of song, and that he should record his experiences is a thing to be
grateful for, especially as he writes of the battle and joys of life
while he is still in harness and the wreathed bowl is in his hand.
In 1818, he began with burlesque--‘Amoroso, King of Little Britain,’
written for amateurs, and taken by Harley, unknown to the author,
to Drury Lane. In 1872, after fifty-four years of work, Mr. Planché
executed the better portion of ‘Babil and Bijou,’ which, compared
with ‘Amoroso,’ is as the _Great Eastern_ steamer to a walnut-shell.
We heartily welcome all chroniclers of an art that lives only in
the artist, and never survives him in tradition. Our own collection
begins with Downes, and Mr. Planché’s emerald-green volumes will find
room there. Scores of biographies are ‘squeezing’ room for him. Fred
Reynolds’s portrait seems to say, ‘Let Planché come next to me.’ As we
look at those dramatic historians we are struck with their usefulness
as well as their power of entertaining. For example, a paragraph in one
of the most ancient of dramatic chronicles--the ‘Roscius Anglicanus,’
by old Downes, the prompter--is of infinite use to the reputation of
Shakespeare. Dryden, who produced _his_ version of ‘The Tempest’ to
show how Shakespeare _ought_ to have written it, maintained that after
the Restoration our national poet was not much cared for by the people,
and that for a long time two plays of Beaumont and Fletcher were acted
for one of Shakespeare. In Downes’s record the prompter registers
the revival of ‘Hamlet;’ and, without any reference to Dryden, or
knowledge, indeed, of his depreciation of Shakespeare, he states that
the tragedy in question brought more money to the house and more
reputation to the players than any piece by any other author during a
great number of years.
To some nameless chronicler we owe a knowledge of the fact that
Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ was played on board ship, in Shakespeare’s time,
by sailors. Why was this left unnoticed when the royal captain of the
_Galatea_ took the chair at the last Theatrical Fund dinner? But for
the chroniclers we should be ignorant that, just six hundred years
ago, the Chester mysteries and passion-plays were at their highest
point of attraction. Indeed, they could never have been unattractive;
for all those who undertook to witness the performance during about
a month’s season were promised to be relieved from hundreds of years
of the fire of purgatory. What a delicious feeling to the earnest
play-goer, that the more regularly he went to the play on these
occasions, the more pleasantly he would work out his salvation! The
different dramatic scenes were represented by the best actors in the
Chester trading companies. One would like to know on what principle the
distribution of parts was made by the manager. Why should the Tanners
have been chosen to play the ‘Fall of Lucifer’? What virtue was there
in the Blacksmiths, that they should be especially appointed to enact
‘The Purification’? or, in the Butchers, that they should represent
‘The Temptation’? or, in the Bakers, that they should be deemed the
fittest persons to illustrate ‘The Last Supper’? One can understand
the Cooks being selected for ‘The Descent into Hell,’ because they
were accustomed to stand fire; but what of angelical or evangelical
could be found exclusively in the Tailors, that they should be cast for
‘The Ascension’? Were the Skinners, whose mission it was to play ‘The
Resurrection,’ not deemed worthy of going higher? Or, were the Tailors
lighter men, and more likely to rise with alacrity?
We are inclined to think that the idea of plays being naughty things
and players more than naughty persons in the early days is a vulgar
error. Plays must have been highly esteemed by the authorities, or
Manningtree in Essex (and probably many another place) would not have
enjoyed its privilege of holding a fair by tenure of exhibiting a
certain number of stage plays annually.
There was undoubtedly something Aristophanic in many of the early
plays. There was sharp satire, and sensitive ribs which shrank from
the point of it. When the Cambridge University preachers satirised
the Cambridge town morals the burgesses took the matter quietly; but
when the Cambridge University players (students) caricatured the town
manners in 1601, exaggerating their defects on the University stage,
there was much indignation.
The presence of Queen Elizabeth at plays in London, and the acting of
them in the mansions which she honoured by a visit, are proofs of the
dignity of the profession. We have her, in the year last named, at one
of the most popular of London theatres, with a bevy of fair listening
maids of honour about her. This was in her old age. ‘I have just come,’
writes Chamberlain to Charlton, ‘from the Blackfriars, where I saw her
at the play with all her _candida auditrices_.’ At Christmas time,
Carlile writes to Chamberlain, ‘There has been such a small court this
Christmas, that the guard were not troubled to keep doors at the plays
and pastimes.’
