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

by Christopher Hibbert

  There was evidently an ever-present need for the rows of sharp spikes which can be seen in Hogarth’s The Laughing Audience separating the men in the pit from the sedate musicians in the orchestra.

  Even when there was no violence, the uproar in the theatre was sometimes deafening, particularly when the first work of a dramatist, who had previously given offence to some part of the audience, was performed. The opening performance of Miller’s Hospital for Fools in 1739, for instance, was shouted down because his earlier Coffee-House was taken to have cast aspersions upon a favourite meeting-place of some young lawyers of the Temple. This was at a

  time when it was the Fashion to condemn them all, right or wrong, without being heard; and when Parties were made to go to new Plays to make Uproars, which they called by the odious name of The Funn of the first Night. And on the very Night I am speaking of … not one single Word was heard that the Actors spoke, the noise of These First-Night Gentlemen was so great. However the Actors went thro’ it and the Spectators might see their Mouths wag, and that was all.

  Similarly, West’s Hecuba was ‘not heard’ when it was presented at Drury Lane, because ‘a rout of Vandals in the Galleries intimidated the young Actresses, disturbed the Audience, and prevented all Attention’. The second performance of Three Hours after Marriage was ‘acted like a ship tost in a tempest’, while Colley Cibber’s The Refusal, though it had nothing to do with politics, was loudly hissed as soon as the first words of the prologue were spoken, since his previous play The Non-Juror had given offence to the Jacobites. And Hugh Kelly’s A Word to the Wise was treated in the same way because the author had changed his political opinions and become a supporter of the government. ‘The people refused to give his play a hearing and easily overcame the small group who insisted on it being presented.’24

  ‘I will wager you five hundred pounds,’ says a character in Boaden’s The Modish Couple – proposing a bet that would certainly not have been accepted at the time –

  that half a Score of us shall quite demolish the best Piece that can come on any Stage … We strike up such a Chorus of Cat-calls, Whistles, Hisses, Hoops and Horse-laughs that not one of the Audience can hear a Syllable, and therefore conclude it to be very sad stuff – The Epilogue’s spoke, the Curtain falls, and so the poor Rascal is sent to the Devil.25

  At the first performance of The Rivals an apple was thrown at the Irish actor taking the part of Sir Lucius O’Trigger. ‘He stepped forward, and with a genuine rich brogue, angrily cried out, “By the pow’rs, is it personal? Is it me or the matter?”’26 And in 1762 ‘there was a great riot at Covent Garden playhouse without the least plea or pretence whatever’, according to a newspaper report:

  [This was] occasioned by the gentry in the upper gallery calling for a hornpipe, though nothing of the sort was expressed in the bills. They went so far as to throw a quart bottle and two pint bottles upon the stage, which happily did no mischief, but might have been productive of a great deal.27

  Nor was it only such demands and antagonism to the author or leading members of the cast that led to uproar.

  At night I went to Covent Garden and saw Love in a Village by Isaac Bickerstaffe, a new comic opera [Boswell recorded in his journal on 8 December 1762] … I saw it from the gallery but I was first in the pit. Just before the overture began to be played, two Highland officers came in. The mob in the upper gallery roared out, ‘No Scots! No Scots! Out with them!’, hissed and pelted them with apples. My heart warmed to my countrymen, my Scotch blood boiled with indignation. I jumped up on the benches, roared out, ‘Damn you, you rascals!,’ hissed and was in the greatest rage. I am very sure at that time I should have been the most distinguished of heroes. I hated the English.28

  Another night, at Drury Lane, ‘in a wild freak of youthful extravagance’, Boswell ‘entertained the audience prodigiously’, so he flattered himself, ‘by imitating the lowing of a cow’. ‘I was so successful in this boyish frolic that the universal cry of the galleries was, “Encore the cow! Encore the cow!”. In the pride of my heart I attempted imitations of some other animals, but with very inferior effect. My reverend friend [his companion, Dr Hugh Blair], anxious for my fame, with the air of utmost gravity and earnestness addressed me thus: “My dear sir, I would confine myself to the cow.”’29

  The uproar before the play begins is indescribable [wrote a German visitor, Friedrich von Schütz] … Not only orange-peels but sometimes even glasses of water or other liquids are thrown from the gallery into pit and boxes, so that frequently spectators are wounded and their clothing is soiled. In short, such outrages are committed in the name of freedom that one forgets one is in a playhouse which claims in its avertisements the title of Royal Theatre. In Germany such disorder would never be tolerated even at a marionette theatre in a village inn. At Drury Lane I wished to look around at the gallery in order to examine its structure, but a heap of orange-peels, striking me with considerable force in the face, robbed me of all curiosity. The best plan is to keep your face turned towards the stage and thus quietly submit to the hail of oranges on your back. On one occasion my hat was so saturated (I really do not know with what watery ingredients) that I was compelled to have it cleaned next day at the hatter’s.

