enthusiasm for the theatre was, to his mind, a failing which required
most careful watching. He feared that the passion might do injury to
his purse, might distract him from serious business, might lead him
into temptation of the flesh. He had a little of the Puritan's dread
of the playhouse. He was constantly taking vows to curb his love of
plays, which "mightily troubled his mind." He was frequently resolving
to abstain from the theatre for four or five months at a stretch, and
then to go only in the company of his wife. During these periods of
abstinence he was in the habit of reading over his vows every Sunday.
But, in spite of all his well-meaning efforts, his resolution was
constantly breaking down. On one occasion he perjured himself so
thoroughly as to witness two plays in one day, once in the afternoon
and again in the evening. On this riotous outbreak he makes the
characteristic comment: "Sad to think of the spending so much money,
and of venturing the breach of my vow." But he goes on to thank God
that he had the grace to feel sorry for the misdeed, at the same time
as he lamented that "his nature was so content to follow the pleasure
still." Pepys compounded with his conscience for such breaches of his
oath by all manner of casuistry. He excused himself for going,
contrary to his vow, to the new theatre in Drury Lane, because it was
not built when his vow was framed. Finally, he stipulated with himself
that he would only go to the theatre once a fortnight; but if he went
oftener he would give £10 to the poor. "This," he added, "I hope in
God will bind me." The last reference that he makes to his vows is
when, in contravention of them, he went with his wife to the Duke of
York's House, and found the place full, and himself unable to obtain
seats. He makes a final record of "the saving of his vow, to his great
content."
II
All self-imposed restrictions notwithstanding, Pepys contrived to
visit the theatre no less than three hundred and fifty-one times
during the nine years and five months that he kept his diary. It has
to be borne in mind that, for more than twelve months of that period,
the London playhouses were for the most part closed, owing to the
Great Plague and the Fire. Had Pepys gone at regular intervals, when
the theatres were open, he would have been a playgoer at least once a
week. But, owing to his vows, his visits fell at most irregular
intervals. Sometimes he went three or four times a week, or even twice
in one day. Then there would follow eight or nine weeks of abstinence.
If a piece especially took his fancy, he would see it six or seven
times in fairly quick succession. Long runs were unknown to the
theatre of Pepys's day, but a successful piece was frequently revived.
Occasionally, Pepys would put himself to the trouble of attending a
first night. But this was an indulgence that he practised sparingly.
He resented the manager's habit of doubling the price of the seats,
and he was irritated by the frequent want of adequate rehearsal.
Pepys's theatrical experience began with the reopening of theatres
after the severe penalty of suppression, which the Civil Wars and the
Commonwealth imposed on them for nearly eighteen years. His playgoing
diary thus became an invaluable record of a new birth of theatrical
life in London. When, in the summer of 1660, General Monk occupied
London for the restored King, Charles II., three of the old theatres
were still standing empty. These were soon put into repair, and
applied anew to theatrical uses, although only two of them seem to
have been open at any one time. The three houses were the Red Bull,
dating from Elizabeth's reign, in St John's Street, Clerkenwell, where
Pepys saw Marlowe's _Faustus_; Salisbury Court, Whitefriars, off Fleet
Street; and the Old Cockpit in Drury Lane, both of which were of more
recent origin. To all these theatres Pepys paid early visits. But the
Cockpit in Drury Lane, was the scene of some of his most stirring
experiences. There he saw his first play, Beaumont and Fletcher's
_Loyal Subject_; and there, too, he saw his first play by Shakespeare,
_Othello_.
But these three theatres were in decay, and new and sumptuous
buildings soon took their places. One of the new playhouses was in
Portugal Row, Lincoln's Inn Fields; the other, on the site of the
present Drury Lane Theatre, was the first of the many playhouses that
sprang up there. It is to these two theatres--Lincoln's Inn Fields and
Drury Lane--that Pepys in his diary most often refers. He calls each
of them by many different names, and the unwary reader might infer
that London was very richly supplied with playhouses in Pepys's day.
