Hippo Drama

Nineteenth-Century Contexts Vol. 28, No. 4, December 2006, pp.
305334
A Matter of Turf: Romanticism, Hippodrama, and Legitimate Satire

Michael Gamer
Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
Nineteenth-Century 10.1080/08905490601086970 GNCC_A_208641.sgm 0890-5495 Original Taylor 2006 0 4 28 mgamer@english.upenn.edu MichaelGamer 00000December and & Article Francis (print)/1477-2663 Francis2006 Ltd Contexts (online)
In February of 1811, facing mounting losses from several unremunerative productions of Shakespeare, John Philip Kemble revived George Colman the Youngers Blue-Beard at Covent Garden Theatre. The novelty of the new production lay in two innovative scenes, each featuring (by Leigh Hunts estimation) about twenty performing horses hired from Astleys Amphitheatre (Examiner, 24 March 1811). These horses first charged on stage in act II, scene I in answer to Selims bugle call, and later returned as part of the productions grand finale: a full-scale attack on Blue-Beards castle. An actor-manager noted for his purity of taste and spectacular revivals, Kemble had long been known as the London stages premier male tragic actor, having built a career out of defending spoken, legitimate drama against the incursions of newer forms like melodrama and pantomime. His decision to revive Blue-Beard had come only after multiple arguments with his managing partner, Henry Harris, over how to reduce Covent Gardens losses (Boaden 2: 542). In an unquestionably legitimate play like Richard III or Henry IV Part 1, Kemble might have added an equestrian battlescene without much risk; but in this case dire economic necessity spurred the choice of Colmans spectacle. The gamble, moreover, paid off: Blue-Beards first forty performances brought the proprietors of Covent Garden an astonishing 21,000 in sales and effectively salvaged the 181011 season (Reynolds 2: 40304). Even Colman the Younger, after publicly expressing his disapproval, quickly brought out a new edition of Blue-Beard containing stage directions for the new equestrian version. Kembles biographer James Boaden, himself an innovator of stage-effect, informs us that Kemble made the decision to revive Blue-Beard with horses only after long meditation and some pain, fearing injury not only to his reputation but also to the drama (Boaden 2: 54142). Certainly he expected critical reprisals for bringing the circus pleasures of Sadlers Wells and Astleys Amphitheatre to Covent Garden, and the response was as divided as it was contentious. While reviewers alternately panned and
ISSN 08905495 (print)/ISSN 14772663 (online) 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/08905490601086970
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1975926
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extolled the production, diarist Anna Larpent, wife of Examiner of Plays John Larpent, succinctly termed the play an improved Adorned Astleys as a way of acknowledging both its generic impurity and its superiority of spectacle (Larpent 8: 83a). Among the most even-handed of Blue-Beards notices, Leigh Hunts review in The Examiner comes essentially to the same conclusion. Opposing Blue-Beard to what he elsewhere terms classical theatre, Hunt acknowledges the spectacles pleasures even while fearing its potential effects:
If it were possible to present the public with such exhibitions and at the same time cherish a proper taste for the Drama, they might even be hailed as a genuine improvement in representation; for if men, and not puppets, act men, there seems to be no dramatic reason why horses should not act horses. But [t]hey are too powerful a stimulus to the senses of the common order of spectators, and take away from their eyes and ears all relish for more delicate entertainment. The managers and the public thus corrupt each other; but it is the former who begin the infection. (Examiner, 24 March 1811)
Such objections will prove striking to romanticists for the ways they recall Samuel Coleridges Fears in Solitude and William Wordsworths Preface to Lyrical Ballads, both of which had argued that gross and violent stimulants (Wordsworth 1: 129), be they German tragedies or descriptions of battles in the popular press, rendered readers and audiences unfit for more delicate entertainment (Coleridge 1: 473). Yet Hunt also anticipates the breakdown of the very oppositions he invokes. Having opened his review by opposing Blue-Beard to what he calls classical theatre, Hunt declares the play to be beneath criticism; nevertheless, he announces himself delighted with the power of its equestrian spectacle, and his delight allows him to question the standards of taste he ostentatiously defends. Debuting under different circumstances or for a less common order of spectator, he reasons, Kembles horses might even prove a genuine improvement were it not for the corrupting influences of dramatic spectacle, produced by the enormous patent theaters to allay their enormous costs. Thus Blue-Beard inhabits a place of double signification, representing the illegitimacy of the minor theaters and the diseased state of the Theatre Royals, unworthy of criticism yet inspiring some of Hunts best writing during these months on the effects of monopoly, censorship, and court interests on the theater.1 If Blue-Beards reception presents an early-nineteenth-century stage barely holding on to traditional generic, legal, and institutional demarcations, these distinctions all but failed in the months that followed. Inspired by Blue-Beards success, Kemble and Harris again looked to Drury Lanes 179798 season, this time tapping the author of The Castle Spectre, Matthew Lewis, to write a new play for Astleys horses. In many ways, their speculation simply repeated the formula established through the revival of Blue-Beard by making the work of a proven popular playwright the site of theatrical innovation, and again they were not disappointed in the result. Premiering as April ended and as Blue-Beards houses were beginning to thin, Timour the Tartar proved an even bigger hit than its predecessor, insuring record profits to the patentees of Covent Garden for the 181011 season.2 In commissioning a new play solely for the purposes of exhibiting equestrian spectacle, however, the management of Covent Garden crossed a number of ideological lines
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1975926
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and institutional boundaries. Kemble, especially, could no longer hide behind his own longstanding practices regarding theatrical revivals, which demanded that theaters make old plays new by adding novelties to them. Nor could the management now make the excuse of financial need. Where Blue-Beard stood as underwriting angel to Covent Gardens more elite productions, Timour could only stand as an embodiment of the greed and debased taste of its managers. While two decades later John Genest would choose to remember Timour olfactorily (Genest 8: 232), prints like The Centaur-ian Manager (1811) presented Kemble trampling the works of Shakespeare and other classical dramatists (see Figure 1). With Sarah Siddons riding on his back, Kemble declares to the monkeys and minions of the circus and pantomime before him, I will engage you for the present season and methinks I shall do well to engage the Devil to play Lewiss Wood Daemon. Like previous attacks on new theatrical genres,3 the print opposes the legitimate theater to the illegitimate forces of pantomime and the circus, and all the expected dualisms of reason and madness, authority and misrule, and good and evil, follow. Rich as it is, the novelty of Timours debut and the comic potential of its popular triumph cannot fully explain the diverse, organized, and sustained critical response it provoked. Lewiss play, after all, came at the end of two decades of theatrical experimentation and innovationafter rather than before the advent of melodrama and military re-enactments, not to mention a long string of celebrated performing animals, the most famous of which remains Drury Lanes Carlo, the Wonder Dog. With audiences accustomed to novelty and innovation, Blue-Beard and Timour could never have heralded a watershed moment in the history of the stage had their horses not proven flashpoints for other, broader conflicts in British culture. Producing dozens of responses in periodicals and on stage, the two plays combined reception outlasted the 181011 season and marked, as Jane Moody has demonstrated, a turning-point in the cultural authority of Covent Garden and Drury Lane (72). As such, the plays provide excellent starting points for exploring popular theaters position within Romantic-period
Figure 1 The Centaur-ian Manager (1811). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Figure 1 The Centaur-ian Manager (1811). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
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culture, since neither their success nor their reception can be explained adequately by theater history alone. Both demand a broader canvas, one that extends beyond the theater to include the myriad of relations involving horses and their literary, political, and social meanings, nearly all of which found ready and constant representation on the Romantic-period stage. As I hope to show, the debut of hippodrama on the stage of Londons Theatre Royals could never have provoked the response it did had it not prophesied similar collapses in other arenas of literary cultureparticularly in dramatic criticism and in that mode of writing most expected to defend tradition and expel all interlopers, satire.
I.
