Part 10
The presence of Queen Elizabeth at plays in London, and the acting of them in the mansions which she honoured by a visit, are proofs of the dignity of the profession. We have her, in the year last named, at one of the most popular of London theatres, with a bevy of fair listening maids of honour about her. This was in her old age. ‘I have just come,’ writes Chamberlain to Charlton, ‘from the Blackfriars, where I saw her at the play with all her _candida auditrices_.’ At Christmas time, Carlile writes to Chamberlain, ‘There has been such a small court this Christmas, that the guard were not troubled to keep doors at the plays and pastimes.’
And if the name of Elizabeth should have a sweet savour to actors generally, not less delicious to dramatic memories should be the mayor of Abingdon, in that queen’s time, who invited so many companies of players to give a taste of their quality in that town for fee and reward. If any actor to whom the history of the stage be of interest should turn up at Abingdon, let him get the name of this play-loving mayor, and hang it over the fire-place of the best room of the Garrick, or rather of the club that _will_ be--the social, cosey, comfortable, professional, not palatial nor swellish, but homelike house, that the Garrick was in its humbler and happier days.
Now the companies the Mayor had down to Abingdon included the Queen’s players, the Earl of Leicester’s players, the players of the Earl of Worcester, of Lord Sussex, of the Earl of Bath, of Lord Berkely, of Lord Shrewsbury, of Lord Derby, and of Lord Oxford. Is there no one who can get at the names of these actors, and of the pieces they played--played for rewards varying from twenty pence to twenty shillings? Will that thoroughly English actor, one of the few accomplished comedians of the well-trained times now left to us, be the more successfully urged to the task, if we remind him that, in 1573, his professional namesake, Mr. Compton, took his players to Abingdon, and earned four shillings by the exercise of their talents?
The Elizabethan time was a very lively one. It had its theatrical cheats and its popular riots. We learn from State records that on the anniversary of the Queen’s accession, November, 1602, ‘One Verner, of Lincoln’s Inn, gave out bills of a play on Bankside, to be acted by persons of account; price of entry, 2_s._ 6_d._ or 1_s._ 6_d._ Having got most of the money he fled, but was taken and brought before the Lord Chief Justice, who made a jest of it, and bound him over in 5_l._ to appear at the sessions. The people, seeing themselves deluded, revenged themselves on the hangings, chairs, walls, &c., and made a great spoil. There was much good company, and many noblemen.’
The Queen died in March, 1603. There were the usual ‘blacks,’ but the court and stage were brilliant again by Christmas. Early in January of the following year people were talking of the gay doings, the brilliant dresses, the noble dramas, the grand bear-baitings, the levity, dancing, and the golden play, which had solemnised the Christmas just ended. Thirteen years later Shakespeare died, and in little more than half a century small spirits whispered that he was not such a great spirit himself after all.
In Mr. Planché’s professional autobiography, which makes us as discursive as the biographer himself, there is a seeming inclination to overpraise some actors of the present time at the expense of those whom we must consider their superiors in bygone days. As far as this may tend to show that there is no actor so good but that his equal may in time be discovered, we have no difference with the author of these ‘Recollections.’ It is wonderful how speedily audiences recover the loss of their greatest favourites. Betterton, who restored the stage soon after Monk had restored the monarchy, was called ‘the glory and the grief’ of that stage. The glory while he acted and lived in the memories of those who had seen him act. To the latter his loss was an abiding grief. For years after Betterton’s decease it was rank heresy to suppose that he might be equalled. Pope, in expressive, yet not the happiest of his verses, has alluded to this prejudice. The prejudice, nevertheless, was unfounded. Betterton remains indeed with the prestige of being an actor who has not been equalled in many parts, who has been excelled in none. Old playgoers, who could compare him in his decline with young Garrick in his vigour, were of different opinions as to the respective merits of these two great masters of their art. We may fairly conclude that Garrick’s Hamlet was as ‘great’ as Betterton’s; that the latter’s Sir John Brute was hardly equal to Garrick’s Abel Drugger; and that the Beverley of the later actor was as perfect an original creation as the Jaffier of Betterton.
