A “THREE TAIL’D BASHAW”
Bluebeard Takes a Turkish Turn
When not mistaken for a pirate, Bluebeard is often characterized as a beturbaned Turkish tyrant. But Bluebeard did not become a “three tail’d Bashaw”1 until the eighteenth century, perhaps beginning around the time that G. M. translated the “coutelas” in Perrault’s story as “scimitar” (instead of Samber’s “cutlass”).2 Bluebeard certainly did not get any of his eastern cast from Charles Perrault. Most crucially, for the English Bluebeard tradition, in 1790 the Irish composer and tenor Michael Kelly was in Paris and saw André Modeste Grétry’s opera Raoul Barbe Bleue (1789, libretto by Paul Sedaine). He returned with a program and commissioned George Colman the Younger, then manager of the summer theater the Haymarket in London, to write a libretto inspired by Grétry’s opera.3 The resulting collaboration, Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity! (1798), was influenced by the French opera, largely in its secondary cast of characters and subplots. But despite the presence of a servant named Osman, there is no further intimation in the French libretto that the opera is set anywhere other than France. By firmly orientalizing Bluebeard as Abomelique, naming his wife Fatima, in love with Selim, and setting the drama in Turkey, the Colman-Kelly production indelibly stamped the Bluebeard story with an oriental countenance. Following from the popularity of Kelly and Coleman’s gothic melodrama, in chapbooks all over the British Isles and on the nineteenth-century stage in just about every form, one is more likely to find a Turkish Bluebeard in England than a French one. One nineteenth-century play has a character refer to Bluebeard as “a Gaul” (French); but by this point Bluebeard was so removed from his French origins that the editor of the play was obliged to add a footnote: “Fact” (Millward 1869, 21). Why did Colman and Kelly make this critical choice, and why was it so popular with the English public?
An interesting series of linked literary and dramatic events seem to have carried the French tale in this new and fascinating direction, as an oriental story on the English stage. To begin with, the oriental fad of the eighteenth century built upon previous stock types (the figure of the Turkish despot was already a dramatic staple in England, and the “Othello dynamic” which makes use of this very type is frequently quoted in later Bluebeard plays). There was also a general fusion in the latter half of the eighteenth century with the gothic phenomenon that drew heavily on orientalism and for which the inherently gothic Bluebeard story was already primed.4 Sedaine and Grétry’s opera was influential and provided the sympathetic servant Osman. By renaming Fatima’s sister Irene, the Colman-Kelly allusion would have evoked for a contemporary audience the then-well-known story of “The Sultan and the Slave Girl (Irene)”. The pantomime called Blue Beard, or, The Flight of Harlequin in 1791 had also been inspired by the success of Grétry’s opera, and its success as a Christmas pantomime money-maker for Covent Garden helped to inspire Colman and Kelly in turn. Meanwhile, the discovery in 1792 of Louis XVI’s secret vault (armoire de fer) at the Tuileries palace and the role it played in the public imagination further contributed, no doubt as did the desire to distance and make France the “other” at a time of war with that country. William Godwin used the Bluebeard story (and the motif of the armoire de fer) for his political gothic novel Caleb Williams in 1794; and Colman himself adapted it for the stage as The Iron Chest (1796). In 1797 Ludwig Tieck’s influential drama Ritter Blaubart appeared in Germany. And finally, the success of Lewis’ gothic melodrama Castle Spectre (1797) influenced the creation of Colman and Kelly’s drama.
A grand spectacle with lavish sets and extravagant special effects machinery, Colman and Kelly’s melodrama was an immediate smash hit. It crossed the Atlantic in 1799 with equal success and, through reprintings and individual musical pieces for sale, enjoyed a very long afterlife, including celebrated revivals (notably that of 1811 with its use of live horses). The success of Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity! cemented an enduring parallel English tradition in which Bluebeard is a Turkish tyrant.
