A Book Of The Play Part 24

Theatrical rioting has greatly declined in violence, as well it might, since the O.P. saturnalia of disturbance, which lasted some sixty-six nights at Covent Garden Theatre in 1809. Swords were no longer worn, but the rioters made free use of their fists, called in professional pugilists as their allies, and in addition to catcalls, armed themselves with bells, post-horns, whistles, and watchmen's rattles.

The O.P. riots may be said to have abolished the catcall, but they established "goose." Captures of the rioters were occasionally made by Brandon, the courageous box-office keeper, and they were charged at Bow Street Police Court with persistent hissing, with noisily crying "Silence!" and with "unnatural coughing." The charges were not proceeded with, but one of the accused, Mr. Clifford, a barrister, brought an action against Brandon for false imprisonment. In this case the Court of King's Bench decided that, although the audience in a public theatre have a right to express the feelings excited at the moment by the performance, and in this manner to applaud or hiss any piece which is represented, or any performer; yet if a number of persons, having come to the theatre with a predetermined purpose of interrupting the performance, for this end make a great noise so as to render the actors inaudible, though without offering personal violence or doing injury to the house, they are in law guilty of a riot.

Serjeant Best, the counsel for the plaintiff, urged that, as plays and players might be hissed, managers should be liable to their share; they should be controlled by public opinion; Garrick and others had yielded cheerfully to the jurisdiction of the pit without a thought of appealing to Westminster Hall. "Bells and rattles," added the serjeant, "may be new to the pit; but catcalls, which are equally stunning, are as old as the English drama." Apparently, however, the catcall, its claim to antiquity notwithstanding, was not favourably viewed by the court. In summing up, Chief Justice Mansfield observed: "I cannot tell on what grounds many people think they have a right, at a theatre, to make such a prodigious noise as to prevent others hearing what is going forward on the stage. Theatres are not absolute necessaries of life, and any person may stay away who does not approve of the manner in which they are managed. If the prices of admission are unreasonable, the evil will cure itself. People will not go, and the proprietors will be ruined, unless they lower their demand. If the proprietors have acted contrary to the conditions of the patent, the patent itself may be set aside by a writ of _scire facias_ in the Court of Chancery." To the great majority of playgoers it probably occurred that hissing was a simpler and more summary remedy of their grievances and relief to their feelings than any the Court of Chancery was likely to afford. In due time, however, came free trade in the drama and the abolition of the special privileges and monopolies too long enjoyed by the patent theatres.

After the failure of his luckless farce, "Mr. H.," Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth: "A hundred hisses (hang the word! I wrote it like _kisses_--how different!), a hundred hisses outweigh a thousand claps.

The former come more directly from the heart." The reception of the little play had been of a disastrous kind, and Lamb, sitting in the front row of the pit, is said to have joined in condemning his own work, and to have hissed and hooted as loudly as any of his neighbours. "I had many fears; the subject was not substantial enough.

John Bull must have solider fare than a letter. We are pretty stout about it; have had plenty of condoling friends; but, after all, we had rather it should have succeeded. You will see the prologue in most of the morning papers. It was received with such shouts as I never witnessed to a prologue. It was attempted to be encored.... The quant.i.ty of friends we had in the house--my brother and I being in public offices, &c.--was astonis.h.i.+ng, but they yielded at last to a few hisses." "Mr. H." could probably in no case have achieved any great success, but it may be that its failure was precipitated by the indiscreet cordiality of its author's "quant.i.ty of friends." They were too eager to express approbation, and distributed their applause injudiciously. The pace at which they started could not be sustained.

