Blackface Minstrelsy

I. General Overview

Minstrelsy was a form of popular theatre like melodrama that spread in the 19th century, appealing especially to lower class and working class audiencces, but crossing over in a variety of ways to appeal to middle class audiences. It was one of the first major forms of popular theatre to the develop in the United States, where it contributed significantly to the development of most modern forms of American entertainment including circus, vaudeville, musical theatre, standup comedy and early television and film. The music of minstrel shows influenced jazz, ragtime, musical show tunes and other forms of American popular music. In short, there’s hardly a genre of American pop culture that can’t trace some part of its development to minstrelsy. For this reason alone, its an important thing for any American theatre artist to know about.

At the same time, minstrelsy has played an extremely ambivalent role in African-American history. The stories and their characters depend on racial stereotypes of African Americans that from a contemporary perspective are blatantly racist. At the time, the characters were understood to represent an “Ethiopian delineation” that occupiied a low position within pseudo-scientific taxonomies of race.

Blackface performers would add water to burnt cork to make a pitch-black paste, use red lipstick to make the performers lips seem thick and wear white gloves to provide stark contrast to the dark face so that every character became a kind of racial grotesque. On the other hand, some scholars have argued that blackface minstrelsy became popular in working class communities in the 1840s where aspects of African-American identity were taken on as a medium for expressing dissent and class consciousness. From this perspective, minstrelsy might be likened to the radical meaning ascribed to rap music and other aspects of contemporary African American culture which is adapted by other identity groups. Although some of these same critics argue that whatever radical character minstrelsy had was co-opted in the 1850s. As we’ll discuss on Wednesday, adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin into melodrama and minstrelsy in the 1850s and 1860s made blackface more genteel at the same time as it addressed the controversies of slavery. The fact that by the 1870s, there were many minstrel troupes comprised of African-American performers complicates the issue further. The history of African-American performance passes directly through blackface minstrelsy.

II. Origins and development

Although there are a variety of more disperse sources for blackface minstrelsy, the practice emerged clearly in 1824 when an Englishman, Charles Matthews, created a sensation in London by performing caricatures of black people he claimed to have seen in the United States. He performed a character named Agamemnon, who was a fat runaway slave fiddler, and a pretentious black actor performing Hamlet (a caricature of the great African-American actor, Ira Aldridge, who was performing Shakespearean roles in Europe at the same time).

Indeed, minstrelsy seems to offer a catalogue of racial types against which African-Americans have struggled for the past century. Let’s consider a few that remained in the repertoire:

George Washington Dixon developed blackface minstrel performances in the working class Five Points district of lower Manhattan. (If you’ve seen Gangs of New York, you have a fairly vivid impression of what this was like). Dixon’s performances were raucous compared to those of Matthews and TD Rice. He invented the character Zip Coon, the uppity Northern dandy, overdressed and ambitious, caricaturing free blacks in the northeast.

Jim Crow, the joyful Southern slave, was the character originated by Thomas Dartmouth Rice in 1830, which gave birth to minstrelsy in the United States. Jim Crow was a kind of anarchic black harlequin who sang and danced a jig. Black drumming infected him with rhythm, making him wheel around, sing and clap.

In the 1840s, the popularity of performers like Dixon and Rice gave way to traveling minstrel troupes consisting of 4 to 6 performers. The programs became more standardized, and by the 1850s had a regular structure of three parts. The first introduced the whole company with music and comedy acts and closed with a big chorus number. There would be a semi-circle of musicians with the end men on one side (Mr. Bones playing bones and Mr. Tambo tambourine) mocking the dignified emcee, or Mr. Interlocutor on the other side. (Spike Lee recreates this kind of an opening part in the section of Bamboozled we’ll watch).

Then there would be an intermission, followed by the olio, a series of specialized individual variety routines like skits, dances, stump speeches (mocking contemporary politicians), or sentimental songs (like those of Stephen Foster). The olio would eventually develop into vaudeville.

The last part was the closest to an actual play, consisting basically of a one-act farce. Sometimes a parody of a serious play, it was usually a sketch set in a center of African-American life (usually a Southern plantation or a northern city), mixing dialogue and slapstick comedy with music and dance—like a miniature musical comedy.

III. Other stock characters

The Coon is “the stupid, malapropism-spouting, grinning, dancing, cowardly character who appeals to white audiences for mere entertainment value. He is the no-account, unreliable, crazy, lazy, subhuman creature, good for nothing more than eating watermelons, stealing chickens, shooting craps or butchering the English language.” (Dicker/sun 22) (See Spike Lee clip).

A variant is the picaninny, a harmless little screwball whose eyes pop and hair stands on end at the slightest provocation (Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

The tragic mulatta is of mixed blood, irrevocably stained by (as little as) one drop of Negro blood (like Boucicault’s The Octoroon who is one eighth black). Her white blood makes her self-sacrificing and sympathetic, and she’s always trying to pass as white.

The Mammy “is big, fat, dark, cantankerous, fiercely independent, and asexual. She can also be generally sweet, joplly, good-tempered, and completely dedicated to her white family, especially to the children.” (eg. Mammy in Gone with the Wind, Aunt Jemima)


VI. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled!

One of the most perplexing aspects of blackface minstrelsy is that in the 1870s, it started to attract a growing number of African-American performers. Before the Civil War, black performers were prohibited from appearing in Minstrel Shows. But by the early 20th century, some of the mst famous minstrels were black. For example, Bert Williams was an African-American who performed in blackface, was part of the famous Williams and Walker vaudeville team, joined Ziegfield’s Follies in 1910, and continued performing into the 1930s. In some situations, African-American minstrels would parody white minstrels, but in most cases they added a paradoxical “authenticity” to the racial stereotypes.

In Bamboozled!, Spike Lee takes a controversial look at how African-American culture can be complicit in perpetuating the kind of racial stereotypes of minstrel shows. The basic premise of the movie is that an African-American TV producer ironically creates a contemporary minstrel show for television. To his horror, it is wildly successful, suggesting that contemporary audiences are not nearly so enlightened about race as they think they are.

Love Suicides at Amijima (1720), a shinju mono puppet play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Contrary to our usual association of puppetry with simple children's stories and fairy tales, the art of bunraku puppetry developed in connection to stories of great tragedy and psychological complexity. Some of the most popular plays within the repertoires belonged to the shinju mono (double suicide play) sub-genre. In a feudal Japanese society in which it was extremely difficult for young people to form relationships across social rank and political alliance, there were many "Romeo and Juliet" stories of young lovers ending their lives in despair at their thwarted romance. Love Suicides at Amijima (1720), Chikamatsu's most famous shinju mono plays, was based on just such a real event in 18th century Japan. Theatre, and especially puppet theatre, provided an opportunity for Japanese audiences to experience and grieve over these issues, which might be too scandalous and controversial to discuss directly.

Chikamatsu's play for bunraku puppets remains in the repertoire at the National Bunraku Theatre. It was also adapted into a very popular version for the live kabuki theatre. Lastly, as you can see in the clip below, the story has found its way into Japanese avant-garde film. This trailer (with English subtitles) is for an avant-garde Japanese movie, "Double Suicide" (1969), directed by Masahiro Shinoda, and adapted from Chikamatsu's puppet script. About halfway through this clip, the director interpolates some images of puppets used in the bunraku version, invoking a tension between the sensuality of the live actors' bodies and the uncanny mythic life of their puppet models. This kind of layering of meaning makes for a rich textual and performance tradition.

