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

Of Mrs. Centlivre's nineteen plays, three at least are still well known, the "Busy Body," the "Wonder," and "A Bold Stroke for a Wife." When she offered the first to the players – it was her ninth play – the actors unanimously denounced it. Wilks, who had hitherto been unaccustomed to the want of straining after wit, the common sense, the unforced sprightliness, the homely nature, for which this piece is distinguished – declared that not only would it be "damned," but that the author of it could hardly expect to avoid a similar destiny;69 and yet its triumph was undoubted, though cumulative.

Hitherto the authoress had written a tragi-comedy or two, the comic scenes in which alone gave evidence of strength, but not always of delicacy. She had, in others, stolen wholesale from Molière, and the old English dramatists. She produced a continuation to the "Busy Body" in "Marplot," but we do not care for it; and it is not till her fourteenth piece, the "Wonder," appeared in 1714, that she again challenges admiration. This, too, is an adaptation; but it is superior to the "Wrangling Lovers," from which it is partly taken, and which had no such hero as the Don Felix of Wilks. The "Bold Stroke for a Wife" was first played in 1718, when the Tory public had forgiven the author for her satires against them, and the theatrical public her fresh adaptations of old scenes and stories. The "Bold Stroke for a Wife" is entirely her own, and has had a wonderful succession of Colonel Feignwells, from C. Bullock down to Mr. Braham! This piece, however, was but moderately successful; but it has such vivacity, fun, and quiet humour in it, that it has outlived many a one that began with greater triumph, and in "the real Simon Pure," first acted by Griffin, it has given a proverb to the English language. One other piece, the "Artifice," a five-act farce, played in 1722, concludes the list of plays from the pen of this industrious and gifted woman.

Mrs. Centlivre had unobtrusive humour, sayings full of significance rather than wit, wholesome fun in her comic, and earnestness in her serious, characters. Mrs. Centlivre, in her pictures of life, attracts the spectator. There may be, now and then, something, as in Dutch pictures, which had been as well away; but this apart, all the rest is true, and pleasant, and hearty; the grouping perfect, the colour faithful, and enduring too – despite the cruel sneer of Pope, who, in the Life of Curll, sarcastically alludes to her as "the cook's wife in Buckingham Court," in which vicinity to Spring Gardens, Mrs. Centlivre died in 1723.

Such were the characteristics of the principal authors who led, followed, trained, or flattered the public taste of the last half of the seventeenth century, and a few of them of the first part of the century which succeeded. Before we pass onward to the stage of the eighteenth century, let us cast a glance back, and look at the quality of the audiences for whom these poets catered.

CHAPTER XII

THE AUDIENCES OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Speedily after the Restoration, there was no more constant visitor at the theatre than Charles II., with a gay, and what is called a gallant, gathering. Thus we are arrested by a crowd at the Temple Gate. On the 15th of August 1661, Charles and the Duke and Duchess of York are leaving the apartments of the Reader, Sir Henry Finch, with whom they have been dining, and an eager audience is awaiting them in the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, where "The Wits" is to be represented, – a piece "never yet acted," says Pepys, "with scenes." Two nights later, the same piece is playing, and the Queen of Bohemia is there, "brought by my Lord Craven," whom some do not scruple to speak of as the ex-Queen's husband. A week later, Charles and "Madame Palmer" were at the theatre in Drury Lane, with the Duke of York and his wife. "My wife," says Pepys, "to her great content had a full sight of them all the while." The King's Madame Palmer became, in fact, an attraction; seated between Charles and his brother, Pepys beheld her a few weeks later, when he and his wife escorted Lord Sandwich's young daughters to the theatre, and obtained places close to Madame and her double escort. The play was Johnson's "Bartholomew Fair," with the puppets, and all its virulent satire against the Puritans. As Pepys listened and remembered that no one had dared to bring forward this slashing play for the last forty years, he wondered at the audacity of managers now, and grieved that the King should countenance it. But what recked the laughing King, when Puritanism was in the dust, and troops of cavaliers were singing, "Up go we?"

