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book of travels, published in 1611, under the quaint title of "Crudities hastily gobbled up," that the playhouses of France and Italy, particularly in Milan and Venice, were stately and convenient buildings, but still not to be compared to our own in decorative splendour, and the excellence of the performances.

Sir William Davenant, in addition to the charm of real women, introduced scenery, machinery, and dresses of a costly description. Fostered by the Court, and patronized by the nobility, the theatres expanded rapidly in expense, variety, and show, while their moral character sank miserably in the same accelerating ratio. The reign of Charles the Second presents a picture of national profligacy which the historian blushes to record, and the reader sighs to believe. A libertine, unreclaimed by the misfortunes of his family, the fate of his father, or his own early years of banishment and poverty, in the full maturity of manhood, ascended the throne of his ancestors amidst the universal acclamations of the people, and at once surrendered himself up to the unbridled licence of an inherently vicious temperament. He had no dawn of moderation--no opening years of restraint, like Nero; from the beginning to the end his rule and life were marked by riot and debauchery. The higher and lower classes readily imitated the contagious example of the monarch, and the whole nation became abandoned to the grossest immorality. Those tremendous visitings the great plague and fire of London, which occurred during the high season of dissipation, produced no more effect, after they had once passed over, than did the pestilence which decimated the Eastern Empire, more than a thousand years before, under the somewhat congenial reign of Justinian. The arts were prostituted in the cause of licentiousness, and the drama, of course, did not escape the contagion. But the theatre had no prominent share in producing this state of moral debasement. It followed perforce, when it had no power to lead or arrest.

Downes's "Roscius Anglicanus," a small volume, published in 1708, gives us a minute and trustworthy account of all matters connected with the English stage from 1662 to 1766.

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We find from this reliable source that "King Henry the Eighth" was performed at Lincoln's-Inn Fields, in December, 1663, and commanded fifteen successive repetitions. By order of Sir William Davenant, the whole of the characters, including the doctors, proctors, bishops, lawyers and tipstaffs, the guards and beefeaters, were clothed in appropriate and costly habits, and all the scenes were new. Then followed, in 1664, "Henry the Fifth," written by the Earl of Ossory, produced with equal, if not superior show. Harris, as the King, wore the Duke of York's coronation suit, given to him for the purpose; Betterton, as Owen Tudor, figured in Charles the Second's; and Smith, as the Duke of Burgundy, in the Earl of Oxford's. "Mustapha,' by the same author, in 1665, received similar care, and realized vast profit. “Macbeth," altered from Shakespeare by Davenant (unfilial outrage), and "The Tempest," by Shadwell, were given by the Duke's company at Dorset Garden in 1672 and 1673, with complicated machinery, dancing and singing. Of the "Tempest," Downes says "It had all new in it→→ as scenes and mechanical contrivances, particularly one scene painted with myriads of aerial spirits; and another flying away with a table furnished out with fruits, sweetmeats, and all sorts of viands, just when Duke Trinculo and his companions were going to dinner; all things performed in it so admirably well that not any succeeding opera got more money." Of "Psyche," which fol lowed early in 1674, the same faithful chronicler says "This long expected opera came forth in all her ornaments-new scenes, new machines, new clothes, new French dances. It was splendidly set out, especially in scenes, the charge of which amounted to above eight hundred pounds. It had a continuance of performance about eight days, and proved very beneficial to the company. Yet The Tempest' got them more money." And again he tells us of "The Fairy Queen," altered from the "Midsummer Night's Dream," and exhibited by Killigrew at the Theatre Royal in 1692, that “in ornaments it was superior to any that had gone before, especially in clothes for all the singers and dancers; scenes,

machines, and decorations all most profusely set off, and excellently performed, chiefly the instrumental and vocal part, composed by Mr. Purcell, and the dances by Mr. Priest. The court and town were wonderfully satisfied with it, but the expenses in setting it out being so great, the company got very little by it."

From these extracts we gather how speedily mere writing and acting, however excellent, ceased to satisfy the capricious and voracious public; and how soon the managers were compelled to buttress up the higher components of the theatrical art by the aid of what some captious critics of our own day, mourning over the supposed decay of taste and talent, delight in stigmatizing as the property man, the upholsterer, the car penter, and the tailor, as if these legitimate accessories came in only the day before yesterday, and were unknown to our grandfathers.

One more apposite extract and we close the pages of honest Prompter Downes: "In the space of ten years past, Mr. Betterton, to gratify the desires and fancies of the nobility and gentry, procured from abroad the best dancers and singers as Monsieur L'Abbé, Madame Lublini, Monsieur Balon, Margaritu Delpini, Maria Gallia, and divers others who, being exorbitantly expensive, produced small profit to him and his company, but vast gain to themselves-Madame Delpini, since her arrival in England, by modest computation, having got by the stage and gentry ten thousand pounds."