While Colman and Kelly’s choice of Turkish characterization for Bluebeard was a surprising turn of events, there was already a persistent tradition of the Turkish tyrant as a stock figure. “Bluebeard” arrived in England not long after The Thousand and One Arabian Nights did; and both “Bluebeard” and the Arabian Nights came to England from the same source: France. Charles Perrault published “Bluebeard” in Paris in 1697, and it was translated into English by Robert Samber in 1729. The Thousand and One Arabian Nights was first translated into English from the French translations as early as 1705–1708.5 Like Perrault’s tales, these stories were immediately disseminated throughout the British reading public in chapbook form, as well as in more expensive editions, although, as one critic noted: “selection was much narrower than from Perrault: ‘Ali Baba’ seems to have been easily first in favour, with ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Sinbad’ some distance behind, and the rest nowhere” (Muir 1954, 40). How aware the same reading public would have been that the frame story of The Thousand and One Nights itself contained a Bluebeard motif in King Schahriar and his wife Scheherezade, and that “The Third Calendar” is also Bluebeard tale, is unclear. But a century later, chapbook illustrations for Bluebeard and for Arabian Nights were literally interchangeable.6
Bluebeard’s connections with Shakespeare’s Othello bolster this stereotypical portrayal. While Othello himself was not Turkish, he metaphorically aligns himself with the type of unruly and cruel Turkish despot in his breach of social and moral codes.7 In his wife murder, if not in his fears of being cuckolded, there are echoes of the Bluebeard story. The sexual nature of Othello’s fears is also not accidental: “Given the conventional association made by European Christians between Islam and promiscuity, it is not surprising that the English expression ‘to turn Turk’ carried a sexual connotation” (Vitkus 2003, 88).8 These parallels with Othello are made much more overt by Robert Samber’s diction in translating the tale in 1729, as has been noted. In later Victorian stage versions of Bluebeard, Othello is quoted frequently and with the persistency of a running joke: “He’s like the black man in the play” (Planché and Dance 1839). The result is that Colman’s choice appears, to a contemporary audience, obvious: “Mr. Colman has made him a bashaw of three tails; presuming, we may suppose, that the murderer of seven wives must have been a very Turk indeed” (Jones 1811, 2:62).
The Arab name Fatima for Bluebeard’s wife has emphatically stuck, likely because she had no name from Perrault to usurp, although the name is often anglicized to Fanny. Her father Ibrahim (in the Colman-Kelly drama) invokes the prophet Mahomet, whose favorite daughter was Fatima (Colman 1983, 183 n.). There is a clear ironic contrast with this Fatima, who as the play opens is being berated by her father for betraying him in attempting to elope with Selim. However, the choice of the name Irene by Colman for Fatima’s sister is mysterious. Grétry’s opera used the names Isaure and Anne.9 In no other version is Irene used for either character; even in burlesques of the Colman-Kelly melodrama immediately following 1798 Fatima remains but the name Irene reverts to Anne. But to contemporary audiences, the name Irene must have resonated with the well-known and frequently dramatized story of “The Sultan and the Greek Slave Girl, Irene.”10 In this story, the Sultan (Mahomet II) falls in love with a captured slave girl. In most versions of the story, he is so infatuated with her that he neglects his government. Howsoever he comes to this realization (the spirit of a dead father, his counselors, an epiphany), he demonstrates mastery over his passion by decapitating Irene.11 The titles of most versions use variations on the name, and other contemporary plays reference variations as well: Hyrin, Hiren, Siren, and finally Irene (as in Gilbert Swinhoe’s The Tragedy of the Unhappy Fair Irene, 1658). In this play, Irene plays along with the Emperor Mahomet to give her lover time to return from Hungary with enough men to overthrow the conqueror of the Greeks. While Mahomet falls in love with Irene, his people insist that she be killed to release him from her charms. She is decapitated a day before her lover’s arrival. After Swinhoe’s play the anglicized name Irene becomes more stable. There were also Irena, a Tragedy (1664); Charles Goring’s Irene, or the Fair Greek (1708); and Dr. Johnson’s Irene, produced by Garrick in 1749 (Chew 1937, 490 n.).12 The use of the name Irene for Fatima’s sister, in lieu of “Anne” a name already firmly associated with the Bluebeard story for a century at this point, is an interesting allusive gesture to this nexus of tales about the slave girl.
Further, there is both an Irene and a Selim in the play of another Turkish tyrant with a noteworthy beard: Barbarossa (Brown 1754).13 Irene is Barbarossa’s daughter. The play was well known; Garrick had performed in it, and it was widely written about. Barbarossa appears in the records of the New York stage as late as the 1803–1804 season (Ireland 1968, 222).
Through this story and others the Turkish despot had long been a stock figure for the English. When Edmund Burke in contemporary writings referred to Warren Hastings, the first Governor General, as “a Bashaw of three tails” (Burke 1786–1788, 267),14 he was drawing on a long and rich English tradition of using this type as shorthand for a barbaric tyrant, and so the English audience of Colman and Kelly’s drama would readily have recognized it.
