The conflict between page and stage: authority, compromise, and the transformation of dramatic art

“ Not one person in a thousand who sit in the auditorium of a theatre has any definite idea of the complicated process by which the untidy, badly-scrawled, interleaved, and interlineated manuscript of the author is translated into the close, crisp, bright, interesting entertainment that, in the eyes of the spectator, represents the value of the money he has paid for admittance. ”

“ There was a manager of Oldfield's day who surely did not escape, and that was Christopher Rich, Esquire, one of the patentees of Drury Lane Theatre, and sole director, as a rule, in the affairs of that Thespian temple. Thespian temple, indeed! What cared Mr. Rich for Thespis or for art? He looked upon actors as a lot of cattle whose sole mission in life was to make him rich in pocket as well as in name, and who might, after the performance of that pious act, betake themselves to the Evil Gentleman for aught he cared. ”

“ The intrusion of the actor’s personality, sometimes enhancing the original conception, and always in some degree modifying the intended balance of the design, adds a new colour to the written page. And then, as day by day the scattered fragments are gradually united and the interpretation grows in emotional strength, there come moments of keen enjoyment of the actor’s art that equal, if they do not surpass, any later impression that may be yielded when the performance is finally presented with the added effects of costume and scenery. ”

“ An intimate knowledge of the stage itself is necessary for success in the writing of plays. The dramatist must know precisely what means, such as scenery, sound-effects, and lights—the hundred contributing elements of a purely mechanical nature at his command— he can employ to construct his play to mimic reality. In the present commercial position of the stage such knowledge is absolutely necessary, or the writer may construct an act that cannot possibly win a production, because he has made use of scenes that are financially out of the question, even if they are artistically possible. ”

“ But how does a dramatic work become theatrical, or fitted to appear with advantage on the stage? In single instances it is often difficult to determine whether a work possesses such a property or not. It is indeed frequently the subject of great controversy, especially when the self-love of authors and actors comes into collision; each shifts the blame of failure on the other, and those who advocate the cause of the author appeal to an imaginary perfection of the histrionic art, and complain of the insufficiency of the existing means for its realization. ”

“ The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. In the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice of the medium of communication;—it is as if he had been speaking to you all the while. ”

“ Even this,—the appropriate, the never to be too much valued advantage of the theatre, if only the actors were what we know they have been,—a delightful, yet most effectual, remedy for this dead palsy of the public mind. What would appear mad or ludicrous in a book, when presented to the senses under the form of reality, and with the truth of nature, supplies a species of actual experience. This is indeed the special privilege of a great actor over a great poet. ”

“ When you witness a really thrilling scene in a play you find yourself sitting on the edge of your seat; you clench your hands until the nails sink into your flesh; tears roll down your cheeks at other scenes, until you are ashamed of your emotion and wipe them furtively away; and you laugh uproariously at still other scenes. ”

“ The art of the poet accordingly consists in separating from the fable whatever does not essentially belong to it, whatever, in the daily necessities of real life, and the petty occupations to which they give rise, interrupts the progress of important actions, and concentrating within a narrow space a number of events calculated to attract the minds of the hearers and to fill them with attention and expectation. ”

“ Because editors print the [Pg 60] plays as if they were five-act dramas, which they are not; (2) because actors, in their stage versions, mutilate the “fable,” and interpolate pictorial effects where none are intended; (3) because, also, actors use a faulty and artificial elocution, unsuited to the poet’s verse. These causes, combined, oust Shakespeare’s original plays from the theatre, and impose in their place pseudo-classical dramas which are not of his making, nor of his time. ”

“ Then black out, and gallery green focus for dance, changing to ruby at cue, and white floods at chord off.
The limelight man never sees the show. In his little cupboard, he hears nothing but the hissing of his arcs and the tinkle of the stage-manager's prompting bell at the switchboard which controls every light in the theatre, before and behind. He has to watch every movement of the artist who is on, but what he or she is doing or saying, he does not know. He is, perhaps, the only man who has never laughed at Little Tich. ”

“ And although we willingly censure the practice of driving argument, upon the stage, into metaphysical refinement, and rendering the contest of contrasted passions a mere combat in logic, yet we must equally condemn those tragedies, in which the poet sketches out the character with a few broken common-places, expressive of love, of rage, or of grief, and leaves the canvas to be filled up by the actor, according to his own taste, power, and inclination. ”

“ Exit denotes the departure of an actor from the stage, and is freely used in all the printed editions of Shakespeare’s works and in all other dramatic literature. The plural exeunt is also used in the same sense. Although exit is written and spoken in its Latin form, the word is thoroughly naturalised, whilst exeunt is marked in the dictionary as a foreigner. Man and Manet are also stage directions often to be met with in the old quarto editions; they signify that the actor or actors whose name or names follow this direction remain on the stage after the others have left ”

