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

But there were greater scandals than these. On the 2d of February 1679, there is a really awful commotion, and imminent peril to house and audience, at the Duke's Theatre. The King's French favourite, the Duchess of Portsmouth, is blazing with rouge, diamonds, and shamelessness, in the most conspicuous seat in the house. Some tipsy gentlemen in the street hard by, hear of her wit and handsome presence, and the morality of these drunkards is straightway incensed. The house is panic-stricken at seeing these virtuous Goths rushing into the pit, with drawn swords in one hand – flaming, smoking, ill-smelling torches, in the other; and with vituperative cries against "the Duchess of Portsmouth, and other persons of honour." The rioters, not satisfied with thrusting their rapiers at the arms, sides, and legs of the affrighted people in the pit, hurl their blazing torches among the astounded actors on the stage! A panic and a general flight ensue. The house is saved from destruction; but as it is necessary to punish somebody, the King satisfies his sense of justice by pressing hard upon the innocent actors, and shutting up the house during the royal pleasure!

Much liquor, sharp swords, and angry tempers, combined to interrupt the enjoyment of many a peaceful audience. An angry word, passed, one April evening of 1682, between Charles Dering, the son of Sir Edward, and the hot-blooded young Welshman, Mr. Vaughan, led to recrimination and sword-drawing. The two young fellows, not having elbow-room in the pit, clambered on to the stage, and fought there, to the greater comfort of the audience, and with a more excited fury on the part of the combatants. The stage was that of the Duke's Company, then playing in Dorset Gardens. The adversaries fought on, till Dering got a thrust from the Welshman which stretched him on the boards; whereupon the authorities intervened, as there was no more mischief to be done, and put Master Vaughan under restraint, till Dering's wound was declared not to be mortal.

The 'tiring rooms of the actresses were then open to the fine gentlemen who frequented the house. They stood by at the mysteries of dressing, and commented on what they beheld and did not behold, with such breadth and coarseness of wit, that the more modest or least impudent ladies sent away their little handmaidens. The dressing over, the amateurs lounged into the house, talked loudly with the pretty orange girls, listened when it suited them, and at the termination of the piece crowded again into the 'tiring room of the most favourite and least scrupulous of the actresses. Among these gallants who thus oscillated between the pit and the dressing bowers of the ladies, was a Sir Hugh Middleton, who is not to be confounded with his namesake of the New River. On the second Saturday of February 1667, Sir Hugh was among the joyous damsels dressing for the play, behind the stage of old Drury. The knight was so unpleasantly critical on the nymphs before him, that one of them, sharp-tongued Beck Marshall, bade him keep among the ladies of the Duke's House, since he did not approve of those who served the King. Sir Hugh burst out with a threat, that he would kick, or what was worse, hire his footman to kick, her. The pretty but angry Rebecca nursed her wrath all Sunday; but on Monday she notified the ungallant outrage to the great champion of insulted dames, the King. Nothing immediately came of it; and on Tuesday, there was Sir Hugh, glowering at her from the front of the house, and waylaying her, as she was leaving it with a friend. Sir Hugh whispers a ruffianly-looking fellow, who follows the actress, and presses upon her so closely, that she is moved by a double fear – that he is about to rob, and perhaps stab her. A little scream scares the bravo for a minute or so. He skulks away, but anon slinks back; and, armed with the first offensive missile he could pick up in a Drury Lane gutter, he therewith anoints the face and hair of the much-shocked actress, and then, like the valiant fellows of his trade, takes to his heels. The next day, sweet as Anadyomene rising from the sea, the actress appeared before the King, and charged Sir Hugh with being the abettor of this gross outrage. How the knight was punished, the record in the State Paper Office does not say; but about a fortnight later a royal decree was issued, which prohibited gentlemen from entering the 'tiring rooms of the ladies of the King's Theatre. For some nights the gallants sat ill at ease among the audience; but the journals of the period show that the nymphs must have been as little pleased with this arrangement as the fine gentlemen themselves, who soon found their way back to pay the homage of flattery to the most insatiable of goddesses.

Not that all the homage was paid to the latter. The wits loved to assemble, after the play was done, in the dressing-rooms of the leading actors with whom they most cared to cultivate an intimacy. Much company often congregated here, generally with the purpose of assigning meetings, where further enjoyment might be pursued.

