THE DRAMATIC AUTHORESSES.
During this half century, there were seven ladies who were more or
less distinguished as writers for the stage. These were the virtuous
Mrs. Philips, the audacious Aphra Behn, the not less notorious Mrs.
Manley, the gentle and learned Mrs. Cockburn, the rather aristocratic
Mrs. Boothby (of whom nothing is known but that she wrote one play,
called "Marcatia,"[66] in 1669), fat Mrs. Pix, and that thorough
Whig, Mrs. Centlivre. The last four also belong to the beginning of
the eighteenth century; and three at least apologised that they,
women as they were, should have ventured to become dramatists.
The "virtuous Mrs. Philips," of Evelyn, the "matchless Orinda,"
of Cowley and other poets, translated the "Pompey" and "Horace"
of Corneille. In those grave pieces, represented at court in the
early years of the Restoration, the poetess endeavoured to direct
the popular taste, and to correct it also. Had she not died (of
small-pox, and in the thirty-third year of her age), she might have
set such example to the playwrights as the Bettertons did to the
actors; but her good intentions were frustrated, and her place was
unhappily occupied by the most shameless woman who ever took pen in
hand, designedly to corrupt the public.
Aphra Behn was a Kentish woman, whose early years were passed
at Surinam, where her father, Johnson, had resided, as
lieutenant-general.[67] After a wild training in that fervid school,
she repaired to London, married a Dutchman, named Behn, who seems to
have straightway disappeared,--penetrated, by means of her beauty,
to the court of Charles II.,--and obtained, by means of her wit, an
irregular employment at Antwerp,--that of a spy. The letters of her
Dutch lovers belong to romance; but there is warrant for the easy
freedom of this woman's life. In other respects she was unfortunate.
On her return to England, her political reports and prophecies were
no more credited than the monitions of old, by Cassandra; so she
abandoned England to its fate, and herself "to pleasure and the
muses."
Her opportunities for good were great, but she abused them all.
She might have been an honour to womanhood;--she was its disgrace.
She might have gained glory by her labours;--but she chose to reap
infamy. Her pleasures were not those which became an honest woman;
and as for her "Muses," she sat not with them on the slopes of
Helicon, but dragged them down to her level, where the Nine and their
unclean votary wallowed together in the mire.
There is no one that equals this woman in downright nastiness,
save Ravenscroft and Wycherley; but the latter of these had more
originality of invention and grace of expression. To these writers,
and to those of their detestable school, she set a revolting example.
Dryden preceded her, by a little, on the stage; but Mrs. Behn's
trolloping muse appeared there before the other two writers I have
mentioned, and was still making unseemly exhibition there after
the coming of Congreve. With Dryden she vied in indecency, and was
not overcome. To all other male writers of her day she served as a
provocation and an apology. Intellectually, she was qualified to have
led them through pure and bright ways; but she was a mere harlot,
who danced through uncleanness, and dared or lured them to follow.
Remonstrance was useless with this wanton hussey. As for her private
life, it has found a champion in a female friend, whose precious
balsam breaks the head it would anoint. According to this friend,
Mrs. Behn had numerous good qualities; but "she was a woman of sense,
and consequently loved pleasure;" and she was "more gay and free than
the modesty of the precise will allow."
Of Aphra Behn's eighteen plays, produced between 1671 and
1696,--before which last year, however, she had died,--but few are
original. They are adaptations from Marlowe, from Wilkins, from
Killigrew, from Brome, from Tatham, from Shirley, from the Italian
comedy, from Molière, and more legitimately from the old romances.
She adapted skilfully; and she was never dull. But then, all her
vivacity is wasted on filth. When the public sent forth a cry of
horror at some of the scenes in her play of "The Lucky Chance," she
vindicated herself by asking, "was she not loyal?"--"Tory to the
back bone;"--had she not made the King's enemies ridiculous, in
her five-act farces;--and had she not done homage to the King, by
dedicating her "Feigned Courtezans" to Nell Gwyn, and styling that
worthy sister of hers in vice and good nature so perfect a creature
as to be something akin to divinity?
