Sardanapalus

Last night, Red Bull Theater produced a staged reading of George Gordon Byron's Romantic tragedy Sardanapalus.

The play remained unperformed during Byron's lifetime, but it premiered in 1834 with William Charles Macready in the title role. Ellen Tree played Myrrha, a Greek slave who inspires the Assyrian emperor to rise to new heights.

At the time, no one in England had any idea what an Assyrian looked like, but excavations of Nineveh in the 1840s meant that ruins began to go on display at the British Museum. When Charles Kean staged a revival of the play in 1853, he could employ designers to meticulously reproduce Nineveh with a new level of historical accuracy never before seen.

Sketches for the sets--which were designed by William Gordon, J. Dayes, and Frederick Lloyds--can be found today in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Gordon painted scenery for the first and second acts of the play, showing an ancient city on the shores of a river. A second set, designed by Dayes, showed a chamber in the Royal Palace. Lloyds' image of the Great Hall of Nimrod shows the final scene of the play before the whole set appeared to burst into flames.

How the designers achieved this effect is a mystery. We do know that four years later the dramatist and theatre manager Dion Boucicault achieved a similar effect in his play The Poor of New York using quick burning "flash torches" which illuminated a large piece of fabric on which flames had been painted. This cloth was kept in constant motion to make the flames appear as realistic as possible.

However it was that set designers managed the feat, it was realistic enough to cause the insurers of the Princess's Theatre where the show was playing to send investigators to verify that the bursts of flames and falling rafters seen on stage did not actually constitute a threat to the building. Sadly, Red Bull did not have the resources to achieve such technical effects for a staged reading.

Still, the reading was quite enjoyable. Amir Arison played Sardanapalus while Shayvawn Webster took on the role of Myrrha. When she recited the monologue in Act III beginning "Now I am alone" (an echo from Act II, scene ii of Hamlet) I was entranced. From that moment on, the play seemed to move quickly from plot point to plot point right up to the grand finale.

This morning, I spoke on a roundtable about the play with noted scholar Michael Gamer and chaired by Omar Miranda. This was a part of the annual Stuart Curran Symposium. Mariam Wassif also delivered a great paper on the play there, noting how Byron's drama presented its protagonist as both an alternative to modernity and a warning about empire.

Sardanapalus has a lot to say to us here in the 21st century. I hope Red Bull will do a full production of it in the future. If they do, you won't want to miss it!

Byron and Steerforth

Today I received in the mail the latest issue of Dickens Quarterly, which includes an article I wrote on how Charles Dickens modeled the character if James Steerforth in David Copperfield after the Romantic poet and dramatist George Gordon Byron.

The article is called "'In a Dark Wig': Reinventing Byron as Steerforth in David Copperfield." I took the title from another Dickens novel, The Old Curiosity Shop, in which Mrs. Jarley dresses up a waxworks of Mary Queen of Scotts "in a dark wig, white shirt-collar, and male attire" to look like Lord Byron.

I received a lot of help on the article from Geoffrey Bond and Christine Kenyon Jones, whose book Dangerous to Show: Lord Byron and His Portraits is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of how Byron's image was shaped, both by himself and by the numerous artists who depicted him. Mr. Bond was kind enough to share some images from his personal collection, including a print of a George Sanders portrait that appeared in Thomas Moore's biography of Byron and a print Dickens's illustrator Robert Seymour did for William Parry's book The Last Days of Lord Byron.

The firm of Byron's publisher, John Murray, lives on today, and I was grateful that the John Murray Collection could share with me an image of a pencil and ink sketch of Byron done by another Dickens illustrator, George Cattermole. That image is now used as the logo of the Byron Society.

Readers of this blog will know that Byron owned a patchwork screen decorated on one side with images of some of his favorite actors. (An image from that screen is reproduced in my book, Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas.) What people might not know is that Dickens and the actor William Macready decorated a screen of their own with prints of Byron as well as other celebrities. That screen is currently at Sherborne House, and the Friends of Sherborne House kindly allowed me to reproduce an image of it.

Yes, this article is rather image heavy, even without reproducing two illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne, the illustrator who worked with Dickens throughout most of his career. Though Dickens was primarily a novelist rather than a playwright, he was influenced by Byron's poems and plays, as well as the previous writer's life.

If you're interested in Dickens and his work, please check out the Friends of Dickens New York. We meet once a month, and are currently discussing Oliver Twist. You'll also soon be able to hear me ramble on about Pickwick Papers on the YouTube channel for the Rosenbach Library. For more information on Pickwick Monthly (online) click here.

Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens!

Today is the 211th birthday of author Charles Dickens, and I am happy to announce that I will be part of an upcoming streaming program on The Pickwick Papers, Dickens's first novel, which is imminently theatrical and has been adapted for the stage numerous times.

As readers of this blog know, Dickens had numerous connections to the stage and was a close friend of the actor William Charles Macready. In his home at Tavistock House, Dickens even staged amateur versions of The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep by his friend Wilkie Collins.

The Pickwick Papers was originally published in monthly installments as The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. It came out once a month from March 1836 to October 1837. Now, the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia will be starting a show about the book that will stream live once per month, each episode corresponding with a different original installment of the novel.

Noted scholar Edward G. Pettit and a rotating set of Dickensian co-hosts will talk about each serialized part once a month from March 2023 to October 2024.  If you tune in, you'll be able to relive the story just as Dickens's first readers did, one piece at a time. I'll be one of the co-hosts, though it hasn't been decided yet which months. You can see a list of dates the show will be airing and get more information here.

 

Known as Pickwick Monthly, the show will be free for anyone to watch--live or recorded--on the Rosenbach’s YouTube channel. The library is asking people to register to receive monthly email updates, plus get links to PDFs of the original serial as it was published with illustrations and advertisements. Yes, the Rosenbach has in its collections the complete serial issues of The Pickwick Papers, along with a portion of the book's manuscript, first editions, letters, a lock of Charles Dickens's hair... you name it! 

 

The first episode of the program will stream live next month on March 25. Subsequent episodes will air on the third or fourth Saturday of each month until October 19, 2024. I hope you can join us!

Talfourd's ION

In the latest issue of Theatre Notebook, Christopher Butcher has an excellent article on William Charles Macready bringing Thomas Noon Talfourd's play Ion to the stage.

Though the play shares its title with a tragedy by Euripides, Talfourd's take is quite different, and involves the young prince Ion sacrificing his own life for the good of the state. The author had the piece printed privately and circulated it among a number of notables, including Macready.

The actor was excited about the play, but recognized that audiences might consider him too old to play a young character like Ion. However, impressed by Macready's performance in another tragedy on classical themes, Virginius, Talfourd requested the star actor to appear in the starring role. Macready was only too happy to oblige.

