



Produced by James Rusk





PEG WOFFINGTON

By Charles Reade


To T. Taylor, Esq., my friend, and coadjutor in the comedy of "Masks and
Faces," to whom the reader owes much of the best matter in this tale:
and to the memory of Margaret Woffington, falsely _summed up_ until
to-day, this "Dramatic Story" is inscribed by CHARLES READE.--

LONDON. Dec. 15, 1852.




CHAPTER I.

ABOUT the middle of the last century, at eight o'clock in the evening,
in a large but poor apartment, a man was slumbering on a rough couch.
His rusty and worn suit of black was of a piece with his uncarpeted
room, the deal table of home manufacture, and its slim unsnuffed candle.

The man was Triplet, scene painter, actor and writer of sanguinary
plays, in which what ought to be, viz., truth, plot, situation and
dialogue, were not; and what ought not to be, were--_scilicet,_ small
talk, big talk, <DW2>s, ruffians, and ghosts.

His three mediocrities fell so short of one talent that he was sometimes
_impransus._

He slumbered, but uneasily; the dramatic author was uppermost, and his
"Demon of the Hayloft" hung upon the thread of popular favor.

On his uneasy slumber entered from the theater Mrs. Triplet.

She was a lady who in one respect fell behind her husband; she lacked
his variety in ill-doing, but she recovered herself by doing her one
thing a shade worse than he did any of his three. She was what is called
in grim sport an actress; she had just cast her mite of discredit on
royalty by playing the Queen, and had trundled home the moment the
breath was out of her royal body. She came in rotatory with fatigue,
and fell, gristle, into a chair; she wrenched from her brow a diadem and
eyed it with contempt, took from her pocket a sausage, and contemplated
it with respect and affection, placed it in a frying-pan on the fire,
and entered her bedroom, meaning to don a loose wrapper, and dethrone
herself into comfort.

But the poor woman was shot walking by Morpheus, and subsided
altogether; for dramatic performances, amusing and exciting to youth
seated in the pit, convey a certain weariness to those bright beings who
sparkle on the stage for bread and cheese.

Royalty, disposed of, still left its trail of events. The sausage began
to "spit." The sound was hardly out of its body, when poor Triplet
writhed like a worm on a hook. "Spitter, spittest," went the sausage.
Triplet groaned, and at last his inarticulate murmurs became words:
"That's right, pit now, that is so reasonable to condemn a poor fellow's
play before you have heard it out." Then, with a change of tone, "Tom,"
muttered he, "they are losing their respect for specters; if they do,
hunger will make a ghost of me." Next he fancied the clown or somebody
had got into his ghost's costume.

"Dear," said the poor dreamer, "the clown makes a very pretty specter,
with his ghastly white face, and his blood-boltered cheeks and nose. I
never saw the fun of a clown before, no! no! no! it is not the clown, it
is worse, much worse; oh, dear, ugh!" and Triplet rolled off the couch
like Richard the Third. He sat a moment on the floor, with a finger
in each eye; and then, finding he was neither daubing, ranting, nor
deluging earth with "acts," he accused himself of indolence, and sat
down to write a small tale of blood and bombast; he took his seat at the
deal table with some alacrity, for he had recently made a discovery.

How to write well, _rien que cela._

"First, think in as homely a way as you can; next, shove your pen under
the thought, and lift it by polysyllables to the true level of fiction,"
(when done, find a publisher--if you can). "This," said Triplet,
"insures common sense to your ideas, which does pretty well for a
basis," said Triplet, apologetically, "and elegance to the dress they
wear." Triplet, then casting his eyes round in search of such actual
circumstances as could be incorporated on this plan with fiction, began
to work thus:


        TRIPLET'S FACTS.                  TRIPLET'S FICTION.

 A farthing dip is on the table.     A solitary candle cast its pale
                                     gleams around.

 It wants snuffing.                  Its elongated wick betrayed an owner
                                     steeped in oblivion.


 He jumped up, and snuffed it.       He rose languidly, and trimmed it with
                                     his fingers. Burned his with an
                                     instrument that he had by his fingers,
                                     and swore a little. side for that
                                     purpose, and muttered a silent
                                     ejaculation


Before, however, the mole Triplet could undermine literature and level
it with the dust, various interruptions and divisions broke in upon his
design, and _sic nos servavit_ Apollo. As he wrote the last sentence, a
loud rap came to his door. A servant in livery brought him a note from
Mr. Vane, dated Covent Garden. Triplet's eyes sparkled, he bustled,
wormed himself into a less rusty coat, and started off to the Theater
Royal, Covent Garden.

In those days, the artists of the pen and the brush ferreted patrons,
instead of aiming to be indispensable to the public, the only patron
worth a single gesture of the quill.

