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The circus has long cast its spell over the creative arts. Fascinated by its colorful, highly charged atmosphere, the ceaseless struggle of its artists for perfection of style and bodily skill, the laughable yet somehow menacing appearance of its white-faced clowns, and the real or (as is more usually the case) imagined tempestuous relationships between its glamourous figures, many poets, painters, novelists, playwrights, and film scenarists have drawn inspiration from its acts and performers. In the twentieth century a number of innovative directors and playwrights have made use of circus settings and techniques in theatrical productions-most recently Peter Brook in his controversial A Midsummer
Night's Dream and Tom Stoppard in his hilarious Jumpers-although such physicalization of emotions and themes can be traced to the experiments of Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Mayakovsky, and other Soviet directors of the early 1920s.1 In fact, these sporadic attempts to combine the circus with theatre are hardly peculiar to the present century, but are only the latest manifestations of a long and traditional relationship. For in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, during the romantic period, a large portion of the typical circus program was theatre, with circus artists, both the two- and four-footed ones, appearing in dramatic roles and compositions whose popularity rivaled and in many cases eclipsed productions in regular theatres. The purpose of this essay is to outline the development of some of these histrionic representations, to describe their format, and to offer a few examples.

Of all the merits that may be claimed for the plays of Shakespeare, surely one of the greatest, though least extolled, is indestructibility. From drolls and burlettas to ballets and grand opera, from the archaeological extravaganzas of Charles Kean and the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen to Copeau's chaste representations on the tréteau nu, from an unceremonious Hamlet fencing in his undershirt (“rehearsal clothes,” or so we were told) to a Harry the Fifth barely visible through clouds of spent gunpowder—no matter how badly mutilated, “improved,” ludicrously performed, or grotesquely mounted, the plays of Shakespeare persistently demonstrate their ability to survive, despite the best efforts of their legion interpreters. And among these interpreters must be included the riders and actors of the circus, whose productions were perhaps no more bizarre than those of their brethren on the legitimate stage.