After such a horrific event, it was impossible to continue the season. Sadler’s Wells closed immediately, save for two nights at which the proceeds were given to the families of the bereaved. The actors, meanwhile, took their benefits at the Royal Circus and, within twelve days of the tragedy, Joe was falling from the balcony for laughs again as Mother Goose reopened at Covent Garden. A further twenty-nine performances guaranteed that by the time it made way for the new Christmas production, it had become the longest-running pantomime in history, eclipsing even the run of John Rich’s Harlequin a Sorcerer, the all-conquering 1727 pantomime so often held up as the epitome of the form.
Mother Goose had also been inordinately profitable, heralding the age of mass entertainment by selling more than three hundred thousand tickets (enough to seat at least a third of the London population) and netting a profit of more than twenty thousand pounds. They were profits that would go unequalled by a pantomime for three decades, although Joe saw little of them. Instead, he shared a summer benefit with Jack Bologna that netted £300, and received a gold watch from Harris, along with the rare privilege of shaking his entire hand. It was perhaps just as well that the management weren’t more extravagant, as soon, Harris and Kemble would be needing every penny they could find.
It was a nervous management that reopened the Wells on Easter Monday 1808. They were relieved to have been granted a licence in the wake of the accident, but it had been issued only on condition that the theatre stopped selling wine. Dibdin was content if it meant an end to vandalism, vulgar oaths and the quarrels of ‘crack brained Boys’, but it also absolved him from paying stipends to soldiers in lieu of billeting them, as he was required to do in accordance with wartime ordinances that placed servicemen in all establishments serving alcohol. Nevertheless, wine had been one of the only reliably profitable aspects of their business, and so entwined with the revellous and rubicund atmosphere of the Wells that he was genuinely worried for a future without it.
Still, the season opened steadily enough as Grimaldi brought audiences out to Islington in record numbers. Joe’s renown was reaching undreamt-of heights, propelled by an array of merchandise and memorabilia that used his iconic visage to sell prints, song-sheets, board games, children’s colouring books, painted wooden statuettes, chinaware, toby jugs, cruet-sets and pocket watches. A cup-winning racehorse was named after him, and his circle of acquaintance grew to include no less a person than Lord Byron. Joe had met the poet after he and Jack Bologna had been hired to entertain guests at the Waiters’ Masquerade, a huge masked ball held at Burlington House on 8 July 1808. Once the performances had concluded at one o’clock in the morning, the sixteen hundred revellers sat down to supper in a covered garden of orange trees, after which Joe and Jack were invited to meet Byron, who was dressed as a monk. Byron was a huge fan of pantomime, later taking Delpini’s afterpiece as the inspiration for his best-known narrative poem, Don Juan, and a long night of jocose carousing concluded with the poet asking the clown to reserve him a box every time he took a benefit.
But though Joe ‘did what he liked with the town’, his new-found celebrity was making it difficult to move around the city with the freedom he’d previously enjoyed. The regular dash he made from Sadler’s Wells to Covent Garden while the seasons overlapped was suddenly dogged by fans and gawkers who wanted to stop and stare or shake his hand. When pressed for time, he’d been accustomed to making the trips in full slap and motley, but this had to be abandoned after he was chased by a rabid group who tried to tear at his costume for keepsakes. It was a good thing he knew Spa Fields much better than they did, hopping through its obstacle course of clothes-lines and water-pipes while they toppled behind him. Even taking a cab was no protection. Henry Downes Miles remembered standing in a crowd watching either a horse die or a man have a fit (he had forgotten which), when he heard a coach rattle past and caught a flash of Joe inside. Having seen the motley blur, the crowd completely forgot their previous diversion (leaving the man/horse to ‘practise his contortions, writhings, and foamings in solitude’) and set to the chase.*
In a previous age, experiences like these would have been reserved solely for saints and kings, but Joe was caught up at the epicentre of a growing phenomenon – modern celebrity, a culture of personal fascination that was born in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It was, in some respects, a by-product of Romanticism’s focus on the individual, reinforced by the perception of men like Bonaparte, popularly thought to have devoted his existence to the possibilities of the self, with the result that the world was entirely remade. Celebrities were credited with a superabundant individuality, a surplus of self that lifted them above the common people and made others want to talk about them and pry into their personal lives. This in itself was by no means a new thing, but suddenly celebrity found that the commercial apparatuses were in place to exploit such urges on a massive scale by, for example, distributing images cheaply and efficiently, or using their notoriety to sustain a large and competitive press.
