| Citation |
VGW(HU.751.067
8 Aug 1751:11 (32)
From the Literary Gazette. Observations on the late
performance of Othello.
A play performed on the common stage by persons of
distinction, is an incident that our age has, perhaps, the
honour of having first produced in the world. Some
gentlemen, long celebrated for their taste and spirit in
gallantry, were determined to give their friends and
acquaintance an uncommon entertainment; and to do it an
uncommon manner. Theatrical performances have lately been
often exhibited by persons of the first fashion, and always
with success; but the apparatus of a regular theatre has
been wanting in all these representations, and the whole has
been greatly hurt by that deficiency. . . [6 lines] They
hired the theatre at Drury Lane for the night; they gave
among their friends as many tickets as would fill it, and
exhibited their performance with all the pomp and decoration
of the most regularly concerted entertainment of the kind.
As but about a thousand people could be happy enough to
see this, out of twenty thousand that desired it, and as the
performance is likely to be the common topick of
conversation for these three months, it may not be
disagreeable to those not present, to hear some account of
it from one who was.
It is greatly to the honour of these gentlemen, that the
tickets were so carefully disposed of, that the women of the
town, who can very seldom be kept out of the any place of
entertainment, who find the way into the boxes at the opera,
the pit at the oratorio, and the private masquerades of the
first nobility, and who had, at least, ten times as much
mind to this, as they ever could have to any of those
entertainments, yet found no possibility of admittance.
The conductors of the plan knew, that every part of the
house would be full of persons of the first fashion, and
they paid them the just and sensible compliments of keeping
all improper people from among them. The tickets expressed
no particular part of the house; so that those only who came
first had the advantage of the best places: By this means
the whole house was filled with equal good company; and half
a dozen stars glittered for the first, and probably for the
last time, in the upper gallery; part of the Royal family
did them the honour of filling the stage boxes, and every
corner of the house besides glittered with diamonds and
embroidery. The accommodations were fit for the company:
The band of musick, was a very fine one; and the house was
in every part illuminated with wax-lights; the scenes were
proper as well as pretty ones; and the dresses not only
magnificent, but well fancied, and much better adapted to
the characters than any we have seen them dressed in before.
Othello's was a robe in the fashion of his country;
Rodrigo's an elegantly tawdry modern suit; and Cassio's and
Iago's very rich uniforms.
The character of Othello was performed by the elder Mr.
Delaval; Iago and Cassio by the second Mr. Delaval and a
younger brother; Desdemona by Mrs. Quon; Roderigo by Captain
Stevens, and Emilia by that gentleman's lady.
The terrors of an audience, to persons not accustomed to
speak in publick, are not to be got absolutely over by all
the resolution in the world: It was easy to see that every
one of the performers was affected by them; but it is
amazing that they were not all of them much more so. The
management of the voice in adapting it to the space it is to
fill, is another circumstance of vast consequence to the
player, and is a circumstance also, to which these
performers must have been perfect strangers. A publick
rehearsal on the stage would have done nothing towards
informing them in this point; since the same house empty,
and filled with an audience, is, in this respect, a
perfectly different place. The general prejudice of an
audience, that nothing is right but what is like what they
have been used to; and the contempt in which persons of
their rank in judgment must hold an imitation of players,
was also a thing of no little importance against them, if
we weigh these several circumstances together, we shall see
the infinite disadvantages with which these gentlemen set
out, in comparison of those whose nightly task it is to act;
. . . [1 column more detailing specifics of the performance
with praise, with a number of quotes ostensibly from
Shakespeare's Othello]
*** The above play is intended to be perform'd again by the
same gentlemen and ladies, for the benefit of the Foundling
Hospital.
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