Dr. Doran

“ She was so fond of humour, in what low part soever to be found, that she would make no scruple of defacing her fair form to come heartily into it, for when she was eminent in several desirable characters of wit and humour, in higher life, she would be in as much fancy, when descending into the antiquated Abigail of Fletcher, as when triumphing in all the airs and vain graces of a fine lady; a merit that few actresses care for. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It may be, that for a man to enjoy Congreve's wit, he should be as witty as Congreve. To me, it seems to shine at best but as a brilliant on a dirty finger. As for his boasted originality, Valentine and Trapbois are Don Juan and M. Dimanche; and as for Valentine, as the type of a gentleman, his similes smack more of the stable-yard than the drawing-room; and there is more of impertinent prattle generally among his characters than among those of Wycherley. His ladies are a shade more elegant than those of the latter poet ”

“ Some tipsy gentlemen in the street hard by, hear of her wit and handsome presence, and the morality of these drunkards is straightway incensed. The house is panic-stricken at seeing these virtuous Goths rushing into the pit, with drawn swords in one hand—flaming, smoking, ill-smelling torches, in the other; and with vituperative cries against "the Duchess of Portsmouth, and other persons of honour." The rioters, not satisfied with thrusting their rapiers at the arms, sides, and legs of the affrighted people in the pit, hurl their blazing torches among the astounded actors on the stage! ”

“ Meanwhile, beaming old Rhodes, with a head full of memories of the joyous Blackfriars' days, and the merry afternoons over the water, at the Globe, leaving his once apprentice, Betterton, listening to Davenant's stage histories, and Kynaston, not yet out of his time, longing to flaunt it before an audience, took his own way to Hyde Park, where Monk was encamped, and there obtained, in due time, from that far-seeing individual, licence to once more raise the theatrical flag, enrol the actors, light up the stage, and, in a word, revive the English theatre. ”

“ Another new play, the "Northern Heiress," by Mrs. Davys, a clergyman's widow, but now the lively Irish mistress of a Cambridge coffee-house, reminds me of the five-act farces of Reynolds, with its fops, fools, half-pay officers, fast gentlemen, and flippant ladies. There are ten people married at the end, a compliment to matrimony, at the hands of the widow; but there is a slip in poetical justice; for, a lover who deserts his mistress, when he finds, as Lord Peterborough did of Miss Moses, that her fortune was not equal to his expectations, marries her, after discovering that he was mistaken. ”

“ His wit, audacity, emphasis, and point, delighted the critics, who thought that "expression" would be more perfect if the actor laid aside the inevitable mask of Harlequin. Pinkethman did so; but all expression was thereby lost. It was no longer the saucy Harlequin that seemed speaking. Pinkey, so impudent on all other occasions, was uneasy and feeble on this, and his audacity and vivacity only returned on his again assuming the sable vizard.
Pinkethman was entirely the architect of his own fortune. He made his way by talent and industry. ”

“ When speaking of his incapacity for writing comedy, he says, "I want that gaiety of humour which is required in it; my conversation slow and dull; my humour saturnine and reserved. In short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company, and endeavour to make repartees; so that those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit; reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend." This is the picture of a dull man, of which Shadwell, whose comedies, to say the least of them, have as much merit as Dryden's, was the exact opposite. ”

“ Down goes her dainty, diving body to the ground, as if she were sinking under the conscious load of her own attractions; then launches into a flood of fine language and compliment, still playing her chest forward in fifty falls and risings, like a swan upon waving water; and, to complete her impertinence, she is so rapidly fond of her own wit that she will not give her lover leave to praise it. ”

“ What a contrast is presented by the appearance of Cromwell's daughter, Lady Mary, in her box at this same theatre, with her husband, Viscount Falconbridge! Pepys praises her looks and her dress, and suggests a modest embarrassment on her part, as the house began to fill, and the admiring spectators began to gaze too curiously on Oliver's loved child; "she put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play, which of late has become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face." ”

