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‘A very nice Theatre at Edinr.’: Sir Walter Scott and Control of the Theatre Royal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Christopher Worth
Christopher Worth
Affiliation:
Lecturer in English and Deputy Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University
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Extract

In short, the drama is in ours, and in most civilized countries, an engine possessing the most powerful effect on the manners of society.

Thus the idea of theatre is political … it must make possible the enactment of an actual political world in the midst of painful and complex transformations within and between politics.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Summer 1992 , pp. 86 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1992

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References

Notes

1. Scott, Walter, Miscellaneous Prose Works, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Cadeil, 1847), I, 805.Google Scholar

2. Hermassi, Karen, Polity and Theatre in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 200–1.Google Scholar

3. See Mennie, Duncan M., ‘Sir Walter Scott's Unpublished Translations of German Plays’, Modern Language Review, 33 (04 1938), 234–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Needier, G. H., Goethe and Scott (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1950), especially pp. 21–30.Google Scholar

4. The Letters of Walter Scott, edited by Grierson, H. J. C., 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1932–1936).Google Scholar Further references to this edition of Scott's letters appear in the text.

5. But only a few months later Scott is broaching the possibility of writing a tragedy about Castle Douglas, perhaps imagining a much more Shakespearian style (it is never written) (Letters, I, 151).Google Scholar

6. Cox, Jeffrey, In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England and France (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), p. 118.Google Scholar

7. See Cox; Otten, Terry, The Deserted Stage: The Search for Dramatic Form in Nineteenth-Century England (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1972)Google Scholar (he doesn't mention Scott); Steiner, George, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber & Faber, 1961)Google Scholar; and Cave, Richard Allen, (ed.), The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe and Towota, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1986).Google Scholar

8. Miscellaneous Prose Works, 6 vols (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1827), VI, 467.Google Scholar

9. See, for example, Crito's Letter to the Manager of the Edinburgh Theatre, with Additions … (Edinburgh, 1800)Google Scholar, Letters Respecting the Performances at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, Originally Addressed to the Editor of the Scots Chronicle, under the Signature of Timothy Plain, and Published in that Paper during the Years 1797, 1798, 1799, and 1800 (Edinburgh: printed for G. Gray, 1800)Google Scholar, and The Theatre; or the Letters of Candidus, &c, on the Performances of the Edinburgh Stage, in 1802. With considerable Additions by the Author (Edinburgh: Printed for J. Buchanan, 1802).Google Scholar

10. N.L.S., MS. 19, fir. I am grateful to the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland for permission to quote from MSS. in their possession.

11. MS. 19, f4.

12. MS. 353, f60r–f60v.

13. MS. 1056, f155r–f156r.

14. MS. 1056, f157v. For his earlier comments on the 1788 Patent see MS. 353, f29r–v.

15. See for example, MS. 353, f33r–v.

16. The Assignees consisted of the following by virtue of their office: the Lord Chief Baron, Lord Advocate, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Lord Provost, and the Solicitor-General; and the following on an individual basis: Dundas, Robert, Erskine, William, Hay, John, Hume, David, Mackenzie, Henry, Murray, Patrick, and Scott, Walter (Edinburgh Annual Register, for 1809 (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne, 1811), p. 385).Google Scholar The names indicate the Tory weighting of the group.

17. See, for example, Scott, 's comments on the ‘moderate stage’Google Scholar to Baillie, , Letters, II, 258Google Scholar, where he also records the anecdote of Siddons getting the favour of the Provost by letting him supply the materials for the clan costumes, thus demonstrating an acute political awareness.

18. 12 March, 1810, quoted by Carhart, Margaret S., The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), p. 146.Google Scholar

19. The London performance Scott saw was at Lane, Drury on 29th 05, 1815Google Scholar, with Joanna Baillie and Lord Byron. Mrs Bartley (Sarah Smith) was playing Helen. It was her benefit night. See Carhart, , 153.Google Scholar

20. There are no really satisfactory accounts of Scott as playwright (not even as a bad one), although John B. Logan does have a number of comments to make in his enthusiastic but not altogether accurate celebration, ‘Sir Walter Scott and the Drama’, Aberdeen University Review, 161 (Spring 1979), pp. 49–60.Google ScholarCameron, Alasdair, ‘Scottish Drama in the Nineteenth Century’, in The History of Scottish Literature, gen. ed. Craig, Cairns, vol. 3 Nineteenth Century, edited by Douglas Gifford (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), pp. 429–41Google Scholar, although necessarily treating Scott briefly, has perhaps the most interesting criticism. See also Dustan, William Gordon, ‘Sir Walter Scott and the Drama’ (Unpubl. Ph. D. dissertation, Univ. of Edinburgh, 1933).Google Scholar

21. The King's Jaunt: George IV in Scotland, August 1822 (London: Collins, 1988).Google Scholar

22. See her Moving Pictures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 28–9.Google Scholar

23. Most notably by Donald Fraser Mackenzie in his entertaining if unscholarly introduction to Scottish theatre, Scotland's First National Theatre (Edinburgh: Stanley Press, 1963).Google Scholar He emphasizes, as I would wish to do as well, that Scott's role in the excitement over Rob Roy consisted of more than the original story: he had represented through the Waverley novels a new image of Scotland and nationhood open for dramatic appropriation. See also Cameron, , p.429.Google Scholar

24. Cameron, , p. 431.Google Scholar There is already a considerable literature on the adaptations of Scott's novels, and several scholars, notably Jerome Mitchell, Richard Ford and Philip Bolton have catalogued them. The most interesting commentaries remain, to my mind, Cameron, 's and Bolton, H. Philip's in his introductions to Dickens Dramatized (N.Y.: Mansell, 1987)Google Scholar and Scott Dramatized (N.Y.: Mansell, 1992).Google Scholar Barbara Bell's excellent statistical assessment of the information on the playbills of Scott adaptations will provide invaluable evidence for more extensive critical accounts of the process by which Scott's novels reached the theatre-going publics of Britain (see her unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Glasgow, 1991).

25. The Visionary, edited with an introduction by Garside, Peter (Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press, 1984).Google Scholar

26. McGlinchee, Claire, ‘Sir Walter Scott: A Man of the Theatre’, in Scott and His Influence. The Papers of the Aberdeen Scott Conference, 1982, edited by Alexander, J. H. and Hewitt, David, ‘Occasional Papers No. 6’ (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1983), pp. 507–10.Google Scholar