For Mrs. Manley there was more excuse. That poor daughter of an old
royalist had some reason to depict human nature as bad in man and
in woman. The young orphan trusted herself to the guardianship of a
seductive kinsman, who married her when he had a wife still living.
This first wrong destroyed her, but not her villainous cousin; and
unfortunately, the woman upon whom the world looked cool, incurred
the capricious compassion of the Duchess of Cleveland. When the
caprice was over, and Mrs. Manley had only her own resources to
rely upon, she scorned the aid offered her by General Tidcombe,
and made her first venture for the stage in the tragedy of "Royal
Mischief," produced at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, in 1696.
It is all desperate love, of a very bad quality, and indiscriminate
murder, relieved by variety in the mode of killing; one unfortunate
gentleman, named Osman, being thrust into a cannon and fired from it,
after which his wife, Selima, is said to be
"Gathering the smoking relics of her lord!"
The authoress in her next venture, in the same year, a comedy,
written in a week, and which perished in a night, "The Lost Lover,"
introduced what the public had been taught to appreciate--a virtuous
wife. Her other pieces, written at intervals of ten years, were,
"Almyna," founded on the story of the Caliph who was addicted to
marrying one day, and beheading his wife the next; and "Lucius,"
a semi-sacred play, on the supposed first Christian king of
Britain--both unsuccessful.
Mrs. Manley survived till 1724. When not under the "protection" of a
friend, or in decent mourning for the lovers who died mad for her,
she was engaged in composing the _Memoirs of the New Atalantis_,--a
satire against the Whig ministry, the authorship of which she
courageously avowed, rather than that the printer and publisher
should suffer for her. The Tory ministry which succeeded, employed
her pen; and with Swift's Alderman Barber,--he being Tory printer,
she resided till her death, mistress of the house, and of the
alderman.
Contemporary with Mrs. Manley was Miss Trotter, the daughter of a
Scottish officer, but better known as Mrs. Cockburn, wife and widow
of an English clergyman. She was at first a very learned young
lady, whose speculations took her to the Church of Rome, from which
in later years she seceded. She was but seventeen, when, in 1696,
her sentimental tragedy, "Agnes de Castro," was played at Drury
Lane. Her career, as writer for the stage, lasted ten years, during
which she produced five pieces, all of a sentimental but refined
class,--illustrating love, friendship, repentance, and conjugal
faith. There is some amount of word-spinning in these plays; and this
is well marked by Genest's comment on Mrs. Cockburn's "Revolution
of Sweden,"--namely, that if Constantia, in the third act, had been
influenced by common sense, she would have spoiled the remainder of
the play.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Cockburn was a clever woman, and kept no dull
household, though she there wrote a defence of Locke, while her
reverend husband was pursuing an account of the Mosaic deluge. As a
metaphysical and controversial writer, she gathered laurels and abuse
in her day, for the latter of which she found compensation in the
friendship and admiration of Warburton. She was a valiant woman too;
one whom asthma and the ills of life could not deter from labour. But
death relieved her from all these in 1749; and she is remembered in
the history of literature as a good and well-accomplished woman--the
very opposite of Mrs. Behn and all her heroines.
Fat Mrs. Pix enjoyed a certain sort of vogue from 1696 to 1709.[68]
She came from Oxfordshire, was the daughter of a clergyman, was
married to a Mr. Pix, and was a woman of genius, and much flesh. She
wrote eleven plays, but not one of them has survived to our time. Her
comedies are, however, full of life; her tragedies more than brimful
of loyalty; later dramatists have not disdained to pick up some of
Mrs. Pix's forgotten incidents; and indeed, contemporary playwrights
stole her playful lightning, if not her thunder; her plots were not
ill conceived, but they were carried out by inexpressive language,
some of her tragedies being in level prose, and some mixtures of
rhyme and blank verse. She herself occasionally remodelled an old
play, but did not improve it; while, when she trusted to herself, at
least in a farcical sort of comedy, she was bustling and humorous.
Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Cockburn, and Mrs. Pix were ridiculed in a farce
called the "Female Wits," their best endowments satirised, and
their peculiarities mimicked. The first and last of those ladies
represented some of their dramas as written by men, a subterfuge
to which a greater than either of them was also obliged to resort,
namely, Susanna Centlivre.
Susanna Freeman was her maiden name. She was the orphan daughter of
a stout but hardly-dealt with parliamentarian, and of a mother who
died too early for the daughter's remembrance. Anthony Hammond is
said to have been in love with her, a nephew of Sir Stephen Fox to
have married her, and a Captain Carrol to have left her a widow--all
before she was well out of her teens. Thus she had passed through a
school of experience, and to turn it to account, Susanna Carrol began
writing for the stage. Writing for--and acting on it, for we find
her in 1706 playing "Alexander the Great" at Windsor, where she also
married Mr. Centlivre, Queen Anne's chief cook.
Of Mrs. Centlivre's nineteen plays, three at least are still well
known, the "Busy Body," the "Wonder," and "A Bold Stroke for a
Wife." When she offered the first to the players--it was her ninth
play--the actors unanimously denounced it. Wilks, who had hitherto
been unaccustomed to the want of straining after wit, the common
sense, the unforced sprightliness, the homely nature, for which this
piece is distinguished--declared that not only would it be "damned,"
but that the author of it could hardly expect to avoid a similar
destiny;[69] and yet its triumph was undoubted, though cumulative.
Hitherto the authoress had written a tragi-comedy or two, the comic
scenes in which alone gave evidence of strength, but not always
of delicacy. She had, in others, stolen wholesale from Molière,
and the old English dramatists. She produced a continuation to the
"Busy Body" in "Marplot," but we do not care for it; and it is not
till her fourteenth piece, the "Wonder," appeared in 1714, that she
again challenges admiration. This, too, is an adaptation; but it is
superior to the "Wrangling Lovers," from which it is partly taken,
and which had no such hero as the Don Felix of Wilks. The "Bold
Stroke for a Wife" was first played in 1718, when the Tory public had
forgiven the author for her satires against them, and the theatrical
public her fresh adaptations of old scenes and stories. The "Bold
Stroke for a Wife" is entirely her own, and has had a wonderful
succession of Colonel Feignwells, from C. Bullock down to Mr. Braham!
This piece, however, was but moderately successful; but it has
such vivacity, fun, and quiet humour in it, that it has outlived
many a one that began with greater triumph, and in "the real Simon
Pure," first acted by Griffin, it has given a proverb to the English
language. One other piece, the "Artifice," a five-act farce, played
in 1722, concludes the list of plays from the pen of this industrious
and gifted woman.
Mrs. Centlivre had unobtrusive humour, sayings full of significance
rather than wit, wholesome fun in her comic, and earnestness in her
serious, characters. Mrs. Centlivre, in _her_ pictures of life,
attracts the spectator. There may be, now and then, something, as
in Dutch pictures, which had been as well away; but this apart, all
the rest is true, and pleasant, and hearty; the grouping perfect,
the colour faithful, and enduring too--despite the cruel sneer of
Pope, who, in the _Life of Curll_, sarcastically alludes to her as
"the cook's wife in Buckingham Court," in which vicinity to Spring
Gardens, Mrs. Centlivre died in 1723.
Such were the characteristics of the principal authors who led,
followed, trained, or flattered the public taste of the last half
of the seventeenth century, and a few of them of the first part of
the century which succeeded. Before we pass onward to the stage of
the eighteenth century, let us cast a glance back, and look at the
quality of the audiences for whom these poets catered.
FOOTNOTES:
[66] "Marcelia."
[67] Her father never resided at Surinam. He died on the voyage out.
[68] The _Biographia Dramatica_ gives 1709 as the year of Mrs. Pix's
last play; but this is certainly an error, as Mrs. Bracegirdle, who
retired in 1707, is in the cast.
[69] Genest states in strong terms his utter disbelief in this
story. It is stated in the _Biog. Dram._ that Wilks used this strong
expression regarding "A Bold Stroke for a Wife."
[Illustration: PRYNNE.]