this suggestion, we find it abundantly and super-abundantly. The
succession of comic operas which Gilbert devised to be set to music
by Sullivan reveal at once that they were contrived with reference
to the capacity and to the characteristics of the chief members of
the company at the Savoy Theater. The sequence of broadly humorous
pieces, farces which almost rose to be comedies and comedies which
almost relaxed into farces, written by Labiche, and by Meilhac and
Halévy for the Palais Royal theater were all of them so put together
as to provide appropriate parts for the quartet of comedians who made
that little house the home of perennial laughter in the third quarter
of the nineteenth century.
At the same time Meilhac and Halévy were contriving for the
Variétés the librettos of ‘Barbe-Bleue’ and the ‘Grande Duchesse
de Gérolstein,’ ‘Belle Hélène’ and ‘La Périchole,’ a series of
opera-bouffes enhanced by the scintillating rhythms of Offenbach and
adroitly adapted to the special talents of Schneider, of Dupuis
and of several of the other more or less permanent members of the
company. Almost simultaneously Augier and the younger Dumas were
giving to the Comédie-Française their social dramas, always carefully
made-to-order to suit the half-dozen leading members of the brilliant
company Perrin was then guiding. The ‘Fourchambault’ of Augier
and the ‘Étrangère’ of Dumas are masterpieces of this profitable
utilization of the pronounced personalities of the performers. The
‘Étrangère,’ in particular, would have been a very different play if
it had not contained characters made-to-order for Sarah Bernhardt and
Croizette, Got and Coquelin.
A little earlier the series of blank verse plays written by Gilbert
for the Haymarket Theater, of which ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ won the
most protracted popularity, had their leading characters plainly
made-to-order for Mr. and Mrs. Kendal and for Buckstone himself. And
just as ‘Richard III’ and ‘King Lear’ are none the worse because
the central character was conceived also as an acting part for
Burbage, so Gilbert’s blank verse pieces, Augier’s social dramas,
Meilhac and Halévy’s farcical comedies lost nothing by their owing
some portion of their inspiration to the necessity of fitting the
accomplished comedians by whom the outstanding characters were to be
impersonated. I venture to express the opinion that this desire to
bring out the best the several actors had to give was helpful rather
than not, stimulatingly suggestive to the author when he was setting
his invention to work.
When we turn back the pages of stage-history from the nineteenth
century to the eighteenth we find perhaps the most striking of all
instances of made-to-order parts,—an instance which shows us not
one or two or three characters in a play, but almost every one of
them, composed and elaborated with an eye single to the original
performers. The ‘School for Scandal’ has been seen by hundreds and
read by thousands, who have enjoyed its effective situations, its
sparkling dialog and its contrasted characters, without any suspicion
that the persons of the play were made-to-order parts. Yet this
undisputed masterpiece of English comedy is what it is because its
clever author had succeeded to the management of Drury Lane, where
Garrick had gathered an incomparable company of comedians; and in
writing the ‘School for Scandal’ Sheridan peopled his play with the
characters which the members of this company could personate most
effectively.
King was Sir Peter, Mrs. Abington was Lady Teazle, Palmer was Joseph
Surface, Smith was Charles Surface; and they were so perfectly fitted
that they played with effortless ease. So closely did Sheridan
identify the parts with the performers that when a friend asked
him why he had written a five-act comedy ending in the marriage of
Charles and Maria without any love-scene for this couple, he is
reported to have responded: “But I couldn’t do it. Smith can’t make
love—and nobody would want to make love to Priscilla Hopkins!”
III
It may be objected that Sheridan and Augier and Dumas were after all
dextrous playwrights and that they are no one of them to be ranked
with the truly great dramatists. While they might very well be
willing once in a way to turn themselves into dramaturgic tailors,
this is a servile complaisance of which the mighty masters of the
drama would never be guilty, from which indeed they would shrink
with abhorrence. But if we turn the pages of stage-history still
further back, from the eighteenth century to the seventeenth, we
discover that Molière did this very thing, the adjustment of a whole
play to the actors who were to perform it, not once as Sheridan did,
but repeatedly and regularly and in all his pieces, in his loftiest
comedies no less than his broadest and most boisterous farces. And
there will be found few competent critics to deny that Molière is
one of the supreme leaders of the drama, with an indisputable right
to a place by the side of Sophocles and Shakspere, even if he does
not climb to the austere and lofty heights of tragedy.
