I've been writing about Cato recently. Yesterday I came up against the following quotation from W. Davenport Adams' A Dictionary of the Drama (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1904):
"The play was revived at Covent Garden in January, 1734, with Quin as Cato and with Marcus and Juba omitted."
This intrigued me, but I couldn't find any other critical reference to these characters being omitted. I eventually looked up the newspaper advertising for the performance, and I found the following:
(From Daily Journal (London, England), Saturday, January 19, 1734; Issue 4059. Source: British Library online.)
Perhaps I'm deeply misunderstanding Adams' summary - but what might "omitted" mean other than "left out"? Yet as the above clearly shows, in the performance he refers to, Marcus was played by a Mr. Wignell and Juba a Mr. Hale. I was especially interested in the idea of a Jubaless Cato - both in terms of plotting, as to write him out would be to substantially alter the turn of events, and for what it might mean for perceptions of romantic leads by the mid-1730s. (I'd elaborate on that latter idea but, well, the point is moot now.)
It's disappointing that this turned out to be a dead-end, and Anderson's error(?) is baffling - but at least I was able to establish that Marcus and Juba were in the play before I ran away in the wrong direction!
As a postscript, I was finally able to visit the First Actresses exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. There were a lot of paintings that I had no idea that I'd be able to see - Miss Rose as Tom Thumb, several of Dora Jordan, Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, as well as a Hogarth I'd never seen before. There was even the portrait of Garrick as Sir John Brute which I use as the picture for this blog - which I thought was rather stretching the theme. What took me by surprise was how excited I was to see the paintings I'd already seen a hundred times. I'm a poor art critic but for perhaps the first time, I felt really awe-struck by being in the presence of paintings that I love. I could have stayed for hours.
