• \"Romantic Drama and the Popular Theater.\" The Romantic Stage: A Many-sided Mirror. Ed. Lilla...

$: • \"Romantic Drama and the Popular Theater.\" The Romantic Stage: A Many-sided Mirror. Ed. Lilla Crisafulli and Fabio Liberto. Rodopi Press, 2014. Pages 57-71.$
For use by the Author only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV

Edited by Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Fabio Liberto

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

The Romantic StageA Many-Sided Mirror


CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii

Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Fabio Liberto The Romantic Stage:Holding the Mirror up to Nature and Culture 1

Jeffrey N. Cox Editing Romantic Drama:Problems of Value, Volume, and Venue 23

PART ONE: CONTEXTUALIZING ROMANTIC THEATRE AND DRAMA

Nicoletta CaputoTheatrical Periodicals and the Ethics of Theatrein the Romantic Age 43

Michael GamerRomantic Drama and the Popular Theatre 57

Carlotta Farese The Strange Case of Herr von K: Further Reflectionson the Reception of Kotzebue’s Theatre in Britain 71

PART TWO: DRAMA ACROSS THE ARTS

Fabio LibertoShakespeare’s Visual Memorability During Romanticism 87

Claudia Corti Poses and Pauses:The Theatrical Portrait in English Romanticism 111


Lilla Maria Crisafulli“A Language in Itself Music”: Salvatore Viganò’sBallet en Action in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound 135

PART THREE: STAGING THE GOTHIC (FEAR ON STAGE)

Diego SagliaStaging Gothic Flesh: Material and Spectral Bodiesin Romantic-Period Theatre 163

Giovanna Silvani Matthew G. Lewis’ Theatre: Fear on Stage 185

Frederick BurwickVampires in Kilts 199

PART FOUR: TEXTS, THEORIES AND CONTEXTS

Franca Dellarosa Dramatic Discourse and the Romantic Stancein Joanna Baillie’s Theatre 227

Rosy ColomboCloset Drama on the Stage of Revolution:Language on Trial in Wordsworth’s The Borderers 245

Carla Pomarè Sardanapalus, or, Romantic Drama betweenHistory and Archaeology 255

Valeria Pellis The Sensory and the Ideal: S.T. Coleridge’s Aestheticsin Romantic Theatrical Discourse 279

Bibliography 293

Notes on Contributors 319

Index 325


ROMANTIC DRAMA AND THE POPULAR THEATRE

MICHAEL GAMER

The past quarter century has brought with it a revival of excellent writing about the drama and theatre of the Romantic period. In fact, much has changed in the scholarship even over the past several years. For when in 1998 Jeffrey Cox and I started to contemplate what might go into The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, we began far more modestly than we would begin now. We hoped to print five full-length plays – by Hannah Cowley, Joanna Baillie, Elizabeth Inchbald, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. We also intended to print the afterpiece Bluebeard by George Colman the Younger, some reviews of our plays, and an essay or two on the drama. Such, we thought, was as much as any commercial press in its right mind would accept. We were, after all, refusing to print the usual closet dramas: Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother, William Wordsworth’s The Borderers, Charles Lamb’s John Woodvil, Byron’s Manfred, and Coleridge’s Osorio. We were choosing, in fact, to print only one play, The Cenci, that had ever appeared in an anthology of Romantic literature. So long as we were insisting on printing plays that were important as theatre, we reasoned, we needed to be careful in what we proposed.

However, when we chose to include Remorse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we also decided to make a case for including a pantomime as well; and with Harlequin and Humpo we had an excellent candidate. Here was a drama that played as the afterpiece to Remorse for nineteen out of the twenty nights of its first London run at Drury Lane. Here was a pantomime for which there existed two separate and detailed descriptions. Such a level of detail is rare in manuscripts of pantomimes; usually all we have are the lyrics of songs and perhaps a listing of individual scenes. With that decision, we sent in the proposal.


