Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (45 page)

T
HEATRE WAS RADICAL
. Theatre was dangerous. Theatre needed to be contained. This was the message that was reiterated over and over from the Restoration of Charles II until - well, in some ways until prior censorship of plays was finally removed in 1968. In fact, if theatre had not been so much fun for the very people who feared its influence on others, it probably would have been banned entirely. But, as it was not banned, it needed to be fiercely regulated. Theatrical performances since 1662 had been controlled by giving royal patents, or permission to perform, the possession of which was necessary before a theatre could function. This requirement for a patent to perform legitimate drama remained in place until the Theatre Regulations Act of 1843. In addition, from 1737 all plays, even those performed by the companies holding patents, were also required by a new Licensing Act to be submitted for prior censorship to the office of the Lord Chamberlain.
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The collapse of the Licensing Act of 1695 at the end of the seventeenth century had freed other writers to write and publish as they pleased; after publication they could be prosecuted for libel, sedition or blasphemy, but playwrights were not even given the freedom to run that risk. It was a sign of how fearful the government was - or, at the least, of how very cross it was about being ridiculed onstage.

The government was right, because theatre represented anarchy,
and control of its exuberant, riotous heart was never entirely achieved. Even with these draconian laws, there were constant attempts to circumvent the legislation. Repression was equally constant, but only intermittently successful. The 1737 Licensing Act had restricted public performances of straight drama or comedies, known as ‘legitimate’ theatre, but had not included musical forms such as burletta (comic opera), melodrama, pantomime, and other types of what now became known as ‘illegitimate’ theatre. Theatrical managers therefore set up private theatre clubs, saying they were not subject to the legislation, which referred to public performances; or they claimed to be presenting musical performances, with a play thrown in to add sufficient length to the programme; or they charged for refreshments, or even snuff, and said the play was free; or claimed that the entertainment was a lecture, or a rehearsal, or a demonstration. These theatres were repressed time and again, but they kept popping up. Charles Macklin, the great dramatic actor, offered a School of Oratory in rented rooms in 1754; in 1764-79 George Alexander Stevens gave ‘Lectures on Heads’, which were disguised satires on the political events of the day; in 1748 Henry Fielding’s feud with fellow playwright Samuel Foote was conducted on his part by a vicious puppet show called
Madam de la Nash’s Breakfasting Room.

Foote himself, who had played many comic parts for the patent theatres, leased the Haymarket Theatre from 1746. There he staged
The Diversions of the Morning, or, A Dish of Chocolate
, which he claimed was permissible because the satirical revue itself was free, although the audience had to pay for a concert afterwards. He continued with further revues, and with puppets, and finally, in 1766, managed legally to breach the duopoly of the two patent theatres - Drury Lane and Covent Garden (Covent Garden did not switch entirely to opera until 1847) - when he was given a patent to perform in the Haymarket during the summer months. This was an act of royal atonement rather than an indication that the government’s grip was weakening. At a party given by the Earl of Mexborough, Foote had been challenged to demonstrate his riding skills on the Duke of York’s horse. He was, predictably enough, thrown, and, rather less predictably, his leg had to be amputated. The patent followed by way of apology, and Foote cheerfully promoted what he called ‘His Majesty’s Company of Comedians’. Apart from Foote, others managed to perform in that blurred area somewhere between ‘theatre’
and ‘entertainment’, often by using non-conventional theatre spaces. Pleasure gardens and fairs were common locations for plays. Even the legitimate theatre companies often performed at the fairs during their off season - Charles Macklin made his London debut at a fair, and many Drury Lane comedians played Smithfield without any sense of incongruity. The pleasure gardens found burlettas one of their most successful forms of entertainment.

