SOURCE: “Thomas Killigrew and the History of the Theatres until the Union, 1682,” in The Playhouse of Pepys, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935, pp. 65-145.

[In the excerpt below, Summers surveys Killigrew's life, his work as a dramatist, and his activities as a theatrical manager.]

Thomas Killegrevv Maître du Theatre Royal & qui a pour sa conduitte des qualitez excellentes.

—Le Sieur Chappuzeau: L’Europe Vivante, 1667.

Our Author writ nine Plays in his Travells, and two at London; amongst which his Don Thomaso, in two parts, and his Parson's Wedding, will always be valu’d by the best Judges and Admirers of Dramatick Poetry.

—Gerard Langbaine: An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, 1691.

Quae theatra [Londini] fuerint, et qui circi, quorumque extent vestigia, et quae penitus conciderint.

—Alex. ab Alexandro, Lib. IV, cap. xxv.

Il y a donc à Londres trois Troupes d’excellens Comediens; la Troupe Royale que jouë tous les iours pour le public, & d’ordinaire tous les Ieudys apres soupé à Vvithal: la Troupe de Monsieur Frere vnique du Roy dans la place de Lincoln, qui reussit admirablement dans la machine, & qui va maintenant du pair auec les Italiens: & une troisième en Drury-lane, qui a grand abord. Il y a vne autre Troupe entretenue à Norvvich, l’vne des bonnes Villes du Royaume, & le seiour de toute la Noblesse du Pays, sans conter les Troupes de Campagne, ou se fait le Nouitiat des Comediens. Il faut ajoûter, Que ces trois Maisons de Londres sont superbes en decorations & en changemens; Que la Musique y est excellente & les Ballets magnifiques; Qu’elles n’ont pas moins de douze violons chacune pour les Preludes & pour les Entr-actes; Que ce seroit vn crime d’employer autre chose que de la cire pour éclairer le Theatre & de charger les Lustres d’vne matiere qui peut blesser l’odorat; & enfin, quoy qu’on iouë tous les iours, que ces Maisons ne desemplissent iamais & que cent carrosses en barricadent les auenues. On ne trouue rien de semblable en Ecosse & en Irlande.

—Le Sieur Chappuzeau: L’Europe Vivante, 1667.

Thomas Killigrew, who at the Restoration made no small figure as Davenant's energetic and not unsuccessful rival in the theatrical world, was able to put forward claims at least equipollent to those of the Laureate, if not indeed of more formal weight, since there is reason to suppose that during the Royal Exile King Charles had named him Master of the Revels,¹ an appointment which in view of the uncompromising attitude adopted and the immediate resumption of the Thespian dictatorship by Sir Henry Herbert, a crusted official and one “dexterous in the ways of the Court, as having gotten much by it”,² Killigrew was content should be quietly lixiviated into the ambiguous but privileged “title of King's Foole or Jester”, since this carried a fee out of the Wardrobe,³ a goodly deal of licence, and no responsibility.

Thomas Killigrew came of old Cornish stock, a family of courtiers “remarkable for its loyalty, accomplishments and wit”.⁴ He was the fourth son of Sir Robert and Mary Killigrew, of whose twelve children, three sons and four daughters⁵ lived to make some figure in the world.

The three brothers, William the eldest son, Thomas the fourth son, and Henry the youngest, were all dramatists, and as plays written by William and Thomas before the closing of the theatres were acted after the Restoration they may both be claimed as links between the period of Shirley and the age of Dryden, in the same way as Davenant is a link, although actually in this respect they are far less important and far less a vital force than the laureate.

The work of Sir William Killigrew demands separate and fuller consideration. Henry Killigrew (1613-1700)⁶ is the author of only one play, Pallantus and Eudora, a romantic tragedy designed for an Entertainment of the King and Queen at York House, at the nuptials of the first Duke of Buckingham's daughter, Lady Mary Villiers, and the Lord Charles Herbert, third son and heir of Philip, fourth Earl of Pembroke, on the 8th January, 1634-5. Two and a half years later the piece was publicly acted at the Blackfriars,⁷ and in 1638 a draft, derived from “a false and imperfect Transcript”, slipped into the world, a contraband quarto, as The Conspiracy. The correct version was printed under the poet's care, folio, 1653, as Pallantus and Eudora. It is curious to find that in the Second Volume of The Works of the Honourable Charles Sedley, Bart., 12mo, 1722,⁸ is included with separate title-page, “The Tyrant King of Crete, A Tragedy Never before Printed,” which is nothing else save a curtailed version of Pallantus and Eudora. It is poor stuff presented in a clouterly sort of blank verse such as can hardly be distinguished from very bad prose. Both The Conspiracy and Pallantus and Eudora are printed in that blank verse which has crumbled to disintegration, but The Tyrant King of Crete is the worst of the three. Yet it is by no means unlikely that this thing may not be an exercise from Sedley's pen. That The Works of 1722 contain spurious pieces may be allowed, but Sedley was a disappointing dramatist, and when we remember his Antony and Cleopatra there is certainly no argument to be derived from internal criticism which can definitely clear him of The Tyrant King.⁹

Thomas Killigrew was born on Friday, 7th February, 1612, at his father's house in the parish of S. Margaret Lothbury, London.¹⁰ Of his boyhood some part was passed at his father's Manor of Hanworth, Middlesex, and part in London. Familiar as the passage is which gives us so vivid a glimpse of the lad Killigrew, it must be quoted once again since it shows how early his love for the theatre manifested itself. Dining with Sir John Minnes on Lord Mayor's Day, 29th October, 1662, Pepys heard “Thos. Killigrew's way of getting to see plays when he was a boy. He would go to the Red Bull, and when the man cried to the boys, ‘Who will go and be a devil, and he shall see the play for nothing?’ then would he go in and be a devil upon the stage, and so get to see plays”. The Red Bull, built about 1600 and enlarged in 1632, stood at the upper end of S. John's, Clerkenwell, and accordingly it was within easy walking distance of the Killigrews’ house. This popular theatre specialized in Trojan derring-do and pyrotechnic effects, such as were employed for example in Heywood's quinary of Ages, where are fireworks and devils galore, and it was “mostly frequented by Citizens, and the meaner sort of People”.¹¹

Thomas Killigrew, says Anthony à Wood, was “not directed at any University (and therefore wanted some learning to poise his excellent natural parts) but in the Royal Court, where he was page of honour to King Charles I”.¹² There is indeed not wanting indirect but pretty conclusive evidence that Killigrew was “without Bookes, or Artes”,¹³ and he even goes so far as to break a jest upon himself as an “illiterate Courtier”,¹⁴ which, of course, must not be pressed too nearly, for his native talent and wit supplied many deficiencies, and he was not without a considerable amount of reading in Spenser and Sidney, in romances new and old, and romantic history, as his plays bear ample witness. The exact date of his introduction at Court and his appointment as a Page of Honour cannot be precisely determined, but if we name 1625-6¹⁵ we shall not be far out in our reckoning. At any rate by 1632 he had an established position and was in considerable favour with the King. Thereafter references to his activities are numerous. His salary from his post was £100 a year,¹⁶ and this he strove to supplement—with no small measure of success—by all the ways and means Caroline courtiers were wont to use, and very shabby and corrupt most of these methods were.

The literary circles of the Whitehall of Charles I were important, and since it was known that Queen Henrietta Maria in particular delighted in poets and playwrights, an obvious way to her favour was by the court stage. Not a few plays which were eventually applauded in the public theatres first saw the light as royal entertainments.¹⁷ Thomas Killigrew, then, served both as an actor¹⁸ and author. His activities in the former rôle were negligible, but in the second character he certainly attracted a good deal of notice.

Before the closing of the theatres in 1642 Killigrew had written three dramas in the most approved style of the day, and owing to his exceedingly useful habit of informing us where he penned his several pieces it is possible to date the composition with something like certainty. On 2nd April, 1640, the Stationers’ Register enters “a tragedy called The Prisoner by Master Killigrey”, and on the following 4th August it enters “a play called Claracilla by Master Killegray”. These “Two Tragae-Comedies” were printed 12mo, 1641,¹⁹ “As they were presented at the Phoenix in Drury Lane, by her Mties Servants.” In the folio Comedies, and Tragedies, 1664, the first play is The Princesse: Or, Love at first Sight, which, Pepys tells us, was acted “before the troubles”.²⁰ Moreover Claracilla (which in the folio becomes Claricilla) was written in Rome; The Princesse in Naples; The Prisoners in London.

Killigrew accompanied Walter Montagu to Italy in 1635. They left London in the late autumn, and spending some two months in France²¹ arrived at Vercelli during the second week of January, 1636. The following four months were passed in the south, Rome and Naples, and Killigrew had returned to England by the beginning of June at the latest, since he married his first wife, Cecilia Crofts, at Oatlands on 29th June, 1636. This gives a close limit for the composition of Claracilla and The Princesse, which two plays must have been written in the spring of 1636. The Prisoners, is certainly earlier and belongs to the period just before Killigrew's continental travels. It is therefore to be assigned to 1634-5, and so similar are these three dramas in style and treatment that it is easy to see they can have followed one another at no very long intervals, whilst the author was in the vein. They form one definite group and are all derived from one source, namely Ariane by Jean Desmaretz, sieur de Saint-Sorlin,²² a romance “très bien inventé” which, originally published without the author's name in two volumes, Paris, 1632, at once became exceedingly popular at both the French and English Courts, and was read with avidity by the platonic précieuses of both countries. Such a refined circle Queen Henrietta Maria had gathered about her, and nothing would have been more grateful to his royal mistress, as Killigrew very well knew, than the romantic dramas she loved, inspired by the fashionable Ariane.²³

Desmaretz de Saint-Sorlin takes his place, and that is by no means unimportant in the history of the novel, with De Gomberville, Vaumorière, La Calprenède, Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry. For Ariane, although considerably shorter than the romans de longue haleine, is of the same school; nay, more it is among the earliest and is completely typical of its kind. The work consists of sixteen books, and in the noble quarto of 1643, which I have used, comprises 775 pages. As is the wont of writers of heroic romance we are at once plunged in medias res. “Rome commençoit à sentir avec douleur les violences & les fureurs de Néron,” who during one of his midnight sallies through the streets of the city attacks and severely wounds two young Sicilians, Mélinte and Palamède, newly arrived in Rome. The main Narrative is soon interlaced with subsidiary tales such as the “Histoire d’Antonin, d’Emilie, de Decie, & de Camille”, commencing on page 29, and on page 50 combining with the “Histoire de Palamède, de Mélinte, d’Emilie, & de Camille”. Thus the crowding incidents are set in an atmosphere of pseudo-historical events; there are mistaken identities and masqued identities; parents or uncles obstruct the course of true love; the heroes are torn betwixt burning love and chivalrous friendship; the heroines are distracted by the conflict of love and honour; pirate bands, whose leader is some person of quality, play a large part in the action; and eventually at a time of general rejoicing when peace is declared, the rough is made smooth and the several pairs of lovers are joined in the soft roseate light of Hymen's torch.

