ABSTRACTS part 1:
Robert D. Hume (Pennsylvania State University): 'John Rich as Manager and Entrepreneur'
John Rich has mostly been ignored or treated as a buffoon by theatre historians. The Biographical Dictionary entry on him says he 'had a flair for comic dancing' and was 'a successful manager.' The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry is brief and derivative. Both contain major omissions and bad errors. Scholars quote sneers about 'natural stupidity' and anecdotes about cats and personal quirks. Here I survey five areas in which scholars have misinterpreted or ignored important evidence about Rich. These are (1) Rich's character and persona; (2) the finances of Lincoln's Inn Fields in its first decade; (3) money issues, especially the financing of Covent Garden in 1732; (4) Rich's involvement in cartel agreements; and (5) the nature of his theatrical offerings, especially in contrast to Garrick. My conclusion challenges the long-dominant picture of Rich as a dunce who inherited a patent theatre and blundered his way to prosperity by pandering to the crude tastes of a lower-end audience. The truth is that Rich exerted a more powerful influence on the development of eighteenth-century English drama and theatre than any other manager or performer, David Garrick included.
Moira Goff (British Library): 'John Rich, French Dancing and English Pantomimes'
When he opened his new theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1714, John Rich faced powerful rivals at Drury Lane. Unable to answer London's leading players with his new and inexperienced company, Rich turned to entr'acte entertainments to help attract audiences. The most important of these additions to each evening's bill was dancing. From the beginning of his career as a theatre manager, John Rich employed in his company several dancers trained in the French style and technique (known as belle dance). Their special skills are shown not only by their advertised repertoire, but also by the dances created for some of them by Mr Isaac and Anthony L'Abbé and recorded in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation.
When the forains Sorin and Baxter appeared at Drury Lane in 1716 in several commedia dell'arte style entertainments, Rich quickly used his dancers to copy them at Lincoln's Inn Fields. During the 1716-1717 season, he and the Drury Lane dancing master John Weaver competed with each other as they developed the first English pantomimes. Although he later turned to singers for the principal roles in the serious plots of his pantomimes, Rich gave prominence to dancers in the serious as well as in the comic plots of these afterpieces throughout the 1710s and 1720s. Among the most successful pantomimes to particularly feature dancers were Amadis (1715), Apollo and Daphne (1726), The Rape of Proserpine (1727) and Perseus and Andromeda (1730). The published pantomime libretti say little about the dancing, but together with the advertisements for performances they provide enough detail to suggest strongly that these very popular afterpieces included much virtuoso belle dance.
This paper will investigate the dancers who appeared with Rich's Lincoln's Inn Fields company between 1714 and 1730. It will consider the evidence for their style and technique, and assess the influence of the company's leading dancers - including Louis Dupré, Francis Nivelon and Marie and Francis Sallé - on dancing in the entr'actes and pantomime afterpieces. It will look in particular at dancing within the serious plots of Rich's most popular pantomimes, and explore the use of virtuoso belle dance within these works. This paper argues not only that dancers trained in the French style and technique were important to the survival of Rich's Lincoln's Inn Fields, but also that they made a significant, and surprising, contribution to the overwhelming success of the
pantomimes given there.
Jennifer Thorp (New College, University of Oxford): 'Pierrot Strikes Back: François Nivelon at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden, 1723-1738'
John Rich's employment of the Paris-trained dancer, François Nivelon, proved to be a mixed blessing for both men. François Nivelon first came to London, with his younger brother Louis, to dance for Rich at Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre in late 1723, where they rapidly made a name for themselves in a commedia-style entr'acte dance called The Two Pierrots. Drury Lane theatre had just launched its 'new Grotesque Entertainment' by John Thurmond, the block-buster pantomime Harlequin Dr Faustus, and Rich's Company at Lincoln's Inn Fields must have been feverishly rehearsing their response, The Necromancer, or Harlequin Dr Faustus. This opened on 20 December, with Rich himself (Lun) as Harlequin, Louis Nivelon as Pierrot Man, and François Nivelon as Punch. Although it seems likely that Louis returned to France at the end of the following season, François was to stay on in London for another fifteen years as one of the most successful and highly paid dancers of his day. His working relationship with John Rich however seems at times to have been stormy, despite the success of their joint enterprises. This paper looks at the London career and dance repertoire of François Nivelon, against the background of his relationship with John Rich.
Kimiko Okamoto (Roehampton University): 'Narrativity of Generic Dance on the London Stage in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century'
Generic dances, such as minuets, sarabands and chaconnes, constituted an important part of the entr'acte repertories on the London stage in the first half of the eighteenth century. They were categorised by distinct compositional parameters - metre, musical rhythms and step patterns - and archetypal temperaments, called 'affects', to be depicted. In the classical tradition, generic dances achieved abstract narrativity regardless of dramatic context; as the theatrical trend inclined towards the dramatic entertainment of dancing, however, they came to be given concrete connotations, employing dramatic/national characters and corporeal amusement. Nevertheless, the purely abstract representation of dance trailed on well into the middle of the century, demonstrating that classical values had not died out in dance. This paper will investigate the variety of generic dance performances in the time of John Rich, and examine the nature of abstract narrativity, with which some dances acquired special status in the London theatres.
Graydon Beeks (Pomona College): 'The Covent Garden Theatre Orchestra 1757-1767: A Decade of Transition'
The decade 1757-1767 was a momentous one for Covent Garden Theatre. It encompassed the last four years of John Rich's management and the entire six years of joint management by his widow Priscilla and son-in-law John Beard. It concluded with the sale of the theatre patent to George Colman, Thomas Harris, William Powell, and John Rutherford, and Beard's retirement from the stage. Beginning with Arne's revival of The Beggar's Opera in 1759, the period witnessed an increase in the scope of musical activity at the Covent Garden, highlighted by Arne's Thomas and Sally (1760), Artaxerxes (1762) and Love in a Village (1762).
The decade is also bracketed by the three earliest surviving lists of the members of the Covent Garden Theatre orchestra, made in anticipation of the seasons of 1757-58, 1760-61, and 1766-67. These lists give family names of performers and daily salaries, but no indication of instrument(s) played. With information that has become available over the past 20 years or so it is now possible to supply the missing information for most of the players with some degree of confidence. The goal of this paper is to examine the changing membership of the orchestra over this time period and assess how those changes are related to the increased musical activity cited above and the change from baroque-style scoring to galant-style scoring noted in the works of Arne and his contemporaries by Peter Holman and others.
Corbett Bazler (Columbia University): 'Harlequin Xerxes: Handel after Rich'
The last act of Henry Fielding's The Author's Farce (1730) is a puppet-show 'afterpiece' called The Pleasures of the Town, in which Signior Opera, the chosen favorite of the Goddess of Nonsense, makes a surprising announcement. After expressing his distaste for wisdom, virtue, and glory, the Signior concludes his second air with an enthusiastic paean to wealth, made in honor of its namesake, John Rich:
Robert D. Hume (Pennsylvania State University): 'John Rich as Manager and Entrepreneur'
John Rich has mostly been ignored or treated as a buffoon by theatre historians. The Biographical Dictionary entry on him says he 'had a flair for comic dancing' and was 'a successful manager.' The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry is brief and derivative. Both contain major omissions and bad errors. Scholars quote sneers about 'natural stupidity' and anecdotes about cats and personal quirks. Here I survey five areas in which scholars have misinterpreted or ignored important evidence about Rich. These are (1) Rich's character and persona; (2) the finances of Lincoln's Inn Fields in its first decade; (3) money issues, especially the financing of Covent Garden in 1732; (4) Rich's involvement in cartel agreements; and (5) the nature of his theatrical offerings, especially in contrast to Garrick. My conclusion challenges the long-dominant picture of Rich as a dunce who inherited a patent theatre and blundered his way to prosperity by pandering to the crude tastes of a lower-end audience. The truth is that Rich exerted a more powerful influence on the development of eighteenth-century English drama and theatre than any other manager or performer, David Garrick included.
Moira Goff (British Library): 'John Rich, French Dancing and English Pantomimes'
When he opened his new theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1714, John Rich faced powerful rivals at Drury Lane. Unable to answer London's leading players with his new and inexperienced company, Rich turned to entr'acte entertainments to help attract audiences. The most important of these additions to each evening's bill was dancing. From the beginning of his career as a theatre manager, John Rich employed in his company several dancers trained in the French style and technique (known as belle dance). Their special skills are shown not only by their advertised repertoire, but also by the dances created for some of them by Mr Isaac and Anthony L'Abbé and recorded in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation.