To John Rich, manager of Lincoln's-Inn Fields, and subsequently of Covent Garden, we owe the intro duction of pantomimes on the English stage, where they have ever since maintained their popularity until they have become a national institution. The superior acting of the company. at Drury Lane thinned his benches, and elongated the face of his treasurer, until he drew upon his inventive genius for this new and seductive variety. He began with some detached harlequinades, after the Italian style, and on the 20th of December, 1723, produced his first grand and complete pantomime, entitled "The Necromancer, or the History of Dr. Faustus." Something of the kind, under the same name,

had been attempted already at Drury Lane by Thommond, a dancingmaster, but Rich soon sunk him by superior weight of metal. Rich was long considered without a rival as harlequin, under the name of Lun, but his successor, Woodward, at the opposite house, was held by many to tread closely on his heels.

Although large sums were expended on dresses, it was long before ap propriate costume was adopted, or correctness in that department cared for. The pictures in the Garrick Club, the engravings to Rowe's and Bell's Shakespeare, and to a series of plays published by Wenman and Harrison from 1777 to 1780, appear authentic and extraordinary speci mens of the eccentricities in dress in which the mistaken taste of the actors indulged, and the ignorance or supineness of the public encouraged. Betterton, Booth, and Quin discharged the duties of Othello in the scarlet uniform of a British general officer of the time, bearing on their heads an enormous white turban, and with their faces redolent of oil and lampblack, sooty and shining like those of the Christy Minstrels. It is recorded of one of these celebrated "lights of other days," we forget precisely which that in his placid dignity, during the earlier scenes of the noble Moor, he wore white gloves, which, when the passion of the character unfolded itself, he tore franticly off, and tossed abroad his inky digits. The retailer of the anecdote adds that the public considered this a decided stroke of genius. In the great revival of

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Henry the Eighth," at the Princess's, when Wolsey crosses the stage in his first procession, the actor, illustrating a biographical fact, bore in his right hand a hollow orange, charged with aromatics, which he ever and anon" carried to his nose as an antidote against infection. The galleries, not having studied Cavendish, thought he was sucking the orange, and received it as a touch of nature."

Garrick's costume in Macbeth, as we see in Toffany's painting of the murder scene, represents a blue, fullskirted coat, red waistcoat, and small clothes, heavily plastered with gold lace, suggestive of the Lord Mayor's coachman on a gala-day. When

Macklin, in his old age, drivelled through the truculent Thane, he arrayed himself in plaid and philibeg, kilt and hose, with a cap surmounted by ostrich feathers, nodding like the plumes of a hearse, or the head-gear of a soldier in a Highland regiment; while the rest of the characters, including his brother-general, Banquo, wore the traditionary court-suits. Macklin's researches in re vestiaria, were as loose as Garrick's-clan tartans not having been introduced into Scotland until ages after the reign of Macbeth. Hogarth's portrait of Garrick in Richard the Third, shows us that he wore a dress not unlike that of Cook, fifty years later; the remainder of the dramatis persona retaining the full costume of George the Second's time. Garrick introduced great improvements in many respects, although his literary vanity induced him to take unpardonable liberties with Shakespeare's text. John Kemble did the same, leaving it for Macready, Phelps, and Charles Kean to restore the true text, and abrogate spurious interpolations. Kemble's togas were considered models of classical propriety, until the opening of the continent, on the conclusion of the great war, showed the superiority of Talmas, which were thenceforward adopted, even by Charles, the brother of John, and their predecessors consigned to the limbo of oblivion.

When Kemble played Reuben Glenroy, he appeared in an evening suit of the day (1807); but, being a Welsh mountaineer, thought it well to place on his head a fur cap, resembling the busby of a modern hussar, and to carry a long pole in his hand. His garb in Penruddock, on the contrary, was truthful and characteristic. In the early scenes of Posthumus, in "Cymbeline," when the action is supposed to pass in the second or third century of the Christian era, he wore a semi-modern tunic, trimmed with spangles, a tuft, tight white pantaloons, and boots of russet leather. In the fifth act, he went back to the war-panoply of Coriolanus or Brutus. During the whole of the Garrick age, the queens and heroines, whether Pagan or Christian, Greek, Roman, French, or English, arrayed themselves in hoops, flounces, furbelows, embroidered petticoats, and three-decked