George Colman the Younger appears to be a key author in bringing Bluebeard to such notoriety on stage. Among his many librettos are two dealing with similar subject matter, The Iron Chest (1796) and Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity! (1798). His father, George Colman the Elder, wrote Fatal Curiosity (1782), an adaptation of an earlier play of the same title by George Lillo (1739).15 Fatal Curiosity is perhaps based on a “true story,” and was possibly taken to be such by the contemporary audience.16 The title alludes to the theme pronounced in the Bluebeard fairy tale, although there is no specific prohibition transgressed. Lillo’s full title reads: Guilt Its Own Punishment; or, Fatal Curiosity.17 Young Wilmot, long thought dead, returns incognito after many years’ absence. After reuniting with his lover, he decides to visit his parents in the guise of a stranger, before revealing himself to be their long-lost son. He refers several times to his own curiosity to see them. He gives his poverty-stricken mother, Agnes, a coffer full of jewels to hold for him while he sleeps; she exhibits curiosity in opening the coffer, but the story then takes a Macbeth-like turn, as she convinces her husband, Old Wilmot, to murder the sleeping man. The identity of the murdered man is belatedly revealed. In despair the husband kills his wife, and then himself. In one version, the lover also dies after discovering the carnage. Evidently, and some of the play’s tenuous connections with Othello aside,18 this is not a Bluebeard story; there is no wife murder, no prohibition and transgression. However, the play contains elements of “Bluebeard”: curiosity as an overt theme, Agnes opening a closed coffer that does not belong to her, and the use of gothic elements. It creates a strong precursor drama about the theme of “fatal curiosity” for George Colman the Younger by his own father.
Michael Kelly, an Irishman, English tenor singer, and prolific composer, was responsible for the inclusion of André Grétry and Paul Sedaine’s opera Raoul Barbe Bleue (1789)19 in the Anglophone tradition, but the Colman-Kelly production, although inspired by the opera and borrowing its overture orchestration, otherwise bears little resemblance to it. In Grétry’s opera, Raoul is a feudal tyrant who marries Isaure against her will. Isaure’s family is noble but recently impoverished; she is in love with the valiant Vergi whom her brothers will not allow her to wed. Raoul has married three women, vassals, and each has failed the test of their curiosity. He has been told three times that a curious woman will be his downfall, and so attempts to make his next experiment with a woman who has the privileges of noble birth. Isaure has a sister Anne whom she loved but who was lost; Vergi tells her to call him Sister Anne. Later, he appears dressed as a woman at Raoul’s castle, and is therefore with Isaure when Raoul departs, drawing up the bridge and imprisoning them during his absence. In a foreshadowing of the many male Sister Anne’s of the nineteenth-century stage, there is some comic business when Raoul comments on what a large and handsome woman she is, but otherwise the opera was not comic. Osman is enlisted to help them get a message shot across the moat to Isaure’s page, and after Raoul has given Isaure time to prepare for her death, “Sister Anne” reports from the turret until the brothers arrive.
Kelly noted in the final pages of the first volume of his Reminiscences seeing the opera in Paris in 1790 on his way home to England from a European tour. He wrote, some three decades after the first production of Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity!:
We saw also the opera of “Blue Beard.” “Racule [sic] Barbe Bleue,” is the French title of it: the fine bass singer, Chenard, was famous in “Barbe Bleue;” and Madame Dubazzon, in Fatima, and Mademoiselle Cretue, in Irene [Isaure], were both excellent: the music, by Grétry, was very good; but so different are the tastes of a French and English audience, that when I produced my “Blue Beard” at Drury Lane, I did not introduce a single bar from Grétry. Mrs. C[rouch] was struck with the subject, and wrote down the programme of the drama, with a view to get it dramatized for Drury Lane; Johnstone got the music copied to bring to Mr. Harris, at Covent Garden, and it was got up at that theatre as a pantomime [Blue Beard, or, the Flight of Harlequin in 1791], I believe by Delpini; I never [saw] it in that shape, but have heard that it was not successful (1826, 347–48).20
This paragraph typifies the influence of French theater on London theater of the period. The influence results in two productions: the Covent Garden pantomime Blue Beard, or, the Flight of Harlequin in 1791, and eight years later in the Colman and Kelly Blue Beard intended to supply the place of a pantomime for a Christmas audience.
