Garrick at Drury Lane, 1747–1776

2004 ◽  
pp. 145-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Auburn
Keyword(s):  
Drury Lane

The lives of three rhinoceroses exhibited in London 1790–1814

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kees Rookmaaker ◽  
John Gannon ◽  
Jim Monson
Keyword(s):  
Rhinoceros Unicornis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Drury Lane

The history of three living Indian rhinoceroses (Rhinoceros unicornis) exhibited at the Exeter ’Change and the adjoining Lyceum on the Strand in London is detailed. The animals were owned by three successive proprietors of the menagerie: Thomas Clark, Gilbert Pidcock and Stephen Polito. Clark's rhinoceros arrived on 5 June 1790 as a two-year-old from India, largely exhibited at the Lyceum, but shown at Windsor and Ascot races in June 1793 and elsewhere in England until his death in Cosham near Portsmouth (not Corsham) in July 1793. The skin was mounted, possibly bought by William Bullock and subsequently by the Royal Museum in Edinburgh. A painting by George Stubbs should show this animal, but a discrepancy in age and stature is discussed. Pidcock's rhinoceros was acquired in 1799, dying early in 1800 in Drury Lane, after acquisition by an agent of the German Emperor, Francis II. He is shown on token half-pennies issued by Pidcock, and sketched by artist Samuel Howitt. Polito's rhinoceros arrived in July 1810, toured England in 1811, and was sold to the continent in October 1814. Howitt incorporated this animal into his artwork.

‘Of Neuter Gender, tho’ of Irish growth’: Charles Churchill's Fribble

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-130
Author(s):  
Declan William Kavanagh
Keyword(s):  
Direct Response ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Literary Source ◽  
David Garrick ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Identity ◽  
Eighth Edition ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Drury Lane ◽  
Fitzpatrick Functions

This essay argues that the work of a lesser-known mid-eighteenth-century satirist Charles Churchill (1731–1764) provides a rich literary source for queer historical considerations of the conflation of xenophobia with effeminophobia in colonial imaginings of Ireland. This article analyzes Churchill's verse-satire The Rosciad (1761) through a queer lens in order to reengage the complex history of queer figurations of Ireland and the Irish within the British popular imagination. In the eighth edition of The Rosciad – a popular and controversial survey of London's contemporary players – Churchill portrays the Irish actor Thady Fitzpatrick as an effeminate fribble, before championing the manly acting abilities of the English actor David Garrick. The phobic attack on Fitzpatrick in The Rosciad is a direct response to Fitzpatrick's involvement in the ‘Fitzgiggo’ riots of January 1763 at the Drury Lane and Covent-Garden theatres. While Churchill's lampooning of the actor recalls Garrick's earlier satirizing of Fitzpatrick as a fribble in The Fribbleriad (1741) and Miss in her Teens (1747), The Rosciad is unique in its explicit conflation of androgyny with ethnicity through Irish classification. The portraiture of Fitzpatrick functions, alongside interrelated axes of ethnicity, class and gender, to prohibit access to a ‘normative’ middle-class English identity, figured through the ‘manly’ theatrical sensibility of the poem's hero, Garrick. Moreover, in celebrating a ‘Truly British Age’, the poem privileges English female players, in essentialist and curiously de-eroticized terms, as ‘natural’ though flawed performers. By analyzing Churchill's phobic juxtaposition of Garrick and the female players against the Irish fribble, this article evinces how mid-century discourses of effeminacy were also instrumental in enforcing racial taxonomies.

De Vere at Drury Lane

1912 ◽  
Vol s11-V (127) ◽  
pp. 435-435
Author(s):  
Willoughby Maycock
Keyword(s):  
Drury Lane

Timour the Tartar and Poe's Tamerlane

PMLA ◽  
1941 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 1103-1106
Author(s):  
Martin Staples Shockley
Keyword(s):  
Primary Source ◽  
Drury Lane

Suggestions for the primary source of Poe's Tamerlane have been either indefinite or improbable. Killis Campbell suggested that while Poe was at school in London he may have learned something of the part played by Tamerlane in history, and that either then or after his return to Richmond in 1820 he may have become acquainted with some of the literary versions of the story. He considered the possibility of Poe's having seen one of the Tamerlane plays on the stage, and noted that Timour the Tartar was acted in Baltimore as late as 1829. Mary E. Phillips advanced the possibility that Poe may have come across a copy of the play Tamerlane in the library of Rector Bransby, since the rôle of Dervish in Tamerlane at Drury Lane was taken by a Mr. Bransby who might have been a relative of Rector Bransby.

The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain McCalman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Drury Lane

Abstract In the autumn of 1781, shortly after being elected to the British Academy of Art as a landscape painter, Alsatian-born artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was hired by the wealthy young aesthete William Beckford to prepare a private birthday spectacle at his mansion in Wiltshire. De Loutherbourg, who was also chief scenographer at Drury Lane theatre and the inventor of a recent commercial “moving picture” entertainment called the Eidophusikon, promised to produce “a mysterious something that the eye has not seen nor the heart conceived.” Beckford wanted an Oriental spectacle that would completely ravish the senses of his guests, not least so that he could enjoy a sexual tryst with a thirteen year old boy, William Courtenay, and Louisa Beckford, his own cousin’s wife. The resulting three day party and spectacle staged over Christmas 1781 became one of the scandals of the day, and ultimately forced William Beckford into decades of exile in Europe to escape accusations of sodomy. However, this Oriental spectacle also had a special significance for the history of Romantic aesthetics and modern-day cinema. Loutherbourg and Beckford’s collaboration provided the inspiration for William to write his scintillating Gothic novel, Vathek, and impelled Philippe himself into revising his moving-picture program in dramatically new ways. Ultimately this saturnalian party of Christmas 1781 constituted a pioneering experiment in applying the aesthetic of the sublime to virtual reality technology. It also led Loutherbourg to anticipate the famous nineteenth-century “Phantasmagoria” of French showman, Gaspard Robertson, by producing in 1782 a miniature Gothic movie scene based on the Pandemonium episode in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

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