As Monsieur Auguste, the famous _chef des claqueurs_ at the Paris Opera House, explained to Doctor Veron, the manager, "_Il ne fallait pas trop chauffer le premier acte; qu'on devait, au contraire, reserver son courage et ses forces pour enlever le dernier acte et le denoument_." He admitted that he should not hesitate to award three rounds of applause to a song in the last act, to which, if it had occurred earlier in the representation, he should have given one round only. Lamb's friends knew nothing of this sound theory of systematised applause. They expended their ammunition at the commencement of the struggle, and when they were, so to say, out of range. It was one of Monsieur Auguste's principles of action that public opinion should never be outraged or affronted; it might be led and encouraged, but there should be no attempt to drive it. "Above all things, respect the public," he said to his subordinates. Nothing so much stimulates the disapprobation of the unbia.s.sed as extravagant applause. Reaction certainly ensues; men begin to hiss by way of self-a.s.sertion, and out of self-respect. They resent an attempt to coerce their opinion, and to compel a favourable verdict in spite of themselves. The attempt to encore the prologue to "Mr. H." was most unwise. It was a strong prologue, but the play was weak. The former might have been left to the good sense of the general public; it was the latter that especially demanded the watchful support of the author's friends. The infirm need crutches, not the robust. The playbills announced, "The new farce of 'Mr. H.,' performed for the first time last night, was received by an overflowing audience with universal applause, and will be repeated for the second time to-morrow." Such are playbills. "Mr.

H." never that morrow saw. "'Tis withdrawn, and there's an end of it,"

wrote Lamb to Wordsworth.

Hissing is no doubt a dreadful sound--a word of fear unpleasing to the ear of both playwright and player. For there is no revoking, no arguing down, no remedying a hiss; it has simply to be endured.

Playgoers have a giant's strength in this respect; but it must be said for them, that of late years at any rate, they have rarely used it tyrannously, like a giant. Of all the dramatists, perhaps Fielding treated hissing with the greatest indifference. In 1743, his comedy of "The Wedding Day" was produced. Garrick had in vain implored him to suppress a scene which he urged would certainly endanger the success of the piece. "If the scene is not a good one, let them find it out,"

said Fielding. As had been foreseen, an uproar ensued in the theatre.

The actor hastened to the green-room, where the author was cheering his spirits with a bottle of champagne. Surveying Garrick's rueful countenance, Fielding inquired: "What's the matter? Are they hissing me now?" "Yes, the very pa.s.sage I wanted you to retrench. I knew it wouldn't do. And they've so horribly frightened me I shall not be right again the whole night." "Oh," cried the author, "I did not give them credit for it. So they have found it out, have they?" Upon the failure of his farce of "Eurydice," he produced an occasional piece ent.i.tled "Eurydice Hissed," in which Mrs. Charke, the daughter of Colley Cibber, sustained the part of Pillage, a dramatic author.

Pillage is about to produce a new play, and one of his friends volunteers to "clap every good thing till I bring the house down."

"That won't do," Pillage sagaciously replies; "the town of its own accord will applaud what they like; you must stand by me when they dislike. I don't desire any of you to clap unless when you hear a hiss. Let that be your cue for clapping." Later in the play three gentlemen enter, and in Shakespearean fas.h.i.+on discuss in blank verse the fate of Pillage's production.

THIRD GENTLEMAN. Oh friends, all's lost! Eurydice is d.a.m.ned.

SECOND GENTLEMAN. Ha! d.a.m.ned! A few short moments past I came From the pit door and heard a loud applause.

THIRD GENTLEMAN. 'Tis true at first the pit seemed greatly pleased, And loud applauses through the benches rang; But as the plot began to open more (A shallow plot) the claps less frequent grew, Till by degrees a gentle hiss arose; This by a catcall from the gallery Was quickly seconded: then followed claps; And 'twixt long claps and hisses did succeed A stern contention; victory being dubious.

So hangs the conscience, doubtful to determine When honesty pleads here, and there a bribe.

But it was mighty pleasant to behold When the d.a.m.nation of the farce was sure, How all those friends who had begun the claps With greatest vigour strove who first should hiss And show disapprobation.

Surely no dramatist ever jested more over his own discomfiture. In publis.h.i.+ng "Eurydice" he described it as "a farce, as it was d--d at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane." This was a following of Ben Jonson's example, who, publis.h.i.+ng his "New Inn," makes mention of it as a comedy "never acted, but most negligently played by some of the king's servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others the king's subjects, 1629; and now, at last, set at liberty to the readers, his majesty's servants and subjects, to be judged of, 1631."

