Doran John
Their Majesties' Servants. Annals of the English Stage (Volume 1 of 3)
One word may be said here for Sir Ludovick Carlell, the old gentleman of the bows to Charles I. Like Shirley, Killigrew, and Davenant, he had written plays before the time of the Commonwealth; and he survived to write more after the Restoration. The only one, however, which he offered to the players was a translation of "Heraclius," by Corneille; and that was returned on his hands. There is another knight, Sir Francis Fane, from whose comedy of "Love in the Dark," Mrs. Centlivre, more clever at appropriation than Mrs. Inchbald, has taken Intrigo, the man of business, and turned him into Marplot, with considerable improvements; but as Fane himself borrowed every incident, and did not trouble himself about his language, his merit is only of the smallest order. He wrote a fair masque, and in his unrepresented "Sacrifice" was little courtier enough to make his Tamerlane declare that "princes, for the most part, keep the worst company." He and Sir Robert Howard, both Tories, could, when it pleased them, tell the truth, like the plainest spoken Whig.
More successful than Sir Francis was rollicking Tom Porter, or Major Porter, according to his military rank. Both were luckless gentlemen; but Tom wrote one play, the "Villain," which put the town in a flame, and raised Sandford's fame, as an actor, to its very highest. Tom was also the author of a rattling comedy, called the "Carnival," but rioting, and bad company and hot temper marred him. He and Sir Henry Bellasys, dining at Sir Robert Carr's, fell into fierce dispute, out of mutual error; fierce words, then a thoughtless blow from Sir Henry, then swords crossing, and tipsy people parting the combatants. They were really warm friends; but Tom had been struck, and honour forbade that he should be reconciled till blood had flown. So Dryden's boy was employed to track Bellasys, and the Major came upon him in Covent Garden, where they fought, surrounded by a crowd of admirers. Tom's honour was satisfied by passing his sword through the body of his dearest friend. The knight felt the wound was mortal, but he beckoned the less grievously wounded major to him, kissed him, and remained standing, that Tom might not be obstructed in his flight. The friend and poet safe, the knight fell back, and soon after died. There was really noble stuff in some of these dissolute fine gentlemen! But there are no two of them who have so faithfully illustrated themselves, and the times in which they lived, as Sir George Etherege and Sir Charles Sedley; the former, a knight by purchase, in order to please a silly woman, who vowed she would many none but a man of title; the latter, a baronet by inheritance. Sir George, born in 1636, was the descendant of a good – Sir Charles, born three years later, a member of a better – family, reckoning among its sons scholars and patrons of scholars. Sir George left Cambridge undistinguished, but took his degree in foreign travel, came home to find the study of the law too base a drudgery for so free a spirit, and so took to living like a "gentleman," and to illustrating the devilishness of that career by reproducing it in dramas on the stage.
Sedley left Oxford as Etherege left Cambridge, ingloriously, bearing no honours with him. Unlike Sir George, however, he was a home-keeping youth, whereby his wit seems not to have suffered. He nursed the latter in the groves, or at the paternal hearth at Aylesford, in Kent, till the sun of the restored monarchy enticed him to London. There his wit recommended him to the King, won for him the hatred of small minds, and elicited the praise of noble spirits, who were witty themselves, and loved the manifestation of wit in others. "I have heard," says honest, brilliant, and much-abused Shadwell, "I have heard Sedley speak more wit at a supper than all my adversaries, putting their heads together, could write in a year." This testimony was rendered by a man whose own reputation as a wit has the stamp and the warrant of Rochester.
Two more atrocious libertines than these two men were not to be found in the apartments at Whitehall, or in the streets, taverns, and dens of London. Yet both were famed for like external qualities. Etherege was easy and graceful, Sedley so refinedly seductive of manner that Buckingham called it "witchcraft," and Wilmot "his prevailing, gentle art." I, humbler witness, can only say, after studying their works and their lives, that Etherege was a more accomplished comedy-writer than Sedley, but that Sedley was a greater beast than Etherege.
These two handsome fellows, made in God's image, marred their manly beauty by their licentiousness, and soon looked more like two battered, wine-soaked demons, than the sons of Christian mothers. Etherege, however, fierce and vindictive as he could be under passion, was never so utterly brutalised in mind as Sedley, nor so cruel in his humours at any time. If Sedley got up that groundless quarrel with Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, the alleged cause of which was some painted hussey, it was doubtless out of the very ferocity of his fun, which he thought well spent on exhibiting the prelate as sharing in the vices common at court.
