Katherine Newey
University of Exeter
The nineteenth century was a theatrical century. It may not have been a century of great dramatic writing by conventional literary standards, but it was a century of energetic and entrepreneurial theatre professionals, and keen, knowledgeable theatre-goers. The theatre was part of the revolution in popular culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century; a revolution so complete that we barely notice it now. The theatre was central to the democratisation of British culture, offering cheap, local entertainment across the ‘pleasure zones’ of Britain’s growing cities, although there is an inevitable focus on London as the centre of the theatrical profession (McWilliam 2020, 107–8). Michael Gamer sketches out the significance of the theatre at the start of the nineteenth century in terms which he admits are almost incomprehensible: ‘[I]magine an art form today bigger than film – bigger than television –bigger than fashion and popular music combined’ (Gamer 2014, 60). The stories, genres, tropes, and character types of the nineteenth-century theatre, and its star actors and managers, with their many anecdotes and memoirs, circulated beyond the growing West End of London theatre district and theatre buildings across the country. By the end of the nineteenth century, British theatre was a global industry, with London at its centre. Although there was no established theatre institution, such as the Comédie Française, which was the designated keeper of national drama, British theatre was at the centre of the making and definition of national identity, particularly as the colonial expansion of British mercantilist and industrial capitalism coalesced into the British Empire, on which, reputedly, the sun never set.
This approach to the British theatre of the nineteenth century is at odds with the dominant literary critical account of the English drama of the period. In the judgements of many critics during the nineteenth century and since, written drama was lacking in the aesthetic qualities it should have inherited from the tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the comedies of manners of the Restoration and eighteenth century. The consciousness of this linguistic and cultural heritage weighed heavily on many theatre professionals, and certainly directed the focus of much of the public discussion of the theatre throughout the nineteenth century. The theatre was felt to be caught between high art and popular culture; between edifying notions of beauty and artistry, and material relationships governed by commercial imperatives. This cultural anxiety is echoed in subsequent scholarly attitudes to the theatre of the period, which have tended to focus on the century’s dramatic literature – and find it wanting.
In order to understand the theatre of the nineteenth century as a serious art form on its own terms, the limitations of this literary and historical narrative need to be recognised. The rest of this essay will offer a framework to the materials and commentaries in this collection, to suggest an approach to the nineteenth century performance which considers the theatre as a social and cultural activity, as well as the written record of dramatic literature.
To look at the theatre at the beginning of the nineteenth century is to see a cultural sector in transformation. The commercial organisation of the theatre profession in the eighteenth century was relatively stable, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century it had become increasingly strained under the pressures of an industrialising and urbanising country. The ferment of new ideas about subjectivity – what it is to be human – from the political and aesthetic ideas of aesthetic romanticism and political revolution changed established modes of representation, in the performance of character, action, and situation. While the theatre profession in the eighteenth century was organised around the monopoly of the Theatres Royal – the holders of the Royal Patent – the pressures of increased population and demand for novelty and spectacle distorted and broke this oligarchic structure. By the end of the nineteenth century, the theatre had become a major international entertainment industry, organised around commercial principles, and London’s West End had become the theatrical centre of the Western world, in much the way it remains today – performances with wide appeal, generally involving spectacular staging or star performers, in long runs of single shows.