There is something pathetic in the way Southerne, the veteran dramatist, in 1726, bore the condemnation of his comedy of "Money the Mistress," at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre. The audience hissed unmercifully. Rich, the manager, asked the old man, as he stood in the wings, "if he heard what they were doing?" "No, sir," said Southerne calmly, "I'm very deaf." On the first representation of "She Stoops to Conquer," a solitary hiss was heard during the fifth act at the improbability of Mrs. Hardcastle, in her own garden, supposing herself forty miles off on Crackskull Common. "What's that?" cried Goldsmith, not a little alarmed at the sound. "Psha! doctor," replied Colman, "don't be afraid of a squib when we have been sitting these two hours on a barrel of gunpowder." Goldsmith is said never to have forgiven Colman his ill-timed pleasantry. The hiss seems to have been really a solitary and exceptional one. It was ascribed by one journal to c.u.mberland, by another to Hugh Kelly, and by a third, in a parody on "Ossian," to Macpherson, who was known to be hostilely inclined towards Johnson and all his friends. The disapprobation excited by the capital scene of the bailiffs in Goldsmith's earlier comedy, "The Good-natured Man," had been of a more general and alarming kind, however, and was only appeased by the omission of this portion of the work. Goldsmith suffered exquisite distress. Before his friends, at the club in Gerrard Street, he exerted him greatly to hide the fact of his discomfiture; chatted gaily and noisily, and even sang his favourite comic song with which he was wont to oblige the company only on special occasions. But alone with Johnson he fairly broke down, confessed the anguish of his heart, burst into tears, and swore he would never write more. The condemnation incurred by "The Rivals," on its first performance, led to its being withdrawn for revision and amendment. In his preface to the published play Sheridan wrote: "I see no reason why an author should not regard a first-night's audience as a candid and judicious friend attending, in behalf of the public, at his last rehearsal. If he can dispense with flattery, he is sure at least of sincerity, and even though the annotation be rude, he may rely upon the justness of the comment." This is calm and complacent enough, but he proceeds with some warmth: "As for the little puny critics who scatter their peevish strictures in private circles, and scribble at every author who has the eminence of being unconnected with them, as they are usually spleen-swoln from a vain idea of increasing their consequence, there will always be found a petulance and illiberality in their remarks, which should place them as far beneath the notice of a gentleman, as their original dulness had sunk them from the level of the most unsuccessful author." This reads like a sentence from "The School for Scandal."

In truth, hissing is very hard to endure. Lamb treated the misfortune of "Mr. H." as lightly as he could, yet it is plain he took his failure much to heart. In his letter signed Semel-d.a.m.natus, upon "Hissing at the Theatres," he is alternately merry and sad over his defeat as a dramatist. "Is it not a pity," he asks, "that the sweet human voice which was given man to speak with, to sing with, to whisper tones of love in, to express compliance, to convey a favour, or to grant a suit--that voice, which in a Siddons or a Braham rouses us, in a siren Catalani charms and captivates us--that the musical expressive human voice should be converted into a rival of the noises of silly geese and irrational venomous snakes? I never shall forget the sounds on my night!" He urges that the venial mistake of the poor author, "who thought to please in the act of filling his pockets, for the sum of his demerits amounts to no more than that," is too severely punished; and he adds, "the provocations to which a dramatic genius is exposed from the public are so much the more vexatious as they are removed from any possibility of retaliation, the hope of which sweetens most other injuries; for the public never writes itself." He concludes with an account, written in an Addisonian vein, of a club to which he had the honour to belong. "There are fourteen of us, who are all authors that have been once in our lives what is called 'd.a.m.ned.'

We meet on the anniversaries of our respective nights, and make ourselves merry at the expense of the public.... To keep up the memory of the cause in which we suffered, as the ancients sacrificed a goat, a supposed unhealthy animal, to aesculapius, on our feast-nights we cut up a goose, an animal typical of the popular voice, to the deities of Candour and Patient Hearing. A zealous member of the society once proposed that we should revive the obsolete luxury of viper-broth; but, the stomachs of some of the company rising at the proposition, we lost the benefit of that highly salutary and antidotal dish."

