The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Read online

  Josie, Cissie and Floyd

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  A Grimaldi Family Tree

  Prologue

  Introduction

  PART ONE 1778–1800

  1. The Wonders of Derbyshire

  2. The Wizard of the Silver Rocks

  3. Harlequin’s Frolics

  4. The Flying World

  PART TWO 1800–10

  5. The Magic of Mona

  6. The Spirit of the Waters

  7. Mother Goose

  8. The Forty Virgins

  PART THREE 1811–37

  9. Harlequin in His Element

  10. The Orphan of Peru

  11. Poor Robin

  12. The Libertine Destroyed

  Epilogue

  Appendix: Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, The Golden Egg!

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Joseph Grimaldi by J.E.T. Robinson, 1819 (Garrick Club/Art Archive)

  2. Foire de Saint-Germain (Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

  3. ‘Grim-All-Day at Breakfast’ by J. Berry, 1788 (© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

  4. Jean-Baptiste Dubois by Van Assen, 1794 (The British Library)

  5. Dora Jordan by John Hoppner, 1791 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  6. John Philip Kemble after Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1834 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  7. Drury Lane Theatre from the Stage, 1804 (Royal College of Music, London)

  8. ‘The Manager and His Dog’ by James Sayers, 1803 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  9. South West View of Sadler’s Wells, 1792 (Harry Elkins Widener Collection, Harvard University, HEW 2.7.4)

  10. Thomas John Dibdin by W. Owen, 1809 (University of Illinois Theatrical Print Collection, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

  11. Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin, junior, by R.W. Satchwell, 1819 (University of Illinois Theatrical Print Collection, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

  12. Charles Farley as Cloten in Cymbeline by Thomas Charles Wageman, 1821 (University of Illinois Theatrical Print Collection, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

  13. Mr Grimaldi as Orson (Robert Gould Shaw Collection, TS 937.8 F v.1, The Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library)

  14. ‘The Favourite Comic Dance of Messers Bologna Jun. and Grimaldi’ by Rudolph Ackermann, 1807 (V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum)

  15. Grimaldi as Clown in Mother Goose, c.1807 (Garrick Club/Art Archive)

  16. Joseph Grimaldi by John Cawse, 1807 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  17. ‘A View of the Confusion at Sadler’s Wells’, 1807 (The British Library)

  18. Covent Garden Theatre by Pugin and Rowlandson, 1809 (Lebrecht Music and Arts)

  19. ‘Killing No Murder, as Performed at the Grand National Theatre’ by George and Isaac Cruikshank, 1809 (© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

  20. Drury Lane Fire by Abraham Pether, 1809 (Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London)

  21. ‘Mr. Grimaldi and Mr. Norman in the Epping Hunt’, 1813 (Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

  22. ‘Grim Joey Dashing Little Boney into the Jaws of a Russian Bear’, 1813 (Harry Elkins Widener Collection, Harvard University, HEW 2.7.4)

  23. ‘Mr. Grimaldi as Clown’ by Rudolph Ackermann, 1811 (Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

  24. ‘Mr. Grimaldi as He Appeared When He Took His Farewell Benefit at Drury Lane Theatre on the 27th June, 1828’, by H. Brown, 1828 (Harry Elkins Widener Collection, Harvard University, HEW 2.7.4)

  25. Grimaldi, Barnes and Ellar by H. Brown, 1823 (© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.)

  26. ‘Mr. H. Kemble as Aslan the Lion’, 1831–4 (Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

  27. ‘Mr. J.S. Grimaldi as Captain Corble in Paul Jones’, by H. Brown, c.1830–32 (Harry Elkins Widener Collection, Harvard University, HEW 2.7.4)

  28. ‘Mr. J.S. Grimaldi as Scaramouch’ by A. Chabot (V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum)

  29. ‘Mr. Grimaldi as Clown’ by Dyer (V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum)

  PROLOGUE

  THERE’S NOTHING PARTICULARLY FUNNY about Hackney, especially when you’re sweaty and cold. Dragging a heavy suitcase down the Kingsland Road on a damp day in early February had left me feeling both. A delayed flight meant that I’d arrived in London twenty-four hours late, and now, struggling past the pound stores, Turkish sports clubs and electronic bazaars offering to unlock my mobile phone, I was seriously worried that I was going to be late for church. I didn’t want to miss the clowns.

