in technical and experimental ways that were not conducive to the culture of wonders, with all its performative dimensions. When Fellows of the Royal Society toured the showground areas of Bartholomew Fair seeking to study the prodigies and monstrosities assembled there amidst the jugglers and rope-dancers, they did so in a spirit of enquiry that was becoming sharply alienated from the spirit in which these monstrosities were displayed. In accordance with principles of study defined by Francis Bacon, the new scientists distanced themselves from popular attraction towards prodigies as ‘frivolous impostures for pleasure and strangeness’, in order to make ‘a substantial and severe collection of the heteroclites or irregulars of nature’.²

As changing interpretations of nature in the domains of science saw the demise of the culture of wonder in favour of a practice of ‘substantial and severe collection’, how did this impact upon the realms of performance and on performative interpretations of the natural order?³ My purpose in reviewing the historical relationship between performative and scientific traditions of display is to identify the forms of co-dependency operating between them, and to notice the tensions arising from this mutual dependence. These tensions surfaced during the scientific revolution of the late seventeenth century but they did not become critical until the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when evolutionary interpretations of nature began to take hold with a relentless programme of demystification. Versions of evolutionary theory arose in connection with anatomical research conducted in Paris by Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire early in the nineteenth century, and became the subject of widespread debate in scientific circles a generation before Darwin published The Origin of Species. By 1840 these theories were being taught at the major medical schools in Edinburgh and London.

At this time, there was a risk that a continuing adherence to wonders, marvels and monsters would relegate popular performance forms to the backwater of a folk culture that was coming to be seen as vulgar and moribund. There was also the alternative prospect that scientific modernisers might lose their battle against the superstitious ideas that had such a strong hold on the popular imagination. But these agonistic tensions did not settle into a set of simple dichotomies: modernity versus tradition, rationality versus superstition, natural order versus an outlandish theatre of wonders. What makes the history interesting is the breakdown of these dichotomies, as through the nineteenth century a responsive movement of reinterpretation takes place in popular performance, a movement that refuses to abandon monsters and marvels, but gives them a new lease of life. In the Victorian era, scientific views of natural history presented threats to the imaginative freedom of show business, but also opportunities for parody and performative elaboration. If prodigies and monsters of the fairground tradition were supposed to be ‘out of the natural order’, their modernised descendants in the circuses and freak shows were out of the natural order in another sense: that they emerged from the order of nature as it was modelled in the scientific museums and anatomy theatres, looming out of its interstices, filling its gaps and relentlessly evolving on their own terms.

Monstrosity in crisis

In 1840, an act permanently banning all forms of theatrical entertainment from Bartholomew Fair in London was implemented for the first time. Henceforth, the stage-players, rope-dancers, jugglers, puppeteers and all who ‘made show of motions and strange sights’ were excluded from the grounds near the gate of St Bartholomew’s Hospital where for seven centuries they had congregated. The most celebrated monster show in Europe had come to an end.

In the same year, the radical journal The Lancet published the texts of two lectures on monstrosity recently delivered to medical students of Middlesex Hospital. The lecturer, John North, was a specialist in obstetrics and his declared aim was to acquaint his students with recent research in an area where ‘a great blank in medical science’ had for too long been filled by ‘gross superstition and credulity’. In particular, North paid tribute to the pioneering work of Parisian anatomist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who a generation previously had demonstrated that ‘monstrosity is not, as was once believed, a disorder arising from the blind freaks of Nature, but that it is governed by constant and precise laws, and is capable of being submitted to a regular and scientific classification’.⁴ Saint-Hilaire’s interest in monsters was an extension of his concern with the progressive development of biological forms. What were traditionally called monsters, freaks or prodigies of nature were, he thought, symptoms of regression to an earlier organic type. A human born with a tail, or any mammal born with its limbs in an embryonic state, were ready examples. For the latter instance, North cited the case of a Miss Biffin, who toured the fairs for nearly twenty years and became celebrated for her ability to paint miniatures with a brush in her mouth or attached to her shoulder. Such anatomical anomalies were evidence to support a view of the natural order as engaged in a perpetual process of progressive organic change or ‘transformism’. Transformism was Saint-Hilaire’s word for evolution, a term which did not begin to gain general currency in scientific circles until the 1830s. The view of monstrosity as an occasional side effect of natural change was one that restricted the scope of conjecture so that, as North put it, ‘whimsical and absurd hypotheses’ could no longer hold sway.⁵ Even the most extreme anomalies were subject to the laws that governed all organic forms. John North’s students might expect to encounter Siamese twins, giants, six-legged cows or humans with tails during the course of their professional lives, but they need not expect to see flying horses, mermaids or satyrs.

