"The Stage's Glory": John Rich (1692–1761)

By Terry Jenkins, Robert D. Hume, Judith Milhous and 15 more

John Rich (1692-1761) was a profoundly influential figure of the eighteenth-century London stage. As producer, manager, and performer, he transformed the urban entertainment market, creating genres and promotional methods still with us today. This volume gives the first comprehensive overview of Rich’s multifaceted career, appreciation of which has suffered from his performing identity as Lun, London’s most celebrated Harlequin. Far from the lightweight buffoon that this stereotype has suggested, Rich—the first producer of The Beggar’s Opera, the founder of Covent Garden, the dauntless backer of Handel, and the promoter of the principal dancers from the Parisian opera—is revealed as an agent of changes much more enduring than those of his younger contemporary, David Garrick. Contributions by leading scholars from a range of disciplines—theatre, dance, music, art, and cultural history—provide detailed analyses of Rich’s productions and representations. These findings complement Robert D. Hume’s lead article, a study that radically alters our perception of Rich.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: May 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781644531259

Book preview

Introduction

Berta Joncus and Jeremy Barlow

THE WORD TRANSFORMATION PERHAPS BEST characterizes the career and legacy of John Rich, arguably the most influential figure of the eighteenth-century London stage. Rich transformed his father’s theatre from a limping enterprise into a cash cow; he irrevocably changed the works and nature of the London stage’s staple repertory; he shaped theatrical fashion with French and Italian imports; he turned eighteenth-century scenography into a forum for lavish experiments; he helped turn around Handel’s waning fortunes. Of course, Rich also staged transformation as both producer and performer: audiences thronged to see the metamorphoses in his pantomimes and his Harlequin roles under the name of Lun. A pioneering entrepreneur who founded Covent Garden, Rich was a midwife at the births of English pantomime, of commercially driven musical theatre, and of the century’s revival of Shakespeare. Britain’s modern theatrical world strongly bears his mark.

Yet Rich has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. While David Garrick has been acclaimed the dominant figure of eighteenth-century theatre, Rich has typically been ignored and sometimes treated with careless disdain. This volume aims not only to fill some of the gaping holes in our knowledge of Rich, but also to identify why scholars have both downplayed and misapprehended his achievements. Misunderstanding about Rich has three main sources: lack of evidence, contemporary prejudice, and the difficulty of capturing the diversity of Rich’s interests. All three points relate to Rich’s public reception and seeming private persona.

Rich’s genius as Harlequin was widely recognized — performers sought out his training and writers praised his performances — yet precisely what he did is lost to us. He developed no notation for his movements, never described his art, and left virtually no objective iconographic trace of his public appearances. As Harlequin, his artistry was one of motion, in which his body became the entertainment’s shifting focus. His movements fused the drive of stage action, the elegance of la belle danse, the grotesqueness of lazzi, the expressiveness of theatrical gesture, and the magic of scene change. Rich focused on how physical motion might transcend an actor’s voice in its eloquence, and this informed his own performances and the other forms of physical theatre that he developed. His lack of interest in documenting himself contrasts starkly with Garrick, who, in reconstructing Shakespeare, masterfully constructed his own legacy as well. Rich embraced transience as well as transformation, defying documentation and categorization alike. That his innovations resist document-based reconstructions should not blind us to their significance.

Elusiveness characterized his private personality as well. What emerges from this volume is Rich’s seeming refusal to be drawn out from behind his Harlequin mask. While skilfully managing his theatres, cultivating new genres, and advancing the artists in whom he believed, Rich apparently shied away from public statement or private testimony, even under provocation. He faced enormous criticism. He apparently never actively contested the accusations — on stage, page, and in pictures — that he debased the London stage with pantomimes and, later, The Beggar’s Opera. He made no attempt to produce, Garrick-style, a public persona for his audiences, though the manufacture of celebrities was clearly a new growth industry. His seemingly perverse silence sprang perhaps from his security: as manager and as performer he had no rivals, and hence no need to court opinion. What Rich could not foresee was how contemporary writers would batten onto interested criticism to construct stories around him, which later scholars would accept as evidence.

To recover Rich we must dig deep, identifying new sources, sensitively rereading old ones, and interrogating received notions. The range of Rich’s contributions demands a synoptic view, through which we can form an understanding of how practices in theatre, dance, music, stagecraft, and the visual arts combined to entrance audiences. The resulting collection reaps the benefits of having facilitated exchanges between specialists whose diversity of disciplines captures Rich’s heterodox achievements. Due to constraints of space, time, and budget, many valuable findings could not be included in the volume. A complementary set of articles is therefore available on the conference Web site, www.johnrich2008.com. We encourage readers to consider The Stage’s Glory in tandem with the Web site, where audio and video examples are available to further elucidate Rich’s peculiarly performance-dependent legacy.

