Curiosities of the American Stage Part 5

Collins, and "Little Mac."

[Ill.u.s.tration: EPH. HORN.]

Nothing like a personal history of any of these men, who have been so prominent upon the negro minstrel stage during the half-century of its existence, can be given here. They have all done much to make the world happier and brighter for a time by their public careers, and they have left a pleasant and a cheerful memory behind them. Their gibes, their gambols, their songs, their flashes of merriment, still linger in our eyes and in our ears; and before many readers scores of quaint figures with blackened faces will no doubt dance to half-forgotten tunes all over these pages, which are too crowded to contain more than the mere mention of their names.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JERRY BRYANT.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: NELSE SEYMOUR.]

How much of the wonderful success and popularity of the negro minstrel is due to the minstrel, how much to the negro melody he introduced, and how much to the characteristic bones, banjo, and tambourine upon which he accompanied himself, is an open question. It was certainly the song, not the singer, which moved Thackeray to write years ago: "I heard a humorous balladist not long since, a minstrel with wool on his head, and an ultra Ethiopian complexion, who performed a negro ballad that I confess moistened these spectacles in a most unexpected manner. I have gazed at thousands of tragedy queens dying on the stage and expiring in appropriate blank-verse, and I never wanted to wipe them. They have looked up, be it said, at many scores of clergymen without being dimmed, and behold! a vagabond with a corked face and a banjo sings a little song, strikes a wild note, which sets the heart thrilling with happy pity."

[Ill.u.s.tration: DAN. BRYANT.]

This ballad perhaps was "Nelly Bly," or "Nelly was a Lady," or "Lucy Long," or "Oh, Susanna," or "Nancy Till," or, better than any of these, Stephen Foster's "Way Down upon the Swanee River," a song that has touched more hearts than "Annie Laurie" itself; for, after all, "The Girl We Left Behind Us" is not more precious in our eyes than "The Old Folks at Home;"

and the American has sunk very low indeed of whom it cannot be said that "he never shook his mother." Foster is utterly unappreciated by his fellow-countrymen, who erect all their monuments to the men who make their laws. He was the author of "Ma.s.sa's in the Cold, Cold Ground," "Old Dog Tray," "Old Uncle Ned," "Old Folks at Home," "Old Kentucky Home," "Willie, We have Missed You," and "Come where My Love lies Dreaming." He died as he had lived, in 1864, when he was but thirty-seven years of age, and his "Hard Times Will Come Again No More."

Joel Chandler Harris, who is one of the best friends the plantation negro ever had, and who certainly knows him thoroughly, startled the whole community by writing to the _Critic_, in the autumn of 1883, that he had never seen a banjo or a tambourine or a pair of bones in the hands of the negroes on any of the plantations of middle Georgia with which he is familiar; that they made sweet music with the quills, as Pan did; that they played pa.s.sably well on the fiddle, the fife, the flute, and the bugle; that they beat enthusiastically on the triangle; but that they knew not at all the instruments tradition had given them. That Uncle Remus, cannot "pick" the banjo, and never even heard it "picked," seems hardly credible; but Mr. Harris knows. Uncle Remus, however, is not a travelled darky, and the existence of the banjo in other parts of the South has been clearly proved. Mr. Cable quotes a creole negro ditty of before the war in which "Musieu Bainjo" is mentioned on every line. Maurice Thompson says the banjo is a common instrument among the field hands in North Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee; and he describes a rude banjo manufactured by its dusky performer out of a flat gourd, strung with horse-hair; while we find in Thomas Jefferson's _Notes on Virginia_, printed in 1784, the following statement: "In music they [the blacks] are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch." In a foot-note Jefferson adds, "The instrument proper to them is the banjar, which they brought hither from Africa."

[Ill.u.s.tration: STEPHEN C. FOSTER.]

The negro minstrel will give up his tambourine, for it is as old as the days of the Exodus, when Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances; and he will give up the bones, for Miss Olive Logan, in _Harper's Magazine_ for April, 1879, traces them back to the reign of Fou Hi, Emperor of China, 3468 B.C., while Shakspere's King of the Fairies, who made an a.s.s of the hard-handed man of Athens, also treated Bottom to the melody of the bones. He will hang up his fiddle and his bow when the time comes, cheerfully enough, for Nero, according to tradition, fiddled for the dancing of the flames that consumed Rome nineteen hundred years ago. None of these are exclusively his own; but it would be very cruel to take from him his banjo, which he evolved if he did not invent, and without which he can be and can do nothing.