Killigrew, it is evident, was well acquainted with and drew upon other sources, upon the work of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, Montemayor's Diana, and the Astrée, all so closely reflected in the heroic romances, as Georges de Scudéry boasts: “Je vous diray donc seulement que i’ay pris et que ie prendray touiours pour mes vniques Modelles, l’immortel heliodore, et le Grand vrfe.”²⁴ None the less Ariane was his most direct inspiration.

The Phoenix, or Cockpit, in Drury Lane at which were publicly performed²⁵ Killigrew's The Prisoners, Claracilla, and The Princesse, was a small roofed theatre, which had been built by Christopher Beeston in 1616, and opened in the following year. The three plays were produced in quick succession in 1637-8, for, as has been noted, Killigrew returned from Italy in May, 1636, and we know that the London theatres were closed owing to the plague for a period of no less than eighteen months in 1636-7. In the prologue²⁶ spoken in the Dublin theatre, which was built in Werburgh Street by John Ogilby in 1634,²⁷ to Shirley's The Doubtful Heir, then being originally acted under the name Rosania, the following lines occur:—

Rosania? methinks I hear one say,
What's that? 'Tis a strange title
to a play …
Such titles unto plays are now the mood,
Aglaura, Claracilla—

Suckling's Aglaura was first produced at the Blackfriars during Christmastide, 1637, and shortly after was given at Court. Rosania was licensed by Herbert on 1st June, 1640,²⁸ and as The Doubtful Heir produced at the Blackfriars.

The Prisoners are two youths, Pausanes and Hipparchas, who belong to the band of the pirate Gallippus. They rescue the King of Sicily's sister, the Princess Cecilia,²⁹ but are captured by her brother's troops, and at her request become the lady's “Prisoners”. There is a vast amount of heroic love, there are continual conflicts of love and honour, extreme emotions, and the dramatist employs every ornament phantasy can devise, for needless to say in the end Pausanes and Hipparchus prove to be of royal stock, sons of the co-rulers of Sardinia, an island which once at war with Sicily is united to this country in perfect amity by the nuptials of the several ruling houses. The play was well received at its original production, but there is no record of any post-Restoration revival.

The plot of The Princesse, or Love at first Sight is not only extremely complicated, but is further farsed by comic scenes. We have an emperor of Rome, Julius Caesar (to be altogether distinguished from Julius the conqueror who was slain with boydkins by false Brutus and his crew); a Prince of Rome, Virgilius; a Princess, Sophia; Facertes, a Prince of Sicily, which country is conquered by Rome; the Princess of Sicily, Cicilia, who is captured by corsairs and sold in the slave-mart at Naples, where Virgilius sees and falls in love with her. There is a good deal of fighting with bandits, and eventually recognitions all round and discoveries. When Virgilius weds Cicilia; and Facertes, Sophia; Rome and Sicily are bound in closest alliance.

The most popular of these three plays was undoubtedly Claracilla, and it is easy to see why, for the situations are more dramatic, the movement swifter, the surprises more theatrically effective.³⁰ The Princess Claracilla, daughter to the King of Sicily, is sought in marriage by the false Seleucus, albeit she loves Melintus, a common soldier, who is none other than the King's nephew in disguise. There is an extraordinary amount of plotting and counterplotting, masquerading and unvizarding, but in the end the villainies of Seleucus are exposed, and the King giving his consent to the nuptials of Melintus and Claracilla, all go off the stage singing “Myrtle and triumphant Bays”. A striking character is the youth Philemon, who also loves Claracilla, but who “out of a high point of honour”, as Mr. Bayes says, resigns all his pretensions in favour of his brother Melintus.

Claracilla was received with great favour, and allowing for a certain extravagance, absurdity if you will, which would have recommended it all the more to contemporary audiences, the play has the merit of vigour; it never falters, and it is not dull. That it was an attraction is shown by the fact that the players performed it privately during the Troubles. “The poor Comoedians … adventuring not long since to Act a Play called Claracilla at one Mr. Gibbions his Tennis Court” were betrayed to the authorities by the treachery of one of their fellows, “an ill Beest³¹ … causing the poor Actors to be routed by the Souldiery,” Mercurius Democritus, 2nd to 9th March, 1653. At the Restoration we find Claracilla in the repertory of the Red Bull actors,³² a company headed by Michael Mohun, who very soon afterwards became His Majesty's Servants under Killigrew. Moreover this play kept the boards, as we learn from Pepys, for at least a decade. On Thursday, 4th July, 1661, Pepys “went to the Theatre [Vere Street], and there I saw ‘Claracilla’ (the first time I ever saw it), well acted”. On Monday, 5th January, 1663, Pepys and his wife went “to the Cockpitt, where we saw ‘Claracilla’, a poor play, done by the King's house”. On Tuesday, 9th March, 1669, he took his wife and other ladies to the Theatre Royal, Bridges Street, “to see ‘Claracilla’, which do not please me almost at all, though there are some good things in it.”

Here then we have in all three plays precisely the same ingredients, dream countries, dream history, a riposte of love and honour, the duello betwixt perfect love and perfect friendship, most gallant heroes, peerless heroines, blackest villains, pirates, storms at sea, a stramash of fighting, an oglio of cross purposes, disguises, the most exalted sentiments, the most artificial emotions, and a general anagnorosis to top the whole.

Yet with all their faults of construction, of diction, with all their endless phantasies and disentanglements and repetitions of incident and character these dramas have something strangely attractive, even although their vogue is gone for nearly three centuries now. I do not mean to suggest that they would bear revival, in the public theatre at least, such is far from the case, though we have seen many worse things there, but they may be read with pleasure and they bring in their pages a fragrance, faint perhaps and fading fast, of the courtesies and gallantries of a better day.

The language is often rhetorical and ornate, but often vigorous and clear. Metrically it represents the final depravation of blank verse, and indeed in the folio The Prisoners and Claracilla (now Claricilla) are printed in prose.

After the Restoration The Princesse was revived at Vere Street on Friday, 29th November, 1661, under which date Pepys has the following entry: “Sir W. Pen and to the theatre, but it was so full that we could hardly get any room, so he went up to one of the boxes, and I unto the 18d. places, and there saw ‘Love at first Sight’, a play of Mr. Killigrew's and the first time that it hath been acted since before the troubles, and great expectation there was, but I found the play to be a poor thing, and so I perceive everybody else do.” Indeed if we may believe a contemporary news letter in much halting rhyme The Princesse was only acted twice:

First then to speak of his Ma[jes]t[y]s Theatre
Where one would imagine Playes should be better
Love att the first sight did lead the dance(33)
But att second sight it had [th]e mischance
To be so dash’t out of Countenance as
It never after durst shew itts face
All though its bashfullnesse as tis thought
Be far from being the Authors ffault.(34)

The fact is that the old style of the days of Charles I was not elegant enough for the English Monsieurs who in their exile had frequented the Parisian theatres, and had returned to demand French modes on their native boards. Mr. Frenchlove's plaint was theirs: “Twould vex me plaguly were I not a Frenchman in my second nature (that is) in my fashion, discourse and cloathes. I cannot devise in this whole City of London, how to find out any one Divertisement.”³⁵

Although his three plays had brought him applause in the circle, and to a lesser degree in the theatre, from the modish and refined, Killigrew had not achieved the golden reward of popular success, and accordingly he began to sketch out a play on very different lines, a comedy which by its mordant pictures of contemporary manners, not to mention its coarseness and rough fun, should appeal to uncultured but more profitable audiences. Accident, catastrophe, indeed, delayed the production of The Parsons Wedding for well nigh a quarter of a century.

At the outbreak of the Civil War Killigrew showed himself active and loyal on behalf of his Master, the King, so much so indeed that he invited the very unpleasant attention of the Rebels, and was in September, 1642, committed to the custody of Sir John Lenthall, “on suspicion for raising arms against Parliament.”³⁶

In the brief epistle, “To the Reader,” prefixed to the folio, 1664, Killigrew speaks of his “Twenty Years Banishment”, but these are of course round figures, and must not be precisely pressed. At the same time they are not so far out, for although the exact date of his leaving England cannot be determined, we know that he was exchanged by order of the House of Lords on 27th July, 1643, “for another Prisoner at Oxon.”³⁷ Queen Henrietta Maria sailed from Falmouth, bound for France on 14th July, 1644, and Killigrew was almost certainly in her train.

Of the next few years we learn little beyond the fact he was at Paris with the court of the English Queen and in a document dated 20th April, 1647,³⁸ he is termed Dilectus & fidelis serviens noster by the Prince of Wales, who employs him on certain important businesses in Italy. In 1648 he returned from his very successful mission, and temporarily acted as Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of York, then in residence at The Hague. When the Prince of Wales became King on the murder of his father, Killigrew was recalled to the royal household at Paris, and was dispatched by Charles II as envoy to Savoy and Florence and Resident at Venice. It has generally and very erroneously been believed that Killigrew was dismissed from Venice in June, 1652, owing to complaints of his loose living and debauchery, a disgrace which served to smutch his name with a very black mark. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Venetian Senate, double-dealing and slippery, discarded the King of England's Resident in consequence of the secret and underhand craft of Cromwell's agents, with whom after Worcester the Republic was eager to curry favour. It is well that this point should be insisted upon and emphasized, for the old story has been repeated and widely accepted sadly to the detriment of Killigrew's character with later writers.³⁹

From Venice Killigrew proceeded first to The Hague, and in 1653 to Paris where any misunderstanding with the King was soon cleared up, and he stood in highest favour. The following year the Court left Paris, and on 28th January, 1655, Killigrew was married at The Hague to a Dutch lady, Charlotte de Hesse, a fortune of ten thousand pounds. During the remaining years of the Exile he lived at Maestricht, and he was occasionally employed in the service of the States-General, as well as ever showing himself busily active—as far as might be—on behalf of his King.

On Wednesday, 23rd May, 1660, King Charles II sailed for England on the Royal Charles, and the following afternoon Mr. Pepys, walking upon the decks, met not a few persons of honour, “amongst others, Thomas Killigrew (a merry droll, but a gentleman of great esteem with the King).”

During the Exile Killigrew had completed one play, already sketched in part at least, The Parsons Wedding, and had composed no less than seven more: The Pilgrim; Cicilia & Clorinda, or, Love in Arms, in two parts; Thomaso, or the Wanderer, in two parts; and Bellamira her Dream, or, The Love of Shadows, in two parts. In this order they stand in the folio, but it will actually be more convenient to consider The Parsons Wedding last, as this was the only one of these pieces to be produced in the English theatre. Incidentally it may here be mentioned that among the books representing Killigrew's plays in the portrait frontispiece to the folio is seen a piece named The Revenge. This may have been an alternative title for Cicilia or for Bellamira, or else it may be some play he contemplated but did not write.

