66 actors. If we look at the pictures in the Garrick Club of Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard in Macbeth, of Garrick and Mrs. Cibber in Venice Preserved, or Barry and Mrs. Barry in Hamlet, we can get some idea of the illusion that the actor was called on to create, and could only create, by the magic of his art. Barry, as Hamlet, is dressed in a black court suit, with the ribbon of the Danish Order of the 'Elephant" across his breast. Garrick as Macbeth wears a blue and red suit, richly trimmed with gold, and short powdered wig; while the ladies, whether as Queen Gertrude or Lady Macbeth, are gorgeous in hoops and feathers. Occasionally some attempt would be made to dress Turkish or classical tragedies with some approach to realism; but such attempts were usually rather less convincing than powdered wigs and court suits. It was not only on the stage that the actor of this day had to contend against formidable difficulties. He had all his work cut out to fix and hold the attention of his audience. Until 1762 he played on a stage surrounded by fops and fine gentlemen, "unlick'd cubs of condition," as Cibber terms them. These persons, lolling in the wings, frequently interrupted the actors, and occasionally fought with them. In 1721 a noble but drunken earl, standing in the wings during a performance of Macbeth, crossed the stage to talk to a friend. Rich, the manager, expostulated with the nobleman for his breach of decorum, and he promptly slapped the manager's face. Thereupon Quin and two of the other actors drew their swords and drove the earl and his friends from the stage. But the gentlemen, not to be defeated, rushed into the boxes and, cutting and slashing right and left, proceeded to destroy the furniture; they were only stopped from doing further damage by the resolute action of Quin, who, calling the watch to his assistance, arrested the rioters and haled them before the magistrates. A less disastrous instance of these curious interruptions was that of a gentleman who was so stirred by the beauty of Mrs. Woffington's performance of Cordelia in King Lear that he could not refrain from coming on to the stage and embracing her in the sight of the audience. Cibber, during his management, did something to mitigate the intrusion of these lollers in the wings; but it was left to Garrick to abolish them. In these days the pit was looked on as containing the critical part of the audience. It occupied the whole of the floor of the theatre, right up to the orchestra. With the exception of the boxes where the ladies and people of quality sat, which cost four shillings, the pit seats at half a crown were the most expensive in the theatre. Macklin, in his old age, has left us a description of these pittites which gives some notion of the awe in which they were held by the actors. "You then saw," he said, speaking of his own day, "no red cloaks, and heard no pattens in the pit, but you saw merchants from the city with big-wigs, lawyers from the Temple with big-wigs, and physicians from the coffee-houses with big-wigs, and the whole exhibited such a formidable grizzle as might well shake the nerves of actors and authors." Here, in the pit, Dr. Johnson would, on occasion, sit in judgment; it was leaning forward in the front row of the pit that the players would descry, with apprehension, the burly form of the poet Churchill, whose satire in The Rosciad had stung not a few of them to the quick. And these gentlemen of the pit gave their criticisms very freely, and often conveyed them very audibly to the persons on the stage. When four theatres at most served the needs of the town and the number of playgoers was very limited, there grew up quite a happy, if at times inconvenient, family feeling between actor and audience. In the prologue that was always spoken before any new play, or on any unique occasion, the actor speaking it would frequently take the audience into his confidence, ask their indulgence for his wife, who was that night making her first appearance in a new part, or apologise for the absence of some artist who had quarrelled with the management. It was this same intimacy of the player with his public that betrayed Garrick into the bad taste of selecting Benedick as the part in which to make his first appearance at Drury Lane after his honeymoon. But it is only fair to say that the audience thoroughly enjoyed the suggestiveness of the situation. If an actor, however popular, was considered by the critics of the pit to be ill-suited to some particular part for which he had been cast, or had cast himself, they very soon hissed him out of it. Cibber, a fine comedian, who, however, fancied himself in tragedy, to which his piping voice and insignificant appearance were quite