Weathering Shakespeare

Audiences and Open-air Performance

Evelyn O'Malley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350078086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre shakespearien

Winner of the ASLE-UKI 2022 Book Prize From The Pastoral Players' 1884 performance of As You Like It to contemporary site-specific productions activist interventions, there is a rich history of open air performances of Shakespeare's plays beyond their early modern origins. Weathering Shakespeare reveals how new insights from the environmental humanities can transform our understanding of this popular performance practice. Drawing on audience accounts of outdoor productions of those plays most commonly chosen for open air performance – including A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest – the book examines how performers and audiences alike have reacted to unpredictable natural environments.

Part One

1

Performing Pastoral: A New Form of Poetic Representation

In an environmentally attentive review of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, in 1900, the commentator discussed Hawes Craven’s spectacular scenography, praising lifelike representations of Shakespeare’s woods outside Athens, before going on to caveat his approval with a memory of another Dream seen years previously, in a garden. The commentator felt that it would be unfair to make a comparison between Tree’s production and a Dream performed at the Villa once owned by Alexander Pope in Twickenham in 1887, presented by the retired actress Henrietta Labouchere, née Hodson (recently returned from America where she had helped to launch the actress Lillie Langtry’s career)¹:

I can never be got to say that I ever saw a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as wondrous as that which Mrs. Labouchere gave at Pope’s Villa, Twickenham; but then she had spreading trees, and a beautiful garden, and night under the open sky, and in midsummer, to assist her. But without betraying my allegiance to that memorable representation, I am compelled to say that Mr. Tree’s production is the best I have ever seen on the stage.²

However good Tree’s Dream, the real experience of nature outdoors on a warm evening had created a superior memory for the reviewer: under a clear night sky in the west of London, summer weather, landscaped gardens, and mature trees represented the latest innovation in picturesque theatrical scenery for Shakespeare’s plays.

On the cast list for Labouchere’s Dream at the Pope’s Villa is a Lady Archibald Campbell playing Oberon, directly connecting this Dream to the open-air performances As You Like It that had taken place just a few years earlier at Coombe Woods, Surrey.³ Campbell—known as “Lady Archie” and regarded “one of the most important women in the aesthetic movement”⁴—was jointly responsible, with the American actress Eleanor Calhoun, for the first woodland staging of As You Like It at Coombe in July 1884, where Campbell had played Orlando and Calhoun Rosalind. Although the designer and architect Edward Godwin, introduced to the women by the artist James Whistler, gets much of the credit for producing As You Like It at Coombe, Godwin was only brought on board toward the end of what Calhoun qualifies as “a year’s happy cooperation by Lady Archibald and myself.”⁵ Michael Dobson’s history of amateur Shakespeare in the open-air begins with As You Like It at Coombe in 1884 and The Pastoral Players (the company that Campbell and Godwin formed in 1885) before departing toward work by Sir Philip Barling Ben Greet—who was, Dobson argues, the “single most important popularizer of outdoor Shakespeare”⁶—in the decades that followed. To my knowledge, however, in existing accounts of open-air theater (and in performance histories of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Labouchere’s production does not appear at all—notwithstanding glancing references to fashionable amateur and charity theatricals in aristocratic circles—despite her Dream’s nature aesthetic haunting encounters with Beerbohm Tree’s landmark Dream years later.⁷ Nevertheless, the reception of nature in the twenty-first-century performances of chapters to come is as much indebted to Labouchere, who is entirely beholden to Campbell, Calhoun, and the Pastoral Players, as it is to Greet. Furthermore, this chapter proposes that any gendered oversights in the ways that these influential performances have been remembered carry ecological implications for the ways we conceive of the in-situ reception of Shakespeare in nature at this time.

My intention is to recuperate these women’s creative and intellectual labor in an effort to enrich the ways we think about audiences for pastoral Shakespeare in the weather. What follows demonstrates how As You Like It at Coombe in the warm, dry summer of 1884 instigated a performance of pastoral in theatergoing practices: audiences “performed” the play’s pastoral trope—physically and discursively—in their retreat to rurality before returning to city life, imaginably renewed by the experience of Shakespeare’s poetry. The weather-narratives surrounding these outdoor productions feed the book’s overarching argument for social performances of weathering undertaken by theater audiences as they encounter staged performances of Shakespeare’s plays in the open-air. As I will show, performing pastoral in response to a sentimental nature at the Coombe As You Like It in 1884 acts as a precursor to performances of weathering undertaken by theatergoers at the wetter and colder 1885 revival. These performances of weathering go on to inflect the written reception of Labouchere’s Dream in 1887. By beginning with Beerbohm Tree’s Dream, an iconic moment in theater history, and reaching back via Labouchere’s production to linger at As You Like It at Coombe, I hope to highlight the environmental significance of the Victorian open-air Shakespeare aesthetic established by Campbell and Calhoun that later endures in the consciousness of audiences attending London’s indoor theaters. Remnants of this aesthetic persist today, with legacy implications for how people encounter and conceptualize nature. Together, these women set a precedent for others to come—also excluded from prominent roles in mainstream theaters—who continue to find breathing space for their creative work by exposing their audiences to the weather.

