A Book Of The Play Part 14

It is rather curious to find the plan of half-price having any sort of effect upon dramatic literature, yet we find, in the "Autobiography of Thomas Dibdin," 1827, the following advice, given him by Lewis, the stage-manager at Covent Garden, in regard to writing for the stage, and apropos of Mr. Dibdin's comedy, called "Liberal Opinions":

"MY DEAR TOM,--This will be your first five-act production, and don't be offended if an old pract.i.tioner ventures to offer (from the respect he bears you) the fruits of his long experience. Half-price is a very proper privilege for those whose time or pockets do not afford them an opportunity of visiting the theatre earlier; but it is often the bane of an author on the first night of a five-act play. The new-comers know nothing of the foregone part of the drama; and having no context with which to connect allusions in the fourth and fifth acts, are apt to d.a.m.n without consideration that which they are no judges of--

And what they cannot comprehend deny.

"To be fore-armed against this contingency, contrive to make some character (either in the heat of pa.s.sion, or in any way you please) briefly run over all the foregoing parts of the story, so as to put everyone in possession of what they otherwise would have lost by absence; and, take my word, you will reap the benefit of it."

Mr. Dibdin expresses so much grat.i.tude for Mr. Lewis's counsel, and recommends it so earnestly to the consideration of all young dramatists, that we cannot doubt that some effect upon subsequent writings for the stage must in this indirect way have resulted from the half-price system, and in avoidance of its disadvantages, as set forth by the stage-manager of Covent Garden Theatre.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE DRAMA UNDER DIFFICULTIES.

For such a triumph as fanaticism enjoyed over the fine arts in England during and for some time after the great Civil War, no parallel can be found in the history of any other nation. And it was not, be it remembered, the work of a capricious and cruel despot; it was the tyranny of a solemn legislative a.s.sembly. Hypocrisy had some share in the proceeding, very likely; but in the main the Puritanism of the time was sincere even to its frenzies of intolerance. Good men and true held that they were doing only what was sound, and wise, and right, when they made ruthless war upon poetry, and painting, and all the refinements and graces of life, denouncing them as scandals and sins, unG.o.dly devices, pernicious wiles of the author of all evil; when they peremptorily closed the doors of the theatres, and dismissed actors, authors, managers, and all concerned, to absolute starvation.

In the England of that time, no doubt, Puritanism obtained supporters out of respect for superior power; just as in France, at a later date, Republicanism gained converts by means of terror. The prudent, when conflict and tumult are at hand, will usually side with the stronger combatant. Thus it was with little resistance that there pa.s.sed through both Houses of Parliament, in 1647, the ordinance by virtue of which the theatres were to be dismantled and suppressed; all actors of plays to be publicly whipped; and all spectators and playgoers, for every offence, condemned to forfeit five s.h.i.+llings. This was the _coup de grace;_ for the stage had already undergone many and severe a.s.saults. The player's tenure of his art had become more and more precarious, until acting seemed to be as a service of danger. The ordinance of 1647 closed the theatres for nearly fourteen years; but for some sixteen years before the stage had been in a more or less depressed condition. Scarcely any new dramatists of distinction had appeared after 1630. The theatres were considerably reduced in number by the time 1636 was arrived at. Then came the arbitrary closing of the playhouses--professedly but for a season. Thus in 1636 they were closed for ten months; in 1642 for eighteen months. In truth Puritanism carried on its victorious campaign against the drama for something like thirty years; while even at an earlier date there had been certain skirmis.h.i.+ng attacks upon the stage. With the first Puritan began the quarrel with the players. As Isaac Disraeli has observed, "we must go back to the reign of Elizabeth to comprehend an event which occurred in that of Charles I." A sanctimonious sect urged extravagant reforms--at first, perhaps, in all simplicity--founding their opinions upon cramped and literal interpretations of divine precepts, and forming views of human nature "more practicable in a desert than a city, and rather suited to a monastic order than to a polished people." Still, these fanatics could scarcely have dreamed that power would ever be given them to carry their peculiar theories into practice, and to govern a nation as though it were composed entirely of precisians and bigots. For two generations--from the Reformation to the Civil War--the Puritans had been the b.u.t.t of the satirical, the jest of the wits--ridiculed and laughed at on all sides. Then came a time, "when," in the words of Macaulay, "the laughers began to look grave in their turn. The rigid ungainly zealots ... rose up in arms, conquered, ruled, and, grimly smiling, trod down under their feet the whole crowd of mockers."

