The Theatre of Eighteenth Century England II: Ballad Opera, The Licensing Act, Minor Forms and Laughing Comedy

While the grand opera was now public and no longer exclusively for king and court, mostly sophisticated audiences attended.  What did the lower orders see?  A new form that took London by storm – ballad opera.  John Gay began the vogue when in 1728 he wrote 

The Beggar’s Opera.  This new piece differed from grand opera in several ways:  whereas grand opera was all sung, ballad opera replaced recitative (sung dialogue) with spoken dialogue; whereas grand opera used original music, ballad opera relied on popular ballads of the day, replacing the lyrics with words that were appropriate to the text of the show; whereas grand opera dealt with heroic figures, ballad opera dealt with the lower 

classes.   The Beggar’s Opera tells the story of a thief named Macheath, who can’t stop getting into trouble and who can’t stop getting married.  It proved tremendously popular, running for 63 consecutive performances, with frequent revivals, in an era that rotated its repertoire nightly, and in which 9 performances total, in rotation, was considered a good run. In fact The Beggar’s Opera was the most performed play on London stages in the eighteenth century, with over 200 performances total.

WHO?

One of the main reasons for the success of The Beggar’s Opera was its mockery of the upper levels of society by showing the corruption of the lower classes, and pointing out where the underlings learned their tricks.  In this sense, ballad opera crossed into another new genre -- the burlesque -- a form which takes off on, or mocks, another form (play) and/or current events.  The Beggar’s Opera burlesqued grand opera in its format, and it burlesqued current London life in its content.  This new genre, 

burlesque, became very popular, and probably its most famous playwright was Henry Fielding.  Fielding’s most successful stage burlesque mocked heroic drama. it was called Tom Thumb; or, the Tragedy of Tragedies (1730).  In it little Tom falls desperately in love with a giant, the princess Hunca-Munca.  It’s an impossible situation. Obviously if they consummated their affections, Tom would be crushed!  So all he can do is wail, “Oh, Hunca-Munca” (and he DOES so, repeatedly and with gusto)!

This story seems harmless enough.  But remember as far back as ancient Greece when a change occurred politically and the highly satirical old comedy was replaced by relatively tame and domesticated new comedy.  As one of my professors liked to say, “It takes a healthy society to laugh at itself,” so I’m passing it on to you. Even though the eighteenth century is praised as the Age of Reason, it had its seamy, unhealthy underbelly. 

The government of England was run by its PRIME minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who wielded a lot of power. Some of his 

Sir Robert Walpole

practices, such as trying to sway votes in the House of Commons by bribery, were questionable, and certainly lampoon-able; as was the fact of a king of England who spoke no English!  Henry Fielding burlesqued both Walpole and the German Kings of England in his plays.  In fact Walpole showed up at the theatre one night to hear peals of laughter at a viciously funny satire of himself in The Historical Register of 1737.  Shortly after that, another Fielding burlesque, called The Golden Rump, made George II its helpless victim, so a furious Walpole rushed an ill-considered piece of legislation through Parliament called the Licensing Act of 1737. 

This act stated 1) that only two theatres were licensed to present plays in London, the Drury Lane and the Covent Garden.  They became the only “legitimate” theatres in town. And 2) that only plays licensed by the Lord Chamberlain could be performed. Now, the licensing of plays had been insisted upon since 1574, and ever since 1660 there were only two official “patent” theatres, so no big deal, right?  Wrong!  The licensing of plays was no longer taken seriously, and other theatres gradually began competing with the patent theatres.  The Licensing Act of 1737, however, insisted on a strict observance of the earlier laws, so that it could stifle theatre that Walpole and company didn’t like. 

The Licensing Act effectively closed all of the small theatres. 

Goodman's Fields was one of the many small theatres closed - even though as you will see in the bill above, they advertised Richard III as a concert of vocal and instrumental music!

In addition it subjected EVERY play to state censorship – not a happy day for the English theatre!  By forcing theatres to close and in doing so limiting the number of plays that could be presented, the Licensing Act of 1737 seriously retarded the growth of the London theatre scene for over a century (until the Regulation act of 1843, which overturned the two-theatres-only rule) and the licensing of plays remained a law on the books (though in later years it was mostly disregarded) until 1968!

      

There began to be ways of getting around the Licensing Act. The first exception was made in 1766 when Samuel Foote, an actor/ 

manager, was granted a license to present plays during the summer at the Haymarket Theatre.  Why?  The Duke of York didn’t much like Foote, in fact MOST people didn’t like Foote – he had a reputation as a constant trouble-maker. The duke had some of his men play a trick on Foote, which left him a cripple!  In order to save the nobility embarrassment by this story going public, the crown allowed Foote to produce plays, but only in the summer, and only at the “little theatre in the Hay,” which would become the Haymarket.

