THEATRE, a place in which dramatic pieces are exhibited. The article Drama, besides relating the literary history of the stage, has furnished as minute an account of the plan and arrangements of the ancient theatres as the purposes of this work allow. Similar details as to the modern theatres of the Continent, would lead into a field far too wide to be traversed; and we must here confine ourselves to a brief notice of the establishments devoted to dramatic entertainments in Britain.

The earliest positive mention of professional actors in England, as a class distinctly separable from minstrels or others, occurs about the middle of the fifteenth century; and a sumptuary law of Edward IV., passed in 1464, makes an exception in favour of “players in their enterludes.” Richard III., when duke of Gloucester, kept a company of players and musicians in his pay. The children of the king’s chapel were trained for acting as well as singing; and Henry VII. had two distinct sets of players, the one being composed of the gentlemen of the chapel, who performed regularly at certain seasons; and the other, the “players of interludes,” being more like those strolling companies whom about that time we find to have been often taken into the pay of noblemen throughout the country. In the reign of Henry VIII. the court amusements became more expensive and diversified, in this respect as in every other; and the royal example was eagerly imitated by the wealthy nobles. Besides the annual payments from the king to the Lord of Misrule, and the large sums expended on masques and other entertainments, we find salaries to have been regularly paid to two companies of the “king’s players,” in addition to the children of the chapel; and the royal players, as well as those of the nobility, travelled through all the provinces. In 1Ô28, Henry entertained the French ambassadors at Greenwich with a Latin moral play, acted by the pupils of St Paul’s school, in which the reformation was ridiculed, and Luther and his wife were prominent characters. The corporations, especially that of Chester, so celebrated for its patronage of religious theatricals, continued to exhibit dramatic shows on occasions of festivity; although the corporation of London appear, even before the middle of the sixteenth century, as decidedly opposing stage plays, and attempting to suppress them within their jurisdiction. In 1543 was passed the earliest act of parliament for the regulation of the stage; and in 1546, if not earlier, was established the office of Master of the Revels, for managing and superintending the pastimes of the court. The disturbances of the two short reigns which succeeded Henry’s, checked the progress of theatrical amusements; but their prosperity revived on the accession of Elizabeth, who lived to witness the rise of the dramatic art to its highest literary excellence. The companies of itinerant players multiplied so excessively, and their irregularities were considered so dangerous, that a statute of the queen, passed in 1572, stamped the first public brand on the profession; declaring that all players, fencers, bearwards, not belonging to any nobleman,—and all tinkers, jugglers, pedlars, &c. not having license from two justices of the peace,—should be dealt with as rogues and vagabonds.

About the year 1570, or very little later, were erected the earliest buildings in London that were devoted exclusively to theatrical representation. These were two, both in Shoreditch; the one called “The Theatre,” by way of eminence, the other called “The Curtain.” A third theatre, within the privileged precinct of the Blackfriars, was built in 1576, by Burbadge, the father of the famous player, whose company had been driven out of the city by the corporation; and the Globe on the Bankside in Southwark (which afterwards became the summer theatre of Shakspeare’s company, while the Blackfriars was their place [7:21:192] of acting in winter) was erected about the year 1594. But between 1570 and 1600, there arose eleven buildings, if not more, in or about London, applied to the purpose of dramatic exhibitions. Several of these were always obscure, but others possess interest, on account of the merit of the works produced on their stages. The Globe and Blackfriars always maintained the first rank, and continued in the possession of the company called the Queen’s Players; Paris-Garden, an old building, was used both for stage-playing and bear-baiting; and the Rose, built about 1585, and the Fortune, in 1599, were especially under the control of the pawnbroker Philip Henslowe, whose manuscript diary is one of the most instructive documents which we possess relating to the dramatic history of that age. An attempt of the government in 1598 to limit the license of playing in London to two companies, bearing the names of the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Admiral, seems to have been completely unsuccessful. In the reign of James, the Globe and Fortune were successively burnt, but both rebuilt; and no new theatre of consequence was erected except the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane, and the Red Bull in Saint John Street, if indeed the latter was not somewhat older.

