Shakespeare, being interested in everything, put everything into a play. If he had lately been thinking about the irony and even contradiction confronting us in self-preservation and suicide, he put it all into Hamlet. If he was annoyed by some passing boom in theatrical babies he put that into Hamlet too. He would put anything into Hamlet which he really thought was true, from his favourite nursery ballads to his personal (and perhaps unfashionable) conviction of the Catholic purgatory. There is no fact that strikes one, I think, about Shakespeare, except the fact of how dramatic he could be, so much as the fact of how undramatic he could be … Shakespeare (in a weak moment, I think) said that all the world is a stage. But Shakespeare acted on the finer principle that a stage is all the world.
(“The Philosopher,” George Bernard Shaw)
To amuse oneself is a mark of gaiety, vitality and love of life. To be amused is a mark of melancholy, surrender and a potentiality of suicide.
The former means that a man’s own thoughts are attractive, artistic and satisfying; the latter means that his own thoughts are ugly, unfruitful and stale. And the happiness of a people is not to be judged by the amount of fun provided for them. For fun can be provided as food can be provided; by a few big stores or shops. The happiness of the people is to be judged by the fun that the people provide. In healthier ages any amount of fun was really provided by the people and not merely for the people. It was so in a vast multitude of songs, fairly tales and dances; but it was so even in the more ornate and official business of the drama.
The men of the mediaeval guilds enacted in person the miracle plays, with all their highly-coloured symbolism of the mysteries of heaven and hell. I have the fullest political sympathy with the modern Trades Unions; but I confess I cannot easily imagine a railway-porter feeling quite comfortable in the costume of the Archangel Gabriel; or even a plumber getting the full delight out of being the Devil. Yet it must have been a very pure delight to be the Devil. There was any amount of gagging and grotesque impromptu in such a part; for the mediaeval men were quite without the modern reverence. That is, they were quite without the modern reverence for the Devil. The carpenter or cobbler who had the happiness of acting Caiphas used to borrow a cope or a chasuble from the parish church; and I earnestly hope that the Archbishop of Canterbury would now lend his apron and gaiters to a dustman for such a purpose.
But the only point here is that numbers of ordinary poor people acted; and there was nothing to prevent it being done in every town and even every village. I daresay they acted as badly as Bottom the Weaver; but I am not talking about art, but about amusement. Above all, I am talking about people amusing themselves; and not only being amused. None will dare deny that Bottom the Weaver amused himself, even more than he amused his audience. Certainly that great man did not stoop merely to be amused; indeed, to amuse Bottom would be a bold and almost blasphemous undertaking; in which all the frolics of the fairies failed.
Shakespeare was probably thinking of the “hard-handed men” whom he may have seen thus acting the last of the mediaeval plays; as he was almost certainly thinking of the traditional figure of Herod in the Bethlehem plays, when he makes Bottom talk of playing a tyrant. A hundred years before he might have found such things in a hundred hamlets.
(Vanity Fair, February, 1920)
It was reported that at the sumptuous performance of Henry VIII at His Majesty’s Theatre, the urns and goblets of the banquet were specially wrought in real and solid silver and in the style of the sixteenth century. This bombastic literalism is at least very much the fashion in our modern theatricals. Mr. Vincent Crummles considered it a splendid piece of thoroughness on the part of an actor that he should black himself all over to perform Othello. But Mr. Crummles’s ideal falls far short of the theoretic thoroughness of the late Sir Herbert Tree; who would consider blacking oneself all over as comparatively a mere sham, compromise, and veneer. Sir Herbert Tree would, I suppose, send for a real negro to act Othello; and perhaps for a real Jew to act Shylock—though that, in the present condition of the English stage, might possibly be easier. The strict principle of the silver goblets might be a little more arduous and unpleasant if applied, let us say, to The Arabian Nights, if the manager of His Majesty’s Theatre presented Aladdin, and had to produce not one real negro but a hundred real negroes, carrying a hundred baskets of gigantic and genuine jewels. In the presence of this proposal even Sir Herbert might fall back on a simpler philosophy of the drama. For the principle in itself admits of no limit. If once it be allowed that what looks like silver behind the footlights is better also for really being silver, there seems no reason why the wildest developments should not ensue. The priests in Henry VIII might be specially ordained in the green-room before they come on. Nay, if it comes to that, the head of Buckingham might really be cut off; as in the glad old days lamented by Swinburne, before the coming or an emasculate mysticism removed real death from the arena. We might re-establish the goriness as well as the gorgeousness of the amphitheatre. If real wine-cups, why not real wine? If real wine, why not real blood?
Nor is this an illegitimate or irrelevant deduction. This and a hundred other fantasies might follow if once we admit the first principle that we need to realize on the stage not merely the beauty of silver, but the value of silver. Shakespeare’s famous phrase that art should hold the mirror up to nature is always taken as wholly realistic; but it is really idealistic and symbolic—at least, compared with the realism of His Majesty’s. Art is a mirror not because it is the same as the object, but because it is different. A mirror selects as much as art selects; it gives the light of flames, but not their heat; the colour of flowers, but not their fragrance; the faces of women, but not their voices; the proportions of stockbrokers, but not their solidity. A mirror is a vision of things, not a working model of them. And the silver seen in a mirror is not for sale.
But the results of the thing in practice are worse than its wildest results in theory. This Arabian extravagance in the furniture and decoration of a play has one very practical disadvantage—that it narrows the number of experiments, confines them to a small and wealthy class, and makes those which are made exceptional, erratic, and unrepresentative of any general dramatic activity. One or two insanely expensive works prove nothing about the general state of art in a country. To take the parallel of a performance somewhat less dignified, perhaps, than Sir Herbert Tree’s, there has lately been in America an exhibition not unanalogous to a conflict in the arena, and one for which a real negro actually was procured by the management. The negro happened to beat the white man, and both before and after this event people went about wildly talking of “the White Man’s champion” and “the representative of the Black Race.” All black men were supposed to have triumphed over all white men in a sort of mysterious Armageddon because one specialist met another specialist and tapped his claret or punched him in the bread-basket. Now the fact is, of course, that these two prize-fighters were so specially picked and trained—the business of producing such men is so elaborate, artificial, and expensive—that the result proves nothing whatever about the general condition of white men or black. If you go in for heroes or monsters it is obvious that they may be born anywhere. If you took the two tallest men on earth one might be born in Corea and the other in Camberwell, but this would not make Camberwell a land of giants inheriting the blood of Anak. If you took the two thinnest men in the world, one might be a Parisian and the other a Red Indian. And if you take the two most scientifically developed pugilists, it is not surprising that one of them should happen to be white and the other black. Experiments of so special and profuse a kind have the character of monstrosities, like black tulips or blue roses. It is absurd to make them representative of races and causes that they do not represent. You might as well say that the Bearded Lady at a fair represents the masculine advance of modern woman; or that all Europe was shaking under the banded armies of Asia, because of the co-operation of the Siamese Twins.
