Further in the proceeding."
Cibber, who narrates the incident, states that "the solicitude of this spiritual minister in filching from his master the grace and merit of a good action, and dressing up himself in it, while himself had been author of the evil complained of, was so easy a stroke of his temporal conscience that it seemed to raise the King into something more than a smile whenever that play came before him. And I had a more distinct occasion to observe this effect, because my proper stand on the stage, when I spoke the lines, required me to be near the box where the King usually sat. In a word, this play is so true a dramatic chronicle of an old English court, and where the character of Harry VIII. is so excellently drawn, even to a humorous likeness, that it may be no wonder why His Majesty's particular taste for it should have commanded it three several times in one winter."
So far Cibber; we hear from another source that on one occasion when the above lines were spoken, the King said to the Prince of Wales, who had not yet been expelled from Court, "You see, George, what you have one day to expect."
When George I., wishing to patronise the English actors, in 1718, ordered the great hall at Hampton Court to be converted into a theatre, he desired that it might be ready by June, in order that the actors in their summer vacation might play before him three times a week. The official obstacles prevented the hall being ready before September, when the actors had commenced their London season, and were, therefore, enabled to play before the King only seven times. The performances were under the direction of Steele, whose political services had been poorly recompensed by granting him certain theatrical privileges. The troop commenced on the 23rd of the month with "Hamlet;" they subsequently played "Sir Courtly Nice," the "Constant Couple," "Love for Money," "Volpone," and "Rule a Wife and Have a Wife." The King could not have been an indifferent scholar if he could readily apply passages, and quickly comprehend others, in plays like these; or could follow Cibber in Sir Courtly, laugh at the jokes of Pinkethman in Crack, feel the heartiness of Miller, in Hothead, be interested in the Testimony of Johnson, sympathetic with the Surly of Thurmond, enjoy the periods of Booth in Farewell, or the aristocratic spirit of Mills in Lord Bellguard. The ladies, too, in some of the plays acted before him,—Leonora, by Mrs. Porter, and Violante, by Mrs. Younger,—had also some phrases to utter, which might well puzzle one not to the matter born. But George I. must have comprehended all, for he so thoroughly enjoyed all, that Steele told Lord Sunderland, the grandson of Sacharissa, and the son-in-law of Marlborough, that the King liked the entertainment "so terribly well, my lord, that I was afraid I should have lost all my actors; for I was not sure the King would not keep them to fill the place at Court, which he saw them so fit for in the play."
In the old days, a play acted before the sovereign at Whitehall, cost that sovereign but the poor fee of £20, the actors playing at their own house, in the afternoon, previous to having the honour of acting before the Court at night. To the performers at Hampton Court their ordinary day's wage was given, with their travelling expenses, for which they held themselves ready to act there at a day's warning. The Lord Chamberlain found the wax-lights, and furnished the "household music," while the players' wardrobe and "traps" generally were conveyed from old Drury down to Hampton in a "Chaise Marine" at his Majesty's expense. The cost of the seven plays amounted to £350; but King George generously threw in a couple of hundred more, as a guerdon to the managers, who had professed that the honour of toiling to afford his Majesty pleasure was sufficient recompense in itself! The King did not believe a word of it; and the Duke of Newcastle, then Lord Chamberlain (and subsequently the original of Foote's Matthew Mug, in the "Mayor of Garratt"), paid the money into the hands of the delighted Cibber, who was astounded at the Chamberlain's modesty, which kept him from arrogating to himself, like Cardinal Wolsey, the merit which belonged to his royal master.
