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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
THIS ESSAY WILL EXAMINE NON-ROYAL PATENT THEATRE MELODRAMA and artisan radical culture in the Drury Lane vicinity in the late 1810s and early 1820s. It will show that contemporary melodramas, especially those written by William Thomas Moncrieff and performed at the Olympic Theatre, Wych Street, and Adelphi Theatre, Strand, have a cognatic relationship with London revolutionary politics. Popular melodrama was a manifestation of an increasingly self-confident artisan class in which the occupation of public spaces (streets, theatres and taverns) articulated their distinctive plebeian public sphere embodied in personal political agency and an active radical press. While this essay claims a high degree of specificity and a robust historical methodology, it necessarily negotiates the contemporary aporias between culture and literature which operated at this time. For the same reasons that state spying dogged radical activism, drama also fell under government scrutiny and control. As Marc Baer has shown, spying on the 1809 "Old Price" riots at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, was controlled by Sir Richard Ford, a senior Bow Street magistrate whose father had held controlling capital in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.(1) Ford, effectively London's "spymaster" and "chief-of-police," managed surveillance to counter United Irish nationalism and metropolitan ultraradicalism.(2) Not least, as Kenneth Johnston has proven, Ford also controlled the espionage dudes of William Wordsworth.(3) Amidst such vividly tantalizing promiscuities between the political and the literary, it is important not to underestimate the pervasive, consistent and invasive role of government control over symbolic expression. Although my essay will imply that there was a certain amount of successful surveillance avoidance, even mildly liberal discourses could be effectively banned from the stage. For example, the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays, the playwright George Colman the younger, in regulating the manuscript of The Castle of Wolfenstein, or, The Accusing Spirit in 1828 expunged the mildly liberal sentiments "and in America you know the distinction of ranks are not so minutely marked as with us."(4) What was possible as utterance in poetry, prose or public speech was disallowed in the theatre, even in the years close to the Reform Bill. This sharp discursive asymmetry between street and stage, magnified by the distinction between patent and non-patent theatres, is a defining feature of the political culture of Drury Lane.
One summer night in 1797 a government spy sent to Furnival's Inn Cellar, Strand, to monitor the London Corresponding Society's dialogue with United Irishmen, noted that the gathering of veteran Jacobins, disaffected "Hackney writers" and "Attorney's Clerks" not only toasted "`the immortal memory of Parker, late Commander of the floating Republic'" but "call'd for a pot of Beer which they term'd Parker's pot" and vowed it "should be introduced every night ... they met." The exemplary execution of Nore mutiny ringleader Richard Parker swiftly deified him amongst ultra-radicals who also drank toasts to "A speedy downfall to Spoony the third and his Ministers" and "Success to the Armies of Bounaparte."(5) Thirty three years later an irate theatre-goer wrote to the Home Office complaining about an "atrocious" and "inflammatory" production of Douglas Jerrold's Mutiny at Spithead and the Nore (1830) at the Royal Coburg Theatre just across the Thames from the Strand on the site of the present Old Vic. The writer considered Jerrold's play "much more ... [dangerous] than Mr Hunt or W. Cobbetts harangues" and feared it would encourage "[in]subordination in the Navy."(6) Curiously, "Parker's pot" had survived, transmogrified in Jerrold's play into a variation muddied by popular memory.(7) In Mutiny at ... the Nore's "tableau" ending (a visual "freeze-frame" typical of 1820s melodrama), Parker is given a glass of wine by the execution squad from which he drinks declaring, "shipmates, hear the last toast of Richard Parker:--`Here's a health to my king, and God bless him! confusion to his enemies, and salvation to my soul!'" Significantly, the Home Office's correspondent had "left some time before the close in utter disgust" and so could not have witnessed Parker's volte face. Jerrold's Mutiny at ... the Nore was the product of a rapidly developing marginal theatre which occupied the generic and dramatic interstices ignored by London's three royal patent theatres at Covent Garden, Haymarket and Drury Lane.
Jerrold's need to impose a kind of "gallows loyalism" on Parker is indicative of the play's several recourses to ideological simplifications and reversals, but these often take place within types of cultural or historical realism admitting alternative readings. For example, when Naval mismanagement is criticized ("`your grog is stopped, and no short-allowance money; wages are not paid for seven years, and who benefits but the purser?'" [38]), the allegations are contained in a seditious handbill read aloud by the dubious Timothy Bubble, a prosperous retired dockyard clerk turned farmer, informer and sexual harrasser. Bubble gives sedition credibility. The mutineer Jack Adams who snatches Parker's infant son from a cannon's mouth before his impetuous father can fire it in celebration, is also more than simply the drama's level-headed contrast to Parker. Adams' pacifying pleas to his fellow sailors ("if you have wrongs, as mayhap you have, write to the Admiralty" [32]) draws attention to the redundancy of petitioning, a political judgment as perennially controversial in the late 1820s as it had been in the 1790s. In other words, Mutiny at ... the Note figures the ultimately penitent Parker within more potentially subversive discourses.
The kind of ideological fault lines found in Jerrold's play are replicated elsewhere in the drama of the period. For example, Moncrieff's one act, Reform; Or, John Bull Triumphant: A Patriotic Drama (1828, Royal Coburg), similarly allows reformist and patrician viewpoints to contest with each other, even as the play touches on agricultural distress and incendiarism. If Douglas Jerrold's Mutiny at ... the Nore is indicative of...
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