Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In

by Henry B. Wheatley

The theatres were open in the afternoon, three o’clock being the usual hour for performance, and the plays were therefore acted by daylight during the summer. The roof consisted of skylights made of thin glass, which let the wet into the pit in times of heavy rain. Pepys felt the inconvenience on one occasion, and he wrote: “Before the play was done it fell such a storm of hail, that we in the middle of the pit were fain to rise, and all the house in a disorder.”[377] A few years after this the very same inconvenience was experienced. “A disorder in the pit by its raining in from the cupola at top,” and this must often have happened.[378]

When plays were acted at court, the performances took place at night, probably because the actors were then free after acting at the theatres. Sometimes even the King had to wait, as we read, “after all staying above an hour for the players, the King and all waiting, which was absurd, saw ‘Henry V.’ well done by the Duke’s people, and in most excellent habits, all new vests, being put on but this night.... The play continued till twelve at night.”[379]

It is here necessary to guard readers of the “Diary” against a mistake very easily fallen into in respect to the various theatres, as the editors have given no explanation to guide them. Davenant’s, or the Duke’s, company occupied the old “Cockpit” in Drury Lane for a short time after the Restoration, until they removed to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in the spring of 1662. Now Pepys frequently mentions the plays acted at the Cockpit, but these were performed at night, and apparently the Cockpit alluded to was the one at Whitehall, not that in Drury Lane. This seems evident by an entry under date Nov. 20, 1660: “I found my Lord in bed late, he having been with the King, Queen and Princess at the Cockpit all night, where General Monk treated them; and after supper a play;” because the Duke of Albemarle lived at the Cockpit in St. James’s Park. Peter Cunningham mentions in the “Handbook of London,” that he found in the records of the Audit Office a payment of xxxli. per annum, “to the Keeper of our playhouse called the Cockpitt, in St. James’s Park,” but he gives no further particulars and does not appear to have noticed how far the entries in the “Diary” illustrate this appointment. On December 1st, 1662, the Duke’s company acted before the King at the Cockpit, and January 5th, 1662–63, the King’s company acted in the same place, but Pepys did not think the latter at all equal to “the Duke’s people.”

All the entries in the “Diary” relating to the stage require more investigation than they have yet received, as the notes of the editors are quite insufficient. We have seen how the allusions to the “Cockpit” in the years 1660–62, might either refer to the Duke’s theatre or to the Court theatre, and the same confusion might easily be made in respect to the Lincoln’s Inn theatre. Pepys says that on November 20th, 1660, he and Mr. Shepley went “to the new play-house near Lincoln’s Inn Fields (which was formerly Gibbon’s tennis-court).” This was the home of the King’s company from 1660 till 1663, when they went to Drury Lane. As already stated, the Duke’s company removed to Portugal Street in 1662, so that for a short period the two rival theatres were close together in the neighbourhood of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Pepys visited all parts of the house, and did not much care where he sat so that he got in: thus on November 7, 1667, he was “forced to sit in the side balcony over against the music-room, close by my Lady Dorset and a great many great ones;” and some years before he was somewhat troubled to be seen by two or three of his clerks, who were in the half-crown box, while he was in an eighteenpenny place.[380] The price of a pit seat was 2s. 6d., and in spite of the inconvenience of the place in wet weather, it was frequented by people of fashion; for instance, the Duke of Buckingham sat there, and was surrounded by Lord Buckhurst, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir George Etherege, and other poets;[381] and “a company of fine ladies” was not absent.[382] But even at that time “citizens, ’prentices and others” jostled their betters. Pepys writes: “I do not remember that I saw so many, by half, of the ordinary ’prentices and mean people in the pit at 2s. 6d. apiece as now; I going for several years no higher than the 12d. and then the 18d. places, though I strained hard to go in when I did.”[383] The theatres were generally crowded, and on special occasions it was difficult to find a place. When Etherege’s “She Would if She Could” was first acted, 1,000 persons were turned away because there was no room in the pit an hour before the performance commenced.[384] An ingenious plan for keeping seats which was in vogue for many subsequent years is mentioned by Pepys. On May 2, 1668, he writes: “To the Duke of York’s play house at a little past twelve, to get a good place in the pit for the new play, and there setting a poor man to keep my place, I out and spent an hour at Martin’s, my bookseller’s, and so back again, where I find the house quite full. But I had my place.”

When the theatre built for the King’s company in Drury Lane, was opened in 1663, Pepys found some faults in the construction, one of these being the narrowness of the passages in and out of the pit. He did not approve also of the placing of the orchestra under the stage, by which means the basses could not be heard at all, and the trebles very faintly.[385]

Pepys does not mention Fop’s Corner in the King’s theatre, a name which recalls the better-known Fop’s Alley of Her Majesty’s Opera House, but it is alluded to in Dryden’s epilogue spoken at the new house in Drury Lane on March 26th, 1674:

“So may Fop Corner full of noise remain,

And drive far off the dull attentive train.”

Pepys does, however, tell us how loudly people of fashion talked. One day Sir Charles Sedley had a merry discourse with two ladies, which prevented the Diarist from hearing any of the play. His feelings were divided between pleasure in hearing the wit and annoyance in losing the play.[386] The manners of most of the audience, as exhibited in several little traits, were far from commendable, but it would be difficult to equal the following incident, which is related as if there were nothing particularly unladylike in it: “I sitting behind in a dark place [in the theatre], a lady spit backward upon me by mistake, not seeing me, but after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all.”[387]