ANALISIS PORTER

Apart from the endemic low-level violence which might be expected in a capital city the size of late seventeenth-century London, one source of unruly behaviour post-Restoration was represented by the two London theatres where gentlemen who had dined too well sought further entertainment and where the heated atmosphere of a crowded playhouse did nothing to alleviate their intoxication.

125 _{Entring Book 11 June 1685.}

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Elizabeth A. Foyster describes how:

Audiences at London’s playhouses were rarely quiet during a performance, but instead exchanged the latest gossip…play going was a social occasion which provided the opportunity for ostentatious show and defence of honour and sexual chatter, in addition to any discussion of the matter on the stage.127

The Entring Book highlights similar behaviour, when Morrice comments: ‘Some commoners &c and severall other gentlemen on Tuesday last went into the play house and there fell a talking about some Ladyes, and some other persons, so that there was a little kind of a hubbub whereupon the Play house is shut up.’128

Where alcohol-inspired brawling ended among theatre-goers and ritualised duelling began in the second half of the seventeenth century is moot, but examples of violence or rowdy behaviour associated with the playhouses are faithfully recorded by Morrice, Pepys and Luttrell, even if such incidents were not particularly common in the Entring Book, Pepys’s

Diary or Luttrell’s Brief Historical Relation respectively. Luttrell records

episodes of violence in the context of the playhouse, the first being on 26 February 1680 when:

Mrs Ellen Gwyn being at the dukes playhouse, who was affronted by a person who came into the pitt and called her a whore; whom Mr

127_{Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England. Honour, Sex and Marriage,}

(Longman, 1999), p.19.

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Herbert, the earl of Pembroke’s brother, vindicating there were many swords drawn, and great hubbub in the house.129

Morrice does not report the Gwyn example - a genuine act of omission, or perhaps he chose not to celebrate someone of her lascivious notoriety - but he does report an incident which took place on 10 April 1684 on which he comments briefly, namely:

On Tuesday the 8 Mr Kirk in the Playhouse did aloud say the Earle of Dorset was a Rascall many times over, the said Earle being in a Box in the Playhouse then. And afterwards Kirk sent Mr Macartey to the Earle to tell him Mr Kirk commanded him to tell his Lordshippe he said he was a Rascall.130

On 10 June 1685, another incident occurred at a metropolitan playhouse, again reported by Morrice:

Yesterday being Wednesday 10th _{At the Playhouse Captain Goreing}

(son to Sir Henry Goreing), and Mr Charles Dearing (son I think to Sir Edward Dearing), fell out in the Playhouse, or Dressing-roome there, and the former was wounded so that he dye immediately.131

Lest the modern-day reader of the Entring Book imagine that violence focused on the playhouses was the preserve of the upper echelons of post- Restoration society, Morrice goes some way to correcting that perception:

The last weeke there had like to have been a great deale of mischief at the King’s Playhouse betweene the footmen and the Guards, for the footmen use to go in the fifth Act, but now are Prohibited by Order of

129 _{Brief Historical Relation 26 February 1680.} 130 _{Entring Book 10 April 1684.}

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the House. The Guards by Command fired upon them, and its said there was a soldier and a footman killed.132

Thomas N. Corns has recently suggested that:

It [the Restoration stage] was largely determined by the rich louts who were its most influential patrons, who strutted its theatres, bedded its actresses, intimidated its actors and at times fell to deadly quarrelling among themselves. The section of the audience that had to be satisfied was nostalgically cavalier and fiercely hostile to the values attributed to the Puritan regimes of the mid-century decades; it was courtly but not genteel, and effectively unshockable.133

The ‘nostalgically cavalier’ climate of the playhouses, no doubt accounts for Morrice’s views on the subject, bearing in mind his strong Presbyterian leanings. That the upper echelons of society were an influential party among the playhouse audience is not in question, but whether this designated the theatre as ‘theirs’ is open to challenge, particularly if, as Harold Love calculates, average theatre-going numbered only perhaps 20,000 attendees per annum for one theatre operating in the metropolis, possibly half as many again when two or more theatres were operating.134 _{Some of the behaviour}

described by Corns in London’s playhouses was mirrored in uncanny detail in the Entring Book. In December 1685, a dispute took place involving one

132_{Ibid., 3 May 1690.}

133 _{Thomas N. Corns, A History of Seventeenth Century English Literature (Blackwell,} 2014), pp.333-334.

134_{Harold Love, ‘Who Were the Restoration Audience?’, The Yearbook of English Studies,}

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Mr Smith (‘a principall Share in the Playhouse’) and Mr Stafford (‘the late Viscount Staffords’s son’.) According to Morrice, the latter:

had often of late affronted Mr Smith when he was acting his Part by hissing and Whistling &c Smith not long since mett Mr Stafford in the Street and said Mr Stafford I am a Gentleman as well as you, and if I have offered you any indignity I am ready to give you satisfaction with my Sword, Mr Stafford declined fighting, and upon Tuesday last brought Mr Gage and many other Papist Gentlemen and placed them in severall parts of the Playhouse with Cattcatchers in their pockets, and when Mr Smith came to his Act his Part they all sounded with their instruments, which makes a very loud shrill noise above that of Catterwouling from severall parts of the Playhouse which begat a great Surprize and Consternation.135

Upon this premeditated disruption, Mr Smith immediately withdrew ‘and took down the Curtain, and said I speake to you gentlemen that have carried out yourselves civilly, you shall have all your money restored, but there will be no more Playes until Royall authority protect us from such affronts, and so they were all dismist.’136