Two PORTERS then bring in a chairman [’s] horse,* on which are two chests of tea. HARLEQUIN and COLUMBINE enter, pursued, he changes the chests into an elegant sideboard, furnished complete, behind which he and COLUMBINE hide themselves. HARLEQUIN changes the Scene to
SCENE SIXTEENTH
Grocer’s Parlour
The CLOWN and PANTALOON enter, and they drink wine with the magic bottle. The CLOWN and PANTALOON go off. HARLEQUIN changes the sideboard into a bee-hive. Stand the whole of the scene, as if by magic, in one second presents the interior of
SCENE SEVENTEENTH
A Farm Yard
HARLEQUIN with COLUMBINE concealed behind the bee stand; when PANTALOON and CLOWN enter, each takes up a bee-hive. The bees swarm about their heads, and they exeunt bellowing. The Scene now changes to
SCENE EIGHTEENTH
The Mermaid’s Cave
The perspective shows the sea through the opening of the cavern.
MOTHER GOOSE enters, attended by four FAIRIES, whom she addresses in these lines:
Your task concludes, your mistress’ rage is o’er,
These wandering mortals, I’ll perplex no more,
Go wake the favourite of my sprites, who sleep
Within the briny bosom of the deep;
The spell-bound egg, from bondage to redeem,
Reward true love, and end our magic dream.
MOTHER GOOSE and FAIRIES exit when ODDFISH rises out of the sea. Pantomime for ODDFISH. Comes forward smacking the serpents that twine around his legs, and takes up two shells* and devours the fish. He then exits.
HARLEQUIN and COLUMBINE enter, as also soon after ODDFISH. COLUMBINE is terrified and HARLEQUIN pours wine into the mouth of
ODDFISH from his sword. HARLEQUIN now commands him to dive into the sea for the golden egg, he obeys, and returns with sea-weed which COLUMBINE receives. He goes a second time, and comes forward with the golden egg. HARLEQUIN receives it from him.
CLOWN and PANTALOON enter. HARLEQUIN and COLUMBINE take shelter behind ODDFISH, who keeps each at bay with his serpents.
MOTHER GOOSE enters. HARLEQUIN presents to her the golden egg, and she reconciles all parties with these lines:
The egg returned, receive thy lovely choice.
The gift is sanctioned by her guardian’s voice.
You soon restored to person, house, and lands,
Shall like a hearty English squire, shake hands.
Meanwhile his magic dwelling you shall view,
Furnished by fairy hands, to pleasure you.
MOTHER GOOSE waves her stick. Changes to a view of the last scene, representing
SCENE NINETEENTH
A Submarine Palace
The wings and sides of which are dolphins. In the perspective a tripod of them, and two recesses or alcoves, in each of which is seen a MERMAID busily employed in combing her hair, and the whole terminated by a distant view of the sea. DANCERS approach habited to correspond with the scene, and at the finale, the SQUIRE joins the lovers’ hands.
Chorus – MOTHER GOOSE, SQUIRE, PANTALOON, &c.
Finale
MOTHER GOOSE Ye patrons kind, who deign to view
The sports our scenes produce,
Accept our wish to pleasure you,
And laugh with Mother Goose.
CHORUS And laugh with Mother Goose, &c.
SQUIRE And let no critic stern reject
What our petitions beg,
That we may from your smiles collect
Each night some Golden Egg.
FULL CHORUS Ye patrons kind, who deign to view
The sport we’d feign produce,
Accept our wish to pleasure you,
And laugh with Mother Goose.
MOTHER GOOSE Who humbly begs,
On bended legs,
That you, good lack,
Her cause will back,
And scorn to crack
Her Golden Egg.
FULL CHORUS Who humbly begs,
On bended legs,
That you, good lack,
Her cause will back,
And scorn to crack
Her Golden Egg.
Curtain
* Some of Jack Bologna’s jumps were doubled by John King, a dancer who had been at Covent Garden since 1788.
