Abstract
The unruly, energized Atlantic low continued to appear in nineteenth-century American playhouses, their mobility, theatricality, and rebellion captivating audiences. On December 30, 1839, Jonas B. Phillips’s Jack Sheppard, or the Life of a Robber! premiered at the Bowery Theatre, by that time a dominantly working-class theatre.1 Phillips was no stranger to the stage forms of underclass life; five years earlier, he had penned the popular Life in New York, a local version of Tom and Jerry that featured blackface performer T. D. Rice at the Bowery Theatre.2 Jack Sheppard, however, turns from contemporary scenes to present the fictional jailbreaks and punishment of the London thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard. Sheppard, the historical model for The Beggar’s Opera’s Macheath, pursued a short but spectacular criminal career that ended on the gallows in 1724. Ever a century later, the play reenacts Jack’s rakish, defiant underclass heroics, reconstructing them after more than a century lurking in the popular Atlantic memory. Jack Sheppard unabashedly celebrates the excarceration that The Beggar’s Opera offers in stylized form. Instead of stylized escape, Jack Sheppard displays literal escapes. However, unlike Macheath, Jack dies on the gallows at play’s end. As Odell writes, the thief enjoyed “all the rope he needed” at the Bowery theatre.3 Jack Sheppard offers this study some closure, bringing old forms around to new contexts. Its scenes look to the past for its emancipatory energies, but they also seem entirely of the 1830s, performing a new clampdown on criminal energies.
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Notes
George Clinton Densmore Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), 3.370
Phillips. W T Lhamon, Jr., Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 67–69
Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 7–41.
John Thurmond, Harlequin Sheppard, a Night Scene in Grotesque Characters: As It Is Perform’d at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane. (London: Printed and sold by J. Roberts, and A. Dodd, 1724).
Christopher Hibbert, The Road to Tyburn: The Story of Jack Sheppard and the Eighteenth Century Underworld (London: Longmans, 1957), 17
“Prologue at theOpening of theTheatrein Drury Lane” (1747), lines 53–54, in Samuel Johnson, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samueljohnson, eds E. L. McAdam and George Milne, vol. 6, Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).
Ibid. Hibbert, Road to Tyburn, 226–31; such actions were fairly common in the eighteenth century; see Peter Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons,” Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, eds Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow (New York: Peregrine Books, 1975), 65–117.
William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance (London: Nottingham Society, 1839).
Matthew Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience,” Victorian Studies 44.3 (2002): 426–29.
Playbills in the Harvard Theatre Collection advertise performances at the Adelphi Theatre on December 28–30, 1840, and the week of January 4, 1841. Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 271.
Elliott Vanskike, “Consistent Inconsistencies: The Transvestite Actress Madame Vestris and Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50.4 (1996): 467
William Worthen Appleton, Madame Vestris and the London Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).
John Baldwin Buckstone, Jack Sheppard; a Drama in Four Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1853), 3.1
Keith Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 1830–1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens and Thackeray (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 139–40.
The Harvard Theatre Collection also holds copies of John Baldwin Buckstone, Jack Sheppard; a Drama, in Four Acts (London: Chapman and Hall, [1840])
T. L. Greenwood, Jack Sheppard, or, the House-Breaker of the Last Century: A Romantic Drama in Five Acts Dramatised from Harrison Ainsworth’s Novel (London: J. Cumberland, 1840)
Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 247–48.
Ibid., 14–16; estimates of the numbers of spectators at the speeches ranges from eight thousand to twenty-five thousand, while the rioters numbered around sixty-five hundred persons. See also Richard Moody, The Astor Place Riot (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1958).
New York Herald, May 16, 1849, collects the “Opinions of the Press on the Late Occurrences in Astor Place.” Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 268
George Lippard, New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (Cincinnati, OH: H. M. Rulison, 1853)
S. Reynolds, George Lippard, Prophet of Protest: Writings of an American Radical, 1822–1854 (New York: P. Lang, 1986)
Shelley Streeby, “Opening up the Story Paper: George Lippard and the Construction of Class,” boundary 2 24.1 (1997): 177–203
Dennis Berthold, “Class Acts: The Astor Place Riots and Melville’s ‘the Two Temples’,” American Literature 71.3 (1999): 429–61.
George Templeton Strong, Diary of George Templeton Strong, eds Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, 4 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 1:351–53
Dennis Berthold, “Melville, Garibaldi, and the Medusa of Revolution,” American Literary History 9.3 (1997): 425–59
W. T. Lhamon, Jr., “The Blackface Lore Cycle,” in Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 56–115.
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© 2009 Peter P. Reed
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Reed, P.P. (2009). Epilogue: Escape Artists and Spectatorial Mobs. In: Rogue Performances. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622715_8
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