With fame came a resurgence of Grimaldi’s depression, although undoubtedly it also helped to cement his fame. Joe’s melancholic personality had first come to the attention of the public during the run of Mother Goose when one periodical noted how he had ‘resolved to betake himself to sack cloth and ashes!’ as soon as the pantomime closed. The image of a melancholy clown was one that Joe himself had taken on, playing with it in his oft-repeated quip ‘I make you laugh at night but am Grim-All-Day’, thus ensuring that the double life of public laughter and private pain was in turn adopted by his audience. They took to it with great enthusiasm. The inevitable curiosity about the ways in which a performer’s personal life might be reflected in his or her public persona resulted in the production of stories that made sensational use of the stark dichotomy, the most abiding of which had Joe paying a visit to a famous physician who advised him to combat his melancholia with ‘relaxation and amusement’. Thomas Goodwin takes up the tale:
‘But where shall I find what you require?’ said the patient.
‘In genial companionship,’ was the reply; ‘perhaps some times at the theatre; – go and see Grimaldi.’
‘Alas!’ replied the patient, ‘that is of no avail to me; I am Grimaldi.’
Though undoubtedly a fable, the popularity of this anecdote, coupled with the fact that it still does the rounds – albeit with Grimaldi’s name substituted for that of more recent comedians – suggests that it is thought to reveal a higher truth about the comedic personality. Indeed, the entire concept of the ‘tears of a clown’ might be traced back to Grimaldi and the popular image of him as a comic Midas, cruelly denied access to the one thing about him that gives others most pleasure. It’s a myth with its roots in the period’s concept of creativity, especially the view that depression or melancholia, the indescribable sadness styled by Coleridge as ‘a grief without a pang – void, dark and drear’, was a symptom of heightened sensibility that inspired and ennobled its sufferers. Nowhere was this idea more evident than in the literary fad known as ‘Wertherism’ after Johann von Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which immortalised emotional torture in its story of a poetic youth’s self-destruction at the hands of unreciprocated love. Wertherism rejected stoic masculine roles in favour of a taut sensibility that quivered at the edge of illness, irrationality and hysteria; its breakdowns were not signs of weakness as much as their victim’s superior emotional capacity.
Some, like the dramatist August von Kotzebue, embraced it as a gift that spurred him on to greater achievements. ‘Never … either before or since,’ he wrote of his depression, ‘did I feel such a rapid flow of thoughts and images; and I firmly believe that there are some maladies, especially those by which the irritation of the nerves is increased, which stretch the powers of the mind beyond their usual reach: just as, report says, diseased muscles’ [sic] shells produce pearls.’
Depression was mysterious, glamorous even. It was the price of talent, the mark that
confirmed him as a superior artist, and the biggest legacy Joe would leave the world of comedy.
