that it came in by force only to please the company, to see her dance in boy's clothes; and the truth is, there is no comparison between Nell's dancing the other day at the King's House in boy's clothes and this, this being infinitely beyond the other.".

"Who would not think to see thee dance so light,

Thou wert all air, or else all soul and spirit,"

wrote Richard Flecknoe.

She was equally charming as a singer; and it is said that she owed her disgraceful elevation to her beautiful singing of the old ballad, "My Lodging is on the Cold Ground," and of another commencing:

"I'll crown thee with a garland of straw then,
And marry thee with a rush ring."

Fascinating the King by these ditties, as Nell Gwynne had done by her witty Epilogue. Her daughter, Mary Tudor, married the second Earl of Derwentwater. In the same company was the beautiful MRS. DAVENPORT, of whom a romantic story is told in the Grammont Memoirs. A woman of unblemished virtue, she was, after most desperate importunities of another kind, entrapped into a sham marriage with the Earl of Oxford, who, after the honeymoon, brutally told her that the ceremony had been performed by his trumpeter, and was no marriage at all. Half distracted, she sought the King, threw herself at his feet, and

THE ROMANCE OF MRS. DAVENPORT.

61

demanded justice. But the only reparation she could obtain was an annuity of three hundred a year, upon which she retired from the stage.

DAVENANT, the manager of the Duke's company, was said to have been Shakespeare's natural son; his mother, a very beautiful woman, kept the Crown Inn at Oxford, where the great poet was accustomed to sleep when journeying between London and Stratford. William was in his boyhood a page to several noble personages; in his youth he wrote plays and verses; was made Laureate after Jonson's death; served in the civil wars, under the Marquis of Newcastle, as General of Ordnance, and conducted himself so bravely that he was knighted by that nobleman; he was afterwards taken prisoner, and he would have been executed but for the intercession of two gentlemen (it has been said of Milton), to whom he had shown great kindness when they were in a similar strait. We now find him closing his adventurous career as a theatrical patentee. He was the first who commenced the barbarous alterations and mutilations of Shakespeare, to better suit the corrupt and gallicised taste of the Court.

The great actors of this company, as their career extended far beyond the period defined by this chapter, I shall reserve for a separate one.

CHAPTER II.

BETTERTON AND HIS ASSOCIATES.

Rivalry-Degradation of the Stage-The Patent bought for £80Thomas Betterton-His Style of Acting-His high PositionHis Last Appearance-A Good Story-Will Mountfort-His Tragical Fate-Kynaston, the Famous Boy Actress-SmithA Famous Heavy Villain Verbruggen - Nokes - LeighCave Underhil-Dick Estcourt-Pictures and Anecdotes of their Acting.

D

AVENANT removed his company from Salis

bury Court to Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1661, and there, according to general authorities, introduced scenery and decorations for the first time. upon the English stage.

This theatre was soon found to be too small, and a new one was commenced in Dorset Gardens. It was not opened, however, until 1671, after its projector's death. As might be expected, there was a strong rivalry between the two houses. The elaborate spectacles, which were a special feature of Dorset Gardens, were frequently ridiculed at Drury Lane; Dryden attacks them in a prologue written for the opening of the new theatre, after the fire,

"You who each day can theatres behold,

Like Nero's palace shining all with gold,
Our mean ungilded stage will scorn, we fear,
And for the homely room disdain the cheer."

DEGRADATION OF THE STAGE.

63

Long deprivation of theatrical amusements made the people eagerly flock to them upon their revival, and for some years both companies were exceptionally prosperous; but Drury Lane had the finer actors, especially after Kynaston and several others seceded from Lincoln's Inn; and when the novelty began to wear off, this superiority told against Davenant, who was then obliged to resort to scenic displays and music, to expensive dresses and decorations, to add a new attraction. Both after a time began to suffer so much from a most contemptible rivalry, that they were driven to petition the King to suppress it-this was no more than a peep-show in Salisbury Change!

Wright in his "Historia Histrionica" complains that plays could not draw an audience without foreigners being called in. Betterton had to bring dancers and singers from France and Italy in 1704. When he opened the great theatre in the Haymarket in 1709, a posture master performed between the acts of Othello.*

To all these evils were added dissatisfaction and insubordination within the Commonwealth. Hart and Mohun were growing old, and younger actors

* In 1717 Rich paid a German £10 a night for two dogs who danced a minuet between the acts; the other house was deserted. In 1758 Signor Grimaldi, the father of Joe, was announced to make his first appearance at Drury Lane in a new pantomimic dance called "The Millers," at the end of the first act of "Richard III." Our ancestors, at all events, were not very strict in their ideas of artistic unities.

were impatient to take their places. At length in consequence of these disagreements, and the great falling off in the audiences, the King commanded the two companies to amalgamate (1682) at Drury Lane.* This union was so much in favour of the Duke's people that Hart quitted the stage in disgust. Mohun died soon afterwards, and thus left the aspirants a clear field. Upon the death of Sir William Davenant the patent went into the hands of his son, Charles, who transferred it to his brother, Alexander. In 1690 it fell into the possession of one Christopher Rich, a lawyer, who bought it for £80, and divided it into shares. The profits were divided into twenty parts, ten for the proprietors, and ten divided. and subdivided among the principal performers. The proprietors sold their shares to speculators, men utterly ignorant of stage affairs, but who were thus admitted to a vote in their management. Cibber describes Rich as being "as sly a tyrant as ever was at the head of a theatre; for he gave the actors more liberty, and fewer days' pay than any of his predecessors: he would laugh with them over a bottle, and bite them in their bargains; he kept them poor that they might not be able to rebel, and sometimes merry that they might not

The Theatre in Dorset Gardens, however, was still occasionally used for plays that required elaborate machinery. It was pulled down early in the following century.

† See Appendix A.