chancel wall of the church a heavily gilded moulding, deep-niched,
and with an arched top, which acted at once both as a frame and
a limit to the picture. The space was practically that of a huge
window with a square base and a half-top requiring for its filling
two groups of figures one above the other. La Farge placed his
standing figures of the apostles and the holy women in the lower
space and their perpendicular lines paralleled the uprights of
the frame; at the top he placed an oval of angels about the risen
Christ, and again the rounded lines of the angel group repeated the
curves of the gilded arch.
Then Professor Van Dyke appends this significant comment:
There was no great novelty in this arrangement. It was frankly
adopted from Italian Renascence painting and had been used for high
altar-pieces by all the later painters—Andrea del Sarto, Raphael,
Titian, Palma. They had worked out the best way of filling that
up-right-and-arched space, and La Farge followed the tradition
because he recognized its sufficiency.
In other words, the art of painting had so far advanced that La Farge
was supplied with the pattern best suited to his purpose; and this
pattern once accepted, he was at liberty to paint the picture as
he saw it, without wasting time in quest of another construction.
The picture he put within that frame was his and his only, even if
the pattern of it had been devised centuries before he was born. In
thus utilizing a framework invented by his predecessors he was not
cramped and confined; rather was he set free. So it is that to Milton
and to Wordsworth the rigidity of the sonnet was not a hindrance
but a help—especially to Wordsworth since it curbed his tendency
to diffuseness. Wordsworth himself declared his delight in the
restrictions of the sonnet:
In truth the prison into which we doom
Ourselves no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be),
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace here, as I have found.
That utterance of Wordsworth’s may be recommended to the ardent
advocates of Free Verse,—that is, of the verse which boasts itself to
be patternless and to come into being in response solely to the whim
of the moment. Sooner or later the Free Versifiers will discover the
inexorable truth in Huxley’s saying that it is when a man can do as
he pleases that his trouble begins.
Since I have ventured these three quotations I am emboldened to make
a fourth—from John Morley’s essay on Macaulay. After informing us
about the rules which Comte imposed on himself in composition, Morley
tells us that Comte
justified his literary solicitude by insisting on the wholesomeness
alike to heart and intelligence of submission to artificial
restrictions. He felt, after he had once mastered the habit of the
new yoke, that it became the source of continual and unforeseeable
improvement even in thought, and he perceived that the reason why
verse is a higher kind of literary perfection than prose, is that
verse imposes a greater number of rigorous forms.
It is because of their rigorous forms that the ballade and the
rondeau have established themselves by the side of the sonnet; and
the lyrist who has learnt to love them finds in their fixity no curb
on his power of self-expression. So in the kindred art of music, the
sonata and the symphony are forms each with a law of its own; yet the
composer has abundant liberty within the law. He has all the freedom
that is good for him; and the prison to which he dooms himself no
prison is.
II
There is however a difference between a fixed form, such as the
sonata has and the sonnet, and the more flexible formula, such as
the arrangement within a framework which La Farge borrowed from the
painters of the Italian Renascence. A pattern of this latter sort is
less rigid; in fact, it is easily varied as successive artists modify
it to suit themselves.
Consider the eighteenth century essay which Steele devised with the
aid of hints he found in the ‘Epistles’ and even in the ‘Satires’ of
Horace, and which was enriched and amplified by Addison. The pattern
of the ‘Tatler’ and the ‘Spectator’ was taken over by a heterogeny
of other essayists in the course of four-score years, notably by
Johnson in the ‘Idler’ and the ‘Rambler’; and assuredly Johnson if
left to himself could never have invented a formula so simple, so
unpretending and so graceful. It was only a little departed from by
Goldsmith, and only a little more by Irving in the ‘Sketch-Book,’
which is not so much a periodical (altho it was originally published
in parts) as it is a portfolio of essays and of essay-like tales.
From Irving, Thackeray borrowed more than the title of his ‘Paris
Sketch-Book’ and ‘Irish Sketch-Book.’
