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The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 written by Charles Lamb

C >> Charles Lamb >> The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4




[Footnote 1: The mathematical pupils, bred up to the sea, on the
foundation of Charles the Second.]

The time would fail me if I were to attempt to enumerate all those
circumstances, some pleasant, some attended with some pain, which,
seen through the mist of distance, come sweetly softened to the
memory. But I must crave leave to remember our transcending
superiority in those invigorating sports, leap-frog, and basting the
bear; our delightful excursions in the summer holidays to the New
River, near Newington, where, like otters, we would live the long day
in the water, never caring for dressing ourselves, when we had once
stripped; our savory meals afterwards, when we came home almost
famished with staying out all day without our dinners; our visits at
other times to the Tower, where, by ancient privilege, we had free
access to all the curiosities; our solemn procession through the City
at Easter, with the Lord Mayor's largess of buns, wine, and a
shilling, with the festive questions and civic pleasantries of the
dispensing Aldermen, which were more to us than all the rest of the
banquet; our stately suppings in public, where the well-lighted hall
and the confluence of well-dressed company who came to see us, made
the whole look more like a concert or assembly, than a scene of a
plain bread and cheese collation; the annual orations upon St.
Matthew's day, in which the senior scholar, before he had done,
seldom failed to reckon up, among those who had done honor to our
school by being educated in it, the names of those accomplished
critics and Greek scholars, Joshua Barnes and Jeremiah Markland (I
marvel they left out Camden while they were about it). Let me have
leave to remember our hymns and anthems, and well-toned organ; the
doleful tune of the burial anthem chanted in the solemn cloisters,
upon the seldom-occurring funeral of some school-fellow; the
festivities at Christmas, when the richest of us would club our stock
to have a gaudy day, sitting round the fire, replenished to the
height with logs, and the penniless, and he that could contribute
nothing, partook in all the mirth, and in some of the
substantialities of the feasting; the carol sung by night at that
time of the year, which, when a young boy, I have so often lain awake
to hear from seven (the hour of going to bed) till ten, when it was
sung by the older boys and monitors, and have listened to it, in
their rude chanting, till I have been transported in fancy to the
fields of Bethlehem, and the song which was sung at that season, by
angels' voices to the shepherds.

Nor would I willingly forget any of those things which administered
to our vanity. The hem-stitched bands and town-made shirts, which
some of the most fashionable among us wore; the town-girdles, with
buckles of silver, or shining stone; the badges of the sea-boys; the
cots, or superior shoestrings, of the monitors; the medals of the
markers; (those who were appointed to hear the Bible read in the
wards on Sunday morning and evening,) which bore on their obverse in
silver, as certain parts of our garments carried, in meaner metal,
the countenance of our Founder, that godly and royal child, King
Edward the Sixth, the flower of the Tudor name--the young flower that
was untimely cropt, as it began to fill our land with its early
odors--the boy-patron of boys--the serious and holy child who walked
with Cranmer and Bidley--fit associate, in those tender years, for
the bishops, and future martyrs of our Church, to receive, or, (as
occasion sometimes proved,) to give instruction.

"But, ah! what means the silent tear?
Why, e'en 'mid joy, my bosom heave?
Ye long-lost scenes, enchantments dear!
Lo! now I linger o'er your grave.

"--Fly, then, ye hours of rosy hue,
And bear away the bloom of years!
And quick succeed, ye sickly crew
Of doubts and sorrows, pains and fears!

"Still will I ponder Fate's unaltered plan,
Nor, tracing back the child, forget that I am man."[1]

[Footnote 1: Lines meditated in the cloisters of Christ's Hospital,
in the "Poetics," of Mr. George Dyer.]


* * * * *


ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPEARE.

CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR STAGE-REPRESENTATION.

Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the
affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen
before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the
celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good
Catholics abroad as to shut players altogether out of consecrated
ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction
of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us
of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this
harlequin figure the following lines:--

"To paint fair Nature, by divine command
Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
A Shakspeare rose; then, to expand his fame
Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,
The Actor's genius bade them breathe anew;
Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
Immortal Garrick called them back to day:
And till Eternity with power sublime
Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,
Shakspeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,
And earth irradiate with a beam divine."

It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to attempt
anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and
nonsense. But the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder,
how, from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should
have been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that
has had the luck to please the Town in any of the great characters of
Shakspeare, with the notion of possessing a _mind congenial with the
poet's_; how people should come thus unaccountably to confound the
power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty
of being able to read or recite the same when put into words;[1]or
what connection that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man,
which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon
the eye and ear, which a player, by observing a few general effects,
which some common passion, as grief, anger, &c., usually has upon the
gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know the internal
workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for
instance, the _when_ and the _why_ and the _how far_ they should be
moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to
pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the
slackening is most graceful; seems to demand a reach of intellect of
a vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare
imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or
gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively and
emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all
but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief,
generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it
differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the
actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye
(without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible
sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which
we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow
apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are
apt not only to sink the playwriter in the consideration which we pay
to the actor, but even to identify in our minds, in a perverse
manner, the actor with the character which he represents. It is
difficult for a frequent play-goer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet
from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while
we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion
incidental alone to unlettered persons, who, not possessing the
advantage of reading, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player
for all the pleasure which they can receive from the drama, and to
whom the very idea of _what an author is_ cannot be made
comprehensible without some pain and perplexity of mind: the error is
one from which persons otherwise not meanly lettered, find it almost
impossible to extricate themselves.

