Shakespeare
Elizabethan Stage Conditions : A Study of Their Place In the Interpretation of Shakespeare's Plays. By M. C. Bradbrook. (Cambridge University Press. Is.) • " Tuts little book attempts, as many hundreds before it haYe attempted, to interpret the career of William Shakespeare." With these words Professor DoVer Wilson sets out on his " Rio- . graphical Adventure." For hint it is an adventure, a synopsis of experience gained and relished during more than thirty years'. continuous study of the plays. The able, charming, and deVont little book in which the adventure is recorded will find many readers, and please them all. But it is, I fancy, one of the last of its kind. As Europe became better known, to vomplete the Grand Tour was not necessarily to commence author. The zigzag path which leads, in our information about Shakespeare's life, from one known fact to another has been trodden by many illustrious explorers. We are still ready to follow them, hat in hand ; ' but the exhilarating flavour of discovery has given place to the insipidity of ritual. We view with a lacklustre eye the familiar, incomplete pan- orama ; we arc's little irritated by the neat, regularly spared notices bidding us Keep Off The Grass of conjecture ; we join with a somewhat blase intonation in the periodic hymns of adoration.
But we could have no better guide than Professor Dover Wilson. We could wish, it is true, that he had scrapped the battered operatic scenery against which Shakespeare's inner life has so often been staged—that he had spared us the dawns and abysses, the peaks and the havens, which are what the author of the second book under review means when she speaks of the " full panoply of his Four Periods." We may continue to prefer Mr. Lytton Strachey's estimate of the " Romantic " plays to Professor Dover Wilson's, though the latter has behind it a weight of orthodoxy powerful enough to stamp on the minds of most young students the impression that f;ambeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest were written on a chaise longue and a diet of calves foot jelly, prepared by Judith. We should have been readier to accept Professor Dover AVilson's Shakespeare as essential, not only to hint, but to us, if he had not, in the intervals of Peening that the Bard was a sportsman and a " good mixer," so frequently betrayed the conviction that poets are a special breed of mortals who may be expected (p. 8) to bear ip their faces evidence of their singularity : whose testimony about Shakespeare is better worth hearing (p. 2) than anyone's : and whose emsdiGnal calibre (as it were) is of a potency known only to Sheiks (p. 137 : " when poets love they love with a passion which cannot be gainsaid").
But there will be those for whom Professor Dover Wilson's book will provide their first introduction to Shakespeare ; and they will be fortunate indeed. To others, too, it offers some- thing. much more than recapitulation. Time and again the author's scholarship throws on mutters of detail a light which has the reassuring and fascinating glow of truth—see, for instance, IdiC ideas about the first production of Love's Labour's Lost; and his digression on Macbeth's " hangman's hands." The best thing in the book is the chapter on " The Elizabethan Scene." Here the author gives a vivid analysis of a period in which men, fOr all their subconscious fears of a return to cosmic chaos, for all their more immediate dread of a relapse into national anarchy, enjoyed for the first time " a combina- tion of social stability with illimitable opportunity for the indi- vidual." The background against which Shakespeare's plays were written has seldom been better summarized.
To-day- " the tendency . on the whole is to rationalize Shakespeare," says Miss Bradbrook, but her study is far more exciting than most attempts to romanticize him ; • though it is less valuable as an examination of the Elizabethan stage (it is left to Professor Dover Wilson, for instance, to remind us that the 'auditorium at the Globe was no bigger than a lawn tennis court) than as a symptom of trends in modern Shakes- pearean criticism.
" Perhaps the chief value of the knowledge of stage condi- tions is a negative one," she says. " It prevents wrong assamptions, or the laying of emphasis in the wrong place. The Elizabethan stage had no rules : even those
tacitly observed . . may never have been conscious, much less formulated.. . . It is only when the various conventions of stage, actor and playwright can be aweepted automatically that knowledge reacts fruitfully upon interpretation."
The dtief merit of modern Shakespearean criticism—it is writ large over the passage just quoted --is its self-con- sciousness. It recognizes both its immediate and its ultimate
I' 'tuitions. It has a kind of defiant caution. "How do we know ? And where does it get us anyhow ? "—a note of sensible, constructive defeatism is heard for the first time since Johnson's honesty and indolence combines' to sound it. every now and then, in his edition of the Plays. "'Theories are required to have some foundation in fact " ; and the focus of interest has shifted front the back of Shakespeare's mind (our ignorance of which sanctions stab speculations as Pro- fessor Dover Wilson's " Hamlet is Shakespeare's effort to understand Essex ") to the words he wrote and the stage on which they were spoken.
The luxuriant subjectivity of nineteenth-century criticism is an indirect indictment of the theatre of that day. The picture stage can seldom have been less adequate as is vehicle lire Shakespeare's art. Lamb's verdict iris King Lear's am- suitability for the stage was delivered (as I pointed out in these columns a year ago) by a man who could only have seen a hopelessly garbled version of Shakespeare's tragedy acted.
"The Romantics," says Miss Bradbrook, "bad they k -11 Shakespeare's theatre, might not have despaired of the stage "
But they knew only their own ; and -their despair, by all accounts, was venial. They withdrew into the library, where, in the theatre of their minds, and by the light of their own tastes and the novels they had read, a more leisurely and a much fuller development of Shakespeare's eltaraeteni was possible. Thus there came into being that vast body of "purely personal and appreciative criticism whielt consists of the creation of an inferior kind of private poem."
It was for Shakespeare's characters that they eltielly prized him. Morgans, in the eighteenth century, had started the trouble by describing the characters as " rather historic, titan dramatic beings." And " Coleridge and Ilazlitt estab- lished finally the critical approach through the characters." They became the focus, not only of critical attention, but of personal emotions too. ("Lamb," says Miss Bradbrook, whose malice is often delightful, "admiral Heywood for his English gentlemen, and his English gentlemen for qualities which Ire found admirable in Wordsworth.") When it beeameapparent that Shakespeare had " made his characters behave inconsis- tently, and motivated them inadequately," the critics treated themselves to an orgy of motive-mongering. Miss Bradbrook, less self-indulgent than they, follows Stoll, who first recognized
the difference between the depiction and the motivation of character." She supests rather than explains that Shakes- peare was working simultaneously in two mediums -the mediums of type and character- so that his dramatis personae had two not always compatible functions to fulfil ; their internal development info beings of an almost human eom- plexity had at time to be roughly subordinated to the sint- piffled actions of " stock " puppets: Though it is richer in suggestions than conclusions, Elkabethan Stage Conditions is
a very stimulating book, full of the in 'se of brilliance.
Miss St. John, in her introduction to Pour Lectures On Shakespeare, tells us that Ellen Terry " lived MI the most inti- mate terms with Shakespeare's men and women, and was all ways discovering something new about their idiosyncrasies." We shudder, remembering such sentimental fabrications as The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines. But our fears prove groundless. The lectures, if not profound, are shrewd and charming. The last, on the Letters in Shakespeare's Plays, IA the best. The first says everything there is to be said about the children in the plays except that they were not children at all, but little old men. If Ellen Terry does not quite persuade us to accept her conception of Lady Macbeth. us " a small slight woman of acute nervous sensibility," she has the warrant of the text (if not the reward of dramatic effectiveness) for her por- trait of Desdemona as an unconventional, rather headstrong girl—" a potential nun," with something in her of Juliet's
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