And if the name of Elizabeth should have a sweet savour to actors
generally, not less delicious to dramatic memories should be the mayor
of Abingdon, in that queen’s time, who invited so many companies of
players to give a taste of their quality in that town for fee and
reward. If any actor to whom the history of the stage be of interest
should turn up at Abingdon, let him get the name of this play-loving
mayor, and hang it over the fire-place of the best room of the Garrick,
or rather of the club that _will_ be--the social, cosey, comfortable,
professional, not palatial nor swellish, but homelike house, that the
Garrick was in its humbler and happier days.
Now the companies the Mayor had down to Abingdon included the
Queen’s players, the Earl of Leicester’s players, the players of
the Earl of Worcester, of Lord Sussex, of the Earl of Bath, of Lord
Berkely, of Lord Shrewsbury, of Lord Derby, and of Lord Oxford. Is
there no one who can get at the names of these actors, and of the
pieces they played--played for rewards varying from twenty pence to
twenty shillings? Will that thoroughly English actor, one of the few
accomplished comedians of the well-trained times now left to us, be the
more successfully urged to the task, if we remind him that, in 1573,
his professional namesake, Mr. Compton, took his players to Abingdon,
and earned four shillings by the exercise of their talents?
The Elizabethan time was a very lively one. It had its theatrical
cheats and its popular riots. We learn from State records that on the
anniversary of the Queen’s accession, November, 1602, ‘One Verner, of
Lincoln’s Inn, gave out bills of a play on Bankside, to be acted by
persons of account; price of entry, 2_s._ 6_d._ or 1_s._ 6_d._ Having
got most of the money he fled, but was taken and brought before the
Lord Chief Justice, who made a jest of it, and bound him over in 5_l._
to appear at the sessions. The people, seeing themselves deluded,
revenged themselves on the hangings, chairs, walls, &c., and made a
great spoil. There was much good company, and many noblemen.’
The Queen died in March, 1603. There were the usual ‘blacks,’ but the
court and stage were brilliant again by Christmas. Early in January of
the following year people were talking of the gay doings, the brilliant
dresses, the noble dramas, the grand bear-baitings, the levity,
dancing, and the golden play, which had solemnised the Christmas just
ended. Thirteen years later Shakespeare died, and in little more than
half a century small spirits whispered that he was not such a great
spirit himself after all.
In Mr. Planché’s professional autobiography, which makes us as
discursive as the biographer himself, there is a seeming inclination
to overpraise some actors of the present time at the expense of those
whom we must consider their superiors in bygone days. As far as this
may tend to show that there is no actor so good but that his equal may
in time be discovered, we have no difference with the author of these
‘Recollections.’ It is wonderful how speedily audiences recover the
loss of their greatest favourites. Betterton, who restored the stage
soon after Monk had restored the monarchy, was called ‘the glory and
the grief’ of that stage. The glory while he acted and lived in the
memories of those who had seen him act. To the latter his loss was an
abiding grief. For years after Betterton’s decease it was rank heresy
to suppose that he might be equalled. Pope, in expressive, yet not the
happiest of his verses, has alluded to this prejudice. The prejudice,
nevertheless, was unfounded. Betterton remains indeed with the prestige
of being an actor who has not been equalled in many parts, who has been
excelled in none. Old playgoers, who could compare him in his decline
with young Garrick in his vigour, were of different opinions as to
the respective merits of these two great masters of their art. We may
fairly conclude that Garrick’s Hamlet was as ‘great’ as Betterton’s;
that the latter’s Sir John Brute was hardly equal to Garrick’s Abel
Drugger; and that the Beverley of the later actor was as perfect an
original creation as the Jaffier of Betterton.
When Wilks made the ‘Constant Couple, or a Trip to the Jubilee,’ a
success by the spirit and ease with which he played the part of Sir
Harry Wildair, Farquhar, the author of the comedy, said ‘That he made
the part will appear from hence: whenever the stage has the misfortune
to lose him Sir Harry Wildair may go to the Jubilee.’ Nevertheless,
Margaret Woffington achieved a new success for that play by the fire
and joyousness of her acting. When Wilks died, poets sang in rapturous
grief of his politeness, grace, gentility, and ease; and they protested
that a supernatural voice had been heard moaning through the air--
Farewell, all manly Joy!
And ah! true British Comedy, adieu!
Wilks is no more.
Notwithstanding this, British comedy did not die; Garrick’s Ranger was
good compensation for Wilks’s Sir Harry.
When Garrick heard of Mrs. Cibber’s death, in 1766, he exclaimed, ‘Mrs.
Cibber dead! Then tragedy has died with her!’ At that very time a
little girl of twelve years of age was strolling from country theatre
to country theatre, and she was destined to be an actress of higher
quality and renown than even Mrs. Cibber, namely, Sarah Siddons. Mrs.
