Oxford Lectures on Poetry Part 25

5.

Hitherto we have not considered a Shakespearean performance on the side, I will not say of its spectacular, but of its pictorial effect. This must be our last subject. We have to bear in mind here three things: the fact that the stage was viewed from three sides, its illumination by daylight throughout the play, and the absence of scenery. It is obvious that the last two deprived the audience of many attractive or impressive pictures; while, as to the first, it seems unlikely that actors who were watched from the sides as well as the front would study to group themselves as parts of a composition addressed to the eye. Indeed one may doubt whether, except in regard to costume, they seriously attended to the pictorial effect of a drama at all; their tiny crowds and armies, for example, cannot have provided much of a show. And in any case it is clear that the audience had to dispense with many more or less beautiful sights that we may now enjoy. But the question whether their loss was, on the whole, a disadvantage is not so easy to answer; for here again it freed them from a temptation--that of sacrificing dramatic to pictorial effect; and we cannot tell whether, or how far, they would have been proof against its influence. Let us try, however, to see the position clearly.

The essence of drama--and certainly of Shakespearean drama--lies in actions and words expressive of inward movements of human nature.

Pictorial effects (if for convenience' sake the various matters under consideration may be signified by that phrase) are in themselves no more dramatic than songs, dances, military music, or the jests of a 'fool.'

Like these other things, they may be made dramatic. They may be used and apprehended, that is to say, as elements fused with the essential elements of dramatic effect. And, so far as this is the case and they thus contribute to that effect, they are, it seems clear, an unmixed advantage. But a distinct and separate attention to them is another matter; for, the moment it sets in, attention begins to be withdrawn from the actions and words, and therefore from the inward movements that these express. And experience shows that, as soon as pictorial attractions exceed a certain limit, impossible to specify in general terms, they at once influence the average play-goer in this mischievous way. It is, further, well-nigh inevitable that this should happen.

However interesting the actions, words, and inward movements may be, they call for some effort of imagination and of other mental activities,[22] while stage-pictures demand very little; and accordingly, at the present time at any rate, the bulk of an audience to which the latter are abundantly presented will begin to enjoy them for their own sakes, or as parts of a panorama and not of a drama. No one, I think, can honestly doubt this who watches and listens to the people sitting near him at what the newspapers too truly call 'an amazing Shakespearean spectacle.' If we are offered a pretty picture of the changing colours of the sky at dawn, or of a forest glade with deer miraculously moving across its sunny gra.s.s, most of us cease for the time to be an audience and become mere spectators; and let Romeo and Juliet, or Rosalind and Orlando, talk as like angels as they will, they will talk but half-heeded. Our dramatists know this well enough. Mr.

Barrie and Mr. Pinero and Mr. Shaw, who want the audience to listen and understand, take good care not to divert its attention and deaden its imagination by scenic displays. And yet, with the heartiest admiration for their best work, one may say that Shakespeare's requires more attention and imagination than theirs.

Whether the Elizabethan companies, if they had had the power to use the attractions of scenery, would have abused it, and whether in that case the audience would have been as readily debauched as ours, it is useless to dispute. The audience was not composed mainly of groundlings; and even the groundlings in that age had drama in their blood. But I venture to disbelieve that the main fault in these matters lies, in any age, with the audience. It is like the populace in Shakespeare's plays, easy to lead wrong but just as easy to lead right. If you give people in the East End, or even in the Albert Hall, nothing but third-rate music, most of them will be content with it, and possibly may come to disrelish what is better. But if you have a little faith in great art and in human nature, and offer them, I do not say the Diabelli variations, but such music as the symphonies of Beethoven or even of Brahms, they will justify your faith. This is not theory, but fact; and I cannot think that it is otherwise with drama, or at least with the dramas of Shakespeare. Did they ever 'spell ruin to managers' if they were, through the whole cast, satisfactorily acted? What spells real ruin to managers and actors alike is what spells degradation to audiences.[23]

But whether or no Shakespeare's audience could have been easily degraded by scenic pleasure, it had not the chance; and I will not raise the further question how far its disabilities were the cause of its virtues, but will end with a few words on two of the virtues themselves. It possessed, first, a vivid imagination. Shakespeare could address to it not in vain the injunction, 'Work, work your thoughts!' Probably in three scenes out of five the place and surroundings of the action were absolutely invisible to its eyes. In a fourth it took the barest symbol for reality. A couple of wretched trees made the Forest of Arden for it, five men with ragged foils the army that conquered at Agincourt: are we stronger than it, or weaker? It heard Romeo say

