Drury Lane Theatre Research Articles

Charles Fleetwood, the 1744 Drury Lane Riots, and Pricing Practices in Eighteenth‐Century British Theatre

AbstractIn November 1744, a series of riots broke out at Drury Lane theatre, forcing its proprietor, Charles Fleetwood, to sell his majority share of the theatrical patent. Theatre scholarship has long held that the riots were caused by Fleetwood's attempt to raise admission prices for old pantomimes, yet also, somewhat contradictorily, has maintained that admission prices definitively increased at London's patent theatres in the period around 1740. This article shows both points to be mistaken: prices did not rise in the period, and Fleetwood was forced out due to a range of grievances that had developed over the preceding decade. By revealing how pricing practices, Fleetwood's tenure, and the riots developed, this article provides new insights on a crucial period in London's theatre history (the 1730s–40s) and on the wider social and economic dynamics of Georgian theatregoing.

Assessing the Long-COVID Impact on Heritage Organisations

The aim of this paper is to understand the long-COVID impact on cultural heritage organisations, and future research needed. COVID-19 was disruptive to cultural heritage socioeconomic activities across the world during 2020 and 2021. Whilst government intervention and changes from physical to digital engagement generally prevailed, the long-COVID impact on cultural heritage organisations, their people and users, buildings, and collections remains unknown. The extent, also, to which financing, curating, visiting, and volunteering patterns have changed is uncertain. Following the pandemic closures and associated support, cultural heritage organisations are facing continuing economic, social, political, environmental, technological, and organisational culture pressures. This research examines the existing academic literature, sector publications, annual reports and associated visitor information to understand whether cultural heritage organisations have long-COVID, whether they can survive another pandemic, and what further research is needed to be better prepared. Four case studies from the UK look at the visitor and financial impacts of COVID-19 on the British Library, the London Transport Museum, The Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and Kensington Palace. This paper contributes to heritage research by providing a deeper understanding of the impact that COVID-19 had on heritage, and how to proactively plan for similar future disruptions. The impact themes show that change did not result in a new normal but in the need for a new space, consisting of blended space (physical and digital), mixed space (indoors and outdoors), and community of practice space (isolated or cross-sector networking space). The literature highlights the significance of the sector coming together during the pandemic to share knowledge and provide support through its networks. It also highlights how important it is for such unity not to be lost but to be harnessed to support ongoing organisational sustainability and better preparedness for future crises. Finally, future research suggestions are proposed grouped into social, digital, financial, and operational research themes.

The Singer and Composer Henry Holcombe (1690–1756)

Henry Holcombe (1690–1756) was trained as a chorister at Chester Cathedral. In 1705 he moved to London, where he sang at the Drury Lane theatre. He later pursued a lucrative career as a private music teacher. Only in later life did he achieve his full potential as a composer, producing four collections of exceptional quality. This is the first study to examine Holcombe’s life and music in detail.

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Anderson, Emily Hodgson. Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss.

Anderson, Emily Hodgson. <i>Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss</i>.

(Un)making a Monster: Melodrama, The Satirist, and the Cartoons of Samuel De Wilde

Our essay takes up the well-known satirical print, ‘The Monster Melo-Drame’, and re-attaches it to several contexts to bring forward its richness and ambiguity as an image. We begin by considering its artist (Samuel De Wilde), printer (Samuel Tipper), and publisher ( The Satirist), interpreting the print in its original publication and in dialogue with the essay that accompanied it in the January 1808 issue of the Satirist. The image, we argue, should not be read on its own but rather as the first of a trio of prints De Wilde made for that magazine. Taken together, the images show the Satirist engaging in a sustained campaign against London’s Theatres Royal, one in which melodrama is a subject but not a primary target. Part of our essay’s work is necessarily that of description: identifying figures, references, and tableaux as these prints comment on a rapidly changing theatrical scene between 1807 and 1809. Considered as a set, De Wilde’s prints constituted a fundamental part of the Satirist’s attacks on the Drury Lane Theatre management, particularly Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his son Thomas Sheridan, whom they represent as corrupt caretakers of that institution and of the national drama.

