Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Capell (1768) is perhaps the least dogmatic of all the eighteenth-century editors, and the most cautious in his judgment, when he remarks: "Generally speaking, the more distant a new edition is from its original, the more it abounds in faults which is done by destroying all marks of peculiarity and notes of time." And in another passage: "That division of scenes which Jonson seems to have attempted, and upon which the French stage prides itself, Shakespeare does not appear to have any idea of." In a note he adds: "The current editions are divided in such a manner that nothing like a rule can be collected from any of them." Unfortunately, like all the other editors, Capell believes it necessary to divide Shakespeare's plays into acts and scenes.

With Malone (1790) Shakespearian criticism enters upon a new phase--the historical one--when research and evidence take precedence of conjecture. What he says of the first editors of his century remains as true to-day as it was when written--"that the men never looked behind them, but considered their own era and their own phraseology as the standard of perfection."

Malone, moreover, observes that the two chief duties of an editor are to show the genuine text of an author and to explain his obscurities. This, it must be admitted, is the view taken by all his contemporaries; and yet dramas are not poems any more than words are deeds. And while Malone spares no pains to amend a corrupt text in the hope of arriving at verbal accuracy, he has little scruple about marring Shakespeare's scheme of action. "All the stage-directions," he writes, "throughout this work I have considered as wholly in my power, and have regulated them in the best manner I could." To do this is to run counter to an editor's province and duty; for a dramatist to know that his text is correct affords him small consolation if his story has been misunderstood and mutilated. It is doubtful whether scholars who insist on editing Shakespeare's plays as if they were anything or everything but drama have any just appreciation of the work they undertake. When Dr. Johnson contends that Shakespeare was "read, admired, and imitated while he was yet deformed," he is indirectly praising deformity. All the eighteenth-century editors blame Shakespeare for the management of his "fable," and attribute it to his ignorance, while many modern editors altogether overlook his art of making a play. The late Dr. Furnivall's introduction to the "Leopold Shakespeare," which has been deservedly and universally praised, has yet one vital defect as dramatic criticism--his comments apply to the art of a novelist, not to that of a playwright.

The arguments brought forward in the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy are a striking illustration of this imperfect knowledge. While the Baconians pride themselves on discovering a similarity in the phraseology or philosophical sentiments of the two writers, they forget that Shakespeare was preeminent in the writing of drama--an art which is as difficult to master as that of a painter or a musician, and in which the hand of an amateur can be as easily detected; an art for which Bacon showed no aptitude, and for which he had had no training. A novelist who describes characters vividly was once asked why she seldom made them talk. Her answer was: "I have little talent for writing dialogue; when my characters speak they often cease to be the same people." Undoubtedly Bacon would have given a similar answer to anyone attributing to him the plays of Shakespeare. Moreover, there is a wide difference between the art of writing dialogue for a novel and for a play. The novelist has innumerable means of escape from difficulties which beset the dramatist. The skill required for successfully conducting the story of a play by means limited to the use of dialogue makes the dramatist's art one of the most difficult to succeed in, and puts it outside the reach of all but the few and the specially gifted. To illustrate Shakespeare's constructive art it is only necessary to look at the old play of "King John," on which his own play is based. Then, to take an instance from a later play--"Twelfth Night"--Viola, when first seen on the stage, is a castaway, rescued by sailors. After an interval of one short scene she reappears as Cesario, the Duke's favourite page. How can the gap be most naturally bridged over? Many dramatists would add dialogue detached from the story, but Shakespeare gives the necessary information in three words, which flash a picture upon the spectator's mind. Valentine says to Viola as they both enter the stage together: "If the Duke _continue these favours_ towards you, Cesario, you are like to be much advanced," etc. In scheming the sequence of incidents, and in suppressing explanatory narrative, lies the art of the dramatist. This result is not obtained without a good deal of practice. Even Shakespeare could not have written a play so compact as "Twelfth Night" at a period when he was writing "The Two Gentlemen of Verona."

In his young days Shakespeare must certainly have read "Gorboduc," with its five acts, its five dumb shows, and its chorus; he may, perhaps, have seen it revived at Greenwich Palace, or elsewhere, and have seen other plays of the kind which were written in five acts by academicians--amateurs who were anxious to air their learning before Queen Bess at the Universities or at the Inns of Court. Then there was Ben Jonson at hand to instruct his elder rival on the superiority of Latin comedy. Chapman, too, who was highly esteemed by clergy and scholars, was within call to point out to "artless Will" the merits of Senecan tragedy. In fact, the Bard of Avon had good reason to know why his playhouse dramas were despised by the learned, who, however, were not justified in presuming that he was ignorant of classical conventions simply because he chose to ignore them.

No doubt it was possible in Shakespeare's time to write plays in five acts for the public stage. We know that at the Rose and Fortune theatres the action of the play was often suspended to allow of dancing and singing, though whether these intervals for interludes came after the termination of each act it is difficult to decide.

But if the four choruses in "Henry V." were intended by Shakespeare to denote act divisions, they are not so marked in the first folio; while "The Tempest," which may have been divided into acts by Shakespeare, has stage-directions which suggest that it was not written originally for representation in the public theatre, but for the Court.

