Charles P. Daly

“ Clara smiled and said:
[Pg 72]
“Be merry then; indeed, Cousin, you could become so again if you chose. Do not determine to find fault with everything and think everything means you. Seek novelty; you say that all here seem to take pleasure in the play while you do not. They are pleased because it is new to them. I have never seen a play, and I am highly pleased. If you have been often to the theater there is nothing strange in your thinking this poor one excellent, though it seems beautiful to me. ”

“ Vanbrugh was giving his attention to architecture. Jeremy Collier and his moral tractate had exorcised the merry devils off the stage, and the pit mourned their departure. So “The Recruiting Officer,” with its broad jests, was particularly welcome. Captain Plume, with his amorous devices, became the ideal of the army, and pretty Rose, with her chickens, furnished laughter for the mess-room and coffee-houses.
Human nature has not much changed. Mr. Daly’s audience last night was as fashionable an audience as could be gathered in the city. ”

“ The stage is the best mirror of human life; let me therefore recommend the oft use of a theatre as the most agreeable and easy method of making a polite and moral gentry, which would end in rendering the rest of the people regular in their behaviour and ambitious of laudable undertakings. ”

“ Effingham sought the least trace of confusion. She surveyed the audience, whilst the Prince of Morocco was uttering his speech, with perfect simplicity, but her eyes not for a single moment rested on the young men collected at the corner [Pg 74] of the stage. For her they seemed to have no existence, and she turned to the Prince again. That gentleman having uttered his prescribed number of lines, Portia advanced graciously towards him and addressed him. Her carelessness was gone. She no longer betrayed either indifference or coldness; she was the actress, with her rôle to sustain. ”

“ All these people were engaged in attending the assemblies at the palace, in dancing at the Apollo, in snatching the pleasures of the moment and enjoying life under a régime that seemed mad for enjoyment.”... The violins seemed to be ever playing for the diversion of the youths and maidens; cocks were fighting, horsemen riding, students mingled in the throng in their academic dress, and his Serene Excellency went to open the House of Burgesses in his coach, drawn by six milk-white horses. It was a scene full of gaiety and abandon, and Williamsburg was never more brilliant than at this period. ”

“ When we examine those treatises that have been written against the stage, the material upon which they rely is almost invariably derived from its abuse, without considering that that abuse is not due to the theater as an institution, but to the state of society that gives rise to it. ”

“ It is a characteristic of those who object to the theater altogether that they rarely, if ever, give any consideration to the origin of the drama, to its long continuance, or appreciate that it will continue as long as civilization continues, and this applies as well to those who have written elaborate treatises against it, like Jeremy Collier, as to those who object to it generally. The briefest form of stating this consideration is that the theater has its origin in human nature. ”

“ Pardon me, sir,” she added, calmly, “I am neglecting what I have engaged to do—play Portia.”
And the young woman, quietly disengaging her sleeve from Mr. Effingham’s fingers, moved away to another part of the stage.
“Here is a pretty affair,” said Mr. Effingham to himself, as he fell back languidly into the chair from which, however, he had not deigned to rise wholly when addressing the young actress. “What are things coming to when an actress treats a gentleman in this manner. I really believe the girl thinks I am not good enough for her. ”

“ The compensation of actors, save in exceptionable instances, was then very small. It supplied little more than a subsistence, and even that was precarious. It was small even in London. Betterton, who has been called the greatest actor, except Garrick, the English stage has ever known,—who, Colley Cibber says, “was, as an actor, what Shakespeare was as an author, without a competitor,”—never received more than four pounds a week, and though a man of economical habits and exemplary life, died, after a career upon the stage of half a century, in limited circumstances. ”

“ On the contrary, a history of the American Stage from the earliest knowledge we have of it to the time of publication, by a writer who had the leisure to make the necessary research, and the art so to arrange his material as to make the work reliable and readable, would be a contribution to literature. Seilhamer’s opinion of what he could do, and had done, is subsequently shown by his constant abuse of Dunlap throughout these three volumes, for Dunlap’s name rarely, if ever, occurs without his applying to it some derogatory, contemptuous, or other abusive epithet. ”

“ Augustine, writing in the beginning of the fourth century, in an article of great severity against the theater, with whose abuses he was no doubt thoroughly familiar in his wild youth, says: “The theaters, those cages of uncleanliness and public schools of debauchery, are tumbling almost everywhere,” which was the fact, as stationary places of amusement in cities or towns. And Tertullian, who wrote at the end of the second century, says even the very magistrates who abet the stage discountenance the players, stigmatize their character, and cramp their freedom. ”

“ If a people are alike brave and greatly cultivated, as the Athenians were when the drama reached to its highest [Pg 93] attainment among them, they witness with pleasure the reproduction of noble deeds, and listen with delight to the inculcation of noble sentiments from such masters of the dramatic art as Euripides and Sophocles, and realize with great enjoyment the power that lies in ridicule as a means of reforming public abuses and correcting deformities in the character of individuals when it comes from such a satirist and wit as Aristophanes. ”

“ But when a nation is sinking into decay or deteriorating, the stage deteriorates with it; or when a people find their highest enjoyment in amusements that are coarse or brutal, like the Romans, who thronged the amphitheater to witness the sanguinary combat of gladiators, the “maddening excitement of the circus” ”

“ Cæsar called him a half Menander, who was the Greeks’ ideal of a perfect comic dramatist, regarding him in comedy, as they did Sophocles in tragedy, as the most complete and finished; whose judgment we accept, as no play of Menander, though he is said to have written about a hundred comedies, has come down to us, but only fragments. ”