ACT III.

THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE.

THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE.

"The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them."

_A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, Act v. Sc. 1.

The burlesque among serious writers has a bad reputation. George Eliot, in _Theophrastus Such_, says that it debases the moral currency; and George Crabb, in his _English Synonymes_, thus dismisses it: "Satire and irony are the most ill-natured kinds of wit; burlesque stands in the lowest rank."

Burlesque, from the Italian _burlare_, "to joke," "to banter," "to play,"

has been defined as "an expression of language, a display of gesture, an impression of countenance, the intention being to excite laughter." In art caricature is burlesque, in literature parody is burlesque, in the drama comic pantomime, comic opera, travesty, and extravaganza are burlesque.

All dramatic burlesque ranges under the head of farce, although all farce is not burlesque. Burlesque is the farce of portraiture on the stage; farce on the stage is the burlesque of events. Bret Harte's _Condensed Novels_ and George Arnold's _McArone Papers_ are representative specimens of burlesque in American letters; Arthur B. Frost's famous domestic cat, who supped inadvertently upon rat poison, is an excellent example of burlesque in American art. What America has done for burlesque on the stage it is the aim of the following pages to show.

Hipponax, of Ephesus, who lived in the latter half of the sixth century before Christ, is credited with having been "The Father of Burlesque Poetry." He was small and ill-favored physically, and his natural personal defects were the indirect cause of the development of his satirical powers and of his posthumous fame. Two sculptors of Chios caricatured him grossly in a statue publicly exhibited, and he, in return, fired his muse with the torch of hatred, and burned them in effigy with terrible but clever ridicule. He parodied the _Iliad_, in which he made Achilles an Ionian glutton; he did not spare his own parents; he poked fun at the G.o.ds themselves; he impaled Mrs. Hipponax with a couplet upon which she is still exhibited to the scoffers, and he is only to be distinguished from his long line of successors by the curious fact that he does not seem to have spoken with derision of his mother-in-law! His tribute to matrimony is still preserved in choice iambics, roughly translated as follows: "There are but two happy days in the life of a married man--the day of his marriage, and the day of the burial of his wife." From this it will be seen that twenty-five centuries or more look down upon the Benedict of the modern burlesque, who leaves his wife at home when he travels for pleasure!

Aristophanes, the comic poet of Athens, who wrote fifty-four comedies between the years 427 and 388 B.C., may be termed "The Father of the Burlesque Play." He satirized people more than things, or than other men's tragedies, and to his school belong Brougham's _Pocahontas_ and _Columbus_, rather than the same author's _Dan Keyser de Ba.s.soon_, or _Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice_. The plots of Aristophanes are as original as his wit. In _The Wasps_ he caricatured the fondness of the Athenians for litigation; in _The Birds_ his object was to convince the Athenians of the advantages of a clean political sweep; in _The Female Orators_ he satirized the Sorosis and the women suffragists of his time; in _The Feast of Ceres_ he pointed out how useful and ornamental woman is in her own sphere; and in _Peace_, written to urge the close of the Peloponnesian war, he reached the sublimity of burlesque in creating a stage heroine who never utters a word. The argument of _The Knights_ will give a very fair idea of the plots of his plays. Athens is represented as a private house, whose master, Demos (the people), has more servants and more servants' relations than he can comfortably wait upon or decently support. Nicias and Demosthenes are his slaves, and Cleon, a political boss of the period, is his butler and confidential valet. Demos is irritable, superst.i.tious, inconstant in his pursuits, and dull in character. Agoracritus, a sausage-seller, subverts the plots and the plans of the demagogue Cleon--originally played by Aristophanes himself--shows the householder that his favorite servant is utterly unworthy of the public trust, and brings the entertainment to a close with the discomfiture of the Ring and the relief of the taxpayers. Demos is said to have been the prototype of "John Bull," the personification of the Englishman, as he was first exhibited by Dr. Arbuthnot in the early part of the eighteenth century, and _The Knights_ is regarded as "an historical piece of great value, because it furnishes a faithful picture of the nation and of its customs." What curious ideas of American life and manners will posterity gather from _Adonis_ and _Evangeline_!

Cla.s.sical critics credit Aristophanes with being distinguished for the exuberance of his wit, for his inexhaustible fund of comic humor, and for the Attic purity and great simplicity of his language; while at the same time he is accused of introducing, when it suits his purpose, every variety of dialect, of coining new words and expressions as occasion offers, and of making bad puns, whether occasion offers or not; in all of which his disciples persistently and consistently follow him.

