The principles of playmaking, and other discussions of the drama

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THE LIBRARY
OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA
RIVERSIDE

'Books by "Brander Matthews

These Many Years, Recollections of a New
Yorker

Biographies

Shakspere as a Playwright
Moliere, His Life and His Works

Essays and Criticisms

The Principles of Playmaking

French Dramatists of the 19th Century

Pen and Ink, Essays on subjects of more

or less importance
Aspects of Fiction, and other Essays
The Historical Novel, and other Essays
Parts of Speech, Essays on English
The Development of the Drama
Inquiries and Opinions
The American of the Future, and other

Essays
Gateways to Literature, and other Essays
On Acting
A Book About the Theater

THE PRINCIPLES OF
PLAYMAKING

JHE PRINCIPLES OF
PLAYMAKING

AND OTHER DISCUSSIONS OF
THE DRAMA

BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS

PROFESSOR OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1919

Copyright. 1919, by
Brander Matthews

Published September, igtg

TO
GUSTAVE LANSON

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I The Principles of Playmaking .

I ! How to IVrite a Play ....

III On Putting Literature into the Drama

IV Three Theorists of the Theater .

V // Shakspere Should Come Back .
VI Shaksperian Stage-Traditions .
VII The Pleasant Land of Scribia .
VIII 'Hamlet' with Hamlet Left Out

IX Situations Wanted

X The Playwright and the Player
XI Irish Plays and Irish Playwrights
XII The Conventions of the Music-Drama
XIII The Simplification of Stage-Scenery
XIV The Vocabulary of the Show-Business
XV Matthew Arnold and the Theater .
XVI Memories of Edwin Booth .

I

31

44
60

93

99

133

147
163
182
196
214
230
251
265
286

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

OF all the theorists of the theater in the nine-
teenth century Francisque Sarcey was the
shrewdest. He had an incomparable intimacy
with the drama and an insatiable desire to dis-
cover the principles of the art of playmaking.
Yet when he once set out to discuss these prin-
ciples he felt obliged to begin by disclaiming any
intention of issuing a series of edicts to be obeyed
to the letter by all intending pla)Avrights. " Most
readers," he declared, "when you speak to them
of a treatise on the art of the theater, or to ex-
press it more simply, as did our fathers, when you
speak to them of the Rules of the Drama, believe
that you have in mind a code of precepts by the
aid of which one is assured, if he writes, of com-
posing a piece without faults, or if he criticizes,
of being able to place his finger precisely on every
defect." Sarcey went on to confess that this be-
lief in the all-sufficiency of a sequence of dramatic
dogmas was peculiarly French and that it was a
long establisht tradition. He cited the case of the
I

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

worthy Abbe d'Aubignac in the seventeenth cen-
tury, who promulgated a code for dramatic liter-
ature (translated into English under the signifi-
cant title of the 'Whole Art of the Stage'), and
who was tempted later to compose a tragedy
"according to his own formula and made it pro-
digiously tiresome," — a misadventure which has
"never cured the public of its belief in the efficacy
of Rules."

Then Sarcey declared that he did not purpose
to formulate any Rules, to promulgate any Laws,
to mint any Maxims or to present any Precepts;
what he proposed to himself was to seek out the
underlying Principles of playmaking by a disin-
terested attempt to ascertain the actual basis of
the drama and by seizing upon the essential con-
ditions of this art, which differentiate it from all
the other arts. And he found this actual basis in
the fact that "the word play carries with it the
idea of an audience. We cannot conceive of a
play without an audience." All the accessories of
performance, scenery and costumes, the stage it-
self and its footlights, these the drama can get
along without, but the audience is indispensable.
"A dramatic work, whatever it may be, is designed
to be witnest by a number of persons united
and forming an audience; that is its very es-
sence; that is one indispensable condition of its
existence. The audience is the necessary and
inevitable condition to which dramatic art must

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

accommodate its means." As it is almost impos-
sible to gather exactly the same audience two or
three times in succession, and as no audience can
be kept interested for more than a few hours at a
sitting, it is a principle of playmaking that the
dramatist must devise a dominating action and
that he must condense his story, dealing only
with its most interesting moments and present-
ing it shorn of all negligible details. And as an
audience is a crowd, composed of all sorts and
conditions of men, the dramatist must deal with
subjects appealing to collective human nature
and he must eschew themes of a more limited
attraction.

Other critics before Sarcey had suggested that
the playwright had always to pay attention to
the desires and to the demands of the playgoers.
In the sixteenth century Castelvetro had had
more than a glimpse of this truth. In the seven-
teenth century Moliere had boldly declared that
the one duty of the dramatist was to please the
public; and Corneille had said the same thing
but characteristically with more caution. In the
eighteenth century, Marmontel, a playwright
himself as well as a theorist of the theater, had
asserted that the first duty of the dramatist was
"to move the spectators, and the second is to
move them only in so far as they are willing to be
moved," which will depend "on the disposition
and the manners of the people to whom appeal is
3

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

made, and on the degree of sensibility they bring
to the theater." And in the nineteenth century,
— and after Sarcey had started his inquiry —
Brunetiere insisted that "a play does not begin
to exist as a play except before the footlights, by
virtue of the collaboration and of the complicity
of the public, without which a play never has been
and never can be anything more than a mere
literary exercise."

Sarcey had made his declaration of faith in
1876; and ten years later, Bronson Howard,
wholly unfamiliar with the French critic's articles,
expounded a doctrine almost identical, in the lec-
ture which he entitled the 'Autobiography of a
Play.' He called attention to the fact that
/Eschylus, Sophocles and Euripides "did not
create the laws of dramatic construction" since
" those laws exist in the passions and sympathies
of the human race. They existed thousands of
years before the Father of the Drama was born, —
waiting, like the other laws of nature to be dis-
covered and utilized by man." The American
playwright declared that the dramatist could
succeed only by obeying these laws, altho "no
man knows much about them. . . . When all
the mysteries of humanity have been solved, the
laws of dramatic construction can be codified
and clearly explained; not until then." It is
true that " a few general principles have been dis-
covered by experiment and discussion"; and
4

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

yet every playwright is under the imperative
necessity of obeying all the principles of the art,
even those he has not discovered. Fortunately,
"the art of obeying them is merely the art of
using your common sense in the study of your own
and other people's emotions."

II

In the epitaph written by Pope we are told that

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, "Let Newton be !" and all was light.

But Newton's Law is only one of Nature's laws;
it declares only one of the principles which control
the visible universe; and no Newton has yet
arisen to declare the principles which control
dramatic construction. These principles however
have been obeyed unwittingly by all the great
dramatists, ancient and modern. The Rules laid
down tentatively or arbitrarily by the theorists of
theater are but groping efforts to grasp the un-
dying principles which we can seize only unsatis-
factorily, which "exist in the passions and sym-
pathies of the human race," and which are never
completely disclosed to anyone, not even if he is
possest of the piercing insight of Aristotle. No
doubt, this is just as true of painting and of sculp-
ture as it is of the drama. The principles of the
pictorial art and of the plastic art have been de-
5

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

clared with certainty and with finaHty by no
critic, not even by Lessing.

The principle of Nature which causes an apple
to fall from a tree is eternal; it existed and did
its work long before Newton was able to formulate
the Law of Gravitation; and it would continue
to exist and to do its work even if some later and
greater Newton should some day be able to prove
that Newton's Law is not just what he asserted
it to be. What is true of Newton's Law in
mechanics is true also of Gresham's Law in finance
and of Grimm's Law in philology, it is no less
true of Brunetiere's Law in the drama. The stal-
wart French critic contended that what differen-
tiates the drama from the epic is the necessity the
play is under of presenting strong-willed creatures
engaged in a tense struggle of clashing volitions;
and the principles of dramatic construction, what-
ever they may be, remain just what they were,
and what they had always been before Brunetiere
made his suggestive and instructive effort to re-
duce one of these principles to a formally stated
Law. In other words, Newton's Law and Gresh-
am's and Grimm's and Brunetiere's are not
strictly speaking "laws" at all; they are only
working hypotheses, which seem to square with
the fact so far as we have been able to ascertain it.

The Rules of the Drama which were formulated
in the classicist code by the supersubtle Italian
critics of the Renascence, Castelvetro, Mintorno
6

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

and the rest, were accepted by the profest critics
of all the other nations, altho the professional
playwrights of England and of Spain refused to
be driven into the triple-barred cage of the Unities
and declined to deprive themselves of the privilege
of commingling the comic with the tragic or to
force themselves to fill out the artificial framework
of five acts. Lessing battered a breach in the
classicist citadel; and it was finally stormed and
sacked by the fiery French romanticists of 1830.
The Rules of the classicists were elaborated by
pedants, who had no intimate acquaintance with
the actual theater, where alone the principles of
dramatic construction can be seen at work. It
is more than probable that Castelvetro and Min-
torno had neither of them ever seen a good play
well acted before any other audience than an in-
vited assembly of dilettants; and it is no won-
der that their Rules were found to lack validity
when put to the test in the theater itself.

Far more valuable are the rough-and-ready
Maxims, the bread-and-butter Precepts, which
the old stager is forever impressing upon the
young playwright. These Precepts and these
Maxims, handed down from generation to genera-
tion, studio-traditions so to speak, are valid, as
far as they go. They are efforts to codify the
practice of contemporary playwrights and to
put into useful words the common sense of these
playwrights and their study of their own emotions
7

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

and of the emotions of their fellows. They may
not be adequate expressions of the eternal prin-
ciples of playmaking, which exist and have
always existed "in the passions and sympathies
of the human race"; but they stand on a solider
foundation, whatever their imcompleteness, than
any of the alleged Rules of the pedantic theorists,
ignorant of the actual theater with its actual
audience.

" Never keep a secret from the audience" ! —
"Never try to fool the audience!" — "Begin in
the thick of the action, and quit when you are
thru!" — "Show every thing that is important
to the plot; don't tell about it merely, but let the
spectators see it for themselves!" — these are all
monitions of indisputable importance; and the
'prentice playwright will do well to get them by
heart and to take them to heart. He will even
find profit in recalling the advice of the wily old
stage-manager to J. R. Planche: "If you want
to make the British public understand what you
are doing, you must tell them that you are going
to do it, — later you must tell them that you are
doing it — finally you must tell them that you
have done it; and then — confound them ! perhaps
they will understand you!" This cynical and
contemptuous saying reveals itself as only a bru-
tal over-statement of the undying principle that
the audience needs ever to know what has hap-
pened so that it may have its interest aroused

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

in what is about to happen. This is the principle
which imposes upon the dramatist the duty of
always being so clear that he cannot be misunder-
stood even by the most inattentive spectator.

The difficulty of perceiving the eternal prin-
ciples of the dramatic art, and the distinction
between these eternal principles and the rule-of-
thumb precepts, will be found clearly exprest in
Weil's 'Etudes sur le Drame Antique,' from
which this suggestive passage may be borrowed:
" Poetry has its laws, natural, necessary, inherent
in the nature of things; it has also its traditional
rules, variable, due to habit, consecrated by in-
heritance. The natural laws scarcely need to be
declared as they can be understood without ef-
fort; but easy to seize they are none the less diffi-
cult to declare. Genius follows them instinc-
tively; ordinary talent may hear them set forth
without being able to conform to them. The
traditional rules may also have a foundation; but
they are for a time only, and they may become a
restraint for the artist, a curb rather than a salu-
tary check; they cannot be devined, but must be
formulated to have the force of law."

Ill

No one of these rule-of-thumb admonitions is
older than that which advises the dramatist to
show everything that is important and to make it
9

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

take place before the eyes of the spectators. We
can find it set forth in the shrewd epistle of
good counsel that Horace wrote to the son of
an old friend when that youth began to manifest
literary ambitions: —

The events, which plays are written to unfold.
Are either shown upon the stage, or told.
Most true, whate'er's transmitted thru the ear
To mind and heart will never come so near.
As what is set before the eyes, and each
Spectator sees, brought full within his reach.
Yet do not drag upon the stage what might
Be much more fitly acted out of sight ;
Much, too, there is which 'twill be always well
To leave the actor's well-graced speech to tell.
Let not Medea kill her boys in view, —

If things like these before my eyes be thrust,
I turn away in sceptical disgust.

There was no living Latin drama when Horace
made these suggestions; and he was proclaiming
the practice of the Greek dramatic poets, when he
warned the youthful playmaker not to let Medea
destroy her children in view of the spectators.
The actors of the Attic drama were raised aloft
on thick-soled boots and they wore towering
masks, and therefore they could not indulge in
any violent gestures; they could neither kill

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

nor be killed without danger of tripping and of
thereby disarranging the mask, a misadventure
which would be unseemly. Yet this reservation,
scarcely more than suggested by Horace, was by
the Italian theorists tightened into a rigorous
restriction of action. In England, for example,
the first five-act tragedy in blank verse is 'Gor-
buduc,' in which little or nothing happens before
the eyes of the spectators, altho the story itself
is filled with violent horrors, all of which are de-
corously and dully narrated by subsidiary char-
acters. And in France the classicists came in
time almost to eschew visible action and to
abound in rhetorical description of things not
seen.

In Victor Hugo's famous preface to his unacted
and unactable 'Cromwell,' an essay which may
be accepted as the Declaration of Independence of
the romanticists, he protested against the dead-
ening results of obedience to this law by the
feebler followers of Voltaire and Racine. "In-
stead of actions we have narratives, instead of
pictures we have descriptions. Solemn person-
ages placed, like the ancient chorus between us and
the drama, come to tell us what is being done in
the temple, in the palace, in the public square,
until we are often tempted to cry out to them,
'Really, — then take us there! It seems to be
amusing; it ought to be interesting to see!' To
which they would no doubt reply, ' It is possible
II

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

that it would amuse and interest you, but that is
not the question: we are the guardians of the
dignity of Melpomene in France !' And there
you are!"

Yet the French classicists might have avoided
getting themselves into this tight box if they had
paid less attention to the later critics, even to
Voltaire himself, and if they had gone back to
Corneille, the father of French tragedy. Corneille
was a born playwright, if ever there was one, with
an instinctive apprehension of the principles of
playmaking. He was a very mitigated classicist;
in fact, he was plainly a classicist against his will
and only in consequence of the strictures of the
French Academy on his earliest masterpiece, the
'Cid/ In his third ' Discourse on Dramatic Art*
Corneille showed a clear understanding of the
principle which Horace had declared. "The poet
is not obliged to put on the stage all the subsidiary
actions which bring about the main action; he
ought to choose those which are most advantage-
ous to be seen, from the beauty of the spectacle
or from the vigor and the vehemence of the pas-
sions which they produce, or from any other ad-
vantage they may have. And he ought to hide
the others off the stage, letting them become
known to the spectator either by a narration or
by some other device of the art."

Here, with intuitive certainty, Corneille laid
his finger on the reasons why certain parts of the
story should be shown in action, — those which are

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

interesting to the audience "from the vigor and
the vehemence of the passions they produce."
Here he was anticipating Robert Louis Steven-
son's assertion that tiie drama is most dramatic
when it sets before the spectators the great pas-
sionate crises of existence, "when duty and in-
cHnation come nobly to the grapple." Here, he
was justifying in advance Brunetiere's Law that'
the stuff out of which drama can be made most
effectively, is the stark assertion of the human
will and the collision of contending desires.
Here, once more, he was on the verge of discover-
ing Sarcey's most significant contribution to the
theory of the theater, — that in any story there
are certain episodes, interviews, moments, which
the spectator must see for himself and which if not
shown will leave the audience dumbly disap-
pointed by their absence. Sarcey called these the
scenes that must be shown, the scenes a /aire; and
Mr. William Archer has called them the Obliga-
tory Scenes.

There is no characteristic of the born play-
wright more obvious than this, — that he makes
an immediate and an unerring choice between the
Obligatory Scenes, which the spectators will
expect to have placed before their eyes, and the
less significant parts of the plot, as to which the
audience is quite willing to be informed "either
by a narrative or by some other device of the
art." In the drama, as in all the other depart-
ments of poetry, the half is often greater than the
13

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

whole. Indeed, since the Middle Ages the drama-
tist has never sought to put on the stage all the
details of his story; he has felt himself forced to
make a choice and to focus the attention of the
audience upon the moments which are really
worth while.

IV

In the first of his ' Discourses on Dramatic Art,'
Corneille had plaintively remarkt, " It is certain
that there are Laws of the drama, since it is an
art; but it is not certain what these laws are."
And even when we have good reason to believe
that we have at last laid hold of an indisputable
principle, we can never be quite assured as to its
proper application. Horace advised the avoid-
ance of the offensively horrible;

Let not Medea kill her boys in view.

For the reasons already suggested the Greeks had
to refrain from the exhibition of any murder,
altho they seem to have had a mechanical device
for bringing into view the gory corpse after the
victim had been slain behind closed doors. The
French, governed by the decorum of the court
of Louis XIV, were content that all scenes of
murderous violence should be left to

The actor's well-graced speech to tell.

But we who speak English do not

Turn away in sceptical disgust
14

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

when Richard and Richmond cross swords or
when Macbeth and Macduff at last stand face to
face to fight to the death. Nor are we revolted
by the murder of Desdemona, painful tho it is
to witness, nor by the suicide of Othello. To
some of us, no doubt, there comes a feeling of
satiety, in the last act of ' Hamlet,' when the stage
is littered with the bodies of character after
character removed from this life by battle, murder
and sudden death; and there are other plays of
Shakspere's at the performance of which some of
us are a little annoyed by the prodigality of as-
sassination. We are well aware that this or that
character is doomed to die; but we would not
object if we were spared from beholding the deep
damnation of his taking off and if his necessary
demise had been made known to us "either by a
narrative or by some other device of the art."

It is because /Eschylus and Shakspere were
born playwrights, masters of all the devices of
the art, that they were each of them enabled to
move us more powerfully by an unseen murder,
by an assassination behind closed doors, than
we could have been moved if we had been forced
to see the fatal stroke descend and the smitten
victim drop. In the 'Agamemnon' we know
that Clytemnestra has gone within, resolved to
slay the husband who had wronged her and whom
she has wronged, and we listen in dread suspense,
not daring to hope that she will abandon her
deadly purpose; we wait until we hear the wail-
15

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

ing outcry of the betrayed hero, taken unawares
and treacherously stricken in his own house.
The only other moment in all drama which sur-
passes this in thick intensity of expectant horror
is that when Macbeth, goaded by the stern pur-
pose of his ambitious wife, takes up the daggers
and creeps into the inner chamber where Duncan,
his king and his guest, lies sleeping the sleep from
which he is never to awaken. It is the outcry of
Agamemnon which tells us that he has been
slain; and Duncan makes no outcry. We know
that he has been slain only when Macbeth comes
out from the room which he entered a brave man
and which he leaves a craven from that time on.
That an unseen murder, which we are made to
feel impending and inevitable, is more effective
dramatically we discover when in the same play
we are witnesses of the later assassination of
Banquo, which discloses itself merely a brutal
and vulgar slaughter, devoid of horror and of
terror.

Jules Lemaitre once wrote a criticism of Maeter-
linck's tragedy of childhood, the ' Death of Tin-
tagiles'; and he began by quoting Horace's

Whate'er's transmitted thru the ear
To mind and heart will never come so near
As what is set before the eyes, and each
Spectator sees, brought full within his reach.

Then the brilliant French critic declared that
"this is true, — and yet it is not true. Yes, often,
16

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

what is set before our eyes, strikes us more forci-
bly than what is merely told; yes, action is ordi-
narily more moving than narrative. But what is
infinitely more pathetic than an action told or
seen, is an action which is divined. Victor Hugo
has said that nothing is more interesting than a
wall behind which something is taking place."
And here Lemaitre and Hugo suggest to us the
explanation why the deaths of Agamemnon and
Duncan, which happened out of our sight behind
a wall, are more moving than if we had seen them
with our own eyes, because in each case we divine
the dire event about to happen beyond our vision.
Lemaitre remarkt that he found this blank wall
in play after play of Maeterlinck's; and he dis-
covered also in Maeterlinck an unfailing power of
forcing us to divine what was taking place behind
the wall. Poor little Tintagiles had fled up the
stairs of the tower till he comes to an iron gate.
His feeble voice calls for his sister, whom we see
trying in vain to open the gate. At last, we
hear the sound of the little body falling on the
far side of the door. "And this is terrible, be-
cause we have seen nothing, not the child shivering
with fright, not her who is not ever named, the
wicked old woman whose hundred year old hands
strangle the child so slowly that he has time to
glue his mouth to the iron bars."

Plainly enough when Horace asserts that what
is heard is less effective than what is seen and
when the old stager bids the novice to "show
17

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

everything important and let the spectators see
it themselves," they have neither of them been
able to do more than draft a rough-and-ready
Rule, which is true and yet not true. They have
not succeeded in laying firm hold on a principle
so certain that it is true in all cases, indisputable
and inexorable.

For example, that is a sound Rule which bids
the playwright not to keep a secret from the audi-
ence. Bronson Howard once told me that the
one of the dullest evenings he ever spent in the
theater was due to the playwright's having hidden
from the spectators the actual facts, thus putting
them upon a false trail. The play was a drama-
tization of Miss Braddon's novel ' Henry Dunbar,'
made by Tom Taylor. A daughter knows that
her father has been wronged by Henry Dunbar
and has been led thereby into a life of crime. She
receives a letter from her father announcing his
intention of seeking Henry Dunbar (who has just
returned to England after a long stay in India),
and of having it out with his old enemy. And
after that she hears nothing more from her father,
who has vanisht from the face of the earth. She
has no doubt that Henry Dunbar has made away
with him; so she sets out in pursuit. But
Henry Dunbar evades her again and again, just
when they are on the point of meeting. At last
she corners him; and in the Henry Dunbar who
i8

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

Stands at bay before her she recognizes her
father — who has killed his enemy and assumed
that enemy's name and that enemy's fortune.
The disclosure is effective, in its way; it procures
a shock of surprise; but the total effect is far less
than it would have been if the spectator had
known the facts from the first. In that case there
would have been no shock of surprize, but there
would have been a steadily increasing intensity
of suspense as the daughter came nearer to the
father whom she loved and whom she was to find
an assassin.

In Lessing's implacable dissection of Vol-
taire's 'Merope,' he admits that "our surprize is
greater if we do not know with certainty that
/^gisthus is /^gisthus before Merope knows it.
But what a poor amusement is this surprize !
And why need the poet surprize us ? He may sur-
prize his characters as much as he likes; and we
shall derive our pleasure therefrom, even if we
have long foreseen what befals them so unex-
pectedly. Nay, our sympathy will be the more
vivid and the more vigorous, the longer and more
certainly we have foreseen it. . . . Let the
characters knot the complication without knowing
it; let it be impenetrable for them; let it bring
them without their foreknowledge nearer and
nearer to the untying. If the characters feel
emotion, the spectators will yield to the same
feelings."

When Lessing wrote this he was a bold man,
19

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

for he was confessing a heresy. He records his
dissent from the Rule laid down by a majority
of those who had written on the dramatic art and
who insisted that the spectators should be kept
guessing at the final solution, never permitted to
foresee it. Even so practical a playwright as
Lope de Vega held that it was wise to conceal
the way in which the plot was to be wound up,
so that the audience might not be tempted to
get up and go out as soon as the end of the com-
plication became visible. Voltaire, also a prac-
tical playwright, thought that Sophocles should
have kept the spectators of his 'CEdipus* in an
ignorance of the secret as total as that which
envelopt the characters. It was only toward
the middle of the nineteenth century that
Sophocles began to be praised for the very
quality for which he had been blamed in the
eighteenth.

What was flagrant heresy in the eighteenth cen-
tury is accepted as establisht dogma in the
twentieth century. Yet even today the Rule
that a secret must not be kept from the audience
is only a rule-of-thumb. It is not one of the
permanent principles of playmaking; and a
dextrous dramatist may sometimes see his profit
in breaking the Rule, if by so doing he can
achieve what appears to him an intensification of
emotional interest. Paul Hervieu called one of
his pieces the 'Enigma'; and he concealed from

20

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

the spectators almost up to the falHng of the final
curtain which of two sisters had been guilty of
admitting a detected lover by night; but it may
be doubted whether the result of his experiment
proved it to be justified. Perhaps he would have
heightened his appeal if we had known from the
beginning which was the guilty wife. " By
means of secrecy," said Lessing, "a poet effects
a short surprize, but in what an enduring dis-
quietude he could have maintained us if he had
made no secret about it I Whoever is struck
down in a moment, I can pity only for a moment.
But how if I expect the blow ? — How if I can see
the storm brewing and threatening for some
time over the head of a character?"

None the less are there occasions where the Rule
has to be broken, in the interest of the play as a
whole, — that is to say, in the interest of the
spectators themselves. In 'Henry Dunbar' the
Rule not to keep a secret from the spectators was
violated to the disadvantage of the play. But
in Bronson Howard's own piece, 'Young Mrs.
Winthrop,' it was violated to the advantage of
the play, — and it was deliberately violated, so
its author told me, because it conflicted with one
of the eternal principles of playmaking. Young
Mrs. Winthrop is jealous because her husband is
frequently visiting a woman whose antecedents
are doubtful. This brings about a dispute so
violent that Mrs. Winthrop leaves her hus-

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

band's house. In the final act, she learns that
her suspicions were unfounded, since her hus-
band's visits to her supposed rival were due to a
highly honorable motive. But the author had
kept this motive a secret from the spectators and
had allowed them to believe that the jealousy of
the wife was probably justified. When I askt
him why he had done this, he explained that he
needed to have his audience sympathize with his
heroine when she left her husband and that
the spectators must see things thru her eyes and
believe the worst. Having only the information
that the wife had, they would feel that her de-
parture from her husband's home was fully war-
ranted. If they had known that the husband
was innocent of any wrongdoing they would have
credited their own knowledge to the wife and
they would have held her to be unreasonable if
she broke with him for a suspicion which they had
seen to be unfounded. And in this case, the
spectators did not resent having been kept in the
dark, for they were not formally told that Win-
throp was guilty, — they were merely left in doubt;
and therefore they were ready enough to be
pleased when he was relieved from suspicion and
reunited to his wife.

VI

That it is unsafe to pin faith to the Rules
which happen to be current in our own time and to

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

feel confident that they contain the law and the
gospel was made manifest in the first half of
the second decade of the twentieth century,
when there happened to be produced in New York
half-a-dozen plays characterized by an honest
effort to find new methods of expression and to
broaden the scope of theatrical presentation. In
*A Poor Little Rich Girl' the spectators were
made to see scenes and characters that existed
only in the ignorant imaginings of a child in the
grip of fever. In 'Seven Keys to Baldpate' the
clever author played a characteristically clever
trick upon the audience itself, most unexpectedly
taking them into his workshop. In 'On Trial'
we were invited to behold in three successive
acts, events which took place long before the be-
ginning of the play itself, and the event thus
shown in the second act was earlier than that
shown in the first act and the event shown in the
third act was earlier than that shown in the
second, — thus taking us further and further
backward toward the beginning of the story. In
the 'Phantom Rival' we had presented before us
the fond day-dreams of a fanciful woman, — day-
dreams made actually visible to us, forced to take
on a concrete existence, and peopled by four
contradictory possibilities of a single character,
creations called into life only by the brooding
imagination of the heroine. And in the * Big
Idea' we were invited to witness the successive
23

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

Steps of the invention, the construction, and the
writing of a play, which is to be built on the
dangerous predicament in which the chief char-
acter finds himself in the piece which is actually
being performed; and this big idea is carried so
far that at last we discover that the play which has
been put together before our eyes is the very
play which is being performed before our eyes.

In all these dramas, serious, comic and serio-
comic, four of them American in authorship and
one of them freely Americanized from a Hungarian
original, there was a deliberate intention to
achieve novelty of form. They were all charac-
terized by ingenuity of invention; and at least
two of them can be credited, more or less, with the
loftier quality of imagination. They might be
termed new departures in the drama, due to the
desire of their several authors to desert the beaten
path and to explore fresh fields. They were all
of them more or less successful on the stage; that
is to say, the authors were able to carry the public
with them along these hitherto untrodden trails.
Indeed, it may as well be admitted that a consider-
able share of the popularity of these pieces was
directly due to the attraction exerted upon the
spectator by the freshness of treatment which is
their most salient quality. These plays seemed
to not a few among those who discuss the drama
to prove that the wisest of men was less wise than
was his wont when he insisted that there was
24

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

nothing new under the sun. And the favorable
reception of this series of daring experiments in
stagecraft was the more surprizing since the
theater itself has always been considered ultra-
conservative, clinging desperately to ancient
landmarks, and struggling blindly against all
efforts to overturn its traditions and to over-
throw its customs.

There is no occasion for surprize, therefore,
that we should have been told vehemently and
vociferously that all the traditions of the theater
were to be abandoned, that all the customs of the
stage were to be renounced, that all the Rules of
the Drama were hereafter to be broken, that all the
Laws hitherto held binding upon the playwright
were to be repealed, and that all the principles
of playmaking were suddenly reduced to chaotic
confusion. To many ardent aspirants for drama-
turgic victory it seemed almost as if a bomb had
been suddenly exploded in the temple of the
drama, shattering the tables of the law and bring-
ing down the walls in ruin, A skilful and success-
ful American playwright was quoted as asserting
that "the day is not far distant when there will
be no stage conventions, so far as the audience is
concerned." A newspaper reviewer of current
plays felt emboldened to declare that the profes-
sor of dramatic literature in one of our leading
universities must be greatly grieved by the success
of one of the five plays already cited — a play writ-
25

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

ten by one of the professor's former students —
because it violated all the doctrines about the
drama, which the professor had been discussing
year after year.

Now, if this happened to be true, and if the
public should accept a play which violated the
theories to which this professor of dramatic
literature had drawn the attention of his classes,
then this would go far toward disestablishing the
validity of these theories and it would put the pro-
fessor in a situation so awkward as to demand
explanation, if not apology to all his former pu-
pils. But fortunately for this professor these
assertions as to the complete upsetting of the
doctrines hitherto expounded by those who have
sought to penetrate into the secrets of stagecraft,
were not well founded. They were the result of
a failure to perceive the wide distinction between
the Rules and the Laws which had won acceptance
for the moment and the eternal principles of play-
making, which are unchanging because they are
essential to the existence of the art.

VII

Since the five plays in which there were nov-
elties of construction succeeded in pleasing the
playgoers, it is safe to say that no one of them
violated any of the eternal principles of playmak-
ing. But did any one of them really contradict
26

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

any of the generally accepted Precepts of the
contemporary theater?

It is difficult to see any reason why anybody
should suppose that either the ' Poor Little Rich
Girl/ or the 'Phantom Rival,' broke any of the
Rules, unexpected as might be their calling upon
the spectator to behold things that exist only
in the imagination of one of the characters —
things that did not happen actually but which
that character merely believed to be happening.
The authors of these two plays were skilful and
careful; they made elaborate preparation; they
led us forward step by step; they told us what
they were going to do, what they were doing, and
what they had done. They were so clear and so
straightforward that they compel us to follow
them. What they askt us to accept might be
very unusual and in itself not easy to accept;
but they so presented it that it was not difficult
for us to accept. After all, the sole novelty
lay in their asking us to witness what happened
in a day-dream, just as a host of earlier play-
wrights had invited the playgoer of the past to
behold what happened in a dream. The 'Victor-
ine' of four score years ago was not the earliest
of dream-plays and the ' Romance' of more recent
years will not be the last. In the 'Phantom
Rival' and the 'Poor Little Rich Girl' the actual
novelty was not as new as it may have appeared
to the younger generation of playgoers; and the
27

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

authors had not needed to break any of the tra-
ditional Precepts of the theater.

The authors of 'Seven Keys to Baldpate' and
of the ' Big Idea' were equally mindful of the
principles of the art, and they did not try to
"fool the audience." In the 'Big Idea/ which
was the more daring of the two amusing dramas,
the authors took the spectator into their con-
fidence from the beginning. We were made to
see the hero and the heroine start to write the very
play in which they are characters. The device
was dangerous, and difficult of acceptance; but
the successive scenes were so clear and they were
so logically related, each growing out of its pre-
decessor, naturally and irresistibly, that we could
not help surrendering ourselves to the delight of
watching the authors win their wager. Here
again, we were told what they were going to do,
what they were doing, and what they had done.
Even the appeal of the heroine in the final act
directly and personally to the assembled audience
asking it to like the play which had been put
together before its eyes and in which she was a
character — even this was not the flagrant novelty
that it may have seemed to some. Its most im-
mediate predecessor is to be found in 'Peter
Pan,' but it is a device for evoking laughter,
which Moliere employed in the 'Miser' and
Aristophanes in the ' Frogs.'

There still remains to be considered 'On Trial,'
28

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

which was hailed as the most subversive of all
these plays, since "it told its story backward."
If On Trial' had told its story backward, it would
have broken the Rule which prescribes that a
playwright must devise an action with a beginning,
a middle and an end, and that he must present
these several parts in strict sequence. But, as a
matter of fact, the author of 'On Trial' did not
tell its story backward; he told it straight forward,
altho he took the liberty of showing us in succes-
sive acts fragments of his story which had taken
place before the moment when he had chosen to
begin it. His play set before us a man on trial
for his life. The scene of every act was laid
in the court-room, with the judge on the bench,
the prisoner at the bar, the jury in the box and
the opposing counsel. In the first act, the widow
of the murdered man was called to the witness
stand and she began to give her testimony,
when suddenly there was a dark change and we
were made to see in action the episode as to
which she was about to testify; and when we had
seen this, then there was another dark change,
after which we found her on the stand finishing
her testimony. In the second act, the little
daughter of the prisoner was called as a witness;
and again we were made spectators of the events
as to which she was supposed to be testifying.
In the third act when the wife of the prisoner was
summoned to the stand, we were once more in-
29

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

vited to be spectators of the thing itself instead
of being merely listeners to her testimony. If
these three witnesses had been allowed to give
their evidence in their own words, no one would
have suggested that the story was being told
backward, because every playgoer knows that in
every play there are events which happened long
before the play began and which can be made
known to the audience only by a telling after the
event has happened. The author of 'On Trial'
did not break any of the Rules; he was merely
inventive enough and ingenious enough to devise
a new way of making visible to us in the present
what had taken place in the past. The novelty
was in the method of presentation and not in any
departure from the Precepts generally accepted
in the theater.

(1914-16.)

30

II

HOW TO WRITE A PLAY

THE title of this paper may seem presumptu-
ous. Who am I that I should presume to
proffer instruction in the art of the playwright, as
difficult as it is dangerous? If this hurrying
twentieth century of ours were only the leisurely
eighteenth century, when everybody had all the
time there was, a fit name for this paper might
be: "A few tentative Suggestions for those who
propose to commence Playwrights, garnered from
the Experience of an old Playgoer." That may
be a more accurate, as it is a more cautious,
description of the intent of the present paper;
but it is a little too long drawn to serve as a
title for an article on a topic of immediate inter-
est to an immense number of ambitious aspirants.
It has been calculated by an imaginative statis-
tician that there are now in these United States
nearly one hundred thousand persons — men,
women and children — who are eager to write
plays, believing that the stage door is the easiest
entrance to the Temple of Fortune and to the
31

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

Hall of Fame. Whether or not this estimate is
scientifically accurate may not be disclosed even
when we have the figures of the new census.
Quite possibly it is not at all inflated, since it al-
lows only one apprentice playmaker to every
thousand of the population. At all events, there
are so many of them that advertisements have ap-
peared of late addressed especially to those igno-
rant of dramatic art and yet ambitious to acquire
it. " Playwriting Taught by Mail" is an alluring
temptation which is probably charming subscrip-
tions from the pockets of many an eager youth.

Whether or not playwriting can really be
taught by mail is a question that need not here
be discust. What is not a question is that it
can be taught, even if these advertisers may
not be capable of teaching it. Playwriting is an
art and every art must be learnt; and whatever
must be learned can be taught — ^whether it is the
art of painting a portrait, of riming a lyric, of
making a speech or of writing a play. It is true
that the poet is born, not made; but it is also
true that after he is born he has to be made.
What he has to say may be the gift of God, but
how he is to say it depends upon the training of the
bard himself. In every artist we can perceive a
man with both a message and a method. His
message may be innate in him, but his method
he has to acquire from others. The painters
have recognized this; and they promptly go to
32

HOW TO WRITE A PLAY

school to the older practitioners of the craft that
they may imbibe its secrets and be shown how to
set a palette and how to bring out on the canvas
before them the things they see in the world
around them. Every painter is the pupil of one
or more painters of an earlier generation; and he
is proud of it as a proof that he has served his
apprenticeship and learnt his trade properly.

Whatever has to be learnt can be taught; but
it can be taught best by those who have practised
it themselves. The instructors in the art schools
are painters, not art critics or historians of art.
And, if playwriting is to be taught with the same
success that painting has been taught, this can
be accomplisht only by the older playwrights
instructing the younger and laying bare before
them the art and mystery of the drama. If a
school of playwriting were to be opened the
proper instructors would be Mr. Gillette and Mr.
Augustus Thomas in the United States, and
Sir Arthur Pinero and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones
in Great Britain. In France, more than half-a-
century ago, there was for a while something very
like a school of playwriting kept by a master play-
wright, Scribe — that is to say. Scribe liked to
collaborate and he was hospitable to the young
men who brought him suggestions for plays.
He showed these young men how their sugges-
tions could be turned to profit on the stage.
And in this collaboration the young men could
33

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

not fail to get an insight into Scribe's method
and to discover some of the reasons why Scribe's
plays were incessantly reappearing in all the
theaters of Europe.

And yet a mere critic, a mere historian of the
drama, may on occasion be able to proffer ad-
vice, not so much to the point, perhaps, as would
be that of the successful playwright, but not with-
out a certain value of its own, however inferior.
When anyone has been intensely interested in the
drama for more than forty years, and when he
has been an assiduous playgoer in many cities,
and when he has taken advantage of every op-
portunity to discuss the problems of playmaking
with the many dramatists he has had the good
fortune to count among his friends — it may not
be unreasonable for him to assume that it is in
his power to call attention to a few of the more
obvious points which the ambitious young dram-
atic author must ever bear in mind. He may
not be justified in advertising "Playwriting
Taught by Mail," but he ought to be able to make
a few elementary suggestions.

The first of these obvious considerations for
the benefit of the 'prentice playwright is that he
ought to devote himself to playgoing. Nearly
forty years ago, when I hoped that 1 might be-
come a professional playwright, 1 introduced
myself to the late Eugene Nus, the author of the
French originals of Charles Reade's ' Hard Cash/
34

HOW TO WRITE A PLAY

Boucicault's 'Streets of New York/ and Tom
Taylor's 'Ticket-of-Leave Man/ Tho the play
plotted as a result of this introduction was
never actually written, one remark of the veteran
French playmaker may be recalled: "Young
man, if you want to write for the theater you must
go to the theater." Every writer of plays must
be intimately familiar with the theater of his own
time and his own country, since that is the only
theater where he can hope to have his plays pro-
duced. He must understand its organization and
its mechanism. He must study earnestly not only
the theater itself but the actors — and, above all,
the audiences.

He must go to see the successful plays of the
season again and again, in the endeavor to dis-
cover the causes of their success and the means
whereby this success has been attained. The
first time he is a spectator at the performance of
a play he is likely to be merely a spectator — carried
away like the rest of the audience by the story
itself, by the interest of the plot, by the excite-
ment of the successive episodes. When he gets
home he will do well to analize his impressions
and to ask himself how it was that these impres-
sions were produced. Then he will do well to go
again to verify this analysis and to clear up the
points that may have been left in doubt. At
this second visit he ought to be able to perceive a
little more clearly the method of the author —
35

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

the reasons, for example, why a certain interview
is in the fourth act and not in the third; and the
reasons why certain parts of the story are shown in
action and certain other parts are merely nar-
rated or otherwise explained to the audience.
He ought to note especially how the dramatist
has conveyed to the spectators the information
about what has happened before the play began,
not necessary to be shown in action and yet ab-
solutely necessary if the actual story is to be fol-
lowed with understanding.

Then he may go a third time — and a fourth —
until he has mastered the construction of the play;
whereupon he may turn his attention from the
play to the audience, marking when the spectators
are fidgety and when they are swept along by the
resistless rush of the action. When he perceives
that some of the audience are looking at their pro-
grams, or whispering to their neighbors, he had
better look again at the play to discover, if he can,
what made the interest relax at that moment.

Nor should he neglect the failures and devote
himself wholly to the successes. Many an inter-
esting lesson can be derived from a failure. The
student can at least try to ascertain why it failed.
He can let it teach him what to avoid. He can
watch the behavior of the scant audience; and this
will sometimes be as illuminating as the conduct
of the spectators at a successful play. Every
dramatist, the mightiest as well as the less signi-
36

HOW TO WRITE A PLAY

ficant — Shakspere and Moliere, no less than Sar-
dou and Belasco — has always kept his eye on his
audience. If he does not desire above all things
to interest and to move and to hold the audience,
then he has no business with playwriting.

It is his first duty to find out what the play-
goers of his own time and his own country enjoy,
for that is what he will have to give them in his
plays — even if he may be able also to give them
something more. When he has learned this art
he may express himself and deliver his own mes-
sage— if he has one; but he has always to keep his
audiences in mind and to remember that they
have to be interested in the play, or his message
will never reach its destination. He has to feel
with his spectators, so that he may make them
feel with him. This does not mean any "writing
down to the vulgar mob"; but it does mean
"writing broad for the people as a whole."

'Hamlet,' for example, is Shakspere's master-
piece, rich in poetry and lofty in philosophy; but
it is also a very amusing play for the gallery-boy,
who cares little either for poetry or for philosophy,
but who is delighted by the ghost, by the-play
within-the-play and by the duel with the poisoned
swords. It has been asserted that if 'Hamlet'
should be performed in a deaf-and-dumb asylum
the inmates would be able to follow the story with
jnterest by means of their eyes alone. A wise
critic once declared that the skeleton of a good

37

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

play is a pantomime. 'Tartuffe' for example is
Moliere's masterpiece, a marvelously rich por-
trayal of human nature; and it has a panto-
mime for its backbone. When the Comedie-
Fran^aise went to London, forty years ago, Sar-
cey picked out 'Tartuffe' as the one play of all
the repertory that produced the most certain effect
upon the English playgoers, since its story was
so clear that it could be followed even by those
ignorant of French.

