Hippo Drama

7/30/2019 Hippo Drama

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/hippo-drama 1/30Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1975926

Nineteenth-Century Contexts

Vol. 28, No. 4, December 2006, pp. 305–334

ISSN 0890–5495 (print)/ISSN 1477–2663 (online) © 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/08905490601086970

A Matter of Turf: Romanticism,Hippodrama, and Legitimate Satire

Michael GamerDepartment of English, University of PennsylvaniaTaylorandFrancisLtd GNCC_A_208641.sgm10.1080/08905490601086970 Nineteenth-Century Contexts0890-5495 (print)/1477-2663 (online)OriginalArticle2006Taylor&Francis284000000December 2006MichaelGamer [email protected]

In February of 1811, facing mounting losses from several unremunerative

productions of Shakespeare, John Philip Kemble revived George Colman the

Younger’s Blue-Beard at Covent Garden Theatre. The novelty of the new production

lay in two innovative scenes, each featuring (by Leigh Hunt’s estimation) “about

twenty” performing horses hired from Astley’s Amphitheatre (Examiner , 24 March

1811). These horses first charged on stage in act II, scene I in answer to Selim’s bugle

call, and later returned as part of the production’s grand finale: a full-scale attack on

Blue-Beard’s castle.An actor-manager noted for his purity of taste and spectacular revivals, Kemble

had long been known as the London stage’s premier male tragic actor, having built a

career out of defending spoken, “legitimate” drama against the incursions of newer

forms like melodrama and pantomime. His decision to revive Blue-Beard had come

only after multiple arguments with his managing partner, Henry Harris, over how to

reduce Covent Garden’s losses (Boaden 2: 542). In an unquestionably legitimate play

like Richard III or Henry IV Part 1, Kemble might have added an equestrian battle-

scene without much risk; but in this case dire economic necessity spurred the choice

of Colman’s spectacle. The gamble, moreover, paid off: Blue-Beard ’s first forty

performances brought the proprietors of Covent Garden an astonishing £21,000 in

sales and effectively salvaged the 1810–11 season (Reynolds 2: 403–04). Even

Colman the Younger, after publicly expressing his disapproval, quickly brought out

a new edition of Blue-Beard containing stage directions for the new equestrian

version.

Kemble’s biographer James Boaden, himself an innovator of stage-effect, informs us

that Kemble made the decision to revive Blue-Beard with horses only after “long

meditation” and some pain, fearing injury not only to his reputation but also to

the drama (Boaden 2: 541–42). Certainly he expected critical reprisals for bringing the

circus pleasures of Sadler’s Wells and Astley’s Amphitheatre to Covent Garden, and theresponse was as divided as it was contentious. While reviewers alternately panned and


http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/hippo-drama 2/30Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1975926

306 M. Gamer

extolled the production, diarist Anna Larpent, wife of Examiner of Plays John Larpent,

succinctly termed the play “an improved Adorned Astley’s” as a way of acknowledging

both its generic impurity and its superiority of spectacle (Larpent 8: 83a). Among the

most even-handed of Blue-Beard ’s notices, Leigh Hunt’s review in The Examiner comes

essentially to the same conclusion. Opposing Blue-Beard to what he elsewhere terms“classical theatre,” Hunt acknowledges the spectacle’s pleasures even while fearing its

potential effects:

If it were possible to present the public with such exhibitions and at the same time cherish

a proper taste for the Drama, they might even be hailed as a genuine improvement in

representation; for if men, and not puppets, act men, there seems to be no dramatic reason

why horses should not act horses. But … [t]hey are too powerful a stimulus to the senses

of the common order of spectators, and take away from their eyes and ears all relish for

more delicate entertainment. The managers and the public thus corrupt each other; but it

is the former who begin the infection. (Examiner , 24 March 1811)

Such objections will prove striking to romanticists for the ways they recall Samuel

Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” and William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads,

both of which had argued that “gross and violent stimulants” (Wordsworth 1: 129), be

they German tragedies or descriptions of battles in the popular press, rendered readers

and audiences unfit for “more delicate entertainment” (Coleridge 1: 473). Yet Hunt

also anticipates the breakdown of the very oppositions he invokes. Having opened his

review by opposing Blue-Beard to what he calls “classical theatre,” Hunt declares the

play to be “beneath criticism”; nevertheless, he announces himself delighted with the

power of its equestrian spectacle, and his delight allows him to question the standards

of taste he ostentatiously defends. Debuting under different circumstances or for a less“common order of spectator,” he reasons, Kemble’s horses might even prove a genuine

improvement were it not for the corrupting influences of dramatic spectacle, produced

by the enormous patent theaters to allay their enormous costs. Thus Blue-Beard

inhabits a place of double signification, representing the illegitimacy of the minor

theaters and the diseased state of the Theatre Royals, unworthy of criticism yet inspir-

ing some of Hunt’s best writing during these months on the effects of monopoly,

censorship, and court interests on the theater.1

If Blue-Beard ’s reception presents an early-nineteenth-century stage barely holding

on to traditional generic, legal, and institutional demarcations, these distinctions all

but failed in the months that followed. Inspired by Blue-Beard ’s success, Kemble and

Harris again looked to Drury Lane’s 1797–98 season, this time tapping the author of

The Castle Spectre, Matthew Lewis, to write a new play for Astley’s horses. In many

ways, their speculation simply repeated the formula established through the revival of

Blue-Beard by making the work of a proven popular playwright the site of theatrical

innovation, and again they were not disappointed in the result. Premiering as April

ended and as Blue-Beard ’s houses were beginning to thin, Timour the Tartar proved an

even bigger hit than its predecessor, insuring record profits to the patentees of Covent

Garden for the 1810–11 season.2

In commissioning a new play solely for the purposes of exhibiting equestrian specta-cle, however, the management of Covent Garden crossed a number of ideological lines


http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/hippo-drama 3/30

Nineteenth-Century Contexts 307

and institutional boundaries. Kemble, especially, could no longer hide behind his own

longstanding practices regarding theatrical revivals, which demanded that theaters

make old plays new by adding novelties to them. Nor could the management now make

the excuse of financial need. Where Blue-Beard stood as underwriting angel to Covent

Garden’s more elite productions, Timour could only stand as an embodiment of thegreed and debased taste of its managers. While two decades later John Genest would

choose to remember Timour olfactorily (Genest 8: 232), prints like “The Centaur-ian

Manager” (1811) presented Kemble trampling the works of Shakespeare and other

classical dramatists (see Figure 1). With Sarah Siddons riding on his back, Kemble

declares to the monkeys and minions of the circus and pantomime before him, “I will

engage you for the present season and methinks I shall do well to engage the Devil to

play Lewis’s Wood Daemon.” Like previous attacks on new theatrical genres,3 the print

opposes the legitimate theater to the illegitimate forces of pantomime and the circus,

and all the expected dualisms of reason and madness, authority and misrule, and goodand evil, follow.Figure1 TheCentaur-ianManager (1811).Courtesyofthe LibraryofCongress.

Rich as it is, the novelty of Timour ’s debut and the comic potential of its popular

triumph cannot fully explain the diverse, organized, and sustained critical response it

provoked. Lewis’s play, after all, came at the end of two decades of theatrical experi-

mentation and innovation—after rather than before the advent of melodrama and

military re-enactments, not to mention a long string of celebrated performing animals,

the most famous of which remains Drury Lane’s Carlo, the Wonder Dog. With audi-

ences accustomed to novelty and innovation, Blue-Beard and Timour could never have

heralded a watershed moment in the history of the stage had their horses not proven

flashpoints for other, broader conflicts in British culture. Producing dozens of responsesin periodicals and on stage, the two plays’ combined reception outlasted the 1810–11

season and marked, as Jane Moody has demonstrated, “a turning-point in the cultural

authority of Covent Garden and Drury Lane” (72). As such, the plays provide excellent

starting points for exploring popular theater’s position within Romantic-period

Figure 1 The Centaur-ian Manager (1811). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.



308 M. Gamer

culture, since neither their success nor their reception can be explained adequately by

theater history alone. Both demand a broader canvas, one that extends beyond the

theater to include the myriad of relations involving horses and their literary, political,

and social meanings, nearly all of which found ready and constant representation on

the Romantic-period stage. As I hope to show, the debut of hippodrama on the stageof London’s Theatre Royals could never have provoked the response it did had it not

prophesied similar collapses in other arenas of literary culture—particularly in dramatic

criticism and in that mode of writing most expected to defend tradition and expel all

interlopers, satire.I.

I. Four-in-Hand

In gay and fanciful parade,

The ball, the rout, the masquerade:

The four-in-hand, the lounging hours,The tonish club, the tempting bowers

Where Beauty, free from Love’s alarms,

To the best bidder sells her charms.