But public theatres in active work at this period of our history were
not permitted by the authorities to exceed two. "The Opera" and "the
Duke's House" are merely Pepys's alternative designations of the
Lincoln's Inn Field's Theatre; while "the Theatre," "Theatre Royal,"
and "the King's House," are the varying titles which he bestows on the
Drury Lane Theatre.[15]
[Footnote 15: At the restoration of King Charles II., no more than two
companies of actors received licenses to perform in public. One of
these companies was directed by Sir William D'Avenant, Shakespeare's
reputed godson, and was under the patronage of the King's brother, the
Duke of York. The other was directed by Tom Killigrew, one of Charles
II.'s boon companions, and was under the patronage of the King
himself. In due time the Duke's, or D'Avenant's, company occupied the
theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the King's, or Killigrew's,
company occupied the new building in Drury Lane.]
Besides these two public theatres there was, in the final constitution
of the theatrical world in Pepys's London, a third, which stood on a
different footing. A theatre was attached to the King's Court at
Whitehall, and there performances were given at the King's command by
actors from the two public houses.[16] The private Whitehall theatre
was open to the public on payment, and Pepys was frequently there.
[Footnote 16: Charles II. formed this private theatre out of a
detached building in St James's Park, known as the "Cockpit," and to
be carefully distinguished from the Cockpit of Drury Lane. Part of the
edifice was occupied by courtiers by favour of the King. General Monk
had lodgings there. At a much later date, cabinet councils were often
held there.]
At one period of his life Pepys held that his vows did not apply to
the Court theatre, which was mainly distinguished from the other
houses by the circumstances that the performances were given at night.
At Lincoln's Inn Fields or Drury Lane it was only permitted to perform
in the afternoon. Half-past three was the usual hour for opening the
proceedings. At Whitehall the play began about eight, and often lasted
till near midnight.
The general organisation of Pepys's auditorium was much as it is
to-day. It had improved in many particulars since Shakespeare died.
The pit was the most popular part of the house; it covered the floor
of the building, and was provided with seats; the price of admission
was 2s. 6d. The company there seems to have been extremely mixed; men
and women of fashion often rubbed elbows with City shopkeepers, their
wives, and apprentices. The first gallery was wholly occupied by
boxes, in which seats could be hired separately at 4s. apiece. Above
the boxes was the middle gallery, the central part of which was filled
with benches, where the seats cost 1s. 6d. each, while boxes lined the
sides. The highest tier was the 1s. gallery, where footmen soon held
sway. As Pepys's fortune improved, he spent more on his place in the
theatre. From the 1s. gallery he descended to the 1s. 6d., and thence
came down to the pit, occasionally ascending to the boxes on the first
tier.
In the methods of representation, Pepys's period of playgoing was
coeval with many most important innovations, which seriously affected
the presentation of Shakespeare on the stage. The chief was the
desirable substitution of women for boys in the female rôles. During
the first few months of Pepys's theatrical experience, boys were still
taking the women's parts. That the practice survived in the first days
of Charles II.'s reign we know from the well-worn anecdote that when
the King sent behind the scenes to inquire why the play of _Hamlet_,
which he had come to see, was so late in commencing, he was answered
that the Queen was not yet shaved. But in the opening month of 1661,
within five months of Pepys's first visit to a theatre, the reign of
the boys ended. On January 3rd of that year, Pepys writes that he
"first saw women come upon the stage." Next night he makes entry of a
boy's performance of a woman's part, and that is the final record of
boys masquerading as women in the English theatre. I believe the
practice now survives nowhere except in Japan. This mode of
representation has always been a great puzzle to students of
Elizabethan drama.[17] Before, however, Pepys saw Shakespeare's work
on the stage, the usurpation of the boys was over.
[Footnote 17: For a fuller description of this theatrical practice,
see pages 41-3 _supra_.]
It was after the Restoration, too, that scenery, rich costume, and
scenic machinery became, to Pepys's delight, regular features of the
theatre. When the diarist saw _Hamlet_ "done with scenes" for the
first time, he was most favourably impressed. Musical accompaniment
was known to pre-Restoration days; but the orchestra was now for the
first time placed on the floor of the house in front of the stage,
instead of in a side gallery, or on the stage itself. The musical
accompaniment of plays developed very rapidly, and the methods of
opera were soon applied to many of Shakespeare's pieces, notably to
_The Tempest_ and _Macbeth_.
