Abstract
In 1711 The Spectator drew attention to the popularity of theatrical scenes which induced terror and pity, noting with cynicism the crowd-pleasing and competitive use of children:
A disconsolate Mother with a Child in her Hand, has frequently drawn Compassion from the audience, and has therefore gained a Place in several Tragedies. A Modern Writer that observed how this had took in other plays […] brought a Princess upon the Stage with a little Boy in one Hand and a Girl in the other. This too had a very good Effect. A third poet, being resolved to outwrite all his Predecessors, a few Years ago introduced three Children, with great Success: And as I am inform’d, a young Gentleman who is fully determin’d to break the most obdurate Hearts, has a Tragedy by him, where the first person that appears upon the Stage, is an afflicted Widow in her Mourning-Weeds, with half a Dozen fatherless Children attending her.
The article also condemned, in a more serious tone, ‘that dreadful butchering of one another which is so very frequent upon the English Stage’, warning that ‘[t]o delight in seeing Men stabb’d, poyson’d, rack’d, or impaled is certainly the sign of a cruel Temper’.1 However, it was not only new dramas which capitalised on audience demand for such spectacles: the fate of Shakespeare’s boys on Restoration and eighteenth-century stages was also closely intertwined with the waxing and waning appetite for the staples of popular theatre addressed in this chapter — sentiment and sensation.
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Notes
Stephen Orgel, ‘The Authentic Shakespeare’, Representations, 21 (1988), 1–25 (pp. 11–12).
For an overview of the increasingly child-centred culture of the eighteenth century, see, for example, J.H. Plumb, ‘The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 67 (1975), 64–95
Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2005), pp. 58–69.
Andrew O’Malley’s The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003) provides a more extensive account of the period.
For a fascinating account of eighteenth-century children’s books as enticing material objects — sold with tie-in toys or sometimes functioning themselves as toys — see Gillian Brown, ‘The Metamorphic Book: Children’s Print Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39.3 (2006), 351–62.
Merry Wives was adapted by John Dennis as The Comical Gallant (1702). This version reduces the role of Falstall’s page significantly, but he is still defined by Falstaff as ‘The Imp whom I have educated’. However, this adaptation was not popular and did not displace Shakespeare’s play which was staged throughout the eighteenth century (see David Crane (ed.), The Merry Wives of Windsor (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 20).
Love’s Labour’s Lost was not staged at all during the eighteenth century. An anonymous adaptation, The Students, was published in 1762, but never seems to have been performed (see Miriam Gilbert, Shakespeare in Performance: Love’s Labour’s Lost (Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 21–7).
Two Gentlemen of Verona also seems not to have been staged during this period until Benjamin Victor adapted it in 1762–63 (see William C. Carroll (ed.), Two Gentlemen of Verona (London: Thomson, 2004), pp. 84–7). In Victor’s version, Lance and Speed are given additional scenes, and Speed seems to be a manservant rather than a pageboy: Victor adds lines suggesting he is involved in a flirtation with Julia’s maid, Lucetta, and the dramatis personae for the Drury Lane performances indicate he was played by an adult male actor, Mr King (boys were, by this stage, more often than not often played by women, or, if played by boy actors, they tended to be listed as Master, rather than Mister).
Edward Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia (London, 1687. Facsimile published by Cornmarket, 1969), p. 38.
Jean I. Marsden, ‘Shakespeare from the Restoration to Garrick’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage, ed. Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 21–36 (p. 33).
In productions of Julius Caesar, however, it was customary for Brutus to ask the pageboy Lucius to kill him, and for Lucius tearfully to reluse, well into the nineteenth century, suggesting that the mix of sentiment and sensation was still powerful in certain circumstances. See John Ripley, Julius Caesar on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (Cambridge University Press, 1980) for references to this in John Philip Kemble’s 1812 production (p. 54), and for Phelps’s breaking of this tradition in 1846 (p. 97).
John Wilders, Shakespeare in Production: Macbeth (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 181.
Kaiman A. Burnim, David Garrick: Director (London: Fetter and Simons, 1961), p. 103.
Margaret J.M. Ezell, ‘John Locke’s Images of Childhood: Early Eighteenth Century Response to Some Thoughts Concerning Education’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 17 (1983–84), 139–55 (pp. 148–9).
John Locke, ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’, in Some thoughts concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Cambridge: Hackett, 1996), p. 26.
Colley Cibber, The Tragical History of King Richard III, 1700. Facsimile from the copy in the Birmingham Shakespeare Library (London: Cornmarket, 1969), p. 21.
A.C. Sprague, ‘A New Scene in Colley Cibber’s Richard III’, Modern Language Notes, 42 (1927), 29–32 (p. 31).
See Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B.R.S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 152.
Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), p. 199.
Charles Lamb quoted in Scott Colley, Richard’s Himself Again: A Stage History of Richard III (London: Greenwood, 1992), p. 60.
Sarah Burton, A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 222.
Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (1798) (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), p. 241.
Letter of 1787 from Sir Joshua Reynolds to the Duke of Rutland, quoted in Winifred H. Friedman, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (London: Garland, 1976), p. 2.
See Alan S. Downer, The Eminent Tragedian: William Charles Macready (Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 58.
W.C. Macready, Preface to The Life and Death of King Richard III (1821), facsimile edition (London: Cornmarket, 1970), p. iii.
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© 2013 Emily Katherine Knowles
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Knowles, K. (2013). Sentiment and Sensation: The Long Eighteenth Century. In: Shakespeare’s Boys. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137005373_5
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