It is to be observed that when a play is hissed there is this consolation at the service of those concerned: they can s.h.i.+ft the burden of reproach. The author is at liberty to say: "It was the fault of the actors. Read my play, you will see that it did not deserve the cruel treatment it experienced." And the actor can a.s.sert: "I was not to blame. I did but speak the words that were set down for me. My fate is hard--I have to bear the burden of another's sins." And in each case these are reasonably valid pleas. In the hour of triumph, however, it is certain that the author is apt to be forgotten, and that the lion's share of success is popularly awarded to the players.

For the dramatist is a vague, impalpable, invisible personage; whereas the actor is a vital presence upon the scene; he can be beheld, noted, and listened to; it is difficult to disconnect him from the humours he exhibits, from the pathos he displays, from the speeches he utters.

Much may be due to his own merit; but still his debt to the dramatist is not to be wholly ignored. The author is applauded or hissed, as the case may be, by proxy. But altogether it is perhaps not surprising that the proxy should oftentimes forget his real position, and arrogate wholly to himself the applause due to his princ.i.p.al.

High and low, from Garrick to the "super," it is probably the actor's doom, for more or less reasons, at some time or another, to be hissed.

He is, as Members of Parliament are fond of saying, "in the hands of the house," and may be ill-considered by it. Anyone can hiss, and one goose makes many. Lamb relates how he once saw Elliston, sitting in state, in the tarnished green-room of the Olympic Theatre, while before him was brought for judgment, on complaint of prompter, "one of those little tawdry things that flirt at the tails of choruses--the pertest little drab--a dirty fringe and appendage of the lamp's smoke--who, it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a 'highly respectable' audience, had precipitately quitted her station on the boards and withdrawn her small talents in disgust. 'And how dare you,'

said the manager, 'how dare you, madam, without a notice, withdraw yourself from your theatrical duties?' 'I was hissed, sir.' 'And you have the presumption to decide upon the taste of the town?' 'I don't know that, sir, but I will never stand to be hissed,' was the rejoinder of Young Confidence. Then, gathering up his features into one significant ma.s.s of wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation--in a lesson never to have been lost upon a creature less forward than she who stood before him--his words were these: 'They have hissed ME!'"

It is understood that this argument failed in its effect, for, after all, a hiss is not to be in such wise excused or explained away; its application is far too direct and personal. "Ladies and gentlemen, it was not I that shot the arrow!" said Braham to his audience, when some bungling occurred in the course of his performance of William Tell, and the famous apple remained uninjured upon the head of the hero's son. If derision was moved by this bungling, still more did the singer's address and confession excite the mirth of the spectators. To another singer, failure, or the dread of failure, was fraught with more tragic consequence. For some sixteen years Adolphe Nourritt had been the chief tenor of the Paris Opera House. He had "created" the leading characters in "Robert," "Les Huguenots," "La Juive,"

"Gustave," and "Masaniello." He resigned his position precipitately upon the advent of Duprez. The younger singer afflicted the elder with a kind of panic. The news that Duprez was among his audience was sufficient to paralyse his powers, to extinguish his voice. He left France for Italy. His success was unquestionable, but he had lost confidence in himself; a deep dejection settled upon him, his apprehension of failure approached delirium. At last he persuaded himself that the applause he won from a Neapolitan audience was purely ironical, was but scoffing ill-disguised. At five in the morning, on the 8th of March, 1839, he flung himself from the window of an upper floor, and was picked up in the street quite dead. Poor Nourrit! he was a man of genius in his way; but for him there would have been no grand duet in the fourth act of "Les Huguenots," no cavatina for Eleazar in "La Juive;" and to his inventiveness is to be ascribed the ballet of "La Sylphide," which Taglioni made so famous.

It is odd to hear of an actor anxious for "goose," and disappointed at not obtaining it. Yet something like this happened once during the O.P. riots. Making sure that there would be a disturbance in the theatre, Mr. Murray, one of John Kemble's company, thought it needless to commit his part to memory; he was so certain that he should not be listened to. But the uproar suddenly ceased; there was a lull in the storm. The actor bowed, stammered, stared, and was what is called in the language of the theatre "dead stuck." However, his mind was soon at ease; to do him justice the audience soon hissed him to his heart's content, and perhaps even in excess of that measure. Subsequently he resolved, riot or no riot, to learn something of his part.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

EPILOGUES.

