The Gentleman's Daughter (42 page)

45 ‘Theatrical Pleasures, Contending for a Seat’, 1821.

As with the opera, contemporaries drew sharp distinctions about status and sexual propriety based on a viewer's position in the auditorium. At Drury Lane the observant Evelina drew a distinction between ‘the most conspicuous’ and the ‘most private part of the house’. When Margaret Pedder saw Mrs Jordan in
The Country Girl
at the same theatre in 1786, she paid six shillings and sat in a front box, whereas James Boswell had lolled cheerfully in the pit at Drury lane with Oliver Goldsmith and his drinking companions in 1763. As at the opera, the upper boxes or green boxes were seen as the proverbial ‘flesh market’.
²⁵
Taken together, metropolitan plays, players, audience and
mise-en-scène
constituted a crucial component of the town talk so beloved by country cousins. But the social pleasures of the play should not be allowed to overshadow the aesthetic engagement of the female audience, which could be thoroughgoing. After all, it was due to the campaign of the aristocractic Shakespeare Ladies Club, formed in 1736, that John Rich and David Garrick reintroduced Shakespeare to the repertoire. This (largely) anonymous group has been credited with the permanent reform of literary taste. At the time they were praised for bringing morality back into fashion; their championing of Shakespeare against both raunchy Restoration plays and foreign imports, such as Italian opera, was celebrated in the name of virtuous patriotism – ‘a truly public Spirit’.
²⁶

Provincial theatre flourished by mid-century, with the proliferation of town companies (the first at Norwich, York and Bath), the construction of new purpose-built auditoria in county towns, market towns and provincial resorts, and the success of touring companies. Few were the towns by the late eighteenth century which had not glimpsed the likes of Sarah Siddons or mounted a voguish play. Take the county of Yorkshire by way of example. In a typical season between 1769 and 1803, the actor-manager Wilkinson Tate took his acting troupe on an annual circuit of the Yorkshire theatres, including performances in York (January to May – Spring Assizes), Leeds (June to July), Pontefract (August), York (August – Race Week), Wakefield (September – Race Week), Doncaster (October – Race Week) and Hull (November to December).
²⁷
He obtained cash in advance by selling box subscriptions for each town's season, but relied on bespoke performances requested by the likes of the Honourable Lady Carolina Herbert (Wakefield, 22 September 1775), Lady Armitage (Wakefield, 20 September 1776), ‘The High-Sheriff and the Gentlemen of the grand Jury’ (York, 16 March 1782) and ‘the Ladies and the Gentlemen of the Card
Assembly’ (York, 25 April 1782) to swell his coffers, since the advertisement of a grand presence tended to draw a wider audience of gawpers. The most exalted aristocratic patronage was to be had during the Wakefield and Doncaster race seasons. Subscribers could also lease a seat in the pit for the season, although there were cheaper nightly seats to be had as well in the first and upper galleries. By this means even towns like Leeds (which Wilkinson dismissed as ‘little better than a Botany Bay for actors’) could offer a fashionable array of new comedies, old tragedies and popular entr'acte entertainments, such as
tableaux vivantes
, a medley of songs, comic dances and pantomime romps. In just a single season in 1771 the New Theatre at Leeds mounted productions of Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet
(1597) and
King Lear
(1605), Rowe's,
Tamerlane
(1702), Young's,
The Revenge: A Tragedy
(1721), Vanbrugh and Cibber's,
The Provoked Husband
(1728), Hull's,
Royal Merchant: An Opera
(1768), Colman's,
The English Merchant
(1767) and his
The Portrait
(1770), Kelly's,
A Word to the Wise
(1770) and Cumberland's
The West Indian
(1771) for the edification of a ‘a numerous and polite audience’.
²⁸
Moreover, women made up an opinionated section of the polite audience for provincial theatre as their letters and diaries amply testify.
²⁹

Private theatricals performed by the great, at their height in decades between 1770 and 1810, drew intense public interest in the period. In fact, in the publicity accorded them and the sheer size and social range of the invited audience, many private theatricals were often only ‘private’ in the narrow sense that the cast were not paid professionals. Audiences of 150 were not uncommon; spectacular performances at Blenheim, Richmond House and Hinchingbrook were reported to have depressed winter bookings at Bath. However, if the professional actress was an ambiguous figure still vulnerable to the imputation of prostitution, then amateurish flaunting cast a reputation for demure dignity in a dubious light, to put it mildly. The donning of disguise and the doffing of decorum might be thrilling for the participants, but it could be disquieting to attentive observers, as novels such as Jane Austen's
Mansfield Park
(1814), Maria Edgeworth's
Patronage
(1814) and Fanny Burney's
The Wanderer
(1814) dramatically demonstrated.
³⁰
Yet perhaps the very shattering of the ideal of modest female reserve was politically calculated in the first place. In a brilliant new study, Gillian Russell reminds us that ‘many leading Whig families were identified as enthusiastic thespians; in this respect amateur acting can be regarded as part of a repertoire of behaviour – including libertine flamboyance, female exhibitionism, and the cultivation of public celebrity – that was used to define the Prince of Wales's party in defiance of the “Farmer George” probity associated with the King’. Russell argues
that private theatricals were not only an important expression of country-house paternalism, but also a mechanism for the consolidation and enactment of social alliances amongst the political elite, an arena in which women glittered centre stage in conspicuous contrast to their negligible role in more traditional fora. Thus, in April 1787 a private performance of
The Way to Keep Him
at Richmond House occupied so many parliamentarians that a motion in the House of Commons had to be deferred.
³¹
Of course, the modest family theatricals mounted by the gentry lacked the political punch and the titillating excitement of these aristocratic extravaganzas. Minimal publicity, a small audience, a suitable play and senior family members
en costume
put the stamp of innocent diversion on family play-acting. Still, an unsated interest in more outrageous productions remained widespread amongst the genteel.
³²