So the plutocratic tendency of such performances as Henry VIII is to prevent rather than to embody any movement of historical or theatrical imagination. If the standard of expenditure is set so high by custom, the number of competitors must necessarily be small, and will probably be of a restricted and unsatisfactory type. Instead of English history and English literature being as cheap as silver paper, they will be as dear as silver plate. The national culture, instead of being spread out everywhere like gold leaf, will be hardened into a few costly lumps of gold—and kept in very few pockets. The modern world is full of things that are theoretically open and popular, but practically private and even corrupt. In theory any tinker can be chosen to speak for his fellow-citizens among the English Commons. In practice he may have to spend a thousand pounds on getting elected—a sum which many tinkers do not happen to have to spare. In theory it ought to be possible for any moderately successful actor with a sincere and interesting conception of Wolsey to put that conception on the stage. In practice it looks as if he would have to ask himself, not whether he was as clever as Wolsey, but whether he was as rich. He has to reflect, not whether he can enter into Wolsey’s soul, but whether he can pay Wolsey’s servants, purchase Wolsey’s plate, and own Wolsey’s palaces.
Now people with Wolsey’s money and people with Wolsey’s mind are both rare; and even with him the mind came before the money. The chance of their being combined a second time is manifestly small and decreasing. The result will obviously be that thousands and millions may be spent on a theatrical misfit, and inappropriate and unconvincing impersonation; and all the time there may be a man outside who could have put on a red dressing-gown and made us feel in the presence of the most terrible of the Tudor statesmen. The modern method is to sell Shakespeare for thirty pieces of silver.
(also published under the title “Realism in the Theatre”, Illustrated London News, October 8, 1910)
While watching the other evening a very well managed reproduction of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I had the sudden conviction that the play would be much better if it were acted in modern costume, or, at any rate, in English costume. We all remember hearing in our boyhood about the absurd conventionality of Garrick and Mrs. Siddons, when he acted Macbeth in a tie-wig and a tailcoat, and she acted Lady Macbeth in a crinoline as big and stiff as a cartwheel. This has always been talked of as a piece of comic ignorance or impudent modernity; as if Rosalind appeared in rational dress with a bicycle; as if Portia appeared with a horsehair wig and side-whiskers. But I am not so sure that the great men and women who founded the English stage in the eighteenth century were quite such fools as they looked; especially as they looked to the romantic historians and eager archaeologists of the nineteenth century. I have a queer suspicion that Garrick and Siddons knew nearly as much about dressing as they did about acting.
One distinction can at least be called obvious. Garrick did not care much for the historical costume of Macbeth; but he cared as much as Shakespeare did. He did not know much about that prehistoric and partly mythical Celtic chief; but he knew more than Shakespeare; and he could not conceivably have cared less. Now the Victorian age was honestly interested in the dark and epic origins of Europe; was honestly interested in Picts and Scots, in Celts and Saxons; in the blind drift of the races and the blind drive of the religions. Ossian and the Arthurian revival had interested people in distant dark-headed men who probably never existed. Freeman, Carlyle, and the other Teutonists had interested them in distant fairheaded men who almost certainly never existed. Pusey and Pugin and the first High Churchmen had interested them in shaven-headed men, dark or fair, men who did undoubtedly exist, but whose real merits and defects would have startled their modern admirers very considerably. Under these circumstances it is not strange that our age should have felt a curiosity about the solid but mysterious Macbeth of the Dark Ages. But all this does not alter the ultimate fact: that the only Macbeth that mankind will ever care about is the Macbeth of Shakespeare, and not the Macbeth of history. When England was romantic it was interested in Macbeth’s kilt and claymore. In the same way, if England becomes a Republic, it will be specially interested in the Republicans in Julius Caesar. If England becomes Roman Catholic, it will be specially interested in the theory of chastity in Measure for Measure. But being interested in these things will never be the same as being interested in Shakespeare. And for a man interested in Shakespeare, a man merely concerned about what Shakespeare meant, a Macbeth in powdered hair and knee-breeches is perfectly satisfactory. For Macbeth, as Shakespeare shows him, is much more like a man in knee-breeches than a man in a kilt. His subtle hesitations and his suicidal impenitence belong to the bottomless speculations of a highly civilized society. The “Out, out, brief candle” is far more appropriate to the last wax taper after a ball of powder and patches than to the smoky but sustained fires in iron baskets which probably flared and smouldered over the swift crimes of the eleventh century. The real Macbeth probably killed Duncan with the nearest weapon, and then confessed it to the nearest priest. Certainly, he may never have had any such doubts about the normal satisfaction of being alive. However regrettably negligent of the importance of Duncan’s life, he had, I fancy, few philosophical troubles about the importance of his own. The men of the Dark Ages were all optimists, as all children and all animals are. The madness of Shakespeare’s Macbeth goes along with candles and silk stockings. That madness only appears in the age of reason.
So far, then, from Garrick’s anachronism being despised, I should like to see it imitated. Shakespeare got the tale of Theseus from Athens, as he got the tale of Macbeth from Scotland; and having reluctantly seen the names of those two countries in the record, I am convinced that he never gave them another thought. Macbeth is not a Scotchman; he is a man. But Theseus is not only not an Athenian; he is actually and unmistakably an Englishman. He is the Super-Squire; the best version of the English country gentleman; better than Wardle in Pickwick. The Duke of Athens is a duke (that is, a cook), but not of Athens. That free city is thousands of miles away.