Epilogues went out of fas.h.i.+on with pigtails, the public having at last decided that neither of these appendages was really necessary or particularly ornamental; but a considerable time elapsed before this opinion was definitively arrived at. The old English moralities or moral plays usually concluded, as Mr. Payne Collier notes, with an epilogue in which prayers were offered up by the actors for the king, queen, clergy, and sometimes for the commons; the latest instance of this practice being the epilogue to a play of 1619, "Two Wise Men and All the Rest Fools." "It resteth now," says the "epiloguiser," "that we render you very humble and hearty thanks, and that all our hearts pray for the king and his family's enduring happiness, and our country's perpetual welfare. _Si placet, plaudite._" So also the dancer entrusted with the delivery of the epilogue to Shakespeare's "Second Part of King Henry IV." may be understood as referring to this matter, in the concluding words of his address: "My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good-night: and so kneel down before you--but, indeed, to pray for the queen." And to this old custom of loyal prayer for the reigning sovereign has been traced the addition of the words, "Vivat rex," or "Vivat regina," which were wont to appear in the playbills, until quite recent times, when our programmes became the advertising _media_ of the perfumers.

The main object of the epilogue, however, was as Ma.s.singer has expressed it in the concluding address of his comedy, "Believe as you List"--

The end of epilogues is to inquire The censure of the play, or to desire Pardon for what's amiss;

and as Theseus states the matter in "The Midsummer Night's Dream:" "No epilogue, I pray you, for your play needs no excuse." Sometimes a sort of bluntness of speech was affected, as in the epilogue to one of Beaumont and Fletcher's comedies:

Why there should be an epilogue to a play I know no cause. The old and usual way For which they were made was to entreat the grace Of such as were spectators. In this place And time, 'tis to no purpose; for I know, What you resolve already to bestow Will not be altered, whatsoe'er I say In the behalf of us, and of the play; Only to quit our doubts, if you think fit, You may or cry it up or silence it.

It was in order, no doubt, the more to conciliate the audience that epilogues a.s.sumed, oftentimes, a playfulness of tone that would scarcely have been tolerated in the case of prologues. The delivery of an epilogue by a woman (i.e. by a boy playing the part of a woman) was clearly unusual at the time of the first performance of "As You Like It." "It is not the fas.h.i.+on to see the lady the epilogue," says Rosalind; "but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes; and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues." There can be little doubt that all Shakespeare's plays were originally followed by epilogues, although but very few of these have been preserved. The only one that seems deficient in dignity, and therefore appropriateness, is that above quoted, spoken by the dancer, at the conclusion of "The Second Part of King Henry IV." In no case is direct appeal made, on the author's behalf, to the tender mercies of the audience, although the epilogue to "King Henry VIII." seems to entertain misgivings as to the fate of the play:

'Tis ten to one this play can never please All that are here. Some come to take their ease, An act or two; but those we fear, We have frighted with our trumpets; so, 'tis clear They'll say, 'tis naught: others to hear the city Abused extremely and to cry--_that's witty!_ Which we have not done neither; that, I fear, All the expected good we're like to hear For this play at this time is only in The merciful construction of good women: For such a one we showed them.

Prospero delivers the epilogue to "The Tempest;" and the concluding lines of "The Midsummer Night's Dream," and of "All's Well that Ends Well"--which are not described as epilogues, and should, perhaps, rather be viewed as "tags"--are spoken by Puck and the King. The epilogues to "King Henry V." and "Pericles" are of course spoken by the Chorus and Gower, respectively, who, throughout those plays, have favoured the spectators with much discourse and explanation. "Twelfth Night" terminates with the clown's nonsense song, which may be an addition due less to the dramatist than to the comic actor who first played the part.

