In this last sentence Mr. Thaler confuses the issue. The question is not whether Burbage wanted to go starring, supported by a more or less incompetent company, but whether Shakspere did on occasion choose to write a play which is in fact a made-to-order garment to fit the idiosyncrasies of a single star. And when it is put in this way the question is easy to answer. We know that Burbage played Richard III, and if there ever was a star-part, if there ever was a one-man play, if there ever was a piece cut and stitched to the measure of the man who first performed it, then it is Richard III. Here we have a dominating character to whom the other characters are sacrificed; he is etched with bold strokes, whereas most of the others are only faintly outlined. So long as Richard is powerfully seized and rendered, then the rest of the acting is relatively unimportant. Richard is the whole show. And while there is only a single star-part in Richard III—Eclipse first and the rest nowhere—there are twin star-parts in Macbeth, who are vigorously drawn, while the remaining characters are merely brushed in, as Professor Bradley has noted.
Now, if this proves that Shakspere’s muse was of a sorry sort, then that heavenly visitor is in no worse case than the muse of many another dramatist. Sophocles is reported to have devised his great tragic parts specially for one actor, whose name has not come down to us. Racine wrote ‘Phèdre’ and ‘Andromaque,’ his masterpieces, for Mlle. de Champsmeslé. Rostand wrote ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ and ‘Chantecler’ for Coquelin. Sardou wrote ‘Fédora’ and ‘Théodora’ for Sarah Bernhardt. The younger Dumas wrote the ‘Visite de Noces’ for Desclée. Giacommetti wrote ‘Maria Antoinette’ for Ristori and the ‘Morte Civile’ for Salvini. D’Annunzio wrote the ‘Gioconda’ and the ‘Citta Morte’ for Duse. Bulwer-Lytton wrote the ‘Lady of Lyons’ and ‘Richelieu’ for Macready. Gilbert wrote ‘Comedy and Tragedy’ for Mary Anderson. Legouvé has told us in detail the circumstances which led to his writing (in collaboration with Scribe) ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur’ for Rachel. Jules Lemaître has told us how and why he came to compose his ‘Age Difficile’ for Coquelin; and Augustus Thomas has told us how he came to compose his ‘In Mizzoura’ for Goodwin. The line stretches out to the crack of doom. When Shakspere chose to produce made-to-order garments to fit the idiosyncrasies of a single actor, he was in very good company, ancient and modern. And we may go further and assert that very few of these plays are any the worse because they were made-to-order.
The great dramatists, whose works we analyze reverently in the study, were all of them, in their own time, successful playwrights, stimulated now and again by association with the most gifted and the most accomplished of contemporary actors. If they had not made their profit out of the histrionic ability of the foremost performers of their own time and country, they would have been neglecting golden opportunities.
Those who best know the conditions of playwriting will be the least likely to deny that not a few of the great characters in the drama came into being originally as parts for great actors. Of course, these characters are more than parts; they transcend the endowment of any one performer; they have complexity and variety; they are vital and accusable human beings; but they were parts first of all more or less made-to-order. In many cases we know the name of the actor for whose performance the character was conceived, Burbage for one, Mlle. de Champsmeslé for a second, Coquelin for a third. And in many another case we lack definite knowledge and are left to conjecture. There are peculiarities in the ‘Medea’ of Euripides, for instance, which seem to me to point to the probability that it also was a made-to-order garment.
To say that Sophocles and Euripides possibly did this cutting-to-fit, that Shakspere and Racine and Rostand indisputably did it, is not to imply that they did it always or even that they did it often. Perhaps they did it more often than we shall ever know; perhaps they had special actors in mind when they created characters which are not star-parts. And this suggests a broadening of the inquiry.
II
After asserting that Shakspere’s were “far from being one-man plays,” Professor Thaler reminded us that Shakspere’s dramas were written “for a great company of actors”; and what is true of Shakspere
holds good also of the Elizabethan drama in general. Its breadth and variety may be ascribed in no slight degree to the fact that the organization of the dramatic companies provided the great poets of a great age with ample facilities for the interpretation of many characters and many phases of life.
This prompts a question as to whether Shakspere may not have fitted other actors who were his associates at the Globe Theater besides Burbage. That he did deliberately and repeatedly take the measure of the foremost performer in the company and that his dramatic genius was stimulated by the histrionic talent of Burbage, I do not doubt. We cannot help seeing that Shakspere’s heroes become older as Burbage himself advanced in years. Romeo being intended for a fiery young fellow and Lear being composed for a maturer man, who had become a more consummate artist. I have suggested elsewhere the possibility—to my own mind a probability—that Shakspere inserted the part of Jaques into ‘As You Like It’ specially for Burbage. Shakspere took his sequence of incidents from Lodge’s ‘Rosalynd,’ in which there is no character which resembles Jaques; and Jaques has nothing to do with the plot; he remains totally outside the story; he exists for his own sake; and he may very well have been thrust into ‘As You Like It’ because Burbage was too important an actor to be left out of the cast and because Orlando was not the kind of part in which Burbage at that period of his artistic development would appear to best advantage.
If Shakspere made parts thus adjusted to the chief performer at the Globe Theater, may he not also have proportioned other and less important characters to the capabilities of one or another of the actors whose histrionic endowment he was in the best possible position to appreciate aptly, since he was acting every day by their side? Is this something to which the greatest of dramatists would scorn to descend? Has this ever been done by any other playwright in all the long history of the stage?