Shakespeare and the Plastic Stage

“ SHAKESPEARE,” said the aged Goethe, in conversation with Eckermann, “was not a theatrical poet. He never thought of the stage. It was far too narrow for his great mind.” But Eckermann seems to have been a thoughtful young man. “It is singular,” he remarked, about a year later, “that the dramas of Shakespeare are not theatrical pieces properly so called, since he wrote them all for his theatre.” But Goethe was unmoved. His opinion was the result of long experience in the scenic production of Shakespeare on the Weimar stage.

In 1825, when Goethe was in his seventy-seventh year, the first quarto of Hamlet, which had been printed in Germany, came to his notice. It seems to have been the only Elizabethan play he ever saw in the original state of the text. Certainly it was the first definite intimation he ever received of the true nature of Elizabethan stagecraft, and it revolutionized his conception of it. “ No locality is indicated, and nothing is said with regard to stage decorations; nor is there any division into acts and scenes. The imagination has free scope, and should be satisfied with the plain old English stage. There the play runs its proper course, full of passion and unhindered, and no one has leisure to ponder over localities. In the newer editions, with which we have so long been familiar, we find the play divided into acts and scenes; the localities and decorations, too, are mentioned.” Then he naively concluded: “Whether these additions were made by the author, or were the work of subsequent commentators, we will not attempt to decide.”

The “localities” were foisted upon Shakespeare by Nicholas Rowe, in an irregular and haphazard manner, in 1709; and successive editors, regarding them as an integral part of the text, have introduced them at every possible opening. The mightiest of managers have realized them in “decorations” that have sat like an incubus on the Shakespearean stage. During two hundred years, as Goethe clearly recognized, Shakespeare has been “ not a theatrical poet; ” the poetic drama has never “run its proper course, full of passion and unhindered.”

Much has been written about Shakespeare and the modern stage. The crux of the question lies in his relation to his own theatre, and this has as yet received the scantest attention.

I

The scholarly world has, as it seems, held a very low opinion of Elizabethan stagecraft. “In all that is external and mechanical,” says Dowden, “the theatre was still comparatively rude.” “There was nothing,” John Addington Symonds remarks, “but the rudest scenery.” Coleridge is even more contemptuous. “The stage in Shakespeare’s time was a naked room, hung with a blanket for a curtain.” It is not without significance, perhaps, that those who despise the Elizabethan stage as crude and naked are no less contemptuous of the complex and highly embellished stage of modern times. None of them shows any love of the theatre as the theatre. Coleridge “never saw any of Shakespeare’s plays performed,” as we learn from a report of one of his lectures, “ but with a degree of pain, disgust, and indignation. He had seen Siddons as Lady Macbeth, and Kemble as Macbeth. These might be the Macbeths of the Kembles, but they were not the Macbeths of Shakespeare. [The actors] drive Shakespeare from the stage, to find his proper place in the heart and the closet.” It is an almost universal cry of intelligent readers. Lamb, in an ecstasy of lyric praise, wrote: “ The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted;” and as for the actors, he asked in fine scorn what they “had to do” with it all, anyway ? “They might more easily propose to impersonate . . . one of Michael Angelo’s terrible figures.” Emerson despised the Hamlet of “ a famed performer, the pride of the English stage,” because the poetry of three lines “spoiled the illusions of the greenroom.” Maeterlinck pronounces the playhouse “a place where works of beauty perish.”

There is something strangely disquieting about all this. One feels that Eckermann’s question has not been answered. Is it quite unreasonable to expect a play, even the greatest play, to be playable? Is it as absurd to make use of the whisperings, the thunder, the varying color, the vibrant emotion of an actor’s voice, in order to reinforce the sonorous lines Lear speaks, as it would be to make living pictures of the Moses or the David ? Shakespeare certainly wrote with his actors in view, — a fact which no doubt gave rise to the vernacular directness and simplicity of his highest flights of poetry, which distinguishes them, as Lowell notes, from the literary, or rather rhetorical, verse of Milton. It is a truism that the artist who creates happily is wedded to his instrument of expression, his imagination to the material it works in. Stevenson relates the fine rapture that filled him at the perfect use of a comma or a semicolon. D’Annunzio once told an interviewer how he is accustomed to read the dictionary, enraptured by the mere sound of beautiful words. If Chopin had had only a spinet, could he have written as he did ? Or, conversely, should we call the man a good writer of songs whose lyrics cannot be sung, the composer a master whose score, however lofty the mind revealed in it, cannot be played by an orchestra ? Could Phidias have made the Parthenon out of Babylonian mud, or Titian have painted his Venetian women in the crude chrome and ochre with which an Indian brave daubs his features ? Certainly it is worth while to picture Shakespeare’s stage, clearly as we may, as the executive instrument for which he wrote his mighty harmonies of the human soul.

What warrant have we for the belief that Elizabethan stage and stagecraft were crude ? Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesy scoffed at its frequent changes of scene. But his point of view was that of the Elizabethan classicist, — or, as we now recognize, pseudo-classicist. Ben Jonson, who was tarred with the same brush, raised the same cry. In the prologue of Every Man in his Humour, he boasted a play

both of which devices Shakespeare employed. But should we give strict credence to the gibes of a satirist ? What would the future antiquary think of our own stage, if he listened only to its detractors, even its most intelligent detractors, — George Moore and W. B. Yeats, for example ? Shakespeare himself, it is true, chafed at the “squeaking Cleopatra” who boyed the greatness of the Egyptian Queen; and in the prologue to Henry V he asked: —

But does this recognition of the limitations of his medium argue that he was out of sympathy with its virtues ? Does it not rather show that, far from being, as Goethe found him, “not a theatrical poet,” he studied his theatre with scrupulous artistic care? Lessing’s painter in Emilia Galotti, in much the same quandary, took advice from the author of Laocoon, and consoled himself with the profound philosophy that one measure of an artist’s greatness is the difference between his aim and his achievement.

