George the First.
There was little change in the Christmas festivities in this reign, for, as Mr. Thackeray says in his lively sketch of George I.: "He was a moderate ruler of England. His aim was to leave it to itself as much as possible, and to live out of it as much as he could. His heart was in Hanover." The most important addition to the plays of the period was
The Christmas Pantomime.
In his "English Plays," Professor Henry Morley thus records the introduction of the modern English pantomime, which has since been the great show of Christmastide:—
a nest of fools.
"The theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, which Christopher Rich had been restoring, his son, John Rich, was allowed to open on the 18th of December, 1714. John Rich was a clever mimic, and after a year or two he found it to his advantage to compete with the actors in a fashion of his own. He was the inventor of the modern English form of pantomime, with a serious part that he took from Ovid's Metamorphosis or any fabulous history, and a comic addition of the courtship of harlequin and columbine, with surprising tricks and transformations. He introduced the old Italian characters of pantomime under changed conditions, and beginning with 'Harlequin Sorcerer' in 1717, continued to produce these entertainments until a year before his death in 1761. They have since been retained as Christmas shows upon the English stage."
In a note to "The Dunciad," Pope complains of "the extravagancies introduced on the stage, and frequented by persons of the first quality in England to the twentieth and thirtieth time," and states that "all the extravagances" in the following lines of the poem actually appeared on the stage:—
"See now, what Dulness and her sons admire! See what the charms, that smite the simple heart Not touch'd by nature, and not reach'd by art. His never-blushing head he turn'd aside, (Not half so pleased when Goodman prophesied) And look'd, and saw a sable Sorcerer rise, Swift to whose hand a winged volume flies: All sudden, gorgons hiss, and dragons glare, And ten-horn'd fiends and giants rush to war. Hell rises, Heaven descends, and dance on earth: Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth, A fire, a jig, a battle, and a ball, Till one wide conflagration swallows all. Thence a new world, to nature's laws unknown, Breaks out refulgent, with a heaven its own: Another Cynthia her new journey runs, And other planets circle other suns. The forests dance, the rivers upward rise, Whales sport in woods, and dolphins in the skies; And last, to give the whole creation grace, Lo! one vast egg produces human race."
David Garrick, the eminent actor, wrote in a similar strain, finding it hard to hold his own against the patrons of the pantomime:—