Part 6 (1/2)

After the riot in the footmen's gallery, the gentlemen of the county of Aberdeen resolved neither to give, nor to allow their servants to receive, any money from their visitors under the name of drink-money, card-money, &c., and instead, augmented their wages. This example was ”followed by the gentlemen of the county of Edinburgh, by the Faculty of Advocates, and other respectable public bodies; and the practice was utterly exploded over all Scotland.”

It was not only while they occupied the gallery, however, that the footmen contrived to give offence to the audience. Their conduct while they kept places for their employers in the better portions of the house, appears to have been equally objectionable. In the _Weekly Register_ for March 25th, 1732, it is remarked: ”The theatre should be esteemed the centre of politeness and good manners, yet numbers of them [the footmen] every evening are lolling over the boxes, while they keep places for their masters, with their hats on; play over their airs, take snuff, laugh aloud, adjust their c.o.c.ks'-combs, or hold dialogues with their brethren from one side of the house to the other.” The fault was not wholly with the footmen, however: their masters and mistresses were in duty bound to come earlier to the theatre and take possession of the places retained for them. But it was the fas.h.i.+on to be late: to enter the theatre noisily, when the play was half over, and even then to pay little attention to the players. In Fielding's farce of ”Miss Lucy in Town,” produced in 1742, when the country-bred wife inquires of Mrs. Tawdry concerning the behaviour of the London fine ladies at the playhouses, she is answered: ”Why, if they can they take a stage-box, where they let the footman sit the two first acts to show his livery; then they come in to show themselves--spread their fans upon the spikes, make curtsies to their acquaintance, and then talk and laugh as loud as they are able.”

CHAPTER X.

FOOT-LIGHTS.

As the performances of the Elizabethan theatres commenced at three o'clock in the afternoon, and the public theatres of the period were open to the sky (except over the stage and galleries), much artificial lighting could not, as a rule, have been requisite. Malone, in his account of the English stage prefixed to his edition of ”Shakespeare,”

describes the stage as formerly lighted by means of two large branches ”of a form similar to those now hung in churches.” The pattern of these branches may be seen in the frontispiece to ”Kirkman's Collection of Drolls,” printed in 1672, representing a view of a theatrical booth. In time, however, it was discovered that the branches obstructed the view of the spectators, and were otherwise incommodious; they then gave place to small circular wooden frames furnished with candles, eight of which were hung on the stage, four on either side. The frontispiece to the Dublin edition of Chetwood's ”History of the Stage,” 1749, exhibits the stage lighted by hoops of candles in this way, suspended from the proscenium, and with no foot-lights between the actors and the musicians in the orchestra. It is probable that these candles were of wax or tallow, accordingly as the funds of the theatrical manager permitted. Mr. Pepys, in his ”Diary,” February 12th, 1667, chronicles a conversation with Killigrew, the manager of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. ”He tells me that the stage is now, by his pains, a thousand times better and more glorious than ever heretofore. _Now, wax candles and many of them; then, not above 3 lb. of tallow._ Now, all things civil: no rudeness anywhere; then, as in a bear-garden,” &c. The body of the house, according to Malone, was formerly lighted ”by cressets or large open lanthorns of nearly the same size with those which are fixed in the p.o.o.p of a s.h.i.+p.”

