Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910

Michael R. Booth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317389453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1981. This study concentrates on one aspect of Victorian theatre production in the second half of the nineteenth century – the spectacular, which came to dominate certain kinds of production during that period. A remarkably consistent style, it was used for a variety of dramatic forms, although surrounded by critical controversy. The book considers the theories and practice of spectacle production as well as the cultural and artistic movements that created the favourable conditions in which spectacle could dominate such large areas of theatre for so many years. It also discusses the growth of spectacle and the taste of the public for it, examining the influence of painting, archaeology, history, and the trend towards realism in stage production. An explanation of the working of spectacle in Shakespeare, pantomime and melodrama is followed by detailed reconstructions of the spectacle productions of Irving's Faust and Beerbohm Tree's King Henry VIII.

1 The taste for spectacle

DOI: 10.4324/9781315677866-1

The Victorian taste for spectacle in theatrical production has long been a subject of comment, often dismissive, but not, on the whole, a matter for explanation and understanding. The contrast with our own tastes in production is extreme. For both economic and artistic reasons, spectacle effects, at least in Britain, are now the province of ballet, grand opera, pantomime and musicals, and even here, for the same reasons, they are becoming rarer. When these effects intrude on a small scale into other kinds of theatre, audiences are surprised. Indeed, a positive austerity dominates contemporary Shakespearean production and the staging of much new drama. Actors move in an empty space defined and limited by light, against a selective and non-representational scenic background (if any), whose materials and textures are closely related to the world of the play. Lear and the Fool stand in light on a bare stage; the scenic illusion of a wild heath is not attempted. Half a dozen actors represent the coronation procession of Henry V; there are no cheering crowds, no scattering of flowers, no painted or built-up streets of London. The visual image can be strong, but there is no show, no mass, no profusion of colour, no picture-making, no rich splendour of lighting or decor, no sensual feast for the eye of the spectator – in short, nothing of what we mean by ‘spectacle’. The current modes of taste in production are so antagonistic to Victorian styles that a real effort of historical understanding is necessary before the existence and importance of spectacle in the Victorian theatre can be properly appreciated. Yet such an effort should be made, since not only is a full comprehension of this theatre impossible without it, but also one finds in the development of the spectacle style a social and cultural microcosm of the age. Theatre is, after all, a social activity and never exists in isolation from the social and cultural pattern of its own age. This is as true of the Victorian theatre as any other, and the way in which society and culture nourished the spectacle style – as it did all the other styles of Victorian theatre is of considerable interest in itself. Lastly, the knowledge of how the Victorians held entirely opposite views to ourselves about the production of Shakespeare and other drama and yet translated these views into effective, popular, and long-lasting practice should make us aware that there have been ways other than our own that worked, and that our methods may not be the only right ones. But that is another subject.

The dates chosen for the period of the study should not be taken to imply that spectacle did not exist on the English stage before 1850 or after 1910. The nature of spectacle had long been established in the shows, pageants and processions of Tudor and Stuart times, and the use of spectacle was essential to the court masque. In the eighteenth century, opera, pantomime and ballet were the proper theatrical habitats for display, and the coronations of George II and George III were occasions for elaborate productions of Henry VIII in the patent houses; other public ceremonials were also imitated in the theatre. The steady progression towards pictorialism and spectacle was also evident in the first half of the nineteenth century, a progression also determined by public taste and technological change. The sixty years from 1850 have been chosen because they represent the full flow of theatrical spectacle and the feeding into that mainstream of the tributary cultural influences which helped to shape its course.

It is significant that in the 1850s writers and critics became aware of what was happening to public taste in the theatre, and their views are remarkably consistent. William Bodham Donne, appointed Examiner of Plays in 1857, realised that what used to satisfy audiences satisfied them no longer, and that they wanted something different, something new. Writing in 1855, he declared:¹

we are become, in all that regards the theatre, a civil, similar, and impassive generation. To touch our emotions, we need not the imaginatively true, but the physically real. The visions which our ancestors saw with the mind's eye, must be embodied for us in palpable forms ... all must be made palpable to sight, no less than to feeling; and this lack of imagination in the spectators affects equally both those who enact and those who construct the scene.

At almost the same time, commenting on Charles Kean's treatment of Shakespeare, his biographer noted that the taste of the age ‘had become eminently pictorial and exacting beyond all former precedent. The days had long passed when audiences could believe themselves transplanted from Italy to Athens by the power of poetical enchantment without the aid of scenic devices.’² Observers felt that a drama could not succeed by the power of imagination or the power of words alone. E. T. Smith, then manager of Astley's and formerly of Drury Lane, told a parliamentary committee in 1866 that ‘for a person to bring out a merely talking drama, without any action in it, or sensational effects, is useless; the people will not go to that theatre; they will go where there is scenic effect, and mechanical effects to please the eye.’³ Over thiry years later Max Beerbohm was saying exactly the same thing: ‘Our public cares not at all for the sound of words, and will not tolerate poetry on the stage unless it gets also gorgeous and solid scenery, gorgeous and innumerable supers. ... The poetry must be short and split; must be subordinated to the action of the piece, and to the expensive scenery and the expensive costumes.’⁴

The kind of theatrical taste described in these remarks cut across all social classes. A fondness for spectacle was not in origin exclusively East End or West End, working and lower middle class on the the one hand, or upper middle class and fashionable on the other. It was a homogeneous, a ubiquitous taste that had nothing to do with income levels, employment, living conditions, or class position. In explaining the audience's enthusiastic reception of the Brocken scene in Faust, Blackwood's pointed out that ‘Society, always more or less represented at the Lyceum, loves a spectacle as much as Whitechapel’,⁵ and there is a mass of evidence to suggest that both participated eagerly in the joys of theatrical spectacle and subscribed wholeheartedly to the predominant pictorial ethic.

Simply to note this change of theatrical taste and then go on to examine the spectacle style as it operated in the theatre is not quite enough. To attempt answers to the question of why such a change occurred is essential, since it illuminates the relationship between the audience in the theatre and the society and culture in which it lived, as well as placing the kind of theatrical production under discussion in a larger and more significant context than that of performance alone. Some theatre historians seem to have forgotten that people who went to the theatre had another, and to them probably more important, existence. It is unlikely that their standards of theatrical taste were formed only in the theatre. The desire for pictures and spectacle may well have come from elsewhere. Although the question is problematic and confident answers are difficult to give, it is necessary to look briefly at what may have created and sustained that desire outside the auditorium.

The elaboration of theatrical spectacle corresponded to the elaboration of urban architecture from the 1820s until after the end of the nineteenth century. The rapid growth of the metropolis and other cities, the concomitantly rising prosperity of the nation, and the spread of empire and mercantile imperialism meant the construction of docks, warehouses, bridges, factories, gasworks, railway stations, hotels, banks, department stores, office blocks, government buildings, insurance offices, and exhibition halls on a scale previously unimaginable: massive monuments to wealth, imperial glory, and commercial supremacy, self-important spectacle productions in real stone, brick, steel, iron, and glass. The fact that many of these same monuments appeared repeatedly on the canvas of scene painters is evidence that the new architectural environment was too significant and too much a source of pleasure to be left outside the theatre. Conditioned to mass, grandeur, and elaborate ornamentation in the buildings about them, it is not surprising that the public responded enthusiastically to the same sort of thing translated into the values of theatrical production. Indeed, demand, creation, and response must have been almost simultaneous: managers, scene painters, and stage carpenters were members of that same larger public and also moved in the world outside the theatre. The developing taste for luxury, ostentation, and outward show, which defined personal and public status in an age that could increasingly afford all three, was naturally reflected on the stage as well as on the street and inside the home. An examination of the late Victorian domestic middle-class interior will illustrate the same disposition to leave no space unoccupied, the same love of detail and mass as the Victorian stage.

There seems little doubt that nineteenth-century man saw the world – or, more specifically, used his eyes – in different ways from his ancestors. The demand in the theatre for the pictorial realisation of the word and the scenic recreation of the dramatist's setting was only a part of the extension and heightening of perception closely related to, if not caused by, a range of visual stimuli previously unknown or undeveloped. Urban architecture was one such stimulus; others were the product of new technology directed toward public and private entertainment. The great increase in urban populations and the intermittent but in the second half of the century steady rise in purchasing power created a whole new market for an entertainment industry of sizeable proportions, as well as leading toward a society of mass consumerism featuring the display and advertising of an immense variety of products.

The means for display and entertainment were soon available. Visual stimulus played an essential part. One can mention here only those developments which can clearly be related to the theatre. The new brilliance of the illumination of London streets by gaslight between 1814 and 1820 was the envy of foreign visitors and a source of delight and utilitarian satisfaction to the Londoner himself. In combination with plate glass, gaslight afforded greatly enhanced opportunities for the display of goods in shop windows. Plate glass was an expensive novelty at the beginning of the century, but by the 1830s it was common in superior shops and much better for display than the small leaded windows preceding it. Peering through a brilliantly lit rectangle of glass into a wonderland of attractive goods for sale was like looking into a peepshow or at a stage flooded with light behind a proscenium. The elements of a rectangular frame of vision, a bright light, a viewer, and the varied objects of his view were common to daily life and entertainment as well as the theatre. ‘We go not so much to hear as to look,’ wrote Percy Fitzgerald of the theatre in 1870. ‘It is like a gigantic peep-show, and we pay the showman, and put our eyes to the glass and stare.’⁶ The peepshow itself, refined and improved, was originally a sixteenth-century invention. The extensive employment of glass in public buildings – markets, shopping arcades, exhibition halls, conservatories, railway stations – did not occur before the end of the eighteenth century and the structural use of cast iron in buildings made possible by new engineering techniques. The lightness, purity, and sheer beauty of glass and its powers of reflecting and refracting bright light fascinated the nineteenth century; on the stage it was extremely popular, especially in pantomime.

Other inventions further stimulated and developed public taste for the visual image. Phillip de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon, first presented to the public in 1781, was a sophisticated combination of lighting, sound, scene painting, transparencies, cutout scenery, and models in a miniature theatre 10 feet wide, 6 feet high, and 8 feet deep. The Eidophusikon presented pictorial images of landscapes and seascapes, shipwrecks and storms, sunrise and moonlight, even Milton's Satan and the raising of Pandemonium. De Loutherbourg had been Garrick's leading scene painter at Drury Lane and a master of the new romantic lighting effects and scenic methods. He was also, significantly, a painter of watercolours and oils, and became an Academician in the same year as he exhibited the Eidophusikon, one of the first of a long line of scene painters who attained reputations as artists. The magic lantern was greatly improved in the nineteenth century with the introduction into its mechanism of, first, a brighter and more efficient oil light, and then limelight. One variant, of American origin, was the Sciopticon, which appeared in British homes in the 1870s. A large domestic market in lanterns and slides followed, although the magic lantern, which dated from the seventeenth century, had long been used for public entertainment. It soon reached the theatre. Edward Fitzball employed it to project the image of the ghost ship in The Flying Dutchman (1829) at the Adelphi, and it had also been the source of kaleidoscopic flashes of light in Edmund Kean's King Lear at Drury Lane in 1821.⁷ The kaleidoscope itself had been invented in 1817, but it never became a public amusement for paying audiences and remained a clever domestic toy for all classes of society. Another such device on the peepshow principle was the stereoscope, invented in 1832; much improved in 1849, it became suitable for home entertainment. Two photographs viewed side by side through two lenses gave an effect of three-dimensional perspective. The stereoscope became even more popular when the hand-viewer came into use, and thousands of sets of cards were sold containing views from all over the world. To travel widely in pictures the Victorian family did not need to leave its own parlour.

As Richard Altick has pointed out in his valuable work, The Shows of London, the stereoscope was no more than the immensely popular panorama domesticated. The panorama was a pictorial entertainment of sufficient public interest to occupy several important London public buildings from the 1790s until the 1880s. The first was what became Burford's Panorama in Leicester Square and opened under another name by Robert Barker in 1794 with a view of London seen from the roof of the Albion sugar mill in Southwark. Rival institutions followed Barker, and panoramas rapidly became a public craze. Landscape views – Rome, Florence, Dublin, the Alps, Naples, Cairo, Niagara Falls; battles – Seringapatam, Agincourt, Salamanca, Waterloo; exploration, coronations, state visits, and other topics of immediate public and topographical interest formed the subject matter of the long-enduring panorama vogue. The most important feature of panoramas was their accurate depiction of this subject matter; ‘fidelity to fact was a prime consideration. Here the literate public repaired to visualize what it read about in the newspapers, with the same expectations with which, in the twentieth century, it would watch first newsreels and then newsreels’ successors, television news programs.’⁸ The panorama itself was originally a huge picture painted in special perspective on a domed cylinder in such a way that it could be viewed from the centre of a circular building, sometimes from several levels in that building, as with Hornor's immense panorama of London from the cross of St Paul's exhibited at the Colosseum in 1829. The panorama soon diverged from the concept of circularity but always retained its great size. It was lit by daylight; when it became a flat picture with an illusion of depth and illuminated by special techniques it was called a diorama. The diorama had been invented by Daguerre and shown in Paris in 1822; the following year, specially housed on a site by Regent's Park next to the Colosseum-to-be, it opened with landscapes and interior views of famous cathedrals. A seated audience – in panoramas the audience strolled around the viewing area – looked through a rectangular frame and down a tunnel 30 or 40 feet long at a large picture painted on opaque and translucent materials and lit by daylight from back and front. Apart from the static nature of the experience, the resemblance between viewing a dioramic painting and a theatrical scene was very close, as it had been with the Eidophusikon. A cross between the diorama and the old peepshow was the Cosmorama, which opened in a building of that name in Regent Street in 1823 after a false start in St James's in 1820. Here the paintings were more numerous, much smaller, and seen through a convex lens with perspective effects created by mirrors. Again, the views shown were of Europe, Africa, and Asia, mixed in with public catastrophes such as the burning of the Houses of Parliament. It did not take long for toy diorama boxes for children to find their way into the home; the first one seems to have appeared in 1826. The fold-out or strip panorama was developed by publishers and the periodical press; it reached the heights (or lengths) of elaboration when the Illustrated London News printed a 22-foot fold-out of the Great Exhibition in 1851.

The theatrical advantages of the panorama or diorama – the terms soon became almost interchangeable and lost their initially precise meanings – were quickly realised. The basic principles of lighting and perspective were much the same in the theatre as in the exhibition room; the audience, it is true, was further away from the painting in the theatre, but lighting resources were more considerable, especially with gas and then limelight. It was the theatre that adapted the moving panorama, where pictorialism and technology united to satisfy the spectator's simultaneous desire for performance, scenic spectacle, and educational topography. Harlequin and Friar Bacon in Covent Garden in 1820 had a moving panorama, painted on a single canvas unrolling from one side of the stage to be rolled up again on the other, of a voyage from Holyhead to Dublin while a profile ship moved across the stage in the other direction. Thereafter pantomime harlequinades were frequently interrupted with not especially relevant views of the Welsh coast (Drury Lane, 1821), the scenery between London and Edinburgh (Covent Garden, 1822), a balloon ascent from Vauxhall Gardens (Covent Garden, 1823), and in the same year at Drury Lane a Clarkson Stanfield panorama of the new breakwater at Plymouth. The moving panorama entered Shakespearean production within a few years, and for the rest of the century was a feature of pantomime and spectacle melodrama. Mechanical and moving pictures were older than the nineteenth-century pantomime or the eighteenth-century Eidophusikon, but this was the first time they had been employed on such a large scale and with a purpose uniquely combining painting and performance.

The possibilities of the separate exhibition of moving panoramas, especially those depicting journeys, were obvious, and irregular shows of this kind culminated in the importation from America of an immense panorama, perhaps 3,600 feet long, of a journey down the Mississippi to New Orleans. It took two hours to unroll, and was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall in 1848. As it unrolled, portraying villages, sugar plantations, colonial mansions, Indian encampments, swamps, steam boats, and levees at different times of the day and night, a commentator spoke from a platform at the side, interspersing his narrative lecture with songs, poems, and jokes. Other monster panoramas, spectacles in their own right, followed: the Nile, the Ohio River, the Overland Route to India, and so on, the rage for these being equal to the demand a generation earlier for the fixed panoramas and dioramas of Burford, Homor, and Daguerre. All such exhibitions were the visual equivalent of travel l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgments
• 1 The taste for spectacle
• 2 Shakespeare
• 3 Melodrama and pantomime
• 4 Henry Irving’s Faust, Lyceum Theatre, 1885
• 5 Beerbohm Tree’s King Henry VIII, His Majesty’s Theatre, 1910
• Appendix The costumes in The Forty Thieves, Drury Lane, 1886
• A note on bibliography
• Notes
• Index