It must also be remembered that of the plays wholly written by Shakespeare, with the one exception of "The Tempest," all are so constructed that characters who leave the stage at the end of an episode are never the first to reappear, a reappearance which would involve a short pause and an empty stage; nor, even, does a character who ends one of the acts marked in the folio ever begin the one that follows, as Ben Jonson directs shall be done in his tragedy of "Sejanus" (1616). Can we reasonably suppose, then, that a method so consistently carried out by Shakespeare throughout all his plays respecting the exit and the re-entrance of characters was due to mere accident, and not to deliberate intention on the part of the dramatist? And in acted drama the exact position where a pause comes in the movement of the story is a matter of importance to the proper understanding of the play. Yet, in the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays the divisions made are so irrelevant to the story that Heminge and Condell may have considered them as merely ornamental. It may never have occurred to them that the divisions would some day be used as an authority for actors as well as for readers. The result has been disastrous to both. A slavish adherence by the actor to these unfortunate divisions for over two hundred years, has caused the representation of Shakespeare's plays on the stage to be in most cases unintelligent, if not almost unintelligible; while, on the other hand, it has for an equally long period been the means of misleading scholars as to Shakespeare's method of dramatic construction. Until editors ignore the acts and scenes in the folio edition of 1623 and take the form of the play as it appears in the quartos--that is, without divisions--no progress can be made with the study of Shakespeare's dramatic art. It is now more generally recognized, especially by American scholars, that the folio divisions are a real stumbling-block and must go overboard. In some of the early comedies, perhaps, pauses can be made where the acts are marked, in the folio, without serious injury to the representation, but the comedies were written to be acted without break, and gain immensely when so given. Besides, the lengths of the present divisions are absurdly unequal. The last act of "Love's Labour's Lost" is more than twice the length of the first act, and nearly four times the length of the second and third acts. In a theatre, it should be the shortest act. Then, the "Comedy of Errors" was acted as an after-supper interlude at Gray's Inn. Time there would not allow of its having four intervals. Throughout Shakespeare's early and middle periods his plays in their dramatic form of construction provide no opportunity for regular intervals, nor should they ever have been divided into five acts. To put more than one break into "Romeo and Juliet," "The Merchant of Venice," "Macbeth," "King Lear," "Hamlet" (acting version) injures the drama. Shakespeare rarely cares to draw breath until he has reached the crisis, nor should the reader be expected to do so. And to halt for talk and refreshments on the eve of a crisis is to play havoc with the story. The crisis comes in the "Merchant of Venice" at that part of the play marked in the folio, Act III., Scene i. But it is almost impossible for an actor to be animated in a scene following an _entr'acte_. The story of Macready and the ladder is a well known instance. The pause, if any, should come after the scene and not before it.

It cannot be urged too often that Shakespeare invented his dramatic construction to suit his own particular stage. And but for the special conditions of his playhouse, Shakespearian drama could never have come into being; for Shakespeare's genius was not adapted to writing plays with intervals for music, as was done at Court. Unity of design was his aim. "Scene individable" is his motto. The internal evidence of the plays themselves proves this.

Dr. Johnson, then, was right to contend that Shakespeare wrote his plays as they were first printed "in one unbroken continuity," but to infer that "they ought now to be exhibited with short pauses interposed as often as the scene is changed, or any considerable time is required to pass," shows that he failed to grasp the real object for which Shakespeare adopted the continuous movement. An Elizabethan audience was absorbed by the story of the play, and thought little about lapse of time or change of place. There was only one locality recognized, and that one was the platform, which projected to the centre of the auditorium, where the story was recited. There was, besides, only one period, and that was "now," meaning the moment at which the events were being talked about or acted. All inconsistencies, then, that are apparent in the text, arising from change of place or break in the time, should be ignored in representing the play. It is no advantage to rearrange the order of the scenes, or to lower the curtain, or to make a pause in the progress of the story in order to call attention to change of place or interval of time. Whatever information Shakespeare wished the audience to have on these matters, he put into the mouths of his characters, and he expected the audience to accept it without any questioning or further illustration by actual presentation. Elizabethan folk-songs are sung without pausing between the verses; in this way attention is fixed on the story, and Shakespeare obtains the same result by dispensing with the empty stage.

Capell long ago pointed out the real difficulty, when he wrote in his preface: "Neither can the representation be managed nor the order and thread of the fable be properly conceived by the reader till the question of acts and scenes be adjusted." Unfortunately, Capell could prescribe no remedy. To this day these irregular divisions continue, and all our modern editions need reprinting and re-editing. One of the debts we owe to Shakespeare is to present his plays in their authentic form. This is due to him for what he was and for what he has done for us, as our greatest national poet and dramatist.

SOME MISTAKES OF THE ACTORS.

In Shakespeare's time the relations existing between the author and his actors were often strained. Those who interpreted the characters were blamed for more faults than their own, while the author, who was out of sight, had his reputation depending upon the skill of his interpreters. The actors, besides, were the author's paymasters, and often gave less for a new play than they paid for a silk doublet, while at the same time they were the absolute owners of all the dramas they produced. It was natural, then, for authors to taunt the actors with being men who thrived by speaking words which "better wits had framed."