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We received in return six separate readers’ reports. Most were positive, and we received a contract. Yet of more interest here is the fact that the reports differed from one another wildly. One readerwondered where were the usual selections from Walpole and Wordsworth; others expressed surprise at the diversity of dramatic genres represented. All had very particular ideas of what the anthology should contain; none could agree on what those contents should be. Scholars interested in gender and Romanticism pointed to one set of plays, while others working in gothic literature pointed to others. Those operating from a postcolonial perspective applauded our choice of Blue-beard but urged other orientalist plays like Inchbald’s A Moghul Tale and Byron’s Sardanapalus.

What became clear to us from these reports was that our sense of Romantic drama was changing and in transition. Reading them was liberating; they licensed us to do more than follow current trends in scholarship. They also told us something equally important: that the drama of the Romantic period mattered to people to the degree that it could be connected with other cultural movements within Romanticism. And it is this task – of connecting the theatre of Romanticism to early nineteenth-century culture – I want to address in this essay.

Part of my interest in the drama of the Romantic period arises from the way in which the theatre provides us with a physical space for raising and working through cultural issues. Here people and productions, both high and low, meet, contest, jostle, applaud, and constitute an evening of entertainment. Here issues of canon and class are raised face to face – between differing audience members, between rival actors, between competing cultural forms, between mainpiece and afterpiece. Romantic theatre audiences may have been segregated physically and economically – by ticket price as well by location in the theatre – but these divisions hardly stopped class interaction and frequently served as a cause for it.

In many ways, this question of ticket pricing provides an apt illustration of how we have misunderstood the theatres of Romanticism and the tastes of their audiences. We have long supposed popular theatre – from melodrama to pantomime, from hippodrama to military spectacle – to have been a staple of the populace at large and barely tolerated by elite audiences. Yet, a fairly rudimentary glance at ticket prices and theatre account books forces us


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to reformulate our own assumptions about hierarchy and dramatic genre, particularly the longstanding assumption that elite audiences preferred legitimate comedy and tragedy and that popular audiences preferred pantomime and other forms of theatrical spectacle. Elite audience members paid much higher ticket prices than those in the uppermost gallery – at least three to six times higher – and sat in spaces created especially for them. When we count the final intake of money, we find these expensive tickets accounting for nearly 90% of the total receipts for a typical evening at Drury Lane.1 It is a percentage high enough to be surprising, yet also high enough to explain why John Philip Kemble withstood the Old Price Riots for so long before giving in and replacing the one-shilling seats in the Second Gallery. Faced with such an expensive renovation, the cheap seats were either not worth rebuilding, or the audience members who sat there were not worth the expense. Thus, where higher-priced tickets brought in nine-tenths of a theatre’s revenue, we would be mistaken in thinking that the working and middle classes were the ones responsible for the triumph of illegitimate genres like melodrama and pantomime. And when we consider that the annual Christmas pantomime often accounted for fifty percent of the total money taken in for the year – half of all receipts for the entire season, including benefit nights – I think we may begin our consideration of popular theatre in the Romantic period by acknowledging that the rage for illegitimate dramatic forms extended across all audiences, from gentlemen to footmen, from masters to apprentices, from ladies to maidservants.

Cutting across barriers of class, sex, and age, popular theatre comprised the central part of British Romanticism’s central form of entertainment, and any consideration of the period or its culture must acknowledge this centrality. Still, for us to understand the sweep of its influence today must be on some level impossible. Imagine an art

1 See Charles Beecher Hogan, The London Stage, Part Five, London and Amsterdam: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968, III, 1569, on the new Drury-Lane Theatre: “The total number of spectators who could be accommodated was 3,611: 1,828 in the boxes (of which there were in all 123) at 6s; 800 in the pit at 3s. 6d; 675 in the 1st gallery at 2s; 308 in the upper gallery at 1s. It was therefore estimated that absolute capacity would bring in £771 6s [True Briton, 7 July 1797]”. My own calculations puts the receipts for an absolute capacity of 3,611 people slightly lower, £751 and 6s, as follows: Boxes at £548 and 8s (73.0% of total receipts); Pit at £120 (16.0%); 1st Gallery at £67 and 10s (9.0%); and the 2nd Gallery at £15 and 8s (2.0%).


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form today bigger than film – bigger than television – bigger than fashion and popular music combined. I cannot imagine it. Yet, this same Romantic stage was where actors and dancers made their mark, where composers and musicians flourished, where popular songs debuted, where public acts of patriotism could be performed, and where one could see the newest fashions and witness the latest special effects and technological marvels.