head-dresses. Some of the coeval caricatures represent the hair-dresser mounted on a ladder. Andromache wore black satin shoes, and Hermione white ones. Henderson was singularly regardless of adventitious aid from costume. It is stated in Ireland's memoirs, that he played twelve different characters in the same dress. We have heard, but although sufficiently "declined into the vale of years," we cannot vouch the fact of our own knowledge, that George Frederic Cooke, the original Peregrine, in "John Bull," temp. 1803, who is supposed to have escaped from a sinking Indiaman by swimming ashore, made his entry on Muckslash Heath in a light-green coat, white waistcoat, and nankeen unmentionables, with his hair powdered and en queue. It is true, he might have refitted himself at a slop-shop on the way, had he met one, but this contingency is negatived by the text.

Those were halcyon days for managers, when a comedy with Morton, Reynolds, or Colman, ran through a whole season, and required no costly adjuncts, nothing beyond half-a-dozen modern suits, and a pair or two of flats, representing a street, a parlour, or a drawing-room. But this golden age passed too rapidly into history. The public soon grow tired of toujours perdrix, and ery for varied and more exciting food. The caterers must supply it or close their houses of entertainment. It is not to be believed that any manager unqualified for Bedlam or St. Luke's, would voluntarily expend thousands, if the outlay of a ten-pound note would answer the same purpose.

John Kemble's Shakespearean revivals were produced at an enormous expenditure, which seldom or never came back in full to the treasury. Meanwhile, the play-going public wondered and adinired. Such combinations of genius, taste, and erudition had never been seen before, and were not expected to be witnessed again. But even in that “age of the giants," as it has been often called, the Covent Garden authorities were driven to live horses and elephants, and to infantine Roscii and Rosciæ; while Sheridan was saved from impending bankruptcy at Drury-lane, by the feats of the renowned Newfoundland dog, Carlo. The leap of

that sagacious quadruped from a lofty rock, and his plunge into real water, from whence he emerged with a half-drowned child in his mouth; as also the astounding grace and courage with which Mrs. Henry Johnston, as Torilda, in "Timour the Tartar," galloped a gallant charger across a tottering drawbridge, and through ruins smoking with the combustion of war, were "sensation effects of half a century ago; and not even surpassed in 1863 by the 46 tremendous header of Mr. Dion Boucicault, in the "Colleen Bawn."

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In 1823-4, at Drury-lane, in the grand aquatic spectacle of "the Cataract of the Ganges," Miss Lydia Kelly, represented by one of Ducrow's light weights, in a veil and female drapery, dashed up a perpendicularlooking precipice, on a fiery steed, down which the torrent frothed and foamed the gods in the upper regions shouting with ecstasy, and half expecting that the pit and boxes would be inundated.

A remarkable instance of the triumph of the spurious over the legitimate, occurred in Dublin, when "Tom Thumb" visited the Irish metropolis. After the public had been drawn in shoals to the Rotunda for many successive weeks, and the phenomenon was supposed to have become stale he was engaged for one night only at the Theatre Royal, and was put, upon a Friday, between two of the most attractive perform ances of a favourite visitor. The "General will beat him out of the field," said Barnum; and he proved a true prophet, the one receipt to the manikin nearly equalling the two to the fullgrown star.

Charles Kemble, who in due succession, inherited the managerial sceptre of Covent Garden, again resuscitated several of Shakespeare's finest plays, with costumes and appurtenances totally different from those of his illustrious brother. In these he was assisted by one of the best informed and most accurate of our professed antiquaries, Mr. Planché, who also held sway in the councils of Madame Vestris, and had much to do with the series of fascinating "burlesques," and elegant drawing-room comedies, which so profusely illustrated her rule at the Olympic, and the more spacious temple in Bow-street.

Purely scenic effects, about the same time, were carried to a height of perfection which the last century had never dreamed of. Dioramas by Stanfield, Roberts, the Greens, and Tolbin, converted the theatres in which they were exhibited into schools of painting and national galleries. Yet the elders talked of the pictorial wonders produced by Greenwood and Mariani, and of a scene by Loutherbourg, painted for De Montfort, at Drury-lane, 1800, representing the chief aisle of a church or cathedral, which perhaps has never been exceeded, and might still have gladdened admiring eyes, as the proprietors intended to preserve it as an heir-loom, had it not perished when Wolland's beautiful structure fell a victim to fire, after a short life of only fifteen years, on the night of the 24th of February, 1809.