Or when you’re tir’d of the town

Newmarket’s interesting Down

May change the scene. (Combe, The Dance of Life 221)

When mentioned at all by dramatic historians, hippodrama traditionally appears as a

symptom of the artistic decline of London theaters after the Old Price Riots of 1809.

Only recently have cultural historians begun connecting it to broader trends in early-

nineteenth-century British culture or to other equestrian fads of the early Regency.4

Most prominent among these was the vogue for coach-driving among wealthy

Londoners, many of whom impersonated hackney-coachmen by adopting their dress

and slang. Referred to as “Whips” or “Bucks” in most accounts, these young men fit

up their carriages to resemble hackney coaches or bribed coachmen to give up their

reins. They also formed dozens of gentleman’s clubs, among them the Barouche,

Bedront, Benson, Defiance, Tandem, Whip, and the most famous of them all, the

Four-in-Hand:

The vehicles of the Club [were] of a hybrid class, quite as elegant as private carriages and

lighter than even the mails. They were horsed with the finest animals that money couldsecure… . The master generally drove the team, often a nobleman of high rank, who

commonly copied the dress of a mail coachman. The company usually rode outside, but

two footmen in rich liveries were indispensable on the back seat, nor was it at all

uncommon to see some splendidly-attired female on the box. A rule of the Club was that

all members should turn out … at mid-day, from the neighbourhood of Piccadilly,

through which they passed to the Windsor-road,—the attendants of each carriage playing

on their silver bugles. (Timbs 248–49)

Equipped with their own uniforms and eccentricities, these clubs comprise the “driving

schism” of Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third (Shelley 345) and the essence of any “tale of the

times” in Scott’s Waverley (Scott 4). Boasting slogans like “neck or nothing,” theirmembers were caricatured in fiction by Thomas Love Peacock, on stage by comic actor




Charles Mathews and pantomime clown Joseph Grimaldi, and in satirical prints by

James Gillray (see Figure 2). With their studied transgression of class roles—and with

horses impacting nearly every aspect of British life—clubs like the Four-in-Hand cut

daringly across the boundaries of sporting, dandy, and military cultures, attracting

aristocrats, officers, and other young professionals. Their ties to the stage, moreover,were pronounced and part of dramatic convention. Not satisfied with seeing

themselves caricatured on stage, real Whips like Robert Coates and fictional ones like

Pompey the Little’s Mr. Chace and Mansfield Park’s Tom Bertram and Mr. Yates

regularly put themselves forward as “gentleman amateurs” in private theatricals and

provincial theaters, while novels like Charles Sedley’s Barouche Driver (1807) repre-

sented the Whip as part of a continuous procession of coaches moving between the

theater and events like Ascot and the Ormsby Regatta (see Figures 3 and 4).Figure2 JamesGillray, ThomasOnslow(1801).Caption:“WhatcanlittleT.O. do?WhyDrivea PhaetonandTwo!!CanlittleT. O.dono more?—yes,driveaPhaetonandFour!!!!”CourtesyoftheUniversityofPennsylvaniaLibrary.Figure3 RobertCoatesinhiscarriageinBath(1810).CourtesyofDavidMayerIII.Figure4 GrimaldiburlesquingCoatesin Harlequin &Padma naba (1811).CourtesyofDavidMayerIII.

During the years of the Regency, then, comic actors like Charles Mathews and Joseph

Grimaldi could lampoon the figure of the “Whip” so effectively because he was a vari-ation on a recognizable social type—what Ellen Moers has called the “horsey set which

spent its afternoons at Tattersall’s, the fashionable market-place for the best in horse-

flesh” (Moers 31). The similarity of contemporary prints of Mathews and Grimaldi

nicely captures this iconic status. In Figure 5, Grimaldi performs his famous song of the

“Whip Club” in Fashion’s Fools (1809), one of the most popular pantomimes to satirize

the slang and activities of the horse-mad dandies. His costume at once drawing on and

surpassing Grimaldi’s in the length of both whip and coat, Mathews is portrayed in

Figure 6 as Dick Cypher, who had made his first entrance in Isaac Pocock’s Hit or Miss!

(Lyceum, 1810) with an offstage crash and a flurry of coachman slang: “that’s prime!—

that’s bang up!” (Pocock 31). The print’s caption introduces Cypher through his signa-ture slang—“Here I am D—mme bang up!”—while the print itself is “Dedicated with

Permission to the Four in hand Club.”Figure5 JosephGrimaldiin Fashion’sFo ols (1809).Courtesyofthe MuseumofLondon.Figure6 CharlesMatthewsasCypherin Hitor Miss! (1810).A uthor’sColle ction.

Fond of speed and sensation, careless in his actions, and exuberant in his pleasures,

the “Whip” was more than merely a staple of Regency pantomime and farce. In the year

Figure 2 James Gillray, Thomas Onslow (1801). Caption: “What can little T. O. do? Why

Drive a Phaeton and Two!!Can little T. O. do no more?—yes, drive a Phaeton and Four!!!!”Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Library.



310 M. Gamer

1814 alone, he appears in Waverley , in Byron’s “The Devil’s Drive,” in Mansfield Park,

and in Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage, which reflects on the cheerful industry of a family

of decayed gentry, the Percies, by expostulating, “What would have been the difference

of their fate, and of their feelings, had they been suffered to grow up into mere idle

lounging gentlemen, or four-in-hand coachmen!” (Edgeworth 1: 316). Such density of signification—the work of a sentence in Patronage—is reduced to a single codeword in

Persuasion (1818) when Austen informs her readers that Mr. Eliot frequents “Tatter-

sal’s” (Austen 50). Once this detail is supplemented by Mr. Eliot’s libertine admiration

of Anne Eliot at Lyme, Miss Smith’s melodramatic exposé becomes almost superfluous,

confirming what we already suspect of Mr. Eliot’s “hollow and black” life of assumed

gentility, gambling, licentiousness, dissipation, and debt (Austen 213).II.

II. Club Cultures

As with most cultural manias, the rages for hippodrama and coach driving were distil-lations of broader tendencies in British culture that predated them by decades and even

Figure 3 Robert Coates in his carriage in Bath (1810). Courtesy of David Mayer III.




Figure 4 Grimaldi burlesquing Coates in Harlequin & Padmanaba (1811). Courtesy of

David Mayer III.

Figure 5 Joseph Grimaldi in Fashion’s Fools (1809). Courtesy of the Museum of London.



312 M. Gamer

centuries. Before Tattersal’s was established in 1766, Newmarket had been associated

with horse-buying and horseracing since the reigns of James I and Charles I, the latter

instituting the first cup race there in 1634. By the early eighteenth century, the spectacle

of the Newmarket races was great enough for Daniel Defoe to “fanc[y himself] in theCircus Maximus at Rome, seeing the ancient games,” even as he regretted watching

men of “high dignity and quality, [descend] to picking one another’s pockets … with-

out respect to faith, honour, or good manners” (102). Like other exclusive clubs, the

Jockey Club at Newmarket (founded 1750) was formed in part to prevent this kind of

class mixing and corruption, but without much success (Bracegirdle 3). As early as

1751, writers like Thomas Warton were depicting Newmarket as having its own

distinct and pernicious culture, a line of critique fully developed in Horace Walpole’s

correspondence, where England figures as a center of fashion, moral dissipation,

political intrigue, and financial decadence:The Maccaronis are at their ne plus ultra: Charles Fox is already so like Julius Caesar, that

he owes an hundred thousand pounds. Lord Carlisle pays fifteen hundred and Mr Crewe

twelve hundred a year for him—literally for him, being bound for him, while he, as like

Brutus as Caesar, is indifferent about such paltry counters… . What is England now?—A

sink of Indian wealth, filled by nabobs and emptied by Maccaronis! A senate sold and

despised! A country overrun by horse-races! A gaming, robbing, wrangling, railing nation,

without principles, genius, character or allies; the overgrown shadow of what it was!

(Walpole 23: 498–99)

At the center of Walpole’s anecdote are the “Maccaronis,” figures literally constituted

of horses and their by-products. Their distinctive ponytails—often described, as weremacaronies generally, as a “club of hair”—were made of horsehair and weighed up to

Figure 6 Charles Mathews as Cypher in Hit or Miss! (1810). Author’s Collection.




three pounds. Invoking the culture of Newmarket and standing as a metonymical stud

to its studs of horses, the Macaroni here embodies Newmarket’s specific brand of

swaggering masculinity and antisocial behavior. In Walpole’s correspondence, the

trope becomes all the more ironic because the Macaroni is an “overgrown shadow,” a

dandified signifier composed of false hair and false bluster defined by what is “with-out,” and hiding an empty center. Walpole’s narrative of British “principles” and

“character” overrun by horseracing thus carries the heft of political allegory, one in

which the follies of one generation bankrupt the political and patrimonial estates of the

preceding one.

