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Political Extravaganza: A Phase of Nineteenth-Century British Theater

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Martin Meisel
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Extract

The nineteenth-century popular theater in England is generally presumed to have been innocent of politics, and indeed of almost any other concern which could be mistaken for intellectual substance. Among other disabilities, the nineteenth-century theater dwelt under an official censorship which had been instituted, in response to the burlesques and extravaganzas of Fielding and Gay, specifically to keep politics off the stage. Nevertheless, our presumptions and the censorship notwithstanding, politics, both topical and general, had an important place in the nineteenth-century English theater; and the normal vehicle for topical political satire in the theater was the Burlesque-Extravaganza.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 3 , May 1962 , pp. 19 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1962

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References

NOTES

1. English Dramatists of Today (London, 1882), pp. 111–113. Archer mentions Gilbert's “popular extravaganzas” as a promising but solitary exception. The reputation of Burlesque-Extravaganza for sexual immorality appears throughout the literature of the century, where a great emphasis is often placed on the element of sex-change. In point of fact, the Burlesque or Extravaganza without a number of charming breeches parts or a grotesque dame part scarcely exists, and a normal feature of Opera Bouffe on the English Stage was the marching chorus of female soldiers. Bernard Shaw fastidiously comments on its appearance in an 1893 revival of Madame Favart: “Nothing marks off Mr D'Oyly Carte from his rivals more effectually and favorably than the fact that on the Savoy stage the women appear as women, and the men as men: The old rule was that women should appear as men, and the men be hidden as much as possible behind the women. Every regiment of soldiers was a row of mincing, plump, self-conscious young women in satin uniforms, pinched at the waist and toes, and bulbous in the unpinched regions” (Music in London 1890–94, London, 1932, III, 90–1). Sex change obviously allowed what was by contemporary standards of dress a daring display, and provided notable opportunity for what Archer seems to suggest as the inevitable concommitant of pre-D'Oyly Carte Burlesque-Extravaganza: audience complicity in double entendre, and interpolated dialogue and action for the sake of “immorality.”

2. Harper's Magazine 81 (June 1890), 59. 3. Extravaganzas of J. R. Planché, ed. T. F. D. Croker and S. Tucker (London, 1879), II, 66. The mode of Burlesque-Extravaganza owed much of its development and popularity to the patent conditions at the beginning of the century, when, during most of the year, the spoken drama was the preserved domain of two theaters, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Technically, Burlesque and Extravaganza were forms of the “Burletta”; that is, they were quasi-musical pieces in less than five acts which could be performed in theaters without patent privileges. Before Gilbert, the musical portions of English Burlesque-Extravaganza were generally not original, but rather, new and amusing words were set to familiar and popular songs as in the eighteenth-century ballad-opera. Thus, in Planché's The White Cat (1842), Prince Paragon, having been sent to find a dog small enough to fit through a thumb ring, sings Gilbert-like verses to “Oh, Ruddier than a Cherry”:

“From Perth to Pondicherry,

From Bow to Bedfordbury,

No dog so small,

Exists at all,

Of that I'm certain-very!” etc.

4. Hersee, Henry, “Opéra-Bouffe,” The Theatre n.s. I (Nov. 1878), 282.Google Scholar

5. Wey, Francis, A Frenchman among the Victorians, trans. Pirie, Valerie from Les Anglais Chez Eux (New Haven, 1936), p. 214.Google Scholar

6. “Extravaganza and Spectacle,” Temple Bar III (1861), 528–9, 531; also Recollections and Reflections (London, 1872), II, 79–82.

7. “The New Taste in Theatricals,” Atlantic 23 (1869), 641.

8. The Field of the Cloth of Gold, p. 5; in Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays (London, n.d.), vol. 80.

9. Ibid. p. 30.

10. Euridice, p. 21; in Lacy, vol. 92.

11. Recollections and Reflections II, 109–110.

12. As reprinted in the Times, 8 Jan. 1872, p. 9.

13. The Galaxy: An Illustrated Magazine of Entertaining Reading, 8 (Aug. 1869), 256.

14. “Opéra-Bouffe,” pp. 282–284.

15. Music in London 1890–94, III, 34–5.

16. Times, 8 March 1873, p. 5.

17. Utopia, Limited, in Plays and Poems of W. S. Gilbert (New York, 1932), p. 622.

18. In Censorship in England (London, 1913), Frank Fowell and Frank Palmer write of the period before the first World War: “Hardly a musical comedy makes its appearance without some more or less offensive reference to politicians, and these occasionally transgress any reasonable limit of good taste. Only a week or two ago we heard an actor in The Dollar Princess singing his wish to raise ‘Wales’ of a different kind on Mr Lloyd George's back with a stick” (p. 199).

19. See letter of Henry Lewis, sub-lessee of St. James's Theatre, to the Times, 10 March 1873, p. 8.