The hired player, however, fared no better than the authors, and it was only those actors who had the right to pool the theatre takings who became rich. Before Shakespeare was forty years of age, he was earning a competent income out of his shares in two playhouses. No other dramatist of his time occupied so fortunate a position, nor probably one more isolated. As a tradesman's son, brought up at a grammar school only, he would have no standing among scholars, and as a writer of plays he was the "upstart crow," taking the bread out of the mouths of those who had paid for a college education. Then the historical dramas which brought the Globe fame and fortune were not calculated to please at Court, because neither the Queen nor the nobility cared to see their ancestors walking the public stages, unmasked, showing authority robbed of its sincerity and of its sanctity. Across the Thames stood the Blackfriars, where the children of the Chapel Royal, backed by royal favour, were rapidly becoming the attraction among the leaders of fashion and culture. These patrons upheld a class of entertainment with which Shakespeare had no sympathy. So the master spirit of the Elizabethan drama, like Beethoven, withdrew from the crowd to work out his own destiny, and to perfect himself in an art that fascinated him, and for which his practical life in the theatre, and his independence, gave him exceptional opportunity for experiment. During his last ten years in London he wrote some dozen or more plays, all of them of supreme merit. That they were dramas far in advance of the requirements of the day is probable, since few of them were printed during the poet's lifetime. Some of them, perhaps, were acted "not above once." He had outgrown, indeed, the theatrical taste of the day, and now only cared for plays which were "well digested in the scenes," meaning well constructed. But this was an achievement which no dramatist of his time attempted, unless it was Ben Jonson, who wrote artificial comedy after the classical models. Shakespeare, however, wanted the art of the theatre to imitate Nature, and he contrived to make speech and story appear natural; and, indeed, his contemporaries mistook this art for Nature, and thought it the work of an untutored mind and an unskilled hand. Even to-day many actors are under the impression that Shakespeare would have sanctioned as improvements the liberties now taken on the stage with his plays. Perhaps, also, his own fellow-actors failed to interpret his dramas entirely in accordance with his wishes; and yet his art is so vital and so vividly impressed on the printed page of the "authentic copies" that there is little justification for misrepresenting it. There is an anecdote about Mrs. Siddons, to the effect that when again reading over the part of Lady Macbeth, after her retirement from the stage, she was amazed to find some new points in the character "which had never struck her before"! A confession which would seem incredible were it not known how apt English actors are to base the study of their parts not on the text, but on stage traditions, which often are valueless, because unauthorized. Yet no actor should defend a conception of character which is shown to be at variance with the author's words.

The only copies of Shakespeare's plays which can with any authority be called acting-versions are the quartos, published during the poet's lifetime, and these are not acting-versions in the modern sense of the term, because, with the exception of textual errors, or abbreviations of dialogue, there is no shortening of the play by the omission of entire scenes or characters. The early quartos, with the notable exceptions of the 1599 "Romeo and Juliet," the 1604 "Hamlet," and the 1609 "Troilus and Cressida," have the appearance of being made up from actors' parts, or taken down by shorthand writers during performances. In consequence, they are less esteemed by the literary expert than are the plays as they appear printed in the first folio; yet to the actors they provide information which cannot be found elsewhere. That in some of these quartos the text is corrupt may be explained by the difficulty of taking down dialogue spoken rapidly from the stage, but at the same time it is unlikely that the note-takers went out of their way to describe any movement which they did not actually see carried out by the actors. From the title-page of "The Merchant of Venice" it is evident that the copyist saw the play acted differently from the way it is now acted. Take, for instance, the headline which is worded: "The comicall Historie of the Merchant of Venice"; and the title-page, which sets forth the "extreme crueltie of Shylocke the Jewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh, and the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests." These two stories, which are continued in alternate scenes throughout most of the play, were to the Elizabethans regarded as of equal importance. To-day the title-page would have to be rewritten, and might run thus: "The tragicall Historie of the Jewe of Venice, with the extreme injustice of Portia towards the sayd Jewe in denying him the right to cut a just pound of the Merchant's flesh, together with the obtayning of the rich heiress by the prodigal Bassanio." Over the Shylock controversy enough ink has been wasted without adding more, but the shortening of all the Portia scenes, and the omission of the Prince of Aragon, one of the three suitors, and one who provides excellent comedy, are indefensible mutilations.

The title-page of the 1600 quarto of "Henry V." mentions Henry's "battell fought at Agin Court, in France, togither with Auntient Pistoll." "Swaggering Pistoll," like Falstaff, had become a delight to the town. The play is, in fact, not a "chronicle history," but a slice out of history, and not of well-made history either, since the evils of Henry's unjust wars are not touched upon. Then Shakespeare's King is an endless talker, while in reality he was the most silent of men. It was ostensibly a "Jingo" play, written to open the Globe playhouse with a patriotic flourish of trumpets. Its object, besides, was to please those Londoners who had not forgotten 1588, when Englishmen faced a similar ordeal to that at Agincourt, and came out victorious, not because they had the means but the men. The interest of this drama, to the Elizabethan playgoer, depended on the knowledge that a handful of starved and ragged soldiers had won a decisive battle over an army which was its superior in numbers and equipment, and contained all the pride and chivalry of the French nation. And the stage-direction in the folio indicates the contrast thus: "_Enter the King and his poore Souldiers_." On the modern stage, however, this direction is ignored, though perhaps it has never been noticed. The whole evening is taken up by the evolutions of a handsome young prince, gorgeously dressed, and spotlessly clean, newly come from his military tailor, together with a large number of equally well-dressed and well-fed soldiers, who tramp after him on and off the stage, not a penny the worse for all the hardships they are supposed to have encountered! Of the French episodes two are omitted and the rest mutilated, while no prominence is given to them, nor is the numerical superiority of the French indicated. Nothing is seen of its army beyond the leaders and their one or two attendants, who are thrust into the contracted space of a front scene. This seems rather an upside down way to act the play!