unsuited, elected on one occasion to appear in the dignified character of Scipio in Thomson's Sophonisba. After being roundly hissed for two nights, he wisely desisted, and surrendered the part to another actor, Williams. When, the following night, the audience saw in the distance Scipio advancing to the front of the stage with stately strides, thinking it was still Cibber they immediately broke into violent hisses and cat-calls, and it was only when they recognised Williams that they changed their hisses to loud applause. If players fell out and they did sometimes-their quarrels became at once the talk of the town, and the pit was quick to take sides. In 1743 the actors at Drury Lane, headed by Garrick and Macklin, revolted against the reckless and discreditable administration of the manager, Fleetwood, whose dissipation and incompetence were bringing the theatre to ruin. Failing, however, to obtain from the Lord Chamberlain-then the Duke of Grafton-a licence to appear elsewhere, the players were obliged to return to Fleetwood, who agreed to receive them all back, with the exception of Macklin. Garrick, on behalf of his colleagues, accepted the manager's terms, and Macklin was left out in the cold. The friends of the latter chose to consider that he had been betrayed by Garrick, though an examination into the circumstances of the negotiations hardly bears out such a charge. In any case, on Garrick's first re-appearance at Drury Lane, the Macklinites, headed by a certain Dr. Barrowby, "a monster of lewdness and prophaneness," according to some authorities, but a keen playgoer and critic, assembled in great force to express their indignation at their hero's treatment. On Garrick's appearance they greeted him with loud cries of "Off! Off!" and pelted him so vigorously with peas, rotten eggs, and apples that he was compelled to leave the stage. This treatment continued for two nights, until Fleetwood put a party of prize-fighters into the pit, who so pounded and pummelled the uproarious Macklinites that they fled in confusion, and order was restored. Even the private characters or personal peculiarities of the actors and actresses were not sacred to the witlings of the pit. If an actress of notoriously immodest reputation uttered modest sentiments on the stage she was liable to be greeted with sarcastic jeers; if another with a plain face undertook a character whose personal beauty was emphasised throughout the play, she would be fortunate to escape without flouts from the gentlemen of the pit. At the same time, these critics were prodigal of applause when moved or delighted by a great actor. Aaron Hill, in endeavouring to persuade Garrick to appear as Cæsar in his adaptation of Voltaire's Death of Caesar, told him that Booth, in the rather similar character of Cato in Addison's tragedy, raised forty-eight to fifty thundering claps for delivering various noble sentiments to the audience; and that when Quin played the same part the claps dwindled to half a dozen. Davies says that Hill's statements are excessive, and they make one a little doubtful of a style of acting the excellence of which was measured by interruptions of this kind. At the same time they prove the eagerness and attention with which the delivery of the lines of some well-known or classical part by succeeding actors was followed by the critical portion of the audience. On the night of November 14th, 1746, the excitement of all good playgoers was stirred in an unwonted degree, and criticism prepared itself for a great effort in judgment and discrimination. The occasion was the appearance of Garrick and Quin at Drury Lane in Rowe's tragedy, The Fair Penitent. It was the first time that the two famous actors had played together in the same piece. Garrick was then in the early years of his extraordinary success. He had come as something of a revelation to those accustomed to the solemn methods of ponderous and declamatory tragedians. Quin was the great representative of this older school. "If this young fellow is right, we have all been wrong," he had said of Garrick's Richard III.; he, the portentous Cato and Brutus, stood in surly opposition to the lively Hamlet and Richard of the younger man, that were drawing all the town. Quin, from afar, lured by the scent of fame, A stage Leviathan, put in his claim," writes Churchill in The Rosciad, in enumerating the rivals of Garrick. He pays Quin the compliment of saying: No actor ever greater heights could reach In all the labour'd artifice of speech. But he qualifies his praise : His eyes in gloomy socket taught to roll, And as Hector making love to Andromache, or Horatio rebuking the gay Lothario, Churchill declares that Quin was still Quin and nothing else. With the same cast of features he is seen |