Pickle Herring. You see and you see, and what do you see?
Fool. Marry, e’en a fool,—just like thee!
Pickle Herring. It is only your own face in the glass.[34]
A “looking-glass” with “a hole through it” seems nearly a contradiction in terms, but the word “glass” is synonymous with “nut,” a name given to the swords of English Folk Dances when so interwoven as to make a kind of frame about a central space. This space is often large enough for a man’s head. The Fool has seen the dancers make such a nut. Holding it up, he asks Pickle Herring what it is. Pickle Herring, seeing the Fool’s face through the opening and seizing his chance for a jest, calls the nut a “looking-glass.” The Fool carries on the conceit. Looking through the hole he and Pickle Herring jibe at each other. The whole Revesby Sword Play provides illustration after illustration of the inseparability of words and business in good dramatic dialogue.
By “business” is meant ordinarily either illustrative action called for by a stage direction or clearly implied in the text. By “latent business” is meant the illustrative action which a sympathetic and imaginative producer finds in lines either ordinarily left without business or treated with some conventional action. Mr. William Poel’s historic revival of Everyman was crowded with such imaginative and richly interpretive business. When Death cried,
| Everyman, thou art mad! Thou hast thy wits five, And here on earth will not amend thy life! For suddenly I do come— |
on that last line he stretched out one arm and with the index finger of his hand barely touched the heart of Everyman. In the gesture there was a suggestion of what might be going to happen, even a suggestion that already Death thus claimed Everyman for his own. It pointed finely the immediate cry of Everyman,
| O wretched caitiff, whither shall I flee, That I might scape this endless sorrow?[35] |
The text did not call for this gesture: it belongs to the best type of interpretive business.
Few untrained persons hear what they write: they merely see it. The skilled dramatist never forgets that he has to help him in his dialogue all that intonation, facial expression, gesture, and the general action of his characters may do for him. Which, after all, is the more touching, the cry of pleasure with which some child of the streets, at a charity Christmas tree, gazes at a rag doll some one holds out to her, or the silent mothering gesture with which she draws it close to her, her face alight? It is just because, at times, facial expression, gesture, and movement may so completely express all that is needed that pantomime is coming to play a larger and larger part in our drama. Older readers of this book may recall the late Agnes Booth and her long silent scene in Jim, The Penman. By comparison of a letter and a cheque, Kate Ralston becomes aware that her husband is a famous forger, Jim, the Penman. Through all this great scene of an otherwise cheap play, the physical movement was very slight. The actress, three-quarters turned toward the audience, sat near a table. It was her facial expression and, rarely, a slight movement of the arms or body which conveyed her succession of increasingly intense emotions. The significant pantomime began with “She puts cheque with others.” The acting of the next seven lines of stage direction held an audience with increasing intensity of feeling for some five minutes.