State regulation and censorship has framed the British theatre industry since the establishment of the first public theatres in sixteenth-century London. State authorities seem always to have regarded the gathering of hundreds of people in the confined space of a theatre, immersed in sympathy with the extreme passions displayed on the stage, as a threat to public order, however infrequently riots in the theatre actually happened. This was clear in 1642, when the theatres were closed during the English Civil War. Theatre survived in the private homes of the Royalist aristocracy (see, for example, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s pastoral comedy, The Concealed Fancies), but not in the public theatres.[1] On the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II presented loyal Royalist actor-managers Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant with Letters Patent giving them a monopoly on the production of ‘entertainments of the stage’ within greater London.[2] In the nineteenth century, these were the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden, with the Theatre Royal Haymarket as a permitted third theatre. State regulation of the theatre was further strengthened by legislation in the 1737 Theatres Act, which introduced censorship of the stage through the office of the Lord Chamberlain and his Examiner of Plays, in order to control direct criticism of the current government from the stage.[3]
This history informs the position of theatre as a public institution in the nineteenth century, and indeed, through to 1968. For this period from 1737 to 1968, the British theatre was explicitly censored by the Lord Chamberlain, and the office of the Examiner of Plays. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Lord Chamberlain – originally an individual tasked with managing arrangements for the monarch’s household – and his censor, the Examiner of Plays, had become entangled in complex layers of legal regulation and professional custom, which were increasingly unfit for managing the vibrant and expanding theatre industry, particularly in London. Existing mechanisms of State control could not easily accommodate the significant changes in urban populations, which were a product of industrialisation and population growth in the first half of the century. London’s new ‘minor’ theatres – those without the Royal Patent and legally limited to ‘music and dance’ or ‘burletta’ – regularly flouted the regulation of both the Lord Chamberlain and local magistrates to produce works from across the English repertoire, together with new plays produced at great speed on topical matters, adaptation from popular novels, and translations of new French plays (Donohue 1973, 29–51). These new theatres catered for growing populations in local neighbourhoods, particularly on the south bank of the Thames around Waterloo and Lambeth, and in the East End of London, providing entertainment and community identity for these newly urbanised areas of largely working class citizens (see Davis and Emeljanow 2001).
Various Parliamentary attempts were made throughout the nineteenth century to take control of the entertainment industry, and direct it towards what was considered to be the public good. There were three Parliamentary Select Committees into the standards and regulation of the theatre, in 1832, 1866, and 1892. Each enquiry revolved around anxiety about the status of theatre, the quality of the written drama, and its competitors. Each Select Committee was concerned with what could – or should – be performed and where. In 1832, the organisation of the British theatre was challenged in ways which were entwined with the highly charged politics of the Reform period, and the language of Reform was applied to the British theatre, as to the British Parliament (for detailed discussions of this history see Swindells 2001; Bratton 2000; Moody 2000). At the end of several weeks of hearings, the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature recommended that the monopoly rights of the ‘Patent’ Theatres Royal be removed, and the local population be empowered to demand and see all types of theatre in their local neighbourhoods (House of Commons 1832). The ‘National Drama’ – symbolised by the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries – should be available to all. However, such was the power of the old order of the Patent theatres that legislative reform of the theatre took another decade. It was not until 1843 that the Theatres Regulation Act brought all theatres under the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, and legal distinctions between the Patent and the minor theatres were removed.
This pattern was repeated in 1866 and 1892, when various coalitions of interest in the theatre business jostled over monopoly and privilege. Protectionism in the theatre industry continued. In 1866, a Parliamentary Select Committee was set up to examine ‘Theatrical Licenses and Regulations’. The focus of this enquiry was not the quality or status of the drama on the nation’s theatre stages, as in 1832, but an anxiety about the repertoire of the music halls, and the competition they posed for ‘legitimate’ theatres. Emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century, music halls were a hugely popular form of entertainment which presented a mixed bill of informal entertainments, and were particularly popular in local working class communities. A night out at the music hall combined eating and drinking (and smoking) with watching a variety of acts: song and dance routines, specialist magic, juggling and aerialist performances, stand-up comedy acts, and various ‘eccentric’ performances. Dan Leno, who became the most famous pantomime Dame of the late nineteenth century, started his career in the music hall as a nine-year-old clog dancer in Coventry, performing with his brother in the ‘Great Little Lenos’. However, when the music hall staged scripted plays, as well as extracts from operas and ballets, theatre managers saw the music halls as a threat to their business. The national drama – the repertoire of written plays – was not to be performed in these houses, according to the proprietors of theatres. Music hall audiences were also of concern to the State; as Richard Schoch (2007, 241) points out, it was no coincidence that anxieties over the conduct and business of music halls peaked at a time of debate over the electoral reform proposed by Benjamin Disraeli in the Second Reform Bill of 1867.
