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Updated: October 14, 2025
He keeps such a bawling at Westminster, that, if the lawyers were not acquainted with it, an order would be taken with him. When he is upon the water he is fair company; when he comes ashore he mutinies, and, contrary to all other trades, is most surly to gentlemen when they tender payment. The playhouses only keep him sober, and, as it doth many other gallants, make him an afternoon's man.
Pendarves, who during the last few years had not lived much in London, and had thus dropped out of Handel's life, wrote in November: "The concerts begin next Saturday at the Haymarket. Carestini sings, Pescetti composes; the house is made up into little boxes, like the playhouses abroad." Dr. Burney gives a comic account of the undertaking.
There is something very sombre and vulgar in the French playhouses with the men's boots and the women's bonnets. Could I in an instant waft you from the solitudes of Stoke to the clatter of Paris, how you would stare to see the boxes filled with persons almost extinguished in their enormous casques of straw and flowers.
So that upon the whole, God knows we are in a sad condition like to be, there being the very beginnings of the late troubles. He gone, I at the office all the morning. At noon home to dinner, where Mrs. Pierce and her boy and Knipp, who sings as well, and is the best company in the world, dined with us, and infinite merry. The playhouses begin to play next week.
Mulgrave, Dorset, Rochester, and many others, left the playhouses in the Mall for hammocks and salt pork, and, ignorant as they were of the rudiments of naval service, showed, at least, on the day of battle, the courage which is seldom wanting in an English gentleman.
Since the soldiers of Cromwell shut up the people's playhouses and destroyed their pleasure fields, the Anglo-Saxon city has turned over the provision for public recreation to the most evil-minded and the most unscrupulous members of the community.
A few years ago there were several of these playhouses, but the number is now reduced to two. The charge of admission is 25 cents or 50 cents. The white people who, out of curiosity, attend a performance, generally pay more, and are given more comfortable seats upon the stage. The stage is a primitive affair. It boasts of no curtain, footlights or scenery of any kind.
The negotiations about the new lease had not come to an end when the elder Burbage died, and left his two sons, Cuthbert, who was a bookseller, and Richard, who was the leading actor of his time, not only burdened with the playhouse, the long lease of which had expired, but opposed by a proprietor with whom it was impossible to come to terms, and by a magistrate who was more eager than ever to deal a blow at the playhouses.
Melopoyn had met with from the world: and signified a desire of hearing how he had been treated by the managers of the playhouses, to whom I understood from Jackson, he had offered his tragedy without success.
I stood patiently at the doors of exhibitions and concerts, and playhouses, to be shoved back by policemen, and insulted by footmen but in vain. Then I tried the fashionable churches, one by one; and sat in the free seats, to listen to prayers and sermons, not a word of which, alas!
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