When the forains Sorin and Baxter appeared at Drury Lane in 1716 in several commedia dell'arte style entertainments, Rich quickly used his dancers to copy them at Lincoln's Inn Fields. During the 1716-1717 season, he and the Drury Lane dancing master John Weaver competed with each other as they developed the first English pantomimes. Although he later turned to singers for the principal roles in the serious plots of his pantomimes, Rich gave prominence to dancers in the serious as well as in the comic plots of these afterpieces throughout the 1710s and 1720s. Among the most successful pantomimes to particularly feature dancers were Amadis (1715), Apollo and Daphne (1726), The Rape of Proserpine (1727) and Perseus and Andromeda (1730). The published pantomime libretti say little about the dancing, but together with the advertisements for performances they provide enough detail to suggest strongly that these very popular afterpieces included much virtuoso belle dance.
This paper will investigate the dancers who appeared with Rich's Lincoln's Inn Fields company between 1714 and 1730. It will consider the evidence for their style and technique, and assess the influence of the company's leading dancers - including Louis Dupré, Francis Nivelon and Marie and Francis Sallé - on dancing in the entr'actes and pantomime afterpieces. It will look in particular at dancing within the serious plots of Rich's most popular pantomimes, and explore the use of virtuoso belle dance within these works. This paper argues not only that dancers trained in the French style and technique were important to the survival of Rich's Lincoln's Inn Fields, but also that they made a significant, and surprising, contribution to the overwhelming success of the
pantomimes given there.
Jennifer Thorp (New College, University of Oxford): 'Pierrot Strikes Back: François Nivelon at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden, 1723-1738'
John Rich's employment of the Paris-trained dancer, François Nivelon, proved to be a mixed blessing for both men. François Nivelon first came to London, with his younger brother Louis, to dance for Rich at Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre in late 1723, where they rapidly made a name for themselves in a commedia-style entr'acte dance called The Two Pierrots. Drury Lane theatre had just launched its 'new Grotesque Entertainment' by John Thurmond, the block-buster pantomime Harlequin Dr Faustus, and Rich's Company at Lincoln's Inn Fields must have been feverishly rehearsing their response, The Necromancer, or Harlequin Dr Faustus. This opened on 20 December, with Rich himself (Lun) as Harlequin, Louis Nivelon as Pierrot Man, and François Nivelon as Punch. Although it seems likely that Louis returned to France at the end of the following season, François was to stay on in London for another fifteen years as one of the most successful and highly paid dancers of his day. His working relationship with John Rich however seems at times to have been stormy, despite the success of their joint enterprises. This paper looks at the London career and dance repertoire of François Nivelon, against the background of his relationship with John Rich.
Kimiko Okamoto (Roehampton University): 'Narrativity of Generic Dance on the London Stage in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century'
Generic dances, such as minuets, sarabands and chaconnes, constituted an important part of the entr'acte repertories on the London stage in the first half of the eighteenth century. They were categorised by distinct compositional parameters - metre, musical rhythms and step patterns - and archetypal temperaments, called 'affects', to be depicted. In the classical tradition, generic dances achieved abstract narrativity regardless of dramatic context; as the theatrical trend inclined towards the dramatic entertainment of dancing, however, they came to be given concrete connotations, employing dramatic/national characters and corporeal amusement. Nevertheless, the purely abstract representation of dance trailed on well into the middle of the century, demonstrating that classical values had not died out in dance. This paper will investigate the variety of generic dance performances in the time of John Rich, and examine the nature of abstract narrativity, with which some dances acquired special status in the London theatres.
Graydon Beeks (Pomona College): 'The Covent Garden Theatre Orchestra 1757-1767: A Decade of Transition'
The decade 1757-1767 was a momentous one for Covent Garden Theatre. It encompassed the last four years of John Rich's management and the entire six years of joint management by his widow Priscilla and son-in-law John Beard. It concluded with the sale of the theatre patent to George Colman, Thomas Harris, William Powell, and John Rutherford, and Beard's retirement from the stage. Beginning with Arne's revival of The Beggar's Opera in 1759, the period witnessed an increase in the scope of musical activity at the Covent Garden, highlighted by Arne's Thomas and Sally (1760), Artaxerxes (1762) and Love in a Village (1762).
The decade is also bracketed by the three earliest surviving lists of the members of the Covent Garden Theatre orchestra, made in anticipation of the seasons of 1757-58, 1760-61, and 1766-67. These lists give family names of performers and daily salaries, but no indication of instrument(s) played. With information that has become available over the past 20 years or so it is now possible to supply the missing information for most of the players with some degree of confidence. The goal of this paper is to examine the changing membership of the orchestra over this time period and assess how those changes are related to the increased musical activity cited above and the change from baroque-style scoring to galant-style scoring noted in the works of Arne and his contemporaries by Peter Holman and others.
Corbett Bazler (Columbia University): 'Harlequin Xerxes: Handel after Rich'
The last act of Henry Fielding's The Author's Farce (1730) is a puppet-show 'afterpiece' called The Pleasures of the Town, in which Signior Opera, the chosen favorite of the Goddess of Nonsense, makes a surprising announcement. After expressing his distaste for wisdom, virtue, and glory, the Signior concludes his second air with an enthusiastic paean to wealth, made in honor of its namesake, John Rich:
Would you have Men to flatter?
To be Rich is the Matter;
When you cry he is Rich, you cry a Great Man.
To be Rich is the Matter;
When you cry he is Rich, you cry a Great Man.
Despite their purported greediness, John Rich and opera singers would seem unlikely bedfellows, especially considering opera's notorious reputation for bankrupting its managers. This makes it all the more remarkable that just four years after Fielding's play Rich would agree to mount Handel's operas in his newly built theater at Covent Garden. Fielding's comparison, however, owes much of its humor to a wider belief, held by many London theatergoers, that Italian opera was an inferior form of theater, belonging with the fashionable, popular entertainments-dance, pantomime, ballad opera, even puppet shows-made famous by Rich and others like him. Even after its earliest appearances in London, opera seria, like these afterpieces and entr'actes, had frequently been deemed nothing more than an irrational, senseless spectacle by its critics, an opinion that was still shared by many well into the 1730s and 40s, as evidenced by satirical and critical essays that continued to attack opera during these years.
Handel's Serse (1738) stands out in this theatrical context by coming closer in form and subject matter to Rich's comic afterpieces than any of Handel's other stage works-so close, in fact, that, after attending one performance, the Fourth Earl of Shaftesbury remarked, 'My own judgment is that it is a capital opera notwithstanding 'tis called a ballad one.' Serse's comic characters and humorous situations-even the extreme brevity of many of its arias, and the playful way in which Handel manipulates operatic conventions-all point to a kind of comic experimentation that seems closer to operatic self-parody than so-called 'serious' opera. This seems all the more likely considering that Handel composed Serse only months after he left Covent Garden, at the very same time Rich was enjoying an extremely successful run of Henry Carey and J.F. Lampe's Handel-parody, The Dragon of Wantley, a work that Handel is said to have seen-and enjoyed. This paper will explore the ways in which Serse might be seen to represent Handel's attempt to reconcile Italian opera-and indeed, his own career-with the much-transformed theatrical world left by Rich, in an effort to shield his own operas from ridicule, and thus make self-critique serve the means of self-preservation.
Robert Anthony Torre (University of Wisconsin, Madison): 'Cultural Translatio and Handel's Pasticci'
The last fifty years have produced an impressive amount of scholarship on the issue of Handel's borrowing practices: from whom he borrowed, whether such borrowings carried malicious intent, how borrowed themes were musically incorporated, and whether the term 'borrowing' best describes the composer's method. More recently, John T. Winemiller situated Handel's appropriation of pre-existent material, both music and libretti, within the context of his literary and cultural milieu, arguing that the composer and his librettists participated in a centuries-old literary tradition of 'transformative imitation,' or the borrowing and refashioning of pre-existent material into a new context.
In this paper, I hope to expand this scholarship to include Handel's activities as an arranger of pasticci, and argue that the rendering of these libretti took shape not only through "transformative imitation," but also through a variety of means, including adaptation, textual retrenchment and amplification, all consistent with the rhetorical notion of translatio, or 'transfer.' Referring to a 'bearing across' or 'transfer of culture' or 'knowledge,' the ideas behind translatio influenced how fiction and cultural knowledge from the middle ages to the eighteenth century were disseminated from place to place and from one historical time to another. To assess its resonance in early eighteenth-century opera, I will examine Oreste (1734) and Arbace (1734), two pasticci Handel arranged for John Rich's theatre at Covent Garden. Imitation was the formative device in the former, while adaptive means shaped the latter. Not only does translatio present new possibilities for understanding the engagement and development of early eighteenth-century musical and poetic texts, but it also implicates a given text within a continuing flow of intertextuality and authorship.