If Theseus came on the stage in gaiters or a shooting-jacket, if Bottom the Weaver wore a smock-frock, if Hermia and Helena were dressed as two modern English school-girls, we should not be departing from Shakespeare, but rather returning to him. The cold, classical draperies (of which he probably never dreamed, but with which we drape Aegisthus or Hippolyta) are not only a nuisance, but a falsehood. They misrepresent the whole meaning of the play. For the meaning of the play is that the little things of life as well as the great things stray on the borderland of the unknown. That as a man may fall among devils for a morbid crime, or fall among angels for a small piece of piety or pity, so also he may fall among fairies through an amiable flirtation or a fanciful jealousy. The fact that a back door opens into elfland is all the more reason for keeping the foreground familiar, and even prosaic. For even the fairies are very neighbourly and fire-light fairies; therefore the human beings ought to be very human in order to effect the fantastic contrast. And in Shakespeare they are very human. Hermia the vixen and Helena the may-pole are obviously only two excitable and quite modern girls. Hippolyta has never been an Amazon; she may perhaps have once been a Suffragette. Theseus is a gentleman, a thing entirely different from a Greek oligarch. That golden good-nature which employs culture itself to excuse the clumsiness of the uncultured is a thing quite peculiar to those lazier Christian countries where the Christian gentleman has been evolved:
For nothing in this world can be amiss
When simpleness and duty tender it.
Or, again, in that noble scrap of sceptical magnanimity which was unaccountably cut out in the last performance:
The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.
These are obviously the easy and reconciling comments of some kindly but cultivated squire, who will not pretend to his guests that the play is good, but who will not let the actors see that he thinks it bad. But this is certainly not the way in which an Athenian Tory like Aristophanes would have talked about a bad play.
But as the play is dressed and acted at present, the whole idea is inverted. We do not seem to creep out of a human house into a natural wood and there find the superhuman and supernatural. The mortals, in their tunics and togas, seem more distant from us than the fairies in their hoods and peaked caps. It is an anticlimax to meet the English elves when we have already encountered the Greek gods. The same mistake, oddly enough, was made in the only modern play worth mentioning in the same street with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Peter Pan. Sir James Barrie ought to have left out the fairy dog who puts the children to bed. If children had such dogs as that they would never wish to go to fairyland.
This fault or falsity in Peter Pan is, of course, repeated in the strange and ungainly incident of the father being chained up in the dog’s kennel. Here, indeed, it is much worse: for the manlike dog was pretty and touching; the doglike man was ignominious and repulsive. But the fallacy is the same; it is the fallacy that weakens the otherwise triumphant poetry and wit of Sir James Barrie’s play; and weakens all our treatment of fairy plays at present. Fairyland is a place of positive realities, plain laws, and a decisive story. The actors of A Midsummer Night’s Dream seemed to think that the play was meant to be chaotic. The clowns thought they must be always clowning. But in reality it is the solemnity—nay, the conscientiousness—of the yokels that is akin to the mystery of the landscape and the tale.
(Illustrated London News, June 24, 1911)
The Drury Lane performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which almost avowedly turned it into a Christmas pantomime, did not, in my opinion, fail thereby in respect for its great traditional and almost religious beauty; for there can be nothing more Christian than Christmas and nothing more ancient than pantomime. Especially do I rejoice in the fact that the clowns really were clowns, in the sense of clowns and pantaloons. It seems to me quite as bad art to play Bottom in a quiet realistic way as to play Hamlet in a vulgar theatrical way. I know not if any dramatic critic has expressed the joy which one spectator at least felt in the impersonation of the Wall, certainly the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse; though the discourse consisted almost entirely of a laugh. But I have no intention of trespassing on the province of any such dramatic critics. I refer to this particular performance for the moment because it raises, as do all such performances, one particular question of historical and artistic setting. The bridal of Theseus and Hippolyta was set in the stiff but strongly coloured framework of archaic Greek art, with the red clay and black profiles of Greek vases; and for the spectacular and pantomimic purpose the effect was very fine. But we all know in reading the play that Theseus is no more an archaic Achaean chief than Hamlet is a barbaric Danish Viking. If Theseus, like Snug the Joiner, could be induced to name his name and tell them plainly who he is, it would be soon apparent that he, Theseus, is not Theseus but Southampton, or Essex, or some genial gentleman of Elizabethan culture and exceedingly English good-nature. His making the best of a bad play is something I recognize as more unmistakable than St. George’s Cross. I do not think that national virtue the one thing needful, but I think it very national. There may or may not have been a Greek Theseus; but I cannot imagine a French Theseus—still less an Irish one.
But I mention the matter here for another reason. There is a certain maxim that nearly everybody now repeats and I am disposed to dispute. It is of the sort not very easy to dispute; because it is not yet a proverb, though it is rapidly becoming a platitude. It is at that precise stage at which everybody says it, yet everybody thinks he is alone in saying it. It is said for the thousandth time with an irritating freshness, as if it were said for the first time. It is to this effect: that we only think our own age vulgar and past ages romantic because people in past ages did the same. They also thought their own clothes comic or commonplace, and the clothes of their grandfathers dignified and distinguished. Old clothes are only beautiful as distant hills are blue—with distance. Thus Mr. Kipling describes the prehistoric men as saying that Romance went with bone and flint and could not survive metals and fire. Thus many have said that my praise of the Guilds is only the recurrent retrospective romance of a past Golden Age. It is suggested that men always think the present prosaic and only the past poetical.
I venture to doubt it. And I will test it by this plain and practical test of theatrical costume. Suppose I suggested that Hamlet, let us say, should be acted seriously in modern costume. It might be quite interesting—if occasionally rather amusing. It would begin, I suppose, with a sentinel in a busby, like the sentinel in Iolanthe. Then Horatio would come out in evening dress, smoking a cigarette. And so on throughout, up to the last catastrophic scene when the Queen takes the tabloid and the King is shot with the automatic. Hamlet was in many ways very modern; and many of his sceptical meditations would sound very suitable to evening dress and a cigarette. Nevertheless, it would be impossible to prevent it seeming like a burlesque. Yet Garrick acted Macbeth in powdered hair and a coat and breeches of his own period; and it did not seem like a burlesque. Why? The simple reason is, I believe, that men in former ages did not have the contempt for their own costume that we have to-day. They did not think knee-breeches absurd, as we think trousers absurd. They did not think a triangular hat a joke, as we think a top-hat a joke. It is a modern custom to despise modern costume.
