Wole Soyinka

Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka studied at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, so he was already at home in the U.K. when the Royal Court Theatre premiered his early play The Lion and the Jewel in London in 1959.

An English-language verse comedy of Shakespearian proportions but dealing with the traditional culture of Soyinka's own Yoruba people, The Lion and the Jewel blends together European and African traditions to deal with the conflict between modernization and traditional culture. Sidi, the jewel of the village, gets her picture published in a magazine and comes to think of herself as too good for any of the local men, but she ends up falling for Baroka, an aging leader who is the lion of his community.

Soyinka's play A Dance of the Forest premiered in Nigeria's capital city of Lagos on October 1, 1960, as the new nation celebrated its official first day of independence. Soyinka also started an influential new theatre company that year, the 1960 Masks, which sought to create a distinctly national theatre for Nigeria. Though ethnically Yoruba, Soyinka chose to write in English both to create a unified national theatre that could transcend tribal divisions within the country, and to appeal to an international audience.

The writer's Yoruba heritage still comes through in his plays, though. This is especially true of his 1964 drama The Strong Breed, which is centered around the Yoruba masquerade festival of Egungun. During the festival, an individual designated as a "carrier" is expected to carry all of the evil in the area away from the community. The Strong Breed shows a conflict between the individual and the community come to a head during a celebration of Egungun that does not go as planned--and with tragic results.

The year after he wrote The Strong Breed, Soyinka was arrested for going into a radio station and replacing a tape of a speech by a government official with a tape accusing officials of election fraud. He was held by the government for months, and only released following protests by the international community. His arrest did not stop him from continuing to write plays critical of the authorities, but a greater crisis arose in 1966 when a military coup led to a bloody civil war. During that period, Soyinka was jailed for an even longer period.

Ironically, while he was languishing in prison, Soyinka's plays were achieving international success around the world, including a New York City production of The Trials of Brother Jero. The play pokes fun at a corrupt seaside prophet in Nigeria who cynically uses Christianity to promote his own interests. After a military dictatorship took hold of the country, Soyinka penned a darker sequel, Jero's Metamorphosis, in which the characters in the earlier play align themselves with a murderous government to continue to enrich themselves.

Nigeria's brutal political situation also came through in adaptations Soyinka wrote of Western classics, including The Bacchae of Euripides and Opera Wonyosi, the latter of which reworks Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (itself an adaptation of The Beggar's Opera by John Gay) with topical references to contemporary Nigeria. His 1971 play Madmen and Specialists bitterly probes Nigeria's civil war, and had to be written while the author was living in exile due to the country's difficult political situation.

Perhaps Soyinka's most famous work, however, is Death and the King's Horseman. The piece is based on real events that took place under the period of British colonial rule and shows the futility of attempting to force people to change tribal customs. The play greatly increased Soyinka's international profile, and in 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African writer to be so honored. Since winning the award, Soyinka has continued to write, including penning the radio plays A Scourge of Hyacinths and Document of Identity. He has also continued to voice his opinions on a variety of political issues inside and outside Nigeria.

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.

Theatre in the Age of Reason

During the eighteenth century, Europeans were riding high on a wave of scientific progress. Over the course of the previous hundred years, Galileo Galilei had revolutionized astronomy using a telescope for observations, William Harvey had forever changed anatomy by postulating how the heart circulates blood, and Anton van Leeuwenhoek had opened a whole new world for biology by using a microscope to observe life forms previously invisible. Then, in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton laid the foundations of classical physics with his Latin treatise Principia Mathematica. Newton's work in particular led to a new spirit of optimism. The eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope paid tribute to Newton's achievement when he wrote: "Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night: / God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was light."

