of simplicity in the production of the plays of Shakespeare. Practical
common-sense, practical considerations of a pecuniary kind, teach us
that it is only by the adoption of simple methods of production that
we can hope to have Shakespeare represented in our theatres constantly
and in all his variety. Until Shakespeare is represented thus, the
spiritual and intellectual enlightenment, which his achievement offers
English-speaking people, will remain wholly inaccessible to the
majority who do not read him, and will be only in part at the command
of the few who do. Nay, more: until Shakespeare is represented on the
stage constantly and in his variety, English-speaking men and women
are liable to the imputation, not merely of failing in the homage due
to the greatest of their countrymen, but of falling short of their
neighbours in Germany and Austria in the capacity of appreciating
supremely great imaginative literature.
II
SHAKESPEARE AND THE ELIZABETHAN PLAYGOER[4]
[Footnote 4: This paper, which was first printed in "An English
Miscellany, presented to Dr Furnivall in honour of his seventy-fifth
birthday" (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1901), was written as a
lecture for delivery on Tuesday afternoon, March 20, 1900, at Queen's
College (for women) in Harley Street, London, in aid of the Fund for
securing a picture commemorating Queen Victoria's visit to the College
in 1898.]
I
In a freak of fancy, Robert Louis Stevenson sent to a congenial spirit
the imaginary intelligence that a well-known firm of London publishers
had, after their wont, "declined with thanks" six undiscovered
tragedies, one romantic comedy, a fragment of a journal extending over
six years, and an unfinished autobiography reaching up to the first
performance of _King John_ by "that venerable but still respected
writer, William Shakespeare." Stevenson was writing in a frivolous
mood; but such words stir the imagination. The ordinary person, if he
had to choose among the enumerated items of Shakespeare's
newly-discovered manuscripts, would cheerfully go without the six new
tragedies and the one romantic comedy if he had at his disposal, by
way of consolation, the journal extending over six years and the
autobiography reaching up to the first performance of _King John_. We
should deem ourselves fortunate if we had the journal alone. It would
hardly matter which six years of Shakespeare's life the journal
covered. As a boy, as a young actor, as an industrious reviser of
other men's plays, as the humorous creator of Falstaff, Benedick, and
Mercutio, as the profound "natural" philosopher of the great
tragedies, he could never have been quite an ordinary diarist. Great
men have been known to keep diaries in which the level of interest
does not rise above a visit to the barber or the dentist. The common
routine of life interested Shakespeare, but something beyond it must
have found place in his journal. Reference to his glorious achievement
must have gained entry there.
Some notice, we may be sure, figured in Shakespeare's diary of the
first performances of his great plays on the stage. However eminent a
man is through native genius or from place of power, he can never,
whatever his casual professions to the contrary, be indifferent to the
reception accorded by his fellow-men to the work of his hand and head.
I picture Shakespeare as the soul of modesty and gentleness in the
social relations of life, avoiding unbecoming self-advertisement, and
rating at its just value empty flattery, the mere adulation of the
lips. Gushing laudation is as little to the taste of wise men as
treacle. They cannot escape condiments of the kind, but the smaller
and less frequent the doses the more they are content. Shakespeare no
doubt had the great man's self-confidence which renders him to a large
extent independent of the opinion of his fellows. At the same time,
the knowledge that he had succeeded in stirring the reader or hearer
of his plays, the knowledge that his words had gripped their hearts
and intellects, cannot have been ungrateful to him. To desire
recognition for his work is for the artist an inevitable and a
laudable ambition. A working dramatist by the circumstance of his
calling appeals as soon as the play is written to the playgoer for a
sympathetic appreciation. Nature impelled Shakespeare to note on the
pages of his journal his impression of the sentiment with which the
fruits of his pen were welcomed in the playhouse.
But Shakespeare's journal does not exist, and we can only speculate as
to its contents.
II
We would give much to know how Shakespeare recorded in his diary the
first performance of _Hamlet_, the most fascinating of all his works.
He himself, we are credibly told, played the Ghost. We would give much
for a record of the feelings which lay on the first production of the
play beneath the breast of the silent apparition in the first scene
which twice crossed the stage and affrighted Marcellus, Horatio, and
the guards on the platform before the castle of Elsinore. No piece of
literature that ever came from human pen or brain is more closely
packed with fruit of the imaginative study of human life than is
Shakespeare's tragedy of _Hamlet_; and while the author acted the part
of the Ghost in the play's initial representation in the theatre, he
was watching the revelation of his pregnant message for the first time
to the external world. When the author in his weird rôle of Hamlet's
murdered father opened his lips for the first time, we might almost
imagine that in the words "pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
to what I shall unfold," he was reflecting the author's personal
interest in the proceedings of that memorable afternoon.[5] We can
imagine Shakespeare, as he saw the audience responding to his grave
appeal, giving with a growing confidence, the subsequent words, which
he repeated while he moved to the centre of the platform-stage, and
turned to face the whole house:--
I find thee apt;
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Wouldst thou not stir in this.
[Footnote 5: Performances of plays in Shakespeare's time always took
place in the afternoon.]
As the Ghost vanished and the air rang mysteriously with his piercing
words "Remember me," we would like to imagine the whole intelligence
of Elizabethan England responding to that cry as it sprang on its
first utterance in the theatre from the great dramatist's own lips.
Since that memorable day, at any rate, the whole intelligence of the
world has responded to that cry with all Hamlet's ecstasy, and with
but a single modification of the phraseology:--
Remember thee!
Ay, thou _great soul_, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.
III
There is a certain justification, in fact, for the fancy that the
_plaudites_ were loud and long, when Shakespeare created the rôle of
the "poor ghost" in the first production of his play of _Hamlet_ in
1602. There is no doubt at all that Shakespeare conspicuously caught
the ear of the Elizabethan playgoer at a very early date in his
career, and that he held it firmly for life. "These plays," wrote two
of his professional associates of the reception of the whole series in
the playhouse in his lifetime--"These plays have had their trial
already, and stood out all appeals." Matthew Arnold, apparently quite
unconsciously, echoed the precise phrase when seeking to express
poetically the universality of Shakespeare's reputation in our own
day.
Others abide our judgment, thou art free,
is the first line of Arnold's well-known sonnet, which attests the
rank allotted to Shakespeare in the literary hierarchy by the
professional critic, nearly two and a half centuries after the
dramatist's death. There was no narrower qualification in the
apostrophe of Shakespeare by Ben Jonson, a very critical
contemporary:--
Soul of _the age_,
The applause, delight, and wonder of _our stage_.
This play of _Hamlet_, this play of his "which most kindled English
hearts," received a specially enthusiastic welcome from Elizabethan
playgoers. It was acted within its first year of production repeatedly
("divers times"), not merely in London "and elsewhere," but also--an
unusual distinction--at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It
was reprinted four times within eight years of its birth.
Thus the charge sometimes brought against the Elizabethan playgoer of
failing to recognise Shakespeare's sovereign genius should be reckoned
among popular errors. It was not merely the recognition of the
critical and highly educated that Shakespeare received in person. It
was by the voice of the half-educated populace, whose heart and
intellect were for once in the right, that he was acclaimed the
greatest interpreter of human nature that literature had known, and,
as subsequent experience has proved, was likely to know. There is
evidence that throughout his lifetime and for a generation afterwards
his plays drew crowds to pit, boxes, and gallery alike. It is true
that he was one of a number of popular dramatists, many of whom had
rare gifts, and all of whom glowed with a spark of the genuine
literary fire. But Shakespeare was the sun in the firmament: when his
light shone, the fires of all contemporaries paled in the contemporary
playgoer's eye. There is forcible and humorous portrayal of human
frailty and eccentricity in plays of Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben
Jonson. Ben Jonson was a classical scholar, which Shakespeare was not.
Jonson was as well versed in Roman history as a college tutor. But
when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson both tried their hands at dramatising
episodes in Roman history, the Elizabethan public of all degrees of
intelligence welcomed Shakespeare's efforts with an enthusiasm which
they rigidly withheld from Ben Jonson's. This is how an ordinary
playgoer contrasted the reception of Jonson's Roman play of
_Catiline's Conspiracy_ with that of Shakespeare's Roman play of
_Julius Cæsar_:--
So have I seen when Cæsar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius--oh! how the audience
Were ravished, with what wonder they went thence;
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious though well-laboured Catiline.
Shakespeare was the popular favourite. It is rare that the artist who
is a hero with the multitude is also a hero with the cultivated few.
But Shakespeare's universality of appeal was such as to include among
his worshippers from the first the trained and the untrained playgoer
of his time.
IV
Very early in his career did Shakespeare attract the notice of the
cultivated section of Elizabeth's Court, and hardly sufficient notice
has been taken by students of the poet's biography of the earliest
recognition accorded him by the great queen, herself an inveterate
lover of the drama, and an embodiment of the taste of the people in
literature. The story is worth retelling. In the middle of December
1594, Queen Elizabeth removed from Whitehall to Greenwich to spend
Christmas at that palace of Greenwich in which she was born sixty-one
years earlier. And she made the celebration of Christmas of 1594 more
memorable than any other in the annals of her reign or in the literary
history of the country by summoning Shakespeare to Court. It was less
than eight years since the poet had first set foot in the metropolis.
His career was little more than opened. But by 1594 Shakespeare had
given his countrymen unmistakable indications of the stuff of which he
was made. His progress had been more sure than rapid. A young man of
two-and-twenty, burdened with a wife and three children, he had left
his home in the little country town of Stratford-on-Avon in 1586 to
seek his fortune in London. Without friends, without money, he had,
like any other stage-struck youth, set his heart on becoming an actor
in the metropolis. Fortune favoured him. He sought and won the humble
office of call-boy in a London playhouse; but no sooner had his foot
touched the lowest rung of the theatrical ladder than his genius
taught him that the topmost rung was within his reach. He tried his
hand on the revision of an old play, and the manager was not slow to
recognise an unmatched gift for dramatic writing.
It was not probably till 1591, when Shakespeare was twenty-seven, that
his earliest original play, _Love's Labour's Lost_, was performed. It
showed the hand of a beginner; it abounded in trivial witticisms. But
above all, there shone out clearly and unmistakably the dramatic and
poetic fire, the humorous outlook on life, the insight into human
feeling, which were to inspire Titanic achievements in the future.
Soon after, Shakespeare scaled the tragic heights of _Romeo and
Juliet_, and he was hailed as the prophet of a new world of art.
Fashionable London society then, as now, befriended the theatre.
Cultivated noblemen offered their patronage to promising writers for
the stage, and Shakespeare soon gained the ear of the young Earl of
Southampton, one of the most accomplished and handsome of the queen's
noble courtiers, who was said to spend nearly all his time in going
to the playhouse every day. It was at Southampton's suggestion, that,
in the week preceding the Christmas of 1594, the Lord Chamberlain sent
word to The Theatre in Shoreditch, where Shakespeare was at work as
playwright and actor, that the poet was expected at Court on two days
following Christmas, in order to give his sovereign on the two
evenings a taste of his quality. He was to act before her in his own
plays.
It cannot have been Shakespeare's promise as an actor that led to the
royal summons. His histrionic fame had not progressed at the same rate
as his literary repute. He was never to win the laurels of a great
actor. His most conspicuous triumph on the stage was achieved in
middle life as the Ghost in his own _Hamlet_, and he ordinarily
confined his efforts to old men of secondary rank. Ample compensation
was provided by his companions for his personal deficiencies as an
actor on his first visit to Court; he was to come supported by actors
of the highest eminence in their generation. Directions were given
that the greatest of the tragic actors of the day, Richard Burbage,
and the greatest of the comic actors, William Kemp, were to bear the
young actor-dramatist company. With neither of these was Shakespeare's
histrionic position then or at any time comparable. For years they
were leaders of the acting profession.
Shakespeare's relations with Burbage and Kemp were close, both
privately and professionally. Almost all Shakespeare's great tragic
characters were created on the stage by Burbage, who had lately roused
London to enthusiasm by his stirring presentation of Shakespeare's
_Richard III._ for the first time. As long as Kemp lived, he conferred
a like service on many of Shakespeare's comic characters; and he had
recently proved his worth as a Shakespearean comedian by his original
rendering of the part of Peter, the Nurse's graceless attendant, in
_Romeo and Juliet_. Thus stoutly backed, Shakespeare appeared for the
first time in the royal presence-chamber of Greenwich Palace on the
evening of St Stephen's Day (the Boxing Day of subsequent generations)
in 1594.
Extant documentary evidence attests that Shakespeare and his two
associates performed one "comedy or interlude" on that night of Boxing
Day in 1594, and gave another "comedy or interlude" on the next night
but one; that the Lord Chamberlain paid the three men for their
services the sum of £13, 6s. 8d., and that the queen added to the
honorarium, as a personal proof of her satisfaction, the further sum
of £6, 13s. 4d. These were substantial sums in those days, when the
purchasing power of money was eight times as much as it is to-day, and
the three actors' reward would now be equivalent to £160.
Unhappily the record does not go beyond the payment of the money. What
words of commendation or encouragement Shakespeare received from his
royal auditor are not handed down, nor do we know for certain what
plays were performed on the great occasion. All the scenes came from
Shakespeare's repertory, and it is reasonable to infer that they were
drawn from _Love's Labour's Lost_, which was always popular in later
years at Elizabeth's Court, and from _The Comedy of Errors_, where the
farcical confusions and horse-play were after the queen's own heart
and robust taste. But nothing can be stated with absolute certainty
except that on December 29 Shakespeare travelled up the river from
Greenwich to London with a heavier purse and a lighter heart than on
his setting out. That the visit had in all ways been crowned with
success there is ample indirect evidence. He and his work had
fascinated his sovereign, and many a time during her remaining nine
years of life was she to seek delight again in the renderings of plays
by himself and his fellow-actors at her palaces on the banks of the
Thames. When Shakespeare was penning his new play of _A Midsummer
Night's Dream_ next year, he could not forbear to make a passing
obeisance of gallantry (in that vein for which the old spinster queen
was always thirsting) to "a fair vestal throned by the West," who
passed her life "in maiden meditation, fancy free."
Although literature and art can flourish without royal favour and
royal patronage, still it is rare that royal patronage has any other
effect than that of raising those who are its objects in the
estimation of contemporaries. The interest that Shakespeare's work
excited at Court was continuous throughout his life. When James I.
ascended the throne, no author was more frequently honoured by
"command" performances of his plays in the presence of the sovereign.
And then, as now, the playgoer's appreciation was quickened by his
knowledge that the play they were witnessing had been produced before
the Court at Whitehall a few days earlier. Shakespeare's publishers
were not above advertising facts like these, as may be seen by a
survey of the title-pages of editions published in his lifetime. "The
pleasant conceited comedy called _Love's Labour's Lost_" was
advertised with the appended words, "as it was presented before her
highness this last Christmas." "A most pleasant and excellent
conceited comedy of _Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of
Windsor_" was stated to have been "divers times acted both before her
majesty and elsewhere." The great play of _Lear_ was advertised, "as
it was played before the king's majesty at Whitehall on St Stephen's
night in the Christmas holidays."
V
Although Shakespeare's illimitable command of expression, his
universality of knowledge and insight, cannot easily be overlooked by
any man or woman of ordinary human faculty, still, from some points of
view, there is ground for surprise that the Elizabethan playgoer's
enthusiasm for Shakespeare's work was so marked and unequivocal as we
know that it was.
Let us consider for a moment the physical conditions of the theatre,
the methods of stage representation, in Shakespeare's day. Theatres
were in their infancy. The theatre was a new institution in social
life for Shakespeare's public, and the whole system of the theatrical
world came into being after Shakespeare came into the world. In
estimating Shakespeare's genius one ought to bear in mind that he was
a pioneer--almost the creator or first designer--of English drama, as
well as the practised workman in unmatched perfection. There were
before his day some efforts made at dramatic representation. The
Middle Ages had their miracle plays and moralities and interludes. But
of poetic, literary, romantic drama, England knew nothing until
Shakespeare was of age. Marlowe, who in his early years inaugurated
English tragedy, was Shakespeare's senior by only two months. It was
not till 1576, when Shakespeare was twelve, that London for the first
time possessed a theatre--a building definitely built for the purpose
of presenting plays. Before that year, inn-yards or platforms, which
were improvised in market-places or fields, served for the performance
of interludes or moralities.
Nor was it precisely in London proper that this primal theatre, which
is known in history simply as The Theatre, was set up. London in
Shakespeare's day was a small town, barely a mile square, with a
population little exceeding 60,000 persons. Within the circuit of the
city-walls vacant spaces were sparse, and public opinion deprecated
the erection of buildings upon them. Moreover, the puritan clergy and
their pious flocks, who constituted an active section of the citizens,
were inclined to resist the conversion of any existing building into
such a Satanic trap for unwary souls as they believed a playhouse of
necessity to be.
It was, accordingly, in the fields near London, not in London itself,
that the first theatre was set up. Adjoining the city lay pleasant
meadows, which were bright in spring-time with daisies and violets.
Green lanes conducted the wayfarer to the rural retreat of Islington,
and citizens went for change of air to the rustic seclusion of
Mary-le-bone. A site for the first-born of London playhouses was
chosen in the spacious fields of Finsbury and Shoreditch, which the
Great Eastern Railway now occupies. The innovation of a theatre, even
though it were placed outside the walls of the city, excited serious
misgiving among the godly minority. But, after much controversy, the
battle was finally won by the supporters of the play, and The Theatre
was launched on a prosperous career. Two or three other theatres
quickly sprang up in neighbouring parts of London's environment. When
Shakespeare was reaching the zenith of his career, the centre of
theatrical life was transferred from Shoreditch to the Southwark bank
of the river Thames, at the south side of London Bridge, which lay
outside the city's boundaries, but was easy of access to residents
within them. It was at the Globe Theatre on Bankside, which was
reached by bridge or by boat from the city-side of the river, that
Shakespearean drama won its most glorious triumphs.
VI
Despite the gloomy warnings of the preachers, the new London theatres
had for the average Elizabethan all the fascination that a new toy has
for a child. The average Elizabethan repudiated the jeremiads of the
ultra-pious, and instantaneously became an enthusiastic playgoer.
During the last year of the sixteenth century, an intelligent visitor
to London, Thomas Platter, a native of Basle, whose journal has
recently been discovered,[6] described with ingenuous sympathy the
delight which the populace displayed in the new playhouses.
[Footnote 6: Professor Binz of Basle printed in September 1899 some
extracts from Thomas Platter's unpublished diary of travels under the
title: _Londoner Theater und Schauspiele im Jahre 1599_. Platter spent
a month in London--September 18 to October 20, 1599. Platter's
manuscript is in the Library of Basle University.]
Some attractions which the theatres offered had little concern with
the drama. Their advantages included the privileges of eating and
drinking while the play was in progress. After the play there was
invariably a dance on the stage, often a brisk and boisterous Irish
jig.