It is clear, I think, that Shakespeare thought of his most dignified figures in Elizabethan or Jacobean fashions. He saw Hamlet with a beard; I suspect he saw him with a ruff. The mortal combat is not the less heroic because Osric can gush over the new pattern of the swords. From the innumerable incidental allusions to sixteenth-century custom and costume in the Shakespearean plays, I am convinced that the poet thought in terms of his own time, even if it was, so to speak, when he was thinking without thinking. And nothing is so great in Shakespeare as those abrupt and unexpected bursts of thoughtless thought. But at least he cannot have felt the details altogether incongruous with the design. I take it that for various reasons such details of daily life were really not felt as ignominious or farcical. Of course, there really is in all cases, and was in his case, a certain moderate and normal tendency to regard the remote past as something mystical and imaginative. But it is one thing to do that and another to regard your own hat as merely a bad joke or a blot on the Forest of Arden.
(Illustrated London News, January 10, 1925)
Shakespeare in Modern Dress (Again)
I suggested a long time ago … somewhere in the appalling stacks of journalistic stuff that I have contributed to this page … that Hamlet is so modern that he might well appear in evening dress with a cigarette. But I meant it to be a foolish passage. I meant it merely as a passing fancy; and I was much amused when I discovered that this also had been carried out by more serious persons in a more solid manner. I remember saying about the same time something that is not irrelevant to the issue. I pointed out that, as a matter of fact, this is the only period of human history when it would have seemed particularly incongruous or inconceivable to act a heroic scene in the costume of the period. People use this argument and say, “Shakespeare thought of Hamlet as a sixteenth-century gentleman; Garrick acted Hamlet as an eighteenth-century gentleman; why cannot we present him as a twentieth-century gentleman?” The obvious answer is: “Why indeed?” Why do we feel the costume of our period to be unsuitable? The very question proves that we do feel it to be unsuitable. There must be some reason for our feeling, so different from the feeling of our fathers. Is it conceivable that there may be something a little unsuitable to the soul of man about the costume? Or about the period?
I think the answer is that to dress Hamlet up in the secondhand clothes of the Manchester merchant of the nineteenth century is not to free him, but to restrain him. And what we call modern costume is simply the last patchwork compromise of the hideous black commercial uniform that the Victorians thought correct and conventional. A man is much freer in an inky cloak than he is in an inky coat. And when the Victorian merchants wore customary suits of solemn black, they were not confined to one individual, to one tragic prince rather ostentatiously in mourning. They really were customary suits; and no bank clerk was allowed to go to business in anything else. What we call modern costume is simply the remains of that queer Puritanical convention; and to make Hamlet modern is not in the least to make him more unconventional. It is to make him more conventional. But I feel this to be even more true in the case of the King, the villain of the story. A dramatic critic for whose judgment I have a very high regard indeed declares that King Claudius becomes much more vivid and human in modern costume. In one sense this may be true, but not in the sense in which I have always understood the character of that agreeable gentleman. The point interests me a little, because (to reveal a dark episode in my life), I did once, in one sense, act King Claudius in modern costume. It was, indeed, in a very mild private reading of Hamlet; but even there I felt that the modern setting made the reading far too mild. It was in my own house; and I became painfully conscious of all the respects in which that lowly cot differs from the Castle of Elsinore.
Whatever else King Claudius was, it struck me at the time that he was a very noisy gentleman. He was very fond of noise; apparently, like a true artist, of noise for noise’s sake. Again and again there is mention of his taste for having his smallest domestic actions saluted with a blare of trumpets and a roar of guns. He himself declares it in glorious blank verse that thunders like the guns and trumpets. Hamlet mentions it, in a passage of imperfect sympathy, which has sometimes given me a horrible feeling that Hamlet had a hankering after temperance. Anyhow the King’s toasts at table and similar things were always saluted in this stupendous and crashing style. And I felt considerable sympathy, and even envy. I wish that, whenever I happen to drink a glass of wine, a small park of artillery in the back garden could be timed to explode and the echoes roll back bespeaking earthly thunder. I wish there were a brass band, with cannons in the orchestra in the Russian manner, to punctuate any little social observation I might have to make, such as “Shall we join the ladies?” or “Take another cigar.” That was the way King Claudius went through life; and I do seriously think it throws, and was meant to throw, a great deal of light on his character.
I think Claudius is a very fine and true study of the Usurper; because he is the man who really wants to be King. A man must take the monarchy very seriously to be a Usurper. In a certain somewhat irregular sense, he must be an extreme Royalist, or even an extreme Loyalist. And in the sixteenth century especially the Crown was really a sort of dizzy and divine glory; like having stolen the sun out of the sky. That I think is the meaning of all the towering pomp of trumpet and cannon with which this Usurper surrounds himself; he is enjoying what he has stolen. He has not stolen mere money; he is not enjoying mere land; what he is enjoying is being Dominus Rex. And that explains, what nobody else ever really explains, why Shakespeare has put into the mouth of this low impostor and assassin the most stately declaration of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. That is why he says, “There’s such divinity doth hedge a king.” That is why in facing the fury of Laertes he can play the man, because he can play the king. The liar fights bravely for his lie. The dream of royalty he has raised around him has become a sort of reality. It is for this that he lives; and for this, in the queer inversion of human virtue, he will almost die. Perhaps it was something hypnotic and overpowering in his haughty pose that drove Hamlet to such raging recriminations about his pettiness and baseness, comparing him to a pickpocket and a slave.
Now my conception of Claudius may be right or wrong, but, anyhow, it is a character Shakespeare might well have drawn. But it is a character that no man in modern clothes could really represent. We do not fire off cannons when we drink a glass of claret any more than we wear crowns when we are kings, or swords when we are gentlemen. The whole of that superb self-expression of the Usurper in pomp and noise becomes impossible. The fulfilment of the false king’s dream cannot even be suggested in modern scenery. It may have many morals; but the moral that strikes me is that of the extreme narrowness of the modern world.
(also published as “King Claudius: Dominus Rex”, Illustrated London News, September 12, 1925)
I know very little about fashions; I seldom move in what are called fashionable circles. At this moment I do not want to move at all, and certainly not to move in circles. I become conscious, or half-conscious, of some change in dress or deportment when it has already become general. In this manner, for instance, it was lately borne in upon me that another change had taken place in the human countenance.
