Download Dog Tales: 19th-Century Dog Drama and the Dog in Your Backyard

Dog Tales: 19th-Century Dog Drama and the Dog in
Your Backyard
Jenny Sternling
Abstract
From their courage on battlefields to their heroics in viral videos, dogs and dog
stories engage the popular imagination like nothing else. Remarkably, a theatrical
phenomenon that perfected and popularized the dog narrative is virtually forgotten:
19th-century dog dramas. Inexorably grounded in melodrama, dog dramas featured
dogs onstage with humans, not as mere set-dressing, but as trained actors depicting
essential heroic characters. Dog dramas were presented throughout the world for
close to a century and the genre produced human and canine stars. While the plays,
actors and dogs, if acknowledged at all in theatrical or canine history, are passed
over as laughable novelties, the genre’s enduring melodramatic tenets shape
contemporary human/canine relationships. In my presentation I provide a brief
illumination of the fascinating history of dog dramas. I examine how a dog, on the
stage or in your backyard, is the idea of a dog; embodying melodramatic
characters, themes, meaning from myth, legend and anecdotes identifying him as a
link to the supernatural. I discuss how this ‘idea of a dog’ functions to make dogs
the moral centre of dog dramas. That role and dog dramas’ repeated narratives
became so deeply embedded in the popular imagination that what was once
melodramatic entertainment is now the lens through which we view the dogs that
share our lives.
Key Words: Dog, dog drama, canine, melodrama, drama, popular entertainment,
19th-century, theatre, performance.
*****
On the evening of December 5, 1803, playgoers at the Drury Lane Theatre
in London were in for something special. That night Fredrick Reynolds’ new play,
The Caravan or the Driver and His Dog introduced a huge Newfoundland dogactor, Carlo. In the production, Carlo held ruffians at bay, pursued the villain and,
in the final thrilling moments, leapt from a cliff into ‘the sea’ – a tank of water on
the stage – to rescue a drowning child. The play was a triumph and Carlo, a
superstar. He made special appearances. His ‘autobiography’ became a popular
children’s book.1 Soon another dog was rescuing a drowning infant at Sadler’s
Wells Theatre in another play: The Ocean Fiend; or the Infant’s Peril. London
audiences loved these thespian dog-heroes, so villains kept flinging children to the
icy depths and brave dogs continued to dutifully retrieve them. Inspired by the
theatrical canine success in London, French actor, director, and prolific playwright,
René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt wove a French legend into the melodramatic
2
Dog Tales: 19th-Century Dog Drama and the Dog in Your Backyard
__________________________________________________________________
play structure he had perfected and crafted the first true dog drama, the first of
thousands.
Dog drama is a virtually forgotten 19th-century melodramatic genre that
featured dog actors on stage with humans, not as mere set-dressing or comic
“props” but as performers depicting heroic acts to assure that virtue was rewarded
and vice punished. The dogs were cast in a variety of roles: the hero’s devoted
companion, the sidekick’s clever helper, the rugged woodsman’s partner, or
protector and servant to the kind elderly parents of the prettiest virgin in the
village. When the inevitable kidnapping, thievery, murder or act of treason
occurred, the dog would use his canine instincts, uncanny intelligence and sheer
strength to rescue, retrieve, revive, restore, reunite the innocent victims and bring
the villain to justice. The success of these plays depended on the canine actors
following blocking, remembering cues, and delivering their lines.
Though incredibly popular, 19th-century dog drama, when acknowledged
at all, is dismissed as a short-lived theatrical gimmick for unsophisticated
audiences. Nothing could be more wrong. Thousands of dog dramas were
presented in theatres throughout the world for over a century. The genre’s dramatic
structure, features, and canine characters continue to shape contemporary fiction,
television and film. 19th-century dog drama generated a narrative that permeates
the popular imagination with an imagined, yet persistent message that assures
humans that we are good.
