Amongst musicologists, theatre manager and performer John Rich has often been little known and less understood, despite his connection to Handel. This collection, which opens with a masterly re-examination of Rich's life and work by Robert D. Hume, should help rectify the situation. Edited by Berta Joncus and Jeremy Barlow, The Stage's Glory developed from the 2008 interdisciplinary conference ‘John Rich and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage: Commerce, Magic and Management’, which assembled an international cast of scholars and performers (material from the conference website is archived at <www.johnrich.org.uk> (20 March 2013)).
Following a chronology and family tree, the essays are divided into five sections: Management, Dance Theatre, Musical Theatre, Dramatic Theatre, and Scenography and Iconography. Dance is particularly well represented – as it should be, being absolutely essential to the consideration of eighteenth-century pantomime. In their Introduction, Joncus and Barlow argue not only that understanding Rich is essential for pantomime, but also that Rich ‘irrevocably changed the works and nature of the London stage's staple repertory … shaped theatrical fashion … [and] helped turn around Handel's waning fortunes' (23).
The contents are varied in length and substance as well as background, with Hume's contribution (thirty tightly packed pages) at one end of the spectrum and the review of images of Rich by the Garrick Club's Marcus Risdell at the other (two pages and five images, though usefully correcting many false identifications). Admirers of the work of David Hunter (I am one) and of others may well wish their contributions were lengthier. However, if readers in one discipline are inspired to read further by scholars with different specialisms, it will surely be to everyone's benefit. Numerous reproductions and figures add a great deal to the collection overall, which is presented in large format with double-column text. Unfortunately, the volume lacks a comprehensive bibliography, leaving readers hunting for references in the notes for individual essays. Similarly, the lack of scholars' names in the index (which lists performers, productions, authors and composers) also proves a drawback.
Roger Fiske devoted substantial space to ballad opera and pantomime in his English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1973; second edition, 1986), but many aspects of his overview need correcting or updating. Subsequent scholarship has been scattered, with The Beggar's Opera enjoying the lion's share of attention; recent work on pantomime, specifically John O'Brien's Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), has had relatively little to say about performance issues, dance or music.
Hume's essay, ‘John Rich as Manager and Entrepreneur’, re-examines the available evidence and scholarship to propose a radical revision both of the prevailing picture of Rich (stupid, illiterate, miserly, eccentric) and of his place in theatre history, contrasting Rich's apparent lack of interest in legacy-building with its great importance to actor-manager David Garrick. Although references to Rich in recently published books on Handel are usually neutral, one need not look far in the theatrical literature to find the misrepresentations Hume deplores. They also appear in earlier musicological scholarship. Fiske was appropriately sceptical of some accounts: ‘The story that he never learnt to read is hard to credit’ (English Theatre Music, 73). However, Fiske revisited several other spurious anecdotes, while conceding that Rich ‘had some appreciation of music and was always a good friend to Handel’ – and a reliable subscriber to Handel's opera publications. Like Handel, Rich was a successful man of business, interacted socially with elites, including the royal family, and contributed generously to charities and other worthy causes, typically through benefits. Also like Handel, he could be quite brusque when displeased with the quality of performances or materials submitted to him: ‘opinionated, stubborn, and unconcerned with his dignity’ (34).
Regarding Rich's career as a manager, Hume uses archival sources to hold past scholarly narratives up to the test of numbers; this will be no surprise to readers familiar with the essential work done by Hume and Judith Milhous on theatrical account books and other legal and financial documents (see, for example, their 1993 article ‘Opera Salaries in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 46/1 (1993), 26–83). Further information comes from a lawsuit between Rich and his brother over their father's estate. (Christopher Rich, lawyer and manager, left the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre in very poor financial shape.)
Milhous's own essay, ‘The Finances of an Eighteenth-Century London Theatre: The Lincoln's Inn Fields Company under John Rich in 1724–1725’, balances Hume's portrait of Rich as manager, observing that Rich's ‘carelessness about money could hurt the lesser people in the company’ and even led to mutiny (68). In addition, the essay records some useful cautions about the shortcomings of standard reference works such as The London Stage, 1660–1800 (ed. William Van Lennep and others, eleven volumes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–1968)) and Philip H. Highfill Jr, Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800 (sixteen volumes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–1993)). Such cautions are particularly relevant for students and scholars encountering these works for the first time, or those who use them infrequently. Further aspects of the company's day-to-day work, including rehearsal patterns, emerge in Hunter's ‘What the Prompter Saw: The Diary of Rich's Prompter, John Stede’, in which Hunter poses and answers ten key questions about this recently discovered document (a discovery first announced in ‘The Diary of John Stede, London Theatre Prompter from about 1710 to the 1760s’, Theatre Notebook 62/3 (2009), 164–167).
Somehow, Rich kept himself and his company afloat from 1714 until 1723 and the success of The Necromancer; or Harlequin Dr Faustus. Indeed, Hume suggests that The Necromancer ‘was if anything an even more revolutionary innovation than The Beggar's Opera’ (38). Several essays chart the impact of the vocal music and dancing in pantomime and the performers involved, with particular attention to The Necromancer.
In ‘“Heathen Gods and Heroes”: Singers and John Rich's Pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn Fields’ Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson argue that the success of the first pantomime with extensive vocal music, Jupiter and Europa (1723), ‘marked the beginning of a new revival for English stage music’ (158). Many of the singers involved in pantomime had operatic as well as other stage experience (albeit, like Richard Leveridge, in minor roles). Baldwin and Wilson expertly trace them through contemporary records, reviewing the surviving musical and other evidence for The Necromancer and other pantomimes, just as they have for many earlier vocal performers.
The quality of dance performances in pantomime was superb. Moira Goff's ‘John Rich, French Dancing, and English Pantomimes’ reviews what is known about French dancers and dancing on the London stage and compares key dance sequences and cast lists from revivals of Lully's operas with corresponding ones in The Rape of Proserpine (1727) and Perseus and Andromeda (1730). In ‘Pierrot Strikes Back: François Nivelon at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden, 1723–1738’ Jennifer Thorp examines the professional relationship between Rich and Nivelon, whose dancing contributed significantly to the success of The Necromancer. Like Milhous and Hume, Thorp finds significant evidence in legal sources (here a 1725 lawsuit brought by Nivelon against Rich). Linda J. Tomko's ‘Harlequin Choreographies: Repetition, Difference, and Representation’ provides her usual rigorous analysis of contemporary choreographies as well as challenging readers to wrestle with understanding the physical and interpretive variety of Harlequin and his music in the later sections ‘Harlequin Semiotician’ and ‘Types of Expression’. Her analysis is illustrated with numerous figures, including the complete engraved Chacoon for a Harlequin (London, British Library, shelfmark K.1.i.13).
Turning from pantomime to ballad opera, Hume also re-evaluates Rich's probable profits from The Beggar's Opera (demonstrating that like the number of attendees at Handel's Fireworks Music, they have been considerably exaggerated). Jeremy Barlow's essay ‘The Beggar's Opera in London's Theatres, 1728–1761’ draws on his experience of working as an editor and director in its survey of performers and performances. The following essay by Joncus and Vanessa L. Rogers examines Rich's apparent failure to dominate the ballad opera market in the same way as he did that of pantomime. Joncus and Rogers find many of the ballad operas staged by Rich more original than their competition, with a more varied selection of music, but not more successful. It is a sign of changed scholarly attitudes that Joncus and Rogers find in John Gay's posthumous Achilles (1733) ‘subtexts of same-sex love, emasculation of men, misogynist biases, and conflation of genders through travesty roles’ (187) where Fiske found it ‘dull’ (English Theatre Music, 113) despite the cross-dressing, although he does comment on the ‘unexpected’ inclusion of music by Corelli, also noted by Joncus and Rogers. As more recent scholarship has confirmed, Corelli's works were indeed well known by English musicians and audiences, and their inclusion (alongside tunes by Handel and Ariosti) demonstrates how often the music of ballad operas had nothing to do with the English ballad tradition.
Hume also briefly addresses subjects of considerable interest for Handelians: the financing of the Covent Garden Theatre and Rich's relationship with Handel. Donald Burrows's ‘Good for the Garden: The Composition of Handel's Ariodante’ provides the context for the first Covent Garden opera, examining the circumstances surrounding its premiere, the elaborate sets constructed for it (as noted in Ana Martínez's essay on staging, ‘the falling rock in Handel's Alcina’ was listed in a 1744 inventory of the theatre's holdings; 227), the cast Handel assembled (including English singers John Beard and Cecilia Young) and Handel's revisions for his singers.
Burrows notes that the ‘integration of operas into the theatre's program suggests that Rich took an active interest in the opera productions’ (150), although, as Hume admits, we have tantalizingly few specifics about the relationship (53). As evidence of Rich's attitude towards opera and his intentions in promoting pantomime, The Stage's Glory includes a facsimile of the Preface to The Rape of Proserpine (attributed to and signed by Rich, though it seems possible that J. E. Galliard, who composed the music, might have had a hand in it as well). The use of dance in Handel's Covent Garden operas receives fresh attention in Sarah McCleave's Dance in Handel's London Operas (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013).
In ‘John Rich, Theatrical Regulation, and the Dilemma of the Commercial Stage’ Matthew J. Kinservik observes that unlike modern scholars, eighteenth-century commentators were likely to see monopolies as positive: ‘the [theatre] repertory offers strong evidence undercutting the modern assumption that competition and multiple venues would improve the quality of drama’ (81). As Fiske noted (English Theatre Music, 93), ‘Cibber complained that the trouble arose from having two theatres …[;] with only one theatre, standards would have been higher. (Similar arguments greeted the arrival of commercial television in Britain.) [But] Rich never bothered his head over the ethics of playing pantomime.’ Indeed, as Fiona Ritchie's essay on the Shakespeare Ladies Club (207–210) reminds us, Rich and many of his contemporaries found the idea of presenting Shakespeare alongside a pantomime perfectly reasonable. As in other eighteenth-century debates over ‘high’ and ‘low’, and ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ forms – particularly those which incorporated a substantial amount of music – audience responses were not dictated by the published commentaries and criticism most readily available to modern scholars.
Felicity Nussbaum's contribution, ‘The Nation in Breeches: Actress Margaret Woffington’, is a preliminary version of the chapter on Woffington in her Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Scholars concerned with questions of eighteenth-century celebrity and representations of gendered, national, political and religious identities will be interested in the fuller version of Nussbaum's work, although opera scholars should note that Bordoni and Cuzzoni appear only briefly in Nussbaum's Rival Queens (86–88), in the context of the 1727 farce sensationalizing their rivalry.
The essays in the final section, dealing with stage designs, scene painting, scientific designs and portraits, again benefit from the generous allocation of illustrations. Readers familiar with the concept of Mesmerism in Così fan tutte should be interested in Al Coppola's ‘Harlequin Newton: John Rich's Necromancer and the Public Science of the 1720s’, in which Coppola associates the telekinetic abilities of Rich's character of Harlequin Dr Faustus with the ‘awesome’ power of gravity. Coppola reads on-stage sorcery as an ironic double of Newtonianism, and sketches the fascinating background of scientific experiments (or rather, demonstrations) as entertainment, a social side of eighteenth-century science with its own twenty-first-century parallels, like the Secret Science Club (<http://secretscienceclub.blogspot.co.uk> (20 March 2013)).
Because Rich's greatest strengths lay in dance, staging and special effects, for which only limited evidence survives, the words of his critics and competitors have dominated the discourse about him. This new collection provides a valuable account of his career and achievements, throwing new light on the cultural circumstances in which he flourished. The range of essays on significant performance and reception-related topics provides clear value for those interested in the theatrical world of eighteenth-century London.