We have no single entertainment medium that performs all of these functions, and current writing about Romantic drama does make much of the theatre’s central place in Romantic-period culture. Still, if there is a problem with our current approach to scholarship, it is our habit of not writing often enough about the relation between Romantic drama and other kinds of Romantic writing. We frequently write about the theatre and its world, or about performance and theatricality in other spheres of life – about the trial of Marie Antoinette or the histrionic attitudes of Emma Hamilton – but less often about how the stage affected other, more familiar forms of Romantic literature and culture. Making this connection must become a primary task if we are to connect the theatre of Romanticism to those other Romanticisms we know and care about. I would like, therefore, to present here a test case for how such connections might begin to be made by taking up a seemingly isolated series of events in the history of popular theatre: the moment that hippodrama debuted on the stage of the Theatre Royale, Covent Garden.

The story goes as follows. In February of 1811, a year after the Old Price Riots had ended, the manager of Covent Garden Theatre, John Philip Kemble, found himself in an unpleasant situation. Faced mounting losses from several unsuccessful productions of Shakespeare, he revived George Colman the Younger’s Blue-Beard, its first revival at a Theatre Royal since its inaugural run at Drury Lane at the end of the previous century.2 The novelty of this new production would arise from two innovative scenes, each featuring (by Leigh Hunt’s estimation) “about twenty”3 performing horses hired from Astley’s Amphitheatre. These horses first charged on stage in

2 By the end of the 1799-1800 season Blue-beard! Or Female Curiosity had been staged 126 times. 3 The Examiner (24 March 1811), 186. James Boaden’s Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825, II, 541-2, puts the number at sixteen.



Act II, scene I in answer to Selim’s bugle call, and later returned in the play’s climactic scene as part of the production’s grand finale: a full-scale attack on Blue-Beard’s castle.

An actor-manager noted for his purity of taste and for his spectacular revivals of classical plays, Kemble had long been known as the London stage’s premier male tragic actor, having built a career for two decades out of defending spoken, legitimate drama –particularly Shakespeare – against the incursions of newer forms like melodrama and pantomime. His decision to revive Blue-Beard had come only after heated arguments with his co-manager, Henry Harris, and others over how to reduce Covent Garden’s losses.4 In the short term, however, the gamble paid off: Blue-Beard’s first forty performances brought the proprietors of Covent Garden an astonishing £21,000 in sales and effectively salvaged the 1810-11 season.5 Even Colman the Younger, after publicly stating that he disapproved of the production, quickly brought out a new edition of Blue-Beardcontaining the new stage directions for this equestrian version.6

Kemble’s biographer James Boaden informs us that Kemble made the decision to revive Blue-Beard with horses only after “long meditation” and some pain, fearing injury to his reputation and to the drama itself.7 Certainly he expected (and received) pointed criticism for bringing the circus pleasures of Sadler’s Wells and Astley’s Amphitheatre to Covent Garden. Yet these reviews could not have anticipated what Kemble did next. Inspired by Blue-Beard’s success, Kemble and Harris again looked to Drury Lane’s 1797-98 season for a

4 See James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, II, 542; cited from Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770-1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 69.5 Frederick Reynolds, The Life and Times of Frederick Reynolds, London: Henry Colburn, 1826, II, 403-404; quoted from Arthur Hartley Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse: A History of Hippodrama in England and France, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1968, 89. 6 George Colman the Younger, Blue-Beard!; or, Female Curiosity, London: W. Clowes, 1811. This new version appears to have become the standard version of theplay; it is reprinted in The Dramatic Works of George Colman the Younger, Paris: Baudry, 1827.7 James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, II, 541-42; quoted from Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse, 89. During this same year Kemble also lamented reintroducing Banquo’s ghost in 1803. See Farington’s Diary, 8 November 1811, quoted in Dennis Bartholomeusz, Macbeth and the Players, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, 133.