* The following text is based on Thomas Hailes Lacy’s edition of Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the Golden Egg!, published in London, undated, though most likely 1807. Some punctuation has been silently modified, and musical cues have been omitted, as have the direction of entrances and exits stage left or right. Emendations for the sake of clarity are marked by square brackets. Omissions are denoted by ellipses.
* puncheon: a large punch bowl.
*Bacchus: Roman god of wine and revelry.
*club rules: a list of house rules affixed to the wall.
† regale: eat.
‡ cocked hat: a three-cornered hat with an upturned brim.
§ President Odd Fellow: head of a benevolent society, formed for largely social purposes, whose structure imitated the rites, orders and degrees of Freemasonry.
*distrain: seize property as punishment for non-payment.
† Fortune: the figure of Fortune was traditionally portrayed presiding over a wheel of fate, to which was affixed a cornucopia, or horn of plenty.
‡ banks: benches.
§ steel trap and spring gun: a jawed trap whose activation triggers a shot from a specially rigged musket. Used to ward off poachers and trespassers.
*the figures: the church of St Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet Street, was famous for its clock – the first in London to have a minute hand – and its bell tower that contained the figures of two giants who rang the chimes.
* Waterman’s Hall: situated on the north bank of the Thames near London Bridge, Waterman’s Hall was the administrative office of the Company of Watermen, incorporated in the sixteenth century.
† Somerset House: from 1779, the affairs of London’s Hackney carriages were overseen by a sub-department of the Royal Treasury located in Somerset House, the Strand.
* chairman’s horse: a handcart or barrow.
* shells: oysters
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NONE OF THIS WOULD have been possible without the friendship, guidance, and gin and ginger ale of my agent, Ben Mason, and the insightful and unfailingly excellent advice of my editor at Canongate, Nick Davies. Both have been a pleasure to work with, and this book would be immeasurably poorer without them. I am also grateful to Andy Miller, who embraced the project when it was just an idea, and Anya Serota, who helped it on its way. Big thanks also to Hazel Orme for her exceptional copy editing, to Elizabeth Lunn and Little Jim Allen for reading parts of the manuscript, and to the judges of the 2007 Jerwood/Royal Society for Literature Prize for non-fiction, Hermione Lee, John Stubbs and Sarah Wheeler, for being so generous and convivial in their assessment of it. More than anyone, I wish to thank my wife, Josie, for her boundless love, support, and willingness to spend at least part of each day discussing sad clowns. Thank you for being so lovely, thank you for our beautiful children, and thank you for largely resisting the inclination to stab me.
During the course of my research, I have been fortunate to encounter many people whose expertise and assistance have been invaluable. These include the Clowns’ Chaplain, the Reverend Roly Bain, the Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin, of All Saints Church, Jane Moody, of the University of York, Don Nielson, of Arizona State University, Willibald Ruch, of the University of Zurich, Jennie Walton, of the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund, and a shadowy private detective named Mrs Perkins. An especially large debt of gratitude is owed to transpontine impresario, Horatio Blood, for introducing me to the treasures of juvenile drama, and unreservedly sharing his vast knowledge, list of contacts and unbridled enthusiasm. For that, I remain enduringly grateful.
Thanks also to the many wonderful librarians I have met, especially Elizabeth Falsey of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Marcus Risdell of the Gar
rick Club Library, and most of all, Laura Taddeo, English Subject Librarian at the University of Buffalo, SUNY, without whose very practical help my research would have been conspicuously harder. I am also grateful for the helpful responses and many photocopied pages I have received from the staff at the Beinecke Library, Yale; the Print and Drawings Room of the British Museum; the British Library; the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds; the trustees of the Huntington Library, San Marino (who were also kind enough to award me a fellowship); the Islington Local History Centre; the London Metropolitan Archive; the Mander and Mitchenson Collection at the University of Greenwich; the Museum of London; the Rare Book Room at Cornell University; the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Room at the University of Toronto; and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Finally, as I was working on the last chapter of this book, my brother suffered an accident that left him in a coma. Thankfully, more than a year later, he is fully recovered, and I promise never to take him for granted again. I may not have had this opportunity were it not for the excellence of the doctors and nurses of the York ICU, the professionals at the Goole Neurorehabilitation Centre, and the many old friends and stonemasons who looked out for him, especially Danny Sampson. Most of all, I wish to acknowledge the unremitting care, loyalty and devotion shown by my parents during my brother’s time of need, and for teaching me, a parent myself, the true meaning of selfless love.
