Merrie Arcadia: staging the pastoral in the age of the Clarion socialist movement

Abstract

This article examines the way in which classical pastoral and contemporary socialist influences were combined in an archetypally Edwardian piece of commercial theatre. The Arcadians (1909) is the exemplary musical comedy of the period. A seemingly trivial production, it has received scholarly interest for its enormous commercial success and portrayal of modernity. Nevertheless, its relationship to antiquity has received little attention. Furthermore, the production has not been discussed in relation to the thought of the Clarion socialist movement, to which the show’s librettist, Alexander M. Thompson, and producer, Robert Courtneidge, were connected. This article argues that socialists’ understanding of the natural world and their ongoing dialogue with classical antiquity informed the production’s adoption of the pastoral tradition within a profoundly modern and commercial performance genre. The interplay of the performance form with the show’s thematic content both reflects the pastoral tradition and exposes some of the tensions between commerce and utopianism. It also demonstrates that apparently quite superficial examples of classical reception are worthy of investigation.