Abstract
Eighteenth-century novels are filled with what became a set piece: a young heroine sits among her friends absorbed in a play.1 She is beautiful in profile, gentle in demeanour, intelligent, and marked by ideal sensibility. Her acquaintances chatter, flirt, call out, and make rude observations not only about the play but also about the heroine and her unfashionable behaviour in the theatre.
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Notes and references
I would like to thank Heather Hicks, the Defoe Graduate Research Fellow, and Lacey Williams, my research assistant, for their many contributions to this essay.
I am thinking of important studies such as David Marshall’s The Figure of the Theater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) and
Joseph Litvak’s Caught in the Act (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
Emily Allen in ‘Staging Identity: Frances Burney’s Allegory of Genre’ discusses briefly Evelina’s first trip to the theatre; Eighteenth-Cenhiry Studies, 31 (1998): 438.
Sarah Bilston’s ‘Authentic Performance in Theatrical Women’s Fiction of the 1870s’ examines women’s portrayals of actresses and offers a model for critics of earlier literature; Women’s Writing, 11 (2004): 39–53.
Sarah Fielding, The History of Ophelia (1760; New York: Garland, 1974), 1:161.
Kitty Clive was famous for flirting with members of the audience while the other actors spoke their lines. In the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice she often did a series of imitations of famous, living lawyers; Jean Benedetti, David Garrick and the Birth of Modern Theatre (London: Methuen, 2001), 55–6. Occasionally newspaper reviews mentioned especially distracting conduct by actors waiting their turn to speak. Fielding commented on how
Garrick ‘is attentive to whatever is spoke and never drops his character when he has finished a speech, by either looking contemptibly on an inferior performer... or suffering his eyes to wander through the whole circle of spectators’; The Champion, reprinted in Gentleman’s Magazine 12 (October 1742), 527.
Eliza Haywood, Fantomina in Popular Fiction by Women, 1660–1730, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 227.
See my ‘Literature as Immediate Reality’, Blackwell’s Companion to the Eighteenth-Centiiry Novel and CulUire, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 504–38, especially 515–16.
[Samuel Foote], A Treatise on the Passions with a critical inquiry into the Theatrical Merit of Mr. G—k, Mr. Q—n, and Mr. B—y. (1747; New York: Blom, 1971), 3. Calculations by
Arthur H. Scouten in The London Stage, 1729–1747 support this figure (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), clxi–clxii.
Other tracts with this educational mission written in the 1740s include David Garrick, An Essay on Acting (1744); Aaron Hill, The Art of Acting, Parti (1746); James Eyre Weeks, A Rhapsody on the Stage: or, the art of playing in imitation of Horace’s Art of Poetry (Dublin, 1746); Eliza Haywood’s second volume of Companion to the Theatre (1747); and Theo-philus Cibber, Two Dissertations on the Theatre (1750).
Francis Gentleman, Dramatick Censor, quoted in James Lynch, Box, Pit, and Gallery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 233.
Quoted in The Revels History of Drama in English, 1660–17SO, ed. Richard Southern, John C. Loftis, Marion Jones, and Arthur H. Scouten (London: Methuen, 1975), 5:14.
In his still useful study. The Neglected Muse: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Tragedy in the Novel (1740–1780), Robert Gale Noyes describes the criticism in novels as ‘abundant’, ‘voluminous’, and even ‘comprehensive’ (1740–1780) (Providence: Brown University Press, 1958), 3–4. He quotes generously from the hundreds of novels mentioned; I disagree with some of his conclusions, especially that the ‘bulk of “fictional”, criticism of repertory is concerned... with the most famous dramas of earlier times’ (5).
Sarah Fielding, The Adventires of David Simple, ed. Peter Sabor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 65–8.
Tobias Smollett, The Adventitres of Peregrine Pickle, ed. James L. Clifford (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 600. There are, of course, many other allusions to plays and actors in this novel; cf., discussion of The Fair Penitent, James Quin, other plays and players, 651–9. Allusions to and quotations from Shakespeare’s history plays are especially numerous. Joyce Grossman identifies
Mary Collyer as the author of Betty Barnes, ‘Social Protest and the Mid-Century Novel: Mary Collyer’s The History of Miss Betty Barnes’, Eighteenth-Century Women, 1 (2001): 165.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 102.
