Shadows of the Stage | Page 2

islands were suppressed, he became
poor and presently kept a tavern, at Brentford, called The Three
Pigeons. Lowin was born in 1576 and he died in 1654--his grave being
in London, in the churchyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields--so that,
obviously, he was one of the veterans of the stage. He was in his
seventy-eighth year when he passed away--wherefore in his last days
he must have been "a mine of memories." He could talk of the stirring

times of Leicester, Drake, Essex, and Raleigh. He could remember, as
an event of his boyhood, the execution of Queen Mary Stuart, and
possibly he could describe, as an eye-witness, the splendid funeral
procession of Sir Philip Sidney. He could recall the death of Queen
Elizabeth; the advent of Scottish James; the ruffling, brilliant, dissolute,
audacious Duke of Buckingham; the impeachment and disgrace of
Francis Bacon; the production of the great plays of Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson; the meetings of the wits and poets at the Apollo and the
Mermaid. He might have personally known Robert Herrick--that
loveliest of the wild song-birds of that golden age. He might have been
present at the burial of Edmund Spenser, in Westminster Abbey--when
the poet brothers of the author of The Faerie Queene cast into his grave
their manuscript elegies and the pens with which those laments had
been written. He had acted Hamlet,--perhaps in the author's presence.
He had seen the burning of the old Globe Theatre. He had been, in the
early days of Charles the First, the chief and distinguished Falstaff of
the time. He had lived under the rule of three successive princes; had
deplored the sanguinary fate of the martyr-king (for the actors were
almost always royalists); had seen the rise of the Parliament and the
downfall of the theatre; and now, under the Protectorate of Oliver
Cromwell, he had become the keeper of an humble wayside inn. It is
easy to fancy the old actor sitting in his chair of state, the monarch of
his tap-room, with a flagon of beer, and a church-warden pipe of
tobacco, and holding forth, to a select circle of cronies, upon the
vanished glories of the Elizabethan stage--upon the days when there
were persons in existence really worthy to be called actors. He could
talk of Richard Burbage, the first Romeo; of Armin, famous in
Shakespeare's clowns and fools; of Heminge and Condell, who edited
the First Folio of Shakespeare, which possibly he himself purchased,
fresh from the press; of Joseph Taylor, whom it is said Shakespeare
personally instructed how to play Hamlet, and the recollection of
whose performance enabled Sir William Davenant to impart to
Betterton the example and tradition established by the author--a model
that has lasted to the present day; of Kempe, the original Dogberry, and
of the exuberant, merry Richard Tarleton, after whom that comic
genius had fashioned his artistic method; of Alleyne, who kept the
bear-garden, and who founded the College and Home at

Dulwich--where they still flourish; of Gabriel Spencer, and his duel
with Ben Jonson, wherein he lost his life at the hands of that burly
antagonist; of Marlowe "of the mighty line," and his awful and
lamentable death--stabbed at Deptford by a drunken drawer in a tavern
brawl. Very rich and fine, there can be no doubt, were that veteran
actor's remembrances of "the good old times," and most explicit and
downright, it may surely be believed, was his opinion, freely
communicated to the gossips of The Three Pigeons, that--in the
felicitous satirical phrase of Joseph Jefferson--all the good actors are
dead.
It was ever thus. Each successive epoch of theatrical history presents
the same picturesque image of storied regret--memory incarnated in the
veteran, ruefully vaunting the vanished glories of the past. There has
always been a time when the stage was finer than it is now. Cibber and
Macklin, surviving in the best days of Garrick, Peg Woffington, and
Kitty Clive, were always praising the better days of Wilks, Betterton,
and Elizabeth Barry. Aged play-goers of the period of Edmund Kean
and John Philip Kemble were firmly persuaded that the drama had been
buried, never to rise again, with the dust of Garrick and Henderson,
beneath the pavement of Westminster Abbey. Less than fifty years ago
an American historian of the stage (James Rees, 1845) described it as a
wreck, overwhelmed with "gloom and eternal night," above which the
genius of the drama was mournfully presiding, in the likeness of an owl.
The New York veteran of to-day, although his sad gaze may not
penetrate backward quite to the effulgent splendours of the old Park,
will sigh for Burton's and the Olympic, and the luminous period of Mrs.
Richardson, Mary Taylor, and Tom Hamblin. The Philadelphia veteran
gazes back to the golden era of the old Chestnut Street