The title-page of The Pilgrim tells us that the piece was penned at Paris in 1651. There must be a mistake here, either in date or place, for in 1651 Killigrew was in Venice. Accordingly either The Pilgrim was composed at Venice; or else, which is the more likely, it was composed at Paris in 1645 or 1646.⁴⁰The Pilgrim, not perhaps exactly as it now stands in print, was certainly at one time intended for the stage, and Genest is right when he says that it “is a good Tragedy—with judicious alterations it might have been made fit for representation”.⁴¹

The tragedy exhibits the intrigues of Julia, Duchess of Pavia, who is wedded to Alphonso, Duke of Milan. Pavia and Milan have been at war, and Julia's first husband, the Duke of Pavia, was apparently killed on the field. Sforza, Alphonso's son, now governor of Pavia, loves Fidelia, Julia's daughter by her first marriage; whilst Julia's son, Cosmo, now general of the Milanese forces, loves Victoria, the daughter of Alphonso by a former wife. The stage seems set fair, but Cosmo is not (as all suppose) the son of the Duke of Pavia, but of Julia's gallant, Count Martino, who, erstwhile the favourite counsellor of the slain Duke, now holds Milan's ear. Julia, who is the more forceful of the adulterous pair, and her paramour resolve that Cosmo shall rule both Pavia and Milan. They essay many devices to estrange Cosmo and Sforza, but from Fidelia the former learns something of the truth. Donning a palmer's weeds he hastens towards Pavia, and on his way saves Sforza from his mother's hired assassinate. Owing to his pilgrim's disguise he gains Julia's confidence, and further plans are laid, including the accusation of Martino upon the charge of Cosmo's murder, since the youth can nowhere be found. It is thought this subtle fetch will allay suspicion. In various ways the Pilgrim endeavours all in vain to win his mother to repentance. Even when the body of Martino, whom he has slain, is exhibited she answers by thrusting a poniard swift and deep to his heart. Too late she realizes that she has slain the son by whose unwitting hand his own father fell. The dagger yet red with her son's gore seeks a sheath in her own bosom. “None but a Son to spill a Father's blood, and a Mother to revenge it!” is her last cry. The tragedy ends with the union of Sforza and Fidelia upon whom the Duke pronounces a paternal blessing, whilst Victoria abandons the world for the cloister. There is at one point a comic underplot which has something of the breadth of an old fabliau, the tale of Trevallin, the ferryman of the River Po, who debauches the serving-wench Moretta; whilst Argentin, the ferryman's wife, intrigues with knave Bertolin their man; a merry mournival of cuckoldoms and japeries, but impertinent.

The Pilgrim calls for considerable revision to be fit for the boards. The trial scene, when in the course of their plots Martino is cunningly set at the bar is far too long for the theatre, too prolix and sustained. The speeches need to be curtailed, so not as to hinder and impede the action which must hurry breathless to the end. It remains an excellent piece of work.

It is interesting to note echoes of Shakespeare (especially from Hamlet) and other dramatists. The main theme of the tragedy was clearly suggested by the situation in Shirley's The Politician, a drama produced at Salisbury Court about 1639-1640,⁴² and there are something more than hints from Davenant's Albovine.

Inasmuch as Cicilia & Clorinda, Bellamira her Dream, and Thomaso were not designed for the stage, but are rather romances in dialogue than plays for the theatre, a brief notice will suffice. Each of these closet dramas is in Two Parts of five acts apiece, but since not one of the tierce has any dénouement to round off Part I, we may fairly say that here we have a leash of huge tenact plays. We are the less surprised when we find that Cicilia & Clorinda is directly based upon L’Histoire d’Aglatidas et d’Amestrias in Artamène; ou, Le Grand Cyrus, Part I, Book 3. The First Part of Cicilia & Clorinda was written in Turin; the Second Part at Florence. This then dates the composition, and gives us November to January, 1649-1650, when Killigrew had newly arrived in the north of Italy as the ambassador of Charles II. The first volume of Le Grand Cyrus had been issued at Paris “chez Augustin Courbé” in 1649, and was at once the rage among the fashionable of high and low degree.⁴³

Killigrew's holograph MS. of Cicilia & Clorinda, both parts, formerly in the Thorn-Drury library was sold at the dispersion of this well-known collection. (Sotheby, ninth day of sale, Monday, 22nd February, 1932; no. 2407.)

Perhaps the most striking incident in this extraordinary play is a triple duel⁴⁴ between the Roman General Lucius who loves Cicilia; his rival Amadeo, prince of Savoy; and Manlius, the brother of Lucius. The villain of the piece is the hunchbacked Otrante, “le plus meprise & le plus hai” as Mlle de Scudéry calls him. He wears an appropriate black hat with huge black feathers, but “His habit must be good”.⁴⁵ This gentleman causes a mort of mischief, but all ends happily with weddings three.

The emotions and passions and incidents which lead to this event are (it must be confessed) rather artificially elaborate and verbose and intertwined, but if Cicilia & Clorinda is complex Bellamira her Dream is a jumble—to adopt old Genest's apter phrase.⁴⁶ Both parts of the piece were written at Venice, that is to say at some time, probably with many intervals and interruptions, between the end of February, 1650, and June, 1652.

Arcadian romances, the heroic romance, and memories of old plays have all gone to make up this fantast pasticcio. We have two dream countries, Sicily and Naples, whose Kings, brothers, have fiercely waged war, in which the latter monarch was slain. The fair Bellamira and the chivalrous Leopoldo are the children of Sicily. The people rise against the King, demanding as their sovran Genorio, son of the fallen King of Naples. Where Genorio and his sister are concealed nobody knows, but actually now named Pollidor and Phillora, they have been reared as simple rustics and dwell in a cave attended by a tame satyr. Their guardian is Ravack, a lord banished by the King of Sicily for opposing that monarch's claim to Naples. Here we have some very obvious borrowing from Cymbeline. Bellamira loves the figure of a shepherd who has appeared to her in a dream, “by night he makes his visits still; like the Egyptian Apis in a dream he comes; the soft-foot’d God of Sleep is onely Witness to our Love,” she sighs; she dotes upon a shadow, and needless to add that shadow is Pollidor. After various incidents Leopoldo and Phillora meet in a bosky glade and promptly burn with mutual flames. Later, Pollidor finds a miniature of Bellamira which has been dropped, and is at once enamoured of the lovely face, so he too loves a Shadow. War breaks out, and in the turmoil Almanzor, a Spanish prince who has intervened, captures Bellamira; Palantus, general of the royal army, who loves her but in vain; Pollidor and Phillora; and very unpleasantly prisons them in a cave chained among “other Prisoners and dead Carcases” where Leopoldo, disguised as a Spanish soldier, is set as sentry. He, of course, aids them to escape, which they achieve by a curious device. Some Moors, also captives, have been annoyed by a warren of fierce foxes entering their cave, but where foxes get in, prisoners can get out, and this they promptly do, an incident very reminiscent of Sinbad's fourth voyage,⁴⁷ which was certainly unknown to Killigrew. The company threading the subterranean exit find themselves on the seashore. In a final conflict Almanzor is slain. The identity of Pollidor and Phillora is revealed; the lovers are all united, Palantus consoling himself with Fidelia, a lady who has throughout been constant to her gallant unkind.

Entirely different from the heroical plays is Thomaso, or The Wanderer, a huge rollicking comedy of cavaliers in exile. The date of composition can be precisely fixed as the spring of 1654, hence in spite of the assertion on the title-pages that both parts were written at Madrid this is doubtful. Killigrew was in Paris, and although he may have paid a short visit to Spain it seems more likely that he took his “local colour”, such as it is, from the conversation of his fellow royalists who had been stationed at the Spanish capital. The scene of Thomaso, a regular pell-mell of amorous encounters, mistakes, jealousies, intrigues, and whore-hired ambuscadoes, lies very agreeably in Madrid, whither Thomaso has come on a visit to his friend Harrigo, as also to woo Serulina the sister of the Grandee, Don Pedro. Two other cavalier exiles, Edwardo and Ferdinando, accompany Thomaso on his travels. Thomaso, who is a general undertaker, is enraptured with the beauty of a lovely Venetian courtesan Angelica Bianca, whose portrait is suspended on the lintel of her house with a notice to say that the original may be purchased at a thousand crowns a night. Thomaso loudly declares his admiration of the picture, and thus comes in conflict with Don Pedro who desires the lady. The English rout the Spaniards, and Angelica at the sight of such gallantry gives herself gratis to Thomaso for whom she conceives an ardent passion. A vast deal of intrigue and masquerading follows. Various punks whom Thomaso has jilted plot to assassinate him, but the bravoes attack another stranger in mistake, and considerable bustle and excitement ensue, during which turmoil Thomaso carries off Serulina to become his bride. Interwoven with all this are the adventures of Edwardo, who falls into the meshes of a cunning bona-roba named Lucetta. This nymph finely chouses and strips him when he visits her at night, even by a trick turning him out into the dark streets without money or clothes in the nastiest pickle. Later Edwardo and Ferdinando in order to aspire to the hands and coffers of two rich Jewish monsters, the one a giantess, a very daughter of the Anakim, and the other a pigmy, employ the love philtres of a quacksalver, Lopus, who also undertakes to fit the couple of freaks with more normal bodies, “to make a Dwarf a Gyant, or Gyantize a Dwarf.” Owing to a mistake in the ceremonies of the Æsonian baths the two monstrosities become even more hideously deformed, whilst other members of the mountebank's family essaying the same experiment are metamorphosed into the strangest shapes. A veritable pandemonium is the result, and it is buzzed abroad that the Holy Office is taking cognizance of the matter. The blame, however, is laid at the door of the old Hebrew guardian of the two monsters, who has indeed already been secured. The English rejoice to have scaped so narrowly and their jollification fits very admirably with the celebration of Thomaso's wedding. Angelica Bianca, Don Pedro, and other of the company hie away to Venice.

Thomaso is an immense canvas. There are more than forty characters, who fill out seventy-three crowded scenes. “The Author has borrow’d several Ornaments,”⁴⁸ thus Angelica's song in Part I, Act II, scene 3, “Come hither, you that Love,” is from Fletcher's The Captain, Act IV, The tremendous harangue of the mountebank Lopus, Part I, Act IV, scene 2, is a patchwork “from Johnson's Fox, where Vulpone personates Scoto of Mantua”. The play is even more indebted to Middleton's Blurt Master Constable; or, The Spaniard's Night-Walke, 4to, 1602, and Brome's The Novella, produced at Blackfriars in 1632; 8vo, 1653. Thomaso, however, is largely autobiographical, and it may very well be questioned whether some of the accidents incidental to adventuring in a foreign city among the fireships and crafty Delilahs, which occur in the old comedies of Middleton and Brome, may not actually have happened to the exiled cavaliers, and have been personal passages taken from life rather than dramatic fictions derived from the stage. Such experiences were then not uncommon to travellers. Thomaso himself is of course Killigrew, and he was generally referred to under this name, as for example by Flecknoe in his very abusive lampoon The Life of Thomaso the Wanderer, 1667.⁴⁹ Harrigo Pogio is Henry Proger, most loyal and active of cavaliers, who in 1654 was at Madrid and of the English ambassador's household. No doubt Edwardo too, “a lost English Boy of thirty,” “an Essex Calf with two legs, posses’d with a Colliar of Croyden,” portrays an actual person. There are indeed throughout Thomaso innumerable vivid touches, all easily recognizable, and which to a contemporary must have proved irresistibly piquant and telling.⁵⁰

It is curious that Killigrew never pruned and abbreviated Thomaso for the boards, the more so since when Aphra Behn with her exceptional instinct utilized such promising material in The Rover; or, The Banish’t Cavaliers, produced at Dorset Garden 24th March, 1677, she gave the theatre one of her liveliest and longest-lived comedies.⁵¹ Beyond question she vastly improved what she took, but her conveyances are extremely ample, and it is hardly too much to say that The Rover is an admirable adaptation from Killigrew. When The Rover appeared in print, 4to, 1677, the town very soon found “that 'twas Thomaso alter’d”, a report which caused Astrea to indite a Post-Script of defence, vigorous and witty enough, but not entirely consonant with the facts.