The more we know about the art of the theater and the more we study
the plays of Molière the more clearly do we perceive that he was
compelled to do persistently what Sheridan did only once. The company
at the Palais Royal was loyal to Molière; nearly all its leading
members came to Paris with him and remained with him until his death
fifteen years later. This company was strictly limited in number;
and as it had a permanent repertory and stood ready to appear in any
of its more successful plays at a moment’s notice, outside actors
could not be engaged for any special part,—even if there had then
been in Paris any available performers at liberty. Molière could not
have more parts in any of his pieces than there were members of the
company; and he could not put into any of his pieces any character
for which there was not a competent performer in the company. No
doubt, he must at times have felt this to be a grievous limitation.
That he never deals with maternal love may be accounted for by
the fact that he had no woman to play agreeable “old women,”—the
disagreeable elderly females being still played by men, in accord
with the medieval tradition. We know the name of the male actor
who appeared as Madame Pernelle in ‘Tartuffe,’ as the wife in the
‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme’ and as the Comtesse d’Escarbagnas.
Molière wrote many parts for his own acting; and as he was troubled
with a frequent cough, he sometimes makes coughing a characteristic
of the person he was to act. His brother-in-law, Béjart, was lame;
and so Molière describes a character written for this actor as having
a limp. His sister-in-law, Madeleine Béjart, was an actress of
authority; and so the serving maids he wrote for her are domineering
and provocative. But when she died and her place was taken by a
younger actress with an infectious laugh, the serving maids in all
the plays that Molière wrote thereafter are not authoritative, and
they are given occasion for repeated cachinnation. And as this
recruit, Mlle. Beauval, had a clever little daughter, Molière did not
hesitate to compose a part for a child in his ‘Malade Imaginaire.’
When we have familiarized ourselves with the record of the leading
man, La Grange, of Madeleine Béjart, of Catherine de Brie, and of
Armande Béjart (Molière’s wife), we find it difficult to study the
swift succession of comedies without constantly feeling the presence
of the actors inside the characters written for them. We recognize
that it was not a matter of choice this fitting of the parts to the
performers; it was a matter of necessity; and even if it may have
irked him at times, Molière made the best of it and probably found
his profit in it.
Now Shakspere was subject to the same limitations as Molière. He
composed all his plays for one company, the membership of which was
fairly constant during a score of years and more. It was also a
repertory company with frequent changes of bill. It could never be
strengthened by the special engagement of an unattached performer; it
had to suffice, such as it was. So far as we can judge by the scant
external evidence and by the abundant internal evidence of the plays
written for them by Shakspere, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher,
and the rest, the company was composed of unusually competent
performers. It is unthinkable that Shakspere should have plotted his
superb series of tragedies, making more and more exacting demands on
the impersonators of his tragic heroes, unless he had a confident
assurance that Burbage would be equal to them. And this confidence
could not fail to be a stimulus to him, encouraging him to seek out
stories for the ample display of his friend’s great gifts.
From all we have learnt of late about Shakspere we are justified in
believing that he was a shrewd man of affairs with a keen eye to
the main chance. He was a sharer in the takings at the door; and he
could not but know that those plays are most attractive to the public
which contain the most parts demanding and rewarding good acting.
So we must infer that he put into his plays the characters in which
he judged that his comrades could appear to best advantage. He not
only wrote good parts for good actors, he wrote special parts for
special actors, shaping his characters to the performers who were to
impersonate them. In other words he provided, and he had to provide,
made-to-order garments.
