consequence of Shakespeare's perfunctory adoption of the Tudor doctrine
that Richard was a blood-boltered monster; but in a larger degree it was
the result of Cibber's vulgar distortion of the original piece. The
actual character of the king,--who seems to have been one of the ablest
and wisest monarchs that ever reigned in England--has never recovered,
and it never will recover, from the odium that was heaped upon it by the
Tudor historians and accepted and ratified by the great genius of
Shakespeare. The stage character of the king has been almost as
effectually damned by the ingenious theatrical claptrap with which
Cibber misrepresented and vulgarised Shakespeare's conception, assisted
by the efforts of a long line of blood-and-thunder tragedians, only too
well pleased to depict a gory, blathering, mugging miscreant, such as
their limited intelligence enabled them to comprehend. The stage
Richard, however, may possibly be redeemed. In Cibber he is everything
that Queen Margaret calls him, and worse than a brute. In Shakespeare,
although a miscreant, he is a man. The return to Shakespeare,
accordingly, is a step in the right direction. That step was taken some
time ago, although not maintained, first by Macready, then by Samuel
Phelps, then by Edwin Booth, and then by Henry Irving. Their good
example was followed by Richard Mansfield. He used a version of the
tragedy, made by himself,--a piece indicative of thoughtful study of the
subject as well as a keen intuitive grasp of it. He did not stop short
at being a commentator. Aiming to impersonate a character he treated
Shakespeare's prolix play in such a manner as to make it a practicable
living picture of a past age. The version was in five acts, preserving
the text of the original, much condensed, and introducing a few lines
from Cibber. It began with a bright processional scene before the Tower
of London, in which Elizabeth, Queen of Edward IV., was conspicuous, and
against that background of "glorious summer" it placed the dangerous
figure of the Duke of Gloster. It comprised the murder of Henry VI., the
wooing of Lady Anne,--not in a London street, but in a rural place, on
the road to Chertsey; the lamentation for King Edward IV.; the episode
of the boy princes; the condemnation of Hastings,--a scene that
brilliantly denotes the mingled artifice and savagery of Shakespeare's
Gloster; the Buckingham plot; the priest and mayor scene; the
temptation of Tyrrel; the fall of Buckingham; the march to battle; the
episode of the spectres; and the fatal catastrophe on Bosworth Field.
Enough of the story was thus related to satisfy the Shakespeare scholar.
The notable peculiarity was the assumption that there are considerable
lapses of time at intervals during the continuance of the story. The
effort to reconcile poetry with history produced little if any
appreciable practical result upon the stage,--seeing that an audience
would not think of lapses of time unless those lapses were mentioned in
the play-bill. An incessant continuity of action, a ceaseless rush and
whirl of events, is the essential life of the play. No auditor can feel
that Richard has waited twelve years before making any movement or
striking any blow, after his aspiration that heaven will take King
Edward and leave the world for him "to bustle in." That word "bustle" is
a favourite word with Richard. And furthermore there is no development
of his character in Shakespeare's play: there is simply the presentation
of it, complete and rounded at the outset, and remaining invariably and
inflexibly the same to the close.
