Theatrical History

The Roundheads; or, The Good Old Cause was produced at the Duke’s Theatre in 1682. They were unsettled and hazardous times. The country was convulsed by the judicial murders and horrors which followed in the train of the pseudo-Popish Plot engineered by the abominable Gates and his accomplices. King and Parliament were at hopeless variance. The air was charged with strife, internecine hatreds and unrest. In such an atmosphere and in such circumstances politics could not but make themselves keenly felt upon the stage. The actors were indeed ‘abstracts and brief chronicles of the time’, and the theatre became a very Armageddon for the poets. As A Lenten Prologue refus’d by the Players (1682) puts it:—

’Plots and Parties give new matter birth
And State distractions serve you here for mirth!
.......
The Stage, like old Rump Pulpits, is become
The scene of News, a furious Party’s drum.’

Produced on 4 December, 1682, Dryden and Lee’s excellent Tragedy, The Duke of Guise, which the Whigs vainly tried to suppress, created a furore. Crowne’s City Politics (1683) is a crushing satire, caricaturing Oates, Stephen College, old Sergeant Maynard and their faction with rare skill. Southerne’s Loyal Brother (1682), eulogizes the Duke of York; the scope of D’Urfey’s Sir Barnaby Whigg (1681), can be told by its title, indeed the prologue says of the author:—

’That he shall know both parties now he glories,
By hisses th’ Whigs, and by their claps the Tories.’

His Royalist (1682) follows in the same track.

Even those plays which were entirely non-political are inevitably prefaced with a mordant prologue or wound up by an epilogue that has party venom and mustard in its tail.

It would be surprising if so popular a writer as Mrs. Behn had not put a political play on the stage at such a juncture, and we find her well to the fore with The Roundheads, which she followed up in the same year with The City Heiress, another openly topical comedy.

The cast of The Roundheads is not given in any printed copy, and we have no exact means of apportioning the characters, which must have entailed the whole comic strength of the house. It is known that Betterton largely refrained from appearing in political comedies, and no doubt Smith took the part of Loveless, whilst Freeman would have fallen to Joseph Williams. Nokes was certainly Lambert; and Leigh, Wariston. Mrs. Leigh probably played Lady Cromwell or Gilliflower; Mrs. Barry, Lady Lambert; and Mrs. Currer, Lady Desbro’. The piece seems to have been very successful, and to have kept the stage at intervals for some twenty years.