this respect the Chinese stage is very much like it, only a bit more
so. Both stages lack curtains, and therefore in both properties are
brought on in full sight of the audience, making necessary in China the
“property men” who furnished so much amusement in the performances of
“The Yellow Jacket.” Shakespeare however arranged that at the end of
a play, for example in “Hamlet”, the dead were carried off the stage,
while in Peking convention allows that a victim of murder arise and walk
off, after having gone through the motion of falling dead. The London
theaters also had (at least such seems to have been definitely proved
by recent writers) a small curtain at the rear of the stage shutting
off a place which served as cave, shop, tomb, bed, Bathsheba’s bath, or
any other locality that needed to be “discovered.” In Peking theaters
things are much more conventionalized; a table represents a shop, a blue
curtain with lines painted on it, held up by two stage hands, makes a
city wall, a chair may be a gate or a prison door, a boat on a lake may
be represented simply by the actors appearing with oars with which they
seem to be rowing. Much is also symbolized; an actor on the bare stage
goes through the motions of opening and shutting a door and thus shows
that he has left the house. When a curtain is needed to represent a
listener in another room, or a patient in a bed behind drawn curtains,
two vertical bamboo poles with a horizontal one attached to them from
which the curtain hangs are placed on the stage by the “property men.”
The arrangement is most primitive and casual; the poles are generally
tied to chairs. If the drawing of the “Swan” showing neither an inner
stage nor a curtain is authentic, a similar portable curtain may have
been the method employed in Elizabethan times. In Peking this is a rich,
figured fabric, even though not exactly an “Arras.” If a Chinese Polonius
were to conceal himself behind the arras, it would have been previously
brought on by the “property men” at the beginning of the act or perhaps
even just a few moments before it was needed. In a Chinese theater the
center back of the stage is a wall hung with a rich piece of tapestry
just as free from doors or recesses as the wall of the “Swan.” There are
doors, however, at both sides of the rear wall, corresponding to those
in the “Swan” drawing. As the Chinese theater has no upper stage, men on
a city wall, for example, stand on a table behind the curtain held up by
the stage hands. A general surveying his troops from a mountain top or a
god on his throne in heaven sit on a chair placed on top of a table.
In the paucity of the stage properties we find another parallel. In
Albright’s “The Shakespearean Stage”,[33] the properties are listed, and
I can say from my five years’ experience that the same and no more are
found on the Chinese stage; bedroom: a bed, table, chairs or stools, and
lights; a hall: table, chairs, and stools; presence chamber: a throne,
and occasionally tables and chairs; a church: an altar, and if needed a
tomb; prison scenes: usually no properties are mentioned except fetters
and chains; woods or park: large and small artificial trees, shrubbery,
and benches; shop scenes: a counter and a few wares. The Chinese theater
is often even a bit more simple; for example, a chair serves as a throne,
or a table with a few decorations as an altar. However, for certain
plays fairly elaborate paper properties are used, which are brought
on and removed in full sight of the audience. In both theaters the
imagination of the audience is strained a great deal more than is the
case in a Belasco play; and many conventions that differ from ours, such
as bringing on properties in full sight of the audience, seem just as
natural as it seems to us that a stage room has only three walls.
Even though the Elizabethan and the Chinese stages have no scenery of
any kind, yet it is wrong to imagine that they seem bare, for the color
is supplied in the rich and elaborate robes of the actors. A Chinese
stage filled with actors in court costumes of yellow, red, black, blue,
or purple, with inwoven designs, fierce warriors with masks or painted
faces, wearing pheasant feathers six feet long, and lovely maidens in
costumes of exquisite pastel shades, walking or running about on a gaudy
Oriental rug against a background of rich tapestry, form a veritable
riot of color, very similar in its effect, no doubt, to what was seen
on the Elizabethan stage when the actors appeared in their gowns costing
from £80 to £100 in modern money. They were elaborate creations of
velvet trimmed with gold and silver lace and embroidery, capped by the
“forest of feathers” that Hamlet mentions as necessary for the equipment
of an actor, with tapestry from Arras as background. To quote Professor
Thorndyke,[34] “No stage cared more for fine clothes than the Elizabethan
or lavished a larger portion of its expenses on dress.” In both theaters
almost no attention is paid to historical appropriateness of costume.
