36
PARTISAN REVIEW
to a production of Shakespeare, and Mr. Gielgud's
Hamlet,
with all
its refinements, was a kind of climax of the rococo. Indeed, I think
it impossible to do a good production of Shakespeare in terms of the
tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whether actor
and producer swallow that tradition whole, or whether they deviate
from it in much or in little, as long as their thinking is bounded by
that tradition the result will be a more or less competent theatrical
barbarism. It is strange that Mr. Gielgud's interest in the stage his-
tory of Shakespeare should not have carried him back to Shakespeare's
own day. If any style of presentation is relevant to Shakespeare's
plays it is surely the style of Shakespeare's period, the style to whose
terms he adapted those plays. Yet Mr. Gielgud, speaking of the first
scene of
Hamlet,
where the Ghost appears on the sentinel's platform,
is full of pity and condescension for the Elizabethans. "One wonders,"
he says, "how this scene can have been played effectively when it was
originally written. A noisy, fidgeting, mostly standing audience, no
darkness, afternoon sunshine streaming on to a tidy little platform."
The point is that the plays were written with these conditions, con-
sciously or unconsciously, in mind. There being no stage parapher-
nalia to create the "illusion," the lines themselves had to do the work
of scenery, careful costuming and props. It is therefore a tautology
to add externally to Shakespeare what exists already in the very fiber
of his plays, and the heaviness one feels in most traditional presenta-
tions of Shakespeare is the heaviness of repetition, of underscoring.
Moreover, it seems as if Shakespeare were intended to be played fast;
in fact, I can think of no other way in which blank verse can be read
effectively. The caressive attention Mr. Gielgud gave his lines, the
pregnant pauses, the judiciously interlarded stage business, all inter-
fered with the sweep of the verse, and the dramatic sweep of the
play. This kind of acting (which is and has been, by the way, the
prevailing style for Shakespeare) tends to atomize the plays, to reduce
them to collections of small and (again) quite heavy nuggets.
If Mr. Gielgud's production was a sort of ornamental applique
imposed on the original, Mr. Welles's
Caesar
was a piece of plastic
surgery. Mr. Welles, to judge from his interpretations of
Macbeth,
Dr. Faustus,
and
Caesar,
has the idea an Elizabethan play is a liability
which only by the most strenuous showmanship, by cutting, doctor-
ing, and modernizing, can be converted into an asset. Mr. Welles's
method is to find a modern formula into which a classic can some-
how be squeezed. In the case of
Macbeth,
the formula was
The Em-
peror Jones;
for
Dr. Faustus
it was a Punch and Judy show; for
Caesar
it was the proletarian play. Now of these three it seems to me
only
Dr. Faustus
was truly successful, for here the formula actually
i
I
!
