Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

clothe a native material with this foreign and scholarly artistic garb. But the English people detected the danger and resisted this foreign influence, to which the French succumbed, with the same energy with which they drove back the Spanish Armada and its attempts upon their civil and religious liberty-with the same strength with which in later times they resisted the attempts of their own kings to destroy their time-honoured freedom and to erect an absolute monarchy upon its ruins.

The cultivated classes admired the learning and brilliant rhetoric of these academical dramas based upon the three unities, but they turned with all the greater delight to the popular productions less intellectually related to their minds. These, however, it must not be denied, had gained something from the classical drama, and although there was no question of observing the unities, yet they had attained to a better totality and coherence by a certain manner of imitation. After the drama had loosened its connection with the Church, Scriptural subjects were naturally abandoned. They were replaced by historical material drawn from ancient and modern times, treated with a boundless naïveté and with inconceivable anachronisms, from which Shakespeare himself was not free. These were accepted very quietly by the people. Still, even in the plays in which time and place are disregarded most mercilessly, plays in which the poet brings together persons and events belonging to different centuries, in which he presents an entirely impossible geography, he always remains true when dealing with man, his passions, his virtues, and his viccs. In the same way, in the pieces we have mentioned, there is to be commended, on the whole, the delineation of character, which remains tolerably true to nature, although we find not a shadow of that incomparably fine and masterly psychological analysis that distinguishes Shakespeare. What particularly marked English dramatic poetry before Shakespeare is its delight in horrors, in monstrosities, in massing

deeds of shame and blood, the tendency to utilise the terrible to an unendurable degree. We shall see, when we come to examine the plays of Shakespeare's first period, that he has also erred in this direction. At all events, it is plain that the audiences had stronger nerves than we can boast of, and that these things, which repel us, must have given them real pleasure. For if the authors had not been aware that what they offered in their plays was likely to hit the taste of the spectators, upon whom they depended for success, they would certainly have changed the character of their work. The English had just passed through a hard school. The horrors of civil war, the repeated executions of prominent men, who shortly before stood at the head of the state under the short reign of Edward VI., the bloody tragedies which Henry VIII. enacted before his subjects in his numerous executions of distinguished men of all ranks and classes, and of delicate women, among whom were the Queens, these and many other such experiences had hardened the people and made them callous to the terrible tragedies brought by the poets of their day upon the stage. The London populace was accustomed, almost daily, to assist at executions, often at frightful martyrdoms, and owing to this habit they bore quietly such a tragedy as that of Titus Andronicus, attributed to Shakespeare. In this play, out of the fifteen personages, six are stabbed, two beheaded, two have their throats cut, one is hacked to pieces and burnt, one buried alive and left to perish of hunger. And the greater part of these horrors are not simply related, but were absolutely represented on the stage before the very eyes of the people. Besides this, Titus Andronicus has one hand cut off, his daughter Lavinia loses both, she is also ravished and her tongue is torn out, after which with her bloody arm-stumps she holds the vessel into which is poured the blood of the author of this crime, slain in revenge by her father. The language of these plays also was exaggerated and inflated, in accordance with the action.

Shakespeare has furnished a caricature of this bombastic talk, carried to its highest point of ridiculous pathos, in the speeches he puts into the mouth of Pistol in Henry IV. Another important characteristic of the English stage before Shakespeare, which also exerted an casily recognised influence over him, was that species of national humour which had found its way to the stage from the minds of the people, scourging without limits, though harmlessly and goodnaturedly, whatever in the circumstances or the personages of the day seemed to lend itself to ridicule or satire. A favourite figure on the English stage that appeared in tragedy and comedy was Vice clothed in the garments of a fool. In his mouth was placed such satire of a rough comic form, which freely spattered the different classes and trades represented in the plays, if they gave, or only seemed to give, occasion for such mockery. Favourite butts were the physicians, lawyers, the avaricious, and so on. It is manifest that one of the peculiarities for which Shakespeare has often been blamed, namely, his tendency to mix deep tragedy and broad farce in the same play, had its root in this popular fashion of his forerunners. Certainly this Vice and other farcical figures, permitted to appear in the midst of horror-laden tragedies, was the source of the comic character in Shakespeare's plays. As to Comedy properly so called, which grew out of the quips and cranks of the court-fools, and specially those of the famous Tarlton, whom both high and low dreaded because of his tongue, the first regular piece of this nature was Gammer Gurton's Needle (1566). It is worthy of note that this first English comedy was composed by a high ecclesiastic, the Bishop of Bath.