Elizabethan actors sometimes wore masks also, just as the Chinese often
do.
[Illustration: THE ORCHESTRA SEATED IN A CORNER OF THE STAGE
From Jacovleff, “Le Théâtre Chinois”]
The stage direction “alarums” for the entry of a king or other important
personage, which may never have been associated by the reader with
anything definite at all, will be full of meaning to any Westerner who
has heard the Chinese orchestra sound the _Leitmotiv_ for the entry of
a famous general. The Chinese orchestra sits on the stage in full view
of the audience, while in Shakespeare’s day the upper stage was the
normal place for the “noise.” The use in the Elizabethan days of the
word “noise” for both music and orchestra establishes another great
similarity between the two theaters. In Shakespeare’s day the music seems
to have been confined chiefly to the intermissions between the acts and
to occasional songs, while in the Chinese drama almost every emotional
part is punctuated by song. It approaches close to opera in many cases
in the number of lines sung by the actors. One division of Chinese plays
is that into civil and military, and in the latter the fighting is
always accompanied by a terrible din of brass, drum and string music.
This frantic noise stimulates in the audience the excitement which
the desperate contest in arms is supposed to arouse. As a fact, these
military plays are very popular with the masses, and they take up fully
half the program.
In the eating, drinking, smoking, hawking, towel-throwing, spitting, and
loud interruptions always found in the Chinese theater we have another
close parallel to the Elizabethan. It is well known that hawkers went
about before and during the performance selling ale, tobacco, and various
articles of food. Apples were fought over by young apprentices and
sometimes even used to pelt the actors. The women in the galleries were
offered pipes to smoke. Young nobles insisted on sitting on the stage in
order that they might display themselves and their garments, while pages
lighted their pipes for them. The groundlings in the yard were intent
on the broad humor and the fighting in the plays. The women of the town
in the gallery probably also had other motives for coming besides that
of seeing the play. All of this a Westerner can understand very much
better after he has seen a Chinese theater, for the conditions are very
similar; except that the Chinese lack of pugnacity makes the spectators
perhaps a little less violent.[35] In this connection it is interesting
to compare the methods of applause and criticism in Shakespeare’s time
and in present-day China. Applause was rendered by clapping—some writers
refer to it as “thundering”—while disapproval was evinced by hissing,
and by even more violent methods, as may be judged from the verse of an
Elizabethan drama:
We may be pelted off for aught we know,
With apples, egges, or stones, from thence belowe.
In China applause is expressed by shouting the word “_hao_”, good, and
disapproval by no more violent method generally than by a sarcastic
intonation of the same word! It it difficult for a foreigner to tell
which is meant, especially since applause is rendered for subtleties
of intonation often lost even on natives. However there is also the
word “_t’ung_”, which is very rarely used to express disgust with the
performance; but when it is employed the actors are driven off the stage
in utter shame and confusion. In recent years, however, clapping has been
introduced from the West along with many other innovations. But in spite
of all distractions one can very often see a Chinese audience sitting
spellbound during the recitation of a particularly beautiful passage or
the presentation of a tragic scene, as I imagine must have been the case
in Shakespearean England also.
Without the aid of scenery or lighting the acting must be splendid
to hold an audience, and there is the danger that it become loudly
declamatory and bombastic. Hamlet’s well-known criticisms frequently
apply in Peking, for there are many who mouth their lines so that the
town crier could improve upon them, who saw the air too much with their
hands, who tear a passion to tatters, who strut and bellow as though one
of nature’s journeymen had made them, and thus make the judicious grieve.
However, good actors of all times avoid this. Hamlet tells of a good
actor who
Could force his soul to this conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in ’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With form to his conceit! and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
It is similarly impressive to see Mei Lan-fang, for example, playing
Mu Lan, the Chinese Joan of Arc, presenting in the first part the coy
maiden and loving daughter, and in the second the brave warrior, or to
see him (he is an actor who always interprets female rôles) portray the
emotions of the daughter who finds her old father in prison but who dares
not make herself known. In most theaters in Peking the acting is good,
so that the foreigner can often follow the play, even though he does not
understand one word of what the actors are saying. For vivid portrayal of
emotions, facial expression, and delightful byplay, the Chinese actors
are wonderful, just as the scholars conjecture that the English players
must have been in Shakespeare’s day.
