IV
Pepys and Shakespeare [14]
I
In his capacity of playgoer, as indeed in almost every other capacity, Pepys presents himself to readers of his naïve diary as the incarnation, or the microcosm, of the average man. No other writer has pictured with the same lifelike precision and simplicity the average playgoer's sensations of pleasure or pain. Of the play and its performers Pepys records exactly what he thinks or feels. He usually takes a more lively interest in the acting and in the scenic and musical accessories than in the drama's literary quality. Subtlety is at any rate absent from his criticism. He is either bored or amused. The piece is either the best or the worst that he ever witnessed. His epithets are of the bluntest and are without modulation. Wiser than more professional dramatic critics, he avoids labouring at reasons for his emphatic judgments.
Always true to his rôle of the average man, Pepys suffers his mind to be swayed by barely relevant accidents. His thought is rarely free from official or domestic business, and the heaviness or lightness of his personal cares commonly colours his playhouse impressions. His praises and his censures of a piece often reflect, too, the physical comforts or discomforts which attach to his seat in the theatre. He is peculiarly sensitive to petty annoyances—to the agony of sitting in a draught, or to the irritation caused by frivolous talk in his near neighbourhood while a serious play is in progress. On one occasion, when he sought to practise a praiseworthy economy by taking a back seat in the shilling gallery, his evening's enjoyment was well-nigh spoiled by finding the gaze of four clerks in his office steadily directed upon him from more expensive seats down below. On another occasion, when in the pit with his wife and her waiting-woman, he was overcome by a sense of shame as he realised how shabbily his companions were dressed, in comparison with the smartly-attired ladies round about them.
Everyone knows how susceptible Pepys was in all situations of life to female charms. It was inevitable that his wits should often wander from the dramatic theme and its scenic presentation to the features of some woman on the stage or in the auditory. An actress's pretty face or graceful figure many times diverted his attention from her professional incompetence. It is doubtful if there were any affront which Pepys would not pardon in a pretty woman. Once when he was in the pit, this curious experience befell him. "I sitting behind in a dark place," he writes, "a lady spit backward upon me by mistake, not seeing me; but after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all." The volatile diarist studied much besides the drama when he spent his afternoon or evening at the play.
Never was there a more indefatigable playgoer than Pepys. Yet his enthusiasm for the theatre was, to his mind, a failing which required most careful watching. He feared that the passion might do injury to his purse, might distract him from serious business, might lead him into temptation of the flesh. He had a little of the Puritan's dread of the playhouse. He was constantly taking vows to curb his love of plays, which "mightily troubled his mind." He was frequently resolving to abstain from the theatre for four or five months at a stretch, and then to go only in the company of his wife. During these periods of abstinence he was in the habit of reading over his vows every Sunday. But, in spite of all his well-meaning efforts, his resolution was constantly breaking down. On one occasion he perjured himself so thoroughly as to witness two plays in one day, once in the afternoon and again in the evening. On this riotous outbreak he makes the characteristic comment: "Sad to think of the spending so much money, and of venturing the breach of my vow." But he goes on to thank God that he had the grace to feel sorry for the misdeed, at the same time as he lamented that "his nature was so content to follow the pleasure still." Pepys compounded with his conscience for such breaches of his oath by all manner of casuistry. He excused himself for going, contrary to his vow, to the new theatre in Drury Lane, because it was not built when his vow was framed. Finally, he stipulated with himself that he would only go to the theatre once a fortnight; but if he went oftener he would give £10 to the poor. "This," he added, "I hope in God will bind me." The last reference that he makes to his vows is when, in contravention of them, he went with his wife to the Duke of York's House, and found the place full, and himself unable to obtain seats. He makes a final record of "the saving of his vow, to his great content."
II
All self-imposed restrictions notwithstanding, Pepys contrived to visit the theatre no less than three hundred and fifty-one times during the nine years and five months that he kept his diary. It has to be borne in mind that, for more than twelve months of that period, the London playhouses were for the most part closed, owing to the Great Plague and the Fire. Had Pepys gone at regular intervals, when the theatres were open, he would have been a playgoer at least once a week. But, owing to his vows, his visits fell at most irregular intervals. Sometimes he went three or four times a week, or even twice in one day. Then there would follow eight or nine weeks of abstinence. If a piece especially took his fancy, he would see it six or seven times in fairly quick succession. Long runs were unknown to the theatre of Pepys's day, but a successful piece was frequently revived. Occasionally, Pepys would put himself to the trouble of attending a first night. But this was an indulgence that he practised sparingly. He resented the manager's habit of doubling the price of the seats, and he was irritated by the frequent want of adequate rehearsal.
