Interlude (theatre)

“ But when the impassioned voice rings with trumpet notes through a vast audience, appealing to what is dearest to the human soul, lifting the mind to the contemplation of the sublimest truths and most momentous interests, then there is real eloquence, such as is never heard in the theatre, interested as spectators may be in the triumphs of dramatic art. ”

“ Without either losing for a moment the sense of conditions imposed by the theatre, or gaining her effects by means of commonplaceness set baldly on the stage, she has evolved an extraordinary realism made up of truth to nature combined298 with a sense of theatric art so nicely adjusted that even in its most telling moments it is the art that conceals art. ”

“ Standing by her grave, on which the myrtle grows dense and dark, and over which the small birds swirl and twitter in the breezy silence, remembrance of the busy scenes of brilliant life wherein she used to move—the pictured stage, the crowded theatre, the wild plaudits of a delighted multitude—came strongly on the mind, and asked, in perplexity and sadness, what was the good of it all. ”

“ On the whole, it would probably be wisest to produce Shakespeare with very simple scenery, in order, on the one hand, not to dim the imagination of the spectators by elaborate magnificence of setting, and, on the other, not to distract their minds by the unaccustomed conventions of a sceneless stage.
What has been said of scenery may be applied also to the use of incidental music. So soon as such music becomes obtrusive, it distracts the attention from the business of the play: and it cannot be insisted on too often that in the theatre the play's the thing. ”

“ The plot or libretto takes a comparatively secondary place and does not attract much attention, it being only the setting of the music, which is the chief attraction. But as a set-off, we are frequently brought face to face with a ballet of a most improper nature. Certainly the inference drawn by the ordinary frequenter of the theatre is that such performances are not wrong, and it is prudish to object to them. ”

“ When we try to picture what the theatre in Shakespeare's time was like, it strikes us that it must have been difficult to carry out those principles. One would think it must have been almost impossible for the actors to keep up the illusion of the play, surrounded as they were by such distracting elements. Figure to yourselves a crowd of fops, chattering like a flock of daws, carrying their stools in their hands, and settling around, and sometimes upon the stage itself, with as much noise as possible. ”

“ There may sometimes have been music, which would not have prevented the audience from stretching themselves and talking. [412] Short intervals, rather than none at all, are, I think, suggested by the well-known passage in the induction of The Malcontent, as altered for performance at the Globe, in which it is explained that passages have been added to the play as originally written for Revels boys, ‘to entertain a little more time, and to abridge the not-received custom of music in our theatre’. ”

“ What culture, though—what a combination of gifts, does this portrayal require and call into play! An actor may be in turn, painter, sculptor, poet, musician, psychologist, moralist, historian, and yet be inadequately equipped for his calling.
Does one go to the theatre to see life depicted upon the stage, or, on the contrary, to escape from life and forget it? Irving takes up a position half-way between the realist and that of the ultra-idealist. ”

“ In these essays the author is largely concerned with the problem of representational versus presentational stage performances. Should illusion be carried to its furthest limits? Should the play be represented, as at the Moscow art theatre, as ‘an independent entity existing side by side with’ the observing audience? Or should it be presented through the medium of the stage? Other matters dealt with are the advantages and disadvantages of ensemble-acting, and long-run plays. ”

“ It has tried to become a more perfect machine,—more nearly an instrument of precision. It may be significant to observe that, although masterpieces of drama gave impetus to the development of the illusion stage,—outstandingly the plays of Ibsen,—the illusion stage has brought forth no masterpieces. In this country, it may be held responsible for the buzz-saw, train-wreck, or horse-race type of melodrama, a type now happily removed from the theatre by the moving picture with its still higher degree of visual veracity. ”

“ The early years of the twentieth century have been a period of rapid development in the theatre, a development marked by at least two broad phenomena: first, the growing public349 sense of the drama as an art, of which acting is a component part, not the chief end; and, secondly, the revolution in the technique of stagecraft. To sum up the matter in a word, the stage is struggling, rather blindly, to liberate itself from the conventions that intervene between audience and play. ”

“ Now, what is the Chorus, this anomalous character standing between the spectacle and the spectator, if it be not the poet completing his epic?
The theatre of the ancients is, like their dramas, huge, pontifical, epic. It is capable of holding thirty thousand spectators; the plays are given in the open air, in bright sunlight; the performances last all day. The actors disguise their voices, wear masks, increase their stature; they make themselves gigantic, like their roles. ”

“ I had not slept long, when I was awakened by the noise of merriment within an adjoining booth. It was the itinerant theatre, rudely constructed of boards and canvas. I peeped through an aperture, and saw the whole dramatis personae, tragedy, comedy, pantomime, all refreshing themselves after the final dismissal of their auditors. They were merry and gamesome, and made their flimsy theatre ring with laughter. I was astonished to see the tragedy tyrant in red baize and fierce whiskers, who had made my heart quake as he strutted about the boards, now transformed into a fat, good humored fellow ”

“ Each group of persons is made to parody itself into concert with the others; while the frequent intershootings of fairy influence lift the whole into the softest regions of fancy. At last the Interlude comes in as an amusing burlesque on all that has gone before; as in our troubled dreams we sometimes end with a dream that we have been dreaming, and our perturbations sink to rest in the sweet assurance that they were but the phantoms and unrealities of a busy sleep. ”

“ The convention was understood, and the illusion was no more impaired by the continued presence of the same chorus in the orchestra, than it is in a modern theatre by our consciousness that the same actors are waiting behind the scenes; and certainly men's minds were not jarred by a sense of discord, and brought down from heaven to earth, as with us, when the descent of the curtain on a scene which has thrilled the house with high-wrought emotion is followed by a babble of gossip and by the shrill importunities of waiters. ”

“ An overflow performance is being given in the theatre to-day for the benefit of those people who could not gain admittance yesterday, and, through the open windows, we can hear the rhythmic chant of the chorus. ”

“ For in their eyes there shone only that place of adventure which delights the feet of the faithful, whether they tread the sands, or the stage, or the rough cobbles of Drury Lane. To the truly imaginative a theatre is a place of uncommon possibilities; our actors and actresses, and even our limelight-men, are not imaginative, and so, I suppose, they find it ugly. ”

“ Great veneration is paid to all that concerns this ceremony of the Holy Ghost: the very mules, it is said, were formerly looked upon as sacred. In passing coffee-houses, billiard-players, and gamblers of all descriptions, leave their profane games, to kneel. At the theatre, the performance is stopped; actors and actresses kneel on the stage, and the audience upon their seats. ”

“ Sitting on the edge of the rock, you can imagine the actors strutting out into the theatre below, and the acquiescent chorus chanting its surprise or horror, and almost see the bent shoulders and heads of the people filling the half-circle and leaning forward to catch each word of the play as it comes to them through the actors' masks. ”

“ Our theatre merely offers the convenient locale for the tempting exhibition of the heterogeneous wares of art manufacture. How incapable is our stage to gather up each branch of art in its highest and most perfect expression—the drama—it shows at once in its division into the two opposing classes, play and opera; whereby the idealizing influence of music is forbidden to the play, and the opera is forestalled of the living heart and lofty purpose of actual drama. ”

“ Nor be it said that the theatre has been now irrevocably turned, in this country, to frivolous or contemptible representations, or that dancing and singing have for ever banished the tragic muse from the stage. Facts—well known and universally acknowledged facts, prove the reverse. How strong soever the desire for excitement or physical enjoyment may be, the passion for heart-stirring incident, the besoin of strong emotions, the thirst for tragic event, is still stronger. ”

“ It is long since I have had such a delightful evening in the theatre, for I took part in the performance like one of the spectators, and laughed, and applauded, and shouted “bravo!” yet conducting with spirit all the time; the choruses in the second act sounded as exact as if fired from a pistol. The stage was crowded between the acts, every one pleased, and congratulating the singers. ”

“ They were followed by Interludes which were much the same as Moralities but were shorter, and as their name shows were meant to come in the middle of something else, for the word comes from two Latin words, "inter" between and "ludus" a play. An Interlude may have been first used, perhaps, as a kind of break in a long feast.
The Miracle plays had only been acted once a year, first by the monks and later by the trade guilds. But the taste for plays grew, and soon bands of players strolled about the country acting in towns and villages. These strolling players often made a good deal of money. ”

“ During the first period it aimed at poetic power, during the second at brilliancy of dialogue, and during the third at naturalness of representment. Throughout the last three centuries, the gradual perfecting of the physical conditions of the theatre has made possible the Drama of Illusion; the conventions of the actor's art have undergone a similar progression; and at the same time the change in the taste of the theatre-going public has made a well-sustained illusion a condition precedent to success upon the modern stage. ”

“ Mr. E. K. Chambers, in his magnificent and scholarly work, The Mediæval Stage, would apply the meaning of the word Interlude to any kind of play, religious or otherwise, but instead of deriving the word from a “ludus” during the interval of something else, he would give it the meaning of a play carried on between (inter) two or more performers; in fact, a ludus in dialogue.
Ludus is the Latin for a play.
COMEDIAN.
Are you a comedian. ”

“ Most esteemed Herr Intendant, with full knowledge of the matter at stake, you have undertaken by its performance at your theatre to give life to a dramatic work the essence of which is that it is in all its parts a continuous whole, and not something incongruous, made up of many different parts. The author of this work does not wish to shine by the effect of single musical pieces; music to him is altogether no more than the most exalted and most comprehensive mode of expression of what he desired to express—the drama. ”

“ Where the overladen stereotyped first production paradoxically fades out of the picture for the spectator and leaves the path of illusion clear for him, the superlatively simple second production, almost wholly bereft of familiar externals, arrests and fixes his attention and makes illusion impossible. It is true, of course, that all this may be changed in time, when the deletion of externals by the new stagecraft shall have become a convention of the theatre as the heavy laying-on of externals is a convention at present. ”

“ But what principally caught my attention was—an itinerant theatre; where a tragedy, pantomime, and farce were all acted in the course of half an hour, and more of the dramatis personae murdered, than at either Drury Lane or Covent Garden in a whole evening. I have since seen many a play performed by the best actors in the world, but never have I derived half the delight from any that I did from this first representation. ”

“ Henceforth the Miracle play was doomed, and hereafter budded forth a new drama, the full blossom thereof culminating in the immortal works of William Shakespeare.
The construction of the open-air stage, where the Miracle plays were exhibited, totally differed from any kind of stage adopted by Europeans for the last three hundred years. The inn-yard performance presents a greater likeness to our present theatre than the primitive shows represented before our ancestors of the Middle Ages compared with the inn-yard performances. ”

“ I may be allowed to subjoin a few subsidiary reflections:—The greater part of modern theatre music suffers from the mistake of seeking to repeat the scenes passing on the stage, instead of fulfilling its own proper mission of interpreting the soul-states of the persons represented. ”

“ It may be further noted (i) the elaborate disguisings of Henry VII and Henry VIII, with much action and speechifying besides the dancing, are difficult to distinguish when merely described from interludes. What Hall, 518, calls in 1511 an interlude, seems from the Revels Accounts (Brewer, ii. 1495) to have been really a disguising. Hall, 641, speaks of a ‘disguisyng or play’ in 1522, and Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, i. 136, of a ‘disguising or interlude’ in 1527; (ii) a disguising or dance might be introduced, as entr’acte or otherwise, into an interlude. ”