FOOTNOTES:
[58] Brady was in no sense a professional dramatic author.
[59] I doubt if Dilke is correctly included in this category.
[60] A grocer. (Johnson's Lives of the Poets.)
[61] Southerne is said to have been at Oxford and Dublin Universities.
[62] This is a quotation from Rymer's second work, "A Short View of Tragedy," published in 1693.
[63] Whether Davenant altered "Julius Cæsar" is somewhat doubtful.
[64] Congreve (ed. 1774) merely says that it was regular.
[65] "Steal me another such."
MRS. CENTLIVRE.
[CHAPTER XI.]
THE DRAMATIC AUTHORESSES.
During this half century, there were seven ladies who were more or less distinguished as writers for the stage. These were the virtuous Mrs. Philips, the audacious Aphra Behn, the not less notorious Mrs. Manley, the gentle and learned Mrs. Cockburn, the rather aristocratic Mrs. Boothby (of whom nothing is known but that she wrote one play, called "Marcatia,"[66] in 1669), fat Mrs. Pix, and that thorough Whig, Mrs. Centlivre. The last four also belong to the beginning of the eighteenth century; and three at least apologised that they, women as they were, should have ventured to become dramatists.
The "virtuous Mrs. Philips," of Evelyn, the "matchless Orinda," of Cowley and other poets, translated the "Pompey" and "Horace" of Corneille. In those grave pieces, represented at court in the early years of the Restoration, the poetess endeavoured to direct the popular taste, and to correct it also. Had she not died (of small-pox, and in the thirty-third year of her age), she might have set such example to the playwrights as the Bettertons did to the actors; but her good intentions were frustrated, and her place was unhappily occupied by the most shameless woman who ever took pen in hand, designedly to corrupt the public.
Aphra Behn was a Kentish woman, whose early years were passed at Surinam, where her father, Johnson, had resided, as lieutenant-general.[67] After a wild training in that fervid school, she repaired to London, married a Dutchman, named Behn, who seems to have straightway disappeared,—penetrated, by means of her beauty, to the court of Charles II.,—and obtained, by means of her wit, an irregular employment at Antwerp,—that of a spy. The letters of her Dutch lovers belong to romance; but there is warrant for the easy freedom of this woman's life. In other respects she was unfortunate. On her return to England, her political reports and prophecies were no more credited than the monitions of old, by Cassandra; so she abandoned England to its fate, and herself "to pleasure and the muses."
Her opportunities for good were great, but she abused them all. She might have been an honour to womanhood;—she was its disgrace. She might have gained glory by her labours;—but she chose to reap infamy. Her pleasures were not those which became an honest woman; and as for her "Muses," she sat not with them on the slopes of Helicon, but dragged them down to her level, where the Nine and their unclean votary wallowed together in the mire.
There is no one that equals this woman in downright nastiness, save Ravenscroft and Wycherley; but the latter of these had more originality of invention and grace of expression. To these writers, and to those of their detestable school, she set a revolting example. Dryden preceded her, by a little, on the stage; but Mrs. Behn's trolloping muse appeared there before the other two writers I have mentioned, and was still making unseemly exhibition there after the coming of Congreve. With Dryden she vied in indecency, and was not overcome. To all other male writers of her day she served as a provocation and an apology. Intellectually, she was qualified to have led them through pure and bright ways; but she was a mere harlot, who danced through uncleanness, and dared or lured them to follow. Remonstrance was useless with this wanton hussey. As for her private life, it has found a champion in a female friend, whose precious balsam breaks the head it would anoint. According to this friend, Mrs. Behn had numerous good qualities; but "she was a woman of sense, and consequently loved pleasure;" and she was "more gay and free than the modesty of the precise will allow."
