Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

II

The likings of the groundlings who stood in the yard of the Globe theater when Shakspere began to write plays were coarser and grosser than those of the burghers whom Molière had to attract to the Petit-Bourbon; and unfortunately Shakspere in his earlier efforts was not as cautious as Molière. In the Falstaff plays, for example, the fat knight is as alive to-day as when Elizabeth is fabled to have expressed the wish to have him shown in love. But the talk of his companions, Nym and Pistol, is too thickly bespangled with the tricks of speech of Elizabethan London to interest American and British theater-goers three hundred years later. There is but a faded appeal in topical allusions which need to be explained before they are appreciated and even before they are understood; and in the playhouse itself footnotes are impossible.

In his earliest pieces, written during his arduous apprenticeship to the craft of playmaking, when he was not yet sure of his footing in the theater, Shakspere had to provide parts for a pair of popular fun-makers,—Will Kempe and another as yet unidentified. They were lusty and robust comedians accustomed to set the house in a roar as soon as they showed their cheerful faces. They created the two Dromios, the two Gobbos, Launce and Speed, Costard and Dull; and it is idle to deny that not a little of the talk that Shakspere put in their mouths is no longer laughter-provoking; it is not only too topical, too deliberately Tudor, it is also too mechanical in its effort at humor to move us to mirth to-day. Their merry jests,—Heaven save the mark!—are not lifted above the level of the patter of the “sidewalk comedians” of our variety-shows. They are frankly “clowns”; and Shakspere has set down for them what the groundlings expected them to utter, only little better than the rough repartee and vigorous innuendo and obvious pun which they would have provided for themselves if they had been free to do as they were wont to do. What he gives them to say is rarely the utterance of the characters they were supposed to be interpreting; and this is because the two Dromios are parts only, are not true characters, and are scarcely to be accepted even as types.

A difference of taste in jests, so George Eliot declared, is “a great strain on the affections”; and it would be insulting to the creator of Bottom and Falstaff to pretend that we have any affectionate regard for Costard and Dull, for Launce and Speed. It is only when Shakspere was coming to the end of his apprenticeship that he found out how to utilize the talents of Kempe and of Kempe’s unknown comrade in comedy, in parts which without ceasing to be adjusted to their personalities were also accusable characters, Dogberry and Touchstone. But when we come to Touchstone we are forced to perceive that Shakspere was the child of his own age even when he refrained from echoing its catchwords. He was cleaner than the majority of his rivals, but he was near enough to Rabelais to be frank of speech. On occasion he can be of the earth, earthy. He bestows upon Touchstone a humor which is at times Rabelaisian in its breadth, in its outspoken plainness of speech, assured of the guffaws of the riffraff and rabble of a Tudor seaport, but a little too coarse for the descendants of the Puritans on either side of the Atlantic to-day. Nearly fifty years ago when Harry Beckett was rehearsing in ‘As You Like It’ for one of the infrequent Shaksperian revivals that Lester Wallack ventured to make, he told me sorrowfully that his part had been sadly shorn, some of Touchstone’s best lines having been sacrificed in deference to the increasing squeamishness of American audiences.

These accessory comic parts are not alone in their readjustment to the modifying moods of a later age. The point of view changes with every generation, and with every change a character is likely to be seen from a different angle. No dramatist, whatever his genius, can foresee the future and forecast the fate of his creatures. The centuries follow one another in orderly procession, and they are increasingly unlike. Moreover, the dramatist of genius, by the very fact that he is a genius, is forever building better than he knew. He may put a character into a play for a special purpose; and after a century or two that character will loom larger than its creator dreamt and will stand forward, refusing to keep the subordinate place for which it was deliberately designed. We listen to the lines he utters and we read into them meanings which the author could not have intended, but which, none the less, are there to be read by us.

We may even accept as tragic a figure whom the playwright expected to be received as comic and who was so received by the audience for which the playwright wrote. Sometimes this is a betrayal of his purpose, as it is when aspiring French actors have seen fit to represent the Figaro of Beaumarchais (in the ‘Marriage of Figaro,’ not in the ‘Barber of Seville’) as a violent and virulent precursor of the French Revolution; or as it is when the same French actors insist on making the Georges Dandin of Molière a subject for pity, tear-compelling rather than laughter-provoking.

It is not a betrayal, however, rather is it a transfiguration when the Shylock of Shakspere is made to arouse our sympathy. I make no doubt that Shakspere projected Shylock as a comic villain, at whom he intended the spectators to laugh, even if they also shuddered because of his bloodthirstiness. Yet by sheer stress of genius this sinister creature, grotesque as he may be, is drawn with such compelling veracity that we cannot but feel for him. We are shocked by the insulting jeers of Gratiano at the moment of his discomfiture. We are glad that his plot against Antonio has failed; none the less do we feel that he has been miserably tricked; we are almost ready to resent the way in which the cards have been stacked against him.

To anyone who has familiarized himself with the attitude of Elizabethan playgoers toward usurers and toward the Jews, it is evident that Shakspere intended the ‘Merchant of Venice’ to be a Portia play; its action begins with talk about Belmont and it ends at Belmont itself; and Shylock is absent from the final act. In spite of this intent of the author, the ‘Merchant of Venice’ has become in our eyes a Shylock play. In fact, Macready four-score years ago used to appear in a three-act version which ended with the trial scene,—a most inartistic perversion of the comedy. After all, the ‘Merchant of Venice’ is a comedy, even if its love-story is sustained and stiffened by a terrible underplot. Shakspere created the abhorrent Shylock that the lovely Portia could cleverly circumvent him and score off him and put him to shame. His hardness of heart was to make more refulgent her brightness of soul. Shylock was set up to be scorned and hated and derided; he is a vindictive moneylender, insisting on a horrible penalty; no one in the play has a good word for him or a kindly thought; his servant detests him and his daughter has no natural affection for him.

When all is said, we cannot but feel that Shakspere in his treatment of Shylock displays a callousness not uncommon in Elizabethan England. And yet—and yet Shakspere is true to his genius; he endows Shylock with life. The Jew stands before us and speaks for himself; and we feel that we understand him better than the genius who made him. Our sympathy goes out to him; and altho we do not wish the play to end otherwise than it does, we are almost ready to regard him as the victim of a miscarriage of justice, guilty though he is. Ellen Terry has quoted from a letter of Henry Irving’s a significant confession: “Shylock is a ferocity, I know—but I cannot play him that way!” Why couldn’t he? It was because the nineteenth century was not the sixteenth, because Victorian audiences were not Elizabethan, because the peoples who have English for their mother-tongue are less callous and more civilized than their forebears of three hundred years ago.