Their Majesties' Servants. Annals of the English Stage (Volume 1 of 3)

Dryden said of Congreve's "Double Dealer," that though it was censured by the greater part of the town, it was approved of by those best qualified to judge. The people who had a sense of decency were derided by Dryden; they were angry, he insinuated, only because the satire touched them nearly. Applying the grossest terms to women, in a letter to Walsh, he protests that they are incensed because Congreve exposes their vices, and that the gallants are equally enraged because their vices, too, are exposed; but even if it were true that Congreve copied from nature, it is also true that he laughs with his vicious and brilliant bad men and women, makes a joke of vice, and never attempts to correct it.

Dryden, as an erst Westminster boy and Cambridge man, may have felt some annoyance on the exposure of his false quantity in the penultimate of "Cleomenes," but to a pert coffee-house fop, who presumed to review his tragedy of that name, he could deliver a crushing reply. In that play Cleomenes virtuously resists the blandishments of Cassandra. "Had I been left alone with a young beauty," said a stripling critic to glorious John, "I would not have spent my time like your Spartan." "That, sir," said Dryden, "perhaps is true; but give me leave to tell you, you are no hero!" Good as this is, Lee said even a better thing to the coxcomb who visited him in Bedlam, during Lee's four years sojourn there. "It is an easy thing," observed this fellow, "to write like a madman." "No," answered Lee, "it is not an easy thing to write like a madman; but it is very easy to write like a fool."

Dryden, however, could criticise himself with justness. He confessed that he was not qualified to write comedies. He saw, too, the defects in his tragedies. He was ashamed of his "Tyrannic Love," and laughed at the rant and fustian of his Maximin. He allowed that in his "Conquest of Granada" the sublimity burst into burlesque, and he could censure the extravagance of Almanzor as freely as he did the bombast of Maximin. Still he was uneasy under censure; he was disappointed at the reception given to his "Assignation," and complained bitterly of the critics, especially of Settle. His best defender was Charles II. Some courtiers ventured to wonder at the King going so often to see "The Spanish Friar," as the piece was a wholesale robbery. "Odds fish!" exclaimed Charles, "select me another such a comedy,65 and I'll go and see it as often as I do 'The Spanish Friar.'" "All for Love" is Dryden's most carefully written play, and the author repeatedly declared that the scene in Act I., between Anthony and Ventidius, was superior to anything he had ever composed.

Dryden attributed whatever merit he had as a writer of prose to having studied the works of Tillotson, and the prelate, it will be remembered, owed some of his graces of delivery to Betterton. In his comedies, Dryden was the encourager, not the scourger of vice; and yet he could warmly approve the purity of Southerne, when Southerne chose to be pure, and acknowledge that it were as politic to silence vicious poets as seditious preachers. If there were few good poets in his day, Dryden sees the cause in the turbulence of the times; and if people loved the stilted nonsense of heroic tragedies, it was simply, he says, because "the fashion was set them by the court." To court-protection, he himself owed much, and he states what one may smile at now, that the King's kindness, in calling the "Maiden Queen" his play, – that singular piece, in which there are eight women and three men, saved the drama from the malice of the poet's enemies. There is no such privilege for poets in our days!

Had Shadwell, who left the law to find a livelihood by literature, not been a Whig, we should have heard less of him in parallels or contrasts with Dryden. Of his dramatic pieces, amounting to about a dozen and a half, there is scarcely one that does not please more in perusal than any by the poet of the greater name, – always excepting Dryden's "Love for Love." Shadwell's "Squire of Alsatia," "Bury Fair," "Epsom Wells," and some others, were necessarily favourites with his public, as they are good character comedies, brisk with movement and incident. For attacking Dryden's "Duke of Guise," Dryden pilloried the assailant for ever, as "Mac Flecnoe;" but when he says that "Shadwell never deviates into sense," he has as little foundation for his assertion as he has for his contempt of Wilmot, when he says in the Essay upon Satire, "Rochester I despise for want of wit." Rochester may have praised Shadwell because he hated Dryden; but Dryden's aspersions on the other two spring decidedly more from his passion than his judgment. To Shadwell was given the laureateship of which Dryden was deprived. The latter would have borne the deprivation better if the laurel-crown had fallen on another head, as he sings to Congreve:

"Oh that your brows my laurel had sustained;Well had I been depos'd, if you had reigned!"

