What more might be said of her as an Actress may be found in the Preface to the Provok'd Husband, to which I refer the Reader.[345]
With the Acquisition, then, of so advanc'd a Comedian as Mrs. Oldfield, and the Addition of one so much in Favour as Wilks, and by the visible Improvement of our other Actors, as Penkethman, Johnson, Bullock, and I think I may venture to name myself in the Number (but in what Rank I leave to the Judgment of those who have been my Spectators) the Reputation of our Company began to get ground; Mrs. Oldfield and Mr. Wilks, by their frequently playing against one another in our best Comedies, very happily supported that Humour and Vivacity which is so peculiar to our English Stage. The French, our only modern Competitors, seldom give us their Lovers in such various Lights: In their Comedies (however lively a People they are by nature) their Lovers are generally constant, simple Sighers, both of a Mind, and equally distress'd about the Difficulties of their coming together; which naturally makes their Conversation so serious that they are seldom good Company to their Auditors: And tho' I allow them many other Beauties of which we are too negligent, yet our Variety of Humour has Excellencies that all their valuable Observance of Rules have never yet attain'd to. By these Advantages, then, we began to have an equal Share of the politer sort of Spectators, who, for several Years, could not allow our Company to stand in any comparison with the other. But Theatrical Favour, like Publick Commerce, will sometimes deceive the best Judgments by an unaccountable change of its Channel; the best Commodities are not always known to meet with the best Markets. To this Decline of the Old Company many Accidents might contribute; as the too distant Situation of their Theatre, or their want of a better, for it was not then in the condition it now is, but small, and poorly fitted up within the Walls of a Tennis Quaree Court, which is of the lesser sort.[346] Booth, who was then a young Actor among them, has often told me of the Difficulties Betterton then labour'd under and complain'd of: How impracticable he found it to keep their Body to that common Order which was necessary for their Support;[347] of their relying too much upon their intrinsick Merit; and though but few of them were young even when they first became their own Masters, yet they were all now ten Years older, and consequently more liable to fall into an inactive Negligence, or were only separately diligent for themselves in the sole Regard of their Benefit-Plays; which several of their Principals knew, at worst, would raise them Contributions that would more than tolerably subsist them for the current Year. But as these were too precarious Expedients to be always depended upon, and brought in nothing to the general Support of the Numbers who were at Sallaries under them, they were reduc'd to have recourse to foreign Novelties; L'Abbeè, Balon, and Mademoiselle Subligny,[348] three of the then most famous Dancers of the French Opera, were, at several times, brought over at extraordinary Rates, to revive that sickly Appetite which plain Sense and Nature had satiated.[349] But alas! there was no recovering to a sound Constitution by those mere costly Cordials; the Novelty of a Dance was but of a short Duration, and perhaps hurtful in its consequence; for it made a Play without a Dance less endur'd than it had been before, when such Dancing was not to be had. But perhaps their exhibiting these Novelties might be owing to the Success we had met with in our more barbarous introducing of French Mimicks and Tumblers the Year before; of which Mr. Rowe thus complains in his Prologue to one of his first Plays:
Must Shakespear, Fletcher, and laborious Ben,
Be left for Scaramouch and Harlequin?[350]
While the Crowd, therefore, so fluctuated from one House to another as their Eyes were more or less regaled than their Ears, it could not be a Question much in Debate which had the better Actors; the Merit of either seem'd to be of little moment; and the Complaint in the foregoing Lines, tho' it might be just for a time, could not be a just one for ever, because the best Play that ever was writ may tire by being too often repeated, a Misfortune naturally attending the Obligation to play every Day; not that whenever such Satiety commences it will be any Proof of the Play's being a bad one, or of its being ill acted. In a word, Satiety is seldom enough consider'd by either Criticks, Spectators, or Actors, as the true, not to say just Cause of declining Audiences to the most rational Entertainments: And tho' I cannot say I ever saw a good new Play not attended with due Encouragement, yet to keep a Theatre daily open without sometimes giving the Publick a bad old one, is more than I doubt the Wit of human Writers or Excellence of Actors will ever be able to accomplish. And as both Authors and Comedians may have often succeeded where a sound Judgment would have condemn'd them, it might puzzle the nicest Critick living to prove in what sort of Excellence the true Value of either consisted: For if their Merit were to be measur'd by the full Houses they may have brought; if the Judgment of the Crowd were infallible; I am afraid we shall be reduc'd to allow that the Beggars Opera was the best-written Play, and Sir Harry Wildair[351] (as Wilks play'd it) was the best acted Part, that ever our English Theatre had to boast of. That Critick, indeed, must be rigid to a Folly that would deny either of them their due Praise, when they severally drew such Numbers after them; all their Hearers could not be mistaken; and yet, if they were all in the right, what sort of Fame will remain to those celebrated Authors and Actors that had so long and deservedly been admired before these were in Being. The only Distinction I shall make between them is, That to write or act like the Authors or Actors of the latter end of the last Century, I am of Opinion will be found a far better Pretence to Success than to imitate these who have been so crowded to in the beginning of this. All I would infer from this Explanation is, that tho' we had then the better Audiences, and might have more of the young World on our Side, yet this was no sure Proof that the other Company were not, in the Truth of Action, greatly our Superiors. These elder Actors, then, besides the Disadvantages I have mention'd, having only the fewer true Judges to admire them, naturally wanted the Support of the Crowd whose Taste was to be pleased at a cheaper Rate and with coarser Fare. To recover them, therefore, to their due Estimation, a new Project was form'd of building them a stately Theatre in the Hay-Market,[352] by Sir John Vanbrugh, for which he raised a Subscription of thirty Persons of Quality, at one hundred Pounds each, in Consideration whereof every Subscriber, for his own Life, was to be admitted to whatever Entertainments should be publickly perform'd there, without farther Payment for his Entrance. Of this Theatre I saw the first Stone laid, on which was inscrib'd The little Whig, in Honour to a Lady of extraordinary Beauty, then the celebrated Toast and Pride of that Party.[353]