When Wilks made the ‘Constant Couple, or a Trip to the Jubilee,’ a success by the spirit and ease with which he played the part of Sir Harry Wildair, Farquhar, the author of the comedy, said ‘That he made the part will appear from hence: whenever the stage has the misfortune to lose him Sir Harry Wildair may go to the Jubilee.’ Nevertheless, Margaret Woffington achieved a new success for that play by the fire and joyousness of her acting. When Wilks died, poets sang in rapturous grief of his politeness, grace, gentility, and ease; and they protested that a supernatural voice had been heard moaning through the air--
Farewell, all manly Joy! And ah! true British Comedy, adieu! Wilks is no more.
Notwithstanding this, British comedy did not die; Garrick’s Ranger was good compensation for Wilks’s Sir Harry.
When Garrick heard of Mrs. Cibber’s death, in 1766, he exclaimed, ‘Mrs. Cibber dead! Then tragedy has died with her!’ At that very time a little girl of twelve years of age was strolling from country theatre to country theatre, and she was destined to be an actress of higher quality and renown than even Mrs. Cibber, namely, Sarah Siddons. Mrs. Pritchard could play Lady Macbeth as grandly as Mrs. Siddons; and Mrs. Crawford (Spranger Barry’s widow), who laughed at the ‘paw and pause’ of the Kemble school, was a Lady Randolph of such force and pathos that Sarah feared and hated her. Not many years after Garrick had pronounced Tragedy and Cibber to have expired together, his own death was described as having eclipsed the harmless gaiety of nations, and Melpomene wept with Thalia for their common adopted son, and neither would be comforted. But as Siddons was compensation for Mrs. Cibber, so the Kembles, to use an old simile, formed the very fair small change for Garrick. When Kemble himself departed, his most ardent admirers or worshippers could not assert that his legitimate successor could not be found. Edmund Kean had already supplanted him. The romantic had thrust out the classic; the natural had taken place of the artificial; and Shakespeare, by flashes of the Kean lightning, proved more attractive than the stately eloquence of ‘Cato,’ or the measured cadences of ‘Coriolanus.’
Edmund Kean, however, has never had a successor in certain parts. Mrs. F. Kemble has justly said of him: ‘Kean is gone, and with him are gone Shylock, Richard, and Othello.’ Mrs. Siddons, at her first coming, did not dethrone the old popular favourites. After she had withdrawn from the stage, Miss O’Neill cast her somewhat under the shadow of oblivion; but when old Lady Lucy Meyrick saw Mrs. Siddons’s Lady Macbeth in her early triumph, she acknowledged the fine conception of the character, but the old lady, full of ancient dramatic memories, declared that, compared with Mrs. Pritchard and Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Siddons’s grief was the grief of a cheesemonger’s wife. Miss Hawkins is the authority for this anecdote, the weak point in which is that in Lady Macbeth the player is not called upon to exhibit any illustration of grief.