By the end of the 1780s, Walpole should have felt his prophetic powers vindicated.

The figure of the Macaroni had come and gone, but Newmarket’s reputation for

fashionable vice and stylish danger—not to mention its symbolic opposition to those

virtues of farming, economy, patriotism, and domesticity cultivated by George III—

quickly attracted the king’s son and Fox’s friend, the young Prince of Wales (laterGeorge IV), who joined the Jockey club in 1784 as soon as he was of age to do so. By

1790 he would boast his first Derby and Newmarket winners, a stud of over forty

horses, and a position as the central icon of the Jockey Club and its culture (see

Figure 7). Rowlandson’s 1790 lampoon was only made into a print for mass sale and

consumption twenty-one years later, the year of Blue-Beard and Timour the Tartar . In

it, the Prince of Wales stands at the center of an all-male coterie surrounded by the

paraphernalia of the club’s culture, as seedy as it is aristocratic. While two shifty card

Figure 7 Thomas Rowlandson, The Jockey Club (1790; George IV at center, coat open).Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Library.



314 M. Gamer

players occupy the left side of the picture, equally dismal backgammon players and two

sinister onlookers occupy the right; the Prince, meanwhile, is flanked by his brother the

Duke of York and what appears to be his bookkeeper. Dogs on the floor form living

counterparts to various boxing, cock-fighting, and racing prints on the wall, while the

prominent “BETTING ROOM” sign and an advertisement for the sale of a pack of hounds suggests the depth of the play. The drawing’s satire is less one of composition

than one of assemblage and accumulation, its title suggesting that the figures and props

of the picture literally constitute the Jockey Club and its ethos.Figure7 ThomasRowlandson,TheJockeyClub(1790;GeorgeIVat center,coatopen).CourtesyofUniversityofPennsylvaniaLibrary.

In this instance, Rowlandson’s print cannily anticipates the event that would divide

the club from its star member: the 21 October 1791 betting scandal known as the

“Escape Affair.” After finishing last the previous day, the Prince’s horse Escape had won

at long odds against a strong field, the Prince and his jockey Sam Chifney winning

significant sums. Concluding the horse to have been watered just before the first race

to raise its odds in the second, the Jockey Club barred Chifney for life. The Princeresponded by withdrawing his horses from further races, selling his entire stud, and

giving Chifney an annuity of 200 guineas (Smith 61–67; David 136–37) (see Figure 8).

Satires of the scandal quickly moved from the print shop to the Covent Garden stage

in the form of Thomas Holcroft’s Road to Ruin (1792), whose character Charles Gold-

finch proved immensely popular as a burlesque of Newmarket dandies and their rakish

masculinity (See Figure 9). In The Road to Ruin, coach-driving and horseracing stand

as component parts of a wider culture of gambling, dissipation, and debt, Goldfinch

standing as (in his words) “a genus” of a cultural type nearly two decades before Charles

Mathews trod on stage as Dick Cypher in Hit or Miss! Yet Goldfinch matters here more

than merely as a prototype of a stock character of Regency farce. Seizing on his signa-ture line (“That’s your sort”), print satirists quickly projected Holcroft’s Whip out of

the theater and back onto broader social and political canvases that included the Prince

Figure 8 Isaac Cruickshank, Hint for an ESCAPE at the next spring Meeting (1792).

(Ridden by Chifney, George flees members of the Jockey Club). © Copyright The Trusteesof the British Museum.




of Wales, Fox (often called the “Jockey of Norfolk”), the Duke of Clarence, and that

other prototypical man of turf and theater, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (see Figure 10).

Such prints demonstrate the degree to which characters like Goldfinch functioned

within a longstanding tradition of satire, one that reached beyond the theater to

produce Rowlandson’s and Cruickshank’s prints and novelistic characters from RobertBage’s Mr. Fillygrove (in Hermsprong ) to Austen’s James Thorpe (in Northanger

Abbey ). More pressing for the purposes of this argument, it helps us to discover the

breadth of the canvas onto which Lewis introduced Timour the Tartar , and the extent

to which that canvas already carried a rich tradition of political satire.Figure8 IsaacCruick shank, Hintfor anESCAPE atthe nextspring Meeting (1792).(Riddenby Chifney,GeorgefleesmembersoftheJockeyClub).©CopyrightTheTrusteesofthe BritishMuseum.Figure9 “Mr.LewisandMr.Quick,asGoldfinchandSulky” CarltonHouseMagazine (1792).Courtesyofthe UniversityofPennsylvania.Figure10 TheRoadto Ruin (1792;GeorgeridesahorsewithFox’sface,whileDorothyJordansays“WelldoneCharly!That’syoursort!”TheDukeof Clarencerideswhatappearsto beSheridan,saying“Pushaway!That’syoursort!”).© CopyrightTheTrusteesofthe BritishMuseum.III.

III. Theaters of War

In connecting Astley’s horses at Covent Garden to Newmarket and gentleman coach-

driving, we might wonder whether we have strayed too far from hippodrama and its

legacies were it not for the fact that Timour ’s audiences strayed even further.Wondering themselves how Timour could mean anything at all, reviewers found

Figure 9 “Mr. Lewis and Mr. Quick, as Goldfinch and Sulky” Carlton House Magazine

(1792). Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania.



316 M. Gamer

F i g u

r e 1 0

T h e R o a

d t o R u i n ( 1 7 9 2 ; G e o r g e r i d e s a h o r s e w i t h F o x ’ s f a c e , w

h i l e D o r o t h y J o r d a n s a y s “ W e l l d o n e C h a r l y ! T h a t ’ s y o

u r s o r t ! ” T h e

D u k e o f C l a r e n c e r i d e s w h a t a p p e a r s t o b e S h e r i d a n , s a y i n g “ P u s h a

w a y ! T h a t ’ s y o u r s o r t ! ” ) . © C o p y r i g h t T h e T r u s t e e s o f t h e B r i t

i s h M u s e u m .



318 M. Gamer

mummery —and while I hail the cause, I cannot but say I am heartily grieved at the effects.

(243n–244n)

The letter itself is a formidable comic performance: Oliver Old Times is jolted awake

from his customary snooze in the theater by “the bray of kettle drums, the galloping

of horses, and the clangour of trumpets” (243n), which bewilder his senses and hissense of dramatic history. But the extent of the satire is both limited and complicated

by the broader changes it marks. Roused from the time of Garrick—when plays were

predictable enough that one could sleep through them in peace—Old Times awakens

to find himself in a world suffused by nearly two decades of war. When dramatic

offerings and popular fashion alike are determined by “the four-in-hand” and “every

Militia and Volunteer Colonel throughout the nation,” he sighs, “no wonder then that

a body of such weight should have an influence in turning the scale of national taste”

(244n).

Theatrical taste, it seems, must fall sacrifice to events of greater national impor-tance. The same can be said of reviews of Timour the Tartar , which are character-

ized by their almost uniform exhibitions of patriotism. As Jane Moody notes

succinctly, Lewis “reimagined Timour … as a Napoleonic bogeyman” (99–100)—an

association confirmed by Kemble’s casting of the diminutive Charles Farley as

Timour—and thus partially inoculated his play against criticism. Whether heartfelt

or de rigeur , patriotic sentiments enter into nearly every review of the play, and

provide striking testimony to the predicament faced by Timour ’s detractors. How to

criticize a play whose popularity stemmed in part from its allegorical celebration of

British military prowess, where each night Astley’s full cavalry stormed the fortress

of a hated Usurper with what can only be called, in spite of exotic costumes and ahistorical setting, astonishing realism (see Figure 11)? Small wonder, then, that

viewers of Timour ’s final siege praised it as both allegory and documentary, drawing

Figure 11 Mr. King as Abdalac in Act II, scene iii of Timour the Tartar (1811). Author’sCollection.




from pantomime and afterpieces like Blue-Beard on one hand and popular military

re-enactments like The Glorious First of June (1794) on the other. Its chief and

lasting innovation to the history of theater lies in this hybridization of fairy tale and

newsreel.Figure11 Mr.KingasAbdalacin ActII,sceneiiiof TimourtheTartar (1811).Auth or’sCollectio n.

Equally troubling for reviewers, however, were the ways in which the play simply could not be ignored. While equestrian dramas had been fixtures of minor theaters for

decades—and while lampoons of Whips and their horse-mad brethren had existed for

as many years—the marginal status of such venues made it easy enough to dismiss their

productions as ephemeral and unimportant. Thus, in spite of hippodrama’s growing

popularity between 1790 and 1810, reviewers and satirists were able to maintain a rela-

tively stable cultural hierarchy, whose notions of “high” and “low” culture comfortably

mirrored the legal institution of “major” and “minor” theaters. Blue-Beard may have

forced critics to write about what they could not ignore, but its reviews suggest that

Astley’s horses had not in and of themselves upset long-cherished hierarchies. As arevived rather than original play, Blue-Beard had occupied a place in the legitimate

repertoire for over a decade, and its equestrian scenes were too clearly mere appendages

to threaten its secondary status as afterpiece. We find such hierarchies placed under

siege only with the advent of Timour the Tartar , that original production confessedly

too fine to be pantomime, too well acted and well produced to be mere afterpiece, and

too frighteningly realistic in its military displays to be dismissed as a tale for children

and apprentices.IV.

