The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield Part 22

_(From the "Spectator")_

No. 338. FRIDAY, MARCH 28, 1712.

"Nil fuit unquam Sic dispar sibi."

HOR. SAT. III. 1-1-18.

"Made up of nought but inconsistencies."

I find the tragedy of the "Distressed Mother" is published to-day. The author of the prologue,[A] I suppose pleads an old excuse I have read somewhere, of "being dull with design;" and the gentleman who writ the epilogue[B] has, to my knowledge, so much of greater moment to value himself upon, that he will easily forgive me for publis.h.i.+ng the exceptions made against gaiety at the end of serious entertainments in the following letter: I should be more unwilling to pardon him, than anybody, a practice which cannot have any ill consequence, but from the abilities of the person who is guilty of it.

[Footnote A: Steele.]

[Footnote B: Addison credited Budgell with the epilogue.]

"MR. SPECTATOR,--I had the happiness the other night of sitting very near you, and your worthy friend Sir Roger, at the acting of the new tragedy, which you have in a late paper or two so justly recommended.

I was highly pleased with the advantageous situation fortune had given me in placing me so near two gentlemen, from one of which I was sure to hear such reflections on the several incidents of the play as pure nature suggested; and from the other, such as flowed from the exactest art and judgment; though I must confess that my curiosity led me so much to observe the knight's reflections that I was not so well at leisure to improve myself by yours. Nature, I found, played her part in the knight pretty well, till at the last concluding lines she entirely forsook him. You must know, Sir, that it is always my custom, when I have been well entertained at a new tragedy, to make my retreat before the facetious epilogue enters; not but that those pieces are often very well writ, but having paid down my half-crown, and made a fair purchase of as much of the pleasing melancholy as the poet's art can afford me, or my own nature admit of, I am willing to carry some of it home with me; and cannot endure to be at once tricked out of all, though by the wittiest dexterity in the world. However, I kept my seat the other night, in hopes of finding my own sentiments of this matter favoured by your friend's; when, to my great surprise, I found the knight, entering with equal pleasure into both parts, and as much satisfied with Mrs. Oldfield's gaiety, as he had been before with Andromache's greatness. Whether this were no more than an effect of the knight's peculiar humanity, pleased to find at last, that, after all the tragical doings, everything was safe and well, I do not know.

But for my own part, I must confess I was so dissatisfied, that I was sorry the poet had saved Andromache, and could heartily have wished that he had left her stone-dead upon the stage. For you cannot imagine, Mr. Spectator, the mischief she was reserved to do me. I found my soul, during the action, gradually worked up to the highest pitch; and felt the exalted pa.s.sion which all generous minds conceive at the sight of virtue in distress. The impression, believe me, Sir, was so strong upon me, that I am persuaded, if I had been let alone in it, I could at an extremity have ventured to defend yourself and Sir Roger against half a score of the fiercest Mohocks; but the ludicrous epilogue in the close extinguished all my ardour, and made me look upon all such n.o.ble achievements as downright silly and romantic. What the rest of the audience felt, I cannot so well tell. For myself I must declare, that at the end of the play I found my soul uniform, and all of a piece; but at the end of the epilogue, it was so jumbled together and divided between jest and earnest, that, if you will forgive me an extravagant fancy, I will here set it down. I could not but fancy, if my soul had at that moment quitted my body, and descended to the poetical shades in the posture it was then in, what a strange figure it would have made among them. They would not have known what to have made of my motley spectre, half comic and half tragic, all over resembling a ridiculous face, that, at the same time, laughs on one side, and cries on the other. The only defence, I think, I have ever heard made for this, as it seems to me the most unnatural tack of the comic tail to the tragic head, is this, that the minds of the audience must be refreshed, and gentlemen and ladies not sent away to their own homes with too dismal and melancholy thoughts about them: for who knows the consequence of this? We are much obliged indeed to poets for the great tenderness they express for the safety of our persons, and heartily thank them for it. But if that be all, pray, good Sir, a.s.sure them, that we are none of us like to come to any great harm; and that, let them do their best, we shall, in all probability, live out the length of our days, and frequent the theatres more than ever. What makes me more desirous to have some reformation of this matter is, because of an ill consequence or two attending it: for a great many of our church musicians being related to the theatre, they have, in imitation of these epilogues, introduced in their farewell voluntaries, a sort of music quite foreign to the design of church-services, to the great prejudice of well-disposed people. Those fingering gentlemen should be informed, that they ought to suit their airs to the place and business; and that the musician is obliged to keep to the text as much as the preacher. For want of this, I have found by experience a great deal of mischief. For when the preacher has often, with great piety, and art enough, handled his subject, and the judicious clerk has with the utmost diligence called out two staves proper to the discourse, and I have found in myself, and in the rest of the pew, good thoughts and dispositions, they have been all in a moment dissipated by a merry jig from the organ loft.

