Читать книгу Defoe on Sheppard and Wild: The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild by Daniel Defoe - Даниэль Дефо, Данієль Дефо, Даниэль Дефо - Страница 11

It is perhaps characteristic that the aging Defoe thoroughly disapproved of the legends that quickly crystallized around Sheppard and Wild, even though as their biographer he was largely responsible for them. The myth-making began rapidly, and within months a pantomime Harlequin Sheppard was mounted on the stalls at Bartholomew’s Fair, in nearby Smithfield Market. This was followed in 1728 by John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera, a ‘Newgate pastoral’ with Wild transformed into the crooked jailer Peachum and Sheppard into the glamorous robber MacHeath.

Gay also picked up Defoe’s hint about the two pretty girls in the coach (Sheppard’s final trade-in for Elizabeth Lyon, perhaps), and invented Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit as rivals for MacHeath’s affections. Defoe’s wonderful feel for the London streets and the crowds, an essential part of his biographies, was also reflected in the use of English folk-songs and street-cries for the music, such as the haunting lyric, ‘Over the hills and faraway’.

Many other spin-offs followed after Defoe’s own death in 1731. They included Henry Fielding’s satirical novel, Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), and the numerous composite biographies published throughout the later eighteenth century in various editions of The Newgate Calendar. By the nineteenth century the Sheppard and Wild saga had taken on a life of its own, flamboyantly revived in Harrison Ainsworth’s bestselling novel, Jack Sheppard (1839), obliquely reflected in Dickens, and vividly embroidered in many Victorian music hall pieces. Here Jack was often played - provokingly - by an actress in tight silk britches, festooned with decorative fetters and chains. The myth also migrated abroad, attaching itself to newspaper stories of the outlaws Ned Kelly in Australia, and Jesse James in America, and re-surfacing in the twentieth century with Brecht’s Threepenny Opera in Germany.

Besides providing the material for so much fiction and music, there was also an interesting visual tradition, attaching particularly to Sheppard. Hogarth’s great sequence of satirical pictures, The Idle Apprentice, was partly inspired by his story. While Applebee’s superb anonymous copperplate illustration of the last escape, was later picked up by Cruickshank in a series of fine, spidery engravings for Ainsworth’s novel. These were set out in action-sequence, and may claim to be one of very the earliest strip-cartoons or bandes-dessinées. The archetypal shadow of the Sheppard and Wild confrontation may also be faintly traced in innumerable modern escape films, not least perhaps in The Great Escape (1963) and Papillon (1973), both featuring the rangy, laconic actor Steve McQueen, whose round, pale-eyed, boyish face bears an odd resemblance to Thornhill’s original portrait of Sheppard in Newgate.

This suggests another feature to the new form of non-fiction that Defoe was helping to create. On the one hand, biography showed itself to be a young aggressive genre, with a growing popular readership, and a natural tendency to consume and absorb older and more primitive literary forms - folk tales, ballads, journalism, trial transcripts, ‘True Confessions’, pious sermons - by gradually insisting on greater human depth, greater historical accuracy and authenticity. On the other hand, it was also a generous, disreputable and uninhibited form, freely and perhaps wantonly providing material about the human condition - often intimate, scandalous or confidential - for further imaginative expansion: in novels, theatre, opera, painting, illustration, and ultimately film.

So from these early beginnings, still uncertain of its origins or authority, still of doubtful or anonymous authorship, but with the presiding restless genius of Daniel Defoe, biography itself was set free to tell a new kind of human story.