| Title: | Harlequin and Humpty Dumptry |
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| Description: | Scene from Harlequin and Humpty Dumptry at the Drury-Lane. |
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| Theatre: | Drury Lane |
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| Source: | The Illustrated London News, Dec 28, 1858, p. 513 |
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| See Source: | Go to Source Images (9.0 MB) |
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| Review: | The Illustrated London News, Dec 28, 1850, pp. 513-514 |
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DRURY-LANE.
This theatre re-opened for its brief holiday season on
Thursday with the "Winter's Tale;" Miss Vandenhoff
performing Hermione, and Mr. Anderson
Leontes. The pantomime, in which the lessee has, we
believe, been assisted by Mr. Fitzball, is entitled
"Harlequin Humpty Dumpty; or, Big-bellied Ben and the First
Lord Mayor of London." The hero was a rebel in the
days of King Richard—one who, on his Monarch’s departure for the
Holy Land, set up for an outlaw, and thus earned melodramatic
distinction. He was a cormorant, also; of whom it is
recorded, that
He swallowed a cow and a calf,
A butcher and a half;
A church, the steeple,
And all the people; |
and also levied blackmail on the citizens of Old London;
running off, among other things, with the "Fayre Maide of
the Chepe"--or, rather, in the pantomime, attempts to do
so, for the monster is prevented by her father’s apprentice, who
ultimately defeats him and a weird crone, his prompter and
assistant, and cuts up the giant, as a memento of the King’s
return from the crusades. The pantomime proper then
succeeds, which is arranged by Mr. Nelson Lee. The whole
is picturesque and costly.
We have engraved a scene in which the hero figures in
grotesque rotundity.
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