Sadler’s Wells had been fortunate to recover from the accident without any obvious damage to its business, but when tragedy struck at Covent Garden in the early hours of 20 September 1808 the results were devastating. Smoke and fire had been spotted coming from the theatre at around four in the morning, but by the time the alarm had been raised, and the men of the Phoenix Fire Company had arrived, the blaze was of such magnitude that the interior was already destroyed. A further two hours were lost as the firemen searched frantically for sufficient water to fight the flames, having to make do with the feeble flow they procured from the pumps of the Bedford Coffee House. With the theatre already lost, nearby residents turned their attentions to saving their own homes, sprinting across the square in their nightshirts holding buckets and wet cloths they used to stuff their windows, while boys and servants scurried up to the rooftops with heavy mats to smother the fiery flakes that were being blown in their direction. As they craned their necks to see the frantic activity above, some of the crowd might have witnessed a bizarre scene – the goose from Mother Goose, canvas and feathers on a light wicker frame, hovering serenely above their heads, borne by thermal winds and making a stately progress from an attic window before floating off in the direction of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Twenty-three people died in the fire, including twelve firemen killed by a falling ceiling as they tried to fight their way into the auditorium. The sun had long risen by the time the flames were finally quenched, revealing a smoking ruin whose roof and eastern wall were entirely demolished, along with all the adjacent houses on the Bow Street and Hart Street sides. Besides the damage to the building, the management had to reckon the loss of all its scenery, instruments and properties, including Mrs Siddons’s entire wardrobe, put together over the course of thirty years, which included a rare bolt of lace that had belonged to Marie Antoinette. Other lost treasures included an organ bequeathed by George Frideric Handel for the oratorios in Holy Week, original scores by Handel and Thomas Arne, prompt-books and play scripts, and the Beef Steak Club’s entire wine cellar, said to be worth more than fifteen hundred pounds. With the whole insured for less than a quarter of the total, there was little comfort to be had from that which could be salvaged: the charred remains of the procession from Kotzebue’s Peruvian tragedy, Pizarro.*
Kemble, aged fifty-one, had lost everything, but bravely promised to raise a greater theatre even as the day broke on the ashes of the old. The company took up residence at the Haymarket while Harris and Kemble did the rounds raising money and engaging an architect, and Joe took the opportunity to play in Manchester and Liverpool, returning in time for Boxing Day, when the ‘lucky old hag’ Mother Goose was revived with a new scene showing the ruins of the old theatre magically rebuilt.
In his absence, Joe found that fickle London had turned to Drury Lane’s Clown, Jean-Baptiste Laurent, whom many were claiming as his equal, if not his superior. Laurent was the Signor’s last remaining apprentice, so Joe knew him well, his father’s imprint still clearly visible in Laurent’s portrayal of Clown as a blank-faced clodpate with a limitless capacity to absorb abuse. He even had something of the old goat’s stamina: at fifteen years Joe’s senior, he had far more agility than the younger man. Laurent, though, was more than just an imitator, and was held in such high regard by his summer employer, Philip Astley, that when he had once absconded, it was the manager himself who hunted him down and brought him back after tracking him to a puppet show on the Pont Neuf. Laurent also deserves special mention in the history of clowning for a particular innovation that has been emulated ever since: his singular pair of huge, flapping shoes.
The Frenchman’s sudden burst of popularity induced the same doubts that had gnawed at Joe with the appearance of Bradbury, and fearing he had once again lost ground, he was greatly relieved that Harris and Kemble’s fundraising came to quick fruition. Four days after the performance at the Haymarket, the entire company was assembled on the sodden cobbles of the piazza to watch the Prince of Wales, dressed in full Masonic regalia, lay the foundation stone for the new theatre. He spread the mortar with a silver trowel, hit it three times with a ceremonial mallet and emptied cups of corn, wine and oil over it for good luck. The company sang ‘Rule Britannia’ to the accompaniment of the band of the Coldstream Guards, and tried not to flinch through a twenty-one-gun salute.
As if jealous of its rival, on 24 February 1809, Drury Lane was itself levelled by fire. Sheridan, seeing the blaze from a window in the House of Commons, watched in mounting horror as he realised that the huge, unbroken flame that measured 450 feet across was his. The same frantic hunt for water followed, though it would have proved hopeless even had it been in plentiful supply as a strong north wind finished the job in hours, making day of night as far west as Fulham. It being a Friday in Lent, there was no play and no rehearsal so no lives were lost, a fact that seemed so convenient it might have been arranged. The finger of suspicion naturally pointed to its delinquent proprietor, whose years of unclassifiably tangled finances and felonious debts made a case in the public imagination for writing the whole thing off.
Sheridan’s apparent composure in the face of ruin did little to quell the rumours: he had at first refused the Speaker’s offer to adjourn the House when the fire was initially spotted, and shortly thereafter, watched the flames from the Piazza Coffee House, where he sat with his reprobate drinking partner, Michael Kelly. ‘A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside,’ Sheridan had said.
