[March, 1820.
Minor Theatres.—This is a subject on which we shall treat, with satisfaction to ourselves, and, we hope, to the edification of the reader. Indeed, we are not a little vain of the article we propose to write on this occasion; and we feel the pen in our hands flutter its feathered down with more than its usual specific levity, at the thought of the idle, careless career before it. No Theatre-Royal oppresses the imagination, and entombs it in a mausoleum of massy pride; no manager’s pompous pretensions choak up the lively current of our blood: no long-announced performance, big with expectation, comes to nothing, and yet compels us gravely to record its failure, and compose its epitaph. We have here ‘ample scope and verge enough;’ we pick and chuse as we will, light where we please, and stay no longer than we have a mind—saying ‘this I like, that I loath, as one picks pears:’—hover over the Surry Theatre; or snatch a grace beyond the reach of art from the Miss Dennett’s at the Adelphi; or take a peep (like the Devil upon Two Sticks) at Mr. Booth at the Cobourg—and one peep is sufficient:—Or stretch our legs and strain our fancies (as a pure voluntary exercise of dramatic faith and charity) as far as Mr. Rae and the East London, where Mrs. Gould (late Miss Burrell), makes fine work with Don Giovanni and the Furies! We are not, in this case, to be ‘constrained by mastery.’—Escaped from under the more immediate inspection of the Lord Chamberlain’s eye, fastidious objections, formal method, regular details, strict moral censure, cannot be expected at our hands: our ‘speculative and officed instruments’ may be well laid aside for a time. At sight of the purlieus of taste, and suburbs of the drama, criticism ‘clappeth his wings, and straitway he is gone!’ In short, we feel it as our bounden duty to strike a truce with gravity, and give a furlough to fancy; and, in entering on this part of our subject, to let our thoughts wander over it, sport and trifle with it at pleasure, like the butter-fly of whom Spenser largely and loftily sings in his Muiopotmos.—
‘There he arriving, round about doth fly
From bed to bed, from one to other border,
And takes survey, with curious busy eye,
Of every flower and herb there set in order;
Now this, now that he tasteth tenderly,
Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder,
Nor with his feet their silken leaves deface,
But pastures on the pleasures of each place.