It is already a commonplace, I suppose, that the ideal and immortal Lover, as conceived by Shakespeare, “sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow,” must now go away and sigh about something else. His mistress has no eyebrows; and it might be inferred that he would produce no ballads. Anyhow, it suggests a sort of metaphysical duel between the Lover and the Poet, rather attractive to the metaphysical poets of that period. Would the balladist still cling to his ballad, pursuing the abstract and archetypal image of an Eyebrow, even when it was entirely detached from a face? Would he prefer the lady’s eyebrow to the lady, leaving the rest of the lady behind like so much lumber, and pursuing only that peculiar vision of vanished hair? Or would he make the supreme sacrifice of tearing up the ballad and taking up with the lady, however strangely disfigured, resolving henceforward to write ballads only about her nose, her ears, or some portion of her which it seemed improbable that she would be in any immediate hurry to cut off? Even about those, of course, he could never be quite safe, if amputation were really the fashion.
In fact, touching that famous phrase, I have often wondered why modern poets do not amuse themselves by reproducing the imaginary Ballad to an Eyebrow. Shakespeare is full of hints that could be used as the basis of all sorts of games and experiments; Browning accepted such a challenge in expanding the suggestive like of “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came”; and my own father, who was a man of many crafts and hobbies he had no ambition to exploit, made a table ornament modelled in every detail on the Three Caskets of Portia. Surely some of us might have a shot at a really Elizabethan address to the supercilious feature. Surely any modern writer, after sighing like a furnace for a few minutes, might be able to attempt something appropriate in the sixteenth-century manner—
As seven-dyed Iris doth o’erarch the spheres,
Love made that bridge that doth o’erarch thine eyne
Bright as that bonded bow enskied; a sign
Against the crystal Deluge of thy tears
As line on line, so brow to brow appears …
At this point the poet looks up at the lady’s eyebrow and finds that it disappears. The pen drops from his fingers, and this immortal fragment (if I may so modestly describe it) remains for ever fragmentary. Shakespeare, especially the Shakespeare of the Sonnets, knew more than most people about the law of change and dissolution spread over all earthly things, even those that seem the most natural—
Since brass, not stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall Beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower.
I quote from memory. Anyhow, even this argument does not force us to a premature plucking of the flower or plucking out of the eyebrow. But, in spite of Shakespeare’s somewhat excessive preoccupation, at one period, with the images of mutability and mortality, I very gravely doubt whether he ever did expect that sonnets or ballads to eyes, eyebrows, ears, noses, and the rest would ever become impossible by a general obliteration of these features. But what is stranger still, and what would have struck Shakespeare as very strange indeed, is the fact that this negative and destructive operation should take place in a society devoted to pleasure, and in an age commonly supposed to be even more pagan than his own.
(Illustrated London News, September 17, 1932)
Modern Drama and Old Conventions
It is obvious that a thing can always be new if it is sufficiently old; that is, that it may seem to be fresh so long as it is stale enough to be forgotten. In several modern experiments in art, especially in dramatic art, I have noticed this fact of late—the fact that what we call novelties might be called rather neglected antiquities. There were rumours of a new kind of drama, in Russia and elsewhere, in which the whole scene was conceived as taking place inside a man’s mind; a theatre for thoughts, rather than things. The characters were ideas, such as will or memory or what not. Some scoffed at it as mad; and of course it is only too easy to scoff at anything as mad. Some admired it as new; and it is only too easy to admire anything as new. But nobody seemed to notice that, good or bad, it is a return to an older and more religious kind of drama, and a reaction against a more recent and realistic kind. It is the sort of mediaeval play that was called a Morality. It is full of that passionate appetite for abstractions that marked the Middle Ages. They would put two deadly sins like Pride and Jealousy on one side of the stage, and two virtues like Love and Pity on the other side, and let them contend, to represent the war in the soul of man. Then when mediaevalism gave way to the realism and rationalism of the Renaissance, people said, “We are tired of these allegories; we wish to see pride and jealousy fighting with love and pity in a real live complex organism called Othello.” In other words, they first took Othello to pieces and exhibited his qualities separate; then they put Othello together again and represented him as a real man; and now they have taken him to pieces again and represent him as a series of separate qualities. It makes no difference that the modern Morality has not the same moral. It makes no difference that it has, in some cases, a much more obscure and inconclusive moral. It makes no difference that we think that the Morality should rather be called an Immorality. Precisely what these people profess to offer is an entirely new technique; and it is the technique that is five hundred years old.
I heard of a much queerer case the other day. The case is queerer because the convention that is revived was much more recently rejected; that is, the old thing seems really hardly old enough to be new just yet. Somebody told me that a new psychological drama was being produced at the Stage Society, in which the dialogue represented not merely the spoken words, but the unspoken thoughts of the characters. They poured out all that really passed in their minds, as if the others were not present, or as if they were in the Palace of Truth. I understand that somebody called it the Expressionist School of Drama. This amuses me, because I should have called it the very stalest tradition of the very stalest school of melodrama. It involves the very things that the realists in my youth were sweeping from the stage as the last tawdry rags and tinsel of the old artificial theatre. It means simply a return to the soliloquy and to the aside. The realists of my youth jeered at the hero for making a long and florid speech about the heroine, which was addressed only to heaven, himself, or the audience. They jeered at the villain for saying, “A time will come,” in an aside that was inaudible to the people on the stage, but heard distinctly by the people in the gallery. They objected because people do not really say such things, and a realistic drama ought only to represent what they really say. But it would seem that the Adelphi hero and the transpontine villain were the forerunners of futurist and advanced art. Yet they were derided as old-fashioned for going only a few steps along the path of progress. The most courageous hero had not the moral courage to soliloquise all the time. The most hardened villain did not venture to tell us all his thoughts and feelings. But he began the great innovation; he told us some of his thoughts; and it would seem that the world soon thought it had had enough of them.