IV. “Hippo-Mania”

Upon the whole, whether the taste of the Town has corrupted the Stage, or whether the

Stage has corrupted the taste of the Town, it would be vain for us now to argue—true it is

that the Hippo-mania rages, and this Spectacle is well calculated to gratify the prevailing

disposition. It will not therefore jog on at a common rate, but have a long run; and the

Managers, at the end of the season, will find themselves and their horses at the winning-

post! (Globe, 30 April 1811)

Eleven weeks after its April premiere, Timour the Tartar ’s popularity appears not

merely to have continued unabated, but to have altered the offerings and, in one case,

internal architecture of London’s theaters. One can only marvel at the extent of itsinfluence. By mid-July, every major and minor London theater of consequence

advertised among its nightly entertainments a hippodrama modeled on Blue-Beard or

Timour , as rivals scrambled to bring forward their own equestrian offerings. Readers

of London newspapers like The Times, therefore, would have found a certain same-

ness in the offerings of the six major London theaters on the morning of 18 July 1811.

With Covent Garden offering “Timour the Tartar every night, this season,” the trans-

planted Drury-Lane company at the Lyceum Theatre advertise the premier of “an

Heroic, Tragic, Operatic Drama” entitled Quadrupeds; or, The Manager’s Last Kick!

Cobbled from an earlier farce, The Tailors (Haymarket, 1805), this burlesque of Blue-

Beard and Timour promises a full-scale battle between master and journeymen tailorson donkeys and mules. Struggling for a hit nearly a month into their season, the



320 M. Gamer

summer Haymarket Theatre, meanwhile, announces the imminent debut of

Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh; or, The Rovers of Weimar , a “Tragico-Comico-Anglo-

Germanico-Hippo-Ono-Dramatico Romance” also taken from an earlier play, the

Anti-Jacobin’s 1798 satire of The Rovers.

Beyond the world of the Theatre Royals, Times readers find even grander spectacles.At Westiminster Bridge, Astley’s publicizes Lisbon, reenacting recent battles of the

Peninsular Campaign, followed by the Blue-Beard -inspired “popular Naval, Military,

Equestrian, and Pedestrian Spectacle, called the Tyrant Saracen and Noble Moor .”

Further east at Blackfriars Road, the Surrey Theatre offers three works from the prolific

Thomas John Dibdin: “the admired Burletta of Tag in Tribulation”; a pantomime enti-

tled The Mandarin; or Harlequin in China; and (with great typographical fanfare) Blood

will have Blood! or, The Battle of the Bridges, a “hippodrame” celebrating Wellington’s

recent victories in Portugal. Not to be outdone, Sadler’s Wells announces several

productions by Thomas’s brother Charles Dibdin, including a “comic dance,” a “new Grand Venetian Aquatic Romance,” and “a new comic pantomime” entitled Harlequin

and Bluebeard , with horses jumping “over real water.” Subtitled “Blue-beard Traves-

tie,” this final entertainment features Mr. Austin as the “Genius of Burlesque,” Mr.

Lund singing “My Kingdom for a Horse,” and a final “grand Gallamaufry Combat,

Bipeds and Quadrupeds; the Quadropediant department under the direction of Mr.

Grimaldi.”

Such advertisements are often useful for reminding us of the diversity of subject,

form, and venue within the theater of Romanticism. Faced with the full spectrum of

performances advertised in London on a typical evening, we usually marvel at the

imaginative breadth of the entertainments offered. In this instance, however, the Timeslistings for 18 July 1811 astonish not for their heterogeneity but for their coherence and

narrow intertextuality. It is not just that every major and minor London theater is

producing hippodrama and devoting significant advertising space to doing so, but that

every hippodrama produced draws from either Wellington’s or Kemble’s recent

victories, whether in Europe or on the stage. It is a situation as remarkable as it is excep-

tional. Portugal or Covent Garden, British forces or Blue-Beard ’s Noble Moors, Napo-

leon or Timour, what signifies in this collective bill of fare is its consistency of subject

matter and source material. Its narrowness smacks of speculative bubble and manage-

rial panic; its uniformity recalls the cultural crazes of the 1790s, whether for Germandrama or Gothic romance. And here the process of imitation and appropriation occurs,

if anything, at a more rapid rate and with greater staying power.

It is not too much to say that, between their April debut and the end of the calendar

year, Timour and his horses became a theatrical discourse in their own right, inspiring

no fewer than seven stage responses in as many months. These plays possessed their

own evolving cast of characters and metatheatrical traditions, and ranged from

burlesque opera to melodrama, pantomime, and farce. They included not only the two

Quadrupeds and the Blue-beard Travestie but also, among the plays submitted to John

Larpent in the second half of 1811, Four-in-Hand (Haymarket, August 1811), The

Travellers Benighted (Haymarket, September 1811), and One Foot by Land and One Foot by Sea; or, The Tartar’s Tartar’d! (Olympic, November 1811). As the inaugural play for




a newly renovated Olympic Pavilion Theatre—which, during the summer of 1811, had

rebuilt its stage to hold up to a hundred horses—The Tartar’s Tartar’d featured

Bangwan Ho and his Oriental allies attacking, in what can only be called a hippodra-

matic vortex, the castles of both Blue-Beard and Timour in a single outing. Over the

next four decades, these two villains would reappear together and separately, Godzilla-like, across dozens of productions, equestrian and otherwise, including Tarrare, the

Tartar Chief (1825), Timour, Cream of Tartars (1845), and Lord Blue Beard; Or, the

Crim-Tartar, a Naturalised British Subject (1856).V.

V. The Production of Illegitimate Satire

As their titles suggest, the majority of stage responses to Blue-Beard and Timour the

Tartar employed elements of satire; yet the satire was of a curiously diffuse kind. While

some productions ridiculed key scenes and the pecuniary motives that produced them,still more simply appropriated their characters for the national stock of villains useful

for spectacles, melodramas, and pantomimes. This latter strategy was especially true of

the so-called “minor” theaters, which chose wholesale appropriation over travesty

since, having produced Timour -like entertainments for decades, their managers could

have little reason to protest Kemble’s apostasy other than for the increased competition

it brought to them. Occupying a position, as Leigh Hunt had put it, “beneath

criticism,” they had little reason to fear that the critical ire directed at Kemble would be

turned on themselves.

Looking to Covent Garden’s successes, the other Theatre Royals occupied a more

difficult position. With Drury Lane being rebuilt and the Old Price Riots still a matterof recent memory, attendance had been flat most of the 1810–11 season until the debut

of Astley’s horses in February. As Timour continued to boast full houses at Covent

Garden through July, Samuel Arnold at the Lyceum and George Colman the Younger

at the Haymarket responded with the same strategy: to exploit the rage for horses, and

assert their own superior taste, through the double medium of satire. The two shows

that resulted, Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, advertised themselves as

burlesques on Kemble’s equestrian productions. As a result, the same crowds that had

gone to see the horses at Covent Garden came to see them travestied as Quadrupeds at

the Lyceum and Haymarket.And in doing so, they attended remarkably similar productions. Beyond their similar

titles, Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh share common narrative struc-

tures, dramatic techniques, and strategies of ridicule. Each play opens with a theater

manager beset by debts weighing the pros and cons of equestrian performances, and

each closes with a mock version of Blue-Beard ’s and Timour ’s climactic battle-scenes.

Perhaps most important, whether Arnold’s “Heroic, Tragic, Operatic Drama” or

Colman the Younger’s “Tragico-Comico-Anglo-Germanico-Hippo-Ono-Dramatico

Romance,” each presents itself as a generic monstrosity and thus as a ridicule of

theaters for promising the span of genres while providing only mongrel productions.

In each play, the theater manager possesses neither the principles nor the resolve toprotect the nation’s drama from foreign and generic contamination. On the surface the



322 M. Gamer

rhetorical position of the plays would seem fairly clear: as Theatre Royals producing

such satires, the Lyceum and Haymarket purportedly promise to be better defenders

and custodians of the drama than Kemble, and to be above such petty concerns.

