Artisan Melodrama and the Plebeian Public Sphere: The Political Culture of Drury Lane and Its Environs, 1797-1830

Abstract

THIS ESSAY WILL EXAMINE NON-ROYAL PATENT THEATRE MELODRAMA artisan radical culture in the Drury Lane vicinity in the late 1810s early 1820s. It will show that contemporary melodramas, especially those written by William Thomas Moncrieff performed at the Olympic Theatre, Wych Street, Adelphi Theatre, Strand, have a cognatic relationship with London revolutionary politics. Popular melodrama was a manifestation of an increasingly self-confident artisan class in which the occupation of public spaces (streets, theatres taverns) articulated their distinctive plebeian public sphere embodied in personal political agency an active radical press. While this essay claims a high degree of specificity a robust historical methodology, it necessarily negotiates the contemporary aporias between culture literature which operated at this time. For the same reasons that state spying dogged radical activism, drama also fell under government scrutiny control. As Marc Baer has shown, spying on the 1809 Price riots at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, was controlled by Sir Richard Ford, a senior Bow Street magistrate whose father had held controlling capital in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.(1) Ford, effectively London's spymaster chief-of-police, managed surveillance to counter United Irish nationalism metropolitan ultraradicalism.(2) Not least, as Kenneth Johnston has proven, Ford also controlled the espionage dudes of William Wordsworth.(3) Amidst such vividly tantalizing promiscuities between the political the literary, it is important not to underestimate the pervasive, consistent invasive role of government control over symbolic expression. Although my essay will imply that there was a certain amount of successful surveillance avoidance, even mildly liberal discourses could be effectively banned from the stage. For example, the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays, the playwright George Colman the younger, in regulating the manuscript of The Castle of Wolfenstein, or, The Accusing Spirit in 1828 expunged the mildly liberal sentiments and in America you know the distinction of ranks are not so minutely marked as with us.(4) What was possible as utterance in poetry, prose or public speech was disallowed in the theatre, even in the years close to the Reform Bill. This sharp discursive asymmetry between street stage, magnified by the distinction between patent non-patent theatres, is a defining feature of the political culture of Drury Lane. One summer night in 1797 a government spy sent to Furnival's Inn Cellar, Strand, to monitor the London Corresponding Society's dialogue with United Irishmen, noted that the gathering of veteran Jacobins, disaffected Hackney writers Attorney's Clerks not only toasted `the immortal memory of Parker, late Commander of the floating Republic' but call'd for a of Beer which they term'd pot vowed it should be introduced every night ... they met. The exemplary execution of Nore mutiny ringleader Richard Parker swiftly deified him amongst ultra-radicals who also drank toasts to A speedy downfall to Spoony the third his Ministers Success to the Armies of Bounaparte.(5) Thirty three years later an irate theatre-goer wrote to the Home Office complaining about an atrocious inflammatory production of Douglas Jerrold's Mutiny at Spithead the Nore (1830) at the Royal Coburg Theatre just across the Thames from the Strand on the site of the present Old Vic. The writer considered Jerrold's play much more ... [dangerous] than Mr Hunt or W. Cobbetts harangues feared it would encourage [in]subordination in the Navy.(6) Curiously, Parker's pot had survived, transmogrified in Jerrold's play into a variation muddied by popular memory.(7) In Mutiny at ... the Nore's tableau ending (a visual freeze-frame typical of 1820s melodrama), Parker is given a glass of wine by the execution squad from which he drinks declaring, shipmates, hear the last toast of Richard Parker:--`Here's a health to my king, God bless him! …