Pritchard could play Lady Macbeth as grandly as Mrs. Siddons; and Mrs.
Crawford (Spranger Barry’s widow), who laughed at the ‘paw and pause’
of the Kemble school, was a Lady Randolph of such force and pathos
that Sarah feared and hated her. Not many years after Garrick had
pronounced Tragedy and Cibber to have expired together, his own death
was described as having eclipsed the harmless gaiety of nations, and
Melpomene wept with Thalia for their common adopted son, and neither
would be comforted. But as Siddons was compensation for Mrs. Cibber, so
the Kembles, to use an old simile, formed the very fair small change
for Garrick. When Kemble himself departed, his most ardent admirers or
worshippers could not assert that his legitimate successor could not be
found. Edmund Kean had already supplanted him. The romantic had thrust
out the classic; the natural had taken place of the artificial; and
Shakespeare, by flashes of the Kean lightning, proved more attractive
than the stately eloquence of ‘Cato,’ or the measured cadences of
‘Coriolanus.’
Edmund Kean, however, has never had a successor in certain parts. Mrs.
F. Kemble has justly said of him: ‘Kean is gone, and with him are gone
Shylock, Richard, and Othello.’ Mrs. Siddons, at her first coming, did
not dethrone the old popular favourites. After she had withdrawn from
the stage, Miss O’Neill cast her somewhat under the shadow of oblivion;
but when old Lady Lucy Meyrick saw Mrs. Siddons’s Lady Macbeth in her
early triumph, she acknowledged the fine conception of the character,
but the old lady, full of ancient dramatic memories, declared that,
compared with Mrs. Pritchard and Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Siddons’s grief was
the grief of a cheesemonger’s wife. Miss Hawkins is the authority for
this anecdote, the weak point in which is that in Lady Macbeth the
player is not called upon to exhibit any illustration of grief.
We have said that Kean never had a superior in certain parts. Elliston
considered himself to be superior in one point; and by referring to
some particular shortcoming in other actors Elliston contrived to
establish himself as _facile princeps_ of dramatic geniuses--in his own
opinion. This we gather from Moncrieff, whom Elliston urged to become
his biographer. He would not interfere with Moncrieff’s treatment of
the subject. ‘I will simply call your attention, my dear fellow,’ said
Elliston, ‘to three points, which you _may_ find worthy of notice, when
you draw your parallels of great actors. Garrick could not sing; I
can. Lewis could not act tragedy; I can. Mossop could not play comedy;
I can. Edmund Kean never wrote a drama; I have.’ In the last comparison
Elliston was altogether out. In the cheap edition of ‘Their Majesties’
Servants’ I have inserted a copy of a bill put up by Kean, in 1811, at
York, in the ball-room of the Minster Yard of which city Edmund Kean
and his young wife announced a two nights’ performance of scenes from
plays, imitations, and songs, the whole enacted by the poor strolling
couple. In that bill Mr. Kean is described as ‘late of the Theatres
Royal, Haymarket and Edinburgh, and author of “The Cottage Foundling,
or Robbers of Ancona,” now preparing for immediate representation at
the theatre Lyceum.’ We never heard of this representation having taken
place. Hundreds of French dramas once came into the cheap book market
from the Lyceum, where they had been examined for the purpose of seeing
whether any of them could be made useful in English dresses. Some of
them undoubtedly were. Kean’s manuscript drama may still be lying among
the Arnold miscellanies; if found, we can only hope that the owner will
make over ‘The Cottage Foundling _and_ the Robbers of Ancona’ to the
Dramatic College. The manuscript would be treasured there as long as
the College itself lasts. How long that will be we cannot say; probably
as long as the College serves its present profitable purpose. We could
wish that the _emeriti_ players had a more lively lookout. A view from
its doorway over the heath is as cheerful as that of an empty house to
the actor who looks through the curtain at it on his benefit night!
Edmund Kean’s loss has not been supplied as Mrs. Siddons’s was, to a
certain extent, and to that actress’s great distaste, by Miss O’Neill;
but Drury Lane has flourished with and by its Christmas pantomimes.
Audiences cannot be what they were in Mr. Planché’s younger days. They
examine no coin that is offered to them. They take what glitters as
real currency, and are content. When we were told the other day of
a player at the Gaiety representing Job Thornberry in a moustache,
we asked if the pit did not shave him clean out of the comedy? Job
Thornberry in a moustache! ‘Well,’ was the rejoinder, ‘he only follows
suit. He imitates the example of Mr. Sothern, who played Garrick in a
moustache.’ We were silent, and thought of the days when actors dressed
their characters from portraits, as William Farren did his Frederick
and his Charles XII.
