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Performing History: Harlequinades of the French Revolution on the Popular
London Stage
Cecilia Feilla
Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 45, 2016, pp. 61-81 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2016.0010
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612330
Accessed 29 Apr 2017 15:55 GMT
Performing History:
Harlequinades of the
French Revolution
on the Popular London Stage
CECILIA FEILLA
A
s England watched with great interest the events unfolding in France
in the summer of 1789, theater managers in London saw opportunity.
Within weeks of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, a burletta
recreating the event opened at the Royal Circus.1 Eager to match its success,
managers at Covent Garden, Sadler’s Wells, and Astley’s Amphitheatre
produced their own Bastille plays, launching what one critic referred to as
a “Bastille war.”2 In the words of Frederick Reynolds: “The loyalist saw
the revolution in one light, the democrat in another; and even the theatrical
manager had also his view of the subject. The Bastile [sic] must bring money;
that’s the settled point; and a piece of that name must be written.”3 Theaters
thus capitalized on public interest in developments abroad by bringing
contemporary history home to British viewers eager to see the action for
themselves. They also offered, as Reynolds suggests, an alternative to the
polarized political reactions that would come to dominate public discourse
in England about the French Revolution.
In recent years, the “Revolutionary” theater in Britain has been examined
in great detail by Jane Moody, Gillian Russell, George Taylor, and David
Worrall.4 These studies have brought new interest and insights to the variety
of institutional, aesthetic, and political battles that were waged in and by
British theaters during the 1790s. In turning to the genre of Revolutionary
61
62 / F E I L L A
harlequinade, my aim is to illuminate the ways in which history was being
rethought and recast in response to the Revolution, and to examine the
role that theater played in this process. The French Revolution’s profound
break with the past and founding of a new order to replace the “old regime”
produced a sharp sense of historical time and a “widespread realization
that even at its most quotidian levels, all life is carried by the current of
history.”5 Revolutionary entertainments offered theater managers a unique
and adaptive form for engaging the present historical moment as they
interpreted and recreated it for a popular audience. According to Jane Moody,
topical plays of the French Revolution “became the dramatic newsreel of the
modern metropolis.”6 But more than merely informational, these plays were
also elaborate pantomime entertainments that combined fact with fiction,
historical personages with stock comic characters, and solemn ceremony
with musical interlude. A hybrid form that appealed to London audiences
as much for their spectacular backdrops and familiar set pieces as for their
accurate portrayals of newsworthy happenings abroad, Revolutionary
harlequinades provided an important site for popular engagement with
history-in-the-making, and a means to frame and mediate current events
for British playgoers.
In what follows, I explore two British harlequin entertainments that
depict the event of the great Festival of Federation (Fête de la Fédération)
in Paris on July 14, 1790: the first, The Paris Federation at the Royalty
Theatre (premiered in August 1790) and the second, The Picture of Paris,
Taken in the Year 1790, at Covent Garden (premiered December 20, 1790).7
My emphasis will be on issues of narrative and spectacle in these historical
entertainments rather than on questions of accuracy or political allegiance
in regard to the deeds and players they portray, although these aspects will
also be important. Like the event they recreate, The Paris Federation and
The Picture of Paris were ephemeral, short-lived productions, fashioned
for the summer and winter holiday seasons. The Paris Federation and The
Picture of Paris were staged at different types of institutions (fringe and
patent theaters respectively) and they straddled the period before and after
the pamphlet controversy began in earnest in November 1790; the two
harlequinades, therefore, offer illuminating snapshots of divergent moments
and contexts of reception of the Revolution in England. With reference to
French plays about the same event, my aim is to elucidate the differences
in historical representation between the Paris and London stages as well as
between the Royalty Theatre and Covent Garden.
Performing History / 63
History as Spectacle
I promised to send you a description of the federation: but it is
not to be described! One must have been present, to form any
judgment of a scene, the sublimity of which depended much less
on its external magnificence than on the effect it produced on the
minds of the spectators.
—Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France
Their confederations, their spectacles, their civic feasts, and their
enthusiasm I take no notice of; they are nothing but mere tricks.
—Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France8
Among the “grandes journées” of the French Revolution, the great
Festival of Federation on July 14, 1790 at the Champ de Mars (the site
today of the Eiffel Tower) was among the most spectacular. Organized
both as an anniversary commemoration of the start of the Revolution one
year earlier with the storming of the Bastille prison and as a marker and
celebration of the Revolution’s end, the fête gathered military personnel,
political representatives, the Royal family, and religious leaders—as well
as approximately 400,000 spectators—in a grand ceremony and mass
oath-taking in Paris.9 Enthusiasm for the event began weeks in advance as
thousands of citizens volunteered their labor to help prepare the military
grounds at the Champ de Mars to accommodate the numerous structures,
participants, and spectators. Even the King pitched in by coming to inspect
the work and progress. The event officially began on the eve of the fourteenth
with a ceremony and choral performance at Notre Dame Cathedral (renamed
the Temple of Liberty). The next morning, deputies, delegates, soldiers,
and guardsmen, representing the many departments of France, proceeded
from the Place de Grève (Hôtel de Ville) over a temporary bridge built for
the occasion to the newly-erected stadium at the Champ de Mars. There a
Catholic mass was performed over the altar of the fatherland by Talleyrand,
Bishop of Autun before three hundred priests. The King and National
Assembly then swore their respective oaths of fidelity to the new Constitution
from the Pavilion where they were seated, after which General Lafayette,
the master of ceremonies, led the nation’s troops in a collective oath of
fidelity to “nation, law, and king,” to which the spectators added their voices.
Several days of festivities followed, including a ball at the former site of the
Bastille on the evening of the fourteenth. William Wordsworth, who arrived
in Calais that day, described the joy of Festival-goers “returning/from the
great spousals newly solemnized” at the Champ de Mars. “Unhoused beneath
the evening star we saw/Dances of liberty.”10
64 / F E I L L A
Not only were oaths sworn by those present in Paris that day, but the
official program for the event had been distributed by royal proclamation
throughout the country three days before so that the oath could be sworn
“in concert and at the same moment by all the inhabitants and in every
part of this empire.”11 Thus at the appointed hour, citizens in towns across
France raised their arms and voices in a simultaneous vow of mutual duty
and loyalty. According to a British traveler who was in the French city of
Rheims and attended the federation ceremony there:
This ceremony was performed at precisely the same hour in
every town in the Kingdom, and there is something very wellconceived and magnificent in the idea of the bells all over the
Kingdom ringing at the same instant of time, and the whole nation
assembling to take the oath.12
The Festival climaxed in an extraordinary moment of national unity. The
oaths of fidelity signified the commitment of deputies to create a constitution
for France and of the military to enforce it. Aimed at quelling anxieties and
restoring order, the event constructed a narrative of reconciliation and happy
reunion between the newly empowered citizen-subjects and their king.