I. Four-in-Hand
In gay and fanciful parade, The ball, the rout, the masquerade: The four-in-hand, the lounging hours, The tonish club, the tempting bowers Where Beauty, free from Loves alarms, To the best bidder sells her charms. Or when youre tird of the town Newmarkets interesting Down May change the scene. (Combe, The Dance of Life 221)
When mentioned at all by dramatic historians, hippodrama traditionally appears as a symptom of the artistic decline of London theaters after the Old Price Riots of 1809. Only recently have cultural historians begun connecting it to broader trends in earlynineteenth-century British culture or to other equestrian fads of the early Regency.4 Most prominent among these was the vogue for coach-driving among wealthy Londoners, many of whom impersonated hackney-coachmen by adopting their dress and slang. Referred to as Whips or Bucks in most accounts, these young men fit up their carriages to resemble hackney coaches or bribed coachmen to give up their reins. They also formed dozens of gentlemans clubs, among them the Barouche, Bedront, Benson, Defiance, Tandem, Whip, and the most famous of them all, the Four-in-Hand:
The vehicles of the Club [were] of a hybrid class, quite as elegant as private carriages and lighter than even the mails. They were horsed with the finest animals that money could secure . The master generally drove the team, often a nobleman of high rank, who commonly copied the dress of a mail coachman. The company usually rode outside, but two footmen in rich liveries were indispensable on the back seat, nor was it at all uncommon to see some splendidly-attired female on the box. A rule of the Club was that all members should turn out at mid-day, from the neighbourhood of Piccadilly, through which they passed to the Windsor-road,the attendants of each carriage playing on their silver bugles. (Timbs 24849)
Equipped with their own uniforms and eccentricities, these clubs comprise the driving schism of Shelleys Peter Bell the Third (Shelley 345) and the essence of any tale of the times in Scotts Waverley (Scott 4). Boasting slogans like neck or nothing, their members were caricatured in fiction by Thomas Love Peacock, on stage by comic actor
Charles Mathews and pantomime clown Joseph Grimaldi, and in satirical prints by James Gillray (see Figure 2). With their studied transgression of class rolesand with horses impacting nearly every aspect of British lifeclubs like the Four-in-Hand cut daringly across the boundaries of sporting, dandy, and military cultures, attracting aristocrats, officers, and other young professionals. Their ties to the stage, moreover, were pronounced and part of dramatic convention. Not satisfied with seeing themselves caricatured on stage, real Whips like Robert Coates and fictional ones like Pompey the Littles Mr. Chace and Mansfield Parks Tom Bertram and Mr. Yates regularly put themselves forward as gentleman amateurs in private theatricals and provincial theaters, while novels like Charles Sedleys Barouche Driver (1807) represented the Whip as part of a continuous procession of coaches moving between the theater and events like Ascot and the Ormsby Regatta (see Figures 3 and 4). During the years of the Regency, then, comic actors like Charles Mathews and Joseph Grimaldi could lampoon the figure of the Whip so effectively because he was a variation on a recognizable social typewhat Ellen Moers has called the horsey set which spent its afternoons at Tattersalls, the fashionable market-place for the best in horseflesh (Moers 31). The similarity of contemporary prints of Mathews and Grimaldi nicely captures this iconic status. In Figure 5, Grimaldi performs his famous song of the Whip Club in Fashions Fools (1809), one of the most popular pantomimes to satirize the slang and activities of the horse-mad dandies. His costume at once drawing on and surpassing Grimaldis in the length of both whip and coat, Mathews is portrayed in Figure 6 as Dick Cypher, who had made his first entrance in Isaac Pococks Hit or Miss! (Lyceum, 1810) with an offstage crash and a flurry of coachman slang: thats prime! thats bang up! (Pocock 31). The prints caption introduces Cypher through his signature slangHere I am Dmme bang up!while the print itself is Dedicated with Permission to the Four in hand Club. Fond of speed and sensation, careless in his actions, and exuberant in his pleasures, the Whip was more than merely a staple of Regency pantomime and farce. In the year
Figure 4 3 2 Robert Grimaldi James Gillray, Coates burlesquing in Thomas his carriage Coates Onslow in (1801). Bath Harlequin (1810). Caption: & Courtesy Padmanaba What of can David (1811). little Mayer T. Courtesy O. do? III. Why of David Drive Mayer a Phaeton III. and Two!!Can little T. O. do no more?yes, drive a Phaeton and Four!!!! Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Library. Figure 6 5 Charles Joseph Grimaldi Matthews inas Fashions Cypher in Fools Hit or (1809). Miss! Courtesy (1810). Authors of the Museum Collection. of London.
Figure 2 James Gillray, Thomas Onslow (1801). Caption: What can little T. O. do? Why Drive a Phaeton and Two!!Can little T. O. do no more?yes, drive a Phaeton and Four!!!! Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Library.
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Figure 3 Robert Coates in his carriage in Bath (1810). Courtesy of David Mayer III.
1814 alone, he appears in Waverley, in Byrons The Devils Drive, in Mansfield Park, and in Maria Edgeworths Patronage, which reflects on the cheerful industry of a family of decayed gentry, the Percies, by expostulating, What would have been the difference of their fate, and of their feelings, had they been suffered to grow up into mere idle lounging gentlemen, or four-in-hand coachmen! (Edgeworth 1: 316). Such density of significationthe work of a sentence in Patronageis reduced to a single codeword in Persuasion (1818) when Austen informs her readers that Mr. Eliot frequents Tattersals (Austen 50). Once this detail is supplemented by Mr. Eliots libertine admiration of Anne Eliot at Lyme, Miss Smiths melodramatic expos becomes almost superfluous, confirming what we already suspect of Mr. Eliots hollow and black life of assumed gentility, gambling, licentiousness, dissipation, and debt (Austen 213).
II.
II. Club Cultures As with most cultural manias, the rages for hippodrama and coach driving were distillations of broader tendencies in British culture that predated them by decades and even
Figure 4 Grimaldi burlesquing Coates in Harlequin & Padmanaba (1811). Courtesy of David Mayer III.
Figure 5 Joseph Grimaldi in Fashions Fools (1809). Courtesy of the Museum of London.
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Figure 6 Charles Mathews as Cypher in Hit or Miss! (1810). Authors Collection.
centuries. Before Tattersals was established in 1766, Newmarket had been associated with horse-buying and horseracing since the reigns of James I and Charles I, the latter instituting the first cup race there in 1634. By the early eighteenth century, the spectacle of the Newmarket races was great enough for Daniel Defoe to fanc[y himself] in the Circus Maximus at Rome, seeing the ancient games, even as he regretted watching men of high dignity and quality, [descend] to picking one anothers pockets without respect to faith, honour, or good manners (102). Like other exclusive clubs, the Jockey Club at Newmarket (founded 1750) was formed in part to prevent this kind of class mixing and corruption, but without much success (Bracegirdle 3). As early as 1751, writers like Thomas Warton were depicting Newmarket as having its own distinct and pernicious culture, a line of critique fully developed in Horace Walpoles correspondence, where England figures as a center of fashion, moral dissipation, political intrigue, and financial decadence:
The Maccaronis are at their ne plus ultra: Charles Fox is already so like Julius Caesar, that he owes an hundred thousand pounds. Lord Carlisle pays fifteen hundred and Mr Crewe twelve hundred a year for himliterally for him, being bound for him, while he, as like Brutus as Caesar, is indifferent about such paltry counters . What is England now?A sink of Indian wealth, filled by nabobs and emptied by Maccaronis! A senate sold and despised! A country overrun by horse-races! A gaming, robbing, wrangling, railing nation, without principles, genius, character or allies; the overgrown shadow of what it was! (Walpole 23: 49899)
At the center of Walpoles anecdote are the Maccaronis, figures literally constituted of horses and their by-products. Their distinctive ponytailsoften described, as were macaronies generally, as a club of hairwere made of horsehair and weighed up to
three pounds. Invoking the culture of Newmarket and standing as a metonymical stud to its studs of horses, the Macaroni here embodies Newmarkets specific brand of swaggering masculinity and antisocial behavior. In Walpoles correspondence, the trope becomes all the more ironic because the Macaroni is an overgrown shadow, a dandified signifier composed of false hair and false bluster defined by what is without, and hiding an empty center. Walpoles narrative of British principles and character overrun by horseracing thus carries the heft of political allegory, one in which the follies of one generation bankrupt the political and patrimonial estates of the preceding one. By the end of the 1780s, Walpole should have felt his prophetic powers vindicated. The figure of the Macaroni had come and gone, but Newmarkets reputation for fashionable vice and stylish dangernot to mention its symbolic opposition to those virtues of farming, economy, patriotism, and domesticity cultivated by George III quickly attracted the kings son and Foxs friend, the young Prince of Wales (later George IV), who joined the Jockey club in 1784 as soon as he was of age to do so. By 1790 he would boast his first Derby and Newmarket winners, a stud of over forty horses, and a position as the central icon of the Jockey Club and its culture (see Figure 7). Rowlandsons 1790 lampoon was only made into a print for mass sale and consumption twenty-one years later, the year of Blue-Beard and Timour the Tartar. In it, the Prince of Wales stands at the center of an all-male coterie surrounded by the paraphernalia of the clubs culture, as seedy as it is aristocratic. While two shifty card
Figure 7 Thomas Rowlandson, The Jockey Club (1790; George IV at center, coat open). Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Library.
