This supplement began with the statement that among the earliest
information that we possess respecting the drama in America, is a
passage in a letter objecting to the performance of a play, and it
may be appropriately closed by a brief enumeration of the objections
generally made to the theater, and the conclusion that seems to follow
from a review of them.
It is a characteristic of those who object to the theater altogether
that they rarely, if ever, give any consideration to the origin of the
drama, to its long continuance, or appreciate that it will continue as
long as civilization continues, and this applies as well to those who
have written elaborate treatises against it, like Jeremy Collier, as
to those who object to it generally. The briefest form of stating this
consideration is that the theater has its origin in human nature. In
the researches made as to its origin it is found that it has sprung up
spontaneously among different peoples, and has not been transmitted by
one people more advanced in civilization to another that was less so.
Thus the rise of the drama, such as it is, in India and in China has in
no way been influenced by the Greeks, who carried the cultivation of
it to a higher degree than any other people of antiquity. The oldest
civilization with which we are acquainted is that of Egypt. Whether it
existed among the Egyptians, whether they had what we call a theater,
the extensive researches that have been made within the present
century so far as I have been able to ascertain do not indicate,[23]
but that it existed at a very early period in China, in Persia, and in
India we have ample evidence, and in China and India it has from its
beginning been a recreation greatly enjoyed by the people; to which may
be added as a general observation that certain races have more aptitude
for the enjoyment of it than others, and greater natural capacity
either as a gift from nature or for acquiring what is requisite in the
actor or dramatist. That some men are endowed by nature in a higher
degree than others with the qualities that make a man eminent as a
dramatist or an actor is sufficiently indicated in the one case by
Shakespeare, and in the other by Garrick, of the latter of whom it may
be said, in the language of Mr. Baker, the historian of the London
stage, that “without any previous apprenticeship, preparation, or
drudgery, at a remote end of the town that had hitherto been as unknown
to fashion as the wilds of Africa, without preliminary puffing of any
kind, he took the whole play-going public by storm, made men old in
prejudice forget the idols of their youth and like Pope confess that
he never had his equal. * * * From “Richard III.” to “Abel Drugger,”
from “King Lear” to “Don Felix,” from “Macbeth” to “Bayes,” his tragic
force, his keen sense of humor, his marvelous genius carried everything
before it;” and this combination of equal excellence, and in the
highest degree, in both tragedy and comedy is the more remarkable, for
the two great Roman actors, Roscius in comedy and Æsopus in tragedy,
never crossed the limits of their respective branches, and both reached
the preëminence they attained by the most careful and assiduous study.
It is said of Roscius that, in the very height of his reputation, he
did not even venture upon a gesture that he did not carefully consider
and practise in private, and yet, notwithstanding this elaborate study,
there was no mannerism or affectation in his acting, but everything he
did seemed natural to the character he represented; and having referred
to these two great Roman actors, it may be mentioned, as an example of
being endowed like Garrick with qualities that enable him who possesses
them to soar easily and at once to the highest reach of his art,
that Terence, the most elegant, subtle, and felicitous in expression
of the Roman comic dramatists, is supposed, his biography being but
imperfectly known, to have been born a slave, who at the age of
twenty-seven offered his first play, the “Andria,” to the conductors of
the theatrical exhibitions, who referred him to an eminent playwright
of Rome for its examination, where, unknown and meanly clad, he
read, seated upon a low stool, his opening scene, afterwards declared
by Cicero to be a model of narrative, and his genius was at once
recognized.[24]
Cæsar called him a half Menander, who was the Greeks’ ideal of a
perfect comic dramatist, regarding him in comedy, as they did Sophocles
in tragedy, as the most complete and finished; whose judgment we
accept, as no play of Menander, though he is said to have written
about a hundred comedies, has come down to us, but only fragments.
And Plautus, the other distinguished Roman dramatist, should also be
mentioned as a further illustration, for he left the humble employment
of turning a mill to become a writer of plays, and surpassed Terence
in native comic force, his gift in that direction being as great as
Shakespeare’s or Molière’s.
