They Did the Police in Different Voices: Representations of the Detective on the Victorian Stage
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They Did the Police in Different Voices: Representations of the Detective on the Victorian Stage by Isabel Stowell-Kaplan A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Isabel Stowell-Kaplan (2018) ii They Did the Police in Different Voices: Representations of the Detective on the Victorian Stage Isabel Stowell-Kaplan Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies University of Toronto 2018 ABSTRACT In the spring of 1863, Detective Jack Hawkshaw strolled carelessly onto the stage of the Olympic Theatre. The first British stage detective of any significance, Hawkshaw ushered in the beginning of a detective era on the London stage. Established quickly as a significant part of the nineteenth-century theatrical scene, the stage detective was swiftly codified into a theatrical “line.” Always happy to adopt a fictional persona or throw off a disguise, to play with performance conventions or manifestly observe his theatrical counterparts, the stage detective spoke the language of nineteenth-century theatre. More than this, he became an integral part of contemporary dramatic structure and style, both facilitating melodramatic resolution and looking forward to the dandiacal style of Wilde’s society comedies. The plays which form the focus of this work are a mixture of the canonical and those unknown to modern scholarship: from Tom Taylor’s well-known 1863 play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, to Clement Scott’s long-forgotten The Detective (1875), from Wilkie Collins’s stage adaptation of The Moonstone to two adaptations of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. To build a clear picture of English attitudes to the new detective and his appearance on the London stage I draw from contemporaneous newspaper articles and accounts, critical reviews and essays dedicated to theories of performance, as well as acting manuals and official police orders. Understanding the detective’s dramatic purpose and theatrical positioning sheds light on nineteenth-century theatrical conventions – from the complex iii interplay between representation and authenticity to the ways in which the melodramatic universe was conceived – as laid out by scholars such as Lynn Voskuil, Martin Meisel, Peter Brooks and Elaine Hadley. It also better illuminates the epistemological frameworks of the period – from questions of deception and fraud to concerns about omniscience and earned authority – as explored by Audrey Jaffe, Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison and others. Despite his significance, the figure of the stage detective has received scant scholarly attention. By pursuing original archival research as well as revisiting the stage detective’s appearance in the more canonical work of the period, I aim to reinstate the detective in the theatre history of the period. iv Acknowledgements This research has been generously supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and a number of fellowships awarded at the University of Toronto – the John Macrory Fellowship, the Arthur Lindsay Fernie Research Fellowship and the Lise-Lone Marker Award. This work would not have been possible without the continuing existence and support of both national and specialist archives and collections. I would like to thank the British National Archives, the British Library and the V&A Theatre and Performance Archives, where I received the generous support of their archivists and, though the research did not find its way directly into this dissertation, I should also like to thank those at the Metropolitan Police Heritage Centre for giving their time and assistance. I want to extend my deepest thanks to my advisors and members of my committee – Stephen Johnson, Lawrence Switzky and David Taylor – for their guidance, critique and unwavering support over the years. I would also like to thank my external examiner, Jim Davis, for his thoughtful and generous comments. I would like to thank Rebecca Biason and Samiha Chowdhury at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, for their friendly and generous support, as well as the members of my kind and encouraging cohort. I would also like to thank my wonderful friends in Toronto – Catie Thompson, Johanna Lawrie, Alex Logue, Allison Graham, Allison Leadley, Matt Jones, Jenn Cole, Nikki Cesare Schotzko and Didier Morelli – as well as my union, CUPE 3902, and the good friends I made there – Emily Clare, Pamela Arancibia, Evan Miller and Ryan Culpepper among many others. Last but not least, I want to extend my sincerest thanks to my sisters, to my parents and to my husband, Will Fysh. I couldn’t have done it without you. v Contents Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v List of figures vi Introduction 1 1 “Enter Hawkshaw”: 29 Performance, Style and Authority in Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man 2 Line of Duty: Developing the Detective 83 3 Mediating Melodrama and Playing the Dandy: 148 Staging Sergeant Cuff Conclusion 207 Works Cited 216 vi Figures 1 “Startling arrest of a Thief at the Great Exhibition by a Detective 60 Disguised as a Statue.” Introduction On the evening of September 29, 1829, the first English police force was officially established in London, introducing to the streets a legion of “bobbies” and “peelers” – so-called after their chief instigator, Robert Peel. Thirteen years later, in the summer of 1842, the Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police submitted a memo, asking to officially establish the position of the “detective” within the force. Centralized policing was thus officially established in the capital. This was not only a procedural development but also a cultural one, for just as the method was established so was the man. In each case – that of the “bobby” and that of the “detective” – a character quickly established itself, an archetype grounded in and responsive to both the realities and the aspirations of the force at the time. Like a theatrical “line,” these archetypes were performatively conceived and understood. The developing archetype of the “bobby” helped to mitigate the shortcomings of the actual constables on the street, offering an idealized type to which recruits might aspire and in which the public could believe. From the very beginning this new force was conceptually intertwined with performative ideas and bound up within theatrical frameworks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the figures of the “bobby” and the “detective” were soon found on the stage itself, where such dramatic principles and performative inflection became more explicit. The “bobby” quickly became a figure of pantomime and burlesque while the detective featured in more “serious,” though nevertheless popular, theatre. The rich history of the stage bobby is deserving of its own dramatic history, attentive to the complex relationship between performance and police. In this dissertation, however, I will be focusing on the stage detective, who, despite his theatrical significance, has been surprisingly neglected in the field of theatre history. Though the genre of detective fiction has attracted notable scholarly attention – 1 2 including that of D.A. Miller (The Novel and the Police 1988) and Ian Ousby (Bloodhounds of Heaven 1976) – and the figure of Sherlock Holmes, the most famous of private detectives, has seen a renewal in popular attention, there is almost no scholarship on the figure of the professional stage detective. Aside from some work by David Mayer on the stage detective’s most well-known example, Hawkshaw of Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man (“‘The Ticket- of-Leave Man’ in Context” 1987), and some attention from Frank Rahill (World of Melodrama 1967) and Martin Meisel (Realizations 1983), the figure of the Victorian stage detective has almost entirely escaped scholarly notice. By pursuing original archival research as well as revisiting the stage detective’s appearance in the more canonical work of the period, I aim to reinstate the detective in the theatre history of the period. The detective character and function in drama is complex and multifaceted, often even contradictory. It can signal a drive to investigate and authenticate, to authorize and regulate – contributing to the smooth running of the civic justice system and the stability of the moral universe. It can also prefigure disruption and deceit, challenging the status quo and threatening to upset the very moral and civic order that the stage detective is also, at times, so keen to protect. This kind of behaviour is not new in theatre, but taps into a long history of authoritative figures adept at manipulating character and plot, contributing significantly to the functioning of the plot and in some cases even facilitating dramatic justice. Duke Vincentio of Measure for Measure – who abdicates his ducal responsibility to disguise himself as a friar in order that he may watch over the misdeeds of his citizens, before ultimately returning to restore civic and moral order – is, as Katharine Eisaman Maus explains, seen by some “as a version of God” (812). More than that, he is “a prince disguised as a friar [thus] bridg[ing], however unsteadily, the gap between knowledge and power” (Maus 813). Like the stage detective, who comes after, the Duke 3 represents an uneasy combination of information dubiously-gotten, with an authoritative position. Similarly, Mirabell, the handsome protagonist of William Congreve’s Way of the World, allows the other characters to tie themselves in knots before eventually revealing that he has in fact forestalled the greed of the ill-intended Fainall, having laid the groundwork sometime prior and allowing for wit to triumph and the rightful marriages to prevail. In both cases, much like their theatrical colleague yet to come, each man is a quasi-authorial figure, observing and manipulating the others through disguise and deception, in order to facilitate the desired social outcomes. In addition, the disruptive and transgressive tendencies of the detective recall the Harlequin figure of Commedia dell’arte, who winks at the social codes of others while playfully working toward his own goal.