To capture in print Rich’s legacy, the articles in this collection are grouped under the areas to which he contributed significantly: management, dance, music, drama, and iconography. The volume opens with the first detailed study of Rich’s reputation and business practices, John Rich as Manager and Entrepeneur, by Robert D. Hume. Rebutting the erroneous yet still current view that Rich was an illiterate and exploitative manager, Hume shows that the opposite was true. Rich was a gifted and well-read businessman who against all odds reversed the faltering fortunes of his company and was often generous. Because Rich was willing to experiment — to follow his own tastes, to support his personnel, and to be tough when needed — he not only amassed a personal fortune but also created an enterprise that fetched a staggering sum when sold. Rich’s social contacts and participation in horse racing indicate that he was accepted in the highest circles, despite any personal idiosyncrasies noted by theatrical contemporaries. Through tracing Rich’s commercial strategies — the entertainments that he selected, the genres that he invested in, the cartels that he arranged — Hume fundamentally alters our perception of Rich and provides a basis for the specialist studies that follow.

Rich’s famous account book for Lincoln’s Inn Fields, of 1724–25 (Egerton 2265), is the basis of Judith Milhous’s appraisal of Rich’s management. Milhous reassesses the account book to correct earlier errors and misevaluations. She points out two formerly unrecognized patterns: that Rich continued to struggle even after the success of The Necromancer during the 1723–24 season — he had to default on paying actors who consequently threatened not to appear — and that, when more prosperous, Rich advanced salaries to his personnel, favoring in particular the principal player Lacy Ryan, who emerges as Rich’s right-hand man. David Hunter discusses his discovery of the diaries of John Stede, the prompter at Rich’s theatres. Stede often recorded personal rather than business information, and his diaries give rare insight not only into theatrical business such as required rehearsal time but also into the prompter’s peer group and domestic routines. Hunter transcribes some key evidence, such as the rehearsal schedule for The Beggar’s Opera, and invites other scholars to use this newly found source. In John Rich, Theatrical Regulation, and the Dilemma of the Commercial Stage, Matthew Kinservik corrects misapprehensions concerning theatrical competition. According to his evidence, the modern conviction that competition improved quality in theatrical productions contradicts eighteenth-century views and theatrical records. Period critics held that competition vitiated theatrical taste because deregulation blocked an enlightened control of entertainment. If one accepts the eighteenth-century view that high-quality theatre equalled mainpiece tragedy, records show that competition did militate against such productions; but yardsticks of quality are, as Kinservik warns, always products of their time.

Part II of the volume focuses on dances and dancers identified closely with Rich. Moira Goff reveals the extent to which Rich uniquely relied on dance to attract audiences. Host to and employer of Parisian dancers — particularly Marie Sallé and her brother Francis — whom Goff identifies, Rich mined the legacy of la belle danse and character dances, featuring existing choreographies in his pantomimes and entr’actes. Lully’s operas provided a key source for dance sequences as did specific dance types, and Goff outlines the notated sources — by Pecour among others — that were probably featured in Rich’s productions. By contrast, Linda Tomko focuses exclusively on Harlequin choreographies. Tomko shows, through a close reading of notation by Feuillet, that dancers drew on a stock of gestures and steps to characterize Harlequin. While warning against a prescriptive interpretation, she brings to life representative forms that Rich was likely to have used; she discusses also the means by which movement created a system of signs shared by dancers and audience members alike. The focus of Jennifer Thorp’s article is Rich’s leading dancer François Nivelon. Nivelon’s history sheds light on The Necromancer — in which he featured — and on Rich’s managerial methods during the troubled 1724–25 season. Based on playbook descriptions, Thorp reimagines Nivelon’s scenes that incorporated French choreographies and mimic action. By means of a court case between Nivelon and Rich, she explores the contractual obligations between manager and dancer, and Rich’s means of securing a skilled player while having to economize on salaries.

