Staging Fairyland

Folklore, Children's Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime

Jennifer Schacker

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780814345924
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Folklore & Sagen Literaturkritik

In nineteenth-century Britain, the spectacular and highly profitable theatrical form known as "pantomime" was part of a shared cultural repertoire and a significant medium for the transmission of stories. Rowdy, comedic, and slightly risqué, pantomime productions were situated in dynamic relationship with various forms of print and material culture. Popular fairy-tale theater also informed the production and reception of folklore research in ways that are often overlooked. In Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children's Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime, Jennifer Schacker reclaims the place of theatrical performance in this history, developing a model for the intermedial and cross-disciplinary study of narrative cultures. The case studies that punctuate each chapter move between the realms of print and performance, scholarship and popular culture. Schacker examines pantomime productions of such well-known tales as "Cinderella, " "Little Red Riding Hood, " and "Jack and the Beanstalk, " as well as others whose popularity has waned—such as, "Daniel O'Rourke" and "The Yellow Dwarf." These productions resonate with traditions of impersonation, cross-dressing, literary imposture, masquerade, and the social practice of "fancy dress." Schacker also traces the complex histories of Mother Goose and Mother Bunch, who were often cast as the embodiments of both tale-telling and stage magic and who move through various genres of narrative and forms of print culture. These examinations push at the limits of prevailing approaches to the fairy tale across media. They also demonstrate the degree to which perspectives on the fairy tale as children's entertainment often obscure the complex histories and ideological underpinnings of specific tales. Mapping the histories of tales requires a fundamental reconfiguration of our thinking about early folklore study and about "fairy tales": their bearing on questions of genre and ideology but also their signifying possibilities—past, present, and future. Readers interested in folklore, fairy-tale studies, children's literature, and performance studies will embrace this informative monograph.

1

Intermedial Magic

Text, Performance, Materiality

In 1749, the antiquarian, art historian, and novelist Horace Walpole wrote to Sir Horace Mann at his home in Florence, describing a recent visit to the Ranelagh pleasure gardens in Chelsea (figure 4). Walpole had attended “a jubilee masquerade in the Venetian manner,” an outdoor entertainment that was both immersive and multimedial, both nostalgic and decidedly fashionable, significant as a site of adult sociability and licentious pleasure, heightened by the possibility of anonymity and the patina of exoticism. As Walpole details, “The whole garden [was] filled with masks and spread with tents,” featuring a “Maypole dance with garlands, and people dancing round it to a tabor and pipe and rustic music, all masked, as were the various bands of music [ . . . ] and a troop of harlequins and scaramouches.” Further along, the visitor could find “booths for tea and wine, gaming tables and dancing, and about two thousand persons”; on special nights, the entertainment at Ranelagh culminated in fireworks. Walpole declared the experience “the prettiest spectacle I ever saw: nothing in a fairy tale ever surpassed it” (quoted in Beresford 1920, 103).

How and why was Walpole invoking the fairy tale in this context? His comparison of the London pleasure-garden masquerade to a “fairy tale” invokes experiences associated with a certain category of fantastical story but also those associated with a certain class of performance forms. Walpole’s reference to a general sense of “fairy tale” (and not to a specific story line) indicates the degree to which these two sets of associations were intimately entwined: the statement makes little sense otherwise. In this case, “fairy tale” denotes spectacular effect and a domain of intensely sensory, sensual, embodied experience in which local and imported customs and styles intermingle. This is a domain with which Walpole, Mann, and others were deeply familiar, and which was largely the province of privileged adults. In this eighteenth-century context, the term fairy tale clearly could serve iconically for exotic beauty, physical pleasure, spectacle, and heightened forms of social performance.

Figure 4. “View of the Rotundo House & Gardens at Ranelagh.” Etching by Nathaniel Parr after Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto), 1751. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Tales (both oral traditional and literary) have frequently been approached as inherently intertextual, each “text” signifying in relation to past tellings in terms of plot, motif, style, or characterization. Important recent work on the intertextual, interdiscursive dimensions of fairy-tale history have inspired radical reassessments of the fairy-tale genre, exploring connections between tales and other forms of discourse (whether literary, medical, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, or political). Studies like Holly Tucker’s Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early Modern France (2003); Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsky’s critical anthology of Russian and Soviet tales, Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales (2005); and Suzanne Magnanini’s Fairy-Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Tales of Straparola and Basile (2008) have reinvigorated readings of well-known tales and integrated into fairy-tale history texts that had sunk into obscurity.

