One night, Hamlet, upon the appearance of the Ghost, threw off his hat, as usual, preparatory to the address, when a kind-hearted dame, who had heard him just before complain of its being "very cold," picked it up and good-naturedly clapped it upon his head again. A similar incident once happened during the performance of Pizarro. Elvira is discovered asleep upon a couch, gracefully covered by a rich velvet cloak; Valverde enters, kneels and kisses her hand; Elvira awakes, rises and lets fall the covering, and is about to indignantly repulse her unwelcome visitor, when a timid female voice says: "Please, ma'am, you've dropped your mantle," and a timid hand is trying to replace it upon the tragedy queen's shoulders. Of another kind, but very much worse, was an accident that befell Mrs. Siddons at Edinburgh, at the hands of another person who failed to distinguish between the real person and the counterfeit. Just before going on for the sleep-walking-scene, she had sent a boy for some porter, but the cue for her entrance was given before he returned. The house was awed into shuddering silence as, in a terrible whisper, she uttered the words "Out, out, damned spot!" and with slow mechanical action rubbed the guilty hands; when suddenly there emerged from the wings a small figure holding out a pewter pot, and a shrill voice broke the awful silence with "Here's your porter, mum." Imagine the feelings of the stately Siddons! The story is very funny to read, but depend upon it the incident gave her the most cruel anguish.
It is not, however, to the uninitiated outsiders alone we are indebted for ludicrous stage contretemps; the experts themselves have frequently given rise to them. All readers of Elia will remember the name of Bensley, one of "the old actors" upon whom he discourses so eloquently—a grave precise man, whose composure no accident could ruffle, as the following anecdote will prove. One night, as he was making his first entrance as Richard III., at the Dublin Theatre, his wig caught upon a nail in the side scene, and was dragged off. Catching his hat by the feather, however, he calmly replaced it as he walked to the centre of the stage, but left his hair still attached to the nail. Quite unmoved by the occurrence, he commenced his soliloquy; but so rich a subject could not escape the wit of an Irish audience. "Bensley, darlin'," shouted a voice from the gallery, "put on your jaisey!" "Bad luck to your politics, will you suffer a whig to be hung?" shouted another. But the tragedian, deaf to all clamour, never faltered, never betrayed the least annoyance, spoke the speech to the end, stalked to the wing, detached the wig from the nail, and made his exit with it in his hand.
Novices under the influence of stage fright will say and do the most extraordinary things. Some years ago, I witnessed a laughable incident during the performance of "Hamlet" at a theatre in the North. Although a very small part, consisting as it does of only one speech, the "Second Actor" is a very difficult one, the language being peculiarly cramped. In the play scene he assassinates the player king by pouring poison into his ear. The speech preceding the action is as follows:
Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing;
Confederate season, else no creature seeing;
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property
On wholesome life usurp immediately.
Upon which follows the stage direction—"Pours poison into his ear."
In a play of so many characters as Hamlet, such a part, in a second-class theatre, can be given only to a very inferior performer. The one to whom it was entrusted on the present occasion was a novice. Muffled in a black coat and a black slouched hat, and with a face half hidden by burnt cork, he looked a most villainous villain, as he stole on and gazed about in the most approved melo-dramatic fashion. Then he began, in a strong north country brogue,—
Thoughts black, hands apt,—
then his memory failed him, and he stuck fast. The prompter whispered "drugs fit;" but stage fright had seized him, and he could not take the word. He tried back, but stuck again at the same place. Half-a-dozen people were all prompting him at the same time now, but all in vain. At length one more practical than the rest whispered angrily, "Pour the poison in his ear and get off." The suggestion restored a glimmering of reason to the trembling, perspiring wretch. He could not remember the words of Shakespeare, so he improvised a line. Advancing to the sleeping figure, he raised the vial in his hand, and in a terribly tragic tone shouted, "Into his ear-hole this I'll power!"
Some extraordinary and agonising mistakes, for tragedians, have been made in what are called the flying messages in "Richard III." and "Macbeth," by novices in their nervousness mixing up their own parts with the context; as when Catesby rushed on and cried, "My lord, the Duke of Buckingham's taken." There he should have stopped while Richard replied, "Off with his head! so much for Buckingham!" But in his flurry the shaking messenger added, "and they've cut off his head!" With a furious look at having been robbed of one of his finest "points," the tragedian roared out, "Then, damn you, go and stick it on again!" Another story is told of an actor playing one of the officers in the fifth act of "Macbeth." "My lord," he has to say, "there are ten thousand——" "Geese, villain," interrupts Macbeth. "Ye—es, my lord!" answered the messenger, losing his memory in his terror.
But a far more dreadful anecdote is related of the same play. A star was playing the guilty Thane in a very small company, where each member had to sustain three or four different characters. During the performance the man appointed to play the first murderer was taken ill. There was not another to be spared, and the only resource left was to send on a supernumerary, supposed to be intelligent, to stand for the character. "Keep close to the wing," said the prompter; "I'll read you the words, and you can repeat them after me." The scene was the banquet; the supper was pushed on, and Macbeth, striding down the stage, seized his arm and said in a stage whisper, "There's blood upon thy face." "'Tis Banquo's, then," was the prompt. Lost and bewildered—having never spoken in his life before upon the stage—by the tragedian's intense yet natural tones, the fellow, imitating them in the most confidential manner, answered, "Is there, by God?" put his hand up to his forehead, and, finding it stained with rose pink, added, "Then the property man's served me a trick!"