In the same reign the principal companies of players were three. Those who obtained the royal patent of 1603, at the head of whom stood Shakspeare, Burbadge, and Laurence Fletcher, had been recently called the Lord Chamberlain’s men, but now resumed their older title of the King’s Players or Servants. The company at first named Players of the Lord Admiral (or of the Earl of Nottingham, who held that office) were afterwards called the Players of Prince Henry: these were the actors especially connected with Henslowe; and his celebrated son-in-law Edward Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich College, was the most distinguished among them. Those actors who had formerly been called Children of the Chapel, but of whom many were persons of mature age, were now called Children of the Revels, and appear frequently in connection with Ben Jonson’s works.

James had passed an act against profanity in plays: his son passed one, the first of his reign, against the acting of them on Sundays, an impropriety which it had been formerly attempted to remove, and which the growing spirit of puritanism regarded with increasing horror. But Charles, whose taste for literature and art was the best feature in his character, was a liberal and judicious patron of the theatre during those few early years of his reign that preceded the disturbances. In the same year as the act last named (1625), he renewed his father’s patent to the “King’s Players,” in favour of Heminge and Condell, Shakspeare’s executors, and others; annexing a condition which we find often insisted on in regard to dramatic exhibitions in those days, that no performance should take place in London unless the persons infected by the plague fell short of a certain number in the week. About 1635 there were in the metropolis, besides a French troop and a Spanish, five settled companies of English players ;—the King’s Servants, under Lowin and Taylor, who played, as of old, at the Globe and Blackfriars ;—the Queen’s, who played at the Cockpit ;—the Prince’s men, at the Fortune ;—the Children of the Revels, probably at the Red Bull ;—and the company attached to a new theatre in Salisbury Court. The civil war broke out in 1642; and in September of that year an “ordinance of both houses of parliament,” setting forth the necessity of fasting and prayer, and of all other means “to appease and avert the wrath of God appearing in these judgments,” ordained that, “while these sad causes and set times of humiliation do continue, public stage-plays shall cease and be forborne.” In 1647 a more peremptory act declared stage-players punishable by public whipping for the first offence, and authorized the demolition of the theatres. And for nearly ten years from that time we hear of only one or two unimportant infractions of the prohibition.

During those early ages of our dramatic annals, which the civil wars thus brought to a close, the theatres were divided into two classes, the Public and the Private, the distinctions of which are not yet very clear, and do not seem to have been ever very important. The private theatres, it is said by Mr Collier, were smaller than the others, and were entirely roofed over, which the latter were not; the performances in them were by artificial light; their “pits” had seats; and there were other minor differences of arrangement. The Blackfriars, the Cockpit, and the house in Salisbury Court, were private theatres; the Globe, Fortune, and Bull, were public. There has been loud controversy on the question whether moveable scenery was at all used in the time of Shakspeare; but it may be considered as having been authoritatively settled in the negative. There was a balcony or upper stage, which served, on multifarious occasions, the purposes of a second scene, representing the walls of a town in King John and elsewhere,—-Juliet’s balcony,— or the seat of the audience at the performance of the play in Hamlet, in which the player-king and queen occupied the front of the main stage. Besides the curtain which concealed this balcony when it was not required, other curtains, called traverses, crossing the back of the stage, served to separate a portion, which, by drawing these partly or wholly, could be made to pass for an inner room. There is good evidence of the use of trap-doors in the stage; and descents from above were also attempted, as in Greene’s Alphonsus, a play older than most of Shakspeare’s, in which one direction was this—“let Venus be let down from the top of the stage and another, in the same play, orders that Venus shall either simply make her exit, “or, if you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top of the stage and draw her up.” The performances, in Shakspeare’s time, took place but once a day; the usual hour seems to have been three o’clock; and nothing except the short and rude pieces called jigs seems to have been exhibited besides the principal play. There were play-bills pasted up in the streets as early at least as the middle of the sixteenth century; and in 1620 a royal patent was granted for the printing of them. The purchases which theatrical companies made from authors seem to have been understood as comprehending, not merely the right of representing the pieces, but the entire copyright; and the care of the players to keep popular pieces in manuscript was one of the causes especially destructive to the dramatic literature of those times. Before the year 1600, Henslowe, whose loans had made most of the dramatists of the time his bond-slaves, seems never to have paid an author more than eight pounds for a play; and even authors of reputation, such as Dekker, sometimes received much less. But the value of literary labour rose in the beginning of the next century, and we then find even inferior writers, like Daborne, stipulating for sums as high as twenty pounds. The usual price, however, till the closing of the theatres, was about twelve pounds, to which were sometimes added the receipts, in whole or in part, of one of the early performances. The actors were divided into two classes: the Shareholders, who were joint proprietors of the establishment, and ranked according to the amount of their interest, as whole sharers, three-quarter sharers, or half sharers; and the Hired Men, who were the inferior actors, receiving weekly salaries from the sharers. In 1608, when the corporation contemplated removing the players of the Blackfriars, but proposed giving them compensation for the loss of their property and employment, a statement was produced which gives some curious results. It appears that the whole interest in the profits of the establishment was divided into twenty shares, which belonged to eleven actors. Burbadge owned the building and four of the shares; Shakspeare owned four shares, with the wardrobe and properties; Fletcher had three shares; Heminge and Condell [7:21:193]two shares each; Taylor and Lowin a share and half each; and four others parted the remaining two shares equally among them. Each share was valued at L.33. 6s. 8d. per annum, and was offered to the corporation at seven years’ purchase: the building was valued at L.1000, the wardrobe and properties at L.500. The whole property was thus estimated by the players themselves at L.6166. 13s. 4d., besides compensation demanded by the hired men, and allowances to the widows and orphans of deceased players. Shakspeare’s interest was valued by him at L.1433. fis. 8d., which might be equal to between L.6000 and L.7000 in modern money. All these valuations, however, must have been above the truth. 1