Goldsmith, Vicar, 111.
Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Kristina Straub (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 70 and see 70n. 1. Edward Kimber’s strange roman-a-clef about Garrick, The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger, Esq. (1757), capitalizes on the part of Ranger and has ‘Ranger’ begin his acting career in a barn playing Hamlet; for a brief discussion of this novel, see Robert Gale Noyes,’ shakespeare in the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, ELH, 11 (1944), 224–5. In Garrick’s later years, he performed only 20–30 times a year, while in his early years he would sometimes perform five different characters in a week; Jane Freeman, ‘Beyond Bombast: David Garrick’s Performances of Benedick and King Lear’, RECTR, 14 (1999): 1–2. Burney’s characters were fortunate to get in the theatre to see him; on the crowding and difficulties of seeing Garrick see Lynch, Box, Pit, 200–2.
‘A Review of the Theatrical Character of the English Roscius’, Universal Magazine, 59 (July 1776): 23, and John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 (1832; New York: Franklin, 1965), 5:499, respectively.
Cf. Arthur Murphy, The Life of David Garrick, 2 vols (1801; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 1:37-9,119-44, and George Winchester Stone and
George M. Kahrl, David Garrick: a Critical Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 313–53, 473–5.
This review is comically written from the perspective of ‘the Fool’ in the pit and was reprinted in The Gentleman’s Magazine 17 (February 1747), 80.
Georg Lichtenberg is describing Garrick as Sir John Brute, Lichtenbergs Visits to England, trans. Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 18.
Cited from an unidentified source by Harry W. Pedicord, ‘On-Stage with David Garrick: Garrick’s Acting Companies in Performance’, Theatre Survey, 28 (1987), 69.
Quoted in Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, 5:499.
I am aware that numerous critics believe that Garrick’s portrayals of heroes, including Shakespeare’s, were sentimental; see, for example Jean I. Marsden’s summarizing essay. Improving Shakespeare: From the Restoration to Garrick’ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage, ed. Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially 30–5.
For more complex reasons, Congreve’s Valentine has pretended madness, and Angelica brings about the happy ending.
It is likely that the version Evelina would have attended had removed lines such as the exchange between Tattle and Miss Prue in which she says he will have to push her down to force his way into her room, and he replies that he will ‘come in first, and push you down afterwards’ (2.1.651-8) and Valentine’s observation that his child’s nurse, had she known her business, would have ‘overlaid the Child a fortnight ago’ (1.1.211-13). These and other suggestive lines are cut in the 1776 edition ‘As performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane, Regulated from the Prompt-Book, By Permission of the Managers, By Mr. Hopkins, Prompter’ reproduced in the Bell edition.
George Colman the Elder, The Deuce is in Him, in The Plays of George Colman the Elder, ed. Kaiman A. Burnim, 6 Vols (New York: Garland, 1983), 1:16.
Burney, Evelina, 229–30. Margaret Doody, one of the few critics to take these trips to plays seriously, gives a good reading of Burney’s enjoyment of farcical plays and their relationship to Madame Duval; Frances Burney: the Life in the Works (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 49–54. Although the plays were not performed on a single night, they were often done in succession, as they were on 18, 19, and 20 June and 24, 25, and 26 June 1767, and very close together as they were 28 and 30 June 1775.
See also Charles Johnstone, Chrysal: or the Adventures of a Guinea, ed. E. A. Baker (London: Routledge & Sons, 1907), 373–8 (also on Garrick).
Frances Brooke, The Excursion, ed. Paula Backscheider and Hope D. Cotton (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 56–7.
‘The British Theatre’, London Magazine, 44 (March, 1775), 106.
An Examen of the New Comedy (London, 1747), 7.
Quoted in Noyes, Neglected Muse, 174. Although not a common practice, private readings and rehearsals were employed by canny managers, authors, and friends to help plays succeed throughout the century, see Lynch, Box, Pit for other examples, 210.
