exhilarating. The mass of the spectators filled the pit, where there
was standing room only; there were no seats. The admission rarely cost
more than a penny; but there was no roof. The rain beat at pleasure on
the heads of the "penny" auditors; while pickpockets commonly plied
their trade among them without much hindrance when the piece absorbed
the attention of the "house." Seats or benches were only to be found
in the two galleries, the larger portions of which were separated into
"rooms" or boxes; prices there ranged from twopence to half-a-crown.
If the playgoer had plenty of money at his command he could, according
to the German visitor, hire not only a seat but a cushion to elevate
his stature; "so that," says our author, "he might not only see the
play, but"--what is also often more important for rich people--"be
seen" by the audience to be occupying a specially distinguished place.
Fashionable playgoers of the male sex might, if they opened their
purses wide enough, occupy stools on the wide platform-stage. Such a
practice proved embarrassing, not only to the performers, but to those
who had to content themselves with the penny pit. Standing in front
and by the sides of the projecting stage, they could often only catch
glimpses of the actors through chinks in serried ranks of stools.
The histrionic and scenic conditions, in which Shakespeare's plays
were originally produced, present a further series of disadvantages
which, from our modern point of view, render the more amazing the
unqualified enthusiasm of the Elizabethan playgoer.
There was no scenery, although there were crude endeavours to create
scenic illusion by means of "properties" like rocks, tombs, caves,
trees, tables, chairs, and pasteboard dishes of food. There was at the
outset no music, save flourishes on trumpets at the opening of the
play and between the acts. The scenes within each act were played
continuously without pause. The bare boards of the platform-stage,
which no proscenium nor curtain darkened, projected so far into the
auditorium, that the actors spoke in the very centre of the house.
Trap-doors were in use for the entrance of "ghosts" and other
mysterious personages. At the back of the stage was a raised platform
or balcony, from which often hung loose curtains; through them the
actors passed to the forepart of the stage. The balcony was pressed
into the service when the text of the play indicated that the speakers
were not actually standing on the same level. From the raised platform
Juliet addressed Romeo in the balcony scene, and the citizens of
Angers in _King John_ held colloquy with the English besiegers. This
was, indeed, almost the furthest limit of the Elizabethan
stage-manager's notion of scenic realism. The boards, which were bare
save for the occasional presence of rough properties, were held to
present adequate semblance, as the play demanded, of a king's
throne-room, a chapel, a forest, a ship at sea, a mountainous pass, a
market-place, a battle-field, or a churchyard.
The costumes had no pretensions to fit the period or place of the
action. They were the ordinary dresses of various classes of the day,
but were often of rich material, and in the height of the current
fashion. False hair and beards, crowns and sceptres, mitres and
croziers, armour, helmets, shields, vizors, and weapons of war, hoods,
bands, and cassocks, were mainly relied on to indicate among the
characters differences of rank or profession.
The foreign observer, Thomas Platter of Basle, was impressed by the
splendour of the actors' costumes. He accounted for it in a manner
that negatives any suggestion of dramatic propriety:--
"The players wear the most costly and beautiful dresses, for
it is the custom in England, that when noblemen or knights
die, they leave their finest clothes to their servants, who,
since it would not be fitting for them to wear such splendid
garments, sell them soon afterwards to the players for a
small sum."
The most striking defect in the practice of the Elizabethan playhouse,
according to accepted notions, lies in the allotment of the female
rôles. It was thought unseemly for women to act at all. Female parts
were played by boys or men--a substitution lacking, from the modern
point of view, in grace and seemliness. But the standard of propriety
in such matters varies from age to age. Shakespeare alludes quite
complacently to the appearance of boys and men in women's parts. He
makes Rosalind say, laughingly and saucily, to the men of the
audience in the epilogue to _As You Like It_: "If I were a woman I
would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me." "_If I were_
a woman," she says. The jest lies in the fact that the speaker was not
a woman but a boy. Similarly, Cleopatra on her downfall in _Antony and
Cleopatra_, (V. ii. 220), laments
the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us ... and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra _boy_ my greatness.