Japanese Puppetry: from ko-joruri to bunraku

The collaboration that gave birth to bunraku: Playwright, Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), and Chanter, Takemoto Gidayu (1651-1714)









I. Conventions of bunraku

Bunraku is typically described as the combination of three previously separate arts: ayatsuri (puppet manipulation), katari mono (storytelling) and shamisen. The puppets are divided into many character types, distinguished primarily by their heads, which are built to be separate from the rest of the puppet. The scenery and stagecraft is related to kabuki, but less intricate, because the puppeteers and puppets themselves take up so much space. The omu zukai (chief puppeteer) wears high clogs to allow better manipulation of the right hand, head and torso. He changes his costume depending on the play, and usually exposes his face. Although the omu zukai’s face is understood to be expressionless, there is a subtle relationship between his embodiment and the actions of the puppet. The hidari zukai (left arm operator) and ashi zukai (leg operator) wear a black robe and hood so that no part of their bodies complicates the character image. The chanter and the shamisen player sit on a special platform at stage left.

II. Placing bunraku within the historical development of Japanese puppetry

There are records of puppet theatre in Japan going back at least to the eighth century, with handheld puppets or stick puppets performing on miniature portable stages. Traveling puppeteers would perform as part of temple festivals and rituals.

In the seventeenth century when bunraku first appeared, the prevailing form of doll puppetry in Japan was called ko-joruri (old joruri, based on the name of Lady Joruri, a character from 12th century history). Ko-joruri grew out of performances by chanters telling stories from the 14th century Tale of Heike. The form of joruri appeared by the 1590s with chanters telling the story to the accompaniment of the shamisen (three-stringed Japanese lute). Ko-joruri was popular in Kyoto and Osaka in the early 17th century, and there were several theatres established just for its performance, and special musical narrative styles (bushi) that developed into the styles of bunraku. Compared to bunraku, the puppets were also relatively simple, requiring only one operator.

The transition started with the chanter-playwright, Uji Kaganojo, who in the late 17th century shifted from the old mythic plays to stories depicting real human emotions, and changed the dramatic structure of the plays to the kind of jo-ha-kyu development practiced in noh and kabuki. Another important step came with the collaboration of two disciples of Kaganojo: the playwright, Chikamatsu Monzaemon and tayu (chanter) Takemoto Gidayu. Chikamatsu wrote The Soga Heir (1683) and Kagekiyo Victorious (1685) for Gidayu, introducing a more literary text with psychologically complex characters and stories drawn from contemporary and historical sources, requiring the kind of sophisticated arts we saw in the video. They created many of the basic genres of plays used in both bunraku and kabuki: jidai mono (history plays), sewa mono (domestic plays), and shinju mono (a subset of domestic plays built around double suicides, such as the Love Suicides at Amijima, 1720). These double-suicide plays were particularly popular and startling to audiences as they depicted events “ripped from the headlines”—real suicides that had occurred in living memory. From this point on, chanting and playwriting became separate occupations, and the playwrights often wrote for both bunraku and kabuki.

The kind of mechanical puppets that developed into bunraku were probably introduced from China in the fifteenth century, and some other styles probably came with Portuguese and other Europeans in the mid-sixteenth century. The kind used today developed with bunraku starting in the late 17th century. The limbs were developed in the 1690s, and the techniques used to manipulate eyes, mouth and eyebrows in the 1720s and 1730s. Originally, the performers were completely concealed. In 1703, Takamatsu Hachirobei performed behind a translucent screen but in full view of the audience for the first time. Then in 1705, he eliminated the screen, leaving the manipulator completely exposed like today. In 1734, the sannin zukai (three-man puppeteering) technique was introduced, and so the techniques of apprenticeship described in the film developed. A manipulator begins operating the lower limbs, advances to the left hand and then finally to becoming the primary manipulator of the head and right hand. From this point on, only minor characters were performed with one operator. These more elaborate puppets responded to the need in the plays of Chikamatsu and his successors to portray more complex emotions and psychological states in stories based on real events.

III. Bunraku and Kabuki

Bunraku and kabuki developed alongisde each other for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, competing for audiences and adapting many of the same plays. From the 1690s to the 1760s, it was bunraku that was the more popular, and many of the masterpieces of kabuki from this period were drawn from puppet scripts. This was the case, for example, with Kandehon Chushingura (The treasury of loyal retainers, 1748) by Takeda Izumo II, a few scenes of which we saw in the film. Playwrights from this golden age of bunraku “dramatized the emotional turmoil of characters embroiled in impossible historical conflicts or burdened by unbearable social obligations: the classic conflict was between duty and emotion created under the constraints of Confucian-inspired morality.” (Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre 580)

In the 1760s, kabuki began to outshine bunraku in popularity and by the end of the century, it had almost died out. It was revived by Uemora Bunrakuken (1737-1810) who re-established the form in Osaka, and after whom it is now named. Bunraku lived on in Osaka through the 19th century and gained some popularity again, but it ran into trouble again in the 1920s. The main theatre burned down, and audiences started dwindling. In 1933, the government essentially nationalized it, then supported bunraku through WWII by using it for propaganda plays. The theatre was destroyed again by US air raids in 1945, destroyed all the old puppet heads and props. In 1963, the Bunraku Association was formed as a foundation of performers and government representatives dedicated to preserving the art. When the National Theatre opened in Tokyo in 1966, it included a smaller stage for bunraku. Finally, in 1984, the government opend the National Bunraku Theatre in Osaka, which remains the primary venue for seein bunraku in Japan, and where most of the performances take place in the video.

From Marionettes to Victor Hugo's Hernani

E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) & Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

I. Goethe, Kleist and Hoffman

Goethe was fascinated with puppets since childhood. He wrote a marionette play in 1769, Das Jahrmarkts-Fest zu Plundersweilern (Junkdump Fair) – uses puppetry to invoke the old medieval fairgrounds—“the audience is regaled with the rough humor and slapstick of the traditional puppet theater.” (Segel 12) It makes use of French ombres chinoises (projected Chinese silhouette puppets) to present a biblical parable. Segel suggests that Goethee could have seen a French puppeteer who exhibited the form at a Frankfurt fair in 1774. It is these allegorical puppets in Goethe’s play who denounce the immorality of the characters. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Goethe depicts a young man who defied his father’s disapproval by taking an interest in puppet theatre. An apparent cipher for Goethe himself, the character is transfixed by how the puppets are animated, how a performer brings an object to life. (14)

Kleist wrote Uber das Marionettentheater in 1810. “By devoting a serious essay to a popular theatrical form largely regarded in Kleist’s time as a diversion for children and an unsophisticated populace, the dramatist sought to explore the possible contribution of ‘low’ or ‘popular’ culture to a reanimation of ‘high’ art.” (Segel 14) “On a higher level, Kleist’s essay on the marionette evidences the Romantic belief in the cognitive and creative superiority of the unconscius over the conscious, of spontaneity and intuition over reason. Because the puppet, or marionette, lacks the ability to think, to reason, it can be made capable of an extraordinary fluidity of motion, of movements beyond the reach of the living actor. precisely because he can think and reason, because he is always conscious of his actions and gestures, the living actor can never achieve the spontaneity of the marionette; thus the grace of the inanimate figure remains ever elusive.” (15)

“Affectation appears… when the soul is located at any point other than the center of gravity of movement.” (16)

Marionettes possess countergravity: “the force that lifts them into the air is greater than that which binds them to earth.” (16)

Hoffman wrote The Sandman (1816) and various other nachtstucke (night pieces) with some inspiration from Kleist. Sandman is a kind of Pygmalion story of the madness of a young man who falls in love with a mechanical woman. Freud would be inspired by this and other Hoffman stories to develop his idea of the unheimlich (the uncanny)—that supremely gothic fascination that we feel towards beings that are somehow inbetween life and death, such as animated automata and performing objects.


