XIX.
ELLEN TERRY: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.
It was perhaps an auspicious portent, it certainly is an interesting fact, that the first play that was ever acted in America at a regular theatre and by a regular theatrical company was Shakespeare's comedy of The Merchant of Venice. Such at least is the record made by William Dunlap, the first historian of the American theatre, who names Williamsburg, Virginia, as the place and September 5, 1752 as the date of that production. It ought to be noted, however (so difficult is it to settle upon any fact in this uncertain world), that the learned antiquarian Judge C.P. Daly, fortified likewise by the scrupulously accurate Ireland, dissents from Dunlap's statement and declares that Cibber's alteration of Shakespeare's Richard the Third was acted by a regular company in a large room in Nassau Street, New York, at an earlier date, namely, on March 5, 1750. All the same, it appears to have been Shakespeare's mind that started the dramatic movement in America. The American stage has undergone great changes since that time, but both The Merchant of Venice and Richard the Third are still acted, and in the Merchant, if not in Richard, the public interest is still vital. In New York, under Edwin Booth's management, at the Winter Garden theatre, January 28, 1867, and subsequently at Booth's theatre, and in London, under Henry Irving's management, at the Lyceum theatre, November 1, 1879, sumptuous productions of the Merchant have brilliantly marked the dramatic chronicle of our times. Discussion of the great character of Shylock steadily proceeds and seems never to weary either the disputants or the audience. The sentiment, the fancy, and the ingenuity of artists are often expended not only upon the austere, picturesque, and terrible figure of the vindictive Jew, but upon the chief related characters in the comedy—upon Bassanio and Portia, Gratiano and Nerissa, Lorenzo and Jessica, the princely and pensive Antonio, the august Duke and his stately senators, and the shrewd and humorous Gobbo. More than one painting has depicted the ardent Lorenzo and his fugitive infidel as they might have looked on that delicious summer night at Belmont when they saw "how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold," and when the blissful lover, radiant with happiness and exalted by the sublime, illimitable, unfathomable spectacle of the star-strewn firmament, murmured, in such heaven-like cadence, of the authentic music of heaven.
It is not to be denied that lovely words are spoken to Jessica, and that almost equally lovely words are spoken by her. Essayists upon the Merchant have generally accepted her without a protest—so much do youth and beauty in a woman count in the scale when weighed against duty and integrity. There is no indication that Shylock was ever unjust or unkind to Jessica. Whatever he may have been to others he seems always to have been good to her; and she was the child of that lost Leah of his youthful devotion whom he passionately loved and whom he mourned to the last. Yet Jessica not only abandoned her father and his religion, but robbed him of money and jewels (including the betrothal ring, the turquoise, that her mother had given to him), when she fled with the young Christian who had won her heart. It was a basely cruel act; but probably some of the vilest and cruelest actions that are done in this world are done by persons who are infatuated by the passion of love. Mrs. Jameson, who in her beautiful essay on Portia extenuates the conduct of Jessica, would have us believe that Shylock valued his daughter far beneath his wealth, and therefore deserved to be deserted and plundered by her; and she is so illogical as to derive his sentiments on this subject from his delirious outcries of lamentation after he learned of her predatory and ignominious flight. The argument is not a good one. Fine phrases do not make wrong deeds right. It were wiser to take Jessica for the handsome and voluptuous girl that certainly she is, and to leave her rectitude out of the question. Shakespeare in his drawing of her was true to nature, as he always is; but the student who wants to know where Shakespeare's heart was placed when he drew women must look upon creatures very different from Jessica. The women that Shakespeare seems peculiarly to have loved are Imogen, Cordelia, Isabella, Rosalind, and Portia—Rosalind, perhaps, most of all; for although Portia is finer than Rosalind, it is extremely probable that Shakespeare resembled his fellow-men sufficiently to have felt the preference that Tom Moore long afterward expressed:
"Be an angel, my love, in the morning,
But, oh! be a woman to-night."
When Ellen Terry embodied Portia—in Henry Irving's magnificent revival of The Merchant of Venice—the essential womanhood of that character was for the first time in the modern theatre adequately interpreted and conveyed. Upon many play-going observers indeed the wonderful wealth of beauty that is in the part—its winsome grace, its incessant sparkle, its alluring because piquant as well as luscious sweetness, its impetuous ardour, its enchantment of physical equally with emotional condition, its august morality, its perfect candour, and its noble passion—came like a surprise. Did the great actress find those attributes in the part (they asked themselves), or did she infuse them into it? Previous representatives of Portia had placed the emphasis chiefly, if not exclusively, upon morals and mind. The stage Portia of the past has usually been a didactic lady, self-contained, formal, conventional, and oratorical. Ellen Terry came, and Portia was figured exactly as she lives in the pages of Shakespeare—an imperial and yet an enchanting woman, dazzling in her beauty, royal in her dignity, as ardent in temperament as she is fine in brain and various and splendid in personal peculiarities and feminine charm. After seeing that matchless impersonation it seemed strange that Portia should ever have been represented in any other light, and it was furthermore felt that the inferior, mechanical, utilitarian semblance of her could not again be endured. Ellen Terry's achievement was a complete vindication of the high view that Shakespearean study has almost always taken of that character, and it finally discredited the old stage notion that Portia is a type of decorum and declamation.
Aside from Hazlitt, who thought that Portia is affected and pedantic, and who did not like her because he did not happen to appreciate her, the best analytical thinkers about Shakespeare's works have taken the high view of that character. Shakespeare himself certainly took it; for aside from her own charming behaviour and delightful words it is to be observed that everybody in the play who speaks of her at all speaks her praise. It is only upon the stage that she has been made artificial, prim, and preachy. That misrepresentation of her has, perhaps, been caused, in part, by the practice long prevalent in our theatre of cutting and compressing the play so as to make Shylock the chief figure in it. In that way Portia is shorn of much of her splendour and her meaning. The old theatrical records dwell almost exclusively upon Shylock, and say little if anything about Portia. In Shakespeare's time, no doubt, The Merchant of Venice was acted as it is written, the female persons in it being played by boys, or by men who could "speak small." Alexander Cooke (1588-1614) played the light heroines of Shakespeare while the poet was alive. All students of the subject are aware that Burbage was the first Shylock, and that when he played the part he wore a red wig, a red beard, and a long false nose. No record exists as to the first Portia. The men who were acting female characters upon the London stage when that institution was revived immediately after the Restoration were Kynaston, James Nokes, Angel, William Betterton, Mosely, and Floid. Kynaston, it is said, could act a woman so well that when at length women themselves began to appear as actors it was for some time doubted whether any one of them could equal him. The account of his life, however, does not mention Portia as one of his characters.
Indeed the play of The Merchant of Venice, after it languished out of sight in that decadence of the stage which ensued upon the growth of the Puritan movement in England, did not again come into use until it was revived in Lord Landsdowne's alteration of it produced at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1701, and even then it was grossly perverted. Forty years later, however, on St. Valentine's Day 1741, at Drury Lane, when Macklin regenerated the character of Shylock, the original piece was restored to the theatre. Women in the meantime had come upon the stage. The garrulous and delightful Pepys, who had seen Kynaston play a female part, records in his marvellous Diary that he first saw women as actors on January 3, 1661. Those were members of Killigrew's company, which preceded that of Davenant by several months, if not by a year; and therefore the common statement in theatrical books that the first woman that ever appeared on the English stage was Mrs. Sanderson, of Davenant's company, at Lincoln's Inn Fields, is erroneous: and indeed the name of the first English actress is as much unknown as the name of the first Portia. When Macklin restored Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice to the stage it is not likely that the character of Portia was dwarfed, for its representative then was Kitty Clive, and that actress was a person of strong will. With Clive the long list begins of the Portias of the stage. She was thirty years old when she played the part with Macklin, and it is probable that she played it with dignity and certain that she played it with sparkling animation and piquant grace. The German Ulrici, whose descriptive epithets for Portia are "roguish and intellectual," would doubtless have found his ideal of the part fulfilled in Clive. The Nerissa that night was Mrs. Pritchard, then also thirty years old, but not so famous as she afterward became.
The greatest actress on the British stage in the eighteenth century undoubtedly was Margaret Woffington (1719-1760). Sarah Siddons, to whom the sceptre passed, was only five years old when Woffington died. Both those brilliant names are associated with Portia. Augustin Daly's Life of Woffington—the best life of her that has been written, and one of the most sumptuous books that have been made—contains this reference to her performance of that part: "All her critics agree that her declamation was accurate and her gesture grace and nature combined; but in tragic or even dramatic speeches her voice probably had its limits, and in such scenes, being overtaxed, told against her. As Portia she appeared to great advantage; but when Lorenzo says, 'This is the voice, or I am much deceived, of Portia,' and Portia replies, 'He knows me, as the blind man knows the cuckoo, by the bad voice,' the audience laughed outright, and Woffington, conscious of her deficiency, with great good-humour joined with them in their merriment." The incident is mentioned in the Table Talk (1825) of Richard Ryan, to which book Daly refers. Mrs. Siddons made her first appearance on the London stage as Portia December 29, 1775, and conspicuously failed in the part on that occasion, but she became distinguished in it afterward; yet it is probable that Mrs. Siddons expressed its nobility more than its tenderness, and much more than its buoyant and glittering glee, which was so entirely and beautifully given by Ellen Terry. After Peg Woffington and before Mrs. Siddons the most conspicuous Portia was Mrs. Dancer, whom Hugh Kelley, in his satirical composition of Thespis, calls a "moon-eyed idiot,"—from which barbarous bludgeon phrase the reader derives a hint as to her aspect. Some of the tones of Mrs. Dancer's voice were so tender that no one could resist them. Spranger Barry could not, for he married her, and after his death she became Mrs. Crawford. Miss Maria Macklin, daughter of the first true Shylock of the stage, acted Portia, April 13, 1776, with her father. She is recorded as an accomplished woman but destitute of genius—in which predicament she probably was not lonesome. On June 11, 1777 Portia was acted at the Haymarket by Miss Barsanti, afterward Mrs. Lister, an actress who, since she excelled in such parts as were customarily taken by Fanny Abington (the distinct opposite of Portia-like characters), must have been unsuited for it. The names of Miss Younge, Miss Farren, Miss E. Kemble, Miss Ryder, Mrs. Pope, Miss De Camp, and Miss Murray are in the record of the stage Portias that comes down to 1800. Probably the best of all those Portias was Mrs. Pope.