The experiment of entrusting a boy with the part of Ophelia was lately
tried in London not unsuccessfully; but it is difficult to realise how
a boy or young man could adequately interpret most of Shakespeare's
female characters. It seems almost sacrilegious to conceive the part
of Cleopatra, the most highly sensitised in its minutest details of
all dramatic portrayals of female character,--it seems almost
sacrilegious to submit Cleopatra's sublimity of passion to
interpretation by an unfledged representative of the other sex. Yet
such solecisms were imperative under the theatrical system of the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Men taking women's parts
seem to have worn masks, but that can hardly have improved matters.
Flute, when he complains that it would hardly befit him to play a
woman's part because he had a beard coming, is bidden by his
resourceful manager, Quince, play Thisbe in a "mask." At times actors
who had long lost the roses of youth masqueraded in women's rôles.
Thereby the ungainliness, which marked the distribution of the cast in
Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses, was often forced into stronger
light.
It was not till the seventeenth century was well advanced that women
were permitted to act in public theatres. Then the gracelessness of
the masculine method was acknowledged and deplored. It was the
character of Desdemona which was first undertaken by a woman, and the
absurdity of the old practice was noticed in the prologue written for
this revival of _Othello_, which was made memorable by the innovation.
Some lines in the prologue describe the earlier system thus:--
For to speak truth, men act, that are between
Forty or fifty, wenches of fifteen,
With bone so large and nerve so uncompliant,
When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.
Profound commiseration seems due to the Elizabethan playgoer, who was
liable to have his faith in the tenderness and gentleness of Desdemona
rudely shaken by the irruption on the stage of a brawny,
broad-shouldered athlete, masquerading in her sweet name. Boys or men
of all shapes and sizes squeaking or bawling out the tender and
pathetic lines of Shakespeare's heroines, and no joys of scenery to
distract the playgoer from the uncouth inconsistency! At first sight
it would seem that the Elizabethan playgoer's lot was anything but
happy.
VII
The Elizabethan's hard fate strangely contrasts with the situation of
the playgoer of the nineteenth or twentieth century. To the latter
Shakespeare is presented in a dazzling plenitude of colour. Music
punctuates not merely intervals between scenes and acts, but critical
pauses in the speeches of the actors. Pictorial tableaux enthral the
most callous onlooker. Very striking is the contrast offered by the
methods of representation accepted with enthusiasm by the Elizabethan
playgoer and those deemed essential by the fashionable modern manager.
There seems a relish of barbarism in the ancient system when it is
compared with the one now in vogue.
I fear the final conclusion to be drawn from the contrast is, contrary
to expectation, more creditable to our ancestors than to ourselves.
The needful dramatic illusion was obviously evoked in the playgoer of
the past with an ease that is unknown to the present patrons of the
stage. The absence of scenery, the substitution of boys and men for
women, could only have passed muster with the Elizabethan spectator
because he was able to realise the dramatic potency of the poet's work
without any, or any but the slightest, adventitious aid outside the
words of the play.
The Elizabethan playgoer needs no pity. It is ourselves who are
deserving objects of compassion, because we lack those qualities, the
possession of which enabled the Elizabethan to acknowledge in
Shakespeare's work, despite its manner of production, "the delight and
wonder of his stage." The imaginative faculty was far from universal
among the Elizabethan playgoers. The playgoing mob always includes
groundlings who delight exclusively in dumb shows and noise. Many of
Shakespeare's contemporaries complained that there were playgoers who
approved nothing "but puppetry and loved ridiculous antics," and that
there were men who, going to the playhouse only "to laugh and feed
fool-fat," "checked at all goodness there."[7] No public of any age or
country is altogether free from such infirmities. But the reception
accorded to Shakespeare's plays in the theatre of his day, in
contemporary theatrical conditions, is proof-positive of a signal
imaginative faculty in an exceptionally large proportion of the
playgoers.
[Footnote 7: Chapman's _Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois_, Act I., Sc. i.]
