The first of these juvenile dramatic performances took place on 4th January 1749—the piece selected for representation being Addison’s “Cato”—and the last occasion of these juvenile theatricals at Leicester House appears to have been on 11th January 1750, on which day Bubb Dodington mentions in his diary that he was invited to witness the representation of Rowe’s tragedy of “Lady Jane Grey” by the royal children.
In after days George III.’s early acquired taste for the drama seems to have kept pace with his life, for so frequent were his visits to the theatre that the people of London are said to have been as well acquainted with his features as with those of their next-door neighbour. His glee during the performance of a broad farce, or a droll hit in a pantomime, may at times have been too exuberantly manifested, but his subjects did not love him the less because he was completely at home in the midst of them. Neither did his sense of the ridiculous prevent his enjoying the higher beauties of the drama. Frequently Mrs. Siddons, and sometimes Garrick, were sent for to read plays or poetry in the royal circle either at Buckingham House, or Windsor.[141] “He is said,” writes Thackeray,[142] “not to have cared for Shakespeare or tragedy much; farces and pantomimes were his joy; and especially when the clown swallowed a carrot, or a string of sausages, he would laugh so outrageously that the lovely princess by his side would have to say, ‘My gracious monarch, do compose yourself.’ But he continued to laugh, and at the very smallest farces, so long as his poor wits were left him.”
But the fondness of George III. for the drama on one occasion was not unattended with risk, for as he was on his way to the Haymarket Theatre, on 25th July 1777, a madwoman attacked and did some damage to his chair. And as he was entering his box in Drury Lane Theatre, on 15th May 1800, he was shot at by a madman named James Hadfield. But he did not lose his composure, and he slept as quietly as usual during the interval between the play and the after-piece. What nowadays would be considered an unpardonable offence was occasionally taken by actors with their royal patrons. When Parsons, for instance, was playing the Chief Carpenter in the “Siege of Calais,” advancing close to the royal box, he exclaimed, “An’ the King were here and did not admire my scaffold, I would say, D—n him! he has no taste”—an impudent sally which amused the King even more than the audience.
An act of indecorum, but trivial compared with that of Parsons, happened when the young King of Denmark—who married the sister of George III.—was present in October 1768, at the tragedy of “Jane Shore,” during the performance of which he went fast asleep, and remained so to the amusement of the audience, but to the annoyance of Mrs. Bellamy, who played Alicia.
She waited for her opportunity, and having to pronounce the words, “O thou false lord,” she approached the royal box, and uttered them “in such a piercing tone, that the King awoke in sudden amazement, but with perception enough to enable him to protest that he would not be married to a woman with such a voice though she had the whole world for a dowry.”[143]
It was on 3rd December 1779, when the “Winter’s Tale” was being played by royal command at Drury Lane, that the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV., was subdued by the beauty of the charming actress, Mary Robinson, in her character of Perdita. An intrigue ensued, and he corresponded with her under the name of “Florizel.” He provided for her a costly establishment, “and when after two years the connection terminated, she obtained from him a bond for £20,000, which she afterwards surrendered.” And although he had sworn to be “unalterable to my Perdita through life,” he abandoned her, and left her to want. But Charles Fox obtained for her an annuity of £300, and, when sojourning in France, Marie Antoinette gave a purse knitted by her own fingers to “la belle Anglaise.”
Queen Victoria, too, not only patronised the drama, but she gave it every encouragement, the performance of a good play well acted being a source of recreation which she thoroughly enjoyed. But, as is well known, owing to the lamented death and irretrievable loss of the Prince Consort, her Majesty during her many years of mourning abandoned many of the former amusements of her Court as distasteful in her bereavement; and it was only in the later years of her life that dramatic representations were once more occasionally seen at Windsor, the memory of which is of too recent occurrence to need further notice.
The prominence assigned to the drama in the diversions at the Court of Louis XIV. did much to encourage this department of literature in France,[144] for we are told that the stigma attaching to the stage had to a large extent been wiped away “by the homage of society, the elevation of the theatre to the level of a State institution,” and a remark by Louis XIV. that a gentleman did not cease to be one by going on the stage.
It was in 1680 that Louis XIV. formed a company of players, undertaking to pay them 12,000 livres a year, and placing them under the control of the First Gentlemen of the Chamber—the origin of the Théâtre Française, more popularly designated the Comédie Française. The company consisted of a sufficient number of members—twenty-seven—“to do justice to a tragedy or comedy in the Maisons Royales, when his Majesty wished to be so diverted.” However much the King’s name was maligned in death, in this outburst of feeling the stage had little or no share, for the players could not forget that the late King had been a lover of the drama from his boyhood, and had raised their art to the dignity of a State institution, and had treated them at Court as on a level with distinguished men of letters, painters, and savants.[145]
Louis XV., on the other hand, showed an apathetic indifference towards the stage, and in the words of Matthieu Marais he cared for neither the drama nor music, and it is said that “the sight of his dull and immovable face never failed to depress the players’ spirits.”