Thus, a kind of apogee was reached with the Federation: the king appeared
to have accepted the Revolution, a moderate constitutional government was
in power, and pressures from below were relatively contained.
In the days immediately following the fête, dramatizations of the
event appeared in theaters throughout Paris. 13 Helen Maria Williams
describes how the playhouses were filled with “comedies relative to the
circumstances of the times, and, on that account, preferred […] to all the wit
of Molière.”14 Topical plays about the Federation thus eclipsed the classical
repertory as audiences in Paris sought to experience the historic event for
themselves or re-live it alongside others. According to Williams’s account,
performances of federation plays gained much from the “accompaniment
of applause from some hundreds of the national guard, the real actors in the
scenes represented.”15 The “real actors” in the Festival of Federation, the
national guardsmen, now found themselves in the role of spectators at the
representation, watching a topical play that portrayed their own participation
in the event. The lines separating theatergoers from actors, and audience
from stage, were blurred. As Pierre Frantz explains, these topical plays, or
faits historiques in French, “which recount very recent events and elaborate
an immediate fiction are the creation of the Revolution. In many aspects
(simulations of military assaults, battles, fanfares, etc.), they resemble
festivals.”16 Born of the Revolution, the fait historique resembles a festival
Performing History / 65
not only in its simulation of pageantry and historic deeds, but also in the
relationship it establishes between spectators and actors. In the famous words
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in festivals, as opposed to theater, “the spectators
become an entertainment to themselves.”17
The presence of the guardsmen also served to authenticate the productions,
which now had to pay attention to the accuracy of the action, costumes, and
sets in ways they did not when depicting history far removed. However,
the primary concern of these French plays (and the playgoers) was not
with historical correctness or information, but with the emotional and
psychological effect on the audience. None of the French dramatizations
of the Federation enacted the fête itself on stage (Olympe de Gouges
planned such a re-enactment but the script was never completed); rather,
these productions either have a character recount the events of the day to
others or perform them as a private theatrical while the action itself remains
offstage. As Williams states in the epigraph above, the “sublimity” of the
event depended less on its “external magnificence” than on the “effect it
produced on the minds of the spectators.” This sentiment is borne out in
the federation plays as well, which represent the emotions and ideals the
day inspired, more than the particulars of the spectacle itself. According to
Williams, the federation plays served to ensure that the “enthusiastic spirit
of liberty displays itself, not merely on the days of solemn ceremonies” but
every day when the lyrics of the popular revolutionary song, the Ça ira,
return to the people’s lips.18 “When they sing, it is but to repeat a vow of
fidelity to the constitution, at which all who are present instantly join in the
chorus, and sportively lift up their hands in confirmation of this favourite
sentiment.”19 As the audience joins in the chorus and repeats the gesture of
the oath, actors and audience unite in a mutual celebration of patriotic values
and a repetition of vows of loyalty to the constitution. In a sense, the oath
is never a completed action in France. As Williams’s eyewitness account
suggests, the oath is re-performed and reinforced with each new display of
enthusiasm for liberty, whether at a federation or in the theater. Historian
Lynn Hunt links this enthusiasm with what she calls a “mythic present”;
that is, the ritual recreation of the Revolution’s spontaneous and unanimous
moment of creation of community in an outburst of feeling, in an attempt
to bring this mythic present to life again and again.20 In this way, the plays
do not so much commemorate or celebrate what happened as they confide
to citizens the persistent sensations and sentiments that embody the event,
and the collective promise to the future.
Theater thus had an important civic role to play. It supplied a dynamic
site of engagement in historical and political progress, and even precipitated
a reimagining of history, not as recordable event, but as ritual repetition.
66 / F E I L L A
Williams again offers a telling account of this when she describes how the
“ça ira hung on every lip, ça ira glowed on every countenance! Thus do the
French, lest they should […] forget one moment the cause of liberty, bind
it to their remembrance.”21 Through ritual repetition—of songs, pledges of
allegiance, and so on—theatergoers and patriots kept the Revolution and its
“cause of liberty” alive every day, and thereby sought to ensure its realization
into the future. Not only did events move directly from the streets to the
stage in the fait historique, but the reverse also occurred: actions moved
from the stage to the streets, as spectators became actors, and history’s
commemoration became the transmission not of the particulars of the event,
as Williams noted, but of shared enthusiasm for the cause of liberty.
The Spectacle of History
It is hardly a surprise that the London theaters would want to recreate
Revolutionary events not long after they happened. Living through the most
cataclysmic event of modern times, the British public was naturally eager to
understand its meaning for both France and England. The discussion above
of French plays about the Festival of Federation will serve chiefly to set the
British dramatizations of the same event in greater relief. Although they share
a number of common features—such as character types, marriage plots, and
republican political culture (songs, costumes, gestures)—the differences in
spirit, form, and content are immediately apparent between the two national
stages. The most significant of these differences is the fact that the British
works inspired by the Fête de la Fédération all recreate the ceremony and
its mass oath-taking on stage, something none of the French plays do.