Yet The Rover justly belongs to Mrs. Behn, who has done a great deal more than merely fit Thomaso for the stage. So successful indeed was her play that rather less than three years later she returned to the material in Thomaso she had at first rejected, and produced The Second Part of The Rover, acted at Dorset Garden in February, 1680. The scene of The Rover is Naples; the Second Part has its incidents at Madrid. In this sequel we meet not only the two monsters, but Harlequin and Scaramouch to boot.

In The Parsons Wedding we have a broadly humorous, occasionally coarse, and consummately clever comedy. Some of the speeches are certainly rough, but the piece has been denounced in so resonant and exceptious a strain of obloquy it seems difficult to escape the conclusion that many who have railed loudest in their abuse truthfully could claim a very slight or rather no acquaintance at all with Killigrew's play. The scene has grossnesses, it is true, but to write that The Parsons Wedding “is a comedy of almost unexampled coarseness”,⁵² “chiefly distinguished for ribaldry and obscenity of dialogue,”⁵³ “one of the most flagrantly indecent of Restoration productions,”⁵⁴ or that the dialogue, in part at least, “is such that it might have curdled the ink with which it was written,” is just to blatter that kind of polly-parrot nonsense which seems so strangely contagious.

If the situations be arraigned as immoral, this attack is answered by the fact that the initial blame cannot be charged to Killigrew since the adventures are for the most part stock old comedy fare. Thus the chousing of the Parson, who discovers himself all unwittingly bedded with an ancient bawd, and being surprised falls a victim to the designs of the Captain, Mr. Jolly, Mr. Wild, and the rest, is found among the Italian novelists, and forms the eighth story of Les Comptes du Monde adventureux, Paris, 1555. In English drama with some variations it had been utilized by Brome in The Novella, produced at the Blackfriars in 1632; and it was also employed by Edward Howard in The Six Days Adventure, given at Lincoln's Inn Fields, March, 1671; and by D’Urfey in Squire Oldsapp, Dorset Garden, May, 1678. Many parallels might be cited.⁵⁵

The “old stale trick” by which Careless and Wild circumvent Lady Wild and Mistress Pleasant into marriage, “is an Incident in several Plays, as Ram-Alley, Antiquary, &c. but in none so well manag’d as in this Play.”⁵⁶ The two jaunty gallants who have gained secret access to the room so compromise the ladies by appearing early in the morning all unready at the window of the bedchamber and thence hailing their friends in the street below, that there is nothing for it but downright matrimony to salve the reputations of the virtuous fair.

It might also be remarked that the figure of the “old Stallion Hunting Widow”, Lady Love-all, whom Killigrew has drawn with rare strokes of humour and vivacity is as common to the stage as it is to life.

When The Parsons Wedding was published in the folio, 1664, it is said on the title-page to have been written at Basle. Killigrew may have sketched a draft of his comedy at this town, but nothing more. It is certain from internal evidence⁵⁷ that the play was composed, at least in greater part, by 1641, and it is equally certain that it was not produced until three and twenty years later on the 5th or 6th October at the Theatre Royal, Bridges Street, when it was “acted all by women”.⁵⁸ It has been mistakenly suggested that possibly The Parsons Wedding was seen on the stage before the closing of the theatres, but the Revels memorandum showing that a sum of £2 was paid for the licence is conclusive, this being the fee for a new play, whilst £1 was paid for a revival.⁵⁹ Pepys, also, on the 4th October, 1664, speaks of The Parsons Wedding⁶⁰ as “a new play”.

When acted, the script of The Parsons Wedding was considerably cut by the hand of Killigrew himself,⁶¹ and indeed the speeches and scenes are so long that it is impossible that it should be given entire as printed.

In 1672, at some date between March and October,⁶²The Parsons Wedding was revived at Lincoln's Inn Theatre, recently vacated by the Duke's company and temporarily occupied by Killigrew's actors. The witty Prologue and Epilogue, especially written for this occasion, were printed in Covent Garden Drollery, 1672, the former address being spoken by the leading lady, Mrs. Marshall, dressed “in man's Cloathes”.

From the time of his return to England in May, 1660, until the government of the playhouse passed out of his hands in February, 1677, into the charge of his second son—the elder of three brothers by his wife Charlotte—Charles, Thomas Killigrew's activities are so intimately concerned with the stage that in great part an account of the Theatre Royal tells his story also, although, of course, as a high favourite with the King he was a prominent figure at Whitehall and much information has come down to us concerning the courtier and the man of affairs. We are, however, only concerned with the theatrical manager.

In the year 1659, John Rhodes “a Bookseller being Wardrobe-Keeper formerly (as I am inform’d) to King Charles the First's Company of Comedians in Black-Friars … fitted up a House then for Acting call’d the Cock-Pit in Drury Lane”,⁶³ where he gathered together a number of actors and recruits who gave performances under very hazardous conditions. His own company included Thomas Betterton, Thomas Sheppey, Thomas Lovel, Thomas Lilliston, Cave Underhill, Robert Turner, James Dixon, Robert Nokes, and for female rôles Edward Kynaston, James Nokes, Edward Angel, William Betterton, John Moseley and young Floid. On 4th February, Thomas Lilliston, one of Rhodes’ leading men, was charged before the Middlesex Sessions with acting “a publique stage-play this present 4th February in the Cock-Pitt in Drury Lane … contrary to the law”.⁶⁴ On Easter Monday, 23rd April following, General Monk and his Council issued an order forbidding theatrical representations.⁶⁵ On Saturday, 12th May, Anthony Turner and Edward Shatterell of the incorrigible Red Bull were ordered to make their appearance, and answer “for the unlawfull maintaineing of Stage-Playes and enterludes att the Redd Bull in S. John's Street”.⁶⁶ As late as Saturday, 28th July, 1660, Rhodes himself was fined for illegal acting at the Cockpit.⁶⁷

Nevertheless when Killigrew and Davenant returned to England in May, 1660, or at any rate not many weeks later, there were three companies acting in London. Rhodes was at the Cockpit with a troupe whose strength lay in the new young recruits, many destined to become famous names; Major Michael Mohun, of the pre-Restoration Cockpit⁶⁸ and a great favourite with King Charles II—he had returned in the King's train—presided over a company of older actors at the Red Bull⁶⁹; and yet another muster was to be found at William Beeston's house, Salisbury Court.⁷⁰

Immediately the energetic and unwearied Sir Henry Herbert asserted the old powers and absolutism of the Master of the Revels to the full, and the three companies of actors found themselves compelled forthwith to submit to the authority which “time out of minde whereof the memory of man is not to the Contrary, belonged to the Master of his Majesties Office of the Revells”. Beeston was licensed and allowed to continue and constitute Salisbury Court a playhouse.⁷¹ The leash of managers, Beeston, Rhodes, and Mohun, severally each agreed to pay Herbert £4 a week whilst their three companies were performing tragedies, comedies, and the like.⁷²

Killigrew and Davenant, however, were almost equally swift in their countercheck. Diplomatically they combined forces and presented a united front to Herbert's claims. They decided between themselves to acquire by Royal grant a monopoly of the London theatres, to select two companies under their own names, to establish these in two playhouses, and effectually to quash all rivals, great or small. Sir William Davenant had by him his old patent of 1639,⁷³ granted by Charles I, but shrewdly he did not entirely rely upon this. The King had given Killigrew on 9th July, 1660, an order for a warrant “to erect one Company of players which shall be our owne Company” and directing that all other companies save the two now to be erected should be silenced and suppressed.⁷⁴ Owing to the great influence of Killigrew and Davenant with the King, on 21st August, 1660, there passed the Privy Signet the order⁷⁵ which assigned to the two managers a complete monopoly of the London theatres, authorizing them to build a couple of playhouses, placing the companies under their jurisdiction, government, and authority, and granting them the censorship of all plays; in short, an absolute control.

What was pending, however, could not be hidden from Sir Henry Herbert who raised a shriek of protest, and was prepared to fight tooth and nail for his authority. He alleged that Killigrew and Davenant had represented to the King that the Master of the Revels was consenting to the grant, which he hotly denied. He protested vehemently against any usurpation or curtailment of his “ancient powers”, and petitioned the throne in very unequivocal terms.⁷⁶ The King referred the whole matter to the Attorney-General, Sir Jeffery Palmer, and a very great deal of debate and angry contention resulted.

In the meantime, called upon to serve many masters, the poor actors were in a pretty predicament. They could obtain no decisive answer when they asked what authority they were to obey, and Herbert actually obtained damages—although far less than he tyrannically claimed—from Mohun's company for alleged failure to pay his fees.⁷⁷ Simultaneously Killigrew and Davenant were enforcing their power over the actors, and both lodged complaints with the King that scandalous plays were being given and the prices exorbitantly raised. Herbert riposted with an official letter “To Mr. Michael Mohun and the rest of the actors of the Cockpitt playhouse in Drury Lane. The 13th of October, 1660”, deriding the “pretended power” of Killigrew and Davenant, and severally reprimanding the troupe for “innovations and exactions not allowed by mee”. Furthermore he laid down regulations in reference to the censorship of even the older plays about to be revived.⁷⁸ Little wonder that on the same day the actors approached the King and presented “The humble Petition of Michael Mohun, Robert Shatterell, Charles Hart, Nich. Burt, Wm. Cartwright, Walter Clun, and William Wintersell”. They complain that Sir Henry harried them until it “ended in soe much per weeke to him” and a promise of his protection, which was nugatory, since under the Royal warrant Killigrew suppressed the company until they had entered into a covenant with the two patentees, Killigrew and Davenant, and bound themselves to act in a new theatre with women, “and habitts according to our sceanes.” None the less Herbert persisted and had become “a continual disturbance”.⁷⁹

The first move by the patentees, then, was an amalgamated company,⁸⁰ and this began acting at the Cockpit, a playhouse of which Rhodes was lessee, on Monday, 8th October, and continued until towards the end of the month. The company included actors from the several theatres, Mohun, Hart, Burt, Robert and Edward Shatterell, Lacy, Clun, Wintershal, Cartwright, Baxter, Loveday, as well as two new-comers to the stage, Betterton and Kynaston.⁸¹ The arrangement soon achieved the result which had been intended by the patentees, the division of the actors into two separate companies under the several management of Killigrew and Davenant.

