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

On the night of representation, Rowe, in a prologue – he was now Poet Laureate and Land Surveyor of the Customs in the Port of London, deprecated the piece being considered unjustifiably discourteous.

"Think not our colours may too strongly paintThe stiff non-juring separation saint.Good breeding ne'er commands us to be civilTo those who give the nation to the devil!"

The play was admirably acted by Booth, Colonel Woodvil; Mills, Sir John; Wilks, Heartley; Cibber, Dr. Wolf (the Cantwell of the modern arrangement); and Walker (soon to be famous as Captain Macheath), Charles. Mrs. Porter played Lady Woodvil, and Mrs. Oldfield turned the heads and touched the hearts of all lively and susceptible folks by her exquisite coquetry, in Maria. The play was not a servile imitation of, but an excellent adaptation to modern circumstances of, the "Tartuffe." Thoroughly English, it abounds with the humour and manner of Cibber, and despite some offences against taste, it was at this time the purest comedy on the stage. There was farce enough for the gallery, maxim and repartee, suggestions and didactic phrases for the rest of the house. The success surpassed even expectation. It raised against Cibber a phalanx of implacable foes – foes who howled at everything of which he was, afterwards, the author; but it gained for him his advancement to the poet-laureateship, and an estimation which caused some people to place him, for usefulness to the cause of true religion, on an equality with the author of "The Whole Duty of Man!" Cibber foresaw the tempest, and, probably, also the prosperous gales which were to follow, to which there is some allusion in the Epilogue spoken by Mrs. Oldfield, which, of course, had a fling against marriage: —

"Was't not enough that critics might pursue him?But must he rouse a party to undo him?These blows, I told him, on his plays would fall:But he, unmov'd, cried, – 's blood! we'll stand it all!"

In the theatre itself the opposition to the piece was confined, Cibber says, to "a few smiles of silent contempt. As the satire was chiefly employed on the enemies of the Government, they were not so hardy as to own themselves such, by any higher disapprobation or resentment." They made up for this constrained silence, as above noted, and Mist's Journal, for fifteen years, lost no opportunity of mauling the detested offender. With the editor of that paper, says Cibber, "though I could never persuade my wit to have an open account with him (for, as he had no effects of his own, I did not think myself obliged to answer his bills), notwithstanding, I will be so charitable to his real manes, and to the ashes of his paper, as to mention one particular civility he paid to my memory after he thought he had ingeniously killed me. Soon after the 'Nonjuror' had received the favour of the town, I read in one of his journals the following short paragraph: – 'Yesterday died Mr. Colley Cibber, late comedian of the Theatre Royal, notorious for writing the Nonjuror.' The compliment, in the latter part, I confess," adds Cibber, "I did not dislike, because it came from so impartial a judge."

The stage lost this year an excellent actor, Irish Bowen, who, at the age of fifty-two, was slain in duel by young Quin.104 Hitherto the sword had dealt lightly with actors. In 1692, indeed, Sandford nearly killed Powell, on the stage. On the 13th of October they were acting together, in "Œdipus, King of Thebes," when the former, to whom a real dagger had been delivered by the property-man, instead of a weapon, the blade of which run up, when the point was pressed, into the handle, gave poor Powell a stab three inches deep; the wound was, at first, thought to be mortal, but Powell recovered. Five years later, in July 1697, I find brief mention in the papers of a duel between an actor and an officer. The initials only of the principals are given: "Mr. H., an actor, of Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, fought Mr. D., an officer, at Barnes Elms." Whether the former was young Hodgson or young Harris is not now to be determined, nor the grounds of the quarrel. The issue of it was that the player dangerously wounded the soldier; and it is added, that both parties exhibited brilliant courage. Bowen was the original representative of Sir Joshua105 Wittol ("Old Batchelor"), Jeremy ("Love for Love"), and Foigard ("Beaux' Stratagem").