While Newton's work didn't illuminate everything, people in the eighteenth century began to feel that everything in the universe could be known if it were only studied rationally. A few monarchs still ruled with absolute power, claiming authority directly from God. However, in 1715 Louis XIV of France, the greatest of such monarchs, died. He left his five-year-old great-grandson to be king. People not just in France but all across Europe dreamt of how they could remake the world along more rational lines. Individuals who discarded tradition and superstition in favor of reason and science viewed themselves as enlightened, and the era in which they triumphed became known as the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment influenced the theatre as well. The free-thinking Scandinavian nobleman Ludvig Holberg wrote a series of comedies mocking old ways of doing things and championing reform. In his most famous play, Jeppe of the Hill, the play's protagonist has a long monologue explaining why he drinks so much, arguing that alcoholism is a rational response to the miseries of life. The following year, Holberg premiered a new play in Copenhagen, The Lying-In-Room, in which a pregnant woman going into labor finds her many visitors cause her greater pain than child birth. Another Holberg play, the gender-bending comedy The Beautiful Bridegroom, was recently made into an opera by the American composer Dan Shore.

In France, Enlightenment ideas frequently drew the ire of the government, in part due to the actions of the philosopher François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name, Voltaire. Most famous for his witty works of satire, Voltaire attacked foolishness and corruption wherever he saw it, but most especially in the Roman Catholic Church and the French establishment. The Comédie Française agreed to perform Voltaire's first play, an adaptation of Oedipus, in 1717. However, before they could stage it, the author was arrested and thrown into the most notorious prison in Paris, the Bastille. He was released the following year, after which the theatre finally performed the play, earning Voltaire much critical praise.

Voltaire's next two plays were failures, and after a dispute with a nobleman, he was imprisoned in the Bastille a second time. The government later released him, on the condition that he go into exile in Britain. It was there that Voltaire met John Gay and other English playwrights. Eventually allowed to return to France, Voltaire had to avoid Paris, where he was routinely attacked and his writings publicly burned. This was the price of criticizing people in power.

Over his long life, Voltaire continued to produce plays in addition to works of philosophy and history. His tragedy Zaire was largely a success, but his play Mahomet drew criticism, not because it attacked the founder of Islam (though it did), but because people rightly perceived that the true object of the play's scorn was the fanaticism of the Catholic Church. Voltaire frequently disguised his criticism of France by setting stories in far-off lands, as was the case with The Orphan of China, an adaptation of the Yuan-era Chinese play, The Orphan of Zhao. Though these plays did not send Voltaire back to the Bastille, they didn't win him many friends in high places, either. Yet by the time he died, Voltaire's literary achievements were grudgingly recognized. In 1778, the 83-year-old author rose from his sickbed to attend his last play, Irene, receiving tremendous applause. A few months later, he died.

By the time of Voltaire's death, criticism of French society and the French government was becoming much more common. The playwright Pierre Beaumarchais scored a huge hit in 1775 with his comedy The Barber of Seville. While the play nominally takes place in Spain, it pokes fun at the French upper classes, showing an aristocrat who is unable to marry his love without the help of a lowly barber. In 1781, Beaumarchais wrote a sequel, The Marriage of Figaro, which went even further, showing the barber outwit the very nobleman he helped in the previous play. After reading the piece, King Louis XVI ordered it banned, in spite of entreaties from his wife, Marie Antoinette, who found it hysterically funny. Three years later, the ban was lifted, and aristocrats flocked to the theatre to see themselves made fun of by a playwright with humble origins.

The Marriage of Figaro is sometimes credited with helping to bring about the French Revolution, but as it so happens, Beaumarchais was involved even more explicitly in revolutionary activity. He helped run guns and supplies to the British colonies during the American Revolution and was intricately involved in a number of spy rings. His sympathies were clearly with the Enlightenment ideals embodied by Voltaire, and he published many of Voltaire's works posthumously, having them printed in Germany to avoid French censors. Beginning in 1787, Beaumarchais became involved in a series of legal battles as his enemies sought to discredit him. Though many in the aristocracy embraced Beaumarchais and his work, others feared the violent disruptions that might be caused by critiques of those in power.

Those fears proved to be well founded. On July 14, 1789, a mob in Paris stormed the Bastille, the prison that had not only once held Voltaire, but had in fact become a symbol of all the oppressive forces opposed by the Enlightenment. The mob's actions sparked a revolution that led to the execution of the king and queen and a Reign of Terror that would take many other lives as well. The social divisions criticized by Voltaire, Beaumarchais, and others had finally brought European civilization to a point where violence seemed the only way to right the wrongs at the heart of society. The age of reason dissolved into an age of violent emotions.

