The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  At first the plays performed were usually new renderings of old plays, versions of Shakespeare and Jonson and of Beaumont and Fletcher; but then came those comedies of manners, like Congreve’s Love for Love, the heroic plays of Dryden and such tragedies as Otway’s Venice Preserv’d. In comedy parts, while gestures and movements were performed in a traditionally stylized manner, the words were delivered with far more naturalness than was expected of the tragedian, who accompanied his extravagant gestures with a reverberating intonation that echoed round the galleries. Actors were renowned for their performances in particular kinds of role; and audiences did not take kindly to their being cast in parts outside their usual type. Samuel Sandford, for example, who had joined D’Avenant’s company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre soon after its formation, and who was celebrated as a stage villain, was once cast as an honest statesman. The audience, so Colley Cibber recalled in his autobiography, sat impatiently through four acts waiting for the true and evil nature of the man to be revealed; and when, at last, finding that ‘Sandford was really an honest man to the end of the play, they fairly damned it, as if the author had imposed upon them the most incredible absurdity’.2 Audiences were never slow to demonstrate their displeasure, either at the poor quality of an unacceptable or boring piece, which they would hiss and boo off the stage, or at the inability of actors to remember their lines, a not uncommon failing when a play’s run was rarely more than two or three days and so many new parts had to be learned.

  A large proportion of the members of any audience came to see each other rather than the play. The Restoration theatre, indeed, has been described as ‘the toy of the upper classes’,3 and its audiences as mainly composed of ‘courtiers and their satellites … noblemen in the pit and boxes, the fops and beaux and wits or would-be wits who hung on to their society, the women of the court … the courtesans with whom these women of quality moved and conversed on equal terms’.4 ‘Women of doubtful character, “Vizard Masks”, as they were euphemistically styled, flocked the side-boxes, in the pit, and in the upper gallery … So numerous did they become that in 1688 John Crowne, the dramatist, could declare that they made up “half the pit and all the galleries”.’5

  Certainly there were many courtesans in most audiences, as well as aristocratic fops who paid an additional charge to visit the actresses behind the scenes; certainly, too, actresses did not enjoy a high reputation for purity; nor, for that matter, did actors. The delightful Nell Gwyn, a star of the Theatre Royal, seems to have had numerous lovers before she became the king’s mistress; while Mrs Pepys had good cause to be jealous of Elizabeth Knepp. On 24 January 1669 Pepys recorded in his diary, ‘I to talk to Tom Killigrew, who told me and others, talking about the play-houses, that he is fain to keep a woman on purpose, at 20s a week, to satisfy eight or ten of the young men of his House [the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane], whom till he did so he could never keep to their business, and now he doth.’6

  Yet perfectly respectable women went to the theatre regularly; and sometimes, like Mrs Pepys, they went without their husbands. The middle gallery usually contained a number of ‘citizens’ wives and daughters’, according to the author of The Country Gentleman’s Vade Mecum of 1699, as well as of ‘serving-men, journey-men, and apprentices’. Above them, the upper gallery was full of servants; below them, in the pit, were squires and the richer citizens and their wives, as well as ‘beaus, bullies and whores … wits and censurers’. In the boxes sat ‘persons of quality’, who had paid 4s each for the seats, four times as much as the price of admission to the upper gallery.7

  The first performances of new plays were generally most exciting events.

  We sat at the office all morning, [runs a characteristic entry in Pepys’s diary], and at noon home to dinner; and my wife being gone before, I go to the Duke of York’s playhouse, where a new play of Etheriges called She would if she could. And though I was there by 2 a-clock, there was 1000 people put back that could not have room in the pit; and I at last, because my wife was there, made shift to get into the 18d box [the middle gallery] – and there saw; but Lord, how full was the house.8

  On a later occasion, when Thomas Shadwell’s comedy, The Sullen Lovers, or the Impertinents, was being first performed, Pepys arrived three and a half hours before the play began ‘to get a good place’ in the pit, paid a poor man to keep his seat for him, and returned after spending an hour at his bookseller’s to find the theatre ‘quite full’.9

  The performances generally started at half past three throughout the reign of Charles II, though by 1695 four o’clock seems to have been a more usual time; by 1703 five or half-past five; in 1706, and for many years afterwards, six o’clock. But it was never possible to reserve a seat, even a seat in a box, though a whole box could be taken in advance. Doors always opened long before the performance, and there was usually a wild scramble to secure a good place. There were vociferous protests when the Drury Lane management proposed to open their doors earlier than usual because this was felt unfair to those who could not leave their work in time to get a seat.