If Shakespeare’s theatre was as bare and as crude as we have so often been assured, it was a solitary phenomenon of the kind in the England of Elizabeth. The order of the day, as is well known, was external luxury running riot in unexampled pageantry, — the reveling of a recently barbarous people in the full splendor of the Renaissance. The accounts of triumphs and progresses fill ponderous volumes. In at least one respect, the actors, as extant records show, rivaled the court itself. Great as was the delight in drama, and talented as were the playwrights who supplied the demand, the highest price Philip Henslowe paid for a play up to 1600 was eight pounds, the lowest being four; but for a pair of hose he paid £4 14s, and for a cloak £20. As money was worth about six times what it is now, the price of this cloak — a single part of a single costume — was equivalent to over £120. Henslowe’s inventory of the apparel of the Lord Admiral’s men lists eighty-seven garments, mainly of silk or satin, with gold lace and fringe, and often of cloth of gold. Is it likely that a Renaissance theatre in which such garments were displayed can be fitly described as a naked room hung with a blanket?

It was, in fact very far from this. Coryat in his Crudities remarks that the playhouses he saw in Venice (July, 1608) were “ beggarly and bare in comparison of our stately playhouses in England: neither can their actors compare with us for stately apparel, shows, or music.” This was no British prejudice, as numerous foreign travelers in England bear witness. A Dutch scholar, Johannes De Witt, was so impressed by the theatres of the Bankside that he drew a sketch of the interior of the Swan, and recorded his observations in a Latin note. He says: “There are in London four theatres [amphitheatra] of noteworthy beauty. . . . The largest and most noteworthy is that whereof the sign is a swan, commonly called the Swan Theatre. It seats [in sedilibus admittad] three thousand persons, is built of a concrete of flintstones [constructum ex coaceruato lapide pyrritide], which abound in Britain, and is supported by wooden columns painted in such excellent imitation of marble that the acutest might not nose out the deception. Since its form seems to approach that of a Roman structure, I have depicted it above.”

Two statements in this description have been branded as errors, — that the theatre was built of concrete, and that it seated three thousand; and because of them the whole has been discredited. In his standard work, Early London Theatres, Mr. T. F. Ordish concludes that De Witt adds nothing to our knowledge. It is certain that the Swan was not built of concrete. But De Witt expressly states that the columns, which, as his sketch shows, made up the greater part of the interior, were of wood. As for the outside, Professor G. P. Baker of Harvard has acutely suggested that it was a half timber structure filled in with plaster, which De Witt mistook for concrete. If the foundation was of concrete, as it might well have been, the mistake would be very natural. The Fortune playhouse, as we know, had a brick foundation rising well above the ground. It is, however, De Witt’s estimate of the capacity of the amphitheatre at three thousand that has mainly discredited his testimony. Even the most careful authorities will have the Elizabethan playhouse small. Ordish says: “Three hundred would probably be nearer the mark.” Dr. Karl Mantzius, in his generally well informed History of Theatric Art (1904, vol. 3, p. 113), places the maximum capacity at six hundred.¹

Mantzius had at hand a far more accurate means of calculation, the neglect of which — by all the historians of the stage — is one of the many curiosities of scholarly oversight. In the third volume of Malone’s Shakespeare (edition of 1821) is a “Historical Account of the English Stage,” which is rich in data and documents, among them being the contract made by Henslowe and Alleyn with one Peter Street, carpenter, in 1599, for the building of the Fortune. This Mantzius quotes (p. 66) from Halliwell-Phillip’s Outlines, with one or two inconsiderable errors in detail. If he had analyzed it he would have seen that it strongly corroborated De Witt’s sketch and description.

The new theatre, unlike the Globe, is to be square; but in many respects, as specified by the contract, the Globe is to be taken as its pattern. It is improbable, therefore, that it differed greatly from the Globe in size. “ Some idea may be formed of the area it occupied,” says H. Barton Barker in his History of the London Stage (p. 15), “when it is stated that [upon its demolition] a street was cut through it and twenty-three (23) tenements, with gardens, raised upon the ground;” but he shows no realization of the capacity of the structure that occupied this area. Its dimensions without, according to Henslowe’s contract with Street, were to be “four score foote of lawful assize;” and the yard, or pit, was to be fifty-five feet square. The three galleries were to be twelve and one half feet deep, which is exactly what the dimensions just given would require. At a conservative estimate, these three galleries would seat 1278 spectators. With pit, stage, and the gallery over the stage, the capacity of the Fortune would be 2138,² or not so far behind De Witt’s round number estimate of the seating capacity of that “largest and most noteworthy theatre,” the Swan. As to the size of the Globe there is a striking bit of contemporary evidence that one of the means by which Essex sought to rouse the city to rebellion, in 1601, was a representation of Shakespeare’s Richard II. The capacity of Daly’s celebrated theatre in New York is 1150, of the Hollis Street Theatre, Boston, 1640; the colossal auditorium in Chicago seats only 4079.

