Coates’s next recorded theater appearance was not so calm, however. The Amateur wasn’t even performing on this occasion, a presentation of Enrico IV at the Opera House on 1 June. (I’m not sure what this performance was; it may have been the opera based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV or the comic opera La caccia d’Enrico IV by Giacomo Rust. The only thing of which I’m sure is that it wasn’t Pirandello!) Angelica Catalani, the prima donna who was to play the lead role, refused to appear (because, according to some reports, the manager hadn’t paid her). The management decided to proceed with the production with no one taking Catalani’s part, but the audience, having learned this, began murmuring in indignation. The disturbance snowballed until parts of the set actually began toppling onto the stage and spectators began leaving their seats to search for the manager. The fugitive spectators, too many to be contained backstage, spilled onto the set and the actors, fearing for their safety, fled. The confusion and fervor escalated into a full-fledged riot. Finally, after several speakers had tried in vain to restore order, at nearly midnight, a member of the audience who had retained his seat rose at the behest of others in the house: Romeo Coates. The crowd quieted, and the would-be peacemaker spoke: "Ladies and gentlemen,--It is a great misfortune, we must allow, to be deprived of the talents of Madame Catalani, but it is of no use for us to go a-rioting." Unfortunately, the crowd occupying the stage felt they were taking the right action and forced Coates off the stage. The rioters rejoined their friends in the house, and the curtain fell at just after midnight. Coates made another few remarks from the pit, saying that he had “hoped some treaty would be entered into about [Madame Catalani]; and . . . that it would be of no use for us to go a rioting . . . ; as I had seen the bad consequences of that, in my acquaintance with the public theatres . . . .” No one else coming forward to speak, the crowd dispersed.
Between stage appearances, Coates, a devotee of dances, parties, and festivities of all kinds--particularly ones where he could show off his finery and, especially, his diamonds--traveled to Brighton around October, the end of the season there, to attend a ball. He had ordered a set of diamond coat buttons from a prominent jeweler and he had them put on a new dress coat for the occasion. He arrived, doubtlessly with his customary pomp and flash, and everyone’s attention was on him as soon as he entered the ballroom. Then the dancing began, and Coates suddenly realized that with his focus on displaying himself, he’d forgotten to find a dancing partner. All the women’s dance cards were full and Coates was faced with the prospect of not only standing alone at a dance without participating, but of missing the chance to sparkle and glisten as he and his diamonds spun around the floor--an effect to which he was especially partial because it enhanced the impact of his jewels. Then an attractive young woman arrived late, and Coates grabbed the opportunity and asked her to be his partner. At first she refused, but Coates waited a suitable interval and asked again, and this time the woman accepted. The commotion that accompanied their entrance onto the dance floor led the lady to see that she had apparently lucked onto the evening’s prize. Pleading that her plain dress was no suitable match for his splendid attire, she begged her partner to let her withdraw. Coates begged her to finish the dance, but the lady demurred, and the dancers were about to separate when Coates made one more plea. She would consent to remain his partner, the young lady replied, if Coates would give her one of his brilliant coat buttons to wear in her hair. Coates hesitated, but he felt trapped in the moment and took out a penknife, snipped off a diamond button, and fixed it in his partner’s hair. The act earned him great accolades from the partiers, but Coates was afraid that now all the other ladies present would desire his diamonds for hair ornaments and he would return to London bereft of his valuable adornments.
On 1 December, Coates appeared again at the Lyceum in a new role and play for him in Britain: Belcour in The West Indian by Richard Cumberland. As usual, it was a benefit performance, this time for Mrs. Bury, the wife of a junior army officer serving in Spain. I don’t have any report on how the performance went, but the real focus of this appearance is what happened before the play began. Just after the curtain rose, a young man stood up in the gallery and called for everyone’s attention. I don’t know if he identified himself by name at that time, but he said he was an admirer of Coates’s and that he was presenting this information so that Coates could respond. In truth, the speaker was a newspaper editor, Gibbons Merle, who 27 years later would publish his own version of the event in Fraser’s Magazine. Merle had, in fact, been a follower of Coates and had even visited the amateur actor at his home. Merle had seen Coates frequently for several months, then not for over a year, during which time Merle lived abroad. He was back in London now, and called on an acquaintance at the Morning Post whom Merle asked to get him a pass for the theater. The Morning Post friend suggested he get over to the Lyceum: “Coates is to perform and it is high time that he should be exposed. From my situation, I cannot do this act of public justice; but you are little known in London, and can interfere without any unpleasant feelings to yourself.”
This all begins to sound like a set-up, but Merle seems to have taken his friend at face value. The Morning Postman told Merle “that although Coates might not be receiving any money directly for his performance on charitable occasions, a certain person who had influence over him was disposing of his services for money; and stated that the widow of an officer for whom he had performed had been compelled to give a bill for £20, which she had paid, and which was then in [the journalist’s] possession.” If Merle would go to the theater and confront Coates, the newspaperman would be there with the evidence. Merle was persuaded to do the deed--he says it was out of concern for Coates’s reputation and to give him the chance to answer the charge--and he appeared at the theater a half an hour before the curtain went up. "Ladies and gentlemen,” declared Merle, “the charge against Mr. Coates is that he does not act upon a principle of philanthropy, but directly or indirectly gives his services for remuneration." The crowded theater was stunned and the audience raised some objections but eventually quieted and Merle recounted the story of Mrs. Bury’s appeal for help:
About the latter end of April, a lady, the wife of a subaltern in his Majesty's service on duty abroad, who was in much straitened circumstances in spite of every effort she could make to improve her position by giving music lessons, thought she would try and raise some funds by a theatrical entertainment. Having heard of Mr. Coates' generosity in these matters, she applied to him, through the medium of Mrs. Lyall, that gentleman's landlady. Your surprise will be as great as mine was, ladies and gentlemen, on learning that this aid was persistently refused, through the same medium as it was asked, until the bénéficiaire agreed to give Mrs. Lyall £40 for the Amateur's services: £20 to be paid by bill before the performance took place, the other half was never called for. I have, ladies and gentlemen, professed myself Mr. Coates' friend. I have proved this by bringing this business forward, thus giving him an opportunity of proving to the public whether he is in deed and in truth a philanthropic 'Amateur of Fashion.’
The crowd hissed and shouted back, “Produce your proofs.” Merle looked around the theater for his friend from the Morning Post but couldn’t see him. Just as Merle feared he was going to be dragged from the theater and bounced on the pavement, the journalist showed up with the putative bill and handed it to Merle, who read the document aloud and showed it to several spectators. The audience called for Coates, who was so dumbstruck that he at first thought the incident was a gag performance, put up by some of his tormentors. He came down to the footlights and said to Merle: “I don’t know who you are. You have the dress of a gentleman; but I can tell you, sir, that it is in my power to give you a thousand pounds to leave the theatre.” (Merle assumed Coates had forgotten their past acquaintance “in his agitation.” He also said he asked Coates to donate half that amount to the theatrical charity, and he would leave the theater.) But when the audience shouted, “Answer the charge,” Coates understood that they were serious. He withdrew to the rear of the stage and quickly wrote a response, which he read to the audience:
I, Robert Coates, do upon my honour declare that I never did, directly or indirectly, receive money for acting, and that all the tickets that I have in the house are paid for.
This didn’t entirely satisfy the audience, given that the bill for the £20 had been shown around, and Coates invited anyone who still wanted more information to go see Mrs. Bury. Then he sat down while the house debated whether he should be allowed to perform. The spectators, having decided that they had paid to be entertained, wanted their money’s worth and so the show went on. Despite (or perhaps encouraged by) the presence of Coates’s fellow actors Charles Mathews and John Liston in the boxes, the audience raised a commotion each time Coates came on stage until the end of the play.
The next day, the Morning Post ran the story of the incident (which it had engineered) at the Lyceum and it was picked up by the other London newspapers. The managers of Covent Garden capitalized on the scandal by staging a parody of Coates and the challenge. The Amateur watched each performance from a box, and though he looked as if he enjoyed the caricature, he didn’t perform another play for three months (though he did deliver a recitation before that). In the meantime, Coates, very hurt by Merle’s charge, set out to find out what might have underlain the accusation the editor made on behalf of the Morning Post. (Merle, for his part, asserted in his 1840 memoir of the event, “that I had good reason to believe, only two days after the exposé which I had made, that Coates had been made the victim of the cupidity of the person at whose request he had performed for the officer’s widow; and that neither on that nor on any other occasion had he received one farthing for his services.”)
It turns out that that Martha Lyall, Coates’s landlady, had earlier come to the Amateur for financial help and that he’d been generous with her, staging one of the early performances at the Haymarket (billed as a benefit for an unnamed “widow”). When Mrs. Lyall saw how liberal Coates was with his assistance and how many others there were who came in search of his philanthropy, she conceived the idea of charging a fee to bring their pleas to her tenant. Coates, of course, never knew of Lyall’s con, and when Mrs. Bury first came to his residence, she found he wasn’t home and Lyall, as had become her habit, interceded. Bury told Lyall her wish for Coates’s help, and the usual procedure unfolded, Bury being none the wiser. The account of this routine and others like it made its way to the offices of the Morning Post and when Merle arrived, essentially innocent for having been living outside London but trusting his colleague, became the perfect vehicle for the exposé. (Whether Merle really tumbled to the truth on his own as soon as a couple of days later or only learned of it with everyone else the next year is a matter of conjecture.)
Having learned the truth, Coates confronted Lyall and demanded not only an apology, but a sworn affidavit acknowledging her guilt and affirming Coates’s innocence. He threatened to take legal action if she refused, and Lyall complied completely. The statement (published in full in Coates’s biography, The Life of Robert Coates) was sworn before the Lord Mayor of London, William Domville, at Mansion House, the “Gracie Mansion” of London, on 16 February 1814. It was published in several periodicals in the city and was sufficient to remove all doubt of Coates’s honesty and forthrightness with respect to his charitable performances. His friends, of course, never believed he was taking money, but the fact of the accusation couldn’t help but damage Coates’s reputation despite Lyall’s confession. Even later, some publications referred to the charge without ever mentioning the refutation. (Does this sound like any news organization we know and love in modern-day America? I’m just sayin’ . . . .) A rumor even circulated, an adjunct to the false corruption charge, that Coates had no fortune and lived off the incomes of his rich friends. No one could live as well as Coates did for as long as he did on a con. I mean, it’s not like they had computers and electronic funds transfers in those days: if you bought diamonds (especially in the quantities Coates did) and bespoke clothing--not to forget that fabulous curricle--you’d need a lot of very real cash. And the Bank of England, the Amateur’s bankers, would certainly know if he was a charlatan, don’t you think?
The false accusation, however, didn’t prevent further demands for Coates’s services, and he responded with the same generosity he had always displayed. He was just more careful about how he arranged his benefits--and for this reason stayed off the London stage for several months.
Coates’s next appearance on a London stage was the recitation mentioned above. On 28 February 1814, he had been solicited by a lady in need whom he had helped before to read “The Hobbies” at the Haymarket Theatre following a performance of The Tragedy of Tamerlane by Nicholas Rowe. Then on 7 March, the Amateur appeared once again as Lothario in The Fair Penitent at the Haymarket. Unfortunately for Coates and the company, the Amateur’s return to the London stage was marred by a large contingent of troublemakers who had come for the express purpose of disrupting the performance. Most of the play proceeded despite the noise, though the actor playing Horatio was so rattled by the disturbances that when he was supposed to say the line "Would I were a beggar and lived on scraps!" he substituted the words "Would I were a baker and lived on sprats!" bringing down the house in laughter. At Lothario’s death scene, however, the rowdies bombarded the character’s corpse as they had Paris’s dead body in an earlier performance, hoping to obtain the same reaction: the dead man would rise and quickly exit the stage. Coates, however, disappointed his tormentors this time and the final act of the play was performed against a horrendous din. Coates was so incensed that he left the theater at the end of the play, skipping his promised rendition of his favorite recitation, despite calls for his appearance from his supporters in the house. Reports say that spectators stayed in the theater for two hours waiting for the Amateur to return.
So distressed was Coates at this latest uproar that he determined that however beneficial his theatrical endeavors were in behalf of people in need of his help, it was no longer worth endangering himself and the other actors. He resolved to redirect his philanthropic efforts more toward cash endowments and less on performances, even though he still harbored a great love for acting. He continued to attend the theater, of course, but more often as a spectator than a participant. That March presentation of The Fair Penitent would be his last London performance. In the following months, however, the Amateur of Fashion fielded requests from theater managers from all over England. He mostly acquiesced to the invitations and there were probably scores of appearances in provincial theaters. Coates’s biographers mention a half dozen as probably typical of the performances he gave between his final London gig in March 1814 and December 1816.
In mid-September 1814, Coates went to Birmingham to perform The Fair Penitent. According to his biography, he was well received by the local audience and since his usual tormentors weren’t there to disrupt the show, it went off with no distractions, though Coates’s biographers note “the rendering of several passages in a different way from that adopted by professional actors.” I can only guess what that’s a euphemism for! Bell’s Weekly Messenger on 18 September, however, reported a somewhat different estimation: “[T]he audience there, much to their credit, refused to tolerate a counterfeit actor. He received merited disapprobation.” When Coates got to the death of Lothario, he received an ovation and calls of “Encore! Encore!” This prompted the manager to come on stage and have a word with the “dead” Lothario. The manager, thinking Coates had agreed to repeat the death scene, announced this to the audience and the curtain fell. When it rose again, the house expected to see the reprise of Lothario’s death, but were met with the final act. The spectators shouted and called again for “Encore,” and the manager came forward to apologize for having misunderstood Coates. The Amateur would gladly deliver a speech he never got the chance to give before the Prince Regent and the Czar of Russia, but he would not repeat the death scene. The audience being satisfied by the alternative, the play was allowed to conclude. After the final scene, the band played "See, the conquering hero comes" and Coates strode on stage in regimental dress. The house hushed, but no sooner had Coates uttered the first words of the speech than a wag in the audience shouted out, “Sing it!” and Coates, miffed, walked off stage not to return. Bell’s even reported that the Amateur displayed a look of contempt and said “[h]e would be d--d if he spoke any more!”