Etherege, perhaps, had the stronger head of the two; he, at all events, kept it sufficiently free to be able to represent his King on more than one small diplomatic mission abroad. Sedley, who was nevertheless the longer liver of the two, indulged in excesses which, from their inexpressible infamy, betray a sort of insanity. When he, with other blackguards of good blood, was brought to trial for public outrages, which disgusted even the hideous wretches that lurked about Covent Garden, Chief Justice Foster addressed him from the bench with a "Sirrah!" and told him, while the reminiscence of the plague and the smoke of the Great Fire still hung over the court, that it was such wretches as he that brought God's wrath so heavily upon the kingdom. But neither the heavy fine of 2000 marks, nor his imprisonment, nor his being bound over to keep the peace for three years, nor his own conscience, nor the rebuke of wise men, could restrain this miscreant. He was not yet free from his bond52 when he, and Buckhurst and others were carried off to the watch-house by the night-constables for fighting in the streets, drunk, as was their custom, and as naked as their drawn swords. On this occasion, in 1668, the King interfered in their favour, and Chief Justice Keeling, senile betrayer of his trust, let them go scatheless; but he punished the constables by whom they had been arrested!
Etherege contributed three comedies to the stage: – "The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub," "She Would if She Could," and the "Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter." Sedley wrote the "Mulberry Garden;" a tragedy, called "Antony and Cleopatra," wherein a single incident in Shakspeare's play is spun out into five acts; "Bellamira," in which comedy, partly founded on the "Eunuchus" of Terence, he exhibited the frailty of Lady Castlemaine, and the audacity of Churchill – a translated drama from the French, called the "Grumbler," and a tragedy, entitled the "Tyrant King of Crete." Of all Sedley's pieces, the best is the "Mulberry Garden,"53 for portions of which the author is indebted to Molière's "Ecole des Maris," and on which Pepys's criticism is not to be gainsayed: – "Here and there a pretty saying, and that not very many either." "Bellamira" is remembered only as the play, during the first representation of which the roof of the Theatre Royal fell in, with such just discrimination as to injure no one but the author. Sir Fleetwood Shepherd said that "the wit of the latter had blown the roof from the building." "Not so," rejoined Sedley, "the heaviness of the play has broke down the house, and buried the author in the ruins!"
Etherege's comedies were, in their day, the dear delight of the majority of playgoers. I say the majority; for though "Love in a Tub" brought £1000 profit to Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, in a single month of 1664, and was acted before enraptured gallants and appreciating nymphs, at Whitehall, some found it a silly play. It gave Etherege a name and a position; and when his next comedy appeared, "She Would if She Could," a thousand anxious people, with leisure enough of an afternoon to see plays (it was only at Court that they were acted at night), were turned away from the doors. To me, this piece is very distasteful, and it is not without satisfaction I read that it was on the first night "barbarously treated," according to Dennis, and that Pepys found "nothing in the world good in it, and few people pleased with it." The plot and denouement he pronounces as "mighty insipid;" yet he says of the piece as a whole, that it was "dull, roguish, and witty." The actors, however, were not perfect on the first night. Dennis praised the truth of character, the purity, freedom, and grace of the dialogue; and Shadwell declared that it was the best comedy since the Restoration, to his own time. All this eulogy is not to be accepted. Etherege's third comedy, the "Man of Mode," has been described as "perhaps the most elegant comedy, and containing more of the real manners of high life than any one the English stage was ever adorned with." In the latter respect alone is this description true; but, though the piece is dedicated to a lady, the Duchess of York, it could have afforded pleasure, as the Spectator remarks, only to the impure. People, no doubt, were delighted to recognise Rochester in Dorimant, Etherege himself in Bellair, and the stupendous ass, Beau Hewitt, in Sir Fopling; but it must have been a weary delight; so debased is the nature of these people, however truly they represent, as they unquestionably did, the manners, bearing, and language of the higher classes.
How they dressed, talked, and thought; what they did, and how they did it; what they hoped for, and how they pursued it; all this, and many other exemplifications of life as it was then understood, may be found especially in the plays of Etherege, in which there is a bustle and a succession of incidents, from the rise to the fall of the curtain. But the fine gentlemen are such unmitigated rascals, and the women – girls and matrons – are such unlovely hussies, in rascality and unseemliness quite a match for the men, that one escapes from their wretched society, and a knowledge of their one object, and the confidences of the abominable creatures engaged therein, with a feeling of a strong want of purification, and of that ounce of civet which sweetens the imagination.
