Doran John
Their Majesties' Servants. Annals of the English Stage (Volume 3 of 3)
The house re-opened on the 4th of October, with the "Beggar's Opera," and "Is he a Prince?" The war was resumed with increase of bitterness in feeling, and of fury in action. Jewish pugilists, under the conduct of Dutch Sam, were hired to awe and attack the dissentients. The boxer, Mendoza, distributed orders, by dozens, to people who would support the pugilists. The speech-makers were dragged away in custody, and Bow Street magistrates sat, during the performances, ready to commit them to prison-companionship with the worst class of thieves; and they lent Bow Street runners to the managers, and these runners, armed with bludgeons, charged and overwhelmed the dauntless rioters in the pit. Dauntless, I say; for, on a succeeding night, they fell upon the Jews in great number, and celebrated their triumph in a bloody fray, by hoisting a placard with the words, "And it came to pass that John Bull smote the Israelites sore!"
The incidents present themselves in such crowds, that it is hardly possible to marshal them. Among them I hear the audience called a "mob," from the stage; and I see Lord Yarmouth and Berkley Craven fighting in the pit, on the part of the managers; and there are "middies" and "gallant tars," or people so attired, addressing the house, in nautical and nonsensical, and rather blackguard style, from upper boxes and galleries; and Brandon is rushing in to point out rioters, and rushing out to escape them; and gentlemen, with "O. P.," in gold, on their waistcoats, laugh at him; and there is up above an encounter between two boxes, the beaten party in which slide down the pillars to the tier below; and, suddenly, there is a roar of laughter at an accident on the stage. Charles Kemble, in Richmond, has stumbled in the fight, with Mr. Cooke as Richard, and fallen on his nose, and the house is as delighted as if he had been their personal enemy!
Then the ear is gratefully sensible of a sudden hush! and the voices of the actors, for once, are heard; but it is not to listen to them the house is silent. A gentleman in the boxes has begun playing "Colleen" on the flute; the piece goes on the while, but it is only the instrumentalist who is listened to and cheered. Then, there is an especially noisy night, when rows of standing pittites are impelled one row over the other, in dire confusion. Anon, we have a night or two of empty houses; the rioters seem weary, and the managers' friends do not care to attend to see a Jubilee procession in honour of George III., in which the cars of the individualised four quarters of the globe are drawn by scene-shifters and lamplighters, in their own clothes!
Because the public were thus kept away, the proprietors thought they had gained a victory, and on the first appearance of a Mrs. Clark, in the "Grecian Daughter," Cooke alluded, in a prologue, to the late "hostile rage." This little scrap of exultation stirred the house to fury again; and when Charles Kemble died as Dionysius, the half-price rioters shouted as if one of their most detested oppressors had perished.
Then came the races up and down the pit benches, while the play was in progress; and the appearance of men with huge false noses, making carnival, and of others dressed like women, who swaggered and straddled about the house, and assailed the few bold occupants of private boxes in terms of more coarseness than wit. Then, too, was introduced the famous O. P. war dance in the pit, to see which alone, – its calm beginning, its swelling into noise and rapidity, and its finale of demoniacal uproar and confusion, even Princes of the Blood visited the boxes; and having beheld the spectacle, and heard the Babel of roaring throats, laughed, and went home.
Not so the rioters; these sat or danced till they chose to withdraw, and then they went in procession through the streets, howling before the offices of newspapers which advocated the managerial side, and reserving their final and infernal serenade for John Kemble himself, in front of his house, No. 89 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury.
The lack of wisdom on the part of the management was remarkable. The introduction of Jewish pugilists into the pit had been fruitless in good; and now I find them and other questionable-looking people admitted to the boxes. Of course, increase of exasperation followed. The rioters celebrated the jubilee of their row on its fiftieth night. Ladies who came wearing O. P. medals were cheered as if they had been goddesses, and gentlemen who had lost hats in the previous night's fray came in cotton night-caps, or with kerchiefs round their heads. The pit was in a frenzy, and so was the indefatigable Brandon, who captured two offenders that night, one of whom he charged with calling "Silence!" and the other with "unnaturally coughing!" The Bow Street runners also carried off many a prisoner, half-stripped and profusely bleeding, to the neighbouring tribunal; and altogether the uproar culminated on the jubilee night.