Yet from the first the Puritans had not neglected the pen as a weapon of offence. In 1579 Stephen Gosson published his curious pamphlet bearing the lengthy t.i.tle of "The Schoole of Abuse, containing a pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Jesters, and such like Catterpillars of a Commonwealth; setting up the Flag of Defiance to their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing their Bulwarks, by Profane Writers, natural reason, and common experience: A Discourse as pleasant for gentlemen that favour learning as profitable for all that will follow virtue." Gosson expresses himself with much quaint force, but he is not absolutely intolerant. He was a student of Oxford University, had in his youth written poems and plays, and even appeared upon the scene as an actor. Although he had repented of these follies, he still viewed them without acrimony. To his pamphlet we are indebted for certain interesting details in regard to the manners and customs of the Elizabethan playgoers. A further attack upon the theatre was led by Dr. Reynolds, of Queen's College, who was greatly troubled by the performance of a play at Christchurch, and who published, in 1593, "The Overthrow of Stage Plays," described by Disraeli as "a tedious invective, foaming at the mouth of its text with quotations and authorities." Reynolds was especially severe upon "the sin of boys wearing the dress and affecting the airs of women;"

and thus unconsciously helped on a change he would have regarded as still more deplorable--the appearance of actresses upon the stage. But a fiercer far than Reynolds was to arise. In 1633 Prynne produced his "Histriomastix; or, The Player's Scourge," a monstrous work of more than a thousand closely-printed quarto pages, devoted to the most searching indictment of the stage and its votaries. The author has been described as a man of great learning, but little judgment; of sour and austere principles, but wholly deficient in candour. His book was judged libellous, for he had unwittingly aspersed the Queen in his attack upon the masques performed at Court. He was cited in the Star Chamber, and sentenced to stand in the pillory, to lose both ears, to pay a heavy fine, and to undergo imprisonment for life. This severe punishment probably stimulated the Puritans, when opportunity came to them, to deal mercilessly with the actors by way of avenging Prynne's wrongs, or of expressing sympathy with his sufferings.

And it is to be noted that early legislation in regard to the players had been far from lenient. For such actors as had obtained the countenance of "any Baron of this Realme," or "any other honourable personage of greater degree," exception was to be made; otherwise, all common players in interludes, all fencers, bearwards, and minstrels, were declared by an Act pa.s.sed in the 14th year of Elizabeth to be rogues and vagabonds, and, whether male or female, liable on a first conviction "to be grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear with an hot iron of the compa.s.s of an inch about, manifesting his or her roguish kind of life;" a second offence was adjudged to be felony; a third entailed death without benefit of clergy or privilege of sanctuary. Meanwhile, the regular companies of players to whom this harsh Act did not apply, were not left unmolested. The Court might encourage them, but the City would have none of them. They had long been accustomed to perform in the yards of the City inns, but an order of the Common Council, dated December, 1575, expelled the players from the City. Thereupon public playhouses were erected outside the "liberties" or boundaries of the City. The first was probably the theatre in Sh.o.r.editch; the second, opened in its immediate neighbourhood, was known as the Curtain; the third, built by John Burbadge and other of the Earl of Leicester's company of players, was the famous Blackfriars Theatre. These were all erected about 1576, and other playhouses were opened soon afterwards. Probably to avoid the penalties of the Act of Elizabeth, all strolling and unattached players made haste to join regular companies, or to shelter themselves under n.o.ble patronage. And now the Church raised its voice, and a controversy which still possesses some vitality touching the morality or immorality of playhouses, plays and players, was fairly and formally entered upon. A sermon preached at Paul's Cross, November, 1577, "in the time of the plague," by the Rev. T. Wilc.o.c.ks, denounced in strong language the "common plays" in London, and the mult.i.tude that flocked to them and followed them, and described "the sumptuous theatre houses" as a continual monument of London's prodigality and folly. Performances, it seems, had for a while been forbidden because of the plague. "I like the policy well if it hold still," said the preacher; "for a disease is but bodged and patched up that is not cured in the cause, and the cause of plague is sin, if you look to it well; and the cause of sin are playes; therefore, the cause of plagues are playes." It is clear, too, that the clergy had become affected by a certain jealousy of the players, the sound of whose trumpet attracted more attention than the ringing of the church-bells, and brought together a larger audience. John Stockwood, schoolmaster of Tunbridge, who preached at Paul's Cross on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1578, demanded, "will not a filthy play, with the blast of a trumpet, sooner call thither a thousand than an hour's tolling bring to the sermon a hundred?" It was, moreover, an especial grievance to the devout at this period that plays were represented on a Sunday, the church and the theatre being thus brought into positive rivalry and antagonism. The clergy saw with dismay that their own congregations were thin and listless, while crowded and excited audiences rewarded the exertions of the players. Mr. Stockwood, declining to discuss whether plays were or not wholly unlawful, yet protested with good reason that in a Christian commonwealth they were intolerable on the seventh day, and exclaimed against the "horrible profanity" and "devilish inventions" of the lords of misrule, morrice, and May-day dancers, whom he accused of tripping about the church, even during the hours of service, and of figuring in costumes which, by their texture and scantiness, outraged ordinary notions of decency.

