Description

Meet Joseph Gerrald, the reformer charged in 1794 with sedition, who had starred as Oedipus in a famous Greek performance at Stanmore School before the French revolution. A West Indian radical of Irish descent, Gerrald was one two members of the London Corresponding Society who were arrested in Edinburgh, together with the secretary of the Society of the Friends of the People. In court, Gerrald refused to answer the charge of sedition, but argued for political reform. He was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation to Australia, where he died the death appropriate to a tragic hero at an early age.

Gerrald’s intuitive revolutionary politics had been fertilised rather than suppressed by his education at the hands of the famous Hellenist and uncompromising free thinker, Dr Samuel Parr. Parr seceded from Harrow because he was persecuted for his reformist politics, and set up a new school at Stanmore, where he made performing Sophocles central to the curriculum.

In 1776, Gerrald had acted Oedipus ‘with an unfaltering eloquence and moving pathos that excited general admiration.’ At that time, the standard reading of Oedipus was that of the French enlightenment, which saw Oedipus as a tyrannical defender of an ancien régime coming into conflict with his people.  Moreover, Parr was so far in sympathy with republican ideas to have danced the ‘Liberty Tree’ circular dance following the fall of the Bastille, even though subsequently he had tried (in vain) to prevent his brilliant but wayward former pupil, Gerrald, from landing in life-threatening danger.

The production was elaborate, with costumes lent by David Garrick and Greek accents perfected with the aid of the nephew of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Nikolaides, whose assistance had been secured by the mediation of Parr’s close friend, the founder of comparative philology, the orientalist William Jones. For Parr, the plays were for him ‘the most difficult [yet] honorable of school business’. We will never know whether Gerrald would have become such an uncompromising defender of republican ideals if he had not performed in the role of Oedipus. But we do know that, on his deathbed, he said that he would die as he had lived, ‘the pupil of Samuel Parr.’