In 1702, the Drury Lane Company brought out eight new pieces, and worked indefatigably. They commenced with Dennis's "Comical Gallant,"—an "improved" edition of Shakspeare's "Merry Wives," in which Powell made but a sorry Falstaff. This piece gave way to one entirely original, and very much duller, the "Generous Conqueror," of the ex-fugitive Jacobite, Bevil Higgons. In this poor play, Bevil illustrated the right divine and impeccability of his late liege sovereign, King James; denounced the Revolution, by implication; did in his only play what Dr. Sacheverell did in the pulpit, and made even his fellow Jacobites laugh by his bouncing line, "The gods and god-like kings can do no wrong."
Laughter more genuine might have been expected from the next novelty, Farquhar's "Inconstant;" but that clever adaptation of Fletcher's "Wild-Goose Chase," with Wilks for Young Mirabel, did not affect the town so hilariously as I have seen it do when Charles Kemble, gracefully, but somewhat too demonstratively, enacted the part of that gay, silly, but lucky gentleman. Still less pleased were the public with the next play, tossed up for them in a month, and condemned in a night, Burnaby's "Modish Husband." Of course, this husband, Lord Promise, is a man who loves his neighbour's wife, and cares not who loves his own. An honest man in this comedy, Sir Lively Cringe, does not think ill of married women, and he is made a buffoon and more, accordingly. When Lady Cringe, in the dark, holds her lover Lionel with one hand, her husband with the other, and declares that her fingers are locked with those of the man she loves best in the world, Sir Lively believes her. In this wise did the stage hold the mirror up to nature at the beginning of the last century.
Not more edifying nor much more successful was Vanbrugh's "False Friend," a comedy in which there is a murder enacted before the audience! What the house lost by it was fully made up by the unequivocal success of the next new piece, the "Funeral, or Grief à la Mode." The author was then six and twenty years of age; this was his first piece, and his name was Steele. All that was known of him then was, that he was a native of Dublin, had been fellow-pupil at the Charter House with Addison, had left the University without a degree, and was said to have lost the succession to an estate in Wexford by enlisting as "a private gentleman in the Horse Guards;" a phrase significant enough, as the proper designation of that body, at this day, is "Gentlemen of her Majesty's Royal Horse Guards." He was the wildest and wittiest young dog about town, when in 1701, he published, with a dedication to Lord Cutts, to whom he had been private secretary, and through whom he had been appointed to a company in Lord Lucas's Fusiliers, his Christian Hero, a treatise in which he showed what he was not, by showing what a man ought to be. It brought the poor fellow into incessant perplexity, and even peril. Some thought him a hypocrite, others provoked him as a coward, all measured his sayings and doings by his maxims in his Christian Hero, and Dick Steele was suffering in the regard of the town, when he resolved to redeem the character which he could not keep up to the level of his religious hero, by composing a comedy! He thoroughly succeeded, and there were troopers enough in the house to have beat the rest of the audience into shouting approbation, had they not been well inclined to do so spontaneously. The "Funeral" is the merriest and the most perfect of Steele's comedies. The characters are strongly marked, the wit genial, and not indecent. Steele was among the first who set about reforming the licentiousness of the old comedy. His satire in the "Funeral" is not against virtue, but vice and silliness. When the two lively ladies in widow's weeds meet, Steele's classical memory served him with a good illustration. "I protest, I wonder," says Lady Brumpton (Mrs. Verbruggen), "how two of us thus clad can meet with a grave face." The most genuine humour in the piece was that applied against lawyers; but more especially in the satire against undertakers, and all their mockery of woe. Take the scene in which Sable (Johnson) is giving instructions to his men, and reviewing them the while:—"Ha, you're a little more upon the dismal. This fellow has a good mortal look—place him near the corpse. That wainscot-face must be a-top o' the stairs. That fellow's almost in a fright, that looks as if he were full of some strange misery, at the end o' the hall! So!—But I'll fix you all myself. Let's have no laughing now, on any provocation. Look yonder at that hale, well-looking puppy! You ungrateful scoundrel, didn't I pity you, take you out of a great man's service, and show you the pleasure of receiving wages? Didn't I give you ten, then fifteen, then twenty shillings a-week, to be sorrowful? And the more I give you the gladder you are!" This sort of humour was new, no wonder it made a sensation. Steele became the spoiled child of the town. "Nothing," said he, "ever makes the town so fond of a man as a successful play." Old Sunderland and younger Halifax patronised Steele for his own and for Addison's sake; and the author of the new comedy received the appointment of Writer of the Gazette.