In 1892, the Select Committee on Theatre and Places of Entertainment returned to the subject of the control and regulation of the Music Halls, and its recommendations included the observation that:
The large collection of theatres and music-halls gathered together, the amount of capital risked in the enterprise, the great number of persons directly and indirectly provided with employment, the multitudes of all classes of the people who attend theatres and music-halls of London, find no parallel in any other part of the country; and when it is remembered that a considerable proportion of the visitors to these places are not habitually dwellers in the metropolis, that in London are organised the travelling companies and troupes that have, as we are informed, taken the places of the stock companies which used to exist in provincial towns: that here only is any school to be found for the study of acting as an art – it cannot, we think, be denied that the control of the London theatres, and to some extent also of the London music-halls, is a matter of national as well as of municipal concern.
(House of Commons 1892)
Once again, theatre and performance in London are positioned at the centre of the theatrical profession, and British self-image as a nation. Each of the Select Committees circled around the rights to the repertoire of the English drama, and its relationship to various classes of audience, with the right to perform this repertoire as part of a highly rhetorical and contested definition of Englishness.
Anxiety about the status of the written drama and its performance is threaded through nineteenth-century critical discourse on the theatre, including public statements by various representatives of the profession. William Macready, the star actor and manager of both Covent Garden (1837–39) and Drury Lane (1841–43), was recognised by his contemporaries for supporting the ‘National Drama’ through his productions of Shakespeare. The Illustrated London News gave lavish coverage to Macready’s retirement from the management of Drury Lane in 1843, reporting his ambition to ‘make your national theatre worthy of Shakspere and of our country’. Significantly, the ILN linked this aesthetic ambition with Macready’s management of the Drury Lane theatre as a social space:
he sought, in a word, to make Drury-Lane a family theatre […] The eye of purity – of fair delicacy – of young womanly innocence – was never offended there by scenes which once brought blushes to every modest cheek […] and fathers, husbands, and brothers did not dread for their fair charges a rude, insulting contact with the flaunting insolence of vulgar and shameless morality.
(Illustrated London News 17 June 1843, 421)
This characterisation of the actor-manager as guardian of both the national drama and national morality stretches across the century, focused on the protection of idealised concepts of femininity. Successors to Macready’s role as eminent tragedians and leaders of the profession included the actor-managers Charles Kean, Madge Kendal, Wilson Barrett, and Henry Irving, the first member of the theatrical profession to be knighted. Barrett’s morality melodramas, such as The Sign of the Cross (1895) and The Silver King (1882) attracted the attention of Prime Minister William Gladstone, whose letter in support of the moral authority of Barrett’s Christian melodrama was printed in a souvenir programme of The Sign of the Cross:
You seem to me to have rendered, while acting strictly within the lines of the Theatre, a great service to the best and holiest of all causes, the cause of Faith, the audience which showed reasonable self-government even in the smaller points, appreciated most highly the passages which were most directly associated with this service and with the fundamental idea of the piece.
(Gladstone 1896, Box 1, Folder 1)
So far, this is the story of the growing respectability of the theatre in the nineteenth century, a story the profession itself was keen to tell. However, the narrative of respectability was told against a more complex theatrical working environment, in which the genres of melodrama and pantomime dominated as theatrical novelties for much of the period, challenging any uniform idea of Victorian respectability. Attempts were made throughout the period to nurture new writing which lived up to the label of the ‘legitimate’ drama. Benjamin Webster set up a competition for a modern comedy in 1843, offering £500 for the best five-act play reflecting modern manners. Here, the emphasis on the length and structure of the play is significant, as it indicates a connection back to the comedies of wit of the eighteenth century. William Macready aimed at literary as well as theatrical success when he commissioned new plays such as Robert Browning’s poetic dramas Strafford (1837) and A Blot on the ’Scutcheon (1843), and Thomas Noon Talfourd’s classicist tragedy Ion (1836). At the end of the century, Henry Irving’s collaboration with Alfred, Lord Tennyson on The Cup and Wilson Barrett’s work with Thomas Hall Caine and Henry Arthur Jones all tried to revive the ‘legitimate’ theatre within the economic stringencies and uncertainties of commercial management.
