Acts of supremacy

J. S. Bratton, Richard Cave, Brendan Gregory, Michael Pickering, J. Bratton, Richard Cave, Brendan Gregory, Michael Pickering

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526162953
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Imperialist discourse interacted with regional and class discourses. Imperialism's incorporation of Welsh, Scots and Irish identities, was both necessary to its own success and one of its most powerful functions in terms of the control of British society. Most cultures have a place for the concept of heroism, and for the heroic figure in narrative fiction; stage heroes are part of the drama's definition of self, the exploration and understanding of personal identity. Theatrical and quasi-theatrical presentations, whether in music hall, clubroom, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre or the streets and ceremonial spaces of the capital, contributed to that much-discussed national mood. This book examines the theatre as the locus for nineteenth century discourses of power and the use of stereotype in productions of the Shakespearean history canon. It discusses the development of the working class and naval hero myth of Jack Tar, the portrayal of Ireland and the Irish, and the portrayal of British India on the spectacular exhibition stage. The racial implications of the ubiquitous black-face minstrelsy are focused upon. The ideology cluster which made up the imperial mindset had the capacity to re-arrange and re-interpret history and to influence the portrayal of the tragic or comic potential of personal dilemmas. Though the British may have prided themselves on having preceded America in the abolition of slavery and thus outpacing Brother Jonathan in humanitarian philanthropy, abnegation of hierarchisation and the acceptance of equality of status between black and white ethnic groups was not part of that achievement.

CHAPTER ONE

British heroism and the structure of melodrama

The world rested upon the British Empire, the British Empire upon England, and England upon the Navy. One school only there was in the island inviolate – the blue-water school. Tommy Atkins, a few hundred thousand of him, was pretty to look at in his scarlet tunic and little round cap on the side of his head ... but Jack was the boy for work and Jack was the boy for play.¹

Introduction: imperialism and heroism

The starting point of the ideology of imperialism must be its justification in terms of the imperialist nation itself. No conviction concerning the needs, the wrongs or the potentialities of the various lands of the periphery is likely to precede an assumption that expansion will serve the centre. Whether the selfish motives are economic or military, rooted in aggression or fear, and explained in religious, Social Darwinian or nationalistic terms, they must be perceived as acceptable in terms of self-interest by the individual within the imperialist nation. His or her perception of personal interest need not, of course, be based on any concrete benefit actually experienced, since it is the hegemonic task of all ideology to convince a working majority that that which actually serves only the interests of a dominant fraction benefits them too; but there will be a psychological payoff for everyone. In the creation of an archetype of the True Briton, naturally superior to and fit to rule over subject races in an ever-growing Empire, the theatre of nineteenth-century Britain performed this function.

Brecht’s dictum ‘Unhappy is the land where heroes are needed’² may be taken as a response to this ideological relation between the stage and the nation in nineteenth-century European theatres. Most cultures have a place for the concept of heroism, and for the heroic figure in narrative fiction; stage heroes are part of the drama’s definition of self, the exploration and understanding of personal identity. Jung expresses this as ‘the universal hero myth’ which

always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions (as if with magic spells) and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero.³

The implications of this psychological phenomenon become disquieting when it is seen in the context of Gilman’s exploration, discussed in the Introduction, of the idea of stereotyping.⁴ His discussion of stereotypes as ‘models for control ... linked to structures in society which provide status and meaning for the individual’ (p. 19) includes a category of ‘positive’ stereotype: ‘we all create images of things we fear or glorify’ (p. 15, my emphasis). Regarding the hero as a positive stereotype, as powerful and as potentially dangerous as the negative varieties, illuminates Brecht’s comment. His uneasiness about the arrested development implied by a need of hero images specifically focuses upon the implications of heroism harnessed to the ideology of nationhood, when the magic superiority of the hero is presented as national or racial, rather than personal, moral or pious. He condemned a very powerful political element in the romantic German bourgeois theatre he was seeking to supersede, and one which was also strongly present on the British stage at every level throughout the reign of Queen Victoria. It was not confined to bourgeois forms of theatre, and its manifestation within the popular dramatic tradition, where the audience/performer relationships were of the more complex kinds Brecht regarded as potentially adaptable to his own didactic purposes, is arguably more important in the operation of cultural hegemony. Where the class fraction addressed is furthest from the most obvious benefits of the world-view proposed, the artistic forms taken by the ideological negotiation must be not only the more powerful but also subtle and many-sided. The examination of the operation of the hero-myth as an element of imperialist discourse must therefore begin with discriminations not simply in terms of audience class but with regard to the different formal and stylistic qualities of the theatrical experience at different social levels.