The stage of the Fortune Theatre is to be forty-three feet “long” and “in breadth to extend to the middle of the yard,” or, as we should say, forty-three feet wide, and twenty-seven and one half feet deep. In a modern theatre a proscenium opening of thirty feet is sufficient for all the purposes of the ordinary run of plays, while an opening of forty feet gives scope to the most elaborate and crowded spectacular productions, even grand opera. Far from adding nothing to our knowledge, De Witt’s description, interpreted in the light of the HensloweStreet contract, revolutionizes it.³

De Witt makes it further evident that the Elizabethan playhouse was as beautiful as it was big. What more could we say of the imitations of marble columns adorning modern theatres than that the acutest might not nose out the deception ? Henslowe’s contract requires that the capitals of the pilasters supporting the stage be “carved proportions called Satiers,”— the grotesque satyrs that lend quaint distinction to so many beautiful sixteenth-century interiors. Far from being small and crude, the Elizabethan theatre was, as Coryat says, “stately,” and in the most sumptuous taste of the time.

II

As to the decoration of the stage, the historians are strangely at variance — and not more at variance with one another than with the facts. Dowden, in his Shakespeare Primer, says: “Of movable scenery there was none.” “Shakespeare,” says George Brandes, “made no attempt at illusive decoration.” Sidney Lee, in his recent Life, says: “Scenery was not known to the Elizabethan stage.” So far, so good; but what are we to make of what follows? In his Introduction to Shakespeare, Dowden says: “Stage properties were numerous, rocks and tombs, stairs and steeples, banks and bay-trees.” John Addington Symonds, in his Predecessors, speaks of “a battlemented city wall behind the stage.” Both of these statements rest on ample authority. Is there not something inconsistent in this postulated theatre, bare and rude, which makes no attempt at illusive decoration, and yet presents woodland and seashore, castle chamber and city wall ?

That pictorial decorations were known to the Elizabethans there is ample evidence. The accounts of the city and corporation of Canterbury record that, a full century before the culmination of Shakespeare’s powers, namely, in 1501-02, the occasion being a performance of The Three Kings of Colyn, “a castle made of painted canvas was erected in the room by way of scenery.” The revel accounts of 1581, when Shakespeare was still a lad at Stratford, make record of “a stone of Pompey enacted in the hall on Twelfnight wherein was ymploied newe one great cittie, a senate house,” etc. Such instances could be multiplied. Painted scenery continued to be used for masques and such like occasions until they culminated in the extravagant creations of Inigo Jones, which rivaled in ingenuity and ambition of illusion the modern creations of the old Lyceum and His Majesty’s, and helped so materially to embarrass the royal chest of James. Under Charles, as high as £20,000 was spent on a single masque — equivalent to $600,000 to-day. If Shakespeare and his fellows had seen any advantage in pictorial decorations, we may be sure that they would have supplied them as they supplied columns and capitals, silks and cloth of gold.

That Shakespeare did not do so, we may fairly deduce from the peculiar form of the playhouses of the Bankside. The halls in which the royal revels took place have this in common with the modern theatre, that the stage was at one end and the audience at the other. It was natural, and one might almost say inevitable, that the division should be marked by a proscenium arch and a curtain, and that the stage should be hung with flies and filled in with wings, creating an illusion all but perfect pictorially. But playhouses like the Swan, the Fortune, and the Globe were built on a radically different plan. The stage was a platform extending, as an arm, to the middle of the pit, so that the spectators viewed it from all points of the compass, except only the narrow surface separating the stage from the tiring-house — and even this, at least after 1600, was at times invaded by the public. No proscenium arch was possible, no wings and no flies — and consequently no properly pictorial illusion. But is it reasonable to denounce a theatre as crude for no other reason than that it differs from ours in principle ? The fact that the illusion was not complete is very far from proving that there was no illusion, for there are other kinds of illusion besides pictorial, — as, for example, plastic. Leonardo’s Last Supper is no more truly illusive than the Laocoön. The real question is whether the amphitheatre with a protruding stage is in itself necessarily crude, and if not, whether Shakespeare made full artistic use of its capabilities.

Strange are the shifts to which those have been reduced who assume the naked stage and the blanket. Mr. Ben Greet, whose generally capable reproductions of Elizabethan stage management have done vast service to intelligent lovers of the drama in England and America, is obstinately convinced that Shakespeare was without not only pictorial scenery, but scenic properties. In Twelfth Night Maria says to her fellow conspirators: “Get ye all three into the box-tree. Malvolio’s coming down this walk.” Mr. Greet denies that Shakespeare troubled his head any more about the box-tree than about the walk, and in staging the play made his three actors dodge into an exit door and awkwardly stick their heads out to deliver their lines. But there is a difference of vast artistic significance between the walk and the box-tree. The walk has no part in the business of the scene: to omit it is to give freer range to the imagination; but the box-tree is the practical centre of the comedy of the situation; to omit it is to mar the plausibility of the scene, its liveliness and fun.⁴