NOTES
AS BEFITS THE LIFE of a popular entertainer, the majority of material on Grimaldi is to be found in informal locations – newspaper reviews, gossip columns, letters, and collections of playbills, memorabilia and theatrical ephemera. In particular, much of what remains has been pasted into scrap-books and ‘grangerised’ editions of Dickens’s Memoirs (the process whereby printed texts were dismantled and rebound alongside supplementary material, popular among Georgian and Victorian book-collectors since the 1790s). Specific references are found here in the notes, although my principal sources have been the British Library’s Percival Collection of Material Relating to Sadler’s Wells, 1683–1849 (14 vols) (hereafter ‘Percival’), and three items in the Harvard Theatre Collection: a two-volume ‘special copy’ of the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (London: Richard Bentley, 1846), ‘illustrated with upwards of two hundred theatrical portraits, engravings, playbills, autographs, cuttings, etc.’; Augustin Daly’s four-volume ex-illustrated edition of the Memoirs (also London, 1846); and the ‘Grimaldi Scrapbook’, whose final entry is dated 28 February 1858. Full details of these and other manuscript sources can be found in the Bibliography.
Introduction
xxi Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: See Dalton and Mary Gross, ‘Joseph Grimaldi: An Influence on Frankenstein’, Notes and Queries, 28:226, no. 5 (1981): 402–4.
xxii primarily aimed at adults: The fact that modern clowns are considered principally to be children’s entertainers – an idea that would have appalled the many hardened acrobats and forains – is thanks largely to the alteration in audience demographics that were a result of Grimaldi’s fame. As his celebrity grew, attendance at the Christmas pantomime increasingly became part of the holiday ritual of many middle-class families: ‘not only hosts of holiday school-boys, and girls,’ wrote Frederick Reynolds, ‘but, grandfathers and grandmothers, and whole families of “children of larger growth”’. The pantomime learnt to accommodate itself increasingly towards its growing juvenile audience throughout the Regency, though it was not until the Victorian period that it became almost entirely infantilised, with clowns throwing sweets into the audience and various characters leading singalongs and playing call-andresponse games with the children.
xxii ‘a flying wagon’: William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–34), vol. 18, p. 323.
xxv twenty thousand Londoners: A mild inflation of David Worrall’s ‘conservative estimate’ from Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity, and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), p. 19.
xxvi ‘half-idiotic… emblem of gross sensuality’: Charles Dibdin, junior, Professional and Literary Memoirs of Charles Dibdin the Younger: Dramatist and Upward of Thirty Years Manager of Minor Theatres, ed. George Speaight (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1956), p. 89 (hereafter ‘Dibdin, Memoirs’).
xxvi Grimaldi’s lawlessness: See David Mayer III, Harlequin in His Element: The English Pantomime, 1806–1836 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 262.
xxvi ‘imbued with the spirit of peculation’: ‘Memoir of Joseph Grimaldi’, in Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes, ed. Catherine and William Oxberry, 5 vols (London, 1825–6), vol. 2, pp. 109–22, p. 119 (hereafter ‘Oxberry (eds), “Memoir of Joseph Grimaldi’’ ’).
xxvi ‘suffered under nervous irritation’: Henry Downes Miles, The Life of Joseph Grimaldi, with Anecdotes of His Contemporaries (London: Christopher Harris, 1838), p. 190 (hereafter ‘Miles, Grimaldi’).
The Wonders of Derbyshire
3‘very Pit or hole’: Martin Lister, A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698 (London, 1699), p. 180.
3‘vast croud of people’: Lister, Journey to Paris, p. 181.