But notwithstanding this old-established opposition to the theatres on the part of both Churchmen and Puritans, and the severe oppression of the players by the authorities, it is yet indisputable that the English were essentially a playgoing people; proud, as well they might be, of the fact that they possessed the finest drama and the best actors in the world. And, allowing for the licence and grossness which the times permitted if they did not encourage, and a certain liberty of speech and action allowed time out of mind to the clowns of the stage, the drama suppressed by the Puritans was of sound and wholesome const.i.tution, rich in poetry of the n.o.blest cla.s.s. It is sufficient to say, indeed, that it was the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. To a very large cla.s.s, therefore, the persecution of the players and the suppression of the stage must have been grave misfortune and real privation. To many the theatre still supplied not merely recreation but education and enlightenment as well. That there was any rising of the public on behalf of the players does not appear.

Puritanism was too strong for opposition; and besides, the playgoer, by the nature of his favourite pursuit, almost avows himself a man of peace and obedient to the law. The public had to submit, as best it could, to the tyranny of fanaticism. But that bitter mortification was felt by very many may be taken for granted.

The authors were deprived of occupation so far as concerned the stage; they sought other employment for their pens; printing a play, however, now and then, by way of keeping their hands in as dramatists. The managers, left with nothing to manage, perhaps turned to trade in quest of outlet for their energies--the manager has been always something of the trader. But for the actors, forbidden to act, what were they to do? They had been const.i.tuted Malignants or Royalists almost by Act of Parliament. The younger players promptly joined the army of King Charles. Mohun acquired the rank of captain, and at the close of the war, served in Flanders, receiving the pay of a major.

Hart became a lieutenant of horse, under Sir Thomas Dallison, in the regiment of Prince Rupert. In the same troop served Burt as cornet, and Shatterel as quartermaster. Allen, of the c.o.c.kpit, was a major and quartermaster-general at Oxford. Robinson, serving on the side of the King, was long reputed to have lost his life at the taking of Basing House. The story went that the Cromwellian General Harrison had, with his own hands, slain the actor, crying, as he struck him down: "Cursed is he that doeth the work of the Lord negligently." Chalmers maintains, however, that an entry in the parish register of St.

Anne's, Blackfriars, of the death and burial of "Richard Robinson, a player," in March, 1647, negatives this account of the actor's fate.

Possibly there were two actors bearing the not uncommon name of Robinson. These were all players of note, who had acquitted themselves with applause in the best plays of the time. Of certain older actors, unable to bear arms for the king, Lowin turned innkeeper, and died, at an advanced age, landlord of the Three Pigeons at Brentford. He had been an actor of eminence in the reign of James I.; "and his poverty was as great as his age," says one account of him. Taylor, who was reputed to have been taught by Shakespeare himself the correct method of interpreting the part of Hamlet, died and was buried at Richmond.

These two actors, as did others probably, sought to pick up a little money by publis.h.i.+ng copies of plays that had obtained favour in performance, but had not before been printed. Thus, in 1652, Beaumont and Fletcher's "Wild Goose Chase" was printed in folio, "for the public use of all the ingenious, and the private benefit of John Lowin and Joseph Taylor, servants to his late Majesty, and by them dedicated to the honoured few lovers of dramatic poesy: wherein they modestly intimate their wants, and that with sufficient cause, for whatever they were before the wars, they were afterwards reduced to a necessitous condition." Pollard, possessed of some means, withdrew to his relatives in the country, and there ended his days peacefully.