Then, when it was holiday with the legislature, the house was filled with parliament-men. On one of these occasions, Pepys records, "how a gentleman of good habit, sitting just before us, eating of some fruit in the midst of the play, did drop down as dead; but with much ado, Orange Moll did thrust her finger down his throat, and brought him to life again." This was an incident of the year 1667.

Returning to the front of the stage, we find the ladies in the boxes subjected to the audible criticisms of "the little cockerells of the pit," as Ravenscroft calls them, with whom the more daring damsels entered into a smart contest of repartees. As the "play-house" was then the refuge of all idle young people, these wit-combats were listened to with interest, from the town fops to the rustic young squires, who came to the theatre in cordivant gloves, and were quite unconscious of poisoning the affected fine ladies with the smell of them. The poets used to assert that all the wit of the pittites was stolen from the plays which they read or saw acted. It seemed the privilege of the box-loungers to have none, or to perform other services; namely, to sit all the evening by a mistress, or to blaze from "Fop's corner," or to mark the modest women, by noting those who did not use their fans through a whole play, nor turn aside their heads, nor, by blushing, discover more guilt than modesty. Thrice happy was she who found the greatest number of slaves at the door of her box, waiting obsequiously to hand or escort her to her chair. These beaux were hard to fix, so erratic were they in their habits. They ran, as Gatty pertinently has it, "from one play-house to the other play-house; and if they like neither the play nor the women, they seldom stay any longer than the combing of their perriwigs, or a whisper or two with a friend, and then they cock their caps, and out they strut again." With fair and witty strangers these gay fellows, their eyebrows and perriwigs redolent of the essence of orange and jasmine, entered into conversation, till a gentleman's name, called by a door-keeper in the passage, summoned him to impatient companions, waiting for him outside; when he left the "censure" of his appearance to critical observers, like those who ridiculed the man of mode for "his gloves drawn up to his elbows and his perriwig more exactly curled than a lady's head newly dressed for a ball."

Of the vizard-masks, Cibber tells the whole history in a few words: "I remember the ladies were then observed to be decently afraid of venturing bare-faced to a new comedy, till they had been assured they might do it without insult to their modesty; or if their curiosity were too strong for their patience, they took care at least to save appearances, and rarely came in the first days of acting but in masks, which custom, however, had so many ill consequences attending it, that it has been abolished these many years."

The poets sometimes accused the ladies of blushing, not because of offence, but from constraint on laughter. Farquhar's Pindress says to Lucinda, "Didn't you chide me for not putting a stronger lace in your stays, when you had broke one as strong as a hempen-cord with containing a violent ti-hee at a – jest in the last play?"

Cibber describes the beaux of the seventeenth century as being of quite a different stamp from the more modern sort. The former "had more of the stateliness of the peacock in their mien," whereas the latter seemed to place their highest emulation in imitating "the pert air of a lapwing." The greatest possible compliment was paid to Cibber by the handsome, witty, blooming young fop, Brett, who was so enchanted with the wig the former wore as Sir Novelty Fashion, in "Love's Last Shift," that fancying the wearing it might ensure him success among the ladies, he went round to Cibber's dressing-room, and entered into negotiations for the purchase of that wonderful cataract perriwig. The fine gentlemen among the audience had, indeed, the credit of being less able to judge of a play than of a peruke; and Dryden speaks of an individual as being "as invincibly ignorant as a town-sop judging of a new play."

Lord Foppington, in 1697, did not pretend to be a beau; but he remarks, "a man must endeavour to look wholesome, lest he make so nauseous a figure in the side-box, the ladies should be compelled to turn their eyes upon the play." It was the "thing" to look upon the company, unless some irresistible attraction drew attention to the stage; and the curtain down, the beau became active in the service of the ladies generally. "Till nine o'clock," says Lord Foppington, "I amuse myself by looking on the company, and usually dispose of one hour more in leading them out."

Some fine gentlemen were unequal to such gallantry. At these, Southerne glances in his "Sir Anthony Love," where he describes the hard drinkers who "go to a tavern to swallow a drunkenness, and then to a play, to talk over their liquor." And these had their counterparts in

"the youngsters of a noisy pit,Whose tongues and mistresses, outran their wit."

