Waxworks as Theatre

Ever since Madame Tussaud began exhibiting wax figures in the eighteenth century, the display of waxworks has had a theatrical flair. Charles Dickens picked up on this in his novel The Old Curiosity Shop, which depicts its heroine, Nell, getting a job with a traveling waxworks exhibit.

The proprietress of the waxworks, Mrs. Jarley, first spied Nell when she was traveling in the company of two Punch and Judy men, Codlin and Short. To Mrs. Jarley, however, her refined waxworks show is infinitely superior to the pair's puppets. "Never go into the company of a filthy Punch any more," she instructs Nell.

While Punch and Judy shows emphasized their comedy, waxworks stressed their refined and educational value. Mrs. Jarley puts it this way:

It's calm and--what's that word again--critical?--no--classical, that's it--it's calm and classical. No low beatings and knockings about, no jokings and squeakings like your precious Punches, but always the same, with a constantly unchanging air of coldness and gentility; and so like life, that if wax-work only spoke and walked about, you'd hardly know the difference. I won't go so far as to say, that, as it is, I've seen wax-work quite like life, but I've certainly seen some life that was exactly like wax-work.

In spite of Mrs. Jarley's pride in the refinement of her craft, she is embarrassed by the fact that she cannot read. When she uncovers that Nell can read and write, she seizes upon this fact as evidence that the girl will be a valuable addition to her team. Mrs. Jarley then goes about teaching Nell the stories of all the people depicted in wax, including "an unfortunate Maid of Honour in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, who died from pricking her finger in consequence of working upon a Sunday" and "Jasper Packlemerton of atrocious memory, who courted and married fourteen wives, and destroyed them all by tickling the soles of their feet."

What's interesting about the waxworks segment of the novel is that Nell herself as exhibitor becomes of greater interest to the crowds than any of the waxworks themselves. Mrs. Jarley at first sends Nell out through the streets in a light cart with a wax figure of a notorious brigand. This attempt to drum up interest in the show works so well that the proprietress later keeps Nell in the exhibition room and sends the brigand out alone, not wanting to cheapen the value of her live exhibit.

Comically, the waxworks figures turn out to be interchangeable. A wax figure of the famed clown Joseph Grimaldi is altered to resemble the grammarian Lindley Murray, and a figure of a murderess is transformed into the imminently respectable dramatist Hannah More, author of the moralistic tragedy Percy. A nightcap and gown are added to a waxwork of William Pitt to turn it into the likeness of the poet William Cowper, and Mary Queen of Scots is dressed in male attire to become Lord Byron!

Not everyone was a fan of the waxworks, however. Miss Monflathers, who runs a school for young ladies, tells Nell that working for a waxworks is "very naughty and unfeminine, and a perversion of the properties wisely and benignantly transmitted to us." As hard as Mrs. Jarley works trying to induce visitors to patronize her establishment, the public increasingly just comes to the entryway to peek inside at the figures there rather than pay their sixpence admission to see the whole show.

Dickens acknowledges the difficulty of art forms that position themselves as middle-brow culture. Punch and Judy, which has no pretensions to being great art, remains popular with the working class, and the temples of culture at Drury Lane and Covent Garden continue in operation. Mrs. Jarley's exhibition, while it has pretensions of appealing to the gentry, earns the scorn of uppity people like Miss Monflathers and fails to draw in the sixpences of working class folks who find the cost of admission to be prohibitive.

The continued presence of Madame Tussaud's wax museum in Times Square proves that waxworks today can still be economically viable, but many other middlebrow arts continue to struggle. One need look no further than the Broadway shows nearby Tussaud's waxworks. They are frequently forced to exhibit star actors as their main attraction, rather than the plays themselves, which can sometimes seem as interchangeable as Lord Byron and a Scottish queen.

The Tragical Comedy of Punch and Judy

I've written in the past about Mr. Punch, the puppet descendant of the commedia dell'arte character Punchinello. He first showed up in England in the 17th century, and a plaque outside of St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden marks the spot of the first recorded performance of a Punch puppet play, which was mentioned by Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1662.

At first, Punch appears to have been a marionette, but later versions tend to be hand puppets. We have records of puppet shows featuring Punch and his wife Judy throughout the eighteenth century. Colley Cibber's daughter, Charlotte Charke, was given a license in 1738 to run a puppet theatre at St. James's that was known as Punch's Theatre. Unfortunately, no scripts for Punch and Judy plays exist from this period.

