Abstract
This chapter argues that the strategic appearance of Double Falsehood at Drury Lane Theatre on 13 December 1727 was part of a larger project to oppose what Lewis Theobald perceived as the inherent anti-theatricalism of the Scriblerian burlesque. To plays such as The What D’ye Call It, Three Hours After Marriage, and—in a pre-emptive move—The Beggar’s Opera, Theobald countered with Double Falsehood, an old-fashioned, affective tragicomedy that exemplified the qualities he valued in serious drama, specifically its ability to use classically crafted form to evoke sympathy and teach virtue. Indeed, Theobald’s interest in drama apart from Shakespeare shows everywhere, from the essays he penned for The Censor, to the editions and tracts he collected for his library, to the various editorial projects he undertook over his lifetime.
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Notes
- 1.
For further information about Pope’s friendship with Betterton, see Maynard Mack’s excellent biography, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). See esp. 89–94. Pope copied Sir Godfrey Kneller’s famous 1695 portrait of Betterton, telling John Caryll his “hand was most successful in drawing of friends and those I most esteem; in so much that my masterpiece has been one of Dr. Swift and one [of?] Mr. Betterton” (quoted in Mack, 91).
- 2.
According to Mack, Pope included in his 1712 miscellany several of Betterton’s adaptations from Chaucer, which he revised and then published for the financial interest of Mrs. Betterton (92).
- 3.
See Pope’s footnote to line 272 in Book III of The Dunciad in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939–69), 5: 180–81. This citation refers to the Methuen edition.
- 4.
Brean Hammond provides an excellent overview of how Double Falsehood quickly became a “talking point” in the press. See DF, 59–66.
- 5.
Lewis Theobald, ed., The Works of Shakespeare (London, 1733), I:xxxv.
- 6.
Ibid., 4: 187–88.
- 7.
In Chapter 2, Robert D. Hume argues against this hypothesis, pointing out that “the copyright to Cardenio was in practical terms an irrelevancy” (49).
- 8.
King, Edmund G.C., “In the character of Shakespeare: Canon, Authorship, and Attribution in Eighteenth-Century England” (Ph.D thesis, University of Auckland, 2008), 152–57.
- 9.
Stern, “Modern Author”; Harriet C. Frazier, “Theobald’s The Double Falsehood: A Revision of Shakespeare’s Cardenio?” Comparative Drama 1, no. 3 (1967): 219–33.
- 10.
“An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot” in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 4: 108. This citation refers to the Methuen edition.
- 11.
As quoted in DF, 319.
- 12.
Gregory Doran, Shakespeare’s Lost Play: In Search of Cardenio (London: Nick Hern Books, 2012), 248.
- 13.
Ajax of Sophocles. Translated from the Greek, with notes (London, 1714), A3.
- 14.
Richard Foster Jones, Lewis Theobald: His Contribution to English Scholarship with Some Unpublished Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919; New York: AMS Press, 1966), 258–45. Citations refer to the AMS edition.
- 15.
Giles Jacobs states in The Poetical Register (1723) that Theobald “finish’d a Translation of the Seven Tragedies of ÆCHYLUS,” 1: 259. As quoted in Seary, 16.
- 16.
Jones says Ajax was “Probably not by Theobald,” whereas more recent assessments by scholars such as J. Michael Walton think it likely he did the translation. See Jones, 347; and J. Michael Walton, “Theobald and Lintott: A Footnote on Early Translations of Greek Tragedy,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 3rd ser., 16, no. 3 (2009): 103–10. See esp. 103–05.
- 17.
Walton, “Theobald and Lintott,” 107.
- 18.
See, for instance, Kristine Johanson’s recent contention that The Censor expresses the “critical beliefs [that] would influence [Theobald’s] later publications and his development into ‘the best English critic’ and one of Shakespeare’s most important editors” (29). Kristine Johanson, ed., Shakespeare Adaptations from the Early Eighteenth Century: Five Plays (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013).
- 19.
In the Preface, Theobald admits that his periodical “followed too close upon the Heels of the inimitable Spectator,” making it difficult to “avoid striking into the Paths he had trod, and still a harder to invent new Subjects, and work upon them with any Degree of the same Genius and Delicacy” (A7r).
- 20.
Theobald in issue 7 provides “an Abstract of the real Story of this Tragedy as it stands in our Old British History,” thus assigning the source to Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1577) rather than the anonymous play, The True Chronicle History of the life and death of King Leir and his three Daughters (London, 1605), that scholars now think Shakespeare consulted as well.
- 21.
