Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2008 The alg lant six hundred: performing the Light Brigade into a heroic icon Elizabeth Carrick Cawns Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Cawns, Elizabeth Carrick, "The alg lant six hundred: performing the Light Brigade into a heroic icon" (2008). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 593. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/593 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. THE GALLANT SIX HUNDRED: PERFORMING THE LIGHT BRIGADE INTO A HEROIC ICON A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Theatre by Elizabeth Carrick Cawns B.A., Webster University, 1990 M.Div., Yale University, 1998 S.T.M., Yale University, 1999 May 2008 © 2008 Elizabeth Carrick Cawns All Rights Reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The process of a dissertation truly is a journey that has many guides along the way. I wish to acknowledge those I can remember and beg apologies from those I could not. Reta Madsen, Keith Welsh and Dennis Huston for their support while I was an undergraduate and their continued interest in my work. All the theatre and opera companies I worked for, all the directors and staff who taught me that doing theatre is not only the hardest job there is, it is the most rewarding. My two triumvirates of mentors at Yale: Peter Hawkins, Richard Ward and Leander Keck at the Divinity School, who convinced me that theatre was in my blood and I might as well give in and enjoy it, and who went on to vigorously support my addiction; and Elinor Fuchs, Jim Leverett and Gordon Rogoff at the School of Drama, who were kind enough to not only take in but encourage a stray Divinity student. My friends from Divinity school, who kept me on prayer lists all over the world for quite a few years; and my friends and clergy at St. James Baton Rouge who did the same. My friends at Covington & Burling who keep asking when I’ll be back in New York (soon, I promise!). Johanna Sandrock, who introduced me to Oliver. The team members of Our Lady of the Lake Hospital corporate office, who in the final days of my writing and defense, gave understanding and support. Barry Kyle, who reminded me why I love Shakespeare. Willie Major and Albert Watanabe, who convinced me that Greek is the perfect language. My departmental chair, Michael Tick, whose support I greatly value, and who occasionally gave me the swift kick necessary to keep going. Malcolm Richardson and Kay Heath, who offered wonderful diversions in the form of English actors. Steve and Lisa Young, who did follow up legwork in England when I could not. My wonderful committee: Dan Novak, Michelle Zerba, Femi Euba, and Les Wade, who were unfailingly supportive, challenging and interested. My first chair, Jennifer Jones Cavanaugh, for convincing me this would make a good subject; and my final chair, who saw me through all the ups and downs – I iii owe more than I can say to Leigh Clemons. John Gedrick, sine qua non. My dearest companions and colleagues on the journey: Ashleigh Dowden and Pete Richardson. Without these two amazing women this document would not exist. And finally my family, whose conviction that I could and would write this never failed: Al and Sheila Cawns and Jennifer Clark. To them I owe the most of all. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT........................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER 1....................................................................................................................1 2..................................................................................................................21 3..................................................................................................................58 4................................................................................................................102 5................................................................................................................138 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................146 APPENDIX A. “THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE” ................................149 B. PERMISSIONS..................................................................................151 VITA ..................................................................................................................154 v ABSTRACT History is not so much what actually happened as how we have received and disseminated what happened. This reception and dissemination take place through a variety of media, many of which are not the purview of the traditional historian. It is in the trifles of daily life that we find the patterns of cultural norms – the ethos of the society that is as unnoticed by that society as the air it breathes. Society makes choices that affect the future based on what has been disseminated, rather than on the original event. This is especially true of such military disasters as the charge of the Light Brigade at the battle of Balaclava in the Crimea on October 25, 1854. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how the event of the charge of the Light Brigade was shaped over time until it became lodged in the British cultural ethos as an icon of heroic and national identity. The dissertation focuses on various types of dissemination: public records, newspaper articles, published personal journals, paintings and lithographs, music, and theatrical entertainments. The written document is composed of five chapters: Chapter One relates the event, the methodology and the importance of the study; Chapter Two examines the accounts of the Charge published immediately following the event, along with the public record of the Parliamentary investigation into the Charge; Chapter Three focuses on the second generation of dissemination through art and music; Chapter Four discusses the representations of the charge of the Light Brigade on the stage, especially through the eyes of one man who rode in the charge and later became an actor, including its satirization by George Bernard Shaw in Arms and the Man; and Chapter Five draws conclusions concerning the perpetuation of the icon of the Light Brigade into this century. A Bibliography and two Appendices will be included providing the text of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and permissions for use of images within the dissertation. vi CHAPTER 1 “I began with a desire to speak with the dead.” (Greenblatt) I have been haunted by these words of Stephen Greenblatt’s ever since I first read them. An historian is, after all, primarily a medium at an academic séance, in which the historian seeks some communication across the barrier of time with the past. As with any séance, the messages are cryptic, incomplete, and subject to interpretation on the part of the recipients. Often those who surround the medium hear what they want to hear; their belief in a particular way of life, or thought, or cultural identity is confirmed rather than confronted. This confirmation is particularly true in interpreting an historic event that has taken on a life of its own and continued well beyond the actual event itself. Historians have been compared to detectives, people who follow clues that lead ultimately to the “truth” regarding an event. It is better to consider them archaeologists, who attempt to make meaning out of the few fragments that remain as artifacts. The dead with whom I desired to speak were cavalrymen of the mid-nineteenth century: those who rode and survived or died in the famous charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War in 1854. In some sense I succeeded: some of the dead at least spoke to me, through memoirs and journals and recorded interviews that had been preserved in libraries. But I discovered in my journey that these were not the same dead as the ones I went looking for. My dead were from poetry, novels, reproductions of paintings; they were all young, they were all brave, and they were all heroic. The charge itself was presented as a tragic romance surrounded by a nimbus of glory and gallantry. Instead, the dead that I found were confused, defensive, and more than a little suspect in their constant glorification of an event that I discovered was far from romantic, and clouded by actions that were far from heroic or gallant. Why was my Light Brigade so far from the actuality? And how on earth did my Light Brigade come into being? 1 Thus was this project born: I set out to discover the process by which the actual events of the battle of Balaclava, with very human participants, became “the Charge of the Light Brigade,” complete with its own mythic heroes and iconography. The investigation into this specific process is, as well, an investigation into how particular events are