18 September 2022

An Imposing Everybody

 

The Gaiety Theatre, Dublin (RFW 026.01-27)

Following his brush with royalty, HCE rises in the world. Having murdered Laius, he has now stepped into his shoes—and his bed—and become Oedipus Rex. But the seeds of his downfall have already been scattered on fertile ground.

HCE’s Oedipal Anacyclesis

A First-Draft Version

The first draft of this paragraph comprised but a single sentence—little more than three lines—which Joyce did not consider sufficiently distinct to place in a paragraph of its own:

Imposing enough indeed he looked and worthy of that title as he sat on gala nights in the royal booth with wardrobepanelled coat thrown back from a shirt wellnamed a swallowall far outstarching the laundered lordies and marbletopped highboys of the pit. (Hayman 63)

In this early sketch, HCE’s royalty is acknowledged—he sits in the royal booth—and the dramatic aspect of his fate is symbolized by the theatrical setting, which is taken up from the preceding paragraph. But there is, as yet, only the merest hint that HCE may be more than a disinterested spectator in the theatre—that he may, in fact, be the very villain of the piece.

HCE’s costume is briefly described. This makes perfect sense, as this sentence is concerned with his appearance and social standing rather than his true nature. A swallowall probably refers to a swallow-tail—a tail-coat with a pair of pointed skirts at the back—though the term is applied here to a shirt. But what is a wardrobepanelled coat? In this context, a panel is “A panel-shaped piece of embroidery or appliqué work for insertion in any drapery” (Murray 421)—which leaves me none the wiser.

A Swallow and a Swallow-Tail Coat

Who are the laundered lordies and marbletopped highboys of the pit? In the published version, lordies has been emended to clawhammers and pit to pit stalls and early amphitheatre. John Gordon, Professor Emeritus of English at Connecticut College, comments:

33.9-10: “Clawhammers,” a Dublin expression for, roughly, dolts; in this sense, would seem to go with “marbletopped highboys,” i.e. blockheads. “Clawhammer coats” were swallowtail coats (.8), so named because of the supposed resemblance of the tails to the claws of a hammer. Pit stalls were medium-priced seats located between stalls and pit; contemporary accounts describe them as occupied by “regular workers,” as opposed to either gentry or hoi-polloi; their occupants were not expected to dress up but sometimes did. Gist: although HCE and the pit stall dwellers may both be dressed formally, in white tie, the quality of the former’s linen is “far outstarching” (.8) the “laundered clawhammers” (.9) of the latter; any such formal getup would presumably need to be starched as well as washed. During Joyce’s time and earlier, the quality of one’s linen was, for men, a major class signifier. (Gordon)

Joycean scholar Petr Skrabanek defined clawhammer thus:

33.09 : clawhammers : in Dublin lingo, ‘a Dublin type who is a bit of an eejit’ (John Kilduff, Irish Times, 25.11.1974) (Skrabanek 80)

Joyce’s early amphitheatre can only be a reference to the theatres of ancient Athens, where Oedipus Rex was first performed.

The Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus at Athens

A Royal Divorce

Outside the covers of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one rarely hears today of this obscure melodrama. But William Gorman Wills’s A Royal Divorce figured prominently in the sentimental education of the young James Joyce. It was first performed at the Avenue Theatre, Sunderland, on 1 May 1891 and in London’s New Olympic Theatre on 10 September 1891. In Dublin, it soon became a staple of the Gaiety Theatre on South King Street—that king’s treat house. It remained a popular part of the city’s repertoire for almost fifty years. John Gordon (32.32) calls it the most durable play of the Dublin theatre scene. It continued to be performed in Dublin theatres into the 1930s. It was thrice adapted for the screen—as silent movies in 1923 and 1926 and as a talkie in 1938. In 1918, it was even burlesqued by Mark Sheridan’s comic revue Gay Paree.

The author W G Wills was a minor Irish novelist, playwright and artist. In a career spanning a quarter of a century, he penned more than thirty plays. A Royal Divorce was his final work, appearing for the first time on the stage just a few months before his death on 13 December 1891. Six days after his death, an obituary by Bram Stoker, Recollections of the Late W G Wills, was published in London in The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper. Stoker, the author of Dracula, was also the business manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre, where Henry Irving had appeared in several of Wills’s plays.

