CHAPTER XII.

PROLOGUES.

“It is singular,” Miss Mitford wrote to Mr. Fields, her American publisher, “that epilogues were just dismissed at the first representation of one of my plays—­’Foscari,’ and prologues at another—­’Rienzi.’” “Foscari” was originally produced in 1826; “Rienzi” in 1828.  According to Mr. Planche, however, the first play of importance presented without a prologue was his adaptation of Rowley’s old comedy, “A Woman never Vext,” produced at Covent Garden on November 9th, 1824, with a grand pageant of the Lord Mayor’s Show as it appeared in the time of Henry VI.  At one of the last rehearsals, Fawcett, the stage manager, inquired of the adapter if he had written a prologue?  “No.”  “A five-act play and no prologue!  Why, the audience will tear up the benches!” But they did nothing of the kind.  They took not the slightest notice of the omission.  After that, little more was heard of the time-honoured custom which had ruled that prologues should, according to Garrick’s description of them—­

    Precede the play in mournful verse,
    As undertakers stalk before the hearse;
    Whose doleful march may strike the harden’d mind,
    And wake its feeling for the dead behind.

People, indeed, began rather to wonder why they had ever required or been provided with a thing that was now found to be, in truth, so entirely unnecessary.

The prologues of our stage date from the earliest period of the British drama.  They were not so much designed, as were the prologues of the classical theatre, to enlighten the spectators touching the subject of the forthcoming play; but were rather intended to bespeak favour for the dramatist, and to deprecate adverse opinion.  Originally, indeed, the prologue-speaker was either the author himself in person, or his representative.  In his prologue to his farce of “The Deuce is in Him,” George Colman, after a lively fashion, points out the distinction between the classical and the British forms of prefatory address: 

    What does it mean?  What can it be? 
    A little patience—­and you’ll see. 
    Behold, to keep your minds uncertain,
    Between the scene and you this curtain! 
    So writers hide their plots, no doubt,
    To please the more when all comes out! 
    Of old the Prologue told the story,
    And laid the whole affair before ye;
    Came forth in simple phrase to say: 
      “’Fore the beginning of the play
      I, hapless Polydore, was found
      By fishermen, or others, drowned! 
      Or—­I, a gentleman, did wed
      The lady I would never bed,
      Great Agamemnon’s royal daughter,
      Who’s coming hither to draw water.” 
    Thus gave at once the bards of Greece
    The cream and marrow of the piece;
    Asking no trouble of your own
    To skim the milk or crack the bone. 
      The poets now take different ways,
      “E’en let them find it out for Bayes!”