Kemble suggested that the _Queen_ should pause, after the first two
words, as tho making up her mind what she should say. While she
hesitates, the other cardinal, _Campeius_, thinking himself addrest by a
lady, steps forward. The _Queen_, seeing this, waves him aside with an
imperious gesture, which sweeps forward to _Wolsey_, at whom she hurls
the next words,
To _you_ I speak!
and then the rest of the fiery speech pours forth like scorching lava.
If the older plays, either tragedies or comedies, seem to us sometimes
richer in detail than the more modern pieces, we shall do well to
remember that these earlier dramas have profited by the accretions of
business and of unexpected readings due to the unceasing endeavor of
several generations of actors and of stage-managers. The plays of
Shakspere that are most frequently performed, the comedies of Molière
also, have accumulated a mass of traditions, of one kind or another,
some of these being of hoary antiquity. In 'Hamlet,' for example, in the
graveyard scene, it was the habit of the _Second Grave-digger_ to take
off his coat before beginning his work, and then to proceed to divest
himself of an indeterminate number of waistcoats, to the increasing
disgust of the _First Grave-digger_. Oddly enough, this same business is
traditional in the 'Précieuses Ridicules,' the less important of the two
comedians going through exactly the same mirth-provoking disrobing.
Probably the business was elaborated for some medieval farce long before
Molière was born, or Shakspere either. Of late, it has been omitted from
'Hamlet,' but it is still religiously preserved in the performances of
the 'Précieuses' by the Comédie-Française, the company of actors that
Molière founded.
Many another tradition is also cherished at the Français, the origin of
which is lost in the mists of antiquity. In the 'Malade Imaginaire,' for
example, _Thomas Diafoirius_ is always provided with an absurdly high
child's chair, apparently the property of _Louison_; and in the 'Avare,'
after the miser has blown out a candle twice and finally pocketed it,
the custom is for his servant to sneak behind him and to light the
candle once again as it sticks out of his coat. Regnier, the cultivated
and brilliant comedian (whose pupil M. Coquelin was in his
'prentice-days), published a text of Molière's most powerful play, which
he called 'Le Tartuffe des Comédiens' because he had recorded in it all
this traditional business. M. Coquelin has told me that he hopes to be
able some day to edit other of Molière's masterpieces on this principle.
And it is greatly to be wisht that some stage-manager of scholarly
tastes would provide us with a record of the customary effects to be
obtained in the performance of most of Shakspere's plays, as these have
been accumulated in the theater itself. Perhaps this book might be able
to tell us why it is that tradition warrants the same rather trivial
practical joke in the performance of the 'Merchant of Venice,' and in
the performance of 'Romeo and Juliet,'--the business of embarrassing a
servant by repeated bows of mock courtesy and protracted farewell.
In preparing for a revival of one of the masterpieces of Shakspere, the
accomplished stage-manager of to-day considers all these traditions
inherited from the past, discarding some of them and selecting those
which appear to him worthy of preservation, and which will accommodate
themselves to the general scheme of the whole performance as he has
conceived it in his mind's eye. He makes such arrangements as he deems
necessary, devising wholly new effects to fit the more modern methods of
presentation, which are less purely rhetorical than they were in the
eighteenth century, and more pictorial. When Herr Barnay impersonated
_Mark Antony_ in the Meiningen revival of 'Julius Cæsar,' the novel
stage-management gave freshness to the Forum scene and greatly increased
its force. As _Mark Antony_ ascended the rostrum, after _Brutus_ had
asked the mob to listen to him, the crowd was too highly wrought up over
the speech they had just heard to pay heed to the next speaker. They
gathered in knots praising _Brutus_; and the murmur of their chatter was
all the greeting that _Mark Antony_ received. Herr Barnay stood for a
moment silent and then he began his appeal for their attention:
"Friends--Romans--countrymen--!" but scarcely a citizen listened to him.
"Lend me your _ears_," he begged, "I come to bury Cæsar not to praise
him!"
