HOUR OF OPENING. 23 in russet or motley, and danced a jig to the sound of the pipe and tabor, singing, as they danced, either such a song as Sir Topas in the Twelfth Night, or a squib extemporising on the events of the day; those who, after this, were still hungry for amusement, could visit the beargarden or the cockpit. the actors fell upon their knees and prayed for the health and prosperity of their patrons, or the Queen, a custom retained in the "God save the Queen" that forms the last line of our playbills. At the end of the performance The play commenced at one or two. Plays were exhibited on Sunday, in spite of all the just denunciations of Puritans. Elizabeth herself visited a theatrical exhibition at Oxford on Sunday, and James I. allowed plays to be acted at Court on the same holy day. Sunday was a favourite night for masks. An indignant Precisian had once the hardihood to indict the Bishop of Lincoln for allowing a comedy to be acted in his house on a Sunday, the night after consecrating a chapel. Elizabeth, it must be remembered, never visited a public theatre, nor did many ladies, the female part of the audience being either courtesans or citizens' wives. This is at once an excuse for the frankness and coarseness of the language of the old dramatic writers: they wrote C 4 for men, and talked openly in public what they talked, and what we (gentle and simple) still talk, in private. The gallants poured into Blackfriars about noon, fresh from the ordinaries, generally on horseback, followed by their pages, who were sometimes also mounted. After the Armada, when coaches began to grow common, the richer people rolled thither in their vehicles. The congregation of coaches about 1683 grew so troublesome that there was an edict that they should not return to the playhouse to take up their owners, but disperse abroad, and wait in Paul's Church Yard, Carter Lane, and the Conduit, in Fleet Street. A great number of people came by water, the Globe, the Rose, and the Swan theatres being all in Southwark. When the distance grew inconvenient, and the players began to move more into the city, the company of watermen petitioned against such removal, declaring that 40,000 men lived by oar and scull between the bridge of Windsor and Gravesend, and this number was increased by the number of pressed men who had returned from the Spanish war. Every day 3000 or 4000 people, says Taylor, the Water-poet, visited the Bankside, besides the lawyers to open Westminster, and the courtiers going to, or retiring from, the Court at Greenwich, Whitehall, or Westminster. To these gay and motley crowds that covered the river at noonday, we COACHES INTRODUCED. 25 25 The must add the visitors and serving-men of the great mansions that lined the green banks of the Strand. players replied that the watermen's suit was unreasonable, and that they might as well ask to have the Exchange, Paul's, or Moorfields removed to the Bankside. No government interference could long stop the irresistible progress of events, for necessity, and not caprice, had compelled the removal: the quarrel was left to settle itself. Cheap steamboats, in our own day, have crushed the last-surviving waterman beneath their paddles. When the watermen in the crowd saw Queen Elizabeth riding from Somerset House to St. Paul's Cross, to hear a sermon on the defeat of the Armada, in a Flemish coach, presented to her by the Earl of Arundel, they little knew what a revolution was commencing. They soon loaded the new inventions with contumely and ridicule, and old men deplored the effeminacy of gallants who no longer walked but rode. "I wonder in my heart," says an anonymous writer, "why our nobility cannot in fair weather walk the streets as they were wont, as I have seen the Earls of Shrewsbury, Derby, Sussex, Cumberland, Essex, &c., besides those inimitable presidents of courage and valour, Sir Francis Drake, Sir P. Sidney, Sir Martin Frobisher, &c., with a number of others, when a coach was almost as rare as an elephant." A Dutchman introduced coaches in 1564, and they were universally abused: one writer says, the first coach was made of a crab-shell by the devil in China, and came over here in a cloud of tobacco-smoke. About the same time long tilt waggons were started from Canterbury, Norwich, Ipswich, and other places, to bring passengers and luggage to London. Strolling comedians would announce themselves at some country gentleman's house, as desiring his Worship's favour to allow them to enact, in the Town Hall; the bestspoken of the band, clad in faded satin, ushered in by a serving-man, would then step forward and speak for his party : "We are, sir, comedians, tragedians, Tragi-comedians, comi-tragedians, pastorists, Humorists, clownists, satirists: we have them, sir, Hamlet gives us a still better impression of them; alludes to the act of 1600 that, forbidding dramatic performances at all but two theatres, drove the actors into the country; and rails at the troop of choristers' children who filled the public stage. We have no doubt at many a house the young gallant greeted with equal courtesy the humorous man, the lover, the clown, the knight, and the *The Mayor of Queenborough (Middleton), Act v. Sc. 1. STROLLING PLAYERS. 27 boy in high-heeled shoes who played the lady. We may be sure that many a strolling manager would declare his opinion that his troop were the best in the world either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical, pastoral-historical, scene individable, or poem unlimited.* Companies of players performed at marriages and christenings, and not uncommonly, when they heard of such feasts, went to tender their services. Itinerant actors were common, even in the reign of Henry VI. By the 14 Elizabeth c. 5., all players not licensed by a nobleman were to be taken up as vagabonds. The London troops occasionally travelled, but it was not very profitable, and the actors generally went on half wages. These Arabs of the stage were miserably poor and acted at fairs and wakes, seldom getting 20s. from any audience. Ben Jonson is said to have played Hieronymo with such a troop, and, clad in a leather doublet, to have driven the waggon of stage properties. It is a staggering reflection that neither Bacon's works, nor those of Sir Thomas Browne, or Hall, or Donne, contain one word about Shakspere. A few obscure and doubtful invectives of rivals, a few quoted words, a sneer *Hamlet, Act ii. Sc. 2. |