Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830. Frederick Burwick.

Abstract

Frederick Burwick, Playing to Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830 (Palgrave, 2012) 319 + $90.00 Frederick Burwick's bravura performance of scholarly imagination and recovery in Playing to Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830, opens with child actors mimicking rape and murder, and concludes with pugilists beloved of the Fancy re-enacting famous bouts on of Coburg Theater. In an increasingly diverse, crowded, and still un-policed London metropolis, audiences of unlicensed theaters sought onstage a mirror of routine urban violence that plagued dark streets outside. peculiar pleasure of audience watching images of themselves on stage, is an abiding interest of Burwick's analysis, in which relation between audience and players in unlicensed theaters is an overwhelmingly self-reflexive phenomenon. (209) The borders between hero and villain, rebel and robber, were often vague, and Burwick's own heroic achievement in this volume is to help explain potpourri of violence-laced melodrama, musical drama, and miscellaneous bills of fare as driven, in first instance, by demands of London's changing urban demographics. Aside from a predilection for child actors in adult roles, these immigrant audiences--often refugees from political conflicts on Continent--craved representations of their own national heroes, from Italian fisherman-cum-revolutionary, Masaniello, to William Tell. Scenes of onstage violence thus operated at multiple scales--from true crime re-enactments of recent grisly cases from Old Bailey, to figurative or otherwise disguised renderings of state violence in revolutionary period, dramas which often struggled to bypass censoring eye of Lord Chamberlain. We often look to Romantic period for modern invention of childhood, as both social category and sentimental trope, but Chapters 1 and 3 of Playing to Crowd contain to reassure us on this score. Pre-teen girls cast in roles of flirt or seducer put one in mind of Jon Benet Ramsey, while legions of child actors processed through acting academies and onto stages of unlicensed theaters in hope of wealth and fame prefigure all too closely child celebrity industry as it operates across contemporary visual media. Jane Austen thought it scandalous enough in Mansfield Park for unmarried women to simulate throes of love onstage. How would that novel read with cast of Lovers' Vows made up entirely of children, as actually happened at Sans Souci theater in 1806! In this context, Wordsworth's disgust at age in which little actor cons another part, in Burwick's history appears less as a Romantic theory of childhood development--as Immortality Ode is customarily read--than a highly topical reaction to vulgar rabble of prodigies paraded upon London stage. Wordsworth's bitter reflections on humorous stage of life in his famous poem are, in this sense, both literal and metaphorical. For Coleridge, meanwhile, stage-child phenomenon was all of a piece with Regency cult of virtuosity, with wonderment always taking place of sense. (15) Given this highly original opening account of Romantic-era fascination with, and exploitation of children, it is all more haunting to read Burwick's subsequent reading of Coleridge's oft-neglected play Zapolya (1816), subject of Chapter 3. Werewolves had long been a staple of farce and harlequinade, but Burwick's careful reading of play and historical frame of reference allows us to see Coleridge's adaption of middle European folklore of werewolf anew, as the first to fully integrate into both character and action. (68) This is not proto-Freudian figure for unrepressed sexual violence of men--made over-familiar to us in Twilight franchise--but a more authentic rendering: werewolf as vengeful self-transformation of unloved child. …