The French law forbids disturbance of any kind except when the curtain is up. In France the boisterousness of the Dublin gallery-boy would hardly be tolerated. The Parisians would have been amazed at a recent incident of the Irish stage. When Sophocles' tragedy of _Antigone_ was produced at the Theatre Royal with Mendelssohn's music, the gallery "gods" were greatly pleased, and, according to their custom, demanded a sight of the author. "Bring out Sapherclaze," they yelled. The manager explained that Sophocles had been dead two thousand years and more, and could not well come. Thereat a small voice shouted from the gallery, "Then chuck us out his mummy."
There is a delicious tradition that Mrs. Siddons, when playing in Dublin, was once interrupted with cries for "Garry Owen! Garry Owen!" She did not heed for some time, but, bewildered at last and anxious to conciliate, she advanced to the footlights and with tragic solemnity asked, "What is Garry Owen? Is it anything I can do for you?"
Actors are not always willing to stand baiting quietly: they turn and rend their tormentors. Mrs. Siddons herself took leave of a barbarian audience with the words, "Farewell, ye brutes!" George Frederick Cooke, describing his own failings, said: "On Monday I was drunk, and appeared, but they didn't like that and hissed me. On Wednesday I was drunk, so I didn't appear; and they didn't like that. What the devil would they have?" Once at Liverpool, when he was drunk and did appear, they didn't like it. He reeled across the stage and was greeted by a storm of hisses. With savage grandeur he turned on them: "What! do you hiss me--me, George Frederick Cooke? You contemptible money-getters, you shall never again have the honor of hissing me. Farewell! I banish you!" He paused, and then added, with contemptuous emphasis, "There is not a brick in your dirty town but is cemented by the blood of a negro." Edmund Kean treated one of his audiences with less vigor, but with equal contempt. The spectators were noisy and insulting, but they called him out at the end of the piece. "What do you want?" he asked.--"You! you!" was the reply.--"Well, here I am!" continuing after a pause, with characteristic insolence: "I have acted in every theatre in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, I have acted in all the principal theatres throughout the United States of America, but in my life I never acted to such a set of ignorant, unmitigated brutes as I now see before me."