It was, however, much the same in the boxes, where the beaux' oath was "zauns," it being token of a rustic blasphemer to say "zounds;" and where, though a country squire might say, "bless us!" it was the mark of a man of fashion to cry, "dem me!"

With such personages in pit and boxes, we may rest satisfied that there was a public to match in the gallery – a peculiar as well as a general public.

A line in a prologue of the year 1672, "The stinking footman's sent to keep your places," alludes to a custom by which the livery profited. Towards the close of the century, the upper gallery of Drury Lane was opened to footmen, gratis. They were supposed to be in attendance on their masters, but these rather patronised the other house, and as Drury could not attract the nobility, it courted the favour of their not very humble servants. Previously, the lacqueys were admitted after the close of the fourth act of the play. They became the most clamorous critics in the house. It was the custom, when these fellows passed the money-taker, to name their master, who was supposed to be in the boxes; but many frauds were practised. A stalwart, gold-laced, thick-calved, irreverent lacquey swaggered past money and check-taker one afternoon, and named "the Lord – ," adding the name which the Jews of old would never utter, out of fear and reverence. "The Lord – !" said the money-taker to his colleague, after the saucy footman had flung by, "who is he?" "Can't say," was the reply; "some poor Scotch lord, I suppose!" Such is an alleged sample of the ignorance and the blasphemy of the period.

Returning to the pit, I find, with the critics and other good men there, a sprinkling of clerical gentlemen, especially of chaplains; their patrons, perhaps, being in the boxes. In the papers of the day, in the year 1697, I read of a little incident which illustrates social matters, and which, probably, did not much trouble the theatrical cleric who went to the pit so strangely provided. "There was found," says the paragraph, "in the pit of the playhouse, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, on Whitsun Eve, a qualification, signed by the Right Honourable the Lord Dartmouth to the Reverend Mr. Nicholson, to be his Chaplain Extraordinary; the said qualification being wrapped up in a black taffety cap, together with a bottle-screw, a knotting needle, and a ball of sky-colour and white knotting. If the said Mr. Nicholson will repair to the pit-keeper's house, in Vinegar Yard, at the Crooked Billet, he shall have the moveables restored, giving a reasonable gratitude."

Probably Mr. Nicholson did not claim his qualification. His patron was son of the Lord Dartmouth who corresponded with James II. while expressing allegiance to William III., and was subsequently Queen Anne's Secretary of State, and the annotator of Burnet's History of his Own Times.

The audiences of King William's time were quick at noticing and applying political allusions; and Government looked as sharply after the dramatic poets as it did after the Jacobite plotters. When much intercourse was going on between the exiled king at St. Germains and his adherents in this country, a Colonel Mottley (of whose son, as a dramatist, I shall have occasion to speak in a future page) was sent over by James with despatches. The Earl of Nottingham laid watch for him at the Blue Posts, in the Haymarket, but the Secretary's officers missed the Colonel, seizing in his place a Cornish gentleman, named Tredenham, who was seated in a room, surrounded by papers, and waiting for the Colonel.

Tredenham and the documents were conveyed in custody before the Earl, to whom the former explained that he was a poet, sketching out a play, that the papers seized formed portion of the piece, and that he had nothing to do with plots against his Majesty de facto. Daniel Finch, however, was as careful to read the roughly-sketched play, as if it had been the details of a conspiracy; and then the author was summoned before him. "Well, Mr. Tredenham," said he, "I have perused your play, and heard your statement, and as I can find no trace of a plot in either, I think you may go free."

The sincerity of the audiences of those days is something doubtful, if that be true which Dryden affirms, that he observed, namely, that "in all our tragedies the audience cannot forbear laughing when the actors are to die: 'tis the most comic part of the whole play." He says, all our tragedies; but we know that such was not the case when the heroes of Shakspeare, represented by Betterton, Hart, or Harris, suffered mimic dissolution, and it is but a fair suggestion that it was only in the bombast and fustian tragedies, in which death was the climax of a comic situation, and treated bombastically, that the audiences were moved to laughter.

