Mr. Lambkin goes to a Masquerade as Don Giovanni
George Cruikshank
1844
Steel-engraving
9.9 cm high by 8.9 cm wide, framed
Tenth illustration for George Cruikshank's The Bachelor’s Own Book; Or, The Progress Of Mr. Lambkin (Gent.), in the Pursuit Of Pleasure And Amusement (page 19, right-hand side of the fifth plate, complementing Lambkin's visiting a theatre).
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Mr. Lambkin goes to a Masquerade as Don Giovanni, which character he supports to perfection. He falls into the company of certain Shepherdesses who shew the n ative simplicity of their Arcadian manners by drinking porter out of quart pewter mugs. They are delighted with the Don, who adds to the porter a quantity of Champagne, which they drink with the same degree of easy elegance as they do the Beer. [page 19].
The context in which Mr. Lambkin adopts the costume and easy swagger of the infamous libertine, the leading figure in Mozart's 1787 opera and Lord Byron's mock epic Don Juan (1819-24) is a masquerade ball that is deteriorating into a drunken debauch with loose women (presumably actresses rather than prostitutes). The illustration seems to set the action of Mr. Lambkin back a generation, to the Regency Period, when poem and the opera created something of a Don Juan craze in London, and when masquerades and costumed or masked balls, so popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in imitation of Venice's Carnival, were still staged at Vauxhall Gardens and Ranelagh.
Although Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first presented the two-act opera Don Giovanni (whose full title is Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni, i. e., The Rake Punished, namely Don Giovanni, or The Libertine Punished) in Prague on 29 October 1787, it did not premiere in London until 1817, when it was presented in both English and Italian at The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Closer to the time that Cruikshank was working on Mr. Lambkin, Madame Vestris starred as Don Giovanni in W. T. Moncrieff's 1820 pantomime spoof of the Mozart opera, Don Giovanni in London. In the Green Room, just off stage, Lambkin, stuffed into the costume of the Renaissance rake, indulges his fantasy of being the legendary libertine as the female members of the chorus dressed as shepherdesses hang on his every word, and consume every drop of the alcohol he has provided. Curiously, perhaps reflecting an actual masquerade that the artist attended in a theatre, the musicians are performing in a balcony rather than in the orchestra pit.
Lambkin is immediately recognizable, despite the costume and stage-moustache, by his salient feature, his bulbous nose. The costumed figure enacting the role of Mozart's Leporello (left), the Don's confidential servant and procurer, smiles gaily at the viewer, and pours out a glass of red wine. In the background, the polka-dancers romp about the stage, right, prominent among them being a figure dressed like the pantomime clown made famous by Joey Grimaldi, whose autobiography Cruikshank had illustrated in 1838, and who had been dead just seven years at the time of publication and was still revered as the English stage's greatest comedian. Lambkin, holding a phallic rapier, is enacting an erotic fantasy; the Mozert and Byronic figure to the nineteenth century seems to have represented unbridled sexuality, as philosopher Søren Kierkegaard postulated:
In his 19th-century treatise, "The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic," found in his 1843 book Either/Or, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) argues that Mozart's Giovanni represents sexuality and eroticism, which are the opposites of Christian morality. Giovanni also represents absolute immorality and the absolute triumph of desire. Kierkegaard writes: "In Don Giovanni, however, desire is absolutely qualified as desire. . . . In this stage, therefore, desire is absolutely genuine, victorious, triumphant, irresistible, and demonic" (84–85). However, the Don is also the center of the story. "Giovanni’s passion ' resonates in and supports . . . Elvira’s wrath, Anna’s hate, Ottavio’s pomposity, Zerlina’s anxiety, Masetto’s indignation, Leporello’s confusion’" (Kierkegaard 119). [Magda Romanska, "In the Wings."]
See also "The Development of Leisure in Britain":
Left: Cruikshank's animated and engaging bacchanal, Greenwich Fair. Centre: Cruikshank's view of the rising classes in a tea garden, London Recreations. Right: Cruikshank's sceneof a lower middle class group of would-be dancers at the neighbourhoodDancing Academy(1839). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: Cruikshank takes a respite from the grim social realism of the disastrous effects of alcoholism in a realistic glyphograph, From the Gin Shop to the Dancing Rooms, from the Dancing Rooms to the Gin Shop, the Poor Girl is Driven on in That Course Which Ends in Misery. [Click on image to enlarge it.]
Cruikshank, George. The Bachelor’s Own Book; Or, The Progress Of Mr. Lambkin, In The Pursuit Of Pleasure And Amusement. Glasgow: David Bryce, 1844, rpt. 1880.
Kunzle, David. "Mr. Lambkin: Cruikshank's Strike for Independence." George Cruikshank: A Revaluation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. P., 1974. Pp. 169-188.
Romanska, Magda. "In the Wings." Boston Lyric Opera. "The Ethics of Don Giovanni." 12 May 2015. http://blog.blo.org/the-ethics-of-don-giovanni.
Last modified 22 May 2018
