Upstaged
Peter Holland
Sublime and Grotesque W. D. Howarth (Harrap £12.75) The English have always been parochial over drama. Brought up to believe in the supreme excellence of Shakespeare, we have never really come to terms with the idea that foreign dramatists are worth the trouble. Racine? Majestic but dull. Goethe and Schiller? Teutonic and dull, and who was Calderon, anyway? If we ignore the peaks, it is hardly surprising that we forget about the connecting ridges. There were plays in France between Racine and Cyrano de Bergerac. As if it were not difficult enough to remember that Shelley and Byron wrote plays, Professor Howarth sets out to introduce us to the French Romantic drama, the plays of Hugo, Dumas pere, Musset and Vigny. The problem, as usual, was Shakespeare. Try as they will, the French have never really liked Shakespeare. There is something about the breadth and variety of his work that is unassimilable within the French pattern of thought. When Berlioz, whose idolatry of Shakespeare was matched only by his idolatry of Harriet Smithson, the Shakespearean actress, wrote what was to have been a Shakespearean opera, Les Troyens, it turned out to be far more of a classical Virgilian epic than even he expected. Berlioz's enthusiasm for the 'dramatic truth' of Shakespeare was part of a general movement at that time. Shakespeare,, though seen through a glass extremely darkly, was the major external model for the creation of the French drame.
While the idea of imitating his expansive' genius seemed an appropriately Romantic endeavour, .a triumphant apotheosis of the individual that was never reconciled with Shakespeare the bourgeois, the practice of the dramatists was distorted from the start. The theatrical groundwork was prepared by thetriumphant success of Kemble's company who visited Paris in 1827. The initial run was to have been for four months — they stayed a year. Dumas' humble gratitude for the experienceknew no bounds, "0 Shakespeare, merci! 0 Kemble et Smithson, mere Merci a mon Dieu! Merci a mes anges de poesier Kemble's actors , performed in English, in a manner that wewould dub melodramatic, with extravaganthand gestures and facial contortions that Racine would have thought appropriate only to ' farce. The French actors copied. Frederick Lemaftre and Marie Dorval, the two actors who ' embodied the spirit of the new drama on the stage, began to overturn the restrictions on the . expression of emotion in acting that were fundamental to classical training and to French classical drama. At the climax of Vigny's Chatterton, with the poet-hero dying in his . garret, Kitty Bell has discovered for herself: what the audience has known all along, that she is in love with the boy-genius. Vigny directed that she should walk down the great : spiral staircase that was in the centre of the stage and collapse at the foot, dying of shock, and a broken heart. The part of Kitty Bell was ' written for Mlle Dorval who was at that time Vigny's mistress (all the Romantic dramatists.'
seem to have written parts for their mistresses) and Marie was dissatisfied with such an end. On the first night, unrehearsed, she altered the move: at the top of the stairs she screamed and collapsed backwards onto the banister with her head and shoulders dangling over the edge, then slid down the rail like a dead weight to fall at the bottom "like a wounded bird." The audience loved it but the other actors resented being upstaged in such a deliberate way and refused to lead her onstage for a bow.
The other problem the new drama had to face was the result of the Napoleonic delight in systems and order. Napoleon had, typically, codified the theatres along with everything else. While the Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, the theatre where the Romantic drama quickly triumphed, was committed "to the genre called melodrama, to plays with great spectacle," the Theatre-Francais was to perform classical drama. Chatterton was performed at the Theatre-Francais, by then the bastion of the establishment. From the start the dramatists tried to win over the audience at the Theatre-Francais. Though Professor Howarth skirts round the point, the audiences at the different theatres were not only interested in different kinds of entertainment but they also came from different social groups. The cheapest seats at the Theatre-Francais cost three times as much as those at the Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin. To be accepted at one theatre was not enough. On February 25, 1830, five years before Chatterton, Hugo's Hernani opened at the same theatre. The result was a riot. Hugo, dispensing with the services of the official claque, had the theatre filled with his supporters, marshalled in battalions under his friends. The battle started with the very first line which broke the strict rules of French metrics. By sheer weight of numbers and vocal power, Hugo's side won the day but the success was not permanent. The Theatre-Francais was never finally conquered and it was from there that the classical counter-attack came in the person of the actress Rachel.
Musset's Lorenzaccio is the greatest of the Romantic plays. Though it is the one that overcame one of the obstacles in its brilliant use of the Shakespearean model, Lorenzaccio failed to defeat the theatrical set-up. The play presents a massive social panorama of Florence, a Romantic's view of the Shakespearean chronicle history. The influence is everywhere, in the large cast covering the whole social spectrum, in the abandoning of the unity of place, even in the way in which the scenes are divided. The effect is of a scope unparalleled in . earlier French drama. But, though the play was published in 1834, it was not performed until 1896 with Sarah Bernhardt, inevitably, as the hero. The triumph in France of the mixed form of drama, the finest example of the fusion of the sublime and the grotesque, defeated the resources of the theatre and it is only since 1945 that relatively uncut, unadapted productions of Lorenzaccio have been seen.
Professor Howarth's guided tour through this drama is worthy but uninspiring. All too often he shies away from an idea just as it begins to be interesting. He mentions but does not pursue Stendhal's provoking comment that, if the new drama did resemble Shakespeare's, "it would only be because our circumstances are the same as those in England in 1590." He drops the merest hints of what Marie Dorval's acting was like, or what the structure of the theatres was, or why the plays were so often turned into operas, or what actually happened on that first night of Hernani. The book's great strength is in its elucidation of the Gallic mysteries of style; as Professor Howarth concludes, "the Romantic drama could not be effective in the theatre until there had been a linguistic and stylistic revolution." Without help, these struggles would be incomprehensible and Professor Howarth's explanation is patient and clear. But the principal failure of the book is in its production. Even though book prices are soaring, the price seems inordinately high. The sixteen plates are ill-chosen and the quality of reproduction is simply dreadful — Wallis's painting of the dead Chatterton looks as though it was made in thick fog. A paperback edition without illustrations would be a sensible alternative. Perhaps someone will now produce some actable translations and, in less stringent times, the National Theatre might give us a properly spectacular production of Lorenzaccio.
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