Hearing Double: Acousmatic Authority and the Rise of the Theatre Director

On 29 April 1895, the Lyceum Stock Company of Denver, Colorado, alleged that George du Maurier, the Punch illustrator and celebrity author of Trilby, had not written the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. Instead, claimed the Lyceum, he stole the title and story of his book from Charles Nodier's 1820 French tale, "Trilby, or the Fay of Argyle." This bizarre accusation was occasioned by an injunction against the Denver troupe brought by A.M. Palmer and Harper and Brothers, who owned the American performance rights to Trilby, to prevent duplicate productions that would deprive them of royalties.¹ Rather than engage with the byzantine copyright laws that regulated the licensing and performance of an adapted foreign novel, the producers of the Denver Trilby attempted to erase the nominal author and replace him with a dead and legally quiescent one.² The "Lounger" column in Harper'sWeekly reprinted the article that originally announced the injunction, with the comment thatNodier's "Trilby" "has just one thing in common with du Maurier's book — the first word in its title" (qtd. in Trilbyana 10).³ Ten days later, the United States District Court ruled that the Lyceum Stock Company had infringed on the rights of Harper and Brothers and ordered all future performances stopped.

The manufactured confusion regarding authorship of the novel, of which the Lyceum scam was only one of several instances, eerily replicates the plot of Trilby, in which two different agents seem to be responsible for the creation of the same artwork. Moreover, Trilby, which fictionally depicts life on the operatic stage and literally occupied British and American stages in various melodramatic incarnations, is a symptom of a broader cultural confusion about the relationship between the visibility of artists in the fin-de-siècle theatre and the invisible agents who might really have been responsible for their artistic virtuosity. The association of these accounts of displaced and uncertain agency in du Maurier's novel with theatrical settings (and with the novel's adaptation into a play) reflects a new division of labour on the stage, the rise of the theatre producer (later director) that provided a continuing source of ethical and professional anxiety for actors and playwrights as well as a reservoir of titillating imaginative possibilities for authors.

It is crucial to Trilby's exploitation of hypnosis that the Eastern European Jew, Svengali, who has "unfortunately no voice to produce," can only make his art on and through the vocal cords of another person and can do so best from the offstage invisibility of a darkened box in the balcony. Gecko, a meek violinist who is one of Svengali's former students, describes Trilby in thrall to her master as "just a singing-machine — an organ to play upon — an instrument of music — a Stradivarius — a flexible flageolet — a voice and nothing more — just the unconscious voice that Svengali sang with" (du Maurier 299). This account of individuality curtailed in the service of artistic creation imagines the effervescent Trilby as a series of objects that diminish in personal agency (machines, musical instruments, merely a voice, then just an "unconscious voice," an unvoiced voice). The eclipse of what du Maurier calls Trilby's idiopathic "Trilbyness" is necessary, according to Gecko, to make her a more pliable instrument. But the disappearance of one person's agency, in this case, leads to the ascendancy of another, so that the allegedly disinterested sacrifice of Trilby in the service of great art is shadowed by Svengali's all-too-interested attempt to use Trilby's body as a vehicle for social and sexual advancement.

This account of an offstage authority who superintends a performance onstage, providing artistic integrity through his intervention — as well as an opportunity for his own self-realization — parallels accounts of the rise of the theatrical director at the end of the nineteenth century as a managerial, creative, and interpreting agent, necessary to raise the artistic standard of the theatre as an art form. Clement Scott, the theatre critic for the British Daily Telegraph in the 1880s and 1890s, divided the...