Brooke, The Excursion, ed. Backscheider and Cotton, 56. In fact, Braganza was critically acclaimed and ran for 19 nights when first performed at Drury Lane in 1775.
Numerous editions of plays published after 1770 announce on the title page, ‘Marked with the Variations in the Manager’s Book, at the Theatre Royal’, and a hand with a pointing finger below the cast list or on the page opposite the prologue reads, ‘The Reader is desired to observe, that the passages omitted in the Representations at the Theatres are here preserved, and marked with Inverted Commas’. These editions are important evidence about the growing recognition of different audiences for printed plays. Especially in comedies, many of the omitted speeches resemble moral discourses commonly found in novels and show an awareness of readers’ practices of art consumption.
Robert Jephson, Braganza. A Tragedy in The Plays of Robert Jephson, ed. Temple James Maynard (New York: Garland, 1980), 1 and 17 respectively.
Samuel Richardson’s novel was styled ‘The Third and Fourth Volumes’ of Pamela, usually identified as ‘Pamela IF, and had the ungainly title, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. In a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel, to Her Parents: And Afterwards, in Her Exalted Condition, between Her, and Persons of Figure and Quality, on the Most Important and Entertaining Subjects. All quotations are from Pamela. Volume Two (1914; London: J. M. Dent, 1950).
David Roberts, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama, 1660–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 73. The exemplary teacher in Sarah Fielding’s The Governess cautions her students to avoid plays not recommended to them ‘by those who have the care of your Education’; ed. Candace Ward (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005), 156.
Quoted from The Companion to the Playhouse (1764) by Noyes, Neglected Muse, 115, and see his discussion of the play in novels, 114–22. The play was among the most popular of the century; it was performed almost every season, at least 186 times before 1776. Fielding refers to a performance of the play in Tom Jones, Bk. 4.1.
Richardson, Pamela II, 253.
See Spectator no. 338 (28 March 1712) and Donald Bond’s notes (1965; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3:250-4. The notes discuss the authorship of the epilogue.
Spectator no. 335 for 25 March 1712, Bond 3:241; Richardson and Fielding may have learned from this scene. Joseph Addison says Sir Roger gives ‘a piece of Natural Criticism’, 241. See also 3:250-4, 3:265-9, and 251n.2 on authorship. Eustace Budgell’s quotation is 3:266.
Autrey Nell Wiley points out that ‘coquetry’ explains their popularity; ‘Female Prologues and Epilogues in English Plays’, PMLA, 48 (1933): 1060–79; for ‘coquetry’, see 1065. This Spectator essay listed as by Budgell was probably written or substantially revised by Addison.
Elizabeth Inchbald’s Remarks in the collected edition are not sequentially paginated but numbered individually; they are arranged alphabetically by play; these are for The Distressed Mother, Remarks for The British Theatre (1806–1809), introduction by Cecilia Macheski (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1990), 4–5.
In fact, the epilogue calls attention to ‘human nature’, both in the person of Ann Oldfield and in the public’s reaction to her and Andromache. Thomas Davies in Dramatic Miscellanies wrote, ‘Notwithstanding [that Oldfield’s connections with Arthur Mayn-waring and Charles Churchill] were publicly known, she was invited to the houses of women... as much distinguished for unblemished character as elevated rank’ (London, 1784), 2:434. Edmund Curll under the pseudonym of William Egerton writes in Faithful Memoirs of... Mrs. Anne Oldfield (1731): ‘The Distresst Mother seemed now to be the case of Mrs. Oldfield both on, and off the Stage’, quoted in Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 93. She also quotes Davies. See also
F. W. Bateson, ‘The Stage (1713)’, Modem Language Notes, 45 (1930): 27–9.
The date of the composition of Pamela means that Richardson would have seen even more successful, excellent comedies in this genre, including Cibber’s The Provoked Husband (1728). On Richardson’s friendship with Cibber, see Ira Konigsberg, Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968), 12–13, 59, 70.