II. Heinrich von Kleist’s Uber das Marionettentheater (1810)

Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionette Theatre” describes an encounter between himself and an associate who is an afficionado of the puppet stage. He lauds the grace of the inanimate human representation, which he connects with its perfect subjection to natural mechanics and gravitation. He and his associate agree that it is the marionette’s absence of human consciousness while replicating the superficial human form that allows it to evoke a connection to the divine. The associate relates another story in which a bear easily parried his own attacks with a sword. The animal moved economically and gracefully in harmony with gravity, succumbing to no deceptions or imbalances. Von Kleist imagines that an actor who could imitate such motion would evoke a transcendent aesthetics.

Kleist envisions the human sphere as graceless, ignoble and debauched. His metaphysical views of consciousness might both be rendered reasonably as circles with human space/time occupying an arc with marionette space and divine space on either side and connecting on the opposite side of the circle from human space. A human, occupying conscious space may reach divine consciousness by travelling directly to it along the circle (i.e. the path of the great sage.) However, Kleist (via Kant) believes that the limitations of human reason make this path impossible. He suggests instead to reach divine consciousness by way of absence of consciousness where they meet on the opposite side of the circle. Put another way, human space/time is seen as the cage that prevents man from experiencing the divine. The marionette moves in accordance with the laws of the universe, not those of humanity. The transcendence of the performing object for Kleist is absolutely predicated on the notion of a gulf between socialized human space/time and divine universal space/time. He also considers that the marionette, as a human image, serves as a specifically human space within divine universal laws.

Kleist’s ascription of grace to the suspended marionette might also be thought of as the opposite of Diderot’s description of David Garrick as the unfeeling craftsman of emotion. Indeed, the kind of spontaneity and naturalness that Kleist ascribes to the marionette at the beginning of the nineteenth century is paradoxically closer to what Stanislavsky will promote at the end of the nineteenth century. Both Kleist and Stanislavsky both believe that it is the lack of self-consciousness that allows a performer to seem spontaneous onstage. For Kleist, this is grace, for Stanislavsky, the reality of doing.


III. Victor Hugo's Hernani (1830)

As we discussed in class, the 1830 premiere of Hugo's Hernani was important at least as much for the "riot" it sparked as for the play itself. This confrontation is often seen in retrospect as the victory of Hugo and the romantics against the old guard of neoclassicists. After this, the French drama moved further towards the kind of values we've been discussing for the past few weeks. For Hugo, what was particularly important here is that the new drama, built on the inspiration of Shakespeare, would derive pleasure from the juxtaposition of the sublime and the grotesque. From Hugo's perspective, the sublime incorporated all the enobling and mystical aspects of Nature and the kind of grace that Kleist invokes in his essay on marionettes. It might be seen as a transformation of the old classical aesthetic of beauty to be more in line with post-revolutionary romanticist sentiments. The grotesque, in contrast, contains all that is earthy and coarse in the ordinary realm of human life; bawdy humor, deformation and ugliness, lack of civilization and refinement. Think of Hugo's story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame-- a paradigmatic mingling of the sublime and the grotesque!

Hugo's Hernani suggests this mingling of the sublime and the grotesque through startlingly ignoble behavior on the part of noble characters, ordinary speech mixed with lofty declarations, and most especially the character of Hernani himself: a bandit with an noble code. The play also challenges the conventions of French neoclassicism in a variety of ways. For example:

• The naturalistic acting style that Hugo developed for his actors (moving freely within the setting rather than in front of it. Actors sitting on or leaning against the scenery)
• Furthermore, emphasis on environment (portrait scene in which attention is called to each of the portraits).
• Emphasis on specific costuming
• Breaking out of alexandrines (short speeches and stichomythic dialogue)
• portraying violence onstage

Although Hugo distanced himself from the popular melodrama, there is much in this "high" romantic drama that resembles that genre. After the French revolution, European dramatists looked to represent a world in which heroism could be found amongst ordinary people, and the welfare of the people and their nation was a greater good than the honor of kings and aristocrats.

Suspension of Disbelief, Marionettes & Melodramatic Suspense

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and Heinrich von Kleist (1771-1811)


I. Suspension of Disbelief and the Suspended Performer

In Biographia Literaria (1817), chapter 14, Samuel Taylor Coleridge introduces his most famous concept: Suspension of Disbelief. This is probably the most widespread, popular explanation of how it is that we can accept the reality of fictions presented onstage or other genres so much that they move us to real emotions. Coleridge offered the supremely romanticist explanation that we are able to access true feelings as spectators because we suspend our rational faculties that tell us it’s all make-believe. It may not be the best objective explanation of how plays work, but Coleridge’s idea of “suspension of disbelief” connects theatre to a major trope of romanticism.

Suspension thematizes gravity; that is to say, our earth-boundedness. Intimations of the tragic attend suspension insofar as falling to earth is always imanent. If the suspended performer falls, if the bridge collapses, it is not entirely shocking. We always knew it could happen, and may in fact be surprised in retrospect that we had allowed ourselves to imagine otherwise; that we had so successfully suspended our disbelief. The good characters in melodrama operate in a state of suspense from which they can only be delivered by divine providence or the justice of human institutions.

And of course, suspension also describes the techniques of certain forms of puppetry that were especially popular in the late 18th and early 19th century: marionettes.

One can consider different styles of puppetry in terms of the distance between the performer and the puppet or character image. Hand puppets, for example, (such as most muppets), use very little distance. The hand of the operator (i.e. demiurge) moves the puppet directly. Projected puppets (from shadow puppets to online avatars) have considerably more distance, i.e. greater mediation, though this may vary depending on the technology.

What Kleist captures in his essay “On the Marionette Theatre” is the subjective perception of suspension as sublime grace vis-à-vis manipulation (i.e. conscious human behavior). This is a perception that does not extend to forms of object performance that do not rely on suspension (neither muppets nor shadow puppets produce this experience), but it is a perception frequently experienced in relation to dance and one that often plays a role in our spiritual receptions of nature.
Think about the wonder we experience at suspension in nature. Cottonwood tufts and leaves wafting through the air on a fall day. Snowflakes drifting down or being blown about. The way a bird appears motionless, suspended in the wind.



Consider what is fascinating about seeing a marionette undergo a metaphysical/psychological reckoning in this opening sequence of "Being John Malkovich" (1999) with marionettes by Phillip Huber

II. Fascination with puppets, marionettes and automata in the age of revolution

In the midst of the romanticist movement, many of the leading theatre figures, especially in Germany, became fascinated with puppet and marionette theatre. They idealized childhood experiences of seeing puppet theatre, wrote philosophical treatises about puppet theatre, wrote works for puppet theatre, and even thought about puppets in writing some of their major works for live actors, like Goethe’s Faust. This might seem like a minor diversion in the history of theatre, but it’s important for a few reasons:

a. this early fascination with puppets would return in the avant-garde at the end of the 19th century with the symbolists (Edward Gordon Craig) and Alfred Jarry whose approaches to puppets would carry an interest into the twentieth century.

b. a significant way of dismantling the distinction between high and low culture and the supposed superiority of “adult” entertainment that coincides with Herder’s notion of a national culture rooted in popular folk traditions.-- primitivism

c. a way of reviving medieval and “oriental” theatrical techniques and aesthetics within the context of a new modern theatre—the gothic and orientalist aesthetics

d. an insight into how romanticist mysticism, spirituality and metaphysics translated into theatrical aesthetics and performance techniques.

