the Duke's Theatre

the Duke's Theatre

South of Salisbury Court, or Dorset Court, in Whitefriars (O. and M. 1677–Strype, 1755).

In Strype's maps called "The Playhouse."

"Queen's Theatre," 1689 (L. and P. Wm. and M. 1689–90, p. 321).

Opened 1671. The Company was called The Duke's Company, and gave their name to the Theatre, which had previously been called Dorset Gardens' Theatre, the site on which it was erected having formed the gardens of Dorset House.

Taken down in the 18th century.

Site afterwards occupied by the City Gas Works and now by the City of London School (q.v.).

[The Duke's Theatre, in Dorset Gardens.] Theatres ... are 3; The Queens, a strong built spacious one, situate in the Haymarket, of the Dorick Order: The Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, and the Dukes in Dorset Gardens; at the 2 former are acted Tragedies, Opera's, Commedies or Farces, except during Lent and the time of Bartholomew Fair.

[The Play House.] Near unto which Place [Dorset Stairs], lately stood the Theatre or Play House; a neat Building, having a curious Front next the Thames, with an open Place for the reception of Coaches. On the other side is a large Wood Yard Wharf, belonging to the Company of Carpenters.

[Dorset Gardens Theatre in Whitefriars.] At the outbreak of pleasure and vice, after the Restoration, the actors, long starved and crestfallen, brushed up their plumes and burnished their tinsel. Killigrew, that clever buffoon of the Court, opened a new theatre in Drury Lane in 1663, with a play of Beaumont and Fletcher's; and Davenant (supposed to be Shakespeare's illegitimate son) opened the little theatre, long disused, in Salisbury Court, the rebuilding of which was commenced in 1660, on the site of the granary of Salisbury House. In time Davenant migrated to the old Tennis Court, in Portugal Street, on the south side of Lincoln's Inn Fields, and when the Great Fire came it erased the Granary Theatre. In 1671, on Davenant's death, the company (nominally managed by his widow) returned to the new theatre in Salisbury Court, designed by Wren, and decorated, it is said, by Grinling Gibbons. It opened with Dryden's Sir Martin Marall, which had already had a run, having been first played in 1668. On Killigrew's death, the King's and Duke's Servants united, and removed to Drury Lane in 1682; so that the Dorset Gardens Theatre only flourished for eleven years in all. It was subsequently let to wrestlers, fencers, and other brawny and wiry performers. The engraving on page 193, taken from Settle's "Empress of Morocco" (1678), represents the stage of the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Wren's new theatre in Dorset Gardens, an engraving of which is given on page 138, fronted the river, and had public stairs for the convenience of those who came by water. There was also an open place before the theatre for the coaches of the "quality." In 1698 it was used for the drawing of a penny lottery, but in 1703, when it threatened to re-open, Queen Anne finally closed it. It was standing in 1720 (George I.), when Strype drew up the continuation of Stow, but it was shortly after turned into a timber-yard. The New River Company next had their offices there, and in 1814 water was ousted by fire, and the City Gas Works were established in this quarter, with a dismal front to the bright and pleasant Embankment.

Pepys, the indefatigable, was a frequent visitor to the Whitefriars Theatre. A few of his quaint remarks will not be uninteresting:—

"1660.—By water to Salsbury Court Playhouse, where, not liking to sit, we went out again, and by coach to the theatre, &c.—To the playhouse, and there saw The Changeling, the first time it hath been acted these twenty years, and it takes exceedingly. Besides, I see the gallants do begin to be tyred with the vanity and pride of the theatre actors, who are indeed grown very proud and rich.

"1661.—To White-fryars, and saw The Bondman acted; an excellent play, and well done; but above all that I ever saw, Betterton do the Bondman the best.

"1661.—After dinner I went to the theatre, where I found so few people (which is strange, and the reason I do not know) that I went out again, and so to Salisbury Court, where the house as full as could be; and it seems it was a new play, The Queen's Maske, wherein there are some good humours; among others, a good jeer to the old story of the siege of Troy, making it to be a common country tale. But above all it was strange to see so little a boy as that was to act Cupid, which is one of the greatest parts in it.

"Creed and I to Salisbury Court, and there saw Love's Quarrell acted the first time, but I do not like the design or words. . ... To Salsbury Court Playhouse, where was acted the first time a simple play, and ill acted, only it was my fortune to sit by a most pretty and most ingenuous lady, which pleased me much."

Dryden, in his prologues, makes frequent mention of the Dorset Gardens Theatre, more especially in the address on the opening of the new Drury Lane, March, 1674. The Whitefriars house, under Davenant, had been the first to introduce regular scenery, and it prided itself on stage pomp and show. The year before, in Shadwell's opera of The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island, the machinery was very costly, and one scene, in which the spirits flew away with the wicked duke's table and viands just as the company was sitting down, had excited the town to enthusiasm. Psyche, another opera by Shadwell, perhaps adapted from Molière's Court spectacle, had succeeded the Tempest. St. André and his French dancers were probably engaged in Shadwell's piece. The king, whose taste and good sense the poet praises, had recommended simplicity of dress and frugality of ornament. This Dryden took care to well remember. He says:—

"You who each day can theatres behold,
Like Nero's palace, shining all in gold,
Our mean, ungilded stage will scorn, we fear,
And for the homely room disdain the cheer."