One knows not what further ill effects the epilogues I have been speaking of may in time produce: but this I am credibly informed of, that Paul Lorrain[A] has resolved upon a very sudden reformation in his tragical dramas; and that, at the next monthly performance, he designs, instead of a penitential psalm, to dismiss his audience with an excellent new ballad of his own composing. Pray, Sir, do what you can to put a stop to these growing evils, and you will very much oblige your humble servant,

"PHYSIBULUS."

[Footnote A: At that time ordinary of Newgate; and who, in his accounts of the convicts executed at Tyburn, generally represented them as true penitents, and dying very well.]

No. 341. TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 1712.

"--Revocate animos, maestumque timorem Mitt.i.te--"

VIRG. AEN.I. 206.

"Resume your courage, and dismiss your care."

DRYDEN.

Having, to oblige my correspondent Physibulus, printed his letter last Friday, in relation to the new epilogue, he cannot take it amiss, if I now publish another, which I have just received from a gentleman who does not agree with him in his sentiments upon that matter.

"Sir,--I am amazed to find an epilogue attacked in your last Friday's paper, which has been so generally applauded by the town, and received such honours as were never before given to any in an English theatre.

"The audience would not permit Mrs. Oldfield to go off the stage the first night till she had repeated it twice; the second night the noise of _ancora_ was as loud as before, and she was again obliged to speak it twice; the third night it was called for a second time; and, in short, contrary to all other epilogues, which are dropped after the third representation of the play, this has already been repeated nine times.

"I must own I am the more surprised to find this censure, in opposition to the whole town, in a paper which has. .h.i.therto been famous for the candour of its criticisms.

"I can by no means allow your melancholy correspondent, that the new epilogue is unnatural, because it is gay. If I had a mind to be learned, I could tell him that the prologue and epilogue were real parts of the ancient tragedy; but every one knows, that on the British stage, they are distinct performances by themselves, pieces entirely detached from the play, and no way essential to it.

"The moment the play ends, Mrs. Oldfield is no more Andromache, but Mrs. Oldfield; and though the poet had left Andromache stone-dead upon the stage, as your ingenious correspondent phrases it, Mrs. Oldfield might still have spoke a merry epilogue. We have an instance of this in a tragedy where there is not only a death, but a martyrdom.[A] St.

Catherine was there personated by Nell Gwyn; she lies stone-dead upon the stage, but, upon those gentlemen's offering to remove her body, whose business it is to carry off the slain in our English tragedies, she breaks out into that abrupt beginning of what was a very ludicrous, but at the same time thought a very good epilogue:--

"'Hold: are you mad? you d.a.m.n'd confounded dog!

I am to rise and speak the epilogue.'

[Footnote A: "Tyrannic Love; or, the Royal Martyr." By Dryden.]

"This diverting manner was always practised by Mr. Dryden, who, if he was not the best writer of tragedies in his time, was allowed by every one to have the happiest turn for a prologue or an epilogue. The epilogues to 'Cleomenes,' 'Don Sebastian,' the 'Duke of Guise,'

'Aurengezebe,' and 'Love Triumphant,' are all precedents of this nature.