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players occupy the left side of the picture, equally dismal backgammon players and two sinister onlookers occupy the right; the Prince, meanwhile, is flanked by his brother the Duke of York and what appears to be his bookkeeper. Dogs on the floor form living counterparts to various boxing, cock-fighting, and racing prints on the wall, while the prominent BETTING ROOM sign and an advertisement for the sale of a pack of hounds suggests the depth of the play. The drawings satire is less one of composition than one of assemblage and accumulation, its title suggesting that the figures and props of the picture literally constitute the Jockey Club and its ethos. In this instance, Rowlandsons print cannily anticipates the event that would divide the club from its star member: the 21 October 1791 betting scandal known as the Escape Affair. After finishing last the previous day, the Princes horse Escape had won at long odds against a strong field, the Prince and his jockey Sam Chifney winning significant sums. Concluding the horse to have been watered just before the first race to raise its odds in the second, the Jockey Club barred Chifney for life. The Prince responded by withdrawing his horses from further races, selling his entire stud, and giving Chifney an annuity of 200 guineas (Smith 6167; David 13637) (see Figure 8). Satires of the scandal quickly moved from the print shop to the Covent Garden stage in the form of Thomas Holcrofts Road to Ruin (1792), whose character Charles Goldfinch proved immensely popular as a burlesque of Newmarket dandies and their rakish masculinity (See Figure 9). In The Road to Ruin, coach-driving and horseracing stand as component parts of a wider culture of gambling, dissipation, and debt, Goldfinch standing as (in his words) a genus of a cultural type nearly two decades before Charles Mathews trod on stage as Dick Cypher in Hit or Miss! Yet Goldfinch matters here more than merely as a prototype of a stock character of Regency farce. Seizing on his signature line (Thats your sort), print satirists quickly projected Holcrofts Whip out of the theater and back onto broader social and political canvases that included the Prince
Figure 7 Thomas Rowlandson, The Jockey Club (1790; George IV at center, coat open). Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Library.
Figure 8 Isaac Cruickshank, Hint for an ESCAPE at the next spring Meeting (1792). (Ridden by Chifney, George flees members of the Jockey Club). Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.
Figure 9 Mr. Lewis and Mr. Quick, as Goldfinch and Sulky Carlton House Magazine (1792). Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania.
of Wales, Fox (often called the Jockey of Norfolk), the Duke of Clarence, and that other prototypical man of turf and theater, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (see Figure 10). Such prints demonstrate the degree to which characters like Goldfinch functioned within a longstanding tradition of satire, one that reached beyond the theater to produce Rowlandsons and Cruickshanks prints and novelistic characters from Robert Bages Mr. Fillygrove (in Hermsprong) to Austens James Thorpe (in Northanger Abbey). More pressing for the purposes of this argument, it helps us to discover the breadth of the canvas onto which Lewis introduced Timour the Tartar, and the extent to which that canvas already carried a rich tradition of political satire.
III. Figure 10 8 Mr. 9 Isaac The Lewis Road Cruickshank, to and Ruin Mr.(1792; Hint Quick, for George as anGoldfinch ESCAPE rides aat and horse the Sulky next withspring Foxs Carlton Meeting face, House while (1792). Magazine Dorothy (Ridden (1792). Jordan bysays Courtesy Chifney, Well of George done the University Charly! flees members Thats of Pennsylvania. your of the sort! Jockey TheClub). Duke of Copyright Clarence rides The what Trustees appears of the toBritish be Sheridan, Museum. saying Push away! Thats your sort!). Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.
III. Theaters of War In connecting Astleys horses at Covent Garden to Newmarket and gentleman coachdriving, we might wonder whether we have strayed too far from hippodrama and its legacies were it not for the fact that Timours audiences strayed even further. Wondering themselves how Timour could mean anything at all, reviewers found
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Figure 10 The Road to Ruin (1792; George rides a horse with Foxs face, while Dorothy Jordan says Well done Charly! Thats your sort! The Duke of Clarence rides what appears to be Sheridan, saying Push away! Thats your sort!). Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.
themselves repeatedly dumbstruck at the willingness of audiences to interpret the playwhether as commentary on the war with France, as condemnation of Napoleons character, or as evidence of Kembles patriotism. Amidst the clattering of hoofs, the clangor of swords and spears, and the shouts of an enraptured audience, the Morning Chronicle lamented, it is scarcely possible for criticism to attempt to speak (30 April 1811). Subsequent reviews confirm this despair over the future of dramatic criticism, with reviewers like John Williams calling Timour the Tartar no less than a Vandal experiment (Dramatic Censor 241), as clearly a barbarian usurper as Timour himself. Williamss treatment of Timour is also remarkable for its willingness to read the play, however regretfully, as emblematic of a changing cultural landscape. Two months earlier in March of 1811, Williams had described Blue-Beard as part of a plot to discountenance and proscribe the legitimate Drama, and establish in its stead a kind of entertainment recognizable by neither the rules of critics, nor the laws of nature (Dramatic Censor 156). By May, however, this sense of conspiracy had been replaced by another kind of fascination. Williamss review of Timour may begin by perfunctorily dismissing its improbable plot, but the rest is devoted to praising its acting, sets, music, and overall conception. If the review maintains an at times elegiac and bewildered tone, the cause lies in Timours incredibly high level of production, one reserved for mainpiece comedy and tragedy: We are bound in justice to allow, that it is the most superb spectacle we have ever seen the last scene, and its whole gorgeous exhibition, is worth being commemorated by itself (Dramatic Censor 242, 244). With such an assessment, the play becomes, in Williamss words, too fine for pantomime, its cultural status indeterminate in the hierarchy of the evenings entertainment. One such lengthy review would be enough; yet, it is only through The Dramatic Censors subsequent essayswritten, in the tradition of the Gentlemans Magazine, as a series of letters to the editor from fictitious correspondentsthat Williams allows himself full reign to speculate on the meaning of Timours success. The most striking of these is signed Oliver Old Times, whose nostalgic memories of Garricks time, when a fine Tragedy was succeeded by an entertaining Farce (243n), invoke an age when genres were stable even as they provide a vehicle for exploring recent changes in the theater:
I will confess to you that still more than the mummery astonished me, was to witness the shouting and delirious acclamation that prevailed, and my hearing many grave men and women exclaim, delightful! charming! wonderful! After a nights rather disturbed rest, in the morning at breakfast a sort of solution occurred to me . We are becoming a warlike people, Mr. Editor . Thanks to Bonapartes threats of invasion, every man now is a soldier, and therefore naturally becomes enamoured of the pomp, pride, and circumstances of glorious war, and amongst them the neighing steed of course holds a conspicuous place in his affections . There is another, and a very strong concurring cause for this partiality towards equestrian performersneed I say that I allude to that respectable fraternity called the Four-in-Hand Club, who with a laudable veneration for antiquity, are trying, as far as in them lies, to revive the glories of the Olympic Games . Yes, Mr. Editor, it is to the prevalence of the military spirit and the four-in-hand that I ascribe this passion for equestrian
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mummeryand while I hail the cause, I cannot but say I am heartily grieved at the effects. (243n244n)
The letter itself is a formidable comic performance: Oliver Old Times is jolted awake from his customary snooze in the theater by the bray of kettle drums, the galloping of horses, and the clangour of trumpets (243n), which bewilder his senses and his sense of dramatic history. But the extent of the satire is both limited and complicated by the broader changes it marks. Roused from the time of Garrickwhen plays were predictable enough that one could sleep through them in peaceOld Times awakens to find himself in a world suffused by nearly two decades of war. When dramatic offerings and popular fashion alike are determined by the four-in-hand and every Militia and Volunteer Colonel throughout the nation, he sighs, no wonder then that a body of such weight should have an influence in turning the scale of national taste (244n). Theatrical taste, it seems, must fall sacrifice to events of greater national importance. The same can be said of reviews of Timour the Tartar, which are characterized by their almost uniform exhibitions of patriotism. As Jane Moody notes succinctly, Lewis reimagined Timour as a Napoleonic bogeyman (99100)an association confirmed by Kembles casting of the diminutive Charles Farley as Timourand thus partially inoculated his play against criticism. Whether heartfelt or de rigeur, patriotic sentiments enter into nearly every review of the play, and provide striking testimony to the predicament faced by Timours detractors. How to criticize a play whose popularity stemmed in part from its allegorical celebration of British military prowess, where each night Astleys full cavalry stormed the fortress of a hated Usurper with what can only be called, in spite of exotic costumes and a historical setting, astonishing realism (see Figure 11)? Small wonder, then, that viewers of Timours final siege praised it as both allegory and documentary, drawing
Figure 11 Mr. King as Abdalac in Act II, scene iii of Timour the Tartar (1811). Authors Collection.