That he did this repeatedly and regularly, just as Molière was to
do it three-quarters of a century later on the other side of the
channel, is plainly evident, altho we do not now know the special
qualifications of his actors as well as we do those of Molière’s. But
we cannot doubt that the company contained one actor of villains,
of “heavies” as they are termed in the theater. I hazard a guess
that this was Condell, afterwards the associate of Heming in getting
out the First Folio; but whoever he was, Condell or another, he was
entrusted with Iago, with Edmund in ‘King Lear,’ with the King in
‘Hamlet,’ and with the rest of Shakspere’s bold, bad men.
We know that there were two low comedians in the company, who
appeared as the two Dromios, as the two Gobbos, as Launce and Speed;
and we know also that one of these was Will Kempe and that when he
left the Globe Theater his place was taken by Arnim. Now, we can see
that the Dromios, the Gobbos, Launce and Speed are merely “clowns”
as the Elizabethans called the funny men,—“Let not your clowns
speak more than is set down for them.” The Dromios and the Gobbos
and the corresponding parts in Shakspere’s earlier plays, including
Peter in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ are only funny men, with little
individuality, almost characterless; and we may surmise that this was
due to Shakspere’s own inexperience in the delineation of humorous
character. But we may, if we choose, credit it also to the fact that
Kempe was only a funny man, and not a character-actor. And we can
find support for this in the superior richness and stricter veracity
of the low comedy characters composed by Shakspere after Arnim took
Kempe’s place,—Dogberry, the porter in ‘Macbeth,’ the gravedigger in
‘Hamlet,’ comic parts which are also characters, equipt with more or
less philosophy. And again this may be ascribed either to Shakspere’s
own ripening as a humorist or to the richer capacity of Arnim. But
why may not these two causes have coöperated?
Then there is the brilliant series of parts composed for a dashing
young comedian,—Mercutio, Gratiano, Cassio, Laertes. That these
successive characters were all entrusted to the same performer seems
to me beyond question; and it seems to me equally indisputable that
Shakspere knew what he was doing when he composed these characters.
He was assured in advance that they would be well played; and there
is no reason to doubt that in composing them he profited by his
intimate knowledge of the histrionic endowment of the unidentified
member of the company for whom they were written, giving him nothing
to do which he was not capable of doing well, and giving him again
and again the kind of thing that he had already exhibited the ability
to do well.
Another group of parts is equally obviously intended for an actor
who had shown himself to be an expert in the impersonation of comic
old women, boldly characterized, broadly painted, highly colored in
humor,—Mrs. Quickly (who appears in four plays), the nurse in ‘Romeo
and Juliet’ and Mrs. Overdone in ‘Measure for Measure.’ Here again I
venture the guess that this low comedian may have earlier been cast
for the Dromio and the Gobbo which was not given to Kempe. And I wish
to record my regret that we cannot pick out from the list of the
company at the Globe the name of the “creator” of Mrs. Quickly and
her sisters, any more than we can identify the “creator” of Mercutio
and his brothers.
In my biographies of Shakspere and of Molière I have dwelt in ampler
detail with this dependence of the two greatest dramatists of the
modern world upon the actors who were their comrades in art and their
friends in life; and I have here adduced only a part of the testimony
which goes to show that both the English dramatist and the French
were visited by the same muse,—whether of the “sorry sort” or not
must be left for each of us to decide for himself.
IV
“It is not more difficult to write a good play,” so the Spanish
dramatist Benavente has declared, “than it is to write a good sonnet;
only one must know how to write it—just as one must know how to write
a sonnet. This is the principal resemblance between the drama and the
other forms of literature.”
The writing of a sonnet imposes rigorous restrictions on a poet; he
must utter his thought completely in fourteen lines, no more and
no less, and these lines must conform to a prescribed sequence of
rimes. But the masters of the sonnet have proved that this enforced
compression and this arbitrary arrangement may be a help rather than
a hindrance,—not a stumbling block, but a stepping stone to higher
achievement. May not the limitations under which Shakspere had to
work, may not the necessity of cutting his cloth to fit his comrades,
may not these enforced conditions have also been helpful and not
harmful? And if this is possible (and even probable) what warrant
have we for thinking scorn of the great dramatist because he was a
good work-man, making the best of the only tools he had? In disposing
important characters to the acting of Burbage, Shakspere was probably
no more conscious of being cribbed, cabined, and confined than was
Milton when he shut himself up in the narrow cell of the sonnet.