We have said that Kean never had a superior in certain parts. Elliston considered himself to be superior in one point; and by referring to some particular shortcoming in other actors Elliston contrived to establish himself as _facile princeps_ of dramatic geniuses--in his own opinion. This we gather from Moncrieff, whom Elliston urged to become his biographer. He would not interfere with Moncrieff’s treatment of the subject. ‘I will simply call your attention, my dear fellow,’ said Elliston, ‘to three points, which you _may_ find worthy of notice, when you draw your parallels of great actors. Garrick could not sing; I can. Lewis could not act tragedy; I can. Mossop could not play comedy; I can. Edmund Kean never wrote a drama; I have.’ In the last comparison Elliston was altogether out. In the cheap edition of ‘Their Majesties’ Servants’ I have inserted a copy of a bill put up by Kean, in 1811, at York, in the ball-room of the Minster Yard of which city Edmund Kean and his young wife announced a two nights’ performance of scenes from plays, imitations, and songs, the whole enacted by the poor strolling couple. In that bill Mr. Kean is described as ‘late of the Theatres Royal, Haymarket and Edinburgh, and author of “The Cottage Foundling, or Robbers of Ancona,” now preparing for immediate representation at the theatre Lyceum.’ We never heard of this representation having taken place. Hundreds of French dramas once came into the cheap book market from the Lyceum, where they had been examined for the purpose of seeing whether any of them could be made useful in English dresses. Some of them undoubtedly were. Kean’s manuscript drama may still be lying among the Arnold miscellanies; if found, we can only hope that the owner will make over ‘The Cottage Foundling _and_ the Robbers of Ancona’ to the Dramatic College. The manuscript would be treasured there as long as the College itself lasts. How long that will be we cannot say; probably as long as the College serves its present profitable purpose. We could wish that the _emeriti_ players had a more lively lookout. A view from its doorway over the heath is as cheerful as that of an empty house to the actor who looks through the curtain at it on his benefit night!
Edmund Kean’s loss has not been supplied as Mrs. Siddons’s was, to a certain extent, and to that actress’s great distaste, by Miss O’Neill; but Drury Lane has flourished with and by its Christmas pantomimes. Audiences cannot be what they were in Mr. Planché’s younger days. They examine no coin that is offered to them. They take what glitters as real currency, and are content. When we were told the other day of a player at the Gaiety representing Job Thornberry in a moustache, we asked if the pit did not shave him clean out of the comedy? Job Thornberry in a moustache! ‘Well,’ was the rejoinder, ‘he only follows suit. He imitates the example of Mr. Sothern, who played Garrick in a moustache.’ We were silent, and thought of the days when actors dressed their characters from portraits, as William Farren did his Frederick and his Charles XII.
If Mr. Planché’s book had not been as suggestive as it is purely historical we should not have been so long coming to it. But he records a fact or makes a reflection, and straightway a reader, who has long memories of books or men, goes far back into older records in search of contrasts or of parallels. We come to him now definitely, and do not again mean to let him go, as far as his dramatic experiences are concerned. Mr. Planché makes even his birth _theatrical_; he says, ‘I believe I made my first appearance in Old Burlington Street on the 27th of February, 1796, about the time the farce begins’ (used to begin?) ‘at the Haymarket, that is, shortly after one o’clock in the morning.’ The Haymarket season, however, ran at that time only from June to September. In spite of ourselves, Mr. Planché’s record of his birth leads us to a subject that is, however, in connection with the record. We find that Mr. Planché was not only of the Kemble and Kean periods, since which time the stage has been ‘nothing’ especial, but that he was born under both. On the night of his birth John Kemble played Manly in ‘The Plain Dealer,’ with a cast further including Jack Bannister, the two Palmers, Dodd, Suett, and Mrs. Jordan! Think of the dolls and puppets and groups of sticks whom people are now asked to recognise as artists, and who gain more in a night than the greatest of the above-named players earned in a week. A few nights later Edmund Kean, if he himself is to be credited rather than theatrical biographers, made his first appearance on any stage as the ‘Robber’s Boy’ on the first night the ‘Iron Chest’ was acted--a play in which the boy was destined to surpass, in Sir Edward Mortimer, the original representative, John Kemble. At the other house little Knight, the father of the present secretary of the Royal Academy, made his _début_ in London; and the father of Mr. Macready was playing _utility_ with a finish that, if he were alive to do it now, would entitle him to a name on ‘posters’ three feet high, and to the sarcasm of managers, who readily pay comedians who ‘draw’ and laugh at _them_ and at the public who are drawn by them. But here is Mr. Planché waiting.