On 1 December, the Amateur of Fashion traveled to perform Romeo in the birthplace of the great poet itself, Stratford-on-Avon. The performance was well received, and Coates took advantage of being in the Bard’s hometown. Charles Mathews, who played there a few weeks later, wrote his wife of the events, couching them in a sarcastic and sneering tone:
After he had acted he was determined to have a procession all by himself, a minor pageant in imitation of the jubilee; and walked, dressed as Romeo, from the barn to the butcher's shop, where Shakspeare was born. Here he wrote his name on the walls, and in the book kept for that purpose, called himself "the illustrator of the poet;" complained of the house; said that it was not good enough for the divine bard to have been born in, and proposed to pull it down at his own expense, and build it up again, so as to appear more worthy of such a being! He went to the church; wrote his name on the monument; and being inspired, on the tablet, close to the pen in the right hand of the bard, wrote His name in ambient air still floats, / And is adored by Robert Coates.
The 1 December appearance having gone so well, the manager of the Startford theater requested a second presentation, and Coates did Lothario on 3 December in behalf of some charitable cause or other. He was also scheduled to recite “The Hobbies” following the play. The house sold out.
Having satisfied himself that he was still loved in the provinces, if not so well in London, Coates decided to take a break from his theatrical endeavors. He was not forgotten by those who petitioned for his help, but as he’d resolved earlier, he was more forthcoming with cash than performances to help those who came to him in need. 1815 was given over in England to celebrating the defeat of Napoleon, but the Celebrated Amateur of Fashion didn’t make many appearances on the stage during that year. He did return to Bath to do The West Indian on 3 and 15 February in the town where he started. At one performance, the great actor William Charles Macready was present, and his memoirs include this rather derogatory passage:
One of the very worst [amateurs], who owed his notoriety chiefly to his frequent exposure of himself in the character of Romeo, Lothario, Belcour, &c., was Coates, more generally known as “Romeo Coates.” . . . . He displayed himself, diamonds and all, this winter [1815] at Bath in the part of the West Indian, and it was currently believed on this occasion he was liberally paid by the theatre, which profited largely by his preposterous caricature. I was at the theatre on the morning of his rehearsal and introduced to him. At night the house was too crowded to afford me a place in front; and seeing me behind the scenes, he asked me, knowing I acted Belcour, to prompt him if he shouild be “out,” which he very much feared. The audience were in convulsions at his absurdities, and in the scene with Miss [Lady] Rusport, being really “out,” I gave him a line which Belcour has to speak, “I never looked so like a fool in all my life;” which, as he delivered it, was greeted with a roar of laughter. He was “out” again, I gave him again the same line, which again repeated, was acquiesced in with a louder roar. Being “out” again, I administered him the third time the same truth for him to utter, but he seemed alive to its application, rejoining in some dudgeon, “I have said that twice already.” His exhibition was a complete burlesque of the comedy, and a reflection on the character of a management that could profit by such discreditable expedients.
The only records I’ve found of performances in 1816 were also at Bath. Coates was apprently in Bath for other reasons when the manager of the Theatre Royal approached him to make a return appearance on the stage. On 14 December 1816, the Amateur of Fashion performed Belcour in the The West Indian again and the portrayal was so well received that Coates remained in Bath to play two performances as Lothario in The Fair Penitent to profit the manager if the latter would stage a third appearance for the benefit of a charitable society in town. On Monday, 21 December, the first performance of Coates’s second production in Bath was not so smoothly presented as The West Indian had been a week earlier: a spectator, who stated he bore Coates no animosity personally, expressed his dislike of the actor’s interpretation of the role. When the hissing got louder, Coates declared that he planned to appear in behalf of a local charity later, but if he couldn’t finish this night’s show without further disturbance, he would cancel his other appearances. The interruption ceased. The presentation of The Fair Penitent on Tuesday evening proceeded without interruption and on Wednesday, 23 December, the Amateur of Fasion returned to his most favorite role, Romeo, for his charitable performance. The play was well received by the audience, which included many who had seen Coates’s début performance in the same role seven years before. It was the last appearance of Robert Coates, the Celebrated Amateur of Fashion, on a public stage. He retired from public performing at the age of 44.
However charitable his motives--and there’s no indication that the Amateur himself ever made a penny from his theatrics--Coates’s idiosyncrasies must have made him exasperating to act opposite, and it confounds me that he could find actors to appear with him. I presume he paid them enormous sums, just as he bribed the managers, but still, it must have been excrutiating not only to be seen with Coates--it can’t have been good for an actor’s reputation--but to try to work in one of his productions. It was also dangerous, considering the upheavals that were inevitable whenever Coates appeared on stage. The Amateur may have performed out of a sense of benevolence, but he also had a “crazy” vanity. He was well-known all over Britain for his eccentric actions both on stage and off, and his acting, well-intended though it may have been, “was nothing better than burlesque,” according to one 19th-century report. Capt. Gronow characterized the performance he saw as “ludicrous” and Max Beerbohm called his acting “grotesque”; a contemporaneous critic called him a “counterfeit actor” and expressed approval of the audiences’ rejection of him. Eventually no actress would play Juliet opposite him and I suspect a lot of the men had second thoughts as well. Perhaps that accounts for his abrupt departure from the stage after just seven years.
Following the last performance at Bath in 1816, his notoriety eventually faded with the remainder of his inheritance. He continued to appear privately and give recitations when requested, but theater audiences were deprived of the pleasure of seeing the celebrated Amateur of Fashion. As an actor, Coates’s notoriety faded as the public’s attention shifted elsewhere. In addition to the ridicule and critical attacks he suffered for his love of acting, Coates also garnered a lot of admirers and supporters--some quite illustrious--who defended not only his character and motivation, but his talent and skill as well. Among the published accounts of Coates’s life on the stage, the periodical press was generally among those who heaped disapprobation on him. Memoirs by the actor Charles Mathews and Capt. Gronow both sneered at the Amateur’s acting as well as his habits and behavior in public. But others recorded a different man. Coates’s biographers, John R. and Hunter H. Robinson; Pryse Gordon; and Max Beerbohm all found reason to praise the Celebrated Amateur of Fashion--or at least to mitigate the criticism. Gordon had a stake in Coates’s reputation as he laid claim to “having been the means of first bringing out the celebrated Romeo Coates on the British stage.” He had initiated Coates’s agreement to appear on stage in Bath; arranged the introduction to William Wyatt Dimond, the manager of the theater in Bath; organized the attendance of society ladies at Coates’s début; and “contrived . . . to plant in the centre of the pit a score of abigails and butlers” who were essentially recruited to act as a claque. It’s not surprising to read that he stood up for Coates, considering how much of his own ego he invested in the Amateur’s success and reputation.
I don’t know what brief the Robinsons held for Coates, but they were generous with him in The Life of Robert Coates and frequently took Coates’s detractors to task for their criticism and insults. I couldn’t find anything out about the two Robinsons--I don’t even know if they were brothers or father and son, or what. They share a name with Coates’s wife, Emma Robinson, and I wondered if they were nephews, cousins, or even brothers of hers, but their names aren’t mentioned in connection with her history so if they are related, it’s pretty distant, I guess. They never cop to having seen the Amateur on stage, so I don’t assume their accounts of his performances are first-hand, so their judgment of his acting skills is not based on observation. Apparently, they just liked his story.
Beerbohm found himself intrigued with the dichotomy of the press reports of Coates’s performances and that of people like Gordon. He set out to discover why there was this disconnect, and he blamed it all on Coates’s first love in England. It’s a little far-fetched for me, but maybe the turn of the 19th century was a really different time. According to Beerbohm’s research, Coates met a young lady, Miss Emma Tylney Long, the heiress of a baronet, in 1811. Miss Long was something of a guy-magnet, and many young (and not-so-young) men in society pursued her. Robert Coates was among the men who fell in love with her. (One of Coates’s rivals was his friend the Baron de Géramb. Another was said to be the Duke of Clarence, the future King William IV.) In 1812, Miss Tylney Long married someone else (and was never reported to have encouraged Coates or any of the other suitors), but Beerbohm writes that the lady basically set Coates up to make a fool of himself out of revenge for a slight she claims he did her at a garden party. Beerbohm found this journal account of the event:
Mr. C**t*s, who will act Romeo (Wherefore art thou Romeo?) this coming week for the pleasure of his fashionable circle, incurred the contemptuous wrath of his Lady Fair at the Fête. It was a sad pity she entrusted him to hold her purse while she fed the gold-fishes. He was very proud of the honour till the gold fell from his hand among the gold-fishes. How appropriate was the misadventure! But Miss Black Eyes, angry at her loss and her swain's clumsiness, cried: “Jump into the pond, sir, and find my purse instanter!” Several wags encouraged her, and the ladies were of the opinion that her adorer should certainly dive for the treasure. “Alas,” the fellow said, “I cannot swim, Miss. But tell me how many guineas you carried and I will make them good to yourself.” There was a great deal of laughter at this encounter, and the haughty damsel turned on her heel, nor did she vouchsafe another word to her elderly lover.
In a letter Beerbohm found, sent by Tylney Long to Coates, the lady confesses that she had “compelled” the Amateur to adopt the performance style and costume he displayed on the night of his theatrical début in Bath, as pay-back for his behavior at the garden party. Beerbohm believed that because Coates had no sense of humor, he didn’t see what Tylney Long was doing, and after he made his début performance, he continued to keep to the same style on stage out of some sense of loyalty to the young lady. It all seems a little thin to me, even if Coates was too dense to see what the lady was up to. Besides, that outrageous, diamond-encrusted costume was his from Antigua--Tylney Long didn’t suggest that to him at all. And why in heaven’s name would Coates continue to perform in a style suggested by Tylney Long years after her marriage to someone else if all it brought him was ridicule and boos? No, I suspect Coates just liked the way he acted and had developed his own style, which was already on display at the York House in Bath before Pryse Gordon ever asked Coates to go on the stage, back in Antigua and wasn’t about to change for anyone, especially not a woman who threw him over.
In 1823, Coates met Emma Anne Robinson, the daughter of a naval officer, and married her on 6 September; they had two children, a son and a daughter, neither of whom, like Coates’s own siblings, lived to adulthood. As early as 1830, Coates’s fortunes began to turn somewhat: in May, his fabulous diamond-and-ruby-hilted sword, which he carried both on stage and at social occasions, was sold at auction. When slave revolts in Antigua and other West Indian islands in 1831 resulted in reduced fortunes for Coates, he moved to Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France, where impoverished British nobility went to lick their financial wounds. (The slave trade was prohibited in the British Empire in 1808, but the institution was not abolished until 1834. Rebellions occurred in the West Indies sporadically, including in the 19th century starting in the 1810s.) The Manchester Guardian ran a report on the English ex-pat’s lifestyle while he and his wife were still living abroad; it included this passage:
He is greatly respected by the inhabitants, both French and English, and acts with great liberality and courtesy to all, and to his poor countrymen he is a kind benefactor. In many respects, so great is the influence of Romeo Coates at Boulogne, that he sets the fashion there. . . . The dress of Romeo Coates is still very peculiar. On Saturday morning he was walking on the pier at Boulogne, which he frequently does for hours, dressed in a blue velvet frock coat, yellow pantaloons and Hessian boots. . . . They evidently do all they can to attract notice at Boulogne.
So respected were the Coateses in their temporary home, where he lived in relative comfort in the best suite at the Hotel du Nord, that when King Louis Philippe paid Boulogne a visit on 21 August 1840, Coates offered his rooms for the use of the royal party. The account of this and the brief exchange between Coates and the King of France was widely reported in the British press. In old age, however, Coates and his wife moved back to London. One day in 1843, a man looking out the open window of a gentleman’s club in London spotted an elderly man, oddly dressed in clothes that were 30 years out of fashion. “It’s Romeo Coates!” the man exclaimed in recognition. The man on the street, walking past the window, stopped, turned to the small crowd that had gathered inside the club, and doffed his hat. “My name, gentlemen, is Robert Coates,” he said sternly. He put his hat back on his head and walked on with great dignity.
The former Amateur of Fashion returned to his old haunts and made the circuit of social events and visits with his old friends. He was occasionally persuaded to recite, especially for those too young to have seen him at his height. On Tuesday, 15 February 1848, Coates was on his way home from an annual concert at Drury Lane when he realized he’d forgotten his opera glasses at the theater. He had barely dismounted his famous curricle when a hansom cab hit him and after knocking him down, ran over him, causing many broken bones and internal injuries. The cab driver sped on and was never found. The badly injured Coates was tended at King's College Hospital until Wednesday, 16 February, and, when it looked as if he was recovering, at home until Sunday, 20 February, when he developed erysipelas. Robert Coates died the next day, Monday, 21 February; he was 75, a ripe age for the day. Amateur acting in England would never be the same again for, as Dutton Cook concluded: “After Mr. Coates’ wonderful performances, the efforts of other amateurs seem to be but pale and feeble.” Some analysts suggest that he prefigured melodrama, the theatrical style that became popular after Coates’s return to London from France. What Coates had been doing on British stages in the early 1800s, however, was something for which no one even had a word at the time, “but we certainly do today,” one 20th-century biographer observed:
Robert Coates had, in utter innocence, invented Camp.
[A blog doesn’t seem the right place for footnotes and such-like source documentation. When I put together these kinds of historical posts--the ones on Everybody Comes to Rick’s/Casablanca and The Group of Hissed Authors are in this same vein--I do have the citations for all the research. If anyone feels the need to challenge me on any of this, go ahead and maybe I’ll clue you in. I ain’t no Doris Kearns Goodwin!]
Showing posts with label Romeo Coates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romeo Coates. Show all posts
02 June 2009
31 May 2009
Romeo Coates, Part 2
Now ready to face a London audience, Coates appeared at the Haymarket Theatre on 9 December 1811 in the role of Lothario in Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent for the benefit performance. Coates was making his London stage début in a role he had not played in England before and which was commonly regarded as a difficult part. The theater had to turn thousands of would-be patrons away. Some rich ticket-seekers offered as much as £5, an enormous price for theater tickets, to stand backstage; they, too, were disappointed. Among those who attended were ambassadors, dukes, barons, earls, viscounts, and other members of the aristocracy, including friends of the Prince Regent, the future King George IV.