However, what Jane Moody (2000) called the ‘illegitimate’ theatre came to dominate the British stage. Audiences ate up the variety offered by long bills of performance given each night, and managers of Theatres Royal and minor theatres alike commissioned the ‘illegitimate’ drama – farces, melodramas, burlesques, burlettas – to meet this ever-growing demand for entertainment. Audiences relished mixed bills, combining the canonical drama of tragedy and high comedy with the new forms of melodrama, concert dance, petite comedies, and farce, presented with more or less lavish spectacle and sensation. The Victorian theatre was hungry for content, and theatres were supplied with a stream of pieces of great variety in form and performance style.
As a consequence, the real innovation and success story of nineteenth-century theatre is to be found in its two dominant forms: pantomime and melodrama. Both were mixed forms, which combined elements from earlier canonical genres, reformulated for mass audiences in urban environments. They were ubiquitous, and survive still, 200 years later. Indeed, the sensibility of melodrama – what Wylie Sypher (1948) called the ‘melodramatic mode’ – still frames much of the global popular culture of the twenty-first century, from the mass production of Hollywood and Bollywood romantic dramas, to radio and television soap opera, and the fashion for ‘reality TV’. The survival of pantomime as a living performance form is limited mostly to the United Kingdom, but it is the dominant form in British commercial theatre every December, and the economic reliance of theatre managements on the box office receipts of pantomime is much the same as it was in the nineteenth century.
These were popular entertainments which could be created and staged at speed for audiences with a seemingly endless desire for novelty and sensation, and neither form remained fixed. The widespread performance and adaptation of melodrama was one of the most significant cultural effects of the Romantic and French Revolutionary movements. The theatre form known initially as mélodrame (a drama with music) emerged from the Boulevard theatres of Paris in the wake of the French Revolution, combining heightened performance and language with music in short, prose plays which eschewed the formal poetic language and complex structure of French classical drama. Guilbert de Pixèrècourt, the writer credited with ‘inventing’ melodrama, remarked, probably apocryphally, that he wrote for those who could not read. The first named melodrama performed in Britain was by radical writer and agitator Thomas Holcroft, who adapted Pixèrècourt’s Cœlina ou l’enfant du mystère (1800), performed at Covent Garden in 1802 as The Tale of Mystery. In the face of discussions about the ‘National Drama’ and the role of Drury Lane and Covent Garden in nurturing it, there is a deep irony (typical of the cultural conflicts of the early nineteenth century) in melodrama making its official debut in a Patent theatre.
This new form soon dominated London’s theatres, and its combination of frank declaration of human feeling through colloquial speech, underscored by music and enlivened by the visual spectacle of dramatic ‘situations’, seemed to provide an embodiment of the popular sentiments and democratic impulses of the time. Melodrama drew on the pathos and high stakes of tragedy, but in its naturalised English form melodramas told stories about ordinary people, rather than kings and lords. Playwright (and one of the founders of Punch) Douglas Jerrold wrote movingly about the life experience of working class servant girls (Sally in our Alley, 1830) sailors (Black-Ey’d Susan, 1829), and tenant farmers (The Rent Day, 1832), presenting their everyday troubles with a seriousness comparable to the downfall of the kings and princes of tragedy. His work, and that of other ‘hack’ writers, such as John Baldwin Buckstone and William Thomas Moncrieff, domesticated and Anglicised the exoticism of the French mélodrame into a model of English domestic drama which focused on the everyday difficulties of families and working people. By mid-century, domestic drama had become thoroughly naturalised, and melodramas on the London stage fed into the growing desire for a realist portrayal of character, action, and behaviour, staged in recognisably contemporary settings. The process of moving towards the domestic, the contemporary, and the recognisable constituted a form of mid-Victorian realism in performance, even when it became the foundation of the sensation melodramas of the 1860s and 1870s, such as Lady Audley’s Secret (adapted from Mary Braddon’s novel) or East Lynne (adapted from Ellen Wood’s novel).