If the successful play of the hour happens to be
publisht the aspirant will do well to get it and to
compare the impression he had in the theater
itself with that made by the printed page in the
library. This will help to show him how much
of the effect of a play is due to the performance —
to the acting, to the looks and gestures, to the
pauses and to the sense of suspense. And it will
probably startle him to discover how little of the
effect is due to external literary merit, to mere
writing, to rhetoric; and how much of this effect
is the result of the story itself, of the building up
of the situations so that one seems to arise nat-
urally out of another; and of the bold, sharp con-
trast of character with character. "Fine writing"
is nowadays at a discount; and in the theater
action is all important. This is no new dis-
covery, for Aristotle said it many centuries ago,
insisting that story and construction were ab-
solutely necessary, whereas poetry was only a
38

HOW TO WRITE A PLAY

decoration or an accompaniment. A good play
must have literary merit, of course; but it must
be drama before it is literature. It has to suc-
ceed on the stage or it will never be read.

The ambitious aspirant will find advantage,
also, in analizing contemporary publisht plays
that he has not seen acted and in trying to guess
at their effectiveness in the theater. Sardou once
told a reporter how he had studied Scribe's pieces
in the endeavor to spy out the secrets of stage-
craft. " I used to take a three-act play that I
did not know anything about. 1 read only the
first act; and, after this exposition of the story
and of the characters, 1 closed the book and then
I tried to build up for myself the rest of the play
that Scribe had erected on that foundation.
And I was satisfied with myself only when I had,
by a sheer exercise of logic, succeeded in con-
structing a plot pretty close to that which I
afterward found in the second and third acts."
Scribe is now a little old-fashioned; but today a
novice would find it very suggestive if he took
Pinero's 'Mid-Channel,' Jones' 'Liars,' or Clyde
Fitch's 'Girl with the Green Eyes,' and, after
studying the first act very carefully, tried to out-
line the play that is the necessary conclusion.

To say this is to emphasize the fact that the

art of the dramatist is very like the art of the

architect. A plot has to be built up just as a

house is built — story after story; and no edifice

39

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

has any chance of standing unless it has a broad
foundation and a soHd frame. What the char-
acters say is less important than what they do,
and still less important than what they are. After
the steel frame is once erected there will be time
enough to consider the decoration and to design
the stained-glass windows. The story, the plot,
the theme — these are the essential things. Vol-
taire says somewhere that the success of a play
depends on the choice of its subject. And whether
a subject is good or not depends on the audience.
Subjects that were excellent for Sophocles and for
Shakspere are no longer satisfactory to modern
spectators, who have a very different outlook on
the world from that of the Athenians or the
Elizabethans. The spectator today wants to
see himself on the stage — himself and his fellows —
the kind of folks he knows by personal experience.
And it is only by choosing a subject of this sort
that the novice can give his work what the late
Augustin Daly used to call "contemporaneous
human interest."

A play needs to have a theme; this theme
must be interpreted by a story; and the story
must be stiffened into a plot. The plot may be
simple and straightforward, free from complica-
tions and complexities; but it must deal with a
struggle. It must show the clash of contending
desires. This marks the sharp difference between
the novel and the play. Alone in the library'
40

HOW TO WRITE A PLAY

we are often glad to read a novel which sets be-
fore us merely a group of characters, revealing
themselves by word of mouth; but in the theater,
when we are assembled together, we are bored if
we are not shown a definite action, a steadily
moving story in which we can follow the strife^
of opposing forces. A novel may delight us by
merely exhibiting human beings; but a play is
not likely to please us unless we can sympathize
with the effort of one of those human beings to
attain a definite purpose. On the stage we want
to see somebody wanting something and either
getting it or not getting it. We want to see a
fight, fought to the finish.

When Mr. Gillette set out to put Sherlock
Holmes into a play he instinctively seized upon
the shadowy figure of Professor Moriarty, the
astute leader of a band of criminals — a figure
only glimpst vaguely in a far corner of one of
the least known of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
stories. Mr. Gillette put this figure in the fore-
front of the play he was composing, and set him
over against the incomparable detective, thus
providing Sherlock Holmes with a foeman worthy
of his steel. The resulting play was a duel of
wits between the wrong embodied in Moriarty
and the right personified by Sherlock Holmes.
And a very large part of the success of the ' Lion
and the Mouse' was due to the ease with which
the audience was able to follow the bitter conten-
41

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

tion between the heroine and the plutocrat, each
of them knowing his own mind and each of them
feeUng justified in his own conscience. It may be
noted, also, that the 'Taming of the Shrew' is one
of the least intellectual of Shakspere's plays, it is
primarily a farce, with an abundance of violent
fun; but it keeps the stage after three centuries
because its story is vigorously dramatic, since it
sets before us an unmistakable contention of op-
posing forces, resulting in the conquest of a
woman's will by a man's.

One piece of advice to the novice can properly
be offered by a student of stage history. Begin
modestly. Begin by imitating the successful
playwrights of your own time and your own coun-
try. Be satisfied, at first, if you can succeed in
doing only what these predecessors have done —
even if you believe you have it in you to do better.
Don't try to be precocious. As Margaret Fuller
said: "For precocity some great price is always
demanded sooner or later in life." The great
dramatists have never exhibited any undue pre-
cocity; they have always begun modestly by
imitating. Shakspere's earliest pieces are merely
his juvenile attempts to write the kind of play
that Marlowe and Kyd, Lyly and Greene had
made popular. Moliere's earliest plays are imita-
tions of the improvised comedies of the Italian
strollers. In these early efforts of Shakspere and
Moliere it is scarcely possible to perceive even
42

HOW TO WRITE A PLAY

the promise of the power to which they ultimately
attained. Henry Arthur Jones began by writing
comediettas and melodramas; and Sir Arthur
Pinero made an equally unambitious beginning
with curtain-raisers.

The really important dramatist is, of course,
a man who has something to say and who has
learnt how to say it. In his immaturity he is
not likely to have much to say of any great sig-
nificance; and he can, therefore, concentrate his
attention on learning how to say what little he has
to utter. An anecdote is told of Courbet, the
French painter, which brings out this point.
A very ambitious young fellow came to him for
advice, enlarging upon the lofty projects he had
in mind. Courbet listened and then answered:
"Go home and paint a portrait of your father."
The young man protested at this humble task,
proclaiming his desire to paint great historical
scenes. " Exactly," said Courbet, " I under-
stand— you want to become a historical painter.
That is why I tell you to go home and paint a
portrait of your father."

This is excellent advice for beginners in every
art. Like the aviators, they must be content to
fly along the level ground for a little distance
before they attempt to soar aloft into the blue
empyrean.

(1911.)

43

Ill

ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE
DRAMA

I

WHEN the future historian of the American
drama comes to deal with the final years
of the nineteenth century and the early years of
the twentieth, he will do well to record that the
riper development in that period was retarded by
three untoward events, — the premature deaths
of Clyde Fitch and William Vaughan Moody and
the premature birth of Bronson Howard.

Moody was a poet who was engaged in con-
scientiously acquiring the art of the playwright
when his career was cut short; and if he had lived
we should have had a right to reckon on a series of
serious plays deep in purpose and expert in crafts-
manship— plays in which we should find a ful-
filment of the expectations aroused by the
promising 'Great Divide' and 'Faith Healer.'
Clyde Fitch ran a longer course; he was far more
prolific; and he had to his credit half-a-dozen or
half-a-score popular successes. But there was no
one of his plays which sustained its entire action
44

ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA

on the high level he had been able to attain in
separate scenes when he was at his best. The
third act of the 'Girl with the Green Eyes' was
a masterpiece of dramaturgic skill and of psycho-
logic veracity, but it was followed by a fourth
act so inept as to be beneath contempt. The
Duke in the 'Coronet of the Duchess' was a
vital character created with real insight into
human nature, but the play itself was false in
motive and feeble in construction. Fitch was
honestly ambitious; and he believed to the end
that his best work was still before him.

As both Moody and Fitch were taken from us
before they had achieved their full artistic ma-
turity, we cannot even guess what ampler effort
they might have put forth if they had been spared.
But we can see that there was a definite loss to
the American drama in the appearance of Bron-
son Howard a score of years too early. He had
an unusual endowment for dramatic authorship;
he had the instinct for theatrical effect; he had a
keen sense of character; he had an individual
insight into human nature; he had an intuitive
understanding of the fundamental principles of
playmaking; and he had a broad outlook on life.
But he came to maturity and he did his best work
in a period of rapid transition, — in the years be-
fore the artificial methods of Sardou and of Bou-
cicault had been supplanted by the sterner sim-
plicity of Ibsen and of the host of latter-day
45

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

playwrights who responded to the stimulus of
Ibsen's masterly technic. The overt theatrical-
ity of the playmakers of half-a-century ago has
now fallen into disrepute, for we expect today
to find in our more ambitious dramas a less ar-
bitrarily arranged story, a theme of more vital
interest, handled with a more obvious veracity.
We demand a more serious treatment of motive
and an ampler vision of life.

These qualities we do not find in Bronson
Howard's plays, clever as they were and amusing
as they were. We cannot help confessing that
they seem to us compounded according to an
outworn formula. Their merits, undeniable as
they are, strike us now as ingeniously theatrical
rather than truly dramatic. These pieces were
good in their own day; but they are not good
enough to withstand the change in our standards.
They are unfortunately old-fashioned, even if we
can still admire the power and the felicity with
which certain episodes are handled, like that in
'Shenandoah,' where the soldier father all un-
wittingly conducts the funeral of his unrecognized
son, a scene which is a little masterpiece of un-
forced pathos. And the reason why these success-
ful plays, the ' Banker's Daughter/ ' Young Mrs.
Winthrop' and the 'Henrietta' are out-of-date
today is that they were up-to-date yesterday;
they are what they are because their author con-
formed to the customs of his youth. But those
46

ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA

who knew Bronson Howard personally can tes-
tify that he had it in him to write plays of a finer
substance and of a solider truth than he was
permitted to write in the changing epoch when he
was at work. He was subdued to what he workt
in; and he was born out of time. If he had come
into this world forty years later he would have
employed the simpler methods which are now
acceptable; he would have dealt more sincerely
with life; he would have been more truly dramatic
without surrendering his theatrical effectiveness;
he would have utilized more imaginatively his
persistent and inquisitive observation of conduct
and of character.

Most successful artists work rather by instinct
than by rule; they achieve their results more or
less unconscious of the laws they are obeying;
and only a very few can be trusted to analize
their own processes and to explain why they did
what they did in the way they did. Bronson
Howard was one of the small minority who could
always give a reason for the faith that was in him.
His methods were intuitive, of course, or they
would not have accomplisht the result at which
he was aiming; but they were also authenticated
by his constant reflection upon the principles of
playwriting. After he had been guided by his
intuition he could explain to himself the reason
why he had done what he had done. In other
words, he had strengthened his native instinct
47

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

by philosophic inquiry into the unvarying prin-
ciples of playmaking.

II

This is a lengthy preamble to a brief anecdote.
In the early eighties of the last century the
Authors Club was founded in New York; and
at its fortnightly gatherings men of letters came
together for informal converse, — poets and play-
wrights, novelists and essayists, historians and
philosophers. In their several degrees they
were all makers of books, but they regarded
literature each from his own special angle.
The unexpected result of this interchange of
view was a broadening of the outlook of those
whose vision had been too narrowly focust on
their own field of endeavor.

At one of these reunions I chanced to be the
third of a group of which the other two were
Bronson Howard and Richard Henry Stoddard,
a poet who was inclined to take himself rather
too seriously and who had little understanding
of the drama. At a pause in our conversation
Stoddard turned to Howard and put a question
which seemed to me then, as indeed it does now,
to be inspired by a combination of condescension
and impertinence.

"Howard," he askt, "why don't you sometimes
put a little literature into your pieces?"
48

ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA

The playwright was not at all disturbed by the
unconscious discourtesy of this query.

"That is an easy question to answer," he re-
plied. "I never put literature into my plays
because I respect my art too much."

I doubt if Stoddard perceived the significance
of the slight emphasis that Howard had given to
the word put. He made no rejoinder; and our
talk drifted to other topics.

Stoddard's inquiry revealed an attitude not
uncommon among men of letters who take little
interest in the theater and who are accustomed
to consider the drama from the literary point of
view. They think of a play as something in-
tended only to be read — to be judged solely
in the study and not also on the stage. What
Stoddard sought in a play was "literary merit,"
so-called, that is to say, style, rhetoric, verbal
brilliancy; he gave little heed to the more
necessary merits of invention and construction.
In his eyes "fine writing" made a fine play. It is
because most of the poets of the English language
took this view persistently in the nineteenth
century that the English drama was then so sterile.
Their attitude was not unfairly represented in
the remark of Bayes in the ' Rehearsal,' when he
inquired "What a Devil is the plot good for but
to bring in fine things?" And by good things
they meant glittering similes, pointed antitheses
and an unending effulgence of figures of speech.
49

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

They would have had Httle sympathy with Jou-
bert's incisive declaration that "what is wanted
is not merely the poetry of images, but the poetry
of ideas." They expected the dramatist to con-
struct his decoration, feeling dissatisfied when
he only decorated his construction.

The quarrel is ancient, if it is not honorable;
and the men of letters could have pointed with
pride to Seneca and to the Italians of the Renas-
cence and to the French who followed in the foot-
steps of the Italians. But they would have found
no support in the practice or in the precepts of
the great Greek dramatists or of the great drama-
tists of the modern languages. The great drama-
tists know better than anyone else that plays
do not live by style alone, but by substance, by
invention and by construction, by imagination
and by veracity. A good play must be well
written, no doubt, but before it is written it must
be well conceived and well developt; it must
have a theme; it must have a story which reveals
itself in a sequence of situations; and this plot
must be peopled with human beings who look like
human beings, who talk like human beings, and
who act like human beings.

While the words by means of which these char-
acters disclose themselves and carry on the action
are important, they are far less important than
the action itself. Moreover, true " literary merit "
does not reside in the smoothness of the external
50

ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA

rhetoric but in the vigorous harmony of the in-
ternal elements which enable the play to stand
four-square to all the winds that blow. It is by
the force of these internal elements that a drama
maintains itself in the theater, even if it is more
or less by its external charm of style that it pleases
us also in the library. In the playhouse the play
appeals to the playgoers, an incongruous mass
made up of all sorts and conditions of men; yet
the verdict of this mass is always sincere and it
has always had the high respect of the great
dramatists, who have indeed paid little or no
regard to any other verdict. Probably most of
the great dramatists would unhesitatingly sub-
scribe to the assertion of one of the most adroit
playwrights of our own time, Mr. William Gil-
lette, when he declared that dramatic authors find
the public "honest and straightforward with us
always, ever ready to be moved by what is true
and lifelike and human, provided it be made in-
teresting; ever ready to reject the false and arti-
ficial, even tho it be festooned with literary gems."
"Festooned with literary gems \" Could there
be an apter description of the "literature" that
is put into a play, in the vain hope of disguising
its falsity and its artificiality and of concealing its
lack of truth and humanity? A dramatist who
understands his art and respects it, never tries
to put literature into his plays; he confines his
effort to putting life into them, well aware that
51

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

if he achieves sincerity and veracity, he will also
attain literature without having strained for it.

Ill

The overmastering desire to be "literary" on
all occasions and at all costs has wrecked the hopes
of many an ambitious man of letters when he
has sought success on the stage. Stevenson, for
example, believed that the artificiality of his
' Deacon Brodie,' its falsity to life, could be atoned
for by its sheer verbal beauty. He was able to
give his story this external merit; but he neg-
lected to give it the necessary internal merit of
sincerity. He amused himself by playing with
his subject, instead of wrestling with it after
fasting and prayer. He tried to palm off on the
public a verbal veneer as a substitute for the
solid mahogany which the public expected.
Clever as he was, he failed to see that a living
drama depends upon a stark simplicity of struc-
ture, which may admit of decoration but which
does not demand this, because it has ever the
undeniable beauty of perfect design, a beauty
equally undeniable even when it is unadorned.

Voltaire was a man of letters, beyond all ques-
tion, but he was also a man with a wide and varied
experience in the theater; and it was this experi-
ence which once led him to set forth the essential
qualities of a play: "Compact a lofty and in-
52

ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA

teresting event in the space of two or three hours;
bring forward the several characters only when
each ought to appear; never leave the stage
empty; develop a plot as probable as it is attrac-
tive; say nothing unnecessary; instruct the mind
and move the heart; be eloquent always and with
the eloquence proper to every character repre-
sented; use a language as pure as the most careful
prose without permitting the fetters of rime to
appear to interfere with the thought, — these are
the conditions now imposed on tragedy." And if
we strike out the injunction never to leave the
stage empty and the advice about rime, — moni-
tions of value only in French tragedy — we have
here a characteristically penetrating analysis.

Man of letters as Voltaire was above all else,
he did not ask the intending playwright to spend
any of his energy on the effort to be "literary."
Even when he prescribed the duty of being
"eloquent always" he qualified this and explained
his real meaning by adding "with the eloquence
proper to every character represented." Plainly
enough Voltaire was out of sympathy with the
many poets of his own time who were wont to
rely on "festoons of literary gems" and whose ver-
bal glitter was often only pinchbeck and paste.
With the same insight into the true conditions
of dramatic composition, Voltaire, on another oc-
casion, declared that tragedy welcomes metaphor
and abhors simile. "Why? Because a meta-
53

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

phor, when it is natural, belongs to passion;
but a simile belongs only to the intelligence."

When we consider the plays of Shakspere in
the order in which he wrote them, it is interesting
to see how he indulged freely in simile in the days
of his apprenticeship to the art of playmaking;
and how as he gained a firmer grasp on the
principles of the art, he banisht simile and relied
almost altogether upon metaphor. In 'Love's
Labor's Lost,' for example, which is probably his
earliest attempt at comedy, we can observe him
joyfully displaying his own verbal dexterity,
delighting in conceits and in fanciful comparisons,
juggling with words for their own sake. Some-
thing of this he retained even when he wrote his
youthful tragedy 'Romeo and Juliet,' where we
can catch him in the act, so to speak, of "putting
literature into a play." But there is nothing of
this in the 'Macbeth' of his maturity; that
achieves literature inevitably, by its simple ver-
acity, and seemingly without overt exertion on
his part. In 'Love's Labor's Lost' we can de-
tect his own consciousness of his cleverness,
whereas in 'Macbeth' he has ceased to be clever
and is content to be true.

In nothing is Shakspere's ultimate mastery of
his craft more clearly disclosed than in the un-
erring certainty with which he employed now
prose and then blank verse as the varying epi-
sodes of his story seemed to demand the one or
the other. In 'Julius Qesar,' for instance, Brutus
54

ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA

and Cassius and Mark Antony, the loftier figures
of the tragedy, speak in blank verse; the less
important characters make use of a rhythmic
prose, effectively cadenced but lacking the rigor-
ous restrictions of meter; the plebeians and the
mob express their emotions and their opinions in
bare prose.

Most of the modern poets of our language,
when they have essayed a five-act tragedy, have
failed to profit by Shakspere's example. They
have not dared to drop into prose, even in dealing
with the unpoetic commonplaces of everyday
existence. They never cease to walk on stilts,
because they are forever trying to put literature
into their plays. "The ordinary English poetical
play varies between rather slack and formless
meter, and ornate, involved and ultra-poetical
diction," so Professor Gilbert Murray asserts.
"The first enables the poet to slide into prose
when asking for his boots; the second, almost un-
assisted, has to keep up the poetic quality of the
atmosphere. It does so, of course, at the expense
of directness, and often with the ruinous result
that where you have Drama 3^ou have killed
Poetry, and where you have Poetry you have
killed Drama."

IV

Professor Murray has here placed his finger
on the prevailing defect of the English poetical
play of the middle of the nineteenth century.

55

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

It insisted on being "poetical" at all times and at
any cost. It was the result of a mistaken belief
that a play could be made poetical by applying a
varnish of "poetry." And a belief equally mis-
taken led the writers of English comedy of the
same period to besprinkle their dialog with
hand-made witticisms, with alleged epigrams,
distributed lavishly to all the characters, even to
the dullest and the least capable of making a
joke. In the insubstantial comic pieces of H. J.
Byron, anybody would say anything however
inappropriate, to anybody else, if this could be
made a cue for a cut-and-dried repartee. The
spectators of these highly unreal pieces could not
doubt that Byron kept a notebook in which he
jotted down every joke, every quip and every
pun that came to him; and they could almost
see him taking out one or another of these merry
jests to pin it into his dialog as best he could.

"The sure sign of a general decline of an art
is the frequent occurence, not of deformity, but
of misplaced beauty," said Macaulay with his
customary common sense. "In general, trag-
edy is corrupted by eloquence and comedy by
wit." Perhaps it is rather grandiloquence than
actual eloquence which marks the decline of
tragedy; but that comedy is debased by a per-
petual questing of epigram, falsely so-called, must
be admitted at once. The disappearance of the
factitious and laborious "wit" from our more
56

ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA

recent plays is evidence that modern comedy is
recovering its health.

Oscar Wilde was the latest British comic drama-
tist to indulge in incessant fireworks. But it is
an error to suppose that his success on the stage
was due to his scintillations and his corruscations.
His best comedies are solidly built, with an in-
genious story carefully elaborated into a com-
pelling plot. The pleasure which we get from
'Lady Windemere's Fan' is only in small part de-
rived from its varnish of witticisms, often highly
arbitrary in themselves and sometimes very
arbitrarily distributed. Indeed, there are already
signs that the persistent and insistent crackle of
the dialog is beginning to be annoying to latter-
day audiences. We are losing our liking for an
external dazzle which distracts our attention from
the internal action artfully arranged to arouse
and to retain out interest.

Even if 'Lady Windemere's Fan' is not quite
sincere in its portrayal of character and not quite
veracious in its dealing with life, it has an in-
geniously articulated plot which would retain
its potency even if the play should be translated
into German and thence into Spanish and finally
back into English, — an operation which would
certainly brush off all the spangles that now glis-
ten in the dialog. Yet we may be assured that
these forced and fortuitous quips and quirks
were not continuously injected because the
57

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

author believed it to be his duty to put literature
into his play, but rather because he recognized that
he had to maintain his own reputation as a wit,
as a manufacturer of cleverness, as a retailer of
"good things." And it may be admitted that in
bestowing this deliberate brilliance on his dialog,
Wilde was dutifully following in the footsteps of
the two masters of the English comedy of manners,
Congreve and Sheridan.

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century
the French drama also suffered from an epidemic
of epigram. The foremost French comedy of that
time, the 'Gendre de M. Poirier' of Augier and
Sandeau, was more or less infected by this mal-
ady; and the chief rival of the 'Gendre de M.
Poirier,' the 'Demi-Monde' of the younger
Dumas, has been quarantined by later French
critics because of its feverish eruption of witti-
cisms. It is only fair to record that Dumas re-
covered, and that in his later 'Francillon' there
is scarcely a single example of calculated repartee.
The dialog of 'Francillon' seems spontaneous
even when it is at its cleverest, whereas that of
the 'Demi-Monde' strikes us today as mannered
and metallic. The French playwrights of the
twentieth century may even be accused of having
reacted a little too violently from the practices
of their immediate predecessors, since they
appear almost to avoid wit.

So long as the dramatist, French, British or
58

ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA

American, was adjusting his plays to the apron-
stage which brought the actors almost into per-
sonal contact with the audience and which
invited the characters to be exuberantly gran-
diloquent in tragedy or confidentially witty
in comedy, he was subject to a constant tempta-
tion to " put literature into the drama." But this
temptation has diminisht, if it has not disap-
peared, now that our playwrights are all working
for the picture-frame stage which keeps the
actors far distant from the spectators and which
therefore places a premium on simple and direct
utterance.

(1918.)

59

IV
THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

I

CRITICS of the drama are like the poor, in
that they are always with us. It matters
little whether the theater is flourishing or expir-
ing; we are never at a loss for self-appointed
judges, ready to pass condemnation on the prin-
ciples and on the practices of the playwrights.
In Alexandria when dramatic literature was non-
existent, as the glory that was Greece was slowly
sinking out of sight, and in Italy again when
there was a splendid renascence of all the arts
save the drama alone, there existed a supera-
bundant and superfluous host of critics, promul-
gating the rigid code which they had deduced
from their own inner consciousness.

Indeed, it seems to be especially in times of
dramatic penury that the theorists of the theater
increase and multiply spontaneously. And this
is most unfortunate, since it is quite as bad for a
critic as it is for a poet to let himself lose sight of
the actual playhouse, with its associated players
and its accustomed playgoers. The fundamental
60

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

principles of any art can be singled out and made
plain only by observation of the practice of the
artists who have excelled in that art. Criticism
is but the hand-maid of creation; and the task
of the commentator is impossible when he lacks
material for comment. Then is he reduced to the
needless and profitless exercise of inventing Rules
for an art which he has not been able to observe
in the actual process. Whenever the dramatic
critic has toiled vainly because there was no liv-
ing drama in his own tongue and in his own time
to inspire him and to guide him, he has been led
unfailingly to deal with the drama as tho it were
solely a department of literature, to be weighed
on literary scales only and to be measured merely
by literary standards.

Even when the theater is active and produc-
tive, it is difficult enough for the critic to re-
member always that the drama does not lie wholly
within the limits of literature. No doubt, it is
mainly by its literary qualities that a drama sur-
vives, by its invention, by its structure, by its
style, by its veracity of character, by its ethical
integrity; but it is by its non-literary qualities
that it has been able at first to succeed on the
stage, by its theatrical effectiveness, its histri-
onic opportunities, its picturesqueness when per-
formed.

In the long, interesting and instructive history
of dramatic criticism — a history which has not
6i

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

yet tempted to its telling any scholar equipt with
a wide acquaintance with literature and a deep
understanding of the theater — in this long history
two names stand out preeminent, the names of
Aristotle and of Lessing. The names of the
Alexandrian writers are forgotten; and the names
of the critics of the Italian Renascence are familiar
only to devoted specialists. It may be ad-
mitted that the names of Sidney and of Boileau
are still cherisht; but the code they declared has
long been discredited and disestablisht. The
names of Gottsched and of La Harpe carry no
weight in the twentieth century, even to those
who chance to remember that once they were
loudly acclaimed as arbiters of taste. Many a
name that for a season blazed brilliantly in the
sky is as disregarded today as the stick of a burnt-
out rocket. Who pays any attention today to
Schlegel, sunk beneath the wave of oblivion be-
cause of the rancor of his political prejudices and
because of the frequent falsity of his general ideas ?
Who knows now, or cares to know, that a cen-
tury ago Nepomucene Lemercier catalogued the
twenty-five rules which tragedy must obey and the
twenty-two rules to which comedy must conform ?
Critics of the drama come and go; they rise and
fall; they have their little fame, and sometimes
they may survive to see it fade away. Reputa-
tion is as fleeting in criticism as it is in creation;
and the promulgators of dramatic doctrine are
62

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

no more likely to retain popular esteem than the
poets and the playwrights they have sought to
guide and to govern. The winds of doctrine
shift with the changing years, and often with
startling suddenness. But however bitterly the
veering breezes may blow, the names of Aristotle
and of Lessing stand where they have stood these
many years.

The pleasure that we find in the selection of
the Hundred Best Books or of the Hundred Finest
Pictures is futile; but there is always profit in
striving to recognize with certainty the Best
Poets and the Best Painters, be they a dozen or
a score or a hundred. And when we seek to get
a firm grasp upon the abiding principles of any
art, it is no less profitable for us to ascertain who
are the Best Critics of that art. In the analysis
and interpretation of the art of the drama the
supreme chiefs are Aristotle and Lessing, these
two and no others. They are theorists, it is true,
as were the Alexandrians and the Italians, whose
vogue was evanescent; but their theories were
solidly rooted in accurate observation of the
acted drama. The laws they declared are as
valid today as ever; their judgments have been
confirmed in the supreme court over which Time
presides; and even their obiter dicta are still sig-
nificant.

When we seek to spy out the reasons why the
solid authority of Aristotle and Lessing endures
63

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

thru the ages, we must begin by crediting both of
them with the fourfold quahfications without
which all efforts at criticism are barren. They
had insight and equipment, sympathy and dis-
interestedness. They did not possess all of these
qualifications in an equal degree; but all four of
these they did possess not only sufficiently but
abundantly. They had the innate gift of analysis;
they had material for comparison; they had a
natural relish for the best; and they sought al-
ways to see the thing as it is, without bias, taking
their personal prejudices out of the way. What-
ever deduction may be indicated from this asser-
tion must be directed to two points only; Aristotle
may be held to be a little limited in his equip-
ment by the fact that he had no other dramatic
literature to compare with that of his country-
men; and Lessing may be thought to be more
than a little limited in his disinterestedness by his
desire to discredit and to destroy the influence of
the French classicists.

Then the ultimate validity of their criticism is
due partly to the fact that their vision was not
circumscribed by the walls of the playhouse;
they toiled in other fields and they knew many
things wholly unrelated to the theater. Their
reputations do not rest solely, or even chiefly, on
their work as expounders of dramaturgic doctrine.
One might go so far as to say that altho Aristotle
and Lessing are the supreme dramatic critics,
64

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

their fame would scarcely be less if they had never
written a word about the theater. No man can
know his own subject thoroly if his own subject
is all that he knows; he needs to wander afield
and to be interested in many other things if he is
to attain breadth of survey even in his own
specialty. Aristotle, and Lessing also, had that
cognate culture, without which, as Mr. Brownell
has insisted, "specific erudition produces a rather
lean result."

But altho their vision was not contracted within
the limits of the theater, it is always in the theater
itself that they conceive themselves to be sitting
when they come to the criticism of a play. They
are never mere readers of literature but always
spectators of the acted drama. They are ever
thinking in terms of the theater itself. "A play
has this peculiarity and distinction," said Brune-
tiere, "that being written to be acted, it is not
complete in itself and it cannot be detacht from
the material conditions of scenic representation
and from the nature of the public for which it is
destined." Aristotle and Lessing kept in mind
the nature of the public to which the play-
wrights they were discussing had appealed; and
they never overlookt the material conditions of
scenic representation. By a constant effort of
imaginative sympathy they were able to transport
themselves in fancy from the desk where they
sat alone to a seat in front of the actors and by
65

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

the side of a crowd of other spectators. It is by
their understanding of the Siamese-twinship of
the drama and the theater that their theories are
vahdated.

The principles they establisht for dramatic
literature were derived from the practice of suc-
cessful playwrights. These principles had noth-
ing etherial or volatile; they were rooted in com-
mon sense. What Professor Giddings says about
Aristotle as an interpreter of the science of govern-
ment is equally true about Aristotle as an ex-
pounder of the art of poetry: "Aristotle was in-
deed one of the greatest of theorists; but he is
likewise one of the shrewdest judges of what we
call practical politics"; and "his theories grew
out of his observations, and they formulate vital
principles from concrete social conditions." And
Lessing was scarcely less shrewd than Aristotle
as a judge of practical playmaking, having even
the advantage of being himself a successful play-
wright, practising what he preacht.

In other words, the dramatic criticism of Aris-
totle and Lessing is expert criticism; and it is
highly technical. As the technical principles of
every art endure thru the ages unchanged, how-
ever much its devices may be modified by altered
conditions, the precepts proposed by Aristotle and
by Lessing state permanent and essential prin-
ciples of dramaturgy. Indeed, it is the insistence
of Aristotle upon sheer technic which has misled

66

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

SO many of his commentators, who have accepted
him as an inspired lawgiver, coming down from
the mountain with the tables of stone in his hand,
instead of seeing that he is only presenting shrewd
deductions from his own observations in the
theater when the masterpieces of the Greek drama
were performed before his gaze.

In its size, in its material conditions, in its spec-
tators, the Globe theater in London was very
unlike the theater of Dionysus in Athens; the
picture-frame stage of our latter-day playhouse
is very unlike the platform-stage of the Eliza-
bethans; but none the less are the essential prin-
ciples which guided Shakspere in his greatest
tragedies, when his ambition was aroused and
when he was exerting all his powers, the same as
those which governed Sophocles and which
Aristotle declared, — as they are the same which
Moliere followed in his turn and which Ibsen was
to obey in our own time. These essential prin-
ciples are independent of the changes in the size
and material conditions of the various theaters
that have succeeded one another in the past
twenty-five centuries. It is because Aristotle was
able to lay hold of the most important of these
principles more than two thousand years ago
that he remains constantly up-to-date, with no
67

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

danger of ever falling out-of-date. This is the
reason why his name is now constantly invoked
by the more important reviewers of the con-
temporary drama, while the names of Johnson and
Pope, of Boileau and Horace are allowed to lan-
guish in innocuous desuetude.

This modernness of Aristotle's dramatic theories
is due mainly to his modesty in not assuming the
attitude of the inspired lawgiver. He was never
arrogant, as Schlegel was. He contented himself
with pointing out the principles which seemed to
him to underly the practices of the dramatic poets
of accredited supremacy. He suggested that if
Sophocles apparently obeys certain rules, why,
then it might be well if all those who may be am-
bitious to compose plays should also obey these
rules. He conceived himself as giving counsel,
and as advising 'prentice playwrights how best
they could model themselves on the masters.
His conclusions were tentative, as becomes a man
of science, conscious that the results of any in-
quiry are never final.

It need not surprize us that the uneasy Italian
commentators of Aristotle did not see him in
this hght, that they ascribed to him their own dic-
tatorial attitude. They knew Seneca better
than they knew Sophocles; and they really relisht
the declamatory rhetoric of the Hispano- Roman
more than the austere poetry and the masterly
plotting of the great Greek. They knew Horace
68

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

better than they knew Aristotle — Horace, who in
all his life may never have seen a good play well
acted, and whose precepts are detacht from prac-
tize, being borrowed second-hand from the
Alexandrian criticasters of the Hellenistic de-
cadence. Perhaps it is not too much to say that
the supersubtle Italians read Aristotle thru the
spectacles of Horace; and because Horace spoke
as one having authority, they believed that
Aristotle also was a promulgator of implacable
decrees. When they failed to find in his text
a code as complete or as rigid as they desired, in
their intolerance they did not hesitate to draft
new laws in the name of Aristotle. They sancti-
fied the elaborate classicist doctrine of the drama
by sheltering it under his revered authority. It
is no wonder that when the romanticist revolt
came, as it had to come, some of its leaders should
have sneered at Aristotle, holding him responsible
for the perverted theories put forth by his insati-
able commentators. Nor is there any wonder
that Aristotle should have come into his own
again, after the "magniloquent silhouettes of
romanticist drama," — as Mr. Huneker has called
them — shrivelled from the stage.

Aristotle's discussion of play making, is inci-
dental to his larger discussion of poetry. It has
come down to us incomplete and fragmentary.
We cannot be assured that we have his own text.
We are in doubt whether what we now possess is
69

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

only a portion of a careful treatise made ready
for publication by Aristotle, or whether it is
only a collection of memorandums set down loosely
to aid him in lecturing. There are even com-
mentators who hold that our manuscripts are due
not to Aristotle himself but to some ardent dis-
ciple who took notes to preserve as best he could
the utterances of the master. The late Jules
Lemaitre was of the second of these opinions,
finding confirmation for it in the famous sentence
about the tragic "purgation" of passion. "No
doubt Aristotle jotted this down as a simple
memorandum, — for it is incomplete and badly
constructed, containing a figure of speech both bi-
zarre and ill-prepared; and it is very like those
notes, intelligible only to ourselves which we set
down in a notebook with telegraphic or hiero-
glyphic brevity."

In the same criticism, — an account of Cor-
neille's vain efforts to reconcile his own practice
with the precepts of Aristotle, — Lemaitre dwelt
on the patent absurdity of supposing that all
the precepts of Aristotle are final for all time and
in all countries, since the Greek philosopher was
making remarks only about the tragedies of his
own day, — "that is to say, about operas of a
kind, which were acted and sung two or three
times a year at great festivals," and of which
Aristotle " might have seen or read a hundred at
most, for they were not very numerous," probably
70

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

outlining " his theories from his study of a score of
prize-winning plays."

It is not to be wondered at that a few of Aris-
totle's remarks are applicable only to Greek
tragedies, — "operas of a kind"; — what is wonder-
ful is that so many of them are acceptable when
applied to modern plays wholly unlike Greek trag-
edies, and that a critic as acute as Emile Faguet
was not guilty of wilful paradox when he asserted
that the more he studied the 'Poetics' the more
assured he felt that Aristotle "has given us rather
the theory of French tragedy than that of Greek
tragedy."

What are the principles of playmaking declared
by Aristotle and as dominant today as they were
in his own time? First of all, there is a clear
recognition of the essential relation of the drama
to the theater, with its declamation, its gestures,
its spectacle, and above all, with its spectators
whom the playwright has to interest, to arouse,
and to hold.

Secondly, there is an equally clear recognition
of the supreme importance of the action, the
story, the plot; — "most important of all is the
structure of the incidents, for a play is an imita-
tion, not of men, but of an action and of life, —
of happiness and misery; and happiness and
misery consist in action, the end of human life
being a mode of action, not a quality. . . .
Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to
71

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

the representation of character; character comes
in as subsidiary to the action. Hence the inci-
dents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and
the end is the chief thing of all. Again, without
action there cannot be a tragedy; there may
be without character. . . . The poet should be a
maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is
a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates
are actions."

This is a hard saying for the defenders of the
closet-drama, for it implies that merely as a play
the 'Two Orphans' is superior to the ' Blot in the
'Scutcheon,' yet this would be denied by no com-
petent dramatic critic. Jules Lemaitre called
attention to the accuracy of Aristotle's clear
distinctions and pointed out that modern melo-
drama makes use of general types, often tradi-
tional and empty of veracity; and that plays with
no atom of observation or of truth may move us
on the stage by virtue of their situations alone,
of their emotional appeal. "The object of the
theater is to represent a man acting, and therefore
to exhibit him to us not as he is himself, but as
he bears himself in his relations with other men
and under the influence of accidental circum-
stances. Now, if the playwright is also an ob-
server and a psychologist, if he is capable of letting
us pierce to the core of a character, of an original
soul, in the brief moment when this soul is react-
ing against an external accident, evidently the
72

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

result will be more valuable. Yet altho this
merit is a welcome addition, it is not indispensable
in the theater. In short, the drama interests us,
not predominantly by the depicting of human
nature, but primarily by situations and only
secondarily by the feelings of those therein in-
volved."

Thirdly, a play must have unity of purpose.

"Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is
complete and whole and of a certain magnitude.
... A whole is that which has a beginning, a
middle and an end. ... A well constructed
plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at
haphazard. ... Of all plots and actions the
episodic are the worst; I call a plot episodic in
which the episodes or acts succeed one another
without probable or necessary sequence."

Fourthly, the story of a play must be plausible.
"It is not the function of the poet to relate what
has happened but what may happen, — what is
possible according to the law of probability or
necessity."

Fifthly, the playwright must never forget the
playhouseand must always seek to foreseethe effect
to be produced when his play is actually per-
formed. " In constructing the plot and working
it out with the help of language, the poet should
place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes.
In this way, seeing everything with the utmost
vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action,
73

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

he will discover what is in keeping with it and will
be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies."

Sixthly, the tragic poet must avoid both the
commonplace and the magniloquent: — "The per-
fection of style is to be clear without being mean."

Here are a few of the most significant of Aris-
totle's suggestions to intending dramatists; they
are simple enough all of them, and obvious enough,
not to say indisputable. Yet they are sufficient
to justify the assertion of Professor Bywater that
when Aristotle was engaged only in showing how
to construct a play in accord with the material
conditions of the Athenian theater, he succeeded
also "in formulating once for all the great first
principles of dramatic art, the canons of dramatic
logic, which even the most adventurous of
modern dramatists can only at his peril forget
or set at naught."

Ill

The modern appreciation of Aristotle dates
from Lessing, for it was the German critic who
brusht aside the swarm of commentators to
scrutinize the actual text of Aristotle and to see
for himself what the Greek had actually said and
what he actually meant. Lessing it was who
made the pregnant suggestion that if we seek a
full understanding of the 'Poetics' we must
consider that truncated treatise in connection
with Aristotle's better preserved ' Rhetoric' and
74

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

' Ethics.' We may hail Lessing, even tho he was
greatly stimulated by Dacier and by Diderot, as
the real leader of the movement to repeal the clas-
sicist code of the drama, erected mainly upon mis-
understanding and misinterpretation of Aristotle.

Perhaps Lessing suffers today from the com-
plete success of his polemic against the French
critics who had adopted the windspun and wire-
drawn theories of the Italians. In his day and in
his country, it was generally believed that French
tragedy was a revival of Greek tragedy and
possibly even an improvement upon it. Now-
adays we see so clearly that there was no basis for
this belief that we find it difficult to understand
how anybody could ever have held it; and there-
fore we are inclined to wonder why Lessing was
so persistent in his demonstration of its absurdity.
This is the inevitable disadvantage of all triumph-
ant polemic, for when the victory is once won
we fail to perceive the necessity for killing the
dead over and over again.

Lessing was never overawed by the authority of
Aristotle; but he insisted, first of all, on being
shown the Greek's own words. He permitted
no predecessor to hold him in pupillage, preferring
to do his own thinking in his own fashion. He
denied the jurisdiction of the French and the
Italian and the Latin critics, tamely accepted
by his contemporaries in Germany. He took
nothing for granted; and he insisted on going
75

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

back to first principles. He analized the judg-
ments of those who have gone before; and he
accepted their verdicts only when he himself
found the decision in accord with the facts.