Don-John Dugas (Kent State University): 'Contemporary Response to Pantomime in London, 1722-1724, from the Pages of the Weekly Pasquin'
Literary critics, theatre historians, and scholars of the dance have overlooked what a short-lived periodical, Pasquin, has to tell us about London's theatre world in the early 1720s. This is not surprising when we realize that Avery used only scraps of it in it in Part 2 of The London Stage, and never in relation to pantomime (the existence of which he barely acknowledges); that Stratman does not list it in his Bibliography of British Theatrical Periodicals; and that Highfill, Burnim, and Langhans do not draw upon the it in the Thurmond and Rich entries in their Biographical Dictionary. But this newspaper has something to tell us about matters dramatic, and we would do well to incorporate it into our understanding of this important moment in English theatrical history. Published weekly from the Autumn of 1722 to the Spring of 1724, Pasquin offered topical commentary on politics, religion, philosophy, fashion, architecture, scandals, society, and other goings-on in the capital. It also included surprisingly detailed coverage of both traditional and non-traditional dramatic entertainments, including reviews of new plays and revivals, observations about actors, and pronouncements on new trends in entertainment.
Of all the performing arts Pasquin commented on in its sixteen months' existence, pantomime and traditional drama received the most coverage. Pasquin's contributors-devoted supporters of traditional drama and avowed enemies of everything that smacked of foreign innovation-were contemptuous of pantomime. Their humorous, sometimes harsh criticisms provide us with new and useful information about pantomime's production and reception. Ironically, Pasquin's strong opposition to pantomime may well have preserved more information about it than if its writers had had luke-warm feelings about it; the journal's coverage of topics seems to have been proportional to the intensity of its writers' feelings about it. That Pasquin's run coincides with the theatrical season 1723-24 is certainly a stroke of good fortune, for this was exactly the moment that John Thurmond and John Rich first brought pantomime to prominence. That pantomime would thrive and do so at the expense of traditional drama is very much the anxiety Pasquin's coverage reveals.
This paper will reproduce Pasquin's pantomime coverage. It will also suggest some of the ways this new material improves and changes our understanding of the emergence of the genre as it was to thrive in eighteenth-century Britain.
Uriel Heyd (Royal Holloway, University of London): 'The World's Stage: The Newspaper in Eighteenth-Century Theatre'
Based on extensive research into the representation of the newspaper press in the long eighteenth century theatre, the paper will focus on one specific aspect - fame. A culture courting recognition, even notoriety, through the newspapers is regularly depicted on stage. The newspaper seems to offer one of the central ways to achieve the eighteenth century equivalent of '15 minutes of fame'. This aspect of the representation of the press in the theatre highlights several motives present in these plays, such as the make-up of the reading public, newspaper content, the interaction between readers and journalists and the thirst for newspapers, and the press' impact on society. The examination of the representation of the press in the theatre offers a unique insight to the way the press was perceived in the eighteenth century, maybe indicating the roots of modern celebrity culture and its close relations with the media.
Neil Pattison (University of Cambridge): 'Lewis Theobald and the Literate Art of Pantomime Entertainments'
Between 1717 and 1728, the playwright, critic, novelist, translator, journalist, poet and editor Lewis Theobald was the librettist behind several of the most popular pantomime entertainments of what Peter Seary has called the eighteenth century's 'golden age of English pantomime'. These included Harlequin a Sorcerer; with the Loves of Pluto and Proserpine (1725), Apollo and Daphne; or, the Burgo-Master Trick'd (1726), The Rape of Proserpine (1727) and -- with its counterpart at Drury Lane, John Thurmond Jr.'s Harlequin Doctor Faustus (1723) -- the most famous of all these performance pieces, The Necromancer; or, Harlequin Dr. Faustus. This essay explores some of the background to Theobald's writing in this genre, and offers a close discussion of Theobald's key written performances in stage spectaculars and pantomime entertainments, arguing that Theobald was attempting more than mere spectacle and entertainment in his writing for the genre.
As John Rich had shown in his 'Dedication' before The Rape of Proserpine, and as the career of Elkanah Settle -- a significant precursor of Theobald's in the development of theatrical entertainments -- amply demonstrates, commercial considerations permeated every aspect of the entertainments: their flexible formal design and utilisation of the whole range of theatrical resource, their stupefying celebratory connection with the entertained community, and their tendency toward fluid innovation in deliquescent generic classes, all respond to the principles of the necessity of profitability (in the formation and reproduction of fashionable display and a shiftingness or hybridity of form, potentiating an appeal to the greatest possible numerical resources of audience and finance) that derive from the installation of commercialism as the governing logic of the art form.
Yet this was an orientation that Theobald, as this essay will argue, did not share, except perhaps in a toleration of Rich's teasing promise that through pantomime might be made possible the development of a theatrical form that would not displace but supplement and adorn the tradition whose power of obligation Theobald, as his career as a writer time and again suggests, felt deeply. That said, he also felt deeply the gravitational pull of commercialism, evidential in its colonisation and distortion of the ordinary language of his criticism, journalism and poetry. The pantomime entertainments, therefore, represented a particularly exacting site of crisis and opportunity for Theobald's spasmodically successful career as a writer. In addition to the allure of lucrative enterprise, the pantomime entertainments, as Rich himself seemed to argue in his dedication, could paradoxically hold for the collaborators the promise of the recuperation of the literary tradition from the dumb spectacular stage which seemed to threaten its catastrophic deformation: after all, 'whenever the Publick Taste shall be disposed to return to the Works of Drama', Rich wrote, 'no one shall rejoice more sincerely than my self'. For sure, 'poetry' was only a necessary 'auxiliary' among other contributory arts in the entertainments as things stood. But might even this residual presence of the tradition of serious drama be enough to make them an embankment against the incoherence of mere spectacle, a literary art that a writer with ambitions to be serious, like Theobald, could take seriously?
David Hunter (University of Texas at Austin): 'What the Prompter Saw: The Diary of Rich's Prompter, John Stede'
While searching for materials at the West Yorkshire Archive Service-Leeds that might shed light on the audience for Handel's performances during his years in England and Ireland (1711-59), I looked at a diary that had been catalogued as written by John Bradley. The volume is, I believe, the diary of John Stede, the long-time prompter for Rich's company both at Lincoln 's Inn Fields and at Covent Garden. Covering the years 1722-29 and 1754, the book is a daily account of Stede's attendance at the playhouse, his other business activities, his pay, his socializing, the weather, and his meal and bed times.
The diary appears to be a unique survival from a set of volumes, for Stede had a life-long journal habit. It is also unique in providing evidence for the number of rehearsals held by Rich's company for both new and old works. We can track the preparation of The Beggar's Opera, which received its premiere on 29 January 1728. We also learn who comprised Stede's social circle and the moral code that he attempted to follow.
Ana Martinez (CUNY Graduate Center): 'Scenographies behind the Scenes: Mapping, Classifying and Interpreting John Rich's 1744 Inventory of Covent Garden'
One of the most important extant documents from John Rich's management of Covent Garden is the long inventory of theatrical possessions (costumes, scenery, and properties) put together when Rich was taking a loan in 1744. Because of its inaccessibility and length, scholars have relegated this inventory to the margins of any serious attempt to investigate Rich's management of scenographies, as well as of reconstructing their form, function, and staging. On the other hand, academics have rightly pointed to its importance and at the fact that hidden in it are valuable bits of evidence. For example, Richard Southern, in his now classic study Changeable Scenery, states that Rich's Inventory 'is at once one of the most important and the most baffling documents in the history of English scenery' and that 'the total of its intriguing items forms as fascinating a puzzle picture as any theatre student could wish to find.' And surprisingly, until now, no one had yet provided a comprehensive analysis of such a relevant piece of evidence. This article seeks to bring into the foreground the inventory's importance and to provide us with one possible methodological approach through which we can arrive at a more informed picture of Rich's scenographies as well as of his management behind the scenes.
At first sight, the Covent Garden inventory is a chaotic and endless list and its only internal logic is the grouping of items by the space where they were stored or located. The cataloguer simply recorded the items as he encountered them in the different backstage and stage spaces. This was the way inventories were usually made. In Rich's inventory, some items are assignable to productions or to scenic practices but many others are impossible to interpret because factors such as confusing terminology or lack of categories, among others. However, keeping in mind that any perfect or complete interpretation would be unrealistic, it is possible to track down some basic groupings as well as to carefully map some connections among them. In my paper I provide examples of significant single findings and of informative relations among items, spaces, and scenographies.
After an exhaustive reading and analysis of the inventory, I arrived at the conclusion that the most fruitful and interesting way of presenting my findings and claims would be to lead a virtual tour through the different architectonic spaces of Covent Garden. I start with a general background of the inventory's structure and content, which is important to understand my proposed methodology, and then an analytical classification in relation to the various spaces from the backstage areas, the backbone of the theatre's anatomy, to the heart of it: the stage.
I argue that John Rich enriched the form and function of British scenic practices by adding an extensive variety of scenery, costumes, and props to the repertory. I have only some of the many possible findings, but I hope that by raising the potential of Rich's inventory through some reconstructions, I can encourage others to approach it.