That changed in 1827, when John Payne Collier published a script entitled The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Punch and Judy. The dialogue was allegedly related to Collier by the puppeteer Giovanni Piccini, but given that Collier was later outed as a forger of documents relating to William Shakespeare, everything he claimed has to be taken with a heavy portion of salt. He secured the noted artist George Cruikshank to illustrate the book, though, so the script at least has the advantage of being beautiful.

Collier's script begins with Punch getting into a fight with his neighbor, Scaramouch, another figure from the commedia tradition. Scaramouch's dog Toby bites Punch's nose, and after a fight between the two neighbors, Punch knocks Scaramouch's head clean off his shoulders. Judy then makes her first appearance, handing the couple's child over to Punch. After failing to appease the crying baby with a lullaby, Punch beats his child, then throws the baby out the "window" of the puppet stage's proscenium and into the audience.

As you might imagine, Judy is unimpressed. She beats Punch with a stick, but then he snatches the stick from her and beats her in turn. After at first appearing like he will relent, Punch beats Judy to death and knocks her body off the side of the stage, claiming, "To lose a wife is to get a fortune." He soon finds another woman, though: Pretty Polly. She's actually a character borrowed from John Gay's play The Beggar's Opera, and in Collier's script Punch sings an air from that play: "When the heart of a man is oppress'd with cares."

The second act opens with a special puppet with an extendable neck. Alluding to hanging, Punch tells him, "You may get it stretched for you, one of these days, by somebody else." The comment foreshadows an event later in the play, when after killing a doctor and a servant and beating a poor blind man, Punch is at last arrested for multiple murders. The hangman Jack Ketch tries to execute him, but Punch tricks Ketch into putting his own head in the noose, and Punch hangs him. Punch's final challenge comes when the devil himself comes for him, but Punch succeeds in even beating the devil.

A later Punch and Judy script appeared in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor in 1851. The script Mayhew recorded also includes a clown named Joey (after Joseph Grimaldi) and a character named Jim Crow (who originated in minstrel shows). Another innovation in the script is bringing Judy back from the grave as a ghost. After being terrified by the ghost, Punch keels over, and a doctor comes on and asks Punch if he's dead. Punch responds that, yes, he is dead, and becomes quite upset when the doctor doesn't believe him.

Punch and Judy shows have continued to evolve over the years, though now in the 21st century, they might just be too violent for most people's taste. Even Mr. Punch himself might tell you that he's now dead. You probably shouldn't believe him, though.

What about the ghost?

I was reading Dinah Mulock's short story "The Last House on C---- Street," when I came across some interesting theatrical tidbits in this curious little ghost tale. The narrator is speaking to an older woman, Mrs. MacArthur, when the old lady recalls the first theatre outing of her youth: "we went to see Hamlet at Drury Lane, with John Kemble and Sarah Siddons!"

Kemble and Siddons have been the topic of previous postings on this blog, but I was intrigued by how Mrs. MacArthur describes the performance later on in the story: "Ah, you know nothing of what a play is, now-a-days. You never saw John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons. Though in dresses and shows it was far inferior to the Hamlet you took me to see last week, my dear--"

The short story comes from 1856, so it would have been written around the height of Charles Kean's "antiquarian" productions of Shakespeare that aimed at historical authenticity. While the "dresses" and "shows" of these more modern productions really were an improvement over the neo-classical productions of Kemble and Siddons, they can't compare with Mrs. MacArthur's memories of her first time in a theatre. As she puts it, "nothing subsequent ever drove from my mind the vivid impression of this my first play." That's particularly impressive, given that subsequent events include the ghost story at the heart of Mulock's tale.

Mrs. MacArthur also remarks that that night, "my father had gone to bed, laughing heartily at the remembrance of the antics of Mr. Grimaldi, which had almost obliterated the Queen and Hamlet from his memory." Joseph Grimaldi was of course one of the great clowns of that era, though I'm not sure if he is supposed to have played the role of the gravedigger or if he allegedly starred in an after-piece for this fictional production of Hamlet.

And what about the ghost? Well, you'll have to read the story to find out about that!