It is with these plays, and the fashion for sensation melodramas throughout the 1850s and 1860s, that the patterns and conventions of production and spectatorship were established which still largely govern theatre-going as a social and cultural practice. It was in the 1860s that the multi-part playbill of a night’s entertainment, part of a revolving seasonal repertoire and changing nightly, gave way to long runs of single plays, especially at the fashionable theatres of London’s West End. Other innovations in theatre production in the last 30 years of the nineteenth century changed the social relations of theatre-going: the emphasis on the stage framed by the elaborate proscenium arch, as if it were a painting; the dimming of auditorium lights during the performance; the conversion of the unreserved benches in the theatre pit into reservable single stall seats. All of these changes served to create an environment in which the desire for every more representational realism could thrive. The thrill of melodrama did not diminish, however, as Henry Irving’s mesmerising performance of the Matthias, in Leopold Lewis’ The Bells (1871) demonstrated. But the sensational interest of the play and Irving’s performance as Matthias (which defined his career) moved from the externalities of earlier melodramatic performance, into Irving’s performance of the inner torment Matthias suffers in remembering his crime. Matthias is a murderer, but the audience does not witness the crime; instead, they witness the effect it leaves on the guilty perpetrator, years later, and watch the gradual breakdown of his character under the burden of guilt. This kind of psychologised performance was to underpin later developments in the English theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century, in response to mainland European dramatic writing in naturalist and realist modes.
The English pantomime, like melodrama, was fashioned and remediated out of a conglomeration of international influences, from Italian street theatre and the characters of the commedia dell’arte, through Charles Perrault’s fairy tales and French Féerie extravaganzas, exotic Arabian Nights stories, and circus clowning. The structure into which pantomime settled by the late nineteenth century is often seen as the ‘traditional’ pantomime, and this is how it was performed throughout the twentieth century. However, pantomime remained as innovative and novelty-seeking as the pantomimic fashions which preceded and succeeded it. By the second half of the nineteenth century, English pantomime had settled into a regular structure of a short ‘Opening’ set in Fairyland, followed by a scene set in the Underworld, amongst the villain and his (invariably pantomime villains were male) acolytes, usually devils or imps. These opening scenes referred to events and current affairs in the contemporary world beyond the theatre in highly topical and satirical commentary: such political commentary was expected, and enjoyed as part of the rough and tumble world of the pantomime.
The Opening also sets up a traditional romance quest story around a young hero (the Principal Boy, always played by a young woman), involving a fight between the fairies and the forces of evil and darkness. The conflict between the benevolent fairies led by the Fairy Queen or King, and the pantomime villains, is then transferred to the mortal world, and we are introduced to the heroic, but also comic, pantomime family – usually, the Principal Boy, the Principal Girl, and the pantomime Dame (played by an older man). These scenes generally involved the whimsical and the fantastical, as theatre managers used spectacle and novel technology in their story-telling, and in their competition for audiences. Once the quest is achieved, the fairy tale or mythological section of the pantomime is concluded, usually with even more extravagant spectacle, and the mish-mash of Fairyland and quotidian London (or Peking, or an unnamed village, or exotic Arabia) changes via the spectacular Transformation scene, into the clowning of the comic ending to the pantomime.
