Between Archive and Repertoire: Astley's Amphitheatre, Early Circus, and Romantic-Era Song Culture

the front page of the friday, september 29, 1797 edition of the Morning Herald begins with advertisements for the plays featured at the two patent theaters in the nation's capital later that night. At the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden, audiences could enjoy The Castle of Andalusia along with The Honest Thieves, while those who attended the Theatre-Royal, Drury Lane would be treated to The Wheel of Fortune and The Children in the Wood. Underneath the relatively plain notices for these plays at the legitimate theaters appears a much more elaborate description of the bill of fare for the "Last Two Nights" of entertainments at Astley's Royal Amphitheatre, the establishment acknowledged to be the first modern circus.¹ Owned and managed by Philip Astley, Astley's Amphitheatre featured a dizzying array of acts designed to amuse and amaze (see fig. 1). With doors opening at half past five, audiences would be treated to a "NEW, GRAND, SERIOUS, and COMIC PANTOMIME" entitled "CUPID AND PSYCHE," followed by a "Musical Entertainment" called "THE WIDOW AND NO WIDOW." Next up would be Senior Leonardi's trained "MONKIES" performing their "EXERCISES," the "Grand Troops of Tumblers," the "Learned Horse" with his "numerous and pleasing Performances," and "Equestrian" entertainments. The evening was to conclude with another novelty, the "much-admired Grand Serio and Comic Pantomime" called "THE EGYPTIAN ORACLE; Or, HARLEQUIN CRIMINAL," featuring "a most splendid variety of Scenery, Machinery, Mechanical Changes, Scenic Transformations, Metamorphoses, &c. suited to the Customs and Manners of the Egyptians, contrasted with the Europeans of the present day." In other words, it was to be another typical night at Astley's.

Figure 1.

Morning Herald, 29 September 1797. © British Library Board. Issue no. 5770, p. 26.

Sandwiched between these descriptions of military horses, death-defying feats of tumbling, and spectacular machinery is information about the performance of a "comic song": "TIPPY JACK'S DESCRIPTION of DRIVING A GIG; or Young GILPIN'S Journey to Hyde Park Corner" to be sung by "Mr. JOHANNOT." The bold face typography used to advertise this song suggests that this vocal act was considered equally as compelling to contemporary audiences as any of the more exotic spectacles. To a twenty-first-century observer, this seems puzzling. Why should a song attract the same attention as the antics of a troupe of trained monkeys or the death-defying acrobatics of a group of trick riders? How could the sound of one man singing possibly compete with the visually stunning and action-packed spectacles featured that night? In the essay that follows, I consider further the example of that song and others like it that were performed night after night at Astley's.² As I will suggest, circus songs like "TIPPY JACK'S DESCRIPTION of DRIVING A GIG" give us an opportunity to rethink our understanding of song in the Romantic era.

Studying Circus Songs: Methods, Materials, and the "Reconstructing Early Circus" Database

As a form of entertainment grouping together miscellaneous activities such as horseback riding and other animal acts, acrobatics, fireworks and, eventually, musical theater, early circus has suffered from scholarly neglect as it has fallen between disciplines and even between subfields within disciplines.³ If circus in general has been overlooked by researchers of numerous disciplines, the study of song within circus has been doubly marginalized.⁴ In focusing on circus songs in this essay, I seek not only to put one of the most popular Romantic-era sites of entertainment in London back on the map but also, in a complementary approach to that of soundscape studies, to restore a sense of the importance of sound to the sights audiences would have enjoyed there.⁵

In particular, I focus here on circus songs as objects that existed at the interstices of the ephemeral and the material, challenging the boundaries between performance and print. In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Diana Taylor suggests that "taking performance seriously" as "a system of learning, storing...