Mr. Greet’s archæology is, in fact, as faulty as his stagecraft. Henslowe’s diary gives a list of certain properties in his possession (March 10, 1598) for the use of the Lord Admiral’s men. It does not include a box-tree; but it does include a bay-tree, a “tree of gowlden apelles,” and a “Tantelouse tre.” There were other means for creating the illusion of natural scenery, — one rock, and two moss banks. The items “I beacon ” and “Pair of stayers for Phaeton” suggest spectacular sensation. For architectural effects there were tombs, — one to bury Guido arid one to bury Dido, and one, as it seems, for general utility. There were two steeples and one chime of bells. A “cage” brings reminders of the fate of Bajazeth in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine ; and “ I caudrem for the Jew ” is clearly the very cauldron into which Barabas of Malta falls and is burned to death in pitch, breathing hatred to all Christians. A reminder of the morality plays is in “Hell Mouth;” while “I great horse with his leages,” i. e., with his legs, illustrates what Ben Jonson (in Cynthia’s Revels) calls “ hobby - horse and footcloth nags,” and shows that for all Hamlet’s Oh! and his Oh! the hobby-horse was not quite forgotten. If any doubt remains as to the employment of such properties and set pieces, it is laid by the frontispiece of the 1615 quarto of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, which pictures the fatal arbor with young Horatio hanging in it by the neck. That it is no fancy of the illustrator is shown by the fact that the leaves are stuck into the bars of the trellis in the manner of a stage property. A similar bit of evidence is the 1636 quarto of Marlowe’s Faustus, which shows the doctor conjuring in a well-appointed study, with the devil appearing through a trap. Passages which call for such means of illusion are without number throughout the Elizabethan drama, and leave no doubt that they were very realistically executed.

The mechanical appliances of the Elizabethans have also been called crude, and with as little warrant. Ophelia’s grave was doubtless sunk into a trap in the stage, and it had earth and bones on it. It was from the trap-room beneath the stage that the ghost of buried Denmark echoed “Swear!” as he worked “i’ th’ earth so fast.” Such devices had been used for centuries. The sacred drama abounds in quaint and intricate contrivances for representing miracles. In Mantzius’s History of Theatric Art there is a picture of a sixteenth-century mystery stage with a ship riding in a Sea of Galilee that puts to the blush our modern tank drama. In Greene’s Looking Glass forLondon (1594) “the magi with their rods beat the ground, and from under the same arises a brave arbor.” Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale, written before 1595, calls for an elaborate use of traps. In Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels (1601) there is a “fountain of self love” out of which Amorphus “takes up some of the water” and “ sups ” of it. In Macbeth the apparitions “descend” and the witches “dance and vanish.”

That there was a loft over the stage of the theatres of the Bankside is evident in everv view we have of them, though no one has as yet made mention of the fact. It was from the loft, no doubt, that in the plays which offended Ben Jonson, the “creaking throne came down, the boys to please,” and from it also in Cymbeline “Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an Eagle: he throws a thunder bolt.” There is the best of reason for believing that this device, which perhaps taxed even the frank Elizabethan phantasy, was not introduced by Shakespeare : the masque in which it occurs is generally regarded as an interpolation. Yet it will not always do to judge Shakespeare rigidly by our own standards of taste in such matters. When Ariel sings, Ferdinand says: —

it seems more than likely that the spirit of the air floated and soared by means of wires worked from the loft. What more was done in the so-called aerial ballet, for employing which lately in A Midsummer Night’s Dream an enterprising firm of New York managers was somewhat loftily censured ?

The private theatres, — such as the Blackfriars, — seem to have made less use of set pieces and mechanical contrivances. One reason, as we may gather from the view of the interior of the Red Bull in Kirkman’s Drolls (1672), is that the stage was smaller than that of the public theatres of the Bankside. The audiences, too, as it seems, prided themselves upon a chaster and more classical taste. The fact throws a strong light on Shakespeare’s position as a popular playwright and provider of spectacles. Coryat, it will be remembered, takes especial pride in England’s stately “shows and music.” It is only “inexplicable” and “dumb” shows that Hamlet girds at.

That cloths painted in perspective were sometimes used as scenery is possible, though not likely. In the induction of Cynthia’s Revels, which was produced at the private theatre of the Blackfriars, (1601), one of the children says: “The boy takes me for a piece of perspective, I hold my life, or some silken curtain come to hang the stage here! Sir Crack, I am none of your fresh pictures that use to beautify the decayed dead arras in the public theatres.” By 1629 “fresh pictures” were to be found at the Blackfriars likewise, for in slanging the audience that had condemned his New Inn Jonson says, “The facings in the hangings and they [i. e., the audience] beheld alike;’’all this, however, is very far from implying that the “pictures” were meant to give pictorial illusion to the passing scenes. Among Henslowe’s list of belongings we find “The sittee of Rome,” which was perhaps such a painted hanging; and “the cloth of the sone and the mone,” the use of which I cannot guess, unless it was to picture the “heavens” which decorated, at need, the under surface of the loft. At the utmost stretch of possibility, pictorial illusion must have been limited to the “ heavens ” and the flat surface behind the stage when balcony and alcove were not in use. Set pieces, properties, and actors stood forth in the amphitheatre, and were seen, so to speak, in the round.

This convention of plastic decoration dates far back into the Middle Ages. It is found in the sacred drama of all countries, and is, in fact, a necessary result of the amphitheatrical stage. In turn, it precluded all thought of completeness and realism of detail. It was enough to show the symbol of the scene. “ Now you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers,” gently gibes Sir Philip Sidney (1581), “and we must believe the stage to be a garden.” In Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale, a wayside cross presents, as we are told, the parting of “three several ways;” and in a similar manner, no doubt, Juliet’s tomb and a yew-tree bodied forth a churchyard, Beatrice’s arbor her garden. All the warrant we have for the statement that Shakespeare’s stage was bare and crude is this use of symbolism as opposed to our modern completeness of realistic detail.

