Efecto de la guerra en Europa del este

English Past, British Present: Shakespeare’s History Plays and the Soundtrack to Late-Georgian Patriotism

Like most plays of the period, the use of ‘incidental’ music in early nineteenth century Shakespeare productions was quite commonplace. Composers had been providing musical accompaniments to Shakespeare’s works since the time of the bard himself, and in a tradition stretching as far back as ancient Greek drama. Following the Restoration, the impresario Sir William Davenant began to reintroduce Shakespeare to English audiences, but with the Lord Chamberlain’s caveat that they should somehow be ‘reformed’.²⁷⁰ This prompted a number of highly successful musical productions, notably The Tempest of 1673, and Matthew Locke’s series of airs and dances for Macbeth, becoming integral to stagings of the Scottish play for the next two centuries.²⁷¹ By the time of Bishop’s Shakespeare operas, the serious application of a composer’s faculties to the production of incidental music had been confirmed by the works of German musicians creating musical backdrops for their own national dramas. Beethoven’s incidental music to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Egmont and Joseph Heinrich von Collin’s Coriolan, though written for specific theatrical

performances have since become staples of the concert-hall repertory, providing a prototype for the descriptive symphonic poems of later romanticism. With a literary giant of

Shakespeare’s stature, English composers were surprisingly reluctant to set the national poet

270Christopher R. Wilson, et al. "Shakespeare, William." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed July 16, 2013,

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/25567.

271R. Fiske: ‘The Macbeth Music’, ML, xliv (1964), 114–25

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to their own incidental scoring. The most famous Shakespearean incidental music of the period was in fact that of a foreigner, and a German one at that. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826) Felix Mendelssohn, still a teenager when composing the overture, managed to create possibly the most enduring piece of Shakespeare’s musical legacy to date. In Britain however, the music most commonly provided for London productions of Shakespeare seem on the whole to have overlooked the new symphonic approach to descriptive, subject specific theatrical music. Instead, the growing pageantry associated with historically

‘accurate’ productions looked to the existing national-patriotic musical idiom as the source for their tonal scenery.

In celebration of George IV’s accession, spring of 1821 saw Kemble’s Covent Garden production of Henry IV part II. This included an extensively choreographed coronation scene, designed with the most rigorous verisimilitude in mind. The periodical John Bull reviewed the procession;

‘A more splendid pageant never graced a Theatre; it reflects the highest credit on the proprietors for their liberality, and on those to whose particular care the arrangement of the processions has been confided.’²⁷²

Central to the spectacle was its musical backdrop; playbills for this particular occasion detail a performance of ‘The Coronation Anthem’, to ‘be sung by all the Principal Performers of the Theatre, assisted by a Numerous Choir’. Whilst the lack of information found on Playbills for the performances precludes absolute certainty, we can assume that this was composed by George IV’s favourite, Thomas Attwood. The fact that Attwood (organist to the King), was tasked with producing a new work for his patron George IV’s coronation the very same year²⁷³, strongly suggests that it was his anthem and not simply the usual

Handelian fare alone that was performed. Attwood’s I was Glad, with its fanfares and melodic quotation of ‘God Save the King’ drew principally from the theatrical mode of composition; its inclusion within the opulent scenes one finds described in printed versions of the play, was therefore quite natural²⁷⁴. The unmistakable ritualistic parallels Covent Garden thus sought to portray with the use of patriotic music was strictly in keeping with the conservative, monarchist stance held by the patent theatre under the Kemble family’s management. For their purposes, music played a role of formalistic conformity. Though entirely anachronistic, an anthem such as I was Glad could, when compounded with patriotic imaginings of its ‘historical’ Shakespearian subject matter, serve to form an

ultra-nationalistic cultural expression of quintessential ‘Britishness’. Most importantly for the

272Odell, G.C.D, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, p. 169.

273Nicholas Temperley. "Attwood, Thomas." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed June 12, 2013, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/01484.

274W.J. Gatens: ‘Thomas Attwood (1765–1838), forefather of Victorian Cathedral Music’, Victorian Cathedral Music in Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 1986) pp. 98-9.

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Kembles however, was the fact that this kind of densely orchestrated ritual drew in the crowds. For the thousands of theatregoers who might not have had the opportunity to witness such a spectacle in the surroundings of Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden’s auditorium provided an arena in which the same messages could be imparted, wrapped in its own ecstatic, sensual treatment of the national past.

