Are at my service, like enforced smiles,
And both are ready in their offices,
At any time to grace any stratagems.
III, 5, 5.
This admirable passage forcibly illustrates the methods adopted by the actors in the art of acting in Elizabethan times. In our days this mode of producing stage effects is chiefly associated with the style of acting pursued by followers of the melodramatic school. If we examine carefully the substructure of Shakespeare’s tragic plays, we shall perforce arrive at the conclusion that melodrama enters largely into their composition.
Stript of their dialogue, the acts of these plays bear a striking resemblance to the lurid and blood curdling dramas nightly performed at our provincial theatres, and during the nineteenth century presented at the London theatres, principally those situated on the Surrey side of the Metropolis, and merely gaining the well-known sobriquet of the transpontine drama. These plays were interpreted by the actors in rather a boisterous manner by ranting and martial stalk, in reality tearing a passion to tatters, to very rags, tricks of the actors preserved by tradition from the very days of Shakespeare himself, who often alluded to and deprecated this inartistic and uncritical style of acting.
ROMEO AND JULIET
ACT. SCENE.
My dismal scene I needs must act alone.
IV, 3, 19.