Among the Regent’s friends attending that night was Baron Ferdinand de Géramb who, for some reason, had become an ardent Coates supporter. (Baron de Géramb was himself a man with a peculiar history; some historians question both the place and date of his birth, and his claim of noble descent.) The crowd at the Haymarket seemed to take an instant dislike to the baron as soon as he appeared in his box and began hissing and screaming at him. This was matched in intensity by others who felt this treatment was undeserved by a distinguished foreign visitor and friend of the Regent. This cacophony continued as 6:30, the scheduled curtain time, came and went. After 7, Coates came on stage and made a special bow to Baron de Géramb, provoking the crowd to a cataclysm of whistles, applause, and shouts of “cock-a-doodle-doo!” Undaunted, Coates faced his audience, dressed again in an incredible outfit:
The habiliments of Mr. Coates were very rich, his dress being of a species of silk so woven as to give it the appearance of chased silver; from his shoulders hung a mantle of pink silk, edged with bullion fringe; around his neck was a kind of gorget, richly set with jewels, and at his side was a handsome gold-hilted sword. Coates' head-dress was composed of a Spanish hat surmounted by tall white plumes, while his feet were encased in shoes of the same material as his dress, and these were fastened with large diamond buckles.
As to his acting, Bell’s Weekly Messenger observed:
This Gentleman’s neck has the appearance of having been twisted, as he swings his head round with wonderful velocity, with great apparent ease. He frequently spun it round, like a harlequin in a Pantomime. His head, in fact, seemed accommodated with an excellent swivel, as it moved about first one way and then the other, like a monkey’s on the cowl of a chimney, in a windy day. His deportment altogether was inconceivably ludicrous.
Coates managed to get through the first four acts of The Fair Penitent despite the atmosphere in the house. By the end of the fourth act, however, the spectators who were intent on disrupting the performance grew so loud that the actors could no longer be heard. Coates had paused each time the uproar got too loud, but this tactic no longer worked and the Amateur of Fashion finally stepped forward and offered, “If it is the wish of the nobility and gentry present that the play shall go on, I will pay the price if those noisy people will go out.” There was a burst of applause and the house quieted for a moment, only to explode into deafening sound again. One review of the evening described Coates amusing himself during the interruption by standing center stage and twirling his sword, which, the journal said, “he did with wonderful dexterity,” to the amazement of the audience. The other actors on stage walked off and Coates, seeing he was alone on stage, “gave another speech, made a very fine bow, and left the stage, snapping his fingers at the audience” and the curtain fell at the end of Act Four. A few supporters waited briefly in the hope that the play would resume, but eventually, everyone, dignitaries, rowdies, and ordinary playgoers, left the theater as the lights were turned off.
It’s unknown whether Coates simply returned to his home alone to a solitary dinner or if, as some suppose, he was accompanied by his friend, the Baron de Géramb. In any case, the critics were especially cruel the next day. One description characterized the evening as “the most ludicrously extraordinary dramatic exhibition at the Haymarket Theatre, that was ever beheld on a London or any other stage . . . .” The same critic concluded: “It is, we might almost say, a lamentable instance of human imbecility, to see any person so far forget himself, as thus unnecessarily to expose himself to public ridicule.” But the papers attacked not only Coates’s performance, ignoring the charitable purpose of the appearance, but his features as well. Cartoonists made fun of his costume, of course, but critics also targeted his native country and there were doubts cast on his lineage, hinting that he was black and even suggesting that he was gay. Coates, who never before or after even acknowledged any criticism of his acting or behavior, felt compelled to respond. He wrote a long letter to the Morning Herald, the one paper all of fashionable London read. Published on 11 December, the letter declared in part:
In regard to the innumerable attacks that have been made upon my lineaments and person in the public prints, I have only to observe, that as I was fashioned by the Creator, independent of my will, I cannot be responsible for that result, which I could not control.
The last scene in The Fair Penitent is usually a crowd-pleaser, especially in Coates’s hands. A later observer describes what the audience at the Haymarket missed:
Who shall describe the grotesque agonies of the dark seducer, his plastered hair escaping from the comb that held it, and the dark crineous [sic: yellowish-brown] cordage that flapped upon his shoulders in the convulsions of his dying moments, and the cries of the people for medical aid to accomplish his eternal exit? Thus, when in his last throes his coronet fell, it was miraculous to see the defunct arise, and after he had spread a nice handkerchief on the stage, and there deposited his head-dress, free from all impurity, philosophically resume his dead condition; but it was not yet over, for the exigent audience, not content that when the men were dead, why there’s an end, insisted on a repetition of the awful scene, which the highly flattered corpse executed three separate times, to the gratification of the cruel and torment-loving audience.
In Coates’s second appearance as Lothario, this is perhaps what the audience saw. (I don’t actually know when the observer, probably a newspaper critic, saw the performance described above.) On 11 September 1812, Coates repeated his performance at the Theatre Royal, Richmond, again for charity, this time finishing the play. Once again, the house was packed; in fact, the theater was so crowded that the pit was even occupied by upper-class spectators who couldn’t get seats in the boxes. Among the high-ranking viewers was the Duke of Clarence, the future King William IV, who had expressed a wish to see Coates in this role. The duke, of course, attended with a large, impressive retinue. A review in the Morning Herald the following day described the scene:
The tragedy of The Fair Penitent was performed at the Theatre Royal, Richmond, last night, when that fashionable amateur Mr. Coates appeared in the lady-killing character of the gay, the gallant Lothario! and there never was so brilliant an assemblage ever seen within the walls of this theatre, since its first establishment.
(All these royals are hard to keep straight, especially here in the anti-monarchical U.S. George III--that’s the one who lost the Revolution to our own George--was still king in name, but he was nuts, so his oldest son, George, Prince of Wales, became Regent in 1811. The Prince Regent had a slew of siblings--plus a few no one mentioned--who included Frederick, Duke of York; William, Duke of Clarence; Edward, Duke of Kent; and several princesses and princes, some of whom went on to rule other European principalities. G3 died in 1820 and the Prince Regent became G4, but he died in 1830 without leaving a legitimate male heir. So younger bro William succeeded G4 as W4. Then he died in 1837 with the same deficiency as his older bros, so guess who inherited the throne, the last Hanoverian monarch. Here’s a hint: She lived a long time, gave her name to an era, and her name wasn’t Elizabeth. Got it? William’s niece, the daughter of his younger brother, Edward, Duke of Kent, Princess Alexandrina Victoria. All this went on during Coates’s life in Britain.
(Victoria reined until 1901--63 years, the longest rein in English history, though Elizabeth II, who stands at 57 and counting, is catching up. Victoria’s son and heir, Edward VII, was the first British monarch in the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha which his son, George V, changed to Windsor during WWI so that the British monarchy wouldn’t have a German name. In turn, G5’s son and successor was Edward VIII, who reined for less than a year in 1936 because he abdicated in favor of his brother to marry the woman he loved. He became the Duke of Windsor and his brother became George VI, the father of the current queen, E2. Everyone caught up now?)
Also in attendance, at the request of the theater’s manager, was a policeman named Lavendor, engaged in fear of an uproar like the previous time Coates performed The Fair Penitent. Everyone was fortunate, however, since so many seats were taken by the gentry and supporters of Coates that the rowdies who would have fomented a disturbance were only present in a very small number. Between acts, Coates treated his audience to a recitation of “The Hobbies,” a practice in which Coates (and other performers of the day, I believe) frequently engaged.
Coates gave his performance in relative calm and several scenes were very well received by the friendly audience. “[W]hile the princely and noble critics applauded with their hands,” reported the Morning Herald, “many an elegant fan was fractured by the ladies, in the amiable zeal of their approval.” The duke was reported to have been “well pleased” with the evening’s efforts as well.
Coates appeared again at the Haymarket on 11 January 1813 as Lothario and again on 29 January in the same role, both for the benefit of widows who had applied to him for help. The performances were well attended; Coates recited his favorite poem, “The Hobbies” as had become his practice; and the appearances were without incident, other than excessive delight on the part of the spectators. One of the journals that had been especially critical of the Amateur’s theatricals, however, published an observation a few days after the later performance:
We consider the gentry who pick up a living by shows of this kind, do not introduce some other animal in the part of the gallant gay Lothario. A baboon, dressed up for the character, would perhaps not be a novelty sufficiently striking, immediately after Mr. Coates; but we should think a bear, a Newfoundland dog, or a full sized tom cat, might prove very attractive, and well deserve the title of “the celebrated amateur of fashion.”
On Monday, 1 February, Coates welcomed an honor he had long sought: he was presented to the Prince Regent at Carlton House, the prince’s residence. Though he had been among the select friends of the prince’s brothers, the Dukes of York and Clarence, he had wanted for a long time to be counted among those welcome at the Prince Regent’s home; now, he thought, his dream would be realized. On Thursday, 4 February, Coates wasn’t surprised, then, to receive “a portentous missive sealed with the Royal arms, and left, so the attendants stated, by a ‘gentleman’ in a scarlet coat.” He ripped open the envelope and found an ornate engraved card with royal insignia which read:
The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by His Royal Highness the Prince Regent to invite Mr. Robert Coates to a ball and supper at Carlton House on Friday evening. The company to appear in the costume of the manufacture of the country. Hour of attendance ten o'clock.
Coates ordered a magnificent new suit and had his diamonds polished in preparation. On the appointed evening, he left his residence in full regalia, diamonds blazing from his clothing, his fingers, and the hilt of his sword. He rode in a hired sedan chair born by two expensively liveried footmen. Upon arrival at Carlton House, Coates was allowed to pass the first of the prince’s attendant officers, but the second stopped him. The coveted invitation, the colonel informed him politely, was a forgery! Coates withdrew and, upon starting for home--his chair had been dismissed--he was halted by a muffled stranger who asked why Coates was leaving so early. The disappointed Coates replied that there had been some small irregularity, and that he was going to ask his friend the Chevalier Ruspini, who lived almost directly across from Carlton House, to allow Coates to watch the arrival of the rest of the illustrious guests from the chevalier’s balcony.
What Coates couldn’t know was that the man who accosted him outside Carlton House was the infamous hoaxer Theodore Hook. Having obtained an invitation card for a few hours, Hook had used his talents as a counterfeiter of signatures to make Coates the butt of a joke. It was even rumored that Hook had dressed up in borrowed military finery to deliver the phony invitation to Coates himself. There’s no report whether Hook ever paid a price for his cruelty, though the prince was very angry that Coates was treated so badly. It is said, however, that Hook never mentioned his joke at Coates’s expense without an expression of guilt. And the joke fell somewhat flat because the intended butt never seemed to recognize that that’s what had happened. Coates was hard-pressed to find bad in anyone and seldom recognized malice when he met it.
The next morning, having been informed of the incident, the Prince Regent sent his secretary to call on Coates and apologize for the slight and to invite him to come to Carlton House to see the party decorations, which were still up. Coates, of course, graciously accepted both the apology and the invitation.
About a week later, Coates was asked to perform his recitation of “Bucks, have at ye all” during a performance of The Devil's Bridge, a three-act opera by Samuel James Arnold, at Drury Lane. It became routine for Coates occasionally to deliver a recitation at a performance in which he had no other hand. Coates’s presence on the bill--as “The Celebrated Amateur of Fashion”--guaranteed a full house. Following this, Coates again performed Lothario at the Haymarket on 24 February, to a standing-room-only crowd, packed with both admirers who came to see the famous amateur act--among them Coates’s friend, the Baron de Géramb--and rowdies who came to disrupt the performance. The noise was so fierce before the curtain rose that three other members of the cast came out to address the audience and plead for courtesy. The noise abated briefly and Coates came out to start the play, only to be greeted with applause from the supporters and shouts from the noisemakers. The performance was interrupted constantly until, in the scene where Horatio confronts Lothario, the actor playing Horatio nearly stopped the show entirely. Instead of saying his lines as written, “When you are met among your set of fools, talk of your dress, of dice, or horses, and yourselves; it's safer, and becomes your understanding better,” the actor substituted the word "curricles" for “horses,” and the house cracked up! Not a word could be heard for about 15 minutes; Coates walked downstage but couldn’t get a hearing and walked back up towards Horatio, who also couldn’t make himself heard. Horatio left the stage, and Coates took advantage of a short lull to address the audience:
Ladies and gentlemen, I was solicited to play for a lady who I was informed was an object deserving of attention. (Applause.) I further beg leave to state that there are several performers in this place who belong to our great theatres, and let me add that one of them has taken a most unwarrantable liberty with me. Many of you may have doubtless read the play of The Fair Penitent, and, if not, you may do so tomorrow, but there you will find something about horses and merriment. But a performer has no right to endeavour to hurt my feelings by inserting allusions to me not [sic] in his part. Let my equipage be laughed at by those that choose; my father, who left me a large fortune, wherewith I indulge my whims, likewise taught me good manners. I am little given to boasting, but if I may be allowed to say a few words on my own conduct, I can say I consider myself a most useful character; for, if my dress be extravagant, and my equipages expensive, let it be remembered it is this that supports the working-classes. Does it not assist the tailors, mercers, and coach-makers? In these respects I set, what I think, a laudable example.
The audience applauded (with a few of the troublemakers continuing to make noises), and Horatio came forward to state that he had explained to Coates that he hadn’t intended any offense by his ad-libbing. Coates shook the actor’s hand, ending the episode, and the play concluded without incident. In the audience that night was the actor Charles Mathews the elder, a popular comic actor of the day who was famous for his impersonations. Coates considered Mathews a friend, though Mathews’s subsequent conduct might throw some doubt on Coates’s judgment.
