Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">       Beneath the ash whose growth romantic spreads

       Its foliage trembling o’er the funeral pile,

       And all around a deeper darkness sheds;

       While through yon arch, where the thick ivy twines,

       Bright on the silvered tower the moon-beam shines,

       And the grey cloister’s roofless length illumines,

       Upon the mossy stone I lie reclined,

       And to a visionary world resigned

       Call the pale spectres forth from the forgotten tombs.

      Such was its power that Netley Abbey began to acquire national status, admired even in the fashionable metropolis, seventy miles away. In 1794 William Shield staged his Netley Abbey – A Comic Opera at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Its plot revolves around the Oakland and Woodbine families, representatives of the Georgian gentry who had settled on Southampton Water. Mr Oakland – played by Joseph Munden – is a modern man, and like William Chamberlayne seeks to capitalise on the nearby ruins, creating an improved landscape by clearing ancient woodland. In the first scene of act one, he is confronted by his daughter, Lucy, played by Miss Hopkins:

      Lucy: Dear sir, in that case all the country about us, will appear desolate. I shall really fancy myself to be ‘Zelinda in the Desart’.

      Oakland: I know it will seem desolate – but you must be sensible ’tis done by way of improvement. How else can I open the vista, to command a fuller view of Netley Abbey?

      Lucy: And is the sweet embowered cottage belonging to Mrs Woodbine, where I used to read the ‘Dear Recess,’ indeed to come down?

      Oakland: Yes, it is; for you must find some other nook to be miserable in … How else are the improvements to go on? All to the Westward must immediately be cleared; and by the fall of the leaf, I hope not a tree will be left standing.

      Lucy: Cruel as the office is, I must prepare Miss Woodbine for this event: the information may else come with a severity she cannot sustain. [Exit]

      Oakland: That girl gathers all her absurd notions, from silly romances – and while I go on improving, she, as if in direct opposition, goes on reading …

       NETLEY ABBEY

       an Operatic Farce in two acts,

       as performed at the Theatre-Royal Covent Garden.

      If Oakland is a vested member of the squirearchy, then it is equally evident that the passionate young Lucy is probably addicted to Mrs Radcliffe’s gothic novels. Her proto-environmentalism is set against her father’s use of the code-word of Whiggery – ‘improvement’; they are also a symbol of the eighteenth-century generation gap. In the succeeding scenes Lucy’s bosom friend, Ellen Woodbine, suffers a grievous loss when her family’s cottage is burnt down and her fortune is lost, only for the hero – Lucy’s brother, the dashing Captain Oakland (Charles Incledon) – to discover that Miss Woodbine’s bonds were in fact stolen. In the final dramatic moonlit denouement, he uncovers them hidden in the ruins of the abbey. Even under these sublime stones, decency and rationality triumph.

      The opera is also very much the product of Southampton’s late eighteenth-century reputation as a spa resort, and the great influx of the fashionable who came to visit it and its tourist spots. Catering to that spa culture, the opera draws on sentimental whimsy and rousing patriotism, such Captain Oakland’s stirring number:

       Should dangers e’er approach our Coast

       The inbred Spirit of the land

       Would animate each heart

       Would animate each head

       Would bind, wou’d bind us in one general Host

       Would bind, wou’d bind us in one general Host

       ENGLAND ENGLAND ENGLAND

       … Our isles best rampart is the sea

       The midnight mark of Foes it braves

       And Heav’n that fenc’d us round

       That fenc’d us round with waves

       Ordain’d the people to be free

       Ordain’d the people to be free

       ENGLAND, &c

      Such robust sentiment, the eighteenth-century equivalent of a football chant, was hardly resonant with the fey subversiveness of gothic, although its fears of imminent (French) invasion concorded with Southampton’s vulnerable position in the patriotic body and the dangers that might indeed approach its coast – a sense of insular adversity elsewhere represented in the recently-composed and equally stirring ‘Rule Britannia’.

      William Shield, born in County Durham in 1748, was a well-known and prolific composer, and his popular tune Rosina would become the melody for ‘Auld Lang Syne’. A republican with ‘sympathies with the Godwin circle’, his opera-pantomime of 1784, The Magic Cavern, ‘anticipated the Gothick Horrors of Mrs Radclyffe’; he died, presumably in London, in 1829. But Netley Abbey is also credited in contemporary texts to William Pearce, ‘a pretty successful dramatist’ working in the last quarter of the century, ‘of whose life we have not been able to learn any particulars’, as an early Victorian source notes. This intimate pair seem to have co-operated as composer and librettist – a list of Pearce’s works appears identical to those attributed to Shield: The Nunnery, 1785; Arrival at Portsmouth, 1794; Windsor Castle, 1795 – or perhaps they were one and the same, two sides of a prolific eighteenth-century Lloyd-Webber, teasing me with their identity down the years. On opening a bound collection of Shield’s operas, the title page of his ‘musical farce’ The Lock and Key declared it to be ‘Composed and Selected by Mr Shield. The Words by P. Hoare Esq.’

      Displayed on the London stage in replica, Netley’s ruins had become a gothic commodity. In 1795 the Reverend Richard Warner wrote his Netley Abbey, a Gothic Story in Two Volumes, another opportunist conflation, printed by the Minerva Press (‘the most famous house of sensational fiction’, publishers of Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels). Warner’s morality tale – translated into both German and French editions – conflates Netley’s myths in its medieval hero, Edward de Villars, who rescues an imprisoned nineteen-year-old girl, the beautiful, auburn-haired Agnes, from a cell in the abbey in which she was confined by the wicked Abbot Peter, in the pay of the yet more evil Sir Hildebrand Warren who has already murdered her father, and whose ghost comes back to haunt him. In the final scene both the Abbot and Sir Hildebrand meet a bloody end, allowing Agnes to be reunited with her brother and the author to draw his moral conclusion on ‘persecuted virtue’.

      As well as inspiring such sensational literature, Netley also prompted a healthy trade in cheap prints. Tourists could have СКАЧАТЬ