It transpires that A Royal Divorce was the work of several hands—at least three—and the manner in which it came to be is still a subject of scholarly debate and independent research. One such researcher, a contributor to the Encyclopaedia of South African Theatre, Film, Media and Performance (ESAT), has the following to say about the true authorship of the play:

Establishing the authorship of this play has been an interesting and rather complex matter. The play is often attributed to one, or both, of two people, namely W. G. Wills (1828–1891) and/or C. C. Collingham [sic], depending on the sources consulted. Wills, a recognized and very experienced Irish dramatist, novelist and painter, was undoubtedly one of the authors of the play, which he apparently completed shortly before his death in 1891, the year in which it was performed at the Olympic Theatre in London. This attribution relies on the fact that the play is also referred to quite often in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, where it is ascribed to Wills alone ... On the other hand “C. C. Collingham” is only noted in a number of film websites, where the name is listed as the author (or co-author) of a play that was the source of the 1926 British historical drama film directed by Alexander Butler ... One source however, Alan Goble’s The Complete Index of Literary Sources in Film, suggests (correctly, it turns out) that the text, published in 1891, is actually by BOTH authors. Why then is Collingham so often ignored?

Besides Wills’s obvious reputation, a key problem seems to be a mistake that was made with the initials, for it appears that the initials of the second author are in fact not “C. C.” , but “G. G.” and that the real author is G. G. Collingham [George Gervaise Collingham], the nom de plume of Mary Helen White (d. 1923), also a known playwright in London. This is evident when one consults the publicity material for the play, including the 1891 posters by Albert Morrow for the first performance in 1891, which say clearly: “A Royal Divorce. Playwright: W. G. Wills. Playwright: G. G. Collingham. Olympic Theatre, London. 10.9.1891.” (Satj)

A 1909 Playbill for A Royal Divorce

A playbill for a 1909 performance of A Royal Divorce contains the following “special notice”, which casts further light on G G Collingham’s involvement:

SPECIAL NOTICE—Since this Play was originally produced at the New Olympic Theatre, in 1891, the last Act has been entirely re-written by GEORGE GERVAIS [sic] COLLINGHAM.

A Royal Divorce

Despite the presence of Take off that white hat! there is no evidence that Joyce was ever aware of Mary Helen White’s contribution to A Royal Divorce. But if Wills’s brother and biographer Freeman Wills is to be believed, there may in fact be very little of W G Wills in the final text:

A Royal Divorce was the last piece to which my brother’s name was appended. The basis was a very poor American play, and the adaptation, if such it can be called, was unworthy of his fame. Still the character of Napoleon caught on with the people and made the play strangely popular. The reputed author was in bad health when he undertook the commission, and much of the work that he did upon it was discarded and the original substituted; so that it retained little of Wills, and much of the American author and Miss Grace Hawthorne. (Freeman Wills 266-267)

Miss Grace Hawthorne was a popular actress of the day, who had been “discovered” in America by W W Kelly, manager of the Evergreen Touring Company—Mr Wallenstein Washington Semperkelly’s immergreen tourers. She played the role of Josephine in A Royal Divorce but was best known for her portrayal of the eponymous Byzantine Empress in Robert Buchanan’s Theodora (adapted from Victorien Sardou’s Théodora).

There is some evidence that G G Collingham was actually the author of the original American play on which Wills’s play was allegedly based:

No single work of theirs equalled the popularity of A Royal Divorce, for which W. W. Kelly was responsible. While a manager in America he “discovered” Grace Hawthorne; in London she became sole lessee of the Princess’s, which was conducted under his management. The Napoleon drama that made his fortune was originally written in America by C. G. Collingham. Wills began to revise it. After his death “much of the work that he did upon it was discarded, and the original substituted”, according to his brother. Grace Hawthorne finished the task of fitting it for the stage. In 1891 it was played first at Sunderland, then at the New Olympic and then at the Princess’s. On tour its profits enabled Kelly to become proprietor of Kelly’s Theatre, Liverpool, and the Theatre Royal, Birkenhead, as well as lessee of the Shakespeare, Liverpool. He kept A Royal Divorce on tour almost until he died at the age of seventy-eight in 1933. It was more than a play; it was an institution. “Not to-night, Josephine”, the rude heckle from the gallery when Emperor bids Empress the last good-bye, became a catch-phrase for thirty years or more. (Disher 174-175)

Miss Grace Hawthorne

In The Books at the Wake, James Atherton has much to say about A Royal Divorce:

It is unlikely that Joyce ever read W. G. Wills’s once popular play A Royal Divorce. Indeed it is almost certain he didn’t for no printed copy seems to exist, and when—having noticed that the title of the play is quoted ten times in the Wake—I decided that I must find a copy I only succeeded because the authorities of the Cohen Library at Liverpool University were kind enough to have photostats made for me from the manuscript copy deposited, for copyright purposes, in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. But I have had the pleasure of speaking to several people who saw the play which seems to have been presented all over the British Isles, and frequently in Dublin until just after the end of the First World War. The company concerned was owned by W. W. Kelly who played the leading part of Napoleon to his wife’s Josephine, and is named twice in the Wake [RFW 026.09-10, 297.20].