Pepys's theatrical experience began with the reopening of theatres after the severe penalty of suppression, which the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth imposed on them for nearly eighteen years. His playgoing diary thus became an invaluable record of a new birth of theatrical life in London. When, in the summer of 1660, General Monk occupied London for the restored King, Charles II., three of the old theatres were still standing empty. These were soon put into repair, and applied anew to theatrical uses, although only two of them seem to have been open at any one time. The three houses were the Red Bull, dating from Elizabeth's reign, in St John's Street, Clerkenwell, where Pepys saw Marlowe's Faustus; Salisbury Court, Whitefriars, off Fleet Street; and the Old Cockpit in Drury Lane, both of which were of more recent origin. To all these theatres Pepys paid early visits. But the Cockpit in Drury Lane, was the scene of some of his most stirring experiences. There he saw his first play, Beaumont and Fletcher's Loyal Subject; and there, too, he saw his first play by Shakespeare, Othello.
But these three theatres were in decay, and new and sumptuous buildings soon took their places. One of the new playhouses was in Portugal Row, Lincoln's Inn Fields; the other, on the site of the present Drury Lane Theatre, was the first of the many playhouses that sprang up there. It is to these two theatres—Lincoln's Inn Fields and Drury Lane—that Pepys in his diary most often refers. He calls each of them by many different names, and the unwary reader might infer that London was very richly supplied with playhouses in Pepys's day. But public theatres in active work at this period of our history were not permitted by the authorities to exceed two. "The Opera" and "the Duke's House" are merely Pepys's alternative designations of the Lincoln's Inn Field's Theatre; while "the Theatre," "Theatre Royal," and "the King's House," are the varying titles which he bestows on the Drury Lane Theatre.[15]
Besides these two public theatres there was, in the final constitution of the theatrical world in Pepys's London, a third, which stood on a different footing. A theatre was attached to the King's Court at Whitehall, and there performances were given at the King's command by actors from the two public houses.[16] The private Whitehall theatre was open to the public on payment, and Pepys was frequently there.
At one period of his life Pepys held that his vows did not apply to the Court theatre, which was mainly distinguished from the other houses by the circumstances that the performances were given at night. At Lincoln's Inn Fields or Drury Lane it was only permitted to perform in the afternoon. Half-past three was the usual hour for opening the proceedings. At Whitehall the play began about eight, and often lasted till near midnight.
The general organisation of Pepys's auditorium was much as it is to-day. It had improved in many particulars since Shakespeare died. The pit was the most popular part of the house; it covered the floor of the building, and was provided with seats; the price of admission was 2s. 6d. The company there seems to have been extremely mixed; men and women of fashion often rubbed elbows with City shopkeepers, their wives, and apprentices. The first gallery was wholly occupied by boxes, in which seats could be hired separately at 4s. apiece. Above the boxes was the middle gallery, the central part of which was filled with benches, where the seats cost 1s. 6d. each, while boxes lined the sides. The highest tier was the 1s. gallery, where footmen soon held sway. As Pepys's fortune improved, he spent more on his place in the theatre. From the 1s. gallery he descended to the 1s. 6d., and thence came down to the pit, occasionally ascending to the boxes on the first tier.
In the methods of representation, Pepys's period of playgoing was coeval with many most important innovations, which seriously affected the presentation of Shakespeare on the stage. The chief was the desirable substitution of women for boys in the female rôles. During the first few months of Pepys's theatrical experience, boys were still taking the women's parts. That the practice survived in the first days of Charles II.'s reign we know from the well-worn anecdote that when the King sent behind the scenes to inquire why the play of Hamlet, which he had come to see, was so late in commencing, he was answered that the Queen was not yet shaved. But in the opening month of 1661, within five months of Pepys's first visit to a theatre, the reign of the boys ended. On January 3rd of that year, Pepys writes that he "first saw women come upon the stage." Next night he makes entry of a boy's performance of a woman's part, and that is the final record of boys masquerading as women in the English theatre. I believe the practice now survives nowhere except in Japan. This mode of representation has always been a great puzzle to students of Elizabethan drama.[17] Before, however, Pepys saw Shakespeare's work on the stage, the usurpation of the boys was over.
It was after the Restoration, too, that scenery, rich costume, and scenic machinery became, to Pepys's delight, regular features of the theatre. When the diarist saw Hamlet "done with scenes" for the first time, he was most favourably impressed. Musical accompaniment was known to pre-Restoration days; but the orchestra was now for the first time placed on the floor of the house in front of the stage, instead of in a side gallery, or on the stage itself. The musical accompaniment of plays developed very rapidly, and the methods of opera were soon applied to many of Shakespeare's pieces, notably to The Tempest and Macbeth.