The use of candles involved the employment of candle-snuffers, who came on at certain pauses in the performance to tend and rectify the lighting of the stage. Goldsmith's Strolling Player narrates how he commenced his theatrical career in this humble capacity: ”I snuffed the candles; and let me tell you, that without a candle-snuffer the piece would lose half its embellishment.” The illness of one of the actors necessitated the pressing of the candle-snuffer into the company of players. ”I learnt my part,” he continues, ”with astonis.h.i.+ng rapidity, and bade adieu to snuffing candles ever after. I found that nature had designed me for more n.o.ble employment, and I was resolved to take her when in the humour.” But the duties of a candle-snuffer, if not very honourable, were somewhat arduous. It was the custom of the audience, especially among those frequenting the galleries, to regard him as a b.u.t.t, with whom to amuse themselves during the pauses between the acts. Something of this habit is yet extant. Even nowadays the appearance of a servant on the stage for the necessary purposes of the performance--to carry chairs on or off, to spread or remove a carpet, &c.--is frequently the signal for cries of derision from the gallery. Of old the audience proceeded to greater extremities--even to hurling missiles of various kinds at the unfortunate candle-snuffer. In Foote's comedy of ”The Minor,” s.h.i.+ft, one of the characters, describes the changing scenes of his life. From a linkboy outside a travelling theatre he was promoted to employment within. ”I did the honours of the barn,” he says, ”by sweeping the stage and clipping the candles. Here my skill and address were so conspicuous that it procured me the same office the ensuing winter, at Drury Lane, where I acquired intrepidity, the crown of all my virtues.... For I think, sir, he that dares stand the shot of the gallery, in lighting, snuffing, and sweeping, the first night of a new play, may bid defiance to the pillory with all its customary compliments.... But an unlucky crab-apple applied to my right eye by a patriot gingerbread baker from the Borough, who would not suffer three dancers from Switzerland because he hated the French, forced me to a precipitate retreat.”

Mr. Richard Jenkins, in his ”Memoirs of the Bristol Stage,” published in 1826, relates how one Winstone, a comic actor, who sometimes essayed tragical characters, appeared upon a special occasion as Richard III. He played his part so energetically, and flourished his sword to such good purpose while demanding ”A horse! a horse!” in the fifth act that ”the weapon coming in contact with a rope by which one of the hoops of tallow candles was suspended, the blazing circle (not the golden one he had looked for) fell round his neck and lodged there, greatly to his own discomfiture and to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the audience.” The amazed Catesby of the evening, instead of helping his sovereign to a steed, is said to have been sufficiently occupied with extricating him from his embarra.s.sing situation. Winstone, indeed, seems to have enjoyed some fame on the score of eccentricity. He took leave of the stage in 1784, being then about eighty years of age. But he was at this time so afflicted with deafness that it was impossible for him to ”catch the word” from the prompter at the side of the stage. To a.s.sist him, therefore, in the delivery of his farewell address, one of the performers, provided with a copy of the speech, was stationed behind the speaker and instructed to keep moving forward and backward as he did, like his shadow. The effect must certainly have been whimsical. Winstone had been a pupil of Quin's, and had played Downright to Garrick's Kitely in ”Every Man in his Humour,” at Drury Lane, in 1751. He was a constant attendant at the Exchange Coffee House, the established resort of the Bristol merchants. ”He had the good fortune at one time to win a considerable prize in the lottery, and often looked in at the insurance offices, where he sometimes received premiums as an underwriter of s.h.i.+ps and cargoes.”

In consequence, he obtained much patronage, and always inserted at the head of the playbills of his benefit, ”By desire of several eminent merchants.”

Garrick, in 1765, after his return from Italy (according to Jackson's ”History of the Scottish Stage”), introduced various improvements in the theatre, and amongst them, the employment of a row of foot-lights in lieu of the old circular chandeliers over head. The labours of the candle-snuffers in front of the curtain were probably brought to a conclusion soon afterwards, when oil-lamps took the place of candles.

The snuffer then found his occupation gone. Probably the tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of the lamps became his next duty; and then, as time went on, he developed into a ”gasman,” that most indispensable attendant of the modern theatre.

Thackeray, in his novel of ”The Virginians,” has some very apposite remarks upon the limited state of illumination in which our ancestors were content to dwell. ”In speaking of the past,” he writes, ”I think the night-life of society a hundred years since was rather a _dark_ life. There was not one wax-candle for ten which we now see in a ladies' drawing-room: let alone gas and the wondrous new illuminations of clubs. Horrible guttering tallow smoked and stunk in pa.s.sages. The candle-snuffer was a notorious officer in the theatre. See Hogarth's pictures: how dark they are, and how his feasts are, as it were, begrimed with tallow! In 'Mariage a la Mode,' in Lord Viscount Squanderfield's grand saloons, where he and his wife are sitting yawning before the horror-stricken steward when their party is over, there are but eight candles--one on each table and half-a-dozen in a bra.s.s chandelier. If Jack Briefless convoked his friends to oysters and beer in his chambers, Pump Court, he would have twice as many. Let us comfort ourselves by thinking that Louis Quatorze in all his glory held his revels in the dark, and bless Mr. Price and other Luciferous benefactors of mankind for abolis.h.i.+ng the abominable mutton of our youth.”

