Charles Macklin and the Theatres of London

Abstract

This collection will interest more than just fans of the Irish actor Charles Macklin. At stake in examining Macklin’s life and work is the fashioning of a more capacious understanding of the Enlightenment. The editors, Ian Newman and David O’Shaughnessy, place Macklin in the frame of Enlightenment values: individual reason and an inclusive sociability. They push the limits of Kant’s understanding of the Enlightenment as the exercise of reason to include praxis, the Enlightenment as embodied performance. As they say, Macklin did things, both as an actor whose body was literally front and center in representing his thought and as a theatre manager and entrepreneur in London’s burgeoning entertainment industry.David Taylor’s essay on Macklin’s “look” focuses on contemporary visual representations of Macklin to complicate the agency implied in that “doing.” The look is both the image created by the actor and the appearance ascribed to him by audiences. The actor’s image is inseparable from that of his most famous role, Shakespeare’s Shylock, as the Irish actor and the Jewish character he played are conflated in representation after representation, making Macklin, Taylor argues, famous by his abjection as racialized other. Manushag Powell also picks up the issue of the actor’s agency in shaping a public persona, focusing on his frequent and persistent representations in the periodical press even after his death. In comparison to his often successful and masterful interventions in courts of law, Powell argues, Macklin was often at the mercy of periodicals presenting him through an ever-turning kaleidoscope of different Macklins. Even in its early stages, the mass media challenged and often triumphed over the Enlightenment ideal of the heroic individual asserting his identity and rights.In “Macklin’s Books,” Paul Goring provides an overview of Macklin’s extensive library, working from the manuscript catalog held at the Houghton Library. Goring adds evidence of the actor as a representative figure of the Enlightenment, engaged in the philosophical and political debates of his day. He also demonstrates his unflagging investment in theatre through the presence of French and English plays as well as texts about the stage and acting. Macklin’s combination of autodidactism and investment in theatrical business could make for awkward moments in his career as a public intellectual, such as his disastrous “British Inquisition” of the 1750s. Macklin brought Enlightenment ideals into the commercial space of the London entertainment business, and his failures tell us as much as his successes about the compatibility of capitalism and the Enlightenment.Macklin’s activity in the practice of law is tracked by David Worrall through his establishment in the courts of copyright over his most successful play, Love a la Mode (1759), and his suit against the rioters who had him fired from Drury Lane after his disastrous Macbeth in the 1770s. In the case of the latter, Macklin established an actor’s right to contracted remuneration, and Worrall gives us plentiful evidence showing his knowledge of case law, in both instances, as well as his association with lawyers, notably the playwright and lawyer Arthur Murphy, a fellow Irishman. Worrall makes the case for an “Irish diaspora” working effectively in both the legal and the theatrical spheres and points us to the agency opened to ethnic outsiders by “Enlightenment progress.” I am not fully convinced that progress was equal across these realms, but Worrall effectively intervenes in the reification of the Enlightenment as the domain of white Englishmen.Concluding this section on “Representing Macklin,” Ros Ballaster tracks the actor through novels that depict characters representative of Macklin and through references to novels in Macklin’s own plays. A picture emerges of the two media as infused with a high degree of mutual consciousness and, at times, antagonism. “Character” is a sticking point in this antagonism. Macklin valued the embodied doing of character on the stage over the novel’s demands for the projection of depth and interiority onto character.In a section titled simply “Theatre,” Matthew Kinservik returns to Macklin’s doings by demonstrating, through meticulous archival research, the considerable extent of the actor/playwright’s career-long work in theatrical management. Kinservik shows us the difficulty of documenting doing, the sometimes informally established, day-to-day management that often fell to Macklin. But his meticulous research also unearths evidence that expands our view of Macklin’s impact on Georgian theatre.Ian Newman takes the question of evidence in the direction of performance theory in his consideration of the music played in Macklin’s plays and, by extrapolation, in theatre in general. Traditional archival materials give us only partial glimpses into the thematic and, more importantly, affective work of music on the stage. Drawing on Diana Taylor’s influential theory of repertoire, the unrecorded, embodied experience of performance passed from performer to performer to constitute