Abstract
by Michael Gamer, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Coming just after the Peace of Amiens failed, 1803-4 was a strange year for British theater. One phenomenon of that season, the pre-pubescent Master Betty, mesmerized Covent Garden audiences with his performances of Shakespeare. The other, Carlo the Wonder Dog, thrilled packed houses at Drury Lane with his daring water rescues in The Cataract (December 1803). Both provoked considerable critical response, who understood their stardom as — on several levels — a challenge to the established star-systems of the time, which placed great actors like Sarah Siddons, John Philip Kemble, and Dora Jordan at the center of any celebration of British theater and dramatic heritage. As I show in the first part of my paper, it was the juxtaposition of Betty and Carlo that raised the real concern, and caused the numerous strictures on Betty’s performances to return, again and again, to the question of whether the young prodigy was truly acting or just a well-trained automaton, going through specific bodily motions and vocal modulations with the eerie precision of a perfectly trained animal. What the juxtaposition of child and animal actor does, I argue, is redirect the question of Betty’s success from one of child genius to something more mechanical.
The second half of the paper then jumps forward seven years, to 1811, to the moment when John Philip Kemble, now manager of Covent Garden, facing mounting losses, decides to hire 20 of Astley’s performing horses for a revival of George Colman the Younger’s Blue-beard. The resulting success of this production led to the first hippodrama written for a Theatre Royal, Matthew Lewis’s Timour the Tartar, commissioned by Kemble to follow Blue-beard as the 1811 season closed.
I wish to explore the response to these performances. Writing with the Betty-Carlo phenomenon behind them, theater critics like Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt began, first satirically and then seriously, to engage the question of whether animals could act. I track this series of essays, which not only break down the human-animal diad but also ask the (I think wonderful) question of where performance sits in this more general question of what makes us human.
