Stock Pieces British Repertory Theatre, 1760–1830

Stock Pieces is a valuable book. Valladares, though, buries the lead on page 10: “this book is the first to make the stock component of the repertoire its object of critical enquiry.” Stock Pieces flips the script about British Romantic originality and authenticity and counters longstanding criticisms of stock plays as “conservative, nostalgic, or unremarkable” (5). Valladares contends that reperformances of stock plays “constituted the most dynamic, versatile entertainments at the disposal of Romantic-period theatre producers and consumers” (20). Throughout Stock Pieces, Valladares thoughtfully interweaves narratives about African-diasporic representations, casts Shakespeare’s plays in supporting instead of lead roles, and attends to the whole show of Romantic theatre—often five–six hours including mainpiece, between-act entertainments, and afterpiece. Valladares’s meticulous archival research transports us from London to regional, provincial, and colonial stages, and her argument demonstrates how stock repertory pieces were reperformed strategically for economic, political, affective, and aesthetic reasons.Stock Pieces has an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. The Introduction begins with an anonymous letter likely written in 1787 to Richard Brinsley Sheridan (playwright, theatre manager, and Parliamentarian), asking him to stage Thomas Southerne’s well-known adaptation (1695) of Aphra Behn’s Oronooko (1688), to galvanize a nascent abolitionist movement. Valladares draws on Southerne’s Oroonoko and other Oroonoko adaptations from 1759–1787 to illustrate how Romantic-period stock pieces often dramatized slavery. Following this gambit, Valladares states her rationale for focusing on the Romantic period: “British theatrical culture boomed during these years—in provincial and colonial towns and cities as well as London” (4) Her reasons for choosing 1760 as this period’s start date, however, are unclear. Why not 1766, which she dubs a “watershed” year because the Haymarket became London’s third patent theatre, or another touchstone year in theatre history (4)? The Introduction usefully defines repertoire, stock, and the prefix re; identifies three types of stock plays: active (performed frequently), dormant (revived infrequently), and preempted (staged on special days); and describes the diversity of Romantic-period theatre audiences, the significance of theatre reviewers, and the censorship power of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Using an intertheatrical methodology, Valladares examines the stock repertoire as “a system of cultural preservation . . . of transfer and transformation indispensable to an institution that functioned both as a site for entertainment, culture, and civic education and as an arena for experimentation with the social performances that permeated everyday life” (9).Chapter 1’s case study of Isaac Bickerstaff’s and Charles Dibdin’s comic opera The Padlock (1768) details how a box office hit could become a repertory stock play. The Padlock was one of the most frequently performed afterpieces at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Its songs were popular on and offstage; in minor theatres it was adapted into puppet shows, ballet, and burletta; in private theatricals its major characters often cross-dressed; on benefit nights new actresses were featured (sometimes cross-dressed and in blackface); and in the 1820s the Black American actor Ira Aldridge transformed Dibdin’s blackface character Mungo into a complex racial critique.Chapter 2 investigates Romantic-period reinventions of John Fletcher’s comedies Rule a Wife (1624), an active stock piece, and The Chances (1617), a dormant stock piece. As is well known, Francis Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s plays were more popular than Shakespeare’s on the Restoration stage, and Shakespeare’s plays only eclipsed theirs near the end of the eighteenth century. Valladares shows why, notwithstanding Shakespeare’s trending, Fletcher’s Rule a Wife continued to be a mainstay in Romantic-period London and the provinces. Its adaptability and surprise plot twists appealed to diverse audiences and star actors, most notably the mercurial Edmund Keane. Rule a Wife’s slapstick minor characters, often played as male transvestites, also had a significant charge. By contrast, The Chances, which David Garrick altered and revitalized in the 1770s, was rarely performed in London after the turn of the century. In the chapter’s concluding section, Valladares attunes us to how Frederick Reynolds’s comic-opera adaptation of The Chances—Don John; Or, The Two Violettas (1821)—became a box office success that briefly appropriated The Chances’ waning stock-play status. Unfortunately, Valladares’s argument about The Chances fades out before chapter’s end.Chapter 3 has the most innovative interpretations in the book. Borrowing the neologism “pantomimetized” from a Romantic-period reviewer, Valladares theorizes that anticipation for pantomime afterpieces influenced performances and audience interpretations of mainpieces. She focuses on Boxing Day pantomimes (26 December) when rowdy holiday audiences often went to the theatre for pantomime entertainment (a stock genre), not the stock mainpiece. As test case Valladares pantomimetizes George Lillo’s tragedy The London Merchant; Or, The History of George Barnwell (1731), rereading this Boxing Day–stock mainpiece through pantomime’s two-part structure (serious part and playful harlequinade), antagonistic characters, rapid transitions, props, tricks, and stunts. Valladares’s insights are striking, and her close readings deserve further development. This chapter also involves David Garrick’s popular late eighteenth-century antipantomime Harlequin’s Invasion (1759), which nearly vanished from the early nineteenth-century stage until it was adapted as Drury Lane’s 1820 Shakespeare vs Harlequin. Valladares’s attention to this adaptation, several other pantomimes, and repurposed scenes from Hamlet not only showcase “[p]antomime’s powerful stimulus to other genres in the repertoire” but also how pantomime “fostered [theatre audiences’] intertextual intelligence” (151).Chapter 4 is fascinating and thought-provoking. Valladares turns to Romantic-period Jamaica to investigate Black “actor boys” street performances of stock plays familiar to the island’s theatregoers. She describes robust print holdings and a dynamic theatre culture in Jamaica’s major towns; shows how the “Jamaican actor boy tradition left deep impressions in early nineteenth-century travelogues, history books, pamphlets, and lithographs”; and maintains that Jamaican “actor boys” could have seen stock play performances in theatres as well as heard about them (198). Valladares argues that these enslaved performers rearranged, reinterpreted, and reimagined select scenes from stock plays (most often Shakespeare’s) with Jonkonnu, an “African form of entertainment that combined music, dance, and masquerade” (184). In British and American theatres, Jonkanoo appeared as a character in John Fawcett’s pantomimical drama Obi; Or, Three-Fingered Jack (1800) and William Murray’s Obi melodrama adaptation (1827), which concern the escaped slave and maroon leader Jack Monsong. This chapter spotlights Jamaican “actor boys’” street performances of popular stock-play scenes from Sheridan’s tragedy Pizarro (1799) and Shakespeare’s Richard III (1593). Valladares contextualizes these performances with Tacky’s Rebellion (1760) and the second Maroon War (1795) in Jamaica as well as the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Her analyses of costuming, props, white masks (contra blackface), intermingled songs, choreographed fights, reanimations of the dead, and frenzied closing dances reveal how such saturnalian street shows resisted slavery, celebrated freedom, and “exposed the fragility of their [white] audiences’ cultural fantasies” (218).The conclusion returns to London, briefly reflecting on interracial romances between servant characters in William Macready’s farcical afterpiece The Irishman in London; Or, The Happy African (1792). Valladares ends with a nod to Jacques Ranciere’s “emancipated spectator” concept from his 2009 book. I wish that Valladares had introduced this concept early in her book and pursued its implications in a few chapters. Overall, Stock Pieces persuasively demonstrates the “remarkable malleability” of Romantic-period stock plays (5). Throughout Valladares generously converses with contemporary scholarship in theatre and performance studies. I also see Stock Pieces as a useful complement to William St Clair’s indispensable The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2007). Stock Pieces deserves to have an active role in the repertory of Romantic period studies.