Mansfield, however, deduced this effect from his consideration of the
flight of time: a contrast between Richard at nineteen and Richard at
thirty-three, a contrast strongly expressive of the reactionary
influence that an experience of evil deeds has produced upon a man who
at first was only a man of evil thoughts and evil will. This imported
into the performance a diversity of delineation without, however,
affecting the formidable weight of the figure of Richard, or its
brilliancy, or its final significance. The embodiment was splendid with
it, and would be just as splendid without it. The presence of heart and
conscience in that demoniac human creature is denoted by Shakespeare and
must be shown by the actor. Precisely at what point his heaven-defying
will should begin to waver is not defined. Mansfield chose to indicate
the operation of remorse and terror in Richard's soul as early as the
throne scene and before yet the king has heard that the royal boys have
been murdered. The effect of his action, equally with the method of it,
was magnificent. You presently saw him possessed of the throne for which
he had so terribly toiled and sinned, and alone upon it, bathed in
blood-red light, the pitiable personification of gorgeous but haunted
evil, marked off from among mankind and henceforth desolate. Throughout
that fine scene Mansfield's portrayal of the fearful struggle between
wicked will and human weakness was in a noble vein of imagination,
profound in its sincerity, affecting in its pathos, and pictorial in its
treatment. In the earlier scenes his mood and his demeanour had been
suffused with a cool, gay, mockery of elegant cynicism. He killed King
Henry with a smile, in a scene of gloomy mystery that might have come
from the pencil of Gustave Dore. He looked upon the mourning Lady Anne
with cheerful irony and he wooed her with all the fervour that passion
and pathos can engender in the behaviour of a hypocrite. His
dissimulation with the princes and with the mayor and the nobles was to
the last degree specious. One of his finest points was the temptation of
Buckingham to murder the princes. There, and indeed at all points, was
observed the absence of even the faintest reminiscence of the ranting,
mouthing, flannel-jawed king of clubs who has so generally strutted and
bellowed as Shakespeare's Gloster. All was bold and telling in the
manner, and yet the manner was reticent with nature and fine with
well-bred continence.
With the throne scene began the spiritual conflict. At least it then
began to be disclosed; and from that moment onward the state of Richard
was seen to be that of Orestes pursued by the furies. But Mansfield was
right, and was consistent, in making the monarch faithful in his
devotion to evil. Richard's presentiments, pangs, and tremors are
intermittent. In the great, empty, darkening throne-room, with its
shadowy nooks and dim corners, shapeless and nameless spectres may
momentarily come upon him and shake his strong spirit with the sinister
menace of hell. Along the dark plains, on the fateful night before the
battle, the sad ghosts may drift and wander, moaning and wailing in the
ghastly gloom; and in that hour of haunted desolation the doomed king
may feel that, after all, he is but mortal man, and that his pre-ordered
destruction is close at hand and not to be averted; but Richard never
deceives himself; never palters with the goodness that he has scorned.
He dies as he has lived, defiant and terrible.
Mansfield's treatment of the ghost scenes at Bosworth was novel,
original, and poetic, and his death scene was not only a display of
personal prowess but a reproduction of historical fact. With a detail
like this the truth of history becomes useful, but in general the actor
cannot safely go back of the Shakespearean scheme. To present Richard as
he probably was would be to present a man of some virtue as well as
great ability. Mansfield's acting revealed an amiable desire to infuse
as much goodness as possible into the Shakespearean conception, but he
obtained his chief success by acting the part substantially according to
Shakespeare and by setting and dressing the play with exceptional if not
altogether exact fidelity to the time, the places, and the persons that
are implicated in the story.
Shakespeare's Richard is a type of colossal will and of restless,
inordinate, terrific activity. The objects of his desire and his effort
are those objects which are incident to supreme power; but his chief
object is that assertion of himself which is irresistibly incited and
steadfastly compelled by the overwhelming, seething, acrid energy of his
feverish soul, burning and raging in his fiery body. He can no more help
projecting himself upon the affairs of the world than the malignant
cobra can help darting upon its prey. He is a vital, elemental force,
grisly, hectic, terrible, impelled by volcanic heat and electrified and
made lurid and deadly by the infernal purpose of restless wickedness. No
actor can impersonate Richard in an adequate manner who does not possess
transcendent force of will, combined with ambitious, incessant, and
restless mental activity. Mansfield in those respects is qualified for
the character, and out of his professional resources he was able to
supply the other elements that are requisite to its constitution and
fulfilment. He presented as Richard a sardonic, scoffing demon, who
nevertheless, somewhere in his complex nature, retains an element of
humanity. He embodied a character that is tragic in its ultimate effect,
but his method was that of the comedian. His portrayal of Richard,
except at those moments when it is veiled with craft and dissimulation,
or at those other and grander moments, infrequent but awful and
agonising, when it is convulsed with terror or with the anguish of
remorse, stood forth boldly in the sunshine, a crystallised and deadly
sarcasm, equally trenchant upon itself and all the world, equally
scornful of things human and things divine. That deadly assumption of
keen and mordant mockery, that cool, glittering, malignant lightness of
manner, was consistently sustained throughout the performance, while the
texture of it was made continuously entertaining by diversity of colour
and inflection, sequent on changing moods; so that Richard was shown as
a creature of the possible world of mankind and not as a fiction of the
stage.