Mr. Vane had conversed with Triplet, that is, let Triplet talk to him in
a coffee-house, and Triplet, the most sanguine of unfortunate men, had
already built a series of expectations upon that interview, when this
note arrived. Leaving him on his road from Lambeth to Covent Garden, we
must introduce more important personages.

Mr. Vane was a wealthy gentleman from Shropshire, whom business had
called to London four months ago, and now pleasure detained. Business
still occupied the letters he sent now and then to his native county;
but it had ceased to occupy the writer. He was a man of learning and
taste, as times went; and his love of the Arts had taken him some time
before our tale to the theaters, then the resort of all who pretended
to taste; and it was thus he had become fascinated by Mrs. Woffington, a
lady of great beauty, and a comedian high in favor with the town.

The first night he saw her was an epoch in the history of this
gentleman's mind. He had learning and refinement, and he had not great
practical experience, and such men are most open to impression from the
stage. He saw a being, all grace and bright nature, move like a goddess
among the stiff puppets of the scene; her glee and her pathos were
equally catching, she held a golden key at which all the doors of
the heart flew open. Her face, too, was as full of goodness as
intelligence--it was like no other farce; the heart bounded to meet it.

He rented a box at her theater. He was there every night before the
curtain drew up; and I'm sorry to say, he at last took half a dislike
to Sunday--Sunday "which knits up the raveled sleave of care," Sunday
"tired nature's sweet restorer," because on Sunday there was no Peg
Woffington. At first he regarded her as a being of another sphere, an
incarnation of poetry and art; but by degrees his secret aspirations
became bolder. She was a woman; there were men who knew her; some of
them inferior to him in position, and, he flattered himself, in mind.
He had even heard a tale against her character. To him her face was its
confutation, and he knew how loose-tongued is calumny; but still--!

At last, one day he sent her a letter, unsigned. This letter expressed
his admiration of her talent in warm but respectful terms; the writer
told her it had become necessary to his heart to return her in some way
his thanks for the land of enchantment to which she had introduced him.
Soon after this, choice flowers found their way to her dressing-room
every night, and now and then verses and precious stones mingled with
her roses and eglantine. And oh, how he watched the great actress's
eye all the night; how he tried to discover whether she looked oftener
toward his box than the corresponding box on the other side of the
house. Did she notice him, or did she not? What a point gained, if she
was conscious of his nightly attendance. She would feel he was a friend,
not a mere auditor. He was jealous of the pit, on whom Mrs. Woffington
lavished her smiles without measure.

At last, one day he sent her a wreath of flowers, and implored her, if
any word he had said to her had pleased or interested her, to wear this
wreath that night. After he had done this he trembled; he had courted a
decision, when, perhaps, his safety lay in patience and time. She
made her _entree;_ he turned cold as she glided into sight from the
prompter's side; he raised his eyes slowly and fearfully from her feet
to her head; her head was bare, wreathed only by its own rich glossy
honors. "Fool!" thought he, "to think she would hang frivolities upon
that glorious head for me." Yet his disappointment told him he had
really hoped it; he would not have sat out the play but for a leaden
incapacity of motion that seized him.

The curtain drew up for the fifth act, and!--could he believe his
eyes?--Mrs. Woffington stood upon the stage with his wreath upon her
graceful head. She took away his breath. She spoke the epilogue, and, as
the curtain fell, she lifted her eyes, he thought, to his box, and made
him a distinct, queen-like courtesy; his heart fluttered to his mouth,
and he walked home on wings and tiptoe. In short--

Mrs. Woffington, as an actress, justified a portion of this enthusiasm;
she was one of the truest artists of her day; a fine lady in her
hands was a lady, with the genteel affectation of a gentlewoman, not a
harlot's affectation, which is simply and without exaggeration what the
stage commonly gives us for a fine lady; an old woman in her hands was
a thorough woman, thoroughly old, not a cackling young person of epicene
gender. She played Sir Harry Wildair like a man, which is how he ought
to be played (or, which is better still, not at all), so that Garrick
acknowledged her as a male rival, and abandoned the part he no longer
monopolized.

Now it very, very rarely happens that a woman of her age is high enough
in art and knowledge to do these things. In players, vanity <DW36>s art
at every step. The young actress who is not a Woffington aims to display
herself by means of her part, which is vanity; not to raise her part by
sinking herself in it, which is art. It has been my misfortune to see
----, and----, and ----, et ceteras, play the man; Nature, forgive them,
if you can, for art never will; they never reached any idea more manly
than a steady resolve to exhibit the points of a woman with greater
ferocity than they could in a gown. But consider, ladies, a man is not
the meanest of the brute creation, so how can he be an unwomanly female?
This sort of actress aims not to give her author's creation to the
public, but to trot out the person instead of the creation, and shows
sots what a calf it has--and is.

Vanity, vanity! all is vanity! Mesdames les Charlatanes.