Musical entertainment of all forms enjoyed a roaring vogue in the eighteenth century. The aforementioned Italian opera, spearheaded the development of the musical stage, while commercial concerts and music festivals were promoted in London from the 1670s. Borsay has unearthed evidence for at least a dozen towns experimenting with a public concert series by the 1760s, and a small but growing number of provincial music festivals in the cathedral cities. Taking Leeds again by way of exemplar, the evidence of newspaper advertisements suggests that the concert, in particular, was a well-established constituent of the cultural scene in the 1760s and 1770s, probably because of the appointment of William Herschel as director of public concerts in 1762. Leeds offered an annual autumn programme of subscription concerts of the works of Bach, Giardini, Boccherini and so on in its New Concert Hall, on Vicar Lane, and at the Old and New Assembly rooms in these decades. There were also a large number of single performances of organ and choral works mounted by local churches: Handel's
Messiah
and his
Judus Maccabaeus
, and Purcell's
Te Deum
and
Grand Coronation Chorus
being perennial favourites. In Leeds, as elsewhere, the Church remained an important provider of public music. Unsurprisingly, the concert audiences tended to be genteel and mixed sex, and the concert may therefore be seen as another new and vibrant cultural form which added further breadth to the social horizons of polite provincial women in the period.
³³

Staged spectacles of all kinds flourished in the eighteenth century, from militia reviews to ladies' processions, from firework displays and magic shows, to the exhibition of ‘freaks’ and dancing dogs, but perhaps the unlikeliest spectacle which coined a profit was the trial. The awful theatricality of the criminal courts was much remarked on by contemporaries as well as modern historians, while the civil courts which dealt with interpersonal disputes presented an enduring fund of scandalous anecdote. On the northern circuit, the biannual assize courts at Lancaster and York and the annual sittings at Durham, Newcastle, Carlisle and Appleby offered the drama of capital trials to an eager public of men, women and children, as well as the gathering of the county in the host town for the accompanying race meetings, public assemblies and private parties. Although the thirteen-year-old Mary Chorley was too young to attend the Lancaster assize ball in 1779, the opportunity to witness the judge's triumphal entry and the posturing showmanship of the barristers in action offered thrills aplenty: ‘went to court and was much [amused] with hearing the lawyers plead. Mr Lee indeed a most provoking man for he is always in the right.’ However, the audience's thirst for spectacle was not always gratified. Susannah Gossip wrote from York with apparent disappointment in 1729, complaining ‘We had but little business at our assize only one man executed for murdering’, although she took solace in the presence of at least eighteen noblemen in town for the races and Lord Carlisle's ball.
³⁴

46 ‘York Music Festival’, 1824. This was a four-day festival to raise money for the York county hospital and the Hull, Leeds and Sheffield General Infirmary. Clearly women predominated in the audience. Ellen Parker of Selby for one was transported by a similar concert in the Minster in 1823: ‘It was the “Messiah” & no words can describe how beautiful was the singing & grand the Choruses … there were 1500 applications for tickets … The gallery was filled with grandees–chiefly (the Ladies) in small bonnets.’

The trials that did most to gratify the prurient were those involving the rich and celebrated, a higher concentration of which were staged in the London courts. Although the Old Bailey was not an everyday site of gentry traffic,
causes célèbres
such as the Rudd–Perreau trial for forgery in 1775, or the trial of the Earl of Ferrers for the murder of his steward in 1760 drew elite women in droves. Lord Lovat's trial for fraud, for instance, prompted an unseemly scramble for tickets, presumably dispensed by an opportunistic porter: ‘all the young ladys are now wishing for tickets to be at Lord Lovats tryall for no bodys pity seems great for him they can go with less concern …’
³⁵
Voyeurism was so pronounced in the intricate Rudd–Perreau case that when the apparently well-born Mrs Rudd and the Perreau brothers were committed for further examination, ‘the public office in Bow-Street was so crowded with genteel people, that the magistrates thought it most prudent to adjourn to Guildhall, Westminster’. Ultimately, ‘the solemnity, that was with so much propriety assumed by the bench on this occasion, joined to the plaintive tone of Mrs Rudd's voice; the artless manner in which she told her story, and the decency of her whole deportment, produced a scene so truly pathetic, as to draw tears from many of the spectators’.
³⁶
More thrilling still were the civil suits for ‘criminal conversation’ and divorce. They offered, as the published
Trials for Adultery, Or The History of Divorces
promised, ‘a complete History of the Private Life, Intrigues and Amours of many Characters in the most elevated sphere’.
³⁷
Bessy Ramsden, for one, could hardly contain herself at the prospect of a ticket to witness the trial of the Duchess of Kingston for bigamy at Westminster Hall in 1776.