woman’s right to do all that becomes a man. When the comedy had been
originally produced at the Globe Theater in London (probably in 1600
but possibly a year or two earlier) no actresses had ever been seen
on the English stage; and therefore Rosalind and Celia and Audrey had
to be entrusted to three shaven lads whom the older actors had taken
as apprentices. When the comedy was performed at Palmer’s Theater in
New York in 1893, almost three centuries later, Orlando and Adam,
Touchstone and Jaques were undertaken by actresses of a maturer age
and of a richer experience than the Elizabethan boys could ever have
acquired.
As one of those who had the pleasure of beholding this unprecedented
performance I am glad to bear testimony that I really enjoyed my
afternoon and that ‘As You Like It’ lost little of its charm when men
were banished from its cast. Jaques was undertaken by Janauschek,
aging and enfeebled, yet still vigorous of mind and still in command
of all her artistic resources. The Orlando was Maude Banks, a brave
figure in her attempt at masculine attire. The Touchstone was Kate
Davis; and Charles, the Duke’s wrestler, was Marion Abbott.
There is a delightful unreality about ‘As You Like It,’ an element
of “make-believe,” an aroma of Once upon a Time, a flavor of “old
familiar far-off things”; and it was this quality which was plainly
prominent in the performance by the Professional Woman’s League.
Consider for a moment the fascinating complexity of Rosalind’s
conduct when she was impersonated by a shaven lad. The Elizabethan
spectators beheld a boy playing the part of a girl, who disguises
herself as a boy and who then asks her lover to pretend that she is a
girl. Set down in black and white this intricacy may appear a little
puzzling; but seen on the stage it causes no confusion nowadays and
it is transparently piquant. Yet there was far more verisimilitude
in the performance in the Tudor playhouse than there can be in our
modern theaters, because it was easy enough for the youth who was
playing Rosalind to look like a lad, after he had once donned doublet
and hose, because he _was_ a lad and not a lass; whereas the woman
who now impersonates Rosalind finds it difficult (if not impossible)
to make her male disguise impenetrable.
The fact is, however, that our latter-day leading lady is not
inclined to take seriously Rosalind’s attempt to pass herself off
as a man. She is likely to be a little too well satisfied with her
feminine charms to be insistently anxious to conceal them; she does
not want the audience ever to forget that she is a woman to be wooed,
even if she is willing to pretend that she is a youth. ‘As You Like
It’ is my favorite among all Shakspere’s plays and in the course of
more than half-a-century of playgoing I must have seen almost a score
of Rosalinds; but I cannot now recall a single one who made an honest
effort to deceive Orlando, as Shakspere meant him to be deceived,
if the story is to be accepted. As a result of this persistent
femininity of Rosalind when she is masquerading as Ganymede, most
of the Orlandos whom I can call up one after another let themselves
flirt with Ganymede as if they had penetrated Rosalind’s disguise. It
was a striking merit of John Drew’s Orlando that he always treated
Ganymede as the lad Rosalind was pretending to be, making it clear to
the audience that no doubt as to Ganymede’s sex had ever crossed his
mind.
IV
I am inclined to guess that if the author of ‘As You Like It’ had
accepted an invitation from the Professional Woman’s League, he would
have sat out the performance at Palmer’s Theater, gazing at it with
tolerant eye and courteously complimenting the Lady President or the
Lady Vice-President who had been deputed to escort him to his box.
But I make no doubt that his glance would have been less favorable
had he been a spectator of a performance of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ given
in May, 1877, at Booth’s Theater for the benefit of George Rignold,
who appeared as Romeo supported by seven different Juliets, the part
changing impersonators with every reappearance of the character.
Grace d’Urfy danced in the masquerade, Adelaide Neilson leaned down
from the balcony, Ada Dyas was married in the cell of Friar Lawrence,
Maude Granger shrank from bloodshed, Marie Wainwright parted from
Romeo, Fanny Davenport drank the potion, and Minnie Cummings awakened
in the tomb.
It cannot be denied that Romeo was the greatest lover in all
literature; but he was not a Don Juan deserting one mistress after
another, and still less was he a Bluebeard married to half-a-dozen
wives. The diversity of actresses, one replacing another as the
sad tale rolled forward to its foredoomed end, may have served to
attract a larger audience than Rignold could allure by his unaided
ability; but it was destructive of the integrity of the tragedy.