There is one pervading feature of the drama to which those who have
written against it seldom refer, and some of the most prominent not
at all, that the stage is, what the age is, or, as Shakespeare has
succinctly expressed it in _Hamlet’s_ speech to the players, “that the
purpose of playing, both at the first and now, was and is, as ’twere,
to hold the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn
her own image, and the _very age_ and body of the time his form and
_pressure_,” and to _Polonius_, in respect to the players, that “they
are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.”
If a people are alike brave and greatly cultivated, as the Athenians
were when the drama reached to its highest attainment among them,
they witness with pleasure the reproduction of noble deeds, and
listen with delight to the inculcation of noble sentiments from such
masters of the dramatic art as Euripides and Sophocles, and realize
with great enjoyment the power that lies in ridicule as a means of
reforming public abuses and correcting deformities in the character of
individuals when it comes from such a satirist and wit as Aristophanes.
But when a nation is sinking into decay or deteriorating, the stage
deteriorates with it; or when a people find their highest enjoyment in
amusements that are coarse or brutal, like the Romans, who thronged
the amphitheater to witness the sanguinary combat of gladiators, the
“maddening excitement of the circus”;[25] or found pleasure in such a
spectacle as beholding the arena filled with wild beasts, tearing each
other to pieces--the performances of the theater, though of a different
kind, became, in time, of the like degraded character, and stirred
up against the drama its greatest, longest, and most unrelenting
enemy--the Christian Church. A warfare against it, at that time, on
the part of the Church, that was necessary for the preservation of
society; for in the period which Gibbon, in his great contribution to
English literature, distinguishes as the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, the stage sank lower than it ever was before, or has ever been
since.
St. Augustine, writing in the beginning of the fourth century, in an
article of great severity against the theater, with whose abuses he was
no doubt thoroughly familiar in his wild youth, says: “The theaters,
those cages of uncleanliness and public schools of debauchery, are
tumbling almost everywhere,” which was the fact, as stationary places
of amusement in cities or towns. And Tertullian, who wrote at the end
of the second century, says even the very magistrates who abet the
stage discountenance the players, stigmatize their character, and cramp
their freedom. “The whole tribe of them,” he says, “is thrown out of
all power and privilege. They are neither suffered to be lords or
gentlemen, to come within the Senate, or to harangue the people.”[26]
And yet the Church, with all its efforts and all the power the law
gave it, could not suppress the players, for so deeply implanted is
the love for the dramatic art, alike in those whose vocation it is
to represent it and those who find enjoyment in seeing it, that it
continued thereafter, in some form or other, under the names of mimes,
masques, drolls, and other titles, to be exhibited throughout the
different countries of Europe by a strolling class of itinerants,
under the various names of gleemen, minstrels, joculators, and other
titles, on the village green, in the hall or courtyard of the castle,
in the city street,--a movable stage for the players being all that
was necessary,--and especially at the fairs, those gatherings of the
Middle Ages for commercial purposes, when amusement was one of the
attractions, whether it was a local fair in a town, or one of those
gatherings of people from many countries as at Beaucaire, in France.
But while the Church did not and could not suppress the practitioner,
as he was then called, of the “gay science,” it made him, for more than
a thousand years, a wanderer and a vagabond. The consolation which
religion affords to support us in our trials, cares, and troubles in
this life was denied him, except so far as he could find it solely
within himself; for he could participate in none of those rites or
acts of religious observance which the Church administers, and the
believer relies on, for securing a happy life hereafter. Upon his
death-bed no mark was made upon his forehead as the Church’s signet of
his repentance and hope of redemption, nor could he lie in consecrated
ground. If a woman who had been baptized married a player, she was
excommunicated; and so were any of the laity who went to any such
performances on a Sunday or a holiday, these being the only days when
the working classes, after doing their duty by attending mass, had
leisure for recreation.
After several centuries the Church, with a sagacity it has frequently
shown, finding that it could not suppress the players--that in all
countries they had the countenance and support of the common people,
who, unable to acquire knowledge by reading, except in very rare
instances, quickly comprehended a dramatic representation, and that
it made a great impression upon them,--determined to make use of the
very thing it had continued to denounce for centuries,--a play, as an
instrument in the hands of the Church for spreading and more deeply
impressing religion upon the unlettered classes, who then constituted
the great bulk of the community, by a representation, through its
instrumentality, of the miracles that had been wrought for the faith.