Samuel Foote, who lived in an age of epithets, was called "The British Aristophanes." He respected no person and no thing. He satirized every subject, sacred or profane, which struck his fancy, from Chesterfield's Letters to the Stratford Jubilee; and he caricatured everybody, from Whitfield to the d.u.c.h.ess of Kingston. His serious attempt at Oth.e.l.lo, in the beginning of his career as an actor, was considered a master-piece of unconscious burlesque, only inferior, in its extravagance and nonsense, to his Hamlet, and he failed in every legitimate part he undertook to play.

As a mimic, however, in dramatic productions of his own writing, he met with immense success; and as a writer of stage burlesque he ranks very high. He made Italian opera ridiculous in his _Cat Concert_; he gave serious offence to a hard-working, respectable trade in _The Tailors, a Tragedy for Warm Weather_; he attacked the medical profession in _The Devil on Two Sticks_; he parodied sentimental romance of the _Pamela_ school in his _Piety in Pattens_; and he offended all right-thinking persons, heterodox as well as orthodox, in _The Minor_, a travesty upon the methods of Wesley and his Church.

_The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruell Death of Pyramus and Thisbie_, originally published in the year 1600, if not the earliest burlesque in the English language, is certainly the model upon which are based all subsequent productions of the same cla.s.s which have been written for the British or American theatre. Stevens believes the t.i.tle to have been suggested to Shakspere by Dr. Thomas Preston's _Lamentable Tragedy Mixed Ful of Pleasant Mirth--Conteyning the Life of Cambises, King of Percia_.

The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is to be found in the fourth book of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_; and a volume called _Perymus and Thesbye_ was entered on the Stationers' Register in 1562-63. Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid was published in 1567, and several other versions of the tale were extant before the birth of Snout or Bottom, the incidents, of course, being the same in all. Shaksperean scholars find traces of other works in the different speeches of the hard-handed men of Athens, but the general impression is that the author's purpose was to travesty the verse of Golding. Limander and Helen are intended for Leander and Hero; Shafalus and Procrus for Cephalus and Procris, and Ninny for Ninus; a form of verbal contortion displayed by the modern burlesquer in _Sam Parr_ for _Zampa_, and _The Roof Scrambler_ for _Sonnambula_; while the lines--

"Whereat, with blade, with b.l.o.o.d.y, blamefull blade, He brauely broacht his boiling b.l.o.o.d.y breast,"

read like the blank-verse mouthed by the deep tragedians of the negro minstrel stage of to-day.

_The Midsummer-Night's Dream_, with Mr. Hilson as Snout and Mr. Placide as Bottom, was performed, "for the first time in America," at the Park Theatre, New York, on the 9th of November, 1826, when the stage in this country was upwards of three-quarters of a century old, and had a literature of its own, comparatively rich in comedy and tragedy, and when its burlesque, such as it was, undoubtedly felt the influence of _Pyramus and Thisbe_.

The second great burlesque upon the British stage was _The Rehearsal_, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in the reign of the Second Charles, first acted in 1672. It was original in design and brilliant in execution.

It introduced a popular author, John Dryden, engaged in superintendence of a rehearsal of one of his own tragedies--the tragedy in this instance consisting of clever parodies of portions of all the dramas then in vogue.

_The Rehearsal_ does not seem to have been produced in this country, although _The Critic_ of Sheridan, obviously based upon it, was performed at the John Street Theatre, New York, November 24th, 1788, when President Was.h.i.+ngton honored the entertainment with his presence. The cast has not been preserved, although William Winter believes Mr. Wignell to have played Puff, Mr. Ryan Whiskerandos, and Mrs. Morris (the second wife of Owen Morris) Tilberina. _The Critic_ still survives, as Mr. Daly's audiences well remember.

Burlesque upon the American stage, although not yet American burlesque, dates back to the very beginning of the history of the theatre in this country, when _The Beggar's Opera_, by John Gay, "written in ridicule of the musical Italian drama," was presented at the theatre in Na.s.sau Street, New York, on the 3d of December, 1750, with Thomas Kean as Captain Macheath. _The Beggar's Opera_ was first acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1727, and took the town by storm. The Archbishop of Canterbury preached a sermon against it; Sir John Fielding, the police-justice, officially begged the manager not to present it on _Sat.u.r.day evenings_, as it inspired the idle apprentices of London, who saw it on their night off, to imitate its hero's thieving deeds; and a certain critic condemned it as "the parent of that most monstrous of all absurdities, the comic opera."

