THE SOCIETY DRAMA.
"Full of most excellent differences, of very soft society, and great
showing."--_Hamlet_, Act v. Sc. 2.
A few extracts from the prologue which Mr. Epes Sargent wrote for Mrs.
Mowatt's _Fashion_, in 1845, will give a comparatively correct picture of
the feeling which existed between native playwrights and the dramatic
critics of this country towards the end of the first half of the present
century, and will show how strong was the prejudice then existing against
dramatic works of home manufacture. The comedy was purely original; its
writer was an American, and a woman; its scenes were laid in the city of
New York; and _Fashion_ was emphatically an American play.
At the rising of the curtain on the opening night Mr. Crisp was discovered
reading a newspaper; and he spoke as follows, the italics being Mr.
Sargent's own:
"_Fashion_, a Comedy! I'll go--but stay--
Now I read farther, 'tis a _native_ play!
Bah! home-made calicoes are well enough,
But home-made dramas _must_ be stupid stuff.
Had it the _London_ stamp 'twould do; but then
For plays we lack the manners and the men!
Thus speaks _one_ critic--hear _another's_ creed:
_Fashion!_ What's here? [_Reads._] It never can succeed!
What! from a _woman's_ pen? It takes a _man_
To write a comedy--no woman can!
* * * * *
But, sir--but, gentlemen--you, sir, who think
No comedy can flow from _native_ ink--
Are we such _perfect_ monsters, or such _dull_,
That wit no traits for ridicule can cull?
Have we no follies here to be redressed?
No vices gibbeted? No crimes confessed?
* * * * *
Friends, from these scoffers we appeal to you!
Condemn the _false_, but, oh, applaud the _true_!
Grant that _some_ wit may grow on native soil,
And Art's fair fabric rise from _woman's_ toil!
While we exhibit but to _reprehend_
The social vices, 'tis for _you_ to mend!"
The audience was long and loud in its applause of the prologue, but the
play was so well written, so well represented, and so deserving of success
that Mrs. Mowatt and Mr. Sargent might have spared themselves their
appeal to the sympathy of the general public. The critics, as a rule, were
well disposed, although Edgar Allan Poe, one of the sternest of them, said
that _Fashion_ resembled _The School for Scandal_, to which some of its
admirers had likened it, as the shell resembles the living locust; a
stricture which was hardly just. _Fashion_ created an excitement in the
theatrical world that had not been known for years before, and has hardly
been equalled since. It was said, and with some truth, to have revived the
drama in this country, and to have reawakened a declining taste for
dramatic representations of the higher and purer kind. It was almost the
first attempt made to exhibit on our stage a correct picture of American
society and manners, and although it was a satire on a certain _parvenu_
class, conspicuous then as now in the metropolis, and always likely to
exist here, it was a kindly, good-natured satire that did not intend to
wound even when it was most pointed. Several familiar New York types were
faithfully and cleverly represented: the millionaire merchant, vulgar,
self-made, proud of his maker; and his wife, uneducated, pretentious,
devoted to dress and display, seeking to marry her daughter to the
adventurous foreigner who is not yet obsolete in the "upper circles" of
metropolitan society. There were besides these, in the underplot, a rich
old Cattaraugus farmer, his granddaughter (a dependant in the merchant's
family), a prying old maid, a black servant, a poet, and a fashionable
selfish man of the world. All of these were well drawn and natural. The
situations were probable, and had existed and do exist in real life, while
the language was bright and pure. The dramatic critic of the _Albion_,
then a leading and influential journal, pronounced _Fashion_ to be "the
best American comedy in existence, and one that sufficiently indicated
Mrs. Mowatt's ability to write a play that would rank among the first of
the age." Mrs. Mowatt, however, was the author of but one other successful
drama, _Armand, the Child of the People_. It was first played at the Park
Theatre on September 27, 1847; while _Fashion_ itself has not been put
upon the stage here in many years, and is almost forgotten, although its
influence is still felt. Its popularity endured longer, perhaps, than that
of any of its contemporaries; it was played throughout the United States,
and was well received by London and English provincial audiences. The
oblivion into which it has fallen now should by no means be ascribed to
its want of merit, the fashion of the time having changed.
[Illustration: EPES SARGENT.]
The comedy was produced at the Park Theatre on the 24th of March, 1845.
The _Herald_ of the next day said it had one of the best houses ever seen
in New York; boxes, pit, and gallery were crowded; all of the _literati_
of the city were present, with a tolerable sprinkling of the _elite_--the
_Herald's_ distinction between the _elite_ and _literati_ might have
suggested another satirical play--and the comedy was enthusiastically
received. Its initial cast was a very strong one and worthy of
preservation. William Chippendale played Adam Trueman, the farmer; William
H. Crisp, the elder, was Count Jolimaitre, the fraudulent nobleman; John
Dyott was Colonel Howard, of the United States Army, in love with
Gertrude; Thomas Barry was Tiffany, the wealthy merchant; T. B. De Walden,
author of _Sam_, _The Baroness_, and other plays, was T. Tennyson Twinkle,
a modern poet; John Fisher played Snobson, the confidential clerk, and Mr.
Skerrett Zeke, a colored servant. None of these gentlemen are known to our
stage to-day, but without exception they were as great in the various
lines in which they were cast as could then be found in America. In the
ladies of its first representations _Fashion_ was equally fortunate, and
Mrs. Mowatt herself, in her _Autobiography_, writes that she felt much of
the great success of the play to be justly due to the cleverness of the
players. Mrs. Barry--the first Mrs. Barry, who died in 1854--represented
the would-be lady of fashion; Miss Kate Horn (Mrs. Buckland), Seraphina
Tiffany, her daughter; Miss Clara Ellis, a young Englishwoman, who
remained but a few years in this country, was the Gertrude; Mrs. Dyott was
Millinette, the French maid; and Mrs. Edward Knight (Mary Ann Povey)
played Prudence, the maiden lady of a certain age. The part of Adam
Trueman, the blunt, old-fashioned, warm-hearted farmer, with his
unfashionable energy and sturdy common-sense, pointing homely morals and
bursting social bubbles--"Seventy-two last August, man! Strong as a
hickory, and every whit as sound"--was for many years a favorite with the
representatives of "character old men" on our stage. Mr. Blake, the
original Adam in Philadelphia, was particularly happy in the _role_,
playing it many times in New York; and E. L. Davenport made a decided hit
as Adam at the Olympic in London, in January, 1850, when the comedy was
first produced in England. Mr. Davenport on this occasion had the support
of his wife, who played Gertrude, and who was then still billed as Miss
Fanny Vining.
There is no record of Mrs. Mowatt's appearance in _Fashion_, except on one
evening in Philadelphia, when she played Gertrude for the benefit of Mr.
Blake, and once in New York--at the Park, May 15, 1846. She felt that the
character gave her no great opportunity, and she never attempted it again.
[Illustration: ANNA CORA MOWATT RITCHIE.]
Mrs. Mowatt's career as an actress was very remarkable. She was one of
the few persons of adult years who, going upon the stage without the
severe training and long apprenticeship so necessary even to indifferent
dramatic success, display anything like brilliant dramatic qualities. She
was an actress and a "star" born, not made. Her reasons for adopting the
profession were as remarkable as the triumphs she won; her success as a
playwright encouraging her, she said, to attempt to achieve like favor as
a player. Every one familiar with the history of the theatre since it has
had a history knows well how great is the distinction between producer and
performer, and how few are the actors who have written clever plays, how
few the authors who have become distinguished as actors upon the stage.
The popularity of Miss Elizabeth Thompson's battle pictures would not
encourage her to attempt to lead armies in the field; gun-makers are
proverbially poor marksmen; and Von Buelow would never succeed were he to
attempt the construction of a grand-piano.
Mrs. Mowatt, however, had stronger inducements than those given in her
_Autobiography_ for the step she took. In looking back upon her life, she
felt that all of her tastes, studies, and pursuits from childhood had
combined to make her an actress. She had exhibited a passion for
theatrical entertainments when she was little more than an infant; she
had written plays, such as they were, before she had seen the inside of a
theatre, and she had played in an amateur way before she had ever seen a
professional performance. Above and beyond all of these things she was a
woman of uncommon intelligence and grace, almost a genius. She had, with
some success, given public readings. She felt the stage to be her destiny.
She determined that her destiny should be fulfilled, and she became a good
actress if not absolutely a great one, and seemingly with little effort
and few rebuffs. The pleasant account she has given of her own theatrical
experiences, and her touching and beautiful defence of those women who
make their living on the stage, have encouraged many ladies who have felt
themselves gifted with similar talents, and possessed of like ambitions
and aspirations, to make the same attempts, and generally to fail.
There have been _debutantes_ enough in New York since the _debut_ of Mrs.
Mowatt to fill to overflowing the auditorium of any single city theatre,
could they be gathered under one roof to witness the first effort of the
next aspirant, whoever she may be. During the season of 1876-77 alone, not
less than seven ladies--Mrs. Louise M. Pomeroy, Miss Bessie Darling, Miss
Anna Dickinson, Mrs. J. H. Hackett, Miss Minnie Cummings, Miss Marie
Wainwright, and Miss Adelaide Lennox--in leading parts made their first
bows to metropolitan audiences, without training or experience; and the
season was not considered a particularly strong one in _debutantes_ at
that. For much of this Mrs. Mowatt, unconsciously and unwittingly, was
responsible. Her sudden success turned many heads, while the equally
sudden failures, not recorded, but very many in number, have been quite
forgotten, and will be still ignored as long as there are new Camilles and
new Juliets to achieve greatness at one fell swoop, and as long as there
are unwise friends and speculative managers to encourage them. The careers
of these candidates for dramatic fame, as they are familiar to the world,
are certainly not inspiring to their foolish sisters who would follow
them. A few still in the profession are filling, creditably but
ingloriously, humble positions; a very small proportion have by the
hardest of work become prominent and popular; but the great majority,
dispirited and disheartened, have gone back to the private life from which
they sprung, without song, without honor, and without tears, except the
many tears they have shed themselves.
Mrs. Mowatt was never behind the scenes of a theatre until she was taken
to witness a rehearsal of _Fashion_ the day before its first production.
Her second passage through a "stage door" was when she had her single
rehearsal of _The Lady of Lyons_, in which she made her _debut_, and she
became an actress, and a triumphant one, three weeks after her
determination to go upon the stage was formed. Her house was crowded, the
applause was genuine and discriminating, and one gentleman, wholly
unprejudiced and of great experience, publicly pronounced it "the best
first appearance" he ever saw.
The performance took place at the Park Theatre, New York, on the 13th of
June, 1845, less than three months after the production of her comedy. The
occasion was the benefit of Mr. Crisp, who had given her the little
instruction her limited time permitted her to receive, and who played
Claude to her Pauline, Mrs. Vernon representing Madame Deschapelles. While
she writes candidly in her _Autobiography_ of her hopes, her experiences,
and her trials, she modestly says but little of the decided praise from
all quarters which she certainly received, the account of her success here
given being taken from current journals and from the recollections of old
theatre-goers, not from her own story of her theatrical life.
On the 13th of July of the same year (1845) Mrs. Mowatt appeared at
Niblo's Garden, playing a very successful engagement of two weeks,
supported by Messrs. Crisp, Chippendale, E. L. Davenport, Thomas Placide,
Nickinson, John Sefton, and Mrs. Watts, afterwards Mrs. Sefton. Here she
assumed her second _role_, that of Juliana in the _Honeymoon_, and more
than strengthened the favorable impression she had made as Pauline.
During the first year she was upon the stage she acted more than two
hundred nights, and in almost every important city in the United States,
playing Lady Teazle, Mrs. Haller in _The Stranger_, Lucy Ashton in the
_Bride of Lammermoor_, Katherine in the _Taming of the Shrew_, Julia,
Juliet, and all of the then most popular characters in the line of
juvenile tragedy and comedy. The amount of labor, physical and mental, she
endured during this period must have been enormous; and the intellectual
strain alone was enough to have destroyed the strongest mental
constitution. In the history of the stage in all countries there is no
single instance of a mere novice playing so many important parts so many
nights, before so many different audiences, and winning so much and such
merited praise, as did this lady during the first twelve months of her
career as an actress.
Mrs. Mowatt went to England in the autumn of 1847, where her success was
as marked as in her own country, and more, perhaps, to her professional
credit. She had to contend with a certain prejudice against her
nationality, which still existed in Britain; she was compared with the
leading English actresses of long experience in their own familiar
_roles_, and she could not depend upon the social popularity and personal
good-will which were so strongly in her favor at home. Her English _debut_
was made in Manchester a few weeks after her arrival. Her first appearance
in London was at the Princess's Theatre on the 5th of January, 1848; Mr.
Davenport, who had played opposite characters to her during her American
tours, giving her excellent support during her English engagements. She
returned to America in the summer of 1851, greatly improved in her
personal appearance and in her art. Her subsequent career here, as long as
she remained upon the stage, was marked with uniform success, the
reputation she had acquired on the other side of the water establishing
even more strongly her claims on this.
Mrs. Mowatt, after nine years of experience as an actress, took her
farewell of the stage at Niblo's Garden on the evening of the 3d of June,
1854. As her _Autobiography_ was published during the preceding year her
reason for this step is not given, unless it was her marriage to Mr.
Ritchie a few days later. The occasion was very interesting. A
testimonial signed by many of the leading citizens, and highly
eulogistic, was presented to her, and her last appearance created as great
an excitement in the dramatic and social world as did her first. The play
selected was _The Lady of Lyons_, the same in which she made her _debut_.
Old play-goers who still remember her consider her one of the most
satisfactory Paulines who have been seen in this country, and the part was
always a favorite of her own. On the last play-bill which contains her
name are found as her support the names of Walter G. Keeble, who played
Claude; of George H. Andrews, then a favorite "old man," who played
Colonel Damas; of T. B. De Walden, who played Glavis; and of Mrs. Mann,
who played Madame Deschapelles. Mrs. Mowatt never again appeared here, or
elsewhere, in any public capacity.
Anna Cora Ogden was born in Bordeaux, France, during a visit of her
parents to that country in 1819. She married James Mowatt, a young lawyer
of New York, when she was only fifteen years of age. Her first appearance
as a public reader was made in Boston in 1841--Mr. Mowatt's financial
troubles leading her to seek that means of contributing to her own
support. During this same year she gave readings in the hall of the old
Stuyvesant Institute in New York. In 1845, as has been shown above, she
became an actress. Mr. Mowatt died in London in the spring of 1851. On the
7th of June, 1854, she was married (on Staten Island) to William F.
Ritchie, of the Richmond _Enquirer_, and she died in the little English
village of Henley-on-the-Thames in the month of July, 1870, Mr. Ritchie
surviving her some years, and dying in Lower Brandon, Virginia, on the
24th of April, 1877.
Mrs. Mowatt is described, by those who remember her in the first flush of
her youth and her success, as "a fascinating actress and accomplished
lady; in person fragile and exquisitely delicate, with a face in whose
calm depths the beautiful and pure alone were mirrored, a voice ever soft,
gentle, and low, a subdued earnestness of manner, a winning witchery of
enunciation, and a grace and refinement in every action"; and it was felt
by her admirers that she would have become, had she remained longer in the
profession, a consummate artist--one of the greatest this country has ever
produced.
After her retirement, and until the breaking out of the civil war, her
home in Richmond, Virginia, was the centre of all that was refined and
cultured in the Southern capital. She devoted herself to literature and to
her social and family cares, writing during this period her _Mimic Life;
or, Before and Behind the Curtain_, in which she spoke so many kind and
encouraging words of her sisters in the profession, particularly of the
ballet girls and the representatives of small and thankless parts, who
contribute in their quiet way so much to the public amusement, and who too
often, by authors and public, are entirely ignored. Among her more
important works, other than those already mentioned here, written in her
youth and later life, was _Gulzara; or, The Persian Slave_, a play without
heroes, the scenes of which were laid within the walls of a Turkish harem,
and which was chiefly remarkable from the fact that the only male
character in the _dramatis personae_ was a boy of ten years.
Marion Harland, in her _Recollections of a Christian Actress_, printed a
few years ago, has paid the highest tribute to the personal worth of Mrs.
Mowatt. What she accomplished during her professional life has, in a
manner, been shown here. She was a representative American woman of whom
American women have every reason to be proud; and as the writer of the
first absolutely American society play, she must be forgiven the harm her
brilliant and easy success as an actress has, by its example, since done
to the American stage.
Very few of our earlier native dramatists followed the fashion set by Mrs.
Mowatt in writing original plays of American social life. "Plays of
contemporaneous society," as they were called, were popular and fairly
successful here; but they were the charming home comedies of men like
Byron or Robertson, thoroughly English in character and tone, or they were
taken from the French and the German, with purely foreign incidents and
scenes. Some of these were "localized," and thus became cruel libels upon
American men and manners, except upon such Americans as are influenced by
the worship of _The Mighty Dollar_, or such as are to be found only in
_Our Boarding-houses_, and _Under the Gas-light_. The New York play-goer
of thirty years since looked in vain upon the stage for the domestic
stories of American city and country life which he found in the then new
novels of Theodore Winthrop, or in the then familiar poems of Dr. Holland.
