What is Victorian about our world stage? While the criminalization of poverty, the corruption of bureaucracies, and the upward redistribution of wealth has put many observers in mind of a Dickens novel, we might also consider a less-studied Victorian object: the spectacle. Take 2017. In the same year that 20th Century Fox released The Greatest Showman, a movie dramatizing the life of nineteenth-century circus impresario P. T. Barnum, political pundits also scrutinized the stunts of a more contemporary media figure, whose “circus-like ‘style,’” seems part of his “showman's reality-TV approach to the presidency.”Footnote 1 The dramatic genre of the day, according to this critic, is not a Jacobean tragedy or even a pièce du théâtre de l'absurde, but a visually excessive, nineteenth-century extravaganza. If there's something showy about the state of play, in other words, there's also something Victorian about the methods of performance. So, what can the Victorians—who lived through what Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland call “the performing century”—tell us about how to bear witness to the Greatest Show on Earth?Footnote 2
For starters, nineteenth-century performance provides a privileged site for analyzing the power of loosely scripted spectacles. Many theater practitioners in Victorian London were at least as interested in exploring the affordances of new stage technologies as they were in dramatizing a particular literary text.Footnote 3 A fascination with visually arresting pageantry or exciting musical numbers was even more operative in the minor theaters, where audiences sought out less text-dependent forms of entertainment in burlesques, melodramas, pantomimes, farces, and freak shows. It is perhaps for this reason that so many drama syllabi skip from Sheridan to Shaw, and so many Victorian literature courses prefer to limit their dramatic texts to later works by Oscar Wilde. As Sharon Marcus notes, “most Victorianists prefer studying durable works by well-known authors to reconstructing the ephemeral work of acting, and have little interest in theater that elevated performers over authors.”Footnote 4
Yet the very qualities that deterred some previous scholars might entice today's critics to look more closely at Victorian performance—and particularly at Victorian spectatorship. Since spectating in the nineteenth century called on visual and auditory savvy as much as on textual hermeneutics, Victorian audiences model how witnesses make meaning of a performance culture in which words don't always carry the expected weight. And fortunately for us, these spectators often left behind records of their meaning-making techniques. In addition to the theatrical scrapbooks, cabinet photos, and program collections analyzed by scholars like Marcus,Footnote 5 the nineteenth century also saw a boom in print narratives about performance, which were published in memoirs, diaries, letters, and essays.Footnote 6 While these texts don't always provide theater historians with conclusive evidence about what happened on Victorian stages, they do offer valuable insight into how audiences interpreted and constructed the significance of those happenings. Understanding how audiences and actors use print accounts of performance to focalize attention, construct characters, and sequence events gives researchers a sense of how performance meanings take discursive shape.
This approach also offers a new way to put work on Victorian performance in conversation with work on the Victorian novel.Footnote 7 How did Victorian audiences make use of the nineteenth-century proliferation of plot structures to craft narratives of theater history?Footnote 8 Do theories of transfictional character help explain how audiences write about “Hamlet” or “Sarah Bernhardt” as figures whose qualities remain recognizable across a series of performances and texts? How do spectators render their point of view in print? Do they tend to adopt the characteristically nineteenth-century perspective of omniscience, or do they turn to more embodied points of view that allow for the representation of limitation or partiality?Footnote 9
By analyzing the techniques that audiences use to narrate spectatorship, Victorianists can learn about the mechanics of turning shows into stories: into the cultural narratives that compete to shape the meaning of cultural performances. In this letter from Charles Dickens to John Forster, for example, Dickens attempts to influence how his reader will understand the sexual politics of a burlesque performance by the young Marie Wilton:
I really wish you would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the Maid and the Magpie burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever I have seen on the stage—the boy Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn't be done at all), it is so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. She does an imitation of the dancing of the Christy Minstrels—wonderfully clever—which, in the audacity of its thorough-going, is surprising. A thing that you cannot imagine a woman's doing at all; and yet the manner, the appearance, the levity, impulse, and spirits of it, are so exactly like a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association with it.Footnote 10
In this account, the characteristically strong “I-you” relationship on which epistolary narrative depends also creates the conditions for a reciprocal reception of performance: what “I have seen” or “have never seen” sets the bounds of what “you cannot imagine” and “cannot think of.” What Dickens attempts to set outside the boundaries of the thinkable is ostensibly an “offensive” hybridity of sex and gender. But there are further acts of hybridity that the narrative aims to make even less imaginable. Although Wilton's imitation of the dancing of the Christy Minstrels—themselves appropriators of an imagined repertoire of African American performance—is the act Dickens narrates, he has displaced possible transgressions of racial and national identity onto the axes of gender and sex. This displacement is not necessarily evidence of what Dickens does not see, but rather a way that Dickens's narrative makes certain performance meanings more or less visible to his readers.
A robust field of Victorian performance studies may thus be particularly critical for understanding how a political circus shapes and is shaped by shifting categories of gender, race, class, disability, and nationality. The Greatest Show on Earth, after all, made a spectacle out of bodily difference in a way that might feel uncomfortably familiar to those analyzing the performances of masculinity and white identity politics involved in a “showman's reality-TV approach to the presidency.” If witnessing the events of 2017 and 2018 can feel like watching the past repeat itself, where better to look than to performance? As a mode that makes meaning through repetition, performance has much to tell us about the embodied and ideological roots of our own “twice-behaved behavior.”Footnote 11