The unavoidable result of this freakish experiment was to take the
mind of the audience off from the play itself and to focus it on
a succession of histrionic stunts,—the single scenes in which the
Juliets, one after another, exhibited themselves in rivalry with
one another. The continuity of the tragedy of young love in the
springtime of life was basely broken, its poetry was sadly defiled,
and its dignity was indisputably desecrated. The actresses who lent
themselves to this catchpenny show were ill-advised; they were false
to their art; and they took no profit from their sacrifice of their
standing in the profession. While the performance was discreditable
to all who were concerned in it, the major part of the disgrace must
be assumed by the actor who lowered himself to make money by it.
The obvious objections which must be urged against the splitting up
of a single part among half-a-dozen performers do not lie against
the appearance of a single actor in two or more characters. In
fact, the doubling of parts, as it is called, is one of the oldest
of theatrical expedients; and it was the custom in the ceremonial
performances of the Greek drama at Athens, when there were only
three actors, who might have to impersonate in turn seven or eight
characters. It sprang up again in Tudor times, when a strolling
company like that to which Hamlet addressed his advice numbered only
a scant half-dozen members, and in which there might be only one boy
to bear the burden of two or three or even four female characters.
When several actresses come forward in swift succession to speak the
lovely lines of Juliet our interest is interrupted by every change;
and the attention we are forced to pay to the appearance and the
personality of each of the successive performers is necessarily
subtracted from that which we ought to be giving to the character
these actresses are pretending to impersonate. But when an actress
appears in the beginning of the play as a mother, to reappear at the
end of the piece as a daughter, there is only a single adjustment
of our attention to be made; and this is easily achieved. In some
cases, or at least with some spectators, there would be no need of
any adjustment, since these spectators might not become aware that
the same performer had been entrusted with the part of the daughter
as well as that of the mother.
When she revived ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ Mary Anderson so arranged the
play that she could appear as Hermione in the earlier acts and as
Perdita in the later acts, resuming the character of the mother only
at the very end when the supposed statue of Hermione starts to life
and descends from the pedestal. Of course, there had to be a few
excisions from the text of the fifth act so that the actress could be
seen first as the lovely maiden and second as the stately matron,
beautiful mother of a more beautiful daughter. The lines cut out were
only a slight loss to the play, whereas the doubling up which these
omissions made possible was a great gain for the spectators. I feel
assured that if Shakspere could have been one of these spectators he
would have been as delighted and as fascinated as I was. He would
have pardoned without a word of protest the violence done to the
construction of his story.
Nor am I any the less convinced that if Shakspere had been present
at one of the memorable representations of his greatest tragedy
when Salvini was Othello and Edwin Booth Iago, he would have smiled
reproachfully at those who were harsh in denouncing the performance
as a profanation of his play on the pretext that Salvini spoke
Italian while Booth and the rest of the cast spoke English. It would
so greatly gratify a playwright to have two of his superbest parts
sustained by the two foremost tragedians of the time that he would
be willing enough to overlook the apparent incongruity of their
using two different tongues. Perhaps the author might have been
inspired to point out to the cavillers that Salvini’s retention of
his mother-tongue resulted in restoring to Othello the language which
the Moor of Venice would actually have spoken. It is, of course,
a flagrant falsification of the fact for Othello and Iago, Hamlet
and Ophelia, Brutus and Cassius to speak English instead of Italian
or Danish or Latin. But this is necessary if an English-speaking
audience is to enjoy ‘Othello’ and ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Julius Cæsar’; and
as it is necessary, the spectators are rarely conscious that it is,
strictly speaking, “unnatural.”
The bilingual performance of ‘Othello’ in which Salvini and Booth
nobly supported one another was not the first of those in which Booth
had been engaged. When Emil Devrient came on a professional visit to
the United States in the early sixties of the last century, Booth was
producing a succession of Shaksperian tragedies at the Winter Garden
theater; and he courteously invited the German actor to play Othello
to his Iago. At these performances Devrient spoke German, Booth spoke
English, and so did the rest of the supporting company, excepting
only the Emilia, a part cast to Madam Methua-Schiller, a German
actress who had migrated to America and learnt to speak English with
only a slight trace of foreign accent. As she had not lost the use of
her mother-tongue, she was allowed to alternate English and German,
employing the former always, except in conversing with Devrient, when
she dropt into the latter. Perhaps her chopping and changing from
English to German and back again to English may have been somewhat
disconcerting and distracting to the audience, who would more readily
adjust themselves to Devrient’s constant use of his own tongue.