However much English acting had improved, those who practised it as a profession had to struggle for a long time with great obstacles. Although their efforts responded to a marked tendency in the people, and though in following their trade they earned very substantial gains, still they were not deemed worthy to hold civic rights-nay, they were

looked upon as vagabonds, when they were not honoured by the Queen with the title of "Her Majesty's Servants," and as such officially entitled to form a troop of actors. Of such companies there were thirteen at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Queen herself, who was exceedingly fond of theatrical entertainments, maintained four such troops: the boys of St. Paul's, the boys of Westminster, those of the Chapel, and those of Windsor. On certain feast-days she also hired other troops to play before her. In all such cases these extra representations were given late in the evening, that the actors might not be hindered in their ordinary occupation, which was the giving of public afternoon performances.

The Earl of Leicester's company obtained from the Queen, through his intercession, the privilege of giving representations in the whole of England, with the exception of the City of London. The London municipality, partly from a fanatical enmity to the theatre-which they considered as a hotbed of wickedness and vice, the work of the devil himself-partly from just displeasure at certain outrageous proceedings provoked by misdemeanours on the part of the players, strove in every way to check the development of the stage. But the very edicts launched against the theatres with intent to suppress them served only to set this now indispensable form of popular amusement upon firmer foundations. In consequence of an edict from the municipality forbidding to the players the further use of the great city taverns, which had been the chief scenes of their activity, the troops found themselves compelled to set up permanent places for their performances. Thus were founded the first playhouses in England, Blackfriars, where Burbadge, afterwards Shakespeare's friend and companion, at that time the head of the Earl of Leicester's company of players, established himself, and the Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch. The number of theatres soon increased, despite the ill-will and open opposition of the Puritans, so

C

that already in the reign of James there were seventeen in London alone. The profession of an actor was so lucrative, that those who, through the excellence of their performance, had won fame, and consequent fortune, used to retire after a certain period of activity, and establish themselves in an easy and comfortable existence. The stage of those days was most simple, as far removed from the splendour of artistic decorations to which we are accustomed on the modern boards, as from the magnificence of costume, decoration, and machinery employed at the court representations of their own day. In the most splendid summer-theatre of London, the Globe, opened by Shakespeare and Burbadge in 1595, the pit was a kind of open court, without any shelter from the weather. Around this space were several rows of covered boxes; the stage, with its dressing-rooms behind, was also covered. The curtain was not drawn up, as at present, but opened in the middle. Painted scenes, houses, mountains, cities, were left to the court plays, where they had been in use since 1568. Generally a blackboard with a name painted on it designated the place of action. For tragedies, the stage was hung with black, for festive subjects the rushes, which usually strewed the boards, were replaced by carpets. A sort of scaffolding in the background of the stage, covered in front by a separate curtain, served as tower, wall, balcony, or theatre according to requirement. Inside were played the intermezzi, such as that in Hamlet. Here stood the bed of Desdemona; above was the balcony on which Romeo and Juliet forgot the nightingale and the lark; beneath was the vault where they were at last united; there, too, were hurried such unfortunates as incurred the wrath of the authors during the performances. Sir Philip Sidney says in his Apology for Poetry: "In most of the pieces there is Asia on one side and Africa on the other, and so many smaller kingdoms added to these, that the actor's first task is to state where he finds himself. Then come three women and gather

« ZurückWeiter »