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Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey,
I was struck with the affected attitude of a figure, which I do
not remember to have seen before, and which upon examination proved
to be a whole-length of the celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would
not go so far with some good Catholics abroad as to shut players
altogether out of consecrated ground, yet I own I was not a little
scandalized at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures
into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities.
Going nearer, I found inscribed under this harlequin figure the
following lines:
To paint fair Nature, by divine command,
Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
A Shakespeare rose: then, to expand his fame
Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew
The Actor's genius made them breathe anew;
Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day:
And till Eternity with power sublime
Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,
Shakespeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,
And earth irradiate with a beam divine.
It would be an insult to my readers'
understandings to attempt anything like a criticism on this farrago
of false thoughts and nonsense. But the reflection it led me into
was a kind of wonder, how, from the days of the actor here celebrated
to our own, it should have been the fashion to compliment every
performer in his turn, that has had the luck to please the town
in any of the great characters of Shakespeare, with a notion of
possessing a mind congenial to the poet's; how people should come
thus unaccountably to confound the power of originating poetical
images and conceptions with the faculty of being able to read
or recite the same when put into words; [1] or what connection
that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man, which a
great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon
the eye and ear, which a player by observing a few general effects,
which some common passion, as grief, anger, etc., usually has
upon the gestures and exterior, can easily compass. To know the
internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello
or a Hamlet, for instance, the when and the why and the how far
they should be moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to
give the reins and to pull in the curb exactly at the moment when
the drawing in or the slacking is most graceful; seems to demand
a reach of intellect of a vastly different extent from that which
is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions
in the countenance or gesture, which signs are usually observed
to be most lively and emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and
which signs can after all but indicate some passion, as I said
before, anger, or grief, generally; but of the motives and grounds
of the passion, wherein it differs from the same passion in low
and vulgar natures, of these the actor can give no more idea by
his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak,
or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. But such is the instantaneous
nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear
at a playhouse, compared with the slow apprehension oftentimes
of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only to sink
the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor,
but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actor
with the character which he represents. It is difficult for a
frequent play-goer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the
person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we
are in reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion incidental
alone to unlettered persons, who, not possessing the advantage
of reading, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player for
all the pleasure which they can receive from the drama, and to
whom the very idea of what an author is cannot be made comprehensible
without some pain and perplexity of mind: the error is one from
which persons otherwise not meanly lettered find it almost impossible
to extricate themselves.
[Footnote 1: It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in dramatic recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who reads Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a great poet and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davies, the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the "Paradise Lost" better than any man in England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this tradition) was therefore, by his intimate friends, set upon a level with Milton.]
Never let me be so ungrateful as to
forget the very high degree of satisfaction which I received some
years back from seeing for the first time a tragedy of Shakespeare
performed, in which these two great performers sustained the principal
parts. It seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto
assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life afterwards
for this juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the
novelty is past, we find to our cost that, instead of realising
an idea, we have only materialised and brought down a fine vision
to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in
quest of an unattainable substance.
How cruelly this operates upon the mind,
to have its free conceptions thus cramped and pressed down to
the measure of a straitlacing actuality, may be judged from that
delightful sensation of freshness, with which we turn to those
plays of Shakespeare which have escaped being performed, and to
those passages in the acting plays of the same writer which have
happily been left out of the performance. How far the very custom
of hearing anything spouted, withers and blows upon a fine passage,
may be seen in those speeches from Henry the Fifth, etc., which
are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to be
found in Enfield Speakers, and such kind of books. I confess myself
utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet,
beginning "To be, or not to be," or to tell whether
it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed
about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from
its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till
it is become to me a perfect dead member.
It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that
the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on
a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their
distinguished excellence is a reason that they should be so. There
is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting,
with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.
The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round such "intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the direct object of the imitation here. But in the best dramas, and in Shakespeare above all, how obvious it is, that the form of speaking, whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at in that form of composition by any gift short of intuition. We do here as we do with novels written in the epistolary form. How many improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with in "Clarissa" and other books, for the sake of the delight which that form upon the whole gives us.
