Of Dryden's coldly licentious comedies and ranting bombastic tragedies a few only seem to have been produced at the Dorset Gardens Theatre. Among these we may mention Limberham, Œdipus, Troilus and Cressida, and The Spanish Friar. Limberham was acted at the Duke's Theatre, in Dorset Gardens; because, being a satire upon a Court vice, it was deemed peculiarly calculated for that playhouse. The concourse of the citizens thither is alluded to in the prologue to Marriage à la Mode. Ravenscroft, also, in his epilogue to the play of Citizen Turned Gentleman, which was acted at the same theatre, takes occasion to disown the patronage of the more dissolute courtiers, in all probability because they formed the minor part of his audience. The citizens were his great patrons.
In the Postman, December 8, 1679, there is the following notice, quoted by Smith:—"At the request of several persons of quality, on Saturday next, being the 9th instant, at the theatre in Dorset Gardens, the famous Kentish men, Wm. and Rich. Joy, design to show to the town before they leave it the same tryals of strength, both of them, that Wm. had the honour of showing before his majesty and their royal highnesses, with several other persons of quality, for which he received a considerable gratuity. The lifting a weight of two thousand two hundred and forty pounds. His holding an extraordinary large cart-horse; and breaking a rope which will bear three thousand five hundred weight. Beginning exactly at two, and ending at four. The boxes, 4s.; the pit, 2s. 6d.; first gallery, 2s.; upper gallery, 1s. Whereas several scandalous persons have given out that they can do as much as any of the brothers, we do offer to such persons £100 reward, if he can perform the said matters of strength as they do, provided the pretender will forfeit £20 if he doth not. The day it is performed will be affixed a signal-flag on the theatre. No money to be returned after once paid."
In 1681 Dr. Davenant seems, by rather unfair tactics, to have bought off and pensioned both Hart and Kynaston from the King's Company, and so to have greatly weakened his rivals. Of these two actors some short notice may not be uninteresting. Hart had been a Cavalier captain during the Civil Wars, and was a pupil of Robinson, the actor, who was shot down at the taking of Basing House. Hart was a tragedian who excelled in parts that required a certain heroic and chivalrous dignity. As a youth, before the Restoration, when boys played female parts, Hart was successful as the Duchess, in Shirley's Cardinal. In Charles's time he played Othello, by the king's command, and rivalled Betterton's Hamlet at the other house. He created the part of Alexander, was excellent as Brutus, and terribly and vigorously wicked as Ben Jonson's Cataline. Rymer, says Dr. Doran, styled Hart and Mohun the Æsopus and Roscius of their time. As Amintor and Melanthus, in The Maid's Tragedy, they were incomparable. Pepys is loud too in his praises of Hart. His salary, was, however, at the most, £3 a week, though he realised £1,000 yearly after he became a shareholder of the theatre. Hart died in 1683, within a year of his being bought off.
Kynaston, in his way, was also a celebrity. As a handsome boy he had been renowned for playing heroines, and he afterwards acquired celebrity by his dignified impersonation of kings and tyrants. Betterton, the greatest of all the Charles II. actors, also played occasionally at Dorset Gardens. Pope knew him; Dryden was his friend; Kneller painted him. He was probably the greatest Hamlet that ever appeared; and Cibber sums up all eulogy of him when he says, "I never heard a line in tragedy come from Betterton wherein my judgment, my ear, and my imagination were not fully satisfied, which since his time I cannot equally say of any one actor whatsoever." The enchantment of his voice was such, adds the same excellent dramatic critic, that the multitude no more cared for sense in the words he spoke, "than our musical connoiseurs think it essential in the celebrated airs of an Italian opera."
Even when Whitefriars was at its grandest, and plumes moved about its narrow river-side streets, Dorset House was its central and most stately mansion. It was originally a mansion with gardens, belonging to a Bishop of Winchester; but about the year 1217 (Henry III.) a lease was granted by William, Abbot of Westminster, to Richard, Bishop of Sarum, at the yearly rent of twenty shillings, the Abbot retaining the advowson of St. Bride's Church, and promising to impart to the said bishop any needful ecclesiastical advice. It afterwards fell into the hands of the Sackvilles, held at first by a long lease from the see, but was eventually alienated by the good Bishop Jewel. A grant in 1611 (James I.) confirmed the manor of Salisbury Court to Richard, Earl of Dorset.
BAYNARD'S CASTLE, FROM A VIEW PUBLISHED IN 1790
The Earl of Dorset, to whom Bishop Jewel alienated the Whitefriars House, was the father of the poet, Thomas Sackville, Lord High Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth. The bishop received in exchange for the famous old house a piece of land near Cricklade, in Wiltshire. The poet earl was that wise old statesman who began "The Mirror for Magistrates," an allegorical poem of gloomy power, in which the poet intended to make all the great statesmen of England since the Conquest pass one by one to tell their troublous stories. He, however, only lived to write one legend—that of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. One of his finest and most Holbeinesque passages relates to old age:—
"And next in order sad, Old Age we found;
His beard all hoar, his eyes hollow and blind;
With drooping cheer still poring on the ground,
As on the place where Nature him assigned
To rest, when that the sisters had untwined
His vital thread, and ended with their knife
The fleeting course of fast declining life.
Crooked-back'd he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed,
Went on three feet, and sometimes crept on four,
With old lame bones, that rattled by his side;
His scalp all pil'd, and he with eld forelore,
His wither'd fist still knocking at death's door;
Fumbling and drivelling, as he draws his breath;
For brief, the shape and messenger of death."