Well! he seems to have been backward in speaking; though he says, as a proof to the contrary, that he spoke Rolla’s speech to his soldiers shortly after he had found his own. ‘Pizarro,’ we will observe, was not produced till 1799, and was not printed _then_. But, on the other hand, Mr. Planché, like Pope, seems to have lisped in numbers, for at ten he wrote odes, sonnets, and particularly an address to the Spanish patriots, which he describes as ‘really terrible to listen to.’ When he passed into his teens, the serious question of life turned up. He could not be made to be a watchmaker, the calling of his good father, a French refugee. Barrister, artist, geometrician, cricketer, were vocations which were considered and set aside. His tutor in geometry died before the pupil could discover the quadrature of the circle; and the other callings not seeming to give him a chance, Mr. Planché bethought himself that, as he was fond of writing, he was especially qualified to become a bookseller. It was while he was learning this _métier_ that his dramatic propensities were further developed. They had begun early; he had been ‘bribed to take some nasty stuff when an urchin, on one occasion, by the present of a complete harlequin’s suit, mask, wand, and all, and on another by that of a miniature theatre and strong company of pasteboard actors,’ in whose control he enjoyed what Charles Dickens longed to possess--a theatre given up to him, with absolute despotic sway, to do what he liked with, house, actors and pieces, monarch of all he surveyed. Mr. Kent has published this ‘longing’ in his ‘Charles Dickens as a Reader,’ and added one shadow on Dickens’s character to the many which Mr. Forster has made public, and which thoughtful biographers ought to have suppressed. We allude
## particularly to where Dickens describes his mother as advertising to
receive young ladies as pupils in a boarding school, without having the means to make preparations for their reception; also his showing-up of his own father as Micawber; and above all, his recording that he never had forgiven and never would forgive his mother for wishing him to go back to his humble work at the blacking-maker’s instead of to school. The light which thoughtless worshippers place before their favourite saint often blackens him at least as much as it does him honour.
While under articles with the bookseller Mr. Planché amused himself as amateur actor at the then well-known private theatres in Berwick Street, Catherine Street, Wilton Street, and Pancras Street. The autobiographer says he there ‘murdered many principal personages of the acting drama in company with several accomplices who have since risen to deserved distinction upon the public boards.’ He adds, the probability, had he continued his line of art, of his becoming by this time ‘a very bad actor, had not “the sisters three and such odd branches of learning” occasioned me by the merest accident to become an indifferent dramatist.’ He says jocosely that finding nothing in Shakespeare or Sheridan worthy of him, he wrote for amateurs the burlesque entitled ‘Amoroso, King of Little Britain,’ which one of the company showed to Harley, who at once put it on the stage of Drury Lane in April 1818. There, night after night, Queen Coquetinda stabbed Mollidusta, King Amoroso stabbed the Queen, Roastando stabbed Amoroso, who however stabbed _his_ stabber, the too amorous cook--all to excellent music and capitally acted, whether in the love-making, the killing, or the recovery. Drury Lane Theatre is described by Mr. Planché as being at the time ‘in a state of absolute starvation.’ Yet it was a season in which Kean led in tragedy and Elliston in comedy, and David Fisher played Richard and Hamlet as rival to the former, and little Clara Fisher acted part of Richard the Third in ‘Lilliput.’ Drury Lane had not had so good a company for years; and besides revived pieces of sterling merit it brought out ‘Rob Roy the Gregarach,’ and the ‘Falls of Clyde;’ and Kean played Othello and Richard, Hamlet and Reuben Glenroy, Octavian and Sir Giles, Shylock and Luke, Sir Edward Mortimer and King John, Oroonoko, Richard Plantagenet (‘Richard Duke of York’), and Selim (‘Bride of Abydos’); Barabbas (‘Jew of Malta’), Young Norval, Bertram, and, for his benefit, Alexander the Great, Sylvester Daggerwood, and Paul in ‘Paul and Virginia.’ Nevertheless the success of ‘Amoroso’ was the _popular_ feature of that Drury Lane season. It made Mr. Planché become a dramatist in earnest. ‘At this present date,’ he says, ‘I have put upon the stage, of one description and another, seventy-six pieces.’