Besides dance, Rich robustly supported opera and musical theatre. In his only published writing on theatre (see Appendix 1), Rich outlines his recommendations for opera in English. Part III dedicates four essays to the ways in which he pursued this goal: by supporting Handel, by featuring serious Parts in his pantomimes, by promoting The Beggar’s Opera, and by fostering new ballad operas. Donald Burrows analyzes the importance of Handel’s Ariodante and Rich’s role in helping to realize this work. Locked out of the King’s Theatre by his former employers, who had formed a rival company, Handel rented Covent Garden for his 1734–35 opera season and featured Rich’s most prominent dancer, Marie Sallé, in Ariodante, a production intended to overcome by musical means the rival company and its featured castrato Farinelli. Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson demonstrate how Rich believed that the serious (i.e., sung) parts of pantomimes could take their place alongside Handel’s operas in their aesthetic aspirations. Through their sophistication and enduring popularity, the airs of Serious Parts helped establish the reputations of leading singers, notably John Laguerre and Richard Leveridge. By contrast, Jeremy Barlow shows how the popularity of the spectacular hit The Beggar’s Opera was less durable than has been assumed. Although Rich persistently revitalized the work, public interest quickly flagged. Only in 1759, by hitting on the right choice of singers for Polly and Macheath, did the work again rank first among audiences. Following The Beggar’s Opera, Rich mounted a series of ballad operas whose variety outstripped those from competing houses. He seemingly had the advantage at first, having at his disposal the father of the genre, John Gay, and its most popular singer, Lavinia Fenton. Despite this, only one other opera mounted by Rich, Flora, became a staple, and in their article Berta Joncus and Vanessa Rogers demonstrate how the genre’s home shifted from Rich’s theatres to rival venues.

As manager, Rich also pioneered new trends in drama. Although Garrick is commonly awarded the palm as the eighteenth-century reviver of Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie shows that Rich preceded Garrick in spearheading fresh productions. He supported the Shakespeare Ladies’ Club, a society that during the 1737–38 season stimulated productions of, and interest in, lesser-known Shakespearean works. Ritchie corrects the view, promulgated during this period, that the Club’s interests caused a decline in pantomime productions; the decline was due instead to the popularity of a burlesque opera, The Dragon of Wantley. Rich contributed also to the growing industry in star production by supporting Peg Woffington. In her article, Felicity Nussbaum unravels the interweaving of gender with patriotic discourses in Woffington’s representations. A famous beauty, Woffington commanded the male gaze by cross-dressing in travesty roles; tropes about the gender differences that she embodied were then conscripted in epilogues to represent the Irish Catholic Woffington as a patriot.

The volume’s final section turns to scenic devices and images linked to Rich. Ana Martínez takes us through a virtual tour of Covent Garden’s scenery and properties listed in the theatre’s 1744 inventory. In the inventory, properties are listed by location, and in describing sample items, Martínez draws on architectural plans to suggest possible uses for these items. Analyzing the scenography of The Necromancer specifically, Al Coppola outlines the means by which its extravagant effects exploited — and were read through — common notions about Newtonian science. Effects like the necromancer’s ability to attract physical objects drew on recently discovered scientific principles that were popularized elsewhere in public lectures and demonized by contemporaries like Daniel Defoe. The iconographic trace of Rich’s most celebrated production, The Beggar’s Opera, is the subject of Robin Simon’s article. A close reading of William Hogarth’s series of paintings of a scene from the show illuminates stage practices such as gesture. Simon also questions one painting’s earlier attribution to Hogarth. The volume concludes with a summary of contemporary illustrations of or about Rich, several of which are housed in the Garrick Club, London. The club’s librarian Marcus Risdell outlines Rich’s legacy in pictures and explains the problems of identification.

The satirical print The Stage’s Glory (fig. 17.5, p. 272) exemplifies the challenge of capturing Rich graphically, whether in pictures or print. On the surface, the engraving attests to Rich’s reputation during his lifetime. It features an elaborate triumphal arch; inside the arch Fortune showers coins into the hat of the Hero Harlequin (Rich). Medallions suspended from the arch show scenes — imagined and real — from his theatre, referring to, among others, The Beggar’s Opera, Grand Opera, A Lady Singer . . . burning Works ... of Shakespeare, and Harlequin diverting the Town. The epigram drives home the familiar message of contemporary satire on Rich, that he shaped, and tended to lower, audience taste to enrich himself (With Craft and Policy his humour tends / To publick Mirth and profitable Ends). Nevertheless, the print acknowledges Rich’s influence and success. Through this volume we propose a reading of The Stage’s Glory that fully recognizes Rich’s transformative powers. Through Craft and Policy, Rich overturned traditions — in performance, in management — to pioneer theatrical practices still in use today.

