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James Robinson Planché and the English Burletta Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

P. T. Dircks
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Extract

In 1879, many years after his initial success in the burletta, James Robinson Planché recalled how the renewed popularity of Kane O'Hara's Midas at the Haymarket in 1825, with the piquant Madame Vestris featured as Apollo, had moved him to write a similar play. He recalled, too, that, despite the fact that his works in burlesque and melodrama had been well received at the patent theatres, he could not persuade any manager, of either a major or minor house, “to accept my classical bantling.” The young playwright put away his manuscript and busied himself with a variety of successful works, opera and melodrama and farce. It was only on meeting Madame Vestris one day late in 1830 and learning that this outstanding actress, now without a permanent means of support, had conceived the idea of opening her own theatre on the site of the little Pavilion in Wych Street which Elliston had formerly occupied, that Planché resurrected his early manuscript and offered it to her for the initial presentation at the new Royal Olympic Theatre. She accepted, and Olympic Revels was performed on 3 January 1831. It was a most successful play in what was to become a most successful playhouse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , May 1976 , pp. 68 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1976

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References

1 Planché, James Robinson, Preface to Olympic Revels, The Extravaganzas of J. R. Planché, ed. Croker, T. F. Dillon and Tucker, Stephen (London, 1879), I, 39Google Scholar.

2 The London Stage 1660–1800, Part 4: 1747–1776, ed. Stone, George Winchester; Part 5: 1776–1800, ed. Hogan, Charles Beecher (Carbondale, Illinois, 1962, 1968)Google Scholar.

3 Lawrence, W. J., “Early Irish Ballad Opera and Comic Opera,” Musical Quarterly, VIII (1922), 407CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 A History of English Drama 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1952), III, 194Google Scholar.

5 Daily Advertiser, 8 November 1748Google Scholar.

6 Arthur Murphy saw the burletta as “a mock performance intended to burlesque the Incidents and Music of the Italian Opera,” but concluded that “whatever Humour it may contain is certainly lost to an English audience” (The Gray's Inn Journal, No 64 [5 01 1754], II, 66)Google Scholar. It was less favorably referred to merely as a “poor Relation to an Opera” in MrsClive's, L.The Rehearsal; or, Bayes in Petticoats (1750)Google Scholar. Richard Cross seemed unaware of any novelty in the burletta as a form, calling it only “an Italian comic opera by some performers just arrived from Paris” (quoted in The London Stage 1660–1800, Part 4, I, cxlvi)Google Scholar.

7 The plays of this company were available in England, where the famous Gherardi collection, Le Theatre italien de Gherardi, originally published in six volumes in Paris in 1700, was brought out in London in 1714 by Jacob Tonson.

8 “On Operas and the Force of Music. A Criticism on Addison's Rosamond” (anon. rev.), The British Journal, or the Traveiler, 9 January 1731Google Scholar, reprinted in Loftis, John, ed., Essays on the Theatre from Eighteenth Century Periodicals, The Augustan Reprint Society, Publication Number 85 (Los Angeles, 1960)Google Scholar; Addison, Joseph, Spectator XIII (15 03 1711)Google Scholar, in The Spectator, ed. Bond, Donald F. (Oxford, 1965), I, 56–57Google Scholar. General John Burgoyne later attacked the concept of recitative, even when rendered in the English language. In the Preface to The Maid of the Oaks (1774)Google Scholar, he maintained that “the adopting what is called recitative into a language, to which it is totally incongruous, is the cause of failure in an English serious opera much oftener than the want of musical powers in the performers.”

9 Hogarth, George, Memoirs of the Opera, A New Edition of the Musical Drama (London, 1851), II, 59Google Scholar.

10 The Macaroni and Theatrical Magazine (February 1773), 209Google Scholar.

11 The London Chronicle, XXIV (25–27 08 1768), 396Google Scholar.

12 Clinton-Baddeley, V. C., The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre After 1660 (rpt. New York, 1971), p. xiGoogle Scholar.

13 Midas. A comic opera as it is perform'd at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. For the harpsichord, voice, German flute, violin, or guitar (London, ca. 1764)Google Scholar; The Songs, Duets, Trios in the Golden Pippin, an English Burletta (London, 1773)Google Scholar; The Overture, Songs, Duetts, & Choruses in Tom Thumb as Altered from H. Fielding by K. O'Hara …. Composed & Compiled by J. Markordt … (London, 1780)Google Scholar.

14 The most useful accounts of the investigation are: Nicholson, Watson, The Struggle for a Free Stage in London (Boston, 1906)Google Scholar; Watson, Ernest Bradlee, Sheridan to Robertson (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1926)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ganzel, Dewey, “Patent Wrongs and Patent Theatres: Drama and the Law in the Early Nineteenth Century,” PMLA, LXXVI (1961), 384–396CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Donohue, Joseph, “Burletta and the Early Nineteenth-Century English Theatre,” Nineteenth Century Theatre Research, I (1973), 29–51Google Scholar.

15 Preface to Olympic Revels, Extravaganzas, I, 39Google Scholar.

16 Genest, John, Some Account of the English Stage (Bath, 1832), VIII, 645Google Scholar.

17 Hazlitt wrote enthusiastically of the performance of Liston as Grizzle: “His Lord Grizzle is prodigious. What a name, and what a person! … What a wig is that he wears! How flighty, flaunting and fantastical. … His wits seem to be flying away with the disorder of his flowing locks, and to sit as loosely on our hero's head as the caul of his peruke. What a significant vacancy in his open eyes and mouth! What a listlessness in his limbs! What an abstraction of all thought or purpose! With what an headlong impulse of enthusiasm he throws himself across the stage when he is going to be married, crying ‘Hey for Doctor's Commons,’ as if the genius of folly had taken whole-length possession of his person! And then his dancing is equal to the discovery of a sixth sense. …” “The Comic Writers of the Last Century,” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Howe, P. P. (London, 1931), VI, 159–160Google Scholar.

18 Preface to Olympic Revels, Extravaganzas, I, 40Google Scholar.

19 Preface to High, Low, Jack, and the Game, Extravaganzas, I, 118Google Scholar. Planché wrote appreciatively of James Bland, who played the part of Pluto in Olympic Revels and who became known as “the King of Extravaganza”: “He made no effort to be ‘funny,’ but so judiciously exaggerated the expression of passion indicated by the mock heroic language he had to deliver, that while it became irresistibly comic, it never degenerated to mere buffoonery, but was acknowledged by the most fastidious critic to be ‘admirable fooling’” (Recollections and Reflections [London, 1872], I, 255–256)Google Scholar.

20 Preface to Olympic Revels, Extravaganzas, I, 40Google Scholar.

21 Preface to Olympic Devils, Extravaganzas, I, 63Google Scholar.

22 O'Hara had used the child's nursery rhyme, “Nancy Dawson,” later known as “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” to tell of the discovery of Jove's amatory indiscretions in Midas (III, i).