“ The comedy with which the New Theater was opened in 1732, “The Recruiting Officer,” is the earliest play known to have been acted in North America, for though, as has been stated, there was a play-house in Williamsburg ten years before, it is not known what plays were acted there until 1736, when four are referred to, and “The Recruiting Officer” was one of them, which had the attraction for Virginia that the Colony was referred to in it. It was a popular play in the early part of the last century, and continued to be acted frequently for nearly a century and a half. ”

“ Franklin wished that he could, after a hundred years, return again to this earth to see what science in the meanwhile had accomplished, and could Collier return after the histrionic experience of the last two centuries, it would be to see how unfounded were his conclusions respecting the theater as an institution, and will ever be among any people while the nation remains in a healthy condition. ”

“ Mr. Hallam was a fat little man, of fifty or fifty-five, with a rubicund and somewhat sensual face, and he expressed extraordinary delight at meeting so many of the “noble aristocracy of the great and noble colony of Virginia” assembled to witness his very humble representation. “It would be the chief and sole ambition of his life,” he said, “to please the gentry who so kindly patronized their servants—himself and his [Pg 69] associates”—and then the smiling worthy concluded by bowing lower than before. ”

“ While the stage may and does much to maintain a healthy moral feeling in society, in the powerful effect that is produced by the dramatic representation of virtuous deeds and of guilty actions, and the consequences that attend the latter, as an institution the theater does not retard society in its downward course, but may be said rather to accelerate it. ”

“ He finds him “inexcusable for not knowing the date of the first appearance of a certain actress and for his want of knowledge of an early American play.” He is declared to have been a failure in everything; as an historian, a novelist, an artist, a theatrical manager, and as a dramatist. A drama of his is a failure for the want of skill in the management of the plot, and the insufficiency of the characters and the incidents ”

“ He had not visited Riverhead a dozen times since his arrival from Oxford and London, and on these occasions he never touched upon the subject of Virginia and its dreadful deficiencies.
“A play,” he said; “that is really good news; but the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ that is not one of my acquaintances.”
“Ah! you young men are wrong in giving up Will. Shakespeare for the Steeles, Addisons, and Vanbrughs. Mr. Addison’s essays are very pleasant and entertaining reading, and surely there never was a finer gentleman than Sir Roger; but in the drama Will. Shakespeare distances him all to nothing.” ”

“ Pleasurable expectations of the production were in many respects realized. The comedy was tastefully mounted, though without extravagance, the costumes were handsome and appropriate to the time represented, and consequently the stage pictures revealed were both handsome and quaint. That the old-time flavor was fully preserved in the action it would be folly to say. An intelligent performance of Farquhar’s comedy was given, however, with much of the original text, and everybody present interested in the history and literature of the English stage found abundant entertainment. ”

“ But there is nothing further respecting the play-house, except the fact that it was in existence in 1722, for Jones had been but two years away from Virginia when he published his book in London in 1724. That nothing more should be found respecting it is not remarkable, for in that early colonial period local occurrences were seldom mentioned in the small-sized journals that existed, for the simple reason that they were generally known to all the inhabitants of the town or place, and were not, therefore, news like intelligence from London or Boston. ”

“ But a more careful perusal of the book, and a consideration of the labor he bestowed in getting together whatever he could find from any source against it as an institution, show that his aim was the impossible—to abolish the theater altogether—that he was in full accord with the pithy St. Augustine that sinners “fancy the world goes wonderfully well when people make a figure; when a man is a prince in his fortune and a beggar in his virtue; has a great many fine things about him, but not so much as one good quality to deserve them; when the play-house goes up and religion goes down ”

“ Societies of a like general nature have been formed in England and in this country, which have usually been named after some individual who at an early period was prominently identified with the subject matter in which the society is interested; and when what has been here stated respecting Dunlap is considered, with the fact that he was the first historian of the American theater, and the purpose for which the Dunlap Society was formed, it appears to me that the choice of his name [Pg 88] for it was as appropriate, if not more so, than that of any other American of that period. ”

“ The licentiousness that had prevailed alike in the composition and representation of plays was rapidly passing away and a better class of persons went to the theater. Addison, writing at this period, says: “I cannot be of the opinion of the reformers of manners in their severity toward plays; but must allow that a good play, acted before a well-bred audience, must raise very proper incitement to good behaviour, and be the most quick and the most prevailing method of giving young people a turn of sense and breeding. ”

“ Oldfield, [Pg 44] a tall, beautiful, finely formed woman, with an exquisite, clear, and powerful voice, that made her as impressive in tragedy as she was fascinating in comedy. Fielding, the novelist, says that her “ravishing perfection made her the admiration of every eye and every ear”; and Colley Cibber and other contemporaries unite in giving her the most unstinted praise. Such an actress, in such a part as Sylvia, the most interesting character in the play, must have been very attractive, especially in that portion of it where Sylvia appears in male attire, dressed as a young officer. ”

“ In conclusion, we may say of the drama, that with the four other arts of poetry, music, sculpture, and painting, it has been the natural outcome of civilization; that as things that are general have always their exceptions, there may have been races, as the Egyptians appear to have been, who, in the development of their civilization, showed no aptitude or desire for it; that its peculiar attraction is, as Lord Bacon says: “That it brings the past before us as if it were the present;” ”