HISTORY IN PANTOMIMES

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 124, 19 February 1938, Page 6 (Supplement)

HISTORY IN PANTOMIMES

The Why And The Wherefore

Did yon ever wonder, as you sat looking at a pantomime, just how it all came about?, asks George Edinger in an English exchange. - Why should the fairy queen come in from the right: demon king from the left?

Who first called the clown Joey? Were there any Babes in the Wood? Had Dick Whittington really got a cat?

There is a reason for all things, even in a pantomime. Usually a very old reason, sometimes so old that we have forgotten it. Principal boys ami dames, for instance. They go right back to the Roman feast of Saturn, when the world turned topsy-turvy for two weeks at the end of every year: when masters served their slaves and men changed clothes 'with their wives.

That custom was long kept up in England on Twelfth Night. Shakespeare called his play “Twelfth Night’ because in it a sister struts in her brother’s clothes.

The pantomime fairy queen descends from the good angel in the old miracle plays: the first demon 'king was Beelzebub. In the churches when a stage was put up for a miracle play heaven always lay on the right, bell on the left, the sinister side. So the good people still come from the wings right of the stage, the evil from the left.

Most of the stories of our pantomimes to-day comes from the old pup]>et shows which travelled the fairs and markets of Britain all the hundreds of years of her history, recording the stories that took the people’s fancy from time to time. Cinderella is the oldest, nobody knows quite how old.

There are 400 versions of it. and it is told in every language in the world.

The Babes in the Wood is based <m the true story of two children who were abducted and abandoned in Norfolk in the fifteenth century.

Dick Whittington, who married the daughter of his master. ' Alderman Fitzwarren. and became Lord Mayor of London three times before he died in 1423, never had a eat and never went to Morocco.

Rut he invested his savings In 4 ketch that did trade to Morocco, and that was the beginning of his fortune. Stories like these were preserved by travelling showmen till the pantomime took them over.

At the end of George Ill’s reign it occurred to managers to substitute English favourites for mythological and historical beings.

So London saw “Columbine Red Riding Hood” and “Harlequin Robinson Crusoe.”

And by that time new stories had caught the people’s fancy and swollen the showmen’s repertory. The adventures of Alexander Selkirk. who lived alone on Juan Fernandez Isle in the Pacific, had inspired Defoe to write “Robinson Crusoe,” first performed in pantomime in 1800, and when the “Arabian Nights” were translated from the French in 1704 the stories of Aladdin and Sinbad the Sailor became quite as popular as Dick* Whittington and the Babes in the Wood.

In 1872 the pantomime clown appeared nt Sadler's Wells with a little monkey on a chain. He swung it round his head so violently that the chain broke and the monkey flew off into the pit. If was rescued in tears from the skin, for this monkey was a three-year-old child, called Joseph Grimaldi.

From 1782 till his last appearance in IS2B Grimaldi never missed a pantomime.

He was the greatest clown who ever lived. He overshadowed Harlequin completely, and he has left his name, "Joey.” to every clown in pantomime.

Hi's big song hit. "Hot. Codlins” (toffee apples), from “Mother Goose.” had a run of 120 years, from 1804 till 1926. Yet Grimaldi, who died in his fifties a hundred years ago, never earned more than £l4 a week. Grimaldi introduced many features into pantomime. He first made the audience join in the chorus by leaving the last word of each verse for them to sing.

He too. standardised the clown’s dress, as it lias remained ever since. The costume he wore is kept in the London Museum.