Portraying political theatre: parody and caricature, ancient and modern

Abstract This article builds on observations made in its author’s book The Hero’s Life-Choice (2023) and examines four nineteenth-century cartoons by John Doyle and his son Richard. It shows how the concetto underlying their title ‘a famous actor between Tragedy and Comedy’ descends from an eighteenth-century painting by Joshua Reynolds of the Shakespearean actor Garrick between the same two female personifications. This painting itself parodied the parable ‘Heracles at the Crossroads’ or ‘The Choice of Heracles between Virtue and Pleasure’, by the fifth-century bc Greek sophist Prodicus. The three earliest cartoons show two politicians on either side of, respectively, a personification of England, a king of England, and a Prime Minister of England. They may thus be interpreted as adumbrating the present-day conviction that politics is merely performative theatre. The appearance of Prime Minister Robert Peel in the latest of John Doyle’s cartoons chimes with the independently attested view by some contemporaries of his career as that of an actor-manager. A final section attempts to explain the unexpected reappearance of the ‘famous actor’ trope in two twentieth-century political cartoons and its definitive disappearance thereafter.