The Project Gutenberg eBook of Curiosities of the American Stage, by Laurence Hutton

Emmett, describing this scene, places the time “in the spring of 1843,” and says that they were all of them “end men, and all interlocutors.” They sang songs, played their instruments, danced jigs, singly and doubly, and “did ‘The Essence of Old Virginia’ and the ‘Lucy Long Walk Around.’” Emmett remained upon the minstrel stage for many years; he was a member of the Bryant troupe from 1858 to 1865, and he was the composer of many popular songs, including “Old Dan Tucker,” “Boatman’s Dance,” “Walk Along, John,” “Early in the Mornin’,” and, according to some authorities, he was the author of “Dixie,” which afterwards became the war-song of the South.

Mr. White, according to a biographical sketch published in the New York Clipper, was born in 1821. He played the accordion—when he was too young to be held responsible for the offence—at Thalian Hall, in Grand Street, New York, as long ago as 1843, and the next year organized what he called “‘The Kitchen Minstrels’ on the second floor of the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. The first floor was occupied by Tiffany, Young & Ellis, jewellers; the third by the renowned Ottignon as a gymnasium. Here, where the venerable Palmo had introduced to delighted audiences the Italian opera, and regaled them with fragrant Mocha coffee handed around by obsequious waiters, he first came most prominently before the public.... In 1846 he opened the Melodeon at 53 Bowery.” Here, as usual, there is a decided confusion of dates and of facts. Valentine’s Manual for 1865 says, “Palmo’s café, on the corner of Reade Street and Broadway, was a popular resort from 1835 to 1840, at which later period he abandoned his former occupation and erected the opera-house in Chambers Street, afterwards Burton’s Theatre.” Joseph N. Ireland, in his Records of the New York Stage, published in 1867, says—and Mr. Ireland is usually correct—“The fourth attempt to introduce the Italian opera in New York, and the second to give it an individual local habitation, was this season [1843-44], made by Ferdinand Palmo, on the site long previously occupied by Stoppani’s Arcade Baths, in Chambers Street (Nos. 39 and 41), and nearly opposite the centre of the building on the north end of the Park originally erected for the city almshouse, and afterwards used for various public offices.... Signor Palmo had been a popular and successful restaurateur in Broadway between the hospital and Duane Street.... Palmo’s Opera-house was first opened by its proprietor on the 3d of February, 1844”; while Charles T. Cook, of Tiffany & Co., who has been connected with that house for over forty years, shows by its records that Tiffany, Young & Ellis did not move to 271 Broadway, on the southwest corner of Chambers Street, until 1847, when they occupied the second floor as well as the first. That Sir Walter Raleigh, losing all confidence in the infallibility of human testimony, should have thrown the second part of his History of the World into the flames is not to be wondered at!

Mr. White, nevertheless, was prominently before the public for many years as manager and performer; he was associated with the “Virginia Serenaders,” with “The Ethiopian Operatic Brothers” (Operatic Brother Barney Williams playing the tambourine at one end of the line); with “The Sable Sisters and Ethiopian Minstrels;” with “The New York Minstrels,” etc. He introduced “Dan” Bryant to the public, and has done other good services in contributing to the healthful, harmless amusement of his fellow-men.

“Christy’s Minstrels, organized in 1842,” was the legend for a number of years upon the bills and advertisements of the company of E. P. Christy. This would give it precedence of the “Virginia Minstrels” by a few months at least. When the matter was called to the attention of Mr. Emmett, many years later, he wrote from Chicago on the 1st of May, 1877, that after his own band had gone to Europe a number of similar entertainments were given in all parts of the country, and that Enam Dickinson, who had had some experience in that line in other companies, had trained Christy’s troupe in Buffalo in all the business of the scenes, Mr. Emmett believing that Mr. Christy simply claimed, and with truth, that he was “the first to harmonize and originate the present style of negro minstrelsy,” meaning the singing in concert and the introduction of the various acts, which were universally followed by other bands on both sides of the Atlantic, and which have led our English brethren to give to all Ethiopian entertainments the generic name of “Christy Minstrels,” as they call all top-boots “Wellingtons” and all policemen “Bobbies.”

