Festival Cities

Culture, Planning and Urban Life

John R. Gold, Margaret M. Gold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000318920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Festivals have always been part of city life, but their relationship with their host cities has continually changed. With the rise of industrialization, they were largely considered peripheral to the course of urban affairs. Now they have become central to new ways of thinking about the challenges of economic and social change, as well as repositioning cities within competitive global networks. In this timely and thought-provoking book, John and Margaret Gold provide a reflective and evidence-based historical survey of the processes and actors involved, charting the ways that regular festivals have now become embedded in urban life and city planning.

Beginning with David Garrick's rain-drenched Shakespearean Jubilee and ending with Sydney's flamboyant Mardi Gras celebrations, it encompasses the emergence and consolidation of city festivals. After a contextual historical survey that stretches from Antiquity to the late nineteenth century, there are detailed case studies of pioneering European arts festivals in their urban context: Venice's Biennale, the Salzburg Festival, the Cannes Film Festival and Edinburgh's International Festival. Ensuing chapters deal with the worldwide proliferation of arts festivals after 1950 and with the ever-increasing diversifycation of carnival celebrations, particularly through the actions of groups seeking to assert their identity. The conclusion draws together the book's key themes and sketches the future prospects for festival cities.

Lavishly illustrated, and copiously researched, this book is essential reading not just for urban geographers, social historians and planners, but also for anyone interested in contemporary festival and events tourism, urban events strategy, urban regeneration regeneration, or simply building a fuller understanding of the relationship between culture, planning and the city.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

My eyes, till then, no sights like this will see,

Unless we meet at Shakespeare’s Jubilee!

On Avon’s Banks, where fl owers eternal blow!

Like its Full Stream our Gratitude shall fl ow!

There let us revel, show our fond regard,

On that lov’d Spot, first breath’d our matchless Bard;

To Him all Honour, Gratitude is due,

To Him we owe our all – to Him and to You.

David Garrick ¹

With these words, the actor and theatre manager David Garrick brought the season of plays at London’s Drury Lane to a close on 18 May 1769. Normally he would have confined himself to a promise to return after the summer’s break, but on this occasion chose instead to extol the virtues of a forthcoming event – a Jubilee to be held at Stratford-upon-Avon in honour of William Shakespeare. It was a cause close to his heart. Garrick first attracted attention in 1741 with his ‘career-defining’ performances as the King in ‘Richard III’ (McPherson, 2014). Thereafter, he became a formative influence in staging and interpreting Shakespeare’s plays for eighteenth century audiences and was the mainstay of the movement that sought to elevate Shakespeare to the status of the ‘national poet and icon’ (Thomson, 2004, p. 537; Marsden, 1995). Such was Garrick’s admiration that in 1756 he commissioned the architect Robert Adam to design an octagonal Palladian-style temple for a riverside plot adjacent to his villa at Hampton-on-Thames to house appropriate memorabilia (figure 1.1). A life-size statue of Shakespeare by the celebrated French Huguenot sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac presided over its interior.

Figure 1.1. Garrick’s faux temple to Shakespeare (designed by Robert Adam) at Hampton-on-Thames. (Photo: John and Margaret Gold)

The planned Jubilee resonated with this brand of hagiography – much later satirized by George Bernard Shaw (1901, p. xxxi) as ‘Bardolatry’ – although its scope and intent fundamentally diverged from anything previously associated with Stratford. Admittedly a funerary bust posited in the parish church (Holy Trinity) shortly after Shakespeare’s death in 1616 was the first memorial to him erected anywhere, but hitherto his name had been primarily connected with London (Dobson, 1992, pp. 180–184). That was where his plays had originally been performed, where he achieved his greatest success and where his audiences, ‘both courtly and common’, resided (Lynch, 2007, p. 245; Salkfeld, 2018). Stratford, by contrast, merely provided the setting for the bookends of his life: the place where he was born and raised and where he later chose to spend his retirement. There is no record of his plays being performed there before September 1746² and a scheme for a festival in 1764 to celebrate the bicentenary of his birth had come to nothing.³ Admittedly the Shakespearean connection had long drawn a trickle of visitors to the town, but the prevailing local attitude towards this early expression of cultural tourism was more acquiescent than enthusiastic. Other than selling souvenirs of dubious provenance, there was strikingly little concerted effort by Stratfordians to capitalize upon the reputation of their illustrious predecessor.