[Illustration: A CLOWN
Chinese Character Type]
The Chinese audiences demand the fool, the acrobat, and the dancer quite
as loudly as they were demanded by the groundling in Shakespeare’s
time. The Chinese clown is very good at improvising, and provokes the
same criticism that Hamlet made, “And let those that play your clowns
speak no more than is set down for them.” Giles in his “History of
Chinese Literature” writes in this connection, “As they stand in the
classical collections or the acting editions, Chinese plays are as
unobjectionable[36] as Chinese poems or general literature. On the stage,
however, actors are allowed great license in gagging, and the direction
which their gag takes is chiefly the reason which keeps respectable women
away from the playhouse.” This recalls that in Elizabethan days the
respectable women who attended the theater wore masks or made judicious
use of their fans to hide their blushes.[37] It is only in the last few
years that the better class of women have begun to attend the theater
in Peking; just as the mingling of the sexes in the theater was an
innovation in the early seventeenth century in England. In Peking, as
formerly was the case in London, the women are admitted to the gallery
only.
A vital similarity between the two theaters is the fact that women’s
parts are played by men. The reasons in both cases are moral or
Puritanical motives. The similarity in this case is accidental, for it
was only about George Washington’s time that women were forbidden to
appear upon the stage; during the Ming Dynasty many princes and officials
had large numbers of actresses in their palaces—a custom that led to
gross abuses and immorality. Therefore the early Manchu emperors forbade
women to appear as actresses. But things are fast changing in this
respect in China, for in some parts of the country men and women appear
together on the stage, while in Peking, where this is forbidden by the
police, there exist two theaters in which women act both male and female
rôles. The Chinese consider the women poor artists, and the connoisseurs
do not patronize these theaters, or if they do they apologize for it. A
Chinese actor who respects himself will never appear on the same stage
with actresses. That the Elizabethans likewise thought women incapable
of good acting can be seen from the patronizing tone of Thomas Coryat
in which he tells (1611) of having seen women acting in Venice “and
they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture and whatsoever
convenient for a player, as ever I saw any masculine actor.”[38]
In connection with the subject of impersonation of the other sex,
which we see nowadays only in burlesque or minstrel shows, I should
like to quote some observations made by Goethe[39] in Italy on seeing a
performance of Goldoni’s “La Locandiera” in which a man acted the part
of the heroine, the pretty innkeeper. Goethe of course grants that the
highest form of art cannot be found in such a representation, but he
says that he would like to speak a few words in defense of this practice
to tell how one might well derive considerable pleasure from such a
performance. He states that he went to the theater with prejudice, but
once there he became reconciled to it and even experienced a certain kind
of pleasure never felt by him before. He tried to analyze this æsthetic
sensation and came to the conclusion it consisted in the enjoyment of
the fact that the actor could not possibly play himself, but had to
put his art of imitation to a far greater test, that of holding the
mirror up to life in a sex not his own. The spectator enjoys a much
more self-conscious delusion, just as when he sees a young man playing
the part of Rip Van Winkle or King Lear. There is a more conscious
æsthetic pleasure in seeing how well a young man has studied the actions
of a young girl in order to present a Rosalind, or how perfectly Mei
Lan-fang can copy the dainty dress, actions, and walk of a Chinese
lady. My experience has been that this is much more pleasant than to
see round-cheeked girls essay the rôles of fearful generals or cruel
husbands in the woman’s theater in Peking.