Yet at the side of these innovations, one very important feature of
the old playhouses, which gravely concerned both actors and auditors,
survived throughout Pepys's lifetime. The stage still projected far
into the pit in front of the curtain. The actors and actresses spoke
in the centre of the house, so that, as Colley Cibber put it, "the
most distant ear had scarce the least doubt or difficulty in hearing
what fell from the weakest utterance ... nor was the minutest motion
of a feature, properly changing with the passion or humour it suited,
ever lost, as they frequently must be, in the obscurity of too great a
distance." The platform-stage, with which Shakespeare was familiar,
suffered no curtailment in the English theatres till the eighteenth
century, when the fore-edge of the boards was for the first time made
to run level with the proscenium.
III
One of the obvious results of the long suppression of the theatres
during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth was the temporary extinction of
play-writing in England. On the sudden reopening of the playhouses at
the Restoration, the managers had mainly to rely for sustenance on the
drama of a long-past age. Of the one hundred and forty-five separate
plays which Pepys witnessed, fully half belonged to the great period
of dramatic activity in England, which covered the reigns of
Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. John Evelyn's well-known remark in
his _Diary_ (November 26, 1661): "I saw _Hamlet, Prince of Denmark_,
played; but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age,"
requires much qualification before it can be made to apply to Pepys's
records of playgoing. It was in "the old plays" that he and all
average playgoers mainly delighted.
Not that the new demand failed quickly to create a supply of
new plays for the stage. Dryden and D'Avenant, the chief dramatists
of Pepys's day, were rapid writers. To a large extent they carried
on, with exaggeration of its defects and diminution of its merits,
the old Elizabethan tradition of heroic romance, tragedy, and
farce. The more matter-of-fact and lower-principled comedy of
manners, which is commonly reckoned the chief characteristic
of the new era in theatrical history, was only just beginning
when Pepys was reaching the end of his diary. The virtual leaders
of the new movement--Wycherley, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, and Congreve--were
not at work till long after Pepys ceased to write. He records only the
first runnings of that sparkling stream. He witnessed some impudent
comedies of Dryden, Etherege, and Sedley. But it is important to note
that he formed a low opinion of all of them. Their intellectual glitter
did not appeal to him. Their cynical licentiousness seemed to him to be
merely "silly." One might have anticipated from him a different
verdict on the frank obscenity of Restoration drama. But there are the
facts. Neither did Mr Pepys, nor (he is careful to remind us) did Mrs
Pepys, take "any manner of pleasure in" the bold indelicacy of Dryden,
Etherege, or Sedley.
When we ask what sort of pieces Pepys appreciated, we seem to be faced
by further perplexities. His highest enthusiasm was evoked by certain
plays of Ben Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Massinger. Near
the zenith of his scale of dramatic excellence he set the comedies of
Ben Jonson, which are remarkable for their portrayal of eccentricity
of character. These pieces, which incline to farce, give great
opportunity to what is commonly called character-acting, and
character-acting always appeals most directly to average humanity.
Pepys called Jonson's _Alchemist_ "a most incomparable play," and he
found in _Every Man in his Humour_ "the greatest propriety of speech
that ever I read in my life." Similarly, both the heroic tragedies and
the comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, of which he saw no less than
nineteen, roused in him, as a rule, an ecstatic admiration. But of all
dramatic entertainments which the theatre offered him, Pepys was most
"taken" by the romantic comedy from the pen of Massinger, which is
called _The Bondman_. "There is nothing more taking in the world with
me than that play," he writes.
Massinger's _Bondman_ is a well-written piece, in which an heroic
interest is fused with a genuine spirit of low comedy. Yet Pepys's
unqualified commendation of it presents a problem. Massinger's play,
like the cognate work of Fletcher, offers much episode which is hardly
less indecent than those early specimens of Restoration comedy of
which Pepys disapproved. A leading character is a frowsy wife who
faces all manner of humiliation, in order to enjoy, behind her elderly
husband's back, the embraces of a good-looking youth.
Pepys is scarcely less tolerant of Fletcher's more flagrant
infringements of propriety. In the whole of the Elizabethan drama
there was no piece which presented so liberal a mass of indelicacy as
Fletcher's _Custom of the Country_. Dryden, who was innocent of
prudery, declared that there was "more indecency" in that drama "than
in all our plays together." This was one of the pieces which Pepys
twice saw performed after carefully reading it in his study, and he
expressed admiration for the rendering of the widow's part by his
pretty friend, Mistress Knipp. One has to admit that Pepys condemned
the play from a literary point of view as "a very poor one, methinks,"
as "fully the worst play that I saw or believe shall see." But the
pleasure which Mistress Knipp's share in the performance gave him
suggests, in the absence of any explicit disclaimer, that the
improprieties of both plot and characters escaped his notice, or, at
any rate, excited in him no disgust. Massinger's _Bondman_, Pepys's
ideal of merit in drama, has little of the excessive grossness of the
_Custom of the Country_. But to some extent it is tarred with the same
brush.
