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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




"Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public custom breeds--
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand."--

Or that other confession:--

"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to thy view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear--"

Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our
sweet Shakspeare, and dream of any congeniality between him and one
that, by every tradition of him, appears to have been as mere a
player as ever existed; to have had his mind tainted with the lowest
players' vices,--envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings after
applause; one who in the exercise of his profession was jealous even
of the women-performers that stood in his way; a manager full of
managerial tricks and stratagems and finesse; that any resemblance
should be dreamed of between him and Shakspeare,--Shakspeare, who, in
the plenitude and consciousness of his own powers, could with that
noble modesty, which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, express
himself thus of his own sense of his own defects:--

"Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possest;
Desiring _this man's art, and that man's scope_."

I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer
of Shakspeare? A true lover of his excellences he certainly was not;
for would any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless
scenes such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber, and the rest of them,
that

"With their darkness durst affront his light,"

have foisted into the acting plays of Shakspeare? I believe it
impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shakspeare,
and have condescended to go through that interpolated scene in
Richard the Third, in which Richard tries to break his wife's heart
by telling her he loves another woman, and says, "if she survives
this she is immortal." Yet I doubt not he delivered this vulgar stuff
with as much anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine parts: and for
acting, it is as well calculated as any. But we have seen the part of
Richard lately produce great fame to an actor by his manner of
playing it; and it lets us into the secret of acting, and of popular
judgments of Shakspeare derived from acting. Not one of the
spectators who have witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions in that part, but
has come away with a proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked
man, and kills little children in their beds, with something like the
pleasure which the giants and ogres in children's books are
represented to have taken in that practice; moreover, that he is very
close and shrewd, and devilish cunning, for you could see that by his
eye.

But is, in fact, this the impression we have in reading the Richard
of Shakspeare? Do we feel anything like disgust, as we do at that
butcherlike representation of him that passes for him on the stage? A
horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is
it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he
displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast
knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part,--not
an atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting
it. Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are
prominent and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the
lofty genius, the man of vast capacity,--the profound, the witty,
accomplished Richard?

The truth is, the characters of Shakspeare are so much the objects of
meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions,
that while we are reading any of his great criminal
characters,--Macbeth, Richard, even Iago,--we think not so much of
the crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring
spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them to overleap
these moral fences. Barnwell is a wretched murderer; there is a
certain fitness between his neck and the rope; he is the legitimate
heir to the gallows; nobody who thinks at all can think of any
alleviating circumstances in his case to make him a fit object of
mercy. Or to take an instance from the higher tragedy, what else but
a mere assassin is Glenalvon? Do we think of anything but of the
crime which he commits, and the rack which he deserves? That is all
which we really think about him. Whereas in corresponding characters
in Shakspeare, so little do the actions comparatively affect us, that
while the impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted greatness,
solely seems real and is exclusively attended to, the crime is
comparatively nothing. But when we see these things represented, the
acts which they do are comparatively everything, their impulses
nothing. The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by
those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that
solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall
strike which is to call him to murder Duncan,--when we no longer read
it in a book, when we have given up that vantage ground of
abstraction which reading possesses over seeing, and come to see a
man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit
a murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as I have witnessed
it in Mr. K.'s performance of that part, the painful anxiety about
the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems
unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality, give a
pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy all the delight which
the words in the book convey, where the deed doing never presses upon
us with the painful sense of presence; it rather seems to belong to
history,--to something past and inevitable, if it has anything to do
with time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which
is present to our minds in the reading.

So to see Lear acted,--to see an old man tottering about the stage
with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy
night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want
to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling
which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of
Shakspeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they
mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to
represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to
represent Lear; they might more easily propose to personate the Satan
of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures.
The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in
intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a
volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that
sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid
bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be
thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see
nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage;
while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,--we are in his
mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of
daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a
mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary
purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it
listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What
have looks, or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his
age with that of the _heavens themselves_, when, in his reproaches to
them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them
that "they themselves are old?" What gesture shall we appropriate to
this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the
play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show; it is too
hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is
not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover
too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for
Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the
mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending!--as if the living
martyrdom that Lear had gone through,--the flaying of his feelings
alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only
decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he
could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and
preparation,--why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As
if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again
could tempt him to act over again his misused station,--as if, at his
years and with his experience, anything was left but to die.

Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how
many dramatic personages are there in Shakspeare, which though more
tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some
circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be
shown to our bodily eye! Othello, for instance. Nothing can be more
soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to
read of a young Venetian lady of the highest extraction, through the
force of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying
aside every consideration of kindred, and country, and color, and
wedding with a _coal-black Moor_--(for such he is represented, in the
imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those
days, compared with our own, or in compliance with popular notions,
though the Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less
unworthy of a white woman's fancy)--it is the perfect triumph of
virtue over accidents, of the imagination over the senses. She sees
Othello's color in his mind. But upon the stage, when the imagination
is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor
unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello
played, whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in
his color; whether he did not find something extremely revolting in
the courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and
whether the actual sight of the thing did not overweigh all that
beautiful compromise which we make in reading;--and the reason it
should do so is obvious, because there is just so much reality
presented to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with
not enough of belief in the internal motives,--all that which is
unseen,--to overpower and reconcile the first and obvious
prejudices.[1] What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action;
what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind,
and its movements; and this I think may sufficiently account for the
very different sort of delight with which the same play so often
affects us in the reading and the seeing.

