A Book of the Play | Page 3

interval of some years, he vainly looked for the same feelings
to recur with the same occasion. He was disappointed. "At the first
period I knew nothing, understood nothing, discriminated nothing. I felt
all, loved all, wondered all--'was nourished I could not tell how.' I had
left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. The same
things were there materially; but the emblem, the reference was gone!
The green curtain was no longer a veil drawn between two worlds, the
unfolding of which was to bring back past ages, to present a 'royal
ghost'--but a certain quantity of green baize, which was to separate the
audience for a given time from certain of their fellow-men who were to
come forward and pretend those parts. The lights--the orchestra
lights--came up a clumsy machinery. The first ring, and the second ring,
was now but a trick of the prompter's bell--which had been, like the
note of the cuckoo, a phantom of a voice; no hand seen or guessed at
which ministered to its warning. The actors were men and women
painted. I thought the fault was in them; but it was in myself, and the
alteration which those many centuries--of six short twelvemonths--had
wrought in me." Presently, however, Lamb recovered tone, so to speak,
as a playgoer. Comparison and retrospection soon yielded to the
present attraction of the scene, and the theatre became to him, "upon a
new stock, the most delightful of recreations."
Audiences have always been miscellaneous. Among them not only
youth and age, but rich and poor, wise and ignorant, good and bad,
virtuous and vicious, have alike found representation. The gallery and
the groundlings have been catered for not less than the spectators of the

boxes and private rooms; yet, upon the whole, the stage, from its
earliest period, has always provided entertainment of a reputable and
wholesome kind. Even in its least commendable condition--and this, so
far as England is concerned, we may judge to have been during the
reign of King Charles II.--it yet possessed redeeming elements. It was
never wholly bad, though it might now and then come very near to
seeming so. And what it was, the audience had made it. It reflected
their sentiments and opinions; it accorded with their moods and
humours; it was their creature; its performers were their most faithful
and zealous servants.
Playgoers, it appears, were not wont to ride to the theatre in coaches
until late in the reign of James I. Taylor, the water-poet, in his invective
against coaches, 1623, dedicated to all grieved "with the world running
on wheels," writes: "Within our memories our nobility and gentry could
ride well mounted, and sometimes walk on foot, gallantly attended with
fourscore brave fellows in blue coats, which was a glory to our nation,
far greater than forty of these leathern tumbrels! Then, the name of
coach was heathen Greek. Who ever saw, but upon extraordinary
occasions, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Drake ride in a coach?
They made small use of coaches; there were but few in those times; and
they were deadly foes to sloth and effeminacy. It is in the memory of
many when, in the whole kingdom, there was not one! It is a doubtful
question whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, for
both appeared at the same time." According to Stow, coaches were
introduced here 1564, by Guilliam Boonen, who afterwards became
coachman to the queen. The first he ever made was for the Earl of
Rutland; but the demand rapidly increased, until there ensued a great
trade in coach-making, insomuch that a bill was brought into
Parliament, in 1601, to restrain the excessive use of such vehicles.
Between the coachmen and the watermen there was no very cordial
understanding, as the above quotation from Taylor sufficiently
demonstrates. In 1613 the Thames watermen petitioned the king, that
the players should not be permitted to have a theatre in London, or
Middlesex, within four miles of the Thames, in order that the
inhabitants might be induced, as formerly, to make use of boats in their
visits to the playhouses in Southwark. Not long afterwards sedans came

into fashion, still further to the prejudice of the watermen. In the
Induction to Ben Jonson's "Cynthia's Revels," performed in 1600,
mention is made of "coaches, hobby-horses, and foot-cloth nags," as in
ordinary use. In 1631 the churchwardens and constables, on behalf of
the inhabitants of Blackfriars, in a petition to Laud, then Bishop of
London, prayed for the removal of the playhouse from their parish, on
the score of the many inconveniences they endured as shopkeepers,
"being hindered by the great recourse to the playes, especially of
coaches, from selling their commodities, and having their wares many
times broken and beaten off