The part was acted by him: it was not declaimed. He made, indeed, a
skilful use of his uncommon voice--keeping its tones light, sweet, and
superficial during the earlier scenes (while yet, in accordance with his
theory of development, Gloster is the personification of evil purpose
only beginning to ripen into evil deed), and then permitting them to
become deeper and more significant and thrilling as the man grows old in
crime and haggard and convulsed in self-conflict and misery. But it was
less with vocal excellence that the auditor was impressed than with the
actor's identification with the part and his revelation of the soul of
it. When first presented Gloster was a mocking devil. The murder of
King Henry was done with malice, but the malice was enwrapped with glee.
In the wooing of Lady Anne there was both heart and passion, but the
mood was that of lightsome duplicity. It is not until years of scheming
and of evil acts, engendering, promoting, and sustaining a condition of
mental horror and torture, have ravaged his person and set their seal
upon him, in sunken cheek and hollow eye, in shattered nerves and deep
and thrilling voice, surcharged at once with inveterate purpose and with
incessant agony, that this light manner vanishes, and the demeanour and
action of the wicked monarch becomes ruthless, direct, and terrible.
Whether, upon the basis of a play so discursive, so episodical, so
irresolutely defined as Shakespeare's _Richard the Third_, that theory
of the development of its central character is logically tenable is a
dubious question. In Shakespeare the character is presented full-grown
at the start, and then, through a confused tangle of historical events,
is launched into action. Nevertheless in his practical application of it
Mansfield made his theory effective by a novel, powerful, interesting
performance. You could not help perceiving in Mansfield's embodiment
that Gloster was passing through phases of experience--that the man
changed, as men do change in life, the integral character remaining the
same in its original fibre, but the condition varying, in accordance
with the reaction of conduct upon temperament and conscience.
Mansfield deeply moved his audience in the repulse of Buckingham, in the
moody menace of the absent Stanley, in the denunciation of Hastings, and
in the awakening from the dream on the night before the battle.
Playgoers have seldom seen a dramatic climax so thrilling as his
hysterical recognition of Catesby, after the moment of doubt whether
this be not also a phantom of his terrific dream. It was not so much by
startling theatrical effects, however, as by subtle denotements, now of
the tempest and now of the brooding horror in the king's heart, that the
actor gained his victory. The embodiment lacked incessant fiery
expedition--the explosive, meteoric quality that astounds and dazzles.
Chief among the beauties was imagination. The attitude of the monarch
toward his throne--the infernal triumph, and yet the remorseful agony
and withering fear--in the moment of ghastly loneliness when he knows
that the innocent princes have been murdered and that his imperial
pathway is clear, made up one of the finest spectacles of dramatic
illumination that the stage has afforded. You saw the murderer's hideous
exultation, and then, in an instant, as the single ray of red light from
the setting sun streamed through the Gothic window and fell upon his
evil head, you saw him shrink in abject fear, cowering in the shadow of
his throne; and the dusky room was seemingly peopled with gliding
spectres. That treatment was theatrical, but in no derogatory sense
theatrical--for it comports with the great speech on conscience; not the
fustian of Cibber, about mutton and short-lived pleasure, but the speech
that Shakespeare has put into Richard's mouth; the speech that inspired
Mansfield's impersonation--the brilliant embodiment of an intellectual
man, predisposed to evil, who yields to that inherent impulse, and
thereafter, although intermittently convulsed with remorse, fights with
tremendous energy against the goodness that he scorns and defies, till
at last he dashes himself to pieces against the adamant of eternal law.
XXI.
GENEVIEVE WARD: FORGET ME NOT.