The Jubilee radically altered matters. The idea stemmed from a somewhat unlikely source, when a proposal emerged in 1768 to fill an empty niche on the exterior wall of the Town Hall, then under construction, with a statue of Shakespeare. Stratford Corporation⁴ readily agreed, provided that the necessary artefact could be procured at little or no expense. Aware of the statue created for the faux temple at Hampton and knowing that he was a man of means, civic dignitaries made tentative inquiries to see if Garrick might donate something similar to Stratford. In December 1768, the strategy of persuasion extended to proposing to make him an Honorary Burgess (freeman) ‘in order to flatter Mr Garrick into some such hansom present’ (quoted in Macdonald, 1986, p. 4). Further blandishment came from suggesting that his portrait might hang alongside Shakespeare’s in the new building (Deelman, 1964, p. 73).

The town’s leaders, it should be stressed, were only interested in sculpture. Yet while quickly obliging their request by supplying a cheaper plaster cast copy of the statue at Hampton, Garrick sensed a bigger opportunity in the offing. A celebratory event based around the statue’s unveiling might revive the spirit that had inspired the unrealized celebrations planned for the 1764 bicentenary. It would also serve professional self-interest. Garrick’s friend and mentor Samuel Johnson had recently published The Plays of William Shakespeare (Johnson, 1765), an eight-volume collection critically acclaimed as a landmark in its field. It was an achievement that challenged Garrick’s position ‘as top man’ in the Shakespearean world in a way that no actor had ever managed (England, 1964, p. 11). By way of response, staging the Jubilee might lastingly endorse his leadership, especially as the festival was initially envisaged as being recurrent. As testimony to that point, the first public announcement on 6 May 1769 in the St James’s Chronicle had proclaimed that:

a Jubilee in Honour and to the Memory of Shakespeare will be appointed at Stratford [at] the beginning of September which will be kept up every seventh year. Mr. Garrick, at the particular request of the Corporation and Gentlemen of the Neighbourhood, has obligingly accepted the Stewardship. At the fi rst Jubilee, a large handsome Edifi ce, lately erected in Stratford by subscription, will be named Shakespeare’s Hall and dedicated to his Memory. (quoted in Tait, 1961, p. 103)

‘Stewardship’ meant responsibility for event planning and design as well as management. Here Garrick had ample precedents to direct his thinking. The theatre, a realm in which he was fully at home, furnished ideas for set and auditorium design and for ways of achieving dramaturgical effect. State and royal pageantry provided inspiration for achieving spectacular displays involving processions, music, lights and pyrotechnics (see also chapter 2). More specifically, there were the ‘Jubilees’ staged at irregular intervals in Georgian London’s pleasure gardens (Corfield, 2012; Coke and Borg, 2011). Usually reserved for special occasions such as celebrating royal births, commemorating military victories or the signing of important peace treaties, Jubilees featured colourful processions, loud music, fireworks, masked balls and abundant opportunities for ‘pleasure-seeking, socializing, [and] dressing up’ (Caines, 2013, p. 105). Observing one such event on 26 April 1749 in the Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea, a ‘Jubilee Masquerade in the Venetian manner’ held in honour of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, the English polymath Horace Walpole told a correspondent that: ‘it had nothing Venetian in it, but was by far the best understood and prettiest spectacle I ever saw; nothing in a fairy tale even surpassed it’ (quoted in Shelley, 2004, p. 171).

The version proposed for Stratford promised a three-day ‘heady cocktail of miscellaneous entertainments’ (Watson, 2007, p. 205; Doderer-Winkler, 2013, p. 33); some designed as ‘panegyric and quasi-religious rites for paying tribute to Shakespeare’ (Habicht, 2001, p. 441) and others more reminiscent of fairground attractions. The programme included the composer Thomas Arne presiding over a performance of his oratorio Judith, cannonades, pealing bells, fireworks, a horse race for the Jubilee Cup, a ball, festive meals, a masquerade, display of transparencies (lantern-lit allegorical illuminations), and a procession of 200 costumed Shakespearean characters (Thomas, 2012, p. 16). Surprisingly, there were no plans to stage any of Shakespeare’s plays as part of the festivities, but Garrick decided to fill that gap with a celebratory ode that would be permeated with suitable ‘echoes and quotations’ from the Bard (DG, 1769).