Yet at the side of these innovations, one very important feature of the old playhouses, which gravely concerned both actors and auditors, survived throughout Pepys's lifetime. The stage still projected far into the pit in front of the curtain. The actors and actresses spoke in the centre of the house, so that, as Colley Cibber put it, "the most distant ear had scarce the least doubt or difficulty in hearing what fell from the weakest utterance... nor was the minutest motion of a feature, properly changing with the passion or humour it suited, ever lost, as they frequently must be, in the obscurity of too great a distance." The platform-stage, with which Shakespeare was familiar, suffered no curtailment in the English theatres till the eighteenth century, when the fore-edge of the boards was for the first time made to run level with the proscenium.
III
One of the obvious results of the long suppression of the theatres during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth was the temporary extinction of play-writing in England. On the sudden reopening of the playhouses at the Restoration, the managers had mainly to rely for sustenance on the drama of a long-past age. Of the one hundred and forty-five separate plays which Pepys witnessed, fully half belonged to the great period of dramatic activity in England, which covered the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. John Evelyn's well-known remark in his Diary (November 26, 1661): "I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played; but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age," requires much qualification before it can be made to apply to Pepys's records of playgoing. It was in "the old plays" that he and all average playgoers mainly delighted.
Not that the new demand failed quickly to create a supply of new plays for the stage. Dryden and D'Avenant, the chief dramatists of Pepys's day, were rapid writers. To a large extent they carried on, with exaggeration of its defects and diminution of its merits, the old Elizabethan tradition of heroic romance, tragedy, and farce. The more matter-of-fact and lower-principled comedy of manners, which is commonly reckoned the chief characteristic of the new era in theatrical history, was only just beginning when Pepys was reaching the end of his diary. The virtual leaders of the new movement—Wycherley, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, and Congreve—were not at work till long after Pepys ceased to write. He records only the first runnings of that sparkling stream. He witnessed some impudent comedies of Dryden, Etherege, and Sedley. But it is important to note that he formed a low opinion of all of them. Their intellectual glitter did not appeal to him. Their cynical licentiousness seemed to him to be merely "silly." One might have anticipated from him a different verdict on the frank obscenity of Restoration drama. But there are the facts. Neither did Mr Pepys, nor (he is careful to remind us) did Mrs Pepys, take "any manner of pleasure in" the bold indelicacy of Dryden, Etherege, or Sedley.
When we ask what sort of pieces Pepys appreciated, we seem to be faced by further perplexities. His highest enthusiasm was evoked by certain plays of Ben Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Massinger. Near the zenith of his scale of dramatic excellence he set the comedies of Ben Jonson, which are remarkable for their portrayal of eccentricity of character. These pieces, which incline to farce, give great opportunity to what is commonly called character-acting, and character-acting always appeals most directly to average humanity. Pepys called Jonson's Alchemist "a most incomparable play," and he found in Every Man in his Humour "the greatest propriety of speech that ever I read in my life." Similarly, both the heroic tragedies and the comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, of which he saw no less than nineteen, roused in him, as a rule, an ecstatic admiration. But of all dramatic entertainments which the theatre offered him, Pepys was most "taken" by the romantic comedy from the pen of Massinger, which is called The Bondman. "There is nothing more taking in the world with me than that play," he writes.
Massinger's Bondman is a well-written piece, in which an heroic interest is fused with a genuine spirit of low comedy. Yet Pepys's unqualified commendation of it presents a problem. Massinger's play, like the cognate work of Fletcher, offers much episode which is hardly less indecent than those early specimens of Restoration comedy of which Pepys disapproved. A leading character is a frowsy wife who faces all manner of humiliation, in order to enjoy, behind her elderly husband's back, the embraces of a good-looking youth.
Pepys is scarcely less tolerant of Fletcher's more flagrant infringements of propriety. In the whole of the Elizabethan drama there was no piece which presented so liberal a mass of indelicacy as Fletcher's Custom of the Country. Dryden, who was innocent of prudery, declared that there was "more indecency" in that drama "than in all our plays together." This was one of the pieces which Pepys twice saw performed after carefully reading it in his study, and he expressed admiration for the rendering of the widow's part by his pretty friend, Mistress Knipp. One has to admit that Pepys condemned the play from a literary point of view as "a very poor one, methinks," as "fully the worst play that I saw or believe shall see." But the pleasure which Mistress Knipp's share in the performance gave him suggests, in the absence of any explicit disclaimer, that the improprieties of both plot and characters escaped his notice, or, at any rate, excited in him no disgust. Massinger's Bondman, Pepys's ideal of merit in drama, has little of the excessive grossness of the Custom of the Country. But to some extent it is tarred with the same brush.