Quin passed over to Lincoln's Inn Fields in this season of 1717-18, where he played Hotspur, Tamerlane, Morat ("Aurungzebe"), Mark Antony, and created the part of Scipio, in the "Scipio Africanus," written by young Beckingham, the pride of Merchant Tailors' School. Beckingham must also have been the pride of Fleet Street, and especially of the craft of linen-drapers, of which his father was a worthy and well-to-do member. The piece was played on the 18th of February 1718. The author was then but nineteen years of age, and was full of bright promise. A tragedy by one so young, excited the public, and most especially the juvenile public, at Merchant Tailors', where Dr. Smith was head-master. The Doctor and sub-masters held the stage in abhorrence till now, when a brilliant alumnus was likely to shed lustre on the corporation of "Merchant Tailors and Linen Armourers." Now they proclaimed high jubilee, gave the lads a half-holiday on the author's night, and joyfully saw the whole school swarming to the pit of Lincoln's Inn, to uphold the tragedy by this honoured condiscipulus. The masters, in this, acted against their own former precept and example; but they made amends for it by religious zeal, and by expelling all the Jewish pupils from the school! Israel was the scapegoat, and the Christian sense of propriety was gratified. But Quin's Scipio established a taste for theatricals at Merchant Tailors', where classical plays were acted, for some years, as at Westminster. Beckingham's tragedy exhibits a romantic story, or stories, in a classical costume. There is severity enough to gratify rigid tastes, with a little of over-warmth of action on the part of one of three lovers, which shows that the young poet was not unread in the older masters.

But there were worse and better plays than "Scipio" brought out on the same stage this season. Taverner failed in a pendant to his "Artful Husband," the "Artful Wife." Bullock did little for the credit of the stage by his farce of the "Perjuror," and Sir Thomas Moore justly criticised his own tragedy of "Mangora, King of the Timbusians," when he called it a "trifle." It is a very noisy trifle, concerned with love, battle, murder, and worse, between the Spaniards and South American Indians. Rich thought its bustle might carry its absurdities successfully through, and Sir Thomas stimulated the actors, when at rehearsal, by inviting them to supper, at which Leigh, the two Bullocks, Williams, Ogden, Knapp, and Giffard, Mistresses Knight, Bullock, and Kent, made a joyous party, as hilarious as the audience was, whose laughter alone prevented them from hissing down the nonsense of an obscure man who was knighted for some forgotten service – certainly not for any rendered to the Muses.

The piece of this season which had stuff in it to cause it to live to our own times, was Mrs. Centlivre's "Bold Stroke for a Wife." Sprightly Mrs. Centlivre was as fervent a Whig as Cibber, and had written verses enough in praise of Brunswick to entitle her to be Poetess-Laureate, had the Princess Caroline had a voice in the matter, when Rowe died this very year, and Newcastle recommended tipsy Eusden for the office of "birthday fibber." The "Bold Stroke," laughed at and denounced by Wilks, and taken reluctantly in hand by the actors, is a fair specimen of that lighter comedy which borders upon farce, but in which the fun is genuine, and the incidents not so improbable but that they may be accepted, or, by the rapidity of their succession, laughed at and forgotten.

This season, withal, was not successful. It broke the heart of Keen, actor and sharer. In the former capacity, though Savage thought his life worth narrating, he won few laurels, – but his wreath was not entirely leafless. He was loved, too, by his brethren of both houses, whose subscriptions defrayed the expenses of a funeral, at which upwards of two hundred persons walked in deep mourning.106

At this time, Drury, with its old, strong company, was patronised by court and town. Plays, acted at Hampton Court, before the King, were repeated in the public theatre. Of the former, I shall speak in a future page. Two new comedies proved, indeed, inferior to Mrs. Centlivre's "Bold Stroke," at the other house. Charles Johnson's "Masquerade," borrowed a little from Shirley, and more from Molière, furnished, in Ombre and Lady Frances Ombre, some ideas, probably, to Cibber, when he placed a similar pair on the stage, in Lord and Lady Townley. A worse piece was more successful, – the rambling comedy, "Chit Chat," by a Mr. Thomas Killigrew, a gentleman who, like his namesake, had a place at court, but not his namesake's wit. The courtiers, with the Duke of Argyle at their head, carried the piece through eleven representations, and enriched the treasury by £1000.

The great effort of the season was made in bringing out "Busiris," a tragedy, by the Rev. Dr. Young, author of Night Thoughts. It was played on March 7, 1719, by Booth, Elrington, Wilks, Mills, Walker and Thurmond, Mrs. Oldfield and Mrs. Thurmond.

