Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 79, No. 484, February, 1856

by Various

Ne’er shall Maga’s laugh trepan;

at least such punning as we have quoted. If we are asked to define legitimate punning, take an example from Punch, who sums up his metaphysics in the following queries and answers:—“What is matter? Never mind.—What is mind? No matter.”

If any one wishes a defence of punning, we must refer him to the Germans, and especially to Herman Ulrici, who thus discourses on the quibbles of our great English dramatist: “If, then, we go back to the origin of this verbal play, and further reflect that Shakespeare never kept up this game of rejoinder and antithesis emptily and unmeaningly, but that with him it has always some meaning, and not unfrequently a most profound significance, we shall see good reason for the whole representation being pervaded by it. For in this discrepancy between the indicated matter and its indication, and the appropriateness of the same or similar words to express wholly different objects, we have the revelation of the deep fundamental and original disagreement between human life and its true idea; as well as the inadequacy of human cognition and knowledge of which language is the expression, for the wide range of objective truth and reality, and consequently of the weakness entailed upon man’s noblest intellectual power by the Fall and the first lie.” So that puns are the result of the Fall, and the fruit of the forbidden tree. Horrible thought for Mr ‘A Beckett—puns impossible in paradise! Without, however, going to the profundities of Ulrici, we have to point out the propriety of this style of wit in the peculiar species of drama which it adorns. A pun is on a small scale what parody is on a large. Accept the burlesque drama wholesale, and there is no reason why one should object to the quibbling in detail. It is consistent throughout.

The Olympic is the theatre in which Planché appears to the greatest advantage—the intensity of which Robson is capable, giving a force to the representation with which all the brilliance and gaiety of the old Lyceum spectacle are not to be compared. It is one of the two best theatres in London, in which one is always sure of good and finished acting—the wayward humours of Robson being in fine contrast with the sustained art of Wigan. Than the latter there is not a more accomplished actor on the stage; he really acts; and it is a high intellectual treat, which one does not often nowadays enjoy, to see how with successive touches he works out a character, or graduates a passion with a delicacy of detail that is not more marvellous than the consistency of tone throughout. As Wigan satisfies the lover of intellectual enjoyment, Robson satisfies the craving for excitement; the one is perfect art, the other perfect nature. Perfect nature in burlesque—impossible! It is possible, however, with Robson. Usually burlesque acting is the most unnatural thing in the world; no single passion or state is represented truly; every word, every tone, every look is false. With Robson, however, every tone is true, every look is nature; it is in the jumble and juxtaposition of details that his burlesque consists, in suddenly passing from the extreme of anger or fear to the extreme of humorous ease, in suddenly relapsing into vulgar slang in mid-volley of the most passionate speech, and all with the most marvellous flexibility of voice and feature. Presto! faster than we can follow him, he has changed from grave to gay, from lively to severe. The Yellow Dwarf of last year was probably his greatest effort, although Prince Richcraft of the present season is not far behind. It has a mad scene which is equal to anything he has ever personated. The story it is needless to recapitulate—it is taken from the collection of Mother Goose. They are all nearly alike. There is sure to be a prince or princess in disguise; a good fairy and a bad one; an army extravagantly armed, murders by the score, magical fruit or something else, a strange discovery, and the prince and princess married at last, in spite of the villain, all his wiles and all his passion. A strange life it is, that pictured in the fairy tales which are worked up into these extravaganzas,—a life in which trap-doors and invisible springs are as essential as patent-leather boots and gibus hats are to us, in which there is always a gutta-percha eagle that comes flying with a necessary key in its claw, and fish are poking their gills out of still lakes with lost rings in their mouths, a purse of gold lies on the ground just when it is wanted, beautiful witches in red-heeled shoes come hobbling down to the footlights; and in the last tableau of all, there are all the fairies in their fairy palace standing pyramidally one above the other. As in the Arabian Nights the characters are always asking each other to tell tales—lives are saved by stories well told—and one gathers that the thread of Arabian existence is one long yarn; so, in the extravaganzas, songs are all the rage,—the enchanter sings his victim to sleep, the princess wins her lover by the charm of her voice,—the lover serenades his mistress; the king must be amused, and his only amusement is “The Ratcatcher’s Daughter.” Music is not only the food of love, but the blue-pill also; and it is the food and the blue-pill of every other feeling as well. There is another characteristic feature of the Arabian Nights which is prominently exhibited in the extravaganzas—the disregard of life. Murder is a mild word for the destructiveness of the kings—they literally massacre all around: it is the dance of death. But let no one confound all this murder and massacre with the similar tendencies in the low gallows-literature of the present time. All the murdering of the fairy tales is counterbalanced by the effect of the slaughter. The victims are scarcely ever killed outright—they are instantly transformed, they start up and fly away in some new shape. The idea of death as annihilation never enters into the fairy tales; all is immortal: murder is but the plucking of a flower that will grow again; the massacre of a village is only a series of dissolving views.

