Although it is not included in his compendium of terms
that have proven crucial in the history of the English language and the
Anglo-American culture that has used and shaped it, "entertainment" would
certainly count as one of what Raymond Williams identified as
keywords, terms opening vistas into the dynamics of social change.
1 Entertainment--literally (via the French) "hold
between"--typically demarcates temporary and interstitial spaces or
activities: among the usages that the Oxford English Dictionary
records for entertainment are as a synonym for maintenance or
sustenance ("the entertainment of the regiment"), as a show of hospitality
such as a meal for guests, or, most frequently in twentieth-century usage,
as a general term for diversions, often those produced by an element of
the culture industry. Common to most of these usages is a sense of
entertainment as something that is provisional and general, situated
between more obviously useful states of work or rest and resistant to
hard-and-fast definitions or excessive specificity. Considering this
indeterminacy at the center of the concept, it is perhaps no surprise that
entertainments--theatrical, athletic, literary, filmic, and
televisual--have often functioned as loci of cultural conflict and
confrontation; they are activities in which cultural values are contested,
negotiated, and legitimated, and through which those values may become
both intelligible to contemporaries and perspicuous to later historians
who want to identify and understand them.
This essay will focus on one particularly vital and
contested form of entertainment in eighteenth-century Britain--the
performance genre better known as pantomime. In their role as "the
entertainment" of an evening's bill, pantomimes were positioned in the
interval between the full-length mainpiece and the close of the program,
when spectators returned to a society that eighteenth-century observers
often analogized to the theatre: "the World and the Stage," claimed
Richard Steele, "have been ten thousand times observ'd to be the Pictures
of one another." 2 If Steele's commonplace--which feels slightly worn
even as he utters it--is even partly right, the enormous popularity of
pantomime in the eighteenth-century British theatre would strongly suggest
that the world it depicted was in the throes of profound change, such that
[End Page 489] certain long-standing expectations and norms could
not longer be assumed to hold. For from the 1720s through the 1740s in
particular, pantomime entertainments frequently reversed the assumed
priority of mainpiece to afterpiece, as they became the most consistently
profitable product that the London patent theatres had to offer; they
flourished outside the licensed theatres in nonlicensed houses (Goodman's
Fields, Sadler's Wells, the Little Theatre at the Haymarket, among
others), in the London fairs held each August and September, and in
provincial theatres as well. 3 As we shall see, pantomime had its admirers and
advocates, as there were writers for whom the imperial pretensions of the
word "pantomime," its etymological claim to imitate any and everything,
and the form's putative origins in the Greek and Roman theatre, made it
available as a way of identifying British culture as the heir to a
tradition of silent, kinetic mimesis that constituted a language of its
own. But modern critics and historians have generally followed the
evaluations of contemporary antagonists such as Alexander Pope and Henry
Fielding, accepting their contemptuous description of pantomime as an
"irrational entertainment," a sign of the depravity of the audience's
taste and of the decline of the British stage. 4 The overkill palpable in [End Page 490] such
attacks as Pope's first version of The Dunciad (1728), which
features the pantomime librettist Lewis Theobold as its mock-hero and
chief dunce, indicates how thoroughly a literary culture deeply invested
in the priority of language, in the purity of literary genres, and in its
own authority over the classical tradition was threatened by what we might
well think of as pantomime's entertainment of conflicting impulses
and competing theatrical modes, the ways in which it combined serious with
comic, spectacular with mundane, classical with popular elements. 5 Perhaps most importantly, in its reliance on the
material components of theatre--scenery, stage effects, the bodies of
performers--for much of its impact, pantomime also aroused long-standing
worries about the materiality of the stage, a physicality associated with
vulgar, unsophisticated, and plebeian spectacle. In effect, then,
pantomime entertainments were located at the crossing of bourgeois
theatre's desire to reform itself in order to become a respectable and
improving form of literature, and the traditions of fairground and
carnivalesque performance that consistently embarrassed bourgeois culture.
6 Indexing their culture's deep investment in and
ambivalence towards mimesis, eighteenth-century British pantomimes
entertained their audiences, and scandalized their critics, by exploiting
the theatre's potential as the literary institution most thoroughly
implicated in the material world--and by courting its risks. 7
I
Modern writers have generally followed eighteenth-century
observers in identifying the fall of 1723 as the moment when pantomime
suddenly emerged as a dominant theatrical form. It was in that year that
the London patent houses staged competing pantomimes on the Faust legend
that became the hits of the 1723-24 season: Harlequin Doctor Faustus;
or, The Masque of the Deities opened at Drury Lane in November 1723,
followed in December by the Lincoln's Inn Fields production of The
Necromancer; or, Harlequin Doctor Faustus. But the Faustus afterpieces
that brought the afterpieces usually promoted as "pantomimic
entertainments" or "dramatic entertainments in dancing" into critical
intelligibility had emerged out of a heterogeneous mix of various kinds of
afterpiece and between-act performances that had been common in the patent
theatres since at least the 1670s: farces, burlesques, dances, masques,
acrobatics, and commedia dell'arte scenarios. Indeed, some elements
of pantomime long predated the Restoration, notably the commedia
dell'arte characters and scenarios, which were almost coterminous with
the emergence of the professional theatre in England as such. As Andrew
Grewar has pointed out, Italian commedia troupes were performing in
England at least by the 1540s, and their stock scenarios were soon
imitated by English [End Page 491] theatre companies; the young
Richard Burbage, later to become the leading actor in many of William
Shakespeare's plays, performed in an adapted commedia scenario
entitled The Plot of the Dead Man's Fortune in 1590. 8 By the 1670s, visiting Continental commedia
dell'arte companies were a regular feature of the London theatre;
Charles II ordered medals and gold chains to be presented to members of
Tiberio Fiorillo's company in 1673. 9 English playwrights incorporated commedia
into their mainpiece productions as well. Aphra Behn adapted The
Emperor of the Moon (1687) from a Continental commedia
scenario; according to Jane Spencer, this was Behn's "second
most-performed play" in the eighteenth century (following only the first
part of The Rover).10 A number of eighteenth-century pantomimes identify
themselves as "masques" as if to recall Stuart court entertainments, where
"Harlekin" and other commedia characters occasionally appeared as
part of the anti-masque segment of the performance; the two-part structure
of "comic" and "serious" sections in eighteenth-century pantomime also
broadly mimics, consciously or unconsciously, the masque/anti-masque
structure of Stuart masques. And there were more immediate examples of
that form as well. 11 John Weaver's afterpieces at Drury Lane, performed
in the late 1710s, for example, staged many of the same classical myths
that had been the subject-matter for Peter Motteux's commercially-produced
"masques" of the 1690s, entertainments that Weaver had probably seen, and
which were revived and adapted into the 1710s. 12 The Faustus pantomimes, which impressed
contemporaries with their novelty, were also in part adaptations of
William Mountfort's farce The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (c.
1684), itself a burlesque of Marlowe's Elizabethan tragedy; Mountfort's
key departures from Marlowe include a speaking Harlequin and Scaramouche
as well as "Songs and Dances between the Acts." 13
What seems to have changed in the early 1720s was the
development of a framework within which several different types of
performance could be organized into a single action. Such a framework
proved to be extremely adaptable and repeatable, such that pantomime
entertainments quickly assumed a paradigmatic two-part shape that typified
the form through the 1720s and 1730s: a "serious" part, usually drawn from
classical mythology, alternating with a "comic" or "grotesque" part, which
focused on the escapades of Harlequin, who used all the resources of stage
[End Page 492] trickery, most crucially the ability to disguise
himself and to transform objects and persons, in order to pry Colombine
from the grasp of her father or husband, a character variously identified
as Pantaloon, the Doctor, or, in some examples from the 1730s (when
Britain was in conflict with Spain), "Don Spaniard." John Rich's
pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn Fields and then Covent Garden were generally
more popular than the ones at Drury Lane until his retirement from
performing the role of Harlequin (under the stage name "Lun") around
midcentury, and his most successful scenarios remained in the repertory
for many years: Apollo and Daphne: or, Harlequin Mercury (1725),
Harlequin a Sorcerer: With the Loves of Pluto and Proserpine
(1725), The Rape of Proserpine (1727), Perseus and Andromeda
(1730), and Orpheus and Eurydice (1740), among others. But Drury
Lane, after a period of consistent failure in their attempts to imitate
Rich's pantomimes, enjoyed some success with its own versions of The
Rape of Proserpine and Orpheus and Eurydice, Cephalus and
Procris (1733), The Harlot's Progress (1733), and Cupid and
Psyche; or, Colombine Courtezan (1734), among others. At the licensed
London houses, pantomimes in this period fulfilled a common set of
expectations: a starring role for Harlequin, who, in the 1720s and 30s,
was always silent, a classical or mythological plot (whose characters
spoke and sang) to contrast with the harlequinade, and the liberal use of
stage machinery, spectacle, and scenic design in both.