Originally, the play was supposed to be performed for Macready's benefit night at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Unfortunately, Macready had a violent quarrel with the theatre's manager, Alfred Bunn. Macready had to turn to Talfourd for legal advice in the matter. The actor wanted out of his contract at Drury Lane, and so he ended up using Ion as a pretext for gaining his own dismissal. He wrote to Bunn demanding that the play be brought into rehearsal as soon as possible. Bunn fired Macready for his impudence, which is precisely what the actor wanted.

Even before Bunn had fired him, Macready had begun negotiations to appear at the rival Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Included in his contract was a stipulation that Ion be performed. Eventually, the date of the premiere was set for May 26, 1836, which was also Talfourd's birthday. Macready wanted the painter Clarkson Stanfield to provide the scenery, though he was unfortunately unavailable.

Ellen Tree agreed to play the role of Clemanthe, and the piece was advertised as being for one night only. Joanna Baillie, the most highly regarded dramatist of her day, was in the audience, as were William Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor, Henry Crabb Robinson, Henry Hart Milman, Robert Browning, Sheridan Knowles, and Charles Dickens.

The play was a success, with the audience calling for the author to take a bow. Talfourd received numerous letters congratulating him, and plans were made for a lengthier run, rather than just the one-night-only event. Macready had introduced cuts that greatly reduced the role of Clemanthe, and when the play later began its official run, Helen Faucit replaced Ellen Tree. At first, Faucit was disappointed by her own performance, but Talfourd wrote her a kind letter that buoyed her spirits.

Ion was performed June 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, and 11 at Covent Garden, and would have run longer, except Macready had engagements elsewhere. It even led to a minor revival in Greek themes on the London stage. Though the play has been largely forgotten, Butcher's article brings new attention to this important moment in theatrical history.

Incidentally, if you want to read more about Macready, you can find plenty of information about him in my new book, Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas. Though I don't have a full chapter on Macready, his career is discussed at length, as is the work of Baillie, Browning, Faucit, Knowles, Milman, and others.

And though I don't have an article in this issue of Theatre Notebook, my article "War, Pandemic, and Immortality: 1918 and the Drama of Eternal Life" appears in the latest issue of Shaw. Check it out!

Samuel Phelps

The Victorian actor Samuel Phelps was described by his biographer Richard Lee as "the last typical classic actor of the English theatre." Lee knew Phelps, and shortly before the great actor died, he had agreed to perform in a comedy Lee had written called Cent per Cent. Alas, he never performed that play, but he appeared in so many other great shows!

Born in 1806, Phelps was the son of a wine merchant. His family valued education, and his younger brother Robert eventually led Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, and at one point even served as Vice-Chancellor of the university there.

Arriving in London as a young man, Phelps took a job in a printing office, where his foreman was Douglas Jerrold, who had not yet risen to fame writing such plays as Black-Eyed Susan and The Rent-Day. Phelps invited Jerrold to watch him act in an amateur production of The Castle Spectre by Matthew G. Lewis. According to Phelps, after the performance "Jerrold told me that by dent of hard study, luck, and patience I might in time act well enough to get thirty shillings a week."

Well, Phelps later made far more than that! His professional debut occurred in 1827 at the Queen's Theatre off of Tottenham Court Road, which later came to be know as the Prince of Wales's Royal Theatre. Phelps, then 21 years old, appeared as Captain Galliard in the farce XYZ. He then joined a company performing in the northern circuit, and according to Lee, Phelps "rapidly became a recognized stage favorite throughout the North of England, in Scotland, and, across St. George's Channel, at Belfast and Londonderry."

Ten years later, in 1837, Phelps made his debut at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in Thomas Otway's tragedy Venice Preserved. Phelps played Jaffier opposite the Pierre of William Charles Macready, an actor who would be both his colleague and his rival for many years to come. Phelps accompanied Macready when the star actor took over the management of the rival Theatre Royal at Drury Lane. It was there that Macready staged Robert Browning's tragedy A Blot in the 'Scutcheon with Phelps as the lead, and then abruptly cancelled it.

"Though its success was undoubted," Lee writes, the play "for reasons never publicly stated, disappeared from the bills after the third representation." Macready was jealous of Phelps's success, but he also had bigger things to worry about as manager of Drury Lane. In 1843, the theatre's owners declined to give him a decrease in rent, and Macready responded by petitioning parliament to end the monopoly the two patent theatres had on performing spoken-word drama. The result was the Theatres Act, which paved the way for the so-called minor theatres like Sadler's Wells to perform more serious fare than melodrama and burletta.

Phelps, together with Thomas L. Greenwood and the actress Mary Warner, took over the management of Sadler's Wells. At first, they planned to stage melodramas, as the house always had, and they even determined to get a fresh one written by Zachary Barnett to inaugurate their new management. When Barnett's melodrama was not forthcoming, however, and with the opening date of Sadler's Wells already advertised, the experienced, classical actors decided to begin with what they knew best. Instead of using a melodrama, they opened with Macbeth. Phelps and Warner played the two leads, and according to Lee, who was there that night, the audience "was hushed by its attention to the action of the tragedy to such perfect stillness as quickened the sense to hear the faintest whisper from the stage."

The trio of managers quickly abandoned their plans to produce melodramas. The Theatres Act now allowed Sadler's Wells to produce any type of show it liked without having to split legal hairs over exactly how many songs were needed to qualify a piece as melodrama or burletta. For a while, they did try to produce new works, but after three new plays in a row failed, and a fourth was not likely to be ready for production, they went back to the classics.

Phelps was particularly known for his stagings of works by William Shakespeare. Of the plays accepted to be in the Shakespeare canon at the time, Phelps staged all of them at Sadler's Wells except the Henry VI trilogy, Troilus and Cressida, and Richard II. Was he the last typical classic actor of the English theatre? I don't know, but he was probably one of the best.

O'Neill's London Debut

On October 6th, 1814, the actress Eliza O'Neill made her London debut at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. She played the role of Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and for years afterward, the night would not be forgotten.

One contemporary said of her that "for grace, sweetness, delicacy, and refinement, she was unequalled." The painter Sir Thomas Lawrence marveled at how natural O'Neill's acting was, comparing her (as many people did) to Sarah Siddons, who had retired from the stage by that time.

Born in 1791 into a theatrical family, O'Neill allegedly made her first stage appearance being carried onstage in her father's arms. The family performed for years in her native Ireland, going back and forth between the Drogheda and Dundalk Theatres. These were decidedly small affairs, so she was quite fortunate to be spotted by a talent scout and invited to perform in Belfast.

O'Neill insisted that her entire family join her in Belfast, so her father, three brothers, sister, and a sister-in-law were all given engagements at the new theatre. It was O'Neill, however, who was undoubtedly the star, and the newspapers in Belfast were extremely favorable in their revues. After two years, the whole family moved to Dublin, where a dispute between a theatre manager and a star actress led to O'Neill getting an opportunity to appear as Juliet at the Crow Street Theatre.