Kevin J. McGinley (Fatih University): 'John Rich as Critic: The Evidence of "Some Remarks on the Tragedy call'd Agis"
In John Rich's own day, his critical judgment when assessing dramatic works was much disparaged. Accounts of Rich's treatment of plays which authors submitted to be considered for staging regularly present him as at best cursory and at worst negligent. Accusations that he did not bother reading the plays submitted to him being fairly common. These aspersions went hand in hand with a view of Rich as having debased the stage in his management of Covent Garden: he was attacked as privileging sensational spectacle and pantomime over substantial dramatic works and was accused of maximising profit at the expense of art. These contemporary attacks should, of course, be viewed with suspicion, especially as Rich's pantomimes were substantial artistic achievements, and The London Stage shows the balance between tragedy, comedy, music, and spectacle to have been similar in Covent Garden and Drury Lane. There is now further evidence, however, which indicates clearly that Rich's critical judgment was marked by good sense and literary insight.
A newly discovered manuscript in Rich's hand, 'Remarks on the Tragedy Call'd Agis' (1754) features a 900-word detailed analysis and rejection of a 1754 version of John Home's play Agis. In this manuscript Rich provides an act-by-act analysis of the play outlining its flaws and suggesting possible improvements. This paper will briefly introduce the manuscript and outline its provenance and the reasons for ascribing it to Rich. It will proceed to show that in his assessment of Home's play Rich provides a careful and sensible analysis based on clearly thought-out principles of dramatic composition, a very practical sense of dramatic plausibility, and a shrewd awareness of how an audience is likely to respond. At the core of Rich's analysis is an emphasis on coherence of plot as the central determining factor for a play's success, along with the demand that characterization, spectacle, and incident must be integrated within a unified narrative whole if they are to be dramatically effective. This text, then, gives the clearest depiction yet of the structural and aesthetic criteria by which Rich assessed a play and provides powerful evidence to show that his contemporary reputation as something of a philistine and a purveyor of tawdry spectacles was not justified. This newly found manuscript provides an image of Rich as a manager of considerable critical acumen whose assessment of what will make a piece commercially successful goes hand in hand with a clear sense of what will make it artistically successful.
Marcus Risdell (Curator, Garrick Club): 'Unmasking the "Davenant Bust"'
In March 1834 during building works at the Royal College of Surgeons, William Clift, the first curator of the Hunterian Museum, rescued a terracotta bust of Shakespeare from a yard at the back of number 39 Lincoln's Inn Fields, adjacent to what can now be shown to have been the main entrance to the Theatre Royal, Lincoln's Inn. The bust became associated with the first manager of that theatre and known as the 'Davenant Bust', and thus considered a true likeness of the Bard. Exhibited at society soirées and the relocated Crystal Palace at Sydenham, it caught the eye of the Duke of Devonshire who purchased and presented it to the Garrick Club in 1855, of which he was President. It remains there to this day. At the time two copies were made in plaster: one would eventually be lost with the Crystal Palace; the other would find its way to the Shakespeare Library at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford, where it was exhibited alongside a painting of the so-called Darmstadt death-mask. The myth of its 'authenticity' was being reinforced and perpetuated.
However by 1900 doubts were cast regarding the bust's early history, in particular the art historian Marion H Spielmann. He was aware of a second, virtually identical terracotta in the British Museum, which had been purchased directly from the studio-sale of the Huguenot sculptor Louis François Roubiliac, following his death in 1762. Roubiliac is known to have arrived in London in 1730, and by 1738 had made a name for him-self with his statue of Handel commissioned for Vauxhall Gardens. This therefore substantially removes the bust away not just from Shakespeare, but also from Davenant.
Unfortunately no eighteenth century records regarding the bust have come to light, however Clift did leave accurate details of its rediscovery, enough to connect it to the third Theatre Royal, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the theatre of John Rich. Previously the Roubiliac bust had been dated alongside David Garrick's commission of a statue of Shakespeare for his Temple at Hampton, completed in 1758. The history of the theatre however suggests an earlier date as it ceased to be used as such in 1744. In fact the last attempt to put on a full dramatic season there was in 1742- 43 when Henry Giffard rented the theatre from Rich, after he had been forced to close his own theatre at Goodman's Fields following his success with Garrick's début. Giffard had long hoped to establish a third Theatre Royal, however by this time the Lincoln's Inn Theatre had been barely occupied for several years, and would have required a little work to make it presentable. Like his young protégé Garrick, Giffard was also an enthusiast of Shakespeare, and only the previous year had unveiled a statue of Shakespeare during his pantomime Harlequin Student and
declared: 'And now the Bard in Speaking Marble Lives.' It must have been Henry Giffard who had the Roubiliac bust placed at the entrance to his theatre.
Robin Simon, FSE (Editor, The British Art Journal): 'Rich and Hogarth: Gesture and Expression in The Beggar's Opera'
Abstract not available.
Iain Mackintosh (with Marcus Risdell): 'John Rich Unmask'd: Off and On Stage'
This presentation of 40 images comes in three parts: OFF STAGE, ON STAGE and SOME AFTERPIECES.
In OFFSTAGE, three images by Hogarth are discussed : The Beggar's Opera in its penultimate version owned by the Mellon at New Haven and shown at the Royal Academy until January 27; the so-called Fountaine Family, now at Philadelphia, and the largely unidentified Gentleman at a Club, also at the Mellon. Their associated engravings are referred to and the conclusion is that we have four convincing images of John Rich, three all very similar by Hogarth, and a fourth, the watercolour portrait by another artist at the Theatre Galleries of the V & A.
Theatrical Steelyards of 1750, in which Rich is in off-stage garb though the other seven are in character, provides another good likeness and is a natural link to Rich/Lun ON STAGE.
The watercolour of 1724 of Rich as Faustus at The British Museum and the Vandergucht 1735 engraving are seen as true images of Lun while it is suggested that Harlequin Dr. Faustus in the Necromancer / RICH, THE HARLEQUIN is a pirated French image of a Harlequin, probably by Nicholas Bonnart (1637 - 1718), to which the titling and the scenes from the play have been added by another hand commissioned by the management of Lincoln's Inn Fields. Half Masks (Europe) and Full Masks (England) are reviewed which leads to the Garrick Club watercolour.
Lastly, in SOME AFTERPIECES further images, some fanciful and some surprising, are rejected or accepted.
Iain Mackintosh is the author of Deciphering The Downfall of Shakespeare on a Modern Stage, 1765, which is in the delegates' pack, and is also one of the Convenors of the conference The Georgian Playhouse and its Continental Counterparts 1750 to 1850, which is to be held at The Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond, Yorkshire on 12, 13 and 14 September 2008 to which you are all invited (see flyer in pack).
Rebecca Harris-Warrick (Cornell University): 'French Dance Music on the London Stage in the Time of John Rich'
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Italian opera singers traveled Europe with what musicologists have dubbed 'suitcase arias', ones that played to the singer's strengths and that could be whisked out of the baggage and plopped into the appropriate scene in virtually any opera. I will propose that French dancers who performed in England during the early 18th century engaged in similar behavior, arriving on British soil with favorite dances in their feet and the appropriate musical scores under their arms. One well-known case is Marie Sallé's 1725 performance at Lincoln's Inn Fields of Jean-Féry Rebel's dance symphony Les Caractères de la danse, the music for which had been published in Paris in 1715. In other instances, however, the original French music for a special dance scene was not itself performed, but served as a model for a composer resident in England. As Sarah McCleave has shown, the music Handel added to his opera Il pastor fido as a vehicle for Sallé in the role of Terpsichore was modelled on Colin de Blamont's opera, Les Fêtes grecques et romaines. There appear to be additional cases in which French operatic dance music either was used in England or inspired imitations: the pantomime Apollo and Daphne, for example, which was done at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1726, also seems to have had a French model, at least for the scene that featured Mlle Sallé.
In this paper I will explore the phenomenon of French dancers who seem to have arrived in London not only with their Parisian dance training, but also with dance numbers that had originated on the stage of the Paris Opera, whether or not the music to which they performed in England was the same as it had been in France.
