XI.
HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.
In his beautiful production of The Merchant of Venice Henry Irving restored the fifth act, the jailer scene, and the casket scenes in full, and the piece was acted with strict fidelity to Shakespeare. With Ellen Terry for Portia that achievement became feasible. With an ordinary actress in that character the comedy might be tedious—notwithstanding its bold and fine contrasts of character, its fertility of piquant incident, and its lovely poetry. Radiant with her fine spirit and beautiful presence, and animated and controlled in every fibre by his subtle and authoritative intellect, judiciously cast and correctly dressed and mounted, Henry Irving's revival of The Merchant of Venice captured the public fancy; and in every quarter it was sincerely felt and freely proclaimed that here, at last, was the perfection of stage display. That success has never faded. The performance was round, symmetrical, and thorough—every detail being kept subordinate to intelligent general effect, and no effort being made toward overweening individual display.
Shakespeare's conception of Shylock has long been in controversy. Burbage, who acted the part in Shakespeare's presence, wore a red wig and was frightful in form and aspect. The red wig gives a hint of low comedy, and it may be that the great actor made use of low comedy expedients to cloak Shylock's inveterate malignity and sinister purpose. Dogget, who played the part in Lord Lansdowne's alteration of Shakespeare's piece, turned Shylock into farce. Macklin, when he restored the original play to the stage—at Drury Lane, February 14, 1741—- wore a red hat, a peaked beard, and a loose black gown, playing Shylock as a serious, almost a tragic part, and laying great emphasis upon a display of revengeful passion and hateful malignity. So terrible was he, indeed, that persons who saw him on the stage in that character not infrequently drew the inference and kept the belief that he was personally a monster. His look was iron-visaged; the cast of his manners was relentless and savage. Quin said that his face contained not lines but cordage. In portraying the contrasted passions of joy for Antonio's losses and grief for Jessica's elopement he poured forth all his fire. When he whetted his knife, in the trial scene, he was silent, grisly, ominous, and fatal. No human touch, no hint of race-majesty or of religious fanaticism, tempered the implacable wickedness of that hateful ideal. Pope, who saw that Shylock, hailed it as "the Jew that Shakespeare drew"—and Pope, among other things, was one of the editors of Shakespeare. Cooke, who had seen Macklin's Shylock, and also those of Henderson, King, Kemble, and Yates, adopted, maintained, and transmitted the legend of Macklin. Edmund Kean, who worshipped Cooke, was unquestionably his imitator in Shylock; but it seems to have been Edmund Kean who, for the first time, gave prominence to the Hebraic majesty and fanatical self-consecration of that hateful but colossal character. Jerrold said that Kean's Shylock was like a chapter of Genesis. Macready—whose utterance of "Nearest his heart" was the blood-curdling keynote of his whole infernal ideal—declared the part to be "composed of harshness," and he saw no humanity in the lament for the loss of Leah's ring, but only a lacerated sense of the value of that jewel. Brooke, a great Shylock, concurred with Kean's ideal and made the Jew orientally royal, the avenger of his race, having "an oath in heaven," and standing on the law of "an eye for an eye." Edwin Forrest, the elder Wallack, E.L. Davenport, Edwin Booth, Bogumil Davison, and Charles Kean steadily kept Shylock upon the stage,—some walking in the religious track and some leaving it. But the weight of opinion and the spirit and drift of the text would justify a presentment of the Jew as the incarnation not alone of avarice and hate, but of the stern, terrible Mosaic law of justice. That is the high view of the part, and in studying Shakespeare it is safe to prefer the high view.
There must be imagination, or pathos, or weirdness, or some form of humour, or a personal charm in the character that awakens the soul of Henry Irving and calls forth his best and finest powers. There is little of that quality in Shylock. But Henry Irving took the high view of him. This Jew "feeds fat the ancient grudge" against Antonio—until the law of Portia, more subtle than equitable, interferes to thwart him; but also he avenges the wrongs that his "sacred nation" has suffered. His ideal was right, his grasp of it firm, his execution of it flexible with skill and affluent with intellectual power. If memory carries away a shuddering thought of his baleful gaze upon the doomed Antonio and of his horrid cry of the summons "Come, prepare!" it also retains the image of a father convulsed with grief—momentarily, but sincerely—and of a man who at least can remember that he once loved. It was a most austere Shylock, inveterate of purpose, vindictive, malignant, cruel, ruthless; and yet it was human. No creature was ever more logical and consistent in his own justification. By purity, sincerity, decorum, fanaticism, the ideal was aptly suggestive of such men as Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes, and John Felton—persons who, with prayer on their lips, were nevertheless capable of hideous cruelty. The street scene demands utterance, not repression. The Jew raves there, and no violence would seem excessive. Macklin, Kean, Cooke, and the elder Booth, each must have been terrific at that point. Henry Irving's method was that of the intense passion that can hardly speak—the passion that Kean is said to have used so grandly in giving the curse of Junius Brutus upon Tarquin. But, there was just as much of Shylock's nature in Henry Irving's performance as in any performance that is recorded. The lack was overwhelming physical power—not mentality and not art. At "No tears but of my shedding" Henry Irving's Shylock took a strong clutch upon the emotions and created an effect that will never be forgotten.
Ellen Terry's Portia long ago became a precious memory. The part makes no appeal to the tragic depths of her nature, but it awakens her fine sensibility, stimulates the nimble play of her intellect, and cordially promotes that royal exultation in the affluence of physical vitality and of spiritual freedom that so often seems to lift her above the common earth. There have been moments when it seemed not amiss to apply Shakespeare's own beautiful simile to the image of queen-like refinement, soft womanhood, and spiritualised intellect that this wonderful actress presented—"as if an angel dropped down from the clouds." Her Portia was stately, yet fascinating; a woman to inspire awe and yet to captivate every heart. Nearer to Shakespeare's meaning than that no actress can ever go. The large, rich, superb manner never invalidated the gentle blandishments of her sex. The repressed ardour, the glowing suspense, the beautiful modesty and candour with which she awaited the decision of the casket scene, showed her to be indeed all woman, and worthy of a true man's love. Here was no paltering of a puny nature with great feelings and a great experience. And never in our day has the poetry of Shakespeare fallen from human lips in a strain of such melody—with such teeming freedom of felicitous delivery and such dulcet purity of diction.