AustLit

Brian Elliott (q.v.) notes in his biography of Clarke that the author seems to have had a little success very early on in his career. Although his major dramatic works were not written and staged until the late 1860s, and after Clarke had attempted a variety of employments, he appears to have tried his hand at both journalism and popular culture entertainment within a short time of arriving in Australia. Elliot writes of The Lady of the Lake : 'The text of such a triflle in burlesque verse... parodied from Scott, survives among Clarke's papers and Hopkins mentions that it was accepted for performance at some time during 1864 (p33). The manuscript for this appears in a notebook held in the Mitchell Library (NSW). See Marcus Clarke Papers, Mitchell Library - MS C270.

Eric Irvin in 'Marcus Clarke and the Theatre' (q.v.) has questioned Elliott's claim that The Lady of the Lake was staged in 1864, arguing that no evidence has yet been found of a production (p3).

NB: Ian McLaren in Marcus Clarke: An Annotated Bibliography (q.v., 1982) proposes a relationship between The Lady of the Lake and Clarke's opera, Moustique (q.v.), written between 1880 and 1881 (see p122). However, both stories clearly follow different narrative paths and contain different characters, which suggests little or no connection. McLaren's claim that French composer (and one time Australian-resident) Henri Kowalski (q.v.) wrote the music for the burlesque is also problematic as Kowalski did not arrive in this country until 1880.