THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE PLAYERS.
It was in the eventful year 1587,[12] while Roman Catholics were
deploring the death of Mary Stuart; while Englishmen were exulting at
the destruction dealt by Drake to a hundred Spanish ships in the port
of Cadiz; while the Puritan party was at angry issue with Elizabeth;
while John Fox was lying dead; and while Walsingham was actively
impeding the ways and means of Armada Philip, by getting his bills
protested at Genoa,--that the little man, Gosson, in the parish of
St. Botolph, of which he was the incumbent, first nibbed his pen,[13]
and made it fly furiously over paper, in wordy war against the stage
and stage-players.
When the Britons ate acorns and drank water, he says, they were
giants and heroes; but since plays came in they had dwindled into
a puny race, incapable of noble and patriotic achievements! And
yet next year, some pretty fellows of that race were sweeping the
Invincible Armada from the surface of our seas!
When London was talking admiringly of the coronation of Charles I.,
and Parliament was barely according him one pound in twelve of the
money-aids of which he was in need, there was another pamphleteer
sending up his testimony from Cheapside to Westminster, against the
alleged abomination of plays and players. This writer entitles his
work _A short Treatise against Stage Plays_, and he makes it as
sharp as it is short. Plays were invented by heathens; they must
necessarily be prejudicial to Christians!--_that_ is the style of
his assertion and argument. They were invented in order to appease
false gods; consequently, the playing of them must excite to wrath
a true Deity! They are no recreation, because people come away from
them wearied. The argument, in tragedy, he informs us, is murder; in
comedy, it is social vice. This he designates as bad instruction; and
remembering Field's query to Sutton, he would very much like to know
in what page of Holy Writ authority is given for the vocation of an
actor. He might as well have asked for the suppression of tailors,
on the ground of their never being once named in either the Old
Testament or the New!
But this author finds condemnation there of "stage effects,"
rehearsed or unrehearsed. You deal with the judgments of God in
tragedy, and laugh over the sins of men in comedy; and thereupon
he reminds you, not very appositely, that Ham was accursed for
deriding his father! Players change their apparel and put on women's
attire,--as if they had never read a chapter in Deuteronomy in their
lives! If coming on the stage under false representation of their
natural names and persons be not an offence against the Epistle to
Timothy, he would thank you to inform him _what_ it is! As to looking
on these pleasant evils and not falling into sin,--you have heard of
Job and King David, and you are worse than a heathen if you do not
remember what _they_ looked upon with innocent intent, or if you have
forgotten what came of the looking.
He reminds parents, that while _they_ are at the play, there are
wooers who are carrying off the hearts of their daughters at home;
perhaps, the very daughters themselves _from_ home. This seems to
me to be less an argument against resorting to the theatre than in
favour of your taking places for your "young ladies," as well as for
yourselves. The writer looks too wide abroad to see what lies at his
feet. He is in Asia, citing the Council of Laodicea against the
theatre. He is in Africa, vociferating, as the Council of Carthage
did, against audiences. He is in Europe, at Arles, where the Fathers
decided that no actor should be admitted to the sacrament. Finally,
he unites all these Councils together at Constantinople, and in a
three-piled judgment sends stage, actors, and audiences to Gehenna.
If you would only remember that many royal and noble men have been
slain when in the theatre, on their way thither, or returning
thence, you will have a decent horror of risking a similar fate in
like localities. He has known actors who have died after the play
was over; he would fain have you believe that there is something in
_that_. And when he has intimated that theatres have been burnt and
audiences suffocated; that stages have been swept down by storms and
spectators trodden to death; that less than forty years previous
to the time of his writing, eight persons had been killed and many
more wounded, by the fall of a London playhouse; and that a similar
calamity had lately occurred in the city of Lyons--the writer
conceives he has advanced sufficient argument, and administered
more than enough of admonition, to deter any person from entering a
theatre henceforth and for ever.
