Remorse and Shakespeare

I previously blogged about theatre articles that appeared recently in The Byron Journal. Today, I want to write about an article in The Coleridge Bulletin.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known today as a poet, but by his own account, he made more money off of his verse drama Remorse than all of his other poetry combined.

Dominik Laciak wrote an article called "Coleridge's Remorse and the Haunting Shadow of Shakespeare" which argues that Coleridge's playwriting and Shakespeare criticism informed one another, which definitely makes sense. Remorse opened at Drury Lane in January of 1813, and throughout the rehearsal process Coleridge was also delivering lectures on Shakespeare.

Laciak concentrates on three Shakespeare villains who likely influenced the character of Ordonio in Remorse: Macbeth, Richard III, and Iago. Like Macbeth, Ordonio feels guilt but tries to pretend that he doesn't. Like Richard III, he is constantly posturing. Like Iago, he takes pride in his intellect.

I wrote about Remorse in my book Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas. It's nice to see other scholars writing about the play as well.

Rhetorical Gesture and Action

In 1807, the actor Henry Siddons, son of the famous tragedienne Sarah Siddons, published a treatise on acting--freely adapted from a German book--called Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action.

In the "Advertisement" at the beginning of the book, Siddons defends his free adaptation of a work by Johann Jakob Engel. While a straight-forward translation of Engel's work might have proved "sufficient" Siddons argues that "as the application of his principles, in the original work, was adapted to the business of the German Stage, and as his references and examples were chiefly taken from the German drama, it became an essential duty of the Editor to Anglicise the matter, as well as translate the language of his author."

Siddons makes sure to give examples from English plays that were well known at the beginning of the 19th century, including Joanna Baillie's De Monfort, Matthew G. Lewis's The Castle Spectre, and William Congreve's Love for Love, as well as popular works by Shakespeare, such as Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. He also makes explicit reference to his mother. At one point,  he writes: "If the first actress now on our stage had never been present at the bed of a dying person, her acting, under such circumstances, might probably have lost one of its most natural and affecting traits." This was Siddons's trick of having her fingers twitch, but nothing else, as she had once seen in a person near death.

The book also includes illustrations, one of which is reminiscent of a painting of Sarah Siddons together with a very young Henry. That painting, Mrs. Siddons and Her Son in the Tragedy of Isabella by William Hamilton, shows a tall, stately mother with a small child to the left. Similarly, the illustration for "Affection" shows a mother and son, and the book draws attention to the fact that (as in the painting) the two figures are on different planes. Siddons writes: "First of all, my friend, let us suppose an object of desire placed more high than the person desirous of obtaining it; or what comes to the same point, that the personages are not of an equal height."

How much was Siddons's guide used as a practical tool for actors? It's difficult to tell, but in addition to being raised by the most famous actress of the era (not to mention being nephew to the actor John Philip Kemble), Henry Siddons was a famous performer himself. He was the leading man at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh, where he originated the role of the Lord of Lorne in Baillie's The Family Legend.

Actors today might not want to follow the advice in the book, which as its title suggests is aimed at a rather rhetorical approach to performance, but it is a fascinating glimpse into the past.

Samuel Phelps

The Victorian actor Samuel Phelps was described by his biographer Richard Lee as "the last typical classic actor of the English theatre." Lee knew Phelps, and shortly before the great actor died, he had agreed to perform in a comedy Lee had written called Cent per Cent. Alas, he never performed that play, but he appeared in so many other great shows!

Born in 1806, Phelps was the son of a wine merchant. His family valued education, and his younger brother Robert eventually led Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, and at one point even served as Vice-Chancellor of the university there.

Arriving in London as a young man, Phelps took a job in a printing office, where his foreman was Douglas Jerrold, who had not yet risen to fame writing such plays as Black-Eyed Susan and The Rent-Day. Phelps invited Jerrold to watch him act in an amateur production of The Castle Spectre by Matthew G. Lewis. According to Phelps, after the performance "Jerrold told me that by dent of hard study, luck, and patience I might in time act well enough to get thirty shillings a week."

Well, Phelps later made far more than that! His professional debut occurred in 1827 at the Queen's Theatre off of Tottenham Court Road, which later came to be know as the Prince of Wales's Royal Theatre. Phelps, then 21 years old, appeared as Captain Galliard in the farce XYZ. He then joined a company performing in the northern circuit, and according to Lee, Phelps "rapidly became a recognized stage favorite throughout the North of England, in Scotland, and, across St. George's Channel, at Belfast and Londonderry."