Pepys's easy principles never lend themselves to very strict definition. Yet he may be credited with a certain measure of discernment in pardoning the indelicacy of Fletcher and Massinger, while he condemns that of Dryden, Etherege, or Sedley. Indelicacy in the older dramatists does not ignore worthier interests. Other topics attracted the earlier writers besides conjugal infidelity and the frailty of virgins, which were the sole themes of Restoration comedy. Massinger's heroes are not always gay seducers. His husbands are not always fools. Pepys might quite consistently scorn the ribaldry of Etherege and condone the obscenity of Fletcher. It was a question of degree. Pepys was clear in his own mind that a line must be drawn somewhere, though it would probably have taxed his logical power to make the delimitation precise.
IV
There is, apparently, a crowning difficulty of far greater moment when finally estimating Pepys's taste in dramatic literature. Despite his admiration for the ancient drama, he acknowledged a very tempered regard for the greatest of all the old dramatists—Shakespeare. He lived and died in complacent unconsciousness of Shakespeare's supreme excellence. Such innocence is attested by his conduct outside, as well as inside, the theatre. He prided himself on his taste as a reader and a book collector, and bought for his library many plays in quarto which he diligently perused. Numerous separately issued pieces by Shakespeare lay at his disposal in the bookshops. But he only records the purchase of one—the first part of Henry IV., though he mentions that he read in addition Othello and Hamlet. When his bookseller first offered him the great First Folio edition of Shakespeare's works, he rejected it for Fuller's Worthies and the newly-published Butler's Hudibras, in which, by the way, he failed to discover the wit. Ultimately he bought the newly-issued second impression of the Third Folio Shakespeare, along with copies of Spelman's Glossary and Scapula's Lexicon. To these soporific works of reference he apparently regarded the dramatist's volume as a fitting pendant. He seemed subsequently to have exchanged the Third Folio for a Fourth, by which volume alone is Shakespeare represented in the extant library that Pepys bequeathed to Magdalene College, Cambridge.
As a regular playgoer at a time when the stage mainly depended on the drama of Elizabethan days, Pepys was bound to witness numerous performances of Shakespeare's plays. On the occasion of forty-one of his three hundred and fifty-one visits to the theatre, Pepys listened to plays by Shakespeare, or to pieces based upon them. Once in every eight performances Shakespeare was presented to his view. Fourteen was the number of different plays by Shakespeare which Pepys saw during these forty-one visits. Very few caused him genuine pleasure. At least three he condemns, without any qualification, as "tedious," or "silly." In the case of others, while he ignored the literary merit, he enjoyed the scenery and music with which, in accordance with current fashion, the dramatic poetry was overlaid. In only two cases, in the case of two tragedies—Othello and Hamlet—does he show at any time a true appreciation of the dramatic quality, and in the case of Othello he came in course of years to abandon his good opinion.
Pepys's moderate praise and immoderate blame of Shakespeare are only superficially puzzling. The ultimate solution is not difficult. Despite his love of music and his zeal as a collector, Pepys was the most matter-of-fact of men; he was essentially a man of business. Not that he had any distaste for timely recreation; he was, indeed, readily susceptible to every manner of commonplace pleasures—to all the delights of both mind and sense which appeal to the practical and hard-headed type of Englishman. Things of the imagination, on the other hand, stood with him on a different footing. They were out of his range or sphere. Poetry and romance, unless liberally compounded with prosaic ingredients, bored him on the stage and elsewhere.
In the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Massinger and Ben Jonson, poetry and romance were for the most part kept in the background. Such elements lay there behind a substantial barrier of conventional stage machinery and elocutionary scaffolding. In Shakespeare, poetry and romance usually eluded the mechanical restrictions of the theatre. The gold had a tendency to separate itself from the alloy, and Pepys only found poetry and romance endurable when they were pretty thickly veiled behind the commonplaces of rhetoric or broad fun or the realistic ingenuity of the stage carpenter and upholsterer.
There is, consequently, no cause for surprise that Pepys should write thus of Shakespeare's ethereal comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream: "Then to the King's Theatre, where we saw A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure." This is Pepys's ordinary attitude of mind to undiluted poetry on the stage.