Marc Martinez (Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III): 'The Tricks of Lun: Mimesis and Mimicry in John Rich's Performance and Conception of Pantomimes'
As imitator rather than instigator of pantomimes, John Rich found in this format the perfect vehicle for his acting style and, more generally, his conception of theatrical show. By elevating Harlequin onto a legitimate stage, while, at the same time, depriving him of speech and hiding his face under a mask, Rich destabilises the paradigm of high-art mimesis: he negates the primacy of words over gestures and shifts the focus of the traditional art of acting from the face to the body. In his pantomimes, which concentrate, in the grotesque part, on the physical agility of the actor and highlight, in the operatic part, the abrupt transitions of theatrical passions, the performer takes centre stage. The displacement of priorities in the performance is paralleled in the composition of the pantomimes, devised to imitate and burlesque rival entertainments. Although most pantomimes draw a line between the high and low characters, Rich collapses this distinction in one significant production, The Royal Chace; or Harlequin's Skeleton. The appearance of the Gods in the roles of the commedia dell' arte merges the statuesque deportment of high characters with the grotesque antics of low comedians. This conflation of styles accounts for the ambivalent response to Rich, both praised for the excellence of his acting and lambasted for the low quality of his shows: the few descriptions of his best lazzi recapture the sense of wonder and the aesthetic pleasure created by his performing style. In The Fair, Lun's last "trick" before retiring, Rich brings the market place onto the stage again and pits the acrobatics of the fairground performer, Maddox, against the gestural and postural stereotypes of his rival, the Drury Lane Harlequin, Henry Woodward. The controversy caused by the production reflected two diametrically opposed conceptions of theatrical performance: one centred on the physical virtuosity of the performer and the other on the accommodation of low entertainments with the legitimate repertoire. The latter sanitization of the form will take an important step further in 1779 with the first speaking pantomime.
Sarah McCleave (Queen's University, Belfast): 'Rich and "High Art": A Consideration of his Support for Opera'
This paper challenges the image of Rich as a cultural philistine by considering his support for serious opera, in the form of lending dancers to the opera house or staging productions himself. His arrangement with Handel during the 1734-35 season - and the extent of his financial commitment towards the operas of that season - will receive particular attention.
Matthew J. Kinservik (University of Delaware): 'John Rich and the Censors'
This paper will address the fundamental question: How did Rich manage successfully to negotiate the unprecedented and varied censorial pressures he faced over his long career? It will take up some important events that brought him into contact with official state censorship (the banning of Polly, the actor rebellions of the 1730s and 1740s, his response to Barnard's Bill and the Licensing Act) and it will also consider the fierce, but unofficial, censure he endured throughout his career (his arbitrariness with actors and playwrights, his repertory decisions, and his advocacy of pantomimes).
Working from recent revisionist studies like John O'Brien's Harlequin Britain (Johns Hopkins, 2004) and neglected primary texts like the 1753 'Ode to John Rich', this paper will take issue with the standard, negative representations of him during his lifetime (and since). In the process, it will point out some chronically overlooked facts about Rich's management, such as his advocacy of Shakespeare and the premieres of two of the century's most popular comic plays (The Beggar's Opera and Suspicious Husband) at his theatres.
Vanessa L. Rogers (London, UK): 'Songs, Dances, and Other "Monkey Tricks:" Henry Fielding, John Rich and Rivalry on the London Stage'
Henry Fielding (1707-1754), playwright, novelist, satirist, and (briefly) theater manager, had a decidedly turbulent relationship with rival playhouse impresario John Rich. Although Rich staged Fielding's controversial play, The Coffee-House Politician in 1730, he avoided Fielding's later plays and ballad operas, leading to bad blood between the two. Consequently, some of Fielding's greatest successes were with stage works that lampooned, among other topics, pantomime, and directed insults at the influential 'Harlequin' and his performers. Although several connections between Fielding's hit Pasquin, its afterpiece Tumble-Down Dick (both 1736), and Rich have appeared in earlier scholarship, the prolific playwright also poked fun at the plots and music of Rich's entertainments in numerous other plays and ballad operas such as The Author's Farce (1730) (where Rich appears in the guise of a puppet called 'Monsieur Pantomime'), The Historical Register, For the Year 1736 and Eurydice Hiss'd (both 1737), among others. Rich, not to be outdone, retaliated by attacking Fielding with Edward Phillips's injurious The Stage Mutineers (1733) and Marforio (1736), which he staged.
Though parodies of Italian opera and Italian singers have famously saturated the content of many ballad operas, a closer look at the themes of many operas - particularly those of Fielding - show that Rich's lucrative pantomimes and his pesky French dancers were also a considerable preoccupation for these writers. The sheer number of references to 'Lun', his 'low paltry Tricks, and juggling Cheats' also demonstrates how much Rich's entertainments permeated popular culture of the era.
Undoubtedly, Fielding's imaginative and adroit send-ups of the London public's favorite entertainments gave his theater patrons what they wanted to see and co-opted appreciative audiences from Rich. By focusing on the works staged by both Fielding and Rich, my investigation will examine their generally neglected theatrical rivalry and illuminate further the nature of the relationship between two of the most significant figures in London's eighteenth century theater world.
Andrew Pink (UCL): 'Patrons, Performers and Politics: Freemasons at the Theatre in Early Eighteenth-Century London'
This paper charts the rise of a confident, masonic theatrical tradition in the 1720s and 30s and its sudden collapse in the charged political atmosphere that surrounded Walpole's fall from office in the 1740s.
It is notable that, following the creation of England's Grand Lodge in 1717, actors, singers, dancers, designers and managers, particularly those from Drury Lane, were attracted to freemasonry's rapidly increasing membership. Freemasons were prominent in theatre audiences too, regularly promoting benefits for masonic actors, whether formally at the annual theatre visit by the Grand Lodge, led by its aristocratic Grand Master, or informally by ad hoc masonic groups. The Grand Master's 1732 Lincoln's Inn benefit for John Rich provides a rare association between Rich and freemasonry. All such theatre visits were characterised by the singing of an established canon of masonic songs between the acts, led by well-known masonic actors.
The absence of any overtly masonic stage works created for these entertainments is curious, given the sustained links between freemasonry and the London stage.
David Nokes (King's College London): 'Rich and The Beggar'
Abstract not available.
Maria Chiara Barbieri (Università degli Studi di Firenze): 'John Rich and Staging The Beggar's Opera'
Through the reading of the several versions of the well-known picture by William Hogarth illustrating a scene of The Beggar's Opera, the paper will investigate the events connected with its staging, its theatrical fortune and the fortune, in financial terms, made by the manager John Rich.
Whereas the 'director' of the first versions of the painting was, undoubtedly, Hogarth, the last ones look as if they were co-directed by Rich. The manager, who had been not so prompt in recognizing the value and the potentiality of the pièce when it was offered by John Gay, was keen enough to identify in Hogarth's picture an effective vehicle to celebrate himself and to advertise his future projects.
Kathryn Lowerre (Michigan State University): 'Music and Magic in Christopher Rich's Theatres, 1694-1709'
My talk will be about some of the musical-theatrical practices John Rich presumably observed under his notorious father, Christopher Rich, with potential implications for his own later works. I will be discussing a group of dramatick opera productions, including The World in the Moon, The Island Princess, and The Virgin Prophetess and their use of elaborate spectacle, special effects, and music.
Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson (Brentwood, Essex): '"Sung Songs like Leveridge, and like Rich play'd Tricks (Harlequin Horace):" Singers and the Pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn Fields'
The presence of scenes of vocal music was a key feature which distinguished John Rich's pantomimes from those at Drury Lane. This may seem surprising, since by 1720 specialist singers had all but vanished from the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, presumably because of the company's financial problems. However, the success in March 1723 of Jupiter and Europa, which included songs for the company's one remaining singer, led to vocal music becoming increasingly important in the pantomimes so that in 1727 The Rape of Proserpine featured seven singers, 13 airs and seven elaborately staged scenes of vocal music.
Rich's increasing use of singers in his pantomimes was a crucial element in the re-establishment of English vocal music on the London stage. It fostered the careers of young singers as well as extending the careers of older ones, particularly Richard Leveridge, who returned to the stage at the age of 53 to sing in the pantomimes for nearly 28 years.
Handel's Serse (1738) stands out in this theatrical context by coming closer in form and subject matter to Rich's comic afterpieces than any of Handel's other stage works-so close, in fact, that, after attending one performance, the Fourth Earl of Shaftesbury remarked, 'My own judgment is that it is a capital opera notwithstanding 'tis called a ballad one.' Serse's comic characters and humorous situations-even the extreme brevity of many of its arias, and the playful way in which Handel manipulates operatic conventions-all point to a kind of comic experimentation that seems closer to operatic self-parody than so-called 'serious' opera. This seems all the more likely considering that Handel composed Serse only months after he left Covent Garden, at the very same time Rich was enjoying an extremely successful run of Henry Carey and J.F. Lampe's Handel-parody, The Dragon of Wantley, a work that Handel is said to have seen-and enjoyed. This paper will explore the ways in which Serse might be seen to represent Handel's attempt to reconcile Italian opera-and indeed, his own career-with the much-transformed theatrical world left by Rich, in an effort to shield his own operas from ridicule, and thus make self-critique serve the means of self-preservation.
Robert Anthony Torre (University of Wisconsin, Madison): 'Cultural Translatio and Handel's Pasticci'
The last fifty years have produced an impressive amount of scholarship on the issue of Handel's borrowing practices: from whom he borrowed, whether such borrowings carried malicious intent, how borrowed themes were musically incorporated, and whether the term 'borrowing' best describes the composer's method. More recently, John T. Winemiller situated Handel's appropriation of pre-existent material, both music and libretti, within the context of his literary and cultural milieu, arguing that the composer and his librettists participated in a centuries-old literary tradition of 'transformative imitation,' or the borrowing and refashioning of pre-existent material into a new context.
In this paper, I hope to expand this scholarship to include Handel's activities as an arranger of pasticci, and argue that the rendering of these libretti took shape not only through "transformative imitation," but also through a variety of means, including adaptation, textual retrenchment and amplification, all consistent with the rhetorical notion of translatio, or 'transfer.' Referring to a 'bearing across' or 'transfer of culture' or 'knowledge,' the ideas behind translatio influenced how fiction and cultural knowledge from the middle ages to the eighteenth century were disseminated from place to place and from one historical time to another. To assess its resonance in early eighteenth-century opera, I will examine Oreste (1734) and Arbace (1734), two pasticci Handel arranged for John Rich's theatre at Covent Garden. Imitation was the formative device in the former, while adaptive means shaped the latter. Not only does translatio present new possibilities for understanding the engagement and development of early eighteenth-century musical and poetic texts, but it also implicates a given text within a continuing flow of intertextuality and authorship.
Don-John Dugas (Kent State University): 'Contemporary Response to Pantomime in London, 1722-1724, from the Pages of the Weekly Pasquin'
Literary critics, theatre historians, and scholars of the dance have overlooked what a short-lived periodical, Pasquin, has to tell us about London's theatre world in the early 1720s. This is not surprising when we realize that Avery used only scraps of it in it in Part 2 of The London Stage, and never in relation to pantomime (the existence of which he barely acknowledges); that Stratman does not list it in his Bibliography of British Theatrical Periodicals; and that Highfill, Burnim, and Langhans do not draw upon the it in the Thurmond and Rich entries in their Biographical Dictionary. But this newspaper has something to tell us about matters dramatic, and we would do well to incorporate it into our understanding of this important moment in English theatrical history. Published weekly from the Autumn of 1722 to the Spring of 1724, Pasquin offered topical commentary on politics, religion, philosophy, fashion, architecture, scandals, society, and other goings-on in the capital. It also included surprisingly detailed coverage of both traditional and non-traditional dramatic entertainments, including reviews of new plays and revivals, observations about actors, and pronouncements on new trends in entertainment.
Of all the performing arts Pasquin commented on in its sixteen months' existence, pantomime and traditional drama received the most coverage. Pasquin's contributors-devoted supporters of traditional drama and avowed enemies of everything that smacked of foreign innovation-were contemptuous of pantomime. Their humorous, sometimes harsh criticisms provide us with new and useful information about pantomime's production and reception. Ironically, Pasquin's strong opposition to pantomime may well have preserved more information about it than if its writers had had luke-warm feelings about it; the journal's coverage of topics seems to have been proportional to the intensity of its writers' feelings about it. That Pasquin's run coincides with the theatrical season 1723-24 is certainly a stroke of good fortune, for this was exactly the moment that John Thurmond and John Rich first brought pantomime to prominence. That pantomime would thrive and do so at the expense of traditional drama is very much the anxiety Pasquin's coverage reveals.
This paper will reproduce Pasquin's pantomime coverage. It will also suggest some of the ways this new material improves and changes our understanding of the emergence of the genre as it was to thrive in eighteenth-century Britain.
Uriel Heyd (Royal Holloway, University of London): 'The World's Stage: The Newspaper in Eighteenth-Century Theatre'
Based on extensive research into the representation of the newspaper press in the long eighteenth century theatre, the paper will focus on one specific aspect - fame. A culture courting recognition, even notoriety, through the newspapers is regularly depicted on stage. The newspaper seems to offer one of the central ways to achieve the eighteenth century equivalent of '15 minutes of fame'. This aspect of the representation of the press in the theatre highlights several motives present in these plays, such as the make-up of the reading public, newspaper content, the interaction between readers and journalists and the thirst for newspapers, and the press' impact on society. The examination of the representation of the press in the theatre offers a unique insight to the way the press was perceived in the eighteenth century, maybe indicating the roots of modern celebrity culture and its close relations with the media.
Neil Pattison (University of Cambridge): 'Lewis Theobald and the Literate Art of Pantomime Entertainments'
Between 1717 and 1728, the playwright, critic, novelist, translator, journalist, poet and editor Lewis Theobald was the librettist behind several of the most popular pantomime entertainments of what Peter Seary has called the eighteenth century's 'golden age of English pantomime'. These included Harlequin a Sorcerer; with the Loves of Pluto and Proserpine (1725), Apollo and Daphne; or, the Burgo-Master Trick'd (1726), The Rape of Proserpine (1727) and -- with its counterpart at Drury Lane, John Thurmond Jr.'s Harlequin Doctor Faustus (1723) -- the most famous of all these performance pieces, The Necromancer; or, Harlequin Dr. Faustus. This essay explores some of the background to Theobald's writing in this genre, and offers a close discussion of Theobald's key written performances in stage spectaculars and pantomime entertainments, arguing that Theobald was attempting more than mere spectacle and entertainment in his writing for the genre.
As John Rich had shown in his 'Dedication' before The Rape of Proserpine, and as the career of Elkanah Settle -- a significant precursor of Theobald's in the development of theatrical entertainments -- amply demonstrates, commercial considerations permeated every aspect of the entertainments: their flexible formal design and utilisation of the whole range of theatrical resource, their stupefying celebratory connection with the entertained community, and their tendency toward fluid innovation in deliquescent generic classes, all respond to the principles of the necessity of profitability (in the formation and reproduction of fashionable display and a shiftingness or hybridity of form, potentiating an appeal to the greatest possible numerical resources of audience and finance) that derive from the installation of commercialism as the governing logic of the art form.
Yet this was an orientation that Theobald, as this essay will argue, did not share, except perhaps in a toleration of Rich's teasing promise that through pantomime might be made possible the development of a theatrical form that would not displace but supplement and adorn the tradition whose power of obligation Theobald, as his career as a writer time and again suggests, felt deeply. That said, he also felt deeply the gravitational pull of commercialism, evidential in its colonisation and distortion of the ordinary language of his criticism, journalism and poetry. The pantomime entertainments, therefore, represented a particularly exacting site of crisis and opportunity for Theobald's spasmodically successful career as a writer. In addition to the allure of lucrative enterprise, the pantomime entertainments, as Rich himself seemed to argue in his dedication, could paradoxically hold for the collaborators the promise of the recuperation of the literary tradition from the dumb spectacular stage which seemed to threaten its catastrophic deformation: after all, 'whenever the Publick Taste shall be disposed to return to the Works of Drama', Rich wrote, 'no one shall rejoice more sincerely than my self'. For sure, 'poetry' was only a necessary 'auxiliary' among other contributory arts in the entertainments as things stood. But might even this residual presence of the tradition of serious drama be enough to make them an embankment against the incoherence of mere spectacle, a literary art that a writer with ambitions to be serious, like Theobald, could take seriously?
David Hunter (University of Texas at Austin): 'What the Prompter Saw: The Diary of Rich's Prompter, John Stede'
While searching for materials at the West Yorkshire Archive Service-Leeds that might shed light on the audience for Handel's performances during his years in England and Ireland (1711-59), I looked at a diary that had been catalogued as written by John Bradley. The volume is, I believe, the diary of John Stede, the long-time prompter for Rich's company both at Lincoln 's Inn Fields and at Covent Garden. Covering the years 1722-29 and 1754, the book is a daily account of Stede's attendance at the playhouse, his other business activities, his pay, his socializing, the weather, and his meal and bed times.
The diary appears to be a unique survival from a set of volumes, for Stede had a life-long journal habit. It is also unique in providing evidence for the number of rehearsals held by Rich's company for both new and old works. We can track the preparation of The Beggar's Opera, which received its premiere on 29 January 1728. We also learn who comprised Stede's social circle and the moral code that he attempted to follow.
Ana Martinez (CUNY Graduate Center): 'Scenographies behind the Scenes: Mapping, Classifying and Interpreting John Rich's 1744 Inventory of Covent Garden'
One of the most important extant documents from John Rich's management of Covent Garden is the long inventory of theatrical possessions (costumes, scenery, and properties) put together when Rich was taking a loan in 1744. Because of its inaccessibility and length, scholars have relegated this inventory to the margins of any serious attempt to investigate Rich's management of scenographies, as well as of reconstructing their form, function, and staging. On the other hand, academics have rightly pointed to its importance and at the fact that hidden in it are valuable bits of evidence. For example, Richard Southern, in his now classic study Changeable Scenery, states that Rich's Inventory 'is at once one of the most important and the most baffling documents in the history of English scenery' and that 'the total of its intriguing items forms as fascinating a puzzle picture as any theatre student could wish to find.' And surprisingly, until now, no one had yet provided a comprehensive analysis of such a relevant piece of evidence. This article seeks to bring into the foreground the inventory's importance and to provide us with one possible methodological approach through which we can arrive at a more informed picture of Rich's scenographies as well as of his management behind the scenes.
