Читать книгу: «Their Majesties' Servants. Annals of the English Stage (Volume 1 of 3)», страница 3

CHAPTER II
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE PLAYERS

It was in the eventful year 1587,¹² while Roman Catholics were deploring the death of Mary Stuart; while Englishmen were exulting at the destruction dealt by Drake to a hundred Spanish ships in the port of Cadiz; while the Puritan party was at angry issue with Elizabeth; while John Fox was lying dead; and while Walsingham was actively impeding the ways and means of Armada Philip, by getting his bills protested at Genoa, – that the little man, Gosson, in the parish of St. Botolph, of which he was the incumbent, first nibbed his pen,¹³ and made it fly furiously over paper, in wordy war against the stage and stage-players.

When the Britons ate acorns and drank water, he says, they were giants and heroes; but since plays came in they had dwindled into a puny race, incapable of noble and patriotic achievements! And yet next year, some pretty fellows of that race were sweeping the Invincible Armada from the surface of our seas!

When London was talking admiringly of the coronation of Charles I., and Parliament was barely according him one pound in twelve of the money-aids of which he was in need, there was another pamphleteer sending up his testimony from Cheapside to Westminster, against the alleged abomination of plays and players. This writer entitles his work A short Treatise against Stage Plays, and he makes it as sharp as it is short. Plays were invented by heathens; they must necessarily be prejudicial to Christians! —that is the style of his assertion and argument. They were invented in order to appease false gods; consequently, the playing of them must excite to wrath a true Deity! They are no recreation, because people come away from them wearied. The argument, in tragedy, he informs us, is murder; in comedy, it is social vice. This he designates as bad instruction; and remembering Field's query to Sutton, he would very much like to know in what page of Holy Writ authority is given for the vocation of an actor. He might as well have asked for the suppression of tailors, on the ground of their never being once named in either the Old Testament or the New!

But this author finds condemnation there of "stage effects," rehearsed or unrehearsed. You deal with the judgments of God in tragedy, and laugh over the sins of men in comedy; and thereupon he reminds you, not very appositely, that Ham was accursed for deriding his father! Players change their apparel and put on women's attire, – as if they had never read a chapter in Deuteronomy in their lives! If coming on the stage under false representation of their natural names and persons be not an offence against the Epistle to Timothy, he would thank you to inform him what it is! As to looking on these pleasant evils and not falling into sin, – you have heard of Job and King David, and you are worse than a heathen if you do not remember what they looked upon with innocent intent, or if you have forgotten what came of the looking.

He reminds parents, that while they are at the play, there are wooers who are carrying off the hearts of their daughters at home; perhaps, the very daughters themselves from home. This seems to me to be less an argument against resorting to the theatre than in favour of your taking places for your "young ladies," as well as for yourselves. The writer looks too wide abroad to see what lies at his feet. He is in Asia, citing the Council of Laodicea against the theatre. He is in Africa, vociferating, as the Council of Carthage did, against audiences. He is in Europe, at Arles, where the Fathers decided that no actor should be admitted to the sacrament. Finally, he unites all these Councils together at Constantinople, and in a three-piled judgment sends stage, actors, and audiences to Gehenna.

If you would only remember that many royal and noble men have been slain when in the theatre, on their way thither, or returning thence, you will have a decent horror of risking a similar fate in like localities. He has known actors who have died after the play was over; he would fain have you believe that there is something in that. And when he has intimated that theatres have been burnt and audiences suffocated; that stages have been swept down by storms and spectators trodden to death; that less than forty years previous to the time of his writing, eight persons had been killed and many more wounded, by the fall of a London playhouse; and that a similar calamity had lately occurred in the city of Lyons – the writer conceives he has advanced sufficient argument, and administered more than enough of admonition, to deter any person from entering a theatre henceforth and for ever.

This paper pellet had not long been printed, when the vexed author might have seen four actors sailing joyously along the Strand. There they are, Master Moore (there were no managers then; they were "masters" till the Georgian era), Master Moore, heavy Foster, mirthful Guilman, and airy Townsend. The master carries in his pocket a royal licence to form a company, whose members, in honour of the King's sister, shall be known as "the Lady Elizabeth's servants;" with permission to act when and where they please, in and about the city of London, unless when the plague shall be more than ordinarily prevalent.