The acquittal of leading rioters gave a little spirit to some after displays; but it led to a settlement. Audiences continued the affray, flung peas on the stage to bring down the dancers, and celebrated their own O. P. dance before leaving; but, at a banquet to celebrate the triumph of the cause in the acquittal of the leaders, Mr. Kemble himself appeared. Terms were there agreed upon; and on the sixty-seventh night, a banner in the house, with "We are satisfied" inscribed on it, proclaimed that all was over.
After such a fray the satisfaction was dearly bought. The 4s. rate of admission to the pit was diminished by 6d., but the half-price remained at 2s. The private boxes were decreased in number, but the new price of admission to the boxes was maintained. Thus, the managers, after all, had more of the victory than the people; but it was bought dearly. In a few years the prices were lowered, but the audiences, except on particular occasions, were not numerous enough to be profitable. In fact the house was too large. The public could not hear with ease what was uttered on the stage, and spectacle was more suited to it than Shakspeare or old English comedy; – and huge houses, high prices, and exorbitant salaries, soon brought the British Drama to grief in the patented houses. Into this melancholy question I do not wish, however, to enter. I have only noticed the O. P. affair, as it marks an improvement in the manners and customs of our audiences. In the preceding century, at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Old Drury, rioters on less provocation went more desperate lengths. Destruction even by fire was often resorted to by them. In the O. P. matter, the insurrectionists did not even break a bench. Mixed with the fury of fight there was an under-current of fun. The combatants declared that they would attain their end by perseverance. They persevered, and did not attain it!
I have previously shown that the second George did not dislike to witness an insurrection of a theatrical audience. The third George was of a more placid temperament, and not only laughed at clowns who swallowed sausages, but at allusions to his own agricultural tendencies, which he accepted with a half-delighted: "I! I! good; they mean my sheep!" or some equally bright exclamation. As guests, he did not invite actors to his house; but his eldest son was more, and unnecessarily, condescending.
When Prince of Wales, and subsequently as Prince Regent, actors and managers were not unfrequently invited to Carlton House. The former seem to have appreciated their position better than the latter, at least as far as we may learn from instances afforded by the elder Bannister and the younger Colman. Charles Bannister told Mr. Adolphus, who had questioned him as to the Prince's bearing, whether it resembled that of Prince Hal, amid his boon companions? "The Prince never assumed familiarity with us, though his demeanour was always most gracious. We public performers sat all together, as all guests took their places, according to their rank; our conversation was to ourselves, and we never mixed in that of the general party, further than to answer questions. At proper moments, with inimitable politeness, he would suggest that he should be pleased with a song, and the individual selected received his highest reward in praises which his royal highness bestowed with an excellent judgment, and expressed with a taste peculiar to himself."
When the younger Colman obtained a day-rule from the King's Bench, in 1811, to dine at Carlton House, whither he was conveyed by the Duke of York, dramatic literature was not so pleasantly represented as the stage had previously been in the persons of Charles Bannister and his comrades. The guest behaved like a boor, the host still like a gentleman. Among the offensive queries put by the former to the Duke, was – "Who is that fine-looking fellow at the head of the table?" The Duke urged him to be silent, lest he get into a scrape. Colman would not be anything but ruffianly, and raising his voice, he exclaimed, – "No! no! I want to know who that fine square-shouldered magnificent-looking, agreeable fellow is, at the end of the table!" The Duke remonstrated; saying, "You know it is the Prince." "Why, then," said George, "he is your elder brother! I declare he doesn't look half your age. Well! I remember the time when he sang a good song, and as I'm out for a lark, for one day only, he will not refuse an old playfellow, if he is the same good fellow that he used to be." The Prince, with more condescension than was warrantable, laughed, and then sang a song, which, being done, Colman roared out applause at the magnificent voice, and with a round oath, expressed his determination to engage the singer for the next season at his own theatre! Peake, who tells the story in fuller detail, in his Memoirs of the Colman Family, adds that the Prince was not offended, and that Colman was, subsequently, his guest. If so, the former had forgotten, since Charles Bannister's days, that propriety which the actor so justly admired.
