Part 25 (1/2)

5

Hitherto we have not considered a Shakespearean performance on the side, I will not say of its spectacular, but of its pictorial effect This must be our last subject We have to bear in e was viewed frohout the play, and the absence of scenery It is obvious that the last two deprived the audience of many attractive or impressive pictures; while, as to the first, it seems unlikely that actors atched froroup themselves as parts of a composition addressed to the eye Indeed one ard to costume, they seriously attended to the pictorial effect of a drama at all; their tiny crowds and armies, for example, cannot have provided much of a show And in any case it is clear that the audience had to dispense with hts that we may now enjoy But the question whether their loss was, on the whole, a disadvantage is not so easy to answer; for here again it freed the dramatic to pictorial effect; and we cannot tell whether, or how far, they would have been proof against its influence Let us try, however, to see the position clearly

The essence of drama--and certainly of Shakespearean drama--lies in actions and words expressive of inward movements of human nature

Pictorial effects (if for convenience' sake the various nified by that phrase) are in thes, dances, military s, they may be made dramatic They may be used and apprehended, that is to say, as elements fused with the essential elements of dramatic effect And, so far as this is the case and they thus contribute to that effect, they are, it seee But a distinct and separate attention to theins to be withdrawn from the actions and words, and therefore from the inward movements that these express And experience shows that, as soon as pictorial attractions exceed a certain lieneral teroer in this h inevitable that this should happen

However interesting the actions, words, and inward ination and of other e-pictures dely, at the present time at any rate, the bulk of an audience to which the latter are abundantly presented will begin to enjoy them for their own sakes, or as parts of a panorama and not of a drama No one, I think, can honestly doubt this atches and listens to the people sitting near hi Shakespearean spectacle' If we are offered a pretty picture of the changing colours of the sky at dawn, or of a forest glade with deer rass, most of us cease for the time to be an audience and become mere spectators; and let Roels as they will, they will talk but half-heeded Our drah Mr

Barrie and Mr Pinero and Mr Shaant the audience to listen and understand, take good care not to divert its attention and deaden its iination by scenic displays And yet, with the heartiest admiration for their best work, one ination than theirs

Whether the Elizabethan companies, if they had had the power to use the attractions of scenery, would have abused it, and whether in that case the audience would have been as readily debauched as ours, it is useless to dispute The audience was not cos in that age had drama in their blood But I venture to disbelieve that the e, with the audience It is like the populace in Shakespeare's plays, easy to lead wrong but just as easy to lead right If you give people in the East End, or even in the Albert Hall, nothing but third-rate music, most of them will be content with it, and possibly may come to disrelish what is better But if you have a little faith in great art and in human nature, and offer them, I do not say the Diabelli variations, but such music as the symphonies of Beethoven or even of Brahms, they will justify your faith This is not theory, but fact; and I cannot think that it is otherith drama, or at least with the draers' if they were, through the whole cast, satisfactorily acted? What spells real ruin to radation to audiences[23]

But whether or no Shakespeare's audience could have been easily degraded by scenic pleasure, it had not the chance; and I will not raise the further question how far its disabilities were the cause of its virtues, but will end with a feords on two of the virtues theination Shakespeare could address to it not in vain the injunction, 'Work, work your thoughts!' Probably in three scenes out of five the place and surroundings of the action were absolutely invisible to its eyes In a fourth it took the barest symbol for reality A couple of wretched trees ed foils the arer than it, or weaker? It heard Romeo say

Look, love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east;

and to its mind's eye they were there It looked at a shabby old balcony, but as it listened it saw the ss flitting round the sun-lit battlerotesque incongruity never troubled it[24] The siination at work If Prospero entered wearing a particular robe, it knew that no one on the stage could see his solid shape;[25] and if Banquo, rising through the trap-door, had his bloody face dusted over with host and thrilled with horror; and we, Heaven help us, should laugh Though the stage stood in broad daylight, again, Banquo, for it, was being ht, for he carried a torch and spoke of rain; and the chaste stars were shi+ning for it outside Desdeuished the lamp Consider how extraordinary is the fact I aination of the audience In _Hamlet_, _Othello_, and _Macbeth_, not one scene here and there but actually the ht, and, to a reader, depend not a little on the darkness for their effect Yet the Ghost-scenes, the play-scene, the sparing of the king at prayer, that conversation of Ha of Polonius and interrupted by the appearance of the Ghost; the murder of Duncan, thescene; the whole of the first Act of _Othello_, the scene of Cassio's drunken revel and fight, and the whole of the terrible last Act,--all of this was played in a theatre open to the afternoon sun, and ritten by a man who knew that it was so to be played But he knew his audience too[26]

