Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Vol. 28, No. 4, December 2006, pp. 305–334
A Matter of Turf: Romanticism,
Hippodrama, and Legitimate Satire
Michael Gamer
Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
28
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Nineteenth-Century
10.1080/08905490601086970
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mgamer@english.upenn.edu
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In February of 1811, facing mounting losses from several unremunerative
productions of Shakespeare, John Philip Kemble revived George Colman the
Younger’s Blue-Beard at Covent Garden Theatre. The novelty of the new production
lay in two innovative scenes, each featuring (by Leigh Hunt’s estimation) “about
twenty” performing horses hired from Astley’s Amphitheatre (Examiner, 24 March
1811). These horses first charged on stage in act II, scene I in answer to Selim’s bugle
call, and later returned as part of the production’s grand finale: a full-scale attack on
Blue-Beard’s castle.
An actor-manager noted for his purity of taste and spectacular revivals, Kemble
had long been known as the London stage’s premier male tragic actor, having built a
career out of defending spoken, “legitimate” drama against the incursions of newer
forms like melodrama and pantomime. His decision to revive Blue-Beard had come
only after multiple arguments with his managing partner, Henry Harris, over how to
reduce Covent Garden’s losses (Boaden 2: 542). In an unquestionably legitimate play
like Richard III or Henry IV Part 1, Kemble might have added an equestrian battlescene without much risk; but in this case dire economic necessity spurred the choice
of Colman’s spectacle. The gamble, moreover, paid off: Blue-Beard’s first forty
performances brought the proprietors of Covent Garden an astonishing £21,000 in
sales and effectively salvaged the 1810–11 season (Reynolds 2: 403–04). Even
Colman the Younger, after publicly expressing his disapproval, quickly brought out
a new edition of Blue-Beard containing stage directions for the new equestrian
version.
Kemble’s biographer James Boaden, himself an innovator of stage-effect, informs us
that Kemble made the decision to revive Blue-Beard with horses only after “long
meditation” and some pain, fearing injury not only to his reputation but also to
the drama (Boaden 2: 541–42). Certainly he expected critical reprisals for bringing the
circus pleasures of Sadler’s Wells and Astley’s Amphitheatre to Covent Garden, and the
response was as divided as it was contentious. While reviewers alternately panned and
ISSN 0890–5495 (print)/ISSN 1477–2663 (online) © 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/08905490601086970
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M. Gamer
extolled the production, diarist Anna Larpent, wife of Examiner of Plays John Larpent,
succinctly termed the play “an improved Adorned Astley’s” as a way of acknowledging
both its generic impurity and its superiority of spectacle (Larpent 8: 83a). Among the
most even-handed of Blue-Beard’s notices, Leigh Hunt’s review in The Examiner comes
essentially to the same conclusion. Opposing Blue-Beard to what he elsewhere terms
“classical theatre,” Hunt acknowledges the spectacle’s pleasures even while fearing its
potential effects:
If it were possible to present the public with such exhibitions and at the same time cherish
a proper taste for the Drama, they might even be hailed as a genuine improvement in
representation; for if men, and not puppets, act men, there seems to be no dramatic reason
why horses should not act horses. But … [t]hey are too powerful a stimulus to the senses
of the common order of spectators, and take away from their eyes and ears all relish for
more delicate entertainment. The managers and the public thus corrupt each other; but it
is the former who begin the infection. (Examiner, 24 March 1811)
Such objections will prove striking to romanticists for the ways they recall Samuel
Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” and William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads,
both of which had argued that “gross and violent stimulants” (Wordsworth 1: 129), be
they German tragedies or descriptions of battles in the popular press, rendered readers
and audiences unfit for “more delicate entertainment” (Coleridge 1: 473). Yet Hunt
also anticipates the breakdown of the very oppositions he invokes. Having opened his
review by opposing Blue-Beard to what he calls “classical theatre,” Hunt declares the
play to be “beneath criticism”; nevertheless, he announces himself delighted with the
power of its equestrian spectacle, and his delight allows him to question the standards
of taste he ostentatiously defends. Debuting under different circumstances or for a less
“common order of spectator,” he reasons, Kemble’s horses might even prove a genuine
improvement were it not for the corrupting influences of dramatic spectacle, produced
by the enormous patent theaters to allay their enormous costs. Thus Blue-Beard
inhabits a place of double signification, representing the illegitimacy of the minor
theaters and the diseased state of the Theatre Royals, unworthy of criticism yet inspiring some of Hunt’s best writing during these months on the effects of monopoly,
censorship, and court interests on the theater.1
If Blue-Beard’s reception presents an early-nineteenth-century stage barely holding
on to traditional generic, legal, and institutional demarcations, these distinctions all
but failed in the months that followed. Inspired by Blue-Beard’s success, Kemble and
Harris again looked to Drury Lane’s 1797–98 season, this time tapping the author of
The Castle Spectre, Matthew Lewis, to write a new play for Astley’s horses. In many
ways, their speculation simply repeated the formula established through the revival of
Blue-Beard by making the work of a proven popular playwright the site of theatrical
innovation, and again they were not disappointed in the result. Premiering as April
ended and as Blue-Beard’s houses were beginning to thin, Timour the Tartar proved an
even bigger hit than its predecessor, insuring record profits to the patentees of Covent
Garden for the 1810–11 season.2
In commissioning a new play solely for the purposes of exhibiting equestrian spectacle, however, the management of Covent Garden crossed a number of ideological lines
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 307
and institutional boundaries. Kemble, especially, could no longer hide behind his own
longstanding practices regarding theatrical revivals, which demanded that theaters
make old plays new by adding novelties to them. Nor could the management now make
the excuse of financial need. Where Blue-Beard stood as underwriting angel to Covent
Garden’s more elite productions, Timour could only stand as an embodiment of the
greed and debased taste of its managers. While two decades later John Genest would
choose to remember Timour olfactorily (Genest 8: 232), prints like “The Centaur-ian
Manager” (1811) presented Kemble trampling the works of Shakespeare and other
classical dramatists (see Figure 1). With Sarah Siddons riding on his back, Kemble
declares to the monkeys and minions of the circus and pantomime before him, “I will
engage you for the present season and methinks I shall do well to engage the Devil to
play Lewis’s Wood Daemon.” Like previous attacks on new theatrical genres,3 the print
opposes the legitimate theater to the illegitimate forces of pantomime and the circus,
and all the expected dualisms of reason and madness, authority and misrule, and good
and evil, follow.
Rich as it is, the novelty of Timour’s debut and the comic potential of its popular
triumph cannot fully explain the diverse, organized, and sustained critical response it
provoked. Lewis’s play, after all, came at the end of two decades of theatrical experimentation and innovation—after rather than before the advent of melodrama and
military re-enactments, not to mention a long string of celebrated performing animals,
the most famous of which remains Drury Lane’s Carlo, the Wonder Dog. With audiences accustomed to novelty and innovation, Blue-Beard and Timour could never have
heralded a watershed moment in the history of the stage had their horses not proven
flashpoints for other, broader conflicts in British culture. Producing dozens of responses
in periodicals and on stage, the two plays’ combined reception outlasted the 1810–11
season and marked, as Jane Moody has demonstrated, “a turning-point in the cultural
authority of Covent Garden and Drury Lane” (72). As such, the plays provide excellent
starting points for exploring popular theater’s position within Romantic-period
Figure 1
The Centaur-ian Manager (1811). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Figure 1 The Centaur-ian Manager (1811). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
308
M. Gamer
culture, since neither their success nor their reception can be explained adequately by
theater history alone. Both demand a broader canvas, one that extends beyond the
theater to include the myriad of relations involving horses and their literary, political,
and social meanings, nearly all of which found ready and constant representation on
the Romantic-period stage. As I hope to show, the debut of hippodrama on the stage
of London’s Theatre Royals could never have provoked the response it did had it not
prophesied similar collapses in other arenas of literary culture—particularly in dramatic
criticism and in that mode of writing most expected to defend tradition and expel all
interlopers, satire.
I.
I. Four-in-Hand
In gay and fanciful parade,
The ball, the rout, the masquerade:
The four-in-hand, the lounging hours,
The tonish club, the tempting bowers
Where Beauty, free from Love’s alarms,
To the best bidder sells her charms.