  His neighbour’s hats fared no better; nor did that of a nearby lady who, nevertheless, assured him that ‘the audience had been on its best behaviour today’.30

  Another German, Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, confirmed that the ‘uproar of the common people in the theatre before the curtain rises [was] simply frightful’:

  A foreigner, unfamiliar with such outbursts, imagines he is facing a field of battle on which the combatants are ready to break one another’s necks … Before going to the theatre, one fills one’s pockets with oranges, which serve the double purpose of refreshment and entertainment … But the peels are often hurled by the occupants of the gallery into the pit, or they land there if they miss the proscenium, at which they are usually aimed … They are so heaped up by the time for the curtain to rise that a servant must enter with a broom.31

  In theatres outside London the noise was quite deafening. At the theatre in Richmond in 1777, Johann Georg Busch was startled by a number of voices crying out, ‘Throw her down! Throw her down!’ He thought the words must apply to an actress who was giving a ‘very mediocre performance’. ‘The actors paused, and I was prepared for the worst,’ Busch wrote. ‘Then something really was thrown down from the gallery, I know not what … Similar disturbances occurred in those quarters several more times, and each time the actors, being quite accustomed to such interruptions, very calmly paused.’32

  Towards the end of the century there seems to have been a marked improvement in the behaviour of theatre audiences. Foreigners praised the way in which the spectators refrained from applause and laughter ‘until the end of the speech or song, disturbing neither the listener in his attention nor the actor in the performance of his role’. ‘This unbearable jubilation and shouting of the French over every little trifle’ was never heard in England, except when an irrepressible youth raised his voice. English audiences became absorbed in the play, unlike audiences in Italy where it was ‘customary to play cards in the loges’ and where it was ‘in poor taste for ladies to pay attention to what takes place on the stage’. When Mrs Bellamy played in Oedipus in London she was so overcome by the tragedy of her role that she had to be carried off the stage unconscious. Most members of the audience, overcome themselves, quietly left the theatre.

  There was also now widespread acclaim for the thoroughness with which English actors memorized their parts, unlike those in other countries where the prompter came to the aid of the performers ‘whenever they showed the slightest uncertainty’.33

  Much of the credit for the improvements noticed in the English theatre was due to David Garrick, who, in the words of Edmund Burke, ‘raised the character of his profession to the rank of a liberal art’. Garrick had arrived in London from Lichfield with Samuel Johnson who sa
id that when he entered the city his friend had no more than three halfpence in his pocket. Soon tiring of the wine merchant’s business which he managed to establish with an elder brother, Garrick set his heart upon becoming an actor but, after some experience in the provinces, he was rejected by both Drury Lane and Covent Garden and had to make his formal debut in 1741 as Richard III at a theatre in Goodman’s Fields, Whitechapel, which was soon afterwards closed through the influence of the patent theatres. Garrick’s success was not immediate. His ‘easy and familiar yet forcible style in speaking and acting’, as his first biographer called it, came as a surprise to audiences accustomed to the measured declamations and stiff mannerisms of James Quin who remarked after seeing his young rival: ‘If the young fellow is right, I and the rest of the players have been all wrong.’ Soon, it was generally agreed that they had been wrong; and Garrick, acknowledged as the greatest actor of his time, took over the management of Drury Lane where most of the best actresses of the day appeared “with him, among them Peg Woffington (for several years his mistress), Kitty Clive, Mrs Cibber, Mrs Bellamy and Mrs Abington. During the thirty-odd years he spent at Drury Lane many reforms in the theatre were instituted: the audience was finally driven from the stage; concealed stage-lighting was introduced as well as cut-out scenery designed for him by the Alsatian painter, de Loutherbourg. Performers still appeared in haphazardly anachronistic costume, often grabbing for themselves the most splendid garments from the stock wardrobe so that a maid might well be seen far more sumptuously dressed than her mistress. While characters like Falstaff and Richard III traditionally wore costumes suitable to their periods, other members of the cast were clothed in eighteenth-century dress. When Garrick himself played King Lear he wore a white wig, silk hose, lace ruffles, high-heeled shoes with diamond buckles, and no beard; as Macbeth he came on stage – as Spranger Barry also did – in the uniform of an officer in the Seven Years’ War; and, when he defied convention by appearing in Othello in Moorish robes instead of a military uniform, the audience ridiculed such eccentricity. But, however strangely inappropiate their attire, the performers in Garrick’s companies were’not permitted the extravagant gestures, the slow delivery and tiresome pauses of the past. Even the great Kitty Clive – whose custom it had been occasionally to let ‘her eyes wander from the stage into the boxes’ in search of her friends and acquaintances and would give them ‘a comedy nod or curtsy’ – was rebuked by Garrick and told always to keep her eyes on her fellow-performers as the convincing production of the play demanded.34