On the next day, at Covent Garden, the production of a two-act farce by Sir Henry Bate Dudley called At Home opened. One of the characters in the play, which apparently had an illustrious cast for a trifle, was named Romeo Rantall, a parody of Coates. For 25 nights, At Home was greeted with peals of laughter as Rantall held Coates up to ridicule for his acting. One 19th-century magazine describes some of At Home:
In a drawing room scene Romeo amuses the company with recitations from the dramatic poets. He is loudly applauded, and makes a speech after the manner of Mr. Coates: “Cheered by your exhilarating applause, I proceed; but know I possess a soul that scorns to bend to interruption!” He then gives a dying scene--in which he demonstrates great solicitude as to his hat and feather, and is careful to raise his right leg so as to display his diamond shoe-buckle to the best advantage.
Rantall was played by Mathews and the Amateur was in a box on opening night to see the parody. Just as Coates had done on his first Haymarket appearance, Mathews came down front and shook hands with the Amateur. Dressed as Coates had been the previous evening, mimicking the Amateur’s actions (including a parody of Coates reciting “The Hobbies”), Mathews “enacted the principal scenes of Lothario; in the whole of which, even to the death, he was Coates all over, and to the very life.” According the the impressionist’s “memoir,” written shortly after his death by his widow, Anne Jackson (no relation to Eli Wallach’s wife, as far as I know), “The effect was amusing to the highest degree, convulsing the great majority of the audience with laughter. A considerable party, however, manifested a strong opposite feeling.” As usual, Coates took the ridicule with good humor, though reports suggest that Mathews went further than Bate Dudley had intended with his travesty.
Many publications, which were not always friendly toward Coates, took exception to this form of ridicule. The European Magazine of March 1813 made a special effort to defend the Amateur by publishing a “Memoir of Robert Coates, Esq.” with which they printed an engraving of one of the few portraits of the actor that was not comic. Characterizing At Home as “coarse buffoonery” and “vulgar imitation,” the editors wrote:
Most men have their peculiarities, some latent, others more apparent; but surely, when the latter are neither immoral nor offensive to society, they can scarcely be deemed, however obnoxious, fair subjects of ridicule, the toleration of which . . . seems a degradation of human nature, and is, in itself, a travestie of the best passions of the human heart.
While the European Magazine acknowledged that Coates’s acting was less than laudable in terms of talent and execution, the editors recognized that “if he chooses to make his humour subservient to a charitable purpose, to engraft virtue upon his whims, and give the solid worth of a benevolent act to harmless eccentricity, who is to prohibit or blame him” and then concluded: “Mr. Coates deserves very great credit for the motive of his performances, whatever difference of taste may exist as to their merit.”
Mrs. Mathews asserts that Coates bided his time to take his revenge on the impersonator, making an appearance at the Drury Lane Theater to recite “Bucks, have at ye all.” I haven’t seen any record of a second appearance at Drury Lane, and Coates’s biographers state that his recitation there after the performance of The Devil's Bridge was a fortnight before At Home was staged at Covent Garden. At any rate, Mathews’s memoirs record that after Coates’s recitation, the Amateur declared:
Ladies and Gentlemen, -- Having had the honour of being imitated at another theatre by a performer of great celebrity, I will now, with your permission, imitate the imitator. If I do not succeed, I hope you will pardon me. As it is my first attempt, (imitating Mr. Mathews,) it
will be “Hit or Miss.”
Hit or Miss is the title of a musical farce by Isaac Pollock in which Mathews had appeared some years earlier, and Mrs. Mathews writes that Coates changed into a costume resembling the one her husband wore in that performance and “strutted about the stage cracking his whip, and recited several passages in that farce to the great amusement of the audience.” Calling her husband “inimitable” and proclaiming that he couldn’t be caricatured, Mrs. Mathews labeled Coates’s parody an “outrage on all sense and propriety.” The pot calling the kettle black, maybe? She went on to “exhort” the management of the Drury Lane “never to permit a similar outrage” on its stage again--though apparently it was all right for the management of Covent Garden to permit its stage to serve as the venue for a travesty of Coates. Hmmm . . . .
(At Home wasn’t the only stage parody of Coates that London audiences saw. In 1816, the year Coates would make his final public appearance on stage, a two-act musical farce called All at Coventry by W.T. Moncrieff was performed at the New Olympic Theatre in London. In Act Two, a character named Lively, speaking in different voices, says:
"Ah, Romeo! my rum one, how are you?" -- “Eh! why how the plague did you know me?” -- “Why by your Coates, to be sure.” -- “Yes, they're the thing, 'ent they ? -- Diamond buttons, cost me five hundred a-piece. -- Here, John, give that beggar a penny, and be sure you tell him it comes from the Philanthropist of Fashion.”)
Coates, who occasionally styled himself “the celebrated Philanthropic Amateur of Fashion,” made his fifth appearance at the Haymarket solely in a recitation following the presentation of Othello on 1 March 1813. He was roundly applauded and called back for a brief encore. (Before commencing, the actor poured himself a drink, walked downstage, and with good humor toasted his enemies, “whom he desired might live to see him prosper.") On 26 April, Coates appeared for the sixth time at the Haymarket, returning to his favorite role, Romeo, which he hadn’t performed since Bath. The house was packed, and the first act was performed in a deliberately shortened version, but the play proceeded well until the marriage scene. A commotion began in the gallery as the actress, Miss FitzHenry, who played Juliet and was the beneficiary of the performance, exited. The actress shot the gallery a glance of anger, and when she came back, the pit had joined the gallery and the disturbance had grown to such a level that she became distressed at the boos and hisses directed at her. Miss FitzHenry clung to the set, her arms wrapped around a stage pillar until the commotion died down. She addressed the audience to ask why they responded this way but she was drowned out and left the stage. The audience quieted and the cast chose to complete the play, which finished relatively calmly. FitzHenry never understood what caused the audience’s reaction, but she was ultimately happy with the financial benefit she received from the show and was grateful to Coates for his generosity.
On 10 May, Coates made his seventh appearance at the Haymarket, again as Romeo, and faced an especially noisy house. There was apparently an organized effort to disrupt the performance and members of the conspiracy were seated in every section of the theater. Every time Coates appeared on stage, he was met with hoots and crows as well as insults and catcalls. The Amateur ignored these for most of the performance, but when the duel between Romeo and Tybalt was about to start, the actors were interrupted by a rooster, which one of the conspirators had sneaked into the theater and released at just the right moment, strutting along the edge of the stage, almost at Coates’s feet. The audience broke into riotous laughter and a collaborator shouted out, “O most gallant Romeo, stain not thy sword with the blood of Tybalt, but kill the cock before you," initiating another burst of laughter. Just as the rooster was about to crow, which is what the rowdies were all waiting for, Old Capulet disappointed them. The actor grabbed the bird in his arms and threw it off stage. Deprived of their prize gag, the troublemakers shouted at Capulet and banged on the sides of their boxes with sticks or rattled other noisemakers they had smuggled into the theater. Despite the commotion, however, the actors completed the scene, Romeo killed Tybalt, and Coates exited the stage. He paused just visible enough at the wing, however, for the conspirators in the box from which the rooster had been released to see him, and he shook his sword at them. The rowdies in the box demanded Coates apologize for this action, but he refused, of course, and completed his exit. The disrupters pelted the remaining cast with orange peels and the actors made quick exits.
One of the occupants of the box came down onto the stage and tried to address the house. The spectators in the pit, angered that these people had disrupted their enjoyment of the play, shouted him down and he returned to his seat. When Coates reentered, the same young man stood up and again demanded an apology from the Amateur. Coates again refused and the spectators in the pit took this opportunity to pay the disrupters back in their own manner: they threw orange peels at the young man until he retreated into his box. The rest of the play went on rather dully, the steam obviously having gone out of the cast, until the scene in which Romeo kills Paris. As Paris lay “dead” on the stage, he was jarred back to life when he was battered on the nose by a whole orange. The actor, incensed, rose and, pointing to the orange, stalked off the stage to further uproar from the house. When Coates returned to the stage to enact Romeo’s death, his signature histrionics brought forth a chorus of “Why don’t you die?” from the gallery.
Coates again played Romeo in a benefit for an actor named Eyre of the Drury Lane company. Eyre asked Coates to appear at the Lyceum Theatre on 29 March 1813, and the only glitch this time around was that the actress who originally agreed to play Juliet had to withdraw at the last minute. Eyre was able to find a replacement on a few hours’ notice, however, and the performance proceeded with no more than minimal interruptions and concluded well.
(There’s still more to the story. Part 3 will be up in a few days. Keep waiting--in fact, hold your breath!)
[A blog doesn’t seem the right place for footnotes and such-like source documentation. When I put together these kinds of historical posts--the ones on Everybody Comes to Rick’s/Casablanca and The Group of Hissed Authors are in this same vein--I do have the citations for all the research. If anyone feels the need to challenge me on any of this, go ahead and maybe I’ll clue you in. I ain’t no Doris Kearns Goodwin!]
Among the Regent’s friends attending that night was Baron Ferdinand de Géramb who, for some reason, had become an ardent Coates supporter. (Baron de Géramb was himself a man with a peculiar history; some historians question both the place and date of his birth, and his claim of noble descent.) The crowd at the Haymarket seemed to take an instant dislike to the baron as soon as he appeared in his box and began hissing and screaming at him. This was matched in intensity by others who felt this treatment was undeserved by a distinguished foreign visitor and friend of the Regent. This cacophony continued as 6:30, the scheduled curtain time, came and went. After 7, Coates came on stage and made a special bow to Baron de Géramb, provoking the crowd to a cataclysm of whistles, applause, and shouts of “cock-a-doodle-doo!” Undaunted, Coates faced his audience, dressed again in an incredible outfit:
The habiliments of Mr. Coates were very rich, his dress being of a species of silk so woven as to give it the appearance of chased silver; from his shoulders hung a mantle of pink silk, edged with bullion fringe; around his neck was a kind of gorget, richly set with jewels, and at his side was a handsome gold-hilted sword. Coates' head-dress was composed of a Spanish hat surmounted by tall white plumes, while his feet were encased in shoes of the same material as his dress, and these were fastened with large diamond buckles.
As to his acting, Bell’s Weekly Messenger observed:
This Gentleman’s neck has the appearance of having been twisted, as he swings his head round with wonderful velocity, with great apparent ease. He frequently spun it round, like a harlequin in a Pantomime. His head, in fact, seemed accommodated with an excellent swivel, as it moved about first one way and then the other, like a monkey’s on the cowl of a chimney, in a windy day. His deportment altogether was inconceivably ludicrous.
Coates managed to get through the first four acts of The Fair Penitent despite the atmosphere in the house. By the end of the fourth act, however, the spectators who were intent on disrupting the performance grew so loud that the actors could no longer be heard. Coates had paused each time the uproar got too loud, but this tactic no longer worked and the Amateur of Fashion finally stepped forward and offered, “If it is the wish of the nobility and gentry present that the play shall go on, I will pay the price if those noisy people will go out.” There was a burst of applause and the house quieted for a moment, only to explode into deafening sound again. One review of the evening described Coates amusing himself during the interruption by standing center stage and twirling his sword, which, the journal said, “he did with wonderful dexterity,” to the amazement of the audience. The other actors on stage walked off and Coates, seeing he was alone on stage, “gave another speech, made a very fine bow, and left the stage, snapping his fingers at the audience” and the curtain fell at the end of Act Four. A few supporters waited briefly in the hope that the play would resume, but eventually, everyone, dignitaries, rowdies, and ordinary playgoers, left the theater as the lights were turned off.
It’s unknown whether Coates simply returned to his home alone to a solitary dinner or if, as some suppose, he was accompanied by his friend, the Baron de Géramb. In any case, the critics were especially cruel the next day. One description characterized the evening as “the most ludicrously extraordinary dramatic exhibition at the Haymarket Theatre, that was ever beheld on a London or any other stage . . . .” The same critic concluded: “It is, we might almost say, a lamentable instance of human imbecility, to see any person so far forget himself, as thus unnecessarily to expose himself to public ridicule.” But the papers attacked not only Coates’s performance, ignoring the charitable purpose of the appearance, but his features as well. Cartoonists made fun of his costume, of course, but critics also targeted his native country and there were doubts cast on his lineage, hinting that he was black and even suggesting that he was gay. Coates, who never before or after even acknowledged any criticism of his acting or behavior, felt compelled to respond. He wrote a long letter to the Morning Herald, the one paper all of fashionable London read. Published on 11 December, the letter declared in part:
In regard to the innumerable attacks that have been made upon my lineaments and person in the public prints, I have only to observe, that as I was fashioned by the Creator, independent of my will, I cannot be responsible for that result, which I could not control.
The last scene in The Fair Penitent is usually a crowd-pleaser, especially in Coates’s hands. A later observer describes what the audience at the Haymarket missed:
Who shall describe the grotesque agonies of the dark seducer, his plastered hair escaping from the comb that held it, and the dark crineous [sic: yellowish-brown] cordage that flapped upon his shoulders in the convulsions of his dying moments, and the cries of the people for medical aid to accomplish his eternal exit? Thus, when in his last throes his coronet fell, it was miraculous to see the defunct arise, and after he had spread a nice handkerchief on the stage, and there deposited his head-dress, free from all impurity, philosophically resume his dead condition; but it was not yet over, for the exigent audience, not content that when the men were dead, why there’s an end, insisted on a repetition of the awful scene, which the highly flattered corpse executed three separate times, to the gratification of the cruel and torment-loving audience.
In Coates’s second appearance as Lothario, this is perhaps what the audience saw. (I don’t actually know when the observer, probably a newspaper critic, saw the performance described above.) On 11 September 1812, Coates repeated his performance at the Theatre Royal, Richmond, again for charity, this time finishing the play. Once again, the house was packed; in fact, the theater was so crowded that the pit was even occupied by upper-class spectators who couldn’t get seats in the boxes. Among the high-ranking viewers was the Duke of Clarence, the future King William IV, who had expressed a wish to see Coates in this role. The duke, of course, attended with a large, impressive retinue. A review in the Morning Herald the following day described the scene:
The tragedy of The Fair Penitent was performed at the Theatre Royal, Richmond, last night, when that fashionable amateur Mr. Coates appeared in the lady-killing character of the gay, the gallant Lothario! and there never was so brilliant an assemblage ever seen within the walls of this theatre, since its first establishment.
