Introduction
From 1737 to 1843 theatrical entertainment in Britain was subject to the Theatre Licensing Act. The act gave a limited number of theatres the license to present comedy, tragedy, and opera. In late eighteenth-century London, this meant that the theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden had a monopoly for the fall and winter seasons; the Haymarket staged plays in the spring and summer; and the Kingâs Theatre presented opera in Italian and French. The Licensing Act also required that all plays to be performed in the patent houses be submitted to the Examiner of Plays for licensing. Reporting to the Lord Chamberlain, the Examiner regularly censored material that was deemed politically inflammatory or that exceeded the bounds of moral propriety. Playwrights and players quickly devised strategies to evade the censorâs interdictions, but there was a loophole in the act that had a profound effect on theatre history: its regulations only applied to spoken drama and its provisions did not apply to alternative entertainment venues.
Late in the eighteenth century, a wide range of venues sprang upâall aimed at cornering some share of Londonâs lucrative entertainment business. Vauxhall Gardens, on the south bank of the Thames, started to present concerts and exhibitions to generate a heady mix of art, entertainment, and music. The pleasure gardens of Ranelagh and the Pantheon in Oxford Street (known as the âwinter Ranelaghâ) followed suit. Astleyâs Royal Amphitheatre thrilled audiences with extraordinary acts of trick riding and eventually Astleyâs famous horses were incorporated into hippodramatic plays. Sadlerâs Wells, already a popular spa, started to offer mixed entertainments that evaded the patent theatresâ monopoly on spoken drama in increasingly inventive ways. An evening at Astleyâs or Sadlerâs Wells would include all manner of play-like performances without dialogue. Virtually everything on offer at Sadlerâs Wells involved music, dance, and dumbshow, but at times players would carry placards or scrolls with âdialogueâ. The key to the success at all of these venues was variety. Audiences at the patent houses would typically see a five-act comedy or tragedyâthe mainpieceâfollowed by a more generically fluid afterpiece. Afterpieces were extremely important to theatrical revenues: rates were reduced for those entering in the midst of the mainpiece, and yet another wave of audience members could be admitted at half-price to see the afterpiece (which was often farcical or musical).
In 1717, John Rich had introduced pantomime spectacle into the repertoire of the legitimate theatre. At Lincolnâs Inn Fields, Rich modified characters and situations from commedia dellâarte to generate a particularly English form of harlequinade. As the eighteenth century progressed, a formula began to cohere: pantomimes often started in exotic locales but eventually the various lovers, Harlequin, Columbine, and the attendant Clowns were magically transported to London such that the plays allowed for exotic fantasy and topical humour. With the explosion of entertainment venues in the late eighteenth century, illegitimate venues became hotbeds of generic experimentation, but their experiments focused on these already anarchic legitimate plays. With a malleable and multifarious roster of non-spoken plays, illegitimate theatre could quickly respond to what audiences wanted; and what they wanted was spectacle, clowning, song, irreverence, patriotic clap-trap, and low humour of every conceivable variety.
During the tenure of Charles Dibdin the Younger as manager of Sadlerâs Wells, that London performance venue would regularly offer a âburlettaâ, a few songs, some rope-dancing, a âpantomimeâ, and whatever else could be cooked up to capture the topical ebb and flow of Georgian life. Much of the material found at that venue in the early years of the nineteenth century was directly commenting upon or sending up plays or players in the patent housesâthose theatres licensed to perform spoken drama (see the more detailed discussion of that history in the Introduction to this volume). This practice of commenting on the world of performance and performers established a form of metatheatrical humour that reverberates (in various ways) across a century of pantomime performance. The company at Sadlerâs Wells under Dibdin was highly improvisational, and its uncommon success lay in its alteration of pre-existing forms. In this chapter we have presented three Sadlerâs Wells entertainments that were printed together as a trio in the highly elliptical form presented here; they could well have been laced together into an eveningâs entertainment, as well. The Bird Catcher, Blackenberg, and Peter Wilkins were advertised as a burletta, a serious pantomime ballet, and a pantomime, respectively; but elements of all three plays would find their way into nineteenth-century pantomime. In their presentation they would have been separated by songs, instrumental music, dancing on the tightrope, and loosely defined ballet. If we see these as the glue that held the evening together we can recognize something important about Dibdinâs company: virtually all of the players could sing, dance, clown, and perform complex tricks, and all of these skills were integrated into the more recognizably âdramaticâ elements of the evening. Many of Dibdinâs self-composed songs of this era were directed to the particular talents of specific singers at the theatre.
The brief burletta The Bird Catcher is similar in tone and subject matter to many comic operas of the period, but the plot, such as it is, is clearly a pretext for Miss Caulfieldâ...