  Garrick, who knew from his own experience in Ipswich how valuable was the training to be gained in the provinces, advised the young people who came to him in the hopes of going on the stage to serve their apprenticeship with Griffith’s company in Norwich.35 There were several other provincial companies to which he might have sent them; and the numbers of provincial theatres were growing all the time as inn yards and town halls were being replaced as playhouses by specially built theatres which, in several cases, were granted royal patents, those in Bath and Norwichin 1768, in Yorkand Hull in 1769, in Liverpool in 1771, and in Chester in 1777.36

  The life of an actor in the provinces continued, however, to be hard. Actors who went on tour from the London theatres during the summer vacation often had an enjoyable time; so did those who were based in the county towns and travelled with companies on regular country circuits; but there were hundreds of small troupes who travelled long distances and worked long hours for a very meagre living. Many of them were recruited by country managers in one of those taverns around Covent Garden where unemployed and would-be actors and comedians congregated. They were asked what parts they had played and how many lines they could master overnight; and then, if chosen, they were sent off to join the company with barely enough money for the journey, sometimes no more than half a guinea per hundred miles which they might be asked to repay out of their share of the profits of the company. The profits were shared out in equal parts, the manager taking five shares to compensate him for his expenses in running the company. Shares were rarely large, and most strolling actors could not have survived without such extra payments as were made for delivering handbills at a shilling a day in the town and two shillings a day in the country, and their benefit performances from which they received all the profits, less expenses. Gradually salaries began to take the place of the sharing system; but there were conservative managers who clung to the old ways, like the one encountered by Sylvester Daggerwood who would have nothing to do with any ‘paltry salary scheme’. There were managers, too, who dressed in fine clothes and silver-laced hats while their players were in rags, who left their companies in the lurch when offered a London engagement, who never announced a final night and crept out of town before the bills were paid, who failed to find money for wagons and left their actors and their actresses to carry their scenery and wardrobes to the next town on their shoulders.37

  There was rarely very much to carry. One strolling actress, Mrs Charke, described a property box in her company as containing a few scabbardless, rusty swords and one or two superannuated mopsticks ‘transmigrated into Tragedy Truncheons’. The company described in Breval’s The Strollers could boast of a second-hand dragon; but this unfortunately had lost a wing and two claws in an over-boisterous opera.38

  Shabby as they were, sometimes even ‘in a deplorable pickle, ragged and emaciated’, the players contrived to make a good show when they entered a town, waving handbills in the air to the sound of drum beats, dressed in bright if tawdry clothes, cocked hats, ruffles, embroidered waistcoats and flounced skirts, all liberally supplied with spangles and feathers. They lodged in inns or the houses of tradesmen, and used barns to store their properties in and to put on their costumes, as the actresses do in Hogarth’s lively picture. If no theatre or town hall was available, they would sometimes stage their plays in a barn, a ‘horrid wreck of a barn’, perhaps, such as that described in George Parker’s memoirs, ‘with a few bits of candle stuck in clay to light the dismal hole’.39 Or they would take a room in an inn which they would do their best to transform into an inviting theatre. John Bernard remembered how the manager of his company took a large room in an inn and from its ceiling suspended a ‘collection of green tatters’ for a curtain – whatever the material, the colour of the curtains had always traditionally to be green. The manager then