Of Aphra Behn's eighteen plays, produced between 1671 and 1696,—before which last year, however, she had died,—but few are original. They are adaptations from Marlowe, from Wilkins, from Killigrew, from Brome, from Tatham, from Shirley, from the Italian comedy, from Molière, and more legitimately from the old romances. She adapted skilfully; and she was never dull. But then, all her vivacity is wasted on filth. When the public sent forth a cry of horror at some of the scenes in her play of "The Lucky Chance," she vindicated herself by asking, "was she not loyal?"—"Tory to the back bone;"—had she not made the King's enemies ridiculous, in her five-act farces;—and had she not done homage to the King, by dedicating her "Feigned Courtezans" to Nell Gwyn, and styling that worthy sister of hers in vice and good nature so perfect a creature as to be something akin to divinity?
For Mrs. Manley there was more excuse. That poor daughter of an old royalist had some reason to depict human nature as bad in man and in woman. The young orphan trusted herself to the guardianship of a seductive kinsman, who married her when he had a wife still living. This first wrong destroyed her, but not her villainous cousin; and unfortunately, the woman upon whom the world looked cool, incurred the capricious compassion of the Duchess of Cleveland. When the caprice was over, and Mrs. Manley had only her own resources to rely upon, she scorned the aid offered her by General Tidcombe, and made her first venture for the stage in the tragedy of "Royal Mischief," produced at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, in 1696. It is all desperate love, of a very bad quality, and indiscriminate murder, relieved by variety in the mode of killing; one unfortunate gentleman, named Osman, being thrust into a cannon and fired from it, after which his wife, Selima, is said to be
"Gathering the smoking relics of her lord!"
The authoress in her next venture, in the same year, a comedy, written in a week, and which perished in a night, "The Lost Lover," introduced what the public had been taught to appreciate—a virtuous wife. Her other pieces, written at intervals of ten years, were, "Almyna," founded on the story of the Caliph who was addicted to marrying one day, and beheading his wife the next; and "Lucius," a semi-sacred play, on the supposed first Christian king of Britain—both unsuccessful.
Mrs. Manley survived till 1724. When not under the "protection" of a friend, or in decent mourning for the lovers who died mad for her, she was engaged in composing the Memoirs of the New Atalantis,—a satire against the Whig ministry, the authorship of which she courageously avowed, rather than that the printer and publisher should suffer for her. The Tory ministry which succeeded, employed her pen; and with Swift's Alderman Barber,—he being Tory printer, she resided till her death, mistress of the house, and of the alderman.
Contemporary with Mrs. Manley was Miss Trotter, the daughter of a Scottish officer, but better known as Mrs. Cockburn, wife and widow of an English clergyman. She was at first a very learned young lady, whose speculations took her to the Church of Rome, from which in later years she seceded. She was but seventeen, when, in 1696, her sentimental tragedy, "Agnes de Castro," was played at Drury Lane. Her career, as writer for the stage, lasted ten years, during which she produced five pieces, all of a sentimental but refined class,—illustrating love, friendship, repentance, and conjugal faith. There is some amount of word-spinning in these plays; and this is well marked by Genest's comment on Mrs. Cockburn's "Revolution of Sweden,"—namely, that if Constantia, in the third act, had been influenced by common sense, she would have spoiled the remainder of the play.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Cockburn was a clever woman, and kept no dull household, though she there wrote a defence of Locke, while her reverend husband was pursuing an account of the Mosaic deluge. As a metaphysical and controversial writer, she gathered laurels and abuse in her day, for the latter of which she found compensation in the friendship and admiration of Warburton. She was a valiant woman too; one whom asthma and the ills of life could not deter from labour. But death relieved her from all these in 1749; and she is remembered in the history of literature as a good and well-accomplished woman—the very opposite of Mrs. Behn and all her heroines.