"Busiris" was Young's earliest tragedy. It is written in a stilted and inflated style, and bears all the marks of a juvenile production. The plot of the piece is void of all ingenuity; but there is little that is borrowed in it, save the haughty message sent by Busiris to the Persian Ambassador, which is the same as that returned by the Ethiopian prince to Cambyses, in the third book of Herodotus. Of the phrasing, and indeed of the incidents of this tragedy, Fielding made excellent fun, in his mock tragedy of "Tom Thumb." The sovereigns and courtiers of Egypt gave little trouble to be converted into Arthur and Dollalolla, Noodle, Doodle, the great little prince, and Huncamunca. The travestie is rich and facile; not least so in that passage mimicking the various addresses to the sun, who is bid to rise no more, but hide his face and put the world in mourning, On these, Fielding remarks, that "the author of 'Busiris' is extremely anxious to prevent the sun's blushing at any indecent object; and, therefore, on all such occasions, he addresses himself to the sun, and desires him to keep out of the way." It was dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle, the patron of Eusden, the laureat, "because the late instances he had received of his grace's undeserved and uncommon favour, in an affair of some consequence, foreign to the theatre, had taken from him the privilege of choosing a patron." If this favour consisted in rewarding Young for writing for the court, the favour may have been "undeserved," but it was by no means "uncommon."

The concluding incident of this play, – the double suicide of Memnon (Wilks) and Mandane (Mrs. Oldfield), found such favour in the author's own estimation, that he repeated it in his next two tragedies, in each of which a couple of lovers make away with themselves. This tripled circumstance reminds a critic of the remark of Dryden: – "The dagger and the bowl are always at hand to butcher a hero, when a poet wants the brains to save him."

Dr. Young was at this time thirty-eight years of age, but was not yet "famous." Born when Charles II. was king and Dryden laureat, the Hampshire godson of the Princess Anne, was as yet only known as having been the friend of the Duke of Wharton, and of Tickell; as having first come before the public in 1713,107 with a poem to Granville, in which there is good dramatic criticism; and of having since written poems of promise rather than of merit, the latest of which was a paraphrase on part of the book of Job, which, curiously enough, abounds with phrases which show the author's growing intercourse with the playhouse and theatrical people. "Busiris" was written in the year that "Cato" was played, but its performance was delayed till this year, and its dramatic death occurred long before "Cato" departed from the stage, – to be read, at least, as long as an admirer of Addison survives.

CHAPTER XVII

THE PROGRESS OF JAMES QUIN, AND DECLINE OF BARTON BOOTH

Quin made great advances in the public favour in the season of 1718-19, at Lincoln's Inn, where, however, as yet, he only shared the leading business in tragedy and comedy with Ryan, and the less distinguished Evans. Southwark Fair, a fashionable resort, contributed to the company a new actor, Bohemia or Boheme, with great comic power; and Susan Mountfort replaced for a few weeks Mrs. Rogers, who had held for a time the tragic parts once acted by Mrs. Barry and Bracegirdle, and who died about this time. Of Susan Mountfort's touching end I will speak in a future page. Mrs. Rogers had been on the stage since 1692, and numbered among her original parts: – Imoinda, Oriana, Melinda, and Isabinda, in "Oroonoko," "Inconstant," "Recruiting Officer," and "Busy Body."

During this season a French company acted for some time in the Fields, where the "Tartuffe" was also played against the "Nonjuror." The only novelty worthy of notice was the "Sir Walter Raleigh" of poor Dr. Sewell, in which Quin played the hero with indifferent success. The author was more remarkable than his piece. He was of good family, and a pupil of Boerhaave; but, unsuccessful as a practitioner in London, he, curiously enough, gained fortune and reputation in the smaller sphere of Hampstead, until, as a singular biographical notice informs us, "three other physicians settled at the same place, after which his gains became very inconsiderable." He became a poor poet instead of a rich physician; "kept no house, but was a boarder; was much esteemed, and so frequently invited to the tables of gentlemen in the neighbourhood, that he had seldom occasion to dine at home." Seven years after Quin failed to lift him into dramatic notoriety, this Tory opponent of the Whig Bishop of Salisbury, and one of the minor contributors (it is said) to the Spectator and Tatler, though he is not included in Bissett's lives of the writers in the first-named periodical, died, "and was supposed," says the anonymous biographer already quoted, "at that time to be in very indigent circumstances, as he was interred in the meanest manner, his coffin being little better than those allotted by the parish to their poor who are buried from the workhouses, neither did a single friend or relation attend him to the grave. No memorial was placed over his remains; but they lie just under a holly-tree, which formed part of a hedge-row, that was once the boundary of the churchyard." Such was the end of the poet, through whom Lincoln's Inn Fields hoped, in 1719, to recover its ancient prosperity.