Ten years later, in 1837, Phelps made his debut at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in Thomas Otway's tragedy Venice Preserved. Phelps played Jaffier opposite the Pierre of William Charles Macready, an actor who would be both his colleague and his rival for many years to come. Phelps accompanied Macready when the star actor took over the management of the rival Theatre Royal at Drury Lane. It was there that Macready staged Robert Browning's tragedy A Blot in the 'Scutcheon with Phelps as the lead, and then abruptly cancelled it.

"Though its success was undoubted," Lee writes, the play "for reasons never publicly stated, disappeared from the bills after the third representation." Macready was jealous of Phelps's success, but he also had bigger things to worry about as manager of Drury Lane. In 1843, the theatre's owners declined to give him a decrease in rent, and Macready responded by petitioning parliament to end the monopoly the two patent theatres had on performing spoken-word drama. The result was the Theatres Act, which paved the way for the so-called minor theatres like Sadler's Wells to perform more serious fare than melodrama and burletta.

Phelps, together with Thomas L. Greenwood and the actress Mary Warner, took over the management of Sadler's Wells. At first, they planned to stage melodramas, as the house always had, and they even determined to get a fresh one written by Zachary Barnett to inaugurate their new management. When Barnett's melodrama was not forthcoming, however, and with the opening date of Sadler's Wells already advertised, the experienced, classical actors decided to begin with what they knew best. Instead of using a melodrama, they opened with Macbeth. Phelps and Warner played the two leads, and according to Lee, who was there that night, the audience "was hushed by its attention to the action of the tragedy to such perfect stillness as quickened the sense to hear the faintest whisper from the stage."

The trio of managers quickly abandoned their plans to produce melodramas. The Theatres Act now allowed Sadler's Wells to produce any type of show it liked without having to split legal hairs over exactly how many songs were needed to qualify a piece as melodrama or burletta. For a while, they did try to produce new works, but after three new plays in a row failed, and a fourth was not likely to be ready for production, they went back to the classics.

Phelps was particularly known for his stagings of works by William Shakespeare. Of the plays accepted to be in the Shakespeare canon at the time, Phelps staged all of them at Sadler's Wells except the Henry VI trilogy, Troilus and Cressida, and Richard II. Was he the last typical classic actor of the English theatre? I don't know, but he was probably one of the best.

Notes from Chuck Berst

Bernard Shaw scholars tend to be a generous lot. When I first went to the Comparative Drama Conference, folks from the International Shaw Society made me feel quite at home, and they have continued to be welcoming as I've met up with them at subsequent conferences.

When the Shaw scholar Chuck Berst passed away in 2019, it was a great loss. His wife Roelina, however, has tried to pass on his large collection of books about Shaw, and generously offered to send me the Constable & Co. collection of the great dramatist's works. One thousand and twenty-five copies of the 32-volume set were printed in 1931, and they are a treasure.

In the past, I have always checked out individual volumes of the Constable & Co. set from the library when I needed them. Unfortunately, libraries have been declared "non-essential" for more than a year now, so I was excited to receive the books. Even better, Roelina left in place the bookmarks where Chuck noted passages of particular interest. I've been going through them, trying to glean what I could from his insights.

One volume of Shaw's writing, Pen Portraits and Reviews, had quite a few passages flagged. The first one was a book review called "The Old Revolutionist and the New Revolution" which Shaw published in The Nation in 1921. Though actually about a book by H.M. Hyndman, the article is more interesting for what it says about the novelist H.G. Wells, a long-time associate of Shaw who had joined him in championing Socialism.

Another book mark, labelled "Terry" in an underlined fashion, marks an interesting comment on the actress Ellen Terry, who "has always been adored by painters." That is certainly true, and John Singer Sargent's 1889 portrait of her as Lady Macbeth has frequently been reproduced in prints and postcards (of few of which I might own). Shaw admits that he wanted Terry to perform his own plays and implies that he wrote Captain Brassbound's Conversion for her. Chuck marked in the margins where Shaw acknowledged that the description of the heroine of The Man of Destiny was "simply a description of Ellen Terry."

Shaw's contribution to a memoir on the journalist H.W. Massingham was also marked, but I was more interested in a flagged article called "Shaming the Devil about Shelley." The first article I published on Shaw had to do with the influence Percy Shelley's play The Cenci had on Shaw's early work. Shelley had anticipated Shaw's vision of the "life force" he worshipped, or at least Shaw thought so when he wrote "there never was a man with so abiding and full a consciousness of the omnipresence of a living force, manifesting itself here in the germination and growth of a tree, there in the organization of a poet's brain."