There was no present opportunity to touch these licensed companies; and, accordingly, a sect of men who professed to unite loyalty with orthodoxy, looking eagerly about them for offenders, detected an unlicensed fraternity playing a comedy in the old house, before noticed, of Sir John Yorke. The result of this was the assembling of a nervously-agitated troop of offenders in the Star Chamber. One Christopher Mallory was made the scapegoat, for the satisfactory reason that in the comedy alluded to he had represented the devil, and in the last scene descended through the stage, with a figure of King James on his back, remarking the while, that such was the road by which all Protestants must necessarily travel! Poor Mallory, condemned to fine and imprisonment, vainly observed that there were two points, he thought, in his favour – that he had not played in the piece, and had not been even present in the house!

Meanwhile the public flocked to their favourite houses, and fortune seemed to be most blandly smiling on "masters," when there suddenly appeared the monster mortar manufactured by Prynne, and discharged by him over London, with an attendant amount of thunder, which shook every building in the metropolis. Prynne had just previously seen the painters busily at work in beautifying the old "Fortune," and the decorators gilding the horns of the "Red Bull." He had been down to Whitefriars, and had there beheld a new theatre rising near the old time-honoured site. He was unable to be longer silent, and in 1633 out came his Histrio-Mastix, consisting, from title-page to finis, of a thousand and several hundred pages.

Prynne, in some sense, did not lead opinion against the stage, but followed that of individuals who suffered certain discomfort from their vicinity to the chief house in Blackfriars. In 1631, the churchwardens and constables petitioned Laud, on behalf of the whole parish, for the removal of the players, whose presence was a grievance, it was asserted, to Blackfriars generally. The shopkeepers affirm that their goods, exposed for sale, are swept off their stalls by the coaches and people sweeping onward to the playhouse; that the concourse is so great, the inhabitants are unable to take beer or coal into their houses while it continues; that to get through Ludgate to the water is just impossible; and if a fire break out Heaven help them, how can succour be brought to the sufferers through such mobs of men and vehicles? Christenings are disturbed in their joy by them, and the sorrow of burials intruded on. Persons of honour dare not go abroad, or if abroad, dare not venture home while the theatre is open. And then there is that other house, Edward Alleyn's, rebuilding in Golden Lane, and will not the Council look to it?

The Council answer that Queen Henrietta Maria is well affected towards plays, and that therefore good regulation is more to be provided than suppression decreed. There must not be more than two houses, they say; one on Bankside, where the Lord Chamberlain's servants may act; the other in Middlesex, for which license may be given to Alleyn, "servant of the Lord Admiral," in Golden Lane. Each company is to play but twice a week, "forbearing to play on the Sabbath Day, in Lent, and in times of infection."

Here is a prospect for old Blackfriars; but it is doomed to fall. The house had been condemned in 1619, and cannot longer be tolerated. But compensation must be awarded. The players, bold fellows, claim £21,000! The referees award £3000, and the delighted inhabitants offer £100 towards it, to get rid of the people who resort to the players, rather than of the players themselves.

Then spake out Prynne. He does not tell us how many prayer-books had been recently published, but he notes, with a cry of anguish, the printing of forty thousand plays within the last two years. "There are five devil's chapels," he says, "in London; and yet in more extensive Rome, in Nero's days, there were but three, and those," he adds, "were three too many!" When the writer gets beyond statistics he grows rude; but he was sincere, and accepted all the responsibility of the course taken by him, advisedly.

While the anger excited by this attack on pastimes favoured by the King was yet hot, the assault itself was met by a defiance. The gentlemen of the Inns of Court closed their law-books, got up a masque, and played it at Whitehall, in the presence of a delighted audience, consisting of royal and noble personages. The most play-loving of the lords followed the example afforded by the lawyers, and the King himself assumed the buskin, and turned actor, for the nonce. Tom Carew was busy with superintending the rehearsals of his "Cœlum Britannicum," and in urging honest and melodious Will Lawes to progress more rapidly with the music. Cavalier Will was not to be hurried, but did his work steadily; and Prynne might have heard him and his brother Harry humming the airs over as they walked together across the park to Whitehall. When the day of representation arrived, great was the excitement and intense the delight of some, and the scorn of others. Among the noble actors who rode down to the palace was Rich, Earl of Holland. All passed off so pleasantly that no one dreamed it was the inauguration of a struggle in which Prynne was to lose his estate, his freedom, and his ears; the King and the earl their heads; while gallant Will Lawes, as honest a man as any of them, was, a dozen years after, to be found among the valiant dead who fell at the siege of Chester.