To the Elizabethan actor a warm tribute is due. Shakespeare has
declared with emphasis that no amount of scenery can secure genuine
success on the stage for a great work of the imagination. He is no
less emphatic in the value he sets on competent acting. In _Hamlet_,
as every reader will remember, the dramatist points out the perennial
defects of the actor, and shows how they may and must be corrected. He
did all he could for the Elizabethan playgoer in the way of insisting
that the art of acting must be studied seriously, and that the
dramatist's words must reach the ears of the audience, clearly and
intelligibly enunciated.
"Speak the speech, I pray you," he tells the actor, "as I pronounce it
to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your
players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not
saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in
the very torrent, tempest, and--as I may say--whirlwind of passion,
you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness.
"Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor:
suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special
observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. O! there be
players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that
highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of
Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted
and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made
men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably."
The player amiably responds: "I hope we have reformed that
indifferently with us." Shakespeare in the person of Hamlet retorts in
a tone of some impatience: "O! reform it altogether. And let those
that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them." The
applause which welcomed Shakespeare's masterpieces on their first
representation is adequate evidence that the leading Elizabethan
actors in the main obeyed these instructions.
VIII
Nevertheless the final success of a great imaginative play on the
stage does not depend entirely on the competence of the actor.
Encircling and determining all conditions is the fitness of the
audience. A great imaginative play well acted will not achieve genuine
success unless the audience has at command sufficient imaginative
power to induce in them an active sympathy with the efforts, not only
of the actor, but of the dramatist.
It is not merely in the first chorus to _Henry V._ that Shakespeare
has declared his conviction that the creation of the needful dramatic
illusion is finally due to exercise of the imagination on the part of
the audience.[8] Theseus, in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, in the
capacity of a spectator of a play which is rendered by indifferent
actors, makes a somewhat depreciatory reflection on the character of
acting, whatever its degree or capacity. But the value of Theseus's
deliverance lies in its clear definition of the part which the
audience has to play, if it do its duty by great drama.
[Footnote 8: See pp. 20-1, _supra_.]
"The best in this kind," says Theseus of actors, "are but shadows, and
the worst are no worse, _if imagination amend them_." To which
Hippolyta, less tolerant than Theseus of the incapacity of the players
to whom she is listening, tartly retorts: "It must be your imagination
(_i.e._, the spectator's), then, and not theirs (_i.e._, the
actors')."
These sentences mean that at its very best acting is but a shadow or
simulation of life, and that acting at its very worst is likewise a
shadow or simulation. But the imagination of the audience is supreme
controller of the theatre, and can, if it be of adequate intensity,
even cause inferior acting to yield effects hardly distinguishable
from those of the best.
It would be unwise to press Theseus's words to extreme limits. All
that it behoves us to deduce from them is the unimpeachable principle
that the success of the romantic drama on the stage depends not merely
on the actor's gift of imagination, but to an even larger extent on
the possession by the audience of a similar faculty. Good acting is
needful. Scenery in moderation will aid the dramatic illusion,
although excess of scenery or scenic machinery may destroy it
altogether. Dramatic illusion must ultimately spring from the active
and unrestricted exercise of the imaginative faculty by author,
actor, and audience in joint-partnership.
What is the moral to be deduced from any examination of the
Elizabethan playgoer's attitude to Shakespeare's plays? It is
something of this kind. We must emulate our ancestors' command of the
imagination. We must seek to enlarge our imaginative sympathy with
Shakespeare's poetry. The imaginative faculty will not come to us at
our call; it will not come to us by the mechanism of study; it may not
come to us at all. It is easier to point out the things that will
hinder than the things that will hasten its approach. Absorption in
the material needs of life, the concentration of energy on the
increase of worldly goods, leave little room for the entrance into the
brain of the imaginative faculty, or for its free play when it is
there. The best way of seeking it is by reading the greatest of great
imaginative literature, by freely yielding the mind to its influence,
and by exercising the mind under its sway. And the greatest
imaginative literature that was ever penned was penned by Shakespeare.
No counsel is wiser than that of those two personal friends of his,
who were the first editors of his work, and penned words to this
effect: "Read him therefore, and again and again, and then if you do
not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger" of losing a
saving grace of life.