Until Joshua Whitcomb appeared we saw no American Peter Probity in an
American _Chimney Corner_; and until Bronson Howard and David Lloyd and
Brander Matthews and Edgar Fawcett began to write American plays we saw no
American Haversack in an American _Old Guard_--not even an American Peter
Teazle or an American John Mildmay; while we could not help feeling that
_Still Waters Run as Deep_ in this country as they run in the old, and
that the _School for Scandal_ in real life has as many graduates and
undergraduates in the United States as it has anywhere else.
[Illustration: EDGAR FAWCETT.]
If an American character was drawn at all, he was too apt to be a Solon
Shingle or a Mose; if an American play was written at all, its scenes were
laid on _Sandy Bars_, or in the false and unhealthful atmosphere of
_Saratoga_ or _Long Branch_. While London managers presented _Orange
Blossoms_ and _Two Roses_, the managers of New York and Boston set
_Diamonds_ and _Pearls_. The English flowers were fresh and fragrant; the
American jewels, although they had a certain sparkle, were too often
paste. The exotics flourished and bloomed on our soil for a time, it is
true; but if they had been native buds they would have withered in a week,
or else, like so many other indigenous plants, have been left to waste
their sweetness in the pigeon-holes of managers' desks. So strong was this
unnatural prejudice against the production of an American picture of
American home-life upon the American stage, that in one of the brightest
American comedies ever taken from the French Mr. Hurlburt was forced to go
abroad with his characters, and to place his _Americans in Paris_.
All this is not so true of the stage of to-day as it was at the beginning
of the second century of our national drama. Scores of native writers,
during the past decade or two, have presented American plays which have
been clean and clever, even if they have not yet become classic. But it
is a striking fact that the first three original "society plays" which
were in any way successful upon the American stage were from the pens of
women--Mrs. Mowatt's _Fashion_, Mrs. Bateman's _Self_, and Miss Heron's
_The Belle of the Season_--and that since their production the name of a
woman has very rarely appeared upon the bills as the author of a play.
During the ten years which followed the first performance of _Fashion_ it
had a few rivals--comedies and dramas, satirical or otherwise--which
treated, or pretended to treat, of that which asserts itself to be "the
higher stratum of American society." Among the longer lived of these were
_Extremes_, a local New York play, which ran for three weeks at the
Broadway Theatre in 1850; a dramatization of Mr. Curtis's _Potiphar
Papers_, brought out at Burton's Theatre in 1854, in which Charles Fisher
made a great hit as Creamcheese; and Mr. De Walden's _Upper Ten and Lower
Twenty_, also at Burton's, in 1854, in which Mr. Burton himself, as
Christopher Crookpath, a serious part, was a genuine surprise to his
audience, and created a profound impression. _Extremes_, by a Baltimore
gentleman, was never repeated here; the version of Mr. Curtis's
work--happily called _Our Best Society_--was merely an adaptation; Mr. De
Walden was not a native writer; and only one of these productions, and
that one the least successful, was an original American play.
[Illustration: BRANDER MATTHEWS.]
"_Self_, an original New York comedy in three acts," by Mrs. H. L.
Bateman, was seen for the first time in New York at Mr. Burton's Chambers
Street house on the 27th of October, 1856. The plot was slight, and the
play was long and a trifle dull. It was the story of a young girl (Mrs. E.
L. Davenport) with a few thousands of dollars of her own, which both of
her parents were determined to possess. She gave the money to her father
(Charles Fisher); the mother (Mrs. Amelia Parker) instigated the son (A.
Morton) to forge a check for the amount; the forgery was discovered; the
girl, to save her mother and her brother, confessed the crime which she
did not commit, and was turned out-of-doors in ignominy and disgrace, Mr.
Burton, the traditional stage uncle, rescuing and righting her in the end.
All of this was not new, was not cheerful, and, it is to be hoped, was not
"society"; but it was received with great praise, and it took its place in
popular favor by the side of Mrs. Mowatt's comedy. _Self_ was frequently
repeated in New York, notably at Wallack's Theatre, now the Star, in the
Summer of 1869, when it introduced John E. Owens as Unit, and where it ran
for three weeks, Miss Effie Germon playing the heroine, and playing it
well. Mr. Owens made of Unit what is called a "star part." It gave him an
opportunity for the display of his peculiar comedy powers, and he
presented it with a variety and force of expression which was not always
to be seen in his acting. In it he appealed more to the hearts of his
audiences than in Solon Shingle; and, next to his Caleb Plummer, his Unit
is the pleasantest and most perfect picture he has left in the memory of
his friends.
Mrs. Bateman was the daughter of Joseph Cowell, a well-known theatrical
manager in the South and West, who came to this country from England in
1821, and whose _Thirty Years Among the Players_ is known to all
collectors of dramatic books. She went upon the stage at New Orleans in
1837 or 1838, but did not long remain an actress. She was successful as a
manager; and she was the author of _Geraldine_, a tragedy, and of a
dramatization of Longfellow's _Evangeline_. For many years she was known
only as the mother of the Bateman Children.
At Winter Garden, on the evening of March 12, 1862, Miss Matilda Heron
produced for the first time _The Belle of the Season_, advertised as "a
new and original home play," and as written by Miss Heron herself. Its
scenes were laid in the parks of Niagara and in Fifth Avenue
drawing-rooms, but it suggested too many familiar plays of _The Lady of
Lyons_ school to be altogether free from the suspicion of imitation. That
it came from Miss Heron's own brain and pen, however, there could be
little doubt; it had, as a literary effort, many of the faults and virtues
and strong characteristics so curiously blended in the acting of its
author. The production, as a whole, was what is termed "emotional," the
part of the heroine being peculiarly so. Unquestionably Miss Heron wrote
it to fit herself, and unquestionably it did not fit her so well as did
Camille, upon which so much of her fame as an actress now rests. She had
all of an author's fondness for the part and for the play. She considered
both her greatest works. She produced the comedy many times in many cities
of the Union, not always to the benefit of her purse or of her
professional reputation, and when urged by her business manager to
withdraw it altogether, she is said to have replied, with characteristic
determination, that _The Belle of the Season_ she wanted to play, _The
Belle of the Season_ she would play, and that when she died she wished
nothing placed over her grave but the epitaph, "Here lies _The Belle of
the Season_!"
[Illustration: BRONSON HOWARD.]
Matilda Heron was one of the most remarkable actresses our stage has ever
produced. With an intensity and passion in her performances which, at
times, were magnificent and carried everything before them, she displayed
professional shortcomings and infirmities which were often glaring and
unpardonable; but she made and held, by the force of her own genius--and
genius she certainly possessed--a position which few modern actresses have
ever reached. Her personal faults were of the head rather than of the
heart, and may they now rest lightly on her!
Miss Heron's immediate successors as native playwrights of society dramas
were Miss Olive Logan, with _Surf; or, Summer Scenes at Long Branch_, at
Daly's Theatre in 1870; Bronson Howard, with _Saratoga_ in 1870-71, with
_Diamonds_ in 1873, and with _Moorcroft_ in 1874; James Steele Mackaye,
with _Marriage_ in 1873; and Andrew C. Wheeler, with _Twins_, and Mr.
Marsden, with _Clouds_, in 1876.
Anything like an enumeration of the original American society plays
written and produced here during the last ten or fifteen years is not
possible within the limits of a single chapter. They have been very many,
and of all degrees of merit, the best and most creditable perhaps being
_Young Mrs. Winthrop_, _Old Love Letters_, _A Gold Mine_, _Esmeralda_,
_Conscience_, and _The Charity Ball_; but how long these are to live, and
how they are to be regarded by the next generation--if the next
generation has ever a chance to regard them at all--of course remains to
be seen. _Fashion_, the first of the lot, survives only in its printed
form, and the shell of the locust gives but a faint dry rattle, while the
locust itself is as much alive as when _The School for Scandal_ was first
seen in America over a century ago. Have we a Sheridan among us? or is he
still twenty years away?
ACT II.
THE AMERICAN STAGE NEGRO.
THE AMERICAN STAGE NEGRO.
_Bottom_: "I have a reasonable good ear in music: let's have the tongs
and the bones."--_Midsummer Night's Dream_, Act iv. Sc. 1.
Shakspere's Moor of Venice was one of the earliest of the stage negroes,
as he is one of the best. If the _Account of the Revels_ be not a forgery,
he appeared before the court of the first English James in 1604, and he
certainly was seen at the Globe Theatre, on the Bankside, on the 30th of
April, 1610. Othello is hardly the typical African of the modern drama,
although Roderigo speaks of him as having thick lips, and notwithstanding
the fact that he himself is made to regret, in the third act of the
tragedy, that he is "black, and has not those soft parts of conversation
that chamberers have." Shakspere unquestionably believed that the Moors
were negroes; and as he made Verges and Dogberry cockney watchmen, and
altered history, geography, and chronology to suit himself and the
requirements of the stage, so he meant to invest his Moorish hero with all
of the personal attributes, as well as with all of the moral
characteristics, of the negroes as they were known to Englishmen in
Shakspere's day.
_Othello_ was followed, in 1696, by _Oroonoko_, a tragedy in five acts, by
Thomas Southerne. The real Oroonoko was an African prince stolen from his
native kingdom of Angola during the reign of Charles the Second, and sold
as a slave in an English settlement in the West Indies. Aphra Behn saw and
became intimate with him at Surinam, when her father was
Lieutenant-General of the islands, and made him the hero of the tale upon
which the dramatist based his once famous play. With the more humble
slaves by whom he was surrounded, the stage Oroonoko spoke in the stilted
blank-verse of the dramatic literature of that period, and without any of
the accent or phraseology of the original West Indian blacks. Mr. Pope was
the creator of Oroonoko; and the part was a favorite one of the elder Kean
in England and of the elder Booth in this country. It has not been seen
upon either stage in many years. Oroonoko, of course, had a black skin and
woolly hair. When Jack Bannister, who began his career as a tragic actor,
said to Garrick that he proposed to attempt the hero of Southerne's drama,
he was told by the great little man that, in view of his extraordinarily
thin person, he would "look as much like the character as a chimney-sweep
in consumption!" It was to Bannister, on this same occasion, that
Garrick uttered the well-known aphorism, "Comedy is a very serious thing!"
[Illustration: CHARLES DIBDIN AS MUNGO.]
Mungo was a stage negro of a very different stamp, and the first of his
race. He figured in _The Padlock_, a comic opera, words by Isaac
Bickerstaffe, music by Charles Dibdin, first presented at Drury Lane in
1768. Mungo was the slave of Don Diego, a West Indian planter. It was
written for and at the suggestion of John Moody, who had been in
Barbadoes, where he had studied the dialect and the manners of the blacks.
He never played the part, however, which was originally assumed by Dibdin
himself. Mungo sang:
"Dear heart, what a terrible life I am led!
A dog has a better that's sheltered and fed.
Night and day 'tis the same;
My pain is deir game;
Me wish to de Lord me was dead!
Whate'er's to be done
Poor black must run.
Mungo here, Mungo dere,
Mungo everywhere;
Above and below,
Sirrah, come, sirrah, go;
Do so, and do so.
Oh! oh!
Me wish to de Lord me was dead!"
This is a style of ballad which has been very popular with Mungo's
descendants ever since. It may be added that Mungo got drunk in the second
act, and was very profane throughout.
The great and original Mungo in America was Lewis Hallam, the younger, who
first played the part in New York, and for his own benefit, on the 29th of
May, 1769, at the theatre in John Street. Dunlap says, "In _The Padlock_
Mr. Hallam was unrivalled to his death, giving Mungo with a truth derived
from the study of the negro slave character which Dibdin, the writer,
could not have conceived." Mungo is never seen in the present time. Ira
Aldridge, the negro tragedian, played Othello and Mungo occasionally on
the same night in his natural skin; but Mungo may be said to have
virtually died with Hallam, and to have gone to meet Oroonoko in that land
of total oblivion to which Othello is destined to be a stranger for many
years to come.
[Illustration: IRA ALDRIDGE AS OTHELLO.]
In 1781 a pantomime entitled _Robinson Crusoe_ was presented at Drury
Lane. It was believed by the editor of the _Biographia Dramatica_ to have
been "contrived by Mr. Sheridan, whose powers, if it really be his
performance, do not seem adapted to the production of such kind of
entertainments. The scenery, by Loutherbourg, has a very pleasing effect,
but, considered in every other light, it is a truly insipid exhibition."
Friday, in coffee-colored tights and blackened face, was naturally a
prominent figure. The pantomime was produced at the Theatre Royal, Bath,
during the next year, when Mr. Henry Siddons appeared as one of the
savages. This gentleman, who played Othello on the same boards a few
seasons later, is only remembered now as having given his name to the
greatest actress who ever spoke the English tongue. This same _Robinson
Crusoe and Harlequin Friday_ was seen at the John Street Theatre, New
York, on the 11th of January, 1786; while at the Park Theatre on the 11th
of September, 1817, Mr. Bancker played Friday in _The Bold Buccaneers; or,
The Discovery of Robinson Crusoe_, a melodrama which was very popular in
its day.
Charles C. Moreau, of New York, possesses a very curious and almost unique
bill of "The African Company," at "The Theatre in Mercer Street, in the
rear of the 1 Mile Stone, Broadway." _Tom and Jerry_ was presented by a
number of gentlemen and ladies entirely unknown to dramatic fame, and the
performance concluded with the pantomime of _Obi: or, Three Finger'd
Jack_. Unfortunately the bill is not dated. Mr. Ireland believes this to
have been a company of negro amateurs who played in New York about 1820 or
1821, but who have left no other mark upon the history of the stage; and
the historians know nothing of the "theatre" they occupied. Broadway at
Prince Street is one mile from the City Hall, although the stone recording
this fact has long since disappeared.
A number of stage negroes will be remembered by habitual theatre-goers,
and students of the drama--two very different things, by-the-way, for the
man who sees plays rarely reads them, and _vice versa_: Zeke, in Mrs.
Mowatt's _Fashion_; Pete, in _The Octoroon_; Uncle Tom; Topsy, whom
Charles Reade called "idiopathic"; a cleverly conceived character in
Bronson Howard's _Moorcraft_; and the delightful band of "Full Moons," led
for many seasons by "Johnny" Wild at Harrigan and Hart's Theatre, who were
so absolutely true to the life of Thompson Street and South Fifth Avenue.
[Illustration]
In the absence of anything like a complete and satisfactory history of
negro minstrelsy, it is not possible to discover its genesis, although it
is the only branch of the dramatic art, if properly it can claim to be an
art at all, which has had its origin in this country, while the melody it
has inspired is certainly our only approach to a national music. Scattered
throughout the theatrical literature of the early part of the century are
to be found many different accounts of the rise and progress of the
African on the stage, each author having his own particular "father of
negro song." Charles White, an old Ethiopian comedian and manager, gives
the credit to Gottlieb Graupner, who appeared in Boston in 1799, basing
his statement upon a copy of Russell's _Boston Gazette_ of the 30th of
December of that year, which contains an advertisement of a performance to
be given on the date of publication at the Federal Street Theatre. At the
end of the second act of _Oroonoko_, according to Mr. White, Mr.
Graupner, in character, sang "The Gay Negro Boy," accompanying the air
with the banjo; and although the house was draped in mourning for General
Washington, such was the enthusiasm of the audience that the performer had
to bring his little bench from the wings again and again to sing his song.
W. W. Clapp, Jr., in his _History of the Boston Stage_, says that the news
of the death of Washington was received in that city on the 24th of
December, and that the theatre remained "closed for a week;" and was
reopened with "A Monody," in which "Mrs. Barrett, in the character of the
Genius of America, appeared weeping over the Tomb of her Beloved Hero";
but there is no mention, then or later, of Mr. Graupner or of "The Gay
Negro Boy."
Mr. White says further that "the next popular negro song was 'The Battle
of Plattsburg,' sung by an actor vulgarly known as 'Pig-Pie Herbert,' at a
theatre in Albany, in 1815"; but H. D. Stone, in a volume called _The
Drama_, published in Albany in 1873, credits "a member of the theatrical
company of the name of Hop Robinson" as the singer of the song; while
"Sol" Smith, an eye-witness of this performance, gives still another and
very different account of it. According to Smith's _Autobiography_
published by Messrs. Harper and Brothers in 1868, Andrew Jackson Allen
produced at the Green Street Theatre in Albany, in 1815, a drama called
_The Battle of Lake Champlain_, the action taking place on real ships
floating in real water. "In this piece," says Smith, "Allen played the
character of a negro, and sang a song of many verses (being the first
negro song, I verily believe, ever heard on the American stage)." Two
verses of this ballad, quoted by Smith "from memory," will give a very
fair idea of its claims to popularity:
"Backside Albany stan' Lake Champlain--
Little pond half full of water;
Plat-te-burg dar too, close 'pon de main:
Town small; he grow big, dough, herea'ter.
"On Lake Champlain Uncle Sam set he boat,
An' Massa Macdonough he sail 'em;
While General Macomb make Plat-te-burg he home,
Wid de army whose courage nebber fail 'em."