Covent Garden’s pantomime Blue Beard, or, the Flight of Harlequin was a relatively popular pantomime, Michael Kelly’s memory notwithstanding. By 1792, Covent Garden announced it was staging the production “for the 19th time.” But in this pantomime by William Reeve there does not appear to be any oriental influence.21 The characters are named Blue Beard, Harlequin, Haggard, Clown, and so on—at least two of these common to pantomime and Harlequinades— but also McCarney, Bounce, Swagger, Sligo, and Bobby Lobby. Bobby Lobby’s song about being a lady’s man comes straight from a British musical entertainment: “As I walk thro’ the lobby, / The girls cry out “Bobby! / Here, Bobby! My Bibbidy Bob!” / Then pulling and hawling! / So smirking and pleasing! / So coaxing and teizing! / I can’t get them out of my knob!” (Airs, Glees 1791). What is interesting about the pantomime is that it introduces “hellish legions” in the cast list (Daemons) and in Blue Beard’s recitative. Act I, Air 1 references “a blessed crew / Of Spirits” obedient to his “wand.” The “fée” key in “Bluebeard” opens the way for such magical characters and is often translated as an actual “fairy” in English rather than merely “enchanted.” Here the inclusion of demonic characters also illustrates a move to incorporate more gothic machinery, one that will be fully exploited in the Colman and Kelly grand musical romance, with lively skeletons, devils, and puffs of smoke shown emanating from Bluebeard’s secret chamber and the conclusion whereby Abomelique (Bluebeard) is killed by a Skeleton and sinks “beneath the earth—a volume of flame arises” (Colman, seventh edition [1837?]).22
One contemporary gothic novel in particular alludes to the Bluebeard tale relatively overtly, through the use of the preface. In the political gothic novel Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, William Godwin had the servant Caleb Williams discover a murderous truth about his master, Ferdinand Falkland, by opening a trunk containing papers confessing the crime. Falkland spends the remainder of the novel demonstrating how power and wealth can be used abusively to persecute others; wherever Caleb flees, Falkland’s power reaches him. In his preface, Godwin wrote:
I rather amused myself with tracing a certain similitude between the story of Caleb Williams and the tale of Bluebeard, than derived any hints from that admirable specimen of the terrific. Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes, which if discovered, he might expect to have all the world roused to revenge against him. Caleb Williams was the wife, who in spite of warning, persisted in his attempts to discover the forbidden secret; and, when he had succeeded, struggled as fruitlessly to escape the consequences, as the wife of Bluebeard in washing the key of the ensanguined chamber, who, as often as she cleared the stain of blood from the one side, found it showing itself with frightful distinctness on the other (Godwin 1794, 352–53; emphasis added).
Godwin’s political gothic was itself quite successful, but it also proved to be a very popular dramatic encounter in the adaptation by George Colman the Younger.23 In 1796, Colman wrote The Iron Chest, later included in the same influential drama collection as his father’s version of Fatal Curiosity: Mrs. Inchbald’s British Theatre (1808). It opened at Drury Lane, with music by Storace, and Kemble as Sir Edward Mortimer (the Falkland role). The play had an inauspicious opening run, a more successful run later that year, and according to at least one biographer of George Colman, it “held the stage ‘for longer than forty years.’”24 Michael Kelly also played a role in this production (Kelly 1826, 2:77–78). In viewing this play as another important precursor to the phenomenon that Blue Beard would become in 1798, it is necessary to note not only that The Iron Chest is a step closer to the Bluebeard story, but also that it too was “embryonic melodrama” (Cox 2000, 33).25
The title of The Iron Chest also brings more overtly another of Caleb Williams’ (and thus Bluebeard’s) many intertexts into play: the infamous armoire de fer that entered into popular legend with the execution of Louis XVI just three months after its discovery in November 1792. A locksmith informed the minister of the interior that he had installed in the Tuileries an armoire de fer (iron cupboard, or safe). Damian Davies wrote: “Roland [the minister], Gamain [the locksmith], and the inspector general of national buildings, Heurtier, hurried to the palace (foolishly and fatally for Roland, with no independent witnesses), where Gamain opened the armoire, hidden behind a wooden panel and iron plate in the wall, to disclose a cache of papers. The contents of this royal archive documenting the king’s perception of the revolution proved to be rather innocuous and did not provide evidence, as many suspected it would, of the king’s having conspired with French émigrés and with the Austrian court against the nation, though it did discredit high-profile figures such as Dumouriez, Lafayette, and Mirabeau” (Davies 2002, 526–27).
