Uninteresting and unsavoury as some of the details of the Elizabethan domestic tragedies are, they were often used with an avowedly moral aim, and they had, according to many contemporary accounts, the most salutary effect on evil-doers.[3] It was not more than forty years after Shakespeare’s death that Richard Flecknoe, in his “Discourse of the English Stage,” comments upon the altered character of the drama:
“Now for the difference betwixt our Theatres and those of former times; they were but plain and simple, with no other scenes nor decorations of the stage, but only old Tapestry, and the Stage strewed with Rushes, whereas ours for cost and ornament are arrived at the height of Magnificence, but that which makes our Stage the better, makes our Playes the worse, perhaps through striving now to make them more for sight than hearing, whence that solid joy of the interior is lost, and that benefit which men formerly received from Playes, from which they seldom or never went away but far better and wiser than when they came.”
The short space of time—two hours and a half—in which an Elizabethan play was acted in Shakespeare’s time, has excited much discussion among commentators. It can hardly be doubted that the dialogue, which often exceeds two thousand lines, was all spoken on the stage, for none of the dramatists wrote with a view to publication, and few of the plays were printed from the author’s manuscript. This fact points to the employment of a skilled and rapid delivery on the part of the actor. Artists of the French school, whose voices are highly trained and capable of a varied and subtle modulation, will run through a speech of fifty lines with the utmost ease and rapidity; and there is good reason to suppose that the blank verse of the Elizabethan dramatists was spoken “trippingly on the tongue.” And then only a few of the plays which were written for the public stage were divided into acts; and even in the case of a five act drama it was not thought necessary to mark each division with an interval, since the jigs and interludes were reserved for the end of the play. So with an efficient elocution and no “waits,” the Elizabethan actors would have got through one-half of a play before our modern actors could cover a third. Even Ben Jonson, while disliking the form of the Elizabethan drama, recognized the advantage to the dramatist of simplicity in the method of representation. He alludes, with not a little contempt, to Inigo Jones’s costly settings of the masque at the court of King James.
“A wooden dagger is a dagger of wood,
Nor gold nor ivory haft can make it good ...
Or to make boards to speak! There is a task!
Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque.
Pack with your pedling poetry to the Stage.
This is the money-got mechanic age!”
If a theatre were established in this country for the performance of Shakespeare’s plays with the simplicity and rapidity with which they were acted in his time, it might limit the endless experiments, mutilations, and profitless discussions that every revival occasions. “To read a play,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, “is a knack, the fruit of much knowledge and some imagination, comparable to that of reading score”; the reader is apt to miss the proper point of view. In omitting one-third of the play every time Shakespeare is acted, the most appropriate scenes for representation may not always be chosen. But were the entire play acted occasionally, the author’s point of view could not fail to declare itself. It is interesting to note that Germany, always to the fore in Shakespearian matters, has obtained in Baron Perfall, the director of the Royal Court Theatre in Munich, an advocate for the performance of Shakespeare’s plays as they were originally acted.
The Elizabethan dramatists, as a rule, deprecated the printing of their plays. They regretted that “scenes invented merely to be spoken should be inforcively published to be read.” Elocution was to the playwrights an all-important consideration. They acknowledge that the success of their labours “lay much in the actor’s voice”; that he must speak well, “though he understand not what,” for if the actor had not “a facility and natural dexterity in his delivery, it must needs sound harsh to the auditor, and procure his distaste and displeasure.” A good tragedy, in Ben Jonson’s opinion, “must have truth of argument, dignity of persons, gravity and height of elocution”; “words,” he says, “should be chosen that have their sound ample, the composition full, the absolution plenteous, and poured out all grave, sinewy, and strong.” And Thomas Heywood, in 1612, thus writes in defence of the actor’s art: “Tully, in his booke, ‘Ad Caium Herennium,’ requires five things in an orator—invention, disposition, eloqution, memory, and pronuntiation; yet all are imperfect without the sixt, which is action: for be his invention never so fluent and exquisite, his disposition and order never so composed and formall, his eloquence and elaborate phrases never so materiall and pithy, his memory never so ferme and retentive, his pronuntiation never so musical and plausive; yet without a comely and elegant gesture, a gratious and a bewitching kinde of action, a natural and familiar motion of the head, the hand, the body, and a moderate and fit countenance suitable to all the rest, I hold all the rest as nothing. A delivery and sweet action is the glosse and beauty of any discourse that belongs to a scholler; and this is the action behoovefull in any that professe this quality, not to use any impudent or forced motion in any part of the body, nor rough or other violent gesture, nor, on the contrary, to stand like a stiffe starcht man, but to qualifie everything according to the nature of the person personated: for in overacting trickes, and toyling too much in the anticke habit of humors, men of the ripest desert, greatest opinions, and best reputations may breake into the most violent absurdities. I take not upon me to teach, but to advise; for it becomes my juniority rather to be pupil’d my selfe than to instruct others.”