“Notes and Queries … ” – That Wren drawing

ABSTRACT In this article I will expand on work presented in ‘Haptic Insights: Model Making as Historical Methodology’ (Fergusson Baugh 2018) and demonstrate the value of the methodologies proposed there on a case study reconstruction of the second Drury Lane theatre (1674) initially prepared for the THEATRON project. I will explore the history of this building through a procedural engagement with source material and the development of a virtual model. I will also explore how an apparently inconsequential inconsistency in the section can account for Langhans, Mulling and Koenig’s disagreement (and resolve which of them was right), and how a process of computer modelling suggests a haptic insight into a more human history of a drawing that has been forcefully torn up but retained and carefully conserved for 350 years.

Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster by Berta Joncus

Reviewed by: Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster by Berta Joncus John Cunningham Berta Joncus, Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster ( Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2019). Pp. 541. $99.00 cloth. Catherine "Kitty" Clive (née Raftor) (1711–1785) was one of the first female stars of the London stage. Born in London to a disgraced Irish Catholic father, William Raftor, she assumed her married name from the barrister George Clive in 1733. Between her debut in 1728 and retirement in 1769, Clive acted and sang on the London stage in a range of productions (including plays, masques, ballad operas, oratorios, and operas), including the role of Dalila in Handel's Samson (1743). Her career coincided with the rise of the English press media and its increasing construction of celebrity. Her star power brought with it financial rewards, which ultimately contributed to the public turning on her in the 1740s, leaving Clive to throw her lot in with David Garrick and, in the process, abandoning and disparaging the serious song through which she had built her career. In this excellent book, Berta Joncus tells the enthralling story of this remarkable heroine. The name Kitty Clive will, of course, be familiar to anyone with an interest in the eighteenth-century London stage; her modern reputation is largely founded on her acting skills. Over 13 substantial chapters, Joncus paints a detailed picture of Clive not simply as an actress but as a performer highly conscious of her self-image and an active participant in its construction. In addition to her meticulous analyses of the theatrical contexts and the works and roles that Clive inhabited, Joncus explores visual representations of Clive in portrait and porcelain. While Clive is generally considered primarily as an actress today, Joncus demonstrates that, in fact, Clive's singing, musicianship, and musical training were the essential elements in her success. Moreover, the "modern ignorance of Clive as initially a celebrated songster, and then a first comedienne-soprano, stems largely from eighteenth-century writings, including Clive's" (4). The book examines Clive's singing career until around 1750. Joncus explains how in this first half of her singing (rather than acting) career, Clive used song as a means of bonding with her audience through improvisation, direct address, and parodying imitations; after 1750, serious song ceased to be an important aspect of Clive's repertory. Though the book's focus only on this early stage of Clive's career leaves a substantial portion of it unexplored, Kitty Clive, or the Fair Songstress nonetheless represents a major reassessment of this largely neglected star of the eighteenth-century stage. Joncus begins with an evocative exploration of Clive's modern reputation, its construction in the eighteenth century, and the emerging culture of stardom and [End Page 734] public identity. In the chapters that follow, Joncus shows how Clive's representation and reputation changed. In the 1720s, she trained with the ill-fated Henry Carey, who in Clive saw an ideal student, one with the potential to realize his own theatrical ambitions. Clive's emergence coincided with The Beggar's Opera and with Lavinia Fenton's star in rapid ascent as Polly Peacham. At the rival Drury Lane Theatre, Colley Cibber sought to stage a ballad opera based on virtue and innocence, with Clive as the leading lady opposite Cibber himself: Carey's Love in a Riddle. The poor quality of the work and Cibber's own lack of singing ability (and self-awareness) were rescued by Clive's own performance. And so Clive's early image of propriety and seriousness was born, as was her reputation as a singer. The next few years brought continued success in both serious and comic roles, culminating in the 1732–33 season. Sexuality and gender are recurring themes in the book. Joncus suggests that Clive's alleged marriage in 1733 never took place and that their association reflected a kind of mutual protection of both borne of the attraction that both felt to members of their own sexes. As Clive's status grew, she became embroiled in several rows and scandals that eventually broke her reputation in the 1740s. For example, in the so-called "Polly Row" (1736...