In the Year 1706,[354] when this House was finish'd, Betterton and his Co-partners dissolved their own Agreement, and threw themselves under the Direction of Sir John Vanbrugh and Mr. Congreve, imagining, perhaps, that the Conduct of two such eminent Authors might give a more prosperous Turn to their Condition; that the Plays it would now be their Interest to write for them would soon recover the Town to a true Taste, and be an Advantage that no other Company could hope for; that in the Interim, till such Plays could be written, the Grandeur of their House, as it was a new Spectacle, might allure the Crowd to support them: But if these were their Views, we shall see that their Dependence upon them was too sanguine. As to their Prospect of new Plays, I doubt it was not enough consider'd that good ones were Plants of a slow Growth; and tho' Sir John Vanbrugh had a very quick Pen, yet Mr. Congreve was too judicious a Writer to let any thing come hastily out of his Hands: As to their other Dependence, the House, they had not yet discover'd that almost every proper Quality and Convenience of a good Theatre had been sacrificed or neglected to shew the Spectator a vast triumphal Piece of Architecture! And that the best Play, for the Reasons I am going to offer, could not but be under great Disadvantages, and be less capable of delighting the Auditor here than it could have been in the plain Theatre they came from. For what could their vast Columns, their gilded Cornices, their immoderate high Roofs avail, when scarce one Word in ten could be distinctly heard in it? Nor had it then the Form it now stands in, which Necessity, two or three Years after, reduced it to: At the first opening it, the flat Ceiling that is now over the Orchestre was then a Semi-oval Arch that sprung fifteen Feet higher from above the Cornice: The Ceiling over the Pit, too, was still more raised, being one level Line from the highest back part of the upper Gallery to the Front of the Stage: The Front-boxes were a continued Semicircle to the bare Walls of the House on each Side: This extraordinary and superfluous Space occasion'd such an Undulation from the Voice of every Actor, that generally what they said sounded like the Gabbling of so many People in the lofty Isles in a Cathedral—The Tone of a Trumpet, or the Swell of an Eunuch's holding Note, 'tis true, might be sweeten'd by it, but the articulate Sounds of a speaking Voice were drown'd by the hollow Reverberations of one Word upon another. To this Inconvenience, why may we not add that of its Situation; for at that time it had not the Advantage of almost a large City, which has since been built in its Neighbourhood: Those costly Spaces of Hanover, Grosvenor, and Cavendish Squares, with the many and great adjacent Streets about them, were then all but so many green Fields of Pasture, from whence they could draw little or no Sustenance, unless it were that of a Milk-Diet. The City, the Inns of Court, and the middle Part of the Town, which were the most constant Support of a Theatre, and chiefly to be relied on, were now too far out of the Reach of an easy Walk, and Coach-hire is often too hard a Tax upon the Pit and Gallery.[355] But from the vast Increase of the Buildings I have mention'd, the Situation of that Theatre has since that Time received considerable Advantages; a new World of People of Condition are nearer to it than formerly, and I am of Opinion that if the auditory Part were a little more reduced to the Model of that in Drury-Lane, an excellent Company of Actors would now find a better Account in it than in any other House in this populous City.[356] Let me not be mistaken, I say an excellent Company, and such as might be able to do Justice to the best of Plays, and throw out those latent Beauties in them which only excellent Actors can discover and give Life to. If such a Company were now there, they would meet with a quite different Set of Auditors than other Theatres have lately been used to: Polite Hearers would be content with polite Entertainments; and I remember the time when Plays, without the Aid of Farce or Pantomime, were as decently attended as Opera's or private Assemblies, where a noisy Sloven would have past his time as uneasily in a Front-box as in a Drawing-room; when a Hat upon a Man's Head there would have been look'd upon as a sure Mark of a Brute or a Booby: But of all this I have seen, too, the Reverse, where in the Presence of Ladies at a Play common Civility has been set at defiance, and the Privilege of being a rude Clown, even to a Nusance, has in a manner been demanded as one of the Rights of English Liberty: Now, though I grant that Liberty is so precious a Jewel that we ought not to suffer the least Ray of its Lustre to be diminish'd, yet methinks the Liberty of seeing a Play in quiet has as laudable a Claim to Protection as the Privilege of not suffering you to do it has to Impunity. But since we are so happy as not to have a certain Power among us, which in another Country is call'd the Police, let us rather bear this Insult than buy its Remedy at too dear a Rate; and let it be the Punishment of such wrong-headed Savages, that they never will or can know the true Value of that Liberty which they so stupidly abuse: Such vulgar Minds possess their Liberty as profligate Husbands do fine Wives, only to disgrace them. In a Word, when Liberty boils over, such is the Scum of it. But to our new erected Theatre.
