Harlequin Britain: Eighteenth-Century Pantomime and the Cultural Location of Entertainment(s)

Abstract

Harlequin Britain: Eighteenth-Century Pantomime and the Cultural Location of Entertainment(s) John O’Brien (bio) Although it is not included in his compendium of terms that have proven crucial in the history of the English language and the Anglo-American culture that has used and shaped it, “entertainment” would certainly count as one of what Raymond Williams identified as keywords, terms opening vistas into the dynamics of social change. 1 Entertainment—literally (via the French) “hold between”—typically demarcates temporary and interstitial spaces or activities: among the usages that the Oxford English Dictionary records for entertainment are as a synonym for maintenance or sustenance (“the entertainment of the regiment”), as a show of hospitality such as a meal for guests, or, most frequently in twentieth-century usage, as a general term for diversions, often those produced by an element of the culture industry. Common to most of these usages is a sense of entertainment as something that is provisional and general, situated between more obviously useful states of work or rest and resistant to hard-and-fast definitions or excessive specificity. Considering this indeterminacy at the center of the concept, it is perhaps no surprise that entertainments—theatrical, athletic, literary, filmic, and televisual—have often functioned as loci of cultural conflict and confrontation; they are activities in which cultural values are contested, negotiated, and legitimated, and through which those values may become both intelligible to contemporaries and perspicuous to later historians who want to identify and understand them. This essay will focus on one particularly vital and contested form of entertainment in eighteenth-century Britain—the performance genre better known as pantomime. In their role as “the entertainment” of an evening’s bill, pantomimes were positioned in the interval between the full-length mainpiece and the close of the program, when spectators returned to a society that eighteenth-century observers often analogized to the theatre: “the World and the Stage,” claimed Richard Steele, “have been ten thousand times observ’d to be the Pictures of one another.” 2 If Steele’s commonplace—which feels slightly worn even as he utters it—is even partly right, the enormous popularity of pantomime in the eighteenth-century British theatre would strongly suggest that the world it depicted was in the throes of profound change, such that [End Page 489] certain long-standing expectations and norms could not longer be assumed to hold. For from the 1720s through the 1740s in particular, pantomime entertainments frequently reversed the assumed priority of mainpiece to afterpiece, as they became the most consistently profitable product that the London patent theatres had to offer; they flourished outside the licensed theatres in nonlicensed houses (Goodman’s Fields, Sadler’s Wells, the Little Theatre at the Haymarket, among others), in the London fairs held each August and September, and in provincial theatres as well. 3 As we shall see, pantomime had its admirers and advocates, as there were writers for whom the imperial pretensions of the word “pantomime,” its etymological claim to imitate any and everything, and the form’s putative origins in the Greek and Roman theatre, made it available as a way of identifying British culture as the heir to a tradition of silent, kinetic mimesis that constituted a language of its own. But modern critics and historians have generally followed the evaluations of contemporary antagonists such as Alexander Pope and Henry Fielding, accepting their contemptuous description of pantomime as an “irrational entertainment,” a sign of the depravity of the audience’s taste and of the decline of the British stage. 4 The overkill palpable in [End Page 490] such attacks as Pope’s first version of The Dunciad (1728), which features the pantomime librettist Lewis Theobold as its mock-hero and chief dunce, indicates how thoroughly a literary culture deeply invested in the priority of language, in the purity of literary genres, and in its own authority over the classical tradition was threatened by what we might well think of as pantomime’s entertainment of conflicting impulses and competing theatrical modes, the ways in which it combined serious with comic, spectacular with mundane, classical with popular elements. 5 Perhaps most importantly, in its reliance on the material...