CORRESPONDENCE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVII, Issue 8320, 29 July 1890, Page 3

CORRESPONDENCE.

THE NEGLECT OF SHAKESPERE.

TO THE EDITOR. Sin, —As you have allowed several letters to appear on the subject of the neglect of Shakespere as shown by the poor attendance at the Opera House lately, will you give me space to state with my accustomed plainness of speech, the causes which hinder or perhaps entirely prevent my attendance, and that probably of many others who think ;',s I do.

In the first place the theatre is dirty, uncomfortable, and unsafe in case of a panic or of a fire. It is the dirtiest theatre i have seen in New Zealand. The stalls are merely hard wooden benches, on which sitting for two or three hours is painful and very fatiguing, particularly for elderly persons like myself. The means of exit are obviously insufficient. The crowd that jams up the doorway to the pit and stalls on such night's as wo had when tho Comic Opera Company was performing, would simply bo holocausts in case of a lire, and even if there were a mere panic scores would be wounded, seriously injured, or lose their lives in the frantic rush. I have been in a panic outrush from a larger building than any in New Zealand—the old Free Trade Hall at Manchester—and I know what a panic in a crowded building is. I never go to the Opera House without a feeling of dread, and I never sit in the stalls without catching cold. " Why don't you go to the dress circle then ?" I hear somebody asking. Because I can't afford it. A foolish old prejudice against bankruptcy and in favour of paying my debts always keeps me poor. If 1 could only make up my mind to run into debt to the extent of a few thousands and thyn file, and pay a penny-farthing in the pound, I could go comfortably to the dress circle.

1 do not know why the Opera House is licensed with such insufficient means of exit for the audience. In Christchurch a space is kept vacant at the side of the theatre, and the whole of the stalls and pit could escape in two minutes. A man has to be kept at each lire-escape door, to throw it open in case of alarm, and this man must be at his post the whole evening. I know this, because when a performance took place for ho benefit of the Hospital Convalescent Fund, the members of the medical staff, and others of the stewards, took these offices themselves to save expense, and I had one of the doors in the pit to look after. But these reasons did not prevent thousands from going to the Opera Comiquo, and I confess that I was one of the thousands. And yet I have not been to see Shakespere played. Now I am going: to make a confession which, when I was younger, I should not have dared to make. The reason is that I do not care to see Shakespere played ! I know the plot of all his plays, so that there is none of the interest of novelty attaches to them. I have seen most of them acted in London, and some of them here, and I would not subject myself to. the inconveniences of gointr to the Auckland Opera House to hear Irving himself act Hamlet! This is horrible, and I know it, and 1 don't say it by way of bravado, but simply as acknowledging that I have shockingly bad taste in literature and the drama. It is the same with Rabelais. I can't relish Rabelais; 1 think his great work is for the most part nonsense and filthy nonsense, and to this day, although I have twice tried to read the book, I do not know l'antagruel from Panurge or (iargantua ! This all goes to prove that I am a hopeless Philistine ; and so I am. But are there not a great number like me, only that they have not tho moral courage (or impudencewhichever you like) to confess their shortcomings? I don't think Shakespero "holds the mirror up to nature." I don't believe that men agitated by passion, ever talked blank verse to one another, or anything like blank verse. I don't believe that anybody meditating .suicide ever soliloquised as Hamlet did. And I am sure that Shaksoere, if he understood women at all, did nob paint them correctly. No young widow would have committed suicide as Juliet did. I have been on the look-out all my life for a case of a young widow killing herself for love alone, and I have neither seen nor heard of a singlo case. What Juliet would have done would hav6 been something like this : She would have fainted away on discovering Romeo's corpse ; she would have been discovered by somebody, and taken home ; she would have cried at intervals for soveral days, only interrupting the crying for necessary meals (" You must take a bit, my dear ; you must not give way so," the nurse would have said), sleep, and the supervision of the dressmakers who were making her mourning. Thou she would have appeared in a most bewitching suit of weeds, with the deepest of crape and the loveliest of. lace handkerchiefs, and she would have gone to the six o'clock mass, accompanied by' her nurse, (the latter grumbling considerably) every day. By-and-by sundry young gentlemen would have been found suddenly devout, they would have gone to six o'clock mass too, and would have eagerly hastened to give her the holy water as she entered or left the church. In three or four months' time one of them would have proposed, and would have been eobbingly refused, on the ground that she "cpuld not think of such a thing so soon after her dear Romeo's death." But if the young man was wise ho would have persevered, and the end would have been that a year and a day after her darling Romeo's death, she would have married somebody else. Now, this would

be the natural and common-place ending ■©£ the affair. Shakespere has chosen to strew the stage with corpses to gratify the sanguinary taste of a cruel age, and really disgusts us with the number of deaths, in his tragedies. I know that there ar.® grand and beautiful passages in Shakespere, not. to be surpassed in literature, but I agree with "Mercutio" in your issue of to-day, ] would just as soon read them as hear them on the stage. Another reason which has operated against Mr. Miln's success hero has been the way m which ho has advertised himself exclusively, as if he had been the whole strength of the company. You see Ajiln," in huge letters, staring at you from every wall. Now, people do not care t/o hear a star with only a makeshift company to support him. They would much rather hear a fair company of average actors than a solitary star supported by "sticks." From the critiques in the ' papers I gather that the company is a very fair company, and that Mr. Miln himself is by 110 means so very far above the average as he perhaps imagin es. Please, excuse this lengthy epistle. I think I shall abstain from reading the correspondence columns for a few days, if it appears, as I know I shall be "• crushed again."lain, &c -> R. H. Bakewell. Auckland, Ju'.y 20.

