Actitud hacia la adopción de un automóvil Nivel 1

Exactly two years after the premiere of Terry’s Guy Mannering, Isaac Pocock opened Covent Garden’s new season with his own Scott opera, also in collaboration with Bishop.

Ever the astute man of the theatre, Pocock, not content in having just one Scottish bard on his playbill, adroitly subtitled his play Auld Lang Syne. As previously discussed, Robert Burns’ famous ditty had by this point become the essence of nostalgic Scottish folk tradition, disseminated through growing incorporation within stage performance, antiquarian

publication and public ceremony. The several hundred other airs known to have been included within productions of the opera at one point or another, include another Burns classic, ‘Comin’ thro’ the Rye’, Jacobite songs such as ‘Charlie’s Drums are Sounding’ and even a nationalist ballad from the pen of Scott himself in the form of ‘Blue Bonnets Over the Border’¹⁸⁸.

Example 2.6

The reviewer for The Times praised both the principal female singer, Miss Stephens for doing ‘great justice to the beautiful national airs of Scotland’ and Bishop for his ‘great taste’

in arranging such numbers¹⁸⁹. It was as Parke notes, Bishop’s unparalleled talent for selecting the ‘most popular Scotch airs’¹⁹⁰, matched by his great ability as an arranger adept in catering for contemporary taste which made him the most prolific of native composers to work on Scott-inspired operas.

188 Bolton, H. Scott Dramatized (Mansell, 1992)

189 Fenner, T. Opera in London: Views of the Press, 1785-1830 (Southern Illinois University, 1994)

190 Parke, W.T. Musical Memoirs, Vol. II (Colburn & Bentley, 1830) p. 135.

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Though quite often billed as a ‘Scottish Romance’ or (particularly in Scotland) ‘national opera’, the nationalist element was carefully tempered, placing the Scottish nation firmly in the past. This was a point Scott had always been quite adamant about from his earliest writings. The Postscript to Waverley reads as such:

There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, has

undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland. The effects of the insurrection of 1745 – the destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs – the abolition of the heritable jurisdictions of the lowland nobility and the barons – the total eradication of the Jacobite party, which, averse to intermingle with the English, or adopt their customs, long continued to pride themselves upon maintaining ancient Scottish manners and customs, - commenced this innovation. The gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time … But the change, though steadily and rapidly progressive, has, nevertheless, been gradual; and like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have made until we fix our eye on the now distant point from which we have drifted. Such of the present generation as can recollect the last twenty or twenty-five years of the eighteenth century, will be fully aware of the truth of this statement.¹⁹¹

Whilst, as Colley suggests, some Lowland Scots still saw their highland neighbours as little more than ‘savages’ or ‘aborigines’¹⁹², Scott’s romances had done much to make this image a largely historical rather than contemporary one. Characters such as Rob Roy, made appealing by his rustic chivalry and dogged resilience, whilst often compared allegorically in song with England’s own outlaw-hero Robin Hood, verged closer to the image of the noble savage ready for domestication than that of a dangerous political freedom fighter threatening the status quo of English dominance. The insularity of this ancient and dying breed is highlighted by Roy’s firm rebuke of Bailie Jarvie’s offer to teach his sons the ways of a city-dwelling merchant; the former preferring all of Glasgow be burnt down before their

introduction to such a lifestyle.¹⁹³ Roy’s educational syllabus is simple and hardy;

‘Hamish can bring down a black-cock on the wing with a single bullet; and his brother drive a dirk through with a two –inch deal board’¹⁹⁴

It is nevertheless one whose future seems to pale in comparison to the new economic order represented by Jarvie’s urban bourgeoisie. This dichotomy between two very distinct cultures, that of the middling (often theatre going) metropolitan and the rustic ways of those found in Britain’s geographical and social fringes, was one that both Bishop and Pocock were clearly at home with whilst penning Rob Roy; their other works increasingly focussed upon the exploits of Empire elsewhere on the globe, routinely depicting caricatures of exotic