Perkins and Sumner lodged humbly together in Clerkenwell, and were interred in that parish. None of these unfortunate old actors lived to see the re-opening of the theatres or the restoration of the monarchy.

But one actor is known to have sided with the Parliament and against the King. He renounced the stage and took up the trade of a jeweller in Aldermanbury. This was Swanston who had played Oth.e.l.lo, and had been described as "a brave roaring fellow, who would make the house shake again." "One wretched actor only," Mr. Gifford writes, in the introduction to his edition of Ma.s.singer, "deserted his sovereign."

But it may be questioned whether Swanston really merited this reprehension. He was a Presbyterian, it seems, and remained true to his political opinions, even though these now involved the abandonment of his profession. If his brother-players fought for the King, they fought no less for themselves, and for the theatre the Puritans had suppressed. Nor is the contrast Mr. Gifford draws, between the conduct of our actors at the time of the Civil War, and the proceedings of the French players during the first French Revolution, altogether fair. As Isaac Disraeli has pointed out, there was no question of suppressing the stage in France--it was rather employed as an instrument in aid of the Revolution. The actors may have sympathised sincerely with the royal family in their afflicted state, but it was hardly to be expected that men would abandon, on that account, the profession of their choice, in which they had won real distinction, and which seemed to flourish the more owing to the excited condition of France. The French Revolution, in truth, brought to the stage great increase of national patronage.

The Civil War concluded, and the cause of King Charles wholly lost, the actors were at their wits' end to earn bread. Certain of them resolved to defy the law, and to give theatrical performances in spite of the Parliament. Out of the wreck of the companies of the different theatres they made up a tolerable troop, and ventured to present some few plays, with as much caution and privacy as possible, at the c.o.c.kpit, in Drury Lane. This was in the winter of 1648. Doubtless there were many to whom the stage was dear, who were willing enough to encourage the poor players. Playgoing had now become as a vice or a misdemeanour, to be prosecuted in secret--like dram-drinking. The c.o.c.kpit representations lasted but a few days. During a performance of Fletcher's tragedy of "Rollo, Duke of Normandy," in which such excellent actors as Lowin, Taylor, Pollard, Burt, and Hart were concerned, a party of troopers beset the house, broke in about the middle of the play, and carried off the players, accoutred as they were in their stage dresses, to Hatton House, then a prison, where, after being detained some time, they were plundered of their clothes and dismissed. "Afterwards, in Oliver's time," as an old chronicler of dramatic events has left upon record, "they used to act privately, three or four miles or more out of town, now here, now there, sometimes in n.o.blemen's houses--in particular Holland House, at Kensington--where the n.o.bility and gentry who met (but in no great numbers) used to make a sum for them, each giving a broad-piece or the like." The widow of the Earl of Holland who was beheaded in March, 1649, occupied Holland House at this time. She was the granddaughter of Sir Walter Cope, and a stout-hearted lady, who doubtless took pride in encouraging the entertainments her late lord's foes had tried so hard to suppress. Alexander Goffe, "the woman-actor at Blackfriars,"