Among the early quartos, the two most interesting to the actor are the first and second editions of "Romeo and Juliet," because they show how Shakespeare adapted his art to the stage of his time. From them it may be inferred that characters on the stage did not always retire from view when they had finished speaking their lines. This, perhaps, was a necessity due to the presence of spectators on the platform, who made, as it were, an outer ring round the forefront or acting part of the stage. Romeo therefore did not leave the stage in the balcony episode, where Juliet is made to call him back again. He merely retired to the side of the platform, among the gallants. When Romeo hears of his banishment, the direction to the Nurse is "_Enter and Knocke_," which means that she comes in at the door of the tiring-house and remains at one side of the stage, probably knocking the floor with her crutch. After three knocks there is again the direction "_Enter_," when, on hearing her cue, she moves from the side into the centre of the stage to join in the dialogue. In this same quarto she and not the Friar is directed to snatch the dagger from Romeo, an evidence that this so-called "traditional-business," still in use, is not of Shakespeare's time. Another stage-direction shows how characters denoted change of locality merely by walking round the inner stage. No doubt this "business" was done to keep the spectators on the stage from chattering, which might easily happen whenever the actors left the forefront of the platform.

With regard to the first quarto of "Hamlet," and its probable history, something will be said later on. But it might be well here to call attention to the three stage-directions in this quarto, which have dropped out of all the subsequent editions, and which elucidate the context. Ophelia, in her "mad" scene, did not bring in flowers, but had a lute in her hands. There would be no need for the Queen so minutely to describe Ophelia's flowers at the time of her death if she had been previously seen with the garlands. The ghost, when in the Queen's chamber, wore a dressing-gown, not armour, probably the same gown he wore at the time of his death; Hamlet is overwhelmed with horror at this pitiful sight of his father. And Ophelia's body was followed to the grave by villagers and a solitary priest, who took no further part in the ceremony.

* * * * *

Elizabethan players had an advantage over modern actors in that they could more readily appreciate the construction of Shakespeare's plays. They knew that the dramatist's characters mutually supported each other within a definite dramatic structure, and that it was the business of the actor to preserve the author's framework. This attitude towards the play grew naturally out of the conditions belonging to their theatre, for unless the plot were adhered to, confusion would have arisen in the matter of entrances and exits, causing the continuity of the movement to be interrupted.

After the Restoration, when the public theatres were reopened, the "fable" ceased to have the same importance attached to it by the actors, and attention became more and more centred on those characters which were good acting parts. In 1773 appeared a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, "As they are now performed at the Theatres Royal, Regulated from the Prompt Books of each House." The volumes were dedicated to Garrick, whom Bell, the compiler, pronounced to be "the best illustrator of, and the best living comment on, Shakespeare that ever has appeared or possibly ever will grace the British stage"; a statement which is qualified by the remark of Capell that "Garrick spoke many speeches of Shakespeare as if he did not understand them." Garrick, however, expresses his fear lest--

"the prunings, transpositions, or other alterations which in his
province as a manager he had often found necessary to make or adopt
with regard to the text, for the convenience of representation or
accommodation to the powers and capacities of his performers, might
be misconstrued into a critical presumption of offering to the
_literati_ a reformed and more correct edition of our author's works;
this being by no means his intention."

The reader need only examine one of the plays in Bell's "Companion to the Theatre" to understand Garrick's modesty as to his "prunings." Take the actor's stage-version of "Macbeth"--one of Bell's notes states, "This play, even amidst the fine sentiments it contains, would shrink before criticism did not Macbeth and his lady afford such uncommon scope for acting merit. Upon the whole, it is a fine drama with some gross blemishes." Apparently the "blemishes" are only found in those scenes where Macbeth or his wife do not appear, for Bell continues:

"The part of the porter is properly omitted...."

"The flat, uninteresting scene, between Lenox and another useless
Lord, is properly omitted...."

"Here Shakespeare, as if the vigorous exertion of his faculties in
the preceding scene required relaxation, has given us a most
trifling, superfluous dialogue between Lady Macduff, Rosse, and her
son, merely that another murder may be committed on the stage. We
heartily concur in and approve of striking out the greater part of
it...."

"There are about eighty lines of this scene (Macduff's) omitted,
which, retained, would render it painfully tedious, and, indeed, we
think them as little deserving of the closet as of the stage," etc.

