The Locals (1882)

Victoria College

"The Locals" was published anonymously in Acta Victoriana in November 1882. Acta Victoriana was established in 1878 at Victoria College, and is the longest-running student publication in Canada. Victoria College was originally established in Cobourg, Ontario, as a Methodist seminary, but was given degree-granting powers in 1841. In 1892, Victoria College became a federated college of the University of Toronto, and moved its campus from Cobourg to Toronto. The script, then, was published when the college and journal were still in Cobourg. "The Locals" was a regular section within Acta Victoriana, meant for local news or stories, and is therefore not the proper title of the piece. Like Sir John and Sir Charles, or Olive Archibald's The Lost Queen, the script was written as short fiction, and never intended to be performed.

The occasion for the piece is Victoria College's annual Bob party. The first Bob party took place in December 1874, named in honour of Robert Beare, the caretaker of the college. The party featured farce at the expense of freshman and faculty, and became an institution of Victoria College. This explains the concluding moral of the piece:

Don't make a fuss and kick and cuss,
At howls and moans Bobistical;
But heaven thank, their groans don't rank
As elocutionistical. (4) [indent]

"The Locals" consists of two parts: four short scenes borrowed from Macbeth, followed by a poem of sixteen four-lined stanzas addressed to "Ye Elocutionists" that describes, or perhaps advertises, the Bob party. The first four scenes borrow lines from Macbeth to describe a prank pulled by three students on three professors. Scene I parodies Macbeth 1.1; here, the three students are presented as the three witches:

1 st Student. - When can we three meet to-night To give the boys and Profs. a fright?
2 nd S. - When the hurly-burly's o'er, When they all begin to snore.
3 rd S. - Then we'll go up and have our fun.
1 st S. - Where the place?
2 nd S. - Division Street.
3 rd S. - I'll bring Graymalkin.
All. - Foul is Fair. I'll meet you there; Howls and shrieks shall rend the air. (1) [indent]

The prank was that the students broke into Alumni Hall and disturbed the lecture hall "beyond recog" (1).

The style of "Ye Elocutionists" shows the influence of Gilbert and Sullivan's early comic operas that were contemporary with the piece. H.M.S. Pinafore opened in London in 1878, and The Pirates of Penzance was first shown in New York in 1879, before it opened in London in 1880. The eighth stanza names Sullivan directly:

With sulen roar they'd stock the floor,
Hint "pistol" or "stiletto,"
Or, limp, they'd cling-that sort of thing-
(See Sullivan's libretto.) (3) [indent]

'Stiletto' didn't refer to a type of shoe heel until the 1950s, so "pistol" and "stiletto" (a dagger with a short, thick blade) refer to The Pirates of Penzance. The opera was probably used in one of the student farces. The sixth stanza opens with the line "Some sought the lake to sport their 'Shak' (2). No doubt Shakespeare was also used as a source of material for sketches and farces at the Bob parties too, which makes them ancestors to the sketch comedy of Wayne and Shuster's "The Shakespearean Baseball Game" and "Rinse the Blood Off My Toga"-and perhaps even the outrageous adaptative gestures made in Strange Brew. The freewheeling use of Shakespeare as a foundation for satire, parody, and comic invention in Canada finds its oldest example in this "play."

Gordon Lester

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Link to Database

"The Bob." Acta Victoriana (Dec. 1882): 7-8.