Reviewers of Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, however, responded not

with applause but with incredulity and even concern. They especially noted the hurriednature of each play’s production: that both were plagiarisms of existing plays; that both

employed the same well-worn frame narrative of distressed manager and dress

rehearsal made popular in The Rehearsal (1671), The Critic (1779), and Old Hay at the

New Market (1795); and that neither significantly altered its source text for the present

occasion. Thomas Rowlandson’s print of Arnold’s play is telling for how it reads its

opening scene as symptomatic of the state of the theater, picturing, as it does, Arnold

sending a dun through a trap door with the aid of Harlequin, Pantaloon, and Clown

(see Figure 12). Yet, unlike the managers in Quadrupeds, Arnold and Colman the

Younger could not dismiss their critics so easily. Among other things, Quadrupeds wascriticized for its inflated advertisements, which, the 19 July 1811 Morning Post reported,

had promised twenty jackasses taught to bray to music. In the case of The Quadrupeds

of Quedlinburgh, the play’s title and timing raised suspicions that Colman was acting

entirely out of competitive need—that he had learned of Quadrupeds while the play was

in rehearsal, and had scrambled to fit up a rival production. Certainly Colman’s

piecemeal application to the Licenser (application 15 July, play MS 18 July, prologue

24 July), his decision to advertise the play the same day Quadrupeds debuted (18 July),

Figure 12 Thomas Rowlandson, The Manager’s Last Kick; or A New Way to Pay Old Debts(1811). Author’s Collection.




and his determination to hurry the play into production only a week later (25 July) all

suggest his own play to be the ironic offspring of the very forces it claimed to satirize.Figure12 ThomasRowlands on, TheManager’sLastKick;orANewWay toPayOld Debts (1811).Auth or’sCollecti on.

Whether privy or not to the hurried details of Arnold’s and Colman’s productions,

reviewers systematically questioned their intent and effect, and most criticized their

deployment of satire as misdirected and inappropriate.5 (One of the most suggestiveaspects of these notices, in fact, is their gravity of interrogation.) All censured the

extreme length of both plays as inappropriate for an afterpiece and as perpetuating

what the 19 July 1811 Morning Post called a “system … for pantomimes in five acts.”

What emerges is a kind of collective and constitutive argument: if the Lyceum and

Haymarket really considered Kemble’s horses a threat to theatrical standards, they

would have produced original satires on them rather than retool stale productions into

lengthy and incomplete burlesques. Leigh Hunt’s review of Quadrupeds in the Exam-

iner for 21 July 1811 synthesizes the point nicely: “[W]hen the humour does come, it is

abrupt and at long intervals; in short, it is not the coat that is humorous, but thepatches; and this is very different from true and entire burlesque.” The implication is

that such patchy satires, far from chastising the forces of pantomime, are essentially cut

from Harlequin’s coat.

Hunt’s observation, moreover, points to a more striking aspect of the critical

discourse: the degree to which reviewers seized on the two Quadrupeds as an

opportunity to define and defend satire from misappropriation and misuse. It is as if

the same forces that had placed hippodramas on the stage of a Theatre Royal had also

corrupted subsequent satires of them. Part of the problem (as reviewers saw it) lay in

the toothless nature of both performances, which seemed less to attack than copy the

Covent Garden horses. Thus, the 19 July 1811 Morning Post protested against Quadru- peds as burlesque without ridicule, a point the Times chose to analyze at length:

[I]t was “flat, stale,” and … completely denuded of humour; and those dialogues were

natural only in being what might have been expected from the flat vulgarity of brutal

violence of low rioters… . If our advice were to be taken, it should be totally disembow-

elled, and … nothing but the first and last scenes—nothing but the “mera exuviae”

suffered to remain. (19 July 1811)

At the bottom, both reviews condemn Arnold as either fundamentally misunderstand-

ing or willfully misapplying burlesque. Composed of a frame narrative burlesquing one

object and a source play satirizing another—and each in a different style—Quadrupedsmixed satiric modes without apparent purpose. The opening and closing scenes may

deflate similar scenes at Covent Garden; but the rest of Quadrupeds proceeds without

referring to Blue-Beard and Timour , instead mocking the vulgar class pretensions of

tailors. The Examiner ’s review of 21 July 1811 comes to similar conclusions, describing

the play as “engrafted,” essentially deformed, and necessarily “different from a true and

entire burlesque.” “It is not too much to say of the performers in general,” Hunt

concludes, comparing Arnold’s satiric pretensions to the class pretensions of the tailors

themselves, “that they act up to the faults of their original, and mistake flat abruptness

for quaintness … [and] have no notion of burlesque.”

By the time these same reviewers approached Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh a week later, their analyses had developed into something like full-scale theorizing, in part



324 M. Gamer

because of Colman the Younger’s status as playwright and satirist. But the greater cause

lay in their broader concern that Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh would exacerbate

tendencies already troubling Arnold’s Quadrupeds: that its even more profound

jumbling of satirical modes, in confusing high and low generally, would further blur

distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate theater. Ironically, their anxiety produced some of the decade’s most sustained writing about dramatic satire.

Thus, the Morning Chronicle’s review of Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh laments at

length to see “parody … degraded, by being made subservient to the exclusive object of

raising a laugh against that which, unworthy as it may be, is below the notice of criti-

cism” (27 July 1811). Hunt’s review in The Examiner , meanwhile, points to Colman’s

fundamental “confusion of burlesque and mock-heroic, which are in reality very

distinct things, the former being a degradation of what is great, the latter an elevation

of what is little” (28 July 1811). Six days later, we find this analysis fully expanded in

Bell’s Weekly Messenger , which takes up the problem of confusing satiric modes and of engaging in dramatic “caricature … independent of any aim at ridicule”:

There are chiefly two forms of comic ridicule—the one … may be termed comic caricature

… [which is] a ridicule of extravagance… . Now, there is no objection to this kind of

caricature, as long as it has a show of ridicule—as long as it is a parody of a similar

absurdity. By itself, however, and independent of any aim at ridicule, it is sheer nonsense.

Lords Puddingfield and Beefington were in this latter predicament. They were absolute

fools, and without any original in ridicule.

The second kind of ridicule is burlesque; which is of two kinds, the high burlesque, which

parodies low images and affairs in a lofty style, and the low burlesque, which degrades what

is serious and lofty, by low and buffoonish appendages. Both these kinds of humour wereemployed in this Piece, but without an attention to their nature. Buffoonery was

introduced without an aim, and without any possible nature or probability; and the high

burlesque was frequently mere grave stupidity. (4 August 1811)

The review’s careful marshalling of Aristotelian categories signifies on several registers.

On one hand, it posits a world in which every satiric mode has a distinct “nature” and

function while also assuming the undesirability—and even unintelligibility—of mixing

these modes or reassigning their functions. Yet it also allows the reviewer to posit social

and formal analogues for this confusion of modes. Where mixing and misapplying

satiric modes produces only buffoonery among Lords and “grave stupidity” among thelower orders, the end must be a more general and pernicious jumbling of hierarchies

of aesthetic and cultural value.

Such a review is suggestive in part because, given the earlier press on Kemble’s

horses, one would not expect similar outcry against dramas claiming to satirize them.

Even more suggestive, however, are the insights they provide concerning the relation

between the cultural production of hippodrama and that of satire. For while the scale

of dramatic response to Blue-Beard and Timour the Tartar may be surprising, I am

not surprised that the response came in the form of satire, or that the “crisis” of confi-

dence provoked by Kemble’s staging of these two plays created its own minor crisis

among critics writing about satire itself. While not sharing legitimate drama’sroyal protections, Regency satire depended on the same dichotomies that upheld




them—particularly, as Gary Dyer has noted, early-nineteenth-century “establish-

ment” satires, which interpreted the juxtaposition of aesthetic modes, whether

dramatic or satiric, as an essentially radical perversion (Dyer 3–4). Satire is, moreover,

perhaps the most aggressively oppositional of genres because it claims to attack from

foundational truths. The site of truth may be contested among satirists; the style may range from ironic laughter to severe chastisement; the relation between satire and the

objects satirized may be mutually constitutive; but through all this, satire, even radical

satire, speaks from a sense of its own authority and legitimacy (see Bogel; Boscawen;

Dryden; Dyer; Gifford; Jones; and Wood).

Thus, looking across the range of responses to satires of Blue-Beard and Timour the

Tartar , we find a growing uneasiness over the definition, function, and power of satire

to defend supposedly established and permanent truths. This is especially visible in

critical notices of Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, where reveiwers, using Colman’s love

of profit as a platform for their own writing, anxiously reconstruct an essentially conservative and ostentatiously classical theory of dramatic satire, painstakingly

defining forms of ridicule, mockery, burlesque, and parody. But such concerns about

satire and the drama are hardly limited to the columns of newspaper reviews. We find

especially compelling examples, for the purposes of this essay, in the poetry of Lord

Byron—not, as one might expect, in Don Juan or English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,

but in work far more intimately concerned with Kemble’s horses and the satiric

responses to them.VI.

