I began writing this book by asking myself a series of why-not questions: if Noverre linked pantomime to liberty, why not figure out how his thinking correlated with the discourse on liberty? If Gluck used ballet-pantomime in his French operas, why not survey a history of operas in pre-Revolutionary France that included the element of pantomime? If Garrick and Gluck made a case for a natural style of human expression, why not figure out why the social circle hosted by d’Holbach welcomed Garrick when he was in Paris? If the philosophes – Condillac, Rousseau, and Diderot – thought deeply about signs, why not trace their thinking to Dubos, who wrote extensively about signs and pantomime in his Réflexions critiques? If Dubos was an important figure in the discourse on signs, why not use his ideas as the foundation of an argument, working outward toward the music/dance/theater culture in France? If the discourse on pantomime was a phenomenon in the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment, why not investigate its impact on the early years of the French Revolution, when Article 11 of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789 explicitly protected freedom of communication?

My answers to these why-not questions have shaped this book, which brings together aesthetics, music history, and intellectual history. Consequently I have discovered that, on the most basic level, pantomime was a designation, one that indicated a dance style. This style had long been used in French opera, as Harris-Warrick has demonstrated, without the designation of “pantomime.” But the consistent uses of this designation in the eighteenth century – in operas as well as in writings about dance, theater, and opera – signaled a kind of revival of ancient Roman pantomime in modern theater, which, as Edelstein argues, was a key characteristic of the Enlightenment. My argument is that pantomime was not simply a style in music and dance history; rather, writers including Dubos, d’Alembert, Condillac, Rousseau, Diderot, Jaucourt, and Marmontel built a critical framework that placed the cultural phenomenon of pantomime within the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment.

From the time of its publication, it has been frequently claimed that the protagonist in Samuel Beckett’s short play Krapp’s Last Tape (originally published in 1958, and later translated by the author into French) is a “pathetic old man” (Knowlson and Pilling 84), “helpless and awkward” (Reinton 92), his life “a string of aimless, inconsequential, and monotonous events” (Brustein 192). Krapp’s habits, it has been pointed out, are stale and tedious, his mind in decline, and he has been seen as a media junkie addicted to his tape machine – his “masturbatory agent,” as Beckett calls it in a note (Theatrical Notebooks 67). In addition, his name suggests “residue and waste” and that “the dregs are all Krapp has left at the end of his life” (Campbell 64). As a sixty-nine-year-old, he is described in the stage directions as “a wearish old man,” “hard of hearing,” “very near-sighted,” with a “cracked voice,” and with a foible for bananas and alcohol. A rather comical figure, his appearance might make us think of Beckett’s well-known quip “nothing is funnier than unhappiness” (Beckett, Dramatic Works 101). This unhappiness is closely connected with his old age.

One of the central tenets of Beckett scholarship is that his works tend to represent processes of worsening and states of worseness, what the French philosopher Alain Badiou has called “empirage.” The way Beckett often describes old people as physically and mentally decrepit makes this age seem an eminent figure of this process. Kathryn White, in her book Beckett and Decay, thus argues that Beckett’s “representation of the aged is a horrific study of the implications of growing old and the undesirability of reaching those twilight years, when all we have to look forward to is bad health, isolation and the overwhelming need to reach the grave” (White 22). Other researchers have, however, been less negative, seeing old age less in terms of biology and death. Elizabeth Barry, who rightly argues that “old age – or at least the tropes associated with it – are everywhere in Beckett,” highlights the relationship between old age and narrative, referring to Beckett’s own statement (in a conversation with Lawrence Shainberg) that “with old age, the more possibilities diminish, the better chance you have” (Barry 206).