Andrew Allen was a very quaint character, and he deserves a paragraph to
himself. Born in the city of New York in 1776, he appeared, according to
his own statement, as a page in _Romeo and Juliet_ at the theatre in John
Street in 1786, on the strength of which, as the oldest living actor, he
assumed for years before his death the title of "Father of the American
Stage." He was more famous as a cook than as a player, however, and he is
the subject of innumerable theatrical anecdotes, none of which are greatly
to his credit. He was called "Dummy Allen" because he was very deaf and
exceedingly loquacious; he adored the hero of New Orleans, whose name he
appropriated when Jackson was elected President of the United States; and
he was devoted to Edwin Forrest, whose costumer, dresser, and personal
slave he was for many years. He invented and patented a silver leather
much used in the decoration of stage dresses; and he kept a restaurant in
Dean Street, Albany, and later a similar establishment near the Bowery
Theatre, New York, being a very familiar figure in the streets of both
cities. Mr. Phelps, in his _Players of a Century_ (Albany, New York,
1880), describes him in his later years as tall and erect in person, with
firmly compressed features, an eye like a hawk's, nose slightly
Romanesque, and hair mottled gray. He wore a fuzzy white hat, a coat of
blue with bright brass buttons, and carried a knobby cane. He spoke in a
sharp, decisive manner, often giving wrong answers, and invariably
mistaking the drift of the person with whom he was conversing. He died in
New York in 1853, and Mr. Phelps preserves the inscription upon his
monument at Cypress Hills Cemetery, which was evidently his own
composition: "From his cradle he was a scholar; exceedingly wise,
fair-spoken, and persuading; lofty and sour to them that loved him not,
but to those men that sought him sweet as summer."
[Illustration: ANDREW JACKSON ALLEN.]
Apropos of Allen's association with Edwin Forrest, and of Smith's
assertion that Allen sang the first negro song ever sung on the American
stage, it may not be out of place here to quote W. R. Alger's _Life of
Forrest_. Speaking of Forrest's early and checkered experiences as a
strolling player in the far West, Mr. Alger says that perhaps the most
surprising fact connected with this portion of his career is "that he was
the first actor who ever represented on the stage the Southern plantation
negro with all his peculiarities of dress, gait, accent, dialect, and
manner." In 1823, at the Globe Theatre, Cincinnati, Ohio, under the
management of "Sol" Smith, Forrest did play a negro in a farce by Smith,
called _The Tailor in Distress_, singing and dancing, and winning the
compliment from a veritable black in his audience that he was "nigger all
ober!" Lawrence Barrett, in his _Life of Forrest_, quotes the bill of this
evening, which shows Forrest as a modern dandy in the first play, as
Cuffee, a Kentucky negro, in the second, and as Sancho Panza in the
pantomime of _Don Quixote_, which closed the evening's entertainment.
Forrest was by no means the only eminent American actor who hid his light
behind a black mask. "Sol" Smith himself relates how he became a
supernumerary at the Green Street Theatre, in Albany, in his fourteenth
year, playing one of the blood-thirsty associates of _Three-fingered Jack_
with a preternaturally smutty face, which he forgot to wash one eventful
night, to the astonishment of his own family, who forced him to retire for
a time to private life.
At Vauxhall Garden, in the Bowery, a little south of and nearly opposite
the site of Cooper Institute, a young lad named Bernard Flaherty, born in
Cork, Ireland, is said to have sung negro songs and to have danced negro
dances in 1838 to help support a widowed mother, who lived to see him
carried to an honored grave in 1876, mourned by the theatre-going
population of the whole country. In 1840, as Barney Williams, he made a
palpable hit in the character of Pat Rooney, in _The Omnibus_, at the
Franklin Theatre, New York. He certainly played "darky parts," such as
they were, for a number of years before and after that date; and he is
perhaps the one man upon the American stage with whom anything like negro
minstrelsy will never be associated, not so much because of his high rank
in his profession as on account of the Hibernian style of his later-day
performances, and of the strong accent which always clung to him, and
which suggested his native city rather than the cork he used to burn to
color his face.
[Illustration: BARNEY WILLIAMS IN DANDY JIM.]
In 1850, when Edwin Booth was seventeen, and a year after his _debut_ as
Tressel at the Boston Museum, he gave an entertainment with John S.
Clarke, a youth of the same age, at the court-house in Belair, Maryland.
They read selections from _Richelieu_ and _The Stranger_, as well as the
quarrel scene from _Julius Caesar_, singing during the evening (with
blackened faces) a number of negro melodies, "using appropriate
dialogue"--as Mrs. Asia Booth Clarke records in the memoir of her
brother--"and accompanying their vocal attempts with the somewhat
inharmonious banjo and bones." Mrs. Clarke reprints the programme of this
performance, and pictures the distress of the young tragedians when they
discovered, on arriving in the town, that the simon-pure negro they had
employed as an advance agent had in every instance posted their bills
upsidedown.
Mr. Booth, during his first San Francisco engagement, appeared more than
once in the character of what was then termed a "Dandy Nigger;" and he
remembers that his father, "some time in the forties," played Sam Johnson
in _Bone Squash_ at the Front Street Theatre, Baltimore, for the benefit
of an old theatrical acquaintance, and played it with great applause.
Lawrence Barrett's negro parts, in the beginning of his career, were
George Harris and Uncle Tom himself, in a dramatization of Mrs. Stowe's
famous tale.
[Illustration: RALPH KEELER.]
Among the stage negroes of later years, whom the world is not accustomed
to associate with that profession, Ralph Keeler is one of the most
prominent. His "Three Years a Negro Minstrel," first published in the
_Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1869, and afterwards elaborated in his
_Vagabond Adventures_, is very entertaining and instructive reading, and
gives an excellent idea of the wandering minstrel life of that period. He
began his career at Toledo, Ohio, when he was not more than eleven years
of age; and under the management of the celebrated Mr. Booker, the subject
of the once famous song, "Meet Johnny Booker on the Bowling-green," he
"danced 'Juba'" in small canton-flannel knee-breeches (familiarly known as
pants) cheap lace, tarnished gold tinsel, a corked face, and a woolly wig,
to the great gratification of the Toledans, who for several months, with
pardonable pride, hailed him as their own particular infant phenomenon. At
the close of his first engagement he received what was termed a "rousing
benefit," the entire proceeds of which, as was the custom of the time,
going into the pockets of his enterprising managers. During his short
although distinguished professional life he was associated with such
artists as "Frank" Lynch, "Mike" Mitchell, "Dave" Reed, and "Professor"
Lowe, the balloonist, and he was even offered a position in E. P.
Christy's company in New York--the highest compliment which could then be
paid to budding talent. Keeler, a brilliant but eccentric writer, whose
_Vagabond Adventures_ is too good, in its way, to be forgotten so soon,
was a man of decided mark as a journalist. He went to Cuba in 1873 as
special correspondent of the New York _Tribune_, and suddenly and
absolutely disappeared. He is supposed to have been murdered and thrown
into the sea.
[Illustration: P. T. BARNUM.]
Lynch, when Keeler first knew him, had declined into the fat and slippered
end man, too gross to dance, who ordinarily played the tambourine and
the banjo, but who could, and not infrequently did, perform everything in
the orchestra, from a solo on the penny trumpet to an obligato on the
double-bass. He had been associated as a boy, in 1839 or 1840, under
Barnum's management, with "Jack" Diamond, who was "the best representative
of Ethiopian break-downs" in his day, and, according to P. T. Barnum, the
prototype of the many performers of that sort who have entertained the
public ever since. Lynch asserted that he and Barnum had appeared together
in black faces; and Mr. Barnum, in his _Autobiography_, called Mr. Lynch
"an orphan vagabond" whom he had picked up on the road; neither statement
seeming to be entirely true. Lynch was his own worst enemy, and, like so
many of his kind, he died in poverty and obscurity, his most perfect
"break-down" being his own!
It is a melancholy fact that George Holland joined Christy and Wood's
minstrels in 1857, playing female characters in a blackened face, and
dividing with George Christy the honors of a short season. He returned to
Wallack's Theatre in 1858. This is a page in dramatic history which old
play-goers do not like to read.
The name of John B. Gough, the temperance orator, occurs occasionally in
the reminiscences of old minstrels. He certainly did appear upon the
stage as a comic singer in New York and elsewhere during his early and
dissipated youth, and even gave exhibitions of ventriloquism and the like
in low bar-rooms for the sake of the few pennies he could gather to keep
himself in liquor, as he himself describes; but there is no hint in his
_Autobiography_ of his ever having appeared in a blackened face, and his
theatrical life, if it may be so called, was very short.
Joseph Jefferson, the third and present bearer of that honored name, was
unquestionably the youngest actor who ever made his mark with a piece of
burnt cork. The story of his first appearance is told by William Winter in
his volume entitled _The Jeffersons_. Coming from a family of actors, the
boy, as was natural, was reared amid theatrical surroundings, and when
only four years of age--in 1833--he was brought upon the stage by Thomas
D. Rice himself, on a benefit occasion at the Washington Theatre. Little
Joe, blackened and arrayed precisely like his senior, was carried onto the
stage in a bag upon the shoulders of the shambling Ethiopian, and emptied
from it with the appropriate couplet,
"Ladies and gentlemen, I'd have you for to know
I's got a little darky here to jump Jim Crow."
Mrs. John Drew, who was present, says that the boy instantly assumed
the exact attitude of Jim Crow Rice, and sang and danced in imitation of
his sable companion, a perfect miniature likeness of that long, ungainly,
grotesque, and exceedingly droll comedian.
[Illustration: JOHN B. GOUGH.]
Thomas D. Rice is generally conceded to have been the founder of Ethiopian
minstrelsy. Although, as has been seen, it did not originate with him, he
made it popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and his image deserves an
honored niche in its cathedral. The history of "Jim Crow" Rice, as he was
affectionately called for many years, has been written by many scribes and
in many different ways, the most complete and most truthful account,
perhaps, being that of Edmon S. Conner, who described in the columns of
the New York _Times_, June 5, 1881, what he saw and remembered of the
birth of Jim Crow. Mr. Conner was a member of the company at the Columbia
Street Theatre, Cincinnati, in 1828-29, when he first met Rice, "doing
little negro bits" between the acts at that house, notably a sketch he had
studied from life in Louisville the preceding summer. Back of the
Louisville theatre was a livery-stable kept by a man named Crow. The
actors could look into the stable-yard from the windows of their
dressing-rooms, and were fond of watching the movements of an old and
decrepit slave who was employed by the proprietor to do all sorts of odd
jobs. As was the custom among the negroes, he had assumed his master's
name, and called himself Jim Crow. He was very much deformed--the right
shoulder was drawn up high, and the left leg was stiff and crooked at the
knee, which gave him a painful but at the same time ludicrous limp. He
was in the habit of crooning a queer old tune, to which he had applied
words of his own. At the end of each verse he gave a peculiar step,
"rocking de heel" in the manner since so general among the many
generations of his imitators; and these were the words of his refrain:
"Wheel about, turn about,
Do jis so,
An' ebery time I wheel about
I jump Jim Crow."
[Illustration: RICE AS JIM CROW.]
Rice closely watched this unconscious performer, and recognized in him a
character entirely new to the stage. He wrote a number of verses,
quickened and slightly changed the air, made up exactly like the original,
and appeared before a Louisville audience, which, as Mr. Conner says,
"went mad with delight," recalling him on the first night at least twenty
times. And so Jim Crow jumped into fame and something that looks almost
like immortality. "Sol" Smith says that the character was first seen in a
piece by Solon Robinson, called _The Rifle_, and that he, Smith, "helped
Rice a little in fixing the tune."
Other cities besides Louisville claim Jim Crow. Francis Courtney Wemyss,
in his _Autobiography_, says he was a native of Pittsburg, whose name was
Jim Cuff; while Robert P. Nevin, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for November,
1867, declares that the original was a negro stage-driver of Cincinnati,
and that Pittsburg was the scene of Rice's first appearance in the part--a
local negro there, whose professional career was confined to holding his
mouth open for pennies thrown to him on the docks and the streets,
furnishing the wardrobe for the initial performance.
[Illustration: THOMAS D. RICE.]
Rice was born in the Seventh Ward of New York in 1808. He was a
supernumerary at the Park Theatre, where "Sam" Cowell remembered him in
_Bombastes Furioso_ attracting so much attention by his eccentricities
that Hilson and Barnes, the leading characters in the cast, made a formal
complaint, and had him dismissed from the company Cowell; adding that this
man, whose name did not even appear in the bills, was the only actor on
the stage whom the audience seemed to notice. Cowell also describes him in
Cincinnati, in 1829, as a very unassuming modest young man, who wore "a
very queer hat, very much pointed down before and behind, and very much
cocked on one side." He went to England in 1836, where he met with great
success, laid the foundation of a very comfortable fortune, and
professionally he was the Buffalo Bill of the London of half a century
ago. Mr. Ireland, speaking of his popularity in this country, says that he
drew more money to the Bowery Theatre than any other performer in the same
period of time.
Rice was the author of many of his own farces, notably _Bone Squash_ and
_The Virginia Mummy_, and he was the veritable originator of the _genus_
known to the stage as the "dandy darky," represented particularly in his
creations of "Dandy Jim of Caroline" and "Spruce Pink." He died in 1860,
never having forfeited the respect of the public or the good-will of his
fellow-men.
[Illustration: JAMES ROBERTS.]
There were many lithographed and a few engraved portraits of Rice made
during the years of his great popularity, a number of which are still
preserved. In Mr. McKee's collection he is to be seen dancing "Jim Crow"
in English as well as in American prints--as "Gumbo Chaff," on a
flat-boat, and, in character, singing the songs "A Long Time Ago" and
"Such a Gettin' Up-stairs." In the same collection, among prints of George
Dimond and other half-remembered clog-dancers and singers, is a portrait
of John N. Smith as "Jim Along Josey," on a sheet of music published by
Firth & Hall in 1840; and, more curious and rare than any of these, upon
a musical composition, "on which copyright was secured according to law
October 7, 1824," is a picture of Mr. Roberts singing "Massa George
Washington and Massa Lafayette" in a Continental uniform and with a
blackened face. This would make James Roberts, a Scottish vocalist, who
died in 1833, the senior of Jim Crow by a number of years.
[Illustration: GEORGE WASHINGTON DIXON.]
George Washington Dixon, whose very name is now almost forgotten, also
preceded Rice in this class of entertainment, but without Rice's talent,
and with nothing like Rice's success. He sang "Coal Black Rose" and "The
Long-tailed Blue" at the old amphitheatre in North Pearl Street, Albany,
as early as 1827, and he claimed to have been the author of "Old Zip
Coon," which he sang for Allen's benefit in Philadelphia in 1834. He
became notorious as a "filibuster" at the time of the troubles in Yucatan,
and he made himself particularly offensive to a large portion of the
community as the editor of a scurrilous paper called the _Polyanthus_,
published in New York. He was caned, shot at, imprisoned for libel, and
finally forced to leave the city. He died in the Charity Hospital, New
Orleans, in 1861.
Mr. White says that in early days negro songs were sung from the backs of
horses in the sawdust ring; that Robert Farrell, "a circus actor," was the
original "Zip Coon," and that the first colored gentleman to wear "The
Long-tailed Blue" was Barney Burns, who broke his neck on a vaulting board
in Cincinnati in 1838. When the historians disagree in this confusing way,
who can possibly decide?
[Illustration: MR. DIXON AS ZIP COON.]
Rice very naturally had many imitators, and Jim Crow wheeled about the
country with considerable success, particularly when the original was in
other lands. In the collection of Mr. Moreau is a bill of "The Theatre"
(the Park), dated May 4, 1833, in which Mr. Blakeley was announced to sing
the "Comic Extravaganza of Jim Crow" between the comedy of _Laugh When You
Can_, in which he played Costly, and the melodrama of _The Floating
Beacon_, and preceded by "Signora Adelaide Ferrero in a new ballet dance
entitled 'The Festival of Bacchus';" the entertainments in those days
being varied and long. Thomas H. Blakeley was a popular representative of
what are called "second old men," Mr. Ireland pronouncing him the best
Sulky, Rowley, and Humphrey Dobbin ever seen on the New York stage: and
the fact that such a man should have appeared at a leading theatre,
between the acts, in plantation dress and with blackened face, shows
better than anything else, perhaps, the respectable position held by the
negro minstrel half a century ago.
Mr. White, so frequently quoted here, is an old minstrel who was part and
parcel of what he has more than once described in the public press, and
upon his authority the following account of the first _band_ of negro
minstrels is given. It was organized in the boarding-house of a Mrs.
Brooks, in Catherine Street, New York, late in the winter of 1842, and it
consisted of "Dan" Emmett, "Frank" Brower, "Billy" Whitlock, and "Dick"
Pelham--the name of the really great negro minstrel being always shortened
in this familiar way. According to Mr. White, they made their first
appearance in public, for Pelham's benefit, at the Chatham Theatre, New
York, on the 17th of February, 1843; later they went to other cities, and
even to Europe. This statement was verified by a fragment of autobiography
of William Whitlock, given to the New York _Clipper_ by his daughter, Mrs.