The beautiful Mrs. Glover played Portia in 1809 at the Haymarket theatre. Mrs. Ogilvie played it, with Macready as Shylock (his first appearance in that part), on May 13, 1823. Those figures passed and left no shadow. Two English actresses of great fame are especially associated with Portia—Ellen Tree, afterward Mrs. Charles Kean, and Helen Faucit, now Lady Martin; and no doubt their assumptions of the part should be marked as exceptions from the hard, didactic, declamatory, perfunctory method that has customarily characterised the Portia of the stage. Lady Martin's written analysis of Portia is noble in thought and subtle and tender in penetration and sympathy. Charlotte Cushman read the text superbly, but she was much too formidable ever to venture on assuming the character. Portia is a woman who deeply loves and deeply rejoices and exults in her love, and she is never ashamed of her passion or of her exultation in it; and she says the finest things about love that are said by any of Shakespeare's women; the finest because, while supremely passionate, the feeling in them is perfectly sane. It is as a lover that Ellen Terry embodied her, and while she made her a perfect woman, in all the attributes that fascinate, she failed not, in the wonderful trial scene, to invest her with that fine light of celestial anger—that momentary thrill of moral austerity—which properly appertains to the character at the climax of a solemn and almost tragical situation.
On the American stage there have been many notable representatives of the chief characters in The Merchant of Venice. In New York, when the comedy was done at the old John Street theatre in 1773, Hallam was Shylock and Mrs. Morris Portia. Twenty years afterward, at the same house, Shylock was played by John Henry, and Portia by Mrs. Henry, while the brilliant Hodgkinson appeared as Gratiano. Cooper, whose life has been so well written by that ripe theatrical scholar Joseph N. Ireland, in one of the books of the Dunlap Society, assumed Shylock in 1797 at the theatre just then opened in Greenwich Street. The famous Miss Brunton (then Mrs. Merry), was the Portia, and the cast included Moreton as Bassanio, Warren as Antonio, Bernard as Gratiano, and Blissett as Tubal. How far away and how completely lost and forgotten those once distinguished and admired persons are! Yet Cooper in his day was idolised: he had a fame as high, if not as widely spread, as that of Henry Irving or Edwin Booth at present. William Creswick—lately dead at an advanced age in London—was seen upon the New York stage as Shylock in 1840; Macready in 1841; Charles Kean in 1845. With the latter, Ellen Tree played Portia. Charles W. Couldock enacted Shylock on September 6, 1852, at the Castle Garden theatre, in a performance given to commemorate the alleged centenary of the introduction of the drama into America. The elder Wallack, the elder Booth, Edwin Forrest, G.V. Brooke, George Vandenhoff, Wyzeman Marshall, and E.L. Davenport are among the old local representatives of the Jew. Madam Ponisi used to play Portia, and so did Mrs. Hoey.
In December 1858, when The Merchant of Venice was finely revived at Wallack's theatre, with the elder Wallack as Shylock, the cast included Lester Wallack as Bassanio, John Brougham as Gratiano, A. W. Young—a quaintly comic actor, too soon cut off—as Launcelot Gobbo, Mary Gannon—the fascinating, the irresistible—as Nerissa, and handsome Mrs. Sloan as Jessica. The eminent German actor Davison played Shylock, in New York, in his own language; and many German actors, no one of them comparable with him, have been seen in it since. Lawrence Barrett often played it, and with remarkable force and feeling. The triumphs won in it by Edwin Booth are within the remembrance of many playgoers of this generation. When he last acted the Jew Helena Modjeska was associated with him as Portia. Booth customarily ended the piece with the trial scene, omitting the last act; and indeed that was long the stage custom; but with the true Portia of Ellen Terry and a good cast in general the last act went blithely and with superb effect. The comedy was not written for Shylock alone. He is a tremendous identity, but he is not the chief subject. The central theme is Portia and her love. That theme takes up a large part of the play,—which is like a broad summer landscape strewn with many-coloured flowers that flash and glitter in the sun, while slowly a muttering thunder-storm gathers and lowers, and presently sweeps overhead, casting one black shadow as it passes, and leaving the fragrant and glistening plain all the brighter and sweeter for the contrast with its defeated menace and vanishing gloom.