The first gas-lamp appeared in London in the year 1809, Pall Mall being the first and for some years the only street so illuminated.

Gradually, however, the new mode of lighting made way, and stole from the streets into manufactories and public buildings, and, finally, into private houses. The progress was not very rapid however; for we find that gas was not introduced into the Mall of St. James's Park until the year 1822. It is difficult to fix the exact date when gas foot-lights appeared upon the stage. But in the year 1828 an explosion took place in Covent Garden Theatre by which two men lost their lives.

Great alarm was excited. The public were afraid to re-enter the theatre. The management published an address in which it was stated that the gas-fittings would be entirely removed from the interior of the house, and safer methods of illumination resorted to. In order to effect the necessary alterations the theatre was closed for a fortnight, during which the Covent Garden company appeared at the English Opera House, or Lyceum Theatre, and an address was issued on behalf of the widows of the men who had been killed by the explosion.

In due time, however, the world grew bolder on the subject, and gas reappeared upon the scene. Some theatres, however (being probably restricted by the conditions of their leases), were very tardy in adopting the new system of lighting. Mr. Benjamin Webster, in his speech in the year 1853, upon his resigning the management of the Haymarket Theatre after a tenancy of fifteen years, mentions, among the improvements he had originated during that period, that he had ”introduced gas for the fee of 500 a-year, and the presentation of the centre chandelier to the proprietors.”

The employment of gas-lights in theatres was strenuously objected to by many people. In the year 1829 a medical gentleman, writing from Bolton Row, and signing himself ”Chiro-Medicus,” addressed to a public journal a remonstrance on the subject. He had met with several fatal cases of apoplexy which had occurred in the theatres, or a few hours after leaving them, and he had been led, with some success, as he alleged, to investigate the cause. It appeared to him ”that the strong vivid light evolved from the numerous gas-lamps on the stage so powerfully stimulated the brain through the medium of the optic nerves, as to occasion a preternatural determination of blood to the head, capable of producing headache or giddiness: and if the subject should at the time laugh heartily, the additional influx of blood which takes place, may rupture a vessel, the consequence of which will be, from the effusion of blood within the substance of the brain, or on its surface, fatal apoplexy.” From inquiries he had made among his professional brethren who had been many years in practice in the Metropolis, it appeared to him that the votaries of the drama were by no means so subject to apoplexy or nervous headache _before_ the adoption of gas-lights. Some of his medical friends were of opinion that the air of the theatre was very considerably deteriorated by the combustion of gas, and that the consumption of oxygen, and the new products, and the escape of hydrogen, occasioned congestion of the vessels of the head. He thought it probable that this deterioration of the air might act in conjunction with the vivid light in producing either apoplexy or nervous headache. He found, moreover, that the actors were subject not only to headache, but also to weakness of sight and attacks of giddiness, from the action of the powerfully vivid light evolved from the combustion of gas; and he noted that the pupils of the eyes of all actors or actresses, who had been two or three years on the stage, were much dilated; though this, he thought, might be attributable to the injurious pigments they employed to heighten their complexions; common rouge containing either red oxide of lead or the sulphuret of mercury, and white paint being often composed of carbonate of lead, all of which were capable of acting detrimentally upon the optic nerve.