[Footnote 1: The error of supposing that because Othello's color does
not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in the
seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam and Eve in a
picture shall affect us just as they do in the poem. But in the poem
we for a while have Paradisiacal senses given us, which vanish when
we see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture. The
painters themselves feel this, as is apparent by the awkward shifts
they have recourse to, to make them look not quite naked; by a sort
of prophetic anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So
in the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes: in the
seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.]

It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters
in Shakspeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet
something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination,
to admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering
a change and a diminution,--that still stronger the objection must
lie against representing another line of characters, which Shakspeare
has introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his
scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to
common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to
consist. When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the
Witches in Macbeth, though some of the ingredients of their hellish
composition savor of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other
than the most serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not
feel spellbound as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of
their presence? We might as well laugh under a consciousness of the
principle of Evil himself being truly and really present with us. But
attempt to bring these things on to a stage, and you turn them
instantly into so many old women, that men and children are to laugh
at. Contrary to the old saying, that "seeing is believing," the sight
actually destroys the faith; and the mirth in which we indulge at
their expense, when we see these creatures upon a stage, seems to be
a sort of indemnification which we make to ourselves for the terror
which they put us in when reading made them an object of
belief,--when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as children
to their nurses and their elders; and we laugh at our fears, as
children, who thought they saw something in the dark, triumph when
the bringing in of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears. For
this exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage is truly bringing
in a candle to expose their own delusiveness. It is the solitary
taper and the book that generates a faith in these terrors: a ghost
by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no spectators,--a
ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human dimensions made
out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and a well-dressed
audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehensions:
as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his
impenetrable armor over it, "Bully Dawson would have fought the devil
with such advantages."

Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile
mixture which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest: doubtless, without
some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have
sat out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the
sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the tempest of
Shakspeare at all a subject for stage-representation? It is one thing
to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we
are reading it; but to have a conjurer brought before us in his
conjuring gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself
and some hundred of favored spectators before the curtain are
supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the _hateful
incredible_, that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us
from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the
highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot
be represented, they cannot even be painted,--they can only be
believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which
the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary
effect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of
familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays
which appeal to the higher faculties positively destroys the illusion
which it is introduced to aid. A parlor or a drawing-room,--a library
opening into a garden--a garden with an alcove in it,--a street, or
the piazza of Covent Garden, does well enough in a scene; we are
content to give as much credit to it as it demands; or rather, we
think little about it,--it is little more than reading at the top of
a page, "Scene, a garden;" we do not imagine ourselves there, but we
readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. But to think by the
help of painted trees and caverns, which we know to be painted, to
transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely
cell;[1] or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an
interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those
supernatural noises of which the isle was full: the Orrery Lecturer
at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly
stationed out of sight behind his apparatus, to make us believe that
we do indeed hear the crystal spheres ring out that chime, which if
it were to enwrap our fancy long, Milton thinks,

"Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,
And speckled Vanity
Would sicken soon and die,
And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;
Yea, Hell itself would pass away,
And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day."

[Footnote 1: It will be said these things are done in pictures. But
pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a world of
itself; but in scene-painting there is the attempt to deceive; and
there is the discordancy never to be got over, between painted scenes
and real people.]

The garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more
impossible to be shown on a stage, than the Enchanted isle, with its
no less interesting and innocent first settlers.

The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses,
which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last
time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of
garment which he varied, the shiftings and reshiftings, like a Romish
priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity
of the public eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish
monarch was fairly a counterpart to that which our King wears when he
goes to the Parliament house, just so full and cumbersome, and set
out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented, I see
not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what robe are we
conscious of? Some dim images of royalty--a crown and sceptre may
float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it? Do
we see in our mind's eye what Webb or any other robe-maker could
pattern? This is the inevitable consequence of imitating everything,
to make all things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a
fine abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external
appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood,
while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is
employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character.
But in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, call
upon us to judge of their naturalness.

Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we
take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that
quiet delight which we find in the reading of it, to the different
feelings with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer,
reads a fine poem. The accursed critical habit--the being called upon
to judge and pronounce, must make it quite a different thing to the
former. In seeing these plays acted, we are affected just as judges.
When Hamlet compares the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second
husband, who wants to see the pictures? But in the acting, a
miniature must be lugged out; which we know not to be the picture,
but only to show how finely a miniature may be represented. This
showing of everything levels all things: it makes tricks, bows, and
curtseys, of importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than
by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene
in Macbeth: it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling tones or
impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter into the
imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene? Does
not the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can? Does it care
about the gracefulness of the doing it? But by acting, and judging of
acting, all these non-essentials are raised into an importance,
injurious to the main interest of the play.

