WHY A STATUE FOR SHAKESPEARE ?

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 19, 6 May 1908, Page 43

WHY A STATUE FOR SHAKESPEARE ?

The unimaginative people who want a national statue of Shakespeare erected in Portland Place are meeting with a good deal of healthy opposition in the literary’and artistic worlds. The suggestion of Portland Place is really too dismal altogether. It is utterly out of keeping with the spirit of Shakespeare as a site well could be. It is as formal, stiff and prosaic in character as a German drill-ground. Nobody ever goes there. Its highly respectable and sombre mansions look out upon a silent street which the traffic of the great city never profanes. An occasional motorcar or electric brougham, a footman waiting at a carriage door, a stray pedestrian or two, are the only signs of life about this majestically dull thoroughfare. A statue of Shakespeare in Portland Place would be utterly cut off from the teeming life of the metropolis; and, furthermore, it would be as effectually removed from the old London that Shakespeare knew so well. It is utterly unconnected with any memory of the poet’s London life. Besides, why a statue at all? It is not needed, and it would be unbeautiful. We have a statue of Shakespeare already in the gardens in Leicester-square, where the effigy of the poet looks gloomily across at the revels of extremely gay young women and “bloods,” who take no more notice of him than do the London sparrows perched disrespectfully on the top of his head! Besides, what British sculptor can do justice to the national poet in marble or in stone? London has far too many statues already, ami nearly all of them are unlovely. Appalling effigies of statesmen in stove : pipe trousers and ungainly frock-coats, sometimes with allegorical females crouching in humility at their lordly feet, - ihar the prospect ’of : many ’a London square and street. They all look' horribly dejected, and soot and fog soon play havoc, wilh their colour,, reducing; them to black monstrosities.., It is ter-, rible to think of the result if the Shakespeare statue hotheads are allowed to have their way. The only consolation would be that in .Portland Place the statue would be decently hidden from the public gaze. But a statue to the memory of Shakespeare is superfluous. - The query in Milton’s splendid lines has never been answered — “What needs my Shakespeare fur Ids honoured bones The labour of an age in piled stones?" Mr. Andrew Lang, who says he declines to have anything to do with any memorial to anybody, points out with gentle sarcasm that the memory of Shakespeare can never die so long as schoolboys are compelled to, “do” him for examination purposes, and “swot up” the notes to the plays in the “Clarendon Press” editions. As the schoolboy well said: “We have to real the notes; we don’t have to read the plays.” And while Shakespeare figures in examination papers, succeeding generations will never forget him; they won’t be allowed to. Compulsory Shakespeare, as Mr. Lang says, is an institution. ■ And so millions of people, who never look at a Shakespeare play after leaving school, will continue for the rest of their lives to offer lip-homage to the national poet. So why a statue? If Shakespeare must have a memorial of “piled stones.” a well-endowed National Theatre ■’'•would be far more i.n keeping with his supremacy in English drama. A National Theatre we must have, and the sooner the better; and it would be a fitting and a worthy tribute to the master dramatist b c.w: it in his memory.