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Hester Santlow Scenical Dancing: The Drama

By Moira Goff


In An Essay towards an History of Dancing, John Weaver had described Scenical Dancing as ‘a faint Imitation of the Roman Pantomimes’.1 In his scenario for The Loves of Mars and Venus, he explained the accomplishments of these performers from classical antiquity to his audience:

… these Mimes and Pantomimes were Dancers that represented a Story or Fable in Motion and Measure: They were Imitators of all things, as the Name of Pantomime imports, and perform’d all by Gesture and the Action of the Hands, Fingers, Legs and Feet, without making use of the Tongue. The Face or Countenance had a large Share in this Performance, and they imitated the Manners, Passions, and Affections, by the numerous Variety of Gesticulations.


Weaver went on to refer to the ‘Rules of the Drama in their mute Performances’ and to their ‘confining each Representation to a certain Action, with a just Observation of the Manners and Passions, which that Action naturally produced.’2

These quotations provide clues to the skills he prized in Hester Santlow, who he elsewhere praised as

a Dancer … where Art and Nature have combin’d to produce a beautiful Figure, allow’d by all Judges in our Art to be the most graceful, most agreeable, and most correct Performer in the World.3

Weaver surely needed little persuading that she was a performer who had a mastery of the ‘Force and Beauty of graceful Motion, and handsome Gesture’ – skills that were the foundation of Scenical Dancing.4

There are two scenes in The Loves of Mars and Venus for which Weaver prescribes specific gestures: scene two in which Venus and Vulcan perform a ‘Dance being altogether of the Pantomimic kind’; and scene six in which Mars, Venus and Vulcan express a series of Passions as Vulcan enjoys his revenge. In both Weaver builds the action around the contrasting gestures of Venus and Vulcan.

In scene two, the passacaille is succeeded by ‘a wild rough Air’ and the Graces and Cupid run off leaving Venus alone on stage. The scene takes on a very different atmosphere:

Enter to Venus, Vulcan: They perform a Dance together; in which Vulcan expresses his Admiration; Jealousie; Anger; and Despite: And Venus shews Neglect; Coquetry; Contempt; and Disdain.



This is the dance ‘of the Pantomimic kind’. On the following pages of the scenario, Weaver describes the gestures used by Vulcan and Venus. There are nine for Vulcan, expressing more powerful and varied Passions than the five for Venus, which are mainly variations on the theme of rejection. Put together, they show the progress of this mute argument, which begins with Vulcan’s Admiration of his beautiful wife and ends with a gesture of Detestation towards him by Venus as she leaves the stage.5 The pair could have moved through some conventional dance figures and even performed some steps with their successive gestures, although the music would surely not have conformed to a particular dance type.

Scene six brings Weaver’s ‘Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing’ to a conclusion as Vulcan exacts his revenge on his wife and her lover and their fellow deities enter as witnesses:

Vulcan shews them his Prisoners. Shame; Confusion; Grief; and Submission, are discover’d in the Actions of Venus; Audacity; Vexation; Restlessness; and a kind of unwilling Resignation; in those of Mars. The Actions of Vulcan, are of Rejoicing; Insulting; and Derision.


None of Vulcan’s actions are included among the gestures described on the last page of the scenario, although the Shame, Grief and Submission of Venus are there. Here, the three leading characters probably performed their actions and gestures simultaneously without really moving round the stage, until Neptune persuades Vulcan to forgive Venus and Mars and they are reconciled before the final Grand Dance.6

Weaver apparently drew on John Bulwer’s rhetorical treatises Chirologia and Chironomia, first published together in 1644, although this source seems to have been overlooked by researchers.7 Rhetoric, of course, provides a link to acting. Another such link is Charles Gildon’s The Life of Thomas Betterton published in 1710, which refers to some of the gestures described by Weaver.8

As an actress as well as a dancer, Hester Santlow would have been familiar with many of the gestures that Weaver describes. During the 1716-1717 season, she played 21 different acting roles (the majority of which were in comedies) and among them were 14 roles that she kept throughout her acting career. Her ‘line’ in tragedy was the pathetic heroine, such as Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Selima in Rowe’s Tamerlane, both plays were staples of the repertoire. In comedy, she was often cast as the young, witty heroine, for example Harriet in Etherege’s The Man of Mode and Angelica in Farquhar’s The Constant Couple. These roles, in particular, provide clues to her representation of Venus in Weaver’s The Loves of Mars and Venus. It is worth noting that both Selima and Harriet had earlier been played by the singer-actress Anne Bracegirdle, who had acted and sung Venus in Motteux’s The Loves of Mars and Venus. Motteux’s masque was one of Weaver’s sources for his ballet and he may well have seen Mrs Bracegirdle as Venus.9

Etherege’s The Man of Mode provides some hints towards Mrs Santlow’s performance of Venus’s ‘Coquetry … seen in affected Airs, given her self throughout the whole Dance’.10 In the first scene of act three, Harriet and Young Bellair feign courtship and he advises her how to behave:

At one motion play your Fan, roul your Eyes, and then settle a kind look upon me.

…

Now spread your Fan, look down upon it, and tell the Sticks with a Finger.

…

Clap your hand up to your bosom, hold down your Gown. Shrug a little, draw up your Breasts and let ‘em fall again, gently, with a Sigh or two,

…

Clap your Fan then in both your hands, snatch it to your Mouth, smile, and with a lively motion fling your Body a little forwards. So—now spread it; fall back on the sudden, cover your Face with it, and break out into a loud Laughter—take up! Look Grave, and fall a fanning yourself—11



Such a sequence, practised when she played Harriet, provided a store of actions that Hester Santlow could draw on for the Coquetry of Weaver’s Venus.

There are very few illustrations of actors and actresses in performance before the late 18th century, so it is difficult to demonstrate visually a link between Weaver’s gestures and Mrs Santlow’s acting skills. Frontispiece illustrations to plays developed significantly when John Bell began to publish Bell’s British Theatre from 1776.12 Among the plates made to accompany Bell’s editions are two that suggest the continuity of the conventions governing gestures. One shows Ann and Spranger Barry as Selima and Bajazet in Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane.

Frontispiece plate from Nicholas Rowe, Tamerlane (London, 1776), in Bell’s British Theatre, Vol. 3.



The scene is from act five and Mrs Barry as Selima is suing for mercy.13 The other shows Mrs Hartley in the title role of Rowe’s Jane Shore.14 Hester Santlow never appeared in the play, but Mrs Hartley’s gesture, from act four, is recognisably Weaver’s Detestation which he describes as a ‘more passionate Form’ and a ‘redoubled Action’ in which ‘both the turn’d-out Palms are so bent to the left side, and the Head still more projected from the Object’.15

Frontispiece plate from Nicholas Rowe, Jane Shore (London, 1776). Bell’s British Theatre, Vol. 1



Gestures similar to Weaver’s can also be found in Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia published in London in 1806. For example, he describes and depicts Shame which ‘in the extreme sinks on the knee and covers the eyes with both hands’ and ‘Mild resignation’ which ‘falls on the knee, crosses the arms on the breast, and looks forwards and upwards to heaven’, adding in both cases that he is showing a ‘feminine expression’ of the Passion.16 Writing some 90 years after Weaver, it is reasonable to assume that Austin is referring to conventions that had changed significantly. Yet, there are enough resemblances within his gestures between Austin’s gestures, those that can be seen in 18th-century depictions of actors and Weaver’s descriptions to suggest a continuous tradition. Austin’s mention of the ‘feminine expression’ of particular Passions opens the possibility that Hester Santlow used her own conventions of gesture, from her work as an actress, in The Loves of Mars and Venus. The action in John Weaver’s ‘Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing’ may have owed more to her than we can ever know.