CHOUAL SOCIETY. TO THE EDITOR. " jrSlunfc wedges rive bard knots." Sir, On a perusal of the correspondence in your- columns, and of your criticisms ou recent) concerts, there undoubtedly is a consensus of opinion that the Society has greatly retrograded of late years, and is still on the downward path. Indeed, we have no less an authority for this than its own committee. For did not; that committee, in its annual report some two years back, deplore the fact that the Society was nob keeping up to its standard, and did it not resolve that all the voices should be re-tested, and those who could not come up to the standard excluded ? I am grieved to add that the committer has not had the courage of its opinion, and the resolution is a dead letter. Your correspondents have each, from his own point of view, endeavoured to indicate what is to be blamed for the decay of the Society, but in common with many others, 1 take a wider view. We are of opinion that not measures but men are to be blamed, and primarily and most of all the conductor. Let me try to illustrate this in a business way, for this is a question not of music but of business. A branch of a large business firm has been flourishing for some time. Gradually customers decrease, business falls oil', employees aro halfhearted and wholly disgusted, and yet tho times are no worse than when tho business was flourishing. Or, again, a mine manager drives here and drives there, and never strikes the lead, although surrounding claims have struck it hard. What do the principals do in each of these and similar cases '! Do they wait until the concern bursts up? No, sir; they send the manager to the right-about. Now for the practical application. Here you have a conductor who has conducted on the Continent, who has had the practical and moral support of one whose word on matters musical has been a law to this city (Judge Fenton), who has had the honour conferred upon him of being more than onco (see Herald of the dates) decorated by tho King of Italy for his valuable services to the cause of music, and who lias, in addition, been specially selected by tho University Council to fill their chair of music—and yet the society he conducts and for whose efficiency he is responsible is rapidly going to the bad ! For this he is to blame, nor can he shelter himself under the plea that the singers and orchestra aro no good, for they are as he has made them. Is not the Orchestral Union practically tho same as the Choral Society's orchestra 2 and yet did it not at its two public appearances, under Mr. Paque's baton, acquit itself right well, and earn the encomiums of the press and public ? The remedy is plain and simple. However clever a musician or estimable a man he may be, the conductor ought to be discharged with three months' salary in lieu of notice, and a conductor advertised for in the New Zealand and Australian papers. This is the first and the most important step to be taken. Other drastic remedies are imperatively needed to remove from the Society the reproach of being tho worst in the colonies, the mention of whoso name all over New Zealand and Australia provokes a derisive laugh or a contemptuous sneer, and to restore it to the proud position it once held of the premier Society of Australasia. On the nature of these remedies I will, with your permission, address you hereafter, as I have, I fear, already trespassed too far on your kindness. —I am. etc., Fiat .Tuktitia Ruat Cojlum. P.S.—I hear that tho committee appointed a sub-committee of three to attend rehearsal, and to report whether the Society was lit to appear before its subscribers with its last production. Is the committee really at last waking up to a sense of its responsibilities ? DEMOCRACY A FAILURE. to Tin: EDITOR. Sir,—ls democracy a failure ? The answer must be, t.s far as New Zealand is concerned, decidedly yes. The rule of only three—yes, three capable and honest: men—a commissioner for each island, with a president or umpire, would well suffice, instead of the hydra-headed monstrosity existing at present, which may be likened to the car of Juggernaut in crushing tho people to financial ruin. A new Parliament will shortly be elected, the people will again raise unto themselves a new idol, and offer homage and sacrifice, and jubilant acclamation, in the hope that their troubles will at last be swept away, but what will be the result? Instead of putting right the errors of its predecessors, it) will simply aggravate them, by adding still further to the burden of our colonial ass, notwithstanding that the poor brute is already staggering under his load, and sir, this like the brook "will go on for ever," or until government by party ceases to exist; and political lagos will continuo to flourish no matter what protestation and vocal thunder on the hustings to the contrary. It was said when provincialism was abolished that a new era of broad colonial policy would bo inaugurated. God knows, it has been broad enough, more so than the most sanguine could expect, with the ouo drawback that tho backs of the people have not broadened likewise, and instead of preserving our perpendicular we are ■ flattened out to a pancake horizontally, ar.d are likely to grovel in the mud while democracy, as we know it, is rampant. With the provincial system remodelled, and the accursed central system of bureaucracy swept away, government, local and economical, may flourish again, with logrolling and chicanery reduced to a minimum simply through being well focussed.— am, &c. Hopeful.

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