After her successful appearance as Juliet, the manager of the theatre offered her a contract, agreeing to take on her father and brother as well. It was in Dublin that John Philip Kemble first spied the actress. "She has great talent and some genius," was Kemble's assessment. He offered her an engagement in London. Again, O'Neill asked that she be able to take her family with her. Kemble refused to employ them, but did agree to allow her brother Robert to accompany her as a personal protector and to have access to the theatre's green room.

And so it was that O'Neill was finally able to bring her celebrated Juliet to London. The actor William Charles Macready, recalling O'Neill's debut, hailed her "beauty, simplicity, and grace," as well as her "native elegance" and "feminine sweetness." Others commented on how as Juliet her character blossomed after she fell in love, and then fell into a heart-breaking despair. If she was ever perceived in a negative light, it was because audiences found her too boisterous and vehement for an era that still extolled classicism.

In fact, O'Neill helped to usher in a new era of Romantic acting. That January, Edmund Kean had made his debut at Drury Lane, and audiences were looking for a more emotional approach to the stage than had been taken by the previous generation. O'Neill obliged them, at least until 1819. That was when she left the stage to marry William Wrixon Becher, Esq., who soon after the marriage became a baronet. Thus, the once impoverished actress ended her life as Lady Becher.

Many theatre fans no doubt wished she had continued on the stage, but the former actress seemed happy in her retirement. She and her husband raised a family in Ireland, and she ended up living to the ripe age of 81. In any case, the revolution in acting she helped to bring about continued, and performers throughout the rest of the nineteenth century tended to adopt her emotion-filled style.

The Would-Be Richelieu

Edward Bulwer-Lytton is less known today for his good plays than he is for his for his bad novels. His novel Paul Clifford (which was itself successfully adapted for the stage) begins with the infamous line: "It was a dark and stormy night..."

Born Edward Bulwer, he married against his mother's wishes, and had a turbulent relationship with his bride, Rosina Doyle Wheeler. After their marriage, his mother cut off the allowance he had previously lived on, so to make money, he began to write.

He had previously published a few poems, but beginning in 1828 he wrote a series of popular novels including Pelham, The Disowned, and The Last Days of Pompeii. In 1838, he had a stage hit with The Lady of Lyons, which starred Helen Faucit and William Charles Macready.

After his mother died in 1843, Edward Bulwer changed his surname to Bulwer-Lytton, adding her maiden name to his own in compliance with her will (thus, allowing himself to inherit her fortune).  He seems to have genuinely mourned her, though, and had already come to regret the marriage she had opposed. He legally separated from Rosina in 1836, and after that, she began to publish her own novels, which rivaled his in sensationalism and sometimes included thinly veiled attacks on her ex-husband.

In 1839, the year Rosina published her first novel, Cheveley, he had his second stage success, Richelieu; or, The Conspiracy. The historical drama opens with the enemies of France's King Louis XIII planning to revolt, forcing the king to abdicate power to his brother. They also scheme to murder the king’s top adviser, Cardinal Richelieu. That part was played by Macready, who portrayed him both as a cunning politician and as a loving father figure to his adopted ward, Julie de Mortemar. Julie is in love with one of the conspirators, the Chevalier de Mauprat. The cardinal craftily arranges to pardon de Mauprat and marry him to Julie, thus turning an enemy into an ally.

Unfortunately, the king has taken a liking to Julie and wants her as his mistress. Scarcely have the marriage rites been performed, when de Mauprat is ordered to abandon his bride. Julie runs to the cardinal, accusing him of betrayal, but he convinces her to trust him. As his enemies close in on him, Richelieu feigns death. Even after he reveals himself to be alive, the king continues to oppose him, until in the final act Richelieu is able to secure a document signed by the conspirators confirming their treason. France is saved, and Julie is reunited with her husband.

Unfortunately, Bulwer-Lytton’s life was not so happy. He might have fancied himself a sort of Richelieu, but he lacked the finesse of the great statesman. In 1858, when Bulwer-Lytton was standing for parliament, his estranged wife denounced him publicly. He had her declared insane and placed in an asylum, but after a public outcry she was released. Still, the scandal did not prevent him from being made a baron in 1866.

As strange as Bulwer-Lytton's fiction could be, his life was sometimes stranger.

Pippa Passes

Closet dramas, plays meant to be read rather than performed, tend to be a bit dodgy. Occasionally you get a gem, like Ibsen's Brand or Peer Gynt, where even though the author didn't seek production, the play gets produced successfully anyway.

Robert Browning's plays were a different matter. His A Blot in the 'Scutcheon should have been a hit, but William Charles Macready gave it an early death. After that unfortunate incident, Browning turned to writing dramatic monologues, and sometimes full-length closet dramas.

The most famous of these is probably his 1841 play Pippa Passes, actually composed before the affair with A Blot in the 'Scutcheon. It follows a young Italian woman named Pippa who works winding silk in a mill, but who wanders through the town of Asolo on New Year's Day, her one day off from work.

Pippa admires other residents of the town whom she considers to be her betters. "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones" include "Great haughty Ottima" who is admired by a German man named Sebald, the newly married couple Jules and Phene, the young Luigi and his elderly mother, and a visiting Monsignor who is staying at his brother's home.

Throughout the day, Pippa passes by each of these four "happy" residences that are anything but happy. In each case, a disaster is about to happen, but Pippa's simple song turns people's hearts, and she ends up doing good unconsciously. Ottima and Sebald, it turns out, have murdered Ottima's husband, and just as they are about to glory in their bloodshed, Pippa's song moves them to repentance.

Pippa then passes some art students making fun of Jules for his new bride. Realizing that he has been tricked into marrying Phene, Jules is at the point of sending her away so they can both be free from the scorn of those around them. Instead, after overhearing an old ballad sung by Pippa, Jules resolves to abandon his sophisticated but shallow circle and run off with Phene to "Some unsuspecting isle in the far seas!"

Next, Pippa passes some policemen and the English informer Bluphocks who is about to betray Luigi for his revolutionary activities. Browning shocked his contemporaries by making Luigi a would-be regicide, but when Pippa sings of an ancient king, he begins to think better of his plan. Luigi's final line is actually ambiguous: "'Tis God's voice calls: how could I stay? Farewell!" What is clear, however, is that whatever action he takes, he will undertake it with a purer heart due to the influence of Pippa's song.

Pippa passes some "Poor Girls" who appear to be prostitutes and then by the house of the Bishop's brother. The Monsignor confronts a blackmailer who goes by many names, including Maffeo. Apparently, the brother had a child, and to cover up the illegitimacy, paid Maffeo to kill the infant. Browning turns the tables on us, though. Maffeo reveals that the child lived, and is none other than "a little black-eyed pretty singing Filippa, gay silk-winding girl." Pippa is apparently the heir to the brother's estate, and to secure it for the Monsignor, Maffeo offers to have the young woman entangled into the world of the prostitutes, where she will never again be a threat. Upon hearing the voice of his niece, though, the Monsignor has Maffeo gagged, bound, and carried away.