III

Certain quaint usages were, indeed, known to this plastic symbolic stage; but they were ably contrived for a definite effect, and at worst Shakespeare early discarded them, if he ever willingly employed them, developing a dramaturgy that needs only to be studied to be esteemed.

It has not been sufficiently noted that in its earlier years the Elizabethan stage admitted something very like the multiple or simultaneous decoration of the sacred drama — in which a series of set pieces, ranging from Hell Mouth to Heaven, was in full view throughout the entire action, each of them in turn giving the symbol for a separate scene. One of Sir Philip Sidney’s satiric glances was at a stage that showed “Asia of the one side, Africk of the other, and so many other under kingdoms that the Player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is; or els the tale wall not be conceived.” In The Old Wives’ Tale the stage presented, besides the cross described above, the door of a smith’s hut, a conjurer’s study, a well, and probably other localities. The accuracy of our prevailing ideas of Elizabethan dramaturgy is shown in the fact that the stage on which all these things were shown has so often been said to have been small.

This convention of multiple symbolic decorations was part and parcel of some of the most vigorous stage effects in the plays that bear Shakespeare’s name — a fact that has curiously escaped the notice of commentators. In the last act of Richard III, Richard enters with his followers and says:—

This done, they go out to “survey the vantage of the ground.” Richmond enters with his followers, and, as it appears, pitches his tent on the opposite side of the stage. At the end of the scene the stage direction says: “They withdraw into the tent.” Richard is of the one side, and Richmond of the other, with all of Bosworth Field lying in the stage between. Then follows a series of rapidly alternating scenes, in which one sees, without break, the contrasting moods of the two generals. In turn they lie down to sleep. The ghosts, as they come in, one after another, go first to Richard’s tent and haunt him with the vision of past crimes, then cross the stage to Richmond’s tent, breathing words of cheer and courage. From this on, without break or change, we are hurried through the incidents of the battle of Bosworth Field, — the opposing armies being no doubt represented symbolically, as Sidney laughingly suggests, with a few swords and bucklers, — until Richard is slain, and Richmond crowned.⁵

One may, if he will, call this multiple symbolic stage rude and crude. But is it not more scientific to recognize in it only the convention that runs through all mediæval art ? Sculpture and painting were for centuries both multiple and symbolic; and for all of our perfection of technique, of detailed realism, we still recognize the elder convention as artistic and highly effective. Certain it is that as applied to the stage it admits of stirring contrasts and a dramatic rapidity quite out of the question with a succession of realistic mountings.

In other ways, the stage was made to show two places at once. Recessed in the back wall, as is well known, was an alcove, which, with the aid of theatrical properties, was used to symbolize a bedroom, a cave, or a tomb.⁶ Above it was a gallery which might symbolize a garden wall or the crest of high Olympus. It is even possible that the “stayers” which Henslowe inventories were used to land Phaeton and his equipage in the orient sky, — which is to say, in the gallery. Alcove and gallery, though separated only by a floor, were used at times to bring two remote localities into dramatic juxtaposition. In Titus Andronicus (1588-90), the folio directions read: “Enter the Tribunes and Senators aloft. And then enter Saturninus and his followers at one door, and Basianus and his followers at the other.” After these two have settled their differences on the stage, “They go up into the Senate House,” i. e., into the gallery. Presently Titus Andronicus and his train enter below, bearing the corpses of two sons. The Senate House is still, as it appears, in session above; but Titus and his train, “ open the tomb,” doubtless in the alcove beneath the Senate House, “ and lay the coffins in the tomb. ” Thereupon there is conversation between those above and those on the stage, and after it “a long flourish till they all come down.” The juxtaposition of localities naturally as remote from each other as a graveyard and a senate house suggests that we may have taken Sir Philip Sidney’s satire too literally. The early Elizabethan stage did not perhaps so much represent Asia and Africk, a senate house and a tomb, as — a stage! The sense of realistic scenic locality was as yet most indefinite.⁷

Crudities again, no doubt, from the point of view of the realistic imagination; but any one reading the play with regard to immediate theatric effect before an Elizabethan audience will own, I think, that it has an unusual measure of concentration, contrast, and speed, which in all times and places are the essence of effective drama. As to what Goethe calls the “passions” of the plays, one may have his doubts; but it is something that this multiple symbolic stage helped them to run their proper course unhindered.

IV

Was this symbolic, plastic, multiple stage “too narrow for Shakespeare’s great mind?” Perhaps! Yet in one respect the manner in which he employed it narrowed it. In none of the plays associated with him did he put Asia of the one side and Africk of the other, or employ any such device as stayers for Phaeton. Whatever share he may have had, moreover, in the actual phrasing of Titus Andronicus and Richard III, there can be little doubt that the primary structure of the scenes, so reminiscent of the archaic stage, was the work of an earlier hand. In the more thoroughly original plays the unity of a scene is never violated.

On the contrary, when the dramatic effect requires it, we find a conscious purpose to define locality — to make the stage seem much more than the stage. After the murder of Duncan, while the hands of the guilty pair are still imbrued with his blood, comes the fateful knocking. The stage direction says, “ Knocking within.” But Lady Macbeth defines the locality very vividly: —

Macbeth addresses the intruder: —

The modern pictorial stage, with all its appurtenances for creating local atmosphere, is capable of no more poignant concentration of effect. An interesting dissertation might be written on this definition of locality in the Elizabethan drama. In Ben Jonson’s Alchemist the action is limited throughout the first four acts to a single spot, Subtle’s consulting chamber, the stage direction “ without ” always indicating an ante-room beyond which is the street door, and “within ” other apartments of the house, leading to the back yard.

