The Royal Amphitheatre and Olympic Tom and Jerry Burlettas

This chapter, and the one which follows, are given over to demonstrating the workings of the popular or plebeian public spheres of drama specific to the non-patent playhouses operating in late Georgian London. Burletta was the optimum dramatic genre for these theatres to develop since it was also the only form available to them which could be confirmed as legally permissible. Inevitably, the narrative of how burletta developed bears little relationship to how spoken drama evolved in the royal theatres. While non-patent playhouses such as the Adelphi and Olympic continued to experience the censor’s interventions, and while no playhouse in the London area was immune from the royal theatres’ mobilization of litigation and political pressure to protect their monopolies, the burletta playhouses developed largely with reference to their own competitors or peers and in combination with a dialogue with their own audiences. For as long as the major contemporary canonical authors such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats remained unable or unwilling to access the potential of these playhouses for reaching popular audiences, even though much of their verse was politically and theoretically derived from native ballads and was ideally suited to burletta, the manner in which dramas such as Giovanni in London and Tom and Jerry developed was unlikely to follow the patterns of literary or social history established by spoken drama. These chapters will demonstrate that successful burlettas reached exponentially large audiences within a public sphere which articulated its own set of concerns. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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