The cross was central to medieval Christianity, both as an image and a material reality. In Britain and Ireland between c. 800 and c. 1500 it appeared as an image in wood, stone, paint, textiles, ivory and metalwork, within interiors and within the landscape, and it varied in scale from hand-held to monumental. The image could be ephemeral – the sign of the cross traced across the body – and it could also be conjured in the mind's eye, through prayer and poetry, and appear in visions. The cross in word and image, as object and part of speech, could both be present and mutually enhance one another, as suggested by Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.16.3, a c. 930 copy of De laudibus sanctae crucis by the Carolingian Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856), with its pages of intricate grids of poetry incorporating, variously, the figure of Christ (Fig. 1.1), cross-shapes, angelic figures, and the beasts of the Gospels; the Ruthwell Cross (Fig. 1.2), the eighth-century monumental cross with carved panels and inscribed with verses found also in the tenth-century poem The Dream of the Rood, presents us with a similarly complex mixture of the visual and the textual.

As well as centrality and complexity, the cross in Britain and Ireland (just as elsewhere in medieval Europe) can also be characterised by variety (in iconography, medium and location), and it is with acknowledgement of these broad characteristics that this volume builds on previous studies of the cross to understand further, but certainly without claiming any definitiveness, some of the kinds of meanings and functions it possessed within Britain and Ireland c. 800–c. 1500. The chapters collected here also have a wider aim, that of deepening our understanding of the visual and material culture of medieval Christian worship within these geographical and chronological boundaries. It is worth briefly outlining in broad strokes the shape of previous scholarship in order to better contextualise the chapters within this volume.

The image of the cross could be a crucifix, a cross bearing the figure of Christ in the act of sacrificing himself for the salvation of the world, or aniconic, four arms of an object only; yet it is also worth remembering, as Sarah Keefer has pointed out, ‘the image of the cruciform presents its viewers with the rudimentary shape of a human being… the frame without flesh’.

The purpose of the final two chapters is to develop some basic starting principles for acquiring a fundamentally ‘nineteenth-century’ approach to violin playing. Whilst it is obvious that such a reductive aim has the potential to ride roughshod over myriad chronological and geographical differences, there is virtue in trying to encapsulate the essence of fundamental technique and performance style. The aim is to encourage players to have a basic understanding of these matters which could then become adapted to a range of projects. There is clearly no substitute for actually doing the practice-asresearch work. What I offer here, then, are some thoughts as though the reader had come to my studio for some initial guidance. One method of doing this (which could be done on a ‘self-learning’ basis) would be, simply, to alert the learner to sensible starting points. This is, however, no small task, and whatever the good intentions, one may well founder on the basis of a lack of direction, incentive, and time.

We shall use Louis Spohr's Violinschule as a case in point. Knowing full well that Spohr's approach is restrictive but at the same time influential, as intimated earlier in this book, this seems a sensible starting point, especially since Spohr's teaching is chronologically suitable to much of this handbook’s timeframe, and because his writing scarcely ever contradicts other sources considered here.

The main factor separating this ‘retrospective’ learning paradigm from the historical past is the fact that, unlike a nineteenth-century beginner, anyone investigating this in the context of this book can already play the violin. Going back and ‘relearning’ from foundational principles is a hard act indeed; habits form over time and become automatic, and any adjustment to them carries risk: given the vulnerability of any performer on stage, it is little surprise that many are somewhat ‘risk averse’! Nonetheless, we should not give up before we begin. Over time ‘Baroque’ specialisms, for example, have become normative, and college players routinely learn to play ‘Baroque violin’ as though it is a different instrument to ‘modern violin’. But here we have some problems. Some aspects of nineteenth-century technique and style allow ‘romantic violin’ to be seen as a separate area of activity in a similar way.

As the subject for an ‘emulation’ approach to romantic violin playing, Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) is an obvious choice. The earliest-born violinist known to have made recordings, and from a tradition with close links to the more distant past, he is an attractive proposition. The fact that he left behind aural traces (his 1903 recordings) as well as substantial written documents means that emulation of his approach with some degree of certainty is possible, enabling a significant ‘re-awakening’ of his performing practices. This chapter summarises discussion of his practices and performance philosophy as revealed by a number of commentators, some key elements of his own writings upon performance, and his recordings, as well as a set of autoethnographic reflections upon my own work in invoking aspects of his playing (experiential ‘practice as research’).

WHICH JOACHIM?

