THE THEATRE
THE TRUE SHYLOCK
WHEN the curtain rose and the new Shakespeare season began at the Old Vie, we saw first (perhaps there is a moral to this) that the scenery was beautifully new and very well designed. A remarkable odour of glue engulfed the stalls and penetrated, no doubt, through all the house. There was a most regal and Nordic Antonio upon the stage, a Coeur de Lion, it might be, but one with sorrow in his blood, and the magnanimous gentleness of deep thought.
But farewell, triviality! The actors are speaking the language of Shakespeare, a language that quiets and almost saddens us with the perfection of style. Through the whole play, through any play of Shakespeare's, that glory of mere speech will persist. Even where there is no help from stage- craft it will heighten all occasions. The action lies within that plane of speech. And what if no men ever spoke so truly, so lavishly, with such an organization of mood and music? Speech is the epic country of Shakespeare, and it is this nobility that makes his characters our gods. Tolstoy objects, " But all of them speak in one manner, with one voice. There should have been a quick difference of idiom, to mark one from another. It is a fraud upon us, that device of Shake- spearian speech." All of them speak like heroes, we reply, and if Shakespeare had no other virtue, this would suffice to astonish mankind for a thousand years.
At the Old Vie we hear actors deliver their lines as if they understood the enchantment of words. And, come what may, it is that memory we most poignantly carry away with us. There is, none the less, the competence and depth of the acting to be considered ; and it seems that in this respect the company has added greatly to its always outstanding merit. Miss Edith Evans is a notable recruit. We must confess that for some time we were dubious ; she seemed rather ill-cast as Portia. In the casket scenes, in especial, she seemed to be acting with a grace and coyness of mannerism which she had brought over from Restoration Comedy. We could not feel that she was conscious of the issues ; she showed too little strain and suspense over the long-drawn-out and fatal choice. How could Portia, when her happiness and all her life had been at stake, take these two first decisions with so easy a smile, so witty a gesture ? The fault was not Shakespeare's. He made and used the discovery that in some measure a crisis of emotion can be met with a witticism or a smile : but the actor must put a kind of wryness in the 'smile. It is as though man were challenging the universe and bearing himself bravely in heaven's despite ; as though he could treat the onslaughts of fate as a trifle and a jest in comparison with his own manhood and self-sufficiency. We were uneasy, then, lest Portia should prove too light for her part : but Miss Evans made more amends than any man could have expected. The play culminates in the trial scene ; that scene is Portia's own ; and it is one of the hardest scenes to play in the whole of dramatic literature. We have seen Portias who were gay and pert ; Portias who were tedious and quibbling. The Portia of Miss Evans was new to us, very serious, and (as we felt it) supremely true.
She was pale and determined, no partial advocate but a goddess of necessity. Perhaps she was hopeless in those great appeals to Shylock ; she must have foreseen the end, and there was a quality of ruthlessness in her procedure. And yet she made her appeals in no perfunctory fashion. She urged mercy upon the Jew calmly and forcibly ; she seemed to know to the uttermost her duty and responsibility, and to exercise herself rigorously and wholly in argument to convince him. When he rejected her appeals and threw away profit and safety for mere malignancy, there was no triumph as she turned the tables upon him ; there was Justice only.
This Justice, this necessity. has its reflex in making Shylock fuller and more real to us. In this humanitarian age an actor will often try to engage our sympathy for the oppressed and
maltreated Jew ; but we could swear that Shakespeare meant no such thing. We may sympathize in part with Shylock ; we may pity his ruin and his grief ; we may even see an inhumanity in the sublime and proud aristocracy of the Christians. Yet Shylock was a villain, and Antonio was noble. If Antonio spat upon Shylock, then Shylock had his due. Shakespeare hated the mob, and Shylock came of the mob, a low and filthy creature. But Shakespeare loved mankind, and Shylock was a man. We have not arrived in Shakespeare at that dispassionate sympathy which Dostoev- sky has given us. Dostoevsky can love and understand the criminal in his crime ; and yet he keeps distinctions, and never confuses crime and virtue. He judges without prejudice or self-interest ; and yet he judges. There is no such clarity of morals in Shakespeare. Shylock on the whole is a wretch beyond sympathy : surely he himself is explicit enough upon that point. When we are moved by his fate, we are moved by the miseries of mankind in him : this is too much suffering. we think, even for this blotch and foulness of a man.
The whole production of The Merchant of Venice helped to induce sanity and truth in our reactions. Mr. Baliol Hollo- way's Shylock was very good ; there were no histrionics and falsities in it. The Antonio of Mr. Neil Porter was magnificent. There was a generosity and freedom in his words and movements that caught us up and made us feel that we were in a noble and wide civilization and that the devilish plot of Shylock was indeed an outrage. Lastly we must pay tribute to Mr. John Garside for his Launcelot Gobbo We were given an evening of wonder and deep emotion and at the end we were sad to break our bondage even by applause.
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