Samuel Foote

• Born: January 27, 1720 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Truro, England
• Died: October 21, 1777
• Place of death: Dover, England

Other Literary Forms

Although Samuel Foote is known chiefly for his dramatic works, he wrote several critical essays and letters and translated a French comedy. His The Roman and English Comedy Consider’d and Compar’d (1747) and A Treatise on the Passions (1747) are well written and sound, but they are short and reflect traditional, conservative Augustan literary and dramatic criticism. A Letter from Mr. Foote, to the Reverend Author of the “Remarks, Critical and Christian,” on “The Minor” (1760) and Apology for “The Minor” (1771) are significant because in them Foote delineates his critical ideas concerning affectation, hypocrisy, comedy, farce, the humorist, and the man of humor. Foote’s thinking as presented in these two essays is strikingly similar to Henry Fielding’s ideas on these topics as stated in the famous preface to Joseph Andrews (1742). Several of Foote’s prologues and prefaces, such as the preface to Taste and the preface to The Minor, are critically important for their discussions of the aims and purposes of his satires. (The prologue to Taste that was written and spoken by actor David Garrick seems also to present some of Foote’s views.) Foote’s The Comic Theatre, Being a Free Translation of All the Best French Comedies, by Samuel Foote and Others (1762) was an ambitious undertaking, and although he wrote the preface for it, he translated only one play, The Young Hypocrite, leaving “the others” to translate the remainder of the five volumes.

Achievements

In his time, Samuel Foote was known as the English Aristophanes, a sobriquet originally used by the opposition in a libel suit but one that stuck because of Foote’s dramatic satires of living persons and of contemporary scandals. G. H. Nettleton has described Foote as Henry Fielding’s direct descendant, because he fully developed the latter’s personalities, localized mimicry, and contemporary satire. In formulating his comic theory, Foote emphasized the corrective purpose of comedy, whose ridicule he considered to be more effective than law or reason in combating folly and vice. There were indeed times when Foote’s satire achieved this purpose. When Foote played Lady Pentweazel in his comedy Taste, for example, he wore a huge headdress made with large, loose feathers that fell off his head to litter the stage throughout the play. His ridicule of the absurd hats then in vogue was credited with reforming this extreme fashion.

Perhaps Foote’s greatest achievement was breaking the monopoly of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, the only two theaters in London that had official permission to produce plays and that did so primarily during the winter, when the social season was at his height. Foote made significant strides in breaking this monopoly when he evaded the 1737 Stage Licensing Act by advertising his performances not as drama but as entertainments, scheduling them for early in the day, and describing them under various names such as The Diversions of the Morning, The Auction of Pictures, “a dish of chocolate,” or “an invitation to a dish of tea.” None of these had a set content but instead contained combinations of successful old material, reworked material, and new material based on the latest social and political gossip. The result of Foote’s “diversions,” according to Simon Trefman (in his 1971 book on Foote), was the first theatrical matinee.

Foote finally broke the monopoly when the king awarded him a summer patent to the Haymarket Theatre that allowed him to operate between May fifteenth and September fifteenth of each year. Foote’s resourcefulness and energy were tremendous, and so was his success. He wrote, produced, and directed his plays and, for most of the season, played the leading roles in them. Most of his plays enjoyed long runs, commanding large audiences not only at his establishment but elsewhere. The Englishman in Paris, for example, became part of the repertoire at Drury Lane and Covent Garden and was regularly played for more than twenty years. In addition, Foote was able to give steady employment to almost fifty actors during each season and to run his performances for fifty to sixty nights. Trefman claims that no one else in the history of English theater had ever drawn such crowds by the sheer power of satiric invention.

Foote was interested in new and experimental theatrical devices. The framing techniques he used in Taste and The Orators provided both unity for the segments that made up the pieces and a plausible explanation for poor and inexperienced performers, with whom they might be staged. He also experimented with puppets in his Primitive Puppet Shew. Foote’s performances were successful not only in England but also in Ireland and Scotland.

Biography

Samuel Foote, although he receives very little attention today, was one of the leading playwrights, actors, and theater managers in mid-eighteenth century England. Foote’s father was an attorney and magistrate who served as mayor in Truro, Cornwall, as Member of Parliament for Tiverton, as commissioner of the Prize Office, and receiver of fines. His mother was Eleanor Dinely Goodere, the daughter of baronet Sir Edward Goodere of Hereford.

