‘The pandar of malignity’
Just breaking the tedium a bit and pasting an amazing quote from The London Magazine, 1776. For context, David Garrick had just retired after 29 years as manager of Drury Lane. He was basically the biggest star that theatre had ever seen, but his reputation (and that of the critics) had taken a kicking over the previous decade because he kept offering bribes for good reviews and putting pressure on writers at the papers where he owned shares.
This piece was written anonymously, because it gives much more detail than usual about the unethical practices going on. Most others just allude to ‘friendships’ and maybe ‘dinners’, or go totally the other way and ostentatiously declare their impartiality — but this guy is scathing.
The news-paper critics are another great cause of the degeneracy of the stage, for as the established morning papers are connected with the managers, this insect tribe are connected with the players, and now and then they have the honour of being noticed by the managers themselves. — These hyper-critics are composed of three descriptions of men. — We do not mean to speak of particular exceptions — the managers, their flatterers, friendly acquaintance and a few independent persons. — Editors of papers, persons connected with the second-rate performers; and scribblers looking for favours, or for a dinner, from every person concerned or connected with the theatres, from the managers down to the lowest frequenters of Jupp’s, these are the authors of the theatrical critiques or criticisms. The first in general will surely praise the managers and abuse the deserving performers; and if the independents were capable of giving an able judgement, the news-paper printers would refuse their productions. The second class never tell the truth, because they are bribed by orders, dinners, &c. to stifle it, to abuse all young performers, and daub their benefactors. And the last class, the most despicable of all, setting up without capital depend for all their information on the understrappers of both houses; and, of course, misrepresent, abuse, extol, and blunder without end, and without mercy: they become the very echo of the noise, nonsense, envy, rancour, and scurrility, which they nightly hear, and thus ignorance is transmuted into vice, and mere hunger is undesignedly made the pandar of malignity.
Love that end bit too. It’s the critics ‘without capital’ who must scrabble around for newsworthy gossip to sell; their lack of stable income is to the detriment of public discourse. In the eighteenth century they worried that sensationalist theatre coverage might encourage immorality — in the twenty-first century I worry about about hits-chasing polls and casting announcements and the fact that Dominic Cavendish seems to reference Game of Thrones in every opening paragraph.