III
SHAKESPEARE IN ORAL TRADITION[9]
[Footnote 9: This paper was first printed in _The Nineteenth Century
and After_, February 1902.]
I
Biographers did not lie in wait for men of eminence on their
death-beds in Shakespeare's epoch. To the advantage of literature, and
to the less than might be anticipated disadvantage of history (for
your death-bed biographer, writing under kinsfolk's tear-laden eyes,
must needs be smoother-tongued than truthful), the place of the modern
memoir-writer was filled in Shakespeare's day by friendly poets, who
were usually alert to pay fit homage in elegiac verse to a dead hero's
achievements. In that regard, Shakespeare's poetic friends showed at
his death exceptional energy. During his lifetime men of letters had
bestowed on his "reigning wit," on his kingly supremacy of genius,
most generous stores of eulogy. Within two years of the end a
sonneteer had justly deplored that something of Shakespeare's own
power, to which he deprecated pretension, was needful to those who
should praise him aright. But when Shakespeare lay dead in the spring
of 1616, when, as one of his admirers technically phrased it, he had
withdrawn from the stage of the world to the "tiring-house" or
dressing-room of the grave, the flood of panegyrical lamentation was
not checked by the sense of literary inferiority which in all
sincerity oppressed the spirits of surviving companions.
One of the earliest of the elegies was a sonnet by William Basse, who
gave picturesque expression to the conviction that Shakespeare would
enjoy for all time an unique reverence on the part of his countrymen.
In the opening lines of his poem Basse apostrophised Chaucer, Spenser,
and the dramatist Francis Beaumont, three poets who had already
received the recognition of burial in Westminster Abbey--Beaumont, the
youngest of them, only five weeks before Shakespeare died. To this
honoured trio Basse made appeal to "lie a thought more nigh" one
another, so as to make room for the newly-dead Shakespeare within
their "sacred sepulchre." Then, in the second half of his sonnet, the
poet, developing a new thought, argued that Shakespeare, in right of
his pre-eminence, merited a burial-place apart from all his fellows.
With a glance at Shakespeare's distant grave in the chancel of
Stratford-on-Avon Church, the writer exclaimed:--
Under this carved marble of thine own
Sleep, brave tragedian, Shakespeare, sleep _alone_.
The fine sentiment found many a splendid echo. It resounded in Ben
Jonson's lines of 1623:--
My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further to make thee a room.
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
Milton wrote a few years later, in 1630, how Shakespeare, "sepulchred"
in "the monument" of his writings,
in such pomp doth lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
Never was a glorious immortality foretold for any man with more solemn
confidence than it was foretold for Shakespeare at his death by his
circle of adorers. When Time, one elegist said, should dissolve his
"Stratford monument," the laurel about Shakespeare's brow would wear
its greenest hue. Shakespeare's critical friend, Ben Jonson, was but
one of a numerous band who imagined the "sweet swan of Avon," "the
star of poets," shining for ever as a constellation in the firmament.
Such was the invariable temper in which literary men gave vent to
their grief on learning the death of the "beloved author," "the famous
scenicke poet," "the admirable dramaticke poet," "that famous writer
and actor," "worthy master William Shakespeare" of Stratford-on-Avon.
II
Unqualified and sincere was the eulogy awarded to Shakespeare, alike
in his lifetime and immediately after his death. But the spirit and
custom of the age confided to future generations the duty of first
offering him the more formal honour of prosaic and critical biography.
The biographic memoir, which consists of precise and duly
authenticated dates and records of domestic and professional
experiences and achievements, was in England a comparatively late
growth. It had no existence when Shakespeare died. It began to blossom
in the eighteenth century, and did not flourish luxuriantly till a far
more recent period. Meagre seeds of the modern art of biography were,
indeed, sown within a few years of Shakespeare's death; but outside
the unique little field of Izaak Walton's tillage, the first
sproutings were plants so different from the fully developed tree,
that they can with difficulty be identified with the genus. Apart from
Izaak Walton's exceptional efforts, the biographical spirit first
betrayed itself in England in slender, occasional pamphlets of
rhapsodical froth, after the model of the funeral sermon. There
quickly followed more substantial volumes of collective biography,
which mainly supplied arbitrarily compiled, if extended, catalogues of
names. To each name were attached brief annotations, which
occasionally offered a fact or a date, but commonly consisted of a few
sentences of grotesque, uncritical eulogy.