Edwin Adams, at the time of Whitlock's death. It is worth quoting here in
full, although it contains no dates: "The organization of the minstrels I
claim to be my own idea, and it cannot be blotted out. One day I asked Dan
Emmett, who was in New York at the time, to practise the fiddle and the
banjo with me at his boarding-house in Catherine Street. We went down
there, and when we had practised Frank Brower called in by accident. He
listened to our music, charmed to his soul[!]. I told him to join with the
bones, which he did. Presently Dick Pelham came in, also by accident, and
looked amazed. I asked him to procure a tambourine, and make one of the
party, and he went out and got one. After practising for a while we went
to the old resort of the circus crowd--the 'Branch,' in the Bowery--with
our instruments, and in Bartlett's billiard-room performed for the first
time as the Virginia Minstrels. A programme was made out, and the first
time we appeared upon the stage before an audience was for the benefit of
Pelham at the Chatham Theatre. The house was crammed and jammed with our
friends; and Dick, of course, put ducats in his purse."
[Illustration: DANIEL EMMETT.]
Emmett, describing this scene, places the time "in the spring of 1843,"
and says that they were all of them "end men, and all interlocutors." They
sang songs, played their instruments, danced jigs, singly and doubly, and
"did 'The Essence of Old Virginia' and the 'Lucy Long Walk Around.'"
Emmett remained upon the minstrel stage for many years; he was a member of
the Bryant troupe from 1858 to 1865, and he was the composer of many
popular songs, including "Old Dan Tucker," "Boatman's Dance," "Walk Along,
John," "Early in the Mornin'," and, according to some authorities, he was
the author of "Dixie," which afterwards became the war-song of the South.
[Illustration: CHARLES WHITE.]
Mr. White, according to a biographical sketch published in the New York
_Clipper_, was born in 1821. He played the accordion--when he was too
young to be held responsible for the offence--at Thalian Hall, in Grand
Street, New York, as long ago as 1843, and the next year organized what he
called "'The Kitchen Minstrels' on the second floor of the corner of
Broadway and Chambers Street. The first floor was occupied by Tiffany,
Young & Ellis, jewellers; the third by the renowned Ottignon as a
gymnasium. Here, where the venerable Palmo had introduced to delighted
audiences the Italian opera, and regaled them with fragrant Mocha coffee
handed around by obsequious waiters, he first came most prominently before
the public.... In 1846 he opened the Melodeon at 53 Bowery." Here, as
usual, there is a decided confusion of dates and of facts. _Valentine's
Manual_ for 1865 says, "Palmo's cafe, on the corner of Reade Street and
Broadway, was a popular resort from 1835 to 1840, at which later period he
abandoned his former occupation and erected the opera-house in Chambers
Street, afterwards Burton's Theatre." Joseph N. Ireland, in his _Records
of the New York Stage_, published in 1867, says--and Mr. Ireland is
usually correct--"The fourth attempt to introduce the Italian opera in New
York, and the second to give it an individual local habitation, was this
season [1843-44], made by Ferdinand Palmo, on the site long previously
occupied by Stoppani's Arcade Baths, in Chambers Street (Nos. 39 and 41),
and nearly opposite the centre of the building on the north end of the
Park originally erected for the city almshouse, and afterwards used for
various public offices.... Signor Palmo had been a popular and successful
_restaurateur_ in Broadway between the hospital and Duane Street....
Palmo's Opera-house was first opened by its proprietor on the 3d of
February, 1844"; while Charles T. Cook, of Tiffany & Co., who has been
connected with that house for over forty years, shows by its records that
Tiffany, Young & Ellis did not move to 271 Broadway, on the southwest
corner of Chambers Street, until 1847, when they occupied the second floor
as well as the first. That Sir Walter Raleigh, losing all confidence in
the infallibility of human testimony, should have thrown the second part
of his _History of the World_ into the flames is not to be wondered at!
Mr. White, nevertheless, was prominently before the public for many years
as manager and performer; he was associated with the "Virginia
Serenaders," with "The Ethiopian Operatic Brothers" (Operatic Brother
Barney Williams playing the tambourine at one end of the line); with "The
Sable Sisters and Ethiopian Minstrels;" with "The New York Minstrels,"
etc. He introduced "Dan" Bryant to the public, and has done other good
services in contributing to the healthful, harmless amusement of his
fellow-men.
[Illustration: EDWIN P. CHRISTY.]
"Christy's Minstrels, organized in 1842," was the legend for a number of
years upon the bills and advertisements of the company of E. P. Christy.
This would give it precedence of the "Virginia Minstrels" by a few months
at least. When the matter was called to the attention of Mr. Emmett, many
years later, he wrote from Chicago on the 1st of May, 1877, that after
his own band had gone to Europe a number of similar entertainments were
given in all parts of the country, and that Enam Dickinson, who had had
some experience in that line in other companies, had trained Christy's
troupe in Buffalo in all the business of the scenes, Mr. Emmett believing
that Mr. Christy simply claimed, and with truth, that he was "the first to
harmonize and originate the present style of negro minstrelsy," meaning
the singing in concert and the introduction of the various acts, which
were universally followed by other bands on both sides of the Atlantic,
and which have led our English brethren to give to all Ethiopian
entertainments the generic name of "Christy Minstrels," as they call all
top-boots "Wellingtons" and all policemen "Bobbies."
Christy's Minstrels proper began their metropolitan career at the hall of
the Mechanics' Society, 472 Broadway, near Grand Street, early in 1846,
and remained there until the summer of 1854, when Edwin P. Christy, the
leader and founder of the company, retired from business. George Christy,
who the year before had joined forces with Henry Wood at 444 Broadway,
formerly Mitchell's Olympic, took both halls after the abdication of the
elder Christy, and rattled the bones at one establishment, "Billy"
Birch, afterwards so popular in San Francisco and New York, cutting
similar capers at the other, and each performer appearing at both houses
on the same evening.
[Illustration: GEORGE CHRISTY.]
Edwin P. Christy died in May, 1862. George Harrington, known to the stage
as George Christy, died in May, 1868; while in April of the latter year
Mechanics' Hall, with which in the minds of so many old New-Yorkers they
are both so pleasantly associated, was entirely destroyed by fire, never
to be rebuilt for minstrel uses.
The contemporaries and successors of the Christys were numerous and
various. The air was full of their music, and dozens of halls in the city
of New York alone echoed the patter of their clogged feet for years. Among
the more famous of them the following may briefly be mentioned: Buckley's
"New Orleans Serenaders" were organized in 1843; they consisted of George
Swayne, Frederick, and R. Bishop Buckley, and were very popular throughout
the country. "White's Serenaders" were at the Melodeon, 53 Bowery, perhaps
as early as 1846, and certainly at White's Athenaeum, 585 Broadway,
opposite the Metropolitan Hotel, as late as 1872. The Harrington Minstrels
were at Palmo's Opera-house in 1847 or 1848. Bryant's Minstrels, as their
old play-bills show, were organized in 1857, when they occupied
Mechanics' Hall; they went to the Tammany Building on Fourteenth Street in
1868, were at 730 Broadway the next year, and opened the hall on
Twenty-third Street near Sixth Avenue in 1870, where they remained until
Dan Bryant, the last of his race, died in 1875. Wood's Minstrels were at
514 Broadway, opposite the St. Nicholas Hotel, in 1862 and later. "Sam"
Sharpley's Minstrels were at 201 Bowery in 1864. "Tony" Pastor's troupe
were in the same building in 1865, where they remained two years; they
were upon the site of the Metropolitan Theatre--later Winter Garden--for a
few seasons, and until they removed to their present cosey home near
Tammany Hall. The San Francisco Minstrels were at 585 Broadway in 1865,
and in 1874 went to the more familiar hall on Broadway, opposite the
Sturtevant House, Budworth's Minstrels opened the Fifth Avenue Hall, where
the Madison Square Theatre now stands, in 1866. Kelly and Leon, who were
on Broadway on the site of Hope Chapel in 1867, where they were credited
with having "Africanized opera bouffe," followed Budworth to the
Twenty-fourth Street house. Besides these were the companies of Morris
Brothers, of Cotton and Murphy and Cotton and Reed, of Hooley, of Haverly,
of Dockstader, of Pelham, of Pierce, of Campbell, of Pell and Trowbridge,
of Thatcher, Primrose and West, of Huntley, and of very many more, to say
nothing of the bands of veritable negroes who have endeavored to imitate
themselves in imitation of their white brethren in all parts of the land.
Brander Matthews, in an article on "Negro Minstrelsy," printed in the
London _Saturday Review_ in 1884, and afterwards published as one of the
chapters of a volume of _Saturday Review_ essays, entitled _The New Book
of Sports_ (London, 1885), describes a "minstrel show" given by the negro
waiters of one of the large summer hotels in Saratoga a few summers
before, in which, "when the curtains were drawn aside, discovering a row
of sable performers, it was perceived, to the great and abiding joy of the
spectators, that the musicians were all of a uniform darkness of hue, and
that they, genuine negroes as they were, had 'blackened up,' the more
closely to resemble the professional negro minstrel."
[Illustration: GEORGE SWAYNE BUCKLEY.]
The dignified and imposing Mr. Johnston has sat during all these years in
the centre of a long line of black comedians, which includes such artists
as "Eph" Horn, "Dan" Neil, and "Jerry" Bryant--whose real name was
O'Brien--Charles H. Fox, "Charley" White, George Christy, "Nelse"
Seymour--Thomas Nelson Sanderson--the Buckleys, J. W. Raynor, Birch,
Bernard, Wambold, Backus, "Pony" Moore, "Dan" Cotton, "Bob" Hart, "Cool"
White, "Dan" Emmett, "Dave" Reed, "Matt" Peel, "Ben" Gardner, Luke
Schoolcraft, James H. Budworth, Kelly, Leon, "Frank" Brower, S. C.
Campbell, "Gus" Howard, "Billy" Newcomb, "Billy" Gray, Aynsley Cooke,
"Hughey" Dougherty, "Tony" Hart, Unsworth, W. H. Delehanty, "Sam" Devere,
"Add" Ryman, George Thatcher, "Master Eugene," "Ricardo," "Andy" Leavitt,
"Sam" Sanford, "Lew" Benedict, "Harry" Bloodgood, "Cal" Wagner, "Ben"
Collins, and "Little Mac."
[Illustration: EPH. HORN.]
Nothing like a personal history of any of these men, who have been so
prominent upon the negro minstrel stage during the half-century of its
existence, can be given here. They have all done much to make the world
happier and brighter for a time by their public careers, and they have
left a pleasant and a cheerful memory behind them. Their gibes, their
gambols, their songs, their flashes of merriment, still linger in our eyes
and in our ears; and before many readers scores of quaint figures with
blackened faces will no doubt dance to half-forgotten tunes all over these
pages, which are too crowded to contain more than the mere mention of
their names.
[Illustration: JERRY BRYANT.]
[Illustration: NELSE SEYMOUR.]
How much of the wonderful success and popularity of the negro minstrel is
due to the minstrel, how much to the negro melody he introduced, and how
much to the characteristic bones, banjo, and tambourine upon which he
accompanied himself, is an open question. It was certainly the song, not
the singer, which moved Thackeray to write years ago: "I heard a humorous
balladist not long since, a minstrel with wool on his head, and an ultra
Ethiopian complexion, who performed a negro ballad that I confess
moistened these spectacles in a most unexpected manner. I have gazed at
thousands of tragedy queens dying on the stage and expiring in appropriate
blank-verse, and I never wanted to wipe them. They have looked up, be it
said, at many scores of clergymen without being dimmed, and behold! a
vagabond with a corked face and a banjo sings a little song, strikes a
wild note, which sets the heart thrilling with happy pity."
[Illustration: DAN. BRYANT.]
This ballad perhaps was "Nelly Bly," or "Nelly was a Lady," or "Lucy
Long," or "Oh, Susanna," or "Nancy Till," or, better than any of these,
Stephen Foster's "Way Down upon the Swanee River," a song that has touched
more hearts than "Annie Laurie" itself; for, after all, "The Girl We Left
Behind Us" is not more precious in our eyes than "The Old Folks at Home;"
and the American has sunk very low indeed of whom it cannot be said that
"he never shook his mother." Foster is utterly unappreciated by his
fellow-countrymen, who erect all their monuments to the men who make their
laws. He was the author of "Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground," "Old Dog
Tray," "Old Uncle Ned," "Old Folks at Home," "Old Kentucky Home," "Willie,
We have Missed You," and "Come where My Love lies Dreaming." He died as he
had lived, in 1864, when he was but thirty-seven years of age, and his
"Hard Times Will Come Again No More."
Joel Chandler Harris, who is one of the best friends the plantation negro
ever had, and who certainly knows him thoroughly, startled the whole
community by writing to the _Critic_, in the autumn of 1883, that he had
never seen a banjo or a tambourine or a pair of bones in the hands of the
negroes on any of the plantations of middle Georgia with which he is
familiar; that they made sweet music with the quills, as Pan did; that
they played passably well on the fiddle, the fife, the flute, and the
bugle; that they beat enthusiastically on the triangle; but that they knew
not at all the instruments tradition had given them. That Uncle Remus,
cannot "pick" the banjo, and never even heard it "picked," seems hardly
credible; but Mr. Harris knows. Uncle Remus, however, is not a travelled
darky, and the existence of the banjo in other parts of the South has been
clearly proved. Mr. Cable quotes a creole negro ditty of before the war
in which "Musieu Bainjo" is mentioned on every line. Maurice Thompson says
the banjo is a common instrument among the field hands in North Georgia,
Alabama, and Tennessee; and he describes a rude banjo manufactured by its
dusky performer out of a flat gourd, strung with horse-hair; while we
find in Thomas Jefferson's _Notes on Virginia_, printed in 1784, the
following statement: "In music they [the blacks] are more generally gifted
than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been
found capable of imagining a small catch." In a foot-note Jefferson adds,
"The instrument proper to them is the banjar, which they brought hither
from Africa."
[Illustration: STEPHEN C. FOSTER.]
The negro minstrel will give up his tambourine, for it is as old as the
days of the Exodus, when Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took
a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels
and with dances; and he will give up the bones, for Miss Olive Logan, in
_Harper's Magazine_ for April, 1879, traces them back to the reign of Fou
Hi, Emperor of China, 3468 B.C., while Shakspere's King of the Fairies,
who made an ass of the hard-handed man of Athens, also treated Bottom to
the melody of the bones. He will hang up his fiddle and his bow when the
time comes, cheerfully enough, for Nero, according to tradition, fiddled
for the dancing of the flames that consumed Rome nineteen hundred years
ago. None of these are exclusively his own; but it would be very cruel to
take from him his banjo, which he evolved if he did not invent, and
without which he can be and can do nothing.
ACT III.
THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE.
THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE.
"The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if
imagination amend them."
_A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, Act v. Sc. 1.
The burlesque among serious writers has a bad reputation. George Eliot, in
_Theophrastus Such_, says that it debases the moral currency; and George
Crabb, in his _English Synonymes_, thus dismisses it: "Satire and irony
are the most ill-natured kinds of wit; burlesque stands in the lowest
rank."
Burlesque, from the Italian _burlare_, "to joke," "to banter," "to play,"
has been defined as "an expression of language, a display of gesture, an
impression of countenance, the intention being to excite laughter." In art
caricature is burlesque, in literature parody is burlesque, in the drama
comic pantomime, comic opera, travesty, and extravaganza are burlesque.
All dramatic burlesque ranges under the head of farce, although all farce
is not burlesque. Burlesque is the farce of portraiture on the stage;
farce on the stage is the burlesque of events. Bret Harte's _Condensed
Novels_ and George Arnold's _McArone Papers_ are representative specimens
of burlesque in American letters; Arthur B. Frost's famous domestic cat,
who supped inadvertently upon rat poison, is an excellent example of
burlesque in American art. What America has done for burlesque on the
stage it is the aim of the following pages to show.
Hipponax, of Ephesus, who lived in the latter half of the sixth century
before Christ, is credited with having been "The Father of Burlesque
Poetry." He was small and ill-favored physically, and his natural personal
defects were the indirect cause of the development of his satirical powers
and of his posthumous fame. Two sculptors of Chios caricatured him grossly
in a statue publicly exhibited, and he, in return, fired his muse with the
torch of hatred, and burned them in effigy with terrible but clever
ridicule. He parodied the _Iliad_, in which he made Achilles an Ionian
glutton; he did not spare his own parents; he poked fun at the gods
themselves; he impaled Mrs. Hipponax with a couplet upon which she is
still exhibited to the scoffers, and he is only to be distinguished from
his long line of successors by the curious fact that he does not seem to
have spoken with derision of his mother-in-law! His tribute to matrimony
is still preserved in choice iambics, roughly translated as follows:
"There are but two happy days in the life of a married man--the day of his
marriage, and the day of the burial of his wife." From this it will be
seen that twenty-five centuries or more look down upon the Benedict of the
modern burlesque, who leaves his wife at home when he travels for
pleasure!
Aristophanes, the comic poet of Athens, who wrote fifty-four comedies
between the years 427 and 388 B.C., may be termed "The Father of the
Burlesque Play." He satirized people more than things, or than other men's
tragedies, and to his school belong Brougham's _Pocahontas_ and
_Columbus_, rather than the same author's _Dan Keyser de Bassoon_, or
_Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice_. The plots of Aristophanes are as
original as his wit. In _The Wasps_ he caricatured the fondness of the
Athenians for litigation; in _The Birds_ his object was to convince the
Athenians of the advantages of a clean political sweep; in _The Female
Orators_ he satirized the Sorosis and the women suffragists of his time;
in _The Feast of Ceres_ he pointed out how useful and ornamental woman is
in her own sphere; and in _Peace_, written to urge the close of the
Peloponnesian war, he reached the sublimity of burlesque in creating a
stage heroine who never utters a word. The argument of _The Knights_ will
give a very fair idea of the plots of his plays. Athens is represented as
a private house, whose master, Demos (the people), has more servants and
more servants' relations than he can comfortably wait upon or decently
support. Nicias and Demosthenes are his slaves, and Cleon, a political
boss of the period, is his butler and confidential valet. Demos is
irritable, superstitious, inconstant in his pursuits, and dull in
character. Agoracritus, a sausage-seller, subverts the plots and the plans
of the demagogue Cleon--originally played by Aristophanes himself--shows
the householder that his favorite servant is utterly unworthy of the
public trust, and brings the entertainment to a close with the
discomfiture of the Ring and the relief of the taxpayers. Demos is said to
have been the prototype of "John Bull," the personification of the
Englishman, as he was first exhibited by Dr. Arbuthnot in the early part
of the eighteenth century, and _The Knights_ is regarded as "an historical
piece of great value, because it furnishes a faithful picture of the
nation and of its customs." What curious ideas of American life and
manners will posterity gather from _Adonis_ and _Evangeline_!
Classical critics credit Aristophanes with being distinguished for the
exuberance of his wit, for his inexhaustible fund of comic humor, and for
the Attic purity and great simplicity of his language; while at the same
time he is accused of introducing, when it suits his purpose, every
variety of dialect, of coining new words and expressions as occasion
offers, and of making bad puns, whether occasion offers or not; in all of
which his disciples persistently and consistently follow him.
Samuel Foote, who lived in an age of epithets, was called "The British
Aristophanes." He respected no person and no thing. He satirized every
subject, sacred or profane, which struck his fancy, from Chesterfield's
Letters to the Stratford Jubilee; and he caricatured everybody, from
Whitfield to the Duchess of Kingston. His serious attempt at Othello, in
the beginning of his career as an actor, was considered a master-piece of
unconscious burlesque, only inferior, in its extravagance and nonsense, to
his Hamlet, and he failed in every legitimate part he undertook to play.
As a mimic, however, in dramatic productions of his own writing, he met
with immense success; and as a writer of stage burlesque he ranks very
high. He made Italian opera ridiculous in his _Cat Concert_; he gave
serious offence to a hard-working, respectable trade in _The Tailors, a
Tragedy for Warm Weather_; he attacked the medical profession in _The
Devil on Two Sticks_; he parodied sentimental romance of the _Pamela_
school in his _Piety in Pattens_; and he offended all right-thinking
persons, heterodox as well as orthodox, in _The Minor_, a travesty upon
the methods of Wesley and his Church.
_The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruell Death of Pyramus and Thisbie_,
originally published in the year 1600, if not the earliest burlesque in
the English language, is certainly the model upon which are based all
subsequent productions of the same class which have been written for the
British or American theatre. Stevens believes the title to have been
suggested to Shakspere by Dr. Thomas Preston's _Lamentable Tragedy Mixed
Ful of Pleasant Mirth--Conteyning the Life of Cambises, King of Percia_.
The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is to be found in the fourth book of
Ovid's _Metamorphoses_; and a volume called _Perymus and Thesbye_ was
entered on the Stationers' Register in 1562-63. Arthur Golding's
translation of Ovid was published in 1567, and several other versions of
the tale were extant before the birth of Snout or Bottom, the incidents,
of course, being the same in all. Shaksperean scholars find traces of
other works in the different speeches of the hard-handed men of Athens,
but the general impression is that the author's purpose was to travesty
the verse of Golding. Limander and Helen are intended for Leander and
Hero; Shafalus and Procrus for Cephalus and Procris, and Ninny for Ninus;
a form of verbal contortion displayed by the modern burlesquer in _Sam
Parr_ for _Zampa_, and _The Roof Scrambler_ for _Sonnambula_; while the
lines--
"Whereat, with blade, with bloody, blamefull blade,
He brauely broacht his boiling bloody breast,"
read like the blank-verse mouthed by the deep tragedians of the negro
minstrel stage of to-day.
_The Midsummer-Night's Dream_, with Mr. Hilson as Snout and Mr. Placide as
Bottom, was performed, "for the first time in America," at the Park
Theatre, New York, on the 9th of November, 1826, when the stage in this
country was upwards of three-quarters of a century old, and had a
literature of its own, comparatively rich in comedy and tragedy, and when
its burlesque, such as it was, undoubtedly felt the influence of _Pyramus
and Thisbe_.
The second great burlesque upon the British stage was _The Rehearsal_, by
George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in the reign of the Second Charles,
first acted in 1672. It was original in design and brilliant in execution.
It introduced a popular author, John Dryden, engaged in superintendence of
a rehearsal of one of his own tragedies--the tragedy in this instance
consisting of clever parodies of portions of all the dramas then in vogue.
_The Rehearsal_ does not seem to have been produced in this country,
although _The Critic_ of Sheridan, obviously based upon it, was performed
at the John Street Theatre, New York, November 24th, 1788, when President
Washington honored the entertainment with his presence. The cast has not
been preserved, although William Winter believes Mr. Wignell to have
played Puff, Mr. Ryan Whiskerandos, and Mrs. Morris (the second wife of
Owen Morris) Tilberina. _The Critic_ still survives, as Mr. Daly's
audiences well remember.
Burlesque upon the American stage, although not yet American burlesque,
dates back to the very beginning of the history of the theatre in this
country, when _The Beggar's Opera_, by John Gay, "written in ridicule of
the musical Italian drama," was presented at the theatre in Nassau Street,
New York, on the 3d of December, 1750, with Thomas Kean as Captain
Macheath. _The Beggar's Opera_ was first acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields in
1727, and took the town by storm. The Archbishop of Canterbury preached a
sermon against it; Sir John Fielding, the police-justice, officially
begged the manager not to present it on _Saturday evenings_, as it
inspired the idle apprentices of London, who saw it on their night off,
to imitate its hero's thieving deeds; and a certain critic condemned it as
"the parent of that most monstrous of all absurdities, the comic opera."
Nevertheless it was immensely popular, and enjoyed an unusually long run.
As a literary production it is distinguished for its combination of
nature, pathos, satire, and burlesque. It brought fame to its author, and,
indirectly, something like wealth; and it made a duchess of Lavinia
Fenton, who was the original Polly. As that monstrous absurdity the comic
opera is without question the parent of that still more monstrous
absurdity the burlesque proper, Polly Peachum and Captain Macheath may be
considered the very Pilgrim Parents of burlesque in the New World. They
were followed almost immediately (February 25, 1751) by _Damon and
Phillada, a Ballad Farce_, by Colley Cibber. Their Plymouth Rock very soon
became too small to hold them; their descendants have taken possession of
the whole land, and every _Mayflower_ that crosses the Atlantic to-day
brings consignments of British blondes to swell their number. Before the
Revolution Fielding's _Tom Thumb; or, The Tragedy of Tragedies_, a clever
travesty, with Mrs. Hallam (Mrs. Douglas) as Queen Dollalolla, and Kane
O'Hara's _Midas_, "a burlesque turning upon heathen deities, ridiculous
enough in themselves, and too absurd for burlesque," had taken out their
naturalization papers. _The Critic_, as has been shown, declared his
intentions very shortly after the establishment of peace; and _Bombastes
Furioso_ became a citizen of New York as early as 1816.
[Illustration: MRS. HALLAM (MRS. DOUGLAS).]
As Satan in the proverb builds invariably a chapel hard by the house of
prayer, so does the demon of burlesque as surely erect his hovel next door
to the palace of the legitimate tragedian. He spoils by his absurd
architecture every neighborhood he enters; he even cuts off the views from
the Castle of Elsinore, and disfigures the approaches to the royal tombs
of the ancient Danish kings. John Poole's celebrated travesty of _Hamlet_,
one of the earliest of its kind, was first published in London in 1811.
George Holland, afterwards so popular upon the American stage for many
years, presented Poole's play on the occasion of his first benefit in this
country, March 22, 1828, appearing himself as the First Grave-digger and
as Ophelia. This was about the beginning of what, for want of a better
term, may be styled "legitimate burlesque" in the United States. It
inspired our managers to import, and our native authors to write,
travesties upon everything in the standard drama which was serious and
ought to have been respected; and it led to burlesques of _Antony and
Cleopatra_, _Douglas_, _Macbeth_, _Othello_, _Romeo and Juliet_,
_Manfred_, _The Tempest_, _Valentine and Orson_, _Richard the Third_, _The
Hunchback_, and many more; and between the years 1839, when William
Mitchell opened the Olympic, and 1859, when William E. Burton made his
last bow to the New York public, was laid out and built between Chambers
Street and the site of Brougham's Lyceum, on Broadway, corner of Broome
Street, that metropolis of burlesque upon the ruins of which the dramatic
antiquary, whose name is Palmy Days, now loves to sit and ponder.
The titles of its half-forgotten streets and buildings, collected at
random from its old directories, then known as the bills of the play, will
recall pleasant memories and excite gentle wonder. There were, among
others, _A Lad in a Wonderful Lamp_, _The Bohea Man's Girl_, _Fried Shots_
[_Freischuetz_], _Her Nanny_, _Lucy Did Sham Her Moor_, and _Lucy Did Lamm
Her Moor_, _Man Fred_, _Cinder Nelly_, _Wench Spy_, _Spook Wood_, _Buy It
Dear_, _'Tis Made of Cashmere_ [_Bayadere; or, The Maid of Cashmere_],
_The Cat's in the Larder, or, The Maid with the Parasol_ [_La Gazza Ladra;
or, The Maiden of Paillaisseau_], _The Humpback_, _Mrs. Normer_, and
_Richard Number Three_.
[Illustration: MARK SMITH AS MRS. NORMER.]
Of this metropolis William Mitchell was the first Lord Mayor. He was the
inaugurator, if not the creator, of an entirely new school of dramatic
architecture, which was as general, and sometimes as absurd, as the style
which has since spread over the country at the expense of the reputation
of good Queen Anne; and he led the popular taste for a number of years, to
the great enjoyment of his clients, if not to their mental profit. William
Horncastle, a good singer and a fair actor, and Dr. William K. Northall
were his assistants in dramatic construction, and the authors of many of
his extravagant productions. One of his earliest and most popular
burlesques was entitled _La Mosquito_. It was based upon _The Tarantula_
of Fanny Elssler, and was presented at the close of his first season. An
extract from the bill will give a fair idea of the quality of the fooling:
"First time in this or any other country, a new comic burlesque ballet,
entitled _La Mosquito_, in which Monsieur Mitchell will make his
first appearance as _une Premiere Danseuse_, and show his agility
in a variety of terpsichorean efforts of all sorts in the genuine
Bolerocachucacacavonienne style.... The ballet is founded on the
well-known properties of the mosquito, whose bites render the patient
exceedingly impatient, and throws him into a fit of slapping and
scratching and swearing delirium, commonly termed the '_Cacoethes
Scratchendi_,' causing the unfortunate being to cut capers enough for a
considerable number of legs of mutton. The scene lies in Hoboken," etc.
Concerning Mitchell's performance, Dr. Northall writes, in _Before and
Behind the Curtain_: "We shall long remember the comic humor with which he
burlesqued the charming and graceful Fanny. The manner of his exit from
the stage at the conclusion of the dance was irresistibly comic, and the
serious care with which he guided himself to the side scenes, to secure a
passage for his tremendous bustle, was very funny."
Mr. Mitchell's other famous burlesque parts were Man Fred, Hamlet, Willy
Walters (in _The Humpback_), Sam Parr, Jap (in _Loves of the Angels_),
Antony, and Richard Number Three. Very few portraits of this old actor,
either in character or otherwise, are known to the collectors. The
accompanying print is from a drawing made by Charles Parsons while seated
in the pit of the old Olympic half a century ago, when the draughtsman--a
mere lad--was beginning his professional career. The original sketch was
given to Mr. Mitchell by the young artist, who received in return a pass
to the theatre--the highest ambition of the boys of that period.
[Illustration: WILLIAM MITCHELL AS RICHARD NUMBER THREE.]
Mitchell was forced to retire from the mayoralty before the close of his
last season at the Olympic, in 1849-50, having been deposed the previous
year by William E. Burton at the Chambers Street house. As Lester Wallack
said in his _Memories_, Burton did everything that Mitchell did, and did
it in a better way, with better players and better plays. His first
burlesque was a cruel treatment of the opera of _Lucia_, followed
immediately by a heartless travesty of Dibdin's _Valentine and Orson_.
These were succeeded by _The Tempest_, in which Mrs. Brougham (Miss
Nelson), a lady of enormous physical size, played Ariel. A little while
later Mr. Brougham played Macbeth to the Macduff of Thomas B. Johnstone,
the Banquo of Oliver B. Raymond, and the Lady Macbeth of Burton himself.
Mark Smith made a fascinating Norma, Leffingwell played the Stern Parient
in _Villikens and his Dinah_, and Charles Fisher, in white tights, a
tunic, gauze wings, and a flowing wig, pirouetted with Mrs. Skerrett in a
production called _St. Cupid_, in which Mr. Burton appeared as Queen Bee,
a Gypsy Woman.
[Illustration: JOHN BROUGHAM AND GEORGINA HODSON IN "POCAHONTAS."]
It would be an easy matter to fill many of these pages with stories of the
humorous productions and the laughable performances of Burton and Brougham
on the Chambers Street boards. The literature of the American theatre
overflows with anecdotes of their quarrels and their reconciliations upon
the stage, their jokes upon each other, their impromptu wit, their
unexpected "gags"--which were always looked for--the liberties they took
with their authors, their audiences, and themselves, and, above all, with
their incomparable acting in every part, whether it was serious or
frivolous.
The last, and in many respects the greatest, of the trio of actors,
authors, and managers who may be considered the founders of American
burlesque, began his brilliant but brief reign at the Lyceum, at Broome
Street, late in 1850, about the time of the retirement of Mitchell, and
long before his later rival, Burton, was ready to lay down his sceptre. If
America has ever had an Aristophanes, John Brougham was his name. His
_Pocahontas_ and _Columbus_ are almost classics. They rank among the best,
if they are not the very best, burlesques in any living language. Their
wit is never coarse, they ridicule nothing which is not a fit subject for
ridicule, they outrage no serious sentiment, they hurt no feelings, they
offend no portion of the community, they shock no modesty, they never
blaspheme; and, as Dr. Benjamin Ellis Martin has happily expressed it,
their author was "the first to give to burlesque its crowning comic
conceit of utter earnestness, of solemn seriousness."
The Lyceum was opened on the 23d of December, 1850, with "an occasional
rigmarole entitled _Brougham, and Co._," which introduced the entire
company to the public. The next absurdity was _A Row at the Lyceum_, with
Mr. Florence in the gallery, Mr. Brougham himself in the pit, and the rest
of the _dramatis personae_ upon the stage; and shortly before the abrupt
close of Mr. Brougham's management he presented _What Shall We Do for
Something New?_ in which Mrs. Brougham appeared as Rudolpho, Mrs. Skerrett
as Elvino, and Mr. Johnstone as Amina, in a travesty upon _La Sonnambula_.
Upon the same stage, on Christmas Eve, 1855, but under the management of
the elder Wallack, Brougham produced his "Original, Aboriginal, Erratic,
Operatic, Semi-civilized, and Demi-savage Extravaganza of _Pocahontas_."
The scenery, as announced, was painted from daguerreotypes and other
authentic documents, the costumes were cut from original plates, and the
music was dislocated and reset, by the heads of the different departments
of the theatre. Charles Walcot played John Smith, "according to this
story, but somewhat in variance with his story"; Miss Hodson played the
titular part, and Mr. Brougham represented "Pow-Ha-Tan I., King of the
Tuscaroras--a Crotchety Monarch, in fact a Semi-Brave." At the close of
the opening song (to the air of "Hoky-poky-winky-wum") he thus addressed
his people:
"Well roared, indeed, my jolly Tuscaroras.
Most loyal corps, your King encores your chorus;"
and until the fall of the curtain, at the end of the second and last act,
the scintillations of wit and the thunder of puns were incessant and
startling. "May I ask," says Col-o-gog (J. H. Stoddart), "in the word
_lie_, what vowel do you use, sir, _i_ or _y_?"
"Y, sir, or I, sir, search the vowels through,
And find the one most consonant to you."
Later the King cries:
"Sergeant-at-arms, say, what alarms the crowd;
Loud noise annoys us; why is it allowed?"
And Captain Smith, describing his first introduction at the royal court,
says:
"I visited his Majesty's abode,
A portly savage, plump and pigeon-toed;
Like Metamora, both in feet and feature,
I never met-a-more-a-musing creature."
[Illustration: HARRY BECKETT AS THE WIDOW TWANKEY, IN "ALADDIN."]
In a more serious but not less happy vein is the apostrophe to tobacco,
by the smoking, joking Powhatan, as follows:
"While other joys one sense alone can measure,
This to all senses gives ecstatic pleasure.
You _feel_ the radiance of the glowing bowl,
_Hear_ the soft murmurs of the kindling coal,
_Smell_ the sweet fragrance of the honey-dew,
_Taste_ its strong pungency the palate through,
_See_ the blue cloudlets circling to the dome,
Imprisoned skies up-floating to their home--
I like a dhudeen myself!"
And so he joked and smoked his way into a popularity which no stage
monarch has enjoyed before or since. _Pocahontas_ ran for many weeks, and
was frequently repeated for many years. The story of the sudden departure
of the original Pocahontas one night without a word of warning, and the
successful performance of the piece by Brougham and Walcot, with no one to
play the titular part at all, is as familiar in the theatrical annals as
the sadder stories of Woffington's last appearance, and the death of
Palmer on the stage; and no doubt it will be remembered long after
_Pocahontas_ itself, despite its cleverness, is quite forgotten.
"_Columbus el Filibustero_, a New and Audaciously Original,
Historico-plagiaristic, Ante-national, Pre-patriotic, and Omni-local
Confusion of Circumstances. Running through Two Acts and Four Centuries,"
was first performed at Burton's Theatre (Broadway, opposite Bond Street,
afterwards the Winter Garden) on the 31st of December, 1857; Mark Smith
playing Ferdinand, Lawrence Barrett Talavera, Miss Lizzie Weston Davenport
Columbia, and Mr. Brougham himself Columbus. It is a more serious
production than _Pocahontas_; the satire is more subtle, and the thought
more delicate. It contains no play upon words, is not filled with
startling absurdities, and is pathetic rather than uproariously funny.
While _Pocahontas_ inspires nothing but laughter, _Columbus_ excites
sympathy, and oftentimes he has moved his audiences to the verge of tears.
He is a much-abused, simple, honest old man, full of sublime ideas, and
long ahead of his times. He dreams prophetic dreams, and in his visions he
"sees a land
Where Nature seems to frame with practised hand
Her last most wondrous work. Before him rise
Mountains of solid rock that rift the skies,
Imperial valleys with rich verdure crowned
For leagues illimitable smile around,
While through them subject seas for rivers run
From ice-bound tracks to where the tropic sun
Breeds in the teeming ooze strange monstrous things.
He sees, upswelling from exhaustless springs,
Great lakes appear, upon whose surface wide
The banded navies of the earth may ride.
He sees tremendous cataracts emerge
From cloud-aspiring heights, whose slippery verge
Tremendous oceans momently roll o'er,
Assaulting with unmitigated roar
The stunned and shattered ear of trembling day,
That, wounded, weeps in glistening tears of spray."
[Illustration: JAMES LEWIS AS SYNTAX, IN "CINDERELLA AT SCHOOL."]
In short, he sees so much that is beyond the comprehension of the ordinary
play-goer, that for thirty years he has been left in absolute retirement
in that Forrest Home for good old plays which is styled _French's Minor
Drama_.
One of Brougham's last burlesque productions was his _Much Ado About a
Merchant of Venice_, presented March 8, 1869, at the little theatre on
Twenty-fourth Street, New York, which has since borne so many names, and
now, rebuilt, is known as the Madison Square. He played Shylock, Miss
Effie Germon Lorenzo, and Mrs. J. J. Prior Portia. This was his final
effort at theatrical management. He appeared in _Pocahontas_ as late as
1876, but Shylock was his last original burlesque part which is worthy of
serious mention.
Francis Talfourd's _Shylock; or, The Merchant of Venice Preserved, a
Jerusalem Hearty Joke_, is a much older production than Brougham's
travesty of the same play, with which it should not be confounded.
Frederic Robson was the original Shylock in London, Tom Johnstone in New
York (at Burton's, October 9, 1853). M. W. Leffingwell gave an admirable
performance of Talfourd's _Shylock_ in September, 1867, on the stage of
this same little Twenty-fourth Street theatre, assisted by Miss Lina Edwin
as Jessica. Mr. Leffingwell was a very versatile actor although he
excelled in burlesque and broadly extravagant parts. He will be remembered
as Romeo Jaffier Jenkins, in _Too Much for Good Nature_, and in travesties
of _Cinderella_ and _Fra Diavolo_. In the last absurdity, as Beppo, made
up in very clever imitation of Forrest as the Gladiator, and enormously
padded, he strutted about the stage for many moments, entirely unconscious
of a large carving-fork stuck into the sawdust which formed the calf of
his gladiatorial leg. His look of agony and his roar of anguish--perfect
reflections of Forrest's voice and action--when his attention was called
to his physical suffering, made one of the most ludicrous scenes in the
whole history of American burlesque. Mr. Forrest is said to have remarked
of a lithograph of Leffingwell in this part, that while the portrait of
himself was not so bad, the characteristics were somewhat exaggerated!
Leffingwell was, no doubt, the original of the full length, life-sized
effigy of Forrest which serves as the sign for a cigar store on one of
the leading thoroughfares of New York to-day.
[Illustration: GEORGE L. FOX AS HAMLET.]
Madame Tostee, in 1867, with the _Grand Duchess_, and Miss Lydia Thompson,
the next season, with _Ixion_--although neither of these can be considered
American burlesques--gave new life to burlesque in America; and for a
number of years burlesque was rampant upon the American stage; many
leading comedians of later days, who will hardly be associated with that
style of performance by the theatre-goers of the present generation,
devoting themselves to travestie and extravaganza. Among the most
successful of these may be mentioned William J. Florence, Stuart Robson,
James Lewis, and Harry Beckett. The last gentleman was exceedingly comic,
and at the same time always refined and artistic in such parts as Minerva
in _Ixion_, Hassarac in _The Forty Thieves_, the Widow Twankey in
_Aladdin_, Maid Marian in _Robin Hood_, and Queen Elizabeth in
_Kenilworth_ long before he became the established low comedian of Mr.
Lester Wallack's company, and won such well-merited popularity by his
clever representations of characters as divergent as Tony Lumpkin, Harvey
Duff, in _The Shaughraun_, and Mark Meddle.
In January, 1869, Mr. and Mrs. Florence played an engagement of
extravaganza at Wood's Museum--now Daly's Theatre--on Broadway, near
Thirtieth Street, presenting _The Field of the Cloth of Gold_, in which
Mr. Florence assumed the character of Francis First, Louis Mestayer Henry
Eighth, Mrs. Florence Lady Constance, Miss Lillie Eldridge La Sieur de
Boissy, and Miss Rose Massey (her first appearance in America) Lord
Darnley. The feature of this performance, naturally, was the grand
tournament upon the plain between Ardres and Guisnes, in which the rival
monarchs fought for the international championship with boxing gloves in
the roped arena, and according to the rules of the prize-ring, the police
finally breaking up the match and carrying both combatants into the
ignominious lockup. Older play-goers will remember Mr. Florence years
before this as Eily O'Conner, in a burlesque of _The Colleen Bawn_, and as
Beppo "a very Heavy Villain of the Bowery Drama in Kirby's days," in _Fra
Diavolo_, Mrs. Florence making a marvellous Danny Mann in the former
piece.
While Mr. Florence was taking gross liberties with the personality of
Francis First at Wood's, Mr. Lewis was doing cruel injustice to the
character of Lucretia Borgia at the Waverley Theatre, 720 Broadway, under
the management of Miss Elise Holt, who played Gennaro. The palace of the
Borgias was "set" as a modern apothecary's shop, where poison was sold
in large or small quantities, and Mr. Lewis excited roars of laughter as a
quack doctress, with great capabilities of advertising herself and her
nostrums. During the same engagement Mr. Lewis played Rebecca in
_Ivanhoe_, and Oenone in _Paris_; but he joined Mr. Daly's company a few
months later, and the legitimate has since marked him for its own.
[Illustration: LYDIA THOMPSON AS SINDBAD.]
At the Fifth Avenue Theatre, and afterwards at Wallack's, in this same
summer of 1869, Stuart Robson made a great hit as Captain Crosstree, in F.
C. Burnand's travesty of _Black-eyed Susan_, a part originally played in
this country during the previous season by Mark Smith. Mr. Robson had the
support of Harry Pearson as Doggrass, of Miss Kitty Blanchard as William,
and of Miss Mary Cary as Susan. The entertainment, as a whole, was
unusually good, full of exquisite drollery and grotesque fancy, although
Captain Crosstree eclipsed every other feature. His "make up" was a marvel
of absurdity, his naturally slight figure was literally blown to an
enormous size, the contrast between his immense physical rotundity and his
thin, inimitably squeaky little voice being exceedingly ludicrous.
During this season the Lydia Thompson troupe was in the full tide of its
success; William Horace Lingard and Miss Alice Dunning were playing
_Pluto_ and _Orpheus in New York_; every negro minstrel and variety
performer was burlesquing some person or some thing every night in the
week, and opera-bouffe had taken possession of half of the theatres in the
land.
[Illustration: WILLIAM H. CRANE AS LE BLANC, IN EVANGELINE.]
The most successful burlesque of those times, and the entertainment which
is most fresh in the memory, was "The New Version of Shakspere's
Masterpiece of _Hamlet_, as arranged by T. C. De Leon, of Mobile, for
George L. Fox," and first presented in New York at the Olympic (formerly
Laura Keene's) Theatre, on Broadway, February 14, 1870. Although not an
improvement upon the original acting version of the tragedy, it was an
improvement upon the general run of burlesques of its generation; it did
not depend upon lime-lights or upon anatomical display, and it did not
harrow up the young blood of its auditors by its horrible plays upon
unoffending words. It followed the text of Shakspere closely enough to
preserve the plot of the story; it contained, as well, a great deal that
was ludicrous and bright, and it never sank into imbecility or indelicacy,
which is saying much for a burlesque. Mr. Fox, one of the few really funny
men of his day upon the American stage, was at his best in this travesty
of _Hamlet_. Quite out of the line of the pantomimic clown by which he is
now remembered, it was as supremely absurd, as expressed upon his face
and in his action, as was his _Humpty Dumpty_. It was perhaps more a
burlesque of Edwin Booth--after whom in the character he played and
dressed--than of Hamlet, and probably no one enjoyed this more thoroughly,
or laughed at it more heartily, than did Mr. Booth himself. While Fox at
times was wonderfully like Booth in attitude, look, and voice, he would
suddenly assume the accent and expression of Fechter, whom he
counterfeited admirably, and again give a most intense passage in the
wonderfully deep tones of Studley, at the Bowery. To see Mr. Fox pacing
the platform before the Castle of Elsinore, protected against the eager
and the nipping air of the night by a fur cap and collar, and with mittens
and arctic overshoes, over the traditional costume of Hamlet; to see the
woful melancholy of his face as he spoke the most absurd of lines; to
watch the horror expressed upon his countenance when the Ghost appeared;
to hear his familiar conversation with that Ghost, and his untraditional
profanity when commanded by the Ghost to "swear"--all expressed, now in
the style of Fechter, now of Studley, now of Booth--was as thoroughly and
ridiculously enjoyable as any piece of acting our stage has seen since
Burton and Mitchell were at their funniest, so many years before. He was
startling in his recommendation of a brewery as a place of refuge for
Ophelia, and in the church-yard his "business" was new and quite original,
particularly the apostrophe to the skull of Yorick, who, he seemed to
think, was laughing now on the wrong side of his face. Fox was one of the
earliest Hamlets to realize that the skull even of a jester, when it has
lain in the earth three-and-twenty years, is not a pleasant object to
touch or smell, although very interesting in itself to point a moral, or
for its association's sake; and the expression of his face, as he threw
the skull of the dead jester at the quick head of the First Grave-digger,
was more suggestive to the close observer of the base uses to which we may
all return than any "Alas, poor Yorick!" ever uttered.
[Illustration: STUART ROBSON AS CAPTAIN CROSSTREE.]
_Hamlet_ at the Olympic was played for ten consecutive weeks. The general
cast was not particularly strong or remarkable, except in the Ophelia of
Miss Belle Howett. She was serious, and surprisingly effective in the mad
scene, and often the superior of many of the representatives of Ophelia in
the original tragedy, who unwittingly have burlesqued what the burlesque
actress, perhaps as unwittingly, played conscientiously and well.
The travesty of _Hamlet_ by Mr. Fox is dwelt upon particularly here as
being in many respects one of the best the American stage has ever seen,
and as giving the present writer an opportunity of paying just tribute to
the memory of an actor who, like so many of his professional brethren, was
never properly appreciated during his life, and who never before--not
even in William Winter's usually complete _Brief Chronicles_--has received
more than a passing notice in the long records of the stage he did so much
to adorn.
George L. Fox was not always the clown and pantomimist of the _Humpty
Dumpty_ absurdity in which he is now remembered. He excelled in burlesque,
as his Hamlet and Richelieu and Macbeth have shown. As a Shaksperean
comedian his Bottom ranks among the best within the memory of men still
living, while in standard low comedy, melodramatic, and even in tragedy
parts, he had no little experience and some decided success. He made his
first appearance in 1830 at the Tremont Street Theatre, in Boston, when he
was but five years of age. The play was _The Children of the Alps_, and
the occasion a benefit to Charles Kean. He played Phineas Fletcher, in the
drama of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, during its famous run of so many nights at
the National Theatre, New York, in 1853-54. He excelled as Mark Meddle, as
Trip, as Jacques Strop, in _Robert Macaire_, as Tom Tape, in _Sketches in
India_, as Box, as Cox, and as Sundown Bowse, in _Horizon_.
[Illustration: HARRY HUNTER AS THE LONE FISHERMAN.]
Bottom was his most finished and artistic assumption, Hamlet probably his
most amusing, and Humpty Dumpty his most successful. He played the latter
part some fifteen hundred times in New York and elsewhere. It was the
last part he ever attempted to play, and only as a clown does he exist in
the minds of the men of to-day who think of him at all. He first appeared
in New York at the National Theatre, in 1850; he was last seen at Booth's
Theatre on the 25th of November, 1875--the saddest clown who ever chalked
his face. After twenty years of constant, faithful service as public
jester--shattered in health, broken in spirit, shaken in mind--he
disappeared forever from public view. Alas, poor Yorick!
One of the most popular as well as the longest lived of the contemporary
burlesques is _Evangeline_, in the construction or reconstruction of which
Mr. Brougham is known to have had a share. As a travesty upon a purely
American subject, originally treated, of course, in all seriousness by an
illustrious American, Mr. Longfellow, and at the suggestion of an American
equally illustrious, Mr. Hawthorne, _Evangeline_ may surely claim to be an
aboriginal production; it merits its success, and with a certain degree of
national pride it may be recorded here that it has been repeated upon the
American stage over five thousand times. In it, at the Fifth Avenue
Theatre, in Twenty-eighth Street, New York, during the summer of 1877,
Miss Eliza Weathersby, as Gabrielle, made a pleasant impression, William
H. Crane appeared as Le Blanc, George H. Knight gave a series of wonderful
imitations of the Hero of New Orleans, N. C. Goodwin came prominently
before the public, and Harry Hunter, although not the original in the
part, created a decided sensation as the Lone Fisherman, one of the
drollest dramatic conceptions of modern times. He had no connection
whatever with the play, had not a word to say, was entirely unnoticed by
his fellow-players, paid no attention to anybody, but was always
present--the first to enter, the last to leave every scene. With his
ridiculous costume, his palm-leaf fan, his fishing-rod, his camp-stool, he
pervaded everything, was ever prominent, never obtrusive, and exceedingly
mirth-provoking. It may be added that Henry Dixey, whose Adonis is one of
the best of modern burlesque performances, made, during the long run of
_Evangeline_, his New York _debut_ as the fore-legs of the heifer!
Amusement seekers in the metropolis will remember with pleasure Willie
Edouin, Mrs. James Oates, and scores of other burlesque actors, excellent
in many ways, whom it will not be possible even to mention here. N. C.
Goodwin burlesqued a burlesque at Harrigan and Hart's first theatre, when
he played Captain Stuart Robson-Crosstree to the Dame Hadley of Mr.
Harrigan and the Black-eyed Susan of Mr. Hart; at the same house G. K.
Fortescue played Lousqueeze to Mr. Hart's Hungry-Yet and Mr. Harrigan's
Pierre, in a play styled _The Two Awfuls_. The San Francisco Minstrels at
the same time presented _The Four Orphans and the Big Banana_, a burlesque
upon two dramas of great popularity and no little merit.
[Illustration: FRANCIS WILSON IN THE "OOLAH."]
The subject of American burlesque can hardly be dismissed here without
some brief allusion to a number of very clever parodies seen of late years
upon the amateur stage. The poets of the various college associations have
turned their muse in the direction of travesty, and with considerable
success; one of the best and most popular of the entertainments of the
Hasty Pudding Club, the _Dido and Aeneas_ of Owen Wister, the grandson of
Fanny Kemble, being a production worthy of professional talent. John K.
Bangs has written for amateur companies _Katherine_, _The Story of the
Shrew_, and _Mephistopheles, a Profanation_. In the first the tamer of
Shakspere finds the tables turned, and is himself tamed; while in the
latter Faust's mother-in-law, the good fairy of the piece, outwits the
evil genius and frustrates his designs; a power of invention on the part
of Mr. Bangs which proves him to be, perhaps, the only true son of the
Father of Burlesque, Hipponax himself.
[Illustration: MR. JEFFERSON AND MRS. WOOD IN "IVANHOE."]
But to return to the "palmy days of burlesque," before the period of
opera-bouffe, and the coming of the English blondes. When stock companies
were the rule, and Mitchell and Burton controlled the stock, singing and
dancing were as much a part of every actor's education as elocution and
gesture; and it was not considered beneath the dignity of the Rip Van
Winkle or the Hamlet of one night to travesty parts equally serious the
next. Mr. Booth, early in his career, appeared in such entertainments as
_Blue Beard_; and Mr. Jefferson was enormously popular as Beppo, Hiawatha,
Pan (in _Midas_), the Tycoon, and Mazeppa--old play-bills recording his
appearance as Granby Gag to the Jenny Lind of Mrs. John Wood, "with his
original grape-vine twist and burlesque break-down." His performance of
Mazeppa at the Winter Garden in 1861 is still a pleasant memory in many
minds. In it he sang "his celebrated aria, 'The Victim of Despair'"; and
his daring act upon the bare back of the wild rocking-horse of the
toy-shops was, perhaps, the most remarkable performance of its kind ever
witnessed by a danger-loving public. During his several engagements at the
Winter Garden Mr. Jefferson was supported by Mrs. John Wood (particularly
as Ivanhoe to his Sir Brian), one of the best burlesque actresses our
stage has known. Her Pocahontas was never excelled. She played it at
Niblo's to the Powhatan of Mark Smith in March, 1872; and almost her last
appearance upon the New York stage was made at the Grand Opera-house in
November of the same year, in John Brougham's burlesque _King Carrot_,
when that humorist remarked, although not of Mrs. Wood, that he was
supported by vegetable "supes."
[Illustration: JAMES T. POWERS AS BRIOLET, IN "THE MARQUIS."]
That burlesque "came natural" to Mr. Jefferson is shown in the wonderful
successes of his half-brother, Charles Burke, in burlesque parts. Mr.
Burke's admirers, even at the end of thirty-five years, still speak
enthusiastically of his comic Iago, of his Clod Meddlenot (in _The Lady of
the Lions_), of his Mr. MacGreedy (Mr. Macready), of his Kazrac (in
_Aladdin_), and of his Met-a-roarer, in which he gave absurd imitations of
Mr. Forrest as the Last of the Wampanoags.
[Illustration: CHARLES BURKE AS KAZRAC, IN "ALADDIN."]
No history of American burlesque could be complete without some mention of
the name of Daniel Setchell. His Leah the Forsook, and Mark Smith's
Madeline are remembered as pleasantly in New York as his Macbeth and Edwin
Adams's Macduff are remembered in Boston. William H. Crane places the
Macduff of Adams--he dressed in the volunteer uniform of the first year of
the war, and read lines ridiculous beyond measure with all of the
magnificent effect his wonderful voice and perfect elocution could give
them--as the finest piece of burlesque acting it has ever been his
good-fortune to see. But the stories told by the old comedians of the
extravagant comedy performances of their contemporaries in other days, if
they could be collected here, would extend this chapter far beyond the
limits of becoming space.
[Illustration: N. C. GOODWIN IN "LITTLE JACK SHEPPARD."]
[Illustration: DE WOLF HOPPER AS JULIET, AND MARSHALL P. WILDER AS ROMEO.]
Whether the burlesque of the present is comparable with the burlesque of
the past is an open question, much debated. Mr. Wilson in the _Oolah_, Mr.
Hopper as Juliet, Mr. Powers in _The Marquis_, Mr. Goodwin in _Little Jack
Sheppard_, Mr. Burgess as the Widow Bedott--if she can be considered a
burlesque part--and other men and women who burlesque women and men and
things to-day, are, without question, very clever performers; the laughs
they raise are as hearty and prolonged as any which paid tribute to the
talents of the comedians who went before them; and it is unjust, perhaps,
to judge them by high standards which live only in the memory, and grow
higher as distance lends enchantment to their view. As Lawrence Barrett
has said, "the actor is a sculptor who carves his image in snow." The
burlesque which has melted from our sight seems to us, as we look back at
it, to be purer and cleaner than the frozen burlesque upon which the sun
as yet has made no impression; and the figure of Pocahontas, gone with the
lost arts, seems more beautiful than the Evangeline of the modern school.
When the Adonis of the present counterfeits the deep tragedian he is
guilty of imitation, and of clever imitation, but nothing more; when he
represents the clerk in the country store he gives an admirable piece of
comedy acting; but he never rises to the sublime heights of Columbus, as
Columbus is remembered by those who saw him before Hoolah Goolah was born.
If American burlesque did not die with John Brougham, it has hardly yet
recovered from the shock of his death; and he certainly deserves a
colossal statue in its Pantheon.
[Illustration: HENRY E. DIXEY AS THE COUNTRY GIRL, IN "ADONIS."]
ACT IV.
INFANT PHENOMENA OF AMERICA.
INFANT PHENOMENA OF AMERICA.
"So cunning, and so young, is wonderful."
_Richard III._, Act iii. Sc. 1.
While the "Grand Spectacle of the _Black Crook_" was enjoying its fourth
successful run at Niblo's Garden, New York, in the season of 1873, a
precociously bright little musician of some six or seven years of age, so
advertised in the bills, and to all appearances no older, preternaturally
large in head and small in person, won the affection and the sympathy of
all those who witnessed his performances. During his very short career he
was one of the chief attractions of that attractive variety show, for the
_Black Crook_ in its later years was nothing more than a variety
entertainment; and when, so soon after the close of his engagement here,
the news of his death came from Boston, few of the established favorites
of many years have been so sincerely mourned as was this unfortunate
little James G. Speaight.
Scarcely larger than the violin he carried, dressed in a bright court
suit of blue satin, with powdered wig and silken hose and buckled shoes,
like a prince in a fairy tale, he seemed the slightest mite of a performer
who ever stood behind the foot-lights. His hands were scarcely big enough
to grasp his instrument; his arms and his legs were not so thick as his
bow; a bit of rosin thrown at him would have knocked him down; and he
could have been packed away comfortably in the case of his own fiddle. As
a musician he certainly was phenomenal. It was said of him that when only
four years of age, and after a single hearing, he could play by ear the
most difficult and complicated of musical compositions, and that he could
remember an air as soon as he could utter an articulate sound. Before he
was five years old he was sole performer at concerts given under his
father's management in some of the provincial towns of England; and when
he first appeared in this country he not only played solos upon his
violin, displaying decided genius and technical skill, but he conducted
the large orchestra standing on a pile of music-books in the chair of the
leader, that he might be seen of the musicians he led.
[Illustration: MUNRICO DENGREMONT.]
The grace and ease of the little artist, his enthusiasm and vivacity,
could not fail to interest and amuse his audiences, while at the same time
it saddened the most thoughtful of them, who realized how unnatural and
how cruel to the child the whole proceeding must of necessity be. That he
was passionately fond of his art there could be no doubt, or that he lived
only in and for it, and in the excitement and applause his public
appearances brought him; but that his indulgence of his passion without
proper restraint was the cause of the snapping of the strings of his
little life, and of the wreck of what might have been a brilliant
professional career, was plainly manifest to every physician, and to every
mother who saw and heard and pitied him.
Until within a very few months of his death he played only by ear. When he
began to learn his notes, and to comprehend the immensity of music as a
science, and the magnificent future it promised him, his devotion to
study, his ambition, and his own active mind were more than his feeble
frame could endure, and his brief candle was suddenly extinguished. At the
close of this run of the _Black Crook_, December 6, 1873, he was taken to
Boston, where he played in the _Naiad Queen_, and led the orchestra of the
Boston Theatre until the night of the 11th of January, 1874. After the
_matinee_ and evening performance of that date he was heard by his father
to murmur in his troubled sleep, "O God, can you make room for a little
fellow like me?" and he was found dead by his father at daybreak. With no
sins of his own to answer for, surely the prayer was heard; and the coming
of that little child was not forbidden.
The few musical prodigies who have succeeded Master Speaight in this
country have been blessed, happily, with stronger constitutions or with
wiser guardians; and Munrico Dengremont, Josef Hofman, and Otto Hegner, so
far at least, have found the rest they need before it is too late. The
little Dengremont, a violinist, began his professional life at the age of
eight, and in 1875. He came of musical people, he had studied hard, and as
a phenomenon he was very successful. He first appeared in New York in
1881, when he was fourteen years of age, but he seems to have produced
nothing, and to have done nothing since he went back to Europe some years
ago.
The infant musician who of late years attracted the greatest attention in
this country, next to the "Child Violinist" noticed in the opening of this
chapter, was unquestionably Josef Hofman; and he appealed particularly to
a class of the community so high in the social scale, according to its own
ideas, that it repudiated Niblo's Garden and the _Black Crook_ as vulgar.
It never heard of little Speaight until it heard of his death, and it
knows nothing of him now, perhaps, except as the mythical hero of
charming and sympathetic poems written in his memory by Thomas Bailey
Aldrich and Austin Dobson.
[Illustration: JOSEF HOFMAN.]
Hofman was born in Cracow, in 1877. His mother was an opera-singer, his
father a teacher of music. The child had a piano of his own before he was
five years of age, and in six months he had acquired the principles of
musical composition, and had written an original mazourka. He made his
first public appearance at a charity concert when he was six; at eight he
played at a public concert at Berlin; and at ten he was drawing enormous
crowds to the largest theatre in New York. He was the subject of more
attention and of more newspaper notice, perhaps, than any musical child
who ever lived. Saint-Saens, the French composer, is said to have declared
that he had nothing more to learn in music, that everything in him was
music; and Rubinstein is said to have pronounced him the greatest wonder
of the present age. All of this would have turned a bigger head than his;
but notwithstanding his remarkable genius he was always a boy, who found
relief in toy steamers and in tin soldiers; and his parents were sensible
enough and humane enough to shut up his piano, and to sacrifice their
ambition for the good of their son. He is devoting his youth to natural
study, and his public career is still before him.
The little Hegner, the latest prodigy, made his first appearance in
America in 1889, when he was twelve years of age; and he, too, came of a
musical family. Like the Hofman infant, the piano is his instrument, and
those who know music speak enthusiastically of his "phrasing," of his
"interpretations," of his "striking perceptions of musical form," and the
like. All of these children have been compared with Mozart and Liszt, who
are, no doubt, innocently responsible for most of the infant musical
wonders who have been born since they themselves began, as babies, to
perform marvels. There has been but one Mozart, and but one Liszt; and the
yet unwritten history of their lives will show whether these lads of the
present would not have grown up to be greater artists and happier men if
they had in their youth played foot-ball instead of fiddles, and had paid
more attention to muscle than to music.
Between the musical wonder and the theatrical wonder there is this
distinction: the baby musician never plays baby tunes, the infant actor
almost always plays child's parts. Little Cordelia Howard, as Eva, many
years ago, and Elsie Leslie and Thomas Russell, alternating in the
character of Little Lord Fauntleroy last season, were doing very
remarkable things in a charmingly natural way; but if they had
attempted to play Macbeth and Lady Macbeth they would only have done what
the musical prodigies are doing when they attempt Mendelssohn's D Minor
Concerto or a mazourka by Chopin. The little actors are certainly the more
rational, the more tolerable, and the more patiently to be endured.
[Illustration: OTTO HEGNER.]
Of the class of prodigies represented by Mr. and Mrs. Stratton ("Tom
Thumb" and Lavinia Warren), "Major" Stevens, "Commodore" Nutt, "Blind
Tom," "Japanese Tommy," and the "Two-headed Nightingale," all of whom were
publicly exhibited in their childhood here, it is hardly necessary to
speak. They were certainly Infant Phenomena, but neither as infants nor as
phenomena do they come within the proper scope of the present chapter; and
they occupy the same position in regard to the drama that the armless
youth who cuts paper pictures with his toes occupies in regard to
pictorial art.
In no case is the Infant Phenomenon upon the stage--thespian,
terpsichorean, harmonical, gymnastic, or abnormal--to be encouraged or
admired. How much of a nuisance the average prodigy is to his audiences
all habitual theatre-goers can tell; how much of a nuisance he is to his
fellow-players _Nicholas Nickleby_ has effectively shown; and what a
bitter burden he is likely to become to himself, his own experience--if
he lives to have experience--will certainly prove. Loved by the gods--of
the gallery--the Phenomenon (happily for the Phenomenon, perhaps,
certainly happily for his profession) dies, as a rule, young.
He does not educate the masses; he does not advance art; he does nothing
which it is the high aim of the legitimate actor to do; he does not even
amuse. He merely displays precocity that is likely to sap his very life;
he probably supports a family at an age when he needs all of the
protection and support that can be given him; and, if he does not meet a
premature death, he rarely, very rarely, fulfils anything like the promise
of his youth.
The career of Master Betty, the "Infant Roscius," of the early part of
this century, and unquestionably the most remarkable and successful
Phenomenon in the whole history of the stage, is ample proof of this. Born
in England, in 1791, he made his theatrical _debut_ in Dublin in 1803, and
he at once sprang into a popularity, there and wherever he appeared, which
seemed to know no limits.
The excitement he created was marvellous. People were crushed in their
efforts to enter the theatres in which he played. The receipts at the
box-offices were considered fabulous in those days. His own fortune was
made in a single season. Lords and ladies, and peers of the realm, were
among his enthusiastic admirers. Royal dukes were proud to call him
friend, and the Prince of Wales entertained him regally at Carlton House.
He was pronounced greater than Garrick himself in Garrick's own parts; he
was petted and praised, and almost idolized, by an entire country; and
even Parliament itself, on a motion made by Mr. Pitt, adjourned to see the
"Infant Roscius" play Hamlet at Drury Lane; than which no higher
compliment could have been paid by England to mortal man!
[Illustration: ELSIE LESLIE.]
This mania over the boy actor continued for two or three seasons, when his
popularity by degrees decreased, and he retired from the stage to enter
the University of Cambridge. In 1812, however, he returned to the
profession a young man of twenty-one, but his prestige was gone. He did
not draw in London; in the provinces he was regarded as nothing but a fair
stock actor; and when he was a little more than thirty years of age he
retired entirely into private life. He died in London, August 24, 1874, a
man of eighty-three, having outlived his glory by at least fifty years. If
such was the lot of the most marvellous of prodigies, what better fate can
the managers of the lesser juvenile stars expect for their child wonders?
The career of Macready, a contemporary of Master Betty's during his later
efforts, as compared with that of the Phenomenon, shows in a marked degree
the difference between the natural and the forced systems of dramatic
education. Macready, after years of careful, conscientious study and
training, went upon the stage a young man, but one mature in experience.
By hard work he made his way up to the top of the ladder of professional
fame, and he died full of years, honored as the most finished actor of his
day in his own land. Betty, at whom as a child he had wondered, and whom
as a young man he had supported, surviving him a month or two, was carried
to his grave by a few personal friends, almost unnoticed by the world who
at one time had worshipped his genius, but to whom for half a century he
had been absolutely dead. Macready, a fixed star, shining brightly and
bravely, gave a lasting, steady, truthful light. Betty, streaming like a
meteor in the troubled air, eclipsing for a moment all of the planets in
his course, plunged into a sea of oblivion and left only a ripple behind.
Two precocious youths, whose careers upon the American stage were not
unlike that of Master Betty in England, were Master Payne and Master
Burke. John Howard Payne is remembered now as the author of "Home Sweet
Home"; he is almost forgotten as the writer of the tragedy of _Brutus_
and some sixty other plays; and he is forgotten entirely as a very
successful child actor in the highest range of parts. He made his _debut_
as Young Norval in _Douglas_ at the Park Theatre, New York, in 1809, when
he was but seventeen years of age. He was called "the favorite child of
Thespis," and his performance was declared to be exquisite, one
enthusiastic gentleman giving fifty dollars for a single ticket at his
benefit in Baltimore. He supported Miss O'Neill in the British provinces,
and Mrs. Duff in New York; but as soon as he was billed as _Mister_ Payne,
not _Master_ Payne, his popularity ceased, and, except as a playwright,
the stage knew him no more.
[Illustration: CHARLES STRATTON ("TOM THUMB").]
Master Burke was a more unusual wonder, for he was a musical as well as a
theatrical Phenomenon. Born in Ireland, Thomas Burke made his _debut_ in
Cork as Tom Thumb, when he was five years of age. He made his first
appearance in America at the Park Theatre, New York, in 1830, before he
was twelve. Mr. Ireland preserves a list of characters he played, which
includes Richard III., Shylock, Norval, Sir Abel Handy, Sir Giles
Overreach, and Doctor Pangloss. He also led the orchestra in operatic
overtures, played violin solos, and sung humorous songs; and "as a
prodigy, both in music and the drama," Mr. Ireland believes that "he has
been unapproached by any child who has trodden the American stage." As a
man, he was considered one of the most perfect violinists of his time, and
he was last heard here in public at the concerts of Jenny Lind, Jullien,
and Thalberg, many years ago.