Christy’s Minstrels proper began their metropolitan career at the hall of the Mechanics’ Society, 472 Broadway, near Grand Street, early in 1846, and remained there until the summer of 1854, when Edwin P. Christy, the leader and founder of the company, retired from business. George Christy, who the year before had joined forces with Henry Wood at 444 Broadway, formerly Mitchell’s Olympic, took both halls after the abdication of the elder Christy, and rattled the bones at one establishment, “Billy” Birch, afterwards so popular in San Francisco and New York, cutting similar capers at the other, and each performer appearing at both houses on the same evening.

Edwin P. Christy died in May, 1862. George Harrington, known to the stage as George Christy, died in May, 1868; while in April of the latter year Mechanics’ Hall, with which in the minds of so many old New-Yorkers they are both so pleasantly associated, was entirely destroyed by fire, never to be rebuilt for minstrel uses.

The contemporaries and successors of the Christys were numerous and various. The air was full of their music, and dozens of halls in the city of New York alone echoed the patter of their clogged feet for years. Among the more famous of them the following may briefly be mentioned: Buckley’s “New Orleans Serenaders” were organized in 1843; they consisted of George Swayne, Frederick, and R. Bishop Buckley, and were very popular throughout the country. “White’s Serenaders” were at the Melodeon, 53 Bowery, perhaps as early as 1846, and certainly at White’s Athenæum, 585 Broadway, opposite the Metropolitan Hotel, as late as 1872. The Harrington Minstrels were at Palmo’s Opera-house in 1847 or 1848. Bryant’s Minstrels, as their old play-bills show, were organized in 1857, when they occupied Mechanics’ Hall; they went to the Tammany Building on Fourteenth Street in 1868, were at 730 Broadway the next year, and opened the hall on Twenty-third Street near Sixth Avenue in 1870, where they remained until Dan Bryant, the last of his race, died in 1875. Wood’s Minstrels were at 514 Broadway, opposite the St. Nicholas Hotel, in 1862 and later. “Sam” Sharpley’s Minstrels were at 201 Bowery in 1864. “Tony” Pastor’s troupe were in the same building in 1865, where they remained two years; they were upon the site of the Metropolitan Theatre—later Winter Garden—for a few seasons, and until they removed to their present cosey home near Tammany Hall. The San Francisco Minstrels were at 585 Broadway in 1865, and in 1874 went to the more familiar hall on Broadway, opposite the Sturtevant House, Budworth’s Minstrels opened the Fifth Avenue Hall, where the Madison Square Theatre now stands, in 1866. Kelly and Leon, who were on Broadway on the site of Hope Chapel in 1867, where they were credited with having “Africanized opéra bouffe,” followed Budworth to the Twenty-fourth Street house. Besides these were the companies of Morris Brothers, of Cotton and Murphy and Cotton and Reed, of Hooley, of Haverly, of Dockstader, of Pelham, of Pierce, of Campbell, of Pell and Trowbridge, of Thatcher, Primrose and West, of Huntley, and of very many more, to say nothing of the bands of veritable negroes who have endeavored to imitate themselves in imitation of their white brethren in all parts of the land. Brander Matthews, in an article on “Negro Minstrelsy,” printed in the London Saturday Review in 1884, and afterwards published as one of the chapters of a volume of Saturday Review essays, entitled The New Book of Sports (London, 1885), describes a “minstrel show” given by the negro waiters of one of the large summer hotels in Saratoga a few summers before, in which, “when the curtains were drawn aside, discovering a row of sable performers, it was perceived, to the great and abiding joy of the spectators, that the musicians were all of a uniform darkness of hue, and that they, genuine negroes as they were, had ‘blackened up,’ the more closely to resemble the professional negro minstrel.”

The dignified and imposing Mr. Johnston has sat during all these years in the centre of a long line of black comedians, which includes such artists as “Eph” Horn, “Dan” Neil, and “Jerry” Bryant—whose real name was O’Brien—Charles H. Fox, “Charley” White, George Christy, “Nelse” Seymour—Thomas Nelson Sanderson—the Buckleys, J. W. Raynor, Birch, Bernard, Wambold, Backus, “Pony” Moore, “Dan” Cotton, “Bob” Hart, “Cool” White, “Dan” Emmett, “Dave” Reed, “Matt” Peel, “Ben” Gardner, Luke Schoolcraft, James H. Budworth, Kelly, Leon, “Frank” Brower, S. C. Campbell, “Gus” Howard, “Billy” Newcomb, “Billy” Gray, Aynsley Cooke, “Hughey” Dougherty, “Tony” Hart, Unsworth, W. H. Delehanty, “Sam” Devere, “Add” Ryman, George Thatcher, “Master Eugene,” “Ricardo,” “Andy” Leavitt, “Sam” Sanford, “Lew” Benedict, “Harry” Bloodgood, “Cal” Wagner, “Ben” Collins, and “Little Mac.”