Outside London, many places had to rely on the plays produced at fairs, both because their smaller populations could not sustain a full-time theatre and because the 1737 act, by making London patents the prerequisite for legal productions, had thereby made all provincial theatres illegal. Yet theatres continued, even if precariously. Provincial magistrates were no more going to forbid their own entertainment than the Londonbased government was, and in 1788 an Enabling Act conceded a compromise: local magistrates could now license theatres for up to a year at a time. Even so, many places had to make do with touring companies for most of the eighteenth century. Wilkinson Tate’s touring company was a fairly typical example, operating from 1769 to 1830 on a regular circuit: York for the spring assizes, Leeds in June and July, Pontefract in August, back to York again for August race week, to Wakefield for September race week, to Doncaster for the race week in October, and finally to Hull in November and December.
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As time went on and increased urbanization produced populations large enough to sustain them, permanent companies were set up in the more prosperous towns, even before the enactment of the 1788 legislation. By the late 1720s three English towns outside London had permanent companies: York, Bath and Norwich. The latter’s resident company by mid-century performed in the city for six months of the year, and then toured the smaller towns in Norfolk. By the 1750s there was also a company in Birmingham and another in Plymouth, and in 1765 there was one in Salisbury.
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These companies performed in the towns themselves, and then made regular circuits of the locality, thus bringing theatre to a much wider audience. Eventually there were eleven Theatres Royal outside London (in Bath, Brighton, Bristol, Dublin, Edinburgh, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich and York). These theatres - which named themselves ‘Royal’, although, licensed by the magistrates, they in fact had no formal warrant from the crown - all had semi-permanent companies, touring set circuits annually, often to
coincide with race meetings or assize-week festivities.
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By 1770, twentysix towns had their own theatres; soon afterwards Lincolnshire alone had fourteen theatres, while by the 1820s there were over forty regular ircuits across the country.
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Spa towns were particularly welcoming for semi-permanent theatre companies. In the 1770s the Orchard Street Theatre in Bath was managed jointly with a theatre in Bristol, sharing the costs and employing nearly thirty people permanently.
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(Sarah Siddons performed there early in her career, from 1778 to 1782.)
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By 1815 six further spas - Buxton, Cheltenham, Harrogate, Leamington, Scarborough and Tunbridge Wells - all had purpose-built theatres, even if they were open only for the season, and not every night then.
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There were more theatres, and the theatres that already existed were growing larger. In the late seventeenth century Drury Lane had seated 400; by the 1730s Covent Garden and the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket (which was solely for opera) seated 1,400 each. After Covent Garden and Drury Lane were rebuilt over the course of the century, they held, 2,500 and 3,600 respectively.
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(Covent Garden today, when at capacity, and including standing room, holds 2,253, Drury Lane 2,237, and these are two of the largest theatres in London.) It was not London alone where this expansion occurred, however: the Birmingham Theatre burned down in 1791, and was rebuilt to seat 2,000.
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Before the second half of the nineteenth century, when iron was first used in the structure of buildings, it was impossible to create overhanging balconies without stout supporting pillars beneath, and the only way to increase the size of a theatre was to expand it ever outward. By the end of the eighteenth century the playwright Richard Cumberland was complaining,

The splendour of the scene, the ingenuity of the machinist and the rich display of dresses, aided by the captivating charms of the music, now in great degree supersede the labours of the poet. There can be nothing very gratifying in watching the movement of an actor’s lips when we cannot hear the words that proceed from them, but when the animating march strikes up, and the stage lays open its recesses to the depth of a hundred feet for the procession to advance, even the most distant spectator can enjoy his shilling’s worth of show.
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Theatres had become so large that not much could be heard; and so large that they needed to appeal to the masses to fill the huge auditoriums. The age of spectacle was beginning.