  I was heading for Holy Trinity, a small but handsome tabernacle settled inconspicuously on a back-street in Dalston. It’s here that a memorial service has been held every year since 1959 for Joseph Grimaldi, Regency superstar and father of modern clowning, a service that enjoys some notoriety, thanks to its congregation of working clowns who attend in full slap and motley. As I bumped through the door and finally dumped my bag, I was relieved to find that they hadn’t started. Instead, they stood around drinking tea and being disarmingly normal, a friendly and excited group of children’s entertainers and retired circus acts clearly at home with the level of glamour implied by the scuffed-up Scout hall they used as a dressing room. Augustes and Pierrots swapped news with American hobos, while a Coco with a pin head and a tiny bowler hat seemingly reassured his colleague about his prosthetic forehead and mechanical eyebrows. Were it not for the extravagant dress, they could have been any other group of people with a shared enthusiasm. Indeed, I suspected many of membership of the Caravan Club.

  The service itself was more disconcerting. I had been a stand-up comic myself and, having twice sought help for depression, was inclined towards the lugubrious in comedy, yet even this left me unprepared for the level of shabby melancholy in which I was about to be immersed. Maybe it was because I was a jet-lagged atheist who was deeply ambivalent about clowns, but I found the experience about as pleasant as a night in a derelict fun park. Presided over by the Vicar of All Saints, and the Clowns’ Chaplain, the service began with a clown procession that was followed by prayers, hymns, a sermon, a skit with balloon animals, and Clown Rainbow reading nervously from the Gospel of St Luke: ‘Blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.’ There was something intractably laconic about it, especially the sincerity with which they offered worship, like a displaced people pleading to come home.

  In a sense, that was what they were, because for decades clowns have occupied an ever-diminishing niche in popular culture, their flapping shoes, hoop-waisted trousers, and streams of multi-coloured handkerchiefs more evocative of forced laughter and jaded memories than genuine fun. Commensurate with their decline is a rise in ‘coulrophobia’ – the fear of clowns – fuelled by horror flicks and comic-book villains whose particular psychosis troubles the line between laughter and terror. Feeling like an ungrateful guest, I realised it was a prejudice I shared, especially as I caught myself calculating how many diseased minds were lurking behind those blood-red smirks.

  Apparently, I was not the only one. The attraction of the abominable draws a big crowd and every year the service is packed with curious onlookers and camera crews who greatly outnumber the dedicated few. By the time I arrived, a busful of Swedish teenagers had already filled the unreserved seats, leaving the aisles to groups of hip young Londoners in futuristic shoes. They were there to enjoy the eccentricity
, soaking it up as they would their regular weekend dose of performance art. It might have been scripted, then, when the man who plays Grimaldi at these events received a nasty poke in the eye just minutes before he was due to go on. Bravely, he went through with his act – a rendition of ‘Hot Codlins’, Grimaldi’s most popular song, rendered gruesomely fascinating by the contrast of his angry crimson eyeball against the alabaster greasepaint – and ran to a waiting ambulance the moment he had finished. I was later told that he sat dejectedly in his costume at Accident and Emergency for several hours.

  It’s hard to imagine a more perfect tribute.

  INTRODUCTION

  Poor Joe! It was like the boys and frogs; it was sport to us, but it was death to you.

  William Robson, The Old Play-goer (1854)

  MIDNIGHT ON BOXING DAY 1810 saw frosts so severe that the Thames froze over. The chill coincided with the news that the old, blind king, George III, had descended into his final fit of madness. This and the weather meant that the streets around Covent Garden were unusually deserted. Even the pickpockets, dressed in stolen dinner jackets to blend in with the theatre crowds, had taken the night off from their foists.

  On Bow Street, the remains of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, stood forlorn in the moonlight like a ruined abbey. Destroyed by fire a year ago, and still to be rebuilt, it looked crippled and pitiful opposite the huge white stockade of its rival, Covent Garden, just yards away. Rich sepia light streamed through those windows, accompanied by booming laughter that tumbled across the walls and cobbles, erupting into stinging peaks before rolling back and exploding again, followed by bursts of showering applause.