Or when you’re tir’d of the town
Newmarket’s interesting Down
May change the scene. (Combe, The Dance of Life 221)
When mentioned at all by dramatic historians, hippodrama traditionally appears as a
symptom of the artistic decline of London theaters after the Old Price Riots of 1809.
Only recently have cultural historians begun connecting it to broader trends in earlynineteenth-century British culture or to other equestrian fads of the early Regency.4
Most prominent among these was the vogue for coach-driving among wealthy
Londoners, many of whom impersonated hackney-coachmen by adopting their dress
and slang. Referred to as “Whips” or “Bucks” in most accounts, these young men fit
up their carriages to resemble hackney coaches or bribed coachmen to give up their
reins. They also formed dozens of gentleman’s clubs, among them the Barouche,
Bedront, Benson, Defiance, Tandem, Whip, and the most famous of them all, the
Four-in-Hand:
The vehicles of the Club [were] of a hybrid class, quite as elegant as private carriages and
lighter than even the mails. They were horsed with the finest animals that money could
secure… . The master generally drove the team, often a nobleman of high rank, who
commonly copied the dress of a mail coachman. The company usually rode outside, but
two footmen in rich liveries were indispensable on the back seat, nor was it at all
uncommon to see some splendidly-attired female on the box. A rule of the Club was that
all members should turn out … at mid-day, from the neighbourhood of Piccadilly,
through which they passed to the Windsor-road,—the attendants of each carriage playing
on their silver bugles. (Timbs 248–49)
Equipped with their own uniforms and eccentricities, these clubs comprise the “driving
schism” of Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third (Shelley 345) and the essence of any “tale of the
times” in Scott’s Waverley (Scott 4). Boasting slogans like “neck or nothing,” their
members were caricatured in fiction by Thomas Love Peacock, on stage by comic actor
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 309
Charles Mathews and pantomime clown Joseph Grimaldi, and in satirical prints by
James Gillray (see Figure 2). With their studied transgression of class roles—and with
horses impacting nearly every aspect of British life—clubs like the Four-in-Hand cut
daringly across the boundaries of sporting, dandy, and military cultures, attracting
aristocrats, officers, and other young professionals. Their ties to the stage, moreover,
were pronounced and part of dramatic convention. Not satisfied with seeing
themselves caricatured on stage, real Whips like Robert Coates and fictional ones like
Pompey the Little’s Mr. Chace and Mansfield Park’s Tom Bertram and Mr. Yates
regularly put themselves forward as “gentleman amateurs” in private theatricals and
provincial theaters, while novels like Charles Sedley’s Barouche Driver (1807) represented the Whip as part of a continuous procession of coaches moving between the
theater and events like Ascot and the Ormsby Regatta (see Figures 3 and 4).
During the years of the Regency, then, comic actors like Charles Mathews and Joseph
Grimaldi could lampoon the figure of the “Whip” so effectively because he was a variation on a recognizable social type—what Ellen Moers has called the “horsey set which
spent its afternoons at Tattersall’s, the fashionable market-place for the best in horseflesh” (Moers 31). The similarity of contemporary prints of Mathews and Grimaldi
nicely captures this iconic status. In Figure 5, Grimaldi performs his famous song of the
“Whip Club” in Fashion’s Fools (1809), one of the most popular pantomimes to satirize
the slang and activities of the horse-mad dandies. His costume at once drawing on and
surpassing Grimaldi’s in the length of both whip and coat, Mathews is portrayed in
Figure 6 as Dick Cypher, who had made his first entrance in Isaac Pocock’s Hit or Miss!
(Lyceum, 1810) with an offstage crash and a flurry of coachman slang: “that’s prime!—
that’s bang up!” (Pocock 31). The print’s caption introduces Cypher through his signature slang—“Here I am D—mme bang up!”—while the print itself is “Dedicated with
Permission to the Four in hand Club.”
Fond of speed and sensation, careless in his actions, and exuberant in his pleasures,
the “Whip” was more than merely a staple of Regency pantomime and farce. In the year
Figure 432
Robert
Grimaldi
James Gillray,
Coates
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Figure 56
Charles
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(1810). Author’s
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of London.
Figure 2 James Gillray, Thomas Onslow (1801). Caption: “What can little T. O. do? Why
Drive a Phaeton and Two!!Can little T. O. do no more?—yes, drive a Phaeton and Four!!!!”
Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Library.
310
M. Gamer
Figure 3 Robert Coates in his carriage in Bath (1810). Courtesy of David Mayer III.
1814 alone, he appears in Waverley, in Byron’s “The Devil’s Drive,” in Mansfield Park,
and in Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage, which reflects on the cheerful industry of a family
of decayed gentry, the Percies, by expostulating, “What would have been the difference
of their fate, and of their feelings, had they been suffered to grow up into mere idle
lounging gentlemen, or four-in-hand coachmen!” (Edgeworth 1: 316). Such density of
signification—the work of a sentence in Patronage—is reduced to a single codeword in
Persuasion (1818) when Austen informs her readers that Mr. Eliot frequents “Tattersal’s” (Austen 50). Once this detail is supplemented by Mr. Eliot’s libertine admiration
of Anne Eliot at Lyme, Miss Smith’s melodramatic exposé becomes almost superfluous,
confirming what we already suspect of Mr. Eliot’s “hollow and black” life of assumed
gentility, gambling, licentiousness, dissipation, and debt (Austen 213).
II.
II. Club Cultures
As with most cultural manias, the rages for hippodrama and coach driving were distillations of broader tendencies in British culture that predated them by decades and even
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 311
Figure 4 Grimaldi burlesquing Coates in Harlequin & Padmanaba (1811). Courtesy of
David Mayer III.
Figure 5 Joseph Grimaldi in Fashion’s Fools (1809). Courtesy of the Museum of London.
312
M. Gamer
Figure 6 Charles Mathews as Cypher in Hit or Miss! (1810). Author’s Collection.
centuries. Before Tattersal’s was established in 1766, Newmarket had been associated
with horse-buying and horseracing since the reigns of James I and Charles I, the latter
instituting the first cup race there in 1634. By the early eighteenth century, the spectacle
of the Newmarket races was great enough for Daniel Defoe to “fanc[y himself] in the
Circus Maximus at Rome, seeing the ancient games,” even as he regretted watching
men of “high dignity and quality, [descend] to picking one another’s pockets … without respect to faith, honour, or good manners” (102). Like other exclusive clubs, the
Jockey Club at Newmarket (founded 1750) was formed in part to prevent this kind of
class mixing and corruption, but without much success (Bracegirdle 3). As early as
1751, writers like Thomas Warton were depicting Newmarket as having its own
distinct and pernicious culture, a line of critique fully developed in Horace Walpole’s
correspondence, where England figures as a center of fashion, moral dissipation,
political intrigue, and financial decadence:
The Maccaronis are at their ne plus ultra: Charles Fox is already so like Julius Caesar, that
he owes an hundred thousand pounds. Lord Carlisle pays fifteen hundred and Mr Crewe
twelve hundred a year for him—literally for him, being bound for him, while he, as like
Brutus as Caesar, is indifferent about such paltry counters… . What is England now?—A
sink of Indian wealth, filled by nabobs and emptied by Maccaronis! A senate sold and
despised! A country overrun by horse-races! A gaming, robbing, wrangling, railing nation,
without principles, genius, character or allies; the overgrown shadow of what it was!
(Walpole 23: 498–99)
At the center of Walpole’s anecdote are the “Maccaronis,” figures literally constituted
of horses and their by-products. Their distinctive ponytails—often described, as were
macaronies generally, as a “club of hair”—were made of horsehair and weighed up to
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 313
three pounds. Invoking the culture of Newmarket and standing as a metonymical stud
to its studs of horses, the Macaroni here embodies Newmarket’s specific brand of
swaggering masculinity and antisocial behavior. In Walpole’s correspondence, the
trope becomes all the more ironic because the Macaroni is an “overgrown shadow,” a
dandified signifier composed of false hair and false bluster defined by what is “without,” and hiding an empty center. Walpole’s narrative of British “principles” and
“character” overrun by horseracing thus carries the heft of political allegory, one in
which the follies of one generation bankrupt the political and patrimonial estates of the
preceding one.