Nothing like a personal history of any of these men, who have been so prominent upon the negro minstrel stage during the half-century of its existence, can be given here. They have all done much to make the world happier and brighter for a time by their public careers, and they have left a pleasant and a cheerful memory behind them. Their gibes, their gambols, their songs, their flashes of merriment, still linger in our eyes and in our ears; and before many readers scores of quaint figures with blackened faces will no doubt dance to half-forgotten tunes all over these pages, which are too crowded to contain more than the mere mention of their names.

How much of the wonderful success and popularity of the negro minstrel is due to the minstrel, how much to the negro melody he introduced, and how much to the characteristic bones, banjo, and tambourine upon which he accompanied himself, is an open question. It was certainly the song, not the singer, which moved Thackeray to write years ago: “I heard a humorous balladist not long since, a minstrel with wool on his head, and an ultra Ethiopian complexion, who performed a negro ballad that I confess moistened these spectacles in a most unexpected manner. I have gazed at thousands of tragedy queens dying on the stage and expiring in appropriate blank-verse, and I never wanted to wipe them. They have looked up, be it said, at many scores of clergymen without being dimmed, and behold! a vagabond with a corked face and a banjo sings a little song, strikes a wild note, which sets the heart thrilling with happy pity.”

This ballad perhaps was “Nelly Bly,” or “Nelly was a Lady,” or “Lucy Long,” or “Oh, Susanna,” or “Nancy Till,” or, better than any of these, Stephen Foster’s “Way Down upon the Swanee River,” a song that has touched more hearts than “Annie Laurie” itself; for, after all, “The Girl We Left Behind Us” is not more precious in our eyes than “The Old Folks at Home;” and the American has sunk very low indeed of whom it cannot be said that “he never shook his mother.” Foster is utterly unappreciated by his fellow-countrymen, who erect all their monuments to the men who make their laws. He was the author of “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground,” “Old Dog Tray,” “Old Uncle Ned,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Old Kentucky Home,” “Willie, We have Missed You,” and “Come where My Love lies Dreaming.” He died as he had lived, in 1864, when he was but thirty-seven years of age, and his “Hard Times Will Come Again No More.”

Joel Chandler Harris, who is one of the best friends the plantation negro ever had, and who certainly knows him thoroughly, startled the whole community by writing to the Critic, in the autumn of 1883, that he had never seen a banjo or a tambourine or a pair of bones in the hands of the negroes on any of the plantations of middle Georgia with which he is familiar; that they made sweet music with the quills, as Pan did; that they played passably well on the fiddle, the fife, the flute, and the bugle; that they beat enthusiastically on the triangle; but that they knew not at all the instruments tradition had given them. That Uncle Remus, cannot “pick” the banjo, and never even heard it “picked,” seems hardly credible; but Mr. Harris knows. Uncle Remus, however, is not a travelled darky, and the existence of the banjo in other parts of the South has been clearly proved. Mr. Cable quotes a creole negro ditty of before the war in which “Musieu Bainjo” is mentioned on every line. Maurice Thompson says the banjo is a common instrument among the field hands in North Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee; and he describes a rude banjo manufactured by its dusky performer out of a flat gourd, strung with horse-hair; while we find in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, printed in 1784, the following statement: “In music they [the blacks] are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch.” In a foot-note Jefferson adds, “The instrument proper to them is the banjar, which they brought hither from Africa.”

The negro minstrel will give up his tambourine, for it is as old as the days of the Exodus, when Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances; and he will give up the bones, for Miss Olive Logan, in Harper’s Magazine for April, 1879, traces them back to the reign of Fou Hi, Emperor of China, 3468 B.C., while Shakspere’s King of the Fairies, who made an ass of the hard-handed man of Athens, also treated Bottom to the melody of the bones. He will hang up his fiddle and his bow when the time comes, cheerfully enough, for Nero, according to tradition, fiddled for the dancing of the flames that consumed Rome nineteen hundred years ago. None of these are exclusively his own; but it would be very cruel to take from him his banjo, which he evolved if he did not invent, and without which he can be and can do nothing.