To the list of pieces by which this chapter is preceded, I direct the attention of those who desire to know the character of our stage literature half a century ago. I will not go so far as Gifford, who, on contemplating a similar list, remarked: "All the fools in the kingdom seem to have risen up and exclaimed, with one voice, – Let us write for the Theatres!" But the censure of Leigh Hunt is almost as strong, when he says, that being present at the comedies of Reynolds and Dibdin, he laughed heartily at the actors; but, somehow or other, never recollected a word of the dialogue! The truth is, that the actors, tragic as well as comic, were superior to the authors, especially to those who wrote parts expressly for them, and composed tipsy grimacers for Munden, and chatterers for Fawcett, and voluble gentlemen for Lewis; and, let the scene of the play be in what remote part of the world it might, always introduced an Irishman, because Johnstone was there, ready and richly able, to play it. The authors thus depended on the actors, and not on themselves; and this was so much the case that Leigh Hunt remarked, that the loss of Lewis would be as rheumatism to Reynolds; and the loss of Munden, "who gives such agreeable variety of grin, would affect him little less than lock-jaw!" The old sentimental comedy was bad enough, and we rejoice to this day that Goldsmith overthrew it; but he was followed by writers who mingled sentiment and farce together, who extorted tears, exacted rude laughter, and violated nature in every sense. With all this, however, – vapid in the reading, as some of these productions now appear, they reflected, with great distortion, no doubt, the manners of the times, and suggested, with some awkwardness, how those manners might be improved. The more obtrusively loyal such writers affected to be, the more loudly their clap-traps were applauded. The absence of servile sentiment, and the suspicion of the author being led by liberal principles in politics, could only bring down upon him condemnation. Poor Holcroft, who went through so many painful varieties of life, and who was a radical before the radical era, was one of the ablest writers of what was then called comedy, but he often failed, because of his politics, and was then taunted for his failure, and that by brother dramatists. "Holcroft has done nothing for literature," says Charles Dibdin; "because, perhaps, he has done little for morality, less for truth, and nothing for social order!" Holcroft belongs, indeed, to two centuries; but if the Administration had hanged him, as they wished to do, in 1794, when he took his trial for high treason, the author of the Road to Ruin would not have added his adaptation of "Deaf and Dumb," and the very first of melodramas, the "Tale of Mystery," to the list of his deserved successes.
The younger Colman justified the writing of nonsense, by metrically asking: —
"If we give trash, as some poor critics say,
Why flocks an audience nightly to our play?"
Nevertheless, there were authors who, in the French phrase, had frequently to "sup at the 'Bagpipes,'" like the minor French playwright, Dancourt, who was accustomed to failure, but who used to find solace under the catastrophe by supping joyously with his friends, at an inn with the above sign. One night, his candid daughter was present at the first representation of one of Dancourt's little comedies. At the close of the second scene, the sibilations commenced, and mademoiselle thereupon turned gaily to her sire, with the pleasant remark, "Papa, you are going to sup to-night at the 'Bagpipes!'" The Regent Duke of Orleans was less tender towards a dramatist who bitterly complained to him, not merely that his piece had been hissed, but that he had been horsewhipped by some of the audience, who disliked the coarse raillery of his satire. "Well," said the Duke, having listened to the complaint, "what is it you now want?" "Justice," answered the author. "I think," replied his highness, coolly, "I think you have had that already!"
English managers found authors quite as unreasonable. Early in the present century, there existed a writer of tragedies, named Masterton. Failing to get any of them represented, he printed one, the "Seducer," in 1811; – promising to publish all his rejected pieces, if his specimen tragedy obtained approval. His object, of course, was to shame the managers. Like most of the authors of this century, Mr. Masterton took Otway for his model, – but he did it after this wise —
"Beware, Olivia, of the wiles of man! —
You've seen one suck an orange in the street;
And when he's feasted, fling the rind away?
So will a man, who has despoiled a woman, —
When all's ta'en from her, cast her in the dirt."
Hayley was angry enough when the public damned his "Eudora," which act he thought, manifested only the bad taste of the public, seeing that his play had received the sanction of Lieutenant-General Burgoyne; but if Hayley knew little of practical triumphs of temper, and exhibited small discretion in printing his rejected tragedy, he at least showed that his tragedy was free from such nonsense as we find in Mr. Masterton's.
