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I mean no disrespect to any actor, but
the sort of pleasure which Shakespeare's plays give in the acting
seems to me not at all to differ from that which the audience
receive from those of other writers; and, they being in themselves
essentially so different from all others, I must conclude that
there is something in the nature of acting which levels all distinctions.
And in fact, who does not speak indifferently of the Gamester
and of Macbeth as fine stage performances, and praise the Mrs.
Beverley in the same way as the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. S.? Belvidera,
and Calista, and Isabella, and Euphrasia, are they less liked
than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than Desdemona? Are they not spoken
of and remembered in the same way? Is not the female performer
as great (as they call it) in one as in the other? Did not Garrick
shine, and was he not ambitious of shining in every drawling tragedy
that his wretched day produced, - the productions of the Hills
and the Murphys and the Browns, - and shall he have that honour
to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable concomitant with
Shakespeare? A kindred mind! O who can read that affecting sonnet
of Shakespeare which alludes to his profession as a player:.
Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public custom [manners] breeds -
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand -
Or that other confession;
Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear -
Who can read these instances of jealous
self-watchfulness in our sweet Shakespeare, and dream of any congeniality
between him and one that, by every tradition of him, appears to
have been as mere a player as ever existed; to have had his mind
tainted with the lowest player's vices, - envy and jealousy, and
miserable cravings after applause; one who in the exercise of
his profession was jealous even of the women-performers that stood
in his way; a manager full of managerial tricks and stratagems
and finesse: that any resemblance should be dreamed of between
him and Shakespeare, - Shakespeare who, in the plenitude and consciousness
of his own powers, could with that noble modesty, which we can
neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself thus of his own
sense of his own defects:
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd:
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope.
I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick
the merits of being an admirer of Shakespeare. A true lover of
his excellences he certainly was not; for would any true lover
of them have admitted into his matchless scenes such ribald trash
as Tate and Cibber, and the rest of them, that
With their darkness durst affront his light,
have foisted into the acting plays of
Shakespeare? I believe it impossible that he could have had a
proper reverence for Shakespeare, and have condescended to go
through that interpolated scene in Richard the Third, in which
Richard tries to break his wife's heart by telling her he loves
another woman, and says, "if she survives this she is immortal."
Yet I doubt not he delivered this vulgar stuff with as much anxiety
of emphasis as any of the genuine parts: and for acting, it is
as well calculated as any. But we have seen the part of Richard
lately produce great fame to an actor by his manner of playing
it, and it lets us into the secret of acting, and of popular judgments
of Shakespeare derived from acting. Not one of the spectators
who have witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions in that part, but has come
away with a proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked man,
and kills little children in their beds, with something like the
pleasure which the giants and ogres in children's books are represented
to have taken in that practice; moreover, that he is very close
and shrewd, and devilish cunning, for you could see that by his
eye.
But is in fact this the impression we
have in reading the Richard of Shakespeare? Do we feel anything
like disgust, as we do at that butcher-like representation of
him that passes for him on the stage? A horror at his crimes blends
with the effect which we feel, but how is it qualified, how is
it carried off, by the rich intellect which he displays, his resources,
his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast knowledge and insight into
characters, the poetry of his part - not an atom of all which
is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting it. Nothing but
his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent and staring;
the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius, the man
of vast capacity, - the profound, the witty, accomplished Richard?
The truth is, the characters of Shakespeare
are so much the objects of meditation rather than of interest
of curiosity as to their actions, that while we are reading any
of his great criminal characters, - Macbeth, Richard, even Iago,
- we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of
the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity which
prompts them to overleap those moral fences. Barnwell is a wretched
murderer; there is a certain fitness between his neck and the
rope; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows; nobody who thinks
at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case
to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an instance from
the higher tragedy, what else but a mere assassin in Glenalvon!
Do we think of anything but of the crime which he commits, and
the rack which he deserves? That is all which we really think
about him. Whereas in corresponding characters in Shakespeare
so little do the actions comparatively affect us, that while the
impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted greatness, solely
seems real and is exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively
nothing. But when we see these things represented, the acts which
they do are comparatively everything, their impulses nothing.
