Trivial Pursuit: The Anecdote as Evidence in Theater History

Abstract

From the Greek for “unpublished things,” the term “anecdote” entered English in the late seventeenth century by way of a translated secret history and quickly became a byword for all manner of literary commodities. Like secret history itself, published anecdotes often operated at the slippery boundary of fact and fiction, incorporating features of the picaresque, life writing, stage drama, jest, and satire. Typically short and often topical, they were ideally suited to a periodical and print marketplace sustained by the speedy reproduction and repackaging of familiar content. Anecdotes about the theater, and about the star actors and actresses who dominated it, were particularly popular. The new collection, English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660 – 1800, examines these “short, often humorous and titillating, sometimes moralistic tales of theater people” (1) and considers the ways they contributed to the rise of celebrity culture. Edited by Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie for University of Delaware Press's new series “Performing Celebrity,” this collection reflects an upswell of scholarly interest in the multimedia landscape of the long eighteenth-century theater and a newly serious attention to theater-adjacent cultural forms that were long marginalized, trivialized, or taken as documentary evidence rather than as cultural artifacts. Collectively, the essays in this collection raise important questions about the formal features, social functions, and circulation of theatrical anecdotes, as well as about the possibilities and challenges they raise for scholars of the period.English Theatrical Anecdotes stands out for its explicit attention to problems of method. The introduction and coda by editors Ritchie and Ladd mark out the epistemological minefield surrounding the use of anecdotes in historical research, and each of their individual essay contributions demonstrates the anecdote's potential for mystification. Ladd's piece, “Samuel Foote, Esq.: Caricature, Class, and the Comic Theatrical Anecdote,” identifies the role anecdotes played in Foote's larger image-management strategy during his career as an actor, playwright, and theater manager. Like a social media-savvy celebrity today, Foote harnessed a newly powerful cultural form to circulate and amplify stories reinforcing his image as a “gentleman clown” (62). As Ladd argues persuasively, the classism underpinning this persona becomes clear only once we recognize the centrality of anecdote to Foote's strategic self-fashioning.Celebrities like Foote might authorize or tacitly approve the circulation of anecdotes that were “on-brand” (75) regardless of their factual truth, but in other cases, anecdotes were crafted intentionally to mislead. In “Killing Delane; Or, Mimicry and the Anecdota Obscura,” Leslie Ritchie identifies a “shady subspecies” of anecdote that acts as a “false witness to history” (27). The anecdota obscura is a weapon in the hands of biographers who suppress historical evidence in the service of a preferred narrative or image of the anecdotal subject. As a case in point, Ritchie tracks the propagation of an anecdote about David Garrick destroying a fellow actor, Dennis Delane, through mimicry. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hagiographers framed Garrick's likely act of “tactical arson” (34) against a key competitor as part of Garrick's principled stand against Delane's declamatory acting style, contributing to the emerging mythology surrounding this patron saint of naturalistic performance. While many of the contributors to this volume explore how anecdotes reflect and perpetuate harmful ideologies, Ritchie's essay is notable for its emphasis on how the form may be leveraged deliberately to rewrite history.Given the problems anecdotes present, how can theater historians evaluate and use them responsibly? One answer, set forth by several essays in this collection, is that anecdotes are useful indicators of normative ideologies. Because they are by definition short and designed to circulate independent of any fixed context, anecdotes rely on a host of existing tropes, associations, and prejudices to make meaning. The challenges of working in this fraught terrain are illustrated by Michael Burden's anthology-style contribution, “A Bellyful of Nightingales: Seven Stories of Seven Singers.” Burden surveys a selection of anecdotes from Green Room Gossip (1809, attributed to Joseph Haslewood) to uncover the changing perceptions of professional women vocalists in the period. Burden is at pains to bracket the numerous ableist, nationalist, ageist, and chauvinistic tropes on display in these texts. Other essays in the collection take the opposite tack, treating anecdotes as more or less transparent windows onto the pervasive misogyny of eighteenth-century British culture. In “Neither Confirmed Nor Refuted: The Anecdotal Elizabeth Barry,” Seth Wilson examines how anecdotes about Barry constructed an image of “defective femininity” that served to contain the threat the undeniably powerful Restoration actress posed to the gendered order (161). The most tenacious of these tales—the legend of Barry's thespian training under the tutelage of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and of their ensuing love affair—is a case in point: it undermines her professionalism and independent success while depicting her as hypersexual, calculating, and ambitious.Another well-worn bit of Barry lore, her alleged stabbing of a fellow actor onstage, is addressed by contributor Máire Macneill in the piece “Violent Afterlives: The Anecdote in Eighteenth-Century Theater Biographies.” Macneill attends to the differences in tone and emphasis between stories of violence ascribed to men and women actors: when the latter attacked women colleagues, they were perceived as engaging in trivial, frivolous, emotionally extravagant competition (think “mean girls”), while comparable acts by men like Charles Macklin were seen as a natural outcome of passion or self-defense. Gender norms were likewise policed in anecdotes about actor Sophia Baddeley, who died prematurely in 1786. In “ ‘A High Treat to the Anecdote Hunters!’: The Body of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley,” Nevena Martinović examines the role newspaper obituaries played in constructing the actor's body as a morality tale made manifest—a public spectacle of the physical toll exacted by unfeminine indulgences. While critiques of long eighteenth-century sexism are hardly news, the authors of these pieces undertake necessary repair work in a field that has relied uncritically on anecdotes as historical evidence, inadvertently amplifying the ideologies they encode.Other essayists demonstrate how anecdotes