acted as "Jackal" on the occasion of these furtive performances. He had made himself known to the persons of quality who patronised plays, and gave them notice of the time when and the place where the next representation would "come off." A stage-play, indeed, in those days was much what a prize-fight has been in later times--absolutely illegal, and yet a.s.sured of many persistent supporters. Goffe was probably a slim, innocent-looking youth, who was enabled to baffle the vigilance of the Puritan functionaries, and to pa.s.s freely and unsuspected between the players and their patrons. At Christmas-time and during the few days devoted to Bartholomew Fair, the actors, by dint of bribing the officer in command of the guard at Whitehall, and securing in such wise his connivance, were enabled to present performances at the Red Bull in St. John Street. Sometimes the Puritan troopers were mean enough to accept the hard-earned money of these poor players, and, nevertheless, to interrupt their performance, carrying them off to be imprisoned and punished for their breach of the law. But their great trouble arose from the frequent seizure of their wardrobe by the covetous soldiers. The clothes worn by the players upon the stage were of superior quality--fine dresses were of especial value in times prior to the introduction of scenery--and the loss was hard to bear. The public, it was feared, would be loath to believe in the merits of an actor who was no better attired than themselves. But at length it became too hazardous, as Kirkman relates, in the preface to "The Wits, or Sport upon Sport," 1672, "to act anything that required any good cloaths; instead of which painted cloath many times served the turn to represent rich habits." Kirkman's book is a collection of certain "scenes or parts of plays ... the fittest for the actors to represent at this period, there being little cost in the cloaths, which often then were in great danger to be seized by the soldiers." These "select pieces of drollery, digested into scenes by way of dialogue, together with variety of humours of several nations, fitted for the pleasure and content of all persons, either in court, city, county, or camp," were first printed in 1662, by H. Marsh, and were originally contrived by Robert c.o.x, a comic genius in his way, who exhibited great ingenuity in evading the ordinances of Parliament, and in carrying on dramatic performances in spite of the Puritans. He presented at the Red Bull what were professedly entertainments of rope-dancing, gymnastic feats, and such coa.r.s.e practical fun as may even now be seen in the circus of strolling equestrian companies; but with these he cunningly intermingled select scenes from the comedies of the best English dramatists. From Kirkman's book, which is now highly prized from its rarity, it appears that the "drollery" ent.i.tled "The Bouncing Knight, or the Robbers Robbed," is, in truth, a famous adventure of Sir John Falstaff's, set forth in close accordance with the original text; while the comedy of "Rule a Wife and have a Wife" is reduced to a brief entertainment called "The Equal Match." Other popular plays are similarly dealt with. But c.o.x, it seems, invented not less than he borrowed. Upon the foundation of certain old-established farces, he raised up entertainments something of the nature of the extemporary comedy of Italy: characters being devised or developed expressly with a view to his own performance of them. "All we could divert ourselves with," writes Kirkman, "were these humours and pieces of plays, which, pa.s.sing under the name of a merry conceited fellow called Bottom the Weaver, Simpleton the Smith, John Swabber, or some such t.i.tle, were only allowed us, and that by stealth too ... and these small things were as profitable and as great get-pennies to the actors as any of our late famed plays." He relates, moreover, that these performances attracted "a great confluence of auditors," insomuch that the Red Bull, a playhouse of large size, was often so full, that "as many went back for want of room as had entered;" and that meanly as these "drolls" might be thought of in later times, they were acted by the best comedians "then and now in being." Especially he applauds the actor, author, and contriver of the majority of the farces--"the incomparable Robert c.o.x." Isaac Disraeli gives him credit for preserving alive, as it were by stealth, the suppressed spirit of the drama. That he was a very natural actor, or what would now be called "realistic," may be judged from the story told of his performance of a comic blacksmith, and his securing thereby an invitation to work at the forge of a master smith, who had been present among the audience.

"Although your father speaks so ill of you," said the employer of labour, "if you will come and work with me, I will give you twelvepence a-week more than I give any other journeyman." As Kirkman adds: "Thus was he taken for a smith bred, that was, indeed, as much of any trade."

It seems certain that for some few years prior to the Restoration there had been far less stringent treatment of the players than in the earlier days of the triumph of Puritanism. Cromwell, perhaps, rather despised the stage than condemned it seriously on religious grounds; the while he did not object to indulge in buffoonery and horseplay, even in the gallery of Whitehall. Some love of music he has been credited with, and this, perhaps, induced him to tolerate the operatic dramas of Sir William Davenant, which obtained representation during the Commonwealth: such as "The History of Sir Francis Drake,"

"represented by instrumental and vocal music, and by art of Perspective in Scenes," and "The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru."

According to Langbaine, the two plays called "The Siege of Rhodes"

were likewise acted _"in stilo recitativo"_ during the time of the Civil Wars, and upon the Restoration were rewritten and enlarged for regular performance at the Duke of York's Theatre, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It seems to have been held that a play was no longer a play if its words were sung instead of spoken--or these representations of Davenant's works may have been altogether stealthy, and without the cognisance of the legal authorities of the time. Isaac Disraeli, however, has pointed out that in some verses, published in 1653, and prefixed to the plays of Richard Brome, there is evident a tone of exultation at the pa.s.sing away of power from the hands of those who had oppressed the actors. The poet, in a moralising vein, alludes to the fate of the players as it was affected by the dissolution of the Long Parliament:

See the strange twirl of times! When such poor things Outlive the dates of parliaments or kings!

This revolution makes exploded wit Now see the fall of those that ruined it; And the condemned stage hath now obtained To see her executioners arraigned.

