With such personages in pit and boxes, we may rest satisfied that there was a public to match in the gallery—a peculiar as well as a general public.
A line in a prologue of the year 1672, "The stinking footman's sent to keep your places," alludes to a custom by which the livery profited. Towards the close of the century, the upper gallery of Drury Lane was opened to footmen, gratis. They were supposed to be in attendance on their masters, but these rather patronised the other house, and as Drury could not attract the nobility, it courted the favour of their not very humble servants. Previously, the lacqueys were admitted after the close of the fourth act of the play. They became the most clamorous critics in the house. It was the custom, when these fellows passed the money-taker, to name their master, who was supposed to be in the boxes; but many frauds were practised. A stalwart, gold-laced, thick-calved, irreverent lacquey swaggered past money and check-taker one afternoon, and named "the Lord ——," adding the name which the Jews of old would never utter, out of fear and reverence. "The Lord ——!" said the money-taker to his colleague, after the saucy footman had flung by, "who is he?" "Can't say," was the reply; "some poor Scotch lord, I suppose!" Such is an alleged sample of the ignorance and the blasphemy of the period.
Returning to the pit, I find, with the critics and other good men there, a sprinkling of clerical gentlemen, especially of chaplains; their patrons, perhaps, being in the boxes. In the papers of the day, in the year 1697, I read of a little incident which illustrates social matters, and which, probably, did not much trouble the theatrical cleric who went to the pit so strangely provided. "There was found," says the paragraph, "in the pit of the playhouse, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, on Whitsun Eve, a qualification, signed by the Right Honourable the Lord Dartmouth to the Reverend Mr. Nicholson, to be his Chaplain Extraordinary; the said qualification being wrapped up in a black taffety cap, together with a bottle-screw, a knotting needle, and a ball of sky-colour and white knotting. If the said Mr. Nicholson will repair to the pit-keeper's house, in Vinegar Yard, at the Crooked Billet, he shall have the moveables restored, giving a reasonable gratitude."
Probably Mr. Nicholson did not claim his qualification. His patron was son of the Lord Dartmouth who corresponded with James II. while expressing allegiance to William III., and was subsequently Queen Anne's Secretary of State, and the annotator of Burnet's History of his Own Times.
The audiences of King William's time were quick at noticing and applying political allusions; and Government looked as sharply after the dramatic poets as it did after the Jacobite plotters. When much intercourse was going on between the exiled king at St. Germains and his adherents in this country, a Colonel Mottley (of whose son, as a dramatist, I shall have occasion to speak in a future page) was sent over by James with despatches. The Earl of Nottingham laid watch for him at the Blue Posts, in the Haymarket, but the Secretary's officers missed the Colonel, seizing in his place a Cornish gentleman, named Tredenham, who was seated in a room, surrounded by papers, and waiting for the Colonel.
Tredenham and the documents were conveyed in custody before the Earl, to whom the former explained that he was a poet, sketching out a play, that the papers seized formed portion of the piece, and that he had nothing to do with plots against his Majesty de facto. Daniel Finch, however, was as careful to read the roughly-sketched play, as if it had been the details of a conspiracy; and then the author was summoned before him. "Well, Mr. Tredenham," said he, "I have perused your play, and heard your statement, and as I can find no trace of a plot in either, I think you may go free."
The sincerity of the audiences of those days is something doubtful, if that be true which Dryden affirms, that he observed, namely, that "in all our tragedies the audience cannot forbear laughing when the actors are to die: 'tis the most comic part of the whole play." He says, all our tragedies; but we know that such was not the case when the heroes of Shakspeare, represented by Betterton, Hart, or Harris, suffered mimic dissolution, and it is but a fair suggestion that it was only in the bombast and fustian tragedies, in which death was the climax of a comic situation, and treated bombastically, that the audiences were moved to laughter.
Sincere or not, the resident Londoners were great playgoers, and gadders generally. I have already quoted Bishop Hackett on this matter. Sermons thus testify to a matter of fashion. It appears from a play, Dryden's "Sir Martin Marall," that if Londoners were the permanent patrons, the country "quality" looked for an annual visit. At the present time it is the visitors and not the residents in London who most frequent the theatre. "I came up, as we country gentlewomen use, at an Easter Term, to the destruction of tarts and cheesecakes, to see a new play, buy a new gown, take a turn in the park, and so down again to sleep with my forefathers."
This resort to the theatres displeased better men than non-juring Collier. Mirthful-minded South, he who preached to the Merchant Tailors of the remnant that should be saved, calls theatres "those spiritual pest-houses, where scarce anything is to be heard or seen but what tends to the corruption of good manners, and from whence not one of a thousand returns, but, infected with the love of vice, or at least with the hatred of it very much abated from what it was before. And that, I assure you, is no inconsiderable point gained by the tempter, as those who have any experience of their own hearts sufficiently know. He who has no mind to trade with the devil, should be so wise as to keep away from his shop." South objects to a corrupt, not to a "well-trod stage."
Yet South, like Collier later, laid to the scene much of the sin of the age.