Even more significant is the picturing of definite locality by means of descriptive speeches. “The player when he cometh in,” says Sidney, “ must ever begin with telling where he is, or els the tale will not be conceived.” This sentence (which should have rendered impossible the statement that changes of scene were always indicated by shifting placards) suggests the origin and use of many of the most splendid passages of poetry in the drama.1 The breezy, fanciful dialogue between Puck and the Fairy, which opens the woodland scenes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the idyllic speech of the Banished Duke which opens the forest scenes of As You Like It, give atmosphere and color to all the rest of the plays. Often the pictorial lines have also a definite function in the dramatic structure. When the royal train approaches the dwelling of Macbeth, Duncan says, —

Banquo answers, —

Could any art of the scene painted present a picture more forcibly in contrast with the murder which, in this same spot, Macbeth and his lady have just been plotting, and which presently takes place ? Similarly dramatic in its suggestion is the “bitter cold” that preludes the first entrance of the ghost of buried Denmark, “the nipping and the eager air” of the second platform scene, and Horatio’s closing lines in the first platform scene: —

Edgar’s description, in Lear, of the cliffs of Dover is the prelude of a moment of suspense, the intensity of which can only be felt in the theatre. Are not those critics somewhat captious and irresponsible who with their scorn of the playhouse and love of the printed page would divorce the means from the effect Shakespeare so clearly intended ?

That the stage settings were kept in a subordinate relation — mere symbols — seems to have been the result of a conscious intention to give full scope to the dramatist’s imagination, and to that of his hearers. There is abundant evidence, certainly, that even on a stage that was necessarily symbolic there was an everpresent temptation to overdo this matter of visual representation. Whatever else the mob may be capable of, it may be relied on to applaud dumb show. It was only after experiment that the early Elizabethans learned when the sight stirs the imagination and when it kills it. In The Troublesome Reign of King John, when the king is crowned the stage direction reads: “There the fiue Moones appeare,” and the Bastard calls the King’s attention to them as a portent of ill: —

1 Mr. Reynolds shows, however, that placards were not infrequently used.

Clearly there was a visual apparition of five moons in the so-called “heavens” above the stage. In Shakespeare’s rewriting of the scene, Hubert enters and describes the apparition as having taken place outside. Note the more vivid appeal to the imagination: —

How clearly Shakespeare recognized the incongruity of an attempt at full scenic realism in the plastic stage he himself has somewhat quaintly shown us. The defect which led Peter Quince to include Moonlight and Wall in his dramatis personæ, it is implied, is a defect of imagination. “The best of this kind are but shadows,” pleads Theseus, indulgent of the artisan-actors who delighted his man’s sense of humor, “and the worst are no worse, if imagination mend them.” But the feminine Hippolita, whose sense of humor is less in proportion as her sensibilities are greater, rejoins in plain terms, “It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs.” Shakespeare found that his own mind’s eye, and that of his judicious auditors, saw better when unhampered by an attempt to present the stuff of his dreams in complete visual reality. Solid and various as were the means at his disposal, and freely as he employed them on occasion, he always kept them subordinate to the verbal poetry. He used his visual emblems to stimulate the imagination, not to cloy it.

When the illusive decoration of the stage required heavy set pieces, Shakespeare, like the playwrights of our own most modern school, avoided as much as possible the awkward interruptions of the scene-shifter, with their deadening effect on the swing of the story. In As You LikeIt it is most probable that the woodland scene, once set, was not removed. The few passages necessary to carry on the narrative in the court of the tyrant Duke are of a kind to be played well forward, and on a part of the stage only — front scenes, as we should call them. The time occupied in setting the woodland scene was also probably occupied by a front scene: — after the tyrant Duke had sentenced Rosalind to banishment, he and his lords went out, while Rosalind and Celia walked about the stage, Rosalind illustrating her swashing and martial outside in manly strides. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the time of setting the woodland scene is occupied with the conference of Bottom and his crew, no doubt at the front of the platform. After that, the action in the wood is uninterrupted till it comes time to change back to the court, the interim of the change being again occupied by the clowns. Throughout the Elizabethan drama, as Heywood implies {History of Women, 1624), it was the duty of the Clown “to breed in the less capable mirth and laughter ” — in particular, no doubt, while the properties were shifting. In certain American popular stock companies the entr’actes are filled by vaudeville performances, coon songs and cake-walks, for example, bridging the scenes of Faust. The function of Tarleton and Kemp, in the popular playhouses of the Bankside, was no doubt precisely similar. How scrupulously Shakespeare studied the æsthetics of the acted drama is evident in the fact that he almost always elevated this front-scene nonsense into an integral part of the story. Hamlet’s command, “And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them,” has very plausibly been taken as an admonition to that unruly extemporist, Kemp. The practical raison d’etre of Dogberry and his crew was to give Kemp a chance to exercise his quality; but Shakespeare made of his clown a plausible god from the machine to solve the whole tangle of the plot.

