Abstract
It has been said that ‘melodramatic music, just as melodramatic incidents, characters, and dialogue, could be readily assembled from ready-made parts, even as mosaics are fashioned from ready-cut chips of coloured tile’. The trend to borrow from a variety of sources, far from pertaining exclusively to melodrama, is a recurrent feature of nineteenth-century theatre. Increasing competition between venues meant that playwrights had to provide yet more spectacular pieces at very short notice, therefore they recycled elements already known to be attractive to audiences. Stock representations of foreign cultures and of ‘exotic’ bodies in particular tended to migrate from one production to the other — sometimes being literally reused, creating a general incongruity of details. It was in some cases even sufficient for stage directions to refer to what was arguably a common knowledge of ‘exotic’ types to see them realized on stage, the employment of ‘etc. etc.’ in playbills, manuscripts, and acting editions of plays standing for a broad range of specific details. My argument in this article is that the accumulation and replication of elements across performances and genres eventually exposed the fictionality of the Other on stage, potentially affecting the audiences’ suspension of disbelief, and complicating political readings of nineteenth-century theatre. Whereas the use of ‘etc. etc.’ indicates the existence of a shared understanding of what was expected of the Other when it came to their portrayal on stage, the accumulation and consequent incongruity of details may suggest a contradictory idea: were audiences to believe what they saw, and, if so, to what extent could the repetitive representation of the exotic as the result of layered discourses work as political commentary on the contemporary world?
Highlights
This article is part of a larger, European-funded project entitled ‘The Representation of the “Exotic” Body in 19th-Century English Drama’ (REBED), the main goals of which have been to map the presence of the non-European Other, both fictional and real, on the Georgian and Victorian stage and to understand to what extent, and in what ways, such a presence mirrored or responded to the cultural policies of the British Empire.[1]
The presence of the exotic body is extensive and widely documentable, articulated as it is in recurrent themes such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, as well as the several adaptations of Robinson Crusoe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin that largely contributed to shape the image of the Black
While real exhibits could feature in these performances, non-Europeans on the theatrical stage were mainly portrayed by white performers, in black, red, or yellow-face where appropriate, employing a number of visual and representational conventions that signalled the exotic to the audience
Summary
This article is part of a larger, European-funded project entitled ‘The Representation of the “Exotic” Body in 19th-Century English Drama’ (REBED), the main goals of which have been to map the presence of the non-European Other, both fictional and real (what I call here the ‘exotic’ body), on the Georgian and Victorian stage and to understand to what extent, and in what ways, such a presence mirrored or responded to the cultural policies of the British Empire.[1]. As David Mayer has observed, ‘melodramatic music, just as melodramatic incidents, characters, and dialogue, could be readily assembled from ready-made parts, even as mosaics are fashioned from ready-cut chips of coloured tile.’[14] Far from involving melodrama exclusively, this trend was generally typical of Victorian theatre, with the actual inclusion of music from a variety of sources, most notably Italian opera, but with an accumulation of intertextual references and topical allusions, performances working as miniature catalogues of available entertainment.[15] Instead of reading this theatre as the product of individual playwrights and managers that functioned as mediator between the outside world and the public, I will read it as the product of the fluidity of genres, narratives, and even roles that characterized the nineteenth-century stage.[16] I will argue that the accumulation and replication of elements across performances and genres, by working against any stable or consistent arrangement or presentation of details, eventually exposed the. I will highlight how the stage, while certainly responding to changing ideologies or resounding events in imperial history, did not do so merely to ‘illustrate’ politics or as a direct dependant of any imperial authority, and to exploit the visual potential of imperial themes in a context in which spectacle was the main key to success
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