Fuller's _Worthies of England_, which was begun about 1643 and was
published posthumously in 1662, was the first English compendium of
biography of this aboriginal pattern. Shakespeare naturally found
place in Fuller's merry pages, for the author loved in his eccentric
fashion his country's literature, and he had sought the society of
those who had come to close quarters with literary heroes of the past
generation. Of that generation his own life just touched the fringe,
he being eight years old when Shakespeare died. Fuller described the
dramatist as a native of Stratford-on-Avon, who "was in some sort a
compound of three eminent poets"--Martial, "in the warlike sound of
his name"; Ovid, for the naturalness and wit of his poetry; and
Plautus, alike for the extent of his comic power and his lack of
scholarly training. He was, Fuller continued, an eminent instance of
the rule that a poet is born not made. "Though his genius," he warns
us, "generally was jocular and inclining him to festivity, yet he
could, when so disposed, be solemn and serious." His comedies, Fuller
adds, would rouse laughter even in the weeping philosopher Heraclitus,
while his tragedies would bring tears even to the eyes of the laughing
philosopher Democritus.
Of positive statements respecting Shakespeare's career Fuller is
economical. He commits himself to nothing more than may be gleaned
from the following sentences:--
Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson; which
two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English
man-of-war: master Jonson (like the former) was built far
higher in learning; solid, but slow, in his performances.
Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk,
but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack
about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of
his wit and invention. He died _Anno Domini_ 1616, and was
buried at Stratford-upon-Avon, the town of his nativity.
Fuller's successors did their work better in some regards, because
they laboured in narrower fields. Many of them showed a welcome
appreciation of a main source of their country's permanent reputation
by confining their energies to the production of biographical
catalogues, not of all manners of heroes, but solely of those who had
distinguished themselves in poetry and the drama.[10] In 1675 a
biographical catalogue of poets was issued for the first time in
England, and the example once set was quickly followed. No less than
three more efforts of the like kind came to fruition before the end of
the century.
[Footnote 10: Such a compilation had been contemplated in 1614, two
years before the dramatist died, by one of Shakespeare's own
associates, Thomas Heywood. Twenty-one years later, in 1635, Heywood
spoke of "committing to the public view" his summary _Lives of the
Poets_, but nothing more was heard of that project.]
In all four biographical manuals Shakespeare was accorded more or less
imposing space. Although Fuller's eccentric compliments were usually
repeated, they were mingled with far more extended and discriminating
tributes. Two of the compilers designated Shakespeare "the glory of
the English stage"; a third wrote, "I esteem his plays beyond any that
have ever been published in our language"; while the fourth quoted
with approval Dryden's fine phrase: "Shakespeare was the Man who of
all Modern and perhaps Ancient Poets had the largest and most
comprehensive Soul." But the avowed principles of these tantalising
volumes justify no expectation of finding in them solid information.
The biographical cataloguers of the seventeenth century did little
more than proclaim Shakespeare and the other great poets of the
country to be fit subjects for formal biography as soon as the type
should be matured. That was the message of greatest virtue which these
halting chroniclers delivered.
In Shakespeare's case their message was not long neglected. In 1709
Nicholas Rowe, afterwards George the First's poet laureate, published
the first professed biography of the poet. The eminence of the
subject justified such alacrity, and it had no precise parallel. More
or less definite lives of a few of Shakespeare's great literary
contemporaries followed his biography at long intervals. But the whole
field has never been occupied by the professed biographer. In some
cases the delay has meant loss of opportunity for ever. Very many
distinguished Elizabethan and Jacobean authors have shared the fate of
John Webster, next to Shakespeare the most eminent tragic dramatist of
the era, of whom no biography was ever attempted, and no positive
biographic fact survives.