The representation of Sir William Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes, in 1656, was the first step towards a revival of theatrical amusements; and three years later, two rival companies began to act openly in London, the one at the Cockpit, the other at the Red Bull. The former, originally organized by one Rhodes, a bookseller, was composed chiefly of new actors, among whom the best, Betterton and Kynaston, were youths who had been his own apprentices; the latter embraced those old actors who had survived the wars, in which several of them had served with some distinction. Two royal patents (the origin of the modem monopoly) were issued in 1663. The one was in favour of Devenant, who placed himself at the head of Rhodes’s players, and acted for some time at a new house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, calling his company the Duke of York’s, though they were sworn in as servants of the king. The other patent was given to the witty Killigrew, whose actors, called the King’s Company, were those who had begun to play at the Red Bull, but who were removed to a new theatre built in Drury Lane. The new companies presented one remarkable novelty, in the accession of several females to their number. Before the Restoration, the female parts had been performed by the younger male actors; and the only instance in which an innovation had been tried was in 1629, when a French company appeared at the Blackfriars, consisting partly of women, or, as Prynne is pleased to express it, “monsters rather”—“an impudent, shameful, unwomanish, graceless, if not more than meretricious attempt.” Those who looked on the matter in a more candid and philosophical temper, might not unreasonably have expected that the introduction of actresses to the stage would have helped to purify it from that coarseness which had disfigured the drama in its preceding ages. But after the Restoration, the players, the public at large, and the court, which gave law to the public and the players, were all alike corrupt; and if the new addition did nothing to deteriorate, it did at all events nothing to retard the increasing degradation. That which, in most of the dramas produced in Elizabeth’s reign, had been merely coarseness of language, had been accompanied in very many of the later plays with real licentiousness of principle and feeling; and the profligacy of Charles the Second and his minions was now aped with applause in works full of the most disgusting and disgraceful obscenity. The injury which morality received from the stage was accompanied by injury to taste, inflicted not only by that undramatic spirit which pervaded the very best works of the time, but by the pomp of decoration, the singing, music, and dancing, by which Davenant sought to make his theatre a match for the superior histrionic skill displayed by his rivals. The licentiousness was greatly amended after the Revolution, but the corruption of taste gave way much more slowly.