NOTES

1) John Weaver, An Essay towards an History of Dancing (London, 1712), p. 168. All of Weaver’s published works are reproduced in facsimile in Richard Ralph, The Life and Works of John Weaver (London, 1985), to which references will also be given. For this quotation see p. 665.

2) John Weaver, The Loves of Mars and Venus (London, 1717), pp. x-xi. Ralph, John Weaver, pp. 739-740.

3) John Weaver, Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (London, 1721), p. x. Ralph, John Weaver, p. 869.

4) Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. xi. Ralph, John Weaver, p. 740.

5) Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, pp. 20-23. Ralph, John Weaver, pp. 752, 754-756.

6)  Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, pp. 27-28. Ralph, John Weaver, pp. 760, 762.

7) John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the naturall language of the hand … whereunto is added Chironomia: or, the art of manuall rhetoricke (London, 1644). Studies of Bulwer’s treatises have focussed on the influence of his sign language in the teaching of deaf people, they await detailed scrutiny by historians of acting as well as dancing.

8) See Ralph, John Weaver, pp. 135-136 for Gildon and Weaver’s Essay.

9) For Mrs Santlow’s acting repertoire in relation to The Loves of Mars and Venus see Moira Goff, ‘In pursuit of the dancer-actress’, in Women’s work: making dance in Europe before 1800, ed. Lynn Matluck Brooks (Madison, Wis., 2007), 183-204 (pp. 191-194).

10) Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. 22. Ralph, John Weaver, p. 755.

11) George Etherege, The Man of Mode (London, 1676), pp. 35-36.

12) See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, The publication of plays in London 1660-1800 (London, 2015), chapter 6.

13) Nicholas Rowe, Tamerlane (London, 1776)

14) Nicholas Rowe, Jane Shore (London, 1776)

15) Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. 23. Ralph, John Weaver, p. 756.

16) Gilbert Austin, Chironomia (London, 1806), p. 489, figures 108, 109.

IMAGES

  1. James Roberts (artist) and John Thornthwaite (engraver), frontispiece plate from Nicholas Rowe, Tamerlane (London, 1776) in Bell’s British Theatre, vol. 31. Copy courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Queen’s University Belfast.
  2. James Roberts (artist), frontispiece plate from Nicholas Rowe, Jane Shore (London, 1776), in Bell’s British Theatre, vol. 1. ©Victoria & Albert Museum.

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The next post, on Clarissa Wybrow (née Blanchet), is by Keith Cavers and will appear on 10th December 2021.

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HESTER SANTLOW ‘SCENICAL DANCING’: THE DANCE

MOIRA GOFF

On 2 March 1717, The Loves of Mars and Venus a ‘Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing’ by John Weaver was given its first performance at Drury Lane. The new afterpiece was innovative and even experimental, for it told the story of the love affair between Mars and Venus and the revenge taken by Venus’s husband Vulcan using only dance and mime, with no spoken or sung words to explain the plot or the action. Weaver himself was Vulcan, with the dancer Louis Dupré as Mars and the dancer-actress Hester Santlow (1693 or 1694 -1773) as Venus. In his scenario, published to accompany performances of the entertainment, Weaver acknowledged ‘I have not been able to get all my Dancers equal to the Design’.[1] The one performer in Weaver’s cast who was undoubtedly equal to his demands was Hester Santlow. She would continue to play Venus in revivals of the afterpiece until 1724 and she would take leading roles in both of his subsequent ‘Dramatick Entertainments’, as Eurydice in Orpheus and Eurydice in 1718 and Helen of Troy in The Judgment of Paris in 1733. Mrs Santlow seems to have been central to John Weaver’s attempts to reform stage dancing in London.

In An Essay towards an History of Dancing, published in 1712, John Weaver devoted his final chapter to ‘Modern Dancing’. He provided his own analysis of genres of stage dancing, proposing the reform of English theatrical dance by adopting what he called ‘Scenical Dancing’. He described his new genre thus:

Scenical Dancing, is a faint Imitation of the Roman Pantomimes, and differs only from the Grotesque, in that the last only represents Persons, Passions, and Manners; and the former explains whole Stories by Action.

According to Weaver, ‘Grotesque Dancing’ was ‘wholly calculated for the Stage and takes in the greatest Part of Opera-Dancing’. He linked grotesque dancing to the principal characters of the commedia dell’arte, referring to their performers as ‘modern Mimes inimitable’. Weaver also mentioned ‘Serious Dancing’, which he defined in terms of skill rather than the expression he saw as integral to the other two genres.[2]

Hester Santlow had begun her career as a dancer at Drury Lane in 1706, making her debut as an actress at the same theatre in 1709. By the 1716-1717 season, she was both a leading dancer and a leading actress with the company and able to draw on a repertoire of more than twenty-five dramatic roles as well as a range of both serious and grotesque entr’acte dances.[3] Mrs Santlow’s most popular entr’acte dance was a solo Harlequine and there are many depictions of her as this character, the best-known of which is now among the theatre collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Hester Santlow as Harlequin, by John Elys, ©Victoria & Albert Museum

We have no corresponding portrait of her as a serious dancer, although some of the choreographies that she performed were recorded and published in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation. These give us an idea of the professional dance skills that Hester Santlow brought to the role of Venus in Weaver’s ballet. As an actress, Mrs Santlow would have had a variety of expressive gestures at her command. She had all the performance skills needed to excel in Weaver’s Scenical Dancing.

Weaver’s afterpiece has six scenes. Venus first appears in scene two:

After a Simphony of Flutes, &c. the Scene opens and discovers Venus in her Dressing-Room at her Toilet, attended by the Graces, who are employ’d in dressing her. Cupid lies at her Feet, and one of the Hours waits by. Venus rises, and dances a Passacaile: The Graces joyn her in the same Movement, as does also the Hour.[4]

The scenery, from the theatre’s existing stock, may have placed Venus in a setting more suited to the heroine of a Restoration comedy than the goddess of love, but her passacaille must have been intended to evoke the sophistication and grandeur of French opera. Hester Santlow’s repertoire as a dancer-actress had made her familiar with both.

No music (with the possible exception of one tune) and no choreography for The Loves of Mars and Venus are known to survive, so we must look to other sources to envisage Weaver’s new afterpiece.[5] He later ascribed the music for The Loves of Mars and Venus to Henry Symonds and Charles Fairbank, with Fairbank (who was also a dancer) responsible for the ‘musical Airs of the Dancing Parts’.[6] It is possible, if not likely, that Fairbank made arrangements of existing music as well as supplying new compositions of his own. He might well have turned to a French passacaille as a dance already familiar to London audiences.