By the end of the 1780s, Walpole should have felt his prophetic powers vindicated.
The figure of the Macaroni had come and gone, but Newmarket’s reputation for
fashionable vice and stylish danger—not to mention its symbolic opposition to those
virtues of farming, economy, patriotism, and domesticity cultivated by George III—
quickly attracted the king’s son and Fox’s friend, the young Prince of Wales (later
George IV), who joined the Jockey club in 1784 as soon as he was of age to do so. By
1790 he would boast his first Derby and Newmarket winners, a stud of over forty
horses, and a position as the central icon of the Jockey Club and its culture (see
Figure 7). Rowlandson’s 1790 lampoon was only made into a print for mass sale and
consumption twenty-one years later, the year of Blue-Beard and Timour the Tartar. In
it, the Prince of Wales stands at the center of an all-male coterie surrounded by the
paraphernalia of the club’s culture, as seedy as it is aristocratic. While two shifty card
Figure 7 Thomas Rowlandson, The Jockey Club (1790; George IV at center, coat open).
Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Library.
314
M. Gamer
players occupy the left side of the picture, equally dismal backgammon players and two
sinister onlookers occupy the right; the Prince, meanwhile, is flanked by his brother the
Duke of York and what appears to be his bookkeeper. Dogs on the floor form living
counterparts to various boxing, cock-fighting, and racing prints on the wall, while the
prominent “BETTING ROOM” sign and an advertisement for the sale of a pack of
hounds suggests the depth of the play. The drawing’s satire is less one of composition
than one of assemblage and accumulation, its title suggesting that the figures and props
of the picture literally constitute the Jockey Club and its ethos.
In this instance, Rowlandson’s print cannily anticipates the event that would divide
the club from its star member: the 21 October 1791 betting scandal known as the
“Escape Affair.” After finishing last the previous day, the Prince’s horse Escape had won
at long odds against a strong field, the Prince and his jockey Sam Chifney winning
significant sums. Concluding the horse to have been watered just before the first race
to raise its odds in the second, the Jockey Club barred Chifney for life. The Prince
responded by withdrawing his horses from further races, selling his entire stud, and
giving Chifney an annuity of 200 guineas (Smith 61–67; David 136–37) (see Figure 8).
Satires of the scandal quickly moved from the print shop to the Covent Garden stage
in the form of Thomas Holcroft’s Road to Ruin (1792), whose character Charles Goldfinch proved immensely popular as a burlesque of Newmarket dandies and their rakish
masculinity (See Figure 9). In The Road to Ruin, coach-driving and horseracing stand
as component parts of a wider culture of gambling, dissipation, and debt, Goldfinch
standing as (in his words) “a genus” of a cultural type nearly two decades before Charles
Mathews trod on stage as Dick Cypher in Hit or Miss! Yet Goldfinch matters here more
than merely as a prototype of a stock character of Regency farce. Seizing on his signature line (“That’s your sort”), print satirists quickly projected Holcroft’s Whip out of
the theater and back onto broader social and political canvases that included the Prince
Figure 7
Thomas Rowlandson, The Jockey Club (1790; George IV at center, coat open). Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Library.
Figure 8 Isaac Cruickshank, Hint for an ESCAPE at the next spring Meeting (1792).
(Ridden by Chifney, George flees members of the Jockey Club). © Copyright The Trustees
of the British Museum.
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 315
Figure 9 “Mr. Lewis and Mr. Quick, as Goldfinch and Sulky” Carlton House Magazine
(1792). Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania.
of Wales, Fox (often called the “Jockey of Norfolk”), the Duke of Clarence, and that
other prototypical man of turf and theater, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (see Figure 10).
Such prints demonstrate the degree to which characters like Goldfinch functioned
within a longstanding tradition of satire, one that reached beyond the theater to
produce Rowlandson’s and Cruickshank’s prints and novelistic characters from Robert
Bage’s Mr. Fillygrove (in Hermsprong) to Austen’s James Thorpe (in Northanger
Abbey). More pressing for the purposes of this argument, it helps us to discover the
breadth of the canvas onto which Lewis introduced Timour the Tartar, and the extent
to which that canvas already carried a rich tradition of political satire.
Figure 10
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III. Theaters of War
In connecting Astley’s horses at Covent Garden to Newmarket and gentleman coachdriving, we might wonder whether we have strayed too far from hippodrama and its
legacies were it not for the fact that Timour’s audiences strayed even further.
Wondering themselves how Timour could mean anything at all, reviewers found
316
M. Gamer
Figure 10 The Road to Ruin (1792; George rides a horse with Fox’s face, while Dorothy Jordan says “Well done Charly! That’s your sort!” The
Duke of Clarence rides what appears to be Sheridan, saying “Push away! That’s your sort!”). © Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 317
themselves repeatedly dumbstruck at the willingness of audiences to interpret the
play—whether as commentary on the war with France, as condemnation of
Napoleon’s character, or as evidence of Kemble’s patriotism. “Amidst the clattering
of hoofs, the clangor of swords and spears, and the shouts of an enraptured audience,” the Morning Chronicle lamented, “it is scarcely possible … for criticism to
attempt to speak” (30 April 1811). Subsequent reviews confirm this despair over the
future of dramatic criticism, with reviewers like John Williams calling Timour the
Tartar no less than “a Vandal experiment” (Dramatic Censor 241), as clearly a
barbarian usurper as Timour himself.
Williams’s treatment of Timour is also remarkable for its willingness to read the
play, however regretfully, as emblematic of a changing cultural landscape. Two
months earlier in March of 1811, Williams had described Blue-Beard as part of a
plot “to discountenance and proscribe the legitimate Drama, and establish in its
stead a kind of entertainment … recognizable by neither the rules of critics, nor the
laws of nature” (Dramatic Censor 156). By May, however, this sense of conspiracy
had been replaced by another kind of fascination. Williams’s review of Timour may
begin by perfunctorily dismissing its improbable plot, but the rest is devoted to
praising its acting, sets, music, and overall conception. If the review maintains an at
times elegiac and bewildered tone, the cause lies in Timour’s incredibly high level of
production, one reserved for mainpiece comedy and tragedy: “We are bound in
justice to allow, that it is the most superb spectacle we have ever seen … the last
scene, and its whole gorgeous exhibition, is worth being commemorated by itself”
(Dramatic Censor 242, 244). With such an assessment, the play becomes, in
Williams’s words, “too fine for pantomime,” its cultural status indeterminate in the
hierarchy of the evening’s entertainment.
One such lengthy review would be enough; yet, it is only through The Dramatic
Censor’s subsequent essays—written, in the tradition of the Gentleman’s Magazine, as
a series of letters to the editor from fictitious correspondents—that Williams allows
himself full reign to speculate on the meaning of Timour’s success. The most striking
of these is signed “Oliver Old Times,” whose nostalgic memories of “Garrick’s time,
when a fine Tragedy was succeeded by an entertaining Farce” (243n), invoke an age
when genres were stable even as they provide a vehicle for exploring recent changes in
the theater:
I will confess to you that still more than the mummery astonished me, was to witness the
shouting and delirious acclamation that prevailed, and my hearing many grave men and
women exclaim, delightful! charming! wonderful! … After a night’s rather disturbed rest, in
the morning at breakfast a sort of solution occurred to me… . —We are becoming a warlike
people, Mr. Editor… . Thanks to Bonaparte’s threats of invasion, every man now is a soldier,
and therefore naturally becomes enamoured of “the pomp, pride, and circumstances of
glorious war,” and amongst them “the neighing steed” of course holds a conspicuous place
in his affections… . There is another, and a very strong concurring cause for this partiality
towards equestrian performers—need I say that I allude to that respectable fraternity called
the Four-in-Hand Club, who with a laudable veneration for antiquity, are trying, as far as
in them lies, to revive the glories of the Olympic Games… . Yes, Mr. Editor, it is to the prevalence of the military spirit and the four-in-hand that I ascribe this passion for equestrian
318
M. Gamer
mummery—and while I hail the cause, I cannot but say I am heartily grieved at the effects.