The final scene shows Pippa alone, unaware of the way she has influenced everyone she passed. Her final lines are moving:

                              All service ranks the same with God--
                              With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
                              Are we: there is no last nor first.

It's hard to imagine Pippa Passes actually being staged, but people have tried. The Browning Society did an adapted version in Boston in 1899, and Henry Miller wrote an adaptation that ran on Broadway in 1906. Three years later, D.W. Griffith made a film version that included Mary Pickford. You can watch it on YouTube here:

D.W. Griffith's Pippa Passes 

The film makes great use of directional lighting, but of course lacks Browning's poetry. It also leaves out the politically fraught Luigi storyline and adds a conventional story of a drunkard. Most frustratingly, it also drops the scene with Maffeo where we learn Pippa's true heritage.

Griffith also made a film version of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, but it appears to be lost. Perhaps it's just as well.

The Patrician's Daughter

When J. Westland Marston's tragedy The Patrician's Daughter is remembered today, it's usually due to Charles Dickens. The novelist wrote a prologue for the play to be spoken by William Charles Macready, who played the role of Mordaunt in the original production at Drury Lane in 1842.

Dickens's verse prologue emphasizes the contemporary nature of the play, and praises the author for choosing a modern setting:

  Its solemn music he does not pursue
  To distant ages out of human view;
  Nor listen to its wild and mournful chime
  In the dead caverns on the shore of Time;
  But musing with a calm and steady gaze
  Before the crackling flames of living days,
  He hears it whisper through the busy roar
  Of what shall be and what has been before.
  Awake the Present! Shall no scene display
  The tragic passion of the passing day?

Though playwrights in the nineteenth century occasionally still wrote tragedies in blank verse, they usually did not set these poetic dramas in modern times. This was the innovation of The Patrician's Daughter that Dickens was praising. The phrase "Awake the Present" appears no fewer than three times in his prologue, which can be best summed up in its final three lines:

  Learn from the lessons of the present day.
  Not light its import and not poor its mien;
  Yourselves the actors, and your homes the scene.

In the first scene of the play, the heroine, Lady Mabel, is bemoaning the fact that women have so few choices in modern society. Still, she is determined to make the most of what agency she has. She tells her father:

  Women who marry seldom act but once;
  Their lot is, ere they wed, obedience
  Unto a father; thenceforth to a husband;
  But in the one election which they make,
  Choice of a mate for life and death, and heaven,
  They may be said to act.

Mabel is interested in Mordaunt, who is wealthy, though not of high birth like her. (She's the daughter of an earl.) She seems to regret that her life is not more romantic, though. In the play's second act, she laments to Mordaunt:

  O, would that I had lived in ancient days,
  The times of old romance! Do you not think
  I should have been a heroine?

His response to her is, "Why not be one now?" If women could be romantic heroines in the past, why not today, in modern drawing rooms wearing the clothes of today, not some bygone fashion? Marston's lines seem particularly self-conscious here, as it was the modernity of his verse tragedy that struck people as so novel. Mordant even uses a theatrical metaphor when he says later in the scene:

    Life's great play
  May, so it have an actor great enough, 
  Be well performed upon a humble stage.

We today would not consider Mordaunt from a humble background, but to Mabel's family, he is downright plebeian. Mabel's Aunt Lydia (originally played by Mary Warner) is so set against Mordaunt forming an alliance with her niece she concocts a plan to make him believe Mabel has already professed her love for him. When he asks to be accepted as an official suitor, Lydia tells Mabel that Mordaunt asked for her hand as part of a business transaction. Mabel is repulsed, and the courtship falls apart before it can even begin.

The fourth act skips ahead five years, and Mabel and Mordaunt are now engaged. During a painful scene with a notary, Mordaunt breaks off the engagement as an act of revenge, thinking Mabel and her family had betrayed him in the past. Mabel falls ill, and Lydia comes to regret her actions. In the first scene of Act Five she declares: "I am my niece's murderer!" Eventually, Mordaunt figures out what happened and asks for Mabel to take him back, but by that point it is too late, and she dies in his arms.

The Patrician's Daughter lasted only 11 performances. The experiment with modern verse tragedy did not catch on in the nineteenth century, though numerous poets (like W.B. Yeats) experimented with it in the twentieth.

End of MLA

Yesterday was the final day of the Modern Language Association conference in New York. I was pleased to be able to present two papers at the conference, one on Charles Dickens and the actor William Charles Macready, and the other on George Bernard Shaw and the Italian playwright Luigi Antonelli.

There were many interesting talks given this year. Frances Ferguson, speaking at the "Romantics at Two Hundred" program arranged by the Keats-Shelley Association of America, spoke about William Hazlitt's criticism in 1818. Hazlitt criticized the poet James Thomson, though he credited him with being the most popular poet among his contemporaries. Thomson was dead by 1818, but his poem The Seasons remained popular. According to Hazlitt, Thomson could not enter into the minds of others, which made him a poor playwright. Thomson's Tragedy of Sophonisba, which opened the same year as George Lillo's The London Merchant, is largely forgotten today.

Speaking of The London Merchant, Laura Rosenthal on Saturday gave a really interesting paper on Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton ghosting 18th-century tragedy. She drew parallels between Hamilton and The London Merchant, which both have scrappy protagonists trying to rise up in the world. In both plays, the protagonist is the victim of a set-up in which a conniving woman gets him to have sex with her, and he then has this event used to get money out of him. In Lillo's play, the protagonist tries to confess his sin to his master, but since Hamilton does not have a master, Rosenthal said, he confesses to the public. Ultimately, she said, Hamilton is sad, but not tragic, because the institutions Hamilton created endure, even as he dies ignobly.

Later on Saturday, Heidi Holder gave a wonderful paper about the popular Newgate drama Jack Shepherd. Shepherd was a real criminal who in the 18th century was arrested for burglary, but managed to escape from prison four times, sometimes with the help of female accomplices. Daniel Defoe wrote an account of Shepherd's life, and in the 19th century W.T. Moncrieff wrote a melodrama about him. William Ainsworth wrote a novel about Shepherd in 1839, which became the basis for numerous other plays, including one by John Baldwin Buckstone, which featured scenery by William Telbin in its original production. Eventually, authorities became concerned that these plays were encouraging crime, and in 1848 the government passed a formal ban on Jack Shepherd plays.

Sunday was the Shaw session I was a a part of, which also included Virginia Costello talking about Shaw and Emma Goldman, Martin Meisel talking about Shaw and Sean O'Casey, and Ellen Dolgin talking about Shaw and J.M. Barrie. It was an honor to join them!

Next year, the MLA conference will be in Chicago. We'll see if they can top the amount of snow we had at the conference this year!

MLA Has Begun!

Yesterday, I began attending my first conference of the Modern Language Association, which is meeting in New York City this year.

