STAGE LADIES AND THE ROMANCE OF HISTORY. "Our happy love may have a secret church, CROWNE, The Married Beau. AFTER the loose fashion of Master Crowne's Married Beau, it was no uncommon thing for gallants once to woo the mimic ladies of the scene. From the time that ladies first appeared upon the stage, they seem to have exercised a powerful attraction upon the cavaliers. Under date of the 18th October, 1666, Evelyn says in his Diary: "This night was acted my Lord Broghill's tragedy, 'Mustapha,' before their majesties at court, at which I was present, very seldom going to the public theatres, for many reasons, now, as they are abused to an atheistical liberty, foul and undecent women now (and never till now) permitted to appear and act, who, inflaming several young noblemen and gallants, became their misses, and to some their wives; witness the Earl of Oxford, Sir R. Howard, Prince Rupert, the Earl of Dorset, and another greater person than any of them, who fell into their snares, to the reproach of their noble families, and ruin of both body and soul. I was invited by my Lord Chamberlain to see this tragedy, exceedingly well written, though in my mind I did not approve of any such pastime in a time of such judgments and calamities." A year and a half earlier than the date of the above entry, namely, April 3, 1665, Pepys notices the same play, with some allusions to the ladies: "To a play at the Duke's of my Lord Orrery's, called 'Mustapha,' which being not good, made Betterton's part and Ianthe's but ordinary too. All the pleasure of the play was, the king and my Lady Castlemaine were there; and pretty witty Nell of the King's House, and the younger Marshall sat next us, which pleased me mightily." The play, however, is not so poor a one as Pepys describes it, and the cast was excellent. Betterton played Solyman the Magnificent. Mustapha and Zanga, the sons of Solyman, were played by Harris and Smith; and Young made a capital Cardinal. Mrs. Betterton was the Roxalana; and Mrs. Davies, one of those ladies who, like her sisters, the two Marshalls, Hughes and Nelly, exercised the fatal attraction over young noblemen and gallants, deplored by Evelyn, was the magnificent Queen of Hungary. Mustapha continued to be the favorite play until the theatre closed, when the plague began to spread. Pepys's "Ianthe" was Mrs. Betterton, of whom he says, on the 22d October, 1662, "the players do tell me that Betterton is not married to Ianthe, as they say; but also that he is a very sober, serious man, studious and humble, following of his studies, and is rich already with what he gets and saves." Betterton, however, married the lady, Miss Saunderson, in 1663. She had been famous for her Ianthe in Davenant's "Siege of Rhodes;" and she played Shakespeare's heroines with great effect. Pepys rightly designates the author of the play, Lord Orrery. Lord Broghill was made Earl of Orrery, five years before Evelyn saw his play. I may add that Mustapha has appeared in half-adozen different versions on the stage. Probably the worst of these was Mallet's; the latter author created great amusement by one of his passages, in which he said :— "Future sultans Have shunned the marriage tie ;" a confusion of tenses which has been compared with a similar error in the sermons of so correct a writer as Blair (vol. v., third edition, page 224), "in future periods the light dawned more and more." Although Evelyn, in 1666, says that "never till now" were women admitted to assume characters on the stage, he is not quite correct in his assertion. There were actresses full thirty years previous to that period. Thus, in 1632, the "Court Beggar" was acted at the Cockpit. In the last act, Lady Strangelove says:— "If you have a short speech or two, the boy's a pretty actor, and his mother can play her part: women-actors now grow in request." Our ancestors wisely followed a foreign fashion when they ceased to employ boys in female characters. Prynne says, in 1633, "They have now their female players in Italy and other foreign parts;" and in Michaelmas 1629, they had French women-actors in a play personated at Blackfriars, to which there was a great resort. Geneste quotes Freshwater as writing thus of French actresses in Paris, in 1629: "Yet the women are the best actors; they play their own parts, a thing much desired in England." In Davenant's patent for opening Lincoln's-inn Fields, in 1661, permission was given for the engaging of women as actresses, on the ground that the employment of men in such parts had given great offence. I more particularly notice this matter, because it was a knight who first opened a theatre with a regular female troupe added to the usual number of male actors. Sir William's ladies were Mrs. Davenport, Mrs. Saunderson, Mrs. Davies, Mrs. Long, Mrs. Gibbs, Mrs. Norris, Mrs. Holden, and Mrs. Jennings. The first four were Sir William's principal actresses, and these were boarded in the knight's own dwelling-house. Their title of "Mistress" does not necessarily imply that they were married ladies, but rather that they were old enough to be so. This knight, too, was the first who introduced scenery on the stage. I will add (par parenthèse) that it was a priest who first suggested the levelling of the pit with the stage, for the purpose of masquerades