This paper pellet had not long been printed, when the vexed author
might have seen four actors sailing joyously along the Strand.
There they are, Master Moore (there were no _managers_ then; they
were "masters" till the Georgian era), Master Moore, heavy Foster,
mirthful Guilman, and airy Townsend. The master carries in his
pocket a royal licence to form a company, whose members, in honour of
the King's sister, shall be known as "the Lady Elizabeth's servants;"
with permission to act when and where they please, in and about the
city of London, unless when the plague shall be more than ordinarily
prevalent.
There was no present opportunity to touch these licensed companies;
and, accordingly, a sect of men who professed to unite loyalty with
orthodoxy, looking eagerly about them for offenders, detected an
unlicensed fraternity playing a comedy in the old house, before
noticed, of Sir John Yorke. The result of this was the assembling
of a nervously-agitated troop of offenders in the Star Chamber. One
Christopher Mallory was made the scapegoat, for the satisfactory
reason that in the comedy alluded to he had represented the devil,
and in the last scene descended through the stage, with a figure
of King James on his back, remarking the while, that such was the
road by which all Protestants must necessarily travel! Poor Mallory,
condemned to fine and imprisonment, vainly observed that there were
two points, he thought, in his favour--that he had not played in the
piece, and had not been even present in the house!
Meanwhile the public flocked to their favourite houses, and fortune
seemed to be most blandly smiling on "masters," when there suddenly
appeared the monster mortar manufactured by Prynne, and discharged by
him over London, with an attendant amount of thunder, which shook
every building in the metropolis. Prynne had just previously seen
the painters busily at work in beautifying the old "Fortune," and
the decorators gilding the horns of the "Red Bull." He had been down
to Whitefriars, and had there beheld a new theatre rising near the
old time-honoured site. He was unable to be longer silent, and in
1633 out came his _Histrio-Mastix_, consisting, from title-page to
_finis_, of a thousand and several hundred pages.
Prynne, in some sense, did not lead opinion against the stage,
but followed that of individuals who suffered certain discomfort
from their vicinity to the chief house in Blackfriars. In 1631,
the churchwardens and constables petitioned Laud, on behalf of the
whole parish, for the removal of the players, whose presence was a
grievance, it was asserted, to Blackfriars generally. The shopkeepers
affirm that their goods, exposed for sale, are swept off their stalls
by the coaches and people sweeping onward to the playhouse; that
the concourse is so great, the inhabitants are unable to take beer
or coal into their houses while it continues; that to get through
Ludgate to the water is just impossible; and if a fire break out
Heaven help them, how can succour be brought to the sufferers through
such mobs of men and vehicles? Christenings are disturbed in their
joy by them, and the sorrow of burials intruded on. Persons of honour
dare not go abroad, or if abroad, dare not venture home while the
theatre is open. And then there is that other house, Edward
Alleyn's, rebuilding in Golden Lane, and will not the Council look to
it?
[Illustration: (Edward Alleyn.)]
The Council answer that Queen Henrietta Maria is well affected
towards plays, and that therefore good regulation is more to be
provided than suppression decreed. There must not be more than two
houses, they say; one on Bankside, where the Lord Chamberlain's
servants may act; the other in Middlesex, for which license may be
given to Alleyn, "servant of the Lord Admiral," in Golden Lane. Each
company is to play but twice a week, "forbearing to play on the
Sabbath Day, in Lent, and in times of infection."
Here is a prospect for old Blackfriars; but it is doomed to fall. The
house had been condemned in 1619, and cannot longer be tolerated.
But compensation must be awarded. The players, bold fellows, claim
£21,000! The referees award £3000, and the delighted inhabitants
offer £100 towards it, to get rid of the people who resort to the
players, rather than of the players themselves.
Then spake out Prynne. He does not tell us how many prayer-books
had been recently published, but he notes, with a cry of anguish,
the printing of forty thousand plays within the last two years.
