Act I Scene I. A Platform Before the Castle
Francisco at his post. Enter to him Bernardo.
Ber. Who’s there?
Fran. Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.
Ber. Long live the king!
Fran. Bernardo?
Ber. He.
Fran. You come most carefully upon your hour.
Ber. ’Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.
Fran. For this relief much thanks; ’tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.
Ber. Have you had a quiet guard?
Fran. Not a mouse stirring.
Ber. Well, good-night.
If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.
Fran. I think I hear them. Stand, ho! Who’s there?
Enter Horatio and Marcellus.
Hor. Friends to this ground.
Mar. And liegemen to the Dane.
Fran. Give you good-night.
Mar. O! farewell, honest soldier:
Who hath relieved you?
Fran. Bernardo has my place.
Give you good-night. [Exit.
Mar. Holla! Bernardo!
Ber. Say,
What! is Horatio there?
Hor. A piece of him.
Ber. Welcome, Horatio; welcome, good Marcellus.
Notice how naturally and in what a businesslike way Bernardo, Francisco, Horatio and Marcellus are all introduced to the audience, and the care taken to stamp their identity upon the mind of the spectators. The natural easy way in which it is done springs from the good craftsmanship of Shakespeare, but the doing of it is the business of every playwright.
One would suppose that such a simple matter as that could not be overlooked, but if one turns to the plays of some modern dramatists and seeks to understand them without studying the stage directions and noticing carefully the name of the speaker, one is apt to get into confusion. The latest craze is to publish a programme with the “order of going in” like a cricket card and thus you can buy for sixpence information that the playwright is too slovenly and too ignorant of his business to provide for you. There were no programmes in Shakespeare’s time, but there were playwrights.
It may occur to those who have not studied the rules of the game that there is not the same necessity for careful workmanship in the matter of entrances in a play of to-day that there was three hundred years ago. The answer to that is that a play or a wheel of to-day is essentially the same as a play or a wheel was in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The duty of the playwright to make his entrances obvious to his audience is equally clear, and is equally understood by the man who knows his business.
Compare as a modern instance Sir Arthur Pinero’s opening of “Sweet Lavender.” The scene is a sitting-room at 3 Brain Court Temple. Left and right are two doors leading to the rooms of Richard Phenyl and Clement Hale. Ruth, the housekeeper, is discovered, and Bulger, the barber, enters the room and the play begins. Now note the workmanship.
Bul. I’ve give Mr. ’Ale a nice shave, Mrs. Rolt, clean and quick. Water’s ’ot enough for me jist to rub over Mr. Phenyl’s face if ’e’s visible.
Ruth. I’m afraid Mr. Phenyl isn’t well enough for you this morning, Mr. Bulger.
Bul. Not one of ’is mornings, hey?
(Ruth goes to the right-hand door and knocks sharply).
Ruth (calling). Mr. Phenyl! Mr. Phenyl! The barber.
You see, Sir Arthur Pinero, having been an actor and knowing his business, informs you in a few lines not only the names of Phenyl, Hale, their housekeeper, and barber, but where each of the two men sleep and something of their characters. In a word, Pinero, like Shakespeare, is a thoroughly experienced playwright.
No doubt the younger writers of to-day have been led into their contempt for the business they have undertaken by the success that has enriched Mr. Bernard Shaw. They should remember, however, that he is more of a preacher and society entertainer than a playwright, winning the game by his delightful personality or personalities. He is an earnest religious man, with a great hatred of the theatre, the stage, and entertainment, to use his own words, “the great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience.” But dour Nonconformist as he is, his dullest moments are interrupted by his deep insight into the really funny things of this world. Mr. Shaw could make a sound play if he cared enough about it to try to do so, and in “Arms and the Man” and “You Never Can Tell” he showed much knowledge of the business. He would never, I think, have attained the real grip of the matter that Shakespeare and Pinero have, and knowing this he prefers to exploit his really great qualities in other ways.
But anyone can see for himself in this one little matter of entrances how slovenly the modern writer can be. If you turn to Mr. Galsworthy’s “Joy,” the play is opened without any effort being made to tell you the names and identities of the people on the stage; so, too, I remember, in the first act of the “Silver Box,” Mr. and Mrs. Borthwick discourse amusingly about politics without disclosing who they are. No doubt these little mysteries are easily solved by the regular up-to-date theatregoer armed with a programme, but the absence of the information irritates some of the duller members of the audience, and the play suffers. Mr. Granville Barker, in “Waste,” opens his piece with a room containing five ladies and one gentleman. He does not disclose you an identity by name for twelve lines, and Mr. Walter Kent, one of the characters, is not introduced by name until some nine pages of very clever dialogue have been spoken.
