changing times, and with epoch-making of "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," caused innovations now and then-has been a revolution which wrested the dominance passed down in the theater through generation after generation of actors; but though much of it has crept into such important books of comment as Colley Cibber's "Apology" and Dr. Doran's "Annals of the Stage," it has never been recorded systematically for the benefit of students in the library. No one would of the theater from the actor to the dramatist and diverted the attention of the public from histrionic achievements. in the heroic parts of Shakespeare to restrained and realistic transcripts of contemporary life. THE YOUNGER GENERATION HEN Irving died in England and think of trying to study the plays of SirMansfield in America, they were James Barrie or of Mr. Bernard Shaw in an edition from which all the stagedirections had been deleted and in which nothing was printed but the spoken lines; yet that is still the state in which we find the texts of Shakespeare. It is true, of course, that his prowess as a poet may be appreciated from the printed page; but his practice as a dramatist can be studied only in the theater. Fortunately for the present generation and for those to follow, the actors who kept Shakespeare continuously alive in the theater from Betterton's day to Irving's were always interested in pitting their own talents against those of their immediate predecessors and were consequently required to study carefully the work of the elder actors whom they were ambitious to supplant. Thus the torch of Shakespeare was passed from Betterton to Wilks and Booth, from them to Macklin and Garrick, from them to Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, and from them to Kean. From Kean it was received by Macready and Junius Brutus Booth, who passed it on, in England, through Phelps to Irving and in the United States to Edwin Booth. So long as this royal line remained unbroken, there was no danger that the acting business of Shakespeare would be lost. supplanted in the theater not by other actors but by a generation of new and very able authors-Pinero and Jones and Shaw and Barrie, and Clyde Fitch and Augustus Thomas. The compositions of these contemporary dramatists required a totally different kind of acting than had been demanded by the Shakespearean productions of the nineteenth century. New pieces were cast according to type, and the performers were taught to move and speak in such a way as to persuade, if possible, the public that they were not acting at all. During the last thirty years, we have developed an entirely new school of acting which is admirable in itself and precisely suited to the requirements of our contemporary drama; but throughout the same period we have allowed Shakespeare to languish. His plays cannot be acted in the same manner as those of our contemporary realistic writers; and, while it is eminently desirable that new methods of performance should be applied to new modes of authorship, we owe it to ourselves and to posterity to cherish the two or three hundred actors still living in the English-speaking world who have learned from their predecessors the acting business of Shakespeare's plays and are competent to pass this knowledge on to their successors. The altered attitude toward this important matter which occurred at the outset of the twentieth century may be illustrated from my own experience of theater-going. I am at present fortythree years old; and, because I began to attend the theater seriously at the age of eight, my experience dates back to the 292 A Public Avid for Contemporary Drama end of the eighteen-eighties. Throughout my childhood and my teens, the plays of Shakespeare were still so prevalent in the theater that I have seen no less than twenty-nine of them; whereas I find that students who are only ten years younger than myself have had no opportunity to see more than eight or ten. The only pieces in the Shakespearean canon that I have never seen are "Troilus and Cressida," "All's Well That End's Well," "Pericles," the three parts of "King Henry the Sixth," "Titus Andronicus," and "Timon of Athens." T SEVERAL ACTORS HERE was a feeling in my childhood that Hamlet died with Edwin Booth; and, later on, I came to feel that Richard the Third had died with Richard Mansfield and that Shylock had died with Henry Irving. The long line of eminent Shakespearean actors appeared to reach its termination when Sir Johnston ForbesRobertson withdrew from the stage and when Mr. E. H. Sothern and Miss Julia Marlowe announced their joint retirement and sold their scenery and properties. The subsequent reappearance of Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe has not been entirely felicitous, for both of them have latterly become somewhat mechanical in an insistent repetition of their foregone mannerisms; but we should always remember gratefully the fact that Miss Marlowe, in her early youth, gave us the most glowing Juliet that has been shown upon