ACT III.
THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE.

“The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.”

A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Act v. Sc. 1.

The burlesque among serious writers has a bad reputation. George Eliot, in Theophrastus Such, says that it debases the moral currency; and George Crabb, in his English Synonymes, thus dismisses it: “Satire and irony are the most ill-natured kinds of wit; burlesque stands in the lowest rank.”

Burlesque, from the Italian burlare, “to joke,” “to banter,” “to play,” has been defined as “an expression of language, a display of gesture, an impression of countenance, the intention being to excite laughter.” In art caricature is burlesque, in literature parody is burlesque, in the drama comic pantomime, comic opera, travesty, and extravaganza are burlesque. All dramatic burlesque ranges under the head of farce, although all farce is not burlesque. Burlesque is the farce of portraiture on the stage; farce on the stage is the burlesque of events. Bret Harte’s Condensed Novels and George Arnold’s McArone Papers are representative specimens of burlesque in American letters; Arthur B. Frost’s famous domestic cat, who supped inadvertently upon rat poison, is an excellent example of burlesque in American art. What America has done for burlesque on the stage it is the aim of the following pages to show.

Hipponax, of Ephesus, who lived in the latter half of the sixth century before Christ, is credited with having been “The Father of Burlesque Poetry.” He was small and ill-favored physically, and his natural personal defects were the indirect cause of the development of his satirical powers and of his posthumous fame. Two sculptors of Chios caricatured him grossly in a statue publicly exhibited, and he, in return, fired his muse with the torch of hatred, and burned them in effigy with terrible but clever ridicule. He parodied the Iliad, in which he made Achilles an Ionian glutton; he did not spare his own parents; he poked fun at the gods themselves; he impaled Mrs. Hipponax with a couplet upon which she is still exhibited to the scoffers, and he is only to be distinguished from his long line of successors by the curious fact that he does not seem to have spoken with derision of his mother-in-law! His tribute to matrimony is still preserved in choice iambics, roughly translated as follows: “There are but two happy days in the life of a married man—the day of his marriage, and the day of the burial of his wife.” From this it will be seen that twenty-five centuries or more look down upon the Benedict of the modern burlesque, who leaves his wife at home when he travels for pleasure!

Aristophanes, the comic poet of Athens, who wrote fifty-four comedies between the years 427 and 388 B.C., may be termed “The Father of the Burlesque Play.” He satirized people more than things, or than other men’s tragedies, and to his school belong Brougham’s Pocahontas and Columbus, rather than the same author’s Dan Keyser de Bassoon, or Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice. The plots of Aristophanes are as original as his wit. In The Wasps he caricatured the fondness of the Athenians for litigation; in The Birds his object was to convince the Athenians of the advantages of a clean political sweep; in The Female Orators he satirized the Sorosis and the women suffragists of his time; in The Feast of Ceres he pointed out how useful and ornamental woman is in her own sphere; and in Peace, written to urge the close of the Peloponnesian war, he reached the sublimity of burlesque in creating a stage heroine who never utters a word. The argument of The Knights will give a very fair idea of the plots of his plays. Athens is represented as a private house, whose master, Demos (the people), has more servants and more servants’ relations than he can comfortably wait upon or decently support. Nicias and Demosthenes are his slaves, and Cleon, a political boss of the period, is his butler and confidential valet. Demos is irritable, superstitious, inconstant in his pursuits, and dull in character. Agoracritus, a sausage-seller, subverts the plots and the plans of the demagogue Cleon—originally played by Aristophanes himself—shows the householder that his favorite servant is utterly unworthy of the public trust, and brings the entertainment to a close with the discomfiture of the Ring and the relief of the taxpayers. Demos is said to have been the prototype of “John Bull,” the personification of the Englishman, as he was first exhibited by Dr. Arbuthnot in the early part of the eighteenth century, and The Knights is regarded as “an historical piece of great value, because it furnishes a faithful picture of the nation and of its customs.” What curious ideas of American life and manners will posterity gather from Adonis and Evangeline!