There's nothing permanent; those high great men That rose from dust to dust may fall again; And fate so orders things that the same hour Sees the same man both in contempt and power!

For complete emanc.i.p.ation, however, the stage had to wait some years; until, indeed, it pleased Monk, acting in accordance with the desire of the nation, to march his army to London, and to restore the monarchy. Encamped in Hyde Park, Monk was visited by one Rhodes, a bookseller, who had been formerly occupied as wardrobe-keeper to King Charles I.'s company of comedians in Blackfriars, and who now applied to the general for permission to reopen the c.o.c.kpit in Drury Lane as a playhouse. Monk, it seems, held histrionic art in some esteem; at any rate the City companies, when with his council of state he dined in their halls, were wont to entertain him with performances of a theatrical kind: satirical farces, dancing and singing, "many shapes and ghosts, and the like; and all to please His Excellency the Lord General," say the newspapers of the time. Rhodes obtained the boon he sought, and, promptly engaging a troop of actors, reopened the c.o.c.kpit. His chief actor was his apprentice, Thomas Betterton, the son of Charles I.'s cook. For some fifty years the great Mr. Betterton held his place upon the stage, and upon his death was interred with something like royal honours in Westminster Abbey.

Of the fate of Rhodes nothing further is recorded. He was the first to give back to Londoners a theatre they might visit legally and safely; and that done, he is heard of no more. Killigrew and Davenant were soon invested with patent rights, and ent.i.tled to a monopoly of theatrical management in London; probably they prospered by displacing Rhodes--but so much cannot be positively a.s.serted.

The drama was now out of its difficulties. Yet the influence and effect of these did not soon abate. Upon them followed indeed a sort of after-crop of troubles, seriously injurious to the stage. The Cavaliers engendered a drama that was other than the drama the Puritans had destroyed. The theatre was restored, it is true, but with an altered const.i.tution. It was not only that the old race of poets and dramatists had died out, and that writing for the stage was as a new profession, almost as a lost art. Taste had altered. As Evelyn regretfully notes in 1662, after witnessing a performance of Hamlet--to which, perhaps, the audience paid little heed, although the incomparable Betterton appeared in the tragedy--"but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesty's being so long abroad." Shakespeare and his brother-bards were out of fas.h.i.+on. There was a demand for tragedies of the French school--with rhyming lines and artificial sentiment--for comedies of intrigue and equivoque, after a foreign pattern, in lieu of our old English plays of wit, humour, and character. Plagiarism, translation, and adaptation took up a secure position on the stage. The leading playwrights of the Restoration--Dryden, Shadwell, Durfey, Wycherley--all borrowed freely from the French. Dryden frankly apologised--he was required to produce so many plays all could not be of his own inventing. The King encouraged appropriation of foreign works. He drew Sir Samuel Tuke's attention to an admired Spanish comedy, advising its adaptation to the English stage: the result was "The Adventures of Five Hours," a work very highly esteemed by Mr. Pepys. The introduction of scenery was due in a great measure to French example, although "paintings in perspective" had already been seen in an English theatre. But now scenery was imperatively necessary to a dramatic performance, and a sort of pa.s.sion arose for mechanical devices and decorative appliances of a novel kind. Dryden was no reformer--in truth, to suit his own purposes, he pandered laboriously to the follies and caprices of his patrons; nevertheless, he was fully sensible of the errors of the time, and often chronicles these in his prologues and epilogues. He writes:

True wit has run its best days long ago, It ne'er looked up since we were lost in show, When sense in doggrel rhymes and clouds was lost, And dulness nourished at the actor's cost.

Nor stopped it here; when tragedy was done, Satire and humour the same fate have run, And comedy is sunk to trick and pun.

Let them who the rebellion first began To wit, restore the monarch if they can; Our author dares not be the first bold man.

And upon another occasion:

But when all failed to strike the stage quite dumb, Those wicked engines, called machines, are come.

Thunder and lightning now for wit are played, And shortly scenes in Lapland will be laid.

Fletcher's despised, your Jonson out of fas.h.i.+on.

And wit the only drug in all the nation.

Actresses, too, were introduced upon the stage in pursuance of continental example. But for these there was really great necessity.

The boys who, prior to the Civil War, had personated the heroines of the drama, were now too mature, both in years and aspect, for such an occupation.