(243n–244n)
The letter itself is a formidable comic performance: Oliver Old Times is jolted awake
from his customary snooze in the theater by “the bray of kettle drums, the galloping
of horses, and the clangour of trumpets” (243n), which bewilder his senses and his
sense of dramatic history. But the extent of the satire is both limited and complicated
by the broader changes it marks. Roused from the time of Garrick—when plays were
predictable enough that one could sleep through them in peace—Old Times awakens
to find himself in a world suffused by nearly two decades of war. When dramatic
offerings and popular fashion alike are determined by “the four-in-hand” and “every
Militia and Volunteer Colonel throughout the nation,” he sighs, “no wonder then that
a body of such weight should have an influence in turning the scale of national taste”
(244n).
Theatrical taste, it seems, must fall sacrifice to events of greater national importance. The same can be said of reviews of Timour the Tartar, which are characterized by their almost uniform exhibitions of patriotism. As Jane Moody notes
succinctly, Lewis “reimagined Timour … as a Napoleonic bogeyman” (99–100)—an
association confirmed by Kemble’s casting of the diminutive Charles Farley as
Timour—and thus partially inoculated his play against criticism. Whether heartfelt
or de rigeur, patriotic sentiments enter into nearly every review of the play, and
provide striking testimony to the predicament faced by Timour’s detractors. How to
criticize a play whose popularity stemmed in part from its allegorical celebration of
British military prowess, where each night Astley’s full cavalry stormed the fortress
of a hated Usurper with what can only be called, in spite of exotic costumes and a
historical setting, astonishing realism (see Figure 11)? Small wonder, then, that
viewers of Timour’s final siege praised it as both allegory and documentary, drawing
Figure 11 Mr. King as Abdalac in Act II, scene iii of Timour the Tartar (1811). Author’s
Collection.
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from pantomime and afterpieces like Blue-Beard on one hand and popular military
re-enactments like The Glorious First of June (1794) on the other. Its chief and
lasting innovation to the history of theater lies in this hybridization of fairy tale and
newsreel.
Equally troubling for reviewers, however, were the ways in which the play simply
could not be ignored. While equestrian dramas had been fixtures of minor theaters for
decades—and while lampoons of Whips and their horse-mad brethren had existed for
as many years—the marginal status of such venues made it easy enough to dismiss their
productions as ephemeral and unimportant. Thus, in spite of hippodrama’s growing
popularity between 1790 and 1810, reviewers and satirists were able to maintain a relatively stable cultural hierarchy, whose notions of “high” and “low” culture comfortably
mirrored the legal institution of “major” and “minor” theaters. Blue-Beard may have
forced critics to write about what they could not ignore, but its reviews suggest that
Astley’s horses had not in and of themselves upset long-cherished hierarchies. As a
revived rather than original play, Blue-Beard had occupied a place in the legitimate
repertoire for over a decade, and its equestrian scenes were too clearly mere appendages
to threaten its secondary status as afterpiece. We find such hierarchies placed under
siege only with the advent of Timour the Tartar, that original production confessedly
too fine to be pantomime, too well acted and well produced to be mere afterpiece, and
too frighteningly realistic in its military displays to be dismissed as a tale for children
and apprentices.
Figure 11
Mr. King as Abdalac in Act II, scene iii of Timour the Tartar (1811). Author’s Collection.
IV.
IV. “Hippo-Mania”
Upon the whole, whether the taste of the Town has corrupted the Stage, or whether the
Stage has corrupted the taste of the Town, it would be vain for us now to argue—true it is
that the Hippo-mania rages, and this Spectacle is well calculated to gratify the prevailing
disposition. It will not therefore jog on at a common rate, but have a long run; and the
Managers, at the end of the season, will find themselves and their horses at the winningpost! (Globe, 30 April 1811)
Eleven weeks after its April premiere, Timour the Tartar’s popularity appears not
merely to have continued unabated, but to have altered the offerings and, in one case,
internal architecture of London’s theaters. One can only marvel at the extent of its
influence. By mid-July, every major and minor London theater of consequence
advertised among its nightly entertainments a hippodrama modeled on Blue-Beard or
Timour, as rivals scrambled to bring forward their own equestrian offerings. Readers
of London newspapers like The Times, therefore, would have found a certain sameness in the offerings of the six major London theaters on the morning of 18 July 1811.
With Covent Garden offering “Timour the Tartar every night, this season,” the transplanted Drury-Lane company at the Lyceum Theatre advertise the premier of “an
Heroic, Tragic, Operatic Drama” entitled Quadrupeds; or, The Manager’s Last Kick!
Cobbled from an earlier farce, The Tailors (Haymarket, 1805), this burlesque of BlueBeard and Timour promises a full-scale battle between master and journeymen tailors
on donkeys and mules. Struggling for a hit nearly a month into their season, the
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summer Haymarket Theatre, meanwhile, announces the imminent debut of
Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh; or, The Rovers of Weimar, a “Tragico-Comico-AngloGermanico-Hippo-Ono-Dramatico Romance” also taken from an earlier play, the
Anti-Jacobin’s 1798 satire of The Rovers.
Beyond the world of the Theatre Royals, Times readers find even grander spectacles.
At Westiminster Bridge, Astley’s publicizes Lisbon, reenacting recent battles of the
Peninsular Campaign, followed by the Blue-Beard-inspired “popular Naval, Military,
Equestrian, and Pedestrian Spectacle, called the Tyrant Saracen and Noble Moor.”
Further east at Blackfriars Road, the Surrey Theatre offers three works from the prolific
Thomas John Dibdin: “the admired Burletta of Tag in Tribulation”; a pantomime entitled The Mandarin; or Harlequin in China; and (with great typographical fanfare) Blood
will have Blood! or, The Battle of the Bridges, a “hippodrame” celebrating Wellington’s
recent victories in Portugal. Not to be outdone, Sadler’s Wells announces several
productions by Thomas’s brother Charles Dibdin, including a “comic dance,” a “new
Grand Venetian Aquatic Romance,” and “a new comic pantomime” entitled Harlequin
and Bluebeard, with horses jumping “over real water.” Subtitled “Blue-beard Travestie,” this final entertainment features Mr. Austin as the “Genius of Burlesque,” Mr.
Lund singing “My Kingdom for a Horse,” and a final “grand Gallamaufry Combat,
Bipeds and Quadrupeds; the Quadropediant department under the direction of Mr.
Grimaldi.”
Such advertisements are often useful for reminding us of the diversity of subject,
form, and venue within the theater of Romanticism. Faced with the full spectrum of
performances advertised in London on a typical evening, we usually marvel at the
imaginative breadth of the entertainments offered. In this instance, however, the Times
listings for 18 July 1811 astonish not for their heterogeneity but for their coherence and
narrow intertextuality. It is not just that every major and minor London theater is
producing hippodrama and devoting significant advertising space to doing so, but that
every hippodrama produced draws from either Wellington’s or Kemble’s recent
victories, whether in Europe or on the stage. It is a situation as remarkable as it is exceptional. Portugal or Covent Garden, British forces or Blue-Beard’s Noble Moors, Napoleon or Timour, what signifies in this collective bill of fare is its consistency of subject
matter and source material. Its narrowness smacks of speculative bubble and managerial panic; its uniformity recalls the cultural crazes of the 1790s, whether for German
drama or Gothic romance. And here the process of imitation and appropriation occurs,
if anything, at a more rapid rate and with greater staying power.
It is not too much to say that, between their April debut and the end of the calendar
year, Timour and his horses became a theatrical discourse in their own right, inspiring
no fewer than seven stage responses in as many months. These plays possessed their
own evolving cast of characters and metatheatrical traditions, and ranged from
burlesque opera to melodrama, pantomime, and farce. They included not only the two
Quadrupeds and the Blue-beard Travestie but also, among the plays submitted to John
Larpent in the second half of 1811, Four-in-Hand (Haymarket, August 1811), The
Travellers Benighted (Haymarket, September 1811), and One Foot by Land and One Foot
by Sea; or, The Tartar’s Tartar’d! (Olympic, November 1811). As the inaugural play for
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 321
a newly renovated Olympic Pavilion Theatre—which, during the summer of 1811, had
rebuilt its stage to hold up to a hundred horses—The Tartar’s Tartar’d featured
Bangwan Ho and his Oriental allies attacking, in what can only be called a hippodramatic vortex, the castles of both Blue-Beard and Timour in a single outing. Over the
next four decades, these two villains would reappear together and separately, Godzillalike, across dozens of productions, equestrian and otherwise, including Tarrare, the
Tartar Chief (1825), Timour, Cream of Tartars (1845), and Lord Blue Beard; Or, the
Crim-Tartar, a Naturalised British Subject (1856).