VI. Byron’s Rejected AddressesWhether Leslie Marchand’s authoritative treatment or more recent accounts, biogra-

phies of Byron are remarkably consistent about July of 1811, the month Byron returned

from his Grand Tour, and the sixteen months that followed (see Eisler; Grosskurth;

Marchand; and McCarthy). During the months Timour the Tartar transformed the

London stage and equestrian culture, Byron was at Malta, having written three long

poems during his travels: cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and two satires,

Hints from Horace and The Curse of Minerva. Returning to England on Bastille Day in

1811, Byron was waylaid in August by the deaths of his mother and his friends John

Edelston and Charles Matthews.

6

The next months saw Byron’s first speech to theHouse of Lords and the printing of the poems, the March 1812 publication of Childe

Harold propelling Byron into stardom. The title of Marchand’s chapter for this initial

period of Byron’s homecoming—”1811–1812: London and Newstead: Childe

Harold ”—tells the story of the biographies concisely, with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

dominating the chronological and geographical landscapes of the literary life.

As writerly choices go, focusing on an author’s breakthrough work hardly requires

apology. Byron’s own correspondence during these months, though, tells a different

story, in part because he had no way of foreseeing Childe Harold ’s success or how that

success would transform his own public persona. Thus, when leaving England in 1809,

Byron had been considered—and had considered himself—a satirist with interests inpoetry, travel, and the theater. The books he took on tour reflect these preoccupations,



326 M. Gamer

as do his letters composed abroad. On embarking, Byron enclosed a verse satire on

travel to Francis Hodgson; subsequent missives described various adventures and

sights, requested Walter Scott’s latest poem, and recounted anecdotes of the 1809

Drury Lane fire. Letters from the first months of 1811 to John Cam Hobhouse and

James Cawthorn, meanwhile, disclosed publication plans not for Childe Harold’sPilgrimage but for Hints from Horace, and show Byron as particular about the quality

of print and paper as about the proposed book’s structure, which he intended to model

on William Gifford’s Baviad .7 Standing as a Horatian sequel to the Juvenalian English

Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Byron’s Hints from Horace stands in a long tradition,

anchored by Pope, of free translations that used Ars Poetica as a base text but substi-

tuted contemporary references as desired. In Byron’s rendering, Horace’s advice to

authors gives way to a satirical compendium of the life stages of Regency man through

his consideration of that “many-headed monster … the public” (Byron, Poetical Works

1: 297):Behold him freshman! forced no more to groan

O’er Virgil’s devilish verses, and—his own;

Prayers are too tedious, lectures too abstruse,

He flies from T[a]v[e]ll’s frown to “Fordham’s Mews”; …

Fines, tutors, tasks, conventions threat in vain,

Before hounds, hunters, and Newmarket plain. (1: 297–98)

This familiar catalogue of the Whip yields to an equally familiar portrait of the British

stage in decline and besieged by the usual suspects: excesses of sentiment and violence

(lines 261–80); Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre and supernatural spectacle (lines

281–92); opera and melodrama (lines 293–326); the decline of comedy into farce(lines 327–48); and the Licensing Act and the “Methodistic men” who administer it

(lines 349–80). Dominated by theatrical anecdotes, the notes are at once more personal

and possess greater bite, satirizing gaming houses (“Hell,” 1: 435), clubs (“a pleasant

purgatory,” 1: 435), Southey’s Curse of Kehama (“Its ‘alacrity of sinking’ … so great,

that it has never since been heard of,” 1: 439), and Lord Grosvenor’s hypocrisy

(“Benvolio does not bet; but every man who maintains racehorses is a promoter of all

the concomitant evils of the turf,” 1: 436). This and not Childe Harold was the poem

Byron first handed to his friend and literary agent Robert Charles Dallas on returning

to England, declaring at the same time that he “believed satire to be his forte” (Dallas117). And when Dallas expressed a preference for Childe Harold and found John

Murray willing to publish it, Byron stipulated a preference for placing on its title page,

instead of his name, the phrase “by the Author of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”

(Byron, Letters 2: 76).

If Dallas was disappointed with Hints from Horace, the reason lay in the dated nature

of the satire. What had been fresh two years earlier was now stale, particularly the

attacks on The Castle Spectre and the culture of Newmarket. While Byron had been

abroad, Lewis had provided satirists with a new equestrian target in the form of Timour

the Tartar , and Whips had added Wellingtonian military flourishes to their great coats.

Needless to say, once ashore Byron adjusted quickly enough to the new equestrian stateof things. Gone were earlier plans to join the regiments in Portugal (Byron, Letters 2:




54, 2: 56–57). Instead, by late July we see Byron writing with satiric vengeance, first

privately in a letter to James Wedderburn (“Bold”) Webster, in which he refuses to

succumb to the usual wheeling and dealing of Whips and Bucks in horses and carriages:

200 g[uinea]s for a Carriage with ancient lining!!! Rags & Rubbish! You must write another

pamphlet my dear W. before—but pray do not waste your time and eloquence in expos-

tulation, because it will do neither of us good, but Decide—Content or not content.—The

best thing you can do for the Tutor you speak of, will be to send him in your Vis (with the

lining) to the U - niversity of Gottingen; how can you suppose (now that my own Bear is

dead) that I have any situation for a German Genius of this kind till I get another, or some

children… . The Coronet will not grace the “ pretty Vis” till your tattered lining ceases to

disgrace it. (2: 63–64)

I quote this passage because it testifies at once to the rapidity with which Byron re-

installed himself into the world of Regency dramatic and equestrian culture. Writing

five days after the debut of Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh, Byron responds to Webster’s

bait-and-switch by transforming the vis-à-vis carriage into the Haymarket Theatre

diligence that propels the various sentimental friendships and illegitimate children of

Colman the Younger’s play. The allusions to “German Genius” and the famous song

(“The U - niversity of Gottingen”) from Colman’s source play, The Rovers, place the

reference beyond doubt. What interests here most, though, is the sophistication,

facility, and sting with which Byron incorporates the language of a current play to

chastise a friend’s double-dealing.

Through the end of 1811, Byron’s letters continue their preoccupation with satire,

theatrical and otherwise. Aside from his lengthy description of “Gentleman Amateur”

Robert Coates at the Haymarket in December (2: 143–44), his correspondence is domi-nated by William Gifford, who functions as presiding spirit to Hints from Horace and

as prospective reader for Childe Harold . With Gifford already having been praised

lavishly in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Byron felt Murray’s sounding the

Quarterly Review editor for his opinion on Childe Harold would prevent him from

expressing his real opinion about the poem:

I am not at all pleased with Murray for showing the MS.; and I am certain Gifford must see

it in the same light I do… . It is bad enough to be a scribbler, without having recourse to

such shifts to extort praise, or deprecate censure. It is anticipating, it is begging, kneeling,

adulating,—the devil! the devil! the devil! (2: 101)

What heightens Byron’s chagrin is his sense of himself as a satirist who has just lost a

position of equal footing with an idol. It is this sense of Gifford (in Byron’s words) as

“Magnus Apollo” (2: 91), as “Juvenal” himself (2: 80), and as “not only the first Satirist

of the day, but Editor of one of the principal Reviews” (2: 78) that causes him to

dominate Byron’s autumn letters. More important, it illuminates—in the wake of

Childe Harold ’s success and Kemble’s decision to revive Timour the Tartar on 30 March

1812 after the success of the previous year—Byron’s belated attempts to intervene in

the debate on hippodrama through the medium of satire, and from the bully pulpit of

the Opening Address for the newly rebuilt Drury Lane Theatre on 10 October 1812.

The details of the destruction of the old Drury and the opening of the new are asfarcical as they are compelling. Where Sheridan’s gross mismanagement had insured



328 M. Gamer

the theater’s ruin even before it was reduced to ashes in 1809, the Committee of

Management did everything possible to make a mess of the new one’s October debut.

Newspaper accounts repeatedly cite inadequate police presence and crowd-control

procedures; they reserve their primary criticisms, however, for the Committee’s

handling of the Opening Address that was to commemorate the evening. Headed by Lord Holland and Samuel Whitbread, the Committee had announced in August a

contest with a prize of twenty pounds, the winning address to be spoken at the opening

festivities. By September they had received 112 submissions, Byron declining to

compete “against all Grubstreet” (2: 197). Whether because of quality of the submis-

sions or because none of the contestants was adequately famous, Holland approached

Byron to write the address. And in spite of his uneasiness over the anger that might

result from the 112 rejected contestants, Byron agreed.

As Byron was quick to discover, writing by invitation was still uncomfortably close

to writing for hire. Having submitted his initial draft on 23 September, he continued tosend revisions feverishly over the next ten days in answer to various Committee

objections. Byron’s uncharacteristic patience with the unending stream of queries,

particularly those of Samuel Whitbread, testifies to how seriously he took the task. As

the manuscript evidence demonstrates, his resolve derived its strength from a desire to

reform what he saw as recent abuses to the stage.