Of the deaths of Cordelia and Lear, Theobald is not as sanguine. Like other eighteenth-century critics, he prefers Nahum Tate’s solution to “the Catastrophe of this Piece: Cordelia and Lear ought to have surviv’d, as Mr. Tate has made them in his alteration of this T[r]agedy (spelled “Tagedy” in the text); Virtue ought to be rewarded, as well as Vice punish’d; but in their Deaths this Moral is broke through” (1:72).
- 22.
The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 4:100.
- 23.
“The Preface of the Editor to The Works of Shakespear” in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Rosemary Cowler, vol. 2 (Hamden, Ct.: Archon, 1986), 16.
- 24.
See Seary, 136 and elsewhere for Theobald’s reliance on the second and third folios for his edition of Shakespeare’s works in contrast to Pope’s preference for the quartos.
- 25.
Much has been written about Pope’s desire for economic control over his writings and his use of subscription to forge a professional notion of authorship, which he was quick to self-promote in poems such as the Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace: “But (thanks to Homer) since I live and thrive, / Indebted to no Prince or Peer alive.” See Pope, Poems, 4:169; David B. Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 6.
- 26.
James Harriman-Smith, “The Anti-Performance Prejudice of Shakespeare’s Eighteenth-Century Editors,” RECTR 29, no. 2 (2014): 51.
- 27.
Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B.R.S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 63.
- 28.
Ashley Marshall not only questions the existence of a coherent Scriblerian enterprise but also the possibility of identifying the formal contours of eighteenth-century satire. While Marshall puts to rest any notion of a shared Scriblerian political agenda, the writers themselves did indeed self-consciously deploy the persona of “Martinus Scriblerus” as a screen for their more outrageous satiric undertakings. Pope, for instance, attributed to “Scriblerus” the “prolegomena” that accompanied The Dunciad Variorum of 1729, which featured Theobald as King of the Dunces, as did the three-book version of 1728. During the period, readers frequently took these works to be collaborative enterprises, seeing especially in Gay’s writings the hand of Pope. I am therefore retaining the term “Scriblerian” for the purposes of this essay. See Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), especially section IV, “The Alleged ‘Scriblerians,’” in Chapter 5, 174–80.
- 29.
Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 5.
- 30.
Ibid., 16.
- 31.
For a more thoroughgoing discussion of the difficulty of sustaining satire on the stage, see Deborah C. Payne, “Comedy, Satire, or Farce? Or the Generic Difficulties of Restoration Dramatic Satire,” in Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, ed. James E. Gill, Tennessee Studies in Literature, vol. 37 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 1–22.
- 32.
In her excellent study, Dianne Dugaw sees John Gay anticipating twentieth-century playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht, Václav Havel, and Alan Ayckbourn—all of whom reworked The Beggar’s Opera—in critiquing an “incipient modernity.” See “Deep Play”—John Gay and the Invention of Modernity (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 31.
- 33.
Peter Lewis, “The Beggar’s Rags to Rich’s and Other Dramatic Transformations,” in John Gay and the Scriblerians, ed. Peter Lewis and Nigel Wood (London: Vision Press, 1988), 137.
- 34.
I am, of course, thinking of J.L. Austin’s famous formulation in How To Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 14–15.
- 35.
See Robert D. Hume, “John Rich as Manager and Entrepreneur,” in “The Stage’s Glory”: John Rich, 1692–1761, ed. Berta Joncus and Jeremy Barlow (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 29–60.
- 36.
Robert D. Hume pointed out to me that Theobald’s name does not appear in pay lists for Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which in turn calls into question Seary’s characterization of him as Stede’s “assistant” both in the entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and in the 1990 monograph. Seary bases his determination largely on three manuscript prompt-books dating from 1716–1726 in the Bodleian Library: he thinks these are in Theobald’s hand, thus showing his intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the theatre from 1716 onwards (Seary, 145, n. 48). Edward A. Langhans, by contrast, assigns the prompt-notes to Stede. Edward A. Langhans, “Three Early Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Promptbooks,” Modern Philology, 65, no. 2 (1967): 114–29. Recent critics have followed Seary’s assertion that Theobald did indeed work professionally with Stede; for instance, Marcus Walsh says he had evident experience of “writing promptbooks.” See Shakespeare, Milton, and eighteenth-century literary editing: The beginnings of interpretative scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 118.
- 37.
A COMPLETE KEY (London, 1715), A3v.
- 38.
Scholars who attribute the Key to Theobald include Richard Foster Jones, Lewis Theobald, 16–17; George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 137–39; and J.V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711–1744 (London: Methuen, 1969), 29. For identification of the Key as a Scriblerian production, see Nokes, 184.