And then the nearest group or two grudgingly turned toward the rostrum;
and to these the adroit speaker addrest himself, coaxing, cajoling,
flattering,--making frequent pauses, in every one of which the audience
could see another band of citizens drawn under the spell of his
eloquence. When he had them all attentive, he played on their feelings
and aroused their enthusiasm; then, after a swift and piercing glance
around to see if they were ripe for it, he brought forth _Cæsar's_ will;
and after that _Brutus_ was forgotten, and _Mark Antony_ held the mob in
the hollow of his hand to sway it at his will. It matters little whether
the credit of this most ingenious rearrangement was due to Herr Barnay
himself, or to the unseen stage-manager; the spectator could not but
recognize that a great play had received new illumination by it, and
that a certain richness of texture had been disclosed which had hitherto
lain concealed and unsuspected.
Sometimes, it must be confest, this craving after pictorial novelty
overreaches itself. Perhaps the allowable limit was not overstept when
Sir Henry Irving gave _Ophelia_ a fan of peacock-feathers, in order that
_Hamlet_ might play with it and have it in his hand when he has to say,
"Ay, a very peacock!"
But it may be doubted whether the boundary of the justifiable was not
crost, when the same stage-manager had the duel-scene of 'Romeo and
Juliet' take place in an open square, with its raised fountain not far
from the porch of the cathedral, so that _Mercutio_ might be able to
point right and left when he declared that his wound would serve, altho
it was not "as deep as a well or as wide as a church-door." Pretty as
this is and clever, it seems a little petty. To suggest that _Mercutio_
was in need of visible promptings for his fancy, is to diminish the
quick-wittedness of Shakspere's wittiest character.
Yet, either of these instances will serve to show the searching
thoroness with which the stage-manager seeks to project the whole
performance in all its minor details, having combined in advance the
gestures of the several actors, the movements of each in relation to
those of the others, the properties they make use of, and the scenery in
the midst of which they play their parts. Altho the scenery, the
properties and the costumes are designed by different artists, it is the
duty of the stage-manager to control them all, to see that they are
harmonious with each other, and that they are subdued to the atmosphere
of the "production" as a whole. He subordinates now one and now another,
that he may attain the more fitting contrast. Mr. Bronson Howard was one
of the authors of 'Peter Stuyvesant, Governor of New Amsterdam,' and to
his skilful direction the "production" of the play was committed. The
first act took place in a Dutch garden ablaze with autumn sunshine; and,
therefore, all the costumes seen in that act were grays and greens and
drabs of a proper Dutch sobriety. The second act presented the
New-Year's reception at night in the _Governor's_ house, and then the
costumes were rich and varied, so that they might stand out against the
somber oak of the spacious hall.
To the first rehearsal of a play, new or old, the stage-manager
sometimes comes with all the salient details of the future performance
visualized in advance, knowing just where every character ought to place
himself at every moment of the action, and having decided where every
piece of furniture shall stand, and how the actors will avail themselves
of its assistance. One accomplished stage-manager of my acquaintance, an
actor himself, works out with a set of chess-men the intricate problem
of moving his characters naturally about the stage. Another, a
playwright this one, has a toy theater in which to manoeuver the
personages of the play into exactly the most effective positions. In one
of M. Sardou's pieces, the manuscript of which I once had occasion to
study, the chairs stand at the beginning of the first act in very
different positions from those in which they are required to be at the
end of the act; and the manuscript contained full directions indicating
just when and exactly how one or another of the characters should seem
accidentally to push a chair into the needed position.
Since modern science has revealed the influence of environment on
character, and since modern fiction, following the example set by
Balzac, has brought out the significance of the background before which
an individual lives, moves and has his being, the stage-manager has a
more difficult duty than ever before. He has to see to it that the
scenery and all the fittings of the set are congruous, and that they are
significant, not merely of the place itself, but of the people also. The
late John Clayton showed me the model for the scene of the first act of
'Margery's Lovers,' remarking with a smile of satisfaction that, when
the curtain should go up, and before a word had been uttered, everybody
in the house would know that the story was laid in Southern France. When
the late James A. Herne brought out a play in which husband and wife
took opposite sides on the slavery question, the curiously stiff and
old-fashioned furniture used in the first act seemed to strike the
key-note of the drama; the spectators could not but feel that those who
lived amid such surroundings were precisely the persons who would behave
in that way.