Then he brings in the dictum of the king:—

"Yet if some pride with want may be allowed,
We in our plainness may be justly proud:
Our royal master willed it should be so;
Whate'er he's pleased to own can need no show,
That sacred name gives ornament and grace,
And, like his stamp, makes basest metal pass.
'Twere folly now a stately pile to raise,
To build a playhouse, while you throw down plays.
While scenes, machines, and empty operas reign,
And for the pencil you the pen disdain:
While troops of famished Frenchmen hither drive,
And laugh at those upon whose alms they live,
Old English authors vanish, and give place
To these new conquerors of the Norman race."

And when, in 1671, the burnt-out Drury Lane company had removed to the Portugal Street Theatre, Dryden had said, in the same strain,—

"So we expect the lovers, braves, and wits;
The gaudy house with scenes will serve for cits."

In another epilogue Dryden alludes sarcastically to the death of Mr. Scroop, a young rake of fortune, who had just been run through by Sir Thomas Armstrong, a sworn friend of the Duke of Monmouth, in a quarrel at the Dorset Gardens Theatre, and died soon after. This fatal affray took place during the representation of Davenant's adaptation of Macbeth.

From Dryden's various prologues and epilogues we cull many sharply-outlined and brightcoloured pictures of the wild and riotous audiences of those evil days. We see again the "hot Burgundians" in the upper boxes wooing the masked beauties, crying "bon" to the French dancers and beating cadence to the music that had stirred even the stately Court of Versailles. Again we see the scornful critics, bunched with glistening ribbons, shaking back their cascades of blonde hair, lolling contemptuously on the foremost benches, and "looking big through their curls." There from "Fop's Corner" rises the tipsy laugh, the prattle, and the chatter, as the dukes and lords, the wits and courtiers, practise what Dryden calls "the diving bow," or "the toss and the new French wallow"—the diving bow being especially admired, because it—

"With a shog casts all the hair before,
Till he, with full decorum, brings it back,
And rises with a water-spaniel's shake."

Nor does the poet fail to recall the affrays in the upper boxes, when some quarrelsome rake was often pinned to the wainscoat by the sword of his insulted rival. Below, at the door, the Flemish horses and the heavy gilded coach, lighted by flambeaux, are waiting for the noisy gallant, and will take back only his corpse.

Of Dryden's coldly licentious comedies and ranting bombastic tragedies a few only seem to have been produced at the Dorset Gardens Theatre. Among these we may mention Limberham, Œdipus, Troilus and Cressida, and The Spanish Friar. Limberham was acted at the Duke's Theatre, in Dorset Gardens; because, being a satire upon a Court vice, it was deemed peculiarly calculated for that playhouse. The concourse of the citizens thither is alluded to in the prologue to Marriage à la Mode. Ravenscroft, also, in his epilogue to the play of Citizen Turned Gentleman, which was acted at the same theatre, takes occasion to disown the patronage of the more dissolute courtiers, in all probability because they formed the minor part of his audience. The citizens were his great patrons.

In the Postman, December 8, 1679, there is the following notice, quoted by Smith:—"At the request of several persons of quality, on Saturday next, being the 9th instant, at the theatre in Dorset Gardens, the famous Kentish men, Wm. and Rich. Joy, design to show to the town before they leave it the same tryals of strength, both of them, that Wm. had the honour of showing before his majesty and their royal highnesses, with several other persons of quality, for which he received a considerable gratuity. The lifting a weight of two thousand two hundred and forty pounds. His holding an extraordinary large cart-horse; and breaking a rope which will bear three thousand five hundred weight. Beginning exactly at two, and ending at four. The boxes, 4s.; the pit, 2s. 6d.; first gallery, 2s.; upper gallery, Is. Whereas several scandalous persons have given out that they can do as much as any of the brothers, we do offer to such persons £100 reward, if he can perform the said matters of strength as they do, provided the pretender will forfeit £20 if he doth not. The day it is performed will be affixed a signal-flag on the theatre. No money to be returned after once paid."

In 1681 Dr. Davenant seems, by rather unfair tactics, to have bought off and pensioned both Hart and Kynaston from the King's Company, and so to have greatly weakened his rivals. Of these two actors some short notice may not be uninteresting. Hart had been a Cavalier captain during the Civil Wars, and was a pupil of Robinson, the actor, who was shot down at the taking of Basing House. Hart was a tragedian who excelled in parts that required a certain heroic and chivalrous dignity. As a youth, before the Restoration, when boys played female parts, Hart was successful as the Duchess, in Shirley's Cardinal. In Charles's time he played Othello, by the king's command, and rivalled Betterton's Hamlet at the other house. He created the part of Alexander, was excellent as Brutus, and terribly and vigorously wicked as Ben Jonson's Cataline. Rymer, says Dr. Doran, styled Hart and Mohun the Æsopus and Roscius of their time. As Amintor and Melanthus, in The Maid's Tragedy, they were incomparable. Pepys is loud too in his praises of Hart. His salary, was, however, at the most, £3 a week, though he realised £1,000 yearly after he became a shareholder of the theatre. Hart died in 1683, within a year of his being bought off.

