With regard to puppets in England, those wooden ladies and gentlemen once figured largely in our church-shows, interludes, and pageants. The names of the puppet masters have come down to us, from Pad, Cookley, Powell, and the daughter of Colley Cibber, to no less a man than Curran, who, taking upon himself, in sport, the charge of a show for one night, found it so easy when speaking for the mute actors to maintain both sides of an argument that he was therefore convinced of his excellent aptitude for the law.
Pepys, as usual, affords us again illustrations of the fashion which attached to puppets in his day. From his brief journalizing we obtain a world of information on this matter. Thus we find him recording:—“12th Nov. 1661. My wife and I to Bartholomew Fayre, with puppets (which I had seen once before, and the play without puppets often); but though I love the play as much as ever I did, yet I do not like the puppets at all, but think it to be a lessening of it.” On the 9th May, in the following year, we find him in Covent Garden, “to see an Italian puppet-play, that is within the rayles there,—the best that ever I saw, and great resort of gallants.” In a fortnight he takes poor Mrs. Pepys to the same play. In October, he says:—“Lord Sandwich is at Whitehall, with the King, before whom the puppet-plays I saw this summer in Covent Garden are acted this night.” On the 30th August, 1667, being with a merry party at Walthamstow, he left his wife to get home as well as she could; he “to Bartholomew Fayre, to walk up and down, and there, among other things, find my Lady Castlemaine at a puppet-play, ‘Patient Grizell,’ and the street full of people expecting her coming out. I confess I did wonder at her courage to come abroad, thinking the people would abuse her; but they, silly people, do not know the work she makes; and therefore suffered her with great respect to take coach, and so away without any trouble at all.”
The last allusion made by Pepys on this subject forms an admirable commentary on the approving ecstasy expressed by the royalists at the lashing which the “Precisians” received at the hands of Lantern’s puppets in Jonson’s comedy. On the 5th September, 1668, Pepys is again on the old ground, “to see the play ‘Bartholomew Faire,’ and it is an excellent play; the more I see it, the more I love the wit of it; only” (he adds) “the business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale, and of no use, they being the people that at last will be found the wisest.”
I began this chapter with a quotation from Puysieux—I may end it with that just cited from Pepys; and therewith, lowering the curtain of my little theatre, I beg the indulgence of my audience for the succeeding portions of what I have respectfully to bring before them; something more especially touching Tailors, and the Man whose making is to Tailors due! First, however, to treat the matter reverently, let us inquire what influenced the ancient corporation in their selection of a protecting Saint.
TOUCHING TAILORS.
“Rem acu tetigisti.”—Horace.
“You have treated of a matter about the needle.”—Translated by a Merchant Tailors’ Pupil.
“Sit merita Laus!”—St. William, Abp.