QUIZ TIME

I have eight depictions of period actors, each showing one of the Ten Major Emotions actors trained to express. Can you identify them?



























1. The pose in question is that of the woman on the right. From Box and Cox.




2. Again, look at the woman's pose, from unidentified play and actors.


















3. Both these pictures of Dame Ellen Terry show the same emotion.



4. Edwin Booth as Iago bristles with a particular mood.



5. Edmund Kean, here as Othello; is he communicating his feeling clearly?



6. Julia Marlowe is overcome by her mood as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.



7. Mary Anderson; the play is unknown, but her emotion should be obvious.




8. How do you respond to this attitude by Marie Wilkins in Two Orphans?

An earlier post of The Ten Major Emotions has a drawing and verbal description for each, included under the link "stage gestures."

ROMANCE IN REAL LIFE

John Maddison Morton subtitled Box and Cox as "A Romance in Real Life," signalling his parody of contemporary melodrama. Rather than heroes fighting bandits, enemy soldiers, or other villains, Morton shows two young Cockneys struggling with housing and marital problems. The setting is not a castle, island, cave or mountain retreat, but a rooming house in London. Instead of a blooming young ingenue, we have the "majestic", middle-aged widow Penelope Ann. Instead of a scheming lawyer, we have a scheming landlady. The hidden will or delayed pardon from execution meant to rush forward the action and resolve the plot(the meaningful artefact of melodrama) becomes letters from Cox's (or Box's) intended. And the stereotyped long-lost family member, identified by a birthmark or token, is rather found by the absence of a strawberry mark!

LORDS OF CREATION (song, 1838)

In New Old Theater's production of Double the Rent, Katherine Mack performs an olio of a period song, Lords of Creation. Copyright free scans of the sheet music are below.

ADDED PERFORMANCE OF BOX AND COX

New Old Theater will also be performing Box and Cox on Saturday, September 19, in Ellicott City. Particulars on flyer below.

THE BUSHMEN

Box asks Cox if he has "seen the Bosjesmans?" This Afrikaans word for Bushmen refers to an indigenous people of South Africa, the Hottentots. In 1847, there was an exhibit at the Egyptian Hall in Picadilly of two men, two women, and an infant, as a sort of ethnographic show.

The Bosjesmans, or Bushmen, appear to be the remains of Hottentot hordes, who have been driven, by the gradual encroachments of the European colonists, to seek for refuge among the inaccessible rocks and sterile desert of the interior of Africa. Most of the hordes known in the colony by the name of Bushmen are now entirely destitute of flocks or herds, and subsist partly by the chase, partly on the wild roots of the wilderness, and in times of scarcity on reptiles, grasshoppers, and the larvae of ants, or by plundering their hereditary foes and oppressors, the frontier Boers. In seasons when every green herb is devoured by swarms of locusts, and when the wild game in consequence desert the pastures of the wilderness, the Bushman finds a resource in the very calamity which would overwhelm an agricultural or civilized community. He lives by devouring the devourers; he subsists for weeks and months on locusts alone, and also preserves a stock of this food dried, as we do herrings or pilchards, for future consumption.
The Bushman retains the ancient arms of the Hottentot race, namely, a javelin or assagai, similar to that of the Caffres, and a bow and arrows. The latter, which are his principal weapons both for war and the chase, are small in size and formed of slight materials; but, owing to the deadly poison with which the arrows are imbued, and the dexterity with which they are launched, they are missiles truly formidable. One of these arrows, formed merely of a piece of slender reed tipped with bone or iron, is sufficient to destroy the most powerful animal. But, although the colonists very much dread the effects of the Bushman's arrow, they know how to elude its range; and it is after all but a very unequal match for the fire-lock, as the persecuted natives by sad experience have found. The arrows are usually kept in a quiver, formed of the hollow stalk of a species of aloe, and slung over the shoulder; but a few, for immediate use, are often stuck in a band round the head.
A group of Bosjesmans, comprising two men, two women, and a child, were recently brought to this country and exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, in Piccadilly. The women wore mantles and conical caps of hide, and gold ornaments in their ears. The men also wore a sort of skin cloak, which hung down to their knees, over a close tunic: the legs and feet were bare in both. Their sheep-skin mantles, sewed together with threads of sinew, and rendered soft and pliable by friction, sufficed for a garment by day and a blanket by night. These Bosjesmans exhibited a variety of the customs of their native country. Their whoops were sometimes so loud as to be startling, and they occasionally seemed to consider the attention of the spectators as an affront.