North’s argument was not altogether new. As Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park point out in their book Wonders and the Order of Nature, historical research soon gives the lie to any linear story about monsters disappearing to be replaced by naturalised objects. Attacks on wonders and marvels go back many centuries in European culture: in the thirteenth century Albertus Magnus saw it as the task of wise men ‘to make wonders cease’. To the philosopher, Daston and Park comment, ‘monstrous births or the rare meteorological and topographical particulars that so amaze the layperson appear only as the necessary (if unforeseeable) effects of similar and universal causes’.⁶ By 1840, though, scientists were getting closer to the causes, so that North was not mounting a philosophical argument on principles but rather an explicit line of evidence-based interpretation. The threat to make wonders cease was becoming more immediate and more general.

The kind of popular credulity that was being discredited through new developments in anatomical research was typified in the culture of monstrosity at Bartholomew Fair. For centuries in Europe, monster displays were a major ingredient of popular show business. No fairground would have been complete without some kind of exhibition of monsters, whether real or faked, and such exhibitions played a major role in cultivating notions of monstrosity in the popular imagination. Monsters were most successfully exhibited as part of a show rather than as isolated spectacles, and they went especially well with displays of conjuring or acrobatics. A 1641 tract describing the activities of Bartholomew Fair gave some sense of the cumulative effect:

Here a Knave in a Fool’s Coat, with a trumpet sounding, or on a drum beating, invites you and would fain persuade you to see his puppets; there a Rogue like a Wild Woodman, or in an antick shape like an Incubus, desires your company to view his motion; on the other side Hocus Pocus with three yards of tape or ribbon in’s hand, showing his art of Legerdemain to the admiration and astonishment of a company of cockaloaches.⁷

Dwarfs, giants, fire-eaters, three-legged hens, jugglers, Siamese twins, dancing dogs, philosophical pigs and contortionists were alike prodigies, and the line between prodigies of nature and prodigies of enactment was always confused in the fairground.

Henry Morley, who published the first history of Bartholomew Fair in 1859, was concerned to explain why the term ‘monster’, in its original meaning, encapsulated something essential to the culture of the Fair: ‘A monster, according to the derivation of the word, means in the first sense a show, a thing to be pointed at, and in that first sense it was then used in Bartholomew Fair with a tie of the word to living wonders, such as the dog Toby, the dogs that dance the morrice, the eagle, the black wolf, the bull with five legs . . .’⁸ Shows worked their chemistry on audiences more or less successfully depending on the mix of acts they had managed to assemble. Monstrosity was an essential ingredient. Without it, a certain edge of strangeness was missing. Bizarre skills could amaze and surprise, but bizarre embodiments gave a sense that the body itself was a theatre of surprises. The earliest forms of English drama used monsters as catalytic presences: the dragon in the mummers’ plays; the hobby-horse in the pageants; the devil in the mystery plays. The devil was a favourite character in the play booths and puppet plays at Bartholomew Fair, where he was typically given the full monster treatment as a human/animal hybrid, with horns and a tail, a humped back and a capacity to generate ferocious energies. In the clash between the perspective of the modern anatomist and that of the popular performance tradition, much was at stake on both sides. John North’s matter-of-fact concept of ‘anatomical anomaly’ had the potential to dispel the powerful mystique attached to fairground monsters and prodigies. Anatomical anomalies could not play the same role as monstrosities and, besides, the explanations that accompanied them were a threat to the whole ethos of popular shows, for which ‘whimsical and absurd hypotheses’ such as John North condemned were a kind of life-support system.