Occasionally, if Pepys witnesses a play ill-acted, he finds compensation in sitting near some "pretty and ingenious lady." At that time oranges were more costly than pines are now, and to offer one of the former, even to an unknown fair neighbour, was an intimation of a readiness on the part of the presenter to open a conversation. To behold his most sacred Majesty seated in his box was for ever, with Pepys, even a stronger attraction than the eyes or the wit of the fairest and sprightliest of ladies. Again and again, he registers a vow to refrain from resorting to the theatre during a certain period, but he no sooner hears of the presence there of his religious and gracious King, than he breaks his vow, rushes to the play, perjures himself out of loyal courtesy, and next morning writes himself down an ass.

At the Cockpit in Drury Lane, Charles's consort, Catherine, was exhibited to the English people for the first time on an autumn afternoon of 1662, when Shirley's "Cardinal" was represented. Pepys, of course, was there too, and reproduces the scene: "By very good fortune, I did follow four or five gentlemen who were carried to a little private door in a wall, and so crept through a narrow place, and came into one of the boxes next the King's, but so as I could not see the King or Queen, but many of the fine ladies, who are not really so handsome generally, as I used to take them to be, but that they are finely dressed. The company that come in with me into the box were all Frenchmen that could speak no English; but, Lord, what sport they made to ask a pretty lady that they got among them, that understood both French and English, to make her tell them what the actors said!"

Soon after this, in dreary November, there is again a crowded audience to greet the King and Queen, with whom now appears the Castlemaine, once more, and near her Lucy Walter's boy, the Duke of Monmouth, all beauty and pretty assurance; and Pepys sees no harm in a company who have come together to witness a comedy whose name might well describe the look and bearing of the outraged Queen, namely, the "Scornful Lady." No wonder that, in December, at the tragedy of "The Valiant Cid," she did not smile once during the whole play.70 But nobody present on that occasion seemed to take any pleasure but what was in the greatness and gallantry of the company.

That greatness and that gallantry were the idols of the diarist. With what scorn he talks of the audience at the Duke's Theatre a few days later, when the "Siege of Rhodes" was represented. He was ill-pleased. The house was "full of citizens!" "There was hardly," says the fastidious son of an honest tailor, "a gallant man or woman in the house!" So, in January 1663, at the same theatre, he records that "it was full of citizens, and so the less pleasant." The Duke's House was less "genteel" than the Cockpit; but the royal visitors at the latter were not much more refined in their manners than the audience in Lincoln's Inn Fields, or Salisbury Court. Early in January 1663, the Duke of York and his wife honoured a play of Killigrew's by their presence, and did not much edify the spectators by their conduct. "They did show," writes the immortal journalist, "some impertinent and methought unnatural dalliances there, before the whole world, such as kissing of hands, and leaning upon one another."

But there were worse scenes than these conjugal displays at the King's House. When Pepys was dying to obtain the only prize in all the world he desired, Lady Castlemaine's picture, that bold person was beginning to lose, at once, both her beauty and her place of favour with the King. Pepys was immensely grieved, for she was always more to him than the play and players to boot. He had reason, however, to be satisfied that she had not lost her boldness. In January, 1664, the "Indian Queen" was played at the King's House, in Drury Lane. Lady Castlemaine was present before the King arrived. When he entered his box, the Countess leaned over some ladies who sat between her and the royal box, and whispered to Charles. Having been thus bold in face of the audience, she arose, left her own box and appeared in the King's, where she deliberately took a place between Charles and his brother. It was not the King alone but the whole audience with him who were put out of countenance by this cool audacity, exhibited to prove that she was not so much out of favour as the world believed.

What a contrast is presented by the appearance of Cromwell's daughter, Lady Mary, in her box at this same theatre, with her husband, Viscount Falconbridge! Pepys praises her looks and her dress, and suggests a modest embarrassment on her part, as the house began to fill, and the admiring spectators began to gaze too curiously on Oliver's loved child; "she put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play, which of late has become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face."