The final bookmark in the volume is for a published letter Shaw wrote about fellow Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde. Each slip of paper was illuminating for me, and I look forward to exploring some of the other marked passages in the set.

The Bible in Shakespeare

I'm pleased to announce that my review of Hannibal Hamlin's book The Bible in Shakespeare has come out in the online journal Performance, Religion, and Spirituality.

Hamlin's study of Shakespeare's allusions to the Bible is a valuable resource for anyone teaching or studying the plays of the Bard. In addition giving an overview of Shakespeare's Biblical allusions, it also includes case studies of the Roman plays, the character of Sir John Falstaff, and the tragedies Macbeth and King Lear.

You can read my review of the book here. I enjoyed it very much, though I'm sad we now have to content ourselves with reading about Shakespeare rather than seeing his plays performed live.

Scotland, PA

Previews are always an exciting time for a show. Last night, when I saw Scotland, PA in previews at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre, director Lonny Price came out to let us know we would be the first audience ever to hear new song lyrics that had just been given to an actor that day!

The number was a patter song, he explained, with lots of words sung very quickly, so the actress would be holding a pad of paper. He said we would know the moment when it came, which was true, but fortunately, the character was a detective taking notes anyway, so had he not announced it in advance, we might not have noticed a thing.

If you haven't heard about Scotland, PA yet, it's a new musical with songs by Adam Gwon and a book by Michael Mitnick based on the 2001 film by Billy Morrissette. Inspired by William Shakespeare's Macbeth, the movie and the musical tell a familiar story of ambition, murder, and madness, but re-set in a 1970s-era fast-food restaurant in the middle of rural Pennsylvania.

The three witches are replaced by three hippies, played in the musical by Alysha Umphress, Wonu Ogunfowora, and Kaleb Wells. Ryan McCartan and Taylor Iman Jones play the murderous couple, whose fierce sexuality only grows as they plot to kill their way to the top. In the film, Christopher Walken played the homicide inspector Lieutenant McDuff, but in a brilliant gender switch, the character in the musical becomes Peg McDuff, played by the exceptional Megan Lawrence.

It was Lawrence who did that wonderful patter song, and Gwon's lyrics can be hysterical. Josh Rhodes's choreography is inventive and memorable, and the set designed by Anna Louizos provides just the right tone. At intermission, even the lobby is transformed into a fast-food restaurant adorned with a certain golden M.

This show deserves to be a hit, so I recommend getting your tickets now.

Witches' Songs

The text of Macbeth calls for two songs that are also in Thomas Middleton's play The Witch. Though The Witch seems to have been written after Macbeth, many critics believe the songs are by Middleton, as full lyrics appear in The Witch and Macbeth simply gives the first lines of the songs in stage directions.

Most likely, they were a later addition to Macbeth made by theatre professionals always looking to utilize a popular song if it could serve their purposes. Of course there are other possibilities as well. Maybe Shakespeare wrote the songs, and Middleton incorporated them into his own play, of perhaps the lyrics were written by a member of Shakespeare's company who contributed to both plays.

The first song, "Come away, come away," occurs at the end of Act III, scene 5 of Macbeth. Here's how the song appears in Act III, scene 3 of Middleton's play:

               WITCHES: Come away, come away, 
               Hecate, Hecate, come away. 
               HECATE: I come, I come, I come, I come, 
               With all the speed I may, 
               With all the speed I may, 
               Where's Stadlin? 
               STADLIN: Here. 
               HECATE: Where's Puckle? 
               PUCKLE: Here. 
               WITCHES: And Hoppo, too, and Hellwain, too; 
               We lack but you, we lack but you. 
               Come away, make up the count. 
               HECATE: I will but 'noint, and then I mount.

                              A spirit like a cat descends.

               WITCHES: There's one comes down to fetch his dues, 
               A kiss, a coll, a sip of blood, 
               And why thou stay'st so long 
               I muse, I muse, 
               Since the air's so sweet and good. 
               HECATE: Oh, art thou come? 
               What news, what news? 
               MALKIN: All goes still to our delight, 
               Either come or else 
               Refuse, refuse. 
               HECATE: Now I am furnish'd for the flight.
               FIRESTONE: Hark, hark, the cat sings a brave treble in her own language!
               HECATE, going up: Now I go, now I fly, 
               Malkin my sweet spirit and I. 
               Oh, what a dainty pleasure 'tis 
               To ride in the air 
               When the moon shines fair 
               And sing, and dance, and toy, and kiss; 
               Over woods, high rocks, and mountains, 
               Over seas, over misty fountains, 
               Over steeples, towers, and turrets, 
               We fly by night, 'mongst troops of spirits. 
               No ring of bells to our ears sounds, 
               No howls of wolves, no yelps of hounds, 
               No, not the noise of water's breach 
               Or cannon's throat our height can reach. 
               No ring of bells, etc.