Margaret Woffington was of another mold; she played the ladies of high
comedy with grace, distinction, and delicacy. But in Sir Harry Wildair
she parted with a woman's mincing foot and tongue, and played the man
in a style large, spirited and _elance._ As Mrs. Day (committee) she
painted wrinkles on her lovely face so honestly that she was taken for
threescore, and she carried out the design with voice and person, and
did a vulgar old woman to the life. She disfigured her own beauties to
show the beauty of her art; in a word, she was an artist! It does not
follow she was the greatest artist that ever breathed; far from it. Mr.
Vane was carried to this notion by passion and ignorance.

On the evening of our tale he was at his post patiently sitting out one
of those sanguinary discourses our rude forefathers thought were
tragic plays. _Sedet aeternumque Sedebit Infelix Theseus,_ because Mrs.
Woffington is to speak the epilogue.

These epilogues were curiosities of the human mind; they whom, just to
ourselves and _them,_ we call our _forbears,_ had an idea their blood
and bombast were not ridiculous enough in themselves, so when the
curtain had fallen on the _debris_ of the _dramatis personae,_ and
of common sense, they sent on an actress to turn all the sentiment so
laboriously acquired into a jest.

To insist that nothing good or beautiful shall be carried safe from a
play out into the street was the bigotry of English horseplay. Was a
Lucretia the heroine of the tragedy, she was careful in the epilogue
to speak like Messalina. Did a king's mistress come to hunger and
repentance, she disinfected all the _petites maitresses_ in the house
of the moral, by assuring them that sin is a joke, repentance a greater,
and that she individually was ready for either if they would but cry,
laugh and pay. Then the audience used to laugh, and if they did not,
lo! the manager, actor and author of heroic tragedy were exceeding
sorrowful.

While sitting attendance on the epilogue Mr. Vane had nothing to
distract him from the congregation but a sanguinary sermon in five
heads, so his eyes roved over the pews, and presently he became aware of
a familiar face watching him closely. The gentleman to whom it belonged
finding himself recognized left his seat, and a minute later Sir Charles
Pomander entered Mr. Vane's box.

This Sir Charles Pomander was a gentleman of vice; pleasure he called
it. Mr. Vane had made his acquaintance two years ago in Shropshire. Sir
Charles, who husbanded everything except his soul, had turned himself
out to grass for a month. His object was, by roast mutton, bread with
some little flour in it, air, water, temperance, chastity and peace, to
be enabled to take a deeper plunge into impurities of food and morals.

A few nights ago, unseen by Mr. Vane, he had observed him in the
theater; an ordinary man would have gone at once and shaken hands with
him, but this was not an ordinary man, this was a diplomatist. First
of all, he said to himself: "What is this man doing here?" Then he soon
discovered this man must be in love with some actress; then it became
his business to know who she was; this, too, soon betrayed itself. Then
it became more than ever Sir Charles's business to know whether Mrs.
Woffington returned the sentiment; and here his penetration was at
fault, for the moment; he determined, however, to discover.

Mr. Vane then received his friend, all unsuspicious how that friend
had been skinning him with his eyes for some time past. After the usual
compliments had passed between two gentlemen who had been hand and glove
for a month and forgotten each other's existence for two years, Sir
Charles, still keeping in view his design, said:

"Let us go upon the stage." The fourth act had just concluded.

"Go upon the stage!" said Mr. Vane; "what, where she--I mean among the
actors?"

"Yes; come into the green-room. There are one or two people of
reputation there; I will introduce you to them, if you please."

"Go upon the stage!" why, if it had been proposed to him to go to heaven
he would not have been more astonished. He was too astonished at first
to realize the full beauty of the arrangement, by means of which he
might be within a yard of Mrs. Woffington, might feel her dress rustle
past him, might speak to her, might drink her voice fresh from her lips
almost before it mingled with meaner air. Silence gives consent, and Mr.
Vane, though he thought a great deal, said nothing; so Pomander rose,
and they left the boxes together. He led the way to the stage door,
which was opened obsequiously to him; they then passed through a dismal
passage, and suddenly emerged upon that scene of enchantment, the
stage--a dirty platform encumbered on all sides with piles of scenery in
flats. They threaded their way through rusty velvet actors and fustian
carpenters, and entered the green-room. At the door of this magic
chamber Vane trembled and half wished he could retire. They entered; his
apprehension gave way to disappointment, she was not there. Collecting
himself, he was presently introduced to a smart, jaunty, and, to do
him justice, _distingue_ old beau. This was Colley Cibber, Esq., poet
laureate, and retired actor and dramatist, a gentleman who is entitled
to a word or two.

This Cibber was the only actor since Shakespeare's time who had both
acted and written well. Pope's personal resentment misleads the reader
of English poetry as to Cibber's real place among the wits of the day.

The man's talent was dramatic, not didactic,