Roland corresponds to Godwin’s Caleb, in this scenario, as he was accused of having altered the contents and could not prove otherwise: the use of the trunk of documents in Godwin’s novel is thus “no mere Gothic prop” (Davies 2002, 529).26 In popular contemporary representations, the iconography of its discovery echoes the discovery of the hidden closet in Bluebeard quite closely. Damian Davies reproduced a satirical print of the opening of the armoire de fer and footnoted another like it: the closet doors are flung open; one man (the locksmith) stands on the right, large key still in his hand; the closet reveals a skeleton (Mirabeau) arranged to look as if it is “dancing” in the closet (right arm and right leg up, knee and elbow bent); the picture on the wall above shows a serpent with a king’s head (the serpent is frequently rendered in the iconography of the Bluebeard story); another male (Roland) is seated to the left of the closet, reacting to the vision: both his arms are raised, which is the standard configuration for Bluebeard’s wife; finally, there is an axe on the floor in the foreground of the picture (528).27 Bluebeard is a story from the ancien régime: it is therefore fitting that the fall of the ancien régime be represented using the iconography of this well-known French tale (Gorilovics 2000, 21).28 It is perhaps another reason why the French fairy tale needed to be set farther afield than France; just as English gothic was doing, France and the Catholic continent were made to be the “other.” Post-Reformation, “English Protestant texts associated both the pope and the Ottoman sultan with Satan or the Antichrist” (Vitkus 2003, 83).29 By rendering Bluebeard as a Turk the parallels are drawn while at the same time the fairy tale is neatly cast further off than England’s front doorstep.
In 1797 Ludwig Tieck’s five-act drama Ritter Blaubart, closely based on the fairy tale of “Bluebeard,” followed from his 1796 short fairy tale “arabesque,” “Die Sieben Weiber des Blaubart” (“Bluebeard’s Seven Wives,” Volksmärchen 1797). In the fairy tale, there is nothing in the forbidden chamber.30 The play, translated by John Lathrop Motley, was first published in English in 1838–1839. Hugo von Wolfsbrunn proposes to Agnes von Friedheim, and she takes her sister Anna to live with her. Von Wolfsbrunn’s worst fear is to be cuckolded by his wife: “‘Woe, says he, ‘to the deceived man who trusts to the false charms of women. … Deceit is a woman’s trade’” (Tieck 1797; Motley 1840).31
Perhaps as significant as Samber’s translation of the story into English, the Colman and Kelly production alters the English course of the story, far beyond the stage.32 Further, the rich cast of secondary characters enabled the story to be transplanted and to evolve upon the stage. It was eminently adaptable for melodramatic, burlesque, and pantomimic renditions, on the public or the private stage, as will be seen.
George Colman the Younger’s play Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity!: A Dramatic Romance opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on January 16, 1798. A performer’s copy of this play alludes to the 1791 harlequinade: “[Bluebeard] had frowned ferociously in a pantomime at Covent Garden, in 1791” (D. G. “Remarks”). The same author went on to note that the present production derived more from “a French piece, the Barbe-Bleu, played at Paris in 1746.”33 While such a play is referred to by Georges Doutrepont, and it is possible that a French piece could have played on a French stage in any given year following Perrault’s publication of the Contes,34 the play has long since dropped from popular or even critical consciousness. In his Reminiscences Kelly cited only Grétry’s opera of 1789, and Colman himself stated in a preface (fourth edition) that “it would be as ungrateful, as impudent, to deny that I took the outline of my Store from the works of the celebrated Mrs. Goose,” to whom he goes on to inscribe the Romance.35 He further distinguishes his drama from any French precursor, with this claim to originality: “The following Trifle is not a Traslation [sic] from the French, nor any other Language:—I have an exclusive right to all it’s [sic] imperfections.”
