Yet when an adroit playwright who seeks to please the public of his own time by the representation of its manners, happens to be also a creative artist, enamored of life, he is sometimes able so to vitalize his satire of a passing vogue that it has abiding vigor. This is what Molière did when he made fun of the ‘Précieuses Ridicules.’ Even when he was writing this cleverest of skits, the cotery which had clustered around Madame de Rambouillet was disintegrating and would have disappeared without his bold blows. But affectation is undying; it assumes new shapes; it is always a tempting target; and Molière, by the magic of his genius, transcended his immediate purpose. He composed a satire of one special manifestation of pretence which survives after two centuries and a half as an adequate satire of all later manifestations. The Précieuses in Paris have long since been gathered to their mothers; so have the Esthetes across the channel in London; and soon they will be followed to the grave by the Little Groups of Serious Thinkers who are to-day settling the problems of the cosmos by the aid of empty phrases. No one sees the ‘Précieuses Ridicules’ to-day without recognizing that it is almost as fresh as it was when Madame de Rambouillet enjoyed it.
The man of genius is able to please his own generation by his depiction of its foibles and yet to put into his work the permanent qualities which make it pleasing to the generations that come after him. The trick may not be easy, but it can be turned. How it shall be done,—well, that is one of the secrets of genius. In the case of the ‘Précieuses Ridicules’ we can see that Molière framed a plot for his lively little piece that is perennially pleasing, a plot which only a little modified was to support two popular successes nearly two centuries later,—the ‘Ruy Blas’ of Victor Hugo and the ‘Lady of Lyons’ of Bulwer-Lytton. He tinged his dialog with just enough timeliness to hit the taste of the town in 1658; and he did not so surcharge it as to fatigue the playgoers of Paris two centuries and a half later.
II
The likings of the groundlings who stood in the yard of the Globe theater when Shakspere began to write plays were coarser and grosser than those of the burghers whom Molière had to attract to the Petit-Bourbon; and unfortunately Shakspere in his earlier efforts was not as cautious as Molière. In the Falstaff plays, for example, the fat knight is as alive to-day as when Elizabeth is fabled to have expressed the wish to have him shown in love. But the talk of his companions, Nym and Pistol, is too thickly bespangled with the tricks of speech of Elizabethan London to interest American and British theater-goers three hundred years later. There is but a faded appeal in topical allusions which need to be explained before they are appreciated and even before they are understood; and in the playhouse itself footnotes are impossible.
In his earliest pieces, written during his arduous apprenticeship to the craft of playmaking, when he was not yet sure of his footing in the theater, Shakspere had to provide parts for a pair of popular fun-makers,—Will Kempe and another as yet unidentified. They were lusty and robust comedians accustomed to set the house in a roar as soon as they showed their cheerful faces. They created the two Dromios, the two Gobbos, Launce and Speed, Costard and Dull; and it is idle to deny that not a little of the talk that Shakspere put in their mouths is no longer laughter-provoking; it is not only too topical, too deliberately Tudor, it is also too mechanical in its effort at humor to move us to mirth to-day. Their merry jests,—Heaven save the mark!—are not lifted above the level of the patter of the “sidewalk comedians” of our variety-shows. They are frankly “clowns”; and Shakspere has set down for them what the groundlings expected them to utter, only little better than the rough repartee and vigorous innuendo and obvious pun which they would have provided for themselves if they had been free to do as they were wont to do. What he gives them to say is rarely the utterance of the characters they were supposed to be interpreting; and this is because the two Dromios are parts only, are not true characters, and are scarcely to be accepted even as types.
A difference of taste in jests, so George Eliot declared, is “a great strain on the affections”; and it would be insulting to the creator of Bottom and Falstaff to pretend that we have any affectionate regard for Costard and Dull, for Launce and Speed. It is only when Shakspere was coming to the end of his apprenticeship that he found out how to utilize the talents of Kempe and of Kempe’s unknown comrade in comedy, in parts which without ceasing to be adjusted to their personalities were also accusable characters, Dogberry and Touchstone. But when we come to Touchstone we are forced to perceive that Shakspere was the child of his own age even when he refrained from echoing its catchwords. He was cleaner than the majority of his rivals, but he was near enough to Rabelais to be frank of speech. On occasion he can be of the earth, earthy. He bestows upon Touchstone a humor which is at times Rabelaisian in its breadth, in its outspoken plainness of speech, assured of the guffaws of the riffraff and rabble of a Tudor seaport, but a little too coarse for the descendants of the Puritans on either side of the Atlantic to-day. Nearly fifty years ago when Harry Beckett was rehearsing in ‘As You Like It’ for one of the infrequent Shaksperian revivals that Lester Wallack ventured to make, he told me sorrowfully that his part had been sadly shorn, some of Touchstone’s best lines having been sacrificed in deference to the increasing squeamishness of American audiences.
These accessory comic parts are not alone in their readjustment to the modifying moods of a later age. The point of view changes with every generation, and with every change a character is likely to be seen from a different angle. No dramatist, whatever his genius, can foresee the future and forecast the fate of his creatures. The centuries follow one another in orderly procession, and they are increasingly unlike. Moreover, the dramatist of genius, by the very fact that he is a genius, is forever building better than he knew. He may put a character into a play for a special purpose; and after a century or two that character will loom larger than its creator dreamt and will stand forward, refusing to keep the subordinate place for which it was deliberately designed. We listen to the lines he utters and we read into them meanings which the author could not have intended, but which, none the less, are there to be read by us.
We may even accept as tragic a figure whom the playwright expected to be received as comic and who was so received by the audience for which the playwright wrote. Sometimes this is a betrayal of his purpose, as it is when aspiring French actors have seen fit to represent the Figaro of Beaumarchais (in the ‘Marriage of Figaro,’ not in the ‘Barber of Seville’) as a violent and virulent precursor of the French Revolution; or as it is when the same French actors insist on making the Georges Dandin of Molière a subject for pity, tear-compelling rather than laughter-provoking.
It is not a betrayal, however, rather is it a transfiguration when the Shylock of Shakspere is made to arouse our sympathy. I make no doubt that Shakspere projected Shylock as a comic villain, at whom he intended the spectators to laugh, even if they also shuddered because of his bloodthirstiness. Yet by sheer stress of genius this sinister creature, grotesque as he may be, is drawn with such compelling veracity that we cannot but feel for him. We are shocked by the insulting jeers of Gratiano at the moment of his discomfiture. We are glad that his plot against Antonio has failed; none the less do we feel that he has been miserably tricked; we are almost ready to resent the way in which the cards have been stacked against him.