(i) General Drama and the Theatre
164 ENGLAND:
BEFORE
AND AFTER WESLEY
written in 1774, when private and public morals had already greatly improved, he made Sir Anthony Absolute define "'a Circulating Library" as "'an evergreen tree of Diabolical Knowledge'; while fourteen years earlier, George Colman, in the concluding words of his drama, Polly Honeycombe, wrote :
"A man might as well turn his daughter loose in Covent Garden, as trust the cultivation of her mind to a circulating library."
Lecky points to " the prevailing coarseness " of the literature of the first half of the century.1
And Sir Walter Scott has recorded the experience of his grand-aunt who in old age turned again to the pages of Aphra Behn, whose novels she " had delighted in when young "' ; but she then found herself '* unable to read without shame a book, which sixty years before she had heard read out for amusement in large circles consisting of the best society in London."?
Goldsmith moreover maintained that most novels of his time were "' no better than instruments of debauchery."'* (i) General Drama and the Theatre John Wesley, because of his attitude to the theatre of his day, has often been lashed and lampooned as " narrow,"
"bigoted," "fanatical" and " Puritanical" ; but if he pronounced the current stage a "sink of all profaneness and debauchery,' many non-squeamish contemporaries passed judgments equally harsh.
Swift's humour was both brusque and "broad"? ; yet referring, in 1709, to current drama he says:
"Tt is worth. observing the distributive justice of the authors, which is constantly applied to the punishment of virtue and the reward of vice: directly opposite to the rules of their best critics, as well as to the practice of dramatic poets in all other ages...
. I do not remember that our English poets ever suffered a criminal amour to succeed upon the stage until the reign of Charles II.
Ever since that time, the alderman is made a cuckold, the deluded virgin is debauched, and adultery and fornication are supposed to be committed behind the scenes as part of the action."
Four decades later William Law wrote his treatise, On the Absolute Unlawfulness of the Stage, wherein he declared the " playhouse "' of his day to be "' as certainly the house of the devil
1 Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 519.
2 [bid., p. 521; see, too, Lockart's Life of Scott, V, pp. 136-7.
Mrs.
Behn (1640-89) was the first English professional authoress.
Modern as oe said of her works that "all alike are coarse."
See Dict. of 3 Citizen of the World, Letter lxxxiii (quoted by Balleine, p. 14).
4 Jonathan Swift, Project for the Advancement of Religion.
DAWN DEFERRED
165, as the Church is the house of God," maintaining also that everyone who attended the theatre was thereby promoting " the devil's triumph."
Henry Fielding, in Joseph Andrews, makes Parson Adams to say of contemporary drama: "I never heard of any plays fit for a Christian to read but Cato and the Conscious
Lovers >—works by Addison and Steele.
Sir John Hawkins, too, in his Life of Dr. Fohnson (1787), says:
"' A play-house and the regions about it are the very hot-beds of vice" ; while, with a magistrate's eye on the social problems of his time, he asks : "' How else comes it to pass that no sooner is a play-house opened in any part of the kingdom, than it at once becomes surrounded by a halo of brothels ? 4
This pronouncement of Johnson's literary executor may seem prudish and cruel.
In an age of moral and spiritual awakening high-minded men are liable to magnify the evils of contemporary life, while in times of spiritual paralysis the same, or even worse, ills may be taken for granted, and so escape censure.
Yet a century after Hawkins's verdict, W. C. Sydney, reviewing, in the light of history, the middle eighteenth century drama and theatre, says:
'' The reader would err, and that very considerably, were he to suppose that it was the attractions of the stage that induced the majority of fine gentlemen in the last century to resort to the three principal theatres of London.
Contemporary light literature bears its emphatic testimony to the fact that it was the attractions presented by the saloons of the playhouses (establishments which partook as much of the nature of brothels as they did of taverns) which filled the benches of the theatres with visitors, and the purses of those who kept them with coin of the realm. The existence of these resorts was the chief inducement for hundreds of men, old and young, to resort to Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket
Theatres."?
Lecky says:
" The profligacy of the theatre during the generation that followed the Restoration can hardly be exaggerated."?
That theatre, too, was the almost exclusive preserve of the aristocracy ; and according to Hallam, Steele's
1 Op. Cit., pp. 75-6.
2 England and the English in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, p. 161.
Even at the opening of the nineteenth century the theatre atmosphere was still bad.
'To the right and left," writes Professor Elie Halévy, of the London theatres, '' were free entrances for the light women of the neighbourhood ; for the management had devised this method of attracting the men."
(History of English People in 1815, p. 440.) Even the 1832 Report of the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature refers to '" a most decided objection to any man carrying his wife or sister to the theatre when he is compelled to take them through a crowd of women of notoriously bad character."