For all of you who have seen or been involved, and the two of you who have actually been suspended in PittRep's current production of Angels in America: Perestroika, think about whether any of these issues get at aspects of that experience. Why is it so wonderful to see actors flown above the stage?

the romantic fascination with marionettes

For Monday, read pages 11-23, "German Sturm und Drang to Romanticism: Goethe, Kleist, ETA Hoffmann" in Harold Segel's Pinocchio's Progeny. Go to Google Books (www.books.google.com) and put "Pinocchio's Progeny" into the search engine. You should be able to scroll through the entire text.

Then take a look at this short video excerpt from a film version of Goethe's Faust by the great Czech animator, Jan Švankmajer. As you read in Segel, many of the theatre artists and dramatists of the period took inspiration from puppet theatre, and Goethe knew the story of Faustus especially from puppet theatre renditions. Think about what it is about marionettes and other puppets that fit with the aesthetics and values of such artists as Goethe, Kleist and Hugo even as the genre of melodrama is becoming so popular. How do both providential melodrama and this fascination with what today we might call "object performance" fit within the spirit of an age rocked by the French revolution and the rejection of Enlightenment rationalism?

Melodrama, Part II! Pixérécourt & Boucicault

René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844) & Dion Boucicault (1820-1890)

In his case study on melodrama in your Zarrilli text (254-60), McConachie compares two nineteenth century melodramas that both achieved significant international popularity in their respective times. He argues that these two plays can give us some insight into the development of the form from its earliest context amidst the upheval of the French Revolution to later plays that responded to the conditions of the Industrial Revolution. Here we see the genre that we have defined somewhat narrowly demonstrating its capacity to be adapted to changing circumstances (an important test for any artform!)

I. Guilbert de Pixerecourt's Coelina, or The Child of Mystery (1800)

McConachie argues that Coelina, through its popularity, became a prototype for a sub-genre of melodrama called providential melodrama, which was popular from around 1800 to 1825. The characteristic elements of this play and its sub-genre include: "a single villain, alienated from the social institutions that provide order in this society of hard-working peasants and small shopkeepers"; a happy ending ensured by the fact that "God watches over innocent goodness" in which the villain departs and "the good characters return to the rural utopia from which they started. (255); and virtue prevails without having been compromised in any way.

II. Dion Boucicault's The Poor of New York (1857)

McConachie argues that Boucicault's play inspired a generation of materialist melodrama popular from around 1855 to 1880. Typical of this sub-genre, the play is set in a specific "time-bound, historical reality"; justice is provided not by God, but by "the institutions of liberal, bourgeois government and society" whose rules are broken by the villain; human agents like the detective in this play are required to unravel the mysteries of human injustice; and though justice is restored at the end, there is a great deal of Chance involved and the villains are not banished, but re-incorporated into society. In materialist melodrama, there are appeals to "bourgeois respectability" and much consciousness of class.

In summary:

Providential melodramas use timeless, universal settings; autocratic institutions ensure order; natural innocence is glorified; God ensures a happy ending; and there is a return to a utopian paradise.

Materialist melodramas use time-bound, historical settings; liberal, bourgeois institutions ensure order; social respectablity is honored; chance puts happy endings at risk; and there is acceptance of the material status quo. (257)

III. Why the change between the 1820s and 1850s?

McConachie argues that beyond the individual styles of the two playwrights, we can make sense of the shift from providential to materialist melodrama in relation to a change in audience tastes, and these tastes reflect the social morality, values and emotions of the audiences.

Providential melodrama thrived in the climate of the first decades of the 19th century in which Napoleon and the Catholic Church enjoyed considerable prestige for restoring order and stability to France while the utopianism and belief in natural intuition of the Revolution were still influential. The audiences of these melodramas were reactionaries who applauded the restoration of absolutism.

By the 1850s, the spread of industrialism and capitalism had created a very different climate that favored materialist melodrama. These melodramas reflected the decline of faith in old social heirarchies and religious beliefs that no longer seemed relevant to the new class mobilities, while at the same time protecting the captains of industry from criticism that might be dangerous by clothing them in bourgeois respectability.

Although we might initially guess that materialist melodrama would be more conducive to socialism or Marxism (recall that Marx's Communist Manifesto was published in 1848), McConachie counters that "this kind of melodrama was even more antithetical to working-class interests than the providential kind because it rendered fundamental reform unthinkable in a chance-ridden world." (260)

"having a good cry": an overview of Melodrama

"L'entrée du théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique à une représentation gratis" (Entrance to a free show at the Ambigu-Comique Theatre) by Louis-Léopold Boilly-- an 1819 depiction of a crowd at one of the primary venues for melodrama in revolutionary Paris

We are talking about melodrama this week on the way to looking at Victor Hugo’s Hernani and George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Melodrama was a defining popular theatre genre of the nineteenth century that builds on some aspects of the 18th century theatre we’ve been talking about and breaks with other aspects.

I. Melodrama as a dramatic genre found in many historical periods

Literally, melodrama means “song” or “music” drama. The term can be used both to refer to a genre found in many historical contexts and a specifc form that developed out of the cultural milieu of the French revolution. The term refers to the kind of music used to accompany such plays, usual intense, emotionally loaded themes. “In these melodramas, a premium was put on surface effects, especially effects evoking suspense, fear, nostalgia, and other strong emotions; the plays were written in a way that would arouse such feelings.” (Wilson/Goldfarb 364) Such conventions, for example, as building suspense with a climactic moment at the end of every act—a “cliffhanger”.

“Briefly defined, melodrama allows spectators to imaginatively experience an evil force outside of themselves, such as a greedy person, a rapacious criminal, or a vast conspiracy. Consequently, melodrama dramatizes social morality; it names the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ in our lives and helps us to negotiate such problems as political power, economic justice, and racial inequality. It may also point audiences beyond their present circumstances to transcendental sources of good and evil.” (Zarrilli 254)

“In addition to its heroes and villains, melodrama had other easily recognized stock characters: the threatened woman; the sidekick (a comic foil to the hero); and the ‘fallen woman’ who, even after repenting, is punished for her wicked past.” (W/G 364)

Melodrama achieves its effects through evoking intense, even extreme emotions in the audience. It is the intensity of these emotions that has been the focus of much of the bad connotations we have for melodrama nowadays. Our current prejudices owe much to how much naturalist and realist playwrights like Shaw and Zola denounced melodrama in relation to their own works, but Eric Bentley has defended melodrama against some aspects of their criticism.

Tears: Tears as “the poor man’s catharsis,” more the point of popular melodrama than its moral pretensions. “Having a good cry,” “feeling sorry for oneself”. Bentley charges that the late twentieth century resistance to representations of self-pity suggests a resistance to surging emotion in general, and in particular a preference for cold irony over surging emotion from the lamentations of Greek tragedy to the high emotions of Victorian melodrama.