The two authors who most strongly contrast with each other as to their feelings under a disagreeable verdict, were Charles Lamb and Godwin. The former was present on the night that his farce, "Mr. H.," was played, and he heartily joined in the shower of hisses with which it was assailed by the audience. This was in juster taste than the conduct of Godwin, who sat in the pit, stoically indifferent, in all appearance, to the indifference of the audience to his tragedy – "Antonio." As the act-drop descended, without applause or disapprobation, the author grimly observed that such was exactly the effect he had laboured to produce. And as the piece proceeded amid similar demonstrations of contemptuous indifference, "I would not for the world," said poor Godwin, "have the excitement set in too early."
I question, however, if anything superior to "Antonio" was produced between 1800 and the first appearance of Edmund Kean. Soon after that event came Sheil, Maturin, Proctor, and a greater than any of them, Sheridan Knowles. Sheil wrote his tragedy, "Adelaide," expressly for Miss O'Neill; everything was sacrificed to one character, – and "Adelaide" proved a failure. The poem, however, contained promise of a poet. There was originality, at least there was no servile imitation, in the style, which was not indeed without inflation, and thundering phrases and conceits, – but there was, withal, a weakness, from which, if the writer ever extricated himself, it was only to fall into greater defect. The story is romantic, and something after the fashion of the day, in which there was an apotheosis for every romantic villain. Such a villain is Lunenberg, who, as he remarks in an early part of the play, had lured Adelaide's unsuspecting innocence, —
"And with a semblance of religious rites,
Abused thy trust, and plunged thee into shame."
This sorry rascal treats the lady so ill that she is driven to take poison, and Lunenberg, after fighting her brother Albert, and heroically running on his sword, dies with sentimental phrases in his mouth of pure and hallowed happiness to come, and with the prophecy that "when the sound of heaven shall raise the dead," he and Adelaide would "awake in one another's arms," which is a very bold image, to say the least of it.
Adelaide herself is so feeble a personage, in nothing superior to the heroines of the Leadenhall Street romances of the time, that she fails to win or to exact sympathy. How very silly a young lady she is, may be seen by her dying speech to the villain who had deceived her by a false marriage —
"When I am dead,
As speedily I shall be, let my grave
Be very humble in that mournful spot.
I pray thee, sometimes visit it at eve,
And when you look upon the fading rose
That grows beside a pillar down the aisle,
And watch it drooping in the twilight dews,
Then think of one who bloomed a little while,
E'en as that sickly rose, and bloomed to die."
There is more here of the small sweets of Anna Matilda than of the pathos and harmony of Otway, or the vigour of Lee.
Whatever promise this first tragedy gave, there was nothing of realisation in the author's next tragedy, the "Apostate." In this piece, Hermeya, the Moslem hero, renounces his faith, for love of the Christian lady Florinda, who is so perplexed between love and duty, even more than he between love and patriotism, that she at length finds expression for her condition in the unusually majestic line – "This is too much for any mortal creature!" – a line which was echoed by more than one critic. "Adelaide" was feeble; the "Apostate," in place of being stronger, was only furious. There was the bombast of Lee, but none of his brilliancy; the hideousness of his images without anything of their grand picturesqueness. Florinda, looking on at the execution of Hermeya, exclaims —
"Lo! they wrench his heart away:
They drink his gushing blood!"
– and when a compassionate gentleman requests that the lady may be removed, she sets forth this series of screaming remarks: —
"You shall not tear me hence; No! – Never! never!
He is my lord! – My husband! – Death! – 'twas death!
Death married us together! – Here I will dig
A bridal bed, and we'll lie there for ever!
I will not go! – Ha! You may pluck my heart out,
I will never go! – Help! – Help! – Hermeya!
They drag me to Pescara's cursed bed!
They rend the chains of fire that bind me to thee!
Help! – Help!"
– and so, screaming, she dies. Not thus, despite some raving, was Belvidera frantic, calling on Jaffier; – and the audience failed to see a second Otway in Lalor Sheil.
It has hardly fared better with Maturin, who wrote especially for Edmund Kean. The year 1816 produced this new dramatic writer, and also a new actress of great promise, in Miss Somerville, who made her first appearance at Drury Lane, in Maturin's tragedy of "Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand," which was played for the first time on May the 9th. The plot is of the romantic school. Imogine, loving and loved by an exiled ruffian (Bertram), marries, in his absence, Bertram's enemy, St. Aldobrand, in order to save her sire from ruin. Bertram, the outcast, is wrecked near the castle of the wedded pair; and of course the old lovers encounter each other. From this time, with some hesitations of decency, all goes wrong. Imogine forgets her duty to her husband, whom Bertram kills, after seducing his wife. He, moreover, treats the lady very ungallantly; and Imogine, gaining nothing by her lapse from righteousness of life, goes mad, and dies; whereupon, Bertram, finding the world emphatically unpleasant, kills himself, with considerable self-exultation that he, captain of a robber band, who had lived with desperate men in desperate ways, —
"Died no felon's death;
A warrior's weapon freed a warrior's soul!"
