Shakespeare Shadows in Salisbury

It’s April, 1837, and Britain is just a few months away from the beginning of the Victorian era. In a theatre in Salisbury the audience were being treated to a “novel” and sometimes risqué entertainment on the theme of the “passions”.

In “Shakespeare’s Dream” spectators enjoyed scenes from the dramatist's more popular plays : The Tempest, Merry Wives, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear and Coriolanus.

As this playbill preserved from the performance shows, it was a series of “living tableaux” or “tableaux vivant”, where actors make a series of still images to represent a scene. It proved such a success that a few days later it was repeated.

Projected against the darkness of the auditorium like the slides of a magic lantern-show, such “still lives” enthralled spectators.

However not all of these were in the best possible taste, some tableaux vivants were decidedly risqué, featuring virtually nude models or actors, in “unusual” poses.

At the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck turns directly to the audience and delivers a monologue, apologising for anything which might have offended them, and asking them to pretend it was all a dream…

“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
(A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream Act V Sc 1)

Another art form was just emerging - one which would similarly ‘freeze’ scenes for posterity.

In 1837, the year in which this playbill was printed, Frenchman Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre invented the precursor to the photograph, the daguerreotype, a unique image on a silver-plated sheet on copper.

Later in the 19th century the medium of photography would be able to record such amusements, as well as other, more traditional performances of plays.