Fat Mrs. Pix enjoyed a certain sort of vogue from 1696 to 1709.[68] She came from Oxfordshire, was the daughter of a clergyman, was married to a Mr. Pix, and was a woman of genius, and much flesh. She wrote eleven plays, but not one of them has survived to our time. Her comedies are, however, full of life; her tragedies more than brimful of loyalty; later dramatists have not disdained to pick up some of Mrs. Pix's forgotten incidents; and indeed, contemporary playwrights stole her playful lightning, if not her thunder; her plots were not ill conceived, but they were carried out by inexpressive language, some of her tragedies being in level prose, and some mixtures of rhyme and blank verse. She herself occasionally remodelled an old play, but did not improve it; while, when she trusted to herself, at least in a farcical sort of comedy, she was bustling and humorous. Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Cockburn, and Mrs. Pix were ridiculed in a farce called the "Female Wits," their best endowments satirised, and their peculiarities mimicked. The first and last of those ladies represented some of their dramas as written by men, a subterfuge to which a greater than either of them was also obliged to resort, namely, Susanna Centlivre.
Susanna Freeman was her maiden name. She was the orphan daughter of a stout but hardly-dealt with parliamentarian, and of a mother who died too early for the daughter's remembrance. Anthony Hammond is said to have been in love with her, a nephew of Sir Stephen Fox to have married her, and a Captain Carrol to have left her a widow—all before she was well out of her teens. Thus she had passed through a school of experience, and to turn it to account, Susanna Carrol began writing for the stage. Writing for—and acting on it, for we find her in 1706 playing "Alexander the Great" at Windsor, where she also married Mr. Centlivre, Queen Anne's chief cook.
Of Mrs. Centlivre's nineteen plays, three at least are still well known, the "Busy Body," the "Wonder," and "A Bold Stroke for a Wife." When she offered the first to the players—it was her ninth play—the actors unanimously denounced it. Wilks, who had hitherto been unaccustomed to the want of straining after wit, the common sense, the unforced sprightliness, the homely nature, for which this piece is distinguished—declared that not only would it be "damned," but that the author of it could hardly expect to avoid a similar destiny;[69] and yet its triumph was undoubted, though cumulative.
Hitherto the authoress had written a tragi-comedy or two, the comic scenes in which alone gave evidence of strength, but not always of delicacy. She had, in others, stolen wholesale from Molière, and the old English dramatists. She produced a continuation to the "Busy Body" in "Marplot," but we do not care for it; and it is not till her fourteenth piece, the "Wonder," appeared in 1714, that she again challenges admiration. This, too, is an adaptation; but it is superior to the "Wrangling Lovers," from which it is partly taken, and which had no such hero as the Don Felix of Wilks. The "Bold Stroke for a Wife" was first played in 1718, when the Tory public had forgiven the author for her satires against them, and the theatrical public her fresh adaptations of old scenes and stories. The "Bold Stroke for a Wife" is entirely her own, and has had a wonderful succession of Colonel Feignwells, from C. Bullock down to Mr. Braham! This piece, however, was but moderately successful; but it has such vivacity, fun, and quiet humour in it, that it has outlived many a one that began with greater triumph, and in "the real Simon Pure," first acted by Griffin, it has given a proverb to the English language. One other piece, the "Artifice," a five-act farce, played in 1722, concludes the list of plays from the pen of this industrious and gifted woman.
Mrs. Centlivre had unobtrusive humour, sayings full of significance rather than wit, wholesome fun in her comic, and earnestness in her serious, characters. Mrs. Centlivre, in her pictures of life, attracts the spectator. There may be, now and then, something, as in Dutch pictures, which had been as well away; but this apart, all the rest is true, and pleasant, and hearty; the grouping perfect, the colour faithful, and enduring too—despite the cruel sneer of Pope, who, in the Life of Curll, sarcastically alludes to her as "the cook's wife in Buckingham Court," in which vicinity to Spring Gardens, Mrs. Centlivre died in 1723.
Such were the characteristics of the principal authors who led, followed, trained, or flattered the public taste of the last half of the seventeenth century, and a few of them of the first part of the century which succeeded. Before we pass onward to the stage of the eighteenth century, let us cast a glance back, and look at the quality of the audiences for whom these poets catered.