Samuel was the youngest of three sons. The oldest son, Edward, was trained as a clergyman but was unable to support himself financially and depended on Samuel. There is very little recorded about the second son, John.

Foote attended Truro Grammar School and, in 1737, entered Worcester College, Oxford, whose founder, Sir Thomas Cookes, was related to the Foote family. During his tenure at Oxford, Foote is said to have become a competent Greek and Latin scholar. He was an undisciplined student, however, and his frequent unauthorized absences led the College to disenroll him on January 28, 1740.

After leaving Oxford, Foote entered London’s Inner Temple to study law, but he soon left to replenish his depleted fortune. On January 10, 1741, he married Mary Hicks, an old acquaintance from Truro. After spending her dowry, Foote neglected and deserted her. This marriage produced no children, but Foote’s will mentions two sons, Francis and George. Scholar Trefman suggests that these children were the result of a short-lived liaison between Foote and one of his servants.

Foote made his first appearance as a professional actor on February 6, 1744, at the Haymarket Theatre in the role of Othello. Foote’s forte, however, was not tragedy but comedy and impersonation. Foote mimicked many of the luminaries of his day, including Charles Macklin, Thomas Sheridan (father of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan), David Garrick, Arthur Murphy, and Henry Fielding. This comedic flair marked his private life as well, and he was a noted conversationalist. Even Samuel Johnson found Foote’s humor attractive, observing “He has wit too, and is not deficient in ideas, or in fertility and variety of imagery . . . he never lets truth stand between him and a jest, and he is sometimes mighty coarse.”

Foote had friends at court, including the duke of York, although these relationships often seemed to be troublesome rather than advantageous. His lifelong connection with wealthy, handsome, socialite Francis Blake Delaval, for example, did lead to many high times at Delaval’s family seat. However, when Delaval commissioned Foote to facilitate the marriage between a supposedly wealthy elderly widow, Lady Isabella Pawlett, and Delaval, the result was strikingly similar to a stage farce: legal battles, social scandal, and very little money for either Foote or Delaval—most of Lady Isabella’s wealth proving to be part of an irrevocable trust for her daughter. Another scheme—in which Foote and some demimondaines were to accompany Delaval and Sir Richard Atkins on a yacht trip to Corsica and help Delaval secure the vacant throne of that country—ended in the death of Sir Richard.

The temptations of high-living friends with money to waste led to other problems for Foote. Although he worked hard, was a prolific playwright, and was much in demand as an actor, debts plagued him for most of his life. A low point was reached in 1742, when he was imprisoned for nonpayment of debts, having been charged by creditors ranging from his mother to Lady Viscountess Castlecoma. The passage of a bill for the relief of insolvent debtors led to Foote’s release, but although his economic difficulties were never to become that acute again, they never entirely disappeared.

Foote traveled often for both work and recreation. It became habitual for him to travel to Dublin and Edinburgh to act, and he regularly spent his holidays in Paris. His trips to Paris inspired The Englishman in Paris and The Englishman Returned from Paris.

Foote’s strongest competition as a theater manager came from the licensed winter theaters, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. In order to make a living, Foote rented and managed the Little Theatre in the Haymarket during the summer months—an insecure undertaking because he did not have legal permission to operate his theater. There he began what came to be a wildly popular form of entertainment consisting of imitations of various actors and celebrities and satiric sketches loosely grouped in programs that were commonly called The Diversions of the Morning.

This situation changed in 1765 as a result of a sad accident. While visiting the aristocratic Lord and Lady Mexborough, Foote’s friends teased him into claiming that he was a good horseman. In backing up this false claim, Foote mounted the duke of York’s spirited horse and was thrown immediately. The hard fall shattered Foote’s leg in several places and the duke’s personal physician had to amputate it. Feeling guilty for his role in this affair, the duke used his influence to obtain for Foote the summer patent rights to the theater, a patent good for the remainder of Foote’s life.

In 1767, Foote bought and refurbished the Haymarket Theatre . He successfully managed it and played most of the lead roles or acted in the afterpieces until 1776, when George Colman was finally able to rent the patent from him. Several times before this, Foote had contemplated retiring and leasing his theater rights, but his reluctance to give up his extremely favorable position in the theater world had always made him reconsider. He only gave the lease to Colman because of the mounting pressure of a battle Foote was waging against the duchess of Kingston, the last and perhaps most disastrous lawsuit resulting from Foote’s habit of satirizing persons involved in contemporary scandals. (An earlier lawsuit over Foote’s lampoon in The Orators of the one-legged Dublin printer George Faulkner had been won by Faulkner.)

The duchess of Kingston, the one-time countess of Bristol, had begun life as Elizabeth Chudleigh. While Chudleigh was maid of honor to the princess of Wales, she met and married the heir to the earl of Bristol—in secret, so that her standing at Court was not jeopardized. A few years later, she found a man she preferred, the wealthy and elderly duke of Kingston. Becoming the duchess involved a series of shady legal maneuvers, but the transfer was accomplished; after the duke’s death, however, the duchess was indicted for bigamy and her trial became the focus for gossip in the highest social circles.

Almost inevitably, Foote made the duchess’s greed and hypocrisy the subject of a satire, The Trip to Calais, enraging the duchess. She retaliated by using her connections to prohibit the play’s continued production. Foote did rewrite the play, with a new second act, as The Capuchin, but the duchess and her supporters were not appeased. A newspaper war ensued. One of Chudleigh’s hangers-on, William Jackson, editor of The Public Ledger, bribed a servant whom Foote had discharged, John Sangster, to sue Foote for homosexual assault, and covered the matter extensively in his scandal sheet.

When the matter finally came to trial, the charge was found to be totally unsubstantiated, and Foote was acquitted. Although Foote appeared in forty-nine mainpieces and twenty-six afterpieces while awaiting trial, the most acting he had done since the loss of his leg, after the verdict was rendered he began to suffer from recurring seizures. In order to rebuild his health, Foote started for Paris, but he died en route at the Ship Inn at Dover. On October 27, 1777, his friends buried him in Westminster Abbey.

Analysis

Samuel Foote developed his theory of comedy over a fifteen-year period in several critical works. According to Foote, the main purpose of comedy is to correct vice and folly by ridiculing them while pleasing and delighting the imagination. By representing fashionable foibles and extravagant humors, comedy teaches people to avoid folly. Foote’s comic design was to amend the heart, improve the understanding, and please the imagination. In his A Letter from Mr. Foote, Foote outlined the requirements of comedy: Comedy should be true to nature; it must represent exactly the peculiar manners of a people; it must faithfully imitate singular absurdities and particular follies. Comic imitation and representation provide an example to the entire community.

Foote himself likened his comic-satiric method to that employed by Aristophanes, William Shakespeare, Molière, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jean de La Bruyère, and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. For Foote, character was the greatest comic requisite, and his definitions of two comic character types—the “humorist” and the “man of humor”—constitute his major contribution to comic theory. According to Foote, the humorist possesses some internal disposition that makes him say or do absurd and ridiculous things while firmly convinced that his actions are correct and acceptable. Foote’s man of humor is the pleasant person who enjoys the humorist’s eccentricities or affectations and exposes them.

Taste

Foote’s plays Taste and The Orators exemplify his comic method, although an analysis of any of Foote’s plays must necessarily be incomplete since it depends on the printed version, while almost every performance was different. Taste was first produced at Drury Lane on January 11, 1752. Foote’s target in this play was the booming art market of the time, the notoriously ignorant and gullible society poseurs who craved antiques and works of old masters only because of the current fad, and the dishonesty of dealers and auctioneers who preyed on them. The play, staged only five times during the 1752 season, was a failure because, according to the critical judgment of the day, the audience lacked taste and did not understand the method or objectives of Foote’s satire. Foote’s satiric approach was high burlesque. In order to appreciate high burlesque, an audience must be aware of certain standards of true taste and judgment and therefore be able to recognize the discrepancy between these standards and the pretensions of the characters in the play. Audiences who were devoted to a similar mad pursuit of trends were unlikely to appreciate Foote’s humor on the subject.

Foote’s theory of taste is similar to the theories of the leading formulators of a standard of taste in the eighteenth century such as David Hume, Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, James Beattie, Oliver Goldsmith, and Joseph Addison. All held the same fundamental requisites to a standard of taste: sensibility, imagination, judgment, education, common sense, morality, and objectivity. In Taste, Foote develops these principles by exhibiting the follies of people who lack these requisites. Foote’s “connoisseurs,” Lord Dupe, Novice, Lady Pentweazel, Squander, and Sir Positive Bubble, are so overcome by the fashionable craze for mutilated objects that are promoted as antiques, for foreign artworks, and for foreign artists that what little intellect they may have suspends operation.

Foote, in the preface to Taste, presents his views on education and morality as necessary to a standard of taste. He says that he is determined to satirize the barbarians who have prostituted the study of antiquity to trifling superficiality, who have blasted the progress of the elegant arts by unpardonable frauds and absurd prejudices, and who have vitiated the minds and morals of youth by persuading them that what serves only to illustrate literature is true knowledge and that active idleness is real business.

In the context of the play itself, the virtuosi do not know art. Lady Pentweazel thinks that the Mary de Medicis and the Venus de Medicis were sisters in the Medici family instead of paintings. Novice and Dupe think that they can evaluate the age and worth of a coin or medal by tasting it. Puff, the auctioneer, is able to convince Dupe, Novice, and Sir Positive that broken statuary and china are more valuable than perfect pieces. Lord Dupe demonstrates a complete lack of common sense when he purchases a canvas that has all the paint scraped off it. Carmine, Puff, and their associates even convince the dupes that a head from Herculaneum dates from before the biblical account of the Creation.

Satire is invariably based on human foibles evident in the time in which it is written, but in good satire, such as that of Aristophanes, the point being made is more widely applicable. Taste reflects conditions that existed in Foote’s day, but its humor is generalizable not merely to any era in which works of art are bought and sold by fashionable and ignorant collectors; it also has something to say about the way in which people come to be so easily misled, no matter what the issue or era.

The Orators

The Orators, a three-act comedy that presented different aspects of another currently fashionable preoccupation, was first produced on Wednesday, April 28, 1762, in Foote’s Haymarket Theatre. Unlike Taste, The Orators was highly successful, appearing thirty-nine times in the first year.

The Orators is a framed play. In the printed version (as was the case with many of Foote’s plays, the staged version varied from one performance to the next), this play consists of three parts. The first is a long satire on oratory, the second is a mock trial of the Cock-Lane ghost (introduced so that students at Foote’s onstage oratory class could practice judicial oratory in the trial of a currently notorious apparition), and the third features amateur debating clubs such as the Robin Hood Society. The parts are united by the four or five principal characters that appear in each, not by plot, because there is none—even within the individual parts.

Originally advertised as “A Course of Comic Lectures on English Oratory,” the play is set in a theater. Harry Scamper and Will Tirehack, two Oxford dandies looking for amusement, enter, seat themselves in a side box, and after questioning the candle-snuffer about what the lectures will contain, call for the theater’s manager, Mr. Foote, played by the author himself. They want him to assure them that they will be amused. From a box on the other side of the stage, Ephraim Suds, a soap-boiler, wants reassurance that the lectures will be educational—that he will learn to give speeches. Foote declares that both needs will be met. In the course of his explanation, it is revealed that Foote operates a school of oratory guaranteed to train even the most burr-tongued Scotsman to be a golden-throated speaker. This prepares the way for the introduction of the other major character, Donald, a young Scot with a broad accent.

After the opening lecture on the principles of oratory, Foote allows his “students” to practice what they have learned in various professions and situations. This framework provides not only unity but also an excuse for poor performers. In one scene, the actors are merely beginning students, in another they are rehearsing. This device enabled Foote to use a series of less skilled (and less expensive) actors and to vary lines on short notice without in any way diminishing the humor of the play.

Foote wrote The Orators primarily to satirize the British Elocutionary Movement and its leader, Thomas Sheridan, whose success as an actor gave weight to his pronouncements on delivery. From the days of the early Greeks, rhetoric had been regarded as possessing five aspects: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, pronuntiatio, and memoria (or discovery of a thesis, arrangement of argument, style, delivery, and memory). It was the belief of more conservative rhetoricians of Foote’s day that Sheridan had devalued rhetoric by extending Cicero’s definition of pronuntiatio and making it seem that it was the whole of the art of ancient rhetoric rather than merely one of five parts, and a lesser one at that.

Foote gives a good picture, though satirized and therefore exaggerated, of the tenets of Sheridan’s elocutionary theory in act 1 of The Orators. At the beginning of his lecture, he refers to Sheridan’s Lectures on Elocution (1762), which delineates Sheridan’s plan “to revive the long-lost art of oratory, and to correct, ascertain, and fix the English language.” To achieve these goals, Sheridan wanted to establish an academy, but the institution had to be structured on his plan alone. Foote ridicules Sheridan’s egocentrism by saying that he (Foote) wants to be made perpetual professor of his own academy.

Foote mimics Sheridan’s intention to “correct, ascertain, and fix the English language” in the character of Ephraim Suds, who has just finished taking Sheridan’s course of oratory. Suds has learned little from Sheridan’s teaching, for he mispronounces words, such as “empharis” for “emphasis,” and speaks ungrammatical English.

Sheridan not only believed his academy could perfect the English language but also envisioned his school as an Irish center for the study of correct English speech, and he thought that students would flock to it from Scotland, Wales, America, and the other British colonies abroad, in order to correct provincialisms in speech. Foote satirizes these ideas by demonstrating the effects of Sheridan’s education on Donald, a Scottish orator who has studied for one year under Sheridan and six weeks under Foote. Donald continues to speak with a heavy Scottish accent and uses dialectal diction that Scamper and Tirehack cannot understand.

Foote also uses Donald to satirize Sheridan’s emphasis on pronunciation—his belief that a good orator could, by following proper accents, read a work he did not understand. In an exaggerated paraphrase of Sheridan’s discussion of pronunciation, Donald contradicts the ancient rhetoricians Demosthenes and Cicero, who called delivery the fourth rather than the first part of oratory. Scamper and Tirehack notice the contradiction and complain. Again, Foote attacks Sheridan and the Elocutionists for their emphasis on voice and gesture to the exclusion of the other four major procedures in rhetoric.

Donald becomes furious at Scamper and Tirehack’s correction, and they tell him that he must tell the truth. Donald replies that he can tell the truth “logically,” satirizing internal or artistic proofs which are based not on empirical evidence but on probability. The Elocutionists wanted to persuade and to win debates through a grandiloquent style, and they did not care about truth; they excluded from rhetoric considerations of subject matter and arrangement of argument and thereby reduced it to style, voice, and gesture alone.

Foote suggests a motto for a treatise that Sheridan planned to write. He adds, however, that Sheridan is probably already well provided with an apt Latin or a Greek one. Here, Foote’s comment is most likely a strike at Sheridan’s greatest shortcoming, his total inability to understand the Greek and Latin rhetoricians from whom he quoted so often, and the consequential diminishing of ancient oratory.

Although today his work is known only to specialists, Foote’s colorful and successful theatrical career offers rich insights concerning the practical exigencies and the underlying values of the eighteenth century English style.

Bibliography

Chatten, Elizabeth N. Samuel Foote. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Chatten focuses on a discussion of Foote’s dramatic works and essays on drama, evaluating them in the light of social history. She describes him as a witty social satirist who resides firmly within eighteenth century literary tradition. Chronology, annotated bibliography, and index.

Freeman, Terence M. “Best Foote Forward.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 29, no. 3 (Summer, 1989): 563. A personal profile of Foote, emphasizing his importance as an ironic satirist.

Kinservik, Matthew J. “The Censorship of Samuel Foote’s The Minor (1760): Stage Controversy in the Mid-eighteenth Century.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 2 (Fall, 1999): 89-104. Kinservik argues that Foote benefited from the censorship of The Minor, a satiric anti-Methodist play.

Lamb, Susan. “The Popular Theater of Samuel Foote and British National Identity.” Comparative Drama 30, no. 2 (Summer, 1996): 245. Lamb relates Foote’s satires in his plays to the changes that were taking place in the England of the time. Examines The Englishman in Paris and The Englishman Returned from Paris, among others.

Murphy, Mary C. Samuel Foote’s “Taste” and “The Orators”: A Modern Edition with Five Essays. Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Academy, 1982. In the essays that accompany’s Foote’s Taste and The Orators, Murphy provides information on Foote’s life and these two works. Bibliography.

Singh, Jyotsna G. Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism. London: Routledge, 1996. Contains a discussion of Foote’s The Nabob for its depiction of relations between the British and the Indians.

Trefman, Simon. Foote, Comedian, 1720-1777. New York: New York University Press, 1971. An examination of Foote’s works and life.