Ere this dénouement to a tragedy so mirthfully commenced had been reached, there were other defiances cast in the teeth of audacious, but too harshly-treated Prynne. There was a reverend playwright about town, whom Eton loved and Oxford highly prized; Ben Jonson called him his "son," and Bishop Fell, who presumed to give an opinion on subjects of which he was ignorant, pronounced the Rev. William Cartwright to be "the utmost that man could come to!" For the Christ Church students at Oxford, Cartwright wrote the "Royal Slave," one of three out of his four plays which sleep under a righteous oblivion. The King and Queen went down to witness the performance of the scholastic amateurs; and, considering that a main incident of the piece comprises a revolt in order to achieve some reasonable liberty for an oppressed people, the subject may be considered more suggestive than felicitous. The fortunes of many of the audience were about to undergo mutation, but there was an actor there whose prosperity commenced from that day. All the actors played with spirit, but this especial one manifested such self-possession, displayed such judgment, and exhibited such powers of conception and execution, that King, Queen, and all the illustrious audience showered down upon him applauses – hearty, loud, and long. His name was Busby. He had been so poor that he received £5 to enable him to take his degree of B.A. Westminster was soon to possess him, for nearly three-score years the most famous of her "masters." "A very great man!" said Sir Roger de Coverley; "he whipped my grandfather!"

When Prynne, and Bastwick, and Burton – released from prison by the Long Parliament – entered London in triumph, with wreaths of ivy and rosemary round their hats, the players who stood on the causeway, or at tavern windows, to witness the passing of the victims, must have felt uneasy at their arch-enemy being loose again. Between politics, perverse parties, the plague, and the parliament, the condition of the actors fell from bad to worse. In a dialogue which professedly passed at this time between Cane of the "Fortune" and Reed of the "Friers," one of the speakers deplores the going-out of all good old things, and the other, sighingly, remarks that true Latin is as little in fashion at Inns of Court as good clothes are at Cambridge. At length arrived the fatal year 1647, when, after some previous attempts to abolish the vocation of the actors, the parliament disbanded the army and suppressed the players. The latter struggled manfully, but not so successfully, as the soldiery. They were treated with less consideration; the decree of February 1647¹⁴ informed them that they were no better than heathens; that they were intolerable to Christians; that they were incorrigible and vicious offenders, who would now be compelled by whip, and stocks, and gyves, and prison fare, to obey ordinances which they had hitherto treated with contempt. Had not the glorious Elizabeth stigmatised them as "rogues," and the sagacious James as "vagabonds?" Mayors and sheriffs, and high and low constables were let loose upon them, and encouraged to be merciless; menace was piled upon menace; money penalties were hinted at in addition to corporeal punishments – and, after all, plays were enacted in spite of this counter-enactment.

But these last enactors were not to be trifled with; and the autumn saw accomplished what had not been effected in the spring. The Perfect Weekly Account for "Wednesday, Oct. 20, to Tuesday, Oct. 26," informs its readers that on "Friday an ordinance passed both Houses for suppressing of stage-plays, which of late began to come in use again." The ordinance itself is as uncivil a document as ever proceeded from ruffled authority; and the framers clearly considered that if they had not crushed the stage for ever, they had unquestionably frozen out the actors as long as the existing government should endure.

At this juncture, historians inform us that many of the ousted actors took military service – generally, as was to be expected, on the royalist side. But, in 1647, the struggle was virtually over. The great fire was quenched, and there was only a trampling out of sparks and embers. Charles Hart, the actor – grandson of Shakspeare's sister – holds a prominent place among these players turned soldiers as one who rose to be a major in Rupert's Horse. Charles Hart, however, was at this period only seventeen years of age, and more than a year and a half had elapsed since Rupert had been ordered beyond sea, for his weak defence of Bristol. Rupert's major was, probably, that very "jolly good fellow" with whom Pepys used to take wine and anchovies to such excess as to make it necessary for his "girl" to rise early, and fetch her sick master fresh water, wherewith to slake his thirst, in the morning.

