The Hunchback | Page 4

became acquainted with William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. The
son, after his school education, obtained a commission in the army, but
gave up everything for the stage, and made his first appearance at the
Crow Street Theatre, in Dublin. He did not become a great actor, and
when he took to writing plays he did not prove himself a great poet, but
his skill in contriving situations through which a good actor can make
his powers tell upon the public, won the heart of the great actor of his
day, and as Macready's own poet he rose to fame.
Before Macready had discovered him, Sheridan Knowles lived partly
by teaching elocution at Belfast and Glasgow, partly by practice of
elocution as an actor. In 1815 he produced at the Belfast Theatre his
first play, Caius Gracchus. His next play, Virginius was produced at
Glasgow with great success. Macready, who had, at the age of
seventeen, begun his career as an actor at his father's theatre in
Birmingham, had, on Monday, October 5th, 1819, at the age of
twenty-six, taken the Londoners by storm in the character of Richard
III Covent Garden reopened its closed treasury. It was promptly
followed by a success in Coriolanus, and Macready's place was made.

He was at once offered fifty pounds a night for appearing on one
evening a week at Brighton. It was just after that turn in Macready's
fortunes that a friend at Glasgow recommended to him the part of
Virginius in Sheridan Knowles's play lately produced there. He agreed
unwillingly to look at it, and says that in April, 1820, the parcel
containing the MS. came as he was going out. He hesitated, then sat
down to read it that he might get a wearisome job over. As he read, he
says, "The freshness and simplicity of the dialogue fixed my attention; I
read on and on, and was soon absorbed in the interest of the story and
the passion of its scenes, till at its close I found myself in such a state
of excitement that for a time I was undecided what step to take.
Impulse was in the ascendant, and snatching up my pen I hurriedly
wrote, as my agitated feelings prompted, a letter to the author, to me
then a perfect stranger." Bryan Procter (Barry Cornwall) read the play
next day with Macready, and confirmed him in his admiration of it.
Macready at once got it accepted at the theatre, where nothing was
spent on scenery, but there was a good cast, and the enthusiasm of
Macready as stage manager for the occasion half affronted some of his
seniors. On the 17th of May, 1820, about a month after it came into
Macready's hands, Virginius was produced at Covent Garden, where,
says the actor in his "Reminiscences," "the curtain fell amidst the most
deafening applause of a highly-excited auditory." Sheridan Knowles's
fame, therefore, was made, like that of his friend Macready, and the
friendship between author and actor continued. Sheridan Knowles had
a kindly simplicity of character, and the two qualities for which an
actor most prizes a dramatist, skill in providing opportunities for acting
that will tell, and readiness to make any changes that the actor asks for.
The postscript to his first letter to Macready was, "Make any alterations
you like in any part of the play, and I shall be obliged to you." When he
brought to the great actor his play of William Tell--Caius Gracchus had
been produced in November, 1823--there were passages of writing in it
that stopped the course of action, and, says Macready, "Knowles had
less of the tenacity of authorship than most writers," so that there was
no difficulty about alterations, Macready having in a very high degree
the tenacity of actorship. And so, in 1825, Tell became another of
Macready's best successes.

Sheridan Knowles continued to write for the stage until 1845, when he
was drawn wholly from the theatre by a religious enthusiasm that
caused him, in 1851, to essay the breaking of a lance with Cardinal
Wiseman on the subject of Transubstantiation. Sir Robert Peel gave
ease to his latter days by a pension of 200 pounds a year from the Civil
List, which he had honourably earned by a career as dramatist, in which
he sought to appeal only to the higher sense of literature, and to draw
enjoyment from the purest source. Of his plays time two comedies {1}
here given are all that have kept their place upon the stage. As one of
the most earnest dramatic writers of the present century he is entitled to
a little corner in our memory. Worse work of the past has lasted longer
than the plays of Sheridan Knowles are likely to last through the future.
H. M.