The other song, "Black Spirits," appears at the beginning of Act IV in Macbeth, which also has the famous "Double, Double Toil and Trouble" song. This fact has led some scholars to speculate that Middleton wrote that song as well, along with perhaps other passages in Macbeth. There's no external evidence for that theory, but lack of evidence has rarely stopped fans of Middleton from attributing all sort of things to him.

Whether "Black Spirits" was written by Shakespeare, Middleton, or someone else, here's how it appears in Act V, scene 2 of The Witches:

               HECATE: Black spirits and white, red spirits and grey, 
               Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may. 
               Titty, Tiffin, keep it stiff in. 
               Firedrake, Puckey, make it lucky. 
               Liard, Robin, you must bob in. 
               Round, around, around, about, about, 
               All ill come running in, all good keep out. 
               FIRST WITCH: Here's the blood of a bat. 
               HECATE: Put in that, oh, put in that. 
               SECOND WITCH: Here's libbard's bane. 
               HECATE: Put in again. 
               FIRST WITCH: The juice of toad, the oil of adder. 
               SECOND WITCH: Those will make the younker madder. 
               HECATE: Put in; there's all, and rid the stench. 
               FIRESTONE: Nay, here's three ounces of the red-hair'd wench. 
               ALL: Round, around, around, about, about, 
               All ill come running in, all good keep out.

Regardless of who wrote the songs, the fact that two plays by different dramatists shared some of the same material probably tells us something about playwriting and theatre production during the Jacobean era. Authorship was complicated, and companies had few qualms about recycling material. When directors today incorporate modern songs into Shakespeare's plays, they might be doing something similar to what Shakespeare's own company did hundreds of years ago.

MACBETH for the Toy Theatre

I just got back from seeing a student production of Shakespeare's Macbeth at City College. This reminded me of the toy theatre versions of the play I saw over the summer while doing research at the New York Public Library.

Here's an image from Hodgson's toy theatre plates. Notice, they were going for the full-on Highland look. This seems typical for the nineteenth century.

Duncan looks perhaps a bit less openly Scottish, but fittingly regal in this image from the third plate of characters:

I'm quite amused by this soldier bringing Birnam Wood to Dunsinane:

Of course, the star of the show is usually Lady Macbeth, shone here with daggers:

In addition to buying plates of characters, toy theatre owners could buy whole scenes to drop down into their miniature stages to create a tableau. Here's one of the banquet scene:

I like the expression on Banquo's face. "Just look at what you did to me, Mackers! Just look!" I imagine some Victorian child just loved that.

Hearing Sarah Siddons

I was excited to learn that the latest issue of Theatre Notebook has an article by Glen McGillivray titled "Rant, Cant and Tone: The Voice of the Eighteenth-Century Actor and Sarah Siddons."

Siddons has interested me for a while now, so after Theatre Notebook arrived in my mailbox this weekend, it didn't take me long to read the article. Frequently, theatre historians compare Siddons with the "natural" acting style of David Garrick who immediately preceded her, or with the Romantic school of actors like Edmund Kean who followed her. McGillivray also makes comparisons, but to show shifting conventions rather than an overall evolution in acting styles.

McGillivray agrees with the conventional wisdom that Siddon's acting "harked back to an earlier era." As he points out, the "new" style pioneered by Siddons and her brother John Phillip Kemble actually "bore strong similarities to the acting techniques of Barton Booth and James Quin, and before them, to those of Elizabeth Barry." This style was described by contemporaries both as being more restrained and as being more stylized than the acting of Garrick and his imitators.

Though Siddons had a strong, deep voice, she frequently made an impression by means of a whisper. This was particularly true of her Lady Macbeth. Rather than exhibiting passionate shrieks of tragic emotion, Siddons made Lady Macbeth at times scarcely audible. McGillivray argues that Siddons, like other actors, was "alert to the rhetorical conventions of the time," but like Garrick, she "could shift an audience's expectations" of those conventions.