Nevertheless it was immensely popular, and enjoyed an unusually long run.

As a literary production it is distinguished for its combination of nature, pathos, satire, and burlesque. It brought fame to its author, and, indirectly, something like wealth; and it made a d.u.c.h.ess of Lavinia Fenton, who was the original Polly. As that monstrous absurdity the comic opera is without question the parent of that still more monstrous absurdity the burlesque proper, Polly Peachum and Captain Macheath may be considered the very Pilgrim Parents of burlesque in the New World. They were followed almost immediately (February 25, 1751) by _Damon and Phillada, a Ballad Farce_, by Colley Cibber. Their Plymouth Rock very soon became too small to hold them; their descendants have taken possession of the whole land, and every _Mayflower_ that crosses the Atlantic to-day brings consignments of British blondes to swell their number. Before the Revolution Fielding's _Tom Thumb; or, The Tragedy of Tragedies_, a clever travesty, with Mrs. Hallam (Mrs. Douglas) as Queen Dollalolla, and Kane O'Hara's _Midas_, "a burlesque turning upon heathen deities, ridiculous enough in themselves, and too absurd for burlesque," had taken out their naturalization papers. _The Critic_, as has been shown, declared his intentions very shortly after the establishment of peace; and _Bombastes Furioso_ became a citizen of New York as early as 1816.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MRS. HALLAM (MRS. DOUGLAS).]

As Satan in the proverb builds invariably a chapel hard by the house of prayer, so does the demon of burlesque as surely erect his hovel next door to the palace of the legitimate tragedian. He spoils by his absurd architecture every neighborhood he enters; he even cuts off the views from the Castle of Elsinore, and disfigures the approaches to the royal tombs of the ancient Danish kings. John Poole's celebrated travesty of _Hamlet_, one of the earliest of its kind, was first published in London in 1811.

George Holland, afterwards so popular upon the American stage for many years, presented Poole's play on the occasion of his first benefit in this country, March 22, 1828, appearing himself as the First Grave-digger and as Ophelia. This was about the beginning of what, for want of a better term, may be styled "legitimate burlesque" in the United States. It inspired our managers to import, and our native authors to write, travesties upon everything in the standard drama which was serious and ought to have been respected; and it led to burlesques of _Antony and Cleopatra_, _Douglas_, _Macbeth_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Manfred_, _The Tempest_, _Valentine and Orson_, _Richard the Third_, _The Hunchback_, and many more; and between the years 1839, when William Mitch.e.l.l opened the Olympic, and 1859, when William E. Burton made his last bow to the New York public, was laid out and built between Chambers Street and the site of Brougham's Lyceum, on Broadway, corner of Broome Street, that metropolis of burlesque upon the ruins of which the dramatic antiquary, whose name is Palmy Days, now loves to sit and ponder.

The t.i.tles of its half-forgotten streets and buildings, collected at random from its old directories, then known as the bills of the play, will recall pleasant memories and excite gentle wonder. There were, among others, _A Lad in a Wonderful Lamp_, _The Bohea Man's Girl_, _Fried Shots_ [_Freischutz_], _Her Nanny_, _Lucy Did Sham Her Moor_, and _Lucy Did Lamm Her Moor_, _Man Fred_, _Cinder Nelly_, _Wench Spy_, _Spook Wood_, _Buy It Dear_, _'Tis Made of Cashmere_ [_Bayadere; or, The Maid of Cashmere_], _The Cat's in the Larder, or, The Maid with the Parasol_ [_La Gazza Ladra; or, The Maiden of Paillaisseau_], _The Humpback_, _Mrs. Normer_, and _Richard Number Three_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARK SMITH AS MRS. NORMER.]

