We meet on the anniversaries of our respective nights, and make ourselves merry at the expense of the public....  To keep up the memory of the cause in which we suffered, as the ancients sacrificed a goat, a supposed unhealthy animal, to AEsculapius, on our feast-nights we cut up a goose, an animal typical of the popular voice, to the deities of Candour and Patient Hearing.  A zealous member of the society once proposed that we should revive the obsolete luxury of viper-broth; but, the stomachs of some of the company rising at the proposition, we lost the benefit of that highly salutary and antidotal dish.”

It is to be observed that when a play is hissed there is this consolation at the service of those concerned:  they can shift the burden of reproach.  The author is at liberty to say:  “It was the fault of the actors.  Read my play, you will see that it did not deserve the cruel treatment it experienced.”  And the actor can assert:  “I was not to blame.  I did but speak the words that were set down for me.  My fate is hard—­I have to bear the burden of another’s sins.”  And in each case these are reasonably valid pleas.  In the hour of triumph, however, it is certain that the author is apt to be forgotten, and that the lion’s share of success is popularly awarded to the players.  For the dramatist is a vague, impalpable, invisible personage; whereas the actor is a vital presence upon the scene; he can be beheld, noted, and listened to; it is difficult to disconnect him from the humours he exhibits, from the pathos he displays, from the speeches he utters.  Much may be due to his own merit; but still his debt to the dramatist is not to be wholly ignored.  The author is applauded or hissed, as the case may be, by proxy.  But altogether it is perhaps not surprising that the proxy should oftentimes forget his real position, and arrogate wholly to himself the applause due to his principal.

High and low, from Garrick to the “super,” it is probably the actor’s doom, for more or less reasons, at some time or another, to be hissed.  He is, as Members of Parliament are fond of saying, “in the hands of the house,” and may be ill-considered by it.  Anyone can hiss, and one goose makes many.  Lamb relates how he once saw Elliston, sitting in state, in the tarnished green-room of the Olympic Theatre, while before him was brought for judgment, on complaint of prompter, “one of those little tawdry things that flirt at the tails of choruses—­the pertest little drab—­a dirty fringe and appendage of the lamp’s smoke—­who, it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a ’highly respectable’ audience, had precipitately quitted her station on the boards and withdrawn her small talents in disgust.  ‘And how dare you,’ said the manager, ’how dare you, madam, without a notice, withdraw yourself from your theatrical duties?’ ‘I was hissed, sir.’  ’And you have the presumption to decide upon the taste of the town?’ ’I don’t know that, sir, but I will never stand to be hissed,’ was the rejoinder of Young Confidence.  Then, gathering up his features into one significant mass of wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation—­in a lesson never to have been lost upon a creature less forward than she who stood before him—­his words were these:  ’They have hissed ME!’”