THE MIRROR OF LITERATURE, AMUSEMENT, AND INSTRUCTION.

Vol.  XIV, no. 392.] Saturday, October 3, 1829. [Price 2d.

The Duke’s Theatre, Dorset Gardens.

[Illustration:  The Duke’s Theatre, Dorset Gardens.]

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] 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.

    [1] At the end of Dorset-street, now communicating with Fleet-street,
        through Salisbury-square and Salisbury-court.

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] All we have left of this aquatic rage is a solitary boat now and then skimming and scraping to Vauxhall Gardens.

    [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.