[Footnote 1: It is observable that we fall into this confusion only
in dramatic recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who reads
Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a great poet
and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davis, the bookseller, who
is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any man in
England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be some
mistake in this tradition), was therefore, by his intimate friends,
set upon a level with Milton.]

Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of
satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the
first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed, in which those two
great performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to embody
and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape.
But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure,
this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our
cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and
brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We
have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.

How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions
thus cramped and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing
actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness,
with which we turn to those plays of Shakspeare which have escaped
being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the
same writer which have happily been left out in the performance. How
far the very custom of hearing anything _spouted_, withers and blows
upon a fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from Henry the
Fifth, &c., which are current in the mouths of school-boys, from
their being to be found in _Enfield's Speaker_, and such kind of
books! I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated
soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning "To be or not to be," or to tell
whether it be good, bad or indifferent, it has been so handled and
pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from
its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is
become to me a perfect dead member.

It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the
plays of Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage,
than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their
distinguishing excellence is a reason that they should be so. 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. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are
here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this
war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed
round such "intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the direct
object of the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in
Shakspeare above all, how obvious it is, that the form of _speaking_,
whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a
highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into
possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of
mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at
_in that form of composition_ by any gift short of intuition. We do
here as we do with novels written in the _epistolary form_. How many
improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with
in Clarissa and other books, for the sake of the delight which that
form upon the whole gives us!

But the practice of stage-representation reduces everything to a
controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous
blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must
play the orator. The love dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those
silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night! the more intimate
and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a
Posthumus with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so
delightful in the reading, as when we read of those youthful
dalliances in Paradise--

"As beseem'd
Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league,
Alone;"

by the inherent fault of stage-representation, how are these things
sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large
assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come
drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though
nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed
at the spectators, who are to judge of her endearments and her
returns of love!

The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of
Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest
ambition to distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one
of their reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a play,
and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation.
The play itself abounds in maxims and reflections beyond any other,
and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral
instruction. But Hamlet himself--what does he suffer meanwhile by
being dragged forth as the public schoolmaster, to give lectures to
the crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are
transactions between himself and his moral sense; they are the
effusions of his solitary musings, which he retires to holes and
corners and the most sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth;
or rather, they are the silent meditations with which his bosom is
bursting, reduced to _words_ for the sake of the reader, who must
else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These profound
sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations, which the
tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be
represented by a gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths them out
before an audience, making four hundred people his confidants at
once! I say not that it is the fault of the actor so to do; he must
pronounce them _ore rotundo_; he must accompany them with his eye; he
must insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of eye, tone or
gesture, or he fails. _He must be thinking all the while of his
appearance, because he knows that all the while the spectators are
judging of it_. And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent,
retiring Hamlet!

It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity
of thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who
otherwise would never earn it for themselves by reading, and the
intellectual acquisition gained this way may, for aught I know, be
inestimable; but I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted,
but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted. I have
heard much of the wonders which Garrick performed in this part; but
as I never saw him, I must have leave to doubt whether the
representation of such a character came within the province of his
art. Those who tell me of him, speak of his eye, of the magic of his
eye, and of his commanding voice: physical properties, vastly
desirable in an actor, and without which he can never insinuate
meaning into an auditory,--but what have they to do with Hamlet; what
have they to do with intellect? In fact, the things aimed at in
theatrical representation, are to arrest the spectator's eye upon the
form and the gesture, and so to gain a more favorable hearing to what
is spoken: it is not what the character is, but how he looks; not
what he says, but how he speaks it. I see no reason to think that if
the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as
Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally
omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakspeare,
his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of
passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to
furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an
audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent
Shakspeare to us differently from his representation of Banks or
Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished prince, and must
be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled in his mind, wavering
in his conduct, seemingly cruel to Ophelia; he might see a ghost, and
start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be his father;
all this in the poorest and most homely language of the servilest
creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate of an audience;
without troubling Shakspeare for the matter: and I see not but there
would be room for all the power which an actor has, to display
itself. All the passions and changes of passion might remain: for
those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought; it is
a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling a note or
two in the voice, a whisper with a significant foreboding look to
announce its approach, and so contagious the counterfeit appearance
of any emotion is, that let the words be what they will, the look and
tone shall carry it off, and make it pass for deep skill in the
passions.

