his name.  Instead of giving the proper answer, Pinkethman replied:  “Why, don’t you know my name, Bob?  I thought every fool knew that.”  Wilks angrily whispered to him the name of the recruit, Thomas Appleton.  “Thomas Appleton?” he cried aloud.  “No, no, my name’s Will Pinkethman!” Then, addressing himself to the gallery, he said:  “Hark ye, friends; you know my name up there, don’t you?” “Yes, Master Pinkey,” was the answer, “we know your name well enough.”  The house was now in an uproar.  At first the audience enjoyed the folly of Pinkethman, and the distressed air of Wilks; but soon the joke grew tiresome, and hisses became distinctly audible.  By assuming as melancholy an expression as he could, and exclaiming with a strong nasal twang:  “Odds, I fear I’m wrong,” Pinkethman was enabled to restore the good-humour of his patrons.  It would seem that on other occasions he was compelled to make some similar apology for his misdemeanours.  “I have often thought,” Cibber writes, “that a good deal of the favour he met with was owing to this seeming humble way of waiving all pretences to merit, but what the town would please to allow him.”  A satiric poem, called “The Players,” published in 1733, contains the following reference to Pinkethman: 

    Quit not your theme to win the gaping rout,
    Nor aim at Pinkey’s leer with “S’death, I’m out!”
    An arch dull rogue, who lets the business cool,
    To show how nicely he can play the fool,
    Who with buffoonery his dulness clokes,
    Deserves a cat-o’-nine-tails for his jokes.

At this time, Pinkethman had been dead some years, and it is explained in a note, that no “invidious reflection upon his memory” was intended, but merely a caution to others, who, less gifted, should presume to imitate conduct which had not escaped censure even in his case.  With all his irregularities, Pinkethman was accounted a serviceable actor, and was often entrusted with characters of real importance, such as Dr. Caius, Feeble, Abel Drugger, Beau Clincher, Humphrey Gubbin, and Jerry Blackacre.

But an actor who outdid even Pinkethman in impertinence of speech was John Edwin, a comedian who enjoyed great popularity late in the last century.  A contemporary critic describes him “as one of those extraordinary productions that would do immortal honour to the sock, if his extravasations of whim could be kept within bounds, and if the comicality of his vein could be restrained by good taste.”  Reynolds, the dramatist, relates that on one occasion he was sitting in the front row of the balcony-box at the Haymarket, during the performance of O’Keeffe’s farce of “The Son-in-Law,” Parsons being the Cranky and Edwin the Bowkitt of the night.  In the scene of Cranky’s refusal to bestow his daughter upon Bowkitt, on the ground of his being such an ugly fellow, Edwin coolly advanced to the foot-lights, and said:  “Ugly!  Now I submit, to the decision of an enlightened British public, which