As Margaret Doody points out, Pamela quotes Andromache’s speech on ‘A Mother’s Sorrow for an only Son’ and, in contrast to Philips’s characters, represents ideal restraint and ‘exemplary generosity’. She calls Richardson’s use of these comparisons ‘audacious’, see A Nahiral Passion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 84–6; quotation, 85, and on Clarissa and pathetic and heroic tragedy, see 107–28 et passim. She also compares Sir Roland in Grandison to Richard Steele’s Sir Harry Gubbin, 285; see also 289.
Quoted in Noyes, Neglected Muse, 43; see also 73–5. The Correspondents is sometimes described as based on actual letters between Thomas, Lord Lyttleton, and Mrs Peach, a widow he married, see ESTC.
Memoirs of Lady Woodford (London, 1771), 2:44-50. This book is treated as a novel in Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) and in the Monthly Review, 44 June 1771), 498, but the Critical Review treats it as an actual memoir, 31 (31 January 1771), 482. The obituary of a Lady Woodford, wife of Sir Ralph, is recorded in the London Times (19 June 1794), 3.1 am grateful to my assistant Lacey Williams for her research on this text.
Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick (London, 1780), 43.
Richard Cumberland, Memoirs (London, 1807), 80–2. See also Murphy’s Life of Garrick, in which he describes Garrick’s performance as Bayes as ‘a keen and powerful criticism of the absurd style of acting that prevailed on the stage’, 1:32.
Stone and Kahrl characterize the letters as approving some actions, criticizing others, and expressing surprise at others, David Garrick, 541.
I accept that Garrick was the living exemplum of the’ science of acting’ that Joseph Roach and others have demonstrated was his theory. Garrick, for instance, once wrote that, ‘when Macbeth kills Duncan, “his faculties are intensely riveted to the murder alone”. This concentration of awed and terrified attention reacts on the entire body... “He should at that time be a moving statue, or indeed a petrified man”.’ Roach is paraphrasing and quoting Garrick’s An Essay on Acting, ‘Garrick, the Ghost and the Machine’, Theatre Journal, 34 (1982): 440. This Cartesian physiology has been identified in acting manuals from the late 1720s but it was Garrick who represented it and made it controversial. Aaron Hill gives a clear schematic in his periodical The Prompter: ‘The imagination assumes the idea’. ‘Its marks and characteristical impressions appear first in the face’. ‘Thence, impelled by the will, a commissioned detachment of animal spirits descending into... the muscles... bends and stimulates their elastic powers into a position... to express the... idea’, quoted in Roach, ‘Garrick, the Ghost’, 436. See also Denise S. Sechelski, ‘Garrick’s Body and the Labor of Art in Eighteenth-Century Theater’, Eighteenth-Centiiry Studies, 29 (1996): 378–9, and Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: the Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 167–71.
Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s Visits to England, 6.
Quoted from Two Dissertations on the Theatre (1750) in Sechelski, ‘The Labor of Art’, 380.
Quoted in Sechelski, ‘The Labor of Art’, 380.
Quoted in Genest, Some Account, 5:499.
The Champion, 1741, reprinted in Gentleman’s Magazine 12 (October 1742), 527.
Quoted in Leigh Woods, Garrick Claims the Stage: Acting as Social Emblem in Eighteenth-Century England (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 43.
Quoted in Noyes,’ shakespeare in the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, 217.
Benedetti, David Garrick, 65–6 and 196.
Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, introduction and commentary by Martin Battestin, ed. Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 2:852–7.
The standard edition of Tom Jones says that Fielding is thinking of ‘Billy’ Mills. Mills played Claudius as early as the 1720s and throughout the early 1740s. Mills played many parts and was a safe journeyman; his voice was once described, however, as ‘unequal to the Swellings and Throws of the Sublime’. By 1742 he played to Garrick’s Hamlet at Drury Lane, but his last performance as the king seems to have been in March 1744. Garrick also played Hamlet with William Bridges as Claudius (Drury Lane, 1744–45). Although Bridgwater is the most likely actor. Fielding may not have had anyone in particular in mind. On Fielding alluding to Billy Mills, who played Claudius at Drury Lane in the season of 1741–42, and to whom Fielding had compared Garrick in The Jacobite’s Journal (23 April 1748), see Tom Jones, 2:855n. 2 and 856n. 2. Garrick played Hamlet in a performance with Mills as the king on 16 November 1742.