That audience had not only iination, and the power to sink its soul in the essence of dra else of scarcely less inorant, noisy, s and dirty jokes, of soldiers and truht be: but he liked poetry If he had not liked it, he, with his brutal manners, would have silenced it, and the Elizabethan dra it was The plays of Shakespeare sith long speeches, almost all of which are cut down or cut clean away for our theatres They are never, of course, irrelevant; sometimes they are indispensable to the full appreciation of a character; but it is manifest that they were not written solely for a dramatic purpose, but also because the author and his audience loved poetry A sign of this is the fact that they especially abound where, from the nature of the story, the dramatic structure is imperfect[27] They abound in _Troilus and Cressida_ and _Henry V_ more than in _Othello_ or _Much Ado_ Remember, for a standard of size, that 'To be or not to be' is thirty-three lines in length, and then consider the following fact _Henry V_ contains seventeen speeches longer than that soliloquy Five of the, two between fifty and sixty, and two exceed sixty Yet if any play entirely by Shakespeare were open to the charge of being a 'drum and trumpet history' written to please the populace, it would be _Henry V_ Not only then the cultured section of the audience loved poetry; the whole audience loved it How long would they have continued to relish this 'perpetual feast of nectared sweets' if their eyes had been feasted too?

Or is it likely that, once habituated to spectacular stimulants, they would have welco'?

1902

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This, one may suspect, was also the position of Webster, who praises Shakespeare, but groups him with Dekker and Heywood, and mentions him after Chapman, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher (Preface to the _White Devil_)

[2] I as declined in popularity as time went on

[3] The examples just cited show his method at its best, and it would be easy to mention others far less satisfactory Nor do I doubt that his plays would be much more free from blemishes of various kinds if his audience had added to their virtues greater cultivation On the other hand the question whether, or how far, he knowingly 'wrote down to' his audience, in the sense of giving it what he despised, seems to me very difficult, if not impossible, to answer: and I may mention soeneral presuainst interpolations in an Elizabethan drama published piratically or after the author's death

We have, further, positive grounds of the strongest kind for believing that 'Shakespeare's plays' contain a good deal that Shakespeare never wrote We cannot therefore siranted that he wrote every silly or offensive thing that we find in the volue is more or less irrelevant and particularly easy to excise I do not say that these considerations have great importance here, but they have some; and readers of Shakespeare, and even soard the texts as if they had been published by himself, or by scrupulously careful men of letters iranted that what seems to us feeble or bad seemed so to Shakespeare Evidently he was aenuities in which most of us find little entertainment Gross jokes, scarcely redeemed in our eyes by their humour, ood faith, what seems to us bombastic or 'conceited' So far as this was the case he was not writing down to his audience He shared its tastes, or the tastes of soain, with such a blot as the blinding of Gloucester on the open stage

(3) Jonson defied his audience, yet he wrote a good deal that we think bad In the same way certain of Shakespeare's faults _cannot_ be due to condescension to his audience: _eg_ the obscurities and distortions of language not infrequent in his later plays And this may be so with so froht have deliberately defended; _eg_ the highly ies of some of the comedies 'It is of the essence of ros with indifference There is a convention that you should take the characters with soree of seriousness while they are in difficulties, and should cease to do so when they are to be delivered from them' Do not we ourselves adopt this point of view to soo to the theatre now?

I added this note after reading Mr Bridges's very interesting and original contribution to the Stratford Town edition of Shakespeare (vol x) I disagree with soes's res that he dislikes But this brief note is not, of course, ests reasons for at least di the proportion of defect attributable to a conscious sacrifice of art to the tastes of the audience

[4] To us their first appearance is of interest chiefly because it introduces the soliloquy 'How all occasions' But, it is a to notice, the Folio, which probably represents the acting version in 1623, o soldiers

[5] I do not refer to the Globe