David Worrall

The Royal Amphitheatre and Olympic Tom and Jerry Burlettas

This chapter, and the one which follows, are given over to demonstrating the workings of the popular or plebeian public spheres of drama specific to the non-patent playhouses operating in late Georgian London. Burletta was the optimum dramatic genre for these theatres to develop since it was also the only form available to them which could be confirmed as legally permissible. Inevitably, the narrative of how burletta developed bears little relationship to how spoken drama evolved in the royal theatres. While non-patent playhouses such as the Adelphi and Olympic continued to experience the censor’s interventions, and while no playhouse in the London area was immune from the royal theatres’ mobilization of litigation and political pressure to protect their monopolies, the burletta playhouses developed largely with reference to their own competitors or peers and in combination with a dialogue with their own audiences. For as long as the major contemporary canonical authors such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats remained unable or unwilling to access the potential of these playhouses for reaching popular audiences, even though much of their verse was politically and theoretically derived from native ballads and was ideally suited to burletta, the manner in which dramas such as Giovanni in London and Tom and Jerry developed was unlikely to follow the patterns of literary or social history established by spoken drama. These chapters will demonstrate that successful burlettas reached exponentially large audiences within a public sphere which articulated its own set of concerns.

The Libertine Reclaimed: Burletta and the Cockney Presence

This chapter will argue that the unnoticed presence behind the attacks on the so-called Cockney School of poets which emanated from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was the parallel growth and assertiveness of Cockneys both as fictional characters and as Londoners spectating and acting on the capital’s increasingly fragmented range of stages. These were the young Londoners, legal scribes, apprentices, shopmen and women who paid to act at private theatres such as the one Keats himself visited in 1818. London’s urban private theatres, the descendants of the spouting clubs, were fundamentally transforming the relationship between actors and audiences. Beyond the authority of the patent houses or Lord Chamberlain, a newly emerging class of Londoner was taking to the stage. To Ann Catherine Holbrook, an older provincial actress writing her Memoirs of the Stage in 1809, they were part of an increasing groundswell of ‘Spouting Clubs, and Private Theatres’ who threatened her livelihood, seeming to ’spring’ ‘from behind the Counter, from off the Shop-board.’449 Ten years after Keats’s death, London could even support The Acting Manager; or, The Minor Spy. A Weekly Review of the Public and Private Stage with its notices of the Shakespeare’s Pavilion private theatre in the working-class Hoxton Old Town (on Richard III, ‘Mr. Green seems to know as much about Shakespeare as a monkey knows about philosophy’).450

Blackface and Black Mask: The Benevolent Planters versus Harlequin Mungo

This chapter will analyse the portrayal of slavery in two late-1780s dramas, William Bates’s Harlequin Mungo; or, A Peep into the Tower (1787) and Thomas Bellamy’s The Friends; or, The Benevolent Planters (1789), and how this issue provoked dissimilar responses in London’s East End and West End playhouses. Different audiences, varied regulatory provisions and inconsistent attitudes to slavery initiated markedly diverse representations of the topic of slavery even in playhouses barely a few miles apart and within a couple of years of each other. Despite these apparently polarized situations, the underlying story of their separate circumstances tells us much about the structural and social complexities of how such a highly charged political issue was portrayed in the capital’s theatres. This chapter will particularly discuss the issue of black mask and blackface (the former being a convention in the representation of pantomime harlequins), and will attempt to recover the materiality of the black presence in London and how the existence of different types of audience catchments in the capital provoked these dissimilar theatrical responses. It will be shown that the opportunities afforded by the Royalty Theatre performing their pantomime of Harlequin Mungo using the traditional black-masked harlequin provided a mechanism more easily able to accommodate that theatre’s racially diverse audience and celebrate an interracial marriage between Harlequin (the West Indian ex-slave, Mungo) and the plantation owner’s daughter, Columbine.