4 Armenian coffee… sweetmeats and pastries: See Robert M. Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) pp. 23–4, 30.
4 Comédie-Française: See Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 118–26.
5‘deformed concert’: Ravel, Contested Parterre, p. 115.
5‘Buy my shit, it’s fresh’: (Qui veut de ma merde? Argent de ma merde; c’est de la fraîche), Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy, p. 32.
5‘Spiritual Tyranny’: Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, Letter Concerning Enthusiasm and Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, ed. Richard B. Wolf (New York: Garland, 1988), p. 14. Spelling modernised.
7 sauteur: Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy, p. 38.
7 Grande Troupe Étrangère: See Émile Campardon, Les Spectacles de la Foire, 2 vols (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), vol. 1, p. 385. According to Philip Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, c.1973–93) (hereafter BDA) vol. 6, Giovanni was not the Grimaldi of ‘Les Enfants Hollandais’, as claimed by Findlater (Joe Grimaldi: His Life and Theatre, 2nd edn [Cambridge University Press, 1977] [hereafter, ‘Findlater, Joe Grimaldi’] Appendix A, p. 24). That troupe belonged to an impresario (possibly a relative, also called Grimaldi) active in Germany in 1760. Les Enfants Hollandais published a book of their pantomime scripts.
7 jump as high as the chandelier: Campardon, Spectacles de la Foire, vol. 1, p. 385.
9 ‘Surgeon Operator for the Teeth’: Advertisements for ‘Signor Grimaldi’s Most Agreeable Dentifrice Powder’ in use ‘for years past’ date as far back as 1737, along with the claims that he could painlessly draw teeth, fill cavities with lead and even make dentures, ‘although this operation is so curiously difficult as to be questioned by many, and particularly some of the profession’. BDA, vol. 6; Dennis Arundell, The Story of Sadler’s Wells, 1683–1977 (London et al.: David and Charles, 1965), p. 23.
9 ‘danced away on four horse-shoes to Dover’: Henry Angelo, The Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, ed. H. Lavers Smith, 2 vols (New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1969), vol. 2, pp. 116–17.
10 a tattered Harlequin’s costume: Miles, Grimaldi, pp. 12–13.
10 nor leaves anything to a son: Will of John Baptist Grimaldi, 11 March 1760. PROB/11/854.
10 ‘she could break chandeliers’: Thomas Dibdin, History of the Stage, quoted in Miles, Grimaldi, p. 13.
11 ‘the precise degree of relationship’: The Drama; or, Theatrical Pocket Magazine, unidentified
clipping, British Library; Miles, Grimaldi, p. 13.
11 part of the retinue of George III’s bride: See BDA, vol. 6.
11 regional tours: Summer tours offered a particularly lucrative outlet for the Signor’s sideline, and whenever he performed in the provinces, as he did in Liverpool in 1760, and Bristol in 1774 and 1775, he made sure first to place a notice in the local paper announcing ‘Grimaldi, Surgeon-Dentist, who has had the Honour of attending her MAJESTY, the Prince of Wales, and the Prince and Princess of Brunswic [sic], and the Happiness of having his Applications crow’d with Success’. BDA, vol. 6, pp. 388–97.
12 ‘sublime et divin’: Findlater, Joe Grimaldi, p. 46.
12 ‘a man of genius’: Charles Dickens, The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, ed. and rev. with notes and additions by Charles Whitehead (London: Richard Bentley, 1846) (hereafter ‘Whitehead Memoirs’), p. 4, fn.
12 ‘Grimaldi is a man of great strength and agility’: Whitehead Memoirs, p. 3, fn.
12 ‘the best Clown we ever saw’: Arundell, Sadler’s Wells, p. 31.
13 ‘symptom of a nation’s degeneracy… the toil of thinking’: The Times, 11 May 1785; John Corry, A Satirical View of London; Comprehending a Sketch of the Manners of the Age, 2nd edn (London, 1803), p. 238.
13 ‘pantomimical’: See John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 210, 213.
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Page 35