The libretto is significant, because it introduces a range of new characters who will become enduring staples in the English dramatic and chapbook traditions of this story. The two-act drama opens with Fatima attempting to elope with Selim by escaping down the rope ladder at her window to his accompaniment of the song “Pit-a-pat.” She is caught by her father Ibrahim: “Ah, traitress, have I caught you?” and sent indoors. Selim and Ibrahim argue, whereupon it becomes clear that Ibrahim has sold Fatima to the higher bidder: “He’s richer. You have your merits, but he’s a Bashaw—with three tails!” Selim vows revenge on his rival Abomelique and alludes more than once to his practice of “spells and magic” (perhaps alluding to Gilles de Rais). Irene, Fatima’s sister, expresses her doubts about how suitable the match is and calls attention to the fact that Abomelique’s serial monogamy is contrary to allowed practice in the Koran: Abomelique arrives in a grand procession to the music of Kelly’s famous “Grand March” and there are several conflicts. In the process, Abomelique “draws his saber” and the libretto indicates that it is Fatima in danger here: “Sabres are gleaming round the throat / Of beauty disobeying.” It is revealed that Abomelique himself is haunted with a prediction: “that it is [his] fate to marry, and [his] life will be endangered by the curiosity of the woman whom you espouse.”
Bluebeard, or Female Curiosity! Colman and Kelly (1798), first page of piano vocal score, illustrated from the theater by R. Cruikshank. Reproduced by permission of the Royal College of Music.
IBRAHIM: I do think that a man’s wives are punishment enough in themselves. Praised be the wholesome law of Mahomet that stinted a Turk to only four at a time!
IRENE: The Bashaw had never more than one at a time, and ’tis whispered that he beheaded the poor souls one after another, for, in spite of his power, there’s no preventing talking (Colman 1798, 1983, 1.1).36
Scene 2 shifts to Abomelique’s castle, and the two courting servants Beda and Shacabac. Beda tries to draw Shacabac into discussion about the secrets he has been entrusted with; the audience finds out that Shacabac feels “tormented” when he goes into the Blue Chamber. But it also foreshadows the theme of female curiosity, as Beda is clearly curious and trying to find out just what secrets Shacabac and his master are keeping from her. They sing their duet to Beda’s guitar: “Tink, tinka-tinka, tink.” Abomelique returns and tells Shacabac they have employment in the Blue Chamber, and Shacabac reluctantly follows him.
Scene 3 opens on “a blue apartment. A winding staircase on one side. A large door in the middle of the flat. Over the door, a picture of Abomelique kneeling in amorous supplication to a beautiful woman. Other pictures and devices on the subject of love decorate the apartment.” Dialogue here reveals both that the Blue Chamber is inhabited with “a few flying phantoms, sheeted spectres, skipping skeletons and grinning ghosts at their gambols!” and that these are Abomelique’s former wives. Shacabac is to go in and place a talisman (a dagger) at the foot of a skeleton inside the chamber, which will keep Abomelique safe.
The audience’s first view of the open chamber is spectacular: “The door instantly sinks, with a tremendous crash, and the Blue Chamber appears, streaked with vivid streams of blood. The figures in the picture of the door change their position, and Abomelique is represented in the action of beheading the beauty he was before supplicating. The pictures and devices of love change to subjects of horror and death. The interior apartment—which the sinking door discovers—exhibits various tombs in a sepulchral building, in the midst of which ghastly and supernatural forms are seen, some in motion, some fixed. In the centre is a large skeleton, seated on a tomb, with a dart in his hand, smiling, and, over his head, in characters of blood, is written: ‘The Punishment of Curiosity’” (1.4).37 As Shacabac lays the talisman in its place, the inscription changes to read: “This Sepulchre Shall Inclose Her Who May Endanger the Life of Abomelique.” The Skeleton’s dart is raised and lowered. Abomelique reads this as a “prosperous” omen for him and wishes: “May Fatima be prudent and avoid [rashness].”
Scene 4 reveals Fatima pining for Selim, singing “When pensive, I thought on my love,” and then conversing with Irene, whose objections are assuaged by Abomelique’s wealth. Fatima gives her a brief lesson on the moral use of money, a preview of how nineteenth-century wives in the fairy story will use their inherited wealth for public good works. Shacabac calls the women to the illuminated garden and stays to sing a commentary on Abomelique’s practices: “A fond husband will, after a conjugal strife, / Kiss, forgive, weep, and fall on the neck of his wife. / But Abomelique’s wife other conduct may dread: / When he falls on her neck, ’tis to cut off her head!”
In Scene 5, another subplot develops: the lecherous Ibrahim tries to seduce Beda, comically exaggerating the power of his position as major domo. The parallels with Abomelique’s misuse of power are obvious: “Cheer up, little one, I rule the roost here; it shan’t go worse with you that I have power and you have charms.”