from pantomime and afterpieces like Blue-Beard on one hand and popular military re-enactments like The Glorious First of June (1794) on the other. Its chief and lasting innovation to the history of theater lies in this hybridization of fairy tale and newsreel. Equally troubling for reviewers, however, were the ways in which the play simply could not be ignored. While equestrian dramas had been fixtures of minor theaters for decadesand while lampoons of Whips and their horse-mad brethren had existed for as many yearsthe marginal status of such venues made it easy enough to dismiss their productions as ephemeral and unimportant. Thus, in spite of hippodramas growing popularity between 1790 and 1810, reviewers and satirists were able to maintain a relatively stable cultural hierarchy, whose notions of high and low culture comfortably mirrored the legal institution of major and minor theaters. Blue-Beard may have forced critics to write about what they could not ignore, but its reviews suggest that Astleys horses had not in and of themselves upset long-cherished hierarchies. As a revived rather than original play, Blue-Beard had occupied a place in the legitimate repertoire for over a decade, and its equestrian scenes were too clearly mere appendages to threaten its secondary status as afterpiece. We find such hierarchies placed under siege only with the advent of Timour the Tartar, that original production confessedly too fine to be pantomime, too well acted and well produced to be mere afterpiece, and too frighteningly realistic in its military displays to be dismissed as a tale for children and apprentices.
Figure 11 Mr. King as Abdalac in Act II, scene iii of Timour the Tartar (1811). Authors Collection. IV.
IV. Hippo-Mania
Upon the whole, whether the taste of the Town has corrupted the Stage, or whether the Stage has corrupted the taste of the Town, it would be vain for us now to arguetrue it is that the Hippo-mania rages, and this Spectacle is well calculated to gratify the prevailing disposition. It will not therefore jog on at a common rate, but have a long run; and the Managers, at the end of the season, will find themselves and their horses at the winningpost! (Globe, 30 April 1811)
Eleven weeks after its April premiere, Timour the Tartars popularity appears not merely to have continued unabated, but to have altered the offerings and, in one case, internal architecture of Londons theaters. One can only marvel at the extent of its influence. By mid-July, every major and minor London theater of consequence advertised among its nightly entertainments a hippodrama modeled on Blue-Beard or Timour, as rivals scrambled to bring forward their own equestrian offerings. Readers of London newspapers like The Times, therefore, would have found a certain sameness in the offerings of the six major London theaters on the morning of 18 July 1811. With Covent Garden offering Timour the Tartar every night, this season, the transplanted Drury-Lane company at the Lyceum Theatre advertise the premier of an Heroic, Tragic, Operatic Drama entitled Quadrupeds; or, The Managers Last Kick! Cobbled from an earlier farce, The Tailors (Haymarket, 1805), this burlesque of BlueBeard and Timour promises a full-scale battle between master and journeymen tailors on donkeys and mules. Struggling for a hit nearly a month into their season, the
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summer Haymarket Theatre, meanwhile, announces the imminent debut of Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh; or, The Rovers of Weimar, a Tragico-Comico-AngloGermanico-Hippo-Ono-Dramatico Romance also taken from an earlier play, the Anti-Jacobins 1798 satire of The Rovers. Beyond the world of the Theatre Royals, Times readers find even grander spectacles. At Westiminster Bridge, Astleys publicizes Lisbon, reenacting recent battles of the Peninsular Campaign, followed by the Blue-Beard-inspired popular Naval, Military, Equestrian, and Pedestrian Spectacle, called the Tyrant Saracen and Noble Moor. Further east at Blackfriars Road, the Surrey Theatre offers three works from the prolific Thomas John Dibdin: the admired Burletta of Tag in Tribulation; a pantomime entitled The Mandarin; or Harlequin in China; and (with great typographical fanfare) Blood will have Blood! or, The Battle of the Bridges, a hippodrame celebrating Wellingtons recent victories in Portugal. Not to be outdone, Sadlers Wells announces several productions by Thomass brother Charles Dibdin, including a comic dance, a new Grand Venetian Aquatic Romance, and a new comic pantomime entitled Harlequin and Bluebeard, with horses jumping over real water. Subtitled Blue-beard Travestie, this final entertainment features Mr. Austin as the Genius of Burlesque, Mr. Lund singing My Kingdom for a Horse, and a final grand Gallamaufry Combat, Bipeds and Quadrupeds; the Quadropediant department under the direction of Mr. Grimaldi. Such advertisements are often useful for reminding us of the diversity of subject, form, and venue within the theater of Romanticism. Faced with the full spectrum of performances advertised in London on a typical evening, we usually marvel at the imaginative breadth of the entertainments offered. In this instance, however, the Times listings for 18 July 1811 astonish not for their heterogeneity but for their coherence and narrow intertextuality. It is not just that every major and minor London theater is producing hippodrama and devoting significant advertising space to doing so, but that every hippodrama produced draws from either Wellingtons or Kembles recent victories, whether in Europe or on the stage. It is a situation as remarkable as it is exceptional. Portugal or Covent Garden, British forces or Blue-Beards Noble Moors, Napoleon or Timour, what signifies in this collective bill of fare is its consistency of subject matter and source material. Its narrowness smacks of speculative bubble and managerial panic; its uniformity recalls the cultural crazes of the 1790s, whether for German drama or Gothic romance. And here the process of imitation and appropriation occurs, if anything, at a more rapid rate and with greater staying power. It is not too much to say that, between their April debut and the end of the calendar year, Timour and his horses became a theatrical discourse in their own right, inspiring no fewer than seven stage responses in as many months. These plays possessed their own evolving cast of characters and metatheatrical traditions, and ranged from burlesque opera to melodrama, pantomime, and farce. They included not only the two Quadrupeds and the Blue-beard Travestie but also, among the plays submitted to John Larpent in the second half of 1811, Four-in-Hand (Haymarket, August 1811), The Travellers Benighted (Haymarket, September 1811), and One Foot by Land and One Foot by Sea; or, The Tartars Tartard! (Olympic, November 1811). As the inaugural play for
a newly renovated Olympic Pavilion Theatrewhich, during the summer of 1811, had rebuilt its stage to hold up to a hundred horsesThe Tartars Tartard featured Bangwan Ho and his Oriental allies attacking, in what can only be called a hippodramatic vortex, the castles of both Blue-Beard and Timour in a single outing. Over the next four decades, these two villains would reappear together and separately, Godzillalike, across dozens of productions, equestrian and otherwise, including Tarrare, the Tartar Chief (1825), Timour, Cream of Tartars (1845), and Lord Blue Beard; Or, the Crim-Tartar, a Naturalised British Subject (1856).