(All these royals are hard to keep straight, especially here in the anti-monarchical U.S. George III--that’s the one who lost the Revolution to our own George--was still king in name, but he was nuts, so his oldest son, George, Prince of Wales, became Regent in 1811. The Prince Regent had a slew of siblings--plus a few no one mentioned--who included Frederick, Duke of York; William, Duke of Clarence; Edward, Duke of Kent; and several princesses and princes, some of whom went on to rule other European principalities. G3 died in 1820 and the Prince Regent became G4, but he died in 1830 without leaving a legitimate male heir. So younger bro William succeeded G4 as W4. Then he died in 1837 with the same deficiency as his older bros, so guess who inherited the throne, the last Hanoverian monarch. Here’s a hint: She lived a long time, gave her name to an era, and her name wasn’t Elizabeth. Got it? William’s niece, the daughter of his younger brother, Edward, Duke of Kent, Princess Alexandrina Victoria. All this went on during Coates’s life in Britain.
(Victoria reined until 1901--63 years, the longest rein in English history, though Elizabeth II, who stands at 57 and counting, is catching up. Victoria’s son and heir, Edward VII, was the first British monarch in the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha which his son, George V, changed to Windsor during WWI so that the British monarchy wouldn’t have a German name. In turn, G5’s son and successor was Edward VIII, who reined for less than a year in 1936 because he abdicated in favor of his brother to marry the woman he loved. He became the Duke of Windsor and his brother became George VI, the father of the current queen, E2. Everyone caught up now?)
Also in attendance, at the request of the theater’s manager, was a policeman named Lavendor, engaged in fear of an uproar like the previous time Coates performed The Fair Penitent. Everyone was fortunate, however, since so many seats were taken by the gentry and supporters of Coates that the rowdies who would have fomented a disturbance were only present in a very small number. Between acts, Coates treated his audience to a recitation of “The Hobbies,” a practice in which Coates (and other performers of the day, I believe) frequently engaged.
Coates gave his performance in relative calm and several scenes were very well received by the friendly audience. “[W]hile the princely and noble critics applauded with their hands,” reported the Morning Herald, “many an elegant fan was fractured by the ladies, in the amiable zeal of their approval.” The duke was reported to have been “well pleased” with the evening’s efforts as well.
Coates appeared again at the Haymarket on 11 January 1813 as Lothario and again on 29 January in the same role, both for the benefit of widows who had applied to him for help. The performances were well attended; Coates recited his favorite poem, “The Hobbies” as had become his practice; and the appearances were without incident, other than excessive delight on the part of the spectators. One of the journals that had been especially critical of the Amateur’s theatricals, however, published an observation a few days after the later performance:
We consider the gentry who pick up a living by shows of this kind, do not introduce some other animal in the part of the gallant gay Lothario. A baboon, dressed up for the character, would perhaps not be a novelty sufficiently striking, immediately after Mr. Coates; but we should think a bear, a Newfoundland dog, or a full sized tom cat, might prove very attractive, and well deserve the title of “the celebrated amateur of fashion.”
On Monday, 1 February, Coates welcomed an honor he had long sought: he was presented to the Prince Regent at Carlton House, the prince’s residence. Though he had been among the select friends of the prince’s brothers, the Dukes of York and Clarence, he had wanted for a long time to be counted among those welcome at the Prince Regent’s home; now, he thought, his dream would be realized. On Thursday, 4 February, Coates wasn’t surprised, then, to receive “a portentous missive sealed with the Royal arms, and left, so the attendants stated, by a ‘gentleman’ in a scarlet coat.” He ripped open the envelope and found an ornate engraved card with royal insignia which read:
The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by His Royal Highness the Prince Regent to invite Mr. Robert Coates to a ball and supper at Carlton House on Friday evening. The company to appear in the costume of the manufacture of the country. Hour of attendance ten o'clock.
Coates ordered a magnificent new suit and had his diamonds polished in preparation. On the appointed evening, he left his residence in full regalia, diamonds blazing from his clothing, his fingers, and the hilt of his sword. He rode in a hired sedan chair born by two expensively liveried footmen. Upon arrival at Carlton House, Coates was allowed to pass the first of the prince’s attendant officers, but the second stopped him. The coveted invitation, the colonel informed him politely, was a forgery! Coates withdrew and, upon starting for home--his chair had been dismissed--he was halted by a muffled stranger who asked why Coates was leaving so early. The disappointed Coates replied that there had been some small irregularity, and that he was going to ask his friend the Chevalier Ruspini, who lived almost directly across from Carlton House, to allow Coates to watch the arrival of the rest of the illustrious guests from the chevalier’s balcony.
What Coates couldn’t know was that the man who accosted him outside Carlton House was the infamous hoaxer Theodore Hook. Having obtained an invitation card for a few hours, Hook had used his talents as a counterfeiter of signatures to make Coates the butt of a joke. It was even rumored that Hook had dressed up in borrowed military finery to deliver the phony invitation to Coates himself. There’s no report whether Hook ever paid a price for his cruelty, though the prince was very angry that Coates was treated so badly. It is said, however, that Hook never mentioned his joke at Coates’s expense without an expression of guilt. And the joke fell somewhat flat because the intended butt never seemed to recognize that that’s what had happened. Coates was hard-pressed to find bad in anyone and seldom recognized malice when he met it.
The next morning, having been informed of the incident, the Prince Regent sent his secretary to call on Coates and apologize for the slight and to invite him to come to Carlton House to see the party decorations, which were still up. Coates, of course, graciously accepted both the apology and the invitation.
About a week later, Coates was asked to perform his recitation of “Bucks, have at ye all” during a performance of The Devil's Bridge, a three-act opera by Samuel James Arnold, at Drury Lane. It became routine for Coates occasionally to deliver a recitation at a performance in which he had no other hand. Coates’s presence on the bill--as “The Celebrated Amateur of Fashion”--guaranteed a full house. Following this, Coates again performed Lothario at the Haymarket on 24 February, to a standing-room-only crowd, packed with both admirers who came to see the famous amateur act--among them Coates’s friend, the Baron de Géramb--and rowdies who came to disrupt the performance. The noise was so fierce before the curtain rose that three other members of the cast came out to address the audience and plead for courtesy. The noise abated briefly and Coates came out to start the play, only to be greeted with applause from the supporters and shouts from the noisemakers. The performance was interrupted constantly until, in the scene where Horatio confronts Lothario, the actor playing Horatio nearly stopped the show entirely. Instead of saying his lines as written, “When you are met among your set of fools, talk of your dress, of dice, or horses, and yourselves; it's safer, and becomes your understanding better,” the actor substituted the word "curricles" for “horses,” and the house cracked up! Not a word could be heard for about 15 minutes; Coates walked downstage but couldn’t get a hearing and walked back up towards Horatio, who also couldn’t make himself heard. Horatio left the stage, and Coates took advantage of a short lull to address the audience:
Ladies and gentlemen, I was solicited to play for a lady who I was informed was an object deserving of attention. (Applause.) I further beg leave to state that there are several performers in this place who belong to our great theatres, and let me add that one of them has taken a most unwarrantable liberty with me. Many of you may have doubtless read the play of The Fair Penitent, and, if not, you may do so tomorrow, but there you will find something about horses and merriment. But a performer has no right to endeavour to hurt my feelings by inserting allusions to me not [sic] in his part. Let my equipage be laughed at by those that choose; my father, who left me a large fortune, wherewith I indulge my whims, likewise taught me good manners. I am little given to boasting, but if I may be allowed to say a few words on my own conduct, I can say I consider myself a most useful character; for, if my dress be extravagant, and my equipages expensive, let it be remembered it is this that supports the working-classes. Does it not assist the tailors, mercers, and coach-makers? In these respects I set, what I think, a laudable example.
The audience applauded (with a few of the troublemakers continuing to make noises), and Horatio came forward to state that he had explained to Coates that he hadn’t intended any offense by his ad-libbing. Coates shook the actor’s hand, ending the episode, and the play concluded without incident. In the audience that night was the actor Charles Mathews the elder, a popular comic actor of the day who was famous for his impersonations. Coates considered Mathews a friend, though Mathews’s subsequent conduct might throw some doubt on Coates’s judgment.
On the next day, at Covent Garden, the production of a two-act farce by Sir Henry Bate Dudley called At Home opened. One of the characters in the play, which apparently had an illustrious cast for a trifle, was named Romeo Rantall, a parody of Coates. For 25 nights, At Home was greeted with peals of laughter as Rantall held Coates up to ridicule for his acting. One 19th-century magazine describes some of At Home:
In a drawing room scene Romeo amuses the company with recitations from the dramatic poets. He is loudly applauded, and makes a speech after the manner of Mr. Coates: “Cheered by your exhilarating applause, I proceed; but know I possess a soul that scorns to bend to interruption!” He then gives a dying scene--in which he demonstrates great solicitude as to his hat and feather, and is careful to raise his right leg so as to display his diamond shoe-buckle to the best advantage.
Rantall was played by Mathews and the Amateur was in a box on opening night to see the parody. Just as Coates had done on his first Haymarket appearance, Mathews came down front and shook hands with the Amateur. Dressed as Coates had been the previous evening, mimicking the Amateur’s actions (including a parody of Coates reciting “The Hobbies”), Mathews “enacted the principal scenes of Lothario; in the whole of which, even to the death, he was Coates all over, and to the very life.” According the the impressionist’s “memoir,” written shortly after his death by his widow, Anne Jackson (no relation to Eli Wallach’s wife, as far as I know), “The effect was amusing to the highest degree, convulsing the great majority of the audience with laughter. A considerable party, however, manifested a strong opposite feeling.” As usual, Coates took the ridicule with good humor, though reports suggest that Mathews went further than Bate Dudley had intended with his travesty.
Many publications, which were not always friendly toward Coates, took exception to this form of ridicule. The European Magazine of March 1813 made a special effort to defend the Amateur by publishing a “Memoir of Robert Coates, Esq.” with which they printed an engraving of one of the few portraits of the actor that was not comic. Characterizing At Home as “coarse buffoonery” and “vulgar imitation,” the editors wrote:
Most men have their peculiarities, some latent, others more apparent; but surely, when the latter are neither immoral nor offensive to society, they can scarcely be deemed, however obnoxious, fair subjects of ridicule, the toleration of which . . . seems a degradation of human nature, and is, in itself, a travestie of the best passions of the human heart.
While the European Magazine acknowledged that Coates’s acting was less than laudable in terms of talent and execution, the editors recognized that “if he chooses to make his humour subservient to a charitable purpose, to engraft virtue upon his whims, and give the solid worth of a benevolent act to harmless eccentricity, who is to prohibit or blame him” and then concluded: “Mr. Coates deserves very great credit for the motive of his performances, whatever difference of taste may exist as to their merit.”
Mrs. Mathews asserts that Coates bided his time to take his revenge on the impersonator, making an appearance at the Drury Lane Theater to recite “Bucks, have at ye all.” I haven’t seen any record of a second appearance at Drury Lane, and Coates’s biographers state that his recitation there after the performance of The Devil's Bridge was a fortnight before At Home was staged at Covent Garden. At any rate, Mathews’s memoirs record that after Coates’s recitation, the Amateur declared:
Ladies and Gentlemen, -- Having had the honour of being imitated at another theatre by a performer of great celebrity, I will now, with your permission, imitate the imitator. If I do not succeed, I hope you will pardon me. As it is my first attempt, (imitating Mr. Mathews,) it
will be “Hit or Miss.”
Hit or Miss is the title of a musical farce by Isaac Pollock in which Mathews had appeared some years earlier, and Mrs. Mathews writes that Coates changed into a costume resembling the one her husband wore in that performance and “strutted about the stage cracking his whip, and recited several passages in that farce to the great amusement of the audience.” Calling her husband “inimitable” and proclaiming that he couldn’t be caricatured, Mrs. Mathews labeled Coates’s parody an “outrage on all sense and propriety.” The pot calling the kettle black, maybe? She went on to “exhort” the management of the Drury Lane “never to permit a similar outrage” on its stage again--though apparently it was all right for the management of Covent Garden to permit its stage to serve as the venue for a travesty of Coates. Hmmm . . . .
(At Home wasn’t the only stage parody of Coates that London audiences saw. In 1816, the year Coates would make his final public appearance on stage, a two-act musical farce called All at Coventry by W.T. Moncrieff was performed at the New Olympic Theatre in London. In Act Two, a character named Lively, speaking in different voices, says:
"Ah, Romeo! my rum one, how are you?" -- “Eh! why how the plague did you know me?” -- “Why by your Coates, to be sure.” -- “Yes, they're the thing, 'ent they ? -- Diamond buttons, cost me five hundred a-piece. -- Here, John, give that beggar a penny, and be sure you tell him it comes from the Philanthropist of Fashion.”)
Coates, who occasionally styled himself “the celebrated Philanthropic Amateur of Fashion,” made his fifth appearance at the Haymarket solely in a recitation following the presentation of Othello on 1 March 1813. He was roundly applauded and called back for a brief encore. (Before commencing, the actor poured himself a drink, walked downstage, and with good humor toasted his enemies, “whom he desired might live to see him prosper.") On 26 April, Coates appeared for the sixth time at the Haymarket, returning to his favorite role, Romeo, which he hadn’t performed since Bath. The house was packed, and the first act was performed in a deliberately shortened version, but the play proceeded well until the marriage scene. A commotion began in the gallery as the actress, Miss FitzHenry, who played Juliet and was the beneficiary of the performance, exited. The actress shot the gallery a glance of anger, and when she came back, the pit had joined the gallery and the disturbance had grown to such a level that she became distressed at the boos and hisses directed at her. Miss FitzHenry clung to the set, her arms wrapped around a stage pillar until the commotion died down. She addressed the audience to ask why they responded this way but she was drowned out and left the stage. The audience quieted and the cast chose to complete the play, which finished relatively calmly. FitzHenry never understood what caused the audience’s reaction, but she was ultimately happy with the financial benefit she received from the show and was grateful to Coates for his generosity.
