Commedia dell'arte

“ If I think of poetry, must I not remember how to the measure of its lofty music the theatre has in almost all ages set the grandest of dramatic conceptions? If I think of literature, must I not recall that of all the amusements by which men in various states of society have solaced their leisure and refreshed their energies, the acting of plays is the one that has never yet, even for a day, been divorced from literary taste and skill? ”

“ As the drama, constructed on this principle, professes to portray the changes of real life, so it admits, it is thought, of that intermixture of the serious and the comic, which the actual world exhibits; and willingly transports the spectator from the most highly wrought scenes of passion, the deepest accents of woe, to the burlesque of extravagant characters, or the picture of vulgar life. ”

“ Here were actors forgetting that they were acting—here was mock life become real life, by the power of art; here was truth of speech and action, which transformed the players into human beings, with their virtues, passions, and weaknesses, instead of into cold-blooded posers, unnatural, declamatory, sententious.... I read—nay, devoured—not only the repertory of Shakespeare but that of every other foreign dramatic poet, and I came to recognise that in the world of the theatre everything emanates from Shakespeare, as in the real world all emanates from the sun.... ”

“ To master the technicalities of his craft, to familiarize his mind with the structure, rhythm, and the soul of poetry, to be constantly cultivating his perceptions of life around him and of all the arts—painting, music, sculpture—for the actor who is devoted to his profession is susceptible to every harmony of color, sound, and form—to do this is to labor in a large field of industry. But all your training, bodily and mental, is subservient to the two great principles in tragedy and comedy—passion and geniality. Geniality in comedy is one of the rarest gifts. ”

“ Modern comic opera has adopted in a modified and refined form the chief characteristics—one of them the woman in tights and another of them the clown with his perfunctory low comedy—of the old-fashioned burlesque. ”

“ Now, when in a so-called Comic Opera your two principal low comedians have very little to do, say, or sing, and when that little is not of a particularly side-splitting character, and when the plot is not replete with comic situations, such a work must depend for its success on the freshness of its melodies, on the popularity of its artistes, and on the excellence of its mise-en-scène. ”

“ The modern interest in the drama, and the ever-growing desire to see literature once more wedded to the stage, will, it can hardly be doubted, lead to a revival of dramatic poetry. This will not, of course, have any relation to the feeble lycean plays of the hour—spectacular romances enshrined in ambling blank verse—but will, in its form and substance alike, offer entertainment to other organs than the eye. ”

“ After his labor, his pleasure. The comedian plays till midnight, studies in the morning, rehearses at noon; the sculptor is bent before his statue; the journalist is a marching thought, like the soldier when at war; the painter who is the fashion is crushed with work, the painter with no occupation, if he feels himself to be a man of genius, gnaws his entrails. ”

“ Comedy, led through a phantasmagoria of pictures, gets lost in the likely and the unlikely, with no other connection but the caprice of an amused imagination, wantonly disjointed and romantic, an opera without music, a concerto of melancholy and tender sentiments, which bears the mind into the supernatural world, and brings before our eyes on its fairy-wings the genius which has created it. ”

“ It is a synthesis of those portions of these other arts that, being elemental, are most easily assimilable on the part of the multitude. It is a snatch of music, a bit of painting, a moment of dancing, a slice of sculpture, draped upon the skeleton of literature. At its highest, it ranks with literature, but never above it. One small notch below, and it ranks only with itself, in its own isolated and generically peculiar field. Drama, indeed, is dancing literature: a hybrid art. ”

“ He makes the comic muse a dealer in riddles, and an expounder of hieroglyphics, and a taste for dramatic excellence, a species of the second sight. He would have the Drama to be the most remote, and it is the most substantial and real of all things. It represents not only looks, but motion and speech. The painter gives only the former, looks without action or speech, and the mere writer only the latter, words without looks or action. Its business and its use is to express the thoughts and character in the most striking and instantaneous manner, in the manner most like reality. ”

“ There is in the performance of this player, all the delicacy of taste, and all the dignity of expression that we reverence in the painter: his figures, where the subject gives him scope, are noble almost beyond imagination, his attitudes the most strictly appropriated to the sensations that inspire them, and his colouring, to borrow a metaphor from the sister art to express an excellence for which the other has yet no word of its own, is the greatest that we ever did or ever must expect to see. ”

“ All the objections to the opera are equally applicable to tragedy and comedy without music, and all proceed on the false principle that theatrical representations are copies of nature, whereas they are imitations. ”

“ The music halls provide for the feasting of the eye; melodrama and farce have attracted and retain an enormous mass of clients; the literary drama and Comedy have secured their own homes, to which one looks only for artistic emotions and refined amusements.
In these are to be found that highest rank of actors and actresses whose rise in fortune, talent, and esteem I have described. ”

“ The spirit of the old romantic comedy had Comedy.long since fled; the graceful artificialities of the pastoral drama, even the light texture of the mask, ill suited the demands of an age which made no secret to itself of the grossness of its sensuality. With a few unimportant exceptions, such poetic elements as admitted of being combined with the poetic drama were absorbed by the opera and the ballet. No new species of the comic drama formed itself, though towards the close of the period may be noticed the beginnings of modern English farce. ”

“ In the first, ideas are expressed in words; this is literature. In the second, ideas are expressed in the sounds of the scale; this is music. In the third, ideas are expressed in rigid forms either round, as in sculpture, or flat, as in p. 225painting. We may call this third art painting, that being its most popular phase.”
“I see your difficulty,” said I. “If drama is not one of the arts, the procession cannot be a branch of drama. But I think the drama is one of the arts all the same.” ”

