This is a privilege implacably denied to the playwright, even if he has abundant compensation in other ways. As Brownell also reminded us, the novel is
a picture of life, but a picture that not only portrays but shows the significance of its subject; its form is particularly, uniquely elastic, and it possesses epic advantages which it would fruitlessly forego in conforming itself to purely dramatic canons.
III
Dickens’s novels were both theatrical and dramatic; they were influenced by the melodramas and farces of his youth, as has already been noted; and it was natural that they should tempt adapters to dramatize them. They abounded in robustly drawn character, often verging into caricature; and therefore they appealed to the actor. They had episodes of violence certain to prove attractive to the public which liked to be powerfully moved and which had little delicacy as to the passions portrayed. Dickens’s sprawling serials were too straggling in story ever to make it possible to compress them into a solidly built framework of plot; but it was not difficult to disentangle a succession of situations sufficient to make an effective panorama of action, peopled with familiar figures. And of these there have been an unnumbered host.
If Thackeray’s novels lend themselves less temptingly to the paste-and-scissors method of the dramatizer, they had an immediate vogue and an enduring reputation, which have allured a host of playwrights, most of whom have confined their exertion to the singling out of a salient character and to the presentation in a play of the more important situations in which this personality is involved, utilizing the other figures and the other episodes only in so far as these might be necessary to set off the chosen hero or heroine. Naturally enough it is upon ‘Vanity Fair’ that they have laid hands most frequently. The final monthly part of the original publication had scarcely been issued when John Brougham ventured upon a stage-version of it, which he produced at Burton’s theater in New York in 1849.
This was an attempt to dramatize the novel as a whole, although necessarily Becky Sharp held the center of the stage. There was a revival of Brougham’s adaptation a few years later; there was another attempt by George Fawcett Rowe; and then in 1893 Sir James Barrie made a one-act playlet out of the last glimpse of Becky that Thackeray affords us, when she and Jos. Sedley, Amelia and Dobbin find themselves together in the little German watering-place and when Amelia learns the truth about her dead husband’s advances to Becky. Sir James has kindly informed me that he thinks that every word spoken in his little piece was Thackeray’s, “but some of them were probably taken from different chapters.”
A few years later two other Becky Sharp pieces were produced, one on either side of the Atlantic. The American play was adroitly prepared by Langdon Mitchell; it was called ‘Becky Sharp’; it was produced in 1899 and it has been revived at least once since; Mrs. Fiske was the Becky. The British play was by Robert Hichens and Cosmo Gordon Lennox; it was originally performed in London, with Marie Tempest as Becky; and she came over to the United States to present it a few times at the New Theater in New York in 1910.
A similar method—the method of focussing the attention of the audience on a single dominating personality and of excluding all the episodes in which this personality was not supreme—was followed in more recent plays cut out of the ‘Newcomes’ and ‘Pendennis.’ No doubt this was the only possible way of dramatizing novels of such complexity of episode. Brownell has declared that the range of the ‘Newcomes’ is extraordinary for the thread of a single story to follow:
Yet all its parts are as interdependent as they are numerous and varied. It is Thackeray’s largest canvas, and it is filled with the greatest ease and to the borders.... It illustrates manners with an unexampled crowd of characters, the handling of which, without repetition or confusion, without digression or discord, exhibits the control of the artist equally with the imaginative and creative faculty of the poet.
A story as vast as the ‘Newcomes’ simply defies the dramatizer; and all he can do is to build his play about a single group or, better still, around a single character, relentlessly excluding all the other allied groups of personages not less interesting in themselves. This has been the method, it may be recorded, chosen by the several French playwrights who have been moved to make dramas out of one or another of the almost equally complex novels of Balzac.