The stage-manager is encouraged to try for these pictorial effects,
because the stage is now withdrawn behind a picture-frame in which the
curtain rises and falls. It is no longer thrust out into the midst of
the spectators, as it was in Shakspere's time; nor does it now project
beyond the line of the curtain, curving out alongside the stage-boxes,
as it did until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. It is now
separated from the audience by the straight row of footlights, within
the lower border of the frame; and the electric light which reaches
every corner of the stage, has put it into the power of the
stage-manager to modify his illumination at will, and to be confident
that no gesture will be lost no matter how he may arrange his groups
against his background. He can darken the whole stage, slowly or
suddenly, as he sees fit. Much of the intense effect attained by Sir
Henry Irving in the trial-scene of the 'Bells' was due to the very
adroit handling of the single ray of light that illumined the haunted
burgomaster, while the persons who peopled his fatal dream were left in
the shadow, indistinct and doubtful. Perhaps the most moving moment in
Mrs. Fiske's production of Paul Heyse's 'Mary of Magdala' was after
night had fallen, and when the betrayer knocked at the door of
_Caiaphas_, who came forth with a lantern and cast its rays full on the
contorted face of the villain,--that face being the sole object visible
on the darkened stage, as the _High Priest_ hissed forth the single
word, "Judas!"
The expert playwright of every period when the drama has flourished
abundantly, has always adjusted the structure of his play to conform to
the conditions of the theater of his own time; and the more adroit of
the dramatists of to-day have been swift to perceive the necessity for a
change of method, since the thrust-out platform has been succeeded by
the stage behind the picture-frame. They are relinquishing the
rhetorical devices which were proper enough on the platform-stage, and
which now seem out of place on the picture-stage. They find their profit
in accepting as a principle the old saying that "actions speak louder
than words." They are abandoning the confidential soliloquy, for
example, which was quite in keeping with the position of an actor in
close proximity to the spectators,--in the midst of them, in fact,--and
which strikes us as artificial and unnatural now that the actor is
behind the mystic line of the curtain. They are giving up the
explanatory "aside,"--lines spoken directly to the audience, and
supposed to be unheard by the other characters on the stage.
In Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's artfully articulated play, 'Mrs. Dane's
Defence,' a most ingenious specimen of story-telling on the stage, the
harassed heroine, left alone at a crucial moment, did not express her
emotion in a soliloquy, as she would have done even fifty years ago. She
revealed her agitation solely by the sudden change of her expression and
by her feverish movements, which not only betrayed her anxiety, but were
really more eloquent than any mere words were likely to be. Even more
remarkable examples of the skill with which significant action may be
substituted for speech, can be found in 'Secret Service'; and Mr.
Gillette has explained that, in the performance of his own plays, he is
"in the habit of resorting largely to the effects of natural pauses,
intervals of silence,--moments when few words are spoken and much mental
struggle is supposed to take place," finding these methods "especially
effective at critical junctures." Perhaps no other modern dramatist
relies so frankly upon sheer pantomime as Mr. Gillette does; and,
certainly, no other has ever made a more skilful use of it. But the
tendency can be observed in all our later playwrights, and it will
surely increase as the possibilities of the picture-stage come to be
better understood.
What the stage-manager is forever striving to attain, in addition to
these salient effects, is variety of impression. He seeks to achieve a
harmony of tone and to create an intangible atmosphere, in which the
spirit of the play shall be revealed. To secure this, he often calls in
the aid of music. When Sir Henry Irving produced 'Much Ado about
Nothing,' the note of joyous comedy that echoed and reëchoed thruout the
performance, was sustained by sparkling rhythms, old English
dance-tunes, most of them, that frolicked gaily thru the evening. In Mr.
Belasco's production of the 'Darling of the Gods,' the accompanying
music was almost incessant, but so subdued, so artfully modulated, so
delicately adjusted to the action, that perhaps a majority of the
audience was wholly unconscious of the three Japanese themes which had
been insisted upon again and again. To evoke the atmosphere of Japan as
soon as possible, Mr. Belasco also had a special curtain designed for
the play, which co-operated with the exotic music to bring about a
feeling of vague remoteness and of brooding mystery.
But all these effects, audible or visible, may be resented as mere
stage-tricks, unless they really belong where they are put, unless they
are intimately related to the main theme of the play, and unless they
are really helpful in evoking and sustaining the current of sympathy.
