Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

Further, at the very core of Mr. Hardy’s drama is the idea that these Napoleons and Pitts and Nelsons are puppets of the Immanent Will. If ever there was a case for raising a puppet show to the highest literary dignity, this was one.

But it was all in vain. Either Mr. Hardy was too modest to declaim his own verse in public, or else the actors pushed in, as they will wherever they can, and laid hands on as much of his work as they could manage. And so we had Mr. Granville Barker’s version early in the war and only the other day the performance at Oxford, and I have nothing to say against either, save that they were, and could only be, extracts, episodes, fragments, instead of the great epic-drama in its panoramic entirety. A puppet show could embrace the whole, and one voice declaiming the poem would to be sure not give the necessary unity of impression—that singleness must be first of all in the work itself—but would incidentally emphasize it.

The puppet presentation would, however, do much more than this. It would clarify, simplify, attenuate the medium through which the poem reaches the audience. The poet and his public would be in close contact. It is, of course, for many minds, especially for those peculiarly susceptible to poetry, a perpetual grievance against the actors that these living, bustling, solid people get between them and the poet and substitute fact, realism, flesh-and-blood for what these minds prefer to embody only in their imagination. There is the notorious instance of Charles Lamb, with his objection to seeing Shakespeare’s tragedies acted. He complained that the gay and witty Richard III. was inevitably materialized and vulgarized by the actor. Lamb, as we all know, was capricious, and indeed made a virtue of caprice, but what do you say to so serious and weighty a critic as Professor Raleigh? Talking about the Shakespearean boy-actors of women, he commits himself to this:—“It may be doubted whether Shakespeare has not suffered more than he has gained by the genius of later-day actresses, who bring into the plays a realism and a robust emotion which sometimes obscure the sheer poetic value of the author’s conception. The boys were no doubt very highly trained, and amenable to instruction; so that the parts of Rosalind and Desdemona may well have been rendered with a clarity and simplicity which served as a transparent medium for the author’s wit and pathos. Poetry, like religion, is outraged when it is made a platform for the exhibition of their own talent and passions by those who are its ministers. With the disappearance of the boy-players the poetic drama died in England, and it has had no second life.”

A little “steep,” is it not? Logically it is an objection to all acting of poetic drama. Boy-players of girls are only a half-way house. The transparent medium for the author’s wit and pathos would be still more transparent if it were merely the medium of the printed page. Now this much is certain. Shakespeare conceived his plays, whatever poetry or wit or pathos he put into them, in terms of men and women (not boy-women). The ideal performance of Shakespeare would be by the men and women who grew in Shakespeare’s imagination. But they, unfortunately, do not exist in flesh and blood, but only in that imagination, and, to bring them on the stage, you have to employ ready-made men and women, who at the very best can only be rough approximations to the imaginary figures. In this sense it is not a paradox but a simple commonplace to say that no one has ever seen Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the stage, or ever will see. And the greater the “genius” of the actor, the more potent his personality—though he will be the darling of the majority, thirsting for realism, the immediate sense of life—the more will he get between the poet and imaginative students like Lamb and Professor Raleigh, who want their poetry inviolate.

This seems like a digression, but is really to my purpose. Flesh-and-blood actors we shall always have with us; they will take good care of that themselves. But for the imaginative souls who are for compromise, who are for half-way houses and look back fondly to the boy-players, I would say: Why not try the puppets? These also present a “transparent medium” for the author’s expression. And, further, the purely “lyrical” passages in which Shakespeare abounds and which seem so odd in the realism of the human actors (e.g., the Queen’s description of Ophelia’s death) would gain immensely by being recited by the poet (or wire-puller). A puppet-show Hamlet might be an exquisite experiment in that highest art whose secret is suggestion.

VICISSITUDES OF CLASSICS

Of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, revived by the Phœnix Society, I said that it was a live classic no longer, but a museum-classic, a curio for connoisseurs. Its multiplication of violent deaths in the last act (four men stabbed and one courtesan poisoned) could no longer be taken seriously, and, in fact, provoked a titter in the audience. This sudden change of tragic into comic effect was fatal to that unity of impression without which not merely a tragedy but any work of art ceases to be an organic whole. The change was less the fault of Webster than of the Time Spirit. Apparently the early Jacobeans could accept a piled heap of corpses at the end of a play without a smile, as “all werry capital.” Violent death was not so exceptional a thing in their own experience as it is in ours. They had more simplicity of mind than we have, a more childlike docility in swallowing whole what the playwright offered them. But Webster was not without fault. One assassination treads so hastily upon the heels of the other, the slaughter is so wholesale. Hamlet closes with several violent deaths, yet Shakespeare managed to avoid this pell-mell wholesale effect.

But there is another element in Webster’s workmanship which, I think, has helped to deprive the play of life. I mean his obtrusive ingenuity. I am not referring to the ingenuity of the tortures practised upon the unhappy Duchess—the severed hand thrust into hers, the wax figure purporting to be her slain husband, and so forth. This fiendish ingenuity is proper to the character of the tyrant Ferdinand, and its exercise does add a grisly horror to the play. I mean the ingenuity of Webster himself, a perverted, wasted ingenuity, in his play-construction. He seems to have ransacked his fancy in devising scenic experiments. There is the “echo” scene. It is theatrically ineffective. It gives you no tragic emotion, but only a sense of amused interest in the author’s ingenuity, and you say, “How quaint!” Then there is the little device for giving a touch of irony to the Cardinal’s murder. He has warned the courtiers, for purposes of his own, that if they hear him cry for help in the night they are to take no notice; he will be only pretending. And so, when he cries for help in real earnest, he is hoist with his own petard, and the courtiers only cry, “Fie upon his counterfeiting.” Again the theatrical effect is small; you are merely distracted from the tragic business in hand by the author’s curious ingenuity. For any one interested in the theatrical cuisine these experiments, of course, have their piquancy. Webster seems to have been perpetually seeking for “new thrills”—like the Grand Guignol people in our own day. He had some lucky finds. The masque of madmen, for instance, is a tremendous thrill, one of the biggest, I daresay, in the history of tragedy. But there were experiments that didn’t come off.