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Charles Reade >> Peg Woffington
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13 Etext by James Rusk, jrusk@mac-email.com. Italics are indicated by the
underscore character (_). Accent marks in are ignored.
Peg Woffington
by Charles Reade
To T. Taylor, Esq., my friend, and coadjutor in the comedy of "Masks and
Faces," to whom the reader owes much of the best matter in this tale: and
to the memory of Margaret Woffington, falsely _summed up_ until to-day,
this "Dramatic Story" is inscribed by CHARLES READE.--
LONDON. Dec. 15, 1852.
CHAPTER I.
ABOUT the middle of the last century, at eight o'clock in the evening, in
a large but poor apartment, a man was slumbering on a rough couch. His
rusty and worn suit of black was of a piece with his uncarpeted room, the
deal table of home manufacture, and its slim unsnuffed candle.
The man was Triplet, scene painter, actor and writer of sanguinary plays,
in which what ought to be, viz., truth, plot, situation and dialogue,
were not; and what ought not to be, were--_scilicet,_ small talk, big
talk, fops, ruffians, and ghosts.
His three mediocrities fell so short of one talent that he was sometimes
_impransus._
He slumbered, but uneasily; the dramatic author was uppermost, and his
"Demon of the Hayloft" hung upon the thread of popular favor.
On his uneasy slumber entered from the theater Mrs. Triplet.
She was a lady who in one respect fell behind her husband; she lacked his
variety in ill-doing, but she recovered herself by doing her one thing a
shade worse than he did any of his three. She was what is called in grim
sport an actress; she had just cast her mite of discredit on royalty by
playing the Queen, and had trundled home the moment the breath was out of
her royal body. She came in rotatory with fatigue, and fell, gristle,
into a chair; she wrenched from her brow a diadem and eyed it with
contempt, took from her pocket a sausage, and contemplated it with
respect and affection, placed it in a frying-pan on the fire, and entered
her bedroom, meaning to don a loose wrapper, and dethrone herself into
comfort.
But the poor woman was shot walking by Morpheus, and subsided altogether;
for dramatic performances, amusing and exciting to youth seated in the
pit, convey a certain weariness to those bright beings who sparkle on the
stage for bread and cheese.
Royalty, disposed of, still left its trail of events. The sausage began
to "spit." The sound was hardly out of its body, when poor Triplet
writhed like a worm on a hook. "Spitter, spittest," went the sausage.
Triplet groaned, and at last his inarticulate murmurs became words:
"That's right, pit now, that is so reasonable to condemn a poor fellow's
play before you have heard it out." Then, with a change of tone, "Tom,"
muttered he, "they are losing their respect for specters; if they do,
hunger will make a ghost of me." Next he fancied the clown or somebody
had got into his ghost's costume.
"Dear," said the poor dreamer, "the clown makes a very pretty specter,
with his ghastly white face, and his blood-boltered cheeks and nose. I
never saw the fun of a clown before, no! no! no! it is not the clown, it
is worse, much worse; oh, dear, ugh!" and Triplet rolled off the couch
like Richard the Third. He sat a moment on the floor, with a finger in
each eye; and then, finding he was neither daubing, ranting, nor deluging
earth with "acts," he accused himself of indolence, and sat down to write
a small tale of blood and bombast; he took his seat at the deal table
with some alacrity, for he had recently made a discovery.
How to write well, _rien que cela._
"First, think in as homely a way as you can; next, shove your pen under
the
thought, and lift it by polysyllables to the true level of fiction"
(when done, find a publisher--if you can). "This," said Triplet, "insures
common sense to your ideas, which does pretty well for a basis," said
Triplet, apologetically, "and elegance to the dress they wear." Triplet,
then casting his eyes round in search of such actual circumstances as
could be incorporated on this plan with fiction, began to work thus:
TRIPLET'S FACTS. TRIPLET'S FICTION.
A farthing dip is on the table. A solitary candle cast its pale
gleams around.
It wants snuffing. Its elongated wick betrayed an owner
steeped in oblivion.
He jumped up, and snuffed it He rose languidly, and trimmed it with
his fingers. Burned his with an instrument that he had by his
fingers, and swore a little. side for that purpose, and muttered a
silent ejaculation
Before, however, the mole Triplet could undermine literature and level it
with the dust, various interruptions and divisions broke in upon his
design, and _sic nos servavit_ Apollo. As he wrote the last sentence, a
loud rap came to his door. A servant in livery brought him a note from
Mr. Vane, dated Covent Garden. Triplet's eyes sparkled, he bustled,
wormed himself into a less rusty coat, and started off to the Theater
Royal, Covent Garden.
In those days, the artists of the pen and the brush ferreted patrons,
instead of aiming to be indispensable to the public, the only patron
worth a single gesture of the quill.
Mr. Vane had conversed with Triplet, that is, let Triplet talk to him in
a coffee-house, and Triplet, the most sanguine of unfortunate men, had
already built a series of expectations upon that interview, when this
note arrived. Leaving him on his road from Lambeth to Covent Garden, we
must introduce more important personages.
Mr. Vane was a wealthy gentleman from Shropshire, whom business had
called to London four months ago, and now pleasure detained. Business
still occupied the letters he sent now and then to his native county; but
it had ceased to occupy the writer. He was a man of learning and taste,
as times went; and his love of the Arts had taken him some time before
our tale to the theaters, then the resort of all who pretended to taste;
and it was thus he had become fascinated by Mrs. Woffington, a lady of
great beauty, and a comedian high in favor with the town.
The first night he saw her was an epoch in the history of this
gentleman's mind. He had learning and refinement, and he had not great
practical experience, and such men are most open to impression from the
stage. He saw a being, all grace and bright nature, move like a goddess
among the stiff puppets of the scene; her glee and her pathos were
equally catching, she held a golden key at which all the doors of the
heart flew open. Her face, too, was as full of goodness as
intelligence--it was like no other farce; the heart bounded to meet it.
He rented a box at her theater. He was there every night before the
curtain drew up; and I'm sorry to say, he at last took half a dislike to
Sunday--Sunday "which knits up the raveled sleave of care," Sunday "tired
nature's sweet restorer," because on Sunday there was no Peg Woffington.
At first he regarded her as a being of another sphere, an incarnation of
poetry and art; but by degrees his secret aspirations became bolder. She
was a woman; there were men who knew her; some of them inferior to him in
position, and, he flattered himself, in mind. He had even heard a tale
against her character. To him her face was its confutation, and he knew
how loose-tongued is calumny; but still-- !
At last, one day he sent her a letter, unsigned. This letter expressed
his admiration of her talent in warm but respectful terms; the writer
told her it had become necessary to his heart to return her in some way
his thanks for the land of enchantment to which she had introduced him.
Soon after this, choice flowers found their way to her dressing-room
every night, and now and then verses and precious stones mingled with her
roses and eglantine. And oh, how he watched the great actress's eye all
the night; how he tried to discover whether she looked oftener toward his
box than the corresponding box on the other side of the house. Did she
notice him, or did she not? What a point gained, if she was conscious of
his nightly attendance. She would feel he was a friend, not a mere
auditor. He was jealous of the pit, on whom Mrs. Woffington lavished her
smiles without measure.
At last, one day he sent her a wreath of flowers, and implored her, if
any word he had said to her had pleased or interested her, to wear this
wreath that night. After he had done this he trembled; he had courted a
decision, when, perhaps, his safety lay in patience and time. She made
her _entree;_ he turned cold as she glided into sight from the prompter's
side; he raised his eyes slowly and fearfully from her feet to her head;
her head was bare, wreathed only by its own rich glossy honors. "Fool!"
thought he, "to think she would hang frivolities upon that glorious head
for me." Yet his disappointment told him he had really hoped it; he would
not have sat out the play but for a leaden incapacity of motion that
seized him.
The curtain drew up for the fifth act, and!--could he believe his
eyes?--Mrs. Woffington stood upon the stage with his wreath upon her
graceful head. She took away his breath. She spoke the epilogue, and, as
the curtain fell, she lifted her eyes, he thought, to his box, and made
him a distinct, queen-like courtesy; his heart fluttered to his mouth,
and he walked home on wings and tiptoe. In short--
Mrs. Woffington, as an actress, justified a portion of this enthusiasm;
she was one of the truest artists of her day; a fine lady in her hands
was a lady, with the genteel affectation of a gentlewoman, not a harlot's
affectation, which is simply and without exaggeration what the stage
commonly gives us for a fine lady; an old woman in her hands was a
thorough woman, thoroughly old, not a cackling young person of epicene
gender. She played Sir Harry Wildair like a man, which is how he ought to
be played (or, which is better still, not at all), so that Garrick
acknowledged her as a male rival, and abandoned the part he no longer
monopolized.
