A FIRST NIGHT
Yesterday I went to the theatre to see a Tragedy played by the Lord Chamberlain, his servants, called “The Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” I was taken thither by Guasconi, who is attached to the Italian Ambassador, and who desired that I should not miss any of the curiosities of the city. The play was new, and the theatre was crowded with people, many of whom were of high rank, since noblemen in this country are fond of visiting the playhouse. They sit in places kept for them on the stage, and encourage the players by applause, and they express their approval and their blame.
The play is written partly in a kind of verse, which is pleasing to the ear and not without a certain happy fancy; but Guasconi told me that the English, who have learnt our science and makesonnets and madrigals after the pattern of our masters, do not consider this kind of writing to be either poetry or literature; but these rough and unpolished rhythms are used to tickle the popular ear and to please the taste of the common people.
There were in the theatre many well-known faces. Sir Bacon was sitting in the front, but he went to sleep shortly after the beginning of the play, and slept right until the end, none daring to disturb him. At the end of the play his servants woke him up by shaking him. He is a busy man, and goes to the theatre for repose, liking well the music, the high screeching of the players, and the buzz of tongues, and finding them conducive to repose. In one of the boxes Guasconi pointed me out the beautiful Countess of Nottingham, whom, he said, the English consider to be one of their most beautiful countrywomen. She has the marks of race, and was richly and elegantly dressed in black and crimson colours. With her was a young nobleman whom I took to be her son, but Guasconi told me that this was not so. He was her second husband. One nobleman, the Earl of Essex, arrived in the middle of the performance, and talked loudly to his friends, paying but little attention to the players. Since his father was beheaded not longago it was considered a lapse in taste on his part to visit the theatre so soon. In the theatre were several well-known players from other theatres, who were much clapped by the populace when they entered. The crowd was good-humoured, and pleased with the show: but they made a great noise, eating oranges and nuts, and throwing shells and peel right and left. There were also in the audience some men of letters, scholars and noblemen, whose fame as writers of verse is the talk of the town. For instance, Lord Southampton, who has written over a hundred sonnets; Sir Iger and the Countess of Pembrock, the author of “The Fall of Troy,” which those who know say is the finest epic which has been written since the death of Virgil. There were also many students, who were tempestuous and unruly in the expression of their enjoyment, and among these many vagabond writers and ballad-mongers.
The show was not displeasing, being full of much excellent clowning and fine dresses. It is a tale of murder and revenge such as have been brought into the fashion by the Italian story-tellers. It is brutal, and therefore suits the English taste, for Guasconi tells me the English will not go to the playhouse unless they can see tales of battle andmurder with plenty of fighting on the stage, mixed with grotesque episodes and rough horseplay. The players declaimed their words nicely, and the utterance of the verse, especially that which was spoken by the young boy who played the part of the mad heroine of the play, struck me as being not unmelodious poetry, but when I said this to the young literary noblemen with whom we supped after the performance, they split their sides with laughter, and said how impossible it was for a foreigner to judge the literature of a country which was not his own.
The author of the play, whose name I have forgotten, but which was something like John or James Shockper or Shicksperry, was himself, they told me, one of the players, which proved that he could neither be a man of education nor capable of writing his own tongue. In the play, they told me, he had played the part of the ghost. If this really be so, he cannot be a man of talent, for he spoke his lines so feebly and so haltingly that the vagabonds in the body of the theatre laughed and interrupted him several times, shouting such things as “Speak louder!” and “Go back to your grave.” The stage plays are, I was told, almost always written by players, for they best know whatsuits the popular taste, being of the populace and vagabonds themselves.
The scene which pleased the audience most was that of a fight in which the players fought bravely, more after the Italian style than the French, and the audience was greatly delighted by the close of the play, and laughed heartily when all the characters were killed and rolled about on the stage, the actor who played the King was especially popular; he had a jovial face, so that whenever he spoke, and sometimes even before he spoke, the audience laughed, heartily enjoying his comic talent.
There is no intelligible story in the play, nor is it possible to follow the sequence of events that happen on the stage; but it is rather the aim of the performance to present the public with a series of varied pictures, pleasant to the eye owing to the finery, the brave dresses, the glint of steel rapiers, the tinselled cloaks, and pleasing to the ear owing to the interludes of viol and hautboy playing.
At the end of the performance there was loud clapping, and the chief actor, who is famous in this country—so famous, indeed, that there is talk of emancipating him from his position as a vagabond and making him equal to a soldier of the Queen—was called on to the stage; nor would the public lethim depart until he had spoken to them, which he did. He thanked them for their warm welcome, and for expressing their pleasure at the performance of the fine play which John or James Shicksperry had written. He said he had felt sure that this play would not disappoint them, and he intended before long to give them another of the same kind, in which there would be still more murders, still more fighting, many more ghosts, and yet finer dresses. What the name of that play was, he said, was as yet a secret: who had written it was a secret. Here the audience shouted out: “We all know who has written it, it is old John or James.” (Now I come to think of it, I remember his name was Bill or Billy or Ben.) Since they had guessed, he said, he would not conceal it any longer: itwasBilly, and the play, which he knew they would enjoy, and in which there was plenty of clowning, was called “King Lear.”
The audience was pleased at this, and cheered for several minutes. They shouted for the author, for old Ben, and went on shouting while people hurried backward and forward across the stage. The author did not come forward, and the shouting continued. At last the chief actor returned, and bowing to the audience, said that old Benwas no longer in the house: he had gone to the tavern. After this there was more cheering, and the actor, kissing his hand to the audience, left the stage.
Guasconi took me to the Mermaid Tavern, a low place where the actors go after such performances, and where some of the nobles and the learned repair also, for the sake of change and to enjoy the spectacle. Here we were obliged to drink a great deal of a hot and nauseous mixture called sack, which is made of good wines spoilt by the admixture of much sugar and spice. I hate these English mixtures; their sweetmeats are made of sugared cake mixed with meat, and with their meat they eat sugared fruits. You can imagine how nauseous is this system, and indeed it reminds me of their plays. Their plays are like their plum puddings, full of great lumps of suet in which little sweet plums and currants are imbedded, but difficult to find. I said this to Guasconi, but he told me I must not judge of the English either by their food or their plays, but that if I wished to judge of their literature I should read the Sonnets of the Countess of Rutland, and he quoted one which begins:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Moreover, he said, the English were not a literary but a musical nation. Their music was unequalled in all Europe; it was the art (and the only art) in which they excelled; witness the divine melodies of Orlando Gibbons, Morley, and Dowland, which, indeed, I had heard performed at the Court, and had greatly enjoyed, for we have nothing like it in France.
The author of the play, Ben Shicksperry, arrived at the Mermaid late, and a learned man who was there, and whose name they told me was Will Johnson, condescended not only to speak but to drink with him. The players made a great noise, toasting each other, likewise the noblemen, who spent the time in violent disputes on the merits and demerits of this writer and that writer. After a time everybody began to talk of public affairs, of the policy of Spain, and of a party of English politicians whom they called pro-Spaniards: and they all agreed that these latter deserved to be immersed in a horse-trough, and so, late in the night, they set out to accomplish this unrefined joke. The English, in spite of their great culture, and their learning, their wonderful power of speaking foreign languages—for every one of the noblemen speaks perfectly not only Greek and Latin, but fiveor six other languages, and is well versed in astrology, music, and chess-playing—the English, I repeat, in spite of all this, have something barbarous at heart, which is awakened after they have partaken much of that nauseous potion called sack.