This afterwards was extended to the representation of the passion of
Christ and religious subjects generally, not only what appertained to
the history of the Church but to what was theological, under the titles
of miracle plays, mysteries, and moralities, to which a recent writer
has felicitously given the general name of the monastic drama.[27] This
resort to plays as a means of religious teaching was especially the
case from the tenth to the twelfth century. Monasteries and convents,
where the name of a play had been previously an abomination, now became
active centers in the production, preparation, and representation of
these mysteries and moralities on the part of monks and nuns. They were
written and acted by ecclesiastics, and when they were given--as they
frequently were--in churches, a bishop presided at the performance,
with his miter on and pastoral staff in hand. Even nuns wrote plays,
the Benedictine nun Hrotsvith, of Saxony, in the tenth century, being
celebrated for her plays, which were distinguishable for their purity
in respect to religion and morals, her knowledge of human nature, and
the dramatic interest she could impart to a scene. As the object was
to attract the common people as much as possible, and to do this it
was necessary to amuse and interest as well as to instruct them, these
representations were not limited to the serious or solemn, but were
freely interspersed with what was comic or amusing. When the devil,
and his attendant, named Vice, two characters that were frequently
represented in the action of the play, were confounded by some witty
retort, made ridiculous by a happy thrust of humor, or were outwitted
in their design by some clever trick, it may be assumed that the sleek
friar and the kindly nun laughed as heartily as any of the audience.
In the tenth century a miracle play called “The Deluge” was performed,
in which Noah’s wife refuses to go into the ark,--being represented,
as it would appear, as regarding it only as a shower,--and boxes her
husband’s ears when he attempts to compel her to; this display of
feminine pertinacity being what in theatrical parlance is regarded
as a hit. And in the twelfth century the Merchant Drapers’ Company
of London represented in a miracle play the Creation, and, that the
representation might be exact, our first parents appeared on the stage
without any covering whatever, which the Drapers’ Company, I suppose,
regarded as appropriately illustrating the necessity for that which
the merchant draper supplies; for I remember that at the celebration
in 1825 in New York of the completion of the Erie Canal the tailors
marched in that great procession with a huge banner, in which Adam and
Eve were represented in a like condition, with the words beneath, “Ye
were naked and we clothed you.”
The first theater in modern times, by which I mean a permanent
structure for such a purpose, in a fixed place, was erected in Paris
about the year 1400, by a body known as the Confraire de la Passion
de N. S., for the representation of the Scriptural mysteries. But
solemn as was the name given by the founders and their purpose in
building this theater, it would appear that in the course of time it
had to yield to the comic and the amusing, as much, and probably more
than the miracle plays, mysteries and moralities that had been long
established, for in the middle of the next century, that is in 1547,
it was suppressed by the Parliament for the scandal it created by what
Hallam calls “this devout buffoonery.”
These religious plays, however limited, extended, or different they may
have been, it appears to be conceded, gave rise to the modern drama,
and I think it very possible that the existence of the comic and the
tragic in the same play, which we find so marked in Shakespeare, and
which is so much nearer to what takes place in life than the French
classical drama of Corneille and Racine, may have been suggested to
Shakespeare by these early religious plays in which both were combined,
which he may frequently have witnessed, and probably did, as a boy.
But although this use of the drama was an aid to the Church, that
circumstance in no way affected or lessened the Church’s attitude
toward the players who acted profane plays, farces, interludes, or gave
any kind of dramatic entertainment of that description. It was right
to employ it on behalf of the Church, but to make any other use of it
was sinful and unlawful. So the player, or common player, as he was
called, to distinguish him from the histrionic assistant of the Church,
remained as he was before. So late even as the thirty-ninth year of
Elizabeth’s reign, a statute was passed declaring that common players
should be taken and adjudged to be rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy
beggars, etc., etc., and be subject to the penalties therein provided,
which Jeremy Collier declares were “infamous to the last degree, and
capital, too, unless they give over,” that is, were punishable with
death. But a reservation was made in favor of players that belonged to
a baron or other personage of high degree, who were authorized to play
under his signature and seal, by which an opening was left for the rise
and development of the great era in the dramatic history of England
that followed.