And the moral of all this is? Well, you can find it very pleasantly
expressed in a quotation from a letter which was written by the
foremost of American Shaksperian scholars to Edith Wynne Matthison
and which is preserved in the introduction to Theodora Ursula
Irvine’s excellent ‘How to pronounce the Names in Shakspere.’
Apparently Mrs. Kennedy had consulted Dr. Furness as to the
pronunciation of a heroine’s name:
Continue to call her Rŏsalĭnd, altho I am much afraid that
Shakspere pronounced it Rōsalīnd. Of all men I would take liberties
with Shakspere sooner than anyone else. Was he so small-minded that
he would care about trifles? Take my word for it, he would smile
with exquisite benignity and say, “Pronounce the name, my child,
exactly as you think it sounds the sweetest.”
(1919)
VIII
THACKERAY AND THE THEATER
VIII
THACKERAY AND THE THEATER
I
In the never-ending comparisons and contrasts between Thackeray and
Dickens, which show no sign of abating even now, when the younger of
the two has been dead for half-a-century, one striking difference
between them has often been dwelt upon—Dickens was incessantly
theatrical, in his dress, in his novels, in his readings, whereas
Thackeray shrank from all theatricality, in his own apparel, in
his fiction and in his lecturing. Dickens delighted in reading the
most dramatic passages from his novels, actually impersonating
the characters, and adjusting the lighting of his reading-desk so
as to enable his hearers to see his swiftly changing expression.
Thackeray’s lectures were narratives enhanced in interest by anecdote
and by criticism; he read them simply, seeking no surcharged effects;
and he disliked his task. As he wrote to an American friend, “I shall
go on my way like an old mountebank; I get more and more ashamed of
my nostrums daily.”
The author of ‘Vanity Fair’ might in his preface feign that he was
only a showman in a booth, and he might talk of “putting the puppets
away”; but as Austin Dobson phrased it aptly in his centenary tribute:
These are no puppets, smartly dressed,
But jerked by strings too manifest;
No dummies wearing surface skin
Without organic frame within;
Nor do they deal in words and looks
Found only in the story-books.
No! For these beings use their brains,
Have pulse and vigor in their veins;
They move, they act; they take and give
E’en as the master wills; they _live_—
Live to the limit of their scope,
Their anger, pleasure, terror, hope.
His stories are never puppet-plays and they never have the
concentrated color which the theater demands. Nor was this because
he was not a constant playgoer, enjoying the drama in all its
manifestations. Altho he had no close intimacy with actor-folk, such
as Dickens had with Macready and later with Fechter, he was for years
meeting at the weekly _Punch_ dinners, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon
and Tom Taylor, all of them playwrights by profession.
Nor were his novels influenced in any marked degree by the
dramatists, since it was not the plays of Cervantes and Fielding
and Balzac that attracted him but their richer and more varied
works of fiction. On the other hand, the novels of Dickens reveal
the impress made upon him by the melodramas and by the farces which
had a fleeting vogue in his early manhood; he relished the boldly
melodramatic and he revelled in the broadly farcical. More especially
was Dickens under the domination of Ben Jonson, whose plays were
still occasionally seen on the stage when Dickens was young and
impressionable. It might almost be said that Dickens transferred the
method of the comedy-of-humors from the play to the novel; and it
is significant that when he made his first appearance as an amateur
actor it was to assume the superbly caricatural character of Captain
Bobadil. It is perhaps because of Dickens’ theatricality that he
exerted a deep and wide influence upon the British playwrights from
1840 to 1870, whereas it was not until Robertson began in 1865 to
deal more simply with life than the immediately preceding playwrights
of Great Britain, that any of the English writers of comedy allowed
himself to profit by Thackeray’s less highly colored portrayals of
men and manners.
Yet Thackeray’s enjoyment of the theater was not less than Dickens’.
