by Tim Rayborn
In Scotland especially, there was support for bringing back the line of Scottish kings to rule, which tied in nicely with ideas about Scottish nationalism and pride. These sentiments were finding their way onto London stages and potentially filling people’s heads with dangerous ideas.
Also, a lot of playwrights just enjoyed tweaking the noses of politicians, who were just as prone to corruption, laziness, and incompetence then as now. Henry Fielding (1707–1754) gleefully wrote plays that satirized the establishment, and his works are sometimes credited with bringing about the Licensing Act, though it was also said that a satirical play called The Golden Rump was the real cause. It turns out that both King George II (1683–1760) and his prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, first Earl of Orford (1676–1745), had, shall we say, generous builds and a lack of height. Both were very wealthy and lived in a time when such well-off folks were expected to show off their wealth by eating copious amounts of expensive food and putting on weight. One unfortunate side effect of this expectation was that they left themselves open to ridicule about their shapes, and this mockery could be vicious and cruel. King George in particular was said to possess a large posterior and was suffering from hemorrhoids, which apparently was hilariously funny to his eighteenth-century enemies and those in the political opposition. They had no qualms at all about using physical problems to get a cheap laugh.
The scandalous play was said to be based on A Vision of the Golden Rump, a satirical allegory published in the political journal Common Sense (an opposition periodical), wherein the narrator has a vision of attending “The Festival of the Golden Rump.” An idol in the shape of a satyr representing George is attended by figures obviously meant to be Walpole and Queen Caroline; she holds a bladder with an attachment and pumps liquid gold into the idol’s anus from time to time to ease its bowels. An explicit engraving of the scene was soon printed and circulated. Rumors began to spread that a play based on the vision was being written (possibly by Fielding himself) and would soon be presented, with much mirth and merriment, no doubt.
Of course, this went over about as well as you might expect, and apparently for Walpole, it was the last straw. The result was the Licensing Act, which sought to censor political criticisms and force all plays to be approved by the government. Anyone found guilty of putting on an unapproved play would be punished as a common vagabond. The language of the Act is something of a tortuous tangle of legalese, but the intent is clear enough, if you can wade through the official-sounding word salad:
Every person who shall, for hire, gain or reward, act, represent or perform, or cause to be acted, represented or performed any interlude, tragedy, comedy, opera, play, farce or other entertainment of the stage, or any part or parts therein, in case such person shall not have any legal settlement in the place where the same shall be acted, represented, represented or performed without authority by virtue of letters patent from His Majesty, his heirs, successors or predecessors, or without licence from the Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty’s household for the time being, shall be deemed to be a rogue and a vagabond within the intent and meaning of the said recited Act, and shall be liable and subject to all such penalties and punishments, and by such methods of conviction as are inflicted on or appointed by the said Act for the punishment of rogues and vagabonds who shall be found wandering, begging and misordering themselves, within the intent and meaning of the said recited Act.
In other words, any performer going about their profession without the express permission of the Lord Chamberlain (who acted for the Crown) would be deemed a rogue and a vagabond, and could be punished in the same way. In theory, this idea went back to Tudor times and even earlier, which is why traveling players had to work under the patronage of a noble or other wealthy person. In practice, the law often looked the other way or failed to enforce the statutes. With the growing Jacobite political threat, this lenience was no longer an option.
Almost immediately, some saw Walpole as the originator of the rumor of a Golden Rump play. It was never proven, but many accused him of making up the story as an excuse to ram the legislation through and silence his critics. No copy of the play has ever been found, either in print or in a handwritten scrawl. Maybe it has just been lost, but maybe Walpole invented it to get what he wanted. In any case, he had the support of the king and parliament.
What were the results of this new law? Walpole’s new legislation basically said that anything the government disliked or considered inappropriate for whatever reason could be censored. Even worse, a tight control on public performances was enacted by the closure of every London theater except for two, those at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. This law had the effect of quashing a vibrant scene and removing the flourishing culture that allowed playhouses to compete by encouraging playwrights to pen as many new plays as they could. Essentially, it put the brakes on the entire theatrical movement and drove many authors and actors into other professions.
This paranoid censorship had a long shelf life, being upheld in the Theatres Act of 1843, which renewed the demand that the government approve all new plays. Incredibly, this law was only finally revoked by an updated Theatres Act in 1968.
Despite its heavy-handed tactics, the law only applied to new works from that year onward, so earlier plays could still be shown, but obviously not without some risk if they were controversial. There was a revival of Shakespeare’s plays in the aftermath of the Act, probably because he was deemed to be “safe,” so that was a small positive.
Further, there was something that Walpole, in his smug I’ve-shown-them arrogance, did not anticipate. Many playwrights began to embrace a new form of writing, the novel. With it, they could tell their subversive stories in a more private manner, and copies could circulate quietly all over the country, rather than having to be publicly declaimed in London to a limited audience. This allowed for the spread of new ideas in a much more efficient and dangerous manner, and authors could write anonymously to avoid persecution.