They are excrescences if they exist for their own sake only; they are
still worse if they interfere with this current of sympathy, if they
distract attention to themselves. The stage-manager must ever be on his
guard against the danger of sacrificing the major to the minor, and of
letting some little effect of slight value in itself interfere with the
true interest of the play as a whole. At the first performance of Mr.
Bronson Howard's 'Shenandoah,' the opening act of which ends with the
firing of the shot on Sumter, there was a wide window at the back of the
set, so that the spectators could see the curving flight of the bomb and
its final explosion above the doomed fort. This scenic marvel had cost
time and money to devise; but it was never visible after the first
performance, because it drew attention to itself, as a mechanical
effect, and so took off the minds of the audience from the Northern
lover and the Southern girl, the Southern lover and the Northern girl,
whose loves were suddenly sundered by the bursting of that fatal shell.
At the second performance, the spectators did not see the shot, they
only heard the dread report; and they were free to let their sympathy go
forth to the young couples. Here, once more, as so often in the art of
the stage, suggestion was far more potent than any attempt to exhibit
the visible object. The truth of this axiom was shown in the third act
of the same play, during its earlier performances, when the playwright
with the aid of a scant dozen soldiers was able to suggest all the
turmoil and all the hazards of a battle only a little removed. At later
performances, the author allowed the attempt to be made actually to
represent certain phases of a retreat, with horse, foot and artillery on
the stage all at once; and altho the stage-management was excellent in
every way, perhaps the total effect was less than when the far larger
possibilities of a great battle had been merely suggested to the
spectators, their own imaginations evoking the possibilities of war more
completely than any stage-manager could set it before them.
So in the 'Tosca' of M. Sardou, the torture of the hero, if we were to
see it, might be received with incredulity, but we are far more likely
to accept it as real when we perceive it only thru the sufferings of the
heroine at the sight of it. So again, in the 'Darling of the Gods,' the
destruction of the little band of loyal Samurai is far more effectively
conveyed to us by the faint voices which call and answer once and again
in the Red Bamboo Forest, than it would be by any actual presentation of
combat and carnage. So, in 'L'Aiglon,' the specters on the battle-field
of Wagram are much more impressive, if they are merely imagined by the
poor little prince, and if there is no vain attempt to realize them
concretely. So, in 'Macbeth,' there is a loss of interest if the ghost
of _Banquo_ struts in upon the banquet. Our modern incredulity doubts
the existence of returning spirits, altho it is willing enough to accept
the reality of _Macbeth's_ belief in them; but when the play was
originally produced, the superstitious groundlings would have felt
themselves cheated of an alluring spectacle if the sheeted ghost had not
stalked out on the stage to shake his gory locks.
In the spacious days of Elizabeth, the half-roofed theaters were only a
little less medieval than the pageants of the mysteries had been; and
the task of the stage-manager must have been very simple indeed. There
was no scenery, and the performance took place by daylight, so that all
the producer of a new play had to do was to arrange such elementary
business as was possible on a platform encumbered with an indefinite
number of spectators. Like all stage-managers, then and now, he had of
course to direct the actors themselves; and _Hamlet's_ speech to the
_Players_ gives us good reason to believe that Shakspere must have been
an excellent trainer, however modest may have been his own native gifts
as an actor. Molière, like Shakspere in so many ways, was like him in
being author and actor and manager; and in the 'Impromptu de Versailles'
he has left us a most instructive record of his own methods of
rehearsing his own company.
But, altho the playhouse in which Molière performed was roofed and
lighted, and altho he had some scenery, yet there were spectators
sitting on his stage as on Shakspere's, and the conditions were those of
the platform and not of the picture. Oddly enough, the most pictorial of
all the theaters that have preceded our own time is the theater of the
Athenians. Few spectacles can ever have excelled in beauty an outdoor
performance in the theater of Dionysius, when the richly-appareled
chorus circled into the orchestra, to the sound of music, in the spring
sunshine, with the breeze from the Bay of Salamis blowing back their
floating draperies, that could not but fall into lines of unexpected
delight and ineffable grace. Stage-management, which was necessarily
neglected by the great Elizabethans, owing to the rudeness of their
playhouses, was studied as an art by the great Greeks and held by them
in high esteem. The dramatic poet was himself the producer, training the
three actors, arranging the evolutions of the chorus, and accepting full
responsibility for the perfection of the complete work of art. Silent
himself, he caused the music he controlled.
(1903.)