IV
I am inclined to guess that if the author of ‘As You Like It’ had accepted an invitation from the Professional Woman’s League, he would have sat out the performance at Palmer’s Theater, gazing at it with tolerant eye and courteously complimenting the Lady President or the Lady Vice-President who had been deputed to escort him to his box. But I make no doubt that his glance would have been less favorable had he been a spectator of a performance of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ given in May, 1877, at Booth’s Theater for the benefit of George Rignold, who appeared as Romeo supported by seven different Juliets, the part changing impersonators with every reappearance of the character. Grace d’Urfy danced in the masquerade, Adelaide Neilson leaned down from the balcony, Ada Dyas was married in the cell of Friar Lawrence, Maude Granger shrank from bloodshed, Marie Wainwright parted from Romeo, Fanny Davenport drank the potion, and Minnie Cummings awakened in the tomb.
It cannot be denied that Romeo was the greatest lover in all literature; but he was not a Don Juan deserting one mistress after another, and still less was he a Bluebeard married to half-a-dozen wives. The diversity of actresses, one replacing another as the sad tale rolled forward to its foredoomed end, may have served to attract a larger audience than Rignold could allure by his unaided ability; but it was destructive of the integrity of the tragedy. The unavoidable result of this freakish experiment was to take the mind of the audience off from the play itself and to focus it on a succession of histrionic stunts,—the single scenes in which the Juliets, one after another, exhibited themselves in rivalry with one another. The continuity of the tragedy of young love in the springtime of life was basely broken, its poetry was sadly defiled, and its dignity was indisputably desecrated. The actresses who lent themselves to this catchpenny show were ill-advised; they were false to their art; and they took no profit from their sacrifice of their standing in the profession. While the performance was discreditable to all who were concerned in it, the major part of the disgrace must be assumed by the actor who lowered himself to make money by it.
The obvious objections which must be urged against the splitting up of a single part among half-a-dozen performers do not lie against the appearance of a single actor in two or more characters. In fact, the doubling of parts, as it is called, is one of the oldest of theatrical expedients; and it was the custom in the ceremonial performances of the Greek drama at Athens, when there were only three actors, who might have to impersonate in turn seven or eight characters. It sprang up again in Tudor times, when a strolling company like that to which Hamlet addressed his advice numbered only a scant half-dozen members, and in which there might be only one boy to bear the burden of two or three or even four female characters.
When several actresses come forward in swift succession to speak the lovely lines of Juliet our interest is interrupted by every change; and the attention we are forced to pay to the appearance and the personality of each of the successive performers is necessarily subtracted from that which we ought to be giving to the character these actresses are pretending to impersonate. But when an actress appears in the beginning of the play as a mother, to reappear at the end of the piece as a daughter, there is only a single adjustment of our attention to be made; and this is easily achieved. In some cases, or at least with some spectators, there would be no need of any adjustment, since these spectators might not become aware that the same performer had been entrusted with the part of the daughter as well as that of the mother.
When she revived ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ Mary Anderson so arranged the play that she could appear as Hermione in the earlier acts and as Perdita in the later acts, resuming the character of the mother only at the very end when the supposed statue of Hermione starts to life and descends from the pedestal. Of course, there had to be a few excisions from the text of the fifth act so that the actress could be seen first as the lovely maiden and second as the stately matron, beautiful mother of a more beautiful daughter. The lines cut out were only a slight loss to the play, whereas the doubling up which these omissions made possible was a great gain for the spectators. I feel assured that if Shakspere could have been one of these spectators he would have been as delighted and as fascinated as I was. He would have pardoned without a word of protest the violence done to the construction of his story.
Nor am I any the less convinced that if Shakspere had been present at one of the memorable representations of his greatest tragedy when Salvini was Othello and Edwin Booth Iago, he would have smiled reproachfully at those who were harsh in denouncing the performance as a profanation of his play on the pretext that Salvini spoke Italian while Booth and the rest of the cast spoke English. It would so greatly gratify a playwright to have two of his superbest parts sustained by the two foremost tragedians of the time that he would be willing enough to overlook the apparent incongruity of their using two different tongues. Perhaps the author might have been inspired to point out to the cavillers that Salvini’s retention of his mother-tongue resulted in restoring to Othello the language which the Moor of Venice would actually have spoken. It is, of course, a flagrant falsification of the fact for Othello and Iago, Hamlet and Ophelia, Brutus and Cassius to speak English instead of Italian or Danish or Latin. But this is necessary if an English-speaking audience is to enjoy ‘Othello’ and ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Julius Cæsar’; and as it is necessary, the spectators are rarely conscious that it is, strictly speaking, “unnatural.”
The bilingual performance of ‘Othello’ in which Salvini and Booth nobly supported one another was not the first of those in which Booth had been engaged. When Emil Devrient came on a professional visit to the United States in the early sixties of the last century, Booth was producing a succession of Shaksperian tragedies at the Winter Garden theater; and he courteously invited the German actor to play Othello to his Iago. At these performances Devrient spoke German, Booth spoke English, and so did the rest of the supporting company, excepting only the Emilia, a part cast to Madam Methua-Schiller, a German actress who had migrated to America and learnt to speak English with only a slight trace of foreign accent. As she had not lost the use of her mother-tongue, she was allowed to alternate English and German, employing the former always, except in conversing with Devrient, when she dropt into the latter. Perhaps her chopping and changing from English to German and back again to English may have been somewhat disconcerting and distracting to the audience, who would more readily adjust themselves to Devrient’s constant use of his own tongue.
And the moral of all this is? Well, you can find it very pleasantly expressed in a quotation from a letter which was written by the foremost of American Shaksperian scholars to Edith Wynne Matthison and which is preserved in the introduction to Theodora Ursula Irvine’s excellent ‘How to pronounce the Names in Shakspere.’ Apparently Mrs. Kennedy had consulted Dr. Furness as to the pronunciation of a heroine’s name:
Continue to call her Rŏsalĭnd, altho I am much afraid that Shakspere pronounced it Rōsalīnd. Of all men I would take liberties with Shakspere sooner than anyone else. Was he so small-minded that he would care about trifles? Take my word for it, he would smile with exquisite benignity and say, “Pronounce the name, my child, exactly as you think it sounds the sweetest.”
(1919)
VIII
THACKERAY AND THE THEATER