V.
V. The Production of Illegitimate Satire
As their titles suggest, the majority of stage responses to Blue-Beard and Timour the
Tartar employed elements of satire; yet the satire was of a curiously diffuse kind. While
some productions ridiculed key scenes and the pecuniary motives that produced them,
still more simply appropriated their characters for the national stock of villains useful
for spectacles, melodramas, and pantomimes. This latter strategy was especially true of
the so-called “minor” theaters, which chose wholesale appropriation over travesty
since, having produced Timour-like entertainments for decades, their managers could
have little reason to protest Kemble’s apostasy other than for the increased competition
it brought to them. Occupying a position, as Leigh Hunt had put it, “beneath
criticism,” they had little reason to fear that the critical ire directed at Kemble would be
turned on themselves.
Looking to Covent Garden’s successes, the other Theatre Royals occupied a more
difficult position. With Drury Lane being rebuilt and the Old Price Riots still a matter
of recent memory, attendance had been flat most of the 1810–11 season until the debut
of Astley’s horses in February. As Timour continued to boast full houses at Covent
Garden through July, Samuel Arnold at the Lyceum and George Colman the Younger
at the Haymarket responded with the same strategy: to exploit the rage for horses, and
assert their own superior taste, through the double medium of satire. The two shows
that resulted, Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, advertised themselves as
burlesques on Kemble’s equestrian productions. As a result, the same crowds that had
gone to see the horses at Covent Garden came to see them travestied as Quadrupeds at
the Lyceum and Haymarket.
And in doing so, they attended remarkably similar productions. Beyond their similar
titles, Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh share common narrative structures, dramatic techniques, and strategies of ridicule. Each play opens with a theater
manager beset by debts weighing the pros and cons of equestrian performances, and
each closes with a mock version of Blue-Beard’s and Timour’s climactic battle-scenes.
Perhaps most important, whether Arnold’s “Heroic, Tragic, Operatic Drama” or
Colman the Younger’s “Tragico-Comico-Anglo-Germanico-Hippo-Ono-Dramatico
Romance,” each presents itself as a generic monstrosity and thus as a ridicule of
theaters for promising the span of genres while providing only mongrel productions.
In each play, the theater manager possesses neither the principles nor the resolve to
protect the nation’s drama from foreign and generic contamination. On the surface the
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rhetorical position of the plays would seem fairly clear: as Theatre Royals producing
such satires, the Lyceum and Haymarket purportedly promise to be better defenders
and custodians of the drama than Kemble, and to be above such petty concerns.
Reviewers of Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, however, responded not
with applause but with incredulity and even concern. They especially noted the hurried
nature of each play’s production: that both were plagiarisms of existing plays; that both
employed the same well-worn frame narrative of distressed manager and dress
rehearsal made popular in The Rehearsal (1671), The Critic (1779), and Old Hay at the
New Market (1795); and that neither significantly altered its source text for the present
occasion. Thomas Rowlandson’s print of Arnold’s play is telling for how it reads its
opening scene as symptomatic of the state of the theater, picturing, as it does, Arnold
sending a dun through a trap door with the aid of Harlequin, Pantaloon, and Clown
(see Figure 12). Yet, unlike the managers in Quadrupeds, Arnold and Colman the
Younger could not dismiss their critics so easily. Among other things, Quadrupeds was
criticized for its inflated advertisements, which, the 19 July 1811 Morning Post reported,
had promised twenty jackasses taught to bray to music. In the case of The Quadrupeds
of Quedlinburgh, the play’s title and timing raised suspicions that Colman was acting
entirely out of competitive need—that he had learned of Quadrupeds while the play was
in rehearsal, and had scrambled to fit up a rival production. Certainly Colman’s
piecemeal application to the Licenser (application 15 July, play MS 18 July, prologue
24 July), his decision to advertise the play the same day Quadrupeds debuted (18 July),
Figure 12 Thomas Rowlandson, The Manager’s Last Kick; or A New Way to Pay Old Debts
(1811). Author’s Collection.
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 323
and his determination to hurry the play into production only a week later (25 July) all
suggest his own play to be the ironic offspring of the very forces it claimed to satirize.
Whether privy or not to the hurried details of Arnold’s and Colman’s productions,
reviewers systematically questioned their intent and effect, and most criticized their
deployment of satire as misdirected and inappropriate.5 (One of the most suggestive
aspects of these notices, in fact, is their gravity of interrogation.) All censured the
extreme length of both plays as inappropriate for an afterpiece and as perpetuating
what the 19 July 1811 Morning Post called a “system … for pantomimes in five acts.”
What emerges is a kind of collective and constitutive argument: if the Lyceum and
Haymarket really considered Kemble’s horses a threat to theatrical standards, they
would have produced original satires on them rather than retool stale productions into
lengthy and incomplete burlesques. Leigh Hunt’s review of Quadrupeds in the Examiner for 21 July 1811 synthesizes the point nicely: “[W]hen the humour does come, it is
abrupt and at long intervals; in short, it is not the coat that is humorous, but the
patches; and this is very different from true and entire burlesque.” The implication is
that such patchy satires, far from chastising the forces of pantomime, are essentially cut
from Harlequin’s coat.
Hunt’s observation, moreover, points to a more striking aspect of the critical
discourse: the degree to which reviewers seized on the two Quadrupeds as an
opportunity to define and defend satire from misappropriation and misuse. It is as if
the same forces that had placed hippodramas on the stage of a Theatre Royal had also
corrupted subsequent satires of them. Part of the problem (as reviewers saw it) lay in
the toothless nature of both performances, which seemed less to attack than copy the
Covent Garden horses. Thus, the 19 July 1811 Morning Post protested against Quadrupeds as burlesque without ridicule, a point the Times chose to analyze at length:
Figure 12
Thomas Rowlandson, The Manager’s Last Kick;or A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1811). Author’s Collection.
[I]t was “flat, stale,” and … completely denuded of humour; and those dialogues were
natural only in being what might have been expected from the flat vulgarity of brutal
violence of low rioters… . If our advice were to be taken, it should be totally disembowelled, and … nothing but the first and last scenes—nothing but the “mera exuviae”
suffered to remain. (19 July 1811)
At the bottom, both reviews condemn Arnold as either fundamentally misunderstanding or willfully misapplying burlesque. Composed of a frame narrative burlesquing one
object and a source play satirizing another—and each in a different style—Quadrupeds
mixed satiric modes without apparent purpose. The opening and closing scenes may
deflate similar scenes at Covent Garden; but the rest of Quadrupeds proceeds without
referring to Blue-Beard and Timour, instead mocking the vulgar class pretensions of
tailors. The Examiner’s review of 21 July 1811 comes to similar conclusions, describing
the play as “engrafted,” essentially deformed, and necessarily “different from a true and
entire burlesque.” “It is not too much to say of the performers in general,” Hunt
concludes, comparing Arnold’s satiric pretensions to the class pretensions of the tailors
themselves, “that they act up to the faults of their original, and mistake flat abruptness
for quaintness … [and] have no notion of burlesque.”
By the time these same reviewers approached Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh a week
later, their analyses had developed into something like full-scale theorizing, in part
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because of Colman the Younger’s status as playwright and satirist. But the greater cause
lay in their broader concern that Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh would exacerbate
tendencies already troubling Arnold’s Quadrupeds: that its even more profound
jumbling of satirical modes, in confusing high and low generally, would further blur
distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate theater. Ironically, their anxiety
produced some of the decade’s most sustained writing about dramatic satire.