Consider the earlier and in some measure stricter form of the essay
as it had been developed by Montaigne,—the pattern that Montaigne
worked out as he put more and more of himself into the successive
editions of his essays. He had begun intending little more than a
commonplace-book of anecdotes and quotations; and yet by incessant
interpolation and elaboration his book became at last the intimate
revelation of his own pungent individuality. This is the pattern that
Bacon adopted and adapted to his purpose, less discursive and more
monitory, but not less pregnant nor less significant. And it is
Montaigne’s formula, not greatly transformed by Bacon, which Emerson
found ready to his hand when he made his essays out of his lectures,
scattering his pearls of wisdom with a lavish hand and not pausing
to string them into a necklace. We cannot doubt that the pattern of
Montaigne and Bacon and Emerson owed something also to their memory
of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
Shakspere was as fortunate as Bacon in the fact that he had not to
waste time in vainly seeking new forms. He did not invent the sonnet
and he did not invent the sonnet-sequence; but he made his profit out
of them. Neither the stanza nor the structure of his two narrative
poems, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and the ‘Rape of Lucrece,’ was of his
contriving; he found them already in use and he did not go in search
of any overt novelty of form.
Scott, “beaten out of poetry by Byron,” as he himself phrased it,
turned to prose-fiction; and almost by accident he created the
pattern of the historical novel, with its romantic heroes and
heroines and with its realistic humbler characters. His earliest
heroes and heroines in prose were very like his still earlier heroes
and heroines in verse; and his realistic characters were the result
of his expressed desire to do for the Scottish peasant what Miss
Edgeworth had done for the Irish peasant. The first eight of the
Waverley novels dealt only with Scottish scenes; then in ‘Ivanhoe,’
and a little later in ‘Quentin Durward,’ Scott enlarged his formula
for the presentation of an English and a French theme.
Since Scott’s day his pattern has approved itself to three
generations of novelists; and it is not yet outworn. In France Victor
Hugo and Alexander Dumas accepted it, each of them altering it at
will, feeling free to adjust it to their own differing necessities.
In Italy it was employed by Manzoni, in Poland by Sinckiewitz; and in
Germany by a horde of uninspired story-tellers. In the United States
it was at once borrowed by Cooper for the ‘Spy,’ the first American
historical novel. Then Cooper, having proved its value, took the
pattern which Scott had created for the telling of a story the action
of which took place on land, and in the ‘Pilot’ made it serve for a
story the action of which took place mainly on the sea,—perhaps a
more striking originality than his contemporaneous employment of it
for a series of tales the action of which took place in the forest.
It is one of the most fortunate coincidences in the history of
literature that Scott crossed the border and made a foray into
English history at the very moment when Cooper was ready to write
fiction about his own country; and it was almost equally unfortunate
that Charles Brockden Brown was born too early to be able to avail
himself of the pattern Scott and Cooper were to handle triumphantly.
Brown died a score of years before the publication of ‘Ivanhoe.’ He
left half-a-dozen novels of varying value, known only to devoted
students of American fiction. He had great gifts; he had invention
and imagination; he was a keen observer of human nature; he had
a rich faculty of description. (In one of his books there is a
portrayal of an epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia which almost
challenges comparison with De Foe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’.)
But “the state of the art” of fiction supplied Brown with no model
appropriate to his endowment; and therefore he had to do the best
he could with the unworthy pattern of the Gothic Romance of Horace
Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe and of their belated followers, “Monk”
Lewis and Godwin. If Brown had been a contemporary of Cooper, then
the author of the ‘Last of the Mohicans’ might have had a worthy
rival in his own country.
The state of the art in his own time was a detriment to a far
greater story-teller than Brown or Cooper or Scott, to one of the
greatest of all story-tellers, to Cervantes. ‘Don Quixote’ abides
as the imperishable monument to his genius, to his wisdom, to
his insight, to his humor, to his all-embracing sympathy. None
the less is it sprawling in its construction and careless in its
composition. There were only two models available for Cervantes
when he wrote this masterpiece of fiction, the Romance of Chivalry
and its antithesis, the Romance of Roguery—the picaresque tale. The
Romance of Chivalry was generally chaotic and involute, with a plot
at once complicated and repetitious. The Romance of Roguery, born of
an inevitable reaction against the highflown and toplofty unreality
of the interminable narratives of knight-errantry, was quite as
straggling in its episodes; and it was also addicted to cruel and
brutal practical joking. For Cervantes these were unworthy patterns;
and he had no other. So it is that the method of ‘Don Quixote’ is
sometimes unsatisfactory, even when the manner is always beyond all
cavil. Moreover, it is evident that Cervantes builded better than he
knew; he seems not to have suspected the transcendent quality of his
own work; and therefore he did not take his task as seriously as he
might. As it has been well said, Cervantes came too early to profit
by Cervantes.