The artist must be free to express himself, but he attains the
loftiest freedom when he accepts the principle of liberty within the
law. Many of the masterpieces of the several arts have been produced
under restrictions as sharply defined as those of the sonnet, and
have been all the finer because of these restrictions. The architect,
for one, does not choose what he shall build, he has perforce to
design an edifice for a special purpose on a special area. The mural
painter has a given wall-space assigned to him, where his work is to
be seen under special conditions of light; and often his subject is
also prescribed for him. The sculptor is sometimes subordinate to the
architect, who decides upon the size and the subject of the group
of statuary needed to enhance the beauty of the building. The artist
who modelled the figures in the frieze of the Parthenon had little
freedom and yet he wrought a mighty masterpiece. Michael Angelo’s
David is what it is because the sculptor was asked to utilize a block
of marble of unusual size and shape; and his Last Judgment is what
it is because he accepted the commission to decorate the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel. In fact, Michael Angelo’s muse was “of that sorry
sort which produces made-to-order garments to fit the tastes and
idiosyncrasies of a single” patron.
If Shakspere fitted his characters to the actors who were to play
them, he was doing what Molière was to do; and this companionship is
honorable. He was doing what the sculptor of the Parthenon did and
the painter of the Sistine, no more and no less; and he stands in no
need of apology.
(1920)
VII
STRANGE SHAKSPERIAN PERFORMANCES
VII
STRANGE SHAKSPERIAN PERFORMANCES
I
If Shakspere could return to earth he would find many things to
astonish him, not the least of which would be his own world-wide
reputation. He seems to have been, so far as we can judge from his
works and from the sparse records that remain, a modest man, with no
sense of his own importance and with no pretension of superiority
over his fellow-poets. In his lifetime there was scant appreciation
for his plays, since the drama was then held to be little better than
journalism, scarcely worthy to be criticized as literature. That he
was popular, or in other words that his plays pleased the people,
and that he was liked personally by his associates,—this seems to be
clearly established. But there was no recognition of his supremacy
as a poet, as a creator of character or even as a playwright. As
Shakspere was a singularly healthy person, we can confidently assume
that he did not look upon himself as an unappreciated genius.
Therefore, if he came back to us we cannot doubt that he would stand
aghast before the constantly increasing library of books that have
been written about him in the past two centuries. Nor can we doubt
that this would appeal to his sense of humor. He would probably be
interested to look into a few of the commentaries which seek to
elucidate him; but he would not long pursue this perusal; and he
would shut the books with a laugh or at least with a smile at the
obstinate perversity of the critics who have wearied themselves (and
not infrequently their readers also) in the vain attempt to explain
what originally needed no explanation, since it had been plain enough
to the unlettered crowds which flocked into the Globe Theater and
stood entranced while his stories enrolled themselves on the stage.
If he were permitted to wander from the library where the immense
mass of Shaksperiana fills shelf after shelf, and to enter any of
our comfortable playhouses to witness a performance of one of his
own plays, as set on the stage by an enterprizing and artistic
producer, such as Sir Henry Irving, he would again be astonished.
The theater itself would be strange to him, for it would be roofed
and lighted, whereas the playhouse he knew was open to the sky and
dependent on the uncertain sun for its illumination. The stage would
be equally novel, for it would have sumptuous scenery, whereas the
platform of his day had had no scenery and only a few properties, a
throne or a pulpit, a bed or a wellhead. The actors would be unlike
his fellow-players at the Globe since they would be attired with
a strenuous effort for historical accuracy, whereas Burbage and
Kempe, Condell and Heming were accustomed to costume themselves in
the elaborate and sumptuous garb of the Elizabethan gallants, glad
when they could don the discarded attire of a wealthy courtier. And
perhaps what would surprize him as much as anything would be to
behold his very feminine heroines impersonated by women instead of
being undertaken by shaven lads, as was the habit in his day.