Based on drawings and first-hand accounts by eyewitnesses at the Festival,
these topical plays provided viewers with the “external magnificence” of
the pageant, ceremony, and festivities. Additionally, whereas the French
plays are largely domestic comedies with conventional sentimental plots of
benevolence and reconciliation, the British plays of the fête are harlequinades,
or comic pantomimes, that mix scenes of Revolutionary history with the
antics of Harlequin and Columbine. The Lord Chamberlain had banned all
references to the French Revolution in the patent theaters,22 therefore the first
topical plays of the Festival of Federation, appeared at the minor playhouses,
which lay outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain’s office. In total
as many as six productions about the Festival of Federation were staged in
London. The Champ de Mars, an elaborate equestrian spectacle at Astley’s
Amphitheatre (also known as the Royal Grove, where Philip Astley exploited
his military background to dramatic effect), followed by Sadler’s Wells’
Performing History / 67
Champ de Mars, or, the Loyal Fœderation, a “Description of the Grand
National Fete held at Paris on July 14th last”; The French Jubilee, or Grand
Confederation at the Champ de Mars offered at Charles Hughes’s Royal
Circus; and The Paris Federation at the Royalty Theatre (July 1790).23 In
August, Liberty, or, Two Sides of the Water by George Colman opened at the
Haymarket (August 13, 1790). The success of the minor theaters with these
topical pieces led the patented theaters royal to try to get in on the action
as well, and on December 20, 1790, The Picture of Paris, Taken in the Year
1790 by Charles Bonner and Robert Merry opened at Covent Garden with
great success. I will focus on the two plays for which printed sketches exist:
The Paris Federation and The Picture of Paris.
The Paris Federation is the simpler of the two entertainments in terms of
plot and structure. It follows the typical harlequinade pattern of two parts,
the first a comic portion or “pantomimic preludio” and the second a serious
portion which here consists of “the most splendid exhibition of the CHAMP
DE MARS on the 14th of July last.”24 The play’s listing in the Times notes that
the theater manager had recently returned from Paris and “pledges himself
for the accuracy of it.”25 The notice also enumerates the many highlights of
the Federation that ticket buyers could hope to see—the “Triumphal Arches,
L’Autel de la Patrie, the Throne, the Populace, and the Military, precisely
as it presented itself to View”—boasting too that the scale of the theater
and “well known Abilities” of the set designer Signior Marinari guarantee
a “magnificent Spectacle.”26 The action opens with the typical harlequinade
love intrigue in which the impending nuptials of Colombine to a rich Spanish
Don are threatened by Harlequin’s arrival. Forcefully captured and deprived
of his magic sword by Colombine’s father (Pantaloon), Harlequin manages to
escape with Colombine (scene II). The couple flees to a nearby wood where
Genius restores Harlequin’s sword with the caveat that he must remain true
to his love or else forfeit his magic powers (scene III). The couple is now
pursued by Pantaloon and his men through a variety of spectacular scenes
on land and sea until Harlequin uses his magic powers to conjure a church in
which he and Colombine are swiftly wed (scene VII). When Pantaloon learns
of the marriage, all is forgiven and the family is reconciled. Harlequin then
invites everyone to the Champ de Mars to attend the Festival of Federation.
The second act follows Harlequin, Colombine, Pantaloon, and his Clown
(Grotesque) as they arrive at an inn in France. Denied entry by the innkeeper
because he will not pay in advance, Harlequin uses his magic to acquire food
and drink and leave the innkeeper “to regret his inhospitality.” The characters
then interact with local peasants, pitch in with the preparations for the grand
fête, and finally attend the ceremony at the Champ de Mars. As Harlequin
makes his way to the Festival, he encounters various types who represent
68 / F E I L L A
a broad cross-section of society and the different perspectives each has on
events, such as a Savoyard, a poissarde, a corps of child soldiers, and so
on. These short scenes offer abundant opportunities for the comic antics of
Harlequin and Grotesque. They also allow for platitudes about liberty and
equality sung by a colorful cast of local characters against the magnificent
backdrops of Paris. In one particularly politically forward scene, peasants
mistake the Clown’s costume for the livery of a servant and entreat him to
exchange it for revolutionary garb: “But doff it all,/For, great and small/
Are equal in this nation;/Arms, titles, liv’ries, they/Are for ever done away/
In a total annihilation.” The prejudices, habits, and symbols of difference
no longer hold in the new order. Enforcing the “annihilation” of rank and
privilege, and its outward signs, the French citizens encourage Clown to
remove his uniform and don instead the red bonnet and cockade of the
revolutionaries. After doing so, the Clown sings: “Now, by the aid/Of this
cockade,/I feel my liberation.”27 The comic transformation of Clown into a
French revolutionary, through a simple costume change, is achieved not by
the powers of Harlequin’s magic wand, but by the will of the people. The
clear message of equality, as the formerly subjugated servant experiences
“liberation” from his servitude (“stripp’d of slavery”), would have resonated
with the original audience at the Royalty which, according to Worrall,
contained many from the liveried servant class.28 The Federation spectacle
thus combines entertainment and information into a highlight reel of the
event that also documents the new political ideologies and culture in France.
The comic and serious portions of the pantomime are thus remarkably
intertwined, more than was typical in eighteenth-century pantomime, so
that Harlequin, Grotesque and Colombine become active participants in the
goings-on in France throughout Act Two. Not only do they pick up shovels
and join laborers in excavating the field for the amphitheater at the Champ
de Mars, but they also join the people in revolutionary songs that celebrate
the storming of the Bastille, the “rights of man” and the sentiment that “the
cruel aristocracy ne’er shed a tear at misery.” These interludes culminate
in the final scene of the Festival of Federation. This depicts the ceremony
performed by Bishop Talleyrand as he administers the civic oath (in fact it
was General Lafayette, the hero of the American Revolution, who oversaw
the political portion of the program). The Bishop then addresses the King
with these words: “The flame of liberty, serene and pure,/Swear henceforth to
preserve.” The King responds with the refrain, “Je le jure, Je le jure (I swear
it, I swear it).” The Bishop then turns to “the people” and says: “Frenchmen…
Swear ye the oath which gives to France new life,” to which they also reply:
“Je le jure, Je le jure.” The people then hail the King as the “guardian of the
law,” bringing the entertainment to a close. Despite the obvious differences
Performing History / 69
in content between the two Acts—namely between domestic and comic
intrigue in the first, and foreign historico-political events in the second—the
action and themes of Act Two loosely parallel and repeat those presented
in the “Pantomimic preludio” of Act One: both involve preparations for a
celebration (marital, political), the clever foiling of an unjust power (the
father, the innkeeper), and a reconciliation with the father figure through
an official vow of fidelity (marriage vow, federative oath). The oath at the
Champ de Mars was designed to mark the moment of reunion that would
mend the broken bonds of the French nation caused by the rebellions of
1789. As Lynn Hunt explains, the Festival of Federation “brought the
French family back together again.”29 The fête was thus a celebration of
solidarity and reconciliation; the tyrannical father was transformed into
a benevolent ruler bound to his children by mutual duty. In the play the
conventional harlequin Preludio prepared the way for the political matter of
the Federation spectacle that followed it. The emphasis in both was on the
rule of law and liberty as the happy and natural resolution of domestic strife.
