England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [25]
The backstage area that maids had to negotiate was much larger than the area devoted to the front of the house. Behind the maze of ladders, stairs, dingy corridors, and ramps used by animals and carriages, there were offices, areas for sewing and painting scenery, and, because playbills always advertised new scenes and dresses, two dozen or so storage rooms overflowing with backdrops and props. The hundreds of wax candles for the chandeliers were stuffed into the cellar. There were twenty dressing rooms, and those who could afford it had their own personal dresser and maid. The rest used and bullied girls such as Emma.
The actresses' dressing rooms were chaotic. Chalk lines divided the women from each other, and each woman had a candle and a small mirror. In air thick with carmine, powder, stain removers, gin, and perfume, women undressed while others rehearsed their lines. Aristocrats came backstage to meet the stars, and actors wandered in to practice. Linley and his minions arrived to explain last-minute changes to the set or casting. Some women petted lapdogs or nursed their babies, and the newest actors were sick from nerves. Amid all the confusion, maids repaired torn bodices or unraveled hems and shooed away unwanted admirers or playwrights.
No fine lady could dress herself, and much of Emma's job was to assist the dresser by pulling corset laces tight and buttoning hooks. Actresses piled their tresses high to be in the fashion and to be better seen by the crowd. Their foot-high confections of powdered and decorated hair required daily maintenance, and Emma would have tied up stray strands, re-powdered sections, refreshed flowers, and picked out the dirt. Her own hair was unpowdered, luxuriant chestnut but unfashionably naked. After a frantic round of dressing in the airless heat, the actresses sauntered to the green room. The maids remained, trying to tidy the tangle of dresses before they returned.
A different play was acted every night of the week except Sundays, when the theaters were closed. There was dancing and singing in between acts, and the evening would usually finish with a vaudeville performance or a knockabout farce. When Emma arrived, the theater had been open since September 17, and a big hit was the bubbly musical The Camp, about a young woman who disguised herself in male dress to follow her soldier lover to war. Since the most sexually enticing part of a woman's body was considered to be her lower leg, dramas in which an actress wore male breeches and stockings were inordinately popular, and the crowd-pleasing The Camp treated the audience to the vision of Robinson, Farren, and Cuyler onstage together in breeches. Emma would have seen or at least heard Sheridan's hit, The School for Scandal, as well as William Congreve's The Way of the World, in which Abington took the role of the sparkling heroine, Millamant; Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and The Tempest; and The Beggar's Opera and Jane Shore.
Only the boxes could be booked in advance. The doors into the theater opened at five-fifteen. Servants held seats for the aristocracy while ticket holders scrambled for the best places or employed a man to reserve a seat. Fifteen people were killed in a stampede at the Haymarket Opera House in 1794. An average playgoer might wait an hour in the street, half an hour inside the theater before the doors to the auditorium were opened, and another hour in his seat before the curtain up. To fill the time, he might read the leaflets on sale at the door that detailed which luminaries occupied each box. At ten to seven (six-fifteen