It does not seem to have struck Garrick that the scenes he "pruned" might have some significance in the scheme of the author's drama independently of their individual characteristics.

To take another instance. In Garrick's version of "Romeo and Juliet," reprinted in Dolby's "British Theatre" (1823), the following paragraph is inserted underneath the list of characters:

"The scenery in 'Romeo and Juliet' at Covent Garden this season
(1823) is very grand. That of the 'Funeral of Juliet' is truly solemn
and impressive. The architectural arrangement of the interior of the
church is most chaste and appropriate: the slow approach of the
funeral procession, the tolling of the bell, and the heart-saddening
tones of the choristers, swelling in all the sublime richness of the
minor key, make an impression on the feelings of the auditory which
can never be forgotten."

Here, then, are illustrations, in two plays, of methods adopted by actors--methods still in use--which are a direct interference with the poet's dramatic intentions. They are methods, moreover, which Elizabethan actors would have regarded as unintelligent, because they turned good drama into bad drama, and created inconsistencies between character and situation. The earliest acting-version of "Romeo and Juliet" (1597) has some eight hundred lines less than the unshortened play (1599), and yet there is no entire scene omitted, nor any of the characters; and those scenes which have dropped out of the play, on the modern stage, are those least curtailed in the 1597 version. In the first acting-version of "Hamlet," published in 1603, there is still more striking evidence of the Elizabethan actor's skill in compressing a play of Shakespeare's when it was necessary. Not only was the play considerably shortened, without the omission of scenes and characters, but it was slightly reconstructed. Herr Emile Devrient, the greatest exponent of the part of Hamlet in Germany, contended that this first quarto was a better constructed play than either the 1604 version or that of the folio. In fact, with the faulty dialogue amended from the perfect text, this 1603 actor's copy, which has 1,757 fewer lines than in the full play, and 557 lines less than in the modern acting edition, would be the best model from which to shorten the play so as to bring it within the limit of a two hours' representation. That Shakespeare sanctioned either the compression or the reconstruction for use in the Globe is not likely. But that he tolerated the alterations is possible, since he would recognize that his own less regular plot, though more artistically suited as the framework for Hamlet's irregular mind, was too subtle and elaborate to be effective on the public stage.

With regard to acting-versions, therefore, it may be contended that the interests of the author are more often than not opposed to those of the modern actor in so far as the latter considers the author's drama to be tedious whenever it fails to enhance the acting merits of some particular character or characters in the play. Thus it is questionable whether, in the absence of the author, the actors are the persons best qualified to make stage-versions of his dramas. Their point of view is rarely the same as that of the author, and if it is necessary to shorten a play they can hardly be expected to undertake the work entirely to the satisfaction of the author, nor yet in the interests of the public, since the value of the fable may or may not be a matter of moment to an actor. If, then, Shakespeare's plays are a valuable asset to the artistic wealth of the nation, the amount of "pruning" they require for the stage should be determined by competent experts. Unfortunately, actors believe that a scholar is not qualified to advise on the matter, owing to his lack of what they call "a sense of the theatre." This "sense" would no doubt be differently interpreted by different actors. Broadly speaking, it may be taken to mean the ability to forecast what degree of emotion or sympathy certain incidents can arouse in an audience when they are seen represented on the stage. Pope rejected the Gonzalo dialogue in the second act of "The Tempest," asserting that it was not Shakespeare's because courtiers who had been just shipwrecked on a desert island would not indulge in idle gossip! Here Pope missed the theatre point of view. The audience see in the first act an old man who once had been a King, but who was cruelly and unjustly thrust out of his kingdom, and exposed with his baby daughter in a frail and rotten bark to the mercy of the perilous ocean. Moreover, it hears that the very men who did this wrong are now themselves shipwrecked on this enchanted island, where Prospero is living. What the audience is curious to see, then, in the second act, is not noblemen who are suffering from shipwreck, but ignoble men, who merit the contempt of those who look upon them, and who deserve the just rebuke they receive from the man who is once more restored to his rights. The question as to what these noblemen have themselves suffered in the course of being shipwrecked, Shakespeare rightly judged was not one that an audience, under the circumstances, could be interested in. Then, again, to take a textual illustration from "King Lear" quoted by Steevens, the commentator. He writes in his "Advertisement to the Reader":

"The dialogue might, indeed, sometimes be lengthened by yet other
insertions than have been made (from the quartos), without advantage
either to its spirit or beauty, as in the following instance:

"'LEAR. No.
"'KENT. Yes.
"'LEAR. No, I say.
"'KENT. I say, yea.'

"Here the quartos add:

"'LEAR. No, no; they would not.
"'KENT. Yes; they have.'

"By the admission of the negation and affirmation, would any new idea
be gained?"

The answer given by the actor is, "Certainly! The added words from the quartos give the idea of reality and character." It is inconceivable that Shakespeare, himself an actor, omitted the additional lines. Without this reiteration, the expression of Lear's amazement at the indignity put upon his servant cannot be adequately tuned by the actor, nor yet be consistent with his character. This, then, is the dilemma with regard to stage-versions; scholars are hampered in their judgment by want of knowledge of the art of the theatre; and actors by their bias for good acting parts, or, in other words, for parts which are always in view of the audience.