French criticism of the acted drama from the
Abbe d'Aubignac to Nepomucene Lemercier is
not so foolish as those who have never read it
may be inclined to suppose. The classicist code
is hard and narrow, and it imposes upon its in-
terpreters not a few absurdities; but these inter-
preters make shrewd suggestions here and there.
Marmontel's advice to aspiring playwrights is
rich in sensible remarks; but where Marmontel
only scratcht the surface, Lessing cut to the core.
Lemercier's twenty-five rules for tragedy and his
twenty-two rules for comedy, altho pedantically
promulgated, are most of them acceptable enough;
but Lessing did not descend to externalities like
these, being moved always to ascertain the inner
qualities which alone vitalize a work of art.
Diderot, from whom Lessing borrowed a great
deal — combating French influence with arms
captured from a Frenchman — was fertile in sug-
gestive ideas, but he was rarely trustworthy; and
the author of the 'Laocoon' was ever a sounder
critic of art than the author of the ' Paradox on the
Comedian.' The German never let himself be
led astray by his own theories, and he achieved a
consistency denied to the gifted but irregular
Frenchman, partly because his equipment was
76

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

more solid and partly because his insight was
more penetrating.

Mezieres, in his preface to the French transla-
tion of the ' Hamburg Dramaturgy/ had no diffi-
culty in showing the extent of Lessing's in-
debtedness to Diderot and also in exhibiting
Lessing's occasionally eratic opinions. Mezieres
pointed out that Lessing allowed himself the
astounding liberty of calling the comedy of Des-
touches finer than the comedy of Moliere, and of
vaunting his own ability to rehandle the themes of
Corneille and Racine more effectively than they
had done. It is true that Lessing was not only a
critic of the drama but also a creator of it, and that
his own pieces are the earliest of German plays to
establish themselves in the theater and to keep the
stage after a century and a half. But this does
not justify his airy assertion that he could surpass
Corneille and Racine in their own field.

The explanation of his uncharacteristic boast
is to be found in the fact that Lessing was fighting
Voltaire, and that he was thus tempted to dis-
parage Corneille and Racine, in whose footsteps
Voltaire was following. The German critic-creator
wisht to explode the belief of his countrymen in
the infallibility of French criticism and in the
indisputable superiority of French tragedy. In
the ardor of battle he was not always so par-
ticular as he might be in the choice of weapons
he snatcht up for attack and defense. As Lowell
77

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

pointed out, Lessing's intellect "was commonly
stirred to motion by the impulse of other minds,
and struck out its brightest flashes by collision
with them." It must be remembered also that
Lessing's discussion of dramatic art is not a treat-
ise like Aristotle's, written out at leisure after
full premeditation; it is a journalistic job, com-
posed as occasion served; its successive chap-
ters, if they may be so called, are evoked by the
particular plays which chanced to be produced
at the Hamburg theater. Very few of these
plays are known today, even by name, except to
readers of the ' Dramaturgy.' It is testimony
to Lessing's critical faculty that he could find
a suggestive text for shrewd comment in preten-
tious German pieces and in artless German adap-
tations from contemporary French drama. As
subject matter for discussion, Lessing lackt
precisely what Aristotle had, — a living dramatic
literature in his own language. Nor had he been
privileged to behold on the stage any of the
masterpieces of Shakspere and Calderon with
which he had acquainted himself in the study.
Where Aristotle had a body of doctrine clearly
and completely thought out before he began on
his book, Lessing had to extemporize his opinions
from day to day during his single year of service as
theatrical reviewer. There need be no wonder
that the 'Hamburg Dramaturgy' is not com-
pact; and the real cause for surprize is that the
78

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

collected articles are as coherent and as consistent
as they are. Nor is there any necessity to deny
that some of these articles reveal themselves now
as mere journalism, sufficient unto the day but
lacking in permanence, or that Lessing does not
hesitate now and again to avail himself of the
privileges of the journalist, — to reiterate, to ex-
aggerate even if need be, to emphasize his asser-
tions by overstatement so as to force his casual
readers to apprehend his meaning. That there
are dry places here and there is due to the aridity
of the plays he had perforce to deal with. This
was unfortunate for Lessing, who seems to have
wearied of his hortatory task before the year
of his servitude was out; and it was also un-
fortunate for us since the finer the work of art
to be criticized the more strenuous is likely
to be the effort of the critic to appreciate it
worthily.

Even if the year's work which makes up the
'Hamburg Dramaturgy' must be described as
journalism, still bearing the traces of its news-
paper origin, we cannot but recognize in Lessing
an incomparable journalist, without peer in in-
sight and in equipment, abundant in sympathy
for what is best, — altho a little lacking in disin-
terestedness so far as the French are concerned.
And for journalism his style was exactly adapted.
He was so clear, so sharp-sighted, so plain-spoken,
so sturdy in common sense that he frequently
79

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

appeared to be witty, altho his wit was rarely
verbal or merely wit for its own sake. It never
had the flashing felicity of Voltaire's style — of
that Voltaire whom Lessing admired even while
attacking. It was from Voltaire that Lessing
borrowed the useful device of using narrative
as an implicit criticism of the plot under con-
sideration. And we may apply to Lessing the
praise Lord Morley bestowed on Voltaire, that
his "work, from first to last, was alert with un-
quenchable life. Some of it, much of it, has
ceased to be alive for us now. . . . Yet we
recognize that none of it was ever the dreary still-
birth of a mind of hearsays. There is no mechani-
cal transmission of untested bits of current
coin."

Yet few of Lessing's precepts of playmaking,
rooted as they are in common sense and instantly
acceptable by all students of the stage, can be
detacht from the criticism of the specific pieces
that evoked them. He restated principles laid
down by Aristotle; he clarified pregnant sayings
of Diderot; he may have derived from d'Aubignac
the belief that unflinching fidelity to the acci-
dental facts of history is not to be demanded
from the writer of a historical play, — altho he may
have found this implicit in one of Aristotle's
paragraphs. He was forever going back to the
great Greek and he was incessant in declaring
that, after all, Aristotle was not a Frenchman.
80

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

He was quite as insistent in tackling Voltaire
and in asserting that after all the great French-
man was not a Greek. He spent half-a-hundred
pages to prove that Voltaire had taken his 'Merope*
from Maffei and had failed to better it in the bor-
rowing. And he was sometimes more negative than
affirmative, more anxious to discredit the French
critics and to disestablish the classicist theorists
than to declare his own sounder and saner prin-
ciples.

IV

Aristotle and Lessing are the two foremost
theorists of the theater; and there is no third
to be rankt with them. Yet at an interval after
them and far in advance of any fourth claimant,
comes Francisque Sarcey, inferior to both in
insight and equipment, even if not inferior in
sympathy and disinterestedness. He was a
journalist like Lessing; but he did not confine his
activity to a single year, continuing it in fact for
nearly two score years. He resembled Lessing
again in that he did not begin with a body of
doctrine, with a code of laws formulated in ad-
vance of any possible application. Like the
English judges he developt the law slowly from
the successive cases that were brought before him,
until at the last he arrived at a consciousness of
the fundamental principles of the art he loved
devotedly his whole life long.

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

Sarcey's body of doctrine, when once he was in
possession of it, was his own; it was the result of
his incomparable experience of the theater and of
his incessant study of the spectators. As a con-
sequence of his integrity and of his critical
shrewdness, his doctrine is substantially identical
with Aristotle's and with Lessing's. Indepen-
dently he arrived at the same conclusions that
they had reacht before him. As he told me
once, whenever he took down the French transla-
tion of the 'Hamburg Dramaturgy' and found
that Lessing had anticipated him in one of his
own discoveries, he rejoiced, feeling thereby rein-
forced in his conviction that his discovery was
solidly based on truth.

Sarcey was more narrowly a man of the theater
than either Aristotle or Lessing; and this is per-
haps a main reason why he does not deserve to
be placed by their side. It is true that he had
many outside interests and that he was an inde-
fatigable writer on all sorts of topics, literary and
social and political; but his heart was ever in the
theater, and to him the art of the drama had a
supreme importance which it had not to Lessing
or to Aristotle, because they had a broader outlook
than he, a more comprehensive philosophy.

Yet whatever his limitations, he was the most

inspiring and suggestive critic of the acted drama

in the nineteenth century. Not so dogmatic as

Bruneti&re, not so brilliant as Lemaitre, not

82

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

SO versatile as Faguet, he easily surpast
all three in his intimacy with the playhouse and
with its people, actors as well as authors; and he
was therefore a sounder critic of that part of the
drama which is more specifically of the theater.
His experience was far longer than Lessing's and
his subject matter is richer and more varied.
Where Aristotle had the Greek drama as his sole
material for the deduction of his principles and
where Lessing had only the plays which happened
to be acted in a single German theater in a single
year, even tho he ranged at will in search of
parallels thruout dramatic literature, Sarcey had
all the theaters of the capital of France for forty
years when they were representing not only the
contemporary and the classic drama in his own
tongue but also many of the masterpieces of the
drama in other literatures, ancient and modern.
It may be admitted that Sarcey did not profit
as he might by his opportunity to see on the stage
the mightiest plays of Greece and England. He
was too fundamentally a man of his own coun-
try, and even of his own time, really to relish
Sophocles and Shakspere. Moreover, he was a
little inclined to be the slave of his own doctrine
and to hold this a little too narrowly. He was
only following the wise Aristotle and the shrewd
Lessing when he insisted on the superior impor-
tance of plot, of story, of action; but he went
ahead of them in his appreciation of the mechan-
83

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

ical dexterity of plotmaking. In fact, he was in-
clined almost to accept skill in craftsmanship, the
skill of a Scribe, for example, as the final word in
dramatic accomplishment, instead of seeing clearly
that this skill is only the first word. Construc-
tion, the adroit building up of a series of situa-
tions— this is a prime requisite of dramatic
art, without which the art cannot exist; but it is
only the beginning and it can never be an end in
itself, as it was in the so-called "well-made play"
of Scribe and of the cloud of collaborators and
disciples that encompast Scribe about.

Still it must be urged that in insisting upon the
duty of providing every play with an inner skele-
ton strong enough to support it unaided, even if
he insisted at times a little too exclusively upon
this, Sarcey was exerting a most wholesome in-
fluence, especially in these days when the novelists
are invading the theater and when some of them
seek to confuse the essential differences between
the art of the drama and the art of prose-fiction.
The first and foremost of these differences is due
to the immitigable fact that the novel may appeal
only to the individual reader whereas the play
must appeal to a crowd of spectators. The
theater is "a. function of the crowd," so a British
critic has declared; and in so declaring he was
only echoing Sarcey, who asserted that he could
deduce all the laws of dramatic art from the single
fact that every play implies the presence of an
84

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

audience. This is why Sarcey was so indefatiga-
ble in his observation of the playgoers and in his
analysis of their characteristics, their predilec-
tions, their prejudices, their unconscious prefer-
ences. Here he was doing explicitly what Aristotle
and Lessing had done implicitly.

Sarcey's attitude when he set himself down at
the first performance of a new play was very like
that of the burgher of Paris who ventured to take
a hand in the exacerbated discussion evoked by
Corneille's 'Cid.' "I have never read Aristotle
and I know nothing about the Rules, but I
decide upon the merit of a play in proportion to
the pleasure I receive." Sarcey had read Aris-
totle and he was familiar with the Rules; but he
judged tragedy and comedy, problem-play and
farce, in proportion to the pleasure he himself
received, but also and more particularly in pro-
portion to the pleasure received by his fellow spec-
tators. He came in time to be very expert in
interpreting these unconscious preferences of the
crowd, which the dramatist has always to reckon
with.

His suggestive theory of the scenes inher-
ent in every story, which demand to be shown
in action, the famous theory of the scenes a f aire,
Obligatory Scenes, was the result of his ability
to translate the dumb disappointment of the
playgoers when the dramatist neglects to set be-
fore their eyes the interesting episode he has led

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

them to expect. This is one of Sarcey's most
important contributions to the theory of the
theater; and it is his own, altho there are inti-
mations of it in earher writers — notably in Cor-
neille's third 'Discourse on the Dramatic Poem.'
Sarcey may have had predecessors also in his
theory of the necessary conventions of the drama.
Every art can exist only by its departure from the
facts of life; the painter and the sculptor, for ex-
ample, are permitted to represent men as motion-
less, altho absolute absence of movement is im-
possible to human beings. The drama demands
the condensation and heightening of the dialog
and the suppression of everything accidental,
altho accident surrounds us on all sides. These
liberties with life are for the benefit of the specta-
tors in the theater, who want to see and to hear
and have their interest focust upon the essentials
of the story set before them on the stage; and by
convention, that is by tacit agreement, by im-
plied contract, the spectators gladly permit the
playwright to depart from the facts of life so that
he can delight them with the truth of life.

It is greatly to be regretted that Sarcey never
composed his promised 'History of Dramatic
Conventions'; but as he once said to me, "If I
had ever written my book, with what could I fill
my weekly articles?" Here he spoke out in
accord with his frank and sturdy common sense —
that common sense which according to Vauvenar-
86

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

gues must be credited rather to character than to
intellect.

The influence of Lessing on the contemporary
German theater was due not so much to his dra-
matic criticism as to his dramatic creation, — to the
three or four plays in which he proved that it was
possible to put German life and German character
on the stage at once effectively and sincerely.
Sarcey may have written a trifling farce or two in
his youth, but his influence on the contemporary
French theater was due wholly to his criticism.
He had the good fortune, denied to Lessing, of
working in a period when there was a living dra-
matic literature in his own language. He was
able to interpret and to encourage Augier and
Dumas fils, Meilhac and Halevy, Labiche and
Rostand, very much as Boileau had interpreted
and encouraged Moliere. The principles of play-
making these dramatists were applying were pre-
cisely those which Sarcey was proclaiming.

It is difficult to overestimate the influence ex-
erted by Sarcey upon the development of the
drama in France in the final third of the nine-
teenth century. His theories of the theater were
adopted and disseminated by other critics, often
by writers as different as Brunetiere, Lemaitre
and Faguet. In the main, and for years, this
influence was helpful; yet a time came at last
when Sarcey's principles, as he himself continued
to declare them, were felt to be a little too narrow
87

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

and a little too rigidly insisted upon. M. Gus-
tave Lanson, for example, has denounced Sarcey
for unduly confining his attention to technic, for
overvaluing the form of a play at the expense of
its content, and for following rather than guiding
the taste of the public. There is a certain jus-
tice in these charges; and it may be admitted that
in his old age Sarcey was a willing prisoner in his
own code of the drama. But to grant this is not
to deny the abiding utility of his contributions to
the theory of the theater.

At bottom the body of doctrine which Sarcey
built up for his own use as a critic of the acted
drama is substantially the same as that which
we find in Lessing and in Aristotle. These three
theorists of the theater estimate plays primarily
by the test of the playhouse and by analysis of
the desires of the playgoers. The several play-
houses in which the Greek and the German and
the Frenchman took their seats varied widely in
their physical conditions, in their dimensions and
in their shapes. But these various playhouses
had one characteristic in common, a characteristic
which is to be discovered in almost every kind
of theater before the final quarter of the nine-
teenth century. I n all these playhouses, the actor
was surrounded on three sides by the audience.

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

In the Attic theater the performers stood in the
orchestra which curved into the hillside of the
Acropolis; in Shakspere's theater, as in Moliere's,
certain spectators were accommodated with seats
on the stage itself; and in the theaters for which
Beaumarchais and Sheridan composed their
comedies the stage jutted out far into the house,
so that the actors actually turned their backs
on a certain proportion of the audience. But in
the final quarter of the nineteenth century this
platform-stage gave way to the picture-frame
stage to which we are accustomed in our snug
modern theaters; and nowadays the actor is not
in close proximity to the spectators; he is not
surrounded by them on three sides; he is with-
drawn behind a picture-frame; and he is bidden
not to get out of the picture.

This change from the platform-stage of the past
to the picture-frame stage of the present is per-
haps the most important which has ever taken
place in all the long history of the drama; and it
is too recent for us to forecast all its consequences,
altho we may be certain that they will be many
and striking, influencing the method of every
writer for the stage. As the dramatist always
plans his plays with the intent and the desire of
seeing them performed before an audience, by
actors, and in a theater, any change in the con-
ditions of the theater will force changes in the
method of both actors and dramatist, and it

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

may also bring about changes in the unconscious
preferences of the audience. It is an interesting
question whether these changes will or will not
invalidate in any way the accredited theory of
the theater as this has been expounded by Les-
sing and Aristotle, who had no other plays as a
basis of study than those composed in accord
with the conditions of the platform-stage; and
even Sarcey could see only the beginnings of the
more modern drama composed specifically for the
picture-frame stage.

The audiences of the past who knew only the
platform-stage, expected to see thereon a story,
with a well-knit plot, setting forth a clash of con-
tending desires. Will the spectators of the future,
sitting in front of the picture-frame stage, retain
this expectation? Or will they be contented with
pictures of life and character held together by a
slacker thread of story, scarcely strong enough
to be called a plot, and lacking in any clearly
defined conflict of volition? More than twenty
years ago, William Archer, that acutest of
British dramatic critics, posed this question
clearly: "What is the essential element of
drama? Is it the telling of a story after a cer-
tain establisht method which has been found by
long experience to answer to the mental require-
ments of an average audience ? Or is it the mere
scenic presentment of passages from real life?
Should the dramatist look primarily to action,
90

THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER

letting character take its chance? Or primarily
to character, letting action look after itself?"

Mr. Archer exprest his own sympathy with the
latter opinion, holding that it was supplanting
the former, which he admitted to have been domi-
nant for fifty years and which he identified with
Sarcey. But he might have identified it with
Aristotle and admitted that it had been dominant
for two thousand years. Nothing could be clearer
or more emphatic than the declaration earlier
quoted from Aristotle that if you string together
a set of speeches expressive of character, and well
fmisht in point of diction and thought, "you will
not produce the essential dramatic effect nearly
so well as with a play, which, however deficient
in these aspects yet has a plot and artistically
constructed incidents." To this Mr. Archer
might answer that when Aristotle and Sarcey in-
sisted on the superior value of plot over char-
acter in arousing and retaining the interest of
the average audience, they could not foresee that
the spectators of the future in front of a picture-
frame stage might not have precisely the same
unconscious preferences as the spectators of the
past almost surrounding the platform-stage — ■
especially after these spectators may have had
their interest focust on character, rather than on
story, by the works of the many realists who have
trod the trail blazed by Balzac.

And to this retort, the rejoinder is easy, — in-
91

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

deed, Mr. Archer may despise it as a little too
easy. Admitting that the change in the playhouse
may bring about an unforeseen change in the at-
titude of the more highly cultivated playgoers,
still it is a little unlikely that the theories of the
theater which we find expounded by Aristotle first,
then by Lessing, and lastly by Sarcey, will turn
out to be any less valid in the next century than
they have proved themselves to be in the past
twenty centuries. This much at least I may
venture to predict without assuming the robe of
a prophet — an unbecoming costume which I
shall not dare to don so long as I recall George
Eliot's assertion, that " of all the forms of human
error prophecy is the most gratuitous."

(1915.)

92

V
IF SHAKSPERE SHOULD COME BACK?*

1NGEN lOUS wits have often amused themselves
by imagining the possible return of a departed
genius that he might mingle for a few hours with
men of the present generation; and they have
humorously speculated upon his emotions when he
found himself once again in the life he had left
centuries earlier. They have wondered what he
would think about this world of ours today, the
same as his of long ago and yet not the same.
What would he miss that he might have expected
to find ? What would he find that he could never
have expected? As he had been a human being
when he was in the flesh, it is a safe guess that he
would be interested first of all in himself, in the
fate of his reputation, in the opinion in which he
is now held by us who know him only thru his
writings. And it is sad to think that many a
genius would be grievously disappointed at the
shrinkage of his fame. If he had hoped to see
his books still alive, passing from hand to hand,

* This paper was written especially for 'A Book of
Homage to Shakspere.' (Oxford University Press, 1916.)
93

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

familiar on the lips as household words, he might
be shockt to discover that they survived solely
in the silent obscurity of a complete edition,
elaborately annotated and preserved on an upper
shelf for external use only. On the other hand,
there would be a genius now and then who had
died without any real recognition of his immortal
gifts and who, on his imagined return to earth,
would be delighted to discover that he now
bulkt bigger than he had ever dared to dream.

It is in this second and scanty group that Shak-
spere would belong. So far as we can judge from
the sparse records of his life and from his own
writings, he was modest and unassuming, never
vaunting himself, never boasting and probably
never puffed up by the belief that he had any
reason to boast. What he had done was all in
the day's work, a satisfaction to him as a crafts-
man when he saw that he had turned out a good
job, but a keener satisfaction to him as a man
of affairs that he was thereby getting on and
laying by against the day when he might retire
to Stratford to live the life of an English gentle-
man. Probably no other genius could now revisit
the earth who would be more completely or more
honestly astonisht by the effulgence of his fame.
To suppose that this would not be exquisitely
gratifying to him would be to suggest that he was
not human. Yet a chief component of his broad
humanity was his sense of humor; as a man he
94

IF SHAKSPERE SHOULD COME BACK f

did not take himself too seriously, and as a ghost
he would certainly smile at the ultra-seriousness
of his eulogists and interpreters. A natural
curiosity might lead him to look over a volume or
two in the huge library of Shaksperian criticism;
but these things would not detain him long.
Being modest and unassuming still, he would soon
weary of protracted praise.

It may be that Shakspere would linger long
enough over his critics and his commentators to
note that they have belauded him abundantly and
superabundantly as a poet, as a philosopher, as
a psychologist and as a playwright. He might
even be puzzled by this fourfold classification of
his gifts, failing for the moment to perceive its
precision. When he read praise of his poetry,
he would naturally expect to see it supported by
quotation from his two narrative poems or from
his one sonnet-sequence. Quite possibly he might
be somewhat annoyed to observe that these
juvenile verses, cordially received on their original
publication, were now casually beplastered with
perfunctory epithets, while the sincerest and most
searching commendation was bestowed on the
style and on the spirit of the plays, in their own
day unconsidered by literary critics and not rec-
ognized as having any claim to be esteemed as
literature. Yet this commendation, pleasing even
if unforeseen, would not go to his head, since
Shakspere — if we may venture to deduce his own
95

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

views from the scattered evidence in liis plays —
had no unduly exalted opinion of poets or of
poetry.

If he might be agreeably surprized by the praise
lavisht on him as a poet, he would be frankly
bewildered by the commendation bestowed on him
as a philosopher. He knew that he was not a
man of solid learning, and that his reading,
even if wide enough for his immediate purpose,
had never been deep. He might admit that he
had a certain insight into the affairs of men and
a certain understanding of the intricate inter-
relations of human motives. But he could never
have considered himself as an original thinker,
advancing the boundaries of knowledge or push-
ing speculation closer to the confines of the un-
knowable. All he had sought to do in the way
of philosophy was now and again to phrase afresh
as best he could one or another of the eternal com-
monplaces, which need to be minted anew for the
use of every oncoming generation. If a natural
curiosity should tempt Shakspere to turn over
a few pages of his critics to discover exactly what
there was in his writings to give him rank among
the philosophers, he would probably be more
puzzled than before, until his sense of humor
effected a speedy rescue.

Bewildered as Shakspere might be to see him-
self dissected as a philosopher, he would be startled
to discover himself described also as a psychol-
ogist. To him the word itself would be unknown
96

IF SHAKSPERE SHOULD COME BACK?

and devoid of meaning, strange in sound and
abhorrent in appearance. Even after it had been
translated to him with explanation that he de-
served discussion as a psychologist because he
had created a host of veracious characters and
had carried them thru the climax of their careers
with subtle self-revelation, he might still wonder
at this undue regard for the persons in his plays,
whom he had considered not so much vital charac-
ters as effective acting-parts devised by him to
suit the several capacities of his fellow actors,
Burbage and Arnim, Heming and Condell. It
might be that these creatures of his invention
were more than parts fitted to these actors; but
none the less had they taken shape in his brain
first of all as parts intended specifically for per-
formance by specific tragedians and comedians.

Only when Shakspere read commendation of
his skill as a playwright, pure and simple, as a
maker of plays to be performed by actors in a
theater and before an audience, so constructed
as to reward the efforts of the performers and to
arouse and sustain the interest of the spectators —
only then would he fail to be surprized at his
posthumous reputation. He could not be un-
aware that his plays, comic and tragic, or at least
that the best of them, written in the middle of
his career as a dramatist, were more adroitly put
together than the pieces of any of his predecessors
and contemporaries. He could not forget the
pains he had taken to knit together the successive
97

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

situations into a compelling plot, to provide his
story with an articulated backbone of controlling
motive, to stiffen the action with moments of
tense suspense, to urge it forward to its inevitable
and irresistible climax, to achieve effects of con-
trast, and to relieve the tragic strain with inter-
mittent humor. And even if it might mean little
or nothing to him that he was exalted to a place
beside and above Sophocles, the master of ancient
tragedy, and Moliere, the master of modern com-
edy, he might well be gratified to be recognized at
last as a most accomplisht craftsman, ever dexter-
ous in solving the problems of dramaturgic technic.
These fanciful suggestions are based on the
belief that Shakspere — like every other of the
supreme artists of the world — "builded better
than he knew"; and that this is a main reason
why his work abides unendingly interesting to us
three centuries after his death. He seems to
have written, partly for self-expression, of course,
but chiefly for the delight of his contemporaries,
with no thought for our opinion fifteen score years
later; and yet he wrought so firmly, so largely and
so loftily that we may rightly read into his works
a host of meanings which he did not consciously
intend — and for which he can take the credit,
none the less, because only he could have put them
there.

(1916.)

98

VI

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS*

IT is unreasonable to expect that a financier,
an artist or an actor should be able to talk en-
tertainingly or to write instructively about his
work in life. Sufficient is it if he can do this
work satisfactorily, by dint of native gift; and
we have no right to demand that he should al-
ways be conscious of his processes. It is the
business of the financier to make money useful
— of the artist to paint pictures or to model
statues, to design buildings or to lay out gardens,
— of the actor to delight us by the impersonation
of character involved in situation; and it is not
necessary that any one of them should be a theorist
of the art whereby he earns his living. Yet now
and again artists appear who happen to possess
the critical faculty as well as the creative; and
whenever one thus doubly endowed is moved to
discuss the practice of his calling and the princi-

* This paper was contributed to ' Shaksperian Studies'
(Columbia University Press, 1916); and it was read at a
meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, on
March 30th, 1916.

99

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

pies of his craft, the rest of us will do well to listen
attentively on the likely chance of picking up sug-
gestions from which we may profit. What Reyn-
olds and Fromentin and La Farge said about
painting has an abiding value; and so have the
less elaborate considerations of acting for which
we are indebted to Talma, to Coquelin and to
Jefferson.

In 'Art and the Actor,' Coquelin's plea for a
fuller recognition of the importance and dignity
of the histrionic profession, we are told that
"there are but few masterpieces of dramatic
literature so perfect that the actor cannot find
something to add to them, if so inclined." This
assertion will seem boastful only to those belated
expounders who still seem to think that Sophocles
and Shakspere and Moliere wrote their plays
solely for us moderns to peruse and who appear
to believe blindly that these plays, composed
expressly for the stage, will yet render up their full
content to a lonely reader in the study. The
perusal of the text will put us in possession of all
the words of the dramatic poet; but only by per-
formance in the theater itself is the spirit of a
true drama made manifest and only before an
actual audience can we gage its appeal to the soul
of the multitude. The more familiar an open-
minded reader may be with the printed lines of
a dramatic masterpiece, the more likely is he
to be delightedly surprized by the richness of

100

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

detail and the fresh revelation of meaning when
at last he has the privilege of seeing the play per-
formed; and this rich revelation is always more
or less due to the inventive skill of the performers
in elaborating the latent possibilities of the dialog,
in short, to the "something added by the actor."
The devoted student who dwells remote from
theaters, and who is thereby deprived of all op-
portunity to see Shakspere's comedies and trag-
edies on the stage itself, may worship the poet
with unquestioning idolatry; but he is in no posi-
tion to estimate the full power of the playwright.
He does not suspect how much more varied and
colored and moving these comedies and these
tragedies are when their characters are sustained
by flesh-and-blood performers, when the words
take on a new magic by the modulated tones of
the human voice, and when the action is illustrated
and illuminated by the appropriate by-play of the
actors. This by-play, which is often team-play,
this stage-business, as it is called, has been de-
vised by successive generations of ingenious per-
formers, every generation retaining the best of the
inventions of its predecessors and handing these
along (augmented by its own contributions) to
the generation that comes after. Today the
stage-manager who undertakes to produce a
play of Shakspere's has at his command an im-
mense body of these traditions, many of which
he may prefer not to utilize, altho he is certain

lOI

UNIVtKSlTY OF CALli

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

to preserve others which serve to bring into high
reHef the inner significance of vital episodes.

Such a body of gestures and actions is cherisht
by the Comedie Fran^aise and utiHzed in its per-
formances of MoHere's comedies. "There are
certain traditions at the Theatre Fran^ais," so
Coquehn told us in his address on the actor's
art, "without which Moliere is never played, and
which the spectator, becoming a reader, mentally
supplies as he sits by his fireside, as one supplies
omissions in an incomplete copy." Some of these
traditions are possibly derived directly from the
original performances when the author-actor was
the manager of the company; and some of them
are the contribution of comedians as recent as
Coquelin himself. They are so many, and they
aid so amply in the interpretation of the plays,
that Regnier brought out an edition of ' Tar-
tuff e' wherein the best of the traditions which
cluster around MoHere's masterpiece were all
carefully and elaborately set down to vivify the
dialog. Regnier called this the 'Tartuffe des
Comediens'; and Coquelin once told me that he
proposed to continue his teacher's task and to
edit other of MoHere's more important comedies
with a similar amplitude of histrionic annotation.
It is greatly to be regretted that the project
was never carried out; no existing edition of
Moliere would surpass this in interest or in utility,
if it had been prepared with the skill, the tact,

102

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

and the scholarship displayed by Regnier in his
single volume.

Coquelin asserted that the spectator of Moli^re,
becoming a reader, supplied mentally the illus-
trative actions which he could not find in the
text. But how about the reader of Moliere who
has never been a spectator? His memory can-
not supply this material; and even if his imagina-
tion is active, he can never invent as adroitly
or as abundantly as the actors themselves,
charged with the high responsibility of actual
performance and trained to scrutinize the dialog
assiduously in search of histrionic opportunity.
The task which Regnier began and which Coquelin
failed to carry out, may yet be completed by one
or another of the comedians of the Theatre Fran-
fais; and even before it is finally accomplisht
for Moliere, it may be undertaken for Shakspere.
The Shaksperian traditions are as many, as
varied and as helpful; and they are now kept
alive only by word of mouth, descending orally
from actor to actor or preserved by the industry
of a chance stage-manager in the flagrant inse-
curity of an unprinted prompt-copy.

When Macready retired from the active prac-
tice of his profession, George Henry Lewes ex-
prest the hope that the actor would devote
his honorable leisure to the preparation of an
edition of Shakspere, in which there should be due
recognition of the fact that Shakspere was as great
103

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

as a playwright as he was as a poet. The actor
did not accept the invitation of the critic; and
even if he had, we may doubt whether he would
have condescended to record all the many tradi-
tions of the theater, some of which he himself de-
vised, while others he inherited from John Kem-
ble and Edmund Kean, to pass along to Edwin
Booth and Henry Irving. Sometimes a con-
temporary criticism has recorded for us the name
of the actor whose ingenuity was responsible for
a striking effect developt out of the unadorned
dialog and yet not discovered by any of his prede-
cessors in the part; and sometimes the customary
business is so old that its origin must be ascribed
to a time whereof the memory of man runneth
not to the contrary.

While it is always interesting to know the name
of the performer who first enricht the text with
a felicitous accompaniment of pause and em-
phasis, glance and gesture, what is really impor-
tant to remember is that there is no single scene
in any one of the more frequently acted comedies
and tragedies which has not thus been made more
pictorial and thereby more dramatic in the eyes
of the actual spectators. Every edition pre-
serves for us the words uttered by Othello and
I ago in the marvelously built up crescendo when
I ago distills the poison of jealousy drop by drop
until Othello writhes in his overwhelming agony.
But how did lago deliver his corroding insinua-
104

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

tions? How did Othello listen to them? Were
they standing or sitting? What was the arrange-
ment of the room? How was the mounting ac-
tion intensified by looks and movements? How
did the two actors play into each other's hands to
achieve the ultimate peak and summit to which
all that went before had tended irresistibly?
These things we do not find in any existing edition.
It is idle to say that these things are relatively
unimportant and that we have Shakspere's
words, which ought to suffice. Shakspere wrote
his words specifically for actors, and for the inter-
pretation and embellishment which only actors
can give; and his words demand this interpre-
tation and embellishment before they surrender
their full content or disclose their ultimate po-
tency. No commentary on Hamlet, of all the
countless hundreds that have been written,
would be a more useful aid to a larger under-
standing of his character than a detailed record
of the readings, the gestures, the business em-
ployed in the successive performances of the part
by Burbage and by Betterton, by Garrick and
by Kemble, by Macready and by Forrest, by
Booth and by Irving. It is not that any one of
these renowned actors is necessarily superior in
critical acumen to the more intellectual of the
commentators; it is that they have been com-
pelled by their professional training to acquire an
insight into this character composed specifically
105

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

S

for their use — an insight to be attained only in
the theater itself and hopelessly unattainable in
the library even by the most scholarly or by
the most brilliant expositor.

II

Outside of her profession Mrs. Siddons was
only an ordinary mortal; and the essay which she
wrote on the character of Lady Macbeth is quite
negligible. But inside of her profession she was
a genius, gifted with an interpreting imagina-
tion by means of which she projected a more
commanding and more sinister figure than had
ever been suspected to be latent in the relatively
few speeches of the comparatively brief part of
Lady Macbeth. Mrs. Siddons created the char-
acter anew; she made it more dominating than
it had ever been before; and in so doing she
seems to have carried Shakspere's intentions to
a point which he could not have foreseen. When
we survey the tragedy as a whole, we perceive
that the dramatist spent his main effort on
Macbeth himself, on the hero-villain who begins
and ends the play, and that the heroine-villain
is only an accessory character, marvelously sig-
nificant, no doubt, but nevertheless subordinate.
In writing the words of Macbeth, so Fleeming
Jenkin finely suggested, Shakspere "cannot have
had present to his mind all the gestures and ex-
io6

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

pressions of Lady Macbeth as she listened," and
yet this by-play of Mrs. Siddons "was such that
the audience, looking at her, forgot to listen to
Macbeth." What Shakspere supplied was a
mightily etcht outline for the performer of the
part to color superbly; and Shakspere is a mas-
terly playwright partly because his plays ever
abound in opportunities to be improved by the
insight of inspired actors.

Fleeming Jenkin was not relying solely upon
the casual discussion of Mrs. Siddons' acting pre-
served in contemporary criticisms; he was sup-
ported by the detailed record of her readings,
her intonations, her pauses, her glances, her
gestures and her movements made by a compe-
tent observer. Professor G. J. Bell, who annotated
the text as he followed her performances night
after night. And Professor Bell added to this
invaluable account of what the great actress did
in this great part, a summary of the total impres-
sion made by her in the tragedy: — "Of Lady Mac-
beth there is not a great deal in the play, but
the wonderful genius of Mrs. Siddons makes it
the whole. . . . Her turbulent and inhuman
strength of spirit does all. She turns Macbeth
to her purpose, makes him her mere instrument,
guides, directs and inspires the whole plot. Like
Macbeth's evil genius she hurries him on in the
mad career of ambition and cruelty from which
his nature would have shrunk." Possibly Shak-
107

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

spere meant this; certainly he suppHed the ma-
terial for it; but it was the actress who brought
out all the hidden possibilities of the character
to an extent that the poet could scarcely have
anticipated.

Professor Bell declared that when she was im-
personating Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Siddons was
"not before an audience; her mind wrought up
in high conception of her part, her eye never
wandering, never for a moment idle, passion and
sentiment continually betraying themselves. Her
words are the accompaniments of her thoughts,
scarcely necessary, you would imagine, to the
expression, but highly raising it, and giving the
full force of poetical effect."

This record of Mrs. Siddons' Lady Macbeth is
testimony to the truth of one striking passage in
the illuminating paper which Fleeming Jenkin
prepared to accompany it. The words uttered
by any one of Shakspere's chief characters, so the
critic asserted, "do not by themselves supply the
actor with one-hundredth part of the actions he
has to perform. Every single word has to be
spoken with just intonation and emphasis, while
not a single intonation or emphasis is indicated by
the printed copy. The actor must find the
expression of face, the attitude of body, the
action of the limbs, the pauses, the hurries — the
life, in fact. There is no logical process by which
all these things can be evolved out of the mere
io8

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

words of a part. The actor must go direct to na-
ture and his own heart for the tones and the
action by which he is to move his audience; these
his author cannot give him, and in creating these,
if he be a great actor, his art is supremely great."
Here Fleeming Jenkin is putting into other words
the almost contemporary assertion of Coquelin
that "there are but few masterpieces so perfect
that the actor cannot find something to add to
them." And all that the supremely great actors
can imagine to move an audience, the printed
dialog is devoid of; and the mere reader in the
library cannot restore it unless he has earlier been
a spectator in the theater itself.

Ill

Just as Regnier's 'TartuflFe des Comediens' af-
forded a model for the editing of Moliere, so we
have in English at least one attempt to supply an
edition of a Shaksperian play as it was interpreted
by the genius of a great actor. This is E. T. Ma-
son's record of Salvini's Othello, in which we
find all that the fortunate spectators of that
massive performance need when they become
readers and when they endeavor to supply men-
tally the tones and the gestures with which the
Italian actor illuminated the English tragedy.
Mr. Mason gave us portraits of the actor cos-
tumed for the part ; and he supplied descriptions
109

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

and diagrams of all the stage-sets used by Salvini.
He set down the tragedian's readings, his glances
and his gestures, and his movements about the
stage; and so complete is this record that a lonely
student who had never been able to see Othello
performed would get from it a fuller disclosure of
the essential energy of the tragedy than he could
possibly have had before.

It is true that the lonely student might have
been aided in the eflfect to evoke in his mind's
eye an imagined performance by a collection
and a comparison of contemporary criticisms of
actual performances by Edmund Kean, by Ma-
cready and by Edwin Booth; and he would find
especially helpful Lewes' noble tribute to Sal-
vini's tremendous exhibition of power at the
highest point of the wonderfully wrought scene
in which lago unchains the demon of jealousy in
Othello. " But the whole house was swept
along by the intense and finely graduated cul-
mination of passion in the outburst, 'Villain, be
sure you prove' when seizing lago and shaking
him as a lion might shake a wolf, he finishes by
flinging him on the ground, raises his foot to
trample on the wretch — and then a sudden re-
vulsion of feeling checks the brutality of the
act, the gentleman masters the animal, and with
mingled remorse and disgust he stretches forth
a hand to raise him up."

Yet eloquent as this passage is, it is not so

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

useful to the lonely student as Mr. Mason's mi-
nute account of all that was done in the course
of the entire act of which this was the climax.
Helpful also are the invaluable notes on his own
procedure when acting Othello or lago contrib-
uted by Edwin Booth to the volume on 'Othello'
in Furness' 'Variorum Edition.' More than any
preceding editor did Furness perceive the im-
portance of considering the actors' specific con-
tribution to an adequate understanding of Shak-
spere's merits as a playwright; and therefore all
the later volumes of the 'Variorum' are enricht
by more or less criticism of actual performances,
often with indication of readings and of business.
Here and there also in the ample volumes of Wil-
liam Winter's 'Shakspere on the Stage' we find
loving record of the manner in which culminating
moments were rendered by the foremost Shak-
sperian actors and actresses of the past half-cen-
tury. For example, Winter has preserved for
us the interesting fact that it was Adelaide Neil-
son who first caused Juliet on the balcony to pluck
the flowers from her breast and to throw them
down to Romeo with an apparently unpre-
meditated gesture expressive of the ecstasy of her
overmastering passion.

Again in Clara Morris' account of her ear-
lier years on the stage she credits herself with
the invention of an intensification of the dra-
matic effect in the final act of 'Othello,' Al-
III

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

tho she was then only a sHp of a girl she was
called upon to impersonate the mature Emilia.
After the death of Desdemona Emilia gives the
alarm, crying aloud,

Help ! Help ! Oh, help !

The Moor hath killed my mistress ! Murder !
Murder !
and then the bell tolls a general alarm. The
young actress arranged with the prompter that
the bell should sound immediately after her
shriek for

Help ! Help !
After this first stroke she raised her voice and
cried.

Help ! Oh, help !
whereupon the bell rang out again and again.
Instantly she resumed her outcry.

The Moor hath killed my mistress !

And then the bell once more tolled the alarm.
Finally she shriekt,

Murder ! Murder !
and the tolling was repeated until Montano and
Gratiano and lago rush in. Miss Morris is
pleased to inform us that the result of this novel
punctuation of her lines by the brazen tongue of
the tocsin was to make her voice seem to combine
with the clangor and to soar above it.

It would be pleasant to know whether or not
the late William F. Owen should be credited with
the devising of the felicitous business which en-

112

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

hanced Falstaff's reception of Prince Hal's ex-
posure of his mendacity in the matter of the men
in buckram, when a condensation of the two parts
of 'Henry IV' was produced by Robert Taber
and JuHa Marlowe. After Falstaff has told his
tale the Prince and Poins corner him. The scene
represented the tavern at Eastcheap with its
huge fireplace before which stood a spacious arm-
chair with its back to the audience. After
Falstaff had met the Prince's incredulity with
abuse, he cried, "O for breath to utter !" and then
he sank into the chair, sputtering out his final in-
sults. Whereupon the Prince explained that: —
" We two saw you four set upon four, and were
masters of their wealth. Mark now, how plain a
tale shall put you down."

As soon as Falstaflf was convinced that his bluff
was about to be called he shrank into the chair
and the back of his head was no longer to be seen;
so the Prince stated his case to an invisible Fal-
staff, ending with "What trick? what device?
what starting hole cans't thou now find out, to
hide thee from this open and apparent shame?"
Then Henry paused for a reply and it was so long
in coming, that Poins backed up the Prince, say-
ing, "Come, let's hear, Jack. What trick hast
thou now?"