The statements of ”Chiro-Medicus” may seem somewhat overcharged; yet, after allowance has been made for that exaggerated way of putting the case which seems habitual to ”the faculty” when it takes up with a new theory, a sufficient residuum of fact remains to justify many of the doctor's remarks. That a headache too often follows hard upon a dramatic entertainment must be tolerably plain to anyone who has ever sat in a theatre. Surely a better state of things must have existed a century ago, when the grandsires and great-grandsires of us Londoners were in the habit of frequenting the theatres night after night, almost as punctually as they ate their dinner or sipped their claret or their punch. To look in at Drury Lane or Covent Garden, if only to witness an act or two of the tragedy or comedy of the evening, was a sort of duty with the town gentlemen, wits, and Templars, a hundred years back, when George III. was king. But gas had not then superseded wax, and tallow, and oil.

Beyond increasing the _quant.i.ty_ of light, stage management has done little since Garrick's introduction of foot-lights, or ”floats,” as they are technically termed, in the way of satisfactorily adjusting the illumination of the stage. The light still comes from the wrong place: from below instead of, naturally, from above. In 1863, Mr.

Fechter, at the Lyceum, sank the _floats_ below the surface of the stage, so that they should not intercept the view of the spectator; and his example has been followed by other managers; and of late years, owing to accidents having occurred to the dresses of the dancers when they approached too near to the foot-lights, these have been carefully fenced and guarded with wire screens and metal bars.

Moreover, the dresses of the performers have been much shortened. But the obvious improvement required still remains to be effected.

George Colman the younger, in his ”Random Records,” describes an amateur dramatic performance in the year 1780, at Wynnstay, in North Wales, the seat of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn. The theatre had formerly been the kitchen of the mansion--a large, long, rather low-pitched room. One advantage of these characteristics, according to Mr. Colman, was the fact that the foot-lights, or _floats_, could be dispensed with: the stage was lighted by a row of lamps affixed to a large beam or arch above the heads of the performers--”on that side of the arch nearest to the stage, so that the audience did not see the lamps, which cast a strong vertical light upon the actors. This,” he writes, ”is as we receive light from nature; whereas the operation of the _float_ is exactly upon a reversed principle, and throws all the shades of the actor's countenance the wrong way.” This defect, however, appeared to our author to be irremediable; for, as he argues, ”if a beam to hold lamps as at Wynnstay were placed over the proscenium at Drury Lane or Covent Garden Theatre, the G.o.ddesses in the upper tiers of boxes, and the two and one s.h.i.+lling G.o.ds in the galleries, would be completely intercepted from a view of the stage.”

Still, Mr. Colman was not without hope that ”in this age of improvement, while theatres are springing up like mushrooms, some ingenious architect may hit upon a remedy. At all events,” he concludes, ”it is a grand desideratum.”

Colman was writing in the year 1830. It is rather curious to find him describing theatres as ”springing up like mushrooms,” when it is considered that, notwithstanding the enormous extension of London, and the vast increase of its population, but one or two theatres were added to it for some thirty years. Meanwhile, the ”ingenious architect,” to whom he looked hopefully to amend the lighting of the stage, has not yet appeared. But then, one does not meet ingenious architects every day.

A concluding note may be added touching the difficulties that may ensue from the system of lighting the theatres by means of gas.

On December 3rd, 1872, there occurred the strike of some 2400 stokers; and, as a consequence, the West-end of London was involved in complete darkness, while in the City the supply of gas was limited to a very few streets. Upon the theatres this deprivation fell heavily. The performances were given up in despair at some houses, and carried on at others in a very restricted manner, by suddenly calling into requisition the twilight of tallow-candles and oil-lamps. The following advertis.e.m.e.nts, among many others of like tenor, appearing in _The Times_ of the 4th December, are ill.u.s.trative of the situation of affairs:

SPECIAL NOTICE.--COURT THEATRE.--This theatre, from its situation, is in no way affected by the Gas Strike, and will be open every evening, and brilliantly illuminated.

ST. JAMES'S THEATRE.--The management having received no notice that, in consequence of the strike, the supply of gas would be discontinued, found at the last moment no light could be obtained, and were compelled to inform the crowds at the door that there would be no performance. _All Tickets_ issued last night will be available this evening.