Aristotelian Pity: We pity the hero of a melodrama because he is in a fearsome situation. We share his fears and pitying ourselves, pity him. This is the characteristic situation of melodrama: goodness beset by badness, hero beset by villain, heroes and heroines beset by a wicked world.

Fear is the genre’s stronger element, the source of its universality. Good melodrama heightens rational fear to an irrational level (i.e. making a genuinely bad villain superhumanly diabolical)

Exaggeration: Melodrama, like Farce, revels in absurdity. From our realistic prejudices, we admit only a narrow range of “artistic” exaggeration. Grand exaggeration requires different criteria. Any exaggeration is justified so long as it is intensely felt. – this is the essentially Rousseauian and Romanticist aspect to melodrama.

In summary:

• Melodramas emphasize exciting plot over character development, the sensational over the subtle, simple morality over moral ambiguity and complexity
• There is frequently an escapist element with a heavy stress on visual spectacle—there’s a clear line of development from spectacular 19th century melodrama to Hollywood action movies.
• Thus, designers began to gain a stature on a par with actors by introducing new stage machinery, flying and other illusionistic devices.
• There is almost always a moral dimension to melodrama with plots culminating in poetic justice (the good are rewarded, the evil punished).
• And melodrama accomplishes its effects by evoking intense emotions of pity and fear in the spectators.

* * *

II. Precursors in German romanticism

A. 1770s: The Sturm und Drang dramatists, inspired by Rousseau’s advocacy of natural, sentimental humanity against the restrictions of Enlightenment rationalism. Jacob M.R. Lenz’s The Soldiers advocated state-sponsored prostitution to satisfy the natural desires of soldiers. Some of these plays were censored, but many circulated in print. The early works of Goethe and Schiller were composed within the movement. (224-5)

B. 1780s: Friedrich von Kotzebue (1761-1819) became the most popular playwright in early 19th century Europe. Avoided the social controversy of the Sturm und Drang playwrights, but embraced their Rousseauian sentimentalism. Misanthropy and Repentance (1787) and over 200 works that followed explored democratic potential in Rousseau’s philosophy. “Kotzebue’s dramas appealed to a wider audience by encouraging them to believe that all people, with or without enlightened reason, were already natural, ethical, and authentic human beings.” (226)

C. 1790s: Gothic thrillers—started in fiction in 1790s, moved into drama—focused on hero-villains “usually a remorseful but still passionate figure who rules female captives and fights ghosts from his past in a crumbling castle. Although these hero-villains struggle in proper sentimental fashion to reform, most go to their deaths without renouncing their desire for lust and revenge” (226)—response to the failure of sentimentalism to explain evil.

* * *


III. The impact of the French Revolution

In 1789, much of Europe and the world still looked to France as the most advanced nation in the world. There was initial approval in Enlightenment circles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and abolition of state monopolies. However, the beheading of the king and the Reign of Terror (1792-1795), implemented by Danton and Robespierre in the name of Reason showed Enlightenment principles taken to a horrible extreme. The ensuing wars brought chaos. There was much admiration of Napoleon when he emerged in 1799 as France’s leader, but then Napoleon plunged Europe into catastrophic wars until 1815.

As McConachie argues, stories about individual villains provided scapegoats for people living during these revolutionary times, and these were the seeds of melodrama.

“The dynamic of the Revolution itself and the wars that followed enjoined Europeans to make absolute distinctions between friend and foe, hero and villain, ‘us’ and ‘them’. In addition, the Revolution (coupled with Rousseauian thinking) had induced a desire for utopia, the conviction that naturally good people might create a society in which evil could be banished from the world. Revolution and war degraded the value of enlightened reason, which many believed had led to The Terror, and elevated nature and intuition as better guides to morality and possible utopia.” (226)

In this climate, 18th century sentimentalism was reformulated for the stage with a simplified ethics. “The first melodramas presented a world in which a traditional utopia of order and happiness was just around the corner if only the good people used their intuition to root out and banish the bad people from society.” (227)

Working class “boulevard” theatres in late 18th century France presented all kinds of popular entertainments that had moved indoores from the fairground theatres, including pantomimes and tableaux vivants (usually with spectacular scenes of violence and suspense or historical events– think historical dioramas in museums).

A few of the first melodrama composed during the French Revolution:

1796 Victor, or The Child of the Forest by Guilbert de Pixerecourt(1773-1844). The first melodrama.

1800 Coelina, Or the Child of Mystery by Pixerecourt depicts the restoration of absolutist values in a French village while praising the superior intuition of common folk and the hope for a future free of bourgeois greed.

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IV. The development and spread of melodrama

Melodrama brought demand for significant improvements in the painted flat scenography that was still dominant in 1800. Like the French Revolution itself, the aesthetic of melodrama was to hide nothing from the audience. Whereas neoclassical drama (like ancient Greek theatre) generally did not represent horrible deeds onstage to preserve the genteel sensibilities of upper and middle class audiences, melodrama emphasized such intense scenes. Exotic locales called for larger stages and three-dimensional scenery. In the 1840s, huge water tanks were installed to facilitate a craze for nautical dramas. Introduction of gaslight after 1825 enabled lighting effects and spectacular eruptions and explosions. By the 1880s, there were sinking ships, steaming trains and galloping horses.

Melodrama was initially rejected as crude by highbrow audiences, but it proved flexible enough to gain wide popularity over the nineteenth century. A huge increase in working-class spectators (who, thanks to the industrial revolution, were increasing in urban centers and gaining disposable income for entertainment) helped fuel the spread. There were politically-oriented works like The Bottle (1847, pro-temperance) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852, abolitionist) that attracted even religious conservatives to the theatre. Actors like Charlotte Cushman and Henry Irving became celebrities on the melodramatic stage.

After 1850, playwrights like Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) and Dion Boucicault (1822-1890) incorporated aspects of the well-made play into melodrama. “In brief, the plot of the well-made play depends on a secret, known to a few characters and the audience, on which the fate of many—perhaps an entire nation—hangs. Through the clever manipulation of chance and circumstance, all of which must appear logical and plausible, the playwright leads the audience to an ‘obligatory scene’ in which the secret is revealed and the characters must resolve their conflicts.” (228)

German cultural nationalism and romanticist theatre

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)

First off, as Dave Bisaha appropriately brought up on Monday, the notion of affirming a national theatre based in some kind of local tradition was not new in the late 18th century. Rousseau, in his Letter to Msr. D’Alembert arguing against establishing a French theatre in Geneva, had made claims about a primitive folk culture that should be the true basis of a distinctively Swiss culture. John Dryden had argued that English drama had distinctive qualities superior to that of the French, and David Garrick had devoted most of his life to establishing Shakespeare as a great national poet. With the founding of the Comedie Francaise in 1680, the French had laid claim to a great national dramatic and theatrial tradition worth preserving from generation to generation. And we can look back to Lope de Vega in the early 17th century, and his argument for privileging Spanish uso against the claims of neoclassicism as a kind of primordial national theatre project. These were all promotions of local distinctiveness against claims for universal standards of art.

So what was so special about the arguments laid out by Johann von Herder in the 1760s and 1770s that lets Steve Wilmer claim him as the most important inspiration not only for a German national culture and theatre, but for the modern rhetoric of national culture throughout the world?

Herder encouraged German-speaking people to take pride in their own cultural traditions and their native language. Like Rousseau, he urged them to acknowledge the importance of the folk poets of the past. But unlike Rousseau and those who followed him, Herder promoted the notion that everyone in the world naturally belongs to a nation, that every nation is distinct in its culture and traditions, and that every nation should express the volksgeist, the spirit of its own people in its own unique way.