The Licensing Act

During the beginning of the eighteenth century, many playwrights in Britain tried to imitate the great comedies of the Restoration period, but they eliminated much of the bawdry that made those comedies funny. The laugh-free plays they produced earned the label "sentimental comedies" since they continued to appeal to an audience's sentiments even as they erased what had been a source of great humor. The Irish dramatist Richard Steele scored a hit in 1722 with his sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers. Based very loosely on Terence's Roman play The Girl from Andros, the play featured heroes who controlled and overcame their passions rather than giving in to them. The play emphasized patience over emotions and peaceful resolutions over violent action.

The small success Steele had was dwarfed, however, by the runaway hit by John Gay called The Beggar's Opera. Premiering at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre in London in 1728, the play ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run of any play in British history up to that time. It was periodically revived throughout the century, becoming one of the most performed plays ever (though in the twentieth century it was largely eclipsed by its German-language adaptation The Threepenny Opera). Gay used the melodies of popular songs but rewrote their lyrics to make pointed comments about public figures, including the powerful Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister in British history. This new form, called ballad opera, was imitated throughout the century, including by Gay himself in a sequel to the play, Polly, which Walpole had banned.

Traditional tragedies of kings and queens seemed out of place in a world that was increasingly being run by the middle classes. The playwright Henry Fielding exploited this disconnect by mocking high drama in his play The Tragedy of Tragedies, which opened in 1731. Also known as The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, Fielding's play featured a protagonist diminutive in stature in love with a princess named Huncamunca. To add to the comedy, Fielding had a giantess fall in love with Tom Thumb. Nearly everyone in the play dies in grand fashion, and audiences laughed hysterically at the deaths of kings, queens, and nobles.

Just as Gay had run afoul of Walpole, Fielding, too, provoked the wrath of the powerful prime minister. In The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (which actually debuted in 1737), Fielding made fun of all of the events of the previous year, particularly excoriating Walpole. This time, however, Walpole was ready. He took advantage of a particularly outrageous satire of the king called The Golden Rump and introduced to parliament the Licensing Act of 1737. The act provided for extreme censorship of the British stage, ensuring that playhouses be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, and stating that anyone who offered a play without a license be fined the exorbitant amount of fifty pounds for each offense.

The two patent theatres in London now had a virtual monopoly throughout the entire country. What was more, all new plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain at least 14 days before they were performed, and if he deemed them unfit for performance, there was no appeal. A theatre manager who performed a banned play could lose his license immediately, and strolling players who performed without a license were treated as vagabonds. The artist William Hogarth created a famous engraving called "Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn" which depicted a copy of the Licensing Act lying on a bed in the corner. As viewers well knew, the act was the death-knell for small companies like the one depicted in the engraving.

Fielding gave up the theatre to write novels, and most serious authors in England followed his lead. Almost two decades passed before Britain produced another play that would capture the public's imagination and work its way into the standard repertoire. That drama was John Home's tragedy Douglas, which perhaps not coincidentally opened in Scotland, debuting in Edinburgh and only later transferring to London. The Licensing Act worked all too well, banishing serious topics from the stage and intimidating authors for years to come. While the eighteenth century became an era of tremendous growth for the English novel, English-language drama languished until the 1770s.

As it happens, I recently purchased a 19th-century copy of the Hogarth engraving. The details aren't as fine as Hogarth's original, but I'm offering the image for free to anyone who wants to publish it in a journal, book, website, whatever. If you need a higher quality image, feel free to contact me. You can credit it to the personal collection of James Armstrong.

Top Comedies After 1737

I previously wrote about the effects of the Licensing Act of 1737, which brought broad censorship to the British stage in the 18th century, and continued to hold back playwrights well into the 20th century.

Comedies like John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and the rollicking satires of Henry Fielding had drawn the ire of Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. He was determined to make sure he would not be made fun of onstage. The Licensing Act silenced the laughter, and comic writing migrated from the stage to the novel.

