Robson, FREDERICK

Robson, FREDERICK, whose real name was F. R. BROWNBILL, low comedian, was born at Margate in 1821. He was apprenticed to a London copper-plate engraver; but became smitten with stage fever and took to the actor's life (1844). From 1853 he was inseparably associated with the Olympic Theatre of London, where he attracted large audiences for years by his representations in comedy, farce, and burlesque. An actor of original genius, Robson excelled in parts that were grotesque, eccentric, quaintly humorous or droll; he was particularly effective in sudden transitions from comicality to pathos, and the reverse, and in the delineation of violent and tumultuous passion. He gave a vivid portrait of the street outcast as Jem Baggs in the Wandering Minstrel, in which he sang the once celebrated 'Villikins and his Dinah.' He burlesqued Macbeth and Shylock, uniting in his playing the ludicrous and the terrible. One of his principal characters was Desmaretts, a spy of Fouché's, a shabby-looking, fawning, cunning, malicious old man in the play Plot and Passion. Others of his strongest impersonations were as the dwarf in Planché's Yellow Dwarf, the Doge of Duralto, Daddy Hardacre, Sampson Burr, and Uncle Zachary in Peter and Paul. He died 12th August 1864. See Dutton Cook in Gentleman's Magazine (1882), and G. A. Sala in Atlantic Monthly (1863).