Snidely Whiplash

In the mid-to-late 19th century, touring theater companies had specific types. Along with the Leading Man and Woman — i.e. the headline performers — there were:

First Old Man and Old Woman

Juveniles: needed large eyes, even when no longer juvenile, since some played the role for life.

Walking Gentlemen and Women: background figures who spoke little, if at all, and whose primary purpose was focus attention on the leads.

Utility Man and Woman: usually young, they got to point when asked “which way did they go?”

Ladies of the Ballet — chorus of young women new to the stage.

The Heavy Man: played the villain; needed a deep baritone voice with thick eyebrows.

“These were the principal lines of business,” writes Clara Morris in Life on the Stage (New York, 1901). “In an artistic sense they bound actors both hand and foot; so utterly inflexible were they that nearly every week, some performance used to be marred by the slavish clinging to these defined ‘lines of business.’”

But the Heavy Man could never be heavy. To exude proper evil, he had to be dark-eyed and rail thin.

In June, 1888, the San Diego Union reprinted an article, from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, that asked: why are there no “fat villains”?

“All villains I have seen on stage have been thin,” says the unnamed author, “but I aver that a man may be fat and be a villain.

“People take their ideas from the physiognomy of certain characters, historical or imaginary, and as Shakespeare pictures jovial Jack Falstaff as fat, so every fat man is prejudiced as a good natured, rollicking blade, with no guile in him.”

During this period, phrenologists measured the size of the human skull to see which mental faculties, in separate parts of the brain, stood out. Physiognomists determined a person’s character by their outer appearance — especially the face, which they inspected like tea leaves (an ardent physiognomist, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky described each character’s face in near exhaustive detail).

But, our author asserts, types aren’t always true. “All stage lawyers are generally represented as lean, clammy, and cadaverous, yet only the poor lawyers are thus.

“Any man who walks with an erect carriage and expanded chest is put down at sight by the general run of people as proud and egoistic, but there’s just as much egotism in little dumpy men.

“I know poets who don’t wear long hair, and preachers who don’t wear long faces. People have formed their ideals of certain phases of character from early impressions of individuals who had, or were supposed to have, the character, and they never changed it.

“I insist that all conspirators are not lean, like Guy Fawkes, and that the public should be warned not to put too much faith in those old beliefs, as fat conspirators are dangerous from the very freedom from suspicion which they enjoy.”