Not only were Farley’s performers the best available, but ever since Mother Goose, pantomime had gone from seasonal afterthought to the most eagerly anticipated production of the year. It had also become increasingly topical, taking on the role of an unofficial national review, a comic gallimaufry that examined manners, dances, current affairs, popular singers, victories in battle, notable public works, inventions like gas light, steam engines and macadamising, developments in industry, progress in mining and manufacture, events on the stock exchange, sporting events like hunting, rowing, boxing matches and horse-racing, the plight of the poor, the emancipation of slaves in the colonies, and all the latest trends in skirts, collars, boots and hats, each element introduced, laughed at and discarded, like a child opening presents on Christmas Day. Pantomime was a cultural audit, a great summing-up, or, in the words of The Times, ‘a running commentary – an annual one, upon the whims and speculations of the year’.
More money than ever was being sunk into productions, and with the reopening of Drury Lane in 1812, competition between the rival houses pushed production costs steadily upwards, until by the late eighteen-teens a show could hardly be staged for less than a thousand pounds. The money went on lavish costumes, grand scenery and increasingly complicated tricks, but also one-of-a-kind novelties calculated to sink the opposition. Farley’s first Regency pantomime, for example, Harlequin Padmanaba; or, the Golden Fish (1811), one of the many pantomimes heavily spiced with eastern aromatics to reflect the Regent’s taste for chinoiserie, introduced to the stage Chunee, the largest Indian elephant ever seen in Britain. An unwilling spectacle, he consistently refused to play his part, turning his backside on the audience, making unscripted exits, rearranging the scenery with his flailing trunk, and trying to unseat a terrified Barnes and Mrs Parker, who were on his back dressed as the Sultan and Sultana of Kashmir. Chunee was booed until Farley finally got him to co-operate by feeding him bribes of rum. It worked for actors, why not elephants?*
In all his obstinate, weighty pointlessness, Chunee might have been a metaphor for the Regency’s own otiose, wastrel ways. The fact is that he probably was, for even as the pantomime was becoming increasingly glutted, its satirical instincts sharpened. Not that pantomime hadn’t always been satirical – J. P. Malcolm, writing in the age of Dubois, had heartily commended it for ‘ridiculing the follies of the age’ – but the early nineteenth century saw a willingness to tackle increasingly political themes, as evinced by productions like Drury Lane’s 1808 anti-slavery pantomime, Furibond; or, Harlequin Negro. Once the connection had been made, theatres leapt on the opportunity to discuss matters of substance behind the smokescreen of laughter, and side-step the censorship that made the stage the most politically neutered arena in Britain. It was this oppressive gagging that caused Leigh Hunt, writing in the Examiner, to declare pantomimes ‘the best medium of dramatic satire’, as their want of speech left the audience free to interpret the action however they pleased. ‘Our farces and comedies spoil the effect of their ridicule by the dull mistakes of the author,’ he argued, ‘but the absence of dialogue in the Pantomime saves him this contradiction, and leaves the spectators, according to their several powers, to imagine what supplement they have to the mute caricature before them.’ It was also an opportunity for the ‘lesser stupid’ to chastise the greater:
a whole train of them … the worldly, the hypocritical, the selfish, the self-sufficient, the gossiping, the traitorous, the ungrateful, the vile-tempered, the ostentatious, the canting, the oppressing, the envious, the sulky, the money-scraping, the prodigiously sweet-voiced, the over-cold, the over-squeezing, the furious, the resenter of inconvenience who has inconvenienced, the cloaker of conscious ill by accusation, the insolent in return for sparing.
With this added bite, Joe Grimaldi went from being England’s best-known simpleton to its premier visual satirist, ‘Hogarth in action’, the ideal mascot of a jostling, intemperate world, rattling off oaths in its creaking boots and gorging on beef and oysters. The easiest targets were the fastest moving. Regency style was fleet and capricious, giving each new production a host of things to laugh about. Bang Up; or, Harlequin Prime!, the Sadler’s Wells pantomime of 1811, made fun of the dandies, raffish slang and the popularity of the Four-in-Hand Club, the coaching fraternity who aimed to outdo each other with the finery of their liveries and equipage. (‘Bang up’ meant both ‘smart’ and ‘alert’.) Harlequin Gulliver (1817) saw Joe don a plum pudding, a coal scuttle and an iron stove-pipe to turn himself into a female dandy, a ‘dandizette’.
