Lane with the American lion-tamer Isaac Van
Amburgh a show which proved a royal
attraction, as young Queen Victoria attended
on six separate evenings between 10 January
and 12 February.11)
Even without circus acts, however, the
nineteenth-entury theatre offered a very
considerable portion of entertainment which
was emphatically non-dramatic. Scene-
painting became increasingly elaborate and
sophisticated, sometimes executed on a huge
canvas backdrop, or diorama, which allowed
the scenery to move on rollers behind the
actors. A new concern with the historical
accuracy in the presentation of plays was
manifest in the detailed attention lavished
on sets and costumes, and the resulting
visual effects often gave productions more
pictorial grandeur than dramatic action.
Actors grouped in tableaux, reproducing on
stage the image of favourite paintings; some
adaptations of Dickens's novels, indeed,
consisted of little more than a series of
static groupings devised to imitate the
engravings of Phiz, and later in the century
a particularly popular entertainment was the
staging of Mrs Jarley's Far-Famed Collection
of Waxworks, in which amateur actors
dressed and posed as the waxwork models
Little Nell encountered in The Old Curiosity
Shop. Most spectacularly of all, pantomimes,
at once the most expensive and lucrative (or
financially disastrous) of all nineteenth-
century theatrical entertainments, depended
on the mechanical ingenuity by which a
windmill would be magically transformed into
a ship at the touch of Harlequin's bat, a
chair on which Clown is sitting would
suddenly fly into the air, or an entire set
would change from a dark cavern into a
sunny countryside.
Business on the stage routinely
emphasized novelty and spectacle as well as
plot. Dog drama, with canine stars in leading
roles, was popular throughout the period. At
Sadler's Wells the stage was replaced by a
massive water tank, which facilitated the
production of nautical drama, including mock
battles of warships. There was invariably
musical accompaniment -the "melo-" of
melodrama -and both within plays and
during the intervals between plays actors
would sing favourite melodies, dance a polka
(or a hornpipe in fetters), juggle, tumble, or
balance on a slack rope. With the
development of the type of entertainment
known as "burletta" - initially a dramatic
form which relied on recitative with musical
accompaniment and no spoken dialogue, but
by the 1830's so various as to be quite
indefinable12) - the legal distinctions
between legitimate and illegitimate drama
broke down entirely, and the revoking of the
monopoly in 1843 merely confirmed what was
already established practice, namely that
mixed forms of entertainment held sway in
theatres throughout Britain.
The acting style of the age was
consonant with the overall emphasis on
colourful display. Boldly mannered, it relied
on rhetorical delivery of lines, sweeping
gestures, and formal posturing, methods well
suited both to the cavernously large theatres
and to the polarities of melodrama. The toy
theatre cutouts of actors frozen at steep
angles, with arms aloft and faces defiant,
accurately represent the stylized manner of
nineteenth-century acting. There was an
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