“ The vizard had not yet fallen to the disreputable. Such ladies as are above designated entered into struggles of wit with the fine gentlemen, bantering them unmercifully, calling them by their names, and refusing to tell their own. All this was to the disturbance of the stage, but this battle of the wits was so frequently more amusing than what might be passing for the moment on the stage, that the audience near listened to the disputants rather than to the actors. Sir Charles Sedley was remarkable as a disputant with the ladies, and as a critic of the players. ”

“ Dryden, as an erst Westminster boy and Cambridge man, may have felt some annoyance on the exposure of his false quantity in the penultimate of "Cleomenes," but to a pert coffee-house fop, who presumed to review his tragedy of that name, he could deliver a crushing reply. In that play Cleomenes virtuously resists the blandishments of Cassandra. "Had I been left alone with a young beauty," said a stripling critic to glorious John, "I would not have spent my time like your Spartan." "That, sir," said Dryden, "perhaps is true; but give me leave to tell you, you are no hero!" ”

“ Returning to the front of the stage, we find the ladies in the boxes subjected to the audible criticisms of "the little cockerells of the pit," as Ravenscroft calls them, with whom the more daring damsels entered into a smart contest of repartees. As the "play-house" was then the refuge of all idle young people, these wit-combats were listened to with interest, from the town fops to the rustic young squires, who came to the theatre in cordivant gloves, and were quite unconscious of poisoning the affected fine ladies with the smell of them. ”

“ Among the dead there, also, rest Cibber, Vanbrugh, and Rowe, of whom the first, too careless of his money affairs, died the poorest man.
Better men than either of the last sleep in humbler graves. Poor Nat Lee, tottering homeward from the Bull and Harrow, on a winter's night, and with more punch under his belt than his brain could bear, falls down in the snow, near Duke Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and is dead when he is picked up. He is shuffled away to St. Clement's Danes. If Lee died tipsy, outside a public-house, Otway died half-starved, within one, at the Bull, on Tower Hill. ”

“ All else in the immediate neighbourhood retained an air of pristine and very ancient nobility. I therefore take the father of Betterton, cook to King Charles, to have been a very good gentleman, in his way. He was certainly the sire of one, and the circumstance of the apprenticeship of young Thomas to a bookseller was no evidence to the contrary. In those days, it was the custom for greater men than the chefs in the King's kitchen, namely, the bishops in the King's church, to apprentice their younger sons, at least, to trade, or to bequeath sums for that especial purpose. ”

“ It was the season in which great Anne fruitlessly forbade the presence of vizard-masks in the pit, and of gallants on the stage; recommended cleanliness of speech, and denounced the shabby people who occasionally tried to evade the money-takers. [81] Steele, in his play, attempted to support one of the good objects which the Queen had in view; but in striving to be pure, after his idea of purity, and to be moral, after a loose idea of morality, he failed altogether in wit, humour, and invention. He thought to prove himself a good churchman, he said, even in so small a matter as a comedy ”

“ For the Haymarket, Fielding wrote the only piece which has come down to our times, his immortal burlesque-tragedy of "Tom Thumb," in which the weakness and bombast of late or contemporary writers are copied with wonderful effect. Young suffered severely by this;—and the "Oh, Huncamunca! Huncamunca, oh!" was a dart at the "Oh, Sophonisba! Sophonisba, oh!" of Jamie Thomson. Of the other pieces I need not disturb the dust. Let me rather, contemplating that of Mrs. Oldfield, glance at the career of that great actress, who living knew no rival, and in her peculiar line has never been excelled. ”

“ Lord Lansdowne's "She Gallants" is a vile comedy for its "morals," but a vivacious one for its manner. Old Downes, the prompter, sneers at the offence taken at it by some ladies, who, he thinks, affected rather than possessed virtue themselves. But ladies, in 1696, were offended at such outrages on decency as this play contains. They were not the first who had made similar protest. Even in this lord's tragedy of "Heroic Love," Achilles and Briseis are only a little more decent than Ravenscroft's loose rakes and facile nymphs. ”

“ An honest man in this comedy, Sir Lively Cringe, does not think ill of married women, and he is made a buffoon and more, accordingly. When Lady Cringe, in the dark, holds her lover Lionel with one hand, her husband with the other, and declares that her fingers are locked with those of the man she loves best in the world, Sir Lively believes her. In this wise did the stage hold the mirror up to nature at the beginning of the last century.
Not more edifying nor much more successful was Vanbrugh's "False Friend," a comedy in which there is a murder enacted before the audience! ”