our stage since Adelaide Neilson's and that Mr. Sothern's Hamlet, in the first season when he played the part, was second only to Forbes-Robertson's in the long hiatus between Edwin Booth's and Walter Hampden's. An actor of considerable talent, Mr. Robert B. Mantell, continued for many years to hold aloft the flickering torch, until he was impeded by the natural infirmities incident to advancing age. At his best, Mr. Mantell was the most effective King John that I have ever seen; and his King Lear was by no means unworthy of respectful consideration. Just as the Shakespearean tradition. appeared to be dying out, a new and greatly gifted actor appeared, in 1918, to revivify it. He caught up the torch that was about to fall from faltering hands. The modest matinée performances at which Mr. Walter Hampden first presented himself to the public of New York in the part of Hamlet-after ten years of unsuccessful effort to persuade any of the mercantile managers to set him forth in a Shakespearean production—are now seen, in retrospect, to have marked a very important moment in the history of the English-speaking stage. With no backing but that of his own idealistic audacity, Mr. Hampden, at odd hours, played the part of Hamlet to enthusiastic audiences more than one hundred and twenty times during the course of his initial season and amassed sufficient capital to extend his repertory by undertaking half a dozen of the other major parts of Shakespeare. By this experiment, Mr. Hampden proved that the mercantile managers had been wrong in the assumption that our public, avid in its eagerness for contemporary drama, had lost all interest in Shakespeare; and his successful example encouraged several other able actors to enter the Shakespearean field. From the 'experience of the last two or three seasons, it now appears that we are no longer threatened with an enduring dearth of Shakespearean drama; and the initiation of this new and active interest in Shakespeare is mainly due to the leadership of Mr. Hampden. IT HAMPDEN IN ENGLAND T IS not unfair to any of his contemporaries to state that Walter Hampden is the standard Shakespearean actor of the present generation. He arrived at his results through long years of studious and careful preparation; and, though he is still in his early forties, his experience dates back to that of his great predecessors. He began his professional career in England, in 1901, as an apprentice in the company of F. R. Benson. Sir Frank Benson was never a great actor, and I have seen him give many bad performances; but he was a first rate stage-director and he was thoroughly familiar with the traditions of the Shakespearean drama. For years and years his touring company was the best training-school for actors in the Englishspeaking theater. While touring the English provinces with Benson, Walter Hampden, in the preparatory period of his early twenties, played more than seventy different parts in Shakespeare and became thoroughly familiar with the traditional business of all of the important Shakespearean plays. Thus, in 1905, when he received his first opportunity to play the part of Hamlet, at the Adelphi Theater in London, he had previously acted no less than seven of the subsidiary parts in the same play and was already familiar with most of the scenes from several different points of view. It was the lack of such experience that led to the lamentable failures of Miss Marjorie Rambeau in the part of Rosalind and Miss Ethel Barrymore in the part of Juliet. These two artists, without question, must be rated among the ablest actresses on the American stage to-day; but neither of them had had any previous years before, his performance had been far from satisfactory; but, in the interim, he had studied the rôle again, under the careful tutelage of the late Louis Calvert, who knew more about Shakespearean acting than almost any other stagedirector of recent times. Last season, Mr. Hackett read the lines of Macbeth intelligently and impressively and gave a creditable rendition of the customary business of the part. In Mr. David Belasco's production of "The Merchant of Venice," the continuity of the Elizabethan narrative was destroyed by his alteration of the order of the episodes for the purpose of setting up the ponderous pictorial scenery with which, in the foregone Victorian manner, he chose to invest his production; but the most disappointing feature of the undertaking was the somewhat surprising inability of Mr. David Warfield to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the part of Shylock. In this instance, again, a commendable ambition was defeated by a lack of necessary training. JULIET IS NOT CLEOPATRA! CARCELY less surprising than the training in the rendition of Shakespearean SCARCEL rôles, and each of them was rehearsed by a director who knew almost nothing about the traffic of the Shakespearean stage. Mr. Robert Milton, who staged "As You Like it," is one of our very ablest directors of modern plays; but he is a Russian, with no ear for Elizabethan