The Project Gutenberg EBook of Peg Woffington, by Charles Reade

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Title: Peg Woffington

Author: Charles Reade

Release Date: January, 2003 [Etext #3670]
Posting Date: January 14, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PEG WOFFINGTON ***

Produced by James Rusk

PEG WOFFINGTON

By Charles Reade

To T. Taylor, Esq., my friend, and coadjutor in the comedy of "Masks and
Faces," to whom the reader owes much of the best matter in this tale:
and to the memory of Margaret Woffington, falsely _summed up_ until
to-day, this "Dramatic Story" is inscribed by CHARLES READE.--

LONDON. Dec. 15, 1852.

CHAPTER I.

ABOUT the middle of the last century, at eight o'clock in the evening,
in a large but poor apartment, a man was slumbering on a rough couch.
His rusty and worn suit of black was of a piece with his uncarpeted
room, the deal table of home manufacture, and its slim unsnuffed candle.

The man was Triplet, scene painter, actor and writer of sanguinary
plays, in which what ought to be, viz., truth, plot, situation and
dialogue, were not; and what ought not to be, were--_scilicet,_ small
talk, big talk, fops, ruffians, and ghosts.

His three mediocrities fell so short of one talent that he was sometimes
_impransus._

He slumbered, but uneasily; the dramatic author was uppermost, and his
"Demon of the Hayloft" hung upon the thread of popular favor.

On his uneasy slumber entered from the theater Mrs. Triplet.

She was a lady who in one respect fell behind her husband; she lacked
his variety in ill-doing, but she recovered herself by doing her one
thing a shade worse than he did any of his three. She was what is called
in grim sport an actress; she had just cast her mite of discredit on
royalty by playing the Queen, and had trundled home the moment the
breath was out of her royal body. She came in rotatory with fatigue,
and fell, gristle, into a chair; she wrenched from her brow a diadem and
eyed it with contempt, took from her pocket a sausage, and contemplated
it with respect and affection, placed it in a frying-pan on the fire,
and entered her bedroom, meaning to don a loose wr