Nevertheless, one of the challenges of engaging with a sense of “fairy tale” from centuries past, such as this example from the famed Walpole-Mann correspondence, is that it requires imaginative mapping of intermedial networks that have long been overlooked, ones that are not exclusively textual and discursive and that are not contained by the methods and theories underpinning current disciplinary formations. Likewise, the fact that the categories of “fairy tale” and “folktale” currently carry with them sets of deeply ideological and remarkably persistent associations (with childhood, narrative transparency, moral instruction, etc.) is reflected in commonplace ipse dixit claims about tales—ones that have gone unchallenged, for far too long, both in popular and scholarly discourses. The assumptions made regularly about the “real,” “authentic,” or “original” nature of tales, oral and literary, often obscure the beautifully complex matters of form, function, meaning, and audience that a more ambidextrous study of fairy tale’s multimedial, performative history can unearth—matters that can inform and be informed by the realm of theater. To set the stage for the chapters that follow, I will foreground examples from the history of the English term fairy tale and the popular performance traditions in which that genre has played a part—including the realm of play, performance, and costuming that extends from eighteenth-century masquerade to Victorian fancy-dress parties. To do so requires a good deal of movement across temporal and geographic frameworks, with a lens that alternates between historically grounded close reading and one that is much broader in scope.

This chapter also seeks to establish a model for study of fairy-tale history that accounts for performance and materiality, not as interesting side notes but as absolutely integral to understanding the ways in which this protean category has and can signify. Here, as throughout Staging Fairyland, I find it productive to draw into dialogue perspectives from folklore and theater. In one sense, there is nothing wholly original in this cross-disciplinary maneuver: a conception of performance is central to contemporary folklore studies, particularly to studies of verbal art that are attentive to the “social interaction between performers and audiences,” the creation and (re)negotiation of meaning in discourse in use (Bauman and Briggs 1990, 59). Such perspectives have brought folklorists into fruitful, cross-disciplinary dialogue with theater scholars and practitioners, and these collaborations have been central to much of the (inter-/cross-/trans-disciplinary) work that first fell under the rubric of “performance studies” (see D. Taylor and Steuernagel 2015). But with regard to the study of folktales and fairy tales in/as theatrical performance, there has been a surprising lack of conversation among researchers in these fields. As a result, theater scholars who have considered British pantomime and related forms have had to rely on inherited and often problematic understandings of the “fairy tale.” Conversely, most contemporary folklorists have remained largely unaware of the popular theater traditions that would have been in the cultural repertoires of our scholarly predecessors as they engaged in the collection of oral traditions and debated theoretical frameworks for the study of Märchen.

Folkloristic perspectives on “performance” have generally extended from and implied an expanded understanding of performance, as both a social mode and a specific communicative register. In terms of the study of folk narrative, this orientation has generated revolutionary studies of tales in and as performance and opens the door to consideration of the interface between narrative and material culture. Notable examples include the studies of the artistry and agency of individual storytellers and careful contextual analyses of specific storytelling events, such as Linda Dégh’s fieldwork with Zsuzsanna Palkó (1996), Henry Glassie’s with Hugh Nolan (1982), or Donald Braid’s with Duncan Williamson (2002). For the most part, the domain of commercial theater has been beyond the purview of such studies, although many have focused on individuals whose uses of storytelling blur the categories of “amateur” and “professional” storyteller, as they do those of “entertainment” and “social commentary.”

As Kay Stone has observed, the term traditional storytelling often goes undefined and is also frequently employed in a rather vague way “to describe non-theatrical presentations” that are assumed to exist outside the realm of commerce—an assumption sometimes challenged by ethnographic work on folk narrative and individual tellers. On the other hand, the early twentieth-century movement to bring “traditional storytelling” into schools and libraries attracted practitioners with theater training and experience, suggesting that the borders between the “traditional” and the professional are, once again, far from clear (1998, 4). In all these ways, the realm of professional “theater” seems to have some relevance to academic folklore study, as well as to folklorists’ work in the public sector.

To contextualize nineteenth-century fairy-tale pantomime, specifically, I would like to focus primarily (although not exclusively) on what may seem to be a more conventional notion of “performance” than the one current in folklore scholarship today, turning to the history of fairy tale in theater.1 The specific story lines currently considered to be “classic fairy tales” have a long and fairly diverse history as theatrical performance, underscoring the centrality of theater itself in the multimedial history of the fairy-tale genre. As always, the term fairy tale requires some parsing: if the category of “fairy tale” is taken to encompass a broad range of secular, fantastical narrative traditions, then a study of fairy tale and theater can engage with traditional forms of performance spanning the globe—such as the Prince Panji stories performed in Javanese wayang topeng (mask and shadow theater), or the Kabuki treatments of Japanese bakeneko (supernatural cat) tales, to name but two significant examples. But even if we limit our scope to the relatively narrow body of story currently considered in the popular imaginary as “classic fairy tale” (predominantly European, dating from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries) and use English-language popular culture as a primary vantage point, it remains the case that various transnational forms of theatrical performance play important roles in that history and in the maintenance of the genre’s cultural currency. Understood in this way, the fairy tale has figured significantly in the emergence of many forms of performance that remain current in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere—including twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments like improv theater, Theater for Young Audiences, Broadway musicals, as well as the long and dynamic traditions of ballet, opera, and pantomime (see Schacker 2018).