How much luckier are the novelists and short-story writers of to-day!
The state of the art has advanced to a point unforeseen even a
century ago. Whatever theme a writer of fiction may want to treat
now, he is never at a loss for a pattern, which will preserve him
from the misadventure which befell Cervantes. In its methods, if in
nothing else, fiction is a finer art than it was once upon a time.
Consider Rudyard Kipling, for example, who is almost infinitely
various, and who is always inexpugnably original. Whatever his
subject might be, there was always an appropriate pattern at his
service; he had only to pick and choose that which best suited his
immediate need. Consider Stevenson, again, and how he was able to
play the sedulous ape at one time to Scott and Dumas, and at another
to Hawthorne and Poe.
III
It is perhaps in the field of playmaking that the utility of the
pattern is most obvious. Sophocles modeled himself on Aeschylus, and
then modified the formula in his own favor. Calderon took over the
pattern that Lope de Vega had developed and the younger playwright
departed from it only infrequently. Racine modeled himself upon
Corneille; and then transformed the formula he borrowed in obedience
to his own genius. Victor Hugo took the theatrically effective (but
psychologically empty) pattern of contemporary Parisian melodrama and
draped its bare bones with his glittering lyrism. Maeterlinck took
the traditional formula of the fairy-play, the _féerie_, and endowed
it with the poetic feeling which delights us in the ‘Blue Bird.’
Oscar Wilde took the framework of Scribe and Sardou; and he was thus
enabled adroitly to complicate the situations of ‘Lady Windermere’s
Fan.’
Then there is Ibsen, whose skilful construction has demanded the
praise of all students of the art and mystery of playmaking. He
started where Scribe and Sardou left off. The earliest of his social
dramas, the ‘League of Youth,’ is in accord with the pattern of
Augier and the younger Dumas. The next, the ‘Doll’s House,’ might
have been composed by Sardou—up to the moment in the final act when
husband and wife sit down on opposite sides of the table to talk out
their future relation. Thereafter Ibsen evolved from this French
pattern a pattern of his own which was exactly suited to his later
social dramas and which has in its turn been helpful to the more
serious dramatists of to-day.
As Shakspere had been content to take the verse-forms of his
predecessors and contemporaries, so he never hesitated to employ
their playmaking formulas. Kyd had developed the type of play which
we call the tragedy-of-blood; and Shakspere borrowed it for his
‘Titus Andronicus’ (if this is his, which is more than doubtful)
and even for his ‘Hamlet,’ wherein it is purged of most of its
violence. Marlowe lifted into literature the unliterary and loosely
knit chronicle-play; and Shakspere enlarged this formula in ‘Richard
III’ and ‘Richard II.’ It was in his youth that Shakspere trod in
the trail of Kyd and Marlowe; and in his maturity he followed in
the footsteps of his younger friends, Beaumont and Fletcher, taking
the pattern of their dramatic-romance for his ‘Winter’s Tale’ and
‘Cymbeline.’ Due perhaps to the fact that the state of the art did
not provide him with a pattern for what has been called high-comedy,
Shakspere did not attempt any searching study of Elizabethan
society,—altho, of course, this may have been because Elizabethan
society was lacking in the delicate refinements of fashion which are
the fit background of high-comedy.
Whatever the explanation may be, it was left for Molière, inspired
by the external elegancies of the court of Louis XIV, to create the
pattern of high-comedy in ‘Tartuffe’ and the ‘Misanthrope’ and the
‘Femmes Savantes,’—the pattern which was to serve Congreve for the
‘Way of the World,’ Sheridan for the ‘School for Scandal,’ Augier
and Sandeau for the ‘Gendre de Monsieur Poirier.’ And Molière
really created the formula, with little or no help from any earlier
dramatists, either Greek or Latin. Neither in Athens nor in Rome was
there the atmosphere of breeding which might have stimulated Menander
or Terence to the composition of comedies of this distinction. It
is the more remarkable that Molière should have accomplished this
feat, since he sought no originality of form in his earlier efforts,
contenting himself with the loose and liberal framework of the
Italian improvized plays, the Comedy-of-Masks.