But the practice of stage representation
reduces everything to a controversy of elocution. Every character,
from the boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity
of womanhood, must play the orator. The love-dialogues of Romeo
and Juliet, those silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night;
the more intimate and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between
an Othello or a Posthumus with their married wives, all those
delicacies which are so delightful in the reading, as when we
read of those youthful dalliances in Paradise
As beseem'd
Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league,
Alone:
by the inherent fault of stage representation,
how are these things sullied and turned from their very nature
by being exposed to a large assembly; when such speeches as Imogen
addresses to her lord, come drawling out of the mouth of a hired
actress, whose courtship, though nominally addressed to the personated
Posthumus, is manifestly aimed at the spectators, who are to judge
of her endearments and her returns of love.
The character of Hamlet is perhaps that
by which, since the days of Betterton, a succession of popular
performers have had the greatest ambition to distinguish themselves.
The length of the part may be one of their reasons. But for the
character itself, we find it in a play, and therefore we judge
it a fit subject of dramatic representation. The play itself abounds
in maxims and reflections beyond any other, and therefore we consider
it as a proper vehicle or conveying moral instruction. But Hamlet
himself - what does he suffer meanwhile by being dragged forth
as a public schoolmaster, to give lectures to the crowd! Why,
nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions between
himself and his moral sense, they are the effusions of his solitary
musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most sequestered
parts of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are the silent
meditations with which his bosom is bursting, reduced to words
for the sake of the reader, who must else remain ignorant of what
is passing there. These profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring
ruminations, which the tongue scare dares utter to deaf walls
and chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticulating actor,
who comes and mouths them out before an audience, making four
hundred people his confidants at once? I say not that it is the
fault of the actor so to do; he must pronounce them ore rotundo,
he must accompany them with his eye, he must insinuate them into
his auditory by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails.
He must be thinking all the while of his appearance, because
he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it.
And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent, retiring
Hamlet.
It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity
of thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who
otherwise would never learn it for themselves by reading, and
the intellectual acquisition gained this way may, for aught I
know, be inestimable; but I am not arguing that Hamlet should
not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being
acted. I have heard much of the wonders which Garrick performed
in this part; but as I never saw him, I must have leave to doubt
whether the representation of such a character came within the
province of his art. Those who tell me of him, speak of his eye,
of the magic of his eye, and of his commanding voice: physical
properties, vastly desirable in an actor, and without which he
can never insinuate meaning into an auditory, - but what have
they to do with Hamlet? what have they to do with intellect? In
fact, the things aimed at in theatrical representation, are to
arrest the spectator's eye upon the form and the gesture, and
so to gain a more favourable hearing to what is spoken: it is
not what the character is, but how he looks; not what he says,
but how he speaks it. I see no reason to think that if the play
of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as Banks
or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omitting
all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakespeare,
his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough
of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss
to furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon
an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent
Shakespeare to us differently from his representation of Banks
or Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished prince,
and must be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled in his
mind, wavering in his conduct, seemingly cruel to Ophelia, he
might see a ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when
he found it to be his father; all this in the poorest and most
homely language of the servilest creeper after nature that ever
consulted the palate of an audience; without troubling Shakespeare
for the matter; and I see not but there would be room for all
the power which an actor has, to display itself. All the passions
and changes of passion might remain; for those are much less difficult
to write or act than is thought; it is a trick easy to be attained,
it is but rising or falling a note or two in the voice, a whisper
with a significant foreboding look to announce its approach, and
so contagious the counterfeit appearance of any emotion is, that
let the words be what they will, the look and tone shall carry
it off and make it pass for deep skill in the passions.