Shakespeare, also, though not so great an actor as he was a dramatist, knew as well what was needed for the art of the one as of the other, and perhaps thought even more about the acting because he had the less genius for it. There are some descriptive passages in his plays which show that he visualized the characters he created and gave them gestures which were appropriate to their personalities.
If the actors were fortunate in having poets such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Heywood, not only to write for them, but also to instruct them, the poets were no less fortunate in their actors. Of Burbage, we are told that he had all the parts of an excellent orator, animating his words with his speech, and his speech with action, so that his auditors were “never more delighted than when he spoke, nor more sorry than when he held his peace; yet even then he was an excellent actor still, never failing in his part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gesture maintaining it still unto the height.” We learn that he was small in stature; that every thought and mood could be understood from his face; and that because of his gifts he was “only worthy to come on the stage,” and because of his honesty “he was more worthy than to come on.” So great was Burbage’s popularity that London received the news of his death, which occurred within a few days of that of the Queen, King James’s Consort, with a greater manifestation of grief than they bestowed on the lady. Perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of Burbage’s unusual ability when he wrote the following lines:
“The eyes of men
After a well-grac’d actor leaves the stage
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious.”
Dick Robinson was an actor of women’s parts. Ben Jonson has left on record that he could dress better than forty women, and, in the disguise of a lawyer’s wife, he could convulse a supper party with merriment. Acting so realistic as his stirred the resentment of the Puritans. Stephen Gosson writes: “Which way, I beseech you, shall they be excused that put on, not the apparel only, but the gate, the gestures, the voice, the passions of a woman.” Nathan Field was the son of a minister, who was one of the earliest as well as one of the bitterest enemies of theatrical performances. While one of the Royal Chapel boys, Field distinguished himself in Ben Jonson’s comedy, “Cynthia’s Revels,” acted entirely by children. Afterwards Field became a member of Shakespeare’s company, and, like him, an author. When Burbage died, Field was his successor in the part of the Moor. It is said that as he was naturally of a jealous disposition, the character suited him, and his impersonation of it became famed as “the true Othello of the poet.” Many particulars have come down to us of the clown, Kemp. His popularity with his audiences cannot be disputed. “Clowns,” writes a dramatic author in 1597, “have been thrust into plays by the head and shoulders ever since Kemp could make a scurvy face.... If thou canst but draw thy mouth awry, lay thy leg over thy staff, saw a piece of cheese asunder with thy dagger, lap up drink on the earth, I warrant thee they’ll all laugh mightily.” It was by tricks such as these that Kemp won the good opinion “of the understanding gentlemen of the ground”; but Shakespeare was not in favour of fooling. Kemp, moreover, loved to extemporize, and Shakespeare wished to abolish a custom fatal to dramatic unity. He preferred to write the clown’s part himself, and desired that no more should be spoken than was set down by the author. The interference with the clown’s privilege, openly advocated by Shakespeare in a well-known passage of “Hamlet,” probably led to Kemp’s temporary retirement from the company. Kemp loved notoriety and money. His morris dance to Norwich and journeys to France and Italy were but gambling speculations, he undertaking to be back in a certain time, and laying wagers with large odds in his favour to that effect.