In the season of 1880-81 Genevieve Ward made a remarkably brilliant hit
with her embodiment of Stephanie De Mohrivart, in the play of _Forget Me
Not_, by Herman Merivale, and since then she has acted that part
literally all round the world. It was an extraordinary
performance--potent with intellectual character, beautiful with
refinement, nervous and steel-like with indomitable purpose and icy
glitter, intense with passion, painfully true to an afflicting ideal of
reality, and at last splendidly tragic: and it was a shining example of
ductile and various art. Such a work ought surely to be recorded as one
of the great achievements of the stage. Genevieve Ward showed herself to
possess in copious abundance peculiar qualities of power and beauty upon
which mainly the part of Stephanie is reared. The points of assimilation
between the actress and the part were seen to consist in an imperial
force of character, intellectual brilliancy, audacity of mind, iron
will, perfect elegance of manners, a profound self-knowledge, and
unerring intuitions as to the relation of motive and conduct in that
vast network of circumstance which is the social fabric. Stephanie
possesses all those attributes; and all those attributes Genevieve Ward
supplied, with the luxuriant adequacy and grace of nature. But Stephanie
superadds to those attributes a bitter, mocking cynicism, thinly veiled
by artificial suavity and logically irradiant from natural hardness of
heart, coupled with an insensibility that has been engendered by cruel
experience of human selfishness. This, together with a certain mystical
touch of the animal freedom, whether in joy or wrath, that goes with a
being having neither soul nor conscience, the actress had to supply--and
did supply--by her art. As interpreted by Genevieve Ward the character
was reared, not upon a basis of unchastity but upon a basis of
intellectual perversion. Stephanie has followed--at first with
self-contempt, afterward with sullen indifference, finally with the bold
and brilliant hardihood of reckless defiance--a life of crime. She is
audacious, unscrupulous, cruel; a consummate tactician; almost sexless,
yet a siren in knowledge and capacity to use the arts of her sex;
capable of any wickedness to accomplish an end, yet trivial enough to
have no higher end in view than the reinvestiture of herself with social
recognition; cold as snow; implacable as the grave; remorseless; wicked;
but, beneath all this depravity, capable of self-pity, capable of
momentary regret, capable of a little human tenderness, aware of the
glory of the innocence she has lost, and thus not altogether beyond the
pale of compassion. And she is, in externals,--in everything visible and
audible,--the ideal of grace and melody.
In the presence of an admirable work of art the observer wishes that it
were entirely worthy of being performed and that it were entirely clear
and sound as to its applicability--in a moral sense, or even in an
intellectual sense--to human life. Art does not go far when it stops
short at the revelation of the felicitous powers of the artist; and it
is not altogether right when it tends to beguile sympathy with an
unworthy object and perplex a spectator's perceptions as to good and
evil. Genevieve Ward's performance of Stephanie, brilliant though it
was, did not redeem the character from its bleak exile from human
sympathy. The actress managed, by a scheme of treatment exclusively her
own, to make Stephanie, for two or three moments, piteous and forlorn;
and her expression of that evanescent anguish--occurring in the appeal
to Sir Horace Welby, her friendly foe, in the strong scene of the second
act--was wonderfully subtle. That appeal, as Genevieve Ward made it,
began in artifice, became profoundly sincere, and then was stunned and
startled into a recoil of resentment by a harsh rebuff, whereupon it
subsided through hysterical levity into frigid and brittle sarcasm and
gay defiance. For a while, accordingly, the feelings of the observer
were deeply moved. Yet this did not make the character of Stephanie less
detestable. The blight remains upon it--and always must remain--that it
repels the interest of the heart. The added blight likewise rests upon
it (though this is of less consequence to a spectator), that it is
burdened with moral sophistry. Vicious conduct in a woman, according to
Stephanie's logic, is not more culpable or disastrous than vicious
conduct in a man: the woman, equally with the man, should have a social
license to sow the juvenile wild oats and effect the middle-aged
reformation; and it is only because there are gay young men who indulge
in profligacy that women sometimes become adventurers and moral
monsters. All this is launched forth in speeches of singular terseness,
eloquence, and vigour; but all this is specious and mischievous
perversion of the truth--however admirably in character from Stephanie's
lips. Every observer who has looked carefully upon the world is aware
that the consequences of wrongdoing by a woman are vastly more
pernicious than those of wrongdoing by a man; that society could not
exist in decency, if to its already inconvenient coterie of reformed
rakes it were to add a legion of reformed wantons; and that it is innate
wickedness and evil propensity that makes such women as Stephanie, and
not the mere existence of the wild young men who are willing to become
their comrades--and who generally end by being their dupes and victims.
