NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Ballad Opera, Imitation, and The
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NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Ballad Opera, Imitation, and the Formation of Genre A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of English By Douglas Franklin O’Keefe EVANSTON, ILLINOIS June 2007 2 © Copyright by Douglas Franklin O’Keefe 2007 All Rights Reserved 3 ABSTRACT Ballad Opera, Imitation, and the Formation of Genre Douglas Franklin O’Keefe The enormous popularity of The Beggar’s Opera gave rise to a remarkable series of plays known as ballad opera, a form that dominated the eighteenth-century London stage during the 1730s, a crucial decade in the development of English theatre. Although virtually every major playwright of the period, including Colley Cibber, Henry Fielding and George Lillo, experimented with the form, ballad operas have been dismissed as artless and insignificant imitations. Arguing that the failure to understand these plays stems from an inability to conceptualize them as a coherent dramatic form, I propose a theory of genre that regards literary categories not as logical taxonomies but as social institutions that constitute texts. I also develop a method for exploring the process of literary imitation, showing how numerous acts of varying an exemplar text combine to create a stable literary form. Drawing on evidence from not only the plays themselves but also eighteenth-century periodicals, dedications, letters, and advertisements, I demonstrate how ballad opera developed into a genre unified by an insistent effort to reveal of the arbitrariness of legal and cultural norms. Unified in its insistence that money is the sole arbiter of virtue, ballad opera explored corruption if every phase of public life, and gleefully championed insincerity, acquisition, and self-promotion as the only logical response to the emerging marketplace economy. Additionally, as the dominant theatrical genre of its time, ballad opera began to change the social function of theatre itself, enticing mass audiences to the patent houses, encouraging dramatic innovation, and using the stage for political protest. These transformations were not universally tolerated: ballad opera was the most frequently censored dramatic form and both the primary cause and main victim of the restrictive Licensing Act—legislation that brought an end to both ballad opera and theatrical experimentation in general. This dissertation therefore resolves a paradox that has troubled previous critics —namely, why such seemingly innocuous plays were the subject of so much government scrutiny. Once one recognizes the genre’s influence on reception, ballad operas no longer can be dismissed as frivolous entertainments; they demand attention as social critiques of considerable power and ingenuity. 4 Ballad Opera, Imitation, and the Formation of Genre Table of Contents Chapter One: Pimps and Parsons: the Genre of Ballad Opera 5 Chapter Two: Literary Imitation and the Development of Ballad Opera 56 Chapter Three: The Court of Nonsense: Ballad Opera Rehearsal Plays and 124 the Staging of Wit and Folly Chapter Four: Political Cynicism and Unrestrained Indulgence on the Page 178 and on the Stage Chapter Five: Epilogue 242 Endnotes 259 Bibliography 262 Appendix One: Ballad Opera Genre-Names: Title Page Designations 276 5 Chapter One: Pimps and Parsons: the Genre of Ballad Opera After the third rehearsal of The Restauration of Charles II , or the Life and Death of Oliver Cromwell (1732), a messenger arrived at the New Theatre in the Haymarket and announced that the play must not be acted, for it had been decided that it had a treasonous title, and that the historical events portrayed were too recent to allow representation on the stage. The play was never again mounted for production, but its author, Walter Aston, managed to have it published, complete with a defensive Prologue, a peevish and insolent dedication to Walpole, and a rather boldly condemnatory epigraph from Hamlet: “Let the gaul’d jade Wince, our withers are unwrung." Although a few scholars have mentioned this remarkable story, no one has managed to explain why the play was subjected to such severe treatment in the early 1730's, a period relatively tolerant of theatrical performances. In fact, modern critics seem to agree that the only objectionable thing about Aston’s play is its incompetence; they hold it to be anywhere from ridiculous, if moderately amusing, to “inept and harmless" (Hume, Fielding , 82). To account for the play’s suppression, these critics have offered intuitively plausible but somewhat vague explanations, such as “Cromwell might be associated with Walpole” (Gagey, 205), or “tales of restoring Stuart kings to their rightful thrones were not popular with Georgian governments” (Loftis, 104), or “the play could be suspected of having Jacobite sympathies" (Hume, Fielding , 82). But eighteenth-century newspapers tell a different story, one that indicates both that the play itself was deliberately rebellious and that the authorities who censored it were far more outraged than these explanations suggest. A puff in the Daily Journal asserted that the new ballad opera was “much approv’d of by several Persons of Distinction. and all allow it contains much Satire” 6 (April 26, 1732). The very next day, the Daily Post carried an item in which Aston proclaimed he had “not any Manner of Concern in the said Theatre in the Hay-market,” a disavowal so complete and disingenuous that it appears coerced (April 27, 1732). Finally, in an article from Read’s Weekly Journal that looks like a reluctant response to a demand for an explanation, several of “his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace” claimed that the work was “too scurrilous to be represented on any stage,” and that it “carried with it such an evil tendency” that the only sensible response was to issue out warrants for taking up all the players (May 20, 1732). Although Aston's play is a particularly spectacular example, The Restauration of Charles II is only one of many ballad operas suppressed and condemned in the eighteenth-century that look unobjectionable to critics today. Polly, for example, was deemed by Lord Hervey to be more direct and more abusive than the Beggar’s Opera , but Hervey’s editor calls it “very stupid and equally inoffensive” (Croker, 26), a view that has now become commonplace. Similarly, many critics find the notorious controversy created by Fielding’s Grub Street Opera out of proportion with the play’s “light hearted banter” (Brown, 32). Furthermore, the vast majority of plays written during the 1730's that failed to reach the stage, either because of governmental intervention or managerial caution, were ballad operas, and in fact, eighteenth-century critics did not limit their objections to particular plays. Instead, they considered the form itself unconscionable; all ballad operas contributed to public degeneracy and political instability, an opinion directly at odds with the current critical view that the form, though occasionally satirical, was “genial and rather innocuous” (Gagey, 10). Far from a curious anomaly, our failure to discern anything potentially offensive in Aston’s play begins to look like a minor symptom of a more widespread critical blindness. 7 My contention here will be that our failure to understand these plays is caused by our inability to conceptualize ballad opera correctly as a genre. However diverse recent theorists of genre may be, they do agree that genre functions as an interpretative guide, that the meaning we assign to an utterance is dependent on the generic lens through which we view it. "All understanding of verbal meaning," declares E. D. Hirsch, is "necessarily genre-bound," and he continues by delineating a system by which readers can gain access to the proper generic framework for each text (76). Similarly, Alistair Fowler has coined the term "generic competence" to designate the learning process involved in understanding various literary types (44). For both critics, insufficient generic understanding can result in deeply flawed interpretations, and it appears at first that a lack of generic competence accounts for our misconception of The Restauration of Charles II . However, ballad opera suffers further because most critics refuse to grant it the status of genre at all. Faced with what appears to be a dazzlingly diverse and even contradictory collection of plays, these critics argue that because "very different sorts of plays employed the technique that Gay had pioneered," ballad opera should not be considered a unified phenomenon (Hume, Fielding ,106). Generic competence is thus regarded as irrelevant to ballad opera, because no one can specify a set of features that constitutes the form's generic norms. Critics thus divide ballad operas into discrete subgroups that do appear consistent, such as pastoral operas, low-life operas, historical operas, and even nautical operas, and the plays are then interpreted and evaluated on the basis of their accordance to these generic standards. More often than not, they end up appearing hopelessly inept, products of authors incapable of grasping the requirements of the sub-genres 8 they employed. The idea that ballad opera as a whole might have different prerequisites has not been considered a serious option. However, a surfeit of eighteenth-century references to the form, in prologues to plays, periodicals, and personal communications, all make pronouncements regarding the form’s methods, purposes, and effects; so perhaps it is our notions of generic unity that require adjustment. In what follows, therefore, I will first articulate a view of genre somewhat different from that of traditional theorists, one that regards generic coherence as a historical structure rather than a logical taxonomy. I will then introduce what I see as the general contours of ballad opera, and conclude by returning to Aston's play, demonstrating how, when looked at from a better-informed perspective, it appears very objectionable indeed. I. Genre as Labeling At first, my call to historicize genre theory might seem ridiculously belated.