In 1843, at the age of twelve, Joachim went to Leipzig to study under Felix Mendelssohn. As Moser accounts:

The importance of the sign and image of the Christian cross in medieval England cannot be underestimated. From the carpet pages of high-status manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, into which the image of the cross is constantly woven, to the simple and ephemeral sign of the cross made upon the body in prayer, there seems to have been no part of Christian spirituality during this era of which it was not an integral part.

The study of liturgy and religious practice in the early Middle Ages has received a great deal of attention in recent years, including devotion to the Holy Cross, which has been analysed from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in the three volumes of the Sancta Crux/Halig Rod project edited by Karen Jolly, Catherine Karkov and Sarah Larratt Keefer. This series investigates subjects such as the blessings of crosses in English pontificals; Karen Jolly has also looked specifically at the use of the cross in healing and protection, noting how frequently its image is used in different kinds of ritual performance, for spiritual defence and healing rites, identifying folk medicine as being deeply indebted to Christian liturgy and devotion, both public and private. Of particular relevance to this chapter, the different terms used for the cross are studied by Ursula Lenker, who explores the three ways of making the gesture of the sign of the cross, and examines in detail the specific meanings of the terms rodetac(e)n, cristes mæl and cruc. This chapter will specifically focus on cristes mæl (Christ's mark) in the sense of a physical cross which can be touched and used, and in particular on five medical remedies in Old English medical collections. Of these, three do not specify from which materials the cristes mæl would have been made, but as they involve removing lichen from the cross, it is implied that they are permanent features of the landscape; all three of these remedies are for mental or spiritual afflictions. They will be compared with similar references to cristes mælu in charters, penitentials, and Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, in which the cross is used as a marker of land, a place of prayer, and a site of healing. The remaining two remedies are not for human illnesses, but for problems affecting food sources: lung disease in cattle and infertility in fields.

Oliver Goldsmith turned to the stage relatively late in a precarious career. Most of his major works did bring Goldsmith money and success but he was as prodigal with his earnings as he was with his gifts, never managing to balance his books. Unlike Charlotte Lennox, he did manage to secure lasting patronage; from 1764, his earnings from publication were enlarged by support from Sir Robert Nugent, Member of Parliament and fellow Irishman. Goldsmith's first play, The Good Natur’d Man, held its opening night at Covent Garden Theatre on Friday 29 January 1768, just over a decade after he began writing periodical essays and translations for Grub Street. It was also his first work for the stage after the runaway success of his short novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), which went into five editions within a year of publication. The story Samuel Johnson told, of rushing to secure a sixty pound payment from the bookseller John Newberry for the manuscript of the novel so that Goldsmith could meet his rental obligations to a furious landlady, indicates the hand-to-mouth existence Goldsmith led as an author. And a version of the story Goldsmith knew so well of the author's struggle to earn money through literature, letters and the patronage of others is given to George Primrose, the Vicar's son in The Vicar of Wakefield who sets off to try and repair the family's fortune when his engagement to Arabella Wilmot is called off because of their sudden poverty. George is reunited with his father and still-devoted fiancee when they find him working as a strolling player in a barn performance of Nicholas Rowe's pathetic she-tragedy, The Fair Penitent.

The title of chapter 21 (George Primrose's story) is ‘The history of a philosophic vagabond, pursuing novelty, but losing content’. The title invites us to recognise the hidden ‘novel’ in ‘novelty’, a term poised in the mid-century between an open association with anything that was new and apparently did not conform to the narrative expectations of established genres, and the more modern denotation as a form of short prose narrative. George's story is an inset novel within the larger one of his family.