Act II begins with Selim’s revenge in motion: the Spahis are gathered in the woods and prepare to launch their attack on the castle. In Scene 2, Abomelique tells Fatima he is to go away, gives her the keys (to Shacabac’s dismayed interruption: “What, all the keys?”), and cautions her not to enter the Blue Chamber: “That door, and that alone, is sacred. Dare to open it, and the most dreadful punishment that tongue can utter will await you! It is the sole restraint I ever shall impose. In all else you have ample scope. Merit my indulgence and tremble to abuse it!” Fatima tries, unsuccessfully, to return this key to him, and Shacabac leaves with Abomelique, terrified that Fatima will pry into the forbidden chamber before he can even get back from opening the gate for his master. Irene, being told of the keys and the chamber, immediately wants to enter it: “Dear, now, I had rather see that room than any other in the Castle!” Irene mentions in an aside that she will try to persuade Fatima into it. Irene sings a song invoking Cupid, echoing the fate of Sister Anne (dowered and married off by Perrault) and perhaps foreshadowing the future Irenes (Annes) who will in Victorian dramas try to usurp her sister’s place or get herself a husband by any means.
In the following scene, Ibrahim, now made “major domo” over all the household slaves, continues to pursue Beda and sings a song in praise of his own greatness: “’Tis a very fine thing to be father-in-law / To a very magnificent three-tailed Bashaw!”
In Scene 4, Irene has succeeded in bringing Fatima to the door of the Blue Chamber and coaxes her into disobedience. On two occasions, ghastly sounds are heard from within the chamber: an echo of the word “Death,” just spoken by Irene, and a “deep groan.” Finally, Irene succeeds because she convinces charitably minded Fatima that it would be inhumane not to help the soul who made the noise. The chamber is revealed to the audience for the second time, just as at first. Shacabac returns from opening the gate and discovers that the key has broken. Abomelique is heard returning “full six hours before his time,” and Fatima implores Shacabac to save them.
In Scene 5, he has hidden the women out of the way and delays Hassan, a black eunuch, seeking Fatima for Abomelique. In Scene 6, Abomelique discovers the broken key and swears death to Fatima; she is granted some time to prepare herself, and Irene and Shacabac promise whatever assistance they can while Abomelique calls up from below. The quartetto here echoes that in the first scene: here it is Fatima, Irene, and Shacabac calling and answering whether anyone can be seen coming, and Abomelique calls insistently for Fatima. Abomelique snatches Fatima; the soldiers rush the gate as Shacabac directs them. In brief Scene 7, Ibrahim submits to his cowardice and comically flees the arrival of the soldiers. In the eighth and final scene, Abomelique (now with scimitar, instead of sabre) drags Fatima within the sepulchre, Selim fights him, and Fatima manages to take the talisman from the foot of the skeleton, prompting it to raise its dart. After a skirmish with Selim, and with a troop of horse visible behind the broken wall of the sepulchre, the skeleton stabs Abomelique and drags him below stage: “A volume of flame arises and the earth closes.” The final chorus celebrates the death of Abomelique: “to your gloomy caves descending, / His career of murder ending” and the forthcoming marriage of Fatima and Selim: “Hymen comes, with pleasure crowning / Happy love!”
In his Reminiscences, Kelly reflected on the first performance (in which he played Selim) and on the play’s popularity with enthusiasm. This passage is worth quoting at its original length, as it captures the phenomenon (and comical glitches) from someone intimately connected with it:38
The drama was immediately accepted at Drury Lane; orders were issued to the machinists, painters, and decorators, to bring it forward with the greatest possible splendour and magnificence; and it must be admitted, that nothing could exceed its brilliancy; the music, which fortunately became extremely popular, I composed, with the exception of two selected pieces, and the success of the whole was beyond expectation and precedent. It may be worth noticing, that the Blue Beard, who rode the elephant in perspective over the mountains, was little Edmund Kean, who, at the time, little thought he should become a first class actor.
The 16th January, 1798, was the first night of its production. From the bungling of the carpenters, and the machinery going all wrong, at one time, as it grew near the conclusion, I gave it up as lost: but never shall I forget the relief I experienced when Miss Decamp sang, ‘I see them galloping! I see them galloping!’ She gave it with such irresistible force of expression, as to call from the audience loud and continued shouts of applause.
