Description
Transpose the Odyssey to a working-class London tavern in 1728, with Penelope, a ballad opera staged at the Little Haymarket Theatre by John Mottley and Thomas Cooke. The epic story is set in the Royal Oak Ale-House; the Sign hanging outside reads, ‘This is the Royal Oak, the House of Pen, / With Entertainment good for Horse and Men.’ The publican is Pen, wife of Ulysses; he is a sergeant in the grenadiers and has been absent fighting for nineteen years. Meanwhile, she has been besieged by suitors: a butcher, a tailor and a parish clerk.
The songs of ballad opera (folk tunes, urban popular ditties and famous refrains by composers like Handel), were known on the streets, and the audiences sang along. Cooke, although an innkeeper’s son, was a classical scholar (indeed, the first translator of Hesiod into English), and the opera is his barbed response to his long-time enemy Alexander Pope’s translation of the Odyssey, issued in 1725–26. But Mottley, as a Grub Street pamphleteer and the son of an absentee Jacobite soldier, was equipped to write about abandoned women and the seedier underside of London life.
The opera’s demotic tone is set when Penelope tells the audience that she has not combed her ‘matted locks’ for a month, and only put on one clean smock in the last three. Her maid Doll suggests that she seek comfort in the bottle, but neither gin nor whisky can help. Penelope calls Doll a ‘silly sow’, and Doll recommends that she marry Cleaver the butcher, singing: ‘He’s tall and jolly,/Believe thy Dolly,/It wou’d be Folly,/To slight his Pain.’ Penelope complains that all the suitors are but ‘rakehells’; she will not choose one of them until she has finished weaving her cabbage-net. She despises, she says, the hotpots, stout, ale and punch with which they woo her.
Doll is less restrained. She favours the butcher because he bribes her with tasty offal; she is less impressed with the tailor’s silver thimble, and nonplussed by the parish clerk’s Bible and offer of a reserved pew at church. (The man of god, interestingly, is himself sent up for his supercilious speech and respect for the crown.) Doll and Cleaver are secretly in love and plotting; Cleaver will marry Penelope, thus acquiring her property, and keep Doll as his mistress. Cleaver is evil but engaging, and able wittily to send up the Homeric archetype. He is a butcher, and therefore asks, ‘Shall I my Fame with whining Sorrows stain,/Whose Arms have Hecatombs of Oxen slain?’ But the opera ends as satisfactorily as the Iliad, and with far less bloodshed.
