Part 7

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

Here was a complete turning of the tables, a triumphant assertion of 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.”