Chapter I: Introduction

I wanted not to write an introduction to these three plays, but circumstances are too strong for me. Yet, after all, what is to be said but, to the public, “Here they are; like them,” and, to the critics, “Here they are; fall on them”? But apparently this is not enough. I must think of something else.

There was a happy time when I was a critic myself. I, too, have lived in that Arcady. What nights were then! Red-letter nights when the play was bad, and in one short hour, standing on the body of the dramatist, I had delivered my funeral oration; black-letter nights when the play was good, and it took six hours of solid pushing, myself concealed by the fellow’s person, to place him fairly in the sun. The years slip away. Yet even now I have something of my old style. Here, lest you should think I am boasting, is my _Hamlet_. Yes, by the enterprise of _The Saturday Review_, I was present on that historic first night. For, lately, this paper stimulated its readers, with promise of reward, to imagine themselves there as critics, and I brushed up my old black doublet and went with the others. Interested, you know, in this young provincial dramatist; hoping against hope that here at last was the.... However, luckily the play was a bad one, and (proud am I to say it) I won the prize.

HAMLET

Mr. William Shakespeare, whose well-meaning little costume play
_Hamlet_ was given in London for the first time last week, bears
a name that is new to us, although we understand, or at least are
so assured by the management, that he has a considerable local
reputation in Warwickshire as a sonneteer. Why a writer of
graceful little sonnets should have the ambition, still less
conceive himself to have the ability, to create a tragic play
capable of holding the attention of a London audience for three
hours, we are unable to imagine. Merely to kill off seven (or was
it eight?) of the leading characters in a play is not to write a
tragedy. It is not thus that the great master-dramatists have
purged our souls with pity and with terror. Mr. Shakespeare, like
so many other young writers, mistakes violence for power, and, in
his unfortunate lighter moments, buffoonery for humour. The real
tragedy of last night was that a writer should so misunderstand
and misuse the talent given to him.

For Mr. Shakespeare, one cannot deny, has talent. He has a certain
pleasing gift of words. Every now and then a neat line catches the
ear, as when Polonius (well played by Mr. Macready Jones) warns
his son that “borrowing often loses a man his friends,” or when
Hamlet himself refers to death as “a shuffling off of this mortal
toil.” But a succession of neat lines does not make a play. We
require something more. Our interest must be held throughout: not
by such well-worn stage devices as the appearance of a ghostly
apparition, who strikes terror into the hearts only of his
fellow-actors; not by comic clowning business at a grave-side; but
by the spiritual development of the characters. Mr. Shakespeare’s
characters are no more than mouthpieces for his rhythmic musings.
We can forgive a Prince of Denmark for soliloquising in blank
verse to the extent of fifty lines, recognising this as a
legitimate method of giving dignity to a royal pronouncement; but
what are we to say of a Captain of Infantry who patly finishes off
a broken line with the exact number of syllables necessary to
complete the _iambus_? Have such people any semblance to life at
all? Indeed, the whole play gives us the impression of having been
written to the order of a manager as a means of displaying this or
that “line” which, in the language of the day, he can “do just
now.” Soliloquies (unhampered by the presence of rivals) for the
popular star, a mad scene for the leading lady (in white), a ghost
for the electrician, a duel for the Academy-trained fencers, a
scene in dumb-show for the cinema-trained rank-and-file—our
author has provided for them all. No doubt there is money in it,
and a man must live. But frankly we prefer Mr. Shakespeare as a
writer of sonnets.

So much for Mr. Shakespeare. I differ from him (as you were about to say) in that I prefer to see my plays printed, and he obviously preferred to see his acted. People sometimes say to me: “How beautifully Mary Brown played that part, and wasn’t John Smith’s creation wonderful, and how tremendously grateful you must be.” She did; it was; I am. The more I see of actors and actresses at rehearsals (and it is only at rehearsals of your own plays that you can see them at all, or learn anything of their art), by so much the more do I admire, am I amazed by, their skill. There are heights and depths and breadths and subtleties in acting, still more in producing, of which the casual playgoer, even the regular playgoer if he only sees the stage from the front, knows nothing. But the fact remains that, to the author, the part must always seem better than the player. That great actor John Smith may “create” the part of Yorick, but the author created it first, and created it, to his own vision, every bit as much in flesh and blood as did, later, the actor. You may read the plays here, and say that this or the other character does not “live,” meaning by this that you are unable to visualise him, unable to imagine for yourself, granted the circumstance, a person so acting, so reacting. Well—“If it be so, so it is, you know”; it is very easy not to be a great artist; I have failed. But do not believe that, because a character does not live for you, therefore it does not live for the author. While we are writing, how can we help seeing the fellow? We shut our eyes, and he is there; we open them, and he is there; we dip our pen into the ink-pot, and he is waiting on the edge for us. We shake him out on to the paper.... Ah, but now he is dead, you say. Well, well, he lived a moment before.

So when John Smith “creates” the character of Yorick, he creates him in his own image—John Smith-Yorick; a great character, it may be, to those who see him thus for the first time, but lacking something to us who have lived with the other for months. For the other was plain Yorick—and only himself could play him. Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well, a fellow of most excellent fancy. Would that you could know him too! Well, you may find him in the printed page ... or you may not ... but here only, if anywhere, is he to be found.

A. A. M.

THE GREAT BROXOPP

FOUR CHAPTERS IN HIS LIFE

CHARACTERS

Broxopp.
Nancy (_his wife_).
Jack (_his son_).
Sir Roger Tenterden.
Iris Tenterden.
Honoria Johns.
Ronald Derwent.
Norah Field.
Benham.
Mary.
Alice.

* * * * *

_The Scene is laid in the Broxopp home of the period._

_Twenty-four years pass between Act I. and Act II., eighteen months between Act II. and Act III., and a year between Act III. and Act IV._

* * * * *

The first performance of this play in London took place at the St. Martin’s Theatre on March 6, 1923, with the following cast:

_Nancy Broxopp_ Mary Jerrold.
_Mary_ Margaret Carter.
_Broxopp_ Edmund Gwenn.
_Benham_ J. H. Roberts.
_Alice_ Gwen Hubbard.
_Honoria Johns_ Marjorie Gabain.
_Jack Broxopp_ Ian Hunter.
_Iris Tenterden_ Faith Celli.
_Sir Roger Tenterden_ Dawson Milward.
_Norah Field_ Beatrix Thomson.
_Ronald Derwent_ Richard Bird.

THE GREAT BROXOPP