With only weeks separating the representation from the events portrayed,
the play offered a newsreel of events but, as Worrall observes, “in a form
subliminally domesticated into the cosily familiar genre of the pantomime
harlequinade.”30 The framing of Revolutionary events within conventional
harlequinade provided a familiar frame through which to view contemporary
history and political culture abroad.
Charles Bonner and Robert Merry’s later pantomime, The Picture of Paris,
follows a similar Harlequin plot as The Paris Federation (Columbine’s love
for Harlequin is opposed by Pantaloon, but Harlequin overcomes this obstacle
by rescuing Columbine from her father’s house), but offers a more complex
narrative structure intertwining three parallel storylines that reinforce the
shared themes of liberty and resistance to paternal authority.31 One cannot
make too much of the content of light and conventional entertainments such
as this. However, the fact that The Picture of Paris premiered at a remove
of five months from the original event, and only three weeks after the
publication of Edmund Burke’s widely-read and controversial Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790), makes for an interesting comparison
with the Royalty’s earlier Federation piece. Burke’s support of the French
aristocracy, its traditions and values, over the revolutionaries whom he
paints as a “band of cruel ruffians,” can be seen reflected in the play, which
expresses much more ambivalence to events unfolding on the Continent than
The Paris Federation. The year 1790 had been characterized by a mixture of
popular violence and peaceable, if feverish, political activity in France, as its
absolute monarchy transformed into a constitutional monarchy. In December
1790 when The Picture of Paris opened it was uncertain whether destruction
70 / F E I L L A
and violence would prevail in France or whether an enduring constitutional
order would emerge. The sense of uncertainty was expressed by a reviewer
of the play in the European Magazine (1790) who writes, “whatever be the
speculative opinions of Parties and their tools—it is the national sentiment
and wish, that France should be free. Whether she be in the road to it, is
probably as well known to Harlequin, the hero of the present Pantomime,
as to Lord Stanhope, Mr. Burke, or Dr. Price.”32
The Picture of Paris contains much more elaborate and numerous sets
than The Paris Federation. Thomas Harris, the manager at Covent Garden,
commissioned five painters to create fourteen different painted scenes. The
production also counted thirty-one characters plus extras, and employed
new machinery constructed for the special effects. In tandem with the more
elaborate sets, the play also included a noteworthy convent plotline (at least
three scenes take place in a convent setting) and new emphasis on patriotic
songs celebrating British liberty not seen in the earlier play. Like the Paris
Federation, the action opens in the home of Columbine’s father, who is now
a French marquis, where two rivals (a petit maître and Harlequin) vie for
Columbine’s hand in marriage. Only now specific references are made to
recent events and acts of legislation in France such that the comic portion
of the pantomime is set, not in a fantastic world of myth, but in the real
world of contemporary France. Harlequin, in the guise of a silversmith, is at
the marquis’s home to execute a decree of the National Assembly banning
signs of nobility; he buys the marquis’ “now useless coronet” using an
assignat, the new currency of France. This opening scene depicts a peaceful
transfer of power from the noble elite to the laboring class as the signs of
aristocratic privilege are cleared away to be replaced by a more democratic
state under the National Assembly. This orderly process contrasts starkly
with the disorder and cacophony of the ensuing scene, in which the set shifts
to a “faithful representation” of the Convent of the Jacobins. According
to the stage direction, part of the convent is now home to a battalion of
national guardsmen and the scene is meant to show “the relaxed State of the
austerity which formerly characterized the religious Order, and the unbridled
licentiousness of the Poissards.” The term poissard refers to the uneducated
and vulgar denizens of Paris and was more specifically associated with the
fishmongers’ wives who had marched on Versailles in the October Days. The
juxtaposition of order and disorder in the scene, of faithful nuns and faithless
Jacobins, expresses wariness about the Revolution and the potentially violent
and immoral forces it unleashed.
This anxious vision of the French people escalates into full-blown fear
of the mob in the next scene set in the Place de Grève outside the Hôtel
de Ville, or city hall, in Paris where, as one reviewer of the entertainment
Performing History / 71
describes, “the fishwomen display the terrors of the Lanterne,” or lamppost
where aristocrats were hanged.33 The poissardes are about to sacrifice a
victim when the National Guard steps in to stop them, insisting that the
victim’s fate be decided by the law embodied in the magistrates at the Hôtel
de Ville. However, hope for the triumph of rational justice instituted by the
new military and judiciary bodies is short-lived: when the magistrates stop
short of a death sentence for the defendant, the crowd turns its “savage
resentment” and “vengeance” on the magistrates. As the feud reaches a
dangerous impasse, magic and commedia step in. Columbine and Harlequin
intervene to save the judges. Harlequin uses his “transforming power” to
turn them into emblematic figures of Justice, Mercy, and Truth. Harlequin’s
magic powers thus restore order and peace to the unruly and savage rioters
(7). Lines of tension are clearly drawn here between the expression of
support for liberty, on the one hand, and fear of the violent and lawless
mob, on the other.
It is a wonder that such incendiary and violent crowd scenes were
approved by the examiner of plays, John Larpent. Harris’s earlier attempts
to mount topical plays of the Revolution at Covent Garden—The Bastile
and The Touchstone, or Harlequin Traveller—met with strict censorship (the
latter was altered significantly and proved a commercial failure). Although
the pantomimic portion contained politically-charged crowd scenes, Harris
was only required to send the spoken portion of the play to the examiner.