Falstaff out of sight of the audience had twisted
himself about in the chair until he was kneeling on
it ; and he slowly raised his face above its back —

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

a face wreathed with smiles and ready to break
into triumphant laughter, as at last he was ready
with his retort: "I knew ye — as well as he that
made ye ! Why, hear ye, my masters; was it for
me to kill the heir apparent? Should I turn
upon the true Prince?"

Whether this business was Owen's own, or
Robert Taber's, or inherited from Samuel Phelps,*
it is excellent; and it deserves to be set down in
the margin of the actor's edition of the play.
And there are countless other histrionic accre-
tions which also demand to be preserved. Valu-
able as are Winter's and Booth's and Lewes'
descriptions. Bell's record of Mrs. Siddons as
Lady Macbeth and Mason's account of Salvini's
Othello, they preserve for us only a few of the
greater moments of a few of the greatest plays as
performed by great actors.

We want more than this; we need to have in
black and white the whole body of stage-tradition.
We ought to have all the valuable readings and all
the accessory business set-down carefully and pre-
served permanently, for if these things are al-
lowed to slip from the memory of the few who now
know them, they can never be recovered. It may
be admitted frankly that some of these traditions
are incongruous excrescences, occasionally foolish
and sometimes oflFensive, handed down thought-

* Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson tells me that he does
not recall it in Phelps' performance.
114

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

lessly from a time when the essential quahty of
Shakspere was less highly appreciated than it is
today. There is no reason for regret, for in-
stance, that the Second Gravedigger in 'Hamlet'
no longer delays the action and disturbs the
spirit of Ophelia's burial by stripping off an un-
expected sequence of waistcoats to the delight
of the unthinking — a clowning device which,
oddly enough, is also traditional at the end of
Moliere's ' Precieuses Ridicules,' where it is not
out of place since it is there quite in keeping with
the tone of that lively little comedy. And per-
haps there would be no loss if Romeo and Mercutio
ceased to bewilder Peter when he is delivering the
invitations by a succession of ironic salutations,
just as Gratiano and Bassanio bewilder Gobbo, —
the business being identical in both plays and
having no warrant in the text of either.

These may be dismist as unwarrantable ob-
trusions to be discarded unhesitatingly; but to
admit this is not to discredit the utility of the
traditions in general. They are to be received
as precious heirlooms, a legacy to the present and
to the future, from the finest performers and from
the most adroit stage-managers of the past, a
store of accumulated devices always to be con-
sidered carefully, to be selected from judiciously
and to be cast aside only after mature considera-
tion. And, first of all, before any selection can
be attempted, these traditions need all of them
115

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

to be placed on record for what they are worth.
Moreover, as the value of a suggestion, if not its
validity, is due in part at least to the reputation
of its suggester, the record ought (in so far as this
is now possible) to register also the name of the
originator of every specific piece of business and
of every illuminating reading.

IV

John Philip Kemble, for example, altho a
little austere and chilly as an actor, was a most
fertile deviser of points; and it is believed that
some of the most striking effects made by Mrs.
Siddons were due to the inventiveness of her
brother. One of these, and one of the most
characteristic, is in the trial scene of ' Henry
VI 11.' Queen Katharine comes before the King
and the two cardinals, Wolsey and Campeius,
sitting as judges of the legality of her marriage
to Henry; and she begins by an appeal to her
husband. When she makes an end, Wolsey,
whom she knows for her personal enemy, counters
by asserting the integrity and the learning of the
judges of the case; and Campeius very courte-
ously suggests that the royal session proceed.
Then there follow these two speeches:

Queen. Lord Cardinal,

To you I speak.
IVolsey. Your pleasure, madam.

Ii6

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

But there are two cardinals present before her,
and Campeius has just spoken. Why then should
Wolsey alone answer when the Queen says.

Lord Cardinal, to you 1 speak ?

The actress can, of course, suggest a sufficient
reason for Wolsey's taking her words to himself
by looking at him when she begins: yet this is
barely sufficient, since the two cardinals are
sitting side by side and the Queen is at some little
distance. When Kemble played Wolsey and Mrs.
Siddons was Queen Katharine this is how the brief
dialog was managed. At the end of Campeius'
senterKe or two, the Queen spoke.

Lord Cardinal,
and then paused, whereupon Campeius rose and
moved a little toward her, evidently believing that
she was about to answer him. As he approacht
her she turned from him impatiently, so Professor
Bell has recorded, immediately making a sweet
but dignified bow of apology. "Then to Wolsey,
turned and looking from him, with her hand
pointing back to him, in a voice of thunder.

To you I speak !

The effect of this outburst is so electric that it
has been repeated in the subsequent revivals of
' Henry VI 1 1,' as I can testify from my memory of
Charlotte Cushman's performance, Modjeska's
and Ellen Terry's; and in so arranging it Kemble
made a permanent contribution to the staging
of Shakspere."

117

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

As much cannot be said for an infelicitous in-
vention of Saraii-Bernhardt's when she rashly
ventured to exhibit herself as Hamlet. In the
interview between Hamlet and the Queen in which
he speaks daggers but uses none, he bids his
mother contrast her two husbands:

Look here, upon this picture and on this.

How are those two portraits to be shown to the
spectators? or are they to be shown at all?
Henry Irving accepted them as purely imaginary,
seen only in the mind's eye; and so did Edwin
Booth sometimes, altho he often preferred
to wear a miniature of his father, pendant from
his neck so that he might compare this with a
miniature of his uncle which his mother wore
suspended also by a chain. Fechter tore the
miniature of his uncle from the Queen's neck
after contrasting it with a painting of his father
hanging on the wall. Betterton had two half-
length portraits side by side above the wainscot,
Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt employed a pair of full-
length paintings, framed high up in the wood-
work on the wall facing the Queen as she sat;
and when the young Prince expatiated piously
on his father's qualities, physical and moral, the
portrait of the elder Hamlet suddenly became
transparent and thru it the audience beheld
the Ghost — a trivial spectacular trick which im-
mediately distracted the attention of the specta-
tors.

Ii8

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

Irving's suppression of visible portraits was
perhaps more in accord with the spirit of the
episode (and of the play as a whole) than was
Booth's occasional use of two miniatures; cer-
tainly it was simpler. And yet Irving was rarely
as simple as Booth. The American tragedian
was wont to rely boldly on his mastery of the art
of acting, whereas the British character-actor
felt it advisable to support his impersonation
by every possible device of the stage-manager.
Irving may or may not have suspected the limita-
tions of his accomplishment as an actor, whereas
in stage-management his supremacy over all his
contemporaries was indisputable. He was in-
cessantly fertile and unfailingly dexterous in the
discovery of novel methods for vivifying Shak-
spere's dialog. For the scene of Jessica's elope-
ment in the 'Merchant of Venice' he designed a
characteristic Venetian set — a piazzetta with
Shylock's house on the right and with a bridge
over the canal which crosses the stage. Shylock
bids Jessica lock herself in; and then he goes
away over the bridge to the supper to which he
has been invited. It is the carnival season; and
a merry band of maskers revels past with light
laughter. Then Gratiano comes on; and a
gondola glides up from which Lorenzo steps out.
They hail Jessica, who throws to them out of the
window her father's casket of jewels and money,
after which she descends and unlocks the door, and
119

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

comes out in boy's apparel, and lets her lover bear
her away in the gondola. Gratiano remains and
exchanges a few words with Antonio, who has
chanced by. When they have gone, the maskers
gaily flash across the bridge once more; and
after a little the stage is left empty. Then in the
distance we hear the tapping of Shylock's staff,
and soon we see him crossing the bridge to stand
at last knocking at the door of his now robbed and
deserted home. It is only when he has knockt
a second time that the curtain slowly falls, leav-
ing us to imagine for ourselves his grief and his
rage when he finds out his double misfortune.

Again in the trial-scene, after Shylock is baf-
fled and despoiled, he asks leave to go.

1 am not well. Send the deed after me, and
I will sign it.

Irving made his exit and there was silence for
a little space, suddenly broken by the angry mur-
murs of the mob outside, hooting at the discom-
fited usurer. For neither of these effects is there
any warrant in Shakspere's text; the first was
impossible on the sceneless stage of the Globe
theater, and the second was too subtle for the
ruder tastes of Tudor audiences; and yet both
are perfectly in keeping with the temper and spirit
of the play.

It is to be noted, however, that Irving missed
a moving dramatic effect in allowing Ellen Terry
to declaim the lines on the Quality of Mercy in

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

accord with the customary delivery of that ora-
tion, treating it as an eloquent opportunity for
triumphant elocution. Ada Rehan adjusted the
speech more artistically to the situation; Portia
has told Shylock that he must be merciful, and he
has scornfully askt,

On what compulsion must I ?

Whereupon Portia explains to him the blessings
of mercy — and Ada Rehan then spoke the speech
as a summons to his better self, addressing herself
directly to him, evidently inspired by the hope
that her plea might soften his heart and watching
eagerly to discover if it did. Thus treated the
beautiful appeal intensified the dramatic poign-
ancy of the moment; and thus treated it seems
to be more completely in harmony with Shak-
spere's intent.

Yet there is danger always in spending undue
effort in a vain attempt to discover what Shak-
spere or any other dramatist meant to do, instead
of centering our attention upon what he actually
did, whatever his intent may have been. It is
highly probable, for instance, that Shakspere
intended Shylock to be a despicable villain de-
testable to all spectators; but what Shakspere
actually did was to create an indisputable human
being, arousing our sympathy at the very time
when we hold him in horror. Fanny Kemble saw
Edmund Kean in 1827, and she recorded that he
" entirely divested Shylock of all poetry or eleva-

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

tion, but invested it with a concentrated ferocity
that made one's blood curdle/' Quite possibly all
that Shakspere intended was this concentrated
ferocity, but none the less did he lend poetry and
elevation to the sinister character. Kean may
have performed Shylock in accord with Shak-
spere's intent; but Irving and Booth, both of
them, preferred to reveal rather the poetry and
the elevation with which Shakspere had dowered
the character. If Shylock has poetry and eleva-
tion, it is because Shakspere gave them to him,
even if he knew not what he did; and it is always
what the artist actually did, and not merely what
he meant to do, which we need to perceive clearly.
Later generations read into a masterpiece of art
many a meaning which the author might disclaim
and yet which may be contained in it, none the
less, because the great artist is great only because
he has "builded better than he knew," even if he
left latent what seem to us patent. A wide
gulf yawns between us and our Tudor ancestors;
and in the centuries that separate us there must
have been many changes in taste, in opinion and
in prejudice. To the stalwart and stout-stom-
ached Elizabethans Shylock may have appeared
as one kind of a creature, while he seems to us a
very different being, more human mainly because
we ourselves are more humane. Irving's pathetic
return of Shylock to his abandoned home would
have been hooted by the groundlings of the Globe;

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

and yet it is a pictorial embellishment which serves
to bring out the Shylock whom we watch with
commingled abhorrence and sympathy, even
tho Shakspere might himself protest that sym-
pathy should not be wasted on his sordid serio-
comic villain.

In its time Fechter's Hamlet was the cause of
a plentiful waste of ink, let loose by the deliberate
novelty of his performance. Fundamentally
Fechter was an emotional rather than an intel-
lectual actor; and what chiefly interested him in
the tragedy was not so much the character of
Hamlet as the swift succession of striking situa-
tions. To him the 'Hamlet' of Shakspere was
like the 'Ruy Bias' of Victor Hugo, essentially
a melodrama altho adorned with exquisite
poetry — and there is this much to be said for
Fechter's view, that we can still catch sight of the
supporting skeleton of the coarser tragedy-of-
blood which Shakspere endowed with the hu-
manity of a true tragedy. Where English
actors had been a little inclined to see an embodi-
ment of philosophic reflection, sicklied o'er with
the pale cast of thought, the French actor saw a
romantic hero entangled in a complexity of
pathetic situations; and what interested him was
rather the theatrical effectiveness of these situa-
tions than the soul of the hero himself. To Fech-
123

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

ter, Hamlet was a picturesque part for the lead-
ing man of the Porte Saint Martin; and he nat-
urally treated the play as he would treat any
other Porte Saint Martin melodrama, to be
made as emotionally effective as might be and
to be presented as pictorially as possible.

As Hamlet was a Dane, Fechter presented
him as a blond, adorning his head with locks not
exactly flaxen in tint but rather reddish. (On
this point doubt is not possible since the wig that
Fechter used to wear as Hamlet is now piously
preserved among the other histrionic memorabilia
on exhibition in the club-house of The Players
in New York.) Himself a sculptor in his youth
and always closely associated with artists pic-
torial and plastic, Fechter was fertile in design-
ing the scenic habiliment of the plays he produced.
A large part of the action of 'Hamlet' was made
to take place in the main hall of the castle of
Elsinore. In this spacious room we saw the
performance of the 'Mousetrap' and also the
fencing match of the final act. This hall filled
the stage; it had broad doors at the back, and
above this portal was a gallery with smaller doors
at both ends leading off to upper rooms and with
curving stairways descending on either side.
Many of the exits and entrances were made by
means of one or another of these stairways; and
Fechter utilized them artfully when the time came
for the killing of the King. The throne upon
124

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

which Claudius sat to behold the fencing was on
one side. Kate Field's record of the business,
in her biography of Fechter, conforms to my own
recollection of it: —
"The moment Hamlet exclaimed

Ho ! let the door be lockt.
Treachery ! Seek it out !

"the King exhibited signs of fear; and while
Laertes made his terrible confession, the regicide
stole to the opposite stairs, shielding himself
from Hamlet's observation behind a group of
courtiers who, paralized with horror, failed to
remark the action. Laertes no sooner uttered
the words

The King's to blame !

than Hamlet turned suddenly to the throne in
search of his victim. Discovering the ruse he
rushed up the left-hand stairs, to meet the King
in the center of the gallery and stabbed him.
"... As he descended the stairs the potent
poison stole upon Hamlet, who, murmuring

The rest is silence !

fell dead upon the corpse of Laertes, thus show-
ing his forgiveness of treachery and remembrance
of Ophelia."

125

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING
VI

Mention has already been made of Ada
Rehan's method of delivering the appeal to Shy-
lock's better nature in which she described the
quality of mercy. In default of evidence 1 cannot
say whether her attitude was derived from a tradi-
tion which had not been preserved in such other
performances of the 'Merchant of Venice' as I
have been permitted to see, or whether it was
assumed for the first time in Augustin Daly's last
production of the play. Daly was a producer — to
use the term now accepted in the theater — of
singular individuality, familiar with accepted
traditions, and yet often preferring to discard
them in favor of novelties of his devising. On
occasion he exhibited a wrongheadness which was
almost perverse in its eccentricity; but far more
frequently his originality manifested itself in
unhackneyed arrangements which set familiar
passages in a new light.

Of all his Shaksperian revivals the 'Taming of
the Shrew' was perhaps the most completely satis-
fying in its sumptuous stage-setting and in its
intricate stage-management, yet his presentation
of 'As You Like It' was a close second. As he
was a martinet in the discipline of his company,
we may credit to him rather than to the actor
himself a new departure in the interpretation of
the character of Jaques. In the structure of
126

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

*As You Like It' Shakspere closely followed the
story of Lodge's 'Rosalynde'; yet he introduced
several figures not to be found in this source.
One of these is Jaques, who has nothing whatever
to do with the plot of the piece, who seems to
exist for his own sake, and who is allowed to
usurp the attention of the audience for his self-
revelatory harangues. 1 have suggested else-
where that possibly Jaques was invented for the
sole purpose of providing a part for Burbage
— a part rich in elocutionary opportunities.
Now, what manner of man is this Jaques, created
to disclose himself not by action but only by
discourse?

Richard Grant White maintained "that what
Jaques meant by melancholy was what we now
call cynicism — a sullen, scoffmg, snarling spirit."
In the view of the American critic, Jaques "was
one of those men who believe in nothing good,
and who as the reason of their lack of faith in
human nature and of hope of human happiness,
and their want of charity, tell us that they have
seen the world." White declared that in de- '
livering the speech on the seven ages of man, J4
Jaques seizes "the occasion to sneer at the repre- - 4
sentatives of the whole human race." . -^

For this opinion of Jaques the critic claimed ]

originality for himself, asserting that it was

contrary to that usually shown on the stage.

Since White first stated it in 1854, it has succeeded

127

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

in acclimating itself in the theater, where Jaques
has frequently been presented as an embittered
despiser of mankind; in fact, it bids fair to estab-
lish itself as the accepted stage-tradition. This
reading of the part is attractive to the actor of
Jaques, since it increases the wilful perversity of
his personality and makes the character stand
out in bold relief, his malignity contrasting with
the kindliness of the Duke and of his genial com-
panions in the forest.

But is this necessarily the right reading of the
part ? Is there ever any one interpretation of the
more richly rounded characters of Shakspere's
plays which we must accept as undeniably the
only admissible rendering? in his more ambi-
tious figures Shakspere is not satisfied to give us
mere outlines, profiles, silhouettes, to be seen
from one angle only; he bestows upon them the
rotundity of real life; and we may dispute
about them, as we dispute about the characters
of our acquaintances and of prominent men in
public life. No critic may feel entitled to assert
that he has attained to a final decision as to the
exact character of Hamlet or Shylock or Jaques;
and every one of us is justified in defending his
own opinion as to these creatures of imagination
all compact.

Certainly it was a Jaques very unlike White's
that Daly showed us in his revival of 'As You
Like It.' Daly held that Jaques is a humorist,
128

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

recognized as such by all his comrades — a humor-
ist who affects to be a satirist and who is not to
be taken too seriously. And Jaques himself is
quite conscious of this tolerant and amused atti-
tude of his fellows toward him and that they are
always expecting him to take antagonistic views
and are always wondering what he is going to
say next, ever ready for his exaggerated out-
breaks and ever ready to laugh with him, even if
they are also laughing at him. As Jaques is
aware of their expectation, he responds to it;
he gives them what they are looking for; he
abounds in his own sense; he looses free rein to
his wit and to his whimsical fantasy, certain that
his customary hearers will know that there is no
sting to his satire. Such men are not uncommon
nowadays in real life; and in the threatening
monotony of our modern existence they are
eagerly welcomed and their over-emphatic utter-
ances are awaited with smiling expectancy.

It was thus that Daly conceived the character
of Jaques and that he arranged the way in which
the other actors should receive the outpourings
of the self-conscious humorist. When Orlando
breaks in upon the feast and demands food for
Adam, the Duke bids him go and fetch the faith-
ful old servant. The interval between Orlando's
departure and his return with Adam must be
filled up so that the audience may not be forced
to feel that it has been kept waiting; and Shak-
129

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

spere drafts Jaques for this service. After Or-
lando goes, the Duke remarks that

We are not all alone unhappy.

This wide and universal theater

Presents more woful pageants than the scene

Wherein we play in.

Here Jaques sees his opportunity and declares
that

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

Then he pauses, to observe whether this meets
with approval; and the others smile back, as if
to encourage him to proceed. Thus heartened
by their sympathetic attention he takes up his
parable and evolves the theory of the seven ages
of man. He is not reciting a set speech, prepared
in advance; he is extemporizing, sometimes
hesitating for the right word, and always acutely
sensitive to the effect he is producing upon his
listeners. Thus delivered the speech is robbed
of its bitterness and emptied of its cynicism.
And as it falls from the lips of Jaques its hearers
exchange glances in recognition of the fact that
their humorous friend is in excellent vein, sur-
passing himself in whimsical exaggeration, even
if he ends, as humorists are wont to do, upon a
note of melancholy.

130

SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS

When the famihar words are spoken under
these conditions they have a freshness which is
totally absent if Jaques declaims them as part of
a set speech. In his illuminating address on the
'Illusion of the First Time in Acting,' William
Gillette* has dwelt on the danger to which the
drama is exposed whenever the actor carelessly
reveals himself as knowing by heart the words
which the character is supposed to be uttering
without premeditation. There is always a temp-
tation for the performer to see in the Seven Ages
and the Quality of Mercy, in Hamlet's soliloquy
and Mark Antony's appeal, an opportunity for
an elocutionary exhibition, perhaps effective
enough in itself, yet damaging to the total effect
of the play. To turn every one of these speeches
into a piece to be spoken may not be fairly de-
scribed as a stage-tradition; yet the practice is far
too prevalent in the acting of Shakspere to-day,
and it is probably an inheritance from the past.
There would be a stimulus to the adoption of a
better method if the actor's edition of Shakspere
should record the various devices by which this
danger has been averted.

In this paper it has been possible to adduce only

*It may be noted that Gillette's address and the essays
of Coquelin and Fleeming Jenkin, from which quotation
has been made in this paper, are all reprinted in the Second
Series of the Publications of the Dramatic Museum of
Columbia University (19 15).
131

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAVMAKING

a few of the many instances where an unexpected
illumination of Shakspere's text has been accom-
plisht by inventive actors and by ingenious
stage-managers, who have made explicit what
they believed to be implicit in the dialog. Where
they found only the seed itself, they have shown
the expanding flower potentially contained within
it. What they have done for Shakspere they have
done for Moliere and for Sheridan; and this is
one reason why the accredited classics of the
drama are likely to seem to us, when we see them
on the stage, ampler in detail and solider in texture
than the plays of our own time, which have not yet
been able to profit by the contributions of genera-
tion after generation of actors and stage-managers.
And a warm welcome awaits the editor who shall
employ the most significant of these stage-tradi-
tions to vivify the text of his edition of Shakspere.

(1916.)

132

VH
THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA

AS we look down the long history of dramatic
L literature we cannot help seeing that the suc-
cessful playwrights may be assorted into different
groups. They are all of them, of course, first and
foremost playwrights — that is to say, they all
possess the innate and instinctive gift of arous-
ing and of retaining the interest of the playgoers
of their own time and of their own country.
They are all story-tellers on the stage, because a
play needs a plot above all else, if it is to please
long and to please many. But the kind of story
they will select and the degree of importance
they will give to the story itself will depend on
their own differing attitude toward life and their
own special qualifications.

Some successful playwrights are poets, essen-
tially dramatic, like Sophocles and Shakspere,
or essentially lyric like Rostand and d'Annunzio.
Some are social satirists, like Moliere and Beau-
marchais. Some are wits like Sheridan or
humorists like Labiche. Some, like Ibsen, are
primarily psychologists creating characters to
133

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

be revealed in successive situations; and some,
like Brieux, are sociologists dealing with the
problems of the day. Some are journalists, as
Aristophanes was on occasion and as Sardou was
in his earlier comedies of contemporary Paris.
Some are preachers, like Bernard Shaw. And
some of them are simply story-tellers, pure and
simple, not poets or psychologists or philosophers,
not humorists or journalists, but merely con-
cocters of plots, so adroitly put together that the
acted narratives amuse us in the playhouse and
give us the special pleasure to be found only in
the theater, without providing us with the added
delight which we derive from the veracious and
significant portrayal of men and women.

Of these story-tellers of the stage, content to
be story-tellers only and satisfied to rely on the
attraction of a sequence of ingenious situations
artfully articulated, Scribe is the chief. He is
not a poet; he is not even a man of letters; he
does not make us think; he does not deposit in
our memories anything worthy of remembrance.
All he can do is to amuse us while we are in the
playhouse with the mechanical dexterity of the
story he is setting before us by the aid of all the
devices of the theater. He is a story-teller on
the stage and nothing else; but he is one of the
indisputable masters of stage story-telling. His
stories may be empty, arbitrary, artificial; but
they are sufficient unto themselves. He is suc-
134

THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA

cessful in achieving all that he is ambitious of
attaining — the entertainment of the spectators,
by the exhibition of his surpassing skill in in-
venting and in combining effective situations.

It may be admitted that merely as a crafts-
man he is not more dexterous than certain of the
greater dramatists. As sheer machinery nothing
of his is better in its kind than the exposition of
'Othello' or of 'Tartuffe'; and he never put
together a plot more artistically wrought out
than those of 'QEdipus the King' or of 'Ghosts.'
But Shakspere and Moliere, Sophocles and Ibsen,
while they reveal themselves as the most accom-
plisht of technicians, are not content to be
technicians only and the larger, loftier and nobler
qualities of their dramas are so abundantly evi-
dent that few of us ever pay attention to their
marvelous mastery of technic. But Scribe was
nothing but a technician; and it is solely by his
mastery of technic that he maintained himself
in the theater for two score years.

He was astonishingly fertile; and his produc-
tivity was exhibited in almost every department
of the drama, — in farce, in the comedy of anec-
dote, in opera-comique, in grand opera, and even
in librettos for the ballet. He did not lay his
scenes always in his native land, whose manners
and customs he could not help knowing; at one
time or another he ventured to manufacture
plots supposed to take place in almost every
135

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

habitable country in the globe. The 'Bataille
de Dames' and 'Adrienne Lecouvreur' were
stories of France; but the action of the 'Dame
Blanche' took place in Scotland, that of 'Fra
Diavolo' in Italy, that of 'La Juive' in Spain,
that of 'Le Prophete' in Germany, and that of
'L'Africaine' partly in Africa. In one piece, sug-
gested by Fenimore Cooper's 'Lionel Lincoln,'
he even ventured to cross the western ocean and
to take Boston for his background.

Sometimes, as in the case of the Cooper adapta-
tion and of the 'Dumb Girl of Portici' he had to
go abroad because the original of the story he
was setting on the stage was foreign and could not
well be made French, And sometimes, on the
other hand, he transported his tale to a far coun-
try, to a land other than his own, so that he could
attribute to it the manners and the customs and
the laws which he needed to enable him to im-
mesh the puppets of his plot in the thrilling situa-
tions he had invented. He did not set out on
these travels to capture the local color of the
countries he might visit, as Hugo had essayed to
do in 'Hernani' and in 'Ruy Bias.' Scribe's
local color was always sporadic and superficial.
He went far afield in order to profit by conditions
different from those familiar to French playgoers;
and these conditions were not necessarily those
which actually obtained in the foreign parts to
which he exiled the personages of his plays;
136

THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA

they were those which he needed to bring about
the events he was devising. Therefore the
manners and the customs and the laws which
we find in many of the stories of Scribe set before
us on the stage are not really those of Spain or
Italy, of England or Germany, of Africa or
America; they were in fact almost as much
Scribe's own invention as the stories themselves.

II

Scribe's frequent departures from the facts of
history and of geography were promptly noted by
contemporary critics more familiar with foreign
lands than he was; and they accused him of
having imagined a country of his own, to which
they gave his name — La Scribie — Scribia — a
very useful country for a playwright because its
social conventions existed solely for the play-
wright's convenience and because they might
be modified unceasingly as the exigencies of
plot making demanded. When Andrew Lang
first heard of this fabled domain, he was moved
to the composition of a lyric, which he called
' Partant pour la Scribie/

A pleasant land is Scribie, where
The light comes mostly from below,

And seems a sort of symbol rare
Of things at large, and how they go.
137

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

In rooms where doors are everywhere
And cupboards shelter friend and foe.

A land of lovers false and gay;

A land where people dread a curse;
A land of letters gone astray.

Or intercepted, which is worse;
Where weddings false fond maids betray.

And all the babes are changed at nurse.

Oh, happy land, where things come right
We, of the world where things go ill;

Where lovers love, but don't unite;
Where no one finds the Missing Will —

Dominion of the heart's delight,
Scribie, we've loved, and love thee still !

Unfortunately the lyrist who rimed this de-
lectable description had allowed himself to be
deceived by a traveler's tale rarely to be relied
upon. The land for which he has here exprest
his longing is not the true Scribia, as this is ac-
curately mapped on the atlas of imaginary
geography. It is an adjoining territory first ex-
plored by Jerome K. Jerome and explained in his
authoritative book of travels, entitled 'Stage-
Land, Curious Habits and Customs of its In-
habitants.' Among the many citizens of this
peculiar place whom Jerome was enterprizing
138

THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA

enough to interview, were the Stage-Hero and
his fit mate, the Stage-Heroine, the Stage-Villain,
and the Stage-Adventuress, the Stage-Detective
and the Stage-Lawyer.

Mr. Jerome was able to accompany his analysis
of these peculiar personalities by an account of
the legislation which governs their conduct and
which has hitherto been unfamiliar to students
of comparative jurisprudence. It appears that
in Stage-Land, when a man dies, without leaving
a will, then all his property goes to the nearest
villain. But, if the deceased has left a will,
then and in that case, all his property goes to the
person who can get possession of this document.
As Jerome fails to cite any decisions in support of
these laws, we are left to infer that they are statu-
tory and not judge-made. Yet he is frank to
inform us that he has not been able to ascertain
the fundamental principles of the jurisprudence
of Stage-Land, since "fresh acts and clauses and
modifications appear to be introduced for each
new play"; and here we discover a condition of
things closely resembling that which obtains in
Scribia.

Yet Stage-Land is not Scribia, altho their
several populations are apparently descended
from the same stock. It is in Stage-Land rather
than in Scribia, that the Missing Will always
turns up in the nick of time and that all the babes
are changed at nurse. Nor is Scribia identical,
139

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

as some geographers seem to have believed, with
the No Man's Land in which dwelt the pale per-
sonages of M. Maeterlinck's earlier plays, a
shadowy and mysterious realm where the unsub-
stantial 'Intruder' finds his way invisibly into
the household of death and where the 'Sightless*
wander aimlessly and hopelessly. Still less is
Scribia to be confounded with two other coun-
tries, Utopia and Altruria, about which the gazet-
teers are able to supply us only with pitiably in-
sufficient information. There is, however, a
certain plausibility in the suggestion that
Scribia has for its capital the city of Weiss-nicht-
wo and that it has recently rectified its frontiers
by annexing the contiguous principality of
Zenda.

When Brunetiere was bringing to its logical con-
clusion his illuminating series of lectures on the
evolution of French dramatic literature, he took
as the topics for his final talk Scribe and Alfred de
Musset, contemporary and unlike — Scribe the
craftsman who was only a craftsman thinking
solely of the theater and living in it contentedly,
and Musset the lyrist, careless of formal structure
and regardless of the narrowing limitations of the
playhouse. Different as they were in equipment
and in aim, both of them were wont to take for
the scene of their dissimilar dramas, emptily
prosaic in the one case and in the other abundantly
poetic, the non-existent country, which had been
140

THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA

named after the elder of them, and which was a
land of fantasy with manners and laws easy to
manipulate according to the necessities of the
fables they had taken as the foundations of their
pieces. Brunetiere did not call Scribia by its
name; but he did draw the attention of his hearers
to the ideal Bavaria of Musset's 'Fantasio,' the
Italy of his 'Bettine/ the Sicily of his 'Carmo-
sine' and the Hungary of his 'Barberine' — "all
Shaksperian lands, if I may so call them, in
which characters from fairy-tales undergo their
adventures in gardens always in bloom and under
skies that are eternally blue."

Ill

When Brunetiere ventured to suggest that the
indeterminate backgrounds of Musset's ironic
imaginations might be called Shaksperian, he
was only recognizing the obvious fact that the
French lyrist, alone among modern dramatists,
had chosen to follow in the footsteps of the
author of 'As You Like It' and of 'Twelfth
Night/ From Shakspere Musset borrowed the
commingling of realistic and prosaic characters
with characters poetic and romanticized. He
arbitrarily banisht the persons who people his
airy fantasies to a far and foreign land chiefly
that he might let them live in an atmosphere of
remoteness and enable them to escape from the
141

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

limitations and the rigors of commonplace exist-
ence in contemporary Paris. So Shakspere, in
order tliat an unknown distance from London
might lend enchantment to the view, had chosen
to domicile the grave and the gay characters of
his romantic comedies in a Bohemia which is a
desert country by the sea and in a Forest of
Arden where glide gilded snakes and where roam
lions with udders all drawn dry.

No doubt Musset scorned Scribe as bitterly as
did his fellow lyrist, Heine; and he was almost the
only French dramatist of his day who was not
tempted to emulate the tricky dexterity of Scribe;
but none the less do we find many of his creatures
living in the pleasant land of Scribia — just as
many of Shakspere's lighter characters had re-
sided in the same strange country more than two
centuries earlier. And while Musset knew about
Scribe even if he might detest him and all his
works, Shakspere could have had no foreknowl-
edge of the prolific French playmaker whose pro-
ductivity was to manifest itself more than two
centuries after that of the English dramatist
had ceased. Still it is difficult to deny that Shak-
spere, who may never have set foot outside of
his precious isle set in the silver sea, had let his
fancy transport him to a territory which we can
now recognize as the Scribia known to all students
of the French dramatists of the nineteenth cen-
tury.

143

THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA

It is not from any actual Verona in any actual
Italy, but from a town of the same name in the
heart of Scribia, that two gentlemen departed
one after another, destined to show once more
that the course of false love does not always
run smooth. It is in a Scribian and not in an
Italian Venice, where dwelt a Jewish usurer who
was trickt out of the deadly forfeit set down in
his merry bond by the sharp practice of a quick-
witted woman triumphantly passing herself off
as a lawyer. In fact, the administration of jus-
tice in this fabled Venice is so frankly fantastic
and so completely contrary to all the precedents
which would govern the courts of any actual
Venice, that we find ourselves wondering whether
this imagined city in the sea is situated in Scribia
or in the adjacent realm of Stage-Land explored
and described by Mr. Jerome.

Again it is in Scribia and not in Greece that
the Athens stood whose Duke wooed and won
the Queen of the Amazons, while the British-born
Bottom, after marvelous misadventures due to
the malice of a fairy King, made ready with his
mates to perform a lamentable tragedy at the
ducal bridal ceremony. Where except upon the
coast of Scribia could we find the Ephesus, the
laws of which put the obtruding stranger imme-
diately on trial for his life and the magic atmos-
phere of which made it possible for twins separated
in infancy and brought up in widely parted places
143

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

to be in manhood indistinguishable one from the
other in speech and even in costume ? And where,
except off the coast of Scribia, could that en-
chanted isle lie which was full of disheartening
noises and which was suddenly invaded by a
ship's company cast up by the sea as the result
of an artificial tempest raised by the cunning of
a royal magician.

Students of imaginary geography, aware that
Utopia was discovered and described by More
in 1 516 and that the earliest tidings from Al-
truria were brought by a traveler interviewed
by Howells in 1894, have never had occasion to
question the discovery of Scribia in the first half
of the nineteenth century, during the lifetime of
the man from whom it took its name. Yet we
can now perceive that this pleasant land was not
unknown to Shakspere in the first half of the
seventeenth century, and that he profited hugely
by his information as to its manners, its customs
and its laws, finding them modifiable to suit his
convenience. How is this to be explained ?

After long meditation over all the peculiarities
of this problem I am emboldened to proffer a
solution, suggested by the notorious fact that
history is prone to repeat itself. This solution
1 venture to submit herewith to the charitable
judgment of experts in imaginary geography.
Altho Scribia has been a densely populated
realm since a time whereof the memory of man
144

THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA

runneth not to the contrary, and altho it had
been visited and traverst and dwelt in by many
of the characters of Shakspere and a Httle later
by not a few of the characters of Beaumont and
Fletcher, for some inexplicable reason it had
failed to be described in any gazetteer of liter-
ature; and at some unknown date it seems to
have secluded itself and forbidden the entry of
all foreigners, just as Japan chose to shut itself
off from the rest of the world.

After long scores of years it was rediscovered
by Scribe, colonized by his characters, reintro-
duced into the community of nations and named
anew. It is to be regretted that there is never
any hope of rectifying an error in geographic
nomenclature; and as this western continent
will continue to hear the name not of Columbus,
but of Americus Vespucius, so to the end of time
will Scribia commemorate the ingenious industry
of Eugene Scribe, falsely believed to be its original
discoverer. And here, to companion the lilting
lyric of Andrew Lang is a copy of verses by
Charles Godfrey Leland:

Thru years of toil, Columbus
Unto our New World came;

But a charlatan skipt after.
And gave that world his name.

All day in street and market
The liar's name we see;
145

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

Columbia ! — sweet and seldom —
Is left to Poetry.

And the names bring back a lesson
Taught to the world in youth —

That the realm of Song and Beauty
Is the only home of Truth.

(1918.)

146

VIII
HAMLET' WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT*

IN the flotsam and jetsam of theatrical anecdote,
derived from the wreckage of forgotten books
of histrionic biography, no tale is more familiar
than that which records how a strolling company
playing a one-night stand and unexpectedly
maimed by the illness of its leading actor, ven-
tured nevertheless to perform the play it had
promised with a modification of the original
advertisement to accord with the unfortunate
fact. That is to say, the company declared its
intention of performing "the play of 'Hamlet' —
with the part of Hamlet left out."

Despite diligent endeavor I have not been able
to discover where or when this fabled performance
was believed to have taken place. Still less suc-
cessful have I been in my search for one of the
spectators at this unique representation of Shak-
spere's masterpiece. It would be both pleasant
and profitable if only a single survivor of the

*This paper was read before the Modern Language
Association of America, at Columbia University, in
December, 1914.

147

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

audience on that occasion could be interrogated
as to the impression produced upon him by the
tragedy thus bereft of its central figure. With
Hamlet himself subtracted, what -can be left?
The scene in which Polonius loads his son with
excellent advice, the scene of Ophelia's madness,
and the scene of the two grave-diggers, — these
would remain intact, and little more. The rest
is silence.

There is perhaps no other play of Shakspere's
(not even 'Macbeth') in which the title-part is as
integrally related to almost every episode of the
plot as it is in 'Hamlet.' It would not be diffi-
cult to arrange an acting edition of both halves of
'Henry IV with the part of Henry IV left out,
for we should still have Prince Hal and FalstafF
and all their jovial crew. And it would not be
impossible, altho the feat would demand the
utmost dramaturgic dexterity, to prepare a
theatrically effective version of 'Julius Caesar'
with the part of Julius Caesar left out. As a
matter of fact not a few critics have complained
that Julius Caesar does not bulk big enough in the
tragedy which bears his name; and by this com-
plaint these critics revealed that they were un-
familiar with the custom of the Tudor theater
which prescribed the giving of the name of the
sovran to any historical play dealing with his
times, even if he himself might not be a dominat-
ing personality in its story.
148

HAMLET WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT

But even if Julius Caesar and Henry IV are
not the most important or the most interest-
ing characters in the plays named after them,
at least they do take part in the action from time
to time. They pass across the stage at intervals
and are seen by the spectators. Neither Shak-
spere nor any other Elizabethan dramatist ever
dreamed of so constructing a piece as to center
attention on an important and interesting char-
acter who should not be brought bodily on the
stage. The Tudor relish for the concrete was
too intense for the playgoers to accept etherial
subtleties of this sort; and the playwright him-
self was necessarily the contemporary of the play-
goers, sharing in their simple tastes and in their
bold desires. Even the frequent ghosts who
stalk thru Shakspere's tragedies were on his
stage boldly visible specters, white-sheeted and
gory-throated, — these very ghosts which a stage-
manager today delicately suggests by ingenious
scientific devices or less confidently leaves to the
imagination of the spectators.

It is curious that the Elizabethan audiences,
perfectly willing to imagine scenery at the will
of the author, demanded to see every character
in the drama, standing on the stage and speaking
for himself, whereas the spectators of today,
insisting upon an adequate scenic background for
every episode of the play are willing enough to
imagine a character who never appears before
149

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

their eyes, — an unseen personage who may in-
deed be more important and more interesting
than any other personage who actually stands in
front of them on the stage.

II

In a volume of one-act plays composed by a
young American playwright, George Middleton,
there is a piece called 'Their Wife/ in which the
most significant figure is that of the woman who
has been the wife of one man and who is the wife
of another. The only two characters who are
seen and heard by the audience are these two
husbands; their wife does not appear; and yet
she is the heroine of the play. It is solely because
she is what she is that the action of the piece is
possible; and it is her character which is the core
of the situation wherein the two men find them-
selves entangled. We do not see her in the flesh,
but the dramatist has made us see her in the
spirit. He has interpreted her thru the mouths
of the two men who have loved her and whom she
has loved in turn. She is the most clearly de-
picted person in the play, so clearly depicted,
indeed, that the spectator realizes her for what
she is. Oddly enough a little later or a little
earlier Mr. George Ade had made use of exactly
the same device in his one-act play 'Nettie,' in.
which we are made to see the invisible heroine
150

HAMLET WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT

as she has imprest herself on three of her "gentle-
men-friends." Quite possibly an average unob-
servant playgoer, recalling one or the other of
these plays after an interval of a month or two,
could discuss its heroine so oblivious of the fact
that he had not actually seen her, that he might
find himself endeavoring vainly to remember
the name of the actress who played the part.

It is now nearly half-a-century since Sardou
brought out one of the cleverest of his satiric
comedies, the 'Famille Benoiton.' It dealt
with the fortunes of a family in the second decade
of the Second Empire, with its gaudy glitter and
with its gangrene of social disintegration. Mon-
sieur and Madame Benoiton have sons and
daughters, married, marriageable, and not yet
ripe for matrimony. All the members of the
family are presented to us in turn, singly and
together, — all of them except Madame Benoiton.
They are put thru their paces in a series of amus-
ing scenes; and we discover slowly that the family
is in its sorry state, largely because it lacks the
guiding hand of the mother. Madame Benoiton
is never at home; she may have just gone out or
she may be immediately expected; but she does
not appear with the rest of the family. She is
a woman of fashion, or she aspires so to be con-
sidered; and her "social duties" are too absorb-
ing for her to give any time to her husband, to
her sons or to her daughters.
151

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

When at last the fifth act draws to its con-
clusion, with the reconciliation of the eldest
daughter to her husband and with the engage-
ment of the next oldest daughter to an eligible
bachelor, there is the sound of carriage-wheels
and a ring at the front door. The youngest
boy looks out the window, cries "Mamma \" and
rushes away to greet her. The eligible bachelor
smiles with anticipatory delight; he has yet to be
introduced to his future mother-in-law ! Then the
boy returns disappointed; and when he is askt
where his mother is, he explains that she has
just gone out again: — "She had forgotten her
parasol !"

