Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  Yet when it came to Shakespeare Lewes felt exactly the opposite: ‘We must have some accessory attraction to replace that literary and historical interest which originally made Shakespeare’s historical plays acceptable…Scenery, dresses, groupings, archaeological research, and pictorial splendour, can replace for moderns the poetic and historic interest which our forefathers felt in these plays.’ Many in the theatre felt the same. By 1873, in a production of Antony and Cleopatra, half the text was cut - twenty-eight complete scenes vanished, as well as chunks of dialogue from the remaining text. This was to make way for a scene in which Cleopatra’s entire barge was brought onstage, while perfume was wafted across the audience ‘by means of Rimmel’s Persian Ribbon’.* There was also the insertion of a Grand Roman Festival with ‘a Path of Flowers’, ballets, songs, and processions for Venus, Juno, Diana and Flora.83 Charles Calvert at the Princess’ Theatre, Manchester, travelled to Venice to bring back a gondola to copy for The Merchant of Venice in 1871; in 1872 he interpolated a scene into Henry V so that the king could return in triumph to London:

  Those who saw the scene will not have forgotten the crowds of citizens, artizans, youths, maidens and nobles of the land who filled the streets and temporary balconies hung with tapestries…One remembers the distant hum of voices, and how the volume of sound swelled as the little army approached on its march from Blackheath; how the sound burst into a mighty shout as the hero of Agincourt rode through the triumphal archway…Showers of gold dust fell from the turrets, red roses of Lancaster covered the rude pavements, the bells clashed out, and a great thanksgiving went up to heaven for the preservation of the gallant King and his little army of heroes. The curtain descended on a perfect picture of mediaeval England.84

  These crowd scenes were popular - as popular as the variations on Shakespeare that the illegitimate theatre had been producing from the early part of the century. In the eighteenth century Garrick had promoted Shakespeare tirelessly; in 1740 Shakespeare had made up only 25 per cent of London theatre productions; under Garrick at Drury Lane alone, 25 per cent of all tragedies and 16 per cent of all comedies were Shakespeare.85 In 1809 the patent theatres lost their monopoly on Shakespeare, unofficially if not officially, when the Surrey Theatre came up with a way of doing Shakespeare while staying on the right side of the Licensing Act. It advertised ‘a Grand Ballet of Action, with recitative, founded on Macbeth’ - a musical version, with whatever dialogue was necessary communicated by banners and scrolls, while a chorus of sprites sang Macbeth’s thoughts to the audience. For example:

  Is this a dagger which I see before me?

  My brains are scatter’d in whirlwind stormy.

  Similar productions quickly followed. The Coburg produced a version of The Merchant of Venice entitled The Three Caskets, a ‘New Tragic Comic Melo-Drama’, as well as a Hamlet, Prince of Denmark that was based on a French neoclassical rewriting, complete with serio-pantomime in the French style and Gothic scenes of the ‘Cemetery of the Kings of Denmark, by Moonlight’ and the ‘Royal Museum, with the Sarcophaguses and Urn of the Late King’. At the Surrey, Hamlet was put on trial for his father’s murder, and the attempted murder of his mother, and was saved at the last moment by Gertrude’s confession, whereupon he was proclaimed king.86

  By the end of the 1820s the Pavilion Theatre, in Whitechapel, was staging more Shakespeare than Covent Garden and Drury Lane combined, including productions (always in song or dumbshow, it must be remembered) of Richard III, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, Cymbeline, Henry IV, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and Coriolanus.87 A good indication of how well known these plays had become was the sudden eruption of burlesques on Shakespeare. The first appeared in 1810: Hamlet Travestie by John Poole, which was staged at the Regency Theatre. Its success on stage can be measured today by the fact that it went through at least six printed editions before 1817. In 1813 it was staged at Covent Garden itself, making the circle complete: now the legitimate theatre was relying on the illegitimate theatre for nourishment. These burlesques grew ever more numerous by mid-century. Most relied for their comedy on inserted business - Juliet’s dog barking throughout the balcony scene, or Hamlet’s graveyard scene sung to the tune of the popular song ‘Dorothy Dumps’ - or they reset the drama in contemporary situations - Othello as a street-sweeper. There were also topical allusions, political satire, interpolated songs, references to prizefighters or magic shows or legitimate productions of the plays, or even just out-and-out silliness - when Hamlet tries to embrace his father in Hamlet according to an Act of Parliament (1853) he is rejected by the ghost, who says, ‘Spectres ain’t allowed to cuddle.’ Yet many of the jokes showed that the audiences possessed a formidable range of theatrical references. In Masaniello; or, The Fish o’Man of Naples [sic] at the Olympic in 1857, the lead opened with:

  My Lord, the Earl of Hammersmith is taken!

