SHAKESPEARE ON THE STAGE

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXV, Issue 5134, 28 November 1903, Page 12

SHAKESPEARE ON THE STAGE

There must surely bo many people who never see Shakespeare cm the stage_ without a curious sensation of surprise. I do not mean from the rarity of the thing, as the cynical observer will suppose, but from some quality in the play itself of difference fiom the expected. So many hundreds of critics have expounded so carefully whatever had no need to bo explained, so many thinkers have discovered their own philosophy where it was least likely to be found, and so many moralists have adorned a tale seemingly in itself tco trifling for them (write's Vv.G.P. in the “Sydney .Morning Herald"), that many of ns are apt to forget that our ever-living pool in tho matter-of-fact world followed tho too prosaic of actor-manager and passed his working life in the wings, breathing an atmosphere least of all philosophic and poetic, and Finely of all the crafts one could turn to tho least imaginative, the modf abundant in disillusion. It can hardly be that Hie trials and triumphs of theatrical management were much different in kind from what wo know to-day, nor is it less true that the fickle taste of the playgoer then as now was anything but a sure and qer. tain hope. But ono is apt not to think of this likeness of conditions, and the sombre shade of Shakespeare the«-Book stalks before the curtain thronged by an innumerable ghostly horde of bookmen who in their day have been determined that Shakespeare the Man should live down to their reputation. Long ago, when the world was young the gods, one remembers, used to come amongst us shrouded i-n magic mist, and tho cloud of critical obscurities has for many of us dimmed the face of Shakespeare in much tho game way. And so it is that once in a while tho play’s tho thing ono has that curious sensation of the unexpected—that hero was just such a worried working deus ex maciiina as we know. One feels that only tho accident of birth prevented his writing a problem play or a musical comedy. He knows as well as any ntod-

ern that an impossible situation is ther salvation of a melodrama. Ho might have plagiarised in turn the pessimism of Ibsen and the epi grams of Mr. Bernard Shaw or studied polite comedy in the studio of Mr. Pinero. And it is this modem note, sol insistent in spite of all the acoidentp of time, and place, that seems so curious to us. It is hardly fair. This is not the profound moralist and subtle philosopher of the bookish world; or is that ideal.,after all. a false Croat ion, “proceeding from the heat-op-pressed brain?” Ideals are generally so misleading. We have been taught" to take our Shakespeare seriously, but the intelligent foreigner might be pardoned for mistaking a modem production of' “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with all its gorgeousness of scenic effect its glitter of pageantry, for a comic opera, simply to be laughed at and enjoyed; just as some people are delighted with the melodies of "Lohengrin” fill they discover they are listening to Wagner.

Tbe more .one (hints of it tho more certain does it’become that for the authormanager himself the play was not a study, hut a spectacle. Never a thought for tomorrow in tho real Shakespeare’s mind. To the Elizaberthean a printed play was nothing to be proud of. It took rank with the penny novelette and the book of words. It is sufficiently striking that in the most personal, pehapa the only personal thing he ever did, his sonnets, William Shakespeare never even mentions that he i& the author of a play. He soon came, as; he tells us. to think playmaking a tedious and tawdry business. He measured its value by its stage success, and it is indicative of his .insight that as a spectacle, his plays have never been surpassed. The playhouse was merely his work-day world, and if adventitiously it came to hold for a time his real interest, that was for him a thing as much of sorrow as of joy. The plain fact was that as actor-menagsr he wanted something that would “take,” just as much as anv manager does now. So with sparing genius impatient, but not quite suppressed, he turns a familiar plot into “Hamlet,” or the novel of tho day into a dream of Arden. Plot and, story, even characters, he hardly ever invents. His immediate purpose is tho stage. Catch the eye and let the memory go hang! True the scenery of his own day is a poor ’thing to ns, a gallery for a hillside, a signboard for a forest. But the pag-