may serve as tools to resist and redress archival bias. In “Anecdote and the Regional Actress: A History of the Farren Family in Several Anecdotes,” Fiona Ritchie examines the persistent slant of theater history and archives toward the London playhouses and identifies anecdote as “one of the few sources available” to scholars interested in women's stage careers outside of the capitol city (142). Ritchie reads against the grain of “rags to riches” stories about London-based actress Elizabeth Farren, later Countess of Derby (148). Even as the anecdotes themselves disavow Farren's regional roots, they provide leads that allow Ritchie to begin tracing the successes of other women in Farren's family on the Manchester, Liverpool, Bath, Bristol, and Edinburgh stages, as well as on the traveling circuits. Chelsea Phillips is likewise interested in how anecdotes might support feminist theater historiography and the recovery of women's lived experiences. In “Pregnancy and the Late Stuart Stage, 1661 – 1702,” Phillips examines an anecdote about the dismissal of pregnant actress Elizabeth Farley Weaver from the King's Company in 1683. The inferences critics have drawn from this story, Phillips argues, reveal less about Restoration-era sexual and professional mores than they do about the dangers of taking a single anecdote to represent an entire category of under-recognized experience. To fill out the context surrounding Weaver's dismissal, Phillips assembles a corpus of anecdotes about pregnant women onstage. Her readings uncover a host of epistemological anxieties these bodies provoked as public evidence of private lives—anxieties that resonate in surprising and fascinating ways with those anxieties surrounding the use of the anecdote as a source for theater history.Ritchie and Phillips move us away from what the theatrical anecdote purports to represent, training our attention instead on the negative space it throws into relief. Amanda Weldy Boyd likewise considers archival absence, focusing on the role anecdotes themselves play in shaping these absences. Her essay “The Vanishing Subject in ‘Anecdotal’ Abridgments of Theatrical Biographies” explores the relationships between anecdotes, theatrical biographies, and obituaries, identifying a tendency for seemingly unrelated stories to eclipse the ostensible subject of life writing. Boyd's attention to the materiality of mediation and circulation is a welcome contribution to this collection, and it is complemented by other authors’ gestures toward multimodal or intermedial reading. For instance, Burden, Martinović, and Ritchie all read anecdotes alongside and in conversation with illustrations, visual satires, and graphic prints. Together, these essays suggest a range of cognate forms and genres that might be better understood as informed by and in conversation with the study of anecdote.At its most exciting, the collection suggests novel approaches to anecdotes that harness their unique properties as objects of study. Danielle Bobker, for example, unpacks the lesbian erotics of a single theatrical anecdote as a means to no less ambitious an end than the reconsideration of the rise of the novel. Picking up a thread of speculation left by Northrop Frye in his handwritten notes on Anthony Hamilton's Memoirs of Count Grammont (1714), Bobker spins a web of connections among a “queer intertextual network” stretching from Orientalist plays by William Davenant and Nathaniel Lee to genre-defining fictions by Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson (213). In making this audacious and exhilarating argument, Bobker treats anecdotes as “the original memes” (214)—highly condensed expressions of complex, culturally specific structures of feeling.Elsewhere, Elaine McGirr proposes a heuristic for approaching the anecdote as evidence, not of historical facts, but of repressed or deferred narrative potentialities: Bearing in mind the tropes, story arcs, and archetypes anecdotes typically deploy, what might we expect to see in a given text? What can we learn by entertaining counterfactual speculations about other versions of the text at hand? McGirr's essay, “Anecdotal Origin Stories: Mary Ann Yates's Trip to Drury Lane,” debunks an anecdotal biography of actor-manager Yates written by her longtime friend and collaborator Frances Brooke and published in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1783. In her account of Yates's early fascination with the stage, Brooke subverts the conventional discovery narrative in which a spectator, typically male, recognizes a young actress's talent and facilitates her rise to fame (see the discussion of Barry and Rochester, above). Brooke offers instead a feminocentric account of how a youthful Yates discovered her own incipient gifts through her appreciation for and identification with mature performer Susannah Cibber. The extent to which this narrative flouts not only historical probabilities but also generic and cultural expectations becomes clear only when McGirr spins out the alternative origin stories that would have been available to Brooke and that would have more easily fit the established conventions of the genre. Like Ritchie's anecdota obscura, Brookes's alternative history of her friend is a carefully crafted ideological fiction, albeit one that works to subvert rather than to reinforce the status quo.Like the collections of anecdotes it examines, this volume works through iteration, juxtaposition, and accretion; essays often echo and one another, offering convergence rather than synthesis. Several opportunities for connection between essays are missed: Wilson and Macneill on interpersonal violence; Ladd and Burden on disability; and Martinović, Boyd, and McGirr on obituary and biography, to name only a few. The essays’ lack of direct dialogue between contributors also results in repeating literature reviews, sometimes to the exclusion of other avenues of inquiry. Critical touchstones by Diana Solomon and Jacky Bratton, in particular, are glossed numerous times, while other recent work in the field receives no notice.1 Julia Fawcett's work on “overexpression” as a technology of celebrity, for example, is never mentioned, nor are any of the essays in relevant special issues of Eighteenth-Century Fiction on “Georgian Theater in an Information Age” or of Restoration on “The Intermedia Restoration.”2 The tight focus on anecdote in this collection seems to come at the expense of broader conversations animating eighteenth-century theater studies as a whole. Nonetheless, the essays in this collection have much to offer to our understandings of theatrical culture and the development of celebrity across the Restoration, Georgian, and Romantic eras, and the volume is certain to exert a significant influence on the study of anecdote within and beyond eighteenth-century studies