The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  For the next four weeks, the performers saw little but the Covent Garden cellars. Dressed in coarse linen toiles, they went carefully through their steps to the scraping accompaniment of the ‘répétiteur’, a dishevelled old gentleman with a violin. Fortunately, the cast worked well together. To say they were close significantly understates the degree to which families were at the heart of Georgian theatre. Joe was joined in the cast by Mary and her sister Louisa, while the Bolognas numbered no less than five: Jack played Harlequin, Louis played Pantaloon, Pietro was the Landlord, Barbara a fairy and Mrs Bologna a villager. Columbine was played by Miss Searle, whose little brother was also in the cast, as were representatives of four other long-standing Covent Garden families: the Tett brothers, the wives of John Follett and Whitmore, the scene painter, and Thomas Goodwin, the son of the music librarian. Connections also opened out beyond the theatre: Oddfish the sea monster was played by Monsieur Ménage, the father of Bella, the prepossessing Columbine of Drury Lane, and Master Ménage, Sadler’s Wells’s most popular monkey. King, Davis and Morelli were all Sadler’s Wells regulars, the last also being an important theatrical agent, who acted as an intermediary between London managers and Italian acrobats.

  There were also some connections for the future. Buried deep within the chorus was the journeyman actor Thomas Blanchard, who would later play Pantaloon to J. S. Grimaldi’s Clown, although not so well: ‘The fault of Mr. Blanchard’, wrote The Times, ‘is that he excites no sympathy. If he is knocked down, or jumped upon, or even killed, you are glad of it.’ Blanchard’s son, Edward, would eventually follow in the footsteps of Farley and Dibdin and become one of the foremost supremos of Victorian pantomime. He was also a manic depressive.

  As rehearsals moved along and word got out that Covent Garden was preparing for Christmas, Drury Lane, determined, perhaps, to punish Grimaldi for his disloyalty, set to work on a spoiler, a pantomime even more hasty than Dibdin and Farley’s, called The Enchanters; or, Harlequin Sultan. Opening on Boxing Day, it had Mr Montgomery as its Clown and Frank Hartland as its Harlequin. Joe and Jack went along to the opening night but found it nothing more than a dire assemblage of old scenery and borrowed airs. Montgomery, who clowned at the Royal Circus, had been called in a week before it opened, and even though he was being paid a much larger salary than any previous Clown at Drury Lane, he completely failed to get a handle on the business. It was, said Joe, ‘so wretched that the audience began to hiss before it was half over, and eventually grew so clamorous that it was deemed prudent to drop the curtain long before the intended conclusion’.

  Drury Lane’s failure offered some encouragement to the cast at Covent Garden, though by the time Mother Goose was ready to open, the company had already resigned itself to the fact that Christmas 1806 would be a lamentable season for pantomime. Harris’s tacit vote of no confidence was cast by his absence. Usually so diligent in his attention to all the productions in his theatre, he attended only one rehearsal, escorted by the man coming to be known as the pantomimists’ albatross, John Philip Kemble. It was midnight on a Sunday, the only time Dibdin and Farley could get access to the stage for a full run-through with all its machinery, a rehearsal that would go until dawn. Harris enjoyed it well enough and even the sclerotic Kemble seemed to take it in good spirits, but both had enjoyed a long dinner and tucked more than a few bottles of wine under their belts. Certainly they found nothing in it to suggest that it was going to be one of the most important productions that either of them would ever live to see.

  Chains of lights converged on Bow Street on the evening of 29 December 1806, the trails of linkboys lighting the way from all corners of the mud-spattered city as theatregoers descended on the Covent Garden pantomime. Outside, hoarse hackney-carriage men shouted impatiently at their passengers, a slow-moving cargo of holiday groups adding to a crowd already swollen by the ‘freshwater sailors’ (fake beggars from the Holy Land), fruit women, playbill hawkers and men selling ‘saloop’, a hot concoction of sugar and sassafras, thought to be good for the guts. The opening of the pit doors signalled the customary dash for the front. With no central aisle or ticketed seats, it was a free-for-all, a steeplechase of men, women, knees and elbows, hurdling over the benches, jostling each other to shouts of ‘Watch your pockets,’ in a mad rush to get close to the stage.