On 10 May, Coates made his seventh appearance at the Haymarket, again as Romeo, and faced an especially noisy house. There was apparently an organized effort to disrupt the performance and members of the conspiracy were seated in every section of the theater. Every time Coates appeared on stage, he was met with hoots and crows as well as insults and catcalls. The Amateur ignored these for most of the performance, but when the duel between Romeo and Tybalt was about to start, the actors were interrupted by a rooster, which one of the conspirators had sneaked into the theater and released at just the right moment, strutting along the edge of the stage, almost at Coates’s feet. The audience broke into riotous laughter and a collaborator shouted out, “O most gallant Romeo, stain not thy sword with the blood of Tybalt, but kill the cock before you," initiating another burst of laughter. Just as the rooster was about to crow, which is what the rowdies were all waiting for, Old Capulet disappointed them. The actor grabbed the bird in his arms and threw it off stage. Deprived of their prize gag, the troublemakers shouted at Capulet and banged on the sides of their boxes with sticks or rattled other noisemakers they had smuggled into the theater. Despite the commotion, however, the actors completed the scene, Romeo killed Tybalt, and Coates exited the stage. He paused just visible enough at the wing, however, for the conspirators in the box from which the rooster had been released to see him, and he shook his sword at them. The rowdies in the box demanded Coates apologize for this action, but he refused, of course, and completed his exit. The disrupters pelted the remaining cast with orange peels and the actors made quick exits.
One of the occupants of the box came down onto the stage and tried to address the house. The spectators in the pit, angered that these people had disrupted their enjoyment of the play, shouted him down and he returned to his seat. When Coates reentered, the same young man stood up and again demanded an apology from the Amateur. Coates again refused and the spectators in the pit took this opportunity to pay the disrupters back in their own manner: they threw orange peels at the young man until he retreated into his box. The rest of the play went on rather dully, the steam obviously having gone out of the cast, until the scene in which Romeo kills Paris. As Paris lay “dead” on the stage, he was jarred back to life when he was battered on the nose by a whole orange. The actor, incensed, rose and, pointing to the orange, stalked off the stage to further uproar from the house. When Coates returned to the stage to enact Romeo’s death, his signature histrionics brought forth a chorus of “Why don’t you die?” from the gallery.
Coates again played Romeo in a benefit for an actor named Eyre of the Drury Lane company. Eyre asked Coates to appear at the Lyceum Theatre on 29 March 1813, and the only glitch this time around was that the actress who originally agreed to play Juliet had to withdraw at the last minute. Eyre was able to find a replacement on a few hours’ notice, however, and the performance proceeded with no more than minimal interruptions and concluded well.
(There’s still more to the story. Part 3 will be up in a few days. Keep waiting--in fact, hold your breath!)
[A blog doesn’t seem the right place for footnotes and such-like source documentation. When I put together these kinds of historical posts--the ones on Everybody Comes to Rick’s/Casablanca and The Group of Hissed Authors are in this same vein--I do have the citations for all the research. If anyone feels the need to challenge me on any of this, go ahead and maybe I’ll clue you in. I ain’t no Doris Kearns Goodwin!]
30 May 2009
Romeo Coates, Part 1
Back last February, I went over to 59E59 to see Primary Stages’ New York preem of Donald Margulies’s Shipwrecked!, a performance piece about the fantastic adventures in the South Seas of Louis de Rougemont. De Rougemont was in reality Henri Louis Glin (1847-1921), and his “adventures” were indeed “fantastic” . . . because they never actually happened. De Rougemont was unmasked as a fraud and in 1899, Glin toured music halls in South Africa billed as “The greatest liar on earth.” A 1945 biography of Glin is also called The Greatest Liar on Earth.
In 2004, the York Theatre Company premièred Souvenir, a play by Stephen Temperley about Florence Foster Jenkins, the worst singer ever. It seems to me that with a performance based on the life of the world’s greatest liar and a play about the world’s worst singer having been produced, we’re now more than ready for a play about the worst actor ever on the English-speaking stage: Robert “Romeo” Coates. If any of you knows the “classic” acting text, Michael Green’s immortal The Art of Coarse Acting, which first appeared in the ‘60s and made a comeback in the ‘80s, you will have some idea of Coates’s stage style. Except that Coates didn’t leave his execrable performance style in the theater: he lived as outrageously as he acted.
Michael Green describes a coarse actor as "one who can remember his lines, but not the order in which they come. One who performs . . . amid lethal props," and goes on: "The Coarse Actor's aim is to upstage the rest of the cast. His hope is to be dead by Act Two so that he can spend the rest of his time in the bar. His problems? Everyone else connected with the production." If that doesn’t sound like “Romeo” Coates, I’ll eat my hat! See what you think.
There are plenty of first-hand accounts of Coates’s appearances on the English stage as he became a kind of succès de ridicule. It seems that everyone went to see his over-the-top performances to laugh at him and jeer--though Coates doesn’t seem to have seen that he was the object of derision. The man truly thought he was the greatest artist to tread the boards of England.
Amateur actors, or “gentlemen players,” were part of a grand tradition in England and its colonies for centuries. In August 1865, a journal called Once A Week did a two-part series entitled “Notes on Amateur Actors,” beginning its history with Oliver Cromwell, who did a turn on the stage possibly as early as 1616 when he was at Cambridge or even earlier. In the second part of the history, Dutton Cook, the author, observed: “Hitherto [gentlemen players] had met with consideration, even generosity, from their audiences: but now they were to become ridiculous in the eyes of the public--now one of their number was to be followed throughout his performance by shouts of the most tumultuous derision.” Cook was about to relate the tale of the man who called himself the “Amateur of Fashion,” “Romeo” Coates.
Robert Coates (1772-1848) was born in the West Indies, the seventh child of a wealthy Antigua sugar planter, Alexander Coates, and his wife, Dorothy. Alexander Coates, born in 1734 in one of the British colonies of North America, had 20,000 acres of land and a huge fortune. (Once, when King George III approached Alexander Coates for a £5,000 loan to help protect Antigua from Spanish and French raiders, Coates casually sent the royal envoy off with £10,000.) The Coateses weren’t happy in everything, however: eight of their children died in infancy or early childhood; only Robert survived to adulthood. It’s probably only natural that Alexander and Dorothy would dote on their only surviving son, and when Robert turned eight, his father escorted him to England to attend school among the sons of British aristocrats and upper classes for the education expected of a young man of station and means. Young Robert returned to Antigua at the end of his schooling, presumably to take his place beside his father as heir to the Coates plantation and fortune. Disinclined, however, to take up such an occupation after the exciting years in England, Robert informed his father that he wanted to take a commission in the guards regiment commanded by the Duke of York. But Alexander Coates didn’t relish the idea of his only remaining child going off to fight in Europe, which was then in a period of military turmoil, so he sent Robert off on what was known then as “The Grand Tour,” a circuit of Britain, Europe, and, in Robert’s case, the United States.
Young Coates returned to Antigua a few years later only to find his experiences abroad had made him feel the provinciality of his homeland more intensely and he looked around for amusement and entertainment. The first theater in Antigua had opened in 1788 and, like most of the European colonies in the New World, the island had its approximation of European cultural outlets, including an orchestra and theatrical troupe, composed mostly of the local residents augmented by some of the soldiers in the British garrison on the island. Occasionally there was also the touring professional from Europe or the United States. Coates gravitated to the stage troupe which performed the classical plays the islanders loved, especially the bloodier and more violent of Shakespeare’s tragedies such as King Lear, Macbeth, and, most particularly, Romeo and Juliet. He was especially partial to the role of Romeo. The island audiences liked their theater “rare and bloody” more than “well done,” but they and the amateur actors enjoyed the crude staging and rough acting. Coates said he didn’t participate, however, until he made a momentous speech some years after his return.
In 1805, Antiguans decided to celebrate the British victory at Trafalgar and memorialize the death of Admiral Lord Nelson (21 October). Nelson had called at the island with his fleet on 4 June on his way to the Battle of Cape Finesterre (22 July) and the islanders had assembled a deputation to greet him; Alexander Coates, as the island’s leading resident, was part of the delegation, accompanied by his son, Robert. The younger Coates was much impressed with Nelson’s demeanor and often mentioned this encounter later. When the Antiguans mounted a festival to commemorate the momentous events, it included a dramatic presentation. Robert Coates delivered two speeches on the occasion, one a patriotic paean and the second, a celebration of the Battle of Trafalgar and a lament for Nelson’s death. Coates’s orations were greeted with effusive applause and the would-be performer was infected with the bug of public appreciation and acclaim. Unhappily, Coates’s love for the theater would be unrequited.
Alexander Coates died in 1807 at 73 and Robert inherited the estate, which brought him an annual income of £40,000, an immense fortune at the turn of the 19th century. (I don’t know how much £40,000 in 1807 comes to in dollars in 2009, but it has to be a helluva lot since £40,000 even today is a considerable income!) He immediately returned to England, settling first in Bath some time late in 1808. He took up residence in stylish Gay Street but appeared daily in the coffee room of the York House for breakfast and lunch and quickly became a figure of curiosity and interest. First of all, he was dark-skinned, a stark contrast in a society where women still used arsenic to make their skin pale. (There were always rumors, given his origins, that he was partly of African heritage, but there is no real evidence to support this. Still, considering the historical behavior of slave-owners in the Americas, it’s not out of the question.) Though his figure was good, Coates’s face was lined with wrinkles, perhaps from his life in the sun of the West Indies, and at 37 years old he looked 50. He also seems to have worn a mustache when he first arrived, though he apparently shaved it off, perhaps at the behest of a lady, before he began to perform on the stage. He went out in daytime attired in furs, irrespective of weather or season, always carrying a thick walking stick with a huge, diamond-studded knob on top. In the evening, he went about in a uniform composed of a pale blue overcoat festooned with braids, tasseled Hessian boots, a high-collared shirt adorned with a brightly-colored bandana, and a large cocked hat. The entire costume was encrusted with diamonds: diamond shirt buttons, diamond knee buckles on his breeches, diamond-studded buckles on his boots, and his ubiquitous diamond-headed cane. Coates sparkled when he moved and seemed to be surrounded by “a halo of rainbow-changing colours like those of the Antiguan moonlight.” In fact, this partiality for diamonds provided him the alternative nickname "Diamond" Coates.
He was driven around town in a huge, heavily gilded, custom-built carriage shaped like a scallop shell. His outlandish appearance, even before he took to the stage, made Coates the object of great interest and renown. Everyone knew of him, but no one knew who he was or where his vast fortune came from. Coates was also sought after for social occasions, as Max Beerbohm, the British caricaturist and wit of the late 19th century, wrote:
His attendance was solicited for all the most fashionable routs, and at assemblies he sat always in the shade of some titled turban. In fact, Mr. Coates was a great success. There was an air of most romantic mystery that endeared his presence to all the damsels fluttering fans in the Pump Room. It set them vying for his conduct through the mazes of the Quadrille or of the Triumph, and blushing at the sound of his name.
By many accounts, Coates was also quite a storyteller himself. A journal editor who met the Antiguan early in his time in Britain and who called on him at his home related that Coates recounted feats of courage he “pretended to be engaged,” such as the time
that a French fleet once appeared off the island, in the West Indies, on which his estates were situated, and that the boats were putting off with the troops to effect a landing, when he put himself at the head of the planters, and all the force they could muster, and, rushing to the shore, drew his sword, and flourished it in the air in defiance of the invaders.
He could have been the subject of one of the novels then in fashion--until, of course, he began his stage career.
Memoirist Pryse Gordon happened to be in residence at the York House when Coates was in the habit of dining there. He described the phenomenon that brought the Amateur of Fashion to his attention:
He shortly attracted my notice by rehearsing passages from Shakespeare during his morning meal, with a tone and gesture extremely striking both to the eye and the ear; and, though we were strangers to each other, I could not help complimenting him on the beauty of his recitations, although he did not always stick to his author's text. On one occasion I took the liberty of correcting a passage from Romeo and Juliet. “Aye,” said he, “that is the reading, I know, for I have the whole play by heart; but I think I have improved upon it.”
Discovering that the fascinating stranger was particularly devoted to the role of Romeo and even kept a costume for the part, which Coates explained he played often in Antigua, Gordon pressed his new acquaintance to perform the play in Bath. “I am ready and willing to play Romeo to a Bath audience,” declared Coates, “if the manager will get up the play and give me a good Juliet." And he added, “[M]y costume is superb and adorned with diamonds, but I have not the advantage of knowing the manager, Dimond.” Gordon reports that Coates was quite amused at his “excellent” pun on the name of the manager of the Theatre Royal, William Wyatt Dimond, whom Gordon explained he knew well and offered either to arrange the performance with Dimond on Coates’s behalf or to write his new friend an introduction. Finishing his breakfast, Coates went off to meet Dimond.
Coates scheduled his British début in Bath on 9 February 1809 and Dimond distributed a handbill announcing that for one night only the Theater Royal would present “ROMEO, BY AN AMATEUR OF FASHION.” The theater sold out as everyone in Bath who had been noticing this odd stranger in their midst for three months came to see the event. In addition, word had leaked out that the rehearsals were more comic than tragic and that Coates’s oral interpretations were, well, unique. In his first performance as Romeo in England, Coates appeared in a costume of his own design, described by the Welsh dandy and memoirist Captain Rees Howell Gronow, a spectator on that night:
[H]e came forward with a hideous grin, and made what he considered his bow--which consisted in thrusting his head forward and bobbing it up and down several times, his body remaining perfectly upright and stiff, like a toy mandarin with moveable head.
His dress was outré in the extreme: whether Spanish, Italian, or English, no one could say; it was like nothing ever worn. In a cloak of sky-blue silk, profusely spangled, red pantaloons, a vest of white muslin, surmounted by an enormously thick cravat, and a wig à la Charles the Second, capped by an opera hat, he presented one of the most grotesque spectacles ever witnessed upon the stage.