In one respect, Dryden was no match at all for Shadwell; and, indeed, he has, inadvertently, confessed as much. When speaking of his incapacity for writing comedy, he says, "I want that gaiety of humour which is required in it; my conversation slow and dull; my humour saturnine and reserved. In short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company, and endeavour to make repartees; so that those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit; reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend." This is the picture of a dull man, of which Shadwell, whose comedies, to say the least of them, have as much merit as Dryden's, was the exact opposite. He was a most brilliant talker; and Rochester remarked of him that even had Shadwell burnt all he wrote, and only printed all he spoke, his wit and humour would be found to exceed that of any other poet.

We come, however, to a greater than Shadwell, in Sir John Vanbrugh, who belongs to two centuries, and who was a man of many occupations, but a dramatist by predilection. He was architect, poet, wit, herald; he stole some of his plots; and he sold his office of Clarencieux, to which he had been appointed, because he was a successful playwright. He had humour, and was exceedingly coarse; but, says Schlegel, "under Queen Anne, manners became again more decorous; and this may be easily traced in the comedies. In the series of English comic poets, Wycherley, Congreve, Farquhar, Vanbrugh, Steele, Cibber, &c., we may perceive something like a gradation from the most unblushing indecency to a tolerable degree of modesty." This, however, is only partly true; and Schlegel himself remarks in the same page, "that after all we know of the licentiousness of manners under Charles II., we are still lost in astonishment at the audacious ribaldry of Wycherley and Congreve."

Of Vanbrugh's ten or eleven plays, that which has longest kept the stage is the "Relapse," still acted, in its altered form, by Sheridan, as the "Trip to Scarborough." This piece was produced at the Theatre de l'Odeon, in Paris, in the spring of 1862, as a posthumous comedy of Voltaire's! It was called the "Comte de Boursoufle," and had a "run." The story ran with it that Voltaire had composed it in his younger days for private representation, that it had been more than once played in the houses of his noble friends, under various titles, that he had then locked it up, and that the manuscript had only recently been discovered by the lucky individual who persuaded the manager of the Odeon to produce it on his stage! The bait took. All the French theatrical world in the capital flocked to the Faubourg St. Germain to witness a new play by Voltaire. Critics examined the plot, philosophised on its humour, applauded its absurdities, enjoyed its wit, and congratulated themselves on the circumstance that the Voltairean wit especially was as enjoyable then as in the preceding century! Of the authorship they had no doubt whatever; for, said they, if Voltaire did not write this piece, who could have written it? The reply was given at once from this country; but when the mystification was exposed, the French critics gave no sign of awarding honour where honour was due, and probably this translation of the "Relapse" may figure in future French editions as an undoubted work by Voltaire!

On looking back upon the names of these authors by profession, the brightest still is Otway's, of whom his critical biographers have said that, in tragedy, few English poets ever equalled him. His comedies are certainly detestable; but of his tragedies, "Venice Preserved" alone is ever now played. The "Orphan" is read; "Alcibiades," "Don Carlos," "Titus and Berenice" are all forgotten. Successful as he is in touching the passions, and eminently so in dealing with ardent love, Otway, I think, is inferior to Lee, occasionally, in the latter respect. Of Lee, Mrs. Siddons entertained the greatest admiration, notwithstanding his bombast, and she read his "Theodosius, or the Force of Love," with such feeling, as to at once wring sighs from the heart and tears from the eyes. She saw in Lee's poetry a very rare quality, or, as Campbell remarks, "a much more frequent capability for stage effect than a mere reader would be apt to infer from the superabundance of the poet's extravagance." Let it not be forgotten that Addison accuses Lee and Shakspeare of a spurious sublimity; and, he adds, that "in these authors, the affectation of greatness often hurts the perspicuity of style!"

The professional authors were not equally successful. Davenant achieved a good estate, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, like a gentleman. Dryden, with less to bequeath, was interred in the same place, without organ or ceremony, two choristers walking before the body, candle in hand, and singing an ode of Horace – like a poet. His victim, Tom Shadwell, acquired wealth fairly; he lies in Chelsea Church, but his son raised a monument to his memory in the Abbey that he might be in thus much as great a man as his satirist. Congreve, too, is there, after enjoying a greater fortune than the others together had ever built up, and leaving £10,000 of it to Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, who so valued the "honour and pleasure of his company" when living, that, as the next best thing, she sat of an evening with his "wax figure" after he was dead. Among the dead there, also, rest Cibber, Vanbrugh, and Rowe, of whom the first, too careless of his money affairs, died the poorest man.