“ Between the two, in some arts, stands the artistic interpreter—the actor who embodies the aery conceptions of the poet, the violinist or pianist who makes audible the inspirations of the musician. But in so far as this artistic interpreter rises to greatness in his field, in so far he will be found soaring above the middle ground, away from the artistic person, and into the realm of the artist or creator. ”

“ What then was this irresolution but the vacillations of a mind broken and confounded? He had exercised too constantly the highest faculties of fiction, and he had precipitated himself into the dreariness of real life. None but a poet can conceive, for none but a poet can experience, the secret wounds inflicted on a mind of romantic fancy and tenderness of emotion, which has staked its happiness on its imagination; for such neglect is felt as ordinary men would feel the sensation of being let down into a sepulchre, and buried alive. ”

“ Analysis is not the business of the poet. His office is to portray, not to dissect. His creed ... will no more influence his poetry, properly so called, than the notions which a painter may have conceived respecting the lachrymal glands or the circulation of the blood will affect the tears of his Niobe or the blushes of his Aurora. If Shakespeare had written a book on the motives of human actions, it is by no means certain that it would have been a good one. ”

“ Yet indications in the poem itself have been pointed out which might incline us to accept the story rather as a meagre tradition of some tragic circumstances in the poet's history, than as the idle invention of an uncritical age. The unrelieved intensity of thought and feeling, by which more almost than any other work of literature it is characterised, seems indicative of an overstrain of power, which may well have caused the loss or eclipse of what to the poet was the sustaining light and joy of his life4. ”

“ In a poet so far superior as Tourneur to the author of those abortions we must seek for an explanation of this perverse error in a transient and tentative theory of realism rather than in an incurable infirmity or obliquity of talent: for no quality is more remarkable in the execution of his masterpiece than his mastery of those metrical properties in which the style of this play is so generally deficient. ”

“ No judicious poet is willing to break the interest of a tale of ancient times, by allusions peculiar to his own period: but when the translator, instead of identifying himself as closely as possible with the original author, pretends to such liberty, he removes us a third step from the time of action, and so confounds the manners of no less than three distinct eras,—that in which the scene is laid, that in which the poem was written, and that, finally, in which the translation was executed. ”

“ Still it should be understood that it is at the option of the dramatist to present himself publicly or to remain in private, and leave the audience to form such conjectures as may occur to them concerning the nature of his physical aspect. The public have no more real right to insist on the dramatic author's crossing the stage than to require that a successful poet, or novelist, or historian, shall remain on view at his publisher's for a specified time after the production of his latest work. ”

“ It would be less remarkable if a poor author, who has none of this giddy range and scope of information, who pores over the page till it fades from his sight, and refines upon his style till the words stick in his throat, should be dull as a beetle and mute as a fish, instead of spontaneously pouring out a volume of wit and wisdom on every subject that can be started. ”

“ More and more, therefore, must it be realized that if an actor wishes to interpret the plays intelligently, he must shut his eyes to all that has taken place on the stage since the poet’s time, turning to Shakespeare’s text and trusting to that alone for inspiration. ”

“ There comes a moment even in the writing of a play when the puppets of the author’s invention seem suddenly to take a detached existence and to follow a law of development that is only half-consciously dictated by their creator. ”

“ When, on the other hand, in explaining his feelings, the poet relates them to events and persons which have been no part of our experience, this symmetry is lost; we no longer utter the poem ourselves, but merely hear the poet speak. Such poetry is already approaching the dramatic; for although still the expression of the poet's life, it is no longer an expression of the reader's life, and the poet also, as he lives past his experience, must come at length to view it as if it were another's. ”

“ But if the author permits an over degree of attention to be drawn to his work ere it has appeared, he places himself in the embarrassing condition of having excited a degree of expectation which, if he proves unable to satisfy, is an error fatal to his literary reputation. ”

“ At the scenes of despair, at the scenes of doubt which assail him, the poet assists rather as the historian than as the actor. And the same holds good for other poems, where he describes those peculiar diseases of the mind which great geniuses alone can comprehend, though they need not have experienced them. ”

“ The Study of the Drama, Brander Matthews.
On the vaudeville stage to-day, when all the sciences and the arts have come to the aid of the drama, there is no period nor place, nor even a feeling of atmosphere, that cannot be reproduced with amazing truth and beauty of effect. Everything in the way of scenery is artistically possible, from the squalid room of the tenement-dweller to the blossoming garden before the palace of a king—but artistic possibility and financial advisability are two very different things. ”

“ Yet, true as it is that dramatic ability inevitably shines through finished drama when it is well played upon the stage, there are so many determining factors of pleasing theme, acting, production and even of audience—and so many little false steps both in manuscript and presentation; which might be counted unfortunate accident—that the failure of a play is not always a sure sign that the playwright lacks dramatic instinct. ”

