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The Merchant of Venice, Rosamond and Other English Plays Performed on the Continent in 1703?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

J. P. Vander Motten
J. P. Vander Motten
Affiliation:
Lecturer in the Department of English Literature, State University of Ghent, Belgium.
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Extract

In September 1781, Jean Van Gulpen, printer in the city of Maastricht, brought out a small octavo volume, entitled Tableau du Spectacle Français ou Annales Théâtrales de la Ville de Mastrigt. Now a rarity, this historical view of the Maastricht stage was the work of the lawyer François Bernard (fl. 1788), a shadowy figure today only remembered – if remembered at all – as the author of a number of works on political and economic history, all published at Leyden in the 1780s. Bernard dedicated his Tableau to ‘Madame Clairville, Première Chanteuse de l'Opéra Français de la Ville de Mastrigt’ and preceded his two-hundred page account of the ‘Spectacle Français’ with a lengthy defense of the stage, in which he claimed due recognition for the acting profession and greater support for the players whose condition was ‘flétri par l'injustice des hommes’.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Winter 1981 , pp. 54 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1981

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References

Notes

1. It was advertised in the Gazette van Maastrigt on September 22: see Jos, E., ‘Geschiedenis van het toneel te Maastricht’, De Maasgouw, X (1888), 26–7Google Scholar. Bound up in one or two copies only of the Tableau is a critique of Bernard's work, entitled Lettres d'un solitaire sur le théâtre ou réflexions sur le tableau du spectacle français. Both the identity of this ‘solitaire’ and the exact date of his letters are a matter of dispute: see Flament, A., ‘Een kritiek op Bernard's Histoire du Théâtre de Maestricht’, De Maasgouw, VII (1885), 1119–20Google Scholar and Heynen, E., ‘Maastrichtse Drukken(1552–1816).Eerste gedeelte (1552–1782). Een bescheiden aanzet tot een Maastrichtse Bibliografie’, Publications de la Société Historique et Archéologique dans le Limbourg, LXXXIII (1947), 165–6.Google Scholar

2. For a full list, see van Abkoude, Johannes, Naamregister van de behendste en meest in gebruik zijnde Nederduitsche Boeken, welke sederi het jaar 1600 tot hetjaar 1761 zijn uitgekomen. Overzien, verbeterd en tot het jaar 1787 vermeerderd door Reinier Arrenberg (Rotterdam, 1788), 52–3Google Scholar; Flament, A. J., ‘Werken van François Bernard den schrijver van de Geschiedenis van het theater te Maastricht’, De Maasgouw, IX (1887), 149Google Scholar; and Catalogue des livres de la Bibliothèque Nationale, XI (1902), 614–5.

3. Most of these records were incorporated in Faber, F.'s Histoire du Théâtretre Français en Belgique depuis son Origine jusqu' à nos jours (Bruxelles-Paris, 1878–1880), 5 vols.Google Scholar

4. See Taylor, F.'s The Wars of Marlborough 1702–1709, ed. Taylor, G. W. (Oxford, 1921), I, 122–3Google Scholar; Churchill, W. S., Marlborough. His Life and Times (London, 1947), I, 651–2Google Scholar; and for Ingoldsby and Albemarle, the Dictionary of National Biography, X–XI.

5. The London Stage 1700–1729, ed. Avery, E. L. (Carbondale, Ill., 1960), 6–7Google Scholar. If, as we are informed by Bernard, the army officers were responsible for the selection and the staging of the plays, The Ladies Visiting-Day may well have been represented on the initiative of Colonel Stanhope who, before serving under Marlborough in 1703, had been one of Burnaby's fellow-wits regularly meeting at Will's Coffee-house in Covent Garden: see The Dramatic Works of William Burnaby, ed. Budd, F. E. (London, 1931; repr. 1978), 45.Google Scholar

6. The London Stage 1660–1700, ed. Van Lennep, William e.a. (Carbondale, Ill., 1965), 368, 392, 467.Google Scholar

7. The London Stage 1700–1729, 142–3.

8. Smithers, P., The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1954), 110–18Google Scholar. Smithers, who misdates the première of Arsinoë as 16 January 1706 (instead of 1705), vaguely assigns the composition of Rosamond to Addison's ‘first years as Under-Secretary’.

9. Smithers, 46, 56, 61–2, 78–9.

10. Already before 1703 the Duke had been the subject of occasional military panegyrics: see Horn, R. D., Marlborough: A Survey. Panegyrics, Satires and Biographical Writings, 1688–1788 (New York, 1975), 1–36.Google Scholar

11. The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Graham, W. (Oxford, 1941), 37–40.Google Scholar

12. Dictionary of National Biography, IV, 476–7.

13. The Merchant of Venice, ed. Brown, J. R. (London, Arden ed., 1955), xxxii–xxxiii.Google Scholar

14. Wood, F. T., ‘The Merchant of Venice in the Eighteenth Century’, English Studies, XV (1933), 209, 214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. The London Stage 1700–1729, 7, 36, 130, passim.

16. Any earlier (seventeenth-century) performances that may have been given, at Graz (1608), Dresden (1626), or elsewhere, were presumably in German: see Cohn, A., Shakespeare in Germany in the 16th and 17th Centuries (London, 1865), lxxxix, cxviiiGoogle Scholar; The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare, ed. Campbell, O. J. (New York, 1966), 256–7Google Scholar; and Morris, I., ‘A Hapsburg Letter’, MLR, LXIX (1974), 18–19.Google Scholar

17. A search I have made in the Municipal Archives of Maastricht has proved fruitless. I owe thanks to Miss Inge Vanderheyden who has provided me with some documentation relating to the town of Wijlre and to Marlborough's stay in the Low Countries.