Shakespeare--With a Difference

IN an American theatre impoverished in both money and talent by the competition of the screen, its forces largely withdrawn to the last stronghold of Broadway, there has been during the past two or three years a sudden flowering of poetic drama and the pomp of royalty. And riding the crest of this renaissance is a dramatist named Shakespeare. Even Hollywood has discovered him. Artemus Ward once stood at his grave, and pronounced it a success. But Americans have, this past winter, stood at his plays, and pronounced them successes, which is even more remarkable.

John Gielgud, a young English actor, played Hamlet 132 times on Broadway, breaking Booth’s old record of 100 times, and John Barrymore’s of 102. Leslie Howard packed the Boston Opera House for two weeks, before taking his Melancholy Dane to New York. Walter Huston, star of Dodsworth on stage and screen, essayed Othello in settings by Robert Edmond Jones. Miss Cornell had already, the season before, played Juliet from ocean to ocean, and the popular Lunt and Fontanne had rioted in The Taming of the Shrew. Finally, in February 1937, another young English actor, Maurice Evans (who had been Miss Cornell’s Romeo), came forth on Broadway as Richard II, a part not professionally acted here, so far as available records show, since Edwin Booth revived it in the seventies, and a first-night audience remained in their seats to cheer for ten minutes. The old saw of the theatre that Shakespeare spells ruin is suddenly reversed, and the Bard of Avon has become the savior of our stage, confounding both the realtors and the realists. What does it all mean?

Its meaning in part is to be explained only by consideration of other theatrical events. On one block of West 44th Street at the moment of writing these words three monarchs strut the stage — Victoria of England, Franz Joseph of Austria, and Richard II. Franz Joseph, like Richard, speaks in blank verse, the verse of Maxwell Anderson, who has given us three poetic dramas in this single season. On the same block is a proletarian or ‘left wing’ drama, relegated to a semi-abandoned roof theatre. Not that all this forebodes the overthrow of Democracy; but it most certainly indicates a swing of theatregoers’ interest away from peephole realism and the drama of ‘social purpose,’ toward the drama of romantic sweep, verbal richness, and even poetic lift. The presence of so much royalty is unconscious testimony, perhaps, to the wisdom of Aristotle, who declared that exalted drama must deal with characters of exalted rank. How much the motion pictures, which inevitably possess a realistic illusion inherent in the camera, have hastened this swing in the theatre, it is beyond the scope of this article to speculate. But the pendulum is swinging, and as always, on the poetic side, it reaches Shakespeare.

The theatre never reaches Shakespeare without finding itself confronted by many problems of production, which at various times it attempts to solve in various ways, and with varying degrees of success. To me, an old theatregoer who as a child saw Booth, and Irving and Terry, and as a student fought with Mansfield on Bosworth Field, what has been most interesting in the recent revivals is the fresh triumph of the spoken word and the rededication of the actor to its supreme commands. Few people short of advanced middle age can fully realize how much theatrical production methods, the style of plays, and the style of acting, have changed since Ellen Terry charmed us with ‘The quality of mercy . . .’ The realistic drama has bred, quite rightly, a school of realistic acting, and that acting has been still further restrained by the camera. Not only has the difficult art of speaking verse been almost lost, but the knowledge of breath control, supported tone, vocal color, clean enunciation, has not been deemed a necessity of the actors’ training, any more than the knowledge of romantic style and the assured grasp of exalted emotion.

On the production side, there has been undoubted improvement over the nineteenth-century ‘realistic’ scenery (which was never truly realistic), though we have progressed at times through a series of fads. Lighting has similarly improved in flexibility and mood qualities. Nearly thirty-five years ago, E. H. Sothern once played Hamlet entire, with realistic sets changed for each scene — and the play finished at 2.30 A. M. A quarter of a century later John Barrymore played Hamlet in a single set (some scenes in front of a curtain), and could doubtless have finished the entire play before midnight. Meanwhile we had seen TheWinter’s Tale entire on an Elizabethan stage, and both Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew in modern dress, with Petruchio carrying off Katherine in a Model T Ford, and making her crank it when it stalled. We had also seen a ‘futuristic’ Macbeth, played against black velvet, under searchlights, and turned at times into straight expressionism. (It is remarkable what Shakespeare can stand.) But although most of these revivals were interesting, their life was not long and they left, no ripple on our emotional lives. The two Shakespearean revivals which stirred us in the 1920’s were Jane Cowl’s Romeo and Juliet and Barrymore’s Hamlet, and in both cases that was because of the acting in the leading rôle.