In this way, he broke through some of the basic assumptions that had informed the debate over neoclassicism for the past two centuries. Rather than worry about what the ancients really meant, or who was authorized to break the rules, he started with the assumption that there are no universal standards for art. Everyone should look for what is unique in the pasts of their own peoples, and this will give them distinct traditions to draw on in formulating an art particular to their own people. The ease with which we nowadays talk about American or English or French or German or Chinese culture as distinct things reflected in the practices of all representatives of those cultures owes a lot to this fundamental shift in thinking. As Wilmer points out, there were significant political consequences. A people with distinct cultural traditions, and a distinct national voice, could make a strong argument for having the right and the natural destiny to have the status of a separate nation-state. So we start to see revolutionaries taking an interest in various kinds of cultural expression, including theatre, as a tool for advancing their goals to establish new states. We see subjects of empires attracted to notions of building a national culture—like much of Europe during the Napoleonic wars, the Finnish in relation to Russia, the Irish in relation to England and the Asian and African peoples colonized by Europe.

Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of invention of tradition is important in this context. Nationalists, of course, would like everybody to think that their claims to distinctiveness are based in reality, that national identity is part of human nature and beyond dispute. The truth is always more ambiguous. The nations of England and France were forged through political and military actions and choices. It took people like John Dryden and David Garrick to promote the notion that there was such a thing as a great dramatic tradition that was distinctively English (rather than being the works of certain people who happened to be English). The disorienting experiences of modernity in the late 18th century with bloody revolutions and huge social uphevals like the industrial revolution made people think about “traditions” with a new kind of nostalgia and to define rigidly practices that had actually been more fluid. To preserve the purity of national origins, nationalists invented traditions that owed nothing to other cultures, conveniently forgetting any kind of complexity that might contradict their distinctiveness.

As Wilmer argues, Herder’s ideas about national culture can be seen in the rhetoric of national theatre projects around Europe and beyond. All these projects show aspects of what John Hutchinson calls cultural nationalism, whose goal is “the moral regeneration of the national community rather than the achievement of an autonomous state.” (64) In Germany, for example, where real political nationhood did not become feasible until the late nineteenth century, cultural nationalism was a significant force building the sense of a national community over the preceding century from the lat 18th century. The goal of such institutions as the German theatres of Hamburg and Munich and Weimar was to build up a national mythology independent from the cultural hegemony of France, England and Italy. As Schiller would put it, “if we had a national stage, we would also become a nation.” (69)

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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)

Nationalism, Imperialism and 18th Century Theatre

TIMELINES

Rise of the British Empire

1707 Act of Union, a treaty with France and the Netherlands leaves England the dominant colonial power in North America and India. The dominance of the British Empire over its rivals might be dated from here.

1757 Battle of Plassey gives the British East India Company decisive control over India against French and indigenous rivals.

1775 American revolution begins (a setback for the British Empire)

1783 United States of America gains independence

1788 British penal colony founded at Australia

1795-1815 Napoleonic wars envelop Europe and their colonies throughout the world. Britain emerges as the pre-eminent global empire.

* * *

The Industrial Revolution

1721 John Lombe’s water-powered silk mill at Derby, arguably the first modern factory

1780s Steam engines increasingly used to power machines; iron foundry technology advances; patents on textile technologies expire, all leading to mass industrialization

* * *

German Romanticism and Cultural Nationalism

1765-9 A number of wealthy burghers in the free city of Hamburg embarked on the establishment of the first German National Theatre with Lessing as ‘theatre poet’. In this position, he issued the Hamburg Dramaturgie. But there was too little public support, and it closed two years later.

1776 The German Sturm und Drang movement begins with Friedrich Klinger’s play by that name–tumultuous dramas rebelling against political, economic, and artistic tyranny; celebrating ordinary people in natural (even primitive) settings; heroic peasants overthrowing villainous and tyrannical rulers; sensational action, Manichean conflicts of raging elements.

1777 A German court theatre established in Munich with Schiller as writer in residence.

1779 Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, the first German play written in blank verse on the inspiration of Shakespeare

1782 Schiller’s The Robbers establishes plot and character types that would become common with melodrama– damsel in distress, falsely accused hero, ruthless villain with labyrinthine castle.

1784 Schiller’s “The Theatre Considered as a Moral Institution’; Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind


1795 Napoleonic wars commence. The occupation of German territories inspires greater interest in cultural nationalism as a form of resistance

1798 Schiller joins Goethe at the court of Weimar, initiating a period of intense theatrical activity trying to articulate a German national theatre

* * * * *

NATIONALISM

The United States, coming into existence as it did in the late 18th century, has always been dominated by commercial theaters, popular and bourgeois. For us, the role of the government in the arts has always either been as a censor or as a provider of grants that are usually not as generous as those provided by private corporations. We had a national theater for a very brief period in the 1930s in the form of the Federal Theater Project, a producing theater funded by the US government. Since then, however, we mostly hear about our government being outraged at any taxpayers money being used to support controversial art, and defunding the NEA. The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. serves some small part of the social function of a national theater, but not the basic economic relationship. As a presidential memorial, the Kennedy Center receives a direct, federal appropriation, but these funds can only be used for the operation and maintenance of the building. None of this funding goes toward the Center’s performances or educational activities. Without private donations and ticket sales, the Kennedy Center would stand only as an empty building. The Kennedy Center is also not ideologically committed to an American repertoire. It is just a big venue for theater in the nation’s capitol.

In most of the rest of the world, national governments have taken theater seriously as a way of promoting national culture and national identity. Making English into “the language of Shakespeare.” French as “the language of Racine and Moliere.” Most of the nations of continental Europe have prominent national theater buildings funded by the government. From the consolidation of many European nations in the 19th century to the new independence of colonized nations in the 20th century, governments have funded national theaters to promote national culture. The establishment of the Comedie Francaise in 1680 was a historic move in this direction, a very different initiative than the joint-stock companies of late 16th and early 17th century England, and a very different initiative than the professional Italian commedia troupes. This was, and still is, a state-sponsored theater whose purpose is to maintain a national repertoire of the great works by French playwrights.


IMPERIALISM

In 1600, China may have been the most economically and politically powerful nation on Earth. Biggest, most populous, most politically sophisticated, most technologically advanced, most economically advanced, most literate. In 1800, it might have been a little harder to say. Europe was getting rich on its colonies through much of the world, had taken huge steps towards advancing democracy and capitalism in their own governments, and was in the midst of accelerating scientific and industrial progress. However, much of the world viewed them, and they viewed themselves as just another set of warring powers who appeared to be tearing each other apart in the Napoleonic wars. Even their colonies were mostly limited to port towns and garrisons. By 1900, however, European powers directly governed nearly 90% of the surface of the Earth. In science, industry, economy, politics and culture and the arts, most of the world now sought to emulate Europe.

As Europe conquered the world militarily, politically and economically, it also did so epistemologically and culturally. Despite the reaction against Enlightenment rationalism in the Romantic era, the 19th century saw a new explosion of science that worked hand in hand with colonialism. European naturalists, such as Charles Darwin, accompanied military journeys to the colonies to catalogue and produce knowledge about all of Nature. Materialist political philosophy channeled Christian notions of emancipation from sin into a progressive emancipation from ignorance. Adam Smith, August Comte, Georg Hegel and Karl Marx all saw human societies and nations as progressing according to rational material causes (rather than God’s will or other super-natural forces) that should be shaped by educated and aware people to bring humanity closer to full knowledge and justice. This is the wider socio-cultural context of the "modern" theatre and drama that began with late 18th century Romanticism and eventually gave rise to 19th century Realism.

Keywords and Concepts for Midterm Exam

Renaissance or Early Modernity?

renaissance and neoclassicism
unity of disunities
invention of tradition
Gumbrecht’s 3 definitions of modernity
“a modern man can never look well dressed”
single-point perspective and prosecnium theatres
Sebastiano Serlio

Spanish ‘Golden Age’ Theatre

corrales de comedias
the cazuela
Lope de Vega’s “New Art”
Lope’s appeal to uso (custom)
Spanish comedias vs. tragedy and comedy
The setting of Life is a Dream
The Corpus Christi festival
Calderon de la Barca and the auto sacramental
Sor Juana and the auto contest in Madrid
Zeal and Religion
The Aztec ritual in Divino Narciso

French Neoclassical theatre

Aristotle vs. Horace
The Hotel de Burgogne
Cardinal Richelieu and the French Academy
the three Aristotelian unities
vraisemblance and bienseance
The controversy over Corneille’s Le Cid
Giacomo Torelli and the Palais Cardinal
The Comedie Italienne and Moliere’s company
The controversy over Tartuffe
Moliere’s relationship to Louis XIV
The Comedie Francaise

English Restoration theatre

The Puritan interregnum
Charles II and his time in France
John Dryden’s defense of English drama
Aphra Behn’s female characters
tennis court theatres
Davenant and Killigrew
Dorset Garden and Drury Lane
fops and rakes
the Glorious Revolution
Hobbes and Locke

Keralan Kathakali

the Mahabharata and puranas
The Natyasastra and the Hastalaksanadipika
rasa and bhava
Namboodiri Brahmins and Nayars
‘house and its land’
rasika
The four plays of Kottayam Tampuran
the Kidangoor style and the Kalluvayi style
illakivattam in the role of Sidhika
green and black character types
kalarippayattu and kathakali actor training
mudras and rasabhinava (facial expression)
the Kerala Kalamandalam

Qing Dynasty theatre

kunqu & jingxi
Peony Pavilion
clapper opera
sheng, dan/tan, jing/ching, ch’ou roles
which characters in Qing Ding Pearl correspond to each type?
Confucianism
teahouse theatres
Mei Lanfang
the cultural revolution & Chinese opera


18th Century Europe

The Bank of England
book culture vs. periodical culture
Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot
Rousseau’s opposition to a theatre in Geneva
the concept of ‘genius’
domestic middle-class drama
social rank or station vs. character
sentimentalism
“the paradox of the actor”
sense and sensibility
David Garrick and Diderot
David Garrick and Hogarth
The Enlightenment and China
David Garrick in Orphan of China

The birth of the "star" actor: David Garrick (1717-1779)

Garrick had an unsuccessful career as a wine merchant befoe he started acting in 1740 in Ipswich, which was an important stop on the touring circuit outside London. He debuted in London as Rechard III in 1741, and followed this with a string of other major Shakespeare tragic roles. He soon became one of the managers of Drury Lane, and remained in control there until 1776. Over the course of his career, Garrick made several important contributions to the development of English theatre. He promoted Shakespeare, not simply as an important member of the English dramatic repertoire, but as the supreme English poet and proof of England’s cultural superiority. The reputation that Shakespeare still enjoys as the greatest playwright in the world was established at this point by the devotion of England’s greatest actor. In the following two centuries, Shakespeare would become a cornerstone of English education throughout the British empire, making theatre a huge part of English nationalism.

Reciprocally, Garrick used his unrivalled status as an emissary of the English national poet to promote the legitimacy of acting as a profession. You’ll recall that in the Restoration, actors were still considered little more than prostitutes. Garrick became a model of the actor as “the new natural man of reason and moral sensibility. Easy and graceful in motion, with a quick intelligence, he planned his performances meticulously, offering a model of the century’s scientific ideal of the rational soul governing the mechanical body.” As Samuel Johnson put it, “his profession made him rich, and he made his profession respectable.” As ambassador or high priest of Shakespeare and model of the new enlightened man, he became a friend of the powerful in London and lived the life of a gentleman.

The article about Arthur Murphy’s 1759 adaptation of Voltaire’s Orphelin de la Chine argues that Garrick’s production of the play navigated between an English attraction to Voltaire’s original and interest in the Enlightenment craze for Chinese culture, but appropriated it to a context in which the play could become an argument for English superiority. This is quintessential Garrick.

He also was the first international acting celebrity. Your text associaties this with periodical culture. He was the subject of hundreds of paintings and engravings, including those by Hogarth described in the book. Benjamin Victor, writing in 1761, described his career as “a bright luminary in the theatrical hemisphere… [which] soon after became a star of the first magnitude and was called Garrick.” This is apparently the first recorded use of the word “star” to describe an actor.

He was praised for bringing a new “naturalism” to the theatre, though if we look closely at what this means from our contemporary perspective, we can see how much it was shaped by the conventions of the time. For the ghost scene in Hamlet, he had a special “fright wig” constructed whose hair could be made to stand on end through a hydraulic hand pump. To 18th century audiences, this was more real than reality.

In 1775, a German visitor to London named Lichtenberg saw Garrick’s Hamlet and wrote this description of the ghost scene. He fails to mention the wig, but the rest gives a revealing impression of Garrick’s intense style:

Hamlet has folded his arms under his cloak and pulled his hat down over his eyes; it is a cold night and just twelve o’clock; the theatre is darkened, and the whole audience of some thousand are as quiet, and their faces as motionless, as though they were painted on the walls of the theatre; even from the farthest end of the playhouse one could hear a pin drop. Suddenly, as Hamlet moves towards the back of the stage slightly to the left and turns his back on the audience, Horatio starts, and saying: ‘Look, my lord, it comes,’ points to the right, where the ghost has already appeared and stands motionless, before anyone is aware of him. At these words Garrick turns sharply and at the same moment staggers back two or three paces with his knees giving way under him; his hat falls to the ground and both his arms, especially the left, are stretched out nearly to their full length, with the hands as high as his head, the right arm more bent and the hand lower, and the fingers apart; his mouth is open: thus he stands rooted to the spot, with legs apart, but no loss of dignity, supported by his friends, who are better acquainted with the apparition and fear lest he should collapse. His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak. The almost terror-struck silence of the audience, which preceded this appearance and filled one with a sense of insecurity, probably did much to enhance the effect.

The European Enlightenment & Middle Class Theatre

18th century European thought is often grouped under the name of the Enlightenment. This was a reaction to all the religious wars that had torn Europe apart throughout the 17th century. A recognition of the power of science to explore the world, and a new faith in the capacity of pure reason and rationality to answer not only scientific, but also political and social issues. There was a new focus on finding truth not in religion but in nature. However, there were ongoing debates that would continue into the nineteenth century about what that nature really was. The diehard rationalists advocated a mechanistic view of a universe that was rigorously logical and could be understood through empirical observation and experiment. Others believed that truth resided within the soul of each human being. This is the Jane Austen dichotomy between sense and sensibility. Both had an impact on thinking about theatre.