“ The New Comedy displays more inventive genius in dramatic construction, together with greater skill in treating the literary dialogue, and a wider sympathy and ingenuity in the development of character, thus appealing to a more educated section of the public. ”

“ In high comedy the social refinement of the nation affords great advantages to their actors. But with respect to tragical composition, the art of the actor should also accommodate itself to the spirit of the poetry. ”

“ Pure landscape-painting into which no light or shade enters, pure portrait-painting into which no expression enters, are phrases less at variance with sound criticism than pure comedy into which no moral enters. ”

“ As on the stage the highest excellence will wear out by frequent repetition, and novelty always possesses a great charm, the dramatic art is, consequently, much influenced by fashion; it is more than other branches of literature and the fine arts exposed to the danger of passing rapidly from a grand and simple style to dazzling and superficial mannerism. ”

“ So long as the dramatists were not hampered by demands from the audience to have its social, political, or æsthetic fancies humoured, and from the actor to have his egotism flattered, the drama flourished as an art as well as a business. ”

“ How many out of the hundreds and thousands of inspired girls and women who have turned to the easel or the desk have become great artists? Upon the stage they may; but I have often questioned whether the dramatic art be a true art, or rather a half-art, in which half-talents can reach the highest eminence. And those who are called actors of genius, what are they in comparison with men of true genius in art, in literature, in music? ”

“ In order to understand the social and dynamic significance of modern dramatic art it is necessary, I believe, to ascertain the difference between the functions of art for art's sake and art as the mirror of life. ”

“ Thus externally fitted for his art, there can be no doubt that he who possessed so much comedy in his conceptions of character, must have had equal judgment and taste in the theatrical expression, and that only the poet himself could fully convey what he alone could have composed. ”

“ There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.
The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular upon our stage. ”

“ To name the actor’s imagination in such a case a creative imagination is a rather wistful procedure, for it does not create but merely duplicates. Surely no advocate of acting as a creative art would be so bold as to contend that any actor, however great, has ever brought creative imagination to the already full and superb creative imagination of Shakespeare. ”

“ Here is entrancing change and flow of pattern, but here is human striving and performance, too; and the emotions of the audience are touched more directly and more deeply because picture and drama have been fused into a single art. ”

“ Art is an evocation of beautiful emotions: art is art in the degree that it succeeds in this evocation: drama succeeds in an inferior degree. Whatever emotion drama may succeed brilliantly in evoking, another art succeeds in evoking more brilliantly. ”

“ On the contemporary stage, characters properly costumed must be exhibited within a carefully designed and painted setting illuminated with appropriate effects of light and shadow; and the art of music is often called upon to render incidental aid to the general impression. The dramatist, therefore, must be endowed not only with the literary sense, but also with a clear eye for the graphic and plastic elements of pictorial effect, a sense of rhythm and of music, and a thorough knowledge of the art of acting. ”

“ Like him, an excellent painter, a writer by impulse, he produces, with wonderful fecundity, a number of interesting comedies, which make the audience laugh till they shed tears, and how and then give great lessons. ”

“ The classical dramatist is too sensitive to the beautiful, the sublime, the essential, and the universal to admit into his conception of fine art either moral and physical deformity or the accidental and particular aspects of life. ”

“ I have elsewhere in these Lectures shown that elegance of form is of the greatest importance in Comedy, as from the want of care in this respect it is apt to degenerate into a mere prosaical imitation of reality, and thereby to forfeit its pretensions to rank as either poetry or art. ”

“ Thus every art and every style received its free and isolated development within the limits of its proper mission. Thus tragedy and comedy shared man and the world between them, each taking a different domain in the region of realities, and coming by turns to offer to the serious or mirthful consideration of a people who invariably insisted upon simplicity and harmony, the poetic effects which their skill could derive from the materials placed in their hands. ”

“ For a musical comedy, even a sentimental one, must be high-spirited in execution—that was the lesson of an unsentimental one, The Beggar’s Opera; and at the same time there must be some courage, some defiance of nature and sound sense, a feeling for fantasy, which means that the life of the spirit is high, even when the life of the body is in chains. ”

“ The introduction of farces into the entertainments of the theatre has been one cause of destroying that legitimate comedy, which such critics require. The eye, which has been accustomed to delight in paintings of caricature, regards a picture from real life as an insipid work. ”

“ It is impossible to conceive any thing more perfect as a specimen of art, or more beautiful as an imitation of nature, than her representation of the kind of heroine most commonly to be found in a French comedy ”

“ Their figures resemble in action the comedians of the ancient theatre, who, to render themselves visible even to the most distant portion of the audience, were compelled to exceed the limits of nature and truth; and the faces of modern figures are like the ancient masks, which for the same reason, the increase of expression, became hideous. ”

“ We hear much of voice, action, grace, and charm of elocution, but nothing of those higher matters of histrionic art which raise it to the level of an intellectual profession. Nothing is said of the effect produced on the minds of the audience, nothing of conception and interpretation of character, nothing of empire over the sources of smiles and tears. ”

“ Are we to take it that the poet, with his eye in a fine phrenzy rolling, sees all the minute details of form, color, light, sound, and action which have to be rendered complete on the stage? Is there nothing in what the individual actor, who is gifted [192] with fine sense and emotional power, can add to mere words, however grand and rolling in themselves, and whatsoever mighty image they may convey? ”