The enrolment of actors in either army occurred at an earlier period, and one Hart was certainly among them. Thus Alleyn, erst of the Cockpit, filled the part of quartermaster-general to the King's army at Oxford. Burt became a cornet, Shatterel was something less dignified in the same branch of the service – the cavalry. These survived to see the old curtain once more drawn; but record is made of the death of one gallant player, said to be Will Robinson, whom doughty Harrison encountered in fight, and through whom he passed his terrible sword, shouting at the same time: "Cursed is he that doeth the work of the Lord negligently!" This serious bit of stage business would have been more dramatically arranged had Robinson been encountered by Swanston, a player of Presbyterian tendencies, who served in the Parliamentary army. A "terrific broadsword combat" between the two might have been an encounter which both armies might have looked at with interest, and supported by applause. Of the military fortunes of the actors none was so favourable as brave little Mohun's, who crossed to Flanders, returned a major, and was subsequently set down in the "cast" under his military title. Old Taylor retired, with that original portrait of Shakspeare to solace him, which was to pass by the hands of Davenant, to that glory of our stage, "Incomparable Betterton." Pollard, too, withdrew, and lusty Lowen, after a time, kicked both sock and buskin out of sight, clapped on an apron, and appeared, with well-merited success, as landlord of the Three Pigeons, at Brentford.

The actors could not comprehend why their office was suppressed, while the bear-baiters were putting money in both pockets, and non-edifying puppet-shows were enriching their proprietors. If Shakspeare was driven from Blackfriars and the Cockpit, was it fair to allow Bel and the Dragon to be enacted by dolls, at the foot of Holborn Bridge? The players were told that the public would profit by the abolition of their vocation. Loose young gentlemen, fast merchant-factors, and wild young apprentices were no longer to be seen, it was said, hanging about the theatres, spending all their spare money, much that they could not spare, and not a little which was not theirs to spend. It was uncivilly suggested that the actors were a merry sort of thieves, who used to attach themselves to the puny gallants who sought their society, and strip them of the gold pieces in their pouches, the bodkin on their thighs, the girdles buckled to give them shape, and the very beavers jauntily plumed to lend them grace and stature.

In some of the streets by the river-side a tragedy-king or two found refuge with kinsfolk. The old theatres stood erect and desolate, and the owners, with hands in empty pockets, asked how they were to be expected to pay ground-rent, now that they earned nothing? whereas their afternoon-share used to be twenty – ay, thirty shillings, sir! And see, the flag is still flying above the old house over the water, and a lad who erst played under it, looks up at the banner with a proud sorrow. An elder actor puts his hands on the lad's shoulder, and cries: "Before the old scene is on again, boy, thy face will be as battered as the flag there on the roof-top!" And as this elder actor passes on, he has a word with a poor fellow-mime who has been less provident than he, and whose present necessities he relieves according to his means. Near them stand a couple of deplorable-looking "door-keepers," or, as we should call them now, "money-takers," and the well-to-do ex-actor has his allusive joke at their old rascality, and affects to condole with them that the time is gone by when they used to scratch their neck where it itched not, and then dropped shilling and half-crown pieces behind their collars! But they were not the only poor rogues who suffered by revolution. That slipshod tapster, whom a guest is cudgelling at a tavern-door, was once the proudest and most extravagantly-dressed of the tobacco-men whose notice the smokers in the pit gingerly entreated, and who used to vend, at a penny the pipeful, tobacco that was not worth a shilling a cart-load. And behold other evidences of the hardness of the times! Those shuffling fiddlers who so humbly peer through the low windows into the tavern room, and meekly inquire: "Will you have any music, gentlemen?" they are tuneful relics of the band who were wont to shed harmony from the balcony above the stage, and play in fashionable houses, at the rate of ten shillings for each hour. Now, they shamble about in pairs, and resignedly accept the smallest dole, and think mournfully of the time when they heralded the coming of kings, and softly tuned the dirge at the burying of Ophelia!