The Pastoral as a Retreat from London

Summarizing contemporary ecocritical resistance to literary pastorals, Greg Garrard argues that the presumption of a “stable, enduring” Nature evoked by the literary form of the pastoral was always untenable, linked to “outmoded and poorly understood scientific models” of equilibrium and harmony.⁸ Sentimental, regressive nostalgia for Theocritus’s Sicilian shepherds’ idyll, Virgil’s mythical Arcadia, and subsequent diverse, wide-ranging literary iterations of Golden Ages, sunsets, and green pastures all variously espouse the delusion of stable ecosystems that has been shattered by “post-equilibrium” ecologies, as Steve Mentz points out (think King Lear not As You Like It).⁹ But as Lawrence Buell—whose The Environmental Imagination (1995) Garrard builds upon—observes, pastoral’s “ideological valence” cannot be reduced to progressive/regressive or left/right politics and is only comprehensible within its “contextual frame.”¹⁰ The historical, geographical, cultural, and aesthetic “frame” in which these—social and staged—performances take place supports Buell’s observation of “the tendency to identify nation with countryside promoted by the English squirearchy” (undertaken by actors, reviewers, and audiences in this chapter), whilst also supporting Garrard’s setting-aside of the pastoral as an environmental impasse from a distance.¹¹ Campbell, Calhoun, and Labouchere alight upon the potential for a “more densely imaged, environmentally responsive art,” such as Buell proposes might coexist with the damaging work of “reducing the land to a highly selective ideological construct,” which their work also does.¹² The “internal contradictions” of these historical performances disclose their simultaneous but unbalanced environmentally “constructive” and “compromised” potential.¹³

Terry Gifford identifies three (overlapping) categories that help to disentangle the cultural work of these theatrical productions and their relationship to the pastoral: the classical pastoral as literary conventions referencing shepherds’ lives; pastoral as a more general context for literature and culture that invoke a retreat from the city to the country, often in response to industrialization and its associated waste and displeasures; and pastoral used pejoratively, obfuscating violence, exploitation, and hardship in the landscape, promulgating regressive values and ideology.¹⁴ As You Like It at Coombe in 1884 and 1885 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Pope’s Villa in 1887 intersect all three categories. First, they present the classical pastoral textual tropes explored by Shakespeare in both plays for a learned, upper-class theater audience, extending the “playful artifice” already inherent in the literary pastoral form with theatrical staging.¹⁵ Second, the productions provide the context for a rural retreat, performed by theatergoers who escape London’s civilization and politics for the supposed simplicity of the unspoilt (landscaped) English countryside before returning to the city. Third, pejorative presentist critiques of the pastoral enable us to historicize the aestheticization of beautiful landscapes coded as theater, facilitated by private land ownership and the expansion of empire, in whose mesh these performances are both caught and culpable.

Permeating the aesthetic of these pastoral Shakespeares was the material atmosphere in which they were performed. Late nineteenth-century environmental conditions in England had been transformed by capitalism, driven by imperial and colonial projects. The country’s transition to a fully industrial and fossil fuel based economy was almost complete. Although population growth continued as it had throughout the century, rural depopulation and poverty accelerated as people left the country for fast-growing towns and cities. Environmental historian Ian Simmons notes of this period that although most “city people were moved away from the close interaction that farmers experience […] they were not immune to weather, nor to a particle-laden atmosphere nor to contaminated groundwater.”¹⁶ Atmospheric pollution—comprising smoke from burning domestic and industrial coal, organic matter, hydrochloric acid, and hydrogen sulphide for alkalis manufacturing—was at its worst in London where air quality was seriously detrimental to human and animal health. Expanding cities contributed to nostalgia for rural life, which in turn contributed to a flight to the suburbs where air quality was markedly better. Amid a period of sustained climatic warming (between 1850 and 1950, temperatures rose by 1 degree centigrade), high rainfall in 1879 and 1880 devastated English agriculture.¹⁷ Between 1881 and 1885—the years leading up to and surrounding the first pastora...