An Actor’s Library: David Garrick, Book Collecting and Literary Friendships by Nicholas D. Smith

Reviewed by: An Actor’s Library: David Garrick, Book Collecting and Literary Friendships by Nicholas D. Smith Judith Milhous Nicholas D. Smith. An Actor’s Library: David Garrick, Book Collecting and Literary Friendships. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2017. Pp. xx + 345. $65. David Garrick had only one functioning kidney, as his 1779 autopsy revealed. He was not short of physical or intellectual energy, but all his life he had to pace himself, because whenever he overdid he got sick. From 1743 on, he made more money acting than he knew what to do with. His earliest traceable bulk purchase of books—which was not necessarily his first—came in 1744: seventeen titles from the Lewis Theobald sale, including his annotated copy of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, can be traced among the Garrick books in the British Library today (George M. Kahrl, The Garrick Collection of Old English Plays, p. 17). When Garrick became co-owner and co-manager of Drury Lane Theatre in 1747, he needed to be able to propose roles for himself and productions for his company. In order to enforce discipline graciously but effectively, he also needed ways to disassociate [End Page 96] himself from other actors outside the precincts of the theater. Book collecting on a grand scale helped accomplish that. Anyone exploring Garrick’s libraries needs to keep in mind these circumstances that differentiate him from other collectors. The hobby allowed him to accomplish much with little effort, and he had no reason to keep records of the process. Collecting may have started as a convenience or as an indulgence, but over time grew into an obsession: he owned well over four thousand books when he died, the majority uncatalogued. He developed two libraries: a wide-ranging “general” collection and a smaller division he called “old English plays,” dating from the very early printed texts to roughly 1700. His plan to bequeath them to the British Museum was known to friends at least as early as 1766, but he was aware much earlier of how special those thousand books were. The museum proved to be somewhat careless with the collection, and after Garrick lost his status as an icon in the nineteenth century, it was broken up and parts were sold off, though much of it is still identifiable. Kahrl, who catalogued it, notes that we lack “any account” of “how it was conceived,” or “from whence and when the items came” (p. 4). Apart from noting occasional mentions of books in correspondence and memoirs, the best we can do is associate titles with sale catalogues. Did either library benefit Garrick’s professional work? His approach to acting was already set before his hobby blossomed. The pattern did not grow out of his reading or for the most part demonstrably change with it. One might argue that his last production of Hamlet suffered from French influence, but he did not impose that form on other plays in the repertoire. If he annotated what we might call working copies of plays, he did not keep them. Nor did he mark other books, so we have little evidence as to which of the thousands he owned he actually read, quite apart from the question of his knowledge of languages. If they inspired costume, prop, or scene designs, nobody mentioned the fact. Garrick was not likely to inflict Gorboduc or even Arden of Faversham on his audience. He was ostentatiously generous in lending books, especially the plays, but we cannot show that he lent to others in the theater: that was not what the books were for. Book collecting as Garrick practiced it did take him into social realms he could never have entered otherwise. As he branched out into subject matter beyond theater, he widened the distance between himself and other actors. The bulk of what he developed was precisely not an actor’s library. Smith is deeply knowledgeable about the eighteenth century but is handicapped by the limits of evidence about Garrick’s library. He has had no better luck than Kahrl at deducing principles of acquisition or practical utilization for the general library. Whim seems to have jostled with competitive book...

The Theatrical Life and Death of Wych Street

In London’s Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century (1925), Errol Sherson describes Wych Street, located on the eastern periphery of the West End and within 200 metres of Drury Lane Theatre, as ‘one of the narrowest, dingiest and most disreputable thoroughfares the West End has ever known.’ By this time Wych Street had long disappeared, although its memory lingered. In a short story entitled ‘Where was Wych Street’ ( Strand Magazine, 1921), Stacy Aumonier attempted to recall the street’s existence and its significance. In the course of the story the street is identified in relation to two theatres – the Gaiety and the Globe – only the latter of which was connected to the street. Surprisingly, no reference is made to the Olympic Theatre with which Wych Street had been identified since the early nineteenth century or to the Opera Comique immediately adjacent to the Globe, highlighting the problematic role of memory in mapping historical space. This article examines the historical, theatrical and geographical mapping of Wych Street, bringing out contrasts, contradictions and paradoxes, and considering its role as part of the theatrical and extra-theatrical milieu of London.