  Even when the house was full, people would push and squeeze their way on to the benches; and on one occasion, so Frederick Reynolds, the dramatist, related, a place was obtained at Drury Lane by a cunning late-comer:

  The riot and struggle for places can scarcely be imagined … Though a side box close to where we sat, was completely filled, we beheld the door burst open, and an Irish gentleman attempt to make entry, vi et armis – ‘Shut the door, box-keeper!’ loudly cried some of the party – ‘There’s room by the pow’rs!’ cried the Irishman, and persisted in advancing. On this, a gentleman in the second row, rose, and exclaimed, ‘Turn out that blackguard!’ ‘Oh, and is that your mode, honey?’ coolly retorted the Irishman. ‘Come, come out, my dear, and give me satisfaction, or I’ll pull your nose, faith, you coward, and shillaly you through the lobby!’

  This public insult left the tenant in possession no alternative; so he rushed out to accept the challenge; when, to the pit’s general amusement, the Irishman jumped into his place, and having deliberately seated and adjusted himself, he turned round, and cried, ‘I’ll talk to you after the play is over.’10

  The seats in the pit, which cost 2s 6d until almost the end of the eighteenth century (prices being doubled for first performances) were the most popular with regular playgoers and critics. But if the pit, as Dryden confirmed, was the best place from which to see and hear a play, it could also be the noisiest when young men came ‘drunk and screaming’ into it, like the youths described in Shadwell’s The Virtuoso who rush raging in to ‘stand upon the Benches, and toss their full Periwigs and Empty Heads, and with their shrill unbroken Pipes, cry, “Dam-me, this is a Damn’d Play. Prithee, let’s to a whore, Jack!”’.11 Drunk and rowdy men were certainly often to be seen at the theatre. Sir Charles Sedley, Sir Thomas Ogle and Lord Buckhurst once all got drunk at the Cock Tavern in Bow Street, exhibited themselves in obscene postures on the balcony of Covent Garden and ‘gave great offence to passengers by very unmannerly discharges upon them’. Sedley after being fined for his conduct commented that he thought he must be the first man that ‘had ever paid for easing himself a postenori’.12 On such occasions brawls frequently erupted, as they did in August 1675, when Sir Thomas Armstrong stabbed one Mr Scrorp to death during a performance of Macbeth, and in February 1679 at the Duke’s Theatre after a gentleman made an insulting reference to the king’s mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth.

  After the accession of William and Mary, there was a strong reaction against the stage and attempts were made to prevent the young from attending playhouses or, at least, to make the places more respectable. In 1696 the Lord Chamberlain ordered that no plays should be performed without licence; and, in 1697, that all scurrilous sentiments and expressions of profanity be deleted from them. In 1700 the Grand Jury of the City of London proposed ‘to the court at the old Baily, that for any person to goe to play houses was a public nuisance; and that the putting up
bills in and about this Citty for playes was an encouragement to vice and prophanesse; and prayed that none be suffered for the future’. The request was granted and playhouse bills were forbidden. But the prohibition was evidently ignored since, soon afterwards, the Grand Jury of Middlesex made further complaints about bills being posted and in 1703 complained:

  We the Grand Jury of the county of Middlesex do present, that the Plays which are frequently acted in the playhouses in Drury-Lane and Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields in this County are full of prophane, irreverent, lewd, indecent, and immoral expressions, and tend to the great displeasure of Almighty God and to the corruption of the auditory, both in their principles and their practices. We also present, that the common acting of plays in the said play-houses very much tend to the debauching and ruining the youth resorting thereto, and to the breach of the peace, and are the occasions of many riots, routs and disorderly assemblies, whereby many murders and other misdemeanors have been frequently done, and particularly the barbarous murder of Sir Andrew Slanning, which was very lately committed as he came out of one of the said playhouses; further that the common acting of plays at the said play-houses is a public nuisance.13

  In 1704 fresh efforts were made to ‘reform all indecencies and abuses of the stage which have occasioned great disorders’. It was, therefore, commanded by royal decree that ‘no person of what quality soever’ should presume to go ‘behind the scenes or come upon the stage, either before or during the acting of any play, that no woman be allowed or presume to wear a vizard mask’, and that no persons should come into a theatre ‘without paying the price established for their respective places’.14

  There were still only two patent theatres, Drury Lane and Co vent Garden, but both were large. In the early 1740s, so it has been calculated, nearly 8500 people were attending them each week, and by the late 1750s almost 12,000. In 1780 Drury Lane had seating for about 2000 and after 1794, when the theatre was rebuilt, 3611. Covent Garden held some 2100 people in 1782, and after it had been altered in 1792, just over 3000.15 (The seating capacity today is 2141.) The monopoly of the two theatres was reinforced by the Theatres Act of 1737 which was passed by the government to restrain the activities of Henry Fielding whose ballad-opera, The Welsh Opera, or, the Grey Mare the Better Horse, had been performed at the unlicensed Haymarket Theatre six years before. Opposition to this piece, which attacked both political parties and satirized the royal family, was strong enough to induce Fielding to offer his next, less contentious plays to Drury Lane. In 1734 his Don Quixote in England was produced at the Haymarket and this and subsequent plays which audaciously and outspokenly satirized Sir Robert Walpole’s administration induced the government to bring in the Act which confirmed Drury Lane and Covent Garden as the only two legitimate theatres, established a strict censorship and brought about the closure of the unlicensed theatres.