It has often been remarked that as a result of the fact that boy actors
played the women’s parts in the Elizabethan theater we find Shakespeare’s
heroines very frequently masquerading as pages. Julia, Portia, Nerissa,
Jessica, Viola, Rosalind, and Imogen all appear as handsome youths. An
analogous result in the Chinese theater of to-day is that the heroines
appear in an endless number of cases as warriors. The Chinese have not
only their Mu Lan (who goes to war in her father’s place because the
latter is old and feeble), but very many other heroines who invariably
defeat men in battle. Chinese history or legend does not account for
this, but it is due to the fact that the actors who portray women seek
opportunities to display their skill in fighting. This fighting is a
highly conventionalized art, a combination of dancing and acrobatics
performed to a deafening and exciting music, which, in regard to its
place on the program, can best be compared to our ballet. Most foreigners
in Peking are kept away from the theater by the fearful noise made in
these “fighting plays”, as they are called, but if these same people
could attend an Elizabethan theater they would possibly find that the
great delight of the audiences was the “noise” (music), the clatter and
scuffle of the battles, the drums, the squibs, and the cannon.[40]
There are in Peking three companies of boy actors, the largest of which
has about three hundred in its theater. These are training schools for
actors in which the boys of eight to sixteen or eighteen years are given
very arduous courses in singing, acrobatics, stage fighting, and all
the other arts that an actor requires. The competition of these “little
eyases” in Peking might well arouse the ire of some of the regular
actors, as it did Shakespeare’s (“Hamlet”, II, 2, 362), for in China the
life of the common actor is a hard one, most of them eking out a meager
living at about twenty cents a day.
The position of the actor in society is very low in Peking, just as
it was in London. A Chinese moralist might well apply to them the
words written in 1759:[41] “Players are masters of vice, teachers of
wantonnesse, spurres to impuritie, the Sonnes of idlenesse, so longe
as they live in this order, loathe them.” Under the former dynasty the
actors and their sons, together with the sons of prostitutes, jailers,
and lictors, were not eligible for taking the examinations. Even now they
usually intermarry only among their own number, and they suffer also from
various other discriminations. Most of them were catamites, until the
Republic abolished this formerly legalized institution. Mei Lan-fang, an
actor who has risen to high perfection in his art, as well as to great
wealth, an artist who may tour America in the near future, would have
ample reason in the present organization of Chinese society to reproach
Fortune in Shakespeare’s words:
That did not better for my life provide,
Than public means which public manners breeds,
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me then and wish I were renewed.
Peoples are alike and differ also in what they consider to be humorous.
It has been said that the first comedy was the torture of a captive
by his enemies. This sort of performance would nowadays of course
be impossible; yet in most of our comedies we enjoy heartily the
discomfiture of victims of circumstances. We have not yet become too
refined to enjoy the difficulties of a man whose senses are benumbed by
alcohol, of a bald man, a lame man, yes, even a deaf man. The condition
of a blind man, however, strikes us as too tragic to figure in a comedy,
and no modern comedian could draw a laugh from his audience by fooling a
tottering old man bereft of his sight. Yet every one who has seen “The
Merchant of Venice” acted recalls very well what Launcelot Gobbo does to
his blind old father, and I have seen in Chinese theaters how a blind old
beggar deceived by a clown affords huge amusement to the audience.
As I have already stated, Chinese and Elizabethan audiences are alike
also in that they use their imaginations much more vividly than we do.
For them a draped screen represents a city wall, and the bare stage any
country, a ship, a mountain, any house, a street, or whatever is needed
in the particular scene acted. Warriors on horseback in the Chinese
theaters carry whips to let the audience know that they are mounted on
chargers, while Macbeth and Banquo rode on the stage on hobbyhorses—and
were taken seriously. I recall a performance in the Chinese City in which
there suddenly came running on the stage on all fours a man in a tiger
skin, and I laughed because of droll recollections of Shaw’s “Androcles
and the Lion.” But no one else laughed; to the Chinese present it was
a tiger, just as real a tiger as the actors on the stage were for the
moment real kings and queens, soldiers and servants. Of this particular
illusion more anon.
Because there are many similarities in the theaters, stages, actors,
conventions, audiences, and the psychology of the spectator of
Shakespeare’s day and of present-day Peking, I certainly should be the
last to say that because a thing is so in local theaters, it must have
been identical in London three hundred years ago. Yet it seems that
since human nature is very much the same everywhere, it would be safer,
if one wished to hazard conjectures as to what was true in the past,
to take a living example of the theater on the same level of culture,
than to look back at the Elizabethan stage in the light of what has been
accomplished since, and what happens to be the fad at the present time.