I'll actually be presenting two papers. On Saturday morning (at 8:30 am) I'll be a part of the "Dickens and Resistance" session arranged by the Dickens Society. Diana Archibald put together the session, which also includes talks by Sophie Christman-Lavin, Jolene Zigarovich, and Jonathan Farina.

My paper is called "A Blot in the Theater: Dickens, Macready, and the Quest to 'Revive the Drama'." It deals with how Charles Dickens championed Robert Browning's play A Blot in the 'Scutcheon even as his friend, William Charles Macready was ensuring the play's demise.

Macready got along much better with playwrights if they were dead. He famously revived William Shakespeare's King John with lush period costumes and scenery painted by William Telbin (who based his work on existing medieval buildings). Macready also turned Lord Byron's play Werner into a star vehicle for himself. You can see here a painting of Macready as Werner. (It currently hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum.)

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending another Dickens panel called "Ephemeral Dickens" that was put together by Susan Zieger. Elizabeth Frengel and Janice Carlisle gave a talk called "Disposable Dickens" on researching Dickens ephemera in the archive. One interesting item they brought up was a call slip from the British Library on which a young Dickens had requested the book Greenwich Hospital. That book is a collection of short comic sketches illustrated by George Cruikshank, who went on to illustrate a book of short sketches by Dickens, Sketches by Boz.

Lillian Nayder, who I had heard speak before at a meeting of The Friends of Dickens New York, gave a talk called "Dickensian Jottings" about how Dickens's celebrity has frequently moved his marginal notes to center stage, and allowed his postscripts to replace scripts. I was particularly intrigued by the last talk of the session, in which Rebecca Mitchell spoke on the famous "Dolly Varden" dress inspired by the character in Barnaby Rudge. The style was based on the polonaise dresses popular in the 18th century, but it received a revival in the nineteenth century after it was worn by the actress Augusta Thomson as Dolly Varden in an 1866 stage adaptation of Barnaby Rudge.

The Dolly Varden dress caused quite a craze in the 1870s. Many songs were composed about it, and you can see the cover of some sheet music for one at left. The Franco-Prussian War might have had some affect on the craze, since the latest fashions from Paris where temporarily unavailable. When Dickens died in 1870, though, one of the items in his estate was a painting of Dolly Varden William Powell Frith had done in the 1840s. After that sale, the style became all the rage.

If you're still around on Sunday at noon, one of the last sessions of the MLA conference will be "Revolutionary States: George Bernard Shaw, 1918." Jennifer Buckley is presiding, and I'll be giving a second paper called "Staging Immortality in 1918: Bernard Shaw and Luigi Antonelli." The paper takes a comparative approach to dramatic responses to the end of World War I and the emergence of state communism, examining Shaw's Back to Methuselah and the Italian playwright Luigi Antonelli's A Man Confronts Himself.

I gave a similar talk at the Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore in 2014, but did some new research that has changed the focus of my comparison. I will be joined by Virginia Costello talking about Shaw and Emma Goldman, Martin Meisel talking about Shaw and Sean O'Casey, and Ellen Dolgin talking about Shaw and J.M. Barrie. Hope to see you there!

The Rise of Melodrama

The playwright René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt pioneered melodrama in France, with such dramas as The Ruins of Babylon and The Dog of Montargis. These plays gave equal billing to their composers, as they relied just as much on dramatic music and acting dumb shows as on dialogue.

In 1802, the British playwright Thomas Holcroft adapted Pixérécourt's play Coelina, or The Child of Mystery as A Tale of Mystery, calling it "A Mélo-Drame In Two Acts." The melodrama had arrived in England, and was haunting Germany as well, where J.W. Goethe's rival August von Kotzebue had a string of hits, including The Ruins of Athens, Misanthropy and Repentance, and The Spanish in Peru.

These plays were tightly plotted, with succinct, functional dialogue designed to help the audience follow the plot, but the language of melodrama attempts little else and lacks the poetic qualities of Romantic drama. Also, while melodrama can be political, it is usually aimed at leading the audience to simplistic conclusions. Romantic dramas, by contrast, dealt seriously with political and moral issues, often giving equal voice to opposing views. Also, Romantic dramas provided towering characters suited for actors like Edmund Kean. The melodramas that overtook Romantic plays forced actors into roles of virtuous heroes or conniving villains in an effort to get the audience to focus on sensationalistic plot twists instead.

In England, the actress and theatre manager Jane Scott turned the Sans Pareil Theatre into a powerhouse of melodrama. The Sans Pareil was known as a "minor theatre" since it was licensed to perform musical entertainments, but was not allowed to perform purely spoken drama. Scott penned a series of plays that incorporated music and song, getting around the monopoly on spoken drama enjoyed by the patent theatres in London. She wrote more than 50 plays in all, many of them designed to show off her own talents as the leading performer. Her most famous, The Old Oak Chest, was originally a star vehicle for herself, but unlike her other works it was published, which allowed it to continue to be performed long after Scott retired from the stage in 1819.

Melodramas frequently drew inspiration from the Gothic novels of the period. Gothic tales frequently had exotic or medieval settings. They could have supernatural events, like Matthew G. Lewis's hit play The Castle Spectre, or they could portray apparently supernatural occurrences that get explained rationally, as happens in The Old Oak Chest. The most famous Gothic novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, was first adapted as a melodrama by Richard Brinsley Peakes in 1823 as Presumption, or The Fate of Frankenstein. The play initially ran for 37 performances and continued to be revived until the middle of the century.

Meanwhile, the official patent theatres in London saw their audiences dwindle, and they increasingly turned to melodrama themselves. The actor William Charles Macready took over the management of the patent theatre at Drury Lane in 1841 pledging to revive the drama to its former glory. Unable to compete with the minor theatres, however, he asked the owners of the theatre for a decrease in rent, and when they declined he petitioned parliament to end the monopoly held by the patent theatres. In 1843, parliament agreed and passed the Theatres Act, which kept censorship in place, but allowed minor theatres to perform any type of play they wanted. Rather than the minor theatres turning to spoken drama, however, the old patent theatres turned to melodrama, making it the dominant theatrical form of the nineteenth century.

The Rise of the English Actress

I just finished reading Sandra Richards's book The Rise of the English Actress. By its nature, the book is a rather general study, but it gives a wonderful history of women on the British stage.

Women appeared on stage during the middle ages, but by the Renaissance they were official banned from taking part in the public performances of plays in England. There were some exceptions, such as the infamous "Moll Cutpurse" who acted illegally, and the French actresses who were hissed at the Blackfriars Theatre in 1629.

It wasn't until the Restoration that actresses became the norm in England, and they quickly became an attractive novelty. Richards points out that in 1664 Thomas Killigrew staged an all-female performance of his play The Parson's Wedding. All-female casts were still being used a decade later when John Dryden's Secret Love was revived with only women on the stage.

