II
After asserting that Shakspere’s were “far from being one-man plays,” Professor Thaler reminded us that Shakspere’s dramas were written “for a great company of actors”; and what is true of Shakspere
holds good also of the Elizabethan drama in general. Its breadth and variety may be ascribed in no slight degree to the fact that the organization of the dramatic companies provided the great poets of a great age with ample facilities for the interpretation of many characters and many phases of life.
This prompts a question as to whether Shakspere may not have fitted other actors who were his associates at the Globe Theater besides Burbage. That he did deliberately and repeatedly take the measure of the foremost performer in the company and that his dramatic genius was stimulated by the histrionic talent of Burbage, I do not doubt. We cannot help seeing that Shakspere’s heroes become older as Burbage himself advanced in years. Romeo being intended for a fiery young fellow and Lear being composed for a maturer man, who had become a more consummate artist. I have suggested elsewhere the possibility—to my own mind a probability—that Shakspere inserted the part of Jaques into ‘As You Like It’ specially for Burbage. Shakspere took his sequence of incidents from Lodge’s ‘Rosalynd,’ in which there is no character which resembles Jaques; and Jaques has nothing to do with the plot; he remains totally outside the story; he exists for his own sake; and he may very well have been thrust into ‘As You Like It’ because Burbage was too important an actor to be left out of the cast and because Orlando was not the kind of part in which Burbage at that period of his artistic development would appear to best advantage.
If Shakspere made parts thus adjusted to the chief performer at the Globe Theater, may he not also have proportioned other and less important characters to the capabilities of one or another of the actors whose histrionic endowment he was in the best possible position to appreciate aptly, since he was acting every day by their side? Is this something to which the greatest of dramatists would scorn to descend? Has this ever been done by any other playwright in all the long history of the stage?
When we turn the pages of that history in search of support for this suggestion, we find it abundantly and super-abundantly. The succession of comic operas which Gilbert devised to be set to music by Sullivan reveal at once that they were contrived with reference to the capacity and to the characteristics of the chief members of the company at the Savoy Theater. The sequence of broadly humorous pieces, farces which almost rose to be comedies and comedies which almost relaxed into farces, written by Labiche, and by Meilhac and Halévy for the Palais Royal theater were all of them so put together as to provide appropriate parts for the quartet of comedians who made that little house the home of perennial laughter in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.
At the same time Meilhac and Halévy were contriving for the Variétés the librettos of ‘Barbe-Bleue’ and the ‘Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein,’ ‘Belle Hélène’ and ‘La Périchole,’ a series of opera-bouffes enhanced by the scintillating rhythms of Offenbach and adroitly adapted to the special talents of Schneider, of Dupuis and of several of the other more or less permanent members of the company. Almost simultaneously Augier and the younger Dumas were giving to the Comédie-Française their social dramas, always carefully made-to-order to suit the half-dozen leading members of the brilliant company Perrin was then guiding. The ‘Fourchambault’ of Augier and the ‘Étrangère’ of Dumas are masterpieces of this profitable utilization of the pronounced personalities of the performers. The ‘Étrangère,’ in particular, would have been a very different play if it had not contained characters made-to-order for Sarah Bernhardt and Croizette, Got and Coquelin.
A little earlier the series of blank verse plays written by Gilbert for the Haymarket Theater, of which ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ won the most protracted popularity, had their leading characters plainly made-to-order for Mr. and Mrs. Kendal and for Buckstone himself. And just as ‘Richard III’ and ‘King Lear’ are none the worse because the central character was conceived also as an acting part for Burbage, so Gilbert’s blank verse pieces, Augier’s social dramas, Meilhac and Halévy’s farcical comedies lost nothing by their owing some portion of their inspiration to the necessity of fitting the accomplished comedians by whom the outstanding characters were to be impersonated. I venture to express the opinion that this desire to bring out the best the several actors had to give was helpful rather than not, stimulatingly suggestive to the author when he was setting his invention to work.
When we turn back the pages of stage-history from the nineteenth century to the eighteenth we find perhaps the most striking of all instances of made-to-order parts,—an instance which shows us not one or two or three characters in a play, but almost every one of them, composed and elaborated with an eye single to the original performers. The ‘School for Scandal’ has been seen by hundreds and read by thousands, who have enjoyed its effective situations, its sparkling dialog and its contrasted characters, without any suspicion that the persons of the play were made-to-order parts. Yet this undisputed masterpiece of English comedy is what it is because its clever author had succeeded to the management of Drury Lane, where Garrick had gathered an incomparable company of comedians; and in writing the ‘School for Scandal’ Sheridan peopled his play with the characters which the members of this company could personate most effectively.
King was Sir Peter, Mrs. Abington was Lady Teazle, Palmer was Joseph Surface, Smith was Charles Surface; and they were so perfectly fitted that they played with effortless ease. So closely did Sheridan identify the parts with the performers that when a friend asked him why he had written a five-act comedy ending in the marriage of Charles and Maria without any love-scene for this couple, he is reported to have responded: “But I couldn’t do it. Smith can’t make love—and nobody would want to make love to Priscilla Hopkins!”