One of the many reasons for the sterility of the English drama in
the middle of the nineteenth century is that the dramatists of our
language seem to have believed it their duty to abide by the patterns
which had been acceptable to the Jacobean and Restoration audiences
and which were not appropriate to the theater of the nineteenth
century, widely different in its size and in its scenic appliances.
The English poets apparently despised the stage of their own time;
and they made no effort to master its methods. As a result they wrote
dramatic poems and not poetic dramas. They did not follow the example
of Victor Hugo and lift into literature a type of play which was
unliterary. Stevenson, in his unfortunate adventures into playmaking,
made the unpardonable mistake of trying to varnish with style a
dramatic formula which had long ceased to be popular.
In the past half-century the men of letters of our language have
seen a great light. They have no contempt for the dramatic patterns
of approved popularity; and of these there are now a great many,
suitable for every purpose and adjustable to every need. They have
found out how to be theatrically effective without ceasing to be
literary in the best sense of the word,—that is to say, they are not
relying on “fine writing” but on clear thinking and on the honest
presentation of human nature, as they severally see it.
(1921)
VI
DID SHAKSPERE WRITE PLAYS TO FIT HIS ACTORS?
VI
DID SHAKSPERE WRITE PLAYS TO FIT HIS ACTORS?
I
In his consideration of the organization of the Elizabethan dramatic
companies Professor Alwin Thaler pointed out that the company of
the Globe Theater in London, to which Shakspere belonged, continued
to contain the same actors year after year, the secessions and the
accessions being few and far between; and he explained that this was
“because its members were bound to one another by ties of devoted
personal friendship.” He noted that he had “emphasized the influence
exerted upon Shakspere the playwright by his intimate knowledge of
the men for whom his work was written, and there can be no doubt
that in working out some of his greatest characters he must have
remembered that Burbage was to act them.” Then Professor Thaler filed
a caveat, so to speak.
But the Shakspere muse was not of that sorry sort which produces
made-to-order garments to fit the tastes and idiosyncrasies of a
single star. Far from being one-man plays, the dramas were written
for a great company of actors.... And Richard Burbage, I imagine,
would have had little inclination to surrender his place among his
peers for the artificial and idolatrous solitude of modern starhood.
In this last sentence Mr. Thaler confuses the issue. The question
is not whether Burbage wanted to go starring, supported by a more
or less incompetent company, but whether Shakspere did on occasion
choose to write a play which is in fact a made-to-order garment to
fit the idiosyncrasies of a single star. And when it is put in this
way the question is easy to answer. We know that Burbage played
Richard III, and if there ever was a star-part, if there ever was
a one-man play, if there ever was a piece cut and stitched to the
measure of the man who first performed it, then it is Richard III.
Here we have a dominating character to whom the other characters
are sacrificed; he is etched with bold strokes, whereas most of the
others are only faintly outlined. So long as Richard is powerfully
seized and rendered, then the rest of the acting is relatively
unimportant. Richard is the whole show. And while there is only
a single star-part in Richard III—Eclipse first and the rest
nowhere—there are twin star-parts in Macbeth, who are vigorously
drawn, while the remaining characters are merely brushed in, as
Professor Bradley has noted.