A number of writers have discussed the Faustus
pantomimes, particularly Rich's The Necromancer (see note 3), but I
want to use Perseus and Andromeda, first performed at Lincoln's Inn
Fields in 1730, as an example that will illustrate many of the features
common to the form as it was typically staged in the 1720s and 30s.
14 First of all, this is a pantomime with a
reasonably complete textual record, one that gives us at least some idea
of what the comic sections (which are missing in most cases) looked like.
The "serious" part was scripted by Lewis Theobold, and although the
printed text of the harlequinade (which was published separately as The
Tricks of Harlequin in Derby in 1739), identifies no author, it is
likely that the comic episodes were largely if not completely
choreographed by Rich himself. Moreover, Perseus and Andromeda was
one of the most successful and best-known pantomimes of this period, a
staple of the repertory that was revived almost every year well into the
1750s. 15 Finally, Perseus and Andromeda's thematics
of spectatorship can be taken, I will suggest, as an allegory for the
broader spectatorial relationship engaged by the eighteenth-century
British stage itself; in its staging of the relationship between an
observer and a spectacle that is at once alluring and threatening, Rich
and Theobold's pantomime narrates an ambivalence towards theatre and
theatricality that, as we shall see, implicates national and gendered
politics as well. [End Page 493]
Like most of Rich's pantomimes, Perseus and
Andromeda interweaves two plots: the rescue of Andromeda, here an
Ethiopian princess, from a sea-monster by the semi-divine hero Perseus
(the "serious"), and a harlequinade in which Harlequin plays a series of
tricks on "Don Spaniard" in order to lure the latter's wife Colombine away
(the "comic" or "grotesque"). Theobold's script for the serious sections
conflates Perseus's most famous feats--his beheading of Medusa and his
rescue of Andromeda--by presenting them as one continuous narrative in
three distinct episodes: the first episode begins with the Ethiopians
panicked at the approach of Medusa, who threatens to turn the entire realm
into what King Cepheus (Andromeda's father) calls "breathless Statues" (2)
and ends with Perseus receiving a magic helmet, handed to him by Mercury
but originally a gift from Pluto, that will enable him to escape the
Gorgons after he has slain Medusa; the second, set in the Gorgon's cave
shows Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa with the help of Mercury and
then escaping by using the helmet to make himself invisible; the third and
final serious episode shows Perseus, fresh off this exploit, rescuing
Andromeda from the sea monster in return for her hand in marriage. The
serious section ends with the descent of the "Palace of Venus," where the
pagan gods bless the union of Perseus and Andromeda, and a dance wherein
the subjects of Cepheus express their joy, both at their deliverance from
a series of monsters, and at a marriage that will ensure the succession of
the monarchy.
The comic episodes, inserted between the episodes of the
serious plot, open with Harlequin admiring a picture of his beloved
Colombine, but so frustrated at his poverty (he mimes his anguish at not
being able to afford the postage to reply to her letter) that he prepares
to commit suicide. But the chair that he has perched upon to hang himself
turns into a magician, who, in the only spoken part of the comic sections,
tells Harlequin not to despair, and gives him the magic sword that will
enable him to perform the transformations that will help him get
Colombine. In the remainder of the comic sections, spectators get to watch
Harlequin use his new powers to trick Don Spaniard and his hapless
servant, the Clown, and the "Petit Maitre," a foppish dancing-master who
is also interested in Colombine: he transforms a chair on which the Petit
Maitre is sitting into a chest and locks him in it; he switches a letter
that the Petit Maitre intends to send to Colombine with one of his own; he
is shot out of a cannon onto Colombine's balcony to escape from the Clown,
etc. Most notoriously, Harlequin transforms himself into a dog to enter
Don Spaniard's house incognito, where he proceeds to ingratiate himself to
Colombine and to piss on the leg of the Petit Maitre (a moment that became
one of Rich's most famous--and notorious--comic turns). In the end,
Harlequin wins Columbine, and the harlequinade joins in a dance; it is
unclear from the printed text whether this dance was combined with the one
that ends the serious episodes, but it may well have been, as there are
examples of pantomimes that unite the two strands of the entertainment in
a final dance where characters from both serious and comic sections join
together.
This highly-compressed description underscores the ways
in which the harlequinade comic sections, like the commedia
dell'arte performances from which they derive, distill the conventions
of comedy, which might be summed up by calling upon Northrop Frye's
description of Greek New Comedy as "an erotic intrigue between a young man
and a young woman which is blocked by some kind of opposition, usually
paternal." 16[End Page 494] Such a description is
reductive enough to work for such contemporary comedies as Richard
Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1722) and Susanna Centlivre's A
Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) (among many others) as well, which is
precisely the point: harlequinades presented their audience with many of
the basic plot elements of the comedies that were simultaneously being
offered as mainpiece entertainments. Meanwhile, the serious sections
compressed and in effect democratized the kinds of material presented in
the Italian operas that had become popular among the elite. In the preface
to The Rape of Proserpine, also scripted by Lewis Theobold, and
performed at Lincoln's Inn Fields beginning in 1727, Rich argued that he
was indeed adapting Italian opera "to the Taste of an English
Audience," rendering it a "general Diversion" rather than an entertainment
for the wealthy by eschewing the expensive foreign performers whose
exorbitant salaries made opera the most expensive and therefore the most
exclusive form of entertainment in this period. 17 Finally, pantomime's interweaving of comic and
serious plots is not all that different in kind from the mixture of the
serious, sentimental relationship between Bevil and Indiana in The
Conscious Lovers and the farcical relationship between Tom and Phyllis
in the same play, the similar combination of serious romance and farce in
Joseph Addison's opera Rosamond (1707), or even the relationship
between the political allegory and the love plot in his most famous play,
Cato (1713). It's perhaps not surprising then that Anne Lovely, the
heroine of Susanna Centlivre's comedy A Bold Stroke for a Wife,
compares her situation--blocked from her beloved Fainwell by no less than
four guardians--to that of Andromeda: "She but one monster feared, I've
four to fear / And see no Perseus, no deliv'rer near." 18 The crossing of the comic and serious registers in
Anne's rueful self-description--here all the more pronounced because it
takes place at virtually the moment of greatest complication, just before
Fainwell (whose capacity for mimicry rivals that of a harlequin) reveals
his own multiple disguises and claims her from all four guardians at
once--would have been familiar to London theatre audiences, not least to
those who had seen Drury Lane's production of The Shipwreck; or,
Perseus and Andromeda in 1717. 19 To contemporary spectators, pantomimic
entertainments could be taken to appropriate and thereby to condense the
most popular and notable features of the contemporary British stage: the
plots of sentimental comedy, the scenery and diegetic material of Italian
opera, the physical farce of Continental commedia dell'arte, and
the elegance of dance. [End Page 495]
Contrasts in tone (comic versus serious) and source
material (classical versus popular or folk) such as the ones I have
described in Perseus and Andromeda were also countered in such
entertainments by visual and thematic (and, one speculates, musical and
scenic) continuities. On the one hand, pantomimic entertainments pursue
the pleasures attendant on viewing rapid changes of scene, extreme
disruptions in narrative logic, and great disparity between classical and
commedia modes; they thus share the quality of "borrowing and
pastiche" that John Brewer has recently observed to be widespread in
eighteenth-century British literary culture. 20 On the other hand, pantomimes also seek the local
pleasures of discovering analogies between widely disparate plots and in
exploring the possibilities of two realms where quotidian norms of cause
and effect and laws of nature are equally held in abeyance. Thus
Perseus and Andromeda includes parallel scenes where Perseus and
Harlequin read letters from the women they love and lament their
incapacity to help them; immediately following each of these scenes first
Perseus, and then Harlequin is equipped with the instruments of the magic
each will need to accomplish his task. Mercury gives Perseus a sword with
which to cut off Medusa's head and the helmet that will render him
invisible from the other Gorgons; in the scene that immediately follows,
Harlequin receives his sword, the magic wand that enables him to transform
himself or anyone else, from a magician. (The helmet given by Mercury to
Perseus might also be seen as an analog to the cap worn by harlequins, a
prop that performers incorporated in a great deal of comic stage
business.) 21 Later in the pantomime, Harlequin transforms
himself into a statue of Mercury, waving the pagan god's caduceus much as
he has been waving his own magic wand. 22 The harlequinade thus stands in a relationship of
burlesque or parody to the serious part of the pantomime; here the
"grotesque" offers a comic version of the classical plot wherein Perseus
uses his god-given equipment first to kill Medusa, and then to rescue
Andromeda from a sea monster, constructing a parodic analogy between the
characters of Perseus and Harlequin that the performance would have
reinforced by establishing visual correspondences or kinetic rhymes
between one scene and the next.