In the eighteenth century, English pantomime was “considered as a form promising sheer entertainment,” something that “seemed new and scandalous” (O’Brien 2004, 40), offering a distinctive and popular combination of music, dance, acrobatics, and physical comedy interspersed with some (melo)dramatic story elements (mistaken identities, star-crossed romance, thwarted inheritance claims, etc.). Story and character were conveyed primarily through gesture, movement, and music (including song and recitative) until the relaxation of theatre licensing laws in the mid-nineteenth century. Until that point in time, pantomime also regularly featured commedia dell’arte figures in the distinct section of the performance known as the “harlequinade,” when the pantomime’s main characters are transformed into anglicized versions of stock characters: Harlequin (figure 5), as well as the familiar Columbine, Pantaloon, and Clown.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, specific characters and story lines currently considered part of the world of “classic fairy tales” became significant parts of the world of English pantomime. These fairy-tale elements continued to serve pantomime’s topical humor and slapstick comedy and also afforded opportunities for social commentary. For example, serious current events resonate in productions from 1830, the year of the “swing riots,” in which agricultural workers in East Kent destroyed threshing machines and tithe barns. That December, the Adelphi Theatre’s pantomime Grimalkin the Great featured actors dressed as Luddite cats whose services are threatened by the new technology of the mousetrap (see Mayer 1969, 256). Beyond London, Christmas pantomime could also speak to local concerns, as did the Manchester Theatre Royal’s Sleeping Beauty of 1863. Here the spindle traditionally associated with the heroine’s enchantment was displaced by stage depiction of a demonic factory, a spinning mill (see Sullivan 2011, 141). Many decades later, in the wake of what was known as Black Week (December 1899), when British forces in southern Africa suffered three successive, staggering defeats, with casualties and injuries in the thousands, the Drury Lane pantomime of Jack and the Beanstalk featured a comic and rousing enactment of British conquest—a production to which I return later in this study.

Figure 5. Engraving of Harlequin, ca. eighteenth century, Harry Beard Collection. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Throughout the century, pantomimes were generally evaluated in terms of innovative costuming and set design, outrageous antics and physical comedy, and novel feats of stage magic, which were both costly and potentially very profitable. These material aspects of stagecraft could serve as more than empty spectacle; nevertheless, the nineteenth century also witnessed many debates regarding the relative cultural value of the related performance genres of “extravaganza,” “burlesque,” and “pantomime.” For instance, the writer and translator J. R. Planché was well known for his fairy extravaganzas based on French tales. These were staged at Madame Vestris’s Olympic Theatre as well as at Covent Garden and the Lyceum, from the 1830s through the 1850s. Planché was at pains to distinguish his work from pantomime both structurally (the extravaganzas did not include a harlequinade) and stylistically, priding himself on the creation of “graceful couplets” and sophisticated humor rather than showy displays of technical innovation (see Booth 1991, 194–96). The differences between pantomime and Planché’s brand of extravaganza seem relatively minor, in retrospect: at very least, both drew on and played with a repertoire of known tales to feed audiences’ “appetite for spectacle” (Richards 2015, 8). Spectacular effects in these related forms of fairy-tale theater had the potential to contribute to a self-reflexive commentary on the dynamics of performance, the performativity of social identities, economies of desire, and the economics of theatrical production—the very processes in which performers and audience alike were engaged and which were established as potent affordances of tales (oral, written, acted) at the turn of the eighteenth century, if not earlier.

As Walpole’s eighteenth-century description of the Ranelagh masquerade and spectacle suggests, the fairy tale also has long-standing associations with forms of sartorial play and performance that occur offstage. On the one hand, many fairy tales demonstrate a tacit understanding of dress, conduct, and affect as means by which social identities and social status are conveyed and negotiated, both for the viewer and the viewed. Changing into a special kind of clothing (something worthy of note, something meriting description, something “odd,” in terms of its deviation from everyday self-presentation) not only alters appearance; within the framework of a tale, it can also effect a change in status, if accompanied by skillful performance—a kind of metamorphosis, an escape from a socially proscribed role, or, in some cases, a revelation of “true” identity enacted through costume. For example, worldwide variants of the tale type ATU 510a, generally known as “Cinderella,” frequently draw attention to these potentialities of costume and the transformative affordances of a social event like a ball; in fact, one can easily imagine a variant of that tale type featuring a Ranelagh masquerade. So while costuming is a common plot element in tales, it is worth grounding a consideration of fairy-tale theatricality and materiality in an understanding of costuming as a social practice, specifically in terms of masquerade, “fancy dress,” or what Americans and Canadians are more likely to call “dressing up.” Fancy dress has operated as yet another form of performance in which the genre of the fairy tale has figured prominently, in two distinct ways: there is a long history of costume choices that signal specific fairy-tale characters and types, but there is an equally long tradition of conceiving the experience of fancy dress itself as a kind of magical transformation best understood with reference to fairy tales—“Cinderella,” in particular. I turn to one such case study in sartorial play at the close of this chapter; first, let’s co...