By the early eighteenth century actresses were using playwrights to pen works especially for them. Richards cites Henry Fielding's Deborah and The Intriguing Chambermaid, written for Kitty Clive, and Colley Cibber's The Careless Husband and The Provok'd Husband, both vehicles for Anne Oldfield. Such collaborations did not always go well, though. Samuel Jonson blamed the failure of his play Irene on a sub-standard performance by Hannah Pritchard.

Perhaps the most celebrated eighteenth-century role created for a specific actress was Lady Teazle in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal. According to Richards, Sheridan wrote the part especially for Frances Abington. It was Abington who made the mob cap fashionable after she wore it on stage in James Townley's two-act farce High Life Below Stairs. The role she played, Kitty, was originally played by Kitty Clive, but Abington used it to create a fashion sensation that came to be known as the Abington Cap.

Women were instrumental in the creation of the benefit performance, and their earnings could top those of male actors. Richards notes that in 1792 the top-grossing benefit night belonged to Dora Jordan. That year, Jordan earned 540 pounds, while the tragic actress Sarah Siddons earned 490 pounds, and the leading male actor, John Philip Kemble, earned only 480 pounds. The Jordan-Siddons rivalry mirrored a debate over whether comedy or tragedy was the superior genre. The Dramatic Magazine in 1788 sided with Jordan, declaring she "fairly beat Melpomene out of the field."

The late eighteenth century also saw the remarkable career of Mary Robinson, the actress who in 1775 began publishing her poems under the patronage of the Duchess of Devonshire. Unfortunately, her 1794 play Nobody struck a nerve, and was hissed off the stage when it exposed the gambling habits of a number of prominent society ladies. Robinson allegedly dictated her poem "The Maniac" while under the influence of opium. As one might expect, Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw a kindred spirit in her and in 1800 declared Robinson "a woman of undoubted genius."

Robinson was famously painted by the major artists of the day, and as Richards puts it, it was in the eighteenth century that actresses "now became a means of establishing a painter's reputation when they allowed themselves to be portrayed." Portraits of actresses "were offered to the market by painters satisfying a public demand, and reflected how audiences saw female players." Richards specifically cites Thomas Lawrence, whose 1790 portrait of Elizabeth Farren catapulted the painter into fame and royal favor.

The great tragic actress of the late eighteenth century was of course Sarah Siddons, and Richards devotes an entire chapter to her. Drawing on Siddons's biography by Thomas Campbell, Richards points out that Siddons strove to be "natural" but by "natural" she meant credible for the character, rather than what we today might consider naturalistic. Siddons famously studied Egyptian and Greek sculpture, using it to help her achieve the exact poise and muscle tension she wanted to have.

In spite of her generally acknowledged superiority over her brother, John Philip Kemble, Siddons could not always enjoy her stardom. While Kemble was given a public dinner at the occasion of his farewell performance, Siddons received no such honor. She remarked to Samuel Rogers, "Well, perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this." Still, she left her mark on plays, and Richards notes that "Siddons's personality and bearing unquestionably informed and determined the role" of Jane de Monfort in Joanna Baillie's play De Monfort, which premiered in 1800.

Eliza O'Neill succeeded Siddons as the great British tragedienne of the early nineteenth century. O'Neill retired from the stage in 1819, though, and in the early Victorian period actresses like Helen Faucit and Siddons's niece Fanny Kemble took the reins. In 1837, Fanny Kemble wrote An English Tragedy, but William Charles Macready refused to stage the play, in spite of recognizing that it was "full of power, poetry and pathos."

The most famous Victorian actress was Ellen Terry, and Richards gives Terry her own chapter. Terry was most renowned for playing Lady Macbeth, wearing "a gown of soft green silk and blue tinsel edged with rubies and diamonds, draped by a heather velvet cape and decorated with flaming griffins and real beetle wings of green to achieve a metallic dazzle.” John Singer Sargent painted a portrait of Terry wearing the dress, helping it to become, in Richards's words, "the most famous costume in stage history."

Sybil Thorndike was one of the great British actresses of the early twentieth century. Richards considers her production of Percy Shelley's The Cenci in 1922 to be one of the most important of the actress's career. According to Richards, "Sybil's Beatrice established her firmly as a great tragic actress and Shelley as a great dramatist." At the time, George Bernard Shaw was trying to determine who should play the title character in his new play Saint Joan. After seeing Thorndike as Beatrice Cenci, Shaw informed his wife, "I have found my Joan." Thorndike later became closely associated with the role of Joan of Arc, which she did indeed originate in Shaw's play.

Richards continues the story of the English actress past Thorndike, writing for instance about Peggy Ashcroft, who played Desdemona opposite Paul Robeson in Othello. She goes right up to the present, discussing Harriet Walter, who I just saw play Prospero in an all-female production of The Tempest. All in all, this is a wonderful book for anyone interested in the history of British acting.

The Apostate

Richard Lalor Sheil's play The Apostate, based loosely on Pedro Calderón's Amar después de la muerte, opened on May 3, 1817 at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden. The play was a success, thanks to Eliza O'Neill's performance as Florinda. Most critics, however, did not think much of the script.

"Of those to whom the tragic drama may look with hope of its revival, we confess we cannot regard the author of the Apostate as likely to be one," wrote a reviewer in The London Quarterly Review. He went on to claim that the piece "savours more of the experience of the machanist than of the inspiration of the poet." Ouch.

Sheil's poetry isn't terrible, though. When Hemeya, the descendant of Moorish kings, falls in love with the Spanish (and Christian) Florinda, his friend Hamet rebukes him, saying:

                                                        This Spanish woman 
                    Has banish'd from your soul each nobler care.--
                    The daughter of Alvarez--she alone 
                    Possesses all your being! You can think 
                    And speak but of Florinda--When the Moors 
                    Weep o'er their cruel wrongs....

Even more powerful is the voice of the elderly Moor, Malec, who in spite of his age, urges on a fierce battle. Hemeya, originally played by Charles Kemble, converts to Christianity so he can marry Florinda. His old mentor Malec rebukes him for his apostasy, and calls for him to instead wage war against the Spanish and the dread Inquisition they have begun. Malec calls out in Act II:

                    Art thou afraid? Look at yon gloomy towers! 
                    Has thy fair minion told thee to beware 
                    Of damps and rheums, caught in the dungeon's vapours? 
                    Or has she said those dainty limbs of thine 
                    Were only made for love? Look at yon towers!--
                    Aye! I will look upon them, not to fear, 
                    But deeply curse them. There ye stand aloft, 
                    Frowning in all your black and dreary pride, 
                    Monastic monuments of human misery, 
                    Houses of torment, palaces of horror! 

The play also provides a suitable villain, Pescara, originally played by William Charles Macready. At first, Macready was disappointed with the role, but he made the best of it and turned it into an opportunity to shine. Having captured Malec and handed him over to the Inquisition, Pescara promises Hemeya a grotesque wedding present:

                    I tell thee, music--thou shalt have the groans 
                    Of grey-hair'd Malec ringing in thine ears!--
                    The crackling flames in which he perishes
                    Shall hiss upon thee when thou art softly laid
                    Within the bosom of the amorous fair!