Linkages such as the ones I have described must be
understood to be associatively rather than diegetically motivated,
indebted far more to visual or thematic analogies than they are to the
logic of either the serious or comic narratives. Indeed, the plots are
themselves so utterly conventional and predictable (who can doubt but that
Harlequin will succeed in his quest to humiliate his rivals Don Spaniard
and the Petit Maestre and win Colombine?) that the spectators' attention
must perforce be engaged elsewhere. In the absence of narrative suspense,
the spectacle, the ingenuity of the comic [End Page 496] routines
and transformations, and the juxtapositions of serious and comic modes
inevitably become the necessary object of the spectators' interest and
pleasure. By contrast with mainpieces such as The Conscious Lovers,
pantomimes like Perseus and Andromeda almost systematically refuse
to gratify the desire for plot complication and resolution; Steele's play,
for example, while ultimately achieving a conventional comic ending by
pairing off Bevil and Indiana, teases us with the possibility of Bevil's
either being killed or ruined in a duel. Pantomime evacuates all such
suspense, in effect parodying the conventions of serious as well as comic
drama by playing them out in particularly schematic and unmediated forms.
By foregrounding its medium and the genres that it mimics
to the point of parody, pantomimes achieve a species of metatheatricality;
they condense many of the salient features of the Augustan theatre so as
to serve at times as a form of critique upon them. We may, for example,
once again use Perseus and Andromeda to demonstrate how pantomimes
could allegorize the ambivalences of what Joseph Roach has termed the
eighteenth-century "theatre of the 'artificial eye.'" 23 Harlequin's fixation on Colombine's picture at the
outset of the comic sections, for example, underscores the ways in which
Perseus and Andromeda thematizes the spectatorial relations that,
as Kristina Straub has argued, constitute the gendered cultural work
performed by the eighteenth-century British stage. It's by using the
extensive discourse about the stage that Straub articulates what she
describes as "the ongoing process of naturalization by which the powerful,
gendered tropes of the male spectator and the female spectacle become
encoded in modern ideology," 24 a process that Perseus and Andromeda
suggests has been so well naturalized as to be the object of mild mockery.
That is to say that pantomimes could display ambivalence about their
desire to gratify the visual pleasure of their spectators, as if they fear
that absorption in the spectacle might turn into fixation. In Perseus
and Andromeda, for example, such a fear is realized in the "baleful
Power" of Medusa's gaze, the force that propels and organizes the serious
part of Perseus and Andromeda. On the one hand, nothing better
allegorizes the way that the spectator's gaze can be turned back upon
itself, shown to be a reckless or even monstrous abuse of power, than the
myth of Medusa. To the extent that we might interpret Perseus to be a
figure for the (male) spectator successfully conquering his own anxieties
about the return of the gaze, then we can imagine the serious of
Perseus and Andromeda as raising the specter of monstrous viewing
in order to offer a kind of reassurance to its audience. But in so doing
it refers us to the question of the theatricality of state power. King
Cepheus, Andromeda's father, laments that Medusa's approach constitutes a
particular threat to his own position as the usual object of the people's
gaze:
Still must the fell Medusa range
Wide oe'r my Realms with Gorgon Terrors arm'd And turn my gazing
Subjects into Stone: Then I in vain am call'd King; Soon
Desolation will o'er-run my Realms, And only breathless Statues be
my Subjects.
[1-2] [End Page 497]
Transformed from "moving" to "breathless Statues,"
Cepheus's Ethiopian subjects will gaze no more at their monarch,
undermining the grounds of his sovereignty and rendering him in effect
impotent. In fusing the Medusa story with the rescue of Andromeda and
thereby threatening Cepheus as well as Perseus with the Medusa's power,
Theobold's script compresses Perseus's exploits for dramatic effect and
efficiency while it also shapes the relationship between political
authority and spectatorship into an object to be viewed and critiqued in
its own right. Depicting a monarch unable to prevent his nation or his
family from being destroyed by monsters, Perseus and Andromeda
discovers a new locus for sovereignty in the role of the hero who
successfully negotiates the hazards of spectatorship, and who in turn
serves as the site of identification for the spectators in the theatre.
To assert that a pantomime offered an allegory of
political power seems to grant it a status not usually associated with
mere entertainment, much less with a notoriously "irrational"
entertainment whose opponents typically described it as replacing reason
with mere sensation tout court. I do not wish to claim that
Perseus and Andromeda or other pantomimes can be taken to be
offering political critique as such, or that they would likely have been
decoded as political statements by spectators in a position to do so. Yet
pantomimes clearly were imagined as political by contemporaries who
understood their popularity as indexing the state of Britain itself.
Critics have frequently observed the way in which contemporary writers
such as Pope identified pantomime as a sign of the decay of British
culture, but they have less frequently interrogated the arguments of its
defenders, much less excavated the logic by which a form of entertainment
could be understood as a reliable indicator of the state of something as
seemingly different in kind as a nation. We can, however, gain a glimpse
into how the distinctive Britishness of pantomime and its positivity were
mutually supported in a rare endorsement offered by the Grub-Street
Journal, which, as a journal following the lead of Pope's critique in
The Dunciad, most frequently attacked pantomime. Yet the
Journal also occasionally endorsed it as another means by which the
stage might accomplish its assigned "business" of offering simultaneous
"pleasure and instruction. Our Pantomime Entertainments, if rightly
managed, might be no less useful than our best Plays: for as these improve
our discourse, so might those our carriage; and a well-chosen Subject,
properly represented by genteel action and graceful attitudes, would, I
doubt not, make a considerable alteration in the outward behaviour of the
attentive spectator." 25
The "Our" of the Grub-Street Journal's atypically
sympathetic account, like the "we" of Ralph's argument, is significant,
because it points to the way in which the conception of "Pantomime
Entertainments" as a distinguishable form in the 1720s and 30s
supported a conception of Britain as possessing a distinctive national
culture, one capable of being compared to the cultures of Greece and Rome.
This conception went hand-in-hand with the reformist agenda that was
initiated by Jeremy Collier's attacks on the licentiousness of comedy in
the late 1690s, an agenda to which playwrights like Steele, Centlivre, and
Colley Cibber declared their allegiance. Collier's incendiary and
extraordinarily influential AShort View of the Immorality, and
Prophaneness, of the English Stage (1698), demarcates "the English
stage" as such in order to compare its "immorality," "smuttiness" and
"prophaneness" to the national theatres of Greece and Rome, [End Page
498] establishing a pattern that other writers would follow. Collier's
title (which, as many fatigued readers have noticed, greatly misleads by
claiming to be "short") alludes to Thomas Rymer's 1671 treatise A Short
View of the Tragedies of the Last Age, as if to expand the scope of
the very notion of genre from a literary to a cultural category. Far from
the being the sign of the decline of the stage, the emergence of pantomime
could also be understood to be a harbinger of its reform, a return to the
classical basis of the theatre in the human body in motion.
Contemporary discussions of pantomime--both
negative and positive--exploit the new coherence of pantomime as a
theatrical kind in the 1720s to make claims about the nature of that other
newly coherent entity, Great Britain, incorporated only in 1707 with the
Act of Union. James Miller uses Perseus and Andromeda to point to
the arbitrary composition of the audience to which it appealed. The
frontispiece to the first edition of Miller's satire Harlequin-Horace:
or the Art of Modern Poetry (1731), offers a hint of what Perseus
and Andromeda looked like in performance, although it is a record of
no single moment; rather, the image overlays two successive scandalous
scenes onto each other in order to achieve a single visual representation
(fig.