191 Kerr, Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller (Cambridge, 1989).

192 Colley, ‘Britishness and otherness: an argument’, in Journal of British Studies, Vol.31. p.314.

193 Pocock, I. & Bishop, H, Rob Roy (Larpent Collection of Plays).

194 Pocock, I. & Bishop, H, Rob Roy (Larpent Collection of Plays).

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natives and nomadic tribesman, the image of the ‘noble savage’ integral to their narrative.¹⁹⁵ Whilst developed from the pastoral operas of Shield’s time which idealised the simplicity of provincial life, these works, like Rob Roy often focussed upon the cultural redemption of

‘savage’ characters who were essentially good-hearted , innocent beings. It is unsurprising that an almost parallel production of Rob Roy by an anonymous playwright which presented the title character as practically genteel, his language eloquent and manners refined, was never revived at the Olympic.¹⁹⁶ Late Georgian audiences evidently preferred their highlanders coarse and brusque, in sharp contrast to the anglicised Scots whose urbanity they encountered daily in most major English towns and cities. Indeed, many Scots

themselves (as indicated by the popularity of such works north of the Border) acknowledged this development imposed largely by her Anglo-Saxon neighbours, holding the civilising process as one of necessary progress as opposed to any destruction of an ancient civilisation of which Ossianic myth had by the early nineteenth century day failed to established recognition of.¹⁹⁷ For Scott, who was obviously gratified by the civilising process he described his nation as having undergone, the clansman was the ‘distant point’ from which Scotland had long since (and with but the slightest of sentimental regret) drifted;¹⁹⁸ his most successful theatrical adapters were equally glad and astute to accommodate this

interpretation in their works.

The national implications conveyed by a work such as Rob Roy seem a little confused at times; whilst the title character spends much of the Opera waxing lyrical about the tyrannous English and the wrongs done towards him and his people, some of the rhetoric found in the libretto transmits a quite different and in many ways contradictory message, notably that found in the piece’s finale:

‘Scots can for their country die, Ne’er from Britain’s foes they fly’¹⁹⁹

Thisis obviously an allusion to the sheer number of Scots who in the previous decades had come to swell the ranks of the British Army and its Highland regiments: by 1830, twelve regiments bore Scottish titles, where only two had in the previous century.²⁰⁰ It seems an unusual, if not entirely inappropriate statement therefore for a piece in which its Scottish protagonist conspires against the British state and its emphatically English martial presence.

In many ways, this eclectic mixture of textual subjects, with their enigmatic, eponymous hero, and his strongly anti-Hanoverian vein, illustrates the growing comfort of

195 Burden, M. ‘Opera in the London Theatres’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730-1830, J. Moody, ed. (Cambridge, 2007).

196Bolton, H. Scott Dramatized (Mansell, 1992)p.167.

197 Kidd, C. Subverting Scotland’s Past (Cambridge, 1993) P.279.

198 Lincoln, A. Walter Scott and Modernity (Edinburgh, 2007) pp. 122-7.

199 Pocock, I. & Bishop, H, Rob Roy (Larpent Collection of Plays).

200 Cookson, J.E. The British Armed Nation, 1793-1815 (Oxford, 1997)pp.150-152.

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Napoleonic Britain with representations of the formerly anxious fractures found in the politics of national union. That English audiences revelled so enthusiastically in Roy’s exploits depicted vividly on the stage, confirms this view. The sensitivity towards such subjects, particularly during the much maligned earlier period of George III’s own unpopularity and even the previous decade of war, had been lessened by the triumphant experience of victory on the continent, ushering in a more confident and reassured attitude towards topics previously marginalised as taboo. Nevertheless, the brief juxtaposition of

‘British’ rhetoric in a work not simply devoid of but presenting a hero in overt opposition to any unionist sentiment, seems a little odd, perhaps betraying the necessity felt by dramatists, even in the optimistic climate of the regency, to reinforce a patriotic message which placed the events firmly within their historically fictive context. Whether they did so for the peace and comfort of the late-Georgian public whose forefathers had just been berated by the clansman, or in response to the demands of a conservatively-minded censor, this not entirely discernible. Whichever way we should interpret the work’s language, the dramatic inclusion of Scotch airs in a context which allowed their implicit political messages to be heard with clarity, had evidently become perfectly acceptable, indicating that within contemporary discourses of nation they no longer possessed the potent threat of earlier decades.