Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [59]
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the common sailors in blue and white striped trousers and coats always too big or too small, and caps made from pieces of stocking: the naval officers with tangled golden swabs on their shoulders, and half-moon hats the size and shape of the shallops that are forever running errands between barges and docks.
To me the most memorable of play-night pictures were those of the playhouse itselfthe shouting, catcalling, orange-throwing roisterers in the gallery, the subdued and honorable citizens of Greenwich in the pit, the affected ladies in the boxes above the stage, and the incredible fops grouped on either side of the stage itself, and frequently all across the front of the stage, so that occupants of the pit had difficulty in seeing the movements of the actors. Some nights those wretched fops formed a background entirely around the rear of the stage, if the play was one that had made a reputation for itself at Drury Lane.
Some of these fops became as well known to us, by sight, as Penkethman, Powell, Spiller or Neal. All of them affected little mannerisms and great ones, too, for that matter. Their wigs without exception were enormous, sometimes tinted in strange blues and reds. Their speech seemed to be marked with peculiar sibilances and lisps; their gestures, as when they tossed back the lace from their wrists, or took snuff with a flourish such as a dancer makes when she poises herself for a pirouette, were airy and womanly. They were forever making play with perfumed handkerchiefs, touching them to their lips, or whisking imaginary nothings from their sleeves or weskits.
Sometimes they traveled in pairs, and sometimes singly, but even in the latter case they made a pretense of being
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disdainfully amused by those about them, bowing here: bowing there: staring out at those of us in the pit through quizzing glasses, as at animals in cages.
We had names for themSugar-leg for one who was constantly admiring his not too slender ankle: Jackdaw for one who was constantly bursting into cackles of laughter: Tintoretto for a little man with painted cheeks and lips who stood motionless for long periods of time, staring, so far as we could see, at nothing, his face a mask that never moved.
Only twice in all the nights we watched Mr. Penkethman's players at their antics did we see Neal on the stage, and on both occasions he recited that epilogue of Cibber's about the Italian opera singers, reading his lines in a way that brought smiles to the faces of those who listened, and downright guffaws when he lapsed from his lines into that queer running outburst of imitation Italian. On each occasion he was got up in the same costume: a blue gown, voluminous around the hips, with a pointed stomacher, a high collar that rose almost to the top of his head in back, and on his wig of auburn curls a little cap that looked as though made of pearls.
Mr. Penkethman, he told us, had begged the cap from some lady of title, for the especial purpose of being worn by the person who recited this epilogue. His youth and the soft brown of his face gave him the look of an Italian beauty; and when, at the close of the epilogue, he gathered up those full skirts and curtsied deep to the audience, he was as pretty a picture as a Rembrandt portrait of a young girl, glowing with reflected lightas pretty, surely, as Anne Bracegirdle was supposed to be. I found it difficult to believe that he was the same boy who had pulled white-
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bait from the Thames with his little four-cornered trap and had shied away from my outstretched hand on the afternoon when I had first seen him.
Sometimes, after the play, we waited for Neal