The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by those
images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that
solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell
shall strike which is to call him to murder Duncan, - when we
no longer read it in a book, when we have given up that vantage-ground
of abstraction which reading possesses over seeing, and come to
see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing
to commit a murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as I
have witnessed it in Mr. K.'s performance of that part, the painful
anxiety about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while
it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of
reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy all
the delight which the words in the book convey, where the deed
doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence:
it rather seems to belong to history, - to something past and
inevitable, if it has anything to do with time at all. The sublime
images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds
in the reading.
So to see Lear acted, - to see an old
man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out
of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it
but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter
and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear
ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted.
The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which
he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors
of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear:
they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton
upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The
greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual:
the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they
are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea his
mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare.
This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought
on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing
but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage;
while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, - we are in
his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice
of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we
discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from
the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the
wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and
abuses of mankind. What have looks, or tones, to do with that
sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves,
when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice
of his children, he reminds them that "they themselves are
old?" What gestures shall we appropriate to this? What has
the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond
all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and stony;
it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough
that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate
has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick
and his followers, the showmen of scene, to draw the mighty beast
about more easily. A happy ending! - as if the living martyrdom
that Lear had gone through, - the flaying of his feelings alive,
did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only
decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if
he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder
and preparation, - why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy?
As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt-robes and sceptre
again could tempt him to act over again his misused station, -
as if at his years, and with his experience, anything was left
but to die.
Lear is essentially impossible to be
represented on a stage. But how many dramatic personages are there
in Shakespeare, which though more tractable and feasible (if I
may so speak) than Lear, yet from some circumstance, some adjunct
to their character, are improper to be shown to our bodily eye.
Othello, for instance. Nothing can be more soothing, more flattering
to the nobler parts of our natures, than to read of a young Venetian
lady of highest extraction, through the force of love and from
a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside every consideration
of kindred, and country, and colour, and wedding with a coal-black
Moor - (for such he is represented, in the imperfect state of
knowledge respecting foreign countries in those days, compared
with our own, or in compliance with popular notions, though the
Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less unworthy
of white woman's fancy) - it is the perfect triumph of virtue
over accidents, of the imagination over the senses. She sees Othello's
colour in his mind. But upon the stage, when the imagination is
no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor unassisted
senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played, whether
he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in his colour;
whether he did not find something extremely revolting in the courtship
and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether the
actual sight of the thing did not overweigh all that beautiful
compromise which we make in reading; - and the reason it should
do so is obvious, because there is just so much reality presented
to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not
enough of belief in the internal motives, - all that which is
unseen, - to overpower and reconcile the first and obvious prejudices.[3]
What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action; what we are
conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind, and its
movements: and this, I think, may sufficiently account for the
very different sort of delight with which the same play so often
affects us in the reading and the seeing.
[Footnote 3: The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in the poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses given us, which vanish when we see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture. The painters themselves feel this, as is apparent by the awkward shifts they have recourse to, to make them look not quite naked; by a sort of prophetic anachronism antedating the invention of figleaves. So in the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes; in the seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.]
It requires little reflection to perceive,
that if those characters in Shakespeare which are within the precincts
of nature, have yet something in them which appeals too exclusively
to the imagination, to admit of their being made objects to the
senses without suffering a change and a diminution, - that still
stronger the objection must lie against representing another line
of characters, which Shakespeare has introduced to give a wildness
and a supernatural elevation to his scenes, as if to remove them
still further from that assimilation to common life in which their
excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist. When we read the incantations
of those terrible beings the Witches in Macbeth, though some of
the ingredients of their hellish composition savour of the grotesque,
yet is the effect upon us other than the most serious and appalling
that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound as Macbeth was?
Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence? We might as
well laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil himself
being truly and really present with us. But attempt to bring these
beings on to a stage, and you turn them instantly into so many
old women, that men and children are to laugh at. Contrary to
the old saying, that "seeing is believing," the sight
actually destroys the faith: and the mirth in which we indulge
at their expense, when we see these creatures upon a stage, seems
to be a sort of indemnification which we make to ourselves for
the terror which they put us in when reading made them an object
of belief, - when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as
children to their nurses and their elders; and we laugh at our
fears, as children who thought they saw something in the dark,
triumph when the bringing in of the candle discovers the vanity
of their fears. For this exposure of supernatural agents upon
a stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness.
