Victorian Classical Burlesques

A Critical Anthology

Laura Monros-Gaspar

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781472537881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

The Victorian classical burlesque was a popular theatrical genre of the mid-19th century. It parodied ancient tragedies with music, melodrama, pastiche, merciless satire and gender reversal. Immensely popular in its day, the genre was also intensely metatheatrical and carries significance for reception studies, the role and perception of women in Victorian society and the culture of artistic censorship. This anthology contains the annotated text of four major classical burlesques: Antigone Travestie (1845) by Edward L. Blanchard, Medea; or, the Best of Mothers with a Brute of a Husband (1856) by Robert Brough, Alcestis; the Original Strong-Minded Woman (1850) and Electra in a New Electric Light (1859) by Francis Talfourd. The cultural and textual annotations highlight the changes made to the scripts from the manuscripts sent to the Lord Chamberlain's office and, by explaining the topical allusions and satire, elucidate elements of the burlesques' popular cultural milieu. An in-depth critical introduction discusses the historical contexts of the plays' premieres and unveils the cultural processes behind the reception of the myths and original tragedies. As the burlesques combined spectacular effects with allusions to contemporary affairs, ambivalent and provocative attitudes to women, the plays represent an essential tool for reading the social history of the era.

1

Why Classical Burlesque?

Enacting the past and the present

The plays collected in this book span the decades of the 1840s and 1850s, a period when Londoners witnessed the expansion of an all-engulfing city, which eventually became the multilayered London that we know today. The growing numbers of new city dwellers led to the influx of a differentiated audience that demanded a new assortment of places of entertainment to frequent for their leisure. As Bratton points out, this was the making of the West End.¹ Yet the variety of entertainment that the experience of London offered did not spring into existence as the showcase of commercial Englishness that it is at present. Before being taken up by the forces of mercantile expansion, the public houses and taverns, shops, bookshops, concert-rooms, theatres, street fairs and art galleries of London were the piecemeal response of a multifaceted society driven by the manifold social changes of the mid-nineteenth century.² As I shall contend in the following pages, such changes entailed a new negotiation of gender relations that was mirrored in Victorian classical burlesque.

The rich, bustling cultural milieu of early Victorian London was attracted by an overwhelming force which had been at the forefront of English literary and artistic tradition since the early years of Chaucer; that is, the classics of Greece and Rome. The manifest presence of antiquity in Victorian England has been the object of several highly influential books – for example, Richard Jenkins’ Dignity and Decadence, Linda Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality, Norman Vance’s The Victorians and Ancient Rome, Yopie Prins’ Victorian Sappho, Christopher Stray’s Classics Transformed, Isobel Hurst’s Victorian Women Writers and the Classics and Jeffrey Richards’ The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage to name but a few. For the sake of brevity, I take the liberty here to summarize the all-pervasive influence of classical culture in the nineteenth century analysed in such a profuse bibliography with Goldhill’s exhaustive and acute description:³

Classics was an integral part of the furniture of the Victorian mind bolstered through the elite education system, spread parodically and aspirationally through popular culture, visible in the physicality of the architecture and sculpture of the capital; disseminated in opera, in theatre, in literature, and even in the battles over religion that dominated the spiritual crises that commentators loved to descry in the final years of the century.

Should one add, for example, ballet, the printing press, the advertising industry and the cultural commodities of the time, one would find the perfect backdrop against which classical burlesque materialized.

Though there are various surveying tactics available for introducing the plays collected in this volume, I propose first to walk the reader through some of the everyday stories and the countless expressions of classical antiquity that accommodated Blanchard’s Antigone (1845), Talfourd’s Alcestis (1850) and Electra (1859), and Brough’s Medea (1856). Some cursory reflections upon the classical presences that haunted Victorian London only partially answer the question which opens this chapter, ‘why classical burlesque?’ The plethora of referents from Greece and Rome that flooded nineteenth-century Britain is a main cause for the profusion of the genre. Yet, as I shall contend, several factors which include the development of a complex stagecraft and the Victorian predilection for testifying to everyday life in the cultural commodities of the time contribute to the success of classical burlesque. A sneak peek at the classics in the lives of the Victorians is the starting point for understanding the texts and contexts of the four plays anthologized in this book. Then, I shall dig into the various theatrical histories of the plays selected to revisit and revise the texts, the performances and the people involved in them to add to the broader history of Victorian classical burlesque.

