DEPARTAMENT DE FILOLOGIA ANGLESA I ALEMANYA CLASSICAL MYTHS ON THE VICTORIAN POPULAR STAGE: THE FIGURE OF CASSANDRA. LAURA MONRÓS GASPAR UNIVERSITAT DE VALÈNCIA Servei de Publicacions 2009 Aquesta Tesi Doctoral va ser presentada a València el dia 7 de setembre de 2009 davant un tribunal format per: - Dr. Francesco De Martino - Dr. Jesús Tronch Pérez - Dra. Fiona Macintosh - Dr. Vicent Montalt i Resurrecció - Dr. Ignacio Ramos Gay Va ser dirigida per: Dr. Miguel Teruel Pozas Dra. Carmen Morenilla Talens ©Copyright: Servei de Publicacions Laura Monrós Gaspar Dipòsit legal: V-952-2011 I.S.B.N.: 978-84-370-7719-2 Edita: Universitat de València Servei de Publicacions C/ Arts Gràfiques, 13 baix 46010 València Spain Telèfon:(0034)963864115 Vniversitat de València Facultat de Filologia, Traducció i Comunicació Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya CLASSICAL MYTHS ON THE VICTORIAN POPULAR STAGE: THE FIGURE OF CASSANDRA TESIS DOCTORAL Presentada por: Laura Monrós Gaspar Dirigida por: Dra. Da. Carmen Morenilla Talens Dr. D. Miguel Teruel Pozas VALENCIA 2009 To my parents and to Juan, for their loving support and understanding TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 9 INTRODUCTION 11 Structure and Objectives 11 Theoretical Framework and Methodology 17 CHAPTER 1. CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY AND THE EVOLUTION OF BURLESQUE 23 1.1. What is Burlesque? 23 1.2. Pre-Nineteenth-Century Burlesques. An Overview 29 1.3. Nineteenth-Century Classical Burlesque 39 1.3.1. The Masters of Nineteenth-Century Classical Burlesque 45 Conclusions 72 CHAPTER 2. WOMEN AND CASSANDRA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 75 2.1. Cassandra and the Classics in Translation: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Homer’s Iliad 75 2.1.1. Knowledge, Witchcraft and Fortune-telling: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 77 2.1.2. Images of the Voice: Cassandra in Homer’s Iliad 98 2.1.3. Other Sources 106 2.2. Nineteenth-Century Cassandra 111 2.2.1. Gestures, Movements and Attitudes 113 2.2.2. Prophets, Gipsies and Fortune-Tellers 136 Conclusions 158 7 Laura Monrós Gaspar CHAPTER 3. COMIC CASSANDRA AND VICTORIAN BURLESQUE 161 3.1. Popular Comic precedents: Street Fairs and French Theatre 162 3.1.1. Street Fairs 162 3.1.2. Cassandra-Columbine in a French Argos 170 3.2. Equestrian Burlesques and the Siege of Troy 175 3.3. Cassandra and the Heyday of Burlesque: Robert Reece’s Agamemnon and Cassandra or the Prophet and Loss of Troy (1868) 198 3.3.1. Robert Reece and Burlesque 199 3.3.2 Agamemnon and Cassandra or the Prophet and Loss of Troy (1868) 219 The Liverpool Scene 219 Textual Sources: An ‘Intertextual Extravaganza’ 231 Cassandra: a Witch, a Fortune-Teller and a New Woman 240 Conclusions 265 CONCLUSIONS: PERFORMING METAPHORS OF CASSANDRA 267 Staging Female Echoes 268 Bodies in Marble and Entombed Experiences 289 Epilogue 307 APPENDIX 309 REFERENCES 325 8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of my supervisors Dr. Carmen Morenilla and Dr. Miguel Teruel who have assisted me in numerous ways both academically and personally. I should also like to thank all the members at the GRATUV from whom I have learnt much about the reception of the classics. I am also indebted to all the members of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford for the significant advances in my research during my stay as an associate of the group between June and December 2007. Special thanks are due to the caring support and inspiring comments of Dr. Fiona Macintosh. I am grateful to the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia for awarding me a substantial FPI research grant from 2004-2008 towards the writing of this thesis. I am also indebted to the Departament de Filología Clàssica and the Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya at the Universitat de València and the Departament de Filologia Anglesa at Universitat d’Alacant for their support during the carrying out of this project. I should like to thank to the curators, librarians and staff who unfailingly helped me with the rich resources at the British Library at St. Pancras and Colindale, the Senate House Library of the University of 9 Laura Monrós Gaspar London, The Bodleian, Sackler and Taylorian libraries in the University of Oxford, the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford, the Theatre Museum (London), the Hallward library at the University of Nottingham and the Joan Reglà library at the Universitat de València. My thanks also go to many individuals who have helped me to proceed with my work. Dr. Carmen Morenilla, Dr. Francesco De Martino and Prof. Lorna Hardwick for publishing material related to my research and Dr. Isobel Hurst for her insightful comments. Prof. Gordon McMullan at King’s College London, Mr. Ronan Fitzsimons at the University of Nottingham Trent and Prof. Alan Sommerstein at the University of Nottingham for their assistance during my research stays in England between 2005 and 2006. Prof. Oliver Taplin, Prof. Stephen Harrison and Dr. Sos Eltis at the University of Oxford for allowing me to attend their stimulating seminars on reception and Victorian theatre. Dr. Eleftheria Ioannidou for her kind support with references and unforgettable friendship. Mike and Gina Hardinge, who meticulously corrected my English and gave constant encouragement. Juan Pérez Moreno for his computing expertise and assistance, Laura Pérez Moreno for her help in digitalizing images, Dr. Vicente Bañuls, Dr. Carmen Manuel and Dr. Jesús Tronch for their academic advice, and my fellow Ph.D. student Roberto Revert for his honest support and comradeship. 10 INTRODUCTION STRUCTURE AND OBJECTIVES The idea for the present thesis originated with a Masters Degree dissertation on the reception of the figure of Echo in William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett and Marlene Nourbese Philip. Parallelisms between the silenced voice of Echo and Cassandra directed my doctoral research towards the analysis of the reception of the tragic heroine in a period of British history crucial for the social development of women: the nineteenth century. Research on Victorian reworkings of Cassandra unveiled the reliance of popular entertainment on classical mythology and a theatrical genre which had been silenced by the critics well up to the middle years of the nineteenth century: classical burlesque. Studies on Victorian burlesque have been published since the late years of the nineteenth century. Still, from Fitzgerald (1870) and Adams (1891), burlesque entered into a critical void in the first half of the twentieth century due to the passionate interest awakened by major playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw, for example. It was not until 1952 with Clinton- Baddeley’s approach to burlesque that the interest of the critics in the genre was revived, with Victorian popular theatre becoming an emerging field of 11 Laura Monrós Gaspar research within English Studies during the 1990s. Numerous international conferences on nineteenth-century theatre have been recently organized in England and there is an increasing amount of published material on particular authors, theatres and the economics of nineteenth-century theatre.1 None of the scholarly works consulted for this thesis, however, has focused on the semiotics of burlesque and its links with contemporary society. At all times and in every genre, Greek and Roman mythology has been one of the most fruitful sources for the arts in the West. Recent studies from various disciplines have converged in the last decade in new trends in the study of the transmission, reception and impact of classical mythology in the literary tradition of the English-speaking world. As contended by Edith Hall, Schechner’s 1968 production of Dionysus in 69 inaugurated a profound reawakening of Greek tragedy which, still today, is an extremely fertile field in the literary production of modern authors.2 Hand in hand with such a revival, the gradual collaboration between writers and academia has resulted in the foundation of numerous international research groups and archives for the compilation and study of such a broad corpus.3 Some 1 For conferences, see for example, ‘Victorian Performances’ organized by the British Association for Victorian Studies in 2001 at the University of Lancaster; the ‘Victorian Theatre and the Visual Arts’ conference at the University of Lancaster in 2006 and the ‘Victorian Dramas’ conference held at the University of Worcester in 2007. For published material see Stedman (2000), Garlick (2003) and McCormick (2004). 2 Hall (2004), 1. 3 E.g: GRATUV, founded at the Universitat de València in 1987 by Dr. Carmen Morenilla; APGRD, founded at the University of Oxford by Prof. Oliver Taplin and Prof. Edith Hall in 1996; the Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English from c.1970 to the Present project directed by Prof. Lorna Hardwick at The Open University; the Classical Reception 12 Introduction thought-provoking recent works on modern receptions of Greek and Roman mythology in Britain are John Hollander’s The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion from Milton and After (1981), Yopi Prins’ Victorian Sappho (1999), and the book edited by Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Edith Hall and Oliver Taplin Agamemnon in Performance: 458 BC to AD 2004 (2005). From Lemprière to Sacks, the reference works and dictionaries on classical mythology and the ancient world consulted for this thesis coincide in spotlighting two episodes from the Cassandra myth: her prophetic visions and her rape by Ajax the Lesser at the temple of Athena.4 Cassandra’s powers of divination have traditionally