But of course this business of the soliloquy goes far beyond mere melodrama; it involves some of the greatest dramas the world has known. Yet the same objections were raised against the Shakespearean soliloquy in the days of the Shavian criticism. It is obvious that there has been another reversal and reversion; that the drama has first become more realistic, and then become less realistic. And in the clash of these two contradictory innovations, it would seem possible that we might return to the rudiments of commonsense. It seems clear that the critics were quite wrong in their attack on the Elizabethan drama; and chose the wrong ground even for their attack on the modern melodrama. If there was any objection to the villain saying, “A time will come,” it was not in the least that a man would not say it; it was either that the villain did not think it or, more probably, that the dramatist did not think it. The dramatist did not think what he was saying, or what he was making the villain say. But, as a matter of fact, the critic was quite as thoughtless as the dramatist. He repeated the tag about realism exactly as the villain repeated the tag about revenge. Indeed, the realistic critic of the Ibsen period really was very like the villain of the Adelphi melodrama. The Ibsenite also was always saying, “A time will come.” Most of Mr. Bernard Shaw’s earlier plays and prefaces have a continual chorus of “A time will come.” They were always saying that a time will come which will produce a real realistic drama, that shall be like our daily life, with men speaking as they do speak, and acting as they do act. The time has come; and it has produced the very opposite.
A convention is a form of freedom. That is the reality that the realists cannot get into their heads. A dramatic convention is not a constraint on the dramatist; it is a permission to the dramatist. It is a permit allowing him to depart from the routine of external reality, in order to express a more internal and intimate reality. Just as a legal fiction has often been the defence of political liberty, so a dramatic fiction is the defence of imaginative liberty. For instance, it is by a convention that the hero of a tragedy talks in blank verse. But the convention does not consist in saying to Mr. William Shakespeare, “You must and shall write a decasyllabic line properly scanned; and we will count the syllables to see you do.” It consists in saying to Mr. William Shakespeare, “You are hereby allowed to make the speeches of Macbeth move to a certain measure and music, which they would not have in real life, if that will give you a greater scope to express the real emotions.” If Shakespeare were under the limitations of realism, he would be forced to make Macbeth express his depressions or despair by saying, “Blast it all!” or “What a bore!” And these ejaculations do not express it; that is part of the bore. But as Shakespeare had the liberty of a literary convention, he can make Macbeth say something that nobody in real life would say, but something that does express what somebody in real life would feel. It expresses such things as music expresses them; though nobody in those circumstances would recite that particular poem, any more than he would begin suddenly to play on the violin. But what the audience wants is the emotion expressed; and poetry can express it and commonplace conversation cannot. Nothing but the convention of blank verse will leave you at liberty to say: “Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”; or “All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.” It is only an artificial metre that can give the soul so much liberty as that. The realist is reduced to inarticulate grunts and half-apologetic oaths, like an apoplectic major in a club.
It is another matter, of course, whether the new unconventional conventions express as much truth as the old poetical conventions. But at least it is quite obvious that the unconventional have come back to conventions. It is a theatrical fiction of the most glaring and even ghastly kind to suppose that one of the characters is speaking, and none of the others are listening. It is a far more fictitious fiction than that of allowing his voice to move in a more or less natural rhythm of verse. It is more startling than the stalest jokes of the theatre of Mr. Crummles; than the old provincial drama in which a man was completely hidden behind a post or completely disguised in a hat. But, anyhow, the reign of realism is over; even if we have to pass through unreality to get back to the real.
(Illustrated London News, March 29, 1924)
There has been some renewal of debate on the problem of the problem story; sometimes called the police novel, or the detective story, but there is one aspect of the detective story which is almost inevitably left out in considering the detective stories. That tales of this type are generally slight, sensational, and in some ways superficial, I know better than most people, for I have written them myself. If I say there is in the abstract something quite different, which may be called the Ideal Detective Story, I do not mean that I can write it. I call it the Ideal Detective Story because I cannot write it. Anyhow, I do think that such a story, while it must be sensational, need not be superficial. In theory, though not commonly in practice, it is possible to write a subtle and creative novel, of deep philosophy and delicate psychology, and yet cast it in the form of a sensational shocker.
The detective story differs from every other story in this: that the reader is only happy if he feels a fool. At the end of more philosophic works he may wish to feel a philosopher. But the former view of himself may be more wholesome—and more correct. The sharp transition from ignorance may be good for humility. It is very largely a matter of the order in which things are mentioned, rather than of the nature of the things themselves. The essence of a mystery tale is that we are suddenly confronted with a truth which we have never suspected and yet can see to be true. There is no reason, in logic, why this truth should not be a profound and convincing one as much as a shallow and conventional one. There is no reason why the hero who turns out to be a villain, or the villain who turns out to be a hero, should not be a study in the living subtleties and complexities of human character, on a level with the first figures in human fiction. It is only an accident of the actual origin of these police novels that the interest of the inconsistency commonly goes no further than that of a demure governess being a poisoner, or a dull and colourless clerk painting the town red by cutting throats. There are inconsistencies in human nature of a much higher and more mysterious order, and there is really no reason why they should not be presented in the particular way that causes the shock of a detective tale. There is electric light as well as electric shocks, and even the shock may be the bolt of Jove. It is, as I have said, very largely a matter of the mere order of events. The side of the character that cannot be connected with the crime has to be presented first; the crime has to be presented next as something in complete contrast with it; and the psychological reconciliation of the two must come after that, in the place where the common or garden detective explains that he was led to the truth by the stump of a cigar left on the lawn or the spot of red ink on the blotting-pad in the boudoir. But there is nothing in the nature of things to prevent the explanation, when it does come, being as convincing to a psychologist as the other is to a policeman.
There is Shakespeare, for instance: he has created two or three extremely amiable and sympathetic murderers. Only we can watch their amiability slowly and gently merging into murder. Othello is an affectionate husband who assassinates his wife out of sheer affection, so to speak. But as we know the story from the first, we can see the connection and accept the contradiction. But suppose the story opened with Desdemona found dead, Iago or Cassio suspected, and Othello the very last person likely to be suspected. In that case, Othello would be a detective story. But it might be a true detective story; that is, one consistent with the true character of the hero when he finally tells the truth. Hamlet, again, is a most lovable and even peaceable person as a rule, and we pardon the nervous and slightly irritable gesture which happens to have the result of sticking an old fool like a pig behind a curtain. But suppose the curtain rises on the corpse of Polonius, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discuss the suspicion that has immediately fallen on the First Player, an immoral actor accustomed to killing people on the stage; while Horatio or some shrewd character suspects another crime of Claudius or the reckless and unscrupulous Laertes. Then Hamlet would be a shocker, and the guilt of Hamlet would be a shock. But it might be a shock of truth, and it is not only sex novels that are shocking. These Shakespearean characters would be none the less coherent and all of a piece because we brought the opposite ends of the character together and tied them into a knot. The story of Othello might be published with a lurid wrapper as “The Pillow Murder Case.” But it might still be the same case; a serious case and a convincing case. The death of Polonius might appear on the bookstalls as “The Vanishing Rat Mystery,” and be in form like an ordinary detective story. Yet it might be The Ideal Detective Story.