Also, the public began to realize that the plays given official sanction were probably going to be pretty dull, or even just plain bad. Soon there developed a distinction between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” theater, and you can guess which one was more interesting. New forms like pantomimes, puppet shows, popular operas, and music hall came about as a way of circumventing censorship and providing audiences with the entertainment they really wanted, even if polite society was supposed to turn up its collective nose at these lowbrow indulgences.
Philippe Fabre d’Églantine (1750–1794)
Getting ahead of himself
Fabre d’Églantine was an actor, playwright, and poet who was actively involved in politics during the tumultuous years leading up to the French Revolution. An ardent enemy of the monarchy, he believed that the Old Regime’s system was morally and ethically corrupt, and so was its drama. He held that new plays could break away from previous dramatic conventions and could help point the way to a more just society. His added surname “d’Églantine” (“wild rose”) came from his claim that he had been awarded a silver or golden rose in a literary competition, but he may have just made this up to enhance his status.
He settled with his wife in Paris in the later 1780s, just as things were getting a bit hot and tense. His first few plays failed, but he produced Philinte, ou La suite du Misanthrope (“Philinte, or the Continuation of the Misanthrope”) as a sequel to Molière’s Le Misanthrope, but with a decidedly more political slant that favored republican ideas, written in his belief that the messages of such works could help remake society by spreading new ideas far and wide.
His zeal for change brought him favor from the revolutionary government. He sat in the new National Convention (the assembly created to form a new republic from the ashes of the deposed monarchy) and voted for the execution of King Louis XVI. This brought him into conflict with the Girondins, revolutionaries who felt that the whole thing had started with good intentions but was spiraling out of control; they were right. T
heir concerns ended up getting them guillotined and France saw the beginning of the Reign of Terror. Meanwhile, d’Églantine helped with the design of the new French Republican Calendar, which was intended to replace the religiously oriented Gregorian calendar, and proposed ten-day weeks and a year based on agricultural cycles and terminology.
During this dangerous time, d’Églantine got caught up in his own intrigues. In early 1794, he was accused of being involved in fraud with the French East India Company (a commercial venture set up in 1664 to compete with similar businesses from the English and Dutch). He was part of a group in the Convention that had issued a decree to drive up the company’s stock price. Then, the company was forced to liquidate, a handy bit of insider trading. Evidence was uncovered that this group had falsified the liquidation decree and then blackmailed the directors so that money from the sale went back to the conspirators, including, presumably, d’Églantine. He and several others were accused of fraud.
D’Églantine maintained his innocence, but in the rampantly paranoid world of the revolutionaries, it didn’t really matter. He was sentenced to die by the guillotine and was executed on April 5, 1794. It was said that as he was taken to meet his fate, he passed out handwritten copies of some of his poems to the people gathered to watch another of the endless gruesome spectacles of the time.
As he waited to die, he lamented his unjust fate. One of his accused coconspirators, Georges Danton, replied, “Des vers…. Avant huit jours, tu en feras plus que tu n’en voudras!” which means, “Within a week, you will make more of them than you want to!” It was a grim pun; “vers” can mean either “verses” or “worms.”
7
The Nineteenth Century
This bold new century would see a strong reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, and yet also witness the ushering in of undreamed-of technologies that would completely transform the Western world by the century’s end. A key artistic movement of the first half of the 1800s was Romanticism, which, as the name implies, was far less concerned about in-one’s-head reason and much more devoted to deeply felt emotions, the individual’s wishes and dreams, and the natural world. And whereas Enlightenment philosophy had looked back to the ancient Greeks and Romans as models for the perfect society (hence all of those neo-Classical buildings from the later eighteenth century), the Romantics found some of their main inspiration in medieval imagery: Celtic and Arthurian myth, neo-Gothic architecture, Robin Hood’s tales, stories of magic and curses, and all of the decidedly-non-rational subjects that such legends contained.
The Romantic Movement wasn’t confined to any one European country. It featured a set of beliefs with which writers, painters, and composers could express themselves fully, regardless of their national origin. The image of the young tortured artist of whatever type laboring away in squalid conditions by a dim candle, as alcohol and wasting sickness take their toll, is a popular take on the Romantic life, and honestly, it’s not all that inaccurate. These guys and gals were living the rock-n-roll lifestyle long before there was such a thing, and stories of their rises and falls are legendary. Alcohol, drugs, scandals, social diseases, and early deaths were all part and parcel of the Romantic life, at least for its younger and more daring devotees.
The Gothic novel, which appeared in the mid-eighteenth century, was a perfect genre for writers to express themselves in, and figures such as Mary Shelley, Mary’s husband Percy, and Lord Byron took to it with relish; Mary, of course, gave the world a classic character in Frankenstein’s monster. Dramatists were also only too happy to draw from this Romantic well of inspiration, creating new types of works that challenged perceptions. An entire genre of vampire plays arose (as if from the dead?) to great popularity as the century progressed; the vampire was a perfect figure for horror, romance, and tragedy long before Bram Stoker gave the world his memorable Count Dracula in 1897.
