Lamb, Charles, 1775-1834
…. 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 childrens' 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 any thing like disgust, as we do at that butcher-like 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 those 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 any thing 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 every thing, 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 any thing 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 shew: 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, any thing 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 shewn 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 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 colour, 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 colour 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 colour; 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 over-weigh 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. [Note: The error of supposing that because Othello's colour 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 Paradisaical 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 aukward 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.] 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.
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 savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound 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 beings 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 armour 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 sate 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 conjuror brought before us in his conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him,
which none but himself and some hundred of favoured 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 parlour 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; [Note: 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.] 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 chrystal spheres ring out that chime,
which if it were to inwrap 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.
The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more impossible to be shewn 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 re-shiftings, 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 every thing, 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 shew how finely a miniature may be represented. This shewing of every thing, levels all things: it makes tricks, bows, and curtesies, of importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by any thing 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 enquiry to his comedies; and to shew 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.