(Un)making a Monster: Melodrama, The Satirist, and the Cartoons of Samuel De Wilde

Our essay takes up the well-known satirical print, ‘The Monster Melo-Drame’, and re-attaches it to several contexts to bring forward its richness and ambiguity as an image. We begin by considering its artist (Samuel De Wilde), printer (Samuel Tipper), and publisher ( The Satirist), interpreting the print in its original publication and in dialogue with the essay that accompanied it in the January 1808 issue of the Satirist. The image, we argue, should not be read on its own but rather as the first of a trio of prints De Wilde made for that magazine. Taken together, the images show the Satirist engaging in a sustained campaign against London’s Theatres Royal, one in which melodrama is a subject but not a primary target. Part of our essay’s work is necessarily that of description: identifying figures, references, and tableaux as these prints comment on a rapidly changing theatrical scene between 1807 and 1809. Considered as a set, De Wilde’s prints constituted a fundamental part of the Satirist’s attacks on the Drury Lane Theatre management, particularly Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his son Thomas Sheridan, whom they represent as corrupt caretakers of that institution and of the national drama.

Lucretia Bradshaw

Chapter three reconstructs the enigmatic life and career of Folkes’s wife, the actress Lucretia Bradshaw whose glittering Drury Lane career ended in tragedy; she was eventually confined to a Chelsea madhouse. Lucretia’s life is used as a case study to understand how her relationship with Folkes was an example of the profound shift in ideas about marriage in this period, as well as Georgian conceptions of insanity and medical treatment.

Drury Lane, 1800

This chapter sets the scene for the transformation of the West End in the nineteenth century. It commences with the attempted assassination of George III at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. This event is employed to look more closely at the theatre in 1800 and then broadens out to look at the wider world of the West End at the time. It argues that the modern notion of the West End as a distinct pleasure district barely existed at the start of the nineteenth century (only taking in the areas of the Strand and Covent Garden). The reader then discovers how this embryonic pleasure district emerged during the period from 1660 to 1800. The construction of Mayfair and St James’s in the eighteenth century was pivotal because it reveals how the West End existed to service the aristocracy, creating elite aristocratic shopping areas such as Bond Street. The peculiar arrangements for the provision of theatre are explained: Drury Lane and Covent Garden enjoyed royal patents which in theory prevented anyone else from performing the spoken word on stage. It also shows how this exclusive world was beginning to change at the end of the eighteenth century as more vulgar entertainments arose on the Strand and in Leicester Square.

The Histrionic Art

This chapter is a study of West End theatre in the age of Romanticism. It explains the importance of the patent theatres (particularly those in Drury Lane and Covent Garden) and their attempts to retain a monopoly over the performance of the spoken word. This is then contrasted with the emergence of so-called ‘minor’ theatres in the West End such as the Lyceum, the Adelphi, and the Olympic. They became associated with new theatrical forms including melodrama and burletta. The chapter explores the theatre-going experience in the early nineteenth-century West End and the varied styles of acting in the age of Edmund Kean. It explains why demands emerged for reform of the patent theatre system leading to the 1843 Theatre Regulation Act. This chapter links the early nineteenth century West End to the confessional state which explains why the nature of theatre had to change in the age of reform.

Jane Austen Goes to Drury Lane: Identifying Individuals in a Late Georgian Audience

This essay identifies the theatre box where the novelist, Jane Austen (1775–1817), sat in 1814 to watch Edmund Kean in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Drury Lane Box Book enables calendar analysis of box occupancy with names, titles and, occasionally, addresses. Critical practice has tended to treat audiences as undifferentiated groups. Assemblage theory makes it possible to conceptualise individuals in audiences as equivalent to audiences in their entirety. Sitting in the same box as Austen was Lady Cecil Copley (1770–1819), the divorced 1st Marchioness of Abercorn. Amongst the other boxes were parties formed by wives of army and naval personnel and a British consul to Brazil. A few boxes away sat Jane Akers, née Ramsay (1772–1842), the wife of a St Kitts slave owner. Akers later claimed compensation under the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. That weekend Austen had with her the manuscript of Mansfield Park (1814), a novel recognised as a critique of a fictional parkland estate sustained by slavery. Given the steep cultural differentials evident in this single box tier, it is argued theatrical performance, even in Kean’s re-evaluation of Shylock, may have been only tangential in altering the behaviour of that night’s audience.