The play is about Napoleon’s divorce from Joséphine [de Beauharnais] and subsequent marriage to Marie Louise [Duchess of Parma]. But it follows Napoleon’s career to its end and concludes with a long monologue by the dying Josephine in which the audience is given to understand that Napoleon also is dying at the same moment, and that the two are reunited in death and ‛begin again’. The final monologue of Finnegans Wake owes something to Josephine’s speech with its visionary journey across the white-topped waves to join her husband, and the rhythms of the two speeches have much in common. (Atherton 161-162)

Note how the trio comprising the Sultan Shahriar, Scheherazade and her sister Dunyazad (HCE and his schizophrenic daughter Issy) of the preceding paragraph has been replaced by the parallel trio of Napoleon, Josephine and Marie Louise. And in place of the folktales of the One Thousand and One Nights of Arabia, we have the plays, operas and pantomimes of the Western stage. It is significant that Joyce alludes to only two of the three operas that constitute the so-called Irish Ring: Michael William Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl and Julius Benedict’s The Lily of Killarney. The third, William Vincent Wallace’s Maritana would be de trop in this context.

Among the actors who played the role of Napoleon in Dublin there was one curiosity:

33.2 ... In the 1911 Dublin production, the role of Napoleon was taken by his great-grandson, Juan Buonaparte, said to strikingly resemble his ancestor. (Gordon)

Sadly, this particular Buonaparte was probably an impostor (Fleischmann 277), but perhaps he was the source of Joyce’s Napoleon the Nth.

William Gorman Wills

Atherton, who is possibly the only Joycean scholar to have actually read A Royal Divorce, continues:

There are two things only, however, which the reader of the Wake needs to know about A Royal Divorce. The first of these is that when Joyce quotes the title it has little to do with the play. It seems rather to be a leit-motiv representing the eternal dichotomies: good and evil, life and death, and so forth; and to symbolize that splitting up which, in the Wake, is the prelude to reuniting; and it derives this meaning from the plot of Wills’s play.

The other thing which Joyce remembered and used was a scene without words. A backcloth showing the scene of Waterloo was pierced with holes which were intermittently lit up to represent the firing of cannon. In front of this models of cavalrymen were wound forward on glass runners while ‛Pepper ghosts’ [RFW 168.10, 357.04] of cuirassiers produced by a sort of magic lantern, fell dramatically to their death in the clouds of white smoke that filled the stage. In the foreground, on a big white horse, rode Napoleon, or sometimes—apparently when Mr. Kelly wanted a rest—Wellington. It made no difference to the play who was on the horse as nothing was said, but Joyce makes great play with this interchangeability of the opposed generals. (Atherton 162)

Napoleon on his Big White Horse

Few of Wills’s writings are currently in print. On the Internet Archive, only a small selection of works is available. There is a manuscript copy of A Royal Divorce in Trinity College Library, but I have not seen it. A new edition of this play is long overdue.

Cardinals Edward MacCabe and Paul Cullen, Archbishops of Dublin

MacCabe and Cullen

  • his bossaloner is ceilinged there a cuckoospit less eminent than the redritualhoods of Maccabe and Cullen

Borsalino is the name of an Italian millinery firm best known for its felt hats. Among its most successful hats was the fedora. Joyce rarely went out without his fedora. Curiously, the fedora takes its name from Fédora, a play by Victorien Sardou, an adaptation of whose Théodora provided Grace Hawthorne with her most famous role.

Paul Cullen and Edward MacCabe were successive Roman Catholic Archbishops of Dublin. Both men were cardinals. The correct form of address for a Catholic cardinal is Your Eminence. The official vesture of a cardinal consists of scarlet garments. Allegedly, the blood-red colour symbolizes a cardinal’s willingness to die for his faith. The traditional mozzetta (cape) and biretta (hat) are reminiscent of the red cape (French: chaperon) which Little Red Riding Hood is usually depicted wearing.

Little Red Riding Hood

I feel I have hardly begun to plumb the depths of this pregnant paragraph. Wallenstein Washington Semperkelly alludes to two famous political assassinations: that of President Abraham Lincoln by the actor John Wilkes Booth—his viceregal booth—during a performance of the play Our American Cousin in Washington, after which Wilkes cried Sic Semper Tyrannis : and that of Albrecht von Wallenstein, a general in the Thirty Years War, by a group of Irish and Scottish officers in his army. Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein’s Death dramatizes this event.

There are also references to Christy’s Minstrels, who popularized the phrase Take off that white hat! In Egyptian mythology, Osiris is usually depicted wearing a white hat, the Atef.

But it would take too much time and labour to extract all the meaning out of these twenty-seven lines.

And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.

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