Sincere or not, the resident Londoners were great playgoers, and gadders generally. I have already quoted Bishop Hackett on this matter. Sermons thus testify to a matter of fashion. It appears from a play, Dryden's "Sir Martin Marall," that if Londoners were the permanent patrons, the country "quality" looked for an annual visit. At the present time it is the visitors and not the residents in London who most frequent the theatre. "I came up, as we country gentlewomen use, at an Easter Term, to the destruction of tarts and cheesecakes, to see a new play, buy a new gown, take a turn in the park, and so down again to sleep with my forefathers."

This resort to the theatres displeased better men than non-juring Collier. Mirthful-minded South, he who preached to the Merchant Tailors of the remnant that should be saved, calls theatres "those spiritual pest-houses, where scarce anything is to be heard or seen but what tends to the corruption of good manners, and from whence not one of a thousand returns, but, infected with the love of vice, or at least with the hatred of it very much abated from what it was before. And that, I assure you, is no inconsiderable point gained by the tempter, as those who have any experience of their own hearts sufficiently know. He who has no mind to trade with the devil, should be so wise as to keep away from his shop." South objects to a corrupt, not to a "well-trod stage."

Yet South, like Collier later, laid to the scene much of the sin of the age.

If we were to judge of the character of women by the comedies of the last half of the seventeenth century, we might conclude that they were all, without exception, either constantly at the play, or constantly wishing to be there. But the Marquis of Halifax, in his Advice to a Daughter, shows that they were only a class. "Some ladies," he says, "are bespoke for merry meetings, as Bessus was for duels. They are engaged in a circle of idleness, where they turn round, for the whole year, without the interruption of a serious hour. They know all the players' names, and are intimately acquainted with all the booths at Bartholomew Fair. The spring, that bringeth out Flies and Fools, maketh them inhabitants in Hyde Park. In the winter, they are an encumbrance to the play-house, and the ballast of the drawing-room."

We may learn how the playhouse, encumbered by the fast ladies of bygone years, stood, and what were the prospects of the stage at this time, by looking into a private epistle. A few lines in a letter from "Mr. Vanbrook" (afterwards Sir John Vanbrugh) to the Earl of Manchester, and written on Christmas Day, 1699, will show the position and hopes of the stage as that century was closing. "Miss Evans," he writes, "the dancer at the new play-house, is dead; a fever slew her in eight and forty hours. She's much lamented by the town, as well as by the house, who can't well bear her loss; matters running very low with 'em this winter. If Congreve's play don't help 'em they are undone. 'Tis a comedy, and will be played about six weeks hence. Nobody has seen it yet." The same letter informs us that Dick Leveridge, the bass singer of Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, was tarrying in Ireland, rather than face his creditors in England, and that Dogget (of whom there is no account, during the years 1698, 1699, 1700), had been playing for a week at the above theatre, for the sum of £30! This is the first instance I know of, of the "starring" system; and it is remarkable that the above sum should have been given for six nights' performances, when Betterton's salary did not exceed £5 per week.

The century closed ill for the stage. Congreve's play, "The Way of the World," failed to give it any lustre. Dancers, tumblers, strong men, and quadrupeds, were called in to attract the town; and the Elephant at the Great Mogul, in Fleet Street, "drew" to such an extent that he would have been brought upon the stage, but for the opinion of a master-carpenter, that he would pull the house down. There was an empty treasury at both the theatres. There was ill-management at one, and ill-health (the declining health of Betterton) to mar the other. And so closes the half century.

Note. – In the second edition, after the words, "This is the first instance of the 'starring' system," Dr. Doran adds: – If Dogget was the first star, he was also an early stroller, and head of a strolling company. Each member wore a brocaded waistcoat, rode his own horse, and was everywhere respected, as a gentleman. So says Aston, reminding one of Hamlet's "Then came each actor on his ass."

Steele, in the Tatler (No. 12), speaks of the manager, MacSwiney, as "little King Oberon," who mortgaged his whole empire (the theatre) to Divito (Christopher Rich), whom Steele thus describes: "He has a perfect skill in being unintelligible in discourse, and uncomeatable in business. But he, having no understanding in this polite way, brought in upon us, to get in his money, ladder-dancers, rope-dancers, jugglers, and mountebanks, to strut in the place of Shakspeare's heroes and Jonson's humorists."