Classical critics credit Aristophanes with being distinguished for the exuberance of his wit, for his inexhaustible fund of comic humor, and for the Attic purity and great simplicity of his language; while at the same time he is accused of introducing, when it suits his purpose, every variety of dialect, of coining new words and expressions as occasion offers, and of making bad puns, whether occasion offers or not; in all of which his disciples persistently and consistently follow him.

Samuel Foote, who lived in an age of epithets, was called “The British Aristophanes.” He respected no person and no thing. He satirized every subject, sacred or profane, which struck his fancy, from Chesterfield’s Letters to the Stratford Jubilee; and he caricatured everybody, from Whitfield to the Duchess of Kingston. His serious attempt at Othello, in the beginning of his career as an actor, was considered a master-piece of unconscious burlesque, only inferior, in its extravagance and nonsense, to his Hamlet, and he failed in every legitimate part he undertook to play. As a mimic, however, in dramatic productions of his own writing, he met with immense success; and as a writer of stage burlesque he ranks very high. He made Italian opera ridiculous in his Cat Concert; he gave serious offence to a hard-working, respectable trade in The Tailors, a Tragedy for Warm Weather; he attacked the medical profession in The Devil on Two Sticks; he parodied sentimental romance of the Pamela school in his Piety in Pattens; and he offended all right-thinking persons, heterodox as well as orthodox, in The Minor, a travesty upon the methods of Wesley and his Church.

The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruell Death of Pyramus and Thisbie, originally published in the year 1600, if not the earliest burlesque in the English language, is certainly the model upon which are based all subsequent productions of the same class which have been written for the British or American theatre. Stevens believes the title to have been suggested to Shakspere by Dr. Thomas Preston’s Lamentable Tragedy Mixed Ful of Pleasant Mirth—Conteyning the Life of Cambises, King of Percia. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is to be found in the fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and a volume called Perymus and Thesbye was entered on the Stationers’ Register in 1562-63. Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid was published in 1567, and several other versions of the tale were extant before the birth of Snout or Bottom, the incidents, of course, being the same in all. Shaksperean scholars find traces of other works in the different speeches of the hard-handed men of Athens, but the general impression is that the author’s purpose was to travesty the verse of Golding. Limander and Helen are intended for Leander and Hero; Shafalus and Procrus for Cephalus and Procris, and Ninny for Ninus; a form of verbal contortion displayed by the modern burlesquer in Sam Parr for Zampa, and The Roof Scrambler for Sonnambula; while the lines—

“Whereat, with blade, with bloody, blamefull blade,
He brauely broacht his boiling bloody breast,”

read like the blank-verse mouthed by the deep tragedians of the negro minstrel stage of to-day.

The Midsummer-Night’s Dream, with Mr. Hilson as Snout and Mr. Placide as Bottom, was performed, “for the first time in America,” at the Park Theatre, New York, on the 9th of November, 1826, when the stage in this country was upwards of three-quarters of a century old, and had a literature of its own, comparatively rich in comedy and tragedy, and when its burlesque, such as it was, undoubtedly felt the influence of Pyramus and Thisbe.

The second great burlesque upon the British stage was The Rehearsal, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in the reign of the Second Charles, first acted in 1672. It was original in design and brilliant in execution. It introduced a popular author, John Dryden, engaged in superintendence of a rehearsal of one of his own tragedies—the tragedy in this instance consisting of clever parodies of portions of all the dramas then in vogue. The Rehearsal does not seem to have been produced in this country, although The Critic of Sheridan, obviously based upon it, was performed at the John Street Theatre, New York, November 24th, 1788, when President Washington honored the entertainment with his presence. The cast has not been preserved, although William Winter believes Mr. Wignell to have played Puff, Mr. Ryan Whiskerandos, and Mrs. Morris (the second wife of Owen Morris) Tilberina. The Critic still survives, as Mr. Daly’s audiences well remember.