Of the remaining amateur writers there is not much to be said. Rhodes was a gentleman's son without an estate, a doctor without practice, and a dramatist without perseverance. His one comedy, "Flora's Vagaries" (1667), gave a capital part to Nelly, and a reputation to the doctor, which he failed to sustain. Corye was another idle gentleman, who, in the same year,54 produced his "Generous Enemies," and that piece was a plagiarism. Ned Revet also exhausted himself in one comedy, "The Town Shifts," which the town found insipid. Arrowsmith was in like plight, and his sole comedy, "The Reformation," was obliged to give way to Shakspeare's "Macbeth," converted into an opera. Nevil Payne was the author of three pieces – "Fatal Jealousy," in which Nokes earned his name of Nurse Nokes; the "Morning Ramble," which was less attractive in 1673, than the "Tempest," even in an operatic form, or "Hamlet," with Betterton for the hero; and the "Siege of Constantinople," a tragedy, in which Shaftesbury and his vices were mercilessly satirised. Tom Rawlins wrote three poor plays, the last in 1678, and he had as great a contempt for the character of author as Congreve himself. He was, like Joe Harris, "engraver of the Mint," kept fellowship with wits and poets, wrote for amusement, and "had no desire to be known by a threadbare coat, having a calling that will maintain it woolly!" Then there was Leanard, who stole not more audaciously than he was stolen from, when he chose to be original – Colley Cibber having taken many a point from the "Counterfeits," to enrich "She Would and She Would Not." Pordage was about as dull a writer as might be expected of a man who was land-steward to "the memorable simpleton," Philip, Earl of Pembroke. Shipman enjoys the fame of having been highly esteemed by Cowley – he certainly was not by the public; and Bancroft, the surgeon, had the reputation of having been induced to write, as he did, unsuccessfully, for the stage, because he prescribed for, or rather against, the most fashionable malady of the day, when it attacked theatre-haunting fops and actors who stooped to imitate the gentlemen. From these he caught the stage fever, and suffered considerably. Whitaker's one play, "The Conspiracy," is remarkable for the sensation incident of a ghost appearing, leading Death by the hand! Maidwell's comedy of "The Loving Enemies" (the author was an old schoolmaster), was noticeable for being "designedly dull, lest by satirising folly the author might bring upon his skull the bludgeon of fools."55 Saunders, and his "Tamerlane the Great," are now forgotten; but Dryden spoke of the author, in an indecent epilogue, as "the first boy-poet of our age;" who, however, though he blossomed as early as Cowley, did not flourish as long.
Wilson was another professional writer, but less successful on the stage than in his recordership of Londonderry. Another lawyer, Higden, was one of the jolliest of fellows; and wishing the actors to be so too, he introduced so many drinking scenes into his sole play, "The Wary Widow," that the players, who tippled their real punch freely, were all drunk by the end of the third act; and the piece was then, there, and thereby, brought to an end!
In the last years of the seventeenth century, a humble votary of the muses appeared in Duffet, the Exchange milliner; and in Robert Gould, a servant in the household of Dorset, where he caught from the wits and gay fellows assembled at Knowle or at Buckhurst, a desire to write a drama. He was, however, a schoolmaster, when his play of the "Rival Sisters" – in which, other means of slaughter being exhausted, a thunderbolt is employed for the killing a lady – was but coldly received. Gould was not a plagiarist, like Scott, the Duke of Roxburgh's secretary, nor so licentious. The public was scandalised by incidents in Scott's "Unhappy Kindness," in 1697. Dr. Drake was another plagiarist, who revenged himself in the last-named year, for the condemnation of his "Sham Lawyer," by stating on the title-page that it had been "damnably acted." That year was fatal, too, to Dr. Filmer, the champion of the stage against Collier. Even Betterton and Mrs. Barry failed to give life to the old gentleman's "Unnatural Brother;" and the doctor ascribed his want of success to the fact, that never at any one time had he placed more than three characters on the stage! The most prolific of what may be termed the amateur writers, was Peter Motteux, a French Huguenot, whom the revocation of the Edict of Nantes brought, in 1660,56 to England, where he carried on the vocations of a trader in Leadenhall Street, clerk in the foreign department of the Post Office, translator, original writer, dramatist, and "fast man," till the too zealous pursuit of the latter calling found Peter dead, in very bad company, in St. Clements Danes, in the year 1718. Of his seventeen comedies, farces, and musical interludes, there is nothing to be said, save that one called "Novelty" presents a distinct play in each act, – or five different pieces in all. By different men, Peter has been diversely rated. Dryden said of him, in reference to his one tragedy, "Beauty in Distress:"
"Thy incidents, perhaps, too thick are sown;
But too much plenty is thy fault alone:
At least but two in that good crime commit; —
Thou in design, and Wycherly in wit."
