At the corner of a Bloomsbury square I found my path blocked by a little
crowd of children who were watching a puppet show of an unusual kind.
The usual kind, of course, is _Punch and Judy_, which has become a
degenerate thing, with its puppets grasped in the operator’s hand; these
puppets were wired, in the grand manner of the art, and had a horse and
cart, no less, for their transport. The show, though lamentably poor in
itself—the puppets merely danced solemnly round and round without any
attempt at dramatic action—was rich in suggestion. Do we not all keep a
warm corner of our hearts for the puppets, if only for their venerable
antiquity and their choice literary associations? Why, in the grave
pages of the _Literary Supplement_ learned archæologists have lately
been corresponding about the Elizabethan “motions,” and Sir William
Ridgeway has traced the puppets back to the Syracuse of Xenophon’s day,
and told us how that author in his “Symposium” makes a famous Syracusan
puppet player say that he esteems fools above other men because they are
those who go to see his puppets (νευρόσπαστα). My own recollections
connect Xenophon with parasangs rather than puppets, but I am glad to
be made aware of this honourable pedigree, though I strongly resent the
Syracusan’s remark about the amateurs of puppets. I share the taste of
Partridge, who “loved a puppet show of all the pastimes upon earth,”
and I sympathize with the showman in “Tom Jones” who could tolerate all
religions save that of the Presbyterians, “because they were enemies to
puppet shows.” And so I lingered with the children at the corner of the
Bloomsbury square.
Puppets, someone has said, have this advantage over actors: they are made
for what they do, their nature conforms exactly to their destiny. I have
seen them in Italy performing romantic drama with a dash and a _panache_
that no English actor in my recollection (save, perhaps, the late Mr.
Lewis Waller) could rival. Actors, being men as well as actors, and
therefore condemned to effort in acting, if only the effort of keeping
down their consciousness of their real, total self, cannot attain to this
clear-cut definiteness and purity of performance. But the wire-puller
must be a true artist, his finger-tips responsive to every emotional
thrill of the character and every _nuance_ of the drama; indeed, the
ideal wire-puller is the poet himself, expressing himself through the
motions of his puppets and declaiming his own words for them.
It was with this thought in my mind that I ventured, when Mr. Hardy first
published _The Dynasts_, to suggest that the perfect performance of that
work would be as a puppet show, with Mr. Hardy reading out his own blank
verse. I pointed out the suggestive reference to puppets in the text. One
of the Spirits describes the human protagonists as “mere marionettes,”
and elsewhere you read:—
Forgetting the Prime Mover of the gear
As puppet-watchers him who moves the strings.
Further, at the very core of Mr. Hardy’s drama is the idea that these
Napoleons and Pitts and Nelsons are puppets of the Immanent Will. If
ever there was a case for raising a puppet show to the highest literary
dignity, this was one.
But it was all in vain. Either Mr. Hardy was too modest to declaim his
own verse in public, or else the actors pushed in, as they will wherever
they can, and laid hands on as much of his work as they could manage. And
so we had Mr. Granville Barker’s version early in the war and only the
other day the performance at Oxford, and I have nothing to say against
either, save that they were, and could only be, extracts, episodes,
fragments, instead of the great epic-drama in its panoramic entirety.
A puppet show could embrace the whole, and one voice declaiming the
poem would to be sure not give the necessary unity of impression—that
singleness must be first of all in the work itself—but would incidentally
emphasize it.
The puppet presentation would, however, do much more than this. It would
clarify, simplify, attenuate the medium through which the poem reaches
the audience. The poet and his public would be in close contact. It is,
of course, for many minds, especially for those peculiarly susceptible
to poetry, a perpetual grievance against the actors that these living,
bustling, solid people get between them and the poet and substitute fact,
realism, flesh-and-blood for what these minds prefer to embody only in
their imagination. There is the notorious instance of Charles Lamb, with
his objection to seeing Shakespeare’s tragedies acted. He complained that
the gay and witty Richard III. was inevitably materialized and vulgarized
by the actor. Lamb, as we all know, was capricious, and indeed made a
virtue of caprice, but what do you say to so serious and weighty a critic
as Professor Raleigh? Talking about the Shakespearean boy-actors of
women, he commits himself to this:—“It may be doubted whether Shakespeare
has not suffered more than he has gained by the genius of later-day
actresses, who bring into the plays a realism and a robust emotion which
sometimes obscure the sheer poetic value of the author’s conception. The
boys were no doubt very highly trained, and amenable to instruction; so
that the parts of Rosalind and Desdemona may well have been rendered with
a clarity and simplicity which served as a transparent medium for the
author’s wit and pathos. Poetry, like religion, is outraged when it is
made a platform for the exhibition of their own talent and passions by
those who are its ministers. With the disappearance of the boy-players
the poetic drama died in England, and it has had no second life.”
A little “steep,” is it not? Logically it is an objection to all acting
of poetic drama. Boy-players of girls are only a half-way house. The
transparent medium for the author’s wit and pathos would be still more
transparent if it were merely the medium of the printed page. Now this
much is certain. Shakespeare conceived his plays, whatever poetry or wit
or pathos he put into them, in terms of men and women (not boy-women).
The ideal performance of Shakespeare would be by the men and women who
grew in Shakespeare’s imagination. But they, unfortunately, do not exist
in flesh and blood, but only in that imagination, and, to bring them
on the stage, you have to employ ready-made men and women, who at the
very best can only be rough approximations to the imaginary figures.
In this sense it is not a paradox but a simple commonplace to say that
no one has ever seen Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the stage, or ever will
see. And the greater the “genius” of the actor, the more potent his
personality—though he will be the darling of the majority, thirsting for
realism, the immediate sense of life—the more will he get between the
poet and imaginative students like Lamb and Professor Raleigh, who want
their poetry inviolate.
This seems like a digression, but is really to my purpose.
Flesh-and-blood actors we shall always have with us; they will take
good care of that themselves. But for the imaginative souls who are for
compromise, who are for half-way houses and look back fondly to the
boy-players, I would say: Why not try the puppets? These also present
a “transparent medium” for the author’s expression. And, further, the
purely “lyrical” passages in which Shakespeare abounds and which seem so
odd in the realism of the human actors (_e.g._, the Queen’s description
of Ophelia’s death) would gain immensely by being recited by the poet (or
wire-puller). A puppet-show _Hamlet_ might be an exquisite experiment in
that highest art whose secret is suggestion.