BOOKS.
DORAN'S ANNALS OF THE ENGLISH STAGE.* EVERY one will be grateful to Mr. Lowe for this beautiful revision of Dr. Doran's Annals of the Stage. Confused, slipshod, iterative, incorrect, Doran's book yet remains the only read- able compendium of dramatic literature and dramatic incident ; of actors, authors, audiences. His worst mistakes are corrected by his editor, who has yet suffered the fine Latin epitaph on Mrs. Oldfield to remain mangled in orthography and punctua- tion; continues to shock faithful Wykehamists by misspelling their founder's name, and by declaring that his chaste episcopal celibate blood " ran in the veins " of Colley Gibber ; repeats the popular misconception that the Maranatha of St. Paul's Epistle is a maledictory imprecation. These are trifling matters, not impairing our debt to Mr. Lowe. His book is carefully annotated, handsomely printed, enriched with a most interesting collection of copper-plate portraits, tail-pieces, and wood-engravings.
At the head of the great actor-roll, chronologically, perhaps artistically, stands the name of Betterton, the finest Hamlet —so say many critics—that the stage has seen ; the friend of Dryden, Swift, Pope, Tillotson; whose noble portrait by Kneller at Knowle is here reproduced. Next in time comes Booth, the Cato of Addison's play, of whom it was said that " the blind might have seen him in his voice, and the deaf heard him in his visage." It was not, however, in Booth, but in Garrick that Betterton's successor was discerned : " when, after long and eager expectation," says Cumberland, "I first beheld little Garrick, young and light, alive in every muscle and in every feature, come bounding on the stage, heavens ! what a transformation ! it seemed as if a whole century had been swept over in the space of a single scene ; old things were done away, a new order at once brought forward, destined to dispel the barbarism of a tasteless age, too long attached to the pre- judices of custom and the illusion of imposing declamation." Garrick " created " thirty-six characters, as Betterton had created fifty-eight ; the splendid novelty of his Richard, his Othello (in which envious Quin compared him to the black boy in Hogarth's Marriage A la Mode), his Lear, Abel Drugger, Falstaff ; the marvellous power of mimicry which enabled him in The Rehearsal to reproduce every actor of the day; his famous " points,"—" Give me another horse !" So much for Buckingham !"—his domestic happiness, his social charm, his quarrels with Johnson, are told with an appreciation so hearty and a fullness so complete, that we altogether pardon its diffuseness. His great rivals were Quin and Barry,— Quin, the creator of Macheath, the successor of Booth as Cato ; illiterate, coarse, a gourmand—" No John Dory in the market P then call me again to-morrow morning," was his address to his valet on waking—yet dignified, bene- volent, immeasurably witty ; we have one side of him in Peregrine Pickle, another in Garrick's amusing soliloquy at Duke Humphrey's tomb, both in Dr. Doran's pages. There was strong liking between the two men ; Quin was the only actor whom Garrick never mimicked. They were wont to act together, stimulating each other to highest efforts ; but in Garrick's special characters Quin failed. The greater actor found, perhaps, a more serious rival in Spranger Barry, who assailed him on his own ground in Othello and Macbeth, playing Romeo to Mrs. Cibber's Juliet at Covent Garden, against Garrick and Miss Bellamy at Drury Lane. The interest felt in this contest enabled both playa to run thirteen consecutive nights, a thing unheard of in earlier stage annals. Great, Barry undoubtedly was, but Garrick outlived him on the stage, and the verdict of after-times has settled the question of superiority in the older actor's favour. Below these giants, but eminent in the second rank, we have Foote, absurdly called the English Aristophanes ; Rich, the father of harlequins, whose gestures were more eloquent than words, and whose parting with Columbine was long after cited as not more graceful than affecting ; Macklin, greatest of Shylocks until
• Doran's Annals of the English Stage. Edited and Revised by Robert W. Lowe. With Fifty Copper-Plate Portraits and Eighty Wood-Engravings. 3 vole. London : Nimmo. 1888.
Edmund Kean appeared ; Doggett, whose badge is rowed for, Baddeley, whose Twelfth Cake is eaten, still once a year ; Ross, whose George Barnwell moved dissolute apprentices to tears, and converted them to continence ; Dodd, the incomparable Aguecheek ; Palmer, the Joseph Surface; King, the Sir Peter Teazle ; Dicky Suett, whose wigs and faces Charles Lamb has made immortal ; Henderson, whose public reading of John Gilpin brought Cowper into fashion, and produced The Task ; Master Betty, the infant Roscius, to see whom Parliament adjourned, and who died, rich but forgotten, only twelve years ago ;—till the r. •ord rises again to a higher level in the Kembles, to the higilest in Edmund Kean, whose melancholy beginning, brief triumph, and tragic end close Doran's chronicle.