Eventful incidents marked the Drury Lane season of 1719-20. It commenced in the middle of September, between which time, and the last week of the following January, things went on prosperously as between players and public, but not so as between patentees and the government. Within the period mentioned Miss Santlow had made Booth happy – an union which helped to make Susan Mountfort mad,108 and Dennis's "Invader of His Country," and Southerne's "Spartan Dame," were produced. The former was the second of three adaptations109 from Shakspeare's "Coriolanus." Forty years before, in 1682, Nahum Tate fancied there was something in the times like that depicted in the days of Coriolanus. To make the parallel more striking, he pulled Shakspeare's play to pieces, and out of the fragments built up his own "Ingratitude of a Commonwealth." Nahum altered all for the worse; and he wrote a new fifth act, which was still worse than the mere verbal or semi-alterations. The impudence of the destroyer was illustrated by his cool assurance in the prologue, that —

"He only ventures to make gold from ore,And turn to money what lay dead before."

Tate was now followed by Dennis, who altered "Coriolanus" for political reasons, brought it out at Drury Lane, in the cause of his country and sovereign, and perhaps thought to frighten the Pretender by it. The failure was complete; although Booth played the principal male character, and Mrs. Porter Volumnia.

Southerne's "Spartan Dame" had been interdicted in the reign of William and Mary, as it was supposed that the part of Celonis (Mrs. Oldfield), wavering between her duty to her father, Leonidas, and that owing to her husband, Cleombrotus (Booth), would have painfully reminded some, and joyfully reminded other, of the spectators, of the position of Mary, between her royal sire and her princely consort. But it would have been as reasonable to prohibit "Othello" or "King Lear," because of the presence in them of individuals so related. Southerne's play has no local colour about it, but abounds in anachronisms and incongruities, and it survived but during a brief popularity. The author was now sixty years of age, Dennis seven years his senior.110 The older and unluckier, and less courteous poet, gained nothing by his play to compensate for the annuity he had purchased, but the term of which he had outlived. Southerne gained £500 by his "author's nights" alone; for patronage and presence on which occasions, the plausible poet personally solicited his friends. For the copyright he received an additional £120.

About six weeks after Southerne's play was produced – that is, after the performance of the "Maid's Tragedy," January 23, 1720, an order from the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Chamberlain, suddenly closed the theatre! The alleged cause was "information of misbehaviour on the part of the players." The real cause lay in Sir Richard Steele, the principal man who held the patent!

Since we last parted with the knight, he had been ungenerously trying, in pamphlets, to hunt to the scaffold the last Tory ministers of Queen Anne; he had lost his second wife; he had been projecting an union of Church and Kirk; he had invented a means of keeping fish alive while being transported across sea; he had been living extravagantly; but he had also offended his patron, the Duke of Newcastle, and therewith, the King, whose servant the Duke was, and the Government, of which the Duke was a member. Steele, in fact, had vehemently and successfully opposed, by speech and pamphlet, Lord Sunderland's Peerage Bill, which proposed to establish twenty-five hereditary peers of Scotland to sit in the English House of Lords, in place of the usual election of sixteen; and to create six new English peerages, with the understanding that the Crown would never, in future, make a new peer except on the extinction of an old family. Steele denounced, in the Plebeian, the aristocratical tendency of the bill, and to such purpose, that the theatre he governed was closed, and his name struck out of the licence!

Steele appealed to the public, in a pamphlet, the Theatre; and showed, by counsel's opinion, how he had been wronged; he estimated his loss at nearly £10,000, and finally sank into distress, with mingled bitterness and wit. His old ducal patron had loudly proclaimed he would ruin him. "This," said Steele, "from a man in his circumstances, to one in mine, is as great as the humour of Malagene, in the comedy, who valued himself for his activity in 'tripping up cripples.'"

Dennis entered the lists against Sir Richard; but the worst the censor could say against the knight was, that he had a dark complexion, and wore a black peruke. Dennis also attacked actors generally, as rogues and vagabonds in the eye of the law, and liable to be whipped at the King's porter's lodge. Such was the testimony of this coarse Cockney, the son of a saddler, and a fellow who, for his ill-doings, had been expelled from Cambridge University.

