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The Scenic Language of Empire: A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1816
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
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On 17 January 1816, a new semi-operatic adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream opened at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, the nineteenth century's first production of the play. Since Shakespeare's time, the play had been seen only in operatic adaptations. The libretto of the new one was by Frederick Reynolds, with music by Sir Henry Rowley Bishop, and it was built on the 1763 operatic version of David Garrick and George Colman the elder. But the more interesting and historically significant text of the 1816 production was in the staging and the new pictorial scenery, whose vocabulary must be read in the light of empire.
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References
1 Genest, John, Some Account of au English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 (Bath: H. E. Carrington, 1832), 8: 545–549Google Scholar, entry for 17 January 1816; Playbill, Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, 17 January 1816, Harvard Theatre Collection.
2 Reynolds, Frederick, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Written by Shakespeare: With Alterations, Additions, and New Songs; as it is performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (London: John Miller, 1816)Google Scholar, noted hereafter as “Miller.” Reynolds acknowledges his debt in the preface (iii–iv), and a heavily annotated copy of the 1763 text in the Folger Shakespeare Library (Shattuck No. 7) appears to be Reynolds' preparation copy for the 1816 version. It does not agree in all points with the printed text of the 1816 opera, but many of the lyrics are the same, and its provisional cast list is nearly that of the 1816 production.
3 Examiner, 20 January 1816.
4 Genest, 8: 545–549.
5 Theatrical Inquisitor and Monthly Mirror, January 1816, 73–74. However, Reynolds’ published text later was chastised in the same journal, June 1816, 446. Clearly, a manager or adapter should add “the pomp and magnificence of scenery,” for this was not seen to mediate Shakespeare's text, but to cut Shakespeare's words was unacceptable.
6 Brown, Eluned, ed. The London Theatre 1811–1866, Selections from the Diary of Henry Crabbe Robinson (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966), 69Google Scholar, entry for 7 February 1816.
7 Reynolds, Frederick, The Life and Times of Frederick Reynolds, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Colbum, 1827), 1: 405.Google Scholar Reynolds claimed 20 performances overall. Genest (8: 545–549) credited him with eighteen for the season. I have been able to find playbills that testify to fifteen (insofar as playbills are reliable evidence of actual performances). A playbill for 9 February 1816 (Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL-Lincoln Center), advertises performances eleven through thirteen. A playbill for 26 June 1816 (NYPL-Lincoln Center), advertises the production for that date “with curtailments” and a bill for 15 February 1817 (Crawford Collection, Sterling Library, Yale) suggests a revival in the following season. Reynolds proudly pointed out in his autobiography that Garrick's 1755 version had eleven performances and Garrick's 1763 version only one, figures borne out by The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 4, 1747–1767, ed. Winchester Stone, G. W. Jr, 3 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962).Google Scholar
8 Reynolds, 1: 411. For Odell's, George C. D. characterizations of these, see his Shakespeare from Betterum to Irving (New York: Charles Scribners, 1920), 2: 131–143.Google Scholar
9 Odell, 2: 111–114, 131. Odell warned, in his discussion of Purcell's The Fairy Queen, that he had given up “every process of historical readjustment to understand what the adapter thought he was doing for Shakespeare” (Odell, 1: 72). Odell's chronological account of staged Shakespeare was, of course, a progressive history, leading up to what he believed was the ideal in Irving and Tree, an agenda about which he was explicit. See for example, 2: 197.
10 Information on the songs and the composer credits has to be derived from the 1816 text and the 17 January 1816 playbill's list of composers, neither of which is complete or reliable. One can only estimate the amount of music brought over from the 1763 opera and that which was newly composed for the 1816 production. The problem, which is complicated by the loss of Charles Burney's 1763 music, is broached but not wholly solved by Loewenberg, Alfred, in “Midsummer Night's Dream Music in 1763,” Theatre Notebook 1 (1946): 25–26Google Scholar, and in my “The Concord of this Discord': Music in the Stage History of A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Theater 4 (1973), 48–51.
