Much more pertinent to discussions of British identity, was another contested idea of national definition surrounding issues of social status. For Scotland’s urban population who formed Rob Roy’s lasting audience, in many cases it was not the Highland Chief, but more often the endearing figure of Bailie Nicol Jarvie who captivated their interest201. A caricature of Edinburgh’s bourgeois classes, Jarvie’s financial prudence and social propriety
represented their own middling, day to day concerns both sympathetically and with humour.
One contemporary reviewer of Charles Mackay’s performance of the role (a veteran interpreter of Jarvie on stage) summed up the view,
‘it is not acting; it is reality. It is the very Bailie Jarvie who lived in the Saltmarket some hundred years ago, with all his eccentricities, and his warmth of heart’202.
The ability of the audience to identify with characters sympathetic to their own position was as essential to the urban theatre goers of the early nineteenth century as the mythological heroes of earlier opera-serie had been to the aristocratic patrons of court establishments in the eighteenth. The movement from elite-centric establishments to more commercially
201 Bolton, H. Scott Dramatized (Mansell, 1992)
202Bolton, H. Scott Dramatized (Mansell, 1992) p. 164.
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egalitarian ones, dependent upon the financial support of Britain’s expanding middle classes had cemented this shift Where Giulio Cesare and Orpheus had by bold example helped to inspire a generation of ancien regime princes, Nicol Jarvie was the unlikely hero of a new economically driven social order. In this sense, he was not simply a ‘Scottish’ character but one who for English urban audiences mirrored both the anglicised Scots who formed a substantial part of London’s population, and the capital’s society and its bourgeois interests more widely. This juxtaposition of Roy, the semi-feral highlander and Jarvie the urbane, modern Scot was one which clearly equated economic modernism within notions of
collective ‘British’ identity in the same way that pastoral backwardness was associated with Scotland’s independent past. For Scottish and English audiences alike, it may have been easy to forget that Jarvie was historically conceived at all, and whilst Roy was enigmatic and daring, the Bailie was in essence a reflection themselves.
Such class stereotypes were not always used to merely flatter the audience. David Buchanan’s research into the various stage adaptations of Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, demonstrates how contrasting dramatic renderings of the same work could act both to reinforce the conservative class-associated assumptions of London’s theatre going
audiences, whilst also playing upon volatile social issues found at all levels of contemporary society. His comparison of the music dramas offered by Dibdin at the Surrey Theatre and Terry at Covent Garden displays this stark contrast. Though provided with an advanced copy of the novel by his friend Scott, Terry’s Heart of Midlothian took both longer to produce and diverges more obviously from its literary source,203 excluding a number of minor and
peripheral characters representing the working classes and their disreputable aristocratic champions. This conservative approach taken by Terry was very much in line with his associate, Scott’s theatrical opinions, and undoubtedly resulted from the close collaboration of the two men in ‘Terry-fying’ numerous Scott novels for the stage.204 Given his
aforementioned dim-view of theatre audiences, Scott realised that what was appropriate for a readership was not quite suitable for the more tentative atmosphere of the playhouse
auditorium; his Life of Kemble, was emphatic in his beliefs regarding the social-role of theatre as a forum of good-natured condescension serving to level the elite’s pretensions on stage whilst in reality making them more socially robust;
a full audience attending a first-rate piece may be compared to a national
convention, to which every order of the community, from the peers to the porters send their representatives . . . The good-natured gaiety with which the higher orders see the fashionable follies which they practice treated with light satire for the amusement of the middling and
203 D. Buchanan, Popular Reception by Dramatic Adaptation: The case of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian, in European Romantic Review, 22:6, p. 752
204 Lang, A. ‘Introduction’ in The Heart of Midlothian, W. Scott (Boston, 1893).
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poorer classes, has no little effect in checking the rancorous feelings of envy which superior birth, wealth and station are apt to engender . . . In short, the drama is in ours, and in most civilized countries, an engine possessing the most powerful manners of society.205
Scott’s own characters certainly catered for this purpose. The figure of the eccentric and amorous laird Dumbiedykes sends up the authority of provincial gentry and their failed attempts to woo social inferiors. His various entanglements also allow for the mockery of the delicate aristocratic disposition; the scene with the unhinged Madge whose advances result in a brush with the law, ending comically with the pair being dragged to prison, and forming the musical finale to Terry’s second act.