How things went between audience and actors in the Hampton Court theatre is admirably told by Cibber himself:—"A play presented at Court, or acted on a public stage," he says, "seem to their different authors a different entertainment. In the common theatre the guests are at home, where the politer forms of good breeding are not so nicely regarded. Every one there falls to, and likes or finds fault, according to his natural taste or appetite. At Court, where the Prince gives the treat and honours the table with his own presence, the audience is under the restraint of a circle where laughter or applause raised higher than a whisper would be stared at. At a public play they are both let loose, even till the actor is sometimes pleased with his not being able to be heard for the clamour of them. But this coldness, or decency of attention at Court, I observed, had but a melancholy effect upon the impatient vanity of some of our actors, who seemed inconsolable when their flashy endeavours to please had passed unheeded. Their not considering where they were quite disconcerted them, nor could they recover their spirits till, from the lowest rank of the audience, some gaping Joan or John, in the fulness of their hearts, roared out their approbation."
These little ebullitions appear to have amused the grave King, for Cibber hints that they raised a smile on the royal countenance, and he suggests that such a fact was entirely natural and reasonable. He adds, "that an audience may be as well too much reserved as too profuse of their applause. For though it is possible a Betterton would not have been discouraged from throwing out an excellence, or elated into an error, by his auditors being too little or too much pleased; yet as actors of his judgment are rarities, those of less judgment may sink into a flatness in their performance for want of that applause which, from the generality of judges, they might, perhaps, have some pretence to; and the auditor, when not seeming to feel what ought to affect him, may rob himself of something more that he might have had, by giving the actor his due, who measures out his power to please, according to the value he sets upon the hearer's taste or capacity; but, however, as we were not here itinerant adventurers, and had properly but one royal auditor to please, after that honour was attained to, the rest of our ambition had little to look after."
And now what of this George's successor as an "auditor?"
Among the unmerited censures which have been flung at Charles II., the most conspicuous and the least reasonable is that the grossness of the dramas produced in his days was owing to his bad taste exhibited in his fondness for French comedy. Had the poets of that period imitated that comedy, they would not have offended as they did, for, taken altogether, French comedy was remarkable for its freedom from utter, abounding, and continual coarseness. I think that George II. was more blameworthy than his predecessor Charles, for he encouraged the representation of immoral dramas, and commanded the restoration of scenes which actors had begun to deem too indecent for acting or expression. For didactic plays the monarch had no stomach; but he savoured Ravenscroft's beastly comedies—the very worst of them did he the most delight in, and helped to keep them on the stage when actors and audiences were alike disgusted with them. This perverted taste was strong upon him from the first. When Prince of Wales, he witnessed the acting of "Venice Preserved," but, discovering subsequently, on reading the old edition of the play, there were scenes in it which are flattered by merely being designated as "filthy," he sent for the "master" of one of the houses, and commanded that the omitted scenes should be restored. They are those which chiefly lie between Aquilia and Antonio, characters which never take part in modern representations of Otway's tragedy. The former part was given to Mrs. Horton, who, though she was something of the quality of the creature she represented, was not only young and beautiful, but was draped in a certain mantle of modesty which heightened the charms of her youth and her beauty; and she must have had a painful task, less than the younger Pinkethman had who played Antonio, in thus gratifying the low predilections of the graceless Prince, who then gave ton to audiences.
George II., when Prince of Wales, found Bartholomew Fair as much to his taste as the theatres. In 1725, he, and a gay posse of companions, went down the Thames, in barges, to Blackfriars, and thence to the fair. At the conclusion of the fun for the night, they entered the old King's Arms Inn, joyously supped there, and got back to St. James's by four o'clock in the morning. Some years later, Prince Frederick, George II.'s son, who valued the stage in much the same measure as his father did, also visited the fair by night. He went amid a little army of yeomen of the guard, and under a blaze of torches, and cries of "make way there for the prince," from a mob who were delighted to see among them the heir apparent, in a bright ruby-coloured frock coat, thickly laced with gold. There was a gallant company, too, of gentlemen, all coated and laced, and besworded like the prince; but the finest and fussiest, and happiest personage there, was the important little man who marshalled the prince the way that he should go, and ushered him to and from the booths, where short solemn tragedies were played, with a disjointed farce between the acts. This important individual was Mr. Manager Rich, and he was as happy at this night's doings, as if he had gained something more substantial by them than empty honour.