After a closing of the houses during Bartholomew Fair, the Drury Lane Company met again, and again won the town by Cibber's "She Would and She Would Not." This excellent comedy contrasts well with the same author's also admirable comedy, the "Careless Husband." In the latter there is much talk of action; in the former there is much action during very good talk. There is much fun, little vulgarity, sharp epigrams on the manners and morals of the times, good-humoured satire against popery, and a succession of incidents which never flags from the rise to the fall of the curtain. The plot may be not altogether original, and there is an occasional incorrectness in the local colour; but taken as a whole, it is a very amusing comedy, and it kept the stage even longer than Steele's "Funeral."
Far less successful was Drury with the last and eighth new play of this season, Farquhar's "Twin Rivals," for the copyright of which the author received £15, 6s. from Tonson. Farquhar, perhaps, took more pains with this than with any of his plays, and has received praise in return; but after Steele and Cibber's comedies, the "Twin Rivals" had only what the French call a succès d'estime.
To the eight pieces of Drury, Lincoln's Inn opposed half a dozen, only one of which has come down to our times, namely, Rowe's "Tamerlane," with which the company opened the season:—Tamerlane, Betterton; Bajazet, Verbruggen; Axalla, Booth; Arpasia, Mrs. Barry. In this piece, Rowe left sacred for profane history, and made his tragedy so politically allusive to Louis XIV. in the character of Bajazet, and to William III. in Tamerlane, that it was for many years represented at each theatre on every recurring 4th and 5th of November, the anniversary of the birth and of the landing of King William. In Dublin, the anniversary of the great delivery from "Popery and wooden shoes," was marked by a piece of gallantry on the part of the Lord Lieutenant, or, in his absence, the Lords Justices—namely, by arrangement with the manager, admission to the boxes was free to every lady disposed to honour the theatre with her presence!
Rowe has made a virtuous hero of Tamerlane, without at all causing him to resemble William of Orange; but, irrespective of this, there is life in this tragedy, which, with some of the bluster of the old, had some of the sentiment of a new school. In 1746, when the Scottish Rebellion had been entirely suppressed, it was acted on the above anniversaries with much attendant enthusiasm, Mrs. Pritchard speaking an epilogue written for the occasion by Horace Walpole, and licensed by the Chamberlain, the Duke of Grafton, notwithstanding a compliment to his Grace, which Walpole thought might induce the Duke, out of sheer modesty, to withhold his official sanction. Tamerlane has been a favourite part with many actors. Lady Morgan's father, Mr. Owenson, made his first appearance in it, under Garrick's rule; but a Tamerlane with a strong Irish brogue and comic redundant action created different sensations from those intended by the author, and though the audience did not hiss, they laughed abundantly.
To "Tamerlane" succeeded "Antiochus the Great," a tragedy, full of the old love, bombast, and murder. The author was a Mrs. Jane Wiseman, who was a servant in the family of Mr. Wright, of Oxford, where, having filled her mind with plays and romances, she wrote this hyper-romantic play, and having married a well-to-do Westminster vintner, named Holt, she succeeded in seeing it fail, as it well deserved to do.[75]
It seemed as if the king-killing in the plebeian lady's tragedy required some counter-action, and accordingly, Lord Orrery's posthumous play of "Altemira" was next brought forward. There is a true king and also an usurper in this roaring yet sentimental tragedy, in whom Whigs and Tories might recognise the sovereigns whom they respectively adored. One monarch himself complacently remarks:—
"Whatever crimes are acted for a crown,