As to elocution, it may be well to recall what an Antwerp merchant who had for many years resided in London said of the English people, about the year 1588. He then observed that "they do not speak from the chest like the Germans, but prattle only with the tongue." The word "prattle" is used in the same sense by Shakespeare in his play of "Richard the Second."[6] In the "Stage Player's Complaint," we find an actor making use of the expression, "Oh, the times when my tongue hath ranne as fast upon the Sceane as a Windebanke's pen over the ocean." Added to this, there is the celebrated speech to the players, in which Hamlet directs the actors to speak "trippingly on the tongue." There can be no doubt, therefore, that Shakespeare's verse was spoken on the stage of the Globe easily and rapidly. And the actor had the advantage of standing well within the building in a position now occupied by the stalls, nor were audiences then stowed away under deep projecting galleries. But unless English actors can recover the art of speaking Shakespeare's verse, his plays will never again enjoy the favour they once had. Poetry may require a greater elevation of style in its elocution than prose, but in either case the fundamental condition is that of representing life, and as George Lewes ably puts it, "all obvious violations of the truths of life are errors in art." In the delivery of verse, therefore, on the stage, the audience should never be made to feel that the tones are unusual. They should still follow the laws of speaking, and not those of singing. But our actors, who excel in modern plays by the truth and force of their presentation of life, when they appear in Shakespeare make use of an elocution that no human being was ever known to indulge in. They employ, besides, a redundancy of emphasis which destroys all meaning of the words and all resemblance to natural speech. It is necessary to bear in mind that, when dramatic dialogue is written in verse, there are more words put into a sentence than are needed to convey the actual thought that is uppermost in the speaker's mind; in order, therefore, to give his delivery an appearance of spontaneity, the actor should arrest the attention of the listener by the accentuation of those words which convey the central idea or thought of the speech he is uttering, and should keep in the background, by means of modulation and deflection of voice, the words with which that thought is ornamented. Macbeth should say:

"That but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all HERE,
But HERE, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to COME.--But in these cases
We still have judgment HERE; that we but teach
BLOODY instructions, which, being taught, RETURN
To plague the INVENTOR."

If the emphasis fall upon the words marked, then these and no others should be the words inflected; but modern actors, if they inflect the right words, inflect the wrong ones too, until it becomes impossible for the listener to identify the sense by the sound. This artificial way of speaking verse seems traditional to the eighteenth century. David Garrick and Edmund Kean no doubt used a more natural delivery, and also Mrs. Siddons, though some of her exaggerations of emphasis probably were never heard at the Globe. Shakespeare would hardly have endorsed her reading of Lady Macbeth's words, "Give me the daggers!" There was nobody else to whom Macbeth could give them. At moments of tension, speech is always direct. A lady, _tete a tete_ with her husband at the breakfast-table, enjoying an altercation over the contents of the newspaper, would surely indicate the natural emphasis by exclaiming, "GIVE me the newspaper!" words that can, in this way, be spoken in half the time that Mrs. Siddons took to speak hers. The two and a half hours in which a play in Shakespeare's time was often acted would not be possible to-day, even without delays for acts and scenes, with the methods of elocution now in vogue. It is legitimate for Romeo to exclaim in his farewell to Juliet:

"EYES, look your last!
ARMS, take your last embrace!"

or he may say:

"Eyes, look your LAST!
Arms, take your last EMBRACE!"

but it is not correct to say:

"EYES, look your LAST!
ARMS, take your last EMBRACE!"

which every Romeo persists in saying to-day; and this method of duplicating emphasis, being used by all the actors throughout the whole play, the time taken up in speaking it is at once doubled. Hence the need for excessive "prunings."

* * * * *

To sum up the arguments: Shakespeare's dramatic art, which is unique of its kind, cannot to-day be properly understood or appreciated on the stage for the following reasons: (1) Because editors print the plays as if they were five-act dramas, which they are not; (2) because actors, in their stage versions, mutilate the "fable," and interpolate pictorial effects where none are intended; (3) because, also, actors use a faulty and artificial elocution, unsuited to the poet's verse. These causes, combined, oust Shakespeare's original plays from the theatre, and impose in their place pseudo-classical dramas which are not of his making, nor of his time. To remedy this evil it is necessary to insist that the early quartos alone represent Shakespeare's form of construction and his method of representation, and that for the purpose of determining the text these same quartos should be collated with the first folio, with occasional reference to modern editions. Cheap facsimiles of the quartos as well as the folio should be accessible to actors, and from these an attempt should be made to standardize stage-versions of Shakespeare's most popular plays, and these stage-versions should be the joint work of scholars and actors.

Perhaps what is important for the general public to recognize is that the acting-versions of Shakespeare's plays, the interpretation given to his characters, and the actor's "readings" have altered but little during the last two hundred years, so that the performances given on the stage to-day are chiefly founded upon traditions which never came into touch with Elizabethan times. More and more, therefore, must it be realized that if an actor wishes to interpret the plays intelligently, he must shut his eyes to all that has taken place on the stage since the poet's time, turning to Shakespeare's text and trusting to that alone for inspiration.

THE CHARACTER OF LADY MACBETH.

