Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

I

In his consideration of the organization of the Elizabethan dramatic companies Professor Alwin Thaler pointed out that the company of the Globe Theater in London, to which Shakspere belonged, continued to contain the same actors year after year, the secessions and the accessions being few and far between; and he explained that this was “because its members were bound to one another by ties of devoted personal friendship.” He noted that he had “emphasized the influence exerted upon Shakspere the playwright by his intimate knowledge of the men for whom his work was written, and there can be no doubt that in working out some of his greatest characters he must have remembered that Burbage was to act them.” Then Professor Thaler filed a caveat, so to speak.

But the Shakspere muse was not of that sorry sort which produces made-to-order garments to fit the tastes and idiosyncrasies of a single star. Far from being one-man plays, the dramas were written for a great company of actors.... And Richard Burbage, I imagine, would have had little inclination to surrender his place among his peers for the artificial and idolatrous solitude of modern starhood.

In this last sentence Mr. Thaler confuses the issue. The question is not whether Burbage wanted to go starring, supported by a more or less incompetent company, but whether Shakspere did on occasion choose to write a play which is in fact a made-to-order garment to fit the idiosyncrasies of a single star. And when it is put in this way the question is easy to answer. We know that Burbage played Richard III, and if there ever was a star-part, if there ever was a one-man play, if there ever was a piece cut and stitched to the measure of the man who first performed it, then it is Richard III. Here we have a dominating character to whom the other characters are sacrificed; he is etched with bold strokes, whereas most of the others are only faintly outlined. So long as Richard is powerfully seized and rendered, then the rest of the acting is relatively unimportant. Richard is the whole show. And while there is only a single star-part in Richard III—Eclipse first and the rest nowhere—there are twin star-parts in Macbeth, who are vigorously drawn, while the remaining characters are merely brushed in, as Professor Bradley has noted.

Now, if this proves that Shakspere’s muse was of a sorry sort, then that heavenly visitor is in no worse case than the muse of many another dramatist. Sophocles is reported to have devised his great tragic parts specially for one actor, whose name has not come down to us. Racine wrote ‘Phèdre’ and ‘Andromaque,’ his masterpieces, for Mlle. de Champsmeslé. Rostand wrote ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ and ‘Chantecler’ for Coquelin. Sardou wrote ‘Fédora’ and ‘Théodora’ for Sarah Bernhardt. The younger Dumas wrote the ‘Visite de Noces’ for Desclée. Giacommetti wrote ‘Maria Antoinette’ for Ristori and the ‘Morte Civile’ for Salvini. D’Annunzio wrote the ‘Gioconda’ and the ‘Citta Morte’ for Duse. Bulwer-Lytton wrote the ‘Lady of Lyons’ and ‘Richelieu’ for Macready. Gilbert wrote ‘Comedy and Tragedy’ for Mary Anderson. Legouvé has told us in detail the circumstances which led to his writing (in collaboration with Scribe) ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur’ for Rachel. Jules Lemaître has told us how and why he came to compose his ‘Age Difficile’ for Coquelin; and Augustus Thomas has told us how he came to compose his ‘In Mizzoura’ for Goodwin. The line stretches out to the crack of doom. When Shakspere chose to produce made-to-order garments to fit the idiosyncrasies of a single actor, he was in very good company, ancient and modern. And we may go further and assert that very few of these plays are any the worse because they were made-to-order.

The great dramatists, whose works we analyze reverently in the study, were all of them, in their own time, successful playwrights, stimulated now and again by association with the most gifted and the most accomplished of contemporary actors. If they had not made their profit out of the histrionic ability of the foremost performers of their own time and country, they would have been neglecting golden opportunities.

Those who best know the conditions of playwriting will be the least likely to deny that not a few of the great characters in the drama came into being originally as parts for great actors. Of course, these characters are more than parts; they transcend the endowment of any one performer; they have complexity and variety; they are vital and accusable human beings; but they were parts first of all more or less made-to-order. In many cases we know the name of the actor for whose performance the character was conceived, Burbage for one, Mlle. de Champsmeslé for a second, Coquelin for a third. And in many another case we lack definite knowledge and are left to conjecture. There are peculiarities in the ‘Medea’ of Euripides, for instance, which seem to me to point to the probability that it also was a made-to-order garment.

To say that Sophocles and Euripides possibly did this cutting-to-fit, that Shakspere and Racine and Rostand indisputably did it, is not to imply that they did it always or even that they did it often. Perhaps they did it more often than we shall ever know; perhaps they had special actors in mind when they created characters which are not star-parts. And this suggests a broadening of the inquiry.