      

The primary way to keep performing in any playing space besides Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and in summers after 1766, the Haymarket, was to present something other than drama. Understandably then many so-called “minor forms” sprang up in London throughout the mid to late eighteenth century.  One of the most popular was pantomime. Variations on this form are still occasionally performed in England, usually at Christmas. The 

name is often shortened to “panto.” Last semester we defined the terms “mime” and “pantomime” as they applied to ancient Greek and Roman theatre. The eighteenth century English panto is quite different from, for example, Roman pantomime.  “Panto” consists of dance, music, mute, commedia-style scenes juxtaposed with mythological stories, all enveloped in excessive scenic spectacle. This hodgepodge, which no authority could accuse of being a play, was most successfully performed by John Rich (1692-1761).  At Lincoln’s Inn Fields and later at Covent Garden, Rich produced and starred in pantos titled Harlequin Executed, and Amadis, or the Loves of Harlequin and Columbine. 

The most important feature of the panto is spectacle. Rich himself played Harlequin (under the pseudonym “Lun”) and this clown had magical powers, which presented the perfect opportunity for “stage Magic.”  A contemporary account describes some of the tricks produced by a wave of Harlequin Rich’s magic wand: 

“the sudden transformation of palaces and temples to huts and cottages; of men and women into wheel-barrows and joints-stools; of trees turned to houses; colonnades to beds of tulips; and mechanic shops into serpents and ostriches.” 

Rich produced these spectacles/pantos regularly from 1717 to 1760, and the source continues,

“there was scarce one which failed to please the public, who  testified their approbation of them forty or fifty nights successively.”

      

Ballad opera faded quickly after its initial great success, primarily because it was so closely associated with burlesque.  Ballad opera was quickly replaced with comic opera, which used original music, and sentimental plots.

Later in the century a reaction occurred against “the joy too exquisite for laughter” of sentimental comedy.  In 1773, Oliver Goldsmith (1730 (?) - 1774), a poet, critic and occasional 

playwright, wrote an argument against sentimental comedy in his “Essay on Theatre; or, A Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy.”  Then in 1773, he wrote play called She Stoops to Conquer, and in his preface to the published version reiterated the points he’d made in his essay, saying basically “it’s okay to laugh again.”  In his preface to She Stoops, Goldsmith wrote eloquently 

and at length about the differences between tragedy and comedy, and made a good case that while “weeping sentimental comedy, so much in fashion at present” may be a satisfying way to see a play, we stand to lose one of comedy’s greatest gifts: the ability to make us laugh. Goldsmith ended his preface with this paragraph: 

“Humour at present seems to be departing from the stage…It is not easy to recover an art when once lost; and it will be but a just punishment that when, by our being too fastidious, we have banished humour from the stage, we should ourselves be deprived of the art of laughing.”

A variation on this argument was offered to audiences every night the play was performed in the Prologue to She Stoops to Conquer (written by David Garrick), so that those who were not interested in reading prefaces in printed books would get the message of laughing comedy, and then see a prime example of it. An actor enters dressed in black and holding a handkerchief to his eyes says (in a version I trimmed shamelessly):

…Pray would you know the reason why I’m crying?

The comic Muse, long sick, is now a-dying!...

One hope remains -- hearing the maid was ill,

A doctor comes this night to show his skill.

To cheer her heart and give your muscles motion,

He in five draughts prepared, presents a potion...

In this clever manner the audience is told, ”go ahead, drink your five draughts (see the five acts) and ‘give your muscles motion’ -- laugh!”  Goldsmith has launched the laughing comedy!  Goldsmith borrowed liberally from Shakespeare for his method of restoring laughter.  As in many Shakespearean comedies, a clever young woman is the central character.  Kate Hardcastle’s father and Marlowe’s father, old friends, have agreed that Kate and Marlowe should meet, and if they like each other, marry.  Marlowe is eligible enough, if a bit too taken with the pleasures of the town and the bottle.  It is Marlowe’s misfortune that whenever he’s introduced to an attractive young woman of his own class he’s reduced to a stammering idiot.  However, when he chats with an attractive servant girl or waitress, he becomes the wittiest Restoration-style rake in all of England!  Kate discovers this flaw in Marlowe and when Marlowe comes to visit, she pretends to be a poor relation reduced to serving the Hardcastle family.  This disguising allows Marlowe to woo her, and in this way Kate (in a sort of “taming of the Marlowe”) STOOPS to conquer.  As in Shakespeare other clever plots abound (Tony Lumpkin is a great variation on Sir Toby Belch, for example) and tie in together. It’s a great, funny, play, still quite often produced.