But an anonymous poet writes, in reference to one of his various poor adaptations, "The Island Princess:"
"Motteux and Durfey are for nothing fit,
But to supply with songs their want of wit."
How Motteux found time for all his pursuits is not to be explained; but, much as he accomplished in all, he designed still more – one of his projects being an opera, to be called "The Loves of Europe," in which were to be represented the methods employed in various nations, whereby ladies' hearts are triumphantly won. It was an odd idea; but Peter Motteux was odd in everything. And it is even oddly said of him, "that he met with his fate in trying a very odd experiment, highly disgraceful to his memory!"57
Hard-drinking, and what was euphoniously called gallantry, killed good-tempered Charles Hopkins, son of the Bishop of Londonderry. Had he had more discretion and less wit, he might have prospered. His tragedies, "Pyrrhus," "Boadicea," and "Friendship improved," bear traces of what he might have done. He has the merit, however, of not being indecent, – a fact which the epilogue to "Boadicea," furnished by a friend and spoken by a lady, rather deplores, and in indecent language, regrets that uncleanness of jest is no longer acceptable to the town!
Walker merits notice, less for his two pieces, "Victorious Love," and "Marry or do worse," than for the fact that this young Barbadian was the first actor whom Eton school gave to the stage. He appeared, when only eighteen, in the first-named piece, but quickly passed away to the study of the law and the exercise of the latter as a profession, in his native island. I know nothing worthy of record of the few other gentlemen who wrote plays, rather as a relaxation than a vocation, save that Boyer, a refugee Huguenot, like Motteux, and a learned man, adapted Racine's "Iphigenia in Aulis," for representation; that Oldmixon was an old, unscrupulous, party-writer; and that Crauford was historiographer for Scotland to Queen Anne, and has left no name of note among dramatic writers.
CHAPTER X
PROFESSIONAL AUTHORS
The men who took up dramatic authorship seriously as a vocation, during the last half of the seventeenth century, amount to something more than two dozen. They begin with Davenant and Dryden; include Tate and Brady,58 Lee and Otway, Wycherley, Congreve, Cibber, and Vanbrugh; and conclude with Farquhar, and with Rowe.
I include Sir John Vanbrugh because he preferred fame as an author to fame as an architect, and I insert Congreve, despite the reflection that the ghost of that writer would daintily protest against it if he could. When Voltaire called upon him, in London, the Frenchman intimated that his visit was to the "author." "I am a gentleman," said Congreve. "Nay," rejoined the former, "had you been only a gentleman, you would never have received a visit from me at all."
Let me here repeat the names: —Davenant, Dryden, Shirley, Lee, Cowley, Shadwell, Flecknoe, Settle, Crowne, Ravenscroft, Wycherley, Otway, Durfey, Banks, Rymer, Tate, Brady, Southerne, Congreve, Cibber, Dilke,59 Vanbrugh, Gildon, Farquhar, Dennis, and Rowe. The half dozen in italics were poets-laureate.
All of them were sons of "gentlemen," save three, Davenant, Cowley, and Dennis, whose sires were, respectively, a vintner, a hatter,60 and a saddler. The sons, however, received a collegiate education. Cowley distinguished himself at Cambridge, but Davenant left Oxford without a degree, and from the former University Dennis was expelled, in March 1680, "for assaulting and wounding Sir Glenham with a sword."
Besides Cowley and Dennis, we are indebted to Cambridge for Dryden, Lee, and Rymer. From Oxford University came Davenant, and Settle, degreeless as Davenant, with Shirley, whose mole on his cheek had rendered him ineligible in Laud's eyes, for ordination; Wycherley, Otway, Southerne, and Dilke. Dublin University yielded Tate and Brady; and better fruit still, Southerne,61 Congreve, who went to Ireland at an early age, and Farquhar. Douay gave us Gildon, and we are not proud of the gift.