Burlesque upon the American stage, although not yet American burlesque, dates back to the very beginning of the history of the theatre in this country, when The Beggar’s Opera, by John Gay, “written in ridicule of the musical Italian drama,” was presented at the theatre in Nassau Street, New York, on the 3d of December, 1750, with Thomas Kean as Captain Macheath. The Beggar’s Opera was first acted at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1727, and took the town by storm. The Archbishop of Canterbury preached a sermon against it; Sir John Fielding, the police-justice, officially begged the manager not to present it on Saturday evenings, as it inspired the idle apprentices of London, who saw it on their night off, to imitate its hero’s thieving deeds; and a certain critic condemned it as “the parent of that most monstrous of all absurdities, the comic opera.” Nevertheless it was immensely popular, and enjoyed an unusually long run. As a literary production it is distinguished for its combination of nature, pathos, satire, and burlesque. It brought fame to its author, and, indirectly, something like wealth; and it made a duchess of Lavinia Fenton, who was the original Polly. As that monstrous absurdity the comic opera is without question the parent of that still more monstrous absurdity the burlesque proper, Polly Peachum and Captain Macheath may be considered the very Pilgrim Parents of burlesque in the New World. They were followed almost immediately (February 25, 1751) by Damon and Phillada, a Ballad Farce, by Colley Cibber. Their Plymouth Rock very soon became too small to hold them; their descendants have taken possession of the whole land, and every Mayflower that crosses the Atlantic to-day brings consignments of British blondes to swell their number. Before the Revolution Fielding’s Tom Thumb; or, The Tragedy of Tragedies, a clever travesty, with Mrs. Hallam (Mrs. Douglas) as Queen Dollalolla, and Kane O’Hara’s Midas, “a burlesque turning upon heathen deities, ridiculous enough in themselves, and too absurd for burlesque,” had taken out their naturalization papers. The Critic, as has been shown, declared his intentions very shortly after the establishment of peace; and Bombastes Furioso became a citizen of New York as early as 1816.

As Satan in the proverb builds invariably a chapel hard by the house of prayer, so does the demon of burlesque as surely erect his hovel next door to the palace of the legitimate tragedian. He spoils by his absurd architecture every neighborhood he enters; he even cuts off the views from the Castle of Elsinore, and disfigures the approaches to the royal tombs of the ancient Danish kings. John Poole’s celebrated travesty of Hamlet, one of the earliest of its kind, was first published in London in 1811. George Holland, afterwards so popular upon the American stage for many years, presented Poole’s play on the occasion of his first benefit in this country, March 22, 1828, appearing himself as the First Grave-digger and as Ophelia. This was about the beginning of what, for want of a better term, may be styled “legitimate burlesque” in the United States. It inspired our managers to import, and our native authors to write, travesties upon everything in the standard drama which was serious and ought to have been respected; and it led to burlesques of Antony and Cleopatra, Douglas, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Manfred, The Tempest, Valentine and Orson, Richard the Third, The Hunchback, and many more; and between the years 1839, when William Mitchell opened the Olympic, and 1859, when William E. Burton made his last bow to the New York public, was laid out and built between Chambers Street and the site of Brougham’s Lyceum, on Broadway, corner of Broome Street, that metropolis of burlesque upon the ruins of which the dramatic antiquary, whose name is Palmy Days, now loves to sit and ponder.

The titles of its half-forgotten streets and buildings, collected at random from its old directories, then known as the bills of the play, will recall pleasant memories and excite gentle wonder. There were, among others, A Lad in a Wonderful Lamp, The Bohea Man’s Girl, Fried Shots [Freischütz], Her Nanny, Lucy Did Sham Her Moor, and Lucy Did Lamm Her Moor, Man Fred, Cinder Nelly, Wench Spy, Spook Wood, Buy It Dear, ’Tis Made of Cashmere [Bayadere; or, The Maid of Cashmere], The Cat’s in the Larder, or, The Maid with the Parasol [La Gazza Ladra; or, The Maiden of Paillaisseau], The Humpback, Mrs. Normer, and Richard Number Three.

Of this metropolis William Mitchell was the first Lord Mayor. He was the inaugurator, if not the creator, of an entirely new school of dramatic architecture, which was as general, and sometimes as absurd, as the style which has since spread over the country at the expense of the reputation of good Queen Anne; and he led the popular taste for a number of years, to the great enjoyment of his clients, if not to their mental profit. William Horncastle, a good singer and a fair actor, and Dr. William K. Northall were his assistants in dramatic construction, and the authors of many of his extravagant productions. One of his earliest and most popular burlesques was entitled La Mosquito. It was based upon The Tarantula of Fanny Elssler, and was presented at the close of his first season. An extract from the bill will give a fair idea of the quality of the fooling:

“First time in this or any other country, a new comic burlesque ballet, entitled La Mosquito, in which Monsieur Mitchell will make his first appearance as une Première Danseuse, and show his agility in a variety of terpsichorean efforts of all sorts in the genuine Bolerocachucacacavonienne style.... The ballet is founded on the well-known properties of the mosquito, whose bites render the patient exceedingly impatient, and throws him into a fit of slapping and scratching and swearing delirium, commonly termed the ‘Cacoethes Scratchendi,’ causing the unfortunate being to cut capers enough for a considerable number of legs of mutton. The scene lies in Hoboken,” etc.