V.
V. The Production of Illegitimate Satire As their titles suggest, the majority of stage responses to Blue-Beard and Timour the Tartar employed elements of satire; yet the satire was of a curiously diffuse kind. While some productions ridiculed key scenes and the pecuniary motives that produced them, still more simply appropriated their characters for the national stock of villains useful for spectacles, melodramas, and pantomimes. This latter strategy was especially true of the so-called minor theaters, which chose wholesale appropriation over travesty since, having produced Timour-like entertainments for decades, their managers could have little reason to protest Kembles apostasy other than for the increased competition it brought to them. Occupying a position, as Leigh Hunt had put it, beneath criticism, they had little reason to fear that the critical ire directed at Kemble would be turned on themselves. Looking to Covent Gardens successes, the other Theatre Royals occupied a more difficult position. With Drury Lane being rebuilt and the Old Price Riots still a matter of recent memory, attendance had been flat most of the 181011 season until the debut of Astleys horses in February. As Timour continued to boast full houses at Covent Garden through July, Samuel Arnold at the Lyceum and George Colman the Younger at the Haymarket responded with the same strategy: to exploit the rage for horses, and assert their own superior taste, through the double medium of satire. The two shows that resulted, Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, advertised themselves as burlesques on Kembles equestrian productions. As a result, the same crowds that had gone to see the horses at Covent Garden came to see them travestied as Quadrupeds at the Lyceum and Haymarket. And in doing so, they attended remarkably similar productions. Beyond their similar titles, Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh share common narrative structures, dramatic techniques, and strategies of ridicule. Each play opens with a theater manager beset by debts weighing the pros and cons of equestrian performances, and each closes with a mock version of Blue-Beards and Timours climactic battle-scenes. Perhaps most important, whether Arnolds Heroic, Tragic, Operatic Drama or Colman the Youngers Tragico-Comico-Anglo-Germanico-Hippo-Ono-Dramatico Romance, each presents itself as a generic monstrosity and thus as a ridicule of theaters for promising the span of genres while providing only mongrel productions. In each play, the theater manager possesses neither the principles nor the resolve to protect the nations drama from foreign and generic contamination. On the surface the
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rhetorical position of the plays would seem fairly clear: as Theatre Royals producing such satires, the Lyceum and Haymarket purportedly promise to be better defenders and custodians of the drama than Kemble, and to be above such petty concerns. Reviewers of Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, however, responded not with applause but with incredulity and even concern. They especially noted the hurried nature of each plays production: that both were plagiarisms of existing plays; that both employed the same well-worn frame narrative of distressed manager and dress rehearsal made popular in The Rehearsal (1671), The Critic (1779), and Old Hay at the New Market (1795); and that neither significantly altered its source text for the present occasion. Thomas Rowlandsons print of Arnolds play is telling for how it reads its opening scene as symptomatic of the state of the theater, picturing, as it does, Arnold sending a dun through a trap door with the aid of Harlequin, Pantaloon, and Clown (see Figure 12). Yet, unlike the managers in Quadrupeds, Arnold and Colman the Younger could not dismiss their critics so easily. Among other things, Quadrupeds was criticized for its inflated advertisements, which, the 19 July 1811 Morning Post reported, had promised twenty jackasses taught to bray to music. In the case of The Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, the plays title and timing raised suspicions that Colman was acting entirely out of competitive needthat he had learned of Quadrupeds while the play was in rehearsal, and had scrambled to fit up a rival production. Certainly Colmans piecemeal application to the Licenser (application 15 July, play MS 18 July, prologue 24 July), his decision to advertise the play the same day Quadrupeds debuted (18 July),
Figure 12 Thomas Rowlandson, The Managers Last Kick; or A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1811). Authors Collection.
and his determination to hurry the play into production only a week later (25 July) all suggest his own play to be the ironic offspring of the very forces it claimed to satirize. Whether privy or not to the hurried details of Arnolds and Colmans productions, reviewers systematically questioned their intent and effect, and most criticized their deployment of satire as misdirected and inappropriate.5 (One of the most suggestive aspects of these notices, in fact, is their gravity of interrogation.) All censured the extreme length of both plays as inappropriate for an afterpiece and as perpetuating what the 19 July 1811 Morning Post called a system for pantomimes in five acts. What emerges is a kind of collective and constitutive argument: if the Lyceum and Haymarket really considered Kembles horses a threat to theatrical standards, they would have produced original satires on them rather than retool stale productions into lengthy and incomplete burlesques. Leigh Hunts review of Quadrupeds in the Examiner for 21 July 1811 synthesizes the point nicely: [W]hen the humour does come, it is abrupt and at long intervals; in short, it is not the coat that is humorous, but the patches; and this is very different from true and entire burlesque. The implication is that such patchy satires, far from chastising the forces of pantomime, are essentially cut from Harlequins coat. Hunts observation, moreover, points to a more striking aspect of the critical discourse: the degree to which reviewers seized on the two Quadrupeds as an opportunity to define and defend satire from misappropriation and misuse. It is as if the same forces that had placed hippodramas on the stage of a Theatre Royal had also corrupted subsequent satires of them. Part of the problem (as reviewers saw it) lay in the toothless nature of both performances, which seemed less to attack than copy the Covent Garden horses. Thus, the 19 July 1811 Morning Post protested against Quadrupeds as burlesque without ridicule, a point the Times chose to analyze at length:
Figure 12 Thomas Rowlandson, The Managers Last Kick;or A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1811). Authors Collection.
[I]t was flat, stale, and completely denuded of humour; and those dialogues were natural only in being what might have been expected from the flat vulgarity of brutal violence of low rioters . If our advice were to be taken, it should be totally disembowelled, and nothing but the first and last scenesnothing but the mera exuviae suffered to remain. (19 July 1811)
At the bottom, both reviews condemn Arnold as either fundamentally misunderstanding or willfully misapplying burlesque. Composed of a frame narrative burlesquing one object and a source play satirizing anotherand each in a different styleQuadrupeds mixed satiric modes without apparent purpose. The opening and closing scenes may deflate similar scenes at Covent Garden; but the rest of Quadrupeds proceeds without referring to Blue-Beard and Timour, instead mocking the vulgar class pretensions of tailors. The Examiners review of 21 July 1811 comes to similar conclusions, describing the play as engrafted, essentially deformed, and necessarily different from a true and entire burlesque. It is not too much to say of the performers in general, Hunt concludes, comparing Arnolds satiric pretensions to the class pretensions of the tailors themselves, that they act up to the faults of their original, and mistake flat abruptness for quaintness [and] have no notion of burlesque. By the time these same reviewers approached Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh a week later, their analyses had developed into something like full-scale theorizing, in part
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because of Colman the Youngers status as playwright and satirist. But the greater cause lay in their broader concern that Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh would exacerbate tendencies already troubling Arnolds Quadrupeds: that its even more profound jumbling of satirical modes, in confusing high and low generally, would further blur distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate theater. Ironically, their anxiety produced some of the decades most sustained writing about dramatic satire. Thus, the Morning Chronicles review of Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh laments at length to see parody degraded, by being made subservient to the exclusive object of raising a laugh against that which, unworthy as it may be, is below the notice of criticism (27 July 1811). Hunts review in The Examiner, meanwhile, points to Colmans fundamental confusion of burlesque and mock-heroic, which are in reality very distinct things, the former being a degradation of what is great, the latter an elevation of what is little (28 July 1811). Six days later, we find this analysis fully expanded in Bells Weekly Messenger, which takes up the problem of confusing satiric modes and of engaging in dramatic caricature independent of any aim at ridicule:
There are chiefly two forms of comic ridiculethe one may be termed comic caricature [which is] a ridicule of extravagance . Now, there is no objection to this kind of caricature, as long as it has a show of ridiculeas long as it is a parody of a similar absurdity. By itself, however, and independent of any aim at ridicule, it is sheer nonsense. Lords Puddingfield and Beefington were in this latter predicament. They were absolute fools, and without any original in ridicule. The second kind of ridicule is burlesque; which is of two kinds, the high burlesque, which parodies low images and affairs in a lofty style, and the low burlesque, which degrades what is serious and lofty, by low and buffoonish appendages. Both these kinds of humour were employed in this Piece, but without an attention to their nature. Buffoonery was introduced without an aim, and without any possible nature or probability; and the high burlesque was frequently mere grave stupidity. (4 August 1811)
The reviews careful marshalling of Aristotelian categories signifies on several registers. On one hand, it posits a world in which every satiric mode has a distinct nature and function while also assuming the undesirabilityand even unintelligibilityof mixing these modes or reassigning their functions. Yet it also allows the reviewer to posit social and formal analogues for this confusion of modes. Where mixing and misapplying satiric modes produces only buffoonery among Lords and grave stupidity among the lower orders, the end must be a more general and pernicious jumbling of hierarchies of aesthetic and cultural value. Such a review is suggestive in part because, given the earlier press on Kembles horses, one would not expect similar outcry against dramas claiming to satirize them. Even more suggestive, however, are the insights they provide concerning the relation between the cultural production of hippodrama and that of satire. For while the scale of dramatic response to Blue-Beard and Timour the Tartar may be surprising, I am not surprised that the response came in the form of satire, or that the crisis of confidence provoked by Kembles staging of these two plays created its own minor crisis among critics writing about satire itself. While not sharing legitimate dramas royal protections, Regency satire depended on the same dichotomies that upheld
themparticularly, as Gary Dyer has noted, early-nineteenth-century establishment satires, which interpreted the juxtaposition of aesthetic modes, whether dramatic or satiric, as an essentially radical perversion (Dyer 34). Satire is, moreover, perhaps the most aggressively oppositional of genres because it claims to attack from foundational truths. The site of truth may be contested among satirists; the style may range from ironic laughter to severe chastisement; the relation between satire and the objects satirized may be mutually constitutive; but through all this, satire, even radical satire, speaks from a sense of its own authority and legitimacy (see Bogel; Boscawen; Dryden; Dyer; Gifford; Jones; and Wood). Thus, looking across the range of responses to satires of Blue-Beard and Timour the Tartar, we find a growing uneasiness over the definition, function, and power of satire to defend supposedly established and permanent truths. This is especially visible in critical notices of Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, where reveiwers, using Colmans love of profit as a platform for their own writing, anxiously reconstruct an essentially conservative and ostentatiously classical theory of dramatic satire, painstakingly defining forms of ridicule, mockery, burlesque, and parody. But such concerns about satire and the drama are hardly limited to the columns of newspaper reviews. We find especially compelling examples, for the purposes of this essay, in the poetry of Lord Byronnot, as one might expect, in Don Juan or English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, but in work far more intimately concerned with Kembles horses and the satiric responses to them.
VI.
VI. Byrons Rejected Addresses Whether Leslie Marchands authoritative treatment or more recent accounts, biographies of Byron are remarkably consistent about July of 1811, the month Byron returned from his Grand Tour, and the sixteen months that followed (see Eisler; Grosskurth; Marchand; and McCarthy). During the months Timour the Tartar transformed the London stage and equestrian culture, Byron was at Malta, having written three long poems during his travels: cantos I and II of Childe Harolds Pilgrimage and two satires, Hints from Horace and The Curse of Minerva. Returning to England on Bastille Day in 1811, Byron was waylaid in August by the deaths of his mother and his friends John Edelston and Charles Matthews.6 The next months saw Byrons first speech to the House of Lords and the printing of the poems, the March 1812 publication of Childe Harold propelling Byron into stardom. The title of Marchands chapter for this initial period of Byrons homecoming18111812: London and Newstead: Childe Haroldtells the story of the biographies concisely, with Childe Harolds Pilgrimage dominating the chronological and geographical landscapes of the literary life. As writerly choices go, focusing on an authors breakthrough work hardly requires apology. Byrons own correspondence during these months, though, tells a different story, in part because he had no way of foreseeing Childe Harolds success or how that success would transform his own public persona. Thus, when leaving England in 1809, Byron had been consideredand had considered himselfa satirist with interests in poetry, travel, and the theater. The books he took on tour reflect these preoccupations,
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as do his letters composed abroad. On embarking, Byron enclosed a verse satire on travel to Francis Hodgson; subsequent missives described various adventures and sights, requested Walter Scotts latest poem, and recounted anecdotes of the 1809 Drury Lane fire. Letters from the first months of 1811 to John Cam Hobhouse and James Cawthorn, meanwhile, disclosed publication plans not for Childe Harolds Pilgrimage but for Hints from Horace, and show Byron as particular about the quality of print and paper as about the proposed books structure, which he intended to model on William Giffords Baviad.7 Standing as a Horatian sequel to the Juvenalian English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Byrons Hints from Horace stands in a long tradition, anchored by Pope, of free translations that used Ars Poetica as a base text but substituted contemporary references as desired. In Byrons rendering, Horaces advice to authors gives way to a satirical compendium of the life stages of Regency man through his consideration of that many-headed monster the public (Byron, Poetical Works 1: 297):
Behold him freshman! forced no more to groan Oer Virgils devilish verses, andhis own; Prayers are too tedious, lectures too abstruse, He flies from T[a]v[e]lls frown to Fordhams Mews; Fines, tutors, tasks, conventions threat in vain, Before hounds, hunters, and Newmarket plain. (1: 29798)
This familiar catalogue of the Whip yields to an equally familiar portrait of the British stage in decline and besieged by the usual suspects: excesses of sentiment and violence (lines 26180); Matthew Lewiss The Castle Spectre and supernatural spectacle (lines 28192); opera and melodrama (lines 293326); the decline of comedy into farce (lines 32748); and the Licensing Act and the Methodistic men who administer it (lines 34980). Dominated by theatrical anecdotes, the notes are at once more personal and possess greater bite, satirizing gaming houses (Hell, 1: 435), clubs (a pleasant purgatory, 1: 435), Southeys Curse of Kehama (Its alacrity of sinking so great, that it has never since been heard of, 1: 439), and Lord Grosvenors hypocrisy (Benvolio does not bet; but every man who maintains racehorses is a promoter of all the concomitant evils of the turf, 1: 436). This and not Childe Harold was the poem Byron first handed to his friend and literary agent Robert Charles Dallas on returning to England, declaring at the same time that he believed satire to be his forte (Dallas 117). And when Dallas expressed a preference for Childe Harold and found John Murray willing to publish it, Byron stipulated a preference for placing on its title page, instead of his name, the phrase by the Author of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (Byron, Letters 2: 76). If Dallas was disappointed with Hints from Horace, the reason lay in the dated nature of the satire. What had been fresh two years earlier was now stale, particularly the attacks on The Castle Spectre and the culture of Newmarket. While Byron had been abroad, Lewis had provided satirists with a new equestrian target in the form of Timour the Tartar, and Whips had added Wellingtonian military flourishes to their great coats. Needless to say, once ashore Byron adjusted quickly enough to the new equestrian state of things. Gone were earlier plans to join the regiments in Portugal (Byron, Letters 2:
54, 2: 5657). Instead, by late July we see Byron writing with satiric vengeance, first privately in a letter to James Wedderburn (Bold) Webster, in which he refuses to succumb to the usual wheeling and dealing of Whips and Bucks in horses and carriages:
200 g[uinea]s for a Carriage with ancient lining!!! Rags & Rubbish! You must write another pamphlet my dear W. beforebut pray do not waste your time and eloquence in expostulation, because it will do neither of us good, but DecideContent or not content.The best thing you can do for the Tutor you speak of, will be to send him in your Vis (with the lining) to the U - niversity of Gottingen; how can you suppose (now that my own Bear is dead) that I have any situation for a German Genius of this kind till I get another, or some children . The Coronet will not grace the pretty Vis till your tattered lining ceases to disgrace it. (2: 6364)
I quote this passage because it testifies at once to the rapidity with which Byron reinstalled himself into the world of Regency dramatic and equestrian culture. Writing five days after the debut of Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, Byron responds to Websters bait-and-switch by transforming the vis--vis carriage into the Haymarket Theatre diligence that propels the various sentimental friendships and illegitimate children of Colman the Youngers play. The allusions to German Genius and the famous song (The U - niversity of Gottingen) from Colmans source play, The Rovers, place the reference beyond doubt. What interests here most, though, is the sophistication, facility, and sting with which Byron incorporates the language of a current play to chastise a friends double-dealing. Through the end of 1811, Byrons letters continue their preoccupation with satire, theatrical and otherwise. Aside from his lengthy description of Gentleman Amateur Robert Coates at the Haymarket in December (2: 14344), his correspondence is dominated by William Gifford, who functions as presiding spirit to Hints from Horace and as prospective reader for Childe Harold. With Gifford already having been praised lavishly in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Byron felt Murrays sounding the Quarterly Review editor for his opinion on Childe Harold would prevent him from expressing his real opinion about the poem:
I am not at all pleased with Murray for showing the MS.; and I am certain Gifford must see it in the same light I do . It is bad enough to be a scribbler, without having recourse to such shifts to extort praise, or deprecate censure. It is anticipating, it is begging, kneeling, adulating,the devil! the devil! the devil! (2: 101)
What heightens Byrons chagrin is his sense of himself as a satirist who has just lost a position of equal footing with an idol. It is this sense of Gifford (in Byrons words) as Magnus Apollo (2: 91), as Juvenal himself (2: 80), and as not only the first Satirist of the day, but Editor of one of the principal Reviews (2: 78) that causes him to dominate Byrons autumn letters. More important, it illuminatesin the wake of Childe Harolds success and Kembles decision to revive Timour the Tartar on 30 March 1812 after the success of the previous yearByrons belated attempts to intervene in the debate on hippodrama through the medium of satire, and from the bully pulpit of the Opening Address for the newly rebuilt Drury Lane Theatre on 10 October 1812. The details of the destruction of the old Drury and the opening of the new are as farcical as they are compelling. Where Sheridans gross mismanagement had insured
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the theaters ruin even before it was reduced to ashes in 1809, the Committee of Management did everything possible to make a mess of the new ones October debut. Newspaper accounts repeatedly cite inadequate police presence and crowd-control procedures; they reserve their primary criticisms, however, for the Committees handling of the Opening Address that was to commemorate the evening. Headed by Lord Holland and Samuel Whitbread, the Committee had announced in August a contest with a prize of twenty pounds, the winning address to be spoken at the opening festivities. By September they had received 112 submissions, Byron declining to compete against all Grubstreet (2: 197). Whether because of quality of the submissions or because none of the contestants was adequately famous, Holland approached Byron to write the address. And in spite of his uneasiness over the anger that might result from the 112 rejected contestants, Byron agreed. As Byron was quick to discover, writing by invitation was still uncomfortably close to writing for hire. Having submitted his initial draft on 23 September, he continued to send revisions feverishly over the next ten days in answer to various Committee objections. Byrons uncharacteristic patience with the unending stream of queries, particularly those of Samuel Whitbread, testifies to how seriously he took the task. As the manuscript evidence demonstrates, his resolve derived its strength from a desire to reform what he saw as recent abuses to the stage. We can see the intensity of the negotiations through the flurry of additions and corrections sent by Byron to Lord Holland that have survived. After dispatching the initial draft from Cheltenham, Byron posted further revisions on September 24th (thrice), 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th (twice), 29th, and 30th. The letters began and proceeded cheerfully enough until 27 September, when negotiations shifted from queries about versification to objections over content. By the 28th, Byron and the Committee were at an apparent impasse, with Byron dug in over the issue of hippodrama:
Is Whitbread determined to castrate all my cavalry lines? I dont see why tother house should be spared, besides it is the public who ought to know better, & you recollect Johnsons was against similar buffooneries of Richs but certes I am not Johnson . I do think in the present state of the Stage, it had been unpardonable to pass over the horses . I confess I wish that part of the address to stand. (2: 21214)
What becomes clear as the exchange of letters progresses is that Byron wished to write an address that was both celebratory and satirical. The manuscript submitted had divided the address fairly evenly between the two: the first half consisting of conventional commemoration, the second of more pointed satirical exhortation. Whitbread had objected to these latter lines, especially a passage condemning the Covent Garden horses as a derogation of public taste:
But knowour triumph this alone secures The judging voice and eye must first be yours Ours to obey your will or right or wrong To soar in Sentiment, or creep in song Nay, lower still, the Drama yet deplores That late she deigned to crawl upon all fours When Richard roars in Bosworth for a horse,

If you command, the steed must come in course If you demandour intellectual feast Must furnish store alike for Man and Beast If you decree, the Stage must condescend To soothe the sickly taste we dare not mend. (Byron, Poetical Works 3: 20n21n)
Inscribed in these and other cancelled linesand in the epistolary exchange itselfis a fundamental disagreement over the duties that Theatre Royals have to the drama, to their audience, and to one another. While the Committee ostentatiously objected because of the lines indecorum, its actions appear also motivated by a desire to prevent any kind of discord between Drury Lane and rival theater Covent Garden. Put another way, Byrons cavalry lines did not so much violate decorum as threaten to erode the cultural authority and monopolistic profitability of the Theatre Royals. The postscript to Byrons September 28th letter hints at such motives by reminding Lord Holland that the Drury Lane company themselves had satirized hippodrama more than once at the Lyceum:
On looking again I doubt my idea of having obviated W[hitbread]s objection to the other house allusion is a non sequitur but I wish to plead for this part, because the thing really is not to be passed over.Many afterpieces in the Lyceum by the same company have already attacked this Augean Stable& Johnson in his prologue against Lun [theater manager John Rich] is surely a fair precedent (Bryon, Letters 2: 214).
While the language of the passage is tortured by Byrons diplomacy, the implication is clear: with the question of precedent a non sequitur and a blind, some underlying motive is being passed over. This and his other arguments either ignored or rejected, Byron was finally reduced on September 29th to pleading: I do implore for my own gratification one lash on those accursed quadrupedsa long shot Sir Lucius if you love me I shall choak if we must overlook their dd menagerie (2: 219). By September 30th Byron had effectively given inalthough whether worn down from the Committees obstinacy or from an attack of kidney stones is uncertain. He continued to send revisions as requested, and four days after the Address acknowledged its lukewarm reception in an October 14th letter to Lord Holland. My opinion, he wrote cryptically, is what it always was, perhaps, pretty near that of the public (2: 226). What had happened on the evening of the Address could only have confirmed Byrons sense of having missed a satiric opportunity. After the conclusion of the mainpiece, one of the Drury rejected contestants, the translator of Lucretius Dr. William Busby, had arisen and asked for the audiences impartial hearing of his Address, which his son George then attempted to recite several times without being heard. The episode provided a feast for reviewers and satirists, with George Cruickshank memorably depicting Byron as the literal butt of the Busbys battering-ram (see Figure 13). While a pouting John Bull exclaims with arms folded Profits!!! Dme if any will come and Lord Holland stands on a pile of rejected Addresses, Byron capers to avoid Busbys battering ram, inscribed Monologue, exclaiming, Stop! good Doctor! one Murder is enough I do not wish to suffer the same fate with Lucretius. These same weeks saw other satires as well. On the same day Byron acquiesced to the objections of the Committee, he related to Holland that the Drury Lane contest had
Figure 13 George Cruickshank, ManagementorButts and Hogheads (1812; detail; Byron at center). Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.