This past winter John Gielgud acted Hamlet in a unit set which consisted of a high, raised platform at stage rear, reached by two flights of steps. Between the steps was a kind of cellar door, through which you expected the janitor to appear at any moment with the ashes. A curtain descended in front of this platform, and scenes were played, with properties, on the forestage in approximate alternation. The lighting was often bad, because it insufficiently illumined minor figures, and the set, as a whole, had no charm and no particular meaning. Yet Gielgud enacted the play 132 times in New York, because he brought to its leading role personal distinction, beautiful speech, and high intelligence. The great and greatly moving play ‘came through,’ because he gave the Word its way. Leslie Howard, successful in drawing crowds on the road because of his fame as a screen actor, failed in New York, though by general consent his flexible unit set for Hamlet was both more fitting and beautiful than Gielgud’s. He failed because as an actor he could not measure up to the stature of the role or the demands of the poetry. Came Othello, with Walter Huston in the title rôle, in costumes and settings by our most imaginative American designer, Robert Edmond Jones, settings of simplified realism suggesting definite place, but of a style and beauty to comport with high poetic drama. Yet the play failed. Huston, so excellent as Dodsworth, on both stage and screen, simply could not. rise on the great emotional wave which is Othello, and ride it to its final thunderous fall. No need to have seen Salvini to tell you that here was something unrealized, un projected, on the stage.

And then came young Maurice Evans, who was still in his teens when Forbes-Robertson doffed his suits of solemn black for the last time in the dressing room at Sanders Theatre — a young man trained in Shakespeare at the Old Vic within the past decade. Acting Richard II in scenery patched up from Richard of Bordeaux and consisting chiefly of hangings for throne room and tent, with a bit of realism in John of Gaunt’s house, and with a projecting forestage which was employed frequently in front of a neutral curtain to indicate any place you wished, — and sometimes you had no thought of any place at all, — this remarkable actor brought to vivid life a drama having in all its length but three or four scenes which are thoroughly dramatic, which are, that is, a conflict built before your eyes.

How did he do it? Primarily, of course, by the firm projection of a vivid character, well conceived and emotionally realized, using the medium of Shakespeare’s poetry not as realistic speech but as magnificent magic, of which not one lovely syllable escaped us. In this he was seconded by many in his cast, especially Augustin Duncan as Gaunt and Ian Keith as Bolingbroke, and aided (or certainly not hindered) by what I’m afraid many of our scene designers would consider a shabby production. The unit set for Shakespeare is a dubious advantage; it invariably looks enough like something to make us unhappily conscious that it is trying to be everything. Some varied suggestions of place which will satisfy our long-inbred demand for scenery appear to be best, with a frequent. and frank use of the forestage bare of all setting, in the Elizabethan manner, so that the flow of the play can be maintained. Actually, place in Shakespeare is far less important than movement, and than the emotional projection of the verse. The Evans production maintained the flow so steadily and throbbingly that the many passages dramatically arid by conventional standards never lost interest.

The truth is, of course, that Shakespeare, or any other high poetic drama, lives by a deeper realism than that of time or place. It projects its own pictures by the magic of waked imagination, its mood is in its music, and its emotional appeal in the clash of great characters who utter in great speech the secrets of their souls. To produce it successfully the first requisite is fine acting; it calls for players who can speak verse, projecting the meaning in terms of music, and who dare reach for and can attain emotional utterance in the grand manner. In spite of certain happy effects in such a screen version of Shakespeare as the recent Romeo and Juliet, the true Shakespeare cannot be put, ever, upon the screen, because the pictures which are his inner core cannot be photographed. They are waked in us by his words, and rise and astonish and dissolve on the stream of his music. They come to us in their perfection, they move us and shake us, only from the lips of a fine actor who is not handicapped by too much or even too beautiful scenery, who has command of the full resources of emotional expression, including vocal clarity, and who is not afraid to pull out the stops. In the high poetic drama, the living actor is supreme.

I listened recently, at Harvard, to a record made by Edwin Booth in 1889. The mechanical noises were so great in those early days that you have to strain to catch the voice. But, once caught, you cannot escape its spell. Rich, quiet, easy, with a sense of infinite reserves of power, it begins, ‘Most potent, grave and reverend signiors . . .’ Not a syllable blurred, not a beat of the music escapes; there is the throb of feeling, of passion, yet no rant. Not Gielgud, not Evans, is more natural and easy. And neither has the rich timbre and the reserves.

Gielgud starts too high and later cannot quite cap his climaxes. He overworks his pauses in his effort to suggest the process of tortured cerebration, and occasionally almost lets the flow of the music and action stop. His Hamlet is intellectualized to a point where emotion takes a secondary place. It lacks the sad, princely loveliness of ForbesRobertson’s, as it lacks the bitter humor of John Barrymore’s and the haunting, tragic melancholy of Booth’s,

The chief reason why Evans’s performance (in a much simpler character) seems to me more satisfactory than Gielgud’s is that he rises more assuredly to his climaxes. And perhaps why Booth would seem superior to either, even today, would be because he could more surely vary his pace, pass from conversational naturalness to lightning speed of action and word, or unloose the full powers of his magnificent voice in a climax that realized the complete stature of Shakespeare’s theatrical conception. The Bard did not write tame tragedies for tame people. The actor who feels ridiculous when he lets himself go in Shakespeare had better let himself go to Hollywood. Meanwhile, let us try to keep Gielgud and Evans in our midst.