"There are five devil's chapels," he says, "in London; and yet in
more extensive Rome, in Nero's days, there were but three, and
those," he adds, "were three too many!" When the writer gets beyond
statistics he grows rude; but he was sincere, and accepted all the
responsibility of the course taken by him, advisedly.
While the anger excited by this attack on pastimes favoured by
the King was yet hot, the assault itself was met by a defiance.
The gentlemen of the Inns of Court closed their law-books, got
up a masque, and played it at Whitehall, in the presence of a
delighted audience, consisting of royal and noble personages. The
most play-loving of the lords followed the example afforded by the
lawyers, and the King himself assumed the buskin, and turned actor,
for the nonce. Tom Carew was busy with superintending the rehearsals
of his "Coelum Britannicum," and in urging honest and melodious Will
Lawes to progress more rapidly with the music. Cavalier Will was
not to be hurried, but did his work steadily; and Prynne might have
heard him and his brother Harry humming the airs over as they walked
together across the park to Whitehall. When the day of representation
arrived, great was the excitement and intense the delight of some,
and the scorn of others. Among the noble actors who rode down to the
palace was Rich, Earl of Holland. All passed off so pleasantly that
no one dreamed it was the inauguration of a struggle in which Prynne
was to lose his estate, his freedom, and his ears; the King and the
earl their heads; while gallant Will Lawes, as honest a man as any of
them, was, a dozen years after, to be found among the valiant dead
who fell at the siege of Chester.
Ere this _dénouement_ to a tragedy so mirthfully commenced had been
reached, there were other defiances cast in the teeth of audacious,
but too harshly-treated Prynne. There was a reverend playwright
about town, whom Eton loved and Oxford highly prized; Ben Jonson
called him his "son," and Bishop Fell, who presumed to give an
opinion on subjects of which he was ignorant, pronounced the Rev.
William Cartwright to be "the utmost that man could come to!" For
the Christ Church students at Oxford, Cartwright wrote the "Royal
Slave," one of three out of his four plays which sleep under a
righteous oblivion. The King and Queen went down to witness the
performance of the scholastic amateurs; and, considering that a
main incident of the piece comprises a revolt in order to achieve
some reasonable liberty for an oppressed people, the subject may be
considered more suggestive than felicitous. The fortunes of many of
the audience were about to undergo mutation, but there was an actor
there whose prosperity commenced from that day. All the actors played
with spirit, but this especial one manifested such self-possession,
displayed such judgment, and exhibited such powers of conception
and execution, that King, Queen, and all the illustrious audience
showered down upon him applauses--hearty, loud, and long. His name
was Busby. He had been so poor that he received £5 to enable him to
take his degree of B.A. Westminster was soon to possess him, for
nearly three-score years the most famous of her "masters." "A very
great man!" said Sir Roger de Coverley; "he whipped my grandfather!"
When Prynne, and Bastwick, and Burton--released from prison by the
Long Parliament--entered London in triumph, with wreaths of ivy and
rosemary round their hats, the players who stood on the causeway,
or at tavern windows, to witness the passing of the victims, must
have felt uneasy at their arch-enemy being loose again. Between
politics, perverse parties, the plague, and the parliament, the
condition of the actors fell from bad to worse. In a dialogue which
professedly passed at this time between Cane of the "Fortune" and
Reed of the "Friers," one of the speakers deplores the going-out of
all good old things, and the other, sighingly, remarks that true
Latin is as little in fashion at Inns of Court as good clothes are
at Cambridge. At length arrived the fatal year 1647, when, after
some previous attempts to abolish the vocation of the actors, the
parliament disbanded the army and suppressed the players. The latter
struggled manfully, but not so successfully, as the soldiery. They
were treated with less consideration; the decree of February 1647[14]
informed them that they were no better than heathens; that they were
intolerable to Christians; that they were incorrigible and vicious
offenders, who would now be compelled by whip, and stocks, and
gyves, and prison fare, to obey ordinances which they had hitherto
treated with contempt. Had not the glorious Elizabeth stigmatised
them as "rogues," and the sagacious James as "vagabonds?" Mayors and
sheriffs, and high and low constables were let loose upon them,
and encouraged to be merciless; menace was piled upon menace; money
penalties were hinted at in addition to corporeal punishments--and,
after all, plays were enacted in spite of this counter-enactment.
But these last enactors were not to be trifled with; and the
autumn saw accomplished what had not been effected in the spring.
The _Perfect Weekly Account_ for "Wednesday, Oct. 20, to Tuesday,
Oct. 26," informs its readers that on "Friday an ordinance passed
both Houses for suppressing of stage-plays, which of late began to
come in use again." The ordinance itself is as uncivil a document
as ever proceeded from ruffled authority; and the framers clearly
considered that if they had not crushed the stage for ever, they
had unquestionably frozen out the actors as long as the existing
government should endure.
At this juncture, historians inform us that many of the ousted
actors took military service--generally, as was to be expected, on
the royalist side. But, in 1647, the struggle was virtually over.
The great fire was quenched, and there was only a trampling out of
sparks and embers. Charles Hart, the actor--grandson of Shakspeare's
sister--holds a prominent place among these players turned soldiers
as one who rose to be a major in Rupert's Horse. Charles Hart,
however, was at this period only seventeen years of age, and more
than a year and a half had elapsed since Rupert had been ordered
beyond sea, for his weak defence of Bristol. Rupert's major was,
probably, that very "jolly good fellow" with whom Pepys used to
take wine and anchovies to such excess as to make it necessary for
his "girl" to rise early, and fetch her sick master fresh water,
wherewith to slake his thirst, in the morning.
The enrolment of actors in either army occurred at an earlier period,
and one Hart was certainly among them. Thus Alleyn, erst of the
Cockpit, filled the part of quartermaster-general to the King's
army at Oxford. Burt became a cornet, Shatterel was something less
dignified in the same branch of the service--the cavalry. These
survived to see the old curtain once more drawn; but record is made
of the death of one gallant player, said to be Will Robinson, whom
doughty Harrison encountered in fight, and through whom he passed
his terrible sword, shouting at the same time: "Cursed is he that
doeth the work of the Lord negligently!" This serious bit of stage
business would have been more dramatically arranged had Robinson
been encountered by Swanston, a player of Presbyterian tendencies,
who served in the Parliamentary army. A "terrific broadsword combat"
between the two might have been an encounter which both armies
might have looked at with interest, and supported by applause. Of
the military fortunes of the actors none was so favourable as brave
little Mohun's, who crossed to Flanders, returned a major, and was
subsequently set down in the "cast" under his military title. Old
Taylor retired, with that original portrait of Shakspeare to solace
him, which was to pass by the hands of Davenant, to that glory
of our stage, "Incomparable Betterton." Pollard, too, withdrew, and
lusty Lowen, after a time, kicked both sock and buskin out of sight,
clapped on an apron, and appeared, with well-merited success, as
landlord of the Three Pigeons, at Brentford.
[Illustration: (John Lowen.)]
The actors could not comprehend why their office was suppressed,
while the bear-baiters were putting money in both pockets, and
non-edifying puppet-shows were enriching their proprietors. If
Shakspeare was driven from Blackfriars and the Cockpit, was it fair
to allow Bel and the Dragon to be enacted by dolls, at the foot of
Holborn Bridge? The players were told that the public would profit
by the abolition of their vocation. 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.
In some of the streets by the river-side a tragedy-king or two found
refuge with kinsfolk. The old theatres stood erect and desolate, and
the owners, with hands in empty pockets, asked how they were to be
expected to pay ground-rent, now that they earned nothing? whereas
their afternoon-share used to be twenty--ay, thirty shillings, sir!
And see, the flag is still flying above the old house over the
water, and a lad who erst played under it, looks up at the banner
with a proud sorrow. An elder actor puts his hands on the lad's
shoulder, and cries: "Before the old scene is on again, boy, thy
face will be as battered as the flag there on the roof-top!" And as
this elder actor passes on, he has a word with a poor fellow-mime
who has been less provident than he, and whose present necessities
he relieves according to his means. Near them stand a couple of
deplorable-looking "door-keepers," or, as we should call them now,
"money-takers," and the well-to-do ex-actor has his allusive joke at
their old rascality, and affects to condole with them that the time
is gone by when they used to scratch their neck where it itched not,
and then dropped shilling and half-crown pieces behind their collars!
But they were not the only poor rogues who suffered by revolution.
That slipshod tapster, whom a guest is cudgelling at a tavern-door,
was once the proudest and most extravagantly-dressed of the
tobacco-men whose notice the smokers in the pit gingerly entreated,
and who used to vend, at a penny the pipeful, tobacco that was not
worth a shilling a cart-load. And behold other evidences of the
hardness of the times! Those shuffling fiddlers who so humbly peer
through the low windows into the tavern room, and meekly inquire:
"Will you have any music, gentlemen?" they are tuneful relics of the
band who were wont to shed harmony from the balcony above the stage,
and play in fashionable houses, at the rate of ten shillings for each
hour. _Now_, they shamble about in pairs, and resignedly accept the
smallest dole, and think mournfully of the time when they heralded
the coming of kings, and softly tuned the dirge at the burying of
Ophelia!
Even these have pity to spare for a lower class than themselves,--the
journeymen playwrights, whom the managers once retained at an annual
stipend and "beneficial second nights." The old playwrights were
fain to turn pamphleteers, but their works sold only for a penny,
and that is the reason why those two shabby-genteel people, who have
just nodded sorrowfully to the fiddlers, are not joyously tippling
sack and Gascony wine, but are imbibing unorthodox ale and heretical
small beer. "_Cunctis graviora cothurnis!_" murmurs the old actor,
whose father was a schoolmaster; "it's more pitiful than any of your
tragedies!"
The distress was severe, but the profession had to abide it. Much
amendment was promised, if only something of the old life might
be pursued without peril of the stocks or the whipping-post. The
authorities would not heed these promises, but grimly smiled--at the
actors, who undertook to promote virtue; the poets, who engaged to
be proper of speech; the managers, who bound themselves to prohibit
the entrance of all temptations into "the sixpenny rooms;" and the
tobacco-men, who swore with earnest irreverence to vend nothing but
the pure Spanish leaf, even in the threepenny galleries.
But the tragedy which ended with the killing of the King gave sad
hearts to the comedians, who were in worse plight than before, being
now deprived of hope itself. One or two contrived to print and sell
old plays for their own benefit; a few authors continued to add a
new piece, now and then, to the stock, and that there were readers
for them we may conjecture from the fact of the advertisements which
began to appear in the papers--sometimes of the publication of a
solitary play, at another of the entire dramatic works of that most
noble lady the Marchioness of Newcastle. The actors themselves united
boldness with circumspection. Richard Cox, dropping the words _play_
and _player_, constructed a mixed entertainment, in which he spoke
and sang; and on one occasion so aptly mimicked the character of an
artisan, that a master in the craft kindly and earnestly offered to
engage him. During the suppression, Cowley's "Guardian" was privately
played at Cambridge. The authorities would seem to have winked at
these private representations, or to have declined noticing them
until after the expiration of the period within which the actors were
exposed to punishment. Too great audacity, however, was promptly
and severely visited from the earliest days after the issuing of
the prohibitory decree. A first-rate troop obtained possession of
the Cockpit for a few days, in 1648. They had played unmolested for
three days, and were in the very midst of "The Bloody Brother" on
the fourth, when the house was invaded by the Puritan soldiery, the
actors captured, the audience dispersed, and the seats and the stage
righteously smashed into fragments. The players (some of them among
the most accomplished of their day) were paraded through the streets
in all their stage finery, and clapped into the Gate House and other
prisons, whence they were too happy to escape, after much unseemly
treatment, at the cost of all the theatrical property which they had
carried on their backs into durance vile.
This severity, visited in other houses as well as the Cockpit,
caused some actors to despair, while it rendered others only a
little more discreet. Rhodes, the old prompter at Blackfriars,
turned bookseller, and opened a shop at Charing Cross. There he
and one Betterton, an ex-under-cook in the kitchen of Charles I.,
who lived in Tothill Street, talked mournfully over the past, and,
according to their respective humours, of the future. The cook's
sons listened the while, and one of them especially took delight in
hearing old stories of players, and in cultivating an acquaintance
with the old theatrical bookseller. In the neighbourhood of the
ex-prompter's shop, knots of very slenderly-built players used to
congregate at certain seasons. A delegate from their number might
be seen whispering to the citizen captain in command at Whitehall,
who, as wicked people reported, consented, for a "consideration,"
not to bring his red-coats down to the Bull or other localities
where private stages were erected--especially during the time of
Bartholomew Fair, Christmas, and other joyous tides. To his shame,
be it recorded, the captain occasionally broke his promise, or the
poor actors had fallen short in their purchase-money of his pledge,
and in the very middle of the piece, the little theatre would be
invaded, and the audience be rendered subject to as much virtuous
indignation as the actors.
The cause of the latter, however, found supporters in many of the
members of the aristocracy. Close at hand, near Rhodes's shop, lived
Lord Hatton, first of the four peers so styled. His house was in
Scotland Yard. His lands had gone by forfeiture, but the proud old
Cheshire landowner cared more for the preservation of the deed by
which he and his ancestors had held them, than he did for the loss
of the acres themselves. Hatton was the employer, so to speak, of
Dugdale, and the patron of literary men and of actors, and, it must
be added, of very frivolous company besides. He devoted much time
to the preparation of a Book of Psalms and the ill-treatment of his
wife; and was altogether an eccentric personage, for he recommended
Lambert's daughter as a personally and politically suitable wife
for Charles II., and afterwards discarded his own eldest son for
marrying that incomparable lady. In Hatton, the players had a supreme
patron in town; and they found friends as serviceable to them in the
noblemen and gentlemen residing a few miles from the capital. These
patrons opened their houses to the actors for stage representations;
but even this private patronage had to be distributed discreetly.
Goffe, the light-limbed lad who used to play women's parts at the
"Blackfriars," was generally employed as messenger to announce
individually to the audience when they were to assemble, and to the
actors the time and place for the play. One of the mansions, wherein
these dramatic entertainments were most frequently given, was Holland
House, Kensington. It was then held and inhabited by the widowed
countess of that unstable Earl of Holland, whose head had fallen
on the scaffold in March 1649; but this granddaughter of old Sir
Walter Cope, who lost Camden House at cards to a Cheapside mercer,
Sir Baptist Hicks, was a strong-minded woman, and perhaps found some
consolation in patronising the pleasures which the enemies of her
defunct lord so stringently prohibited. When the play was over, a
collection was made among the noble spectators, whose contributions
were divided between the players according to the measure of their
merits. This done they wended their way down the avenue to the high
road, where probably, on some bright summer afternoon, if a part of
them prudently returned afoot to town, a joyous but less prudent few
"padded it" to Brentford, and made a short but glad night of it with
their brother of the "Three Pigeons."
At the most this was but a poor life; but such as it was, the players
were obliged to make the best of it. If they were impatient, it was
not without some reason, for though Oliver despised the stage, he
could condescend to laugh at, and with, men of less dignity in their
vocation than actors. Buffoonery was not entirely expelled from
his otherwise grave court. At the marriage festival of his daughter
Frances and his son-in-law Mr. Rich, the Protector would not tolerate
the utterance of a line from Shakspeare, expressed from the lips of
a player; but there were hired buffoons at that entertainment, which
they well-nigh brought to a tragical conclusion. A couple of these
saucy fellows seeing Sir Thomas Hillingsley, the old gentleman-usher
to the Queen of Bohemia, gravely dancing, sought to excite a laugh by
trying to blacken his face with a burnt cork. The high-bred, solemn
old gentleman was so aroused to anger by this unseemly audacity, that
he drew his dagger, and, but for swift interference, would have run
it beneath the fifth rib of the most active of his rude assailants.
On this occasion, Cromwell himself was almost as lively as the hired
jesters; snatching off the wig of his son Richard, he feigned to
fling it in the fire, but suddenly passing the wig under him, and
seating himself upon it, he pretended that it had been destroyed,
amid the servile applause of the edified spectators. The actors might
reasonably have argued that "Hamlet" in Scotland Yard or at Holland
House was a more worthy entertainment than such grown-up follies in
the gallery at Whitehall.
Those follies ceased to be; Oliver had passed away, and Richard had
laid down the greatness which had never sat well upon him. Important
changes were at hand, and the merry rattle of Monk's drums coming
up Gray's Inn Road, welcomed by 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.
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. In a few days the drama commenced its new career
in the Cockpit, in Drury Lane; and this fact seemed so significant,
as to the character of General Monk's tastes that, subsequently, when
he and the Council of State dined in the city halls, the companies
treated their guests, after dinner, with satirical farces, such as
"Citizen and Soldier," "Country Tom," and "City Dick," with, as the
newspapers inform us, "dancing and singing, many shapes and ghosts,
and the like; and all to please his Excellency the Lord General."
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. His dignity, his marvellous talent,
his versatility, his imperishable fame, are all well known and
acknowledged. His industry is indicated by the fact that he created
one hundred and thirty new characters! Among them were Jaffier and
Valentine, three Virginiuses, and Sir John Brute. He was as mirthful
in Falstaff as he was majestic in Alexander; and the craft of his
Ulysses, the grace and passion of his Hamlet, the terrible force of
his Othello, were not more remarkable than the low comedy of his Old
Bachelor, the airyness of his Woodville, or the cowardly bluster of
his Thersites. The old actors who had been frozen out, and the new
who had much to learn, could not have rallied round a more noble or
a worthier chief; for Betterton was not a greater actor than he was
a true and honourable gentleman. Only for him, the old frozen-outs
would have fared but badly. He enriched himself and them, and, as
long as he lived, gave dignity to his profession. The humble lad,
born in Tothill Street, before monarchy and the stage went down, had
a royal funeral in Westminster Abbey, after dying in harness almost
in sight of the lamps. He deserved no less, for he was the king of
an art which had well-nigh perished in the Commonwealth times, and
he was a monarch who probably has never since had, altogether, his
equal. Off as on the stage, he was exemplary in his bearing; true
to every duty; as good a country gentleman on his farm in Berkshire
as he was perfect actor in town; pursuing with his excellent wife
the even tenor of his way; not tempted by the vices of his time, nor
disturbed by its politics; not tippling like Underhill; not plotting
and betraying the plotters against William, like Goodman, nor
carrying letters for a costly fee between London and St. Germains,
like Scudamore. If there had been a leading player on the stage in
1647, with the qualities, public and private, which distinguished
Betterton, there perhaps would have been a less severe ordinance than
that which inflicted so much misery on the actors, and which, after a
long decline, brought about a fall; from which they were, however, as
we shall see, destined to rise and flourish.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Should be 1579. Stephen Gosson's _Schoole of Abuse_ was entered
at Stationers' Hall, July 22, 1579. Dr. Doran corrects this in the
second edition.
[13] Gosson was not made rector of St. Botolph till 1600.
[14] February 1647-48: that is, February 1648. This act succeeded the
one mentioned in the next paragraph.
[Illustration: THE GLOBE THEATRE.]