His biographer, Lewis Melville, has recorded that Thackeray once
asked a friend if he loved the play, and when he received the
qualified answer, “Ye-es, I like a good play,” he retorted, “Oh,
get out! You don’t even understand what I mean!” Almost his first
published effort as a draftsman was a series of sketches of a ballet,
‘Flore et Zephyr’; and toward the end of his life, in 1858, he
presided at the annual dinner of the Royal General Theatrical Fund.
In his days of arduous hack-work he wrote half-a-dozen papers on the
French stage. One of these essays was entitled ‘Dickens in France’;
and in this he described with abundant gusto the gross absurdities
of a Parisian perversion of ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ produced at the
Ambigu. Another is called ‘English History and Character on the
French Stage’; and in this he has an easy task to show up the wilful
disregard of veracity which taints the ingenious ‘Verre d’Eau’ of
Scribe. A third paper is devoted to ‘French Dramas and Melodramas’;
and in this he begins by an unfortunate prediction, that French
tragedy, the classic plays of Corneille and Racine, “in which
half-a-dozen characters appear and spout sonorous alexandrines” was
dead or dying, and that Rachel was trying in vain to revive tragedy
and
to untomb Racine; but do not be alarmed, Racine will never come to
life again, and cause audiences to weep as of yore. Madam Rachel
can only galvanize the corpse, not revivify it. Ancient French
tragedy, red-heeled, patched and be-periwigged, lies in its grave;
and it is only the ghost of it that we see, which the fair Jewess
has raised.
Here Thackeray revealed his insularity, his inability to “penetrate
French literature by an interior line.” Red-heeled, patched and
be-periwigged as French tragedy may be, and as it undoubtedly
is in some of its aspects, it is not dead even now, more than
three-quarters of a century since Thackeray preached this funeral
sermon, nor is it dying. After the fiery fervor of the Romanticist
revolt it may have needed the genius of Rachel to bring it back to
favor; but to-day it is kept alive by the more modest talent of her
successors.
II
Before he was of age Dickens had thought seriously of becoming an
actor; and he even went so far as to apply to a manager for an
engagement. Not long after he wrote a farce or two; and he was
responsible for the book of a little ballad-opera. Late in his career
he collaborated with Wilkie Collins in writing ‘No Thoroughfare,’ an
effective melodrama, compounded specifically for Charles Fechter,
who acted it successfully, first in London in English and then in
Paris in French (under the title of ‘L’Abîme’). In Dickens’ letters
we are told of the trouble he took in getting all the details of
stage-management arranged to his satisfaction. It is evident that he
found these labors congenial and that he did not doubt his possession
of the intuitive qualities of the play-producer, so distinct from
those of the artist in pure narrative.
Thackeray also made one or two juvenile attempts at the dramatic
form. Perhaps it is safer to say that these early efforts were
dramatic only in form, in their being wholly in dialog; and there is
little reason to suppose that he endeavored to have them acted. In
1840, the year in which the ‘Paris Sketch-Book’ was published, there
was produced in Paris a melodrama, called the ‘Abbaye de Penmarque’
and founded upon Southey’s ‘Mary, the Maid of the Inn.’ Its authors
were announced as MM. Tournemine and Thackeray; and an American
translator fearlessly ascribed it to the author of the ‘Paris
Sketch Book,’ finding possible justification in the catalog of the
British Museum and in the early edition of Shepard’s bibliography.
The ascription was erroneous; and the “nautical melodrama” (as the
translator termed it) seems to have been written by a distant kinsman
of the novelist otherwise unknown to fame. The explanation recalls
that given by an Irish critic, who solved his doubts as to another
case of disputed authorship by the opinion that “Shakspere’s plays
were not written by Shakspere himself, but by another man of the same
name.”
Once and once only did Thackeray make a serious effort to appear
before the public as a playwright. In 1854 after he had established
his fame by ‘Vanity Fair’ and consolidated it by ‘Pendennis’ and
the ‘Newcomes,’ he composed a comedy in two acts, the ‘Wolves and
the Lamb.’ He proffered the play to two managers in turn, first to
Buckstone of the Haymarket Theater, and then to Alfred Wigan of
the Olympic. They declined it, one after the other; and apparently
Thackeray made no further effort to have it produced. In 1860 he
utilized the plot of his play in a story, ‘Lovel the Widower,’ which
was never one of his attractive novels, perhaps because it was more
or less deprived of spontaneity by its enforced reliance upon a plot
put together for another purpose.