verse or prose, and with no sense of the spirit and the tempo of Shakespearean comedy. The static methods of Mr. Arthur Hopkins as a stage-director, though admirably suited to a certain type of modern play, are, also, utterly unsuited to the projection of the headlong hurry of Elizabethan tragedy. MACBETH, SEVERAL YEARS AGO AND NOW almost complete artistic failure of Mr. Warfield's Shylock was the almost complete artistic success of Miss Jane Cowl's Juliet. Here was a really fine performance and an excellent production; and the public, though little skilled in criticism, was quick to recognize the presence of extraordinary merit. In appearance, in temperament, and in spirit, Miss Cowl was admirably suited to the part; and the entire company, under the skilful direction of Mr. Frank Reicher, played with a contagious zest which awakened from the public a contributive enthusiasm. But when Miss Cowl subsequently attempted Shakespeare's Cleopatra, her lack of experience in classic The advantages of prolonged and HE advantages of prolonged and rôles was not so successfully disguised. season when Mr. James K. Hackett, after a long absence from our stage, reappeared in the rôle of Macbeth. When he had first attempted this same part, several Mr. John Barrymore is in the peculiar position of an actor who has never played any part in any play of Shakespeare's with the exception of the two great parts of Richard the Third and Hamlet. In 294 Throwing Tradition to the Dogs stead of beginning at the bottom, like all of the great Shakespearean actors since Betterton, and working his way up from minor rôles to major, Mr. Barrymore began at the top. He was not, by any means, unmindful of his lack of preparatory training; and he devoted many months of arduous study to each of these two parts. On each occasion, he placed himself under the tutelage of an able elocution teacher; and by assiduous application he improved his voiceproduction, his diction, and his ear for rhythm. voice He is still hampered by an inability to read verse rapidly; and he plays both parts in a monotonous slow tempo that becomes ineffective when the drama is intense. Also, he is not yet able to read and act at the same time: he crosses the stage in silence and comes to a stop before he speaks his next speech. It would be easier to judge his latent abilities and to estimate his promise if he were not impeded by the perversity of Mr. Arthur Hopkins in ignoring or deliberately deleting the essential business of most of the important scenes and in ordering the other actors to stand still and to refrain from any gestures while Mr. Barrymore is on the stage. Mr. Hopkins's production of "Hamlet" is not "Hamlet" with the prince left out, but "Hamlet" with everybody else left out and with most of the prince's business erased. BARRYMORE'S POPULARITY HE enormous popularity of Mr. Barrymore, Hamlet arises mainly from his beautiful appearance in the trappings and the suits of woe, the illusion of youthfulness that is created by his short stature and slight physique, and by the irresistible charm of his personality. His Hamlet is not a great performance, and is not comparable with those of Mr. Walter Hampden, Sir Johnston ForbesRobertson, or Mr. E. H. Sothern at his best; but it is electrified at several moments by sudden flashes of something akin to genius. One of these moments occurs at the outset of "Angels and ministers of grace," when his face takes on the look of one who sees beyond the veil and his voice flutters aloft to an angel-toned falsetto; another is his passionately tender moment with Ophelia at "Get thee to a nunnery"; and another comes at "Then, venom, to thy work," when he takes a sudden leopard-like athletic leap through the air as he plunges his sword at the King. But other passages are deeply disappointingas when, for instance, Mr. Barrymore, for the first time in the history of the stage takes "Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I" at a slow tempo, and when he misconceives and entirely misplays the closet scene with the Queen. That the public, however, should permit Mr. Hopkins, without protest, to turn the ghost into an electric light; to stage "Unhand me, gentlemen," on a small platform at the top of a steep flight of stairs, where it is utterly impossible to act the business of the scene; to direct the ranting at Ophelia's burial without having Hamlet leap into the grave; to order the King to forget all the business that belongs traditionally to his part; and so forth and so on, affords an indication of han found an the fact that the younger generation is strangely ignorant of "The Tragedy of Hamlet" and eager to welcome any opportunity to see it produced, however inadequately, on the stage. The Senators, the Washington baseball team, for the first time in their long career, covered themselves with glory not only by winning the championship of the American League, but also by defeating the New York Giants, champions of the National League, and earned for themselves the title of World's Champions. |