CHAPTER XIII

A SEVEN YEARS' RIVALRY

The great players, by giving action to the poet's words, illustrated the quaintly expressed idea of the sweet singer who says:

"What Thought can think another Thought can mend."

Nevertheless, the theatres had not proved profitable. The public greeted acrobats with louder acclaim than any poet. King William cared more to see the feats of Kentish Patagonians than to listen to Shakspeare; and, for a time, Dogget, by creating laughter, reaped more glittering reward than Betterton, by drawing tears. The first season, however, of the eighteenth century was commenced with great spirit. Drury Lane opened with Cibber's "Love Makes a Man," an adaptation from Beaumont and Fletcher. Cibber was the Clodio; Wilks, Carlos; and Mrs. Verbruggen, Louisa. Five other new pieces were produced in this brief season. This was followed by the "Humour of the Age," a dull comedy, by Baker, who generally gave his audience something to laugh at, and showed some originality in more than one of his five pieces. He was an attorney's son, and an Oxford University man; but he took to writing for the stage, had an ephemeral success, and died early, in worse plight than any author, even in the days when authors occasionally died in evil condition. The third novelty was Settle's mad operatic tragedy, the "Siege of Troy,"72 with a procession in which figured six white elephants! Griffin returned to the stage from the army, with "Captain" attached to his name, and played Ulysses. The dulness and grandeur of Settle's piece were hardly relieved by Farquhar's sequel to his "Constant Couple," "Sir Harry Wildair." The reputation of the former piece secured for the latter a run of nine nights, so were successes calculated in those early days. Wilks laid down Sir Harry to enact the distresses of Lorraine, in Mrs. Trotter's new play, "The Unhappy Penitent," which gave way in turn for Durfey's intriguing comedy, "The Bath, or the Western Lass," in which Mrs. Verbruggen's "Gillian Homebred," made her the darling of the town. In the same season, the company at Lincoln's Inn Fields produced a like number of new pieces. In the first, the "Double Distress," Booth, Verbruggen, Mrs. Barry, and Mrs. Bracegirdle wasted their talents. Mrs. Pix, the author, having failed in this mixture of rhyme and blank verse, failed in a greater degree in her next play in prose, the "Czar of Muscovy." Booth and Mrs. Barry could do nothing with such materials. The masters forthwith enacted the "Lady's Visiting Day," by Burnaby. In this comedy, Betterton played the gallant lover, Courtine, to the Lady Lovetoy of Mrs. Barry. The lady here would only marry a prince. Courtine wins her as Prince Alexander of Muscovy; and the audience laughed as they recognised therein the incident of the merry Lord Montagu wooing the mad Duchess-Dowager of Albemarle, as the Empress of China, and marrying her under that very magnificent dignity, to any inferior to which the Duchess had declared she would not stoop.

The hilarity of the public was next challenged by the production of Granville (Lord Lansdowne's) "Jew of Venice," – "improved" from Shakspeare, who was described as having furnished the rude sketches which had been amended and adorned by Granville's new master-strokes!73

Gildon's dull piece of Druidism, "Love's Victim, or the Queen of Wales," appeared and failed,74 notwithstanding its wonderful cast; but Corye's "Cure for Jealousy" brought the list of novelties merrily to a close; for though the audience saw no fun in it, they did in the anger of the author – a little man, with a whistle of a voice, who abandoned the law for the stage, and was as weak an actor as he was an author. He attributed his failure to the absurd admiration of the public for Farquhar. He was absurd enough to say so in print, and to speak contemptuously of poor George's "Jubilee Farce." In those wicked days, literary men loved not each other!

In 1702, the Drury Lane Company brought out eight new pieces, and worked indefatigably. They commenced with Dennis's "Comical Gallant," – an "improved" edition of Shakspeare's "Merry Wives," in which Powell made but a sorry Falstaff. This piece gave way to one entirely original, and very much duller, the "Generous Conqueror," of the ex-fugitive Jacobite, Bevil Higgons. In this poor play, Bevil illustrated the right divine and impeccability of his late liege sovereign, King James; denounced the Revolution, by implication; did in his only play what Dr. Sacheverell did in the pulpit, and made even his fellow Jacobites laugh by his bouncing line, "The gods and god-like kings can do no wrong."