- 39.
As quoted in Nokes, 184, n. 70.
- 40.
Calhoun Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1993), 50.
- 41.
Joseph Spence, Observations and Characters, ed. S.W. Singer (London, 1820), 103.
- 42.
As quoted in Nokes, 248.
- 43.
See J.D. Breval’s satiric pamphlet drama, The Confederates (London, 1717).
- 44.
As quoted in Nokes, 248.
- 45.
George Sherburn, “The Fortunes and Misfortunes of ‘Three Hours after Marriage,’” Modern Philology 24, no. 1 (1926): 92.
- 46.
While Cavendish’s reputation no longer suffered the “gratuitous insults” frequently issued during her lifetime, the eighteenth century did tend “to trivialize and sentimentalize both the woman and the writing.” See James Fitzmaurice, ed., Margaret Cavendish: Sociable Letters (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997; New York: Routledge, 2012), xi. The citation here refers to the Routledge edition.
- 47.
See A Letter from Mr Cibber to Mr Pope (London, 1742).
- 48.
Katherine Mannheimer, “The Scriblerian Stage and Page: Three Hours After Marriage, Pope’s ‘Minor’ Poems, and the Problem of Genre-History,” Comparative Drama, 43, no. 1 (2009): 67.
- 49.
Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre, 87; 91.
- 50.
William Eben Schultz, Gay’s Beggar’s Opera: Its Content, History, and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923; New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), 1. The citation here refers to the 1967 edition.
- 51.
Calhoun Winton hazards that Cibber and the other two managers Robert Wilks and Barton Booth simply found The Beggar’s Opera “too out-of-the-way, too experimental, too nonstandard for commercial success. It was a what-d’ye call it” (93).
- 52.
Although generally agreed to be the least collaborative of the three plays, contemporaries nevertheless saw the hand of Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot in The Beggar’s Opera. See Nokes, 414–16.
- 53.
Theobald’s decision could also have been strategic. Drury Lane’s big hit that fall was a production of Henry VIII, mounted in honor of George II’s succession, and Theobald could have hoped to capitalize on the popularity of Shakespeare, as well as the company’s reputation for staging serious dramatic works.
- 54.
Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 203. Judith Milhous estimates a more generous time frame for rehearsals, noting that semi-operas could be nearly two years in the making while “ordinary” plays were allotted between “four to eight weeks.” See “Opera Finances in London, 1674–1738,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 37, no. 3 (1984): 568.
- 55.
In 2007, David Hunter discovered John Stede’s rehearsal diary for LIF; in it, he lists rehearsals for The Beggar’s Opera from the 17th through the 27th of January. Unfortunately, the diary does not include entries from October 1727 to the end of December. Given the additional time customarily allotted to semi-operas, it stands to reason that The Beggar’s Opera required far more rehearsal than the ten days recorded in Stede’s diary. See “What the Prompter Saw: The Diary of Rich’s Prompter, John Stede,” in “The Stage’s Glory”: John Rich, 1692–1761, ed. Berta Joncus and Jeremy Barlow (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 71.
- 56.
See, for instance, Ryan L. Boyd and James W. Pennebaker’s article, “Did Shakespeare Write Double Falsehood? Identifying Individuals by Creating Psychological Signatures With Text Analysis,” Psychological Science 26, no. 5 (2015): 570–82.
- 57.
See, for instance, Carnegie, “Adaptation,” which examines Theobald’s concern with the rules of neoclassicism, while Gary Taylor and John V. Nance’s essay, “Four Characters in Search of a Subplot: Quixote, Sancho, and Cardenio,” shows how Theobald probably removed the original subplot to make Double Falsehood “acceptable to Georgian audiences or theatre managers,” (QC, 193).
Selected Bibliography
Corbett, Charles. A Catalogue of the Library of Lewis Theobald, Esq. Deceas’d. London, 1744.
Dugas, Don-John, and Robert D. Hume. “The Dissemination of Shakespeare’s Plays Circa 1714.” Studies in Bibliography 56 (2003/2004): 261–79.
———. The Works of Shakespear. 6 vols. London, 1725.
———. Double falshood; or, the Distrest Lovers. London, 1728.
———. Shakespeare restored. London, 1726.
———. The Works of Shakespeare. 7 vols. London, 1733.
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Payne, D.C. (2016). Textual Skirmishes and Theatrical Frays: Double Falsehood versus the Scriblerians. In: Payne, D. (eds) Revisiting Shakespeare’s Lost Play. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46514-2_5
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