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hit. This time, they tapped Matthew Lewis, the author of The CastleSpectre and several other successful stage productions, to write a new play that would serve as a suitable vehicle for Astley’s horses. They were not disappointed in the result. Premiering as April ended and as Blue-Beard’s houses were beginning to thin, Lewis’ Timour the Tartar – the first play commissioned by a Theatre Royal written explicitly for horses – proved an even bigger hit than Blue-beard, insuring record profits to the patentees of Covent Garden for the 1810-11 season.8

To achieve this reversal of financial fortune, Kemble was forced to transgress several ideological lines and institutional boundaries. In commissioning a new play, he could no longer hide behind his own longstanding practice of making old plays new by adding novelties to them. Nor could he plead financial need. Blue-Beard may have been the underwriting angel to Covent Garden’s more classical productions, but Timour could only stand as a monument to the greed and debased taste of its managers. Certainly for satirists and reviewers Kemble’sdescent from the pure air of high culture presented a fall of Miltonic proportions. Writing for The Examiner, Leigh Hunt devoted two reviews each to Blue-Beard and Timour – the best of which minutely criticized in mock-serious tones the acting styles of the three principal horse-actors, Twitcher, Twirler, and Whitenose. The Dramatic Censor, meanwhile, joked that Kemble’s decision to reinforce Covent Garden’s floorboards so that they might withstand the weight of the horses, water, and machinery was only a humiliating first step. Permanent alterations to the Green Room and its governing rules would soon follow to accommodate the horses, with Kemble forced to introduce a new system of fines payable in hay, grass, and oats.9

8 Timour experienced an initial run of forty-four nights, a run cut short only by the end of the theatrical season; it was revived at Covent Garden in the following season on 30 March 1812 and played regularly there and at other London theatres for the next half-century. See John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, Bath: H.E. Carrington, 1832, VIII, 235-37; Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse, 87-95; and The Life and Times of Frederick Reynolds, II, 403-4, which report for Covent Garden “the most profitable season in its history” (Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse, 90), with annual receipts for 1810-11 at £100,00, 25% above average. 9 Anthony Pasquin [John M. Williams], The Dramatic Censor: or, Criticial and Biographical Illustration of the British Stage, London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1812, 155. Saxon reports that Covent Garden’s hippodramatic successes at the end of



Still, the comic potential of Timour’s debut cannot explain the diverse, organized, and sustained critical response it provoked. Timour the Tartar, after all, comes at the end of two decades of sustained theatrical experimentation and innovation. It comes after rather than before the advent of melodrama and military re-enactments, and at the end of a long string of celebrated performing animals, the most famous of which remains Carlo, the wonder dog. With audiences accustomed to theatrical novelty and innovation, Timour could hardly have inspired the response it did were the play simply a curiosity. The play could never have proven to be, as Jane Moody has called it, a watershed moment in the history of the stage had its horses not proven flashpoints for other, broader conflicts in British culture. It would never have provoked such a lasting reception – one that not only outlasted the 1810-11 season, but also became a theatrical discourse in its own right – one that transformed the conventions not just of the drama but also of satire. Timour’s success did more than confirm the disintegration of longstanding definitions of theatrical legitimacy and illegitimacy. It also warned of a similar collapse in other arenas of literary culture, particularly dramatic criticism and that mode of writing most expected to defend tradition and expel all interlopers, satire.

When they have commented on the hippodrama at all, dramatic historians until recently have kept to the immediate context of London and Parisian theatre – particularly to the Old Price Riots of 1809-10 and the pressures that brought them about – to explain the theatrical innovations made during these years of increasing population, military boom, and strict government censorship. I say “until recently” because essays by Jeffrey N. Cox, Jane Moody, and Charles Rzepka have begun to explore hippodrama’s relation to other aspects of early nineteenth-century British culture, especially to other equestrian fads of the day.10

the 1810-11 season led the Olympic Pavilion (opened 1806) to improve and strengthen their own stage to support “a hundred horses, if necessary” (17).10 See Jeffrey N. Cox, “Spots of Time: The Structure of the Dramatic Evening in the Theater of Romanticism”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, XLI/4 (Winter 1999), 403-25; Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 69-74, 98-100; Melynda Nuss,“‘The gravis Esopus of our stage’: Animals in the Theater of Romanticism”, unpublished dissertation chapter; and Charles J. Rzepka, “Bang-Up! Theatricality and the ‘Diphrelatic Art’ in De Quincey’s English Mail Coach”, Nineteenth-Century Prose, XXVIII (Fall 2001), 75-101.