We can see the intensity of the negotiations through the flurry of additions and

corrections sent by Byron to Lord Holland that have survived. After dispatching the

initial draft from Cheltenham, Byron posted further revisions on September 24th

(thrice), 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th (twice), 29th, and 30th. The letters began and proceeded

cheerfully enough until 27 September, when negotiations shifted from queries aboutversification to objections over content. By the 28th, Byron and the Committee were at

an apparent impasse, with Byron dug in over the issue of hippodrama:

Is Whitbread determined to castrate all my cavalry lines? I don’t see why t’other house should

be spared, besides it is the public who ought to know better, & you recollect Johnson’s was

against similar buffooneries of Rich’s but certes I am not Johnson… . I do think in the

present state of the Stage, it had been unpardonable to pass over the horses… . I confess I

wish that part of the address to stand. (2: 212–14)

What becomes clear as the exchange of letters progresses is that Byron wished to write

an address that was both celebratory and satirical. The manuscript submitted haddivided the address fairly evenly between the two: the first half consisting of conven-

tional commemoration, the second of more pointed satirical exhortation. Whitbread

had objected to these latter lines, especially a passage condemning the Covent Garden

horses as a derogation of public taste:

But know—our triumph this alone secures

The judging voice and eye must first be yours

Ours to obey your will or right or wrong

To soar in Sentiment, or creep in song

Nay, lower still, the Drama yet deplores

That late she deigned to crawl upon “all fours”

When Richard roars in Bosworth for a horse,




If you command, the steed must come in course

If you demand—our intellectual feast

Must furnish store alike for Man and Beast

If you decree, the Stage must condescend

To soothe the sickly taste we dare not mend. (Byron, Poetical Works 3: 20n–21n)

Inscribed in these and other cancelled lines—and in the epistolary exchange itself—is

a fundamental disagreement over the duties that Theatre Royals have to the drama, to

their audience, and to one another. While the Committee ostentatiously objected

because of the lines’ indecorum, its actions appear also motivated by a desire to prevent

any kind of discord between Drury Lane and “rival” theater Covent Garden. Put

another way, Byron’s “cavalry lines” did not so much violate decorum as threaten to

erode the cultural authority and monopolistic profitability of the Theatre Royals. The

postscript to Byron’s September 28th letter hints at such motives by reminding Lord

Holland that the Drury Lane company themselves had satirized hippodrama more than

once at the Lyceum:

On looking again I doubt my idea of having obviated W[hitbread]’s objection to the other

house allusion is a ‘non sequitur’ but I wish to plead for this part, because the thing really

is not to be passed over.—Many afterpieces in the Lyceum by the same company have

already attacked this “Augean Stable”—& Johnson in his prologue against Lun [theater

manager John Rich] … is surely a fair precedent (Bryon, Letters 2: 214).

While the language of the passage is tortured by Byron’s diplomacy, the implication is

clear: with the question of precedent a “non sequitur” and a blind, some underlying

motive is being “passed over.” This and his other arguments either ignored or rejected,

Byron was finally reduced on September 29th to pleading: “I do implore for my owngratification one lash on those accursed quadrupeds—a ‘long shot Sir Lucius if you love

me’ … I shall choak if we must overlook their d—d menagerie” (2: 219).

By September 30th Byron had effectively given in—although whether worn down

from the Committee’s obstinacy or from an attack of kidney stones is uncertain. He

continued to send revisions as requested, and four days after the Address acknowledged

its lukewarm reception in an October 14th letter to Lord Holland. “My opinion,” he

wrote cryptically, “is what it always was, perhaps, pretty near that of the public” (2:

226). What had happened on the evening of the Address could only have confirmed

Byron’s sense of having missed a satiric opportunity. After the conclusion of the main-piece, one of the Drury rejected contestants, the translator of Lucretius Dr. William

Busby, had arisen and asked for the audience’s impartial hearing of his Address, which

his son George then attempted to recite several times without being heard. The episode

provided a feast for reviewers and satirists, with George Cruickshank memorably

depicting Byron as the literal butt of the Busbys’ battering-ram (see Figure 13). While

a pouting John Bull exclaims with arms folded “Profits!!! D—me if any will come” and

Lord Holland stands on a pile of rejected Addresses, Byron capers to avoid Busby’s

battering ram, inscribed “Monologue,” exclaiming, “Stop! good Doctor! one Murder

is enough I do not wish to suffer the same fate with Lucretius.”Figure13 GeorgeCruickshank,“Management—or—ButtsandHogheads”(1812;detail;Byronat center).© CopyrightTheTrusteesof theBritishMuseum.

These same weeks saw other satires as well. On the same day Byron acquiesced to theobjections of the Committee, he related to Holland that the Drury Lane contest had



330 M. Gamer

inspired “myriads of ironical addresses [al]ready—some in imitation of what is calledmy style … it will not be bad fun even for the imitated ” (2: 221). Having been forced to

censor himself, Byron took a palpable enough pleasure at the prospect of dramatic

satire nonetheless having its day.

And whether inspired by this expectation or galled by the Committee, Byron’s own

resolution to satirize equestrian culture, if anything, intensified during these weeks.

Blocked from criticizing the state of the drama in his own public person, he began

writing anonymously, composing at least eleven satirical poems between October and

December of 1812. As one might expect, the most energetic of these—“A Parenthetical

Address, by Dr. Plagiary” and “The Waltz,”—were composed during the first nineteendays of October.

Perhaps more than any other poem by Byron, “The Waltz” is the snapshot of a

moment in popular culture; yet, here the seductive indecorum of waltzing (at its peak

of popularity in 1812) is seen as part of broader trends in British culture. In short, “The

Waltz” is less about the dance itself than about the culture of ostentation and display of

which it is a symptom. Thus its Preface, written in the persona of a Midlands country

gentleman invited “to pass the winter in town,” begins not with waltzing but with the

associated fad of gentleman coach driving:

Thinking no harm, and our girls being come to a marriageable (or, as they call, marketable)

age … we came up in our old chariot, of which, by the by, my wife grew so much ashamed,

in less than a week, that I was obliged to buy a second-hand barouche, of which I might

Figure 13 George Cruickshank, “Management—or—Butts and Hogheads” (1812; detail;

Byron at center). © Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.




mount the box, Mrs. H. says, if I could drive, but never see the inside—(Byron, Poetical

Works 3: 22)

Byron’s name for his persona, “Horace Hornem, Esq.,” aptly summarizes the cultural

forces here at work. In one sense, middle England is being horned (“given horns to,

cuckolded”) by Regency fashion; in another, middle England is being horned by Horace himself, Byron donning the appellation “Horace” (as he had in Hints from

Horace) much in the same way he dubs Gifford “Juvenal” in his correspondence. The

Preface then moves from coach-driving to a ballroom transformed by waltzing where

Hornem, at first outraged at seeing “Mrs. Hornem with her arms half around the loins

of a huge hussar-looking gentleman” (3: 23), is finally made to approve when his own

daughter laughs at him. What follows is the completion of a trinity of Regency popular

culture, where the country-squire-turned-gentleman-coach-driver not only approves

the new dance but also links the recent victories in Portugal to Dr. Busby’s alternative

Address at Drury Lane:Indeed, so much I like it, that having a turn for rhyme, tastily displayed in some election

ballads and songs, in honour of all the victories … I sate down, and with the aid of W. F.

Esq. and a few hints from Dr. B. (whose recitations I attend, and am monstrous fond of

Master B.’s manner of delivering his father’s late successful D. L. Address), I composed the

following Hymn, wherewithal to make my sentiments known to the Public, whom,

nevertheless, I heartily despise as well as the Critics. (3: 23)

One finds a similar triumvirate in Byron’s “Parenthetical Address, by Dr. Plagiary,”

which quotes Busby’s address in the first half of each couplet while undercutting it in

the second. Thus Busby’s lines celebrating British military victories become the vehicles

for dramatic satire:

“This spirit WELLINGTON has shewn in Spain,”

To furnish Melo-drames for Drury-lane;

“Another MARLBOROUGH points to Blenheim’s story,”

And GEORGE and I will dramatise it for ye. (3: 33)

In both poems, vulgar self-advertisement and self-proclaimed excellence are depicted

as symptomatic forms of a more general national prostitution—and both are

insistently linked to the present state of the stage: “’Old Drury never, never soared so

high,’ / So says the Manager, and so says I” (3: 33).In this sense, Byron’s move to anonymous satire in “The Waltz” and the “Parenthet-

ical Address” signals a growing sense that dramatic satire must be cultivated outside the

orbit of the patent theaters for the rights and duties of satire to be reasserted. Put

another way, through his experience with the Drury Lane Address, Byron comes to the

same conclusion as did reviewers of Quadrupeds and Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh: that

dramatic institutions protected by royal patent cannot be expected to police

themselves; and that legitimacy in drama and satire must come from without.