The epilogues of the Elizabethan stage, so far as they have come down to us, are, as a rule, brief and discreet enough; but, after the Restoration, epilogues acquired greater length and much more impudence, to say the least of it, while they clearly had gained importance in the consideration of the audience. And now it became the custom to follow up a harrowing tragedy with a most broadly comic epilogue. The heroine of the night--for the delivering of epilogues now devolved frequently upon the actresses--who, but a few moments before, had fallen a most miserable victim to the dagger or the bowl, as the case might be, suddenly reappeared upon the stage, laughing, alive, and, it may be said, kicking, and favoured the audience with an address designed expressly, it would seem, so to make their cheeks burn with blushes that their recent tears might the sooner be dried up. It is difficult to conceive now that certain of the prologues and epilogues of Dryden and his contemporaries could ever have been delivered, at any time, upon any stage. Yet they were a.s.suredly spoken, and often by women, apparently to the complete satisfaction of the playgoers of the time. But, concerning the scandalous condition of the stage of the Restoration, there is no need to say anything further. The ludicrous epilogue, which has been described as the unnatural tacking of a comic tale to a tragical head, was certainly popular, however, and long continued so. It was urged, "that the minds of the audience must be refreshed, and gentlemen and ladies not sent away to their own homes with too dismal and melancholy thoughts about them." Certain numbers of "The Spectator" were expressly devoted to the discussion of this subject, in the interest, it is now apparent, of Ambrose Philips, who had brought upon the stage an adaptation of Racine's "Andromaque," and who enjoyed the zealous friends.h.i.+p of Addison and Steele. To the tragedy of "The Distressed Mother," as it was called, which can hardly have been seen in the theatre since the late Mr. Macready, as Orestes, made his first bow to a London audience in 1816, an epilogue had been added which had the good fortune to be accounted the most admirable production of its cla.s.s. Steele, under the signature of "Physibulus," wrote to describe his visit to Drury Lane, in company with his friend Sir Roger, to witness the new performance. "You must know, sir, that it is always my custom, when I have been well entertained at a new tragedy, to make my retreat before the facetious epilogue enters; not but that these pieces are often very well written, but, having paid down my half-crown, and made a fair purchase of as much of the pleasing melancholy as the poet's art can afford me, or my own nature admit of, I am willing to carry some of it home with me, and cannot endure to be at once tricked out of all, though by the wittiest dexterity in the world." He describes Sir Roger as entering with equal pleasure into both parts, and as much satisfied with Mrs. Oldfield's gaiety as he had been before with Andromache's greatness; and continues: "Whether this were no more than an effect of the knight's peculiar humanity, pleased to find that, at last, after all the tragical doings, everything was safe and well, I do not know; but, for my own part, I must confess I was so dissatisfied, that I was sorry the poet had saved Andromache, and could heartily have wished that he had left her stone dead upon the stage. I found my soul, during the action, gradually worked up to the highest pitch, and felt the exalted pa.s.sion which all generous minds conceive at the sight of virtue in distress.... But the ludicrous epilogue in the close extinguished all my ardour, and made me look upon all such achievements as downright silly and romantic." To this letter a reply, signed "Philomedes," appeared in "The Spectator" a few days later, expressing, in the first place, amazement at the attack upon the epilogue, and calling attention to its extraordinary success.

"The audience would not permit Mrs. Oldfield to go off the stage the first night till she had repeated it twice; the second night, the noise of the _ancoras_ was as loud as before, and she was obliged again to speak it twice; the third night it was still called for a second time, and, in short, contrary to all other epilogues, which are dropped after the third representation of the play, this has already been repeated nine times." "Philomedes" then points out that, although the prologue and epilogue were real parts of ancient tragedy, they are on the English stage distinct performances, entirely detached from the play, and in no way essential to it. "The moment the play ends," he argues, "Mrs. Oldfield is no more Andromache, but Mrs. Oldfield; and though the poet had left Andromache 'stone dead upon the stage' ...

Mrs. Oldfield might still have spoken a merry epilogue;" and he refers to the well-known instance of Nell Gwynne, in the epilogue to Dryden's tragedy of "Tyrannic Love," "where there is not only a death but a martyrdom," rising from the stage upon which she was supposed to be lying stone dead--an attempt having been made to remove her by those gentlemen "whose business it is to carry off the slain in our English tragedies"--and breaking out "into that abrupt beginning of what was a very ludicrous but at the same time thought a very good epilogue:

"Hold! are you mad? you d.a.m.ned confounded dog, I am to rise and speak the epilogue!"