  Stop! That’s in Hamlet. I’m Masaniello!

  To be or not to be was - that’s in Othello,

  Translated into Irish - for Ristori.

  Pop goes the Weasel - that’s from Trovatore!*88

  Planché had been expecting his audience to be well versed in Shakespeare for years, and he was adept at mingling Shakespearean references with the contemporary and the commercial in his extravaganzas. In The Good Woman in the Wood, King Bruin mixed Hamlet and shopping:

  Though yet of our late brother, who has been

  So long defunct, the memory’s so green

  That we have subjects who dare still look blue

  When that grave subject is alluded to; This is to give you all a gentle hint

  Not to presume at acts of ours to squint

  Through spectacles of any hue but those

  Made by our order of ‘Couleur de Rose’,

  And sold, to suit all ages and conditions,

  By Wink and Company, the Court opticians…

  But now, our cousin Sylvan, and step-son.

  PRINCE (aside): A little more than cozened, I am done Unutterably brown, if all be true…

  And the references went beyond theatre. At the Olympic, in Francis Talfourd’s Atalanta, or, The Three Golden Apples, an extravaganza staged in 1857, King Schoeneus of Scyros appeared in a chariot loaded down with a picnic basket which was labelled ‘FOPTNYM AND LAROM’.89 In The Sleeping Beauty, Planché had Beauty comment on ‘The lock upon the door at the first landing, / The only Locke upon my understanding.’90 It is hard to imagine today straight theatre, much less pantomime, expecting its audiences to read Greek characters, or appreciate jokes about political philosophers.

  While some audiences enjoyed these knowing winks and nods, others wanted more visceral amusement. The Coburg managed to win over working-class audiences with blood and guts - this was in the period when the theatre was nicknamed the Blood Tub or the Bleedin’ Vic for its fondness for staging melodramas* - while it reassured its middle-class customers that all was done in the name of historical accuracy. Milner’s Lucius Catiline, the Roman Traitor (1827) was advertised as ‘a faithful picture of the Manners, Warfare, Religious and Civil Ceremonies, &c., of the Ancient Romans’. This followed the line Thomas Dibdin had taken when he ran the Royal Circus after 1819, staging versions of The Bride of Lammermoor; or, The Spectre at the Fountain and Ivanhoe; or, The Jew’s Daughter which amused the lower classes with strong melodramatic elements, and reassured the more serious by being adaptations of Sir Walter Scott.91

  As well as an assurance of taste, an adaptation, a well-known plot, also gave the audience a head start in the huge theatres where audibility was often a problem. Really popular works were adapted over and over, and the characters of novels and poems achieved afterlives their authors could never have imagined: Byron’s The Corsair was adapted for the stage, and was then followed by a new theatrical ‘family’ with The Corsair’s Bride and The Corsair’s Son.92 Within a single month of publication of Dickens’s Christmas story ‘The Cricket on the Hearth’, seventeen adaptations had been staged. Earlier, Moncrieff, wh
o had adapted Life in London, was one of many who produced a version of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein. The first version of this amazingly popular story appeared in Birmingham in 1824 as Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, and it was helped along by a vociferous campaign mounted by those shocked at the immoral life of the novel’s author. The Coburg produced Frankenstein; or, The Demon of Switzerland in the same year, and managed to fill its nearly 4,000 seats every night. Other versions reset the novel in Venice, or Sicily; some gave the characters ‘comic’ foreign names such as Ratzbaen or Tiddliwincz.93* There were pantomime Frankensteins, and musical ones; there were burlesques, there were parodies, and there were straightforward melodramas.

  It was melodrama that was best suited to the dramatic stage effects that had been in vogue since de Loutherbourg. Melodrama had been developing over the century, from the Gothic effusions of the eighteenth century, through military dramas like Mazeppa, to plays that explored the social world of their own audiences. Jerrold’s The Rent Day, which was superficially about a rural world of oppressed peasants and wicked squires that few of his audience now knew at first hand, was in reality very close to home: it was about being turned out of one’s home for lack of money to pay the rent. After its success, a series of factory- or workrelated plays followed, with titles like The Factory Strike; or, Want, Crime, and Retribution (1838), and Mary of Manchester; or, The Spirit of the Loom (1847), and The Foreman of the Works (1886).94 And melodrama appealed to more than a taste for stories of good triumphing over evil: its reliance on spectacle was a great selling point. In its early days in the illegitimate theatres, spectacle had been necessary owing to the ban on dialogue. Later, in the mega-theatres, the visual could make clear what was lost through inaudibility. The manager of Astley’s in the 1860s testified to a parliamentary select committee, ‘For a person to bring out a merely talking drama, without any action in it, or sensational effects, is useless; the people will not go to that theatre; they will go where there is scenic effect, and mechanical effects to please the eye.’ This had nothing to do with class any more. The Theatre, an upmarket arts journal, in 1882 thought that

  The great success achieved at Drury Lane…certainly justifies Mr Harris [the manager] in his strong opinion that at a theatre so large his action is vastly more important than dialogue, and situation infinitely preferable to sentiment…As a rule the playgoers of to-day want to see and not to think. A facile stage workman who understands dramatic effect is nowadays of far greater value to a manager than a man of letters who has a capacity of writing for the stage.95

  The early-nineteenth-century melodramas were frequently set in the rural world. Isaac Pocock’s The Miller and his Men (1813 at Covent Garden, by 1814 in the provinces) had, according to the Norwich Mercury, ‘a variety of spectacular scenic effects - a windmill working, a boat passing, a cottage room with a fire, a dark forest, a bandits’ cavern, an inn, and a celebrated finale involving a bridge from a high rock to the ground and an explosion’ involving a drawbridge ‘which passes to the Rocky Prominontory [sic] across the Ravine; from whence Lothair fires…a dreadful Explosion ensues, the Mill and Millers are blown into the air, &c. &c.’.96 From the late 1830s a number of melodramas revolved around the railways, as the biggest, most dramatic new topic that could be portrayed. The very first, in 1836, was Edward Stirling’s The Lucky Hit; or, Railroads for Ever!, a drama about railway speculation, but while there was emotional turmoil aplenty, there was little of scenic excitement in it. It was The Scamps of London (1843), based on Euge`ne Sue’s French melodrama Les Myste`res de Paris, and set in Waterloo station, that really began to take the measure of what could be achieved scenically. In 1863 a ‘real’ train was brought onstage, in The Engineer, at the Royal Victoria: ‘In the thunderous finale, young George Stephenson mounts the footplates, shunts the heroine to safety in a ballast truck, and crushes her prostrate seducer beneath his cardboard wheels.’97 And in London by Night (1868) came the apotheosis of the railway melodrama. The opening scene was set in ‘A London railway terminus, exterior, The stage filled with passengers, newspaper boys calling

  out the names of their papers, shoeblacks following their occupation, vendors of fruit and cigar-lights, porters with luggage. Railway and engine heard without; the scene, in fact, to realise the arrival of a train.’ The final scene took the audience to ‘The brick-fields at Battersea. Lone house, L. The river in the distance. Night, and moonlight. A railroad track runs at back from L. to R.’ Our hero, the rather wonderfully named Dognose, has been knocked unconscious and left on the railroad track; Louisa, the heroine, can see him from the house where she has been locked in. ‘Locks and bars alike defy me,’ she wails. She finds an axe. ‘Heaven has not deserted me. Courage! (Strikes gate) Courage! (The steam whistle is heard again nearer, and rumble of train on the track) It must give! (Noise of train increases. A last blow. Gate flies open and Louisa rushes to Dognose. Just as his head is removed from the track, the train passes with a roar and a whistle.)’ The hero declares of his arch-enemy, ‘Let the law punish him’, and heads into his golden future with Louisa.98

  Who wrote this deathless narrative it is difficult to say. One historian of Victorian melodrama has suggested that it was a combination of Moncrieff, Sue, and Dion Boucicault, who was to do so much for the genre, with perhaps others all adding bits and pieces as it was re-staged in different theatres, and all claiming it as their own.99 But, whoever wrote it, it was Boucicault (1820-90) who became for ever connected with ‘sensation scenes’. Alfred Thompson’s Linda of Chamouni, or, Not Formosa, An Operatic Incongruity, in Three Scenes and a Sensation (1869) was happy to acknowledge Boucicault’s primacy even as it derided it:

  I’ll sing you the tragic story

  Of a young man of our days,

  Who gained not tin, but glory,

  By writing five act plays.

  He soon found plays legitimate

  Could never boil the pot;

  He voted Byron second-rate

  And Shakespeare awful rot.

  All this was laid to the fault,

  Of one whose name was Boocicault,

  Of one whose name was Boo bar sic was salt,

  Was Boocicault.

  Chorus. All this, &c.

  He did away the cupboards old,

  The screen that used to fall,

  The folding doors which would unfold,

  With ‘Heaven bless ye all.’

  And to his aid sensation calls,

  Real cabs, real turning tides,

  Real railway trains, real music halls,

  Real plunging suicides.

  All this, &c.…100

  Boucicault’s first play, London Assurance, a tidied-up version of a Restoration comedy, had been produced by Mme Vestris and her husband at the Olympic in 1841, to enormous success. But it was with his adaptation of The Corsican Brothers in 1852 that he achieved the impossible: he tamed the melodrama, domesticated it, and made it safe for the middle classes - and thereby hugely increased its audience numbers.* The Corsican Brothers was taken from a French play that was in turn adapted from a story by Dumas pe`re, and it opened at the Princess’s Theatre, which, like the Olympic, was one of a handful of theatres that were attempting to lure in the respectable middle classes by stressing their gentlemanly elements, both onstage and off. These were in general smallish theatres, with foyers decorated in a style that mirrored the homes of their desired patrons. The dramas they mounted also revolved around scenes of domestic life that their audiences would recognize, or, as in the case of The Corsican Brothers, a historical setting that could be considered educational.

  The plot itself was very simple: the story of a murdered man and his brother’s revenge. But there were two elements, one of plot construction, one of staging, that took the audiences of the day by surprise, and lifted the piece out of its genre category. First, Boucicault set Acts I and II so that they had to be understood to have taken place simultaneously. This novel approach gave the illusion
of depth to a straightforward narrative. Taken together with the innovative technology and staging, many thought they were seeing far more than was in fact the case: the plot had been raked over a hundred times before. What was shatteringly original was the staging. At the end of Act I, Fabien dei Franchi sits at his desk, writing to his brother Louis (both played in the original by Kean), with his mother nearby.

  At the same time Louis dei Franchi appears, without his coat or waistcoat, as his brother is, but with a blood stain upon his breast; he glides across the stage, ascending gradually through the floor at the same time, and lays his hand on Fabien’s left shoulder…Louis dei Franchi waves his arm, passes through the wall, and disappears; at the same moment the scene at the back opens and discloses a glade in the Forest of Fontainebleau. On the side, a young man who is wiping the blood from his sword with a handkerchief; two seconds are near him. On the other side, Louis dei Franchi, stretched upon the ground, supported by his two seconds and a surgeon. Picture.

  Act II opens in Paris, with the events that are to lead up to this duel, and then ‘A glade in the Forest of Fontainebleau…’, and the duel takes place, an exact replica of the conclusion of the previous act, except that, as the scene ends, ‘[Louis] sinks back exhausted and dies…The back of the scene opens slowly and discovers the chamber of the first act, the clock marking the hour…Mme dei Franchi and Fabien, looking exactly as they did before. Fabien: “Pray for Louis, dearest mother. I go to avenge him.” ‘ The third act concerns Fabien’s pursuit of his brother’s murderer. He finally avenges Louis’s death and, at the end of the act, ‘He passes behind a tree up stage; then advances, with face covered by his hands, and sinks weeping upon the fallen tree. A pause. Louis dei Franchi appears, rising gradually through the earth and placing his hand on the shoulder of his brother. Louis: “Mourn not, my brother. We shall meet again.” Curtain.’101