SIR H. TREE ON SHAKESPEARE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXV, Issue LXV, 15 November 1913, Page 9

SIR H. TREE ON SHAKESPEARE.

?sr ion o s f **£* -r y »s oemg that of the producers who em opportunities that he had?—

TU J^^ cockPit hold The vasty .fields of France? O may we cram * Otin the air, at Asincourt? thShte- im Perfections with your Into a thousands parts divide one man And make imaginary puissance.

The views of Beerbohm Tree, which ST^T*" become the accepted mode m bhakespeare production, should be Iw^ij ."V .^Junction with Oscar Wilde's brilliant study, "The Truth of Masks," published in "Intentions" : twenty years ago. Wilde was not a producer. with the knowledge and experience of Tree, but his dramatic instinct made him perceive with what a. sure touch Shakespeare employed every device of costume at his command arid there can be little doubt tnat bhakespeare, considered as a producer, was as "gorgeous" as the resources of his day^allowed him to be Costume is an essential part of the story m Shakespeare. Wilde quotes, in a very convincing fashion, 'the use made of Caesar's mantle in Mark Antony's speech over the murdered body. Beerbohm Tree quotes the same scene, and points out how the force of the great .speech is intensified in a production wh^ch makes the stage resemble as closely as possible the crowded Forum of Borne. What his opponents called "ostentatious spectacle" Tree justified by results. In three years at her Majesty's Theatre three Shakespearian productions have been given—-"JuHns Caesar," "King-John," and. "A Midsummer Night Dream"; and much, no doubt, as it^vill. shock some people, I am not ashamed to say that for these productions I have tried to borrow from the art and the sciences all that the arts and sciences had to lend. And what has been the result? In London alone two hundred and fortytwo thousand people witnessed "Julius Caesar." over one hundred and seventy thousand came to see "King John," arid nearly two hundred and twenty thousand were present during the run of "A Midsummer Night Dream" —

in a.ll a grand total of 632,000 visitors to these three productions. Sir Herbert Tree, in some of the other essays (notably that of "Hamlet"), proceeds to discuss what has been called the psychological meaning of Shakespeare; and he discusses the drama from the prosaic point of view of "an actor's mxmipt book." He comes to saner and clearer conclusions than most of those who, with Uiterary and philosophic microscopes, have made wonderful discoveries concerning the abstruse psychological studies which (they think) the dramatist intended to make. More nonsense has been written concerning Shakespeare's "psychology" than on any other phase of his work. In dramatic stories Ixirrowed bodily from Plutarch's "Lives," or from Holinshed's "Chronicles," where Shakespeare did little else but put metre and sonorousness into the historical matter, we have been told' to perceive the philosophic subtleties in which a nineteenth, cetiturv professor used to entangle himself. The fashion of sheer idolatry of Shakespeare, in which students have been bidden to perceive infallible genius in a past participle, and passionate perfection in a comma, has been a ridiculous thing in Enclish criticism, which was not satisfied" with a Shakespeare unrivalled in literature for poetic splendor and fertility, but wanted him to be confessed "as also ' beyond rivalry in dramatic, philosophic \ and historical equipment. It is instructive to see him sanely criticised, as one theatrical manager viewed through the experience of another.