Charles Macready’s King John: Victorian Theatre and Double-voiced Medievalism

During the nineteenth century, there was a revival of interest in the Middle Ages, which was considered the birth of English culture and identity in opposition to Classical Antiquity. This movement was called the Medieval Revival. It was expressed in several areas of knowledge and artistic manifestations, including in the theatre. Charles Macready’s reconstruction of Shakespeare’s King John in 1842 at Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London is inserted in this context. Macready’s production brings together two perspectives of the Middle Ages on stage: the more negative Renaissance view along with the Victorian idealised outlook, cha0racterising a phenomenon I call double-voiced medievalism, based on Richard Schoch’s concept of double-voiced historicism.

Becoming Somebody: Refashioning the Body Politic in Mary Robinson’s Nobody

In 1794, Mary Robinson—author, celebrity figure, and former actress and mistress of the Prince of Wales—debuted her new comedy Nobody at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. It caused a near-riot. This chapter maintains that allusions in Robinson’s drama to “Nobody,” a graphic image often figured as a woman wearing an empire-waist gown with “no bodice,” stage a crisis of embodiment in which the ills of the state are imaged through fashionable folly. The drama provides fresh insight into the politics of fashion, and how authors engaged print media and performance networks to generate suggestion and critique. Moreover, it reveals how Robinson intended, through Nobody, to write herself into being—to rescript her social role from a stylish trendsetter into a respected author.

Jenna M. Gibbs.Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850.

In 1768, Isaac Bickerstaffe’s afterpiece opera The Padlock opened to great acclaim in London’s Drury Lane Theatre and featured an African slave named Mungo, played by the actor Charles Dibdin. When it traveled to Philadelphia’s Southwark Theatre the following year, it was an even greater hit. In both productions, as well as in the frequent subsequent restagings on both sides of the Atlantic, the overworked Mungo was played by a white actor in blackface, a practice that continued until as late as a 1979 revival at the Old Vic. So popular was the play that “his visage showed up in prints and on tea caddies, and his name graced the title of an anthology of prose and poetry, The Padlock Open’d; or, Mungo’s Medley (1771). Masqueraders even impersonated Mungo at balls” (59). Mungo, with his malapropisms and complaint of having to be everywhere for everyone, quickly was put to use in political cartoons and in print.

‘Mungo Everywhere’: How Anglophones Heard Chattel Slavery

This article re-engages with the performance history of the character of Mungo, an enslaved servant from Isaac Bickerstaff and Charles Dibdin's comic opera The Padlock (1768), which premiered at London's Drury Lane Theatre during David Garrick's tenure there. In dialogue with nearly a century of criticism that has misread Mungo as solely a caricature prefiguring the codified racism of the American minstrel show, this article examines contemporary periodicals, libretti, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings on music to posit that the opera's musical representation offered a more nuanced alternative to print's black and white representations of racial and status difference.

The Other Jack Tanner: Shaw and Robert Loraine

The Other Jack Tanner: Shaw and Robert Loraine

The Celebrated Monsieur Desnoyer, Part 1: 1721–1733

George Desnoyer first danced in London in 1721 and 1722, and returned to pursue a successful performing career there between 1731 and 1742. He may have been born around 1700 in Hanover, for he was the son of the dancing master ‘Denoyé’ employed by Georg Ludwig Elector of Hanover (later King George I of England) from at least 1694. 1 Musicians named ‘Desnoyers’ can be found in Paris records from the 1650s. 2 The elder Desnoyer may have been related to Antoine Desnoyers, who was a member of the ‘violons de la Chambre’ at the court of Louis XIV from at least the late 1670s until about 1694. 3 He may also have been the Desnoyers who danced in the 1689 and 1690 revivals at the Paris Opéra of Lully's Atys and Cadmus et Hermione respectively. 4 Whatever his lineage, George Desnoyer was already a skilled exponent of French belle dance style and technique when he first appeared in London, at the Drury Lane Theatre, early in 1721. Desnoyer's father died on 18 April 1721, and he was presumably appointed to succeed him for he left England during the summer of 1722 to become dancing master to George I's grandson Prince Frederick, who had remained in Hanover. His appointment at the electoral court formally ended early in 1730, and the following year Desnoyer returned to London. He was billed as ‘first dancer to the King of Poland’ when he appeared at Drury Lane in late 1731, and for the next few years he divided his time between London, Dresden and Warsaw. Desnoyer's London career lasted until 1742. Over the years, he performed solos, duets and group dances as well as appearing in a variety of afterpieces, and he enjoyed notable partnerships with several leading female dancers. Although virtually all the choreographies he performed are lost, there is much other evidence to shed light on Desnoyer's dancing style and technique. I have documented the lives and careers, as dancing masters, of George Desnoyer and his son Philip elsewhere. 5 In this article I will explore and analyse George Desnoyer's repertoire during his first two periods in London, 1721–1722 and 1731–1733. In a second article, I will look at his repertoire and his dancing partnerships between 1734 and his retirement from the London stage in 1742. 6