Look, love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east;

and to its mind's eye they were there. It looked at a shabby old balcony, but as it listened it saw the swallows flitting round the sun-lit battlements of Macbeth's castle, and our pitiful sense of grotesque incongruity never troubled it.[24] The simplest convention sufficed to set its imagination at work. If Prospero entered wearing a particular robe, it knew that no one on the stage could see his solid shape;[25] and if Banquo, rising through the trap-door, had his b.l.o.o.d.y face dusted over with meal, it recognised him for a ghost and thrilled with horror; and we, Heaven help us, should laugh. Though the stage stood in broad daylight, again, Banquo, for it, was being murdered on a dark wet night, for he carried a torch and spoke of rain; and the chaste stars were shining for it outside Desdemona's chamber as the awful figure entered and extinguished the lamp. Consider how extraordinary is the fact I am about to mention, and what a testimony it bears to the imagination of the audience. In _Hamlet_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, and _Macbeth_, not one scene here and there but actually the majority of the most impressive scenes take place at night, and, to a reader, depend not a little on the darkness for their effect. Yet the Ghost-scenes, the play-scene, the sparing of the king at prayer, that conversation of Hamlet with his mother which is opened by the killing of Polonius and interrupted by the appearance of the Ghost; the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, the Banquet-scene, the Sleep-walking scene; the whole of the first Act of _Oth.e.l.lo_, the scene of Ca.s.sio's drunken revel and fight, and the whole of the terrible last Act,--all of this was played in a theatre open to the afternoon sun, and was written by a man who knew that it was so to be played. But he knew his audience too.[26]

That audience had not only imagination, and the power to sink its soul in the essence of drama. It had something else of scarcely less import for Shakespeare, the love of poetry. Ignorant, noisy, malodorous, too fond of dances and songs and dirty jokes, of soldiers and trumpets and cannon, the groundling might be: but he liked poetry. If he had not liked it, he, with his brutal manners, would have silenced it, and the Elizabethan drama could never have been the thing it was. The plays of Shakespeare swarm with long speeches, almost all of which are cut down or cut clean away for our theatres. They are never, of course, irrelevant; sometimes they are indispensable to the full appreciation of a character; but it is manifest that they were not written solely for a dramatic purpose, but also because the author and his audience loved poetry. A sign of this is the fact that they especially abound where, from the nature of the story, the dramatic structure is imperfect.[27] They abound in _Troilus and Cressida_ and _Henry V._ more than in _Oth.e.l.lo_ or _Much Ado_. Remember, for a standard of size, that 'To be or not to be' is thirty-three lines in length, and then consider the following fact. _Henry V._ contains seventeen speeches longer than that soliloquy. Five of them are between forty and fifty lines long, two between fifty and sixty, and two exceed sixty. Yet if any play entirely by Shakespeare were open to the charge of being a 'drum and trumpet history' written to please the populace, it would be _Henry V._ Not only then the cultured section of the audience loved poetry; the whole audience loved it. How long would they have continued to relish this 'perpetual feast of nectared sweets' if their eyes had been feasted too?

Or is it likely that, once habituated to spectacular stimulants, they would have welcomed 'the crystal clearness of the Muses' spring'?

1902.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This, one may suspect, was also the position of Webster, who praises Shakespeare, but groups him with Dekker and Heywood, and mentions him after Chapman, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher (Preface to the _White Devil_).

[2] I am obliged to speak summarily. Some of these things declined in popularity as time went on.

[3] The examples just cited show his method at its best, and it would be easy to mention others far less satisfactory. Nor do I doubt that his plays would be much more free from blemishes of various kinds if his audience had added to their virtues greater cultivation. On the other hand the question whether, or how far, he knowingly 'wrote down to' his audience, in the sense of giving it what he despised, seems to me very difficult, if not impossible, to answer: and I may mention some causes of this difficulty.

(1) There is no general presumption against interpolations in an Elizabethan drama published piratically or after the author's death.

We have, further, positive grounds of the strongest kind for believing that 'Shakespeare's plays' contain a good deal that Shakespeare never wrote. We cannot therefore simply take it for granted that he wrote every silly or offensive thing that we find in the volume; and least of all should we do this when the pa.s.sage is more or less irrelevant and particularly easy to excise. I do not say that these considerations have great importance here, but they have some; and readers of Shakespeare, and even some scholars, constantly tend to forget them, and to regard the texts as if they had been published by himself, or by scrupulously careful men of letters immediately after his death.