Not long before this Time the Italian Opera began first to steal into England,[357] but in as rude a disguise and unlike it self as possible; in a lame, hobling Translation into our own Language, with false Quantities, or Metre out of Measure to its original Notes, sung by our own unskilful Voices, with Graces misapply'd to almost every Sentiment, and with Action lifeless and unmeaning through every Character: The first Italian Performer that made any distinguish'd Figure in it was Valentini, a true sensible Singer at that time, but of a Throat too weak to sustain those melodious Warblings for which the fairer Sex have since idoliz'd his Successors. However, this Defect was so well supply'd by his Action, that his Hearers bore with the Absurdity of his singing his first Part of Turnus in Camilla all in Italian, while every other Character was sung and recited to him in English.[358] This I have mention'd to shew not only our Tramontane Taste, but that the crowded Audiences which follow'd it to Drury-Lane might be another Occasion of their growing thinner in Lincolns-Inn-Fields.
To strike in, therefore, with this prevailing Novelty, Sir John Vanbrugh and Mr. Congreve open'd their new Hay-Market Theatre with a translated Opera to Italian Musick, called the Triumph of Love, but this not having in it the Charms of Camilla, either from the Inequality of the Musick or Voices, had but a cold Reception, being perform'd but three Days, and those not crowded. Immediately upon the Failure of this Opera, Sir John Vanbrugh produced his Comedy call'd the Confederacy,[359] taken (but greatly improv'd) from the Bourgeois à la mode of Dancour: Though the Fate of this Play was something better, yet I thought it was not equal to its Merit:[360] For it is written with an uncommon Vein of Wit and Humour; which confirms me in my former Observation, that the difficulty of hearing distinctly in that then wide Theatre was no small Impediment to the Applause that might have followed the same Actors in it upon every other Stage; and indeed every Play acted there before the House was alter'd seemed to suffer from the same Inconvenience: In a Word, the Prospect of Profits from this Theatre was so very barren, that Mr. Congreve in a few Months gave up his Share and Interest in the Government of it wholly to Sir John Vanbrugh.[361] But Sir John, being sole Proprietor of the House, was at all Events oblig'd to do his utmost to support it. As he had a happier Talent of throwing the English Spirit into his Translation of French Plays than any former Author who had borrowed from them, he in the same Season gave the Publick three more of that kind, call'd the Cuckold in Conceit, from the Cocu imaginaire of Moliere;[362] Squire Trelooby, from his Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, and the Mistake, from the Dépit Amoureux of the same Author.[363] Yet all these, however well executed, came to the Ear in the same undistinguish'd Utterance by which almost all their Plays had equally suffered: For what few could plainly hear, it was not likely a great many could applaud.
It must farther be consider'd, too, that this Company were not now what they had been when they first revolted from the Patentees in Drury-Lane, and became their own Masters in Lincolns-Inn-Fields. Several of them, excellent in their different Talents, were now dead; as Smith, Kynaston, Sandford, and Leigh: Mrs. Betterton and Underhil being, at this time, also superannuated Pensioners whose Places were generally but ill supply'd: Nor could it be expected that Betterton himself, at past seventy, could retain his former Force and Spirit; though he was yet far distant from any Competitor. Thus, then, were these Remains of the best Set of Actors that I believe were ever known at once in England, by Time, Death, and the Satiety of their Hearers, mould'ring to decay.
It was now the Town-talk that nothing but a Union of the two Companies could recover the Stage to its former Reputation,[364] which Opinion was certainly true: One would have thought, too, that the Patentee of Drury-Lane could not have fail'd to close with it, he being then on the Prosperous Side of the Question, having no Relief to ask for himself, and little more to do in the matter than to consider what he might safely grant: But it seems this was not his way of counting; he had other Persons who had great Claims to Shares in the Profits of this Stage, which Profits, by a Union, he foresaw would be too visible to be doubted of, and might raise up a new Spirit in those Adventurers to revive their Suits at Law with him; for he had led them a Chace in Chancery several Years,[365] and when they had driven him into a Contempt of that Court, he conjur'd up a Spirit, in the Shape of Six and eight Pence a-day, that constantly struck the Tipstaff blind whenever he came near him: He knew the intrinsick Value of Delay, and was resolv'd to stick to it as the surest way to give the Plaintiffs enough on't. And by this Expedient our good Master had long walk'd about at his Leisure, cool and contented as a Fox when the Hounds were drawn off and gone home from him. But whether I am right or not in my Conjectures, certain it is that this close Master of Drury-Lane had no Inclination to a Union, as will appear by the Sequel.[366]