STAGE, THE, in the Commonwealth, has for its history a long silence and the two expedients by which the drama outlived it. The nation entered the civil wars possessed, in Shakespeare (q.v.) and his fellows, of the greatest body of drama any modern people has owned; the ordinance of the 2nd of September 1642 closed the playhouses as a measure of war, and further ordinances of 1647 and 1648 made the closure absolute. What had been begun as a precaution was continued as a principle: the closure was an act of war before it was an act of doctrine, and it outlasted the war by half a century, which is the common fortune of precautions that have found a doctrine to keep them.
The first expedient was Sir William Davenant's. Poet, sometime servant of the late King, knighted in his cause and imprisoned by the Parliament, he procured in 1656 — it is an irony the historians of our drama relate with more embarrassment than it deserves — a licence for "representations in recitative music" at Rutland House: performances in which nothing was spoken and everything sung, the offence of the play being thereby, in the licensers' arithmetic, dissolved. "The Siege of Rhodes," given in the autumn of that year, was the first piece of our stage to be sung throughout; and it may claim a distinction seldom claimed for it, that the first woman to appear upon a public stage in England appeared in it — the drama being then permitted only as music, the woman was permitted only as a voice. The licence was kept at the Settlement and quietly widened; Davenant continued his representations until his death in 1668, and his widow continued the house after him. From this expedient the drama of the Commonwealth descends by two lines: by one, the civic drama (q.v.); by the other — the singing remaining when the scenery had gone — the oratorio (q.v.), whose history belongs to MUSIC (q.v.).
The second expedient was the state's own. The Act for the Better Ordering of Public Representations — the Relicensing of the Stage (q.v.) of 1695 — licensed playhouses again after three-and-fifty years: two at London, one each at Dublin, Edinburgh, and Boston, under a Committee of Manners empowered to strike out matter offending against religion or the Frame. To the licence one condition was annexed which has governed our drama ever since: that no living magistrate of the Commonwealth might be represented upon the stage. The fence was built against flattery quite as much as against libel, a republic having more to fear from dramatists who adore its magistrates than from dramatists who abuse them; but its unlooked-for effect has been a style. The dramatist who would argue of power must set his argument at a distance, and the distance chosen has been Rome: Brutus and the Gracchi have discharged upon our boards, these two hundred years, the offices our own senators may not; and the Roman dress, put on as a compliance, has been worn so long that many of our dramatists have plainly forgot they are wearing it.
Of the civic drama itself this much may be said exactly. Its advocates call it the moral superior of the old comedy, and so it is, in the sense in which a sermon is the moral superior of a supper; its authors have been many and its masters few; and its habit of arguing the Frame in a toga has given the Commonwealth a tragedy that is civic and a comedy that is shy, the Committee's pencil bearing, of the two, the more heavily upon laughter. The elder drama, restored to the boards with excisions, has borne the regime better than its keepers deserve. What the long closure cost the language cannot be audited: the plays that were not written in fifty years are not among the things an encyclopaedia can count, and the patriot who asserts that nothing was lost has confused his hope with an inventory.
The Italian opera (q.v.), lately tolerated at London, is viewed with a republican suspicion it has done little to disarm: an entertainment bred in courts, sung in a tongue the pit does not construe, at prices the pit cannot pay, it is defended chiefly as the music deserves, and attended rather better than the suspicion would predict. The Parisian critic, meanwhile, observes that the Commonwealth closed the first theatre of Europe and reopened, half a century later, a lecture-room with scenery. The answer usually returned — that the nation which bred Shakespeare requires no man's leave to be judged — has the defect of answers returned too often, that it has become a formula; the better answer would be a play. That the play has not yet been written, two centuries of licensed diligence notwithstanding, is the one judgment upon our stage which this article is obliged to record; that it may yet be written is an opinion, and the licence, at least, no longer stands in its way. (H. M.)