An excursion to the Theatre, with some brief diversions into other arts
Sam’s biographers represent him as no connoisseur of the arts. At his most philistine he could say that music was loved by all ‘except myself’, and that it was an ‘idle and frivolous pursuit’ fit to occupy ‘no man of talent’. Sir John Hawkins, who besides being Sam’s biographer was a historian of music, commented that he was impervious to the delights of a good tune – and recorded his saying that a skilled musician had no more merit than a canary. ‘Of the beauties of painting,’ noted Hawkins, ‘he had not the least conception’; when he looked at a statue he perceived only ‘an unshapen mass’, and he claimed that he would rather see a portrait of a dog that he knew than look upon the whole world’s stock of fancy allegorical pictures.
Yet he struck such attitudes to be provocative. He was sometimes affected by music and paintings – Handel, an old ballad, historical canvases such as Benjamin West’s. He was interested, too, in the principles of aesthetics, as well as in practical applications of artistic skill, and enjoyed confounding critics who felt they knew the limits of his interests, as when in 1759 he waded into the public debate over the best design for a new bridge across the Thames at Blackfriars.1 He was often among artistic people, and when the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, with Sir Joshua Reynolds as its president, he took a keen interest in its activities. Reynolds, the most successful portraitist of the day, was one of his closest friends and painted him at least five times. Sam also sat for Johann Zoffany, John Opie and the sculptor Joseph Nollekens. Although sitting for a portrait doesn’t make one an art expert and involves a degree of vanity, it is hardly the mark of someone who thinks that paintings are contemptible. Equally, he wrote thoughtful dedications for two works by Fanny Burney’s father, Charles: his General History of Music (1776) and Commemoration of Handel (1785). There he described music as ‘one of the first attainments of rational nature’ and ‘the art which unites corporal with intellectual pleasure’.
It is clear, though, that his poor eyesight and hearing impaired his appreciation of art and music, and those same deficiencies limited his pleasure in going to the theatre. He was scathing about the people who made a living on the stage, and in the Life of Savage claimed that most actors were ‘insolent, petulant, selfish, and brutal’. That animosity later softened, but he continued to think that the theatre and its practitioners were shallow and obsessed with fashion. It therefore seems strange that, notwithstanding his own modest appetite for attending plays, he imagined he could delight others by writing one. Or perhaps that’s not so strange: how many people today find the theatre unbearable and conclude that the solution is to pen a drama of their own?
Sam began his one play, Irene, before he arrived in London, and throughout his early years there he clung to the idea that it would transform his fortunes. To modern eyes and ears its first underwhelming feature may well be the title. When I first became aware of the play I supposed that its main character’s name was pronounced eye-reen (at the time there was such an Irene, a permanently pissed-off matriarch, in the BBC’s EastEnders), and it took a while for me to gather that it was actually eye-ree-nee. Sam’s Irene is based on a Greek woman of great beauty who appears in a book he admired, Richard Knolles’s General History of the Turks (1603). Captured by the Turkish emperor Mahomet, she is told that her life will be preserved if she converts from Christianity to Islam. The play depicts a religious and cultural confrontation, between the ‘wolves of Turkey’ and the ‘ill-fated’ children of Greece. A modern audience may shrink from its abrasive image of Islam, or be intrigued that the subject was on his mind – Mahomet speaks of the need to ‘pursue the task of war, / Till every nation reverence the Koran’. But for Sam’s contemporaries the main issue was the failure to do justice to a potentially exciting subject, for as Irene ponders the question of what it means for a person to abandon her religion, it resembles a moral essay rather than a drama. I’ve seen claims that Irene was far ahead of its time – in its appeal to reason and its preference for the episodic rather than the seamless, a forerunner of the revolutionary techniques of Bertolt Brecht. But Sam, in trying to write a play that was concerned more with thoughts than with feelings, ended up creating something inert.
The opportunity to put it on came about through Garrick. Sam’s former pupil was now a star. In 1747, he had become the manager of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and he launched his tenure there in September by reciting verses specially commissioned from Sam. He promised a new regime that would feature fresh infusions of ‘useful mirth’ and ‘salutary woe’ – the replacement of amusing trash with works of real artistic merit. Sam knew Garrick well enough to be aware that he might have more selfish priorities, but could point to his own play as a specimen of ‘salutary woe’. At the start of 1749 Garrick finally gave him the chance to resurrect Irene, though not without some bruising arguments about how it could be made more pointed and performable.
The cast for the premiere was reassuringly strong. It included Garrick himself, along with the tall and handsome Irish actor Spranger Barry as Mahomet, while the popular Hannah Pritchard, who had recently played opposite Garrick in Macbeth, took the title role. But there were glitches. On opening night, 6 February, theatregoers applauded a speech that dwelled on the word tomorrow, apparently because it called to mind Macbeth’s famous lines ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day’. This wasn’t what Sam had been hoping for. Worse, they jeered the death of the title character – something which Sam would have preferred to be suggested, not shown, but which Garrick had insisted should happen onstage. As Hannah Pritchard struggled to utter her final lines while being strangled, there were cries of ‘Murder! Murder!’ Eventually she retreated, to die (of embarrassment) out of sight. For the rest of the run the audience was not subjected to this indecorous spectacle, but there were other sources of chagrin. Sam was not impressed with Mrs Pritchard’s performance and would in due course condemn her mechanical approach, claiming that ‘she no more thought of the play out of which her part was taken, than a shoemaker thinks of the skin out of which . . . he is making a pair of shoes’. As for her colleague Susannah Cibber, he’d have preferred to ‘sit up to the chin in water for an hour than be obliged to listen to the whining’. Spranger Barry fared no better, in Sam’s estimate ‘fit for nothing but to stand at an auction room door with his pole’.