Theater in general prospered and newer forms, like vaudeville and satirical puppet shows, flourished alongside Shakespeare and the “higher” arts of the more respectable theaters. However, trouble still brewed. Major riots erupted over theatrical disputes. Some actors gained fortune and fame, while others fell from grace horribly. Plays became more daring in what they chose to depict. This chapter will look at some of these theatrical goodies and show that despite becoming more “modern,” the Western world still retained many of the terrors of its past.
August von Kotzebue (1761–1819)
Taking a stab at it
Born in Weimar, August von Kotzebue was a controversial German dramatist. He divided his time between Germany and Russia, not always willingly; in fact, the man did a crazy amount of traveling. Among his achievements were collaborations with Beethoven, who composed music for his plays The Ruins of Athens and King Stephen. Von Kotzebue wrote more than two hundred plays, including the scandalous Doctor Bahrdt with the Iron Brow, which was a harsh ad hominem attack on various thinkers and journals of the later Enlightenment. The police investigated and he denied writing it, but the suspicion ultimately alienated those friends that he had originally sought to defend.
Training as a lawyer, he obtained legal positions in Russia and then Estonia, before moving on to Paris, back to Germany, then back to Estonia, and finally to Vienna, where he worked as dramatist to the court’s theater. But he didn’t remain there long, and soon he returned to Weimar, where he had a falling out with fellow writer Goethe—von Kotzebue was not a big fan of the burgeoning Romantic movement in literature. So he decided to return once again to St. Petersburg, but on the journey, he was arrested on suspicion of supporting the French Revolution and shipped off to Siberia. This might have been the end, but it turns out that one of his comedies was flattering and appealed to Tsar Paul I of Russia, who then released him and presented him with an estate back in the Baltics; he was also given the directorship of the theater in St. Petersburg. At last, something permanent.
Um, no, not really. Paul was assassinated in 1801, so von Kotzebue felt compelled to return to Germany, this time settling in Berlin. That was all well and good until 1806, when Napoleon won a victory at the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt and gained control of Prussia. So, once again, von Kotzebue fled to Russia and Estonia and stayed put, at least for a while. There, he freely and safely wrote satires about Napoleon.
In 1816, he was sent back to Germany as consul general for Russia and found himself again in Weimar. Over the next couple of years, he made enemies of the German nationalists (those who wanted a united German state) when he denounced their demands for free and more open expression in the press and universities. Many saw him as a spy for Russia, though this was probably not true. In March 1819, one such nationalist, Karl Ludwig Sand, went to von Kotzebue’s house and, meeting him at the door, produced a dagger and stabbed him several times in the chest. However, von Kotzebue’s young son witnessed this and began to cry, whereupon Sand was overcome with guilt and stabbed himself, staggering away from the crime scene. His attempt at suicide failed, and he was nursed back to health, conveniently in time for his execution by beheading.
As a result of von Kotzebue’s murder (and other civil unrest), the governing body issued the Carlsbad Decrees, which cracked down on nationalist sympathies and radical student organizations, and imposed strict censorship of new and dangerous ideas, particularly in the press, probably not what von Kotzebue would have wanted, but there you have it.
Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811)
Blown away
Heinrich von Kleist is remembered these days as one of the great early Romantic German dramatists and writers, but he himself felt that he lived in the shadow of Goethe and other contemporaries and so never was able to achieve all that he wanted. Still, poets in the Romantic, Nationalist, and Existentialist schools drew inspiration from him and his internal conflicts. Born into a minor noble family, he served in the military for seven years, but resigned in 1799, feeling that he had wasted precious time. He attempted proper university
education, but his studies of the philosophy of Kant (some of the most difficult and dense words ever put to paper) convinced him that reason was useless—many modern students of Kant would probably readily agree!
He resolved to wander Europe and devote himself to emotions like a true Romantic, though his work didn’t focus on the usual longings for nature. His first tragedy, The Schroffenstein Family, explored the human mind’s inability to comprehend truth by itself, through the story of two rival families and the star-crossed lovers from each of them, as in Romeo and Juliet. In Paris, he attempted another tragedy, Robert Guiskard (about the life of an eleventh-century Norman knight), but he was so dissatisfied with it that he burned the manuscript. The French didn’t take to him, so he set out for Prussia, where he took a post in civil service in Königsberg. He didn’t see it through and left for Dresden but was arrested by French forces and imprisoned for six months as a spy at the modern border between France and Switzerland. Yes, he was living the tragic Romantic lifestyle already, but it was only going to get worse.
Throughout it all, he was rather obsessed with his Lebensplan, or “life plan,” which he had developed after leaving the army in 1799. This was a way of planning out how his life would unfold, so as to give a greater sense of security. It involved studying philosophy, theology, and mathematics in the university city of Göttingen; the problem was, little things like getting arrested and imprisoned tended to mess with that. He spent time in Dresden and Berlin, working on poetry and plays that explored realistic human emotional conflicts and fallibilities. His own life would soon encounter those same conflicts.