Concerning Mitchell’s performance, Dr. Northall writes, in Before and Behind the Curtain: “We shall long remember the comic humor with which he burlesqued the charming and graceful Fanny. The manner of his exit from the stage at the conclusion of the dance was irresistibly comic, and the serious care with which he guided himself to the side scenes, to secure a passage for his tremendous bustle, was very funny.”

Mr. Mitchell’s other famous burlesque parts were Man Fred, Hamlet, Willy Walters (in The Humpback), Sam Parr, Jap (in Loves of the Angels), Antony, and Richard Number Three. Very few portraits of this old actor, either in character or otherwise, are known to the collectors. The accompanying print is from a drawing made by Charles Parsons while seated in the pit of the old Olympic half a century ago, when the draughtsman—a mere lad—was beginning his professional career. The original sketch was given to Mr. Mitchell by the young artist, who received in return a pass to the theatre—the highest ambition of the boys of that period.

Mitchell was forced to retire from the mayoralty before the close of his last season at the Olympic, in 1849-50, having been deposed the previous year by William E. Burton at the Chambers Street house. As Lester Wallack said in his Memories, Burton did everything that Mitchell did, and did it in a better way, with better players and better plays. His first burlesque was a cruel treatment of the opera of Lucia, followed immediately by a heartless travesty of Dibdin’s Valentine and Orson. These were succeeded by The Tempest, in which Mrs. Brougham (Miss Nelson), a lady of enormous physical size, played Ariel. A little while later Mr. Brougham played Macbeth to the Macduff of Thomas B. Johnstone, the Banquo of Oliver B. Raymond, and the Lady Macbeth of Burton himself. Mark Smith made a fascinating Norma, Leffingwell played the Stern Parient in Villikens and his Dinah, and Charles Fisher, in white tights, a tunic, gauze wings, and a flowing wig, pirouetted with Mrs. Skerrett in a production called St. Cupid, in which Mr. Burton appeared as Queen Bee, a Gypsy Woman.

It would be an easy matter to fill many of these pages with stories of the humorous productions and the laughable performances of Burton and Brougham on the Chambers Street boards. The literature of the American theatre overflows with anecdotes of their quarrels and their reconciliations upon the stage, their jokes upon each other, their impromptu wit, their unexpected “gags”—which were always looked for—the liberties they took with their authors, their audiences, and themselves, and, above all, with their incomparable acting in every part, whether it was serious or frivolous.

The last, and in many respects the greatest, of the trio of actors, authors, and managers who may be considered the founders of American burlesque, began his brilliant but brief reign at the Lyceum, at Broome Street, late in 1850, about the time of the retirement of Mitchell, and long before his later rival, Burton, was ready to lay down his sceptre. If America has ever had an Aristophanes, John Brougham was his name. His Pocahontas and Columbus are almost classics. They rank among the best, if they are not the very best, burlesques in any living language. Their wit is never coarse, they ridicule nothing which is not a fit subject for ridicule, they outrage no serious sentiment, they hurt no feelings, they offend no portion of the community, they shock no modesty, they never blaspheme; and, as Dr. Benjamin Ellis Martin has happily expressed it, their author was “the first to give to burlesque its crowning comic conceit of utter earnestness, of solemn seriousness.”

The Lyceum was opened on the 23d of December, 1850, with “an occasional rigmarole entitled Brougham, and Co.,” which introduced the entire company to the public. The next absurdity was A Row at the Lyceum, with Mr. Florence in the gallery, Mr. Brougham himself in the pit, and the rest of the dramatis personæ upon the stage; and shortly before the abrupt close of Mr. Brougham’s management he presented What Shall We Do for Something New? in which Mrs. Brougham appeared as Rudolpho, Mrs. Skerrett as Elvino, and Mr. Johnstone as Amina, in a travesty upon La Sonnambula.

