Performing History: Harlequinades of the French Revolution on the Popular London Stage

As England watched with great interest the events unfolding in France in the summer of 1789, theater managers in London saw opportunity. Within weeks of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, a burletta recreating the event opened at the Royal Circus.¹ Eager to match its success, managers at Covent Garden, Sadler’s Wells, and Astley’s Amphitheatre produced their own Bastille plays, launching what one critic referred to as a “Bastille war.”² In the words of Frederick Reynolds: “The loyalist saw the revolution in one light, the democrat in another; and even the theatrical manager had also his view of the subject. The Bastile [sic] must bring money; that’s the settled point; and a piece of that name must be written.”³ Theaters thus capitalized on public interest in developments abroad by bringing contemporary history home to British viewers eager to see the action for themselves. They also offered, as Reynolds suggests, an alternative to the polarized political reactions that would come to dominate public discourse in England about the French Revolution.

In recent years, the “Revolutionary” theater in Britain has been examined in great detail by Jane Moody, Gillian Russell, George Taylor, and David Worrall.⁴ These studies have brought new interest and insights to the variety of institutional, aesthetic, and political battles that were waged in and by British theaters during the 1790s. In turning to the genre of Revolutionary harlequinade, my aim is to illuminate the ways in which history was being rethought and recast in response to the Revolution, and to examine the role that theater played in this process. The French Revolution’s profound break with the past and founding of a new order to replace the “old regime” produced a sharp sense of historical time and a “widespread realization that even at its most quotidian levels, all life is carried by the current of history.”⁵ Revolutionary entertainments offered theater managers a unique and adaptive form for engaging the present historical moment as they interpreted and recreated it for a popular audience. According to Jane Moody, topical plays of the French Revolution “became the dramatic newsreel of the modern metropolis.”⁶ But more than merely informational, these plays were also elaborate pantomime entertainments that combined fact with fiction, historical personages with stock comic characters, and solemn ceremony with musical interlude. A hybrid form that appealed to London audiences as much for their spectacular backdrops and familiar set pieces as for their accurate portrayals of newsworthy happenings abroad, Revolutionary harlequinades provided an important site for popular engagement with history-in-the-making, and a means to frame and mediate current events for British playgoers.

In what follows, I explore two British harlequin entertainments that depict the event of the great Festival of Federation (Fête de la Fédération) in Paris on July 14, 1790: the first, The Paris Federation at the Royalty Theatre (premiered in August 1790) and the second, The Picture of Paris, Taken in the Year 1790, at Covent Garden (premiered December 20, 1790).⁷ My emphasis will be on issues of narrative and spectacle in these historical entertainments rather than on questions of accuracy or political allegiance in regard to the deeds and players they portray, although these aspects will also be important. Like the event they recreate, The Paris Federation and The Picture of Paris were ephemeral, short-lived productions, fashioned for the summer and winter holiday seasons. The Paris Federation and The Picture of Paris were staged at different types of institutions (fringe and patent theaters respectively) and they straddled the period before and after the pamphlet controversy began in earnest in November 1790; the two harlequinades, therefore, offer illuminating snapshots of divergent moments and contexts of reception of the Revolution in England. With reference to French plays about the same event, my aim is to elucidate the differences in historical representation between the Paris and London stages as well as between the Royalty Theatre and Covent Garden.

History as Spectacle

I promised to send you a description of the federation...