Odd this day
The first night of Appius and Virginia, by John Dennis, at Drury Lane. It’s not what you might call a widely remembered piece of theatre, but the play did give rise to one of the best known phrases in the English language. Dennis, you see, was not just a writer. He was an actor-manager, too — jobs for which he is also not remembered. He did, though, invent the thunder sheet, a thin piece of metal kept backstage to simulate, when shaken, the rumbling noises of a storm.
Well, unless it was “a machine that rolled a drum over wooden troughs”.
This, you see, is one of many aspects of the story which are… not altogether settled, let’s say.
Still, let’s tell the story and see how we get on… This was the first play performed at Drury Lane for six weeks, because all the theatres had gone dark in official mourning of Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, who had recently died of asthma and dropsy (fluid retention) at just 55. They were, then, all rather in need of punters and hard cash.
Appius and Virginia, unfortunately, did not provide these. It ran for a grand total of four nights. (See point above about this not being a widely renowned play.) So, they put on a guaranteed-bums-on-seats Shakespeare revival: the storm-tossed Macbeth.
Dennis allegedly attended the opening night, and — thinking the sound over which the witches were cackling sounded rather too familiar — stood up and shouted:
Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!
…unless it was:
That’s my Thunder; by God! How these Rascals use me! They will not let my Play run, but steal my Thunder.
Accounts, as I say, vary, and if you try to trace the story to its source, you find not a newspaper account but… Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, published in 1728 — and not even the body of the poem itself. In a section on “the wond’rous pow’r of Noise”, there is a mention of “thunder rumbling from the mustard-bowl”, and a footnote:
Whether Mr. Dennis was the inventor of that improvement, I know not; but it is certain, that being once at a Tragedy of a new Author, he fell into a great passion at hearing some, and cry’d, “S’death! that is my Thunder.”
So, 19 years after the event, there is a gossipy aside in a satirical poem which doesn’t use the word ‘steal’ in any form (and doesn’t mention Shakespeare). In 1734, a biography of John Dennis trots out the same story, now apparently an established fact, using most of the same words. In 1747, a collection of theatrical stories retells it. Only in this version does the disgruntled playwright use that phrase.
There may well be some truth in the ur-text: perhaps Dennis did invent the thunder sheet (or another device), and perhaps he was pissed off when someone nicked it. The only reason anyone still knows his name, though, is that Pope planted that story. So… why did he do that?
Well, Pope and Dennis were not fond of one another. This may date back to Pope’s Pastorals, his first printed poems, which came out in May of 1709. Dennis, a critic of the time, apparently ignored them, and Pope — a man with a gift for vitriol — wrote in his An Essay on Criticism two years later:
There well, might Criticks still this Freedom take;
But Appius reddens at each Word you speak,
And stares, Tremendous! With a threatening Eye,
Like some fierce Tyrant in Old Tapestry!
‘Appius’ there is Dennis, treated rudely, and reminded of his great failure. He was, apparently, bewildered by this, having “only met Pope three times before this attack and they never had any disagreements”. Whatever the truth of the matter, he wasn’t going to take it lying down. He rushed out a glorified review of Pope’s opus, entitled Reflections, Critical and Satyrical, upon a Late Rhapsody, Call’d, An Essay upon Criticism, in which he had a go at the younger man:
…as there is a great deal of venom in this little gentleman’s temper, nature has very wisely corrected it with a great deal of dullness.
That ‘little’ there was a reference to the fact that Pope was 4.5 feet tall as a result of Pott disease, a form of tuberculosis which distorted his spine. So, naturally, Dennis added that:
there is no creature in nature so venomous, there is nothing so stupid and so impotent as a hunch-back’d toad
…which wasn’t entirely necessary. So, Pope wrote a poem, The Critical Specimen, which characterised Dennis as
Rinaldo Furioso, Critick of the Woeful Countenance
…and basically, they insulted each other in print for years afterwards. Things had been calm for a while when the Dunciad came out, and it reignited everything, not least because that footnote is just one of many insults directed at Dennis which are woven throughout the text.
Like I said: Pope; good at hating.
Basically, no one knows if John Dennis even did invent a theatrical thunder device, let alone accused anyone of nicking his idea, but it makes for a good story — and, either way, leads us on to the other good story, which we know is true, and is very entertaining (because literary feuds, practised as they are by people who are good with words, do tend to be rather fun).
