From The Emperor of the Moon to the Sultan’s Prison

Eighteenth-century people loved processions. They crowded the streets for Lord Mayor’s Day, royal progresses, and parades of prisoners to be transported, and they lucratively rewarded theatre managers for staging reenactments of coronations and all manner of grand processions from the serious to the ridiculous. Accompanied by opulent music, kings from every continent marched across the stages with a magnitude of attendees. Priests from every religion, armies in every uniform, various animals, shepherdesses nearly obscured by masses of flowers, and prisoners or beggars in grungy rags—audiences could see them all. Even the opening of theatres became performance occasions (fig. 1). Processions were but one kind of spectacle, and from the time Sir William Davenant had to overcome handicaps built into his patent at the Restoration they became a source of reliable revenue. In addition to their entertainment value, they were major ways that playwrights incorporated political commentary. Many of them began as though they were royal, even patriotic, events celebrating national values or merely calculated attempts to keep audiences coming. Suddenly a wildly ridiculous element interrupts and a serious, often angry point is disclosed.

Figure 1.

John Rich’s entry into the Covent Garden Theatre, 1732. William Hogarth, Thomas Cooke, Samuel Davenport, and John Trusler, The Works of William Hogarth, vol. 2 (London: Printed for J. Sharpe, King-Street, Covent-Garden; R. Griffin and Co. Glasgow, 1821).

Characters, costumes, sets, music, gestures, and mimicry provided means of commentary although only a few big productions with tableaux and processions had new sets and trappings. In fact, the most notable spectacular productions were the work of manager-playwrights or special alliances between managers and playwrights. Examples are the William Davenant- John Dryden-Henry Purcell Tempest (1674), the Thomas Betterton-Thomas Shadwell Psyche (1675), the John Rich-Lewis Theobald-Johann Galliard The Necromancer; or Harlequin Dr. Faustus 1723) and The Rape of Proserpine with the Birth of Harlequin (1727),¹ the David Garrick-Charles Dibdin-Isaac Bickerstaff Maid of the Mill (1765), and the George Colman- William Shield-Alexander Johnstone (machinist) Blue-Beard (1798). There is an obvious break between the seventeenth-century productions, the pantomimes of the second quarter of the eighteenth century, and the spectacular farces later in the century. In fact, farce became the genre that made a home for the seventeenth-century dramatic spectaculars. I want to work with two examples of women’s uniting of spectacle and farce in times of crises as a way of beginning to explore mixed form plays as means of participation in public debate and of carrying out individual political agendas (domestic and national). My emphasis here will be popular culture formulas that are especially prevalent and long-lived in farce and spectacle.

I will begin with Aphra Behn’s farce Emperor of the Moon with special attention to its relationship to John Dryden’s Albion and Albanius, both elaborate spectacle plays produced during the troubled reign of King James II. Both are magnificent examples of their theatrical times. I will conclude with a few of Elizabeth Inchbald’s plays. Mogul Tale is the farce that launched her career as a playwright, and another, Wives as They Were, Maids as They Are, about which she said that she could not “sustain true comedy” but “had recourse at the end of her second act to farce,”² is recognized as one of her most important plays. Produced nearly 100 years later, her plays are also representative of the plays of their time, of an equally tumultuous political time, and of playwrights’ understanding of the work spectacle and processions can do when employed within farces.

The World of Farce and Spectacle

The standard for spectacular productions was set by Dorset Garden 1673–1692, and episodes from them continued to be performed as afterpieces and interludes throughout the eighteenth century. For example, Thomas Augustine Arne used the entire finale and Juno’s Peacock machine from Albion and Albanius in 1771 in his The Fairy Prince, and Emperor of the Moon and pieces of it continued to...