      

If Goldsmith issued the manifesto and used Shakespeare to help audiences laugh again, his colleague Richard Brinsley Sheridan 

(1751-1816) continued the tradition, and used Restoration comedy to bring laughter back to his audiences.  Though he wrote in the Restoration style, Sheridan made certain that the good guys were ultimately moral and upright.  In this way, he was able to poke great fun at both fops and sentimental types. In his first great play, The Rivals (1775) Sheridan lampooned Bob Acres, a country bumpkin 

who wants to be a gentleman and makes pathetic attempts to be “in style.”  He also mocks sentimental characters.  For example, the woman Captain Jack Absolute loves is named Lydia Languish, because she languishes on her divan, reading sentimental novels, which of course preach moral sentiments.  And Absolute’s friend Falkland is in love with Julia but almost loses her because he becomes so easily lost in sentimental poses and emotions.  

Perhaps the most famous character in the play is Mrs Malaprop, who completely misuses or mistakes large words as she tries unsuccessfully to show off her knowledge.                                            

                             

Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute in a scene from
a recent revival

Care for a few examples?

“He is the very pineapple of politeness!”

(she wants the word pinnacle, not pineapple)

“She is as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile!”

       (allegory?? she meant alligator)

“Promise to forget this fellow – to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.”

       (illiterate, as you might guess, should be obliterate)

“I have since laid Sir Anthony’s preposition before her.”

       (perhaps proposition is better than preposition in this case?)

“Sure if I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs.”

(this one is a whopper: for reprehend, comprehend; for oracular, vernacular; for derangement, arrangement; and for epitaphs, epithets)

One last (though Mrs M commits many more errors in the play):

“if you ever betray what you are entrusted with…you forfeit my malevolence forever!”

(she should have used benevolence, yes?)

Mrs Malaprop, true to her name, which comes from the French mal à propos, or inappropriate, misuses all sorts of words. But while the word comes from French, I think Sheridan might have been borrowing from one of Shakespeare’s great originals; Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing.

In The School for Scandal (1777) Sheridan has a field day with fops, who have in this play formed a “scandal” club, which 

mercilessly lies and gossips about people around town -- in the scandal club, characters such as Sir Benjamin Backbite more than live up to their names!  Reminds me of a theatre department at times...

Sheridan’s arch-villain, Joseph Surface, is a man who poses (on the surface, yes?) as a pious, moral, and sentimental man, but who is

in reality more hypocritical than the backbiters of the scandal club.  He’s a good bit like Tartuffe, and like that character he ultimately gets his just desserts in one of the most brilliantly structured comic scenes in the history of theatre...the screen scene.  Read these plays! See them! Both The Rivals and School for Scandal are frequently revived today.

      

Laughing comedy, however and alas, did not remain in vogue for long.  Clever as Goldsmith and Sheridan were, the age was against them.  Moral, sentimental plays continued to be the standard bill of fare in England well into the nineteenth century.  And in another case of their story remaining our story, compare them to many of the sitcoms and dramas we languish through on TV these days.

      

Having mentioned the Shakespearean style of Goldsmith, I should note that revivals remained popular and numerous in the 

In this picture and the one just below, note the
contemporary 18th c costumes in the plays of
Shakespeare

eighteenth century, and that Shakespeare is one of those most often revived, but still in “improved” format.  The Restoration, you’ll remember, thought of Shakespeare as an “unweeded garden” and, as we saw, took out the weeds.  The eighteenth century added its sentimental, moral touch in its improvements.  A man with one of the greatest minds of the century, Samuel Johnson, said that he couldn’t bear to read the last act of King Lear.  All the suffering that Lear goes through must have its reward.  And in 

Shakespeare’s play there is none.  Only in a world where wickedness thrives would Cordelia be allowed to die. And in Shakespeare she does.  All of this unrewarded suffering went against the eighteenth century concept of people’s innate goodness; against what we have already called, “poetic justice,” meaning that at the end of the play the good should be rewarded, the evil punished.  So Nahum Tate’s distortion of King Lear that had been concocted in the Restoration continued to play through the eighteenth century, and well into the nineteenth, as did much other ”Shakespeare Improved.”

      

Sidebar: As we’ll see in every era we study this semester, Shakespeare is re-shaped, reinvented (see Gary Taylor’s excellent book Reinventing Shakespeare) to suit its own needs, if not by altering the text, by re-interpreting it on the stage and usually by doing some of both!  In this way Shakespeare is like a touchstone. The theatre of any age since his time can be defined to a large extent by the way that age interprets and plays Shakespeare.