_I should never think, for instance, of contesting an actress's right
to represent Lady Macbeth as a charming, insinuating woman, if she
really sees the figure that way. I may be surprised at such a vision;
but so far from being scandalized, I am positively thankful for the
extension of knowledge, of pleasure, that she is able to open to
me._--HENRY JAMES.

The introduction of women players led to one of the evils connected with the star system. So long as boys acted the women's parts there was no danger of any woman's character being made over-prominent to the extent of unbalancing the play. But when Mrs. Siddons became famous by her impersonation of Lady Macbeth, it may be contended, without prejudice to the talent of the actress, that the character ceased to represent Shakespeare's point of view. This is the more to be regretted in view of Mrs. Siddons' confession that her personality was not suited to the part. There was, besides, another drawback unfortunately in that, during the eighteenth century, the part of Lady Macduff dropped out of the playbill, thus removing from the play the one person in it whose presence was necessary for the proper understanding of Lady Macbeth's character. The appearance of Lady Macduff on the stage affords opportunity for the reflection that Duncan's murder would never have taken place had she been Macbeth's wife. Yet she, too, has shortcomings to which she falls a victim, for when the assassins are at her door she exclaims:

"Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable; to do good, sometime,
Accounted dangerous folly: why then, alas!
Do I put up that womanly defence,
To say, I have done no harm?"

Now, admirable as this reflection is from an ethical standpoint, it is not appropriate to the moment, and in Lady Macbeth's eyes it would have been "dangerous folly" to talk moral platitudes at such a time. In fact, if the mistress of Inverness Castle had been placed in Lady Macduff's cruel position, it is more than likely she would have had the courage and the energy to save her own life and those of her children from the fury of Macbeth. Nor is it inconceivable that if Lady Macbeth had married a man of stronger moral fibre than her husband, she might have lived a useful life, loved and respected by all who knew her. And yet, unhappily for both women, neither Macbeth nor Macduff were fine types of manhood.

Another idea which needs to be cleared out of the way is that of the unusual enormity of Lady Macbeth's crime in contriving the death of a man who was her guest. Shakespeare's audience knew that a sovereign was never immune from assassination. Queen Elizabeth's life became the mark for assassin after assassin. Moreover, the Catholics contended that "good Queen Bess," by beheading Mary Stuart, had murdered a woman who was her guest and who had come into her kingdom assured of protection. There was something childish about Duncan's credulity in face of the treachery he had already experienced from the first Thane of Cawdor. In a monarch whose position was open to attack from the jealousy of his nobles, Duncan's conduct showed an almost incredible want of caution. In fact, it was his unguarded confidence which brought about his death. No onlooker in the Globe playhouse ever thought the murder of this King at Inverness to be an improbable or unusual occurrence. And this inference suggests another of even more importance, namely, the period in which Shakespeare's tragedy is placed. When the poet-dramatist demanded that his actors should hold the mirror up to Nature, it was not the nature of the Greeks, nor of the Romans, nor of the early Britons that he meant. The spirit of the Italian Renaissance, with its humanism and intellectuality, had taken too strong a hold upon the imagination of Englishmen to allow of their playgoers being interested in the puppets of a bygone age. Shakespeare had no need to look beyond his own time to find his Lady Macbeth. There were many women still existing who were uninfluenced by the didactic teaching of the Puritans and their love of moral introspection. Queen Elizabeth herself was an instance. As the historian Green points out, we track her through her tortuous maze of lying and intrigue until we find that she revelled in byways and crooked ways, and yet was adored by her subjects for a womanliness she, in reality, never possessed. And this love of shuffling and lack of all genuine religious emotion failed utterly to blur the brightness of the national ideal. Or, to take her rival, Mary Stuart. The rough Scottish nobles owned that there was in her some enchantment whereby men were bewitched. "Her beauty," writes Green, "her exquisite grace of manner, her generosity of temper and warmth of affection, her frankness of speech, her sensibility, her gaiety, her womanly tears, her manlike courage, the play and freedom of her nature ... flung a spell over friend or foe which has only deepened with the lapse of years." And yet this piece of feminine fascination visited her sick husband, Darnley, in his lonely house near Holyrood Palace, in which he was lodged by her order, kissed him, bade him farewell, and rode gaily back to a dance within two hours of the terrible explosion which deprived him of his life, a murder that was attributed to Bothwell, and at which Mary herself may easily have connived.

And so it was with Lady Macbeth. Murder, to those who were not injured by it, was no crime in her opinion, and excited neither terror nor remorse. She was to the last unconscious of being criminal or sinful. Her life was the playing of a red-handed game by one who thought herself innocent. For this reason she could walk placidly through any evil she contemplated. She knew that her persuasive power over men lay in her womanliness, and that in this there was nothing compromising. Unlike her husband, her face betrayed no moral conflict. The Puritan spirit had never penetrated her own nature. Whatever her outward religion might be, she was at heart a materialist, not from conviction, but from shallowness, due to the absence of all the higher powers of reflection and imagination. Banquo is dead, and therefore she knows that it is impossible for him to come out of his grave to torment his murderer. It is only necessary to wash the blood from her hands, and that will clear away the consequences. Even the "spirits," to which her husband has alluded; those which she mockingly invokes to her feminine aid, have no reality to her, because they have no material whereabouts. So that her husband's talk about conscience and retribution is unintelligible to her. She knows that what he would do "wrongly" he would like to do "holily," because she has heard about the Ten Commandments; but these things have no meaning for her, they do not come within her experience. With her limited outlook, the beginning and end of everything necessary for her husband's success in life is that he should be practical, inventive, and never appear embarrassed.

