Description
Understand the political agenda of James Robinson Planché’s The Birds of Aristophanes (1846), a rare adaptation of the Athenian playwright for the pre-20th century stage. Planché was a committed member of the Victorian establishment, as is proved by his appointment in 1854 to no less a ceremonial office than Rouge Croix pursuivant at the College of Arms, which entailed accompanying Garter missions and appearing, in full regalia, on state occasions.
In the 1840s Planché was a prominent playwright, and he staged an Easter entertainment at the Haymarket, based on an ancient Greek comedy. The result was The Birds of Aristophanes: A Dramatic Experiment in One Act, being an humble attempt to adapt the said ‘Birds’ to this climate, by giving them new names, new feathers, new songs, and new tales.
The production was not a success, despite its lavishness and excellent cast. One reason may have been that it is reactionary in political terms. It may have annoyed the cross-class audience, accustomed to more insouciant burlesque entertainments. After the establishment of the new bird city, problems are created both by human immigrants and by some of the lower-class birds, who become restive and demanding. The rooks want a rookery because they ‘can’t afford to live in Peacock-square’; the sparrows are mutinous, and the geese demand a common on health grounds. The hero is unsympathetic, scornfully asking ‘What can it signify what sparrows think?’, and pointing out that geese are ‘always cackling for a commonwealth’.
The King of the Birds regrets he was misguided enough to try to build a paradise for idiots: why did he think it was rational to ‘stir inferior beings up to treason?’ The play concludes with a regal epiphany of Jupiter, who rebukes all birds and men, ‘Who discontented ever with their lot, / Sigh only to be something they are not’, and advises them to ‘fear the gods and trust the wise’. In the context of the far-reaching reforms of the previous decade, and the continuing Chartist agitation of the 1840s, the conclusion of this light-hearted adaptation of Aristophanes must have come over as an admonition against constitutional aspirations of any radical nature at all. Planché’s Birds perpetuated the reactionary tradition in which Aristophanes had found his nearly exclusive home in Britain since the 1790s.