Even these have pity to spare for a lower class than themselves, – the journeymen playwrights, whom the managers once retained at an annual stipend and "beneficial second nights." The old playwrights were fain to turn pamphleteers, but their works sold only for a penny, and that is the reason why those two shabby-genteel people, who have just nodded sorrowfully to the fiddlers, are not joyously tippling sack and Gascony wine, but are imbibing unorthodox ale and heretical small beer. "Cunctis graviora cothurnis!" murmurs the old actor, whose father was a schoolmaster; "it's more pitiful than any of your tragedies!"

The distress was severe, but the profession had to abide it. Much amendment was promised, if only something of the old life might be pursued without peril of the stocks or the whipping-post. The authorities would not heed these promises, but grimly smiled – at the actors, who undertook to promote virtue; the poets, who engaged to be proper of speech; the managers, who bound themselves to prohibit the entrance of all temptations into "the sixpenny rooms;" and the tobacco-men, who swore with earnest irreverence to vend nothing but the pure Spanish leaf, even in the threepenny galleries.

But the tragedy which ended with the killing of the King gave sad hearts to the comedians, who were in worse plight than before, being now deprived of hope itself. One or two contrived to print and sell old plays for their own benefit; a few authors continued to add a new piece, now and then, to the stock, and that there were readers for them we may conjecture from the fact of the advertisements which began to appear in the papers – sometimes of the publication of a solitary play, at another of the entire dramatic works of that most noble lady the Marchioness of Newcastle. The actors themselves united boldness with circumspection. Richard Cox, dropping the words play and player, constructed a mixed entertainment, in which he spoke and sang; and on one occasion so aptly mimicked the character of an artisan, that a master in the craft kindly and earnestly offered to engage him. During the suppression, Cowley's "Guardian" was privately played at Cambridge. The authorities would seem to have winked at these private representations, or to have declined noticing them until after the expiration of the period within which the actors were exposed to punishment. Too great audacity, however, was promptly and severely visited from the earliest days after the issuing of the prohibitory decree. A first-rate troop obtained possession of the Cockpit for a few days, in 1648. They had played unmolested for three days, and were in the very midst of "The Bloody Brother" on the fourth, when the house was invaded by the Puritan soldiery, the actors captured, the audience dispersed, and the seats and the stage righteously smashed into fragments. The players (some of them among the most accomplished of their day) were paraded through the streets in all their stage finery, and clapped into the Gate House and other prisons, whence they were too happy to escape, after much unseemly treatment, at the cost of all the theatrical property which they had carried on their backs into durance vile.

This severity, visited in other houses as well as the Cockpit, caused some actors to despair, while it rendered others only a little more discreet. Rhodes, the old prompter at Blackfriars, turned bookseller, and opened a shop at Charing Cross. There he and one Betterton, an ex-under-cook in the kitchen of Charles I., who lived in Tothill Street, talked mournfully over the past, and, according to their respective humours, of the future. The cook's sons listened the while, and one of them especially took delight in hearing old stories of players, and in cultivating an acquaintance with the old theatrical bookseller. In the neighbourhood of the ex-prompter's shop, knots of very slenderly-built players used to congregate at certain seasons. A delegate from their number might be seen whispering to the citizen captain in command at Whitehall, who, as wicked people reported, consented, for a "consideration," not to bring his red-coats down to the Bull or other localities where private stages were erected – especially during the time of Bartholomew Fair, Christmas, and other joyous tides. To his shame, be it recorded, the captain occasionally broke his promise, or the poor actors had fallen short in their purchase-money of his pledge, and in the very middle of the piece, the little theatre would be invaded, and the audience be rendered subject to as much virtuous indignation as the actors.