Lee, Otway, and Tate were sons of clergymen. Little Crowne's father was an Independent minister in Nova Scotia, and Crowne himself laid claim, fruitlessly, to a vast portion of the territory there – unjustly made over by the English Government to the French. Cibber was an artist, on the side of his father the statuary, and a "gentleman" by his mother.
It may be said of a good number of these gentlemen that idleness and love of pleasure made them dramatic poets. Shadwell, Ravenscroft, Wycherley, Durfey, Bankes, Southerne, Congreve, and Rowe, were all apprenticed to the law; but the study was one too dull for men of their vivacious temperament, and they all turned from it in disgust. According to their success, so were they praised or blamed.
The least successful dramatists on the above list were the most presumptuous of critics. Rymer, who was wise enough to stick to the law while he endeavoured to turn at least Melpomene to good account, tried to persuade the public that Shakspeare was even of less merit than it was the fashion to assign to him. In 1678,62 Rymer boldly asserted that "in the neighing of a horse as the growling of a mastiff, there is a meaning; there is as lively expression and, may I say, more humanity than many times in the tragical flights of Shakspeare." He says, that "no woman bred out of a pigstye could talk so meanly as Desdemona," in that tragedy which Rymer calls "a bloody farce without salt or savour." Of Brutus and Cæsar, he says Shakspeare has depicted them as "Jack Puddins." To show how much better he understood the art, Rymer published, in 1678, the tragedy he could not get represented, "Edgar, or the English Monarch." He professes to imitate the ancients, and his tragedy is in rhyme; he accuses Shakspeare of anachronisms, and his Saxon princess is directed to "pull off her patches!" The author was ambitious enough to attempt to supersede Shakspeare, and he pooh-poohed John Milton by speaking of Paradise Lost as "a thing which some people were pleased to call a poem."
Dennis was not quite so audacious as this. He was a better critic than the author of the Fœdera, and a more voluminous writer, or rather adapter, of dramatic pieces. He spoke, however, of Tasso as compassionately as the village-painter did of Titian; but his usefulness was acknowledged by the commentator, who remarked that men might construct good plays by following his precepts and avoiding his examples. Boyer has said something similar of Gildon, who was a critic as well as dramatist – namely, "he wrote an English Art of Poetry, which he had practised himself very unsuccessfully in his dramatic performances."
Cowley, although he is now little remembered as a dramatic writer, was among the first who seized the earliest opportunity after the Restoration to set up as playwrights; but Cowley failed, and was certainly mortified at his failure. He re-trimmed a play of his early days, the "Guardian," and called it the "Cutter of Coleman Street." All there is broad farce, in which the Puritan "congregation of the spotless" is coarsely ridiculed, and cavalierism held up to admiration. The audience condemned the former as "profane," and Cowley's cavaliers were found to be such scamps that he was suspected of disloyalty. Gentle as he was by nature, Cowley was irritable under criticism. "I think there was something of faction against it," he says, "by the early appearance of some men's disapprobation before they had seen enough of it to build their dislike upon their judgment." "Profane!" exclaims Abraham, with a shudder, and declares it is enough to "knock a man down." Is it profane, he asks, "to deride the hypocrisy of those men whose skulls are not yet bare upon the gates since the public and just punishment of it," namely, profanity. Thus were the skulls of the Commonwealth leaders tossed up in comedy. He adds, in a half saucy, half deprecatory sort of way, that "there is no writer but may fail sometimes in point of wit, and it is no less frequent for the auditors to fail in point of judgment." Nevertheless, he had humbly asked favour at the hands of the critics when his piece was first played, in these words: —
"Gentlemen critics of Argier,
For your own int'rest, I'd advise ye here
To let this little forlorn hope go by
Safe and untouch'd. 'That must not be!' you'll cry.
If ye be wise, it must: I'll tell ye why.
There are 7, 8, 9, – stay, there are behind
Ten plays at least, which wait but for a wind
And the glad news that we the enemy miss;
And those are all your own, if you spare this.
Some are but new-trimm'd up, others quite new,
Some by known shipwrights built, and others too
By that great author made, whoe'er he be,
That styles himself 'Person of Quality.'"
The "Cutter" rallied a little, and then was laid aside; but some of its spars were carried off by later gentlemen, who have piqued themselves on their originality. Colonel Jolly's advice to the bully, Cutter, if he would not be known, to "take one more disguise at last, and put thyself in the habit of a gentleman," has been quoted as the wit of Sheridan, who took his Sir Anthony Absolute from Truman, senior. And when Cowley made Aurelia answer to the inquiry, if she had looked in Lucia's eye, that she had, and that "there were pretty babies in it," he little thought that there would rise a Tom Moore to give a turn to the pretty idea, and spoil it, as he has done, in the "Impromptu," in Little's Poems.