Because the manuscript Larpent saw for The Picture of Paris was free of any
content that might offend or inspire republican sympathies, it was approved.34
The Prologue, for example, expresses a neutral perspective on the events
depicted: “[T]hink not, we presumptuously intend/To censure other Nations,
or commend./…No, be it ours, those comforts to revere,/Which Liberty and
Justice settled here, / Where the Free heart a genuine tribute brings, And hails
with Gratitude the best of Kings.”35 The insistence on the play’s patriotic
purpose, in service of King and country, effects a distancing from French
politics, drawing a clear border between the “here” of England and “there”
of France. The rest of the spoken portion involves an Irish captain and his
friend, the English gentleman St. Alban, who has come to the Continent
with the hopes of freeing his lover from a Catholic convent thanks to the
“decree that sets all Nuns free” (the February 1790 legislation passed by
the National Assembly that dissolved the convents and monasteries). This
convent plot, which will be picked up and developed throughout Act Two,
reverses the earlier convent scene with which the play opened. Whereas the
sanctuary of the Jacobin Convent was breached by the boisterous military
and political poissards in the earlier scene, in Act Two the convent becomes
the site of liberation from the tyranny of the patriarchal Church and family,
72 / F E I L L A
as rebellious daughters, forced into enclosure, are returned to society and
their true loves. The approved spoken portion thus only comprises a subplot
of the entertainment and is placed within the quite different context and clear
political references of the pantomimic portions.
In the next scene, which offers alternating panoramic and close-up views
of the banks of the Seine and the new temporary bridge (Pont Louis Seize),
a French soldier steps forward to sing a song in praise of Britannia: “Great
Britain is the noblest land/That e’er the world could boast,/Where Freedom
regulates command,/And her we love the most.” Lauding British liberty as
a model for France, he repeats this sentiment in the verses: “No fetters e’er
could Britons bear/Then why, my boys, should we.” The chorus joins in with
the refrain: “The King, the Nation, and the Law we are ready to obey” (8).
Appropriating the Revolution in the service of British values and ideals, the
scene depicts the happy transfer of British liberty across the Channel. In this
way, the play creates an interesting parallel with David Garrick’s Harlequin’s
Invasion (1759), about the invasion of England by Continental forms of
pantomime. In Garrick’s pantomime play, Harlequin is presented, from the
xenophobic view of the British stage, as French and Italian styles invading
England. At the end of the entertainment, Shakespeare triumphs as the icon of
Britain, figured on stage in a new monument to the bard: “Genius and Taste to
Britain he’ll restore,/And Farce and Harlequin shall be no more.”36 However,
as John O’Brien explains, after mid-century, the popularity of pantomime
with generations of theatergoers had “accomplished the remarkable trick of
making Continental commedia dell’arte characters seems always to have
been British.” Associated in particular with the Christmas season, Harlequin
plays “had the effect of domesticating pantomime” and identifying it as a
“national custom.”37 This transformation is apparent in The Picture of Paris,
which enacts an inversion of Harlequin’s Invasion. Now Harlequin represents
the incursion, not of Continental tastes into England, but of British liberty
into France. The unbridled passions and violence of the opening pantomime
scenes, symbolized in the lanterne and poissardes, are metamorphosed by
Harlequin’s magic into liberty and concord fashioned on the English model.
This transforming influence is repeated in the final scene of Act One,
which takes the viewers inside the National Assembly where deputies debate
and visitors look on from the galleries. Again, Harlequin uses his “mutable
power” to establish order, this time by changing the National Assembly into
the “Temple of Concord.” The Goddess Concord appears and her attendants
sing a duet in praise of peace and divine calm to the “soft and sweet music” of
wind instruments. This elaborate scene of magical transformation, typical of
harlequinade, creates a historical narrative connecting the previous episodes
and preparing the transition from the discordant first act of the pantomime
Performing History / 73
into the historical celebration of harmony and union at the Festival in the
second.
Act Two opens with “a partial view of the Champs de Mars” including the
Arc de Triomphe, altar of the fatherland, and the Pavilion where the King and
the National Assembly were seated throughout the ceremony. Here a number
of pantomimic incidents occur involving a trio of soldiers, Harlequin, and
Grotesque (the Clown), culminating in a perspective view of the Champ de
Mars taken from Chaillot (today the Trocadero). When a discharge of fire
and cheers from the crowd announce the start of the proceedings, the scene
abruptly shifts to the inside of a convent where a “humorous sketch” depicts
the “effect which the throwing off of restraint from the religious orders” has
had on the manners of the nuns (“those hitherto secluded characters”). The
scene includes a song about “an honest lad/Who lov’d a cloyster’d nun”
and who visits the convent every day. “He thought it a big shame, a most
confounded sin,/That she cou’d not get out at all, and he cou’d not get in.”
His persistence is rewarded when “Tenderly she listen’d to all he had to
say/…Then open’d the door and [they] together ran away.”38 She and the
other nuns thus exchange their religious oaths for marriage vows; even the
“Lady Abbess has been married this fortnight […] she’s so happy.” Indeed,
the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was passed by the National Assembly
only two days before the Festival of Federation, and would prove to be an
important turning point in the Revolution’s de-christianizing agenda.
Although the second act is largely concerned with the procession of
military guardsmen and clergy, culminating in the ceremony and mass
oath-taking at the Champ de Mars, the convent plot offers a counterpoint
of intrigue that repeats the theme of liberty being celebrated. In breaking
free of the chains of the Church, the lovers are free to choose according to
their natural inclinations and thus free to contract together. A reviewer in the
European magazine describes the climax of the St. Albans plot as follows:
[A] pathetic scene takes place at a Convent, on the visit of an
English Gentleman who had lost his mistress within the walls.
The Nun comes out to him veiled; affects deep concern that his
mistress should not have lived to participate this happy event;
and in the act of delivering to him her last bequest, she throws off
her veil and delivers up herself. These additional circumstances
give peculiar interest to the Pantomime.39
The happy reunion of the Gentleman and his love clearly echoes and
reinforces the theme of reunion and liberty celebrated in the civic Festival.
