The answer given by the actor is, “Certainly! The added words from the quartos give the idea of reality and character.” It is inconceivable that Shakespeare, himself an actor, omitted the additional lines. Without this reiteration, the expression of Lear’s amazement at the indignity put upon his servant cannot be adequately tuned by the actor, nor yet be consistent with his character. This, then, is the dilemma with regard to stage-versions; scholars are hampered in their judgment by want of knowledge of the art of the theatre; and actors by their bias for good acting parts, or, in other words, for parts which are always in view of the audience.
As to elocution, it may be well to recall what an Antwerp merchant who had for many years resided in London said of the English people, about the year 1588. He then observed that “they do not speak from the chest like the Germans, but prattle only with the tongue.” The word “prattle” is used in the same sense by Shakespeare in his play of “Richard the Second.”[6] In the “Stage Player’s Complaint,” we find an actor making use of the expression, “Oh, the times when my tongue hath ranne as fast upon the Sceane as a Windebanke’s pen over the ocean.” Added to this, there is the celebrated speech to the players, in which Hamlet directs the actors to speak “trippingly on the tongue.” There can be no doubt, therefore, that Shakespeare’s verse was spoken on the stage of the Globe easily and rapidly. And the actor had the advantage of standing well within the building in a position now occupied by the stalls, nor were audiences then stowed away under deep projecting galleries. But unless English actors can recover the art of speaking Shakespeare’s verse, his plays will never again enjoy the favour they once had. Poetry may require a greater elevation of style in its elocution than prose, but in either case the fundamental condition is that of representing life, and as George Lewes ably puts it, “all obvious violations of the truths of life are errors in art.” In the delivery of verse, therefore, on the stage, the audience should never be made to feel that the tones are unusual. They should still follow the laws of speaking, and not those of singing. But our actors, who excel in modern plays by the truth and force of their presentation of life, when they appear in Shakespeare make use of an elocution that no human being was ever known to indulge in. They employ, besides, a redundancy of emphasis which destroys all meaning of the words and all resemblance to natural speech. It is necessary to bear in mind that, when dramatic dialogue is written in verse, there are more words put into a sentence than are needed to convey the actual thought that is uppermost in the speaker’s mind; in order, therefore, to give his delivery an appearance of spontaneity, the actor should arrest the attention of the listener by the accentuation of those words which convey the central idea or thought of the speech he is uttering, and should keep in the background, by means of modulation and deflection of voice, the words with which that thought is ornamented. Macbeth should say:
“That but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all HERE,
But HERE, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to COME.—But in these cases
We still have judgment HERE; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, RETURN
To plague the INVENTOR.”
If the emphasis fall upon the words marked, then these and no others should be the words inflected; but modern actors, if they inflect the right words, inflect the wrong ones too, until it becomes impossible for the listener to identify the sense by the sound. This artificial way of speaking verse seems traditional to the eighteenth century. David Garrick and Edmund Kean no doubt used a more natural delivery, and also Mrs. Siddons, though some of her exaggerations of emphasis probably were never heard at the Globe. Shakespeare would hardly have endorsed her reading of Lady Macbeth’s words, “Give me the daggers!” There was nobody else to whom Macbeth could give them. At moments of tension, speech is always direct. A lady, tête à tête with her husband at the breakfast-table, enjoying an altercation over the contents of the newspaper, would surely indicate the natural emphasis by exclaiming, “Give me the newspaper!” words that can, in this way, be spoken in half the time that Mrs. Siddons took to speak hers. The two and a half hours in which a play in Shakespeare’s time was often acted would not be possible to-day, even without delays for acts and scenes, with the methods of elocution now in vogue. It is legitimate for Romeo to exclaim in his farewell to Juliet:
“Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace!”
or he may say:
“Eyes, look your LAST!
Arms, take your last EMBRACE!”
but it is not correct to say:
“Eyes, look your LAST!
Arms, take your last EMBRACE!”
which every Romeo persists in saying to-day; and this method of duplicating emphasis, being used by all the actors throughout the whole play, the time taken up in speaking it is at once doubled. Hence the need for excessive “prunings.”