“ A playwright often receives $100 per night while the play runs. More frequently the manager pays a sum outright for the rights of the play. The sum of $10,000 was paid recently for the right to dramatize a popular work of fiction, the author having already received a fortune from its sale as a novel. ”

“ When an author, believing that the end of his play should be tragic, so plans his work that until the last act or even the middle of that act, a tragic ending is the logical conclusion, and then because he is told or believes that an audience will quit the theatre much more contented if the ending be happy, he forces a pleasant ending on his play, he is untrue to himself, dishonest with his art, and truckles to his public. ”

“ I have always wondered how he came to be in a theatre."
"Why, madame, the theatre is a house of correction for morals," said Gaudissart. "Poor Pons!—Upon my word, one ought to cultivate the species to keep up the stock. 'Tis a pattern man, and has talent too. When will he be able to take his orchestra again, do you think? A theatre, unfortunately, is like a stage coach: empty or full, it starts at the same time. Here at six o'clock every evening, up goes the curtain; and if we are never sorry for ourselves, it won't make good music. ”

“ Yet no actor should defend a conception of character which is shown to be at variance with the author’s words.
The only copies of Shakespeare’s plays which can with any authority be called acting-versions are the quartos, published during the poet’s lifetime, and these are not acting-versions in the modern sense of the term, because, with the exception of textual errors, or abbreviations of dialogue, there is no shortening of the play by the omission of entire scenes or characters. ”

“ A general outline of the whole effect desired can be given; but try as we may, all the more delicate shades, the finer details of accent and inflection, must always be left to the taste, insight, and temperament of the individual performer; just as the intelligent reading of a poem depends upon much 40 besides an observance of the punctuation marks. It is not within the limits of human ability to edit a single period of eight measures so perfectly that no variations or mistakes in the interpretation are possible. ”

“ Man does not need to have a whole life laid before him to form a judgment. Little things are what drive character impressions home.
It is this human trait of which the playwright makes use in the delineation of character. The playlet writer has even less time than the legitimate dramatist to stamp character. He must seize on the essentials, and with a few broad strokes make the character live as distinct from all other men.
For much of his characterization—aside from that absolutely inherent in the plot—the playlet writer depends upon the actor. ”

“ Even the conscientious and thoroughly-prepared actor is apt to be disconcerted when he hears the flutter of leaves being turned over in the theatre, and discovers that his speeches are being followed, line for line and word for word, by critics armed with the author's text. On such occasions his memory is much inclined to play him false, and a sudden nervousness will often mar his best efforts. ”

“ I became an enthusiastic lover of the theatre; and with my craze for actors and the play, the work of my demoralization began. The stage, in a great metropolis, exerts a very deadly influence over the young; they never quit the theatre save in a state of emotional excitement almost always beyond their power to control ”

“ I shall never forget an experience of my own, when I took a good French friend to see David Warfield in "The Music Master"; this young chap could not understand more than a word here and there, but we were compelled to miss the last act because he cried so hard during the famous lost-daughter scene that he was ashamed to enter the theatre after the intermission.
Every great play is, in the last analysis, a pantomime. Words are unnecessary to tell a stage story that has its wellspring deep in the emotions of the human heart. Words can only embellish it. ”

“ As the audience left the theatre, the opinions expressed accentuated the reality of the actor’s success. “The things that have been said about his mannerisms are shameful”; “Why, he has no more mannerisms than Booth!” “I never was more agreeably surprised”; “He speaks like an educated American”; “And in the street looks like a Yale or Harvard professor”; “Never saw anything finer”; “Most awfully impressive scene, [132] that last act”; “Stage magnetism in the highest degree”; “Guess he is safe for the biggest run of popularity of any actor or any man who has ever come to this country” ”

“ It must be allowed that the worst even of the rhyming tragedies contains good description and magnificent rhetoric. But, even when we forget that they are plays, and, passing by their dramatic improprieties, consider them with reference to the language, we are perpetually disgusted by passages which it is difficult to conceive how any author could have written, or any audience have tolerated, rants in which the raving violence of the manner forms a strange contrast with the abject tameness of the thought. ”

“ It is mistaking the province of the artist for that of the historian; and it is this very obligation of painting and statuary to fill up all the details, that renders them incapable of telling a story, or of expressing more than a single moment, group, or figure. Poetry or romance does not descend into the particulars, but atones for it by a more rapid march and an intuitive glance at the more striking results. By considering truth or matter-of-fact as the sole element of popular fiction, our author fails in massing and in impulse. ”

“ It is only fair to the prospective reader to warn him that there are some passages in the book that seem reverberantly empty, and others whose content appears to be of the cloudiest; it will be for the reader himself to decide how far any apparent hiatus of meaning is due to failure of expression on the author’s part, how far to his own lack of intuition. ”