A Penchant for Perdita on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage

Abstract

on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage IRENE G. DASH When The Winter’s Tale finally gained acceptance on the eighteenth-century stage, it was not as Shakespeare’s full-length play but in abbreviated versions derived from the last two acts. On March 25, 1754, John Rich presented a musical farce The Sheep Shearing or Florizel and Perdita, by MacNamara Morgan, as an afterpiece at Covent Garden.1 Two years later, David Garrick presented his version of the play, also entitled Florizel and Perdita, at Drury Lane.2 As their titles suggest, both versions center on the sheep-shearing, pastoral scenes of the last two acts. Garrick’s, however, has far greater pretensions than does Morgan’s. Presented as the mainpiece in a double bill with another work derived from Shakespeare, Catherine and Petruchio, it pledges to “lose no drop of that immortal man.”3 By eliminating the “gap of sixteen years,” however, it amputates most of the first three acts—a contradiction that Garrick’s critics were quick to observe. Never­ theless, the actor-manager had discovered the key to The Winter’s Tale’s theatrical potential; his version remained popular to the close of the century. z7 331 332 / IRENE G. DASH Earlier attempts to revive the full-length play had had limited success. Giffard’s famous “first-time-acted-in-a-hundred-years” production during the season of 1740-41 and Rich’s the following season at Covent Garden survived nine and five performances respectively.4 Nor was Hull’s five-act version in 1771 applauded.5 For even after audiences and critics no longer insisted on the unities, only the pastoral adaptations drew their support. Several factors explain this development: the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of the 1730s and ’40s; the work of the early textual editors; but most of all, the character of the women themselves. With the publication in 1739 of William Smith’s first direct English translation of Longinus’ On the Sublime, poets, play­ wrights, and painters began to reexamine their aims.6 Smith’s works prepared “the way for the ultimate rejection” of the neoclassical rules. Suddenly the outdoors—external nature and simple rural characters—provided new and vital sources of inspi­ ration.7 Seeking to evoke from their readers an emotional re­ sponse approximating the sublime experience described by Longinus, poets indulged in vivid descriptions of nature’s minutest changes. To compensate for the diminution of action and wit, they expanded their poems to include philosophical musings, discovering analogues to man’s behavior in the constantly changing cycles of nature. Descriptions of natural phenomena were inter­ spersed with contemplative passages on life and death and the transitoriness of man’s existence. In Perdita’s analogy of the flowers of the seasons to the ages of man, in the description of the storm at sea, and in the behavior of the natural rustic characters at the sheep shearing, The Winter’s Tale fit the new mold. In 1747, it was therefore natural for Warburton, responding to the new intellectual climate, to commend for special reader attention most of the fourth and fifth acts of the play, thereby presaging the versions of the 1750s.8 Before his work, Pope too had laid the groundwork for the pastoral adaptations when he subdivided the scenes in Shakespeare’s plays into brief scenic units. Particularly in IV.iv where he created eight scenes, breaking down the long nine-hundred-line sheepshearing, Pope revealed a theatrical poten­ tial previously unrealized.9 A Penchant for Perdita I 333 On the whole, however, the first eighteenth-century editors indicated a progression of interest from the earlier to the later sections of the play: from the women of its potentially tragic first acts to Perdita who dances, strews flowers, and philosophizes at the sheepshearing. Rowe, for example, introduced excessive punctu­ ation into the dramatically explosive sections. Because he himself was a writer of she-tragedies, one can only suspect that he hoped, through a plethora of dashes and exclamation points, to enhance the emotional intensity of Hermione and therefore of her appeal to contemporary audiences. Because he did not tamper with the text, however, she withstood his attempts, remaining aloof...