Staging FairyLand: Folklore, Children's Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime by Jennifer Schacker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Staging FairyLand: Folklore, Children's Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime by Jennifer Schacker Heather Sanford (bio) Staging FairyLand: Folklore, Children's Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime, by Jennifer Schacker. Wayne State UP, 2018. As Jennifer Schacker notes in the introduction to Staging FairyLand: Folklore, Children's Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime, fairy-tale and folklore scholars have limited their own field of study in the implicit privileging of textual records (7-8). Defaulting to textual transcriptions has "become so naturalized that they can be taken for granted," even though these stories have roots in multiple forms, many of them nontextual (7). In particular, Schacker identifies a period at the turn of the nineteenth century in which England's cultural interest in fairy tales strayed so far from textual forms that scholars often regard this as "a period of remarkable inactivity in the history of the [End Page 275] fairy tale" (58). The thesis of this project is to demonstrate that fairy tales did not drop out of the cultural dialogue during this period; rather, they were simply being adapted into other, nontextual forms. Focusing on fairy-tale pantomime as just one of the forms of adaptation that have been largely ignored or discounted by folklorists given its nontextual nature, Schacker's work demonstrates how the study of fairy-tale adaptations can reveal new layers of understanding not just of the tales themselves but also of the cultures in which they are produced. In doing so, Schacker suggests an interdisciplinary and multimodal methodology of fairy-tale and folklore studies. In the introduction to the book, Schacker provides context regarding the intertwining history of fairy tales and pantomime, specifically focusing on the evolution of pantomime as a storytelling tradition in nineteenth-century England during the Theatre Licensing Act enacted in 1737. She argues for the importance of merging adaptation studies and folklore studies in order to understand fairy tales in their fullest cultural context. Underscoring the need for this book, Schacker notes a gap in the existing literature regarding attention to pantomimes as adaptations of fairy tales, despite their potential to influence "our thinking about fairy tales" in terms of "their bearing on questions of identity and sociability, genre and ideology, and also their signifying possibilities, past, present, and future" (22). The first chapter, titled "Intermedial Magic: Text, Performance, Materiality" is organized into four sections, beginning with an introduction and then given the subtitles "The Theatricality of 'Fairy Tale,'" "Fairy-Tale Theater across Borders," and "Dressing the Part." Breaking her chapters down in this way, a model which she repeats in each chapter, is particularly helpful in chunking the wealth of information she presents. Schacker begins this chapter by highlighting the intertextual, culturally and historically situated nature of fairy tales and their various adaptations. She notes the obstacles that have prevented research on the connection between fairy tales and pantomime, specifically the lack of dialogue between folklore theorists and performance theorists (26), the difficulty in tracing these storytelling practices as they have migrated across cultures and mediums (25), and the double-stigma against both fairy tales and pantomime as illegitimate or lowbrow art forms (25). Pressing forward despite these challenges, Schacker provides cultural and historical context for the marriage of fairy tale and pantomime, particularly focusing on eighteenth-century England. As Schacker explains, under the Theatre Licensing Act, pantomime [End Page 276] theaters during this time were limited in the types of storytelling in which they could engage without committing copyright infringement. To get around this, these theaters would rely on the conventions of the harlequinade opening sequence to set up a story and then use visual elements such as costuming to communicate to the audience which popular story (typically a fairy tale) it was adapting (28). This type of story structure lent itself to "topical humor and slapstick comedy" and provided a unique platform for social commentary, thus further underscoring the significance of Schacker's research. The subsequent subsections of the chapter support these introductory claims primarily by establishing the medium's transnational roots, especially in the Italian practice of commedia dell'arte; by establishing and analyzing the medium's popularity across classes; and by illustrating how the costuming...