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Figure 13 George Cruickshank, ManagementorButts and Hogheads (1812; detail; Byron at center). Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.
inspired myriads of ironical addresses [al]readysome in imitation of what is called my style it will not be bad fun even for the imitated (2: 221). Having been forced to censor himself, Byron took a palpable enough pleasure at the prospect of dramatic satire nonetheless having its day. And whether inspired by this expectation or galled by the Committee, Byrons own resolution to satirize equestrian culture, if anything, intensified during these weeks. Blocked from criticizing the state of the drama in his own public person, he began writing anonymously, composing at least eleven satirical poems between October and December of 1812. As one might expect, the most energetic of theseA Parenthetical Address, by Dr. Plagiary and The Waltz,were composed during the first nineteen days of October. Perhaps more than any other poem by Byron, The Waltz is the snapshot of a moment in popular culture; yet, here the seductive indecorum of waltzing (at its peak of popularity in 1812) is seen as part of broader trends in British culture. In short, The Waltz is less about the dance itself than about the culture of ostentation and display of which it is a symptom. Thus its Preface, written in the persona of a Midlands country gentleman invited to pass the winter in town, begins not with waltzing but with the associated fad of gentleman coach driving:
Thinking no harm, and our girls being come to a marriageable (or, as they call, marketable) age we came up in our old chariot, of which, by the by, my wife grew so much ashamed, in less than a week, that I was obliged to buy a second-hand barouche, of which I might

mount the box, Mrs. H. says, if I could drive, but never see the inside(Byron, Poetical Works 3: 22)
Byrons name for his persona, Horace Hornem, Esq., aptly summarizes the cultural forces here at work. In one sense, middle England is being horned (given horns to, cuckolded) by Regency fashion; in another, middle England is being horned by Horace himself, Byron donning the appellation Horace (as he had in Hints from Horace) much in the same way he dubs Gifford Juvenal in his correspondence. The Preface then moves from coach-driving to a ballroom transformed by waltzing where Hornem, at first outraged at seeing Mrs. Hornem with her arms half around the loins of a huge hussar-looking gentleman (3: 23), is finally made to approve when his own daughter laughs at him. What follows is the completion of a trinity of Regency popular culture, where the country-squire-turned-gentleman-coach-driver not only approves the new dance but also links the recent victories in Portugal to Dr. Busbys alternative Address at Drury Lane:
Indeed, so much I like it, that having a turn for rhyme, tastily displayed in some election ballads and songs, in honour of all the victories I sate down, and with the aid of W. F. Esq. and a few hints from Dr. B. (whose recitations I attend, and am monstrous fond of Master B.s manner of delivering his fathers late successful D. L. Address), I composed the following Hymn, wherewithal to make my sentiments known to the Public, whom, nevertheless, I heartily despise as well as the Critics. (3: 23)
One finds a similar triumvirate in Byrons Parenthetical Address, by Dr. Plagiary, which quotes Busbys address in the first half of each couplet while undercutting it in the second. Thus Busbys lines celebrating British military victories become the vehicles for dramatic satire:
This spirit WELLINGTON has shewn in Spain, To furnish Melo-drames for Drury-lane; Another MARLBOROUGH points to Blenheims story, And GEORGE and I will dramatise it for ye. (3: 33)
In both poems, vulgar self-advertisement and self-proclaimed excellence are depicted as symptomatic forms of a more general national prostitutionand both are insistently linked to the present state of the stage: Old Drury never, never soared so high, / So says the Manager, and so says I (3: 33). In this sense, Byrons move to anonymous satire in The Waltz and the Parenthetical Address signals a growing sense that dramatic satire must be cultivated outside the orbit of the patent theaters for the rights and duties of satire to be reasserted. Put another way, through his experience with the Drury Lane Address, Byron comes to the same conclusion as did reviewers of Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh: that dramatic institutions protected by royal patent cannot be expected to police themselves; and that legitimacy in drama and satire must come from without. In connecting the stage to Newmarket, hippodrama to gentleman coach driving, and popular drama to satire, I have sought to make a case for placing popular theater at the center of how Romantic-period culture understood and organized itselfas a force, in short, irresistible enough to affect the orbits of other cultural forms. For however much
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we remember systems of genres as arbitrary impositions of one set of views or historical moments over others, the issue changes the moment we re-anchor these concepts and categories in specific cultures and their institutions. This is particularly true of the theater, where parliamentary act and royal decree codify otherwise abstract notions of high and low, legitimate and illegitimate, so that conceptual dichotomies become legal and institutional properties. In the form of monopolies awarded by royal patent, then, such concepts could be, for lack of a better word, owned, until they took on a material existence backed by statutory law and royal edict. Such aristocratic and legal backing provides a powerful illusion of the real; and when that illusion is broken and its Legitimate Order of Things upset, we can expect crises that reach far beyond the local site where the break or transgression has occurred even with transgressions so apparently small as that of gentlemen driving their own coaches or Theatres Royal hiring horses to stage a more spectacular pitched battle or cavalry charge. When we add a sense of the economic stakes at play here, which are so high that the division of dramatic turf must be supported by royal patent and parliamentary act, we can begin to see how small transgressions invite fairly massive responses. Hence my interest in connecting two Regency crises of legitimacy, of theater and of satire, to one another. And hence my desire to explain the theatrical seasons of 181011 and 181112 not only in terms of theater history, but also in terms of other cultural arenas connected to the theaterfrom the scandals that produced institutions like Newmarket and the Jockey Club, to the horse culture that gave us clubs like the Four-in-Hand and the craze for gentleman coach-driving, to, finally, the tradition of dramatic satire that gave us characters like Goldfinch in The Road to Ruin, and that outraged Byron when powerful interests in the theater forced him to censor himself. Notes
[1] [2]
1. 2.
[3] [4] [5]

3. 4. 5.
[6] [7]
6. 7.
See The Examiner, March 1731, May 12, July 14, and July 28, 1811. Timours run of forty-four nights ended only with the close of the theatrical season; revived 30 March 1812, it held the stage for half a century. Frederick Reynolds reports Covent Garden in 181011 had the most profitable season in its history, with receipts of 100,00, 25% higher than average (Reynolds 2: 404). Probably the most well known is the 1807 Satirist print entitled The Monster Melodrama. Notable early exceptions are Saxon, and Mayer. More recently, see Cox; Moody; and Rzepka. See the 19 July 1811 Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, and Times; the 21 July 1811 Bells Weekly Messenger and Examiner; the 27 July 1811 Morning Chronicle, Courier, and Times; and the 28 July 1811 Examiner. Not the actor Charles Mathews, but a Cambridge friend. Byron wished his poem to be printed with the original Horace on facing pages. In his correspondence Byron calls Hints from Horace a paraphrase and an imitation, recalling the subtitle of Giffords Baviad: A Paraphrastic Imitation of the First Satire Of Persius (Byron, Letters 2: 43; 2: 8081; and 2: 90).
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Moody, Jane. Illegitimate Theatre in London 17701840. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2000. Morning Chronicle. London: 17891865. Morning Post. London: 17721937. Pocock, Isaac. Hit or Miss! London: Wyatt, 1810. Reynolds, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Reynolds. 2 vols. London: Colburn, 1826. Rowlandson, Thomas. How to Escape Losing. London: Fores, 1791. . How to Escape Winning. London: Fores, 1791. Rzepka, Charles J. Bang-Up! Theatricality and the Diphrelatic Art in De Quinceys English Mail Coach. Nineteenth-Century Prose 28 (2001): 75101. Saxon, A. H. Enter Foot and Horse: A History of Hippodrama in England and France. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1968. Scott, S. Mr. Davis as the Georgian Chief in Timour the Tartar. London: Wheble, 1811. Scott, Walter. Waverley; or, Tis Sixty Years Since. Ed. Claire Lamont. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Sedley, Charles. The Barouche Driver and His Wife: A Tale for Haut Ton. 2 vols. London: Hughes, 1807. Shelley, Percy. Shelleys Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002. Smith, E. A. George IV. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999. Songs, Recitative and Duets [] in the opera entitled Tarrare, the Tartar Chief. London: Lowndes, 1825. Sun. London: 17921871. Timbs, John. Clubs and Club Life in London. London: Chatto and Windus, 1872. Times. London: 1788. Timour, Cream of Tartars. London: Johnson, 1845. Travellers Benighted. San Marino: Huntington Library Larpent MS 1690. Walpole, Horace. Correspondence. 48 vols. Ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis. New Haven and London: Yale UP 193783. Warton, Thomas. Newmarket, A Satire. London: Newbery, 1751. Wood, Marcus. Radical Satire and Print Culture, 17901822. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Wordsworth, William. Prose Works. 3 vols. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

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Nineteenth-Century Contexts Vol. 28, No. 4, December 2006, pp.

A Matter of Turf: Romanticism, Hippodrama, and Legitimate Satire

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1975926

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1975926

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Figure 1 The Centaur-ian Manager (1811). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Figure 6 Charles Mathews as Cypher in Hit or Miss! (1810). Authors Collection.

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