The most marked feature, then, in Lady Macbeth's character is her femininity, and Shakespeare dwells upon this trait throughout her career. In the first place, no one at Inverness Castle suspects that she is accessory to the terrible crime. Macduff is distressed at the mere thought of telling her what has happened. The woman who would have been trampled under foot in the courtyard on that eventful night, if the truth about her had been known, becomes the centre of immediate anxiety when she faints, or feigns to faint, to rescue her husband from a perilous position. Duncan could not find words to express his delight at her charm as a hostess. The guests at the royal coronation banquet grieve that she should be exposed to a trying ordeal through her husband's extraordinary behaviour. The doctor who overhears her dying confessions is a "mated" and "amazed" and incredulous at the thought of her self-implications. One voice speaks of her with harshness, and it is that of the son of the murdered King, and then only at the close of the play. If, again, we turn to her own reflections, it is always her woman's weakness which she dreads may defeat her purpose. Murder is something foreign to her temperament; the details are ugly and revolting; the sight of blood may unnerve her. She can do the crime herself if she can accomplish it without seeing the wound the dagger will make; but she evidently imagines that her husband, who has killed men in battle, can do it better, and this conviction becomes a moral certainty when she is confronted with the pathetic figure of that trusting, white face, with its whiter hair, so like her own father's. When the fatal moment arrives she cannot meet her husband in her normal mood, but has recourse to the wine-cup, not because she shrinks from the notion of murder, but from dislike for the details of the operation. She has, besides, all the little partialities of a woman who delights in the beauty of the innocent flower and in perfumes of Arabia. Then the thought of being a Queen and wearing a real crown is an intense delight to her. Macbeth knew of her weakness for finery when he sought her approval of the deed; it was his bribe for her help. And women of Lady Macbeth's temperament do not care to be disappointed of their pleasures. To break promise in these matters, she tells her husband, is as cruel as it would be for her to kill her own child, that being a crime of which she is incapable, for she is a devoted mother.

Nor must the marked contrast between her attitude before and after the crime be overlooked. At its inception, murder is a mere means to an end, which creates no misgivings in her mind. She sees "the future in the instant," a future which gives her "the golden round," and bestows on her husband "sovereign sway and masterdom." But no sooner is the crime committed than her optimism fails her, for her husband seems no nearer to "masterdom" than he was before. After the coronation there comes her tragic reflection that the murder was a mistake. Unfortunately for her, it was worse than a mistake; it was a blunder for which her husband deposes her authority. No longer does he listen to her counsels, and although she has not lost any of her charm or her womanliness, her spell over him has gone for ever. Never again can she say, "From this time such I account thy love," but merely ejaculates, "Did you send to him, _sir_?" No such cruel awakening was in store for her husband. He knew from the first that his crime must bring retribution and arouse the anger of the gods; but she, for her part, foresaw no harm and no consequences. It is the shock of her failure which paralyzes her power for further action. She is not repentant, because she is unconscious of having sinned, and to the last she is at a loss to understand why murdering an old man in his bed has divorced her husband's affection from her, and turned him into a bloodthirsty tyrant. Her brain is not big enough to take in what all these things mean, and under strain of anxiety and disappointment her mind gives way. This, then, is the Lady Macbeth that Mrs. Siddons identifies as "a character which, I believe, is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex, fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile. Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless as Macbeth."

There is no portrait in Shakespeare's gallery of women more generally misunderstood than this one, the reason, perhaps, being that the poet has not been credited with the desire or experience to draw a type of woman so obviously disingenuous. But no one can read Shakespeare aright who thinks that the men and women who live in our age do not resemble those who lived in his time. Not until we read the Lady Macduff scene carefully can we grasp the kind of woman Shakespeare had in his mind. Then it will be evident that the real criminal in the play is Macbeth, whose conscience warns him that "unnatural deeds beget unnatural troubles," and who, against his better judgment, allows himself to be influenced, out of connubial love, into an action of which he knows his wife to be incapable of foreseeing the consequences. When disaster follows, we can set up that "womanly defence" for her and say, "she meant no harm." There is no such appeal possible for her husband, who is condemned from the first out of his own mouth.

Shakespeare, it must be remembered, wrote the play of "Macbeth" probably about 1605, when the Globe actors were still competing with the children at Blackfriars, who, with their fine music, gorgeous costumes, and "candlelight," attracted the well-to-do people of the town. In this tragedy, therefore, Shakespeare revives interest in the Faustus legend, once so popular at a rival house. The notion that man could set himself up in opposition to the Deity was due to the teaching of the Reformation. If man could defy the supremacy of the Pope, might he not challenge also Omniscience Itself? Having once tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, Faustus will not rest until he can know all, can do all, and dare all: