The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  By the time The Triumph of Mirth was finished, Joe had become an established juvenile performer at Drury Lane, and that summer, he was taken on fully at Sadler’s Wells, dancing, marching in processions, and playing monkeys, imps, fairies and demons to order. It was the beginning of a long and demanding apprenticeship that would last for many years.

  The London theatre scene at the end of the eighteenth century was as hierarchical and partisan as anything in British society, dominated as it was by the two imposing theatres royal, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. These venues had been granted a monopoly on spoken drama under Charles II, which they guarded jealously by systematically suppressing any theatre that dared to utter dialogue on stage. With only the corner of Bow Street and Russell Street to separate them, they were close neighbours, although culturally they could not have been further apart. Covent Garden was a bastion of establishment respectability, a loyal and monarchical institution patronised by the King and his Tory ministers, while Drury Lane was home to the Whig opposition, radical republican sympathisers and the exclusive cliques of the Prince of Wales, Charles James Fox and the members of the Duchess of Devonshire’s Devonshire House salon.

  Such extreme factionalism underscored the theatre’s political role. Since the Restoration, it had been an extension of public life, forming, in the words of the Constitutional Review, ‘an absolutely constituent part of our political system’. Far from being centres for the passive consumption of entertainment, theatres were popularly thought of as representative assemblies or national debating chambers, where the division of the auditorium into ranks of boxes, galleries and pit seats provided a perfect vision of society in miniature from the most exalted citizens to the many prostitutes ‘openly selling and delivering the articles they trade in’. Audiences took their places with a sense of collective ownership, never allowing actors to forget that they appeared at their pleasure. They came and went as they pleased with scant regard for what was happening on stage, punctuating the evening with a series of interruptions, first from the fashionable set who caused a stir by taking their boxes in the middle of the play after their dinner parties had broken up, and then again by the bargain hunters who took up the unsold seats for half price at the end of the third act. No wonder, then, that the author Matthew Lewis should advise budding playwrights that, if they wanted their work to be understood, they had to open act four with a summary of the entire plot.

  Heckling was commonplace – Dr Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, was extremely proud of himself for entertaining the audience ‘by imitating the lowing of a cow’ – and respectful silence, though not unheard of, was more than likely the result of the natural ebb and flow of chatter than attentive consideration. Actors retaliated as best they could. When playing Lear, Garrick placed ‘hush men’ throughout the house to keep the noise down during his important scenes. John Philip Kemble preferred irony: interrupted mid-sentence by a crying baby in the audience, he stepped forward and gravely intoned, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, unless the play is stopped, the child cannot possibly go on.’

  A further ‘exuberance of liberty’, as one foreign visitor called it, was the audience’s right to throw things, especially from the gods, or the upper galleries. The pit was bombarded with a constant hail of nutshells, apple cores and orange peel or, the ultimate prize, a direct hit on one of the liveried servants keeping his master’s place in the boxes. An apple to the head was getting off lightly. Bottles, glass and bits of wood were often pitched into the orchestra, and one lady’s shoulder was dislocated by a piece of brass that weighed at least a pound. Even she was comparatively lucky next to the actor Thomas Hollingsworth, who was almost killed when he was hit in the eye by an apple skewered on a knife.

  But the ultimate demonstration of the audience’s authority was a riot, and while there hadn’t been a serious one at Drury Lane for almost thirty years, a row of spikes still lay across the orchestra pit to deter stage invasions. Recent disorder at the opera house had resulted in a three-hour brawl that was noteworthy only for featuring so many combatants there was hardly room for them to grapple one another, let alone swing a punch. The rest of the audience stayed on to watch, ‘more pleased than ever they were at a regular entertainment’, according to the Morning Herald.