One of the founding principles of this book is that there is a fundamental shift of attitude towards the act of performance (and the role of the performer) in the early years of the twentieth century: in general terms (with all due caveats acknowledged!) this might be said to be a schism between romanticism and modernism. Although this idea has been problematised and a degree of scepticism exercised concerning whether this constituted a ‘revolution’, it is self-evident that not only performance style but also fundamental aesthetic principles in these two epochs differ very substantially. In general terms, twentieth-century thought considered the role of the performer to be more towards the ‘faithful notational cypher’ end of the interpretative spectrum (rendering notation ‘precisely’ with great skill) than appears to be evident in the nineteenth century, in which, by and large, notation was seen more as the starting point of interpretative ideas. Truthfulness to the work (‘Werktreue’), in terms of accurate and ‘correct’ delivery of what notation encodes, is a concept that can and does encapsulate romantic performance as well, of course (as shown, maybe, by studies that concentrate on semiotic meanings in this period). But the performer seeking to ‘be romantic’ (in all the various manifestations of the term) must explore ideas as to how to ‘read between the lines’ to a greater extent. This inevitably can lead to changes to notation (i.e. not playing what it says, and seeing departures from ‘the text’ as integral to artistic delivery), as well as magnifications of the notation (a process of going ‘further’ than what is written down).4 Of course, all performance (in a hermeneutic activity such as music) must by definition go ‘beyond’ the notation. The questions to ask are: in which ways, and how much? In this respect, it is important to consider ways of encouraging a deliberately more flexible attitude to the performance score in terms of realisation. We are used to this concept in terms of notations that are, self-evidently, incomplete (as in the case for Baroque ornamentation, for example).

Paradoxically, the ‘persons’ who emerge with most presence in the history of theatre and novel traced in this book are wholly fictional. Those who make works of art and those who consume them are real embodied persons in time. Yet they prove tantalisingly elusive, inclined to disappear as ‘beings’ when we attempt to retrieve them from behind (or anticipate them beyond) the texts or performances that appear to ‘represent’ them. In contrast, invented characters – ‘persons’ who are most distant from real embodied people in the making of a work of fiction – are those with most apparent ‘presence’ to us. In this sense too, characters ‘occupy space’: they are more tangible, extend further into our apprehension, than authors or readers. In particular, the dramatis personae discussed in the preceding section of this book extend beyond the ‘role’: they become ‘themselves’ rather than stand for, or in the place of, a position in an aesthetic system. Nonetheless, character – like the other forms of person in art (artist and consumer) – also achieves an effect of presence through the process of unconcealment and withdrawal.

The characters discussed here occupy both stage and page to the extent that they become more absorbing to us than the stories in which they feature. They impede rather than advance both ‘plot’ and ‘meaning-effects’ through their pausing, digressing, departing or preventing the actions of others. Of course, such impediments also generate plot. And characters also thicken the environment so as to make plot more plausible, or to turn our attention away from the implausibility of plot by creating a sense that they, as characters, are real. Blakey Vermeule notes the ‘portability’ of literary characters, they are:

Character portability enables readers to reason offline, to address the problem of other minds in environments where they can ‘reason about the social contract under conditions of imperfect access to relevant information’.

The chorus of Thomas Thompson's topical ballad ‘Canny Newcassel’ is archetypical of late-Georgian songwriting on Tyneside, simultaneously articulating a fiercely local civic pride, and undercutting that sentiment with its knowingly bathetic use of dialect. Thompson (b.c.1773), at this time an established timber merchant who had held a commission in a volunteer regiment of horse, would naturally have written in what we know as Standard English, as would his immediate audience; in adopting this stylized narrative voice, he is being self-consciously parochial, a comic strategy that nuances, but does not negate, the display of local pride with which the song is concerned. An ostensibly ‘authentic’ small-town sentiment is instead something rather more complex, and to take it at face value does injustice to the reality of Newcastle upon Tyne around 1800: a boom town that claimed to have grown by 25% in the twenty years up to 1801; a cosmopolitan entrepôt significant enough that the governments of Russia, Prussia, Sweden and the United States each maintained a lifeboat on the Quayside for their citizens’ benefit; a melting pot for Dissenting communities including Scots Presbyterians, Unitarians, Baptists, Independents, Quakers, Methodists, Congregationalists, Glassites and Catholics; and, most pertinently to this chapter, a centre of both printing and ‘organised cultural activity of all kinds’ second only to London across the Atlantic archipelago. Newcastle functioned as a northern metropolis, its presses exerting influence over a broad geographical region that reached not only south to York and west into Cumbria, but also north into Lowland Scotland. The town boasted four prominent weekly newspapers, one of the country's two first Literary and Philosophical Societies, recently built New Assembly Rooms, a Theatre Royal and numerous churches and taverns that were sites for elite musical performance.

The northern cathedral city of Durham was, during the eighteenth century, a centre of political power. Governed by the ‘Prince Bishop’, its cathedral was wealthy, generating significant levels of income from the tracts of land in its possession. Daniel Defoe, who visited in the second decade of the eighteenth century, commented that the ‘church … is eminent for its wealth; the bishoprick is esteemed the best in England; and the prebends and other church livings, in the gift of the bishop, are the richest in England’. As a centre of local power, Durham naturally attracted the aristocracy and gentry as well as enjoying a good deal of affluence from its burgeoning middle classes, and it is no surprise that Durham proved to be a hotbed of musical activity. From concerts to religious services, club meetings and various civic performances, music permeated all areas of urban life. In this respect Durham was not dissimilar from any other provincial town or city, but what particularly set Durham above most others was the quality of much of the music composed there.

The main driving force behind music production at Durham was the cathedral choir, which, along with its organist and minor canons, was responsible for all the music at the cathedral and at the majority of local concerts. Such a situation is in itself not unusual as, in other cities, such as Hereford, Salisbury and Exeter, the cathedral musicians were behind much of the public music-making. This was also true at Carlisle, where the local concerts were organized by the cathedral organists, Charles Pick, Thomas Greatorex and Thomas Hill. However, unlike the choir at Carlisle Cathe-dral, that at Durham Cathedral was held in high esteem, both locally and nationally, and musicians from this group travelled significant distances to perform. Much of the choir's success was largely owing to the poor qual-ity of music produced at other similar establishments, and the eighteenth century is accepted to have been a low period in terms of cathedral music, with many organists and choirmen having an indifferent attitude to their jobs. At Carlisle, for instance, there were instances of drunkenness, fight-ing, gambling, theft, a high level of absenteeism, and demonstrations of contempt towards the dean and chapter. There were similar issues with some individuals at Durham but, in terms of music production, Durham for a time went against this national decline.

IN a 1999 production of Christoph Willibald Gluck's French version of Alceste (1776), conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner and theater director Robert Wilson offered an intriguing interpretation of Act 1 Scene 3: Although Gluck explicitly asked the priests and priestesses to perform a “pantomime” in this scene, nobody appeared onstage in Wilson's production; instead, Wilson sent a gigantic cube slowly spinning down onto the empty stage. Though solemn, refined, and breathtakingly beautiful, this scene prompts me to raise a question: What does it mean when the body is removed, or displaced by an object, in a pantomime?

Wilson's interpretation is disconcerting because it eliminates the body that is supposed to be onstage; it is not simply an issue of performance practice, for the body played an essential role in the relationship between acting and liberty in the Enlightenment. In the article “Pantomime,” in the Supplément à l’Encyclopédie (1776–77), Marmontel distinguished two types of actors: he criticized one as the “copyist of the poet,” while praising the pantomime actor: “Between the action of the actor and that of the pantomime there must be the difference between slavery and liberty.” By correlating an actor with enslavement and a pantomime with liberty, Marmontel made clear that a live performer was an important means through which audience members grasped the idea of liberty.

What makes Marmontel's thesis particularly relevant to the Enlightenment is not just that he published it in the supplement of the Encyclopédie, the greatest intellectual achievement of the Enlightenment, but also that he was a frequent participant in social gatherings hosted by Paul-Henri-Dietrich Thiry, baron d’Holbach, whose salon provided an intellectual hub of Enlightenment in Paris from around 1750 to 1780. Writers who frequented that space published a range of thoughts about liberty. D’Holbach's protege, Naigeon, attributed as the co-author of the article Liberty (Moral)” of the Encyclopédie (1765), proclaimed that “We are the masters of our homes, not as God is in the world, but as a wise prince is in his states, or a good father of the family is in his household.” By sharp contrast, d’Holbach himself denied, in Système de la nature (1770), that human beings are free: “Man is not free at any instant of his life. He is not master of his build that he takes from nature.