INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The author, in his preface, has explained the pedigree of “A Thousand Years Ago.” It is the chief advantage of long pedigrees that they allure us from the contemplation of the present to the investigation of the past; and, for students of dramatic literature, perhaps the most important feature of this present play is that the tracing of its ancestry leads us back to one of the most interesting periods in the history of the theatre.
In his quotations from John Addington Symonds, the great English authority on the Renaissance in Italy, Mr. MacKaye has already set before us the main features of theCommedia dell’ Arte Improvisata, which flourished in Italy for several centuries; but a few additional notes may be appended for the benefit of those who wish to extend their study of this type of drama. Two books upon the subject are readily accessible and may be strongly recommended. One of these is the “Histoire du Théatre Italien” by Louis Riccoboni, and the other is a volume entitled “Masques et Bouffons” by Maurice Sand, the son ofGeorges Sand, the famous novelist. Both of these books contain interesting illustrations of the stock characters in Italian comedy; and the pictures in “Masques el Bouffons” are reproduced in colors.
TheCommedia dell’ Arteattained its climax about the year 1600, but its career was extended well along into the eighteenth century by the interested activity of the very fertile and very popular playwright, Carlo Gozzi. The essential feature of this type of drama was that the lines were improvised by the actors as they worked their way through the scenes of an intrigue which had been carefully plotted in advance. Throughout the seventeenth century in Italy, the general public showed little patience with theCommedia Erudita(the phrase may be translated into contemporary slang as “High-brow drama”), in which the lines were written out by a man of letters and repeated by the actors parrotwise. Such plays, though they might have been composed by poets as eminent as Torquato Tasso, were condemned by the populace because they lacked what seemed the essential element of spontaneity. It will not be difficult for us to understand the attitude of the Italian public toward this distinction, if we apply a similar test to our own contemporaryart of after-dinner speaking. We demand of our after-dinner speakers that they shall cull their phrases as they go along, and we respond with dulness to a speech that has been evidently written out and learned by rote. The president of one of our great American universities has been quoted as saying that any professor who writes and learns a lecture is merely insulting the printing-press; there can be no advantage in speaking on a subject unless the speaking be spontaneous: and this was the attitude of the old Italian public toward the actors that addressed it from the stage.
A single set sufficed for most of the improvised Italian comedies. This set represented a public square in an Italian town, a meeting-point of several streets; and the houses of the leading characters were solidly built with doors and windows fronting on the square. With the action set in such a public place, the playwright could experience no embarrassment in motivating his entrances and exits; any characters could meet at any time in the neutral ground of the stage; and the practicable doors and windows of the surrounding houses could be employed by acrobatic actors in the exhibition of exciting scenes of elopement or of robbery.
One of the most definitive features of theCommedia dell’ Artewas the fact that, though the plays presented differed greatly from each other in subject-matter and in plot, they invariably employed the same set of characters. The individual actor appeared in many different plays, wearing always the same costume and the same mask. Harlequin made love to Columbine in play after play; the Doctor, from Bologna University, repeated the same sort of pedantries in plot after plot; and the Captain Spavento (a lineal descendant of theMiles Gloriosusof Plautus) swaggered through story after story. Individual actors became so completely identified with the stock characters they assumed upon the stage that they bore in private life the conventional names of their impersonations. A letter is extant which was sent by Henry Fourth of France (the gallant Henri Quatre of Navarre) to a famous actor of Italy inviting him to bring his company to Paris; and this letter is simply addressed to Harlequin, since the royal patron had no knowledge of the actor’s actual name. Similarly, the famous Scarramuccia from whom the immortal Molière learned the rudiments of his craft as a comedian—an actor described in a rhymed chronicle of the time as “leroi des comédiens et le comédien de rois”—has come down to us in history under the title of Scaramouche, with no recollection of his parental name.
The modern stage exhibits many analogies to this identification of an actor with a singlerôle. For instance, in the old days of the association of Weber and Fields, these comedians always appeared in precisely the same parts, regardless of any difference of subject-matter in the comic scenes that they presented. Mr. Weber invariably depicted a fat little man who was easily gullible; and the leaner and more strenuous Mr. Fields was forever getting the better of him and using him as a butt for ridiculous persecution. At the present time, Mr. William Collier approaches very nearly the method of the old Italian actors. Regardless of the particular points of any play in which he chooses to appear, he always represents precisely the same character—a perennial dramatization of his individual traits as a comedian; and he also habitually exercises the Italian actor’s license of improvisation in the presence of an assembled audience.
Five of these standard acting types of theCommedia dell’ Arteare revivified by Mr. MacKaye in his new play on Gozzi’s old theme. The most interestingfigure is the Capocomico—the leader of thetroupe, who devises thescenariof the plays which they present and rehearses the other actors in the business of their respective parts. This creation of the author’s is an evocation of a famous figure from a nigh-forgotten page of the storied past of the theatre, and may serve easily as a starting point for a series of very interesting researches undertaken by individual students of the history of the drama.
Though Mr. MacKaye’s play has been written appropriately in English verse, aptly varied in its forms to be spoken by the modern actor, the reader should remember that this drama is designed to appeal more emphatically to the eye than to the ear. It should be regarded as a modification of that type of Decorative Drama which was exhibited by Professor Reinhardt in his masterly production of the pantomime of “Sumurûn.” For his background, Mr. MacKaye has chosen an old tale of the Arabian Nights which is hung before the eye as a fantastic bit of oriental tapestry; and in the foreground he has exhibited insilhouettethe sharper colors of the prancing figures of his group of Italian comedians.
More subtly, this play may be conceived as aparabolic comment on a problem of the theatre at the present time. The histrionic disciples of Carlo Gozzi, the eighteenth century champion of traditional romance, are depicted as having lost their fight in Venice against the dramatist Goldoni, who, as a follower of Molière, was regarded at that time as the leader of the realistic movement; and, despairing of being accepted any longer in the country of their birth, these romantic outcasts have sought refuge in the distant orient, an orient to be considered in no sense as historic or realistic, but as purely fantastic. At the present time, our theatre has been conquered (for the moment) by sedulous recorders of the deeds of here and now; we find the drama in the throes of a new realism, more potent in its actuality than the tentative and groping realism of Goldoni; and our romantic playwrights, like these old adventurous and tattered histrions of Carlo Gozzi, have recently sought refuge in the fabulous and eye-enchanting orient. Hence the success, in recent seasons, of such romantic compositions as “Kismet” and “Sumurûn” and “The Yellow Jacket.” To escape from the obsession of Broadway and the Strand we now turn eagerly to the gorgeous east, just as these discarded comedians of Gozzi’s soughta new success within the enchanting and alluring gates of the city of Pekin.
Furthermore, by restoring to our stage the old European tradition of masks in his group of “Maskers,” Mr. MacKaye flings a prophetic shaft in the age-long tourney between symbolism and naturalism in the arts of the theatre.
Clayton Hamilton.
Clayton Hamilton.
Clayton Hamilton.
Clayton Hamilton.