Upon the same stage, on Christmas Eve, 1855, but under the management of the elder Wallack, Brougham produced his “Original, Aboriginal, Erratic, Operatic, Semi-civilized, and Demi-savage Extravaganza of Pocahontas.” The scenery, as announced, was painted from daguerreotypes and other authentic documents, the costumes were cut from original plates, and the music was dislocated and reset, by the heads of the different departments of the theatre. Charles Walcot played John Smith, “according to this story, but somewhat in variance with his story”; Miss Hodson played the titular part, and Mr. Brougham represented “Pow-Ha-Tan I., King of the Tuscaroras—a Crotchety Monarch, in fact a Semi-Brave.” At the close of the opening song (to the air of “Hoky-poky-winky-wum”) he thus addressed his people:

“Well roared, indeed, my jolly Tuscaroras.
Most loyal corps, your King encores your chorus;”

and until the fall of the curtain, at the end of the second and last act, the scintillations of wit and the thunder of puns were incessant and startling. “May I ask,” says Col-o-gog (J. H. Stoddart), “in the word lie, what vowel do you use, sir, i or y?”

“Y, sir, or I, sir, search the vowels through,
And find the one most consonant to you.”

“Sergeant-at-arms, say, what alarms the crowd;
Loud noise annoys us; why is it allowed?”

“I visited his Majesty’s abode,
A portly savage, plump and pigeon-toed;
Like Metamora, both in feet and feature,
I never met-a-more-a-musing creature.”

In a more serious but not less happy vein is the apostrophe to tobacco, by the smoking, joking Powhatan, as follows:

“While other joys one sense alone can measure,
This to all senses gives ecstatic pleasure.
You feel the radiance of the glowing bowl,
Hear the soft murmurs of the kindling coal,
Smell the sweet fragrance of the honey-dew,
Taste its strong pungency the palate through,
See the blue cloudlets circling to the dome,
Imprisoned skies up-floating to their home—
I like a dhudeen myself!”

And so he joked and smoked his way into a popularity which no stage monarch has enjoyed before or since. Pocahontas ran for many weeks, and was frequently repeated for many years. The story of the sudden departure of the original Pocahontas one night without a word of warning, and the successful performance of the piece by Brougham and Walcot, with no one to play the titular part at all, is as familiar in the theatrical annals as the sadder stories of Woffington’s last appearance, and the death of Palmer on the stage; and no doubt it will be remembered long after Pocahontas itself, despite its cleverness, is quite forgotten.

“Columbus el Filibustero, a New and Audaciously Original, Historico-plagiaristic, Ante-national, Pre-patriotic, and Omni-local Confusion of Circumstances. Running through Two Acts and Four Centuries,” was first performed at Burton’s Theatre (Broadway, opposite Bond Street, afterwards the Winter Garden) on the 31st of December, 1857; Mark Smith playing Ferdinand, Lawrence Barrett Talavera, Miss Lizzie Weston Davenport Columbia, and Mr. Brougham himself Columbus. It is a more serious production than Pocahontas; the satire is more subtle, and the thought more delicate. It contains no play upon words, is not filled with startling absurdities, and is pathetic rather than uproariously funny. While Pocahontas inspires nothing but laughter, Columbus excites sympathy, and oftentimes he has moved his audiences to the verge of tears. He is a much-abused, simple, honest old man, full of sublime ideas, and long ahead of his times. He dreams prophetic dreams, and in his visions he

“sees a land
Where Nature seems to frame with practised hand
Her last most wondrous work. Before him rise
Mountains of solid rock that rift the skies,
Imperial valleys with rich verdure crowned
For leagues illimitable smile around,
While through them subject seas for rivers run
From ice-bound tracks to where the tropic sun
Breeds in the teeming ooze strange monstrous things.
He sees, upswelling from exhaustless springs,
Great lakes appear, upon whose surface wide
The banded navies of the earth may ride.
He sees tremendous cataracts emerge
From cloud-aspiring heights, whose slippery verge
Tremendous oceans momently roll o’er,
Assaulting with unmitigated roar
The stunned and shattered ear of trembling day,
That, wounded, weeps in glistening tears of spray.”

ACT III. THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE.

ACT III.
THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE.