ROBERT SPEAIGHT
WILLIAM FOEL
AND THE ELIZABETHAN
REVIVAL
IT is to William Poel thai contemporary Shake
spearean production certainly owes more than
to any other mab. Yet his name is probably
unknown to most modern play-goers* It is
to establish his true position once and for all
in the history of the English Theatre that this
biography* has been written.
The author, Robert Spfcaight, with many
other outstanding actors of our time^ worked
with Poel; they wore inspired by Ms vision,
Ms methods and Ms picturesque personality,
and in the brilliance of their work they
demonstrate Bod s lasting if$bence.
Here is die first authentic biography of this
remarikable pioneer written by one of our
leading Actors who is also an author and a
jaan of Jetters.
This important wprk has been written and
published in the closest collaboration with The
Society for Theatre Research wMct initiated
the project in ordbr to commemorate the
Centenary of the birth of William Poel
& mfo m the awiior m focwk flop of wrapper
792*09
Speaight
William Poel and
Revival
the Elizabethan
WILLIAM POEL
AND THE
ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
OCt 1964
MAT JUL 1 9 1988
, \"(ilinnett Portrait
WILLIAM POEL
as Peter Kecgan in John Butt s Other hland
Painted by Henry Tonks
WILLIAM POEL
AND THE
ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
by
ROBERT SPEAIGHT
FOR THE SOCIETY FOR THEATRE RESEARCH
WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD
MELBOURNE LONDON TORONTO
FIRST PUBLISHED 1 954
The William Poel Centenary Volume, published
in July 1954 as the Annual Publication of
The Society for Theatre Research for
PUBLISHED BY:
WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.
99 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, LONDON, W.C.I
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN FOR THE PUBLISHERS
BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH
FOR
ERNEST MILTON
IN MEMORY OF MANY CONVERSATIONS
6404901
/* ; j
u
It is the business of life to make the thoughts and teaching of a
great man understanded of the people. William Poel
You alone (so far as I know) are the right Shakespearian.
Sir Walter Raleigh to William Poel
Old men ought to be explorers
7". S. Eliot
I carry from my mother s womb
A fanatic heart!
W. B. Teats
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
AUTHOR S PREFACE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII ..
CHAPTER IX
THE FORMATIVE YEARS
THE CHALLENGE
THE FIRST EXPERIMENTS
SHYLOCK AND SAMSON
EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES
MACBETH AND TROILUS
CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES . .
THE PLATFORM STAGE
THE LAST PHASE
APPENDICES
By ALLAN GOMME
APPENDIX I CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PRODUCTIONS . . 279
APPENDIX II SOME ARTICLES ABOUT POEL AND His WORK 286
APPENDIX III SELECT LIST OF WILLIAM POEL S WRITINGS . . 288
INDEX 291
Page
9
ii
15
. 43
. 90
132
. 161
i?9
. 203
. 222
253
ILLUSTRATIONS
WILLIAM POEL as Peter Keegan in John Bull s Other Island Frontispiece
Painted by HENRY TONKS
Facing page
L ECUYER -Poel as a boy of about twelve years old 30
Painted by Sir F. W. BURTON
WILLIAM POEL in Early Manhood 31
WILLIAM POEL in Old Age 31
HAMLET (FIRST QUARTO) 1881 Maud Holt as Ofelia 96
FRATRICIDE PUNISHED 1924 Esme* Percy as Hamlet
Orlando Barnett as Horatio
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA 1896 in Merchant Taylors Hall 97
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 1895 in Gray s Inn Hall .. ..128
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 1895 129
MEASURE FOR MEASURE 1893 at the Royalty Theatre .. ..192
DOCTOR FAUSTUS 1896 in St. George s Hall 193
EVERYMAN 1907 F. W. G. Gilly as Death 224
William Poel as Adonai
EVERYMAN (i) The Summoning of Everyman 225
(ii) The Death of Everyman
(m) Everyman and his Friends
Foreword
IN 1948 the first long-term project which the newly-founded
Society for Theatre Research proposed to itself was the
commemoration in 1952 of the centenary of the birth of William
Poel. A critical and biographical study and some kind of
public celebration, preferably theatrical, were the ideas then
envisaged by the Committee. On n July 1952 a centenary-
matinee was presented at the Old Vic, thanks primarily to
nine guarantors who agreed to cover the risk of loss, and then
to the generous collaboration of eminent members of the
theatrical profession and the Governors of the Old Vic and to
the work of Mr. Robert Atkins and the special organizing
committee set up under the chairmanship of Dame Edith
Evans, the Society s Vice-President. Now, as the annual
publication for 1951-52, the critical biography upon which
Robert Speaight has been engaged since 1950 appears under
the auspices of the Society over the imprint of Messrs. William
Heinemann ; and thanks to this welcome association with a
famous publishing firm it can be made available to the general
public. It inaugurates a series of books which the Society hopes
to publish from time to time, which will have a wider interest
than the more specialized works issued for members only.
Mr. Speaight s study is at once his own and the Society s
centenary tribute to the importance of Poel s work and to his
influence on Shakespearian production in the English theatre.
The Society is greatly indebted to Mr. Speaight for his
response to the invitation to undertake what proved to be the
extremely arduous task of authorship. The project had Mrs.
Poel s* approval shortly before her death in 1950, and the
work was made possible by the help and co-operation of three
friends of William Poel and his wife, Mr. Allan Gomme,
Mr. Oliver D. Savage and Mr. Arthur G. Jennings, to whom
*Mrs. Poel always called herself Mrs. William Pole, and Poel himself often
used the correct form of his name on occasions unconnected with the theatre.
10 FOREWORD
the Society offers its most grateful thanks. Mr. Gomme, who
joined the Society at its start, was closely associated with
PoePs activities and productions from 1906 until 1933. In
1935-36 he put together a fully-annotated bibliography of PoePs
writings and a chronological list of his stage-productions,
compiled from newspapers, periodicals and the various sources
available in the British Museum and other libraries. This
account he collated with the papers and material in Mrs.
PoePs possession; and fortunately for the present study he also
made a transcript of PoePs early diary upon which Mr.
Speaight has drawn freely in his first chapter. The original,
apparently, has not been preserved.
It had been Mrs. PoePs intention to publish this record of
her husband s life-work, together with a brief personal memoir,
and to this end she asked Mr. Savage to abridge Mr. Gomme s
original compilation. On her death all the Poel papers, etc.,
passed to Mr. Savage; and as publication had by then proved
impracticable Mr. Gomme placed his own MSS. unreservedly
at the Society s disposal and put our intentions before Mr.
Savage. Under the provisions of Mrs. PoePs will Mr. Savage
was able to entrust to the Society in the same way all the
letters, prompt-books and other relevant material and to secure
for the projected work the approval of her solicitor and
executor, Mr. Jennings, whose father had been associated
with Poel as Honorary Treasurer of the Elizabethan Stage
Society. For the inestimable advantage of the unrestricted
use of all this basic MSS. material the Society remains deeply
grateful. Thanks to the generosity of Mr. Savage the prompt
books and many photographs of PoePs productions are now
in the Enthoven Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Mr. Gomme compiled the three Appendices and the Index
to the present volume and has crowned his many kindnesses
by giving his MSS. to the Society. My personal thanks as
editor are due to Miss Phyllis Hartnoll and Sir St. Vincent
Troubridge for their invaluable help with proof correction.
M. ST. CLARE BYRNE,
General Editor for The Society for Theatre Research.
Author s Preface
HAVE been indebted to many people in the writing of this
book, and my thanks must go, first, to the officers of the
ociety for Theatre Research who have sustained me with
leir encouragement and criticism during the time too long,
fear that I have been at work. I am very conscious of the
igh trust they reposed in me. Then I must express my
articular gratitude to Mr. Savage and Mr. Gomme, for without
leir preliminary work a work of piety and personal devotion
-my task would have been incalculably more difficult. I
en under a deep obligation to Mr. Gomme for compiling the
adex and Appendices, and for giving me his advice whenever
have asked for it
But there still remained many gaps to be filled in before a
itisfactory book could be written about William Poel. There
r ere virtually no press cuttings after 1905, and those preserved
efore that date were sadly incomplete. There were very few
itters. I am grateful, therefore, to all those who have allowed
le to see and to use the letters from Poel still in their possession,
ad who have helped me from their own knowledge to attempt
portrait of his personality. I must acknowledge a special
ebt to Mr. Robert Atkins, Mr. W. Bridges-Adams, Sir Lewis
lasson, Mr. Alan Edmiston, Dame Edith Evans, Sir John
rielgud, Sir Denis Grayson, Sir Barry Jackson, Lady Keeble
VKss Lillah McCarthy), Miss Winifred Oughton, Mr. B.
ien Payne, Mr. Reginald Pole (nephew), Dr. A. W. Reed,
Ir. G. O. Sharman, Dr. Percy Simpson, Professor A. C.
prague, Dr. Marie Stopes, Mr. Allan Wade and Mr. Donald
folfit.
When Sir Barry Jackson took over the direction "of the
hakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon, in 1945,
e invited a number of actors and actresses who had known
nd worked with Poel to contribute their impressions to a
jssier which is now in the Memorial Theatre library. I have
12 AUTHORS PREFACE
drawn liberally upon this, and I am grateful to all those
who have allowed me to quote from them.
Poel s prompt-books are less illuminating than I had hoped,
except where they show his abridgement and rearrangement
of a text. Together with his programmes and numerous
photographs of his productions, they now form part of the
Gabrielle Enthoven collection at the Victoria and Albert
Museum.
Poel frequently produced the same play more than once,
each production separated by an interval of years. I have
generally found it best to discuss his treatment of each play
in a single, consecutive survey, even when this meant retracing
my steps to pick up the narrative.
On several occasions during the past two years the question
has been put to me, "Who was William Poel?" It is not easy
to write a biography without telling people whom you are
writing about, and at last, to anticipate this query and the
blank look which accompanied it, I would add a few words in
explanation of who, in fact, Poel was. The necessity for doing
this reminded me how largely he had been forgotten, and of
how little he had ever been known. If I had been writing a
book about Gordon Craig or Granville-Barker, I should not
have been required to explain who they were; yet Poel s
influence on the contemporary theatre has not been less than
theirs. And so far from being discouraged by the general
ignorance about his work, I was braced by what I interpreted
as a challenge to set this in its true perspective.
"Poel was a dear old man," a famous and successful novelist
remarked to me, "but who will want to read a book about
him?" I do not share this pessimism. The study and pro
duction of Shakespeare, and others of our less familiar classics,
is part of our prime business as Englishmen. It is as important,
in its way, as the maintenance of the Queen s ships at sea!
The record of the Old Vic and Stratford show what vast
numbers of people are nourished by the performance of
Shakespeare s plays. I do not think it can be a matter of
public indifference how they are put upon the stage. Some
of what follows in these pages may seem to be addressed to the
scholar and the specialist, but I hope that enough will remain
to interest the ordinary spectator.
AUTHOR S PREFACE 13
I worked a good deal with Poel in his later years, and I
therefore make no apology for writing, on occasion, more
personally than I should have judged proper if I had been
treating someone I had never known. Poel was certainly "a dear
old man" at the time I first came in contact with him; but he
was a great deal more than this, and I shall hope to demonstrate
the steel as well as the sweetness of his character. He was
important not only for what he taught but for what he was;
his disinterested devotion to the first principles of his art was
unique in my experience of the stage. It contained not the
faintest alloy of egoism. Some people regarded him as a
genius and others would always tend to dismiss him as a
crank. In reality he was both. But let no one pretend that
in a theatre tainted by commerce and trimmed by com
promise there was no place for his "fanatic heart."
BENENDEN R-S.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE Society for Theatre Research and the Publishers wish
to acknowledge their grateful thanks to the following for
permission to reprint copyright material in this book :
Messrs. Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., for an extract from
Shakespeare in the Theatre. Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd., for
an extract from Shakespeare s Comic Characters by John Palmer,
Messrs. George Allen & Unwin for quotations from What s
Wrong with the Stage. Mrs. C. E. Montague and Messrs. T.
Werner Laurie, Ltd., and Messrs. Chatto & Windus for extracts
from Dramatic Values. Theatre Arts Magazine for an extract
from November 1916 issue. The Public Trustee and the
Society of Authors for extracts from the writings of G. Bernard
Shaw. To the following national newspapers and journals:
The Times; The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post; The Evening
News; The News Chronicle; The Sunday Times; The New Statesman
and Nation. And to the many individuals who so willingly
offered letters and other material to the author.
CHAPTER I
The Formative Years
ON 22 July 1852 at 3 Storey s Gate, in the City of
Westminster, a son was born to William Pole and Matilda
his wife. The Poles had been settled in the West Country for
several generations and traced a collateral descent from Regi
nald, Cardinal Pole, the counsellor of Mary Tudor. It was
only recently that some of them had moved to London. Storey s
Gate was a row of eight houses at the Parliament Square end
of Birdcage Walk, just at the corner of Princes Street. It was
pulled down in 1890 and the site is now occupied by the
Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Treasury
Solicitor s offices, William was the fourth child of his parents;
they already had two sons and a daughter. William Pole,
senior, was an eminent civil engineer, with a gift for music
and mathematics. He was also an authority on whist. From
1844 until 1847 he had held the post of Professor of Engineering
at Elphinstone College, Bombay, and at the time of William s
birth he was assisting J. Meadows Rendel, principally in the
construction of railways. Five years later he became assistant
to Sir John Fowler, and afterwards consulting engineer at
Westminster and secretary to the Royal Commission on the
London water supply. From 1859 to 18*67 he was Professor
of Civil Engineering at University College, London, and from
1878 to 1891 examiner for musical degrees at London Uni
versity. He was a Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal
Society, and Vice-President of the Royal College of Organists.
It was a versatile, distinguished and characteristically Victorian
career.
Mrs. Pole was the daughter of the Revd. Henry Gauntlett,
Vicar of Olney, a close friend of Rowland Hill, and author of
a commentary on the Book of Revelation. Her brother,
Henry John, was a famous organist. He had played in the
church at Olney as a child, and was subsequently organist
at St. Olave s, Southwark, the United Church, Islington, and
15
1 6 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
St. Bartholomew s, Smithfield. He patented a new electrical
organ, based on the Haarlem model; edited the Musical
World; composed several hymn-tunes; and was the chief
author of the Encyclopaedia of the Chant, published in 1885.
From both sides of his family, therefore, the young William
Poel inherited a fine artistic sensibility, a deep intellectual
seriousness, and a delicate ear for music. His father was
logical, industrious, and determined to the point of obstinacy;
his mother was intensely religious in the evangelical tradition.
They handed on to their son a care for detail, an incapacity
for compromise, and a reverence, which was in itself a form
of piety, for whatever work he had in hand.
William Poel breathed from his earliest years all that was
most high-minded in mid- Victorian culture, and he retained
to the end the temperament and, to some degree, the tastes
of a pre-Raphaelite. The very beautiful cast of his features
caught the eye of Holman Hunt, who was a frequent visitor
to the house, and who chose him as a model for the Divine
Child in "The Discovery of Christ in the Temple. 55 This
painting hangs now in the Birmingham Art Gallery. About
the same time he was singled out by Sir Frederick Burton to
serve as model for "The Knight s Esquire, 55 a water-colour
which can be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. These
are, in effect, the earliest portraits we possess of William Poel.
But it was music which played the largest part in his forma
tion. He was taught to play the 5 cello, which he mastered
well enough, though not always to his father s satisfaction;
and there was an echo of this intransigence in his own teaching
when he sought to awaken, in ears less sensitive than his own,
a response to the rhythms of Elizabethan verse.
Poel was born into the heyday of scientific optimism. He
would always incline to the radical and even the revolutionary
solution; it was no part of his nature or his upbringing to
assume that what was established was true. He was a sceptic
in the sense that he was a questioner. We lack information
about his schooling, except that he was a bad subject for
conventional education; and that, when he was already
seventeen, his tutor expressed the hope that he would never
read Measure for Measure, or Troilus and Cressida. At the age
of twelve he fell on to a railway line and this affected his health
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 1 7
for some years to come. It certainly imposed on him a large
measure of solitude and threw him, at a perilously early age,
upon the resources of his own thoughts. At fourteen he was
described as "dreamy and restless" (Letter from G. B. Stuart to
Mrs. Pole, 10 Jan. 1935). His natural tastes developed
unhindered, and also unhelped, by academic discipline. He
was judged too delicate to be sent to the University, where
his two brothers had been sent before him the one to Oxford
with a scholarship at Christ Church and the other to Cam
bridge with a scholarship at Queen s and he was apprenticed
instead to a firm of building contractors, Messrs. Lucas Bros.,
when he was still only seventeen.
This choice of occupation may have seemed to him as good
as any other. London was being transformed (from one of the
most beautiful cities in Europe to one of the ugliest) before
his eyes. It must have been interesting, at the least, to have a
hand in the business; and he was first set to work on the window
frames of the Albert Hall. Lucas had the contract for these
and the Hall was then nearing completion. Poel enjoyed the
crafts and companionship of the joiner s shop, but in the office
he was less at home. The plans for the Albert Hall were not
in themselves inspiring; moreover, he had not been responsible
for drawing them up. And what Poel craved, in however
modest a degree, was responsibility. Instead, he was drawn
deeper into the machinations of "real estate/ predatory in
intent and hideously inartistic in execution. He acquired an
early distaste for the "City" and a permanent disapproval of
commercial values. Remembering the pre-Raphaelite con
tacts of his boyhood, we might suppose that these would have
led him straight to William Morris and the neo-medievalism
of the seventies. Poel, as Edward Garnett pointed out, had in
many respects the character of a medieval craftsman, and his
rediscovery and presentation of Everyman was to be his most
faffioxss sinarle achievement. But Poel was never at ease with
the theology of the Middle Ages. Nor had they possessed the
kind of theatre that was closest to his dreams; a theatre con
secrated to the secular passions of mankind.
Nothing is more difficult to capture in the life of a creative
artist than the moment when he says, with a final certitude:
"This is what I want to do, and nothing else." Or perhaps,
1 8 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
with a tinge of presumption : "This is what I was sent into the
world to do, and nothing else/ It is not possible to say at
what point the vocation of William Poel took definite shape in
his mind. We know that he had always enjoyed reciting and
dressing up, but he did not go to the theatre until he was
twenty, when his father took him to see Ryder in The Merchant
of Venice. In fact, he had little opportunity for theatre-going,
for he left London soon after entering on his apprenticeship
and worked in Lucas s office at Warnham, a small village near
Horsham, in Sussex. Poel had no taste for country life,
and was inclined afterwards to regret the years he had
spent away from London. What troubled him most, he
writes four years later in his diary,* was
the loss I felt of means for self-improvement. Shut up in that
little village there were no classes to be attended, no libraries,
no reading-rooms, no people, no competition, no excitement,
no variety. I love being alone. I am always happy then,
but I mean alone inwardly, not outwardly, that is to say I
like to be so situated as to feel that my thoughts may wander
where they will and my actions may be sufficiently free to
follow the bent of those thoughts.
He had returned to London at Christmas 1873, a year before
these lines were written (i February 1874), and was able to
compare the advantages, for a natural solitary, of life in the
town and the country.
Now when I am alone in London my loneliness consists in
my feeling myself to be a very small object in an extraordin
arily large circulation of activity where my eyes can for ever
feast oa what is well suited for the digestion of my mind.
Whether I am walking in the streets, or sitting in a theatre
or office there is always before me a panorama for ever moving
of human life and yet never the same, for the scenes are a
mixture and revelation of the sublime and the ridiculous.
So my mind no longer hungers.
Nevertheless, during his residence at Warnham, he had met
someone who was to have a considerable influence on his life
and work, and who was perhaps to determine his career.
Rather curiously he does not mention this person s name in
*Poel kept a diary between i Feb. 1874 an< * 6 Aug. 1878, and all the
quotations in this chapter, unless otherwise stated, are taken from it.
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 1 9
his diary, and research has not established his identity. But
Poel generously acknowledged his debt.
My Friday evenings shut up with him in his library were
happy hours for me. His conversation, his books, were my
delight. In him I saw how a man of knowledge, though
solitary, can be happy when surrounded by his books
treasures that he well knew how to value and enjoy. He was
very liberal in lending me his books and in giving me informa
tion and encouragement towards self-improvement. From
his acquaintance I may date a change in my mind s desires
which may have no little effect on my future career.
Once re-established in London, and living with his family,
who had now moved to Stanhope Place, Poel hopes that his
"sluggish nature may be roused to exertion by the activity
with which it must necessarily be surrounded in this great
city." To anyone who remembers PoePs energy at the
age of eighty this self-reproach will sound surprising. But he
may still have been suffering from the ill-health which had
prevented him from going to Oxford ; or, at the least, this may
have left him more or less chronically fatigued. "I want," he
writes," to increase my energy of which I fear I have no large
supply, that I may find out what is in me and how best to use it.
To know if I have got a THAT within me and what that THAT is.
To let no gifts that nature may have given me slumber and
decay." Here was the crux of the matter; but it was some
time before Peel s THAT revealed itself with the precision
which was to give shape and direction to his whole life.
Meanwhile he was beginning to feel the gaps in his education.
<C I want to learn Latin; I want to read all the English versions
of the Classics, I want to write my own language correctly
and fluently." He took some part in social life, but was
humiliated by not being able to dance properly. "No man
likes to be held in contempt by a woman and I don t. For a
man six feet high to be looked down upon by the fair sex with
indifference, even with ridicule, is most disagreeable . . ."
(12 Feb. 1874). He read avidly; John Forster s Life of Charles
Dickens and Tom Moore s Life of Byron are among the books
mentioned about this time. He also quotes with approval the
following passage from Tom Jones:
I hastened therefore back to London, the best retirement
of either grief or shame, unless the person is of a very public
20 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
character; for here you have the advantage of solitude without
its disadvantage, since you may be alone and in company
at the same time (17 March 1874).
Poel had neither grief nor shame to contend with; but this
solitary was also an inveterate spectator and his theatrical
judgments would always be checked by his observation of the
world. It was, however, in the theatre itself that he found
his deepest recreation. In this same spring of 1874 he saw
Philip and The Bells at the Lyceum, and we get his first opinions
on the art of Henry Irving. His views were not yet formulated,
either on acting or production; he was simply taking stock of
the English stage as he then found it. He did not think
Philip a good play; it seemed to him "too much of a comedy
to suit Henry Irving. His acting towards the end of the first
act is, no doubt, well finished; but considered throughout it
seems to me too forced in some parts and I should be inclined
to call him pedantic, carrying on his psychological movements
to a needless extent" (24 May 1874). The Bells he found
unwholesome in its blatant sensationalism, although he was
charmed by the first two acts, and thought "the climax at the
second act when Mathias jumps up from his chair and franti
cally joins the dance ... the finest conceived and best rendered
piece of acting" he had ever seen. "Talking guess work,"
he continues, "I should say Irving had spent an unusual
amount of labour and pains on this play, perhaps studying it
for jears." But the third act disgusted him; he found
it "false to art and to good sense." What was the
point or the profit, he asked, in "learning the particulars
of a murder and the contortions of a dying man?" Even
at the early age of twenty-one Poel had set his face against the
seductions of realism, as he was to set it against the inflations
of rhetoric; and it was not Irving but Charles Mathews who
really excited his enthusiasm. He went to see him in The
Critic, and wrote afterwards :
Charles Mathews is the man to see for acting. I never saw
anything like it before in anybody else. His short, quick way
of speaking, giving his own particular emphasis to every little
sentence. His brisk movements-so natural and graceful
While you are hearing him, you seem to forget you are in a
theatre, and during the representation of The Critic you
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 21
imagine yourself to be watching some persons amusing them
selves with a rehearsal, not acting a studied play, and you felt
inclined to jump on to the stage and join in the fun.
Did he suspect already that what he had enjoyed was an
Elizabethan intimacy? In any case it is interesting to recall
that Charles Mathews had also been the idol of Henry Irving.
He must have been an incomparable comedian, and those
who have studied the series of coloured drawings in the
Billiard Room at the Garrick Club, depicting him in an aston
ishing range of parts from plays long since forgotten, will be
able to recapture, in some faint degree, his ease, agility and
charm. For the student of costume these drawings have a
unique interest; each dress or uniform seems to fit the actor
like a glove, clothing his entire personality. Poel also saw
Mathews as Charles Surface in The School for Scandal, sur
rounded by a glittering cast Helen Faucit, Mrs. Stirling,
Samuel Phelps, Compton, Toole, and many others, all
assembled for the benefit of Benjamin Webster on his retirement
from the management of the Adelphi. Poel greatly admired
Mathews acting in the Picture Gallery Scene:
the way in which he approached his uncle s picture and swept
his handkerchief down it, carelessly, not pathetically as I
expected so well suiting himself to the character. His boyish
movements, too it was all very good (2 March 1874).
But what impressed him even more than Charles Mathews
were the visits of two French companies to the Princess s
Theatre in the spring and summer of 1874. The first of these
produced de Musset s On ne badine pas avec V amour, and Balzac s
Mercadet le Faiseur. It was characteristic of Poel to note that
in de Musset s comedy there was
nothing whatever harsh or obtrusive, no series of climaxes
to cloud the general effect. . . . Every scene and every speech
has its purpose and meaning, and while the intention in the
grand climax is dexterously hid from the audience, their feelings
are being prepared and worked up to that point of interest
and sympathy which causes the climax, when it does burst,
to have a terrible but truly grand effect (27 Dec. 1874).
A few days later he saw Got in Mercadet le Faiseur, and he was
22 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
able to compare him with Charles Mathews in an English
version of the same play (A Game of Speculation).
Charles Mathews acting had none of the fire and go in it
of M. Got s, but then C. Mathews was so villainously supported
and the whole piece so carelessly got up. M. Got s interpreta
tion of the character was so intense that in the last Act when
all his creditors come in clamouring for their money my
feelings were raised to a pitch of excitement that I felt to be
produced much more by the acting of the man than by the
actual plot.
Later in the year the Vaudeville from Paris gave the reper
tory of their plays at the Queen s. Poel saw them in Sardou s
Nos Intimes, and here again he was able to compare a French
and English treatment of the same part, for he had seen Mile.
Beatrice s production at the Haymarket (Friends and Foes).
He thought the French production, in its ensemble, "the best
bit of acting I have yet seen." His Victorian sensibility
was slightly shocked by the big scene in the fourth act; it
needed
a great artist to interpret [this] without giving offence to our
English audience. Mile. Beatrice was unable to do this and
the scene went off flat to the audience, not to say disagreeably.
Quite the contrary was the case with Mile. FargueiPs inter
pretation. So vigorously did she act her part that the interest
created in the minds of the audience for the welfare of C6cile
causes the indelicacy of the situation to be in a measure over
looked. I shall never forget the horror depicted on Mile.
FargueiFs face at the advances of the young man and the
intense anxiety she showed to get rid of him. So much did
she exert herself that she all but fainted afterwards and I
noticed that one of the actors had to hand her some smelling
salts she turned so pale.
These performances gave Poel a permanent standard of
acting values; what he liked particularly about the French
method was its willing obedience to rhythm. English acting,
by comparison, seemed stilted and staccato. Poel s taste was
classical; he had no appreciation of the romantic hit-or-miss.
During the rest of 1874 Poel remained in a state of chronic
unrest, enlarging in every way possible the horizons of his
mind. He paid three visits to the Bethnal Green Museum
where he was struck by the Greuze heads and by two portraits
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 23
by Van Dyck. If he journeyed as far as Bethnal Green, we
may assume that he was a fairly frequent visitor to the National
Gallery. When he had the house to himself, he returned to the
playing of his cello. I do not think that Poel played much
in later life, but it is not fanciful to suggest that his productions
had the deep tone the tone of reverie which it is the property
of the cello to suggest. Any good production of a play is
musical, and Poel s productions were marked by an unerring
rhythm and a tranquil, meditative tone. This sense of har
mony was already in his blood, and it became the basis of all
his teaching.
He continued his reading with a life of Goethe, which
suggested to him why the marriages of genius are so frequently
unhappy.
See how these great men burn to be alone, to rush into the
fields or streets, to revel with their imaginations. Surely a
married life must be burdensome to them.
PoePs own married life was to be anything but a burden to
him, but he, too, liked to rush into the streets, if not into the
fields, and be alone with his fancy. The office hours grew
irksome.
Somehow I seem to do nothing well. I was sent this after
noon to square up some dimensions with a young fellow who
I know had not had more experience in the matter than
myself yet if he did not beat me out of countenance in
quickness (28 September 1874).
When he had the opportunity to observe, his artist s eye was
quick to seize the significant and moving detail. One day
towards the end of October he went to Charing Gross station
to see his parents and sister off to the continent.
There was a lady standing on the platform opposite the
windows of one of the carriages, waiting there to see the train
start that was to carry away from her her child, a little girl
about seven or eight years old, going off, I believe, under the
care of strangers. She kept talking to her child till the last
moment and it was touching to hear the effort made to disguise
her feelings and her thoughts in playful chit-chat. But the
train moved away and the pang came with all its severity.
I remember two years ago while waiting at St. Catherine s
wharf for a steamer to take me to France a scene equally
24 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
touching. A passenger steamer from Hamburg had just
arrived with a large cargo at the wharf after a very rough
passage, everyone on board looking miserable. There were
some anxious friends on shore waiting and the meeting was a
true heartfelt one. One person, a girl about fifteen, lost all
control over her feeling. Coming foremost from the crowd on
deck she saw standing on the wharf her two sisters, or friends,
girls of about the same age, when rushing wildly down the
gangway she threw herself in their arms and sobbed aloud. It
was "her better self," or what I should call her spirit, freeing
itself from bodily restraint that trials made too severe for the
body to bear, and expressing itself in a language of its own.
I admit it is weak to commit yourself to the world in scenes
like these. The feelings enveloped in a human body, its
intelligence confined to the small limits of utterance that
human language gives it, should not manifest itself to the
world except through the mediums common to mankind.
Otherwise no sympathy can be obtained from mankind
(24 October 1874).
This philosophical understanding of emotion was to give a
new dimension to Poel s productions in the theatre, and even
now, before he had ever set foot on the stage, he turns to the
theatre for an illustration of what he is trying to say.
A powerful actor can move his audience to tears at a striking
incident towards the middle or close of the play, because he has
been careful from the commencement of the play to represent
the feelings as affected by the various minor incidents leading
up to the great one. Thus a corresponding feeling has been
awakened in us and we sympathise with the character repre
sented. But if the same actor was to come forward and give
us the striking incident without the previous preparation,
we should laugh and not cry. It is so in life. We cannot
sympathise with the sudden outbursts of another person s
feelings, because we do not know or have not seen their origin.
Here is mature criticism indeed for a man of twenty-two,
and the strength of Poel s convictions will give him increasing
courage. He is quite unmoved by Gilbert s Sweethearts or
Robertson s Society; he goes to see Irving s Hamlet at the
Lyceum and then to know the worst sits through an old-
style production of the same play at Drury Lane with Creswick
as the Prince. His description gives us a good idea of what
even London playgoers had occasionally to endure. He found
the whole thing "damnable."
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 25
Stagey to a degree that reduces to a minirnuin any interest
in the characters or their fates. When individuals walk about
the stage with measured steps, stand in symmetrical positions,
raising their hands first to their breasts, then towards the
heavens, then towards the earth, making recitals of every
speech they utter, I feel sure it is fatal to all interpretation of
character. I am glad a revolution has come to pass. A good
actor will now, I believe, make it his business to abstain as
much as possible from this sort of business, as I believe the
great actors and actresses, like Mrs. Siddons, Miss O Neill and
others must more or less have done in order to make the
impression they did on their audiences. A man, when he
tells his friends he hopes to go to heaven, does not point
towards the sky to demonstrate his meaning. Why, then,
should it be done on the stage? (18 Dec. 1874).
Poel, we observe, admits that "a revolution has come to
pass"; he may have felt that Lyceum Shakespeare, for all its
defects, was in a different category to this. We have no record,
unfortunately, of what he thought of living s Hamlet. But
there was always Charles Mathews to quicken his playgoer s
pulse with some inimitable stroke of nature; and soon he was
to receive a major revelation of what personal genius could
bring to the art of acting. In the matter of his own vocation
this revelation was decisive.
II
At the beginning of 1875 Poel felt himself to be at the parting
of the ways. On i January there is the following entry in
his diary:
No one can tell where I may be by the end of this year. But
I write under the feeling that this may be the last New Year s
Day for many years, if not for ever, that I shall be writing under
this roof. It is my wish and the bent of my mind that I take
this year a new step in life of a most serious nature, one that
will considerably affect my future position in life, one that may
lead me into many hardships and trouble and poverty. I
only want pluck and I shall do it, but it is a most bold step,
a sort of leap into darkness in which may be hid some fearful
consequences. It wants a clear head and energy (that^ is
health and strength) and I fear I am not well provided with
either. May God in His great mercy preserve me in this year
or through such a part of it as He may think best.
26 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
The weeks and months go by and the diary is blank. Then,
on Sunday n April, there is the brief entry:
I seem to get no nearer to the change I long for and this
makes me sad. I am still under the bondage of Hell (the City).
I saw Salvini in Othello the other day, a great treat.
"What went you out into the wilderness to see?" was the
phrase perpetually dinned into his ears by those who did not
understand why he went so often to the theatre. "No one
then knew," he wrote, on the morrow of Salvini s death, "with
what awe I approached the shrine where Salvini stood in the
likeness of a superhuman. ... It was the genius of the poet-
dramatist Shakespeare, and of the actor Salvini who so finely
interpreted some of his characters, which urged me to labour
in the cause of the theatre."
In fact, the night on which Poel first saw Salvini was the
turning-point in his whole life. He was never to forget it.
Fifty-six years later, when I was playing Coriolanus for him
at the Chelsea Palace, he met me as I entered my dressing-
room with the gentle reproach: "Salvini used to be in the
theatre two hours before the performance." We have no
detailed account of what Poel thought of his Othello, but it is
interesting to note how he described his Hamlet nine years
later. Salvini s Othello had astonished by its primitive
ferocity; his Hamlet had other qualities which Poel found
even more congenial.
Perhaps the Hamlet of Signer Salvini cannot appear a
striking performance to the English Playgoer who has been
accustomed to see the melodramatic side of the character
emphasised and the intellectual and poetical side suppressed.
The artistic instinct so predominates in Salvini that to violate
nature in voice or gesture is an impossible offence; yet in the
interpretation of a character like Hamlet, in which, under
the excuse of madness, feigned or real, the actor is given so
much opportunity to be noisy, a rendering as undemonstrative
as Salvini s may appear to many unintelligible. Moreover,
Salvini s conscientiousness as an artist induces him to sacrifice
both dramatic effect and traditional usage to be true to his
author, so that his Shakespearian performances have probably
given the most pleasure to those most intimately acquainted
with the plays. To me Salvini s Hamlet had a charm as great
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 27
as, if not greater than, his Othello. He acted Hamlet as I
never saw it done before, and probably never shall again.
There was a prince in manner as well as birth; and the fact
of the part having been studied, not from the play as known
through its acting edition but from the original text, rendered
the interpretation free from many inconsistencies that displease
the Shakespearian student. His Hamlet did not, in the scene
with Ophelia, fitfully rush on and off the stage, nor show an
undignified irritability in his remarks to Polonius, nor sprawl
on the ground in the presence of ladies, nor whine in monotones
at each appearance of the Ghost. He was content with natural
gestures, a variety of delicate intonations, and very graceful
and expressive movements, for his interpretation of the char
acter. The dismissal of Ophelia was given with exquisite
feeling. ... In the closet scene, it was evident that Salvini had
formed his conception from the original text. The latter half
of this scene being omitted from our acting edition, it is usual
for the Queen to show a degree of repentance, and Hamlet,
therefore, a show of tenderness that would make nonsense of
the omitted lines if they were spoken. The Queen s grief and
compunction are transient, and she leaves the scene and returns
direct to the King. May this be my justification for urging
all coming Hamlets to banish from their minds not only our
present acting edition of the play, but also the traditional
business connected with it, and to found their conception of
this complex character on a careful study of the text alone
(Letter in The Era, 26 April 1884).
There was one particular touch in Salvini s Hamlet, which
Poel was never to forget and which may have helped to
develop his ideas of economy in movement. When Salvini
threw off Horatio and Marcellus during his first encounter
with the Ghost, he was seized with a tremendous paroxysm of
anger and then stood in rigid stillness for a long pause, holding
his audience, as he so well knew how. At last he just moved
the little finger of his right hand to indicate his decision, and
then came the words : "Go on; I ll follow thee." Poel described
this effect to his nephew, Reginald Pole, who was playing the
Ghost with John Barrymore in New York, and Barrymore
adopted it in his own performance. This is a good example
of how stage tradition is created; of how one actor may help
another in the same part. Poel saw Barrymore twice when
he brought his production to London in 1926, and thought it
the most interesting English-speaking Hamlet he had seen,
superior to Irving or Forbes Robertson. He admired the way
28 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Barrymore "talked his part all the way through and got the
other actors to do the same" (Letter to Reginald Pole, 1925}.
But he thought him quite deficient in emotional power, and
found that the famous pauses grew tiresome from repetition
and exaggeration. "Of course/ he said, "it was not a bit
equal to Salvini, and never dignified or pathetic, and the
version he acts should not be called Shakespeare s Hamlet, but
scenes from Hamlet 1 (Ibid.}.
What Poel had admired in Salvini was the testing of every
effect by reference to the text. Here was his gospel of a new
start which was nothing more than the original point of
departure, and we shall discuss it later on. It was certainly
not yet formulated in his mind when he saw Salvini as Othello
in April 1875. . Yet by realizing the essential lightness of
Salvini s approach to acting and the consummate ease of his
technique, Poel came to see more clearly what was wrong with
the stage around him. He became impatient and where a
revolution in art is in question, both patience and impatience
are necessary.
There are no entries in the diary between n April and
3 October, and the problem arises what did Poel do in
the intervening months? All we know is that he made an
attempt to go on the stage, and returned, discouraged and
disconsolate, to London. In Ris Memoir of William Poel in
the Dictionary of National Biography, Mr. S. R. Littlewood states
that he went to Italy with Salvini; but no date is given for this
visit. Poel once told me that he "walked on" as a super with
the great Italian actor in order to study his method more
closely. Salvini was only in London during the springs of
l8 75> J 876 and 1884, ar *d PoePs known activities forbid the
hypothesis that he joined Salvini s company in 1876 or 1884;
it is still possible, however, that he did so in 1875. Salvini
would have needed English "supers" and may gladly have
engaged Poel; but it is much less likely that he would have
taJcen him back to Italy, where he could have found all the
actors he wanted and where an Englishman who spoke no
Italian might well have been an embarrassment. If Poel
had spent six months in Italy, he could hardly have returned
in October with a humiliating sense of failure. He would
have had no opportunity seriously to test his talents. I think
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 2 9
it much more possible that he appeared with Salvini in London
during the spring of 1875; that he gained admission to his
company while he was still under the spell of his Othello; and
that he did this shortly after 1 1 April.
This theory still leaves unexplained the details of PoePs
disappointment. All he tells us is that it was "a very painful
one." He had had no encouragement, needless to say, from
his family. The stage is so unsettling and precarious a career
that it is the first duty of any father to prevent his son from
courting its hazards. In the case of Poel there was no evidence
that he had a serious talent for acting; he was, to all appearance,
a mere stage-struck youth. What possible future could be
foreseen in the theatre of that time for a young man of high
personal ideals, great strength and purity of character,
unless he had gifts of a quite exceptional kind ? And even if
he had, what chance had he of exercising his gifts and still
preserving his integrity? William Pole senior may well have
asked how the fastidious taste and critical intelligence of his
son would obtain a hearing. If he could have foreseen the
sublime failure of Poel s theatrical career, he would hardly
have been more encouraging.
Poel returned to his father s house, mortified but unrepen
tant. "The battle had been lost," he wrote on 3 October,
and a retreat becomes necessary. Friends will now crowd
round the winning side and the loser, unable to prove his
cause and his honour, must suffer double ignominy for having
made the attack. But whatever slanders be heaped on my
name I swear my intentions were honest to free myself from
an unlucky bondage that I had crept into unawares. But a
man cannot leap from one side of the river to another without
due preparation, and I know I formed my plans rashly. What
I had hoped to gain in a single struggle, I must now leave to
time and labour to win in the long run. The result of course
will not be the same, as the yellow leaf must lack vital growth.
. . . But the sacrifice must be made. No friends, no means, no
strength, no health, he is a madman who fights with such
weapons. So after five days sea breathing at Margate I make
a fresh start in the old direction, running with the stream and
not against it, trusting that Providence will guide me into
smooth waters.
He went back to Lucas s for a few months. The firm were
30 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
just completing Liverpool Street Station, and whatever
nostalgia this sprawling edifice may now evoke in a generation
which has been educated by Mr. John Betjeman, it cannot
have filled the young Poel with a burning faith in the future
of British architecture. His faith, we have seen, was elsewhere;
and it is not possible to read the passage just quoted from his
diary without realising that no force on earth could have
deflected him from his ambition. The cynic may reflect that
all stage careers begin like this; only time can show whether
these tremendous imperatives are the voice of vanity or
vocation. One thing is sure; any man resolving to try his
luck on the stage is, in a measure, a man obsessed. But when
Liverpool Street Station at last stood forth in all its glory,
and William Poel packed his bags for Bristol, there is no reason
to doubt the truth of his explanation.
, I was not blind when I took the step; it was not ambition
to emerge from obscurity; such stuff was never in my thoughts.
I wanted to be in a position where I could see much of life
and get much change of scene. In an office this was not to be
had. The study of men and women and their passions was
my earnest, my only desire. The stage offered the best facilities
for it. Success had no weight in the matter; I found out what
I wanted and accepted the bargain, cost what it might.
The date was 26 February 1876.
Ill
What had brought Poel to Bristol was his old idol, Charles
Mathews, who was starting a provincial tour with a play
called My Awful Dad. Poel joined his company, and by a
printing mistake in the programme Pole became Poel over
night. It has been suggested that he kept this change of name
in order to spare the feelings of his father who had been so
strongly opposed to his going on the stage. Mathews was
now in his seventies, but the great comedians do not age ;
their high spirits preserve them in a gay, perpetual maturity,
and Poel, watching eagerly from the wings, was able to study
the technique that kept Mathews young. He saw how he
achieved an illusion of rapidity, while actually speaking very
Victoria and Albert Museum
L ECUYER
("The Knight s Esquire 53 )
Painted by Sir F. W. Burton
This water-colour sketch, first exhibited in 1864,
shows Poel as a boy of about twelve years old
WILLIAM POEL
in early manhood
WILLIAM POEL
in old age
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 3!
slowly. Mathews acted in two pieces every night, but he
would not rehearse them beforehand, sending his stage-
manager to go through his part with the company. When the
evening came, the younger actors found it difficult to resist
laughing out loud, as they watched the old man s comic
expression and by-play. He could always predict at what
point the audience would laugh, and he cautioned the actors
against spoiling this by laughing prematurely themselves.
Poel himself was rarely a good actor. His appearance and
personality were both impressive, and I should judge that
they became more impressive as he grew older. But the
actor s flair for self-communication, his essential spontaneity,
was generally lacking. Whether Poel harboured any illusions
on this score or, if so, for how long is doubtful. It would
seem that his approach to the theatre was, at first, critical
rather than creative; the mode of his own creativeness would
declare itself later on. He wanted to find out what this place,
the theatre, was really like; he wanted to discover all he could
about the science of acting; he wanted, above all, to study
Shakespeare. And so he settled down, for two and a half
years, to the routine of provincial touring; mixing with all
manner of people; doing every sort of odd job behind the
curtain; acting a wide variety of parts; and getting paid a
guinea a week if he was lucky.
When he left Mathews he became a general utility man at
a theatre in Dublin and afterwards in Liverpool. Here he
saw the famous Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe, but
discovered "no atom of merit" in their performance. The
burlesque was, however, preceded by a comedy by Tom
Taylor and here he admired the acting of Lionel Brough.
He thought this "the best bit of artistic acting" he had seen,
after Charles Mathews and Jefferson. When his engagement
at Liverpool was over, he went on tour with Osmund Tearle.
He was in London during the first six months of 1877, and
took the opportunity of going to the theatre whenever he
could. He was able to compare Mrs. KendaPs acting in
Nos Intimes (produced under the title of Peril at the Prince of
Wales Theatre) with Mile. Fargueil s performance in the same
part. Mrs. Kendal, he found, missed all the "fine points" in
which the French actress had so excelled. Where Mile. Fargueil
32 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
had turned pale, bitten her lips, and quivered from head
to foot, Mrs. Kendal did nothing to indicate the struggle that
was going on inside her. And Squire Bancroft as her husband
seemed "rather tame." Poel also saw Irving as Richard III
at the Lyceum and came to a general conclusion about his
powers.
Of all the plays produced by him I like it the best, as also
do I like his performance of Richard better than his acting of
any other character. There is less exaggeration and the
comedy touches are good, but his last scenes exhibit all his
old weaknesses. This last representation of Mr. Irving has
pretty well satisfied my mind as to the extent of his power.
He has a true artistic mind, a great love for completeness in
details of scenery and costume and correctness in the small
parts. In his own acting he is most successful in the comedy
element and seems to me unable to rise to greatness in a
pathetic or passionate situation. He appears to aim at creating
an effect by working his scene up to a striking picture upon
which the curtain may fall. This is a modern practice that I
much dislike as it is sensational and stagey (23 February 1877).
Poel had not yet realised that the rhythm he craved for in
Shakespearian production could only be captured on a stage
similar to the stage for which Shakespeare wrote.
After a short tour in Scotland he joined Clifford Cooper s
.company at the Theatre Royal, Oxford, for the summer
vacation through August and September; and in October
obtained an engagement with James Scott s company at
Rosedale in the North Riding of Yorkshire, on the edge of the
Whitby moors.
He arrived at Pickering late on a Saturday evening and
slept at the inn. The next morning he set out to walk the ten
miles to Rosedale, leaving his luggage to be sent on later. It
was a sunny autumnal day, and Vernon Vole Cockburn,
Scott s leading man, came half way to meet him. Poel had
already made friends with him during his Oxford season and
described him as "a very intelligent fellow and most fascinating
in conversation" (Letter to Harriet Pole, March 1878). Poel
himself had been engaged to play secondary but important
parts lago or Laertes and it was on Cockburn s advice that
he had offered his services to the management. As the two
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 33
friends walked through the lush meadowlands of the Vale of
Pickering and then climbed up through the dale, Cockburn
explained, as gently as he could, that Scott had no capital
and hardly any wardrobe or properties, and that the payment
of salary depended on how much was taken at the doors. He
was relieved to hear that Poel still had sixteen shillings in his
pocket, saved from his previous engagement. The summer
season had been extremely difficult owing to the depression
in the iron trade, but when Poel arrived at Rosedale he can
hardly have been prepared for the situation which confronted
him. He described this in a letter to his sister six months
later:
A shilling, a pole with a torn red curtain and a scene were
all the exacting time had left to them. When I look back and
think of the cold shudder that came over me as I entered the
Rosedale schoolroom, and saw this wretched stage delusion, this
miserable eyesore, to which my winter s livelihood was linked,
and now look at the neat little fit-up we carry about with us,
with its respectable company and attractive powers, so success
ful that last night more than a hundred persons were turned
away from the doors unable to procure admission, I am bound
to admire the indomitable pluck and perseverance with which
the Manager, though in the yellow leaf of life, faced the
difficulties before him.
It is worth looking at the repertory of this plucky little
troupe. The opening play was Nobody s Child, a romantic
drama in three acts by W. Phillips, with twenty characters
acted by a company of six. It was followed by Catherine
Howard, another romantic drama in three acts from the play of
Dumas by W. E. Suter; The Lady of Lyons; East Lynne; George
Colman s The Iron Chest; Eugene Aram and Hamlet, in which
Poel himself played three parts. He played a fourth in the
farce which followed it; for each performance concluded with
a farce and a dance by the manager s daughter. The shows
appear to have been reasonably good, so long as the manager
could be kept out of the cast and his daughter prevented
from playing tragedy. All the actors savings were pooled
and when the last performance in a place was over, everyone
was still loading up the waggon at five o clock in the morning.
This company was not above soliciting patronage, and Poel
would take his turn in going up to the big house, showing the
34 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
playbill, and waiting in the kitchen until the chatelaine
would consent to receive him. Both off the stage and on it
improvisation was always necessary. "I was forced to laugh"
(writes Poel to his sister) "when the manager, who was playing
Pettibone in Kiss in the Dark, had to light his candle. He lifted
it from the table, walked to the edge of the stage, extended
his body to the fiillest, and lit it from a suspended gas burner,
more to my amazement than that of the audience."
They went from Rosedale to Kirby Moorside, loading the
donkey cart with such properties as they possessed and sending
it by road, while Poel, with Scott and Cockburn, walked over
the hills. He described the scenery as equal to any that he had
seen in Scotland. His luggage had been forwarded from
Pickering, and it was welcomed as a valuable acquisition to
the chattels of the troupe. The hat-box was just the thing
for the block on which Catherine Howard would lose her
head the following evening; the two black trunks were easily
transformed into a tomb; and PoePs property sword, at grips
with the manager s cutlass, would permit them at last to play
the fencing scene from The Lady of Lyons. The stage at Kirby
Moorside was even smaller than the stage at Rosedale; it
had only five feet in depth and the roof of the building was
so constructed that whenever Poel appeared, his head was
hidden by a beam. When he complained that the roof
was too low, he invited the retort that he was too tall.
At the end of the first week he had received i os. lod. in
salary.
After a disastrous week at Driffield they had barely enough
money to get themselves to Easingwold where they survived
the competition of a circus; and from there they proceeded
to Knaresborough on the western side of the Vale of York.
The ladies of the company rode on top of the luggage cart
while the gentlemen walked beside. Scott was in "gushing"
high spirits, since he was entering a new town with at least
2 in his pocket. Poel was now being paid one to three
shillings arrears of salary, every night, as the money came in.
They went from Knaresborough to Keighley, where Scott
had hired the Drill Hall and an orchestra at thirty shillings a
night. By eight o clock only eighteen shillings had been taken
at the door, and this did not even cover the rent of the hall,
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 35
let alone the salaries of the actors. Next morning they all
invited themselves to breakfast with the manager. This was
no concerted plan; each had acted on a spontaneous impulse
of despair. Scott regaled them with tea and bread and butter,
and then ordered two thousand handbills to be printed, which
the company later distributed from the corners of the streets.
Poel stood in the neighbourhood of a factory, and gave five
or six leaflets to each workman as he passed on his way home.
This eagerness did much to restore the morale of the company;
surely there would be an improvement in the takings for the
second performance. In fact, they took only fifteen shillings.
It was discovered afterwards that the male population of
Keighley had seized on the leaflets because they made such
excellent spills !
On the Friday morning two thousand more were printed,
advertising the performance of Eugene Aram; but by now other
handbills were in the streets announcing a music-hall pro
gramme, at which twelve prizes would be given away, these
to consist of bottles of whisky, gin and sherry. The battle
seemed irretrievably lost, and on Friday night Scott took less
than i. But there was 4 in the house on the Saturday, and
by the end of the week he was able to pay for the hall and give
six shillings a head to the company. He hoped to make good
on the second week by offering i worth of prizes on the
Friday night; this, it was thought, would ensure him a house
of 15. The prizes were advertised tea, coffee, an umbrella,
a teapot but Scott s fortunes seemed at their nadir when he
discovered, two hours before the show was to begin, that the
competing manager was wheeling a nine-gallon barrel of
beer round the town, with a large placard announcing the
following bribe: "This will be given away tonight at the
Music Hall." Scott s 15 house dwindled to 243., and when
the week was over the local proprietor took possession of his
curtain, scene and frame to meet the rental of the hall. Poel
himself was forced to part with a pair of trousers to pay his
landlady, and Scott had to leave behind the Duke of North
umberland s and Henry VIIFs costumes. Even so, there was
not enough money to pay the railway fares to Malton. These
were only raised through the sale of Poel s watch, and from
this moment on the fortunes of the company improved.
36 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Poel says little about his own performances and progress,
but as one reads his diary and the few letters that survive from
this period, one becomes aware of a secret purpose. This
drudgery was no aimless drifting from one engagement to
another. Poel knew what he wanted to do and was
doing it. He was not only discovering the stage in its most
picturesque and precarious aspects; he was discovering a
great deal about himself. While he was still with Scott, he
writes, again to his sister:
If I have persuaded you ever so little that my motive for
adopting the stage as a profession is an honest one and that I
am sincere in my determination to succeed, a great step has
been gained. I myself feel no regret for the drudgery I have
or may have to undergo. I feel that it is giving me a spirit
of self-possession, independence and power, that will be of use
to me through life, and throughout our troubles the love of
my art and the sympathy with all that is noble and good have
not once deserted me. The breaking of my connection with
the two best provincial managers [Mathews and TearleJ was
my own doing. I had seen all I wanted to see, and was getting
sadly tired of playing quite small parts.
To anyone who knew Poel in his maturity, "self-possession,
independence and power" will recur as his most characteristic
qualities. But it would be a mistake to imagine him as a
proud intellectual, condescending to the theatre from a cloud-
cuckoo land of theory. He never fell into the flagrant heresy
of despising actors; here the comparison with other producers
of genius is wholly in his favour. He believed, in his serious
Victorian way, that the theatre could be an elevating force.
He believed in the stage before he believed in the Elizabethan
stage. When he was in Ireland he dropped into the Protestant
Cathedral at Waterford.
The Bishop was preaching and in his sermon he made the
remark that he could not see with what satisfaction a man
could look back at having spent his time at a theatre. As we
were the first dramatic company that had entered the town for
some time, I could not help feeling that the remark applied
particularly to our entertainment and I was very sorry to
hear it. ... Why will the votaries of religion and morals
despise and denounce the stage as they do? Where would
those large numbers that never enter a church get their
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 37
instruction of what is right and wrong, of the misery of crime
and the blessings of virtue if not from the stage? (123 July 1876).
Although Poel held various and extreme theological views at
different times, he was by nature a profoundly religious man.
The sense of Divine Providence was always with him. We
get the impression, during these early years, that he is examin
ing one by one the competing forms of Christian belief and
withholding, in each case, any complete personal assent. In
August 1874 he goes with his brother to hear Archbishop
Manning preach in the pro-Cathedral at Kensington,
I was disappointed. He divides our history into three
periods. The period of Popular Liberty, the period of Despot
ism beginning from the reign of Henry VIII, and the period
of the return to Popular Liberty, that is the present day. He
cried shame on those who attempted to separate the civil and
religious powers from under the control of the Church, and he
called upon all Englishmen to struggle to regain their popular
liberty. Popular fiddlesticks! A most vague expression.
He said nothing about the popular liberty of Bloody Mary s
reign. I think it is weak to hold forth on such tract-beaten
subjects. Everyone knows there is as much to be said on one
side as the other and about as much to prove. Why, then,
speak upon it in a pulpit when no one can rise and say Nay/
and to a congregation more than half of whom are Church
of England come to hear out of curiosity. The Archbishop
went on to say that the Pope has not fallen, and acknowledged
his infallibility by the argument that so many learned divines,
that is Cardinals and Bishops, having met together and agreed
thereto, it must be right, for surely they know much better
than we do (25 Aug. 1874).
Manning was an unusual mixture of the political radical
md the ecclesiastical ultramontane; Poel would always have
ipplauded the one and detested the other. Three weeks later
le went to hear Charles Kingsley preach in Westminster
Vbbey, and this was much more to his taste.
His sermon seemed chiefly to point out that no nation,
people or individual could exist in a prosperous, happy or
civilised condition that did not acknowledge God. And he
spoke warmly of the importance of self-communion with God
through His Son Jesus, and not through priests and con
fessors (14 Sept. 1874).
38 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Whenever Poel arrived in a new town he went first to the
Parish Church, if possible during service time, and then to
the cemetery and the High Street. In this way the "mind"
of a place became clear to him.
IV
Poel had remained for nine months with James Scott. He
had "met with real hardships and real hard work" and hoped
that both had done him good. "My great ambition," he had
told his sister, "is to become the pupil of nature" (March 1878).
He had "thoroughly enjoyed the engagement, for the manager,
wife and daughters were homely, earnest people and quite
unprofessional in appearance and conduct. I have had some
good practice in juvenile, heavy, leading and comedy parts
which I feel have given me a large amount of confidence and
repose." He was now returning home "to recruit my severely
tried strength and also to carefully consider my next move
ments . . . perhaps by getting an engagement in some first-class
theatre with a good salary but small business, or by preparing
myself to play good business in small theatres" (25 June
Actors commonly talk little else but "shop," and there is
no need to underline further Poel s devotion to his craft. He
might well have had little time to think about anything else.
But although he was in every way a man of the theatre, he had
a mind singularly free from greasepaint, and when he dis
covered the true sense of his vocation he brought to his
productions a wide culture as well as a dramatic sensibility.
Culture is of little use to an actor, but it is a valuable, if not an
essential, asset to the stage director. It is interesting, therefore,
to know what had been happening to Poel s mind during the
first, tentative years of his professional career. He was to
stand, later, before the world as a man with a single fixed idea
many would have called it an obsession but behind the
fanatical adherence to principle there was a much broader
formation than may have at first appeared.
His travels had taken him to Oxford and Cambridge, and
he must have regretted sometimes that he had not been sent
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 39
to the University; he would have profited more from a course
of humane studies than from fitting the windows into the
Albert Hall and making a minute, anonymous contribution
to the amenities of Liverpool Street Station. At Oxford he
walked with delight round New College garden and paid
several visits to the Ashmolean. Here he made the acquaint
ance of an eccentric and appealing character, Mr. Rowell, the
Assistant Keeper.
As a neglected pot-boy serving his time in noisy ale-houses,
a thirst for science seized him and an ardent desire to discover
the nature and course of rain, wind and storm. He is now of
advanced age and complains of his wasted exertions and the
neglect and contempt with which the University Authorities
have treated his experiments and explorations. He at present
is absorbed in an elaborate, descriptive catalogue of the
Museum, but the subject of rain accidentally cropping up,
and seeing that I became interested in his remarks thereon,
his face brightened up and he burst eagerly into descriptions
of his various observations. Seeing that I noticed his enthusi
asm he remarked sadly, C I burnt all my papers and tried to
forget the subject by burying my thoughts in this catalogue,
but with the first mention of the subject all the old love and
excitement come back to me (30 December 1877).
Mr. Rowell lent Poel a pamphlet on "the beneficent distri
bution of the sense of pain." It is difficult to believe that this
was a work of great profundity, but it confirmed Poel s opinions
on the "inability of our intellects to fathom the workings of
Divine intelligence." At the same time he found in his lodgings
a copy of George Lewes Philosophy of the Ancients, and this, he
tells us, "had an important influence on my mind in giving
a wholesome stability to my thoughts."
In March 1877 he visited his brother at Cambridge, where
he was properly impressed by the grandeur of King s, and the
gateway of Trinity. He liked especially "the old red wall
abutting the water of Queen s College with the dilapidated
stone windows, the bay window and the wooden bridge then
the side gateway of Caius College, the market fountain."
In the Fitzwilliam he admired the statuette of "part of a
woman in draperies," and the "shoulder and chest of a man"
by Phidias, and the little clay models in the glass case of the
40 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
first Archaic period. "They almost seem to breathe, and
beneath every fold of drapery one feels the presence of flesh
and blood/ In London, during July, he went to the
Grosvenor Gallery with his sister and had some interesting
comments on Watts s "Love and Death."
I can t help thinking that a striking picture . . . would
and should be imperative to an observer who nevertheless
may be unaware of the cause of the impressiveness, and in this
case I felt that unless I looked at the picture with the artist s
conception in my mind the picture failed utterly to be attrac
tive or impressive (16 July 1877).
He also criticised the neutral tint of the draperies, and com
plained that the idea of "resistless motion" was not sustained
in Watts treatment of the folds. Raphael would have done
it better.
Poel was an avid reader. He found in Lord Byron s Occasional
Pieces "a plaintive music that I can compare with nothing
earthly/ and then adds, a shade sententiously, "What a pity
it was he lacked that spirit of calm, religious philosophy that
has so enhanced the value of Shakespeare s and Wordsworth s
genius" (i July 1877). But the book which most delighted
him was Hazlitt s Table Talk.
The charm in the reading of his essays springs from the
impression given that the writer is writing from a conviction
of the truth and for no other purpose than to declare the truth.
What a pleasure does this give to one searching for truth!
Here is an author not trying to please you, to flatter you, or
to convince you, to fill space, time, paper or make money,
or with a view to being malicious and disagreeable, but only
anxious to speak straight from the heart. . . . How keenly I
felt these words, While a man is contented with himself and
his own resources all is well. When he undertakes to play
a part on the stage and to persuade the world to think more
about him than they do about themselves, he has got into a
track where he will find nothing but briars and thorns, vexa
tion and disappointment 5 (28 March 1877).
Poel was still "searching for truth" when he returned to
Stanhope Place in June 1878, and he now decided to take
lessons in acting. It will always be matter for debate how far
acting can be taught; in this respect the English tradition is
empirical where the French is academic. Poel certainly
THE FORMATIVE YEARS 4 1
believed that the English theatre suffered from a lack of
preliminary grounding the kind of tuition that only a
conservatoire could supply. And he became, in his day, a very
great teacher indeed. But when he first took lessons himself,
he seems to have been sceptical of their value. Within a week
or two of returning home he called on Edward Terry, who
shared his doubts, but it was agreed that he should go one
night and read to him. The result of this audition was that
two days later he took his first lesson, not from Edward Terry
himself, but from Mr. Stirling, at Drury Lane, to whom Terry
had probably recommended him. Stirling took him through
the part of Romeo, but Poel felt that he "wanted more self-
abandonment, more throwing myself into the part, real love,
variety of expression. It is a part that does not come easy to
me" (12 July 1878). A week later they were studying Shylock
together. Poel was already in reaction against the sympathetic
Shylock popularised by Irving. He had been to hear a reading
of The Merchant of Venice by Miss Glyn, and had much liked
her conception of the part. He found it similar to his own :
"not feeble and sympathetic but vigorous and implacable,
the most impenetrable cur that ever lived" (13 July 1878).
Stirling was evidently unprepared for PoePs treatment of the
character, but Poel felt that his intensity had impressed him.
In his account of the interview he seems to foreshadow, for an
instant, the long loneliness of his career.
At any rate the truth was forced upon me that it is useless
to communicate one s ideas to professionals, but that one must
fight resolutely against their sneers and trust alone to the
decision of the public.
Poel studied two other parts with Stirling Mercutio and
Charles Surface. At the end of the final lesson Stirling told
him to tell his father that in his, Stirling s, opinion, he should
certainly continue his stage career. This may be regarded
as a partial judgment; it is the business of teachers to believe
in their pupils. But when, the same evening, he read Mercutio
to Edward Terry, the celebrated actor told him that he had
"improved wonderfully." It is possible, all the same, that
PoeFs critical faculties were now directed upon himself more
severely than hitherto and that he began to doubt whether he
had the talent to justify his perseverance. He had, no doubt,
42 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
picked up some valuable advice from Stirling and Terry, but
it would be mainly useful to him in his direction of other
people. Increasingly, from now onward, it is the critic and
the reformer, even the iconoclast, that speaks in him: He sees
Irving in Vanderdecken and finds him "more mannered and
faulty than ever." He seemed to "lose more and more the
power of characterization," and the day was to come when,
in answer to the question, "What do you think of Irving?"
Poel would reply, "I wouldn t give him five pounds a week,"
then adding, with more justice, "He is wonderful in his way,
but it is not my way." He was not much more favourably
disposed to Ellen Terry whom he went to see in Olivia at the
Court Theatre. "Miss Terry s acting is graceful, but she quite
failed through lack of voice to make her part impressive"
(5 August 1878). Poel s favourite English actress was Marie
Wilton (Mrs. Bancroft). Already, at the age of twenty-six,
he looked at the tradition of Lyceum Shakespeare, enthroned
and sacrosanct, and in company with another rebel a red
headed Irishman called Bernard Shaw prepared, in his own
good time, to challenge it.
CHAPTER II
The Challenge
IT is in many ways a misfortune for the biographer that
PoePs diary stops at this point the point where Edward
Ferry tells him that he has "wonderfully improved" and was
aever afterwards, so far as we know, renewed. We would give
much to overhear his secret thoughts on the people he met and
worked with, and the controversies in which he was engaged.
But the fact that the diary stops is in itself significant. It
marks the point at which Poel gave up wondering what he had
to do and began assiduously to do it. The nature of this
decision can be guessed when we realise that he never after
wards sought another acting engagement; that was the result
of Edward Stirling s tuition and Edward Terry s encourage
ment. He had learnt from them a thing or two about acting
and these he would pass on. But his mind and purpose were
now set elsewhere.
In the winter of 1878 he went on tour in the provinces,
picking up an audience wherever he could, and giving recitals
from Shakespeare, Sheridan, and other classical playwrights.
This was all in tune with his intention to start again at the
beginning. He was convinced that Shakespeare and his
fellow-Elizabethans could not adequately be contained within
the limits of the proscenium stage; that they were harmed by
realistic scenery; and that the rhythm of the plays was destroyed
by the intervals that these accessories- imposed. He had come
to see, and was now incessantly to preach, that Shakespeare the
poet was his own scene painter and electrician. He believed
that although Shakespeare had indeed written for all time, he
had not written out of time; that as he had seen the world
through Elizabethan eyes, so we must recover that vision if we
wished to do him justice. In brief, he believed that the
methods of Shakespearian production then triumphantly in
43
44 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
vogue were totally and radically wrong. And since he was
himself a radical in the deepest fibre of his being, he would set
about, all by himself, to put them right.
A decision of this kind is always heroic. The artist must
turn his back on the easy accommodations of compromise. He
must resist the temptation to say: "I will go quietly, step by
step, so as not to upset people. I will introduce this or that
reform so that they won t notice it. I will make what use I can
of existing conditions. I can only take people as far as they
are willing to be led. There is no value in a voice crying in
the wilderness where no one will listen to you. A surgical
operation often does more harm than good; a slow, curative
treatment may well have a more permanent effect." It is
thus that nine people out of ten, holding the views that Poel
held, would plausibly argue. No one can say what would
have happened if he had been a man of this facile stamp. He
might still have taught some important lessons to the English
theatre. He might have achieved some memorable produc
tions, and held positions of high influence on the stage. He
would certainly have died, or retired, crowned with public
honours and secure in private fortune. When it is said that
Poel was his own worst enemy, that is what is meant. But
there is no sense in saying it, because it was the essence of
Peel s achievement that he remained, intransigently, the man
he was. His work, though it was based on a theory, was far
more than theoretical. It was the effect, highly practical
within its limits, of a total, an integrated personality. It was
an achievement of character, even of difficult character, before
it was an achievement of intelligence.
^ In other words, Pod s genius was prophetic, and it was
inseparable from the purity of his gospel. How far this gospel
was true will always be argued about; how far his preaching
of it was marred by wilfal eccentricity will be discussed in
these pages. But you only had to work with Poel for ten
minutes to realise that his eccentricity was not to be corrected
by criticism And the reason was clear. Poel was a man with
a vision. He was to walk through all his life holding fixed
before his inward eye something that no one else saw quite
^ ! ?t ^ WaS n0t an idea that could be trimmed and
adapted by discussion; it was a view of art, which was funda-
THE CHALLENGE 45
mentally a view of life, and it had to be accepted or rejected
as a whole.
There was never any point in objecting that this or that thing
that he wanted you to do was manifestly absurd. If it was not
absurd to him, he would not mind he would not see the
absurdity. If you got a good notice for a performance, he was
equally indifferent. "They would never have said you were
good/ he once told an actor, "if you had done what I told
you." He would rather you did imperfectly what he wanted
you to do, than carry off successfully some quite other effect.
This complete indifference to ridicule may be merely the mark
of the eccentric; but it may also be the signature of the saint.
The saints have always seemed absurd to the sensible and
the worldly-wise. And Poel had in him I cannot insist
upon this too strongly a stuff analogous to sanctity. I mean
that his entire action was founded on the belief that what other
people accepted as normal was nonsense, and that what they
rejected as ridiculous was true.
The more recent history of the theatre suggests an interesting
parallel to Poel. When Jacques Copeau abandoned his work
at the Vieux Colombier and retired with a handful of adherents
to a small village in Burgundy, his warmest admirers thought
that he had gone mad. Why had he neglected his productions
in Paris in order to found a school of innocents among the
vineyards of the Cote d Or? What value could these un
sophisticated jongleurs possess beside the Jouvets, the Dullins,
the Valentine Tessiers, who had made the Vieux Colombier
the darling of intellectual Paris ? At the time when Poel set
out on his mission there was nothing comparable to the Vieux
Colombier in the London theatre; there has been nothing
comparable to it since. But at the back of his mind there was
an instinct similar to Copeau s decision for flight. There was
the same desire to recover an ancient purity for the stage, even
if this involved some loss of present accomplishment. There
was the same belief that the commercialism of the modern
theatre forbade the kind of work he wanted to do. There
was the same readiness to cut loose, once and for all, and to
accept the consequences without complaint or cavil. When I
visited Copeau in his retreat near Beaune during the summer
of 1945, I was powerfully struck by the resemblance between
46 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
the ideas and the destinies of these two men. And when I
called to mind the freedom of Poel s platform-stage, I under
stood the point of Copeau s famous exclamation : Donnez-moi
un plateau nu."
Poel s life is so completely of a piece, it is so dominated by an
overmastering vision, that it is not easy to reconstruct in
chronological terms. He went on to the end saying exactly the
same things, often in the very same words. He was patient
and tireless in controversy, scrupulous in scholarship, unshakable
in purpose, and quite empty of personal ambition. We have
the impression that once he had decided what he wanted to
do, he never gave another thought to himself. And if the
keeping of a diary generally indicates a certain degree of
self-regard, the silence of Poel about his inmost thoughts may
be read as a sharp alteration of perspective. Nevertheless,
those passages of early introspection are valuable for a study
of his character. They show him more soberly, though not
less fundamentally, critical, than he was sometimes afterwards
to appear.
It is the definition of a radical as distinct, very often, from
a revolutionary that he goes down to the roots of things, not
that he pulls them up. Poel s work in the theatre may be
compared to a drastic pruning; the rose-bush was stripped
bare and cut short in order that it might produce, in time, more
splendid blooms. And so, having familiarised himself with
the plays he intended one day to produce for I think we can
take his winter tour of recitals in 1878 as an exercise in self-
education he proceeded in June 1879 to form a small
company of "professional ladies and gentlemen whose efforts
are specially directed towards creating a more general taste
for the study of Shakespeare." He called these "The Eliza
bethans" and they toured the country during the summer
months giving costume recitals from the plays. No doubt
Poel had prepared his audiences for this during the preceding
winter, and it was with "The Elizabethans" in mind that he
had made the preliminary tour alone.
"The Elizabethans" described themselves as "Shakesperian
Students," and among the towns they visited, playing in
rooms and small halls, were Newport, Buxton, Derby,
Oswestry, Shrewsbury, Burton, and Rotherham. They gave
THE CHALLENGE 47
scenes from Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear,
The Merchant of Venice, The Hunchback, The Iron Chest, The Rivals,
and Eugene Aram. It was, in fact, quite a Lyceum repertoire.
Poel won praise from the local critics, whose taste is not
usually very exacting, for his performance of Bob Acres and
Romeo, and for his rendering of The Dream of Eugene Aram.
The evening concluded, after the fashion of those days, with
"a humourous Sketch, arranged from Cervantes celebrated
novel, DON QUIXOTE, when will be shown the Extraordinary
Flight of the Knight and his Squire upon a WOODEN HORSE."
In Derby those wishing for reserved seats (accurately described
as chairs) were requested to apply to the Schoolmaster. This
suggests that the performances were often given in schools.
Foci s company cannot have been a very large one, since we
are informed in his circular that "with the assistance of a
gentleman and a lady, Mr. Poel can give, in appropriate
Costume, the following Dramatic entertainment."
The very simple conditions of these performances threw the
actors back upon the text, and Poel himself was forced to
compare the acting editions of Shakespeare then in use with
the original versions of the plays. He was made to realise
how much had intervened since these had left the hands of
the stage manager in the Globe or Blackfriars Theatre. It
was not merely a question of cuts or traditional "business";
it was a question of literary editors preparing a text for publica
tion, setting up their own system of punctuation and arranging
their own division of the play into acts and scenes. The
Shakespeare who met the student in 1879 was a Shakespeare
trimmed for the study; he bore little trace of the swift, con
tinuous rhythm, and the boisterous hurly-burly of the Eliza
bethan stage. If a performance was to be given as Shakespeare
might have seen it, it was essential, first, to establish an
authentic text; to go back as close as possible to the original
representation
With this in mind Poel wrote the following autumn (23
October 1880) to Dr. F. J. Furnivall, the President of the New
Shakspere Society, offering to deliver a paper on the Acting
Editions of Shakespeare. He was only twenty-eight years old
and he was as little known in the world of scholarship as he
was in the world of the stage. But those who knew him then
48 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
have described him as, already, a man "possessed." His
family, too, as we have seen, moved in cultivated circles and
this would have helped to ensure that his initiative was not
ignored. He wrote with some experience of provincial custom,
pointing out to Furnivall that one of the editions then in
common use retained David Garrick s version of Romeo and
Juliet, which had "no right to be called Shakespeare s tragedy
at all." Furnivall accepted Poel s offer and the paper was
given the following June. But at the time he proposed it Poel
can hardly have realised how fortunate a moment he had
chosen. For only a few months earlier William Griggs had
published his facsimile editions of the first and second Quartos
of Hamlet (1603 and 1604 respectively) with forewords by
Furnivall himself. The hour had indeed struck for the
Elizabethan revival.
Poel naturally pounced upon these while he was preparing
his lecture, and so stirred was he by his study of them that he
wrote the following letter to Furnivall on the i February 1881 :
I need hardly say how delighted I was to be able to read
these first two editions of the play. If to the literary student
the Quarto of 1604 has the chief interest, I feel sure that to an
actor the Quarto of 1603 has an equal interest, because
however misrepresented the text may be, the actor cannot help
recognising that the Editor has endeavoured to reproduce the
play as he saw it represented and therefore in the arrangement
of the scenes, the stage directions, the omissions, and the altera
tions, there is much to guide and instruct him in the stage
representation of the play as it appeared in Shakespeare s time.
There was so much that was new and interesting to me, from
a dramatic point of view, in the first Quarto, that I could not
help thinking, if the printer s blunders could be corrected, a
performance of the Quarto might be of some interest to
students. I have spoken to many of my friends about it and
also to Miss Phipson who suggested my writing to you and
asking if you thought the first Quarto as a literary composition
too imperfect for a stage representation, My idea would be
to have it played by amateurs so as to avoid much expense,
and if it was thought the performance would excite any
interest to make it a public one.
Poel was to amplify these arguments in a programme note
to his second production of the First Quarto version (Carpen
ters Hall, 21 February 1900).
THE CHALLENGE 49
Presuming that the First Folio version was the Globe
Playhouse acting edition of the play, and that the Second
Quarto (allowing for printer s omissions) is Shakespeare s
perfect work printed from his own manuscript, we have in the
First Quarto a deliberate tampered version of the Globe
Playhouse copy, reconstructed and compressed with consider
able practical knowledge of stage requirements, a knowledge
that shows the skill of the actor or stage manager, and not that
of the poet or dramatist. Improved as the version of the
First Quarto undoubtedly is in dramatic construction of a
practical kind, it cannot be believed that the "improvements"
were sanctioned by Shakespeare or appealed to his sympathies.
Still, it is probable that a shorter version of so popular a play
as Hamlet (shorter than that of the First Folio), was needed
by Shakespeare s actors for representation in the provinces,
or the Palace, and further research may prove that it is this
shorter, reconstructed version which the compiler of the First
Quarto saw. For as regards the first Quarto in its relation to
the Second Quarto, while there is no indication in the former
of any knowledge of the additional lines which are to be found
in the latter, there is evidence that the compiler of the First
Quarto had an intimate knowledge of the First Folio Hamlet,
without the help of which it is to be doubted if the com
pression of Act IV, so skilfully contrived in the First Quarto
could have been done.
Poel argued that the language of the First Quarto had
all the marks of being Shakespeare s language imperfectly
reported :
that the very errors due to the actor s delivery or to the
reporter s notes, are in themselves instructive. For there
are many sins of commission which were apparently made by
the speaker of Shakespeare s lines, those actors liberties which
are so often taken with the author s language; such as the
interpolation of exclamations, the "Ay, father," "Oh, I have it,"
"the better the better" and the repetition of sentences such as
"to a nunnery go, to a nunnery go." Again we have the
transposition of the text occurring just where the actor would
be likely to misplace his words, as of Hamlet s lines with the
Ghost and again in the play scenes, and the interpolation of
lines in a later scene that should have been spoken in an
earlier one, or the introduction of a line from another play
where the actor s memory has failed to retain any of the
words, an illustration of which occurs in the speech of Corambis
(Polonius) :
Such men often prove
Great in their words, but little in their love,
50 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
when the actor may have been thinking of Viola s words:
For still we prove
Much in our vows but little in our love.
All actors who have served in a stock company, where the
playbill has been changed nightly, know how easily these
mistakes are made.
Another instructive feature of the First Quarto was the stage
directions. The reporter would obviously put down what he
had seen in performance rather than what may have been
indicated in the author s script. If the Ghost entered Gertrude s
bedchamber "in his nightgown," this would explain Hamlet s
remark that he was "in his habit as he lived." If the King,
Queen, Laertes and the other lords followed Ophelia s corpse
"with a Priest after the coffin," who refused to approach the
grave, this would show to what extent the rites were "maimed."
It was also suggestive that only in the Play scene was the
King s entrance accompanied by a "flourish." The play had
evidently been produced as a domestic rather than a historical
tragedy.
Furnivall accepted Poel s suggestion, and on the afternoon
of 1 6 April 1 88 1 his first Elizabethan production was given on
a bare, draped platform at St. George s Hall. On any reckon
ing this was a historic date in the annals of the English theatre,
but it was at the same time obscure to the point of clandestinity.
This was the way with many of Poel s productions; they
seemed contrived to make as little noise as possible. When
we read of an historic theatrical occasion we think of Kean as
Shylock and Irving in The Bells , we think of Mrs. Patrick
Campbell in The Second Mrs. Tanquerqy. We expect to hear
of a great artist arrived at the zenith of his powers and exploding
into public fame. There was nothing of all this in Poel s
production of the First Quarto Hamlet. We have no reason
to suppose that the performance was even a tolerably good one.
Poel himself played Hamlet, and though he must have looked
the part to perfection, he simply had not the power to interpret
it. The Academy, which had shown itself well disposed to the
performance in general, put the matter kindly in the course
of a scholarly review :
He looked the pale and thoughtful student to the life, and
in some passages moved his audience to warm applause; but
THE CHALLENGE 5!
his voice and he were hardly up to the requirements of the
part who indeed is? and his emphasis was sometimes
faulty (23 April 1881).
Ophelia was played by Maud Holt, afterwards Lady Tree,
and those who remember her acting in later years will easily
reconstruct the mindless beauty and vacant pathos of her
performance. But the other members of the cast were all
amateurs Bernard Partridge, the celebrated cartoonist of
Punchy played Laertes and the critic of the Saturday Review
stated that, as a whole, they "displayed the airy confidence of
ineptitude/ Button Cook was interested by the appearance of
Fortinbras, "a character usually omitted from ordinary acting
editions of the tragedy," but went on to say:
the attitude of the general audience was one of apathy tinc
tured by a disposition to deride. ... To many the performance
was very wearisome and depressing; while a strong feeling
prevailed that, upon the whole, the experiment was of an
absurd and reprehensible sort, involving, as it did necessarily,
some degradation of the poet in whose honour it purported
to be undertaken (Nights at the Play II, 314-16: 1883).
In a word, the note of theatrical triumph was conspicuously
absent. A friendly writer remarked that "the critics had no
sympathy with an experiment the nature of which they did not
understand." But the full brunt of their ridicule fell on
Dr. Furnivall, whose emendations of the text, and in particular
of the famous soliloquy, were thus parodied in Punch .
To be, or not to be? There you are, don tcherknow !
To die, to sleep! Is that all? Forty winks?
To sleep, to dream! Ah, that s about the size of it!
For from that forty winks when we awake
In the undiscovered cotton-night-cap country
From which no passenger ever took a return ticket
Why ah, yes humphexactly very much so !
Nevertheless the performance was historical, not because it
announced the maturity of a new artist but because it an
nounced the birth of a new idea. Writing many years later,
Poel claimed that it was "the first revival of the draped stage
in this country or elsewhere." This is not quite accurate;
52 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
there had been a quasi-Elizabethan production of The Taming
of the Shrew, given by Benjamin Webster at the Haymarket in
1844 and again in 1847. This had been played without
scenery in the sense that the play proper had been acted in
Christopher Sly s chamber, and Sly himself had remained on
the stage throughout. But the Induction had been played
with full scenic accessories.
For all intents and purposes, however, Poel s claim was
justified. There was no vestige of scenery, not even placards
telling the audience where they were supposed to be. There
was no interval, and played thus, the performance lasted for
two hours. The "dumb-show," acted on a raised platform,
was included another daring innovation; the Player Queen
was taken by a boy; and Ophelia, in her mad scene, carried a
lute instead of the customary flowers. We do not know if Poel
had yet had the inspired notion of her finding a feather on the
ground and presenting it as rosemary and rue. He maintained
that the Queen would not have so elaborately described
Ophelia s floral weeds, a few minutes later, if the audience had
already seen them.
Ten years after, in one of many letters to The Era, Poel gave
his ideas on the interpretation of Hamlet, and it is at least
reasonable to suppose that some of these were illustrated by
the performance of the First Quarto. Hamlet s familiar talk,
he maintained, was the tersest and raciest in the English
language," but he complained that this side of his character
was never shown on the stage. His badinage was delivered
with a tragic solemnity that bordered on the ridiculous.
He should not rail at Ophelia in the "nunnery" scene; he
should not be tender with his mother in the "closet" scene; in
the churchyard scene he should appear in sailor s dress; the
King should himself break off the play-scene in confusion, and
not be driven off by Hamlet; Polonius is the essence of genteel
foppishness, ceaselessly chattering. In the mad scene, Ophelia
should move from one person to another, unconscious of what
she was saying, where she was going or to whom she was
speaking. The introduction of Fortinbras at the end is essential.
The distant sound of drums, the tramp of soldiers, the gradual
filling of the stage with them, the shouts of the crowd outside
and the entrance of Fortinbras are materials for a fine stage
picture, a strong dramatic contrast. Life in the midst of death.
THE CHALLENGE 53
Was not this Shakespeare s conception? The play of Hamlet
has not yet been done justice to on the English stage (30 April
1892).
This famous production at St. George s Hall was of course
designed to illustrate, in advance, the lecture which Poel was
to deliver in June. Replying to his critics (the first of how
many replies) he writes to The Era as follows, only a week after
the performance:
The question, as it appears to me, is not so much a com
parison of Quarto I with the play made familiar to the public
through our stage version, as with Quarto II, which shows us
Hamlet as it finally left Shakespeare s hand. . . . Quarto I
represents more truly his dramatic conception than either Quarto
II or our stage version. Accepting Quarto I as Shakespeare s
first draft of the play (though clumsily pirated as to language)
I think one ought to arrange a stage version from the authentic
text upon the lines laid down in Quarto I rather than sacrifice
dramatic coherence for the sake of bringing in all the beautiful
passages.
Here Poel was on very controversial ground. If it was
thought necessary to reduce the play to two or even three
hours playing time, then cuts were of course essential, and it
was reasonable that they should be made with the First
Quarto in mind. It was better to have a carefully edited
version of the First Quarto than the average stage version
trimmed to suit the vanity of the leading actor and the senti
mentality of the Victorian audience. But it was quite another
thing to suggest that the final text of the play, as it has come
down to us in the Folio and Second Quarto versions, is un-
dramatic and that some of the "beautiful" speeches had better
be left out. It was specious to make this arbitrary distinction
between a literary and philosophic, and a theatrical Shake
speare. No one who has seen the unabridged Hamlet at the
Old Vic will agree that it is undramatic. On the contrary,
much that is confused in the play becomes clear; and although
the performance is in fact longer by about three quarters of an
hour than the normal playing version, it does not seem so.
The complexity of the play demands this tempo and this
elbowroom; they give us that sense of life s ebb and flow of
which Poel himself was afterwards to speak. Both for the
54 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
audience who watch, and for the actor who plays the leading
part and here I can speak in both capacities the unabridged
Hamlet is at once more intelligible and less tiring.
But on the main issue Quarto II versus the usual acting
editions Poel s position was unassailable. The acting versions
cut anything up to a thousand lines and more, and omitted
the characters of Voltimand, Cornelius, Reynaldo, a gentle
man, and even Fortinbras. "In Quarto II," said Poel in his
lecture,
I see a play constructed for the purpose of showing us
types of character contrasted one with the other. Strong men,
weak men, old men, fond women, all living and moving under
the influence of a destiny that is above them. I see also a
Danish Court in which a terrible crime has been committed,
and because the influence of good in this Court is too weak to
conquer the evil, the sword falls on the good as well as on the
evil, on the weak as well as on the strong. It is the play as
the epitome of life, as the history of mankind that you feel is
interesting the mind of Shakespeare, and not the career of one
individual, even though the whole play be influenced by the
actions of that individual. Look at the first Quarto and we
have a proof of this. Mutilated as that version is, care has
been taken to keep the story of the play complete (Poel MSS.
Collection).
In the usual acting version Poel especially criticised the
cutting out of the ends of the scenes in order that the actor
might get a "hand" on his exit. This encouraged him to
make his points with exaggerated emphasis, thus distorting
the play and delaying its progress. Poel pointed out the value
of Hamlet s earlier entrance in Act II, Scene 2 ; if he caught
sight of Polonius hurrying the King and Queen off the stage,
this would account for his suspicions. An Elizabethan Hamlet
is now quite usual, but it was a shock for people accustomed to
Nordic decor and costumes to be told that "Shakespeare s
thoughts were not in Denmark when he wrote this play."
It is customary today for Hamlet to suspect, from a movement
of the arras, that he is being spied upon during the scene with
Ophelia and this is taken to justify the violence with which
most actors bid her go her ways to a nunnery. Poel did
not approve of the violence, and he showed that the movement
THE CHALLENGE 55
of the arras was unnecessary if the direction of the Second
Quarto were followed and Hamlet actually saw the King and
Polonius concealing themselves. He maintained, too, that the
reproach, "I have heard of your paintings, too," might have
been directed generally against those married women who
conducted themselves like the Queen, not against Ophelia at
all. If the Dumb-Show were retained, as we know it was
retained at the performance at St. George s Hall, it would
prevent the actor rising to his climax at the lines: "He poisons
him in the garden for his estate, etc." These should be spoken
to the Court and not to the King; the last thing Hamlet would
want was to drive Claudius prematurely from the play. It
was when the King heard him explain to the other spectators
that presently they would see how the murderer got the love
of Gonzago s wife it was then that he broke up the assembly,
not wishing them on any account to see it. Again it was
senseless to keep in "O my offence is rank . . ." and to cut
"Now might I do it pat, now he is praying." In the church
yard scene Hamlet should appear, not in his recognisable
sable black, but in the disguise of a common sailor. The
absence of religious ceremony at Ophelia s funeral should be
sufficiently evident to warrant his reference to "maimed rites,"
and Poel suggested that her coffin should be borne by soldiers
and not by monks. When he produced the Second Quarto
in 1914, it was, in fact, borne by waiting gentlewomen. To
the hackneyed question whether Hamlet was mad, Poel was
to reply in 1912, in a letter to The Westminster Gazette (6 Feb.)
but his thought had such a close consistency that the-following
probably represents the intention of his own performance
in 1881.
If Hamlet is mad, who in the play is saner? Certainly not
the King who is a murderer; nor the Queen who is an adulteress
in intention if not in deed; nor the senile Polonius; nor the
brainless Ophelia; nor her boastful brother! There is only
left Horatio who, not being passion s slave, looked on life
calmly and probably with indifference. Every honest soul
who is as sensitive and as emotional as Hamlet is liable to be
considered mad.
In discussing W. F. Trench s Shakespeare s Hamlet, a New
Commentary (1913), Poel developed this idea that there would
56 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
have been nothing mysterious about Hamlet to the Elizabethan
mind, because he could have been "seen daily at Elizabeth s
Court." He would have been "no enigma to those who knew
how brilliant and how ready for good or for evil were the talents
of those rival noblemen whose fame and use in life were
dependent on the Queen s capricious favour" (Athenaum,
21 June 1913). Poel believed that criticism had gone astray
in concentrating too exclusively on the character of Hamlet
himself, to the neglect of his environment. He rather cavalierly
brushed aside the Ghost s "thy almost blunted purpose" as
evidence of chronic procrastination, and held that Hamlet s
inaction was due to a genuine doubt in reason and conscience
as to whether the King s death would be in accordance with
the Divine Will. He based this belief on Act V, Scene 2, 63-70.
Does it not, thinks t thee, stand me now upon
He that hath kill d my king and whor d my mother,
Popped in between the election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage is t not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is t not to be damn d
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil ?
Here Poel was arguing from the question-marks; but the
argument invited the reply. "What about the confirmation
sought and obtained in the Play Scene? What about the
casuistry of Now might I do it pat? How could the determination
to send Claudius 5 soul to hell be squared with a doubt as to
whether his death would be agreeable to Divine Providence ?
What is How all occasions, admitted by Poel himself to be the
key speech of the play, but an examination of conscience,
because Hamlet had not done what he deeply believed to be
his duty?" For Poel, however, Hamlet was a drama of revenge
before it was a puzzle in psychology. He saw it as a parallel
play to Richard II, with a similar opposition between a sensitive
prince and an unscrupulous usurper. "Until," he argued, "we
can trace back to the King the many tragic misfortunes of the
play, commentators will fail to show us the true meaning of
Shakespeare s Hamlet: A new Claudius rather than a new
Hamlet would be the keynote of Poel s production of the
Second Quarto in 1914, and I shall discuss this in its place.
THE CHALLENGE 57
Many, but not all, of Poel s ideas on Hamlet have now been
adopted by theatrical custom; it is important, however, to see
how he arrived at them. He arrived at them, not in the way
that many modern producers arrive at their novelties; not by
saying "What can we do with this scene that has never been
done before?", not by thinking up some bizarre explanation
for perfectly explicable behaviour. He arrived at them by the
simple expedient of reading the play. Instead of saying:
"This is where we want a big effect," he sat down and tried
to find out what effect a literal fidelity to Shakespeare would
produce. He was not interested in big effects; he was only
interested in effects that were significant.
It will now be clear in what sense the performance at St.
George s Hall was historic. It was historic in the sense that it
was seminal. There is nothing new today in Hamlet being
performed in curtains; there is nothing sensational in the
appearance of Fortinbras. No one will raise an eyebrow if
you suggest that Hamlet is a play drenched in Renaissance
thought, or that while Hamlet should never behave like an
actor, there is every reason why he should, on occasion,
behave like a cad. The romantic Hamlet is now the reaction
ary Hamlet, and the sentimental Hamlet is obsolete. These
changes might never have come about if William Poel
had not had the startlingly original idea of reading the play
as if he had just borrowed the prompter s copy from the
Globe Theatre. He was on the side of logic against prejudice,
of common sense against theatrical convention. But his
arguments were little noted at the time. During this same
spring of 1 88 1 Irving and Booth were alternating Othello
and lago at the Lyceum, and all London was flocking to see
two consummate lagos defeat, in each case, their Moorish
opponent. lago was probably Irving s finest performance
and one guesses that even Poel might have approved of it.
But it was at St. George s Hall that a first blow had been
struck for Shakespeare s integrity. No modern producer
pays any attention to the old acting versions in vogue when
Poel started his reforms; but we who have seen a far more
flagrant travesty of Shakespeare s play exhibited on the screen
have no right to conclude that, even now, the battle has
decisively been won.
58 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
II
The First Quarto performance had little immediate effect;
and the following years must have sorely tried the patience
of this intrepid reformer. Only an unshakable inner certitude
sustained him. He set about, first, to elaborate and define
his doctrine; to test it, not as yet by experiment, but
by comparing the Shakespearian performance of his
vision with those he saw, or suffered, on the London stage.
They were so manifestly wrong that some other way must
surely be right. In 1884, however, he records with pleasure
a visit to the Princess s Theatre where Wilson Barrett was
giving a better acting version of Hamlet than had hitherto been
seen, and where many of the suggestions Poel had made in his
lecture to the New Shakspere Society had been adopted*
Meanwhile he never lost sight of the theatre as a whole; of its
present degradation and its possible dignity. Here he was not
without practical experience, for in October 1881 Miss Emma
Cons appointed him manager of the Royal Victoria Coffee
Hall (now the Old Vic ) which had been opened in the
previous December "with the view of providing amusement
free from the temptation of drink and other evils by which
ordinary Music Halls do so much mischief (Circular issued
by the Guarantee Committee, early 1882). Poel held this
appointment till Christmas 1883. During these two years he
reduced the expenses of management, raised the tone of
the entertainments, and attracted larger audiences to the Hall.
The programmes included Variety Shows, a Ballad Concert
on Thursdays, a Penny Reading every Friday, and an enter
tainment for children on Saturday afternoons. It is an
extraordinary comment on theatrical affairs that Poel should
never have directed a production at the Old Vic when it had
ceased to be a house of Variety and had become a home for
Shakespeare.
But these two years left a permanent mark upon his charac
ter. "I remember how it came to me," he told Harold Begbie
many years later
entering my father s house late at night and sometimes early
in the morning, fresh from contact with poverty and want and
suffering all those things which disfigure life and make
THE CHALLENGE 59
existence so ugly and so terrible how it came home to me,
the frightful contrast, the awful difference, between the lives
of the rich and the lives of the poor. I was haunted by that
feeling, ridden by it, and could not be easy under it. And ever
since those days I have striven to change the dramatic world,
to alter life on the stage as we know it, to make it what obviously
it should be, and what plainly it must one day become, an
experience of the spirit of man evolving through beauty and
knowledge towards the fullness and perfection of existence
(Interview in The Daily Chronicle; 3 Sept. 1913).
He left the Royal Victoria Hall at Christmas 1883 an d for
the next six months worked as Stage Manager with F. R.
Benson. Here, no doubt, he found much to criticise but much
also to admire, for Benson was not only himself an actor of
remarkable quality an inspired amateur, he has sometimes
been called but he was a born leader of men and he had
gathered round him, already, a brilliant company of actors.
For a man like Poel, who was dominated by a single idea,
practical experience was an essential, a saving grace. It was
important for him to realise what actors were like; how far
they were malleable; where, in any particular case, the Kne
had to be drawn between personality and impersonation. He
had to learn what could or could not be done for Shakespeare
within the limits of the proscenium arch; he had to guess how
far you could induce in a modern audience an Elizabethan
frame of mind. He had never before worked with actors as
good as the Benson company, and they helped to keep him
in touch with the hard, capable, often unimaginative core
of the profession.
Many years later, in a speech which he was too indisposed
to deliver, he recalled his days with Benson.
It was a delightful experience, if not a long one, for the
atmosphere was not in the least Elizabethan. The Benson
Worthies lived in the open air. They were frank and gay by
temperament. Of princely intrigues and prelatical inquisitions
they knew nothing and cared less. For their arduous duties
on the stage they prepared themselves by severe exercises in
the playing-fields. The leader himself of this happy band of
Arcadians was a typical Greek in nobility of thought, in
seriousness of purpose, in physical fitness and energy, a worthy
model for the chisel of a Phidias. At the age of twenty-three,
60 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
as a young graduate fresh from college, his costume consisted
of a flannel shirt, a grey pea-jacket, cricketing trousers, no cap
and a red necktie. That necktie proclaimed his political
opinions. He was a disciple of William Morris. He followed
in the footsteps of that apostle of radicalism, who believed
that it was Greek civilisation and its democratic form of
government which enabled art to flourish at Athens. It was
in the early eighties that I first heard spoken by Benson those
memorable words of Morris, Commercialism and competi
tion have sown the wind recklessly, and must reap the whirl
wind (Poel MSS. Collection).
Poel was not without influence on his fellow Bensonians.
He gave Henry Herbert, who was a member of the company,
the idea of playing front scenes in front of green velvet
curtains instead of painted front-cloths, and Herbert restored
much that was normally cut out of the plays by Benson himself.
At the same time Poel was writing plays of his own. They
were not good plays, but they probably taught him something
about stagecraft. Most of them were one-act comediettas and
adaptations, and two of these he had produced himself at the
King s Cross Theatre on 29 June 1880. But he wrote a number
of longer ones; Priest or Painter, adapted from W. D. Howells
novel "A Foregone Conclusion," which Benson took on tour,
and Equality Jack, a musical play adapted from a story by
Captain Marryat and produced with music by W. S. Vinning
on 28 Feb. 1891. In 1885 Poel formed the "Little Comedies"
company, afterwards to be known as "Poel and Berlyn s
Drawing-Room Comedy Company/ which gave recitals and
performances of one-act plays at private "At Homes" and
"Charities." This company, which at one time included
Kate Rorke, Rosina Filippi, and Elizabeth Robins all
extremely fine actresses continued to give entertainments of
the same kind for years. There is nothing, we note, remotely
highbrow about this marginal activity of Poel s. His plays,
which have no kind of literary distinction, were designed in *
their very modest way merely to edify and to entertain.
The affairs of the Royal Victoria Coffee Hall had not
prospered since he left, and in October 1884 he gave a lecture
before the Church and Stage Guild, in which he claimed that
"religious people had neglected their duty in this matter.
The present theatres and music halls in the East End and
THE CHALLENGE 6 1
transpontine districts of London were little better than public
houses. . . . The Victoria Coffee Hall had failed because it
aimed too high and had drawn in a different audience, glad
to get for 3d. in the New Gut what would cost them one
shilling in St. James s Hall." And in a lecture given in January
1885 before the Liberal Social Union, Poel stated that "thous
ands of pounds had been lost in the Victoria Coffee Hall
because the Committee thought first of providing entertain
ment of an educational character and ignored the wishes of
the audience. The advantages of any scheme were doubtful
in which not the people themselves but the charitably inclined
were the prime movers." The very naivete of PoePs own
dramatic works may have sprung from this desire not to talk
above the heads of his audience.
When the serious business of Elizabethan reform was in
question, Poel never lacked a pulpit. He assisted regularly at
the discussions of the New Shakspere Society, sometimes
reading a paper himself. He wrote to the newspapers. He
lectured wherever anyone would offer him a platform. Nothing
escaped his criticism or his comment. Slowly, in the face of
mounting incredulity, his views became known. Since these
never changed throughout his working lifetime, it would seem
better to discuss them as a whole as an integral body of
theatrical dogma and then see how they were applied to the
plays he chose to interpret. They are conveniently sum
marised in his two volumes of collected papers, Shakespeare in
the Theatre (1913), and in Monthly Letters* (1929), and elabor
ated in the personal correspondence and journalistic activity
of a lifetime.
Poel, we have seen, had begun by going back to the text
and his primary concern was always how the text should be
spoken. If we could recover the secret of Elizabethan speech,
we should have a clearer idea of how a play by Shakespeare
was meant to sound. And his purpose in going back to the
First Quarto was to get as near as he could to the Prompt
*Poel edited a series of single-sheet leaflets which were distributed monthly
between 1916 and 1919, first to members of the London Shakespeare League
(see p. 288) and then to selected persons. There were 52 letters in all. Extracts
from these were published, with later material, under the same title, Monthly Letters,
by T. Werner Laurie in 1929. Further selections from the original leaflets may
be found in the Poel MSS. collection.
62 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Book. He had proved, by experiment, that if you acted a
Shakespeare play without intervals and no intervals or act
divisions were indicated either in the First or Second Quarto
Texts it was no mere figure of speech to talk about the "two
hours traffic of our stage." But the Elizabethan actor
must have possessed, besides, a secret of rapid and natural
delivery which had now been lost. In an argument with
Sydney Carroll, Poel quoted the old Elizabethan actor
who had exclaimed, "Oh, the times when my tongue hath
run as fast upon the scene as a Windebankis from over the
ocean!" He reminded Mr. Carroll that " German actors in
those days complained that Englishmen on the stage did not
declaim but merely prattled " (Letter to The Sunday Times;
14 Oct. 1920). Poel was concerned to find this via media between
the slavish following of the iambic te-tum-te-tum and the heresy
that if you wanted Shakespeare s poetry to sound natural, all
you had to do was to treat it as if it were prose. Poel s method
was much simpler than he made it appear and it can be
defined in two of his own phrases exaggerated naturalness"
and "tuned tones." By this he meant that just as Shakespeare s
characters themselves talked with an "exaggerated natural
ness," so the actor should do likewise; and by "tuned tones"
he merely meant that any speech which was to carry and have
significance must be inflected.
The flat tones of normal English conversation make this
difficult for the average English actor. His speech is not
naturally vivacious and coloured. The Elizabethans must have
spoken with a variety of rhythm and emphasis much more
characteristic of the best French or Italian actors than of their
own Victorian posterity. Moreover, it was easy for them to
do this without offending the modesty of nature, since no
member of an audience at the Globe Theatre was more than
about thirty feet from the actor speaking from the front of
the main platform. The modern theatre, by contrast, imposes
the necessity of projection. Yet the three-storeyed horseshoe,
to which the Victorian audience was accustomed, was intimacy
itself compared to the New Theatre at Oxford or the latest
Sadlers Wells. A wise decision has reserved c The Wells for
Ballet and Opera, but it is difficult to understand how the
governors of the Old Vic, not to mention Miss Baylis herself,
THE CHALLENGE 63
who had imbibed, mainly through Robert Atkins, the essentials
of Poel s teaching, could have sanctioned a building so inimical
to speech of any kind whatever.
At the time when Poel was beginning his reforms, most
actors not only spoke slowly but gave the effect of slowness.
Poel had learnt from Charles Mathews that it was possible to
speak slowly and yet give the effect of speed. He put his
point of view very clearly in a letter to The Saturday Review
(31 July 1909).
As with all the other arts, so it is with good acting, its
excellence lies in restraint and in knowing what to surrender.
If elocution is to imitate nature, a dozen or more words must
be sacrificed so that one word may predominate and thus give
the keynote to the tune of the whole sentence. In this way
only can the sound be made to echo the sense. But the last
thing, apparently, the actor cares to do is to give up making
every word tell. Redundancy of emphasis is his besetting sin,
especially in the speaking of verse. Thus Shakespeare, without
elaborate scenic accessories, is unattractive on our stage,
because our actors rarely bring intelligence to what they are
saying. . . . Only recently at a West End theatre, a leading
actor of repute spoke the following words of Macbeth thus :
or why
Upon this BLASTED heath you stop our way
With such prophetic greeting?
All these words in italics were inflected besides a double
emphasis on the word blasted. . . . The speech as spoken
conveyed no sense to the listener. . . . There are three words
only that need inflecting in the sentence ( why, stop and
prophetic ) with the emphasis either on stop or prophetic.
If these three words are rapped out and heard distinctly, the
listener knows what the rest of the sentence means, and the
whole can be said very quickly. Of course to speak rapidly
on the stage and clearly at the same time requires not only a
flexible voice but severe training in exercises. . . . Compared
to the French or the Germans the English are bad listeners
when they get inside a theatre.
It is often said that Shakespeare was an actor and that his
plays were written to be performed. But what does this mean ?
It means that Shakespeare must have had a profound under
standing of the actor s art. He must have known that a large
part of his skill consisted not merely in expressing what had
been put down but in supplying what had been left out. The
64 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
actor often had a choice, and to choose he must exercise
his instinct and his intelligence. PoeFs argument can be
followed in his Monthly Letters (1929, p. 20). He would quote
the example of Talma who had said "The hunting for the
key-word gives you the eyes of a lynx in searching all the
corners of a sentence, and compels you to study closely the
thought of an author and to weigh all his words. " Or again
Goquelin: "When I have to create a part, I begin reading the
play with the greatest attention five or six times." In this
matter of leaving out there was a lesson for the literary drama
tist who, like the over-emphatic actor, was fond of putting
everything in. Poel took the ordinary sentence "Are you
going out today?" and pointed out that, as it appears, its
meaning is obscure. It was for the actor to clarify it by laying
his stress on you or out or today, according to the dramatic
context. When a manager told an aspiring dramatist that his
words "won t speak," he usually meant that there were too
many of them.
But had Shakespeare left the actor a clue? By going back,
not this time to the Quartos but to the First Folio, Poel thought
he had discovered one. He found that here certain words
were printed with a capital letter which, even in Elizabethan
days, were not spelt in this way. Lines such as Hamlet s
"But I have that Within which passeth show," and Malvolio s
"seated in my branched Velvet gown," and Macbeth s "That
but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all Here"
indicated clearly an actor s emphasis. In each case the word
with the capital letter is manifestly the key- word; and in the
line from Macbeth the compositor had put a full-stop before
the word "Here". This might of course have been a printer s
error, but it was more likely to have been the effect of an
actor s pause. Poel was to give great attention to Shakespeare s
punctuation, and he took part in an interesting correspondence
on the subject in The Times Literary Supplement, which arose in
consequence of Dr. Percy Simpson s essay, Shakespeare s
Punctuation (Oxford 19212).
Dr. Simpson maintained a distinction between a punctuation
which was oral or dramatic, and one which was primarily
grammatical. After quoting an actor who had written,
"earless and unabashed/ to The Times to explain that in
THE CHALLENGE 65
delivering a verse speech from Julius Caesar he had "deliber
ately followed the modern stopping to enable him to over-ride
the rhythm and turn poetry into prose/ Dr. Simpson suggested
that the punctuation of the Quarto text would have been more
helpful to the Elizabethan actor than the punctuation of a
modern edition of Shakespeare was to the actor to-day. He
compared four lines from the Quarto Hamlet:
My father s spirit (in armes) all is not well,
I doubt some foul play, would the night were come,
Till then set still my soul, foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o erwhelm them to men s eyes.
with the same lines printed in the Cambridge Shakespeare:
My father s spirit in arms! all is not well:
I doubt some foul play : would the night were come !
Till then set still, my soul: foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o erwhelm them, to men s eyes.
Here was all the difference between an Elizabethan and a
modern delivery, and Dr. Simpson continued, "Note in the
early text the quick, unpausing utterance of these lightly
punctuated lines; thought follows thought in flashes. But the
crucial point is the use of the parenthesis : why are the words
c in armes enclosed in brackets? Because Shakespeare is here
giving the actor his key- word." Mulcaster, in his Elementarie
of 1582, had written on the effect of parenthesis. "It warneth
us that the words enclosed are to be pronounced with a lower
or quicker voice than the words either before or after them."
Dr. Simpson suggested that "theoretically an actor of the part
might make father or spirit the key-word. The Quarto
expressly warns him against that. The significant point is,
not that a ghost has appeared, nor even that it is the ghost of
Hamlet s father; it is Hamlet s father armed, and armed too in
a suit he wore on an historic occasion" (Times Literary Supple
ment, 17 Feb. 1921).
Poel, rather surprisingly, would not go as far as Dr. Simpson;
he did not believe that the punctuation of the Quartos was
inserted for the benefit of the actors "even when it was apt."
He believed that it had been made with reading aloud rather
than with acting in mind. To this objection Dr. Simpson
had the convincing reply that "as Shakespeare s MSS. were
3
66 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
written exclusively for the theatre, and used as prompt-copies
when they got there, Mr. Poel convicts him of a very un
practical, not to say unprofessional course" (Ibid., 3 March
1921). He went on to point out that the old system not only
marked the pauses but suggested the intonations, quoting
Pompey s line from Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, Scene vi :
Pompey: I have heard that Julius Caesar, grew fat with feasting
there.
Antony: You have heard much.
The irony of this exchange was immensely reinforced by the
emphasis indicated by the comma. Later, Bernard Shaw joined
in the controversy to suggest that no authenticity should be
accorded to the Quarto and Folio punctuations, since in these
matters the actor would always have it his own way. He cited
Barry Sullivan in Macbeth:
Hang out your banners. On the outer walls
The cry is still they come.
and again in Hamlet:
I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is
Southerly, I know a hawk from a heron. Pshaw !
These emendations were daring, to be sure; but they were
theatrically justified. The lesson that Poel drew from all this,
though he admitted many points in Dr. Simpson s argument,
was that in any attempt to set up a new standard text for
Shakespeare, the actor should be represented. Here he was
supported by Granville-Barker who wrote that "it is unwise
to decide upon any disputed passage without seeing it in
action, without canvassing all its dramatic possibilities. For a
definitive text, we need first a Shakespeare Theatre in which a
generation of scholars may be as used to seeing as to reading
the play" (Times Literary Supplement, 17 Feb. 1921).
The key- word, then, was the principle of PoePs elocutionary
technique. He exacted the "natural intonation which would
give to every sentence the same tune that a sentence of
identical meaning" would have in modern conversation.
"Hail, Mark Antony!" must be said in the same way as
"Hullo, Billy!" There must be an equal regard for the
THE CHALLENGE 67
context and the meaning of the words, and for their rhyth
mical and poetic value. Shakespeare had attached great
importance to the sound of words; he had known how to
adapt them to the mood and action of the scene. We think
of Antony s "I am dying, Egypt, dying/ and Othello s "It is
the cause, my soul, it is the cause," and Lear s "Never, never,
never, never, never" moments where music and meaning are
one. Poel reminded his listeners that when Hamlet bade the
player "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue," he was thinking of the rhymed
verse that he had just composed. In rhymed or blank verse,
each syllable must have a definite sound. "We can t," said
Poel, "say the word roses* as we speak it to-day. Olivia must
say, Cesario, by the Ro-ses of the Spring. And we cannot
in verse say the word Beautiful as we pronounce it today.
Olivia must say, "Oh what a deal of scorn looks Beau-ti-ful"
(Monthly Letters; 1929., p. 18). Poel s aim was always a "reason
able imitation" of nature, and this was to be carefully dis
tinguished from realism.
The uses of prose are different, and they impose another
discipline on the speaker. But it is not enough to mark the
transition from iambic metre to a rhythm more obviously conver
sational, or vice versa; these must be related to characterisation
and dramatic necessity. Examples are easy to find in Shake
speare. They mark a lowering of atmosphere and change
of key, as when Hamlet drops into prose with his assumption
of lunacy. They differentiate a single character from everyone
else, as with the Porter in Macbeth or the Clown in Antony and
Cleopatra. They distinguish between one set of characters and
another, as in Twelfth Night where the comedians speak in
prose, only Malvolio breaking into verse when he returns
Viola her ring and when he interrupts the allegro of the final
scene with the bitter discord of his reproach. They distin
guish between the several facets of a character, as with lago
who soliloquises in verse and rises to it again with the mounting
rhythm of the jealousy scene. He himself is conceived in
realistic terms and it is therefore fitting that when he speaks
to Roderigo he should speak in the idiom of realism. But
Othello is created in a poetic and metaphysical dimension,
and when Shakespeare wants to focus our attention not on
68 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
lago s machinations or their imagined motive, but on the swift
havoc they work in Othello s soul, then lago must borrow,
momentarily, the music of his victim; and we in the audience
who are used to the tune of "Virtue a fig! Tis in ourselves
that we are thus or thus" are ready to accept "Witness, you
ever-burning lights above/ because at that moment of crisis
lago does not matter.
There was nothing esoteric about PoePs technique of
speech. But what the average actor found disconcerting
was his method of instruction. For Poel a play was primarily
a thing heard, although, as I shall hope to make clear, he was
careful of pictorial effect. He heard it as precisely as a com
poser hears the symphony he has just put down on paper.
But Poel was a poor executant. When it came to illustrating
what he had picked up from a page of Marlowe or Shakespeare,
the result was a crude recording. The actor had to hear
through, so to speak, to what he imagined that Poel himself
had heard, and then render it, as best he could, on his own
instrument. He had to assimilate, not slavishly copy. Poel,
we must remember, was not always dealing with highly trained
actors; he was dealing for the most part with actors, many of
them amateur, whom he was in the process of training himself.
It is understandable that he should sometimes have preferred
amateurs to professionals; these were less fixed in what he
regarded as pernicious habits. But they were much less
accomplished and their most faithful efforts left a tentative
impression on the spectator. At times PoePs idea, oral as well
as pictorial, of a play came through with a blazing clarity; at
other times it was wilfully or involuntarily blurred. *
I remember rehearsing Coriolanus with him in a bus; there
was nothing unusual in this. As we jolted up the Charing
Cross Road, I was trying to master, by docile imitation, the
steep arpeggios of his intonations. He then turned to me and
remarked gently, "You won t really say it like that, will you ?
If you do, your sister will think you are mad." But it was only
rarely that he achieved this saving sense of the ridiculous. I
recall a recital of Marlowe that he had organised in celebration
of the Marlowe centenary. There were moments during the
*Miss Winifred Oughton has told me that in dealing with rather raw material
at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art she often has recourse to Poel s tunes.
THE CHALLENGE 6g
afternoon when the sounds that came to one from the stage
seemed equally remote from nature, poetry, or realism. They
resembled the bestial agonies of the slaughter-house. Poel
was generally hampered by insufficient rehearsal. He could
pay his actors little or nothing for their pains, and they could
only work with him at odd times. This did not make him less
exacting, or them less grateful. But it did mean that when
they came to performance, they were still, so to speak, dragging
the chains of their novitiate. They had not attained the
liberty which the patient endurance of his discipline could
ultimately give. They were still automata, repeating, im
perfectly, his tones and gestures, not fully understanding why
they must speak and act in a way that would make their sisters
ashamed of them. If Poel had been able, or had wanted, to
retire, like Copeau, into a rural retreat and work for six
months with a few chosen actors, the results would have been
far more persuasive.
As it was, the most valuable part of his tuition was given in
private. When Robert Atkins was preparing the part of Basilio
in Life s a Dream, Poel invited him to rehearse in the Browning
Rooms in the Adelphi. When they got there, it was discovered
that Poel had forgotten to book a room. Nothing daunted,
he took Mr. Atkins along to Charing Cross Station, sat him
down on a bench in the waiting-room and proceeded to instruct
him in the "tunes" of an almost interminable soliloquy. . . ."A
couple of madmen," remarked one exasperated passenger to
another as the noise went on. Later, as the weather improved,
the rendezvous shifted to Kensington Gardens. When he
expressed the wish to hear Winifred Oughton read the part of
Viola, she invited him to her flat which then adjoined the
Old Vic. "This will do splendidly for my rehearsals," remarked
Poel, looking around, and without more ado summoned the
actors to meet him there. Towards the end of the afternoon
Miss Oughton s mother returned home from her duties as
housekeeper to Miss Baylis at the Vic. "Go away," shouted
Poel, waving a blue knitted glove in her face, "we re busy
rehearsing." And Mrs. Oughton meekly withdrew to Waterloo
Station, where she spent most of her leisure hours for the next
fortnight.
To rehearse with Poel was always an arduous and sometimes
70 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
a painful experience. Granville-Barker has recalled the
occasion during the rehearsals for Richard II when the Duchess
of Gloucester was pleading for her son s life. Poel was lying
back in a deck-chair, his eyes shut, his hands crossed on his
chest, and his feet spread out. "More hysteria," he was
saying, "more hysteria," and then, a moment later, "That s
the tone, keep it up." But Barker had to remind him gently
that the lady was sobbing on the floor, and the hysteria was
real (Letter from Dr. Percy Simpson to the author, 13 July 1952).
For some reason Poel did not think that actors could begin to
perform until they were prostrate with hunger. Once he
suspected Miss Oughton of having eaten before rehearsal ; and
when she explained that she had only just risen from a bed
of flu and had drunk a glass of Burgundy on doctor s orders,
Poel was so enraged by this avowal that he slapped her face.
But Poel s slaps really did hurt him more than they hurt his
actors; all they remembered of them afterwards was the
exquisite grace of his apology.
In later years you went down to his house in Putney and in a
setting of some domestic disorder you read over the part with
him. Subsequently, you met him at the Emerson Club in
Whitehall and this address suggests the climate of high-
mindedness in which, he naturally moved. Occasionally a
fellow-member would glance up, incredulous, from his arm
chair., Poel continued his instruction, energetic and un
dismayed. After about six weeks, you began to rehearse with
other members of the cast, generally in a vegetarian restaurant.
Only at the last moment were you able to get your Elizabethan
legs on the platform-stage which he had built out over the
stalls of some house of variety the Holborn Empire or the
Chelsea Palace. The moment has not come yet to discuss
Poel s theory and practice of staging. He began, as we have
seen, with the text and the proper speaking of the text. He
began with the actor, and here his views were as carefully
formulated in 1881 as they were in 19123, when I first came
into close personal contact with him.
There will always be roughly two views of acting. According
to the first, acting is an expression, an interpretation of per
sonality. The actor bends, or twists, the part to suit his own
temperament. The acting of Henry Irving or Sarah Bernhardt
THE CHALLENGE 7 1
is said to have been of this kind. But according to the second
view, the actor s primary business is to impersonate. He
cannot, of course, de-personalise himself entirely; his own
stamp will remain upon all his work; the audience will be in
no doubt that it is seeing this particular actor and no other.
But it will be aware of the part at least as strongly as it will
be aware of the performer. Coquelin was an actor of this
kind; and Coquelin, with Salvini, was Poel s great exemplar.
Too often, he felt, in the English theatre personality was
substituted for technique, and for the mental and physical
conformity to the role. He wrote me a letter while I was
rehearsing Chapman s Biron, which illustrates very well
his idea. I was enjoying this part enjoying it far too
much.
I want to make a final criticism about the character of
Biron so that I need not worry you with my remarks at the
last moment. I notice that more and more you are sacrificing
the creative art to the personal self-personating method.
More and more is Biron becoming R.S. But be careful:
Yourself in costume and modern methods may not be accepted
as an impersonation of Biron! Mere emotion and force and
intensity will not, I think, in the opinion of the critical be
enough to give you that success in the part which I hoped you
would get. Without restraint and the greatest care in your
movements I do not think you will fill the picture the audience
will realise is appropriate to the period. I am not saying this
to depress you. Your personality will be a great help to you, but
the play may suffer ! This does not matter to me if it does not
injure you. Here are a few points.
Keep as still as you can, listen while others are talking,
keep your arms full-length by your side and move as little as
possible, take very SHORT steps, keep the hands off the face.
You show too much physical anger and bitterness which leads
to repetition both of gesture and tune. You have so much
opportunity of letting yourself go at the end of the play, that
the quieter you are in the earlier scenes the better it will be for
you, for the part and the play.
Please don t interpret this remark in the light of complaints.
I am most grateful to you for attempting such an arduous part
which at any rate will not be without animation. All I am
anxious about is that you should not, when it is too late, be
sorry that you did what we call c let yourselves go, which an
experienced actor not only never dares do, but never tries to
do (Undated, July 1929).
72 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
All the wisdom and kindliness of Poel are here and the
letter illustrates very clearly his philosophy of art. He was
suggesting to me what he had stated explicitly to his nephew,
Reginald Pole, many years before, that all art was founded
on repose. If one objected that Beethoven, Michaelangelo,
and the Shakespeare of King Lear were hardly examples of
repose, he would reply that even here the art itself was balanced,
and held together by an interior stillness. "All my work in the
theatre/ he would say, "is founded on that idea." We shall
see many other examples of his dealings with actors, but I
have quoted this letter (scribbled in pencil from Miles s res
taurant in Chandos Street) to show his attitude to the actor as
a man and as an artist. This most exacting of directors never
forgot that it was upon the actor that, in the last analysis,
everything depended.
Ill
In 1887 Poel took his next step towards experiment. He
was invited to become instructor for the Shakespeare
Reading Society, and in the recitals and productions he
directed for them he adopted many of the principles which he
was to illustrate more fully with the Elizabethan Stage Society
later on. The Shakespeare Reading Society had been founded
by students of University College, London, and Henry Irving
was its president. At first the actors sat round on a platform
and read the plays without act or scene divisions, and with the
minimum of cuts (Victorian taste would have imposed certain
omissions). These recitals attracted the attention of George
Bernard Shaw, who was by now established as a journalist in
London and tilting against all the windmills of established
custom. He wrote in The Star on 20 February 1890:
From these simple recitals, without cuts, waits or scenery,
and therefore without those departures from the conditions
contemplated by the poet which are inevitable in a modern
theatre, I learn a good deal about the plays which I could
learn in no other way. What is more, I enjoy myself.
That was written apropos of Much Ado about Nothing, given at
the London Institution, in which (we are delighted to learn)
THE CHALLENGE 73
a gentleman called Samuel Johnson read the part of Dogberry.
The first of the series directed by Poel was The Merchant of
Venice, given in the Botanical Theatre of University College,
and this was followed by Romeo and Juliet (May 1888 at the
London Institution), Twelfth Night (Feb. and Mar. 1889 at the
London Institution), Much Ado about Nothing (Feb. 1890 at the
London Institution) ; and The King and the Countess, an episode
from King Edward III (May 1890 at the Steinway Hall), and
Henry V (April 1891 at the Royal Academy of Music). Intense
preparation was given to these readings; Poel rehearsed the
actors for three months, sometimes three or four times a week.
In 1891 it was decided to do Measure for Measure in costume,
but without scenery, at Ladbroke Hall, Notting Hill Gate.
The next year the Society gave a recital of The Two Gentlemen
of Verona in the St. James s Banqueting Hall and repeated it in
costume before the members of the Albany Club at Kingston.
In the autumn of the same year he revived The Duchess ofMalfi,
in a new acting version, at the Opera Comique. In this he was
helped by the Independent Theatre Society. The play was
given with scenery, since Poel felt that the plot was too in
coherent for pure Elizabethan treatment. Very properly, he
invited Swinburne to attend the performance, for Swinburne s
enthusiasm for the Jacobean dramatists was well known, and
a few days later Poel had the following letter from him:
I must send you a word of thanks for the honour done me
as a Websterian by your gift of a box on the 25th and for the
great pleasure I had in seeing that transcendent masterpiece
of tragedy restored to the stage under such favourable auspices.
How great the pleasure was you may judge when I tell you
that I was just 12 years old when I first read so much of The
Duchess 9 as is given in Campbell s Specimens, 5 and was as
much entranced and fascinated at that not very mature age
as I am now and have been ever since by its unique beauty and
power. I congratulate you most cordially on the benefits
you have conferred on all lovers of English dramatic poetry at
its best and highest in other words, upon all lovers of what is
best and highest in the literature, or rather in the creative
work of all countries and all ages. And I most earnestly hope
that you may see your way to doing as much for other great
works of the same great age especially, I need not say, of the
same great hand. I think I must have been the only person
present on Tuesday who had brought with him a copy of the
3*
74 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Author s edition 1623. I wish I had had the privilege of
showing you the beautiful little quarto which I had slipped
into an inside breast pocket. But I hope you will allow me an
opportunity of showing you my little collection of such rarities
(Undated, October 1892).
Love s Labours Lost followed in the spring of 1893, performed
in the Steinway Hall. The effect of one of these readings
The Tempest, given also in the Steinway Hall with Hermann
Vezin as Prospero, in June 1897 may be guessed from the
following review in The Daily Chronicle.
In front of dark drapery, forming a species of screen, sat
about a dozen ladies and gentlemen in nineteenth century
evening attire, who, representing the characters in the play,
rose at their respective cues and delivered the lines allotted
them, the majority with books in their hands. Below the
platform sat Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and three lady assistants,
who played the incidental music upon instruments of Shake
speare s time. To a treble viol was added a tenor viol, a viol
da gamba, and virginals. ... It was delightful to hear the
ancient instruments again giving life to the music composed
for them, the Shapes who offer the banquet to the King and
his companions dancing (in weird costumes) to a pavane and
galliard composed by William Byrd (5 June 1897).
The addresses chosen for these readings do not immediately
suggest the theatre; PoePs addresses rarely did. They strike
a note of adult education and sober self-improvement, equally
remote from the modern or the Elizabethan playhouse. In
spite of his preaching, Poel, in whose temperament there was
a mingling of the Pre-Raphaelite and the Puritan, would
always remain at a certain distance from the rhetoric and
rough-and-tumble of the Globe.
He had come to feel that it was impossible to test his theories
of Elizabethan acting and speech in the conditions of the
contemporary theatre, and all the time he was directing these
recitals he was trying to recreate in his own mind the stage
for which the plays had been written. Now in this matter of
Shakespeare and the greater Elizabethans two attitudes are
possible. It is both easier and more convenient to say
Shakespeare was so transcendent a genius that he wrote for all
time and all peoples. His genius is universal. He speaks in one
THE CHALLENGE 75
way to the Elizabethans and in another way to us. There are
as many different ways of interpreting Shakespeare as there
are imaginations capable of putting him on the stage. If he
had been alive today, he would have been grateful for modern
theatrical techniques. He would have been quite content
to retire behind the footlights. He would have been prepared
to sacrifice what was inessential in the plays in order that what
was essential in them should reach the greatest number of
people. He was a democratic dramatist, depending on a
mass-appeal. And so the absurdities multiply. They have
led to a screen version of Hamlet in which the play is solemnly
described in captions as the story of a man "who could not
make up his mind." Or again, they have led to a Henry VIII
where the crowning expression of Shakespeare s regalism
Cranmer s speech at the christening of the Princess Elizabeth
is treated as comic, anti-clerical relief. They have led in
New York to a modern-dress Julius Caesar, where a play
designed to show the havoc wrought by high-minded liberals,
caught in the toils of their own demagogy, is treated as anti-
Fascist propaganda. Thanks to the virtual elimination of
the Fifth Act, this treatment was reasonably successful.
These and similar "bold experiments" quickly recoil upon
their perpetrators. By trying to make Hamlet easy you only
make it unintelligible, and when you shorten it for the wrong
reasons it seems to go on for ever. And a man who maintains
that Julius Caesar is a play about the wickedness of dictators
will maintain anything. Modernism on the Shakespearian
stage can easily become an excuse for saying anything you
like on any subject whatever by the simple expedient of
pretending that Shakespeare said it first. Compared to these
heresies, the deficiences of Lyceum Shakespeare were venial.
It was enormously to PoePs credit that he revived the
historical Shakespeare, quoting Ruskin s opinion that "it is
a constant law that the greatest poets and historians live
entirely in their own age, and the greatest fruits of their
work are gathered out of their own age." He went on to
say that "Shakespeare and his companions were inspired
by the prolific energies of their day. Their material was
their own and their neighbours experiences, and their
plays were shaped to suit the theatre of the day and no
76 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
other." He then corrected the notion that the Elizabethan
Theatre was a drab and primitive structure, all rashes and
groundlings. He quoted the Englishman visiting Venice in
1605 and commenting: "I was at one of their playhouses
where I saw a comedy acted. The house is very beggarly and
base in comparison with our stately playhouses in England,
neither can the actors compare with us for apparel, shows and
music." The idea that an Elizabethan performance, as
distinct from an Elizabethan play, was a clownish pantomine,
relieved by crude and tasteless rhetoric, was contradicted by
Busoni who wrote of a performance at the Fortune in 1617
that the nobility were "listening as silently and soberly as
possible." The effect of Julius Caesar on a contemporary
audience was described by Leonard Digges:
So I have seen when Caesar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Gassius. Oh ! how the audience
Were ravished, with what wonder they went thence !
In a discussion arising out of an article in The Nineteenth
Century Poel vigorously contested Arthur Bourchier s view that
impersonation, as distinct from the mere recitation of lines,
was forbidden by the conditions of the Elizabethan stage.
(Letter to The Stage, 23 August 1906). Impersonation had been
essential for the reason that the same actor had to appear so
often before the same audience. Thomas Heywood had told
the actor "to qualify everything according to the nature of the
person personated." The great Burbage had been so eager to
sustain his part "unto the height" that he kept up his imper
sonation in the Tiring House, or dressing-room. And we know
from Ben Jonson that Dick Robinson, a famous actor of
women s parts, could pass himself off as a lady at a supper-
party. Elizabethan acting, at its best, had followed Hamlet s
advice to the players; it had striven not to "o erstep the
modesty of nature." In The Return from Parnassus, published
in 1 60 1, Kempe, the celebrated clown, is made to remark to
Burbage in a discussion on the acting merits of the Cambridge
undergraduates :
It is a good sport, in a part, to see them never speak but at
the end of the stage, just as though in walking with a fellow,
THE CHALLENGE 77
we should never speak but at a stile, a gate, or a ditch, where
a man can go no further.
Anyone who has tried to act knows that nothing is more
difficult than to walk and talk naturally at the same time.
What, then, was the secret of these productions, of their pro
found popular appeal? Surely, argued Poel, it must have
lain in the perfect adaptability of the plays to the theatres in
which they were performed. If you regarded the Elizabethan
playhouse as a primitive sheep-pen from which the proscenium
was shortly to emancipate us, of course it was easy to argue
that if Shakespeare had been alive today he would have been
delighted. We have not, in fact, the faintest idea whether
Shakespeare would be delighted or not. Such assertions are
pure hypothesis. What is quite certain is that, if he had
been alive today or any day since the advent of the picture
stage he would have written quite different plays. His plays
are what they are, not because he was a universal genius
writing for all time, but because he was a particular Elizabethan
Englishman writing for a particular Elizabethan stage and
public. This is the starting-point for any intelligent Shake
spearian discussion; if we want freshness as distinct from
modernism in our Shakespearian productions, this is where
we must begin.
No one in his senses will set about producing Greek tragedy
without acquainting himself with the structure of the Attic
stage. It is no accident that Greek drama performed in a
modern theatre never quite comes off and that probably the
most convincing presentation of these plays now to be seen in
England are the performances given annually, under Mr.
Cecil Bellamy s direction, in the Greek theatre at Bradfield.
In the Greek theatre there was a different, a stricter unity.
But here, as in the Elizabethan playhouse, there was a per
manent scene instead of a shifting d6cor. In a very real
sense the vast audience at Epidaurus was closer to the actors,
speaking through their masks and moving on their stilts, than
is the modern spectator looking beyond the footlights from
the darkened stalls. They were enjoying a more intimate
experience, nourished by profound communities of belief.
To have assisted at a performance of a comedy by Aristophanes
must have been much more like an evening at the Palladium
78 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
than an evening at the Haymarket. These conditions are no
more easily recovered than are the conditions of Shakespeare s
playhouse. But it is not thought an impossible pedantry if the
producer takes them into account.
Poel saw that what the Elizabethan stage, with its daylight,
its multiple planes, and its wide projecting platform made
possible, was a special kind of realism. The audience was in
the play, not in front of it; the action of the play was not in
Rome or Alexandria; it was here and now; it was Elizabethan,
and immediate. An Elizabethan performance was essentially
an experiment with time. The eyes of the audience were
never invited to desert the solid octagonal walls of the play
house, but their imaginations were asked to superimpose upon
them the visible universe of the dramatist. It seems very ques
tionable whether in fact a boy came on with a placard stating
where the audience was supposed to be. In any case
the dramatist who knew his business was quick to indicate
the locality in question, and thenceforward he and the audience
between them did the scene-shifting. There was no effort to
create illusion that is the prerogative of the picture stage
but there was a mutual imaginative effort which secured that
these actors should be Romeo and Juliet and also Elizabethan
Englishmen; that this balcony should be in London by day
and also in Verona by night. For the architecture of the
Globe provided Juliet s balcony and Juliet s bedroom and
Juliet s tomb with no more trouble than was required for the
drawing of a curtain; just as it provided Cleopatra s monument
and the battlements of Elsinore, Ophelia s grave (which was
below the trap) and Orlando s tree (which was one of the
forward pillars). The Elizabethan stage was a map of any
where, and when a landscape was required, the poet was at
hand to paint it.
It is a matter for discussion whether Lorenzo and Jessica
are helped or hindered by a simulation of moonlight and moss
a great deal depends upon Lorenzo and Jessica. But it is
not contestable that they make poetry of the moonlight and
the moss, because at the first performance of The Merchant of
Venice both had to be imagined. They were not the less real
for that. A great deal of Shakespeare s finest poetry is the
fruit of theatrical necessity. We watch Ophelia drown with
THE CHALLENGE 79
our imaginations because we may not watch her drown with our
eyes. We listen to Burgundy telling us about the devastated
fields of France because we cannot see them for ourselves.
But what happens when the much-vaunted resources of the
modern theatre come to Shakespeare s aid? In the film of
Hamlet Gertrude s great speech, one of Shakespeare s classical
appeals to the imagination and successful, as such, with any
audience at any time, was destroyed by cheap visual dis
tractions. The same thing happened with Burgundy in
Henry V. Scarcely had Mr. Valentine Dyall begun, very
nobly, to deliver the lines, when the shots mercilessly inter
vened. We were only able to listen to Mr. Dyall while we
were looking at him. Either the poetry or the picture became
irrelevant.
I shall not go so far as to say that poetry is always destroyed by
scenery, for in the theatre the actor, however much he may be
supplemented by decor, is always there for one to look at.
But what scenery does destroy is the poetic realism which was
the secret of the Elizabethan achievement. The neutral,
non-localised, immobile platform-stage, beautiful and satis
fying as architecture, acts as a screen on which the poet may
paint at will. "Crowflowers, nettles, and long purples . . her
pendant weeds ... an envious sliver broke" one by one, with
matchless clarity, the images rise before us and then sink back
to merge gradually with our composite picture ours, remem
ber, not Shakespeare s alone, still less the scenic artist s of
Ophelia dying. It is not such a poor arena after all, this
wooden O, since it gives us the freedom to imagine; or rather
gives it back to us enriched.
In 1950 I was producing Pierre-Jean Jouve s translation of
Romeo and Juliet at the Theatre des Gompagnons in Montreal.
My two lovers, Jean Goutu and Helene Loiselle, gave as good
performances of the two parts as I have seen. But they
never seemed to me to act so well as on a certain morning when
we were unable to rehearse on the stage and had to betake
ourselves, as so often happens, to the vestibule. As vestibules
go, the vestibule of the Theatre des Compagnons is quite
agreeable; long, low, and spacious; hung with interesting
photographs. But at eleven o clock in the morning even the
most elegant vestibule is brutally unromantic. We were
80 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
working on the Balcony scene. Mile. Loiselle placed herself
on a chair and M. Coutu was still encumbered with his script.
I sat, a good distance away, at the further end of the room.
As the scene proceeded, I felt the tears come into my eyes;
and this rarely happens to me, in the theatre or out of it. At
last, I said to myself, I have seen, I have experienced, the
Balcony scene. And yet what had moved me was, in many
ways, only a sketch of what, at the first public performance,
left me cold.
I have always been interested to discover why. It is alto
gether too easy to say that M. Coutu and Mile. Loiselle acted
better at rehearsal than they did on the opening night. I have
no reason to suppose that this was the case. It is true that my
Balcony set an uneasy compromise between flats and curtains
was not successful; the lighting, for want of sufficient
rehearsal, was nothing to write home about. But I do not
think the answer to my question was here. I think the reason
why I was less moved was because poetic realism had gone by
the board, and psychological realism had gone with it. Down
below, in the vestibule, I was no nearer to my two actors than
I was in the auditorium. But we were under the same roof;
we were on the same stage. I was in Romeo and Juliet, not
outside it. I was no longer an eavesdropper; I had entered,
respectfully, the room.
I am not suggesting, for a moment, that if M. Coutu and
Mile. Loiselle had given their vestibule performance on the
stage, they would have had the same effect on me. I should
have been much more conscious, I am sure, of its incom
pleteness. And the reason for this is clear. On the picture
stage, the eye demands a picture. Poel himself would have
been the first to admit this. The only point of constructing
a frame is that you put a picture inside it. Poel admired the
rich pictorial effects achieved by Irving at the Lyceum and
by Tree at His Majesty s. All he maintained was that they
were irrelevant to the imagery of Shakespeare s plays and
destructive of their rhythm. If you objected that when the
curtain goes up, the audience expect to see a picture, he would
have said that the audience was right. It is the first rule of
entertainment not to disappoint your audience. But the
point about an Elizabethan performance was that there
THE CHALLENGE 8 1
was no curtain and that the audience did not expect to see a
picture. They expected to assist at a spectacle, which is not
the same thing.
Nowhere was Poel more revolutionary than in his attitude
to stage lighting. Here, at least, one might have thought that
the technical facilities of the modern stage came to the rescue
of the actor. But no ; it was here that
the picture stage most loses the resemblance to reality. The
lighting of the picture is considered to be of great importance
to the lighting of the characters, and in some theatres, it is
regarded as of more importance; and although the lights in
the battens and wings illuminate the stage, they give no
appreciable light to the faces, which have to be independently
lit in a very artificial way, one which not only distorts the
countenance, but often interferes with the lighting of the
picture. Unfortunately, the construction of the modern stage
allows of no top light reaching the faces [this is not true when
the stage is lit from the front of the house} as is the case in day
light, and limelight thrown on from the perches lights the
figures only from the side or from the back. . . . The only other
light which can reach the faces is that from the footlights,
which is an upside down method of illumination, causing
seven parts of the whole light which reaches the face, to come
from the ground instead of from the sky; hence the need for
the actor to "make-up/ which further destroys any approach
to realism; while the necessity for two different and indepen
dent schemes of lighting to be used at the same time, one to
light the scene and the other the characters, brings into the
universe of stageland two suns, a phenomenon that no man,
dead or alive, ever saw outside of the theatre. No favourable
comparison, therefore, is possible in the matter of realism
between modern stage-lighting and the daylight that fell on
the actors from the open roof of the Globe playhouse. [Here
Poel seems to ignore the fact that the greater part of the stage, as
distinct from the auditorium, was probably roofed.} Of course, this
light could not be varied, when the action of the play was
supposed to take place at night, or in twilight, or during
thunder and rain, but here the art of the dramatist came to
the rescue, and it was his business to indicate during the
progress of the play the varying conditions of the environment
(The Mew Age, 2 June 1910).
This is a good example of Poel s implacable logic; but he
was right in seeing that you cannot ask audiences, or actors,
to do without scenery and lighting unless you give them
another kind of theatre. A performance of Shakespeare,
82 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
spoken rapidly and flowing smoothly in curtains behind a
proscenium, is certainly better than a spasmodic performance
of the same play truncated to make room for scenery. But
it is not an ideal performance; and it is not remotely an
Elizabethan performance. There is a total absence of per
spective in the flat, monotonous line of the traverse curtain
and a fatal lack of space in front of it. And if you try to con
struct an Elizabethan set behind the proscenium, with upper
and lower levels and a staircase, perhaps, connecting them,
you are liable to run into difficulties. When Mr. Glen Byam
Shaw, who is one of our best directors of Shakespeare, pro
duced Antony and Cleopatra at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1946,
he was obliged to place his permanent Elizabethan* set so
close to the proscenium that there was very little room to
manoeuvre in front of it. But if he had not so placed it, the
actors performing on the upper levels would have been in
visible from the upper tiers of the auditorium. When I was
producing the same play at the Opera House in Geneva, a
year later, I tried a similar solution. Here the theatre was so
built that I could place my permanent set at a reasonable
distance from the proscenium arch, and I was able to build
out an c apron j over the wide well of the orchestra, still leaving
room for the musicians in the uncovered portion of the well
on the right, and still having space for a staircase leading up
to the apron from the left. In both Mr. Byam Shaw s pro
duction and my own the permanent set did well enough for
Rome and Athens, for Pompey s galley and Cleopatra s
monument. But in neither case was the central opening
below (at the Piccadilly this was slightly to one side) more
than an opening. If one had been able to build an inner
stage, it would have been too far from the audience for anyone
to act on it. And if my memory serves me right, we were both
equally defeated by the battle scenes, though here, perhaps, I
had the greater space for deployment a space which I do not
think I used to the best advantage. In each case we achieved
something of the suppleness and unlocalised character of the
Elizabethan stage, but very little of its intimacy and dimension.
The best solution we have seen in recent years was Miss
Tanya Moisewitch s set for the Histories at Stratford in 1951.
This was ludicrously underestimated by the critics; for it had
THE CHALLENGE 83
the sovereign merit of being architecture rather than decor.
It was brilliantly used by Mr. Quayle and his co-producers.
But it was a particular solution, shining brightly for all that,
compared to the submarine and operatic Tempest which
followed it. Here was the total sacrifice of poetry to picture,
and the subsequent performance of the same play at the little
Mermaid (although there is no record of any production of
The Tempest at the Globe and although the Mermaid does not
really reproduce Elizabethan conditions) was far more satis
fying. But the problem is strictly insoluble, and the intransi
gent genius of Poel saw it to be so. That is why he worked in
the wilderness. That is why he only succeeded when he took
his audience as well as his actors away from the proscenium;
when, as in his later platform-stage productions, he turned
his proscenium into the framework of an inner stage. For you
cannot have even an approximately Elizabethan performance
before a public which rejects your premises, for the good
reason, as Poel never tired of pointing out, that in the Eliza
bethan playhouse audience and actors were one. The most
successful Elizabethan productions of our time have un
doubtedly been those, like Mr. Ronald Watkins s at Harrow
and Mr. Nugent Monck s at the Maddermarket, where the
audience get what they are expecting; where actors and
audience are physically and therefore psychologically under
the same roof, or, as in certain pastoral performances, under
the same sky.
These are highly disputable matters, but there is no disputing
the passage quoted by Poel from Richard Flecknoe s Discourse
of the English Stage written no more than forty years after
Shakespeare s death.
Now for the difference between our Theatres and those of
former times; they were but plain and simple, with no other
scenes or decorations of the stage, but only old Tapestry, and
the Stage strewn 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 plays 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 were formerly received from Plays,
from which they seldom or never went away but far better
and wiser than when they came.
84 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
At the same time Poel was careful not to be dogmatic where
the evidence was insufficient. He maintained over many years
a correspondence with W. J. Lawrence, and to read this
unfortunately most of Lawrence s letters are lost is to see how
two scrupulous scholars reached and tested their conclusions.
They also became close friends, although their friendship was
clouded at the end by Poel s treatment of Coriolanus. I shall
relate this episode in its proper place; but in the meantime
it may be interesting to see how Poel elaborated in his letters
to Lawrence the ideas which he concurrently put into practice.
I am particularly glad [he writes on the 26 April 1909] to
see you lay emphasis on the fact that it is almost impossible
to insist on any rules for Elizabethan staging, beyond the need
for great adaptability according to what theatre was being
used or Hall, and what play was being acted. And the
dramatists knowing that their plays would not always be
acted in the same building would be careful not to be too
dogmatic in stage directions, excepting the inferior writers.
I forget what is your idea about the Traverse. I mean the
lower one, nearest the audience, that might have gone between
the two pillars; not that I think they did go there, but probably
obliquely across the rear of the stage. It was at best but a
temporary arrangement, and probably only used for some
plays. I am quite against William Archer s emphatic declaration
that there was no second Traverse at all.
Poel never forgot that the Elizabethan theatres differed
considerably in shape, and on this point he would go to
Lawrence for advice.
Can you tell me if the Blackfriars Hall (when James Burbage
converted it into the Playhouse in 1596 and the Hall was 66
feet long and 40 feet wide) had for its stage the total width
of the Hall? That is to say, did the width of the stage extend
forty feet that is from wall to wall? I rather expect it did
because I think somewhere you have written that the side
boxes in the Hall did not extend over the stage! Are the
dimensions of the stage at the Blackfriars known as to depth,
and the position of the doors? I so often find myself in diffi
culties whenever I allude to performances at the Blackfriars 9
because I have no means of visualizing the size and appearance
of the stage. I am inclined to think that the stage was not
much smaller than that at the Globe, that is to say 43 x 40.
Can one speak with any certainty as to the exact position of
the alcove and two doors? (July 1926).
THE CHALLENGE 85
In answer to Lawrence he wrote again, a few days later:
You were quite right to point out my error of forty feet deep
for the Globe stage, because that is a misleading statement
and I knew it was at the time I wrote it. But no one seems to
grasp the idea that both at the Globe and at the FortuncAe,
platform began, so to speak, at the middle of the Arena and
extended to the tiring house, and further still into the alcove.
The great width of the stage Drury Lane is only 36 feet
wide in the proscenium opening served as you say at the
Blackfriars 5 and afterwards at the Globe for spectators to sit
at the sides. Also it allowed all the actors in the play to be
seen when they were speaking, and since the dramas were
regarded as largely rhetorical this was an advantage. ... I
am glad to hear from you as an authority that we cannot be
sure of details about doors and windows at the Blackfriars
and I suppose not at the Globe either?*
In the following year Poel explained the purpose of his
platform-stage productions.
The Platform performance simply means this, that I want
to show that there was a possible movement on the Elizabethan
stage not possible on the proscenium stage! G. B. Shaw
noticed this the first time he saw one of my Elizabethan
performances on my miniature model stage. He said, this
stage can show people walking about from one house and
street to another. . . . For a Shakespearian representation, I am
myself content with a balcony, a recess, two doors and the
forward platform which must be the same size as that in use
in the Fortune theatre I And I think that Shakespeare re
garded a good deal of the crude paraphernalia still in use in
his day as out of date and therefore as mere comic imitations
of realities that were better dispensed with. Often must he
have wished to say to the actors, "A little more invention please,
gentlemen, and less powder." By the way, how was it that the
Globe playhouse existed for 14 years without being burnt
down, unless we may presume that some definite provision
had been made to prevent any offchance of a flaming wad
lodging in the thatched roof? Perhaps some day evidence
will be forthcoming to show that in 1613 the Globe was burnt
down by an incendiary who was bribed by some hot-headed
Puritans who wished to remind King James that no more
Spanish marriages with the English Court would be tolerated!
An authoritative comment on the dimensions of the Elizabethan stage can
be found in E. K. Chambers magisterial survey (The Elizabethan Stage, 1923).
The proscenium opening at Drury Lane is considerably wider than Poel here
makes out.
86
WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Poel went on to illustrate, by argument and diagram
(reproduced below) how the movement, of which the possi
bilities had been seen by Shaw, could be effected.
I am under the impression that the vogue for gallants to sit
on stools on the public stage did not begin much before 1600.
But in what way did this custom modify the movement of the
actors, and more especially as it affected their entrances?
There are instances in the First Folio, and elsewhere, I believe,
where either actors are shown, in the stage-directions, to enter
some lines before they speak, or to be given two entrances,
one, let us say, in the rear of the stage, and the other from the
side where the gallants are seated, and the actor is waiting
for his cue to take up the dialogue within the ring. There is
an illustration of what I mean in the First Folio Facsimile,
Stanton s edition page 69, where the Nurse enters Friar
Lawrence s cell in the Banishment scene. Here the first
stage-direction is "Enter Nurse and knocks" which to me
means that the Nurse comes on to the stage at the back and
knocks with her crutch on the floor. She then comes down
the stage among the gallants giving three other knocks on the
floor to three different cues, then at another cue, but appar
ently the wrong cue, we have the stage-direction "Enter
Nurse" and here I take it she enters the ring, down stage, and
takes up the dialogue. I try in the illustration on the following
page to draw a plan of the action as I have described it (14
May 1927).
Cnfcer tlum
u
gallants
>o o
o
o
IRotneo
Triar
oo
6ntcr Uut5e
flutsc
Blocks
fee
It is a matter of history that the poetic drama declined in
England from the development of the picture stage, and if it
was in a manner reborn with Eliot s Murder in the Cathedral,
it is significant that this was written for performance in the
Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral where there was
THE CHALLENGE 87
only a formal setting, no lighting to speak of, and where the
actors and the audience were in a kind of Elizabethan contact.
A great part of the play the Choruses, the Sermon and the
Knights apologia was spoken directly to the public; and the
play was never afterwards so successful as in the little Mercury
Theatre at Notting Hill Gate, where there is a wide apron
and where an easy intimacy is possible. It is worth remarking
that many of the more interesting poetic plays written during
the past twenty years were composed for performance in the
same conditions at Canterbury. These included Charles
Williams Cranmer, Dorothy L. Sayers The %eal of Thy House,
Christopher HassalPs Christ s Comet, Laurie Lee s Peasant Poet,
Christopher Fry s Thor, with Angels, and Robert Gittings*
The Makers of Violence.
Poel, writing in The Manchester Playgoer (1912), was conscious
of the tyranny of the visual arts. This was not in the least, as
I have said, because he had an insensitive eye. He was, in
fact, to prove himself a master of stage grouping. But he
feared that the imaginative faculties of modern man faculties
essential for the enjoyment of Shakespeare were being
smothered by the insistent appeal to the eye, which at every
turn was recklessly flattered.
It can no longer be said that an interest in pictures lessens
with the close of childhood. The taste continues and gathers
new strength from habitual indulgence until it threatens the
adult with paralysis of the imagination . . . more and more do
men and women distrust their own intuitions. They turn to
pictures for the realisation of what they themselves hesitate to
visualise. They fancy that their own perceptions do not
disclose the author s meaning without the help of the illus
trations. They forget that in most cases it is the illustrator,
and not the author, who determines how much the reader
shall know. . . . Poetry takes precedence of history in its power
to illuminate the past. It mellows the pictures of memory
with a special beauty, and has a more lasting and subtle
influence over the mind than has either music or painting.
In fact the art of the poet presupposes and comprehends all
the other arts. Not a few of the most beautiful descriptions
of Homer furnish no pictures for the artist. Poetry in fact
makes her own pictures as she makes her own music.
It is the consciousness of this greater freedom that language
gives which makes the poet often impatient of the limitations of
the painter s art. ... To what end does the present popularity
88 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
of the pictured page lead ? Is it man s destiny to regard life
as if it were a vast kaleidoscope, existing for the sole purpose
of being looked at, until his brain, wearied by watching the
ever-revolving machine, becomes incapable of concentrated
and continuous thought? Let it be remembered that it is
only thinking that makes thinkers.
There is perhaps a touch of the puritan in all this, and the
important distinction which Poel illustrated through all his
work is the distinction between the pictorial and the plastic.
All producers, and all designers, too, should take to heart
Ulysses* warning to Achilles that "things in motion sooner
catch the eye than what not stirs." Poel was to quote Lessing
in support of his theory "that if we are witnesses of an important
and touching event, and another event of less importance
traverses it, we resent the distraction" (Letter to The Nation,
23 August 1919). We know from experience that we cannot
look indefinitely at a picture, and the most ravishing stage
decor only holds us for a few minutes. It is the actor who by
his movements, attitudes, and gestures creates the picture,
just as by his words if these be Shakespeare s or another
poet s he suggests it. The case for the Elizabethans is just
this; that the picture they were able to compose on a stage
which was architectural rather than decorative, and to suggest
with a poetry to which the public was eager to respond, was
more seductive and more dramatic than any creation of the
artist s studio. We misunderstand Poel if we imagine that the
Elizabethans were not visual people; their palaces and gardens,
their fertile elaboration of costume, prove the contrary. But
they were visual in a very different way from the modern spec
tator, glued to his cinema screen and satisfied with the conjuring
tricks of realism. They were athletes, not eunuchs, of the
imagination and when they went to the theatre they demanded
the opportunity for exercise. But they were also mortal
men, and by the time Shakespeare was thinking of retire
ment, the decadence had begun to set in. The age of illusion
was already implicit in the masques of Ben Jonson and the
ceremonial baroque of Inigo Jones. These were splendid
spectacles, to be sure, but the fancy was less free to move in
them.
But Poel was quick to remind those who wanted, at that
THE CHALLENGE 80
^7
prosaic close of the nineteenth century when the new drama
was a drama of ideas, to revive a theatre of poetry, that
never can lyricism on the stage usurp the place of drama . . .
it would be both ungenerous and inaccurate to contend that
there are no verse plays of merit written today, and if they
do not find their way on to the stage, perhaps it is because
the conditions there are not, at the present time, favourable
for their presentation. At the same time poets who wish to
write plays to be acted too often forget how severely practical
are the needs of the theatre. . . .
Even the man of genius
must to some extent conform to the dictionary meaning of
the word drama, which is a "stage play," and that this involves
something more on the part of a writer than to express himself
in images or allegories. . . . The bringing together of so large
a number of composite minds under one roof to witness an
imitation imposes restraint upon the dramatist out of which
has grown the art of the theatre. A poet, therefore, who
wishes to write plays for the stage, cannot be indifferent as to
what he has to do to make his work suitable for the theatre.
Poetry in drama must be subservient to incident and char
acter (The Contemporary Review; Nov. 1913).
Here, then, were the principles which animated Poel s
recovery of Elizabethan values. Even at their most austere,
they had no purpose that, properly interpreted, would not
quicken and illustrate dramatic conflict. Poel made himself
into a considerable scholar, holding his own with the most
learned opinions of his day; but his scholarship was the
by-product of his theatrical research. No one would have
described him as a man of letters. He was a man of the
theatre who never really had a stage; that was his paradox
and his problem. We shall now see how he proceeded to
resolve it.
CHAPTER III
The First Experiments
Elizabethan Stage Society, whose long list of per-
JL formances gives Poel his title to fame, was born naturally
out of the recitals he had organised for the Shakespeare
Reading Society. When he was asked by a representative of
The Daily Chronicle in 1913 why he had founded it, he replied:
It was just for acting s sake that the Elizabethan Stage
Society was born. Some people have called me an archaeologist,
but I am not. I am really a modernist. My original aim was
just to find out some means of acting Shakespeare naturally
and appealingly from the full text as in a modern drama. I
found that for this the platform stage was necessary and also
some suggestion of the spirit and manners of the time (3 Sep
tember 1913).
In the autumn of 1893 the interior of the Royalty Theatre
was converted into as near a likeness of the old Fortune
Playhouse as was possible in a roofed building. The Fortune
was easy to reproduce correctly because it is almost the only
Elizabethan theatre for which we have the text of the builder s
contract and the exact details of the construction. We even
know how the roof was tiled and guttered to prevent the rain
water spilling over on to the heads of the pit.
Poel s sole financial backing was one hundred pounds from
Mr. Arthur Dillon and twenty-five pounds from the members
of the Shakespeare Reading Society. The play chosen to
inaugurate the experiment was Measure for Measure, a work
practically unknown to Victorian playgoers. Poel himself
played the part of Angelo.
He would quote the Duke s lines:
O what may man within him hide,
Though angel on the outward side,
to show that Angelo must not appear a reprobate; he had
after all, gained the affection of Mariana. Among Shake
speare s portraits he stood "alone as an instance of one who
fell while contemplating virtue 1 (Letter to W. Bridges- Adams;
7 September 1931). And Poel insisted that Isabella, not being
90
FIRST EXPERIMENTS r
yet professed in the religious life, must not wear the habit of a
nun. In a later discussion on this play he cited Claudio s
" This day my sister should the cloister enter" and the Provosts
"And to be shortly of a sisterhood" to prove that, at the moment
when the play begins, she was only on the point of entering
the convent. She asks Francesca what are the duties of a nun
and is told them, obviously for the first time. Against this
argument there was Lucio s line describing her as a novice/
and Lucio s visit to the convent where she has apparently
just gone to live; but she is still free to go to and fro with the
outside world. Lucio of course might easily have got muddled
over a detail of this kind; and so, for the matter of that, might
Shakespeare. Poel was perhaps stretching his case a little
when he claimed that Lucio could never have said the lines,
"Hail, virgin, if you be as these cheek-roses proclaim you are
no less" to a woman wearing the habit of a religious order.
Lucio could have said anything to anyone. But he was surely
right in arguing that the Duke "could not and would not have
asked her to be his wife if to consent meant breaking a religious
vow." He was less certainly right in thinking that Angelo
would never have "dared to tempt a woman already set apart
to the service of God." He interpreted the passage:
I will about it straight,
No longer staying but to give the Mother
Notice of my affair,
as showing that her brother s affair had for the time being
delayed her joining the order, and the only lines he would
admit as evidence for her status were those in the scene at
the convent where she is first introduced to the audience.
All the other references were gossip, and did not "pretend
to accuracy." Her sole object, he maintained, was "to escape
from an uncongenial marriage, the youths of Vienna being
notoriously corrupt" (Letter to W. Bridges- Adams; 7 September
1931). What he required, in sum, was "a charming Angelo,
a boisterous Lucio, a lively Duke, a passionate Isabel" (Ibid.}.
When this play was given many years later by the Fellowship
of Players an interesting controversy arose on the question of
Isabella s costume between the producer, Andrew Leigh, and
Hubert Griffith, who was then assistant dramatic critic on
The Observer. Mr. Leigh maintained that Isabella was clearly
Q2 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
a novice and must be dressed as one; Mr. Griffith objected
that not even so good an actress as Miss Grizelda Hervey
could play the part with her face imprisoned in a coif. No
one, however, seems to have considered that Isabella might
have been a. postulant; for no woman is admitted to the novitiate
of the Poor Clares, the order to which Isabella is said to aspire,
without a period of probation. When she speaks of herself as
a probationer, this is surely what she means. But even as a
postulant she would still have worn a simplified habit, or dark
costume, and she would certainly not have maintained her
contacts with the outside world, except by special dispensation.
It is arguable that, since her brother s life was at stake, this
dispensation would have been given her, especially in the lax
conditions of late mediaeval times. But the fact that she was
living at the convent would indicate that she had taken some
preliminary step towards joining the order. The only reason
for her not wearing some kind of religious habit would be that
she had only just joined the community, and that no postu
lant s or novice s garb had as yet been prepared for her. It is
quite possible that she would have worn a postulant s dress
within the enclosure, and a secular attire when she was visiting
the prison or the deputy s house. Her opening sentence,
"And have you nuns no further privileges?" indicates that the
discipline of the order may have been more severe than she
expected, and the ease with which she later withdraws into
the world may be taken as evidence that her vocation was at
no time more than skin-deep.
Poel maintained that the Duke, not Isabella, should be the
centre of the play. Here he envisaged no elderly wiseacre, but
an actor of flexibility seldom to be found in this country.
He must be the life and soul of the play. He should be able
to show the Duke delighting in freedom from irksome duties.
He should impersonate him as a man of about forty, alert,
full of resource and energy, adored by all for his easy-going
and kindly ways; always helpful, never willing to hurt, and
far too witty and wise for anyone to be dull in his company.
To the spectator the righteous indignation of Isabella, the
tears of Mariana, or the fears of Claudio do not arouse painful
emotions since the Duke watches over them and will not let
them be injured through the shortcomings of his deputy.
He insisted that the great speech "Be absolute for death"
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 93
should be given "with ease and spirit, for the Duke here
ironically proclaims the triumph of death over life, laughing
to himself while he says the words, for he is not a religious man
in the conventional sense" (Letter to W. Bridges- Adams; 7
September 1931). This argument is typical of Poel s rational
approach. He did not see that Shakespeare s imagination was
working at such heat in the Claudio, Isabella and Angelo
scenes that the spectator is moved and painfully in spite of
all he may know or guess about the Duke s beneficent designs.
The Duke is a much more complex character than Flecker s
Caliph strolling incognito through the Bazaars, or Schnitzler s
Anatol sniffing adventure in the Ring. The Vienna he evokes
for us is the Vienna of the Stefanskirche, not the Vienna of
Sacher s nor even of Schonnbrunn. His observation of Angelo
has the desperate seriousness of a practical joke; and although
he may be quizzical on the surface, we must be made to feel
the philosopher-statesman underneath. Just as Poel himself
would sometimes conceive one production and execute
another, so Shakespeare was capable of setting out with one
play in his mind and finishing up with a different one. This
explains why Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and
even, pace Poel, The Merchant of Venice, have the character of
tragi-comedy. The creative imagination has intervened.
The critic of The Times admitted that the experiment at the
Royalty had "proved at least that scenic accessories are by no
means as indispensable to the enjoyment of a play as the
manager supposes"; and a professor of literature from London
University wrote that he had "never been more fascinated by
a play upon the stage, and now I shall ever think the cutting
up into scenes and acts a useless cruelty and an utter spoiling
of the story." Poel would have been especially pleased with
this tribute because the continuity of action in Shakespeare was
one of his chief tenets. It was for this reason, he maintained,
that so many Elizabethan plays had a double plot to avoid,
even for a moment, an empty stage. It was noticeable, too,
that the same character never ended and began consecutive
scenes. The only exception to this was in The Tempest, which
had evidently been written as a Court entertainment. Yet,
from an aesthetic point of view, it is disastrous to interrupt
The Tempest for a single instant. How, otherwise, is the
94 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
audience to be brought a second time under the spell of
Prospero s Island ? In A Midsummer Night s Dream no interval
is conceivable once the lovers have left for the wood; the only
really legitimate breaks are after Act One and before Act Five,
and it may well be objected that the first of these is too early
and the second too late. In Hamlet the curtain should never
fall between the end of the second Ghost scene and Hamlet s
departure for England, and never in Macbeth before "To be
thus is nothing but to be safely thus." I confess that, as a
spectator, I am generally maddened by intervals, and I think
there are very few plays of Shakespeare that do not gain by
being acted at a stretch.
But there are two issues here; what ought to be done now,
and what was in fact done in Shakespeare s day. Poel admitted
that in some theatres musical interludes had been creeping in,
but he believed that at the Globe Shakespeare had maintained,
or ^restored, a strict continuity. There were no indications of
act or scene division in the Quarto texts; and Burbage had
referred in the introduction to The Malcontent to the "not
received custom of music in our theatre." William Archer
argued that the Chorus in Henry V proved the existence of
act divisions ; but Poel replied by asking why Shakespeare had
omitted to write one to mark the beginning of the Fourth Act,
and why in the three Quartos of the play published between
1600 and 1608 no Chorus appeared at all. Did not this suggest
that the Chorus had been found ineffective and unnecessary
in performance, and that when it was dropped the man
employed by the printer to take notes for publication had no
chance of hearing the words ? The five-act division had of
course been adopted, but this was due to the influence of Ben
Jonson at a time when Shakespeare was retiring more and
more from active theatrical management.
Poel always had a great liking for Measure for Measure and it
may be useful to consider here his subsequent production of
it, fifteen years later, at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester.
His own powers and method had ripened in the meantime,
and this later performance came to be regarded as a classic
example of his art. The Gaiety was then under the direction
of Miss Horniman. Iden Payne was her stage director and
she had gathered round her a group of actors, many of whom
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 95
were to become famous in the English theatre. It was probably
the best team that Poel ever had to work with. But it was only
with the greatest difficulty that Iden Payne persuaded Poel
to accept Miss Horniman s offer. , He said that the actors
would be too fixed in their ways to accept his teaching. He
knew many of them and shook his head at every name. At
last he discovered a very minor performer, rather stuffy in
style, who was employed in smaller parts and whom, it was
said, Iden Payne only kept in the company because he amused
him personally. Poel, however, sat up as soon as his name
was mentioned. "What," he exclaimed, "have you really
got So-and-So in your company? That makes a difference.
He can take the tones."
Poel at first tried Lewis Casson in the part of the Duke, but
after three weeks rehearsal decided that he was not sprightly
enough and cast him for the Provost instead. The Duke was
eventually played by James Hearne, who gave a fine per
formance but was not too adaptable at "taking the tones."
Basil Dean was the Claudio, Ada King the Mistress Overdone,
and Iden Payne himself played Lucio. Although Sybil
Thorndike was a member of the company, Poel would not
accept her as Isabella. He had a great desire to see Sara
Allgood in the part and persuaded Miss Horniman to engage
her specially. Poel himself again played Angelo. Some of
the rehearsals took place in Dublin, where the company were
playing on tour, and this gave Poel the opportunity of meeting
Yeats, Synge, and Edward Dowden. Yeats told me many
years later that he had never agreed with PoePs method of
verse-speaking. This is not surprising since for Yeats, when
his poet s blood was really up, every syllable was a key-word
and every tune was an incantation.
The impact of Poel on this celebrated and slightly com
placent repertory company the first of its kind in England
has been vividly described by Mr. Basil Dean.
I well recall the announcement that Mr. William Poel was
coming down to produce the company in Measure for Measure.
All sorts of rumours about his eccentric methods preceded his
arrival; and his peculiarities of speech and manner were
mercilessly burlesqued in the dressing room by us youngsters.
In appearance at that time William Poel was tall and thin,
96 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
and had a pronounced stoop. He strode about the stage like
some great black bird, with flapping arms protruding from a
black cape and hands usually encased in black woollen gloves.
His beautiful aquiline features shone with ascetic zeal as he
expounded his views on the rendering of the part to each
individual player. His method of production was in marked
contrast to anything known hitherto in the theatre of that day;
it was the method of the scholar and the student, sometimes
of the pedagogue. Many of the Horniman players resented
his close teaching. As I had been given the part of Claudio,
it behoved me to listen carefully to what I was told. I soon
discovered there was method in the apparent madness of
incantation of the Shakespearian line upon which Poel insisted.
I spent long hours in solitary instruction with him, saying the
lines over and over until my head was in a whirl. In the end
I found Poel had taught me the secret of rhythmic speech,
the value of the operative word, and the magic of Shakespeare
when it is spoken both musically and intelligently. Those
lessons for that is what they were I have never forgotten.
The impact of Pod s ideas upon the Horniman company
was like a fresh sea breeze in a rather self-satisfied atmosphere.
In the end, despite some rather over-accentuated moments,
he achieved a total effect of surge and sweep quite unlike
anything I had heard before, the exhilaration of which remains
still in my memory (Stratford Dossier] ,
Sir Barry Jackson saw this production when it was subse
quently given at Stratford (21 and 22 April 1908) and admits
that it completely swept him off his feet.
Even before PoePs day [he writes], I experienced an in
stinctive feeling that something was wrong. Irving s twenty
minute interval whilst an elaborate garden scene was set for
the short fifth act in The Merchant of Venice; and a very popular
production of The Shrew by Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton
when I had a sensation that the audience spent as much time
looking at the tableau curtain as the comedy itself; such and
other similar experiences account for the tremendous impact
of Peel s Measure for Measure with its directness, its impetus
and simplicity (Letter to the Author; 15 May 1951).
It was fortunate for Poel s fame that G. E. Montague was
at this time dramatic critic of The Manchester Guardian, and
we can obtain a good idea of what this production really felt
like from his review of it, reprinted in Dramatic Values (1911).
The whole of this essay, entitled The Art of Mr. Poel, is Mon
tague at his best; that is to say, it is in the first rank of English
HAMLET
(First Quarto) 1881
Maud Holt (Lady Tree)
as Ofelia
" Enter Ofelia playing on a lute
and her haire downe singing "
(See page j/)
Enthoven Colhdio
FRATRICIDE PUNISHED
1924
(R) Hamlet: Esme Percy
(L) Horatio : Orlando Barnet.
(See page 240}
Enthoven Collection
Photograph : Arthur Hands
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 97
dramatic criticism. There was a limit, of course, to the degree
to which the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, or the old Memorial
Theatre at Stratford could be turned to Elizabethan uses.
Mr. Poel did wonders, but he could not get rid of the
proscenium arch. What he gave us was not an Elizabethan
stage as it was to Elizabethan playgoers, but a picture of an
Elizabethan stage seen through the frame of a modern pro
scenium. So we gained a good visual idea of a Shakespearian
stage, but not the Elizabethan sensation of having an actor
come forward to the edge of a platform in the midst of our
selves and deliver speeches from a position almost like that of a
speaker from a pulpit or from a front bench in Parliament,
with only the narrowest scope for theatrical illusion, with no
incentive to naturalism, and with every motive for putting his
strength into sheer energy and beauty of declamation, giving
his performance the special qualities of fine recitation as
distinct from those of realistic acting. But, without that, we
got a good deal. We saw better than ever the needlessness,
as well as the destructiveness, of the quite modern method of
taking Shakespeare s shortest scenes. They are usually
scurried through by actors who maintain a precarious footing
on a strip of boarding between the footlights in front and a
bellying sail painted with landscape, which swells out at them
from behind. In Mr. "PoeFs Elizabethan arrangement a
roomy front portion of the stage is divisible from the rest by a
curtain which can be either passed through at its middle or
walked round at its ends; the rear portion of the stage is in
turn divisible into two or more planes of distances as it retreats
into the "tiring house" at the very back. With this arrange
ment those short scenes and the long ones flow into one another
without the slightest jolt or scrappiness. The use of the upper
stage, too, was surprisingly effective and undisturbing; it
made you see why Shakespeare s stage directions so often
bring in people "above," "on the walls," or otherwise aloft.
But in fact the whole performance threw "sidelights on
Shakespeare" by the dozen, while -just cause for thanksgiving
it never froze up the imagination of us ordinary, half-
instructed persons, as reconstructive scholarship often does.
As for scenery, one did not think about it, either in the way of
missing it, or of being glad it was away. But if any people did
imperatively need to be distracted from the play, they could
look at the dresses, which were quaint and rich to admiration,
and, we understood, prodigies of historical accuracy only
another Mr. Poel should venture to speak more dogmatically.
Last, and very large, there was the pleasure of the acting
of Angelo by Mr. Poel himself, an actor who did not wait for
Irish amateurs or Sicilian peasants to teach him to act as if he
4
98 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
meant it. Whatever he may be doing at the moment, the
consuming energy with which he conceives a part communi
cates itself to the spectator; the character is so vehemently
imagined by the artist that its expression seems almost inde
pendent of the ordinary symbolism of tones and looks. Or,
rather, while he uses just the means which other actors use,
they mean more to him; they stand for a more ardent realisation,
by him, of the idea, say, of an Angelo. When once the specta
tor is caught up into itself by this authentic heat of passionate
imagination in an actor, the actor can then do nothing wrong;
thenceforth his technics seem scarcely to matter; you feel as if
you had got past all that, as you get past any little inexpressive-
ness in a friend. So Mr. Peel s acting seizes you up and makes
you more intimate with the character than its own speeches
are (pp. 244-6).
Here, for once, Poel seems to have realised his own teaching
by an effect of sheer intensity, and one is glad to print Mon
tague s tribute against the general view that he was at all times
a bad actor.
Poel was so commonly regarded as an apostle of textual
integrity that it may be useful to examine how far this reputa
tion was justified. Measure for Measure is an interesting test
case. It is a fairly long play, and it is a play generally con
sidered as painful and unpleasant and improbable, redeemed
by many incidental splendours. It was certainly not a play
suited to the popular taste of 1893 or even of 1908. Poel had
two choices open to him in preparing his acting version. He
could have said, "I want to woo the public into liking this
play, and I shall therefore excise whatever might wantonly
offend them." Or he could have said, " No audience can enjoy
this play unless they can be persuaded into an Elizabethan
frame of mind. They must accept the realism as well as the
poetry." As far as the staging of the play was concerned, he
was, as we have seen, true to his principles, and there can be
no doubt that as a spectacle the performance made sense.
But where the text was concerned he surrendered on every
count to the Puritanism still in vogue. If he had been pro
ducing the play for a commercial c run, there might have been
some excuse for this. He could have argued that some sacrifice
of realism, some failure of fidelity, was pardonable, so long as
the core of the play was communicated effectively. But his*
treatment of the text could not be justified by this plea.
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 99
You cannot separate the sordid realism of Measure for
Measure from the purity of Isabella and the philosophy of the
Duke without damage to the total structure of the play.
Unless we are made to feel the unbridled sexuality of the city,
with its pimps and bawds and brothels, its aphrodisiac incite
ment to lust, Isabella s vocation and Angelo s villainy lose their
full significance. It was the genius of Peter Brook s production
at Stratford in 1950 to have realised just this; for it is the whole
point of the play that it unashamedly calls a spade a spade.
Some of Lucio s pornographic prattle is hardly intelligible and
may judiciously be cut; but Poel did not scruple to amputate so
Shakespearian a jewel as "Why, what a ruthless thing is this
in him, for the rebellion of a cod-piece to take away the life
of a man" ; or Mistress Overdone s accusation of Lucio to the
Provost, "Mistress Kate Keepdown was with child by him
in the Duke s time; he promised her marriage; his child is a
year and a quarter old, come Philip and Jacob; I have kept
it myself." Here, in four lines, is a whole short story by de
Maupassant; the passage is a small miracle of human sympathy
and observation. But this was a side of Shakespeare s genius
a dimension of his poetry to which Poel was quite un
responsive. He would have cut c old Double, if he felt that
old Double was holding up the story.
He could not prevent the audience from suspecting that
Measure for Measure is a play about a young man getting a
girl into trouble, but he did his best to conceal the fact. "He
has got a wench with child," became, incredibly, "He will
shortly be a father." Again, it is very difficult to play Measure
for Measure without mentioning the word c bawd ; but Poel
did so fairly successfully, except at one point where c bawd
had perforce to do service for e whoremaster. More significant
still was an alteration in Angelo s speech to Isabella at the end
of Act II Scene 4. The lines run as follows:
Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite,
Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes
That banish what they sue for, redeem thy brother
By yielding up thy body to my will;
Or else he must not only die the death,
But thy unkindness shall his death draw out
To lingering sufferance.
IOO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Here the world self 3 was substituted for body/ to the total
destruction of the rhythm, which should match the precipitancy
of Angelo s unfettered impulse. Up to this point the two
characters have dexterously fenced with each other, Isabella
not able or willing to understand, Angelo not daring to reveal
his naked thought. But at the end of the scene the verse
suddenly begins to flow with the momentum of a passion and
a purpose which can no longer be held in check. I defy any
actor to say self instead of body without finding a large
stone unexpectedly placed in his path. The iambic metre is
here given its head, and all he needs to do is to follow it. If
Poel thought his audience could not stomach body , he
could have substituted person/ which is feeble enough by
comparison but would at least have preserved the rhythm.
Poel, for all his concern for accurate and musical speech, had
little ear for metrical values or their reinforcement of dramatic
meaning.
These scruples would not have been remarkable if Poel had
been an untroubled nineteenth-century Englishman, like
Henry Irving, satisfying the highest common factor of con
temporary taste. But Poel set out to be a reformer, and even
a revolutionary. In fact, he remained to the end a high-
minded Victorian, and he deluded himself that Shakespeare,
in spite of occasional concessions to the groundlings, was high-
minded in the same way. He would have been surprised if
you had suggested to him that the most Shakespearian of
modern writers was James Joyce. Yet his excisions from
Measure for Measure were rather like depriving Marion Bloom
of her last soliloquy. Poel had historic imagination of a high
order, but there were limits to his penetration of, the Eliza
bethan mind. If he had occasionally frequented a public
house, and chosen the right one, he could have heard people
talk like Lucio and Mistress Overdone any evening of his life.
But the conversation at the Emerson Club ran on different
lines. Henry Irving would probably have cut Measure for
Measure in much the same way as William Poel; but he would
have done so with a sly twinkle in one eye, and in the other a
shrewd glance at his receipts. His natural Bohemianism and
bonhomie kept him close to Shakespeare s heart and enabled
him, no doubt, to overcome in a large degree the deficiencies
FIRST EXPERIMENTS IOI
of the Lyceum way. Poel s Elizabethanism, by contrast, was
puritan and refined.
II
The Elizabethan Stage Society became formally established
in 1894 and among the first to subscribe to it were Mr. and
Mrs. Edmund Gosse, Sir Walter Besant, the Rev. Stopford
A. Brooke, Professor Israel Gollancz, and Sir Sidney Lee. In
the same year Poel married Ella Constance Locock, daughter
of the Rev. Alfred Locock, of Putney Heath, and grand
daughter of Sir Charles Locock, M.D., F.R.S., physician-
accoucheur to Queen Victoria. The marriage was an extremely
happy one. Mrs. Poel was a woman of considerable intel
lectual powers and an accomplished musician. Although
for many years an invalid, she was well qualified to assist and
encourage him in his work.
There was no production, properly speaking, in 1894, but
Poel organised a recital of Richard II in April, and another of
Romeo and Juliet in March 1895. Here Romeo was read by
Lilian McCarthy and Mercutio by Leah Bateman; this was
the first sign of PoeFs eccentricity of putting women in men s
parts. No convincing explanation of this disconcerting practice
was ever given; but at least he never claimed that it was
Elizabethan. Probably he found women s voices easier to
modulate; and actresses were generally more willing to give
him the time he needed for rehearsal. He was indifferent to
the sex of the performer and the sense of the play provided
that the actor or the actress spoke in tune.
Miss McCarthy, whose family had newly settled in London,
came to know Poel through her brother. He was an ardent
amateur actor and had already taken part in the Shakespeare
Readings. He introduced his sister to Poel who gave her an
audition and then asked her to read Romeo. This was the
beginning of a long and important association; Poel never
found a better actress or a more faithful friend. This is how
she describes their first meeting.
When I got there I knew it was heaven because I saw
William Shakespeare. There he was with his handsome,
gentle face with resolution glancing from behind a gracious
smile. Dan nudged me and said : "Don t stare, that s William
102 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Poel, the Dramatic Director." "No!" I whispered, "it s
Shakespeare!" I was right, for the more I came to know
William Poel the more clearly I saw in him Shakespeare come
to life again, and that being so it seemed simple and natural
that Poel should give new life to Shakespeare s dramas : that
he should do easily what others had so often found impossible :
reconcile the poetic and the dramatic in Shakespeare s plays by
showing that they are not contradictory but complementary
to one another (Myself and my Friends; 1933, p. 28).
Miss McCarthy, would now listen to him on the lecture
platform "speaking excitedly, passionately and even violently/
and endure "days and days of scolding" before she stepped on
to the platform of the Steinway Hall to "read" Romeo. In
fact, the actors were required to know their parts by heart,
but they carried books because the occasion was technically a
reading. She had her reward when Henry Irving, who was
in front, came over to her afterwards, "took my hand, bent
over it, and in that voice which none who has heard it can
forget began to praise me "(Ibid.}
In May 1895 Miss McCarthy played Lady Macbeth for
Poel in a production by the Shakespeare Reading Society at
the St. George s Hall. Bernard Shaw wrote of her performance
as follows:
She . . . can hold an audience whilst she is doing everything
wrongly. . . . The banquet scene and the sleep-walking scene
. . . were quite successful; and if the earlier scenes were im
mature, unskilful and entirely artificial and rhetorical in their
conception, still, they were very nearly thrilling. In short I
should like to see Miss Lillah McCarthy play again (Our Theatres
in the Nineties; 1932, Vol. I, pp. 131-3).
The first production of the Elizabethan Stage Society, as
finally constituted, was Twelfth Night, given in Burlington Hall,
Savile Row, and for a second performance in St. George s
Hall, in June 1895. A valuable wardrobe of Elizabethan
costumes had been purchased, and the stage fittings prepared
for Measure for Measure were used in this and many subsequent
productions. Poel had made the acquaintance of Arnold
Dolmetsch, who superintended the music for all the Society s
revivals until 1905. Sometimes Dolmetsch would join in the
action of the play and on these occasions Charlotte Wilberforce
compared him to an "attractive Veronese dwarf." His wife
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 1 03
recalls "the glee with which, while accompanying a clown s
song in The Spanish Gypsy, he interpolated ribald rejoinders
between the stanzas" (Mrs. Arnold Dolmetsch in Personal Recol
lections of Arnold Dolmetsch: The Corisort No. 8; 1951). Captain
Hutton, F.S.A., was at hand to advise on swordsmanship.
Hutton was the author of a book on this subject, and as a
conscientious antiquarian he was shocked by the defective
swordsmanship on the London stage. The duel in the last
act of Hamlet was still fought with modern foils instead of
with rapier and dagger, as the text demanded.
As a result of this performance of Twelfth Night Poel was to
encounter the most formidable critic of his work. William
Archer was then writing for The World. A dour and rational
Scot, he* proclaimed himself "a Prohibitionist as regards
alcohol, but not as regards reason" (Letter to The Nation; 23
August 1919). But in some pigeon-hole of his orderly mind he
kept a tame romantic daemon which was later to escape and
become known as The Green Goddess. He was no reactionary.
On the contrary, he had already proved himself the pioneer of
the new drama with his translations of Ibsen and his support
of Shaw. He was quite free from the current idolatry of Irving,
although he admired him in certain parts. He had been as
impressed as Poel himself by the Saxe-Meiningen Julius Caesar
which had been seen at Drury Lane in the eighties, and he was
in sympathy with many of Poel s aims. But he never ceased
to maintain that Poel defeated his own objects. The case
against Poel, as it was always felt by many intelligent play
goers, has never been put more clearly than in Archer s well-
knit and logical prose. Archer unkindly commented that
Twelfth Night, which was described on the programme as
"Acted after the manner of the Sixteenth Century" was, in
fact, "Staged (more or less) after the manner of the sixteenth
century and acted after the manner of the Nineteenth Century
Amateur." He went on to say that "the true end to be aimed
at is to make Shakespeare, and some twelve or fifteen plays
of his contemporaries, really live for the modern playgoer; and
this end can never be attained by a form of representation which
appeals only to the dilettante and the enthusiast." He ad
mitted that Elizabethan costume was permissible for Twelfth
Night, but then argued: "Let the Elizabethan] S[tage]
IO4 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
S[ociety] act Julius Caesar in Elizabethan dress and tell me
that the effect is not ludicrous ! Let them put As You Like It on
their arras-hung platform and tell me that the lack of the
woodland setting matters nothing!" (New Budget; 27 June 1895:
Reprinted in The Theatrical World, 1895-96, p. 219). Poel
would always have the answer that at the Globe Julius Caesar
was in fact played in Elizabethan costume with minor classical
accessories. Lines such as "pluck d me ope his doublet"
or "half their faces buried in their cloaks" were evidence of
this. The notion of Julius Caesar in Elizabethan dress is not
so bizarre now as it was then. Some of those concerned with
the production of the play at Stratford in 1950 confessed to
me that they wished they had produced it in this way. And all
Mr. Ronald Watkins s arguments for "Moonlight at the Globe"
might be applied to As Tou Like It. But in 1895 ey en a man so
intelligent as Archer could only reply, with some truth, to be
sure, that an Elizabethan audience heard a play differently.
They did not expect scenery. But it would not be long before
the members of the Elizabethan Stage Society ceased to expect
it either. And how many members of the Old Vic audience
would complain of the simple curtains which enabled Robert
Atkins s productions to flow so freely ? All that Archer would
allow was the utility of a reconstructed Globe, set up alongside
a permanent National Repertory Theatre, where the student
might see how the plays were originally staged* Poel himself
did not ask for more; but their wish has not yet been
realised.
When Poel produced Twelfth Night in 1897 (10 and 12
February at the Middle Temple Hall), practically nothing was
cut except the greater part of Sebastian s important soliloquy
in Act IV Scene 3. But in the 1895 production Archer
reproaches him with the omission of two hundred and fifty-
one lines, very few of which were either improper or obscure.
For the rest he says that the "Viola [Elsie Fogerty] was intelli
gent and pleasant, the Olivia [Lillah McCarthy in a high red
wig] had a handsome and expressive stage face," the Malvolio
was "sprightly," the Antonio "spoke well," and the Aguecheek
was "really excellent." Ben Greet was present at this per
formance and immediately engaged Miss McCarthy to play
leading parts in a tour of Shakespeare s plays. She replaced
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 105
Dorothea Baird who had joined Beerbohm Tree at His
Majesty s.
Archer showed himself an implacable critic to the end.
When PoePs collected papers, entitled Shakespeare in the Theatre,
were published in 1913, Archer reviewed the book for The
Nation. Most of this article was devoted to the old controversy
about act divisions, but in the opening paragraph he summar
ised his view on PoePs twenty-five-odd years work in the
theatre.
If Mr. William PoePs judgment had been equal to his
enthusiasm, his energy, his disinterested devotion to his ideal
of dramatic art, he might have done signal service to the
English theatre. Some service he has done he has helped
onward a reaction against the subordination of Shakespeare
to scenery and spectacle. He had the root of the matter in
him; of that there is no doubt; but both his theories and his
practice as Director of the Elizabethan Stage Society were
marred by such eccentricities as to deprive them of all per
suasiveness either to managers or to the public. In these
latter days, no doubt, he has had some influence on such
managers as Mr. Granville-Barker and Mr. Martin Harvey:
but the movement they represent would certainly have come
without him, and it may be questioned whether, in detail,
his influence has been altogether for good.
Having challenged Poel on his own ground, Archer continued :
If we want to act a scene as Shakespeare meant it to be
acted, we must place it on a stage as like his own as we can
make it, must seriously study the evidence as to his method of
presentation, and must put a strict curb upon our private
inspirations and fancies. This Mr. Poel was very far from
doing. He was a non-scenic Beerbohm Tree (5 July 1913).
This last was a shrewd thrust and we shall see how far it
was justified. In fact, Archer claimed to be as good an
Elizabethan as Poel, but he impugned PoePs scholarship.
In answer to another article by Archer in The Quarterly Review
(April 1908) Poel prepared a long and interesting reply which
for some reason was never published. Here he accuses Archer
of a want of historic imagination; of using expressions like
"visible," "tableau," and "ineffective entrance" in a way that
would have had no meaning for the Elizabethan playgoer.
He then goes on to develop an argument which seems to me
4*
IO6 WILLIAM* POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
extremely dangerous for any defender of the Elizabethan
method. Indeed, I wonder if Poel himself realised how
double-edged it was and refrained from publishing it for this
reason. Archer had maintained that "the middle-stage thus
curtained-in would be wholly invisible to everyone who sat,
or stood, further back than the two pillars." I confess that this
same objection in fact the relative remoteness of anyone
acting in the upper or inner chamber occurred to me when I
was reading Mr. Ronald Watkins s fascinating book on the
production of Shakespeare. Poel replied by blandly admitting
that one- third of the audience at the Globe of those seated in
the galleries would have seen little more than the backs of
the actors heads; and that a third of those in the twopenny
seats "would have seen nothing at all but the backs of the
noblemen seated on the corners of the stage." He was in no
way daunted by this admission, but went on to argue, "The
real object in going to the theatre in those days was not to see,
but to hear. It was as if a man invited an author to his room
in order to read his play or novel to some couple of dozen
friends, when the reader is put into the middle of the room and
the listeners sit round him, some of them with their backs to
him, and some with eyes half closed, all too intent on listening
to the words to care for any distractions intended to please the
eye." If the "main object of the entertainment that drew
people to the Globe playhouse was not to look at a play but
to hear a good story well told," then these performances can
have had little in common with anything that has ever been
understood by theatrical entertainment. And it becomes mere
whimsical folly to plead for the reconstruction on the South
Bank, or anywhere else, of a theatre where one-third of the
audience is unable to see the stage. Poel took up these points
in his correspondence with Lawrence, whom he thought paid
too much attention to Archer s reasoning. Lawrence had
argued that there must have been something like a bay window
on the Elizabethan stage because a character in Shakespeare
refers to them. To this Poel replied by asking why he should
accept this as evidence
when I am confident that when Romeo says :
Lady by yonder blessed moon I swear
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops,
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 1 07
there were no fruit-trees on the stage ? Here lies my quarrel
with William Archer whose opinions you trust much more than
you should, for you have double his knowledge and insight,
only I think that like him you sometimes lack the power of
visualising a period that is not our present one. Your scien
tific mind objects to imagine anything. Now I took objection
to Archer s fanciful reconstruction of the Fortune Theatre
because it is built up from arguments which, in my
opinion, are not legitimate evidence. When he con
tends that the side doors must be at a certain angle because
in a play a character comes into the doorway and talks with
somebody on the balcony, or says that he can see somebody
on the balcony, and therefore contends that we must admit that
the balcony can be seen from the doorway, he is simply in my
opinion talking nonsense. It does not in the least follow. All
that is really necessary is that the audience shall be able to see the
speaker and the person on the balcony at the same moment.
This I know by actual experiment, which he himself (Archer)
has never taken the trouble to make. What I insist so strongly
upon and therefore fall out with the experts over is this: that
there was no finality in the form of the Elizabethan Stage
which dramatists like Shakespeare would or could accept,
because they knew that the play must be acted one day in
their own theatre, another day in the palace, and, when they
were travelling, in town halls where there must always be
slight differences in the positions of the doors and the balconies;
so that Shakespeare must have known that many lines, describ
ing scenes or "stage business" or "exits and entrances," must
have been spoken on the stage which were not suitable for
actual realisation on the stage, so that the audiences got used
to the discrepancies and accepted them (15 January 1914).
Poel contested Archer s statement that there cannot have
been traverse curtains between the two forward pillars because
"it is quite inconceivable that a playwright should never have
discovered the convenience of the tableau ending to an act or
scene the ending which leaves a group of characters on the
stage and simply draws the curtains on them." (The Quarterly
Review; April 1908). He challenged Archer to name a single
good play which had been written with the object of bringing
down the curtain on a group of characters. No such play
existed in the classical drama of Greece or of seventeenth-
century France. If the author had got his characters into a
situation, it was his business to get them out of it in full view
of the audience. Again, Archer had argued that if there had
been a traverse curtain, there was no reason why Silence, in
I08 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
the orchard scene from Henry IV, Part Two, should not
have been left sleeping in his chair. "But why?" replies Poel.
Carrying off a drunken man is good business on the stage.
But the traverse was not required to shut off anything from
the eye. If Silence had got up and walked out at the end oi
the scene, I don t believe the audience would have noticed it
or minded. A scene is always over on the Elizabethan stage
when the speaking ends; what the actors did afterwards was
done simply to suit their own convenience. If they were in
sight of the audience, they were no longer looked upon as the
characters but as the actors.
Poel quoted the stage direction from the first Quarto of
Romeo and Juliet, which showed that Romeo never in fact
left the stage during the Balcony scene, but that Juliet simply
called him back from the side. Again, in the scene where
the Nurse goes to find Romeo in Friar Laurence s cell, she
would have first stood at the side of the stage, knocking on
the floor three times with her crutch. Here one is tempted
to object that if the actors stood about at the side of the stage
chatting on occasions to the gallants, the performance must have
been even more generally invisible than Poel had suggested.
Poel believed that the traverse, which has now become a
common convenience for all Elizabethan productions attempted
inside the proscenium arch, was used
to differentiate a street from a hall, or a hall from a bedroom:
or a person walking from his own house to his neighbour s
which could be shown by drawing the traverse, showing the
character moving across the street in front of the traverse and
then on opening the traverse again, with a slight change of
furniture having taken place, show him in his neighbour s
house. But even this was not always necessary to illustrate
movement though I believe it was often done. In Measure
for Measure the Duke is seen leaving the prison for the street
by simply crossing the stage where he is met by other characters
who enter from the back (Poel MSS. Collection).
And so the controversy went on, between two mentalities,
mutually incompatible, but with a common overriding
interest. Archer never took kindly to what he called "starved
Shakespeare," and when in later years he was persuaded to
attend a performance at the Old Vic, he was disgusted, but
not perhaps greatly surprised, to feel a voracious rat gnawing
FIRST EXPERIMENTS
away at his square-toed boots. What emerges from his
debate with Poel is the very conjectural nature of the Eliza
bethan stage itself. Within certain agreed limits one scholar s
guess is as good as another s. But Poel was certainly more
widely informed in these matters than Archer had allowed.
Twelfth Night was played with a single interval often minutes,
and a feature of the performance was that all the members of
Olivia s household were dressed in black. "Nobody can
pretend/ wrote Bernard Shaw in The Saturday Review (20 July
1895),
that the Society had any advantage over Mr. Daly or Sii
Henry Irving in the histrionic talent at its disposal. But
what it had went so much further under the Elizabethan
conditions that everyone present took the acting to be much
better than it really was; whereas at Daly s or the Lyceum,
only the most gifted players can make any considerable effect,
the other parts invariably seeming colourless and unduly
subordinate. . . . On the whole though I will not urge Sir Henry
Irving to rebuild the Lyceum on the old inn yard model, I do
seriously suggest that our leading actors might occasionally
come down and take a turn on the stage of the Elizabethan
Stage Society at Gray s Inn Hall or elsewhere, just to show
us what they could do on the sort of stage which helped
Burbage to become famous. (Reprinted in Our Theatres in the
Nineties, 1932: Vol. I, pp. 188-191.)
There was a project to repeat the performance in December
of the same year, 1895, in the hall of Gray s Inn, but The
Comedy of Errors was substituted. The stage, as erected here
and elsewhere, required a floor space of thirty feet in width,
twenty-four feet in depth, and a height of not less than twenty-
three feet.
The whole evening was designed to recall the first per
formance of The Comedy of Errors as an after-supper interlude
in the same place. On the evening of Holy Innocents Day,
28 December 1594, the students of the Inner Temple had been
invited to dinner at Gray s Inn; but the hall was already
crowded and there was barely standing room for the c Templar-
ians, who took considerable offence at what they regarded
(with some reason) as a gross breach of hospitality. By way
of appeasement, therefore, an entertainment was improvised
of which Shakespeare s comedy was the chief item "so that
IIO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
night was begun and continued to the end in nothing but
confusion and errors, whereupon it was ever afterwards called
The Might of Errors." On the tercentenary of this occasion the
Benchers and their guests sat in their usual places at the long
tables, and the actors appeared through the Tudor doors at
the lower end of the hall and played on the same level as their
audience. -The play was given without an interval. The
costume of the Dromios reproduced exactly the dress and
equipment of an Elizabethan serving man, whose duty it was
to accompany his master when he left the house and to carry
his sword. A Dutch form of dress was affected by the Anti-
pholi; this was a popular fashion of the period. The Duke
and his entourage were dressed in imitation of the Elizabethan
court, and the Halberdiers were played as servants of Gray s
Inn, wearing the Griffin on their sleeves. The Queen s
Prayer, taken from Ralph Roister Doister, was recited by the
actors at the conclusion of the play, and this was followed by a
programme of Elizabethan music given by the Dolmetsch
ensemble, while the company were having supper. This was
described by Shaw as "a delectable entertainment which
defies all description by the pen"; and in the same article he
awarded the Elizabethan Stage Society the season s palm
"for a delightful, as distinguished from a commercially
promising first night. ... I have never, I hope, underrated the
importance of the amateur ; but I am now beginning to cling
to him as the saviour of theatrical art." (The Saturday Review;
14 December 1895; reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties;
1932, Vol. I, pp. 269 seq.}
In February 1897 Poel made a similar experiment in the
Hall of the Middle Temple with a revival of Twelfth Mght.
It was here that the play had been given in 1601, and a very
distinguished audience gathered to see Pod s production.
Among them were the Prince of Wales, sitting as a Bencher of
the Inn, Princess Louise and the Duke of Teck, the Bishop of
London and Mrs. Mandell Creighton, the Lord Chancellor
and Lady Halsbury, the President of the Royal Academy and
Lady Poynter, with many others. For this performance Poel
had erected a raised platform and proscenium with carved
columns and an architrave and high-pitched roof, with a
raised gallery at the back. A brass rod, heavy with tapestry
FIRST EXPERIMENTS III
curtains, was run from column to column, and these shut out
the farther part of the stage where necessary. This arrange
ment had been copied from the drawing of the Swan Theatre
at Bankside, generally attributed to the Dutchman, de Witt,
who had visited London in 1596. A row of shaded lamps
swung from the ceiling concentrated the light on the stage.
The performance seems to have been a little slow it needed
considerable experience to capture PoeFs inflections at the
speed required to give animation to the play and one or two
of the actors were inaudible.
He had tried to orchestrate his voices in the following way;
Viola (Mezzo Soprano), Olivia (Contralto), Sebastian (Alto),
Antonio (Basso Profundo), Sir Toby (Bass), Sir Andrew
(Falsetto), Malvolio (Baritone), Maria (High Soprano), Orsino
(Tenor), Clown (Tenor). He maintained that neither Olivia
nor Orsino was more than seventeen, and that Viola and
Sebastian were about sixteen. His first idea for Viola was Mrs.
Gabrielle Enthoven. This lady was a friend of Irving s and
she relates how he coached her for the part. After she had been
to Grafton Street three or four times, he professed himself well
pleased. But Poel would have none of it. "The bit that
wrecked my chances was the scene where Olivia lifts her veil
and says Is t well done? Irving told me to look at Olivia.
Remember you are a woman, you want to see if she is made
up or not. A man would just say you are wonderful but a
woman wants to know." This reading was too modern for
Poel, but it is difficult to imagine where he wanted Viola to
look if not at Olivia. The upper stage was apparently not
used at all, the one scene which clearly demanded it
Malvolio s prison being cut. The Duke s household were
dressed in two shades of crimson and Olivia, as before, in
black. Halberdiers stood at the side of the stage throughout
the performance, and also on the stage and in the corridors
outside the Hall. The music was composed by the Dolmetschs
in skilful imitation of Elizabethan settings, and it was played on
an Italian virginal of 1550, a treble and a bass viol, and a lute
made in Venice about 1560. Indeed the whole occasion was a
splendid one and brought the Society both publicity and prestige.
In the spring of 1903 Poel revived Twelfth Night, first at the
Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens (23 April), and then at
112 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
the Court Theatre (16 June), with himself in the part of
Malvolio. But although he was in the play, he was not in the
programme. According to the critic of The Morning Post, Poel
was
a very good Malvolio, in some ways the soundest Malvolio
we have seen. At the outset he lacked weight and sonority;
self-satisfaction was there, but it was not the ponderous, deep-
rooted self-satisfaction that is not only Malvolio s dominant
trait but the petard by which the conspirators^ hoist him into
fatuity. Still Mr. Poel preserved, as not all actors have, the
contrast between Malvolio when left to himself and the fan
tastic impertinent that his enemies make of him. He does
not start frivolous, and the change they work is a good deal
more than a change of clothes. And in the scenes in which
Malvolio is befooled Mr. Poel played with rich and admirable
comedy (17 June 1903).
By 1903 PoeFs method had matured; so had his actors and
audience. The effect of his finished Twelfth Might was described
by the same critic as
peculiar and remarkable. The want of scenery does not affect
the spectators nor diminish the reality of the action; the words
receive full justice except in a few passages where the delivery
is too slow and formal. We incline to the opinion that Mr.
Poel has done a, service to the drama and the stage by his
efforts, and that the managers of the principal theatres have
something to learn from him, not by way of copying any
details but by observing how much effect he produces by
simple means, and how great is the spell laid on the audience
by the silent and even solemn stillness of the mutes on his stage
(24 April 1903).
Edmund Gosse described the performance as
one of the most inspiring and most poetical at which I have
ever been present. There is perhaps no other product of the
human intellect so pervaded by the sunshine of imagination as
Twelfth Night, none as completely harmonious. You have
trained your actors to treat it with the maximum of respect.
I felt myself carried away this afternoon far out of all common
conditions into the very Elysium of Illyria. Malvolio was
splendid (Letter to William Poel; 23 April 1903).
And the following vindication of PoeFs method by Byam Shaw
must have been all the more gratifying since it came from a
distinguished painter.
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 113
I told several of my artist friends to go and see it and they
were all simply delighted. I only wish that others would
follow your noble example and allow us to listen to Shakespeare
instead of looking at what Mr. So-and-So thinks is like a
sunset or a cherry tree (Letter to William Poet; 19 June 1903).
Among the first recognitions that the Elizabethan Stage
Society was doing something of importance was an invitation
to Poel from Sir Walter Raleigh to address the students of
Liverpool University. When this lecture had been given, in
June 1896, Raleigh wrote, "I am sure the only thing for
Shakespeare critics is to go back to the Globe and Fortune and
understand them" (Letter to William Poel; 8 June 1896).
Ill
In his next production Poel broke entirely new ground.
Marlowe s Faustus had not been seen within living memory
although it had been popular in its own day. It had been
acted probably at the Curtain Theatre by the Earl of
Nottingham s servants, with Alleyn in the chief part. The
Quarto text had been published in 1604, but the date of the
first performance was very uncertain. It could hardly have
been later than 1590. The play had an obvious appeal for a
public which remembered the Morality plays of its youth and
whose more instructed members were still fascinated by the
niceties of classical learning and theological debate. The
mind of Marlowe, for all its professed atheism, moved in a
metaphysical dimension, and Faustus is the only example of
purely religious drama to have found its way into the Eliza
bethan theatre.
Little as Poel sympathised with the theology of the play,
he saw that it differed radically from anything he had handled
up till then, and he understood its essential seriousness. He
was quick to seize on its anti-papal tendencies, and he claimed
in his programme note that "the greater seriousness which
marked the age of the Reformation gives a tragic dignity to
the conception of the revolt of a human being against his god,
and invests the spirit of such a defiance with what has been
truly called a titanic character." Anyone who undertakes
the production of Faustus is disconcerted by the intractable
stuff which makes up the middle portion of the play. Poel
114 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
maintained that this was not by Marlowe s hand and he .did
not hesitate to cut and rearrange it, leaving the central
structure of Faustus fatal compact unencumbered and drama
tically clear. At the same time he sought to strengthen the
play with whatever pictorial aid he could bring to it, and his
production was conceived, very exactly, in a spirit of "tragical
sport."
The play was given in St. George s Hall on a stage which
reproduced, as far as possible, the stage of the Fortune Theatre.
But the tapestried hangings were replaced by red curtains
similar to those with which the travelling cars of the Mystery
Plays had been draped. The dress worn by Faustus in the
invocation scene was inspired by the following verse from a
contemporary ballad.
The gull gets on a surplice
With a cross upon his breast,
Like Alleyn playing Faustus
In that manner was he dressed.
On the title page of the 1616 edition of the play there is a
woodcut of Alleyn s Faustus invoking a devil with a pug-nose.
Here he is shown wearing a ruff and long academic robe, lined
with white fur, with puffed-out, episcopal sleeves. For some
unexplained reason, Poel did not follow this description in his
dressing of the part during the rest of the play. The business
designed for the summoning of the demons was taken from
Reginald Scot s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which had
certainly influenced Shakespeare in the writing of Macbeth.
This had the deliberate effect of pantomime and comic relief;
an Elizabethan audience would have laughed at it with less
hesitation than its Victorian successor. Poel s use of his stage
is well illustrated in the course of a favourable review by the
critic of The Morning Post (3 July 1896) :
The two pillars between which the curtain hangs stand
about six feet away from the footlights, and a little further
away from each side of the stage. This enables the performers
to appear at the side of or in front of the curtain, whether it
is drawn or not. The curtain open reveals a room of which
the back is in two storeys, each with its own curtains. The
Chorus . . . came from behind a subsidiary small curtain on
the (stage) right of the central structure, and having finished
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 115
her verses walked back behind the same curtain. Then the
principal curtain was drawn, and disclosed Dr. Faustus in his
study. . . . Mephistopheles, in traditional fiendish shape,
appeared on the . . . balcony at the back. When ordered to
come again as a friar, he came out through the curtains of the
lower storey. The farcical and other interludes . . . took place
in front of the stage with the principal curtains closed. When
Lucifer appeared it was on the balcony behind, the apparition
being rendered more demoniacal by the addition of one or
two attendant devils and by red fire and smoke. The lower
curtains at the back when opened revealed a great dragon s
mouth wide open, representing the mouth of hell. Out of this
came Mephistopheles, and under his escort the Seven Deadly
Sins, Alexander and his paramour, and Helen. The good angel
always came from the curtains on the right-hand side, and stood
in front of the stage; the bad angel came from her own special
door at the back of the room. The important scenes, the
conjuration, the appearance of the deadly sins, of Alexander
to Charles V and of Helen to the students and to Faustus, the
Pope s dinner, and the appearance of Faustus and Mephisto
pheles on Olympus all took place in the room revealed when
the chief curtain was opened; most of the other performers
appearing from one or the other wing and coming in front of
the curtain.
The religious character of the play was emphasised by the
intonation of the supernatural characters, and from the
moment of Mephistopheles reappearance in Franciscan guise
Mr. Dennis Eadie, who played the part, spoke with his face
entirely masked by a cowl. This was to impose a perhaps
unnecessary handicap on the actor. There were the customary
complaints that the speech, generally, was too slow the
players were, no doubt, still consciously clinging to their tunes
and not even at the climax of Helen s entrance was Faustus
allowed the precipitancy called for by his lines. Helen kissed
his forehead and he kissed her hand! Here, if anywhere,
Darby and Joan were an anachronism. But the entrance
itself was splendidly contrived. The actress was given a long
walk up stage, with her face three-quarters turned away from
the audience; all her beauty could be read in the rapt expres
sion on Faustus face, and there was no risk of rhetoric being
contradicted by reality. Any full-blooded Marlovian in
St. George s Hall would have found compensation in the
prologue specially written for the occasion by Algernon
Il6 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Charles Swinburne. Edmund Gosse had interested Swinburne
in the production, and the poet had intended to speak his own
lines. But Swinburne s declamation never matched the fervour
of his fancy, and in the end it was Gosse who recited them.
His elocution, we are told, was "not that of a practised actor,"
and it is difficult to imagine any reader less likely to have
written his own script. But PoePs Faustus was the first of many
revivals of plays by the other Elizabethans, and in the cir
cumstances Swinburne s hyperbole had some excuse.
But song might bid not heaven and earth be one
Till Marlowe s voice gave warning of the sun.
Thought quailed and fluttered as a frightened bird
Till passion fledged the wing of Marlowe s word.
Faith born of fear bade hope and doubt be dumb
Till Marlowe s pride bade light or darkness come.
Then first our speech was thunder: then our song
Shot lightning through the clouds that brought us wrong.
Blind fear, whose faith feeds hell with fire, became
A moth self-shrivelled in its own blind flame.
The poem printed in the programme closed with these lines:
And for his tomb, though there no point may stand
The flower it shows was laid by Shakespeare s hand.
Shaw wrote a long and provocative article on the pro
duction for The Saturday Review (n July 1896). Marlowe, for
him, was the "true Elizabethan blank- verse beast" who, "the
moment the exhaustion of the imaginative fit deprives him of
the power of raving, becomes childish in thought, vulgar and
wooden in humour, and stupid in his attempts at invention."
With rare prescience Shaw looked forward to the Arena
Theatre of fifty years later. "The more I see of these per
formances by the Elizabethan Stage Society, the more I am
convinced that their method of presenting an Elizabethan
play is not only the right method for that particular sort of
play, but that any play performed on a platform amidst the
audience gets closer home to its hearers than when it is pre
sented as a picture framed by a proscenium." Having de
scribed the Botticellian angels and Schongauer devils and
Beardsleyan c Sins, he concluded that Poel had given his
audience "an artistic rather than a literal presentation of
Elizabethan conditions, the result being, as always happens
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 117
in such cases, that the picture of the past was really a picture
of the future. For which result he is, in my judgment, to be
highly praised. The performance was a wonder of artistic
discipline in this lawless age" (Reprinted in Our Theatres in the
Nineties; Vol. II: pp. 181-186).
Poel revived Faustus in the autumn of 1904 with two
performances at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane
Square, followed by a provincial tour. The company
visited Bedford, Cambridge, Leamington, Nottingham,
Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, St. Andrews,
Newcastle, Durham, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham,
Chester, Rugby and Oxford. Everywhere they played
in large halls. The production was the same, although
Faustus was now permitted lightly to brush Helen s cheek, and
there were changes in the cast. Faustus was played by Hubert
Carter, whose performance was variously appreciated. Accord
ing to J. T. Grein, writing in The Sunday Times, he was
an actor of many but uneven qualities. He has a fine voice
which he does not always rightly govern. He has great
emotional powers, which he does not always use judiciously.
Thus in the first part Faust making his compact his musings
and lamentations failed to impress. He discoursed in one key
and became monotonous. But later, after the transformation
of Faust s being, he very often rose to the occasion. More
than that, he gave a somewhat startling reading of the char
acter. He strove to make Faustus a modern man swayed by
feelings to which he gave a wholly unstilted expression. That
was an audacious but a happy feat, and when the climax
came, the terrible effusion of self-accusation, he displayed fine
tragic force. . . . Nothing could be more powerful, more
thrilling, actually more discomforting, than the supreme
moments before, during, and after the striking of the clock
which indicates that Faustus must fulfil his contract. It was
I speak for one only as if I saw that great abstract power
which we call conscience materialised before my eyes. Not
for many a day has the psychical side of a drama impressed
me so deeply as the effusions, mostly in monologue, of the
wretched Faustus.
Carter was severely criticised, however, in The Daily Chronicle
for his inaudible diction and "cogitative style" (3 July 1896).
On no one, however, did the production have a greater effect
than upon its Faustus. Many years afterwards a visitor called
Il8 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
to see Hubert Carter in his flat. The actor was in bed, and in
the course of conversation he remarked : "Would you like to
know what Hell is like? Well, it s like this." And thereupon
he uttered a shriek which curdled the blood of his visitor, and
caused the neighbours to conclude that some violent crime
had been committed on the premises. The Daily Telegraph
did not like the "slow, woebegone, sepulchral delivery"
affected by the new Mephistopheles, and he felt that "nothing
was gained by making the good and bad angels chant their
speeches, which would come home more poignantly if spoken"
(3 July 1896), Grein had "one serious fault" to find with Poel,
and this was on the score of the "would-be comical ladies"
who impersonated the Seven Deadly Sins. This, he felt, was
"to heap ridicule on an august fantasy," and even if Poel had
contemporary warrant for his conception, here was a case
where "extreme fidelity was an error."
The best account of the production was by Montague, who
saw it at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and reported on
it afterwards in The Manchester Guardian (8 Nov. 1904). He
began by comparing the play with Everyman; PoePs production
of the mediaeval classic, which I shall discuss in due course, had
intervened between the first revival of Faustus and the second.
Everyman on revival was found to be a good play in the same
sense strange as it sounds in which Sudermann s Heimat or
Mr. Pinero s Iris is a good play. It kept you always wanting
to know what would come next. Many of us who for the first
time saw Doctor Faustus acted last night must have felt that,
with all its magnificence, it is not in this sense a good
play, at least not to us. One felt that as compared with
Everyman time had clawed Faustus uncommonly severely in his
clutch. The Morality, though perhaps two centuries older,
recurred to the mind last night as having been really much
the more modern of the two modern in the vital sense in
which The Pilgrim s Progress is more exciting to a modern than
Sir Charles Grandison, though Bunyan wrote so long before
Richardson. The older play, like the older story, goes much
straighter to feelings that do not change from age to age;
whereas, in spite of all its imperishable single lines, whole
tracts and aspects of Doctor Faustus, the playgoer grieves to
confess, were of their own time solely, and now are dead as
doornails the keen Renaissance relish, for example, for a
certain kind of bookishness. And yet the performance does
give a rare and curious pleasure or blend of pleasures.
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 1 19
There is the pleasure of judging the effect of the Elizabethan
platform stage, when the actors stood out "in the round"
like statues and the public could see between them and the
back cloth or curtains with all its differences from our
modern picture stage, where the actor is seen in the flat,
framed in a recess, and planted on a background. Last night
the contrast was not brought out quite completely; for that,
we spectators would have had to be sitting on three sides of
the stage, which should have jutted out to just the middle of
the pit. No doubt this was not physically possible in the Free
Trade Hall, and even as it was, and with actors who could not
quite disengage themselves of modern methods, one was
helped to feel the tremendous difference between the influence
of the two forms of stage upon the drama that used them.
The platform stage obviously made naturalism in acting
impossible and declamation essential. The fact "jumped
into your eye" that on such a stage Elizabethan drama had
to be a drama of harangues, as on our own stage an illusive
hole in the wall drama is almost bound over to be realistic. . . .
Like all the Society s work, the performance of Faustus
keeps you, at any rate while it lasts, in that state of grave and
childlike absorption and of freedom from our modern affliction
of knowingness that simple and enthusiastic souls can achieve
while looking at Giotto s tower with an unclouded faith in
Ruskin. Last night the Pope at dinner was a masterpiece of
well conceived ndiveti\ the bell, book, and candle business was
in deliciously effective contrast with a recent commination
service at Drury Lane, and the set, mortified countenance of
the Duchess s one waiting- woman was worth whole retinues of
the wheeling and countermarching Abigails of our age. The
Botticellian angels, the M6ryon devil from Notre Dame, the
quaintly trapesing and trolloping Seven Deadly Sins, the
Michelangelesquely sinewy Lucifer were all delectable inven
tions in a very difficult kind, for the least slip in judgment would
have raised a laugh, and yet nobody laughed. Everybody s
mind was for the moment simplified not, indeed, to the point
of sharing Elizabethan joy in such a play, but to the point of
genuine interest in that joy and partial comprehension of it.*
Throughout this tour performances of The Comedy of Errors
were given alternately with Faustus.
IV
For his next production. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Poel
borrowed the Merchant Taylors Hall. There was no built-up
*The substance of this notice, partially rewritten, was incorporated in Dramatic
Values, pp. 237-41; 1911-
ISO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
stage, but the audience was raised on tiers. The design for
the costume of the two gentlemen was taken from some
frescoes painted about the middle of the sixteenth century on
the walls of the Carpenters Hall. The outlaws were
dressed as Halberdiers, after a design used in the Fishmongers
Pageant of 1609, and they made their entrance through the
audience to the accompaniment of flag and drum. Schubert s
setting for "Who is Sylvia ?" seemed an evident anachronism
and a new melody was composed by Arnold Dolmetsch.
Poel had invited Lugne-Poe, the celebrated director of the
Theatre de FCEuvre in Paris, to come over for the performance,
and Lugne-Poe afterwards described his impressions in
La Nouvelle Revue (i March .1897). We learn from him that the
minstrels gallery of the Hall served, naturally enough, for
Sylvia s balcony, and that when Valentine went into exile he
passed through the middle of the audience, acting his part all
the time. Hardly had he left by the door through which the
audience had come in, than the noise of the outlaws attack
was heard in the vestibule. Sylvia escaped in the same way,
running after her lover, and accompanied by a servant. And
then came the Duke in chase of his daughter, turning round
when he had almost reached the exit to give a last instruction
to the servants who were still on the stage. A moment later
he, too, was attacked in the vestibule. At the end everyone
returned through the audience to the rolling of a drum, and
it was on the stage proper that Valentine persuaded the
outlaws to submit to the Duke who had been their prisoner.
"Everything combined," wrote Lugn6-Poe, "to make us relive
naively and sincerely the glorious flowering of English dramatic
art."
The production, however, was not a success. The speaking
was monotonous and inaudible, and once again, in reading the
criticisms, one has the impression of half-trained actors strug
gling to acquire a technique of elocution which they could not
master and did not understand. In the process all spontaneity
was lost. The play was given on the 30 November 1896,
and repeated in the Great Hall of the Charterhouse on 18
January 1897.
Poel s second production of this play was one of his most
important contributions to the * Elizabethan Revival. In
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 121
1910 Beerbohm Tree, who had an impresario s nose for novelty,
invited him to present The Two Gentlemen of Verona during the
Shakespeare Festival at His Majesty s. This was to ask the
wolf to step into the sheep-fold, for Tree s way with Shake
speare was the popular illustration of everything Poel con
demned. But he was in no mood for compromise when he
led his half-trained troupe of semi-amateurs within those
sumptuous and slightly vulgar precincts. The young Bridges-
Adams, only recently down from Oxford, was his Assistant
Stage Manager, under Nugent Monck, and he has described
to me his first meeting with the great reformer.
He found Poel wrapped in a grey muffler, nibbling at a
biscuit and sipping a glass of milk. In front of him a lady,
shimmering with sequins and no longer in her first youth, was
in an attitude of visible distress. Poel s voice was raised in
querulous criticism: "I am disappointed," he said, "very-
disappointed indeed. Of all Shakespeare s heroes Valentine
is one of the most romantic, one of the most virile. I have
chosen you out of all London for this part, but so far you have
shown me no virility whatsoever."
Yet the production had beauties which lingered in the mem
ory; among them, Nugent Monck s inn-keeper nodding to
sleep over his lantern. For the first time an apron was
built out over the orchestra pit of His Majesty s and front
lighting installed in the balconies. Beerbohm Tree may have
smiled at the austerity of Poel s Elizabethan way, but the
apron and the front lighting were retained for his own Henry
VIII two years later. And they have now become a common
place of Shakespearian production. It was the thin edge of
the Elizabethan wedge and no one has since dislodged it.
The production was described by A. B. Walkley as "an
entertainment of absorbing interest. The literary quality of
the play, the verve of its dialogue, the lyric beauty of many of
its passages came out with unusual freshness and clear-cut
relief." He thought that the Elizabethan convention, for all
its stiff archaic quaintness, gave one far more of the play s
atmosphere its "romantic amorism" than could ever have
been conveyed by a modern setting. And it brought to mind
a number of more recent analogies some "trifle of de Musset,"
some "marivaudage of Marivaux/ or the "fervour of Cyrano
122 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
deBergerac serenading his precieuse" (The Times; 21 April 1910).
This production was to be remembered. Six years later, in
a letter to Poel, Prince Antoine Bibesco paid him the following
tribute :
Having been present at a Shakespearian performance
given by you a few years ago at His Majesty s I realise that you
are really the only man that has given an adequate idea of the
way Shakespeare should be played (18 April 1916).
Meanwhile Poel had been encouraged by the success of
Faustus to explore further into the lumber room of Elizabethan
drama. He chose the anonymous Arden of Feversham as the
subject of his next experiment (9 July 1897). Swinburne had
already urged him to revive this play, and with it he planned
to produce the opening half of Edward III also an anonymous
work although he believed that the passages he had picked
were by Shakespeare.
Here, not for the first time, Poel underestimated his public.
People who went to see Arden of Feversham wanted the whole
play, not a precis prepared by Poel. The play is an admirably
constructed domestic tragedy, or melodrama, and PoePs
surgery robbed it of its cumulative effect. Nor was the per
formance *a good one. It suffered, according to the critic of
The Morning Post (10 July 1897), from the "unhappy tradition
of the Society to drawl or deliver slowly all their sentences
and words, even in passages that ought to be full of fire."
This tradition seemed "to be against by-play or any effective
expression in the silent passages . . . there is a tendency to
move about rather like pot-dolls without joints, and to speak
with the deliberation of Dutch clocks." The critic ended by
hoping that Poel would "remove the fetters in which his players
have been hampered." Poel revived the play at the Scala, for
the Renaissance Theatre, on the 6 December 1925, with a
much stronger cast. Ernest Milton appeared as Arden,
D. A. Clarke-Smith as Franklin, D. L. Mannering (the original
Faustus) as Mosbie, Hubert Carter as Cheiny, and Miriam
Lewes as Alice. A wide interest had by then been excited in the
minor Elizabethans and a more or less complete version of the
play was given. It was acted on a multiple stage with three
fixed localities; the parlour of Arden s house, the high road,
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 123
and a street in London. The effect of playing on this was
described by Ernest Milton.
I was amazed at the elasticity, and the wide and varied
terrain offered by his stage. Three or four things, and as many
personalities, could be, or occur, at one and the same time.
There was a constant lapping over of times and places which
provided continual movement and excitement, without
slurring or distraction or overbrusqueness. I ve seen this
imitated in a play like, shall we say, Late Night Final, with good
effect, but not nearly so thrilling and dependent upon elaborate
devices, such as floor upon floor rising to the top of the pro
scenium.
Mr. Milton recalls a further interesting detail:
He had the strange idea of putting the weak, sad, doomed,
unpopular Thomas Arden into pink tights, and it had the
strange effect of showing perhaps what the man, Arden, might
have been, as of some hidden frivolity in his nature, or some
exquisite suppressed libido (Stratford Dossier) .
It is worth remarking that on this occasion Poel was working
with highly skilled actors, who could make his method their
own, and Mr. Milton adds, rather surprisingly, that "in
interpretation he seemed to guide or imperceptibly influence,
never dictate."
In the 1897 production the scenes from Edward III, perhaps
because they were played in their original sequence, carried
a good deal more conviction than Arden of Feversham. They
describe how the king, arrived at Roxburgh Castle, which
had been successfully defended by the Countess of Salisbury,
makes love to the Countess and is by her restored to his sense
of duty. These passages were performed at the Poel Cen
tenary Matinee at the Old Vic in 1952, and although their
authorship cannot be affirmed with certainty, they powerfully
suggested the flow and idiom of Shakespeare s earlier style.
Poel had pointed out the discrepancy between the first and
second parts of the play, and it is difficult for the sensitive
reader to believe that they are by the same hand.
On 5 November of the same year (1897) The Tempest was
produced before the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress in the
Egyptian Hall of the Mansion House. An Elizabethan stage
was erected for the occasion. The music was arranged from
composers of the period and Mrs. Dolmetsch now for the first
124 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
time joined the instrumental ensemble. The play was given
without an interval. The dresses worn by Ariel and the
Shapes were taken from prints of a Masque found in the
British Museum, and when they brought in the banquet they
danced a Masque by Giles Farnaby and went out to a Coranto.
The Nymphs and Reapers performed La Volta, a graceful
movement, to the music of Thomas Morley. For Prospero s
magic robe Poel claimed, once again, the authority of The
Discoverie of Witchcraft. The part of Prospero was spoken,
very nobly, by Paget Bowman, a London solicitor, who was
by far the most accomplished of the amateurs Poel had gathered
round him. Very few professional actors of the time could
speak with his distinction and grace. The Tempest was repeated
shortly afterwards at the St. George s and Goldsmiths Halls.
The play with its magical poetry and clear opportunity for
spectacle was a challenge to Poel s doctrine as well as to his
rather inexperienced performers. The acoustics of City Halls,
with their high absorbent roofs, are not easy, and the actors
had not caught the orator s trick of always addressing them
selves, at the Mansion House, to the second pillar on the right
of the door. To those who argued that here, if anywhere,
scenery was essential, Shaw replied in The Saturday Review
(5 November 1897) that it required
the nicest judgment to know exactly how much help the
imagination wants. . . . You can do best without scenery in
The Tempest and A Midsummer Night s Dream, because the best
scenery you can get will only destroy the illusion created by
the poetry; but it does not at all follow that scenery will not
improve a representation of Othello.
A Lyceum production of the play would have substituted
the "screaming violin" for the "harmonious viol"; "charac
teristic" music "scored for wood-wind and percussion by
Mr. German" for Mr. Dolmetsch s pipe and tabor; and
"an expensive and absurd stage ship" for the Musicians
Gallery of the Mansion House. Poel said frankly, "See that
singers gallery up there? Well, let s pretend that it s the
ship," and for Shaw, at least, the trick was done. "But how,"
he asked,
could we agree to such a pretence with a stage ship ? Before
it we should say, Take that thing away: if our imagination
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 125
is to create a ship, it must not be contradicted by something
that apes a ship so vilely as to fill us with denial and repudia
tion of its imposture. The singing gallery makes no attempt
to impose on us; it disarms criticism by unaffected submission
to the facts of the case, and throws itself honestly on our
fancy, with instant success. In the same way a rag doll is
fondly nursed by a child who can only stare at a waxen
simulacrum of infancy (Reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties;
1932, Vol. Ill, pp. 241-244).
This was PoePs doctrine argued by a master of polemical
prose; the truth of it could be tested by those who were able
to compare Michael BenthalPs production of The Tempest at
Stratford in 1951 and Bernard Miles s production of the same
play at the Mermaid. The poetry which had been drowned
by Mr. BenthalFs pantomime survived on the platform in St.
John s Wood. The first time I met Poel was at a performance
of The Tempest at Angmering-on-Sea in 1926. Most of those
taking part in the production were amateurs, although some
of us, including the Prospero and co-producer, Martin Browne,
were to work professionally in the theatre later on. It is
piquant to recall that Antonio was played by Mr. John van
Druten and Ferdinand by Mr. Godfrey Winn. The per
formances were given in a Y.M.C.A. hut; Poel was present
and gave a lecture there in the evening. Afterwards he wrote
an article on the production in Monthly Letters (1929, pp. 25-26),
and since I was only playing the relatively small part of
Alonso, I may without immodesty quote what he said. It is
impossible to imagine that this lovely and elaborate play can
ever have been given under more primitive conditions.
In a wooden shanty by the sea, playgoers were brought
close up to the poetic work, and this was mainly due to the
skill and intelligence of the performers. The quality of the
representations was on a high level because the company
realised that their business was not to act the stage was too
small for that but to speak the words Shakespeare had
written for them to say, in the way he wanted them said, and
thus to allow the author to tell his own story as he wished it to be
told, without the modifications so often made by actor and
scene painter and the use of limelight.
All this sustained activity and splendour of costuming had
cost money, most of it from PoePs private purse. On 30
March 1898 Bernard Shaw wrote to him as follows:
126 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
I am perfectly paralysed by your balance sheet. I have
myself just had to fork out more than 50 to wind up the
Independent Theatre solvently, but your 917 16s. 7d. takes
my breath away. I have often wondered at the recklessly
handsome way in which the E.S.S. dressed its performances,
and where you had discovered the munificent patrons at whose
expense I concluded it was being done. If I had thought
that you were standing the racket yourself, I should certainly
have remonstrated with you like a father. All I can do is to
seize the occasion of the forthcoming performance to do what
I can through the Saturday Review to let people know what you
have done and what they must do if you are to go on.
The following year (1898) was one of great activity. On n
February Beaumont and Fletcher s The Coxcomb was given at
the Inner Temple Hall, Poel himself as the coxcomb, Michael
Sherbrooke, a very powerful character actor, as Mercury, and
Bowman as Valerio. The Irishman s dress worn by Antonio
in disguise was taken from a woodcut of Derricke s Image of
Ireland (1581), reprinted in Scott s edition of Somers* Tracts.
"It was not unusual," Poel pointed out in his programme note,
"for the gentlemen of that day to employ the Irish wood-
kerns as running footmen. These men wore their native dress,
as the Highlanders still do."
Shaw described the performance as one of the best the
Society had achieved. Certain concessions had been made to
the modesty of the Inner Temple. "Mercury s relations with
Maria," he wrote,
stop short of exacting her husband s crowning sacrifice to
friendship; and when the three merry gentlemen make
Riccardo too drunk to keep his appointment to elope with
Viola, the purpose with which the four roysterers sally out
into the street, much insisted on by Beaumont and Fletcher,
is discreetly left to the guilty imagination of the more sophisti
cated spectators.
Shaw confessed to a "condescending tolerance for Beaumont
and Fletcher"; they seemed to him "dainty romantic poets,"
who "had no depth, no conviction, no religious or philosophic
basis, no real power or seriousness . . . they neither knew nor
cared anything about human psychology, but they could
mimic the tricks and manners of their neighbours, especially
the vulgarer ones, in a highly entertaining way." He did not
criticise Poel for putting a woman into the part of Riccardo;
FIRST EXPERIMENTS
indeed he thought the anonymous lady (Alice Arden) who
played it "hit the part off to perfection, having, by a happy
temperamental accident, the musical root of the poetic
passion in her. 1 She reminded him of Calve. (The Saturday
Review; 10 Feb. 1898; reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties;
1932; Vol. Ill, pp. 317-320.)
On 5 April, Middleton and Rowley s The Spanish Gypsy
was produced at St. George s Hall, with Michael Sherbrooke
in the part of Alvarez. This play had won the esteem of
Swinburne, and he composed a prologue in heroic couplets for
the occasion of its first revival after two hundred and fifty
years. In his introduction to the Mermaid edition of Middle-
ton s plays he had claimed that he was "worthy to hold his own
beside all but the greatest of his age; and that age was the age
of Shakespeare." The first act of The Spanish Gypsy is indeed a
consummate piece of work; Walter Scott had called it "horribly
striking." The hero, Roderigo, kidnaps and rapes a beautiful
young woman whom he meets by chance on the highway, but
this violent beginning is tempered by Roderigo s remorse and
Clara s reasonable reproaches. Mr. T. S. Eliot, following
Dugdale Sykes, has argued that The Spanish Gypsy is patently
by another hand, but Middleton was always ready to admit
collaboration generally by Dekker or Rowley. One may
recognise Rowley s conventional hack-work in a good deal of
The Spanish Gypsy the sub-plot is notably less interesting than
the Roderigo-Clara episode and still catch the authentic
accent of Middleton in such lines as these :
Instead of feeding
Too wantonly upon so rich a banquet
I found, even in that beauty that invited me
Such a commanding majesty of chaste
And humbly glorious virtue, that it did not
More check my rash attempt than draw to ebb
The float of those desires which in an instant
Were cooled in their own streams of shame and folly.
Middleton, as Mr. Eliot has said, had a noble, not merely a
nobly conventional, view of women, and this is shown in his
treatment of Clara, as it was shown supremely in The Changeling.
Poel did not burke the implications of the first act, although
he eliminated the bed which is plainly calle d for by the text.
After describing the performance as a "tolerably good one,"
128 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Shaw drew up a critical balance sheet of the Society s achieve
ments to date. Poel, he said, had
unquestionably made a contribution to theatrical art . . . the
truth is that nothing like the dressing of his productions has
been seen by the present generation: our ordinary managers
have simply been patronising the conventional costumier s
business in a very expensive way, whilst Mr. Poel has achieved
artistic originality, beauty, and novelty of effect, as well as the
fullest attainable measure of historical conviction. Further,
he has gained the assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch, and so brought
the most remarkable musical revival of our time to bear on
his enterprise. . . . He has done extraordinary things with the
amateur talent at his disposal, the last few performances
showing not only that he has at last succeeded in forming a
company of very considerable promise, but that something
like a tradition of Elizabethan playing is beginning to form
itself in the Society.
Shaw went on to draw attention to the Society s financial
plight. Poel could
hardly be expected to continue to endow the public at this rate
in return for the enthusiast s usual tribute of misunderstanding
and ridicule. It seems a pity that the Society should succumb
just as it is getting into shape, and beginning to understand
its business thoroughly (The Saturday Review; 16 April 1898;
reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties; 1932; Vol. Ill; pp.
About the same time Shaw wrote to Poel with the news that
he was giving up his job as critic on The Saturday Review and
recommending him to invite his successor, Max Beerbohm,
to attend the Society s productions. But Max seldom risked
the ruffling of his urbanity by such unconventional goings-on.
It is a melancholy fact that among the more influential critics
of the Edwardian decade, only Montague and, later, the young
Desmond MacCarthy and Herbert Farjeon grasped the im
portance of what Poel was trying to do,
Two months later The Broken Heart was produced in St.
George s Hall ( 1 1 June 1 898) . In a very interesting programme
note, which deserves quotation because I do not know that it
has been reproduced elsewhere, Edmund Gosse suggested the
reason for the difference of mood separating Ford from the
other Jacobean dramatists. This was something more than a
distinction of style, that sustained adagio which is Ford s
1
O
u
g.g 2
TJ
fl
s
I
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 1 29
personal contribution to the sum of English dramatic verse.
It was a kind of classical coherence, appearing in clear contrast
to the weakness and confusion of so much contemporary
writing. It reminded Gosse
less of the more flowing characteristics of the English school
than of other dramatic literatures that of Greece in the past,
that of France in the immediate future. The performance
tonight can scarcely fail to emphasise that severity, we might
almost say that rigidity, which distinguishes Ford from all other
English playwrights, and draws him nearer to Gorneille and
to Rotrou in their devotion to dramatic discipline.
There is no play in the English language which gives the
impression of a fine French tragedy so completely as The
Broken Heart, with its exact preservation of the unities its
serried action, its observance of the point of honour, its rapid
and ingenious evolution of exalted intrigue. Were it not for
the dates, we could hardly account this accidental, but the
latest possible year of composition for Ford s play is 1633,
when Corneille had not finished composing Clitandre, the
earliest of his tragedies. Yet the spectator should none the
less be prepared for a performance more in the French than
in the English taste, and for a piece perhaps the most classic
in our repertory. Individual beauties, gushes of exquisite
lyrical extravagance, are not in Ford s way. The construction
with him is not less solid than it is subtle, and it is the con
centrated subtlety on which the solidity is built. Racine
might have envied the skill with which, from the very first,
the fate of Ithocles and Calantha, apparently so secure and
so fortunate, flutters in the closed hand of Orgilus. His
revenge has a quiet resolution which is absolutely demoniac,
and it moves, as a stage passion should, in full sight of the
audience, although unsuspected by the other characters.
Gosse was immensely impressed by the whole rendering of
the play. For the military characters Poel chose semi-classical
costumes; Ithocles was dressed after Veronese s picture of
Alexander the Great in the National Gallery. The King and
his nobles wore peers robes, and the ladies of the court cos
tumes of early seventeenth-century design. Calantha, the
heroine, was in a classical gown of English sixteenth-century
style. We can detect here a new freedom in PoePs approach
to costume; a freedom which saved him from pedantry, but
was carried in later years to ludicrous extremes. John
Dowland s Lacryma Pavan was performed during the Revels
5
130 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
in the fifth act, and the "more sprightly" dance which followed
it was Byrd s Canaries. This music was played on a lute, a
"chest" of five viols, and the virginals. The performance as a
whole was greatly helped by Eleanor Calhoun s Calantha; she
brought to it a ripe professional experience, and this was not
outweighed by occasional touches of disconcerting modernism.
(She had recently sought to galvanise the sleep-walking scene
in Macbeth by tumbling over a table.) All the principal parts
seem to have been well played; Paget Bowman again acting
with high distinction as Ithocles, and Michael Sherbrooke
really coming into his own as Bassanes, the nightmare husband
of the play. Poel pared down the text considerably, cutting
the whole scene of Orgilus suicide and Bassanes magnificent
comment: "He has shook hands with time." He would always
justify these liberties by the plea that he was afraid of losing
the attention of the audience. Yet he was strangely insensitive
to the kind of thing which so often made his productions seem
like an academic exercise and restricted their appeal to the
scholarly. One critic, * in the course of a most discerning and
generally favourable review of The Broken Heart, referred to the
care which had been taken "to bring the atmosphere of the
museum across the footlights," adding, "unfortunately, that
is precisely the atmosphere in which the poet cannot live."
The last production of the season was Ben Jonson s Masque,
The Sad Shepherd, which was performed on the 23 July in the
courtyard of Fulham Palace. It was the first time the Society
had attempted a Pastoral. Poel was by now indulging his
weakness for putting women into men s parts; a practice which
may on occasion have been justified by its vocal effect, but
which quite lacked Elizabethan precedent. The critic of
The Morning Post, always sympathetic to the Society s work,
remarked that "Miss Arden was dressed in a skin or fur, and
nothing but the fact that she answered to the name of Lionel
revealed the secret that she was pretending to be a man."
Poel had invited Edward Dowden to write a foreword to the
programme. In discussing the date of the play, about which
there is no clear evidence, Dowden put forward the following
ingenious theory.
* Neither the identity of the critic nor the name of the newspaper can be traced
from Poel s press-cutting book.
FIRST EXPERIMENTS 13!
The scene of The Sad Shepherd is Sherwood Forest; the
shepherds invited by Robin Hood are of the vale of Belvoir.
From 1612 to 1620 Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland,
was keeper of Sherwood Forest. In The May Lord the Countess
of Rutland probably Sir Philip Sidney s daughter, wife of
the fifth Earl appeared under a pastoral disguise. It has not
been noticed in connection with The Sad Shepherd that Belvoir
Castle was painfully connected with the subject of witchcraft
in 1618-19. The Earl of Rutland s two sons died in infancy.
Joan Flower and her two daughters, servants at Belvoir
Castle, were dismissed for neglect of duty. In 1618, five years
after the loss of the elder son, they were accused of causing his
death by witchcraft; Joan Flower died upon wishing that the
bread she ate might choke her if she were guilty; her daughters
confessed the crime, and were executed while Jonson was in
Scotland. Is it altogether a fanciful conjecture that Jonson
may have written the fragment of The Sad Shepherd before this
discovery of witchcraft; may have laid his work aside as having
distressing suggestions for the Earl and Countess of Rutland,
and towards the close of his life, after the death of the Earl
(December 1632) may have decided to complete the play,
but with his enfeebled hand may have failed to accomplish
his design?
The production gave special opportunities to the Dolmetsch
emble. The song "Though I am young" was given in its
ginal setting by Nicholas Lanearn; Maudlin, Lozel and
nee danced to William Byrd s La Volta, which according
Scot s Discoverie of Witchcraft was the measure affected by
i "night-dancing witches/ Another piece by Byrd, "The
int s Up," and "The King s Hunt" were introduced in the
mting Scene, and the performance concluded with "The
ines Morris/ where the very accurate description of the
ps given in the first edition of The Dancing Master (1650)
is scrupulously followed.
The quadrangle of the Palace was a suitable, though it was
t a sylvan setting. The witch-hunt, with its meute of dogs
d men, and the capture of the Sorceress in the shape of a
.re, were especially effective.
CHAPTER IV
Shylock and Samson
THE Elizabethan Stage Society had now been before the
public for three years, and PoePs theories had been seen
in practice for a good deal longer than that. At the close of
the season 1897-8 he took stock of the situation in a short
pamphlet (An Account of the Elizabethan Stage Society: printed for
the Society: June 1898; 12 pp.)* where he answered a number of
criticisms which had been directed against his work. To those
who objected to artificial lighting as inconsistent with Eliza
bethan principles he replied that
the Elizabethan playhouse was open to the sky, and the
performance began at three o clock. On winter afternoons,
when the play was acted in the palace or in the private
theatre, candles were used as footlights, or torches were held
by servants. In the Society s Revivals, the object has been
to give a diffused and subdued light, somewhat equivalent
to the candle-power light of the olden times, and thus to avoid
that glare and distortion of feature that comes from the
modern method of illumination. Whether this be done by
candle or electric light is not much to the moment, if the
visible effect is the same.
Others had objected that, in logic, he should have put
boys into his women s parts, and here he pointed out that
boy actors were simply not available "because neither the
schoolmaster nor the choirmaster will give the necessary
permission." He defended his occasional reconstruction of a
play on the ground that
the Elizabethan dramatists, with the exception of Shakespeare,
were bad constructors of plots. They could conceive fine
dramatic situations and write powerful scenes, but there is
often no method, no sequence, no directness of purpose, in
the arrangement of the scenes, so that interest aroused in one
scene is often dissipated in the next. . . . The effect of such
drama upon a modern audience is wearying and disappointing,
nor can actors be found of sufficient ability to sustain the
spectator s attention in scenes that have no connection with
the main issue. But where rearrangement of scenes is neces
sary, the utmost precaution must be taken.
132
SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 133
He quoted Stevenson s remark that "to read a play is a knack,
the fruit of much knowledge and some imagination, compar
able to that of reading a score/ and he revealed that, in order
to guard against mishap, it had
always been a rule of the Society to rehearse the whole play as
it was originally written, and only when the author s point of
view is realised to make such omissions and revisions as are
absolutely essential. To give more perfect form to a play is
to increase its vitality; and every work the Society revives is
given in the hope of its becoming part of a repertory for
future use.
Such argument was not inherently unreasonable, but
Poel s rational and classical mind exaggerated the extent to
which the Elizabethan drama could be tidied up. Its splen
dours were often incidental to a dull plot and an incoherent
design. They were not worth losing for the sake of shortening
a scene or simplifying a story. Here it was less a question of
principle than of discretion and Poel could be very indiscreet
indeed. The pamphlet ended with a review of the Society s
finances which were fairly satisfactory, but he appealed to his
supporters for a sum of 300 to be held in reserve against
future loss.
In deciding to produce The Merchant of Venice Poel was
plunging into the heat of Shakespearian controversy. For a
long time argument had raged around the character of Shylock.
There was no doubt that the Elizabethan audience had
regarded him as a comic figure, whether or not he had been
conceived in contrast to Barabbas, Marlowe s colossal carica
ture. Anti-semitism was a recognized sport and in June 1594
Doctor Roderigo Lopez, a Jew of Portuguese descent, had been
hanged at Tyburn on the suspicion of plotting to poison the
Queen. The case was so doubtful that for some time Elizabeth
hesitated to sign the death warrant. Lopez had been personal
physician to the Earl of Leicester and Shakespeare may have
been acquainted with him. He had possibly witnessed his
last agony at Tyburn, and he would have certainly recognised,
even if he did not share, the revulsion caused in a minority of
sensitive minds by the barbarous lengths to which Jew-baiting
was then carried by the mob. Two years after the execution
of Lopez a book called The Orator, translated from the French,
134 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
was published in London, consisting of model speeches on
matters of historical or present interest. One of these showed
a clear division of opinion on the treatment of the Jews. It
was, as Mr. John Palmer argues in his brilliant essay on the
character of Shylock (Shakespeare s Comic Characters; 1 946) 9 just
such a speech as Shylock might have made before the Doge s
court. What right had the Christians to deny him his pound
of flesh ? Did they not themselves condemn their debtors to
worse forfeits, "binding all the body into a most loathsome
prison or into an intolerable slavery?" Had not the Romans
regarded it as "lawful for debt to imprison, beat and afflict
with torments the free citizens ?" There was certainly enough
evidence, outside the evidence of the play itself, to suggest
that Shakespeare would have been capable of imagining a
Shylock who was comic and sinister, to be sure, but who
was also human and real within the conventions of the
story.
We do not know how much humanity the genius of Burbage
infused into this part; we only know that he played it in a
red wig. He thus established a tradition which lasted until
1741 when Macklin, although still conceiving the character
in comic terms, "made some tender impressions on the
audience" (Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies; 1783; Vol. II,
p. 394). Macklin had at least discarded the red wig, but his
successors in the part continued to build up the figure described
and denounced by Hazlitt, "a decrepit old man, bent with
age and ugly with mental deformity, with the venom in his
heart congealed in the expression of his countenance, sullen,
morose, glaring, inflexible, brooding over one idea, that of his
hatred, and fixed on one unalterable purpose, that of his
revenge." This Shylock was shattered by Edmund Kean on
27 January 1814, and Kean s tragic genius was responsible
for Hazlitt s judgment, which no one seriously questioned until
Poel revived the play in November 1898. The new legend had
received its latest confirmation from Henry Irving, whose
pathetic and offended patriarch was by common acknow
ledgment among his greatest parts. The character who for
Hazlitt had become "a depository of the vengeance of his
race" was for Heine and his romantic posterity "the most
respectable person in the play."
SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 135
The dispute about Shylock, like the dispute about the
rejection of Falstaff, will always arise from a failure to remem
ber that these people, who are more real to us than our neigh
bours, are nevertheless characters in a play. Their fortunes
are bound to the wheel of dramatic necessity. If you forget
that The Merchant of Venice is a skilful combination of two
serio-comic fairy-tales, it is easy to maintain that Shylock is as
respectable as any contemporary usurer in Threadneedle
Street; that Antonio is a pompous and gullible prig; that
Bassanio is a profligate and conscienceless adventurer; and
that Portia s play-acting is so thorough that Antonio might
well have died from a heart-attack before he was saved from
the knife. But all this is to forget the theatre; and especially
the Shakespearian theatre where the meaning, the significance,
is not to be separated from the conventions and the exigencies
of entertainment, or from the dispassionate ironies of the truly
observant mind. Translate Bassanio into real life and he
becomes a calculating cad ; but in Belmont he can still be the
gilded hero of an impossible romance. Translate Shylock
into Whitechapel and we quickly sympathise with him as the
victim of Fascist beasts; but place him in a court of law, whose
procedures have no precedent outside Nicaragua in the early
days of the Spanish conquest, and our sympathies, though they
may be momentarily quickened by his fall, can still respond to
the music and the moonlight of the final act.
It was not difficult for a powerful actor to alter the per
spective of the part, and therefore of the play. The famous
duologue with Tubal, where Shylock laments the loss of his
daughter and his ducats, is satiric comedy as Moliere would
have understood that term. But an Irving or a Kean could
easily wrench it to pathos. Indeed the most memorable
moment of living s Shylock was when he returned after
Jessica s flight and stood with his lantern, knocking on the
door; an entrance which is not indicated in the text for the
very good reason that it depends for its effect upon a tableau
curtain; and in the Elizabethan theatre a tableau curtain was
impossible. Irving s was the reigning Shylock when Poel
started his reforms, and it was against this sort of sentimental
deformation that he set his face. Twelve years earlier, in
1887, he had lectured on the character to the Church and
136 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Stage Guild. The Chairman was a devoted follower of
Irving, and as Poel developed his argument, he rose in protest.
But Poel was not the sort of speaker to be silenced from the
chair, and as he continued unabashed, the Chairman left
the meeting.
Shakespeare s Jew [Poel wrote later], is the Elizabethan
Christian s notion of the infidel in much the same way as the
modern stage Paddy is the Englishman s idea of the Irishman.
. . . Shylock is an isolated figure, unsociable, parsimonious, and
relentless, who tries to inflict harm on those who envy him his
wealth and hate him for his avarice. Perhaps it is this marked
isolation in which the dramatist has placed Shylock, that
tempts our modern actors to uphold him as the victim of
religious persecution, and therefore as one that does not merit
the misfortune that falls upon him. In this way the figure
becomes tragic, and, contrary to the dramatist s intention,
is made the leading part; so that when the Jew finally leaves
the stage the interest of the audience goes with him. But if
Shakespeare intended his comedy to produce this impression,
he was at fault in writing a last act in which every character
that appears is evidently not aware that Shylock s defeat was
undeserved.
In the same article, published in The Westminster Review
(Vol. 171; Jan. 1909; pp. 54-64) and afterwards reprinted as
a pamphlet, Poel admitted that
in so far as Shylock resents the want of tolerance shown him
by the Christians, he is in the right and Shakespeare is with
him; but when he tries to justify his method of retaliation and
schemes to take Antonio s life, not simply in order to revenge
the indignities thrust upon him, but also that he may put more
money into his purse, Shylock is in the wrong and Shakespeare
is against him. For it is obvious that Shylock does not seek
the life of Gratiano, or that of Salanio or Salarino, the man
who caUed him the "dog Jew," or that of the man who ran
away with his daughter, but of the merchant who lends out
money gratis, who helps the unfortunate debtors, and who
exercises charity and generosity.
Poel took this argument from Ulrici (Shakespeare s Dramatic
Art, 1876). Shylock s dominating passion was neither racial
pride nor paternal love; it was avarice. And to those who
held that the character was a relatively humane reply to
Marlowe s Barabbas, Poel retorted that Shakespeare was
SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 137
concerned, in so far as he was concerned at all, not with
Marlowe s attack upon the Jews but with his attack upon the
Christians.
He pointed out that Marlowe named his play after the Jew
who owned the argosies, Shakespeare after the Christian who
apparently had lost them; that in Marlowe s play the Christians
took forcible possession of the Jew s wealth, but that in
Shakespeare s they asked for a loan on business terms; that
Barabbas upbraids the Christians for quoting Scripture to
defend their roguery, while Antonio upbraids Shylock for
quoting Scripture in defence of his; that Marlowe s Christians
break faith with Turk and Jew alike, but that the Venetian
court upholds Shylock s claim; that Barabbas s daughter
rescues her father s money from the Christians where Jessica
steals Shylock s treasure and gives it away to them; that
Barabbas s servant helps his master to cheat the Christians,
where Launcelot Gobbo deserts Shylock to join them; that
two of Marlowe s Christians try to cajole Barabbas s daughter
away from him and die the victims of his treachery, while
Lorenzo elopes with Jessica and inherits Shylock s wealth;
that Abigail becomes a Christian and is poisoned by her
father, while Jessica becomes a Christian and lives happily
ever afterwards; that Barabbas saves the Christians from the
Turk, while Portia saves the Christians from the Jew; that
Marlowe s Christians are treacherous accessories to Barabbas s
death, where Shakespeare s save Shylock s life by extending to
him the mercy he had refused to Antonio.
Poel strangely brushed aside the evidence for Marlowe s
atheism evidence which was a powerful reinforcement of
his own argument. But he made it clear how Marlowe had
been able to capture the public taste with his portrait of
Barabbas, and yet indulge his own anti-Christian bias. By
making Barabbas so monstrous, he excused, in eyes other than
his own, the moral obliquity of his Christian characters. No
one, of course, is quite human in The Jew of Malta; but then
Marlowe was a very inhuman writer. His genius was for
melodrama, rhetoric, and farce. It is the overpowering
humanity of Shakespeare, breaking through the stiffness of
his material, that makes The Merchant of Venice so difficult a
play to interpret. Can a middle way be found between
5*
138 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Burbage s red wig and Heine s view that Antonio was unworthy
to tie Shylock s shoelaces?
But Poel was never a man for middle ways, and in reacting
against one extreme he ran to another. It was one thing
to insist that "the language that Shakespeare has put into the
mouth of Shylock does not impress one as being that of a man
whose physical and mental faculties are in the least impaired
by age/ But he did not ask himself how far Heine had
been right in maintaining that Shakespeare intended to write
a comedy but was too great an artist to succeed ; how far "the
genius of humanity that reigned in him stood ever above his
private will." He did not see that The Merchant was, in John
Palmer s valuable definition, "a comedy in which ridicule
does not exclude compassion, in which sympathy and detach
ment are reconciled in the irony which is necessarily achieved
by the comic spirit in a serene presentation of things as they
are." He played Shylock himself, and resorted to Burbage s
red wig; this was to desert art for archaeology and comedy for
caricature. "Only by Shylock in the Trial scene being in a
great rage and rushing out in a great rage can the audience
be greatly pleased and in a fit humour to be interested in the
further doings of Portia." So he reasoned, in contradiction
to Shylock s own "I pray you give me leave to go from hence;
I am not well." He was blind to Shakespeare s power of
seeing all round a situation or a character, of writing on more
than one level, of giving to his comedies the quality of chequered
sunshine. Malvolio is punished for his vanity and there is no
need to play him like an hidalgo; but his reproaches momen
tarily darken the espousals at the end of Twelfth Might and
mingle with the sadness of Feste s final song. The melancholy
Jaques deserts the fraternity of Arden to learn from some
distant anchorite the wisdom which is not even of Shakespeare s
world. Falstaff has been the joy and scandal of Bolingbroke s
England with his defiance of virtue and mockery of honour,
but he is eternally unregenerate and our reason tells us that
it is time for him to go. But our thrill in Harry s coronation is
damped by the knowledge that he is temporarily under lock
and key. It is the same with The Merchant: the poetry and
persiflage of the fifth act are given a deeper tone by our memory
of Shylock s fall. Poel would have us rejoice that avarice and
SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 139
cruelty had met their due reward; and this is what the bulk
of Burbage s audience may well have felt. It is what we should
feel ourselves if The Merchant had been written by Ben Jonson;
it is what we feel about Arpagon in Moliere s L Avare. But
a modern audience is moved by the end of The Merchant, as
only the rare, sensitive spectator would have been moved if
he had seen the play acted at the Globe; it knows that the
"lacrimse rerum" lie close to the surface of Lorenzo s love-
making and that even in Belmont it is still "a naughty world."
PoePs performance was not only without pathos, but it was
largely deficient in dignity; yet for George Wyndham "this
was the Jew that Shakespeare drew" (Letter to W. Poel; 27 June
1898). And it elicited high professional praise from Frank
Fay, the Irish actor and producer, whose letter deserves to
be quoted in full:
I cannot refrain from writing to thank you for the unique
experience of seeing a performance of a Shakespearian play
to which I can apply the word convincing. Of all the Shylocks
I have seen, yours, with the possible exception of the late
Osmond Tearle s, is the most real; I do not put Irving s above
it and I am not sure whether you may not have effaced Tearle s ;
you certainly do in simplicity. I noticed and liked your
tendency to use an upward tone of the voice where the official
stage tone (English) seems to be a downward tone. With
many foreign actors I have noticed this upward tone and the
curiously natural effect it gives to the diction. Our actors
all use it, because it is a part of Irish intonation, but very few
English actors do so. It was a delight to have part of an actor s
face in the shadow and part in the light, instead of the arid
modern stage lighting which chases the shadow. I liked, too,
to see the people standing in a circle talking, and the absence
of the absurd "dressing the stage" and "crossing" as is custom
ary. The stage was nevertheless full of beautiful and seemingly
unprepared pictures. You have also, thank goodness, got rid
of the practice of people standing several feet away and
declaiming at each other when commonsense directs the
opposite. I cannot say I thought your Shylock comic, but he
was a man and won one s sympathy because of his flesh and
blood; he was not a monster. He was doubtless comic to the
crowd in the court, as he would be in life. Your Portia did a
wonderful thing, behind which I think I see your brain.
Instead of a calm elocutionist, the woman Portia, mixed up
in the trial because of her husband s indebtedness to Antonio,
burst forth and the petulance of a woman pleading to a stone
I4O WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
was unerringly expressed; all the time you saw Portia unable
to act the advocate, and when I think of one woman who plays
and has been praised highly for her acting in this part, and
remember all the stage tricks of the actress, I am amazed at
the critics who write such foolish things merely because a
performer is a great popular favourite (Undated}.
Against PoePs Shylock Eleanor Calhoun s Portia stood out
with regal grace; her costume was taken from a portrait
of Queen Elizabeth. Not since the Bancrofts 1875 production
had all three casket scenes been played, and this gave due
dramatic emphasis to Bassanio s choice. The religious character
of Portia s obligation to respect the terms of her father s will was
underlined by the introduction of a priest and four acolytes,
who stood by while the suitors were making up their minds.
The songs were sung by a choir to the accompaniment of an
organ and for some curious reason a hermit was dis
covered with two soldiers when the curtains opened on the
scene. But The Merchant of Venice is so packed with improba
bilities that one hermit more or less in a country house was
unlikely to have troubled the spectators. It would not have
been until the final act that they would have learnt from
Stephano that a hermit had accompanied her on her return
home. In no other respect does her conduct or conversation
display a penchant for the contemplative life. Paget Bowman
excelled in the ungrateful part of Antonio, and the speaking of
the company had generally improved. The Merchant of Venice
is less popular today than it was then, but it is now produced,
when it is produced at all, with a truer emphasis. Nothing
can rob Shylock of his eminence, but he is not generally per
mitted to steal the play. He is seen in focus. And Poel s
interpretation, harsh as it undoubtedly was, had helped to
restore the balance. To Frederic Harrison, at least, it was
quite certain now "that The- Merchant is not a tragedy, but a
romantic comedy, and I think the Elizabethan Stage Society
has done a great work in proving that once for all" (Letter to
W. Poel; undated). Edward Dowden was in entire agreement
with PoeFs conception of Shylock and also with his view of the
relation of Shakespeare s play to Marlowe s. But no argu
ment or demonstration can alter the fact that Shylock has more
life in him than all the other characters put together. Is it a
SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 14!
perception of this dilemma either to let Shylock have his
head and make the play exciting, or to keep him in his place
and risk making it dull which has made our modern
producers rather reluctant to tackle The Merchant at all?
Komisarjevsky s brilliant extravaganza at Stratford (1933),
balanced by the enchanting sanity of Fabia Drake s Portia,
was an exception to this defeatism.
II
On 24 February 1899 Poel produced The Alchemist in
the Apothecaries Hall and the critic of The Morning Post
observed that "whereas The Merchant of Venice is estranged from
us by being represented after the manner of the time when it
was written, such a play as The Alchemist can only be efficiently
rendered in some such fashion as that adopted last night at
Apothecaries Hall/ In so far as there was reason in this
distinction it lay in th*e fact that Jonson was a much more
"contemporary" dramatist than Shakespeare. He breathes
the humours of Elizabethan London, and he is helped, as
The Morning Post pointed out, by "having his characters
bound down to their time and place, and reproduced in the
manner present to his mind." But if he was less universal than
Shakespeare, in the sense that his appeal is more restricted,
he is at the same time a more properly classical writer. His
characters are types, though they are none the less lively for
that. But Jonson is not content, as Shakespeare had been
content, to rest in their humanity; he is always seeing through
to the social or psychological principles which they illustrate.
And this bold definition was congenial to Poel s dogmatic
style. His production was a clear success, and the text
perhaps because The Alchemist is a fast-moving, firmly con
structed play was treated generally with respect.
It was about this time that Lewis Casson first became
acquainted with Poel. He played the small part of "a neigh
bour" in The Alchemist. This was the beginning of a long
association. No one has done more to illustrate, both in
teaching and practice, Poel s principles of rapid, musically
inflected speech; Sir Lewis is not a Welshman for nothing.
This is how he describes Poel at the time of their first meeting :
142 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
He was then, I suppose, in the middle forties, but as a
young actor I looked on him as old, and all the years I knew
him he seemed to look the same, and I should think he never
looked young. He was tall and well-built, but with the stoop
of a scholar. Longish grey hair brushed back from a high
forehead going bald. The head thrust forward enquiringly,
little twinkling eyes half hidden by steel spectacles set well
down his nose, over which he peered at you. An air of vague
eagerness and the general aspect of a kindly old don. His
speech hesitant and almost stammering, interrupted at inter
vals by the queer interjection "Ah rumtarrah." At work he
wore a long floppy grey alpaca coat and on our long walks on
Wimbledon Common I remember a dilapidated green hat
and an Inverness cape ( Talk given for the Third Programme,,
.C., 31 December 1951).
The Alchemist was revived in 1902, first at the Imperial
Theatre, London, in July, and then at the New Theatre,
Cambridge, in August. Peel s programme note for these
occasions revealed the bias of his mind. Although Jonson had
"abstained from moralising sentiment or conscious pathos,"
he had aimed at "scotching, if not killing, one of the most
monstrous, iniquitous, and pernicious follies of his age by the
sole weapon of ridicule/ and "this folly was the offspring of
the accursed thirst for gold."
On 20 March 1899 Poel for the first time produced a
play by a living poet. His choice fell on Swinburne s Locrine.
"It said much," observed Edmund Gosse in his programme
note, "for the divorce which exists in England between poetic
drama and the stage, that the most eminent of our living poets
should have published ten plays, or poems in dramatic form,
not one of which has been seen on the boards until to-night."
But Swinburne, as we have shown, had already demonstrated
his goodwill towards Poel s work by the composition of two
prologues, and he was on terms of close friendship with Gosse,
who was one of the Society s chief supporters. It was natural
that if modern poetic drama were to be attempted, Swinburne s
plays should be considered.
The fable from which Locrine is taken dates back to the
mythical origins of English history. Locrine, son of Brutus,
the first King of Britain, is in love with Estrild, the widow of a
captured invader; he keeps her in a bower in Essex, and they
have a child, Sabrina. Gwendolen, Locrine s wife, incites
SHYLOCK AND SAMSON 143
heir son, Madan, to take up arms against his father. Locrine
s wounded in battle and creeps to Estrild s bower, where he
lies. Estrild commits suicide and Sabrina drowns herself in
he river to escape Gwendolen s wrath. Gwendolen, having
pared nobody, can afford to be magnanimous at a moment
vhen forgiveness costs her nothing.
The gods are wise who lead us now to smite.
And now to spare: we dwell but in their sight,
And work but what their will is. What hath been
Is past. But these that once were king and queen,
The sun, that feeds on death, shall not consume
Naked. Not I would sunder tomb from tomb
Of those twain foes of mine, in death made one
I, that when darkness hides me from the sun
Shall sleep alone, with none to rest by me.
This is grave and beautiful writing, free from the Swin-
mrnian excess. The play which begins with heroic couplets
s in rhyme throughout, the rhythm changing after the opening
cene and developing less strictly. The action is extremely
imple, more reminiscent of French than Jacobean tragedy.
There is nothing but the play of character and the inexorable
>rocess of fate. For Gosse, writing his foreword to the pro-
pramme, Gwendolen was a Cornelienne heroine illustre,
xtraordinaire, serieuse. Locrine himself was modern in his
;omplexity "sensitive, high-strung, and unstable" opposed
o Gwendolen s simplicity. Gosse did not discuss the central
ault of the play which is the absence of real motive in
VEadan s turning against his father. We are asked to take his
:ruel and decadent nature on trust. It was enough that
^ocrine himself should "give to this savage tragedy a tenderness
vhich relaxes its archaic severity and teaches it to move our
learts with a human paroxysm of pathos."
There is no evidence that the performance by the Elizabethan
>tage Society did any such thing.
Instead of letting the characters speak for themselves, [wrote
the critic of The Morning Post,] and doing his best to see that
they have every opportunity of making themselves understood,
Mr. Swinburne has forced them into speaking his language
and speaking it in the complicated arrangements of which he
is a master. The greater part of the play is in rhymed couplets
and in more than one duologue, meant to be passionate, the
characters speak alternate lines for pages together. To an
144 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
English audience what seems to be going on on the stage is not
a dramatic scene, but a contest at capping verses. And what
is to be said of the occasional use of the sonnet series of rhymes ?
The sonnet is a difficult form of verse to handle in a lyric,
when one is speaking for oneself. It handicaps a dramatist
still more when his characters instead of expressing themselves
with that spontaneity which is the mark of good blank verse,
have to make their way, at all hazards, to a rhyme, it may be
to a second or third one where rhymes are few. The restraint
of rhyme makes the characters artificial in their talk, and as,
except at a few violent moments, they never do anything but
talk, their want of nature comes home the more keenly.
On a celebrated occasion Jonson answered Sylvester s objection
But that s not rhyme with No, but it s truth. Conversely
last night one heard much that was certainly rhyme, but was
as certainly not truth (21 March 1899).
The most interesting criticism of the performance came,
however, from The Weekly Sun (26 March 1899). Here the
writer recognised that the passion of the play was something
more than hysteria, and that it was a solidly constructed work.
But it was still overladen with parenthesis and smothered by
Swinburne s favourite symbolism of fire and flame. "Such
dialogue," he maintained, required a classical elocution.
It must not be gabbled over as our Elizabethans did it the
other night, with the result that during the greater portion of
the evening it was frequently not possible to hear what was
being said, far less to make sense of it. Whether Mr. Poel
learnt his idea of swift speaking in France or Italy, I do not
know. You can speak Italian more quickly than French
[is this true?] and French more quickly than English. It is a
question of whether vowels or consonants predominate in the
languages. Rhymed lines, like those in Locrine, should be
spoken decoratively, that is for their beauty of music, of
sentiment, and description rather than enunciatively, as
expressing dramatic ideas. The slightest realism is out of
place in a work which goes to the extreme of imaginative
romance.
This was enlightened comment from a man who believed
that Poel was "thoroughly at home in the Renaissance," and
compared him, rather curiously, with Antoine in France, He
did not complain of the absence of scenery, only pointing out
that if you bring on a sofa strewn with a tiger skin to illustrate
the outdoor feeling of Estrild s bower, "your tiger-skin shall be
SHYLOCK AND SAMSON 145
handsome in colour and your sofa of a fine design." Was he
right in saying that Locrine left the problem of poetic drama
where it was ? Not altogether. Swinburne had failed to write
a successful play, to be sure; but his introduction of rhyme,
monotonous though it may have been, had at least challenged
the doctrine that poetic plays could only be written in un-
rhymed iambips. Mr. Eliot was to issue the same challenge,
more judiciously, in Murder in the Cathedral; here the rhymed
ending was only used to bring certain scenes to their climax.
Furthermore, Locrine, for all the remoteness of its setting, was
modern in much of its feeling. Gwendolen herself was far from
being the virago of conventional romantic tragedy; her wrongs
were real and recognisable, even though her revenge was
archaic. The critic of The Weekly Sun would have welcomed "a
Locrine in a frock-coat, a Gwendolen in furs, and a Sabrina in
short frocks." He was convinced that "Mr. Burbage and his
friends, if they lived among us, would not have formed an
Elizabethan Stage Society, but a Victorian Stage Society.
And when we are looking for simplicity, would it not be wise
to try if it is not to be found in the trousers, waistcoats, collars
and boots, which after all we work, play, and get married in?"
This was to anticipate the experiments of twenty-five years
later experiments which have served a purpose without
establishing a rule. By 1950 modernity had lost its glamour;
it no longer surprises or shocks. And we should now find a
genuinely Elizabethan production of Hamlet much more
exciting than the same play performed in modern dress.
Frederic Harrison, the philosopher of Positivism, wrote
to Poel congratulating him on the performance. He thought
the poetry "fine and romantic" and Gwendolen "a real
triumph." He expressed himself "quite a convert to the rule
of no stage scenery," and concluded, "If the tragedy is cold,
that is because Algernon Charles is not William. Your part
of it was as good as can be."
Poel s production of Locrine was distinguished by the per
formance of Lillah McCarthy as Gwendolen; she brought to
the part, which is one of the longest ever written for a
woman, great beauty of voice and person and considerable
tragic power. Poel had escorted her to "The Pines," where
Swinburne was then living with Watts-Dunton. He had
146 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
warned her not to be afraid; Mr. Swinburne was "of a highly
excitable and nervous disposition."
When we came into the room oh! the Victorian mustiness
of it Swinburne stood up and was very charming. He was
dressed in shiny black from head to foot. His frock-coat
fitted badly, his trousers were pulled up so high that they
showed the tops of his elastic-sided boots. His arms hung so
limp at his sides that they might have been boneless; but his
head was astonishing, and his eyes seemed to betray the
struggle which I came to see in his poetry the struggle of the
image to keep afloat in the mighty tide of his words. He said :
"You cannot be this part you are too young." Then he
read, with a voice like a choric chant. The voice sounded
strange and wonderful to me. . . . Swinburne handed me the
manuscript, after choosing a difficult passage for me to read.
My ear had caught the cadence of the lines and I chanted as he
had done. Imagine my delight when I heard Swinburne
exclaim: "That is right, you have a fine vibrating voice;
appealing in its heroic quality." (Myself and my Friends; p.
35)-
In spite of this, however, he did not attend the performance;
perhaps because he knew himself to be too deaf, or because
Watts-Dunton knew him to be too excitable.
Estrild was played by Elsie Fogerty, who learned from Poel
some of the secrets of her elocutionary technique. She was to
pass these on, through the Central School of Speech Training
and Dramatic Art, to several generations of English actors,
and it was in such indirect ways, by the fidelity of his more
intelligent disciples, that Poel came to influence people who
hardly even knew his name. Laurence Olivier s Romeo, for
example, owed a great deal to notes taken by Miss Fogerty
while Poel was rehearsing Lilian McCarthy in the same
part.
If Locrine had been criticised as a literary rather than a
dramatic exercise, the same complaint was made about
Edward Fitzgerald s translation of Calderon s La Vida es Sueno,
which foUowed on 15 May 1899 at St. George s Hall.
The^greatness of the play quite failed to come through. But
Poel s audacity in putting a young actress Margaret Halstan
into the part of Sigismund was apparently justified. She
had caught, and assimilated, Poel s trick of declamation and
SHYLOCK AND SAMSON 147
carried herself bravely. For the last production of the season,
Sakuntald, Kalidasa s sixth century Hindu classic, was
produced on 3 July in the Conservatory of the Botanical
Gardens in Regent s Park. The play had been given, some
years earlier, in Parsee by an Indian company at the Gaiety.
Poel s actors, among whom were several Indians, moved
among tropical foliage, and the illusion of an Indian forest
was happily procured; but the horses of the car of India, the
stuffed tiger and antelope provoked the hilarity of the audience.
The play itself, rich even in Sir William Jones s prose translation
and accompanied by Dolmetsch music, which never quite lost
its Elizabethan idiom, made a profound effect. All the
musicians were Indian, with the exception of Arnold and
Elodie Dolmetsch. Both of these were in appropriate costume,
and their oriental colleagues declared Arnold to be indistin
guishable from a Moslem musician from Kashmir. He did
not hesitate to accompany, from ear, on his viola tfamore, an
Indian singing in the original language. "The Hindu poet/
remarked the critic of The Referee, "has not much to learn, and
has something to teach, the later masters of his craft. Where
will they be, the best of them, I should like to know, in thirteen
hundred years to come?"
Sakuntald was revived on i August 1912 in the Examina
tion Hall of Cambridge University. It was acted on a mul
tiple stage which showed, simultaneously, the forest jungle, the
King s palace and the Elysian fields. The King s Jester was
played by Nigel Playfair, and for the small part of Gautami
Poel chose a young milliner, whom he had seen acting with
some amateurs in London. Poel, for all his rationalism, had
far more flair than judgment, and there were times when his
flair was unerring. The name of this young milliner, still in
her early twenties, was Edith Evans.
The season of 1899 recorded a loss of 276, and this was
borne, once again, by Poel himself. In presiding at the
Annual Meeting of the Society, Mr. (later Sir) Sidney Lee
appealed to those who had enjoyed the Society s work to
guarantee what would probably be a yearly deficit of 300.
In a letter to The Morning Post (i August 1899) he quoted
Frederic Harrison s words that "an intellectual theatre can
never be maintained by the money taken at the doors till the
148 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
culture and habits of our people are entirely transformed.
And the only way in which it can be maintained is by the
munificence of some citizen of great wealth, high culture, and
ardent public spirit." There was no doubt of Poel s culture
and public spirit, but was it fair that he should continue to
bear the financial burden alone?
Ill
Those who like to uncover the tradition, the handing
down, of truth in any sphere of human experiment will
appreciate the following passage from Dr. J. Dover Wilson s
Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English
Literature at Edinburgh (University of Edinburgh Journal;
Summer 1936).
It is one of the most important literary discoveries of our
age that Shakespeare wrote, not to be read, but to be acted;
that his plays are not books, but as it were libretti for stage
performance. It is amazing that so obvious a fact should so
late have come to recognition. The truth is that critics
writing when the English theatre was at its nadir could not
bring themselves to believe that Shakespeare had ever served
so shabby an art. The classical example of this is Lamb s
condemnation of the stage King Lear . . . "the Lear of Shake
speare cannot be acted. 33 No one attempted to reply to this
until 1927, when an actor and a dramatist took up the cudgels
in defence of Shakespeare s quality, and began in his modestly
entitled Prefaces to Shakespeare a fresh epoch in Shakespearian
criticism.
The new criticism has been made possible by two distinct,
though not unrelated, developments of modern times the
renaissance of the English theatre, and the virtual rediscovery
at the hands of William Poel, W. J. Lawrence, Sir Edmund
Chambers, and many others, of the character and methods of
the Elizabethan stage. And it is just because Mr. Granville-
Barker is himself a brilliant representative of both tendencies
that he has become the first of the new critics. He has shown
us that no school of dramatic criticism is I will not say
valueless but safe, which is divorced from theatrical ex
perience.
On 3 September 1913 Barker gave Poel an introduction
to Max Reinhardt. In the enclosed letter he wrote that Poel
had "taught us all (by his great devotion) more about the
SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 149
staging of Shakespeare and the spirit of playing in it, I think,
than anyone else in Europe." Barker s Prefaces are a brilliant
application of PoePs principles. They have in fact influenced,
far more profoundly than the fading memory of Poel, the
whole modern experiment with Shakespeare in the theatre.
Mr. Harcourt Williams and Sir John Gielgud, in particular,
have generously acknowledged their debt. Barker had
qualities that Poel had not; his mind was more balanced
and flexible; and his grasp of principle was not stiffened by
fanaticism. He talked the language of the twentieth century,
and his ideas were correspondingly more accessible to it.
It was both curious and characteristic that Poel himself failed
to appreciate the Prefaces. He did not think Barker understood
the Elizabethans; he was "out and out of the Victorian plus
Georgian age" (Letter to W. J. Lawrence, 24 January 1931).
Barker, in sending him the book, had foreseen this reaction.
"You won t agree with much of it," he wrote, on the 14 Jan.
1930. "Never mind. A dull world it would be in which we
all found ourselves in agreement. But such light as has shone
for me on W. S. dates from an earlier day on which you came
to York Buildings to see me and shook all my previous con
victions by showing me how you wanted the first lines of
Richard II spoken."
On that "earlier day" a Sunday morning in the autumn
of 1899 Barker was 22 years old. As an actor he was quite
unknown, having played only a small part with Cyril Maude
in Under the Red Robe, served a short apprenticeship under
Sarah Thorne at Margate, and toured with Ben Greet. Like
Poel himself, he was that rather rare person an intellectual
in theatreland, but we do not know whether Poel had seen
him act. Later he became the first husband of Lillah
McCarthy. The rehearsals for Richard II took place in an
empty house in Harrington Road. They were unusually
arduous. On one occasion Poel locked his actors in a room
and declared that he would keep them there until they had
mastered his inflections. They remained incarcerated for
most of the night. The performance was given in the Lecture
Room of London University in Burlington Gardens at four
o clock in the afternoon on n November 1899. Many of
the entrances were made through the audience and Richard
150 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
confronted Bolingbroke at Ravensburgh from the gallery.
The Duchess of Gloucester was dressed as a nun of Barking
Abbey, as represented on her monumental brass at West
minster, and in Act III Richard appeared in the disguise of a
friar; for this Poel had historical, if not Shakespearian, warrant.
The play had not yet won its way to popularity; the last pro
duction of any note had been Charles Kean s sumptuous
revival in 1857, although the title part was already a favourite
of Benson s and Tree was shortly to make it very much his own
at His Majesty s. If Granville-Barker had written a preface
to Richard II, we should certainly have a clearer notion of what
PoePs production was like. But in his lecture at the Sheldonian
Theatre, Oxford, in 1952, Sir John Gielgud read passages
from two letters Barker had written him while he was himself
playing Richard II at the Queen s in 1937. I quote these from
the lecture. Obviously Barker had by then formed his own
conception as "to how Richard should be acted, but it is not
fanciful to suppose that in some respects he had followed,
and even bettered, the instruction he had received from
Poel.
Everything the actor does [he had written to Sir John
Gielgud] must be done within the frame of the verse. Whatever
impression of action or thought he can get within this frame,
without disturbance of cadence or flow, he may. But there
must be nothing, no trick, no check, beyond an honest pause
or so at the end of a sentence or speech. And I believe you ll
seldom find that the cadence and emphasis, the mere right
scansion of the verse, does not give you the meaning without
much of any further effort on the actor s part. The pace you
may vary all you like. Clarity there nrnst be, of course. But
here it is really the breaking of the verse which destroys it,
for as I said Shakespeare has written one tune and his words
are playing that in the treble (I say); if one tries to play
another tune with them in the bass naturally we can t under
stand the thing. Variety of pace tone colour of speech;
oh, yes, as much as possible, but within the frame. You must
not turn W. S. s quavers into crotchets or semi-breves or
semi-quavers for that matter. And I think each character
ought to have his own speech.
Richard II is a long play, and Poel permitted an interval
at the close of Act III, Scene 3. His cuts were reasonable,
SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 15!
until he came to the scene of Richard s murder. Here the
great soliloquy, where Richard plays the artist with his own
misfortune, was torn to shreds. It ran as follows:
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world;
And for because the world is populous.
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. (Music). Music do I hear?
No less than 37 lines of priceless introspection had been
taken out; lines of capital importance for an understanding of
Richard s psychology. Later in the same speech Poel did not
scruple to sacrifice "For now hath time made me his numbering
clock" and the ten superb lines which follow it. It is strange
indeed that a man capable of these amputations should have
been both admired and derided as a purist of textual integrity.
No doubt Poel would have argued that Richard s speech was
not dramatic; but to argue thus was to apply to tragedy the
canons of melodrama. In fact, of course, the crude and sense
less horror of Richard s end is at once magnified and redeemed
by the touching and subtle disquisition which has preceded it.
Furthermore, it was just the kind of speech in which an
intellectual actor like Barker would have excelled. Poel
received a warm letter from Sir Sidney Lee who had seen the
production. "Let me congratulate you on the very satis
factory performance of Richard II. It was admirable. Mr.
Granville-Barker as the King was first-rate" (13 November
1899).
The next production was an English version of Moliere s
Don Juan given in the hall of Lincoln s Inn (15 Dec. 1899).
The play had never before been produced in English, and it
had not been seen in France for twenty years. It is rarely
played there, even now; Jouvet s production at the Athenee
in 1948 was a novelty to Parisian playgoers. The translation
of Moliere is a perilous, an almost impossible business, and the
quick, light seriousness of the original came through very
stodgily in the version used by Poel. Poel wrote, through
Eleanor Calhoun, to the Administrator of the Comedie
Frangaise, asking him for information about the traditional
way of acting Moliere in France. He also enquired about the
152 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
possibility of hiring the costumes from Paris. Only the
volatility of Michael Sherbrooke as Sganarelle seems to have
given some life to the proceedings. In fact, however, Don
Juan required a good deal more accomplishment than the
Elizabethan Stage Society could provide; and after a revival
of the First Quarto Hamlet at the Carpenters Hall, which we
have already discussed (pp. 48-49), Poel turned to more
promising matter.
There was no record of Milton s Samson Agonistes ever
having been performed on the stage, except for a single per
formance in Dublin. Indeed it was unlikely that Milton had
himself thought of it in terms of theatrical presentation.
It had probably been written between 1666 and 1670; that is
to say, it was a post-Restoration work. If Milton had con
ceived it at a time when the theatres were still closed, he had
composed it at a moment when the public mood was far too
frivolous to accept his austere utterance. It was a dramatic
poem rather than a play, with little characterisation or humour
and little action of one character upon another. Some of the
speeches were 100 lines in length, and the movement was slow.
But the play was alive because it was personal. Milton s
Samson was much closer to Milton than he was to his biblical
prototype. In his blindness and bitterness and solitude, in
his domestic misery, this Samson was born of an English
poet s experience and contemplation.
But if the play had not been written to be acted, the poetry
clamoured to be heard, and Poel s production was justified
by its own success. He took the work out of its Biblical context
and placed it firmly where it belonged among the passions
and controversies of the seventeenth century. The characters
were dressed in the conventional classical costumes of the
time; and these were designed from a tapestry made by Dr.
Clyne, under the direction of Sir Francis Crane, director of
the Royal Mortlake Factory, which was founded by James I
in 1619. Poel said afterwards that he wished he had dressed
the whole play in seventeenth-century costume. "I feel we
wanted the cavaliers on the stage" (Letter to Mrs. C. C. Stopes;
28 December 1908). The music, too, was as nearly contempor
ary as possible. Dalila and her train entered to an air by
Lawes, printed in 1669, and the accompaniment to the semi-
SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 153
choruses "While their hearts were jocund and sublime" and
"But he, though blind of sight" was an early work by Purcell.
It seems curious, however, that Poel, who had used an organ
in The Merchant of Venice, did not use one here. The per
formance had, quite rightly, the effect of recitation rather than
acting. The choruses, which are the greatest thing in Samson
Agonistes, were generally spoken or intoned; but occasionally
they were chanted to a very simple sequence of notes which
Poel believed had been in use for thousands of years. Some
times they were declaimed in unison and sometimes they were
broken up into short phrases and given to individual voices.
As generally happens with choral speaking, the parts spoken
in unison were the least impressive.
The play was presented on 7 April 1900 in the Lecture
Theatre of the South Kensington Museum before a large
audience, which was rather more Philistine in its composition
than the public which usually assembled, at such odd times
and places, to see the productions of William Poel. Certain
gentlemen of military appearance were seen to leave in the
middle, and certain ladies also went before the end, reluctant
to miss their tea. Others, who sat the performance out, were
heard to remark that they had not understood the play, and
others, again, wondered how the actors had managed to
memorise such long parts. But the performance made a deep
impression.
There were a few [said the critic of The Morning Post] who
as they left the Lecture Theatre, found the ranged and dated
exhibits of the South Kensington Museum, even the most
august and venerable of them, strangely unimpressive. The
sense of time had been obliterated, and for a cabinet to boast
of being Fifteenth Century was the merest impertinence. To
these it was as though they had listened to a nobler Burial
Service than ours, performed more nobly than it could be by
any priest, over not a friend or an acquaintance, but over a
stranger that was yet themselves. And for some time after
they carried about with them, in cab, train, or bus, hearts
larger than they had ever known them to be, all filled with
tears that trembled with excess of joy (9 April 1900).
Poel never earned a finer tribute than this. The same
writer held the production to be one "of the most important
154 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
that it lies in the power of our times to give." His opinion was
endorsed by other critics, even by the facetious representative
of The Referee. The production was repeated soon afterwards
at St. George s Hall, and on 15 December 1908 Poel revived
it for the Milton Tercentenary in the Lecture Theatre
at Burlington Gardens, at the request of the Tercentenary
Committee. On this occasion Samson was played by Ian
Maclaren; Poel considered his voice the finest he had heard
on the stage since Salvini. This opinion was not shared by
Max Beerbohm, who thought it an ineffective baritone
issuing from an inadequate physique. The part, he said,
clamoured for Hubert Carter, who was apparently not avail
able. In an article entitled "Agonising Samson" Max com
plained of "downright boredom, mingled with acute irritation"
(The Saturday Review; 19 December 1908). But then Max had
never begun to come to terms with Poel. He was still at the
stage of complaining that the entrance of the Chorus down
the gangways of the Lecture Theatre in Burlington Gardens
spoiled the illusion of the play. Such a contravention of estab
lished custom within a stone s throw of Albany must have
seemed to him an insufferable breach of taste. Performances
were afterwards given at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon
Street, the Whitworth Hall of Manchester University, the
Bedford Corn Exchange, and the New Theatre, Cambridge.
Cambridge was a disappointment. Most of the Dons stayed
away, except for the Master of Christ s Milton s college
who wasted twenty minutes of valuable time in explaining
from the platform that Milton had written the play to demon
strate his belief in God. In the evening Poel met several of
the Dons wives at Peterhouse, where he was the guest of the
Principal, Dr. Ward. He found them "lifeless and almost
idiotic." It was in the course of this same tour that the pro
duction was seen and reviewed by Montague.
Hearing Samson Agonistes played in the new great hall of the
University of Manchester, in the twilight and first darkness of
a December evening, a new pleasure possessed you. One
seemed to be in at the birth of a thing that some day might be
valued for ancientry. Great buildings are furnished in that
way, in youth, with treasures for their old age: the resonance
does not die out; and today, in the Hall of the Middle Temple, it
is part of a diner s pleasure that Twelfth Night was first acted
SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 155
there, and Shakespeare s voice, it may well be, rang in the
rafters you sit under (Dramatic Values, p. 225).
After comparing Samson with a Greek tragedy, Montague
went on:
An apt ear, of course, is kept happy, merely by the august
loveliness of the verse; a reader s mind may find intrinsic
poignancy in the poem as a "last sunset cry" of Milton s
wounded spirit; but the eye, the playgoer s change-seeking
and incident-loving eye, is apt to have poor sport of it among
these wide expanses of still rhetoric, in which the one shrewd
touch of stage-craft, the finely announced entry of Dalila,
shines like a good deed in a naughty world. Here, to the
vacant eye s rescue, came in the genius of Mr. William Poel,
the master of this revel.
Mr. Poel began by planting the whole visible action of the
play not on the horizontal plane the floor of the stage but
on the vertical plane its back wall. He built up this back
wall into something like the semi-circular tribuna at the east
end of an early Christian basilica; travellers in Italy will
remember one in the cathedral at Torcello, with the priests
seats rising in steps, tier above tier, culminating in the bishop s
throne at the top in the middle. In the seat corresponding to
this episcopal throne Mr. Poel planted Samson for almost the
whole time that he was on the stage. The remaining char
acters were repeatedly grouped and regrouped so as, in the
aggregate, to present a triangular mass of colour, receding and
tapering as it rose, like one side of a pyramid. Thus, in an
early group, Samson was at the apex of this pyramid, one of
its bounding lines was formed by the Chorus, and the other
marked out by Dalila in the middle of the line and by her
attendants at its base. At her exit the composition of the
picture dissolved for a few moments; the Chorus gesticulated,
huddled, swarmed, and then, like swallows re-perching after
a moment s scare, resumed their place in the pyramidal
formation, Harapha and his followers now forming the other
side of the triangle, precisely as Dalila and hers had done.
Again the composition melted away for some minutes; the
Chorus declaimed and pattered, twittered and crooned and
keened, and then it settled again as before, with the Public
Officers in Harapha s and Dalila s place, and his guard of
soldiers in that of their attendants.
In each of these groupings Samson was seen full length,
his feet higher than the head of the person next below, and
this person in turn was seen, clear from head to foot, above
the group below; and this mode of presentation was singularly
pleasing to the eye, for reasons not explicable here, but good
156 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
enough, as it would seem, to have made Raphael adopt it
almost exactly, steps and all a in the so-called School of Athens,
and in the Incendio del Borgo at the Vatican. And not Raphael
only; the pyramidal formation is perhaps the most familiar
of all beautiful patterns of pictorial grouping; it is the pattern
of the Ansidei Madonna in the National Gallery, and of the
Giorgione altar-piece at Castelfranco ; and two or three times
in the playing of Samson the design of this last painting was
recalled by a grouping of the three persons forming for the
moment the apex of the larger pyramid Samson at the top,
his green-clad attendant below him on his right, where
St. Liberalis is in the piature, and Manoa or Dalila in the
place of St. Francis. We are not in Mr. PoePs secrets, but to
an uninformed spectator it looked as if he had had every one
of his groupings painted to a finish in his mind and then
transferred it, touch by touch, to its place on the purple back
ground, all under the strong influence of Italian medieval and
Renaissance theories of pictorial design. Whatever the words
that were spoken, it would have been good to sit for two hours
and stare at the spectacles painted upon the end wall of the
hall. Their colour was choice; they had line and structure
enough for cathedrals. Not strict playgoing, perhaps, all this,
but quite strict pleasure; the playgoing eye was at least
triumphantly pacified (Dramatic Values; pp. 227-30, 1911).
Here was a brilliant vindication of PoePs pictorial sense,
and Montague s conjecture about the way his eye worked
in building up a production is borne out by a glance at his
scrap-books. These are filled with articles on painting and
reproductions of old masters. He would pay Jennie Moore*
thirty shillings a time to make exact copies of dresses from
pictures in the National Gallery. In one production he
instructed Nugent Monck to kneel in a particular attitude,
holding a candle. This pose made no kind of pictorial or
dramatic sense, until it was discovered, long afterwards, that
Poel had taken it from a design in an ancient Missal. I shall
relate in due course how his whole conception of the way
Coriolanus should be dressed was altered by a visit to the
Italian Exhibition; and a letter to Mrs. Pole from an artist
*Jennie Moore, who died on 22 June 1924, designed and made all the costumes
for Poel s productions from The Duchess ofMalfiin 1893 until Fratricide Punished in
1924. The Stage commented, "Among the most successful of her colour schemes
were those painted for Marlowe s Doctor Faustus and for Everyman. Miss Moore,
in her sketches, anticipated the brilliant combinations of elemental colouring
which later became best known through the Russian ballet in this country "
(10 July 1924). y
SHYLOCK AND SAMSON 157
friend, Paul Urikson, is further evidence of his painter s
eye.
His insistence on an artist eliminating everything in a picture
that hindered the dramatic effect, made an impression on me
the first time we went to a picture gallery together, and I feel
that much of the success I have had as a painter of subject
pictures is the result of my association with him. He is prob
ably in my mind when I am in my studio more than any other
man I have known (20 October 1913).
In the case of Samson Agonistes there was an affinity between
his own mind, which was both ethical and prophetic, and the
mind of the great Puritan poet whom he served ; and he was
seen at his best in a work where the problems of human
destiny had received a classical, rather than a romantic,
exposition. This had already been the case with Faustus and
it would presently be the case with Everyman. His tireless
scholarship and incalculable invention would always illumin
ate the Elizabethan theatre; but it was not with the Eliza
bethans it was not even with Shakespeare that he was most
naturally at home. A Victorian radical to the core, he was in
closest sympathy with those writers in whom the radical and
the religious impulses went hand in hand, reinforcing and
correcting one another. He asked of the drama that it should
elevate; he was not content that it should merely entertain.
In forming our estimate of a man, it is sometimes useful to
enquire on which side he would have been found in the English
Civil War. In the case of William Poel there was no doubt
of the answer; he would have stood where Milton stood.
The season concluded with a production of Schiller s
Wallenstein, in the translation by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Coleridge had seen Wallenstein produced on the German stage
in the winter of 1798-99, and on returning to London had
selected it for translation as a typical example of the new roman
tic drama in Germany. He had completed his task in six weeks,
and Schiller remarked, on seeing the English version, that in
spite of some ridiculous mistakes the translator was evidently
a man of genius. In fact, Coleridge s genius is not very
apparent in this work; he is more impressive when he is
being plain than when he is being poetical. Here there are
hints as to how the poetic drama was going to develop a hun
dred years later; a conversational tone which is in sharp
158 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
contrast to the tired iambic prosody. It was not possible, in
a single evening, to present the two five-act dramas which
comprise Schiller s Wallenstein trilogy; so Poel chose to give a
shortened version of The Death of Wallenstein (a glance at his
prompt book reveals how very shortened this was), preceded
by a selection of scenes from the Piccolomini. Macready,
writing in his diary on 15 August 1836, had wondered whether
it was possible to turn Coleridge s translation "to account in
representation; but, though abounding with noble passages
and great scenes, it is spread over too much space to be con
tracted within reasonable dimensions." Poel concentrated,
as far as possible, on the love relationship between Piccolomini
and Wallenstein s daughter, Thekla, and neglected the humours
of the camp. It was an immense task of simplification, and it
raised once more the question of how far it is profitable to
abbreviate a work which has been composed to a particular
imaginative rhythm, and transpose it into another key. There
is plenty of padding in Schiller s Wallenstein and this is not made
any more digestible by translation; but if you suddenly turn
it into a slim play, you find that you have sapped its strength
and radically changed its character. If we are to get the best
out of certain great works, we have to put up with being bored.
But boredom is more tolerable in print than in performance.
The reader can lay his book aside and resume it when he
chooses; the spectator can walk out. But for so long as the
young Lillah McCarthy was on the stage as Thekla, it is most
unlikely that he did so.
The play was given first in the Lecture Theatre at Burlington
Gardens on the 22 June 1900, and revived for the University
Extension Delegacy s Summer School at Oxford on 1 1 August
1911. It was played in the New Theatre. For this performance
Poel adopted a modified Elizabethan technique, which enabled
the immensely complicated drama to flow easily between two
scenes. An oak-panelled room with three steps in the middle
led to a second room at the back with a balcony in the centre,
just large enough to contain a canopied bed. The room below
was hung with tapestries and had a window looking out on to
the walls of the castle. The outer room served equally well for
Piccolomini s castle and Wallenstein s palace. Uniformed
pages would enter and change the position of the furniture to
SHYLOCK AND SAMSON 159
indicate in which of these two places the action was supposed
to be taking place. The castle was suggested by a straight-
backed wooden settee in the middle of the stage, and the
palace by an oak table, with papers laid out upon it and a
helmet. Curtains could be drawn between the two rooms,
if necessary. The key to the production, however, was the
terrace of three broad steps dividing one part of the stage
from the other. This permitted a great variety of grouping,
and avoided the restlessness of actors crossing and recrossing
the stage. The picture at the climax of the second act was
deeply impressive. While Wallenstein and his generals
received the news that one regiment after another had revolted,
a servant stood impassively leaning against the wall at the top
of the steps, looking down with indifference and contempt at
the panic and horror of the scene. So placed at that particular
moment, he had the power to suggest the immovable Destiny
of whom Wallenstein spoke so often.
In this revival Poel himself played a small part, which he
filled, according to The Manchester Guardian (12 August 1900),
with an "energy of attack," an "almost rioting invention in
details," and a "real joy of creation," which "made everybody
else seem colourless and cold and precise." Frank Cellier
added to his growing reputation as Wallenstein and Katharine
Pole replaced Lillah McCarthy as Thekla.
The last production of 1900 was one of the most singular
that Poel presented on any stage. Sir Walter Scott s Marmion
was then on the syllabus for the Cambridge Local Examina
tions, and Poel had invited a certain Mr. Alick Bayley to
turn the poem into a play. This was performed on
i December, again in the Lecture Theatre at Burlington
Gardens, before the young girls who were studying the poem for
the Local . During the first hour or so, they desperately
tried to follow the proceedings from their text-books. This
was not easy, since the adapting dramatist had arranged his
material to meet the minimum requirements of the stage.
Between the second and third acts the girls were taken off
by their governesses in search of tea. They wandered through
circuitous stone passages, illuminated by a single flickering
gas jet, and some of the more persevering at last reached the
refreshment room. We are not told what they found when
l6o WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
they got there. Those who had the courage to return enjoyed
a magic lantern display between Acts III and IV, which
illustrated the scenes and characters of the play. Their
reactions to the performance seem to have been typically
juvenile. They laughed loudly in the wrong places, and
particularly at the costume affected by the gentlemen of the
Society, which reminded them of their own hoisted skirts when
they were paddling at the seaside.
The adapter had done his best to give a coherent dramatic
shape to what was then a very popular poem; but Scott s
octosyllabic jingle defeated all attempts to relieve its monotony
by emphasis on the key words.
CHAPTER V
Everyman and Euripides
IN 1901 Poel suffered a great loss in the death of his mother.
He had always been a devoted son and he spent nine days
and nights of growing anxiety and dwindling hope at her
bedside. Her death preyed upon his mind and dictated the
choice of his next production. He consulted Dr. Ward, who
had helped him with Faustus, and Ward replied "Do Everyman."
Poel read the play, which deeply affected him, and discussed
its dramatic possibilities. The story of Everyman was to be
found in the romance of Barbaam and Jehoshaphat, ascribed
to John of Damascus, Patriarch of Antioch, who died in 1090.
It reappeared in a Dutch version, Elckerlijk, probably the work
of a priest, in the fifteenth century, and a Latin translation
of this, entitled Homulus y was published in 1536. The English
version had been reprinted three times in the sixteenth century
and had later been included in Hawkins English Drama.
The text used by Poel was taken from the manuscript in the
library of Lincoln Cathedral.
Having rediscovered the old morality, he wished to present
it in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, but the Dean and
Chapter refused their permission for this. Then he wrote to
Dean Farrar at Canterbury. The author of Eric, or Little by
Little agreed to his request but was overruled by his Chapter.
Eventually it was arranged to present the play on three
successive Saturdays in July 1901 in the Master s Court of the
Charterhouse. These surroundings had a powerful effect
The old quadrangle, grey and prayerful, the sundial to
which the sun gave a holiday as if to let it look on its old
acquaintance in peace, the thin and fervent tones of a neigh
bouring clock not so pledged to the pageant, yet concurring
in its general purport, the Sittings to and fro of sparrows of
old the authorised remembrances of a heavenly care made
a setting that it is not in the power of man to repeat (The
Morning Post; 10 March 19012).
Poel found himself famous overnight. The performance
6 *6i
1 62 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
was repeated in August 1901 in the quadrangle of University
College, Oxford, before a packed audience and in the following
May (1902) at St. George s Hall. This and all subsequent
performances were given in partnership with Philip Ben Greet.
The play ran for, a month at the Imperial Theatre, London,
in July 1902 and was taken to many important provincial
cities in England and also to Dublin and Edinburgh.. Every
where it was received with the same hushed enthusiasm, and
everywhere except in Dublin it drew large audiences.
It was probably never so effective as in its original setting,
or one like it, but Montague s review indicated its power to
transform the customary associations of the Free Trade Hall,
Manchester.
It was presented with what seemed to us amazing in
genuity, judgment and care. We are not prepared to define
the medieval spirit, but the performance had not lasted
five minutes before one felt that the mind was being adroitly
filled with reminiscences of everything that before had brought
it nearest to late mediaeval ways of looking at life and death.
Mainly, it must be confessed, they were Italian reminiscences,
not English. The "Messenger" who spoke the prologue was a
study in the ascetic s wax-like anticipation, in living flesh,
of that fine austerity of death which is fully expressed in art
nowhere but on the sculptured tombs on the floor of the
Florentine church of Santa Groce; the decoration of the
canopied recess from which God spoke the opening lines was a
typical landscape background of Bellini, with topped trees
and a distance of mountains; the angel sitting on the steps was
in every detail, if we remember rightly, the angel of Botticelli s
"Tobit"; Everyman in his grave clothes came straight from
the "Last Judgment" of Orcagna, where the grave is giving
up its dead ; the figure of Confession was, to the life, one of the
blithe angelic monks who look so like happy, serious, pretty
and good children, with tonsures, on the tombs sculptured by
Mino da Fiesole. All very much out of place, a captious
spectator might say, in a reproduction of an English play
ascribed by some to the early fifteenth century, and placed
later than the end of the fifteenth century by no good authority.
In a narrow sense that may be true, but not in a sense that is
more important. Most Englishmen whose imaginations have
conceived in the slightest the frame of mind most characteristic
of the Middle Ages have got at it through Italy at Florence,
Assisi, and Venice and an anachronism or a dozen anachron
isms are nothing so long as you are helped to make the nearest
EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 163
approach which your ignorance renders possible to the right
mood for listening to the play.
Another thing that was beyond praise in the performance
was the severe seriousness and simplicity of method which
the whole company achieved. We have never seen actors
grimace less, or stand so still. This simplicity and reticence
never lapsed into insipidity or lifelessness. It nearly always
gave the right tragic effect of outward expression purged and
refined down to its pure essentials by the stress of intense
feeling. The set and immobile face, level delivery, and almost
unchanged position of Death were curiously effective in
enhancing the solemnity of his first message to Everyman;
they affected you like so many symbols of an inexorable fixity
in the sentence. There was the same excellent discretion in
the gait of Death when he did walk or run. A little more would
have made it ridiculous. As it was, it was unexpected and
disquieting. About the wisdom of the extent to which the
dialogue was intoned we are not quite sure. Much of it
undoubtedly was extremely effective; but in one case, that of
Good Deeds, there was a rather overdone plaintiveness, and
the words of a few of the speeches were not clearly audible.
There can be no such doubts about the stage management,
which was masterly; nothing could have been better arranged
to give the effect intended than the half-heard Mass behind
the scenes, and the ingenious naivete no mere affectation or
infanticism of the burial of Everyman and of the ensconcing
of Goods behind a curtain was admirably conceived, as was
everything in the scenery, the dresses, and all the accessories
(Manchester Guardian; i November 1902).*
Some critics (but not Montague) objected to Everyman
being played by a woman. No one, however, denied the beauty
of May Douglas Reynolds s performance, or that of Edith
Wynne Matthison when she took over the part. The opening
passages of the play were read at the Poel Centenary Matinee
in 1952, and here Everyman was taken by Margaret Halstan
with Robert Atkins as the Messenger, Russell Thorndike as
Death, and Lewis Gasson as Adonai. The effect of the single
woman s voice against the massed brass, so to speak, of the
three men was certainly impressive. Miss Matthison main
tained that it was this musical effect at which Poel was aiming.
"At the entrance of Everyman/ she relates, "he wanted him
to be light and gay and unreflective until the very moment
* The substance of this notice was reprinted in Montague s Dramatic Values
PP- 233-37: 1911.
164 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
when Death strikes him to the heart. Another wonderful
suggestion was concerning Everyman s great prayer at the
crisis of the play. Most directors would suggest a gradual
working up to an emotional climax, but he told me to start
the speech at the highest point of feeling and go on from
there" (Letter to Alan Edmiston: 26 June 1951).
Adonai was played by Poel himself as an elderly man with
a curling grey beard, and Death carried no scythe but had a
drum and a trumpet. He was made up to look like a skeleton
and spoke with a strong Scots accent. This conception was
varied for a single performance at the Ethical Church, Bays-
water, when he was draped in grey, after Watts picture
"Love and Death," and Adonai was heard but not seen.
When Martin Harvey produced the play he adopted this
emasculation of Poel s original idea. The effect of that idea,
as it was first realised, is conveyed by some verses by Ernest
Marriott,* contributed to Poel s fifteenth "Monthly Letter"
in September 1916. It is sub-titled "in memory of Mr.
William Poel s production of Everyman in October 1902."
" Scritch, scritch, scratch, scritch,
In the distance that quick sinister noise.
Then, near at hand,
Scritch, scritch the sound
Of skeleton feet
Fleet, horribly fleet,
As if on parched ground
Running;
And then, suddenly, Death scattering drily,
His wryneck all be-ruffed with fur
Against the cold;
His velvet cap, monstrous small, perked
With a side-tilt on clean-picked skull,
And one long, ridiculous, draggled feather,
A- top of it a-joggeting as he runs . . .
. . . O horrid scraping Form of Fate
Each bare old bone articulate
Of channel cold.
. . . How the grisly ghostly figure
Grides and scrattens on the bare boards
Of the Morality. 5
* Ernest Marriott (b. 1882, d. 1918) was an artist and author who studied under
Walter Crane, a keen supporter of Poel 3 at the Manchester Municipal School of
Art and was later assistant to Gordon Craig at the School for the Art of the
Theatre in Florence.
EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 165
As a crow, gliding to earth, takes,
Just as it settles,
A solemn swirl or turn,
So Death, on creaking joints
Swoops round
To a full stop-
He raises his tall trumpet
That tapers like a metal lily slender
And from its pallid throat
Flows out a rare thin note,
Rare and high
Shrill-sweet, yet piercing tender . . .
.... Higher and yet higher
The sweet, pale, fierce sound flows
Until it seems to stretch
Like a tense silver wire
From stage to sky."
Everyman was the only one of PoePs productions to make
money. It attracted a public which would never have been
touched by his Elizabethan revivals. He received 1000 in
royalties from America and sold the American rights for 500.
In the autumn of 1903 Ben Greet and Charles Frohman sent it
out on two extensive tours of the eastern and western states.
The religious communities supported it, and those who have
since admired the Salzburg Jedermann may like to know that
Max Reinhardt was among the audience at the Charterhouse.
It was unquestionably one of the most beautiful and original
productions that have been staged in England during the
present century. It brought back the mediaeval drama into
limited circulation, so that we can trace a whole cycle of
public taste from the rediscovery of Everyman by Poel in 1901
to the revival of the York Mystery plays by Martin Browne
fifty years later.
Yet there was a subtle and disquieting irony for Poel in
this popular success of Everyman. It was not only that he had
set out to popularise the Elizabethans by methods which were
anything but popular, and that, in the event, he had brought
the ages of Chaucer and Milton, not the age of Shakespeare,
back to life. It was rather that his own deepest convictions
were disturbed by the play whose success he had assured.
"I hated the play," wrote Gordon Craig to him, "because it
was so against all I believe, but people loved it and it was
1 66 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
mighty powerful" (Letter undated}. It was against much that
Poel believed also. He was to express his mind to Harold
Begbie in an interview for The Daily Chronicle many years
later (3 September 1913).
I do not believe in the future of religious plays. I have come
to see that their tendency is dangerous. Religion can never
be acted. It is too real and personal a thing. It is too precious,
too sacred. A player may act another man s ambition, cupidity,
passion or what you will, but he cannot act another man s
religion. An acted religion is of all insincere and odious
things the most insincere, the most odious. And the tendency
of such plays is towards sentimentalism and claptrap, which
are blasphemous in conjunction with religion. Since the
first production of Everyman there have been many religious
plays, and all of them, I think, have been hateful and false.
I did not myself produce Everyman as a religious play. As a
religious play, it is bad. Its theology is indefensible. One
can very easily tear it to pieces in that respect. But the whole
story, Eastern and not Catholic in its origin, is beautiful as a
piece of art; it offers a hundred opportunities from the point
of view of beauty, and it leaves an impression that is fine
and chaste. I rejoiced to find it, I have loved producing it
but I am now moving away from it.
In fact, Poel parted with the good- will of the production to
Ben Greet and disposed of its costumes and properties : and
in 1922 he declined an invitation from Miss Baylis to produce
the play at the Old Vic.
Poel s dilemma was the dilemma of a man who was naturally
both radical and religious, coming to maturity in the heyday
of rationalism. He distrusted the alliance between the Church
and the stage, on the grounds that the frame of mind of an
audience is very different from that of a congregation. The
audience comes to criticise, to discuss, and to applaud; the
congregation comes to listen and to obey. The stage could
edify, to be sure, but it might well do so in a sense opposed to
the teachings of orthodoxy. Unless the functions of each were
kept carefully distinct, the stage might come to think it was its
business to preach and the Church that it was its business to
entertain. And this confusion of functions might lead to the
censorship of the theatre by the Church. Such a censorship
exists in Ireland today, although it is nominally exercised by
a lay-appointed body. Its decisions have resulted in the
EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 167
prohibition of much serious and important literature and have
brought the Catholic Church into contempt among men of
intelligence and good-will. Poel was writing before the
foundation of the Irish Free State, but the experience of the
Irish censorship has justified all his fears.
His anticlericalism, however, went deeper than this. He
was a man of overpowering energy and will, and what he ob
jected to in the religious attitude was a certain shiftless passivity.
He was not impressed by the piety, still less by the super
stitions, of the ignorant and the poor. He would go at least
half-way with Marx in maintaining that religion was the
opium of the people, and that it derived from economic
causes which it was the business of the theatre to point out, and
the business of politics to remove. His spirituality was severely
ethical, and although there was much that he adhered to in
the teachings of Christ and St. Francis, he held that these had
been muddled by theology and sterilised by sacerdotalism. It
was natural that the brunt of his prejudice should have fallen
on the Catholic Church. He protested vigorously against the
modifications in the King s oath, when George V ascended
the throne. "Read in conjunction with the old Declaration
and as a successor to it," he wrote in The New Age, 21 July
1910, "the new form means in effect, that the King is to say
that though he believes as a Protestant that twelve million of
his subjects are taught erroneous doctrines he dare not say so."
Protestantism, he argued, had but one object, and "that was to
dethrone Catholicism, the one religion that had been man s
life-long foe, because it was a religion not intended to establish
citizenship, but to destroy it."
From this point of view he never wavered, although his
Protestantism was mainly negative. For a time, at least, he
became a vocal rationalist, pleading for the abolition of the
Christian calendar, and for the initiation of the Year One in
1918. "It has now become an absurdity," he wrote to Mr.
George Sharman, 30 August 1919, "to talk about one man
having died to save the world, since five million men have
laid down their lives for that purpose." There is a note of
crankiness in all this, which should not lead us to disparage
PoePs sincerity. And for all his hatred of clerical complacency,
his attitude to life remained a profoundly religious one. "I
1 68 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
hope you say your prayers, Willie ?" his wife remarked to him
once. "I am always praying/ he replied simply.
II
Essentially Poel was a prophet as well as a pioneer, and it
was the prophet, and even the preacher, that he admired in
Milton, or, on an inferior plane, in Bernard Shaw. His mind
craved for a message which would match his own intuitions of
reality; a message quite free from the formulas of the Christian
creed. It was at this point of emancipation that Euripides
came to his rescue.
Poel did not know Greek and therefore his acquaintance
with the classics was confined to more or less inadequate
translations. He had, however, read the versions of Euripides
made by Professor Gilbert Murray, although he found them,
with the exception of the Hippolytus, deficient in dramatic
power. He had seen the Medea produced by Barker at the
Savoy, and thought it "the most appallingly dull performance"
he had ever sat through. "It drove you out of the place in
despair! There was no life or variety or emotion in the voices
to give the thing a lift anywhere. It was nothing but whining
all the way through" (Letter to Professor A. W. Gomme; 8 January
1909). In 1908 Lillah McCarthy, who was then married to
Granville-Barker, invited him to produce the Baccha in
Murray s translation for two special matinees at the Court.
Barker was away on tour and could not, therefore, take on
the production himself. The play had not the human appeal
of The Trojan Women or the Medea, but its interest for a modern
audience was suggested in a letter written by Gilbert Murray
to Lillah McCarthy on 10 October 1908:
Try to imagine what the story of some persecuted Christian
saint or missionary would be, if it were continued into the next
world and we saw the persecutors in a mediaeval hall being
torn by devils with red-hot pincers while the saint, with a
seraphic smile, stood by saying :"I told you so." Think even
of the Crucifixion story as treated with Pontius Pilate in hell
suffering ghastly tortures while Jesus stood by making com
ments. That gives one almost exactly the point of the Baccha.
It is exactly the criticism that Euripides would have made on
an ordinary mediaeval mystery play. "You say that bias-
EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 1 69
phemous people suffer in hell? Very well, I represent them
doing so: now see if you admire your God who has made a hell.
Pentheus is a tyrant and a persecutor, Dionysus a holy and
sanctified being; but when this holy being has his will, his full
revenge, he seems infinitely worse than his persecutor (Myself
and my Friends; p. 293-4).
This was certainly the criticism that Poel would have made
of Everyman, although Everyman is saved from hell. It
was the doctrine of eternal punishment, without which the
Christian theology of salvation is meaningless, that his mind
would always have abhorred. In fact, his point of view was
very similar to Murray s.
Euripides [he wrote to Professor Gomme 8 January 1909]
seems to me to have been much like Marlowe. A man who
thought that all religions evolved from the inner consciousness
of mankind, and that we make our gods into petty tyrants
to scourge and mock us quite unnecessarily. Like Marlowe,
too, his contemporaries and especially the common folk could
not understand his subtle irony and resented his levity. But
Euripides face seems to tell me, in his bust, that he is a great
thinker, like Browning was, and that Aeschylus and Sophocles
had nothing like the same powers of observation or originality
of thought. And once accept Euripides* point of view and
he is a great teacher besides. He is not a pessimist to the
same extent that Tolstoy is. The Baccha to me means nothing
more or less than this: Euripides 5 satire on the absurdity of
the notion that a person who is worshipped for his beauty and
his gentleness and his humility shall be called a god, who at
the same time is so cruel and relentless that he can bring about
the death of a youth by the hands of his own mother as a
punishment to this youth for not believing in the divinity
of this god. The play to me is either a satire or it is nothing.
To believe, as some do, that it is old Euripides repenting of
the heresies of his earlier days seems to me absurd. He would
not have chosen so revolting a story to propitiate the gods
unless he was laughing at them while he wrote it. Of course
the extraordinary part of the play is the parallelism of the
scenes with some of the incidents in Christ s life. If the play
had been written [in] A.D. 400 a spectator of the play would
have been bound to notice the similarity.
Having read the play. Pod expressed himself as "very
struck with its stage possibilities/ but stipulated that he must
have a "free hand" in its production. He therefore accom
panied Lilian McCarthy to Oxford and spent the better part
6*
I7O WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
of a day explaining to Gilbert Murray how he wished to treat
the play and where he intended to strengthen its construction.
He argued that Euripides, like Shaw, had often spoiled his
effects by anti-climaxes which were irritating to a modern
audience. He believed, but did not say, that Murray s trans
lation was "particularly bad and undramatic," and stated
quite frankly "that if I were Murray and Murray Poel, and
Murray proposed taking the liberties with my translations
that Poel does, then I should tell Poel that I will see him
damned before I would give him permission" (Letter to Professor
Gomme; 8 January 1909). After this Poel returned to London
thinking that they had all heard the last of the Bacchce. To
his great surprise, however, a letter arrived from Murray the
next morning, giving him the liberty he had asked for.
The play was rehearsed in a fortnight. The Chorus was
taken by four women, two sitting at the sides of the proscenium
arch facing inwards, two facing outwards on either side of the
flight of steps. These ladies were dressed in lavender
muslin and each carried a thyrsus. It was intended that they
should remain in these positions throughout the play and then
make a dignified exit. One of them, however (Mrs. Ernest
Thesiger) reminded Poel that they "could only hope to be able
to crawl off, using the thyrsus as a crutch, after sitting for
several hours in one position, and so we got leave at a given
cue to turn and face in the opposite direction for one act, and
then, for the last, to resume our first position. We hobbled
off creaking, even so" (Stratford Dossier). It was not in PoePs
nature, once he was launched on a production, to set any
limits to the powers of human endurance.
The choruses were muttered, moaned, chanted and occasion
ally spoken, sometimes by one or two voices and sometimes in
unison. "If any one of us lapsed," Mrs. Thesiger recalls,
"he stopped us and said c No, no, I must have my TREMULO. "
Poel himself conducted them from the orchestra pit. So
placed, he could gauge the effect of the performance as a
whole, which he summarised as follows: "As a production in
costume .and background, it was a thing of beauty. For two
hours it kept the house spellbound. But unfortunately, owing
to the abominable acoustics of the place, the quiet passages
were not heard beyond the stalls" (Letter to Professor Gomme}.
EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES
His rapture was not shared by Max Beerbohm, who pointed
out that Greek tragedy demanded above all things light and
space and air: it was ill at ease in any modern playhouse, but
if it were going to be produced at all, it should have been
given in the largest and not the smallest theatre in London.
Poel had made matters worse by shrouding the stage in purple
hangings which gave it "the appearance of a chapelle ardente
without candles." The effect of this confinement on the
Chorus was described by Max as follows:
In the middle of the stage, as set, there was just room for
three young ladies to revolve, by dint of taking great care and
keeping very close together. And these were the wild maidens
of Dionysus retinue maidens filled with a mystic ecstasy
that causes them to rush headlong down pine-clad slopes and
tear fauns and such-like creatures limb from limb in honour
of their inspiring master. And to add to the discomfort of
their effect, the front of the stage was occupied by four other
cramped young ladies, immobile in attitudes of the deepest
dejection, and looking like nothing so much as drawings by
some not at all gifted imitator of Simeon Solomon. These,
too, were Maenads and were singing songs of the wildest
lyric passion. Singing? It was not that. I hardly know what
it was. Imagine a sound midway between the howling of
dogs locked out in a yard by night and the intoning of the
Commination Service by curates with very bad colds in the
head, and you will have some notion of the noises made by
these Maenads. ... I possess a book of the words. Few of
these words could be distinguished: I was conscious only of
the dismal, penitential, intolerable drone (The Saturday Review;
14 November 1908).
The only thing Max admired was Lilian McCarthy as
Dionysus, because she was dignified where the others were
Lugubrious, and because she was the "only one to whom her
part was a living thing, and not just a difficult and depressing
experiment." She conveyed a sense of the supernatural, and
spoke the verse with a beautiful precision. The scene which
especially excited Max s wrath was the scene of frenzy where
Agave enters, imagining that the head she bears in her arms
is the head of a lion slain to the glory of the god. Poel pre-
jented a young lady "clad in a grass-green dress that strikes
the most fearsome discord against the purple curtains, executing
i very tame little skirt-dance and twittering her triumph,
172 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
while she timidly waggles in the air the head of a white
plaster cast from the antique." These may have been the
intentions of satire, but the author ofSavanarola Brown was not
amused.
Murray felt strongly the mystical element in the Baccha,
which Poel had rationalised away into a light and cheerful
satire. The two men had not only imagined but had heard
the play differently. There was one particular chorus where
Murray had taken great pains to keep the original rhythm.
It runs as follows :
For his kingdom it is th6re
In the ddncing and the prdyer
In the mrisic and the Idughter . . .
Here the natural stress reinforced the meaning. But for some
reason Poel made it trip along to a pointless jingle, which
exasperated the translator. He made it run like this :
F6r his kingdom it is there
In the dancing dnd the prayer
In the music dnd the laughter . . .
The second performance went better than the first and on
each occasion the house was crammed. It was intended to
give four more matinees, but, according to Poel (Letter to Pro
fessor Gomme: above) these were vetoed by Gilbert Murray,
who did not approve of the way he had treated the play.
Murray s attitude was hotly resented by Poel. He claimed
that Murray had attended the rehearsals and only made his
objections known when the success of the play was assured
and there was a question of it being revived by Tree at His
Majesty s with scenery by Gordon Craig (Letter to Professor
Gomme: above). Apart from a rather drastic abridgement of
the Choruses, Poel had respected the text, and the disagree
ment between the two men was essentially the difference
between a theatrical and a literary or philosophical approach.
Murray thought that Euripides should be left to speak for
himself; Poel wanted to speak for him. He thought that
Murray had accentuated "all Euripides weaknesses" and
gloried in them, as Shaw gloried "in some of his unnecessary
EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 173
digressions." He maintained that neither Shaw, Euripides
nor Murray cared "a scrap for the art of the theatre as an art
for compelling and sustaining attention by arousing human
emotions which, when once aroused, resent the introduction
of superfluous conversation which is not in harmony with the
emotions that have been aroused" (Letter to Professor Gomme;
above). Even in Shakespeare Poel had no scruples about
discarding as "superfluous conversation" the most subtle or
sublime poetry on the ground that no one would listen to
it. He did not seem to ask himself what was the point in
going back to Elizabethan conditions of performance, if he
could not persuade his audience to listen as an Elizabethan
audience listened, at the same time as he persuaded his actors
to speak as an Elizabethan actor spoke.
Ill
There was a difference, nevertheless, between PoePs approach
to Elizabethan and Euripidean tragedy. He did not pretend to
discover a gospel in Shakespeare; there was no party line to be
traced in The Duchess of Malfi, and the satire of The Alchemist
was compatible with any theology or none. Only the voice
of Marlowe, solitary and sometimes shrill, echoed the ancient
protest against the Gods. Poel s work on the Elizabethans was
a work of technical reconstruction, interesting and debatable
always, pursued with a scholarship which was disinterested
but rarely quite dispassionate. In the case of Euripides he
was not interested in recovering a classical mode of presenta
tion. He never made a profound study of the Attic stage.
It was the thinker in Euripides, not the dramatist or the poet,
whom he now wanted to reveal.
The success of the Baccha encouraged him to further experi
ment and in February 1909 he began a long correspondence
with Professor A. W. Gomme, who was then a post-graduate
student of Trinity, Cambridge, and later became Professor of
Greek at Glasgow University. Poel s interest had been
stimulated by the publication of VerralFs book on Euripides,
which he found "altogether free from sentimentality." He
was not insensitive to the grandeur of the other Greek drama-
174 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
tists; he even wanted to believe that "Aeschylus the idealist
was the best man, but in these immoral days when all our gods
get shattered one after another, it is some comfort to know
that the same thing took place in Greece so long ago" (13 Feb
ruary 1 909) . The more he studied VerralPs work on Euripides,
the more sure he became that
Euripides was a greater thinker than Aeschylus or Sophocles
in the same way that Browning was greater than Tennyson.
Socrates and Euripides I think are the two most truthful and
profound students and interpreters of human motive and con
duct the world has ever produced. In my belief a society
should be formed for reviving Euripides plays in English on
the lines explained by Dr. Verrall. It would be an ethical
education of some value now that the fallacies of our own re
ligions are being seriously questioned. I have a longing to
produce the Alcestis and to stage-manage the play so as to
accentuate the absurdity of the girl s return to life being taken
seriously as a miracle in a way that Dr. Verrall contends
Euripides never intended. Our Ethical Societies ought to
form a Dramatic Society for the propagation of Ethics through
Drama, and Euripides should be their chief asset. English
stage versions should be arranged so as to illustrate Euripides
ethical views without wearying the attention of the audience
with the presentation of those parts of the play which Dr.
Verrall contends were merely inserted by Euripides so as to
conform to the stage conventions of the theatre of his time
(25 November 1909).
Poel turned his back upon Gilbert Murray s translations,
for Murray, he knew and admitted, would never sanction the
liberties he proposed to take; the "omission of everything
extraneous to the plot of the story as Euripides wished us to
understand it/ This suggestion was too radical even for so
tried a friend and ally as Professor Gomme. He replied to
Poel, demurring at what classical scholars would say to so
drastic a mutilation of the text. Poel was unconvinced.
If Euripides, like Shakespeare, had lived 300 years ago,
you could insist that those who wish to understand his writings
should take the trouble to become familiar with the times in
which he wrote and the theatre for which he wrote. But you
can t call upon playgoers to become familiar with an age that
existed 500 years before the Christian era. To make Euripides
alive today what is wanted is to show the modern rationalist
EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 175
that Euripides is the great model for all those who today want
to show the immorality and irreligion of the Christian religion
as it is used by the Church for her own interests today. . . .
This I contend can only be accomplished by removing every
thing from the play that does not directly bear upon the
intention. . . . What Greek scholars personally would think
of any liberties we took with the text is not to the point. The
scholar cannot monopolise what is vital in a man s work and
never will. It is the business of life to make the great thoughts
and teachings of a great mind understanded of the people
(9 December 1909).
This last sentence which I have already quoted as an
epigraph to this book, is the justification of all Poel s endeavour.
However controversial his methods may have been, this was
the plea that he would always adduce in their defence. Very
often, in my submission, it was a specious, an invalid defence.
Very often it involved him in flagrant contradictions of prin
ciple. But although it was opportunist, it was not for that
reason insincere.
Everything now turned on finding an actable translation
of the Alcestis, and Professor Gomme started work on a version
in prose. Poel was anxious that Alcestis herself should appear
hysterical rather than heroic. He came up to Cambridge to
see his nephew Reginald play Richard II for the Marlowe
Society in February 1910. The Marlowe had recently been
founded by Rupert Brooke, and its productions were in
fluenced from the first by Poel s ideas. He profited from his
visit to meet Verrall and to have further talks with Gomme.
The following week he saw the Alcestis acted in London by
amateurs in a version by Dr. Warre-Cornish, the Vice- Provost
of Eton. The production seems to have had a satiric intention.
The Alcestis and Heracles scenes were taken seriously, but the
scene between the father and son "soon created considerable
merriment and it became really impossible to take anything
seriously afterwards, but this was not what the performers
intended. The end was unconvincing because of course the
audience were . . . instinctively sceptical about the coming
back to life" (21 February 1910).
What interested Poel were the liberties Warre-Cornish
had taken with the text the boy s speech at the death of the
mother was spoken by the father instead and the fact that
176 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
much of the translation, though it was spoken prosaically,
seemed to be in verse. Poel came to the conclusion that without
tampering with Euripides text, it would still be possible to
treat the play throughout as an amusing satire. And for this
purpose he felt that a rhymed version, reminiscent of Moliere
or Pope, would be best. He asked Gomme, therefore, whether
there was any student at Trinity capable of turning his prose
version into rhymed verse.
This was the solution finally adopted; a translation was
made by Francis Hubback, a fellow-student of Gomme s at
Trinity. Hubback was a brilliant Greek scholar who was
subsequently killed in the first World War. How this trans
lation worked out can be seen by comparing the literal and
the rhymed versions. Here is Death s opening speech:
Ha! Why are you here! Why do you haunt these halls,
Apollo ? You are wronging me again, confining and checking
the honours of the dead. Are you not content to save Admetus
from his doom, deceiving the Fates with your crafty lies ? Are
you going to guard her, too, with your bow in your hand the
daughter of Pelias who promised to save her lord by her own
death ? (Gomme)
What are you doing? Why do you remain
Here by this house? Ah! would you again
Baulk the Infernals of honour that s due ?
Was it not amply sufficient for you
Your tricks to be trying
In stopping the death of Admetus, frustrating
And cheating the Fates, that you now must be waiting
Ready on guard with your bow in your hand
To shield her who freely consented to stand
For her husband and save him by dying? (Hubback)
The difficulties of translation were acutely analysed by Poel
in a further letter to Gomme. There was a difference, he said,
between a translation and dramatisation of Euripides.
In the latter case the dramatist abandons textual accuracy
for clearness, knowing that it is more important to interpret
the spirit of the poet s ideas and dramatic intentions than to
correctly reproduce the verbal phraseology; and that you
must take it for granted that many people among the audience
(the women for instance) must be considered in the light of
having no previous knowledge of Greek history. Another
EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 177
matter of great difficulty, when one is thinking too much about
verbal accuracy, is characterisation. Death talks a little too
much like Apollo and uses the same kind of words and sen
tences. He should talk more like the Death in Everyman,
even if Euripides himself does not make him do so in as marked
a contrast (21 October 1910).
Through this exchange of views with a fine scholar Poel
came to see that Euripides knew his business, and that the
reason why the amateur production of the play in London had
fallen comparatively flat was that all the lines which seemed
most likely to get laughs had been omitted. He came also
to see that although the play was satirical, it was subtly so;
that because Alcestis was not heroic, she need not therefore
be hysterical; that she was just an ordinary woman, a martyr
malgre elle*
What I mean about Alcestis 3 unwillingness is this. When
a husband tells his wife to black his boots, she does so; but it
can hardly be said that she does so willingly. When there is
a tussle between the sexes, the woman generally expects to
have to give way. Admetus never says to his wife "You
shan t die for me," and as the woman thinks her husband
expects it of her, she does it, but if there was any way of getting
out, she would only be too glad to escape (Ibid.) f
The play was at last produced on the Grand Staircase of
London University in December 1911. Esme Percy played
Admetus and Lucy Wilson Alcestis. It was not easy in practice
to balance the component elements of the play. Those who
were glad that the Chorus was not treated in the conventional
way in the way, *that is, that middle-class English ladies
imagine that a Greek chorus behaved still felt that the play
would have been more impressive, if it had been acted as it
was acted in 400 B.C. Those who read their Euripides in the
way that Poel read him complained that the burial should
have been a much more hurried affair. To this Poel replied
that, even with the excision of several lyrics, he could not
bury Alcestis faster than Euripides text would let him. It was
also very difficult to suggest, simultaneously, the idea that
Alcestis does not die and the idea that the superstitious might
have believed a miracle to have taken place. In general,
Poel was satisfied that the "gentle and acid" quality of the
original had been conveyed. The production was revived at
178 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
the Little Theatre in the following January and again
in April 1914, under the auspices of the Religious Drama
Society, at the Ethical Church, Bayswater. This building,
with its slightly raised tiers of seats round a semi-circular floor,
was excellently suited to the performance of Greek tragedy,
and Poel s beautiful groupings stood out with particular
effect against the bare background. But the production was
spoiled by the Admetus. Esme Percy was not available and
Poel had put a woman in the part. Whatever excuse he might
have had at other times for indulging this perversity, he had
none here. "In Admetus," argued the critic of The New
Weekly, "Euripides offers us a study in masculine egoism
incarnate his lack of personal touch, his impervious tone, his
note of aggressive self-complacency, all are designed to make
the audience open their eyes and cry c Oh, what a man! "
By putting a woman in his place, Poel had destroyed the con
trast of the play.
At the Little Theatre the production was marred by another
minor eccentricity. What was the point of Poel stationing
himself at the head of a long flight of steps in the costume of a
Roman Centurion, and remaining there, immobile, throughout
the performance, with everything except his long and hirsute
legs cut off from sight by the borders ? Was it that he could
not afford a super? But why, in any case, should a Roman
centurion mount guard over a Greek tragedy?
This was the last time that Poel was to produce a Greek
play. He may have felt that Euripides 5 message, for all its
seeming immediacy, was too remote in expression to be
"understanded of the people" ?
CHAPTER VI
Macbeth and Troilus
WE must now pick up the sequence of the Elizabethan
Stage Society productions in the years that followed
the success of Everyman. On 10 August 1903 Marlowe s
Edward II was produced for the first time, it was believed,
since the author s death at the New Theatre, Oxford, for the
University Extension Delegacy. Granville-Barker played the
leading part. His performance was subtle, scholarly and
sensitive, though inaudible in the final scenes. A fully Eliza
bethan production was not possible at the New Theatre; so
Poel replaced his balcony by a raised platform which could be
screened off, when required, from the forestage. The text
was treated with reasonable respect, although the current
conventions of propriety robbed Gaveston of the last ten lines
of his great speech: "I must have wanton poets, pleasant
wits." In fact the play s homosexual theme seems to have been
considerably softened. In a correspondence with Sir Adolphus
Ward, Poel had written that "Gaveston ought to be made a
quite delightful stage character of sublime impudence and
attractive likeness," but the effect in performance was purely
comic and this reduced the force of Isabella s protests. The
murder of the King was splendidly contrived. As Edward
fell asleep, Lightborn worked his way round to the back of
the bench and seated himself by the King s head. Presently
he awoke, and while he was speaking the lines
Something still buzzeth in mine ears,
And tells me if I sleep I never wake;
This fear is that which makes me tremble thus;
And therefore tell me, wherefore art thou come?
Lightborn s right hand came up slowly behind him, and on the
reply "To rid thee of thy life," closed over his head, touching
the spot between the brows which hypnotists touch in order to
produce rigidity. Edward became petrified, as if he were
now in a cataleptic state, and the eyeballs rolled upward
179
l8o WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
showing the whites of the eyes in a ghastly stare. The traverse
curtains closed and a wild prolonged shriek was heard from
behind them. Then Matrevis and Gurney entered from in
front with Lightborn drawing on his gloves a macabre,
imaginative touch. A moment later he was stabbed by his
two accomplices.
When the head of Young Mortimer was brought to the new
King as he was following his father s funeral, he seized it,
stopped the procession, knelt, and held it forth as an oblation
to the coffin. On the words "I offer up this wicked traitor s
head," he threw it from him in disgust and it was caught by
Leicester. Poel had the great producer s genius for keeping
his stage tinglingly alive.
In February and March of the following year (1904), he
gave performances of Much Ado About Nothing throughout the
London suburbs, at the invitation of the London School
Board, and the production was seen later at the Lecture
Theatre, Burlington Gardens and at the Court Theatre,
Sloane Square. Lewis Casson played the part of Don Pedro,
and Nugent Monck, who was now stage-managing regularly
for Poel, was also in the cast. He played Giovanni in a revival
of Poel s own play, The First Franciscans, at St. George s Hall
in April 1905. Here Dorothy Minto made her first appearance
with the Society as a peasant girl, and Poel chose her to play
Juliet in the production of Romeo and Juliet that he was planning
for the following month.
This was the last production of the Elizabethan Stage
Society as an organised body. Poel s supporters could no
longer face the burden of financial failure, and on 5 June Mr.
and Mrs. Edmund Gosse wrote to him as follows :
I hope that you will not look upon it that your efforts have
failed. They have come to an end, partly because so much is
now comprehended and accepted which you began your
labours in order to explain and to recommend. When the
literary history of our age is written, your energetic work must,
of necessity, have a niche in it, and what you have accom
plished will not be forgotten.
To assume that Poel s labours had come to an end was to
show a singular ignorance of Poel. In fact he took the sole
responsibility of his productions from this time onward.
MACBETH AND TROILUS l8l
Much of his most important work was still before him, and he
accomplished it at the price of a growing personal impoverish
ment. The name of the Society remained, however, as a
guarantee of continuity and goodwill.
Romeo and Juliet was produced, as it should always be
produced, with two master ideas in mind; first, that the play
is a contrast between love and hate, and that the death of the
two lovers is a senseless sacrifice unless we have been allowed
to feel the ferocity of the feud which is healed over their bodies;
and second, that Romeo and Juliet are a boy and girl. The
first of these conditions is generally fulfilled if the play is given
with the minimum of cuts, and in particular if the last scene
is not too severely curtailed. But the second difficulty is not
necessarily resolved by casting a Romeo and Juliet in their
teens, for the reason that both parts are intensely difficult and
require players of considerable technique. Either you must
have a boy and girl of precocious accomplishment, or mature
actors who have the power to suggest extreme youth. Neither
of these combinations is at all easy to come by. Furthermore,
the action of the play is at once so complicated and so swift,
the scenes are so short and so closely dovetailed, that each
episode must be allowed its natural rhythm; any interruption
for the sake of putting Verona on the scenic map is disastrous
to the total effect. Verona is a very beautiful city and the
scenic artist generally likes to linger there. But not even
the deftest drawing of curtains or dropping of backcloths will
save the play from scrappiness. Either you must have a
multiple stage, such as Georges PitoefF designed with great
ingenuity for his production at the Vieux Golombier in Paris,
and Mr. Roger Furse for the Old Vic production in 1952; or
you must boldly conceive your production on Elizabethan
lines and banish any ideas of realistic locality. But your
multiple stage, though it will give you swiftness, will not as a
rule give you space. Mr. Furse, however, was successful in
designing, and Mr. Hugh Hunt in using, a decor that gave
both. Their only mistake was to trundle on an absurd art
nouveau contraption from the wings, which was supposed to
give one the illusion of Friar Laurence s cell. The illusion, of
course, in so far as it had ever existed, was destroyed as soon
as the actors began to take the full stage. And this was the
1 82 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
sovereign merit of the set, that any part of it could be used
at any time.
Poel gave a very fair version of the play. It was produced
at the Royalty and on the kind of stage for which it had been
written, in so far as such a stage can be reconstructed in a
modern theatre and the qualification is important. In
Esme Percy and Dorothy Minto, Poel had a Romeo and Juliet
still in their teens, each having the temperament, if not the
experience, for their parts. Many years later, returning from
a performance of the play at Stratford, Poel saw his ideal
Juliet in the railway carriage.
She was travelling with her father and mother and two
younger sisters. In appearance she was a miniature copy of
the famous Venus of Milo. She had the same supple grace.
Love was to her as the very health of her being. Old and
young, rich and poor, would be impressed by her youth, her
beauty and her soft confidings. . . . And there were in this
counterfeit of a Juliet glimpses of gloom, latent in the utmost
depth of her eyes, as we see when peering into a clear bottom
less pool a gloom revealing the soul s steadfastness, an untold
excellence for which the mocking gods exact from its possessors
a penalty often paid in terms of precious sorrow, or by even
costlier anguish one which finds relief only in the loving and
last sigh, "O happy dagger, this is thy sheath, there rest and
let me die." Here, then, was a possible Juliet (Monthly Letters 3
1929; pp. 412-43).
Harold Child described PoePs Romeo and Juliet as the only
performance of the play he had ever been able to believe in
(Letter to Poel, 9 November 1933), and the credibility, apart
from the competence, of the production was unquestionably due
to the youth of the lovers, which conferred on them a pathos
they might never have attained by histrionic means; and to
the self-evident suitability of the stage.
II
From the day when Poel penned the last page of his diary
and opened his heart to his sister from the Yorkshire fit-up,
the secret of his spiritual growth and the stress of his essential
solitude had been closely guarded. Only his wife was the
partner of an anxiety, which. was far more prophetic than
personal. He had been schooled in reticence and he was
MACBETH AND TROILUS 183
never tempted to betray the teaching and traditions of his
home. But early in 1906 he lifted the curtain, a little shyly,
in an article which appeared anonymously in The Westminster
Review (12 January 1906).
He had just spent Christmas at sea on his way to the United
States. It was his first visit to America and the object of his
voyage was to launch the tours of Everyman which were being
undertaken by Philip Ben Greet.
On Christmas night the ship was swept by a storm of unusual
severity, even for the time of year, and the effect of this was
vividly described by Poel. He was not a natural writer.
His arguments, however forcible, were marshalled in foot-
slogging prose; his tactics were the tactics of attrition. But
in this article more than one memorable phrase escaped him,
and he successfully conveyed three things. First, the impression
of the storm itself "the sea is black as ink, on which the foam
lies scattered like patches of snow, and the sound of the wind
is like the fluttering of a million fans." Second, the mortal
struggle of the crew "with the thunder of a Niagara comes
down a wave upon the seamen s deck, sweeping a sailor off
his feet and hurling him into the darkness; others run to his
rescue; presently a group of men move hurriedly across the
track of light with something in their arms and pass out by
the cabin door." Thirdly, the careless contrasting gaiety and
inconsequent conversation of the passengers, mostly American.
And fourthly, the lonely brooding figure of Poel himself,
here styled "the Anglo-Saxon. " "At midnight on the day
following the gale is the Anglo-Saxon again pacing the prom
enade deck; not once has he closed his eyes during the last
forty-eight hours." He watches the silent funeral of the
seaman who has been struck down by the gale, and then
goes to the Doctor s cabin "and begs for a narcotic to compel
sleep."
The article is not only curious and interesting in itself, but
it is a parable of Poel s vocation. Observant of men and
sensitive to nature, solitary but sympathetic, speculative but
engaged, he was to walk through life very much as he paced
the deck through the darkness of the Atlantic night. To those
who crossed his path he would always appear something of a
stranger; a remnant from some world, far more remote than
184 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Burbage s London, whose mystery he wore like a cloak but
was never quite able to communicate.
Ill
A production of Goldsmith s The Good-natured Man followed
on 9 August 19065 first at the New Theatre, Cambridge,
and then at the Coronet Theatre, London. Lewis Casson,
Ben Field and Clare Greet were in the cast. The play went
on a short tour afterwards, but at Tunbridge Wells the bookings
were so poor that a concert had to be improvised at the last
moment. This was enlivened by a whistling solo by Mr.
Casson. Poel s next important Shakespearian venture was
Macbeth.
None of Shakespeare s tragedies is more Elizabethan in
feeling than this one; the blood-guiltiness of Holyrood and
Fotheringay darkens the corridors of Dunsinane. Yet the
play is rarely satisfactory, and rarely successful, in the theatre.
Is this because the tow-coloured wigs and customary cross-
gartering, the clanking brass jewellery and horned head-gear,
evoke irresistibly a time which is too remote to touch us ? There
is barbarism in Macbeth, to be sure, but it is the barbarism of
Bothwell, not of Boadicea. English audiences cannot take the
Anglo-Saxons seriously, and it is time that stage directors
gave up asking them to. In any case the blood-shot meta
physical complexity of Macbeth gives them no excuse. "If it
were done when tis done" John Donne might have turned
this soliloquy into a sermon and delivered it from the pulpit
of St. Paul s.
Poel saw this, of course, from the start. The recent accession
of James I in part explained Shakespeare s choice of a Scottish
subject, and Poel may have believed with Dover Wilson that
the dramatist had himself been in Scotland for a time after
the fall of Essex. King James believed that he had the healing
touch, and the references in the play to Edward the Confessor,
though they serve a dramatic purpose which in performance
is often ignored, show that Shakespeare was not above paying
a timely compliment by the way. Poel certainly held that the
details of the murder of Darnley in 1567 had, by the end of
the century, become fairly generally known, and that they
were much in Shakespeare s mind. The wife of the murdered
MACBETH AND TROILUS 185
King in Hamlet marries his assassin; and perhaps Professor
Moberley was right in suggesting that when Macbeth protests
that the dead have the power to push him from his stool,
Shakespeare was thinking of Mary and Bothwell who had found
that Darnley dead had more power to overthrow them than
when he was alive. The Scottish Confederates had carried
into battle against Mary a banner painted with the image of a
murdered man, and kneeling beside it was a child uttering the
words "Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord!" In Macbeth
the idea of Divine judgment was represented by the image of a
"naked new-born babe."
To those who argued that the witches removed the play
into the twilight of history, Poel could quote once again
from Scot s Discoverie of Witchcraft. Here there was a descrip
tion of the old women who passed for witches in the
England of Shakespeare s time. "An old weather-beaten
crone, having her chin and her knees meeting for age, walking
like a bow, leaning on a staff, hollow-eyed, untoothed, furrowed,
having her lips trembling with the palsy, going mumbling
in the streets." This is how the witches in Macbeth have
generally been shown on the stage. James I had himself
been a believer in witchcraft, and had had a witch tried for
raising a tempest at sea while the Queen was crossing the
channel. In 1565 a witch was burnt who confessed to having
caused all the tempests during that year. Poel produced the
three witches in Act I of Macbeth as Scot had described them,
but in the cauldron-scene he surrounded Hecate with three
attendants, all four being dressed in masque costumes. These
three attendants were a kind of superior Fates and they spoke
for the silent apparitions, thus giving to their utterances an
effect of sinister ventriloquy. When Michael Redgrave pro
duced Macbeth at the Aldwych in 1948, his three crones of
the blasted heath were shadowed, from the beginning, by
three stately counterparts; the metaphysical figurae, so to speak,
of their prophecy and equivocation.
Where Poel challenged tradition most deliberately was in
his conception of Lady Macbeth. He took his text from
Mrs. Siddons, who had seen her as "a character which I believe
is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex,
fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile. Such a combination
1 86 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
only, respectable in energy and strength of mind and capti
vating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm
of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless
as Macbeth." There were certain indications in the text to
support this view:
O gentle lady
3 Tis not for yo u to hear what I can speak,
and again
All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
Poel maintained that the deepest impulse behind the murder
of Duncan came from Macbeth s own fantasy and ambition,
the persuasions of his wife only helping forward a design
already more than half formed. The play was his tragedy,
not hers, because he had a conscience where she had none.
For Poel, Macbeth represented the new awareness of personal
responsibility, which he believed had been the gift of the
Reformation; Lady Macbeth, by contrast, represented the
amoralism of the Renaissance. He argued these points in an
article for The Nation (23 March 1912; reprinted in Shakespeare
in the Theatre, 1913, pp. 61-69).
She was to the last unconscious of being criminal or sinful.
Her life was the playing of a red-handed game by one who
thought herself innocent. Unlike her husband, her face
betrayed no moral conflict; the puritan spirit had never
penetrated her own nature. Whatever her outward religion
might be, she was at least a materialist, not from conviction
but from shallowness, due to the absence of all the higher
powers of reflection and imagination. So that her husband s
talk about conscience and retribution is unintelligible to her.
. . . If we turn to her own reflections, it is always her woman s
weakness which she dreads may defeat her purpose. Murder
is foreign to her temperament; the details are ugly and revolt
ing; the sight of blood may unnerve her. But she evidently
imagines that her husband, who has killed men in battle, can
do it better. When the fatal moment arrives she cannot meet
her husband in her normal mood, but has recourse to the
wine-cup, not because she shrinks from the notion of murder,
but from dislike of the details of the operation. . . . Then the
thought of being a Queen and wearing a real crown is an
intense delight to her. Macbeth knew of her weakness for
finery when he sought her approval of the deed, and women
of Lady Macbeth s temperament do not care to be disappointed
MACBETH AND TROILUS 187
of their pleasures. . . . But no sooner is the crime committed
than her optimism fails her, for her husband seems no nearer
to "masterdom" than he was before. After the coronation
there comes her tragic reflection that the murder was a mistake.
Unfortunately for her it was worse than a mistake; it was a
blunder for which her husband deposes her authority.
This view that Lady Macbeth was a woman and not a
virago was borne out by her passivity and gradual break
down from the discovery of the murder onwards. The initiative
now came entirely from Macbeth, and his agonies were due to
remorse and fear, not to irresolution. If Lady Macbeth
seemed at moments to be stronger than he was, that was not
because she was made of steel, but because she was morally
insensitive. And the reason why Poel insisted on keeping in
the scene with Lady Macduff was not in order to point the
contrast between a woman and an Amazon; it was to stress
the more subtle comparison between two women who were
alike in their domestic affections, and possibly in their physical
habit, but who differed completely in their degree of moral
sensibility. Phelps had restored Lady Macduff (but not her
children) in his productions of 1847 and 1850. The effect of
keeping in the scene was suggested by Shaw, writing to Poel
after the performance. "I never before had realised with
absolute certainty that Macbeth was a doomed man if ever
he let Macduff catch him."
Archer entered the lists against these ideas. He quoted
the invocation to the "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts"
to prove that Lady Macbeth knew perfectly well the atrocity
of the crime she was instigating. If she did not, he claimed,
there was no meaning in words; and if the sleep-walking
scene did not show her that her prayer to escape the "compunc
tious visitings of nature" had gone unanswered, then it was a
purposeless and not a pathetic episode. But this was not the
woman whom Poel invited Lilian McCarthy and Evelyn
Weeden to portray, alternately, for a week s performances at
the Fulham Theatre (22-26 June 1909). Miss McCarthy
describes the rehearsals as the most tremendous experience of
her career. PoePs energy was tigerish; his face would become
taut with the intensity of the truth he was striving to com
municate and then relax into the sweetest and most disarming
1 88 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
of smiles. He had seen Lady Macbeth down to the smallest
detail of her appearance and make-up. Her hair was bright
red and her complexion flushed pink. Her eyelids were painted
a light green and there were flecks of gold under her eyes.
Her mouth was very clear and carmined. Her neck and hands
were white tinted with a pale blue. She carried her head high,
with straightened back and squared shoulders, and moved
with a slight swing. She should suggest a woman of thirty-five
(Lillah McCarthy; Stratford Dossier}.
When it came to interpretation, every problem was referred
to the kind of woman she was. How, for example, should she
speak the line "Give me the daggers" ? Here there were three
possible emphases, either on give or on me or on daggers .
Poel argued that to a woman of her practical disposition the
question of who returned the daggers to Duncan s death-
chamber was secondary to the immediate necessity of their
being replaced. This meaning was enforced if she put the
emphasis on give . In the sleep-walking scene he had the
brilliant idea of showing her at her dressing-table, playing
mechanically with her brushes and comb and going through
the motions of doing her hair. This presumably took place
in the inner chamber while the doctor and waiting woman
watched and commented from outside. Later, she rose and
began to walk about. Poel held that the effect of the scene
would be far more impressive if the audience could see her
moving gradually into the rhythm of her sleep-walking
instead of being already fixed in it at the moment of her fiisl
appearance.
Another daring innovation was in the Banquet scene.
Charles Knight, in his edition of the play, had asked what
exactly was the significance of the original stage direction
"Enter Ghost," after the line "Give me some wine, fill full."
Banquo s spectre had already appeared once and vanished.
Was it good stage-craft to repeat so tremendous an effect?
Was it dramatic to bring on Banquo a second time just when
Macbeth had expressed the wish that he could be there?
The stage direction had not said "re-enter Ghost," nor had it
specified whose Ghost it was. Furthermore, the second
apparition was evidently more terrifying than the first. When
Banquo had appeared, Macbeth had replied to the question
MACBETH AND TROILUS 189
"Are you a man?" with "Ay, and a bold one that dare look on
what might appal the devil." But when the Ghost appears
the second time, his language is stronger. "Avaunt and quit
my sight," "Take any shape but that" "Hence, horrible
shadow." He now speaks in the plural; "Can such things be ?"
"When now I think you can behold such sights }" Had there
in fact been two separate apparitions? And was the second
and more frightening the ghost of Duncan? Could the
description "Thy bones are marrowless" be properly applied
to someone who had only been dead an hour? This reasoning
was plausible, though not conclusive; but it justified Poel in
bringing on the ghost of Duncan, when the audience expected
to see the ghost of Banquo. It is interesting to note that in
Mr. Bridges-Adams later productions of Macbeth at Stratford
this interpretation of the second Ghost was followed. Another
powerful effect was secured at the end of the Banquet scene,
where Poel brought on Hecate sharp on the top of Macbeth s
last line "We are yet but young in deed." This entrance,
Poel argued in a letter to W. J. Lawrence (14 December 1920),
"was most dramatic and a fitting climax to the Banquet scene.
It was as if the Fates themselves had taken fright at the thought
of their own mischief and the awful tragic developments that
were threatening in consequence."
Macbeth was played by Hubert Carter, a young actor of
taurine physique with a strong and flexible voice. "I think
he has genius," wrote Gordon Craig to Poel a few years later.
Carter, like Esme Percy, became one of Poel s favourite
actors. The witches of the first act were kept in the Fay
family; they were played by W. G. Fay, his wife and his
brother Frank. Here the Irish bjogue must have been very
effective, setting them, as it were, apart in a preternatural
element of their own, Hecate and her attendants were all
taken by women.
IV
On i November 1904 Bernard Shaw s John Bull s Other
Island had been produced by Granville-Barker under the
Vedrenne-Barker management at the Royal Court Theatre.
The play was given for six matinees, and it was revived for
six further performances, also matinees, from 7 February 1905.
190 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
On i May it was put into the evening bill for three weeks and
again in the September following for a fortnight. At all of
these performances the part of Keegan, the poet, priest and
visionary, was played by Granville-Barker.
When the play was again revived at the same theatre on
17 September 1906, Barker was not available and Shaw
suggested Poel for the part. His "quaintness his very un-
professionalism," Shaw wrote to Vedrenne, "will give the
performance . . . just the sort of unusual touch that the pro
vinces will be looking for in the V-B management 1 (Letter in
Enthoven Collection). "Yes, I admit that I was Keegan,"
Poel wrote to Shaw many years later (i August 1932), "and
needed no make-up to publish the fact. Yet I found the part
not by any means easy to play, for I was always in terror
lest I should be acting Keegan as someone else. The danger
of my doing so was due to my unusual stage experience. I
never had any ambition to act, only to stage-manage." Poel
played the part for six weeks in the autumn of 1906; again for
two weeks at the Coronet Theatre, Netting Hill; in September
1909, followed by a provincial tour; and lastly for a series of
matinees during Granville-Barker and Lillah McCarthy s
season at the Kingsway in the winter of 1912-13. He acted
it nearly 100 times in all and his performance, though it seems
to have been uneven in execution, made a deep impression
nevertheless.
The next two years were mainly directed to revivals of
previous productions, and to the preparations for the Alcestis;
these I have already discussed (cf. pp. 173-178). The only
new play to be presented was an old sixteenth-century morality,
Jacob and Esau. This was given at the Little Theatre on the
6 and 12 March 1911, with Cathleen Nesbitt as Rebecca and
Reginald Owen as Esau. In the same programme were
included the "Shakespearian" scenes from Edward III, which
Poel had first produced in 1890, under the title of The King
and the Countess. Arthur Wontner now played the King and
Helen Haye the Countess.
On Sunday evening i December 1912, a dinner was organised
in PoeFs honour at the Trocadero restaurant. This was the
most imposing public tribute he was ever to receive, and a
list of those present shows to what extent he had converted the
MACBETH AND TROILTJS
world of scholarship and taste. Granville-Barker was in the
chair and among those sitting at the long tables stretching
down the room were Miss Lilian Braithwaite, Mr. D. Clayton
Calthrop, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Casson, Mr. and Mrs. Hayden
Coffin, Mr. and Mrs. A. E. Drinkwater, Miss Edith Evans,
Miss Rosina Filippi, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Flower, Mr.
Edward Garnett, Sir Laurence and Lady Gomme, Mr. and
Mrs. Edmund Gosse, Miss Clare Greet, Mr. Edmund Gwenn,
Mr. Martin Harvey, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, Mr. Carl
Hentschel, Miss A. E. Horniman, Mr. and Mrs. Selwyn
Image, Miss Gertrude Kingston, Sir Sidney Lee, Mr. and Mrs.
Sidney Low, Mr. Seymour Lucas, R.A., Miss Lilian McCarthy,
Mr. Edward Marsh, Mr. H. W. Massingham, Mr. George
Moore, Mr. B. Iden Payne, Mr. Esme Percy, Mr. and Mrs.
Nigel Playfair, Mr. Byam Shaw, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw,
Mr. and Mrs. Clement Shorter, Miss Laura Smithson, Mr.
William Strang, A.R.A., Mr. Montague Summers, Miss
Ellen Terry, Lady Tree, Sir Frederick Wedmore, Mr. and
Mrs. F. Whelen, and Mrs. and Mrs. Israel Zangwill. The
arrangements for the evening were in the hands of Allan
Gomme. A "consomme Sarah Bernhardt" followed the
hors d ceuvre, and a vegetarian menu was provided for those
who had given- notice in time. There is no mention of drink,
though it may have been served and must have been available.
In those high-minded days of theatrical reform even Granville-
Barker habitually drank ginger-wine.
All the guests signed their names in an autograph book
which was afterwards presented to Poel. In proposing his
toast Barker referred to the Sunday morning in 1899 when
Poel had called at his lodgings, and to the rehearsals of
Richard II which had shaken his self-complacency. Poel, he
said, was "one of the greatest and finest influences in the
English Theatre." He had begun his work when the genius
of Irving was supreme in Shakespearian matters, and when it
was blasphemy to say anything against it. But Poel had had
the courage to commit that blasphemy, and in time that
heresy would become an accepted creed. Edmund Gosse,
who followed Barker, praised Poel for having "defended the
sanctity of our national dramatic documents." Martin
Harvey and Stewart Headlam also spoke.
WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
The speech of the evening, however, came from Shaw.
"Mr. Poel and myself/ he said, "happened not only to have
read the works of Shakespeare, but we rather liked them."
In the matter of Romeo and Juliet,, he went on, Poel had
the ridiculous habit of going to see what Shakespeare said.
When he found that a child of fourteen was wanted, his critics
exclaimed, c Ah but she was an Italian child, and an Italian
child of fourteen looks exactly the same as an Englishwoman
of forty-five. 3 Mr. Poel did not believe it. He said, C I will
get a child of fourteen and accordingly he performed Romeo
and Juliet in that way and for the first time it became endurable.
I sat at it with Mr. Granville-Barker. I forget who else was
in the house. I think there were about six people.
Shaw went on to recall Poel s production of The Comedy of
Errors, in which "a tremendous procession of a most striking
kind" had walked in from the far end of the hall.
The effect was magnificent, unforgettable, and the moment
I saw it, I said, C I will steal that some day/ No one took the
slightest notice of it; or if anyone did, it was only to say, c ls it
not a pity that Mr. Poel did not learn something about the
theatre, and know at which end of the hall the stage was ? . . .
When years and years afterwards, Reinhardt came along,
they cried Magnificent and fell down at his feet. And yet
Reinhardt never produced the marvellous effect that Poel
did on that occasion. If Poel had been a German, they would
probably have believed there was something in him; they
never believe that art can come out of England. In all the
text books he will probably be described as a disciple of
Reinhardt (Pall Mall Gazette; 2 December 1912).
In his reply Poel characteristically looked forward and not
back. He was interested, just then, in his new production,
which he admitted might also be his last.
I remember my literary instructor I am speaking of when
I was 17 or 1 8 years of age telling me that there were two
pieces written by Shakespeare which he hoped I should never
read because they were not proper ones. One was Measure
for Measure and the other was Troilus and Cressida. It is a
peculiar coincidence that although these words had gone
out of my memory at the time of doing it, Measure for Measure
was the first work that I did for the Elizabethan Stage Society.
. . . Troilus and Cressida is going to be the last one that I shall
present to a London public on my own responsibility.
S;*
MACBETH AND TROILUS 193
He went on to speak of the neglect into which the play had
fallen, maintaining that
it is the most ethical thing that Shakespeare ever wrote, and
in this respect it is to be classed with the productions of Zola
and Ibsen, of Bernard Shaw and of Granville-Barker. Shake
speare knew that he wrote romances, and he knew that Ay
You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing told his neighbours
nothing about their real selves. And he comes down from the
clouds and says to his friends, Now I will tell you something
about your fellow creatures as they are in Elizabethan London.
In Edwardian London they were not very different, and
just then, in the first years of the new reign, Troilus and Cressida
had an ironic actuality. Although Poel was to set it firmly in
an Elizabethan context, we can detect in his liking for the play
a tinge of that anti-militarism which was then blowing through
the English intelligentsia. This was the period of The Riddle of
the Sands, of the Parliament Act and Mr. Lloyd George s
Budget; and William Poel was not a radical for nothing.
V
Troilus and Cressida is now regarded as one of Shakespeare s
problem plays and it has been given a good deal of attention
by Professor Tillyard and others. It has also been performed
with success by the Cambridge Marlowe Society; at the
Old Vic; and at the Westminster Theatre, under Mr. Michael
MacOwan s skilful direction, in modern dress. But in 1912
the play was little known outside a small circle of students.
Poel had been drawn to it for a long time, perhaps because it
set him so many problems.
First of all, there was the difficulty of the date. The play
had been entered on The Stationers 3 Register on 7 February
1603, as "The Book of Troilus and Cressida as it is acted by
my Lord Chamberlain s men." Never before had a play of
Shakespeare s been entered on the Register as being per
formed at the time of its publication. In fact, this particular
play, though registered, did not get printed, and Dr. A. W.
Pollard had pointed out that the managers of the Globe often
persuaded a publisher to enter a play on the Stationers Register
to protect their own copies from piracy. However, on
7
WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
28 January 1609, another firm of publishers entered on the
Register a book which was subsequently published as "The
Historic of Troylus and Cresseida. As it was acted by the
Kings Majesties servants at the Globe/ Soon afterwards this
title-page was suppressed and another one inserted with no
mention of the Globe performances, thus denying to the Globe
managers any rights in the play. On the back of the new
title-page there also appeared a new preface. In the First
Folio it appears, unpaged, between the Histories and the
Tragedies, with additions and corrections from the 1609
Quarto. It does not appear at all among the contents of the
volume. It is, however, still described as a tragedy, although it
was not given this title in the 1609 Quarto. The problem is
therefore; when was the play written and when was it per
formed? Why was it such an evident cause of embarrassment?
Poel s answer to these questions is given fully in his Shake
speare in the Theatre (pp. 98-116). It may be summarised
as follows. He believed that although the play was inspired
by the bitterness and disillusionment which we find in the later
tragedies, it cannot possibly have been a late composition. Its
loose construction and excessive verbalism, the large number
of rhymed endings, forbid this hypothesis. He maintained
that the whole play, except perhaps the prologue, was written
some time between the autumn of 1598 and the spring of 1599,
and that the displeasing play referred to in the Epilogue to
Henry IV, Part 2 was in fact Troilus and Cressida; that it was
composed in reaction to Chapman s translation of the Iliad,
with its eulogy of the Homeric heroes; and that the
character of Achilles is a reflection of certain incidents in the
life of Essex before he left for Ireland in 1599. Essex, like
Achilles, had been sulking in his tent; one of his friends had
urged him to return to the Queen s service in terms that recall
very closely Ulysses famous remonstrance. "The greatest
subject that ever is, or was, greatest in the prince s favour in
his absence is not missed/ The Elizabethan audience would
not forget, either, that in 1591 Essex had sent to the Governor
of Rouen a challenge almost identical with Hector s challenge
to the Greeks. "Si vous voulez combattre vous meme a cheval
ou a pied, je maintiendrai que la querelle du roi est plus juste que
celle de la ligue, et que ma maitresse est plus belle que la votre."
MACBETH AND TROILUS 1 95
It was inevitable that the political unrest at the turn of the
century should have been reflected on the stage, and Troilus
and Cressida may well have suffered from the decision of the
Privy Council in the summer of 1599 that "no plays be printed
except they be allowed by such as have an authoritie." This
would explain why the play had not been printed after it had
been registered in 1603. The fall of Essex was still too recent
in the public mind. There was no force in the argument that
the wisdom of the play was too precocious for Shakespeare to
have written it as early as 1598, since he had already expressed
the same sentiments in The Rape of Lucrece. Poel believed that
the play might have been acted at the Curtain late in 1598,
or at the Globe in the spring of 1599, or privately at the house
of some nobleman who might have been one of the Essex
faction; that it was not liked; that Shakespeare suffered in
consequence his first and most serious rebuff on the stage.
The play was withdrawn, and it was only in 1603, two years
after Ben Jonson, in The Poetaster, had defended his younger
friend from the earlier attacks, that a revival and publication
of the play was contemplated. But this was not yet possible
and it may never have been given again; since in 1609, the
date of its eventual publication, Shakespeare was getting
ready to retire.
W. J. Lawrence agreed with PoePs early dating of the
play, but another scholarly friend, Dr. A. W. Ward, writing
from King s College, London, while seeing many points in
his theory, "was not yet converted from a traditional opinion
to which the peculiar character of the play lends colour/
Poel would have agreed, however, that Troilus and Cressida was
essentially a tragi-comedy. Cressida is introduced as a
frivolous coquette, but here the emotional experience of the
Dark Lady comes into play and from the moment when
Troilus discovers her with Diomed the tragic note predomin
ates. Poel argued in a letter to Mrs. C. C, Stopes (December
1912) that Shakespeare s Cressida was founded on Chaucer s
who made her a widow, "and one cannot read the part carefully
without realising that Shakespeare also had in his mind a
woman who is not a girl but a woman who has had consider
able experience of the world, and the fact that Pandaras tells
her that Troilus is not yet 23 is a meaningless remark if she
196 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
is young as he is. She is about 28, I take it." The play was
perfectly suited to Elizabethan production; indeed it is hard
to see how it can be done otherwise. The continual passage
from Troy to the Grecian camp demands a spacious, unlocalised
stage, and Poel went far towards achieving this with his two
Houses on the right and left of the proscenium opening.
Troilus and Cressida is reduced to nonsense by scenery; at the
same time, the upper level of the Elizabethan stage is im
peratively called for only in the scene where Gressida watches
the Trojan warriors return from the battlefield. There is no
indication of a balcony in Poel s prompt book; only a centre
opening is suggested. Since "there was nothing in the text
... to justify its production as a picture of Greek or Trojan
life of the Homeric period/ the Greeks were dressed as
Elizabethan soldiers, smoking the tobacco which Raleigh had
just introduced from Virginia, and the Trojans wore masque
costumes of Elizabethan design. (Programme Note.) Their
flamboyance emphasised the sophistication of a court which
thought Helen worth a war, but it would have matched oddly
with the stiff sense of honour which made Hector pursue it
against his better judgment.
Thersites was played as the camp jester, dressed as a clown
and speaking with a Scots accent, and the Prologue appeared
in full armour a satirical device adopted by Marston and
Ben Jonson to ward off the attacks of hostile critics. When the
production was given at Stratford-on-Avon, Thersites was
played by a woman, Mrs. Robertson Scott, who had formerly
been Secretary of the London Shakespeare League. Poel
entrusted her with the part, because "a man would be sure to
over-act." Mrs. Scott had a liking for odd characters and was
an excellent mimic; she had no difficulty in affecting a queru
lous male voice. During one of the performances her husband,
J. W. Robertson Scott, was sitting in the stalls with
Israel Zangwill. "How good that man is," exclaimed Zangwill
"who is playing Thersites!" He was incredulous when Scott
informed him that the man in question was his wife, and was
only convinced when he was taken round and introduced to
her afterwards.
There is nothing in all this, except possibly the pipes and the
male impersonation, that a modern audience would find
MACBETH AND TROILUS IQJ
difficult to accept, but in his treatment of the text Poel was on
much more controversial ground. Troilus and Cressida is a very-
wordy play; there was substance in PoePs criticism that the
dialogue continually held up the drama. No play of Shake
speare s more clearly calls for cutting. But in his cutting of it
Poel, once again, was strangely insensitive. Four examples
will show his defective ear for poetry; his inability, despite all
his preaching, to enter into the lyrical experience of an Eliza
bethan play. In Act III Scene 2 Gressida plights her troth;
If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When water drops have worn the stones of Troy,
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing; yet let memory.
From false to false, among false maids in love,
Upbraid my falsehood!
It is almost incredible that the lines here printed in italics
should have been omitted. In the following scene where
Ulysses goes to Achilles 5 tent the great speech "Time hath, my
lord, a wallet at his back" was unbearably truncated and
quite senselessly transposed. Poel argued that here Shake
speare was letting the Essex motif run away with him and that
neither Ulysses nor Achilles are speaking in character. But
this was to talk like Bernard Shaw. Shakespeare s characters
exist in different dimensions and the experience they transmit
is poetic. It cannot be discussed in terms of psychological
realism, or not in these terms alone. Many years earlier Poel
had even argued that the lines
Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun,
proved that Juliet must have been a girl since no "full-grown
woman" could "talk like that about her young man" ! Poel
did not see that Ulysses has the character of a Chorus; his
speech to Achilles is one of the greatest passages of reasoning
in the whole of dramatic literature, and it was a sacrilege to
WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
maltreat it. Again, in Act IV Scene 4, where Troilus is taking
leave of Cressida, the first nine lines of the speech beginning
"And suddenly; where injury of chance" are cut altogether,
and it continues as follows:
Injurious time now with a robber s haste
Grams his rich thievery up he knows not how:
As many farewells as be stars in heaven,
With distinct breath and consigned kisses to them.
He fumbles up into a loose adieu;
And scants us with a single famished kiss,
Distasted with the salt of broken tears.
This was the climax of perversity. "He fumbles up into a
loose adieu" is of the deep Shakespearian essence; it is not only
one of his most perfect lines, but it is a line that very few other
poets could have written. Poel was quite insensitive to the
melodic line of a speech; he did not see that he was sacrificing
not only a particular jewel, but the proportion and symmetry
of the whole.
Worse, however, was to come. The play ends with Troilus s
frenzied challenge to the Greeks, expressing all the Trojan
despair at the death of Hector.
Hector is gone !
Who shall tell Priam, so, or Hecuba ?
Let him that will a screech-owl aye be called
Go into Troy, and say there Hector s dead :
There is a word will Priam turn to stone,
Make wells and Niobes of the maids and wives,
Gold statues of the youth; and, in a word,
Scare Troy out of itself. But march, away :
Hector is dead; there is no more to say.
Anyone who heard Ion Swinley or Robert Harris deliver
these lines will remember their thrilling effect. But Poel
cut them entirely, with the speech of which they are a part.
Ahd I believe the reason was this. He had a rooted distaste
for invective, and their temper jarred against his pacifism.
In the name of what principle, we may ask, did he censure
Sir Henry Irving for cutting Shakespeare when he himself
took such liberties with the text ?
Troilus and Cressida was first performed at the King s Hall,
Govent Garden on 10 December 1912 and on 12 May 1913
MACBETH AND TROILXJS 1 99
at Stratford-on-Avon. At the first performance Troilus was
played by Esme Percy and at the second by Ion Swinley. Poel
himself played Pandarus. But the production will- always be
remembered for its Cressida. On the fly-leaf of PoeFs prompt
book a name now famous is scribbled in hardly legible pencil :
"Miss Edith Evans." Miss Evans was not yet a professional
actress, and when the performance was over, she wrote to
Poel as follows:
I should have written to you long ago to thank you for
allowing me to play Cressida for you. ... I thank you now
and say everything is dull and uninteresting to me since the
play is over. I can t make ray hats, and although I try hard,
my thoughts seem to wander and I m afraid I shall have to
give them up ... I have not heard anything further from
Mr. George Moore, so I expect he is too busy to write
(29 December 1912).
In fact, George Moore was hunting high and low for Miss
Evans s address, and when he had found it he wrote her several
letters of warm admiration. He had seen the production and
been thrilled by her performance. Besides, the idea of a
milliner who was also an actress must have greatly appealed
to the author of A Mummer s Wife. An unconsidered judgment
might wonder, even now, whether Miss Evans can ever have
been nature s Cressida; but Dame Edith has always had
genius s power of infinite surprise, and we owe it largely to
William Poel that the greatest English comedienne of the
twentieth century finally gave up her hats.
Poel was only modest in claiming in a letter to W. J. Lawrence
that his production had "set people thinking." Mr. Bridges-
Adams, who was later to take over the direction of the New
Shakespeare Company at Stratford, wrote in a transport of
enthusiasm.
I wish I could put into words all I thought about it
especially the love scene which caught in perfection everything
that the Savoy Twelfth Night hungers for, and the Cressida!
I wish I knew how you contrived to teach an amateur to give
such a perfect and such a classic performance: it seemed to
create Cressida once and for all for this generation, I thought.
And I can hardly remember a single paper that had the good
sense to compliment you on what was the masterpiece of the
production (December 1912).
2OO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
This letter raises the fascinating question; what exactly was
it that the Savoy Twelfth Night called out for and failed to
get ? Barker s production has become a legend, like Copeau s
production of the same play at the Vieux CoJombier which
Barker so ardently admired. And Mr. Bridges-Adams himself,
though he may have felt that Barker was reaping where Poel
had sown, would always maintain that Barker s was the
more finished, the more effective, product. Was this just the
difference between the two? The difference between tidiness
and disorder, clarity and chiaroscuro, reason and something
which often looked like madness. Barker s defects were defects
of temperament; and they were the defects of a man who had
too little temperament rather than too much. One remembers
his hygienic d6cor for the fourth act of The Winters Tale all
hurdles and huts in a scene which, if it were going to be painted
at all, called out for Gamille Pissaro. The defects of Poel,
on the other hand, were the aberrations of genius; they reflected
the deep interior divisions of a man who was a rationalist on top
and a mystic underneath. The magnificent thing about Barker
was his mind an,d his power of expressing it on paper. His
monument is the Prefaces, and any producer will always
break his teeth against them in vain. The magnificent thing
about Poel was a vision, which you caught from his eyes as
you passed him in the street, but which he never began to
express on paper and only expressed in flashes on the stage.
In a letter, from which he has kindly allowed me to quote,
Mr. Bridges-Adams suggests the difference between the
master and the disciple.
Actually I think Poel was more nearly akin to Irving his
adversary, than Barker, his disciple, was to him. They were
of two generations, Poel s the sterner. Poel was in his way as
tough as Irving and battered his head against the granite of
the Lyceum, compared to which His Majesty s was as soap-
stone. Poel, like Irving, addressed himself to an audience
preponderantly male; Barker s style appealed strongly to
women, who liked things clean and neat no boot and saddle
about the place. Poel, like Irving, was fond of chiaroscuro;
all the hygienist in Barker hated a sticky light. While Irving
drew pictorial inspiration from Gustave Dore and the French
romantics, Poel drew on the Italians in their prime. But
Barker chose for his Shakespeare the hard, unmodulable tints
of enamel, or sent Rutherston and Wilkinson in search of
MACBETH AND TROILUS 2O1
"new" colour and tailoring of a cut that had never been seen.
Irving loved the macabre, and Poel was on easy terms with
the Totentanz. The Barker of the Prefaces had enough of this
to serve but I am glad the Barker of the Savoy didn t try his
hand at Everyman or Faustus. Both Irving and Poel delighted,
in their different ways, in stage-magic, whether in the form of
a Witches Sabbath or of a bloody Duncan coming up with a
bump through the supper-table. Barker, I believe, had some
brilliantly thought-out Witches at the blue-print stage when
the war cut him short but they might have proved to be the
Witches of a man who didn t hold with Witches (Letter to the
Author; 25 September 1952).
In fact, the critics proved unusually cantankerous over
Troilus and Cressida. Few of them showed any understanding
of the play. The Times complained that it was decadent, and
bristled with disgust at the "moping, degenerate Troilus" and
the "mincing, detestable Cressida." But Mr. S. R. Littlewood,
writing in The Daily Chronicle, paid a proper tribute to the
atmospheric staging.
a sort of dark seance, with all sorts of lighting experiments
against an enormous spread of black and purple draperies;
now Rembrandtesque effects of warm glow and shadow, now
cold streaks of limelight, footfalls deadened upon a carpeted
floor, curtains gliding across the whole thing designed in the
most modern of modernist ways, to work upon the nerves
instead of upon the pure imagination.
In fact, Poel had seen that Troilus and Cressida is a play of
nerves, and his pictorial treatment of it was yet another
example of his ability to desert the letter of his doctrine. This
ability could illuminate as well as disconcert.
Edward Garnett replied to the critics in an article published
in The Contemporary Review; February 1913.
the teeming vitality of the piece, the richness and spontaneity
of the interpretations, the beauty, both noble and artful, of its
stage pictures, its flowing and running ease in action, gesture,
delivery and grouping, ^compensated for any flaws or eccentri
cities of taste. The resourceful genius of the producer was
shown by his matching each of Shakespeare s character
studies with an original manner, air and breeding in the
actor. . . . The infinite variety of the great poet . . . came
springing fresh to life in this production, fluid as the passage
of a brimming river.
7*
2O2 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Garnett went on to defend PoePs and Miss Evans s inter
pretation of Cressida.
Nothing showed the justness and fineness of Mr. PoePs con
ception better than his rendering of the scene (Act IV Scene 4)
of the Lady Cressida s leave-taking of her sorrowful lover.
She is shown us as pinning on her hat, visibly intent on looks
and on her change of fortune, while Troilus is boring her with his
repeated e But yet be true. *Oh, heavens! be true again/
retorts the lady in her impatience to get his entreaties done
with. . . . The exquisite by-play of this woman of quick sense,
and later her sprightly response to the kisses of the Greek lords,
was beautifully natural. . . . Mr. PoePs conception of Gressida
as a fashionable Elizabethan lady, with the languid airs and
affected graces of a Gourt beauty, had the positive merit of
creating, with cunning artistic detail, a real woman. . . . Mr.
Percy s Troilus, a study of absorbed, brooding passion, was
also one of many possible readings.
Garnett ended his defence with a tribute to PoePs own im
personation of Pandarus, "exquisite in its breadth, naturalness
and fineness of touch/
CHAPTER VII
Causes and Controversies
IN the famous cartoon by Max Beerbohm, where Granville-
Barker prescribes a strong dose of municipal pills to cure
the pernicious anaemia of the British Theatre, William Poel
is not shown at the bedside, Craig is there, and Bennett and
Masefield and even George Moore, with averted gaze, com
plaining or boasting that he had once been the lover of the
invalid. But with the exception of Barker the dispassionate
physician who thought too fondly that the theatre could be
cured from Harley Street none of these men had given such
thought to the patient as PoeL Throughout his active lifetime
he kept up a running diagnosis of its disease. But the British
Theatre was in no mind to subject herself to the shock treat
ment or the surgical operation he proposed.
PoePs criticism was implicit in the principles of his own
experiment, and they were formulated in a spate of articles
and letters to the Press. At last, in 1920, he condensed his
argument into a pamphlet, Whafs Wrong with the Stage?
published by George Allen & Unwin. Here he had collected
a great deal of evidence, which had already been published in
his Monthly Letters, the miscellany which he began to edit for
his friends and supporters in July 1915, PoePs case was
essentially this; that "the theatre today is controlled by those
who keep from the public the representation of what is best in
life, or at least of what is most appropriate, solely for considera
tions of personal gain." He asked for popular instead of
private control, and compared the orderly system of manage
ment which he had seen and admired in Germany with the
scrambles and speculations of the London Stock Exchange,
under which any work of superior intelligence was placed at a
mortal disadvantage. He believed that everyone, except the
pure, innocent public, was a partner in the sordid conspiracy;
he had the Fabian hatred of anarchy and the Fabian hatred
of avarice; and at the end of his life he could write as follows
to his friend G. O. Sharman:
203
2O4 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
I am glad to know that you are interested in setting up a
practical fight against the commercial stage. The only way
to do this and produce good results is to cut yourself off entirely
from all borrowed help of any kind which has a theatrical
source. You must not act in its theatres, or borrow its actors
or use its plays, and you must let everyone know that you
exist as a protest to the present state of things. You may not
be able to give good performances. You cannot give good
performances without plenty of money and help. But you
can produce a play in order to tell people that this play ought
to be produced and that the professional stage does not want
it to be produced. It wants the people to live on sawdust.
Above all things, you must not let a press man into your
building. He is the tool of the syndicate and used by them to
suppress every intellectual effort (Undated).
There was, of course, a large grain of truth in PoePs fana
ticism; how large can be measured by comparing his accusa
tions with Mr. Findlater s account of The Unholy Trade
(1952). Popular entertainment for that is what the theatre,
at any level, must always be will inevitably contain a large
element of unholiness, for whatever any Fabian may once
have thought, you cannot change human nature by Acts of
Parliament. What you can do, and what has since been done
by the Arts Council and remission of Entertainment Tax, is
to help quality to survive. And you may describe this as trust
or distrust of democracy, according to your political pre
dilections. In any case there is no reason to doubt that Poel
would have approved of these remedies, as far as they went,
although he would not have thought they went far enough.
His case was, basically, a familiar one, and it was interesting
less for the charges he brought forward than for the reforms
which he proposed.
He first of all considered the question of the Lord Chamber
lain s licence. It was obviously intolerable that a play like
Dear Old Charlie, by C. H. Brookfield, himself an official of the
Lord Chamberlain s Office, should be permitted, while Barker s
Waste was banned. The censor had to consider the state of
public feeling which varied from one generation to another,
the subject of the play, and its treatment by the dramatist
and the stage director. In 1911 W. L. Courtney s version of
Oedipus Rex had been refused a licence. Poel argued that if the
story of Oedipus were a contemporary event, every newspaper
CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 2O5
would be full of it and the legislature would not interfere.
Why should a similar liberty be denied to the theatre? He
welcomed the newly- won permission to perform sacred drama,
but not even Shakespeare, he claimed, had written a play
with a nobler purpose than Shaw s The Sheuring-Up of Blanco
Posnet. "I am sorry for those men who have the easy con
science to sit down and eat their meals in peace while they
deny their fellow-men the opportunity of hearing so wholesome
and inspiring a play as God put it into the heart and brain of
this man to write for us" (Contribution to a symposium of
opinions organised by The Morning Leader; 6 December 1911).
Poel was sceptical of the judgment of any mari who would con
sent, for the sake of three hundred a year, to spend the greater
part of his time reading plays and pantomimes and libretti
which were for the most part valueless in themselves and incom
prehensible apart from their performance. Furthermore, the
dice were weighted against the play which broke new ground
and treated an unconventional theme, in favour of the heavily-
capitalised commercial entertainment. It caused less fuss,
in the end, to try the patience of Granville-Barker or to excite
the wrath of Bernard Shaw than to challenge the vested
interests of the popular stage. Not even the Lord Chamberlain,
Poel thought, would care to offend the City, though he might
have more humane motives for declining to censor a play
which he knew to be pernicious in morals. For it was only
after a theatre had been taken, a company engaged, space for
advertisement bought, and printing put in hand it was only
then that the MS. of the play reached his office. If he refused
to license it, the management would face a heavy loss, and
the actors be thrown out of work. Either, therefore, the Lord
Chamberlain s licence should be abolished altogether, and the
managers take full responsibility for what they put before the
public; or "the Government should forbid any play being
capitalised and put into rehearsal until it is licensed." What
Poel wanted was an alert and sensitive public opinion which
would exert its own censorship on what the financiers imagined
it wanted. A glance at the audiences which flocked to No
Orchids for Miss Blandish and embarrassed the serious intentions
of A Streetcar Named Desire might have cured him of his optimism.
He next attacked the cancer of theatre rents. Already,
2O6 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
in 1915, he could cite the case of a small theatre paying a
basic rent of 80 a week. Then it was bought by a theatrical
firm who raised the rent to 110 for the next incomer. He,
in his turn, could sublet it at 150 a week, and the new
tenant sublet it again at 200. Furthermore every tenant of
a West End theatre had to reserve a certain number of seats
for the intermediate lessees, to be disposed of in any way they
saw fit. In one case these had amounted to seventy. Here the
yearly rental of the theatre was 1 1,500, of which only 7,500
went into the pocket of the owner, the rest being taken by the
sub-tenants. To prevent this abuse Poel would have forbidden
the sub-letting of theatres altogether. He would also have
limited a manager s interests in the acting rights of a play to
the theatres that he personally rented. Poel did not specify
what would happen when the play went on tour or was
performed in repertory. At what point did the manager s
responsibility cease? At what point was it divided? Poel
wanted plays to be capitalised by public subscription, like other
commercial enterprises, not by private individuals. Would
he have made it unlawful for more than one man to hold more
than so many shares? Or would he have been content to
invite public investment and if this was not forthcoming after
a certain time, to allow private subsidy even if this meant
a monopoly of interest or control?
Poel was sensible to the peril of long runs. These meant
that actors were kept too long in the same part and that
theatres were occupied for too long by the same play. He
proposed that when a play had run for a year in a particular
theatre, it should then be compelled to vacate its original
home, and if it were still decided to continue the run, then
new actors should be engaged. He also proposed that no
actor should be given a contract for more, or less, than three
months; he did not say whether the management or the actor,
or both, should have the option of renewal. In November
1915 he had founded the Theatre Reform Association, a
mixed body of professionals and playgoers, to Urge the adoption
of these ideas. In the leaflet announcing the formation of this
society (which was neither long-lived nor efficacious) he had
even proposed that the run of any play should be limited
to one hundred performances at any one theatre. He did not
CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 2O7
see that this limitation would hurt the popularity of the rare
good play as well as of the many bad ones.
Finally he attacked the power of advertising. He believed
that this was responsible for attracting large audiences to
listen to rubbish, and he suggested that the cost of advertising
a play in the newspaper should never exceed five shillings a
day, and that no theatre should have a space for daily adver
tisement of more than five lines. He suggested, further, that
all theatrical news, other than criticisms of performances,
should be paid for by managers and marked e Advt. 5 ; and he
would place a Government tax of one shilling on every free
ticket issued in a theatre, to be paid for by the manager. This
would help, he thought, to cure the abuse by which a manage
ment filled its house with paper in order to foster the illusion
of success, and to secure thereby that the provincial and touring
rights of the play were disposed of. There was evidence to
show that in a single week before the outbreak of the first
World War there had been ten thousand free admissions to
five West End theatres.
Poel did not delude himself that these drastic and Utopian
proposals stood the slightest chance of acceptance by anybody.
Nor did he reckon how far his argument cut both ways. In a
theatre run on these lines the successful play of quality would
be handicapped equally with the vulgar farce. Here I can speak
from some personal experience. My professional career has
been almost monotonously confined to plays that nobody
ever imagined could possibly have a successful run. To take
three examples; Journey s End, a war play without women,
was turned into a popular success overnight by the unanimous
praise accorded it by the critics when it was produced by the
Stage Society; Murder in the Cathedral was enormously helped
by a single sentence from The Times review, of which we took
full advantage "the one great play by a contemporary
dramatist now to be seen in London"; and the success of
This Way to the Tomb, Ronald Duncan s beautiful and exacting
verse drama, which ran for 300 performances, was assured by
Mr. Beverley Baxter s notice in The Evening Standard. Within an
hour of the edition containing this being on sale, our un
frequented Box Office was besieged. In each case a play,
exceptional in its way, and challenging the conventions of
20)8 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
public taste, was decisively helped by those methods of publi
city which Poel condemned.
It must be remembered, however, that Poel formulated his
indictment at a moment when the standards of the English
theatre had touched their nadir. The sufferings and uncer
tainties of the first World War had not stimulated any demand
for entertainment to match the agonies of the hour. The
public taste oscillated between melodrama and frivolity.
The ordinary civilian did not brace himself against disaster
by invoking the aid of music or painting or poetry. The
National Gallery concerts, the Old Vic tours through the
industrial areas, the Henry V film, the sudden and salutary
decentralisation of dramatic art during the second World War
these were developments that Poel could not have foreseen
and they were the reflections of a more reasonable and a more
exalted mood. By 1940 the acquisitive society was in dis
solution and in the theatre, as elsewhere, the War was hastening
its collapse. The Arts Council was soon to be at work on the
sound principle of assistance without interference, and already,
in a few daring minds, the Edinburgh Festival had been born.
Poel saw that the chronic malady of the theatre was due to
the immense, inhuman size of the metropolis where most of
its activity was concentrated. He would gladly have signed
Barker s prescription for municipal pills. The suburban theatres
were only ports of call; until they could be provided with stock
companies and, if posssible, local dramatists until they could
be nourished by local loyalties there would be no improve
ment. This improvement presently came to pass and Poel
lived to see Repertory Theatres flourishing up and down the
country. But in the second decade of the century he looked
in vain for the theatre to bring its anodyne to industrial unrest.
He would cite the People s Theatre in Berlin, with its member
ship of 5,000 workers, as an example of how the protest of the
depressed proletariat could be ennobled not stifled by
communion with the greatest minds. "Lacking the advan
tages of a college education," he argued in the course of two
articles for The Evening Mews (12 and 13 December 1913),
a workman can yet obtain through his theatre a knowledge of
the best minds from Aeschylus to Ibsen. But in this country
no theatre exists which provides classics as well as modern
CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 2OQ
drama acted as repertory. For a sum of 5,000 three com
panies of players could be organised and maintained for
three years to visit the town halls twice a week in some parts
of the populous neighbourhoods of London during eight
months of each year. In every hall once a week there could be
presented a Shakespearian play and a modern play, alter
nately with an English version of a foreign play, modern or
classical.
Poel also put forward the idea of theatres run by committees
of workers and financed out of the workers savings.
When he looked back on his forty years of struggle in
the theatre he could only see a succession of splendid dis
appointments. Barker s pre-war season at the Savoy had
failed to repay its investment, or even to cover its costs; so had
his season in partnership with Vedrenne at the Court a few
years earlier; so had PoePs own gallant and sustained experi
ment. This had cost him 5,000 out of his own pocket. He
was angered, though he was not embittered, by the chaos
of vulgarity that surrounded him. In 1917, the climax of
national misfortune, he could read that in The Tiger Woman
Miss Theda Bara had worn a pair of Chantilly lace stockings
costing 50 and that a popular young actress had secured a
seven years lease of a London theatre at a rental of 13,000
per annum. Where Shakespeare was concerned, he had to
console himself with the news that, at the invitation of Sir
Oswald Stoll, Miss Mary Anderson would emerge from her
retirement among the timber and whitewash of Broadway to
play the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet for a week at the
Coliseum. Even at the Old Vic, Poel complained, the caskets
in a production of The Merchant of Venice looked like cigar-
boxes and were handled with a levity which told the audience
they were made of cardboard. He was forced to conclude
that in "the present condition of the professional stage 3
Shakespeare was sometimes better served by the amateur.
(Monthly Letters^ 1929; pp. 86-89.)
II
If Shakespeare were to be restored to his proper dignity
then it was essential that a norm of good manners should be
established, and the setting up of certain standards of respect
2IO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
would be the work of a National Theatre. Racine and
Molire, Schiller and Lessing, had been protected some
people would say they had been petrified by the state theatres
of France and Germany. It was inevitable that at the time
when Poel was reaching maturity, the question of a national
theatre for Great Britain should have begun to agitate pro
gressive minds; and that this should have been linked to the
idea of a national memorial to Shakespeare.
Poel himself played an important and combative part in
these discussions. In 1900 he proposed to present a petition
to the L.C.C., asking for the grant of a site on which a replica
of the old Globe Playhouse should be erected. This would
perpetuate for posterity the kind of stage for which Shakespeare
had written his plays. The proposal remained in abeyance
during the South African War, but was revived at a meeting
held in the hall of Clifford s Inn on 23 April 1902. The chair
was taken by Frederic Harrison. Two resolutions resulted
from this meeting. The first established the London Shake
speare Commemoration League; the second recommended
that the memorial proposed by Poel should be considered by
the Committee of the League. It soon transpired that the
building restrictions of the L.C.C. would forbid the erection
in central London of the kind of building that Poel had in
mind. In 1903 Mr. Richard Badger presented the League
with a gift of 2,500 towards a fund to be directed to the
erection, not of a theatre but of a statue, if the L.C.C. could
be persuaded to offer a site. The L.C.C. agreed to offer the
site, if sufficient public money were forthcoming. This in
nocuous and purposeless proposal was fathered by a Provisional
Committee, which presently added to it a further scheme
hardly less ridiculous. Eight members of the Council, includ
ing its President, Dr. Furnivall, served on the Committee and
they now proposed the building of a "Shakespeare Temple"
which should "serve the purpose of humane learning much in
the same way as Burlington House has served those of natural
science."
This suggestion aroused considerable protest, and on
27 February 1905 a letter appeared in The Times over the
signatures of Mr. J. M. Barrie, Professor A. C. Bradley, the
Earl of Carlisle, Sir W. S. Gilbert, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr.
CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 211
Maurice Hewlett, the Earl of Lytton, Dr. Gilbert Murray, the
Earl of Onslow, Sir A. W. Pinero, Sir Frederick Pollock,
Mr. A. B. Walkley, and Professor W. Aldis Wright. These
gentlemen tersely pointed out that "any museum which could
be formed in London would be a rubbish heap of trivialities."
On the following day a public meeting was held at the Mansion
House with the Lord Mayor presiding. No reference was made
to the Statue or the Temple, and Bram Stoker, with the
balance sheets of the Lyceum still bitterly in mind, pointed
out that a National Theatre would be both difficult and
expensive to run. On a motion proposed by Dr. Furnivall
and seconded by Sir H. Beerbohm Tree, the following resolu
tion was carried :
"That the meeting approves of the proposal for a Shakespeare
Memorial in London and appoints a General Committee, to
be further added to, for the purpose of organising the move
ment and determining the form of the memorial."
Poel was invited to serve on this Committee and was duly
elected. It comprised, in the end, 250 persons and was
therefore not of a size to favour punctual performance or
precise deliberations. It was the third Committee to have
been set up since Poel made his original proposal in 1900.
Five years had passed.
An Executive Committee was next formed to draw up a
Report and to decide for what exactly the subscriptions of
the public should be asked. It was agreed that a National
Theatre should be built and endowed; but Poel, who was not a
member of the Executive, was insistent on asking a number of
pertinent questions. What part of the subscribers 9 money
would be set apart for the endowment fond ? Would the director
also be the producer; if not, to what extent would he control
the producer? If Shakespeare s plays were acted once a
week, in what way would they be produced ? If other classical
plays were given, by what standard of criticism would they be
chosen? The Committee had been meeting for four years,
and still no answer was forthcoming to these questions when
Poel formulated them on 3 November 1909. Meanwhile the
Organising Secretary was waiting for his subscription, "so
that we may have the assistance of including your name in
the first published list/
212 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Early in 1910 Poel was again asked for his annual sub
scription. He replied this time that he could not send it until
he had seen a balance sheet for the preceding year. He also
asked when there would be another meeting of the General
Committee. To this letter he received no reply, but five
months later he was asked if he would be willing to address
the "drawing-room meetings" then being organised in support
of the scheme. He said that he would gladly do so, if he were
free to criticise the rulings of the Executive where he disagreed
with them, and he again asked when it was proposed to con
vene the General Committee. On 2 June Mr. (later Sir)
Israel Gollancz wrote enjoining him to be patient, and explain
ing that, owing to the death of the King, it had been found
necessary to postpone the meeting of the General Committee
till the autumn; and in December he wrote again to say that
there would probably be a meeting in the following May "as
at present there is very little to put before the general body."
By the middle of June 1911 no meeting of the General Com
mittee had been held since March 1909. In the meantime
Poel did not question that the Executive had been busy, but
he wondered whether it had been wise.
He maintained that instead of concentrating all its resources
on the building of a theatre, which might be out of date
to-morrow, the Executive should give priority to the endow
ment fond. There was no point in having a theatre until the
actors and actresses were ready to perform in it, and until
there were "at least six Repertory Theatres in the provinces
which may serve as the training ground for actors and for the
experiments of dramatists" (The New Age; 22 June 1911). He
thought the Executive would do better to spend the interest
of its capital on helping these local theatres than to erect a
costly and luxurious playhouse, only to find that they had "no
idea strong enough to fill it" (Ibid.) The sum of 80,000 had
been collected in two years, and the cost of the site, building
and equipment of the theatre was estimated at 250,000.
What was to happen, Poel asked (Letter to The Times, 26 June
1911) if the building were begun and there were no endowment ?
He was not opposed to a National Theatre of bricks and mortar;
he only held that this must grow from the soil, like the Comedie
Frangaise which "never obtained a building of its own until
CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 213
it had proved its right to one by its own sturdy growth. " In
1911 there was small evidence that the seed of a flourishing
National Theatre in Britain had even germinated in the
ground.
Poel further criticised the composition of the Executive
Committee. It was a "self-constituted body, as arbitrary in
its proceedings as the Pope, and as narrow in policy."
He believed that its deliberations should be open to the Press
and that it should co-opt a number of actor-managers "in the
hope that they would associate themselves with those parts
and plays of more than ordinary merit which undoubtedly
have a claim to be admitted into the repertory of a National
Theatre, and with which they individually were specially
identified." He had complained in a previous letter to The
Times (14 March 1908) that there was not a single poet or
dramatist on the Committee, and he believed, in general, that
in a matter so closely concerning the theatrical profession, the
profession should be encouraged to take the lead.
It was not only for the performance of Shakespeare that
a National Theatre was necessary. It was necessary for the
contemporary dramatist. There was a growing "inclination
on the part of the public to see the economic, social and
religious conditions of our life discussed on the stage" (Lecture
at the London Institution; 4 February 1909). But the drama
tist who depended on a long run for his play would always be
tempted to make concessions incompatible with the dignity
of his subject. Was it conceivable, Poel asked, that two
such masterpieces as John Bull s Other Island and The Playboy
of the Western World could have reached the stage through the
normal commercial channels? The production had been a
matter of chance; in a National Theatre it would have been
a matter of course.
Poel saw that the central problem in the constitution of a
National Theatre was the problem of defining and separating
the powers to be possessed respectively by the Director and the
Standing Committee.
If the Director is not good at all points in choosing plays,
in casting them, in producing them, both classical and modern
then the Committee cannot deal with the shortcomings
without more freedom than it at present possesses. Let the
214 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Director be Chairman of the Standing Committee; let him
have power to engage the producers, for more than one will
be wanted; and let the producer have sole control over the
cast and the staging of the play for which he is specially en
gaged. Then, when there is a failure, there is also a remedy.
The plan, as now proposed, allows of no elasticity. There is
no choice for the Standing Committee between dismissing its
Director and tolerating his defects for the sake of what he
does well (Letter to The Daily News; 31 March 1909).
Poel maintained that while the Director of the Theatre should
be the only one to recommend appointments or dismissals,
the power of appointment should rest with the Standing
Committee.
It would be tedious to relate (except for purposes of satire)
the subsequent activities of the National Theatre Committee.
Two World Wars have now intervened since Poel was enjoined
to patience by Sir Israel Gollancz; two sites for a building
have been secured and sold, each in close proximity to one of
our national museums. Finally a site on the South Bank was
promised by the L.C.C. in 1946, and it was announced that
the organisation of the Old Vic would run it. The Old Vic
had profited by Sir Laurence Olivier s blaze of genius in a
succession of great parts to get itself accepted as the de facto
National Theatre of Great Britain; but the dissensions which
later confused its policy suggested that the acceptance was
premature. Already, when Robert Atkins ceased to direct
its productions in 1926, Poel discerned the signs of retrogression
and declared himself opposed to the handing over of any
National Theatre funds to the managements either of the Old
Vic or of the Memorial Theatre at Stratford. His views
were finally crystallised in a letter to Allan Wade, 28 March
1927.
I contend that if there is not enough money to build and
endow a N.T., then what money is available, the interest of it,
should be spent on endowing something of a lasting nature,
that is (1) a Training School for elocution, especially for Verse
speaking, and (2) the use and control of a critical audience.
. . . To lay the foundations of a theatre for dramatic art we
first need a school where actors are not being trained for the
commercial stage; then the use of a theatre for occasional
matin6es. Added to this the financing of the Stage Society
and the Phoenix Society that these may continue their per-
CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 215
formances of exceptional plays which attract a cultured and
critical audience. This plan has elasticity because it can be
controlled within the available funds, without pledging a
three years outlay for an uncertain result, and because it
localises the work on one spot so as to ensure that permanency,
as regards methods and principles, which belongs to the
necessary conditions of dramatic art and which does not
depend for its existence on the initiative of one mind or the
caprice of an audience.
Meanwhile his modest, original proposal had lapsed from
the agenda. The Globe Theatre could have been recon
structed at any time before 1914 for the small expenditure of
5,000. The idea of rebuilding it, both on the South Bank
and at Stratford, was revived, without public encouragement
or debate, in connection with the Festival of Britain. It was
squashed by considerations of economy. In London a skylon
was thought to be more important than a stage, and at Strat
ford objections of a purely practical kind proved insuperable.
Here Mr. Quayle and Miss Moisewitch made some amends
by building their stage inside the Memorial Theatre, instead
of in its grounds. The use of this in the production of Shake
speare s historical tetralogy was a brilliant vindication of PoePs
teaching. The same lesson had been illustrated by Mr.
Guthrie in the Assembly Hall at Edinburgh and by Mr.
Watkins in the Speech Room at Harrow, by Mr. Monck at
Norwich and by Mr. Miles in St. John s Wood. But still,
more than half a century after Poel made his proposal, the
Globe Theatre remains a blue-print. Is it too much to hope
that by the time the quater-centenary of Shakespeare s birth
is celebrated in 1964, the blue-print may have been converted
into a building? Somewhere, surely, on the former site of
the South Bank Exhibition there should be room for the
wooden cockpit, from which poet and player may conjure
up for us the kingdoms of infinite space.
Ill
In the summer of 1914 preparations were set on foot to
celebrate the tercentenary of Shakespeare s death, which was
due to fall two years later. Poel had hoped that the lead in
this matter would be taken by the National Theatre Memorial
Committee, but it was taken instead by men of letters. He
2l6 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
did not claim to be a man of letters himself, but he was invited
to the meeting summoned by The British Academy at Burling
ton House on 4 July. It would have been difficult, and even
dangerous, to exclude him. The previous day he had written
to The Daily Chronicle, urging that the following resolution be
considered :
"That Shakespeare s vocation being that of an actor and
a theatrical manager, the British Academy should recognise
the right of the dramatic profession to arrange the programme
of the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration."
It is not clear whether this motion was ever put to the
meeting, but Poel had shown a rather characteristic want of
tact in bringing it forward through the columns of a newspaper.
He spoke lengthily and forcibly at the meeting, and he
regretted, two days later, in a letter to The Times, that "no
anxiety was shown to connect Shakespeare s name with the
profession to which he belonged." It may be suggested that
he rode this particular horse a shade too hard. Fifteen letters
on the subject appeared in the Press under his signature during
the next four weeks, and on 19 July he convened a meeting of
protest at the London Opera House, Kingsway. In the event,
a gala matinee of Julius Caesar was given at Drury Lane on
23 April 1916, during which the King knighted F. R. Benson,
who was playing Caesar, in the Royal Box. Poel believed that
this honour was thoroughly deserved; and a few months later
he advocated a national testimonial to Benson for the work
he had done in bringing the plays of Shakespeare before so
wide a public. In comparing him with Irving, Poel held that
he "had a far larger and healthier grasp of his responsibility
as a manager towards his author. The actors who worked
with him were encouraged and expected to do their utmost
to give individuality and prominence to their parts. Nor
would Benson tolerate the long run of a play which turned
both actors and authors into mere machines." This suggested
tribute was realised through the London Shakespeare League;
8,000 signatures and a substantial sum of money were collected
in little more than twelve months. A remarkable result for
war-time! An album containing the signatures and a cheque
for the money which had been raised were presented to
Benson at the Holborn Restaurant on 21 May 1919.
CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES
For many years Poel was associated with the work of the
London Shakespeare League, which had been founded by
the Rev. Stewart Headlam (an Anglican clergyman of remark
able character) in support of Poel s ideas. His aims included
an annual production of a Shakespeare play in the Elizabethan
manner; the discussion of a current Shakespeare production
or work of Shakespearian criticism; and the publication of
Shakespeare s plays without act or scene divisions. Later, the
League split into two parties; an academic party led by its
successive Presidents Dr. Furnivall, Sir Israel Gollancz and
Sir Edward Braybrook, and a stage party led by Poel, who
wanted the League to protest against extravagant spectacle
and mutilation of the texts. The definite split came at a
meeting at King s College in November 1913; the academic
party was defeated and left the room. Gloomily Headlam and
Poel walked home together. "Well, Poel, what are you going
to do now?" asked Headlam abruptly. "We are going to
make you President," replied Poel. And they did. Headlam
remained President until his death in 1914, when Poel suc
ceeded him (Stewart Headlam, by F. G. Beltany; 1926).
Poel and Headlam were immediately successful in a modest
but moving project. They secured that a Memorial tablet to
Richard Burbage should be placed, in the name of the London
Shakespeare League, on the walls of, St. Leonard s Church,
Shoreditch. This was unveiled by Sir George Alexander on
1 6 March 1914. It was noticed that Arthur Bourchier and
Beerbohm Tree were among the distinguished absentees; and
Otis Skinner, sending his subscription from America, asked
why neither Forbes Robertson nor the Terrys were on the list
(Letter from Hart Conway to William Poel; I May 1914). The
inscription ran as follows:
This stone is placed here to the Glory of God and in
acknowledgment of the work done for the English drama by
the players, musicians, and other men of the theatre, who
are buried within the precincts of this Church. And in par
ticular to the memory of those who are named below :
James Burbage (died 1597), a joiner by trade and head of
Lord Leicester s players, who in 1576 built in Shoreditch the
first English playhouse. Cuthbert Burbage (died 1636), his
son, who in 1599 built in Southwark the famous Globe play
house. Richard Burbage (died 1639), also his son, the great
2l8 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
tragedian, and the first actor to play the parts of Richard III
and Hamlet. William Somers (died 1560), Court Jester to
Henry VIII. Richard Tarleton (died 1588), one of ^ Queen
Elizabeth s players, and the foremost comic actor of his time.
Gabriel Spencer (died 1598), a player at the Rose Theatre.
William Sly (died 1608), and Richard Cowley (died 1619),
players at the Globe Theatre. Erected by subscription in 1 9 1 4.
So, in the windy chill of the afternoon, the ghosts gathered;
so they were decked with their last garlands, and received
from William Poel and his friends the mute applause of piety.
IV
In the years immediately preceding and following the first
World War Poel travelled in Germany and Austria, Holland
and France, to observe theatrical conditions. He found in
Germany no company to compare with the Saxe-Meiningen
troupe which had astonished him with its Julius Caesar many
years before. In Dresden and Berlin the producer, rather
than the actor, was the object of curiosity and applause.
Reinhardt had set the pace, and Poel saw his production of
Schiller s William Tell at the Art Theatre in Berlin. Here the
walls of the theatre disappeared and the spectator was con
fronted on every side by a panorama of mists and mountains.
This virtuosity of scenic illusion effectively prevented either
the poet or the actor from making themselves heard. Most
of the theatres were experimenting with revolving stages,
although curtains and an c apron were sometimes used for
Shakespeare. It is not fanciful to suppose that Poel s own
experiments had had some influence here. He had become
close friends with Herr Savits, Director of the Royal Theatre
at Munich, and it was at Munich that Savits had given his
first Elizabethan production, with King Lear, in 1890. He had
been urged to this by Baron Perfall, Intendant of the Royal
Theatre, who regretted that the more spectacular productions
of Saxe-Meiningen should be over-shadowing the prestige of
Munich. Savits then suggested, by way of complete contrast,
a return to Elizabethan methods. He received permission for
this and adapted his stage for the purpose. Poel saw the
production of Lear, and although he was not entirely satisfied
CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 2ig
with the setting, he thought it the most stimulating performance
of the tragedy he had seen.
He began to correspond with Savits in 1908, and the two
producers met twice; once in 1909 when Savits came over to
England and once at Stuttgart in 1913 when Frau Savits was
dying. On the former occasion Poel took his friend to see
some productions of Shakespeare in London and at Stratford.
After each performance Savits had the same comment: "How
tired your actors voices are!" His own energy was tireless.
Where Beerbohm Tree had produced Hamlet or Julius Caesar
and run it for 200 nights, Savits in the same length of time had
given 12 different plays of Shakespeare, and 125 other plays,
mostly classics. He died in 1915 just when the new perfecting
of mechanical techniques was coming to challenge the simpli
city for which he had fought (Monthly Letters; 1929, pp. 91-94).
Already, in 1911, Poel found the German actors nervous
and restless; they were becoming puppets in the hands of an
omnicompetent regisseur, and their stages were being con
verted into ingenious toys. The Court and municipal theatres
were now having to compete with the private impresario, and
were finding it difficult to maintain their standards. In Vienna
the Burg and Volks theatres still showed a supremacy of style.
The productions were at once spontaneous and controlled;
the actors were natural and inventive. They were especially
skilful in the suggestion of atmosphere. "Whether the environ
ment be the palace, the monastery, or the office, the characters
give the impression of being born and bred in their surround
ing" (Article by Poel in The New Weekly, 25 April 1914). In
1920 he gave a lecture in Cologne, comparing English and
German methods of Shakespearian production. He questioned
whether it was legitimate to use the theatre "as if it existed
merely to imitate the art of the picture book." He also
pointed out that the art of the theatre was always changing
and that the German theatre had reached the highest possible
point of scenic excellence. What would be the next stage of
development? Acting in Germany had stood still for a long
time, and it showed no successor to Herr Barnay, the romantic
and well-graced leader of the Saxe-Meiningen troupe
(Letter to W. Bridges-Adams; 6 October 1920).
Poel was the kindest of men, but controversy was the breath
22O WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
of his being. He could never resist the temptation to intervene
on any question that touched him at all closely. He objected
equally to theatre queues and the raising of Cabinet salaries;
to house-to-house canvassing at election times and the transport
of voters by Parliamentary candidates on polling day; to the
establishment of the Church of England and the publication
of Charlotte Bronte s memoirs; to the absence of Protestant
and Roundhead heroes from the London pageant and the
proposed carrying of the Host through the streets at the
Eucharistic Congress. He was strongly anti-militarist, holding
the curious view that "the soldier is as much a minor as the
child with regard to his responsibilities to his fellow-men"
(Article in The Arbitrator, August 1911). He particularly disliked
the military display at the funeral of King Edward VII,
and held that it would have been more in keeping with
democratic sentiment if General Booth, Mr. John Burns,
Mr. Bernard Shaw, Dr. Clifford, the Rev. R. J. Campbell,
and Father Bernard Vaughan had walked beside the coffin.
Little as he sympathised with the Prussian temperament, he
had too many links with Germany not to hold aloof from the
national hysteria of hate. He preached that the conscientious
objector deserved the respect and not the obloquy of his
fellow-citizens; and he hoped, in common with many others,
that out of the sacrifice of war, a new and better society would
be born. These hopes were largely disappointed, and Poel
grew more and more disgusted with the chicanery of party
politics, believing, in a rather vague way, that the people had
once more been betrayed by their leaders. But he did not
allow the war to distract him from his dramatic business.
When he claimed in a public lecture that the theatre was
more intelligently and more artistically organised in Germany
than it was in England, Sir Squire Bancroft, who was in the
chair, was careful to dissociate himself from this seditious
utterance.
Poel was a man for whom all points are points of principle,
and for whom there are never two sides to any question.
When he was engaged in controversy, he was at war. I have
already referred (pp. 64-66) to the discussion* between Poel,
Dr. Percy Simpson, and others, on the problem of Shakespeare s
punctuation. This was hardly an inflammatory topic; and
CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 221
although Poel had disagreed with some of Dr. Simpson s
conclusions. Dr. Simpson greeted him, when they next met,
with the cordiality natural between two scholars working in
the same field. Poel held his hand for nearly five minutes
and seemed much moved. Dr. Simpson could not understand
the reason for this, and it was only later that he had the
explanation from a mutual friend. "Simpson is a noble fellow/
Poel had said, "I insulted him in The Times Literary Supplement
and he came up to me the other day in the friendliest fashion/
Literary feuds are not fashionable in England and they
receive no encouragement from The Times Literary Supplement;
but Poel would have gone to the stake for the interpretation of
a comma or the significance of a semi-colon.
CHAPTER VIII
The Platform Stage
DURING the early spring of 1913 Poel approached his
friend Edward Garnett with the proposal to stage
certain passages from The Trial of Jeanne dArc. This was
given in October at the Ethical Church, Bayswater, with
Edith Evans, most surprisingly, as the Bishop of Beauvais!
In July of the same year she had taken over the part of Know
ledge in Everyman for performances at the Ethical Church and
Crosby Hall
In January of the following year Poel produced a version
of the Second Quarto Hamlet at the Little Theatre with Esme
Percy as the Prince and Miss Evans as the Queen (27-30
January 1914). Poel believed that the Second Quarto text
had been acted as early as the autumn of 1599, or not later
than the autumn of 1600; and that it had probably been
printed from Shakespeare s original MS. as a protest against
a pirated version of the same play which had been published
in the previous year. The sense of political intrigue and
personal insecurity broods heavily over Elsinore, and this
may well have reflected the atmosphere at Elizabeth s court
when the Queen s health was failing. Poel thought and the
idea seems a trifle far-fetched that the play might appropri
ately have been called The Revolt of Youth, since the young
Hamlet, the young Laertes, and the pretty Ophelia were all
shown as the catspaws of unscrupulous forces. And what did
he mean by the strange suggestion that the hopes of the
younger generation were defeated when Fortinbras ascended
the throne, since the "influence of the new King is entirely
reactionary" ? The last entrance of Fortinbras has no signi
ficance unless it is seen as the assertion of life in the midst of
death, and of purity in the midst of corruption. Fortinbras
is a symbol of political virginity, and when Georges Pitoeff
produced Hamlet in Paris, he had the inspired notion of
dressing him in white.
222
THE PLATFORM STAGE 223
In any case, Poel saw Hamlet as a political rather than a
psychological play, and the intention of the 1914 revival
was to emphasise the character of the King. He therefore
edited the play with this idea in mind, not pretending that
his version was Hamlet as Shakespeare could, or should, have
written it. It was a deliberate choice of certain passages, very
much as a photographer might reproduce certain details of
an old master in order to illustrate, by his selection, the pro
portions and significance of the whole, Poel believed that
only when Claudius s part in the drama had been so stressed
would Hamlet himself be seen in a true perspective. The
ghost therefore did not appear until he entered Gertrude s
bed-chamber; and, among other favourite passages, both
"To be or not to be" and the Gravediggers 3 scene were omitted.
The curtain rose upon an elderly lady pompously enthroned,
and below her at a table Claudius sat among the gallants.
"In a flash," as Mr. S. R. Littlewood described it, the Eliza
bethan context was brought before the spectator s eye. They
were all there Burleigh and Raleigh and Essex and above
them loomed the upholstered Queen. Claudius was presented
as a "pale and neat young man," still in his thirties, and so
the theme of rivalry was introduced prior even to the motive
3f revenge. It is interesting to recall that Poel admired Sir
Barry Jackson s production of Hamlet at the Kingsway in 1924
not because it was in modern dress (though he did not object
to this) but because the play was presented as a tragedy of
revenge. "I would like you now to print your stage version,"
tie wrote to Sir Barry (25 September 1925), "that it may become
the standard one." He was particularly impressed by Frank
Vosper s performance of the King. Vosper suggested the
same kind of cool and calculating despot, the same smiling
md not snarling villain, as Desmond Brannigan had portrayed
a shade less brilliantly, one guesses in 1914.
The production itself was not in the least Elizabethan.
Mr. Littlewood tells us that it was "nervously evolved in front
)f a darkened auditorium, upon a purple-carpeted, soft-trod
itair and scene, with heavy velvet curtains and Gordon Craig
suggestions of vast rectangularities for the Elsinore battlements,
ind the modernist limelight effects against dim backgrounds,
md all the ceremonial circumstances of the latest type of
224 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
Poel seance" (The Daily Chronicle; 28 January 1914). Poel had
the mad Ophelia, who had fled the palace in her imaginary
coach, brought back by the insurrectionary rabble. His
researches had also uncovered the following interesting detail.
He had noticed that in the first Quarto Polonius s advice to
Laertes appeared within inverted commas, and he next
discovered that the lines in question were inspired from a
passage in Greene s romance The Mourning Garment. They
were presumably the stock in trade of any Elizabethan father;
and Poel, who played Polonius, rattled them off as if they
were platitudes he had got by heart. He was just then recover
ing from a long illness, but his fatigue, according to Edward
Garnett, did no injury to his performance. "It brought out
that ancient querulousness" (Letter to W. Poel; 4 February 1914).
He was always perplexed by the problem of "Look here
upon this picture and on this." Either the two portraits
could be shown in miniature; or hanging on the walls (most
unlikely on the Elizabethan stage, in spite of W. J. Lawrence s
assertion to the contrary) ; or in the mind s eye, in which case,
Poel maintained, in an argument I cannot follow, that Hamlet s
description would have been unconvincing to the Queen; or
Hamlet might have waved to a corridor where the pictures
were visible to the Queen but not to himself or to the audience.
This was the reading that Poel perversely preferred. For it is
impossible for the actor speaking the lines "See what a grace
was seated on this brow" not to be looking with a loving
intentness at the image of his father, whether that image is a
miniature or a portrait or a picture in his mind s eye. No man
would talk like that about a portrait hanging in the next room.
On another point of interpretation in the same scene Poel was
more plausible. He believed that Polonius should stagger
through the arras and fall dead at the extreme front of the
stage. In this way a natural grouping was formed and the
movement of Hamlet s thought in the later passages of the
scene was made much less abrupt.
The outbreak of war in August naturally put a curb
upon Poel s activities; it was not until two years later that he
gave a new production. His energies were absorbed, and
his temper exasperated, by the controversies discussed in the
last chapter. In April 1916, however, he produced Ben
)EL as ADONAI
(See page 161}
EVERYMAN
Produced in the Quadrangle
of the Charterhouse, London,
and University College, Oxford,
1901
DEATH (F. W. G. Gilly)
Enihwm Collection
Photographs: Arthur Hands
Mander, Mitchenson Collection
Arthur
EVERYMAN
1901
1. The Summoning of Everyman
2. The Death of Everyman
3. Everyman and his Friends
(L R : Knowledge, Discretion, Beauty, Five Wits,
Strength, Good Deeds, down right of Everyman)
(Set pag
THE PLATFORM STAGE 2 25
Jonson s Poetaster at the Apothecaries Hall. He had become
interested in the play when he was producing Troilus and Ores-
sida, interpreting its central episode as a defence of Shakespeare
against the partisans of Chapman. The principal characters
of the satire, though they were ostensibly Roman, were all
relevant to the London of 1600. Shakespeare could be
identified under the bay leaves of Nigel; Dekker was Demetrius
and Marston Grispinus. Histrio was any bombastic tragedian
of the late Elizabethan stage. The costuming varied from the
Elizabethan to the Caroline, with an occasional classical
reminiscence. Ovid the elder wore a Cavalier s hat and
Van Dyck beard; Ovid the younger had a toga, which seems
to have resembled a Burberry, draped over his doublet and
hose. Tucca s two pages were dressed and made up as blacka
moors, with turban, sash and sandals. If Jonson had been
siding with Shakespeare against Chapman s glorification of
the Homeric heroes, as Poel believed, then the production of
the play was all in tune with Poel s dislike of the tub-thumping
patriotism in vogue. The Poetaster was repeated in the Small
Theatre at the Albert Hall.
II
In the same spring of 1916 Poel received an invitation from
Thomas Wood Stevens, Director of the Drama Department at
the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburg. He
was asked to visit the Institute and work with the students.
He arrived in June and stayed for three weeks. Scenes from
Macbeth and Hamlet were privately rehearsed, and when the
students had grown to some degree accustomed to PoeFs
methods, a public reading of Life s a Dream was given. Poel
liked the Americans he met; he was refreshed by their absence
of prejudice and their receptiveness to new ideas. He spoke
his mind to them with great freedom about the commercial
theatre and the "Tercentenary humbug." On 8 June he gave
the "Commencement" address at the Institute of Technology.
The Director had asked for "a message from Shakespeare,"
but Poel spent the greater part of his lecture in demolishing
Shakespeare the Wisest Man, Shakespeare the Greatest English
man, Shakespeare the Fervent Patriot, and Shakespeare the
delineator of exquisite and refined femininity. He reminded
8
226 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL
his listeners that Shakespeare was primarily a workman, and
that the best tribute one could pay him was to talk about him
rather less and to act him rather more.
As a result of his visit Poel was asked to come back in the
autumn and produce any play he liked. He returned in
October with the costumes of The Poetaster, and produced
Ben Jonson s play for three performances. American students,
though they are docile to ideas, are not amenable to discipline;
and they began to tell gloomy stories about rehearsals from
ten to five without a break for lun 
