THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 1920, A GREAT UNDERTAKING.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20689, 11 April 1929, Page 8

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 1920, A GREAT UNDERTAKING.

The production of no fewer than eighteen of the plays of Shakespeare within the limits of a three weeks’ season is an enterprise sufficiently striking, not to say stupendous, to merit attention and even to excite amazed surprise. Several years have passed since Mr Allan Wilkie conceived the idea of producing the whole of the plays of Shakespeare for the benefit of the theatre-going public of Australia and New Zealand, and unfortunately he has not escaped “ the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” despite which he has adhered with great courage to the determination he had formed. The threefold nature of Shakespeare’s appeal is emphasised by the magnitude of the undertaking to which Mr Wilkie has applied himself. In their high tragedy and rollicking comedy the plays combine in rare measure the elements of recreation, education, and inspiration. Nor can it he too strongly insisted that Shakespeare’s plays were written to be acted and that no amount of reading or study can take the place of the visualising of the scenes and characters which a stage representation provides. It has been remarked by one critic that Shakespeare was an entertainer who succeeded because he was himself much entertained with life; —he set out to be a dramatist and his dramatic greatness, the excellence of his construction, and the power which made his method possible cannot be rightly perceived if his plays are robbed of their form. The “play’s the thing,” and nothing can take the place of its dramatic representation. There is no need to enlarge upon the immensity of the debt which Great Britain and the English language owe to Shakespeare. As each play proceeds, familiar phrases and sentences follow one another as they come “ trippingly on the tongue ” of the actors. Only then is the truth driven home of the degree in which the genius of Shakespeare has entered into the very warp and woof of the language of the common people. To. Shakespeare was given the peculiar power of making his characters come to life and be themselves the moment they appear on the stage. Glutton Brock points this out rarely when he writes: —

Hamlet is- Hamlet in the first words he speaks. Language identifies him as people in real life are identified by their faces, yet at the same time it is used to carry on the action of the play, and things happen as swiftly as in a play of mere situation. But when Hamlet soliloquises, it is not merely an outworn dramatic device, for his thoughts are so phrased that we recognise his mind as if it were a well known face. And this power of giving instant life to a character is what gives life also to Shakespeare’s form, for without it there would be no continuity in the glimpses of his searchlight. It is the characters themselves the moment they appear that connect one glimpse with another and convince us that they are glimpses of a real world which continues in all its complexity and richness between the glimpses. Hamlet, Cordelia, Othello, Macbeth, lago, seem to have a life independent of the play. We feel that we see only a little of them and deduce much more. We are aware of their existence between the scenes in which they appear, for when they enter they are already absorbed in their business, and when they depart they are still absorbed in it. This explains why the practice of quoting, in speech and readings, passages that are divorced from their context fails altogether to do justice to the genius of Shakespeare and why the stage representation is alone effective. Tfle plays have a message for all time, because they envisage the problems of everyday life. “ Shakespeare's problem,” says a commentator, “ was the problem of a man who wrote for a living, of one who loved life too well to empty it of content for artistic purpose; and yet it was a problem of one who could not be content without making a music out of life. Words, for him, must perform all their ordinary functions, yet they must dance; men and women must have all the marks of circumstance upon them, yet they must utter their immortal souls; life must not be separated from its routine and its indignities, yet it must overcome them, both with laughter and tears.”