One of the most remarkable circumstances in Cowley's character, considering how he distinguished himself at college, is, that he never thoroughly understood the rules of grammar! and that in seriously setting up for a dramatic author, he took, like Dryden, the course in which he acquired the least honour. When Charles II., on hearing of Cowley's death, declared that he had not left a better man behind him in England, the King was, assuredly, not thinking of the poet as a dramatist.
Several of Cowley's contemporaries who were considered better men by some judges, were guilty of offence from which he was entirely free. That offence consisted in their various attempts to improve Shakspeare, by lowering him to what they conceived to be the taste of the times. Davenant took "Measure for Measure," and "Much Ado about Nothing," and manipulated them into one absurd comedy, the "Law against Lovers." He subsequently improved "Macbeth" and "Julius Cæsar;"63 and Dryden, who with at least some show of reason, re-arranged "Troilus and Cressida," united with Davenant in a sacrilegious destruction of all that was beautiful in the "Tempest." Nat Lee, who was accounted mad, had at least sense enough to refrain from marring Shakspeare. Shadwell corrected the great poet's view of "Timon of Athens," which, as he not too modestly observed, he "made into a play;" but, with more modesty in the epilogue, he asked for forgiveness for his own part, for the sake of the portion that was Shakspeare's. Crowne, more impudently, remodelled two parts of "Henry VI.," with some affectation of reverence for the original author, and a bold assertion of his own original merits with regard to some portions of the play. Crowne's originality is shown, in making Clifford swear like a drunken tapster, and in affirming that a king is a king – sacred, and not to be even thought ill of, let him be never so hateful a miscreant. Ravenscroft, in his "Titus Andronicus," only piled the agony a little more solidly and comically, and can be hardly said to have thereby molested Shakspeare. There was less excuse for Otway, who, not caring to do as he pleased with a doubtful play, ruthlessly seized "Romeo and Juliet," stripped the lovers of their romance, clapped them into a classical costume, and converted the noble but obstinate houses of Capulet and Montagu into riotous followers of Marius and Sylla – Caius Marius the younger wishing he were a glove upon the hand of Lavinia Metella, and a sententious Sulpitius striving in vain to be as light and sparkling as Mercutio. Tate's double rebuke to Shakspeare, in altering his "King Lear" and "Coriolanus," was a small offence compared with Otway's assault. He undertook, as he says, to "rectify what was wanting;" and accordingly, he abolishes the faithful fool, makes a pair of silly lovers of Edgar and Cordelia, and converts the solemn climax into comedy, by presenting the old king and his matchless daughter, hand in hand, alive and merry, as the curtain descends. Tate smirkingly maintained, that he wrought into perfection the rough and costly material left by Shakspeare. "In my humble opinion," said Addison, "it has lost half its beauty;" and yet Tate's version kept its place for many years! – though not so long as Cibber's version of "Richard III.," which was constructed out of Shakspeare, with more regard for the actor than respect for the author.
In the last year of the century, the last attempt to improve that inefficient poet was made by Gildon, who produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields his idea of what "Measure for Measure" should be, by omitting all the comic characters, introducing music and dancing, transposing incidents, adding much nonsense of his own to that of Davenant, and sprinkling all with an assortment of blunders, amusing enough to make some compensation for the absence of the comic characters in the original play.
It seemed to be the idea of these men, that it were wise to reduce Shakspeare to the capacities of those who could appreciate him. There were unhappy persons thus afflicted. Even Mr. Pepys speaks of "Henry VIII." as "a simple thing, made up of a great many patches." The "Tempest," he thinks, "has no great wit – but yet good, above ordinary plays." "Othello" was to him "a mean thing," compared with the last new comedy by another author. "Twelfth Night," "one of the weakest plays I ever saw on the stage." "Macbeth," he liked or disliked, according to the humour of the hour; but there was a "divertissement" in it, which struck him as being a droll thing in tragedy, but in this case proper and natural! Finally, he records, in 1662, of the "Midsummer's Night's Dream," which he "had never seen before, nor ever shall again," that "it is the most insipid, ridiculous play, that ever I saw in my life."