Doubting we should never play agen, We have played all our women into men!

says the prologue, introducing the first actress. Hart and Mohun, Clun, Shatterel and Burt, who were now leading actors, had been boy-actresses before the closing of the theatres. And even after the Restoration, Mohun whose military t.i.tle of major was always awarded him in the playbills, still appeared as Bellamante, one of the heroines of s.h.i.+rley's tragedy of "Love's Cruelty." But this must have been rather too absurd. At the time of the Restoration Mohun could hardly have been less than thirty-five years of age. It is to be noted, however, that Kynaston, a very distinguished boy-actress, who, with Betterton, was a pupil of Rhodes, arose after the Restoration. Of the earlier boy-actresses, their methods and artifices of performance, Kynaston could have known nothing. He was undoubtedly a great artist, winning extraordinary favour both in male and female characters, the last and perhaps the best of all the epicene stage-players of the past.

But if the stage, after the Restoration, differed greatly from what it had been previously, it yet prospered and gained strength more and more. It was most fortunate in its actors and actresses, who lent it invaluable support. It never attained again the poetic heights to which it had once soared; but it surrendered gradually much of its grossness and its baser qualities, in deference to the improving tastes of its patrons, and in alarm at the sound strictures of men like Jeremy Collier. The plagiarist, the adapter, and the translator did not relax their hold upon it; but eventually it obtained the aid of numerous dramatists of enduring distinction. The fact that it again underwent decline is traceable to various causes--among them, the monopoly enjoyed by privileged persons under the patents granted by Charles II.; the bungling intervention of court officials invested with supreme power over the dramatic literature of the nation; and defective copyright laws, that rendered justice neither to the native nor to the foreign writer for the theatre. And something, too, the stage of later years has been affected by a change in public taste, which has subordinated the play to the novel or poem, and converted playgoers into the supporters of circulating libraries.

CHAPTER XXII.

STAGE BANQUETS.

A veteran actor of inferior fame once expressed his extreme dislike to what he was pleased to term "the sham wine-parties" of Macbeth and others. He was aweary of the Barmecide banquets of the stage, of affecting to quaff with gusto imaginary wine out of empty pasteboard goblets, and of making believe to have an appet.i.te for wooden apples and "property" comestibles. He was in every sense a poor player, and had often been a very hungry one. He took especial pleasure in remembering the entertainments of the theatre in which the necessities of performance, or regard for rooted tradition, involved the setting of real edible food before the actors. At the same time he greatly lamented the limited number of dramas in which these precious opportunities occurred.

He had grateful memories of the rather obsolete Scottish melodrama of "Cramond Brig;" for in this work old custom demanded the introduction of a real sheep's head with accompanying "trotters." He told of a North British manager who was wont--especially when the salaries he was supposed to pay were somewhat in arrear, and he desired to keep his company in good humour and, may be, alive--to produce this play on Sat.u.r.day nights. For some days before the performance the dainties that were destined to grace it underwent exhibition in the green-room.

A label bore the inscription: "This sheep's head will appear in the play of 'Cramond Brig' on next Sat.u.r.day night. G.o.d save the King!" "It afforded us all two famous dinners," reveals our veteran. "We had a large pot of broth made with the head and feet; these we ate on Sat.u.r.day night; the broth we had on Sunday." So in another Scottish play, "The Gentle Shepherd" of Allan Ramsay, it was long the custom on stages north of the Tweed to present a real haggis, although n.i.g.g.ard managers were often tempted to subst.i.tute for the genuine dish a far less savoury if more wholesome mess of oatmeal. But a play more famous still for the reality of its victuals, and better known to modern times, was Prince h.o.a.re's musical farce, "No Song no Supper." A steaming-hot boiled leg of lamb and turnips may be described as quite the leading character in this entertainment. Without this appetising addition the play has never been represented. There is a story, however, which one can only hope is incorrect, of an _impresario_ of oriental origin, who supplying the necessary meal, yet subsequently fined his company all round, on the ground that they had "combined to destroy certain of the properties of the theatre."

There are many other plays in the course of which genuine food is consumed on the stage. But some excuse for the generally fict.i.tious nature of theatrical repasts is to be found in the fact that eating during performance is often a very difficult matter for the actors to accomplish. Michael Kelly, in his "Memoirs," relates that he was required to eat part of a fowl in the supper scene of a bygone operatic play called, "A House to be Sold." Bannister at rehearsal had informed him that it was very difficult to swallow food on the stage.