We have already agreed that the dramatist works ever under the sway of
three influences which are not felt by exclusively literary artists like
the poet and the novelist. The physical conditions of the theatre in any
age affect to a great extent the form and structure of the drama; the
conscious or unconscious demands of the audience, as we have observed in
the preceding chapter, determine for the dramatist the themes he shall
portray; and the range or restrictions of his actors have an immediate
effect upon the dramatist's great task of character-creation. In fact, so
potent is the influence of the actor upon the dramatist that the latter, in
creating character, goes to work very differently from his literary
fellow-artists,--the novelist, the story-writer, or the poet. Great
characters in non-dramatic fiction have often resulted from abstract
imagining, without direct reference to any actual person: Don Quixote, Tito
Melema, Leatherstocking, sprang full-grown from their creators' minds and
struck the world as strange and new. But the greatest characters in the
drama have almost always taken on the physical, and to a great extent the
mental, characteristics of certain great actors for whom they have been
fashioned. Cyrano is not merely Cyrano, but also Coquelin; Mascarille is
not merely Mascarille, but also Molière; Hamlet is not merely Hamlet, but
also Richard Burbage. Closet-students of the plays of Sophocles may miss a
point or two if they fail to consider that the dramatist prepared the part
of Oedipus in three successive dramas for a certain star-performer on the
stage of Dionysus. The greatest dramatists have built their plays not so
much for reading in the closet as for immediate presentation on the stage;
they have grown to greatness only after having achieved an initial success
that has given them the freedom of the theatre; and their conceptions of
character have therefore crystallised around the actors that they have
found waiting to present their parts. A novelist may conceive his heroine
freely as being tall or short, frail or firmly built; but if a dramatist is
making a play for an actress like Maude Adams, an airy, slight physique is
imposed upon his heroine in advance.
Shakespeare was, among other things, the director of the Lord Chamberlain's
men, who performed in the Globe, upon the Bankside; and his plays are
replete with evidences of the influence upon him of the actors whom he had
in charge. It is patent, for example, that the same comedian must have
created Launce in _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ and Launcelot Gobbo in the
_Merchant of Venice_; the low comic hit of one production was bodily
repeated in the next. It is almost as obvious that the parts of Mercutio
and Gratiano must have been intrusted to the same performer; both
characters seem made to fit the same histrionic temperament. If Hamlet were
the hero of a novel, we should all, I think, conceive of him as slender,
and the author would agree with us; yet, in the last scene of the play, the
Queen expressly says, "He's fat, and scant of breath." This line has
puzzled many commentators, as seeming out of character; but it merely
indicates that Richard Burbage was fleshy during the season of 1602.
The Elizabethan expedient of disguising the heroine as a boy, which was
invented by John Lyly, made popular by Robert Greene, and eagerly adopted
by Shakespeare and Fletcher, seems unconvincing on the modern stage. It is
hard for us to imagine how Orlando can fail to recognise his love when he
meets her clad as Ganymede in the forest of Arden, or how Bassanio can be
blinded to the figure of his wife when she enters the court-room in the
almost feminine robes of a doctor of laws. Clothes cannot make a man out of
an actress; we recognize Ada Rehan or Julia Marlowe beneath the trappings
and the suits of their disguises; and it might seem that Shakespeare was
depending over-much upon the proverbial credulity of theatre audiences. But
a glance at histrionic conditions in Shakespeare's day will show us
immediately why he used this expedient of disguise not only for Portia and
Rosalind, but for Viola and Imogen as well. Shakespeare wrote these parts
to be played not by women but by boys. Now, when a boy playing a woman
disguised himself as a woman playing a boy, the disguise must have seemed
baffling, not only to Orlando and Bassanio on the stage, but also to the
audience. It was Shakespeare's boy actors, rather than his narrative
imagination, that made him recur repeatedly in this case to a dramatic
expedient which he would certainly discard if he were writing for actresses
to-day.
If we turn from the work of Shakespeare to that of Molière, we shall find
many more evidences of the influence of the actor on the dramatist. In
fact, Molière's entire scheme of character-creation cannot be understood
without direct reference to the histrionic capabilities of the various
members of the _Troupe de Monsieur_. Molière's immediate and practical
concern was not so much to create comic characters for all time as to make
effective parts for La Grange and Du Croisy and Magdeleine Béjart, for his
wife and for himself. La Grange seems to have been the Charles Wyndham of
his day,--every inch a gentleman; his part in any of the plays may be
distinguished by its elegant urbanity. In _Les Précieuses Ridicules_ the
gentlemanly characters are actually named La Grange and Du Croisy; the
actors walked on and played themselves; it is as if Augustus Thomas had
called the hero of his best play, not Jack Brookfield, but John Mason. In
the early period of Molière's art, before he broadened as an actor, the
parts that he wrote for himself were often so much alike from play to play
that he called them by the same conventional theatric name of Mascarille or
Sganarelle, and played them, doubtless, with the same costume and make-up.
Later on, when he became more versatile as an actor, he wrote for himself a
wider range of parts and individualised them in name as well as in nature.
