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Updated: June 2, 2025
The theatres were, we know, totally suppressed, "so there might be no more plaies acted." Play-goers there were, as I have shown, but they never knew when, in witnessing a performance, they might be seized by the military, to be fined or imprisoned, or perhaps both.
It is just as well, as Schiller said, to 'keep the type-idea flexible in one's mind', especially when we know that his experiment was received with ecstasy at its first performance and has ever since held its place in the affection of German play-goers. They are not troubled by its irrationalities, but receive them with pious awe, as Schiller intended.
It does not seem wonderful at the present day that Robert Macaire or Mephistopheles should be played in the manner which all play-goers are so familiar with, and recognize as the correct mode of embodying the part; but he who creates the idea that is afterward accepted as a matter of course is a very different being from him who repeats it.
We have seen how Shakespeare mirrored his age, but we have less means of ascertaining what effect he produced upon the life of his time. Until after his death his influence was mainly direct, upon the play-goers, and confined to his auditors. He had been dead seven years before his plays were collected.
His facts confused him and pulled him this way and that. And so we miss in 'Fiesco' that 'monumental fresco-painting', as it has been called, which constitutes the charm of his riper historical dramas. But average play-goers are wont to bother their heads but little over these questions of higher artistic import which are apt to bulk so large before the mind of the literary critic.
They said their undertaking in the theatre was a private speculation for a public purpose, and they had no right to be compelled to do, what no other tradesmen would be expected to do, that is, prosecute their business at a loss. The play-goers, however, seemed determined to carry things with a high hand, and endeavour to force Messrs. Lewis and Knight to come to their terms.
She yielded to his objections, and Voltaire, deeply mortified at the refusal, was left to console himself as best he could with the enthusiastic acclamations of the play-goers of the capital, who crowned his bust on the stage, while he sat exultingly in his box, and escorted him back in triumph to his house; those who could approach near enough even kissing his garments as he passed, till he asked them whether they designed to kill him with delight; as, indeed, in some sense, they may be said to have done, for the excitement of the homage thus paid to him day after day, whenever he was seen in public, proved too much for his feeble frame.
Cibber and Macklin, surviving in the best days of Garrick, Peg Woffington, and Kitty Clive, were always praising the better days of Wilks, Betterton, and Elizabeth Barry. Aged play-goers of the period of Edmund Kean and John Philip Kemble were firmly persuaded that the drama had been buried, never to rise again, with the dust of Garrick and Henderson, beneath the pavement of Westminster Abbey.
"All London," as the phrase goes, was flocking to see the latest musical comedy at Daly's, but all London, regarded thus collectively, is far from owning motor cars, or even affording taxicabs, so the majority of the play-goers were hurrying on foot towards tube railways and omnibus routes.
Who does not remember his first play? the proudly concealed impatience which seemed seething in the very blood, the provoking coolness of old play-goers, the music that rather excited than soothed the fever of expectation, the mystery of mimic life that throbbed behind the curtain, the welcome tinkle of the prompter's bell, the capricious swaying to and fro of that mighty painted scroll, its slow uplift, revealing for an instant, perhaps, the twinkle of flying dancers' feet and the shuffle of belated buskins?
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