A performative display of strange embodiments was an invitation to the game of imagined possibilities, as, for example, with the case of ‘Bold Grimace Spaniard’, a successful act that played on the semimythical stories of exploration and discovery in vogue at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Bold Grimace, it was claimed,

lived 15 years among wild creatures in the Mountains, and is reasonably supos’d to have been taken out of his cradle, an Infant, by some savage Beast, and wonderfully preserved, ’till some Comedians accidentally pass’d through those parts, and perceiving him to be of human Race, pursued him to his Cave, where they caught him in a Net. They found something wonderful in his Nature, and took him with them on their Travels.

The promotional description in this handbill is an essential preparation for the audience, evoking as it does the coalescence of mismatched organic forms:

He performs the following surprising Grimaces, viz.: He lolls out his tongue a foot long, turns his eyes in and out at the same time; contracts his face as small as an Apple; extends his mouth six Inches, and turns it into the shape of a Bird’s Beak, his eyes like to an Owl’s . . . licks his nose with his tongue like a Cow.

This was clearly an example of monstrosity by enactment, and the display of hybridity included mixing genres of performance. After his contortionary excesses, the Bold Grimacer would ‘sing wonderfully fine’, accompanying himself on the lute.⁹

Prodigies could be faked to suit an imagined preconception, but the prodigy status of actual exotic species could also be enhanced through imaginative construction. A cassowary exhibited at around the same time as the wild Spaniard was promoted as ‘the strangest creature in the Universe, being half a Bird and Beast . . . his head is like a Bird, and so is his Feet . . . his Body is like to the Body of a Deer; instead of feathers, his fore-part is covered with Hair like an Ox, his hinder part with a double feather of one Quill; he eats Iron, Steel or Stones’.¹⁰ As a way of imaging the cassowary, this involves a fertile sense of hypothesis. Exotic animals with body forms never seen before in Europe were potential evidence that the most bizarre and wonderful combinations of animal types could indeed occur in the natural world.

After all, even the most sceptical scientists sometimes found themselves profoundly challenged by new discoveries brought back from expeditions to distant continents. George Shaw, keeper of the Natural History Department of the British Museum, received the body of a platypus from Australia in the 1790s, and described it in terms that would have graced a fairground handbill. It was, he pronounced, ‘of all the Mammalia yet known . . . the most extraordinary in its conformation; exhibiting the perfect resemblance of the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped’.¹¹ Shaw had put himself in an awkward position by establishing a reputation for hard-line orthodoxy in classification. He refused to believe in the Dodo, and declared that what was not in Linnaeus did not exist.¹² When it came to the problem of the platypus, he commented that it was impossible ‘not to entertain some doubts as to the genuine nature of the animal, and to surmise that there might have been practised some arts of deception in its structure’.¹³ On the other side of the fence, those who practised such artifice as a way of earning a living were significantly advantaged by the confusion that genuine cases were able to cause. Such cases helped to create a reception for fairground presentations like the ‘strange monstrous creature brought from the Coast of Brazil, having a head like a Child, legs and Arms very wonderful, with a long tail like a serpent, wherewith he feeds himself, as an elephant doth with his trunk’.¹⁴ The reader in our own times can only speculate as to where nature ended, artifice began, performance embellished and inventive description took over in the composition of this creature.

By 1840, though, the monster tradition appeared to be finally on its way out. A new generation of students was being taught that even monsters were subject to ‘the general laws and principles of organization’, of which the first and foremost was ‘that of the unity of organic composition’.¹⁵ While the life sciences were establishing firm limits to the potential for heterogeneity in nature, a rich and long-standing culture of heterogeneity was to be quashed. Since the Restoration, theatrical booths at Bartholomew Fair had been subject to annual licence, which had intermittently been refused (always to great popular indignation), but the category exclusion after 1839 was permanent and sweeping. It was clear from the decisions made about individual acts in 1840 that the term ‘theatrical entertainments’ was taken to include performance of any kind. Specific refusals are recorded for an equestrian, a gymnast, and ‘Mr. Lakey’s Living Curiosities’, which comprised a giantess, a dwarf, serpents and a crocodile.¹⁶

A reactionary craze for monster exhibits flared up in the commercial museums and showplaces of London, with Punch satirising ‘Deformito-mania’ in an 1847 cartoon showing crowds pressing ar...