Copyright claims in the early 21st Century are absurd enough that they really don’t hold up to any reasonable analysis. You — yes, you personally — can easily have removed virtually any video or posting that’s been uploaded to a centralized service like YouTube or Instagram. All you have to do is file a claim of copyright violation. It doesn’t cost anything. And if your claim turns out to be completely fabricated, that’s fine; there’s no consequence. Crazy, right? But copyright nonsense, it turns out, isn’t entirely due to the Internet.
In 1737 in England, the “Licensing Act” was passed. This act forbid the production of plays by any theatre that didn’t hold “letters patent” for the play. Basically, if you didn’t license the copyright to a play, the theatre itself could be shut down. Naturally a number of different strategies were invented to get around this. One of them was to produce the play but not charge a cent to attend it. Instead, you’d pay for something else — anything from a musical concert to a dish of tea or chocolate — and the play would be tossed in for nothing. Or so they said.
One budding playwright/actor/theatre manager even came up with a play satirizing the whole system: Samuel Foote wrote “The Diversions of the Morning or, A Dish of Chocolate.” It opened in the Haymarket Theatre in 1747. Foote had leased the theatre, written the play, and starred in it. Unfortunately for Foote, he had made two mistakes. The first was that he had illegally produced “Othello” in his theatre before opening his own play. The second was that “A Dish of Chocolate” satirized popular actors and public figures, evidently pretty savagely. Some of the wrong people got offended, and the cops locked Foote’s theatre.
Foote had some well-placed friends as well, though, and got his theatre reopened. Resuming his career led him to Paris and back, and he both wrote some successful plays and turned out to be in demand as an actor. In 1754, back in London again, he rented the same Haymarket Theatre. His new idea was to stage lectures that were, for the most part, satirical. One of his targets was Charles Macklin, probably the most famous actor of the time, and Foote’s original acting teacher.
Macklin was quite a character. For one thing, he lived to the age of 106, which was quite a feat in the 1700s.He retired from acting in 1753. He was 63 at the time, so at that point he still had 43 years of retirement ahead of him, and needed something to do. So he opened a sort of entertainment venue he called “The British Inquisition.” It was a lecture and debate presentation, and probably gave Foote the idea for his lectures.
Foote was not just a satirist; he’s said to have been a fantastic mimic. He was able to poke fun at anyone and everyone — including his old teacher Macklin. The two must have remained on good terms, because they would appear, on occasion, at each other’s theaters. Now, one of the things that Macklin lectured about in his own venue was his claim that due to his training as an actor, he could memorize any text just by reading it once. And then he’d demonstrate doing just that. One night he did this with Foote in the audience, and sure enough, Foote wrote something on the spot and submitted it to be memorized. What he wrote was this;
“So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. “What! No soap?” So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.”
As the story goes, Macklin refused to repeat a word of such nonsense, but Foote’s paragraph was evidently grabbed by somebody, became a fairly well-known bit of folderol, and was published in at least a couple of books.
Not only that, but “grand panjandrum” actually entered the language (it’s usually just “panjandrum”) as a title for a self-important, pompous official. You can find it used in Maria Edgeworth’s 1825 novel “Harry and Lucy Concluded”, a Vanity Fair article from 1861, by Aldous Huxley in 1955, and more recently in publications as diverse as “The Independent” in 1999 and the “Quarterly Economical Report” from the Indian Institute of Public Opinion” in 1997. All that from a simple attempt to poke fun at an old panjandrum of an actor.