Thus, the Morning Chronicle’s review of Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh laments at
length to see “parody … degraded, by being made subservient to the exclusive object of
raising a laugh against that which, unworthy as it may be, is below the notice of criticism” (27 July 1811). Hunt’s review in The Examiner, meanwhile, points to Colman’s
fundamental “confusion of burlesque and mock-heroic, which are in reality very
distinct things, the former being a degradation of what is great, the latter an elevation
of what is little” (28 July 1811). Six days later, we find this analysis fully expanded in
Bell’s Weekly Messenger, which takes up the problem of confusing satiric modes and of
engaging in dramatic “caricature … independent of any aim at ridicule”:
There are chiefly two forms of comic ridicule—the one … may be termed comic caricature
… [which is] a ridicule of extravagance… . Now, there is no objection to this kind of
caricature, as long as it has a show of ridicule—as long as it is a parody of a similar
absurdity. By itself, however, and independent of any aim at ridicule, it is sheer nonsense.
Lords Puddingfield and Beefington were in this latter predicament. They were absolute
fools, and without any original in ridicule.
The second kind of ridicule is burlesque; which is of two kinds, the high burlesque, which
parodies low images and affairs in a lofty style, and the low burlesque, which degrades what
is serious and lofty, by low and buffoonish appendages. Both these kinds of humour were
employed in this Piece, but without an attention to their nature. Buffoonery was
introduced without an aim, and without any possible nature or probability; and the high
burlesque was frequently mere grave stupidity. (4 August 1811)
The review’s careful marshalling of Aristotelian categories signifies on several registers.
On one hand, it posits a world in which every satiric mode has a distinct “nature” and
function while also assuming the undesirability—and even unintelligibility—of mixing
these modes or reassigning their functions. Yet it also allows the reviewer to posit social
and formal analogues for this confusion of modes. Where mixing and misapplying
satiric modes produces only buffoonery among Lords and “grave stupidity” among the
lower orders, the end must be a more general and pernicious jumbling of hierarchies
of aesthetic and cultural value.
Such a review is suggestive in part because, given the earlier press on Kemble’s
horses, one would not expect similar outcry against dramas claiming to satirize them.
Even more suggestive, however, are the insights they provide concerning the relation
between the cultural production of hippodrama and that of satire. For while the scale
of dramatic response to Blue-Beard and Timour the Tartar may be surprising, I am
not surprised that the response came in the form of satire, or that the “crisis” of confidence provoked by Kemble’s staging of these two plays created its own minor crisis
among critics writing about satire itself. While not sharing legitimate drama’s
royal protections, Regency satire depended on the same dichotomies that upheld
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 325
them—particularly, as Gary Dyer has noted, early-nineteenth-century “establishment” satires, which interpreted the juxtaposition of aesthetic modes, whether
dramatic or satiric, as an essentially radical perversion (Dyer 3–4). Satire is, moreover,
perhaps the most aggressively oppositional of genres because it claims to attack from
foundational truths. The site of truth may be contested among satirists; the style may
range from ironic laughter to severe chastisement; the relation between satire and the
objects satirized may be mutually constitutive; but through all this, satire, even radical
satire, speaks from a sense of its own authority and legitimacy (see Bogel; Boscawen;
Dryden; Dyer; Gifford; Jones; and Wood).
Thus, looking across the range of responses to satires of Blue-Beard and Timour the
Tartar, we find a growing uneasiness over the definition, function, and power of satire
to defend supposedly established and permanent truths. This is especially visible in
critical notices of Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, where reveiwers, using Colman’s love
of profit as a platform for their own writing, anxiously reconstruct an essentially
conservative and ostentatiously classical theory of dramatic satire, painstakingly
defining forms of ridicule, mockery, burlesque, and parody. But such concerns about
satire and the drama are hardly limited to the columns of newspaper reviews. We find
especially compelling examples, for the purposes of this essay, in the poetry of Lord
Byron—not, as one might expect, in Don Juan or English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,
but in work far more intimately concerned with Kemble’s horses and the satiric
responses to them.
VI.
VI. Byron’s Rejected Addresses
Whether Leslie Marchand’s authoritative treatment or more recent accounts, biographies of Byron are remarkably consistent about July of 1811, the month Byron returned
from his Grand Tour, and the sixteen months that followed (see Eisler; Grosskurth;
Marchand; and McCarthy). During the months Timour the Tartar transformed the
London stage and equestrian culture, Byron was at Malta, having written three long
poems during his travels: cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and two satires,
Hints from Horace and The Curse of Minerva. Returning to England on Bastille Day in
1811, Byron was waylaid in August by the deaths of his mother and his friends John
Edelston and Charles Matthews.6 The next months saw Byron’s first speech to the
House of Lords and the printing of the poems, the March 1812 publication of Childe
Harold propelling Byron into stardom. The title of Marchand’s chapter for this initial
period of Byron’s homecoming—”1811–1812: London and Newstead: Childe
Harold”—tells the story of the biographies concisely, with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
dominating the chronological and geographical landscapes of the literary life.
As writerly choices go, focusing on an author’s breakthrough work hardly requires
apology. Byron’s own correspondence during these months, though, tells a different
story, in part because he had no way of foreseeing Childe Harold’s success or how that
success would transform his own public persona. Thus, when leaving England in 1809,
Byron had been considered—and had considered himself—a satirist with interests in
poetry, travel, and the theater. The books he took on tour reflect these preoccupations,
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as do his letters composed abroad. On embarking, Byron enclosed a verse satire on
travel to Francis Hodgson; subsequent missives described various adventures and
sights, requested Walter Scott’s latest poem, and recounted anecdotes of the 1809
Drury Lane fire. Letters from the first months of 1811 to John Cam Hobhouse and
James Cawthorn, meanwhile, disclosed publication plans not for Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage but for Hints from Horace, and show Byron as particular about the quality
of print and paper as about the proposed book’s structure, which he intended to model
on William Gifford’s Baviad.7 Standing as a Horatian sequel to the Juvenalian English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Byron’s Hints from Horace stands in a long tradition,
anchored by Pope, of free translations that used Ars Poetica as a base text but substituted contemporary references as desired. In Byron’s rendering, Horace’s advice to
authors gives way to a satirical compendium of the life stages of Regency man through
his consideration of that “many-headed monster … the public” (Byron, Poetical Works
1: 297):
Behold him freshman! forced no more to groan
O’er Virgil’s devilish verses, and—his own;
Prayers are too tedious, lectures too abstruse,
He flies from T[a]v[e]ll’s frown to “Fordham’s Mews”; …
Fines, tutors, tasks, conventions threat in vain,
Before hounds, hunters, and Newmarket plain. (1: 297–98)
This familiar catalogue of the Whip yields to an equally familiar portrait of the British
stage in decline and besieged by the usual suspects: excesses of sentiment and violence
(lines 261–80); Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre and supernatural spectacle (lines
281–92); opera and melodrama (lines 293–326); the decline of comedy into farce
(lines 327–48); and the Licensing Act and the “Methodistic men” who administer it
(lines 349–80). Dominated by theatrical anecdotes, the notes are at once more personal
and possess greater bite, satirizing gaming houses (“Hell,” 1: 435), clubs (“a pleasant
purgatory,” 1: 435), Southey’s Curse of Kehama (“Its ‘alacrity of sinking’ … so great,
that it has never since been heard of,” 1: 439), and Lord Grosvenor’s hypocrisy
(“Benvolio does not bet; but every man who maintains racehorses is a promoter of all
the concomitant evils of the turf,” 1: 436). This and not Childe Harold was the poem
Byron first handed to his friend and literary agent Robert Charles Dallas on returning
to England, declaring at the same time that he “believed satire to be his forte” (Dallas
117). And when Dallas expressed a preference for Childe Harold and found John
Murray willing to publish it, Byron stipulated a preference for placing on its title page,
instead of his name, the phrase “by the Author of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”
(Byron, Letters 2: 76).
If Dallas was disappointed with Hints from Horace, the reason lay in the dated nature
of the satire. What had been fresh two years earlier was now stale, particularly the
attacks on The Castle Spectre and the culture of Newmarket. While Byron had been
abroad, Lewis had provided satirists with a new equestrian target in the form of Timour
the Tartar, and Whips had added Wellingtonian military flourishes to their great coats.