This is the day of stage lighting and color effects, of Gordon Craig,
Max Reinhardt, and Bakst, but we should hardly think that these problems
troubled Burbage, who had neither electric light nor scenery, and who
performed his plays on an uncurtained stage by daylight. Yet Professor
H. T. Stephenson of Indiana University, for fifteen years a lecturer
on Shakespeare, author of “Shakespeare’s London”, and “The Elizabethan
People”, by profession a specialist in reconstructing the times of
“Merrie England”, discusses seriously in his very stimulating “Study of
Shakespeare” (page 40) the plight of the stage manager of Shakepearean
days, who could never tell beforehand how the gaily dressed young nobles
sitting on the stage would fit into his color scheme! He also believes
that changes in the stage setting could not have been made in full sight
of the audience, because “this would have upset entirely the unity if not
the gravity of the piece.”
In Peking one can see very remarkable things on the stage that fail to
upset the gravity of any present except the Westerners, who are used to
different conventions in the theater. Professor Stephenson, with the
results of three hundred years of stage experience at his hand, believes
that the Elizabethans must have been fools if they could not have thought
of the same useful devices for the theater that he knows of. To quote
(page 47):
“To my mind the situation suggested by these facts reduces itself almost
to a mathematical problem; if one of us can easily invent such a staging
for an Elizabethan scene, as any ingenious person could construct out
of what we know they had in those days, is it unfair to assume that the
ingenious Elizabethans did as well if not better? More likely better.
They were more used than we are to making a little go a great way.”
He even goes on to explain how one could put up a curtain, simply by
the use of canvas, wire, a few rings, and presto, the thing is done. A
play without the commonplace scenic devices of the twentieth century is
unthinkable to him.
Another theorist is Mr. Corbin, in the _Century Magazine_ for December,
1911. He proves to his own satisfaction that Burbage and his colleagues
had means for darkening the stage.[42] It seems this author staged “The
Winter’s Tale” in New York a few years ago. In this play a bear has to
appear on the stage, and this part was acted by a man on all fours. At
first the scene was played on a lighted stage, and all the New Yorkers
present laughed at the sight of the actor in a bearskin. Then they hit
upon the device of darkening the stage, and having the actor-bear run
quickly across. When this was done, no one’s risibilities were affected.
This forms one of Mr. Corbin’s chief arguments for his assumption that
the Elizabethan stage was darkened; namely, that it would have offended
the good taste of the audience to see in broad daylight in a serious
scene, an actor impersonating a bear. If human nature can endure this
convention in Peking, with the above-mentioned tiger, why should we
assume that three hundred years ago people felt as we do now, and base on
this the novel theory that stages were darkened in those days?
A large measure of the success attained by “The Yellow Jacket” was due
to the fact that the Chinese stage conventions employed seemed so funny
to us provincial Westerners that they caused a great deal of happy
laughter. But this is really quite as intelligent as the attitude of the
rustic who sought out Richard III after the performance and offered to
sell him a good horse for less than a kingdom. It is very strange that
even otherwise scholarly men, like, for example, Victor Albright in “The
Shakespearean Stage”, struggle with all fours against the possibility
that in the theater of the gentle Shakespeare there might have been
committed such desecrations as setting properties on the stage in full
view of the audience. He approaches the evidence with blinkers when it
seems to contradict his theory. He says (page 126): “Only the dramatists
had not yet learned to use explicit stage directions.” On page 143 he
tells us that the Elizabethans did not read stage directions literally.
Then on page 106: “Here in the midst of a street scene is a direction
to set the stage with a table, stand, chairs, stools, etc.,—just such
properties as are used in the next scene, a counting room. We cannot
believe that a manager would disturb an important scene by setting the
stage for a coming one.” Further, on page 110: “The placing and replacing
of a regular setting in full view of the audience never was a _general
custom_. It is contrary to the very nature of the stage,—an illusive,
make-believe world.” In my opinion it is contrary only to the very nature
of a provincial New Yorker.
Let me add in passing that William Archer holds that “in the generality
of cases properties were brought on in full sight of the audience, often
in the middle of the action.”[43]