Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In

by Henry B. Wheatley

How doth it stir this airy part of us

To hear our poets tell imagin’d fights,

And the strange blows that feigned courage gives.”

The Tragedy of Nero.

In dealing with the amusements of Pepys’s day, we find how pre-eminent a position the theatre held in popular esteem. The presentation of a new play was looked upon as an event of the greatest moment, and the various appearances of favourite actors were chronicled in the “Diary” with considerable regularity.

Immediately after the Restoration, two companies of actors were organized, who acted at two different houses: one theatre was known as the King’s house, and the other as the Duke’s house. Sir William Davenant obtained a patent for his company under the name of “The Duke’s servants,” and as he had succeeded during the Commonwealth in performing certain dramatic pieces under cover of a musical accompaniment, his theatre was sometimes known as “The Opera.” A patent for “The King’s servants” was granted to Tom Killigrew, whose house was for distinction’s sake called “The Theatre.” Pepys has registered as many as 145 plays which he saw acted, some of them several times over, and there is every reason to believe that he saw many more during the period over which the “Diary” extends, that he has omitted to mention.[362] When the theatres were first opened, the old plays were revived until the living dramatists had time to produce new ones, but several of the old masterpieces held their ground for many years. Among the revived dramatists were Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and Shirley. In the whole of Evelyn’s “Diary,” Hamlet is the only play of Shakespeare which the author mentions as having seen acted, and his observation upon this is that “now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesty’s been so long abroad.”[363] Yet, in the one month of December, 1660, Pepys had seen two distinct plays of Shakespeare, and after the date of Evelyn’s entry, he saw Henry IV., Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Merry Wives, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry VIII., Macbeth, Othello, Taming of a Shrew, and Tempest, which proves that Shakespeare was more generally appreciated than is usually supposed. Here we have eleven plays, which is the largest number of plays by one dramatist, with the exception of Fletcher, whose separate productions and joint ones with Beaumont number as many as twenty-four. Shirley comes next with nine, then Ben Jonson with five, Ford with two, and Massinger with the same number. We have already seen how little Pepys appreciated Shakespeare’s genius, but it seems as if he could not enough express his delight in the plays of Ben Jonson. He describes the “Alchymist” as “a most incomparable play,”[364] and the “Silent Woman” as “the best comedy, I think, that ever was wrote;”[365] of “Every Man in His Humour,” he writes, “wherein is the greatest propriety of speech that ever I read in my life.”

Although some of the actors had gained experience on the stage of Charles I.’s reign, most of them were novices, and it is therefore remarkable to find such an array of talent at both houses.

Most of the old players were attached to the King’s company. Hart, Mohun, and Burt were all fine actors, and they had acted female parts before the suppression of the theatre, but Betterton, one of the greatest actors that ever lived, was a host in himself and the mainstay of the Duke’s house. Pepys was never tired of lauding his powers, and delighted in seeing him act. His Hamlet was “beyond imagination,”[366] and his Henry V. “incomparable.”[367] Mrs. Knipp was one of those actresses of whom little or nothing is known outside the “Diary,” but who makes a considerable figure there. Pepys was very partial to this free-and-easy lady, and when we read of his behaviour to her we need not be surprised to find Mr. Knipp alluded to as a “jealous-looking fellow.”[368] This is the place to expose a cruel slander against a worthy man, which Pepys has embalmed in his pages and which has not been corrected by the editors. Pepys having occasion to mention Anne and Beck Marshall, the well-known actresses, he sets down that Mrs. Pierce told him how they were the daughters of Stephen Marshall, the great Presbyterian, and then reports Nell Gwyn’s often-quoted speech to Beck as to the difference in the education of the two; the latter being “a Presbyter’s praying daughter.”[369] With such an authority it is not surprising that Lord Braybrooke should reproduce the statement in a note to another passage,[370] but on investigation the whole bubble bursts. Stephen Marshall died on the 19th of November, 1655, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. At the date of his will his wife was dead, and five of his daughters were already married, three of them at least to clergymen. The remaining daughter, Susan, who was unmarried, must have been more than twenty-one years of age at the time of her father’s death, as she proved his will. These important facts were discovered by Colonel Chester, and set forth in his remarkable volume, “Westminster Abbey Registers.” It did not concern the Colonel to discover the parents of Anne and Rebecca, but he proved very conclusively that they were not the children of the Rev. Stephen Marshall. Another blunder is made in the “Memoirs of Count Grammont,” where “Roxolana” in Davenant’s “Siege of Rhodes,” is confused with “Roxana” in Lee’s “Rival Queens,” and in the notes it is inferred that one of these Mrs. Marshalls was seduced by Aubrey de Vere, last Earl of Oxford, of that name. The “Roxolana” who was deceived by Lord Oxford with a false marriage, was Elizabeth (or Frances) Davenport, who is frequently mentioned by Pepys.

At the revival of the stage after the Restoration, a more lavish expenditure on scenery and dresses became common. Pepys tells us that when Ben Jonson’s “Catiline” was acted at the King’s House, Charles II. gave the actors £500 for robes which were required.[371] We also learn that “the gallants do begin to be tired with the vanity and pride of the theatre actors, who are indeed grown very proud and rich.”[372] But a few years afterwards, when Pepys stepped up to Harris’s dressing-room after the play, he observed “much company come to him and the wits, to talk and to assign meetings.”[373] When Kynaston was beaten by Sir Charles Sedley for imitating him, the manager of the King’s theatre was forced to read Kynaston’s part in “The Heiress,” much to the disadvantage of the vraisemblance of the play. Pepys writes, “but it was pleasant to see Beeston come in with others supposing it to be dark, and yet he is forced to read his part by the light of candles, and this I observing to a gentleman that sat by me, he was mightily pleased therewith, and spread it up and down.”[374] Pepys had occasional talks with Tom Killigrew on the state of the stage, and heard from him of the scheme for setting up a nursery of young actors in Moorfields, where plays should be acted; “but four operas it shall have in the year, to act six weeks at a time; where we shall have the best scenes and machines, the best music and everything as magnificent as in Christendom.” For this purpose Killigrew “sent for voices and painters and other persons from Italy,”[375] but all this fine project came to naught, and two years afterwards he explained to Pepys all that he had done for the theatre and what he proposed still to do. He said “that the stage is now by his pains a thousand times better and more glorious than ever heretofore. Now wax-candles and many of them; then not above 3 lbs. of tallow: now all things civil, no rudeness anywhere; then, as in a bear-garden: then, two or three fiddlers; now, nine or ten of the best: then, nothing but rushes upon the ground, and everything else mean; now, all otherwise: then, the Queen seldom, and the King never would come; now, not the King only for state, but all civil people do think they may come as well as any.”[376]