If Shakspere could return to earth he would find many things to astonish him, not the least of which would be his own world-wide reputation. He seems to have been, so far as we can judge from his works and from the sparse records that remain, a modest man, with no sense of his own importance and with no pretension of superiority over his fellow-poets. In his lifetime there was scant appreciation for his plays, since the drama was then held to be little better than journalism, scarcely worthy to be criticized as literature. That he was popular, or in other words that his plays pleased the people, and that he was liked personally by his associates,—this seems to be clearly established. But there was no recognition of his supremacy as a poet, as a creator of character or even as a playwright. As Shakspere was a singularly healthy person, we can confidently assume that he did not look upon himself as an unappreciated genius.
Therefore, if he came back to us we cannotdoubt that he would stand aghast before the constantly increasing library of books that have been written about him in the past two centuries. Nor can we doubt that this would appeal to his sense of humor. He would probably be interested to look into a few of the commentaries which seek to elucidate him; but he would not long pursue this perusal; and he would shut the books with a laugh or at least with a smile at the obstinate perversity of the critics who have wearied themselves (and not infrequently their readers also) in the vain attempt to explain what originally needed no explanation, since it had been plain enough to the unlettered crowds which flocked into the Globe Theater and stood entranced while his stories enrolled themselves on the stage.
If he were permitted to wander from the library where the immense mass of Shaksperiana fills shelf after shelf, and to enter any of our comfortable playhouses to witness a performance of one of his own plays, as set on the stage by an enterprizing and artistic producer, such as Sir Henry Irving, he would again be astonished. The theater itself would be strange to him, for it would be roofed and lighted, whereas the playhouse he knew was open to the sky and dependent on the uncertain sun for its illumination. The stage would be equally novel, for it wouldhave sumptuous scenery, whereas the platform of his day had had no scenery and only a few properties, a throne or a pulpit, a bed or a wellhead. The actors would be unlike his fellow-players at the Globe since they would be attired with a strenuous effort for historical accuracy, whereas Burbage and Kempe, Condell and Heming were accustomed to costume themselves in the elaborate and sumptuous garb of the Elizabethan gallants, glad when they could don the discarded attire of a wealthy courtier. And perhaps what would surprize him as much as anything would be to behold his very feminine heroines impersonated by women instead of being undertaken by shaven lads, as was the habit in his day.
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 hiscomedies 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.
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 thekind 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!
Now, Tybalt, take the villain back,That late thou gav’st me!
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.
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 hewasa 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 toconceal 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.
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 courteouslycomplimenting 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 andto 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 theremight 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 thelovely 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 usingtwo 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 toGerman 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.”
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)