Now, if this proves that Shakspere’s muse was of a sorry sort, then
that heavenly visitor is in no worse case than the muse of many
another dramatist. Sophocles is reported to have devised his great
tragic parts specially for one actor, whose name has not come down
to us. Racine wrote ‘Phèdre’ and ‘Andromaque,’ his masterpieces,
for Mlle. de Champsmeslé. Rostand wrote ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ and
‘Chantecler’ for Coquelin. Sardou wrote ‘Fédora’ and ‘Théodora’ for
Sarah Bernhardt. The younger Dumas wrote the ‘Visite de Noces’ for
Desclée. Giacommetti wrote ‘Maria Antoinette’ for Ristori and the
‘Morte Civile’ for Salvini. D’Annunzio wrote the ‘Gioconda’ and the
‘Citta Morte’ for Duse. Bulwer-Lytton wrote the ‘Lady of Lyons’
and ‘Richelieu’ for Macready. Gilbert wrote ‘Comedy and Tragedy’
for Mary Anderson. Legouvé has told us in detail the circumstances
which led to his writing (in collaboration with Scribe) ‘Adrienne
Lecouvreur’ for Rachel. Jules Lemaître has told us how and why he
came to compose his ‘Age Difficile’ for Coquelin; and Augustus Thomas
has told us how he came to compose his ‘In Mizzoura’ for Goodwin.
The line stretches out to the crack of doom. When Shakspere chose to
produce made-to-order garments to fit the idiosyncrasies of a single
actor, he was in very good company, ancient and modern. And we may
go further and assert that very few of these plays are any the worse
because they were made-to-order.
The great dramatists, whose works we analyze reverently in the
study, were all of them, in their own time, successful playwrights,
stimulated now and again by association with the most gifted and the
most accomplished of contemporary actors. If they had not made their
profit out of the histrionic ability of the foremost performers of
their own time and country, they would have been neglecting golden
opportunities.
Those who best know the conditions of playwriting will be the least
likely to deny that not a few of the great characters in the drama
came into being originally as parts for great actors. Of course,
these characters are more than parts; they transcend the endowment of
any one performer; they have complexity and variety; they are vital
and accusable human beings; but they were parts first of all more
or less made-to-order. In many cases we know the name of the actor
for whose performance the character was conceived, Burbage for one,
Mlle. de Champsmeslé for a second, Coquelin for a third. And in many
another case we lack definite knowledge and are left to conjecture.
There are peculiarities in the ‘Medea’ of Euripides, for instance,
which seem to me to point to the probability that it also was a
made-to-order garment.
To say that Sophocles and Euripides possibly did this cutting-to-fit,
that Shakspere and Racine and Rostand indisputably did it, is not to
imply that they did it always or even that they did it often. Perhaps
they did it more often than we shall ever know; perhaps they had
special actors in mind when they created characters which are not
star-parts. And this suggests a broadening of the inquiry.
II
After asserting that Shakspere’s were “far from being one-man plays,”
Professor Thaler reminded us that Shakspere’s dramas were written
“for a great company of actors”; and what is true of Shakspere
holds good also of the Elizabethan drama in general. Its breadth
and variety may be ascribed in no slight degree to the fact that
the organization of the dramatic companies provided the great poets
of a great age with ample facilities for the interpretation of many
characters and many phases of life.
This prompts a question as to whether Shakspere may not have fitted
other actors who were his associates at the Globe Theater besides
Burbage. That he did deliberately and repeatedly take the measure of
the foremost performer in the company and that his dramatic genius
was stimulated by the histrionic talent of Burbage, I do not doubt.
We cannot help seeing that Shakspere’s heroes become older as Burbage
himself advanced in years. Romeo being intended for a fiery young
fellow and Lear being composed for a maturer man, who had become a
more consummate artist. I have suggested elsewhere the possibility—to
my own mind a probability—that Shakspere inserted the part of Jaques
into ‘As You Like It’ specially for Burbage. Shakspere took his
sequence of incidents from Lodge’s ‘Rosalynd,’ in which there is no
character which resembles Jaques; and Jaques has nothing to do with
the plot; he remains totally outside the story; he exists for his own
sake; and he may very well have been thrust into ‘As You Like It’
because Burbage was too important an actor to be left out of the cast
and because Orlando was not the kind of part in which Burbage at that
period of his artistic development would appear to best advantage.
If Shakspere made parts thus adjusted to the chief performer at
the Globe Theater, may he not also have proportioned other and
less important characters to the capabilities of one or another of
the actors whose histrionic endowment he was in the best possible
position to appreciate aptly, since he was acting every day by their
side? Is this something to which the greatest of dramatists would
scorn to descend? Has this ever been done by any other playwright in
all the long history of the stage?