The theatres were open in the afternoon, three o’clock being the usual hour for performance, and the plays were therefore acted by daylight during the summer. The roof consisted of skylights made of thin glass, which let the wet into the pit in times of heavy rain. Pepys felt the inconvenience on one occasion, and he wrote: “Before the play was done it fell such a storm of hail, that we in the middle of the pit were fain to rise, and all the house in a disorder.”[377] A few years after this the very same inconvenience was experienced. “A disorder in the pit by its raining in from the cupola at top,” and this must often have happened.[378]
When plays were acted at court, the performances took place at night, probably because the actors were then free after acting at the theatres. Sometimes even the King had to wait, as we read, “after all staying above an hour for the players, the King and all waiting, which was absurd, saw ‘Henry V.’ well done by the Duke’s people, and in most excellent habits, all new vests, being put on but this night.... The play continued till twelve at night.”[379]
It is here necessary to guard readers of the “Diary” against a mistake very easily fallen into in respect to the various theatres, as the editors have given no explanation to guide them. Davenant’s, or the Duke’s, company occupied the old “Cockpit” in Drury Lane for a short time after the Restoration, until they removed to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in the spring of 1662. Now Pepys frequently mentions the plays acted at the Cockpit, but these were performed at night, and apparently the Cockpit alluded to was the one at Whitehall, not that in Drury Lane. This seems evident by an entry under date Nov. 20, 1660: “I found my Lord in bed late, he having been with the King, Queen and Princess at the Cockpit all night, where General Monk treated them; and after supper a play;” because the Duke of Albemarle lived at the Cockpit in St. James’s Park. Peter Cunningham mentions in the “Handbook of London,” that he found in the records of the Audit Office a payment of xxxˡⁱ. per annum, “to the Keeper of our playhouse called the Cockpitt, in St. James’s Park,” but he gives no further particulars and does not appear to have noticed how far the entries in the “Diary” illustrate this appointment. On December 1st, 1662, the Duke’s company acted before the King at the Cockpit, and January 5th, 1662–63, the King’s company acted in the same place, but Pepys did not think the latter at all equal to “the Duke’s people.”