No one supposes that Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Barker could not put these little matters right somehow, though they could not do it with the craftsmanship of Pinero or Shakespeare. Unfortunately they seem to have a very real contempt for the minor details of the playwright’s business, which prevents the full effect of their literary gifts being appreciable in a theatre. Mr. Galsworthy, it is very pleasant to notice, is growing out of these ways somewhat, and will probably, as his knowledge of the stage increases, come to respect its old world characteristics, and recognise that they are permanent, fixed, and unalterable. In his love of pantomime and the exhibition of real things on the stage, he has the true playwright’s instinct. His real police courts, real prisons, and real boardrooms are admirable, and he is on the verge of understanding the true gospel of the playwright according to Vincent Crummles, manager, who really knew all about it from the Shakespearean standpoint.
Of course, this little matter of opening a play and designing an entrance for a character is only one of many simple matters that a good workman or “wright” has to attend to, but it is a very important one, and sufficiently illustrative of the difference between good and bad craftsmanship. To extend the theme by citing further instances of elementary rules broken and followed would be to commence an essay on the construction of plays. But to anyone who wishes to pursue the matter, it is curiously entertaining to see how in all essential things the actor-playwright is invariably the better craftsman than the literary man who commences dramatist. Mr. McEvoy, one of our most interesting modern dramatists, who has still perhaps something of the craft to learn, writes in a spirit of noble optimism: “I, as a dramatist, who knows how to do things the right way, mainly because I never had to unlearn how to do them wrong,” in a few words, expresses the attitude of the dramatist of to-day towards the experience of centuries in the craft of playwriting. No one doubts that Mr. McEvoy and others may help a little in the evolution of the stage, but they lessen their chances of success by the belief so piously held nowadays that there is nothing to be learned from the playwrights that have gone before. It was reckoned a mad conceit that prompted Walt Whitman to sing:
“I conn’d old times
I sat studying at the feet of the great masters
Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me.”
The modern genius finds nothing to study in the old masters, and if they, poor fellows, were now eligible to return and study our world of genius, I fear they would lack even the courtesy of an invitation box.
It is a pity that it should be so, but for my part I think it is only a temporary matter, and that, like all other things connected with the stage, it will work itself out under the wholesome discipline of the Box Office. A man who will not learn some of the elementary rules of playwriting must ultimately become too expensive for the most patient patron. Nor should we blame the literary man who turns dramatist very severely because he has a contempt for the craft of the playwright. He was born for higher things. His journalist friends proclaim the value of his ideas, and the literary expression of them in his play, and it is only the carelessness of the players and the stupidity of the playgoers that hinder his success. It is all to the good for the stage that men of education and intellect should be players, and that good artists should be scene painters, but no one who is a player or a painter expects to succeed in his stage work without learning the rules of the game. Why should a literary man despise the craft of the playwright when he seeks to earn his wages as a craftsman?
There is nothing new in this distaste of a literary man for the baser duties of playwriting. Bulwer Lytton, who, whatever we may think of his literary qualities, had undeniable talent as a playwright, discovered when he wrote “The Duchess de la Vallière” the interesting fact that playwriting was a special craft and that “dramatic construction and theatrical effect” were mysteries to be mastered. “I felt,” he writes in his preface to the Lady of Lyons, “that it was in this that a writer accustomed to the narrative class of composition would have the most faults to learn and unlearn. Accordingly, it was to the development of the plot and the arrangement of the incidents I directed my chief attention, and I sought to throw whatever belongs to poetry less into the diction and the ‘felicity of words’ than into the construction of the story, the creation of the characters and the spirit of the pervading sentiment.”
Genius will shrug his shoulders at the name of Bulwer Lytton, but as a playwright two things are worth remembering about him—first, that in modern phrase he “got there,” and, second, that “he remains.” And if genius desires to write plays with a view to “getting there” and “remaining,” after the manner of Bulwer Lytton and other greater men who have stooped to the craft, let genius seriously consider whether, in his own interests as well as in the interests of the harmless necessary playgoer, it is not worth while to learn the rules of the game and commence playwright.