"I might further justify this practice by that excellent epilogue which was spoken, a few years since, after the tragedy of 'Phaedra and Hippolitus;'[A] with a great many others, in which the authors have endeavoured to make the audience merry. If they have not all succeeded so well as the writer of this, they have however shown that it was not for want of good will.

[Footnote A: By Edmund Neal.]

"I must further observe, that the gaiety of it may be still the more proper, as it is at the end of a French play; since every one knows that nation, who are generally esteemed to have as polite a taste as any in Europe, always close their tragic entertainments with what they call a _pet.i.te piece_, which is purposely designed to raise mirth, and send away the audience well pleased. The same person who has supported the chief character in the tragedy, very often plays the princ.i.p.al part in the _pet.i.te piece_; so that I have myself seen, at Paris, Orestes and Lubin acted the same night by the same man.

"Tragi-comedy, indeed, you have yourself, in a former speculation, found fault with very justly, because it breaks the tide of the pa.s.sions, while they are yet flowing; but this is nothing at all to the present case, where they have already had their full course.

"As the new epilogue is written conformably to the practice of our best poets, so it is not such an one, which, as the Duke of Buckingham says in his 'Rehearsal,' might serve for any other play; but wholly rises out of the occurrences of the piece it was composed for.

"The only reason your mournful correspondent gives against this facetious epilogue, as he calls it, is, that he has a mind to go home melancholy. I wish the gentleman may not be more grave than wise. For my own part, I must confess, I think it very sufficient to have the anguish of a fict.i.tious piece remain upon me while it is representing; but I love to be sent home to bed in a good humour. If Physibulus is however resolved to be inconsolable, and not to have his tears dried up, he need only continue his old custom, and when he has had his half-crown's worth of sorrow, slink out before the epilogue begins.

"It is pleasant enough to hear this tragical genius complaining of the great mischief Andromache had done him. What was that? Why, she made him laugh. The poor gentleman's sufferings put me in mind of Harlequin's case, who was tickled to death. He tells us soon after, through a small mistake of sorrow for rage, that during the whole action he was so very sorry, that he thinks he could have attacked half a score of the fiercest Mohawks in the excess of his grief. I cannot but look upon it as a happy accident, that a man who is so b.l.o.o.d.y-minded in his affliction, was diverted from this fit of outrageous melancholy. The valour of this gentleman in his distress brings to one's memory the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, who lays about him at such an unmerciful rate in an old romance. I shall readily grant him that his soul, as he himself says, would have made a very ridiculous figure, had it quitted the body and descended to the poetical shades in such an encounter.

"As to his conceit of tacking a tragic head with a comic tail, in order to refresh the audience, it is such a piece of jargon, that I don't know what to make of it.

"The elegant writer makes a very sudden transition from the playhouse to the church, and from thence to the gallows.

"As for what relates to the church, he is of opinion that these epilogues have given occasion to those merry jigs from the organ-loft, which have dissipated those good thoughts and dispositions he has found in himself, and the rest of the pew, upon the singing of two staves culled out by the judicious and diligent clerk.

"He fetches his next thought from Tyburn; and seems very apprehensive lest there should happen any innovations in the tragedies of his friend Paul Lorrain.

"In the mean time, Sir, this gloomy writer, who is so mightily scandalised at a gay epilogue after a serious play, speaking of the fate of those unhappy wretches who are condemned to suffer an ignominious death by the justice of our laws, endeavours to make the reader merry on so improper an occasion by those poor burlesque expressions of tragical dramas and monthly performances.--I am, Sir, with great respect, your most obedient, most humble servant,

"PHILOMEDES."

ON DRAMATIC CRITICS

(_Addison in the "Spectator_")

No. 592. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1714.

"--Studium sine divite veni."

HOR. ARS POET. 409.

"Art without a vein."

ROSCOMMON.