In the wake of this massive new censorship law, what comedies were produced? Now that political theatre was effectively banned, what could the playhouses of the Georgian era actually stage? What were the comic plays they put on, over and over again, which proved to be the most popular? The answer is: virtually nothing new.

From 1737 to the end of the eighteenth century, all of the top ten most performed comedies in London were (with one important exception) revivals from earlier eras. I recently came across a list of these comedies, and I found some of the names on it quite unexpected. Here they are in reverse order:

10. The Alchemist by Ben Jonson. Jonson's reputation once exceeded that of Shakespeare, though his works are seldom performed today. Personally, The Alchemist is my favorite of his, and in the 18th century it out-ranked all of his other comedies, as well as all but two comedies by Shakespeare.

9. As You Like It by William Shakespeare. One of the Bard's two comedies to top Jonson was this perennial favorite. Now that women could perform on stage, Rosalind was a wonderful opportunity for actresses to show off their legs in perhaps the greatest cross-dressing role of all time.

8. School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. That's right - Sheridan's classic play was the only new comedy to break into the top ten, and it didn't premiere until 1777. For 40 years, the comic well ran pretty dry for the British stage, and even Sheridan barely made it onto the list.

7. The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar. This 1706 comedy tones down some of the bawdiness of the Restoration, but still has plenty of laughs. I saw New York Classical Theatre do the show a few years back, and I can attest that it still works.

6. The Busy Body by Susanna Centlivre. For those who think there were no female playwrights before Wendy Wasserstein, this 1709 play should be a wake-up call. Though Centlivre is not performed much today, she once outranked Sheridan!

5. The Tempest by William Shakespeare. This late Shakespearean comedy has always been a favorite. Some recent productions in New York have occasionally missed the mark, though I rather enjoyed this summer's production by The Classical Theatre of Harlem.

4. The Provoked Husband by Colley Cibber and John Vanbrugh. You haven't heard of this 1728 play? I can't say that I'm surprised. I've never read it myself, but it once outranked all of Shakespeare's comedies!

3. The Beaux' Stratagem by George Farquhar. This 1707 play is probably Farquhar's best known, so it should come as no surprise it ranked so high. It received 419 performances in London from 1737 to 1800. As You Like It by comparison received only 264 over that same time period.

2. The Conscious Lovers by Richard Steele. This sentimental comedy edged out The Beaux' Stratagem with 434 performances in London from 1737 to 1800. It was no match for the era's top play, however.

1. The Beggar's Opera by John Gay. In spite of the Licensing Act, a ballad opera savagely attacking Robert Walpole and his policies remained (by far) the top comedy in the wake of the new censorship law. The Beggar's Opera had 875 London performances from 1737 to 1800, far more than any other comedy. Though the play was one of the chief causes of the Licensing Act, Walpole couldn't stop performances. It was already an audience favorite.

The Licensing Act of 1737

On June 21, 1737, the British government passed one of the most sweeping censorship laws in its nation's history. Those of us who love freedom would be wise to heed the warning of such ill-advised legislation.

Robert Walpole, widely regarded as the first Prime Minister in British history, skillfully manipulated parliament into passing The Licensing Act within a matter of days. Ostensibly, the bill was designed to protect the monarchy from slanders. In reality, it was to protect Walpole himself.

A number of political dramas had flourished on the Georgian stage prior to the passage of the act. Most notably, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, which savagely lampooned Walpole (among other figures), was a hit when it premiered in 1728, and the London theatres periodically revived it afterward to great success. Later, Henry Fielding wrote a number of satirical plays, including The Temple Beau, The Author's Farce, and Tom Thumb.

Particularly offensive to Walpole was Fielding's satiric drama The Historical Registry of 1736. Actually performed in 1737, the play poked fun at a number of powerful individuals, and Walpole was by no means immune from criticism.

The last straw, however, was an outrageous satire (sometimes attributed to Fielding) called The Vision of the Golden Rump. Though the piece was apparently not intended for performance, Walpole himself seems to have commissioned a dramatic version of the satire and then read the most offensive portions out loud to King George II.