Pixérécourt’s 1814 smash hit dog drama started it all. The Dog of
Montargis, or the Forest of Bondy was inspired by a 14th-century legend about
Dragon, a dog that ‘duelled’ his master’s suspected murderer in a specially
arranged battle. In Pixérécourt’s play, a clever dog actor leaps fences, rings a
doorbell and convinces the kindly Dame Gertrude to follow him as he carries a
lantern in his mouth to guide her through the Forest of Bondy to his murdered
master’s hidden grave. Within months of the Paris premiere, adaptations of The
Dog of Montargis were packing audiences into theatres in Berlin, Vienna,
Philadelphia, Washington DC and Baltimore. In Paris, Pixérécourt’s production of
The Dog of Montargis ran uninterrupted in repertory for twenty years. The play
was continually produced for at least sixty years on stages throughout the world
from Dublin, Ireland to Hobart Town in Tasmania. Charles Dickens must have
seen it; in his story, ‘Our School,’ he describes a miniature theatre and a pet white
mouse that ‘made a very credible appearance on the stage as the Dog of
Montargis.’2 Soon after The Dog of Montargis became a hit in Paris, dog dramas
received top billing in British and American theatres for decades. Audiences loved
plays like Sydney and his Dog, Philip and His Dog, or Where’s the Child? and The
Dog of the Ship or, Sailors and Savages in which the dogs acted as servants as well
as heroes: the playbill notes that dogs would ‘Fetch Chairs, Table & set Tea
Things, save the Child from being murdered, etc.’3 Thousands of dogs dramas
were presented over the course of the 19th century and the genre became so popular
that it developed its own type of actors, teams that specialized in dog drama. A
Jenny Sternling
3
__________________________________________________________________
man named Barkham Cony (his real name!) known as ‘The Dog Star’ along with
his partner William Blanchard and their dogs garnered international fame
performing original plays like Dog of the Castle or, the Trial by Battle! and The
Smuggler’s Dog! Or the Blind Boy’s Murder.
Like 19th-century melodramas, dog dramas sometimes reflected gothic
themes as in The Terror of Charing Cross or the Dogs of the Abbey. Fascination
with the American West and Native Americans inspired Wonga of the Branded
Hand or, The Dogs of the Forest Log House! and The Cherokee Chief, or the
Shipwrecked Sailor and his Dogs. Dog dramas remained favourites during the
American Civil War years, with plays like The Galley Slave, or the Blind Boy and
His Dog, reflecting American concerns. The genre was not only for male actors: a
popular New York performer, Miss Fanny Herring and her dogs, Lafayette and
Thunder, got into the act with original plays like The Rag Woman and her Dogs.
The genre came full circle with a 1901 dog drama at the Theatre Royal in
Melbourne, Australia titled Riding to Win. In an imitation of Carlo’s performance a
hundred years earlier, a dog leaps into a tank of water and rescues a drowning
youngster.
Four years later, in 1905, dog drama made the easy leap from stage to film
when British filmmaker Cecil Hepworth shot his highly successful short film,
Rescued by Rover. The movie was in such demand that Hepworth wore out the first
two negatives as he made reproductions.4 While live dog dramas gradually
disappeared from theatres, dog drama continued to thrive in films and later in
television and made stars of dogs like Lassie and Rin Tin Tin.
Dog drama employs melodrama’s conventional features and devices such
as: situation-driven plots; stereotypical characters who never experience inner
struggle; themes of loss of family, home, honour; lucky coincidences; last-minute
rescues and escapes and plenty of spectacle. In the course of my research I’ve
determined three requirements, unique to dog drama, that are necessary for a play
to function as a dog drama: the dog must save a human life; the dog must facilitate
the victim’s placement or restoration to his/her rightful place in society (in
melodrama, anything less is hardly a life worth living); and the dog must be a
central agent whose actions are essential for virtue to triumph and vice to be
punished. Also, while codified gesture and pantomime are emblematic of
melodrama, dog drama makes extreme use of these techniques. In fact, theatrical
reviews suggest that a few dog dramas, such as The Cherokee Chief, were entirely
pantomimic.
People loved dog drama because it was perfect melodrama with a perfect
hero at the centre. Melodrama is a genre we human beings love because it tells a
story curled in our gut – the story about how hard it is to make our way in the
world, about life being so unfair, about the loss of innocence and about the hope
that someone or something will make things right. It is a story of heroes and
villains and we humans – research suggests that even babies as young as five
4
Dog Tales: 19th-Century Dog Drama and the Dog in Your Backyard
__________________________________________________________________
months – understand ‘helpers and hinderers’ on an instinctual level so it is no
wonder that the melodramatic plot resonates deep within.5 At the deepest level, we
understand that we must be surrounded by helpers and rid of hinderers if we are to
survive. A dog lends itself perfectly to melodrama’s archetypical ‘helper’ roles:
hero, sidekick, the true friend who takes the bullet.
Our collective idea of a dog is a distillation of undeniably melodramatic
attributes, characters and themes: hero, victim, comic sidekick, domesticity,
purity, loyalty, courage, and sacrifice. When a dog walks on stage, it is an
embodiment of these attributes; it becomes the idea of a dog, naively cooperating
in the creation of what Bert O. States in his essay ‘The Dog on Stage’ terms a
‘system of illusion.’6 The dog-illusion also embodies meaning from centuries of
myth, legend, and anecdotal evidence that identify him as an apt link to the
hereafter, seer of the invisible and a GPS device in a furry suit. Yet, as States
points out, a dog on stage is also a real dog. It’s not acting like a dog; humans on
the stage are acting, pretending. But a dog is truly there, doing what it truly does –
a dog on stage is true, trustworthy. The people who wrote dog dramas capitalized
on this perception. When a dog appears on stage in a dog drama, audiences
instantly recognize and accept all the potential of the dog-illusion character and
also, because the dog embodies Truth, they accept the dog as the moral centre of
the play.
Certain consistent features of dog drama help support this perception. In
The Melodramatic Imagination, Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode
of Excess, Peter Brooks elaborates on how muteness, exaggerated expression and
physicalisation, the codified gestures, the Tableau in melodrama, function to
indicate ‘signs which render the world expressive of moral sentiments.’7 Dogs—
mute (that is: they do not speak any human language), yet so physically
expressive—are perpetually viewed though a melodramatic lens and are thus
rendered perfect dramatic ‘signs’ of moral justice, innocence and virtue. Brooks
discusses the dog in The Dog of Montargis and notes, ‘This dramaturgy of the nonhuman already suggests the importance of the nonspoken, nonverbal indicators of
plot and meaning.’8 We cannot always understand or trust words, we trust actions.
Pantomime is at the core of melodrama; dogs are perfect in melodrama because
they are natural mimes, communicating through action and expression.
Melodrama, with its dependence on gesture and facial expression, is meant to
circumnavigate intellectual processing (one of the reasons it has been maligned
since it first developed) and cut right to the heart. Dogs, as characters in the
melodramatic structure ‘speak’ the language of truth, the language of the heart,
reinforcing their position as signs of truth and virtue.
In this state of assumed innate goodness, dogs are perceived as plausible
messengers from and actors for a Greater Power and, as such, they can righteously
pass judgment and exact instant justice on villains without question or blame. In
melodrama, Absolute Justice is often violent: the bridge where the villain stands to
shout his triumph collapses and sends him screaming to his death or a misstep hurls
Jenny Sternling
5
__________________________________________________________________
the villain to molten death in a volcano. In dog drama – if the villain deserved
death – the hero dog would ‘take the seize’: leap onto the villain, lock his jaws on
the villain’s throat and choke his life away. For an especially graphic death, the
actor playing the villain would hide a bag of pig’s blood in his collar and break the
bag as the dog took the seize. Dog drama allowed audiences to delight in such
brutal justice because good and innocent humans are not the ones enacting
vengeance – it is an act of Divine Intervention through a mute sign of moral truth:
the dog. Dogs are faultless juries and superb executioners, freeing the human hero
from the risk of tainting himself with an act of violence. The dog allows the human
hero to remain perfect. Audiences trusted that the dog was not only right, he was
righteous – a conduit from a Higher Power, an avenging angel – and so viewers
were reassured of their own goodness when they cheered a villain’s violent end.
For nearly one hundred years, live dog dramas were a unique and
important reflection of the hopes and fears of 19th-century audiences. I have
described dog drama as a ‘forgotten theatrical genre,’ but in truth, dog drama
transformed and adapted to new types of entertainment and technology, and they
remain vital in the 21st-century popular imagination. Of the thousands of
contemporary ‘true story’ dog books, no small number includes the terms ‘saved
my life’ or ‘angel’ in the title.9 Humans assign meaning to actions, so if we humans
have been saved, protected, received divine messages from or through these canine
beings, then (the meaning we most prefer is) we must be valuable. We believe that
dogs are good – all evidence points to that idea and throughout history they have
always been good to us – so, in melodrama when this good, pure being, with a
Divine connection saves one of us (humans) it must be because we are good. That
is an idea we love, so naturally - whether through books, film, YouTube videos, the
spoken word – we continue to tell dog drama stories.
What could possibly be the source of this faith in dogs’ affirmation of our
goodness? Cultural anthropologist Constance Perin suggests that humans identify
dogs’ attention and behaviours toward us as unconditional love and that ‘we reach
across species and idealize dogs because in no human relationship can we re-create
this symbolic vessel of excess love.’10 Humans accept that dogs are capable of
unrestricted emotion, beyond anything a human can generate. That acceptance
creates a perception that dogs have other unconstrained abilities as well, such as
supernatural levels of consciousness, awareness of the unseen and connections to
the Divine. Dogs are archetypal guides to otherworldliness. That notion is
exemplified in The Butcher’s Dog of Ghent or the Vision of the Heath (sometimes
billed as Vision of the Heart.) In the play the dog is the hero’s guide through
dreams which will reveal his brother’s murderers. In Dark Donald, the Idiot of the
Cliff; or the Dogs of Loch Lomond, a dog appears in visions, promising to take
down the murderer. In Dark Donald, The Old Toll House, and The Dog of
Montargis the dog hero advances threateningly toward the villain when they first
encounter one another, in a ‘sign to bear the message of the action.’11 This
6
Dog Tales: 19th-Century Dog Drama and the Dog in Your Backyard
__________________________________________________________________
dramatic action supports deeply held notions that dogs know when something is
wrong, that dogs will protect us, that dogs love us.
We created and cling to this 19th-century melodramatic narrative because
it validates us through the agency of a creature we imagine possesses a perfect
moral compass: a dog. We view the dogs that share our lives through a
melodramatic lens and they seem willing to cooperate as our as our helpers, heroes,
and sidekicks. So when dogs, in these roles, continue to affirm us as valuable and
good, why would we ever view them any other way?
Dog drama then, is more than a plot line or a theatrical genre, it is an
imagined narrative with the features of theatrical melodrama – pure goodness, pure
evil, victimization, voiceless innocence, heartbreak, suffering, heroism and home –
combined to give breath to a human cry that life is not as it should be. This
narrative exposes the injustice in how society functions and fuels expectations
about how it ought to function. It is a call to a hero who will thwart enemies, lead
the way home, and once there, protect the truly good and virtuous. In this story we
persist in telling, there is no better friend and protector to answer that call than a
dog.
Notes
1
Eliza Fenwick, The Life of Carlo, the Famous Dog of Drury-Lane Theatre
(London: Talbart and Co, 1809).
2
Charles Dickens, ‘Our School, in Selected Short Fiction, ed. Deborah A. Thomas
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 156.
3
Dog of the Ship or, Sailors and Savages. 1828, playbill. Leeds Playbills, viewed
on 12 February 2013. http://www.leodis.net/playbills.
4
Deborah Painter, Hollywood's Top Dogs: The Dog Hero in Film (Baltimore:
Midnight Marquee, 2008), 23.
5
Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Crown,
2013), 26.
6
Bert O. States, ‘The Dog on the Stage: Theater as Phenomenon,’ New Literary
History 14.2 (Winter, 1983): 373-88.
7
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 45.
8
Brooks, ‘Dog on Stage,’ 57.
9
Amazon website book search, January 2015. Search term: ‘dogs true story’.
10
Eleanora M.Woloy, The Symbol of the Dog in the Human Psyche, a study of the
Human-Dog Bond (Wilmette: Chiron Publications, 1990), 20.
11
Brooks, ‘Dog on Stage,’45.
Jenny Sternling
7
__________________________________________________________________
Bibliography
Bloom, Paul. Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. New York: Crown,
2013.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Dickens, Charles. ‘Our School.’ In Selected Short Fiction. Edited by Deborah A.
Thomas, 156. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Dog of the Ship or, Sailors and Savages. 1828, playbill. Leeds Playbills. Viewed
on 12 February 2013. http://www.leodis.net/playbills.
Fenwick, Eliza. The Life of Carlo, the Famous Dog of Drury-Lane Theatre.
London: Talbart and Co, 1809.
Painter, Deborah. Hollywood's Top Dogs: The Dog Hero in Film. Baltimore:
Midnight Marquee, 2008.
States, Bert O. ‘The Dog on the Stage: Theater as Phenomenon’. New Literary
History 14.2 (Winter, 1983). 373-88.
Woloy, Eleanora M. The Symbol of the Dog in the Human Psyche, a study of the
Human-Dog Bond. Wilmette: Chiron Publications, 1990.
Jenny Sternling is an actor, director, theatre arts instructor and independent
scholar. Sternling focused her graduate research and 2012 Masters thesis on 19thcentury dog dramas and continues her unprecedented work recovering evidence of
19th-century dog drama performances and chronicling dog drama history. In 2014
she wrote Taking the Seize: a Dog Drama, a play based on the lives of the genre’s
most famous human and canine actors.