VOL. XIV, NO. 392.] SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1829. [PRICE 2d.
The Duke's Theatre, Dorset Gardens.
[Illustration: The Duke's Theatre, Dorset Gardens.]
The above theatre was erected in the year 1671, about a century after the
regular establishment of theatres in England. It rose in what may be
called the brazen age of the Drama, when the prosecutions of the Puritans
had just ceased, and legitimacy and licentiousness danced into the theatre
hand in hand. At the Restoration, the few players who had not fallen in
the wars or died of poverty, assembled under the banner of Sir William
Davenant, at the Red Bull Theatre. Rhodes, a bookseller, at the same time,
fitted up the Cockpit in Drury Lane, where he formed a company of entirely
new performers. This was in 1659, when Rhodes's two apprentices, Betterton
and Kynaston, were the stars. These companies afterwards united, and were
called the Duke's Company. About the same time, Killigrew, that eternal
caterer for good things, collected together a few of the old actors who
were honoured with the title of the "King's Company," or "His Majesty's
Servants," which distinction is preserved by the Drury Lane Company, to
the present day, and is inherited from Killigrew, who built and opened
the first theatre in Drury Lane, in 1663. In 1662, Sir William Davenant
obtained a patent for building "the Duke's Theatre," in Little Lincoln's
Inn Fields, which he opened with the play of "the Siege of Rhodes,"
written by himself. The above company performed here till 1671, when
another "Duke's Theatre." was built in Dorset Gardens,[1] by Sir
Christopher Wren, in a similar style of architecture to that in Lincoln's
Inn Fields. The company removed thither, November 9, in the same year, and
continued performing till the union of the Duke and the King's Companies,
in 1682; and performances were continued occasionally here until 1697. The
building was demolished about April, 1709, and the site is now occupied by
the works of a Gas Light Company.
[1] At the end of Dorset-street, now communicating with Fleet-street,
through Salisbury-square and Salisbury-court.
The Duke's Theatre, as the engraving shows, had a handsome front towards
the river, with a landing-place for visiters by water, a fashion which
prevailed in the early age of the Drama, if we may credit the assertion of
Taylor, the water poet, that about the year 1596, the number of watermen
maintained by conveying persons to the theatres on the banks of the
Thames, was not less than 40,000, showing a love of the drama at that
early period which is very extraordinary.[2] All we have left of this
aquatic rage is a solitary boat now and then skimming and scraping to
Vauxhall Gardens.
[2] The _Globe_, the _Rose_, and the _Swan_, were on Baukside;
besides which there were, either then or after, six other
theatres on the Middlesex bank of the Thames.
The upper part of the front will be admired for its characteristic taste;
as the figures of Comedy and Tragedy surmounting the balustrade, the
emblematic flame, and the wreathed arms of the founder.
Operas were first introduced on the English stage, at Dorset Gardens, in
1673, with "expensive scenery;" and in Lord Orrery's play of Henry V.,
performed here in the year previous, the actors, Harris, Betterton, and
Smith, wore the coronation suits of the Duke of York, King Charles, and
Lord Oxford.
The names of Betterton and Kynaston bespeak the importance of the Duke's
Theatre. Cibber calls Betterton "an actor, as Shakspeare was an author,
both without competitors;" in his performance of _Hamlet_, he profited by
the instructions of Sir William Davenant, who embodied his recollections
of Joseph Taylor, instructed by SHAKSPEARE to play the character! What
a delightful association--to see Hamlet represented in the true vein in
which the sublime author conceived it! Kynaston's celebrity was of a more
equivocal description. He played _Juliet_ to Betterton's _Romeo_, and was
the Siddons of his day; for women did not generally appear on the stage
till after the Restoration. The anecdote of Charles II. waiting at the
theatre for the stage _queen_ to be _shaved_ is well known.
Pepys speaks of Harris, in his interesting _Diary_ as "growing very proud,
and demanding 20_l_. for himself extraordinary more than Betterton, or
any body else, upon every new play, and 10_l_. upon every revive; which,
with other things, Sir William Davenant would not give him, and so he
swore he would never act there more, in expectation of his being received
in the other house;" (this was in 1663, at the Duke's Theatre in Lincoln's
Inn Fields.) "He tells me that the fellow grew very proud of late, the
King and every body else crying him up so high," &c. Poor Sir William, he
must have been as much worried and vexed as Mr. Ebers with the Operatics,
or any Covent Garden manager, in our time; whose days and nights are not
very serene, although passed among the _stars_,
In one of Pepys's notices of Hart, he tells us "It pleased us mightily
to see the natural affection of a poor woman, the mother of one of the
children brought upon the stage; the child crying, she, by force, got upon
the stage, and took up her child, and carried it away off the stage from
Hart." This pleasant playgoer likewise says, in 1667-8, "when I began
first to be able to bestow a play on myself, I do not remember that I saw
so many by half of the ordinary prentices and mean people in the pit at
2_s_. 6_d_. a-piece as now; I going for several years no higher than the
12_d_. and then the 18_d_. places, though I strained hard to go in then
when I did; so much the vanity and prodigality of the age is to be
observed in this particular."
It may be at this moment interesting to mention that the first Covent
Garden Theatre was opened under the patent granted to Sir William Davenant
for the Dorset Gardens and Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatres. We must also
acknowledge our obligation for the preceding notes to the _Companion to
the Theatres_, a pretty little work which we noticed _en passant_ when
published, and which we now seasonably recommend to the notice of our
readers.
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