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Updated: July 9, 2025
Play-houses, like men, have their vicissitudes. The Panorama-Dramatique suffered from competition. The machinations of its rivals, the Ambigu, the Gaite, the Porte Saint-Martin, and the Vaudeville, together with a plethora of restrictions and a scarcity of good plays, combined to bring about the downfall of the house.
Well, the poor seem to have a prejudice against the workhouse which the rich have not; for of course everyone who takes a pension from Government goes into the workhouse on a grand scale: only the workhouses for the rich do not involve the idea of work, and should be called play-houses.
But as such Men who think that the understanding of Religion is a thing needless to Women, do commonly much more believe all other rational Knowledge to be so; let us see how reasonably these same Men who willingly allow not to Ladies any employment of their Thoughts worthy of them as rational Creatures, do yet complain, that either Play is their daily and expensive pastime; or that they love not to be at home taking care of their Children, as did heretofore Ladies who were honour'd for their Vertue; but that an eternal round of idle Visits, the Park, Court, Play-houses and Musick Meetings, with all the costly Preparations to being seen in publick, do constantly take up their Time and their Thoughts.
Captain Stokes has described the habits and "play-houses" of another species, the Great Bower-bird, which was seen "amusing itself by flying backwards and forwards, taking a shell alternately from each side, and carrying it through the archway in its mouth."
"And if the generality of his female characters conduct themselves badly there is always one heroine of irreproachable morals," said Lady Sarah. "Who talks like a moral dragoon," said Fareham. "Oh, dem, we must have the play-houses!" cried Masaroon. "Consider how dull town is without them. They are the only assemblies that please quality and riffraff alike.
The abilities of my father and mother were not perceptibly unequal, and education had given neither much advantage over the other. They had both kept good company, rattled in chariots, glittered in play-houses, and danced at court, and were both expert in the games that were in their times called in as auxiliaries against the intrusion of thought.
O Julian, if you had not gone down to earth yourself among the castles and caverns of Derbyshire, we should have had enough of delicious topics the play-houses, Julian Both the King's house and the Duke's Louis's establishment is a jest to them; and the Ring in the Park, which beats the Corso at Naples and the beauties, who beat the whole world!"
When seats in the galleries grew to be regarded as inferior to seats and pews on the ground floor, the boys, who of course must have the worst place in the house, were relegated from the pulpit stairs to pews in the gallery, and these square, shut-off pews grew to be what Dr. Porter called "the Devil's play-houses," and turbulent outbursts were frequent enough.
We are also consuming what foreign countries give us on credit; in other words, we are living on borrowed money. It is childish lying and deception to act on the tacit assumption that thoroughgoing Socialism means something like a garden-city idyll, with play-houses, open-air theatres, excursions, picturesque raiment and fire-side art.
Churches, play-houses, coffeehouses, all alike, are destined to be mingled, and equalized, and blended into one common rubbish, and, well sifted, and lixiviated, to crystallize into true, democratic, explosive, insurrectionary nitre.
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