Killigrew selected for his troupe the older actors, the King's Company, and on Monday, 5th November, they played Wit without Money at the old Red Bull; on the next day they gave The Traitor; and on Wednesday Beggars Bush. On Thursday, 8th November, they opened with I Henry IV at Gibbons’ Tennis Court, Vere Street, Clare Market, the first Theatre Royal.⁸²

It must be borne in mind that Vere Street, as the house may be conveniently known, was a platform stage, hung with tapestries, and not set with scenery.⁸³ An oblong roofed theatre, it was the last constructed house of the Elizabethan order.

Although the history of the two companies inevitably cross and come in contact it will be simpler directly to follow the fortunes of Killigrew's actors, and then to pick up the threads of the Duke of York's servants under Davenant. A few words may not inaptly, perhaps, be given here to a brief consideration of that interesting question, Who was the first English professional actress? It may at once be said that it is impossible to speak with certainty upon this point, and indeed the very words “the first professional actress” must be ambiguous, since it is hardly to be supposed that one lady appeared at any distinct interval before others.⁸⁴ As I have already dealt with the evidence at some length,⁸⁵ and propose to treat it in a later chapter in even fuller detail, it will suffice to summarize the inquiry here. The precise phrase “professional actress” is used, speaking by the card, to exclude that “pleasant jolly woman” Mrs. Coleman,⁸⁶ who sang Ianthe in The Siege of Rhodes at Rutland House in 1656. Curll's assertion in his notoriously inexact History of the Stage that Mrs. Norris was our first professional actress, which is echoed by Davies,⁸⁷ is a mere guess and a blunder to boot. The “received tradition”⁸⁸ that Mrs. Mary Saunderson who married Betterton, “made her first essay” at the Red Bull at Vere Street, and “was the first English actress” is entirely erroneous. Bellchambers, also, says that Mrs. Saunderson was “the first woman, before her marriage, that appeared upon the English stage”, but he is confused and flatly contradicts himself as he further adds that Ann Marshall “the principal unmarried actress in the royal company is perhaps entitled to this dubious distinction”.⁸⁹

In a petition, printed by Mr. Albert S. Borgman in The Times Literary Supplement, 27th December, 1934, which was addressed by Mrs. Katherine Corey to the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Dorset, on 11th March, 1689, praying that she should be readmitted into the playhouse whence she had been most unfairly excluded, this lady represents that “she was the first and is the last of all the Actresses that were constituted by King Charles the Second at His restauration”, adding moreover that she had been on the stage “for 27 yeares”. Here then we have a very definite statement, and it is significant that Downes when giving in the Roscius Anglicanus a list of the seven Women who upon the Creation of the King's Servants belonged to “his Majesty's Company of Comedians in Drury-Lane” places Mrs. Corey first. The others follow in this order: Mrs. Ann Marshall; Mrs. Eastland; Mrs. Weaver; Mrs. Uphill; Mrs. Knepp; Mrs. Hughes. Mrs. Corey's own phrase may, of course, imply nothing further than that at the time the actors and actresses of Thomas Killigrew's original troupe were sworn His Majesty's Servants she was the first woman to take the oath.

Katherine Corey was certainly the last of these seven ladies to remain upon the stage, for in 1689 more than a decade had elapsed since the appearance of any one of the six actresses whom Downes here names with her. As I have shown in my essay Pepys’ “Doll Common”, included in Essays in Petto, Mrs. Corey did not retire until 1692, her last rôle probably being that of the Abbess of Cheston in a revival of The Merry Devil of Edmonton.

The traditional claim of Mrs. Margaret Hughes to be the first English actress in that very restricted sense in which alone so equivocal a term can reasonably be used rests upon evidence of some weight and no little interest.

On Saturday, 8th December, 1660, The More of Venice was acted at Vere Street, and this, we presume, was the occasion on which Mrs. Hughes appeared as Desdemona. The rôle we know from Thomas Jordan's “A Prologue to introduce the first Woman that came to Act on the Stage in the Tragedy, called The Moor of Venice”. It has been superfluously pointed out that there is a slight ambiguity in the rubric to Jordan's prologue, as it appears in A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie,⁹⁰ but it is quite clear on reading this address that the reference is not to the first woman who acted in Othello, but to the first woman who professionally appeared upon the stage, on which occasion the part she played was Desdemona. Downes⁹¹ informs us that Desdemona was taken by Mrs. Hughes.

Incidentally John Payne Collier in his MS. History of the Restoration Stage (Harvard University Library), when discussing the question of the first actress, decides that it must have been Ann Marshall, and he supports himself by quoting the following doggerel, preserved, he says, in the Bridgewater House MSS., but which is doubtless a forgery.

Who must not be partial
To pretty Nan Marshall?
Though I think be it known
She too much does de-moan. (Desdemona)
But that in the Moor
May be right, to be sure,
Since her part and her name
Do tell her the same
But none can refuse
To say Mistress Huges
Her rival out-does.

A little later he adds the following:—

Yet—I swear—honest Coz.,
With a critical oath
That Ned beats them both.

The allusion here must, of course, be to Kynaston. But the lines are more than suspect, and the very fact of an addition being tagged on after seems in itself evidence of bad faith. Even if these verses were genuine they do not, be it noted, decide the point. Moreover it is in the highest degree improbable that the rôle of Desdemona would have been assigned to two several actresses, Margaret Hughes and Ann Marshall, nor were these ladies rivals in any sense of the word.

We do not know which actresses originally sustained the parts of Emilia and Bianca to the Desdemona of Mrs. Hughes. Downes gives Mrs. Rutter as Emilia, but he also tells us that she did not join Killigrew's company until some time later. Indeed his cast must be subsequent to August, 1664, the date of Walter Clun's murder, for Clun was a famous Iago, in which rôle he was succeeded by Michael Mohun, and Downes has: “Jago, Major Mohun.”

The quarto of Othello, 1687, gives Mrs. Cox as Desdemona; Mrs. Rutter, Emilia; and Mrs. James, Bianca. Hart who used to play Cassio (now assigned to Kynaston) has followed Burt as the Moor, and the cast is certainly that of the Second Theatre Royal, which opened on 26th March, 1674.

It is not impossible, although it appears very unlikely, that young actors were at first the Emilia and Bianca to the Desdemona of Mrs. Hughes. It might be argued also that in the other case the two actresses who filled these parts at that performance have almost equal claims to priority with herself. So we arrive at over-subtle distinctions, and rather than split hairs let us say that, if we will, we can very justifiably regard Margaret Hughes as in a certain sense the first professional actress in the English theatre.

Having opened at Vere Street, His Majesty's Theatre, on Thursday, 8th October, as we have seen, Thomas Killigrew found himself by no means immune from the persecution—for it was nothing else—of the rancorous and truculent Master of the Revels. In Trinity term, 1661, Herbert filed a suit against Killigrew and Davenant for the infringement of his rights owing to the acting from the 8th to the 16th October, 1660, of their united company, and in the following Michaelmas term he brought a similar suit at Westminster. Eventually the two patentees were not only acquitted, but awarded £25 damages and costs.⁹² Undeterred, nay, further exasperated, Herbert now divided his attack. Killigrew he pursued with such relentless molestations and annoy that on the 4th June, 1662, the vexed and fretted manager was compelled to come to terms with his tormentor. The first clause of the Articles of Agreement,⁹³ “That a firme Amity be concluded for life betweene the said Sir Henry Herbert and the said Thomas Killigrew,” sounds with a bitter tang. The Articles give Herbert a sweeping victory. illigrew agreed to pay him all licensing fees for plays acted since the 11th August, 1660, at the rate of £2 for new plays and £1 for revivals. He also liquidated the expenses of all Herbert's litigation, and added “a noble present” of £50 for the great damages the Master of the Revels had sustained—on his own showing. Further yet, Killigrew bound himself to aid and assist Herbert in his office “and neither directly nor Indirectly to Ayde or Assiste sir William Davenante, Knight”. In return Herbert superficially extended his patronage to Killigrew, and promised not to harry him for the future. Possibly a more one-sided agreement was never signed, and Herbert appears without disguise as little other than a pitiless bloodsucker and oppressor.

Killigrew, meanwhile, was busy with the building of his new permanent theatre, the site of which was a “piece or parcell of ground scituate in Pach. Sct. Martin's in the Ffeilds and St. Paule Covent Garden, knowne by the name of the Rideing Yard”, in length from east to west 112 feet; in breadth from north to south at the east end 59 feet, and at the west end 58 feet. This was leased on 20th December, 1661, from William, Earl of Bedford, to Killigrew; to Sir Robert Howard, who thus early began to play an important part in the history of the theatre; to eight actors, Hart, Mohun, Burt, Lacy, Robert Shatterell, Clun, Cartwright, and Wintershal; and to William Hewett and Robert Clayton. An annual ground rent of £50 was to be paid, and there was a condition that before Christmas, 1662, £1,500 should have expended in building a playhouse on the aforesaid “piece or parcell of ground”.⁹⁴

On 28th January, 1662, Hewett and Clayton sold their interest in the site, and the property was divided into thirty-six parts, nine to Sir Robert Howard, nine to Killigrew, four to Lacy, and two apiece to Mohun, Hart, Burt, Robert Shatterell, Clun, Cartwright, and Wintershal. On the same day Howard and Killigrew entered into an agreement with these eight actors, to whom were joined Theophilus Bird, Richard Baxter, Edward Kynaston, Nicholas Blagden, and Thomas Loveday, by which contract the actors bound themselves only to play at this theatre, and covenanted that the whole company should pay the building sharees a fee of £3 10s. every acting day. As Fitzgerald comments, a very business-like joint-stock speculation.⁹⁵

When Theophilus Bird, one of the sharing actors, died early (before 28th April) in 1663, Killigrew despotically endeavoured to appropriate his share, and the company appealed to the King.⁹⁶ In the course of this dispute it becomes clear that the manager had already delegated his powers, in practice at any rate, to Mohun, Hart, and Lacy,⁹⁷ which boded ill for the true welfare of the theatre, and indeed on one occasion, at least, when there was a quarrel between Mohun and Hart the house closed down and was silenced.⁹⁸