When he moved into his own home in Kensington in 1862, only a few
months before his untimely death, he arranged an amateur performance
of the ‘Wolves and the Lamb’ as a special attraction for his
house-warming. He did not undertake any part in his own play; but he
appeared in the character of Bonnington just before the final fall of
the curtain, and spoke a rhymed epilog, by way of salutation to his
guests:
Our drama ends;
Our Landlord gives a greeting to his friends;
Some rich, some poor, some doubtful, some sincere,
Some tried and loved for many a faithful year.
He looks around and bids all welcome here.
And as we players unanimously say
A little speech should end a little play;
Through me he tells the friendliest of pits
He built this story with his little wits;
These built the house from garret down to hall;
These paid the bills,—at least, paid nearly all.
* * * * *
And though it seems quite large enough already,
I here declare the Landlord’s purpose steady
Before the novel-writing days are o’er
To raise in this very house one or two stories more.
As we recall the pitiful penury of the English drama in the midyears
of the nineteenth century, when the stage relied largely upon
misleading adaptations of French plays, we may wonder why Buckstone
and Wigan were inhospitable to the ‘Wolves and the Lamb.’ It is true
that Thackeray’s little piece was slight in story, devoid of novel
situation, obvious in its humor, simple in its character-delineation,
and traditional in its methods. But at that time both Buckstone and
Wigan were willing enough to risk their money on other plays by
authors of less authority, plays which were quite as superficial and
quite as artificial as this. Perhaps the two managers were moved to
decline it partly because they were disappointed in that it had none
of the captivating characteristics of Thackeray’s major fictions.
So few of these qualities did the play possess that if it had been
published anonymously it might have been attributed to some unknown
imitator of Thackeray rather than to Thackeray himself. It revealed
more of his mannerisms than of his merits.
Obviously he did not take his little comedy very seriously; he did
not put his back into his work; he was content to write no better
than his contemporary competitors in comedy and without their
experience and their knack. It is difficult to deny that in the
‘Wolves and the Lamb’ most of the characters are only puppets; and
that therefore Thackeray was for once well advised to put them away.
The real hero of the play, it may be amusing to remark, is John,
the butler, who has a soul above his station, and who is a sketchy
anticipation of Barrie’s Admirable Crichton.
Setting aside his single venture into playmaking and attempting
to estimate Thackeray’s potentiality as a playwright, we cannot
help feeling that he lacked the swift concision, the immitigable
compression, imposed on the dramatist by the limitation of the
traffic of the stage to two hours. Also he rarely reveals his
possession of the architectonic quality, the logical and inevitable
structure, which is requisite in the compacting of a plot and in the
co-ordination of effective incidents. Not often in his novels does
he rise to the handling of the great passionate crises of existence,
which, so Stevenson has told us, are the stuff out of which the
serious drama is made. He is so little theatrical that he is only
infrequently dramatic, in the ordinary sense of the word. He prefers
the sympathetic portrayal of our common humanity in its moments of
leisurely self-revelation.
Finally, if Thackeray had made himself a dramatist, by dint of
determination, he would have lost as an artist more than he gained
since he would have had perforce to forego the interpretive comment
in which his narrative is perpetually bathed. In his unfolding of
plot and his presentation of character, Thackeray could act as his
own chorus, his own expositor, his own _raisonneur_ (to borrow the
French term for the character introduced into a play not for its own
sake but to serve as the mouthpiece of its author). “Thackeray,” so
W. C. Brownell has asserted in his sympathetic study,
enwraps and embroiders his story with his personal philosophy,
charges it with his personal feeling, draws out with inexhaustible
personal zest its typical suggestiveness, and deals with his
material directly instead of dispassionately and disinterestedly.
This is a privilege implacably denied to the playwright, even if he
has abundant compensation in other ways. As Brownell also reminded
us, the novel is
a picture of life, but a picture that not only portrays but
shows the significance of its subject; its form is particularly,
uniquely elastic, and it possesses epic advantages which it would
fruitlessly forego in conforming itself to purely dramatic canons.
III