To top it off, the hat was festooned with ostrich feathers and the whole costume was, indeed, encrusted with diamonds from head to toe. The audience roared with laughter at this absurdly inappropriate presence as Coates literally snuck onto the scene, Romeo’s first clandestine visit to Juliet’s house, as if in imitation of a burglar, with his face concealed from view. But that wasn’t the end of it. Coates’s costume was so tightly fitted that his arms and legs bulged out in what sounds like a live representation of Popeye. So tightly wrapped, Coates was able to move only stiffly and he jerked across the stage like a faulty robot. What drove the audience out of their stunned state into riotous laughter, however, was the bursting of a seam in the seat of Coates’s trousers “and the sudden extrusion through the red rent of a quantity of white linen sufficient to make a Bourbon flag, which was visible whenever he turned round.” At first, spectators thought this was a deliberate effect, a nose-thumbing at conventional mores, but then they realized how oblivious Coates was and the crowd burst into uncontrolled hilarity. Through the first act, the audience wasn’t sure the performance wasn’t an intentional spoof of Shakespeare, as Coates read every line wrong and moved about the stage in such a ludicrous manner, even standing still awkwardly. According to Beerbohm, the Amateur “cut little capers at odd moments.” Eventually, however, the spectators realized that this was no joke and the jeers, catcalls, and shouts of “Off! Off!” began and the rowdies in the balcony began throwing orange peels and apple cores. The balcony scene was stopped by laughter from the house when Coates paused during Juliet’s passionate speech and took out a snuff box. After the actor took a pinch, one wag in the audience shouted out, "I say, Romeo, give us a pinch," and Coates strode over to the boxes and offered his snuff to the gentlemen, then to the ladies. The actor acknowledged the uproar from the house with a nod and a grin and returned to Juliet’s balcony. But the rest of the scene, with Coates’s absurd gestures, was performed as if in dumb-show because the spectators’ roars of laughter drowned out the actors’ voices.
Finally, in the last scenes, some of Coates’s odder conceptions of Shakespearean acting were displayed. First, to retrieve Juliet’s body from her tomb, Coates pried it open with a crowbar. Then, when Romeo is supposed to carry Juliet’s corpse away in sorrow and grief, Coates “dragged the unfortunate Juliet from the tomb, much in the same manner as a washerwoman thrusts into her cart the bag of foul linen” and threw her aside. Before Romeo takes the poison and prepares to die--according to Shakespeare, that is; our Amateur of Fashion . . . well, let’s let Capt. Gronow, who was there, describe Romeo’s death scene:
Out came a dirty silk handkerchief from his pocket, with which he carefully swept the ground; then his opera hat was carefully placed for a pillow, and down he laid himself.
The audience, as might be imagined, roared with laughter at this sight. Coates, nonplussed, challenged them, “Ah, you may laugh, but I do not intend to soil my nice new velvet dress upon these dirty boards,” and returned to his business. Ready now to take the apothecary’s potion, Romeo delivers a soliloquy--but Coates, for unknown reasons, decided to walk downstage and deliver the entire speech in a whisper to one of the boxes as the rest of the house strained to hear a single word. Coates’s actions, however, were plainly visible to one and all: he “died” for minutes, “gasping and grimacing over and over again as he lay writhing on the floor, groaning his way through every stage [of] agony imaginable.” As you might guess, the audience broke into howls of laughter. Gronow provided more first-hand details:
After various tossings about he seemed reconciled to the position; but the house vociferously bawled out, "Die again, Romeo!" and, obedient to the command, he rose up, and went through the ceremony again. Scarcely had he lain quietly down, when the call was again heard, and the well-pleased amateur was evidently prepared to enact a third death; but Juliet now rose up from her tomb, and gracefully put an end to this ludicrous scene by advancing to the front of the stage and aptly applying a quotation from Shakspeare: "Dying is such sweet sorrow, That he will die again until to-morrow."
Well, the house broke out into arguments about whether this was a comic travesty or the buffoonery of a talentless and oblivious fool. Manager Dimond, fearing for the outcome, dropped the curtain abruptly and the audience sat stunned for minutes. Then they broke into uproarious applause! By all accounts, Coates, now known universally as “Romeo” Coates, was more than pleased with his British début and his reception. It’s a wonder how this rank amateur of no observable talent could get onto the stages of England, but if he couldn’t persuade a theater manager to book him--as his fame spread, the Amateur of Fashion’s presence on a bill would guarrantee an SRO audience--Coates simply bribed him. The audiences’ response was often so raucous and unpredictable, that the managers frequently had the police on hand in case the spectators got out of control. The audience habitually responded with angry taunts and jeers--and plenty of laughter. Through it all, Coates blundered ahead, ignoring the ridicule shouted from the auditoriums, and, by all accounts, enjoyed his notoriety immensely. If Coates thought the spectators were becoming too rowdy, he spoke directly to them in the same tone. Nonetheless, he repeated the performance over the next few years--Brighton in 1810, Cheltenham in 1811. Of the Brighton performance, presented, apparently, to a select few friends, the local newspaper said: "[H]is performance . . . astonished the aquatics and submarines of the Sussex coast."
In Cheltenham, however, when Romeo is supposed to exit after one scene, Coates remained on stage, crawling around on all fours. “Come off, come off,” hissed the prompter to no reply. After a time, Coates responded that he had lost a diamond knee-buckle and would leave the stage when he had found it. The audience was delighted, apparently in the hope that something like that would happen again.
It was also at about this time, 1811, that Coates moved to London, taking a residence in the Strand. A rich bachelor, fond as he was of displaying his wealth and attire, Coates drove all over town from the immediate vicinity of his residence to the center of the city where he stopped to do business at the Bank of England. His shell-shaped carriage, known as a curricle (a light, two-wheeled open carriage, drawn by two horses abreast), became so well-known in London that it provided Coates with yet another familiar nickname: “Curricle” Coates. Coates’s biographers gave a detailed description of the vehicle:
Its shape was that of a scallop shell; the outside was painted a beautiful rich lake colour, and bore its owner's heraldic device--a cock, life-size, with outspread wings, and over this the motto, "While I live, I'll crow." The step to enter the vehicle was also in the form of a cock. The interior was richly lined and upholstered, and the whole mounted upon light springs with a pair of high wheels picked out in well-chosen colours. The vehicle was drawn by two white horses of faultless figure and action, and which must have been matched and acquired at great cost. Their trappings were of the latest fashion and ornamented with the crowing cock in silver. The horses were driven in pair, and the splinter bar was surmounted by a carved brass rod; on top of this stood a plated cock, crowing.
Such a carriage, which Coates called his “triumphal car,” could not help but attract curiosity and attention from anyone who saw it anywhere in London. As “Curricle” Coates drove by, onlookers would shout, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” Long before the Amateur of Fashion presented himself on a London stage, he became even more famous than the reports from Bath had made him, much, it can be assumed, to his gratification. He became the subject of frequent newspaper gossip.
Coates’s notoriety also made him the object of appeals for loans and charity from hangers-on--the 19th-century equivalent of his posse. And just as his father had been a generous and benevolent benefactor in Antigua, Robert Coates lent his money freely, seldom expecting repayment. The more pitiful the supplicant, the more generous was Coates, who never looked for any social gain from his generosity. For all his obliviousness to criticism of his acting and mode of dress, Coates was a guileless and honest kind man. So when he was approached for help by a poor widow, he immediately lit on the best solution: a benefit performance. He needed to warm up first, however, so, at the request of friends in Richmond, outside the city, Coates arranged a one-night stand at the Theatre Royal there. On 4 September 1811, Coates reprised his performance as Romeo to a packed house. The gentry came to applaud their friend and benefactor and rowdies--the period counterpart of soccer hoodlums--came prepared with pockets full of ripe fruit.
For the most part, this performance went along smoothly--or at least without significant interruption. Until, that is, Romeo’s death scene. When Coates took the poison, several young men, probably drunk, broke out into such paroxysms of laughter that a doctor who was in the audience, concerned for their well-being, ordered them removed from the theater to be treated for “excessive laughter.” Coates was so annoyed by this display that at the end of the performance, he came down to the proscenium and recited “Bucks, have at ye all,” a poem reportedly used occasionally by David Garrick. Coates’s recitation included lines written for him to use in just such circumstances, delivered while pointing at the boxes from which the disturbance had come: “Ye Bucks of the boxes there, who roar and reel, / Too drunk to listen and too proud to feel.” The house broke into applause as the spectators lept to their feet. As untalented as Coates might have been, he had one attribute rare in the theater of his day: total ingenuousness. (But then, we must remember, this also describes Bottom the Weaver of the Rude Mechanicals . . . and we know what a travesty he and his cohorts made of a classical play!)
(There’s much more to tell, but because this post grew so large as I was preparing it, I’ve split it into three parts. I’ll be posting Part 2 in a few days and Part 3 a few days after that. Can you bear to wait?)
[A blog doesn’t seem the right place for footnotes and such-like source documentation. When I put together these kinds of historical posts--the ones on Everybody Comes to Rick’s/Casablanca and The Group of Hissed Authors are in this same vein--I do have the citations for all the research. If anyone feels the need to challenge me on any of this, go ahead and maybe I’ll clue you in. I ain’t no Doris Kearns Goodwin!]
In 2004, the York Theatre Company premièred Souvenir, a play by Stephen Temperley about Florence Foster Jenkins, the worst singer ever. It seems to me that with a performance based on the life of the world’s greatest liar and a play about the world’s worst singer having been produced, we’re now more than ready for a play about the worst actor ever on the English-speaking stage: Robert “Romeo” Coates. If any of you knows the “classic” acting text, Michael Green’s immortal The Art of Coarse Acting, which first appeared in the ‘60s and made a comeback in the ‘80s, you will have some idea of Coates’s stage style. Except that Coates didn’t leave his execrable performance style in the theater: he lived as outrageously as he acted.
Michael Green describes a coarse actor as "one who can remember his lines, but not the order in which they come. One who performs . . . amid lethal props," and goes on: "The Coarse Actor's aim is to upstage the rest of the cast. His hope is to be dead by Act Two so that he can spend the rest of his time in the bar. His problems? Everyone else connected with the production." If that doesn’t sound like “Romeo” Coates, I’ll eat my hat! See what you think.
There are plenty of first-hand accounts of Coates’s appearances on the English stage as he became a kind of succès de ridicule. It seems that everyone went to see his over-the-top performances to laugh at him and jeer--though Coates doesn’t seem to have seen that he was the object of derision. The man truly thought he was the greatest artist to tread the boards of England.
Amateur actors, or “gentlemen players,” were part of a grand tradition in England and its colonies for centuries. In August 1865, a journal called Once A Week did a two-part series entitled “Notes on Amateur Actors,” beginning its history with Oliver Cromwell, who did a turn on the stage possibly as early as 1616 when he was at Cambridge or even earlier. In the second part of the history, Dutton Cook, the author, observed: “Hitherto [gentlemen players] had met with consideration, even generosity, from their audiences: but now they were to become ridiculous in the eyes of the public--now one of their number was to be followed throughout his performance by shouts of the most tumultuous derision.” Cook was about to relate the tale of the man who called himself the “Amateur of Fashion,” “Romeo” Coates.
Robert Coates (1772-1848) was born in the West Indies, the seventh child of a wealthy Antigua sugar planter, Alexander Coates, and his wife, Dorothy. Alexander Coates, born in 1734 in one of the British colonies of North America, had 20,000 acres of land and a huge fortune. (Once, when King George III approached Alexander Coates for a £5,000 loan to help protect Antigua from Spanish and French raiders, Coates casually sent the royal envoy off with £10,000.) The Coateses weren’t happy in everything, however: eight of their children died in infancy or early childhood; only Robert survived to adulthood. It’s probably only natural that Alexander and Dorothy would dote on their only surviving son, and when Robert turned eight, his father escorted him to England to attend school among the sons of British aristocrats and upper classes for the education expected of a young man of station and means. Young Robert returned to Antigua at the end of his schooling, presumably to take his place beside his father as heir to the Coates plantation and fortune. Disinclined, however, to take up such an occupation after the exciting years in England, Robert informed his father that he wanted to take a commission in the guards regiment commanded by the Duke of York. But Alexander Coates didn’t relish the idea of his only remaining child going off to fight in Europe, which was then in a period of military turmoil, so he sent Robert off on what was known then as “The Grand Tour,” a circuit of Britain, Europe, and, in Robert’s case, the United States.
Young Coates returned to Antigua a few years later only to find his experiences abroad had made him feel the provinciality of his homeland more intensely and he looked around for amusement and entertainment. The first theater in Antigua had opened in 1788 and, like most of the European colonies in the New World, the island had its approximation of European cultural outlets, including an orchestra and theatrical troupe, composed mostly of the local residents augmented by some of the soldiers in the British garrison on the island. Occasionally there was also the touring professional from Europe or the United States. Coates gravitated to the stage troupe which performed the classical plays the islanders loved, especially the bloodier and more violent of Shakespeare’s tragedies such as King Lear, Macbeth, and, most particularly, Romeo and Juliet. He was especially partial to the role of Romeo. The island audiences liked their theater “rare and bloody” more than “well done,” but they and the amateur actors enjoyed the crude staging and rough acting. Coates said he didn’t participate, however, until he made a momentous speech some years after his return.
In 1805, Antiguans decided to celebrate the British victory at Trafalgar and memorialize the death of Admiral Lord Nelson (21 October). Nelson had called at the island with his fleet on 4 June on his way to the Battle of Cape Finesterre (22 July) and the islanders had assembled a deputation to greet him; Alexander Coates, as the island’s leading resident, was part of the delegation, accompanied by his son, Robert. The younger Coates was much impressed with Nelson’s demeanor and often mentioned this encounter later. When the Antiguans mounted a festival to commemorate the momentous events, it included a dramatic presentation. Robert Coates delivered two speeches on the occasion, one a patriotic paean and the second, a celebration of the Battle of Trafalgar and a lament for Nelson’s death. Coates’s orations were greeted with effusive applause and the would-be performer was infected with the bug of public appreciation and acclaim. Unhappily, Coates’s love for the theater would be unrequited.