Pepys only saw A Midsummer Night's Dream once. Twelfth Night, of which he wrote in very similar strains, he saw thrice. On the first occasion his impatience of this romantic play was due to external causes. He went to the theatre "against his own mind and resolution." He was over-persuaded to go in by a friend, with whom he was casually walking past the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Moreover, he had just sworn to his wife that he would never go to a play without her: all which considerations "made the piece seem a burden" to him. He witnessed Twelfth Night twice again in a less perturbed spirit, and then he called it a "silly" play, or "one of the weakest plays that ever I saw on the stage."
Again, of Romeo and Juliet, Pepys wrote: "It is a play of itself the worst I ever heard in my life." This verdict, it is right to add, was attributable, in part at least, to Pepys's irritation at the badness of the acting, and at the actors' ignorance of their words. It was a first night.
The literary critic knows well enough that the merit of these three pieces—A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet—mainly lies in their varied wealth of poetic imagery and passion. One thing alone could render the words, in which poetic genius finds voice, tolerable in the playhouse to a spectator of Pepys's prosaic temperament. The one thing needful is inspired acting, and in the case of these three plays, when Pepys saw them performed, inspired acting was wanting.
It is at first sight disconcerting to find Pepys no less impatient of The Merry Wives of Windsor. He expresses a mild interest in the humours of "the country gentleman and the French doctor." But he condemns the play as a whole. It is in his favour that his bitterest reproaches are aimed at the actors and actresses. One can hardly conceive that Falstaff, fitly interpreted, would have failed to satisfy Pepys's taste in humour, commonplace though it was. He is not quite explicit on the point; but there are signs that the histrionic interpretation of Shakespeare's colossal humorist, rather than the dramatist's portrayal of the character, caused the diarist's disappointment.
Just before Pepys saw the first part of Henry IV., wherein Falstaff figures to supreme advantage, he had bought and read the play in quarto. "But my expectation being too great" (he avers), "it did not please me as otherwise I believe it would." Here it seems clear that his hopes of the actor were unfulfilled. However, he saw Henry IV. again a few months later, and had the grace to describe it as "a good play." On a third occasion he wrote that, "contrary to expectation," he was pleased by the delivery of Falstaff's ironical speech about honour. For whatever reason, Pepys's affection for Shakespeare's fat knight, as he figured on the stage of his day, never touched the note of exaltation.
Of Shakespeare's great tragedies Pepys saw three—Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. But in considering his several impressions of these pieces, we have to make an important proviso. Only the first two of them did he witness in the authentic version. Macbeth underwent in his day a most liberal transformation, which carried it far from its primordial purity. The impressions he finally formed of Othello and Hamlet are not consistent one with the other, but are eminently characteristic of the variable moods of the average playgoer.
Othello he saw twice, and he tells us more of the acting than of the play itself. On his first visit he notes that the lady next him shrieked on seeing Desdemona smothered: a proof of the strength of the histrionic illusion. Up to the year 1666 Pepys adhered to the praiseworthy opinion that Othello was a "mighty good" play. But in that year his judgment took a turn for the worse, and that for a reason which finally convicts him of incapacity to pass just sentence on the poetic or literary drama. On August 20, 1666, he writes: "Read Othello, Moor of Venice, which I have ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but having so lately read the Adventures of Five Hours, it seems a mean thing."
Most lovers of Shakespeare will agree that the great dramatist rarely showed his mature powers to more magnificent advantage than in his treatment of plot and character in Othello. What, then, is this Adventures of Five Hours, compared with which Othello became in Pepys's eyes "a mean thing"? It is a trivial comedy of intrigue, adapted from the Spanish by one Sir Samuel Tuke. A choleric guardian arranges for his ward, who also happens to be his sister, to marry against her will a man whom she has never seen. Without her guardian's knowledge she, before the design goes further, escapes with a lover of her own choosing. In her place she leaves a close friend, who is wooed in mistake for herself by the suitor destined for her own hand. This is the main dramatic point; the thread is very slender, and is drawn out to its utmost limits through five acts of blank verse. The language and metre are scrupulously correct. But one cannot credit the play with any touch of poetry or imagination. It presents a trite theme tamely and prosaically. Congenital inability of the most inveterate toughness to appreciate dramatic poetry could alone account for a mention of the Adventures of Five Hours in the same breath with Othello.
Pepys did not again fall so low as this. The only other tragedy of Shakespeare which he saw in its authentic purity moved him, contradictorily, to transports of unqualified delight. One is glad to recall that Hamlet, one of the greatest of Shakespeare's plays, received from Pepys ungrudging commendation. Pepys's favourable opinion of Hamlet is to be assigned to two causes. One is the literary and psychological attractions of the piece; the other, and perhaps the more important, is the manner in which the play was interpreted on the stage of Pepys's time.