Those reproofs came later. When Irene opened, Sam was excited and not yet in a mood to blame the actors for failing to do justice to his mighty lines. He attended the performance in uncharacteristically fine clothes – a scarlet waistcoat, trimmed with gold lace, and a hat adorned in similarly extravagant style. He thought this was his moment and was eager to milk the attention. He quickly put the hat to one side, conscious of how ridiculous it looked on him, but we’re struck all the same by his flamboyant image of how a successful playwright ought to present himself and by his readiness to embrace this showy garb.
The production ran for nine nights – certainly not a flop by the standards of the time. Sam attended every performance, made just under £200 from his share of the profits, and received a further £100 from the publisher Robert Dodsley for the playscript. This was far from disastrous. But Sam experienced what many other fledgling playwrights have found: no amount of praise could make him forget the criticisms, which felt like punches in the gut. Boswell would record his commenting on the brief and meagre influence of critics: ‘A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.’ In his Dictionary entry for brusher, Sam includes a pointed quotation from Sir Francis Bacon: ‘Sir Henry Wotton used to say, that critics were like brushers of noblemen’s clothes.’ The truth, though, is that critics are often more than flies and the objects of their criticism rather less than stately horses. Besides, the sting of a hostile review does more than make one wince. Writers who don’t read reviews of their work tend to claim that they don’t trust or value them, but it’s more likely that they are uncomfortable with the degree to which reviews – even, or perhaps especially, stupid ones – can be upsetting, a cause of self-doubt and despair.
Boswell reports that when Sam was asked ‘how he felt upon the ill success of his tragedy’, he replied, ‘Like the Monument.’ The dutiful biographer interpreted this as meaning ‘that he continued firm and unmoved as that column’ – namely the flute of Portland stone that still stands today on the site of the first church destroyed by the Great Fire of London. But he may have missed some of the significance of Sam’s words. Perhaps, like the Monument, he was unable to feel anything; the play’s reception numbed him. Or perhaps he thought that the failure was inscribed indelibly upon his reputation; he would have known that the Monument was originally commissioned ‘to preserve the memory of this dreadful visitation’, and might have believed that the unhappy story of Irene’s first production would also be preserved, a founding feature of his personal myth.
The trouble was that Sam had an untheatrical imagination. He did not grasp what gave a play and a production their vitality. In Irene, many of the scenes consist of head-to-head confrontation rather than three- or four-way talk, with the result that speechifying outmuscles more nuanced, layered kinds of interaction. If we return to the verses written for Garrick in 1747, we find him presenting it as a matter of fact that ‘The Stage but echoes back the public voice’. Yet while Garrick at Drury Lane responded pragmatically to the audience’s apparent enthusiasms and dislikes, Sam had little concept of who that audience was or what it wanted. Their desire for fervent exchanges between vividly realized characters was alien to him. Garrick would reflect that Shakespeare, in writing tragedy, ‘dipped his pen in his own heart’, but when his former schoolmaster essayed it, ‘passion sleeps’. An anonymous critique that appeared soon after Irene’s Drury Lane run called its poetry ‘languid and unaffecting’ and complained of characterization being ‘mangled in a miserable manner’.2
Reading the play now, it’s hard to imagine a remotely bearable revival, and Sam’s later commentary on theatre hints at the reasons for its woodenness. In the 1750s he wrote theatre reviews for the Gentleman’s Magazine, and like many critics before and since he had ideas about the theatre that were at odds with those of the day’s leading practitioners, who must have groaned to find him holding forth about their efforts. ‘A play read, affects the mind like a play acted,’ he claimed. It’s a striking statement, for the text of a play needs animating by a team, and although the imagination can simulate this, the solitary reading of a playtext will never match the four-dimensional work of bringing it to life in collaboration with a cast and crew.