The Olympic is the only theatre without a harlequinade attached to its fairy tale. For tricks of clown and pantaloon one naturally travels to Covent Garden and the adjacent theatres. Who shall describe all the nonsense and merriment that passes current in these temples of the Muse? Puns, puns, nothing but puns—and such rough practical joking as the youth of England delights in! What an immense deal of laughter they manage to get out of that part of the body in which angels are said to be deficient. It is kicked, pins are stuck into it as into a convenient pin-cushion; Clown puts a live lobster into his comprehensive pockets, and jumps up with fearful grimaces. Then what pulling of noses; how they are flattened, how they are lengthened, how they are blackened with soot, how they are filled with snuff till the poor member sneezes and bleeds! And how the little fellows in the boxes laugh and crow over the practical jokes! It is such rare fun to see Clown stumble over a baby, and crush its head like a pancake, and double it up into the cradle. O glorious to see a shopkeeper’s window smashed, and his coat torn off his back; to see Clown burning the potatoes and licking the roast, and throwing carrots and turnips about the stage; to see Pantaloon pitched into the pot, and turning out a plum-pudding; to see Clown’s head cut off, and the body running headless about the stage, the head crying out for the body,—glued on to the shoulder, and so happily united that Clown takes a leap through a window, and tumbles back as well as ever through the grating below; to see the sucking-pig running about, and given to the nurse instead of her lost child; to see Clown for all his iniquities put into a great gun, with lots of powder, and shot to perdition, next hanging like a caitiff from the top of the theatre, and suddenly flopping down on the devoted heads of first and second fiddle in the orchestra. Hip, hip! away, you little wicked-eyed younkers, and when you go home put the poker in the fire, Master Jacky, turn in your small toes, and with your redhot plaything burn holes in the tails of papa’s coat, while Sarah Jane dances about in all the ecstasy of Columbine.

