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‘Wistful Remembrancer’: the Historiographical Problem of Macqueen-Popery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Jim Davis  and
Victor Emeljanow
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Abstract

The theatre shelves of secondhand bookshops testify to the sometime popularity and prolific output of the theatre publicist and would-be historian Walter Macqueen-Pope. Yet even by the time Macqueen-Pope was publishing his later volumes in the 1950s, the rise of academic theatre scholarship was questioning such anecdotally based and unverified accounts of the theatre and its past. Today, we can look at Macqueen-Pope, and at the period immediately before the First World War which was so often the focus of his attention, not so much for evidence of flawed scholarship as for his revealing attitude towards his subject and its social context. For anecdotage and nostalgia have inevitably to be taken into account in any historical approach to so ephemeral an art as the theatre, and, as the authors here conclude, while Macqueen-Pope may not tell us the whole truth about his many subjects, such a ‘wistful remembrancer’ remains significant to any investigation of a theatrical past ‘that must always be a melting pot of imperfect recognitions and unattainable desires’. Jim Davis is Associate Professor of Theatre and Head of the School of Theatre, Film and Dance at the University of New South Wales. victor Emelijanow is Professor of Drama and Head of the Department of Drama at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. Both have written extensively on nineteenth-century British theatre and are the joint authors of Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880, which has just been published by the University of lowa Press.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , November 2001 , pp. 299 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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References

Notes and References

1. Macqueen-Pope, W., Shirtfronts and Sable: a Story of the Theatre when Money could be spent (London: Robert Hale, 1953), p. 305Google Scholar.

2. Macqueen-Pope, W., Ghosts and Greasepaint: a Story of the Days that Were (London: Robert Hale, 1951), p. 19Google Scholar.

3. Macqueen-Pope, W., Twenty shillings in the Pound (London: Hutchinson, 1948), p. 6Google Scholar.

4. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London; New York: Verso, 1994), p. x.

5. Ibid., p. 15.

6. Hazlitt's Literary Remains, I, p. cxx, quoted in Archer, William and Lowe, Robert, ed., Hazlitt on Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), p. xxviiGoogle Scholar.

7. Revised edition (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968), p. 9–11.

8. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. ix.

9. Yearning for Yesterday: a Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, Macmillan, 1979), p. 49.

10. Ghosts and Greasepaint, p. 13.

11. Ibid.,

12. Ibid., p. 15.

13. Half Century of Entertainment (London: Dennis Yates, n. d.), unpaginated.

14. Carriages at Eleven: the Story of the Edwardian Theatre (London: Hutchinson, 1947), p. 7–8.

15. Ibid., p. 8.

16. Haymarket: Theatre of Perfection (London: W. H. Allen, 1948), p. 16.

17. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), p. xiv.

18. Colley, Anne C., Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 3–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Ibid., p. 4–5.

20. Wilson, A. E., Edwardian Theatre (London: Arthur Barker, 1951)Google Scholar.

21. Trewin, J. C., Edwardian Theatre (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), p. 28Google Scholar.

22. Nicoll, Allardyce, English Drama 1900–1930: the Beginnings of the Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)Google Scholar. Nicoll acknowledges Carriages at Eleven (p. 18) and discussions of actor-managers (p. 20), refers briefly to , Gaiety, Theatre of Enchantment (London: W. H. Allen, 1949)Google Scholar and to Nights of Gladness (London: Hutchinson, 1956, p. 153–4), and mentions a short essay on Daly's (p. 159).

23. See Booth, Michael R. and Kaplan, Joel H., ed., The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. In The Revels History of Drama in English, Vll: 1880 to the Present Day (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 17, Hugh Hunt suggests, in contrast to Macqueen-Pope, that during the Edwardian era ‘the country's economy was rooted in sand. Its leisurely pursuits were little more than an escape from unpleasant realities. Its social progress was achieved at the expense of uncertainty and a sense of impermanence’. A particularly challenging approach is offered by Bailey, Peter, ‘Theatres of Entertainment: Spaces of Modernity’, Nineteenth Century Theatre, XXVI, No. 1 (Summer 1998), p. 5–24Google Scholar, who considers the notion of ‘modernity’ in the relationship of popular entertainment at the turn of the century to social and economic change. He evolves a concept of popular modernism, and suggests that this was the means, through popular entertainments such as the music hall and musical comedy, by which popular audiences explored anxieties around change and new developments. While Bailey believes we should remain alert to the ‘countervailing and modifying power of inertia, continuity, and resistance’, he also implies that there was a substantial audience for ‘the stage forms of popular modernism, whose entertainments could be read as texts for living in a volatile urban world’. This call for a more complex cultural reading of popular theatregoing in the period is important, especially as historical surveys of popular entertainment in these years often represent it as stable, secure, unaffected by change and an oasis from the incursions of new technologies (which of course it wasn't).

24. Shirtfronts and Sables, p. 302.

25. The Melodies Linger On: the Story of Music Hall (London: W. H. Allen, 1950), p. 9.

26. Shirtfronts and Sables, p. 302.

27. Nights of Gladness, p. 240.

28. Ibid., p. 23.

29. The Melodies Linger On, p. 30.

30. The Footlights Flickered (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1959), p. 14.

31. The Melodies Linger On, p. 5.

32. Shirtfronts and Sables, p. 11–12.

33. Ibid., p. 300.

34. Ibid., p. 301.

35. Ibid.

36. Ghosts and Greasepaint, p. 322–3.

37. Shirtfronts and Sables, p. 306.

38. Op. cit., passim.

39. Trewin, J. C., The Gay Twenties: a Decade of the Theatre (London: MacDonald, 1958), p. 9Google Scholar.

40. The Footlights Flickered, p. 17.

41. Berman, Marshall, All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983)Google Scholar, quoted in P. Bailey, ‘Theatre of Entertainment’, p. 6.

42. Vivian Ellis, ‘I'm on a See-Saw’, quoted by Dent, Alan, ‘Walter Macqueen-Pope’, Dictionary of National Biography 1951–60 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

43. Carriages at Eleven, p. 7.

44. Ghosts and Greasepaint, p. 197.

45. Ibid., p. 321.

46. The Footlights Flickered, p. 198.

47. On Longing, p. 23.

48. Ibid.