520

HONEST INDIGNATION.

horror-that the actors were usually loose men about town, needy and unscrupulous, some of them wenchers, and some of them dicers, and some of them bullies-that the actresses were half of them kept mistresses of gentlemen of quality, and a moiety of the remainder at the service of the first comer with a golden Carolus in his pocket-the honest man, we say, who knew all this, might well refuse to become the patron of the polluted boards. His was an indignant disinclination which no right thinking man can blame. The clergy who lashed the vices of the play-house-and many such were ornaments and guardians of the Established Church-had not only Christian truth but common good taste upon their side; and it was a side which they showed themselves amply able to defend against all comers, as Congreve found to his cost when he heedlessly grappled with Jeremy Collier, the great non-juror, aud came out of the conflict mauled and bruised as never playwright was before. The Puritan had no horror of what was really excellent in dramatic literature, when its degrading connection (for such he considered it) with the play-house was severed. The first hearty recognition of the real greatness of Shakespeare came from the pen of John Milton, who was himself the author of the beautiful Masque of Comus,' which, until a few years, kept its place as a musical afterpiece upon the English stage. The most sturdy and resolute, and persistent sneers at Shakespeare, on the other hand, came from John Dryden, who found no relief from his torturing hatred of the Puritans, until he was safely lodged upon the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, which, if he had but played in his own productions, would have refused him at that time a Christian burial."

That the theatre has not been utterly destroyed and swept from existence, under the influence of the baleful evils that have so often fastened upon it, is only due to

VITALITY OF THE DRAMA.

521

the wonderful intrinsic vitality of the drama. For twentyfour hundred years it has existed. It was invented at Athens, Greece, twenty centuries ago. It has survived the rise and fall of empires, the change of the Greek and Latin languages from living to dead tongues; the downfall of kings, emperors and nations.

But above all it has outlived the destructive influences of vice and shamelessness, brought against it by wicked and worthless men, who have from time to time been its representatives and defenders.

A writer in the Cincinnati Gazette, in a mistaken conception of my position toward the drama, and a severe eriticism thereon, said some things which I could not say better, if I tried. "We read of the time when people of rank attended the theatre, and we read of noble and other literary celebrities writing for it, and of the literary circles that went together to see a new play, and to approve or denounce it; and from this we have fancied that in those days the theatre must have been much more respectable than now, and that the actors and actresses were reputable and virtuous. But the manners of the time were coarse. The plays which they witnessed are mostly banished from the stage now, because of their indelicacy. Even the plays of Shakespeare, whom we have lately seen written down a Christian dramatist of the time when the theatre was a school of pure morality, have to be much 'cut' to suit the delicacy of our degenerate times. Literary men themselves were not considered a very reputable class at that time. And to be the mistress of a man of fashion was regarded as the natural relation of a favorite actress. The honest Dame Quickly expresses naively the common. report, when, in admiration of Falstaff's acting of the heavy father in reproving Prince Hal, she exclaims, 'O rare! he doth it as like one of these harlotry players as ever I see.' If we place the palmy age of the stage at the time

522

A SUGGESTIVE RETROSPECT.

when it was most prolific in the great celebrities of its traditions, such as Garrick, Quin, Barry, Colley Cibber, Kemble, Cooke, and Foote, we shall find it a time when the drama was grossly licentious; when audiences were coarse and often turbulent; when the pit made free remarks upon the actresses, and they often replied; when the men of fashion frequented the 'tiring room' of the actresses, and freely commented on what was revealed and concealed, and when the great actresses generally were mistresses to men of wealth and fashion, and it made no difference in their reception by their royal patrons. In the list of the great actresses of the eighteenth century, whose names are now greatest in the traditions of the stage, they are very rare exceptions who lived according to the ordinances; while the list of our time and country has such as Julia Dean, Mrs. Mowatt, Miss Davenport, Miss Cushman, and many others who achieved success on the stage and maintained good social repute. If we place the palmy or the virtuous period of the stage at a time other than that when it produced its greatest historical celebrities, where shall we put it? In all later times it has been lamenting its decline. The stage has so much improved that a woman may be an actress without its being thought a matter of course that she has sacrificed modesty and chastity. That is a great improvement upon the 'pure age' of the drama. Actors and actresses are regarded as a peculiar people, on account of the atmosphere of fiction in which they are always seen by the public; but man or woman may now follow the stage and still maintain a social standing. Many American women have done so who were admirable in all the relations of life. In fine, the stage, though by no means perfect, has improved, and is improving in every respect-decency, reputability, remuneration, artistic ability, public appreciation and professional respectability."

In one respect it is undoubtedly true that there has been a retrograding movement on the part of our theatres. I refer to the accommodations provided for the players.

In former days, when the theatre was almost invariably a building from ground to attic, entirely devoted to theatrical uses to the theatre, in fact-the comforts of the players were greater than they are in this progressive and utilizing age. But, now that ground is so very valuable in our large cities, and as theatres must always be situated in the most populous and fashionable quarters of the town, stores below and offices above encroach upon the theatre's space, and "Behind the Scenes" is a more cramped and crowded world than ever. Every available inch is given to the auditorium and the stage. In many theatres there no longer exists a green-room-that time-honored rallying ground of the players-and the dressing-rooms are bare and beggarly little cubbyholes, ill-lighted, damp, and foulsmelling.

But this is counterbalanced in numberless particulars, wherein the march of improvement has been steadily onward. A writer in one of our theatrical journals thus brings up several of these: "As a rule," he says, "our actors now take more pains to understand their parts than they did at a former period-this with regard to little ones as well as big. We have known the time when a professional having a part under what is technically called a 'length' (forty-two lines), was either careless about it, or exerted himself to render it ridiculous, deerning it below his deserts. Then, as to the dressing and scenery of plays -both betrayed the utmost ignorance on the part of managers who could pay for better. A gratifying evidence of the improvement we speak of, is afforded us on the occasion of Mr. Edwin Booth's appearance at the Winter Garden as Hamlet. How this tragedy used to be given, we need not inform our readers. If there was a tolerable per

524

BETTER SCENERY AND COSTUMING.

former in the principal character, it was considered quite enough. The rest might be below par-a Ghost that was husky instead of solemn, a Polonius senile and not courtly, a Grave-digger a buffoon in place of a quaint fellow, a Claudius who was a regularly ticketed villain instead of a very passable monarch, and an Ophelia who was an affected walking lady. Then, the costumes and the scenery! There was Hamlet himself dressed like a rope-dancer in mourning, the daughter of Polonius like a modern Miss done up for a ball, and the rest to suit; exteriors and interiors not known for many centuries after the represented race-the whole constituting a ludicrous hash. Where and when we saw Mr. Booth in the part all this was changed for the better. All the scenery was antique, also the costumes-the long, flowing habits of the era being the general wear. Often in our time had we seen Claudius seated on a throne bearing the English insignia of royalty; but it was different on the occasion in question, when, in place of the golden lions of Albion it was the mysterious raven of Denmark that met our view, and the banner of Odin in place of that of St. George. As 'Hamlet' used to be acted, the churchyard scene, instead of being one of the most solemn in the whole play, was usually changed into one of low fun. The idea of those who were sent on as the grave-diggers was that they were intended to show as the lowest sort of buffoons. To do this they tried their best in style of speech, in look and in action. What old play-goer can forget the bottle of supposed Rhenish from which the chief clod-shoveler has several pulls, the red nightcap on his head and the sixteen vests his companion helped him to take off? Another change for the better perceptible in plays, as they are acted, in contradistinction to that in which the were acted, is the grand music we have between the acts. This was a particular which used to be entirely neglected, or observed