Needless to say, once ashore Byron adjusted quickly enough to the new equestrian state
of things. Gone were earlier plans to join the regiments in Portugal (Byron, Letters 2:
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54, 2: 56–57). Instead, by late July we see Byron writing with satiric vengeance, first
privately in a letter to James Wedderburn (“Bold”) Webster, in which he refuses to
succumb to the usual wheeling and dealing of Whips and Bucks in horses and carriages:
200 g[uinea]s for a Carriage with ancient lining!!! Rags & Rubbish! You must write another
pamphlet my dear W. before—but pray do not waste your time and eloquence in expostulation, because it will do neither of us good, but Decide—Content or not content.—The
best thing you can do for the Tutor you speak of, will be to send him in your Vis (with the
lining) to the U - niversity of Gottingen; how can you suppose (now that my own Bear is
dead) that I have any situation for a German Genius of this kind till I get another, or some
children… . The Coronet will not grace the “pretty Vis” till your tattered lining ceases to
disgrace it. (2: 63–64)
I quote this passage because it testifies at once to the rapidity with which Byron reinstalled himself into the world of Regency dramatic and equestrian culture. Writing
five days after the debut of Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, Byron responds to Webster’s
bait-and-switch by transforming the vis-à-vis carriage into the Haymarket Theatre
diligence that propels the various sentimental friendships and illegitimate children of
Colman the Younger’s play. The allusions to “German Genius” and the famous song
(“The U - niversity of Gottingen”) from Colman’s source play, The Rovers, place the
reference beyond doubt. What interests here most, though, is the sophistication,
facility, and sting with which Byron incorporates the language of a current play to
chastise a friend’s double-dealing.
Through the end of 1811, Byron’s letters continue their preoccupation with satire,
theatrical and otherwise. Aside from his lengthy description of “Gentleman Amateur”
Robert Coates at the Haymarket in December (2: 143–44), his correspondence is dominated by William Gifford, who functions as presiding spirit to Hints from Horace and
as prospective reader for Childe Harold. With Gifford already having been praised
lavishly in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Byron felt Murray’s sounding the
Quarterly Review editor for his opinion on Childe Harold would prevent him from
expressing his real opinion about the poem:
I am not at all pleased with Murray for showing the MS.; and I am certain Gifford must see
it in the same light I do… . It is bad enough to be a scribbler, without having recourse to
such shifts to extort praise, or deprecate censure. It is anticipating, it is begging, kneeling,
adulating,—the devil! the devil! the devil! (2: 101)
What heightens Byron’s chagrin is his sense of himself as a satirist who has just lost a
position of equal footing with an idol. It is this sense of Gifford (in Byron’s words) as
“Magnus Apollo” (2: 91), as “Juvenal” himself (2: 80), and as “not only the first Satirist
of the day, but Editor of one of the principal Reviews” (2: 78) that causes him to
dominate Byron’s autumn letters. More important, it illuminates—in the wake of
Childe Harold’s success and Kemble’s decision to revive Timour the Tartar on 30 March
1812 after the success of the previous year—Byron’s belated attempts to intervene in
the debate on hippodrama through the medium of satire, and from the bully pulpit of
the Opening Address for the newly rebuilt Drury Lane Theatre on 10 October 1812.
The details of the destruction of the old Drury and the opening of the new are as
farcical as they are compelling. Where Sheridan’s gross mismanagement had insured
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the theater’s ruin even before it was reduced to ashes in 1809, the Committee of
Management did everything possible to make a mess of the new one’s October debut.
Newspaper accounts repeatedly cite inadequate police presence and crowd-control
procedures; they reserve their primary criticisms, however, for the Committee’s
handling of the Opening Address that was to commemorate the evening. Headed by
Lord Holland and Samuel Whitbread, the Committee had announced in August a
contest with a prize of twenty pounds, the winning address to be spoken at the opening
festivities. By September they had received 112 submissions, Byron declining to
compete “against all Grubstreet” (2: 197). Whether because of quality of the submissions or because none of the contestants was adequately famous, Holland approached
Byron to write the address. And in spite of his uneasiness over the anger that might
result from the 112 rejected contestants, Byron agreed.
As Byron was quick to discover, writing by invitation was still uncomfortably close
to writing for hire. Having submitted his initial draft on 23 September, he continued to
send revisions feverishly over the next ten days in answer to various Committee
objections. Byron’s uncharacteristic patience with the unending stream of queries,
particularly those of Samuel Whitbread, testifies to how seriously he took the task. As
the manuscript evidence demonstrates, his resolve derived its strength from a desire to
reform what he saw as recent abuses to the stage.
We can see the intensity of the negotiations through the flurry of additions and
corrections sent by Byron to Lord Holland that have survived. After dispatching the
initial draft from Cheltenham, Byron posted further revisions on September 24th
(thrice), 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th (twice), 29th, and 30th. The letters began and proceeded
cheerfully enough until 27 September, when negotiations shifted from queries about
versification to objections over content. By the 28th, Byron and the Committee were at
an apparent impasse, with Byron dug in over the issue of hippodrama:
Is Whitbread determined to castrate all my cavalry lines? I don’t see why t’other house should
be spared, besides it is the public who ought to know better, & you recollect Johnson’s was
against similar buffooneries of Rich’s but certes I am not Johnson… . I do think in the
present state of the Stage, it had been unpardonable to pass over the horses… . I confess I
wish that part of the address to stand. (2: 212–14)
What becomes clear as the exchange of letters progresses is that Byron wished to write
an address that was both celebratory and satirical. The manuscript submitted had
divided the address fairly evenly between the two: the first half consisting of conventional commemoration, the second of more pointed satirical exhortation. Whitbread
had objected to these latter lines, especially a passage condemning the Covent Garden
horses as a derogation of public taste:
But know—our triumph this alone secures
The judging voice and eye must first be yours
Ours to obey your will or right or wrong
To soar in Sentiment, or creep in song
Nay, lower still, the Drama yet deplores
That late she deigned to crawl upon “all fours”
When Richard roars in Bosworth for a horse,
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 329
If you command, the steed must come in course
If you demand—our intellectual feast
Must furnish store alike for Man and Beast
If you decree, the Stage must condescend
To soothe the sickly taste we dare not mend. (Byron, Poetical Works 3: 20n–21n)
Inscribed in these and other cancelled lines—and in the epistolary exchange itself—is
a fundamental disagreement over the duties that Theatre Royals have to the drama, to
their audience, and to one another. While the Committee ostentatiously objected
because of the lines’ indecorum, its actions appear also motivated by a desire to prevent
any kind of discord between Drury Lane and “rival” theater Covent Garden. Put
another way, Byron’s “cavalry lines” did not so much violate decorum as threaten to
erode the cultural authority and monopolistic profitability of the Theatre Royals. The
postscript to Byron’s September 28th letter hints at such motives by reminding Lord
Holland that the Drury Lane company themselves had satirized hippodrama more than
once at the Lyceum:
On looking again I doubt my idea of having obviated W[hitbread]’s objection to the other
house allusion is a ‘non sequitur’ but I wish to plead for this part, because the thing really
is not to be passed over.—Many afterpieces in the Lyceum by the same company have
already attacked this “Augean Stable”—& Johnson in his prologue against Lun [theater
manager John Rich] … is surely a fair precedent (Bryon, Letters 2: 214).
While the language of the passage is tortured by Byron’s diplomacy, the implication is
clear: with the question of precedent a “non sequitur” and a blind, some underlying
motive is being “passed over.” This and his other arguments either ignored or rejected,
Byron was finally reduced on September 29th to pleading: “I do implore for my own
gratification one lash on those accursed quadrupeds—a ‘long shot Sir Lucius if you love
me’ … I shall choak if we must overlook their d—d menagerie” (2: 219).
By September 30th Byron had effectively given in—although whether worn down
from the Committee’s obstinacy or from an attack of kidney stones is uncertain. He
continued to send revisions as requested, and four days after the Address acknowledged
its lukewarm reception in an October 14th letter to Lord Holland. “My opinion,” he
wrote cryptically, “is what it always was, perhaps, pretty near that of the public” (2:
226). What had happened on the evening of the Address could only have confirmed
Byron’s sense of having missed a satiric opportunity. After the conclusion of the mainpiece, one of the Drury rejected contestants, the translator of Lucretius Dr. William
Busby, had arisen and asked for the audience’s impartial hearing of his Address, which
his son George then attempted to recite several times without being heard. The episode
provided a feast for reviewers and satirists, with George Cruickshank memorably
depicting Byron as the literal butt of the Busbys’ battering-ram (see Figure 13). While
a pouting John Bull exclaims with arms folded “Profits!!! D—me if any will come” and
Lord Holland stands on a pile of rejected Addresses, Byron capers to avoid Busby’s
battering ram, inscribed “Monologue,” exclaiming, “Stop! good Doctor! one Murder
is enough I do not wish to suffer the same fate with Lucretius.”