There is not much interest in going minutely over the theatres, and recording all the peculiarities of treatment. At Covent Garden the preliminary burlesque is the best subject that can be imagined— Y^e Belle Alliance, but it is very poorly treated. The most remarkable thing about the pantomime is the curtain. What is that, most gentle reader? An immense advertisement sheet, in which Mechi, and Moses, and Madame Tussaud, and all the notorious puffers, dazzle the eye of the spectators, with magic strops and wonders of cheapness, until the curtain rises on the usual trickery of the evening. “Shilling razors”—“Whiskers in five minutes”—“Baking powder”—“Who’s your glover?”—“Look to your legs”—“Gentlemen’s hair dyed in half-an-hour, ladies’ in an hour”—“Caspiato, or the folding bonnet; to fold in a box two inches deep”—“The Teflis silk umbrella,” and all the chicanery of Sheffield and Brummagem wares;—these are the objects of contemplation that, as a kind of mercantile prelude, in which the auctioneer’s hammer and the chinking of coin are the principal instruments, are intended to prepare the mind for the more honest arts of harlequin and pantaloon. Let us go to Drury Lane, the lessee of which is a man who seems anxious to be regarded as the English Barnum, and who probably, like his American prototype, would accept it as the greatest of compliments were we to describe him as the most perfect humbug in London. Jenny Lind, the Feejee mermaid, and the woolly horse, were all the same to Barnum. The African twins, Vauxhall Gardens, the cage of lions, Charles Mathews, or Miss Glyn—it is all the same to E. T. Smith. His great guns for the present are Charles Mathews and Tom Matthews. The Great Gun-Trick, of which the former is the life and soul, appearing as Professor Mathews, the wizard of the S.S.W. by S., is a really clever little piece, happy in idea, brilliant in execution, and worthy of all its success. The pantomime, Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, is all fiddlededee. Tom Matthews, the clown, plays the deuce with the tea and the pale ale, and when Jim and Jerry go to the public-house hard by, with the name of Tom Matthews above it, and his picture as merry-andrew above that, don’t they expect to see a red-and-white face peeping from the back shop, and wonder what sort of a man Mr Clown is at home, and what sort of fourpenny he can recommend? Pass down the Strand to the Adelphi. There is an audience on the most friendly terms with the performers, an unsophisticated audience, that roars and screams, and thoroughly enjoys. When Wright takes off his hat, how they laugh; when he puts it on a chair, how they scream; when he sits on it, what convulsions! The peculiarity of the pantomime here is, that Madame Celeste appears as harlequin. She goes through the performance with marvellous agility, but, on the whole, one could wish that in this case the cap of harlequin had really the power of rendering the wearer invisible. At the Haymarket, Mr Buckstone has turned his attention to entomology, and given us The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. He has succeeded in overcoming our antipathy to insects, in teaching us to endure wasps, negotiate with fleas, hobanob with spiders, and flirt with flies. If the Haymarket is entomological, Sadler’s Wells is decidedly feline, and the Princess’s partly feline, partly canine, partly ornithological. The latter is without doubt the best pantomime of the year—the best in idea, the best put upon the stage. It is impossible to give an idea of it without going more into detail than we can afford. The introduction is supposed to take place partly in the land of birds and partly in the isle of beasts; the canaries and humming-birds are afraid of the cats, and the story of the Maid and the Magpie is interweaved with the hopes and fears of the bright-plumed birds and the gigantic grimalkins, that play and roll over each other like veritable kittens on the hearth-rug. Then, in the harlequinade, we have the pas des parachutes by the young ladies, who come upon the stage—how? dropping from the clouds; the gymnastic feats of Mr Tanner’s wonderful dogs, who poise themselves on barrels and dance on their heads as nimbly as clown in the sawdust of the circus; and best of all, the representation of the banquet in Henry VIII. by a troop of children, the little bluff King Hal making love to a diminutive Anne Bulleyn, a miniature Queen Kate scratching the face and tearing the eyes of her maid of honour in a way that would have shocked Shakespeare not less than Dr Watts, who declares that little hands were never made for such a purpose.

The Princess’s Theatre ought to produce the best pantomime, for it is the theatre of all others which pays most attention to stage effect; and it would be strange, if, eclipsing all others in the illustration of the Shakespearean drama, it should be behindhand in the representation of its pantomime. It is no vulgar brilliance of scenery, no clap-trap effects of green, red, and gold without meaning, that Mr Charles Kean introduces to his audience. There is always something striking, something to remember, something wholly original and highly suggestive, sometimes even poetical, in his scenic effect. Take the angel tableau in Faust and Marguerite, which is substantially the same as in the dying vision of Queen Katherine, what a fine solemn effect it had in feeling, how pure and beautiful it looked as a picture, and, last of all, how cleverly managed as a mere mechanical contrivance—the angels sliding down without any visible support. Or take the banquet scene in Henry VIII.; there was a marvellous originality in the point of view from which the banquet-hall was seen. It was represented slanting up the stage, so that the spectators were supposed to stand, not at the end, but at the corner of it. There is a picture in the window of every printshop, in which the Duke of Wellington is represented feasting his Waterloo comrades, and which is drawn from a similar point of view. Make the slant greater, cut the table off in the middle by the side-scenes or the picture-frame, and we have the suggestion of a room of illimitable extent. Compare this imaginative mode of suggesting a great space, with the vulgar method adopted in Drury Lane, where, in the absurd procession of idols that ended Fitzball’s Egyptian monster of a play, the stage was thrown open to the back wall, and one looked at a stream of cats, rats, and crocodiles, coming down a small street. The scenery and upholstery of Mr Charles Kean, it is true, are very much decried by certain writers, and are continually brought forward as evidences of the low estate of the drama. These writers, however, seem to speak with a personal feeling against the manager of the Princess’s, and with very little knowledge of the history of the drama. And on these two points, the present low estate of the theatre and Mr Kean’s share in that degradation, we have a few remarks to make. Praise it or blame it—the tendency to scenic illustration is the characteristic of the British theatre in its latest development, and rightly to understand its intention, is rightly to comprehend the position of our modern drama.

