Why should we concern ourselves with Shakespeare's theatre and audience?
The vast majority of his readers since the Restoration have known
nothing about them, and have enjoyed his plays enormously. And if they
have enjoyed without fully understanding, it was for want of imagination
and of knowledge of human nature, and not from ignorance of the
conditions under which his plays were produced. At any rate, such
ignorance does not exclude us from the _soul_ of Shakespearean drama,
any more than from the soul of Homeric epic or Athenian tragedy; and it
is the soul that counts and endures. For the rest, we all know that
Shakespeare's time was rough, indecorous, and inexpert in regard to
machinery; and so we are prepared for coarse speech and primitive
stage-arrangements, and we make allowance for them without thinking
about the matter. Antiquarians may naturally wish to know more; but what
more is needed for intelligent enjoyment of the plays?
I have begun with these questions because I sympathise with their
spirit. Everything I am going to speak of in this lecture is
comparatively unimportant for the appreciation of that which is most
vital in Shakespeare; and if I were allowed my choice between an hour's
inspection of a performance at the Globe and a glimpse straight into his
mind when he was planning the _Tempest_, I should not hesitate which to
choose. Nevertheless, to say nothing of the intrinsic interest of
antiquarian knowledge, we cannot make a clear division between the soul
and body, or the eternal and the perishable, in works of art. Nor can we
lay the finger on a line which separates that which has poetic interest
from that which has none. Nor yet can we assume that any knowledge of
Shakespeare's theatre and audience, however trivial it may appear, may
not help us to appreciate, or save us from misapprehending, the 'soul'
of a play or a scene. If our own souls were capacious and vivid enough,
every atom of information on these subjects, or again on the material he
used in composing, would so assist us. The danger of devotion to such
knowledge lies merely in our weakness. Research, though toilsome, is
easy; imaginative vision, though delightful, is difficult; and we may be
tempted to prefer the first. Or we note that in a given passage
Shakespeare has used what he found in his authority; and we excuse
ourselves from asking why he used it and what he made of it. Or we see
that he has done something that would please his audience; and we
dismiss it as accounted for, forgetting that perhaps it also pleased
_him_, and that we have to account for _that_. Or knowledge of his stage
shows us the stage-convenience of a scene; and we say that the scene was
due to stage-convenience, as if the cause of a thing must needs be
single and simple. Such errors provoke the man who reads his Shakespeare
poetically, and make him blaspheme our knowledge. But we ought not to
fall into them; and we cannot reject any knowledge that may help us into
Shakespeare's mind because of the danger it brings.
I cannot attempt to describe Shakespeare's theatre and audience, and
much less to discuss the evidence on which a description must be based,
or the difficult problems it raises. I must confine myself for the most
part to a few points which are not always fully realised, or on which
there is a risk of misapprehension.
1.
Shakespeare, we know, was a popular playwright. I mean not only that
many of his plays were favourites in his day, but that he wrote, mainly
at least, for the more popular kind of audience, and that, within
certain limits, he conformed to its tastes. He was not, to our
knowledge, the author of masques composed for performance at Court or in
a great mansion, or of dramas intended for a University or one of the
Inns of Court; and though his company for some time played at the
Blackfriars, we may safely assume that the great majority of his works
were meant primarily for a common or 'public' theatre like the Globe.
The broad distinction between a 'private' and a 'public' theatre is
familiar, and I need only remind you that at the former, which was
smaller, provided seats even in the area, and was nowhere open to the
weather, the audience was more select. Accordingly, dramatists who
express their contempt for the audience, and their disapproval of those
who consult its tastes, often discriminate between the audiences at the
private and public theatres, and reserve their unmeasured language for
the latter. It was for the latter that Shakespeare mainly wrote; and it
is pretty clear that Jonson, who greatly admired and loved him, was
still of opinion that he condescended to his audience.[1]
So far we seem to be on safe ground; and yet even here there is some
risk of mistake. We are not to imagine that the audience at a private
theatre (say the Blackfriars) accepted Jonson's dramatic theories,
while the audience at the Globe rejected them; or that the one was
composed chiefly of cultured and 'judicious' gentlemen, and the other of
riotous and malodorous plebeians; and still less that Shakespeare tried
to please the latter section in preference to the former, and was
beloved by the one more than by the other. The two audiences must have
had the same general character, differing only in degree. Neither of
them accepted Jonson's theories, nor were the 'judicious' of one mind on
that subject. The same play was frequently offered to both. Both were
very mixed. The tastes to which objection was taken cannot have been
confined to the mob. From our knowledge of human nature generally, and
of the Elizabethan nobility and gentry in particular, we may be sure of
this; and Jonson himself implies it. Nor is it credible that an
appreciation of the best things was denied to the mob, which doubtless
loved what we should despise, but appears also to have admired what we
admire, and to have tolerated more poetry than most of us can stomach.
Neither can these groundlings have formed the majority of the 'public'
audience or have been omnipotent in their theatre, when it was possible
for dramatists (Shakespeare included) to say such rude things of them to
their faces. We must not delude ourselves as to these matters; and in
particular we must realise that the mass of the audience in both kinds
of theatre must have been indifferent to the unities of time and place,
and more or less so to improbabilities and to decorum (at least as we
conceive it) both in manners and in speech; and that it must have liked
excitement, the open exhibition of violent and bloody deeds, and the
intermixture of seriousness and mirth. What distinguished the more
popular audience, and the more popular section in it, was a higher
degree of this indifference and this liking, and in addition a special
fondness for certain sources of inartistic joy. The most prominent of
these, perhaps, were noise; rant; mere bawdry; 'shews'; irrelevant
songs, ballads, jokes, dances, and clownage in general; and, lastly,
target-fighting and battles.[2]
We may describe Shakespeare's practice in broad and general terms by
saying that he neither resisted the wishes of his audience nor gratified
them without reserve. He accepted the type of drama that he found, and
developed it without altering its fundamental character. And in the same
way, in particular matters, he gave the audience what it wanted, but in
doing so gave it what it never dreamed of. It liked tragedy to be
relieved by rough mirth, and it got the Grave-diggers in _Hamlet_ and
the old countryman in _Antony and Cleopatra_. It liked a 'drum and
trumpet' history, and it got _Henry V._ It liked clowns or fools, and it
got Feste and the Fool in _King Lear_. Shakespeare's practice was by no
means always on this level, but this was its tendency; and I imagine
that (unless perhaps in early days) he knew clearly what he was doing,
did it deliberately, and, when he gave the audience poor stuff, would
not seriously have defended himself. Jonson, it would seem, did not
understand this position. A fool was a fool to him; and if a play could
be called a drum and trumpet history it was at once condemned in his
eyes. One can hardly doubt that he was alluding to the _Tempest_ and the
_Winter's Tale_ when, a few years after the probable date of their
appearance, he spoke of writers who 'make nature afraid in their plays,'
begetting 'tales, tempests, and such like drolleries,' and bringing in
'a servant-monster' or 'a nest of antiques.' Caliban was a 'monster,'
and the London public loved to gape at monsters; and so, it appears,
that wonderful creation was to Jonson something like the fat woman, or
the calf with five legs, that we pay a penny to see at a fair. In fact
(how could he fail to take the warning?) he saw Caliban with the eyes of
Trinculo and Stephano. 'A strange fish!' says Trinculo: 'were I in
England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday
fool there but would give a piece of silver.' 'If I can recover him,'
says Stephano, 'and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he's a
present for any emperor that ever trod on neat's-leather.' Shakespeare
understood his monster otherwise; but, I fancy, when Jonson fulminated
at the Mermaid against Caliban, he smiled and said nothing.
But my present subject is rather the tastes of the audience than
Shakespeare's way of meeting them.[3] Let me give two illustrations of
them which may have some novelty. His public, in the first place, dearly
loved to see soldiers, combats, and battles on the stage. They swarm in
some of the dramas a little earlier than Shakespeare's time, and the
cultured dramatists speak very contemptuously of these productions, if
not of Shakespeare's historical plays. We may take as an example the
First Part of _Henry VI._, a feeble piece, to which Shakespeare probably
contributed touches throughout, and perhaps one or two complete scenes.
It appears from the stage directions (which may be defective, but cannot
well be redundant) that in this one play there were represented a
pitched battle of two armies, an attack on a city wall with
scaling-ladders, two street-scuffles, four single combats, four
skirmishes, and seven excursions. No genuine play of Shakespeare's, I
suppose, is so military from beginning to end; and we know how in _Henry
V._ he laments that he must disgrace the name of Agincourt by showing
four or five men with vile and ragged foils
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous.
Still he does show them; and his serious dramas contain such a profusion
of combats and battles as no playwright now would dream of exhibiting.
We expect these things perhaps in the English history-plays, and we
find them in abundance there: but not there alone. The last Act in
_Julius Caesar_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _King Lear_, _Macbeth_, and
_Cymbeline_; the fourth Act of _Antony and Cleopatra_; the opening Acts
of _Coriolanus_,--these are all full of battle-scenes. If battle cannot
be shown, it can be described. If it cannot be described, still soldiers
can be shown, and twice in _Hamlet_ Fortinbras and his army march upon
the stage.[4] At worst there can be street-brawls and single fights, as
in _Romeo and Juliet_. In reading Shakespeare we scarcely realise how
much of this kind is exhibited. In seeing him acted we do not fully
realise it, for much of it is omitted. But beyond doubt it helped to
make him the most popular dramatist of his time.
If we examine Shakespeare's battles we shall observe a certain
peculiarity, which is connected with the nature of his theatre and also
explains the treatment of them in ours. In most cases he does not give a
picture of two whole armies engaged, but makes a pair of combatants rush
upon the stage, fight, and rush off again; and this pair is succeeded by
a second, and perhaps by a third. This hurried series of single combats
admitted of speech-making; perhaps it also gave some impression of the
changes and confusion of a battle. Our tendency, on the other hand, is
to contrive one spectacle with scenic effects, or even to exhibit one
magnificent tableau in which nobody says a word. And this plan, though
it has the advantage of getting rid of Shakespeare's poetry, is not
exactly dramatic. It is adopted chiefly because the taste of our public
is, or is supposed to be, less dramatic than spectacular, and because,
unlike the Elizabethans, we are able to gratify such a taste. But there
is another fact to be remembered here. Few playgoers now can appreciate
a fencing-match, and much fewer a broad-sword and target fight. But the
Elizabethan public went to see performances of this kind as we go to see
cricket or football matches. They might watch them in the very building
which at other times was used as a playhouse.[5] They could judge of the
merit of the exhibition when Hotspur and Prince Henry fought, when
Macduff 'laid on,' or when Tybalt and Mercutio used their rapiers. And
this was probably another reason why Shakespeare's battles so often
consist of single combats, and why these scenes were beloved by the
simpler folk among his audience.
Our second illustration concerns the popular appetite for musical and
other sounds. The introduction of songs and dances[6] was censured as a
corrupt gratification of this appetite. And so it was when the songs and
dances were excessive in number, irrelevant, or out of keeping with the
scene. I do not remember that in Shakespeare's plays this is ever the
case; but, in respect of songs, we may perhaps take Marston's _Antonio
and Mellida_ as an instance of abuse. For in each of the two Parts of
that play there are directions for five songs; and, since not even the
first lines of these songs are printed, we must suppose that the leader
of the band, or the singing actor in the company, introduced whatever he
chose. In addition to songs and dances, the musicians, at least in some
plays, performed between the Acts; and the practice of accompanying
certain speeches by low music--a practice which in some performances of
Shakespeare now has become a pest--has the sanction of several
Elizabethan playwrights, and (to a slight extent) of Shakespeare. It
seems clear, for example, that in _Twelfth Night_ low music was played
while the lovely opening lines ('That strain again') were being spoken,
and also during a part of the dialogue preceding the song 'Come away,
come away, death.' Some lines, too, of Lorenzo's famous speech about
music in the _Merchant of Venice_ were probably accompanied; and there
is a still more conspicuous instance in the scene where Lear wakes from
his long sleep and sees Cordelia standing by his side.
But, beyond all this, if we attend to the stage-directions we shall
realise that in the serious plays of Shakespeare other musical sounds
were of frequent occurrence. Almost always the ceremonial entrance of a
royal person is marked by a 'flourish' or a 'sennet' on trumpets,
cornets, or hautboys; and wherever we have armies and battles we find
directions for drums, or for particular series of notes of trumpets or
cornets appropriate to particular military movements. In the First Part
of _Henry VI._, to take that early play again, we must imagine a dead
march, two other marches, three retreats, three sennets, seven
flourishes, eighteen alarums; and there are besides five directions for
drums, one for a horn, and five for soundings, of a kind not specified,
by trumpets. In the last three scenes of the first Act in
_Coriolanus_--scenes containing less than three hundred and fifty
lines--there are directions for a parley, a retreat, five flourishes,
and eight alarums, with three, less specific, for trumpets, and four for
drums. We find about twenty such directions in _King Lear_, and about
twenty-five in _Macbeth_, a short play in which hautboys seem to have
been unusually favoured.[7] It is evident that the audience loved these
sounds, which, from their prevalence in passages of special kinds, seem
to have been intended chiefly to stimulate excitement, and sometimes to
heighten impressions of grandeur or of awe.
But this is not all. Such purposes were also served by noises not
musical. Four times in _Macbeth_, when the Witches appear, thunder is
heard. It thunders and lightens at intervals through the storm-scenes in
_King Lear_. Casca and Cassius, dark thoughts within them, walk the
streets of Rome in a terrific thunderstorm. That loud insistent knocking
which appalled Macbeth is repeated thrice at intervals while Lady
Macbeth in vain endeavours to calm him, and five times while the Porter
fumbles with his keys. The gate has hardly been opened and the murder
discovered when the castle-bell begins its hideous alarum. The
alarm-bell is used for the same purpose of intensifying excitement in
the brawl that ruins Cassio, and its effect is manifest in Othello's
immediate order, 'Silence that dreadful bell.' I will add but one
instance more. In the days of my youth, before the melodrama audience
dreamed of seeing chariot-races, railway accidents, or the infernal
regions, on the stage, it loved few things better than the explosion of
fire-arms; and its favourite weapon was the pistol. The Elizabethans had
the same fancy for fire-arms, only they preferred cannon. Shakespeare's
theatre was burnt down in 1613 at a performance of _Henry VIII._, not, I
suppose, as Prynne imagined, by a Providence which shared his opinion of
the drama, but because the wadding of a cannon fired during the play
flew to the thatch of the roof and set it ablaze. In _Hamlet_
Shakespeare gave the public plenty that they could not understand, but
he made it up to them in explosions. While Hamlet, Horatio, and
Marcellus are waiting for the Ghost, a flourish is heard, and then the
roar of cannon. It is the custom to fire them when the King drinks a
pledge; and this King drinks many. In the fencing-scene at the end he
proposes to drink one for every hit scored by his beloved nephew; and
the first hit is duly honoured by the cannon. Unexpected events
prevented the celebration of the second, but the audience lost nothing
by that. While Hamlet lies dying, a sudden explosion is heard.
Fortinbras is coming with his army. And, as if that were not enough, the
very last words of the play are, 'Go, bid the soldiers shoot,' and the
very last sound of the performance is a peal of ordnance. Into this most
mysterious and inward of his works, it would seem, the poet flung, as if
in derision of his cultured critics, well-nigh every stimulant of
popular excitement he could collect: 'carnal, bloody, and unnatural
acts'; five deaths on the open stage, three appearances of a ghost, two
of a mad woman, a dumb-show, two men raving and fighting in a grave at a
funeral, the skulls and bones of the dead, a clown bandying jests with a
prince, songs at once indecent and pathetic, marching soldiers, a
fencing-match, then a litter of corpses, and explosions in the first Act
and explosions in the last. And yet out of this sensational
material--not in spite of it, but out of it--he made the most mysterious
and inward of his dramas, which leaves us haunted by thoughts beyond the
reaches of our souls; and he knew that the very audience that rejoiced
in ghosts and explosions would listen, even while it was waiting for the
ghost, to that which the explosion had suggested,--a general
disquisition, twenty-five lines long, on the manner in which one defect
may spoil a noble reputation. In this strange harmony of discords,
surely unexampled before or since, we may see at a glance the essence of
Elizabethan drama, of its poet, and of its audience.
2.
We have been occupied so far with characteristics of the drama which
reflect the more distinctively popular tastes objected to by critics
like Jonson. We may now pass on to arrangements common to all public
theatres, whether the play performed were Jonson's or Shakespeare's; and
in the first instance to a characteristic common to the public and
private theatres alike.
As everyone knows, the female parts in stage-plays were taken by boys,
youths, or men (a mask being sometimes worn in the last case). The
indecorous Elizabethans regarded this custom almost entirely from the
point of view of decorum and morality. And as to morality, no one, I
believe, who examines the evidence, especially as it concerns the state
of things that followed the introduction of actresses at the
Restoration, will be very ready to dissent from their opinion. But it is
often assumed as a matter beyond dispute that, on the side of dramatic
effect, the Elizabethan practice was extremely unfortunate, if not
downright absurd. This idea appears to me, to say the least,
exaggerated. Our practice may be the better; for a few Shakespearean
parts it _ought_ to be much better; but that, on the whole, it is
decidedly so, or that the old custom had anything absurd about it, there
seems no reason to believe. In the first place, experience in private
and semi-private performances shows that female parts may be excellently
acted by youths or men, and that the most obvious drawback, that of the
adult male voice, is not felt to be nearly so serious as we might
anticipate. For a minute or two it may call for a slight exertion of
imagination in the audience; but there is no more radical error than to
suppose that an audience finds this irksome, or to forget that the use
of imagination at one point quickens it at other points, and so is a
positive gain. And we have further to remember that the Elizabethan
actor of female parts was no amateur, but a professional as carefully
trained as an actress now; while dramatically he had this advantage over
the actress, that he was regarded simply as a player, and not also as a
woman with an attractive or unattractive person.[8]
In the second place, if the current ideas on this subject were true,
there would be, it seems to me, more evidence of their truth. We should
find, for example, that when first the new fashion came in, it was hailed
by good judges as a very great improvement on the old. But the traces of
such an opinion appear very scanty and doubtful, while it is certain that
one of the few actors who after the Restoration still played female parts
maintained a high reputation and won great applause. Again, if these
parts in Shakespeare's day were very inadequately performed, would not
the effect of that fact be distinctly visible in the plays themselves?
The roles in question would be less important in Shakespeare's dramas,
for example, than in dramas of later times: but I do not see that they
are. Besides, in the Shakespearean play itself the female parts would be
much less important than the male: but on the whole they are not. In the
tragedies and histories, it is true, the impelling forces of the action
usually belong in larger measure to men than to women. But that is
because the action in such plays is laid in the sphere of public life;
and in cases where, in spite of this, the heroine is as prominent as the
hero, her part--the part of Juliet, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth--certainly
requires as good acting as his. As to the comedies, if we ask ourselves
who are the central or the most interesting figures in them, we shall
find that we pronounce a woman's name at least as often as a man's. I
understate the case. Of Shakespeare's mature comedies the _Merchant of
Venice_, I believe, is the only one where this name would unquestionably
be a man's, and in three of the last five it would almost certainly be a
woman's--Isabella's, Imogen's, Hermione's. How shall we reconcile with
these facts the idea that in his day the female parts were, on the whole,
much less adequately played than the male? And finally, if the dramatists
themselves believed this, why do we not find frequent indications of the
belief in their prologues, epilogues, prefaces, and plays?[9]
We must conclude, it would seem, that the absence of actresses from the
Elizabethan theatre, though at first it may appear to us highly
important, made no great difference to the dramas themselves.
3.
That certainly cannot be said of the construction and arrangements of
the stage. On this subject a great deal has been written of late years,
and as regards many details there is still much difference of
opinion.[10] But fortunately all that is of great moment for our present
purpose is tolerably certain. In trying to bring it out, I will begin by
reminding you of our present stage. For it is the stage, and not the
rest of the theatre, that is of special interest here; and no serious
harm will be done if, for the rest, we imagine Shakespeare's theatre
with boxes, circles, and galleries like our own, though in the shape of
a more elongated horse-shoe than ours. We must imagine, of course, an
area too; but there, as we shall see, an important difference comes in.
Our present stage may be called a box with one of its sides knocked out.
Through this opening, which has an ornamental frame, we look into the
box. Its three upright sides (for we may ignore the bottom and the top)
are composed of movable painted scenes, which are changed from time to
time during the course of the play. Before the play and after it the
opening is blocked by a curtain, dropped from the top of the frame; and
this is also dropped at intervals during the performance, that the
scenes may be changed.
In all these respects the Elizabethan arrangement was quite different.
The stage came forward to about the middle of the area; so that a line
bisecting the house would have coincided with the line of footlights, if
there had been such things. The stage was therefore a platform viewed
from both sides and not only from the front; and along its sides, as
well as in front of it, stood the people who paid least, the
groundlings, sometimes punningly derided by dramatists as 'the men of
understanding.' Obviously, the sides of this platform were open; nor
were there movable scenes even at the back of it; nor was there any
front curtain. It was overshadowed by a projecting roof; but the area,
or 'yard,' where the groundlings stood, was open to the weather, and
accordingly the theatre could not be darkened. It will be seen that,
when the actors were on the forward part of the stage, they were (to
exaggerate a little) in the middle of the audience, like the performers
in a circus now. And on this forward naked part of the stage most of a
Shakespearean drama was played. We may call it the main or front
stage.[11]
If now we look towards the rear of this stage, what do we find? In the
first place, while the back of our present-day box consists of a
movable scene, that of the Elizabethan stage was formed by the
'tiring-house,' or dressing-room, of the actors. In its wall were two
doors, by which entrances and exits were made. But it was not merely a
tiring-house. In the play it might represent a room, a house, a castle,
the wall of a town; and the doors played their parts accordingly. Again,
when a person speaks 'from within,' that doubtless means that he is in
the tiring-house, opens one of the doors a little, and speaks through
the chink. So apparently did the prompter.
Secondly, on the top of the tiring-house was the 'upper stage' or
'balcony,' which looked down on the platform stage. It is hardly
possible to make brief statements about it that would be secure. For our
purposes it may be imagined as a balcony jutting forward a little from
the line of the tiring-house; and it will suffice to add that, though
the whole or part of it was on some occasions, or in some theatres,
occupied by spectators, the whole or part of it was sometimes used by
the actors and was indispensably requisite to the performance of the
play. 'Enter above' or 'enter aloft' means that the actor was to appear
on this upper stage or balcony. Usually, no doubt, he reached it by a
ladder or stair inside the tiring-house; but on occasions there were
ascents or descents directly from, or to, the main stage, as we see from
'climbs the tree and is received above' or 'the citizens leap from the
walls.' The reader of Shakespeare will at once remember many scenes
where the balcony was used. On it, as the city wall, appeared the
Governor and citizens of Harfleur, while King Henry and his train stood
before the gates below. From it Arthur made his fatal leap. It was
Cleopatra's monument, into which she and her women drew up the dying
Antony. Juliet talked to Romeo from it; and from it Romeo ('one kiss and
I'll descend') 'goeth down' to the main stage. Richard appeared there
between the two bishops; and there the spectators imagined Duncan
murdered in his sleep.[12] But they could not look into his chamber. The
balcony could be concealed by curtains, running, like all Elizabethan
stage curtains, on a rod.
In the third place, there was, towards the back of the main stage, a
part that could be curtained off, and so separated from the front part
of that stage. Let us call it the back stage. It is the matter about
which there is most difficulty and controversy; but the general
description just given would be accepted by almost all scholars and will
suffice for us. Here was the curtain (more strictly, the curtains)
through which the actors peeped at the audience before the play began,
and at which the groundlings hurled apples and other missiles to hasten
their coming or signify disapproval of them. And this 'back stage' was
essential to many performances, and was used in a variety of ways. It
was the room where Henry IV. lay dying; the cave of Timon or of
Belarius; probably the tent in which Richmond slept before the battle of
Bosworth; the cell of Prospero, who draws the curtains apart and shows
Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess within; and here, I imagine, and
not on the balcony, Juliet, after drinking the potion, 'falls upon her
bed within the curtains.'[13] Finally, the back stage accounts for those
passages where, at the close of a death-scene, there is no indication
that the corpse was carried off the stage. If the death took place on
the open stage, as it usually did, this of course was necessary, since
there was no front curtain to drop; and so we usually find in the
dialogue words like 'Take up the bodies' (_Hamlet_), or 'Bear them from
hence' (_King Lear_). But Desdemona was murdered in her bed on the back
stage; and there died also Othello and Emilia; so that Lodovico orders
the bodies to be 'hid,' not carried off. The curtains were drawn
together, and the dead actors withdrew into the tiring-house unseen,[14]
while the living went off openly.
This triple stage is the primary thing to remember about Shakespeare's
theatre: a platform coming well forward into the yard, completely open
in the larger front part, but having further back a part that could be
curtained off, and overlooked by an upper stage or balcony above the
tiring-house. Only a few further details need be mentioned. Though
scenery was unknown, there were plenty of properties, as may be gathered
from the dramas and, more quickly, from the accounts of Henslowe, the
manager of the Rose. Chairs, benches, and tables are a matter of course.
Kent sat in the stocks. The witches had a caldron. Imogen slept in a
bed, and Iachimo crept out of his trunk in her room. Falstaff was
carried off the stage in a clothes-basket. I have quoted the direction
'climb the tree.' A 'banquet' figures in Henslowe's list, and in the
_Tempest_ 'several strange shapes' bring one in. He mentions a 'tomb,'
and it is possible, though not likely, that the tomb of the Capulets was
a property; and he mentions a 'moss-bank,' doubtless such as that where
the wild thyme was blowing for Titania. Her lover, you remember, wore an
ass's head, and the Falstaff of the _Merry Wives_ a buck's. There were
whole animals, too. 'A great horse with his legs' is in Henslowe's
list; and in a play not by Shakespeare Jonah is cast out of the whale's
belly on to the stage. Besides these properties there was a contrivance
with ropes and pulleys, by which a heavenly being could descend from the
stage-roof (the 'heaven'), as in _Cymbeline_ Jupiter descends upon his
eagle. When his speech is over we find the direction 'ascends.' Soon
after comes another direction: 'vanish.' This is addressed not to
Jupiter but to various ghosts who are present. For there was a hollow
space under the stage, and a trap-door into it. Through this ghosts
usually made their entrances and exits; and 'vanish' seems commonly to
mean an exit that way. Through it, too, arose and sank the witches'
caldron and the apparitions shown to Macbeth. A person could speak from
under the stage, as the Ghost does when Hamlet calls him 'old mole'; and
the musicians could go and play there, as they do in the scene where
Antony's soldiers hear strange music on the night before the battle;
'Musicke of the Hoboyes is under the Stage' the direction runs
('Hoboyes' were used also in the witch-scene just mentioned).
4.
We have now to observe certain ways in which this stage with its
arrangements influenced the dramas themselves; and we shall find that
the majority of these influences are connected with the absence of
scenery. In this, to begin with, lies the main, though not the whole,
explanation of the shortness of the performance. In our Shakespeare
revivals the drama is always considerably cut down; and yet, even where
no excessive prominence is given to scenic display, the time occupied is
seldom less than three hours, and often a good deal more. In
Shakespeare's day, as we gather from various sources (_e.g._ from the
Prologues to _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Henry VIII._), the customary time
taken by the un-shortened play was about two hours. And the chief reason
of this great difference obviously is that the time which we spend in
setting and changing scenes his company spent in acting the piece. At a
given signal certain characters appeared. Unless a placard announced the
place where they were supposed to be,[15] the audience gathered this
from their conversation, or in the absence of such indications asked no
questions on the subject. They talked for a time and went away; and at
once another set appeared. The intervals between the acts (if intervals
there were, and however they were occupied) had no purpose connected
with scene-changing, and must have been short; and the introduction and
removal of a few properties would take next to no time from the
performance.[16] We may safely assume that not less than a hundred of
the hundred and twenty minutes were given to the play itself.
The absence of scenery, however, will not wholly account for the
difference in question. If you take a Shakespearean play of average
length and read it at about the pace usual in our revivals, you will
find, I think, that you have occupied considerably more than a hundred
or a hundred and twenty minutes.[17] The Elizabethan actor can hardly
have spoken so slowly. Probably the position of the stage, and
especially of the front part of it where most of the action took place,
was of advantage to him in this respect. Standing almost in the middle
of his audience, and at no great distance from any section of it, he
could with safety deliver his lines much faster than an actor can now.
He could speak even a 'passionate' speech 'trippingly on the tongue.'
Hamlet bids him do so, warns him not to mouth, and, when the time for
his speech comes, calls impatiently to him to leave his damnable faces
and begin; and this is not the only passage in Elizabethan literature
which suggests that good judges objected to a slow and over-emphatic
delivery. We have some actors not inferior in elocution, we must
presume, to Burbage or Taylor, but even Mr. Vezin or Mr. Forbes
Robertson may find it difficult to deliver blank verse intelligibly,
musically, and rapidly out of our stage-box.[18]
I return to the absence of scenery, which even in this matter must be
more important than the position of the stage or the preference for
rapid speech. It explains, secondly, the great difference between
Elizabethan and more modern plays in the number of the scenes.[19] This
number, with Shakespeare, averages somewhere about twenty: it reaches
forty-two in _Antony and Cleopatra_, and sinks to nine in _Love's
Labour's Lost_, the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_, and the _Tempest_. In the
fourth act of the first of these plays there are thirteen scenes, no one
of them in the same place as the next. The average number in Schiller's
plays seems to be about eight. In plays written now it corresponds not
unfrequently with the number of acts.[20] The primary cause of this
difference, though not the only one, is, I presume, that we expect to
see appropriate surroundings, at the least, for every part of the
story. Such surroundings mean more or less elaborate scenery, which,
besides being expensive, takes a long time to set and change. For a
dramatist accordingly who is a dramatist and wishes to hold his audience
by the play itself, it is an advantage to have as few scenes as may be.
And so the absence of scenery in Shakespeare's day, and its presence in
ours, result in two totally different systems, not merely of theatrical
effect, but of dramatic construction.
In certain ways it was clearly an advantage to a playwright to be able
to produce a large number of scenes, varying in length according to his
pleasure, and separated by almost inappreciable intervals. Nor could
there be any disadvantage in this freedom, if he had a strong feeling
for dramatic construction, and a gift for it, and a determination to
construct as well as he could. But, as a matter of fact, many, perhaps
the majority, of the pre-Shakespearean dramas are put together very
loosely; scene follows scene in the manner of a casual narrative rather
than a play; and a good deal is admitted for the sake of its immediate
attraction and not because it is essential to the plot. The freedom
which we are considering, though it could not necessitate these defects,
gave the widest scope for them; the majority of the audience probably
was, and continued to be, well-nigh indifferent to them; and a large
proportion of the plays of Shakespeare's time exhibits them in some
degree. The average drama of that day has great merits of a strictly
dramatic kind, but it is not well-built, it is not what we mean by 'a
good play'; and if we look at it from the restricted point of view
implied by that phrase we shall be inclined, I think, to believe that it
would have been a better play if its author had been compelled by the
stage-arrangements to halve the number of the scenes. These remarks will
hold of Shakespeare himself. Some of his most delightful dramas,
indeed,--for instance, the two Parts of _Henry IV._--make little or no
pretence to be well-constructed wholes; and even in those which fully
deserve that title a certain amount of matter not indispensable to the
plot is usually to be found. In point of construction _Othello_ is the
best of his tragedies, _Julius Caesar_ better than _King Lear_, and
_Antony and Cleopatra_ perhaps the faultiest. To say that this depends
solely on the number of scenes would be ridiculous, but still it is
probably significant that the numbers are, respectively, fifteen,
eighteen, twenty-one, and forty-two.
The average Elizabethan play could not, of course, have been converted
into a well-built fabric by a _mere_ reduction of the number of its
scenes; and in some cases no amount of rearrangement of the whole
material employed could have produced this result. This means, however,
on the other hand, that the Elizabethans, partly from the very
simplicity of their theatrical conditions, were able to handle with
decided, though usually imperfect, dramatic effect subjects which would
present difficulties still greater, if not insuperable, to a playwright
now. And in Shakespeare we can trace, in this respect and in others, the
advantages connected with the absence of scenery. He could carry his
audience freely from one country, town, house or room, to another, or
from this part of a battle-field to that, because the audience imagined
each place and saw none. I take an extreme example. The Third Act of
_Antony and Cleopatra_, according to modern editions, contains thirteen
scenes, and these are the localities assigned to them: (1) a plain in
Syria, (2) Rome, an ante-chamber in Caesar's house, (3) Alexandria,
Cleopatra's palace, (4) Athens, a room in Antony's house, (5) the same,
another room, (6) Rome, Caesar's house, (7) near Actium, Antony's camp,
(8) a plain near Actium, (9) another part of the plain, (10) another
part of the plain, (11) Alexandria, Cleopatra's palace, (12) Egypt,
Caesar's camp, (13) Alexandria, Cleopatra's palace. I wonder how long
this Act would take on our stage, where each locality must be
represented. Three hours perhaps, of which the performance might occupy
one-eighth. But in Shakespeare's day there was no occasion for any
stage-direction as to locality throughout the Act.
Again, Shakespeare's method of working a double plot depends largely on
his ability to bring the persons belonging to the two plots on to the
stage in alternate scenes of no great length until the threads are
combined. This is easily seen in _King Lear_; and there we can observe,
further, how he varies the pitch of feeling and provides relief by
interposing short quiet scenes between longer exciting ones. By this
means, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the Storm-scene on the heath,
which if undivided would be intolerable, is broken into three, separated
by very short duologues spoken within the Castle and in prose. Again,
since scene follows scene without a pause, he could make one tell on
another in the way either of intensification or of contrast. We catch
the effect in reading, but in our theatres it is usually destroyed by
the interval. Finally, however many scenes an Act may contain,
Shakespeare can keep attention glued to the play throughout the Act,
because there are no intervals. So can our playwrights, because they
have but one or two scenes in the Act. But in our reproductions of
Shakespeare, though the number of scenes is reduced, it can scarcely
ever be reduced to that extent; so that several times during an Act, and
many times during the play, we are withdrawn perforce from the dramatic
atmosphere into that of everyday life, solitary impatience or ennui,
distracting conversation, third-rate music, or, occasionally, good music
half-drowned in a babble of voices.
If we consider the characteristics on which I have been dwelling, and
bear in mind also the rapidity of speech which we have found to be
probable, we shall realise that a performance in Shakespeare's day,
though more of the play was performed, must have been something much
more variegated and changeful, and much lighter in movement, than a
revival now. And this difference will have been observed by those who
have seen Shakespeare acted by the Elizabethan Stage Society, under the
direction of Mr. Poel, who not only played scene after scene without
intervals, but secured in a considerable degree that rapidity of speech.
A minor point remains. The Elizabethan stage, we have seen, had no front
curtain. The front curtain and the use of scenery naturally came in
together, for the second, so far as the front stage was concerned, was
dependent on the first; and as we have already glanced at some effects
of the absence of the second, that of the first will require but a few
additional words. It was clearly in some ways a great disadvantage; for
every situation at the front of the stage had to be begun and ended
before the eyes of the audience. In our dramas the curtain may rise on a
position which the actors then had to produce by movements not really
belonging to the play; and, what is more important, the scene may
advance to a striking climax, the effect of which would be greatly
diminished and sometimes destroyed if the actors had to leave the stage
instead of being suddenly hidden. In Elizabethan plays, accordingly, we
seldom meet with this kind of effect, though it is not difficult to
discover places where it would have been appropriate. But we shall not
find them, I venture to think, in tragedies. This effect, in other
words, appears properly to belong to comedy and to melodrama (if that
species of play is to be considered here at all); and the Elizabethans
lost nothing by their inability to misuse it in tragedy, and especially
at the close of a tragedy. Whether it can be artistic to end any
serious scene whatever at the point of greatest tension seems doubtful,
but surely it is little short of barbarous to drop the curtain on the
last dying words, or, it may be, the last convulsion, of a tragic hero.
In tragedy the Elizabethan practice, like the Greek, was to lower the
pitch of emotion from this point by a few quiet words, followed perhaps
by sounds which, in intention at least, were majestic or solemn, and so
to restore the audience to common life 'in calm of mind, all passion
spent.' Thus Shakespeare's tragedies always close; and the end of
Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_ is not _Exeunt Devils with Faustus_, but the
speech beginning
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel-bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man.
In this particular case Marlowe, if he had not been a poet, might have
dispensed with the final descent, or ascent, from the violent emotions
attending the catastrophe; but in the immense majority of their
tragedies the Elizabethans, even if they had wished to do as we too
often do, were saved from the temptation by the absence of a front
curtain.[21]
5.
Hitherto we have not considered a Shakespearean performance on the side,
I will not say of its spectacular, but of its pictorial effect. This
must be our last subject. We have to bear in mind here three things: the
fact that the stage was viewed from three sides, its illumination by
daylight throughout the play, and the absence of scenery. It is obvious
that the last two deprived the audience of many attractive or impressive
pictures; while, as to the first, it seems unlikely that actors who were
watched from the sides as well as the front would study to group
themselves as parts of a composition addressed to the eye. Indeed one
may doubt whether, except in regard to costume, they seriously attended
to the pictorial effect of a drama at all; their tiny crowds and armies,
for example, cannot have provided much of a show. And in any case it is
clear that the audience had to dispense with many more or less beautiful
sights that we may now enjoy. But the question whether their loss was,
on the whole, a disadvantage is not so easy to answer; for here again it
freed them from a temptation--that of sacrificing dramatic to pictorial
effect; and we cannot tell whether, or how far, they would have been
proof against its influence. Let us try, however, to see the position
clearly.
The essence of drama--and certainly of Shakespearean drama--lies in
actions and words expressive of inward movements of human nature.
Pictorial effects (if for convenience' sake the various matters under
consideration may be signified by that phrase) are in themselves no more
dramatic than songs, dances, military music, or the jests of a 'fool.'
Like these other things, they may be made dramatic. They may be used and
apprehended, that is to say, as elements fused with the essential
elements of dramatic effect. And, so far as this is the case and they
thus contribute to that effect, they are, it seems clear, an unmixed
advantage. But a distinct and separate attention to them is another
matter; for, the moment it sets in, attention begins to be withdrawn
from the actions and words, and therefore from the inward movements that
these express. And experience shows that, as soon as pictorial
attractions exceed a certain limit, impossible to specify in general
terms, they at once influence the average play-goer in this mischievous
way. It is, further, well-nigh inevitable that this should happen.