Pepys's easy principles never lend themselves to very strict
definition. Yet he may be credited with a certain measure of
discernment in pardoning the indelicacy of Fletcher and Massinger,
while he condemns that of Dryden, Etherege, or Sedley. Indelicacy in
the older dramatists does not ignore worthier interests. Other topics
attracted the earlier writers besides conjugal infidelity and the
frailty of virgins, which were the sole themes of Restoration comedy.
Massinger's heroes are not always gay seducers. His husbands are not
always fools. Pepys might quite consistently scorn the ribaldry of
Etherege and condone the obscenity of Fletcher. It was a question of
degree. Pepys was clear in his own mind that a line must be drawn
somewhere, though it would probably have taxed his logical power to
make the delimitation precise.
IV
There is, apparently, a crowning difficulty of far greater moment when
finally estimating Pepys's taste in dramatic literature. Despite his
admiration for the ancient drama, he acknowledged a very tempered
regard for the greatest of all the old dramatists--Shakespeare. He
lived and died in complacent unconsciousness of Shakespeare's supreme
excellence. Such innocence is attested by his conduct outside, as well
as inside, the theatre. He prided himself on his taste as a reader and
a book collector, and bought for his library many plays in quarto
which he diligently perused. Numerous separately issued pieces by
Shakespeare lay at his disposal in the bookshops. But he only records
the purchase of one--the first part of _Henry IV._, though he mentions
that he read in addition _Othello_ and _Hamlet_. When his bookseller
first offered him the great First Folio edition of Shakespeare's
works, he rejected it for Fuller's _Worthies_ and the newly-published
Butler's _Hudibras_, in which, by the way, he failed to discover the
wit. Ultimately he bought the newly-issued second impression of the
Third Folio Shakespeare, along with copies of Spelman's _Glossary_ and
Scapula's _Lexicon_. To these soporific works of reference he
apparently regarded the dramatist's volume as a fitting pendant. He
seemed subsequently to have exchanged the Third Folio for a Fourth, by
which volume alone is Shakespeare represented in the extant library
that Pepys bequeathed to Magdalene College, Cambridge.
As a regular playgoer at a time when the stage mainly depended on the
drama of Elizabethan days, Pepys was bound to witness numerous
performances of Shakespeare's plays. On the occasion of forty-one of
his three hundred and fifty-one visits to the theatre, Pepys listened
to plays by Shakespeare, or to pieces based upon them. Once in every
eight performances Shakespeare was presented to his view. Fourteen
was the number of different plays by Shakespeare which Pepys saw
during these forty-one visits. Very few caused him genuine pleasure.
At least three he condemns, without any qualification, as "tedious,"
or "silly." In the case of others, while he ignored the literary
merit, he enjoyed the scenery and music with which, in accordance with
current fashion, the dramatic poetry was overlaid. In only two cases,
in the case of two tragedies--_Othello_ and _Hamlet_--does he show at
any time a true appreciation of the dramatic quality, and in the case
of _Othello_ he came in course of years to abandon his good opinion.
Pepys's moderate praise and immoderate blame of Shakespeare are only
superficially puzzling. The ultimate solution is not difficult.
Despite his love of music and his zeal as a collector, Pepys was the
most matter-of-fact of men; he was essentially a man of business. Not
that he had any distaste for timely recreation; he was, indeed,
readily susceptible to every manner of commonplace pleasures--to all
the delights of both mind and sense which appeal to the practical and
hard-headed type of Englishman. Things of the imagination, on the
other hand, stood with him on a different footing. They were out of
his range or sphere. Poetry and romance, unless liberally compounded
with prosaic ingredients, bored him on the stage and elsewhere.
In the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Massinger and Ben Jonson,
poetry and romance were for the most part kept in the background. Such
elements lay there behind a substantial barrier of conventional stage
machinery and elocutionary scaffolding. In Shakespeare, poetry and
romance usually eluded the mechanical restrictions of the theatre.