Scenery was used for the first time by Killigrew at his new house, the Theatre Royal, Bridges Street, which opened on Thursday, 7th May, 1663, with The Humorous Lieutenant. “Note, this Comedy was Acted Twelve Days Successively.”⁹⁹ The principal actors in Killigrew's company from 1663 to 1682 were: Charles Hart; Michael Mohun; John Lacy; Nicholas Burt¹⁰⁰; William Cartwright; Walter Clun; Richard Baxter; Robert and William [Edward]¹⁰¹ Shatterell; Marmaduke Watson; Thomas Hancock; Edward Kynaston; William Wintershal; Thomas Bateman; Nicholas Blagden; Thomas Loveday; Thomas Gradwell; Joseph Haines; Philip Griffin; Cardell (Cardonell) Goodman; Walter Lydal; Richard Hart; Graydon; William Wilbraham, who was at the Cockpit in 1630, when he played Bashaw Alcade in Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, and where he also played Isaac in Shirley's The Wedding; William Charleton, the original Jerry Blackacre, and who is possibly to be identified with Will Cherrington the boy who played Feminia in Jordan's Money is an Asse, acted in the country c. 1637-8; William Shirley (upon the pre-Restoration stage better known as Sherlock) who was at the Cockpit as early as 1622; Henry Hailes; Thomas Kent, who was possibly the father of Tommy Kent, a boy who commenced acting at the Theatre Royal in 1689; George Beeston; Richard Bell; Thomas Clarke; Martin Powell; Carey Perin; John Wiltshire; Nathaniel Cue; Disney; John Coysh; Chapman; Styles; Gray; Saunders; Alexander (not to be confused with the actor of this name 1685-1694); Littlewood; Reeves; Hughes; Thomas Tanner; Jermaine; John Power; Henry Boutell; and William Harris. The principal actresses were Katherine Corey; Ann and Rebecca Marshall; Mrs. Eastland; Elizabeth Weaver; Susanna Uphill; Mary Knepp; Margaret Hughes; Mrs. Pratt; Mrs. Boutell; Nell Gwyn; Mrs. James; Margaret Rutter; Anne Reeves; Mrs. Corbet; Anne Quin; Elizabeth Cox; Frances and Elizabeth Davenport; Jane Davenport; Mrs. Yockney; Mrs. Elizabeth Roche; Sarah Cook; Mrs. Farlee (who may bethe same as Mrs. Weaver); Mrs. Merchant; Mrs. Vincent; Sue Percival, who afterwards married Mountford; Mrs. Bates; Katherine and Frances Baker; Elizabeth Slade; Anna Maria Knight; Mrs. Dalton; Mrs. Beattie; Mrs. Yates; Mrs. Hall; Mrs. Moyle; and Mrs. Anne Child. The Book-keeper, that is to say the librarian of the theatre to whose custody were entrusted the manuscripts, was Mr. Charles Booth.

These actors and actresses were not, of course, all in the company at the same time. Downes tells us, for example, that Bell, Reeves, Hughes, and William Harris “were Bred up from Boys, under the Master actors”.¹⁰² Clarke, again, Wiltshire, and others were later comers, as also were Katherine and Frances Baker, and the more famous Anna Maria Knight. Mrs. Cox joined the theatre about 1670, and only remained on the stage some seven or eight years. Mrs. Reeves retired to a foreign cloister in the Spring of 1675. Anne Quin left the Theatre Royal in 1668-9. Clun was murdered by highway robbers in August, 1664; Richard Bell perished during the fatal fire of January, 1672.¹⁰³

A crushing blow was dealt to both theatres when their doors were closed for eighteen months on account of the visitation of the Plague. On 5th June, 1665, the Lord Chamberlain ordered that no performance of any kind should be attempted anywhere until he gave official sanction, and this actually was not accorded until 29th November, 1666, which day both houses began to act on condition that a large share of the takings should be assigned to charitable uses.¹⁰⁴ Although plays had been given at Whitehall,¹⁰⁵ an attempt to open the two theatres in October was quashed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who complained to the King,¹⁰⁶ and even on Thanksgiving Day, 20th November, the town openly murmured that the Thanksgiving was hastened “to get ground for plays to be publicly acted, which the Bishops would not suffer till the plague was over”, the notice being suddenly given and no ceremony.¹⁰⁷

During the interval Killigrew had taken advantage of the closing of the theatres to make considerable alterations in his house, particularly widening the stage in order to give room for ampler scenery, a larger number of actors, and a grander spectacle. On the 19th March, 1666, Pepys found the workmen busy, and the playhouse “all in dirt”.

The improvements effected at so doleful and difficult a time must have been extremely costly, and therefore the disaster which befell the Theatre Royal on Thursday evening, 25th January, 1672, came with overwhelming force. A fire, breaking out between seven and eight o’clock under the stairs at the back of the building, spread with incredible rapidity and consumed half the theatre, including the scenes and wardrobe. All the houses from the Rose Tavern in Russell Street on that side of the way in Drury Lane and many in Vinegar Yard were destroyed, whilst inevitable destruction was also done by the gunpowder used to blow up the houses in the way of the flames to check the conflagration. It was in one of these explosions that the young actor, Richard Bell, was killed. The damage to property was estimated at £20,000.¹⁰⁸

No more terrible misfortune than the destruction of their home could have fallen upon the company, and for a time they were completely paralysed. Indeed from this date we may clearly reckon the rapid decline and disintegration of the Theatre Royal, until its final collapse some eight or nine months before the Union of the Two Companies in 1682.

Before 1672 Killigrew's actors had not only excelled in their magnificent repertory, but it was their house which presented by far the greater number of successful new plays, and in spite of the extraordinary strength of their rivals, the Duke of York's Servants, they were for a decade at any rate the established favourites of the town. Among their stock pieces were Othello, King Henry IV, Julius Cæsar, Volpone, The Alchemist, The Silent Woman, Bartholomew Fair, The Maid's Tragedy, A King and no King, The Scornful Lady, The Chances, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, Philaster, The Jovial Crew, The White Devil, and many more which never failed to draw crowded houses. Dryden was their principal modern author, and The Indian-Queen, The Indian Emperour, Secret Love, Tyrannick Love, The Conquest of Granada, were all immensely applauded and admired. Yet even as early as February, 1667, Killigrew was complaining “how the audience at his house is not above half so much as it used to be before the late fire”.¹⁰⁹

To add to the misfortunes of Killigrew's actors the rival company had only two months before moved into a new house, the magnificent Dorset Garden, where they had opened on Thursday, 9th November, 1671, with the popular S^r Martin Mar-all, which never failed of its attraction.¹¹⁰ Hart and his fellows were obliged to occupy Lisle's Tennis Court, Lincoln's Inn Fields, the playhouse whence Betterton had so recently migrated. On Monday, 26th February, 1672, the “shipwreck’d Passengers” publicly commenced with Wit without Money, “that compleat Actor Major Mohun” playing Valentine and speaking a Prologue especially written by Dryden for the occasion.¹¹¹ With such costumes as they could muster they were compelled to depend upon the stock fare for many weeks ere they could hazard the mounting of a new piece. Probably the first new play given by Killigrew's company at Lincoln's Inn Fields was Dryden's Marriage A-la-Mode, which achieved a triumph.

The date when Killigrew's company vacated their temporary home cannot be precisely determined. There is, it is true, a warrant of the Lord Chamberlain to Killigrew, 7th June, 1673, signifying the King's pleasure “that there shall not bee acted any playes at the Theatre in Lincolnes Inne fieilds after Mid-summer day next ensueing vntill further order”, and it has been assumed that 24th June, 1673, was the date of the final performance by the Theatre Royal troupe at Lincoln's Inn Fields. None the less their new house was not ready for another nine months to come, and the warrant so far from forbidding any acting at Lincoln's Inn Fields for the future, merely suspends performances “vntill further order”. There is no reason to think that permission to resume was not granted in due course, or that Hart and his fellows were not giving plays at Lincoln's Inn Fields during the autumn and winter of 1673, indeed until towards the opening of their new house in March, 1674.

At once Killigrew set about building a new theatre, which should be more commodious than his first house in Bridges Street, and in order to provide accommodation for the scenes stretched on their frames he added a cellared scene-house in Vinegar Yard, a rear annex to the main structure. The price of this theatre, the second Theatre Royal in Bridges Street (more loosely the second Drury Lane) was “near £4,000”,¹¹² a sum of money which was not raised without considerable difficulty. The building investors owned the theatre, but the cost of the scene-house, new scenery, machines, and dresses was raised by contributors in proportion to their shares, from the actor-sharers of the company.

Matters were further complicated by Killigrew's financial operations, which could not fail badly to affect the prosperity of the Theatre Royal. As early as 1st May, 1663, he had made over his own shares in the theatre to Sir John Sayer under certain conditions of assignment. On 21st June, 1673, he made over these same shares to Sir Laurence Debusty as security for a loan of £950, and a month later he borrowed £1,600 of a Richard Kent, by means of his agent James Magnes, the security being his theatrical patent and authority.¹¹³ Thus hypothecation and re-hypothecation were forced upon him, and the second Theatre Royal, Bridges Street, which opened on 26th March, 1674, with the popular comedy Beggars Bush commenced its career in somewhat disadvantageous circumstances, the effects of which were very shortly to make themselves felt.

Dryden's Prologue, addressed to the King and Queen, who were present at the first performance, adroitly contrasts—giving the preference to the former—the new “Plain built House” with the rococo magnificence of Dorset Garden “shining all with Gold”, where “Scenes, Machines, and empty Opera's reign”.

The “homely House” would have been well enough, but all was far from peace within. As early as 16th May, 1674, the Lord Chamberlain had been obliged to issue an order prohibiting members of either company from suddenly migrating to the rival house. The takings were dwindling, whilst during 1675 Hart, Kynaston, Cartwright, and Wintershal more than once gave in their notices, and with difficulty were persuaded to continue. Killigrew by now had long left the government in the hands of Hart and Mohun, with the result that early in 1676 the company “left off actinge upon private differences and disagreements betweene themselves”, until a royal mandate on the 14th February peremptorily bade them at once resume. In the autumn of the same year owing to the quarrel between Thomas Killigrew and his son Charles, who claimed his father's promise of the Managership of the theatre and the office of Master of the Revels—held by Thomas since Sir Henry Herbert's death in 1673—the Lord Chamberlain appointed Mohun, Hart, Kynaston, and Cartwright to control the Theatre Royal. A little later Hart was commissioned to act in the capacity of manager alone. In the autumn of 1676 two leading actresses, Mrs. Marshall and Mrs. Hughes, migrated to the Duke's Company. At Dorset Garden Mrs. Hughes created Octavia in The Wrangling Lovers and Mrs. Moneylove in Tom Essence, whilst early the next year, 1677, she acted Cordelia in A Fond Husband with Mrs. Marshall as Maria, and Mrs. Barry, Emilia. On 22nd February, 1677, Thomas Killigrew having come to terms with his son resigned to him all power and authority over His Majesty's Comedians, and two days later he further delivered up to him the office of Master of the Revels. Thomas Killigrew died on 19th March, 1683, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

As may be supposed, all these domestic dissensions, these variances and divisions, not unmixed with a good deal of sharp practice, to use no harsher term, utterly disorganized, and in fine practically ruined, the company. Yet during those years, 1674 to 1677, they produced many first-rate plays.