His growth in depicting the characters of young women is curiously
coincident with the growth of his wife as an actress for whom to devise
such characters. Molière's best woman--Célimène, in _Le Misanthrope_--was
created for Mlle. Molière at the height of her career, and is endowed with
all her physical and mental traits.
The reason why so many of the Queen Anne dramatists in England wrote
comedies setting forth a dandified and foppish gentleman is that Colley
Cibber, the foremost actor of the time, could play the fop better than he
could play anything else. The reason why there is no love scene between
Charles Surface and Maria in _The School for Scandal_ is that Sheridan knew
that the actor and the actress who were cast for these respective roles
were incapable of making love gracefully upon the stage. The reason why
Victor Hugo's _Cromwell_ overleaped itself in composition and became
impossible for purposes of stage production is that Talma, for whom the
character of Cromwell was designed, died before the piece was finished, and
Hugo, despairing of having the part adequately acted, completed the play
for the closet instead of for the stage. But it is unnecessary to cull from
the past further instances of the direct dependence of the dramatist upon
his actors. We have only to look about us at the present day to see the
same influence at work.
For example, the career of one of the very best endowed theatrical
composers of the nineteenth century, the late Victorien Sardou, has been
molded and restricted for all time by the talents of a single star
performer, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt. Under the influence of Eugène Scribe,
Sardou began his career at the Théatre Français with a wide range of
well-made plays, varying in scope from the social satire of _Nos Intimes_
and the farcical intrigue of _Les Pattes de Mouche_ (known to us in English
as _The Scrap of Paper_) to the tremendous historic panorama of _Patrie_.
When Sarah Bernhardt left the Comédie Française, Sardou followed in her
footsteps, and afterwards devoted most of his energy to preparing a series
of melodramas to serve successively as vehicles for her. Now, Sarah
Bernhardt is an actress of marked abilities, and limitations likewise
marked. In sheer perfection of technique she surpasses all performers of
her time. She is the acme of histrionic dexterity; all that she does upon
the stage is, in sheer effectiveness, superb. But in her work she has no
soul; she lacks the sensitive sweet lure of Duse, the serene and starlit
poetry of Modjeska. Three things she does supremely well. She can be
seductive, with a cooing voice; she can be vindictive, with a cawing voice;
and, voiceless, she can die. Hence the formula of Sardou's melodramas.
His heroines are almost always Sarah Bernhardts,--luring, tremendous,
doomed to die. Fédora, Gismonda, La Tosca, Zoraya, are but a single woman
who transmigrates from play to play. We find her in different countries and
in different times; but she always lures and fascinates a man, storms
against insuperable circumstance, coos and caws, and in the outcome dies.
One of Sardou's latest efforts, _La Sorcière_, presents the dry bones of
the formula without the flesh and blood of life. Zoraya appears first
shimmering in moonlight upon the hills of Spain,--dovelike in voice,
serpentining in seductiveness. Next, she is allowed to hypnotise the
audience while she is hypnotising the daughter of the governor. She is
loved and she is lost. She curses the high tribunal of the Inquisition,--a
dove no longer now. And she dies upon cathedral steps, to organ music. _The
Sorceress_ is but a lifeless piece of mechanism; and when it was performed
in English by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, it failed to lure or to thrill. But
Sarah Bernhardt, because as an actress she _is_ Zoraya, contrived to lift
it into life. Justly we may say that, in a certain sense, this is Sarah
Bernhardt's drama instead of Victorien Sardou's. With her, it is a play;
without her, it is nothing but a formula. The young author of _Patrie_
promised better things than this. Had he chosen, he might have climbed to
nobler heights. But he chose instead to write, year after year, a vehicle
for the Muse of Melodrama, and sold his laurel crown for gate-receipts.
If Sardou suffered through playing the sedulous ape to a histrionic artist,
it is no less true that the same practice has been advantageous to M.
Edmond Rostand. M. Rostand has shrewdly written for the greatest comedian
of the recent generation; and Constant Coquelin was the making of him as a
dramatist. The poet's early pieces, like _Les Romanesques_, disclosed him
as a master of preciosity, exquisitely lyrical, but lacking in the sterner
stuff of drama. He seemed a new de Banville--dainty, dallying, and deft--a
writer of witty and pretty verses--nothing more. Then it fell to his lot to
devise an acting part for Coquelin, which in the compass of a single play
should allow that great performer to sweep through the whole wide range of
his varied and versatile accomplishment. With the figure of Coquelin before
him, M. Rostand set earnestly to work. The result of his endeavor was the
character of Cyrano de Bergerac, which is considered by many critics the
richest acting part, save Hamlet, in the history of the theatre.