In 1671 the Duke’s players opened a new theatre in Dorset Gardens, probably on the site of the old house in Salisbury Court; and in 1674 the King’s players opened a second new theatre in Drury Lane, in the place of their former one, which had been burned down. A union of the two patents, and of both companies, produced discontents both among the actors and the public; and a new patent having been granted by King William to Betterton and some of the rebellious players, a third theatre was built by them in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for which was afterwards substituted a splendid but ill-designed house in the Haymarket, planned by Sir John Vanbrugh, and opened in 1705. In the mean time, various disputes and misfortunes happened among the old patentees. The interference of the Lord Chamberlain, whom, as coming in the place of the Master of the Revels, the actors and the public sometimes considered as having exclusive jurisdiction over the playhouses, while at other times the managers voluntarily submitted their disputes to his arbitration, was repeatedly exerted, and often very arbitrarily, to restore something like order and prosperity; and at length matters were placed for a time on a footing not materially different from the modern one. The theatre in the Haymarket was appropriated solely to the opera; and the two old patents of Charles the Second were the warrant under which the regular drama was played at Drury Lane by a company acting under Killigrew’s patent, and at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (once more rebuilt) by a company directed by the younger Rich, the holder of the patent which had been granted to Davenant. At Drury Lane, plays which, however indifferent, were the best the age could produce, or the public endure, were acted with excellent skill by a company directed by the first actors of the day, Wilks, Dogget, Booth, and Cibber, with whom, for a good many years, Sir Richard Steele was associated in the patent. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields were produced those execrable abortions called pantomimes, on which the manager Rich prided himself so much, and whose scenery and drolleries gained for his house a popularity which he probably thought cheaply purchased by the ridicule showered on him without ceasing by the wits of Queen Anne’s reign.

In 1720 there arose new quarrels, new financial embarrassments, and new interferences and prohibitions by the Lord Chamberlain; but of the events which took place for many years, two or three only demand notice. The first was the opening, in 1729, of a new theatre in Goodman’s Fields, rebuilt in 1732, which did not for some time obtain such success as to tempt the patentees to suppress it. A second occurrence was the transfer of Rich’s company, in 1733, to a new house in Covent Garden. In 1737 there was passed, in spite of energetic and well-founded opposition, an act of parliament, taking from the crown the right of granting any new patents for theatres in the metropolis, and forbidding the representation of any plays not previously licensed by the Lord Chamberlain. In 1741 Garrick appeared at Gcβd∙ man’s Fields, in the character of Richard the Third.

In 1747 the patent of Drury Lane was renewed in favour of Lacey, who was to be the man of business of the establishment, and Garrick, who was to support it both as actor and author. Under the direction of these managers the theatre enjoyed uninterrupted prosperity’ for nineteen years; and, however faulty Garrick’s ideas of the literary qualities of the drama may in some respects have been, we owe him a heavy debt of gratitude for the benefits he conferred on public taste by his restoration of Shakspeare’s works to that place on the stage from which they had been banished with equal constancy by the debauchery of Charles the Second’s time, and the pedantic coldness of Queen Anne’s. In the mean time, after the death of Rich in 1761, Covent Garden was chiefly supported by its musical pieces; and the new management, begun in 1767, at the head of ’ For the history of the theatres till their suppression in the civil wars, see Collier’» Annals of the Stage, 3 vols. 1831; and Malone’s History of the Stage, in his posthumous Shakspeare of 1821.
[7:21:194]

which stood the elder Colman, produced little advantage to any except the lawyers who received fees in the lawsuits between the proprietors. In 1766, a theatre in the Haymarket, not that which held the patent, but another which had been built in 1720, and which had received occasional licenses for performances during the summer, received a regular patent, granted in favour of Foote, which recognized its actors as the king’s servants, and allowed performances in it from the 14th of May to the 14th of September. The patentee immediately pulled down the old house, and built a new one, which was opened in 1767.

In 1790 there was built, on the site of Sir John Vanbrugh’s Haymarket Theatre, a new house devoted to the Italian opera, which received the name of the King’s Theatre, and has since then suffered no very material alteration in the general structure of its interior. In 1794 was opened a new theatre in Drury Lane, built, after a plan by Holland, on the site of the former one; and two or three years earlier, Covent Garden had received such improvements as amounted nearly to a total renovation. Long before these events, however, the management of Covent Garden had passed to Harris; while at Drury Lane, Garrick had been succeeded by Sheridan, Ford, and Linley; and Foote’s place at the Haymarket had been filled by Colman. In 1803 the stage-management of Covent Garden passed to John Philip Kemble; and the subsequent changes which took place for some time in that and the other theatres are not of such literary moment as to require notice. In September 1808, Covent Garden Theatre was burnt to the ground; and the present building, erected on its site, after a plan by Smirke, was opened within twelve months from the catastrophe. In 1809 a similar calamity destroyed the theatre in Drury Lane, which was rebuilt by Wyatt, and opened for performances in 1811. Foote’s summer theatre in the Haymarket made way, in 1821, for a new house planned by Nash, and possessing a patent extending its performances to seven months.