Here again quite possibly the average unob-
servant playgoer, recalling the play after an in-
terval, might easily fail to remember that he had
never laid eyes on Madame Benoiton herself,
altho it was because she was what she was that
her children had developed into the characters
set before us. Quite possibly once more Sardou
himself, intent only upon a characteristically
clever theatrical trick, did not intend or even
apprehend the full significance of Madame
Benoiton's absence from the home which it was
her privilege to control. Yet his technical skill
was sufficient to impress upon us a clear vision
of this unseen mother, derelict to her duty.

It deserves to be recorded also that in Al-
phonse Daudet's play of Provencal life, 'L'Arle-
152

HAMLET WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT

sienne/ the woman of Aries, who is the cause of
the fatal catastrophe, does not appear before
the eyes of the spectators.

Ill

It may not be strictly accurate to say that in
Ibsen's ' Rosmersholm ' the mainspring of the
action is Beata, Rosmer's wife, who had thrown
herself into the stream some time before the
opening scene of the play. In fact, such an asser-
tion would be inexact, since it is the scheming of
Rebecca West which has brought about Beata's
suicide. Yet the dead Beata is as determining
a figure upon the action of 'Rosmersholm' as
the dead Julius Caesar is upon that part of the
action of 'Julius Caesar' which follows his as-
sassination. Here again it is because Beata was
what she was that the ambition of Rebecca West
to take her place came so near to fulfilment.
And it is with marvelous adroitness that Ibsen
drops the hints and supplies the suggestions here
and there which we eagerly piece together (much
as we might work over the once popular puzzle-
pictures) until at last we are enabled to make out
a full-length portrait of the dead and gone wife,
whose gentle spirit is now more potent over the
volitions of her husband and of the woman who
aspires to be her successor than it was while
she was yet on earth to mingle with them, a
153

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

pale and unobtrusive figure. It is the influence
emanating from Beata which really inhibits
Rebecca from the accomplishment of her intent
to marry Beata's widower.

In two of Sir Arthur Pinero's plays there are
also dead wives, whose personality reaches for-
ward and interferes with the orderly march of
events after their departure from this life. In
the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray' we are made to
feel the austere chilliness of the first Mrs. Tan-
queray, her cold-blooded physical asceticism,
which ultimately drove the warm-blooded wid-
ower to ask the equally warm-blooded Paula
to become his second wife. And in 'His House
in Order' we are presented with a second wife
tormented by the saintly reputation of the first
wife, to whose memory everything is sacrificed
including the happiness of her successor. The
culminating moment of the play is when the out-
raged second wife discovers that this saintly rep-
utation of the first wife was usurpt, since the
dead woman had been unfaithful. It must be
admitted that the author has not been as skilful
or at least not as successful in 'His House in
Order' as in the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray' in
creating in our minds a distinct impression of the
unseen woman whose dead hand clutches the
heart of the action. The first Mrs. Tanqueray
we can reconstruct sharply enough. But the
first wife of the man whose house is not in order
154

HAMLET WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT

remains a rather unsatisfactory shadow, since
it is a Httle difficult for us to perceive exactly
how it was that a woman of her indefensible char-
acter should have been able to pass as a woman
of her indisputable reputation.

IV

In these two plays by Sir Arthur Pinero as well
as in the 'Rosmersholm' of Ibsen, dead women
still influence the lives of living men; even tho
they are dead when the several plays begin, they
had each of them been alive only a little while
earlier, a few months or a few years. In one of
Maeterlinck's somber pieces, remote from the
realities and the trivialities of everyday existence,
there is also a personage unseen by the spectators,
a personage not dead, since he never had been
alive in the flesh.

In the 'Intruder,' Maeterlinck invites us to
behold a dim hall in which a waiting family is
gathered, grandfather, father, daughters, chil-
dren— all but the mother who lies in the adjoin-
ing room, desperately ill and hovering between
life and death. The conversation between the
different members of the family is subdued and
almost in whispers. The blind grandfather hears
a step in the garden outside; — but nobody has
come to the gate. A moment later he hears the
click of the latch of the gate, as if it had opened
155

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

and shut; — but nobody has past thru. Then
the old man asks who has entered the room: —
but nobody has been seen to come in. And as
query follows query, the spectators begin to
suspect that the senses of the blind man are super-
normally acute and that he is conscious of hap-
penings which the others fail to perceive. The
dialog is as tense as it is terse; it is all in ques-
tion and answer; it abounds in seemingly un-
meaning repetition which the audience feels
somehow to be strangely significant. There is
an almost breathless suspense while we wonder
whether or not there is an invisible visitor and
while we ask ourselves who this unseen newcomer
can be. Finally the door of the sick room
opens and the sister of charity, who has been
in attendance on the ailing mother, is seen stand-
ing silent with hands crost over her breast. Then
at last we know with certainty that there was a
mysterious visitor and that he was no less a
person than Death himself.

Of all Maeterlinck's dramas the 'Intruder'
is perhaps the simplest in its story as it is the
strongest in its effect. And the means whereby
this effect is achieved are seemingly as simple as
the story itself. But altho the dramatist has
wisely chosen a primitive and elementary form,
he reveals his possession of the power to excite
the imagination and to make the spectators in-
terpret for themselves what he had refrained from
156

HAMLET WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT

bringing before their eyes. Often in poetry we
discover that the part is greater than the whole;
and in the 'Intruder' we perceive that the poet
has so toucht the chords of our sensibiHties that
we attain to a vision of the whole, altho no part
has actually been before our eyes. Here is a
case where M. Maeterlinck was happily inspired,
lighting on a topic which responded sympathetic-
ally to his etheriality of treatment. In the in-
tangible means whereby an indefinable mood is
evoked and sustained, there is nothing in modern
literature comparable with the 'Intruder' —
except, it may be, the 'Fall of the House of
Usher,' where we find the same haunting and
insistent melancholy, the same twilight paleness,
the same dread advance of we know not what.

The 'Intruder' differs from the several plays
in which there is an absent character in that even
the most careless and oblivious spectator must
recall the fact that the grisly invader was not
seen by anyone either in the auditorium or on
the stage. In this play we have no true parallel
to 'Hamlet' with the part of Hamlet left out be-
cause we have been made to feel that Death has
actually past before us even if our eyes have
proved too feeble to perceive him. He is a thing
unseen; yet the accumulated evidence is too
157

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

convincing for us to dream of denying his actual
presence. There is, however, another French
play in which a character actually alive, altho
far distant, is the motive force of the action of a
play wherein he has not appeared and in which
his name is only casually mentioned.

This is the 'Death of the Duke of Enghien'
by Leon Hennique, a brief tragedy in three swift
episodes. In the first we are shown the head-
quarters of the French general in command at
Strasburg; and to him an officer brings orders
for a raid into neutral territory to capture the
Duke. The obedient general does not discuss
or dispute this command; but the spectators
feel that he does not approve it. In the second
part we see the Duke at Ettenheim, in the
midst of his little court. While they are at table,
the house is surrounded by the French cavalry.
The general enters and arrests the Duke by the
order of the French First Consul. In the third
scene we behold the sitting of the court-martial
in a dilapidated room in the castle of Vincennes.
There are no witnesses against the Duke, no in-
criminating papers, no counsel for the defense;
yet these things are disregarded without com-
ment. The Duke is summoned and interrogated
with the utmost courtesy. He scorns to deny
that he has fought against the Republic. There-
upon the members of the military tribunal with-
draw to deliberate — but the spectators are never
158

HAMLET WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT

in doubt as to the fatal verdict. In time the
Duke drops off to sleep, to be awakened by an
officer who bids him summon his courage and
follow. When he has gone the audience over-
hears the sentence read to him as he stands in
the moat below the open window. Then comes
the order to fire, and with the rattle of musketry
the curtain slowly descends.

Nothing can be barer than the dialog of this
drama; it achieves the acme of directness; and
in the trial scene almost every word is derived
from the official report. The name of the First
Consul is not brought in; and yet the author
has made the spectators feel that it is the steel
volition of Napoleon which commands every
movement and which dictates every word. It
is a duel to the death between the two, the cap-
tive whom we behold and the implacable usurper
who overrules justice to destroy a man he wishes
out of the way. It is a duel of an unarmed man
with an unseen opponent, for the final thrust of
whose long rapier there is no possible parry.
Napoleon pervades the whole play from the be-
ginning to the end; he is the hero-villain; his
iron will is the mainspring of the action; and we
cannot fail to feel this altho he never comes be-
fore us and altho no one dares to bring in his
name.

In the 'Marion Delorme' of Victor Hugo it is
the inflexible determination of Richelieu which
J 59

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

controls the action. Altho the Cardinal is never
seen, yet he is heard to utter a single word,
"No!" from behind the curtains of his litter as
he is borne across the stage in the final act.
In Hennique's play Napoleon is neither seen nor
heard, nor is his name bandied about as is Riche-
lieu's in Hugo's drama. Surely here at last is a
novelty in the drama; here is really an analog
to the performance of 'Hamlet' with the part
of Hamlet left out. Still the student of the
stage will not readily admit that any novelty is
possible at this late date in the long history of
the theater; and with no very great difficulty
he can recall at least one drama in which there
is a single combat between a character whom the
spectators can see and sympathize with and an
unseen personality of inflexible determination.
The ' Death of the Duke of Enghien' is compara-
tively recent, since it was acted in Paris in the
later years of the nineteenth century; and yet
it was anticipated in Athens more than two thou-
sand years ago by the earliest of the Greek
dramatic poets.

In the 'Prometheus Bound' of /^schylus the
play begins with the rivetting of Prometheus to
the rock in accord with the command of Zeus,
because he will not tell what the god wants to
know. Zeus is determined to force this secret
from Prometheus; and Prometheus is equally
firm in his resolution to keep it to himself, no
i6o

HAMLET WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT

matter how keen the torture to which he may be
condemned or how prolonged the agony. To
Prometheus chained to the crags of the Caucasus
other characters come, one after another, some to
encourage him in resistance and some to urge
him to yield since resistance is ultimately in vain.
Altho Zeus does not come the spectators are well
aware that it is his unbending volition which is
responsible for the situation. Prometheus may
vaunt himself to be the master of his fate and
captain of his soul; he may steel his will to with-
stand every outrage; but his invisible opponent
has a long arm and a sharp sword in his hand.
In the utilization of the device of the unseen duel-
list, the obvious difference between the ' Death of
the Duke of Enghien' and 'Prometheus Bound'
lies in the sublety of the later dramatist whereby
ne gets his effect without even allowing any of
the characters to allege the name of Napoleon,
whereas /Eschylus causes all his characters to
discuss the deeds and the misdeeds of Zeus, and
he permits Prometheus to exhale his griefs
against the hostile god as often as occasion oc-
curs. There is this further difference also,
that M. Hennique is a sophisticated Parisian
who was deliberately achieving his effect by
conscious art, whereas /Eschylus was a reverent
spirit not condescending to artistic subtleties of
this sort, even if they had been possible in the
primitive conditions of the Attic theater, when

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THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

tragedies were presented before ten thousand
spectators sitting or standing, tier on tier, on the
curving hillside of the Acropolis.

(1914.)

162

IX

SITUATIONS WANTED

I

IN a forgotten book by a forgotten British bard,
in the 'Gillot and Goosequill' of Henry S.
Leigh, we may read the appeaHng plaint of a play-
wright who felt that his invention was failing
and who could no longer find the succession of
poignant episodes that the drama demands: —

Ten years I've workt my busy brain

In drama for the million;
I don't aspire to Drury Lane,

Nor stoop to the Pavilion.
I've sought materials low and high

To edify the nation;
At last the fount is running dry —

I want a situation.

I've known the day when wicked earls

Who made improper offers
To strictly proper village girls.

Could fill a house's coffers.
The lowly peasant could create

A wonderful sensation.
Such people now are out of date —

I want a situation.
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THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

The writer of these despondent stanzas had had
a hand in a play or two but he was by profession
a lyrist and not a dramatist; and it may be
doubted whether any of the bom playwrights
would ever have sent forth this cry of distress,
since fecundity is a necessary element in their
endowment. The major dramatic poets have
always been affluent in their productivity; Soph-
ocles and Shakspere and Moliere appear to
have averaged two plays in every year of their
ripe maturity. It is true, of course, that they
had no scruple in taking their material wherever
they might find it, not only despoiling their pre-
decessors of single situations, but on occasion
helping themselves to a complete plot, ingeniously
invented and adroitly constructed and needing
only to be transformed and transfigured by their
interpreting imagination.

We like to think that in these modern days our
dramatists are more conscientious in the acquisi-
tion of their raw material, and that they can with-
stand the temptation to appropriate an entire
plot or even a ready-made situation. When
Sardou was scientifically interrogated by a
physiological psychologist as to his methods of
composition he evidently took pleasure in declar-
ing that he had in his notebooks dozens of
skeleton stories needing only to be articulated
a little more artfully and then to be clothed with
words. Probably no one of the playwrights of
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SITUATIONS WANTED

the second half of the nineteenth century was
more fertile in invention than Sardou; and not
a few effective situations originally devised by
him have been utilized by playmakers in other
countries, — one from 'La Haine' for instance in
the 'Conquerors' and one from 'La Tosca' in
the 'Darling of the Gods.' Notwithstanding
this notorious originality Sardou was frequently
accused of levying on the inventions of others,
without recompense or even acknowledgment;
and more than once the accusers caught him "with
the goods on him" — if this expressive phrase is
permissible. 'Les Pommes du Voisin,' for ex-
ample, was traced to a story of Charles de Ber-
nard's; 'Fernande' to a tale of Diderot's; and
'Fedora' to a novel of Adolphe Belot's. As it
happened Belot had dramatized his novel, and
when he saw that Sardou had borrowed and
bettered his plot, he made no outcry; he con-
tented himself with arranging for a revival of his
play, so that the similarity of its story to Sardou's
might be made immediately manifest.

When Mario Uchard asserted that the domi-
nant situation in his 'La Fiammina' had been
lifted by Sardou for service in 'Georgette,' Sar-
dou retorted by citing three or four earlier pieces
and stories in which an identical situation could
be found. Those who seek equity must come
into court with clean hands; so Uchard lost his
case. Nevertheless the impression left upon at
165

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

least one reader of the testimony was that Uchard
had no knowledge of the forgotten fictions which
Sardou disinterred, that he believed himself
to be the inventor of the situation in dispute, and
that Sardou probably did derive it from Uchard,
— altho quite possibly he may have invented it
independently.

The fact is indisputable that the number of
situations fit for service on the stage is not in-
finite but rigorously restricted. Gozzi declared
that there were only thirty-six; and when Goethe
and Schiller sought to ascertain these, they could
not fill out the list. Georges Polti accepted
Gozzi's figure and after indefatigable investiga-
tion of several thousand plays, ancient and
modern, he catalogued the three dozen with all
their available corollaries. Of course scientific
certainty is not attainable in such a counting up;
there may be fifty-seven varieties or even ninety
and nine. The playwrights of this generation
have to grind the grist already ground by their
predecessors a generation earlier; they may bor-
row boldly, that is to say, they may be aware that
what they are doing has been done before, or
they may be innocently original, fondly believing
themselves to be the inventors of a novel pre-
dicament and unaware that it was second-hand a
score of centuries before they were born. Their
good faith can not fairly be denied, even if their
originality can be disproved.
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SITUATIONS WANTED

There is the Romeo and Juliet situation, for
instance, — the course of true love made to run
rough by the bitter hostility of the parents. We
can find it in 'Huckleberry Finn' in the nine-
teenth century, and we can also find it in the
'Antigone,' more than two thousand years earlier;
and we may rest assured that Mark Twain did
not go to Sophocles for it, or even to Shakspere.
It is probably to be found in the fiction of every
language, dead and alive; and those who employ
it now do so without giving a thought to any of
its many earlier users. The theme is common
property, to be utilized at will by anybody any-
where and anywhen.

During the run of the 'Chorus Lady' in New
York I happened to call the attention of Bronson
Howard to the identity of its culminating situa-
tion with that in 'Lady Windemere's Fan.' A
young woman foolishly adventures herself in the
apartment of a man, whereupon an older woman
goes there to rescue her; then when the younger
woman is summoned to come out of the inner
room in which she has taken refuge, it is the older
woman who appears, thus placing herself in a
compromising position in the eyes of the man
whom she is expecting to marry. " Don't forget
that I had had it in 'One of Our Girls,'" Howard
remarkt, without in any way suggesting that
167

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

Oscar Wilde had despoiled him, or that James
Forbes had lifted the situation from either of
his predecessors. Then I recalled that 1 had
seen it in an unacted play, 'Faith,' by H. C.
Bunner, the story of which he had taken as the
basis of a novel entitled, 'A Woman of Honor/
Knowing Bunner and Howard intimately, I felt
certain that they had no doubt as to their right
to utilize this situation, and that if either of
them had been conscious of any indebtedness to
any specific predecessor he would have declared
it frankly.

Bronson Howard, on the playbill of the ' Henri-
etta,' acknowledged the borrowing of a situation
from 'Vanity Fair'; he was compelled to this
confession because in this case he happened to
know where he had found the situation. He
was aware that it was borrowed, and not his own
invention. A confession equally complete and
of a somewhat larger import is to be found in
the Author's Note prefixt to Maeterlinck's play,
'Marie Magdeleine':

" i have borrowed from M. Paul Heyse's drama,
' Maria von Magdala,' the idea of two situations
in my play, namely at the end of the first act,
the intervention of Christ, who stops the crowd
raging against Mary Magdalene, with these words,
spoken behind the scenes: 'He that is without
sin among you let him cast the first stone'; and
in the third the dilemma (in which the great sinner
168

SITUATIONS WANTED

finds herself) of saving or destroying the Son of
God, according as she consents or refuses to give
herself to a Roman. Before setting to work, I
askt the venerable German poet, whom I hold in
the highest esteem, for his permission to develop
those two situations, which, so to speak, were
merely sketcht in his play, with its incomparably
richer plot than mine; and offered to recognize
his rights in whatever manner he thought proper.
My respectful request was answered with a re-
fusal, none too courteous, I regret to say, and al-
most threatening. From that moment, I was
bound to consider that the words from the Gospel
quoted above are common property; and that the
dilemma of which I speak is one of those which
occur pretty frequently in dramatic literature.
It seemed to me the more lawful to make use of
it inasmuch as I had happened to imagine it in
the fourth act of 'Joyzelle' in the same year in
which 'Maria von Magdala' was publisht and
before I was able to become acquainted with that
play."

Then the Belgian poet declared that, except in
so far as these two situations were concerned, his
play had absolutely nothing in common with the
German drama. "Having said this," Maeter-
linck concluded, " I am happy to express to the
aged master my gratitude for an intellectual
benefit, which is not the less great for being
involuntary."

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THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

This note calls for two comments. The first
is that altho the words from the Gospel are com-
mon property, still it was Heyse who first ap-
plied them to Mary Magdalene; and the second
is that altho the dilemma that Maeterlinck wanted
to borrow from 'Maria von Magdala' was one
that he had already imagined in ' Joyzelle' and one
that could be found not infrequently in earlier
plays, notably in 'La Tosca' of Sardou, in the
' Dame aux Camelias' of the younger Dumas and
in the 'Marion Delorme' of Victor Hugo, still
it was Heyse who first had the happy thought of
forcing this dilemma upon Mary Magdalene.
When the Belgian poet persisted in making his
profit out of these two situations of the German
story-teller, he may have seemed to some rather
high-handed in his forcible rectification of his
frontier by the annexation of territory already
profitably occupied by his neighbor. To this,
it is only fair to answer that the application of
the Gospel words and the propounding of this
special dilemma to Mary Magdalene were so na-
tural as to be almost necessary, if her story was
to be shaped for the stage and sustained by a
satisfactory struggle. They are so natural and
so necessary that Maeterlinck might almost
have been expected to invent them for himself
if he had not found them already invented by
Heyse.

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SITUATIONS WANTED

III

Bronson Howard would have held that
Maeterlinck was absolutely within his right in
taking over from Herr Heyse what was necessary
for the improvement of his own play, if only he
declared the indebtedness honestly and if he
offered to pay for it. And no playwright was
ever more scrupulous in acknowledging his own
indebtedness than Howard. The situation which
he took from 'Vanity Fair' for use in the 'Hen-
rietta' he might have invented easily enough or
he might have found it in half-a-dozen other
places besides Thackeray's novel; but as he was
aware that it had been suggested to him by
Thackeray's novel, he simply had to say so, —
just as, many years earlier, on the playbill of his
' Moorcroft,' he had credited the suggestion of its
plot to a story by John Hay, altho this source
was so remote that Hay was able to say to me
that he never would have suspected it except for
the note on the program.

When 1 assert that Howard might easily enough
have invented for himself the situation he bor-
rowed from Thackeray I am supported by my
own experience. 1 invented that situation,
quite forgetful of the fact that I must once have
been familiar with it in 'Vanity Fair'; and I
made it the center of a one-act comedy, 'This
Picture and That,' written almost simultaneously
171

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

with the 'Henrietta/ Only after the perform-
ance of my little piece and only when I saw
Howard's play with its note of acknowledgment
to Thackeray, did I feel called upon to doubt
my own originality. A few years thereafter I
had the pleasure and the profit of collaborating
with Howard in the composition of 'Peter Stuy-
vesant, Governor of New Amsterdam/ and when
we were still engaged in the arduous and delight-
ful task of putting together our plot, of setting
our characters upright upon their feet and of
seeking situations in which they might reveal
themselves effectively, I chanced to suggest that
we might perhaps utilize a situation in a certain
French drama. I find that 1 have now for-
gotten the situation and the title of the play in
which it appeared. I made the suggestion doubt-
fully, as its acceptance might lay us open to the
accusation of plagiarism.

Howard promptly waved aside my scruples by
a declaration of principle: — "When I am at work
on a play," he explained, "my duty as an artist
is to make that play just as good as I can, to
construct it as perfectly as possible no matter
where I get my materials. If this situation you
suggest is one which will help our play, we should
take it without hesitation. Our scenario is cer-
tain to be greatly modified before we are satisfied
with it and ready to begin on the actual writing;
and very likely we shall find that this borrowed
172

SITUATIONS WANTED

situation which today seems to us helpful will
not survive to the final revision; it may have led
us to something finer and then itself disappeared.
But if, when the play is done at last, we are face
to face with the fact that one of our situations
came to us from somebody else, — then, our duty
as honest men begins. We must give due credit
on the playbill when the piece is performed and
in the book when it is publisht. Furthermore, if
the somebody from whom we have borrowed is
alive, if he has rights either legal or moral, we
must secure his permission, paying whatever may
be necessary."

Bronson Howard was as candid as he was
clear-eyed; and the principle he declared is one
by which every dramatist would do well to govern
himself. If a playwright should be exceedingly
scrupulous and seek to avoid the use of any situa-
tion invented and utilized by any one of his
predecessors in the long history of playmaking,
he would soon find himself at a standstill and in
a blind alley; he would discover speedily that
unused situations are very scarce. The play-
wright must perforce resign himself to the em-
ployment of those which have already seen ser-
vice. Where there is specific obligation he should
acknowledge it frankly, — unless indeed the bor-
rowed situation is so well known that acknowl-
edgment may seem a work of supererogation. It
is instantly obvious that the 'Rantzau' of Erck-
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THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

mann-Chatrian is an Alsatian 'Romeo and
Juliet' and that the 'Andre Cornelis' of Paul
Bourget is a Parisian 'Hamlet'; — these resem-
blances were so very evident that they could
not be denied and therefore need not be declared.

IV

With characteristic wisdom and with a liber-
ality as characteristic, Goethe held that what was
really important was not where a situation came
from but what use was made of it. He noted
that Scott had helpt himself to a situation from
'Egmont,' and "because he did it well, he de-
serves praise." We may be sure that Goethe
would have only commendation for the skill with
which the Jacobean playwrights despoiled the
Spanish stage, because these gifted Englishmen
always bettered what they borrowed. In his
illuminating little book on the Spanish drama,
George Henry Lewes called attention to the
imaginative energy with which Fletcher in the
'Custom of the Country,' transformed an in-
geniously contrived situation in Calderon's
*Mejor esta que Estaba' into a superbly dra-
matic scene.

In the Spanish piece, Don Carlos rushes in
and begs Flora to conceal him and save his life.
She has no sooner hidden him than his pur-
suers enter, — to tell her that they have followed
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SITUATIONS WANTED

into the house a cavalier who has just killed her
cousin. She keeps her promise to protect the
hidden fugitive; and she tells those who are
seeking him that he sprang from the window into
the garden and so escaped. This is an effective
scene; but it is infinitely inferior to that made
out of it by Fletcher (possibly aided by Mas-
singer). Donna Guiomar is alone in her bed cham-
ber; she is anxious about her absent son and she
kneels in prayer. Rutilio rushes in. He is a
stranger,

a most unfortunate stranger.
That, called unto it by my enemy's pride.
Have left him dead in the streets. Justice pur-
sues me,
And for that life I took unwillingly.
And in a fair defense, I must lose mine.
Unless you, in your charity, protect me.
Your house is now my sanctuary !

Donna Guiomar agrees to shelter him and bids
him hide himself in the hangings of her bed,
saying

Be of comfort;
Once more I give my promise for your safety.
All men are subject to such accidents.
Especially the valiant; — and who knows not.
But that the charity I afford this stranger.
My only son elsewhere may stand in need of.
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THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

Then enter officers and servants with a bier
whereupon a body lies lifeless; and a servant
declares that

Your only son,
My lord Duarte*s slain !

And an officer explains that

his murderer.
Pursued by us, was by a boy discovered
Entering your house.

The noble mother, stricken to the heart, is true
to her promise. She tells the officers to go forth
and search for the murderer. Then at last
when she is left alone with the corpse of her son,
she orders the concealed slayer to make his es-
cape:—

Come fearless forth ! But let thy face be cov-

er'd.
That I hereafter be not forc*d to know thee !

This is an incomparable example of the deep
difference between the theatrically effective and
the truly dramatic, — between adroit story-telling
on the stage for the sake of the story itself, and
story-telling for the sake of the characters in-
volved in the situation. The incident invented
by Calderon is ingenious and it provides a shock
176

SITUATIONS WANTED

of surprise and a thrill of suspense; but how much
richer and nobler is the situation as Fletcher im-
proved it, and how superbly did he phrase the
motive and the emotion of the stricken mother !
The Jacobean poet achieved surprise and sus-
pense and also a larger significance, because he
had imagination to project the scene as a whole,
to prepare it, to express its ultimate value, and to
end it to the keen satisfaction of the spectators.

The younger Dumas, a playmaker of surpris-
ing skill, was once persuaded to rewrite a play
by Emile de Girardin, the 'Supplice d'une
Femme.' The original author protested that
he could not recognize his drama in the new
version. Dumas explained that the original
play had been cast aside because it was a poor
piece of work, quite impossible on the stage. But
it had a central situation which Dumas declared
to be very interesting and very dramatic; and
therefore Dumas had written a new play to pre-
sent this novel and powerful situation so as to
make it effective in the theater, which was pre-
cisely what Girardin had been incapable of doing,
altho he had himself invented the situation.

"But a situation is not an idea," Dumas ex-
plained in the article in which he justified his
rejection of Girardin's plot and construction.
177

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

"An idea has a beginning, a middle and an end,
— an exposition, a development and a con-
clusion. Anybody may happen on a dramatic
situation; but it must be prepared for; it must
be made possible and acceptable; and above all
the knot must be untied logically." Then
Dumas illustrated these assertions by suggesting
the kind of dramatic situation which anybody
might happen on. A young man falls in love with
a girl; he asks her hand; and they are married.
Then, and only then, at the very moment when
he is about to bear her away to their future home,
he learns categorically that he has married his
own sister. "There's a situation! and very in-
teresting indeed. But how are you going to get
out of it? I give you a thousand guesses — and
then I give you the situation itself, if you want it.
He who can start with this and make a good play
out of it, will be the real author of that play, and
I shall claim no share in it."

The situation, around which Girardin had
written the 'Supplice d'une Femme,' was difficult
and it was dangerous; but it was not impossible.
Dumas was able to find a way out and to bestow
upon the story an attractive exposition, a highly
emotional development and a conclusion at once
logical and acceptable to a profitable succession
of audiences. And this is just what one of the
establisht American dramatists was able to do re-
cently for a novice who had happened on a strong
178

SITUATIONS WANTED

and striking situation. The piece in which the
'prentice playwright had put his situation was
promptly rejected by all the managers, until at
last in despair he went to the older dramatist for
advice. He had put his powerful situation in the
first act, so that it was inadequately prepared
for while its superior weight prevented his giving
to the later acts the increasing force which later
acts ought to possess. The remedy suggested by
the more experienced dramatist was simple; it
was to begin and to end the story earlier —
to cancel the original second and third acts, and
to compose a new first and second act to lead up
to the strong and striking situation, which could
then be amply developt in the new third and
last act to be made out of the material in the
original first act.

VI

In 'Rupert of Hentzau,' the sequel to the
'Prisoner of Zenda/ there is a superb situation
which needed to be solved and which cried aloud
for poetic treatment. Rudolph Rassendyll looks
almost exactly like the King of Ruritania. In the
'Prisoner of Zenda' circumstances force him to
take the King's place and to be crowned in his
stead; so it is that he meets the King's cousin,
the Princess Flavia, and falls in love with her
and she with him. In 'Rupert of Hentzau' we
find that the Princess for reasons of state has
179

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

married her cousin; and then circumstances
again force Rassendyll to personate the King,
who is suddenly murdered and his body burnt.
What is Rassendyll to do? Shall he accept the
throne and take with it the Queen who loves
him and whom he loves? The Queen begs him
to do this for her sake. If he decides to profit
by this series of accidents, then he must, for the
rest of his life, live a lie, knowing that he is hold-
ing that to which he has no right, legal or moral.

Here is the stuff out of which serious drama is
made; here is one of the great passionate crises
of existence, when, in Stevenson's phrase, "duty
and inclination come nobly to the grapple."
Here is an ethical dilemma demanding a large
and lofty poetic treatment, — like that which
Fletcher bestowed on the situation he borrowed
from Calderon. Unfortunately the author of
the story was unable to rise to this exalted alti-
tude; and he got out of the complication by a tame
device, which simply dodged the difficulty. Be-
fore the hero can declare his decision, he is as-
sassinated. The author had happened on a fine
situation; he was adroit in his exposition of it
and in his development; but he failed to find a
fit conclusion.

Perhaps, in the course of time, when the hour
strikes for a rebirth of the poetic drama, a drama-
tist of a later generation, — a poet who is truly
a playwright and a playwright who is really a
1 80

SITUATIONS WANTED

poet, — will be tempted to take over this situation
invented by the ingenious novelist; and he may
be able to discover a satisfactory conclusion and
to treat it with the interpreting imagination it
demands.

(I9J7)

l8l

X

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER

IN one of his essays Robert Louis Stevenson
discust the technic of style; and he felt it
necessary to begin by apologizing and by ad-
mitting that to the average man there is nothing
more disenchanting "than to be shown the springs
and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occu-
pations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the
surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness,
and significance; and to pry below is to be
appalled by their emptiness and shockt by the
coarseness of the strings and pulleys." He in-
sisted that most of us dislike all explanations of
artistic method, on the principle laid down in
'Hudibras': —

Still the less they understand

The more they admire the sleight-of-hand.

No doubt, this is true of the majority, who are

delighted by the result of the conjuror's skill and

prefer not to have its secret revealed to them.

But it is not true of a minority who are ever

182

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER

eager to discover the devices whereby the marvel
has been wrought; and it is this minority who
constitute the insiders, so to speak, so far as that
art is concerned, the majority being content to be
forever outsiders ignorant of the technical diffi-
culties and the technical dangers which the artist
has triumphantly overcome. The insider, the
expert, the artist himself, the critic of wise pene-
tration, is ever intensely interested in technic, —
as Stevenson himself testified in another essay:
"A technicality is always welcome to the ex-
pert, whether in athletics, art or law; 1 have heard
the best kind of talk on technicalities from such
rare and happy persons as both know and love
their business."

It is a sign of the constantly increasing interest
in the drama that more and more theatergoers
are showing an eager desire to understand the
secrets of the two allied arts of the theater, —
the art of the playmaker and the art of the player,
each dependent upon the other, each incapable
of exercise without the aid of the other. The
work of the author can be revealed completely
only by the work of the actor; and the actor can
do nothing unless the author gives him something
to do. The dramaturgic art and the histrionic
art are interdependent; they are Siamese twins,
bound by a tie of flesh and blood. They can
quarrel, as perhaps Chang and Eng may have had
their fraternal disagreements; but they can
183

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

separate only under the penalty of a double
death. At every hour of their joint existence
they have to consider and to serve one another,
whatever their jealousies may be.

It is true that there have been periods when
acting flourisht and the drama languisht, as in
the midyears of the nineteenth century in Great
Britain and the United States. Yet in these
decades the performer unprovided with profitable
parts by the playwrights of his own time, was
able to find what he needed in the plays of the
past, in which moreover he could experience the
keen pleasure of measuring himself with the mem-
ory of the foremost performers of the preceding
generation. John Philip Kemble cared little for
new parts in new plays; and it was said of him
that he thought all the good parts had already
been written. Edwin Booth was content with
the characters that Shakspere had created; and
Joseph Jefferson found in one of Sheridan's come-
dies a character he preferred to any of those in
the countless modern plays which aspiring authors
were forever pestering him to produce.

It needs to be noted however that there is
danger to the drama in these periods when the
actor is supreme and when he feels at liberty to
revise the masterpieces of the past in accord
with his own whim and perhaps in compliance
with his own self-esteem. Jefferson was both
skilful and tactful in his rearrangement of the
184

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER

' Rivals'; he added but little of his own and what
he omitted was little loss. None the less was
there a certain justice in the gibe of his cousin,
William Warren, to the effect that however de-
lightful Jefferson's Bob Acres might be, it left
"Sheridan twenty miles away." Far less ex-
cusable was Macready's violent condensation of
the 'Merchant of Venice' into a mere Shylock
piece, omitting the final act at Belmont and end-
ing with the trial scene.

It is in these periods of dramatic penury that
the actor is able to usurp an undue share of popu-
lar attention. In periods of dramatic productiv-
ity his importance is less unduly magnified; and
even if plays are written specially for him, they
are rarely mere vehicles for the display of his
histrionic accomplishment; most of them are
solidly constructed works of art, in which the
character he is to personate is kept in its proper
proportion to the others. A playwright willing
to manufacture a piece which is only a vehicle
for an actor is humbling himself to be the domestic
of the practitioner of the sister art. But the
dramatist who is not eager to profit by the special
gifts of the foremost actors, who are his con-
temporaries and his comrades, is simply neglecting
his obvious opportunities.

185

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING
II

It is a credit and not a discredit to Sophocles
and to Shal<spere, to Moliere and to Racine, to
Sheridan and to Augier that they made use of the
possibihties they perceived in the performers of
their own time. It may be a discredit to Sar-
dou that he wrote a series of effective but false
melodramas for Sarah-Bernhardt, not because
he composed these plays for her, but because
they were unworthy of him. It was not a dis-
credit to Rostand that he put together 'Cyrano
de Bergerac' and 'L'Aiglon' and 'Chantecler/
one after another, in order that the dominant
character in each should be impersonated by the
incomparably versatile Coquelin, because in com-
posing them for this comedian the author did
not subordinate himself; because he did not sacri-
fice a play to a part; and because he was not con-
tent, as Sardou had been, to make a whole play
out of a single part.

To those who had followed the career of this
comedian it was obvious that 'Cyrano de Berge-
rac' had been written not only for Coquelin but
around him, in order to let him display in one
piece as many as possible of the facets of his
genius already disclosed in a host of other plays.
It was equally evident that 'Chantecler,' with all
its lyric exuberance, was also a play tailor-made
for the brilliant comedian with the clarion voice,
i86

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER

who could be both vivacious and pathetic. It is
even possible that the first suggestion of this
barnyard fantasy may be found in the fact that
the comedian was in the habit of signing his notes
to his intimates with the single syllable "Coq."

But it is likely to surprize those who remember
that the part of the ' Eaglet' was written for Sarah-
Bernhardt and that Coquelin did not appear in the
play when it was originally performed, to learn
that none the less was it begun with the sole in-
tention of providing him with a congenial char-
acter. Yet such is the case, as Coquelin told me
himself.

As he and Rostand were leaving one of the final
rehearsals of 'Cyrano,' the poet said to the
player, "this is not going to be the last piece that
I shall write for you, of course. Tell me now,
what kind of a character do you want?"

And Coquelin answered politely that he would
be delighted to produce any piece that Rostand
might bring him.

"No, no," returned the author; "that is all
very well; but what I'd like to do is to write a
play specifically for you, and to please you. Isn't
there some character which you have always
longed to impersonate and which has never come
your way?"

Coquelin thought for a moment and then he
admitted that there was one type which he had
not attempted and which he had often wisht to
187

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

act. This was an aging veteran of Napoleon's
armies, who had followed the Little Corporal in
all his campaigns from Egypt to Russia, — the
type depicted in Raffet's sketches, the type famil-
iarly known as "the old grumbler of the Em-
pire," le vieux grognard de V Empire.

"Excellent!" cried Rostand. "Excellent! I
shall set to work on it as soon as we get ' Cyrano'
out of the way."

If this was the starting point of 'L'Aiglon/
how was it that the play was written for Sarah-
Bernhardt and not for Coquelin? And to find
the answer to this we must go into the workshop
of the dramatist. If the old soldier of Napoleon
is to be the central figure of the play, then Na-
poleon himself must not appear in the piece, since
the Emperor was a personality so overmastering
that he could not be made a subordinate in the
story. Therefore the action must take place
after Napoleon's exile and death. Yet, after all,
the old soldier is devoted to Napoleon; and if he
is to be interesting on the stage, he must be a man
of action, strong-willed, resolute and ingenious;
he must be engaged in a plot intimately related
to Napoleon. It is well known that after the
return of the Bourbons the Bonapartists were
speedily disaffected and that there were several
intrigues to restore the empire with Napoleon's
son as Emperor.

Thus Rostand was led irresistibly to the little
i88

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER

King of Rome, an exile in Austria living almost in
captivity with his Austrian mother. And then
all the possibilities of the pale and pathetic
profile of the Eaglet disclosed themselves to
Rostand one after another; and from the old
soldier planning to put his master's son on his
master's throne the poet's interest shifted to the
young prince, in whom there were resemblances
to 'Richard IP and to 'Hamlet.' So the Duke
of Reichstadt became the hero of the piece and
took the center of the stage. Yet the old soldier
Flambeau still occupied Rostand's mind and
he was all-^wed to occupy a wholly disproportion-
ate space in the play. In the plot of 'L'Aiglon'
as it was finally elaborated, Flambeau ought to
have been only one of a host of accessory char-
acters revolving around the feeble and weak-willed
prince crusht beneath a responsibility far be-
yond his capacity.

Ill

When Jules Lemaitre, as the critic of the De-
hats, was called on to comment upon his own com-
edy, 'L'Age Difficile,' he contented himself with
telling his readers how he came to write the play
and with describing the successive steps of its
inception, growth, and composition. The excit-
ing cause was the suggestion that he should pre-
pare a piece for Coquelin. Naturally he was de-
lighted at the possibility of having so accom-
189

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

plisht an interpreter for the chief character of the
play he might write; and his invention was in-
stantly set in motion. As an actor is likely to be
most effective when he is least made up, Lemaitre
started with Coquelin as a man of about forty-
five or fifty; and this led him to consider the
special dangers of that period in a man's life.
So it was that he hit upon the theme of his
comedy, the 'Difficult Age'; and this theme he
developt so richly that the story seemed to have
been devised solely to illustrate the thesis. In
fact, if Lemaitre had not frankly confest that the
exciting cause of his comedy was the desire to
find a part to fit Coquelin, no spectator of the
play would ever have suspected it.

If there had been no Coquelin, there would
have been no 'Age Difficile' and no 'Chantecler,*
no 'Aiglon' and no 'Cyrano de Bergerac,' — just
as it is possible that without Mile. Champsmesle
there might have been no 'Phedre' and without
Burbage there might have been no 'Hamlet,' no
' Othello ' and no ' Lear.' For the full expansion of
the energy of the dramatic poet the stimulus of
the actor is as necessary as the response of the
audience. In his old age Goethe confided to
Eckermann that he had been discouraged as a
dramatist by the lack of these two necessities.
" If I had produced an effect, and had met with
applause, 1 would have written a round dozen of
pieces such as ' Iphigenia' and 'Tasso': there was
190

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER

no deficiency of material. But actors were want-
ing to represent such pieces with hfe and spirit;
and a public was wanting to hear and receive them
with sympathy."

The merely literary critic who judges a drama
as if it were a lyric, as if it were simply the ex-
pression of the poet's mood at the moment of
creation, often fails to understand the play be-
cause he has no consciousness of the complexity
of the dramatic art, which must needs languish
unless there is the hearty cooperation of the three
necessary elements, — the playwright to compose,
the player to impersonate, and the playgoer to
respond to the double appeal of player and play-
wright.

The dramatists have always been conscious of
the intimacy with which their work is associated
with the work of the actors. In the preface to
one of his slightest pieces, 'L'Amour Medecin,'
Moliere put his opinion on record: "Everybody
knows that comedies are written only to be acted,
and I recommend the reading of this play only
to those who have eyes to discover while reading
all the by-play of the stage." And Mr. Henry
Arthur Jones asserts that "actors are on the stage
to fill in a hundred supplementary touches to
the author's ten; — but this leads to the quaintest
results, since the actor has the choice of filling in
the wrong hundred in the wrong places. And the
public and critics always suppose that he has
191

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

filled them in rightly. How can they do other-
wise ? They can judge only by what they see and
hear."

IV

Here is what may be called the paradox of
dramatic criticism — that on the first night of an
unpublisht play, the public and the critics have
to take the performance as a whole, finding it a
task of insuperable delicacy to disentangle the
work of the players from the work of the play-
wright. They can form their opinion of the value
of the play itself only from that single perform-
ance; and they can form their opinion of the
value of the individual actor only from the im-
pression he has made at that performance. Now,
it is matter of common knowledge that sometimes
good parts are ill-played and bad parts well-
played. But on the first night, how are the public
and the critics to know in advance which are the
good parts and which are the bad parts ? There
are parts which seem to be showy and effective,
and which are not so in reality. In French there
is a term for them ; — " false good parts," faux bons
roles. For example, in Sardou's ' Patrie,' perhaps
his finest play, the heroine has to express an in-
cessant series of emotions; she has abundant occa-
sion for powerful acting; and yet half-a-dozen
actresses of authority have been tempted to essay
the part without success. The character is high-
192

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER

strung and wilful, but she is not true and sincere;
she is artificial and arbitrary; and the audience
is dumbly conscious of this trickiness and looks
on at her exhibition of histrionics with languid
sympathy. It is a false good part.

On the other hand there are parts that "play
themselves" and there are pieces that are "actor-
proof" — effective even if performed only by an
ordinary company without any actors of accred-
ited ability. Hamlet is a part that "plays itself,"
since the plot of the piece is so moving that it
supports the performer of the central figure even
if he is not really equal to the character. George
Henry Lewes asserted that no one of the leading
English tragedians had ever completely failed as
Hamlet, — whereas the greatest of them all, David
Garrick, had made so complete a fiasco as Othello
that he never dared to appear in the piece a second
time.

The 'Tartuffe' of Moliere is an actof-proof play,
holding the interest of the audience even when an
uninspired company is giving a ragged perform-
ance. Almost as actor-proof are 'As You Like
It' and the 'School for Scandal.' All three of
these comedies reward the most competent and
the most careful performance; but they do not de-
mand this. Their appeal is so broad and so certain
that they can be carried off by good will, aided in
the case of the two English comedies by high
spirits. Then too their reputation is solidly
193

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

establisht and widespread; and the spectator
comes to them assured that he will have enter-
tainment, predisposed to easy enjoyment. Quite
possibly no one of the three comedies was actor-
proof at its first performance; and perhaps they
might then have been killed by an inadequate
performance of any one of their more important
characters.

Moliere was his own stage-manager and at the
first performance of 'L'Amour Medecin' he was
responsible for "all the by-play of the stage."
And when Mr. Henry Arthur Jones produces his
own plays he takes care that the actor shall not fill
in the wrong "hundred supplementary touches.'*
But when the author of the play is dead or un-
able to be present at the rehearsals, we sometimes
see "the quaintest results." There are actors
who are supersubtle in the supplying of the little
touches which the dramatist has left to their dis-
cretion, and who so embroider the parts they are
playing that the main outline is obscured and en-
feebled.

At the end of the nineteenth century there was
an actor of prominence whose career I had fol-
lowed with interest for more than a score of years,
observing the expansion of his reputation and the
deterioration of his art. When I first saw him on
the stage he was direct and swift, creating a char-
acter in bold outline; and at the end of a quarter
of a century he had become painfully over-in-
194

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER

genious in the accumulation of superfluities of
detail which maskt the main Hues of the part.
In fact he had begun by acting inside the char-
acter and he had ended by acting outside it.
The result was quaint enough; but it was also
pitiably ineffective; and if the authors of the
plays he thus disfigured by the trivialities of his
jig-saw fret-work could have beheld his perform-
ance, they would have cried out in protest at this
betrayal of their purpose.

(i9'5-)

195

XI

IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS

IT is one of the many interesting and significant
coincidences of history that the more com-
pletely a smaller country may be absorbed into
a larger nation, the more likely are the inhabitants
of the lesser community to cherish their own pro-
vincial peculiarities. They seek to keep alive
the local traditions and to revive the local cus-
toms; and often they strive to reinvigorate the
local dialect and to raise it to a loftier level, that
it may be fitter to express their local patriotism,
different from their larger national patriotism
but in no wise antagonistic to it. As a result of
this pride in the past and of this pleasure in the
present there is likely to arise a local literature
in the local variation from the standard speech
of the nation — the standard speech assiduously
taught in the schools, which are ever struggling
to eradicate in the illiterate every vestige of the
dialect that the men of letters are cultivating with
careful art. And this deliberate provincialism
is not factional or separatist; it indicates no re-
laxing of loyalty toward the nation. Indeed, in
196

IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS

SO far as any political significance is concerned,
the outflowering of a dialect literature may
be taken as evidence of national solidarity and of
the dying down of older sectional animosities.

It was in the last quarter of the eighteenth cen-
tury and in the first quarter of the nineteenth,
when Scotland had at last accepted the Han-
overian succession, that Burns and Scott and
lesser lyrists of a varying endowment made use
of the broad Scots tongue to sing the sorrows and
the joys of the North Briton. It was in the third
and fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, after
the fierce ardor of the Revolutionary expansion
and of the Napoleonic conquests had finally
welded France into a self-conscious unity, that
Mistral and his fellow-bards told again the old
legends of Provence and illumined that fair land
with new tales of no less charm, all composed in a
modern revision of the soft and gentle speech of
the troubadours. And now it is just at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, after three score
years of incessant agitation have removed most of
the wrongs of the Irish people, that Yeats and
Synge and Lady Gregory have bidden their fellow-
countrymen to gaze at themselves in the mirror of
the drama and to listen to their own persuasive
brogue.

Surprize has been exprest at the sudden bur-
geoning forth of this new Irish drama almost at
the behest of Lady Gregory. But when due
197

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

consideration is given to the long list of Irishmen
who have held their own in the English theater,
there is cause for wonder rather that Ireland did
not have a drama of its own long ago. In fact
the history of English dramatic literature, and
more especially the record of English comedy,
would be sadly shrunken if the Hibernian con-
tribution could be cancelled. We can estimate
the gap that this operation would make when we
recall the names of George Farquhar, Richard
Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheri-
dan, John O'Keefe, Sheridan Knowles, Samuel
Lover, Dion Boucicault, John Brougham, Oscar
Wilde, Bernard Shaw and "George A. Birming-
ham." There is food for thought as well as for
laughter in the saying that " English comedy has
either been written by Irishmen or else adapted
from the French." A harsh and cynical critic
might even go further and add — having Steele
in mind for one and for another Boucicault —
that sometimes English comedy has been both
written by an Irishman and adapted from the
French.

It is to English comedy that these Irishmen
contributed; it is not to Irish comedy. The ad-
mission may be made that one or another of
them now and again sketcht a fellow-countryman
or two; but before Lover and Boucicault no one
of these Irish dramatists peopled a play with
Irish characters and laid its scene in Ireland.
198

IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS

Altho they must have known Ireland and the
Irish better than they knew England and the
English, it is to the portrayal of the latter that
they gave their loving attention, neglecting alto-
gether the delineation of the former. For some
reason they were not tempted to employ their
talents at home and to devote themselves to the
depicting of the manners and customs of their
own island. Probably the explanation of their
refusal to utilize the virgin material that lay
ready to their hands is to be found in the fact
that to achieve a living wage they had to write
for the London theaters, the audiences of which
took little or no interest either in Ireland or in
the Irish.

Whatever the reason may be why these bril-
liant Irish playwrights did not write plays of
Irish life, there is no denying that they did not,
and that it was left for the contemporary support-
ers of the Abbey Theater to plow the fresh fields
which their predecessors had refused to cultivate.
Even the later English comic dramatists of Irish
birth have eschewed themes fundamentally Irish
and have rarely introduced Irish characters into
their English plays; there is not a single Irish
part in all Oscar Wilde's comedies and there is
only one of Mr. Shaw's pieces the scene of which
is laid in Ireland. Irish novelists, Maria Edge-
worth, Banin, Carleton, Lever and Lover, won
fame by writing Irish stories; but only Lover and
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THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

Boucicault wrote Irish plays. The Irish drama-
tists were all of them working for the London
market and they were subdued to what they workt
in.

When we consider the closeness of Ireland to
England, and the ease of communication we can
only marvel at the infrequency with which Irish
characters appear in English plays. There is no
Irishman — except the slim profile of Captain
Macmorris in 'Henry V — in all Shakspere's
comedies and histories and tragedies, altho there
are Scotsmen and Welshmen. Apparently the
earliest Irish character in the English drama did
not step on the stage until after the Restoration
and nearly fifty years after Shakspere's death.
This earliest Irish character was a comic servant,
called Teague, who appears in Sir Robert How-
ard's 'Committee,' a play which Pepys went to
see in June, 1663. And apparently the second
Irish character was another Tegue in Shadwell's
'Lancashire Witches and Tegue O'Divelly the
Irish Priest,' a highly colored piece which was
produced in 1681. The first Teague was devised
to provoke laughter, whereas the second Tegue
was intended to be detested and despised as an
intriguing villain. It seems probable that this
portrayal of a Hibernian scoundrel by an English
playwright was pleasing to the London play-

IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS

goers, since Shadwcll brought him forward again
a few years later in another play, the 'Amorous
Bigot,' produced in 1690.

Then came the first of the native Irishmen who
were to brighten English comedy with their in-
genuity and their wit, and their grace and their
good humor — the first, and perhaps the most
gifted of them all, George Farquhar. After try-
ing his wings in public as an actor, an experience
which explains the superior briskness and the-
atrical effectiveness of his plays over those of
his immediate predecessors, Congreve, Wycherly
and Vanbrugh, he went over to London and ".com-
menced playwright." Yet he did not draw on his
knowledge of his own people; and in all his plays
we find only two relatively unimportant and ab-
solutely insignificant Irish characters. One of
these is another Teague in the more or less success-
ful 'Twin Rivals/ produced in 1705; and the
other is an Irish priest in the triumphantly suc-
cessful 'Beaux' Stratagem,' produced in 1707.

We cannot even guess what Farquhar might
have done if he had survived, and whether or
not he would have drawn more richly upon his
recollections of his fellow-countrymen after his
repeated success had given him confidence in
himself and authority over the public. His
career was cut short by death before he was
thirty — about the age when Sheridan abandoned
playmaking for politics. It has been noted that
201

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

the novelist is likely to flower late and often not
fully to reveal his capacity as a creator of char-
acter until he is forty, whereas the dramatist
may win his spurs when he is still in the first
flush of youth. Playmaking demands inventive
cleverness, first of all, and dexterity of craftsman-
ship, and these are qualities which a young man
may possess in abundance almost as native gifts,
even tho he may not have had time to reflect
deeply upon the spectacle of human folly, which
is the prime staple of comedy.

It is possibly because he was an Irishman that
Farquhar's morality is not ignoble like Congreve's
and Wycherly's. He is not to be classed with the
rest of the Restoration dramatists, as is usually
done. Farquhar may offend our latterday pro-
priety, now and again, by his plain-spoken speech,
but he is never foul in his plotting, as are Wycherly
and Congreve, whom he surpasses also in the
adroitness of this plotting. His dialog can be
clensed by excision, whereas their dirt lies deeper
and cannot be overcome by all the perfumes of
Araby. It is upon Farquhar that Sheridan
modelled himself, and not upon Congreve as has
often been assumed. The 'School for Scandal'
may reveal an attempt to echo the wit of the
'Way of the World'; but its solid structure and
its skilful articulation of incident disclose a close
study of the ' Inconstant,' the ' Recruiting Officer'
and the 'Beaux' Stratagem,' all of them fre-

202

IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS

quently acted when Sheridan was serving his
apprenticeship as a playwright.

Ill

In crediting Farquhar with a finer moral
sense than Congreve or Wycherly, it must in
fairness be noted that they composed their more
important comedies before Jeremy Collier had
attackt the rampant indecency which char-
acterized the English comic drama at the end of
the seventeenth century, and that Farquhar came
forward as a playwright after the non-conformist
divine had cleared the air by his bugle-blast.
The dramatist who took Collier's remarks most
to heart was Farquhar's contemporary and fellow
Irishman, Steele. But unlike Farquhar, Steele
decided to be deliberately didactic. He declared
that in his comedy, the 'Funeral,* produced in
1701, altho it was "full of incidents that move
laughter," nevertheless "virtue and vice appear
just as they ought to do." Steele was even more
ostentatiously moral in the 'Lying Lover,' pro-
duced in 1704 and withdrawn ofter only a few
performances, its author asserting sadly that
the play had been "damned for its piety."
Yet in neither of these early comedies, nor later in
the 'Conscious Lovers,' does Steele introduce any
Irish character.

And we do not discover any Irish character in
203

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

either of the comedies of OHver Goldsmith, the
'Good-natured Man,' produced in 1768, and 'She
Stoops to Conquer,' produced in 1773. A year
after this second comedy had establisht itself
as a favorite on the stage, where it is still seen with
pleasure after seven score years, Goldsmith died,
at the comparatively early age of forty-six. Here
again, it is idle to speculate on what he might
have achieved as a dramatist after the stage-doors
had swung wide to welcome him. If he had sur-
vived, it is possible that he might have been
tempted to take a theme from his native island
and to treat it with all his genial insight into hu-
man nature, never likely to be keener or more
caressing than in dealing with his own country-
men.

Two years after Goldsmith had brought out
'She Stoops to Conquer,' Sheridan brought out
the 'Rivals,' to be followed in swift succession
and with equal success by the ' Duenna,' the
'School for Scandal' and the 'Critic' Then he
forsook the theater for the more temporary stage
offered to him by politics. In only one of these
varied masterpieces of comedy is there an Irish
character. This single specimen is Sir Lucius
OTrigger in the 'Rivals,' easily the best Irish
part that had yet appeared in any comedy, and
surpast by scarcely any Irish character in any
later play, English or Irish. Sir Lucius is an
Irish gentleman; he is essentially a gentleman
204

IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS

and he is intensely Irish. Here was a novelty,
since most of the few Irish characters already
introduced into English comedy had been serv-
ants, first of all, and secondly only superficially
Irish. Oddly enough, the bad acting of the origi-
nal impersonator of Sir Lucius, a performer named
Lee, almost caused the failure of the 'Rivals' at
the first and second performances. The comedy
was then withdrawn for repairs, and for the re-
hearsal of another actor. Clinch, as Sir Lucius.
In gratitude to Clinch for the rescue of the 'Ri-
vals* from the doom that impended, Sheridan im-
provised for his benefit a two-act farce, called
'St. Patrick's Day, or the Scheming Lieutenant,'
a lively little play of no importance, in which
Clinch appeared as the scheming lieutenant, an
Irishman, only superficially Hibernian.

It is strange that the popularity of Sir Lucius
and his appeal to the public did not lure the later
English comic dramatists of Irish nativity to
invite other characters over from the island of
their own birth. But we do not recall any Irish
part in any of the many plays of John O'Keefe,
only one of whose comedies 'Wild Oats' is ever
seen on the stage of today, and then only at in-
tervals which are constantly lengthening. Nor
can we recall any Irish part in any of the top-
lofty comedies of Sheridan Knowles, composed
partly in turgid prose and partly in very blank
verse, devoid all of them of tl>e wit and the
205

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

gaiety and the liveliness which we believe we
have a right to expect from an Irish dramatist.
Very Irish however are the pieces made out of
the 'Handy Andy' and the 'Rory O'Moore' of
Samuel Lover; and most characteristically Hi-
bernian is the lighthearted hero of Lover's farcical
little fantasy called the 'Happy Man.' That
these slight plays of Lover's represent almost the
only attempts to deal with Irish character on the
English stage in the earlier half of the nineteenth
century is the more surprizing since Miss Edge-
worth had long since disclosed the richness of the
material proffering itself to any keen observer
intimate with Irish conditions. Walter Scott, at
least, had seen the value of 'Castle Rackrent' and
of the 'Absentee'; and he is on record as confessing
that one of the motives which urged him to the
composition of 'Waverly/ and of its immediate
successors, was the desire to do for the Scottish
peasant what Miss Edgeworth had done for the
Irish peasant. It is to be regretted that the most
popular of the Irish followers of Scott in the writ-
ing of tales of adventure was Charles Lever, whose
earlier and more rollicking romances are happy-
go-lucky in their plotting, and never disclose
any desire for significant character-delineation.
Lever's scampering stories were so loose-jointed
that they were almost impossible to dramatize,
and even when they were turned into plays they
did not demand critical consideration.
206

IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS
IV

Then toward the end of the first half of the
nineteenth century appeared the most proHfic
of all native Irish playwrights, Dion Boucicault.
But it was long after he had become a very
expert purveyor of theatrical wares for the
theaters of London and New York that Boucicault
turned to his native island for a theme. His
first play was 'London Assurance/a five-act comedy
with its scene laid in England and with a single
Irish character. There is a green-room tradition
that the play had been put together by another
young and aspiring Irishman, John Brougham,
that its original title was 'Irish Assurance,' and
that the part now called Dazzle had originally
borne an Irish name, having been intended by the
ambitious Brougham for his own acting. Nearly
forty years ago, when I ventured to ask Brougham
as to this tradition and as to his share in the
composition of the play, he laughed a little sadly,
and then gave me this enigmatic answer, "Well,
I've been paid not to claim it 1"

Whatever may have been Brougham's share in
the beginning, there can be no dispute as to
Boucicault's share at the end. 'London Assur-
ance' is not like 'Playing with Fire' or any other
of Brougham's later plays; and it is exactly like
'Old Heads and Young Hearts' and half-a-dozen of
Boucicault's succeeding comedies, the work all of
207

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

them of an old heart and a young head, — hard,
ghttering, insincere and theatrically effective.
In these pieces Boucicault was compounding five-
act comedies in accord with the traditional form-
ula of the English stage, inherited from Sheridan
and Congreve, and becoming at every remove
more remote from reality and more resolutely
artificial. Altho one of this early group of
Boucicault's comedies was called the 'Irish Heir-
ess,' they were all English plays, with only a rare
Irish character. A few years later, after Bouci-
cault had become an actor himself, he wrote for
his own acting a series of pleasantly sentimental
Irish melodramas stuft with sensational scenery, —
'Arrah-na-Pogue' with its sinking wall, the
'Shaughraun' with its turning tower, and the
'Colleen Bawn' with the spectacular dive of its
hero into the pool where its heroine is drowning.
The theatrical effectiveness of these pieces was un-
deniable and it was rewarded by long continued
popular approval; but no one of them had any
validity as a study of life and character in Ire-
land. They were very clever indeed, but they
were only clever; and they but skimmed the
surface of life, never cutting beneath it to lay
bare unexpected aspects of human nature. It
is characteristic that two of the later pieces in
which Boucicault appeared as an Irishman were
adaptations from the French, 'Daddy O'Dowd'
(from 'Les Crochets du Pere Martin') and
208

IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS

'Kerry' (from 'La Joie fait Peur'). That he
could so twist these French plots with their for-
eign motives as to make them masquerade as
Irish plays is testimony to his incessant clever-
ness; but it is evidence also that the Irish veneer
was so thin as to be almost transparent.

Yet however artificial and superficial might be
these Irish pieces of Boucicault's, at least they
were more or less Irish, in that they pretended
to deal with Irish life in Ireland itself. This is
what no one of the earlier Irishmen writing plays
for the London stage had ventured to attempt;
and it was what the wittiest Irish dramatist of
the generation following Boucicault's never d4d.
Oscar Wilde was an Irishman who never toucht
an Irish theme or sketcht an Irish character.
He never put into his plays any of the haunting
sadness, the humorous melancholy of Ireland.
He was not quite as free-handed as Boucicault in
levying on the private property of his contem-
poraries, yet he was willing enough to take his
own wherever he found it. His dramatic methods
are derivative, to put it mildly. Altho he com-
posed a ' Duchess of Padua' more or less in imita-
tion of Victor Hugo and a 'Salome' more or less
in imitation of Flaubert, the most popular of his
plays are comedies of modern London life, more
or less in imitation of Sardou. 'Lady Winde-
mere's Fan' is in accord with the latest Parisian
fashion of the season in which it was originally
209

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

produced; and even the young girl's trick of utter-
ing only the same two words, — " Yes, mamma" —
in answer to all questions is an echo of Gondinet's
'Oh, Monsieur.' The more farcical comedy called
the 'Importance of being Earnest' is a striking
example of Wilde's imitative method, the first
act and half of the second act having a closely
knit comic embroglio such as we find in Labiche's
'Plus Heureux des Trois' and 'Celimare le Bien-
Aime' and the rest of the piece being loosely
put together in the whimsical manner of W. S.
Gilbert's ' Engaged/

There is nothing in any of Oscar Wilde's plays
to reveal his Irish birth — unless we may credit
to his nativity his abundant cleverness and his
ready wit, the coruscating fireworks of which
were sometimes exploded by an ill-concealed
slow-match. It is almost as tho the apostle of
estheticism recoiled from his native island and
deliberately refused to be interested in his
fellow-countrymen. And almost the same re-
mark might be made about a later and far more
richly gifted English author of Irish birth,
Bernard Shaw. Of all his score or more plays
only one, 'John Bull's Other Island' is Irish in
its subject; and this sole exception, so the author
himself tells us, was due to the urgent request
of Yeats, who begged him to come to the aid
of the struggling Abbey Theater in Dublin. As
it happens, 'John Bull's Other Island' was never

210

IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS

produced at the playhouse for which it was com-
posed, because, as Shaw confesses, "it was un-
congenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic
movement, which is bent on creating a new
Ireland after its own ideal."

In the United States, with our scattered Irish
contingent, Boucicault's Irish pieces were as
successful as they were in Great Britain. John
Brougham, following in Boucicault's footsteps,
wrote plays to order for Barney Williams and
William J. Florence, cutting his cloth close to the
figure of the special performer he was fitting. In
the American variety-shows a host of Irish im-
personators of both sexes presented broad carica-
tures of Irish character often rooted in reality.
And here in New York there was developt out
of these variety-show caricatures a special type
of robust Irish comedy, more veracious than Bou-
cicault's sentimental melodramas. Edward Har-
rigan began with a mere sketch, the 'Mulligan
Guards,' peopled with half-a-dozen species of
Irishmen acclimated in America; and as he was
encouraged by immediate appreciation on the
part of our cosmopolitan and hospitable public,
he went on, feeling his way and refining his
method, until he attained the summit of his reach
in the delightful 'Squatter Sovereignty,' with its

211

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

beautifully difTerentiated groups of the clan
Murphy and the clan Macintyre. It need not
be denied that there were wilful extravagances in
this series of studies of the New York Irishman
and that to the very end there were traces of
the variety-show out of which this type of play
had been evolved; but no native Irishman had
a more realistic humor than Harrigan nor a keener
insight into human nature.

Then we come to the beginning of the twentieth
century and to the founding of the Abbey Theater
in Dublin, to the movement led by Lady Gregory
and adorned by the widely different talents of
Yeats and Synge. Here was at last a new de-
parture of the Irish drama in Ireland itself.
Here were plays of very varying value and of
many different kinds, alike only in this, that they
eschewed manufactured bulls; that they did not
rely on a varnish of paraded brogue; that they
did not deal in boisterous fun-making for its own
sake, — their fun depending rather upon a subtler
humor tinged with melancholy; and that they
were no longer contented with an external in-
dication of superficial Irish characteristics, but
sought an internal and intimate expression of the
essential. These new Irish plays were not Irish
by accident; they were Irish by intention, Irish
in character and in action, Irish in motive and
in sentiment, Irish thru and thru, immitigably
Irish.

212

IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGUI S

The late Laurence Hutton once defined an
American play as a play written by an American
on an American theme and carried on solely by
American characters; but he had to confess the
falsity of this definition when it was pointed out
to him that so rigid a demand would exclude from
the French drama the 'Cid' of Corneille, the ' Don
Juan' of Moliere, the 'Phedre' of Racine, and the
'Ruy Bias' of Hugo, while it would also rule out
of the English drama the 'Romeo and Juliet,'
the 'Hamlet' and the 'Julius Caesar' of Shak-
spere. Yet there is significance in the sugges-
tion, nevertheless; and these new Irish plays of
Lady Gregory, of Yeats and of Synge, are all the
more Irish because they were written by Irishmen
on Irish themes and peopled exclusively by Irish
characters.

(1914.)

213

XII

THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-
DRAMA

I

IN an illuminating criticism of the operas of
Puccini, by D. C. Parker, there is a passage
which may serve as a text for the present paper.
The British writer pointed out that in 'Madame
Butterfly' the Italian musician struck out a new
line in his choice of a theme, widely different from
those which had hitherto appealed to composers,
in that he deserted the old world of romanticism
and of picturesque villainy, preferring, for the
moment at least, a world which is neither old nor
romantic and in which the villainy is not pictur-
esque.

"We breathe the air of these times and a
modern battleship rides at anchor in the bay.
Opera is a convention and a realization of the
fact should throw some light on the suitabiHty of
subjects. It was not without reason that Wagner
insisted upon the value of legendary plots, and I
am sure that it is a reliable instinct which whispers
to us that there is something wrong when Pinker-
ton offers Sharpless a whiskey and soda. The
214

THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA

golden goblet of the Middle Age, the love-philter
of Wagner, we can cheerfully accept. But a
decanter and a syphon break the spell and cause
a heaviness of heart to true children of the opera-
world."

This is sound doctrine, beyond all question;
and yet Mr. Parker based it only upon a reliable
instinct, without caring to go deeper and to ask
why we are willing to quaff a love-philter from the
golden goblet and why we hesitate to sip a
draught mixt before our eyes from syphon and
decanter. Yet he hinted at the reason for our
acceptance of the one and for our rejection of the
other when he reminded us that "opera is a
convention." But it needs more than a realiza-
tion of this fact to enable us to develop a reliable
instinct in regard to the subjects most suitable for
operatic treatment. It needs an inquiry into
the exact meaning of the word convention, as Mr.
Parker here employed it. Perhaps we may at-
tain to a solider ground than that supplied by a
reliable instinct if we ask ourselves what is the
necessity of convention in any of the arts, more
particularly in the art of the drama and most
particularly in the art of opera.

No doubt, these questions have often been askt
and as often answered, altho the responses have
not always been wholly satisfactory. This is no
bar to a reargument of the case, even if there is
no new evidence to be introduced. The French
215

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

critic was wise as well as witty when he declared
that "everything has already been said that could
be said; but as nobody listened to it, we shall
have to say it all over again." Moreover, very
few of us are conscious of the immense number
of conventions by means of which we save time
and spare ourselves friction in our daily life;
and still fewer have taken the trouble to under-
stand either the necessity for these conventions
or the basis on which they stand.

A convention is an agreement. In the arts
it is an implied contract, a bargain tacit and taken
for granted, because it is to the advantage of
both parties. In the art of life the spoken word
is a convention, and so is the written word. As
John C. Van Dyke has aptly put it, in the open-
ing chapter of his suggestive discussion on the
'Meaning of Pictures,' when we wish to convey
the idea of water to a friend we do not show him a
glass of the fluid, we pronounce the word, which is
by agreement the symbol of the thing. If we
write it we use five letters, w-a-t-e-r, which bear
no likeness whatever to the thing itself, and yet
which bring it to mind at once. "This is the
linguistic sign for water. The chemical sign for
it H2O, is quite as arbitrary, but to the chemist
it means water. And only a little less arbitrary
are the artistic signs for it. The old Egyptian
conveyed his meaning by waving a zigzag up or
down the wall; Turner in England often made a
216

THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA

few horizontal scratches do duty for it; and in
modern painting we have some blue paint touched
with high lights to represent the same thing.
None of these signs attempts to produce the orig-
inal or has any other meaning than to suggest
the original. They are signs which have meanings
for us only because we agree to understand their
meanings beforehand."

If we do not agree to accept the blue paint
toucht with high lights or the few horizontal
scratches as a proper method of representing
water then we deny ourselves the pleasure of
marine-painting and of pencil-drawing. The
art of the painter is possible only if we are willing
to allow him to contradict the facts of nature so
that he may delight us with the truth of nature
as he sees it. In the preface to his most abidingly
popular play, the 'Dame aux Camelias/ the
younger Dumas declared that there is "in all the
arts a share, larger or smaller but indispensable,
which must be left to convention. Sculpture
lacks color, painting lacks relief; and they are
rarely the one or the other, in the dimensions of
the nature they represent. The more richly
you bestow on a statue the color of life, the more
surely you inflict upon it the appearance of death,
because in the rigid attitude to which it is con-
demned by the material it is made of, it must al-
ways lack movement, which even more than color
and form is the proof of life."
217

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

Still more striking is the passage in which
the late John La Farge asserted the immitigable
necessity of convention in these same twin-arts
of painting and sculpture: — "When I work as
an artist 1 begin at once by discarding the way
in which things are really done, and translating
them at once into another material. Therein con-
sists the pleasure that you and I take in the work
of art, — perhaps a new creation between us. The
pleasure that such and such a reality gives me
and you has been transposed. The great depth
and perspective of the world, its motion, its never
resting, I have arrested and stopt upon a little
piece of flat paper. That very fact implies
that I consider the flatness of my paper a fair
method of translating the non-existence of any
flatness in the world that I look at. If I am a
sculptor I make for you this soft, waving, fluctu-
ating, colored flesh in an mmovable, hard, rigid,
fixt, colorless material, and it is this transposition
which delights you; (as well as me in a lesser
degree who have made it). Therefore at the
very outset of my beginning to aflfect you by
what is called the record of a truth, I am obliged
to ask you to accept a number of the greatest
impossibilities, evident to the senses, and some-
times disturbing, when the convention supposed
to be agreed upon between you and myself is
understood only by one of the two parties."

218

THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA

These quotations from La Farge and from
Dumas call attention to the essential conditions of
the arts of painting and of sculpture, — that the
artists do not merely depart from reality, they
contradict it absolutely. Only by so contradict-
ing it can they provide us with the specific plea-
sure that we expect from their respective arts.
The portrait painter has to present the head of
his sitter motionless on a flat surface and the
portrait sculptor has to present the head of his
sitter motionless and without color, or rather with
the uniform tint of his material, clay or plaster,
marble or bronze. And the public accepts these
greatest impossibilities not only without protest
but without any overt consciousness that they
are impossibilities. The public, as a whole, is not
aware that it is a party to an implied contract;
it is so accustomed to the essential conventions of
these two arts that it receives the result of their
application as perfectly natural.

In fact, the public can scarcely be said to have
made the tacit bargain; rather has it inherited
the implied contract from its remotest ancestors,
the cave-men who scratched profile outlines on the
bones of animals now for centuries extinct.
The public is so accustomed to the methods of the
painters and of the sculptors that when its atten-
tion is called to the fact that it is accepting the
219

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

greatest impossibilities it is frankly surprized
at the unexpected revelation and not altogether
pleased. As a whole, the public is not curious
to analize the sources of its pleasures; it is per-
fectly content to enjoy these pleasures without
question, as its fathers and its forefathers had
enjoyed them century after century. To
say this is to say that the fundamental conven-
tions of painting and of sculpture have not been
consciously agreed to by the existing public;
they have just been taken for granted.

So in like manner have the fundamental con-
ventions of the drama and of the music-drama
been taken for granted, generation after genera-
tion, altho they involve departures from the fact,
contradictions of the fact, impossibilities (to
borrow La Farge's exact word) quite as great as
those which underly and make possible painting
and sculpture. Just as the conventions of the
graphic arts were establisht by the cave-dwellers
who made the first primitive sketches of the
mastodon, so the conventions of the dramatic
arts were willingly accepted by the spectators of
the earliest dance-pantomime, more or less spon-
taneously evolved to celebrate the coming of the
springtime or the gathering of the harvest.

All the permanent conventions of the drama
are accepted by the public because they are for its
benefit, to heighten its pleasure, to prevent it
from being bored, or even from having its atten-

THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA

tion distracted by minor things not pertinent to
tiie matter in hand. In real hfe all stories are
straggling; they are involved with extraneous
circumstance; and they continue indefinitely into
the future as they began indefinitely in the past.
The playwright arbitrarily chooses a point of
departure; he resolutely eliminates all accom-
panying circumstances and all environing char-
acters not contributory to the arbitrary end upon
which he has decided. He peoples his plot with
only the characters absolutely needed; and he
conducts his action swiftly from start to finish,
heaping situation upon situation, so as to arouse
and retain and stimulate the interest of the spec-
tators as the artificially compacted story moves
irresistibly and inevitably to its climax.

His characters always make use of his native
tongue, which is also the native tongue of the
audience. In 'Hamlet' the Danes all speak Eng-
lish; in 'Romeo and JuHet' the Italians all speak
English; and in 'Julius Caesar' the Romans all
speak English. Moreover they all make use of
an English that no mortal man ever used in real
life, not even Shakspere himself. Every one of
them always expresses himself accurately and
adequately, and completely, with no hesitancies,
no repetitions, no fumbling for words; and every
one of them apprehends instantly and under-
stands precisely everything that everyone else
may say to him. All the language used, whether

221

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

in prose or in verse, is highly condensed, inexor-
ably compact, transparently clear. There is
no need to point out that this is a state of lin-
guistic efficiency unknown in everyday life, filled
with the halting babble of a myriad of insignifican-
cies. Yet this departure from reality, this con-
tradiction of the fact, this impossibility, is as-
sented to not only gladly but unthinkingly. The
bargain is not consciously made, it is taken for
granted, partly because it is for the benefit of
the spectators and partly because it is an ances-
tral inheritance.

These are all essential conventions of the
drama, without which it could not exist. They
can be found in the plays of every people, ancient
or modern, civilized or savage, in the lofty trage-
dies of Athens, two thousand years ago, as well as
in the farces of Paris five hundred years ago.
They make possible the drama in prose, the
drama in verse, the drama in song, and the
drama in gesture. They are the fundamental
conventions of the dramatic art, handed down by
tradition and certain to survive so long as rnan
shall find delight in the theater, in beholding a
story set on the stage to be shown in action be-
fore his admiring eyes. From the beginning
of things the playwright, like the painter and the
sculptor, has always had to ask his audience "to
accept a number of the greatest impossibilities."

222

THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA

in

While these are all of them permanent and
essential conventions of the drama, there are
others peculiar to the music-drama and to it
equally necessary, since without them it could
not exist, — indeed it could not even have come
into being.

We all know that the ordinary speech of man is
prose, often careless and inaccurate, ragged and
repetitious; and yet if we are to enjoy 'Hamlet'
or 'Macbeth' we must accept the impossible sup-
position that Denmark and Scotland were once
inhabited by a race of beings whose customary
speech was English blank verse. We all know
that the ordinary speech of man is unrhythmic
and unrimed; and yet if we are to fmd pleasure in
'Tartuffe' we must allow that Paris in the reign of
Louis X IV was peopled by men and women whose
customary speech was the rimed Alexandrine.
So the convention which alone makes possible the
beautiful art of pantomime — a form of drama re-
stricted in its range but always delightful within
its rigid limitations — is that there exists a race
of beings who have never known articulate speech,
who utter no sounds, and who communicate their
feelings and their thoughts by the sole aid of
gesture. If we are unwilling to assent to this
monstrous proposition we deny ourselves in-
stantly and absolutely all the pleasure that the
art of pantomime can bestow.
223

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

Now, the convention which supports and makes
possible the music-drama is that there is a race
of beings whose natural speech is song and only
song, with no recourse to merely spoken words.
It is by the aid of song alone that the persons
who people grand opera can communicate with
one another, can transmit information, can ex-
press their emotions. Of course, this is a prop-
osition quite as monstrous as that upon which the
art of pantomime is based, — or as thoseupon which
the arts of painting and sculpture are founded.
It is a proposition which any plain man of every-
day common sense is at liberty to reject unhesitat-
ingly; and no one has any right to blame him.
All we have a right to do is to point out that the
acceptance of this convention is a condition prece-
dent to the enjoyment of opera and that he who
absolutely refuses to be a party to the contract
thereby deprives himself of all the delights which
the music-drama may afford.

Tolstoy was one of those who felt keenly the
inherent absurdity of opera, if the test of reality
is applied to it, — altho oddly enough he seems
never to have become conscious that painting and
sculpture are just as remote from the facts of
nature. In his curiously individual treatise on
'What is Art?' he narrates his visit to an opera-
house while a performance of Wagner's 'Sieg-
fried' was taking place. This music-drama did
not interest him, and he held it up to ridicule by
224

THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA

the aid of the inexpensive device of satirically
narrating the story as it was shown in action, and
of describing reaHstically the appearance and
gestures and utterances of the performers.
"When I arrived," Tolstoy writes, "an actor sat
on the stage amid scenery intended to represent
a cave, and before something which was meant
to represent a smith's forge. He was drest
in tights, with a cloak of skins, wore a wig, and an
artificial beard, and with white, weak, genteel
hands beat an impossible sword with an unnatural
hammer in a way in which no one uses a hammer;
and at the same time, opening his mouth in a
strange way, he sang something incomprehensi-
ble."

This quotation is sufficient to show Tolstoy's
unsympathetic attitude and his unwillingness to
accept the implied contract which opera calls for.
Apparently Tolstoy was present at a performance
not as perfect artistically as it ought to have been;
but it is equally apparent that he would have
been just as hostile if the performance had at-
tained to an ideal perfection. What he was con-
demning was the music-drama as an art-form;
and the animus of his adverse verdict is his un-
exprest expectation that opera ought to with-
stand the test of reality. But opera is always un-
natural and impossible. It is absurd and mon-
strous that the dying Tristan's last breath should
be powerful enough to reach to the top gallery
225

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

of a large opera house and that the Rhine-maidens
should sing as they are swimming under water;
but it is just as unnatural, impossible, absurd and
monstrous that Hamlet should speak English
blank verse and that the Mona Lisa should be
motionless

Here we recall again the final sentence of the
pregnant passage earlier quoted from La Farge, —
" 1 am obliged to ask you to accept a number of
the greatest impossibilities evident to the senses
and sometimes disturbing when the convention
supposed to be agreed upon between you and
myself is understood only by one of the two par-
ties."

IV

Altho the music-drama cannot provide plea-
sure for those who do not understand the conven-
tion or who wilfully refuse to accept it, "the true
children of the opera-world," as Mr. Parker feli-
citously termed them, are so accustomed to this
convention that they are rarely conscious of it.
Nevertheless they do not wish to be unduly re-
minded of it and to have their attention called
to its various and manifold consequences. Wag-
ner was wise in his generation in preferring to
build his plots upon the legends of once-upon-
a-time, because it is always easier to make-
believe when we allow ourselves to be trans-
ported on a magic carpet to that remote, vague
226

THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA

and fantastic period. As we know that the
Rhine-maidens never existed anywhere or any-
when, we never think of cavilHng at their ability
to sing while they are swimming under water.

But when a battleship swings at anchor and
when Pinkerton produces a decanter and syphon
to mix a whiskey and soda, we can hardly help
being conscious of the artistic impossibility of
Pinkerton's extending his invitation in song,
which we know not to be the mode of expression
natural to an American of our own time asking a
friend to take a drink. The sound rule for any
artist would seem to be that, whatever his special
art, he should carefully avoid everything which
tends to awaken in the spectators the conscious-
ness that they are parties to a bargain. The con-
tract holds best when it is implicit, when neither
party gives it a thought and when both parties
abide by it. "The dramatist," so Lessing de-
clared, "must avoid everything that can remind
the audience of their illusion, for as soon as they
are reminded, the illusion is gone."

This is the rule that William Gillette broke in
his ' Sherlock Holmes', when he allowed one of his
characters to describe the invisible fourth wall
of the gas-chamber to which the cool and keen-
witted detective was to be lured, — that fourth
wall which had to be supposed away, so that the
audience could hear and see what is taking place
upon the stage. This same rule was again vio-
227

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

lated by Jerome K. Jerome in the ' Passing of the
Third Floor Back' and by Barrie in the 'New
Word/ when these playwrights set a fender and
fire-irons down by the prompter's box, thus ask-
ing the spectators to believe that there was an
invisible fireplace in the invisible wall.

Nearly a score of years ago I was present at a
performance of 'La Traviata' in the opera-house
at Vienna; and I v/as forced to observe the dis-
advantage of an ill-advised attempt at realistic ex-
actitude in the realm of operatic convention. I
had been accustomed to see Verdi's opera set in
scenery of no particular place and of no particu-
lar period, — and therefore not calling attention
to itself; and I was also used to beholding the
consumptive heroine arrayed in the very latest
Paris gown, while her lovers wore a nondescript
costume as dateless and as characterless as the
scenery itself. The manager of the Vienna opera-
house had unfortunately remembered that Verdi's
score was composed to a book made out of the
'Dame aux Camelias' of the younger Dumas,
originally performed in Paris in 1852; and there-
fore he had sought an accurate reproduction of a
series of Parisian rooms, with the draperies and
the furniture of 1852, while the characters, male
and female, lovely heroine and disconsolate lovers,
were attired according to the French fashion-
plates of that date. In the ballroom scene there-
fore I beheld all the male members of the chorus
228

THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA

habited in the evening dress of 1852 and carrying
under their arms the closed crush-hat which had
been invented by the ingenious M. Gibus only a
little earlier.

And 1 then had it brought home to me as never
before how monstrously impossible the convention
of opera is — and must be. I need not say that,
as I sat there in the mood of unconscious enjoy-
ment, I regretted having my attention wantonly
called to the essential and permanent and inevita-
ble convention by which alone the music-drama is
made possible. It struck me not only as unwise
but even as a little unfair.

229

XIII

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-
SCENERY

I

THIS is a time of unrest in the theater. In
almost every modern literature the drama is
aliveas it was not, half-a-century ago, in any litera-
ture except the French. The public is slowly but
steadily recovering the lost art of reading plays;
and the American public, in particular, is ex-
hibiting a constantly increasing interest in the
dramatic literature of other languages, not only
French and German, but also Scandinavian and
Russian. We are becoming more and more cos-
mopolitan; and we welcome with equal cordiality
the ballet of the Russians and the pantomime of
the French. A host of youthful enthusiasts have
opened little theaters not only in the leading
cities but even in some of the less important
towns; and they have made many novel experi-
ments both in the kind of play they have chosen
to perform and in the method of presentation.
These youthful enthusiasts are abundantly vocal
in clamoring for a new departure in dramatic art,
boldly demanding the abolition of the hamper-
230

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY

ing traditions of the nineteenth century. Some of
them are ready to renounce the heritage of the
past, and to venture into the future as upon an
uncharted sea. Not a few of them seem to
be possest by what the late E. L. Godkin once
termed the "common illusion of young men that
facility in composition indicates the existence of
thought."