Walpole's purpose was to create so much outrage he could pass a law sweeping enough to allow him to ban essentially any play he wanted. After reading scandalous passages aloud in the House of Commons, he got his bill through the house unopposed. No member of parliament in the lower house wanted to look unpatriotic by voting against the bill.

In the House of Lords, Walpole encountered scarcely any more opposition than he had in Commons. Five members voted against the bill, led by Philip Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield. Though Lord Chesterfield was a friend of Walpole and a member of his Whig party, he had tried to create a space within the Whigs for legitimate differences of opinion.

Speaking before the House of Lords, Chesterfield appealed to his fellow parliamentarians to allow the stage to remain a check on the powers of tyranny:

The barriers and fences of the people's liberty must be plucked up one by one, and some plausible pretences must be found for removing or hood-winking, one after another, those sentries who are posted by the constitution of a free country, for warning the people of their danger.

Later, he continued:

I must look upon the Bill as a most dangerous encroachment upon liberty in general. Nay farther, my Lords, it is not only an encroachment upon liberty, but it is likewise an encroachment on property. Wit, my Lords, is a sort of Property: it is the property of those that have it, and too often the only property they have to depend on.  

The act effectively silenced Wit upon the stage. Fielding, of course, turned to writing novels instead, and political drama virtually disappeared for decades to come.

Henry Brooke's tragedy Gustavus Vasa was the first casualty, banned by the government in 1739, in spite of the fact it was already in rehearsal at Drury Lane. Later that year, the government banned another historical drama, James Thomson's Edward and Eleonora. In December, William Patterson's tragedy Arminius was also banned.

If we wish to remain a free country, Chesterfield's plea must be heeded. Otherwise, the barriers and fences defending our liberty will indeed be plucked up, until nothing remains.

Madame Vestris and the London Stage

Lucia Elizabeth Bartolozzi, later known as Madame Vestris, was born into an interesting family, to say the least. Her father, Gaetano Bartolozzi, was an art dealer and son of an engraver to King George III, and her mother, Therese Jansen Bartolozzi, was a musician to whom the great Haydn had dedicated five different piano pieces.

When she was just 15, she met Armand Vestris, a ballet dancer at the King's Theatre in London. The two married at the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields in 1813. At the age of 18, Madame Vestris made her debut as a performer, taking the title role in Peter von Winter's opera Il Ratto di Proserpina. She made quite an impression, winning even the admiration of Princess Charlotte.

Though Madame Vestris was gaining the affection of the crowds, that audience did not include her husband. He took her to Paris, where he hoped to renew his career, and then left her there, heading off with another woman to Naples, where he had an engagement at the Teatro San Carlo. They never saw each other again.

Returning to London, Madame Vestris made her debut at Drury Lane in the comic opera The Siege of Belgrade. Seeing her there, the critic Leigh Hunt called her "a true singer, a pleasing actress, and a handsome woman; three graces not very frequently united in the same woman."

This "handsome woman" had such fine legs that audiences flocked to see her dressed as a man. She appeared as a Persian prince in Artaxerxes and then as the great libertine in Giovanni in London, a burlesque sequel to Mozart's Don Giovanni that follows the arch-rake after he gets kicked out of Hell for trying to seduce the Furies. More trouser roles followed, including Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.

Hunt wrote disapprovingly of these roles, claiming: "The more we are pleased with her in trousers and boots, the more we long to see her out of them.... In a word, we never remember an instance of an actress who contrived to be at once so very much of a gentleman and yet so entire and unaltered a woman." Whether or not Hunt was entirely aware of the sexual nature of these comments, the male admirers of Madame Vestris were certainly drawn to her, and for more than just her acting skills.

By 1822, Madame Vestris had taken up residence on Curzon Street, where she earned the nickname "The Siren of Mayfair." She gathered a bevy of admirers, jokingly referred to as her "Vestry-men." Her husband died in 1825, but it was not as if the swells of London had considered her unavailable before then. That same year, Madame Vestris had her breakout hit, appearing opposite John Liston in John Poole's comedy Paul Pry at the Haymarket. She sang the song "Cherry Ripe," a ditty whose sexual double-entendres were surely not lost on the audience. The play was performed 115 times that season, giving it the longest initial run of any play in London since the original production of The Beggar's Opera.