It is common for people to talk of Shakspeare's plays being _so
natural_; that everybody can understand him. They are natural indeed,
they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies
out of the reach of most of us. You shall hear the same persons say
that George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very natural,
that they are both very deep; and to them they are the same kind of
thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of
young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit a _trifling
peccadillo_, the murder of an uncle or so[1] that is all, and so
comes to an untimely end, which is _so moving_; and at the other,
because a blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white
wife; and the odds are that ninety-nine out of a hundred would
willingly behold the same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and
have thought the rope more due to Othello than to Barnwell. For of
the texture of Othello's mind, the inward construction marvellously
laid open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic
confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate springing
from the depths of love, they see no more than the spectators at a
cheaper rate, who pay their pennies apiece to look through the man's
telescope in Leicester-fields, see into the inward plot and
topography of the moon. Some dim thing or other they see; they see an
actor personating a passion, of grief, or anger, for instance, and
they recognize it as a copy of the usual external effects of such
passions; or at least as being true to _that symbol of the emotion
which passes current at the theatre for it_, for it is often no more
than that: but of the grounds of the passion, its correspondence to a
great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of
tragedy,--that common auditors know anything of this, or can have any
such notions dinned into them by the mere strength of an actor's
lungs,--that apprehensions foreign to them should be thus infused
into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how it can
be possible.

[Footnote 1: If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the
Managers, I would entreat and beg of them, in the name of both the
Galleries, that this insult upon the morality of the common people of
London should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks.
Why are the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead
of an amusement, to be treated over and over again with a nauseous
sermon of George Barnwell? Why _at the end of their vistas_ are we to
place the _gallows_? Were I an uncle, I should not much like a
nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his eyes. It is
really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done upon
such slight motives;--it is attributing too much to such characters
as Millwood:--it is putting things into the heads of good young men,
which they would never otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that think
anything of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain
against it.]

We talk of Shakspeare's admirable observations of life, when we
should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and
every-day characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but
from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the
very "sphere of humanity," he fetched those images of virtue and of
knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing a part, think we
comprehend in our natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the
powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more than
indigenous faculties of our own minds, which only waited the
application of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and
clear echo of the same.

To return to Hamlet.--Among the distinguishing features of that
wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is
that soreness of mind which makes him treat the intrusions of
Polonius with harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his
interviews with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be
not mixed in the latter case with a profound artifice of love, to
alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind
for the breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer
find a place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do)
are parts of his character, which to reconcile with our admiration of
Hamlet, the most patient consideration of his situation is no more
than necessary; they are what we _forgive afterwards_, and explain by
the whole of his character, but _at the time_ they are harsh and
unpleasant. Yet such is the actor's necessity of giving strong blows
to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character,
who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous
features,--these temporary deformities in the character. They make
him express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his
gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; they make
him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's
father,--contempt in its very grossest and most hateful form; but
they get applause by it: it is natural, people say; that is, the
words are scornful, and the actor expresses scorn, and that they can
judge of: but why so much scorn, and of that sort, they never think
of asking.

So to Ophelia.--All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave
at her as if she had committed some great crime, and the audience are
highly pleased, because the words of the part are satirical, and they
are enforced by the strongest expression of satirical indignation of
which the face and voice are capable. But then, whether Hamlet is
likely to have put on such brutal appearances to a lady whom he loved
so dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that in all such deep
affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there is a
stock of _supererogatory love_, (if I may venture to use the
expression,) which in any great grief of heart, especially where that
which preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers a kind of
indulgence upon the grieved party to express itself, even to its
heart's dearest object, in the language of a temporary alienation;
but it is not alienation, it is a distraction purely, and so it
always makes itself to be felt by that object: it is not anger, but
grief assuming the appearance of anger,--love awkwardly
counterfeiting hate, as sweet countenances when they try to frown:
but such sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to show, is
no counterfeit, but the real face of absolute aversion,--of
irreconcilable alienation. It may be said he puts on the madman; but
then he should only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy as his own
real distraction will give him leave; that is, incompletely,
imperfectly; not in that confirmed, practised way, like a master of
his art, or as Dame Quickly would say, "like one of those harlotry
players."

I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which
Shakspeare's plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to
differ from that which the audience receive from those of other
writers; and, _they being in themselves essentially so different from
all others_, I must conclude that there is something in the nature of
acting which levels all distinctions. And, in fact, who does not
speak indifferently of the Gamester and of Macbeth as fine
stage-performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as
the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. S.? Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella,
and Euphrasia, are they less liked than Imogen, or than Juliet, or
than Desdemona? Are they not spoken of and remembered in the same
way? Is not the female performer as great (as they call it) in one as
in the other? Did not Garrick shine, and was he not ambitious of
shining, in every drawling tragedy that his wretched day
produced,--the productions of the Hills, and the Murphys, and the
Browns,--and shall he have that honor to dwell in our minds forever
as an inseparable concomitant with Shakspeare? A kindred mind! O who
can read that affecting sonnet of Shakspeare which alludes to his
profession as a player:--