Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

III

It may be objected that Sheridan and Augier and Dumas were after all dextrous playwrights and that they are no one of them to be ranked with the truly great dramatists. While they might very well be willing once in a way to turn themselves into dramaturgic tailors, this is a servile complaisance of which the mighty masters of the drama would never be guilty, from which indeed they would shrink with abhorrence. But if we turn the pages of stage-history still further back, from the eighteenth century to the seventeenth, we discover that Molière did this very thing, the adjustment of a whole play to the actors who were to perform it, not once as Sheridan did, but repeatedly and regularly and in all his pieces, in his loftiest comedies no less than his broadest and most boisterous farces. And there will be found few competent critics to deny that Molière is one of the supreme leaders of the drama, with an indisputable right to a place by the side of Sophocles and Shakspere, even if he does not climb to the austere and lofty heights of tragedy.

The more we know about the art of the theater and the more we study the plays of Molière the more clearly do we perceive that he was compelled to do persistently what Sheridan did only once. The company at the Palais Royal was loyal to Molière; nearly all its leading members came to Paris with him and remained with him until his death fifteen years later. This company was strictly limited in number; and as it had a permanent repertory and stood ready to appear in any of its more successful plays at a moment’s notice, outside actors could not be engaged for any special part,—even if there had then been in Paris any available performers at liberty. Molière could not have more parts in any of his pieces than there were members of the company; and he could not put into any of his pieces any character for which there was not a competent performer in the company. No doubt, he must at times have felt this to be a grievous limitation. That he never deals with maternal love may be accounted for by the fact that he had no woman to play agreeable “old women,”—the disagreeable elderly females being still played by men, in accord with the medieval tradition. We know the name of the male actor who appeared as Madame Pernelle in ‘Tartuffe,’ as the wife in the ‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme’ and as the Comtesse d’Escarbagnas.

Molière wrote many parts for his own acting; and as he was troubled with a frequent cough, he sometimes makes coughing a characteristic of the person he was to act. His brother-in-law, Béjart, was lame; and so Molière describes a character written for this actor as having a limp. His sister-in-law, Madeleine Béjart, was an actress of authority; and so the serving maids he wrote for her are domineering and provocative. But when she died and her place was taken by a younger actress with an infectious laugh, the serving maids in all the plays that Molière wrote thereafter are not authoritative, and they are given occasion for repeated cachinnation. And as this recruit, Mlle. Beauval, had a clever little daughter, Molière did not hesitate to compose a part for a child in his ‘Malade Imaginaire.’ When we have familiarized ourselves with the record of the leading man, La Grange, of Madeleine Béjart, of Catherine de Brie, and of Armande Béjart (Molière’s wife), we find it difficult to study the swift succession of comedies without constantly feeling the presence of the actors inside the characters written for them. We recognize that it was not a matter of choice this fitting of the parts to the performers; it was a matter of necessity; and even if it may have irked him at times, Molière made the best of it and probably found his profit in it.

Now Shakspere was subject to the same limitations as Molière. He composed all his plays for one company, the membership of which was fairly constant during a score of years and more. It was also a repertory company with frequent changes of bill. It could never be strengthened by the special engagement of an unattached performer; it had to suffice, such as it was. So far as we can judge by the scant external evidence and by the abundant internal evidence of the plays written for them by Shakspere, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and the rest, the company was composed of unusually competent performers. It is unthinkable that Shakspere should have plotted his superb series of tragedies, making more and more exacting demands on the impersonators of his tragic heroes, unless he had a confident assurance that Burbage would be equal to them. And this confidence could not fail to be a stimulus to him, encouraging him to seek out stories for the ample display of his friend’s great gifts.

From all we have learnt of late about Shakspere we are justified in believing that he was a shrewd man of affairs with a keen eye to the main chance. He was a sharer in the takings at the door; and he could not but know that those plays are most attractive to the public which contain the most parts demanding and rewarding good acting. So we must infer that he put into his plays the characters in which he judged that his comrades could appear to best advantage. He not only wrote good parts for good actors, he wrote special parts for special actors, shaping his characters to the performers who were to impersonate them. In other words he provided, and he had to provide, made-to-order garments.

That he did this repeatedly and regularly, just as Molière was to do it three-quarters of a century later on the other side of the channel, is plainly evident, altho we do not now know the special qualifications of his actors as well as we do those of Molière’s. But we cannot doubt that the company contained one actor of villains, of “heavies” as they are termed in the theater. I hazard a guess that this was Condell, afterwards the associate of Heming in getting out the First Folio; but whoever he was, Condell or another, he was entrusted with Iago, with Edmund in ‘King Lear,’ with the King in ‘Hamlet,’ and with the rest of Shakspere’s bold, bad men.

We know that there were two low comedians in the company, who appeared as the two Dromios, as the two Gobbos, as Launce and Speed; and we know also that one of these was Will Kempe and that when he left the Globe Theater his place was taken by Arnim. Now, we can see that the Dromios, the Gobbos, Launce and Speed are merely “clowns” as the Elizabethans called the funny men,—“Let not your clowns speak more than is set down for them.” The Dromios and the Gobbos and the corresponding parts in Shakspere’s earlier plays, including Peter in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ are only funny men, with little individuality, almost characterless; and we may surmise that this was due to Shakspere’s own inexperience in the delineation of humorous character. But we may, if we choose, credit it also to the fact that Kempe was only a funny man, and not a character-actor. And we can find support for this in the superior richness and stricter veracity of the low comedy characters composed by Shakspere after Arnim took Kempe’s place,—Dogberry, the porter in ‘Macbeth,’ the gravedigger in ‘Hamlet,’ comic parts which are also characters, equipt with more or less philosophy. And again this may be ascribed either to Shakspere’s own ripening as a humorist or to the richer capacity of Arnim. But why may not these two causes have coöperated?

Then there is the brilliant series of parts composed for a dashing young comedian,—Mercutio, Gratiano, Cassio, Laertes. That these successive characters were all entrusted to the same performer seems to me beyond question; and it seems to me equally indisputable that Shakspere knew what he was doing when he composed these characters. He was assured in advance that they would be well played; and there is no reason to doubt that in composing them he profited by his intimate knowledge of the histrionic endowment of the unidentified member of the company for whom they were written, giving him nothing to do which he was not capable of doing well, and giving him again and again the kind of thing that he had already exhibited the ability to do well.

Another group of parts is equally obviously intended for an actor who had shown himself to be an expert in the impersonation of comic old women, boldly characterized, broadly painted, highly colored in humor,—Mrs. Quickly (who appears in four plays), the nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and Mrs. Overdone in ‘Measure for Measure.’ Here again I venture the guess that this low comedian may have earlier been cast for the Dromio and the Gobbo which was not given to Kempe. And I wish to record my regret that we cannot pick out from the list of the company at the Globe the name of the “creator” of Mrs. Quickly and her sisters, any more than we can identify the “creator” of Mercutio and his brothers.

In my biographies of Shakspere and of Molière I have dwelt in ampler detail with this dependence of the two greatest dramatists of the modern world upon the actors who were their comrades in art and their friends in life; and I have here adduced only a part of the testimony which goes to show that both the English dramatist and the French were visited by the same muse,—whether of the “sorry sort” or not must be left for each of us to decide for himself.