Returning to the action at the Champ de Mars, various groups proceed
74 / F E I L L A
onto the field and sing airs and choruses with Freedom as their theme. “Hope
that speaks the bliss of wooing,/Passion bent on soft subduing/Friendship,
joy, and peace agree, /To be blest we must be free” (17). Blending the
private story of romantic love with the public expression of love of liberty,
the final scenes pit French tyranny (both religious and political) against
liberty and happiness. The spectacular procession is then followed by “the
reconciliation of the Marquis with Harlequin, on whom he bestows his
daughter.” The marriage of Harlequin and Columbine, therefore, occurs
with the consent of the father (and so is not a rebellious act as it was in The
Paris Federation). The entertainment concludes with the “celebrated Fete
given by the National Guards of Paris to the provincial deputies upon the
decorated and illuminated platform of the bastile,” and a final round of the
popular revolutionary song, Ça ira.40
The Picture of Paris expresses clear support for liberty and the overthrow
of tyranny (religious, political, patriarchal) in France, but also fear of the
violent mob and is quick to praise Britannia throughout. The final chorus,
for example, both attacks despotism in France (“Oppression’s heavy hour
is past”) and sings the praises of Britain’s “honour’d King” and “favour’d
land.” As George Taylor notes, “the ambiguity between praise of Britannia
and the attack on despotism was to become typical of all plays that touched
on the struggle for liberty in France.”41 The play’s equivocal attitudes toward
the Revolution led some in the press to focus more on the play’s early
turbulent scenes of violence than on the later reconciliations of the ending.
Reporting on the King and Queen’s attendance at a performance of The
Picture of Paris, a journalist for the Times personified the city of Paris as a
citizen “snatching the diadem from an anointed head, and bestowing it on the
tyrannical leaders of a mob.”42 In contrast to the ancient hero of Greek legend
“deciding on the merits of beauty,” this “Modern Paris” overthrows the gods
and intervenes in (divine) history to change its course and its parameters in
favor of the people. Another critic of the play in the Times wryly commented
on the scene in which Harlequin transforms the magistrates into emblems
of Justice, Mercy, and Truth, questioning what relevance these three virtues
could possibly have in a play about contemporary France: “surely the author
of this incoherent jumble of ideas does not mean to affirm that the Revolution
in France is founded on any of those godlike virtues.”43 In their discomfort
with the slippage between myth and reality, divine hierarchy and democratic
politics, both critics echo Burke’s concerns with Revolutionary festivals
and confederations as a “trick,” not unlike Harlequin’s own, to artificially
promote bonds of affection and loyalty to new democratic institutions.
According to O’Brien, “pantomime became an excellent means of containing
political content, invoking contemporary issues in the culture and the state
Performing History / 75
for the purpose of domesticating them in a world of myth and fantasy.”44
However, with the advent of the French Revolution, we see a complicating
of the relationship between politics and fantasy, as the comic pantomime and
serious Federation portions blend into a single present with clear references
to the immediate political realities in France. Thomas Harris was criticized
for the production of The Picture of Paris, and the Tory government under
William Pitt, nervous about the potential spread of the Revolution to England,
warned the theater that it “ought to steer clear of politics” in future.45 It was
evident five months after the Festival of Federation that the celebration did
not mark the end of the Revolution as some organizers of the event, and
onlookers from England, had hoped.
The Picture of Paris was nonetheless a commercial success. According
to the Times, “[t]his splendid exhibition met with great applause.”46 It was
advertised forty-three times and ran until June 1791. Although some called
it a “Hodge Podge” production, the European magazine, and London review
deemed “the scenes and decorations superb and charming” and “the dialogue
and songs well written. It is an entertainment of considerable merit in its
kind.”47 Whereas the Royalty spectacle focused exclusively on the immediate
events surrounding the Festival of Federation and on the democratic ideals
and political culture in France, The Picture of Paris places the event in the
larger historical context of a review of “the Year 1790.” It thus provides a
broader and different narrative of the Revolution into which the festival
figures as a moment of concord. Additionally, whereas the Clown is turned
into a revolutionary by exchanging his costume for a cockade in The Paris
Federation, in the Covent Garden pantomime, Harlequin instead transforms
revolution and violence into British liberty and concord.
Performing History
As Britons reacted to the sudden and unscripted events in France in 1789
and 1790 and considered their power to reshape the political and moral
landscape, the role of history moved to the fore in a new way. Theaters
in London attempted to bring contemporary history on stage through the
dramatic portrayal of actual Revolutionary events, such as the destruction of
the Bastille and the Festival of Federation. As Frederick Reynolds pointed
out, theaters offered a different perspective on the French Revolution from
the polemical ones expressed in political writings and newspaper reports.
It only stands to reason that the London plays of the Festival of Federation
would be different in both content and form from those staged in Paris. There
were no French guardsmen in the London audiences, and few if any British
76 / F E I L L A
spectators would have witnessed the Federation firsthand. The Revolutionary
entertainments functioned like “dramatic newsreel[s]” of contemporary
events with stock comic preludes and scenes that played to the curiosity and
wonder of the British public in regard to developments across the Channel.
Whereas the progressive French faits historiques pioneered an innovative
aesthetic strategy aimed at providing audiences with the experience of
being present—bodily and emotionally—at the process of historical and
political change, the British harlequinades of the Festival of Federation
turned instead to the familiar form of popular pantomime that served to
domesticate foreign events within national narratives and perspectives. The
two British Harlequin entertainments explored here nonetheless represent
different views on the events they portray, a function of timing but also of
the institutions in which they were staged. Covent Garden was a legitimate
theater royal, subject to censorship, and thus the script included the requisite
patriotic platitudes despite the playwright, Robert Merry’s, sympathetic
support of the Revolution. The “Hodge Podge” nature of The Picture of
Paris thus stemmed from the diverse forces molding the work, and put
forward an overdetermined interpretation of the French Revolution in the
service of British nationalism. The Royalty Theatre, by contrast, was able to
take greater liberties in representing republican and democratic values and
the ideological viewpoints of the French character types portrayed. More
documentary in nature, and more in line with the Royalty’s own politics, it
expresses a less conflicted enthusiasm for liberty in France than the Covent
Garden production, which is tempered by greater alarm and uncertainty.
