The last proprietor of the theatre was Rich, an actor who, failing in tragedy, turned harlequin and manager, and became celebrated for producing spectacles, ballets, and pantomimes. Under the name of Lun he revelled as harlequin, and was admirable in a scene where he was hatched from an egg.
Pope, always sore about theatrical matters, describes this manager’s pompousness in the Dunciad (book iii.):—
“At ease
’Midst storm of paper fierce hail of pease,
And proud his mistress’ order to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.”
Rich’s great success was the production of Gay’s Beggars’ Opera in 1727-8. This piece brought £2000 to the author, and for a time drove the Italian Opera into the shade. It ran sixty-three nights the first season, and then spread to all the great towns in Great Britain. Ladies carried about the favourite songs engraved on their fan-mounts, and they were also printed on fire-screens and other furniture. Miss Lavinia Fenton, who acted Polly, became the idol of the town; engravings of her were sold by thousands: her life was written, and collections were made of her jests.[755] Eventually she married the Duke of Bolton. Sir Robert Walpole laughed at the satire against himself, and “Gay grew rich, and Rich gay,” as the popular epigram went. Hogarth drew the chief scene with Walker as Macheath, and Spiller as Mat o’ the Mint. Swift was vexed to find his Gulliver for the time forgotten.
The custom of allowing young men of fashion to have chairs upon the stage was an intolerable nuisance to the actors before Garrick. In 1721 it led to a desperate riot at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. Half-a-dozen beaux, headed by a tipsy earl, were gathered round the wings, when the earl reeled across the stage where Macbeth and his lady were then acting, to speak to a boon companion at the opposite side. Rich the manager, vexed at the interruption, forbade the earl the house, upon which the earl struck Rich and Rich the earl. Half-a-dozen swords at once sprang out and decreed that Rich must die; but Quin and his brother actors rushed to the rescue with bare blades, charged the coxcombs, and drove them through the stage-door into the kennel. The beaux returning to the front, rushed into the boxes, broke the sconces, slashed the hangings, and threatened to burn the house; upon which doughty Quin and a party of constables and watchmen flung themselves on the rioters and haled them to prison. The actors, intimidated, refused to re-open the house till the king granted them a guard of soldiers, a custom that has not long been discontinued. It was not till 1780 that the habit of admitting the vulgar, noisy, and turbulent footmen gratis was abandoned.[756]
Macklin, afterwards the inimitable Shylock and Sir Pertinax, played small parts at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre till 1731, when a short speech as Brazencourt, in Fielding’s “Coffee-house Politicians,” betrayed the true actor. He lived till over a hundred, so long that he did not leave Covent Garden till after Braham’s appearance, and Braham many of our elder readers have seen.[757]
Macklin, an Irishman, and in early life a Dragoon officer, was irritable, restless, and pugnacious; he obtained his first triumph at Drury Lane, as Shylock in 1741. In stern malignity, no one has surpassed Macklin. His acting was hard, but manly and weighty, though his features were rather rigid. He naturally condemned Garrick’s action and gesture as superabundant. His Sir Pertinax was excellent in its sly and deadly suppleness. He was also admirable in Lovegold, Scrub, Peachem, Polonius, and many Irish characters.
Quin was at Portugal Street as early as 1718-19. There he first “delighted the town by his chivalry as Hotspur, his bluntness as Clytus, his fieriness as Bajazet, his grandeur as Macbeth, his calm dignity as Brutus, his unctuousness as Falstaff, his duplicity as Maskwell, and his coarse drollery as Sir John Brute.”[758] It was just before this, that locked in a room and compelled to fight, he had killed Bowen, who was jealous of his acting as Bajazet. When Rich refused to give Quin more than £300 a year, he joined the Drury Lane company, where he instantly got £500 per annum.
When Rich grew wealthy enough to hire a new theatre in Covent Garden, he left Portugal Street. Almost the last play acted there was “The Anatomist,” by Ravenscroft, a second-rate author of Dryden’s time.
The mob attributed the flight of Rich from the old theatre to the appearance of a devil during the performance of the pantomime of “Harlequin and Dr. Faustus,” a play in which demons abound. The supernumerary spirit ascending by the roof instead of leaving by the door with his paid companions, was believed to have so frightened manager Rich that, taking the warning against theatrical profanity to heart, he never had the courage to open the theatre again.[759] The legend is curious, as it proves that even in 1732 the old Puritan horror of theatricals had not quite died out, and that at that period the poorer part of the audience was still ignorant enough to attribute mechanical tricks to supernatural interference.