I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakspeare. It
would be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry to his
comedies; and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the
rest, are equally incompatible with stage-representation. The length
to which this Essay has run will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently
distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without going any deeper
into the subject at present.


* * * * *


CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,
CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEAKE.

* * * * *

When I selected for publication, in 1808, "Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets" who lived about the time of Shakspeare, the kind of
extracts which I was anxious to give were not so much passages of wit
and humor, though the old plays are rich in such, as scenes of
passion, sometimes of the deepest quality, interesting situations,
serious descriptions, that which is more nearly allied to poetry than
to wit, and to tragic rather than to comic poetry. The plays which I
made choice of were, with few exceptions, such as treat of human life
and manners, rather than masques and Arcadian pastorals, with their
train of abstractions, unimpassioned deities, passionate
mortals--Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and Amaryllis. My leading
design was to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our
ancestors. To show in what manner they felt when they placed
themselves by the power of imagination in trying circumstances, in
the conflicts of duty and passion, or the strife of contending
duties; what sort of loves and enmities theirs were; how their griefs
were tempered, and their full-swoln joys abated: how much of
Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in
his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind. I was
also desirous to bring together some of the most admired scenes of
Fletcher and Massinger, in the estimation of the world the only
dramatic poets of that age entitled to be considered after
Shakspeare, and, by exhibiting them in the same volume with the more
impressive scenes of old Marlowe, Heywood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford,
and others, to show what we had slighted, while beyond all proportion
we had been crying up one or two favorite names. From the desultory
criticisms which accompanied that publication, I have selected a few
which I thought would best stand by themselves, as requiring least
immediate reference to the play or passage by which they were
suggested.

* * * * *

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.

_Lust's Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen_.--This tragedy is in King
Cambyses' vein; rape, and murder, and superlatives; "huffing braggart
puft lines," such as the play-writers anterior to Shakspeare are full
of, and Pistol but coldly imitates.

_Tamburlaine the Great, or the Scythian Shepherd_.--The lunes of
Tamburlaine are perfect midsummer madness. Nebuchadnezzar's are mere
modest pretensions compared with the thundering vaunts of this
Scythian Shepherd. He comes in drawn by conquered kings, and
reproaches these _pampered jades of Asia_ that they can _draw but
twenty miles a day_. Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I
never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of
mine Ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set
down in a play, which their ancestors took to be serious.

_Edward the Second_.--In a very different style from mighty
Tamburlaine is the Tragedy of Edward the Second. The reluctant pangs
of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints, which Shakspeare
scarcely improved in his Richard the Second; and the death-scene of
Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene ancient or
modern with which I am acquainted.

_The Rich Jew of Malta_.--Marlowe's Jew does not approach so near to
Shakspeare's, as his Edward the Second does to Richard the Second.
Barabas is a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to
please the rabble. He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries,
invents infernal machines. He is just such an exhibition as a century
or two earlier might have been played before the Londoners "by the
royal command," when a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews
had been previously resolved on in the cabinet. It is curious to see
a superstition wearing out. The idea of a Jew, which our pious
ancestors contemplated with so much horror, has nothing in it now
revolting. We have tamed the claws of the beast, and pared its nails,
and now we take it to our arms, fondle it, write plays to flatter it;
it is visited by princes, affects a taste, patronizes the arts, and
is the only liberal and gentlemanlike thing in Christendom.

_Doctor Faustus_.--The growing horrors of Faustus's last scene are
awfully marked by the hours and half hours as they expire, and bring
him nearer and nearer to the exactment of his dire compact. It is
indeed an agony and a fearful colluctation. Marlowe is said to have
been tainted with atheistical positions, to have denied God and the
Trinity. To such a genius the history of Faustus must have been
delectable food: to wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden to
go, to approach the dark gulf, near enough to look in, to be busied
in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit
that fell from the tree of knowledge.[1] Barabas the Jew, and Faustus
the conjurer, are offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to
dally with interdicted subjects. They both talk a language which a
believer would have been tender of putting into the mouth of a
character though but in fiction. But the holiest minds have sometimes
not thought it reprehensible to counterfeit impiety in the person of
another, to bring Vice upon the stage speaking her own dialect; and,
themselves being armed with an unction of self-confident impunity,
have not scrupled to handle and touch that familiarly which would be
death to others. Milton, in the person of Satan, has started
speculations hardier than any which the feeble armory of the atheist
ever furnished; and the precise, strait-laced Richardson has
strengthened Vice, from the mouth of Lovelace, with entangling
sophistries and abstruse pleas against her adversary Virtue, which
Sedley, Villiers, and Rochester wanted depth of libertinism enough to
have invented.