With regard to the present decline of the drama, we must point out that in its entire history there never has been a time when it has not been exposed to the severest condemnation which our language is capable of expressing. It has always been giving up the ghost, always dead, or worthy of death. Shakespeare began to write for the stage in 1589. Exactly ten years before was published the earliest diatribe against the stage, at least the earliest of importance:—“The School of Abuse: containing a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and suchlike Caterpillars of a Commonwealth: setting up the flag of defiance to their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing their bulwarks, by profane writers, natural reason, and common experience: a discourse as pleasant for gentlemen that favour learning, as profitable for all that will follow virtue. By Stephen Gosson.” After Gosson came Philip Stubbes, then Rankins, then Rainolds; then Histriomastin, the play: and many years afterwards, the still more celebrated Histriomastin of William Prynne, which took the author seven years to compose, and four years more to pass through the press. These attacks were levelled against the licentiousness of the stage; had in view the suppression, rather than the reformation, of the theatres; and were so far successful that for a period of years, in which the drama suffered greater comparative injury than has ever since or was ever before inflicted on it, the acting of plays was entirely prohibited. So great was the injury inflicted that from this time forward—from the reopening of the playhouses under Charles II. to the present hour—the cry has never ceased to be heard that the British drama is either dead or dying. All manner of changes have been rung upon it. At one time, amid the unparalleled licentiousness of Wycherley and Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, when a hard heart was the best flint for wit to sparkle from, and a hardened conscience the best steel to make it sparkle, the conclusion was drawn quite logically that artistic degradation is the inevitable accompaniment of such moral debasement, the sensual inhuman spirit tending to destroy that power of sympathy which is the fountainhead of dramatic inspiration. Then when the Italian opera came into vogue, and the fashionables of London turned a ready ear to the poetry of an unknown language, it was declared (by Sir Richard Steele, if we remember rightly, or at all events in the epilogue to one of his plays) that the English, who had eschewed Popery in religion, were hankering after Popery in wit; and loud and many were the warnings raised against the growing apostasy. Again, when the vein of native talent seemed to have been exhausted, and almost every piece that could boast of the slightest success had a plot borrowed from the Spanish, and sentiment borrowed from the French, refugee characters and the refuse of foreign wit, how bitterly was it lamented that so wealthy an heiress, and so beautiful, as the muse of the British drama, having squandered her dowry and prostituted her gifts to ignoble ends, should thus at length be driven forth in penury to live on alien charity, and perhaps, like another Jane Shore, to end a wretched existence begging on the highways and byways of literature? At a later period, the ignominious demise of the British muse was expected with still greater certainty, when the play-wrights seemed to have forgotten even the art of forging clever imitations, seemed to have lost even the Spartan talent of clever plagiarism, and their highest achievements were avowedly translated from Kotzebue and other Germans. And afterwards, when some of the poets who adorned the early part of the present century—Coleridge, Maturin, Milman—surrounding as it were the deathbed of the old lady, did their best to keep her in life, critical doctors shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders as if the labour were useless, and but a prolonging of the last inevitable agonies of a toothless, palsied, miserable old beldame, that had better die than live. She has not yet given up the ghost, however, nor is likely to do so in a hurry. Nevertheless the symptoms of dissatisfaction, so far from being silenced, are more frequent and doleful than ever, and are now directed not only against the dramatists, but also against the actors, there being no doubt that, to whatever cause it may be owing (probably it is very much due to that commonly assigned, the abolition of theatrical monopoly, which has distributed amongst a number of companies the histrionic talent formerly concentrated in two), it is extremely difficult to secure for a comedy, and almost impossible to secure for the highest tragedy, a strong and thoroughly good cast, so that from the protagonist down to the meanest performer every part is well fitted, and the result on the stage, with all the accompaniments of costume, scenery, and music, is a perfect whole, a true work of art. When, partly on this account—namely, the inefficiency of the actors—but partly also through a tendency which is inherent in all art, Mr Macready and other managers after him paid extraordinary attention to the dressing of the stage, so that cases have occurred, on the representation of a new piece, of the audience calling before the curtain, not the author who planned the whole of it, not the manager who brought it effectually to light, not the actors who stood forward as the chief interpreters of the play, but the scenic artist who, with his paint-pots and his Dutch foil, his muslin waterfalls and his paper moons, wrought in the gorgeous background,—dire were the denunciations hurled against those who seemed bent on transforming the theatre into a prodigious panoramic peep-show, to which the dialogue of the players has about the same merely accessory relation as the music of the orchestra. And these last are the most frequent cries, now that Mr Charles Kean has so far outstript his predecessors as almost to create an epoch in the history of the stage, by the production of spectacles which, for splendour and truth of representation, could, some years ago, have hardly been deemed possible. On the production of Sardanapalus, it was said that he had turned his theatre into a Gallery of Illustration, and that, properly read, his playbills invited the public to witness, not the Drama of Sardanapalus, but the Diorama of Nineveh.