  The three thousand souls packed into Covent Garden had no thought for the cold, immersed as they were in the climax of the year’s new pantomime, Harlequin Asmodeus; or, Cupid on Crutches. In an auditorium that smelt of orange peel and candle-wax, and sitting beneath chandeliers the size of galleons, they’d already endured a bill that included Shakespeare’s As You Like It and a dire tragedy called George Barnwell – six hours of drama – though they showed little sign of fatigue. All eyes were fixed on the grinning face that emerged from the curtain, entirely white save for the gaping cavern of its mouth, and a pink and green plume wobbling suggestively on its head. Limb after rantipole limb climbed out from the wings, followed by a quarrelsome body seemingly trying to outrun itself, the whole barely having time to settle before leaping off, hands on hips, covering the enormous width of the stage in only four bounds.

  This was Joseph Grimaldi, known to everyone just as ‘Joe’, a clown in the ascendant. Wearing a pink shirt and appliquéd breeches that gave way to blue spotted tights, he skipped casually sideways, his ballet slippers depositing him nimbly outside a grocer’s shop, where his rolling eyes suddenly narrowed to meet an incoming thought. Casting sly glances in every direction, his busy hands dipped among the vegetables, pulling out two extremely large mushrooms, which he placed carefully beside him on the floor, before returning to rummage with unbreakable concentration. Two oversize rhubarb stalks followed, a foot and a half long and nine inches across, which he stood upright on the mushroom caps. Next, he rolled out a cabbage the size of a beach ball, heaved it into place atop the rhubarb, added a long carrot to either side, placed a melon on top, and stepped back to admire his creation.

  His self-congratulation was short-lived. A window opened in the shop and a masked figure leant out, his glittering patchwork arm bearing a sword, with which he fetched the vegetable man a thwack. Suddenly, the creature seemed different. A carrot arm appeared to twitch. Grimaldi looked puzzled. The arm moved again. Grimaldi blinked. Then the melon rotated, revealing a face to the audience that turned to its creator. Grimaldi screamed. The vegetables are alive! A mushroom foot moves forward, then the other, and, with a shambling gait and carrot arms outstretched, it began to bear in. Terrified, Grimaldi retreated, fishing out two large turnips, which he grabbed by the stalks to use as boxing gloves. The vegetable man stopped to observe his opponent’s odd pose, his knees bent in a manner that recalled the fashionable art of pugilism, then squared up. A bell was rung in the orchestra pit and the bout began, the adversaries exchanging cautious exploratory jabs until the monster made its move, coming at its master with unexpected speed, its carrot arms relentlessly batting at Grimaldi’s head until he is forced to throw up his turnips and flee the stage.

  The audience was in hysterics. Grimaldi had been their idol since he first came to prominence in 1806, having been thrust into the highest sphere of celebrity with a virtuoso comic performance in the original production of Mother Goose, a show that took record profits and ran for longer than any other pantomime in history. Its success brought him national recognition, enormous fees, and a social circle that included Lord Byron, Sarah Siddons, Edmund Kean, Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis and the entire Kemble family. The critics Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt sang his praises, the young Charles Dickens edited his Memoirs. The press even credited his routine in Harlequin Asmodeus with inspiring Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

  But though Grimaldi was a clown, he was neither a children’s entertainer nor a circus act. Instead, he graced the royal stages of Covent Garden and Drury Lane and was a shareholder in the famous summer theatre of Sadler’s Wells. In all these venues, his speciality was pantomime, the Regency’s most popular and consistently lucrative form, and a mirror of the age with its ridiculous extravagance, liberal, self-regarding wit and obsession with being bang up to date. Grimaldi’s pantomime had little in common with its modern counterpart, whose principal boys, pantomime dames and oh-no-it-isn’ts wouldn’t come into being until almost a century later. For a start, its bawdy, energetic humour, as explicit and visceral as a Gillray or Rowlandson cartoon, was primarily aimed at adults. Neither was it solely reserved for Christmas: the royal theatres traditionally unveiled their new pantomimes on Boxing Day, but their old ones played throughout the year. Summer pantomime was also common, with smaller theatres like Sadler’s Wells introducing as many as four new shows in the course of a season, which ran from April to October.

