Part 14 (2/2)
were likewise acted _”in stilo recitativo”_ during the time of the Civil Wars, and upon the Restoration were rewritten and enlarged for regular performance at the Duke of York's Theatre, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It seems to have been held that a play was no longer a play if its words were sung instead of spoken--or these representations of Davenant's works may have been altogether stealthy, and without the cognisance of the legal authorities of the time. Isaac Disraeli, however, has pointed out that in some verses, published in 1653, and prefixed to the plays of Richard Brome, there is evident a tone of exultation at the pa.s.sing away of power from the hands of those who had oppressed the actors. The poet, in a moralising vein, alludes to the fate of the players as it was affected by the dissolution of the Long Parliament:
See the strange twirl of times! When such poor things Outlive the dates of parliaments or kings!
This revolution makes exploded wit Now see the fall of those that ruined it; And the condemned stage hath now obtained To see her executioners arraigned.
There's nothing permanent; those high great men That rose from dust to dust may fall again; And fate so orders things that the same hour Sees the same man both in contempt and power!
For complete emanc.i.p.ation, however, the stage had to wait some years; until, indeed, it pleased Monk, acting in accordance with the desire of the nation, to march his army to London, and to restore the monarchy. Encamped in Hyde Park, Monk was visited by one Rhodes, a bookseller, who had been formerly occupied as wardrobe-keeper to King Charles I.'s company of comedians in Blackfriars, and who now applied to the general for permission to reopen the c.o.c.kpit in Drury Lane as a playhouse. Monk, it seems, held histrionic art in some esteem; at any rate the City companies, when with his council of state he dined in their halls, were wont to entertain him with performances of a theatrical kind: satirical farces, dancing and singing, ”many shapes and ghosts, and the like; and all to please His Excellency the Lord General,” say the newspapers of the time. Rhodes obtained the boon he sought, and, promptly engaging a troop of actors, reopened the c.o.c.kpit. His chief actor was his apprentice, Thomas Betterton, the son of Charles I.'s cook. For some fifty years the great Mr. Betterton held his place upon the stage, and upon his death was interred with something like royal honours in Westminster Abbey.
Of the fate of Rhodes nothing further is recorded. He was the first to give back to Londoners a theatre they might visit legally and safely; and that done, he is heard of no more. Killigrew and Davenant were soon invested with patent rights, and ent.i.tled to a monopoly of theatrical management in London; probably they prospered by displacing Rhodes--but so much cannot be positively a.s.serted.
The drama was now out of its difficulties. Yet the influence and effect of these did not soon abate. Upon them followed indeed a sort of after-crop of troubles, seriously injurious to the stage. The Cavaliers engendered a drama that was other than the drama the Puritans had destroyed. The theatre was restored, it is true, but with an altered const.i.tution. It was not only that the old race of poets and dramatists had died out, and that writing for the stage was as a new profession, almost as a lost art. Taste had altered. As Evelyn regretfully notes in 1662, after witnessing a performance of Hamlet--to which, perhaps, the audience paid little heed, although the incomparable Betterton appeared in the tragedy--”but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesty's being so long abroad.” Shakespeare and his brother-bards were out of fas.h.i.+on. There was a demand for tragedies of the French school--with rhyming lines and artificial sentiment--for comedies of intrigue and equivoque, after a foreign pattern, in lieu of our old English plays of wit, humour, and character. Plagiarism, translation, and adaptation took up a secure position on the stage. The leading playwrights of the Restoration--Dryden, Shadwell, Durfey, Wycherley--all borrowed freely from the French. Dryden frankly apologised--he was required to produce so many plays all could not be of his own inventing. The King encouraged appropriation of foreign works. He drew Sir Samuel Tuke's attention to an admired Spanish comedy, advising its adaptation to the English stage: the result was ”The Adventures of Five Hours,” a work very highly esteemed by Mr. Pepys. The introduction of scenery was due in a great measure to French example, although ”paintings in perspective” had already been seen in an English theatre. But now scenery was imperatively necessary to a dramatic performance, and a sort of pa.s.sion arose for mechanical devices and decorative appliances of a novel kind. Dryden was no reformer--in truth, to suit his own purposes, he pandered laboriously to the follies and caprices of his patrons; nevertheless, he was fully sensible of the errors of the time, and often chronicles these in his prologues and epilogues. He writes:
True wit has run its best days long ago, It ne'er looked up since we were lost in show, When sense in doggrel rhymes and clouds was lost, And dulness nourished at the actor's cost.
Nor stopped it here; when tragedy was done, Satire and humour the same fate have run, And comedy is sunk to trick and pun.
Let them who the rebellion first began To wit, restore the monarch if they can; Our author dares not be the first bold man.
And upon another occasion:
But when all failed to strike the stage quite dumb, Those wicked engines, called machines, are come.
Thunder and lightning now for wit are played, And shortly scenes in Lapland will be laid.