Better men than either of the last sleep in humbler graves. Poor Nat Lee, tottering homeward from the Bull and Harrow, on a winter's night, and with more punch under his belt than his brain could bear, falls down in the snow, near Duke Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and is dead when he is picked up. He is shuffled away to St. Clement's Danes. If Lee died tipsy, outside a public-house, Otway died half-starved, within one, at the Bull, on Tower Hill. The merits of Lee and Otway might have carried them to Westminster, but their misfortunes barred the way thither. Almost as unfortunate, Settle died, after hissing in a dragon at Bartholomew Fair, a recipient of the charity of the Charter-house. Crowne died in distress, just as he hoped his "Sir Courtly Nice" would have placed him at his ease. Wycherley, with less excuse, died more embarrassed than Crowne, or would have done so had he not robbed his young wife of her portion, made it over to his creditors, and left her little wherewith to bury him in the churchyard in Covent Garden. Two other poets, who passed away unencumbered by a single splendid shilling, rest in St. James's, Westminster – Tom Durfey and Bankes. Careless, easy, free, and fuddling Tate, died in the sanctuary of the Mint; and St. George's, Southwark, gave him a few feet of earth; while Brady pushed his way at court to preferment, and died a comfortable pluralist and chaplain to Caroline, Princess of Wales. Farquhar, with all his wit, died a broken-hearted beggar, at the age of thirty-seven; and Dennis, who struggled forty years longer with fortune, came to the same end, utterly destitute of all but the contemptuous pity of his foes, and the insulting charity of Pope.

I think that, of the whole brotherhood, Southerne, after he left the army and had sown his wild oats, was the most prudent, and not the least successful. He was a perfect gentleman; he did not lounge away his days or nights in coffee-houses or taverns, but after labour, cultivated friendship in home circles, where virtue and moderate mirth sat at the hearth. In his bag-wig, his black velvet dress, his sword, powder, brilliant buckles, and self-possession, Southerne charmed his company, wherever he visited, even at fourscore. He kept the even tenor of his way, owing no man anything; never allowing his nights to be the marrer of his mornings; and at six and eighty carrying a bright eye, a steady hand, a clear head, and a warm heart – wherewith to calmly meet and make surrender of all to the Inevitable Angel.

As Southerne originally wrote "Oroonoko," that tragedy could not now be represented. The mixture of comic scenes with tragic is not its worst fault. His comedies are of no worth whatever, except as they illustrate the manners and habits of his times. They more closely resemble those of Ravenscroft than of Congreve or Wycherley. His "Sir Anthony Love" was successful; it is impossible to conjecture wherefore. It has not a wise sentiment or a happy saying in it; and all to be learned from it is, that Englishmen, when abroad, in those days, used to herd together in self-defence, against being cheated; that they were too wise to learn anything by travel; and were fond of passing themselves off as having made a campaign. As Cowley anticipated Moore, in the "Cutter," so, in "Sir Anthony," has Southerne anticipated Burns. "Of the King's creation," says the supposed Sir Anthony to Count Verola, "you may be; but he who makes a count, never made a man." There is the same sentiment improved in the well-known lines:

"A king may mak' a belted knight,A marquis, duke, an' a' that;But an honest man's aboon his might,Gude faith he canna fa' that."

Southerne was not more famous for the nicety of his costume than "little starched Johnny Crowne" was for his stiff, long cravat; or Dryden for his Norwich drugget suit, or his gayer dress in later days, when, with sword and Chadrieux wig, he paraded the Mulberry Garden with his Mistress Reeve – one of that marvellous company of 1672, which writers with long memories used to subsequently say could never be got together again. Otway's thoughtful eye redeemed his slovenly dress and his fatness, and seemed to warrant the story of his repenting after his carousing. Lee dressed as ill as Otway, but lacked his contemplative eye, yet excelled him in fair looks, and in a peculiar luxuriance of hair.

Shaftesbury, in his "Characteristics," shows us how the play-house authors throned it in coffee-houses, and were worshipped by small wits. There were, however, dramatic authors who never went thither; and of these, the ladies, I have now to speak.