Nor need there be anything vulgar in the violent and abrupt transition that is the essential of such a tale. The inconsistencies of human nature are indeed terrible and heart-shaking things, to be named with the same note of crisis as the hour of death and the Day of Judgment. They are not all fine shades, but some of them very fearful shadows, made by the primal contrast of darkness and light. Both the crimes and the confessions can be as catastrophic as lightning. Indeed, The Ideal Detective Story might do some good if it brought men back to understand that the world is not all curves, but that there are some things that are as jagged as the lightning-flash or as straight as the sword.
(Illustrated London News, October 25, 1930)
On Shakespeare’s Method of Opening His Plays
I once read a paper about Lord Macaulay, which I believe started in my mind the string of notions that afterwards resolved themselves into the nonsense I am now going to inflict on you. Lord Macaulay once said to a famous literary contemporary, “Thackeray, if you want to read Clarissa you should begin at the third volume and skip all letters to Italians, from Italians, or about Italians, and you will find it most interesting” … The real point I wished to introduce to you by the anecdote I have quoted is that in the works of most authors, as well as those of Richardson, the first chapter, book, canto, scene, or whatever it may be, is the most difficult to write and the most tedious to read. Before entering, therefore, into Shakespeare’s way of overcoming the difficulty, I propose to glance at the differing treatments of it at the hands of the minor English story-tellers. Foremost among the novelists popularly appreciated at the present day is Sir Walter Scott, who, in spite of his long-winded prolixity, I must mention with the deepest reverence and gratitude. The Scott method is simple enough. You have a string of prefaces and a baker’s dozen of introductions. You then devote the two first chapters to an account of the time, the description of the country, and the history of the noble house, and then you start the third chapter with a couple of servants talking about their master’s affairs. But this method, which I uphold, as it gets the worst over and then launches you fairly into the story, has been found somewhat too long-winded for readers of this degenerate age, and has given prominence to a school of novelists writing on an entirely different principle.
The logician who founded this sect argued in this way.
The most uninteresting part of a story is the beginning. The best romancer cannot begin it attractively. The natural inference is, don’t begin at the beginning, begin in the middle. Struck by this reasoning, the novelist of the new school begins thus:
CHAPTER I.
“No; they weren’t mine,” or some such remark, and continues a mysterious conversation straggling down three pages in short lines, at the end of which he informs you that the speaker was a tall dark man, or some other kind of man of whom we are thoroughly tired.
Among the many talented authors of the present day who have embraced this startling form of opening the most prominent is Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, whose beautiful story of Little Lord Fauntleroy, you will remember, begins “Cedric himself knew nothing whatever about it.” What’s “it”? I remember reading down in the country one of the most clever and amusing of her books, which began with the explanatory sentence, “By Jove! How she rides.” Such is the new style to all appearance most rapid and interesting. My friends, one word is as good as a thousand. It is a fraud.
The guileless victim reads on in his simplicity through the first or jerky conversational chapter, exultant in the absence of dates, reflections, and hard names, little dreaming that the same old history and geography, the same philosophy and genealogy, that he dreamt he had escaped, do but lie in wait for him in the second chapter. You must have them sooner or later, as Serjeant Buzfuz said, and the thin disguise of conversation is a deception and a snare.
But the case is different, and the difficulty overcome, when we turn to the system of Shakespeare.
It is well worth while to notice with what wonderful skill and ingenuity the great dramatist overcomes the difficulty by introducing into a casual conversation, which is at once natural and interesting, all that is necessary to communicate to the reader as to the personal and historical situations.
Look, for instance, at the first scene of Richard III, which opens with the soliloquy of Gloucester, beginning “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.” In it are introduced, with all the naturalness of an actual train of thought, the chaos left by the Wars of the Roses, the peaceful time following, the pleasures of Edward IV, the intrigues of his court, all, as it were, brooded over and seen through by the dark spirit of the speaker, which is fully and yet naturally laid bare in the speech. This, then, is the secret. The intriguing and ambitious soul of Gloucester is the pervading idea of the story, and this being introduced into the first scene makes that scene interesting. The long-winded descriptions of the older school have no real dependence on the spirit of the story, and are therefore tedious.
The servants’ conversation dodge is dull for the same reason. The spasmodic colloquial chapter of the new school has seldom any bearing on the point of the story, being generally merely a pretext for mentioning the heroine’s beautiful eyes and the villain’s easy laugh. It is a curious thing to notice, by the way, that in novels villains always have easy laughs. This facility of merriment seems somehow incompatible with honesty. I cannot say that I have ever noticed it in real life, but the truth is that I am not at all sure that I know what an easy laugh is like. However, it sounds well. But to return to Richard III.
It is the grim misshapen figure of Richard of Gloucester that first occupies the stage, and it is that figure that walks through the entire play, the spirit of the whole, the conception of the highest courage and genius, linked with the darkest falsehood and cruelty. It is this introducing into the opening scene the central thought of the play that shows itself in almost all of Shakespeare’s dramas, and gives them their interest. In Macbeth, for instance, the first scene on the blasted heath introduces the witches, the three unearthly beings by whose deep evil influence is swayed the whole dark tale of blood and crime. In The Merchant of Venice, again, although the circumstances of the plot forbid any direct reference to the actual catastrophe, it is suggested both by Antonio’s general presentiments of the calamity and the mention of the actual cause of it, in the danger of merchant vessels at sea. Antony and Cleopatra opens with the Roman soldier, statesman, and orator courting ruin. There are many more instances which I will not delay to cite, but … I think … my rule, though liable to exceptions like other rules, yet does on the whole apply to the works of the great dramatist.