Both emphasize the swiftness of the changes taking place in the political and
social order in France. Whether it is the quick costume change of the Clown
into revolutionary garb in The Paris Federation, or the quick transformation
of the Champ de Mars from empty military field to federation stage in The
Champs de Mars at the Royal Circus, or the swift dismantling of the Palais
Bourbon, home of the renowned Prince de Condé, into a heap of ruins
in a scene in The Picture of Paris, the pantomimic actions elicit a comic
performance of the rapidity, spontaneity, and ease of transition from the Old
to New Regime. In her analysis of early nineteenth-century harlequinade,
Jane Moody has noted the way in which the “unexpected metamorphosis of
urban goods and shops in pantomime…seems to transform into laughter the
experience of endless change and social mobility.”48 In the case of the magical
metamorphoses wrought by the French Revolution, something similar
can be said of the topical pantomimes of the early 1790s: the unexpected
transmutations of aristocratic armorial badges, costumes, and structures seem
to transform into laughter the experience of revolutionary change as the past
and its traditional markers and institutions undergo swift demolitions and
Performing History / 77
reinventions. English pantomime entertainments employed a familiar form
in which to frame these foreign events, and also, in the case of The Picture
of Paris, to historicize them within a British national narrative. Whether,
like The Paris Federation, the play expresses pro-republican sentiments or
the more cautious and ambivalent perspectives of The Picture of Paris, the
British harlequinades reflect a British perspective on contemporary history
that directs enthusiasm to patriotic ends. Focusing primarily on the “external
magnificence” of the Festival, they underscore the spectacle of history
and circumscribe the unfolding events in France within the familiar form
of harlequinade and its stock trope of magical transformation in order to
elicit the distancing effect of laughter. Whereas the French federation plays
sought to keep the enthusiastic moment alive in a mythic present, the British
harlequinades of the Festival of Federation aimed instead to monumentalize
the ephemeral event as History.
NOTES
y thanks to Dan Gustafsson for organizing the panel “Dramatic and Historical ReM
enactments in the Eighteenth Century” at NEASECS 2013 at which an early version
of this paper was given, and to those who attended for their helpful comments, many
of which are reflected here. I also wish to thank Michelle Burnham, Eve T. Bannet,
and the anonymous reviewers at SECC for their invaluable insights and suggestions.
1.
The Triumph of Liberty, or the Destruction of the Bastille premiered on
August 5, 1789 at the Royal Circus, and played for seventy-nine nights. Despite
the avid interest of audiences in the French Revolution, the examiner of plays in
England (who had control over the repertory in the royal patent theaters following
the Licensing Act of 1737) censored all dramas that referred to democratic rights.
For example, Thomas Harris’s play, The Bastille (written by Frederick Reynolds)
was banned. When he tried to reuse the sets in a revival of The Touchstone, or
Harlequin Traveller (1779) later that year, he was forced to scale them back and
the play proved a commercial failure. As a result of this censorship, the minor
theaters seized the opportunity to stage topical plays. These non-patent theaters were
barred from staging the spoken word, but otherwise their performances lay outside
the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain’s office. George Taylor notes that Dent’s
Bastille play, Triumph of Liberty at the Royal Circus, was probably “the same play
that the censor had banned at Covent Garden.” The French Revolution and the
London Stage, 1789–1805 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000] (43).
2.Astley’s Paris in an Uproar premiered on August 18, 1789. Gallic Freedom
at Sadler’s Wells (premiere September 28, 1789) was so popular that “servants were
allowed to keep their master’s places only until 7:30, instead of the usual 8:30”
78 / F E I L L A
(Dennis Arundell, The Story of Sadler’s Wells, 1683–1964 [NY: Theatre Arts Books,
1965], 46). “Bastille war” is cited by Gillian Russell, Theatres of War: Performance,
Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995):
67.
3.
The Life and Times of Frederick Reynolds (London, 1827): vol. 2, 54.
4. Jane Moody in Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000); Gillian Russell in The Theatres of War; George Taylor
in The French Revolution and the London Stage; and David Worrall in Politics of
Romantic Theatricality, 1787–1832: The Road to the Stage (London: Palgrave, 2014)
and Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period Subcultures,
1773–1832 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). This essay also responds to John
O’Brien’s magisterial monograph on eighteenth-century pantomime, Harlequin
Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ.
Press, 2004). O’Brien maintains that it was “comparatively rare” for a harlequin
play to depict a political event in the eighteenth century (the scope of his study ends
in 1760), but political topics become more frequent on the London stage after the
Revolution in 1789 (O’Brien, “Pantomimic Politics,” in The Oxford Handbook of
the Georgian Theatre, eds. Swindells and Taylor [New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
2014], 405). David Worrall treats these two plays in the context of institutional (the
Royalty Theatre) and domestic (Birmingham Riots of July 1791) history respectively
in order to “demonstrate the engagement of dramatic writing with political culture”
(Worrall, The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 67), and John Mee discusses them
in the context of Robert Merry’s works and politics in “The Magician No Conjuror:
Robert Merry and the Political Alchemy of the 1790s” in Unrespectable Radicals?
Popular Politics in the Age of Reform, eds. Michael T. David and Paul A. Pickering,
(Aldershot, UK; Ashgate, 2008), 41–55.
5.Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 7.
6. Mark Salber Philips, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
2013), 19.
7. Royalty Theatre (Tower Hamlets, London, England), A Sketch of the
entertainment, now performing at the Royalty Theatre, in two parts: consisting of
a pantomimic preludio, and The Paris federation. To which is added, the popular
French music, adapted to the harpsichord. Fourth ed. (London, 1790), Eighteenth
Century Collections Online; and Robert Merry, The airs, duetts, and chorusses,
arrangement of scenery, and sketch of the pantomime, entitled The picture of Paris.
Taken in the year 1790. As performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden (London,
1790), Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
8.
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, eds. Frank Miller Turner and
Dawn M. McMahon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 161.
9. As Mona Ozouf explains in Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. by
Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), for some organizers of
the event, the fête was intended to serve as “a way of bringing the turbulent period
to a close rather than setting men in motion. They had not foreseen that collective
enthusiasm would spill beyond their joyless projects” (44–45).
10.Wordsworth, Prelude, Book 6, ll. 388–89 and 368–69.
Performing History / 79
11. Quoted in Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 43.
12. In a letter from C. B. Wollaston, a British naval lieutenant, to his sister-inlaw describing the events at Rheims on July 14, 1790, in English Witnesses of the
French Revolution, ed. J.M. Thompson, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1938), 83.
