Plays, Acting and Music: A Book Of TheorySymons, Arthur
Philosophy
Plays, Acting and Music: A Book Of Theory
Symons, Arthur
Actors; Music -- History and criticism; Theater
In Juliet Miss Marlowe is ripe humanity, in Ophelia that same humanity
broken down from within. As Viola, in "Twelfth Night" she is the woman
let loose, to be bewitching in spite of herself; and here again her art
is tested, and triumphs, for she is bewitching, and never trespasses
into jauntiness on the one hand, or, on the other, into that modern
sentiment which the theatre has accustomed itself to under the name of
romance. She is serious, with a calm and even simplicity, to which
everything is a kind of child's play, putting no unnecessary pathos into
a matter destined to come right in the end. And so her delicate and
restrained gaiety in masquerade interprets perfectly, satisfies every
requirement, of what for the moment is whimsical in Shakespeare's art.
Now turn from Shakespeare, and see what can be done with the modern
make-believe. Here, in "Jeanne d'Arc," is a recent American melodrama,
written ambitiously, in verse which labours to be poetry. The subject
was made for Miss Marlowe, but the play was made for effect, and it is
lamentable to see her, in scenes made up of false sentiment and
theatrical situations, trying to do what she is ready and able to do;
what, indeed, some of the scenes give her the chance to be: the little
peasant girl, perplexed by visions and possessed by them, and also the
peasant saint, too simple to know that she is heroic. Out of a play of
shreds and patches one remembers only something which has given it its
whole value: the vital image of a divine child, a thing of peace and
love, who makes war angelically.
Yet even in this play there was ambition and an aim. Turn, last of all,
to a piece which succeeded with London audiences better than
Shakespeare, a burlesque of American origin, called "When Knighthood was
in Flower." Here too I seemed to discern a lesson for the English stage.
Even through the silly disguises of this inconceivable production,
which pleased innocent London as it had pleased indifferent New York,
one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool's
fabric of the melodrama, which set the action far above our steady
practitioners in the same art of sinking. And, above all, a sense of
parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the
nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She
was a live thing, defiantly and gaily conscious of every absurdity with
which she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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