  Ways of evading the Act were found, however. The Haymarket reopened and was taken over in 1747 by Samuel Foote, a brilliant mimic who some years later, after losing a leg in a cruel practical joke in which the Duke of York was involved, managed to obtain a patent from the king for the summer months. So the ‘Little Theatre in the Hay’, as it had been known, became the Theatre Royal. At the same time, other theatres, charging about 6d a seat, sprang up all over London to cater for the larger, less discriminating, increasingly middle-class audiences which were being found for the new sentimental comedies, the ballad-operas which became so popular after the success of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, the pantomimes, the burlettas and those other entertainments of an age of which it was complained that nothing would go down ‘but Ballad-Operas and Mr Lun’s Buffoonery’.16

  Lun was the stage-name of John Rich, the theatrical manager whose appearances as Harlequin were largely responsible for the enormous success of eighteenth-century pantomimes: his own ran for the then astonishing number of forty or even fifty consecutive performances. These pantomimes were a remarkable mixture of comic dumb show, opera, mythological masque and such mechanical spectacles as presented themselves to the audience when the curtain rose upon one of Rich’s productions, A Dramatick Entertainment, call’d Harlequin a Sorcerer: ‘dark rocky caverns, by the side of a Wood, illumin’d by the Moon; Birds of Omen promiscuously flying, Flashes of Lightning faintly striking’.17

  In the 1770s spoken dialogue was introduced into pantomimes. But, despite the success of Colman’s The Genius of Nonsense, this was not generally considered an improvement; and after 1786 the pantomime reverted to its earlier type, in which the noise of the audience fully compensated for the silenced voices on the stage.18 The comments in the stage directions of The British Stage; or, The Exploits of Harlequin: A Farce give a good idea of the part the spectators were expected to play in one of Rich’s shows:

  Enter the Dragon, spitting Fire … (The whole Audience hollow with Applause, and shake the very Theatre). [An ass] endeavours to mount the Dragon, falls down, the Dragon is drawn up in the Air by Wires.

  (The Audience ring with Applause).

  Enter Windmill.

  Harl [equin]. Advance, Mr Windmill, and give some Entertainment to this great Assembly.

  (The Audience hollow and huzza, and are ready to break down the House with Applause).

  They dance with the Ghosts, Devils, and Harlequin.

  (The Audience clap prodigiously).19

  In these audiences pickpockets abounded, and prostitutes were numerous, though these generally kept to their own special parts of the house. Drunkenness and fighting were still quite common; duels took place in the aisles and on the stairs and, on one occasion at least, upon the stage when other accommodation was deemed too restricting. A drunken earl once staggered across the stage during a performance of Macbeth, struck one of the actors who politely remonstrated with him, and, when a second blow was returned, drew his sword and, with several companions, did such damage to the theatre that it had to be closed for two days.20 ‘This night,’ Richard Cross wrote in his diary on 26 December 1757, ‘by the Crowd upon the upper Gallery Stairs two Women and a Man were killed.’21 And J. P. Malcolm recorded, ‘We witness constant disputes often terminating in blows, and observe heated bodies stripped of the outward garments, furious faces, with others grinning horribly.’22

  Sometimes the disturbances turned into riots. There were riots in 1737 when a French company was granted a licence to perform at the Little Theatre, Haymarket; there were riots when prices were raised at Drury Lane; and there were riots when managements attempted to end the custom of allowing people into the theatres at half price after the end of the third act of the main item on the programme. Seats were torn up, curtains pulled down, sconces and mirrors smashed, box partitions splintered.

  In 1755, when war with France threatened, there were further riots when a show, The Chinese Festival, directed by a supposed Frenchman (actually Swiss) and with a few French actors in the cast, was put on at Drury Lane:

  The inhabitants of the boxes, from the beginning of the dispute, were inclined to favour the exhibition of the Festival, and very warmly espoused the cause of the managers against the plebeian part of the audience, whom they affected to look down upon with contempt. The pit and galleries became more incensed by this opposition of the people of fashion, and entered into a strong alliance to stand by each other, and to annoy the common enemy. Several gentlemen of rank being determined to conquer the obstinacy of the rioters, they jumped from the boxes into the pit with a view to seize the ringleaders of the fray. The ladies at first were so far from being frightened at this resolution of the gentlemen, that they pointed out the obnoxious persons with great calmness. Swords were mutually drawn, and blood shed … The contest between the boxes and the other parts of the house was attended with real distress to the managers, for they knew not which party they could oblige with safety. One would not give way to the other, and they seemed to be pretty equally balanced: at last, after much mutual abuse, loud altercation, and many violent blows and scuffles, the combatants fell upon
that which could make no resistance, the materials before them. They demolished the scenes, tore up the benches, broke the lustres and girandoles, and did in a short time so much mischief to the inside of the theatre, that it could scarce be repaired in several days.23