‘Now on tour’: Evaluation, Persuasion, and Multimodality in Late Modern English Theatre Posters

ABSTRACT

This paper draws upon collections of late-nineteenth-century theatre posters currently available at the National Library of Scotland for an investigation of the main linguistic strategies employed for promotional purposes. These posters are both descriptive (indicating for instance the names of the actors and the number of days on which the show can be viewed) and evaluative (stressing novelty, uniqueness, or indeed both features simultaneously). Accompanied by important paralinguistic and extralinguistic tools, such as the use of images, choice of typeface, and poster layout, such strategies are selected to make the posters striking and consequently memorable. My analysis highlights some typical traits contributing to the persuasiveness of the texts under analysis, focusing in particular on the features that appear to have been most popular.

KEYWORDS:

• Late Modern English
• pragmatics
• multimodal discourse
• persuasive and promotional discourse
• theatre posters

Notes

¹ All the sites to which reference is made in this essay were accessed in November 2016.

² It would also of course be possible to discuss evaluation on the basis of other theoretical approaches – see for instance Hunston & Thompson (2001) and Hunston (2011). Indeed, the comparison of findings based on a broader range of materials and different theories is already envisaged as a valuable addition to the current project.

³ An overview of the history of TPs and sample materials are equally available at the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/theatre-posters/). These, however, will be considered at a later stage in the project.

⁴ For example, an analysis of the differences between British and American TPs would be a worthwhile line of study for the future.

⁵ These include Free Masons’ Hall, Queen Street Hall, Albert Hall, and John Henry Cooke’s New Royal Circus, among others which are not named; see http://digital.nls.uk/83973665

⁶ In this sense, TPs differ from the magazine covers discussed by Held (2005) and the advertisements analysed by White (2010), despite obvious contiguities in relation to modal density and the interaction of visual and verbal rhetoric.

⁷ On multimodality in medieval texts and on the impact of the invention of the printing press on the decrease of text and image integration, see Waller (2012: 239).

⁸ Although TPs could be authored by figures who would leave an indelible mark on art history, such as in the case of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, and Aubrey Beardsley, at this stage, there is no evidence that any well-known artists were involved in the production of the TPs under discussion here.

⁹ IDs refer to the permanent URLs at which the posters can be seen.

¹⁰ This was the first establishment to be granted a theatre licence in Scotland; in 1822 George IV visited it for a performance of Rob Roy MacGregor (Baird 1964: 42).

¹¹ This is immediately obvious when nineteenth-century textbooks, newspapers, and magazines are compared with current ones. In the former, there could be long sequences of pages comprising nothing but text – something which would be unthinkable in present-day materials.

¹² On superiority theory in humour, see Morreall (2016).

¹³ This kind of promotional discourse centred on uniqueness and exclusivity may have been frequent since the Renaissance, if not before. See, for instance, the comically hyperbolic way in which Polonius introduces the company that will perform ‘The Mousetrap’ in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (II.2.1477–1482). Similarly, in ‘Ma che aspettate a batterci le mani’, a 1958 song written by Nobel Laureate Dario Fo – an expert in Commedia dell’Arte and early theatre performances – a chorus of travelling comedians invites villagers (i.e. prospective audiences) to celebrate the company’s arrival and the enticing shows on schedule which even royalty is claimed to have enjoyed on several occasions (see www.archivio.francarame.it/scheda.aspx?IDScheda=8768&IDOpera=174).

¹⁴ When macro-functions are concerned, reference is made to Halliday (1978) and to the tenets of Systemic Functional Linguistics more in general.

¹⁵ See Dossena (2013) for a discussion of nineteenth-century Scottish ballads concerning elections and other issues.

¹⁶ In this respect, the humorous quality of much dialect literature and of literary uses of dialect could also be considered. The mechanisms at work in the representation of supposedly distant yet comprehensible shibboleths rely on the fact that readers will be able to decode and enjoy them while acknowledging their relative unfamiliarity. Instances of such uses are also prominent in many periodical publications (see Donaldson 1986, 1989).

¹⁷ This refers to Escher’s famous lithograph of a man looking at an exhibition in art gallery in which he appears looking at an exhibition in an art gallery, etc. (see www.mcescher.com/news/mystery-of-print-gallery-solved-escher-and-the-droste-effect/).

¹⁸ This is obviously a catchphrase in this context, later used also in the lyrics introducing one of the most ‘magical’ cats in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical based on T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats: ‘Oh, well I never! / Was there ever / A cat so clever / as Magical Mr Mistoffelees?’ (see www.catsthemusical.com/characters/mr-mistoffelees).

¹⁹ See www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/