It is common for people to talk of Shakespeare's
plays being so natural, that everybody can understand him. They
are natural indeed, they are grounded deep in nature, so deep
that the depth of them lies out of the reach of most of us. You
shall hear the same persons say that George Barnwell is very natural,
and Othello is very natural, that they are both very deep; and
to them they are the same kind of thing. At the one they sit and
shed tears, because a good sort of young man is tempted by a naughty
woman to commit a trifling peccadillo, the murder of an uncle
or so,[2] that is all, and so comes to an untimely end, which
is so moving; and at the other, because a blackamoor in a fit
of jealousy kills his innocent white wife: and the odds are that
ninety-nine out of a hundred would willingly behold the same catastrophe
happen to both the heroes, and have thought the rope more due
to Othello than to Barnwell. For of the texture of Othello's mind,
the inward construction marvelously laid open with all its strengths
and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human misgivings,
its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love, they see
no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their pennies
apiece to look through the man's telescope in Leicester Fields,
see into the inward plot and topography of the moon. Some dim
thing or other they see, they see an actor personating a passion,
of grief, or anger, for instance, and they recognize it as a copy
of the usual external effects of such passions; or at least as
being true to that symbol of the emotion which passes current
at the theatre for it, for it is often no more than that: but
of the grounds of the passion, its correspondence to a great or
heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of tragedy, - that
common auditors know anything of this, or can have any such notions
dinned into them by the mere strength of an actor's lungs, - that
apprehensions foreign to them should be thus infused into them
by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how it can be
possible.
[Footnote 2: If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the Managers, I would entreat and beg of them, in the name of both the galleries, that this insult upon the morality of the common people of London should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks. Why are the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead of an amusement, to be treated over and over again with a nauseous sermon of George Barnwell? Why at the end of their vistas are we to place the gallows? Were I an uncle, I should not much like a nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his eyes. It is really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done upon such slight motives; - it is attributing too much to such characters as Millwood; it is putting things into the heads of good young men, which they would never otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that think anything of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain against it.]
We talk of Shakespeare's admirable observation
of life, when we should feel that not from a petty inquisition
into those cheap and every-day characters which surrounded him,
as they surround us, but from his own mind, which was, to borrow
a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very "sphere of humanity,"
he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which every
one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our natures
the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he positively
creates in us for nothing more than indigenous faculties of our
own minds, which only waited the application of corresponding
virtues in him to return a full and clear echo of the same.
To return to Hamlet. - Among the distinguishing
features of that wonderful character, one of the most interesting
(yet painful) is that soreness of mind which makes him treat the
intrusions of Polonius with harshness, and that asperity which
he puts on in his interviews with Ophelia. These tokens of an
unhinged mind (if they be not mixed in the latter case with a
profound artifice of love, to alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies,
so to prepare her mind for the breaking off of that loving intercourse,
which can no longer find a place amidst business so serious as
that which he has to do) are parts of his character, which to
reconcile with our admiration of Hamlet, the most patient consideration
of his situation is no more than necessary; they are what we forgive
afterwards, and explain by the whole of his character, but at
the time they are harsh and unpleasant. Yet such is the actor's
necessity of giving strong blows to the audience, that I have
never seen a player in this character, who did not exaggerate
and strain to the utmost these ambiguous features, - these temporary
deformities in the character. They make him express a vulgar scorn
at Polonius which utterly degrades his gentility, and which no
explanation can render palatable; they make him show contempt,
and curl up the nose at Ophelia's father, - contempt in its very
grossest and most hateful form; but they get applause by it: it
is natural, people say; that is, the words are scornful, and the
actor expresses scorn, and that they can judge of: but why so
much scorn, and of that sort, they never think of asking.
So to Ophelia. - All the Hamlets that
I have ever seen, rant and rave at her as if she had committed
some great crime, and the audience are highly pleased, because
the words of the part are satirical, and they are enforced by
the strongest expression of satirical indignation of which the
face and voice are capable. But then, whether Hamlet is likely
to have put on such brutal appearances to a lady whom he loved
so dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that in all such
deep affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there
is a stock of supererogatory love (if I may venture to use the
expression), which in any great grief of heart, especially where
that which preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers
a kind of indulgence upon the grieved party to express itself,
even to its heart's dearest object, in the language of a temporary
alienation; but it is not alienation, it is a distraction purely,
and so it always makes itself to be felt by that object: it is
not anger, but grief assuming the appearance of anger, - love
awkwardly counterfeiting hate, as sweet countenances when they
try to frown: but such sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet
is made to show, is no counterfeit, but the real face of absolute
aversion, - of irreconcilable alienation. It may be said he puts
on the madman; but then he should only so far put on this counterfeit
lunacy as his own real distraction will give him leave; that is,
incompletely, imperfectly; not in that confirmed, practised way,
like a master of his art, or a Dame Quickly would say, "like
one of those harlotry players."
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