Gossipmongers endlessly speculated about which "Vestry-men" had made it into her bed. However, as William W. Appleton puts it in his biography Madame Vestris and the London Stage: "Her reputed stable of lovers would have taxed the energies of a full-time courtesan, let alone those of an extraordinarily busy actress." In fact, the letters of some of her admirers suggest that while she might have been a great flirt, she tended to hold off sexual relations, much to their frustration.

As interesting as her career as an actress was, Madame Vestris is known primarily for her role as a theatre manager. Certainly, women had managed theatres in Britain before, but none had been quite as prominent as Madame Vestris. In 1830, while she was working at the Tottenham Street Theatre, Charles Kemble, then the lessee of Covent Garden, brought suit against the minor theatre, arguing it had no license to perform "legitimate" drama. On December 6, the theatre announced it would have to close, and that same day, Madame Vestris rented another theatre, the Olympic, from John Scott for a thousand pounds a year.

As head of the her own theatre, she abolished benefit nights, which did not always function to an actor's benefit anyway, and hired the gifted comic actress Julia Glover. She also got rid of the long lists of people to receive free tickets, offering complimentary admission only to the press. Similarly, the Green Room became more exclusive, as she ushered out any outsiders who did not need to be there, which simultaneously made the theatre more respectable.

Acutely aware of the dangers of presenting "legitimate" serious dramas that might compete with the two patent houses at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, Madame Vestris produced elaborate light entertainments, many written and designed by James Planché. She played the central character of Pandora in Planché's Olympic Revels, which aimed to please but not intellectually challenge its audience.

In 1835, she hired for six pounds a week Charles James Mathews, the son of the famous comedian Charles Mathews. By the next year, there were already rumors they were sleeping with each other. He was only seven years younger than her, but the pairing turned heads. It was one thing for a man managing a theatre to have a relationship with a younger actress. For a woman manager to take up with a pretty-boy novice whose main claim to fame was his celebrity dad was another matter.

(However, some of the men spreading rumors were probably just jealous. Not yet 40, Madame was still recognized as having the best pair of legs in London.)

Though gossip persisted, the couple kept mum. Then, on July 18, 1838, a week before the company was scheduled to set sail on an American tour, the two were quietly married. The service was over and the two were out the door of the church before the public had a chance to come and gawk. Cruel commentators noted that recent productions at the Olympic had included You Can't Marry Your Grandmother and What Have I Done? It didn't matter. The couple was to enjoy a long, happy union, in spite of the naysayers.

The following year, the great actor William Macready announced he was giving up the management of Covent Garden. Madame Vestris, as she was still called, or Mrs. Mathews, which was her more proper legal name, jumped at the opportunity. She announced that she would be taking over the lease of one of the two inner sanctums of British high drama. Reassuring the public comic actors would not be usurping great tragic roles, she declared: "Mr. Mathews will not play Macbeth and I have positively refused Queen Katharine."

For her debut production at Covent Garden, she revived Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, which had not been seen on stage since the days of the Bard himself. "I have done great things in a small theatre so you will not now find cause to complain that I have done small things in a great one," she announced before the curtain went up. She herself played Rosaline, the best female part in the play, but in spite of the production's ambitions, it did not please the audience.

Taking seriously Covent Garden's mission to provide high art, Madame Vestris produced Leigh Hunt's poetic drama A Legend of Florence, but it came off feeling like a watered-down version of Romeo and Juliet. She had better luck producing more of Planché's extravaganzas, like The Fortunate Isles and The Sleeping Beauty.

She still stuck to her ambitions of producing great Shakespearian comedy, first with The Merry Wives of Windsor and then with A Midsummer Night's Dream. The latter play had not been performed in its original form since the Puritans had closed the theatres in 1642. Instead, the Restoration era had transformed it into an opera. The landmark production she staged in 1840 marked an important milestone in the return on Shakespeare productions to the original texts.