  Like the royal houses that sustained them, the fortunes of the royal theatres sank and rose, although, by virtue of its strong company and talented manager, the Irishman Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Drury Lane was currently in the ascendant. Sheridan was a young and ambitious adventurer with boundless energy and a brilliant mind who, through a series of complicated and ultimately unsound financial manoeuvres, had managed to raise enough money to buy a controlling share in the theatre after Garrick had retired. At twenty-eight, he was already famous as the author of four enormously successful plays, one of which, his masterpiece, The School for Scandal, had been greeted with such thunderous laughter on its opening night that the writer Frederick Reynolds was convinced the building was about to collapse on him as he walked by.

  Sheridan was quick-witted and enormously charismatic, and owed his rapid ascent in society to an inherent understanding of the basic theatricality of aristocratic life. He presented his emotions for public consumption with some frequency, fainting lifeless into the arms of Edmund Burke after a marathon oration at the Warren Hastings trial, or appearing at Garrick’s funeral with a train of black velvet carried by six pages, refusing to utter a word for grief. To his civic persona, he added a rakish mystique that had won him an army of admirers, despite his unusual features and bright red face. It was a visage Lord Byron admired greatly, describing it as half ‘god’, with ‘an eye of peculiar brilliancy and fire’ that also ‘shewed the satyr’.

  Sheridan’s decision to move into management was not motivated by a desire to succeed Garrick as Britain’s foremost theatrical man so much as to gain access to Garrick’s connections. Determined to be an intriguer, Sheridan had set his sights on penetrating the heart of the Whig élite, using his role as manager to ease himself effortlessly into their circles and sit with them in their boxes. Fawning over glamorous friends did not sit well with the responsibilities of running one of Europe’s largest theatres, however, and its day-to-day business was constantly overshadowed, first by his long and chaotic pursuit of a seat in Parliament, and then, having been returned as MP for Stafford in 1780, by an equally disordered retention of it. The neglect would not have been so bad had Sheridan been capable of delegating responsibility, but his erratic habits and long absences kept the theatre in a permanent state of disarray, best embodied in the state of his office, which was littered with unpaid bills and a ‘funeral pile’ of manuscripts he had promised to consider but never read.

  Putting off artistic decisions was one thing, but it was his chronic malfeasance and extravagant expenditure that had the biggest impact on Drury Lane. Payday, recalled the actress Maria de Camp, meant a backstage crew of ‘carpenters, painters, scene-shifters, understrappers of all sorts and plebs in general’ mobbing the staircase and narrow passageways that led to his office, crying, ‘For God’s sake, Mr Sheridan, pay us our salaries!’

  ‘Certainly, certainly, my good people,’ he would answer, ‘you shall be attended to directly,’ whereupon he would enter the treasury, sweep the week’s receipts into his pockets and escape from the building by an alternative route. Another trick was to promise to pay everything he owed just as long as he could first borrow fifty pounds. If that didn’t work, he simply charmed people into submission, descending from his office like a blessed saint. ‘So cordial were his manners,’ remembered James Boaden, a hungry author who had camped for hours in the stairwells and anterooms of the theatre, ‘his glance so masterly and his address so captivating, that the people, for the most part, seemed to forget what they actually wanted, and went away as if they had only come to look at him.’

  Even the Signor was defeated by his unnatural charisma. He had once forced his way into Sheridan’s house in Hertford Street, pushing
past the servants and threatening to beat him in front of his guests, who included the Mayor of Stafford, unless he was immediately paid what he was owed. Sheridan protested in the haughtiest terms but, unable to dent the Italian’s resolve, he finally wrote a banker’s draft that he delivered in a conciliatory handshake. Delighted with his fearsome reputation, the Signor went straight to the bank where, instead of the forty pounds he was expecting, he received just four – Sheridan had deliberately omitted the zero. But rather than going back and making good on his threats, the Signor was impressed by the audacity with which he’d been fleeced, stopping Frederick Reynolds in the street to exclaim admiringly, ‘O vat a clevare fellow dat Sheridan is!’

  As for the company, Drury Lane boasted two of the country’s biggest stars, the siblings Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble, a pair of grave and statuesque tragedians who dominated the theatre in the years after Garrick. Mrs Siddons in particular was an incomparable talent, the finest actress the stage had ever seen. She was distant, imperious, possessed of ‘a somewhat masculine beauty’ and described by Hester Piozzi as one of ‘the noblest specimens of the human race I ever saw’. To Sheridan, she was a ‘magnificent and appalling creature’, whom, he couldn’t help remarking, he found about as sexy as the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was in the minority, for at the height of her powers she attracted an enormous band of devotees. Drawn by her strong voice, imposing figure and majestic features, they came nightly to indulge their fix of ‘Siddonean idolatry’. Particularly enthralling was her delivery, which at its most effective could be employed on a single line, intensifying sentences as slight as ‘Was it a miserable day?’ with such an electric charge that the audience could be heard to catch its collective breath. This was exactly what they paid for. Guided by the spirit of Romantic sensibility, they surrendered themselves to the swells of emotion in which she specialised. As James Boaden wrote,

  I well remember (how is it possible I should ever forget) the sobs, the shrieks, among the tender part of her audiences; or those tears, which manhood, at first, struggled to suppress, but at length grew proud of indulging. We then, indeed, knew all the luxury of grief; but the nerves of many a gentle being gave way before the intensity of such appeals; and fainting fits long and frequently alarmed the decorum of the house, filled almost to suffocation.

  Her brother, too, sought to ascend the highest peaks of human emotion, although he was hampered by a natural reserve that meant he often came across more like the Roman Catholic priest he had originally planned to be than the high-Romantic artist he became. Like his sister, John Philip Kemble cut a stately figure, tall and thin, with the classical features particularly suited to Roman patricians. His performances were noteworthy for displaying a total immersion in the reality of the play-world, a level of concentration that was almost unique among his colleagues, who were often accused of being too aware of the audience and wasting their energies in trying to provoke them into applause with nods and winks and all kinds of attention-seeking tricks.

  Wishing to pursue a psychological element in his acting, Kemble was the first Macbeth to have the ghost of Banquo played by an empty chair rather than the conventional man in a sheet, and one of his greatest innovations, it was said, was never allowing himself to look bored while waiting for his turn to speak. His delivery was also notorious: he spoke as though he literally held a plum in his mouth and peppered his speeches with tortuous pauses that sent the prompter into fits. He was also at the vanguard of a one-man mission to return ‘proper’ pronunciation to an English language he considered to have slipped into derelict habits, wilfully transposing vowels and collapsing consonants until he pronounced ‘beard’ as ‘bird’, ‘conscience’ as ‘conshince’ and ‘virtue’ as ‘varchue’. As the stage historian Charles Beecher Hogan once pointed out, if Kemble had ever cause to say, ‘It is odious that the merchant has no mercy for my hideous aches,’ the audience would have heard, ‘It is ojus that theh marchant has no maircy for meh hijjus aitches.’

  Not that he was the only one at Drury Lane to speak strangely. In his devotion to the Whig oligarchs, Sheridan had adopted their famous ‘Devonshire House Drawl’, a cliquey patois that was ‘part baby-talk, part refined affectation’, whose most notable aspects were the elongation of vowels, unexpected stresses and the syrupy pronunciation of ‘you’ as ‘oo’ (as in ‘I looove oo’).

  With such powerful stars and matters of state to attend to, pantomimists remained second-class citizens at Drury Lane, regardless of their popularity. It was a different story at Sadler’s Wells, the oldest and the best known of London’s many minor theatres, a group of eccentric venues, including the Royal Circus and Astley’s Amphitheatre, that operated on both the edges of town and the margins of respectability. While the Drury Lane season was organised to convenience the families of rank and fashion who descended upon the capital for the beginning of the new parliamentary session in September and departed for the country in late spring, the Wells’s season began on Easter Monday and ran throughout the summer. In this way it could make the most of its fine pastoral setting on the banks of the New River, at the end of a neat avenue of poplars in the middle of three square miles of meadows that bordered Clerkenwell at the south and the new Pentonville estate in the north.

  The first playhouse to occupy the site had been a simple wooden music room, erected in 1685 to entertain the five or six hundred people who came daily to take the medicinal waters that Thomas Sadler had uncovered in his garden, land that had once been part of the monastery of St John, Clerkenwell. A number of enterprises followed, with mixed results, until in 1746 the property was taken over by a local builder named Thomas Rosoman, who established a permanent company for the theatre and housed it in a new stone building. Rosoman prided himself on offering quality entertainment by professional performers, but to make sure he didn’t run foul of the royal ‘patent’ theatres, he offered it free, charging patrons only for the compulsory pint of port, Lisbon or punch that was necessary to gain admission. Unsurprisingly, Sadler’s Wells gained a reputation for drunkenness and providing performances ‘only to persons who had rendered themselves in some degree incapable of judging their merit’, prompting the inevitable accusations of immorality and vice. ‘Most of the unhappy wretches who pay their lives as forfeit to the law’, warned one respectable ladies’ journal, ‘are such as frequent these ill-conducted places of recreation, where their imaginations are enflamed to a degree of madness that makes them run on any crime and danger for the gratification.’

  Though such horrors were clearly overstated, early audiences were, if not exactly criminal, certainly of a lower order than those found at Drury Lane: maids and footmen – mop-squeezers and fart-catchers, as they were prosaically known – tradesmen, apprentices and boisterous sailors wrapped around their ‘red-ribboned Mollies’. Similarly, its isolated spot a mile beyond Clerkenwell made it an attractive haunt for thieves and brigands who waylaid playgoers as they stumbled through the fields, knocking their shins against the network of leaky wooden pipes that carried the waters of the New River, or getting tangled in the washing lines that serviced the city’s laundry industry. Though actors venturing out of the theatre after dark were able to protect themselves with pistols or a blunderbuss they rented from the stage door, picking off the audience was easy. If they had no money, they were mugged for their wigs and hats.

  By the time the Signor arrived as maître de ballet in 1763, the management had made a concerted effort to promote the Wells as a respectable and credible place of entertainment, refitting the auditorium and raising the ceiling for greater ventilation, although the fact that they had to install an ornamental iron railing along the water’s edge to stop people ‘throwing in their dogs, etc.’ suggests that there was still some way to go. In time, its reputation grew steadily, although it wasn’t until the management mounted horse patrols and posted linkboys to light the way between Islington and the City to ensure their clients’ safety that a more affluent crowd at last ventured no
rthward. This, combined with the engagement of a rope-dancer called Jack Richer, ‘one of the handsomest and best made men in England’, as beautiful as he was graceful, meant that by the time Joe made his début in The Wizard of the Silver Rocks, the Wells was at last beginning to emerge as a summer resort of the fashionable and well-to-do.

  As the patent theatres held a monopoly on speech – so strictly enforced Carlo Delpini once found himself in prison after he’d dared to utter the words ‘roast beef’ on a minor stage – Sadler’s Wells was forced to approach its business with unflagging ingenuity, filling the bills with a stream of novelties and entertainments that didn’t require any dialogue. Aside from innumerable variations on dancing, tumbling and rope-walking, the Wells specialised in serious and comic pantomimes, the former denoting mimed melodramas, and ‘burlettas’, a bastard, quasi-operatic genre that dodged the limitations of the law by restricting speech to rhymed recitatives accompanied by ‘orchestral twinklings’. On the occasions when only words would do, the audience were apprised of a character’s thoughts by means of cartoonish banners, dialogue painted on flags, and labels pinned to actors – a practice William Wordsworth alluded to in The Prelude, when he recalled a youthful visit to the Wells to see a performance of Jack the Giant Killer: ‘The garb he wears is black as death, the word ‘Invisible’ flames forth upon his chest.’