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Most prominent among these fads was the vogue for gentleman coach-driving among wealthy Londoners. Referred to as “Whips” in most contemporary accounts, these young men impersonated hackney-coachmen by adapting their dress and slang, by fitting up their carriages to resemble coaches, and by bribing coachmen to give up their reins. They also formed dozens of gentleman’s clubs, among them the Barouche, the Bedront, the Benson, the Defiance, the Tandem, the Whip, and the most famous of them all, the Four-in-Hand.

Sporting distinct uniforms and eccentricities, these clubs appear nearly everywhere in Romantic writing. They are embodied in the blustering rattle of John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey, comprise the “driving schism” of Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third, and form the essence of any “tale of the times” in Scott’s Waverley.11 With their studied transgression of propriety – and with horses impacting nearly every aspect of British life – clubs like the Four-in-Hand cut daringly across existing class boundaries, engaging sporting, military, and theatrical culture. They attracted aspiring actors, officers, young professionals, and aristocrats both legitimate and illegitimate. During the years of the Regency, then, comic actors like Charles Mathews and Joseph Grimaldi could lampoon the figure of the “Whip” so effectively because he was a variation on a recognizable social type –what Ellen Moers refers to as the “horsey set which spent its afternoons at Tattersall’s, the fashionable market-place for the best in horseflesh”.12 The similarity of contemporary prints of Mathews and Grimaldi nicely captures this iconic status:

11 Percy Shelley, “Peter Bell the Third”, l. 97, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers, New York: Norton, 1977; Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 4.12 Ellen Moers, The Dandy, London: Secker and Warburg, 1960, 63.



Joseph Grimaldi in Fashion’s Fools 1809; Charles Mathews as Cypher inHit or Miss! 1810. From the author’s own collection.

In the left illustration, Grimaldi performs his famous burlesque song of the “Whip Club” in Fashion’s Fools (1809), one of the first pantomimes to satirize the slang and activities of the horse-mad dandies. Mathews is portrayed in the right-hand print as Dick Cypher, who had made his first entrance in Isaac Pocock’s Hit or Miss! at the Lyceum Theatre in 1810 with an offstage crash and a flurry of coachman slang: “that’s prime! – that’s bang up!” The print’s caption introduces Cypher with his signature slang – “Here I am D-mme bang up!” – while the print itself is “Dedicated with Permission to the Four in hand Club”.

Fond of speed and sensation, careless in his actions, familiar in his manners, and dissipated in his pleasures, the “Whip” was more than merely a staple of Regency pantomime and farce. Certainly he was a part of both theatrical and sporting culture: the Whip’s dual fondness for coaching and for theatricals is captured with exuberance in Mansfield Park’s Mr Yates and Tom Bertam, and is reduced to a single codeword in Persuasion when Austen informs her readers in an early chapter that Mr Eliot frequents “Tattersal’s”.13 Yet he was also a distillation of broader tendencies in British that predated the Regency

13 Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Linda Bree, Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1998, 50.


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by decades and even centuries. Satires of him find their theatrical and political roots in radical writing of the 1790s through characters like Mr Filligrove in Robert Bage’s Hermsprong (1796) and Charles Goldfinch in Thomas Holcroft’s 1792 hit comedy The Road to Ruin.Debuting in the wake of the “Escape Affair”, in which a horse owned by the Prince of Wales had won a Newmarket race at long odds after coming in last place the previous day, Holcroft’s comedy linked the Whip explicitly to royal scandal and aristocratic dissipation.14

With such levels of scandal in such high places, it is not surprising that The Road to Ruin achieved immediate acclaim. Holcroft presents Goldfinch as an amoral force of nature in perpetual motion, driven entirely by the pleasure he takes in horse racing, gambling, and cutting a fine figure, as his first entrance illustrates:

(Enter Goldfinch in a high-collared coat, several under-waistcoats, buckskin breeches covering his calves, short boots, long spurs, high-crowned hat, hair in the extreme, &c.)Goldfinch. Hah! my tight one!Harry (surveying him). Well, Charles!Goldfinch. How you stare! An’t I the go? That’s your sort!...Harry. You improve daily, Charles!Goldfinch. To be sure! That’s your sort! (Turning round to show himself.) An’t I a genus?Harry. Quite an original! You may challenge the whole fraternity of the whip to match you!Goldfinch. To be sure! Know the odds! Hold four in hand! Turn a corner in style! Reins in form – elbows square – wrist pliant – hayait! Drive the Coventry stage twice a week all summer – pay for an inside place – mount the box – tip the coachy a crown – beat the mail – come in full speed! Rattle down the gateway! Take care of your heads! Never killed but one woman and a child in all my life – that’s your sort!15

Here is a key source for Grimaldi’s and Mathews’ Regency caricatures: a satire re-attached to several cultural referents. Having

14 For more information on the Escape affair, see E.A. Smith’s George IV, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999, 61-62, 66-67; and Saul David, Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998, 136-37. 15 Thomas Holcroft, The Road to Ruin, ed. Ruth I. Aldrich, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968, II.i.303-78.



been a groom as a boy, Holcroft meant Goldfinch to be a satire on Newmarket and its culture, and that culture included not only the Prince of Wales but also Richard Brinsley Sheridan, another early prototype for this association between turf and theatre.

In connecting Newmarket to the theatre, hippodrama to the fad of gentleman coach driving, and popular theatre to satire, I wish to make a case for placing theatre and dramatic hierarchies, from legitimate tragedy to trained animal acts, at the centre of how Romantic culture understood and organized itself – as a force irresistible enough to affect the orbits of other cultural forms. Yet studying Romantic writing exerts its own gravitational pulls over us. When we combine the highly regulated nature of the nineteenth-century stage with the primacy given first to poetry and then to fiction within literary histories of nineteenth-century Britain, we are tempted not just to neglect the drama in pursuit of other literary forms but to cast a second blind eye to the connections that exist between the drama and those other forms as well. We nearly always speak of Lord Byron’s early satires – most obviously English Bards and Scotch Reviewers but also Hints from Horace and even the shorter poems of 1812 – as specifically literary satires: as attacks on the poetry of writers like Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Moore. These same poems, however, also devote considerable time to other aspects of Regency culture. In particular, they devote dozens and even hundreds of lines to the drama and to popular theatre, and these lines occur often at the very moments we find Byron calling on figures like William Gifford and the spirits of Juvenal and Horace to revive British satire.

Hence my interest in connecting two Regency crises of legitimacy – in this case, of theatre and of satire – to one another. And hence my desire to provide a broader context – not just the theatrical season of 1810-11 but also the scandals that fed institutions like Newmarket and the Jockey Club, the horse culture that produced clubs like the “Four-in-Hand” and the craze for gentleman coach-driving, and the tradition of political theatre that gave us characters like Goldfinch in The Road to Ruin and Cypher in Hit or Miss – for understanding the introduction of hippodrama to the legitimate stage and for explaining the disproportionate backlash it produced.

For however much we remember systems of genres as arbitrary impositions of one set of views or historical moments over others, the


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issue changes when we find parliamentary acts and government institutions buttressing them. In her recent book Illegitimate Theatre in London, Jane Moody has mapped the myriad ways in which questions of legitimacy shaped the political and aesthetic landscape of London theatre. In the process, she has described how a conceptual dichotomy became a distinct kind of legal property through the theatre and its institutions. In the form of monopolies awarded by royal patent, the concepts of dramatic legitimacy and illegitimacy could be, for lack of a better word, owned – either held or leased by theatres –until they took on a cultural and even material existence, backed as they were by statutory law and authority of royal favour.

Such aristocratic and legal backing provides a powerful illusion of reality; and when that illusion is broken, we can expect crises that reach far beyond the local arena where the break or transgression has occurred, even when the transgression is so apparently small as that of gentlemen driving their own coaches or Theatres Royal hiring horses to stage a more realistic pitched battle or cavalry charge. When we add a sense of the economic stakes at play here – which are so high that they must be supported by royal patent and parliamentary act –we can begin to see how small transgressions invite fairly massive responses.