Hemeya takes the high ground, though, and promises Pescara he will never escape his own conscience. In one passage, he contends:

                    Bind me upon your beds of burning pain,
                    Here on my limbs waste all your arts of agony,
                    And try some new experiment in torture--
                    Yet, even then, the pangs that rend my body
                    Will be heav'n's bliss to torment such as thine--
                    Guilt's poison'd shaft shall quiver in thy heart!
                    And in Remorse's fires thy scorpion soul
                    Shall writhe and sting itself!

Pescara cruelly forces Florinda to marry him, and Hemeya unfairly accuses her of falsehood, not knowing she drank a slow-acting poison before marrying the villain. Learning this, Hemeya stabs himself, but Florinda, gradually losing her senses, tries to stem the flow of blood with her hair. Dying, Florinda refuses to leave the corpse of her lover, saying:

                    You shall not tear me hence--No!--never! never! 
                    He is my lord!--my husband!--Death!--'twas death!--
                    Death married us together!--Here I will dig 
                    A bridal bed, and we'll lie there for ever!

Sheil's play definitely has its moments, in spite of the negative reviews almost 200 years ago.

Isaac Pocock

Originally a painter, Isaac Pocock began writing for the stage with the musical farce Yes or No? which opened in 1808 at the Haymarket Theatre in London. More farces followed, such as the 1810 smash Hit or Miss! with Charles Mathews.

Pocock wrote numerous melodramas, the most famous being The Miller and His Men, which featured music by Henry Bishop. The composer would later become famous for writing the melody to "Home, Sweet Home," which first appeared in John Howard Payne's play Clari, or the Maid of Milan. Pocock later wrote his own "operatic entertainment" entitled Home, Sweet Home!, which also featured Bishop's music and included the famed Madame Vestris in the cast.

Artistic training can come in handy, as when Pocock painted this portrait of his famous collaborator, Bishop. Pocock's stage directions also suggest a penchant for visual composition. Consider the opening description from The Miller and His Men:

The Banks of a River in Bohemia. On the right, in the distance, a rocky eminence, on which is a windmill at work--a cottage in front, R. Sunset.

Music. The MILLER'S MEN are seen in perspective, descending the eminence--they cross the river in boats, and land near the cottage, with their sacks, singing the following round....

Clearly, Pocock knew how to take advantage of the scenic effects available to him. These effects helped to make The Miller and His Men the most popular play of all for 19th-century toy theatres. At the end of the story, the mill explodes, and this dramatic scene was used in advertising toy theatre versions of the play. A young Charles Dickens is said to have delighted his schoolmates with toy-theatre productions of Pocock's melodrama.

Later, Pocock penned operatic dramas adapted from the novels of Sir Walter Scott. His adaptation of Rob Roy Macgregor opened in 1818 at Covent Garden with William Charles Macready in the title role. This play was also a favorite of the toy theatre.

Towards the end of his life, Pocock provided the text for the Christmas equestrian spectacular King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which ran during the winter of 1834-35. He passed away later that year, but still had a couple of his plays produced posthumously.

Dickens and Macready

Today is the birthday of Charles Dickens, so I wanted to write about the great author's friendship with the greatest actor of his day, William Charles Macready, who for many years ran the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden.

Dickens dedicated his third novel, Nicholas Nickleby, to Macready, and the actor included Dickens in a group of friends known as his "council" who would advise him on play selections and other matters. When Macready decided to cut two scenes from Thomas Noon Talfourd's play The Athenian Captive, he relied on his council to break the news to the author. Dickens and John Forster (who later became Dickens's biographer) spoke with Talfourd and eased him into the news so that Macready wouldn't have to announce the cuts himself.

In 1838, when Covent Garden was mounting its Christmas pantomime Harlequin and Fair Rosamond--allegedly under Macready's direction--the theatre manager attended rehearsals with less enthusiasm than Dickens and other council members. Though Macready feared the pantomime would ruin him, it ended up running a very respectable 41 performances. Dickens and the council were similarly helpful when Macready staged Henry V the next year.

Dickens later gave Macready the play Glencoe, allegedly by a Mr. Collinson. As it turns out, Talfourd was the real author of the piece, and with the council's urging, Macready put the play into rehearsal. The play opened on May 23, 1840 and lasted 22 performances. Dickens wrote of Macready's acting in the piece:

I have seen you play ever since I was that high, but I never saw you make such a gallant stand as you did last night, or carry anything through so triumphantly and manfully by the force of your own gifts.

Though Macready gave up the management of Covent Garden, in 1841 he took over the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane. It was there that he premiered Westland Marston's play The Patrician's Daughter, a blank-verse drama that took place in contemporary Britain. Dickens wrote a prologue for the piece, to be spoken by Macready. Part of it runs:

Awake the Present! Shall no scene display
The tragic passion of the passing day?
Awake the Present! What the past has sown
Be in its harvest garner'd, reap'd, and grown!

The play proved profitable for the theatre, though Macready later undercut another promising new work, Robert Browning's A Blot in the 'Scutcheon. It seems that Dickens was a positive influence on Macready, though not as positive as one might hope.

Virginius

On May 17, 1820, William Charles Macready opened a new play at Covent Garden called Virginius. The play was by James Sheridan Knowles, and according to the author's own preface, he had written it in three months.

Knowles was careful to credit the Glasgow Theatre, which performed his play a month prior to the opening at Covent Garden. It was Macready who made the play's reputation, though, and to Macready that Knowles dedicated the published script.

According to the critic Michael R. Booth, Knowles originally wrote the play at the suggestion of Edmund Kean, but by the time the playwright submitted it to Drury Lane, the theatre had already accepted a play on the same subject by another author. Virginius had a respectable run in Glasgow with John Cooper in the title role, and a friend passed the script on to Macready, who snatched it up for Covent Garden.

A potential crisis arose when King George IV requested to see the manuscript personally. On the eve of the opening, he gave it back with several lines crossed out--lines that referenced tyranny. Not wanting to offend the new monarch, the company dropped the offending passages. Charles Kemble went on as the young lover Icilius, Maria Foote appeared as the virtuous Virginia, but Macready towered over all in the title role of Virginius.

The story deals with the Second Decemvirate of the Roman Republic. The Romans created the First Decemvirate in 451 B.C. to codify their law in the wake of unrest among the lower plebeian class. All of the city's magistrates resigned so that a council of ten men with dictatorial powers could both run the government and draft a new code of laws. The Decemvirs produced ten bronze tables inscribed with the law, but there was a general consensus that an additional two tables would be needed.

