The Elizabethan Scene
Tat: movement to relate with particularity of detail Shakes- peare to his environment, so ably initiated by Dr. G. B. Harrison with the hope that the accruing reflected light will show what influences were at work on the moulding of his genius and dissipate many obscurities, is rapidly gaining momentum. For one thing, it constitutes the informing spirit of a third of the studies in this serviceable miscellany. Quite admirable as a prelude is Professor C. J. Sisson's succinct conspectus of " The Theatre and the Companies," although, such are the complexities of the subject, that criticism finds in it something for the exercise of its scalpel. We are told that early playwriting was piece-work, paid for by the lump sum, a system which certainly ruled in a multiplicity of cases, but there was likewise a secondary method of which we learn nothing. Attached to certain companies there was also a house dramatist (often a player in the company) who contracted under articles to supply a certain number of plays per year and received in return a weekly salary. Seeing that after his novitiate Shakespeare never wrote for any other company save those with which he was connected as an actor, there is good reason to believe that he must be reckoned in the latter category. Sticklers for accuracy of phrasing will doubtless object to Professor Sisson's use of the locution " the run of the play," since a run implies an unbroken series of performances, and no consecutive representations of any play, new or old, were given in Shakespeare's day. In his outstanding paper on " Shakespeare's Dramatic Art," Mr. Granville Barker writes with a flaming intensity in curious contrast with the academic aridity of his associates, and takes occasion to rein- force his earlier contention that, given adequate acting and a stage which makes fair approximation to the stage for which he wrote, there is no need to fear loss of virtue in the plays of Shakespeare when put to the sole use for which they were originally intended. So potent is his reasoning that one fears it will take a greater than Charles Lamb to uphold Lamb's old
• fallacy.
From Dr. G. B. Harrison as from Mr. Granville Barker the well-read scholar knows what to expect, but it needs to be said of Dr. Harrison's study of " The National Background " that his method of approach improves as it progresses. There is more surety of handling and less speculation. In confining himself to Shakespeare's environment in his middle period, he shows incidentally that the poet's puzzling description of the players as " the abstract and brief chronicle of the times " is a mere topicality born of the personalities in which the end- of-the-century stage was indulging. But it is curious that he should confess to complete bafflement over Hamlet's cryptic reference to the age having grown so picked " that the toe of the peasant comes near the heel of the courtier " to the galling of his kibe, seeing that Miss M. St. Clare Byrne in her vivid companion picture of " The Social Background " affords a clue to the mystery in quoting from a pamphleteer of 1598 to the effect that " the Gentlemanly Profession of Serving Men " was being invaded by farmers' sons and others of the same class, with the result that service was ceasing to be an honour- able calling, and the real " gentleman " servant was finding it difficult to obtain employment. Of a surety, this lament has its utility in serving to date Hamlet. This is an accidental contribution to knowledge, but Miss Byrne performs a high service in laying stress on the dignity and importance of the office of steward in the households of the Tudor nobility, and in indicating that accretive ignorance on this point led in the theatre to a gradual degradation of the character of Malvolio. On some points a few of the studies in the book give regret- tably short measure. Mr. A. L. Attwater mars an otherwise good paper on " Shakespeare's Sources" by an inadequate dis- cussion of the burning problems of collaboration and revision. Professor Edward J. Dent writes informatively on the subject of " Shakespeare and Music," but leaves certain vital matters concerning Elizabethan theatre music untouched. What he has failed to grasp is that for long the common players pro- vided (i.e., played) their own music, and that it was only from 1609 (when the King's Men took over the Blackfriars Theatre as a winter house, and, in conserving the private-theatre principles, were compelled to provide a separate orchestra) that musicians as a separate body were employed in the common theatres. This accounts for the fact that before 1609 there is no evidence of musical inter-acts in the open theatres, usual as they were in the selecter houses. As for Professor Dent's challenging statement that there is absolutely nothing to show that A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor were ever acted publicly, one takes leave to direct his attention to the declarations made on the title pages of the first quartos of both plays. By a parity of reasoning, several other of Shakespeare's plays con- cerning which information is lacking must have been written solely for private performance : which is absurd.
Finally, there is much of interest in Mr. Harold Child's neat conspectus of Shakespearean representation from Betterton's day till our own, and not a little over which the expert stage historian will shudder. The fancy sketch drawn of the peculiarities of Restoration scene-shifting is so wide of the mark that one becomes convinced that Mr. Montague Summers's recent book on the Restoration Theatre arrived not a moment too soon. Mr. Child commits the common error of speaking of Philip de Loutherbourg as a scene- painter, a calling he never followed. It was simply as scene designer and general scenic director that he was employed at Drury Lane. As for the statement that he was never associated with any of Garrick's Shakespearean revivals, some of his designs for Richard III were formerly in Sir Henry Irving's collection and were once reproduced in The Magazine of Art. To William Capon also Mr. Child does some injustice in speaking of his " obviously very romantic scenery " for Kemble's Drury Lane. Seeing that Capon has the distinction of being the first stage archaeologist, the obviousness is not
Previous page
