Shakespeare in the Theatre

by William Poel

“I have preserved the common distribution of the plays into acts, though I believe it to be in almost all the plays void of authority. Some of those which are divided in the later editions have no division in the first folio, and some that are divided in the folio have no division in the preceding copies. The settled mode of the theatre requires four intervals in the play, but few if any of our author’s compositions can be properly distributed in that manner. An act is so much of the drama as passes without intervention of time or change of place. A pause makes a new act. In every real and therefore in every imitative action, the intervals may be more or fewer, the restriction of five acts being accidental and arbitrary. This Shakespeare knew, and this he practised; his plays were written, and at first printed in one unbroken continuity, and ought now to be exhibited with short pauses, interposed as often as the scene is changed, or any considerable time is required to pass. This method would at once quell a thousand absurdities.”

Something must be said later on about the “short pauses.” There is wisdom as well as humour in Johnson’s observation: “Let him who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give read every play from the first scene to the last with utter negligence of all his commentators.”

To Steevens belongs the credit of being the first to collect and reprint (1766) in one volume the original quartos, of which a revised and completed edition is much needed. “Many of the quartos,” he writes, “as our own printers assure me, were far from being unskilfully executed, and some of them were much more correctly printed than the folio.” With regard to Shakespeare’s text, he observes: “To make his meaning intelligible to his audience seems to have been his only care, and with the ease of conversation he has adopted its incorrectness.” In fact, Steevens thinks that Shakespeare, of all the writers of his day, was the most ungrammatical.

Capell (1768) is perhaps the least dogmatic of all the eighteenth-century editors, and the most cautious in his judgment, when he remarks: “Generally speaking, the more distant a new edition is from its original, the more it abounds in faults which is done by destroying all marks of peculiarity and notes of time.” And in another passage: “That division of scenes which Jonson seems to have attempted, and upon which the French stage prides itself, Shakespeare does not appear to have any idea of.” In a note he adds: “The current editions are divided in such a manner that nothing like a rule can be collected from any of them.” Unfortunately, like all the other editors, Capell believes it necessary to divide Shakespeare’s plays into acts and scenes.

With Malone (1790) Shakespearian criticism enters upon a new phase—the historical one—when research and evidence take precedence of conjecture. What he says of the first editors of his century remains as true to-day as it was when written—“that the men never looked behind them, but considered their own era and their own phraseology as the standard of perfection.”

Malone, moreover, observes that the two chief duties of an editor are to show the genuine text of an author and to explain his obscurities. This, it must be admitted, is the view taken by all his contemporaries; and yet dramas are not poems any more than words are deeds. And while Malone spares no pains to amend a corrupt text in the hope of arriving at verbal accuracy, he has little scruple about marring Shakespeare’s scheme of action. “All the stage-directions,” he writes, “throughout this work I have considered as wholly in my power, and have regulated them in the best manner I could.” To do this is to run counter to an editor’s province and duty; for a dramatist to know that his text is correct affords him small consolation if his story has been misunderstood and mutilated. It is doubtful whether scholars who insist on editing Shakespeare’s plays as if they were anything or everything but drama have any just appreciation of the work they undertake. When Dr. Johnson contends that Shakespeare was “read, admired, and imitated while he was yet deformed,” he is indirectly praising deformity. All the eighteenth-century editors blame Shakespeare for the management of his “fable,” and attribute it to his ignorance, while many modern editors altogether overlook his art of making a play. The late Dr. Furnivall’s introduction to the “Leopold Shakespeare,” which has been deservedly and universally praised, has yet one vital defect as dramatic criticism—his comments apply to the art of a novelist, not to that of a playwright.

The arguments brought forward in the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy are a striking illustration of this imperfect knowledge. While the Baconians pride themselves on discovering a similarity in the phraseology or philosophical sentiments of the two writers, they forget that Shakespeare was preeminent in the writing of drama—an art which is as difficult to master as that of a painter or a musician, and in which the hand of an amateur can be as easily detected; an art for which Bacon showed no aptitude, and for which he had had no training. A novelist who describes characters vividly was once asked why she seldom made them talk. Her answer was: “I have little talent for writing dialogue; when my characters speak they often cease to be the same people.” Undoubtedly Bacon would have given a similar answer to anyone attributing to him the plays of Shakespeare. Moreover, there is a wide difference between the art of writing dialogue for a novel and for a play. The novelist has innumerable means of escape from difficulties which beset the dramatist. The skill required for successfully conducting the story of a play by means limited to the use of dialogue makes the dramatist’s art one of the most difficult to succeed in, and puts it outside the reach of all but the few and the specially gifted. To illustrate Shakespeare’s constructive art it is only necessary to look at the old play of “King John,” on which his own play is based. Then, to take an instance from a later play—“Twelfth Night”—Viola, when first seen on the stage, is a castaway, rescued by sailors. After an interval of one short scene she reappears as Cesario, the Duke’s favourite page. How can the gap be most naturally bridged over? Many dramatists would add dialogue detached from the story, but Shakespeare gives the necessary information in three words, which flash a picture upon the spectator’s mind. Valentine says to Viola as they both enter the stage together: “If the Duke continue these favours towards you, Cesario, you are like to be much advanced,” etc. In scheming the sequence of incidents, and in suppressing explanatory narrative, lies the art of the dramatist. This result is not obtained without a good deal of practice. Even Shakespeare could not have written a play so compact as “Twelfth Night” at a period when he was writing “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

In his young days Shakespeare must certainly have read “Gorboduc,” with its five acts, its five dumb shows, and its chorus; he may, perhaps, have seen it revived at Greenwich Palace, or elsewhere, and have seen other plays of the kind which were written in five acts by academicians—amateurs who were anxious to air their learning before Queen Bess at the Universities or at the Inns of Court. Then there was Ben Jonson at hand to instruct his elder rival on the superiority of Latin comedy. Chapman, too, who was highly esteemed by clergy and scholars, was within call to point out to “artless Will” the merits of Senecan tragedy. In fact, the Bard of Avon had good reason to know why his playhouse dramas were despised by the learned, who, however, were not justified in presuming that he was ignorant of classical conventions simply because he chose to ignore them.

No doubt it was possible in Shakespeare’s time to write plays in five acts for the public stage. We know that at the Rose and Fortune theatres the action of the play was often suspended to allow of dancing and singing, though whether these intervals for interludes came after the termination of each act it is difficult to decide.

But if the four choruses in “Henry V.” were intended by Shakespeare to denote act divisions, they are not so marked in the first folio; while “The Tempest,” which may have been divided into acts by Shakespeare, has stage-directions which suggest that it was not written originally for representation in the public theatre, but for the Court.