Here's where things get tricky. The original Decemvirate included the two men who had just been elected consuls and had to resign: Appius Claudius Crassinus and Titus Genucius Augurinus. When the Romans elected a new Decemvirate, however, only Appius got re-elected from the old Decemvirate, and the other nine Decemvirs were all his close friends. It seems Appius was the one who had counted the votes.

In Knowles's play, Viginius comments on this situation, but by attacking the people who elected Appius rather than accusing Appius of cheating:

Most sapient people! You re-elect Appius into the Decemvirate for his honesty, and you thrust Titus out of the Decemvirate--I suppose for his honesty also! Why, Appius was sick of the Decemvirate!

At least Appius said he was sick of ruling. That, too, was likely a ploy. Virginius, for all his anger, does not hate all the supporters of the Decemvirate, though. He agrees to allow his daughter Virginia to marry Icilius, who apparently had a hand in the election. The two young people are in love, and Virginius cannot bear to refuse his daughter her choice.

Trouble brews in Act II, when Appius sees the beautiful Virginia and falls in lust with her. It isn't just me who says Appius doesn't love her, but Appius himself who recognizes that his feelings are a much less patient emotion than love. He says at the beginning of Act III:

It is not love, if what I've felt before
And call'd by such a name, be love--a thing
That took its turn--that I could entertain,
Put off, or humour--'tis some other thing....

Appius hatches a plot to have his friend Claudius claim Virginia was a child of one of his slaves, illicitly sold to Numitoria (the now deceased wife of Virginius) because she was in fact barren. Then, Appius can have his way with Virginia, in spite of the fact she has rejected all of his smarmy overtures thus far. The plot sounds ridiculous, but Claudius has one of his slaves swear she is Virginia's real mother, and the girl's actual mother isn't around anymore to refute the claim.

Act IV is the heart of the play, and it is here that Macready could really shine. Appearing in the Forum, Virginius mocks the idea that his daughter should be taken from him on the word of one of Claudius's slaves:

Is she not his slave! Will his tongue lie for him--
Or his hand steal--or the finger of his hand 
Beckon, or point, or shut, or open for him?
To ask him if she'll swear! Will she walk or run,
Sing, dance, or wag her head; do any thing
That is most easy done? She'll as soon swear!

When asked to answer the slave woman's oath, Virginius brings forth his daughter as the answer:

Is this the daughter of a slave? I know 
'Tis not with men, as shrubs and trees, that by 
The shoot you know the rank and order of
The stem. Yet who from such a stem would look
For such a shoot? My witnesses are these--
The relatives and friends of Numitoria,
Who saw her, ere Virginia's birth, sustain
The burden which a mother bears, nor feels
The weight with longing for the sight of it.

However, as head of the government, Appius is the judge, and since the Decemivate has dictatorial powers, there is no right to appeal. The crowd supports Virginius, but Appius has troops and lictors (government bodyguards) hold them back. Appius declares he has long known that Virginia was born a slave, and he rules that Claudius must take her home. Seeing through the plot, Virginius appeals to the crowd:

Look not on Claudius--look on your Decemvir!
He is the master claims Virginia!
The tongues that told him she was not my child
Are these--the costly charms he cannot purchase,
Except by making her the slave of Claudius,
His client, his purveyor, that caters for
His pleasures--markets for him--picks and scents
And tastes, that he may banquet--serves him up
His sensual feast, and is not now asham'd,
In the open, common street, before your eyes--
Frighting your daughters and your matrons' cheeks
With blushes they ne'er thought to meet--to help him
To the honour of a Roman maid, my child, 
Who now clings to me, as you see, as if
This second Tarquin had already coil'd
His arms around her. Look upon her, Romans!

Here it perhaps becomes apparent why the king was so concerned about this play. George IV had a reputation for numerous affairs. His separation from his wife and his possession of a string of mistresses (whom he did not always treat well) made him a decidedly unpopular figure. Audiences could very well associate their monarch with the tyrannical villain of the play.

I won't give away the outcome, but let it suffice to say that this scene helped to secure Macready's reputation. Poor Kean missed his chance when Drury Lane passed on the play. Years later, when Kean's career was on the skids, he decided to take on Virginius, in spite of the fact that it had been some time since he had learned a new role. Kean appeared in the play at the end of 1828, but suffered from unfavorable comparisons to Macready. The unfortunate Kean was dead five years later.

Knowles's play, on the other hand, continued in the repertoire for quite some time.

Mary Warner

The eminent tragedian of the Victorian era, William Charles Macready, was often paired with an equally skilled leading lady, Helen Faucit. After Faucit went her own way, however, another actress stepped up to Macready's side. She was Mary Warner, and also an important performer of note.

Born Mary Amelia Huddart, she came from a family of thespians and began acting when she was around 15 years old. By 1829, she was making appearances in Dublin, and the following year Macready discovered her talents and began casting her whenever possible. She made her Drury Lane debut on November 22, 1830 in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved playing Belvidera opposite Macready's Pierre.

Initially, there seems to have been some romantic attraction between the two. Macready, however, was married, and a devoted husband and father. While he and Miss Huddart were performing together in Manchester, the actors were fortunately able to fall into a purely professional relationship, with Macready recording in his diary that he was relieved to be set free from a temptation.

As Miss Huddart, she frequently played secondary female roles to Macready's regular leading lady, Helen Faucit. For instance, she took the role of Paulina to Faucit's Hermione in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Around 1836 or 1837 (it's unclear which) she married the tavern keeper Robert Warner, and as Mrs. Warner she took on increasingly strong roles, such Regan in Macready's production of King Lear.

When Macready took over the management of Covent Garden in 1837, Warner joined his company, and she followed him when he moved to the Haymarket Theatre two years later. It was at the Haymarket that Warner originated the role of Lady Arundel in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's play The Sea Captain.

Eventually, Warner rose to performing Lady Macbeth with Macready. In 1844, she took on the management of Sadler's Wells, along with Samuel Phelps and T.L. Greenwood. Her final performance in England came in 1851 at Sadler's Well, acting the title role of Mrs. Oakley in George Colman the Elder's The Jealous Wife. After that, she departed for America, where British actors frequently thought they could make their fortunes.

Unfortunately, Warner had developed cancer, and she eventually returned to London, where the retired Macready kindly gave her some financial assistance. In 1853, she filed for bankruptcy, and the following year she died. Macready saw to the upbringing of her son, while the wealthy philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts took charge of her daughter.

Throughout her career, many actors and critics paid tribute to Warner's considerable talents.  One appreciation came in the form of this anonymous acrostic, which appeared in the Theatrical Journal of 1839:

M ild in your natural character, thou art
A n able actress of the fiery mood;
R ebundant action, frequent strut and start,
Y our judgement wisely tells should be subdued.

W ell do your death-black eyes their part fulfill,
A nd flash to fury, or in scorn strike awe;
R ich in Evadne's portraiture of ill.
N o critic e'er condemned it; all who saw
E steemed it noble, thrilling, awful, grand.
R evived and cleansed by great Macready's hand!