THE ‘PUBLIC MAN’ AND THE ‘PRIVATE THEATRICAL: ’Frank Delaval’s 1751 production of Othello and the performance of masculinity.
Drawing on histories of identity and manhood, this paper will present an example of reciprocity between so-called ‘private’ theatricals and the negotiation of ‘public’ masculinity in the mid-C18th.
Francis (Frank) Delaval (1727-1771) is remembered by contemporaries and historians alike as a practical joker and rake. Lampooned in the popular press for his curious inventions, improbable exploits, and (extra)marital complications, Frank was a parliamentary candidate who in 1749 received only a single vote, a debtor whose spending forced a £45,000 re-mortgage of his family’s estates, and a failed dynastic patriarch with illegitimate children but no heir. He was also a keen actor, disciple of self-proclaimed ‘pedlar of comedy’ Samuel Foote and, in March 1751, hired a Drury Lane theatre in order to perform Othello alongside his innermost circle – an event that led Horace Walpole to remark on the House of Commons’ early adjournment, due to a ‘rage’ among Members to see the performance. Two months later Frank was returned as the Member of Parliament for Hindon, beginning the life of a ‘public man’ (McCormack and Roberts, 2007).
What does it betoken, that Samuel Foote’s ‘dissipated, gay and giddy’ protégé opted to privately invest £2,000 to act out the central role in Shakespeare’s solemn and moralising tragedy, before a clamouring audience of his peers, and so shortly before beginning a career as an MP? By reflecting on Frank’s relationship with Foote, the theatre, and public life, and through synthesis with discourse on the public/private dichotomy, manliness, and the concept of a ‘socially turned’ cultural identity (Wahrman, 2006), the paper will seek to address this question.
Positioned alongside McCormack and Roberts’ characterisation of the public and private spheres as ‘mutually constitutive’ in C18th men’s performance of politics, and French and Rothery’s (2012) account of landed masculinities of the same period, Frank’s ‘private’ presentation and performance of Othello will be framed as an attempt to perceptibly realign the rakish youth with Shakespeare’s strong moral narrative in the court of public opinion. Furthermore, notions of identity and of ‘private’ versus ‘public’ theatricals will be shown to have diverged in ideology and experience from the concepts of today. Accordingly, the paper will propose a reading of the Othello production wherein it can be seen as a strategy that sought to validate Frank’s ‘fitness to rule’ in the theatres of power, by exploiting the customs of identity play within the theatre of pleasure.
Though this strategy appears to have ultimately been a failure for Frank, the paper will argue that its execution nevertheless suggests the existence of a reciprocal relationship between public masculinities and private theatricals – ‘work and play’ – in the 1750s, and of an innate understanding of this by Frank Delaval, which spawned behaviours aimed at forming and disseminating his cultural identity as an C18th man.