Notes

1. See Chapter I, p. 4.

2. The Autobiography of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. 1896, p. 22.

3. Pepys, 13th February, 1667-8. The Lord Chamberlain's Records contain a copy of a warrant, “Livery for y^e jester,” 12th July, 1661, “to deliver to Mr. Killigrew thirty yards of velvett, three dozen of fringe, and sixteene yards of Damaske for the year 1661.” R. W. Lowe, Thomas Betterton, p. 70. Mr. Harbage in his recent study Thomas Killigrew, Cavalier Dramatist, 1930, pp. 133-4, has misunderstood “the title of King's Foole or Jester”.

4. Anecdotes of Painting, Horace Walpole, ed. 1849, ii, p. 456.

5. Charles Killigrew died soon after attaining his majority. Of Robert Killigrew (not to be confused with his cousins of the same name) who proceeded B.A. at Christ Church, Oxon, 10th June, 1630, practically nothing is known. Two sisters, Anne and Elizabeth, were maids of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria. Katherine was maid of honour to the Princess Royal of Orange. Mary, the youngest, married Sir John James.

6. Henry Killigrew had a distinguished career. He proceeded M.A., Christ Church, Oxon, 1638, and having taken Orders was Chaplain to the King's army, 1642; D.D., 1642; Chaplain and almoner to the Duke of York, 1660; Master of the Savoy, 1663. In addition to his one play he published sermons and Latin verses. Thomas Killigrew in Thomaso, or The Wanderer, Part I, Act V, scene 1, has the following allusion to his brother: “he's a serious black fellow, he smells like Serge and old Books.”

7. Langbaine, English Dramatick Poets, 1691, p. 310, says that it “found the approbation of the most Excellent Persons of this kind of Writing which were in that time, if there were even better in any time”.

8. Printed for S. Briscoe, at the Belle-Savage on Ludgate-hill.

9. Mr. Vivian de Sola Pinto in his Sir Charles Sedley, 1927, p. 281, pleads that it is time Sedley “was freed from all responsibility for this shapeless mass, which has been falsely attributed to him for two centuries”, but he gives no reason at all why Sedley should be thus freed. In his Poetical and Dramatic Works of Sir Charles Sedley, 1928, vol. i, p. xxiv, he remarks again in reference to the same piece, “there is no good reason to suppose that Sedley had anything to do with it,” an expression of opinion which lacks support.

10. Killigrew himself made an entry of his birth in a Bible, La Sacra Biblia, tradotta in lingua Italiana da Giovanni Diodati, folio, 1640. The book was sold by Ellis and White in 1872, when the notes made by Killigrew were copied out by R. N. Worth, and printed in Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, ed. J. J. Howard, New Series, i, p. 370.

11. Wright, Historia Histrionica, 8vo, 1699.

12. Athenae Oxonienses, iv, 692.

13. The phrase is from the complimentary verses prefixed by Henry Bennet (afterwards Earl of Arlington) to The Prisoners and Claracilla, 12mo, 1641.

14. The Parsons Wedding, Act V, scene 4. See Restoration Comedies, ed. by Montague Summers, 1921, p. 139.

15. Mr. Harbage, Thomas Killigrew, pp. 49-51, argues very convincingly for 1625.

16. Calendar of State Papers. Domestic, 1635, pp. 80, 444; ibid., 1635-6, p. 226.

17. Lodowick Carliell in his Dedication before The Deserving Favourite, 4to, 1629, specifically says that his tragi-comedy “was not designed to travell so farre as the common stage”.

18. Joseph Knight refers to an engraving in which Lord Coleraine and Thomas Killigrew are depicted as “The Princely Shepherds” in a masque.

19. There are separate title-pages for the two plays, and that of The Prisoners carries the date 1640.

20. Diary, 29th November, 1661.

21. It is interesting to note that he visited Loudun and there saw the possessed Ursuline nuns, who had been ensorcelled by Urbain Grandier. The letter he wrote detailing his experiences was widely distributed in MS., and copies are not uncommon. It was printed in the European Magazine, 1803, pp. 102-106.

22. Born at Paris in 1595. Under the influence of Cardinal Richelieu, Desmaretz turned his attention to the drama. Among his plays are the satirical comedy Les Visionnaires and the famous Mirame. He died 28th October, 1676.

23. There is an English translation: Ariana. In Two Parts. As it was translated out of French, and presented to my Lord Chamberlaine, folio, 1636; 2nd ed., 4to, 1641. The original French edition was followed by reprints, 1639, 1643, and 1644. There are Dutch and German translations.

24. “Au lecteur” prefixed to Artamène; ou, le Grand Cyrus. Second ed., 10 vols., Paris, 1650-4. Vol. i (1650), “Au lecteur,” unnumbered pages.

25. They had doubtless been privately given at Court. During the long interval of the closing of the theatres a company had been organized by Christopher and William Beeston to act before the King and Queen.

26. Printed in Shirley's Poems, 1646, p. 148. I quote from the Gifford and Dyce, James Shirley, 1833, vol. iv, p. 278. The play was acted at Dublin as Rosania; or, Love's Victory, but before 7th August, 1641, the name had been changed to The Doubtful Heir, and under this title it was printed, 8vo, 1652. Shirley, of course, draws attention to the new fashion of naming a drama simply from the heroine.

27. Closed in October, 1641, by order of the Lords Justices.

28. Malone, Varorium Shakespeare, iii, p. 232.

29. In the folio edition of the play she has become the Princess Lysimella. Perhaps the name Cecilia was originally chosen in compliment to Cecilia Crofts, Killigrew's first wife. This would have been entirely in the taste of the day. The lady died on 1st January, 1638.

30. In Claracilla the comic relief is supplied by a bluff old soldier, Timillus, who is at least suggested by Leontius (The Humorous Lieutenant), Chilax (The Mad Lover), the Ensign to Archas (The Loyal Subject), and other popular characters.

31. Whom Mr. L. Hotson rightly identifies with William Beeston, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, pp. 49-51.

32. Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, ed. J. Q. Adams, 1917, p. 82. From Malone, Varorium, iii, p. 272.

33. Mr. Hotson, Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, p. 247, comments on this: “At Gibbons's Tennis Court—‘His Majesty's Theatre’—the first new play was Tom Killigrew's Princess: or, Love at first Sight.” According to Pepys, however, this is inexact, for it was not a new play but a revival, and Pepys is certainly correct.

34. British Museum, Add. MS. 34,217, fol. 31b. See also Hist. MSS. Comm., Rep. X., App., pt. 4, p. 21.

35. The Hon. James Howard, The English Mounsieur, 4to, 1674, p. 4.

36. Hist. MSS. Comm., Fifth Report, Appendix, Part I (1876), 63, 86; Lords Journals, v, 511; vi, 47.

37. Lords Journals, vi, 151.

38. British Museum, Add. MSS., 20032, f. 2.

39. Mr. Harbage in his Thomas Killigrew, pp. 86-100, deals with the matter in considerable detail, and shows the utter unscrupulousness of Cromwell and his gang.

40. Mr. Harbage, op. cit., pp. 192-3, suggests and not without likelihood that The Pilgrim may have been acted in Paris by the company which Charles, then Prince of Wales, struggled to maintain for a few months, July to November, 1646.

41. Some Account of the English Stage, Bath, 1832, vol. i, p. 391.

42. A. H. Nason, James Shirley, Dramatist, 1915, p. 307. The Politician was first printed 4to, 1655. Nason remarks, p. 311, “In theme and tone, The Politician is vaguely reminiscent both of Hamlet and of Macbeth.” Both Nason, pp. 107-8 and pp. 336-343, and J. Q. Adams, Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, 1917, agree with F. G. Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 1891, vol. ii, p. 246, that The Politique Father, licensed 26th May, 1641, is the play published as The Brothers, 8vo, 1652. R. S. Forsythe in his unsatisfactory and ill-digested monograph, The Relations of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama, 1914, p. 45, and pp. 173-185, endeavours to dispute this, but in any case his opinion may be accounted negligible.

43. It was inevitable that Langbaine, p. 312, should draw attention to Killigrew's source. The first edition of Le Grand Cyrus was Paris, chez Courbé, 10 vols., 1649-1653. The English translation appeared London, folio, 1653-4. In the 12mo edition, Englished by F. G., Esq., London, 1691, “The History of Aglatidas and Amestris” occupies pages 257 and 383 of volume i.

44. In the 12mo Artamenes, London, 1691, this duel is illustrated with a copper-plate. The account of the duel occupies pp. 299-306, and the catastrophe in the play differs from that in the romance. Killigrew also has altered the names. His Amadeo is the Aglatidas of De Scudéry; Lucius, Megabise; and Manlius, Arbate. Cicilia stands for Amestris.

45. Comedies and Tragedies, folio, with general title-page, 1664. The First Part of Cicilia and Clorinda, 1663, p. 217.

46. English Stage, vol. i, p. 391.

47. Actually derived from the story of Aristomenes the Messenian who was delivered from the Spartan cave by a fox. For Aristomenes see Pausanius, iv, 14-24, 34. Mrs. Centlivre's farce A Bickerstaff's Burying, or, Work for the Upholders, Drury Lane, 27th March, 1710, 4to [1710], which was sometimes played as The Custom of the Country, is suggested by the Oriental tale.

48. Langbaine, op. cit., pp. 313-14.

49. Reprinted from what is probably a unique copy by Mr. G. Thorn-Drury in 1925. The cause of Flecknoe's wrath, which is very scurvil in its expression, obviously lies in the fact that Killigrew was not eager to produce his plays. The wounds of vanity are the worst sores and take longest to heal. Flecknoe's tirades must be considerably discounted.

50. In the margin of the folios, p. 456, Thomaso, Part II, Act V, scene 7, we even find printed precise identification of persons to whom allusion is made. Thus Will Crofts, Killigrew himself, Sir John Denham, and Davenant are named.

    Embassadour Will, Resident Tom,
    John the Poet with the Nose;
    All Gondiberts dire Foes.

    Gondiberts indeed has no gloss here, but the reference is not to be mistaken.

51. See The Works of Aphra Behn, edited by Montague Summers, 1915, vol. i, pp. 1-213. The two plays are here reprinted and furnished with Theatrical Histories, Notes on the Source, and other excursuses. The first part of The Rover was popular throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. In March, 1790, a poor version by J. P. Kemble, Love in Many Masks, was presented at Drury Lane. This was acted eight times that season.

52. Mr. F. E. Schelling, The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. viii, 1912, chap. v, p. 120.

53. Miss Helen McAfee, Pepys on the Restoration Stage, 1916, p. 169, n. 2. One of Miss McAfee's great discoveries is a Restoration theatre, hitherto unknown as a playhouse and unrecognized. This is “Chyrurgeon's Hall”. The evidence is Pepys, 29th August, 1668, “To Chyrurgeon's hall … and there to see their theatre, which stood all the fire.”

54. Mr. J. R. A. Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama, 2nd ed., 1928, p. 23. On p. 171, n. 2, Mr. Nicoll speaks of “A study of Killigrew's Comedies and Tragedies”, which, however, I can find no evidence at all that he has made.