From The Illustrated London News

They were a huge draw at the Egyptian Hall, but their combination of familiar human form with outlandish customs sometimes caused as much repulsion and disgust as fascination. Charles Dickens wrote:

Think of the Bushmen. Think of the two men and the two women who have been exhibited about England for some years. Are the majority of persons - who remember the horrid little leader of that party in his festering bundle of hides, with his filth and his antipathy to water, and his straddled legs, and his odious eyes shaded by his brutal hand, and his cry of 'Qu-u-u-u-aaa!' (Bosjesman for something desperately insulting I have no doubt) - conscious of an affectionate yearning towards that noble savage, or is it idiosyncratic in me to abhor, detest, abominate, and abjure him? I have no reserve on this subject, and will frankly state that, setting aside that stage of the entertainment when he counterfeited the death of some creature he had shot, by laying his head on his hand and shaking his left leg - at which time I think it would have been justifiable homicide to slay him - I have never seen that group sleeping, smoking, and expectorating round their brazier, but I have sincerely desired that something might happen to the charcoal smouldering therein, which would cause the immediate suffocation of the whole of the noble strangers.

All in all, not the type of comfortable relaxation a conservative Victorian might prefer. Uncouth habits and scanty dress might well lead a strong-minded fiancee to forbid the sight to her intended.

BOX AND COX FOR CHILDREN

Grace Chetwin, a children's author, was inspired by Morton's play to write Box and Cox (1990), the story of a hatter and a printer who are "always in the same place, but not at the same time." The author mistakenly believed the story to come from vaudeville so she set the story circa 1900, with charming color illustrations of Box, Cox, and Mrs. Bouncer, the landlady they both want to marry.

FEATHERING HER NEST

This is an upper-class version of the bed and bolster, with canopy, Mrs. Bouncer furnished her tenants (see picture in September 3 post). A bolster is a long cylindrical cushion, used on sofas as well as beds. Box and Cox had only one bolster between them, which Mrs. Bouncer moved from end to end to accommodate their different tastes. This bolster probably had the only feathers in the bed furniture, the mattress made of wool or straw. Feather beds were for the rich. Here is a list of London prices for a pound of feathers in 1847 (for a decent mattress, about 50 pounds were needed):



This explains the flatness Cox complains of: Mrs. Bouncer has been "tapping the mattress"! -- extricating feathers from the stuffing to sell on the street. Landladies and servants often appropriated candles, coal, grease and alcohol for their own use or to sell for extra income. Compare the street price of about ten pence for a pound of feathers with the daily pay for a matchbox maker (about 18 pence for a day's labor, figure from Henry Mayhew, 1849).

BOX AND COX PLAYBILL (1878)

BOX AND COX ILLUSTRATION

Mrs. Bouncer is summoned by two irate tenants.

From Lacy's Acting Editions.

MRS. WIGGINS' BATHING MACHINES

Box and Cox's Mrs. Wiggins made a fortune by running bathing machines in the seaside towns of Margate and Ramsgate. Bathing machines were small huts on wheels, drawn out by horses, and later by steam, into the water, where a visitor could descend into the waves with some privacy, as well as assistance from the attendants or "dippers". While beaches were segregated by gender till late in the century, observers (of both sexes) were known to stand on cliffs and balconies, using spyglasses. (This was especially intimidating in the early part of the century, when swimming was generally done in the nude.)

The bathing machine was perfected at Margate by Benjamin Beale, who added a hoop and canvas device to the exit for added seclusion. Here are some contemporary pictures of the machines:





Please read the articles here and
here to enjoy more about this this topic, and to see a delightful collection of pictures of machines and the people who used them.

COX AND BOX

Box and Cox inspired composer Sir Arthur Sullivan (later half of the Gilbert and Sullivan team)to create the musical Cox and Box or, the Long Lost Brothers with playwright F.C. Burnand. Mrs. Bouncer the landlady became Mr. Bouncer the landlord, and all events were sung. You can read more about the play and listen to the music by clicking
here.

NEW OLD THEATER PRESENTS BOX AND COX

The 1847 farce Box and Cox will be performed this September as Double the Rent! at the locations and dates listed below. Box and Cox was popular for decades; it involves a greedy landlady who rents out her room simultaneously to two boarders -- one works the day shift and one the night shift. Eventually, however, they are home at the same time...come see what happens next.



Fri, Sept 11, 7:30 pm The Old Parish House, 4711 Knox Road, College Park (near the Metro!) Tickets $5

Sun, Sept 13, Fri-Sun Sept 25-27, 8:00 pm Time and Tide Theater at the Fell's Point Visitor Center, 1724 Thames Street, Baltimore
PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN EVERY EVENING EXCEPT SAT SEPT 26 ($15)