A comparison of an Elizabethan audience with a theatre-full of people at
the present day is, in many ways, disadvantageous to the latter. With our
forefathers, theatre-going was an exercise in the lovely art of
"making-believe." They were told that it was night and they forgot the
sunlight; their imaginations swept around England to the trampling of
armored kings, or were whisked away at a word to that Bohemia which is a
desert country by the sea; and while they looked upon a platform of bare
boards, they breathed the sweet air of the Forest of Arden. They needed no
scenery by Alma-Tadema to make them think themselves in Rome. "What
country, friends, is this?", asked Viola. "This is Illyria, lady." And the
boys in the pit scented the keen, salt air and heard the surges crashing on
the rocky shore.
Nowadays elaborateness of stage illusion has made spoiled children of us
all. We must have a doll with real hair, or else we cannot play at being
mothers. We have been pampered with mechanical toys until we have lost the
art of playing without them. Where have our imaginations gone, that we must
have real rain upon the stage? Shall we clamor for real snow before long,
that must be kept in cold storage against the spring season? A longing for
concreteness has befogged our fantasy. Even so excellent an actor as Mr.
Forbes-Robertson cannot read the great speech beginning, "Look here, upon
this picture and on this," in which Hamlet obviously refers to two
imaginary portraits in his mind's eye, without pointing successively to two
absurd caricatures that are daubed upon the scenery.
The theatre has grown older since the days when Burbage recited that same
speech upon a bare platform; but I am not entirely sure that it has grown
wiser. We theatre-goers have come to manhood and have put away childish
things; but there was a sweetness about the naïveté of childhood that we
can never quite regain. No longer do we dream ourselves in a garden of
springtide blossoms; we can only look upon canvas trees and paper flowers.
No longer are we charmed away to that imagined spot where journeys end in
lovers' meeting; we can only look upon love in a parlor and notice that the
furniture is natural. No longer do we harken to the rich resonance of the
Drama of Rhetoric; no longer do our minds kindle with the brilliant
epigrams of the Drama of Conversation. Good reading is disappearing from
the stage; and in its place we are left the devices of the stage-carpenter.
It would be absurd to deny that modern stagecraft has made possible in the
theatre many excellent effects that were not dreamt of in the philosophy of
Shakespeare. Sir Arthur Pinero's plays are better made than those of the
Elizabethans, and in a narrow sense hold the mirror up to nature more
successfully than theirs. But our latter-day fondness for natural
representment has afflicted us with one tendency that the Elizabethans were
luckily without. In our desire to imitate the actual facts of life, we
sometimes become near-sighted and forget the larger truths that underlie
them. We give our plays a definite date by founding them on passing
fashions; we make them of an age, not for all time. We discuss contemporary
social problems on the stage instead of the eternal verities lodged deep in
the general heart of man. We have outgrown our pristine simplicity, but we
have not yet arrived at the age of wisdom. Perhaps when playgoers have
progressed for another century or two, they may discard some of the
trappings and the suits of our present drama, and become again like little
children.
V