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One can imagine the playgoer after the farce, rare, alas! which honestly may be called side-splitting, saying to himself next morning, "What a ripping time I must have had last night!" and advising all his friends to go and see the play. Smoking in the Auditorium
He used to go to the highest seats in the house, thrust his fingers into his ears, and then, to the astonishment of his neighbours, watch the performance with the sharpest interest. As a constant playgoer, he knew the words of the plays by heart, and what he sought was to isolate the gesture of the performers, and to enjoy and criticise that by itself.
Desdemonas who come forward, after the smothering scene, to receive flowers, and Romeos and Juliets who rise from the tomb that they may bow and smirk before an audience while we have such as these among us, let us not cast stones at the early playgoer. Addison has left, in the Spectator, a delightful story of dear old Sir Roger de Coverley's experience with the "Distressed Mother."
And, if you please, the playgoer despising the Salvationist as a joyless person, shut out from the heaven of the theatre, self-condemned to a life of hideous gloom; and the Salvationist mourning over the playgoer as over a prodigal with vine leaves in his hair, careering outrageously to hell amid the popping of champagne corks and the ribald laughter of sirens!
Thus, instead of situations intelligibly indecent, we get situations unintelligibly indecent. Eros, like an Indian conjuror, is left suspended from nothing. As the English playgoer does not ask for intelligible situations, he is satisfied with the residuum. The dramatist's uneasy striving to account for the behaviour of his personages only renders the latent character of the residuum more glaring.
The vast range of his writings enabled him to bring his bold questionings to the attention of all sorts and conditions of men, not only to the general reader, but even to the careless playgoer. While Voltaire was successfully inculcating free criticism in general, he led in a relentless attack upon the most venerable, probably the most powerful, institution in France, the Roman Catholic church.
It seemed clear that there must be greater difficulties than are obvious. So questions were put to an ardent playgoer, who spends appalling sums of money on her dress, as to why she makes a fuss about taking off her hat in the theatre. "My good man," she said to the questioner, "you are talking 'through your hat' as well as about mine.
Can you say, 'These tedious old fools! Fool thyself, this night shall thy youth be required of thee. You might think of this next time you drop across the old playgoer. It was natural in Hamlet to swear at Polonius who, you will remember, was an old playgoer himself but, being a gentleman, it was natural in him, too, to recall the first player with, 'Follow that lord; but look you mock him not!
The eyes whose kindly light had illumined the dull soul of many a playgoer, closed for ever on the 23rd of October, 1730, and the incomparable Oldfield was no more.
I was awfully glad that night to see you at the play, though in a way it shocked me. It seemed incongruous. Tell me, do you really care for the theatre?" "To a moderate extent I do," Dominic answered. She wanted, so he divined, to give a lighter tone to the conversation. He tried to meet her wishes. "I am not a very ardent playgoer, I am afraid.
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