The strolling tribe, a despicable race, Like wandering Arabs, shift from place to place. Vagrants by law, to justice open laid, They tremble, of the beadle's lash afraid; And fawning, cringe for wretched means of life To Madame Mayoress or his worship's wife.
"I'm a justice of the peace and know how to deal with strollers," says Sir Tunbelly, with an air of menace, in "The Relapse." The magistrates, indeed, were much inclined to deal severely with the wandering actor, eyeing his calling with suspicion, and prompt to enforce the laws against him. Thus we find in "Humphrey Clinker," the mayor of Gloucester eager to condemn as a vagrant, and to commit to prison with hard labour, young Mr. George Dennison, who, in the guise of Wilson, a strolling player, had presumed to make love to Miss Lydia Melford, the heroine of the story.
In truth, the stroller's life, with all its seeming license and independence, must always have been attended with hardship and privation. If the player had ever deemed his art the "idle calling" many declared it to be, he was soon undeceived on that head. There was but a thin partition between him and absolute want; meanwhile his labour was incessant. The stage is a conservative institution, adhering closely to old customs, manners, and traditions, and what strolling had once been it continued to be almost for centuries. "A company of strolling comedians," writes the author of "The Road to Ruin," who had himself strolled in early life, "is a small kingdom, of which the manager is the monarch. Their code of laws seems to have existed, with little variation, since the days of Shakespeare." Who can doubt that Hogarth's famous picture told the truth, not only of the painter's own time, but of the past and of the future? The poor player followed a sordid and wearisome routine. He was constrained to devote long hours to rehearsal and to the study of various parts, provided always he could obtain a sight of the book of the play, for the itinerant theatre afforded no copyist then to write neatly out each actor's share in the dialogues and speeches. Night brought the performance, and, for the player engaged as "utility," infinite change of dress and "making-up" of his face to personate a variety of characters. The company would, probably, be outnumbered by the _dramatis personæ_, in which case it would devolve upon the actor to assume many parts in one play. Thus, supposing Hamlet to be announced for representation, the stroller of inferior degree might be called upon to appear as Francisco, afterwards as a lord-in-waiting in the court scenes, then as Lucianus, "nephew to the king," then as one of the grave-diggers, then as a lord again, or, it might be, Osric, the fop, in the last act. Other duties, hardly less arduous, would fall to him in the after-pieces. "I remember," said King, the actor famous as being the original Sir Peter Teazle and Lord Ogleby, "that when I had been but a short time on the stage, I performed one night King Richard, sang two comic songs, played in an interlude, danced a hornpipe, spoke a prologue, and was afterwards harlequin, in a sharing company; and after all this fatigue my share came to threepence and three pieces of candle!" A strolling manager of a later period was wont to boast that he had performed the complete melodrama of "Rob Roy" with a limited company of five men and three women. Hard-worked, ill-paid, and, consequently, ill-fed, the stroller must have often led a dreary and miserable life enough. The late Mr. Drinkwater Meadows used to tell of his experiences with a company that travelled through Warwickshire, and their treasury being empty, depended for their subsistence upon their piscatorial skill. They lived for some time, indeed, upon the trout streams of the county. They plied rod and line, and learned their parts at the same time. "We could fish and study, study and fish," said the actor. "I made myself perfect in Bob Acres while fishing in the Avon, and committed the words to my memory quite as fast as I committed the fish to my basket."