1). In the foreground, Rich as Harlequin transformed into a dog
urinates on the leg of a classical figure; in the background, Harlequin
masquerading as Mercury rises on top of a cupola. Miller's text glosses
the image:
In the farce of Perseus and Andromeda,
a most obscene Dance was perform'd in a Temple, several Persons
in the Characters and Habits of Priests and Bishops being present; at
the same Time the ingenious Mr. Lun deported himself very
naturally in the Shape of a Dog, till a Dome rising voluntarily from
under the Stage, gave him room for another Transformation by standing
on the Top of it in the guise of a Mercury, to the high
Admiration and Delight of a British Audience. 26
Miller's identification of the delighted audience of
Perseus and Andromeda as "British" is not accidental, but rather
essential to the logic of his critique, which constructs an homology
between the debased "Taste" of the audience and the "inconsistent"
spectacles that they support, an homology based on a specific
conceptualization of the national character of Britain itself. Such
entertainments as Perseus and Andromeda, Miller wants to argue,
perfectly mirror the spectatorship that admires them insofar as both
consist of heterogeneous elements that have been joined together in
pursuit of no particular overarching logic. Hence the "Thousand jarring
Things together yoke[d]" in Rich's entertainment "suits the various
Temper of our Isle" precisely because both stage and state "Consult
no Order, nor pursue no End" (24). We have already seen that Perseus
and Andromeda, at least, obeys a more complicated internal logic than
Miller seems willing to recognize or admit, but what is worth stressing
here is how his argument attempts to account for pantomime's popularity by
linking the character of the performance to the character of a nation that
it not only entertains but represents. Miller's linkage is designed to
compliment neither Rich nor his patrons, but it testifies to a desire to
understand the state of Britain by assessing the state of the nation's
taste, an entity that is imagined as analogous to a theatrical form or
genre.
Positive descriptions of pantomime stressed how it would
make a contribution to British culture by offering origin myths featuring
pantomime as the key to the revival [End Page 499][Begin Page
501] of the Roman theatre. John Weaver, the dancing-master at Drury
Lane who staged and performed in a number of "dramatic entertainment[s],
in imitation of the Roman pantomimes" in the 1710s, provided the period's
most unequivocal defense and theorization of pantomime by in effect
casting ancient Rome as an allegory of modern Britain, describing it as a
nation whose public entertainments had been trivialized as a consequence
of its imperial conquests and its material success. 27 When, as Weaver puts it, "the Introduction of the
Asiatick Luxury" sank the Romans "into Effeminacy," the stage
declined as well into "foolish Amusements" such as rope-dancing and mere
pageants, "so that the admirable Effects of Tragedy, and the agreeable
Diversions of Comedy, were lost in Noise and Show." 28 But the "Depravity (I say) of the Taste of the
Audience" was rescued, says Weaver, when pantomime artists "invented a new
sort of Diversion" that represented traditional stories without words or
spectacle, thereby purifying the stage of the sensational clutter that had
overcome the "manly Taste" gratified by the traditional Roman theatre.
29 Weaver claims that Roman pantomime performers
fulfilled the etymology of their art's name by becoming "Imitators of
all persons and of all Things," performing through "Gesture,
and the Action of Hands, Legs, and Feet" what orators and actors in
the spoken drama communicated through language. 30 Weaver does not fail to make the application to
Augustan Britain that we might well expect; by encouraging a revival of
classical pantomime, he hopes to "improve our present Diversions," which,
like those of imperial Rome, have typically consisted of "Trick and Show"
where they could have offered "the Beauty of Imitation, and the
Harmony of Composition and Motion." 31 By embracing classical pantomime, Britain could be
imagined to instantiate what can only be called a pantomimic
relationship with Roman culture, imitating its manly sincerity by adopting
entertainments that could reform a national stage similarly threatened by
effeminate spectacle.
Weaver was, to be sure, skeptical about the harlequinade
sections that, as we have seen, became an essential component of British
pantomime, complaining in the 1720s that the "ludicrous Representations of
Harlequin, Scaramouch, Columbine, Pierot, &c." represented a
corruption of the classical form. But Weaver also performed in
harlequinades, playing the role of Harlequin himself at Drury Lane in the
1710s, and appearing as Colombine's Father and the Clown in the 1720s.
32 More important, his critical writings offer only
the strongest articulations of an understanding of pantomime that was in
fact shared far more broadly than has generally been recognized. James
Ralph's survey of the "reigning Diversions of the Town" The
Touch-Stone (1728), asserted that classical pantomime succeeded a
particularly "licentious" period in the theatre of [End Page 501]
ancient Greece; in his case, the predecessor was the "old Grecian Comedy,"
which, by "abusing nominally Persons of the highest Stations and brightest
Characters," had discredited itself (94). Although he turns in the first
instance to Greece rather than Rome for his model, we can see Ralph's
argument as being consistent with Weaver's logic of making the classical
period into an allegory of recent British literary history if we take, as
I believe we should, his characterization of old comedy as standing in for
the abusive, name-calling, and scandalous nature of early
eighteenth-century public discourse in Britain. 33 Ralph claims that because it offers an alternative
to the allegorical and scandalous license of earlier comedy, English
pantomime "is of greater Moment to Mankind than may appear at first View,
and should be manag'd with Sense and Discretion," put under the auspices
of "a chosen Society of learned Antiquaries and penetrating
Virtuosi," who, after studying representations of classical
pantomime on urns, coins, and other artifacts, would instruct pantomime
dancers in the classical attitudes in order to "enforce all Precepts of
Religion, and Morality, by their dumb Eloquence, and
silent Rhetorick." 34 For both Weaver and Ralph, English pantomime
fulfills the logic (as it exposes the blind spot) of Collier's reform
program because it purges profane and licentious language in order to make
the British stage a worthy heir to the classical tradition. Collier's
attack had focused on the verbal component of plays to the virtual
exclusion of the material constituents of the theatre, including the
bodies of actors and actresses on stage (indeed, it often seems as if
Collier has never actually seen a play in performance, so deeply
invested is his Short View in the kind of close verbal analysis
that relies on repeated readings of printed texts), thereby ironically
creating an opening for a mode of performance that avoided the charge that
it traded in profane and licentious language simply by avoiding language
at all. 35
Or, perhaps even better, pantomime could be understood to
provide a fully-adequate substitute for language. As Weaver stresses in
his introduction to The Loves of Mars and Venus, classical
pantomime artists "perform'd all by Gesture and the Action of the Hands,
Fingers, Legs and Feet, without making use of the Tongue," 36 describing "by Motion alone, which the Poet
painted out to the Life by Words." 37 At his most ambitiously intercultural, Weaver
claims that pantomime offers the potential for a universal language,
relating the story of a barbarian who, when asked by the emperor Nero what
he wanted as a going-away present, requested a pantomime artist so that he
could negotiate with the other barbarian "Nations" without having to learn
all of their different dialects. 38 We might (at a stretch) read Weaver's barbarian as
an allegory [End Page 502] for the British theatrical manager,
eager to appropriate a form that was intelligible to what John Dennis
called the "new and numerous gentry" who have "arisen among us by the
Return of our fleets from the sea, of our Armies from the Continent, and
from the wreck of the South Sea," who were now taking over from the
Restoration court coterie as the primary patrons of the patent houses.
39 For his part, Ralph underscored pantomime's
potential as a form of communication, suggesting that each of the poetic
genres could be duplicated by a mode of dance, and finally casting
pantomime's imperializing ambitions in the form of a paradox: "the only
Method of attaining an universal Language, is to be Dumb" (T, 111).
Ralph's wit hints, I think, at the lability of his analysis, the ways in
which his seeming endorsement of pantomime is complicated by a sense of
unease or irony that Weaver's professional enthusiasm never admits.
Ralph's support of pantomime is predicated, he says, on his assumption
that modern poetry is dead, and dramatic poetry even deader; in that case
"the Art of Dancing should wholly ingross the Stage, as it did formerly in
its Infancy: For, since we can no longer boast the Shadow of those
Beauties, for whose Sakes we banish'd it thence; why should any one now
object to its Restoration?" (T, 104). This satiric and rueful edge
marks Ralph's text as a kind of entertainment in its own right, a
performance manifesting a kind of playfulness about the diversions he
discusses in The Touch-Stone that Ralph compares to "cutting
Capers" in the manner of a dancer or a harlequin (T, 87). His
ambivalence about pantomime is embodied in the equivocal stance of a text
that absorbs as it critiques those cultural forms--pantomime, but also
music, poetry, masquerades, et al.--which Ralph identifies as necessary
but somehow trivial at the same time: in short, as entertainments,
in the sense of events situated in-between established, essential, or
normative categories.
In its reliance on spectacle, scenic effects, and the
kinetic bodies of performers, pantomime awakened traditional ambivalences
about the materiality of the stage as it promised--at least to some--a
means of bypassing the barriers of linguistic competence or expense that
had limited the potential audience for the theatre. Mirroring the
heterogeneous character or "varied Temper" of Britain itself, a nation
that Ralph called "those Tragi-Comedians of the World" (112),
pantomime both affirmed and parodied the genres of comedy, tragedy, and
opera that were considered to be legitimate theatre. Its ability to keep
both modes in play at once contributed to its success in the 1720s and
30s, when it both mimicked the dominant modes of the British stage and
offered a critical stance on them. Indeed, far from a sign of its decay,
pantomime might rather be read a sign of the vitality of the British
theatre in these decades, a vitality often inaccessible to modern critics
and historians who, like pantomime's contemporary opponents, are committed
to upholding the authority of the printed text. Pantomime continued to be
a part of British theatrical programs well into the nineteenth century,
and survives today in the form of the "panto," a Christmas entertainment
for children. But after the 1740s, it was transformed, absorbed into the
theatrical mainstream, a process that resulted in a decline in the number
and intensity of attacks upon it, but also in a deadening
institutionalization. A key figure in this process was David Garrick,
whose indebtedness to pantomime technique and whose theatre's reliance on
[End Page 503] pantomime profits was sometimes noted by
contemporary observers. Less easily seen is how Garrick rearticulated
pantomime's associations with national character and social deviance,
claiming it for a bourgeois audience while simultaneously evacuating it of
the critical capacity that had made it so vital, and so scandalous.