Booth, Cibber, and Wilks were permitted to reopen Drury under a licence, after an interval of a few days, and the season thus recommencing on the 28th of January, with the "Careless Husband," Cibber playing Lord Foppington, ran on to August 23rd, when the house closed, with "Bartholomew Fair!" The only novelty was Hughes's "Siege of Damascus," with false quantities in its classical names, and much heaviness of treatment of an apt story. It was Hughes's first play, and he died unconscious of its success. He was then but forty-three years of age. The old school-fellow of Isaac Watts had begun his career by complimenting King William and eulogising Queen Anne. He had published clever translations, composed very gentlemanlike music, contributed to the Spectator, and obtained a place among the wits. He wrote, in 1712, the words of the opera of "Calypso and Telemachus," to prove how gracefully the English language might be wedded to music. Two Lord Chancellors were among his patrons, Cowper and Macclesfield, and that he held the Secretaryship to the Commissioners of the Peace was a pleasant consequence thereof. His "Siege of Damascus" has for moral, that it is wrong to extend religious faith by means of the sword. The angry lover who left the city he had saved, to assault it with the Arabians from whom he had saved it, and to meet the lady of his love full of abhorrence for the traitor, might have produced some emotion; but loving, loved, living, and dying, they all talk, seldom act, and never touch. Nevertheless, Booth, Wilks, Mills, and Mrs. Porter had attentive listeners, if not ecstatic auditors, during a run of ten nights. The long tirades and the ponderous similes gratified the same audiences who took delight in Norris's Barnaby Brittle, Shepherd's Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, and Mrs. Booth's Helena, in the "Rover." Nevertheless, Hughes acquired no fame. When Swift received a copy of his works, he wrote to Pope: – "I never heard of the man in my life, yet I find your name as a subscriber. He is too grave a poet for me; and, I think, among the mediocrists in prose as well as in verse." Pope sanctioned the judgment; adding, that what Hughes wanted in genius, he made up as an honest man. Hitherto, the great tragedy of this century was "Cato."

At Lincoln's Inn, Quin played the King to Ryan's Hamlet, and created Henri Quatre in young Beckingham's second, last, and unsuccessful essay, "Henry IV. of France." What was the course of the Merchant Tailors' pupil, and son of the Fleet Street linen-draper, after this, I am unable to say, further than that he died in obscurity some ten years later. A comedy, by "Handsome Leigh," a moderately fair actor, called "Kensington Gardens, or the Pretenders," showed some power of drawing character, especially an effeminate footman, Bardach, played by Bullock, but it did nothing for a theatre which was now partly relying on subscriptions in aid. At the head of the subscribers was the last Baron Brooke, whose more famous son, the first Earl of Warwick, of the Fulke Greville line, used to subscribe his political vote so singularly – first for ministers, then for the opposition, and thirdly, not at all, in undeviating regularity.

This piece failing, came Theobald's adaptation of Shakspeare's "Richard II.," very much for the worse, but so far to the profit of the adapter that the Earl of Orrery conferred on him an unusually liberal gift for the dedication, namely, a hundred pound note, enclosed in a box of Egyptian pebble, which was worth a score of pounds more. The original author was less munificently remunerated, except in abiding glory.

Another attempt served the house as poorly namely, the re-appearance of a Mrs. Vandervelt, not because she was a clever, but that she was a very aged actress, eighty-five years old, who had not played since King Charles's time, but who had spirits enough to act the Widow Rich, in the "Half-pay Officers," a vamped-up farce, by Molloy, the political writer, and strength enough to dance a sprightly jig after it. As the hostess of a tavern in Tottenham Court Road, Peg Fryer, as the old dame was called off the stage, kept a merry and prosperous house.

Another adaptation was Griffin's comedy, "Whig and Tory," which had nothing political in it but the name; and by which that excellent low comedian, who ought to have been in the Church, and who would not be a glazier, did not add to his fame.

The "Imperial Captives" was a more ambitious venture, by a new author, Mottley. It was a tragedy, in which Quin played Genseric, King of the Vandals, and in which there is much love and a little murder, in the old thundering style, and all at cross-purposes. Distress made a poet of Mottley. His father was a Jacobite colonel, who followed James to France; his mother, a thorough-bred Whig, who stayed under William in England. Occasionally, they settled their political differences, and met. Mottley was one of those men who depend on patrons. He had lost a post in the Excise Office, and had not gained either of two which had been promised him, one in the Wine Licence Office, by Lord Halifax, and one in the Exchequer to which he had been appointed, but from which he was immediately ousted by Sir Robert Walpole. An estate, in which he had a reversionary interest, was sold by his widowed and extravagant mother to pay her debts, and thus stripped of post and prospects, Mottley made an essay as dramatic author, a career in which he was not destined to be distinguished, although Queen Caroline patronised him during a part of it – but so she did Stephen Duck! "Cato" was not superseded; but Young was putting the finishing stroke to his "Revenge."