Gordon Craig, for example, who is hailed as one
of the chief inspirers of the new movement in
stage-decoration, is a very radical iconoclast,
never concealing his profound dissatisfaction with
the achievements of the stage-directors of today.
Seemingly he wants the theater to declare its in-
dependence of all the other arts, even including
literature. At least this appears to be his desire,
altho it is not a little difficult to find out from his
manifestoes exactly what it is that he wishes.
His thoughts, if not hazily held, are obscurely
exprest. Seemingly, however, he looks forward
to an isolation of the art of the theater as a result
of its freeing itself from all entangling alliances
and of relying solely on its own resources.

If this really is his aim, its accomplishment
would deprive the drama of the aid of literature
and reduce it to pantomime, — which was, in-
deed, its earliest and most primitive form. Now,
it ought to be obvious that to force the drama
to forego the aid of literature and of all the other
arts, is to make it renounce its signal superiority
231

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

over all these other arts. Music may invite the
companionship of lyric poetry and the dance,
just as architecture can enrich itself by invoking
the assistance of sculpture and of painting. The
drama stands alone in its ability to call in the
collaboration not of one or two of the sister
arts, but of all of them, — music and the song and
the dance, painting, sculpture and architecture,
even on occasion oratory and the epic. Wagner
boldly proclaimed that his music-drama was to be
the art-work of the future, simply because it
was to be the result of the cordial cooperation of
all the nine muses. It is because the drama has
never been willing to restrict itself solely to the
dramatic that it has achieved its surpassing
breadth of appeal.

But if Gordon Craig is not a cogent or a co-
herent thinker, he is indisputably an artist of
undeniable originality, individuality and fertility,
as 1 can testify after a delightful London afternoon
spent at an exhibition of his beautiful models. He
is dissatisfied with the accepted methods of
mounting plays and more especially with the
elaborate complexity of the realistic scenery to
which the stage-directors of the last two or
three generations have accustomed us. He
would annihilate both the complexity and the
realism, substituting a symbolic simplicity, less
expensive and more effective. His designs, if
not always practical, have been suggestive; indeed
232

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY

some of those whom he has inspired have been
able to achieve results more satisfactory than
any he has himself attained. In fact, he is frank
in admitting that what he proposes may not be
immediately practical, since his designs are only
occasionally adjusted to the actual theater of
today, some of them being intended for a type
of theater which he foresees, and yet others for a
theater which he glimpses in his mind's eye and
which is never likely to be erected. That is to
say, these impractical sets were invented for the
sheer delight of the artist himself in their beauty
and not for the benefit of future spectators
gathered in front of the stage itself.

II

This brings us face to face with two questions.
First, why are the ardent young enthusiasts so
bitterly dissatisfied with the complex and realistic
stage-sets to which we are accustomed? And,
second, how did the realistic complication of our
modern scenery come to be accepted all the
world over? The latter had better be answered
before the former.

The orchestra of the Greek theater was devoid
of scenery and so was the wide and shallow stage
of the Roman theater. On the projecting plat-
form of the Tudor theater there were all the
properties that might be needful, thrones and
233

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

beds, well-heads and arbors; but there was no
painted scenery. In the theater of Louis XIV
there might be scenery of a kind, summary and
decorative, rather than characteristic; and the
acting took place far in front of the scenery, such
as it was, the performer standing well for-
ward between the lines of spectators seated on
both sides of the stage and keeping close under the
pendent chandeliers that he might be seen. Even
on the English stage in the time of Sheridan, the
acting was done on the apron curving forward
into the audience and lighted by a semi-circle
of inadequate oil-lamps. The characters of
Sheridan, of Moliere and of Shakspere stood
nearly all the time; and chairs were provided for
them only on the very rare occasions when the
plot of the play required them to be seated.

In the eighteenth century the novel had not
come into its own; it was held to be so inferior
to the drama that it escaped from the control of
the codifiers of critical theory. The novelists
had often begun as dramatists, Lesage for one
and Marivaux for another; and when they wrote
fiction they did not feel any more called upon to
relate their characters realistically to an appro-
priate background than they had done when they
wrote plays. It is true that Defoe (who had
been a journalist), took keen delight in sup-
plying all manner of descriptive details, yet
Fielding (who had been a playwright), was
234

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY

not tempted to follow him and was content to
project his characters almost in a void, letting
them live and move in rooms nearly as bare of
furniture and as uncharacteristic as was the stage
of the time.

Scott changed all this; he was the earliest of
historical novelists; and when he placed his
characters in the remote past, he was forced to
supply the familiar details of human existence in
the period he had chosen for his story. Scott had
to do this necessarily, if he wanted to make his
readers realize life in some earlier century about
which they were likely to know little. Balzac, in
his turn, applied the same process to the novel of
contemporary life; he described places with in-
tense gusto, revelling in imagining all possible
particularities of the town, of the house, and even
of the room, in which any one of his more vital
characters resided.

The interrelation of prose-fiction and the
drama is constant; and just as the novelists of
the eighteenth century had been content with the
bareness to which they were accustomed in the
theater of their own day, so the dramatists of the
middle of the nineteenth century began to de-
mand appropriate stage-sets for their intenser
social dramas. "An acted play is a novel intensi-
fied," said Henry James, "it realizes what the
theater suggests, and, by paying a liberal tribute
to the senses anticipates your possible complaint
235

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

that your entertainment is of the meager sort
styled intellectual." The composers of acted
plays, who knew the abiding effect which Balzac
had achieved by the veracity of his descriptions,
were desirous that the scenery should reinforce
the intellectual appeal of their writing by the sen-
sual of the things seen on the stage.

Fortunately compliance with this demand was
facilitated by a momentous change which took
place in the playhouse in the years when the realis-
tic movement was carrying all before it. In the
course of the middle half of the nineteenth century
the actual stage underwent a transformation.
It was so amply lighted first by gas and then by
electricity, that the actor had no longer to go down
to the footlights to let his changing expression be
seen. The parallel wings and borders by means
of which interiors had been crudely indicated were
abolisht and the compact box-set enabled the
stage-director to suggest more satisfactorily an
actual room. The apron was cut away; and the
curtain rose and fell in a picture-frame. The
characters of the play were thereafter elements in
a picture, which had a characteristic background,
and which might be furnisht with the most realis-
tic elaboration. The former intimacy of the
actor with the spectators, due to his close proxim-
ity, disappeared speedily; and with this intimacy
there disappeared also its concomitant, the solil-
oquy addrest by a character to the audience for
236

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY

the sole purpose of supplying information. The
drama immediately became more pictorial; it
could rely more certainly upon gesture; it could
renounce the aid of purely rhetorical oratory;
it could dispense with description; and it insisted
that the performer should subdue himself to
those new conditions and to be on his guard lest
he should "get out of the picture."

This modification of the physical conditions of
performance, which took place between 1850
and 1890, invited the dramatist to deal more
directly with life; and it encouraged him to rely
more solidly upon the purely dramatic, eschewing
the lyric and the epic and seeking solely to pre-
sent character immesht in situation. It stimulated
Ibsen to the acquisition of his masterly technic
and it supplied the stage best fitted for his austere
inquest upon human nature. Ibsen was as in-
sistent upon the appropriate environment for his
characters as was Balzac; and the interior in
which he placed any one of his several groups is
always vigorously characteristic. The set which
he visualized as the fit background for his creat-
ures in the' Doll's House' would not be appropriate
for those in 'Hedda Gabler' or for those in 'Ros-
mersholm.' Each of these plays has its own dread
atmosphere, subtly indicated by significant de-
tails.

237

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING
III

Yet Ibsen, even if he was the foremost, was not
the only outstanding figure at the beginning of
the twentieth century. He was companioned by
playwrights as unlike as Rostand and Haupt-
mann and d'Annunzio. Ibsen, poet as he was
beyond all question, wrote prose, compact and
direct; he was a realist, altho he was also often
a romanticist even in his severer problem-plays.
Rostand and Hauptmann and d'Annunzio are
rarely realistic; more often than not they are
romanticists; and above all they are more
frequently poetic. And here we are in sight of
an answer to the question early formulated:
Why is there so bitter a dissatisfaction with the
complex and realistic set to which we have slowly
become accustomed? It is because this set, suit-
able for the staid interiors, wherein the action of
the prosaic problem-play is slowly unrolled be-
fore it, is less suitable for the out-door scenes of
avowedly poetic plays.

The realistic complexity, which elaborates a
significant room for the characters of a social
drama rooted in fact, cannot attain an equal
significance when it seeks to reproduce the haunt-
ing landscape of a romantic play flowering out
of fantasy. It is appropriate for the 'Ghosts' of
Ibsen; but it is not appropriate for the 'Sightless'
of Maeterlinck or for the 'As You Like It' of
238

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY

Shakspere. In a word, the realistic set may be
exactly suited to plays of real life, but it does not
necessarily suit plays of unreal life illumined by
the light that never was on sea or land. Even
when 'Twelfth Night' or 'Much Ado About
Nothing' is mounted sumptuously and tastefully
by a stage-director of the liberality, the ingenuity
and the interpreting imagination of Sir Henry
Irving, the result is not commensurate with his
effort; and the effort itself is often only too visi-
ble. The semi-medieval stories which Shakspere
adjusted to the jutting platform of the Tudor
theater and which are plausible to us now only
if we are willing to make believe, have to be taken
apart and then put together again in contradic-
tion and almost in defiance of Shakspere's own
semi-medieval construction, so that they may
be made to adjust themselves to the copiously
pictorial method of our modern picture-frame
stage. After this inartistic dislocation, they are
likely to be overloaded with decorative details
not in harmony with their delightful unreality;
and the more strenuously the stage-director
strives to supply a realistic setting, the less
real, the less actual, is the result.

"Of pure poetry there are two kinds," said
Lord Dunsany in a preface for a volume of a
friend's verses; "that which mirrors the beauty
of the world in which our bodies are, and that
which builds the more mysterious kingdoms,
239

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

where geography ends and fairyland begins,
with gods and heroes at war, and the sirens sing-
ing still, and Alph going down to the darkness
from Xanadu." In the modern drama the leader
of those whose works mirror the beauty of the
world in which our bodies are, is Ibsen; and the
foremost representative of those who lay their
plays frankly in fairyland is Maeterlinck. It
was inevitable that there should be a reaction
against the effort to apply the method of compli-
cated realism to plays not compact with reality
but compounded of fancy, insubstantial and
etherial.

It was inevitable also that a younger genera-
tion should welcome a new departure for the pre-
sentation of the poetic dramas of Shakspere and
would endeavor to discover the means for re-
capturing something of the simplicity of the orig-
inal performance, and of avoiding the crushing
and needless expense of mechanical realism.
Inevitably again the ardor of the youthful leaders
of this revolt would tend to be unduly impatient,
and to be stimulated by an iconoclastic fervor
which might tempt them to a root and branch
reform, — to a violent revolution instead of an
orderly evolution. They were eager to prove all
things and yet they were not always anxious to
hold fast that which is true.

What was welcome in the realistic interiors of
the problem-plays was the congruity of the back-
240

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY

ground to the temper and tone of the play.
The set which Ibsen had visualized for his somber
'Ghosts' was rich in character; it was the fit en-
vironment for his disenchanted creatures; it
was absolutely congruous with his theme; it
served to intensify the appalling action of his
tragic story; and it did these things without in
any way drawing undue attention to itself. But
certain of the sets which Gordon Craig has de-
signed for one or another episode of ' Hamlet' and
of 'Macbeth,' — indisputably beautiful in them-
selves, truly imaginative, superbly decorative, —
are not in keeping with the atmosphere of the
plays; they are not unobtrusive backgrounds;
in fact, they cry aloud to be noticed for their
own sake. So it is also with the striking set which
he devised for the ' Electra,' bold and massive, but
foreign to the spirit of Sophocles, hopelessly un-
Greek, and likely to distract the attention of the
spectators from the dramatist to the decorator.
As we turn the pages of Gordon Craig's 'Art
of the Theater,' delighting in the designs and
doing our best to discover his own convictions,
we cannot avoid the suspicion that he holds the
decorator to be superior to the dramatist and
that he believes the control of the theater should
pass from the playwright-poet to the painter.
Surely it ought to be obvious that the dramatist
is the ultimate master of the stage and that the
artists whose aid he may invite must be his ser-
241

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

vants. Beauty of line and of color are in place
in the theater only when they contribute to the
emotional and intellectual appeal of the play
itself; and they are out of place whenever they
are permitted to obtrude themselves, to inter-
fere with this appeal and to detract from it.

IV

After the raising of the banner of revolt against
the costly and unsatisfactory realistic set, there
were many signs of unrest in the theaters of many
countries, notably in those of Russia and of
Germany. Stage-directors of varying ability
ventured upon all sorts of interesting experi-
ments. Some of these novelties approved them-
selves immediately and won acceptance as tend-
ing toward the development of a more satisfac-
tory mode of presenting the poetic drama; but
some of them were abhorrent, being incited ap-
parently by an egotistic desire to be different at
all costs, to be eccentric or even to be frankly
freakish. We find ourselves in a period of transi-
tion; and while we are justified in looking forward
hopefully, we cannot now clearly descry the goal
at the end of the winding path upon which we
have entered.

But we know our point of departure, even if we
cannot yet foresee where we shall arrive or when;
and already can we find full justification for the
242

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY

reaction against the persistent practice of sup-
plying complicated realism for plays the action
of which does not take place in the realm of real-
ity. There was, for example, a noble dignity in
the bold archway wherewith Sam Hume indicated
the city-gate for a Detroit production of Lord
Dunsany's 'Tents of the Arabs,' a design which
had a distinct beauty of its own but which was
also absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the
play, — altho a hypercritic might regret that the
arch itself was Roman rather than Arabic or
even vaguely oriental. Quite as effective in its
stark simplicity was the lovely scene designed by
Hamilton Bell for the 'Sister Beatrice' of Maeter-
linck when it was produced by Winthrop Ames
at the New Theater, — a medieval entrance-hall,
devoid of all distracting detail and provided with
a tall door at the back, ready to open once to
reveal the dark sky with its stars shining down
on the stalwart figure of the lover come to carry
off the enamored nun.

A like feeling for the fitness of things, for the
delicately artistic adjustment of the setting to the
soul of the play, was discoverable also in the
two contrasting scenes which Winthrop Ames
caused to be prepared for that enchanting pan-
tomime 'Pierrot the Prodigal.' One of these
sets represented the unpretentious home from
which the erring son goes forth and to which
he returns at last with a broken and a contrite
243

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

heart, — a low ceilinged room, summarily yet
adequately indicated with only the furnishings
necessary to the action; and the other set, equally
successful in its significance, was the temporary
abode of the prodigal when he has yielded to the
lure of the lady of pleasure, — a loftier room,
seemingly more spacious, sumptuously extrava-
gant in its ornament and yet achieving a char-
acter of its own without the aid of a clutter of
insignificant details.

The names of the personages and the final
flourish of the tricolor flag when the drums rattle
past and the fifes shrill out, inform us that the
action of * Pierrot the Prodigal* must be supposed
to take place Somewhere In France; and it is
also somewhere in France that a certain Man mar-
ried a Dumb Wife. The vicissitudes of his
misadventure were narrated by Rabelais four
hundred years ago and they were only recently
cast into dialog by Anatole France; yet the in-
felicitous wedding did not happen in the twentieth
century or in the sixteenth, but in the dim and
distant epoch known as Once upon a Time.
As a matter of fact, the consequences of this
marriage are so fantastic, so completely removed
from the restraints of reality, that we cannot
help knowing that they never did happen any-
where or anywhen, — a knowledge which in no
wise interferes with our enjoyment. For this
inconsequent impossibility Robert E. Jones
244

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY

invented a singe set, at once exterior and in-
terior, charming in color and playful in design,
perfectly n accord with the tricksy comicality
of the play and reinforcing the humorous unreal-
ity of the story. No such house as that which
we were invited to gaze upon had ever been built
by the hand of man; and yet we accepted it
instantly as the only possible habitation for the
Man and for his Dumb Wife. In fact, this com-
pletely satis!"actory setting was designed in per-
fect accord with the principle this artist has him-
self declared : " Scenery isn't there to be lookt at,
it's really there to be forgotten. The drama is
the fire, the scenery is the air that lifts the fire
and makes it bright."

The Rabelais-France farce was produced in
New York by Granville Barker, and it was by far
the most successful of his experiments, several
of which were a little too regardless of traditional
methods and a little too idiosyncratic in their
insistence on novelty for its own sake. The
set of the ' Dumb Wife' did not attract attention to
itself, whereas in the same manager's production
of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' both the
scenes and the costumes shriekt aloud, because
they seemed to American audiences out of keep-
ing with the spirit of Shakspere's fairy fantasy.
The same criticism would have to be past on
the powerfully projected backgrounds which
were prepared by Golsovine for a Russian produc-
245

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

tion of the 'Festin de Pierre' and which were not
consonant with the restrained tone of Mohere's
version of the Don Juan story, aitho they might
have been in place if used to adorn the lyric
melodrama of Tirso de Molina, the remote
original of Moliere's piece.

In the immediate future it is probable that the
poetic drama, Shakspere's or Maeterlinck's, will
be presented in our theaters far less realistically
and far less expensively. We shall no longer
expect a spectacle as glittering, as costly and as
cumbrous as the reproduction of Paul Veronese's
'Marriage at Cana' which Augustin Daly be-
stowed upon the final act of the 'Taming of the
Shrew.' It is also probable that this simplifi-
cation, this renunciation of ultra-realism, this
substitution of indication, summary but ade-
quate, for actual representation, may in time
affect even the mounting of modern plays in
prose. This will not necessarily prove to be an
improvement. A British critic once found fault
with Ibsen because he used the fittest words
and not the most beautiful; and Ibsen insisted on
the fittest backgrounds for his social dramas,
and not the most beautiful. In the mounting of
the modern problem-play what is essential is not
beauty for its own sake, but character.
246

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY

There is always danger that the effort to'
achieve the characteristic may over-reach itself
with disastrous results. In a letter to Sarcey on
the art of stage-management Dumas fils recorded
his preference for a very simple interior with as
little furniture as possible, all in neutral tones,
against which the personages would stand out in
vigorous relief; and he was not at all pleased
with the single set which Montigny devised for
the three acts of 'Monsieur Alphonse.' As the
action took place in the country-house of a
retired naval officer, the manager imagined a
room with an exotic decoration vaguely Chinese
and with bamboo furniture, most of which was
painted a brilliant red. "The effect was original
and gay, when the stage was empty; but none
the less it suggested a bird-cage . . . and one
was moved to wonder whether the persons of the
play would not sooner or later begin to hop from
perch to perch."

Dumas, a born playwright, demanded always
that the decorative should be subordinate to the
dramatic. " If we insist on being original, and
on being different, we are in imminent danger of
being eccentric and of bringing about an antagon-
ism between the subject of the play and its
scenery." It was this unfortunate desire to be
original and to be different which recently mis-
led an American manager into entrusting a New
York house-decorator with the designing of the
247

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

successive sets for the 'New York Idea.' Lang-
don Mitchell's heroine in the first act is about to
marry into a family of hereditary dulness; and
being herself a delightfully lively person, she re-
turns, in the last act, to the husband she has
divorced. But the uninspired house-decorator
did not provide the opening act with an interior of
transcendent respectability nor did he bestow
upon the closing scene an interior of contrasting
levity. There was not actual antagonism be-
tween the subject of the play and its scenery,
but there was certainly no harmony. The in-
teriors were in no wise characteristic of the
persons who were supposed to live in them; in fact
the only character that they had was that of the
house-decorator's own shop.

No such blunder was made by David Belasco
in the single set of the ' Return of Peter Grimm' —
perhaps the most extreme example of realistic
complexity, with its unending details, all charac-
teristic, all unobtrusive and all congruous with
the topic of the play. The room which the
author-manager set before us is the room in
which Peter Grimm would live; it is the house
in which he would die; and it is the home to
which he would return after death. The at-
mosphere of the whole dwelling, as we breathe
it, is in perfect accord with the appealing per-
sonality of the forlorn ghost. To simplify this
set would be to deprive it of the value given
248

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY

to it by the intuition and the dexterity of its
designer.

Yet Belasco, ahvays alert to perceive the possi-
bilities of every new development in the art
of the stage, has more recently bestowed upon
'Marie-Odile' a very simple setting in accord
with its simpler theme; and so dexterously did
he select the sparse elements of this rarer and less
encumbered scene, that there was no diminu-
tion in the pictorial support of the story, in
both cases Belasco workt in obedience to the
unchanging law which declares that it is the
perfection of a woman's dress to make its wearer
look her best without in any way attracting at-
tention to itself.

The dominating principle in putting a drama
on the stage is plain enough. Every play ought
to be provided with the specific background
which will best serve to bring out its own special
quality. A brilliant comedy of modern society
like Clyde Fitch's 'Truth' will call for a scenic
investiture more complex than would be appro-
priate for a fleeting episode like Lady Gregory's
' Rising of the Moon.'

It is not often that the author himself is as
willing to leave the choice of method to the pro-
ducer as Echegaray disclosed himself to be in
the directions prefixt to his one-act piece, the
'Street Singer': — "The stage represents a square
or a street. There may or may not be trees;
249

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

there may or may not be seats; there may or may
not be Hghted lamps. The only thing which is
essential is the wall of a house facing the spectators
so that the Beggars and the Singer may take their
places against it. The time is night."

(1918.)

250

XIV

THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-
BUSINESS

EVERY art has, and has to have, its own
special and highly specialized vocabulary,
ample for its own needs and therefore abounding
in words and terms and phrases, often startlingly
strange to those who are unfamiliar with the
technicalities devised by its practitioners. The
electricians, for example, make use of a heterogeny
of vocables unknown to the profane and sometimes
fearfully and wonderfully made. I recall that I
once saw in an electrical weekly an advertisement
asserting the superiority of the manufacturer's
"separately excited boosters"; and when I con-
sulted an electrical expert he informed me that
these were very useful machines and that their
name exactly described their purpose. This
explanation did not lift me out of my ignorance;
but when it was too late to retaliate I wondered
whether I could not have had him at an equal
disadvantage if I had askt him if he knew what
a star-trap was or a taking-piece, a run-down or a
baby-spot. I think that he would have been as
251

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

much puzzled by these terms, well-known to all
who are wont to pass thru the stage-door, as I
was bewildered by the excitability of boosters.

The theater has an elaborate terminology of its
own, completely adequate to its manifold necessi-
ties, and as precise in its meaning and as accurate
in its application as the vocabulary of any of the
sciences. To the outsider the technicalities of the
stage are likely to be as mysterious as those of
any other department of human activity, — as
mysterious and as misleading. A star-trap, for
example, is not intended for the sole use of a star ;
on the contrary it is a mechanical device the
obvious dangers of which no star would ever be
called upon to risk. A baby-spot carries with it
no suggestion that a stage infant is about to break
out with the measles; and a run-down does not
imply that anybody is in need of medical treat-
ment. Nor has a raking-piece anything what-
ever to do with gardening.

In the prosaic eighteenth century, it was held
to be good form in speaking and in writing to use
general terms so far as possible and to avoid the
use of specific technicalities. But in our more
imaginative twentieth century we relish the exact
word and we delight in employing it with ab-
solute scientific precision. Rudyard Kipling re-
vealed himself as a man of his own time when
he made use of the special terms of engineering,
as he did in prose in '007' and in verse in ' M'An-
252

THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS

drevvs' Hymn.' Perhaps no other of our poets
and story-tellers has gone so far in this direction
as Kipling; and yet many of them are tending
that way, to the constant enrichment of our every-
day speech as this is necessarily replenisht from
the highly specialized vocabularies of the several
arts and sciences.

It is not uncommon to hear the technicalities
of the theater contemptuously thrust aside as
merely the slang of the stage. Now, no doubt,
the stage has its slang; indeed, there is no deny-
ing that stage-folk are plentifully supplied with
the fleeting phrases which may fairly be dis-
mist as slang. But none the less has the theater
a vocabulary of its own, as rigid in its meaning
and as legitimate in its usage as the vocabulary
of electricity or of architecture. No one is jus-
tified in denouncing baby-spot and star-trap,
raking-piece and run-down as specimens of
merely ephemeral slang. These terms have a
scientific precision as indisputable as horse-power
or foot-ton or kilo-watt; they are as necessary
and they are as deserving of collection and of
definition as the terms of painting or of sculpture,
of chemistry or of medicine.

It is a curious thing that these technicalities
of the theater are only a few of them to be found
even in the largest and most comprehensive of
the dictionaries of the English language; and it
is even more curious that they have never been
253

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

assiduously selected and set in order in a subordi-
nate dictionary of their own. Similar vocabularies
have been prepared for the art of painting, for
example, and for the science of medicine; and an
ample proportion of the specific terms of painting
and of medicine have been included in the larger
dictionaries of the language as a whole. It is
to be hoped that some man of letters, some jour-
nalist intimately acquainted with the things of the
theater, may some day be moved to undertake
the task of preparing a stage-glossary, of collect-
ing and of defining the vocabulary of the arts of
the stage — playwriting, acting, scene-painting,
stage-management.

II

The task will prove to be more arduous and
more onerous than would appear at first sight,
since it ought not to be limited to the theater
itself but should be made to include also the
special vocabularies of all the other departments
of the show-business, not only pantomime and
dancing, but the circus and negro-minstrelsy, the
variety-show and the moving-picture. Each of
these departments of the show-business has words
and phrases of its own, many of them more or less
unknown in the others and all of them needing
explanatory definition. We want to be able to
turn to this glossary for the precise description of
Leotard-body, for example, and of Risley-ad.
254

THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS

We shall be glad to have an exact explanation of
the circus-act known as'Tete Jenkins," — most hu-
morously described by Mark Twain in 'Huckle-
berry Finn.' And how many of us know what
a iranka is or how the haioute of the circus differs
from the springboard of the gymnasium? We
may be able to guess at the meaning of hig top,
and of canvas-man; we may hazard a conjecture
as to the exact significance of giant-swing and of
muscle-grind ; but not a few of us would grope in
the dark vainly if we were suddenly asked for
an explanation of lashells (which are the ropes
making taut the rod wherefrom a trapeze is
suspended). Then there is mechanic, which the
outsider recognizes as a name applied to a human
being and which the circus insider knows as the
name of a machine used in the training of riders
for the ring.

However outlandish these terms may seem to
those inexperienced in the life led by the itin-
erant tent-dwellers, they are so familiar and so
usual to the circus man that he would probably
be surprised to learn that they were unfamiliar
to the immense majority of mankind who are
only spectators of the sports of the arena and not
participants therein. Altho the circus has a host
of these special terms, perhaps more than any
other subdivision of the show-business except the
theater itself, other subdivisions have also their
full share. While the vogue of the circus reveals
255

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

no sign of diminishing, the popularity of negro-
minstrelsy has undergone an eclipse in recent
years. Half-a-century ago there were two dozen
or two score troupes touring the country season
after season, whereas there are now fewer than
half-a-score and perhaps even fewer than a scant
half-dozen.

No longer does the big drum invite us to " 40.
Count them. 40" and very rarely do we listen
to the preliminary request of the middleman:
"Gentlemen, be seated !" Only occasionally now
do we see the the semi-circle of burnt-cork counte-
nances with the unfailingly dignified interlocutor
in the center and with Bones and Tambo at the
extremities. Here in the United States, where
negro-minstrelsy was bom, Bones and Tambo are
known as end-men, whereas in Great Britain, to
which the black-face entertainment was trans-
ported early in its career, they are always called
corner-men. Not often now does the First Part
end with the accustomed walk around; and only
infrequently in these days is the Second Part
described as an olio. Still rarer is our oppor-
tunity to behold the break-down, rendered more
difficult and more amazing by the use of flappers,
or to gaze delighted on a statue clog-dance, with
its rhythm tinklingly accentuated by the em-
ployment of clinkers. Vanisht also is the street
parade which made it necessary that the play-
ers of the stringed instruments should be able
256

THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS

to double in brass, as the advertisements in-
sisted.

Ill

The picturesqueness of the vocabulary of the
circus and of the minstrel-show is undeniable;
and those of us who are keenly interested in the
multiform developments of the English language
cannot fail to regret that this vocabulary has not
received from the lexicographers the attention it
deserves. Probably the most obvious reason for
their neglect is their ignorance of its existence.
The most obvious of reasons for their ignorance
is that the technical terms of the several sub-
divisions of the show-business do not often find
themselves set down in black and white. They
exist and they survive by word of mouth only;
and there is rarely any actual need to write them
down. Even when they may get themselves
written out, this is likely to be only in a tem-
porary list drawn up by a prompter or a stage-
manager. Of course, they are freely employed
in the friendly letters of the stage-folk one to
another. But these letters and these lists, when
they have served their immediate purpose, are
very unlikely to get into print or even to be pre-
served.

Not often actually written, the technicalities
of the theater even less frequently appear on the
printed page where they might chance to meet
257

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

the eye of the dictionary-maker. Doubtless,
there are a host of stage-terms which have been
used orally for years without ever finding them-
selves in print. Thus it is that they have never
had a chance to excite the curiosity of the lexi-
cographers. The vocabularies of engineering and
of medicine are preserved in the many text-books
constantly pouring from the press for the benefit
of the students of these two arts; and so it is
that they are brought to the attention of the alert
scouts of linguistic research, always desirous of
multiplying the number of new words to be in-
cluded in the newest editions and in the latest
supplements of their dictionaries. But no college
has yet been tempted to give a course in stage-
craft; and there are no technical schools requiring
text-books for the instruction of novices in the
various branches of the show-business. There are
examinations for the license to practise law and
medicine; but admission to all the departments
of the show-business is free. The stage-door
stands open to all, no diploma being demanded
from actor or acrobat, dancer or pantomimist.

It is true that the vocabulary of the show-
business is necessarily employed more or less by
writers of fiction when they venture to take their
heroes and their heroines from among the show-
folk. But the novelists who have chosen to deal
with life behind the scenes are rarely equipt with
an intimate knowledge of that dim region and
258

THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS

they are not likely to feel themselves called upon
to present the everyday details of the theatrical
career with the aid of the special vocabulary of
the stage. 1 suppose that I must have read at
least a hundred stories of theatrical life, long and
short ; and I doubt if there could be gleaned from
them all more than half-a-hundred of the tech-
nical terms of the theater. And while novels of
the stage are many, novels of the circus are few
and novels of the minstrel-show are non-existent.
Just at present the writers of fiction seem to have
a particular fancy for the moving-picture; and
they are making plain to new readers the methods
and the mysteries of the art of the screen, still
in process of rapid development. These readers
are enlightened as to the heroine's endeavor to
register her swiftly changing emotions and as
to her efforts to avoid wasting film. They are
told what a close-up is; they are informed as to
the precise moment when the director tells the
camera-man to shoot ; and they may even be
instructed as to the meaning of a necessary but
entirely new verb made out of an old noun, — the
verb to panoram.

IV

Rapidly expanding as the vocabulary of the
moving-picture studio may be, rich as the vocab-
ulary of the variety-show may be, ample
as the vocabulary of the circus already is,
259

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYiMAKING

no one of them is as full and as varied as the
vocabulary of the theater itself, — a vocabulary
having its remoter origins in the rude mysteries
of the Middle Ages, expanding steadily in the
professional playhouse of Elizabeth and James,
enlarging itself again in the roofed and artificially
lighted theaters of the Restoration, gaining a
further elaboration in the eighteenth-century
theater with the development of scene-painting
by De Loutherburg, and attaining to its present
complexity after the invention of the electric
light had aided in the substitution of our present
picture-frame stage for the apron-stage of a
hundred years ago.

The unlearned reader of Henslowe's diary is
likely to wonder what matter of property it was
which he there finds catalogued as "/ Hell-
month." The inquiring reader of Ford's plays
is interested to discover that this dramatist in
one of his pieces calls for the use of a "chair with
an engine," — the context making it evident that
this was a trick-chair, with concealed arms which
flew forward to imprison the unsuspicious sitter
whenever the villain released the secret spring.
The intelligent reader of Shakspere who abandons
our misleading library editions, with their modern-
ized stage-directions, and who turns to the original
folios and quartos, can gather a significant collec-
tion of Elizabethan stage-technicalities, which he
will find helpful to a proper understanding of the
260

THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS

conditions of theatrical performance in Tudor
days. In 'Julius Caesar,' for example, when the
time comes for Mark Antony to deliver his address
to the Roman populace we are informed that " he
goes up into the pulpit" — that is to say into a
crude and conventionalized rostrum perfectly
satisfactory to the groundlings who stood restless
in the unroofed yard.

This intelligent reader of Shakspere may how-
ever find himself a little at a loss when he comes
to the 'Taming of the Shrew' and when he finds
that at a certain moment the stage-direction
declares "enter the drunkard above." The
context however will make it plain that the
drunkard is Christopher Sly; and any text-book
of the Tudor theater will inform him that "to
enter above" meant to appear in the gallery over
the stage so that the actor could look down on
the action taking place on the broad platform
below. The Elizabethan "to enter above" must
not be confounded with our modern "to go up
stage" which means to go further back from the
footlights just as "to come down" means to ap-
proach them. If however this Shaksperian reader
meets with the unfamiliar word traverse, he will
consult the text-books in vain for a satisfactory
explanation, since we have not yet ascertained
exactly what kind of a scenic appliance this term
designated.

The compiler of the much to be wisht for his-
261

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

torical dictionary of theatrical terms, ancient and
modern, will make it plain that the word clown
did not connote to the Elizabethans what it did
to the Victorians. It did not mean an acrobatic
humorist of the circus or a comic character in a
pantomime. It was in fact almost the exact
equivalent of low comedian, of the performer
who undertakes the broadly comic parts, the ac-
cepted funmaker of the company, certain to pro-
voke a ready laugh merely by his welcome ap-
pearance even before he has crackt his first joke.
That there were recognized "lines of business" in
the English theater while Shakspere was writing
for it is indisputable; but except in this single
case of the clown we do not know what they were
called. It seems likely that in the company of
the Globe theater Condell played heavies and
that some unidentified but brilliant performer was
entrusted with the light-comedy parts. But we
have no information as to the names given to these
two lines of business or even if they had then any
specific name. As the Tudor actors had become
professional only a few years before Shakspere
went on the stage, it is probable that they had
not yet been forced to invent a long list of tech-
nical terms, altho they must have had many
which have not come down to us.

262

THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS

In the course of the past three centuries and
a half the theater has soHdly establisht itself;
it has undergone many changes; and its vocab-
ulary has been multiplied in response to vary-
ing conditions. Shakspere was used to an octag-
onal playhouse, open to the sky, with a platform
jutting into the yard. His stage was encumbered
by the gallants who sat on both sides, smoking
their long pipes. It had abundant properties but
it had absolutely no scenery, as we now under-
stand the word. The machinery was extremely
simple and primitive. As the playwrights sought
for as much spectacle as was possible on their
bare stage, and as they delighted in storms —
there are three of these in ' King Lear,' — probably
their theater had devices akin to the wind-
machine and the thunder-barrel. But Shakspere
would be badly puzzled if he could come back to
hear a producer of our own time talk about the
wings or the flies, about tormentors and border-
lights, about panorama-grooves and cyclorama-
drops.

While Shakspere could not possibly have fore-
seen these terms descriptive of our latter-day
complexity of stage-decoration, he would find
it easy enough to arrive at the significance of
phrases which dealt rather with the art of the
actor. He would not take long to ascertain that
263

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

one performer confines himself to straight business
or that another performer had a part that played
itself. He would appreciate the compliment
when he was assured that certain plays of his,
'Hamlet* for one and 'As You Like It' for an-
other, were actor-proof. He would be inclined to
praise the actor, who was always letter-perfect,
who never failed to get a hand, whose popu-
larity was so great that no piece in which he ap-
peared was ever a. frost, and whose memory was
so good that he never dried up.

Men who rarely or never enter the theater will
be found declaring that a certain politician is
only an understudy, altho he is always seeking to
get himself in the spotlight, thereby making a
three-ring circus of himself. In an incriminat-
ing letter one American statesman asserted that
he would not be found " a dead head in the enter-
prize"; and another American statesman, when
he was a candidate for the presidency, was loudly
advertized as "the advance-agent of prosperity."

(1917-)

264

XV

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER

THOSE of us who are now sexagenarians and
who had the good fortune to make acquain-
tance with 'Essays in Criticism ' in our undergradu-
ate days and to read the successive collections of
Matthew Arnold's later criticisms as they ap-
peared one by one in the score of years that fol-
lowed, can never forget the debt we owe to the
critic who opened our eyes to the value of culture,
to the purpose of criticism and to the duty of
"seeing the thing as it is." We felt an increasing
stimulus as we came to know Arnold's writings
more intimately, as we absorbed them, as we made
his ideas our own, as we sought to apply his
principles and to borrow his methods. The
influence of Arnold's work upon the generation
born in the middle of the nineteenth century was
immediate and it has been enduring.

"Without in the least over-rating himself,"
so Brownell has finely phrased it, Arnold "took
himself with absolute seriousness, and his work
from first to last is informed with the high sin-
cerity of a consistent purpose — the purpose of
265

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

being nobly useful to his time and country by
preaching to men precisely the gospel he conceived
they most vitally needed. For the consideration
of his public and his era he deemed energy less
important than light, earnestness less needful than
sweetness, genius less beneficent than reasonable-
ness, erudition less called for than culture." He
preacht always persuasively, making his points
sharply and often tipping them with wit that
they might penetrate the more swiftly. He knew
so certainly what he wanted to prove that it was
easy for him always to be clear. His style, one
of the most delightful in the whole range of English
literature, is ever limpid, pellucid, transparent.

As he was directly addressing the public of
his own era, he constantly dealt with the themes of
immediate interest to his contemporaries in his
own country. So it is that a large proportion of
his writing, always indisputably literary in its
treatment, is now discovered to be sometimes
journalistic in its theme. Whatever interest his
discussion of the Burials Bill, and of the Deceased
Wife's Sister's Bill, may have had when
these topics were being hotly debated in the
House of Commons, has evaporated now that
the passage of years has deprived them of their
pertinency. Moreover, even in writing his es-
says on questions of permanent importance, the
question of secondary education, for example, and
the question of the classics against the sciences,
266

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER

Arnold was so eager to catch the attention of his
contemporaries that he never hesitated to make
use of illustrations from the happenings of the
moment, likely to be a little unintelligible to
readers of a later generation.

To say this is to suggest that he yielded a little
too much and a little too often to the temptation
of an instantaneous and fleeting effect, and that
there are passages in his writings, and not a few
of them, which will be obscure to readers of the
twentieth century without an annotation almost
as abundant as that which does not prevent
Pope's 'Dunciad' from being unreadable. The
fact is that Arnold, although essentially a man
of letters, had a hankering after the newspaper,
after the direct and evanescent impression of
journalism. His essays were publisht in maga-
zines and reviews; and the magazine, — and the
review also — is always alert to capture the ele-
ment of timeliness; it is at best only a bridge
between literature and journalism. 'Friend-
ship's Garland,' one of the most amusing of Ar-
nold's books and one in which he most completely
exprest certain of his opinions, was originally
contributed to a daily paper, the Pall Mall Ga-
zette, at irregular intervals during the years 1866
to 1870. It is true that the Pall Mall Gazette,
while under the control of its founder, Frederick
Greenwood, and afterward when it was edited by
John Morley, was the most literary of London
267

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

journals, rivalling in this respect the Temps and
the Dehats of Paris. To this evening journal,
appealing to the better sort of newspaper readers,
Arnold continued to contribute from time to
time brief articles on literary and educational
topics, most of which he did not care to preserve
in his successive volumes, and only half-a-dozen
of which have been included even in the more
or less complete edition de luxe of his prose and
verse publisht in fifteen volumes in 1903-4 and
limited to seven hundred and fifty copies.

Among these newspaper contributions rescued
in this limited edition are a valuable note on
George Sand (whom he rated higher than Bal-
zac), and a series of five letters from 'An Old
Playgoer,' written between December, 1882, and
October, 1884. These five letters represent his
sole venture into the field of theatrical criticism,
— excepting only the very interesting paper on the
'French Play in London,* evoked by the visit of
the Comedie-Franjaise to England in 1879. This
single essay and these five brief letters are the
only evidences of Arnold's keen interest in the
theater. He was a constant playgoer, — unlike
Sainte-Beuve, in whose footsteps he followed
loyally and who seems to have cared little for the
acted drama, altho he was always character-
istically acute and felicitous in his criticism of
Moliere and of the other masters of the French
stage.

268

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER

Born in 1822, Matthew Arnold was old enough
to have witnessed the final appearances of the last
of the Kemble brotherhood; and in one of the
Pall Mall Gazette letters he recorded his opinion
that the Benedick of Charles Kemble was superior
to that of Henry Irving. " I remember how in my
youth," he confest in his paper on the perform-
ances of the Comedie-Frangaise, "after a first
sight of the divine Rachel at the Edinburgh
theater, in the part of Hermione, I followed her to
Paris, and for two months never missed one of her
performances." No doubt it was this intensive
study of the great actress which inspired his three
noble sonnets on Rachel.

