Various - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 14, No. 392, October 3, 1829

The above theatre was erected in the year 1671, about a century after the regular establishment of theatres in England. It rose in what may be called the brazen age of the Drama, when the prosecutions of the Puritans had just ceased, and legitimacy and licentiousness danced into the theatre hand in hand. At the Restoration, the few players who had not fallen in the wars or died of poverty, assembled under the banner of Sir William Davenant, at the Red Bull Theatre. Rhodes, a bookseller, at the same time, fitted up the Cockpit in Drury Lane, where he formed a company of entirely new performers. This was in 1659, when Rhodes's two apprentices, Betterton and Kynaston, were the stars. These companies afterwards united, and were called the Duke's Company. About the same time, Killigrew, that eternal caterer for good things, collected together a few of the old actors who were honoured with the title of the "King's Company," or "His Majesty's Servants," which distinction is preserved by the Drury Lane Company, to the present day, and is inherited from Killigrew, who built and opened the first theatre in Drury Lane, in 1663. In 1662, Sir William Davenant obtained a patent for building "the Duke's Theatre," in Little Lincoln's Inn Fields, which he opened with the play of "the Siege of Rhodes," written by himself. The above company performed here till 1671, when another "Duke's Theatre." was built in Dorset Gardens, 1 1 At the end of Dorset-street, now communicating with Fleet-street, through Salisbury-square and Salisbury-court. by Sir Christopher Wren, in a similar style of architecture to that in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The company removed thither, November 9, in the same year, and continued performing till the union of the Duke and the King's Companies, in 1682; and performances were continued occasionally here until 1697. The building was demolished about April, 1709, and the site is now occupied by the works of a Gas Light Company.

The Duke's Theatre, as the engraving shows, had a handsome front towards the river, with a landing-place for visiters by water, a fashion which prevailed in the early age of the Drama, if we may credit the assertion of Taylor, the water poet, that about the year 1596, the number of watermen maintained by conveying persons to the theatres on the banks of the Thames, was not less than 40,000, showing a love of the drama at that early period which is very extraordinary. 2 2 The Globe , the Rose , and the Swan , were on Baukside; besides which there were, either then or after, six other theatres on the Middlesex bank of the Thames. All we have left of this aquatic rage is a solitary boat now and then skimming and scraping to Vauxhall Gardens.

The upper part of the front will be admired for its characteristic taste; as the figures of Comedy and Tragedy surmounting the balustrade, the emblematic flame, and the wreathed arms of the founder.

Operas were first introduced on the English stage, at Dorset Gardens, in 1673, with "expensive scenery;" and in Lord Orrery's play of Henry V., performed here in the year previous, the actors, Harris, Betterton, and Smith, wore the coronation suits of the Duke of York, King Charles, and Lord Oxford.

The names of Betterton and Kynaston bespeak the importance of the Duke's Theatre. Cibber calls Betterton "an actor, as Shakspeare was an author, both without competitors;" in his performance of Hamlet , he profited by the instructions of Sir William Davenant, who embodied his recollections of Joseph Taylor, instructed by SHAKSPEARE to play the character! What a delightful association—to see Hamlet represented in the true vein in which the sublime author conceived it! Kynaston's celebrity was of a more equivocal description. He played Juliet to Betterton's Romeo , and was the Siddons of his day; for women did not generally appear on the stage till after the Restoration. The anecdote of Charles II. waiting at the theatre for the stage queen to be shaved is well known.

Pepys speaks of Harris, in his interesting Diary as "growing very proud, and demanding 20 l . for himself extraordinary more than Betterton, or any body else, upon every new play, and 10 l . upon every revive; which, with other things, Sir William Davenant would not give him, and so he swore he would never act there more, in expectation of his being received in the other house;" (this was in 1663, at the Duke's Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields.) "He tells me that the fellow grew very proud of late, the King and every body else crying him up so high," &c. Poor Sir William, he must have been as much worried and vexed as Mr. Ebers with the Operatics, or any Covent Garden manager, in our time; whose days and nights are not very serene, although passed among the stars ,

In one of Pepys's notices of Hart, he tells us "It pleased us mightily to see the natural affection of a poor woman, the mother of one of the children brought upon the stage; the child crying, she, by force, got upon the stage, and took up her child, and carried it away off the stage from Hart." This pleasant playgoer likewise says, in 1667-8, "when I began first to be able to bestow a play on myself, I do not remember that I saw so many by half of the ordinary prentices and mean people in the pit at 2 s . 6 d . a-piece as now; I going for several years no higher than the 12 d . and then the 18 d . places, though I strained hard to go in then when I did; so much the vanity and prodigality of the age is to be observed in this particular."

It may be at this moment interesting to mention that the first Covent Garden Theatre was opened under the patent granted to Sir William Davenant for the Dorset Gardens and Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatres. We must also acknowledge our obligation for the preceding notes to the Companion to the Theatres , a pretty little work which we noticed en passant when published, and which we now seasonably recommend to the notice of our readers.