These same weeks saw other satires as well. On the same day Byron acquiesced to the
objections of the Committee, he related to Holland that the Drury Lane contest had
Figure 13
George Cruickshank, “Management—or—Butts and Hogheads” (1812; detail; Byron at center). © Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.
330
M. Gamer
Figure 13 George Cruickshank, “Management—or—Butts and Hogheads” (1812; detail;
Byron at center). © Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.
inspired “myriads of ironical addresses [al]ready—some in imitation of what is called
my style … it will not be bad fun even for the imitated” (2: 221). Having been forced to
censor himself, Byron took a palpable enough pleasure at the prospect of dramatic
satire nonetheless having its day.
And whether inspired by this expectation or galled by the Committee, Byron’s own
resolution to satirize equestrian culture, if anything, intensified during these weeks.
Blocked from criticizing the state of the drama in his own public person, he began
writing anonymously, composing at least eleven satirical poems between October and
December of 1812. As one might expect, the most energetic of these—“A Parenthetical
Address, by Dr. Plagiary” and “The Waltz,”—were composed during the first nineteen
days of October.
Perhaps more than any other poem by Byron, “The Waltz” is the snapshot of a
moment in popular culture; yet, here the seductive indecorum of waltzing (at its peak
of popularity in 1812) is seen as part of broader trends in British culture. In short, “The
Waltz” is less about the dance itself than about the culture of ostentation and display of
which it is a symptom. Thus its Preface, written in the persona of a Midlands country
gentleman invited “to pass the winter in town,” begins not with waltzing but with the
associated fad of gentleman coach driving:
Thinking no harm, and our girls being come to a marriageable (or, as they call, marketable)
age … we came up in our old chariot, of which, by the by, my wife grew so much ashamed,
in less than a week, that I was obliged to buy a second-hand barouche, of which I might
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 331
mount the box, Mrs. H. says, if I could drive, but never see the inside—(Byron, Poetical
Works 3: 22)
Byron’s name for his persona, “Horace Hornem, Esq.,” aptly summarizes the cultural
forces here at work. In one sense, middle England is being horned (“given horns to,
cuckolded”) by Regency fashion; in another, middle England is being horned by
Horace himself, Byron donning the appellation “Horace” (as he had in Hints from
Horace) much in the same way he dubs Gifford “Juvenal” in his correspondence. The
Preface then moves from coach-driving to a ballroom transformed by waltzing where
Hornem, at first outraged at seeing “Mrs. Hornem with her arms half around the loins
of a huge hussar-looking gentleman” (3: 23), is finally made to approve when his own
daughter laughs at him. What follows is the completion of a trinity of Regency popular
culture, where the country-squire-turned-gentleman-coach-driver not only approves
the new dance but also links the recent victories in Portugal to Dr. Busby’s alternative
Address at Drury Lane:
Indeed, so much I like it, that having a turn for rhyme, tastily displayed in some election
ballads and songs, in honour of all the victories … I sate down, and with the aid of W. F.
Esq. and a few hints from Dr. B. (whose recitations I attend, and am monstrous fond of
Master B.’s manner of delivering his father’s late successful D. L. Address), I composed the
following Hymn, wherewithal to make my sentiments known to the Public, whom,
nevertheless, I heartily despise as well as the Critics. (3: 23)
One finds a similar triumvirate in Byron’s “Parenthetical Address, by Dr. Plagiary,”
which quotes Busby’s address in the first half of each couplet while undercutting it in
the second. Thus Busby’s lines celebrating British military victories become the vehicles
for dramatic satire:
“This spirit WELLINGTON has shewn in Spain,”
To furnish Melo-drames for Drury-lane;
“Another MARLBOROUGH points to Blenheim’s story,”
And GEORGE and I will dramatise it for ye. (3: 33)
In both poems, vulgar self-advertisement and self-proclaimed excellence are depicted
as symptomatic forms of a more general national prostitution—and both are
insistently linked to the present state of the stage: “’Old Drury never, never soared so
high,’ / So says the Manager, and so says I” (3: 33).
In this sense, Byron’s move to anonymous satire in “The Waltz” and the “Parenthetical Address” signals a growing sense that dramatic satire must be cultivated outside the
orbit of the patent theaters for the rights and duties of satire to be reasserted. Put
another way, through his experience with the Drury Lane Address, Byron comes to the
same conclusion as did reviewers of Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh: that
dramatic institutions protected by royal patent cannot be expected to police
themselves; and that legitimacy in drama and satire must come from without.
In connecting the stage to Newmarket, hippodrama to gentleman coach driving, and
popular drama to satire, I have sought to make a case for placing popular theater at the
center of how Romantic-period culture understood and organized itself—as a force, in
short, irresistible enough to affect the orbits of other cultural forms. For however much
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we remember systems of genres as arbitrary impositions of one set of views or historical
moments over others, the issue changes the moment we re-anchor these concepts and
categories in specific cultures and their institutions. This is particularly true of the
theater, where parliamentary act and royal decree codify otherwise abstract notions of
high and low, legitimate and illegitimate, so that conceptual dichotomies become legal
and institutional properties. In the form of monopolies awarded by royal patent, then,
such concepts could be, for lack of a better word, owned, until they took on a material
existence backed by statutory law and royal edict.
Such aristocratic and legal backing provides a powerful illusion of the real; and when
that illusion is broken and its Legitimate Order of Things upset, we can expect crises
that reach far beyond the local site where the break or transgression has occurred—
even with transgressions so apparently small as that of gentlemen driving their own
coaches or Theatres Royal hiring horses to stage a more spectacular pitched battle or
cavalry charge. When we add a sense of the economic stakes at play here, which are so
high that the division of dramatic turf must be supported by royal patent and
parliamentary act, we can begin to see how small transgressions invite fairly massive
responses. Hence my interest in connecting two Regency crises of legitimacy, of theater
and of satire, to one another. And hence my desire to explain the theatrical seasons of
1810–11 and 1811–12 not only in terms of theater history, but also in terms of other
cultural arenas connected to the theater—from the scandals that produced institutions
like Newmarket and the Jockey Club, to the horse culture that gave us clubs like the
“Four-in-Hand” and the craze for gentleman coach-driving, to, finally, the tradition of
dramatic satire that gave us characters like Goldfinch in The Road to Ruin, and that
outraged Byron when powerful interests in the theater forced him to censor himself.
Notes
[1]
[2]
1.
2.
[3]
[4]
[5]
3.
4.
5.
[6]
[7]
6.
7.
See The Examiner, March 17–31, May 12, July 14, and July 28, 1811.
Timour’s run of forty-four nights ended only with the close of the theatrical season; revived 30
March 1812, it held the stage for half a century. Frederick Reynolds reports Covent Garden in
1810–11 had “the most profitable season in its history,” with receipts of £100,00, 25% higher
than average (Reynolds 2: 404).
Probably the most well known is the 1807 Satirist print entitled “The Monster Melodrama.”
Notable early exceptions are Saxon, and Mayer. More recently, see Cox; Moody; and Rzepka.
See the 19 July 1811 Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, and Times; the 21 July 1811 Bell’s
Weekly Messenger and Examiner; the 27 July 1811 Morning Chronicle, Courier, and Times; and
the 28 July 1811 Examiner.
Not the actor Charles Mathews, but a Cambridge friend.
Byron wished his poem to be printed with the original Horace on facing pages. In his
correspondence Byron calls Hints from Horace a “paraphrase” and an “imitation,” recalling
the subtitle of Gifford’s Baviad: A Paraphrastic Imitation of the First Satire Of Persius (Byron,
Letters 2: 43; 2: 80–81; and 2: 90).
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