The nineteenth century saw a further liberalizing of the licensing situation, in the short term as a pragmatic response to a short-term situation. In 1808 and 1809 both Drury Lane and Covent Garden were badly damaged in fires. The pressure created by the lack of more than 6,000 seats every night forced the Lord Chamberlain to license new theatres, and the Lyceum, the Olympic and the Adelphi in the West End gained legal status to produce burlettas, music, dancing and ‘the entertainments of the stage’, but not legitimate theatre in the form of Shakespeare, drama or comedy. By the 1830s there were another thirty theatres operating under annual licences, or simply with illegal impunity. This growth was equally matched in the new industrial cities. Liverpool, to take one example, by 1830 had six theatres - the Theatre Royal, the Liver, the Royal Amphitheatre, the Sanpareil, the Rotunda and the Diorama.
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At the same time, the pleasure gardens and taverns were moving enthusiastically into staged theatre: in 1832 alone there were fifty-four applications at the Middlesex sessions for entertainment licences for public houses and pleasure gardens. Vauxhall Gardens in its death throes staged burlettas and other musically-based performances; Astley’s had entered the most thrilling stage of its career (see below). So in 1843 the Theatre Regulations Act gave legal acknowledgement to what had previously been tacit: it was no longer possible to privilege the patent theatres alone, and all theatres could now apply for a licence and perform legitimate drama.

As one set of theatres was swept into the mainstream, another series of small theatres - many in working-class areas outside the West End, some licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, some by local magistrates - took over their function. Known as the ‘minor’ theatres, they performed the old melange of songs, burlettas, melodramas and illegitimate drama.
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These entertainments were also held in taverns and supper clubs. Taverns and clubs also held ‘free and easies’ and ‘cock and hen clubs’ (both evenings of singing, the difference being that the former were men-only events) and ‘judge and jury’ entertainments (in which the notorious crim.-con. cases of the day were staged), forming a precursor to what would shortly become the music-hall world (see pp. 372-4). Some tavern theatres were already well established: the Royal Albert Saloon
and Standard Tavern and Tea Gardens, in Shoreditch, had an extension built which housed two stages, where pantomimes, tumbling, songs, comic ballets and melodramas took place.
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Then there were the penny gaffs, which, like the taverns and supper clubs, had mixed entertainments and were again one of the precursors of the music hall. By the 1830s there were probably around a hundred of these in London, and they held up to nine shows a night, for 150 or so spectators, usually boys aged under sixteen. Some of the largest gaffs may have held as many as 2,000, which meant audiences every night larger than all but the largest West End theatres could hold. The gaffs had a similar mix of entertainment to the taverns, as reported by one shocked (middle-class and eminently respectable) journalist. After a comedian and a dancer,

a fool comes upon the stage, and keeps the pit in a roar, especially when he directs his wit to the three musicians who form the orchestra, and says ironically to one of them, ‘You could not drink a quartern of gin, could you?’ and the way in which the allusion was received evidently implied that the enlightened but juvenile audience around me evidently had a very low opinion of a man who could not toss off his quartern of gin…But the treat of the evening was a screaming farce, in one act, in which the old tale of ‘Taming the Shrew’ was set forth in the most approved Shoreditch fashion. A husband comes upon the stage, whose wife…is an unmitigated shrew. She lords it over her husband as no good woman ever did or wishes to do. The poor man obeys till he can stand it no longer. At length all his manhood is aroused. Armed with what he calls a persuader - a cudgel of most formidable pretensions - he astonishes his wife with his unexpected resistance. She tries to regain the mastery, but in vain; and great is the delight of all as the husband, holding his formidable instrument over his cowed and trembling wife, compels her to obey his every word. All the unwashed little urchins around me were furious with delight…and I fear, as they passed out to the number of about 200, few of them did not resolve, as soon as they had the chance, to drink their quartern of gin and to whop their wives.

He attended another penny gaff south of the river, which shocked him even more, but all he would say about it was that ‘A great part of the proceedings were indecent and disgusting, yet very satisfactory to the half grown girls and boys present.’
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Other theatres called themselves ‘private’, but were really just minor
theatres, operating in the grey area between public and private, minor and illicit. The Strand Theatre was one of these: the building had originally held a panorama; it was then taken over by Benjamin Rayner, who called it the New Strand Subscription Theatre, which allowed it to operate under the pretence of private membership.
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Its location, near the Olympic, the Lyceum and the Adelphi, soon pushed it into licensing and legitimacy. It was theatres like these that were to form the basis of the newly emerging West End.