PRYNNE.
[CHAPTER XII.]
THE AUDIENCES OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
Speedily after the Restoration, there was no more constant visitor at the theatre than Charles II., with a gay, and what is called a gallant, gathering. Thus we are arrested by a crowd at the Temple Gate. On the 15th of August 1661, Charles and the Duke and Duchess of York are leaving the apartments of the Reader, Sir Henry Finch, with whom they have been dining, and an eager audience is awaiting them in the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, where "The Wits" is to be represented,—a piece "never yet acted," says Pepys, "with scenes." Two nights later, the same piece is playing, and the Queen of Bohemia is there, "brought by my Lord Craven," whom some do not scruple to speak of as the ex-Queen's husband. A week later, Charles and "Madame Palmer" were at the theatre in Drury Lane, with the Duke of York and his wife. "My wife," says Pepys, "to her great content had a full sight of them all the while." The King's Madame Palmer became, in fact, an attraction; seated between Charles and his brother, Pepys beheld her a few weeks later, when he and his wife escorted Lord Sandwich's young daughters to the theatre, and obtained places close to Madame and her double escort. The play was Johnson's "Bartholomew Fair," with the puppets, and all its virulent satire against the Puritans. As Pepys listened and remembered that no one had dared to bring forward this slashing play for the last forty years, he wondered at the audacity of managers now, and grieved that the King should countenance it. But what recked the laughing King, when Puritanism was in the dust, and troops of cavaliers were singing, "Up go we?"
Occasionally, if Pepys witnesses a play ill-acted, he finds compensation in sitting near some "pretty and ingenious lady." At that time oranges were more costly than pines are now, and to offer one of the former, even to an unknown fair neighbour, was an intimation of a readiness on the part of the presenter to open a conversation. To behold his most sacred Majesty seated in his box was for ever, with Pepys, even a stronger attraction than the eyes or the wit of the fairest and sprightliest of ladies. Again and again, he registers a vow to refrain from resorting to the theatre during a certain period, but he no sooner hears of the presence there of his religious and gracious King, than he breaks his vow, rushes to the play, perjures himself out of loyal courtesy, and next morning writes himself down an ass.
At the Cockpit in Drury Lane, Charles's consort, Catherine, was exhibited to the English people for the first time on an autumn afternoon of 1662, when Shirley's "Cardinal" was represented. Pepys, of course, was there too, and reproduces the scene: "By very good fortune, I did follow four or five gentlemen who were carried to a little private door in a wall, and so crept through a narrow place, and came into one of the boxes next the King's, but so as I could not see the King or Queen, but many of the fine ladies, who are not really so handsome generally, as I used to take them to be, but that they are finely dressed. The company that come in with me into the box were all Frenchmen that could speak no English; but, Lord, what sport they made to ask a pretty lady that they got among them, that understood both French and English, to make her tell them what the actors said!"
Soon after this, in dreary November, there is again a crowded audience to greet the King and Queen, with whom now appears the Castlemaine, once more, and near her Lucy Walter's boy, the Duke of Monmouth, all beauty and pretty assurance; and Pepys sees no harm in a company who have come together to witness a comedy whose name might well describe the look and bearing of the outraged Queen, namely, the "Scornful Lady." No wonder that, in December, at the tragedy of "The Valiant Cid," she did not smile once during the whole play.[70] But nobody present on that occasion seemed to take any pleasure but what was in the greatness and gallantry of the company.
That greatness and that gallantry were the idols of the diarist. With what scorn he talks of the audience at the Duke's Theatre a few days later, when the "Siege of Rhodes" was represented. He was ill-pleased. The house was "full of citizens!" "There was hardly," says the fastidious son of an honest tailor, "a gallant man or woman in the house!" So, in January 1663, at the same theatre, he records that "it was full of citizens, and so the less pleasant." The Duke's House was less "genteel" than the Cockpit; but the royal visitors at the latter were not much more refined in their manners than the audience in Lincoln's Inn Fields, or Salisbury Court. Early in January 1663, the Duke of York and his wife honoured a play of Killigrew's by their presence, and did not much edify the spectators by their conduct. "They did show," writes the immortal journalist, "some impertinent and methought unnatural dalliances there, before the whole world, such as kissing of hands, and leaning upon one another."
But there were worse scenes than these conjugal displays at the King's House. When Pepys was dying to obtain the only prize in all the world he desired, Lady Castlemaine's picture, that bold person was beginning to lose, at once, both her beauty and her place of favour with the King. Pepys was immensely grieved, for she was always more to him than the play and players to boot. He had reason, however, to be satisfied that she had not lost her boldness. In January, 1664, the "Indian Queen" was played at the King's House, in Drury Lane. Lady Castlemaine was present before the King arrived. When he entered his box, the Countess leaned over some ladies who sat between her and the royal box, and whispered to Charles. Having been thus bold in face of the audience, she arose, left her own box and appeared in the King's, where she deliberately took a place between Charles and his brother. It was not the King alone but the whole audience with him who were put out of countenance by this cool audacity, exhibited to prove that she was not so much out of favour as the world believed.
What a contrast is presented by the appearance of Cromwell's daughter, Lady Mary, in her box at this same theatre, with her husband, Viscount Falconbridge! Pepys praises her looks and her dress, and suggests a modest embarrassment on her part, as the house began to fill, and the admiring spectators began to gaze too curiously on Oliver's loved child; "she put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play, which of late has become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face."