Although she is not billed as dancing a passacaille until 5 April 1720 (when she performed a solo for John Weaver’s benefit), Hester Santlow had become familiar with the form as early as 1706, when she danced a duet with Mrs Elford choreographed by Anthony L’Abbé to the passacaille from Lully’s opera Armide. L’Abbé later created a solo for her to the passacaille from Desmaret’s opera Vénus & Adonis, which she may have performed around the time of The Loves of Mars and Venus.[7] L’Abbé’s choreography hints at dancing expressive of ‘Persons, Passions, and Manners’ as well as exploiting Mrs Santlow’s technical skills. It reveals the qualities she would have brought to her performance as Venus in Weaver’s ballet and provides clues to the choreography she performed in scene two.[8]

Anthony L’Abbé, Plate one, ‘Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis’

Venus has two more dances in Weaver’s ballet, an Entry in scene four and a final Grand Dance in scene six. Scene four is set in ‘A Garden’, although Weaver characterises the action as ‘alternate, as representing Love and War’. The Entry is begun by the four Followers of Mars, who are joined by the Graces (and presumably the Hour as well) and then by Mars and Venus. Although Weaver prescribes no specific gestures, he obviously saw this dance as expressive, for he describes how ‘the Fire, Robustness; and Strength of the Warrior is seen mixt with the Softness and Delicacy of Love’ adding that the dance concludes ‘with every Man carrying off his Woman’. It may have been a suite of dances, beginning with the Followers of Mars and culminating in a duet between Mars and Venus before finishing with all ten dancers together. Hester Santlow and Louis Dupré had been the lead couple in the group dance Myrtillo, first given at Drury Lane on 14 October 1715 within the afterpiece Myrtillo and Laura but soon performed separately in the entr’actes. The surviving music for this dance is a suite.[9] Since at least six of the ten dancers in the Entry in scene four of The Loves of Mars and Venus also danced in Myrtillo, there is the possibility of a connection between the two. 

The Grand Dance which ends The Loves of Mars and Venus is performed by ‘Mars, with the rest of the Gods, and Goddesses’.[10] Weaver leaves us to infer that this is a piece of serious dancing, symbolising the restoration of harmony between the deities after Vulcan has forgiven Mars and Venus. Such Grand Dances already had a long history on the London stage, with notable examples in the dramatic operas of Henry Purcell (which Weaver is likely to have known). There were nine performers in his Grand Dance, suggesting that Mars, Vulcan and Venus may have danced singly and together, with the other deities forming a corps de ballet. Mars and Venus, if not Vulcan, will surely have provided a display of French serious dancing for the stage.

The Loves of Mars and Venus was performed forty-four times between 1717 and 1724. The dancers who performed Mars and even Vulcan (Weaver’s role) changed over that period, but Hester Santlow retained the role of Venus. She went on to take the leading female roles in Weaver’s subsequent dramatic entertainments of dancing, showing his dependence on her skills as both a dancer and an actress.

Other dancing masters at Drury Lane acknowledged her mastery by casting her in leading roles within new afterpieces which tried to emulate Weaver’s. She was Daphne in John Thurmond Junior’s Apollo and Daphne; or, Harlequin’s Metamorphoses, given on 20 February 1725, and Andromeda in Roger and Weaver’s Perseus and Andromeda: With the Rape of Colombine; or, The Flying Lovers, given on 15 November 1728. Roger choreographed the serious part of Perseus and Andromedaand later cast Hester Santlow as Diana in a pantomime afterpiece, Diana and Acteon, which he created for his own benefit performance on 23 April 1730. It is possible to see her dance-drama skills being deployed in two of the entr’acte dances she performed with her last dancing partner George Desnoyer, the Grand Ballad d’Amour and Le Chasseur Royal given during the 1731-1732 season.[11]

 John Weaver visited and worked in London intermittently after 1712. Scenical dancing was used and developed in Drury Lane’s afterpieces and entr’acte dances by Hester Santlow, and her performances influenced dancing at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and elsewhere. As the leading dancer and a leading actress at Drury Lane for more than twenty years she ensured the ultimate success of Weaver’s reforms in London’s theatres.

Notes

[1] John Weaver, The Loves of Mars and Venus (London, 1717), p. x. All of Weaver’s published works are reproduced in facsimile in Richard Ralph, The Life and Works of John Weaver (London, 1985), to which references will also be given. For this quotation see p. 739.

[2] John Weaver, An Essay towards an History of Dancing (London, 1712), pp. 162, 164, 168. Ralph, John Weaver, pp. 655, 658, 665.

[3] For details of Mrs Santlow’s career, see Moira Goff, The Incomparable Hester Santlow (Aldershot, 2007).

[4] Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. 20, Ralph, John Weaver, p. 752.

[5] The country dance tune ‘Mars and Venus’ in The Dancing Master: or, Directions for Dancing Country Dances. The Third Volume (London, [1728?]), p. 31, and its possible inclusion in The Loves of Mars and Venus is discussed by George Dorris, ‘Music for the Ballets of John Weaver’, Dance Chronicle, 3.1 (1979), 46-60 (pp. 50-53). The tune is also associated with the actor Henry Norris, who may have been one of the Drury Lane ‘Comedians’ who danced the Cyclops in Weaver’s ballet in 1717.

[6] John Weaver, Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (London, 1721), p. 143, also reproduced in Ralph, John Weaver, p. 1017.

[7] Goff, Hester Santlow, p. 79. For the notation, see Anthony L’Abbé, A New Collection of Dances. Originally published by F. le Roussau London c.1725, intro. Carol G. Marsh (London, 1991), pls. 46-56.

[8] Moira Goff, ‘Imitating the Passions: Reconstructing the Meanings within the Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis’, Preservation Politics: Dance Revived, Reconstructed, Remade, ed. Stephanie Jordan (London, 2000), pp. 154-165.

[9] Goff, Hester Santlow, p. 78.

[10] Weaver, Loves of Mars and Venus, p. 27. Ralph, John Weaver, p. 760.

[11] Hester Santlow’s repertoire and her contribution to dancing on the London stage is discussed in detail in Moira Goff, ‘Art and Nature Join’d: Hester Santlow and the Development of Dancing on the London Stage, 1700-1737’ (unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 2000).

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‘Hester Santlow “Scenical Dancing”: The Drama’, by Moira Goff, will appear on 24 November.

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Three’s a crowd: Mlle Parisot part 2

SARAH McCLEAVE

James Gillray, ‘Modern Grace, or the operatically finale to Alonzo e Cora’. From the New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/81e29940-b1a1-0133-dea2-00505686a51c.

In spring 1796 Parisot continued to attract interest, not only for her own comely person, but for her relationships with others. James Gillray’s print as shown above depicts (from left to right) Madame Rose Didelot, Charles-Louis Didelot, and Parisot in the finale to the King’s Theatre’s May 1796 production of Alonso e Cora (chor. Giacomo Onorati).

This print is a caricature on several levels; first, let’s consider the movement style of the dancers. Rose Didelot, described in one source as the ‘last of the old school, la belle ecole de VESTRIS’ (1), is depicted in a relatively upright pose reminiscent of the noble style. Parisot – described as offering ‘less formal graces’ (2) – is seen in a more extended attitude. But it is the dynamic between the dancers that is the actual focus of the caricature. Mme Didelot’s husband is orientated completely towards the younger dancer, with his hand and foot forming a suggestive frame that points to Parisot’s genital region. Parisot’s head is inclined flirtatiously towards Didelot while Mme Didelot looks on in evident disapproval. The exposure of one of Parisot’s breasts was a comment on her scanty costumes, which weren’t necessarily of her choice. The perhaps too acute Gillray adroitly portrays a dynamic.

Despite the very public nature of this pictorial comment, no crisis was reported regarding the Didelots’ marriage, and all three dancers returned to the King’s Theatre in autumn 1796. In May 1797 the King’s Theatre staged a new ballet, Sappho and Phaon, that can in retrospect be considered another document in the story of this ‘love triangle’. Didelot is advertised as the choreographer, and is clearly credited as the creator in the published scenario (3). In this publication, Didelot himself describes the mythical story of Sappho:

The celebrated Sappho left nothing to posterity but a few pieces of poetry … We only learn that she loved Phaon, and that he was ungrateful; left her for one of her pupils; returned to her more through pride than love, and abandoned her once more– that she followed him even to Sicily, and that, unable to gain his heart, she threw herself into the deep from the rock of Leucate (4).

Didelot saw fit to cast his wife as the unloved Sappho, and himself as the ‘ungrateful’ Phaon. He used the Advertisement of the ballet scenario to point out that he decided to make the mythically beautiful Sappho ugly, in order to highlight the moral allegory in his imagined denouement, and to render Sappho ‘more interesting [and] to show the goodness of her heart’ (4). Quite.

In another flash of gifted casting, Parisot featured as the goddess of love Venus; her character was moved to tutor the famously beautiful Phaon in the arts of love in the opening scene. Indeed, the scenario afforded the character of Phaon the opportunity to make love to each of three female leads (the third was one of the Hilligsbergs) during the course of the ballet – hence its title-page designation as a ‘ballet érotique’. And while Sappho is offered the chance of revenge under Venus’s protection in Didelot’s dénouement, we might wish to note that she explicitly rejects the possibility of Phaon’s death, or even the milder punishment that he be rendered ugly. One can appreciate the appeal of a ballet where a philandering lover meets no consequences for Monsieur Didelot. And who can blame a man who would stray from an ugly partner? This piece of art was mirroring life all too closely, for by August both the Courier (8 August) and Observer (13 August) breathlessly reported:

There has been a fracas between some of the dancers at the Haymarket, on account of an illicit pas de deux. The enchantress was none other than the divine Parisot; and of the forsaken one it may be said, in the phrase of Shakespeare:

Against the blown Rose

They do stop their nose,

That kneel’d unto the buds.


Within days, Parisot is reported as returning to the continent (Morning Chronicle 16 August 1797). When the non-renewal of her contract was announced, the True Briton (18 November 1797) declared that the ‘gratification of the public’ was not taken into account, revealing that Parisot, ‘the greatest attraction of last year’, had offered ‘her services’ for the coming season. The choice of language here (gratification, services) is suggestive, although not as overtly so as this grotesque anticipation of Parisot’s marriage that was published during the performance run of Didelot’s ‘ballet érotique’:

Madame PARISOT is going to enter into the holy state of Matrimony before next winter. She will be able to exhibit some new motions and attitudes (5).

The reception of this young dancer in words and images during her first stint in London reveals some troubling trends in then-current attitudes towards young, nubile female dancers. Parisot was fodder for the press and the caricaturists, an objectified body for elderly peers of the realm to covet, and a pliant conquest for an older, married colleague. And it was she who took the rap for their affair, being obliged to leave a position upon which she and her family were financially dependent. #MeToo. #Parisot. To be continued.

Notes

  1. ‘London’, St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post 4-6 May 1797. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection. Gale.
  2. True Briton 29 May 1797. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection. Gale.
  3. True Briton 5 May 1797. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection. Gale. See also C.L. Didelot. 1797. Sapho & Phaon: grand ballet erotique, en quatre actes. Composé par M. Didelot. Et donné pour la Iere fois sur le Théâtre du Roi, Hay-Market, le 6 avril 1797. La musique composée par M. Mazzinghi. Les décorations par M. Greenwood. Les habits par M. Sestini. De l’imprimerie de Baylis , 15, Greville Street, Holborn. Se trouve chez A. Dulau and Co. Wardour – Street. Soho. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
  4. Didelot, ‘Advertisement.’
  5. Morning Post (London), 16 May 1797. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection. Gale.

Image

Modern grace, or the operatical finale to the ballet of Alonzo e Caro [sic]; [London], H. Humphrey, 1796 / J[ames] G[illra]y d[elineavit] et f[ecit. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. (1796 – 1840). Irina Baronova collection of dance prints Retrieved from https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/81e29940-b1a1-0133-dea2-00505686a51c. Accessed 23 October 2021.

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The first of a pair of posts on the dancer Hester Santlow, by Moira Goff, will appear on 10th November.

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Body on Show: Mlle Rose Parisot part 1

Sarah McCleave

Mlle Rose Parisot (1777?-after 1837) was a young French dancer whose reception in London is well documented in the contemporary press, and also through satirical prints as well as two portraits. From her King’s Theatre début in February 1796 she attracted attention for her looks and the physicality of her movement, as this Morning Chronicle review (10 Feb. 1796) reveals:

Madamoiselle PARISOT, a new dancer from Paris … is a most beautiful figure, about 18 years of age, and with a face full of expression. A little divertissement has been got up to introduce her to the public, and she displayed powers in the grand character extremely striking. Her attitudes are graceful, her step firm, her balance is positively magical, for her person was almost horizontal while turning as on a pivot on her toe. From the specimen of last night, she is a great acquisition to the Theatre; and if her talent for acting be equal to her dancing and figure, they will be able to give us ballets in good style.

Parisot had previously served as première danseuse in Rouen and had also danced in Paris (2). Press reports in London suggest that she was obliged to become professional through the events of the French Revolution (3), further indicating that she supported her mother and a sister. There’s no sense, however, that she enjoyed any familial protection, or indeed that she had any valuable guidance or support during what would prove to be a turbulent career for this young foreign dancer. The Morning Chronicle review touches on two issues that would dominate her reception: her beautiful figure, and the unusual attitude she introduced to the London stage. Towards the end of her first London season we are told ‘Parisot, the beautiful Parisot, captivates, by her curvets and her attitudes, all the hearts in Fop’s Alley’ (4). Her winning combination of curves and poses stimulated strong responses from a certain kind of theatre spectator.

Richard Newton, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

This blog post reproduces two satirical prints of Parisot’s spectators (5). Above we have Newman’s print, which shows Parisot being ogled by the then 72-year-old William Douglas, 4th Duke of Queensberry. It’s likely the cleric pictured is Shute Barrington, Bishop of Durham, who openly censored the immorality of current stage practices. Below we have Isaac Cruickshank’s ‘A Peep at the Parisot – with Q in the Corner’. So once again the faithful Duke of Queensbury – an inveterate gambler popularly known as ‘Old Q’ – is in attendance. As the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (5 May 1796) reported, ‘the Duke of QUEENSBERRY looks not at any other garter than that appertaining to the enchanting leg of PARISOT’. The experienced satirist Cruickshank focuses on those enchanting legs, the outline of which can be appreciated underneath Parisot’s costume. By drawing the opening in her skirt – a detail we don’t have in the Newman – Cruickshank brings a greater immediacy to the scenario. We apprehend the young dancer’s level of exposure without seeing beneath the skirt ourselves.

Isaac Cruikshank, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

While the furore that Parisot’s attitudes caused was a lively enough introduction to the London theatre scene, she had to cope with an even more significant scandal the following season.

To be continued.

Notes

1) ‘Arts and Culture.’ Morning Chronicle [1770], 10 Feb. 1796. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection, Gale Primary Resources, accessed 26 Sept. 2021.

2) The Biographical Dictionary of Actors indicates Parisot’s pre-London experience; for a most interesting blog that includes some detail about her press coverage from the age of 14, see Naomi Clifford, ‘Mademoiselle Parisot’s shocking pirouettes put London in a spin’, in Books and Talks (blog), 10 Sept. 2018. https://www.naomiclifford.com/portfolio/mademoiselle-parisot/, accessed 26 Sept. 2021.

3) ‘News.’ Oracle, 18 Aug. 1796. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection, Gale Primary Resources, accessed 26 Sept. 2021.

4) ‘News.’ Sun, 9 June 1796. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection, Gale Primary Resources, accessed 26 Sept. 2021.

5) For further on these men, and the notion that they are the object of the satire rather than the dancer, see Caitlyn Lehmann, ‘Madame Rose Parisot, “Attitudinarian”‘, in vintage pointe (blog), no date. https://vintagepointe.org/madam-rose-parisot-attitudinarian/, accessed 26 September 2021.

Images

  1. Richard Newton. 1796. ‘Madamoiselle Parisot.’ London: William Holland. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Accessed 21 April 2021. 
  2. Issac Cruikshank (artist). 1796. ‘A Peep at the Parisot with Q in the Corner.’ London: S.W. Fores. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1137209/h-beard-print-collection-print-cruikshank-isaac/. Accessed 21 April 2021.

Next Post

“Three’s a Crowd,” a continuation of the account of Mlle. Parisot’s London reception, will appear on 10 October.

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The reputation of Nancy Dawson part 2

OLIVE BALDWIN & THELMA WILSON

It was words that were later set to her hornpipe tune that led to Nancy Dawson’s posthumous reputation.  In the eighteenth-century it became a popular and innocuous ballad tune, used for numerous new sets of words, satirical, political, amorous, Masonic and commercial, as well as for airs in musical pieces for the theatre.  The tune also became popular among sailors, being used in the navy to call the men for their ration of grog (7), and was used for shanties, some of course indecent.  The tune was also used for the bawdy song ‘Nancy Dawson was a whore’ in which Nancy entertains sailors of every age and rank from a midshipman to the commodore.  We have been unable to trace this song in print before its appearance in Nancy Dawson’s Cabinet of Choice Songs [1842?], where it is headed ‘a very celebrated and out-and-out ditty, not to be had in any other collection’ (8).  (No other song in the book has anything to do with Nancy Dawson.)  Several of the correspondents to Notes and Queries in the nineteenth century appear to have been familiar with this song.  For instance, in April 1876, J. Standish Haly remembered it ‘being sung with “rapturous applause” when he was a boy at the Royal Naval College, and he added ‘The Memoirs of Miss N— D— must refer to some one else’.  Between 1866 and 1958, various writers to Notes and Queries believed that the first eight lines of  the indecent song were engraved on her tombstone, before being obliterated or hidden by a later rector. Surprisingly, Nancy Dawson’s supposed tombstone continues to affect her reputation, for the final sentence of her current Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry states: ‘The size and prominence of her tombstone have prompted speculation about liaisons in her later years’.  This statement is taken from the Biographical Dictionary of Actors, for in 1966 one of the editors visited the site of her burial, now St George’s Gardens, and was spun a yarn by the ground keeper that the largest monument in the garden, a six metres high obelisk, was her memorial (9).  The enormous obelisk in fact dates from 1729, two years after she was born (10).  

The obelisk wrongly associated with Nancy Dawson. Photo: Wilson.

It is ironic that Nancy Dawson would not have a modern reputation, good or bad, were it not for writings about her long after her death.  Her undoubted skill as a hornpipe dancer would merit only limited coverage in modern reference books, her entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Actors would be shorter and she would almost certainly not have been allocated an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Notes

 7) Dear, I. C. B., and Peter Kemp, The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 376.

8) Nancy Dawson’s Cabinet of Choice Songs, being a collection of some of the most superlative, amatory, flash, luxurious, and dainty ditties, ever before printed (London: W. West, [1842?]).  In the British Library catalogue, the author of the collection (C.116.a.45) is given as Nancy Dawson!

9) Burnim, Kalman A. ‘Nancy Dawson’s tombstone’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, First series, 5.1 (1966), 59.

10) She was almost certainly born in Axminster, Devon, where Ann, daughter of William Newton, was baptized on 27 January 1727.  See: Chapman, Geoffrey, A History of Axminster to 1910 (Honiton: Marwood, 1998), 135-6. 

Next post

24th September, Mademoiselle Parisot Part 1

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The Reputation of Nancy Dawson

OLIVE BALDWIN & THELMA WILSON


Image 1) ‘Nancy Dawson’, her hornpipe. From The New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/49d8b010-3448-0131-1b38-58d385a7b928


Nancy Dawson had a seven-year career, dancing on the London stage from 1756 to 1763. She became a celebrity overnight in October 1759, when Covent Garden’s dancer Francis Miles fell ill and she replaced him as the performer of the hornpipe in the Newgate scene of the prisoners in chains in The Beggar’s Opera (1). Her popularity attracted the immediate attention of gutter journalists and print sellers. Dawson’s only speciality on stage was her hornpipe, so it is perhaps surprising to find that this dancer, with a short career and limited range, appeared in the 1888 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, where she is described as ‘of shrewish temper, heartless and mercenary, and of notoriously immoral life’ (2). Moreover, between 1860 and 1958 she figured over thirty times in Notes and Queries, with various respectable contributors showing a strong interest in the more lurid aspects of her reputation, much of which seems to have been acquired long after her death.


Two very similar anonymous celebrity ‘biographies’ quickly appeared, The Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Nancy D―n (London: R. Stevens, 1760) and The Authentic Memoirs of Celebrated Miss Nancy D*w*n (London: Tom Dawson, [1762?]) (3). A review of The Genuine Memoirs in the London Magazine; or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer of October 1760 dismissed the publication as ‘ridiculous, yet pernicious’ (p. 560), and indeed, like other catchpenny ‘memoirs’ of the time, it consists of a good deal of scurrilous invention. However, her supposed low-life origins and amours were generally accepted as fact until the editors of the Biographical Dictionary of Actors consulted Dawson’s will. Her father, William Newton, was not a pimp and porter, nor had her drunken mother died in a gutter, for he ran a stay-making business in the Covent Garden area and Nancy left suitable bequests to her father and to his wife, her ‘dear mother’.

Prints of Nancy Dawson were rapidly produced. The Genuine Memoirs included a crudely executed frontispiece showing her dancing among the thieves in The Beggar’s Opera and prints for sale in the shops quickly followed. There were essentially two different images, one showing her about to begin her stage hornpipe (see Image 1, above) and one that is clearly based on Reynolds’s portrait of the courtesan Kitty Fisher (see Images 2-3, below). In both, she is wearing the straw hat that was part of her hornpipe costume. In time, assumptions as to her character came to be drawn from these prints. In February 1866 a correspondent to Notes and Queries described the image showing her about to dance on stage as depicting ‘a young lady of saucy appearance … in the act, apparently, of asking someone to walk in’, while in 2012 Kevin Bourque, in Blind Items: Anonymity, Notoriety, and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Celebrity assumed that the use of the image of Kitty Fisher showed that Nancy Dawson, too, was a notorious courtesan, rather than seeing it as a way of quickly and cheaply producing a print of a stage celebrity (4).