At first sight, the Covent Garden inventory is a chaotic and endless list and its only internal logic is the grouping of items by the space where they were stored or located. The cataloguer simply recorded the items as he encountered them in the different backstage and stage spaces. This was the way inventories were usually made. In Rich's inventory, some items are assignable to productions or to scenic practices but many others are impossible to interpret because factors such as confusing terminology or lack of categories, among others. However, keeping in mind that any perfect or complete interpretation would be unrealistic, it is possible to track down some basic groupings as well as to carefully map some connections among them. In my paper I provide examples of significant single findings and of informative relations among items, spaces, and scenographies.
After an exhaustive reading and analysis of the inventory, I arrived at the conclusion that the most fruitful and interesting way of presenting my findings and claims would be to lead a virtual tour through the different architectonic spaces of Covent Garden. I start with a general background of the inventory's structure and content, which is important to understand my proposed methodology, and then an analytical classification in relation to the various spaces from the backstage areas, the backbone of the theatre's anatomy, to the heart of it: the stage.
I argue that John Rich enriched the form and function of British scenic practices by adding an extensive variety of scenery, costumes, and props to the repertory. I have only some of the many possible findings, but I hope that by raising the potential of Rich's inventory through some reconstructions, I can encourage others to approach it.
Kevin J. McGinley (Fatih University): 'John Rich as Critic: The Evidence of "Some Remarks on the Tragedy call'd Agis"
In John Rich's own day, his critical judgment when assessing dramatic works was much disparaged. Accounts of Rich's treatment of plays which authors submitted to be considered for staging regularly present him as at best cursory and at worst negligent. Accusations that he did not bother reading the plays submitted to him being fairly common. These aspersions went hand in hand with a view of Rich as having debased the stage in his management of Covent Garden: he was attacked as privileging sensational spectacle and pantomime over substantial dramatic works and was accused of maximising profit at the expense of art. These contemporary attacks should, of course, be viewed with suspicion, especially as Rich's pantomimes were substantial artistic achievements, and The London Stage shows the balance between tragedy, comedy, music, and spectacle to have been similar in Covent Garden and Drury Lane. There is now further evidence, however, which indicates clearly that Rich's critical judgment was marked by good sense and literary insight.
A newly discovered manuscript in Rich's hand, 'Remarks on the Tragedy Call'd Agis' (1754) features a 900-word detailed analysis and rejection of a 1754 version of John Home's play Agis. In this manuscript Rich provides an act-by-act analysis of the play outlining its flaws and suggesting possible improvements. This paper will briefly introduce the manuscript and outline its provenance and the reasons for ascribing it to Rich. It will proceed to show that in his assessment of Home's play Rich provides a careful and sensible analysis based on clearly thought-out principles of dramatic composition, a very practical sense of dramatic plausibility, and a shrewd awareness of how an audience is likely to respond. At the core of Rich's analysis is an emphasis on coherence of plot as the central determining factor for a play's success, along with the demand that characterization, spectacle, and incident must be integrated within a unified narrative whole if they are to be dramatically effective. This text, then, gives the clearest depiction yet of the structural and aesthetic criteria by which Rich assessed a play and provides powerful evidence to show that his contemporary reputation as something of a philistine and a purveyor of tawdry spectacles was not justified. This newly found manuscript provides an image of Rich as a manager of considerable critical acumen whose assessment of what will make a piece commercially successful goes hand in hand with a clear sense of what will make it artistically successful.
Marcus Risdell (Curator, Garrick Club): 'Unmasking the "Davenant Bust"'
In March 1834 during building works at the Royal College of Surgeons, William Clift, the first curator of the Hunterian Museum, rescued a terracotta bust of Shakespeare from a yard at the back of number 39 Lincoln's Inn Fields, adjacent to what can now be shown to have been the main entrance to the Theatre Royal, Lincoln's Inn. The bust became associated with the first manager of that theatre and known as the 'Davenant Bust', and thus considered a true likeness of the Bard. Exhibited at society soirées and the relocated Crystal Palace at Sydenham, it caught the eye of the Duke of Devonshire who purchased and presented it to the Garrick Club in 1855, of which he was President. It remains there to this day. At the time two copies were made in plaster: one would eventually be lost with the Crystal Palace; the other would find its way to the Shakespeare Library at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford, where it was exhibited alongside a painting of the so-called Darmstadt death-mask. The myth of its 'authenticity' was being reinforced and perpetuated.
However by 1900 doubts were cast regarding the bust's early history, in particular the art historian Marion H Spielmann. He was aware of a second, virtually identical terracotta in the British Museum, which had been purchased directly from the studio-sale of the Huguenot sculptor Louis François Roubiliac, following his death in 1762. Roubiliac is known to have arrived in London in 1730, and by 1738 had made a name for him-self with his statue of Handel commissioned for Vauxhall Gardens. This therefore substantially removes the bust away not just from Shakespeare, but also from Davenant.
Unfortunately no eighteenth century records regarding the bust have come to light, however Clift did leave accurate details of its rediscovery, enough to connect it to the third Theatre Royal, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the theatre of John Rich. Previously the Roubiliac bust had been dated alongside David Garrick's commission of a statue of Shakespeare for his Temple at Hampton, completed in 1758. The history of the theatre however suggests an earlier date as it ceased to be used as such in 1744. In fact the last attempt to put on a full dramatic season there was in 1742- 43 when Henry Giffard rented the theatre from Rich, after he had been forced to close his own theatre at Goodman's Fields following his success with Garrick's début. Giffard had long hoped to establish a third Theatre Royal, however by this time the Lincoln's Inn Theatre had been barely occupied for several years, and would have required a little work to make it presentable. Like his young protégé Garrick, Giffard was also an enthusiast of Shakespeare, and only the previous year had unveiled a statue of Shakespeare during his pantomime Harlequin Student and
declared: 'And now the Bard in Speaking Marble Lives.' It must have been Henry Giffard who had the Roubiliac bust placed at the entrance to his theatre.
Robin Simon, FSE (Editor, The British Art Journal): 'Rich and Hogarth: Gesture and Expression in The Beggar's Opera'
Abstract not available.
Iain Mackintosh (with Marcus Risdell): 'John Rich Unmask'd: Off and On Stage'
This presentation of 40 images comes in three parts: OFF STAGE, ON STAGE and SOME AFTERPIECES.
In OFFSTAGE, three images by Hogarth are discussed : The Beggar's Opera in its penultimate version owned by the Mellon at New Haven and shown at the Royal Academy until January 27; the so-called Fountaine Family, now at Philadelphia, and the largely unidentified Gentleman at a Club, also at the Mellon. Their associated engravings are referred to and the conclusion is that we have four convincing images of John Rich, three all very similar by Hogarth, and a fourth, the watercolour portrait by another artist at the Theatre Galleries of the V & A.
Theatrical Steelyards of 1750, in which Rich is in off-stage garb though the other seven are in character, provides another good likeness and is a natural link to Rich/Lun ON STAGE.
The watercolour of 1724 of Rich as Faustus at The British Museum and the Vandergucht 1735 engraving are seen as true images of Lun while it is suggested that Harlequin Dr. Faustus in the Necromancer / RICH, THE HARLEQUIN is a pirated French image of a Harlequin, probably by Nicholas Bonnart (1637 - 1718), to which the titling and the scenes from the play have been added by another hand commissioned by the management of Lincoln's Inn Fields. Half Masks (Europe) and Full Masks (England) are reviewed which leads to the Garrick Club watercolour.
Lastly, in SOME AFTERPIECES further images, some fanciful and some surprising, are rejected or accepted.
Iain Mackintosh is the author of Deciphering The Downfall of Shakespeare on a Modern Stage, 1765, which is in the delegates' pack, and is also one of the Convenors of the conference The Georgian Playhouse and its Continental Counterparts 1750 to 1850, which is to be held at The Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond, Yorkshire on 12, 13 and 14 September 2008 to which you are all invited (see flyer in pack).
Rebecca Harris-Warrick (Cornell University): 'French Dance Music on the London Stage in the Time of John Rich'
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Italian opera singers traveled Europe with what musicologists have dubbed 'suitcase arias', ones that played to the singer's strengths and that could be whisked out of the baggage and plopped into the appropriate scene in virtually any opera. I will propose that French dancers who performed in England during the early 18th century engaged in similar behavior, arriving on British soil with favorite dances in their feet and the appropriate musical scores under their arms. One well-known case is Marie Sallé's 1725 performance at Lincoln's Inn Fields of Jean-Féry Rebel's dance symphony Les Caractères de la danse, the music for which had been published in Paris in 1715. In other instances, however, the original French music for a special dance scene was not itself performed, but served as a model for a composer resident in England. As Sarah McCleave has shown, the music Handel added to his opera Il pastor fido as a vehicle for Sallé in the role of Terpsichore was modelled on Colin de Blamont's opera, Les Fêtes grecques et romaines. There appear to be additional cases in which French operatic dance music either was used in England or inspired imitations: the pantomime Apollo and Daphne, for example, which was done at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1726, also seems to have had a French model, at least for the scene that featured Mlle Sallé.
