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(On The) Tragedies Of Shakespeare
(On The) Tragedies Of Shakespeare
Introductory Note
Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was born in the Temple, London, where his father
was a clerk to one of the benchers. He was a schoolmate of Coleridge`s at
Christ`s Hospital, and shortly after leaving school he entered the Indian
House, on the staff of which he worked for thirty-three years. He never
married, but lived with his sister Mary as her guardian on account of her
inherited tendency to insanity. His friends included (besides Coleridge)
Wordsworth, Hunt, Hazlitt, Southey, and many others, and his letters as well
as the works he published reveal one of the most attractive personalities in
literature.
Lamb wrote a handful of poems marked by delicate sentiment, and made some
rather unsuccessful attempts at drama. But his name rests on his essays, - the
familiar essays on a great variety of subjects, whimsical, humorous, graceful,
quaint; the critical essays, sensitive, illuminating, in the best sense
appreciative. He did much for the revival of interest in the Elizabethan
drama; and the essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare," is the most
distinguished single piece of critical writing that came from his pen. The
main thesis of the paper - "that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated
for performance on a stage than those of almost any dramatist whatever" - is,
of course, paradoxical; but Lamb`s method was not logical or philosophical as
his friend Coleridge`s aimed at being. His criticism is a frank expression of
his personal feelings; it is in the proper sense "impressionistic" criticism;
and it gets its value from the quality and flavor of the author`s taste and
personality. It is thus pure literature - the expression of the man himself -
rather than scientific analysis; and in this branch of writing there is
nothing in English more delightful.
Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation
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 congenia 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."
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 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,
[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.]
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.
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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