55. See my edition of The Parsons Wedding in Restoration Comedies, 1921, Introduction, pp. xxv-xxvi.

56. Langbaine, p. 313. See my Restoration Comedies, p. xxv. Ram Alley, 4to, 1611, is a capital comedy by David Oge Barry (Lording Barry). The Antiquary, 4to, 1641, is by Shackerley Marmion. Christopher Bullock in Woman is a Riddle, 4to, 1717, produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields, 4th December, 1716, has cleverly introduced the same situation in his Fifth Act.

    Owing to an ambiguous expression in Charles Dibdin's Complete History of the Stage, ed. 1800, iv, p. 64, it was supposed that The Parsons Wedding is largely based upon Calderon's famous La Dama Duende. Actually the two plays do not bear the slightest resemblance in any particular. The whole point is treated at length in my Restoration Comedies, xxi-xxv. It is much to be regretted that not only do we remark Mr. F. Schelling in his chapter on the Restoration drama (see n. 52 supra,) and so superficial a writer as Mr. Nettleton, English Drama of the Restoration, 1914, p. 45, emphasizing this absurdity, but even scholars have been misled. In spite of the fact that this crusted mistake has been so carefully corrected we are not, of course, at all surprised to find Mr. J. R. A. Nicoll, Restoration Drama, 2nd ed., 1928, p. 180, blithely follows the bell-wether of error in most docile fashion.

57. The whole atmosphere of the scene is pre-Restoration. There are also such references as Banks's ordinary, “The spiritual Non-sence the age calls Platonick Love” (Restoration Comedies, p. 29); Patent-snow (p. 70); Joseph Taylor (p. 113), and Stephen Hamerton (p. 140), the actors; and many more.

58. Pepys, 4th October, 1664.

59. The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, ed. J. Q. Adams, p. 138. It should be carefully noted that the date of the first item, 3rd November, 1663, applies to Flora's Vagaries alone, and is the date of licensing this play. The following items all belong to 1664. Mr. Harbage, Thomas Killigrew, p. 190, n. 16, argues that the fee of £2 paid for The Parsons Wedding is not conclusive, since £2 was also paid for “the licensing of” Henry 5th “which was scarcely an unacted play”. Mr. Harbage is confusing Shakespeare's Henry V with the Earl of Orrery's Henry the Fifth, produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields, on 11th August, 1664, and licensed for a fee of £2. Strictly speaking the memorandum is not that of Herbert but that of his deputy, Edward Hayward, to whom he had farmed out his office in July, 1663.

60. 4th October, 1664. The Person's Dreame is of course The Persons Wedding. On 11th October, 1664, Luellin told Pepys “what a bawdy loose play this ‘Parson's Wedding’ is, that is acted by nothing but women at the King's house, and”, adds the diarist, “I am glad of it.”

61. Killigrew's own copy of the folio Comedies and Tragedies, 1664, is preserved in the Library of Worcester College, Oxford. A note by him directs that certain passages in three of the plays should be cut out as marked, and he has made further corrections throughout the volume. In a private letter to myself, 22nd December, 1921, Mr. G. Thorn-Drury wrote: “I have to-day seen a large paper copy of Killigrew's plays which was apparently his own property: several of the plays have very extensive cuts made by him, I suppose, for representation. It is disappointing that there is comparatively speaking nothing in the way of correction of the text—in most cases he has simply cut out whole chunks.”

62. Killigrew's company opened at Lincoln's Inn Fields on 26th February, 1672. Covent Garden Drollery is in The Term Catalogues, ed. Arber, vol. i, p. 117, for Michaelmas (21st November), 1672.

63. Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, edited by Montague Summers, 1928, p. 17. For Rhodes’ repertory, ibid.

64. Middlesex County Records, A. J. C. Jeaffreson, vol. iii, p. 282.

65. Whitelocke, Memorials, 1732, p. 699. Downes’ statement (p. 17) that Rhodes obtained “a Licence from the Governing State” is incorrect.

66. Middlesex County Records, ut sup., pp. 279, 280.

67. Parton, Some Account of the Hospital and Parish of St. Giles in the Fields, p. 236.

68. James Wright, Historia Histrionica, 1699. See also my edition of Downes, pp. 71-2.

69. For their repertory see Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, ed. J. Q. Adams, p. 82.

70. This theatre, built in 1629, stood on the site of the old granary of Dorset House, near Fleet Street. It was completely destroyed in the Great Fire, 1666.

71. Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, ed. J. Q. Adams, p. 81.

72. Ibid., p. 121.

73. See Chapter I, p. 24.

74. State Papers. Domestic, Entry Book V, 158.

75. Malone, Variorum, iii, p. 249.

76. Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, ed. J. Q. Adams, pp. 85-7.

77. The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, L. Hotson, pp. 203-4.

78. Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, ed. J. Q. Adams, pp. 93-4.

79. Ibid., pp. 94-6.

80. R. W. Lowe, Thomas Betterton, 1891, pp. 68-9.

81. Gildon says that both Betterton and Kynaston were apprentices to Rhodes the bookseller.

82. The Theatre Royal, Bridges Street, the house burned down in January, 1672. For the repertory and order of plays at the Red Bull and Vere Street, see Malone, Variorum, iii, p. 273.

83. There are allusions to the tapestries in Sir Robert Howard's The Surprisal, produced at Vere Street, 23rd April, 1662, Act II, scene 1, where Brancadoro says: “Wou’d I were hid under a Bed, or Behind the Hangings.” Also in Dryden's The Wild Gallant, produced at Vere Street on 5th February, 1662-3. See Dryden The Dramatic Works, 1931, edited by Montague Summers, vol. i, p. 110, where Nonsuch refers to “these Hangings” and note p. 433; also stage-direction at commencement of Act IV, “Table set,” and note p. 429, and p. 62, Theatrical History of the play.

84. Coryat, Crudities, 1611, p. 247, observes that in a Venetian theatre he witnessed “things that I never saw before, for I saw women act, a thing that I never saw before, though I have heard that it hath been some times used in London”. There is no record of actresses in an English theatre at this date, not even experimentally, and Coryat may have been mistaken or misinformed. Perhaps the allusion is to the dancing of ladies in Masques at Whitehall. Prynne, Histriomastix, 1633, p. 215, refers to “Frenchwomen actors in a play” at Blackfriars, in Michaelmas term, 1629, and girds angrily at “some Frenchwomen, or monsters rather” who attempted to act in a French comedy at Blackfriars, “an impudent, shameful, unwomanish, graceless, if not more than whorishe attempt,” p. 414. The foreign innovation did not please, and the Frenchwomen were “hissed, hooted, and pippin-pelted from the stage”, see the contemporary letter in J. P. Collier's Annals of the Stage, 1831, vol. ii, p. 23. In Brome's The Court Beggar, produced at the Cockpit, 1632, 8vo, 1653, Lady Strangelon has the following scomm: “To your business Gentlemen; if you have a short speech or two, the boy's a pretty Actor; and his mother can play her part; women-Actors now grow in request.”

85. In my edition of the Roscius Anglicanus, pp. 93-5. In her work Enter the Actress, 1931, Rosamond Gilder has a chapter, vii, “Enter Ianthe, Veil’d—The First Actress in England,” pp. 132-143. Wisely enough, Miss Gilder does not venture to decide the point. Unfortunately this chapter as well as the following chapters, xiii, “Mary Betterton,” and ix, “Aphra Behn,” all three betray the most superficial acquaintance with the Restoration stage. Miss Gilder has paid me the compliment of quoting from and generally paraphrasing my work at great length (although it is true without acknowledgement), but I would beg that in future she will at least report me correctly.

86. Pepys met the lady more than once. See the Diary, 31st October, 6th December, 8th December, 31st December, 1665; and 3rd January, 1666.

87. Dramatic Miscellanies, 1784, vol. ii, p. 364.

88. The Life and Times of that Excellent and Renowned Actor Thomas Betterton, 1888, pp. 69-71.

89. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, ed. Edmund Bellchambers, 1822, pp. 69-70, n.

90. We also have in this same book a Prologue to Fletcher's The Tamer Tam’d given on 24th June, 1660, and a corresponding “Epilogue Spoken by the Tamer, a Woman”, but this merely refers to the fact that in the comedy the Tamer was a female character, Maria; it does not indicate that Maria was played by a woman.

91. The cast Downes gives, pp. 6 and 7, of The Moor of Venice is demonstrably not in every particular that of the earliest revival after the Restoration, but the discrepancies are of no importance as regards the present point.

92. The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, L. Hotson, 1928, p. 211.

93. Malone, Variorum, iii, 269.

94. Percy Fitzgerald, A New History of the English Stage, 1882, vol. i, pp. 81-3, and notes.

95. Ibid., p. 83.

96. State Papers. Domestic, Charles II, lxxii, 45.

97. Chalmers, Apology, 1797, p. 529.

98. Pepys, 7th December, 1667.

99. The Restoration Theatre, Montague Summers, 1934, pp. 14-16; and Roscius Anglicanus, p. 3.

100. The last trace of Burt is in 1690. He is often confused with Theophilus Bird, who, as I have noted, died before 28th April, 1663. See State Papers. Domestic, Charles II, lxxii, 45.

101. Robert was the famous brother. Unless there were three brothers William is to be identified with Edward Shatterel. See Roscius Anglicanus, notes pp. 76-7. An Edward Schottuel was acting at The Hague in 1644-5; and Edward Shatterel at the Red Bull in May, 1659. Edward apparently died before 1667.

102. Roscius Anglicanus, p. 2.

103. For accounts of the several actors see my notes passim under the respective names in my edition of Downes.

     If one is to accept the authority of Collier's MS. History of the Restoration Stage, now in the Harvard Library, Timothy Twyford should be added to the list of Theatre Royal actors. There was certainly a Timothy Twyford, a bookseller. See Stapylton's The Step-Mother, 4to, 1664. There was an actress of the Duke's House, Mrs. Twyford.

104. State Papers. Domestic, Charles II, clxxvii, 6.

105. Pepys, 29th October and 5th November, 1666. Evelyn, 18th October, 1666.

106. State Papers. Domestic, Charles II, clxxix, 136.

107. Pepys, 20th November, 1666.

108. Fitzgerald, New History of the English Stage, 1882, vol. i, pp. 136-7. Fitzgerald, however, says “The loss was not very serious”, an amazing statement. The Works of William Wycherley, 1924, ed. Montague Summers, vol. i. Introduction, pp. 39-40. Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Montague Summers, Explanatory Notes, pp. 86-7. We note also the allusion to the bad fire at the King's House only checked after much destruction by blowing up the adjacent houses in a letter 25th January, 1671-2, to Sir Daniel Fleming of Rydal Hall, Westmorland. Hist. MSS. Comm., 12th Report, App. VII, 1890.

109. Pepys, 12th February, 1667.

110. Downes, p. 31.

111. Covent Garden Drollery, 1672. Langbaine, Dramatick Poets, p. 216.

112. Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, vol. i, p. 160. Mr. L. Hotson has worked out the exact cost as £3,908 11s. 5d.: The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, p. 255.

113. Hotson, op. cit., pp. 256-7.