Kitty Fisher (Image 2, above) by Joshua Reynolds.

Nancy Dawson (Image 3, below) by Charles Spooner.


Three years before her first advertised stage appearance Ann [Nancy] Newton married James Dawson, a mariner, who seems to have soon disappeared from her life (5). The scandal associated with her in her lifetime arose from her affair with the popular comic actor Edward Shuter, which was repeatedly referred to in song lyrics and satires. The catchy tune to which she danced her hornpipe was named after her and verses in her honour were fitted to it, beginning ‘Of all the girls in our town … There’s none like Nancy Dawson’. Here ‘Shuter droll’ is represented as standing in the way of other lovers, while another set of verses (‘Come all ye bucks and bloods so grim’ — see Image 4, below) states ‘She’s only for N―d S―r’s arms / The smiling Nancy Dawson’. In 1763 G. A. Stevens, who had quarreled with Shuter, wrote a tedious general satire entitled The Dramatic History of Master Edward, Miss Ann, and Others, in which Nancy does not appear until page 137. The couple are shown quarreling and coming to blows, and this section of Stevens’s satire seems to have been responsible for the description of her character in the Dictionary of National Biography entry as shrewish and mercenary. The relationship between Nancy Dawson [Dawsonia] and Ned Shuter [Shuterius] also features in the anonymous satire The Battle of the Players (London: W. Flexney, 1762).


Image 4 ‘Nancy Dawson’, her hornpipe, detail from Image 1.


Nancy worked with Shuter from autumn 1757, when she joined the Covent Garden company (6), and it is likely that they were still lovers when they appeared in Dublin together in summer 1763, a few months before she left the stage. Her will was made in May 1767, a month before her death, and the Biographical Dictionary of Actors (BDA) states that she left Shuter a mourning ring but did not notice that she also left him ‘all my Money in the publick Funds belonging to the Glass Cases in both my parlours’ and asked for him to be one of the pall bearers at her funeral (7). She may, of course, have had other lovers but no names survive. Nancy Dawson seems to have kept her friends, for at her last benefit she danced a double hornpipe with John Walker, the Drury Lane dancer and dancing master who taught her the hornpipe (8). She asked for Walker to be a pall bearer and left mourning rings to him and his dancer wife.

To be continued.

Notes

1. For a full account of Nancy Dawson’s life and reputation, see Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson, ‘Nancy Dawson, her hornpipe and her posthumous reputation’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, 30.1-2 (2015), 55-71.

2.   S.v. ‘Dawson, Nancy’ by A.V. [Alsager Richard Vian], in Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen, 63 vols. (London: Smith, 1885-1900), vol. 14.

3. The Life of Lavinia Beswick, alias Fenton, alias Polly Peachum (London: A. Moore, 1728) is a similarly unreliable work about Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly in The Beggar’s Opera.

4. Kevin J. Borque, Blind Items: Anonymity, Notoriety, and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Celebrity, Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin (2012); Nancy Dawson was also paired with Kitty Fisher in Whore Biographies, vol.4, edited by Julie Peakman (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006).

5.  The marriage took place on 1 January 1753 (National Archives, Kew, Marriage records of the Fleet).

6.  Will of Ann Dawson of Saint George the Martyr , Middlesex, 24 May 1767, PROB 11/929/346, National Archives, Kew.

7. I.C.B. Dear, and Peter Kemp, The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 376.

8. Nancy Dawson’s Cabinet of Choice Songs, being a collection of some of the most superlative, amatory, flash, luxurious, and dainty ditties, ever before printed (London: W. West, [1842?]).  In the British Library catalogue, the author of the collection (C.116.a.45) is given as Nancy Dawson!

Images

  1. Anonymous. ‘Nancy Dawson’, her hornpipe. London: Robert Sayer, [c.1762]. Engraving. From The New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/49d8b010-3448-0131-1b38-58d385a7b928. Accessed 24 August 2021. Public domain.
  2. Joshua Reynolds. ‘Miss Kitty Fisher.’ London: Robert Sayer, 1763. Mezzotint. London: Robert Sayer, [c. 1760]. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
  3. Charles Spooner. ‘Nancy Dawson.’ London: Robert Sayer, [c.1763]. Mezzotint. From The New York Public Library, https://nypl.getarchive.net/media/nancy-dawson-43e358. Accessed 24 August 2021. Public domain.
  4. Detail from Image 1, above.

Next post

‘The reputation of Nancy Dawson part 2’ will appear on 10 September 2021.

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‘I long to be ogling Madam’s feet’: Marie-Thérèse Perdou de Subligny (1666-c.1735)

JENNIFER THORP

Marie-Thérèse Perdou de Subligny was born in July 1666 in Paris, daughter of the author and playwright Adrien-Thomas Perdou, sieur de Subligny (1636-1696). The first reference we have to her as a member of the Paris Opéra dance troupe dates from April 1687 when the architect Nicodemus Tessin saw her dance in a performance of Lully’s Persée. He thought she was one of the best female dancers there, and even described her exquisite costume: ‘The underskirt was made of gold moiré, with a blue and silver embroidered border all round. It was the same for the overskirt, which came to the knee. Around the bottom of the under-petticoat of gold moiré, there were fairly widely spaced bands of black braid, resembling velvet and bordered with silver. Near the top, the sleeves were slashed, then tight-fitting, and open lower down’ (1).

Mlle Sublingy by Henri Bonnart
Mlle Subligny by Henri Bonnart (Paris, 1699). Source: Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF.

Research by Nathalie Lecomte and Rebecca Harris-Warrick has corrected several errors in the existing biographies and dictionary articles on Subligny. There is, for instance, uncertainty about exactly what and when she danced in her early years at the Opéra because female dancers were not named in the livrets before 1699. Twentieth-century biographers all tended to follow Émile Campardon’s entry for Subligny in his L’Académie Royale de Musique au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1884, vol. 2, pp. 295-297), and thereby were misled into assuming that, because she is known to have danced in post-1699 revivals of certain operas, she therefore must also have danced in the original staging, yet this is by no means certain and both the choreographies and the performers may well have changed before 1699.

Subligny is first mentioned in the opera livrets as dancing in the 1699 revival of Jean Baptiste Lully’s Proserpine, as one of the ‘Ombres heureuses’ (happy spirits) of the underworld in Act IV. Also in 1699, Henri Bonnart published an engraving of ‘Mademoiselle Subligny Danseuse de l’Opéra, and around the same time Jean Mariette published another, of ‘Mademoiselle Subligny dansant à l’Opéra’ (2).

Mlle Subligny by Henri Mariette (Paris, c. 1699). From the New York Public Library. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-0c52-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Subligny’s skills in different dance styles are borne out by the number of solos she danced subsequently in Paris (3). By the time she retired from the stage she was one of the highest paid female dancers at the Opéra and had performed in at least six Lully operas and in revivals of such works as the Ballet des Fragments de Mr de Lully, and André Campra’s L’Europe galante, often as the dance partner of Claude Balon (1671-1744). Her last known performance before retiring was on 26 November 1705, dancing a solo as a Nymph of Diana and a duet with Balon in Le Triomph de l’Amour (4).

The surviving dances for Subligny comprise four theatrical solos and twelve duets with Claude Balon. All were created by the Opéra’s ballet-master of their day, Guillaume-Louis Pécour, and survive because they were published in notation by Raoul-Auger Feuillet (L’Allemande in 1702, inspired by a Balon-Subligny duet, followed by ten more duets and three solos in his Recueil de dances contenant […] des meilleures Entrées de Mr Pecour in 1704), and by yet another duet and one solo published by Michel Gaudrau (in his Nouveau recueil de danse […] de Ballet in 1713). All were set to music from operas and opera-ballets by Lully, Campra, André Cardinal Destouches, and Theobaldo di Gatti (5).

Two of the solos specify that Subligny danced them ‘en Angleterre’, and she is believed to be the first leading female dancer from Paris to perform on the London stage. Robert D. Hume’s proposal that she was in London in December 1701 is now challenged by Lecomte’s findings that Subligny could not have reached London before late-January 1702, for she had been in Paris, dancing in Destouche’s Omphale, between 10 November and 8 January, and in a new version of Gatti’s Scylla from 20 December until 10 January (but not in its Versailles Trianon performance on 27 February) (6). Nor could she have remained in London much beyond March or early April, as more Omphale performances after Easter and rehearsals for Acis & Galatea (due to open in June) required a return to Paris. As will be discussed presently, Subligny was mentioned in the London publication A Comparison between the Two Stages, a critical discourse presented as a dialogue ‘between Ramble and Sullen, two gentlemen, and Chagrin a critick’ which was published on 14 April 1702 but probably compiled in February and March (7).

For a dancer who spent such a short time in London, Subligny made a remarkable impact. The charms of ‘gallick heels’ were blamed for wrecking the revival of Farquhar’s play The Inconstant at Drury Lane in February 1702 because audiences preferred to go and see the ‘French lady’ dance at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (8). Subligny was described, in A Comparison between the Two Stages, as ‘a new wonder’ whose footwork became a near-obsession for ‘gentleman’ Ramble (p. 67 – it is he who ‘long[s] to be ogling Madam’s feet’); the critic Chagrin, however, thought her a ‘surprising monster’ (p. 67). The only two solos that we know she danced in London were the Gigue pour une femme (to music from Gatti’s Scylla), which may or may not have been adapted from the Paris version (1701), and a Passacaille pour une femme to music from Lully’s Armide, which perhaps was destined to be modified for inclusion in the new Paris version of that opera in 1703. Otherwise, we shall probably never know exactly what she danced in London, as no copy of Walsh’s Second Book of the Gentleman’s Companion …for the flute…To which are added several new French Dances perform’d by Mlle de Subligny (advertised in the Post Boy 25-28 April 1702) is known to have survived. His naming of a female dancer of renown in one of his own music publications was perhaps an early sign of his commercial acumen in trying to be the first to present new talent or newsworthy musical events to the public. 

The comment in the Biographical Dictionary of Actors that Subligny arrived in London with a letter of introduction to the philosopher John Locke does not imply that they actually met (9). Given that her father was a writer, and that Locke had spent some time in Paris in the 1670s, it would not have been unusual for Subligny to carry such a letter, but by 1702 the now very elderly Locke had long retired to High Laver in Essex, and it seems unlikely that Subligny would have had time to make a journey out of London to visit him.

Subligny lived on for another thirty years after her own retirement, dying in c.1735.  It is a pity that more is not known of her career, which was halfway over by the time she started to be widely documented as a dancer. In Paris, younger female dancers such as Mademoiselle Guiot were already making a name for themselves, their own careers no doubt helped by Subligny setting a high standard by her performance skills. In London, however, responses to her varied: Thomas Betterton, the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre manager, deplored the expensive fee that she was able to command, but the public flocked to see her perform (10), and the beauty and ingenuity of her surviving dances still continue today to bear witness to her skills.

Notes

  1. Caroline Wood and Graham Sadler, French Baroque Opera: A Reader (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000),126. 
  2. Editor’s note: These are early examples of portraits depicting a performer rather than a member of the social élite: Bonnart had previously drawn King James II; Mariette’s earlier work included a portrait of  a more typical subject in Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth.
  3. See Rebecca Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 384.
  4. Nathalie Lecomte, Entre cours et jardins d’illusion: le ballet en Europe 1515-1715 (Paris: Centre National de la Danse, 2014), 342-3. Also personal communications.
  5. See catalogue descriptions in Meredith Little and Carol Marsh, La Danse Noble, an Inventory of Dances and Sources (New York: Broude Bros, 1992); Francine Lancelot, La Belle dance, catalogue raisonné (Paris: Van Dieren, 1996).
  6. Robert D. Hume, “A Revival of The Way of the World in December 1701 or January 1702”, Theatre Notebook 26 (1971), 30-36; for Lecomte, see n4 above.
  7. Anonymous, A Comparison between the two Stages, with an Examen of The generous Conqueror; and some critical Remarks on The funeral, or Grief alamode, The false friend, Tamerlane and others. In dialogue (London : [s.n.], 1702). Hume (as in n. 6, p. 30) notes the date of publication as 14 April 1702, without citing a source. The London Post of 8 May 1702 described it as ‘lately Publish’d’.
  8. George Farquhar, The Inconstant (London, 1702), preface.
  9. Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and other stage Personnel in London 1660-1800, vol. 14 (1991), 329.
  10. Betterton would later blame ‘the Depravity of the Taste of the Audience’ for obliging him ‘on Account of Self-defence’ to keep on bringing in foreign and expensive stars who included Subligny, followed by Balon and L’Abbé: see Charles Gildon, The Life of Mr Thomas Betterton (London, 1710), 142-3, 155. John Downes had made a similar observation two years earlier: John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (London, 1708), 96-97.

Images

Next post

‘The reputation of the dancer Nancy Dawson’ part 1 of 2, by Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson. To be published 24 August 2021.

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Playing the man or trousers roles: Call for contributors 6

Duvernay by Chalon, from the New York Public Library

Below is the final ‘Call for Contributors’ post for the Dance Biography blog. Several posts on this theme are invited, including subjects not posted below.

Chalon, Alfred Edward, 1780-1860 (artist). ‘Pauline Duvernay. [Lithograph by Alfred E. Chalon]’. [London, ca. 1836]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.  https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/fa820f30-8b72-0131-1ba4-58d385a7b928

Costume de Melle Maria, rôle d’un PAGE, dans La chatte métamorphesée en femme, ballet. Académie Royale de Musique, no. n51.’ Paris,[1837?].  https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b70016661

Currier, Nathaniel, 1813-1888 (lithographer and publisher) after William Drummond. ‘Maddle Celeste as the wild Arab boy.’ New York, lith. & pub. by N. Currier, 2 Spruce St. [1839?]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Fairburn, J. (publisher). ‘Madam Celeste as the dumb Arab boy in The siege of Constantine.’ [London] pub. by J. Fairburn, Jan. 15, 1838. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c9122840-294d-0131-8c9b-58d385a7b928

Lecomte, Hippolyte, 1781-1857 (designer). ‘La Muette de Portici: seize maquettes de costumes, No. 9 Les Pages Ballet Dames.’ [n.p., 1828]. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84545168

Maleuvre, Louis, 1785-after 1837 (engraver). ‘Costume de Melle Taglioni, rôle de ZULMA, La révolte au sérail, ballet. Académie Royale de Musique, no. 838.’ Paris, [1833?]. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b7001466b

Maleuvre, Louis, 1785-after 1837 (engraver). ‘Costume de Melle Pauline Leroux, rôle de Zéïr, La révolte au sérail, ballet. Académie Royale de Musique, no. 836.’ Paris, [1833?]. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b7001411c

Maleuvre, Louis, 1785-after 1837 (engraver). ‘Costume de Mazilier, rôle de ISMAÏL, La révolte au sérail, ballet. Académie Royale de Musique, no. 841.’ Paris, [1833?]. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b70017560

All offers of contributions, on this or any other subject, to the editor Sarah McCleave, s.mccleave@qub.ac.uk

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Noblet to Taglioni: Call for contributors 5

Above: Anonymous print of Marie Sallé in ‘Ballet des fleurs’ from the New York Public Library.