Kynaston, in his way, was also a celebrity. As a handsome boy he had been renowned for playing heroines, and he afterwards acquired celebrity by his dignified impersonation of kings and tyrants. Betterton, the greatest of all the Charles II. actors, also played occasionally at Dorset Gardens. Pope knew him; Dryden was his friend; Kneller painted him. He was probably the greatest Hamlet that ever appeared; and Cibber sums up all eulogy of him when he says, "I never heard a line in tragedy come from Betterton wherein my judgment my ear, and my imagination were not fully satisfied, which since his time I cannot equally say of any one actor whatsoever." The enchantment of his voice was such, adds the same excellent dramatic critic, that the multitude no more cared for sense in the words he spoke, "than our musical connoiseurs think it essential in the celebrated airs of an Italian opera."

Dorset Gardens Theatre, Dorset Street, Fleet Street, stood fronting the river on the east or City side of Salisbury Court, with an open place before it for the reception of coaches, and public stairs to the Thames for the convenience of those who came by water. It was called Dorset Gardens from standing on what used to be the gardens of Dorset House.

The new theatre in Dorset Garden being finished, and our company [the Duke's], after Sir William's death, being under the rule and dominion of his widow, the Lady Davenant, Mr. Betterton, and Mr. Harris (Mr. Charles Davenant, her son, acting for her), they removed from Lincoln's Inn thither. And on the 9th day of November, 1671, they opened their new theatre with Sir Martin Marral, which continued acting three days together, with a full audience each day, notwithstanding it had been acted thirty days before in Lincoln's-inn-fields, and above four times at Court.—Downes's Roscius Anglicanus, 12mo, 1708, p. 31.

The prologue, by L'Estrange, spoken at the opening, is printed in A Collection of Poems upon Several Occasions (12mo, 1672, p. 67). All Otway's plays, except the last, The Atheist, were produced at this theatre; and it was here he essayed to turn actor, making the attempt in Mrs. Behn's play of the Jealous Husband.

In this play Mr. Otway the Poet having an inclination to turn actor, Mrs. Behn gave him the King in the play for a probation part, but he, not being used to the stage, the full house put him to such a sweat and tremulous agony, being dasht, spoilt him for an actor.—Downes's Rosc. Angl., p. 34.

From a line in Dr. Davenant's prologue to Dryden's Circe, acted at the Dorset Gardens Theatre in June 1677, it appears that the price of admission to the pit of this theatre on the first night of a new play was five shillings. On the death of Thomas, better known as Tom Killigrew, who held the patent under which the King's Company of actors performed at Drury Lane, the King's and the Duke's servants became one company; the Duke's servants removing from Dorset Gardens to Drury Lane, and the two companies performing together for the first time, November 16, 1682. Dryden, in his "Epilogue spoken at the opening of the New House," having deprecated censure for the plain unadorned convenience of the new house as contrasted with the pomp and "tarnished gawdry" of the older one, points out in the epilogue one decided advantage which Drury Lane possessed over Dorset Gardens:

Our house relieves the ladies from the frights
Of ill-pav'd streets and long dark winter nights;
The Flanders horses from a cold bleak road,
Where bears in furs dare scarcely look abroad;
The audience from worn plays and fustian stuff,
Of rhyme more nauseous than three boys in buff.

He also gives a hint of the style of decoration of the older house:

Though in their house the poets' heads appear,
We hope we may presume their wits are here.

Fashion travelled westward, and Dorset Gardens declined. The theatre was subsequently let to wrestlers, fencers, and exhibitors of every description who could afford to pay for it.

Ah Friends! poor Dorset Garden House is gone;
Our merry meetings there are all undone.
Prologue to Farquhar's Constant Couple, 4to, 1700.

Congreve in a letter to his friend, Joseph Keally, dated March 26, 1702, gives a lively account of a musical competition which was then taking place in "Dorset Garden," and doubts whether "any one place in the world can show such an assembly." For awhile it was again opened as a theatre, as we learn from an advertisement of a performance, "By the deserted Company [sic] of the Theatre Royal, at the Queen's Theatre in Dorset Gardens."¹ It was standing in 1720, when Strype published his continuation of Stow, but was shortly after taken down, and the site on which it stood transformed into a woodyard. The situation is exactly marked in Morden and Lea's Large View of London, and in Strype's Map of the ward of Farringdon Without. The site was afterwards occupied by the City Gas Works; and on it was built in 1885 the City of London School. Of the front towards the river there is a view in Settle's Empress of Morocco (4to, 1673). There is another and somewhat different view in the Gentleman's Magazine for July 1814; and another (showing the surrounding houses) in a "Large View of London," by Sutton Nicholls, delin. et sculp. circa 1710. Wren supplied the design, and Gibbons, it is said, the sculpture.

¹ Daily Courant, Tuesday, October 22, 1706.