and balls. Prynne was not among those who fancied that morality would profit by the introduction of actresses. He had his misgivings as to the effects likely to be produced on the susceptible young gal lants of his day. Touching the appearance of the French actresses at the Blackfriars Theatre, noticed above, he calls it "an impudent, shameful, un-womanish, graceless, if not more than -ish attempt." The fashion was, undoubtedly, first set by the court, and by no less a person than a queen. Anne of Denmark, wife of James I., acted a part in a pastoral. They who remember some of the incidents of the training she gave her son, the princely knight young Henry, will hardly think that Anne gave dignity to the occupation she temporarily assumed. W Mrs. Saunderson is said to have been the first regularly-engaged actress who opened her lips on the English stage. Had she and her compeers only half the charms which report ascribed to them, they must have afforded far more pleasure to audience and spectators than the "beautiful woman-actor," Stephen Hamerton Hart, with his womanly dignity; Burt, with his odious female sprightliness; or Goffe, who was as hearty and bustling as old Mrs. Davenport. King Charles himself and his cavaliers, too, must have been especially delighted when they were no longer kept waiting for the commencement of a play, on the ground that the Queen was not yet shaved.” It is curious that there were some people not near so strait-laced as Prynne, who considered that public virtue would suffer shipwreck if actresses were permitted to establish themselves in the general favor. The opposite party, of course, went to an opposite extreme; and in 1672, not only were "Philaster," and Killigrew's "Parson's Wedding," played entirely by women, but one of the "Miss" Marshalls, gay daughter of a Presbyterian minister, on both occasions spoke the prologue and epilogue in male attire. "Philaster" is simply an absurd piece, which was rendered popular by Hart and Nell Gwyn; but with respect to Killigrew's piece, it is so disgusting, from the commencement to the finale, that I can hardly fancy how any individuals, barely alive to their humanity, could be brought to utter and enact the turpitudes which Killigrew set down for them, or that an audience could be kept from fleeing from the house before the first act was over. But the gallants could endure anything rather than a return to such effects as are alluded to by a contemporary writer, who, by way of introducing a female Desdemona, said in his prologue "Our women are defective and so sized You'd think they were some of the guard disguised; Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen; With brow so large, and nerve so uncompliant, When you call Desdemona enter Giant." Half a century elapsed before knight or gentleman took an actress from the stage, for the purpose of making her his wife. The squires, in this case, had precedence of the knights; and the antiquary, Martin Folkyes, led the way by espousing Lucretia Brad shaw, the uncorrupted amid corruption, and the original Corinna in the "Confederacy," Dorinda in the "Beaux Stratagem," and Arabella Zeal in the "Fair Quaker of Deal." This marriage took place in 1713, and there was not a happier hearth in England than that of the antiquary and the actress. A knight of the Garter followed, with an earl's coronet, and in 1735 the great Lord Peterborough acknowledged his marriage with that daughter of sweet sounds, Anastasia Robinson. This example at once flattered, provoked, and stimulated the ladies, one of whom, the daughter of Earl de Waldegrave, Lady Henrietta Herbert, married young Beard the actor. This was thought "low," and another knight's daughter was less censured for marrying her father's footman. The "Beggars' Opera" gave two coronets to two Pollys. Lavinia Fenton (Betswick), the original Polly at Lincoln's Inn, in 1728, became Duchess of Bolton a few years later; and in 1813, no less a man than Lord Thurlow married Mary Catherine Bolton, who was scarcely an inferior Polly to the original lady, who gave up Polly to become a Bolton. The squires once more took their turn when Sheridan married Miss Lindley; but before the last century closed, Miss Farren gave her hand to "the proudest earl in England," the Earl of Derby, Knight of the Bath. In 1807, knight and squire took two ladies from the stage. In that year Mr. Heathcote married the beautiful Miss Searle; and Earl Craven married Louisa Brunton. We have still among us five ex-actresses who married men of the degree of noble, knight, or squire. These are Miss Stephens, the widowed Countess of Essex; Miss Foote, the widowed Countess of Harrington; Miss O'Neill the widow of Sir William Beecher, Bart.; Mrs. Nisbett, the relict of the bold Sir Felix Boothby; and Miss M. Tree, whose late husband, Mr. Bradshaw, was at one time M. P. for Canterbury. There is something romantic in the lives of all these ladies, but most in that of "Lizzy Farren," and as the life of that lady of a Knight of the Bath has something in common with the career of a celebrated legal knight and judge, I will take some of its incidents as the chief points in the following sketch, which is a supplementary chapter to the Romance of History, and perhaps not the least interesting one in such a series. |