Fletcher's despised, your Jonson out of fas.h.i.+on.
And wit the only drug in all the nation.
Actresses, too, were introduced upon the stage in pursuance of continental example. But for these there was really great necessity.
The boys who, prior to the Civil War, had personated the heroines of the drama, were now too mature, both in years and aspect, for such an occupation.
Doubting we should never play agen, We have played all our women into men!
says the prologue, introducing the first actress. Hart and Mohun, Clun, Shatterel and Burt, who were now leading actors, had been boy-actresses before the closing of the theatres. And even after the Restoration, Mohun whose military t.i.tle of major was always awarded him in the playbills, still appeared as Bellamante, one of the heroines of s.h.i.+rley's tragedy of ”Love's Cruelty.” But this must have been rather too absurd. At the time of the Restoration Mohun could hardly have been less than thirty-five years of age. It is to be noted, however, that Kynaston, a very distinguished boy-actress, who, with Betterton, was a pupil of Rhodes, arose after the Restoration. Of the earlier boy-actresses, their methods and artifices of performance, Kynaston could have known nothing. He was undoubtedly a great artist, winning extraordinary favour both in male and female characters, the last and perhaps the best of all the epicene stage-players of the past.
But if the stage, after the Restoration, differed greatly from what it had been previously, it yet prospered and gained strength more and more. It was most fortunate in its actors and actresses, who lent it invaluable support. It never attained again the poetic heights to which it had once soared; but it surrendered gradually much of its grossness and its baser qualities, in deference to the improving tastes of its patrons, and in alarm at the sound strictures of men like Jeremy Collier. The plagiarist, the adapter, and the translator did not relax their hold upon it; but eventually it obtained the aid of numerous dramatists of enduring distinction. The fact that it again underwent decline is traceable to various causes--among them, the monopoly enjoyed by privileged persons under the patents granted by Charles II.; the bungling intervention of court officials invested with supreme power over the dramatic literature of the nation; and defective copyright laws, that rendered justice neither to the native nor to the foreign writer for the theatre. And something, too, the stage of later years has been affected by a change in public taste, which has subordinated the play to the novel or poem, and converted playgoers into the supporters of circulating libraries.
CHAPTER XXII.
STAGE BANQUETS.
A veteran actor of inferior fame once expressed his extreme dislike to what he was pleased to term ”the sham wine-parties” of Macbeth and others. He was aweary of the Barmecide banquets of the stage, of affecting to quaff with gusto imaginary wine out of empty pasteboard goblets, and of making believe to have an appet.i.te for wooden apples and ”property” comestibles. He was in every sense a poor player, and had often been a very hungry one. He took especial pleasure in remembering the entertainments of the theatre in which the necessities of performance, or regard for rooted tradition, involved the setting of real edible food before the actors. At the same time he greatly lamented the limited number of dramas in which these precious opportunities occurred.
He had grateful memories of the rather obsolete Scottish melodrama of ”Cramond Brig;” for in this work old custom demanded the introduction of a real sheep's head with accompanying ”trotters.” He told of a North British manager who was wont--especially when the salaries he was supposed to pay were somewhat in arrear, and he desired to keep his company in good humour and, may be, alive--to produce this play on Sat.u.r.day nights. For some days before the performance the dainties that were destined to grace it underwent exhibition in the green-room.
A label bore the inscription: ”This sheep's head will appear in the play of 'Cramond Brig' on next Sat.u.r.day night. G.o.d save the King!” ”It afforded us all two famous dinners,” reveals our veteran. ”We had a large pot of broth made with the head and feet; these we ate on Sat.u.r.day night; the broth we had on Sunday.” So in another Scottish play, ”The Gentle Shepherd” of Allan Ramsay, it was long the custom on stages north of the Tweed to present a real haggis, although n.i.g.g.ard managers were often tempted to subst.i.tute for the genuine dish a far less savoury if more wholesome mess of oatmeal. But a play more famous still for the reality of its victuals, and better known to modern times, was Prince h.o.a.re's musical farce, ”No Song no Supper.” A steaming-hot boiled leg of lamb and turnips may be described as quite the leading character in this entertainment. Without this appetising addition the play has never been represented. There is a story, however, which one can only hope is incorrect, of an _impresario_ of oriental origin, who supplying the necessary meal, yet subsequently fined his company all round, on the ground that they had ”combined to destroy certain of the properties of the theatre.”
There are many other plays in the course of which genuine food is consumed on the stage. But some excuse for the generally fict.i.tious nature of theatrical repasts is to be found in the fact that eating during performance is often a very difficult matter for the actors to accomplish. Michael Kelly, in his ”Memoirs,” relates that he was required to eat part of a fowl in the supper scene of a bygone operatic play called, ”A House to be Sold.” Bannister at rehearsal had informed him that it was very difficult to swallow food on the stage.
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