Spectator Narratives: Print Representations of Performance and Nineteenth-Century Audiences by Lauren Eriks Cline A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Adela Pinch, Co-Chair Professor Valerie Traub, Co-Chair Assistant Professor Clare Croft Professor Daniel Hack Lauren Eriks Cline [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0001-9547-9146 © Lauren Eriks Cline For the teachers who came before me, prepared my way, and went before I was ready Jennifer Young David Klooster Patsy Yaeger Barbara Hodgdon My grandmother, Annette DeWolf And most of all, my mother, Leigh Ann DeWolf Eriks ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It’s difficult to express how much this project owes to the mentorship and support of my dissertation committee. If I tried to fabricate them from my wildest imagination, I could not have dreamed of co-chairs more exacting and generous than Valerie Traub and Adela Pinch. They read my work on its own terms and held it to its own highest standards. Daniel Hack and Clare Croft have continually called me into deeper and more complicated relationship with my fields and in doing so have helped me discover what I think to be most true in my work. While my dissertation could not have been half as strange, ambitious, or energizing to write without the guidance of this committee, I save my deepest gratitude for their friendship. The research for this project has been carried out with the financial assistance of the English and Women’s Studies Departments at the University of Michigan, the English Department Writing Program, the Rackham Graduate School, the Early Modern Conversions Project, and the Lilly Foundation. The intellectual community at University of Michigan has been even more crucial to sustaining my work. Patsy Yaeger taught my first graduate course and gave me my first performance research opportunity. Barbara Hodgdon helped orient me to the sometimes-bewildering world of theatre archives. Meg Sweeney helped me come into my own as a teacher and continues to inspire me with her own, fierce pedagogical example. E.J. Westlake offered me a number of invaluable opportunities to build community in the theatre world. The staff at the English Department and the English Department Writing Program – especially Jan Burgess, Senia Vasquez, and Denise Looker – not only helped me navigate the system but also went out of their way to sleuth out the best solutions. The officers at the Graduate Employee’s Organization have fought tirelessly to make our work life livable. And my fellow graduate students have been my greatest accomplices at every step. I give special thanks daily for Anoff Nicholas Cobblah, Sheila Coursey, Maia Farrar, Joseph M. Gamble, Amanda Greene, Kyu Han Lee, Anne Charlotte Mecklenberg, Laura Strout, and Phil Witte. iii Many generous, incisive readers have strengthened drafts of this project at various stages. In addition to my fellow students and faculty at Michigan, I would like especially to acknowledge the support of Susan Bennett, Gina Bloom, Roberta Barker, Amy Rodgers, Paul Yachnin, Kenneth Graham, Alysia Kolentsis, William N. West, James Siemon, and Diana Henderson for helping to shape my work and find ways of making it public. A very warm thanks, too, to my undergraduate mentors at Hope College – David Klooster, Rhoda Janzen Burton, Stephen “Doc” Hemenway, William Pannapacker, Peter Schakel, and Jack Ridl – who have continued to provide heartfelt encouragement, material support, and clear-sighted professional advice. Even more numerous are the generous friends who have buoyed my spirit through the completion of this project. My cohort in Lilly Fellowship kept me company in dark periods and joyous reunions. Emily Wegemer, Brianne Carpenter, Lauren Berka, and Annie Lewandoski have been and will be my constant companions along the way. The Clines have been a second family and an unfailing support network. My brothers, Martin and Matthew Eriks, are my first friends and my favorite of humans. My father, Mark Eriks, has given me the gift of unquestioning support, constant companionship, and a fierce proving ground for my analytical abilities. What I owe to Leigh Ann Eriks, my mother – who is not here to see this work finished but who could not possibly have been more confident that I could do all of this and more – would overflow any form I could fashion for my love, grief, and gratitude. Finally, for Kyle, whose quiet, everyday efforts to clear space for my work and nourish my life cannot be catalogued. Where you fly, I fly too. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii Abstract vii INTRODUCTION Setting the Scene 1 CHAPTERS 1. ACT I: Point of View Introduction: “Mere Lookers-on at Life” 20 Scene 1: Omniscience 25 Scene 2: Embodied, Partial Perspective 58 2. ACT II: Epistolarity Introduction: Performance History in Letters 85 Scene 1: Epistolarity and Theatrical Co-Presence 92 Scene 2: Extended Liveness 100 Scene 3: Precarious Liveness 125 3. ACT III: Serial Plotting Introduction: Serial Shakespeare 155 Scene 1: Contagion 162 Scene 2: Ghosting 194 v EPILOGUE After the Curtain 224 Works Cited 237 vi ABSTRACT Spectator Narratives: Print Representations of Performance and Nineteenth-Century Audiences examines print narratives about theatre events in letters, diaries, periodicals, and novels. Building an archive that recovers the productively loose relationship among genres in the nineteenth century, Spectator Narratives reads historical accounts of theatregoing in conversation with fictional representations of performance in contemporaneous novels. Such an inter-generic approach to theatre writing reveals, on the one hand, how Victorian actors and audience members use the techniques of nineteenth-century narrative to shape the meaning of performance events; and, on the other, how Victorian novelists incorporate scenes of theatregoing in their experiments with fictional form. This dissertation presents the spectator narrative in three acts, each oriented around a current question in theatre history and performance studies and a specific nineteenth-century narrative technique. Act I examines the intersection between scenes of spectatorship and narrative point of view. In close readings of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, and theatre writing from Henry Crabb Robinson, Clement Scott, Fanny Kemble, Marie Bancroft, and Lady Maud Tree, Act I analyzes how spectator-narrators wield both the depersonalized authority of Victorian omniscience and a more embodied, partial perspective marked by the boundaries of gender, class, and disability. Act II moves from a narrator’s point of view to a text’s narrative mode, in order to ask what epistolarity reveals about the spatial and temporal presence of live performance. Two case studies examine the uses of “epistolary liveness” –Fanny Burney’s Evelina and Early Journals and Letters in the late- eighteenth century and Wilkie Collins’s No Name and Fanny Kemble’s Record of a Girlhood in the mid-nineteenth century – with a specific focus on how the presence and precarity of epistolary narrative highlight the vulnerability of feminine performance. Act III steps back from scenes of performance to consider narrative structures. Focusing on the intersection between performance histories and serial plotting, this Act analyzes both how novels like George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Great Expectations, and Wilkie Collins’s vii The Moonstone use scenes of performance to stage pivotal moments of connection and return and also on how theatre reviews and essays from Sir Theodore Martin, Henry Morley, George Henry Lewes, and Clement Scott draw on the dynamics of narrative seriality to plot changes in performance over time. This final act undertakes, in particular, a revision of Shakespeare performance history. While Victorian Shakespeare is often narrated as a story of inherited traditions and Darwinian evolution, Act III presents a more serial Shakespeare by reading across spectator narratives that use the plotting devices of contagion and ghosting. By offering comparative analyses that draw together insights from performance theory, narrative theory, reception theory, and Shakespeare performance studies, Spectator Narratives offers not only new insights into the particular relationship between Victorian theatre and the Victorian novel, but also a useful method for performance scholars working in other historical periods. As it shifts from a focus on the reading practices of audiences to an examination of audience tactics for writing performance narratives, Spectator Narratives opens up new avenues of research for scholars interested in historical audiences and reception studies. viii INTRODUCTION Setting the Scene For Victorian audiences, crafting stories about theatrical events played a key role in the communal experience of spectatorship. By the early 1900s, better technologies for dimming auditorium lighting would combine with the dramatic conventions of fourth-wall realism to create a new expectation of audience silence during performance.1 But before the rise modernist theatre and its attendant etiquettes, the pits and galleries of Victorian theatres were filled with whispered exchanges about the last time someone had seen Sarah Siddons perform or the first time someone else had seen a production of The Lady of Lyons. The sociability of the audience was partially