Alexander Coates died in 1807 at 73 and Robert inherited the estate, which brought him an annual income of £40,000, an immense fortune at the turn of the 19th century. (I don’t know how much £40,000 in 1807 comes to in dollars in 2009, but it has to be a helluva lot since £40,000 even today is a considerable income!) He immediately returned to England, settling first in Bath some time late in 1808. He took up residence in stylish Gay Street but appeared daily in the coffee room of the York House for breakfast and lunch and quickly became a figure of curiosity and interest. First of all, he was dark-skinned, a stark contrast in a society where women still used arsenic to make their skin pale. (There were always rumors, given his origins, that he was partly of African heritage, but there is no real evidence to support this. Still, considering the historical behavior of slave-owners in the Americas, it’s not out of the question.) Though his figure was good, Coates’s face was lined with wrinkles, perhaps from his life in the sun of the West Indies, and at 37 years old he looked 50. He also seems to have worn a mustache when he first arrived, though he apparently shaved it off, perhaps at the behest of a lady, before he began to perform on the stage. He went out in daytime attired in furs, irrespective of weather or season, always carrying a thick walking stick with a huge, diamond-studded knob on top. In the evening, he went about in a uniform composed of a pale blue overcoat festooned with braids, tasseled Hessian boots, a high-collared shirt adorned with a brightly-colored bandana, and a large cocked hat. The entire costume was encrusted with diamonds: diamond shirt buttons, diamond knee buckles on his breeches, diamond-studded buckles on his boots, and his ubiquitous diamond-headed cane. Coates sparkled when he moved and seemed to be surrounded by “a halo of rainbow-changing colours like those of the Antiguan moonlight.” In fact, this partiality for diamonds provided him the alternative nickname "Diamond" Coates.
He was driven around town in a huge, heavily gilded, custom-built carriage shaped like a scallop shell. His outlandish appearance, even before he took to the stage, made Coates the object of great interest and renown. Everyone knew of him, but no one knew who he was or where his vast fortune came from. Coates was also sought after for social occasions, as Max Beerbohm, the British caricaturist and wit of the late 19th century, wrote:
His attendance was solicited for all the most fashionable routs, and at assemblies he sat always in the shade of some titled turban. In fact, Mr. Coates was a great success. There was an air of most romantic mystery that endeared his presence to all the damsels fluttering fans in the Pump Room. It set them vying for his conduct through the mazes of the Quadrille or of the Triumph, and blushing at the sound of his name.
By many accounts, Coates was also quite a storyteller himself. A journal editor who met the Antiguan early in his time in Britain and who called on him at his home related that Coates recounted feats of courage he “pretended to be engaged,” such as the time
that a French fleet once appeared off the island, in the West Indies, on which his estates were situated, and that the boats were putting off with the troops to effect a landing, when he put himself at the head of the planters, and all the force they could muster, and, rushing to the shore, drew his sword, and flourished it in the air in defiance of the invaders.
He could have been the subject of one of the novels then in fashion--until, of course, he began his stage career.
Memoirist Pryse Gordon happened to be in residence at the York House when Coates was in the habit of dining there. He described the phenomenon that brought the Amateur of Fashion to his attention:
He shortly attracted my notice by rehearsing passages from Shakespeare during his morning meal, with a tone and gesture extremely striking both to the eye and the ear; and, though we were strangers to each other, I could not help complimenting him on the beauty of his recitations, although he did not always stick to his author's text. On one occasion I took the liberty of correcting a passage from Romeo and Juliet. “Aye,” said he, “that is the reading, I know, for I have the whole play by heart; but I think I have improved upon it.”
Discovering that the fascinating stranger was particularly devoted to the role of Romeo and even kept a costume for the part, which Coates explained he played often in Antigua, Gordon pressed his new acquaintance to perform the play in Bath. “I am ready and willing to play Romeo to a Bath audience,” declared Coates, “if the manager will get up the play and give me a good Juliet." And he added, “[M]y costume is superb and adorned with diamonds, but I have not the advantage of knowing the manager, Dimond.” Gordon reports that Coates was quite amused at his “excellent” pun on the name of the manager of the Theatre Royal, William Wyatt Dimond, whom Gordon explained he knew well and offered either to arrange the performance with Dimond on Coates’s behalf or to write his new friend an introduction. Finishing his breakfast, Coates went off to meet Dimond.
Coates scheduled his British début in Bath on 9 February 1809 and Dimond distributed a handbill announcing that for one night only the Theater Royal would present “ROMEO, BY AN AMATEUR OF FASHION.” The theater sold out as everyone in Bath who had been noticing this odd stranger in their midst for three months came to see the event. In addition, word had leaked out that the rehearsals were more comic than tragic and that Coates’s oral interpretations were, well, unique. In his first performance as Romeo in England, Coates appeared in a costume of his own design, described by the Welsh dandy and memoirist Captain Rees Howell Gronow, a spectator on that night:
[H]e came forward with a hideous grin, and made what he considered his bow--which consisted in thrusting his head forward and bobbing it up and down several times, his body remaining perfectly upright and stiff, like a toy mandarin with moveable head.
His dress was outré in the extreme: whether Spanish, Italian, or English, no one could say; it was like nothing ever worn. In a cloak of sky-blue silk, profusely spangled, red pantaloons, a vest of white muslin, surmounted by an enormously thick cravat, and a wig à la Charles the Second, capped by an opera hat, he presented one of the most grotesque spectacles ever witnessed upon the stage.
To top it off, the hat was festooned with ostrich feathers and the whole costume was, indeed, encrusted with diamonds from head to toe. The audience roared with laughter at this absurdly inappropriate presence as Coates literally snuck onto the scene, Romeo’s first clandestine visit to Juliet’s house, as if in imitation of a burglar, with his face concealed from view. But that wasn’t the end of it. Coates’s costume was so tightly fitted that his arms and legs bulged out in what sounds like a live representation of Popeye. So tightly wrapped, Coates was able to move only stiffly and he jerked across the stage like a faulty robot. What drove the audience out of their stunned state into riotous laughter, however, was the bursting of a seam in the seat of Coates’s trousers “and the sudden extrusion through the red rent of a quantity of white linen sufficient to make a Bourbon flag, which was visible whenever he turned round.” At first, spectators thought this was a deliberate effect, a nose-thumbing at conventional mores, but then they realized how oblivious Coates was and the crowd burst into uncontrolled hilarity. Through the first act, the audience wasn’t sure the performance wasn’t an intentional spoof of Shakespeare, as Coates read every line wrong and moved about the stage in such a ludicrous manner, even standing still awkwardly. According to Beerbohm, the Amateur “cut little capers at odd moments.” Eventually, however, the spectators realized that this was no joke and the jeers, catcalls, and shouts of “Off! Off!” began and the rowdies in the balcony began throwing orange peels and apple cores. The balcony scene was stopped by laughter from the house when Coates paused during Juliet’s passionate speech and took out a snuff box. After the actor took a pinch, one wag in the audience shouted out, "I say, Romeo, give us a pinch," and Coates strode over to the boxes and offered his snuff to the gentlemen, then to the ladies. The actor acknowledged the uproar from the house with a nod and a grin and returned to Juliet’s balcony. But the rest of the scene, with Coates’s absurd gestures, was performed as if in dumb-show because the spectators’ roars of laughter drowned out the actors’ voices.
Finally, in the last scenes, some of Coates’s odder conceptions of Shakespearean acting were displayed. First, to retrieve Juliet’s body from her tomb, Coates pried it open with a crowbar. Then, when Romeo is supposed to carry Juliet’s corpse away in sorrow and grief, Coates “dragged the unfortunate Juliet from the tomb, much in the same manner as a washerwoman thrusts into her cart the bag of foul linen” and threw her aside. Before Romeo takes the poison and prepares to die--according to Shakespeare, that is; our Amateur of Fashion . . . well, let’s let Capt. Gronow, who was there, describe Romeo’s death scene:
Out came a dirty silk handkerchief from his pocket, with which he carefully swept the ground; then his opera hat was carefully placed for a pillow, and down he laid himself.
The audience, as might be imagined, roared with laughter at this sight. Coates, nonplussed, challenged them, “Ah, you may laugh, but I do not intend to soil my nice new velvet dress upon these dirty boards,” and returned to his business. Ready now to take the apothecary’s potion, Romeo delivers a soliloquy--but Coates, for unknown reasons, decided to walk downstage and deliver the entire speech in a whisper to one of the boxes as the rest of the house strained to hear a single word. Coates’s actions, however, were plainly visible to one and all: he “died” for minutes, “gasping and grimacing over and over again as he lay writhing on the floor, groaning his way through every stage [of] agony imaginable.” As you might guess, the audience broke into howls of laughter. Gronow provided more first-hand details:
After various tossings about he seemed reconciled to the position; but the house vociferously bawled out, "Die again, Romeo!" and, obedient to the command, he rose up, and went through the ceremony again. Scarcely had he lain quietly down, when the call was again heard, and the well-pleased amateur was evidently prepared to enact a third death; but Juliet now rose up from her tomb, and gracefully put an end to this ludicrous scene by advancing to the front of the stage and aptly applying a quotation from Shakspeare: "Dying is such sweet sorrow, That he will die again until to-morrow."
Well, the house broke out into arguments about whether this was a comic travesty or the buffoonery of a talentless and oblivious fool. Manager Dimond, fearing for the outcome, dropped the curtain abruptly and the audience sat stunned for minutes. Then they broke into uproarious applause! By all accounts, Coates, now known universally as “Romeo” Coates, was more than pleased with his British début and his reception. It’s a wonder how this rank amateur of no observable talent could get onto the stages of England, but if he couldn’t persuade a theater manager to book him--as his fame spread, the Amateur of Fashion’s presence on a bill would guarrantee an SRO audience--Coates simply bribed him. The audiences’ response was often so raucous and unpredictable, that the managers frequently had the police on hand in case the spectators got out of control. The audience habitually responded with angry taunts and jeers--and plenty of laughter. Through it all, Coates blundered ahead, ignoring the ridicule shouted from the auditoriums, and, by all accounts, enjoyed his notoriety immensely. If Coates thought the spectators were becoming too rowdy, he spoke directly to them in the same tone. Nonetheless, he repeated the performance over the next few years--Brighton in 1810, Cheltenham in 1811. Of the Brighton performance, presented, apparently, to a select few friends, the local newspaper said: "[H]is performance . . . astonished the aquatics and submarines of the Sussex coast."
In Cheltenham, however, when Romeo is supposed to exit after one scene, Coates remained on stage, crawling around on all fours. “Come off, come off,” hissed the prompter to no reply. After a time, Coates responded that he had lost a diamond knee-buckle and would leave the stage when he had found it. The audience was delighted, apparently in the hope that something like that would happen again.
It was also at about this time, 1811, that Coates moved to London, taking a residence in the Strand. A rich bachelor, fond as he was of displaying his wealth and attire, Coates drove all over town from the immediate vicinity of his residence to the center of the city where he stopped to do business at the Bank of England. His shell-shaped carriage, known as a curricle (a light, two-wheeled open carriage, drawn by two horses abreast), became so well-known in London that it provided Coates with yet another familiar nickname: “Curricle” Coates. Coates’s biographers gave a detailed description of the vehicle:
Its shape was that of a scallop shell; the outside was painted a beautiful rich lake colour, and bore its owner's heraldic device--a cock, life-size, with outspread wings, and over this the motto, "While I live, I'll crow." The step to enter the vehicle was also in the form of a cock. The interior was richly lined and upholstered, and the whole mounted upon light springs with a pair of high wheels picked out in well-chosen colours. The vehicle was drawn by two white horses of faultless figure and action, and which must have been matched and acquired at great cost. Their trappings were of the latest fashion and ornamented with the crowing cock in silver. The horses were driven in pair, and the splinter bar was surmounted by a carved brass rod; on top of this stood a plated cock, crowing.
Such a carriage, which Coates called his “triumphal car,” could not help but attract curiosity and attention from anyone who saw it anywhere in London. As “Curricle” Coates drove by, onlookers would shout, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” Long before the Amateur of Fashion presented himself on a London stage, he became even more famous than the reports from Bath had made him, much, it can be assumed, to his gratification. He became the subject of frequent newspaper gossip.
Coates’s notoriety also made him the object of appeals for loans and charity from hangers-on--the 19th-century equivalent of his posse. And just as his father had been a generous and benevolent benefactor in Antigua, Robert Coates lent his money freely, seldom expecting repayment. The more pitiful the supplicant, the more generous was Coates, who never looked for any social gain from his generosity. For all his obliviousness to criticism of his acting and mode of dress, Coates was a guileless and honest kind man. So when he was approached for help by a poor widow, he immediately lit on the best solution: a benefit performance. He needed to warm up first, however, so, at the request of friends in Richmond, outside the city, Coates arranged a one-night stand at the Theatre Royal there. On 4 September 1811, Coates reprised his performance as Romeo to a packed house. The gentry came to applaud their friend and benefactor and rowdies--the period counterpart of soccer hoodlums--came prepared with pockets full of ripe fruit.
For the most part, this performance went along smoothly--or at least without significant interruption. Until, that is, Romeo’s death scene. When Coates took the poison, several young men, probably drunk, broke out into such paroxysms of laughter that a doctor who was in the audience, concerned for their well-being, ordered them removed from the theater to be treated for “excessive laughter.” Coates was so annoyed by this display that at the end of the performance, he came down to the proscenium and recited “Bucks, have at ye all,” a poem reportedly used occasionally by David Garrick. Coates’s recitation included lines written for him to use in just such circumstances, delivered while pointing at the boxes from which the disturbance had come: “Ye Bucks of the boxes there, who roar and reel, / Too drunk to listen and too proud to feel.” The house broke into applause as the spectators lept to their feet. As untalented as Coates might have been, he had one attribute rare in the theater of his day: total ingenuousness. (But then, we must remember, this also describes Bottom the Weaver of the Rude Mechanicals . . . and we know what a travesty he and his cohorts made of a classical play!)
(There’s much more to tell, but because this post grew so large as I was preparing it, I’ve split it into three parts. I’ll be posting Part 2 in a few days and Part 3 a few days after that. Can you bear to wait?)
[A blog doesn’t seem the right place for footnotes and such-like source documentation. When I put together these kinds of historical posts--the ones on Everybody Comes to Rick’s/Casablanca and The Group of Hissed Authors are in this same vein--I do have the citations for all the research. If anyone feels the need to challenge me on any of this, go ahead and maybe I’ll clue you in. I ain’t no Doris Kearns Goodwin!]
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