1894 promotional poster for the Sandow Trocadero Vaudevilles. A lithograph depicting a variety of performers, including clowns, ballerinas, dogs, acrobats, jugglers, and a performer in blackface.
12 August 2021
Today, vaudeville is a term for music hall or variety theater of bygone days. One often hears the word in reference to entertainers of the early-to-mid twentieth century who made the transition from the variety stage to movies and television. As one might guess, the word is from French, but its original meaning was that of a ballad or country song.
Vaudeville is a clipping and alteration of chanson du Vau de Vire (song of the valley of the Vire). The Vire Valley is in Calvados, Normandy. The phrase was originally applied to songs written by the fifteenth-century composer of drinking songs Olivier Basselin, who was born there.
Vaudeville made its way into English via bilingual dictionaries, such as Abel Boyer’s 1702 Dictionnarie Royal:
VAUDEVILLE, S.M. (Chanson historique qui court par la ville) a Ballad, or Country-Ballad.
(Historical song that runs through the city)
By 1724 vaudeville appeared in Elisha Coles’s English dictionary, indicating vaudeville was being used in English discourse. But since Coles, like most lexicographers of the period, included only unusual or “hard” words in their lexicons, the word was probably not yet in widespread or common use:
Vaudeville, verelay, a country ballad, or common proverb.
An 18 June 1739 letter by Horace Walpole uses vaudeville in this sense of a song. He wrote the letter from Rheims, France, so he is using it in French context:
I had prepared the ingredients for a description of a ball, and was just ready to serve it up to you, but he has plucked it from me. However, I was resolved to give you an account of a particular song and dance in it, and was determined to write the words and sing the tune just as I folded up my letter: but as it would, ten to one, be opened before it gets to you, I am forced to lay aside this thought, though an admirable one. Well, but now I have put it into your head, I suppose you won't rest without it. For that individual one, believe me, ’tis nothing without the tune and the dance; but to stay your stomach, I will send you one of their vaudevilles or ballads, which they sing at the comedy after their petites pièces.
Over the course of the next century, vaudeville broadened in meaning to mean any light entertainment, not just ballads or other songs. We can see this broader use in dramatist and songwriter Thomas John Dibden’s 1837 Reminiscences:
I also had the honour (for such it most certainly was) of being selected by her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth to write a sort of vaudeville farce, to be performed at Frogmore Lodge, before their Majesties and the royal family, at a fête given in celebration of the recovery of the late Princess Amelia from a dangerous indisposition.
And by the same year we see an American sense had developed, the one we’re most familiar with today, that of music hall or variety theater. From the Evening Star of 31 August 1837:
NIBLO’S VAUDEVILLES.—Niblo’s Benefit.—The proprietor, William Niblo, so universally known and esteemed for his successful and well directed efforts for many years past to gratify our citizens with whatever can add to their instruction and pleasure in the way of amusement, himself asks a benefit tonight. He will not ask in vain, and if the superior attractions of music and a Vaudeville theatre, (the first in our country) which he has offered this year, are any claim, and the crowds that flock nightly to them are in proof they are, let the author and getter up of these costly luxuries for the public, be for once richly rewarded.
This kind of American vaudeville flourished for about the next hundred years, when movies and then television drove the variety stages out of business.
Sources:
“Amusements.” Evening Star (New York), 31 August 1837, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Boyer, Abel, ed. Dictionnaire Royal, François et Anglois, vol. 1. The Hague: Adrian Moetjens, 1702. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Coles, Elisha, ed. An English Dictionary. London: R. and J. Bonwicke, et al., 1724. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Dibden, Thomas. The Reminiscences of Thomas Dibden of the Theatres Royal, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, Haymarket, &c., vol. 1 of 2. London: Henry Colburn, 1837, 268. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. vaudeville, n.
Walpole, Horace. Letter to Richard West (18 June 1739). The Letters of Horace Walpole, vol. 1. Peter Cunningham, ed. Edinburgh: John Grant, 1906, 20. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit. Unknown artist, 1894. Library of Congress. Public domain image.