Of this metropolis William Mitch.e.l.l was the first Lord Mayor. He was the inaugurator, if not the creator, of an entirely new school of dramatic architecture, which was as general, and sometimes as absurd, as the style which has since spread over the country at the expense of the reputation of good Queen Anne; and he led the popular taste for a number of years, to the great enjoyment of his clients, if not to their mental profit. William Horncastle, a good singer and a fair actor, and Dr. William K. Northall were his a.s.sistants in dramatic construction, and the authors of many of his extravagant productions. One of his earliest and most popular burlesques was ent.i.tled _La Mosquito_. It was based upon _The Tarantula_ of f.a.n.n.y Elssler, and was presented at the close of his first season. An extract from the bill will give a fair idea of the quality of the fooling:

"First time in this or any other country, a new comic burlesque ballet, ent.i.tled _La Mosquito_, in which Monsieur Mitch.e.l.l will make his first appearance as _une Premiere Danseuse_, and show his agility in a variety of terpsich.o.r.ean efforts of all sorts in the genuine Bolerocachucacacavonienne style.... The ballet is founded on the well-known properties of the mosquito, whose bites render the patient exceedingly impatient, and throws him into a fit of slapping and scratching and swearing delirium, commonly termed the '_Cacoethes Scratchendi_,' causing the unfortunate being to cut capers enough for a considerable number of legs of mutton. The scene lies in Hoboken," etc.

Concerning Mitch.e.l.l's performance, Dr. Northall writes, in _Before and Behind the Curtain_: "We shall long remember the comic humor with which he burlesqued the charming and graceful f.a.n.n.y. The manner of his exit from the stage at the conclusion of the dance was irresistibly comic, and the serious care with which he guided himself to the side scenes, to secure a pa.s.sage for his tremendous bustle, was very funny."

Mr. Mitch.e.l.l's other famous burlesque parts were Man Fred, Hamlet, w.i.l.l.y Walters (in _The Humpback_), Sam Parr, j.a.p (in _Loves of the Angels_), Antony, and Richard Number Three. Very few portraits of this old actor, either in character or otherwise, are known to the collectors. The accompanying print is from a drawing made by Charles Parsons while seated in the pit of the old Olympic half a century ago, when the draughtsman--a mere lad--was beginning his professional career. The original sketch was given to Mr. Mitch.e.l.l by the young artist, who received in return a pa.s.s to the theatre--the highest ambition of the boys of that period.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM MITCh.e.l.l AS RICHARD NUMBER THREE.]

Mitch.e.l.l was forced to retire from the mayoralty before the close of his last season at the Olympic, in 1849-50, having been deposed the previous year by William E. Burton at the Chambers Street house. As Lester Wallack said in his _Memories_, Burton did everything that Mitch.e.l.l did, and did it in a better way, with better players and better plays. His first burlesque was a cruel treatment of the opera of _Lucia_, followed immediately by a heartless travesty of Dibdin's _Valentine and Orson_.

These were succeeded by _The Tempest_, in which Mrs. Brougham (Miss Nelson), a lady of enormous physical size, played Ariel. A little while later Mr. Brougham played Macbeth to the Macduff of Thomas B. Johnstone, the Banquo of Oliver B. Raymond, and the Lady Macbeth of Burton himself.

Mark Smith made a fascinating Norma, Leffingwell played the Stern Parient in _Villikens and his Dinah_, and Charles Fisher, in white tights, a tunic, gauze wings, and a flowing wig, pirouetted with Mrs. Skerrett in a production called _St. Cupid_, in which Mr. Burton appeared as Queen Bee, a Gypsy Woman.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN BROUGHAM AND GEORGINA HODSON IN "POCAHONTAS."]

It would be an easy matter to fill many of these pages with stories of the humorous productions and the laughable performances of Burton and Brougham on the Chambers Street boards. The literature of the American theatre overflows with anecdotes of their quarrels and their reconciliations upon the stage, their jokes upon each other, their impromptu wit, their unexpected "gags"--which were always looked for--the liberties they took with their authors, their audiences, and themselves, and, above all, with their incomparable acting in every part, whether it was serious or frivolous.

The last, and in many respects the greatest, of the trio of actors, authors, and managers who may be considered the founders of American burlesque, began his brilliant but brief reign at the Lyceum, at Broome Street, late in 1850, about the time of the retirement of Mitch.e.l.l, and long before his later rival, Burton, was ready to lay down his sceptre. If America has ever had an Aristophanes, John Brougham was his name. His _Pocahontas_ and _Columbus_ are almost cla.s.sics. They rank among the best, if they are not the very best, burlesques in any living language. Their wit is never coa.r.s.e, they ridicule nothing which is not a fit subject for ridicule, they outrage no serious sentiment, they hurt no feelings, they offend no portion of the community, they shock no modesty, they never blaspheme; and, as Dr. Benjamin Ellis Martin has happily expressed it, their author was "the first to give to burlesque its crowning comic conceit of utter earnestness, of solemn seriousness."