These final scenes, known as the ‘Comic Business’ in the scripts lodged with the Lord Chamberlain’s Office for licensing, and still available for reference today, were the Victorian remnant of the eighteenth-century Harlequinade. The comic scenes were generally constructed as a series of chase scenes, with endless variations. This is what audiences waited for: the licensed mayhem of the Clown’s antics. They expected knockabout humour, clowning, violence, music, song and dance, and beautiful spectacle. The comic scenes in pantomime focused attention on laughter, pleasure, and absurdity for their own sakes. Despite increasing emphasis in the late nineteenth century on the pantomime Dame, and complaints that the Harlequinade suffered a terminal decline throughout the period, the Harlequinade survived, and even prospered, in these final comic scenes. It survived in a constantly mutating form, however, with increasing emphasis on sensational tricks, and novelties such as two Clowns, or the ‘skin acts’ – performers who specialised in playing animals on stage. The comic scenes involved highly virtuosic gymnastic skills of the Clown and Pantaloon, jumping through stage windows, somersaulting across and through the stage settings, and generally creating comic mayhem. The fun is anti-authoritarian and anarchic, drawing on the very lively and strongly felt commitment of the pantomime audience to its liberties and pleasures.
Pantomime and melodrama presented nineteenth-century audiences with highly charged moral worlds, built around binary oppositions – good and evil; male and female; rich and poor. In pantomime the stakes are never so high as in melodrama. Yet through laughter and absurdity it could reveal much more overtly some of the ambiguities and paradoxes of the social relations of the period. Public laughter, as Malcolm Andrews (2013, 177) has argued in relation to Charles Dickens, was a social glue and signalled the communal recognition of something ridiculous. Both genres offer an alternative view of British society and culture through the demotic and forceful voice of popular and populist opinion. It is a rough democracy in the theatre, but one of which we need to take note. The theatre is the nation, and the nation defines itself in the theatre.
References
Andrews, Malcolm (2013) Dickensian Laughter; Essays on Dickens and Humour, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bratton, Jacky (2000) New Readings in Theatre History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, Jim and Victor Emeljanow (2001) Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880, Chicago: University of Iowa Press.
Donohue, Joseph (1973) ‘Burletta and the Early Nineteenth-Century English Theatre’, Nineteenth Century Theatre Research, 1(1): 29–51.
Gamer, Michael (2014) ‘Romantic Melodrama and the Popular Theatre’, in Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Fabio Liberto (eds) The Romantic Stage: A Many-Sided Mirror, Amsterdam and New York: Brill.
Gladstone, W. E. (1896, 8 August) Crain Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas (Austin), Box 1, Folder 2.
House of Commons (1832, 2 August) Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature: With the Minutes of Evidence, London: House of Commons, p. 3.
House of Commons (1892, 2 June) Report from the Select Committee on Theatres and Places of Entertainment; Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index, London: House of Commons, p. iv.
Kinservik, Matthew (2002) Disciplining Satire: the Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage, London: Associated University Presses.
McWilliam, Rohan (2020) London’s West End: Creating the Pleasure District, 1800–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moody, Jane (2000) Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Shaughnessy, David (ed.) (2023) The Censorship of Eighteenth-Century Theatre: Playhouses and Prohibition, 1737–1843, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schoch, Richard (2007) ‘Shakespeare and the Music Hall’, in Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (eds) The Performing Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Shellard, Dominic and Steve Nicholson, with Miriam Handley (2004) The Lord Chamberlain regrets…: a History of British Theatre Censorship, London: British Library.
Straznicky, Marta (1995) ‘Reading the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and Commonwealth Closet Drama’, Criticism, 37(3): 355–90.
Swindells, Julia (2001) Glorious Causes: the Grand Theatre of Political Change, 1789 to 1833, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sypher, Wylis (1948) ‘Aesthetic of Revolution: The Marxist Melodrama’, Kenyon Review, 10(3).
[1] Marta Straznicky (1995, 355–90, esp. 357) points out that between 1642 and 1660, some 90 closet dramas were written.
[2] A digital image of the Letters Patent is available on the Victoria and Albert Museum website: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1112956/patent/.
[3] There is a relatively extensive discussion of this long period of formal censorship in the British theatre, as the bureaucratic mechanisms and records of the Examiner of Plays are comparatively well-preserved. For the eighteenth century, see Matthew Kinservik’s (2002) provocative study, Disciplining Satire: the Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage. For coverage of the nineteenth century, see Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson with Miriam Handley (2004). Most recently also David O’Shaughnessy (2023) offers fresh perspectives across the period from 1737 to 1824.