_L'Aiglon_ was also devised under the immediate influence of the same
actor. The genesis of this latter play is, I think, of peculiar interest to
students of the drama; and I shall therefore relate it at some length. The
facts were told by M. Coquelin himself to his friend Professor Brander
Matthews, who has kindly permitted me to state them in this place. One
evening, after the extraordinary success of _Cyrano_, M. Rostand met
Coquelin at the Porte St. Martin and said, "You know, Coq, this is not the
last part I want to write for you. Can't you give me an idea to get me
started--an idea for another character?" The actor thought for a moment,
and then answered, "I've always wanted to play a _vieux grognard du premier
empire--un grenadier à grandes moustaches_."... A grumpy grenadier of
Napoleon's army--a grenadier with sweeping moustaches--with this cue the
dramatist set to work and gradually imagined the character of Flambeau. He
soon saw that if the great Napoleon were to appear in the play he would
dominate the action and steal the centre of the stage from the
soldier-hero. He therefore decided to set the story after the Emperor's
death, in the time of the weak and vacillating Duc de Reichstadt. Flambeau,
who had served the eagle, could now transfer his allegiance to the eaglet,
and stand dominant with the memory of battles that had been. But after the
dramatist had been at work upon the play for some time, he encountered the
old difficulty in a new guise. At last he came in despair to Coquelin and
said, "It isn't your play, Coq; it can't be; the young duke is running away
with it, and I can't stop him; Flambeau is but a secondary figure after
all. What shall I do?" And Coquelin, who understood him, answered, "Take it
to Sarah; she has just played Hamlet, and wants to do another boy." So M.
Rostand "took it to Sarah," and finished up the duke with her in view,
while in the background the figure of Flambeau scowled upon him over
_grandes moustaches_--a true _grognard_ indeed! Thus it happened that
Coquelin never played the part of Flambeau until he came to New York with
Mme. Sarah Bernhardt in the fall of 1900; and the grenadier conceived in
the Porte St. Martin first saw the footlights in the Garden Theatre.
But the contemporary English-speaking stage furnishes examples just as
striking of the influence of the actor on the dramatist. Sir Arthur Wing
Pinero's greatest heroine, Paula Tanqueray, wore from her inception the
physical aspect of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Many of the most effective dramas
of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones have been built around the personality of Sir
Charles Wyndham. The Wyndham part in Mr. Jones's plays is always a
gentleman of the world, who understands life because he has lived it, and
is "wise with the quiet memory of old pain." He is moral because he knows
the futility of immorality. He is lonely, lovable, dignified, reliable, and
sound. By serene and unobtrusive understanding he straightens out the
difficulties in which the other people of the play have wilfully become
entangled. He shows them the error of their follies, preaches a
worldly-wise little sermon to each one, and sends them back to their true
places in life, sadder and wiser men and women. In order to give Sir
Charles Wyndham an opportunity to display all phases of his experienced
gentility in such a character as this, Mr. Jones has repeated the part in
drama after drama. Many of the greatest characters of the theatre have been
so essentially imbued with the physical and mental personality of the
actors who created them that they have died with their performers and been
lost forever after from the world of art. In this regard we think at once
of Rip Van Winkle. The little play that Mr. Jefferson, with the aid of Dion
Boucicault, fashioned out of Washington Irving's story is scarcely worth
the reading; and if, a hundred years from now, any student of the drama
happens to look it over, he may wonder in vain why it was so beloved, for
many, many years, by all America; and there will come no answer, since the
actor's art will then be only a tale that is told. So Beau Brummel died
with Mr. Mansfield; and if our children, who never saw his superb
performance, chance in future years to read the lines of Mr. Fitch's play,
they will hardly believe us when we tell them that the character of Brummel
once was great. With such current instances before us, it ought not to be
so difficult as many university professors find it to understand the vogue
of certain plays of the Elizabethan and Restoration eras which seem to us
now, in the reading, lifeless things. When we study the mad dramas of Nat
Lee, we should remember Betterton; and properly to appreciate Thomas Otway,
we must imagine the aspect and the voice of Elizabeth Barry.
It may truthfully be said that Mrs. Barry created Otway, both as dramatist
and poet; for _The Orphan_ and _Venice Preserved_, the two most pathetic
plays in English, would never have been written but for her. It is often
thus within the power of an actor to create a dramatist; and his surest
means of immortality is to inspire the composition of plays which may
survive his own demise. After Duse is dead, poets may read _La Città
Morta_, and imagine her. The memory of Coquelin is, in this way, likely to
live longer than that of Talma. We can merely guess at Talma's art, because
the plays in which he acted are unreadable to-day. But if M. Rostand's
_Cyrano_ is read a hundred years from now, it will be possible for students
of it to imagine in detail the salient features of the art of Coquelin. It
will be evident to them that the actor made love luringly and died
effectively, that he was capable of lyric reading and staccato gasconade,
that he had a burly humor and that touch of sentiment that trembles into
tears. Similarly we know to-day, from the fact that Shakespeare played the
Ghost in _Hamlet_, that he must have had a voice that was full and resonant
and deep. So from reading the plays of Molière we can imagine the robust
figure of Magdeleine Béjart, the grace of La Grange, the pretty petulance
of the flighty fair Armande.
Some sense of this must have been in the mind of Sir Henry Irving when he
strove industriously to create a dramatist who might survive him and
immortalise his memory. The facile, uncreative Wills was granted many
chances, and in _Charles I_ lost an opportunity to make a lasting drama.
Lord Tennyson came near the mark in _Becket_; but this play, like those of
Wills, has not proved sturdy enough to survive the actor who inspired it.
For all his striving, Sir Henry left no dramatist as a monument to his art.