13. Examples include Jean-Louis Gabiot de Salins’s La Confédération nationale
(July 20, 1789 at the Ambigu Comique); Boutet de Monvel’s Le Chêne patriotique,
ou La Matinée du 14 juillet 1790 (music by Dalayrac, July 10, 1790 at the Italiens);
La fête de la liberté ou le diner des patriotes (July 12, 1790 at the Théâtre du Palais
Royal); La Fête en petit at the Montansier; and Collot d’Herbois’s La Famille
patriote (July 17, 1790 at the Théâtre du Feydeau [de Monsieur]). Other plays, such
as Nicolas de Bonneville’s L’an MDCCLXXXIX and Joseph Aude’s Le Journaliste
des ombres were written for the event and performed starting on July 14.
14.Williams, Letters from France, ed. Janet Todd, vol. I, vol.1 (New York:
Scholars Facsimiles, 1975), 90. I am repeating here some of the points made in
“Sentimental Vows and the Affective Bonds of Social Contract” in The Sentimental
Theater of the French Revolution (Aldershot, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 93–126, in order
to provide the context for British stagings of the Federation and its oath. See also
Jean Starobinski, “The Oath: David” in 1789: The Emblems of Reason, trans. Barbara
Bray (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 99–124; and Scott Magelssen, “Celebrating
the Revolution While the King Is Still on the Throne: The Fall of the Bastille and
the Festival of Federation (July 1790)” in Staging Nationalism: Essays on Theatre
and National Identity, ed. Kiki Gounaridou, (Jefferson: McFarland, 2005), 32–47.
15.Williams, Letters from France, vol. I, vol. 1, 91.
16. Pierre Frantz, “Pas d’entracte pour la Révolution,” in La Carmagnole des
muses, ed. Jean Claude Bonnet (Paris: Colin, 1988): “[L]es faits historiques qui
racontent des événements très récents et élaborent une fiction immédiate sont une
création de la Révolution. Par bien des aspects (simulations d’assauts militaires,
combats, fanfares, etc.), ils s’apparentent à la fête” (392).
17.Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater,
trans. by Allan Bloom (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 126. “[Make
them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so
that all will be better united]” (126).
18.Williams, Letters from France, vol. I, vol. 1, 204–6. With the Marseillaise,
the ça ira was the popular song of the French Revolution. As Williams describes, “ça
ira hung on every lip, ça ira glowed on every countenance! Thus do the French, lest
they should [...] forget one moment the cause of liberty, bind it to their remembrance”
(205). Williams is referring here to the play La Famille patriote, ou le jour de la
Fédération by Collot d’Herbois. Her relatives put on a private performance of the
play in which Williams reluctantly acted the part of Liberty.
19.Williams, Letters from France, vol. I, vol.1, 70–71.
20. Lynn Hunt, Politics Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1984), 27.
21.Williams, Letters from France, vol. I, vol.1, 70–71.
22.On censorship in Georgian Theater, see Jeffrey N. Cox, “The French
Revolution in the English Theater” in History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic
80 / F E I L L A
Literature, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1990), 33–52;
Leonard W. Conolly, The Censorship of English Drama, 1737–1824 (San Marino,
CA: Huntington Library, 1976); and Worrall, Theatric Revolution.
23. Worrall refers to it as Pantomimic Preludio from its full printed title, A Sketch
Of The Entertainment, Now Performing At The Royalty Theatre, In Two Parts:
Consisting Of A Pantomimic Preludio, And The Paris Federation, To which is added
The Popular French Music (1790). Like George Taylor, I use the less ambiguous
Paris Federation. On the Royalty Theatre, which was managed in June 1790 by the
actor Ralph Wewitzer, see Worrall, Theatric Revolution, 69–102.
24.London Times (December 20, 1790).
25.London Times (December 20, 1790).
26.London Times (December 20, 1790).
27.The Paris Federation, Part II, scene 2, 9–10.
28. Worrall, Theatric Revolution, 96.
29. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 35.
30. Worrall, Theatric Revolution, 99.
31. Several printed “sketches” of the pantomime were published. Quotations here
are drawn from the fourth edition, as well as the Larpent manuscript. Robert Merry
was a well-known poet who made a name as Della Crusca. He was in France in the
summer of 1789, visiting the National Assembly, and on his return to London in
1790 published the poem, “Laurel of Liberty.” He wrote occasional verse for English
newspapers. Further sources of The Picture of Paris include the 37-page vocal score
published by Longman and Broderip, London; Gresdna Doty, The Career of Mrs.
Anne Brunton Merry in the American Theatre (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State
Univ. Press, 1999), 34–35; Philip H. Highfill, et al, A Biographical Dictionary of
Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in
London, 1660 to 1800 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1993), 16: 71.
32.The European magazine, and London review; containing the literature,
history, politics, arts, manners and amusements of the age. By the Philological
Society of London, vol. 18 (London, 1790), 468.
33.The European magazine 18 (1790): 468.
34. Taylor sees the approval of the play’s depiction of events of the Revolution
as an affirmation of England’s sympathies with the achievements being celebrated
in the Federation. Because of the vast difference between the spoken portion in the
manuscript sent to Larpent’s office and the pantomime parts, Paul F. Rice and David
Worrall rather maintain that Larpent had been duped. (British Music and the French
Revolution [Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010].)
35. From the Larpent manuscript quoted in Taylor, The French Revolution on the
London Stage, 60–61.
36. See John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain, 227
37. John O’Brien, “Pantomime,” in Cambridge Companion to British Theater
1730–1830, eds. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2009), 113.
38.The Picture of Paris, 18.
Performing History / 81
39. The European magazine 18 (1790): 468. It is telling that this most affecting
scene of the play mobilizes emotion for British rather than French characters and
for personal rather than political interests.
40. On the role of music in the Revolutionary harlequinades, see Paul F. Rice,
British Music and the French Revolution.
41. Taylor, The French Revolution and the London Stage, 45.
42. London Times (Dec. 30, 1790), 2.
43. London Times (Dec. 20, 1790).
44. O’Brien, “Pantomimic Politics,” 391.
45. London Times (Dec. 20, 1790) quoted in Walley Chamberlain Oulton, The
History of the Theatres of London: Containing an annual register of all the new
and revived tragedies, comedies, operas, farces, pantomimes, &c. that have been
performed at the Theatres-Royal, in London, from the year 1771 to 1795, vol. 1
(London, 1796), 80.
46. London Times (Dec. 20, 1790).
47. London Times (Dec. 20, 1790) and The European magazine 18 (1790): 468
respectively.
48. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 219.