The inclusion of Handel’s music was equally important as a kind of stock programme for Shakespearean pageantry; present in Kemble’s Henry IV²⁷⁵, it was a powerful allusion not only to coronation proceedings, but a body of works from a composer who himself represented a somewhat peculiar figure of Britishness. Although a naturalized British citizen, Handel’s music came to symbolise the royal household more than any composer before or since. Imported by George I from his native Hanover as the new monarch’s Kapellmeister, Handel’s eminence cemented in his lifetime by the enormity of both his character and talents, was continued if not superseded by the dedication to his works fostered during the following half-century. ²⁷⁶ The Handel festivals which began in 1784 would become ever more magnificent throughout the following decade. In 1791, the celebrations even received royal patronage and the grandest of all venues in the form of Westminster abbey. ²⁷⁷ Presided over by George III himself, these events, whose performers numbered the thousands and congregations greater still, equated to something of a national celebration and Handel the German –born composer became a British ‘institution’²⁷⁸. Whilst Handel never composed any Shakespearean Music himself,²⁷⁹ within the context of Henry IV, his music like other anthems placed the present ceremonial of British Kingship within the English past. There was no more potent symbol of the Hanoverian dynasty’s direct influence upon the course of British art in the later eighteenth century than its patronage of Handel, and to have one of their distant monarchical ancestors processing to the very music composed specifically to exalt their own modern kingship was a powerful reminder of their historical legitimacy.

Where Bishop had been hailed as the bringer of a new, traditional style of English

composition in his Shakespeare operas, they were after all comedies, and ones that had little to do with a specifically English setting at that. The music which had become associated with legitimate Shakespeare productions was of a specifically British age, and yet whilst finding itself deeply set within Shakespeare’s English past managed to project messages of British modernity in the present. The Handelian themes and anthems of a coronation scene

275 Examiner, July 1, 1821.

276 Brewer, J. Pleasures of the Imagination (Harper Collins, 1997) pp. 404-5

277 H.C. Robbins Landon, ‘Music’ in Cambridge Guide to the arts in Britain, pp.231-3.

278 G.B Shaw

279 Cudworth, C ‘Settings of Shakespeare’s Lyrics, 1660-1960.’ in Shakespeare in Music P. Hartnoll ed. (Macmillan,1964) p. 65.

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bore no resemblance to the rituals of ancient English Kingship, and certainly had nothing in common with the insular values of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan England. They were absolute symbols of Hanoverian Monarchy and British Union, composed for and championed by George III. Included in national festivals, fetes and coronations alike, their fusion within Shakespeare’s historical setting, was a statement of legitimacy for the Royal household. For the theatre proprietors who included them within Shakespeare productions, they were clear signs of their own loyalty to the benefactors of their Royal patents. This cross-fertilization between the ceremonies of the playhouse and those of state was in part, as many theatre historians are keen to point out, the result of a wider theatricalization of society ( ‘King John’ Kemble’s proprietorship of Covent Garden was often likened to that of an absolutist tyrant)²⁸⁰. Equally, it was an alarming reminder of how surreptitiously the values of

monarchy and its British national agenda had managed to infiltrate the formerly questioning medium of theatre, which now looked to commercial potential as its raison d’être.

In this sense, historians such as Linda Colley may be justified in arguing that Shakespeare’s representation within a ‘British’ national culture of late Georgian Britain, ‘remained

variable, sporadic, and at the mercy of local and private interest groups’.²⁸¹ What should also be acknowledged is that theatrically speaking this representation became invariably, if not uniformly, one operating within a discourse of nation and more often than not that nation was indisputably British. In the case of London playhouses, the bard’s image was closely allied to wider notions of Britishness, both in how his works were presented and in turn received. For managements of the Patent theatres their position as legitimate institutions not only depended on the production of Shakespeare, but allowed them to use their exclusive rights to his work in its appropriation for their own agendas, political and financial. Whilst the years of war with France and its censorial influence had managed to all but silence tampering with the national poet, the decade and a half of peace which followed opened up a new arena of contention surrounding the increasing number of new ways that Shakespeare could be produced. This fiercely fought over theatrical terrain saw its combatants more often than not employing the language of nation as their weapon of choice. Whether in the case of the patriotic pageantry found in the historical productions of the early 1820s or the affront to national taste many accused Frederic Reynolds’ operas of having perpetrated, the

articulation of opinions and ideas surrounding Shakespeare were never far from those involving the state of the British nation itself.

280 Baer, M. Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford, 1992) pp.10-12.

281 Colley, L. Shakespeare and the Limits of National Culture in the Hayes Robinson Lecture Series No. 2 (1999) p.18.

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