Busby, Burletta and Barnwell: Music, Stage and Audience

The terms of the restrictions imposing burletta as the principal dramatic form in Georgian London were perfectly well understood by contemporaries of Ireland, Dibdin and Moncrieff. The curtailment of speech was, inevitably, subjected to withering popular ridicule. The song writer Jacob Beuler, in his ‘Major versus Minors, A Petition to the Lovers of the Drama,’ sung from the stage of the Surrey Theatre, satirized how ‘The Great Theatres charge the Small/With open means and latent, / Infringing on prerogative / And Charles the Second’s patent.’ As well as deploying the traditional option of marking how Covent Garden and Drury Lane abused their privilege by replacing literary drama with animals and acrobats (‘Instead of Hamlet’s ghost, a snake/That “could a tail unfold,” sirs!’), it is striking that Beuler’s song also notices the restrictions on vocalization: It’s said the rigours of the law Shall be our tongue correctors; Unless we keep to pantomime, To placards, gongs, and spectres. So sentenced us a learned Wig— A judge we hold in awe, sirs, We know it is the law keeps him, And we must keep the law, sirs.48

Dramatic Topicality: Robert Merry’s The Magician No Conjurer and the 1791 Birmingham Riots

The main purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that drama retained the ability to respond to topical debates affecting contemporary political culture. In many ways, registering topical representations in the theatre is the evidential precondition for much of this book’s contents.155 The chapter aims to prove that theatre, despite consistent attempts at suppression, had both the willingness and the context of experience with which to develop responses to turbulent political conditions. The example chosen examines how the Birmingham Riots of July 1791, one of the most unsettling incidents of civil disturbance between loyalist and reformist groups, were reflected through the unlikely medium of a comic opera.

Belles Lettres to Burletta: William Henry Ireland as Fortune’s Fool

The case of William Henry Ireland, probably the most famous eighteenth-century Shakespeare forger, is already well known to literary scholars through his notorious ‘Shakespearean’ tragedy, Vortigern.355 What has not been noticed before is that the cultural conditions of stage drama in Britain in the 1790s make his activities remarkably rational and consonant. His greatest problem was that he tried to write belles lettres when he should have been aiming to produce burletta. With only two London venues available for spoken tragedy, if Ireland wished to write a five-act tragedy for the stage, the Royal theatrical duopoly curtailed his range of manoeuvre. Outside of the Royal theatres, in London, burletta was the only permissible dramatic genre, and it was in those alternative playhouses that the future of British drama lay. Furthermore, even if the generic restraints were surmounted, any new dramatic piece containing a text (whether song, prologue, epilogue, five-act spoken tragedy or three-act burletta), and which was deemed to fall within the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays, the piece would be further subject to licensing, cutting or even prohibition.

Conclusion: The Canadian Tom and Jerry Murder

The Tom and Jerry burlettas of the early 1820s, prefigured as they were by a string of what one might call ‘Giovanni in XYZ’ plays of the late 1810s, mark the maturity of a genuine public plebeian dramatic sphere located at the heart of London. Whatever the arguments which might be posited about the degree of permeability of plebeian public sphere of drama this book has outlined, there clearly existed a large body of dramatic writing which had little to do with the literary canon or even the national heritage of spoken drama. The regulatory framework, and its bewildering legal and cultural intricacies, ensured that Romantic-period drama outside of the patent playhouses would develop differently from the five-act spoken format of play derived from the era of Shakespeare or the Restoration. The manner in which this drama increasingly reflected or embodied consciously working-class aspirations or sentiments may be more open to discussion, but it seems quite clear that the playhouses and playwrights themselves felt they were in the middle of a new phenomenon of class and dramaturgy. Even the Adelphi, with the hit of Moncrieff’s Tom and Jerry firmly on its hands in late 1821, staged its own comment about the revolution in taste, which was increasingly a devolution towards the representation of the artisan, Cockney, public who comprised their audiences.

Moncrieff’s Tom and Jerry and its Spin-Offs

By the time Moncrieff wrote his Tom and Jerry for the Adelphi in the late autumn of 1821, there was already a strong metropolitan cultural tradition of dramatic representations derived from Pierce Egan’s original Life in London. This chapter, like Chapter 6, shows how dramas in London developed within a separate public sphere in an intertextuality gaining its own independence within the burletta form. It is perhaps worth reiterating at this point the separateness of the public sphere discussed. Occasionally, dramas masquerading as if from the regular, legitimate, canonical repertoire were advertised but, in practice, they were always distanced from the wrath of the patentees. In 1818 the Royalty Theatre advertised ‘a Burletta founded on the Tragedy of Hamlet,’ and later engaged Edmund Kean in 1824 in a ‘Grand Tragic Melo-Drame’ version of the same play.637 At best, any Royalty Hamlet would have been more than usually heavily cut but, of course, it would also have been performed interspersed with imported songs and accompanied by continuous music of the type Leman Thomas Rede found so irksome. It is quite possible that further variations abounded. An 1823 Surrey ‘grand Melo-Drame, founded on… Hamlet’ was curiously advertised as 108 ‘rounds’ of speech which, although fully cast, implied that its performance was presented as an exhibition or feat of memory.638