Notwithstanding, however, the persecution, penalties, hardships,
and sufferings to which the common players were subject, they clung
to their vocation with a tenacity that showed how strong was their
affection for it; that it was not only a means of livelihood, but the
one of all others they preferred, for to impart pleasure is as much of
an enjoyment as to receive it. But persistent as was this degradation
of the players, the Church and the law had to yield at last to the
inevitable. But how long this was in coming about, or how long the
effect of it prevented the player from being recognized as on the
same level with the rest of his fellow-men, may be illustrated by the
well-known anecdote of Garrick, when a chimney-sweep called out to his
fellow, “There goes Garrick the player,” and his companion responded,
“Hush, you don’t know what you may come to yourself.”
When we examine those treatises that have been written against the
stage, the material upon which they rely is almost invariably derived
from its abuse, without considering that that abuse is not due to
the theater as an institution, but to the state of society that
gives rise to it. Some writers are broad-minded enough to make this
discrimination; but the bulk of them do not, which this contrast will
sufficiently illustrate. Tertullian, writing about the beginning of the
third century, writes thus of the stage: “What, though the performance
may be in some measure pretty and entertaining--what, though innocence,
yes, and virtue, too, shines through some part of it! It is not the
custom to prepare poison unpalatable, nor make up ratsbane with rhubarb
and senna. No, to have the mischief speed, they must oblige the senses
and make the dose pleasant. Thus, the devil throws in a cordial drop
to make the draught go down, and steals some ingredients from the
dispensary of heaven. In short, look upon all the engaging sentences of
the stage--their flights of fortitude and philosophy, the loftiness of
their style, the music of the cadence, and the fineness of the conduct!
Look upon it only, I say, as honey dropping from the bowels of a toad,
or the bag of a spider.”[28] And fourteen hundred years afterward a
discrimination was made in a sermon by Archbishop Tillotson, one of
the most eminent of English divines, denouncing the licentiousness of
the English stage as it then existed, and the plays that were acted,
as a reproach to the nation, which was true; but in which he says that
to denounce the stage in general would not be just or reasonable; for,
he continues, “it is very possible that they” (the plays) “might be
so framed, and governed by such rules as not only to be innocently
diverting, but instructing and useful; to put some vices and follies
out of countenance, which cannot, perhaps, be so decently reproved nor
so effectually exposed and corrected in any other way.” But examples
like Tillotson’s, at least in England, have been rare. Even the great
Bossuet, as he has been called, one of, if not the most distinguished
of, French pulpit orators, and a prominent theological writer, was an
example of the opposite. An actor having some scruples of conscience
respecting his continuing in his profession, consulted a priest named
Caffaro, who, by his reasoning, appears not only to have removed the
actor’s scruples, but wrote a defense of the stage, which, not being
desirous of being known as the author, he published anonymously; and
when it was ascertained that he was the writer of it, the Archbishop of
Paris threatened to suspend him; and Bossuet wrote a pastoral letter
exhorting him to repent his mistake, and rescind his mischievous
opinions, which the priest accordingly did.[29]
While the stage may and does much to maintain a healthy moral feeling
in society, in the powerful effect that is produced by the dramatic
representation of virtuous deeds and of guilty actions, and the
consequences that attend the latter, as an institution the theater
does not retard society in its downward course, but may be said
rather to accelerate it. The players depend for their support upon
public patronage, and therefore court public favor, as when a nation
through luxury, or those causes that bring about national decay and
the consequences that follow it, or where a reaction takes place, as
it did in England from the reign of puritanism to the restoration
of the monarchy under Charles II., and from the example set by the
restored monarch, society, or rather what is called high society, as
a class, becomes corrupt and licentious, the theater caters to the
taste of those who are its chief patrons, as the theaters did then
by the production and representation mainly of comedies in which,
as Dr. Johnson expressed it, “the plot was an intrigue, and the wit
indecency,” and, as respects some of these comedies, indecency might be
extended to the word filth.