However interesting the actions, words, and inward movements may be,
they call for some effort of imagination and of other mental
activities,[22] while stage-pictures demand very little; and
accordingly, at the present time at any rate, the bulk of an audience to
which the latter are abundantly presented will begin to enjoy them for
their own sakes, or as parts of a panorama and not of a drama. No one, I
think, can honestly doubt this who watches and listens to the people
sitting near him at what the newspapers too truly call 'an amazing
Shakespearean spectacle.' If we are offered a pretty picture of the
changing colours of the sky at dawn, or of a forest glade with deer
miraculously moving across its sunny grass, most of us cease for the
time to be an audience and become mere spectators; and let Romeo and
Juliet, or Rosalind and Orlando, talk as like angels as they will, they
will talk but half-heeded. Our dramatists know this well enough. Mr.
Barrie and Mr. Pinero and Mr. Shaw, who want the audience to listen and
understand, take good care not to divert its attention and deaden its
imagination by scenic displays. And yet, with the heartiest admiration
for their best work, one may say that Shakespeare's requires more
attention and imagination than theirs.
Whether the Elizabethan companies, if they had had the power to use the
attractions of scenery, would have abused it, and whether in that case
the audience would have been as readily debauched as ours, it is useless
to dispute. The audience was not composed mainly of groundlings; and
even the groundlings in that age had drama in their blood. But I venture
to disbelieve that the main fault in these matters lies, in any age,
with the audience. It is like the populace in Shakespeare's plays, easy
to lead wrong but just as easy to lead right. If you give people in the
East End, or even in the Albert Hall, nothing but third-rate music, most
of them will be content with it, and possibly may come to disrelish what
is better. But if you have a little faith in great art and in human
nature, and offer them, I do not say the Diabelli variations, but such
music as the symphonies of Beethoven or even of Brahms, they will
justify your faith. This is not theory, but fact; and I cannot think
that it is otherwise with drama, or at least with the dramas of
Shakespeare. Did they ever 'spell ruin to managers' if they were,
through the whole cast, satisfactorily acted? What spells real ruin to
managers and actors alike is what spells degradation to audiences.[23]
But whether or no Shakespeare's audience could have been easily degraded
by scenic pleasure, it had not the chance; and I will not raise the
further question how far its disabilities were the cause of its virtues,
but will end with a few words on two of the virtues themselves. It
possessed, first, a vivid imagination. Shakespeare could address to it
not in vain the injunction, 'Work, work your thoughts!' Probably in
three scenes out of five the place and surroundings of the action were
absolutely invisible to its eyes. In a fourth it took the barest symbol
for reality. A couple of wretched trees made the Forest of Arden for it,
five men with ragged foils the army that conquered at Agincourt: are we
stronger than it, or weaker? It heard Romeo say
Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east;
and to its mind's eye they were there. It looked at a shabby old
balcony, but as it listened it saw the swallows flitting round the
sun-lit battlements of Macbeth's castle, and our pitiful sense of
grotesque incongruity never troubled it.[24] The simplest convention
sufficed to set its imagination at work. If Prospero entered wearing a
particular robe, it knew that no one on the stage could see his solid
shape;[25] and if Banquo, rising through the trap-door, had his bloody
face dusted over with meal, it recognised him for a ghost and thrilled
with horror; and we, Heaven help us, should laugh. Though the stage
stood in broad daylight, again, Banquo, for it, was being murdered on a
dark wet night, for he carried a torch and spoke of rain; and the
chaste stars were shining for it outside Desdemona's chamber as the
awful figure entered and extinguished the lamp. Consider how
extraordinary is the fact I am about to mention, and what a testimony it
bears to the imagination of the audience. In _Hamlet_, _Othello_, and
_Macbeth_, not one scene here and there but actually the majority of the
most impressive scenes take place at night, and, to a reader, depend not
a little on the darkness for their effect. Yet the Ghost-scenes, the
play-scene, the sparing of the king at prayer, that conversation of
Hamlet with his mother which is opened by the killing of Polonius and
interrupted by the appearance of the Ghost; the murder of Duncan, the
murder of Banquo, the Banquet-scene, the Sleep-walking scene; the whole
of the first Act of _Othello_, the scene of Cassio's drunken revel and
fight, and the whole of the terrible last Act,--all of this was played
in a theatre open to the afternoon sun, and was written by a man who
knew that it was so to be played. But he knew his audience too.[26]
That audience had not only imagination, and the power to sink its soul
in the essence of drama. It had something else of scarcely less import
for Shakespeare, the love of poetry. Ignorant, noisy, malodorous, too
fond of dances and songs and dirty jokes, of soldiers and trumpets and
cannon, the groundling might be: but he liked poetry. If he had not
liked it, he, with his brutal manners, would have silenced it, and the
Elizabethan drama could never have been the thing it was. The plays of
Shakespeare swarm with long speeches, almost all of which are cut down
or cut clean away for our theatres. They are never, of course,
irrelevant; sometimes they are indispensable to the full appreciation
of a character; but it is manifest that they were not written solely
for a dramatic purpose, but also because the author and his audience
loved poetry. A sign of this is the fact that they especially abound
where, from the nature of the story, the dramatic structure is
imperfect.[27] They abound in _Troilus and Cressida_ and _Henry V._ more
than in _Othello_ or _Much Ado_. Remember, for a standard of size, that
'To be or not to be' is thirty-three lines in length, and then consider
the following fact. _Henry V._ contains seventeen speeches longer than
that soliloquy. Five of them are between forty and fifty lines long, two
between fifty and sixty, and two exceed sixty. Yet if any play entirely
by Shakespeare were open to the charge of being a 'drum and trumpet
history' written to please the populace, it would be _Henry V._ Not only
then the cultured section of the audience loved poetry; the whole
audience loved it. How long would they have continued to relish this
'perpetual feast of nectared sweets' if their eyes had been feasted too?
Or is it likely that, once habituated to spectacular stimulants, they
would have welcomed 'the crystal clearness of the Muses' spring'?
1902.