The cause of the latter, however, found supporters in many of the members of the aristocracy. Close at hand, near Rhodes's shop, lived Lord Hatton, first of the four peers so styled. His house was in Scotland Yard. His lands had gone by forfeiture, but the proud old Cheshire landowner cared more for the preservation of the deed by which he and his ancestors had held them, than he did for the loss of the acres themselves. Hatton was the employer, so to speak, of Dugdale, and the patron of literary men and of actors, and, it must be added, of very frivolous company besides. He devoted much time to the preparation of a Book of Psalms and the ill-treatment of his wife; and was altogether an eccentric personage, for he recommended Lambert's daughter as a personally and politically suitable wife for Charles II., and afterwards discarded his own eldest son for marrying that incomparable lady. In Hatton, the players had a supreme patron in town; and they found friends as serviceable to them in the noblemen and gentlemen residing a few miles from the capital. These patrons opened their houses to the actors for stage representations; but even this private patronage had to be distributed discreetly. Goffe, the light-limbed lad who used to play women's parts at the "Blackfriars," was generally employed as messenger to announce individually to the audience when they were to assemble, and to the actors the time and place for the play. One of the mansions, wherein these dramatic entertainments were most frequently given, was Holland House, Kensington. It was then held and inhabited by the widowed countess of that unstable Earl of Holland, whose head had fallen on the scaffold in March 1649; but this granddaughter of old Sir Walter Cope, who lost Camden House at cards to a Cheapside mercer, Sir Baptist Hicks, was a strong-minded woman, and perhaps found some consolation in patronising the pleasures which the enemies of her defunct lord so stringently prohibited. When the play was over, a collection was made among the noble spectators, whose contributions were divided between the players according to the measure of their merits. This done they wended their way down the avenue to the high road, where probably, on some bright summer afternoon, if a part of them prudently returned afoot to town, a joyous but less prudent few "padded it" to Brentford, and made a short but glad night of it with their brother of the "Three Pigeons."

At the most this was but a poor life; but such as it was, the players were obliged to make the best of it. If they were impatient, it was not without some reason, for though Oliver despised the stage, he could condescend to laugh at, and with, men of less dignity in their vocation than actors. Buffoonery was not entirely expelled from his otherwise grave court. At the marriage festival of his daughter Frances and his son-in-law Mr. Rich, the Protector would not tolerate the utterance of a line from Shakspeare, expressed from the lips of a player; but there were hired buffoons at that entertainment, which they well-nigh brought to a tragical conclusion. A couple of these saucy fellows seeing Sir Thomas Hillingsley, the old gentleman-usher to the Queen of Bohemia, gravely dancing, sought to excite a laugh by trying to blacken his face with a burnt cork. The high-bred, solemn old gentleman was so aroused to anger by this unseemly audacity, that he drew his dagger, and, but for swift interference, would have run it beneath the fifth rib of the most active of his rude assailants. On this occasion, Cromwell himself was almost as lively as the hired jesters; snatching off the wig of his son Richard, he feigned to fling it in the fire, but suddenly passing the wig under him, and seating himself upon it, he pretended that it had been destroyed, amid the servile applause of the edified spectators. The actors might reasonably have argued that "Hamlet" in Scotland Yard or at Holland House was a more worthy entertainment than such grown-up follies in the gallery at Whitehall.

Those follies ceased to be; Oliver had passed away, and Richard had laid down the greatness which had never sat well upon him. Important changes were at hand, and the merry rattle of Monk's drums coming up Gray's Inn Road, welcomed by thousands of dusty spectators, announced no more cheering prospect to any class than to the actors. The Oxford vintner's son, Will Davenant, might be seen bustling about in happy hurry, eagerly showing young Betterton how Taylor used to play Hamlet, under the instruction of Burbage, and announcing bright days to open-mouthed Kynaston, ready at a moment's warning to leap over his master's counter, and take his standing at the balcony as the smooth-cheeked Juliet.

Meanwhile, beaming old Rhodes, with a head full of memories of the joyous Blackfriars' days, and the merry afternoons over the water, at the Globe, leaving his once apprentice, Betterton, listening to Davenant's stage histories, and Kynaston, not yet out of his time, longing to flaunt it before an audience, took his own way to Hyde Park, where Monk was encamped, and there obtained, in due time, from that far-seeing individual, licence to once more raise the theatrical flag, enrol the actors, light up the stage, and, in a word, revive the English theatre. In a few days the drama commenced its new career in the Cockpit, in Drury Lane; and this fact seemed so significant, as to the character of General Monk's tastes that, subsequently, when he and the Council of State dined in the city halls, the companies treated their guests, after dinner, with satirical farces, such as "Citizen and Soldier," "Country Tom," and "City Dick," with, as the newspapers inform us, "dancing and singing, many shapes and ghosts, and the like; and all to please his Excellency the Lord General."