(2) We must never take for granted that what seems to us feeble or bad seemed so to Shakespeare. Evidently he was amused by puns and quips and verbal ingenuities in which most of us find little entertainment. Gross jokes, scarcely redeemed in our eyes by their humour, may have diverted him. He sometimes writes, and clearly in good faith, what seems to us bombastic or 'conceited.' So far as this was the case he was not writing down to his audience. He shared its tastes, or the tastes of some section of it. So it may have been, again, with such a blot as the blinding of Gloucester on the open stage.

(3) Jonson defied his audience, yet he wrote a good deal that we think bad. In the same way certain of Shakespeare's faults _cannot_ be due to condescension to his audience: _e.g._ the obscurities and distortions of language not infrequent in his later plays. And this may be so with some faults which have the appearance of arising from that condescension.

(4) Other defects again he might have deliberately defended; _e.g._ the highly improbable conclusions and the distressing mis-marriages of some of the comedies. 'It is of the essence of romantic comedy,'

he might have said, 'to treat such things with indifference. There is a convention that you should take the characters with some degree of seriousness while they are in difficulties, and should cease to do so when they are to be delivered from them.' Do not we ourselves adopt this point of view to some extent when we go to the theatre now?

I added this note after reading Mr. Bridges's very interesting and original contribution to the Stratford Town edition of Shakespeare (vol x.). I disagree with some of Mr. Bridges's remarks, and am not always repelled by things that he dislikes. But this brief note is not, of course, meant for an answer to his paper; it merely suggests reasons for at least diminishing the proportion of defect attributable to a conscious sacrifice of art to the tastes of the audience.

[4] To us their first appearance is of interest chiefly because it introduces the soliloquy 'How all occasions.' But, it is amusing to notice, the Folio, which probably represents the acting version in 1623, omits the soliloquy but retains the marching soldiers.

[5] I do not refer to the Globe.

[6] The latter, no doubt, accompanied by the band, except when the clown played the tabor while he danced alone.

[7] This may possibly be one of the signs that _Macbeth_ was altered after Shakespeare's retirement or death.

[8] Surely every company that plays Shakespeare should include a boy.

There would then be no excuse for giving to a woman such parts as Ariel and Brutus's boy Lucius.

[9] This question will not be answered by the citation of one famous speech of Cleopatra's--a speech, too, which is strictly in character.

But, as to this matter and the other considerations put forward above, I must add that, while my impression is that what has been said of Shakespeare holds of most of the contemporary dramatists, I have not verified it by a research. A student looking for a subject for his thesis might well undertake such a research.

[10] When the lecture was given (in 1902) I went more fully into details, having arrived at certain conclusions mainly by an examination of Elizabethan dramas. I suppress them here because I have been unable to study all that has since been written on the Elizabethan stage. The reader who is interested in the subject should refer in the first instance to an excellent article by Mr. Archer in the _Quarterly Review_ for April, 1908.

[11] This is a description of a public theatre. A private one, it will be remembered, had seats in the area (there called the pit), was completely roofed, and could be darkened.

[12] 'The doors are open, and the surfeited grooms Do mock their charge with snores,' says Lady Macbeth on the stage below; and no doubt the tiring-house doors _were_ open.

[13] This view, into the grounds of which I cannot go, implies that Juliet's bedroom was, in one scene, the upper stage, and, in another, the back stage; but the Elizabethans, I believe, would make no difficulty about that.

[14] Perhaps. It seems necessary to suppose that the sides of the backstage, as well as its front, could be open; otherwise many of the spectators could not have seen what took place there. But it is not _necessary_, so far as I remember, to suppose that the sides could be closed by curtains. The Elizabethans probably would not have been troubled by seeing dead bodies get up and go into the tiring-house when a play or even a scene was over.

[15] Where this contrivance was used at all it probably only announced the general place of the action throughout the play: _e.g._ _Denmark_, or, a little more fully, _Verona_, _Mantua_.

[16] It is possibly significant that _Macbeth_ and the _Tempest_, plays containing more 'shews' than most, are exceptionally short.

[17] It suffices for this rough experiment to read a column in an edition like the Globe, and then to multiply the time taken by the number of columns in the play.

[18] I do not know whether the average size of our theatres differs much from that of the Elizabethan. The diameter of the area at the _Fortune_ and the _Globe_ seems to have been fifty feet.

[19] I mean by a scene a section of a play before and after which the stage is unoccupied. Most editions of Shakespeare are faulty in the division of scenes (see _Shakespearean Tragedy_, p. 451).

[20] So it very nearly does in some Restoration comedies. In the _Way of the World_ the scenery is changed only twice in the five acts, though there are more than five scenes.