[Illustration: LAVINIA WARREN.]
The cynical remark of Richard to the young Prince of Wales that "so wise
so young, they say, do ne'er live long," does not always apply to stage
children. The Batemans, Miss Mary McVicker, Miss Matilda Heron, Miss Clara
Fisher, Miss Jean Margaret Davenport (from whose early career Dickens is
believed to have drawn the character of Miss Crummles), and other juvenile
wonders, lived to achieve more enduring greatness as men and women than
was ever thrust upon them in their childish days--while many of the
present veterans in the profession were on the stage as actors before they
were old enough to read or write. Miss Fanny Davenport and Miss Susan
Denin made their dramatic _debuts_ as children in _The Stranger_,
_Pizarro_, _Metamora_, or other of the standard plays of their youth; Mr.
Jefferson, at the age of six, engaged in a stage combat with broadswords
with one Master Titus, at the Park Theatre, for the benefit of the latter
young gentleman; and Madame Ristori, carried upon the stage in a basket at
the age of two months, was at the age of four years playing children's
parts in her native Italy. Miss Lotta began her professional career a
Phenomenon when eight years old; but Lotta, to be measured by no known
dramatic rules, is an Infant Phenomenon still. Miss Mary Taylor, than whom
no lady in her maturity enjoyed greater popularity in New York, sang as a
child in concerts, and even before she reached her teens was a great
favorite in the choruses of the National Theatre on Church Street, New
York; and there are to-day, among collectors of such things, rare prints,
highly prized, of Miss Adelaide Phillips and of Miss Mary Gannon as child
wonders; the latter young lady having been an actress before she was three
years old.
[Illustration: JOHN HOWARD PAYNE.]
Evidences of such early dramatic experiences might readily be multiplied;
but a decided distinction should be made between the phenomenal young
actor or actress who walks upon the stage in leading parts, a child
Richard or an infant Richmond, and the youthful artist, born of dramatic
parents, who, never attempting what is beyond his years or his station,
plays Young York or Young Clarence to support his father, says his few
lines, gets his little bit of applause, is not noticed by the critics, and
goes home like a good child to his mother and to his bed. It is as natural
for the child of an actor to go upon the stage as it is for the son of a
sailor to follow the sea; but while the young mariner before the mast is
taught the rudiments of his profession by the roughest of experiences and
the hardest of knocks, the young Roscius too frequently is given command
of his dramatic ship before he can box the dramatic compass, or can tell
the difference in the nautical drama between _Black-eyed Susan_ and _The
Tempest_.
[Illustration: BLIND TOM.]
Miss Clara Fisher (Mrs. James G. Maeder) was regarded in her youth as a
prodigy second only to Master Betty; but, unlike Master Betty, she more
than realized the best hopes of her early admirers, and lived to be
considered one of the most perfect and finished actresses ever known to
our stage. Born in England in 1811, she appeared in Drury Lane, London,
the scene of Master Betty's earliest successes, when she was only six
years of age, and at once she won the most decided triumphs. It was
said of her that she clearly understood, even at that early age, her
author and his meaning, entered thoroughly and enthusiastically into all
of her parts, and displayed in every scene not only acuteness of
intellect, but a temperament fully in unison with the profession of her
choice. Cast in plays with actors of the regulation age and size, instead
of being dwarfed by the contrast with them, she made the rest of the
_dramatis personae_ appear entirely out of proportion, and carried away all
of the honors. Her American _debut_ was made September 12, 1827, at the
Park Theatre, New York. In the seventeenth year of her age she could
scarcely rank among the Infant Phenomena, however, and she is only known
in this country, where the rest of her professional life has been spent,
as a leading lady, justly celebrated, but not wonderful, out of all
whooping, as an Infant Roscia.
[Illustration: MASTER BURKE AS HAMLET.]
Mrs. Maeder comes of a theatrical race, and one which seems to mature
early. Her sister, Jane Marchant Fisher, the good old Mrs. Vernon of
Wallack's, went upon the stage in London a child of ten; Frederick G.
Maeder, her son, made his first appearance at the age of eighteen; and
Alexina Fisher (Mrs. A. F. Baker) and Oceana Fisher, daughters of Palmer
Fisher, and members of the same family, played here as children half a
century ago.
[Illustration: MAY HAINES AND ISA BOWMAN AS THE TWO PRINCES IN KING
RICHARD III.]
The most remarkable and most successful of the Infant Phenomena of modern
times in America have been the Bateman Children, the Marsh Juvenile
Troupe, and the Boone and the Holman Children. On the 10th of December,
1849, E. A. Marshall, manager of the Broadway Theatre, introduced on the
boards of that house, for the first time to New York audiences, Kate and
Ellen Bateman, whose united ages were not ten years. Kate made her _debut_
as Richmond, and Ellen, the younger, as Richard, in scenes from
Shakspere's _Richard III._ The announcement of the coming of the
infantile Thespians was not favorably received by the regular attendants
of the Broadway; the appearance of prodigies of any kind being a departure
from the ways of that traditional home of the legitimate drama, and there
was a prejudice formed against these young stars which nothing but the
absolute cleverness of their performances was able to overcome. After Mr.
Hackett as Falstaff, and Miss Cushman as Lady Macbeth, it was scarcely
natural that unknown children in the same and kindred parts should satisfy
the critical audiences of the Old Broadway. The popularity of the
Batemans, however, was quickly established; those who came to scoff on the
first night returned to praise; the whole town, young and old, petted and
applauded the children; while still the wonder grew, during the single
week of their engagement, how the two small heads could carry all they
knew. It seemed incredible that an infant of four years like Ellen Bateman
could present anything approaching an embodiment of such characters as
Shylock, Richard, or Lady Macbeth; or that a child of six, as was Kate at
that time, should be able to play Richmond, Portia, or the Thane with the
correctness of elocution, the spirit, and the proper comprehension of the
language and the business which she displayed. The simple task of
committing to memory the text of so many parts was in itself a marvellous
effort for children of their tender age, but to be able to speak these
lines as set down for them with correct emphasis and gesture, and with
every appearance of a thorough conception of the character sustained, as
the little Batemans are said to have done, certainly warranted all the
praise that was bestowed upon them. Every fresh character they undertook
was a surprise, and was considered more clever than any that had preceded
it. Lady Macbeth was, perhaps, the most successful of Ellen's assumptions,
while Kate read Portia with amazing skill and propriety; her delivery of
the familiar lines was finished, and her carriage throughout was that of
an experienced artist.
After appearing in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other American
cities, the Bateman Children were taken to England by P. T. Barnum, in the
summer of 1851, making their first appearance there at the St. James's
Theatre, London, on the 23d August, as _The Young Couple_, and meeting
with decided success. They returned to the Old Broadway November 15, 1852,
and opened in a comedietta entitled _Her Royal Highness_, written
expressly for them. They were quite as popular here as when they first
appeared, and before they left New York Mayor Kingsland, "on behalf of a
committee of leading citizens," presented to each of the children a tiny
gold watch.
In 1856, no longer juveniles, though still most acute, voluble, and full
of grace, they retired from the stage. Miss Kate Bateman returned to it,
however, in a few years, a young lady, and an actress of more than
ordinary merit. Even if she had not since then made for herself, both in
this country and in England, a reputation as one of the strongest tragic
and melodramatic artists on the English-speaking stage, the story of her
early career as told here is worthy of a place in dramatic history because
of the precocious excellence of her acting as a child, and of the
wonderful success which she everywhere won. She was a Phenomenon among
Phenomena in this respect, that she grew and advanced in her profession as
she grew in stature and advanced in years--one of the very few of the
infant prodigies who, in later life, became an ornament to the stage.
On the 10th of December, 1855, precisely six years after the first
appearance of the Bateman Children at the Broadway Theatre, the Marsh
Juvenile Troupe made their first appearance here at the same house, and
made, also, a very favorable impression even upon critics not predisposed
to be attracted by any exhibition of prodigies. In their acting was a
perceptible absence of that familiar, parrot-like, mechanical repetition
of unfamiliar words, and of those studied and artificial attitudes so
painfully marked in juvenile players generally. Their impersonations were
spirited and exact, and evinced unusual mental aptitude and training,
their audiences being sometimes startled by the extraordinary precocity
with which some of the leading parts were filled. Their initial
performance consisted of _Beauty and the Beast_, Miss Louisa Marsh
representing the Beast, while little Mary Marsh, as Beauty, pleasantly
filled all of the personal and mental requirements of that _role_. _Beauty
and the Beast_ was followed by _The Wandering Minstrel_, Master George H.
Marsh playing Jem Baggs, "with the popular, doleful, pathetic,
sympathetic, lamentable history of 'Villikins and his Dinah.'" These were
supplemented later, during the Marshes' engagement, with _The Rivals_--Mr.
Blake as Sir Anthony, Madame Ponisi as Julia--or with _A Morning Call_,
Madame Ponisi playing Mrs. Chillington, and Augustus A. Fenno Sir Edward;
the Juveniles, although attractive, being scarcely successful in filling
the house by their sole exertions.
The Marsh Children, although generally announced by that name on the
bills, were not members of one family, nor were they Marshes. George and
Mary, brother and sister, and both of them said to have been less than
eight years of age when they came here first, were in private life Master
and Miss Guerineau--while the other leading lady, Louisa Marsh, was
properly Miss McLaughlin. The entire company was composed of children. As
they died--and the mortality among them was remarkable--or as they grew
too large for the troupe, their places were filled by other precocious
infants, engaged by their clever manager in his strollings from town to
town. Among the members of the company at different times were Miss Ada
Webb, Miss Fanny Berkley, Miss Ada and Miss Minnie Monk, and Louis
Aldrich, all of whom, if not great, subsequently, in their profession, are
still not unknown to fame. Unlike the Batemans, however, none of the Marsh
Juveniles ever became stars of more than common magnitude, and none of
them are shining very brilliantly on the stage to-day. George Marsh, the
low comedian, was very clever in his way, although not original in his
impersonations. His powers of imitation were marvellous, and his Toodles,
a miniature copy of Burton's Toodles, in which all of the business and
many of the gags--even to the profanity at the mention of Thompson--were
retained, was almost as funny in its uproariousness as was Burton's
Toodles itself, and certainly better than many of the imitations that have
been seen since Burton's day. Little Mary Marsh was an uncommonly
attractive child, bright-eyed, graceful, fresh, and fair. The boy between
eight and fifteen in her audiences who did not succumb to her loveliness
was only fit for treason, stratagem, and spoils. Her name was to be found
written in some copy-book, her face sketched in some drawing-book in the
male department of every school in New York, and in the average
schoolboy's mind she was associated in some romantic way with all of the
good and beautiful women of his history or his mythology; she inhabited
all the salubrious and balmy isles in his geography; she was dreamed of in
his philosophy; and one particular lad, who is now more than old enough to
pay the school bills of boys of his own, when asked, in a chemistry class,
by the master, "What is the symbol and equivalent of potassium?" answered,
absently, but without hesitation, "Mary Marsh!"
The passion the child inspired in the breasts of her adorers was a pure
one, and, except in the neglect of a prosy lesson or two, it did no harm.
Her memory is still kept green in the hearts of many practical men of
to-day, who unblushingly confess to a filling of their boyish eyes and a
quivering of their boyish lips when the sad story of her untimely and
dreadful death was told here. While playing in one of the Southern cities,
her dress took fire from the footlights and she was fatally burned,
living but an hour or two after the accident occurred.
On the 3d of August, 1857, the Marshes played _Black-eyed Susan_ at Laura
Keene's Theatre here, followed by _The Toodles_. From the bill of this,
their opening night, the following casts are copied:
BLACK-EYED SUSAN.
William Miss Louisa Marsh.
Gnatbrain Master George H. Marsh.
Tom Bowling Master Alfred (Stewart).
Admiral Master Waldo (Todd).
Dolly Mayflower Miss Carrie (Todd).
Black-eyed Susan Miss Mary Marsh.
TOODLES.
Timothy Toodles Master George H. Marsh.
George Acorn Miss Louisa Marsh.
Tabitha Toodles Miss Mary Marsh.
This was probably the last season of the Marsh Juveniles in New York, and
since their exit no startling troupe of Phenomena have appeared here. The
Boone and the Holman Children were clever, but not so successful as the
Marshes. The Worrell Sisters were popular, but, although young girls, they
were in their teens, and scarcely came under the head of infant players.
They made their New York _debut_ at Wood's Theatre, 514 Broadway,
afterwards the Theatre Comique, under the management of George Wood, in a
burletta called _The Elves_, April 30, 1866, Miss Sophie Worrell, the
eldest of the three sisters, being at that time fully eighteen years of
age.
Among the occasional companies of children who have appeared in New York
were "The Mexican Juvenile Troupe." They occupied Mr. Daly's Fifth Avenue
Theatre during the summer season of 1875, remaining two weeks, and
appearing at the Lyceum Theatre, on Fourteenth Street, from the 1st to the
13th of November in the same year. Their performances were conducted in
the Spanish language, and their specialty was opera-bouffe. They were well
trained in voice and action, but the music in their childish treble was
weak; and, personally, the troupe ran to legs and arms and hands and feet,
and the general angular and awkward undevelopment characteristic of their
age and size. The bit of a _prima donna_ who sang La Grand Duchesse and La
Belle Helene in the titular parts, and who was known to fame as Signorina
Carmen Unda y Moron, was made up carefully after Tostee, whom, in certain
actions and gestures and expression of face, she much resembled. She
displayed all of the vim and _abandon_ and _chic_ of the veteran actress,
and tossed her head, and switched her train, and ogled and leered, and
capered like the very Tostee herself, as seen through the reverse of an
opera-glass. The child acted with spirit, or something that was like it,
and seemed to have a morbid enjoyment and comprehension of the indelicate
parts she played. The spectacle was far from being a pleasant one, and
probably shocked more persons than it amused. Little Carmen was certainly
not more than eight years old, and barely as tall as the table in her
stage parlor, while none of the company reached in height the backs of the
chairs of ordinary size with which, in strange incongruity, the stage of
the Lyceum was always set.
During the past fifteen or twenty years there have appeared upon the New
York stage, generally unheralded, several little actors and actresses who
have shown decided ability for the profession, while claiming no
phenomenal talent, and in whom certainly there seemed to be fair promise
of a brilliant future. Among these have been little Minnie Maddern, who
appeared at the French Theatre on Fourteenth Street, May 30, 1870, as
Sibyl Carew, in Tom Taylor's _Sheep in Wolf's Clothing_, supporting Miss
Carlotta Leclercq as Anne. Her knowledge of stage business, her general
carriage, and the careful delivery of her lines throughout the play were
remarkable for a child of her years; and hers was considered one of the
most satisfactory representations in the piece. The pleasant reputation
she made there was sustained at Booth's Theatre in the month of May, 1874,
when she played Arthur in _King John_, with Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., in
the titular part, Mrs. Agnes Booth as Constance, and John McCullough as
the Bastard--a good cast. A more pretentious Arthur--an older, not a
better one--was that of Master Percy Roselle, who played it in one act of
_King John_ at a _matinee_ benefit given to Miss Matilda Heron, January
17, 1872.
Miss Jennie Yeamans was _almost_ a Phenomenon, although, fortunately for
herself, she was never subjected by her managers to the forcing process.
As Joseph in a burlesque of _Richelieu_, at the Olympic, in February,
1871, she was very good, second only to George Fox as the Cardinal-Duke,
whom, with a piece of chalk, she assisted in drawing the awful circle of
the Tammany Ring around the form of Miss Lillie Eldridge as Julie. The
solemnity of the entire performance on the child's part, her wonderful
command of her features, and her display of a dry, apparently unconscious
humor, all in the true spirit of burlesque, were delightful to
contemplate. She was equally good and amusing in a part of an entirely
different nature, Notah, the Little Pappoose, in Augustin Daly's
_Horizon_, a little later in the same season at the same house.
Representing an Indian child who had no knowledge of the English tongue,
and who united to the natural mischievousness of childhood all of the
untamed viciousness of the Indian nature, she was captured on the plains
by the Hon. Sundown Bowse (G. L. Fox), and she made that gentleman's stage
existence more than a burden to him through several acts. When Charles
Fisher played Falstaff at the Fifth Avenue Theatre she was an excellent
William Page.
Miss Mabel Leonard, apparently some five years old, supported H. J.
Montague at Wallack's Theatre in the month of October, 1874, when the
_Romance of a Poor Young Man_ was produced, playing with a good deal of
skill a little Breton peasant girl. The same young lady and Bijou Heron
were the children in Miss Morris's version of _East Lynne_, called _Miss
Multon_, at the Union Square Theatre in November, 1876. Their judicious
training, and the careful acting of their not unimportant parts, added
much to the general completeness of the drama, and will be still vividly
remembered by all now living who were play-goers years ago.