11 Connor, W. R., “Theseus in Classic Athens,” in The Quest for Theseus, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 143–174Google Scholar; den Boer, W., “Theseus: The Growth of Myth in History,” Greece and Rome 16 (1969): 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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14 Tidworth, 226–28. Barye's Theseus Slays the Centaur, Bianor is in the Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, D. C.
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19 A full account of the Elgin operation and of the investigation of it in 1816 by the House of Commons committee, which wholly absolved Elgin, is in Greenfield's, JeannetteThe Return of the Cultural Treasures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Chapter II, 47–105.Google Scholar Greenfield places the Elgin affair in the context of other such appropriations and the international moral and legal issues. Much smaller fragments from the Parthenon are at present in museums in Copenhagen, Vienna, Heidelberg, Palermo, and the Vatican.
20 Gordon, George, Byron, Lord, The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 143.Google Scholar
21 Gted in Greenfield, 62.
22 Greenfield, 72. The Stuart and Revett volumes were published between 1762 and 1830; Greenfield does not cite the specific volume, and I have not been able to examine the 19th century volumes.
23 Greenfield, 62–72.
24 Tidworth, 226.
25 Ibid.
26 Keats, John, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by Abrams, M.H. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 1675Google Scholar, ll. 11–12.
27 The only visual record of the production is John Duruset as Oberem. Yale-Rockefeller Collection of Theatrical Prints, D.I.3.10,0005, Yale Drama School Library. The engraving shows Duruset in a belted Grecian tunic, mantle, and sandals, with a spear in hand, a more specific evocation of the ancients than the generic Greco-Roman helmet and breastplate of the eighteenth century.
28 The Cambridge Modern History (New York: Macmillan, 1909), VI, 584, 551–585; 9: 715,733; Trevclyan, G. M., History of England, new illus. ed. (London: Longman, 1973), 702Google Scholar, and Trevelyan, , A Shortened History of England (New York: Penguin, 1987), 440.Google Scholar As Trevelyan expresses it, in his patriarchal absolution of colonial privilege, Hastings “saved British rule in India in spite of all, but not without making the kind of mistakes a strong man is like to make in difficult emergencies.”
29 I draw here on discussions of colonialist discourse such as Said's, EdwardOrientalism (London: Routledge, 1978)Google Scholar, and Brown, Paul, “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Political Shakespeare, eds. Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 48–71.Google Scholar
30 Reynolds' pageant is reminiscent of Thomas Betterton's appropriation of the exotic East in the Chinese Eden that he created for the last act of Purcell's The Fairy Queen to honor William and Mary. This 1692 staging of Purcell's opera is explained in my booklength study, “Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre,” now under consideration by a publisher.
31 See Hodgdon, Barbara, “Gaining a Father The Role of Egeus in the quarto and the Folio,” RES 37 (1986), 534–42.Google Scholar
32 “The Scenery, Machinery, Dresses, and Decorations are entirely new. The Scenery painted by Mss. Phillips, Whitnore, Pugh, Grieve, Hollogan, Hodgins, and their assistants. The Machinery by Mr. SAUL. The Decorations by Mr. Bradwell. The Dresses by Mr. Flower & Miss Egan.” (Covent Garden Playbill, 17 January 1816.) For slightly earlier examples of early playbill descriptions of scenery, with scene painter credits, see Odell (2: 109–110) on the 1814 Richard III and Macbeth at Dniry Lane, with Edmund Kean.
33 Theatrical Journal, 1 May 1841. For descriptions of the Vestris and Charles Kean productions, see my “Madame Vestris's A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Web of Victorian Tradition,” Theatre Survey 18 (1977): 1–22.
34 In 1854, in both of the rival New York productions of William Burton and Thomas Barry, the argonaut arrived in Act I in a galley ship.
35 Tuchman, Barbara, The Proud Tower (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 67, 64–69.Google Scholar
36 The Tieck-Mendelssohn production is described in my “Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre,” see note 30.