[21] The 'back' stage, which had curtains, must, I suppose, have been too small to accommodate the number of persons commonly present, alive or dead, at the close of a tragedy. I do not know if any recent writer has raised and discussed the questions how often the back stage is used in the last scene of an Elizabethan play, and, again, whether it is often employed at all in order to produce, by the closing of the curtains, the kind of effect referred to in the paragraph above. Perhaps the fact that the curtains had to be closed by an actor, within them or without, made this effect impossible. Or perhaps it was not desired. In Shakespeare's tragedies, if my memory serves me, the only sudden or startling appeals of an outward kind (apart, of course, from actions) are those produced by supernatural appearances and disappearances, as in _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_. These, we have seen, were usually managed by means of the trap-door, which, it would seem from some pa.s.sages, must have been rather large. These matters deserve investigation if they have not already received it.

[22] I do not refer to such deliberate and sustained effort as a reader may sometimes make. It is not commonly realised that continuous attention to any imaginative or intellectual matter, however enjoyable, involves considerable strain. If at a lecture or sermon a careless person makes himself observable in arriving late or leaving early, the eyes of half the audience will turn to him and follow him. And the reason is not always that the speaker bores them; it is that involuntarily they seek relief from this strain. The same thing may be seen in the concert-room or theatre, but very much less at a panorama, because the mere use of the eyes, even when continuous, is comparatively easy.

[23] I am not referring here, or elsewhere, to such a moderate use of scenery in Shakespearean performances as most of our actor-managers (_e.g._ Mr. Benson) now adopt. I regret it in so far as it involves a curtailing of the play; but I do not think it withdraws from the play any attention that is of value, and for some of the audience it probably heightens the dramatic effect. Still, in my belief, it would be desirable to decrease it, because the less there is of it, the more is good acting necessary, and the more of the play itself can be acted. Some use of scenery, with its consequences to the play, must unquestionably be accepted as the rule, but I would add that it ought always to be possible for us to see performances, such as we owed to Mr. Poel, nearer to those of Shakespeare's time.

[24] When, in the time of Malone and Steevens, the question was debated whether Shakespeare's stage had scenery, it was argued that it must have had it, because otherwise the contrast between the words and the visible stage in the pa.s.sage referred to would have been hopelessly ludicrous.

[25] 'Enter invisible' (a common stage-direction) means 'Enter in the dress which means to the audience that you are invisible.'

[26] Probably he never needed to think of the audience, but wrote what pleased his own imagination, which, like theirs, was not only dramatic but, in the best sense, theatrical.

[27] Their abundance in _Hamlet_ results partly from the character of the hero. They helped, however, to make that play too long; and the omission of 'How all occasions' from the Folio doubtless means that the company cut this soliloquy (whether they did so in the author's life-time we cannot tell). It may be noticed that, where a play shows clear signs of revision by Shakespeare himself, we rarely find a disposition to shorten long poetical speeches.

In some of these lectures[1]--for the duties and pleasures that have fallen to me as Professor of Poetry are now to end--I may have betrayed a certain propensity to philosophise. But I should ask pardon for this only if I believed it to intrude where it has no place, in the imaginative perception of poetry. Philosophy has long been at home in this University; in the remarkable development of English philosophical thought during the last five-and-thirty years Oxford has played a leading part; and I hope the time will never come when a son of hers will need to apologise to his brethren for talking philosophy. Besides, though I owe her grat.i.tude for many gifts, and most for the friendships she gave me, her best intellectual gift was the conviction that what imagination loved as poetry reason might love as philosophy, and that in the end these are two ways of saying the same thing. And, finally, I hoped, by dwelling in these lectures (for instance, with reference to the poets of Wordsworth's time) on the connection of poetry with the wider life around it, to correct an impression which my opening lecture seems here and there to have left. Not that I can withdraw or even modify the view put forward then. So far as any single function of spiritual life can be said to have an intrinsic value, poetry, it seems to me, possesses it just as other functions do, and it is in each case irreplaceable. And further, it seems to me, poetry attains its own aim, and in doing so makes its contribution to the whole, most surely and fully when it seeks its own end without attempting to reach those of co-ordinate functions, such as the attainment of philosophic truth or the furtherance of moral progress. But then I believe this because I also believe that the unity of human nature in its diverse activities is so intimate and pervasive that no influence can affect any one of them alone, and that no one of them can operate or change without transmitting its influence to the rest. If I may use the language of paradox I would say that the pursuit of poetry for its own sake is the pursuit both of truth and of goodness. Devotion to it is devotion to 'the good cause of the world'; and wherever the imagination is satisfied, there, if we had a knowledge we have not, we should discover no idle fancy but the image of a truth.