sardanapalus, spectacle, and the empire state

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February 25, 2011 16:33 MAC/TICS Page-33 9780230_246461_04_cha02

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2Sardanapalus, Spectacle,and the Empire StateAndrew M. Stauffer

As the drama draws to a close, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra imagines withhorror the Roman theatrical sequels that will spring up in mockery ofher Egyptian majesty. As she tells her handmaiden Iras, “scald rhymers”will “ballad us out o’ tune,” and

. . . quick comediansExtemporally will stage us, and presentOur Alexandrian revels; AntonyShall be brought drunken forth, and I shall seeSome squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatnessI’ th’ posture of a whore.1

Cleopatra expresses her fears of burlesque imitation in nouns thatbecome verbs—“ballad,” “stage” and “boy”—a rhetorical tendency typ-ified in her reaction to Caesar’s promises a few lines earlier: “He wordsme, girls, he words me” (5.2.192). In each case, the anxiety conveyedby Cleopatra’s verbing concerns an imagined subjugation to a reduc-tive and captivating incarnation: I will become a ballad, my life equatedwith what a stage can hold, my greatness confined in the body of a boy.The noun–verb oscillation allows her to convey such fears of objectifi-cation (that is, of becoming an “Egyptian puppet . . . shown / In Rome”(209–10)) simultaneously with fears of a narrative controlled by others,of the import of the dismissive phrase, “you’re history.”

The theatrical record of Byron’s Assyrian drama Sardanapalus providesan instance of a related movement of throne room to imperial stage,with particular regard to the issues of incarnation, spectacle, and legacythat Cleopatra’s words here invoke and that also lie at the heart ofByron’s concerns in his Eastern play. Like a number of Byron’s dramatic

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PROOF34 Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror

works, Sardanapalus was frequently performed during the Victorian era,both in England and America.2 The critical conversation about theseperformances has focused almost exclusively on Charles Kean’s 1853London staging (at the Royal Princess’s Theater), in part because ofthe production’s priority in drawing on Austen Henry Layard’s Assyrianmid-century archaeological finds to furnish the stage.3 Once Layardhad hauled ancient Assyrian artifacts and monuments back to theBritish Museum and published illustrated accounts of his adventuresand discoveries, Byron’s play became a ready-made excuse for creat-ing elaborate panoramas of Nineveh, and then—what was even moreexciting—presenting their destruction. Kean remarks that his produc-tion was set based on the “wonderful discoveries made within the lastfew years . . . on the site of ancient Nineveh” in order “to convey to theStage an accurate portraiture and a living picture of an age long sincepassed away, but once as famous as our own country for its civiliza-tion and power.”4 Already the chain of empires is being emphasized,as Sardanapalus is being made over into an allegorical touchstone forVictorian Britain. However, it was the 1876 New York City production,based on Charles Calvert’s arrangement, that was the culmination of theplay’s nineteenth-century theatrical history: in the longest-running per-formance of any of Byron’s dramas ever, Sardanapalus played at Booth’sTheater in Manhattan for 113 nights.5

Even more so than Kean’s production, the Booth’s show was a tri-umph of spectacle, with great attention paid to creating the marvelousfuneral pyre as the grand finale. Accordingly, Byron’s text was radi-cally cut in order to emphasize visual and technological displays; thedrama was set amidst ‘authentic’ ancient Assyrian scenery and featur-ing a “Grand Ballet” of at least eight different dances. The details ofthis history reveal connections between Sardanapalus’ own sense of hisspectacular legacy and its eventual realization in the Empire State in1876—that is, at the urban heart of a burgeoning imperial nation cele-brating its centennial year in the wake of a Civil War. There are levelsof coincident irony in the convergence of techno-spectacle, imperial-ism, and the looting of relics represented by this production, plottedalong an axis connecting New York City and the place we now call Iraq.In addition, the 1876 New York show takes place under the auspicesof the Booth family, whose most infamous member had assassinatedPresident Abraham Lincoln as he sat in a theater watching a play: sicsemper tyrannis. Byron’s drama becomes involved in the mythic historyof the United States, constructed by means of spectacle and the rehearsalof certain spectacular events as if they were keys to understanding the


PROOFSardanapalus, Spectacle, and the Empire State 35

nation proper. As Megan Sanborn Jones writes of this production, “Thesuccess of the production can be attributed . . . to the theatrical presenta-tion of the exotic East. The setting for Sardanapalus . . . created for themthe shape and style of lands beyond their borders and reaffirmed theirplace as American.”6 The 1876 Sardanapalus brings to the surface boththe ideological work of national definition in America at its centen-nial and the play’s own concern with issues of nation, reputation andinheritance.

Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Byron’s monarch expresses a strongsense of his own legacy. Indeed, Sardanapalus is centrally concerned withthe struggles of the last Assyrian monarch to determine what his reignwill mean to future eras. The king is a pacifistic hedonist who says hehas intended to make

mine inoffensive ruleAn era of sweet peace ’midst bloody annals,A green spot amidst desert centuries,On which the future would turn back and smile,And cultivate, or sigh when it could notRecal Sardanapalus’ golden reign.7

Coming where it does in this passage, that imagined “green spot”morphs from written sign (a spot of green ink on the pages of thoseblood-stained annals) to a temporal paradise (an oasis-like spot of time“amidst desert centuries”), serving in both cases as an emblem or hiero-glyph to be read by “the future.” And yet the king’s language heresuggests a concern that this verdant record may, in time, be forgotten:the world would “sigh when it could not / Recal Sardanapalus’ goldenreign.” “Recal” here means “call back,” of course, but it also means“remember,” and that “sigh” becomes the wordless breath of future gen-erations no longer able to read Sardanapalus’ “green spot” on the pageof history. It is worth noting that Byron was writing all of this just priorto the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics by Champollion andYoung in the 1820s—that is, at a time when the written records of theancient Near East were still ciphers to the modern world.

Indeed, fears of illegibility animate the drama, which ends withSardanapalus and his beloved slave, Myrrha, atop a suicidal pyre meantto destroy the palace as the rebellious satraps close in—and also meantto be the king’s final monument, the act by which posterity will remem-ber him. Indeed, he imagines his flaming destruction will produce “alight / To lesson ages, rebel nations, and / Voluptuous princes,” even



though “Time shall quench full many / A people’s records, and a hero’sacts; / Sweep empire after empire, like this first / Of empires, intonothing” (5.1.440–5). In the event, Sardanapalus’ last words on thematter come in the form of a satire on the Egyptian pyramids, thoseproud Ozymandian monuments which time has turned into sites ofconfusion:

In this blazing palace,And its enormous walls of reeking ruin,We leave a nobler monument than EgyptHath piled in her brick mountains, o’er dead kings,Or kine—for none know whether those proud pilesBe for their monarch, or their ox-god Apis:So much for monuments that have forgottenTheir very record! (5.1.480–7)

Physical monuments forget their record, cows may be mistakenfor kings, and Time may erase “full many / A people’s records”:Sardanapalus fears that, like the “green spot” which can no longerbe recalled or read on the pages of “bloody annals,” material relicsalways tend towards illegibility. So he chooses to arrange instead forhis story to be passed on, staging his own grand finale and tellinga faithful servant to “fly,— / And as you sail, turn back” and, uponarriving in Paphlagonia, “Say what you saw at parting” (5.1.390–4). InSardanapalus’ final gamble, then, the records of Assyria are burned tostoke the fires of memorable spectacle.

In fact, the nineteenth-century theatrical fortunes of Byron’s playconfirm this spectacular tendency adumbrated in the last act ofSardanapalus: synoptic studies by Taborski and Margaret Howell, andrecent work by Edward Ziter, make it clear that every Victorian per-formance of the play subordinated text to special effects, particularlyafter Charles Kean’s famous 1853 London version. As Ziter puts it,“the tried and true practice of the closing conflagration” was “used toillustrate the popular view that ancient Eastern civilizations collapsedwith spectacular speed under the weight of their own decadence.”8

In Sardanapalus, the great conflagration is literally the show-stopper,and this special effect became more elaborate and realistic with eachrevival until it reached a kind of culmination in the 1876 New Yorkproduction.

Sardanapalus played at Booth’s Theater (under the management ofHenry Jarrett and Harry Palmer) from August 15 until December 2. This



production was based on a condensed, four-act version of the play byCharles Calvert, who said beforehand that Sardanapalus “is a poem overthe heads of the people, but the ‘conflagration’ will make it a finan-cial success.”9 In the competition for stage time between poem andscenic effects, the latter took decided precedence, as the theater pro-gram demonstrates: “scenery,” “costumes,” “regalia,” “the simulatedconflagration,” “the machinery and mechanical appliances,” and “thecalciums and other marvelous stage lights” receive near-top billing (seeFigure 2.4).10 Of the 1876 Jarrett and Palmer production, the New YorkHerald wrote scathingly,

[T]he play was hacked to pieces . . . We read of the gypsy child steal-ers who used to capture children and turn them into monsters byrude surgery. Mr Calvert has done the same for Lord Byron . . . Whatwe had, from beginning to end, was spectacle and ballet. It was the“Black Crook” or the “White Fawn” woven together with fragmentsof Byron’s rhetoric.11

At the same time, the Illustrated Sporting New Yorker called it “the mosteffective and complete spectacular illustration of dramatic and scenicart ever before seen in this country.”12 According to the latter pub-lication, an average of three thousand people were going to Booth’seach night by mid-September; they reasserted that Jarrett and Palmer’sSardanapalus “far surpasses any spectacular effort every before made inthis country.”13

Those playgoers in Booth’s Theater in 1876 would have seen some-thing like the images presented in Figures 2.1 and 2.2. Published in theillustrated journals of the day, these engravings of the New York finale ofSardanapalus have never been reproduced. In both of the images, onecan see the Assyrian winged bull colossi looming in the background.In Figure 2.2, from the Illustrated Sporting New Yorker of 1876, we cansee Agnes Booth as Myrrha striking a pose strangely similar to that ofthe new colossus, Liberty, which Frederic Bartholdi had designed forthe New York harbor in that same centennial year. Indeed, the upperright arm and torch of the incipient Statue of Liberty were on dis-play at the Centenntial Exposition in Philadelphia, a display used toraise money for the construction of the rest of the statue (Figure 2.3).That is, the Booth’s Theater performance of Sardanapalus seems to haveconverged fortuitously upon a number of resonant iconic images—theraised arm, the flaming brand, the monumental sculpture, the blazingpyre—that circulated as part of the American national myth-making of



Figure 2.1 “Scene from Sardanapalus—Booth’s Theater.” (September, 1876?).Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

1876. That the whole production centered on the fall of Assyria andthe self-destructive end of an imperial state—the empire dying—suggeststhat any mature mythic narrative of nationhood will include a fantasyof its own ending. In 1840, Thomas Babington Macaulay had famouslyimagined a future epoch “when some traveller from New Zealand shall,in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch ofLondon Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.”14 The rapidity andextent to which Macaulay’s image circulated in Victorian England pro-vides a counterpart here, from the English perspective. In parsing thedeveloping relationship of their nation and empire, Englishmen had fre-quent recourse to this icon of ruin. In a similar way, the popularity ofthe performance suggests that Byron’s play, Calvert’s adaptive revisions,and the stagecraft at Booth’s came together to provide a kind of sym-bolic narrative of empire that Americans found compelling at this pointin their history.

The theater program itself (Figure 2.4) offers a curious coincidence inthe lower-right hand corner: the fortuitous advertisement headed “TheEmpire Dyeing.” I like to imagine that advertisement catching the eye,in the lurid light of the play’s concluding fires, of an American theater-goer, perhaps recently up on the train from Philadelphia and a visit to



Figure 2.2 “Mrs. Agnes Booth, as Myrrha, in Sardanapalus.’ ” The IllustratedSporting New Yorker 7.174 (October 7, 1876), 9

the 1876 Centennial Exhibition halls, in which the cultural and com-mercial wonders of the world were displayed as a kind of congratulationand promise to the Empire State and its united brethren who were risingas a nation from the ashes of their own civil war. “Work Surpassed byNone,” the advertisement promises, echoing the “Ozymandias” inscrip-tion as Byron and Shelley found it in Diodorus Siculus (who was alsoByron’s source for Sardanapalus), “If anyone would know how great I am,and where I lie, / Let him surpass me in any of my works.”15 From acertain angle, one sees in these columns of advertisements—for hats,safes, refrigerators, toothpaste, and carriages—the pillars of the brashly



Figure 2.3 “Centennial Exhibit, Philadelphia, 1876 [Colossal hand and torch,Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty].” Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views.New York Public Library Photography Collection, Wallach Division of Art, Printsand Photographs (Wikimedia Commons image)

confident consumer capitalism that would come to support the UnitedStates in its world-beating character, twin trade towers flanking an invi-tation to watch the flaming destruction of a Near Eastern potentate andhis civilization.16

The lead roles in the Booth’s production—Sardanapalus and Myrrha—were played by Frank C. Bangs and Agnes Booth, respectively(Figure 2.5). Agnes Booth (formerly Rookes) had in 1867 married JuniusBrutus Booth, Jr., brother of Edwin and John Wilkes; so she was aninsider, chosen presumably because of her connections to the fam-ily. And indeed, the play itself must have resonated with memories ofBooth’s assassination of Lincoln, as the conspirators led by Salamenesplot rebellion and death for Sardanapalus—just as Julius Caesar musthave done when it was played at Booth’s earlier in that same year.17

Booth’s Theater itself was a prodigious showplace begun in 1869 byEdmund Booth, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and thedeath of Lincoln and John Wilkes. One theater historian calls it “per-haps the most innovative, opulent, and technically advanced Americantheatre of the Nineteenth Century.”18 In the year of its opening in1872, a contemporary called it “one of the architectural jewels of thecity”19 and Harper’s Weekly reported, “Mr. Booth designs that it shallbecome, as doubtless it will, the best theater in this country, both asan edifice and on account of its stage representations . . . [The building]offers a majestic and imposing presence, and forms one of the architec-tural and artistic gems of our city.”20 The Sardanapalus production wasmeant as a showcase production for this wondrous structure. In thesecabinet photos (Figure 2.5) from the Harvard Theater collection, we see



Figure 2.4 Program, Booth’s Theater. September 30, 1876. (Author’s collection)

the actors standing separately in front of a painted backdrop represent-ing the throne room, unlike the actual stage which was built out toallow movement within the space. Throughout, the winged, human-headed bulls and other Assyrian bas-reliefs demonstrate the influence ofLayard’s archaeological discoveries on the set, and on souvenirs such as



Figure 2.5 Agnes Booth and Frank C. Bangs, Cabinet card publicity photographs,1876. Cabinet Photographs (Booth, Agnes, and Bangs, Frank C.), Harvard TheaterCollection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

these photos which usually dispense with background. As the programstates,

[T]he spectator in “Sardanapalus” may fairly believe he is witness-ing a page of ancient history as it really occurred 2500 years ago, sofaithfully have the manners and customs of the people, the elaborateand gorgeous scenery and mountings, and the interesting details ofcostumes and ornamentation been carried out.

After a break, the next line of the column reads, “Sardanapalus neck-ties are advertised.” That is, as signs of authenticity, the program offerssouvenirs (“I was there!”) and recreated relics (“It felt like I was reallythere!”): material objects as agents of memory for these latecomerAmericans.

The Booth’s Theater Sardnapalus was popular enough to spawn at leasttwo parodies, in the form of burlesque performances running concur-rently with the Jarrett and Palmer show. In October and November of1876, the new Eagle Theater (also in Manhattan, at Broadway and 33rd

Street) presented “Sardine-Apples! King of Ninnyvah & Astoria, L.I.” with



Mr. A.H. Shelton (who composed the parody) starring as Sardine-Apples,“A King who ‘BANGS’ his subjects about,’ ” referring to his counterpartFrank Bangs in the Booth’s production.21 The synopsis includes suchincidents as

The Sunset and Moon Effects incidental to this Scene cost $5,000!!!Pania bothered by Tramps. Arrival of Salamander bearing his “WhiskyRing.” The Terrific Sword Combat. A PRIZE FIGHT INTRODUCEDIN LORD BYRON’S TRAGEDY!! Arbabeces and Beleses banished fromLong Island. A DANGEROUS BALLON ASCENSION! Departure ofSardine-Apples for the Hall of Ramrod in the Royal Canal Boat.Realistic Scenic Display! The MAGIC SHOWER of PEARLS ANDDIAMONDS!! (3)

This must have been a particularly lively spectacle, especially as allof that occurred in only one scene out of seven. Equally outrageousmust have been “Sir Dan O’Pallas, Chief of the Assyrian Jim Jams,”a parody first mounted on September 2, 1876, by Kelly and Leon’sMinstrels and Burlesque Opera Troupe and performed somewhere closeto Booth’s Theater.22 “Leon” was the stage name of Patrick FrancisGlassey (b. 1840), a famous female impersonator from New York whoteamed up with Edwin Kelly (b. 1835), an Irish vocalist and actor.Rice calls Leon “the dean of minstrel female impersonators,” and heplayed the role of Myrrha, who is described in the program as “a sweetscented young lady, and a copy of the original Greek Slave invented byMr. Powers, who has captivated Sir Dan and introduced domestic broilsinto the O’Pallas household, which eventually end at the stake.”23 Theproliferation of these burlesque shows demonstrates the prominence ofthe Jarrett & Palmer production on the New York theatrical scene in thefall of 1876; the parodies are part of a total cultural phenomenon thatcentered on the spectacular entertainment provided at Booth’s Theater.

We are a long way from Byron here, but I want to return nowto a consideration of the competition that the Booth performance ofSardanapalus engages between relic and spectacle, and between text andperformance. Indeed, this competition structures Byron’s own origi-nal Sardanapalus as well. We already know that the monarch distrustsphysical monuments, dismissing the Egyptian pyramids and the stonemarkers left by Bacchus, “a few columns / Which . . . might be mine,if I / Thought them worth purchase and conveyance” (1.2.168–70),and favoring instead Bacchus’ invention of wine, which, like poetry,is reproducible and variable. Byron was living in one of the great eras



of archaeological progress, inaugurated by Napoleon’s invasion of Egyptin 1798, and Byron’s written works are filled with meditations on theirown relationship to the ancient monuments coming then so clearly intoEuropean view. An example from Don Juan is worth citing in full:

What is the end of Fame? ’tis but to fillA certain portion of uncertain paper:

Some liken it to climbing up a hill,Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour;

For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,And bards burn what they call their “midnight taper,”

To have, when the original is dust,A name, a wretched picture and worse bust.

What are the hopes of man? Old Egypt’s KingCheops erected the first Pyramid

And largest, thinking it was just the thingTo keep his memory whole, and mummy hid;

But somebody or other rummaging,Burglariously broke his coffin’s lid:

Let not a monument give you or me hopes,Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops. (Canto 1, stanzas

218–19)

According to Byron here, relics—papers, pictures, busts, and pyramids—do not function reliably as agents preservative of one’s identity. Remainsturn to dust, and monuments preserve only the memory of loss: suchhomilies were being brought home with vivid force in the Egyptologicalnineteenth century, when once-venerated things were being unburiedand admired with blank or mistaken wonder—an experience repeatedat mid-century with Layard’s discoveries in Sardanapalus’ Nineveh.

My point is that Byron’s mockery of ancient Near Eastern monu-ments literally sets the stage for the Victorian emphasis on spectaclein their performances of Sardanapalus, in which Assyrian artifacts arelovingly displayed and even more lovingly destroyed. The priorities ofByron’s Assyrian monarch and of Jarrett and Palmer at Booth’s The-ater converge in the conflagration that, on the one hand, consumesSardanapalus’ relics and, on the other, requires the radical cutting ofByron’s text. Sardanapalus himself shows a good deal of interest in thetechnology of his pyre, directing his soldiers to pile “Faggots, pine-nuts,and wither’d leaves . . . cedar, too, and precious drugs, and spices, / And



mighty planks” so that the throne will “form the core of it.” Soundinglike a stagecraft designer, he commands them to arrange the conflagra-tion so that “the foundation / Be such as will not speedily exhaust / Itsown subtle flame; nor yet be quench’d / With aught officious aid wouldbring to quell it” (5.1). Against the looming coup d’etat, Sardanapaluscomposes a coup d’theatre that will become his summative legacy, con-firmed by the play’s theatrical history as much as by Delacroix’s famouspainting of the scene.

For the Victorians, staging this spectacle so that it “form[ed] the core”of Sardanapalus meant Byron’s words had to give way. In an actor’sprompt book for the New York production, one can observe that thecase is even more extreme than editions of the Calvert adaptation indi-cate: the promptbook reveals over 150 lines cut by hand from a versionalready radically thinned. The nightmare Sardanapalus has of his ances-tors is slashed, along with the scene where Sardanapalus calls for themirror before battle, the discussion of his famous inscription, “Eat,drink, and love,” many of the soliloquies, and much of Myrrha’s dia-logue. Remember Sardanapalus’ imagined “green spot,” at once oasisand verdant, inky record on the “bloody annals” of history? One can seethe page from the Booth’s Theater promptbook upon which its erasure isliteralized. The “green spot” speech—already truncated and conflated—is excised, a cut that resonates with Sardnapalus’ concern that futureages would not be able to recall his reign.24 Of course, the play had tobe reduced from its estimated four-and-a-half-hour running time in itsentirety; but the unprecedented extent of these cuts—far beyond Kean’sin 1853 or even Calvert’s own in the printed text—suggests a new low inthe priority of Byron’s words just as the play’s techno-spectacle was peak-ing. In short, in a way at once typical of Victorian melodramatic theaterand yet also surprising in its extremity and resonances, the conflagrationconsumed the literary text, and people took home souvenirs.25

When Shakespeare’s Cleopatra predicts that she will be an “Egyptianpuppet . . . shown / In Rome,” she anticipates events like the New Yorkproduction of a British play about an Assyrian monarch; that is, thestage history of Byron’s play tells us something about the history ofempire, about how imperial states are entertained by spectacles of theirancestors’ destruction, seen through a glass darkly. The Booth’s TheaterSardanapalus claims our attention as part of this story, but it also illu-minates Byron’s own imagination of the legacy as involving a strugglebetween material relics and spectacular scenes, or between verbal andvisual narratives. In a sense, Byron’s own reception has always involveda species of this competition, particularly between his literary works



and the scenes of his biography—a competition that he intentionallyaggravated in his choices of subject and his framing of narrators. By theVictorian era, “Byron” had become increasingly stylized, as the biogra-phies and letters seeped more fully into the bedrock imagination ofEuropean and American culture, and technological advancements inbook illustration and stagecraft gave rise to elaborate visions of theByronic. In this way, the 1876 New York Sardanapalus may be said toembody the contradictions of Byron’s play and its legacy.

Tragic and carnivalesque, faithfully historic and aggressively contem-porary, full of soliloquies and spectacles, Sardanapalus calls forth thekind of production it received at Booth’s Theater, and, perhaps evenmore aptly, in the various parodies that sprung up around it (“quickcomedians / Extemporally will stage us,” says Cleopatra). ‘Sardine-Apples’ and ‘Sir Dan O’Pallas’ are the burlesque mirrors of the Byronichero, which is to say that they best expose the broadly comic natureof the play and Byron’s vision of human life that it conveys. As JeromeMcGann has written of the Byronic figure,

Redemption comes to this hero when his tragic sense calls him to dona comic mask. This theatrical move informs the entirety of Don Juan,whose comical adventures are shadowed by a finale Byron did notlive to complete: the death of Juan on the guillotine in the Reign ofTerror. The life and death of Byron’s Sardanapalus suggest how thatscene would have played out in Byron’s poem. Perhaps not exactlylike the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but something alongthose lines.26

From such a perspective, Byron’s drama is finally illuminated by theculture of Victorian melodrama and theatrical spectacle which the 1876Sardanapalus so fully represents. Produced in the Empire State, in a defin-ing year for the American nation, it evokes the contradictions of Byron’sown legacy, the spectacular terror of modern imperial culture, and thetragic-comic nature of the Byronic hero, puppet and redeemer.

sardanapalus, spectacle, and the empire state

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