II
David Garrick's debut on the London stage as Richard III
in the fall of 1741 was immediately perceived to herald a new style of
acting, one that, as Joseph Roach has put it, "reputedly substituted
speed, agility, and variety for the apparent heaviness and monotony of the
reigning oratorical style" that had dominated the London stage since at
least the time of Thomas Betterton. 40 To his many admirers, Garrick's physicality seemed
fresh and exciting, and it represented the new priority of (in Garrick's
own formulation) "Action, Action, Action" over "Oratory." 41 But to his critics, Garrick's actions seemed to
represent a kind of excess, a hyper-kineticism that they frequently
associated with pantomime. Captain Robert Morris, a theatregoer of the
1760s, objected to Garrick's "pantomime gesture . . . [his] miserable
expedients fit only for a booth in a fair, not for royal theatres in a
metropolis." 42 More comprehensively, Theophilus Cibber (himself a
composer of and occasional performer in pantomimes at Drury Lane in the
1730s) criticized Garrick's "studied tricks, his Over-fondness for
extravagant Attitudes, frequent affected Starts, convulsive Twitchings,
Jerkings of the Body, sprawling of the Fingers, slapping the Breast and
Pockets:--A Set of mechanical motions in constant use, the caricatures of
Gesture suggested by pert vivacity,--his pantomimical Manner of acting
every Word in a Sentence." 43 Observers like Morris and Cibber associated
Garrick with Harlequin, a linkage that may have been stoked by a rumor
(which Garrick was unable quite to deny) that his actual debut had been in
the role of Harlequin in March 1741, when he seems to have stepped in to
perform a few scenes in Goodman's Fields' production of Harlequin
Student when the regular Harlequin was too ill to go on. 44 In effect, Garrick (unknowingly) followed a career
path blazed by Richard Burbage by beginning his stage career in the
commedia tradition. [End Page 504]
I would argue that Garrick's heralded novelty and
modernity derive in no small measure from his aggressive cooptation of the
physicality that had been brought to the eighteenth-century stage through
pantomime. In fact, for all that Garrick's performance style appeared
novel to contemporary observers, eighteenth-century acting theory had long
anticipated his assimilation of pantomimic technique. Referring to Charles
Gildon's The Life of Thomas Betterton (1710), the most influential
acting manual in the first half of the century, Weaver argued that
Gildon's portrait of Betterton can better be read as "a Draught of the
Virtues and Qualifications of a Pantomime," as if Betterton, for
all his emphasis on oratory, were more a pantomime artist than merely an
actor. 45 In the 1730s, Hill figured the "plastic
imagination" that he believed was required of the actor as a "Faustus
for the theatres" that by itself "conjures up all changes in a moment."
46 That is to say that Hill imagines how the power of
transformation that had been thematized as an external force in the
Faustus pantomimes of the 1720s could be internalized, cast literally as a
motivation, a mental impulse that shapes and drives the motions of
the body. 47 In his own Essay on Acting (1744), Garrick
(here adopting the voice of a critic attacking a certain "little
fashionable actor," i.e. himself) describes the "puppet hero" of his
treatise by focusing on silent moments in his performance. Like Hill, he
stresses that the performer's ability to be a "moving statue" depends upon
the degree to which he is "mentally absorbed" in his role. 48 Garrick's new, protean style of performance
represents the absorption of pantomime itself, the cooptation of
"afterpiece" technique by a performer who wished to be known as a star of
only "mainpiece" dramas. With Garrick, the legitimate theatre revitalized
itself by importing key elements of the entertainments that, a generation
earlier, had seemed to threaten its existence.
It's perhaps a measure of the depth of Garrick's
indebtedness to pantomime that his absorption of its style entailed an
equally aggressive disavowal, a public distancing of himself from
pantomime that began, as we have seen, with his attempts to obscure his
own experience in the role of Harlequin. Garrick consistently attempted to
distance himself and the Drury Lane Theatre that he managed from 1747 to
1776 from pantomime, publicly begrudging it its popularity even while he
programmed it regularly. In his prologue composed for the opening of the
1750 season (which, as we shall see, is a crucial year in the history of
English pantomime), he makes it clear that the company would be doing
something other than pantomime if only the audience would let them:
Sacred to Shakespeare was this spot design'd,
To pierce the heart, and humanize the mind. But if an empty
House, the Actor's curse, Show us our Lears and Hamlet lose their
force; [End Page 505] Unwilling we must change the nobler
scene, And in our turn present you Harlequin. 49
Garrick's aims as manager were, as his biographer Arthur
Murphy put it, to "reform" the British stage by ensuring that "Lun
and his favourite harlequin" would give "way to a just representation of
nature," a concept that, as his 1750 Prologue suggests, Garrick identified
with Shakespeare. 50 Garrick's indefatigable efforts to promote
Shakespeare as the singular figure who simultaneously represents and
transcends the British stage and, by extension, British culture
itself--efforts that, as Michael Dobson has argued, are ultimately
inextricable from Garrick's desire to offer himself as Shakespeare's
modern avatar--rely to a great extent on his positioning of the figure of
Harlequin as Shakespeare's demonic other, the rival whose illegitimate
usurpation of the stage must be exposed and repulsed. 51 Garrick shares responsibility for Shakespeare's
elevation to this position of transcendence with many others;
Shakespeare's transformation in the course of the eighteenth century from
being one of three Elizabethan/Jacobean playwrights whose works were held
in roughly equal esteem (the others were John Fletcher and Ben Jonson) to
what Dobson succinctly describes as "the paradigmatic figure of literary
authority" is a process that greatly exceeds Garrick, who was exploiting
an opportunity which many critics, performers, journalists, editors, and
booksellers had a hand in creating. 52 But Garrick's opposition of Shakespeare to
Harlequin was a shrewd and decisive tactical move within that larger
process, a local appropriation of pantomime's popularity from the 1720s
through the 1750s that enabled him to offer Shakespeare as an emblem
around whom a broad range of literary, historical, and nationalistic
associations could condense. Garrick's management at Drury Lane may be
said to mark two rearticulations with the British theatre that have
endured to the present day, and which I would suggest are intimately
related to each other: the segregation of pantomime to essentially a
seasonal entertainment, associated with Christmastime, and the elevation
of Shakespeare to a position that was in effect beyond criticism or
temporality, the timeless "Bard" whose writings occupy a
never-to-be-surpassed pinnacle of British culture. These processes
converge in Garrick's 1759 Christmas entertainment, Harlequin's
Invasion, an afterpiece that we might dub an "anti-pantomime" for the
way in which it seeks to undercut the genre to which it seems to declare
its affiliation.
In writing this entertainment under his own name, Garrick
was taking over a task that had usually fallen upon Henry Woodward, Drury
Lane's Harlequin, who had designed a new pantomime virtually every year
since 1750: Queen Mab (1750), Harlequin Ranger (1751),
The Genii (1752), Fortunatus (1753), Harlequin in
China (1754), Proteus (1755), and Mercury Harlequin
(1756). Each of Woodward's pantomimes opened [End Page 506] just
after Christmas, an innovation in scheduling that eventually became the
norm; earlier in the century, new pantomimes had appeared throughout the
season, and had most frequently premiered between late January and early
March. 53 Garrick and Woodward segregated pantomime to the
Christmas season, establishing an association between it and the holiday
period that would endure, to the point where pantomime became a Christmas
tradition in its own right. Woodward took over the management of a theatre
in Dublin in 1758, leaving it to Garrick to craft a new pantomime for the
1759 Christmas season. Garrick took the opportunity to break with the
tradition of the last three decades by writing dialogue for Harlequin; in
many respects, Garrick's most important rearticulation of British
pantomime is simply to undercut what theorists like Weaver and Ralph would
have understood to be its raison d'être by giving Harlequin the
capacity of speech. 54
More important, Harlequin's Invasion's plot works
to reverse the association between pantomime and British national
character that Weaver, Ralph, Rich, and Miller, among others, had either
explicitly claimed or played with by casting Harlequin as an alien
presence in a theatre whose Britishness is confirmed by its identification
with Shakespeare. In Harlequin's Invasion, Garrick reproduces, as
several critics have noted, the basic structure of Harlequin
Student, the 1741 pantomime in which he had, however furtively, once
appeared. 55 Like Giffard's pantomime, Harlequin's
Invasion stages a harlequinade displaying a number of Harlequin's
tricks, but then abruptly reverses course to conclude with a spectacular
tableau in which the statue of Shakespeare rises to banish Harlequin from
the stage. Both Giffard's and Garrick's final tableaux appropriate the
typical conclusion of earlier pantomimes, which had similarly ended with
the arrival of the classical gods and which sometimes included statues,
such as Perseus and Andromeda's statue of Mercury, which transforms
into Harlequin, establishing a structural isomorphism between classical
and modern tricksters. But Harlequin Student and Harlequin's
Invasion (where Mercury incites townspeople to repulse Harlequin and
to celebrate Shakespeare) call upon the spectators' memories of such
earlier pantomime climaxes for the purpose of delegitimating the form
itself. In their concluding tableaux, the comic and serious plots are not
reconciled, as in Perseus and Andromeda, but driven apart, with
harlequinade decisively routed and scapegoated, its emblematic figure,
Harlequin, driven from the stage as Shakespeare takes his place, a
polarization summed up in one of Harlequin Invasion's final stage
directions: "Shakespear rises: Harlequin sinks" (224). As Denise
Sechelski describes this conclusion, "The obvious disjunctions between the
two theatrical forms rest in the images of the real 'bodies' onstage: the
harlequin's multivalent body opposes the statuesque 'body' of
Shakespeare." 56 Sechelski shrewdly uses the thematics of the body
to link the Harle-quin/Shakespeare dichotomy to that between the
carnivalesque, popular tradition [End Page 507] and the elite
culture that was posited by Mikhail Bakhtin and elaborated by Peter
Stallybrass and Allon White. As she suggests, the conclusion of
Harlequin's Invasion stages the contradictions in Garrick's
practice, which explicitly attempted to promote the "classical body" of
Shakespeare while it unconsciously absorbed the techniques of a "lower"
form.
But a more specific reading of Harlequin Student
is possible and necessary, one that makes use of its topical and thematic
referents to particularize the cultural work that Garrick's popular
afterpiece--it was frequently revived and had 167 performances in
all--performed. Such a reading suggests that Garrick's relationship toward
pantomime might best be described less as thoroughly antagonistic than as
ambivalently opportunistic. Harlequin's Invasion conjoins class,
national, legal, and professional themes in an elliptical and to some
degree incoherent plot. Most obviously, Harlequin's Invasion
celebrates the triumph of British culture, epitomized by Shakespeare, over
French culture, epitomized by Harlequin, and does so at a particularly
jingoistic moment. 1759 was hailed in Britain as a "year of victories"
over France, as the British military defeated French forces at Quiberon
Bay, Quebec, and Minden. Garrick's pantomime, which premiered on New
Year's Eve, 1759, thus celebrates the year that marked a turning point in
the Seven Years' War, casting "Monsieur Harlequin" (203) as the foreign
invader who, at the start of the performance, has in effect already
been repulsed. 57 (He is further exoticized racially as characters
mistake him for a "blackamoor" [213, 223] because of his characteristic
black mask, an association between Harlequin and Africans that becomes
common after the 1770s.) 58 Garrick's aggressive exoticization of Harlequin in
Harlequin's Invasion essentially picks up a tendency that
Woodward's pantomimes had begun. Although the texts of most of Woodward's
pantomimes are lost, titles such as The Genii and Harlequin in
China suggest that Drury Lane under Garrick was determined to
associate Harlequin with foreign locales and cultures. In such pantomimes,
the definition of "Britishness" was proven by constructing a series of
others, who are successively embodied in the figure of Harlequin.
Somewhat less obvious is the way that Harlequin's
Invasion rearticulates and eventually undercuts the classic
commedia romance plot and the British fascination with law by
stitching together themes of class, profession, and criminality. Garrick's
Pantaloon figure is Snip, a London tailor whose shrewish wife sends him
out to get the head of the invading Harlequin. Meanwhile, his daughter
Dolly, performing the function of Colombine, has ditched her beau Abram, a
young tailor apprenticed to her father, and fallen in love with Harlequin,
whom she somehow recognizes to be a [End Page 508] character in a
play from the outset: "Wiser folks than you and I, Mama, prize him more
than your tragedies or your comedies, aye, or your singing, either" (215).
But Dolly joins her mother in wishing for Harlequin's death once she
learns that it might be the means for her social advancement as well. Both
women are motivated by their ambitions to ascend from the urban working
class to the nobility, what Mrs. Snip calls being "Qualitified"; she
believes that her husband might gain a title for his heroism if he kills
Harlequin, while Dolly fantasizes about becoming "Lady Doll Snip."
Offering women's social aspirations as a target for the audience's
condescension, Garrick nonetheless severs the link between Harlequin and
Colombine that had provided the plot engine of the grotesque or comic
portions of earlier pantomimes.
In its place Garrick offers essentially a narrative of
pursuit, as an alliance of national types (perhaps representing Britain's
allies in the Seven Years' War) join together to catch and if possible
kill Harlequin, a job that, as we have seen, Snip is prodded into taking
on as his own heroic task. But his attempt to kill Harlequin backfires;
Harlequin tricks Snip, cuts his head off, then sews it back on. That is,
Garrick's Harlequin is a tailor himself, though one with no established
master or home; as he admits, "I am nobody and came from nowhere" (207).
By granting Harlequin the skill of the tailor's craft, Garrick may be
making an association between the protean Harlequin and the tailoring
trade based on a contemporary understanding of the latter as an art of
transformation, the profession that was able to "make the man," permitting
anyone to pass for the member of another social class. More intriguingly,
the equation between Snip and his nemesis replicates that between
Garrick and Harlequin; in each case, the English craftsman and the
Continental "invader" share a skill-set, one that, however, sets them in
opposition to each other. We could read Harlequin's Invasion, then,
as an allegory of Garrick's professional ambitions, a recasting of the
narrative of assimilation and then repulsion that I have offered to
describe Garrick's engagement with pantomime.
Garrick's choice of tailor as Snip's profession seems not
to be casual in other respects as well. As a rootless tailor, Harlequin
can be understood to be a journeyman in a trade that was marked by
notoriously contentious labor relations. Journeymen tailors were among the
first tradesmen to form unions, and there were a series of conflicts in
the eighteenth century between them and their masters, with major disputes
over pay and working conditions flaring up in 1720-21, 1745, 1752,
1767-68, 1778, and 1800. 59 Tailors were frequently suspected of petty
thievery; Snip articulates a long-standing belief (on the part of their
clients) that tailors abused their access to valuable dry goods by
remarking in fear that Harlequin might "make no more of killing me than I
would of stealing a piece of cloth" (208). 60 Harlequin's professional criminalization fits
Harlequin Invasion's frequent identification of him as a "Nobody,"
a man without a proper place or him, a characterization that, as a Justice
brought on to sentence him says, means that [End Page 509] "he
comes within the statute description of incorrigible rogue" (212). The
statute in question is the Vagabond Act of 1744, which criminalized those
with no fixed address. In invoking this law, Garrick mobilizes an
association between harleqinade and representations of criminality that
was well established by the 1750s. The titles of two now-lost
harlequinades of the 1710s show that representations of the criminal
justice system in action were within the range of topics considered
appropriate for afterpiece entertainments: Harlequin turn'd Judge
and Harlequin Executed (both 1717). Several pantomimes of the 1720s
and 30s portray Harlequin being subjected to a trial in court; in at least
one instance, he is sentenced to death. In the comic part of the
Theobold/Rich Perseus and Andromeda, the stage scene opens and
"Discovers Harlequin Hanging" on a gallows. But he is not killed by
the rope; his body falls from the gallows in several pieces, which are
magically reconstituted on a bier, and he rises to get his revenge.
61 By identifying Harlequin as a legal vagabond,
Harlequin's Invasion demonizes Harlequin as both a foreign
and a domestic threat to bourgeois order, casting him not only as a
French invader but as an English plebeian who must be marginalized,
neutralized, and ultimately expelled.
My somewhat speculative reading of Harlequin's
Invasion can only be understood as the play's unconscious rather than
its manifest content, as a bourgeois fantasy about the power of British
culture and the ease with which its enemies could be contained or
repulsed. With Garrick, the affirmative and critical aspects that we have
observed coexisting in an entertainment like Perseus and Andromeda
have been in effect split apart. As Garrick appropriated pantomimic
technique in order to revolutionize performance style in mainpiece drama,
he also exploited its parodic capacity in order to align it in opposition
to a Shakespeare who now stood for the legitimate British stage as such.
Pantomime, one might say, was now understood as mere entertainment,
a diversion defanged of its critical content and thereby rendered safe,
innocuous, an ally of bourgeois desires to reform the stage rather than a
threat to them. After Garrick, pantomime continued to be produced in the
London theatres, and even at times to thrive. Thomas Dibden was a popular
and skilled Harlequin and creator of pantomime scenarios, writing and
performing from the late 1770s into the 1820s. In the early nineteenth
century, the emphasis of British pantomime shifted somewhat as Joseph
Grimaldi elevated the Clown or Pierot figure to the center of the
performance, elbowing Harlequin out of the way. In the 1830s, British
pantomimes began to be combined with minstrel acts, an event best summed
up by citing the title of an 1836 afterpiece: Harlequin Jim Crow.
62 But in its criminalization of pantomime's central
figure and its evacuation of the form's critical potential, Garrick's
Harlequin's Invasion may be used to mark the moment when a
particularly vital phase in this mode of entertainment had come to an end.
63
John O'Brien is Assistant Professor of English at the
University of Virginia.
Notes
1. See Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
2. Richard Steele, The Theatre #7 (23 January 1720)
in Richard Steele's The Theatre, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1962), 28.
3. See Paul Sawyer, "The Popularity of Various Types of
Entertainment at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden Theatres,
1720-1733," Theatre Notebook 24 (1970): 154-63. Sawyer's study,
which is based on registers now housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library,
lists average daily ticket receipts at these theatres, which were the
homes of a single company under the management of John Rich. (Rich's
company was at Lincoln's Inn Fields from 1709 to 1732 when they moved to a
new theatre at Covent Garden, one financed in part with the windfall
profits from The Beggar's Opera.) Over these fourteen years, the
average house receipts for a performance without a pantomime afterpiece
was £52, but when a pantomime was part of the program, the average house
receipts were £91, an increase of 75%. On pantomimes performed in the late
summer fairs, see Sybil Rosenfeld, The Theatre of the London Fairs in
the 18th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
4. Pantomime was referred to as an "irrational
entertainment" as early as 1733, when Edward Phillips's introduction to
his poem The Players, A Satyr claimed that he did not intend to
waste his time on such "irrational Entertainments" as "Pantomime
Absurdities." That epithet has had an astonishingly long critical
half-life in discussions on eighteenth-century pantomime. For a fairly
recent example, see Ralph Allen, "Irrational Entertainment in the Age of
Reason," in The Stage and the Page: London's 'Whole Show' in the
Eighteenth-Century Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1981), 90-112. The critical material on eighteenth-century pantomime is
not extensive. There are several articles on the Faustus pantomimes of
1723-24; see, for example, Elvena M. Green, "John Rich's Art of Pantomime
as Seen in his The Necromancer, or Harlequin Doctor Faustus: A
Comparison of the Two Faustus Pantomimes at Lincoln's-Inn-Fields and Drury
Lane," Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 4
(1965): 47-60, John McVeagh, "'The Subject of all Companies': A New Look
at The Necromancer," Theatre Notebook XLV (1991): 55-70, and
Phyllis T. Dircks, "The Eclectic Comic Genius of John Rich in The
Necromancer," Theatre Notebook XLIX (1995): 165-72. Some of the
most useful scholarship on British pantomime remains the articles by
Emmett L. Avery, "Dancing and Pantomime on the English Stage, 1700-1737,"
Studies in Philology 31 (1934): 417-52, and "The Defense and
Criticism of Pantomimic Entertainments in the Early Eighteenth Century,"
ELH 5 (June 1938): 127-45. Mitchell Preston Wells's dissertation is
also extremely useful, especially since he prints a performance record of
every pantomime in the century; see "Pantomime and Spectacle on the London
Stage, 1741-1761," Ph.D. Diss, University of North Carolina, 1934. The
only other dissertation devoted to pantomime that I have found is Frank
Leland Miesle's "The Staging of Pantomime Entertainments on the London
Stage: 1715-1808," Ph.D. Diss, The Ohio State University, 1955. Paul
Sawyer has written several useful articles: "The Popularity of Various
Types of Entertainment at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden Theatres,
1720-1733," Theatre Notebook 24 (1970): 154-63; "John Rich's
Contribution to the Eighteenth-Century London Stage," in Essays on the
Eighteenth Century English Stage, ed. Kenneth Richards and Peter
Thomson (London: Methuen, 1972), 85-104; "Smorgasbord on the Stage: John
Rich and the Development of Eighteenth Century English Pantomime," The
Theatre Annual 34 (1979): 37-65; "The Popularity of Pantomime on the
London Stage, 1720-1760," Restoration and 18th Century Theatre
Research, second series V (1990): 1-16.
5. To be sure, Pope had a personal grievance against
Theobold having to do with their rival editions of Shakespeare. But The
Dunciad, particularly the poetic text (as opposed to the notes and
apparatus of the Variorum editions) attacks pantomime perhaps even
more aggressively than it does Theobold's alleged lapses as an editor and
scholar.
6. See Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'The
Popular,'" in People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael
Samuels (London: Routledge, 1981), 227-40.
7. For a recent discussion of the history of the concept of
mimesis, see Gunter Gebauer and Cristoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art,
Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995). For a discussion of the relationship between theatre and national
identity, see Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural
Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992). And for a theoretical model on the relationship
between literary texts and materiality, see Bill Brown, The Material
Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
8. See Andrew Grewar, "Shakespeare and the actors of the
commedia dell'arte," in Studies in the Commedia Dell'Arte,
ed. David J. George and Christopher J. Gossip (Cardiff: University of
Wales Press, 1993), 13-47.
9. See Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, "Italian Comedians in England,"
Theatre Notebook VIII (July 1954): 87.
10. Jane Spencer, Introduction to Behn, The Rover and
Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), xxi. A Harlequin
also appears in the second part of Behn's The Rover (1681).
11. In Britannia Triumphans, a late Carolean masque
(1637) by Inigo Jones and William Davenant, for instance, "Harlekin"
appears as one of many figures of disorder who interrupt the noble
masquers.
12. See Leo Hughes, "Afterpieces: or, That's
Entertainment," in George Winchester Stone, Jr., ed., The Stage and the
Page: London's "Whole Show" in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 55-70, Virginia P.
Scott, "The Infancy of English Pantomime: 1716-1723," Educational
Theatre Journal 24 (1972): 125-38, and Lucyle Hook, "Motteaux and the
Classical Masque," in British Theatre and the Other Arts,
1660-1800, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Washington: Folger Shakespeare
Library, 1984), 105-15.
13. See William Mountfort, The Life and Death of Doctor
Faustus, Made into a Farce, introd. by Anthony Kaufman (1697: Los
Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1973). Mountfort's farce
was not published until 1697, but Kaufman cites evidence that its first
performances occurred sometime between 1684 and 1688.
14. See Lewis Theobold, Perseus and Andromeda
(London, 1730) and the anonymously-published The Tricks of
Harlequin (Darby, 1739). The latter prints a provincial company's
version of the harlequinade from Perseus and Andromeda (which only
indicates where the comic sections are located, but does not
describe them in detail), and it is fully consistent with what Theobold
does print of the Lincoln's Inn Field harlequinade of the original London
production. This was not the first pantomime version of the story of
Perseus and Andromeda, for Drury Lane had staged The Shipwreck; or,
Perseus and Andromeda in 1717, with the characters of Harlequin and
Colombine doubling in the title roles. See Wells's dissertation, 225. This
text of pantomime is lost, and it does not seem to have been too
successful, with only four recorded performances in 1717-18. More
recently, Drury Lane had staged Perseus and Andromeda, with the Rape of
Colombine; or, The Flying Lovers in 1728.
15. Mitchell Preston Wells, "Pantomime and Spectacle on
the London Stage, 1714-1761," 300-10; Wells records 369 performances of
Perseus and Andromeda in London from 1730-52.
16. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 44.
17. John Rich, preface to Lewis Theobold, The Rape of
Proserpine (London, 1727), A2, iv. By investing in "those various
Embellishments of Machinery, Painting, Dances, as well as Poetry it self"
(all of which would be fixed costs, amortizable over the run of the
production as well as fairly predictable), rather than in the salaries of
the foreign singers (one-time costs, and highly variable since subject to
the popularity of the performers at any one moment), Rich claims to be
advancing the interests of music in Britain by democratrizing the
audience, suggesting "the Effect an Opera wou'd have, if conducted (by an
abler Hand) in the same manner" (iv). Since one of the most frequently
used attacks against Rich was that he was illiterate, there is some reason
to be suspicious of his authorship of this preface, but whether it was
written by him or not, it seems fair to take it as a piece of evidence
that explains what Rich claimed he was doing.
18. Susanna Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife,
ed. Nancy Copeland (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1995), 122.
19. Recognizing Centlivre's prediliction for elaborate and
ingenious plotting (as opposed to witty or elegant language), William
Hazlitt observed that the situations in her play The Busie Body
(1709) "succeed one another like the changes of machinery in a pantomime.
It is a true comic pantomime"; Hazlitt, "A View of the English Stage," in
The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols.
(London: J. M. Dent, 1930), V: 271.
20. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination:
English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 1997), 428ff.
21. The proper use of Harlequin's hat is a central issue
in a rare text that records dance steps and physical motions for
prospective Harlequins by using a system of dance notation. See F. Le
Rousseau, A Chacoon for a Harlequin (London, 1730), reprinted in
Cyril W. Beaumont, The History of Harlequin (1926; New York:
Benjamin Blom, 1967), 121-32.
22. There were several eighteenth-century pantomimes
equating Harlequin with Mercury, and historians of the commedia
dell'arte have made the connection frequently as well. Pierre Louis
Duchartre, for example, gushes that Harlequin "remains intangible, for he
is without doubt of divine essence, if not, indeed, the god Mercury
himself, patron of merchants, thieves, and panders"; The Italian
Comedy, trans. Randolph T. Weaver (1929: New York: Dover, 1966), 124.
23. Joseph Roach, "The Artificial Eye: Augustan Theater
and the Empire of the Visible," in The Performance of Power: Theatrical
Discourse and Politics, ed. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 135.
24. Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects:
Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992), 19.
26. James Miller, Harlequin-Horace: Or, The Art of
Modern Poetry, introduction by Antony Coleman (1731; Los Angeles:
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1976), 24.
27. See Weaver's polemical texts on dance and
pantomime--An Essay Towards an History of Dancing (1712),
Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (1721) and The
History of the Mimes and Pantomimes (1728; essentially a reprinting of
the sections relating to pantomime in his first book).
28. Weaver, An Essay Towards an History of Dancing
(London: J. Tonson, 1712), 118.
30. John Weaver, The History of the Mimes and
Pantomimes (London: J. Roberts, 1728), 8.
31. Ibid., 1. On Greek and Roman pantomime, see also
Allardyce Nicholl, Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Studies in the Popular
Theatre (London: George Harrap, 1931).
32. See A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses,
Musicians, Dancers, Managers & other Stage Personnel in London,
1660-1800, ed. Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A.
Langhans (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press,
1993), 15: 306-308, s. v. "John Weaver."
33. On the scandalous character of early
eighteenth-century public discourse in Britain, see Catherine Gallagher,
Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the
Marketplace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 88-144.
34. The Touch-Stone (London, 1728), 100-101,
hereafter cited in the text as T.
35. As Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack observe, Collier in
effect applies habits developed from the professional study of scripture
to playtexts; see their English Drama: A Cultural History (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1996), 128-29. While he virtually ignores the materiality
of the stage, Collier interestingly focuses on the materiality of the
printed text itself; in his discussion, "smut" seems to refer not only to
a mode of "Coarse" discourse, but also to the "blot" that those words make
on the paper on which they are printed. See Collier, Short View, 6.
36. The Loves of Mars and Venus; A Dramatic
Entertainment of Dancing, Attempted in Imitation of the Pantomimes of the
Ancient Greeks and Romans (London, 1717), x.
39. John Dennis, "The Causes of the Decay and Defects of
Dramatick Poetry, and of the Degeneracy of the Publick Taste," in E. Niles
Hooker, ed., The Critical Works of John Dennis (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1939), II: 278, 276. This essay was not
published in Dennis's lifetime, but Hooker dates the manuscript, now in
the Folger Shakespeare Library, to 1725.
40. Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science
of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 56.
41. Garrick to Lieutenant Edward Thompson (12 September
1766), in David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, eds., The Lettersof David Garrick, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963),
II: 542.
42. Robert Morris, cited in Leigh Woods, Garrick Claims
the Stage: Acting as Social Emblem in Eighteenth-Century England
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 19.
43. Cibber, Theophilus Cibber, To David Garrick, Esq.,
With Dissertations on Theatrical Subjects (London, 1759), 56. Cibber,
the son of Colley Cibber, composed The Harlot's Progress, a
"Grotesque Pantomime Entertainment" on the theme of Hogarth's famous
series of pictures in 1733.
44. See Michael Wilson, The Making of the National
Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship 1660-1769 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), and Denise Sechelski, "Garrick's Body and the
Labor of Art in Eighteenth-Century Theater," Eighteenth-Century
Studies 29 (Summer 1996): 369-89. In a letter to his brother in
December 1741, Garrick tried to downplay the experience, and responds to
the rumor that he had performed in the role of Harlequin: "As to playing a
Harlequin 'tis quite false--Yates last season was taken very ill & was
not able to begin the Entertainment so I put on the Dress & did 2 or
three Scenes for him, but Nobody knew it but him & Giffard: I know it
has been Said I play'd Harlequin at Covent Garden but it is quite false."
Letters, I: 34.
46. Hill, Prompter 66 [27 June 1735] in The
Prompter: A Theatrical Paper (1734-1736), ed. William W. Appleton and
Kalman A. Burnim (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966), 85.
47. Hill's and Garrick's writings have been justly placed
in the narrative of the emergence of the doctrine of sensibility; see for
example Roach, The Player's Passion, 96. What interests me here is
how that same doctrine overlaps with the terms in which pantomime was
described in the period.
48. David Garrick, An Essay on Acting, in Toby Cole
and Helen Krich Chinoy, Actors on Acting, rev. ed. (New York:
Crown, 1970), 133-35.
49. Garrick, "Occasional Prologue, Spoken by Mr. Garrick
at the Opening of Drury-Lane Theatre, 8 Sept. 1750, in The Poetical
Works of David Garrick, 2 vols. (1785: New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968),
I: 103. Samuel Johnson's 1747 prologue, written to mark the occasion of
Garrick's assumption of the job of manager at Drury Lane, also expresses
the wish that he will banish the spirit of "great Faustus" from the
British stage.
50. Arthur Murphy, The Life of David Garrick, Esq.,
2 vols. (1801; New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1969), II: 164, 161.
51. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National
Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), especially 176-84.
53. I base this figure on the performance record in
Wells's dissertation.
54. See George Winchester Stone, David Garrick: A
Critical Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1979), 221.
55. The similarity between Harlequin Student and
Harlequin's Invasion was first noticed by Elizabeth Stein, who
edited the first published edition of Garrick's pantomime; see Three
Plays by David Garrick (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1926). I will
be using Harry Pedicord and Fredrick Bergmann's edition of Harlequin's
Invasion, printed in The Plays of David Garrick, 2 vols.
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980),
I: 199-225. Page references will appear in the text.
58. A number of pantomimes beginning towards the end of
the century cast Harlequin as an African, often a slave or former slave;
examples include Harlequin Mungo (1789), and Furibond, or
Harlequin Negro (1807). For a discussion of the Africanization of
harlequin, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs
and the "Racial" Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Gates,
picking up an argument that originates with Brander Matthews, suggests
plausibly that there exists a line of descent between Harlequin and the
Jim Crow figure of American minstrelsy, particularly as it was popularized
in Britain in the 1830s and afterwards, a point developed further in
George F. Rehin, "Harlequin Jim Crow: Continuity and Convergence in
Blackface Clowning," Journal of Popular Culture 9 (1975): 682-701.
59. See Select Documents Illustrating the History of
Trade Unionism, I. The Tailoring Trade, ed. F. W. Galton (London:
Longmans, Green, and. Co, 1896).
60. Peter Linebaugh notes that tailoring was frequently
associated with thievery; its mythical origins lay in the theft of the
arts by Prometheus, and modern tailors were frequently suspected of using
their shears liberally in order to produce large amounts of "cabbage," the
excess cloth that was considered theirs by customary right. See Linebaugh,
The London Hanged (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
241-48.
62. See David Mayer, Harlequin in his Element: The
English Pantomime, 1806-1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1969).
63. I want to thank Victoria Olwell, Jeffrey Cox, and the
anonymous reader for Theatre Journal for their comments and advice
on previous incarnations of this essay. I would also like to thank the
Huntington Library for a fellowship in the summer of 1997 during which
much of the research for this essay was conducted.
Copyright © 1998 by The Johns Hopkins University
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