The Sublime of Tragedy in Low Life

Abstract

In an essay on comic actors in The London Magazine (January 1820) William Hazlitt described John Emery’s performance of the Yorkshire rustic, Robert Tyke, in Thomas Morton’s The School of Reform (Covent Theatre, 1805), as “the sublime of tragedy in low life.” Five years earlier, he referred to Emery as “in his way, the most perfect actor on the stage.” The impact of Emery’s Tyke was so immediate that Samuel De Wilde exhibited an oil painting of Emery in the role at the Royal Academy in 1806. Emery was the leading exponent of stage countrymen on the London stage during the Romantic era. This paper explores Emery’s acting in the context of critical discourses introduced into theatrical criticism by Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt as well as in relation to contemporary discourses in art and literature and considers more precisely Hazlitt’s notion of “the sublime of tragedy in low life.” It concludes that, despite the problem of dialect, Emery achieved the “sublime” at moments within his performance, but that such moments alternated with more comical episodes.