That great epoch that is distinguished as the Elizabethan drama,
which includes some of the highest efforts of the human intellect, is
embraced within the narrow limits of fifty-five years--or from Marlowe
to Shirley--that is, from the first representation of Marlowe’s
“Tamerlane,” in 1587, to the year 1642, when the act of Parliament was
passed forbidding the acting of plays in any part of England, upon
which Shirley ceased to write. It would seem to have begun to decline
in Ben Jonson’s life, for in the dedication to his play of “The Fox”
he says at that date, 1607, respecting the theater, “that nothing but
ribaldry, profanation, and blasphemy was practised,” and in respect to
himself, that he could with a clear conscience affirm that he “loathed
the use of such foul and unwashed bawdry as is now made the food of the
scene.”[30]
However this may have been, the condition of the stage had become
such as to arouse the opposition of the puritans, and in 1633 William
Prynne, a puritan barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, published a large volume
which he called “Histrio-Mastix. The Players’ Scourge, or the Actors’
Tragedy, in two books, in which it is largely evidenced by divers
arguments that popular stage plays are sinful, heathenish, lewd, and
ungodly spectacles,” a book more remarkable for the extensive erudition
of the author, or rather for his industry in bringing such a mass of
materials together, than for his arguments, which I shall not pause
now to enumerate, as they can be considered hereafter with those of
subsequent writers in the concrete, being all of the same general
character, and founded almost exclusively upon the abuses of the stage.
He was persecuted by the government for the publication of this work
and heavily punished, not so much, it was said, for what he had written
against the stage, as for passages in it that it was assumed were
intended to reflect upon Charles I. and his queen, Henrietta Maria. The
queen and her ladies had taken part in the performance of a play, and a
passage in the book reflecting upon actresses in general was construed
as an aspersion upon her, and a reference to Nero and other tyrants who
had failed to suppress the plays was supposed to have been aimed at the
king. He was tried in the Star Chamber and sentenced to be put in the
pillory, to have his ears cut off and be branded on the cheek with the
letters S. L. (signifying Seditious Libeller), expelled from Lincoln’s
Inn, deprived of his degree in the University of Oxford, and his book
was ordered to be burned by the common hangman, to all of which was
added a fine of £5,000, a large sum at that day, and be imprisoned for
life, all of which was vigorously carried out as far as it could be.
Upon the overthrow of Charles I. he was released by Parliament, the
sentence against him was declared to have been illegal, a sum of money
was voted to him by way of restitution, and, being a great favorite
with the people, alike from his sufferings and his writings, he was
elected a member of Parliament, where, strangely enough, he became a
strong antagonist of Cromwell and was in turn imprisoned by his own
party, became an advocate for the monarchy, was rewarded after the
Restoration by the office of Keeper of the Records of the Tower, and
dedicated one of his works to Charles II.
He is said to have written more than two hundred books, a remarkable
instance of fecundity, though many were, as I suppose, mere tracts or
pamphlets. And this curious incident in the history of literature in
respect to one of them, his work against the stage, “Histrio-Mastix,”
may be mentioned: that sixteen years after it was published, that is
in 1649, the year in which Charles I. was executed, an unknown writer,
with a view of depriving it of whatever influence it may have had,
published a book entitled “William Prynne, His Defence of Stage Plays,
a Retraction of a former work of his called Histrio-Mastix.” It would,
indeed, have been curious if a man who had written so bitterly as he
had against the stage, and had accumulated and printed such a mass of
learning to support the attack upon it, should have retracted all he
had said and come out as the author of a work in defense of the stage.
But it was a forgery; Prynne published afterwards what is called a
broadside, entitled “Mr. Prynne’s Vindication of himself from being the
author of The Defence of Stage Plays.”
It will not be necessary in a brief review like this to refer to what
many eminent men have said in favor of the stage, as my purpose has
been to consider the objections made against it, and it is the less
necessary as it has already been admirably done by John W. Calcraft,
manager of the Theater Royal of Dublin, in a volume entitled “A Defence
of the Stage,” published in that city in 1839. Calcraft was not only
a manager of a theater, but a man with a large amount of information
respecting the history of the drama, and a good classical scholar, who
was able to consult the authorities when requisite in the original.
He prefixes at the beginning of the book a list of those he cites or
quotes in it in favor of the stage, which, independent of literary
men and other writers, contains four cardinals, nine archbishops,
fourteen bishops, and forty-six divines, and among them are some of
the most eminent names in the church, as St. Thomas Aquinas, called
the Angelic Doctor, Albertus Magnus, St. Antoninus, Archbishop of
Florence, Melanchthon, and Martin Luther, the latter of whom writes:
“of all amusements the theater is the most profitable”; and it further
appears, on the authority of Baker’s Biographia Dramatica, that more
than one hundred clergymen in England have written plays. Calcraft also
gives a remarkable illustration of an attempt to carry out what writers
against the stage have earnestly advocated, the entire suppression
of the theater, as if all mankind were made like themselves, or were
capable of being made so. Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, in his
zeal for the security of the public morals, “shut up the play-house
and expelled the players, strollers, and minstrels as debauchers and
corrupters of mankind, but soon had reason to alter his opinion, for
he found that the people ran into all manner of excesses, and that,
wanting something to amuse them, they committed the most horrid crimes
by way of pastime. On this account he repented of his edict, recalled
the banished players, and granted them a free use and liberty of the
stage.”
The licentiousness of the theater after the Restoration had become such
as to call for some leading mind to appeal to the body of the English
people, who were then, as they have always been, a strong race to
bestir themselves in the cause of public morality, and such a one was
found in the Rev. Jeremy Collier, a man of learning and ability, who,
in 1698, published what he called “A Short View of the Immorality and
Profanity of the English Stage, together with the Sense of Antiquity
upon this Argument,” which brought about a reformation as rapid as
it was thorough. About one half the book was devoted to the English
stage as it then existed, and its contrast with that of antiquity,
very much to the discredit of the former, and to those who were then
thought so highly of as comic dramatists. Collier was a fine classical
scholar, and so familiar with the Greek dramatists and with Terence
and Plautus among the Romans, as well as with all the leading comedies
produced after the Restoration, that he was able to compare these
comedies, passage by passage, with the Latin and Greek dramatists, and
thereby furnish unanswerable proof, not only of their inferiority, but
of the degraded character of the plays then produced on the English
stage, when compared with the productions of the Greek and Roman
dramatists. He showed in respect to the stage, in different chapters,
its immodesty, its profaneness, its ridicule of the clergy, and its
encouragement of immorality so completely that there was no replying to
it. Dryden, who was a leading playwright at the time, yielded at once,
not attempting to defend himself; on the contrary, he even thanked
Collier for his treatment of him, complaining only of his roughness.
Congreve undertook to reply, but it was a failure, and that he felt
that Collier was right appears in the fact that in a subsequent
edition of his plays he left out many offensive passages.
Collier’s strength lay in the truth of what he said about the condition
of the English stage at that time, and in the fact that he was a
learned man, which, in itself, inspired respect, and enabled him to
cope with any general scholar who should attempt to answer him. The
result was, that his book aroused the people, and the nation went with
him in effecting a reform that has lasted ever since.
But he did not confine himself to the immorality and profanity of the
English stage, but extended his attack to the stage in general. He
devoted the latter part of his book to copious quotations from pagan
writers, from the fathers of the church, and from the laws that had to
be passed respecting plays, to show, as he expressed it, that they “had
generally been looked upon as the nurseries of vice, the corrupters
of youth, and the grievance of the country where they are suffered.”
It was my impression at first that a man so thoroughly well informed
respecting the history of the theater in antiquity could discriminate
between its use and its abuse as its condition was then in England, and
that he made his assault upon it general that it might have more effect
than if he admitted any qualification whatever, in the expectation that
its chief patrons, who were then what are called the higher classes,
would cease to attend the representation of these comedies whose
immorality and profaneness he had so unanswerably shown, and that in
time by this means the theater would gradually correct itself. But a
more careful perusal of the book, and a consideration of the labor he
bestowed in getting together whatever he could find from any source
against it as an institution, show that his aim was the impossible--to
abolish the theater altogether--that he was in full accord with the
pithy St. Augustine that sinners “fancy the world goes wonderfully well
when people make a figure; when a man is a prince in his fortune and a
beggar in his virtue; has a great many fine things about him, but not
so much as one good quality to deserve them; when the play-house goes
up and religion goes down; when prodigality is admired and charity is
laughed at; when the players can revel with a rich man’s purse and the
poor man has scarcely enough to keep soul and body together”; and with
St. Hierom in his caution to ladies to have “nothing to do with the
play-house, because it sets all humors at work, caresses the fancy, and
makes pleasure a conveyance to destruction.”
Collier divides this portion of his subject into three parts: the
opinion of philosophers, orators, poets, and historians of antiquity;
the opinion of the church; and that of the state as shown in the laws
enacted against theaters. In making these quotations he frequently does
what some advocates do, quotes so much as supports his argument and
omits what qualifies or limits it. Thus, when he quotes from Plutarch
that plays are dangerous to corrupt young people, and when they grow
bawdy or licentious they should be checked, he omits the further
observation of the great biographer, that he thought plays useful to
polish the manners and instil the principles of virtue,[31] and, while
giving what Cicero says of licentious plays as an authority against the
institution of the theater, makes no mention of the fact that Roscius
was an intimate friend of Cicero, and that it is to Cicero we are
chiefly indebted for our knowledge of the greatness of the Roman actor
and of the purity of his private life.
In considering the objections that have been made to the stage, it will
not be necessary to particularize them, as they are founded almost
entirely upon its abuses, in respect to which it is sufficient to say
that nearly all things have their abuses; and, as Calcraft put it, to
insist that the stage should be abolished and its _use_ denied because
of its _abuse_ would be about as reasonable as to denounce the pulpit
because there have been rebellious and heterodoxical preachers; to
proscribe the bench because there have been corrupt and unjust judges,
and periods of the venal administration of the judiciary; or dispense
with the art of printing because by its means immoral books have been
circulated. This will dispense with the necessity of enumerating the
objections made by subsequent writers, such as the Rev. Arthur Bedford,
Bossuet, Witherspoon, Law, and a few others, the first of whom,
Bedford, published, in 1719, what he called “A Serious Remonstrance in
behalf of the Christian Religion against the horrid blasphemies, and
impurities, which are still used in the English Play-houses, being a
new edition of the Evil of Stage Plays,” in which he is said to have
cited seven thousand lewd and criminal passages out of plays of the
then current century, displaying, in my opinion, rather a prurient
curiosity than a labor on behalf of public morality, on the part of a
clergyman who might have been better employed; and as respects what has
been advanced by other writers against the theater as an institution,
that is concisely, energetically, and fully expressed in Collier’s
final conclusion, the whole of which I shall not give in detail, but
sufficient to state what it was.
“My conclusion,” he says, “is let nobody go to the Infamous _Play
House_, A place of such staring contradiction to the Strictness and
Sobriety of Religion A Place hated by God and haunted by the Devil.
Let no man I say learn to relish any thing that’s said there; For ’tis
all but poison handsomely prepared.” He objects to plays as “dilating
so much on the passion of love, which is a cunning way of stealing on
the blind side and practising upon the weakness of human nature,” that
“people love to see their passions painted no less than their persons,
that recommends the business of amours and engages inclination. It
forms passions where it does not find them. Love has a parley within,
and when the wax is prepared the impression is easily made, and when
these passions are born they thrive extremely in that nursery. They
grow strong, and when the passions are up in arms there is a mighty
contest between duty and inclination.” He further objects to plays as
encouraging the passion of revenge as nothing is more common in their
action than duels or quarrels among the leading characters. “Practices”
he says, “that are infamous in reason, capital in law, and damnable
in religion, are to the credit of the stage, and Rage and Resentment,
Blood and Barbarity are deified.” “What must we say,” he continues,
“of the more foul representations, of all the impudence in language
and gesture, can this stuff be the inclination of ladies? Is vice
so entertaining, and do they love to see the stews depicted before
them. One would think the dishonor of their own Sex the Discovery of
so much lewdness, and the treating of Human Nature so very coarsely
could have little satisfaction in it.”... “Call you this Diversion?
Can Profaneness be such an irresistible Delight?... Is the Scorn of
Christianity the Entertainment of Christians? Is it such a pleasure
to hear the Scriptures burlesqued? Is Ribaldry so very obliging and
Atheism so charming a Quality? Are we indeed willing to quit the
Privilege of our Nature; to Surrender our Charter of Immortality and
throw up the Pretenses to another Life?” And he winds up his conclusion
in these words: “In short: Nothing can be more disserviceable to
Probity and religion than the management of the _stage_. It cherishes
those Passions, and rewards those Vices which ’tis the business of
Reason to discountenance. It strikes at the Root of Principle draws
off the Inclinations from Virtue and spoils good Education, ’tis the
most effectual means to baffle the Force of Discipline, to emasculate
people’s Spirits and Debauch their Manners.”
It is sufficient to say in answer to all this, that an examination
of the history of the English and American stage for the two hundred
years that have elapsed since these words were written, shows that
it has had no such effect, that it has been a rational source of
amusement that has been beneficial and not injurious to society. It is
the most attractive of all amusements, and that this attraction, as an
amusement, has continued to increase, or, at least, has not diminished,
would seem to appear from the number of theaters there is now in
London, in New York, in Paris, and in other cities of Europe.
It is notable that plays which combine enjoyment with a healthy
moral effect are now very much liked, such as Denman Thompson’s “Old
Homestead,” Mr. Heme’s “Shore Acres,” and Mr. John Hare’s “Pair of
Spectacles,” and plays of a like character that have within the present
period been produced in the city of New York by these three managers,
Messrs. Augustin Daly, Dan’l Frohman, and A. M. Palmer; and that a
taste in this country has been widely diffused for what is exalted in
the drama, is found in the fact that crowded audiences, for a hundred
nights consecutively, went to see Edwin Booth perform the principal
part in a tragedy of so high a character as Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”
Another feature in this history of the last two centuries, and
especially since the days of John Kemble, and his distinguished sister,
Mrs. Siddons, is that the player is no longer a wandering vagabond, or
one looked down upon because his sole vocation in life is to minister
to our pleasures, but one who is as much respected as any other member
of the community, unless he does something individually to forfeit that
respect. No player at the present day has, in respect to his vocation,
to exclaim against fortune as Shakespeare did in his 99th sonnet:
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,
Than public means which public manners breeds,
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued,
To what it works in like the dyer’s hand.
All this is now completely changed, as is shown conclusively by the
circumstance that Sir Henry Irving has been honored by being raised
to the dignity of a knight for his eminence as an actor. We are, in
this respect, where Greece was when the drama had reached its highest
perfection:--when Æschylus, who was an actor as well as dramatist,
commanded as an officer on the field of Marathon, where his exploits
and those of his brother were so remarkable that they were commemorated
by a descriptive painting in the theater of Athens; when Neoptolemus,
a celebrated tragic actor, was sent as one of the ambassadors to
conclude a treaty of peace with Philip; when Aristodemus, another great
tragic actor, was prominent in the political affairs of his time, was
also employed upon an embassy, and, on the proposal of Demosthenes,
was honored with a golden crown for his public services;[32] and when
Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles produced those plays that have ever
since been the admiration of mankind.
Dr. Franklin wished that he could, after a hundred years, return again
to this earth to see what science in the meanwhile had accomplished,
and could Collier return after the histrionic experience of the last
two centuries, it would be to see how unfounded were his conclusions
respecting the theater as an institution, and will ever be among any
people while the nation remains in a healthy condition.
In conclusion, we may say of the drama, that with the four other arts
of poetry, music, sculpture, and painting, it has been the natural
outcome of civilization; that as things that are general have always
their exceptions, there may have been races, as the Egyptians appear
to have been, who, in the development of their civilization, showed
no aptitude or desire for it; that its peculiar attraction is, as
Lord Bacon says: “That it brings the past before us as if it were the
present;” and as respects the present, that it is what Shakespeare and
Addison declared it to be, the mirror of human nature.