Now, suppose that this, and worse than all this, is true—granting that the stage is in the worst state possible, let us compare the denunciations now directed against it with the description that Gifford gives of a period which we are accustomed to look back upon us a kind of golden age. It may be instructive to quote the passage, as a warning to those who may be disposed to howl too lugubriously over the fancied ruin of the drama. In the preface to the Mæviad, published in 1795, he writes as follows: “I know not if the stage has been so low, since the days of Gammer Gurton, as at this hour. It seems as if all the blockheads in the kingdom had started up, and exclaimed with one voice, ‘Come, let us write for the theatres.’ In this there is nothing, perhaps, altogether new; the striking and peculiar novelty of the times seems to be, that ALL they write is received. Of the three parties concerned in this business, the writers and the managers seem the least culpable. If the town will feed on husks, extraordinary pains need not be taken to find them anything more palatable. But what shall we say of the people? The lower orders are so brutified by the lamentable follies of O’Keefe, and Cobbe, and Pilon, and I know not who—Sardi venales, each worse than the other—that they have lost all relish for simplicity and genuine humour; nay, ignorance itself, unless it be gross and glaring, cannot hope for ‘their most sweet voices.’ And the higher ranks are so mawkishly mild that they take with a placid simper whatever comes before them; or, if they now and then experience a slight fit of disgust, have not resolution enough to express it, but sit yawning and gaping in each other’s faces for a little encouragement in their culpable forbearance.” Then, in a note to the Baviad, he speaks of a deep even lower than the bathos of O’Keefe. On referring to Morton, Reynolds, and Holcroft—to “Morton’s catchword,” to Reynolds’ “flippant trash,” and to “Holcroft’s Shug-lane cant”—he asks, “Will future ages believe that this facetious triumvirate should think nothing more to be necessary to the construction of a play than an eternal repetition of some contemptible vulgarity, such as ‘That’s your sort!’ ‘Hey, damme!’ ‘What’s to pay!’ ‘Keep moving!’ &c. They will: for they will have blockheads of their own, who will found their claims to celebrity on similar follies. What, however, they will never credit is, that these drivellings of idiotism, these catchwords, should actually preserve their respective authors from being hooted off the stage. No, they will not believe that an English audience could be so besotted, so brutified, as to receive such senseless exclamations with bursts of laughter, with peals of applause. I cannot believe it myself, though I have witnessed it. Haud credo—if I may reverse the good father’s position—haud credo, quia possibile est.” And not to quote further, let us but cite his description of the tragedy of the time:

“From first to last