Fashionable pastimes were also parodied: in Harlequin and the Swans, Clown performed with the popular Indian jugglers and, while trying to emulate their sword-swallowing, put a sword into his mouth that came out of the back of his head. In Harlequin Whittington (1814) he went on a balloon ride through the proscenium and over the heads of the audience. Harlequin and the Red Dwarf; or, the Adamantine Rock (1812) made fun of the famous Epping Hunt where East End traders and Essex grandees risked their necks trying to pass themselves off as sportsmen. Its hunt consisted of three laps round the stage with a real pack of hounds, Pantaloon riding a bedraggled pony and Clown a curious shaggy-haired horse, pursuing their stag, a bemused llama procured from Bullock’s menagerie. The Red Dwarf also demonstrated how the pantomime might cast a critical eye over topics of more substance than excessive surtouts in a scene in which Joe used the detritus of a stable to transform himself from Clown to Hussar. As The Times described it:
Two black varnished coal-scuttles formed his boots, two real horse-shoes shod the heels, and with jack-chains and the help of large brass dishes or candlesticks for spurs, equipped his legs in an uniform almost as clattering unwieldy, and absurd as the most irresistible of our whiskered propungnatores [‘champions’ or ‘defenders’]. A white bear-skin formed his pelisse, a muff his cap, and a black tippet finished his toilet, by giving him a beard, whiskers, and pendant moustaches.
It is odd to think that, in a time of war, jokes at the expense of élite soldiers should have been so well received, but according to The Times, the audience ‘roared with laughter, as they saw the buffoon of a Theatre turn the favourite invention of the mighty, and the wise, and the warlike, into merited ridicule’. The paper’s approval stemmed from a ‘general contempt for these miserable imitations of foreign foppery’, adding that the joke was given special relish by the presence of a group of genuine Hussars sitting in the stage box, ‘covered de cap à pied, with chains and cat skins’. While the British worshipped their navy, they were at best ambivalent about their land forces, who did not begin to gain popular support until after Wellington’s victory at the battle of Vitoria in the summer of 1813. Pantomimes showed them to be either a rabble and inept, as in Harlequin and the Swans or Harlequin’s Jubilee (1814), where Joey inspected shabby regiments built from the dregs of the alehouse garden, or as posturing, entitled braggarts, more interested in their uniforms than their duty.
To be the constant butt of Grimaldi’s jokes left the officers unamused, and Harris once received a note direct from the Horse Guards’ mess saying that unless Clown desisted from ‘his d—d infernal foolery’ they would withdraw their patronage en masse. But the pantomime happily practised double standards, for even as it chided the army for its vanity, it continued to revel in its glories, presenting all manner of patriotic parades and tableaux to honour heroes in the struggle against France. This was demonstrated in the way that Joey the coal-scuttle Hussar applauded the feats of the men he ridiculed by seizing a midget dressed as Napoleon and dashing him into the jaws of a passing Russian bear – an allusion to Bonaparte’s disastrous retreat from Moscow. The only rule was that nothing was sacred. No pretensions of excellence or claim to gravity were exempt from the cartoon world.
Throughout this period, Joe became increasingly known for his tricks of construction, the production of a novel whole from a selection of found objects. One of their earliest uses came in Harlequin in His Element; or, Fire, Water
, Earth and Air (1808), the show that followed Mother Goose and which Joe considered ‘one of the best pantomimes in which he ever played’. One of its scenes found Joey idling at the side of a road, pilfering produce from the assorted tradespeople who passed him there. His trawl amounting to a fresh salmon, a pair of gloves, a hatbox, a pair of boots and the broad-brimmed hat of the constable sent to arrest him, he decides to stand the boots on the floor and rest the hatbox on top of them. His interest engaged, he next ‘attaches a long glove on each side for arms, the piece of salmon for the head, and the whole is surmounted by the BEADLE’S hat’. As he steps back to admire his curious, fish-headed figure, Harlequin appears, transforming the salmon into a ‘perfect face’, which nods a greeting to Clown, who is struck with terror and flees the scene.