  Erected a pair of paper screens right-hand and left for wings; arranged four candles in front of said wings to divide the stage from the orchestra (the fiddlers’ chairs being legitimate division of the orchestra from the pit), and with all spare benches of the inn to form boxes, and a hoop suspended from the ceiling (perforated with a dozen nails, to receive as many tallow candles) to suggest the idea of a chandelier, he had constructed and embellished what he denominated a Theatre.40

  Hard as was their life, most strolling players would have had no other. They complained of grasping managers; but there were others who were trusted and even loved, who would willingly turn their hands to any task from painting scenery to printing handbills, who, like the one described by S. W. Ryley in the Itinerant (1808), ‘if he had money which was rarely the case, he laughed and lent it; if he had none he laughed and did without’. ‘We players are a set of merry, undone dogs,’ one of them is quoted by Ryley as having remarked contentedly, ‘and though we often want the means of life, we are seldom without the means of mirth.’41

  The booths of strolling players were often to be seen at fairs alongside those of acrobats and freaks, foreign musicians and singers, rope-dancers and posture-dancers, fortune-tellers and keepers of strange animals such as bears that ‘daunce like any ladies while “tat, tat, tat, tat,” says the little penny Trumpet’. A late seventeenth-century ballad lists some of the fair’s attractions:

  Here are the rarities of the whole fair!

  Piper-le-Pim, and the wise Dancing Mare;

  Here’s valiant St George and the Dragon, a farce,

  A girl of fifteen with str
ange moles on her arse,

  Here is Vienna Besieged, a rare thing,

  And here Punchinello, shown thrice to the King.42

  The plays were generally far from sophisticated, consisting for the most part of crude farces and drolls, of spectacles representing recent events and occasional political squibs, though these were not so popular in the eighteenth century as they had been earlier.43 ‘Everything was done to such a Perfection of Uncoothness,’ wrote Ned Ward of one ‘dwarf comedy, Sir-named a Droll entitled, “The Devil of a Wife”’. It was ‘the strangest Hodg-Podg that ever was Jumbled together’. Yet he had to admit that it was ‘an excellent Farce to please an Audience of such Fools’.44 Later commentators, while admitting the crudity of the shows, were equally entertained.

  By the middle of the century at Bartholomew Fair and elsewhere the players’ booths had become much more elaborate and comfortable. Pantomimes and ballad-operas were presented as well as such farces as ‘The Whore of Babylon, the Devil and the Pope’. Actors, giving as many as nine performances a day, could earn five or six guineas a week, far more than the 25s a week which was as much as they could expect to earn even in the best provincial companies. The booths, constructed of stout wooden boards, were described as being ‘of extraordinary Largeness’. Some had two galleries, in addition to the pit and boxes, and a balcony on which the players marched about in costume and attracted audiences by the blare of trumpets. In the early years of the century prices were not much cheaper than those demanded at ordinary permanent theatres, 2S 6d for boxes, is 6 for the pit, is for the first gallery and 6d for the upper gallery. But towards the end of the century they became cheaper: at St Bartholomew’s Fair in 1784 a seat in an upper gallery could be had for 3d.45

  Repeated attempts were made by the authorities to close or restrict fairs and to shut down the players’ booths which were condemned as the corrupters of morals of servants and children, gathering places of ‘Loose, Idle, Disorderly People, who were taught there to mock their betters’, and – at Bartholomew Fair at any rate – to ridicule ‘the Grandeur of the City’, even to laugh at a ‘Lord-Mayor (as in the Renown’d Play of Whittington)’ and to find amusement in the sight of a drunken porter representing ‘an alderman in a Scarlet Gown’. The collapse of a booth in August 1749, and the consequent death of two spectators, furnished an excuse for the prohibition of show booths the following year; but they soon appeared again, and further decrees against them had to be issued. When the authorities tried to enforce these decrees there was usually a riot. In 1743 the Borough authorities ordered the bellman to cry around the fairground at Southwark that all performers offering plays would be taken up as vagrants and punished and that the fair should be limited to three days. This so incensed the debtors in the nearby Marshalsea Prison – who had been accustomed to receiving by way of charity a share of the money collected by the booth-keepers – that they began to hurl stones over the wall at the crowd, killing a child and injuring several other people. Some years later a similar announcement at Bartholomew Fair resulted in the enraged populace breaking the windows ‘of almost every inhabitant of Smithfield’.46