Mary Cromwell, modestly masked, was a prettier sight than what Pepys on other occasion describes as "all the pleasure of the play;" meaning thereby, the presence of Lady Castlemaine, or of Miss Stewart, her rival in royal favour, but not her equal in peerless beauty. With these, but in less exalted company than they, we now meet with Nell Gwyn, in front of the house. She is seen gossiping with Pepys, who is ecstatic at the condescension; or she is blazing in the boxes, prattling with the young and scented fops, and impudently lying across any three of them, that she may converse as she pleases with a fourth. And there is Sir Charles Sedley looking on, smiling with or at the actors of these scenes, among the audience, or sharply and wittily criticising the players on the stage, and the words put into their mouths by the author, or flirting with vizard masks in the pit. Altogether, there is much confusion and interruption; but there is also, occasionally, disturbance of another sort, as when, in June 1664, a storm of hail and rain broke through the roof of the Kings House, and drove the half-drowned people from the pit in a disorder not at all admired.

Like Evelyn, Pepys was often at the Court plays, but, except with the spectacle of the Queen's ladies, and the King's too, for that matter, he found small delight there, – the house, although fine, being bad for hearing. This Court patronage, public and private, increased the popularity of the drama, as the vices of the King increased the fashion of being dissolute; and when Charles was sadly in need of a collecting of members of parliament to throw out a bill which very much annoyed him, and was carried against him, he bade the Lord Chamberlain to scour the play and other houses, where he knew his parliamentary friends were to be found, and to send them down to vote in favour of their graceless master.

Ladies of quality, and of good character, too, could in those days appear in masks in the boxes, and unattended. The vizard had not yet fallen to the disreputable. Such ladies as are above designated entered into struggles of wit with the fine gentlemen, bantering them unmercifully, calling them by their names, and refusing to tell their own. All this was to the disturbance of the stage, but this battle of the wits was so frequently more amusing than what might be passing for the moment on the stage, that the audience near listened to the disputants rather than to the actors. Sir Charles Sedley was remarkable as a disputant with the ladies, and as a critic of the players. That the overhearing of what was said by the most famous of the box visitors was a pleasant pastime of many hearers, is made manifest by Pepys, who once took his place on "the upper bench next the boxes," and described it as having "the advantage of seeing and hearing the great people, which may be pleasant when there is good store."

To no man then living in England did fellowship with people of quality convey such intense delight as to Pepys. "Lord!" he exclaims, in May 1667, "how it went against my heart to go away from the very door of the Duke's playhouse, and my Lady Castlemaine's coach, and many great coaches there, to see 'The Siege of Rhodes.' I was very near making a forfeit," he adds, "but I did command myself."

He was happiest with a baronet like Sir Philip Frowd at his side, and behind him a couple of impertinently pretty actresses, like Pierce and Knipp, pulling his hair, drawing him into gossiping flirtations, and inducing him to treat them with fruit. The constant presence of lively actresses in the front of the house was one of the features of the times, and a dear delight to Pepys, who was never weary of admiring their respective beauties.

Proud as he was of sitting, for the first time in his life, in a box, at four shillings, he still saw the pit occupied by greater men than any around him, particularly on the first night of a new piece. When Etherege's comedy, "She Would if She Could," was first played, in February 1668, to one of the most crowded, critical, and discontented audiences that had ever assembled in the Duke's House, the pit was brilliant with peers, gallants, and wits. There, openly, sat Buckingham, and Buckhurst, and Sedley, and the author, with many more; and there went on, as the audience waited till the pelting rain outside had ceased to fall, comment and counter-comment on the merits of the piece and of the actors. Etherege found fault with the players, but the public as loudly censured the piece, condemning it as silly and insipid, but allowing it to possess a certain share of wit and roguishness.

From an entry in the Diary for the 21st of December 1668, we learn that Lady Castlemaine had a double, who used to appear at the theatre to the annoyance of my lady and the amusement of her royal friend. Indeed, here is a group of illustrations of the "front of the stage;" the house is the Duke's, the play "Macbeth." "The King and Court there, and we sat just under them and my Lady Castlemaine, and close to a woman that comes into the pit, a kind of a loose gossip that pretends to be like her, and is so, something. The King and Duke of York minded me, and smiled upon me, at the handsome woman near me, but it vexed me to see Moll Davies, in a box over the King's and my Lady Castlemaine's, look down upon the King, and he up to her; and so did my Lady Castlemaine once, to see who it was; but when she saw Moll Davies, she looked like fire, which troubled me."