In Harlequin Asmodeus (1810) he made the vegetable man that may have sown the seed of Frankenstein; in Harlequin Padmanaba he made a carriage from a child’s bassinet and four wheels of cheese and hitched it to a team of springer spaniels. Tricks of construction provided a broader comic palette than he’d previously been able to use, offering something akin to sketch comedy rather than the freneticism of the circus ring, making the audience wait as he developed what critics called his ‘sleepy style’ of ‘quiet humour and busy intensity’. Describing a piece of coach building in Harlequin and the Ogress, one wrote of how ‘no one can be at a loss like Grimaldi. No one can suddenly hit upon a remedy like himself. He really seems never to have had a notion before how he was to make his carriage, but appears to build on the inspiration of the moment.’ By letting things unfold at a more measured pace, and adopting ‘the delightful assumption of nonchalance’, he heightened the audience’s anticipation and, in so doing, doubled the effect. Sometimes the routines were accompanied by a rare morsel of speech, short, elliptical utterances, like ‘Here we are again’, as he first came on, ‘Nice moon’, as he took in the nocturnal scenery, ‘Nice’, when eating biscuits, or ‘Don’t’, when about to be tortured. Sparse and seemingly redundant though they were, they dripped with character and contained, in one critic’s words, ‘a world of concentration’ that left nothing to be said. ‘The audience drank in oblivion of all their grievances with the first tones of their old friend Joe’s voice,’ wrote William Hazlitt, ‘for which indeed he might be supposed to have a patent.’
Clown was becoming more vocal in general, singing more and more songs, many of which included spoken sections of nonsense, mimicry or double-talk. Most of them came from the indefatigable pen of Charles Dibdin, who, near the end of his career, claimed to have written close to five thousand. Dibdin himself admitted that they were of little consequence: ‘Unless sung by the Clown of the Pantomime, in Character, [they] lost half their effect.’ Favourites included Joe partnering a horse-size starling in Harlequin Gulliver, or, in Harlequin and the Swans, singing a trio with a giant cod’s head and a morose giant oyster recently jilted by its lover. Songs like ‘What’ll Mrs Grundy Say?’, featuring a polyphony of unconnected snippets of London conversations, and ‘Betty Brill’, which incorporated the cries of a rebarbative fishwife, presented opportunities for Joe to delve into different characters. One of the most famous was called ‘Tippitiwichit: or Pantomimical Paroxysms’. First sung in 1811, it was merely an excuse for him to engage in outlandish yawns, coughs and sneezes:
This very morning handy,
My malady was such,
I in my tea took brandy
And took a drop too much.
(Hiccups) Tol de rol, etc.
Now I’m quite drowsy growing,
For this very morn,
I rose while cock was crowing,
Excuse me if I yawn.
(Yawns) Tol de rol, etc.
But stop, I mustn’t mag hard,
My head aches – if you please,
One pinch of Irish blackguard
I’ll take to give me ease.
(Sneezes) Tol de rol, etc.
I’m not in cue for frolic,
Can’t up my spirits keep,
Love’s a windy colic,
’Tis that makes me weep.
(Cries) Tol de rol, etc.
I’m not in mood for crying.
Care’s a silly calf,
If to get fat you’re trying,
The only way’s to laugh.
(Laughs) Tol de rol, etc.
When the song went well, Joe was able to induce the entire theatre to yawn and sneeze along with him, ‘A most remarkable instance of control over a large audience by means of the purely comic element,’ said Thomas Goodwin.
Though the words were Dibdin’s, the effect was Farley’s, whose earlier instruction had provided Joe with the tools that enabled him to mature into a fine actor. Increasingly, his pantomimes came to feature scenes in which he took the stage alone for a virtuoso display of comic acting. Again, it was Harlequin in His Element that featured one of the first, a bit of business in which Clown stole a bottle of wine from a sleeping watchman, drank it, then played at being the watchman himself. Having tired of that game, he discovered that he was suddenly too drunk to find his mouth and so entered into a long quarrel with his mutinous body that could only be resolved by holding up the watchman’s lamp to his cheek to light the bottle’s way.
