Should unreveal’d and unrevenged pass,
How should we term your dealings to be just
If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust?[31]
If we remember what the play has already told us of Hieronimo: that having found his son hanging murdered in the arbor, he enters in a perfect ecstasy of grief; and if we recall that the Elizabethan loved a style as ornate as this, feeling it no barrier between him and the thought behind it; the look of the passage begins to change. Put the feeling of the father into the voice as one reads, and lo, these lines are not a bad medium for expressing Hieronimo’s grief. They may lack the simplicity we demand today, but strong, clear feeling may be brought out from behind them for any audience. For an Elizabethan audience it came forth in a style delightful in itself. The fact is, time cannot wholly spoil the value even of lines phrased according to the standards of some literary vogue of the moment if the author originally wrote them with an imagination kindled to accuracy of feeling by complete sympathy with his characters. Never judge the dialogue of a play only by the eye. Hear it adequately, interpretively spoken. Then, and then only, judge it finally.
It is almost impossible, also, to separate the voice from gesture and facial expression as aids in dramatic dialogue. Unquestionably each of these would help the voice in the illustrations just given from Come Here, Othello, and the Spanish Tragedy. When Antony, absorbed in Cleopatra, and therefore unwilling to listen to the messenger bearing tidings of the utmost importance from Rome, cries, “Grates me: the sum!”[32] it is not merely the intonation but the accompanying gesture in the sense of general bodily movement, and the facial expression, which make the condensed phrasing both natural and immensely effective. When Frankford (A Woman Killed With Kindness, Act III, Scene 2)[33] asks his old servant, Nicholas, for proof of Mrs. Frankford’s unfaithfulness the answer is not, “I saw her,” or “I saw her and her lover with my eyes,” but simply “Eyes, eyes.” The last are what rightly, in dramatic dialogue, may be called “gesture words,” words demanding for their full effect not only the right intonation, but facial expression and all that pantomime may mean. The old man lifts his head, and, though unwillingly, looks his master straight in the face as he speaks. Perhaps he even emphasizes by lifting his hand toward his eyes. With the concomitants of action and voice, the words take on finality and equal: “What greater proof could I have? I saw the lovers with these eyes.”
So close, indeed, is the relation between action and phrasing that often we cannot tell whether dialogue is good or bad till we have made sure of the “business” implied by it, or to be found in it by an imaginative worker. The following passage from The Revesby Sword Play is distinctly misleading because of the word, “looking-glass” unless one studies the context closely for implied business, and above all, understands the sword dances of the period in which the play was written.
Fool. Well, what dost thou call this very pretty thing?
Pickle Herring. Why, I call it a fine large looking-glass.
Fool. Let me see what I can see in this fine large looking-glass. Here’s a hole through it, I see. I see, and I see!