  Pantomime had first appeared in Britain in the early eighteenth century. An anglicisation of Italian commedia dell’arte blended with opera and ballet, it was initially thought to be a revival of an ancient Roman entertainment. Despite the inaccuracy, it soon became popular in its own right, especially under its first great exponent, John Rich (c. 1692–1761), who based much of his work on classic mythology, merging comic and serious scenes in equal measure. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the serious scenes were purged, and by the time Grimaldi emerged, pantomime had become purely a vehicle for vigorous slapstick and satirical gags. Consisting of two loosely connected parts, a lavish opening that mobilised all the tinsel and pageantry available to the theatre, and a core sequence of ten to fifteen scenes known as the ‘harlequinade’, Regency pantomimes took their cues from fairytales, current affairs or, in deference to the Prince of Wales’s love of the Oriental arts, Eastern stories like The Thousand and One Nights.

  Dialogue was conspicuously light, save for sung recitative and doggerel verse. This was partly due to convention, and partly to arcane licensing laws that refused to acknowledge pantomimists as legitimate actors and so disqualified them from speaking on the public stage. Various attempts had been made to introduce speech throughout the period, but were generally rebuffed by audiences who, like William Hazlitt, thought ‘a speaking pantomime is not unlike a flying wagon’. The action was mimed by actors wearing ‘big heads’, huge papier-mâché masks that gave the appearance of carnival mascots or life-size Russian dolls, yet this still left little chance that the audience would fail to grasp the plot, as half of the enjoyment of pantomime sprang from its repetitious and ritualistic form.

  Stories invariably revolved around a pair of devoted young lovers kept cruelly apart by a tyrannical parent or malicious rival, until hope appeared in the guise of a beneficent intermediary who promised the young lovers happiness upon the successful completi
on of a quest. For reasons never sufficiently explained, the quest also required the principal characters to be magically transformed into the protagonists of the harlequinade, four figures that were instantly recognisable to every man, woman and child in Britain: the fleet-footed and shimmering Harlequin and his gauzy, dove-like lover, Columbine, and their enemies, the elderly ‘libidinous, miserly Dotard’, Pantaloon, and his titular manservant, Clown.

  Once the transformation was complete, the big heads were discarded, the harlequinade began, and the newly altered characters embarked upon a frenetic chase. With the gift of a magic sword, the original ‘slapstick’ primed with gunpowder to lend it a satisfying crack, Harlequin stayed one step ahead of Clown and Pantaloon by using it to transform anything it touched, transformations that were enabled by ‘tricks’, ingenious bits of scenery that turned one thing into another. As the quality of the tricks frequently determined the reception of the pantomime, they were some of the most closely guarded secrets in the theatre, and even today we are not entirely sure how many of them worked. Harlequin used them to effect his escapes and torment his pursuers, turning their sedan chairs into prison cells, their postboxes into lions’ mouths, and piles of vegetables into belligerent monsters.

  Unlike the fairy-tale settings of the opening, much of the harlequinade took place against a background of the sights and sounds of contemporary London. Smoky with sea-coal and jam-packed with fast-moving pedestrians and even faster traffic, the Regency metropolis was well on its way to modernity, its population having more than doubled during Grimaldi’s lifetime from one to more than two and a half million. Teeming and prosperous, in spite of two decades of intermittent war with France, Londoners were avid for entertainment. Indeed, Bonaparte may be credited with inspiring the birth of the modern entertainment industry in all its sumptuous, glamorous, vapid and commercial glory, as theatre was never so profitable or popular as it had been during the Napoleonic wars. Bills and posters papered every fence and pillar, advertising plays, oratorios, scientific demonstrations, exotic menageries, fireworks, mechanical puppets, sermons, galleries, freak shows, tomahawk displays by American Indians, and what the English Illustrated Magazine described as ‘the man who performed the disgusting feat of eating a fowl alive’.