  Once the auditorium was full the bell rang twice, and in accordance with a fifty-year-old tradition, the audience settled in to watch John Philip Kemble’s brother, Charles, appear in a constipated tragedy called George Barnwell. Playing it before the pantomime had originally been Garrick’s idea, a means of salving his conscience by offsetting what he saw as the weightless amorality of laughter with stern admonitions to youth: ‘We do not know a single drama’, wrote the Dramatic Censor of this stodgy tale of a young merchant’s vice-strewn path to the gallows, ‘better calculated to place the youth of the metropolis … upon their guard against the snares, to which inexperienced innocence is but too often exposed from female seduction, and the dangerous allurements of fallen beauty.’ The audience, however, tended to side with William Hazlitt, who thought it ‘a piece of wretched cant’, and showed their contempt by talking all the way through and applauding only when the green carpet that signalled the final scene of a tragedy was brought out.* By the time Barnwell was finally led to the scaffold, the mood in the house could not have been gayer. Safely backstage, Charles Kemble, a strong, emerging actor in his own right, despondently brushed the orange peel from his shoulders, and made way for the pantomimists waiting in the wings.

  Pieces of fruit made graceful parabolas across the auditorium as the scene-shifters set to work behind the heavy stage curtain, the hum of anticipation intensifying as the conductor stood in his pit and gestured to the orchestra. With a flick of his baton, as if throwing a lighted match into a tar barrel, he ignited William Ware’s overture with a whoof that fanned out across the excited crowd. The curtain rose to a crack of thunder, revealing a village in the midst of a storm. In the distance were fields and a river with puzzled boats tossed on its swell. At opposite sides of the stage stood the gates of Squire Bugle’s mansion and a simple country cottage, above which appeared Mother Goose riding on the back of her magic gander. Played by Samuel Simmons, a pocket-sized comedian (he ‘can never lie long in bed’), who had initially cursed his luck but eventually came to see it as one of his greatest roles, she descended to the stage as the scenemen removed multiple layers of gauze to create the effect of dispersing clouds, simultaneously raising coloured lustres to show the sun breaking through and forming a rainbow. Now, bathed in glorious sunshine, a chorus of singing, dancing peasants poured into the village to celebrate the coming marriage of Squire Bugle to the beautiful young Colinette.

  Grimaldi played Bugle, ‘a rich widower with repulsive manners’, whose name suggested a life devoted solely to the pleasures of the hunt. Bugle was representative of a country type much loathed in the metropolis for exploiting its tenants, enclosing their land and impoverishing them through inflated rents. It was not his authority they objected to so much as the way his exercise of it threatened the established order. If despotism was allowed to become cruelty, might it not imperil the nation by fuelling the kind of revolutionary discontent that had wrought such destruction in France? A disgrace to his class, the Squire was the polar opposite of the ideals of lordly paternalism that formed the supposedly benign foundation of the British social contract. His desire for Colinette, the unwilling bride pandered to by her sycophantic guardian Avaro, similarly represented his disregard for natural order.

  Colinette is in love with Colin, a humble swain, played by Jack Bologna, seen pining from his cottage window at the beginning of the scene and cursing both the Squire and his intractable poverty. Bugle pulls Colinette towards him as she vainly protests, appealing to the Squire’s own experience of young love by pointing to a gravestone at the centre of the stage that reads: ‘In Memory of Xantippe, wife of Bullface Bugle, esq.’ The lecherous old Squire just
laughs, jovially singing, ‘First wife’s dead/There let her lie/She’s at rest,/And so am I.’ This is all too much for Colin: he suddenly rushes out to Colinette, who flies into his arms. A Beadle appears, as Avaro is pulling them apart, dragging Mother Goose in his wake. Accusing Mother Goose of witchcraft, the Squire condemns her to the ducking stool, despite Colin’s pleas for clemency. But before the Beadle can lead her away, Colin pulls her free, running away as Mother Goose flies up to the clouds, and Avaro retreats with Colinette. Furious, the Squire cracks his whip at his first wife’s tomb, accidentally summoning her ghost. Dressed in satin and ribbons, Xantippe – so named for the notoriously scolding wife of the philosopher Socrates – angrily chases her husband from the stage.

  Safe in her cottage, surrounded by sprites, Mother Goose comes across the dejected Colin, and rewards him for his decency with a golden egg and the magic bird that lays them: ‘This present shall her guardian’s sanction gain,’ she prophesies, before promptly disappearing. The astonished Colin carries both egg and gander (played by a small boy named Leonard) to the greedy Avaro, who now cannot give Colinette away fast enough. Consumed by avarice and too impatient to wait for another golden egg, he pulls out a knife to cut it from the goose and, though Colin stays his hand, he relents when the Squire reappears, suddenly fearful that he will again lose the right to marry his love. With the knife bearing down, the bird magically changes into Mother Goose, who launches the golden egg into a far distant ocean and transforms them all into the characters of the harlequinade – Bugle and Avaro become Clown and Pantaloon, and Colin and Colinette become Harlequin and Columbine. Scolding each in turn, Mother Goose gives Harlequin alone a chance to atone by handing him a magic sword and sending him on a quest: ‘Regain the egg, and happy be,/Till then, farewell! Remember me!’

  Such is the plot of Mother Goose, a simplistic rubric intended merely to kick-start the harlequinade. To a crowd like that of Covent Garden, well versed in Shakespearean comedy, its young lovers thwarted by cross-grained authority would have had a familiar feel. Shakespeare, however, affords his characters the chance to broaden their horizons by slipping into the woods and re-inventing themselves in a place of suspended laws and relaxed hierarchies, whereas the green world of pantomime is almost entirely punitive, a rapid succession of real and fantastic locations that subjected its characters to endless rehabilitative violence.

  Mother Goose’s harlequinade begins with two classic tricks: Harlequin leaping through a clock face in Avaro’s hall, and a painting of a shotgun discharging itself into Clown’s face. From here the lovers are pursued to a country inn, where Clown is scared off by a recruiting party who only manage to press a single drunken cobbler into service.

  It was at this point during the performance of 27 January that a bottle was thrown from the two-shilling gallery, severely wounding a man below. A Mr Shepherd told how he and his brother had been watching the pantomime from the pit, about six rows back from the boxes, when he heard the sound of breaking glass, and turned to his brother, who had blood gushing from a wound in his head and was crying, ‘I am a dead man.’ Grimaldi came forward to try to calm the house as the victim was carried backstage. Farley, accompanied by two Bow Street officers, secured the gallery and offered sixty guineas to anyone willing to finger the culprit. A ‘poor simple Welchman’ named Davis was arrested and arraigned the following day, at which time it was doubtful that Shepherd would survive.

  Back on stage, Joe as Clown and Louis Bologna as Pantaloon rough up the Landlord, while Jack Bologna as Harlequin disguises himself as a female fruit-seller. Joe moves in on Jack’s fruit basket, pilfers a couple of items and, changing tack, tries to seduce him. The pair begin a burlesque pas de deux, parodying the latest fashions in dance, their leaps and twirls becoming ever more ludicrous until they are both being ‘flung and floundered, and flounced and bounced, and shuffled and scuffled, and draggled and wiggle-waggled, shambled, gambolled, scrambled, and skimble-skambled’. It’s typical of Joey’s off-beam sexuality that he should entirely ignore Columbine yet be passionate for a man in drag. For Harlequin, Columbine is the ultimate reward. Helplessly feminine, the allure of this almond-eyed innocent is found as much in the fragrant rustle of satin and gauze as it is in flesh and bone. While he pursues his goal with a rigid determination, ceaselessly seeking the egg, which is the key to her sexual possession, Clown is staunchly his opposite, the epitome of meandering sexuality and libidinous digression that embodies itself as an oblique ardour for a man disguised as a fruit-laden woman.

  The lovers are chased inside the inn, where Clown and Pantaloon are distracted by a meal of wine and pies. When they sit down to cut into one, a live duck flies out, presenting Harlequin with the opportunity to bat the chairs and tables, sending them eight feet into the air. With a shout of terror, Joe, Pantaloon and the Landlord are flung up and down, propelled on long poles pushed through the stage from the cellars, bumping and buffeting their passengers, who have to cling on for dear life. When the furniture finally lands, there’s a pause in the action as the audience are treated to a display of morris dancing, before the scene changes to reveal a young lad dressed in the navy blue coat of a cabin boy standing at the door of a humble Woodcutter’s cottage. The boy, Master Smalley, plucked from the gutter by Thomas Harris, launches into a sentimental ballad that describes how he had been driven to sea by poverty and, having filled his purse after many cruel hardships, was shipwrecked in sight of land. His song over, he knocks at the cottage door in search of his mother and father, only to find them being turned out by a Bailiff and his constables, at which point Harlequin enters and transforms a broken coach wheel into the goddess Fortune, who showers the family with gold. This affecting portrait of the deserving poor, a father and son whose work accrues virtue rather than profit, restates once again the piece’s antipathy to the politics of Squire Bugle. Heart-warming though it is, it’s insufficient to prevent Clown trying to steal food from the Woodcutter’s wife.

  A garden of flowers and a moonlit pavilion provide transitional scenes before the harlequinade arrives in London. Joe is shot again and caught in a bear trap, and Columbine dances a reflective pas seul that conveys the tremulous mix of love and apprehension that defines her, entwining herself in a long garland of flowers that looks like a skipping rope made of roses. Columbines were not the greatest ballerinas, certainly not equal to the svelte foreign beauties who danced in the élite companies of Haymarket or King’s, yet they had an air of erotic availability that those more polished ladies lacked. Generally local girls with milky complexions and saucy reputations, like the well-made Bella Ménage, denounced by Mrs Siddons as ‘a naughty little dancing girl’ for seducing her nephew, they had the devotion of large sections of the crowd. On occasion, this popularity translated into factional warfare, such as the trouble that broke out over the Surrey’s rival Columbines, Miss Giroux and Miss Taylor, whose supporters fought pitched battles that landed both ladies in court. Columbines were not just for Christmas. When Byron first came down from Cambridge, he took full advantage of the sybaritic pleasures offered by the pupils of James d’Egville, who, it seems, supplemented his Drury Lane salary with a little procuring.

  Now that the harlequinade had reached London, it called first at a house in Golden Square, where Joe falls from a balcony that suddenly disappears under the auspices of Jack Bologna’s sword. Next they appear at St Dunstan’s church, where Harlequin and Columbine hide by disguising themselves as figures on the clock tower. A Jewish milliner enters and is instantly robbed of two hats by Clown and Pantaloon, which Harlequin turns into enormous bells the moment they place them on their heads. He and Columbine then use them to ring the chimes.

  Thus reeling, the scene is transplanted to Vauxhall Gardens, and the most spectacular of all the changes in this ‘plain’ pantomime, a view of the pleasure gardens during a midsummer gala. Vauxhall was a celebrated site of fashionable resort, offering music and dining, and romantic garden walks decorated with pergolas and fountai
ns. The stage is filled with stylish extras dining in a sumptuous pavilion, while behind them the glamour of the evening is rendered in minute scenic detail, down to the tiny illuminated Chinese lanterns that line the receding walkways and the distant orchestra whose animated violinists bow in time to the music. The gorgeous vision is completed by the entry of the Pandean Minstrels, five handsome young Italian men engaged at Vauxhall to serenade the paths and bowers with astral music made on Pan pipes, triangles and tabors, each playing two instruments at once.

  Yet the instant this study in elegance has had time to compose, it is upset by Joe, who starts his own serenade on a tin fish kettle, before somehow cajoling the entire company to join him in a crude country dance. With everyone up on their feet and dancing, he adds to the chaos by whipping off the tablecloths, like a cheap magician, and inexpertly juggling the crockery. Waiters charge frantically from side to side as plates smash and live birds splutter skywards from beneath the dinner platters, confusion that increases in speed and intensity until it reaches a crescendo of pandemonium, at which point the curtain drops and a cheesemonger, ruddy sort of fellow with back-bacon forearms and a new black smock, steps from the wings and awkwardly takes a bow. It is Mr Whitmore, the scene designer. The audience bathes him in its approval, and the harlequinade moves on.

  The curtain rises to reveal something altogether more sedate: a grocer’s shop and country post office. In a show that had so many well-loved scenes, this is probably the most famous, largely for Grimaldi’s mordant pun, when, having stolen the letters from the postbox, he opens one, pulls out a small rope tied in a noose and reads, ‘Sir, I’ll trouble you with a line.’ This done, he thrusts his hand back into the postbox just as Harlequin appears and turns it into a lion’s mouth. Joe shrieks, snatching out his hand, and bringing with it an angry midget postman who menaces him with his bell. A baker appears, sets down his basket and enters the shop. Joe takes a loaf of bread and throws it to Pantaloon, who covers the postman’s head with a basket. As the postman struggles, Joe comes to Pantaloon’s aid, but as he does so, a ‘Blackamoor’s head’ rises from the top of the basket and scares him out of his wits. Reaching for a plank, he tries to beat it back, but succeeds only in breaking it over Pantaloon’s pate.