One can glean from his publisht corre-
spondence a sparse record of his occasional visits
to the theater in England and on the continent, —
records often accompanied by his off-hand judg-
ments of the plays and of the players whom he
beheld. In February, 1861, he saw Charles
Fechter as Othello: "the first two acts I thought
poor (Shakspere's fault, partly), the next two ef-
fective, and the last pretty well." In April,
1864, he accepted an invitation to see Kate Bate-
man as Leah, adding that he had already seen
"most of the things that are being given now."
In March, 1865, he went with his family to see
Sothern as Lord Dundreary. In November,
1874, he writes that he much wanted to see ' Ham-
let' (which Irving was then acting); and in
269

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

February, 1876, he tells his sister that he is going
to see "that gibbering performance, as I fear it is,
Irving's Othello." Nearly ten years later in
November, 1885, he saw 'Othello' at the Royal
Theater in Berlin: — "horrid! but I wanted for
once to see Shakspere in German." And a year
after, in March, 1886, when he was again in Ger-
many, he reported that he was going "a great deal
to the theaters, the acting is so good" (this was
in Munich).

II

In 1856, when he was thirty-four, he seems to
have planned a closet-drama on a Roman theme;
" I am full of a tragedy of the time of the end of
the Republic — one of the most colossal times of
the world, 1 think. ... It won't see the light,
however, before 1857." It never has seen the
light; and when 1857 arrived it found him at
work on a closet-drama on a Greek theme, the
' Merope' which he was to publish in 1858. As he
was engaged in rehandling a story already dealt
with by Euripides, Maffei, Voltaire and Alfieri,
Arnold wisely undertook an analysis of the
dramaturgic methods of the greatest and the most
skilful of all the Attic dramatists: "what I learn
in studying Sophocles for my present purpose is,
or seems to me, wonderful; so far exceeding all
that one would learn in years ' reading of him with-
out such a purpose."

270

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER

In the preface to his collected 'Poems,' issued
in 1853, he had discust the poet's choice of a
theme. He did not cite but he echoed Voltaire's
assertion that the success of a tragedy depends on
its subject. In fact, Arnold is discussing poetry
at large and not dramatic poetry only, yet the
principle he laid down applies with special force to
the drama: "the poet has in the first place to
select an excellent action; and what actions are
the most excellent ? Those, certainly, which most
powerfully appeal to the great primary human
affections: to those elementary feelings which sub-
sist permanently in the race, and which are in-
dependent of time."

In the preface to 'Merope' itself, written five
years later, Arnold sought to justify his selection
of a Greek action, and his attempt to present this
action as he imagined it would have been pre-
sented by a Greek dramatist. He described the
origin and development of Greek tragedy, proving
his knowledge of its principles. Yet in the play
itself he was unable to apply these principles
successfully. He lackt both the native dramatic
genius and the acquired theatrical talent. In a
letter of February, 1858, to his sister, he exprest
his dissatisfaction with the adverse criticisms of
his dramatic poem, which were the result largely
of his own argumentative preface: "Instead of
reading it for what it is worth, everybody begins
to consider whether it does not betray a design to
271

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

substitute tragedies d la grecqiie for every other
kind of poetical composition in England, and falls
into an attitude of violent resistance to such an
imaginary design. What I meant them to see in
it was a specimen of the world created by the
Greek imagination. This imagination was dif-
ferent from our own, and it is hard for us to appre-
ciate, even to understand it; but it had a peculiar
power, grandeur, and dignity, and these are worth
trying to get an apprehension of."

What Arnold himself failed to perceive is that
the peculiar power, grandeur and dignity of the
Greek imagination can best be apprehended by a
study of the tragedies written by the Greeks them-
selves and that there was no need for him or for
any other Englishman to try to beat the Attic
tragedians on their own ground and with their
own weapons. After all, the most satisfactory
Greek tragedies are and must be those written by
the Greeks, as the most satisfactory Elizabethan
dramas are those written by the Elizabethans.
The action of 'Merope' might be excellent; it
might "most powerfully appeal to the great
primary human affections"; but it could exert
this appeal upon a modern audience only if it were
presented in accord with modern conditions. The
theme of 'Merope' might have a universal and
perennial interest, but the form which Matthew
Arnold gave it was only local and temporary,
however superb it might have been when it had
272

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER

evolved spontaneously from the special conditions
of theatrical performance in Athens. Further-
more, with all his liking for the acted drama,
Arnold in composing 'Merope' was not thinking
of performance in any theater, he was creating
only a closet-drama, a still-born offspring of the
Muse. A play which is not intended to be played
is a contradiction in terms; it is an overt ab-
surdity, no matter how greatly gifted the poet
may be who deceives himself in the vain effort to
achieve the truly dramatic without taking into
account the theater, in which only can the true
drama be born.

Eight years later he seems to have been on the
verge of repeating his blunder and of again wast-
ing his effort in an attempt foredoomed to failure.
In March, 1866, he wrote to his mother that he
was troubled to find that Tennyson was at work
on a subject, the story of the Latin poet Lucretius,
which he himself had been occupied with for
some twenty years: "I was going to make a
tragedy out of it. . . . I shall probably go on
with it, but it is annoying, the more so as 1 cannot
possibly go on at present so as to be ready this
year, but must wait till next." Fortunately for
himself he did not go on; and before the next year
came the project of a tragedy on Lucretius had
joined the earlier project of the tragedy "of the
time of the end of the Republic." In the first
planned dramatic poem there might have been the
273

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

stuff out of which a true tragedy could be made,
even if Arnold was not the man to make it ; but
the subject of the later Roman poem seems hope-
lessly infertile. It is true that Moliere was in-
tensely interested in Lucretius, and Moliere was a
born playwright; but all that Moliere planned to
do was to make a French translation of the great
work of Lucretius; and the Latin poet would
never have suggested himself to the French drama-
tist as the possible hero of a tragedy.

Ill

With Arnold's persistent desire to use the dra-
matic form, with his lively curiosity as to the prin-
ciples of playmaking and with his unfailing in-
terest in the art of acting, we may well wonder
why it is that no one of his more elaborate critical
studies was devoted to any of the great dramatists.
There are the lofty sonnets on Sophocles and on
Shakspere; but there is no single study of Soph-
ocles or of Shakspere or of Moliere. Scattered
thru his essays are many penetrating bits of
criticism upon one or another of the playwrights
of Europe. In the essay, 'A French Critic on
Goethe,' for example, there is an illuminating
comparison of Goethe's 'Goetz von Berlichingen'
with Schiller's ' Robbers.' Arnold quoted the
assertion of a British critic that "there was some-
thing which prevented Goethe from ever becom-
274

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER

ing a great dramatist; he could never lose him-
self sufficiently in his creations." And on this
Arnold commented that it is in 'Goetz' that
Goethe loses himself most. 'Goetz' is full of
faults, " but there is a life and a power in it,
and it is not dull. This is what distinguishes
it from Schiller's ' Robbers.' The ' Robbers' is at
once violent and tiresome. 'Goetz' is violent,
but it is not tiresome."

The one long article devoted exclusively to
things theatrical is the ' French Play in London/
written in 1879, and reprinted in ' Irish Essays,' —
a volume in which it finds itself strangely out of
place in its enforced companionship with half-a-
dozen sprightly specimens of political polemic.
The ' French Play in London' is one of the clever-
est of Arnold's essays, and one of the most charm-
ing. It is also one of the most valuable, rich
in matter, graceful and urbane in manner, witty
in expression and wise in outlook. It reveals
Arnold's genuine appreciation of the drama as a
literary form, — and it discloses also his under-
standing of the art of acting, by which only is the
drama made vital.

The Comedie-Frangaise was then in the pleni-
tude of its superiority over all other histrionic ag-
gregations. It possest a company of comedians
probably unequalled in France before or since, and
certainly unequalled in England, — except possibly
at Drury Lane in the early years of Sheridan's
275

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

management, when the ' School for Scandal ' was
"in all its glory," as Charles Lamb said. The
boards of the Theatre Franjais were nightly trod
by Got and Coquelin, by Thiron, Barre and
Febvre, by Sarah-Bernhardt and Croizette, by
Barretta and Jouassain. In comedy, in Moliere,
Beaumarchais and Augier, it was incomparable; in
Hugo it was superb; and even if it was not so
superb in Corneille and Racine, it was at least
far more than adequate.

Although Arnold began by declaring that he
did not propose to analize the artistic accomplish-
ment of the several members of this galaxy of
stars, he did allow himself one excursus into purely
histrionic criticism, — an excursus which proved
both his insight and his foresight. He pointed
out — and this was in 1879 — the fatal defect in the
equipment of Sarah-Bernhardt, a defect which was
to be made painfully manifest in the ensuing
thirty years: — "One remark I will make, a remark
suggested by the inevitable comparison of Mile.
Sarah-Bernhardt with Rachel. One talks vaguely
of genius, but 1 had never till now comprehended
how much of Rachel's superiority was purely in
intellectual power, how eminently this power
counts in the actor's art as in all arts, how just
is the instinct which led the Greeks to mark
with a high and severe stamp the Muses. Tem-
perament and quick intelligence, passion, ner-
vous mobility, grace, smile, voice, charm, poet-
ry,— Mile. Sarah-Bernhardt has them all. One
276

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER

watches her with pleasure, with admiration, —
and yet not without a secret disquietude. Some-
thing is wanting, or, at least, not present in
sufficient force, something which alone can secure
and fix her administration of all the charming
gifts which she has, can alone keep them fresh,
keep them sincere, save them from perils by ca-
price, perils by mannerism. That something is
high intellectual power. It was here that Rachel
was so great; she began, one says to oneself as
one recalls her image and dwells upon it, — she
began almost where Mile. Sarah-Bernhardt ends."

A little later in his essay, Arnold, as was his
wont, and in accord with what Brownell has called
his "missionary spirit," askt what was the moral
to be drawn by us who speak English from the
opportunity to study the best that the French
stage had to offer. He digrest to point out that
Victor Hugo is not "a poet of the race and lineage
of Shakspere", as Swinburne had rashly asserted
in one of his characteristically dithyrambic rhap-
sodies. Arnold dwelt also on the inferiority of the
rimed French alexandrine to English blank verse
and to the Greek iambic as a poetic instrument
for dramatic use. "Victor Hugo is said to be
a cunning and mighty artist in alexandrines,
and so unquestionably he is; but he is an artist
in a form radically inadequate and inferior, and
in which a drama like that of Sophocles or
Shakspere is impossible."

Then Arnold, writing in 1879, it must be again
277

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

recalled, declared that "we in England have no
modern drama at all. We have our Elizabethan
drama" and eighteenth-century comedy. "Then
we have numberless imitations and adaptations
from the French. All of these are at bottom fan-
tastic,"— because the result of putting French
wine into English bottles is to give to the attentive
observer "a sense of incurable falsity in the piece
as adapted." To this point Arnold was to recur
again in one of his ' Letters of an Old Playgoer.'
Yet even at this moment, when the English lan-
guage had no drama dealing with life of the Eng-
lish-speaking peoples, these peoples were revealing
a steadily increasing interest in the theater.
" 1 see our community turning to the theater with
eagerness, and finding the English theater with-
out organization or purpose, or dignity, — and no
modern English drama at all except a fantastical
one. And then I see the French company from
the chief theater of Paris showing themselves to
us in London, — a society of actors, admirable in
organization, purpose and dignity, with a modern
drama not fantastic at all, but corresponding
with fidelity to a very palpable and powerful
ideal."

He askt "What is the consequence which it is
right and rational for us to draw? Surely it is
this: 'The theater is irresistible; organise the
theater.'" And then he outlined a method of
organization which would provide London with
278

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER

a company of actors worthy of consideration by
the side of the company which had come over from
Paris. When this is once done a modern drama
"will also, probably, spring up"; — that is to say,
Arnold hoped that an adequate and working or-
ganization of the theater would bring about a
new birth in the English drama. And the event
proved that the second of these hopes was to be
fulfilled without being preceded by any effort to
attain the first. The English theater is not yet
"organized" in accord with Arnold's suggestions;
but the English language has developt a modern
drama, not adapted from the French and there-
fore not fantastic at all, but corresponding with
more or less fidelity to a palpable and powerful
ideal. The beginnings of this revivification of
the English drama were already visible in 1879,
altho they were a little more obviously visible
five years later, in 1884, when Arnold wrote the
fifth and final of his 'Letters of an Old Playgoer.'

IV

The first of these letters was the result of an
invitation from Henry Arthur Jones to attend the
first performance of the 'Silver King' on Novem-
ber 16, 1882; and the other four followed at ir-
regular intervals during the next two years, called
forth by one or another of the "current attrac-
tions" at the London theaters. It is plain enough
279

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

that he enjoyed writing them, pleased at the new
opportunity to apply the old doctrine and glad to
note the signs of the coming of a modern English
drama, slowly purging itself of fantasticality.
When Morley exprest his liking for these letters,
Arnold called them "the last flicker of a nearly
exhausted rushlight." Yet they still have illu-
mination for us, more than thirty years later. They
deal with both of the aspects of the double art
of the drama, with the plays themselves and with
the performers who made them live at the mo-
ment. They disclose Arnold's constant sanity,
his penetrating shrewdness, his ability to see the
thing as it is, his cogency of presentation, his
power of drawing out the principle from the prac-
tice, and his insistence on finding the moral latent
in every manifestation of art.

In the performance of the 'Silver King' Arnold
noted "the high general level of the acting," and
he contrasted this with his memories of thirty-five
years earlier when Macready was acting his
great Shaksperian parts, supported by two or
three middling actors, "and the rest moping and
mowing in what was not to be called English but
rather stagese," — a remark to be recommended
to the consideration of those praisers of past times
who still talk of the palmy days and who affect
to believe that the level of acting is lower than it
was when the old stock-companies strutted to half-
empty houses in dingy and shabby theaters.
280

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER

He found that the 'Silver King' was an honest
melodrama, relying "for its main effect on
an outer drama of sensational incidents," that is to
say, upon its external action, rather than on its
characters. But melodrama as it was in its struc-
ture, the 'Silver King' was not melodramatic in
its dialog. " In general thruout the piece the dic-
tion and the sentiments are natural; they have
sobriety and propriety; they are literature."

In the second and third letters he dealt with
three comedy-dramas, 'Forget-me-not' by Grove
and Merivale, 'A Great Catch' by Hamilton Aide,
and 'Impulse' by Charles Stephenson. The
plays of Aide and of Grove and Merivale were
evidences of the immediate development of a
modern drama in England, far superior in veracity
and in execution to the adaptations which had
held the stage in London half-a-century earlier.
Arnold credited 'Forget-me-not' with dialog
"always pointed and smart, sometimes quite
brilliant"; and he declared that "the piece has
its life from its ability and verve." But with his
usual insight he could not fail to see that its
action lackt an adequate motive. In this re-
spect 'A Great Catch' was more satisfactory;
yet once again he was able to put his finger on
the defect; one of the most important characters
was inadequately developt. Here Arnold's criti-
cism is purely technical; and it is sound and useful.
Then he gave high praise to the admirable acting

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

of Genevieve Ward, an American who had taken a
foremost position on the EngHsh stage.

' Impulse,' he did not like at all: "a piece more
unprofitable it is hard to imagine." Stephenson's
play was a flagrant example of the fantasticality,
of the incurable falsity, likely to result from the
dislocation of a plot essentially French in an ab-
surd effort to adjust it to social conditions essen-
tially English. The story no longer represents
French life and it misrepresents English life;
it becomes "something half-true, factitious and
unmeaning." So the play is "intensely disagree-
able," achieving success because of the acting
of the two chief parts, because of "the singularly
attractive, sympathetic and popular personalities
of Mr. and Mrs. Kendal; while they are on the
stage it is hard to be dissatisfied."

The three plays considered in the first two let-
ters were evidences that dramatists were coming
forward in England who were capable not only of
invention and construction, but who were pos-
sest also of a sincere desire to deal with life as
they severally saw it; and the single play consid-
ered in the third letter was evidence that the
public had not yet experienced a change of heart
and still lingered in the condition when it could be
amused by insincere adaptations. In the fourth
and fifth letters Arnold had worthier topics. The
fourth letter was devoted to Henry Irving's
sumptuous and brilliant presentation of 'Much
282

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER

Ado About Nothing' ; and the fifth and final letter,
the only one written after his visit to America,
after his voyage across "the unplumbed, salt,
estranging sea," was devoted to Wilson Barrett's
ambitious presentation of 'Hamlet/

Arnold asserted that 'Much Ado' was beauti-
fully put upon the stage, which "greatly heightens
the charm of ideal comedy." He declared also
that it was "acted with an evenness, a general
level of merit which was not to be found twenty-
five years ago." He discovered in Henry Irving
and also in Ellen Terry "a personality which
peculiarly fits them for ideal comedy. Miss
Terry is sometimes restless and over-excited; but
she has a spirited vivacity which is charming.
Mr. Irving has faults which have often been
pointed out; but he has, as an actor, a merit
which redeems them all, and which is the secret
of his success: the merit of delicacy and distinc-
tion. . . . Mankind are often unjust to this
merit, and most of us much resist having to ex-
hibit it in our own life and soul; but it is singular
what a charm it exercises over us."

Arnold begins his criticism on Wilson Barrett's
Hamlet with a discussion of the tragedy itself
and with the influence exerted upon Shakspere
himself at the very moment of its composition
by Montaigne. This leads him to the rather
strange conclusion that 'Hamlet' is "not a drama
followed with perfect comprehension and pro-
283

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

foundest emotion, which is the ideal for tragedy,
but a problem, soliciting interpretation and solu-
tion. It will never, therefore, be a piece to be
seen with pure satisfaction by those who will
not deceive themselves. But such is its power and
such is its fame that it will always continue to be
acted, and we shall all of us continue to go to see
it." Then the critic turns to the acting, praising
E. S. Willard's Claudius and finding Wilson Bar-
rett's Hamlet "fresh, natural, young, prepossess-
ing, animated, coherent, the piece moves. All
Hamlets I have seen dissatisfy us in something.
Macready wanted person, Charles Kean mind,
Fechter English; Mr. Wilson Barrett wants elo-
cution."

As we read these 'Letters of An Old Playgoer'
we cannot help noting three things; first, Arnold's
alert interest in the drama as an art and his in-
sight into its principles; second, his equally alert
interest in acting and his understanding of its
methods, — an understanding quite unusual among
men of letters, who are generally even more at sea
in discussing the histrionic art than they are in dis-
cussing the arts of the painter, the sculptor, and
the architect. And it is significant that Arnold's
own appreciation of dramaturgic and histrionic
craftsmanship was not accompanied by any corre-
spondingly acute appreciation of either pictorial
284

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER

or plastic skill, in the manifestations of which he
seems never to have been greatly interested, even
during his visits to Italy and France.

The third thing we note is that Arnold retained
his openmindedness and his freshness of impres-
sion. He was sixty when he turned aside to con"
sider the improving conditions of the English
theater, the advance in English acting and the
beginnings of the modern English drama; but he
revealed none of the customary sexagenarian
proneness to look back longingly to the days of
his youth, and to bewail the degeneracy discover-
able in the years of his old age. He was quick
to see progress and frank in acknowledging its
presence. Perhaps his openmindedness in his
maturity was in some measure due to his early
and severe training in Greek and to his absorption
of the free Greek spirit, which secured him against
pedantry and kept his vision unimpaired.

(1916.)

28s

XVI

MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH

I

MY earliest recollection of Edwin Booth goes
back to 1865, when I was taken to the
Winter Garden Theater to see one of the hundred
consecutive performances of 'Hamlet* — the long-
est run that any play of Shakspere's had ever had
(up to that time) in any city in the world. I find
that all I can recall of the play, then seen for the
first time, is a misty memory of the moonlit
battlements of Elsinore with the gray figure of the
Ghost as he solemnly stalkt forward. A few
weeks later in that same winter I was allowed to
see Booth again, as Richelieu; and I can more
readily recapture the thrill with which I heard
him threaten to launch the curse of Rome. I
have an impression that the scenery for 'Riche-
lieu' had been painted in Paris; and I think that
even now after the lapse of more than half-a-
century I can visualize the spacious and beautiful
hall in which Richelieu had his interview with
Marion Delorme.

In 1869, when I was scant seventeen, I had the
good fortune to be present at the opening of
286

MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH

Booth's own theater, the handsomest playhouse
which had ever been erected in New York and
the most elaborately equipt. The play was

* Romeo and Juliet'; and the part of the impulsive
heroine was taken by Mary McVickar, whom
Booth was soon to marry. The only picture still
imprinted on my memory is the lovely garden,
flooded with moonlight, as Juliet appeared on the
balcony and as Romeo lightly overleapt the walls.

After I attained to man's estate I saw Booth in
all his great parts — excepting only Richard II,
which he did not long retain in his repertory.
The sinister malignity of his Pescara (in Shiel's

* Apostate') has etcht itself in my memory;
and so also has the demoniac dance of Bertuccio
(in the 'Fool's Revenge') when the deeply out-
raged jester believes that he has been able at
last to repay in full the injury he had received from
his enemy. As the audience knows that it is not
his enemy's wife but his own beloved daughter
that he has just helpt to abduct, the tragic
irony of the poignant situation was intensified by
the few irrepressible capers of the hunchback, an
effect as daring as it was successful, and possible
only to an actor of imagination and of unfailing
certainty of execution.

Altho I saw Edwin Booth often on the stage I
did not have the pleasure of making his acquain-
tance until about 1884, three or four years before
he founded The Players, — which opened its doors
287

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

just before midnight on the last day of i!
One of my good friends, Laurence Hutton was a
good friend of Booth's; and when Hutton and I,
Lawrence Barrett, Frank Millet and E. A. Abbey
organized a little dinner club, called The Kins-
men, Booth was one of the first of the practition-
ers of the several allied arts whom we askt to
join us. In private life he was unaffected and
unassuming, gentle, simple, modest, — altho he
was naturally dignified and altho he could not
but be conscious of his position at the head of the
American stage.

It has been my privilege to know fairly well the
leaders of the dramatic profession, in the later
years of the nineteenth century, Booth and Irv-
ing, Jefferson and Coquelin, Salvini and Barnay;
they were none of them openly vainglorious or
even unduly self-centered; and perhaps Booth
was the least pretentious of them all. He had
the saving sense of humor; and while he took his
work seriously he did not take himself too seri-
ously. In fact, when I read his familiar corre-
spondence, lovingly set in order by his devoted
daughter, I recognized the man disclosed in these
letters as the very man whose characteristics
Sargent captured and fixt forever in the illuminat-
ing portrait which E. C. Benedict presented to
The Players. There was a certain transparency
about his character; and in private life his per-
sonality was very winning — a quality which on the
288

MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH

Stage transmuted itself into what is often termed
"magnetism."

II

At the supper which The Kinsmen gave when
we welcomed Irving as a member, — it had to be a
supper and not a dinner since Irving was acting
every night — chance placed me at table be-
tween Booth and Irving. I noted with apprecia-
tion the high friendliness of their association, de-
void of any suspicion of jealousy or even of rivalry,
altho one of them was the acknowledged leader of
the American stage and the other was the undis-
puted chief of the British theater. It was evident
that their cordiality was not put on for the occa-
sion only and that they really liked one another
and were glad to foregather for the interchange
of experiences. Of course, their talk soon
turned to their profession and to the mighty
actors who had preceded them. I soon discovered
that Irving had never been greatly interested in
the performers of an earlier generation; he was
familiar enough with the careers of Macready
and of Charles Kean, who were his immediate
predecessors, but he had not cared to study the
lives of Edmund Kean, of George Frederick Cooke
and of the Kembles, who had been the leaders of
the stage two generations earlier. Of course, it is
never necessary for an artist to be a student of
the biographical history of his art; for him it is
289

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

sufficient if he has spent his strength on mastering
its principles and in training himself to apply
them.

Booth's devotion to the memory of his father,
the Junius Brutus Booth who had been hailed as
a rival of Edmund Kean, had lured him into the
study of the lives of all of his father's more im-
portant contemporaries. While he could not be
called a bookish man, he owned most of the vol-
umes of histrionic criticism and of theatrical
biography which elucidate the history of the
English-speaking stage in the first half of the
nineteenth century. Not only did he own them,
he had read them; and by their aid his father's
fellow-players had become living men to him.
He had accumulated anecdotes about them and
he had studied out their methods. As he had
found this reading instructive as well as interest-
ing he assumed that Irving had done the same;
and in reviving these half-forgotten figures, al-
ready going into the night, one and all. Booth
frankly took for granted Irving's equal intimacy
with them. Apparently Irving saw no reason to
undeceive him, and without in any way pretending
to an exhaustive acquaintance with careers of his
renowned predecessors, he was able to throw in
from time to time an apt anecdote, — which had
probably come to him by oral tradition.

Booth was three years older than Irving; in
1861 when he was not yet thirty and already a
290

MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH

Star of proclaimed promise, he paid his first pro-
fessional visit to England; and in Manchester,
Irving, then only an obscure stock actor, sup-
ported him. A score of years later when Irving
was the prosperous manager of the foremost
theater in England, Booth again ventured across
the Atlantic to act in London. His season was
none too successful financially, partly because he
had unwisely allowed himself to be taken to the
wrong theater. With characteristic kindliness
Irving invited Booth to join him for a month at
the Lyceum to alternate the characters of Othello
and lago and to have the aid of Ellen Terry as
Desdemona. This was in the spring of 1881;
and for four weeks the Lyceum was crowded to
its full capacity.

A friend of mine, who had played one of the
parts in the tragedy, described the rehearsals to
me and dwelt on the unfailing courtesy with which
Irving, as the host, sought always to make Booth,
as the guest, feel at home. Whenever they came
to a scene in which Booth appeared, Irving would
ask how he would prefer to have the action ar-
ranged; and with equal courtesy Booth would
leave the settling of the business to Irving, sug-
gesting only when it was necessary. "This is
the way I usually do it." My friend noticed that
Irving seemed surprized, and perhaps even a little
shockt, that Booth set so little store by the details
of stage-management. And here the most markt
291

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

difference between these two great actors stood
revealed.

Booth was an actor, first of all, and he was a
stage-manager only in so far as stage manage-
ment might be necessary for the effect which he
himself desired to make as an actor. Perhaps it
would not be fair to say that Irving was primarily
a stage-manager; but it is not unfair to suggest
that he was a stage-manager of extraordinary
fertility of invention and that he was accustomed
to use his skill as a stage-manager to support his
efforts as an actor. Booth was always careful
about his own effects, his own business; but he
relied mainly on himself and upon his own individ-
ual power as an actor. So it was that he was less
interested in the play as a whole and in those
scenes in which he did not himself appear. Irving,
on the other hand, was insistent in getting the
smallest details exactly to his taste, holding with
Michael Angelo that "trifles make perfection,
and perfection is no trifle." Perhaps this differ-
ence in their attitude explains why it was that
Booth was unsuccessful in the management of
the theater he had built for himself and that
Irving managed his theater triumphantly for
more than a score of years.

It is possible that Irving never himself per-
ceived how truly magnanimous he had been in
inviting Booth to appear with him at the Lyceum.
In the first week when Booth was Othello and
292

MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH

Irving lago there was a comparative equality
between them. Booth had the ampHtude of
elocution and the fiery passion which Othello de-
manded; and Irving was a brilliant and pic-
turesque lago. But the second week, when they
exchanged parts, the comparative equality dis-
appeared. Fine as Booth was as Othello he was
even finer as lago, whom he represented as the
incarnation of implacable malignity, whereas
Irving iackt the simple utterance and the mas-
sive emotion required for the adequate perform-
ance of Othello. It would be going too far to
suggest that Irving failed as Othello; he was too
clever, too experienced and too richly endowed
to fail in anything he undertook. Yet it may be
said not unfairly that his Othello was among
the least successful of his Shaksperian characters,
ranking with his spasmodic Romeo and far below
his graceful and noble Hamlet.

Ill

It was after Irving's first visit to the United
States that he took part in a discussion with Co-
quelin as to the completeness with which the
actor ought actually to feel the emotion he is ex-
pressing. Coquelin had declared that Diderot's
'Paradox on Acting' — to the effect that the per-
former must have felt the emotion while he is
studying the part but that he must not feel it
293

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

too acutely on the stage or it will interfere with
his certainty of execution — Coquelin had declared
that this was not a paradox, but only a plain
statement of the indisputable fact. Irving had
denied this, asserting that the actor needs to be
moved by the actual passion when he is express-
ing it. I recall that Joseph Jefferson told me
that he thought they were both right, each from
his own point of view, and each advocating the
method he himself had found satisfactory — Co-
quelin merely recalling the emotion he had origi-
nally felt and Irving allowing himself to feel it
again and again as amply as he could.

When I spoke to Booth about Diderot's ' Para-
dox,' he said that he thought that there was more
in it than Irving was willing to admit; and he
illustrated this opinion by an experience of his
own. One night when he was acting in the
'Fool's Revenge,' he saw his daughter sitting in a
stage-box; and this reminded him that he, like
Bertuccio, had an only daughter whom he loved
devotedly. This thought kept recurring as the
play advanced; and he was conscious that his
own paternal affection was making him identify
himself more than ever before with the hunch-
back father whom he was portraying. He found
that he was putting himself into the place of Ber-
tuccio and asking how he would feel if his own
daughter, then before his eyes, had the sorrowful
fate of the heroine of the play. It had seemed
294

MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH

to him that, as a result of this intensified per-
sonal emotion, he had never acted the character
with so much poignancy of pathos. Yet when his
daughter took him home in a carriage, she askt
what had been the matter with him that evening,
since she had never seen him impersonate Ber-
tuccio so inefiFectively. Here was a case where
excess of actual feeling had interfered with the
self-control needed for the complete artistic ex-
pression of the emotion.

Irving may have exprest his opinion with more
emphasis than was warranted; and Coquelin was
quite as intolerant in maintaining his. I must
confess that I thought Coquelin a little extreme in
his insistence on the necessity of absolute freedom
from emotion when the actor was before the audi-
ence. In one of our many talks about the art of
acting, he once went so far as to assert that after
he had seen a certain actress shed real tears at a
moment of emotional tension, this accomplisht
performer immediately sank in his estimation,
since her weeping seemed to him to reveal an
absence of the complete self-control which a fine
artist ought always to possess.

Booth's famous father, so his son has recorded,
endeavored always to sink his own personality
in that of the character he was performing.
"Whatever the part he had to impersonate, he
was, from the time of its rehearsal until he slept
at nfght, imbued with its very essence. If
295

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

'Othello' was billed for the evening, he would, per-
haps, wear a crescent pin on his breast that day.
... If Shylock was to be his part at night, he
was a Jew all day; and, if in Baltimore at the
time, he would pass hours with a learned Israelite,
discussing Hebrew history." During the actual
performance of one of these mighty characters
with which he had thus sought to identify him-
self, he was possest by the passion which surged
from the progressive situations of the play. "At
the instant of intense emotion, when the specta-
tors were enthralled by his magnetic influence
... he would whisper some silliness or make a
face" while his head was turned from the audience.
His fellow-actors attributed his conduct at such
times to lack of feeling, whereas it was in reality,
so Edwin Booth testified, due to his "extreme
excess of feeling."

IV

In 1884 Laurence Hutton and I made prepara-
tions to edit a book about the theater upon a
novel plan; and a year or two later we sent forth
at intervals the five volumes entitled 'Actors and
Actresses of Great Britain and the United States,
from the days of David Garrick to the present
time.' We carefully selected about eighty per-
formers of acknowledged prominence, each in his
own generation; and we wrote ourselves or had
written by experts in histrionic history, brief but
296

MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH

carefully documented biographies, appending to
the sketch of every performer's career excerpts
from contemporary dramatic criticism, from mem-
oirs and reminiscences, and from collections of
theatrical anecdotes, so as to depict from several
angles the men and women who were sitting for
their portraits. Our friends came generously to
our assistance, more especially those devoted
students of stage-history, William Winter and
William Archer. Austin Dobson enricht our first
volume with a delightful account of the varied
activities of David Garrick; and H. C, Bunner
contributed to our fifth volume an equally de-
lightful account of Joseph Jefferson.

The article on Edwin Booth was prepared by
Lawrence Barrett; and Edwin Booth himself was
to prepare that on his father. Irving willingly
agreed to write the paper on Edmund Kean; but
when the time came he askt us to release him
from his promise. So we turned to Edwin Booth
again and requested him to give us the sketch of
Kean to accompany that which he had already
written on Kean's sometime rival, Junius Brutus
Booth; and he allowed himself to be persuaded.
I think that the writing of these two papers was
Edwin Booth's first venture into literature, since
his valuable notes on the acting of Othello and of
Shylock were prepared a little later. To write
was for him a novel experience, and he was
modestly diffident, postponing the unwonted
297

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

task until at last the spirit moved him; then he
sat himself down to the work and poured forth his
unpremeditated recollections of his father with the
precipitancy with which he might write a letter.

Even after he had set down what was in his
heart he hesitated to let the manuscript pass out
of his own hands. When Hutton was at last em-
powered to carry it off, he brought it to me;
and it made glad our editorial souls. It was not
at all in accord with the pattern accepted by the
professional writers who had prepared the articles
for the earlier volumes. It did not give the facts
of its subject's career in strict chronological se-
quence, with the obligatory dates in their proper
places. It contained no dates and only a few
facts; but it did give what was better than all the
panoply of information, — an illuminating inter-
pretation of an extraordinary character by the
one person who knew him best and loved him
most.

It was thrown on paper in haste; it had not
been modified by second thoughts; its sentences
were sometimes entangled; and its punctuation
was eccentric. But these external inadvertences
were negligible. To precede Booth's tribute to
his father and to be distinguisht from it by a
difference of type, we prepared an outline biog-
raphy of Junius Brutus with all the missing facts
and all the obligatory dates; and we then had
Booth's own manuscript copied faithfully, where-
298

MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH

upon we made the few adjustments necessary to
bring it into conformity with the conventions
of literature. The result stood forth as an ad-
mirable piece of writing, individual in expression,
full of flavor, and rich in sympathetic understand-
ing. It may be noted that actors, when they can
write at all, generally write well, perhaps because
their profession has trained them to avoid prolix-
ity while its practice has stored their memory
with a vocabulary as varied as it is vigorous.

Encouraged by our editorial appreciation, Ed-
win Booth wrote out for us his impressions of
Kean, inspired in some measure by the study of
Kean's death-mask. He told us that altho Ed-
mund Kean and Junius Brutus Booth had been
rivals in London, there was no personal enmity in
their contest for the crown, and when they came
together again in America their meeting was not
only friendly but cordial. That the two great
actors were not hostile to each other was made
certain by this glowing tribute to Edmund Kean
written by the son of Junius Brutus Booth, as it
had been made probable years before by the ap-
pearance of Junius Brutus Booth as the Second
Actor in support of the Hamlet of Edmund Kean's
son.

Doubtful as Edwin Booth had been as to his

ability to put on paper adequately his impressions

of Kean and Booth, he was keenly interested in

their reception by his friends after they were

299

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

printed in the third volume of our 'Actors and
Actresses.' In the correspondence lovingly col-
lected by his daughter he is constantly mention-
ing his "little sketches," anxious to learn what his
friends thought of them. As an actor he was sur-
feited with newspaper criticism and he had come
to pay little attention to it; but as a writer he
wanted to see every journalistic review of our
volume which might comment on his two contri-
butions. It is amusing; in fact, it is almost
pathetic, to note the new interest which the
writing of these two articles had brought into his
life when he was beginning to be wearied, and to
observe the eagerness with which he awaited any
casual comment on what he had written.- I am
glad to be able to record that the two brief essays
were highly valued by those most competent to
appreciate them.

One of the most intelligent and accomplisht
actors of the present day has made it a rule not
to read the incessant newspaper notices of his per-
formance; and he once gave me an excellent rea-
son for his decision: — "If the criticism is un-
friendly, it is likely to disturb me at my work, —
and if it is friendly it is likely to increase my
natural conceit !" 1 think that this would have
won the approval of Edwin Booth. I recall
that when I once askt him if he had ever been
300

MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH

benefited by any of the criticisms of his acting,
he responded at once "Never!" Then, after a
moment's pause and with his good-humored smile
he added, "That's not quite true. Sometimes, in
one of the little cities, the theatrical critic points
out that I have been careless in the performance
of this scene or that; and sometimes I have seen
that he was right. But that is the only benefit
I ever got from anything of the sort."

He held that it was not good for the actor to
associate with those whose duty it was to criticize
his artistic endeavors. For this reason he sug-
gested that critics of acting should not be ad-
mitted to The Players; and to this day and after
thirty years that is the unwritten law of the club
he founded. He regretted greatly that this rul-
ing excluded his cherisht friend, William Win-
ter; but he did not wish us to make a single
exception. I believe that it "was in his thought
that it would be unfortunate if the actor should
be tempted to make up to the critics and to get
on the blind side of them, so to speak. Perhaps he
had also in mind two other reasons for his request.
The first is that artists of all kinds, and perhaps
the actors more especially, are prone to express
exaggerated opinions of one another's work,
opinions extravagantly favorable and some-
times extravagantly unfavorable; — opinions which
it would be undesirable to have overheard by out-
siders. And the second is that as the actor's
301

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

canvas on which he paints his picture and the
actor's clay with which he models his statue, are
his own person, his own features, his own members,
any criticism of his achievement, or of his failure
to achieve, is necessarily personal, — possibly so
personal as to make it unpleasant for artist and
critic to have to sit at meat together.

It was after he made his home at The Players —
where the room in which he lived and died is
piously kept exactly as he left it — that I had more
frequent opportunities of meeting him. He
liked to come down to the reading-room and the
dining-room and to mingle freely with his fellow-
members, and to have them accept him as one of
themselves and not set him apart as the Founder
of the club. As it chanced he used to spend at
least a portion of the later summers of his life
with his daughter at Narragansett Pier, almost
exactly opposite my own summer home. Some-
times he came over to see us and sometimes we
went over to call on him.

I regret now that I did not make notes of the
more interesting things he said in one or another
of our talks. I can recapture only a few of them.
He told me that the conditions of the theater were
very primitive when he first began to act in sup-
port of his father; and in 'Richard III,' for in-
stance, when the time came for Richard to fight
Richmond, his father used to go to the wings on
one side of the stage as the actor of Richmond
302

MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH

went to the wings on the other side; and each of
them seized by the hilt a combat-sword thrust
out by an invisible stage-hand, whereupon they
went back to the center of the stage and began
their fight to the death. He also confest that
he had been inclined to doubt the wisdom of his
having discarded Colley Gibber's perversion of
* Richard 1 1 1 ' — a fiery and bombastic adaptation
which had held the stage for two centuries and
which was really more effective theatrically than
the reverent rearrangement of Shakspere's own
text which Booth had substituted for it.

I happened once to mention Irving's taking
Ellen Terry and his whole company to West
Point to play the 'Merchant of Venice' in the
Mess Hall on a platform draped only with Amer-
ican flags and therefore without any scenery;
and I remarkt that Irving had assured me that
the power of the play was in no wise lessened by
the enforced deprivation of all decorative aid.
To cap this Booth told me about his unexpected
misadventure at Waterbury. He arrived at the
theater to be informed that the costumes had
not been delivered. Scenery and properties
had come all right, but the trunks containing
the dresses for 'Hamlet' could not be found.
Booth inquired about the advance sale of tickets
and learnt that every seat had been sold. "Very
well, then," he said, "we must not disappoint an
audience. We'll give the play in the clothes we
303

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

have on!" When the time came he sent the
manager before the curtain to explain the situation
and to announce that any spectator who was not
satisfied with the prospect could have his money
back from the box-office.

"Of course, nobody left the house/' he com-
mented smiling. "But you should have seen the
fright of the company — especially the women —
at the idea of appearing in a Shaksperian tragedy
in the dresses they wore to travel in. They got
over that, as soon as they found that the effect
of strangeness quickly wore off. After the first
act, Robert Pateman, who did not appear as the
Gravedigger until the fifth act, and who had
gone in front to judge the effect, came round be-
hind to reassure his wife, who was our Ophelia.
He explained that there were little runs of
laughter every now and then during the opening
scenes but that these soon died down, until
toward the end of the act the performance was ap-
parently as effective as if we had all been garbed
with historic propriety. It was an odd experience,
— and perhaps the most amusing part of it was
that the trunks containing the costumes were
discovered at last in a heap outside the railroad
station 1"

On another occasion he told me about a little

discussion he had had with Jefferson when ' Rip

Van Winkle' was first produced at Booth's

Theater. He had wanted his old friend to be

304

MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH

pleased and he had prepared entirely new scenery.
The set for the first act, the home from which Rip
is to be driven out by his shrewish wife, was a
careful reconstitution of a characteristic kitchen
in a Catskill farmhouse, with a kettle swinging on
a crane before a glowing fire. But at the dress
rehearsal when Jefferson made his entrance, he
stopt short and called out sharply "Take that
thing away !" — that thing was the gas-log blazing
brightly; "I don't want people to be looking at
that. I want them to look at me!" The re-
hearsal waited while the objectionable distraction
was removed. When the first act had been gone
thru, Booth called Jefferson's attention to the
black gap where the log had been and he askt
if that might not draw the eyes of the spectators
away from Rip's features. "Perhaps you are
right," Jefferson admitted; "have the log put
back — but don't light it. 1 don't want it to sparkle
and hiss."

Fifty years ago a gas-log was a novelty and it
might have diverted the gaze and thereby inter-
fered momentarily with the current of dramatic
sympathy. Of course, it was not personal vanity,
but a due respect for art, which led Jefferson to
declare that he wanted people to look at him all
the time. When he played Rip the true center of
interest was Rip's ever-changing countenance.

Unless my memory plays me false it was in this
same conversation with Booth that he told me of
305

THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING

a remark Charlotte Cushman had made to him
when they were rehearsing 'Macbeth.' "You
must not be afraid of overdoing the part," she had
said. " Remember that Macbeth is the father of
all the stage-villains !"

(1919.)

306

;^*'

NOV 3.

Date Due

NOV X3 1962

M^ 1 6

nJ73

JUN 1 ;: 1973 y

OCT :. 1973

JUL I'. 0 1973 7

Library Bureau Cat. No. 1137

UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY

■"■" ■■iniiiiiir"

AA 001 260 979 8