When Mr. Macready entered on management at Covent Garden, one of his first great achievements was "Coriolanus," announced from the text of Shakespeare, but still retaining the last act as compounded by Thompson and the elder Sheridan, and which John Kemble had also preferred, as more effective. This was a mistake in taste, and an unskilful mystification easily detected, which such a zealous reformer and influential artist could scarcely have been expected to fall into. The writer of this notice, on the first night, happened to sit next to a nobleman of high rank and literary attainments, with whom he was acquainted. At the end of the third act, he asked, "How do you like this?" "Infinitely," was the reply; "it is all as delightful as it is new. "I think so too," he rejoined; "but I can scarcely distinguish Coriolanus" meaning that the pageantry overlaid the acting. Nothing could exceed the accuracy of detail and lifelike reality with which the procession, mobs, senate, and armies were grouped. A waggish, if not a malicious critic, said, in one of the papers, that Roman noses were supplied from the property room to all the characters, down to the supernumeraries inclusive, who lacked that prominent feature. This was pure invention, though some affected to believe it. Mr. Macready carried on his plans with increasing energy and outlay, during his subsequent short management at Drury

lane; but it was always understood that he gained more reputation than bank stock.

Mr. Phelps, the most celebrated disciple and follower of the Macready school, by the force of individual talent and perseverance, converted the spectacle-loving, and peculiarly aquatic audience of Sadler's Wells into fervent worshippers of Shakespeare. He too retired, and why? Was it that he had exhausted his repertoire, or that he found the returns inadequate to the cost and labour?

Mr. C. Kean's restorations of Shakespeare at the Princess's are too recent to require elaborate comment. What ever might be the exceptional carpings of personal prejudice or pique, ill or well founded, public opinion, in an overwhelming majority, pronounced them to be the most perfect scenic exhibitions that had ever been submitted to public judgment, when considered in their entirety, and with regard to all the complicated attributes and appliances of the art theatrical. But however Mr. C. Kean may have increased his fame and proved his devotion to high art, we have his own assurance, in his farewell speech on resigning management, that "the cost had been far too great for the limited arena in which it was incurred," and that "he had been no gainer in a commercial sense.' Where are these glorious illustrations now? Buried in the tomb of the Capulets, and not likely to be disinterred even if future speculators should combine the genius and resources of the original reviver. In a few weeks they ceased to be themes of conversation; in as many months they were forgotten; and in little more than a year, on the same boards, a French actor, with foreign idiom, accent, and cadence, drew eighty or ninety overflowing audiences to a representation of Hamlet, startling indeed by its novelty and daring, but destitute of the true Shakespearean essence alike in thought and execution.

On the 13th of November, 1802, the British public became acquainted with the "sensation melodrama," a hybrid of French origin, which soon became indigenous on our soil, and has flourished ever since with expanding vigour, until it bids fair to become the type and enduring exponent of our national stage. The

"Tale of Mystery," the first, and long considered the best exemplar of its class, was produced at Covent Garden Theatre, at the date above named. It took the town by storm, ran thirtyseven nights, was acted in every theatre in the kingdom, and continued a stock favourite for many years. If revived now, it would, in all probability, be considered a tame affair. The author, Thomas Holcroft, was a voluminous writer of plays and novels, and attained a considerable literary reputation. But he studied and admired the wild theories of the French Revolution, and found time to become a political demagogue on a small scale, and an incipient radical. The most notable action of his lifeexcept perhaps, his courage in marrying four wives-was his voluntary surrender to the indictment for high treason, preferred against him in the autumn of 1794. Such a step, after the Grand Jury had decided that the accused parties should be tried for their lives, was certainly an impressive demonstration of conscious innocence. When Hardy, Horne Tooke, and Thelwall had been acquitted, Holcroft and the other eight were discharged without being put upon their trial. Our author was fond of oratorical display, and had prepared his own defence, which Galt says, in his memoir, "he expected would go down to posterity as something wonderful, at least equal to Paul's before Agrippa;" but he had no opportunity of delivering it. The other persons who were placed at the bar with him, on being liberated, bowed in silence and retired. But Holcroft was determined to make a speech, and the indulgent Chief Justice almost consented to hear him; but he charged half an hour, and was then hustled out of court incontinently.

The conjugation of the verb "to degenerate," in all its moods and tenses, as applied to the dramatic art, is not a tendency of to-day or yesterday. The complaint has existed from early periods. When Lord Byron wrote his famous satire, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," the London boards possessed Mrs. Siddons and the Kembles, Mrs. Jordan, Miss Duncan, Mrs. Glover, Mrs. Gibbs, Mrs. Edwin, Young, Lewis, Elliston, Bannister, Liston, Matthews, Emery, Marsden, Dowton, Jack Johnstone, Fawcett,

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