Abstract
This issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film is dedicated to the memory of two distinguished scholars, Michael R. Booth, who died in October 2017, and Victor Emeljanow, who died in April 2018. Michael had intended to present a paper at the City, Space, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century Performance conference organised by this journal in conjunction with the University of Warwick and held at the Palazzo Pesaro-Papafava, Venice, in June 2018. As it turned out, the conference was dedicated to his memory, a tribute that we felt was apt given Michael’s pioneering work on the representation of urban environments on the nineteenth-century stage. Victor was also expecting to attend the City, Space, and Spectacle conference. The paper he had intended to give was presented by his long-time friend and colleague Jim Davis, who has also edited the version that appears in this issue.
This special issue is dedicated to the theme of ecologies and environments, and most of the articles that follow originated in our symposium, Theatrical Ecologies and Environments in the Nineteenth Century, which took place on 1 July 2017 at the University of Warwick. In our call for papers, the theme was construed broadly to include proposals that addressed the impact of theatre and early film on the environment, ecological themes in theatre and performance, and the application of ecological methodologies to the interlacing economic, cultural, and social networks of theatrical production. While the interdisciplinary turn of recent decades has encouraged approaches to the subject that highlight the connectedness of theatre and performance history to other spheres, we wanted to invite participants to think specifically about what ecological themes or methodologies might bring to our understanding of nineteenth-century performance.
As we wrote in our call for papers, ecocriticism is a live issue in both theatre studies and nineteenth-century studies, but remains an under-examined area in scholarship on nineteenth-century theatre. Yet environmental and ecological concerns are central to the performance culture of this period. Like other types of production, the burgeoning theatre industry contributed to what Ruskin referred to as a dark and menacing ‘plague-cloud’ in his famous lecture on pollution, ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’, a text that has been understood as an early contribution to the discussion of human impact on climate. 1 In its emphasis on seductive spectacle, nineteenth-century theatre may be seen as a facet of the emergent commodity culture, with all that suggests of voracious consumption, the dazzling illusions of gaslight masking the ‘heavy, dirty industry’ involved in their production. 2 Approaching the conference theme in a broader sense, the demand for convincingly realised stage settings, whether representing local and familiar sites or those which were distant and ‘exotic’, also reflects contemporary thinking about the formative role of both natural and social environments on human character and behaviour. Landscape settings portraying specific places such as Ireland or Australia were not merely picturesque backdrops to the action but, rather, spoke of the perceived link between the land and the character of a people. As Michael Booth argued, urban dramas such as The Streets of London (1864), Lost in London (1867) and The Great City (1867) presented the metropolis as a character in the play, a complex network of competing interests whose workings are often mysterious to its inhabitants, but which nevertheless shapes their narratives. 3
The vogue for ‘archaeological’ staging and historically accurate costumes that we associate with this period also demonstrates the new importance that was awarded to environment, both in the formation of individual character and as a determining factor in historical events. As the art historian Beth S. Wright has written, ‘[a]bsolute fidelity to material aspects of a culture (costume, architecture, flora, fauna)’ indicate the less visible aspects of past cultures: their ‘laws, habits and beliefs’. 4 Wright’s comments refer to the treatment of history in the painting of this period, but the same thinking can be applied to the demand for authenticity in the theatre. By evoking the ‘strangeness’ of the past in a material sense through architectural settings or costumes, something of its essential difference, as well as the sense that historical events are shaped by and contingent upon environment, could be communicated to the spectator.
Two of the articles in this special issue deal with the urban environment. We begin with Victor Emeljanow’s ‘The Theatrical Life and Death of Wych Street’ in which the author considers a part of lost London destroyed in the modernising ‘improvements’ of the late nineteenth century, an ancient street of uncertain reputation, once the locality of several theatres. Emeljanow refers us to a short story by Stacy Aumonier, Where Was Wych Street?, written in 1921 when the street was still within living memory, in which a trivial dispute about its exact location escalates, ultimately resulting in violence and death. Beginning with this tale about the fallibility of memory, Emeljanow turns to the theatrical history of the street. Using maps, prints, photography and written accounts, he invites us to wander through the shifting and sometimes contradictory perceptions of this elusive site.
Laurence Senelick also examines the theme of the city in his comprehensive account of publicity posters, ‘Signs of the Times: Outdoor Advertising in the Nineteenth Century’. Although Senelick’s article was first given as a paper at our City, Space, and Spectacle conference in 2018, it is nevertheless an apt addition to this issue, dealing, as it does, with the effects of advertising on the urban environment, the complex interactions of printing technology, market forces and entrepreneurial individuals, and the theme of pollution, both with regard to the bold claims and often lurid hues of publicity posters, the effects of which, Senelick tells us, have been likened to a ‘skin disease of the cities’, and in the fact that, as he explains, the spaces of advertising in the city often also functioned as public conveniences. Moving between London, Paris, New York and Berlin, Senelick describes these cities as they once were with almost every available space used for advertising, the sublime and the ridiculous jarringly juxtaposed. The modern metropolis emerges as a new kind of entity, flimsy and ragged, yet able to adapt. Quoting the French commentator, Maurice Talmeyre, Senelick writes of this paper city, ‘it breeds incessantly, keeps changing, and lacks substance’.
In ‘Staging Technology: The International Electrotechnical Exhibition in Frankfurt-am-Main, 1891’, Christina Vollmert examines the artificial Alpine wilderness that was created in Frankfurt for this event. Intended to promote the new technology of electricity, the exhibition included a feature known as the Tatzelwurm-Scenery, a replica of a real Bavarian site that was both a spectacle to be viewed from a distance and a three-dimensional environment in which the participant could walk. The Tatzelwurm-Scenery was so named for the Tatzelwurm creature that inhabited this fantastical landscape, a mythical, man-eating, dragon-like beast, believed to dwell in mountain waterfalls, whose wrath could only be assuaged by the sacrifice of a beautiful virgin. While the Tatzelwurm of legend was an elusive creature, Frankfurt’s electricity-driven version obediently performed for the pleasure of visitors, leaving his grotto at intervals to roar at a statue of a naked virgin. Vollmert’s study examines the significance of this fascinating episode in which the unknown and invisible force of electricity was tamed and rendered familiar to the public.
In ‘The Actress in Nature: Environments of Artistic Development in Victorian Fiction and Memoir’, Victoria Wiet considers how female performers contributed to contemporary discourses about environment in their memoirs. As Wiet argues, actress-autobiographers drew on ‘the language of Victorian anthropology and evolutionary theory’ to posit a ‘wild’ girlhood as the requisite condition that would allow a child to develop into an adult with the sensitivity, responsiveness and physiological flexibility that defined a great performer. Scholars have tended to identify the trope of the ‘natural’ actress as an assertion of normative femininity; the performer’s success is explained by their possession of ‘natural’ womanly virtues of sympathy and charm, thus downgrading their creativity, craft and intelligence. However, Wiet argues against the grain to focus on actresses’ agency in the construction of their own life stories. Indeed, while we tend to think of the norms of Victorian femininity in terms of their power to constrain, Wiet explores the ways in which such restrictions might open the way for acts of creative transgression.
While recent work in the field has sought to apply ecological modes of thought to theatre and performance studies, in her article, ‘Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the Geological Sublime, and the Romantic Theatre’, Alexis Harley turns the tables, offering a close reading of Lyell’s use of theatre as a mode for thinking about and understanding geology. Harley explores Lyell’s approach to the problem of how to consider the ‘deep time’ of geological history from the limited perspective of human subjectivity. As she explains, Lyell embraced theatrical techniques in his public lectures, enthusing at one point over the possibility of staging a volcanic eruption. Yet, Harley also tells us that Lyell was ambivalent about the spectacular tendency of the performance culture of his time and was drawn to Coleridge’s idea of a ‘mental theatre’ that would privilege the imagination over the senses. Harley weaves a complex web in which theatrical, literary and scientific discourses are all implicated in the fundamental question of whether the senses or the imagination provide the key to true understanding.