If Mr. Planché’s book had not been as suggestive as it is purely
historical we should not have been so long coming to it. But he records
a fact or makes a reflection, and straightway a reader, who has long
memories of books or men, goes far back into older records in search
of contrasts or of parallels. We come to him now definitely, and do
not again mean to let him go, as far as his dramatic experiences are
concerned. Mr. Planché makes even his birth _theatrical_; he says, ‘I
believe I made my first appearance in Old Burlington Street on the
27th of February, 1796, about the time the farce begins’ (used to
begin?) ‘at the Haymarket, that is, shortly after one o’clock in the
morning.’ The Haymarket season, however, ran at that time only from
June to September. In spite of ourselves, Mr. Planché’s record of his
birth leads us to a subject that is, however, in connection with the
record. We find that Mr. Planché was not only of the Kemble and Kean
periods, since which time the stage has been ‘nothing’ especial, but
that he was born under both. On the night of his birth John Kemble
played Manly in ‘The Plain Dealer,’ with a cast further including Jack
Bannister, the two Palmers, Dodd, Suett, and Mrs. Jordan! Think of the
dolls and puppets and groups of sticks whom people are now asked to
recognise as artists, and who gain more in a night than the greatest
of the above-named players earned in a week. A few nights later
Edmund Kean, if he himself is to be credited rather than theatrical
biographers, made his first appearance on any stage as the ‘Robber’s
Boy’ on the first night the ‘Iron Chest’ was acted--a play in which
the boy was destined to surpass, in Sir Edward Mortimer, the original
representative, John Kemble. At the other house little Knight, the
father of the present secretary of the Royal Academy, made his _début_
in London; and the father of Mr. Macready was playing _utility_ with
a finish that, if he were alive to do it now, would entitle him to a
name on ‘posters’ three feet high, and to the sarcasm of managers, who
readily pay comedians who ‘draw’ and laugh at _them_ and at the public
who are drawn by them. But here is Mr. Planché waiting.
Well! he seems to have been backward in speaking; though he says, as
a proof to the contrary, that he spoke Rolla’s speech to his soldiers
shortly after he had found his own. ‘Pizarro,’ we will observe, was
not produced till 1799, and was not printed _then_. But, on the other
hand, Mr. Planché, like Pope, seems to have lisped in numbers, for at
ten he wrote odes, sonnets, and particularly an address to the Spanish
patriots, which he describes as ‘really terrible to listen to.’ When
he passed into his teens, the serious question of life turned up. He
could not be made to be a watchmaker, the calling of his good father,
a French refugee. Barrister, artist, geometrician, cricketer, were
vocations which were considered and set aside. His tutor in geometry
died before the pupil could discover the quadrature of the circle;
and the other callings not seeming to give him a chance, Mr. Planché
bethought himself that, as he was fond of writing, he was especially
qualified to become a bookseller. It was while he was learning this
_métier_ that his dramatic propensities were further developed. They
had begun early; he had been ‘bribed to take some nasty stuff when an
urchin, on one occasion, by the present of a complete harlequin’s suit,
mask, wand, and all, and on another by that of a miniature theatre
and strong company of pasteboard actors,’ in whose control he enjoyed
what Charles Dickens longed to possess--a theatre given up to him,
with absolute despotic sway, to do what he liked with, house, actors
and pieces, monarch of all he surveyed. Mr. Kent has published this
‘longing’ in his ‘Charles Dickens as a Reader,’ and added one shadow
on Dickens’s character to the many which Mr. Forster has made public,
and which thoughtful biographers ought to have suppressed. We allude
particularly to where Dickens describes his mother as advertising to
receive young ladies as pupils in a boarding school, without having the
means to make preparations for their reception; also his showing-up of
his own father as Micawber; and above all, his recording that he never
had forgiven and never would forgive his mother for wishing him to go
back to his humble work at the blacking-maker’s instead of to school.
The light which thoughtless worshippers place before their favourite
saint often blackens him at least as much as it does him honour.
