| Abstrakt: |
George Dibdin Pitt is best remembered today for writing the first Sweeney Todd dramatisation. Not published until 1883 in Dick's Standard Plays (as Sweeney Todd: The Barber of Fleet Street), the printed play differs significantly from Dibdin Pitt's original, which was initially performed in 1847 as The String of Pearls, or The Fiend of Fleet Street. Yet the text from the original manuscript (archived in the Lord Chamberlain's Plays at the British Library) has never before been published and has received very little scholarly attention. Scholars who rely on the 1883 Sweeney Todd to discuss the 1847 melodrama are in many respects talking about a different play. The present edition of the 1847 LCP manuscript makes Dibdin Pitt's creation in its original form available for study for the first time. The Introductory essay offers biographical information on the playwright, historical background on the theatre that first produced The String of Pearls (the Britannia), a detailed synopsis of the serial novel also called The String of Pearls that was the play's source text, and both practical and aesthetic explanations about why the playwright would have made some of his changes in adapting the novel for the stage. While examining relevant historical contexts (such as the status of the abolition movement in Britain in 1847, stage depictions of race, and the popularity of animal melodrama), the introduction argues for the significance of one particular alteration. In the 1846-47 novel, a faithful dog named Hector is important to the plot; in the 1847 play, he is transformed into a heroic major character who foils the play's villains - no longer a dog, but a deaf-mute black boy, a former slave from British Honduras who loyally continues to serve his former owner out of gratitude for his freedom. Without doubt, Hector's portrayal is racist and condescending. Yet by including this character, Dibdin Pitt takes an identifiably abolitionist stance, working through what was still England's strong sense of moral achievement in abolishing slavery and still strong sense of purpose in working to end slavery in the United States. But by 1883, Hector disappears from Sweeney Todd; in regards to race and colonialism, the cultural work of Dibdin Pitt's play without Hector operates through an unthinking backdrop of the Empire's power and the status quo of racial hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