So we find in the response to Blue-beard and Timour the Tartar. We find it in the form of countless theatrical reviews and essays –three by Leigh Hunt alone – and in the many separate and full-length theatrical responses that these two plays provoked between June and December of 1811. Simply listing the titles and dates of these plays will provide a notion of how big the response was. In late June of1811, we find the Lyceum doing Quadrupeds; or the Manager’s Lack Kick and the Haymarket Theatre doing Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh,both adaptations of earlier plays. In August, while the Lyceum revived Matthew Lewis’ The Wood Daemon, the Haymarket submitted a play called Four-in-Hand to the Licensor of Plays, John Larpent. So much for the legitimate summer theatres. It is not until we look to the newspapers, however, that we see just how sweeping the satirical response was. If we open The Times in late June of 1811, eleven weeks after the debut of Timour the Tartar, we find the no fewer than eight performances advertised – including Timour, Harlequin and Blue-beard, The Quadrupeds, and a new play entitled BLOOD WILL



HAVE BLOOD! or, The Battle of the Bridges – all with horses, all going on in London, in a single day.

While the magnitude of this response to Bluebeard and Timourmight be surprising, I am not surprised that the response came in the form of satire, or that the crisis of dramatic confidence provoked by John Philip Kemble’s staging of these two plays caused its own minor crisis among critics writing about satire itself. Where institutional definitions of dramatic legitimacy and illegitimacy break down, we should not be surprised to find similar crises in other genres that depend on the same hegemonic dichotomies. Satire is perhaps the most aggressively oppositional of all genres, primarily because it nearly always claims to attack from foundational truths. The site of truth may be contested among satirists and the relation between satire and the objects satirized may be mutually constitutive; but through all this, satire, even radical satire, attacks from a sense of its own authority and legitimacy.

Thus, I find it most significant of all that, within the critical responses to satires of Blue-beard and Timour the Tartar, we find a crisis of confidence in the definition, function, and power of satire to defend supposedly established and permanent truths. Dramatic critics reviewing these satires – from Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh to One Foot by Land, & One Foot by Sea, or The Tartars Tartared, which played at the end of 1811 – repeatedly question whether such productions are legitimately satirical or trying to exploit the fad for hippodrama. And this anxiety produces some of the best theoretical writing about the drama or about satire in the nineteenth century. This is particularly true of writing about The Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh,George Colman’s adaptation of The Rovers, first published in The Anti-Jacobin in 1798. Seeking to compete with Samuel James Arnold’s Quadrupeds at the Lyceum Theatre, Colman had quickly cobbled together his own horse-farce from The Rovers and added the framing device of a staged dress rehearsal in which the manager and the playwright discuss the aims of the play. For several reviewers, the hurried manner in which Colman mounted the play showed him to be acting out of the same economic pressures he was satirizing. As a result, they subjected the play to minute analysis, concluding the classically trained Colman either to be unaccountably confusing, or perniciously jumbling, the practices of burlesque and caricature, and thus blurring the very boundaries his play claimed to be defending.


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There exist no fewer than a dozen reviews of this kind in 1811 alone, all responding not to Blue-beard and Timour the Tartar but to satires of them, with most lamenting that the Colman’s satire, ifanything, would perpetuate the crisis of legitimacy in the theatre.16

Using Colman’s love of profit as a platform for their own writing, these reviewers anxiously reconstruct a classical theory of dramatic satire, painstakingly defining various forms of ridicule, mockery, burlesque, and parody. And in doing so, they provide us with a compelling starting point for considering how we might approach our own work on Romantic drama and theatre: to understand it as changing and in transition; to connect it to other cultural forms and rituals of daily life; and to allow it into the same room (and as a dominant force in that room) with our most canonical forms – whether that means placing the author of the very hippodramatic Giaour firmly back into his seat on the Drury Lane board, preferring Coleridge’s Remorse to Osorio, or (dare we think it) reading Remorse with Harlequin and Humpo, and trying to imagine what that complete night at the theatre might have been like.

16 See especially The Times, 27 July 1811, 3; The Evening Mail, 26-29 July 1811, 3; Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 24 February 1811, 61-62; The Examiner, 28 July 1811, 485-86; and The Morning Post, 27 July 1811, 3.

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