In stark contrast to Hobbes, who advocated a benevolent monarchy to elevate humanity from a state of nature which was innately bad (“Life is nasty, brutish and short”), Enlightenment philosophers frequently started from the premise that human nature is innately good, and that both personal and social bonds would thrive if individuals were true to their innate virtues and their moral sentiments, resisting selfishness and exercising benevolence.

Rousseau epitomizes this view when he writes in The Social Contract, “Man is born free, but everywhere finds himself in chains.” The philosophical approach known as romantic individualism stems from this. Be true to yourself and you can’t go wrong. The measure of truth is in our own soul. People are good. It is society that is corrupt. Evil is not innate, but rather a corruption of our good natures that can be reformed. This was a view also promoted by Addison and Steele in periodicals such as The Tatler and The Spectator. They argue that theatre should be a vehicle for educating the public in these moral sentiments appropriate to a new middle class. These are the roots of what we will later speak of as liberalism—the belief that prosperity and justice are best served by limiting the role of government and all other social institutions and letting people do whatever they want. Of course, the heroes of liberalist thought are the capitalists and industrialists who take advantage of such freedoms to amass huge fortunes.


The new drama, by extension, should abandon the aesthetics of Restoration comedy and French comedy of manners in which fops and rakes ridicule each other with witty repartee for a new kind of middle class drama about the struggles of middle class characters in which the middle class virtues such as thrift, hard work and family loyalty are rewarded and vices that destroy the family or the productivity of society are punished. This is the poetic justice that Rymer hinted at in the Restoration, but which became the moral compass for the new bourgeois drama. The important point to keep in mind here is that these shifts are a response to specific changes in European society. You can’t understand the rise of some of these things that start to look like realist drama outside the context of a middle class, capitalist and increasingly nationalistic society.

Chinese kunqu and jingxi video clips

Here are a handful of videos to give you a better taste of kunqu and jingxi

1) This is a promotional video from one of several productions of the kunqu opera, Peony Pavilion that took place earlier this decade in response to a UNESCO project focussing on the form as a world cultural treasure. There is a narration by UC Berkeley professor Pai Hsien-yung who emphasizes such typical elements of the form as its exquisitely decorated costumes and beautiful poetry. Kunqu is a very high and refined form that translates easily to elite contemporary global touring venues.



2) A scene from Peony Pavilion performed in a more traditional style on a traditional stage. If you find this harder to watch or less interesting than the clip above, think about the fact that the one above has been marketed for Western audiences. What have they done to make it more attractive for us?



3) A scene from a jingxi performance with various jing and wu sheng characters engaged in a battle sequence. As with kathakali, note that it isn't really about the narrative story so much as the performers displaying the essence of the experience of battle. In this sense, think of it more like dance.



4) Another video collage of a jingxi performance on a proscenium stage featuring some of the characteristic acrobatic fight scenes and the ever-popular "monkey" character. This is what all that intense physical training accomplishes!



5) Rare footage of Mei Lanfang at the age of 60 performing the dan role from the jingxi play, Farewell, my Concubine.

Chinese "opera": kunqu & jingxi and their actors

17th century painting of a private stage in Peking where kunqu might have been performed (left) and a mid-19th century Chinese stage showing the clear influence of Western proscenium scenography (right)


* * * * *

Historical overview

The Sung Dynasty (906-1279) saw the development of institutions and practices crucial to the emergence of a professional, commercial Chinese theater. An emergent middle class built numerous permanent theaters. The nanxi theatrical style, which developed at this time in South China, made extensive use of regional folk music styles and sophisticated typological systems of characterization. But the strongest evidence appears under the Mongol rulers of China in the late 13th and 14th centuries. This Yuan drama was patronized by the court of Kublai Khan, and many of the plays that are performed in all the forms of Chinese theatre were first written during this time. Chinese theatre artists look back on the Yuan drama as the golden age of Chinese playwriting when the most sophisticated and refined (that is, the most courtly) plays were written. These plays are more literary and have a more linear plot structure than most later Chinese opera and concentrate on a single protagonist who is the only singing character (somewhat like the first Greek tragedies which only had one “actor”). However, unlike the Japanese who revere the golden age of Noh or Westerners who revere Shakespeare, Chinese feel free to change these Yuan plays to adapt them to whatever new forms they want. The words of the playwright are not sacred in China.

During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and the first century of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1910), Chinese theatre drawing from folk traditions and the Yuan drama developed differently in the different provinces. During the 16th and 17th centuries, a very refined form of Chinese Opera known as Kunqu developed in the Northern cities. Kunqu drew from the literary Yuan dramas, developed refined music and became the Chinese national theatre form. But unlike in Japan where refinement brought Noh greater respect, refinement destroyed Kunqu. Chinese audiences demanded something more exciting.

In 1779 (at a point when Kunqu was practically dead) for the Emperor’s seventieth birthday (and again ten years later for his eightieth birthday) troupes of a more popular, more spectacular form called clapper opera came to Peking from the province of Anhui. They were so successful that many of them remained in Peking and spawned a new school of performance that developed into Jingxi (Peking/Beijing Opera), and influenced the development of similar regional operas all over China.

Chinese opera clearly started in more popular venues even though it first became a sensation in the North as part of a courtly celebration. Performances of Chinese opera were and still are given in the streets as well as in lavish theatre buildings. However, probably the most typical place to see Chinese opera is in a teahouse theatre. Similar to our “dinner theatres,” these are places where people go to drink tea, eat, socialize, gamble, and (up through the nineteenth century) smoke opium. Teahouses varied in how exclusive they were, and could house a wide variety of different kinds of theatre from puppet shows to Chinese opera.

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Acting in Chinese Theatre

As we saw in the extracts from the film, Farewell, my Concubine, training of boys for Chinese opera was similarly rough and rigorous as for kathakali performers in India. Boys in acting schools (who typically came from impoverished backgrounds) were treated as property of their teachers. This could certainly be abusive. At the same time, the life of an actor offered the opportunity for fame and success otherwise unimaginable for poor Chinese children with no education.

As in India, young actors training in China would be selected early for their physical qualities and talent to specialize in specific role types. There are four basic character types in Chinese Opera: sheng (male archetype roles such as old men (lao sheng) and warriors (wu sheng), tan/dan (female characters, played in all-male troupes by men), ching/jing (painted face male characters – often kings or mythological figures) and ch’ou (clown characters)

As in India, Chinese actors portray their characters through a complex system of codified gestures (although Chinese acting gestures are generally symbolic rather than a complete sign language like Indian mudras), movements, styles of walking, styles of speaking and singing, costumes and make-up. The most famous of Chinese acting conventions are the hua lien (painted faces). Although painted faces may be quite simple as for the Dan roles (usually just white make-up with blush highlights), they can be quite elaborate for the ching/jing characters, using symbolic lines and highlights and different symbolic colors to indicate character complexity.

In Qing Ding Pearl, the fisherman's daughter is obviously a dan role, famously played by Mei Lanfang, the most celebrated Chinese actor of the twentieth century. The character is a model of the kind of filial piety expected of daughters towards their fathers in Confucian social philosophy. Her father is a typical lao sheng. His friends, the fighters, are most likely wu sheng. The diabolical magistrate is a jing character, and the comic "boxers" are chou clowns, similar to braggart soldier characters in numerous world theatre traditions.







(Left to right, top to bottom) A lao sheng character, four different jing characters, a "flower dan" (an innocent girl role), a ch'ou clown character