eant has the splendour of the Borgia s Italy, and tho whole scheme is instinct with Renaissance colour and form. How often some trifling Bergomask dance is toward, a masque set to musio. tho glittering processions of a iVolsey, tiro mirrored kings that twofold balls and treble sceptres carry, the awesome revels of tho witches’ Sabbath. Every play is a mirage, a movement, anything but a thought, its philosophy is a clothes philosophy that appeals only to the eye. The literary student sees no point in tho nightgown of Macbeth, or Juliet's robes of bridal burial, or Cae-ai J s bloodv cloak. But on tho stage these things make the play. Surely no self-conscious moralist is hero at work, no fanciful poet merely. On this obvious axiom that the dramatist exists not for posterity but the playhouse ono curious sidelight may be thrown. There is hardlv one of his heroines who docs not masquerade in the guise of boyhood and cause all, sorts of confusion in consequence. Think of Rosalind, of Viola, of Imoggn. Nowadays we miss the point of this masquerade; but on Shakespeare's stage thoro ware no women players, and such parts together with ‘■juvenile leads," were taken by young boys. No doubt the real Romeo of Shakespeare’s stage actually was what Mr. Ivyrle Bellew so excellently "made up" to be. Quine a host of Shakepoarian parts are rather fourth-form boys than thomid-dlo-aged creations of modern actors. There is no philosophic reason for these things, though ono would rather have that /"shadow like an angel with bright hair" than half a hundred cryptograms or syllogisms And no one will deny that just in this way tho mere conditions of the,moment the artifice and accident of state presentation, did in truth inspire our so sympathetic poet with some of his most exquisite line's. Tilts at least is one side of the real Shakespeare, the actor-author to whom the pen is as prosaio as the spado, tho creature of his conditions and careless of them, using the playhouse only as tho portico of life, willing to bo forgotten and anxious to forget. Perhaps alter all there was very little

of the bookman in Shakespeare. In Marlowe, in. Green, in Jon-son, die literary outlook is obvius. but Shakespeare's was a different order of mind. A listener rather than a reader, I fancy him. How he passed his wandering time we shall never know. But certainly not in the cloisters. Ho was too much of sunlight and sweet air, too much of the laughtef of the open road. The changing chance and mystery of the sea crops up again and again; whole plays are built on shipwreck; Marina,. Viola, IJerdita are daughters of the sea. And wh'n he comes to make so frequent U 93 of Italian and French sources for hug plots, note the so deft touches, constantly recurring, as of an eye-witness. Every play has its journevs—Verona to Milan. Venice to Bel. mont, Eouslllon to Marseilles. Frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds — what a personal note they have. And everywhere his knowledge Is the kind one picks up not from books hut from men. Whatever acquaintance he can be shown to have with languages, with literature, with the thousand and one stray facts and fictions by reason of which the bateyed have made him sailor, lawyer, botanist, and Eosicrucian, is precisely of this order. An eager listener ho must have been. One fancies him the keen Stratford air still fresh on his cheeks, a trifle hectic, bending forward as some Raleigh or Sydney who has 1 carat all that Italy and England have to teach, tells his story of life; the lad’s soul the while, like an old violin one has loved, instinct with music.

And so, surely, the proper place for Shakespeare is not the study but the stage. Such a man must needs deal in sensations rather than ideas. Ho least of all will be moralist or philosopher. When the heart is young it knows no need of systems. . When it has grown old it is weary of them. The world appeals to the artist through tho eye. Life is a pageant —the ohruse sums up the whole meaning of the Bonaissanoe. of tho pagan ideal itself. The realisation of beauty and the emotions of the beautiful. the so careful consciousness of colour and form, of sky and sea and storm and sunlight as a spectacle merely—this was an end in iteclf. And when from this some sort of philosophy emerges it is a philosophy, not to “justify tho ways of God to man.” but bent on tho very practical business of setting 'life to the music of emotion. Tho artist only mirrors the world in his own heart; Whatever philosophy can bo

extracted from life can to extracted from Shakespeare also, for he runs his fingers through the whole gamut. But when life itself is silent so is Shakespeare silent too. The martial music dies away, the baseless fabric of the vision fades into air, into thin air. One by one the lights go 'out. The stage is lolt in darkness. As a spectacl ethere is no other end to life and the magician will break hia staff deeper than did ever plummet sound will drown his Book. And from a child of the stage at least there could come no fitter epitaph on life than Prospero's; We are such stuff as dreams are made on; our little life is rounded with a sleep. ,