The gold had a tendency to separate itself from the alloy, and Pepys
only found poetry and romance endurable when they were pretty thickly
veiled behind the commonplaces of rhetoric or broad fun or the
realistic ingenuity of the stage carpenter and upholsterer.
There is, consequently, no cause for surprise that Pepys should write
thus of Shakespeare's ethereal comedy of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_:
"Then to the King's Theatre, where we saw _A Midsummer Night's Dream_,
which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the
most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I
confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my
pleasure." This is Pepys's ordinary attitude of mind to undiluted
poetry on the stage.
Pepys only saw _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ once. _Twelfth Night_, of
which he wrote in very similar strains, he saw thrice. On the first
occasion his impatience of this romantic play was due to external
causes. He went to the theatre "against his own mind and resolution."
He was over-persuaded to go in by a friend, with whom he was casually
walking past the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Moreover, he had just
sworn to his wife that he would never go to a play without her: all
which considerations "made the piece seem a burden" to him. He
witnessed _Twelfth Night_ twice again in a less perturbed spirit, and
then he called it a "silly" play, or "one of the weakest plays that
ever I saw on the stage."
Again, of _Romeo and Juliet_, Pepys wrote: "It is a play of itself the
worst I ever heard in my life." This verdict, it is right to add, was
attributable, in part at least, to Pepys's irritation at the badness
of the acting, and at the actors' ignorance of their words. It was a
first night.
The literary critic knows well enough that the merit of these three
pieces--_A Midsummer Night's Dream_, _Twelfth Night_, and _Romeo and
Juliet_--mainly lies in their varied wealth of poetic imagery and
passion. One thing alone could render the words, in which poetic
genius finds voice, tolerable in the playhouse to a spectator of
Pepys's prosaic temperament. The one thing needful is inspired acting,
and in the case of these three plays, when Pepys saw them performed,
inspired acting was wanting.
It is at first sight disconcerting to find Pepys no less impatient of
_The Merry Wives of Windsor_. He expresses a mild interest in the
humours of "the country gentleman and the French doctor." But he
condemns the play as a whole. It is in his favour that his bitterest
reproaches are aimed at the actors and actresses. One can hardly
conceive that Falstaff, fitly interpreted, would have failed to
satisfy Pepys's taste in humour, commonplace though it was. He is not
quite explicit on the point; but there are signs that the histrionic
interpretation of Shakespeare's colossal humorist, rather than the
dramatist's portrayal of the character, caused the diarist's
disappointment.
Just before Pepys saw the first part of _Henry IV._, wherein Falstaff
figures to supreme advantage, he had bought and read the play in
quarto. "But my expectation being too great" (he avers), "it did not
please me as otherwise I believe it would." Here it seems clear that
his hopes of the actor were unfulfilled. However, he saw _Henry IV._
again a few months later, and had the grace to describe it as "a good
play." On a third occasion he wrote that, "contrary to expectation,"
he was pleased by the delivery of Falstaff's ironical speech about
honour. For whatever reason, Pepys's affection for Shakespeare's fat
knight, as he figured on the stage of his day, never touched the note
of exaltation.
Of Shakespeare's great tragedies Pepys saw three--_Othello_, _Hamlet_,
and _Macbeth_. But in considering his several impressions of these
pieces, we have to make an important proviso. Only the first two of
them did he witness in the authentic version. _Macbeth_ underwent in
his day a most liberal transformation, which carried it far from its
primordial purity. The impressions he finally formed of _Othello_ and
_Hamlet_ are not consistent one with the other, but are eminently
characteristic of the variable moods of the average playgoer.
_Othello_ he saw twice, and he tells us more of the acting than of the
play itself. On his first visit he notes that the lady next him
shrieked on seeing Desdemona smothered: a proof of the strength of the
histrionic illusion. Up to the year 1666 Pepys adhered to the
praiseworthy opinion that _Othello_ was a "mighty good" play. But in
that year his judgment took a turn for the worse, and that for a
reason which finally convicts him of incapacity to pass just sentence
on the poetic or literary drama. On August 20, 1666, he writes: "Read
_Othello, Moor of Venice_, which I have ever heretofore esteemed a
mighty good play; but having so lately read the _Adventures of Five
Hours_, it seems a mean thing."