At the end of the piece, when Blue Beard is slain by Selim, a most ludicrous scene took place. Where Blue Beard sinks under the stage, a skeleton rises, which, when seen by the audience, was to sink down again; but not one inch would the said skeleton move. I, who had just been killing Blue Beard, totally forgetting where I was, ran up with my drawn saber, and pummelled the poor skeleton’s head with all my might, vociferating, until he disappeared, loud enough to be heard by the whole house, ‘D—n you! d—n you! why don’t you go down?’ The audience were in roars of laughter at this ridiculous scene, but good-naturedly appeared to enter into the feelings of an infuriated composer.
The next day, the piece was much curtailed; the scenery and machinery were quite perfect; and, on its next representation, it was received with the most unqualified approbation, by overflowing houses, and has kept its standing for six-and-twenty years. The music had an unparalleled sale, but I could not escape the shafts of envy and malice. The professional, would-be theatrical composers, the music-sellers and their friends, gave out that the music was not mine, and that I had stolen it from other composers. But I laughed them to scorn; conscious that I never even selected a piece from any composer to which, when I printed it, I did not affix his name; …
The second act of Blue Beard opened with a view of the Spahis’ horses, at a distance; these horses were admirably made of pasteboard, and answered every purpose for which they were wanted. One morning, Mr. Sheridan, John Kemble, and myself, went to the property room of Drury Lane Theatre, and there found Johnston, the able and ingenious machinist, at work upon the horses, and on the point of beginning the elephant, which was to carry Blue Beard. Mr. Sheridan said to Johnston, —‘Don’t you think, Johnston, you had better go to Pidcock’s, at Exeter ’Change, and hire an elephant for a number of nights?’ – ‘Not I, Sir,’ replied the enthusiastic machinist; ‘if I cannot make a better elephant than that at Exeter ’Change, I deserve to be hanged.’
In the grand march, where Blue Beard comes over the mountain, there was to be a military band. I was not sufficiently conversant with wind instruments, and therefore I went to Mr. Eley, a German, and Master of the band of the guards. I took my melody to him, and he put the parts to it most delightfully (Kelly 1826, 131–34).
The play was intended, by his own description, to make Kelly’s name in England as a composer.39 In his Reminiscences, he talked often of writing music, passing over his actual performances as a sought-after tenor almost as footnotes in his seemingly constant touring with the singer Mrs. Crouch.
Despite the play’s popularity, Colman’s “Preface” (1798c) included an apologia for his use of “Romance, and Legends” (an interesting comment on the status of fairy tales at the time), and on his use of magic: “I feel nothing upon my conscience in having substituted a Blue Beard for a Black Face. —I have not attempted to make Magick usurp that space of the Evening’s Entertainment much better occupied by Dramas of Instruction, and probability. I have kept my Enchantment within the limits where rational minds, without pedantry, have not only long tolerated it, but have found pleasure in unbending with it, after they have been more solidly engaged. In short, my Syllabub does not make its appearance until after the substantial part of the repast is over.”
That the play was immediately and hugely successful can be evinced in several ways, more objective than Kelly’s boast in his memoirs that all the world had seen the play by 1824,40 through its performance history, reprintings,41 sales of music,42 and the immediate incorporation of imagery from the play in chap-books of the period. In 1804 Benjamin Tabart “advertised Cinderella, Blue Beard and Valentine and Orson ‘each with coloured representations of the scenes contained in the last spectacle at Drury Lane’” (Darton 1932, 207). Later editions of Colman’s play included, for instance, “a fine engraving From a Drawing taken in the Theatre by Mr. R. Cruikshank.” Its American success was perhaps even greater.43 The 1811 transatlantic revival was another stage phenomenon, this time using live horses from Astley’s who made their debut on the stage of Covent Garden on 18 February 181144 in the adaptation. In its first forty-one nights it brought receipts of more than £21,000 (one-quarter of the contemporary annual average).45
The impact of George Colman and Michael Kelly’s collaboration turning Bluebeard definitively into the stereotype of an oriental stage tyrant permanently introduced a powerful “new” Bluebeard into the burgeoning pantheon. This figure is the most enduringly popular English Bluebeard, perfectly poised as he was to become the blundering buffoon (Pantaloon) of nineteenth-century harlequinade and pantomime, the endearing butt of the lovers’ joke.