In this paper I will explore the phenomenon of French dancers who seem to have arrived in London not only with their Parisian dance training, but also with dance numbers that had originated on the stage of the Paris Opera, whether or not the music to which they performed in England was the same as it had been in France.
Marc Martinez (Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III): 'The Tricks of Lun: Mimesis and Mimicry in John Rich's Performance and Conception of Pantomimes'
As imitator rather than instigator of pantomimes, John Rich found in this format the perfect vehicle for his acting style and, more generally, his conception of theatrical show. By elevating Harlequin onto a legitimate stage, while, at the same time, depriving him of speech and hiding his face under a mask, Rich destabilises the paradigm of high-art mimesis: he negates the primacy of words over gestures and shifts the focus of the traditional art of acting from the face to the body. In his pantomimes, which concentrate, in the grotesque part, on the physical agility of the actor and highlight, in the operatic part, the abrupt transitions of theatrical passions, the performer takes centre stage. The displacement of priorities in the performance is paralleled in the composition of the pantomimes, devised to imitate and burlesque rival entertainments. Although most pantomimes draw a line between the high and low characters, Rich collapses this distinction in one significant production, The Royal Chace; or Harlequin's Skeleton. The appearance of the Gods in the roles of the commedia dell' arte merges the statuesque deportment of high characters with the grotesque antics of low comedians. This conflation of styles accounts for the ambivalent response to Rich, both praised for the excellence of his acting and lambasted for the low quality of his shows: the few descriptions of his best lazzi recapture the sense of wonder and the aesthetic pleasure created by his performing style. In The Fair, Lun's last "trick" before retiring, Rich brings the market place onto the stage again and pits the acrobatics of the fairground performer, Maddox, against the gestural and postural stereotypes of his rival, the Drury Lane Harlequin, Henry Woodward. The controversy caused by the production reflected two diametrically opposed conceptions of theatrical performance: one centred on the physical virtuosity of the performer and the other on the accommodation of low entertainments with the legitimate repertoire. The latter sanitization of the form will take an important step further in 1779 with the first speaking pantomime.
Sarah McCleave (Queen's University, Belfast): 'Rich and "High Art": A Consideration of his Support for Opera'
This paper challenges the image of Rich as a cultural philistine by considering his support for serious opera, in the form of lending dancers to the opera house or staging productions himself. His arrangement with Handel during the 1734-35 season - and the extent of his financial commitment towards the operas of that season - will receive particular attention.
Matthew J. Kinservik (University of Delaware): 'John Rich and the Censors'
This paper will address the fundamental question: How did Rich manage successfully to negotiate the unprecedented and varied censorial pressures he faced over his long career? It will take up some important events that brought him into contact with official state censorship (the banning of Polly, the actor rebellions of the 1730s and 1740s, his response to Barnard's Bill and the Licensing Act) and it will also consider the fierce, but unofficial, censure he endured throughout his career (his arbitrariness with actors and playwrights, his repertory decisions, and his advocacy of pantomimes).
Working from recent revisionist studies like John O'Brien's Harlequin Britain (Johns Hopkins, 2004) and neglected primary texts like the 1753 'Ode to John Rich', this paper will take issue with the standard, negative representations of him during his lifetime (and since). In the process, it will point out some chronically overlooked facts about Rich's management, such as his advocacy of Shakespeare and the premieres of two of the century's most popular comic plays (The Beggar's Opera and Suspicious Husband) at his theatres.
Vanessa L. Rogers (London, UK): 'Songs, Dances, and Other "Monkey Tricks:" Henry Fielding, John Rich and Rivalry on the London Stage'
Henry Fielding (1707-1754), playwright, novelist, satirist, and (briefly) theater manager, had a decidedly turbulent relationship with rival playhouse impresario John Rich. Although Rich staged Fielding's controversial play, The Coffee-House Politician in 1730, he avoided Fielding's later plays and ballad operas, leading to bad blood between the two. Consequently, some of Fielding's greatest successes were with stage works that lampooned, among other topics, pantomime, and directed insults at the influential 'Harlequin' and his performers. Although several connections between Fielding's hit Pasquin, its afterpiece Tumble-Down Dick (both 1736), and Rich have appeared in earlier scholarship, the prolific playwright also poked fun at the plots and music of Rich's entertainments in numerous other plays and ballad operas such as The Author's Farce (1730) (where Rich appears in the guise of a puppet called 'Monsieur Pantomime'), The Historical Register, For the Year 1736 and Eurydice Hiss'd (both 1737), among others. Rich, not to be outdone, retaliated by attacking Fielding with Edward Phillips's injurious The Stage Mutineers (1733) and Marforio (1736), which he staged.
Though parodies of Italian opera and Italian singers have famously saturated the content of many ballad operas, a closer look at the themes of many operas - particularly those of Fielding - show that Rich's lucrative pantomimes and his pesky French dancers were also a considerable preoccupation for these writers. The sheer number of references to 'Lun', his 'low paltry Tricks, and juggling Cheats' also demonstrates how much Rich's entertainments permeated popular culture of the era.
Undoubtedly, Fielding's imaginative and adroit send-ups of the London public's favorite entertainments gave his theater patrons what they wanted to see and co-opted appreciative audiences from Rich. By focusing on the works staged by both Fielding and Rich, my investigation will examine their generally neglected theatrical rivalry and illuminate further the nature of the relationship between two of the most significant figures in London's eighteenth century theater world.
Andrew Pink (UCL): 'Patrons, Performers and Politics: Freemasons at the Theatre in Early Eighteenth-Century London'
This paper charts the rise of a confident, masonic theatrical tradition in the 1720s and 30s and its sudden collapse in the charged political atmosphere that surrounded Walpole's fall from office in the 1740s.
It is notable that, following the creation of England's Grand Lodge in 1717, actors, singers, dancers, designers and managers, particularly those from Drury Lane, were attracted to freemasonry's rapidly increasing membership. Freemasons were prominent in theatre audiences too, regularly promoting benefits for masonic actors, whether formally at the annual theatre visit by the Grand Lodge, led by its aristocratic Grand Master, or informally by ad hoc masonic groups. The Grand Master's 1732 Lincoln's Inn benefit for John Rich provides a rare association between Rich and freemasonry. All such theatre visits were characterised by the singing of an established canon of masonic songs between the acts, led by well-known masonic actors.
The absence of any overtly masonic stage works created for these entertainments is curious, given the sustained links between freemasonry and the London stage.
David Nokes (King's College London): 'Rich and The Beggar'
Abstract not available.
Maria Chiara Barbieri (Università degli Studi di Firenze): 'John Rich and Staging The Beggar's Opera'
Through the reading of the several versions of the well-known picture by William Hogarth illustrating a scene of The Beggar's Opera, the paper will investigate the events connected with its staging, its theatrical fortune and the fortune, in financial terms, made by the manager John Rich.
Whereas the 'director' of the first versions of the painting was, undoubtedly, Hogarth, the last ones look as if they were co-directed by Rich. The manager, who had been not so prompt in recognizing the value and the potentiality of the pièce when it was offered by John Gay, was keen enough to identify in Hogarth's picture an effective vehicle to celebrate himself and to advertise his future projects.
Kathryn Lowerre (Michigan State University): 'Music and Magic in Christopher Rich's Theatres, 1694-1709'
My talk will be about some of the musical-theatrical practices John Rich presumably observed under his notorious father, Christopher Rich, with potential implications for his own later works. I will be discussing a group of dramatick opera productions, including The World in the Moon, The Island Princess, and The Virgin Prophetess and their use of elaborate spectacle, special effects, and music.
Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson (Brentwood, Essex): '"Sung Songs like Leveridge, and like Rich play'd Tricks (Harlequin Horace):" Singers and the Pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn Fields'
The presence of scenes of vocal music was a key feature which distinguished John Rich's pantomimes from those at Drury Lane. This may seem surprising, since by 1720 specialist singers had all but vanished from the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, presumably because of the company's financial problems. However, the success in March 1723 of Jupiter and Europa, which included songs for the company's one remaining singer, led to vocal music becoming increasingly important in the pantomimes so that in 1727 The Rape of Proserpine featured seven singers, 13 airs and seven elaborately staged scenes of vocal music.
Rich's increasing use of singers in his pantomimes was a crucial element in the re-establishment of English vocal music on the London stage. It fostered the careers of young singers as well as extending the careers of older ones, particularly Richard Leveridge, who returned to the stage at the age of 53 to sing in the pantomimes for nearly 28 years.
Abstracts