In connecting the stage to Newmarket, hippodrama to gentleman coach driving, and

popular drama to satire, I have sought to make a case for placing popular theater at the

center of how Romantic-period culture understood and organized itself—as a force, inshort, irresistible enough to affect the orbits of other cultural forms. For however much



332 M. Gamer

we remember systems of genres as arbitrary impositions of one set of views or historical

moments over others, the issue changes the moment we re-anchor these concepts and

categories in specific cultures and their institutions. This is particularly true of the

theater, where parliamentary act and royal decree codify otherwise abstract notions of

high and low, legitimate and illegitimate, so that conceptual dichotomies become legaland institutional properties. In the form of monopolies awarded by royal patent, then,

such concepts could be, for lack of a better word, owned, until they took on a material

existence backed by statutory law and royal edict.

Such aristocratic and legal backing provides a powerful illusion of the real; and when

that illusion is broken and its Legitimate Order of Things upset, we can expect crises

that reach far beyond the local site where the break or transgression has occurred—

even with transgressions so apparently small as that of gentlemen driving their own

coaches or Theatres Royal hiring horses to stage a more spectacular pitched battle or

cavalry charge. When we add a sense of the economic stakes at play here, which are sohigh that the division of dramatic turf must be supported by royal patent and

parliamentary act, we can begin to see how small transgressions invite fairly massive

responses. Hence my interest in connecting two Regency crises of legitimacy, of theater

and of satire, to one another. And hence my desire to explain the theatrical seasons of

1810–11 and 1811–12 not only in terms of theater history, but also in terms of other

cultural arenas connected to the theater—from the scandals that produced institutions

like Newmarket and the Jockey Club, to the horse culture that gave us clubs like the

“Four-in-Hand” and the craze for gentleman coach-driving, to, finally, the tradition of

dramatic satire that gave us characters like Goldfinch in The Road to Ruin, and that

outraged Byron when powerful interests in the theater forced him to censor himself.

Notes

1.

[1] See The Examiner , March 17–31, May 12, July 14, and July 28, 1811.2.

[2] Timour ’s run of forty-four nights ended only with the close of the theatrical season; revived 30

March 1812, it held the stage for half a century. Frederick Reynolds reports Covent Garden in

1810–11 had “the most profitable season in its history,” with receipts of £100,00, 25% higher

than average (Reynolds 2: 404).3.

[3] Probably the most well known is the 1807 Satirist print entitled “The Monster Melodrama.”4.

[4] Notable early exceptions are Saxon, and Mayer. More recently, see Cox; Moody; and Rzepka.5.

[5] See the 19 July 1811 Morning Chronicle, Morning Post , and Times; the 21 July 1811 Bell’s

Weekly Messenger and Examiner ; the 27 July 1811 Morning Chronicle, Courier , and Times; and

the 28 July 1811 Examiner .6.

[6] Not the actor Charles Mathews, but a Cambridge friend.7.

[7] Byron wished his poem to be printed with the original Horace on facing pages. In his

correspondence Byron calls Hints from Horace a “paraphrase” and an “imitation,” recalling

the subtitle of Gifford’s Baviad: A Paraphrastic Imitation of the First Satire Of Persius (Byron,

Letters 2: 43; 2: 80–81; and 2: 90).

Works CitedAusten, Jane. Persuasion. Ed. Linda Bree. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1998.




Bell’s Weekly Messenger. London: 1796–1896.

Blue-beard Travestie. Sadler’s Wells, 1811.

Boaden, James. Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble. 2 vols. London: Longman, 1825.

Bogel, Frederick W. The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron. Ithaca:

Cornell UP, 2001.

Boscawen, William. The Progress of Satire. London: Bell, 1798Bracegirdle, H. Concise History of British Horseracing. Derby: English Life, 1999.

Bundle, Jacob. Lord Blue Beard; Or, the Crim-Tartar, a Naturalised British Subject. London: Printed

for the Author, 1856.

Byron, George Gordon. Complete Poetical Works. 7 vols. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Clarendon,

1980–93.

———. Letters and Journals. 13 vols. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. London: Murray, 1973–94.

Carlton House Magazine. London: Stratford, 1792–8.

The Centuar-ian Manager. London, 1811.

Coleridge, Samuel. Poetical Works. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.

Colman, George the Younger. Blue-Beard!; or, Female Curiosity. London: Clowes, 1811.

Combe, William. The Dance of Life. London: Ackermann, 1817.Cox, Jeffrey N. “Spots of Time: The Structure of the Dramatic Evening in the Theater of

Romanticism.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41 (1999): 403–425.

Courier London: 1804–42.

Cruickshank, George. Management—or—Butts & Hogsheads. London: Jones, 1812.

Cruickshank, Isaac. A Hint for an Escape at the Next Spring Meeting. London: Fores, 1792.

Dallas, Charles Robert, ed. Correspondence of Lord Byron. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1825.

David, Saul. Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency. New York: Atlantic

Monthly, 1998.

Defoe, Daniel. Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722. New York: Cassell, 1888.

Dent, William. Road to Ruin. London: Dent, 1792.

Dramatic Censor . Ed. J. M. Williams. London: 1811–12.Dryden, John. “Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire.” Satires of Decimus Junius

Juvenalis. 2nd ed. London: Tonson, 1697.

Dyer, Gary. British Satire and the Politics of Style 1789–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Edgeworth, Maria. Patronage. 3 vols. London: Johnson, 1814.

Eisler, Benita. Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame. New York: Knopf, 1999.

Evening Mail. London: 1789–1868.

The Examiner. Ed. Leigh Hunt, 1808–21. London: 1808–81.

Franklin, Caroline. Byron: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.

Genest, John. Some Account of the English Stage. 10 vols. Bath: Carrington, 1832.

Gifford, William. The Baviad. London: Faulder, 1791.

———. The Maeviad. London: Nicol, Debrett, and Richardson, 1795.Grosskurth, Phyllis. Byron: The Flawed Angel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Heath, William. Mr. Mathews in the Character of Cipher. London: Walker, 1810.

Hook, Theodore Edward. Four-in-Hand. San Marino: Huntington Library Larpent MS 1689.

Jones, Steven. Satire and Romanticism. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.

Larpent, Anna. Diary. 17 vols. San Marino: Huntington Library MS 31201.

Male, G. One Foot by Land and One Foot by Sea; or, The Tartar’s Tartar’d! San Marino: Huntington

Library Larpent MS 1695.

Marchand, Leslie A. Byron: A Biography. 3 vols. New York: Knopf, 1957.

Mayer, David III. Harlequin in His Element: The English Pantomime, 1806–1836. Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 1969.

McCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Moers, Ellen. The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P,

1960.



334 M. Gamer

Moody, Jane. Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770–1840. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP,

2000.

Morning Chronicle. London: 1789–1865.

Morning Post . London: 1772–1937.

Pocock, Isaac. Hit or Miss! London: Wyatt, 1810.

Reynolds, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Reynolds. 2 vols. London: Colburn, 1826.Rowlandson, Thomas. How to Escape Losing. London: Fores, 1791.

———. How to Escape Winning. London: Fores, 1791.

Rzepka, Charles J. “Bang-Up! Theatricality and the ‘Diphrelatic Art’ in De Quincey’s English Mail

Coach.” Nineteenth-Century Prose 28 (2001): 75–101.

Saxon, A. H. Enter Foot and Horse: A History of Hippodrama in England and France. New Haven and

London: Yale UP, 1968.

Scott, S. Mr. Davis as the Georgian Chief in Timour the Tartar. London: Wheble, 1811.

Scott, Walter. Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. Ed. Claire Lamont. Oxford and New York: Oxford

UP, 1998.

Sedley, Charles. The Barouche Driver and His Wife: A Tale for Haut Ton. 2 vols. London: Hughes,

1807.Shelley, Percy. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat. 2nd ed. New York:

Norton, 2002.

Smith, E. A. George IV. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999.

Songs, Recitative and Duets […] in the opera entitled Tarrare, the Tartar Chief . London: Lowndes,

1825.

Sun. London: 1792–1871.

Timbs, John. Clubs and Club Life in London. London: Chatto and Windus, 1872.

Times. London: 1788–.

Timour, Cream of Tartars. London: Johnson, 1845.

Travellers Benighted . San Marino: Huntington Library Larpent MS 1690.

Walpole, Horace. Correspondence. 48 vols. Ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis. New Haven and London:Yale UP 1937–83.

Warton, Thomas. Newmarket, A Satire. London: Newbery, 1751.

Wood, Marcus. Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.

Wordsworth, William. Prose Works. 3 vols. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser.

Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

Hippo Drama

Documents

Transcript of Hippo Drama