An even bigger theatrical milestone came in 1841 with the production of Dion Boucicault's London Assurance. Though the play did not have the first box set in England (in fact, Madame Vestris had already given the public a rudimentary box set at the Olympic for the play The Conquering Game), the scenery was so magnificent it drew its own applause. Covent Garden was enjoying great artistic success, even though the high rent kept the company only just solvent.

Then, Charles Kemble struck again. The same man who had shut down the Tottenham Street Theatre when he was running Covent Garden decided he wanted his old theatre back. He maneuvered to get the proprietors to terminate the lease for a temporary shortfall of 600 pounds, allowing them to seize 14,000 pounds worth of properties Madame Vestris still had in the theatre.

After being thrown out of the theatre in which they had made their livelihood, Madame Vestris and her husband found themselves living hand to mouth. In 1847, facing competition from other great actors, "Mrs. Mathews" went on a farewell tour of the provinces. The farewell tour proved so lucrative, she was able to return to London with her husband and lease the Lyceum Theatre. So much for farewells!

At the Lyceum, they produced popular extravaganzas, but money troubles continued to plague them. In 1856, Madame Vestris died, and her husband made sure the funeral was solemn and private, much like their wedding. She was buried at Kensal Green, but her legacy lived on, in a London theatre scene that would be forever changed.

The Top Twelve Plays (of the late 18th century)

I was recently reading Ve-Yin Tee's book Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism. In it, there's a wonderful chart of the the dozen most performed plays in London from 1776 to 1800. Some of them might surprise you.

Number one was The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In one sense, this isn't surprising at all, as the 1777 comedy is arguably the best play written in English during that period. What is remarkable is that Sheridan's contemporaries acknowledged that fact. The top place did not go to some flash in the pan that was forgotten a hundred years later.

The classic comedy also beat out earlier works, including John Gay's 1728 play The Beggar's Opera. This would have been my guess for number one, as it was a perennial favorite throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. During the last quarter of the 18th century, it had only 32 fewer performances than The School for Scandal. However, it had 61 performances more than the next-placed play.

That would be Isaac Bickerstaff's 1762 comic opera Love in a Village. I haven't read it, either. I guess there had to be at least one flash in the pan in there. The next most performed play was yet another comic opera, but it was by someone you've heard of--and how do I know that?

Because it was by Sheridan, a writer I just mentioned. Sheridan wrote a comic opera? Why yes, he did! It's called The Duenna, and it was first performed two years before The School for Scandal. The plot involves an elopement that parallels Sheridan's own courtship with Elizabeth Ann Linley.

Number five was Hamlet. Finally, we get to Shakespeare! It's not surprising that Hamlet was the late eighteenth century's most performed work by Shakespeare (and most performed tragedy by any author). What is surprising is that even in an age that tended to worship the Bard, Shakespeare's plays weren't as popular as some more recent works.

Coming in just after Hamlet is Inkle and Yarico, a comic opera by George Coleman the Younger. First performed in 1787, this piece wasn't around as long as the other comic operas that beat it out for higher slots. Still, it received more performances than Shakespeare's next most popular play.

Macbeth came in at number seven. Having seen Macbeth at the Armory earlier this year, there's a special place in my heart right now for the Scottish play. Defeated by Inkle and Yarko? Really? I'll just have to console myself with the fact that it had more performances than the second most popular Coleman play.

Okay, so The Spanish Barber, an adaptation of The Barber of Seville, was actually by George Coleman the Elder, father of the Inkle and Yarico author. Who can keep them both straight, though? In any case, Mr. Coleman beat out the next most popular play by Shakespeare. What was it? Othello? King Lear?

Nope. The Merchant of Venice was the third most popular Shakespeare play of the late eighteenth century. Technically, though, it tied for third place with Romeo and Juliet. Both had 119 performances on the London stage between 1776 and 1800.

Number eleven was Hannah Cowley's delightful comedy The Belle's Strategem. I saw an excellent production of this play by the Prospect Theater Company a number of years ago. As far as I'm concerned, it's just as good as The School for Scandal.

Rounding out our dozen is James Cobb's The Haunted Tower. I've never read this one, but it's on my list of plays I should know.

It

I recently finished reading Joseph Roach's book It, which traces stardom from Restoration England to the celebrities of the present day.

Roach's introduction sets up his project by first identifying the intangible quality we mean when we say a certain person has "it." He quotes Elinor Glyn, who wrote in the forward to her novel called It:

To have "It," the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. He or she must be entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence, indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others.

In Glyn's novel, the charismatic protagonist with "it" is a man, but when it came time to make a movie of the work, Paramount wanted to turn the piece into a vehicle for their newest discovery, Clara Bow. Anyone who has seen the film knows that Bow definitely had It. There were plenty of other stars in Hollywood who were more beautiful of better actors, but it doesn't matter. When she's on screen, you can't take your eyes off of her. It's that elusive quality of attraction that Roach wants to chronicle throughout the Anglophone world.

Though the book does follow a loose chronology, it jumps around more often than not. Rather than organizing the chapters by time period, Roach groups his examples by metonymy, naming his chapters accessories, clothes, hair, skin, flesh, and finally bone.

The accessories chapter touches on a number of topics, including the Restoration's original It girl, Nell Gwyn. An accessory, Roach notes, is something supplementary that serves to identify the wearer, but is not itself necessary. So it was with the famed actress who became an accessory to King Charles II, a beautiful but ornamental mistress who served a political purpose in the king's retinue of women by serving no political purpose at all. Gwyn remained popular because belonging to no one she belonged to everyone. Roach cites Aphra Behn's dedication of her play The Feigned Courtesans to Gwyn, in which the playwright gushed:

...you never appear but you glad the hearts of all that have the happy fortune to see you, as if you were made on purpose to put the whole world into good Humour; whenever you look abroad, and when you speak, men crowd to listen to you with that awful reverence as to Holy Oracles or Divine Prophecies, and bear away the precious words to tell at home to all the attentive family the Graceful thing you uttered.

In his chapter on clothes, Roach backtracks a few years from Behn's play to focus more on George Etherege's 1676 comedy The Man of Mode. The play provides two archetypal characters, the seductive rake Dorimant and the outrageous fop Sir Fopling Flutter. The play underscores the importance of clothes to both these types by having the entire first scene take place in Dorimant's dressing room while the protagonist puts on clothes--in Roach's words--"as a well-attended knight dons armor to do battle."

The chapter on hair delves more thoroughly into the eighteenth century, quoting not just Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, but also Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. This was an age of wigs, and Roach gets much out of Old Hardcastle's reminiscence of how Tony Lumpkin "fastened my wig to the back of my chair, and when I went to make a bow, I popped my bald head in Mrs. Frizzle's face."

A chapter on skin cannot help but bring up the deathly pallor of Sarah Siddons, especially as depicted in her portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds as The Tragic Muse. Siddons, Roach notes, also played Euphrasia in Arthur Murphy's 1772 tragedy The Grecian Daughter. This role became the subject of another portrait of Siddons by William Hamilton.

The chapter on flesh jumps ahead to the twentieth century and George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion. (Incidentally, this year marks the centennial of the play's premiere.) The famous opening scene of that play takes place in Covent Garden, a site already haunted by a great deal of theatrical history. Roach notes how the fascination Henry Higgins develops for Eliza Doolittle is mirrored in Shaw's own fascination with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the actress who first played the role.

Roach's final chapter on bone deals with the dark side of It, the attraction of the highwayman and the pirate. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera becomes a key text here, along with Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's re-imagining of the play as The Threepenny Opera.  Roach makes an interesting case for using the original Marc Blitzstein adaptation that opened off-Broadway in 1954 rather than the more faithful translation by Ralph Mannheim and John Willett. Though Blitzstein had Jenny Diver sing the song "Pirate Jenny" rather than Polly, he did so with good reason. Lotte Lenya was playing Jenny in that production, and her interpretation of the song has deservedly been ingrained into our consciousnesses.

It is a delightful book, and I whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone interested in celebrity in the theatre.