THE ENGLISH STAGE IN THE I I HAVE selected as the subject of the two lectures which I am to have the honour of delivering to you the history of our English stage in the eighteenth century. The history of our theatre has been as glorious as it has been brief. For the three centuries of its existence as a part of our national life, our stage can point, with justifiable pride, to a record, splendid in its achievement, in some respects unsurpassed, a history that may well rank in quality and distinction with those of literature and art, and compare worthily with the annals of any of the European theatres. I think, roughly speaking, we may say that of those three centuries—the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-the first was the century of great drama, the greatest drama the world has ever known; the second a century in which the interest shifts from the drama to its exponents, the players; the third a century which at any rate we may venture to say, even though we are yet so close to it, will be noteworthy for the extraordinary advance made in the presentation of plays on the stage, the realisation of the utmost that the theatre can do in the way of giving to the work of the dramatist a worthy setting; a century in which painting, music, history, and archæology have all been pressed into the service of the theatre, in a degree never thought or 1 Two lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in February, 1906. Reprinted from The Fortnightly Review. dreamed of by our forefathers. Of these periods of theatrical history, general reasons point to the eighteenth century as the one which will at present best repay study and consideration. For the actual history of the theatre in the seventeenth century, for the lives of the dramatists and actors of those days, our materials are very scanty; to one seeking to gain a real knowledge of the great men of the Elizabethan and Restoration theatres, investigation can only yield very inadequate and therefore disappointing results. The nineteenth is too near to us to make it in the present instance either profitable or expedient to deal with its achievement. But the eighteenth century is not open to these objections; in this case the materials are sufficient; our stage becomes for the first time in some measure living, we can form some idea of the personalities of those who make its history, and we are so far removed in point of time as to be able to view their proceedings with impartiality. And there is one supreme reason why an actor is drawn irresistibly to study, if he does study, the history of the theatre in this eighteenth century. It is, in theatrical history, the century of the actor; he and not the dramatist is the dominating figure, his the achievement that survives, his art that finds in this century its highest opportunity for distinction. It is the player, not the author, that fixes the attention of posterity in the history of the Georgian theatre. For all those plays that attracted audiences in the eighteenth century are for the most part dead things. We can name on the fingers of one hand those plays that have survived and still hold their place on the stage. Home and Rowe, Murphy and Colman, Hill and D'Urfey, more or less popular authors of the day, they and their works have passed into oblivion; to read them with patience is beyond human power; while as for Addison and Steele, Fielding and Dr. Johnson, Cibber and Smollett, their dramatic efforts, successful or unsuccessful, would be buried in as dark oblivion, but for the undying fame of their authors in other branches of literature. Congreve, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh live to-day as literature and nothing else, while such once-popular plays as Home's Douglas, The Gamester, The Honeymoon, Holcroft's Road to Ruin, and Lillo's George Barnwell, that survived at any rate their own immediate popularity, have to-day all but passed out of recollection; indeed, Goldsmith and Sheridan alone, of all these eighteenth-century dramatists, have given to posterity imperishable works of genius. The tragic writing of the eighteenth century is devoid of inspiration; it is the true product of that Augustan age of English literature, the age of noble prose, or regular, uniform, correct, but unimpassioned poetry. Tragedy, bound hand and foot by the trammels of poetical orthodoxy, is lifeless and ponderous to the last degree; Dr. Johnson's Irene is the reductio ad absurdum of such attempts. The comedies are not so insufferable as the tragedies, but they are for the most part purely ephemeral productions, mechanical in construction, laboured in utterance. Cibber and Colman do little more than mark time between the brilliant impropriety of the age of Wycherley and Congreve and their more decorous and skilful successors, Goldsmith and Sheridan. If, however, posterity can find nothing to kindle its interest in the contemporary plays of the eighteenth century, it is not so with the players. For the first time in our history we begin to know something of our actors, and very interesting and entertaining people they turn out to be; interesting because of the conditions under which they work, entertaining because of their agreeable or disagreeable personalities. Never as an artist has the actor in this country enjoyed such opportunities for distinction, or occupied so prominent a place in the art of the theatre. Many causes contributed to this state of things. Foremost of all, perhaps, was the absence of long runsthe bane, from the actor's point of view, of our modern stage; the constant change of bill enabled the successful actor in the eighteenth century to cultivate and exhibit his versatility; whilst the fact that he never played a long or exacting part more than three or four times a week enabled· him to husband his strength, maintain his freshness, and escape that monotony of work which it is difficult for an actor not to experience in the conditions of our present-day theatre, when business considerations compel the theatrical manager to give seven or eight performances a week of a successful play. Mrs. Woffington, one of the most industrious of eighteenth-century actresses, was considered to have greatly impaired her health and hastened her premature death by frequently playing six times a week. What would her contemporaries have said to the labour of some of our modern actors, who, up to the very end of their career, have played arduous and exacting characters uninterruptedly season after season? Garrick, throughout his career, never played more than 138 nights in one year, and that the year of his début; during his management of Drury Lane he played on an average about 70 times a year. The run of Addison's Cato in 1713, which lasted twenty nights, of the Beggar's Opera in 1728, lasting sixty-two, were considered phenomenal in their length; and when in 1750 Garrick and Barry, as rival Romeos, played Shakepeare's tragedy at the two theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, for eight successive performances, the indignation of the public found vent in epigram. This very rivalry of Garrick and Barry in Romeo and Juliet, and the excitement it created, is a very striking instance of the keen emulation of the actors of that day in following one another in classical parts, and of the critical enthusiasm that was stirred in the public, whenever a new Othello, or Hamlet, or Falstaff challenged comparison with illustrious predecessors. And the opportunity given to these eighteenth-century actors of exhibiting their skill was rendered glorious by the proudest feature in the history of the Georgian theatre-the return of Shakespeare to the stage. If the contemporary drama offered them but poor material for the exercise of their art, they found in the revival of the great poet's fame all they could desire. Coincidently with the appearance of David Garrick in 1741, by the labours of Pope, Theobald, Warburton, Johnson, and others, Shakespeare had begun to take his supreme place in English literature; within the previous forty years nine editions of his works had been published, and some ladies of rank had formed a club to encourage and support the performance of his plays. This change found its immediate reflection in the theatre. Whereas during the early part of the century but eight or nine sorely mutilated plays of Shakespeare had held the stage, Garrick, when he went into the management, gave the public seventeen or eighteen of them annually. Apart from his own admiration of Shakespeare, which did not hinder him from perpetrating some outrageous improvements in his acting versions of the master's plays, Garrick found that he best consulted his own interests as a manager in giving his patrons frequent Shakespearean performances. There was another and a very strong reason why the actor of the eighteenth century was encouraged, nay, driven, to exert his powers to the utmost; it lay in the conditions under which he was compelled to exercise his art. In the first place, he was deprived of most of those accessories of scenery and costume which to-day have become part of our theatre. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that any real attempt was made by the actor to dress his characters in the costumes proper to the period of the play in which they figured. When in 1773 Macklin, to the incidental accompaniment of the Coldstream March, appeared as Macbeth, dressed in a kilt, he incurred all the ridicule and opprobrium of a daring innovator. The ordinary costume and wig of the day, richer or poorer in style according to the station of the character represented, was the only theatrical dress of the eighteenth-century |