To these audiences were presented dramatic pieces of a very reprehensible quality. Charles II. has been more blamed than any other individual because of this licentiousness of the stage. I have before ventured to intimate, that the long-accepted idea that the court of Charles II. corrupted English society, and that it did so especially through patronising the licentiousness of poets and the stage, seems to me to be untenable. From of old there had been a corrupt society, and a society protesting against the corruption. Before Charles made his first visit to the theatre, there was lying in Newgate the ex-Royalist, but subsequently Puritan poet, George Wither. In the dedication of his Hallelujah, in 1641, he thus describes the contemporary condition of society: – "So innumerable are the foolish and profane songs now delighted in, to the dishonour of our language and religion, that hallelujahs and pious meditations are almost out of use and fashion; yea, not at private only, but at our public feasts, and civil meetings also, scurrilous and obscene songs are impudently sung, without respecting the reverend presence of matrons, virgins, magistrates or divines. Nay, sometimes in their despite they are called for, sung, and acted, with such abominable gesticulations, as are very offensive to all modest hearers and beholders, and fitting only to be exhibited at the diabolical assemblies of Bacchus, Venus, or Priapus."

In the collection of hymns, under this title of Hallelujah, there is a hymn for every condition in and circumstance of life, from the King to the Tailor; from a hymn for the use of two ardent lovers, to a spiritual song of grateful resignation "for a Widower or a Widow deprived of a troublesome Yokefellow!" There is none for the player; but there is this hit at the poets, who supplied him with unseemly phrases, and the flattering friends who crowned such bards: —

"Blasphemous fancies are infused,All holy new things are expell'd,He that hath most profanely mused,Is famed as having most excelled:Such are those poets in these days,Who vent the fumes of lust and wine,Then crown each others' heads with bays,As if their poems were divine."

Against the revived fashion of licentious plays, some of the wisest men among theatrical audiences protested loudly. No man raised his voice with greater urgency than Evelyn. Within six years of the Restoration, he, who was in frequency of playgoing only second to Pepys, but as sharp an observer and a graver censor than the Admiralty clerk, addressed a letter to Lord Cornbury on this important subject. The letter was written a few weeks previous to the Lent season of 1665, and the writer mourns over a scandal less allowed in any city of Christendom, than in the metropolis of England, namely – "the frequency of our theatrical pastimes during the indiction of Lent. Here in London," he says, "there were more wicked and obscene plays permitted than in all the world besides. At Paris three days, at Rome two weekly, and at the other cities, Florence, Venice, &c., only at certain jolly periods of the year, and that not without some considerable emolument to the public, while our interludes here are every day alike; so as the ladies and the gallants come reeking from the play late on Saturday night" (was Saturday then a fashionable day for late performances?) "to their Sunday devotions; and the ideas of the farce possess their fancies to the infinite prejudice of devotion, besides the advantages it gives to our reproachful blasphemers." Evelyn, however, does not pursue his statement to a logical conclusion. He proposes to close the houses on Friday and Saturday, or to represent plays on these nights only for the benefit of paupers in or out of the workhouses. Remembering rather the actresses who disgraced womanhood, than such an exemplary and reproachless pair as Betterton and his wife, he recommends robbery of the "debauched comedians," as he calls them, without scruple. What if they be despoiled of a hundred or so a year? They will still enjoy more than they were ever born to; and the sacrifice, he quaintly says, will consecrate their scarce allowable impertinences. He adds, with a seriousness which implies his censure of the royal approval of the bad taste which had brought degradation on the stage – "Plays are now with us become a licentious excess, and a vice, and need severe censors, that should look as well to their morality as to their lines and numbers."

This grave and earnest censor, however, allowed himself to be present at stage representations which he condemns. He objects but does not refrain. He witnesses masques at Court, and says little; enjoys his play, and denounces the enjoyment, in his diary, when he reaches home. He has as acute an eye on the behaviour of the ladies, especially among the audience, as for what is being uttered on the stage. "I saw the tragedy of 'Horace,'" he tells us, in February 1668, "written by the virtuous Mrs. Phillips, acted before their Majesties. Betwixt each act a masque and antique dance." Then speaking of the audience, where the King's "lady" was wont to outblaze the King's "wife," he adds: – "The excessive gallantry of the ladies was infinite: those especially on that … Castlemaine, esteemed at £40,000 and more, far outshining the Queen." Later in the year he is at a new play of Dryden's, "with several of my relations." He describes the plot as "foolish, and very profane. It afflicted me," he continues, "to see how the stage was degenerated and polluted by the licentious times."

