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William Poel William Poel EDWARD M. MOORE FT would be difficult to exaggerate the debt that all of Shake­ spearian owe to William Poel. It can easily be argued, as William Archer did, that scenic Shakespeare had reached such extremes by the turn of the last century that a reaction Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sq/article/23/1/21/5100337 by guest on 29 September 2021 was inevitable, and it is not difficult to find forces alive at the end of the century that would have ended the established vogue even if Poel had never lived and had never formed the Elizabethan Stage Society. It is also true that Poel's direct influence hardly spread beyond London. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it was Poel who first demonstrated that the whole conception behind the current methods of staging Shakespeare was radically wrong, demonstrated this fact not by criticism alone but by what Shaw later referred to as "desperate experiments".1 It is further true that the later producers who did finally overturn spectacular Shakespeare—from Gran- ville-Barker to Bridges-Adams and Nugent Monck—were directly indebted to him. As it turns out, Poel is actually a rather difficult person to come to terms with. Pie was so radically right in the main things he did, and so persevering against the forces of the theater that he opposed, that one hates to have to qualify one's praise. Moreover, he fought virtually single-handedly for the first twenty-five years of his professional career; Shaw's was almost the only im­ portant critical voice raised in his favor, and at the time Shaw's patronage was probably at least as much a handicap as a blessing. And yet, so eccentric and single-minded was Poel that, as much as one hates to admit it, there was a good bit of justification in Archer's charge (made, however, for all the wrong reasons) that Poel was a "non-scenic Beerbohm Tree".2 Unfortunately, Poel got worse as he went on, and his last productions, coming at a time when he was at last getting the recognition he deserved, were indeed little better than Beer­ bohm Tree's, if for different reasons. But we begin at least with his virtues, which can hardly be overestimated. He saw that something was radically wrong with the staging of Shakespeare's plays, and he devoted his whole life to reforming the principles behind current staging practices. Poel entered the theater relatively late in life, having had no professional training before he joined Charles Mathew's company in 1876 at die age of twenty-four. He seems to have entered the theater from the begin­ ning for the sole purpose of reforming it. Pie first saw Irving in 1873, and immediately detested what he saw; he found Irving's acting "unwholesome" in stirring up emotion with no resolution; the celebrated third act of The Bells, 1 In the "Forward" to Cymbeline Refinished (1937), Complete Plays with Prefaces (New York, 1963), IV, 781. 2 The Nation, 5 July 1913, pp. 535-536. 22 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY Mathias' death scene, seemed to him "false to art and to good sense".3 Of Irv- ing's Richard III in 1877, he wrote in his diary: He appears to aim at creating an effect by working his scene up to a strik­ ing picture upon which the curtain may fall. This is a modern practice that I much dislike as it is sensational and stagey.4 The impetus behind Poel's intended reform was rather awkwardly religious and utilitarian. Again from his diary, a year before: Where would those large numbers that never enter a church get their in­ Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sq/article/23/1/21/5100337 by guest on 29 September 2021 struction of what is right and wrong, of the misery of crime and the bless­ ings of virtue, if not from the stage?5 His dissatisfaction with the "sensational and stagey" soon led him to question the whole method of staging Shakespeare. He was, especially at first, primarily interested in seeing Shakespeare's text put on the stage: his early work did no more than attack the acting versions then current. In 1879 he founded The Elizabethans, a group of "professional ladies and gentlemen whose efforts are specially directed toward creating a more general taste for the study of Shake­ speare",6 and in 1881 he got F. J. Furnivall to assist him in arranging a per­ formance of the 1603 quarto of Hamlet, and to invite him (Poel) to give a talk to the New Shakspere Society on current acting editions of Hamlet? The Elizabethans had toured the provinces during the summer of 1879, giving costume recitals of scenes from various plays. But the Hamlet was to be a full production, in which Poel himself would play the Prince, and Maud Holt (later Lady Tree) would be engaged to play Ophelia. The rest of the cast were amateurs. The performance was given without scenery and without music; Poel did use a curtain (though there were no intervals), and did not attempt any kind of Elizabethan stage—he did not even use an upper or inner stage. As his lec­ ture to the New Shakspere Society and several letters to the press indicate, he was not at this time concerned with attempting to simulate Elizabethan stage conventions at all; he was only concerned with showing how radically wrong nineteenth-century acting versions were from a standpoint of text alone. For example, in the lecture he is led to such considerations as the following: The second scene [of act two] is called 'A Room in the Castle' both in the Globe and acting editions. Might it not be an exterior scene? It is true that Polonius remarks 'Here in the lobby,' but the line next to this in the first quarto suggests that he is pointing to some place off the scene, for lie adds 'There let Ophelia walk,' and Ophelia is on the stage. An exterior scene would, in my opinion, give more meaning to the words 'Will you walk out of the air, my lord?' and to Hamlet's speech, 'This most excellent canopy the air,' etc. The scene of a palace garden or cloister could be well intro­ duced in a play so full of interiors.8 Similarly, Poel has a good deal to say in favor of having an interval to show 3 Robert Spcaight, William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p. 20. 4 Spcaight, p. 32. 5 Spcaight, pp. 36-37. 6 Spcaight, p. 46. 7 Reprinted in Sha\espeare in the Theatre (London, 1913), pp. 156-176. 8 Shakespeare in the Theatre, pp. 161-162. WILLIAM POEL 23 that time has passed between some scenes, such as between the fourth and fifth scenes of Act Four "to allow of Laertes' return from France".9 Poel would later have known such considerations to be irrelevant to the Elizabethan stage, and, indeed, to be more in character coming from Irving's pen than his own. It seems rather strange, moreover, that Poel should perform the First Quarto of Hamlet to demonstrate his dissatisfaction with contemporary acting editions; certainly out of the corpus of Shakespeare's plays a better choice could have been made with which to begin his revolution in the production of Shakespeare, to say nothing of the Second Quarto or Folio versions of Hamlet Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sq/article/23/1/21/5100337 by guest on 29 September 2021 itself. But Poel was convinced that the First Quarto was a pirated first draft of "*• Shakespeare's play, and, as he wrote in The Era a week after the production, he thought it represented "more truly his dramatic conception than either Quarto II or our stage versions."10 Furnivall shared this view, and not only did the production take place under his auspices, but it was Furnivall who arranged the text. The later text, they felt, was more "literary"—they could not deny the mutilation of the dialogue in the 1603 quarto—but less dramatic. Forty years later Poel was still of this same opinion; in 1922 he contributed a note to Notes and Queries maintaining that the First Quarto was a cut and rearranged version of the prompt-book made by an actor for touring perform­ ances.11 In his lecture, Poel argued for playing the Second Quarto, but for cut­ ting it down in accordance with the dramatic structure of Quarto One. For, as he later wrote, the Second Quarto "though more artistically suited as the framework of Hamlet's irregular mind, [is] too subtle and elaborate to be effective on the public stage".12 Poel was reacting against the sentimental Prince who usurped the play on stage, but his reaction led him to a great many eccentric opinions, and we shall see later what he did to the Second Quarto when he produced it in 1914. The performance was by no means a success. I know of no one who praised either the acting or the production; the former was amateurish, the latter crude. Though there was no scenery, Poel did attempt effects with lighting; the first scene was played in darkness, but at Horatio's "in russet mantle clad" the gas lights were suddenly turned up,13 producing what must have been a ludicrous effect. The performance became important later because it was Poel's first production, and marked the beginning of his attempt to restore Shake­ speare to an Elizabethan stage.
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