There is no moral to this piece; but there is some beauty of language, with a load of bombast, and an old-world amount of fierce sentiment and grotesque horrors. Among the last may be enumerated, Bertram sitting with the body of the murdered Aldobrand; and Imogine sitting with that of her child, – who had been a good angel, of the best intentions, but never in time to save his mother from mischief. The German element – in story, style, speech, and minute stage-directions – prevails throughout the piece, which had a greater success than it deserved.
If Maturin, in this tragedy, followed the German model rather than strove to imitate the touching melody of Rowe, and the unaffected but energetic tenderness of Otway, – he brought back to the stage some of the grosser features of the dramas of the preceding centuries, which lowered the standard of woman, and made her not less eager to be won than dishonest lovers were to woo. The same villainous spirit marked the epilogue, furnished by the Hon. George Lamb (afterwards Viscount Melbourne). In it, the villainous Bertram was covered with the dignity of a hero; and of woman, generally, it was said by the writer, that – "Vice, on her bosom, lulls remorseful care."
As in the case of Sheil, Maturin's second tragedy, "Manuel," did not fulfil even the small promise of his first; and, after "Bertram," "Manuel" was found insipid, – but more pretentious, roaring, and bombastic. The interest of the play hangs on one incident. Manuel's son is reported as slain in battle; but Manuel accuses his kinsman, and once heir, before that son was born (De Zelos), of having murdered him. Trial by battle ensues, between Torrismond, son of De Zelos, and a stranger, who offers himself as champion of Manuel. This champion (Murad) is vanquished: and he confesses to have been the murderer, at the instigation of De Zelos; but, having been uneasy in his mind ever since, he had come to risk and render his own life, by way of expiation. The instigator stabs himself; Manuel dies; and of course there is no wedding for Victoria, the daughter of the latter, and her lover (Torrismond), the son of De Zelos.
A droll, minor incident, in this tragedy, is that in which De Zelos, when hiring the assassin, and very much desiring to be unknown, gives him a dagger, with the owner's name upon the haft. Thereby, of course, he is ultimately known and betrayed; and it was suggested, that the incident might have authorised the writer to call his tragedy a comedy, and to give it the name of the "Absent Man." For violation of nature, common sense, and I may add, sound, this tragedy of Maturin's equals anything of the kind produced in the earliest ages of the drama. To Edmund Kean, in the very bloom of his fame and best of his strength, was raving, like the following, consigned. De Zelos has just died, – hiding his face, – probably ashamed of the whole business, whereupon Manuel exclaims, spasmodically: —
"False! – False! – ye cursed judges! – do ye hide him?
I'll grasp the thunderbolt! rain storms of fire!
There! – There! – I strike! The whizzing bolt hath struck him.
He shrieks! His heart's blood hisses in the flames!
Fiends rend him! lightnings sear him! hell gapes for him!
Oh! I am sick with death! (Staggering among the bodies.)
Alonzo! Victoria! – I call, and none answer me!
I stagger up and down, an old man, and none to guide me:
Not one! (Takes Victoria's hand.) Cold! cold! That was an ice-bolt!
I shiver! It grows very dark! Alonzo! Victoria! – Very – very
dark! (Dies.)"
There is no such nonsense as this in the tragedies of Proctor, Milman, or Sheridan Knowles. "Mirandola," "Fazio," and "Virginius," will never want readers; and "Virginius," especially, will never want an audience, if it be but fittingly represented. The principal character in "Virginius" was written expressly for Edmund Kean; but mere and lucky accident conveyed it to Mr. Macready, who found therein golden opportunity, and knew how to avail himself of it. To the former, with a sketch of whose career I close my contributions towards a History of the English Stage, may be happily applied the lines of the French poet: —
"Ce glorieux acteur,
Des plus fameux héros fameux imitateur;
Du théâtre Anglais, la splendeur et la gloire,
Mais si mauvais acteur dedans sa propre histoire."