‘Byron and 1812’ London Byron Society Symposium, Kingsway Hall Hotel 10-14 September 2012

The first day of the London Byron Society's Symposium on the theme of 'Byron and 1812' coincided with a victory parade for the UK's Olympic athletes. Celebration was in the air (as well as several red arrows) as delegates made their way through worse than usual traffic congestion in the capital towards the conference venue. Delegates met to register and enjoy a welcome reception in the Kingsway Hall Hotel in Covent Garden prior to setting offfor John Murray's at 50 Albemarle Street.The conference theme was broadly intended to celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Childe Harold was the first of Byron's works to be published by John Murray. The publisher's descendant, John Murray VI, once said he often had 'the fanciful thought that on the morning that Byron woke up to find himself famous, Murray woke to find himself a gentleman'. The sentiment neatly articulates the mutual benefit the poem brought to poet and publisher - 2012 also marks the bicentenary of Murray's acquisition of Albemarle Street, a location he described as 'peculiarly favourable for the dissemination of any work of eminence among the fashionable & literary part of the Metropolis'. I have worked on Byron and Murray for many years but had never visited Albemarle Street and I cannot describe my excitement as I approached the famous premises. We enjoyed wonderful hospitality from John and Virginia Murray, and a particularly informative talk from Virginia Murray, and were encouraged to wander about, inspecting some treasures which were on display. Amongst several (some disturbingly long) locks of hair were Byron's boots, a beautiful miniature of Caroline Lamb, the manuscript of the first two cantos of Childe Harold, and intriguingly, the notebook from which the memoirs were torn and burned in the upstairs drawing room.The following morning saw the academic programme begin with two superb close readings of Childe Harold I and II from Bernard Beatty (Liverpool and St Andrews) and Michael O'Neill (Durham). Beatty's paper revisited a question that critics have been asking for 200 years and will probably be asking for 200 more - what was it about Childe Harold which led it to take (in his words) 'sudden and entire possession of English minds in 1812?' His answer was to stress the combination of violence, lyrical elegance, and impetuosity in the opening cantos and to offer a fascinating reading of 'the Harold problem'. O'Neill illuminated what he called Byron's 'poetry of departure' in a forensic analysis of the poem, demonstrating the manner by which Byron's poetry often welcomes 'accidental contingency'. Both papers focused on the force and drive of Childe Harold which propels the poem forward - as Beatty reminded us, 'no one does rushing better than Byron'.After lunch, the panel focused on female authors and Byronic heroines. Anna Camillieri (Oxford) began by reminding us of the contrast between Byron's often passive heroes and his lively heroines. With special emphasis on Don Juan, Camillieri argued that it is in the civilised world of conversation that these heroines excel. Caroline Franklin (Swansea) spoke eloquently about Caroline Lamb and Glenarvon, stressing that the novel is a critique of the Byronic hero and exploring its influence on Victorian feminist writing and particularly on 'silver-fork' novels. The concluding paper saw Peter Graham (Virginia Tech) contrast what he called the light and dark side of the spirit of the age, Childe Harold and Pride and Prejudice. 2013 sees the bicentenary of the publication of Jane Austen's novel, and it was fascinating to hear Graham explore it with reference to Byron.The second evening saw delegates enjoy a visit to Melbourne House. I regretted not being able to attend at the time, and regret it even more so after hearing a report of events from Bernard Beatty. He described the walk there on a beautiful summer's evening, through Covent Garden, past Drury Lane Theatre, and the site of Dickens's infamous blacking factory, along the embankment to Melbourne House as 'one of the nicest unexpected events' in recent Byron gatherings. …

Evelina , the Rustic Girls of Congreve and Abington, and Surrogation in the 1770s

In Evelina Frances Burney represents characters attending a performance of William Congreve's Love for Love at the Drury Lane Theatre, at a time when Frances Abington, one of the company's principal actors, regularly performed the part of Miss Prue in the play. Joseph Roach's concept of "surrogation" facilitates a reading of this episode that demonstrates how selective memory functions in the culture's search for substitutes in the 1770s. Late in a decade of new Congreve revivals and critical conversation about them, Burney offers her novel as a surrogate for Congreve's kind of comedy. While some characters comment on the play's indelicacy, the episode recalls Congreve's characters, notably the vulgar Miss Prue, whom Burney contrasts with Evelina, a more delicate rustic girl. Illustrating the uncanniness of surrogation, the novelist also suppresses references to Abington, so celebrated for this part that Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her in it. Burney, who had once followed the actress down a London street, was wary of Abington's theatricality on stage and off and so chose another model of conduct for her protagonist and herself as author. Her approach differs from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's exploitation of Congreve's memory and Abington's celebrity through new revivals before offering his own stand-in for the former's plays, The School for Scandal , in which the latter portrayed Lady Teazle, another young woman from the country. Burney's strategy, when juxtaposed with Sheridan's, shows that surrogation may sometimes be a gendered process.

Henri Drayton, English Opera and Anglo-American Relations, 1850–72

AbstractThis article explores aspects of transatlantic culture through the career and works of the baritone, librettist and impresario Henri Drayton (1822–72). Using the published operas as well as reviews from period newspapers, the author retraces the events of the Philadelphia-born Drayton's professional life. Concentrating on the creative works, the author shows how Drayton went from playing stock roles at London's Drury Lane Theatre to collaborating with composers such as Joseph Duggan and Edward James Loder. With his wife, the soprano Susanna Lowe, Drayton performed in what he termed ‘drawing-room’ operas. Their popularity attracted the attention of visiting US impresario P. T. Barnum, who brought Drayton to New York in 1859. When his success in the USA was cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War, Drayton returned to London and created a one-man ‘entertainment’, Federals and Confederates. Spending what would be his final years as a member of the Richings English Opera Company, Drayton returned to New York in 1869.

Fictional, Factual, and Flying Space: Throwing at the Theatre in The Author on the Wheel

The anonymously-written one-act play The Author on the Wheel, or, a Piece Cut in the Green Room premiered at Theatre Royal Drury Lane on April 18, 1785 (The Daily Universal Register April 18, 1785). It follows a theatre manager with an awful, yet necessary task on his hands: to substantially revise and cut down a play in between the play’s first and second performances. The opening night performance of the play was such a failure that it provoked the audience to throw fruit at the actors to show their disdain; therefore the cast refuses to perform until the script is substantially changed. The revision session in the green room does not go according to plan, and after much insult and humiliation from the manager, cast, and crew, the arrogant author storms out with his manuscript, ready to inflict his awful dialogue on another unsuspecting theatre company.Spaces in the theatre, due to their dynamic and potent properties, offer a way to examine meanings created by spectators and performers in terms of physical space, fictional space, and even textual space. Through my study of The Author on the Wheel, I consider a part of performance that complicates the idea of physical stage space to an extreme (and sometimes even dangerous) degree while somehow managing to avoid much historical and theoretical scrutiny: the thrown object. I investigate the movement between and amongst spaces made by the thrown object. The thrown objects to which I am referring are the apples, pears and oranges hurled toward the stage by the fictional audience in The Author on the Wheel. The incident of the thrown object occurs only as a memory in the play, recounted in the after-performance discussion in the green room. Through this dialogue, the characters tell tales of acting on the stage whilst enduring a barrage of fruit.