The limits of his thinking about drama are apparent in his edition of Shakespeare. Love, he claims, is not an important subject on the stage. He thinks that Shakespeare was ‘much more careful to please than to instruct’ – and considers this a fault, evidence of his lacking moral purpose. No less telling is his belief that ‘In his tragic scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire’. In his opinion, the tragic scene most charged with tenderness comes not in Hamlet or King Lear, but in Henry VIII, when Queen Katherine hears of the death of Cardinal Wolsey. It’s a good scene in a play that was then much more popular than it is now, and perhaps Sam was taken with the description of Wolsey by the Queen’s usher, Griffith: ‘This cardinal, / Though from an humble stock, undoubtedly / Was fashion’d to much honour from his cradle. / He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one; / Exceeding wise, fair-spoken and persuading.’ Perhaps, too, he was touched by the moment when Katherine, foreseeing her own death and ‘that celestial harmony I go to’, has a vision of white-robed spirits who invite her to a banquet. But there’s a lot of perhaps here, and Sam’s choice is a contrary one. He delights in the scene’s unfolding ‘without gods, or furies, or poisons, or precipices’. The mockery of other people’s preferences – not least for key moments in Hamlet and King Lear – isn’t hard to spot, and it doesn’t make his opinion any easier to share. In any case, Shakespeare collaborated on Henry VIII, and the lines Sam admired may have been the work of John Fletcher. Selecting this as Shakespeare’s most affecting scene is a bit like saying your favourite kind of wine is a kir.
But Sam was right about some of theatre’s problems. In the Drury Lane prologue written for Garrick, he noted that the management needed to ‘watch the wild vicissitudes of taste’. Anyone who has spent much time in the theatre will know what Sam is talking about when he writes that they must attend to every ‘meteor of caprice’ and ‘chase the new-blown bubbles of the day’. A lot of theatre, it’s true, is so utterly obsessed with being on-trend that it’s deadly, so pious about the importance of speaking to the present moment that it’s doomed to be both ephemeral and insufficient. Yet such suspicion of the arena in which he was working could go too far. In the prologue he wrote for Irene, he called the theatre’s patrons ‘sons of avarice’ and insinuated that a lot of them were snoozy fops whose critical faculties didn’t extend beyond being able to applaud or hurl catcalls. Although there will always be a contingent of theatregoers who enjoy being wound up, this was a risky gambit, and the substance of his play didn’t do much to justify such disdain. Instead, its reception revealed to him an uncongenial truth about being a playwright – the audience can’t be counted on to laugh when you want them to, or share your sense of pathos, and the actors can’t be counted on to place emphasis where you’d like it. To be a playwright one has to accept the precariousness of live performance and its reception, and ideally one should enjoy it. But plenty of people who fancy themselves playwrights struggle to let go of their work in this way. Trusting others, including the audience, is the fundamental gesture of theatre, an optimistic art form.
Still, for all its dramatic limitations, Irene provides interesting evidence of Sam’s sexual politics. The first time the audience sees Irene she is asking her friend Aspasia to teach her how to repel Mahomet’s advances. Aspasia encourages her to stay true to her Christian faith, but points out that withstanding Mahomet will be difficult, for Irene has been instructed from infancy to act submissively. Their later conversation has a similar degree of substance, and when Aspasia returns to this theme, she reflects on the ways in which patriarchy silences women. Mahomet objectifies Irene – in his eyes she is fit to ‘adorn a throne’, and he says that he won’t rest ‘till I clasp the lovely maid, / And ease my loaded soul upon her bosom’. His coercive attitude leaves a rancid taste.
Irene is also full of robust Johnsonian language. We can briefly admire references to the ‘dubious twilight of conviction’, the ‘dull serenity’ of monarchs, the ‘labyrinths of treason’, ‘glittering fallacy’ and ‘agonizing pomp’, the unsettling effects of ‘hooting infamy’, and the moment when passions mingle and ‘Fate lies crowded in a narrow space’. But the play’s verse seems stilted compared to his most significant poem of the period: shortly before the premiere of Irene, Sam published The Vanity of Human Wishes. A devastating portrait of a brutally competitive society, it’s often described as a poet’s poem, admired by other writers for its dignified precision. Frequently misread, on the strength of the title, as a statement about the emptiness and pointlessness of life itself, it in fact depicts the emptiness of an existence controlled by desires (for status, wealth, beauty, longevity). Like the earlier London it is an imitation of the Roman satirist Juvenal, whom Sam commended for his ‘declamatory grandeur’, and its attack on self-seeking materialism is a mighty catalogue of human failings, reverberating with a philosophically charged rhetoric that Garrick deemed ‘as hard as Greek’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn’t very popular, certainly not compared with London, but it is his signature poem – grave, melancholy, philosophical and formal, bookish but worldly.
The Vanity of Human Wishes also underscores Sam’s role as a guide. It identifies some of the ways in which ambition causes people to become disorientated. For instance, he imagines a scholar who must ‘pause a while from letters to be wise’ – rather than being smothered by academic study and failing to take note of the rest of humanity. But the ‘fever of renown’ makes it difficult to do this; institutional life creates a very narrow sense of what it means to be successful, and scholars all too easily become blinkered. The problem, in essence, is one of framing: the scholar’s judgement is limited to the options that seem available, instead of embracing the full range of what’s actually possible. This is salience trumping intelligence, and it’s normal; although at the very start of the poem Sam proposes taking an ‘extensive view’ of the world, in what follows he conveys the difficulties of doing this. Overwhelmed with images and impressions, we struggle to achieve a wider perspective. Yet while he acknowledges that he shares such weaknesses, he seems to perceive them with an unusual degree of clarity – a necessary endowment, for by the time of The Vanity of Human Wishes and Irene’s premiere he was at work on a project that would test him profoundly.