The scene was instantly popular and led to further opportunities to showcase his talents as a mime. One was witnessed by William Robson, a long-standing fixture of the London theatre scene, who had been particularly impressed by the emotional range Joe portrayed in Charles Dibdin’s melodrama The Wild Man (1809). Recalling a scene in which Joe played an Orson-style beast about to kill an infant, he described the transformations that fell upon him when the child’s despairing father used music to try to calm the beast. Robson wrote,
The first fierce glance and start, as the sound struck upon his ear, were natural and fine – the hands hung as if arrested, the purpose was at pause. As the plaintive air of the flageolet continued, it was really wonderful to watch that which you felt as the natural effect of the music upon such a being – and when, at length, the savage heart became so softened that his whole frame shook convulsively, and he clasped his hands to his face in an agony of tears, he never failed to elicit the proudest triumph of the actor’s art – the sympathizing drops from the eyes of every spectator. And, when the measure was changed to a livelier strain, the picture became almost frightful, for his mirth was in as great an extreme as his grief – he danced like a fury!
Such was Joe’s reputation as a mime, he was said to have provided instruction to John Philip Kemble, and there were many who urged him to make the transition into legitimate drama. An 1812 letter from the radical politician Thomas Perronet Thompson to his sister sums up the feeling: ‘It is greatly to be regretted’, he wrote, having seen Joe perform in Perouse; or, the Desolate Island, ‘that he did not make his appearance in Touchstone in As You Like It. He would have had John Kemble in Jaques; and I have no doubt that Grimaldi would throw great light upon the fool who was the delight of our forefathers, and deserve well of all lovers of Shakespeare.’
Joe had already taken a tentative step into legitimate drama in 1811 when, in a move that was sure to infuriate his enemy John Fawcett, he performed Bob Acres in Sheridan’s The Rivals for his own Covent Garden benefit. It was one of two legitimate parts he would keep in his repertoire until his retirement. The other was a cross-dressing role, a kind of pantomime dame avant la lettre, the blowsy Moll Flaggon in Burgoyne’s The Lord of the Manor, one of Fawcett’s own parts.
The combination of singing and acting freed Grimaldi to move away from physical clowning and experiment with other types of comedy, especially scenes played at a slower pace than normally allowed by pantomime. It was this evolution that in Oxberry’s judgement made him ‘the only purely intellectual Clown we ever beheld’, though by the same token, it was an adaptation he needed to make in order to survive. Finding ways to be funny while slowing the tempo was imperative if Joe was not to end his career prematurely. His Christmas pa
ntomimes were regularly running into June, by which time Sadler’s Wells had been open for two months, requiring him to do double duty on twenty-eight consecutive nights, fifty-six performances, each of which was equivalent to running several miles, dancing a ballet and doing a couple of rounds with a wrestler. Celebrity meant that the pantomime was increasingly being built around him, requiring that he appear in more scenes as the size of shows swelled in response to their popularity.
When Joe’s health was flagging, new characters were invented to help share the load, as in Harlequin Asmodeus’ introduction of a character called ‘Dandy Lover’, a self-regarding fop and Pantaloon’s favoured suitor for the hand of Columbine, who exists, in the words of Thomas Dibdin, ‘for no other earthly reason than to be knock’d about, trod upon, and pitch’d in to the Pit’. But whether due to the pressure of expectations or professional pride, Joe would never entirely abandon the fundamentals of physical comedy that had made him famous. He crossed the stage in four enormous strides, and when slapstick was called for, he held nothing back: ‘It is absolutely surprising’, wrote a correspondent for The Times in 1813, ‘that any human head or hide can resist the rough trials which he volunteers. Serious tumbles from serious heights, innumerable kicks, and incessant beatings, come on him as matters of common occurrence, and leave him every night fresh and free for the next night’s flagellation.’ And, unlike Robert Bradbury, this ‘most assiduous of all imaginable buffoons’ refused to wear padding.
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Page 23