Pepys is not the only owner of a prosaic mind who has found satisfaction in Shakespeare's portrait of the Prince of Denmark. Over minds of almost every calibre, that hero of the stage has always exerted a pathetic fascination, which natural antipathy to poetry seems unable to extinguish. Pepys's testimony to his respect for the piece is abundant. The whole of one Sunday afternoon (November 13, 1664), he spent at home with his wife, "getting a speech out of Hamlet, 'To be or not to be,' without book." He proved, indeed, his singular admiration for those familiar lines in a manner which I believe to be unique. He set them to music, and the notes are extant in a book of manuscript music in his library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The piece is a finely-elaborated recitative fully equal to the requirements of grand opera. The composer gives intelligent and dignified expression to every word of the soliloquy. Very impressive is the modulation of the musical accompaniment to the lines—
To die, to sleep!
To sleep, perchance to dream! ay, there's the rub.
It is possible that the cadences of this musical rendering of Hamlet's speech preserve some echo of the intonation of the great actor, Betterton, whose performance evoked in Pepys lasting adoration.[18]
It goes without saying that, for the full enjoyment of a performance of Hamlet by both cultured and uncultured spectators, acting of supreme quality is needful. Luckily for Pepys, Hamlet in his day was rendered by an actor who, according to ample extant testimony, interpreted the part to perfection. Pepys records four performances of Hamlet, with Betterton in the title-rôle on each occasion. With every performance Pepys's enthusiasm rose. The first time he writes (August 24, 1661): "Saw the play done with scenes very well at the Opera, but above all Betterton did the Prince's part beyond imagination." On the third occasion (May 28, 1663) the rendering gave him "fresh reason never to think enough of Betterton." On the last occasion (August 31, 1668) he was "mightily pleased," but above all with Betterton, "the best part, I believe, that ever man acted."
Hamlet was one of the most popular plays of Pepys's day, mainly owing to Betterton's extraordinary faculty. The history of the impersonation presents numerous points of the deepest interest. The actor was originally coached in the part by D'Avenant. The latter is said to have derived hints for the rendering from an old actor, Joseph Taylor, who had played the rôle in Shakespeare's own day, and had been instructed in it by the dramatist himself. This tradition gives additional value to Pepys's musical setting in recitative of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy. If we accept the reasonable theory that that piece of music preserves something of the cadences of Betterton's enunciation, it is no extravagance to suggest that a note here or there enshrines the modulation of the voice of Shakespeare himself. For there is the likelihood that the dramatist was Betterton's instructor at no more than two removes. Only the lips of D'Avenant, Shakespeare's godson, and of Taylor, Shakespeare's acting colleague, intervened between the dramatist and the Hamlet of Pepys's diary. Those alone, who have heard the musical setting of "To be or not to be" adequately rendered, are in a position to reject this hypothesis altogether.
Among seventeenth century critics there was unanimous agreement—a rare thing among dramatic critics of any period—as to the merits of Betterton's performance. In regard to his supreme excellence, men of the different mental calibre of Sir Richard Steele, Colley Cibber, and Nicholas Rowe, knew no difference of opinion. According to Cibber, Betterton invariably preserved the happy "medium between mouthing and meaning too little"; he held the attention of the audience by "a tempered spirit," not by mere vehemence of voice. His solemn, trembling voice made the Ghost equally terrible to the spectator and to himself. Another critic relates that when Betterton's Hamlet saw the Ghost in his mother's chamber, the actor turned as pale as his neckcloth; every joint of his body seemed to be affected with a tremor inexpressible, and the audience shared his astonishment and horror. Nicholas Rowe declared that "Betterton performed the part as if it had been written on purpose for him, as if the author had conceived it as he played it." It is difficult to imagine any loftier commendation of a Shakespearean player.
V
There is little reason to doubt that the plays of Shakespeare which I have enumerated were all seen by Pepys in authentic shapes. Betterton acted Lear, we are positively informed, "exactly as Shakespeare wrote it"; and at the dates when Pepys saw Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and the rest, there is no evidence that the old texts had been tampered with. The rage for adapting Shakespeare to current theatrical requirements reached its full tide after the period of Pepys's diary. Pepys witnessed only the first-fruits of that fantastic movement. It acquired its greatest luxuriance later. The pioneer of the great scheme of adaptation was Sir William D'Avenant, and he was aided in Pepys's playgoing days by no less a personage than Dryden. It was during the succeeding decade that the scandal, fanned by the energies of lesser men, was at its unseemly height.