_A LINE OF FRENCH ACTRESSES._
The English stage has not been wanting in an illustrious line of right royal queens of tragedy. Mrs. Barry is the noble founder, and perhaps the noblest queen of that brilliant line. Then came Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Spranger Barry (Mrs. Crawford), Mrs. Siddons (who hated Mrs. Crawford for not abdicating), and Miss O’Neill, whom Mrs. Siddons equally disliked for coming after her.
With all these the lovers of dramatic literature are well acquainted. Of the contemporary line of French tragedy queens very little is known in this country; nevertheless the dynasty is one of great brilliancy, and the details are not without much dramatic interest.
In the year 1644, in the city of Rouen, there lived a family named Desmares, which family was increased in that year by the birth of a little girl who was christened Marie. Corneille, born in the same city, was then eight-and-thirty years of age. Rouen is now proud of both of them--poet and actress. The actress is only known to fame by her married name. The clever Marie Desmares became the wife of the player, Champmeslé. Monsieur was to Madame very much what poor Mr. Siddons was to his illustrious consort. Madame, or Mademoiselle, or _La_ Champmeslé, as she was called indifferently, associated with Corneille by their common birth-place, was more intimately connected with Racine, who was her senior by five years. La Champmeslé was in her twenty-fifth year when she made her _début_ in Paris as Hermione, in Racine’s masterpiece, ‘Andromaque.’ For a long time Paris could talk of nothing but the new tragedy and the new actress. The part from which the piece takes its name was acted by Mdlle. Duparc, whom Racine had carried off from Molière’s company. The author was very much interested in this lady, the wife of a M. Duparc. Madame was, when a widow, the mother of a very posthumous child indeed. The mother died. She was followed to the grave by a troop of the weeping adorers of her former charms, ‘and,’ says Racine, alluding to himself, ‘the most interested of them was half dead as he wept.’
The poet was aroused from his grief by a summons from the king, who, in presence of the sensitive Racine’s bitterest enemy, Louvois, accused him of having robbed and poisoned his late mistress. The accusation was founded on information given by the infamous woman, Voisin, who was a poisoner by passion and profession, and was executed for her devilish practices. The information was found to be utterly false, and Racine, absolved, soon found consolation and compensation.
He became the master of La Champmeslé, and taught her how to play the heroines of the dramas which he wrote expressly for her. She, in her turn, became the mistress of her tutor. Of his teaching indeed she stood in little need, except to learn from him his ideas and object, as author of the play. She was not only sublime, but La Champmeslé was the first sublime actress that had hitherto appeared on the French stage. Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter:--
La Champmeslé is something so extraordinary that you have never seen anything like it in all your life. One goes to hear the actress, and not the play. I went to see ‘Ariadne’ for her sake alone. The piece is inspired: the players execrable. But as soon as La Champmeslé comes upon the stage a murmur of gladness runs throughout the house, and the tears of the audience flow at her despair.
The magic of the actress lured Madame de Sévigné’s son, the young Marquis, from the side of Ninon de l’Enclos. ‘He is nothing but a pumpkin fricasseed in snow,’ said the perennial beauty. After the young nobleman thought proper to inform his mother of the interest he took in La Champmeslé, Madame de Sévigné was so proud that she wrote and spoke of her son’s mistress as her daughter-in-law! To her own daughter she wrote as follows of the representation of Racine’s ‘Bajazet,’ in which La Champmeslé acted Roxane:
The piece appeared to me fine. My daughter-in-law seemed to me the most miraculously good actress I had ever seen; a hundred thousand times better than Des Œillets; and I, who am allowed to be a very fair player, am not worthy of lighting the candles for her to act by. Seen near, she is plain, and I am not astonished that my son was ‘choked’ at his first interview with her; but when she breaks into verse she is adorable. I wish you could have come with us after dinner; you would not have been bored. You would probably have shed one little tear, since I let fall a score. You would have admired your sister-in-law.
Two months later the mother sent to her daughter a copy of the piece, and wrote: ‘If I could send you La Champmeslé with it you would admire it, but without her it loses half its value.’