Whether during such front scenes the shifting was screened from the audience is not easy to determine. There is no question that front curtains had long been known. The revel accounts for 1573-74 read: “ John Rosse, for poles and shyvers for draift of curtins before revel house, 25s.” In 1581, “ Pompey’s Senate House ” had “eight ells of double sarcenet for curtens.” As for the public playhouses, in the absence of a proscenium arch the curtain could at best have hidden only that part of the stage beneath the loft, running about the columns that upheld it. That such a curtain existed, I have found no evidence. A “ traverse” or an “arras” is often called for, but only as the hanging of alcove, balcony, or box — as, for example, the curtain that shuts Juliet from view after she has taken the potion, and Desdemona when she is dead. It could scarcely have been possible for gallants to sit on stools on the stage, if anything like a front curtain was employed. The strongest evidence that there was nothing of the sort is the fact that when characters were killed on the stage it was the almost universal custom to provide some means in the attendant action for removing their bodies, as Hamlet made way with Polonius, and Falstaff with Hotspur. The simplicity of the symbolic settings made shifting a matter of a few moments only, while the amphitheatrical form of the playhouse. and the immediate contact it established between actor and audience, probably made any attempt at concealment only the more destructive of illusion.

The great virtue of this merely symbolic decoration was the fact that it made possible a dramatic narrative of the utmost rapidity, and capable of being varied infinitely to the needs of the story in hand. In both senses of the word it was plastic; and it was to preserve this plasticity in narrative, no doubt, as well as for the more imaginative poetic suggestion, that Shakespeare made sparing use of solid visual properties. I have found no instance in which they were employed except when essential to the actual stage business. For the most part, the player when he came in “told where he was,” and when he went out the stage was free to take up the narrative in another place, though this might be in a different country. When the locality was of no dramatic significance, Shakespeare did not pause to “ponder over ” it, either with regard to properties or to poetic description. The stage remained the stage, and the whole emphasis was thrown upon the “ necessary questions of the play, ” — dialogue, character, and action. The imagination had free scope — those are haunting words of Goethe’s— and the play ran its proper course, full of passion and unhindered.

As Shakespeare found the plastic, symbolic stage, it abounded in the obsolescent conventions of the Middle Ages. He studied it with the eye of a master, and made of it the fit instrument for the mightiest of poetic dramas.

The inferiority of the realistic picturestage of to-day for the production of our old poetic dramas need scarcely be insisted on. The attempt to make a locality which Shakespeare has been at pains to define more real by means of the trivial art of the scene-painter is, to say the least, to produce the deadening effect of redundancy. When the curtain rises, as, for example, on Macbeth’s castle as Irving represented it, the eye takes in the whole at a glance. Then Banquo speaks those marvelous lines. Instead of perceiving the inner vision Shakespeare intended, — “ the light that never was on sea or land, ” — one instinctively tallies off the “mansionry” of the martlet, his “pendent bed and procreant cradle, ”on the crude paint and canvas — and whether one finds them or not, the result is to dispel the dreams of poetry. Instead of reinforcing this moment of beauty and foreboding, the redundant illustration kills it. So it is with Horatio’s “morn in russet mantle clad,” with the moonlight in Portia’s garden at Belmont, — in fact, with all the marvelous verbal suggestions of locality with which Shakespeare has been at pains to envelop and reinforce his action.

The effect of the constant shifting of our modern scenery is even more deadening. To make time for it, the text has to be mercilessly cut and transposed, which ruins many of Shakespeare’s most ably calculated effects, and often renders the action all but unintelligible. And in the long and frequent entr’actes devoted to the heroic labors of the scene-shifter, the interest of an audience cools, even in the case of the most stirring story. The Marlowe-Sothern presentation of The Taming of the Shrew was conceived as a rapid, knockabout farce; but the shifting of the scenes took sixty-one minutes in a total space of three hours. In a word, the narrative effect of the plays — a consideration of the highest moment in the theatre — is all but ruined.

v

Some such stage as that of Shakespeare is to be found wherever the poetic drama has reached its highest spontaneous development. The similarity of the form of the Spanish and the English dramas has often been pointed out, but has never been properly related to the similarity between the Spanish and the English stage. The first theatres of Madrid were the yards of houses, and took their name, corrales, from this fact. They were, in effect, amphitheatres, open to the sky, with pit (patio) and galleries. Doors, windows, and balconies were not dissimilar to those of the Elizabethan stage. Changes of place were as numerous, and if painted scenery was used, it was only in the form of simple drops that made no pretense at complete pictorial illusion. The Spanish stage was thoroughly symbolic, thoroughly plastic. The intimacy between actors and audience is attested by many circumstances, — notably the fact that spectators sat on the stage. Spectacular machinery was used, and by 1622 was carried to lengths of “inexplicable dumb show” which the judicious thought grievous. The preface of the sixteenth volume of the plays of Lope de Vega energetically satirizes “ the Spanish comedia, where figures rise and descend so crudely, and animals and birds appear in like manner.” In every essential the two theatres were identical.

The Greek stage in its final form, under Sophocles and Euripides, observed the unity of time, and, roughly speaking, the unity of place; but in other essentials it was all but identical with the theatres of England, though the analogy has not, so far as I know, been pointed out. The space in which the actors stood was the centre of an amphitheatre. There were properties, but, as the latest authorities agree, virtually no illusive decorations. The representation was thus in the highest degree plastic. The proskenion corresponded to the wall behind the Elizabethan stage, and the roof of it was used like the Elizabethan gallery. A loft was of course impossible; but a crane was manipulated from the roof of the skênê in full view of the audience, on which gods and goddesses were made to float and soar. In place of the Elizabethan alcove, the Greeks used that astonishing mechanical device, the ekkyklema, which swung tableaux out into view of the spectators — thus effecting what was virtually a change of scene, by blending one locality with another. There were traps, and devices for imitating thunder.