By the late eighteenth century the sale of Sir Robert Walpole’s collection of paintings from his country house at Houghton had sparked off a public debate on the need for a site in Great Britain to house the great works of national art.⁴ Yet it was not until 1838 – after the insistent calls by James Barry and other artists for the establishment of a national gallery to educate public taste in art – that Trafalgar Square sparkled with the paintings of the Old Masters at the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts, both housed in the same building until 1869. Let us picture an average passer-by admiring the columns of the gallery, recycled from the demolished Carlton House anytime between the 1840s and 1859, the years that span the plays collected in this volume. Whether or not this person were acquainted with the heated controversy over the site of the building in Trafalgar Square, the scandal surrounding the picture-cleaning of the 1852 season, and the actual display of the paintings,⁵ he or she would be invited, as a visitor, to cross the threshold of the gallery and marvel at the imprint left by the Greeks and Romans in European visual culture. The earliest examples acquired by the gallery that our visitor could admire belong to the Angerstein and the Beaumont collections and included, for example, Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Cephalus and Procris and Landscape with Narcissus and Echo as well as Richard Wilson’s The Destruction of the Children of Niobe.⁶ Encouraged to contemplate the latest acquisitions, said visitor would move from Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, Correggio’s Venus with Mercury and Cupid or Poussin’s Nymph with Satyrs, to J. M. W. Turner’s Dido Building Carthage, bequeathed to the nation by Turner after his death in 1851.

Should our new acquaintance be strolling through the streets of London in that same year, 1851, an obligatory stopover must have necessarily been the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. Visited by over six million people, the Great Exhibition displayed manufactured products from over forty-four nations. A whole section of the exhibition was devoted to fine arts, sculpture, models, plastic arts, mosaics and enamels.⁷ The watercolours painted before the event, which were reproduced as souvenir guides throughout the nineteenth century, manifest how the Exhibition still bore the imprint of a period when a love of art was inspired, among other things, by mythology and the classics of Greece and Rome.⁸ Silver waiters from Donalds Wm. Jas & Charles in London with the engraved groups of Triumph of Galatea and A compilation of Venus and Adonis by Franciscus Albanus⁹ a folding screen by James Howard Earle with encaustic painting illustrating the story of Cupid and Psyche,¹⁰ and Onyx gem cameos with Cupid, Ariadne, Bacchantes and Medusa by the designer G. Brett were among the myriad examples from Greek and Roman myths that vied for attention in the Exhibition.¹¹ With an admission price of £3 for gentlemen, £2 for ladies and one shilling a head for the masses from 24 May, the 1851 Exhibition attracted visitors from all walks of life. Yet for those who could not relish all the beauties of the exhibition in person, and those who did and delighted in recalling the experience, extensive coverage of the event was provided by the press of the time which included illustrations from the exhibits.¹² This is but one example of how nineteenth-century newspapers and journals indoctrinated the general public on ancient Greece and Rome.

On some occasions antiquity also served as model for present concerns. In 1862 The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine published the article ‘The Women of Greece’ which juxtaposed the Victorian ideal with classical women.¹³ Newspapers also recommended to our visitor to London a wide range of entertainments of the period which, more often than not, revealed tantalizing glimpses of Greek and Roman mythology. Strolling around the city in 1846, for example, our acquaintance could enter the Ancient Hall of Rome at Great Windmill Street which exhibited tableaux vivants giving ‘living representations of heroes and heroines of the antique’ without ‘the cold appearance of the Grecian statues’.¹⁴ In July the same year, the Royal Academy presented Diana surprised by Actaeon by W. E. Frost, which was displayed in the Illustrated London News with the text from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why Classical Burlesque?
• 2 Antigone Travestie, Edward L. Blanchard (1845)
• 3 Alcestis, the Original Strong-Minded Woman, Francis Talfourd (1850)
• 4 Medea; or, the Best of Mothers, with a Brute of a Husband, Robert Brough (1856)
• 5 Electra in a New Electric Light, Francis Talfourd (1859)
• References
• Index
• Copyright