CHAPTER XI

THE DRAMATIC AUTHORESSES

During this half century, there were seven ladies who were more or less distinguished as writers for the stage. These were the virtuous Mrs. Philips, the audacious Aphra Behn, the not less notorious Mrs. Manley, the gentle and learned Mrs. Cockburn, the rather aristocratic Mrs. Boothby (of whom nothing is known but that she wrote one play, called "Marcatia,"66 in 1669), fat Mrs. Pix, and that thorough Whig, Mrs. Centlivre. The last four also belong to the beginning of the eighteenth century; and three at least apologised that they, women as they were, should have ventured to become dramatists.

The "virtuous Mrs. Philips," of Evelyn, the "matchless Orinda," of Cowley and other poets, translated the "Pompey" and "Horace" of Corneille. In those grave pieces, represented at court in the early years of the Restoration, the poetess endeavoured to direct the popular taste, and to correct it also. Had she not died (of small-pox, and in the thirty-third year of her age), she might have set such example to the playwrights as the Bettertons did to the actors; but her good intentions were frustrated, and her place was unhappily occupied by the most shameless woman who ever took pen in hand, designedly to corrupt the public.

Aphra Behn was a Kentish woman, whose early years were passed at Surinam, where her father, Johnson, had resided, as lieutenant-general.67 After a wild training in that fervid school, she repaired to London, married a Dutchman, named Behn, who seems to have straightway disappeared, – penetrated, by means of her beauty, to the court of Charles II., – and obtained, by means of her wit, an irregular employment at Antwerp, – that of a spy. The letters of her Dutch lovers belong to romance; but there is warrant for the easy freedom of this woman's life. In other respects she was unfortunate. On her return to England, her political reports and prophecies were no more credited than the monitions of old, by Cassandra; so she abandoned England to its fate, and herself "to pleasure and the muses."

Her opportunities for good were great, but she abused them all. She might have been an honour to womanhood; – she was its disgrace. She might have gained glory by her labours; – but she chose to reap infamy. Her pleasures were not those which became an honest woman; and as for her "Muses," she sat not with them on the slopes of Helicon, but dragged them down to her level, where the Nine and their unclean votary wallowed together in the mire.

There is no one that equals this woman in downright nastiness, save Ravenscroft and Wycherley; but the latter of these had more originality of invention and grace of expression. To these writers, and to those of their detestable school, she set a revolting example. Dryden preceded her, by a little, on the stage; but Mrs. Behn's trolloping muse appeared there before the other two writers I have mentioned, and was still making unseemly exhibition there after the coming of Congreve. With Dryden she vied in indecency, and was not overcome. To all other male writers of her day she served as a provocation and an apology. Intellectually, she was qualified to have led them through pure and bright ways; but she was a mere harlot, who danced through uncleanness, and dared or lured them to follow. Remonstrance was useless with this wanton hussey. As for her private life, it has found a champion in a female friend, whose precious balsam breaks the head it would anoint. According to this friend, Mrs. Behn had numerous good qualities; but "she was a woman of sense, and consequently loved pleasure;" and she was "more gay and free than the modesty of the precise will allow."

Of Aphra Behn's eighteen plays, produced between 1671 and 1696, – before which last year, however, she had died, – but few are original. They are adaptations from Marlowe, from Wilkins, from Killigrew, from Brome, from Tatham, from Shirley, from the Italian comedy, from Molière, and more legitimately from the old romances. She adapted skilfully; and she was never dull. But then, all her vivacity is wasted on filth. When the public sent forth a cry of horror at some of the scenes in her play of "The Lucky Chance," she vindicated herself by asking, "was she not loyal?" – "Tory to the back bone;" – had she not made the King's enemies ridiculous, in her five-act farces; – and had she not done homage to the King, by dedicating her "Feigned Courtezans" to Nell Gwyn, and styling that worthy sister of hers in vice and good nature so perfect a creature as to be something akin to divinity?

For Mrs. Manley there was more excuse. That poor daughter of an old royalist had some reason to depict human nature as bad in man and in woman. The young orphan trusted herself to the guardianship of a seductive kinsman, who married her when he had a wife still living. This first wrong destroyed her, but not her villainous cousin; and unfortunately, the woman upon whom the world looked cool, incurred the capricious compassion of the Duchess of Cleveland. When the caprice was over, and Mrs. Manley had only her own resources to rely upon, she scorned the aid offered her by General Tidcombe, and made her first venture for the stage in the tragedy of "Royal Mischief," produced at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, in 1696. It is all desperate love, of a very bad quality, and indiscriminate murder, relieved by variety in the mode of killing; one unfortunate gentleman, named Osman, being thrust into a cannon and fired from it, after which his wife, Selima, is said to be

"Gathering the smoking relics of her lord!"

The authoress in her next venture, in the same year, a comedy, written in a week, and which perished in a night, "The Lost Lover," introduced what the public had been taught to appreciate – a virtuous wife. Her other pieces, written at intervals of ten years, were, "Almyna," founded on the story of the Caliph who was addicted to marrying one day, and beheading his wife the next; and "Lucius," a semi-sacred play, on the supposed first Christian king of Britain – both unsuccessful.

Mrs. Manley survived till 1724. When not under the "protection" of a friend, or in decent mourning for the lovers who died mad for her, she was engaged in composing the Memoirs of the New Atalantis, – a satire against the Whig ministry, the authorship of which she courageously avowed, rather than that the printer and publisher should suffer for her. The Tory ministry which succeeded, employed her pen; and with Swift's Alderman Barber, – he being Tory printer, she resided till her death, mistress of the house, and of the alderman.

Contemporary with Mrs. Manley was Miss Trotter, the daughter of a Scottish officer, but better known as Mrs. Cockburn, wife and widow of an English clergyman. She was at first a very learned young lady, whose speculations took her to the Church of Rome, from which in later years she seceded. She was but seventeen, when, in 1696, her sentimental tragedy, "Agnes de Castro," was played at Drury Lane. Her career, as writer for the stage, lasted ten years, during which she produced five pieces, all of a sentimental but refined class, – illustrating love, friendship, repentance, and conjugal faith. There is some amount of word-spinning in these plays; and this is well marked by Genest's comment on Mrs. Cockburn's "Revolution of Sweden," – namely, that if Constantia, in the third act, had been influenced by common sense, she would have spoiled the remainder of the play.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Cockburn was a clever woman, and kept no dull household, though she there wrote a defence of Locke, while her reverend husband was pursuing an account of the Mosaic deluge. As a metaphysical and controversial writer, she gathered laurels and abuse in her day, for the latter of which she found compensation in the friendship and admiration of Warburton. She was a valiant woman too; one whom asthma and the ills of life could not deter from labour. But death relieved her from all these in 1749; and she is remembered in the history of literature as a good and well-accomplished woman – the very opposite of Mrs. Behn and all her heroines.

Fat Mrs. Pix enjoyed a certain sort of vogue from 1696 to 1709.68 She came from Oxfordshire, was the daughter of a clergyman, was married to a Mr. Pix, and was a woman of genius, and much flesh. She wrote eleven plays, but not one of them has survived to our time. Her comedies are, however, full of life; her tragedies more than brimful of loyalty; later dramatists have not disdained to pick up some of Mrs. Pix's forgotten incidents; and indeed, contemporary playwrights stole her playful lightning, if not her thunder; her plots were not ill conceived, but they were carried out by inexpressive language, some of her tragedies being in level prose, and some mixtures of rhyme and blank verse. She herself occasionally remodelled an old play, but did not improve it; while, when she trusted to herself, at least in a farcical sort of comedy, she was bustling and humorous. Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Cockburn, and Mrs. Pix were ridiculed in a farce called the "Female Wits," their best endowments satirised, and their peculiarities mimicked. The first and last of those ladies represented some of their dramas as written by men, a subterfuge to which a greater than either of them was also obliged to resort, namely, Susanna Centlivre.

Susanna Freeman was her maiden name. She was the orphan daughter of a stout but hardly-dealt with parliamentarian, and of a mother who died too early for the daughter's remembrance. Anthony Hammond is said to have been in love with her, a nephew of Sir Stephen Fox to have married her, and a Captain Carrol to have left her a widow – all before she was well out of her teens. Thus she had passed through a school of experience, and to turn it to account, Susanna Carrol began writing for the stage. Writing for – and acting on it, for we find her in 1706 playing "Alexander the Great" at Windsor, where she also married Mr. Centlivre, Queen Anne's chief cook.