[Footnote A: Thomas Brown.]
Drury Lane must have presented an animated but none the less disorderly scene any evening during the season when a popular play was to be given. Women in the boxes talking away for dear life, beaux walking about the house, chattering, ogling and laughing, or even sitting on the stage while the performance was in progress,[A] and the orange girls running around to sell their wares and, not infrequently, their own souls as well.
[Footnote A: Owing in great part to the efforts of Queen Anne, this wretched custom of allowing a few spectators to sit on the stage was practically abolished before the close of the reign.]
"Now turn, and see where loaden with her freight,
A damsel stands, and orange-wench is hight;
See! how her charge hangs dangling by the rim,
See! how the balls blush o'er the basket-brim;
But little those she minds, the cunning belle
Has other fish to fry, and other fruit to sell;
See! how she whispers yonder youthful peer,
See! how he smiles and lends a greedy ear.
At length 'tis done, the note o'er orange wrapt
Has reach'd the box, and lays in lady's lap."
These lines by Nicholas Rowe form a graphic but unsavoury picture of the demoralisation to be found in an early eighteenth century audience. Affairs were much better than they used to be in the laissez-faire Restoration period, but, as may be imagined, there was still room for improvement. The rake, the cynic and the loosely-moraled women were still abroad in the land (have we quite done with them even yet?), and many a hard struggle would take place before the artificial restraint and decorum of the Georgian era would triumph over the mocking spirit of Charles Stuart and his professional idlers. In the meantime, as Shadwell relates, the rakes "live as much by their wits as ever; and to avoid the clinking dun of a boxkeeper, at the end of one act they sneak to the opposite side 'till the end of another; then call the boxkeeper saucy rascal, ridicule the poet, laugh at the actors, march to the opera, and spunge away the rest of the evening." And he goes on to say that "the women of the town take their places in the pit with their wonted assurance. The middle gallery is fill'd with the middle part of the city, and your high exalted galleries are grac'd with handsome footmen, that wear their master's linen."[A]
[Footnote A: The footmen were sometimes sent, early in the afternoon, to keep places in the theatre until their masters or mistresses should arrive. They created so much disturbance, however, that a stop had to be put to the practice, and the servants were relegated to the upper gallery. To this they were given free admission.]
And now for a few pages about Drury Lane's rival, the theatre within the walls of the old tennis court in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It was the home of the company headed by the noble Betterton, the "English Roscius," who had, in 1695, headed the revolt against the management of the other house. At that time the tide of popular success at Drury Lane had reached a rather low ebb, a painful circumstance due, no doubt, to the fickleness of a public that was beginning to tire of the favourite players and to betray a fondness for operatic and spectacular productions rather than the "legitimate." Christopher Rich, the manager of the theatre, was, like many of his kind, more given to considering the weight of his purse than the scant supply of sentiment with which nature might originally have endowed him, and so he tried to do two characteristic things. The salaries of his faithful employés should be reduced and the older members of the company retired into the background as much as possible. Younger faces must occupy the centre of the stage; even Betterton, the greatest actor of his time, should be supplanted in some of his parts by the dissolute George Powell, and the genius of Mrs. Barry,[A] whom Dryden thought the greatest actress he had ever seen, was to give way to the less matured charms of the lovely Anne Bracegirdle.
[Footnote A: Mrs. Barry is said to have been a very elegant dresser; but, like most of her contemporaries, she was not a very correct one. Thus, in the "Unhappy Favourite," she played Queen Elizabeth, and in the scene of the crowning she wore the coronation robes of James II.'s Queen; and Ewell says she gave the audience a strong idea of the first-named Queen.—DORAN'S "Annals of the Stage.">[
Cibber relates the story in a sympathetic vein. "Though the success of the 'Prophetess' and 'King Arthur' (two dramatic operas in which the patentees[A] had embark'd all their hopes) was in appearance very great, yet their whole receipts did not so far balance their expense as to keep them out of a large debt, which it was publicly known was about this time contracted…. Every branch of the theatrical trade had been sacrificed to the necessary fitting out those tall ships of burthen that were to bring home the Indies. Plays of course were neglected, actors held cheap, and slightly dress'd, while singers and dancers were better paid, and embroider'd. These measures, of course, created murmurings on one side, and ill-humour and contempt on the other."
[Footnote A: Alexander Davenant, Charles Killigrew, and Rich.]