The forms of stage heroism: kings and the common man

The bourgeois theatrical tradition, which turned theatre into the kind of ritual Jung describes, exalting the individual to an identification with the hero, was the context of the productions of Henry V discussed in the Introduction. Even in these the romantic tradition of illusion, glamour and hero-worship was deployed within an ideological negotiation, its emotional attractions used to ensure that the subversive, oppositional or adverse responses to heroic national enterprise deliberately generated in the play were effectively contained and their energy redirected. This was not apparent to the earlier practitioners involved, who rarely showed any awareness of the significance of their translation of the King into a Victorian gentleman set down amidst the heraldic glitter of ‘history’ but for them as for the imperialist propagandist Frank Benson, Henry V was the play in which Shakespeare ‘told Englishmen the worth of England’.⁵ Their lavish productions were long-running and successful. But Shakespearean production, ever since Phelps’s pioneering mission to the subaltern intellectual audience of Islington in the 1840s, and in spite of the efforts of some proletarian theatres across the country, was chiefly influential with elite or at least aspiring social groups. When the Bensons toured the music halls in 1917 as part of their war effort, Gertrude records in her memoirs the exasperation of the regular variety performers who found audiences difficult to recapture after Frank’s recitations from the history plays had ‘dropped it all’.⁶ The halls, especially in the Edwardian period, had their own forms for the spectacular endorsement of imperialism; and it is in discussing the apparent enjoyment by lower-class audiences of the crudest jingoistic and xenophobic expressions of racial superiority in music hall spectacle and song that it is necessary to consider the formal properties of various kinds of popular performance and their contribution to the ideological impact of the hero as a positive stereotype.

The argument about working-class jingoism goes back to J.A. Hobson’s 1901 condemnation of the music hall perversion of the imperial ideal, and has been conducted by several historians in recent years seeking to exonerate the working-class audiences. The most recent is Penny Summerfield, who in 1986⁷ offered a developmental analysis of ‘the theme of the righteousness of British predominance’ and ‘uncritical support for the monarch, the Empire and the government’ as ‘highly marketable products’ in the Edwardian music hall (pp. 26, 42). Her contention is that this development should be seen as linked to the 1890s suppression of the saloon theatres, which had been exclusively used by working-class audiences, and their replacement by socially-mixed venues, the large music halls, which were controlled by business interests. She therefore sees the jingoistic tone as imposed upon a working class which previously accepted the glorification of the nation only in the military, naval and slave melodramas staged in the saloons, in which it was always offered with the qualification that ‘the goal of British power was freedom’ (p. 41). It is unfortunate for her argument that Richard Price, also attempting to discover working-class resistance to the crude jingoism he attributes to the lower middle classes, finds in his examination of working men’s clubs that in their records ‘the rising imperialist tide in the nineties could only be traced through the increase in plays and entertainments which used the empire as a blackcloth’.⁸ In the 1890s, such plays partook of the prevailing imperialist tone, and he does not suggest that those chosen for amateur performance in the clubs differed from those performed in the commercial theatre. It would therefore seem that the difference between the ‘mass’ and the working-class audience in this respect was the form in which the heroic and triumphant stereotype of the Briton was preferred: the working-class audience looked for imperialism embodied in plays, and more specifically in melodramas, and staged them in the working men’s clubs when the saloon theatres were suppressed.

Reading the cultural traces in this way suggests that the implication of the British working man in the imperialist discourse was not a jingoistic outburst in the commercialised halls of the 1890s but began as early as the 1820s; and that it was intertwined with the flowering of the nation’s last ‘genuinely popular theatre’.⁹ Such an account of working-class culture need not be simply pessimistic, if it is understood as demanding an analysis of how melodrama actually works, rather than as simply eliciting intellectual condemnation. Price describes the frustration of seeking a working-class attitude to imperialism, because while

the formally educated are trained to view events according to a contextual and ideological frame of reference ... to look for a recognizably consistent and cultural value system through which the working classes could view the Boer War and imperialism is to look for something which did not exist. This is not to imply that working men did not have an opinion: they always did. What it does mean is that what appear to educated minds to be two seemingly contradictory opinions can be held at the same or different times about one event. (p. 4)

His problem is solved if we observe that a ‘cultural value system’ necessarily transcends any rational frame of reference; an understanding of this or any other value system is more accessible to us through an examination of the art forms that acted within it, often without benefit of intellectual formulation, than through an attempt to impose rational categorisations. Melodrama presents conflicts and attitudinal complexities without recourse to intellectual frames of reference; this is what is happening in the heroic melodramas concerned with imperialist themes.