Before Sophocles even the unity of place and time were not observed. Æschylus, in his earlier plays, changes locality at will, and in a manner suggestive of the multiple stage of the Middle Ages — or rather of a stage from which all sense of definite locality is absent. In the comic drama, even as late as Aristophanes, there was evidently no pretense of realizing definite localities. Thus in The Peace Trygæus begins by feeding his beetle in a pig-sty, mounts it, and, by means of the crane, flies up to heaven to the palace of Zeus, and thence descends to earth. Throughout, as it seems, there has been no illusion of place. The stage has been simply the stage. When Trygæus dismisses the chorus, he tells them to guard the stage properties from the thieves that lurk about the tiring-house. There was thus the closest similarity between the form and methods, if not the size, of the early Greek and the Elizabethan playhouses. Judged by its fruits, the plastic stage is the most perfect instrument of the poetic drama the world has yet produced.

The unities of time and place seem to have resulted from the fact that Sophocles used the proskênion to stand for a definite locality—a temple or a palace. That they were an improvement, even in the sculpturesque Greek drama, may be questioned. As imposed upon the later drama of Europe, there can be little doubt that they were a misfortune. Corneille was at first enamoured of Spanish dramaturgy. He submitted to pseudoclassic rules only after a struggle — and, as it seems, much to the injury of his great powers. For centuries after him, pseudo-classicism sat like an incubus on the Continental drama.

In one important respect the Greek theatre, considered as an instrument of dramatic expression, was pretty plainly inferior to the Spanish and the Elizabethan. The huge expanse of the amphitheatre — at the smallest estimate, it seated seventeen thousand as against two thousand or more in Shakespeare’s theatre — made hearing and even sight so difficult that only the broadest and most conventional effects were possible. The voices of the actors were reinforced by means of “sound-basins,” and perhaps megaphone attachments in the masks — to the manifest destruction of all the finer shades of vocal coloring. The rigid mask sacrificed to a single salient grimace all the infinite variety of expression possible in the human face. The costumes were conventional, too, and quite unlike anything seen in real life. Not only the stature of the actor, but his strides and gestures, aimed at an effect of the heroic, even of the superhuman. In one way, of course, this conventionalization of speech and mimetics threw emphasis on the poetic element; but it may be doubted whether there was a gain in the total effect. The Elizabethan drama, as lofty as Æschylus at its loftiest, as in Lear, has a whole gamut of delicate and intimate effects impossible in the Greek amphitheatre. As the plastic stage is the most nearly perfect instrument of the poetic drama, the playhouses of the sixteenth century represent it in its aptest development.

VI

When Goethe discovered the artistic superiority of the Elizabethan theatre, the work of his life was all but ended, both as a dramatist and as a producer of Shakespeare. It is interesting to speculate as to what would have been the result if he had made the discovery in his student days, when Shakespeare swam into his ken. Goetz von Berlichingen, which was the first result of this overmastering influence (sketched out in 1771, when Goethe was twenty-two), has, in its completed form, no less than fifty-five scenes, many of them mere snippets of half a dozen lines, yet calling for the interposition of the curtain and the scene-shifter. Schiller followed in Goethe’s wake; and though subsequent experience with the actual stage somewhat retrenched the recklessness of both in shifting scenery, it is none the less true that they formed the German poetic drama on a conception of Shakespeare’s stage and stagecraft which is false both to fact and to art. By their overmastering genius they galvanized the pseudo-Shakespearean tradition into life. But they have had no successors. If Goethe in his youth had had any knowledge of Shakespeare’s stagecraft, we might have gained a Faust that would be playable, if not altogether intelligible. Wagner’s ponderous and undramatic music-dramas are also perhaps in part a result of the pseudo-Shakespearean tradition. Certainly the critics who object to Siegfried’s dragon of wriggling pasteboard and his mechanically flapping bird might emphasize their objection by the analogy of Quince’s Moonshine and Wall. If anything “mends” those animated properties, it is the spectator’s “imagination,” not Wagner’s dramaturgy.

In England the course of events has been as bad, and worse. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, have all attempted to carry on the national tradition in the drama. That their gifts were equal to the task, there can be no doubt. But one and all they failed. Other causes no doubt contributed to the death of the poetic drama on the English stage, but none more serious than the prevailing contempt and neglect of the æsthetics of the playhouse, which has led our poets to practice a dramaturgy founded on a study of the plastic drama when writing for a pictorial stage.

VII

Thanks to the liberality of a few citizens of New York, we are soon to have a repertory theatre devoted to dramatic art. The great Shakespearean masterpieces will doubtless continue to be embellished with realistic pictorial scenery, and in the process cut, transposed, and dragged out in the long-familiar manner The public cannot be weaned at a stroke from its love of easy and obvious splendor. But there is a strong and growing minority of intelligent people who prefer their Shakespeare harmoniously produced on a stage that, instead of destroying the effect Shakespeare intended, realizes it to the utmost. And not the least powerful argument for restoring the true Elizabethan tradition is that it avoids expenses which have so often proved ruinous. Irving once called attention to the fact that every great English actor-manager has died poor; and he himself proved no exception. No money should be spared in providing costumes, hangings, and the few requisite properties of. the richest and most harmonious fashion. But less than the cost of a single spectacular production would equip a stage for the presentation of the entire Elizabethan drama. Certainly it should be the privilege of every child at school to make the acquaintance of the classics of our language in their habits as they lived. Nor is it certain that even the public will not in the end learn to prefer that the greatest of all poetic dramas be permitted to run their proper course, full of passion and unhindered, on the most perfect of all poetic stages.