I

Management

1

John Rich as Manager and Entrepreneur

Robert D. Hume

JOHN RICH HAS MOSTLY BEEN IGNORED BY THEatre historians — or worse, dismissed as a blockhead and a buffoon. Neglect and disdain notwithstanding, he ran a company in London under royal patent for forty-seven years, turning a barely marginal second company into a cash cow that eventually sold for £60,000 (a sum that might be conservatively calculated as worth anything from £12,000,000 to £18,000,000 today). He was widely admitted to be a genius at staging pantomime and at all kinds of theatrical display. As a comic dancer he was a stunningly effective Harlequin and continued performing occasionally right up to the age of 60. The best overview of Rich yet written appeared in 1987 in volume 12 of the Highfill—Burnim—Langhans Biographical Dictionary, an assessment that nevertheless comes across as curiously mixed and irresolute.¹ The authors say tepidly that Rich had a flair for comic dancing (p. 338) and grant that he was a very successful manager who accumulated a sizable fortune (p. 352). They profusely quote derogatory personal and professional commentary from pamphlets and memoirs with virtually no attempt to assess the reliability of the sources. Phyllis T. Dircks’s article on Rich in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) is brief, derivative, and essentially non-evaluative. One would not guess from either account that John Rich may well have exerted a more powerful influence on the development of eighteenth-century English drama and theatre than any other manager or performer. Or so I shall argue here.

Rich has to be the least understood (and most understudied) major figure in the eighteenth-century London theatre. The reasons for this are both prejudicial and evidentiary. Pantomime was loudly and regularly execrated by playwrights and critics of the time, almost all of whom regarded the form as contemptible and its popularity as testimony to nothing but the debased taste of hoi polloi who flocked to it.² Being the greatest contriver, producer, and performer of pantomime was not exactly a way to become the darling of the elite-culture types who wrote commentary on public entertainments in the eighteenth century. Twentieth-century literary scholars have been no less dismissive. So far as I am aware, only one important critical book has been published on pantomime in modern times — John O’Brien’s Harlequin Britain (2004).³ Pantomime is admittedly difficult to reconstruct and appreciate from the skeletal scenarios that survive for a few of the shows. Would we feel the potency of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) or Buster Keaton’s The General (1927) if we had only a bare description of the sequence of action? We would understand even less if only an eccentric selection of such descriptions of silent films survived. Given dominant views of pantomime, then and now, few scholars have even wanted to try to comprehend the impact of the genre.

Where does our knowledge of Rich come from? Prejudice is a formidable obstacle, but evidentiary problems can be even more daunting. Primary biographical material is almost nonexistent. No personal letters have come down to us, and almost no business documents. Account books survive for eleven scattered seasons of Rich’s management (and receipts are reported in Rich’s Register for another dozen), but the interpretation of eighteenth-century theatrical accounts is a science still in its infancy and hardly any serious use has ever been made of these materials.⁴ Most of what is known about Rich as manager and person comes from comments made en passant in theatrical memoirs, most notably those by Benjamin Victor, Thomas Davies, and Tate Wilkinson. These are regarded as good sources, but memoirists generally have some axes to grind. Posthumous anecdotes often gain much in the telling, and they are frequently un-verifiable. I will be arguing that the picture of Rich that emerges is badly skewed — and in some important respects direly misleading. Many of the comments published during Rich’s lifetime are from pamphlets that are mostly anonymous, sometimes satiric, and often vitriolically hostile. Newspaper paragraphs are of little assistance: Rich died before London papers devoted much attention and space to public entertainments. Even in the 1750s Rich gets little ink. Unlike David Garrick, his late-career counterpart and competitor at Drury Lane, Rich was not a publicity hound, and he seems to have made no attempt whatever to capitalize on the booming print culture of mid-eighteenth-century London. Garrick craved celebrity and systematically worked to promote his fame; Rich appears to have had no interest whatever in selfpromotion. An iconographical comparison yields interesting figures. The Biographical Dictionary iconography for Rich lists seventeen items. Numbers 4, 6, and 7 are illegitimate, as Rich is apparently not the person shown. Eight are by unknown artists.⁵ Five are manifestly satiric. Number 5 is purely fanciful and dates from 130 years after Rich’s death. None was definitely commissioned, and Rich probably sat for no more than one or two of them, if any. In striking contrast, the Garrick iconography runs to upwards of 280 paintings, engravings, and busts — and this is an undercount, because engravings based on known paintings do not receive separate numbers. In iconography as in almost all other ways, Rich is a maddeningly shadowy figure.

My object in the present essay is to offer some arguments in aid of a fundamental reassessment of Rich’s managerial career and its impact on the British theatre. I shall look at five separate areas in which I believe modern scholars have either misinterpreted or ignored important evidence about John Rich, how he operated, and what he was attempting to do. These realms are (1) Rich’s character and persona; (2) the stability and solvency of Lincoln’s Inn Fields in its first decade; (3) a variety of money issues (particularly the financing of Covent Garden in 1732); (4) Rich’s involvement in a series of cartel agreements with his counterparts at Drury Lane — stretching from 1720 to his death in 1761; and (5) the nature of his theatrical offerings, with special attention to dance and music. My conclusion takes us back to the long dominant picture of Rich as a dunce who inherited a patent theatre and blundered his way through nearly half a century of management by pandering to the crude tastes of a lower-end audience. The evidence, I shall argue, suggests a radically different assessment.

THE PERSONAL CONUNDRUM

Most of the few facts about John Rich were perfectly well known half a century ago.⁶ The conclusions that have been drawn from them are unflattering and they largely echo eighteenth-century derogation. Tate Wilkinson (who had worked for Rich) speaks of Rich’s "natural stupidity and thoroughly ridicules his pretensions to larning actors in their parts, especially in tragedy.⁷ Thomas Davies states that The education of Mr. Rich had been grossly neglected; for though his understanding was good, his language was vulgar and ungrammatical: he was a perfect male Slipslop.⁸ Davies (among others) reports that Rich called everyone Mister (which he pronounced Muster), and he is the source of the oft-quoted anecdote about Rich trying to placate Samuel Foote by saying that he sometimes forgot his own name — to which Foote cuttingly replied, I knew you could not write your own name, but I did not suppose you could forget it." Several contemporaries testify to Rich’s settled habit of using comically distorted versions of actors’ names: Footseye or Footy for Foote; Griskin for Garrick; Shuttleworth for Shuter, Barlymore for Barry, Williamskin or Whittington for Wilkinson.⁹ Add Pope’s sneering dismissal in The Dunciad (1728) and Fielding’s derisive dedication and contemptuous satire in Tumble-Down Dick (1736), and one sees why Rich got dismissed out of hand by early theatre historians. Charles Dibdin called him the vainest and perhaps the most ignorant of all human beings.¹⁰ John Gen-est declared that Rich was ill qualified for his situation and that he did not have talents adequate to the proper management of a theatre.¹¹ Twentieth-century scholars all too frequently accepted these verdicts or drew similar conclusions from misinterpreted evidence. C. F. Burgess, for example, finds the loss of [James] Quin [to Drury Lane in 1734] over the relatively small sum of 200 pounds evidence of utter incompetence, calling it damning and denouncing Rich as parsimonious, even niggardly.¹² In so concluding, he is ignoring the buying power of that sum, which in present-day terms would be at least £40,000–£60,000. Paul Sawyer — Rich’s principal modern champion — says flatly that Rich’s ignorance and obtuseness are beyond question.¹³ The evidentiary basis for such a conclusion, however, is practically nonexistent.

Literacy

Of all the derogatory comments made about Rich the oddest is surely that he was illiterate. This is implied in the Foote anecdote mentioned above, but a bon mot is hardly proof of anything. Nonetheless Joseph Knight’s entry on John Rich in the old DNB states that he was quite illiterate. This is wildly improbable on the face of it. Rich was, after all, the son of a well-to-do lawyer; he owned and managed a large company and signed the account books; he was famous for gruff rejections of play manuscripts submitted to his theatres; and he outraged authors by suggesting verbal changes.¹⁴

However implausible the illiteracy charge, the claim has been taken seriously enough to provoke refutations. Burgess worriedly admits that some of the few extant letters signed John Rich are apparently scribal copies (signatures included), and grants that There is no evidence that Rich ever denied Foote’s charge that he was unable to write his own name.¹⁵ He does, however, print two notes in the Folger Library that appear to be holograph and competently written. Four years later, Paul Sawyer reopened the matter, printing two more holographs, one of them a long and detailed letter to Rich’s ground-landlord, the Duke of Bedford.¹⁶ Sawyer also points out that in 1740 when John Hill accused Rich of plagiarizing from the manuscript of Hill’s opera Orpheus, the two scripts were read aloud to a Company of auditors who were to judge the rights of the