Below are further proposed themes, subjects, and and images for the Dance Biography blog:

“ESCAPING EFFIE” Noblet, Lise (1801-1852)

Costume sketch, Hautecoeur-Martinet, number 728, Lise Noblet in La Sylphide as Effie, circa 1832. Houghton library, George Chaffee Dance Collection.

Grévedon, Henri, 1776-1860 (artist), and Alphonse Bichebois, 1801-1850 (lithographer). ‘Melle Noblet de l’Académie royale de Musique.’

Paris, [182-].  The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b66f4be0-beb3-0132-6b2c-58d385a7bbd0

Maleuvre , Louis, b. 1785 (engraver). ‘Costume de Mlle. Noblet dans La révolte au sérail ballet. Acte II.’ Paris, [1833?].  https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b70016876

Vigneron, Pierre Roch, 1789-1872 (del.). ‘Melle. Noblet, Académie royale de musique.’ [Paris], [c. 1830]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/dbac5e70-beb3-0132-babd-58d385a7bbd0

FORTHCOMING Parisot, Mlle (c. 1775-after 1837) ‘Body on Show’ by Sarah McCleave

FORTHCOMING Sallé, Marie (1709?-1756) ‘La Vestale’ by Sarah McCleave

FORTHCOMING: Santlow, Hester, ‘The Loves of Mars and Venus’ (provisional title) by Moira Goff.

FORTHCOMING Subligny, Marie-Thérèse (1666-1735?) ‘The First Lady of Dance’ by Jennifer Thorp.

Mariette, Jean, 1660-1742 (engraver). “Mademoiselle Subligny dansant à l’Opéra.” Paris, [169-?]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-0c52-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

THE GENIUS OF DANCE: Taglioni, Maria (1804-1884)

‘Taglioni.’ Paris: F. Sinnett (rotonde 10) galerie Colbert [183-?]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/a64800a0-dd56-0132-0538-58d385a7bbd0

Grévedon, Henri, 1776-1860 (illustrator). [‘Marie Taglioni.’] [Paris, ca.1840]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1840. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/1d7d39c0-dd5a-0132-3af0-58d385a7bbd0

Lane, Richard James, 1800-1872 (artist), after Alfred Edward Chalon. ‘Marie Taglioni [fac. sig.].’ [London], 1831. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-0c43-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Lange, Jane (Ange-Louis Janet, 1811-1872), illustrator, lithographer, engraver. ‘Scène des fleurs, dansée par Mlle Taglioni (Académie Royale de musique).’ https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8427166w

Noël, Alphonse Léon, 1807-1884 (lithographer). ‘Mlle Taglioni Académie de Musique.’ Paris, [c.1840]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/94bd81d0-dd59-0132-ff26-58d385a7bbd0

Vigneron, Pierre Roch, 1789-1872 (artist). ‘Melle. Taglioni.’ Paris, [183-]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/0a5ea010-dd59-0132-6afa-58d385a7bbd0

Offers of contributions, on the above or other subjects, to the editor Sarah McCleave, s.mccleave@qub.ac.uk

Categories
Historical biography Uncategorised

Guimard to Nielson: Call for contributors 4

Above: Mlle Joséphine Hullin. Source: gallica.bnf.fr. /BnF.

Below are further proposed themes, subjects, and images for the Dance Biography blog:

“LA GUIMARD in PARIS and LONDON”: Guimard, Marie Madeleine (1743-1816)

Boquet, Louis-René, 1717-1814 (designer). Tancrède Mlle Guimard guerrière 1764 [maquette de costume]. [n.p., 1764].. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8454777n?rk=21459;2

Gervais, Eugène (after F. Boucher). “Melle Guimard.” Paris,

[between 1840-1860]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-0be6-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Humphrey, E. (“The celebrated Mademoiselle G-m-rd or Grimhard from Paris.” [London], 1789. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-0c21-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Dulertre (artist), and Jean-François Janinet, 1752-1814 (engraver). ‘Mlle Guimard dans le ballet du Navigateur). Paris, 1786. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b100269535?rk=42918;4

CHILD PRODIGY: Hullin, Joséphine (1808-1838).

Maleuvre (engraver). ‘Mlle Joséphine HULLIN, agée de 4 ans, dans la rôle du Petit Poucet dans la Botte de sept lieues. … Théatre de la Gaité Pantomime.’ A Paris, chez Mme Masson Libraire rue de l’Echelle, No. 10, [1812]. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53177576j/f1.item

FORTHCOMING. “BORN IN AMERICA” Maywood, Augusta (1825-1877?) by Lynn Matluck Brooks.

 Bedetti, Augusto (Lithographer). ‘Augusta Maywood.’ Ancona: Lit. Pieroni, [1853]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Clay, Edward Williams, 1799-1857 (artist). ‘[La petite Augusta, aged 12 years, in the character of Zoloe, in the Bayadere].’ N.Y.,[1838]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/05fe3de0-dd5d-0132-f092-58d385a7b928

“FAME IN THE FRENCH PROVINCES” Molard, Mlle. Zélie.

Noël, Francisque (lithographer), and F. Marin. ‘Mlle. Zélie Molard. Artiste du Théâtre de la Porte St. Martin. Rôle de Louise dans Le déserteur. Lith. de F. Noël.’ Paris,[184-]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1840 – http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/bde95d80-d70f-0132-3e8d-58d385a7bbd0

“ADOPTING AN IDENTITY” Montez, Lola (1818-1861)

Dartinguenave, Prosper Guillaume, b. 1815 (Artist), and Adolphe Menut (lithographer).  “Lola Montez.” Paris, [184?]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/aac27cc0-1454-0133-8e55-58d385a7b928

‘Portrait of Lola Montez,’ [183-?-185-?]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/e85bdbb0-8cc2-0134-3629-00505686a51c

FORTHCOMING on Nautch Girls by Aryama Bej, Jadavpur University.

“THE COST OF FAME” Nielsen, Augusta W. (1822-1902)

Senties, Pierre Asthasie Théodore, b. 1801 (Artist), and Emilien Desmaisons,1812-1880 (Lithographer). ‘Melle. Augusta Nielsen. Première danseuse du Théâtre Royal de Copenhague. Lith. par E. Desmaisons d’après Senties.’ Paris, [1842?]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ffc6df70-1454-0133-69f6-58d385a7b928

Offers of contributions, on these or other subjects, to the editor Sarah McCleave, s.mccleave@qub.ac.uk.