While under articles with the bookseller Mr. Planché amused himself
as amateur actor at the then well-known private theatres in Berwick
Street, Catherine Street, Wilton Street, and Pancras Street. The
autobiographer says he there ‘murdered many principal personages of
the acting drama in company with several accomplices who have since
risen to deserved distinction upon the public boards.’ He adds, the
probability, had he continued his line of art, of his becoming by
this time ‘a very bad actor, had not “the sisters three and such odd
branches of learning” occasioned me by the merest accident to become
an indifferent dramatist.’ He says jocosely that finding nothing in
Shakespeare or Sheridan worthy of him, he wrote for amateurs the
burlesque entitled ‘Amoroso, King of Little Britain,’ which one of
the company showed to Harley, who at once put it on the stage of
Drury Lane in April 1818. There, night after night, Queen Coquetinda
stabbed Mollidusta, King Amoroso stabbed the Queen, Roastando stabbed
Amoroso, who however stabbed _his_ stabber, the too amorous cook--all
to excellent music and capitally acted, whether in the love-making,
the killing, or the recovery. Drury Lane Theatre is described by Mr.
Planché as being at the time ‘in a state of absolute starvation.’ Yet
it was a season in which Kean led in tragedy and Elliston in comedy,
and David Fisher played Richard and Hamlet as rival to the former, and
little Clara Fisher acted part of Richard the Third in ‘Lilliput.’
Drury Lane had not had so good a company for years; and besides revived
pieces of sterling merit it brought out ‘Rob Roy the Gregarach,’ and
the ‘Falls of Clyde;’ and Kean played Othello and Richard, Hamlet and
Reuben Glenroy, Octavian and Sir Giles, Shylock and Luke, Sir Edward
Mortimer and King John, Oroonoko, Richard Plantagenet (‘Richard Duke of
York’), and Selim (‘Bride of Abydos’); Barabbas (‘Jew of Malta’), Young
Norval, Bertram, and, for his benefit, Alexander the Great, Sylvester
Daggerwood, and Paul in ‘Paul and Virginia.’ Nevertheless the success
of ‘Amoroso’ was the _popular_ feature of that Drury Lane season. It
made Mr. Planché become a dramatist in earnest. ‘At this present date,’
he says, ‘I have put upon the stage, of one description and another,
seventy-six pieces.’
_A LINE OF FRENCH ACTRESSES._
The English stage has not been wanting in an illustrious line of right
royal queens of tragedy. Mrs. Barry is the noble founder, and perhaps
the noblest queen of that brilliant line. Then came Mrs. Cibber, Mrs.
Pritchard, Mrs. Spranger Barry (Mrs. Crawford), Mrs. Siddons (who hated
Mrs. Crawford for not abdicating), and Miss O’Neill, whom Mrs. Siddons
equally disliked for coming after her.
With all these the lovers of dramatic literature are well acquainted.
Of the contemporary line of French tragedy queens very little is known
in this country; nevertheless the dynasty is one of great brilliancy,
and the details are not without much dramatic interest.
In the year 1644, in the city of Rouen, there lived a family named
Desmares, which family was increased in that year by the birth of a
little girl who was christened Marie. Corneille, born in the same city,
was then eight-and-thirty years of age. Rouen is now proud of both
of them--poet and actress. The actress is only known to fame by her
married name. The clever Marie Desmares became the wife of the player,
Champmeslé. Monsieur was to Madame very much what poor Mr. Siddons
was to his illustrious consort. Madame, or Mademoiselle, or _La_
Champmeslé, as she was called indifferently, associated with Corneille
by their common birth-place, was more intimately connected with Racine,
who was her senior by five years. La Champmeslé was in her twenty-fifth
year when she made her _début_ in Paris as Hermione, in Racine’s
masterpiece, ‘Andromaque.’ For a long time Paris could talk of nothing
but the new tragedy and the new actress. The part from which the piece
takes its name was acted by Mdlle. Duparc, whom Racine had carried off
from Molière’s company. The author was very much interested in this
lady, the wife of a M. Duparc. Madame was, when a widow, the mother
of a very posthumous child indeed. The mother died. She was followed
to the grave by a troop of the weeping adorers of her former charms,
‘and,’ says Racine, alluding to himself, ‘the most interested of them
was half dead as he wept.’
The poet was aroused from his grief by a summons from the king, who, in
presence of the sensitive Racine’s bitterest enemy, Louvois, accused
him of having robbed and poisoned his late mistress. The accusation was
founded on information given by the infamous woman, Voisin, who was a
poisoner by passion and profession, and was executed for her devilish
practices. The information was found to be utterly false, and Racine,
absolved, soon found consolation and compensation.
He became the master of La Champmeslé, and taught her how to play the
heroines of the dramas which he wrote expressly for her. She, in her
turn, became the mistress of her tutor. Of his teaching indeed she
stood in little need, except to learn from him his ideas and object, as
author of the play. She was not only sublime, but La Champmeslé was the
first sublime actress that had hitherto appeared on the French stage.
Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter:--