"This diverting manner," "Philomedes" proceeds, "was always practised by Mr. Dryden, who, if he was not the best writer of tragedies in his time, was allowed by everyone to have the happiest turn for a prologue or an epilogue." And he further cites the example of a comic epilogue known to be written by Prior, to the tragedy of "Phaedra and Hippolita," Addison having supplied the work with a prologue ridiculing the Italian operas. He refers also to the French stage: "Since everyone knows that nation, who are generally esteemed to have as polite a taste as any in Europe, always close their tragic entertainment with what they call a _pet.i.te piece_, which is purposely designed to raise mirth and send away the audience well pleased. The same person who has supported the chief character in the tragedy very often plays the princ.i.p.al part in the _pet.i.te piece_; so that I have myself seen at Paris Orestes and Lubin acted the same night by the same man."

This famous epilogue to "The Distressed Mother" is spoken by Andromache, and opens with the following lines, which are certainly flippant enough:

I hope you'll own that with becoming art I've played my game and topped the widow's part!

My spouse, poor man, could not live out the play, But died commodiously on his wedding-day; While I, his relict, made, at one bold fling, Myself a princess, and young Sty a king.

Of this address the reputed author was Eustace Budgell, of the Inner Temple, whose name is usually found printed in connection with it--"the worthless Budgell," as Johnson calls him--"the man who calls me cousin," as Addison used contemptuously to describe him. In Johnson's Life of Ambrose Philips, however, it is stated that Addison was himself the real author of the epilogue, but that "when it had been at first printed with his name he came early in the morning, before the copies were distributed, and ordered it to be given to Budgell, that it might add weight to the solicitation which he was then making for a place." It is probable, moreover, that Addison was not particularly anxious to own a production which, after all, was but a following of an example so questionable as Prior's epilogue to "Phaedra," above mentioned. The controversy in "The Spectator" was, without doubt, a matter of pre-arrangement between Addison and Steele, for the entertainment of the public and the increase of the fame of Philips; and the letter of "Philomedes," which with the epilogue in question has been often ascribed to Budgell, was probably also the work of Addison. For all the rather unaccountable zeal of Addison and Steele on behalf of their friend, however, the reputation of Philips has not thriven; he is chiefly remembered now by the nickname of Namby-Pamby, bestowed on him by Pope, who had always vehemently contested his claims to distinction. As Johnson states the case: "Men sometimes suffer by injudicious kindness; Philips became ridiculous, without his own fault, by the absurd admiration of his friends, who decorated him with honorary garlands which the first breath of contradiction blasted." Johnson, by-the-way, had at the age of nineteen written a new epilogue to "The Distressed Mother," for some young ladies who designed an amateur performance of that still-admired tragedy. The epilogue was intended to be delivered by "a lady who was to personate the ghost of Hermione."

But although protests were now and then, as in the case of "The Distressed Mother," raised against the absurdity of the custom, comic epilogues to tragic plays long remained in favour with the patrons of the stage. Pointed reference to this fact is contained in the epilogue spoken by the beautiful Mrs. Hartley to Murphy's tragedy of "Alzuma,"

produced at Covent Garden in 1773:

Our play is o'er; now swells each throbbing breast With expectation of the coming jest.

By Fas.h.i.+on's law, whene'er the Tragic Muse With sympathetic tears each eye bedews; When some bright Virtue at her call appears.

Waked from the dead repose of rolling years; When sacred worthies she bids breathe anew, That men may be what she displays to view; By fas.h.i.+on's law with light fantastic mien The Comic Sister trips it o'er the scene; Armed at all points with wit and wanton wiles, Plays off her airs, and calls forth all her smiles; Till each fine feeling of the heart be o'er, And the gay wonder how they wept before!

To Murphy's more famous tragedy of "The Grecian Daughter," Garrick supplied an epilogue, which commences:

The Grecian Daughter's compliments to all; Begs that for Epilogue you will not call; For leering, giggling, would be out of season, And hopes by me you'll hear a little reason, &c.

The epilogue to Home's tragedy of "Douglas" is simply a remonstrance against the employment of "comic wit" on such an occasion: