Finding Sampson Penley

Stockwell, Alan2012

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Total copies: 6

Summary

What did the common people do for entertainment while the bon ton was enjoying itself in the elegant attractions of Jane Austen's Bath or Tunbridge Wells? The most democratic amusement was the theatre; George III sitting amongst his humblest subjects laughing at the same comedies and thrilling to the same dramas. In Georgian times even the tiniest country town had its theatre visited regularly by travelling players. These companies were usually family based and this book is an account of one such troupe - more adventurous than most - the Jonas & Penley Company, grandiloquently self-styled "His Majesty's Servants of the Theatre Royal Windsor". On the retreat of Napoleon in 1814, this English company, headed by Sampson Penley, was the first to play Amsterdam, Brussels and other towns in Flanders and northern France. In 1822, the first English actors since Elizabethan times to attempt to play in Paris, the Penley troupe was forced out by a yelling mob in a riot that ultimately changed the face of French theatre for ever. The half-century covered in these pages also saw the Penley family suffer several bankruptcies and ill-fated financial ventures, premature deaths, and one well-favoured son advanced and sustained by the Queen of England herself. The Jonas & Penley Company of Comedians under their indefatigable leader Sampson Penley comprised three siblings, their spouses and two dozen children. This is their story.