(The Debater, September, 1891)
The Merits of Shakespeare’s Plots
I see that Mr. John M. Robertson has written a book about the problem of Hamlet, round which the critics still revolve with all the irresolution of which they accuse the hero. I have not read Mr. Robertson’s book, and am thus inhibited by a fine fantastic scruple from reviewing it. But I gather from one of the shrewdest and sanest of critics, Mr. J. C. Squire, that it explains the inconsistencies of the play as mainly the rugged remains of the old romances or chronicles. It may be suggested that in truth a hero is made human when he is made inconsistent. This is true; but the explanation is at least a great improvement on the insane seriousness of the German psychologists. They talked of Hamlet not merely as a human character, but as a historical character. They talked as if he had secrets, not only hidden from Shakespeare’s readers, but hidden from Shakespeare. This is madness; it is merely staring at a portrait till you think it is alive. It is as if they undertook to tell me the real truth about the private life of Oberon.
Moreover, the case of Hamlet does happen to be one in which Mr. Robertson’s theory seems relatively right. I should deny any inconsistency in a dreamer doing sudden things like stabbing Polonius; they are just the sort of things a dreamer would do. But it is true that some things out of the old story seem harsh and irrelevant; and it is truer still that the old story contains less than usual of the soul of the new story. I say “less than usual”; for I should like to point out that the general rule is rather the other way. Mr. Robertson’s thesis may be true of Hamlet, but it is not so true of Shakespeare.
Of course, much can be said by this time both for and against the national poet. But if it be hopeless to denounce Shakespeare, it may appear almost as impertinent to defend him. And yet there is one point on which he has never been defended. And it is one on which I think he should not only be defended, but admired. If I were a Shakespearean student, or any kind of student (the improbability of which prospect words wholly fail me to express), I should specialise in the part of Shakespeare that is certainly not Shakespeare. I mean I should plead for the merit of Shakespeare’s plots; all the more because they were somebody else’s plots. In short, I should say a word for the poet’s taste; if only his taste in theft. It is the fashion to abase Shakespeare as a critic, if only to exalt him the more as a creator. It is the fashion to say that he built on a foundation of mere rubbish; and that this lifts to a greater glory the cloud-capped pinnacles he reared upon it. I am not sure that it is such pure praise for a practical architect to say that he was totally indifferent to the basement and cellars and interested exclusively in the roof and chimney-pots. But, anyhow, I am sure that Shakespeare did not forget the foundation; or despise the basement or the cellars.
Shakespeare enjoyed the old stories. He enjoyed them as tales are intended to be enjoyed. He liked reading them, as a man of imagination and intelligence to-day likes reading a good adventure story, or still more a good detective story. This is the one possibility that the Shakespearean critics never seem to entertain. Probably they are not simple enough, and therefore not imaginative enough, to know what that enjoyment is. They cannot read an adventure story, or indeed any story. For instance, nearly all the critics apologise, in a prim and priggish manner, for the tale on which turns the Trial Scene in The Merchant of Venice. They explain that poor Shakespeare had taken a barbarous old story, and had to make the best of it. As a matter of fact, he had taken an uncommonly good story; one of the best that he could possibly have had to make the best of. It is a clear, pointed, and practical parable against usury; and if a large number of modern people do not appreciate it, it is because a large number of modern people are taught to appreciate and even admire usury. The idea of a man forfeiting part of his body (it might have been an arm or leg) is a highly philosophical satire on unlimited recovery of ruinous debts. The idea is embodied in all those truly Christian laws about wain-age and livelihood which were the glory of the Middle Ages. The story is excellent simply as an anecdote working up to a climax and ending in an unexpected retort. And the end is a truth and not merely a trick. You do prove the falsity of pedantic logic by a reductio ad absurdum.
While we have had masses of learned work about the Shakespearean origins, we have had very little about the Shakespearean origin. I mean we have had very little on the main matter of his human and natural inheritance of the whole civilization of Christendom from which he came. It is a commonplace that Shakespeare was a result of the Renaissance; but the Renaissance itself was a result of the Middle Ages; nor was it by any means merely a revolt against the Middle Ages. There are a thousand things in which Shakespeare would be much better understood by Dante than he was by Goethe. I will take one example, all the stronger for being always taken the other way.
English patriotism is one of the more manly realities of the modern world; and Shakespeare was a passionate patriot. But in that very passage in praise of England, which is hackneyed without ceasing to be holy, about half is a mediaeval memory of the sort called a mediaeval superstition. It is not about the spacious days of Elizabeth, but the cloistered days of Peter the Hermit. It is not about the Armada, but about the Crusades—
As in the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world’s museum, blessed Mary’s Son.
That note was neglected and nearly lost in the whole modern world; and scarcely any modern critic would have cared to notice it. Only the prodigious events of yesterday have brought us back, half-bewildered, into the footsteps of our fathers; and the vision of John of Gaunt was fulfilled in the hour when a great English soldier entered Jerusalem on foot.
(Illustrated London News, October 18, 1919)
Good Stories Spoilt by Great Authors
Under the title “Good Stories Spoilt by Great Authors,” a considerable essay might be written. In fact, it shall be written. It shall be written now. The mere fact that some fable has passed through a master mind does not imply by any means that it must have been improved. Eminent men have misappropriated public stories, as they have misappropriated public stores. It is always supposed (apparently) that anyone who borrows from the original brotherhood of men is not bound to pay back. It is supposed that if Shakespeare took the legend of Lear, or Goethe the legend of Faust, or Wagner the legend of Tannhäuser, they must have been very right, and the legends ought to be grateful to them. My own impression is that they were sometimes very wrong, and that the legends might sue them for slander. Briefly, it is always assumed that the poem that somebody made is vastly superior to the ballad that everybody made. For my part I take the other view. I prefer the gossip of the many to the scandal of the few. I distrust the narrow individualism of the artist, trusting rather the natural communism of the craftsmen. I think there is one thing more important than the man of genius—and that is the genius of man.
Let me promptly, in a parenthetical paragraph, confess that I cannot get Shakespeare into this theory of mine. As far as I can see, Shakespeare made all his stories better; and as far as I can see, he could hardly have made them worse. He seems to have specialised in making good plays out of bad novels. If Shakespeare were alive now I suppose he would make a sweet springtime comedy out of an anecdote in a sporting paper. I suppose he would make a starry and awful tragedy out of one of the penny novelettes. But as Shakespeare does not support my argument I propose to leave him out of my article. …
(Illustrated London News, April 9, 1910)