Not less interesting is the catalogue of famous actresses : first of boys in women's clothes, with Pepys's admired Kynas- ton at their head ; brazen hoydens next, during the reign of Moll Davies and of Nell Gynn ; decorous yet not less bewitching in Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Montfort ; in Bracegirdle, the beautiful and good, the " pious Belinda " of Congreve, the innocent cause of hapless Will Mountfort's death at the ruffian hands of Lord Mohun and Captain Hill ; of Mrs. Oldfield, Pope's " poor Narcissa," whose body. attired in " Holland night-dress, with tucker and double ruffles of Brussels lace, and a pair of new kid gloves," lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, and was buried in West- minster Abbey, with a noble Latin epitaph, to which, rather than to Petronius, we owe the oft-quoted curiosa felicitas ; Peg Woffington, the Peggy of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams's charming song, who bewitched one sex as Sylvia, the other as Sir Harry Wildair, loveliest and most vivacious, most erring, most charitable and kindly of all the many-featured sister- hood ; Miss Gibber, Tom Arne's sister, and wife to worthless Theophilus ; Mrs. Pritchard, the " inspired idiot," whose Lady Macbeth even Mrs. Siddons could not shake ; Kitty Clive, the " Comic Genius ;" Mrs. Abington, creator of Lady Teazle, the Comic Muse of Reynolds's portrait; unhappy Perdita Robin- son, victimised and abandoned by the First Gentleman in Europe; Mrs. Jordan, lavishing her all upon his Royal brother and their children, dying impoverished and neglected. Above all these, above her famous brothers, towers the majestic Siddons. Her theatrical life was as prolonged as it was successful ; into her own person and those of her rela- tions, the whole history of the post-Restoration stage is gathered. Her grandfather acted with Betterton, her parents with Quin ; her own career commenced with Garriek and ended with Macready ; she witnessed the cVbut of Fanny Kemble, and her great-niece, Mrs. Scott Siddons, still interprets Shakespeare. Hissed on her first appearance in a strolling company, she became a lady's-maid, married at nineteen, returned to the stage, roused admiration in Cheltenham, mad enthusiasm in Dublin and in Bath, won London audiences at Drury Lane in Isabella and in Constance ; was appointed by thrifty Queen Charlotte, who had recognised Fanny Burney's merits in a somewhat kindred fashion sixteen years before, preceptress, without emolument, in elocution to the Princesses ; and was honoured with critical advice by the judicious King. Public excitement reached its height over her Lady Macbeth, whom she daringly conceived as a beautiful and delicate blonde. At Edinburgh, the crowds of unwashed Caledonians who thronged the unventilated theatre generated an in- fectious sickness known as the " Siddons fever ;" the General Assembly of the Kirk suited their meetings to her times of acting ; her piercing " 0 my Biron !" in The Fatal Marriage, was one night repeated hysterically by a young lady who was carried screaming from the pit, and who became next year the wife of the Hon. John Byron, and ulti- mately the mother of the poet. She was painted by Gains- borough and by Reynolds ; the last, in his portrait of her as the Tragic Muse, writing his name on the hem of her garment. It has faded from the painting, but still survives in the fine copper-plate engraving. In comedy she failed ; Colman called her " a frisking Gog." The repose of her later days was dignified but melancholy ; readers of the " Recollec- tions" of Fanny Kemble, whose own graceful portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence figures in these volumes, will remember the graphic description of the vacuous insipidity and weary dead- ness of spirit which marked her later days ; her cup had been so highly flavoured that its dregs were tasteless. Considering the stigma, puritanical and social, from which the profession is only now beginning to be freed, it is curious to notice the large number of aristocratic pedigrees in which actresses hold a place. The Dukes of St. Albans and Abercorn, Lord Petre, iLord St. Germans, Lord Cadogan, Lord Wilton, are all un peu, as Talleyrand said, the descendants of famous actresses. Mrs. Davenport married the Earl of Oxford, Miss Fenton married the Duke of Bolton, Miss Farren the Earl of Derby, Miss Stephens the Earl of Essex, Miss Brunton became Countess of Craven, Miss Mellon Duchess of St. Albans ; one only liaison of the converse kind took place when Lady Susan Fox Strangways eloped, as Horace Walpole tells, with the handsome actor, Irish O'Brien.
Not the least valuable chapters are devoted to the history of dramatic authors. The most eminent of these belong to general literature; with Cowley and Buckingham, the Caroline dramatists, Otway and Rowe, Steele and Addison, Goldsmith and Sheridan, all English students are familiar. It is for the less known names, and still more for the less known plays, alluded to in many a novel, depicted in many a gallery, yet imperfectly known to most of us, that we seek guidance, not in vain, from such a book as this. We read of Lee's Alexander, with its hackneyed line, oftener perhaps misquoted and misunderstood than any locus classicus in the language—" When Greek joined Greek, then was the tug of war ;"—of the " real Simon Pure" in Mrs. Centlivre's Bold Stroke for a Wife ; of the " Who rules o'er freemen should himself be free," from Brooke's Earl of Essex, falla- ciously crushed by Dr. Johnson ; of the " soberly, as Lady Grace says," quoted from The Provoked Husband in the opening chapter of Cecilia; of The Distressed Mother, to which the " Spectator " and Sir Roger de Coverley went in state, with Captain Sentry as a body-guard ; of Zara, in which Georgina Falconer charmed Count Altenberg ; of Lovers' Vows, whose love-scenes shocked innocent Fanny Price. We read of Mrs. Philips, the " Matchless Orinda " of the poets; of Mrs. Blagg, afterwards the Mrs. Godolphin of Evelyn's delightful narrative ; of Colley Cibber, playwright, actor, critic, author of The Provoked Husband and The Apology ; of Lillo's George Barnwell ; of The Suspicious Husband and The Jealous Wife ; of the forgotten Beggars' Opera, with its Newgate morals, its political allusions, its exquisite songs.
The accessories of the theatres and the behaviour of the audiences read strangely at the present day. We hear with a shudder of the dresses assumed by the performers. Hamlet wore a Court suit, bag-wig, and the Order of the Garter ! Mercutio, the costume of a country squire ; Lady Macbeth, a hoop and powdered hair; Cato, a long flowered dressing-gown. When Quin, as Falstaff, sat down in the battle-scene to moralise, a velvet chair was placed for his accommodation on Shrewsbury field. Even in our own memory, Macready and Wallack played Macbeth and Macduff in the tartans of a Highland chieftain. Men of fashion had seats upon the stage, sometimes quarrelling and drawing swords in view of the spectators, always between the scenes thronging the actresses' dressing-rooms. Orange-girls plied their trade noisily in the pit, or stood upon the benches to bandy jests with gentlemen in the boxes. If the play were indecent, as often happened, " modest ladies " wore vizards, or half-masks. The galleries were crowded with footmen, who had prescriptive right of unpaid entrance when attending on their masters. " Encores " were introduced early in the eighteenth century, and were egregiously misused ; a favourite actor playing in a tragic scene would be interrupted by the audience, and commanded to deliver speeches from some comic play in which he had pleased them on a previous night. When Incledon, not so very long ago, was singing the most pathetic ballad, his hearers would demand some coarse popular song, and stop the proceedings till he had sung it. Pit license reached a climax in the once historical " 0.P." riots, known now to most of us only by a line in the Rejected Addresses. To meet the cost of rebuilding Covent Garden, the prices of pit and gallery were raised ; the public stopped the acting with hisses and clamour until the " old prices " should be restored. The managers persisted; the Riot Act was read ; soldiers were sent into the gallery, Bow Street runners with bludgeons, Dutch Sam and his pugilists with fists, were employed to pummel the malcontents. For sixty-seven nights the strife continued; the Times supported the " rebels," the Magistrates acquitted them. Each night the actors in dumb show went through their parts, the dancers stumbled and fell on the
peas showered upon the stage; gentlemen wore " 0.P." in gold lace on their waistcoats, and encouraged the rioters from the boxes ; the pit invented an " 0.P." war-dance in imitation of the Carmagnole, to see which, " its calm beginning, its swelling rapidity and noise, its finale of demoniacal uproar," Princes of the Blood visited the boxes. At last the managers surrendered ; a compromise was made; " We are satisfied" was exhibited in enormous letters on a placard in the pit, and the riot came to an end.
It reads like ancient history ; it was only in 1809: with the death of Edmund Kean, in 1832, the Annals end. We would gladly see stage literature and history brought down to later times : would read of Knowles, Milman, Henry Taylor, Lytton, Talfourd, Robertson ; of Mathews, Charles Kean, Macready, Fechter, Buckstone, Robson, Hare, Irving ; of Madame Vestris, Miss Bateman, Mrs. Bancroft, the Terrys, Mrs. Kendal. That a sequel so desirable may be compiled by Mr. Lowe, must be the wish of all who acknowledge, while they read his volumes, the accession to their store of literary and biographic treasure which his editorial enterprise and judgment have bestowed upon them in so enchanting a shape.
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