“ Lord Gardenstone, a lord of seat, I believe, and not [300] a lord of state, as it is said in the North, indignantly remarked of the "Confederacy":—"This is one of those plays which throw infamy on the English stage and general taste, though it is not destitute of wit and humour. A people must be in the last degree depraved among whom such public entertainments are produced and encouraged. In this symptom of degenerate manners we are, I believe, unmatched by any nation that is, or ever was, in the world."
In the "Confederacy," Dogget's fame as an actor culminated. ”

“ Wycherley, on the other hand, was admirable for the epigrammatic turn of his stage conversations, the aptness of his illustrations, the acuteness of his observation, the richness of his character-painting, and the smartness of his satire; in the indulgence or practice of all which, however, the action of the drama is often impeded, that the audience may enjoy a shower of sky rockets.
Pope said that Wycherley was inspired by the Muses, with the wit of Plautus. ”

“ Kynaston's contemporary, James Nokes, was as prudent and as fortunate as he; but James was not so well-descended. His father (and he himself for a time) was a city toyman—not so well to do, but he allowed his sons to go on the stage, where Robert was a respectable actor, and James, after a brief exercise of female characters, was admirable in his peculiar line. The toyman's son became a landholder, and made of his nephew a lord of the soil. Thus, even in those days of small salaries, players could build up fortunes ”

“ The English stage owes a debt of gratitude to both Monk and Rhodes. The former made glorious summer of the actors' winter of discontent; and the latter inaugurated the Restoration by introducing young Betterton. The son of Charles I.'s cook was, for fifty-one years, the pride of the English theatre. His acting was witnessed by more than one old contemporary of Shakspeare,—the poet's younger brother being among them,—he surviving till shortly after the accession of Charles II. The destitute actors warmed into life and laughter again beneath the sunshine of his presence. ”

“ A middle-aged duchess, fond of heroes, adopted him as a lover, and Cardell Goodman had fine quarters, rich feeding, and a dainty wardrobe, all at the cost of his mistress, the ex-favourite of a king, Barbara, the Duchess of Cleveland. Scum Goodman was proud of his splendid degradation, and paid such homage to "my duchess," as the impudent fellow called her, that when he expected her presence in the theatre, he would not go on the stage, though king and queen were kept waiting, till he heard that "his duchess" was in the house. ”

“ Naturally and justifiably jubilant is Colley Cibber when giving the history of the united companies. That union led to a prosperity of twenty years, though the union itself did not last so long. We now find houses crowded beyond anything known to that generation; and that not so much from surpassing excellence on the part of the actors, as from their zeal, industry, and the willingness with which they worked together. ”

“ Important changes were at hand, and the merry rattle of Monk's drums coming up Gray's Inn Road, welcomed by [57] thousands of dusty spectators, announced no more cheering prospect to any class than to the actors. The Oxford vintner's son, Will Davenant, might be seen bustling about in happy hurry, eagerly showing young Betterton how Taylor used to play Hamlet, under the instruction of Burbage, and announcing bright days to open-mouthed Kynaston, ready at a moment's warning to leap over his master's counter, and take his standing at the balcony as the smooth-cheeked Juliet. ”

“ Loose young gentlemen, fast merchant-factors, and wild young apprentices were no longer to be seen, it was said, hanging about the theatres, spending all their spare money, much that they could not spare, and not a little which was not theirs to spend. It was uncivilly suggested that the actors were a merry sort of thieves, who used to attach themselves to the puny gallants who sought their society, and strip them of the gold pieces in their pouches, the bodkin on their thighs, the girdles buckled to give them shape, and the very beavers jauntily plumed to lend them grace and stature. ”

“ James Howard belonged to the faction which affected to believe that there was no popular love for Shakspeare, to render whom palatable, he arranged "Romeo and Juliet" for the stage, with a double denouement—one serious, the other hilarious. If your heart were too sensitive to bear the deaths of the loving pair, you had only to go on the succeeding afternoon to see them wedded, and set upon the way of a well-assured domestic felicity! ”