If arson it was, it was terribly ill-conceived as Sheridan was pitifully under-insured and had no money to rebuild. Furthermore, when the job of reviving the theatre was considered in the wake of the fire, he found it impossible to interest investors in anything that had his name attached to it. It was a fall from grace as dramatic as that of the statue of Apollo that had come crashing through the dome of Drury Lane as he and Michael Kelly looked on. Pushed aside in favour of an officious committee under the chairmanship of Samuel Whitbread, Sheridan quickly became yesterday’s man. It was the close of another long chapter in the history of London theatre. Drury Lane would not reopen for three and a half years, exactly half the time Sheridan had left to live.
By contrast, the new Covent Garden was ready in record time. It was an unlovely building, big and boxy with an enormous Doric portico that, wrote James Boaden, ‘astonishes by its ponderous inutility’, giving the impression of nothing more than a dour Midlands pottery. Financed by a public subscription, insurance money and a generous gift from the Duke of Northumberland, the budget still fell short by almost £164,000, and to cover costs, Kemble and Harris looked to increase profit directly from the point of sale, raising ticket prices across the board and refitting the third gallery as a series of expensive private boxes that could be purchased for an entire season. The changes, announced in advance, caused an outcry, and ‘the new theatre, born from misfortune’, in the words of Thomas Dibdin, ‘was nursed in fresh calamity’ as angry jeremiads accused the proprietors of forgetting their duty as custodians of a national institution to act like chiselling landlords. The theatre, they argued, was an extension of the democratic franchise exempt from tawdry economics. For the proprietors to assert their right to charge whatever they liked while privatising access to certain parts of it was nothing less than an attempt to reverse the balance of power in which the management served at the audience’s pleasure.
Special anger was reserved for the Italian singer Angelica Catalani, hired from the Haymarket at a phenomenal fee. Catalani was supposed to usher in the new era, but the suspicion was that the higher prices were subsidising her pampered and allegedly immoral lifestyle. Immorality became a key theme of the protests, as the management was accused of practically installing a suite of brothels in the new boxes, whose privacy facilitated ‘the playing of a play which does not endure witnesses’.
At first the controversy confined it
self to a lively exchange of views, but when Covent Garden reopened on 18 September 1809, two days before the first anniversary of its destruction, it erupted into three months of vociferous and frequently violent protest that amounted to nothing less than a battle for the soul of the stage. Not that Harris felt any of it: a few months before the opening he decided to scale down his involvement and pass on his duties to his son, Henry, leaving Kemble to bear the full brunt of the opposition. Even as he drew breath to begin a laudatory prologue on the opening night, his voice was lost in ‘a roar of disapprobation … a volley of hisses, hootings, and execrations’, noise that continued from the opening address to the final curtain and beyond. In a heady state of belligerence, the house refused to clear until two in the morning, ignoring even the magistrates who arrived flanked with officers and tried unsuccessfully to read the Riot Act. The following night was the same. The auditorium was festooned with placards and banners proclaiming ‘Old Prices’ and not a single performer could be heard above the din. At the end of the performance, the audience again stayed put, hissing and shouting, ‘God Save the King’, ‘No foreigners’, ‘No Catalani’ and ‘No Kemble’.
On the third night, Kemble came forward to entreat with them, but they gave him no quarter. The disturbances quickly took on a distinct identity, rallying the struggle under the initials ‘OP’ and adopting all the slogans and accoutrements of a political rally – OP medals, OP fans, OP handkerchiefs, OP waistcoats and caps – while the perpetrators evolved their tactics from straightforward shouting to incorporate singing, howling, barking, throwing sticks, running up and down the benches, waving rattles, blowing horns, ringing dustman’s bells, sitting with their backs to the stage, cross-dressing, staging mock fights, pinching live pigs and performing a tribal dance, which involved monotonously jumping backwards and forwards and shouting, ‘OP, OP,’ while knocking the floor with staffs. Rival performances took place in the boxes until Kemble had spikes put along the sills to stop people jumping in and out of them, and orations were delivered from every quarter. ‘Even women tried to speak,’ wrote an amazed visitor from Sweden, ‘and these speeches were regularly reported next day in the papers with the same exactitude as the parliamentary debates.’ OP was all the rage.
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Page 21