No disrespect seems to have been intended to Shakespeare's memory by those who devoted themselves to these acts of vandalism. However difficult it may be to realise the fact, true admiration for Shakespeare's genius seems to have flourished in the breasts of all the adapters, great and small. D'Avenant, whose earliest poetic production was a pathetic elegy on the mighty dramatist, never ceased to write or speak of him with the most affectionate respect. Dryden, who was first taught by D'Avenant "to admire" Shakespeare's work, attests in his critical writings a reverence for its unique excellence, which must satisfy the most enthusiastic worshipper. The same temper characterises references to Shakespeare on the part of dramatists of the Restoration, who brought to the adaptation of Shakespeare abilities of an order far inferior to those of Dryden or of D'Avenant. Nahum Tate, one of the least respected names in English literature, was one of the freest adapters of Shakespearean drama to the depraved taste of the day. Yet even he assigned to the master playwright unrivalled insight into the darkest mysteries of human nature, and an absolute mastery of the faculty of accurate characterisation. For once, Tate's literary judgment must go unquestioned.
It was no feeling of disrespect or of dislike for Shakespeare's work—it was the change that was taking place in the methods of theatrical representation, which mainly incited the Shakespearean adapters of the Restoration to their benighted labours. Shakespeare had been acted without scenery or musical accompaniment. As soon as scenic machinery and music had become ordinary accessories of the stage, it seemed to theatrical managers almost a point of honour to fit Shakespearean drama to the new conditions. To abandon him altogether was sacrilege. Yet the mutation of public taste offered, as the only alternative to his abandonment, the obligation of bestowing on his work every mechanical advantage, every tawdry ornament in the latest mode.
Pepys fully approved the innovations, and two of the earliest of Shakespearean adaptations won his unqualified eulogy. These were D'Avenant's reconstructions of The Tempest and Macbeth. D'Avenant had convinced himself that both plays readily lent themselves to spectacle; they would repay the embellishments of ballets, new songs, new music, coloured lights, and flying machines. Reinforced by these charms of novelty, the old pieces might enjoy an everlasting youth. No spectator more ardently applauded such bastard sentiment than the playgoing Pepys.
Of the two pieces, the text of Macbeth was abbreviated, but otherwise the alterations in the blank-verse speeches were comparatively slight. Additional songs were provided for the Witches, together with much capering in the air. Music was specially written by Matthew Locke. The liberal introduction of song and dance rendered the piece, in Pepys's strange phrase, "a most excellent play for variety." He saw D'Avenant's version of it no less than eight times, with ever-increasing enjoyment. He generously praised the clever combination of "a deep tragedy with a divertissement." He detected no incongruity in the amalgamation. "Though I have seen it often," he wrote later, "yet is it one of the best plays for a stage, and for variety of dancing and music, that ever I saw."
The Tempest, the other adapted play, which is prominent in Pepys's diary, underwent more drastic revision. Here D'Avenant had the co-operation of Dryden; and no intelligent reader can hesitate to affirm that the ingenuity of these worthies ruined this splendid manifestation of poetic fancy and insight. It is only fair to Dryden to add that he disclaimed any satisfaction in his share in the outrage. The first edition of the barbarous revision was first published in 1670, after D'Avenant's death, and Dryden wrote a preface, in which he prudently remarked: "I do not set a value on anything I have written in this play but [i.e., except] out of gratitude to the memory of Sir William Davenant, who did me the honour to join me with him in the alteration of it."
The numerous additions, for which the distinguished coadjutors are responsible, reek with mawkish sentimentality, inane vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, Hippolito, who has never before seen a woman. Caliban becomes the most sordid of clowns, and is allotted a sister, Milcha, who apes his coarse buffoonery. Ariel, too, is given a female associate, Sycorax, together with many attendants. The sailors are increased in number, and a phalanx of dancing devils join in their antics.
But the chief feature of the revived Tempest was the music, the elaborate scenery, and the scenic mechanism.[19] There was an orchestra of twenty-four violins in front of the stage, with harpsichords and "theorbos" to accompany the voices; new songs were dispersed about the piece with unsparing hand. The curious new "Echo" song in Act III.—a duet between Ferdinand and Ariel—was deemed by Pepys to be so "mighty pretty" that he requested the composer—Bannister—to "prick him down the notes." Many times did the audience shout with joy as Ariel, with a corps de ballet in attendance, winged his flight to the roof of the stage.