As he was an artist in construction, an expert in stage-craft as this
had been conditioned by the circumstances of the Tudor playhouse,
he could not very well fail to be annoyed by the curtailing of his
plays to adjust themselves to the circumstances of our superbly
equipt theaters; and he would resent the chopping and the changing,
the modification and the mangling to which his plays are subjected
so that their swift succession of situations could each of them
be localized by appropriate and complicated scenery. But because
he was a modest man and because he had composed his tragedies and
his comedies to please his audiences, he would probably soon be
reconciled to all these transmogrifications when he saw that his
pieces had none the less retained their power to attract spectators
and to delight their ears and their eyes. If the house was crowded
night after night, then he would feel that he had no call to protest,
since other times bring other manners.
II
If Shakspere would be surprized to see Ophelia performed by a girl,
he would be still more surprized, not to say shocked, to see Hamlet
performed by a woman. And yet this is a spectacle that he might have
beheld again and again in the nineteenth century, if he had been
permitted to visit the theaters of New York at irregular intervals.
In that hundred years he could have seen not one female Hamlet or two
or three but at least a score of them. The complete list is given in
Laurence Hutton’s ‘Curiosities of the American Stage’; it begins with
Mrs. Bartley; it includes Clara Fisher, Charlotte Cushman and Anne
Dickinson; and it was drawn up too early to include Sarah Bernhardt,
whose unfortunate experiment belongs to the very last year of the
last century.
George Henry Lewes asserted that ‘Hamlet’ itself is so broad in
its appeal, so interesting in its story, so moving in its episodes,
that no actor had ever made a total failure in the part. It might be
asserted with equal truth that no actress had ever succeeded in it,
because Hamlet is essentially masculine and therefore impossible to a
woman, however lofty her ambition or however abundant her histrionic
faculty. It is not a disparagement of the versatility and dexterity
of Sarah Bernhardt to record that the details of her impersonation
of the melancholy Prince have wholly faded from the memory of one
spectator who yet retains an unforgettable impression of Coquelin’s
beautifully humorous embodiment of the First Gravedigger.
It was perhaps because Charlotte Cushman was more or less lacking in
womanly charm and because she was possessed of more or less masculine
characteristics, that her Hamlet seems to have been more successful,
or, at least, less unsuccessful than that of any other woman. Nor was
Hamlet the only one of Shakspere’s male characters that she undertook
in the course of her long and honorable career in the United States
and in Great Britain. Altho she was an incomparable Katherine in
‘Henry VIII,’ dowering the discarded Queen with poignant pathos, she
undertook more than once the part of Cardinal Wolsey, which does not
present itself as the kind of a character likely to be attractive to
a woman. From all the accounts that have come down to us, she appears
to have impersonated Romeo more satisfactorily than either Wolsey or
Hamlet. In fact, one competent critic, who had seen her in all her
greatest parts, including Lady Macbeth and Meg Merrilies, selected as
her highest peak of achievement the moment when Romeo inflamed by the
death of Mercutio provokes Tybalt in a fiery outburst:
Now, Tybalt, take the villain back,
That late thou gav’st me!
Shakspere would not in all probability be long displeased to see
Ophelia and Queen Katherine and Juliet impersonated by women, however
much he might be annoyed by the vain efforts of any woman to assume
the masculinity of Hamlet and Wolsey and Romeo. His tragedies are of
imagination all compact, and he might very well wish to have them
treated with all possible respect. But perhaps he would not insist
on taking his comedies quite so seriously; and therefore he might
have been amused rather than aggrieved if he could have seen the
performance of ‘As You Like It’ given by the Professional Woman’s
League at Palmer’s Theater in November, 1893, when every part in the
piece was entrusted to a woman.
III