It would not be too much to say, that the excellence of the dramas which our modern stage has produced, bears, in comparison with those of our older times, a proportion nearly inverse to that of the dimensions and adornment of the edifices in which the works of the two ages have been respectively acted. The question as to the causes of our decay, and as to our probable prospect of revival, has been handled elsewhere, and would lead us beyond the proper province of this article; but the discouraging state of the drama during the whole period which has elapsed in the present century may be admitted as a sufficient reason for declining to trace the history of our great theatres through that series of misfortunes which has hung over all of them, especially Drury Lane, for the last thirty years. The ruinous consequences of their injurious monopoly have not, it should appear, been even yet made sufficiently obvious to those who possess the power of remedying the evil; and the many minor theatres, which, if allowed free scope, might perhaps become the nurseries of a new school in dramatic art, are left to struggle against obstacles arising from this cause, and seconded but too faithfully by the general corruption of dramatic taste.

The evils produced by the monopoly of the great theatres in the metropolis were till lately aggravated tenfold by the laws affecting copyright in dramatic performances. Literary property of this sort was continually invaded, and towards the end of the eighteenth century the courts of law formally authorized the encroachments. The decisions were founded on very curious and subtile distinctions.

The first case brought forward was that in which Macklin, in 1770, applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction to stay the printing of his farce of “Love-a-la-Mode” in a magazine, in which it was appearing piecemeal. The farce had never yet been printed or published; and the booksellers obtained their manuscript from a shorthand writer, whom they employed to attend the theatre and take down the dialogue from the mouths of the actors. The court held that this was a publication of the play, and forbidden by the act of Queen Anne. In terms of this decision, it was always afterwards held, that the author or his assignce retained the exclusive right of printing and publishing a play, although it might have been already acted.

But in 1790, the Court of King’s Bench laid down the law very differently for the case in which redress is claimed against the unauthorized representation of a play on the stage. O’Keeffe’s farce, “The Agreeable Surprise,” had been acted on various stages, although the copyright had been sold by the author to Colman of the Haymarket. Colman prosecuted the manager of the Richmond theatre for infringement of the act of Queen Anne, maintaining that his acting of the piece was a publication of it in the sense of the statute. The court found that acting (or, as one of the judges called it, repeating a book from memory) was not publication, nor prohibited by the act. The provincial managers thenceforth continued to plunder dramatic authors with impunity, as soon as, by the publication of their works, or in other ways, they were able to procure access to them. No endeavour was made in the courts to shake the decision given in Colman’s case, tiD the year 1822, when Murray the bookseller prosecuted Elliston for acting Byron’s tragedy of Marino Faliero, “altered and abridged for the stage,” the play having been previously printed and published by Murray, the proprietor of the copyright. The attempt in this case to found the action for redress independently of the statute, was equally unsuccessful with the previous attempt to rest it solely on the statutory words.

These decisions, it is true, left several very important questions still undetermined; but the letter of the law, and the spirit of the interpretations which had been long put upon it, were equally unfavourable to the dramatic author. Writers of plays continued to depend for remuneration on the small sums which they could obtain from booksellers for the right of printing and publishing, with any other sum which the managers of the London theatres chose to give for the privilege of acting the drama till publication.

This unfair state of things was altered in 1833 by Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer’s act, “To amend the laws relating to dramatic literary property.” By this statute it is enacted, first, that the author of every dramatic piece not printed or published (or the assignce of the author) shall have, as his own property, the sole liberty of representing it, or causing it to be represented, at any place of dramatic entertainment; secondly, that the author of every dramatic piece which has been or shall be printed and published (or the assignce of the author) shall have, as his own property, the same liberty of representing it, or causing it to be represented, till the end of twenty-eight years from the date of the publication, and also during the residue of the author’s life; thirdly, that the penalty for infringement of the act shall be, for each representation, an amount not less than forty shillings, or the full amount of the benefit or advantage arising from the representation, or the injury or loss sustained by the proprietor of the drama, recoverable in an action to be brought within twelve months after the offence. (b. l.)