See Fredson Bowers’ summary in The History of Tom Jones, ed. Bowers, 853n. 2 and 854nn. 1, 2. For contextualizing information, see Gerrard, Aaron Hill, 144–71.
Quoted in Gerrard, Aaron Hill, 167–71, and Garrick quoting Hamlet 3.2.12f in Letter no. 345, 12 December 1764, Letters of Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 2:436.
Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 3:78.
Quoted in Fielding, Tom Jones, l:493n. 2.
Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker, ‘Actors and Their Repertory’ in The Revels History of Drama in English, 1750–1880, ed. Michael Booth, et al. (London: Methuen, 1975), 101. Francis Gentleman’s Dramatic Censor (London, 1770) is filled with eye-witness comparisons of these actors and more, cf., 1:107-13, 150–5.
Peregrine remarks that ‘It was not to be supposed that one actor could shine equally in all characters’. Peregrine Pickle, 275. For a good account of reactions to Garrick’s first season, see Benedetti, David Garrick, 42–67.
I agree with Howard Buck that the passages vary in judiciousness but give unusually vivid accounts of, for instance, Garrick’s ‘force, daring, and intelligence’ and even the exchanged delivery of lines by Quin and Garrick, A Sùidy in Smollett, Chiefly ‘Peregrine Pickle’, With a Complete Collation of the First and Second Editions (Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1973), especially 91–2 and 651–5. Buck also gives detailed information about Smollett’s relationships with Quin and Garrick. For a good account of reactions to Garrick’s first season, see Benedetti, David Garrick, 42–67.
The novels and theatre sources remind us that Garrick worked continuously on his parts, cf. Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies in which he remarks that ‘After [Garrick] had fully satisfied his fancy, and ripened his judgment by the experience of two or three years, he was pronounced to be perfect [as Sir John Brute] as in any of his most approved parts’, 3:428-9.
Eye-witness accounts of Garrick confirm this, especially regarding Lear. Cf. Aaron Hill, London Daily Advertiser (27 February 1752), 48–9; Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, 2:97-8.
Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker, ‘Actors and Their Repertory’, Revels History, 6:96.
In the second, more specific episode, members of the College of Authors report on The Fair Penitent and Edward Young’s very popular The Revenge (1721).
Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 1:273-5.
A. J. Hassall, ‘Garrick’s “Hamlet” and “Tom Jones”,’ Notes and Queries, 24 (1977): 247–9.
Noyes, Neglected Muse, 5.
An important contribution to this discussion is in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer, ed. Margaret Doody, Robert Mack, and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Burney’s scene leads to a sense of balance, suggested by something that Garrick once wrote, ‘I have Hamlet in my head, & can say & think of Nothing Else’, letter no. 727, 18 December 1772, Letters of David Garrick, ed. Little and Kahrl, 2:838.
Fielding, Ophelia, 1:261.
The group of auditors raise the question ‘Whether this excellence were the result of practice and instruction, or a sudden emanation of general genius’. Her best effect is assigned to ‘deep research into the latent subjects of uneasiness belonging to the situation of Lady Townly. This, however, was nahire, which would not be repressed; not art, that strove to be displayed’ (emphasis mine), Wanderer, 94–9, 398–400. And see note 48.
Fielding, Ophelia, 1:161-2.
Quoted in Noyes, Neglected Muse, 146.
Henry Man, Mr. Bentley: or, The Rural Philosopher (Dublin, 1777), 2:209-13.
David Roberts argues a different situation for women in the Restoration, concluding ‘There is, furthermore, no indication that the unexceptional, inconspicuous majority needed to attend with a male escort any more than they had to worry about the damaging effects of a new play on their reputations’, The Ladies, 94.
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Backscheider, P.R. (2007). Shadowing Theatrical Change. In: Cordner, M., Holland, P. (eds) Players, Playwrights, Playhouses. Redefining British Theatre History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287198_4
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