Who cuts off monarchs' heads and horses' tails,
By malice led, by rage and envy stung,
Put in his mouth a gag, and tied his tongue."
Rich thought himself so much a better actor than mimic, that he was ten times happier when giving foolish instruction to a novice training for Hamlet, than when he was marshalling his corps of pantomimists, and admirably teaching them to say everything, and yet be silent.
A man like John Rich, of course, had his little jealousies. He was angry when the combination of Garrick and Quin filled his house and treasury, and when the season of 1746-47 yielded him a profit of nearly £9000, to which his wand of Harlequin had contributed little or nothing. He was wont to look at the packed audience, through a hole in the green curtain, and then murmur, "Ah! you are there, are you? much good may it do you!"
The avidity of the old public, however, to witness harlequinades, was even more remarkable than that of the present day. Then, pantomimes went through, not merely a part of one, but several seasons. Theobald's "Harlequin Sorcerer," which had often filled Lincoln's Inn Fields, was even more attractive at Covent Garden, above a quarter of a century later. The company assembled at mid-day, and sometimes broke the doors open, unless they were opened to them, by three o'clock, and so took the house by storm. Those who could not gain admittance went over to Drury Lane, but Garrick found them without heart for tragedy; the grown-up masters and misses had been deprived of their puppet show and rattle, and were sulky accordingly.
Booth, Wilks, and Cibber came under the somewhat dirty censure of Hogarth, who ridiculed them in a well-known unsavoury engraving for producing Harlequin Jack Sheppard. Booth tolerated these harlequinades, and Garrick acted in like fashion; remarking—"If you won't come to Lear and Hamlet, I must give you Harlequin;" and he perhaps gave them the best the stage ever had, save Rich, in Woodward, who had worn the party-coloured jacket before, but who, in "Queen Mab," and in speaking Harlequins, exhibited an ability, the effect of which is illustrated in a contemporary print, wherein you see all the great actors of the day in one scale, and Harlequin Woodward in the other, who makes them kick the beam.
From the very first, however, the poets made protest against the invasion of the stage by foreign dancers and home-born Harlequins; and Cibber quotes Rowe as complaining, or asking, in a prologue to one of his first plays—
"Must Shakspeare, Fletcher, and laborious Ben,
Be left for Scaramouch and Harlequin?"