It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in
these terrors: a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company,
deceives no spectators, - a ghost that can be measured by the
eye, and his human dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of
a well-lighted house and a well-dressed audience, shall arm the
most nervous child against any apprehensions: as Tom Brown says
of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his impenetrable armour
over it, "Bully Dawson would have fought the devil with such
advantages."
Much has been said, and deservedly,
in reprobation of the vile mixture which Dryden has thrown into
the Tempest: doubtless without some such vicious alloy, the impure
ears of that age would never have sate out to hear so much innocence
of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and
Miranda. But is the Tempest of Shakespeare at all a subject for
stage representation? It is one thing to read of an enchanter,
and to believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it; but
to have a conjuror brought before us in his conjuring-gown, with
his spirits about him, which none but himself and some hundred
of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to see,
involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our
reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such
gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish
and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they
cannot even be painted, - they can only be believed. But the elaborate
and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the age
demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what
is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life,
adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal
to the higher faculties, positively destroys the illusion which
it is introduced to aid. A parlour or a drawing-room, - a library
opening into a garden, - a garden with an alcove in it, - a street,
or the piazza of Covent Garden does well enough in a scene; we
are content to give as much credit to it as it demands; or rather,
we think little about it, - it is little more than reading at
the top of a page, "Scene, a Garden;" we do not imagine
ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of familiar
objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and caverns,
which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to Prospero,
and his island and his lonely cell; [4] or by the aid of a fiddle
dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us
believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle
was full: - the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well
hope, by his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind
his apparatus, to make us believe that we do indeed hear the crystal
spheres ring out that chime, which if it were to inwrap our fancy
long, Milton thinks,
Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,
And speckled vanity
Would sicken soon and die,
And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;
Yea Hell itself would pass away,
And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.
The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more impossible to be shown on a stage than the Enchanted Isle, with its no less interesting and innocent first settlers.
[Footnote 4: It will be said these things are done in pictures. But pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a word of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt to deceive; and there is the discordancy, never to be got over, between painted scenes and real people.]
The subject of Scenery is closely connected
with that of the Dresses, which are so anxiously attended to on
our stage. I remember the last time I saw Macbeth played, the
discrepancy I felt at the changes of garment which he varied,
- the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish priest at mass.
The luxury of stage improvements, and the importunity of the public
eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish monarch
was fairly a counterpart to that which our King wears when he
goes to the Parliament-house, - just so full and cumbersome, and
set out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented,
I see not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what
robe are we conscious of? Some dim images of royalty - a crown
and sceptre may float before our eyes, but who shall describe
the fashion of it? Do we see in our mind's eye what Webb or any
other robe-maker could pattern? This is the inevitable consequence
of imitating everything, to make all things natural. Whereas the
reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction. It presents to the
fancy just so much of external appearances as to make us feel
that we are among flesh and blood, while by far the greater and
better part of our imagination is employed upon the thoughts and
internal machinery of the character. But in acting, scenery, dress,
the most contemptible things, call upon us to judge of their naturalness.
Perhaps it would be no bad similitude,
to liken the pleasure which we take in seeing one of these fine
plays acted, compared with that quiet delight which we find in
the reading of it, to the different feelings with which a reviewer,
and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine poem. The accursed
critical habits, - the being called upon to judge and pronounce,
must make it quite a different thing to the former. In seeing
these plays acted, we are affected just as judges. When Hamlet
compares the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second husband,
who wants to see the pictures? But in the acting, a miniature
must be lugged out; which we know not to be the picture, but only
to show finely a miniature may be represented. This shewing of
everything, levels all things: it makes tricks, bows, and curtseys,
of importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than by
the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene
in Macbeth: it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling tones
or impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter into
the imaginations of the reader of that wild and wonderful scene?
Does not the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can? Does
it care about the gracefulness of the doing it? But by acting,
and judging of acting, all these non-essentials are raised into
an importance, injurious to the main interest of the play.
I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakespeare.
It would be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry to his
comedies; and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and
the rest are equally incompatible with stage representation. The
length to which this Essay has run, will make it, I am afraid,
sufficiently distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without
going any deeper into the subject at present.
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