It is natural, however, that this adventurer--who has kept a
gambling-hell and ruined many a man, soul and body, and who now wishes
to reinstate herself in a virtuous social position--should thus strive
to palliate her past proceedings. Self-justification is one of the
first laws of life. Even Iago, who never deceives himself, yet announces
one adequate motive for his fearful crimes. Even Bulwer's Margrave--that
prodigy of evil, that cardinal type of infernal, joyous, animal
depravity--can yet paint himself in the light of harmless loveliness and
innocent gayety.
_Forget Me Not_ tells a thin story, but its story has been made to yield
excellent dramatic pictures, splendid moments of intellectual combat,
and affecting contrasts of character. The dialogue, particularly in the
second act, is as strong and as brilliant as polished steel. In that
combat of words Genevieve Ward's acting was delicious with trenchant
skill and fascinating variety. The easy, good-natured, bantering air
with which the strife began, the liquid purity of the tones, the
delicate glow of the arch satire, the icy glitter of the thought and
purpose beneath the words, the transition into pathos and back again
into gay indifference and deadly hostility, the sudden and terrible mood
of menace, when at length the crisis had passed and the evil genius had
won its temporary victory--all those were in perfect taste and
consummate harmony. Seeing that brilliant, supple, relentless,
formidable figure, and hearing that incisive, bell-like voice, the
spectator was repelled and attracted at the same instant, and thoroughly
bewildered with the sense of a power and beauty as hateful as they were
puissant. Not since Ristori acted Lucretia Borgia has the stage
exhibited such an image of imperial will, made radiant with beauty and
electric with flashes of passion. The leopard and the serpent are fatal,
terrible, and loathsome; yet they scarcely have a peer among nature's
supreme symbols of power and grace. Into the last scene of _Forget Me
Not_,--when at length Stephanie is crushed by physical fear, through
beholding, unseen by him, the man who would kill her as a malignant and
dangerous reptile,--Genevieve Ward introduced such illustrative
"business," not provided by the piece, as greatly enhanced the final
effect. The backward rush from the door, on seeing the Corsican avenger
on the staircase, and therewithal the incidental, involuntary cry of
terror, was the invention of the actress: and from that moment to the
final exit she was the incarnation of abject fear. The situation is one
of the strongest that dramatic ingenuity has invented: the actress
invested it with a colouring of pathetic and awful truth.
XXII.
EDWARD S. WILLARD IN THE MIDDLEMAN AND JUDAH.
E.S. Willard accomplished his first appearance upon the American stage
(at Palmer's theatre, November 10, 1890), in the powerful play of _The
Middleman_, by Henry Arthur Jones. A representative audience welcomed
the modest and gentle stranger and the greeting that hailed him was that
of earnest respect. Willard had long been known and esteemed in New York
by the dramatic profession and by those persons who habitually observe
the changeful aspects of the contemporary stage on both sides of the
ocean; but to the American public his name had been comparatively
strange. The sentiment of kindness with which he was received deepened
into admiration as the night wore on, and before the last curtain fell
upon his performance of Cyrus Blenkarn he had gained an unequivocal and
auspicious victory. In no case has the first appearance of a new actor
been accompanied with a more brilliant exemplification of simple worth;
and in no case has its conquest of the public enthusiasm been more
decisive. Not the least impressive feature of the night was the steadily
increasing surprise of the audience as the performance proceeded. It was
the actor's way to build slowly, and at the opening of the piece the
poor inventor's blind ignorance of the calamity that is impending is
chiefly trusted to create essential sympathy. Through those moments of
approaching sorrow the sweet unconsciousness of the loving father was
expressed by Willard with touching truth. In this he astonished even as
much as he pleased his auditors; for they were not expecting it.