The scenic devices which distinguished the Restoration production of The Tempest have, indeed, hardly been excelled for ingenuity in our own day. The arrangements for the sinking of the ship in the first scene would do no discredit to the spectacular magnificence of the London stage of our own day. The scene represented "a thick cloudy sky, a very rocky coast, and a tempestuous sea in perpetual agitation." "This tempest," according to the stage-directions, "has many dreadful objects in it; several spirits in horrid shapes flying down among the sailors, then rising and crossing in the air; and when the ship is sinking, the whole house is darkened and a shower of fire falls upon the vessel. This is accompanied by lightning and several claps of thunder till the end of the storm." The stage-manager's notes proceed:—"In the midst of the shower of fire, the scene changes. The cloudy sky, rocks, and sea vanish, and when the lights return, discover that beautiful part of the island, which was the habitation of Prospero: 'tis composed of three walks of cypress trees; each side-walk leads to a cave, in one of which Prospero keeps his daughter, in the other Hippolito (the interpolated character of the man who has never seen a woman). The middle walk is of great depth, and leads to an open part of the island." Every scene of the play was framed with equal elaborateness.
Pepys's comment on The Tempest, when he first witnessed its production in such magnificent conditions, runs thus:—"The play has no great wit but yet good above ordinary plays." Pepys subsequently, however, saw the piece no less than five times, and the effect of the music, dancing, and scenery, steadily grew upon him. On his second visit he wrote:—"Saw The Tempest again, which is very pleasant, and full of so good variety, that I cannot be more pleased almost in a comedy. Only the seamen's part a little too tedious." Finally, Pepys praised the richly-embellished Tempest without any sort of reserve, and took "pleasure to learn the tune of the seamen's dance."
Other adaptations of Shakespeare, which followed somewhat less spectacular methods of barbarism, roused in Pepys smaller enthusiasm. The Rivals, a version by D'Avenant of The Two Noble Kinsmen (the joint production of Fletcher and Shakespeare), was judged by Pepys to be "no excellent piece," though he appreciated the new songs, which included the familiar "My lodging is on the cold ground," with music by Matthew Locke. Pepys formed a higher opinion of D'Avenant's liberally-altered version of Measure for Measure, which the adapter called The Law against Lovers, and into which he introduced, with grotesque effect, the characters of Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado about Nothing. But it is more to Pepys's credit that he bestowed a very qualified approval on an execrable adaptation by the actor Lacy of The Taming of the Shrew. Here the hero, Petruchio, is overshadowed by a new character, Sawney, his Scottish servant, who speaks an unintelligible patois. "It hath some very good pieces in it," writes Pepys, "but generally is but a mean play, and the best part, Sawny, done by Lacy, hath not half its life by reason of the words, I suppose, not being understood, at least by me."
VI
It might be profitable to compare Pepys's experiences as a spectator of Shakespeare's plays on the stage with the opportunities open to playgoers at the present moment. Modern managers have been producing Shakespearean drama of late with great liberality, and usually in much splendour. Neither the points of resemblance between the modern and the Pepysian methods, nor the points of difference, are flattering to the esteem of ourselves as a literature-loving people. It is true that we no longer garble our acting versions of Shakespeare. We are content with abbreviations of the text, some of which are essential, but many of which injure the dramatic perspective, and with inversion of scenes which may or may not be justifiable. But, to my mind, it is in our large dependence on scenery that we are following too closely that tradition of the Restoration which won the wholehearted approval of Pepys. The musico-scenic method of producing Shakespeare can always count on the applause of the average multitude of playgoers, of which Pepys is the ever-living spokesman. It is Shakespeare with scenic machinery, Shakespeare with new songs, Shakespeare with incidental music, Shakespeare with interpolated ballets, that reaches the heart of the British public. If the average British playgoer were gifted with Pepys's frankness, I have little doubt that he would echo the diarist's condemnation of Shakespeare in his poetic purity, of Shakespeare as the mere interpreter of human nature, of Shakespeare without flying machines, of Shakespeare without song and dance; he would characterise undiluted Shakespearean drama as "a mean thing," or the most tedious entertainment that ever he was at in his life.
But the situation in Pepys's day had, despite all the perils that menaced it, a saving grace. Great acting, inspired acting, is an essential condition to any general appreciation in the theatre of Shakespeare's dramatic genius. However seductive may be the musico-scenic ornamentation, Shakespeare will never justly affect the mind of the average playgoer unless great or inspired actors are at hand to interpret him. Luckily for Pepys, he was the contemporary of at least one inspired Shakespearean actor. The exaltation of spirit to which he confesses, when he witnessed Betterton in the rôle of Hamlet, is proof that the prosaic multitude for whom he speaks will always respond to Shakespeare's magic touch when genius wields the actor's wand. One could wish nothing better for the playgoing public of to-day than that the spirit of Betterton, Shakespeare's guardian angel in the theatre of the Restoration, might renew its earthly career in our own time in the person of some contemporary actor.