ABSTRACT

10 December 1806, the first night at Drury Lane theatre of a farce entitled Mr. H, was a humiliating experience for its author, Charles Lamb. He wrote later to a friend: ‘Hang ‘em, how they hissed! It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese, with a roaring sometimes like bears … sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness.’ 1 Lamb’s biographer Thomas Noon Talfourd claimed that Lamb went so far as to participate in his own damnation: giving way ‘to the common feeling’ he ‘hissed and hooted as loudly as any of his neighbours.’ 2 The custom of hissing, which a still wounded Lamb was to reflect on in an essay published five years later, was a frequently exercised form of audience expression in the Georgian theatre, used to indicate disapproval of a performance, a particular actor, or a perceived failure of theatre management to comply with the bill promised in newspaper or playbill publicity. 3 On some occasions, such dissent was politically motivated, as when the arrival of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at Smock Alley theatre in Dublin in July 1784 was greeted by ‘chorusses of groaning, hissing, and shouting, with full accompanyments of claps, cat-calls, whistles.’ 4 In 1775, the notoriously litigious actor Charles Macklin brought a case against two men, James Sparks and Samuel Reddish, whose hissing, he believed, had led to the failure of his production of Macbeth at Covent Garden theatre and his eventual sacking by the manager George Colman in 1773. During the trial, the Chief Justice Lord Mansfield defined ‘hissing and applauding’ as an ‘unalterable right’ of audiences, but he distinguished between such behaviour as a ‘natural’ spontaneous response and as premeditated intimidation designed to rob an individual of his livelihood. 5