a cultural memory (20), Newman argues that on the eighteenth-century stage songs stitch the world of the play to the world of the audience. When an actor turns to the audience and sings, that song may or may not connect to the play’s diegesis, but it builds an affective connection between performer and spectator that can produce empathy or identification while also encouraging the audience to examine social as well as theatrical experience critically. Newman is honest about the speculation that is necessarily part of a hermeneutics of repertoire but nonetheless gives us illuminating ways to think about the ubiquitous presence of music in the drama of this period.The vexed question of humor based on ethnic difference is the subject of Michael Brown’s essay on how laughter works in Macklin’s plays, which are peopled by characters who embody Britain’s provincial and ethnic stereotypes: the Scot, the Irishman, the Jew, and, importantly, the Southern English character who represents the gold standard from which those others are excluded. Brown argues that, while Macklin draws on those stereotypes, his jokes ultimately expose English prejudices and envision a Britain that integrates different identities into one nation. This essay thus complicates narratives of British identity formation as a process of consolidation through othering. I note, however, the absence of any discussion of the politics of assimilation in the otherwise convincing discussion of Macklin’s ethnic comedy. While modern identity politics is, as Brown argues, certainly anachronistic here, when does integration morph into a culturally genocidal assimilation?David O’Shaughnessy makes excellent use of the Larpent Collection by tracing the trajectory of Macklin’s agenda of social and political reform through the censored content of his plays. O’Shaughnessy gives a clear sense of the kinds of content most frequently struck by the censor’s pen but also insight into Macklin’s agenda as a playwright who used personal satire to reform a corrupt society and its politics. He also shows us how women are interpolated into Macklin’s vision of a reformed British culture and politics. While their presence is the butt of bawdy, even Rabelaisian humor, it also signals a shift away from a boys-will-be-boys, corrupt political culture.Two essays constitute a section titled “Sociability,” Markman Ellis’ on Macklin’s “coffeehouse,” a hybrid space that included food, drink, lectures, and debates, and Helen Burke’s on the British Inquisition, a lecture and debating series that Macklin staged in this space. Ellis’ emphasis is on Macklin’s regendering of sociability by his inclusion of women in public spaces and discourses. Burke examines the various activities of the coffeehouse—which were usually associated with different gender- and status-based groups—in light of the Inquisition’s threats to class. What emerges from both essays is Macklin’s strong adherence to ideals of reason, democracy, and inclusion and how thoroughly these ideals were demolished when deployed in commercial ventures.The volume under review wraps up with reflections on 2017 and 2018 productions of Macklin’s farce Love a la Mode: “Re-Staging Macklin” by Nicholas Johnson and a dialogue between Johnson and Colm Summers (the director with Felicity, an Irish theatre company, who produced the play in Dublin and performed at the Notre Dame symposium on Macklin behind this collection). Both speak to collaboration between academics and theatre makers as enriching both kinds of work. Both Johnson and Summers fully realize the erasures and misconceptions that lie in the binary between the academic and the artistic, and both seek a reconception of this relationship more as spectrum than as binary. The result would seem to be embodied in their description of this new Love a la Mode as a departure from the museum piece that seeks impossible reenactment of some alleged original. Rather, they see Summers’ new production as translation, opening the play up to interpretation through the contemporary lens of the current Brexit crisis and the #MeToo movement. It is worth noting that this openness to reworking old plays to convey new messages is a key characteristic of Georgian theatre making. Summers was actually staying true to this tradition.This reflection on performance brings us back to what Charles Macklin has to do with the key Enlightenment ideal of an informed, inclusive public. Johnson quotes the director Colin Blumenau on Georgian drama as “engaging . . . moralizing, educating, amusing, and diverting” (278) the audience, and no one was more aware than Macklin of the audience-directed nature of everything that happened in the public spaces inside and outside the walls of the Georgian playhouse. Doing theatre makes the public even as it caters to it. As Macklin’s career shows us, doing for that audience did not always succeed in accordance with Enlightenment ideals, but he seemed to have known, as I think we should today, of the dangers of throwing out the aspirational inclusiveness and egalitarianism of the Enlightenment along with the failures that inevitably accompany those aspirations.