Example 2.7
Whilst Dumbiedykes is subject to the chiding and trickery of others throughout the opera, it is important to remember however that in the end, his security and privileged position is never questioned; by virtue of birth he, unlike Madge, always finds his way out of the prison cell.
Terry’s amalgamation of several characters (including the rector, Willingham) symbolic of local Scottish civic and ecclesiastical authority within the single personage of the English Magistrate Oakdale, displays a quite different and indeed less nuanced conception of ultimate authority from that found in Scott; for Terry, this is vested in a single, secular,
205 Bolton, Women, Nationalism and the Romantic stage, pp.16-17.
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Anglo-Westminster centric body more congenial to the cosmopolitan but nevertheless rather conservative London audience which frequented theatres such as Covent Garden, with its cherished royal patent.206 With Scott’s known collaboration on the work, allowing the omission of such characters can only indicate a form of acquiescence by the author on grounds of his more conservative ideology regarding theatrical productions, and Terry’s own pragmatic approach to legitimate London audiences.
This also explains to some extent Terry’s elimination of the feminine monarchical role embodied by Queen Caroline and her Royal prerogative as found in the novel, which in contemporary terms could only have alluded to the Prince Regent’s tempestuous relations with his own queen-to-be, Caroline of Brunswick. Dibdin’s production for the Surrey obviously had no such qualms with upsetting the corpulent Prince, even elevating of the consort in theatrical terms in a way that could only have acted as an unambiguous metaphoric endorsement of her namesake, the Princess of Wales. From the sympathetic portrayal of the ‘insane’ Madge Wildfire to the expanded role of Jeanie Deans, Dibdin’s production was as a whole less willing to follow the conventional character types and scene structures readily found in Terry’s version. This was of course more easily achieved at the Surrey which hadn’t the same practical restrictions of royal censorial jurisdiction and prudish audiences found at Covent Garden.207 Scott himself compared the riots which broke out in support of Caroline to the Popish Plot of Charles II’s reign, and though Scott tackled this very issue in his later Peveril of the Peak (1823), his interest in varieties of popular agitation was not to be encouraged in the more socially far-reaching surroundings of the London theatre.208 Where Dibdin, true to Scott’s novel depicted ‘society broadly and in transition’, in Buchanan’s words, ‘Terry presents his audience with a portrait of Britain as his audience wishes to see it’, that is, true to Scott’s theatrical ideology, if not his literary method. Either way, it is clear from the numerous productions of Dibdin’s work which continued to be staged (compared to just sixteen nights of Terry’s) that for contemporary audiences, it was the former which proved more popular.
Scotland could therefore act in a multitude of metaphoric modes. As a location it could serve not only as a place of dissidence and revolt, but as the arena in which different and sometimes competing notions of centrally based British authority could be exercised, its wild landscapes and hardy peoples representing a stark contrast to the excesses of regency society and its debauched goings on. For Scottish and English audiences alike to witness this multiplicity of themes enacted out upon the stage, and without the conflict which evidently
206 D. Buchanan, Popular Reception by Dramatic Adaptation: The case of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian, in European Romantic Review, 22:6, p. 752
207 D. Buchanan, Popular Reception by Dramatic Adaptation: The case of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian, in European Romantic Review, 22:6,
208 McMaster, G. Scott and Society (Cambridge, 1981) p.130.
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characterised earlier instances of theatrical integration (notably the ‘Culloden Riot of 1749209), in many ways signalled the reconciliation of cultures, Highland and Lowland, Scottish and English, under the umbrella of an accepted ‘British’ imagining of staged Scottish History, represented by Scott’s dramatist adapters.