Another engraved portrait, in the collection of the Earl of Bute, represents her playing the harpsichord, and has a Dutch inscription, with the words—“Isaac Brunn delin. et sc. 1653.” One of Gaywood’s prints, which, in Granger’s time, was in the possession of Fredericks, the bookseller, at Bath, had the following memorandum written under the inscription:—“This woman I saw in Ratcliffe Highway in 1668, and was satisfied she was a woman. John Bulfinch.” Granger describes her from the portraits, as follows:—“The face and hands of this woman are represented hairy all over. Her aspect resembles that of a monkey. She has a very long and large spreading beard, the hair of which hangs loose and flowing like the hair of the head. She is playing on the organ. Vanbeck married this frightful creature on purpose to carry her about for a show.”
CHAPTER III.
Strolling Players in the Seventeenth Century—Southwark Fair—Bartholomew Fair—Pepys and the Monkeys—Polichinello—Jacob Hall, the Rope-Dancer—Another Bearded Woman—Richardson, the Fire-Eater—The Cheshire Dwarf—Killigrew and the Strollers—Fair on the Thames—The Irish Giant—A Dutch Rope-Dancer—Music Booths—Joseph Clark, the Posturer—William Philips, the Zany—William Stokes, the Vaulter—A Show in Threadneedle Street.
The period of the Protectorate was one of suffering and depression for the entertaining classes, who were driven into obscure taverns and back streets by the severity with which the anti-recreation edicts of the Long Parliament were enforced, and even then were in constant danger of Bridewell and the whipping-post. Performances took place occasionally at the Red Bull theatre, in St. John Street, West Smithfield, when the actors were able to bribe the subordinate officials at Whitehall to connive at the infraction of the law; but sometimes the fact became known to some higher authority who had not been bribed, or whose connivance could not be procured, and then the performance was interrupted by a party of soldiers, and the actors marched off to Bridewell, where they might esteem themselves fortunate if they escaped a whipping as well as a month’s imprisonment as idle vagabonds.
Unable to exercise their vocation in London, the actors travelled into the country, and gave dramatic performances in barns and at fairs, in places where the rigour of the law was diminished, or the edicts rendered of no avail, by the magistrates’ want of sympathy with the pleasure-abolishing mania, and the readiness of the majority of the inhabitants to assist at violations of the Acts. In one of his wanderings about the country, Cox, the comedian, shod a horse with so much dexterity, in the drama that was being represented, that the village blacksmith offered him employment in his forge at a rate of remuneration exceeding by a shilling a week the ordinary wages of the craft. The story is a good illustration of the realistic tendencies of the theatre two hundred years ago, especially as the practice which then prevailed of apprenticeship to the stage renders it improbable that Cox had ever learned the art of shoeing a horse with a view to practising it as a craftsman.
The provincial perambulations of actors did not, however, owe their beginning to the edicts of the Long Parliament, there being evidence that companies of strolling players existed contemporaneously with the theatres in which Burbage played Richard III. and Shakespeare the Ghost in Hamlet. In a prologue which was written for some London apprentices when they played The Hog hath lost his Pearl in 1614, their want of skill in acting and elocution is honestly admitted in the following lines—
“We are not half so skilled as strolling players,
Who could not please here as at country fairs.”
In the household book of the Clifford family, quoted by Dr. Whitaker in his ‘History of Craven,’ there is an entry in 1633 of the payment of one pound to “certain itinerant players,” who seem to have given a private representation, for which they were thus munificently remunerated; and two years later, an entry occurs of the payment of the same amount to “a certain company of roguish players who represented A New Way to pay Old Debts,” the adjective being used, probably to distinguish this company, as being unlicensed or unrecognized, from the strolling players who had permission to call themselves by the name of some nobleman, and to wear his livery. The Earl of Leicester maintained such a company, and several other nobles of that period did the same, the actors being known as my Lord Leicester’s company, or as the case might be, and being allowed to perform elsewhere when their services were not required by their patron.