The ability to hold contradictory opinions or responses simultaneously is the basis of ‘popular’ theatre, what Peter Davison has called ‘multiconscious apprehension’.¹⁰ He traces a particular kind of theatricality, which mixed direct address, illusion and frame-breaking, the comic and the serious, demanding audiences used to a multiple interaction with a performance, who could respond with a constantly shifting reading of a stage world in which disparate, even conflicting relationships with the world outside were presented. This was the kind of theatrical relationship Brecht hoped to use in ensuring that his plays were learning experiences, and that the exercise of thought set audiences free.¹¹ In Britain it had been operating for a hundred years as part of the negotiating machinery for the incorporation of the working class in imperialist discourse; it is worth considering whether the form itself, even while operating as a powerful hegemonic instrument, nevertheless fostered that freedom at some level, and that this was what its audiences chose in preferring melodrama. Summerfield’s brief consideration of the melodramas of the 1870s and 1880s, in which ‘national superiority was seen to derive from the good qualities of the redcoats and bluejackets themselves, ... and hostility was rarely directed at an enemy with a distinct national identity, but usually at “evil” in general’ (p. 31), is thematic, and does not undertake formal analysis of the plays. It therefore bypasses their many oppositional elements, which are not presented as a simple polarity of good and evil, British and foreign. She generally ignores the large part played in all melodrama by the comic plot and its characters; and there are many popular Victorian plays which directly acknowledge and attempt to present the complexities and tensions of power relations in specific imperial conflicts. Within a complex theatrical structure, heroic stereotypes are posited and confronted, and affirmative, oppositional and subversive ideas about nationality and Empire are voiced. It is these formal elements of the plays, as well as the thematic stress upon British freedom which Summerfield picks out, that are our evidence for the part melodrama played in the hegemonic negotiations by which the British imperial position was naturalised for the majority of nineteenth-century men.

Patterns of representation and negotiation in imperialist melodrama

There were hundreds of spectacular melodramas on military or imperialistic themes, with soldiers, sailors or adventurers as their heroes, ending on a patriotic display of flags and cannon to the tune of ‘Rule, Britannia’. In the course of the nineteenth century they were to be found at every theatrical level from the saloons and gaffs up to Drury Lane, though they were more common over a longer period at the large suburban houses such as the Surrey and the Britannia Hoxton. They appeared frequently outside London, in venues ranging from circus booths to the Theatres Royal. These were plays created in large numbers and at short notice, and they therefore express apparent immediacy and topicality of reference in terms of a strong formal tradition, often repeating motif and plot: hence the use of instant musical triggers and talismanic patriotism in the form of the union flag. The hack or house dramatist, reaching for well-used building blocks of incident, character and expression, imposed the appearance of pattern and reinforced assumptions and prejudices by formal repetition; but by the same token, the practice could reveal parallels or disclose changes which required considerable re-negotiation to accommodate them, and it could perpetuate the claims of oppositional perceptions, including anti-imperialist attitudes, even in the midst of chauvinist excesses generated by events such as the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 or the Anglo-Boer wars.

Melodrama negotiated its ideological positions by the dramatic manipulation of juxtaposition rather than by any more explicit or rationalised process. The elements of the piece are as separate as the frames of a film; their interaction in the mind is melodrama’s equivalent of the persistence of vision. The most obvious aspect of this is the split between words and actions. The plays include rhetorical set-pieces, both verbal battles between the British and Others, and isolated utterances of pointed sentiment. These latter, which Jacobean dramatists would have called sententiae, came to be labelled and deliberately manipulated as ‘claptraps’. The fine phrase is conventionally detachable and isolated, greeted with a burst of applause, interrupting the action. Conflict is suspended, the hero pauses at the head of his troops to elaborate a complex sentence stating in general terms the superiority of British freedom and justice; the audience congratulates him and itself, and the moment is over. It will, of course, reverberate with the surrounding action; but not necessarily in an obvious or expected way. The relation of humour to the sentiment is particularly important in this.

Fitzball quotes a piece of friendly advice from Daniel Terry, manager of the Adelphi, on the improvement of Fitzball’s slave play Omala; or, The Settlers in America: ‘I should advise the simplification of the serious characters, both in the length of their speeches and style of their language. The serious interest in such plays, is always increased by condension [sic]; and the moment the point necessary for the plot is attained, the audience are always impatient for the comic relief.’¹² Terry suggests the rapid transition of mood is a matter of desirable pace, and the superior interest of the comic elements; but in analysing the effect such just a positions have in the heroic melodrama, it often appears that more complex interactions are taking place. Melodramatists often claimed that they learnt their dramaturgy from Shakespeare, and the potentialities of this structural device can be understood by reference to Henry V as its model. Henry’s rhetoric conquers at Harfleur and Agincourt, but the antics of the Eastcheap characters, fleeing from danger, robbing churches and terrorising hostages, which are repeatedly seen in juxtaposition to his glorious speeches, present an inglorious enactment of his power, a mute comment upon the ambiguities of his position. In Omala, the heroic/sentimental plot, in which the noble savage strives in vain to cope with his love for the daughter of the British governor of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s introduction
• Notes on the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 British heroism and the structure of melodrama
• 2 Staging the Irishman
• 3 Melodrama, realism and empire on the British stage
• 4 Staging British India
• 5 Mock blacks and racial mockery: the ‘nigger’ minstrel and British imperialism
• Bibliography
• Index