After a month spent formulating plans, carpenters and builders moved in to undertake the necessary works. Houses were freshly whitewashed. The completion of a turnpike road from Dudley was expedited. Sedan chairs arrived from London and Bath to meet the needs of more genteel visitors (Fogg, 2014, pp. 112–113). A substantial octagonal, wooden-boarded and ‘elegantly painted and gilded’ rotunda, based on the design of the large rococo building used for concerts at London’s Vauxhall Gardens (Coke and Borg, 2011), would serve as an arena for the main celebrations. Constructed at a spot where woodland had been cleared at Bankcroft Mead, a water meadow ‘on the brink of the Avon’ (Boswell, 1769, p. 451), the Stratford rotunda (figure 1.2) could hold a thousand spectators, with a stage large enough for 100 performers.

Figure 1.2. A sketch of the Rotunda built at Bomstead Mead, Stratford-upon-Avon, originally published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. XXXVIII, October 1769. (Image: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

Garrick actively marketed the event to polite society, drawing on his celebrity status⁵ and his consummate abilities in the field of self-promotion. The festival of music, theatre and entertainments, he assured them, would be well worth the ‘difficult and crowded’ two-day stagecoach ride from London (Frost and Laing, 2013, p. 110). Sceptics, however, questioned whether Stratford, a provincial market town with just 2,200 inhabitants, could cater for a gathering on this scale. It manifestly lacked sufficient accommodation to cope with the sudden influx of performers, festivalgoers and their small armies of accompanying servants. The proprietor of the drab and poorly appointed ‘White Lion’, the only inn, did endeavour to modernize his premises, rapidly adding assembly, coffee and card rooms, renaming guest bedrooms after Shakespearean characters, ordering 3,600 pewter plates and the cutlery to go with them, procuring a 327-pound sea turtle, and stocking his cellar with 1,000 gallons of wine (McConnell Stott, 2019, p. 114). Nevertheless like other hostelries of rural England, the ‘White Lion’ was essentially geared to cater for the clientele attending the town’s three annual fairs:⁶ typically ‘plebian, brash and raw’ affairs (Cameron, 1998, p. 1) that served the agricultural economy and provided sites for recruitment for domestic service. It was always highly unlikely that it could provide food and services of the calibre to which fashionable visitors from London were accustomed. Stratford would also lack a functioning sewerage and main drain system until the mid-nineteenth century. Its roads were unmetalled, rutted, poorly lit and always likely to turn into a quagmire if the weather should turn inclement. Conscious of potential problems, the organizers therefore inserted the phrase ‘if the Weather will permit’ into the publicity material for the Jubilee (Ousby, 1990, p. 43).

Those harbouring doubts would soon feel that their views were fully vindicated. The Jubilee drew double the anticipated number of visitors (Stochholm, 1964, p. 173), with accommodation in short supply and then only available at sharply inflated prices. Those unable to rent houses found themselves lodging in the parish almshouses, spare rooms, attics, cellars, hay lofts and even henhouses (England, 1964, p. 34). Others that failed to procure even those meagre and sometimes insanitary quarters might find themselves sleeping in the carriages in which they arrived. Visitors complained volubly about the high cost and poor quality of the limited amount of food that was available. The clause about the weather proved judicious. While the first day enjoyed clear skies, ‘a violent tempest of wind and rain’ (Murphy, 1801, p. 298) blighted the more ambitious second day. Floodwater inundated the riverside site. The street pageant was postponed for a day before being summarily cancelled. The firework display was severely impaired, literally featuring damp squibs. The roof of the Rotunda leaked and the rising waters affected the ball, necessitating the rescue of the more unsuitably clad participants. The third day’s activities were truncated despite improved weather, with the Rotunda unusable and the horse race on Shottery Meadow contending with deep standing water before the winner ‘swam home by seven lengths’ (Fogg, 2014, p. 120). It would be several days before the roads were sufficiently passable for the remaining visitors to depart.

After the Jubilee

The Jubilee, which had aroused huge public curiosity before the event, triggered even keener interest afterwards. Contemporary commentators avidly debated the merits and follies of the occasion (Cunningham, 2008). The machinations of the local inhabitants invited vitriol, with Garrick’s colleague Benjamin Victor, Drury Lane’s treasurer, railing against ‘the scandalous Behaviour of the very low People of the Town of Stratford, in regard to their Avarice, and shameful Extortions’ (cited Stochholm, 1964, p. 112). In a letter to The Town and Country Magazine another correspondent scathingly concluded:

A Jubilee, as it hath lately appeared, is a public invitation urged by puffi ng, to go post without horses, to an obscure borough without representatives, governed by a mayor and aldermen who are no magistrates, to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Ancient and Modern
• 3 Biennale
• 4 Salzburg
• 5 Cannes
• 6 Edinburgh
• 7 Proliferation
• 8 Asserting Identity
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index