Access provided by University of Michigan @ Ann Arbor

Harlequin Britain:
Eighteenth-Century Pantomime and the Cultural Location of Entertainment(s)

John O'Brien

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 A Short 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.

25. Grub-Street Journal 384 (4 May 1737), 1.

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.

29. Ibid., 119, 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.

37. Essay Towards a History of Dancing, 139.

38. Ibid., 135.

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 Letters of 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.

45. History of the Mimes and Pantomimes, 28

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.

52. Dobson, 2.

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.

56. Sechelski, 376.

57. Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730-1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 28.

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.

61. The Tricks of Harlequin, 19.

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.

.