When forming part of the audience, by invitation of the Lord Chamberlain, at the Court plays, at Whitehall, in September 1666, Evelyn uses as freely his right of judgment. He sat ill at ease in the public theatres, because they were abused, he says, "to an atheistical liberty." The invitation to see Lord Broghill's "Mustapha" played before the King and Queen, in presence of a splendid court, was a command. Evelyn attended; but as he looked around, he bethought him of the London that was lying in charred ruins, and he sorrowingly records his disapproval of "any such pastime in a time of such judgments and calamities." With better times come weaker censures on these amusements; and the representation of the "Conquest of Granada," at Whitehall in 1671, wins his admiration for the "very glorious scenes and perspectives, the work of Mr. Streeter, who well understands it." In the following year, although not frequenting court plays, he takes a whole bevy of maids of honour from court to the play. Among them was one of whom he makes especial mention, on account of her many and extraordinary virtues, which had gained his especial esteem. This grave maid, among the two vivacious ladies whom Evelyn 'squired to an afternoon's play, was Mistress Blagg, better known to us from Evelyn's graceful sketch of her life, as Mrs. Godolphin.

Mrs. Blagg was herself not the less a lovely actress for being a discreet and virtuous young lady. In 167571 Evelyn saw her act in Crowne's masque-comedy, "Calisto, or the Chaste Nymph." His friend acted in a noble but mixed company – all ladies – namely, the Ladies Mary and Anne, afterwards Queens of England, the Lady Henrietta Wentworth, afterwards the evilly-impelled favourite of the Duke of Monmouth, and Miss Jennings, subsequently the sharp-witted wife of the great Duke of Marlborough. There were others of less note, with professional actresses to aid them, while a corps-de-ballet of peers and nymphs of greater or less repute, danced between the acts. For the piece, or for the interludes, Evelyn had less admiration than he had for Mrs. Blagg's splendour. She had about her, he informs us, £20,000 worth of jewels, of which she had lost one worth about £80, borrowed of the Countess of Suffolk. "The press was so great," he adds, "that it is a wonder she lost no more;" and the intimation that "the Duke" (of York) "made it good," shows that Mrs. Blagg was fortunate in possessing the esteem of that not too liberal prince. The entire stage arrangements at Whitehall were not invariably of a liberal character, and the audiences must have had, on some occasions, an uncourtly aspect; "people giving money to come in," he writes in this same year 1675, "which was very scandalous, and never so before at Court-diversions."

Of the turbulence of audiences in those days, there are many evidences on record. It was sometimes provoked, at others altogether unjustifiable, and always more savage than humorous. In 1669, Mrs. Corey gratified Lady Castlemaine, by giving an imitation of Lady Harvey, throughout the whole of the part of Sempronia, in "Catiline's Conspiracy." Lady Harvey, much excited, had influence enough with her brother, Edward Montagu, Lord Chamberlain, to induce him to lock Mrs. Corey up, for her impertinence. On the other hand, Lady Castlemaine had still greater influence with the King; and not only was Mrs. Corey released, but she was "ordered to act it again, worse than ever." Doll Common, as the actress was called, for her ability in playing that part in the "Alchymist," repeated the imitation, with the required extravagance, but not without opposition; for Lady Harvey had hired a number of persons, some of whom hissed Doll, while others pelted her with fruit, and the King looked on the while, amazed at the contending factions, whose quarrels subsequently brought him much weariness in the settling.

Then, again, much disturbance often arose from noisy, financial squabbles. It was a custom to return the price of admission to all persons who left the theatre before the close of the first act. Consequently, many shabby persons were wont to force their way in without paying, on the plea that they did not intend to remain beyond the time limited. Thence much noisy remonstrance on the part of the door-keepers, who followed them into the house; and therewith such derangement of the royal comfort, that a special decree was issued, commanding payment to be made on entering; but still allowing the patron of the drama to recover his money, if he withdrew on or before the close of the first act.