Now it very, very rarely happens that a woman of her age is high enough
in art and knowledge to do these things. In players, vanity cripples art
at every step. The young actress who is not a Woffington aims to display
herself by means of her part, which is vanity; not to raise her part by
sinking herself in it, which is art. It has been my misfortune to see
----, and----, and ----, et ceteras, play the man; Nature, forgive them,
if you can, for art never will; they never reached any idea more manly
than a steady resolve to exhibit the points of a woman with greater
ferocity than they could in a gown. But consider, ladies, a man is not
the meanest of the brute creation, so how can he be an unwomanly female?
This sort of actress aims not to give her author's creation to the
public, but to trot out the person instead of the creation, and shows
sots what a calf it has--and is.
Vanity, vanity! all is vanity! Mesdames les Charlatanes.
Margaret Woffington was of another mold; she played the ladies of high
comedy with grace, distinction, and delicacy. But in Sir Harry Wildair
she parted with a woman's mincing foot and tongue, and played the man in
a style large, spirited and _elance._ As Mrs. Day (committee) she painted
wrinkles on her lovely face so honestly that she was taken for
threescore, and she carried out the design with voice and person, and did
a vulgar old woman to the life. She disfigured her own beauties to show
the beauty of her art; in a word, she was an artist! It does not follow
she was the greatest artist that ever breathed; far from it. Mr. Vane was
carried to this notion by passion and ignorance.
On the evening of our tale he was at his post patiently sitting out one
of those sanguinary discourses our rude forefathers thought were tragic
plays. _Sedet aeternumque Sedebit Infelix Theseus,_ because Mrs.
Woffington is to speak the epilogue.
These epilogues were curiosities of the human mind; they whom, just to
ourselves and _them,_ we call our _forbears, _ had an idea their blood
and bombast were not ridiculous enough in themselves, so when the curtain
had fallen on the _debris_ of the _dramatis personae,_ and of common
sense, they sent on an actress to turn all the sentiment so laboriously
acquired into a jest.
To insist that nothing good or beautiful shall be carried safe from a
play out into the street was the bigotry of English horseplay. Was a
Lucretia the heroine of the tragedy, she was careful in the epilogue to
speak like Messalina. Did a king's mistress come to hunger and
repentance, she disinfected all the _petites maitresses_ in the house of
the moral, by assuring them that sin is a joke, repentance a greater, and
that she individually was ready for either if they would but cry, laugh
and pay. Then the audience used to laugh, and if they did not, lo! the
manager, actor and author of heroic tragedy were exceeding sorrowful.
While sitting attendance on the epilogue Mr. Vane had nothing to distract
him from the congregation but a sanguinary sermon in five heads, so his
eyes roved over the pews, and presently he became aware of a familiar
face watching him closely. The gentleman to whom it belonged finding
himself recognized left his seat, and a minute later Sir Charles Pomander
entered Mr. Vane's box.
This Sir Charles Pomander was a gentleman of vice; pleasure he called it.
Mr. Vane had made his acquaintance two years ago in Shropshire. Sir
Charles, who husbanded everything except his soul, had turned himself out
to grass for a month. His object was, by roast mutton, bread with some
little flour in it, air, water, temperance, chastity and peace, to be
enabled to take a deeper plunge into impurities of food and morals.
A few nights ago, unseen by Mr. Vane, he had observed him in the theater;
an ordinary man would have gone at once and shaken hands with him, but
this was not an ordinary man, this was a diplomatist. First of all, he
said to himself: "What is this man doing here?" Then he soon discovered
this man must be in love with some actress; then it became his business
to know who she was; this, too, soon betrayed itself. Then it became more
than ever Sir Charles's business to know whether Mrs. Woffington returned
the sentiment; and here his penetration was at fault, for the moment; he
determined, however, to discover.
Mr. Vane then received his friend, all unsuspicious how that friend had
been skinning him with his eyes for some time past. After the usual
compliments had passed between two gentlemen who had been hand and glove
for a month and forgotten each other's existence for two years, Sir
Charles, still keeping in view his design, said:
"Let us go upon the stage." The fourth act had just concluded.
"Go upon the stage!" said Mr. Vane; "what, where she--I mean among the
actors?"
"Yes; come into the green-room. There are one or two people of reputation
there; I will introduce you to them, if you please."
"Go upon the stage!" why, if it had been proposed to him to go to heaven
he would not have been more astonished. He was too astonished at first to
realize the full beauty of the arrangement, by means of which he might be
within a yard of Mrs. Woffington, might feel her dress rustle past him,
might speak to her, might drink her voice fresh from her lips almost
before it mingled with meaner air. Silence gives consent, and Mr. Vane,
though he thought a great deal, said nothing; so Pomander rose, and they
left the boxes together. He led the way to the stage door, which was
opened obsequiously to him; they then passed through a dismal passage,
and suddenly emerged upon that scene of enchantment, the stage--a dirty
platform encumbered on all sides with piles of scenery in flats. They
threaded their way through rusty velvet actors and fustian carpenters,
and entered the green-room. At the door of this magic chamber Vane
trembled and half wished he could retire. They entered; his apprehension
gave way to disappointment, she was not there. Collecting himself, he was
presently introduced to a smart, jaunty, and, to do him justice,
_distingue_ old beau. This was Colley Cibber, Esq., poet laureate, and
retired actor and dramatist, a gentleman who is entitled to a word or
two.
This Cibber was the only actor since Shakespeare's time who had both
acted and written well. Pope's personal resentment misleads the reader of
English poetry as to Cibber's real place among the wits of the day.
The man's talent was dramatic, not didactic, or epic, or pastoral. Pope
was not so deep in the drama as in other matters, and Cibber was one of
its luminaries; be wrote some of the best comedies of his day. He also
succeeded where Dryden, for lack of true dramatic taste, failed. He
tampered successfully with Shakespeare. Colley Cibber's version of
"Richard the Third" is impudent and slightly larcenic, but it is
marvelously effective. It has stood a century, and probably will stand
forever; and the most admired passages in what literary humbugs who
pretend they know Shakespeare by the closet, not the stage, accept as
Shakespeare's " Richard," are Cibber's.
Mr. Cibber was now in private life, a mild edition of his own Lord
Foppington; he had none of the snob-fop as represented on our
conventional stage; nobody ever had, and lived. He was in tolerably good
taste; but he went ever gold-laced, highly powdered, scented, and
diamonded, dispensing graceful bows, praises of whoever had the good luck
to be dead, and satire of all who were here to enjoy it.
Mr. Vane, to whom the drama had now become the golden branch of letters,
looked with some awe on this veteran, for he had seen many Woffingtons.
He fell soon upon the subject nearest his heart. He asked Mr. Cibber what
he thought of Mrs. Woffington. The old gentleman thought well of the
young lady's talent, especially her comedy; in tragedy, said he, she
imitates Mademoiselle Dumenil, of the Theatre Francais, and confounds the
stage rhetorician with the actress. The next question was not so
fortunate. "Did you ever see so great and true an actress upon the
whole?"
Mr. Cibber opened his eyes, a slight flush came into his wash-leather
face, and he replied: "I have not only seen many equal, many superior to
her, but I have seen some half dozen who would have eaten her up and spit
her out again, and not known they had done anything out of the way."
Here Pomander soothed the veteran's dudgeon by explaining in dulcet tones
that his friend was not long from Shropshire, and-- The critic
interrupted him, and bade him not dilute the excuse.
Now Mr. Vane had as much to say as either of them, but he had not the
habit, which dramatic folks have, of carrying his whole bank in his
cheek-pocket, so they quenched him for two minutes.
But lovers are not silenced, he soon returned to the attack; he dwelt on
the grace, the ease, the freshness, the intelligence, the universal
beauty of Mrs. Woffington. Pomander sneered, to draw him out. Cibber
smiled, with good-natured superiority. This nettled the young gentleman,
he fired up, his handsome countenance glowed, he turned Demosthenes for
her he loved. One advantage he had over both Cibber and Pomander, a fair
stock of classical learning; on this he now drew.
"Other actors and actresses," said he, "are monotonous in voice,
monotonous in action, but Mrs. Woffington's delivery has the compass and
variety of nature, and her movements are free from the stale uniformity
that distinguishes artifice from art. The others seem to me to have but
two dreams of grace, a sort of crawling on stilts is their motion, and an
angular stiffness their repose." He then cited the most famous statues of
antiquity, and quoted situations in plays where, by her fine dramatic
instinct, Mrs. Woffington, he said, threw her person into postures
similar to these, and of equal beauty; not that she strikes attitudes
like the rest, but she melts from one beautiful statue into another; and,
if sculptors could gather from her immortal graces, painters, too, might
take from her face the beauties that belong of right to passion and
thought, and orators might revive their withered art, and learn from
those golden lips the music of old Athens, that quelled tempestuous mobs,
and princes drunk with victory.
Much as this was, he was going to say more, ever so much more, but he
became conscious of a singular sort of grin upon every face; this grin
made him turn rapidly round to look for its cause. It explained itself at
once; at his very elbow was a lady, whom his heart recognized, though her
back was turned to him. She was dressed in a rich silk gown, pearl white,
with flowers and sprigs embroidered; her beautiful white neck and arms
were bare. She was sweeping up the room with the epilogue in her hand,
learning it off by heart; at the other end of the room she turned, and
now she shone full upon him.
It certainly was a dazzling creature. She had a head of beautiful form,
perched like a bird upon a throat massive yet shapely and smooth as a
column of alabaster, a symmetrical brow, black eyes full of fire and
tenderness, a delicious mouth, with a hundred varying expressions, and
that marvelous faculty of giving beauty alike to love or scorn, a sneer
or a smile. But she had one feature more remarkable than all, her
eyebrows -- the actor's feature; they were jet black, strongly marked,
and in repose were arched like a rainbow; but it was their extraordinary
flexibility which made other faces upon the stage look sleepy beside
Margaret Woffington's. In person she was considerably above the middle
height, and so finely formed that one could not determine the exact
character of her figure. At one time it seemed all stateliness, at
another time elegance personified, and flowing voluptuousness at another.
She was Juno, Psyche, Hebe, by turns, and for aught we know at will.
It must be confessed that a sort of halo of personal grandeur surrounds a
great actress. A scene is set; half a dozen nobodies are there lost in
it, because they are and seem lumps of nothing. The great artist steps
upon that scene, and how she fills it in a moment! Mind and majesty wait
upon her in the air; her person is lost in the greatness of her personal
presence; she dilates with _thought,_ and a stupid giantess looks a dwarf
beside her.
No wonder then that Mr. Vane felt overpowered by this torch in a closet.
To vary the metaphor, it seemed to him, as she swept up and down, as if
the green-room was a shell, and this glorious creature must burst it and
be free. Meantime, the others saw a pretty actress studying her business;
and Cibber saw a dramatic school-girl learning what he presumed to be a
very silly set of words. Sir C. Pomander's eye had been on her the moment
she entered, and he watched keenly the effect of Vane's eloquent eulogy;
but apparently the actress was too deep in her epilogue for anything
else. She came in, saying, "Mum, mum, mum," over her task, and she went
on doing so. The experienced Mr. Cibber, who had divined Vane in an
instant, drew him into a corner, and complimented him on his well-timed
eulogy.
"You acted that mighty well, sir," said he. "Stop my vitals! if I did not
think you were in earnest, till I saw the jade had slipped in among us.
It told, sir--it told."
Up fired Vane. "What do you mean, sir?" said he. "Do you suppose my
admiration of that lady is feigned?"
"No need to speak so loud, sir," replied the old gentleman; "she hears
you. These hussies have ears like hawks."
He then dispensed a private wink and a public bow; with which he strolled
away from Mr. Vane, and walked feebly and jauntily up the room, whistling
"Fair Hebe;" fixing his eye upon the past, and somewhat ostentatiously
overlooking the existence of the present company.
There is no great harm in an old gentleman whistling, but there are two
ways of doing it; and as this old beau did it, it seemed not unlike a
small cock-a-doodle-doo of general defiance; and the denizens of the
green-room, swelled now to a considerable number by the addition of all
the ladies and gentlemen who had been killed in the fourth act, or whom
the buttery-fingered author could not keep in hand until the fall of the
curtain, felt it as such; and so they were not sorry when Mrs.
Woffington, looking up from her epilogue, cast a glance upon the old
beau, waited for him, and walked parallel with him on the other side of
the room, giving an absurdly exact imitation of his carriage and
deportment. To make this more striking, she pulled out of her pocket,
after a mock search, a huge paste ring, gazed on it with a ludicrous
affectation of simple wonder, stuck it, like Cibber's diamond, on her
little finger, and, pursing up her mouth, proceeded to whistle a quick
movement,
"Which, by some devilish cantrip sleight,"
played round the old beau's slow movement, without being at variance with
it. As for the character of this ladylike performance, it was clear,
brilliant, and loud as blacksmith.
The folk laughed; Vane was shocked. "She profanes herself by whistling,"
thought he. Mr. Cibber was confounded. He appeared to have no idea whence
came this sparkling adagio. He looked round, placed his hands to his
ears, and left off whistling. So did his musical accomplice.
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