Cymbeline - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

century than they had been in the first decades, and Toole
was able to recall Paul Pry performed by Listen (1776-1846)
in a manner "very droll, sometimes a trifle coarse"-
but he had been encouraged in this by his
audience, who like broad fun, and had
inherited, perhaps, some of the rough
tastes of still older playgoers... it was
the sort of coarseness that was not considered
offensive by our grandfathers.9
Mayhew's Punch and Judy man - whose livelihood depended
precariously upon changing tastes in marital relationships
observed:
Punch, you know, sir, is a dramatic performance
in tvo hacts. It's a play, you -aay
say. I don't think it can be called a
tragedy hexactly; a drama is what we names
it. There is tragic parts, and conic and
sentimental parts, too. Gome families where
I performs will have it most sentimental
in the original style; then families is
generally sentimental themselves. Others is
all for the comic, and then I has to kick up all
the games I can. To the sentimental folk I am
obliged to perform werry steady and werry slow,
and leave out all comic words and business.
They won't fcave no ghost, no coffin, and no devil;
and that's what I call spiling the performance
entirely. It's the march of hintellect wot's
a doing all this it is, sir. 10
She march of intellect was not much reflected in the performance
history of Cvmbeline. although Irving's text of
the play is more effectively bowdleriaed than its predecessors,
and it would be possible to see his version
produced without knowing what lachimo had wagered he could
do with Imogen. Gyrabeline was much more acceptable than
other plays with a similar fulcrum to their plot - Troilus
and Cressida or All's Veil that Ends ' r ell - and it was
eminently suited to the "sentimental" among the Punch and
Judy man's patrons. It offered opportunities for
"historical" staging, and it offered th^ portrait of an
ideal woman with whom Jiost literary critics of the play