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The rise of directorial influence in Broadway Shakespearean production: 1920-1950

Weiss, Steven Marc, Ph.D.

The Ohio Stato University, 1994

UMI 300N.ZeebRd. Ann Arbor. MI 48106

THE RISE OF DIRECTORIAL INFLUENCE

IN BROADWAY SHAKESPEAREAN PRODUCTION: 1920-1950.

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the

Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Steven Marc Weiss, B.F.A., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1994

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

S. Constantinidis

J. Reilly divise:Adviser A. Woods Department of Theatre ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express sincere gratitude to Dr. Stratos

Constantinidis for his guidance and encouragement as well as for his supportiveness and his seemingly limitless patience.

Appreciation is also extended to the other members of my advisory committee. Dr. Joy Reilly and Dr. Alan Woods, for their helpful comments and suggestions. The staff of The

Billy Rose Collection at the Lincoln Center Library for the

Performing Arts is acknowledged for its helpfulness; I am particularly grateful to research librarian Christine

Karatnytsky for demonstrating her personal interest in my research. Finally, I offer my sincere appreciation to family members and friends for maintaining faith in my ability to persevere, and especial thanks to JBL for his conscientious prodding whenever I wanted to be doing something else.

ij. VITA

January 17, 1950 ...... Born - Brooklyn, New York

1973 ...... B.F.A., School of Fine and Applied Arts, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts

1987 ...... M.A., State University of New York, University Center at Binghamton, Binghamton, New York

1993-Present ...... Lecturer in Theatre, The Ohio State University, Marion Campus, Marion, Ohio

FIELD OF STUDY

Major Field: Theatre

111 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... ii

VITA ...... iii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER PAGE

I. EARLY 20TH-CENTURY BROADWAY SHAKESPEAREAN PRODUCTION ...... 20

II. DAVID BELASCO: SHAKESPEARE AND NATURALISM . 44

III. ARTHUR HOPKINS; SHAKESPEARE AND THE NEW STAGECRAFT ...... 82

IV. ORSON WELLES: SHAKESPEARE AND FORMALISM . . 147

V. GUTHRIE MCCLINTIC: SHAKESPEARE AND THE (STAR-VEHICLE) ENSEMBLE ...... 218

VI. MARGARET WEBSTER: SHAKESPEARE POPULARIZED . 279

CONCLUSION ...... 361

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 381

IV INTRODUCTION

The staging of plays has become a focal subject during the final quarter of the twentieth century, in which performance analysis has gained ground at the expense of the analysis of dramatic literature in departments of theatre.

The shift in critical focus away from "dramatic" literature and toward "theatrical" performance is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the area of Shakespearean criticism.

The "revolution" in Shakespearean criticism, as J. L.

Styan has labelled it, was kindled nearly a century ago in the critical writings and staging experiments of both

William Poel (1852-1934) and Harley Granvi1le-Barker (1877-

1946).! The twentieth-century movement toward a more production-centered Shakespearean criticism parallels a comparable revolution in Shakespearean production itself.

Styan submits that the two are linked. The change in emphasis to "a line of scholarship . . . directly related to the practical business of staging a play," he holds

^ J. L. Styan, The Shakespeare Revolution; Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977) 6. 2 accountable for the century's most significant advances in

Shakespearean study.^

The English critic and Shakespeare scholar Ralph Berry has also noted a correlation between innovations in

Shakespearean production and criticism, which he expresses in terms of cause and effect;

in the last half-generation the réévaluation of Shakespeare has been led by the stage. The most interesting and influential reappraisals of certain plays have been launched by performance— and this in spite of the evidence one could accumulate that a given production owed something to an argument published in the scholarly press.^

Berry posits that changes in interpretations of

Shakespeare's plays reflect changes in the overall context in which the plays are both read and produced:

In choosing one of his dramas, a director reanimates it with the spirit of his own society and day. In addition to his personal vision, he will identify some current social assumptions and preoccupations in his production. He has no choice. So the history of Shakespearean productions is always a guide of sorts to the times.'*

Acknowledging the influence of the socio-historical context on interpretation. Berry's unspoken assumption is that

Shakespearean study can serve as a model for non-

Shakespearean theatrical study as well.

^ Styan 4.

^ Ralph Berry, Changing Stvle in Shakespeare (London: Allen, 1981) 5.

'* Berry, Changing Stvles 1. 3

This view is supported by Toby Cole and Helen Krich

Chinoy, editors of the anthology Directors on Directing, the

1963 revised edition of which contains a section entitled

"Staging Shakespeare: A Survey of Current Problems and

Opinions." The survey— added as a supplement to the contents of the original book, published in 1953 as

Directing the Plav— includes excerpts from the writings of a dozen European and American directors of the twentieth- century known at least in part for their work in

Shakespearean production. Its inclusion a decade later was justified by editors Cole and Chinoy as both practical

(since the intervening period had witnessed something of a

Shakespeare "boom") and, more importantly, paradigmatic of the evolving notions of theatre in general:

How Shakespeare is staged has produced an important index to theatrical values from the Restoration on. His plays are the raw material used by successive generations to define and redefine what theatre means to them.^

In The Emptv Space. British director Peter Brook has suggested reasons why Shakespeare's theatre can wield so much influence on theatre artists and spectators alike.

Brook suggests that Shakespeare's appeal derives from the impossibility of reconciling its multi-faceted human contradictions. The plays exhibit all aspects of human character simultaneously, presumably much the same as a

® Preface, Directors on Directing. Revised Edition, ed. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1963) ix. 4

cubist painting displays objects as viewed simultaneously

from various perspectives.

Brook has found in Shakespeare's multi-faceted vision a

correlation with those of two highly disparate twentieth-

century playwrights, Brecht and Beckett:

A primitive situation disturbs us in our subconscious, our intelligence watches, comments, philosophizes. . . . We identify emotionally, subjectively— and yet at one and the same time we evaluate politically, objectively in relation to society.®

Brook further asserts that no one before or since

Shakespeare succeeded as well as he in writing plays "that

pass through many stages of consciousness.

According to Charles Marowitz, classic works of art

(among which he numbers the plays of Shakespeare) survive

because they successfully communicate to succeeding

generations of perceivers some of the "moods, emotions and

relationships they know intimately from their own lives and

times;" in Shakespeare, he suggests, audiences identify

readily with "certain patterns of behaviour, feelings and

motives" that transcend the period in which they were

written.® Shakespeare's dramas, Marowitz contends, exist

on a "plateau" that must be scaled by its interpreters

® Peter Brook, The Emptv Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968) 87.

^ Brook 88.

® Charles Marowitz, Recvclina Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1991) 116. 5 before "the full weight of their artistic baggage" can be delivered; and what makes the plays so rich is that they contain within them at one and the same time both "the rhetorical and the lyrical, the domestic and the regal, the private and the public, the poetic and the mundane.

The American theatre critic John Mason Brown wrote in

1938 of the difficulties facing producers of Shakespeare, suggesting that there were no more tempting (nor more difficult) challenges to the ambitions of actors, directors and designers;

They are tests of strength and ingenuity, of skill and imagination, of intelligence and pliability. The results may at times be disastrous but they are always instructive.

And if Shakespeare's plays pose such intense demands upon the actors who perform in them or to the designers who invent settings, costumes, lighting or sound for them, surely they present even greater challenges to directors; for theatre in the twentieth century has evolved steadily into an art that relies profoundly upon the vision of a director who allegedly functions as the central, unifying force in a highly collaborative form of expression.

Before the end of the nineteenth century, actors generally served as direct intermediaries between the ideas of a dramatist and the response of spectators to the

® Marowitz 116-117.

John Mason Brown, Two on the Aisle: Ten Years of the American Theatre in Performance (New York: Norton, 1938) 21. 6

presentation of those ideas. In re-creating the imaginary

life of a playtext before an audience, actors functioned as the text's principal interpreters. But since that time, and throughout the twentieth century, actors have experienced a gradual decline in power in terms of their ability to

influence an entire production, while directors (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, designers) have experienced a marked

increase in such power and influence.

The shifting of "go-between" responsibility from actor to director was stimulated in large part by the development of scientific and technological advancements that revolutionized theatrical production by making it far too complex to be staged effectively by a leading performer.

The technological revolution in theatrical machinery and stage lighting that began in Germany during the 1880s was prompted in part by the desire to find a more efficient means of shifting three-dimensional settings than the existing, non-electrical methods allowed. Electricity as a new technological force in the theatre made possible such devices as the elevator stage, the revolving stage and the mechanized rolling platform stage. Improvements in the incandescent lamp during the first decade of the twentieth century led to advancements in stage lighting, such as incandescent spotlights, floodlights and projections.

Gareth and Barbara Lloyd Evans, The Shakespeare Companion (New York: Scribner's, 1978) 146. 7

The technological innovations of the mechanized age

served to accelerate the rising power and responsibility of

the director in theatrical production. As staging problems

became more complicated, a director (presumably a more

impartial individual than an actor portraying a leading

character in the play) could more objectively than the actor

interpret a playwright's work.

The modern director performs a function that is both

interpretive and cohesive. "The director deploys his or her

actors and ideas about design, music, text in the interests

of a particular concept of the play . . . derived from and

manifested in an extremely subtle attention to its

details.

The concept of theatre directing in the most modern

sense of the term is a relatively new one. While the

overseeing of theatrical activity can be traced, at least to

some extent, as far back as the training of the choruses who

performed in the plays of Ancient Greece, directing was

firmly established as an independent theatrical art only

beginning in the 1870's, under the influence of Georg II,

the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, who formed a troupe at his court

and, "through a series of international tours, showed Europe what could be done when a play was completely realized in

Anthony B. Dawson, Watching Shakespeare; A Playgoer's Guide (New York: St. Martin's, 1988) 9. 8 performance through the application of a single, unified vision.

Saxe-Meiningen's influence was far reaching and, by the end of the nineteenth century, the director had become a commonplace figure in the theatre, although at the outset there were no traditions upon which directors could base their methods. As a result, "the terminology used to refer to directors and their art remained vague well into the present century.

Directing is among the most easily misunderstood of activities centrally related to play production. In the introduction to Great Directors at Work.David Richard

Jones argues that theatre directing is and has been

"inherently unsystematized and fluid" citing four reasons why he believes this is so:

(1) the director's position is only a century old, and its

job description has been codified only progressively;

Samuel Leiter, From Belasco to Brook: Representative Directors of the Enalish-soeakina Stage (New York: Greenwood, 1991) xi. The Duke of Saxe-Meiningen's contribution, as well as that of his forerunners, is chronicled in Helen Krich Chinoy's "The Emergence of the Director" (see Directors on Directing 3-25).

Leiter xi.

David Richard Jones, Great Directors at work: Stanislavskv. Brecht. Kazan. Brook (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986). 9

(2) theatre is collaborative— actors, designers, producers,

and even lawyers compete to wield influence over a

production's growth and style;

(3) theatre's collaborative structure and its many

component media make production a complex operation

with many points of view, many component parts, and an

unpredictably interactive set of means and tools;

(4) directing is a process accomplished over considerable

time, not a momentary lyric flash of inspiration-

création.

Taking all these factors into consideration, the world of a director, Jones posits, "is confusing to casual observers and resistant to coherent intellectual or critical treatment.

The director today exerts more influence over a theatre production than ever before. And, in the English speaking world at least, no greater challenge is perceived for a director than the challenge of staging Shakespeare's plays.

Directors view Shakespeare "as the ultimate test of their mettle," as an opportunity "to flex their artistic muscles.

It is no small irony, then, that the directing of

Shakespearean drama in England and the United States remained, well into the twentieth century, a function of

Jones 6.

Dawson 3. 10

actor-managers whose productions served as vehicles for

their own "star-turn" performances in leading roles. The

prominent exception in nineteenth-century America was

Augustin Daly, a manager who was not himself an actor, but

who produced sixteen of Shakespeare's plays (a number of

which served as vehicles for the principal actress of his

company, Ada Rehan) between 1869 and his death in 1899.^®

Notwithstanding Daly's significant directorial

contributions, American Shakespearean production in the late

nineteenth century and during the first twenty years of the

twentieth was almost exclusively the purview of actor-

managers, most notable among whom were Edwin Booth and

Laurence Barrett, Mary Anderson, Richard Mansfield, Robert

Mantell, E. H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe.

The history of Shakespeare on the American stage in the

twentieth century spans a remarkable period of development

from actor-directed productions featuring a literal, highly

pictorial Victorian approach to mise en scène, through

experimentation with the New Stagecraft methods (influenced

by the theory and practice of English theatre artist Gordon

Craig) in productions mounted by directors collaborating

closely with designers (or, in some cases, staged by

Louis Marder, His Exits and His Entrances: the Storv of Shakespeare's Reputation (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963) 313. 11 designers themselves), eventually leading to the eclectic "conceptual" approaches of interpretive directors who have exploited situations and themes in Shakespeare's dramatic works in order to express, by way of analogy, their own contemporary concerns.

The current investigation is focused on directorial theory and practice in the American theatre, localizing

Shakespearean production during the first three decades of

"directed" Shakespeare on the Broadway stage— from Arthur

Hopkins' 1920 production of Richard III to Guthrie

McClintic's production, in 1947, of Antony and Cleopatra— as epitomizing the directing of classic plays on the professional American stage during the first half of the twentieth century.

The Broadway theatre has been isolated as having been— prior to the postwar period, during which a pattern of decentralization of the American theatre was solidified by

The most prominent early examples of such productions were four collaborations in the early 1920's between director Arthur Hopkins and designer Robert Edmond Jones: Richard III, Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet. Gordon Craig's designs for a 1928 Macbeth eclipsed Douglas Ross's direction in contemporary reports, even though Craig himself was not directly involved in the production. Also, Norman Bel Geddes was both designer and director for a 1931 Hamlet.

Unveiled anti-war sentiments informed Vietnam War era productions of both Hamlet (1967: New York Public Theatre— directed by Joseph Papp) and Henry V (1969: American Shakespeare Festival, Stratford Connecticut— directed by Michael Kahn), exemplifying the "conceptual" approach. 12 the establishment of numerous regional professional theatres

in various cities around the country— the predominant venue

for professional theatre activity in the United States, setting the artistic standards that were emulated elsewhere.

While it seems that the major body of professional

Shakespeare production in the U.S. since the end of the

Second World War has occurred outside New York in the regional and festival venues, such companies were relatively non-existent before 1945. Despite early activities of

Shakespeare festivals in Ashland, Oregon (founded in 1935) and in San Diego, California (also established in 1935, but active only sporadically until after the war), the

"Festival" phenomenon— which figures among America's

"greatest contributions to the spread of Shakespeare's works and their appreciation"^^— has superseded Shakespearean production on Broadway only during the second half of the current century.

Productions considered herein, thus, (with the notable exception of Orson Welles' "voodoo" Macbeth of 1936, first produced off-Broadway at the Lafayette Theatre and later moved to the Adelphi, a Broadway theatre) are only those that were introduced in New York City on the commercial

"Broadway" stage during the period in question.

Lloyd Evans 184. 13

Methodology and Organization

While a brief overview of the post-war period is provided in the first chapter as a means of identifying generalized trends in American Shakespearean production, the work of five American directors— David Belasco, Arthur

Hopkins, Guthrie McClintic, Orson Welles and Margaret

Webster, all of whom staged Shakespeare in New York during the period 1920-1950— has been scrutinized in detail in order to focus more specifically on their representative contributions. These directors were selected on the basis of the following criteria, which have been determined arbitrarily in order to render the area of study manageable: a) the director staged at least one Shakespeare play

during the period that achieved a respectable run in

the New York commercial (i.e., Broadway) theatre. Any

run equalling or exceeding four weeks (approximately 32

performances) will be considered "respectable" for the

purpose of this study, as long-running productions of

Shakespeare were rare during this period, fewer than

fifteen garnering 100 performances or more; b) the director staged at least one Shakespeare play on

Broadway during the period that has merited attention

(beyond contemporary newspaper and periodical reviews

and articles) in scholarly journals and other secondary

source materials, including monographs and unpublished

dissertations on the directors and their careers. 14

While one director (Margaret Webster) focused a major

portion of her work on Shakespeare, the others

(Belasco, Hopkins, McClintic and Welles) produced his

plays relatively infrequently, but with no less impact; c) the director's own views regarding Shakespearean

production in general and/or the directing of

Shakespeare in particular have been preserved either in

promptbooks, monographs, articles or interviews others

have held with them. In order adequately to trace the

rise of directorial influence in Shakespearean

production, it is necessary to come to terms with the

attitudes and intentions behind distinctive directorial

approaches.

The first and second categories include a number of

American directors active in Shakespearean production on

Broadway during the period of study who were not selected for closer examination, because there is little or no material available to satisfy the third criterion. The five directors selected are the only representative directors of

Shakespeare in New York between 1920 and 1950 whose own thoughts on directing Shakespeare are accessible.

Source materials have been examined for what they can reveal regarding the prevalent attitudes of prominent

American directors active during the period toward the producing of Shakespeare. Production reviews and (where available) the directors' self-evaluations also have been 15

inspected as a means of comparing theory with practice. The aim is to deduce a general pattern (or patterns) of American directorial theory and practice in the approach to

Shakespeare's plays during the earliest period of "directed"

Shakespeare on the Broadway stage. All pertinent aspects of the production work of the five directors have been examined for both similarities and differences, and as a means of ascertaining whether any design arises regarding a distinctive American approach to Shakespearean production.

The first chapter provides brief overviews of

Shakespearean production in New York during the period prior to that of the study (intended as contextual background for the advent of "directed" Shakespeare) and of Shakespearean production in New York during the period of study (intended to demonstrate the relevance of the five representative directors to the study).

Chapter II, which focuses on David Belasco's 1922 production of The Merchant of Venice, examines the compatibility (or lack of compatibility) between

Shakespeare's playtexts and naturalism in the theatre. Its purview includes an investigation of the ways in which naturalistic staging techniques must be compromised when adopted for Shakespearean production.

The abstract principles of the New Stagecraft, developed in Europe by designers Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig and Georg Fuchs were first employed in Broadway Shakespeare 16 by Robert Edmond Jones in productions he designed for director Arthur Hopkins. Chapter III examines Hopkins' four

Shakespeare productions— for which a distinctly American form of New Stagecraft design was developed by Hopkins and

Jones, utilizing principles (predominantly) of minimalism and expressionism— in light of the director's theory of

Unconscious Projection, by which he attempted to evoke a unified, collective audience response by appealing to the conscious minds of the spectators.

The kind of Shakespearean production commonly referred to nowadays as "conceptual," insofar as it focuses on a director's singular perception regarding how best to communicate whatever [s]he determines to be the central, unifying theme of the play, is the overriding concern of

Chapter IV. This chapter explores two dynamic productions staged during the mid-1930s by theatre and film director

Orson Welles as being among the forerunners of the

"conceptual" approach to Shakespeare on Broadway.

Chapter V, which focuses on three Shakespeare productions directed by Guthrie McClintic, examines the way in which the introduction of directing eventually altered the nature of "star-vehicle" Shakespeare— which had been the predominant mode of production under actor-managers and, in fact, has continued to be so in commercial Shakespearean production throughout the twentieth century. Abetted by his wife, actor-producer Katharine Cornell, McClintic dedicated 17 himself to the development of "ensemble" productions, even when the cast included star performers.

The Shakespeare productions of Margaret Webster, the foremost "popularizer" of Shakespeare in America during the twentieth century, form the subject of Chapter VI. Webster kept Shakespeare alive and commercially successful on the

Broadway stage for more than a decade leading up to the mid­ century. She produced the plays not for scholars and students and sections of the public who were already

Shakespeare "converts" but rather for "the large majority of audiences who, at any rate in the United States, have to be persuaded that Shakespeare is anything but a dead 'classic' without modern urgency or personal appeal.

Margaret Webster wrote in the 1940s that no modern

American tradition existed for the producing or playing of

Shakespeare,^^ and director Tyrone Guthrie shared that opinion, declaring in the 1960s that there had not emerged a

"recognizably American style of classical productions."2*

Yet, Shakespeare has been produced in the United States with great frequency since the earliest colonial period; and it has been argued that an examination of Shakespeare in

Alfred Harbage, Theatre for Shakespeare (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1955) 89.

Margaret Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears (New York: McGraw, 1942) 10.

24 Tyrone Guthrie, In Various Directions: A View of Theatre (New York: Macmillan, 1965) 65. 18

America is one way of "testing our social and cultural growth.Indeed, according to Michael Bristol,

Shakespeare "exists" in the United States as "a complex institutional reality that cuts across many different levels of culture and many contrasting domains of social practice.

The institutionalization of Shakespeare in America,

Bristol posits, is the result of this nation's attempt to appropriate from Great Britain its greatest cultural treasure. The "Shakespearization" of America he understands as "a massive transfer of authority and of cultural capital to American society." That transfer of authority is a function of "tradition," and Bristol contends that tradition is "a social agency and . . . a medium for sustaining collective life," concrete logistical aspects of which in the United States have focused primarily on "the building of libraries and research facilities" and on "the activities of editors and textual scholars.

When Bristol's notion of Shakespearean "tradition" is applied to the realm of theatrical performance, the concrete evidence must focus on staged productions of the plays. If the perceived lack of a "recognizably American style" of

Esther Cloudman Dunn, Shakespeare in America (New York: Macmillan, 1939) 3.

Michael Bristol, Shakespeare's America. America's Shakespeare (London & New York: Routledge, 1990) 2.

Bristol 10. 19

Shakespearean production expressed by Webster in 1942 and again by Guthrie in 1965 is to be re-evaluated in the 1990s, then, it must be by an in-depth examination of Shakespeare as produced on American stages and directed by American theatre artists.

In general, American theatre production during the second half of the twentieth century has developed into an extraordinarily eclectic form of expression, borrowing cumulatively from various sources and antecedents— among which number the handful of influential Shakespeare productions examined in this study.

The question remains whether the stylistic amalgamation that informs American theatre practice in the second half of the twentieth century can be regarded as a distinctly

American style in and of itself and, if so, whether that eclectic style can be said to be the evidence proving the existence of an American tradition in the production of

Shakespeare.

If a twentieth-century "tradition" of directing

Shakespeare in the United States can be said to exist at all, it would likely have obtained in large measure from the ground-breaking Broadway productions of David Belasco,

Arthur Hopkins, Orson Welles, Guthrie McClintic and Margaret

Webster during the earliest decades of "directed" American

Shakespeare. CHAPTER I

EARLY 20TH-CENTURY BROADWAY SHAKESPEAREAN PRODUCTION

The absence in the United States of any prominent institution dedicated to the appreciation of Shakespeare's works analogous to the Royal Shakespeare Company or the

Royal National Theatre of Great Britain is due in large measure to a lack of federal support for the performing arts in this country comparable to that the British government has provided in subsidizing its artistic community since after the end of World War II.

Nevertheless, as Michael Bristol recently asserted,

Shakespeare has been adopted by Americans as much as he has by the English as representing the highest possible standard of cultural achievement. Thus, Bristol argues, Shakespeare is in essence as much an American institution as he is an

English one.^ Both English-speaking nations view

Shakespeare as a central figure in their sense of cultural pride:

many of the roots and branches of both American and English culture find a common sustenance in the moral values, the customs, the intellectual and emotional realities, and the language of Shakespeare.^

^ Bristol, pp 1-11.

^ Lloyd Evans 182.

20 21

Shakespearean production has been a part of the

American theatre scene since long before there existed a

body of dramatic literature written by American authors and his plays have a long history of activity on American

stages.

The earliest American productions of Shakespeare's plays were given by itinerant English companies, beginning

in earnest with the 1752 arrival in Virginia Colony of Lewis

Hallam and his "London Company of Comedians." The British influence dominated American Shakespearean theatre for decades, with tours by George Frederick Cooke, Edmund Kean and Junius Brutus Booth setting the standards of

Shakespearean production well into the nineteenth century.

Edwin Forrest (1806-1972), "the first American actor convincingly able to compete with, and often triumph over, the best England could provide," and Charlotte Cushman

(1816-1976), "America's greatest 19th-century and tragic actress," were central to "the USA's emergence into full commitment and distinction in Shakespearean theatre.But it was with Edwin Booth (1833-1993), the preeminent native- born actor of the American stage for nearly four decades in the late nineteenth century,^ "that a characteristic

^ Lloyd Evans 183.

^ Lloyd Evans 184. 22

American ingenuity linked with imagination began to assert

itself in presenting Shakespeare"^

Actor-manager directed productions accounted for nearly all American-produced Shakespeare before 1920, and a virtual monopoly in presenting Shakespeare's plays in New York was held by American actor-producers.® Richard Mansfield offered his renowned interpretation of the title role in

Henry V for 54 performances in 1900, which he nearly matched two years later with 50 performances as Brutus in Julius

Caesar; he presented Shakespeare once more before his death in 1907, appearing during the 1905-1906 season as Richard

III and Shylock. Robert B. Mantell produced at least ten of the bard's plays during the century's first two decades, appearing in New York quite frequently between 1904 and

1918. Sothern and Marlowe presented Shakespeare in New

York, appearing together for the first time in 1904 and repeatedly thereafter until they retired from the stage twenty years later. Walter Hampden began offering his celebrated interpretation of Hamlet in 1918, which he

^ Marder 313.

® Except where otherwise noted, the series of books edited by Burns Mantle and his associates, entitled The Best Plavs of . . . and the Yearbook of the Drama in America (New York: Dood, Mead & Co.) is the source for what follows. Information in greater detail about the period between 1900 and theatre events concurrent with the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration can be found in Charles H. Shattuck's Shakespeare on the American Stage: From Booth and Barrett to Sothern and Marlowe (Washington, DC: Folger, 1987). 23 revived a number of times in the years that followed.

Hampden was one of the few American actor-producers whose greatest successes in Shakespeare occurred after 1920: in

1925-1926, he offered productions of Othello, Hamlet and The

Merchant of Venice that ran for a cumulative total of 179 performances. Several other American actor-managers appeared in only a handful of Shakespearean roles before

1920, including Viola Allen, Margaret Anglin, William

Faversham, James K. Hackett, John E. Kellerd, and Annie

Russell.

Visits by European actor-managers became rarer occurrences after the turn of the century than they had been before 1900. Ben Greet's Company presented Shakespeare in

New York during the 1906-1907 and the 1909-1910 seasons.

Ermete Novelli played Shakespeare in Italian for six weeks in 1907. Johnston Forbes-Robertson performed three plays in repertory, including his renowned Hamlet in 1913. Harley

Granvi1le-Barker offered his production of A Midsummer

Night's Dream in 1915, and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's visit coincided with the Shakespeare Tercentenary celebration of

1916. While British actor-managers continued to exert a significant influence over Shakespearean production in Great

Britain until after World War II, their presence on the

Broadway stage became virtually negligible after the

Tercentenary. 24

In England, several producer-directors had been staging

(without acting in) Shakespeare's plays since the I890's, when, with his Shakespeare Society, William Poel "mounted his campaign against Henry Irving's overblown splendors at the Lyceum by reviving the platform and balcony stage of the

Elizabethans and banishing scenery altogether.Poel's experimentation with Victorian notions of Elizabethan staging techniques were innovative in their time, but most of his work was done with amateurs and never achieved widespread public recognition. It was Harley Granville-

Barker, Poel's disciple, who in refining and popularizing

Poel's techniques, "revolutionized the staging of

Shakespeare along lines suggested by his mentor."®

"Directed" Shakespeare began much later on the New York stage than it did in Great Britain, securing significantly for the first time in 1920. It was in that year the

American producer-director Arthur Hopkins presented the first of what developed into a series of four Shakespearean productions conceived in part as vehicles for members of the renowned Barrymore family. Richard III, starring John

Barrymore in his first classical role, opened on March 6 and ran for 27 performances. Lionel Barrymore played 28 performances of Macbeth a year later, beginning on February

^ Shattuck 15,

® Chinoy, "The Emergence of the Director," Directors on Directing 72. 25

7, 1921. Then in December of 1922, Hopkins presented Romeo and Juliet starring Ethel Barrymore, which had a run of 29 performances). Just one month earlier, on November 16, John had opened in Hopkins' production of Hamlet, which eventually played 101 consecutive performances (surpassing the record of 100 set by Edwin Booth in the 1860's) and became one of the landmark Shakespearean productions of the twentieth-century.

The Hopkins-directed productions of Shakespeare were designed by Robert Edmond Jones whose work, based on principles derived from the so-called New Stagecraft, attracted critical attention equal to (or, in the case of

Macbeth, greater than) that received by the director or the actors. The designer's contributions cannot be overlooked, for his work bears a direct relation to Hopkins' theory of

"Unconscious Projection," which served as a guiding principle behind the Hopkins-Jones Shakespeare collaborations.

Hopkins himself has provided the clearest definition of his method, which is based upon extreme simplification and the weeding out of non-essentials that distract because they arouse the conscious mind:

All tricks are conscious in the mind of the person who uses them, and they must necessarily have a conscious appeal. I want the unconscious of the actors talking to the unconscious of the audience. 26

and I strive to eliminate every obstacle to that.^

Arthur Hopkins' desire for Unconscious Projection found

its ideal visual equivalent in the minimalist approach to

mise en scène Jones derived from principles developed by

European designers (particularly by Adolphe Appia, Gordon

Craig and Georg Fuchs). Visual abstraction, common in

American Shakespearean production during the second half of

the twentieth century, owes much to the pioneering efforts

of Arthur Hopkins and his visionary designer, Robert Edmond

Jones— and their Shakespearean collaborations are examined

in detail in Chapter III.

On December 21 of 1922, a production of The Merchant of

Venice starring David Warfield opened at the Lyceum Theatre

under the direction of David Belasco, the foremost proponent

of Naturalism on the American stage. Belasco had never

before staged a Shakespeare play, and in spite of the

production's artistic and popular (although not financial)

success, he never directed Shakespeare again. The

naturalistic Merchant of Venice of 1922, a production that

Stanislavsky saw and held in high esteem, may be regarded as

an anomaly in Belasco's oeuvre, but it marks a significant

early instance of "directed" Shakespeare in America. A

close examination of Belasco's Merchant (see Chapter II)

® Arthur Hopkins, How's Your Second Act? (New York; Samuel French, 1931) 16. 27

reveals the nearly impossible task of applying the staging

techniques of naturalism to Shakespearean production.

A somewhat less traditional approach to Shakespeare was

first introduced to London audiences in 1925 by producer- director of the Birmingham Repertory Company, Sir Barry

Jackson, whose modern-dress Hamlet created a stir on both sides of the Atlantic. In its wake, two modern-dress

Shakespeare productions, both starring British actor Basil

Sydney, were presented successfully on Broadway during the late 1920's. A production of Hamlet (patterned closely after Jackson's) that was produced by Horace Liveright and staged by James Light, opened in November of 1925 and played

88 performances at the Booth Theatre.

Denmark's court [was] presented as such a gathering as might assemble at any present-day function, the ghost scenes being played on what appeared to be a terrace at Newport, and Polonius being shot neatly through the arras with a one-man automatic. Hamlet was at all times accoutered as a young man about town whose taste in dress was faultless according to the fashions of the time.

Sydney played Petruchio opposite an American Katharine, Mary

Ellis, when The Garrick Players offered a modern-dress production of The Taming of the Shrew early in the season of

1927-28. Under H. K. Ayliff's direction, the comedy was extremely successful, playing at the Garrick Theatre for a total of 175 performances. Katharine was dressed "in sports

The Best Plavs of 1925-26 491. 28 clothes and Petruchio in striped sweater and derby hat. The forced wedding journey [was] taken in a trick flivver.

Despite their popularity, these two productions failed to establish a new trend on Broadway, for Shakespeare was not produced in modern dress again until Orson Welles staged

Julius Caesar at the Mercury Theatre in 1937. Furthermore, neither Light nor Ayliff is listed as director of any subsequent Shakespearean production on Broadway, suggesting the possibility that they may have served as assistants to

Basil Sydney, staging the plays according to conceptions of his own devising.

Another development in the staging of Shakespeare during the 1920's resulted directly from the influence of the New Stagecraft. In 1928, a Broadway production of

Macbeth achieved notoriety not so much for Douglas Ross' direction or for the acting of the principal roles by Lyn

Harding and Florence Reed, but rather for its "designment"

[sic] by Gordon Craig.Although Ross had worked closely on a visual concept with Craig during the director's summer visit to the designer's Italian villa earlier that year,

Craig himself took no part in (nor did he travel to New York to supervise) the execution of his designs. Three years

11 The Best Plavs of 1927-28 439.

The Best Plavs of 1928-29 418.

Douglas Ross, "The Craig-Shakespeare Macbeth," The Drama 19 (December 1928): 70. 29

later, in 1931, a production of Hamlet, starring Raymond

Massey, was presented in New York "designed, staged, directed, drest [sic], and illuminated"^^ by American designer Norman Bel Geddes. Critics in New York generally failed to notice that, while credited with directing the production, Bel Geddes in fact had re-staged the Hamlet

(originally directed by Howard Lindsay) that he had designed for the Lakewood Players of Skowhegan, Maine during the summer of 1929.^^ An Othello that opened in January of

1937, featuring Walter Huston in the title role and Brian

Aherne as lago, was designed and directed by Robert Edmond

Jones, who had collaborated with Arthur Hopkins and the

Barrymores in the early 1920's. Like the Bel Geddes Hamlet, this was a revision of the tragedy that Jones himself had produced, designed and directed during the summer of 1934 for the Third Annual Play Festival of the Central City Opera

House Association in Central City, Colorado.These representative examples of design-centered Shakespeare, like the aforementioned modern-dress productions, were exceptional; yet, they may have contributed in some small way to the subsequent rise of "conceptual" Shakespeare— in

"A Hamlet of 'Lights' and 'Shades,' The Literarv Digest 111.9 (28 November 1931): 21.

see Frank Chouteau Brown, "The Bel Geddes' 'Hamlet, a Melodrama,'" The Drama 20.3 (December 1929): 73-4.

Ralph Pendleton, ed., The Theatre of Robert Edmond Jones (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1958) 173-4. 30 which visual imagery generally serves as a principal tool by which a director can convey his or her message(s).

Several of Shakespeare's most popular plays predominated Broadway production of Shakespeare in the first half of the twentieth century: Hamlet, Julius Caesar,

Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Romeo and Juliet,

The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night all received respectable New York runs (of a month or longer) more than once during the period. Audiences returned to these perennial favorites not so much to see how different directors staged them as much as to watch the most admired actors of their time interpret some of the most challenging roles of their careers. The following assertion was made in reference to American Shakespearean production in the nineteenth century, but it applies with almost equal force to the first half of the twentieth:

the names of the greatest American performers of the period . . . are inextricably bound up with the Shakespearean roles in which they achieved fame. Indeed, these roles were the measures of greatness by which an actor laid claim to immortality. For, as William Archer has observed, 'All we really know about the great actors of the past is the effect they produced upon their audiences.' And no plays . . . were so rich as Shakespeare's to produce 'effect.

Several "star" performers of the first half-century directed their own companies in the tradition of nineteenth- century actor-managers, although the practice all but

Marder 220. 31 disappeared on the Broadway stage by the mid-1930's. After the early years of the century, which were dominated by

Mansfield, Mantell, Sothern and Marlowe, the most prominent actor-managers who programmed Shakespeare with any regularity were Walter Hampden, Fritz Leiber, and Eva Le

Gallienne. Between 1918 and 1934, Hampden appeared as

Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Shylock, and Henry V— directing himself in all but Henry V (the staging of which is credited to Claude Bragdon). Leiber, who had acted with Mantell's company before forming his own Civic Shakespeare Society in

Chicago, offered Broadway audiences a number of Shakespeare productions, for only a handful of performances each, both at the end of the 1929-30 season and then again early during the season of 1930-31. Le Gallienne directed the Civic

Repertory Theatre presentations of Twelfth Night, in which she played Viola in 1926-27, and Romeo and Juliet, in which she played Juliet in 1930.

There were a number of "star" actors who, although they rarely if ever directed themselves, nevertheless elected occasionally to include certain Shakespearean roles in their repertoire. Directors of Shakespeare's plays presented as vehicles for star performers either were hired by the actors to help them package the material or else were themselves catalysts prodding the actors to undertake certain roles at certain points in their careers. Thus, in January of 1923— just one month after the opening of Belasco's Merchant of 32

Venice and two months after that of Hopkins' Hamlet— a

production of Romeo and Juliet was presented starring Jane

Cowl under the direction of Frank Reicher. Despite

formidable competition from David Warfield and John

Barrymore, Cowl attracted so much attention as Juliet that the production eventually outdistanced those of her rivals, achieving a run of 157 performances (compared with 101 for

Hamlet and 92 for The Merchant of Venice). Cowl subsequently played 31 performances as Cleopatra (in 1924, also under Reicher's direction) and Viola for 65 performances (in 1930, under the direction of Andrew Leigh).

Katharine Cornell— a "star" actor who produced many of her own vehicles— undertook only two Shakespearean roles during her distinguished career: Juliet, for 77 performances during the 1934-35 season (and 15 performances in revival the following year), and Cleopatra, for a run of 126 performances during the season of 1947-48. The director in both instances was Guthrie McClintic, to whom Miss Cornell was married. McClintic also directed John Gielgud, during the 1936-37 season, in an extremely successful Hamlet, which set a new record for that play of 132 consecutive performances.

The most penetrating analysis available of his directorial approach and working methods reveals Guthrie

McClintic as an "anti-theorist" who responded to a script on an immediate, emotional level and then instinctively sought 33

"to direct the play in such a way as to 'put over to the audience' the same emotion he felt on reading it.He denounced directing that was overly analytical or obsessively attentive to individual details of stage business, asserting that at all times a director's foremost concern was "the quality of the play as a whole, its 'higher value'.

A director of Shakespeare's plays as "star" vehicles,

McClintic was nevertheless always more concerned with the overall effect of the acting ensemble than he was with any one central performance, demanding (and often obtaining, since Cornell shared his concern for) strong supporting casts. The New York production of Romeo and Juliet featured, in addition to Cornell, Basil Rathbone as Romeo,

Brian Aherne as Malvolio, Orson Welles as Tybalt, and Edith

Evans as the Nurse. When a national tour was organized after the original engagement was twice extended, new cast members included Maurice Evans as Romeo, Ralph Richardson as

Mercutio, Tyrone Power as Benvolio and Florence Reed in the role of the Nurse.

McClintic's Shakespeare productions— which are examined in Chapter V— are significant for the director's instinctual and expedient approach to the individual problems each play

Morton Eustis, "The Director Takes Command," Theatre Arts MonthIv 20 (Feb. 1936) 114.

Eustis 115. 34 occasioned and, especially, for his (and Cornell's) dedication to the cultivation of ensemble casts. "Any actor can act best surrounded by good actors," Cornell once professed, while she and McClintic were being interviewed for The New York Times. "The sparkle of fine acting makes a play live." McClintic concurred, adding: "And after all

. . . the play's the thing.

At the start of the 1935-36 season. The Theatre Guild offered a production of The Taming of the Shrew featuring husband-and-wife team Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne and directed by Harry Wagstaff Cribble. The Lunt-Fontanne Shrew eventually obtained a run of 129 performances, demonstrating to the Guild (in its first Shakespearean venture) the Bard's commercial potential. In subsequent years. The Theatre

Guild would produce some of the most highly successful New

York productions of Twelfth Night (1940-41, directed by

Margaret Webster), Othello (1943-44, directed by Margaret

Webster) and As You Like It (1949, directed by Michael

Benthall).

Theatre and film director Orson Welles had a lifelong fascination with Shakespeare that manifested itself in only a handful of stage productions (two of which played on

Broadway before 1950) and in three films that are generally acknowledged as being among the finest examples of

Woolf 32. 35

Shakespeare adapted for the cinema.Welles'

contribution to Broadway Shakespeare is as unique, complex

and deeply personal as the director was himself :

Shakespeare was Welles's first dramatic love, and whenever he . . . wanted to find himself artistically he . . . returned to Shakespeare's plays. In them he [found] not only themes compatible with his own and characters large enough to justify his most grandiose conceptions but also a standard against which he [could] measure his own egotism, a theatrical ideal which challenge[d] him to reconcile his subjective obsessions with the demands of universality

In 1936, Welles directed Macbeth for the Negro division

of the Federal Theatre Project, which was under the

supervision of producer-director John Houseman. It marked

Welles' "earliest full-scale production for the professional

theatre.The play was performed 64 times in Harlem's

Lafayette Theatre and later moved into a larger theatre in

the Broadway district. Although it was mounted in an off-

Broadway venue, Welles' Macbeth is nonetheless significant

for being "the first full-scale, professional Negro

Shakespearean production in theatrical history.

^ Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952) and Chimes at Midnight (1967). The last named was an adaptation by Welles of scenes from Shakespeare's history plays and of portions of Holinshend's Chronicles that related to the character of Falstaff.

Joseph McBride, Orson Welles. Cinema One Series 19 (New York: Viking, 1972) 106.

Richard France, "The 'Voodoo' Macbeth of Orson Welles," Yale Theatre 5.3 (1974): 66.

John Houseman, Run-through (New York: Simon, 1972) 190. 36

The Negro Theatre Project Macbeth stands as a

significant precursor of contemporary "conceptual" productions of Shakespeare's plays. Based on an idea suggested to him by his wife Virginia, Welles set the play

in a jungle of a mythical island resembling Haiti in the

West Indies. The text of the play was radically cut and, although some passages were transposed, the dialogue that

Welles retained was essentially unaltered. The number of

"weird sisters" (transformed into voodoo priestesses) was expanded from three to thirty— to evoke a world dominated by evil^®— and "the cast put in fancy dress that suggested a garden party given by Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones to show off his court.

Richard France, who has written extensively on Welles' theatrical career, posits that the concept for Macbeth served "to transform Shakespeare into a spectacle of thrills and sudden shocks" based more on a showman's need to impress than on a polemicist's desire to instruct.

In a Welles production . . . content served as little more than an obvious vehicle for its expressive form. Welles' real statement was contained in his violent imagery.

Welles' imaginative stage productions of Shakespeare, in other words, were conceived as theatrical events gauged to

25 France, "'Voodoo' Macbeth" 67.

The Best Plavs of 1935-36 475.

27 France, "'Voodoo' Macbeth" 67. 37

achieve the greatest visual and aural impact on their audiences.

If theatricalism was the point of the 1936 Macbeth,

France's generalization is (partly) undercut by Welles'

Mercury Theatre production a year later of Caesar, a "modern dress" version of Julius Caesar played without scenery and employing a text the director had altered considerably in order to present the play "as a political melodrama with clear contemporary parallels."^® Welles related the play's action and characters to the growing concern in the

United States over the anti-democratic political structures of Fascism and Nazism (in Italy and Germany, respectively), in order "to emphasize the similarity between the last days of the Roman republic and the political climate of Europe in the mid-thirties."^®

The press was quick to label Welles' Caesar anti-

Fascist; yet, while the director sought to point up contemporary parallels, he did not have overtly political

"agit-prop" aims in mind. His primary interest was in the character of Brutus (the role he played in the production) as a case-study of the liberal reformer and his ineffectual.

Houseman, Run-throuah 298.

Houseman, Run-through 298. 38

impotent fumblings against the menacing threat of mob-rule dictatorship far beyond his power to amend.

The Shakespearean productions of Orson Welles (which are examined in Chapter IV) are significant primarily in light of the dialectical tensions between form and content he interposed between the texts and his audiences. The

"specific meaning" of a Welles production "was contained in its very form, with the objective content serving to amplify this meaning and make a rhetorical understanding of it readily available.

Margaret Webster, the most renowned director of

Broadway Shakespeare for over a decade beginning in the late

1930s, was born in New York City in 1905 during an American tour by her parents, British actors Ben Webster and Dame May

Whitty.^2 Although she studied in Paris and London and apprenticed as an actor in Great Britain, Webster's distinguished career as a stage director reached its zenith in eight productions of Shakespeare's plays she directed for the Broadway stage, most of which were equally successful with audiences when taken on extensive tours throughout the

United States.

John Ripley, Julius Caesar on stage in England and America. 1599-1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980) 223.

Richard France, The Theatre of Orson Welles (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1977) 14.

Webster maintained dual citizenship (American and British) throughout her life. 39

In February of 1937, Webster made an auspicious

American debut by staging Richard II in a production that

had an initial Broadway run of 133 performances and was

revived later the same year for another 38 and again in 1940

for an additional 32; both an "ensemble" production as well

as a "vehicle" for actor Maurice Evans, it was the first production of the play to surface in New York since Edwin

Booth had acted the title role in 1878.

In October of 1938, Webster directed Evans in a four- hour Hamlet, the first uncut production on Broadway of that play; after an initial run of 96 performances, the Evans-

Webster Hamlet was revived in December of 1939 for an additional 40 performances.

In January of 1939, Evans appeared as Sir John Falstaff in a Webster-directed production of Henry IV, Part I, which ran for a total of 74 performances.

The Theatre Guild produced Webster's next Shakespeare production during the 1940-41 season: Twelfth Night featuring Evans as Malvolio and Helen Hayes as Viola; the first major revival of the play since Jane Cowl's in 1930,

Webster's Twelfth Night was performed 129 times.

Webster then directed Macbeth, in a critically acclaimed production starring Maurice Evans and Judith

Anderson; Macbeth opened in November of 1941 and achieved a

131-performance run. 40

Perhaps the greatest triumph of Webster's directing career, the Theatre Guild's production of Othello starring

Paul Robeson, José Ferrer and Uta Hagen, opened in October of 1943; Webster's Othello— the first on Broadway in which an African-American portrayed the title role, accumulated

296 consecutive performances during its Broadway run, which remains unprecedented in American Shakespearean production.

Webster followed Othello with a production of The

Tempest in 1945, which played an initial run of 100 performances and was later revived for an additional 24.

A somewhat abridged and slightly altered version of the text was employed and the production featured a revolving stage that facilitated various views of Prospero's and Caliban's living quarters.

Webster directed Shakespeare on Broadway for the last time in 1946; in that year she staged a spectacular, pictorial production of Henry VIII for the American

Repertory Theatre that ran for a total of 40 performances.

Webster's approach to Shakespeare was neither unduly reverent nor particularly innovative. Her productions were predominantly "pictorial" in the nineteenth-century tradition of scenic investiture. And, although Webster worked in the proscenium theatres of Broadway, she emphasized a need to find a modern equivalent for

Elizabethan staging practice based on "the speed and ease with which one scene could . . . melt into another without 41 break or visual change.Fidelity to text was generally the rule, although she occasionally made judicious cuts or emended antiquated usagestill she cautioned against making "a cut or transposition of text without weighing a possible loss in speed, meaning, impact, or clarity" and against inserting "a prolonged and extraneous piece of business without taking the same factors into consideration.

Perhaps it was her simplicity of approach, unencumbered as it was by the need for self-aggrandizement that best characterized Margaret Webster's Shakespeare and that accounted for the popular success of her many productions.

She concentrated on discovering dramatic truth and honesty in the plays and eschewed either "an over-eager search for novelty at any price" or "a too great reverence for the traditions" of the past.^®

Fundamentally a "popularizer" of Shakespeare, Webster produced his plays not for scholars and students and sections of the public who were already Shakespeare

"converts" but rather for "the large majority of audiences

33 Webster, "On Directing Shakespeare" Producing the Plav by John Gassner (New York: Dryden, 1941) 445-6. [Webster's italics]

3^ Only in Henry VIII did Webster radically alter Shakespeare's text, in an attempt to render the complexity of English history palatable to American audiences.

33 Webster, "On Directing" 445.

33 Webster, "On Directing" 444. 42

Who, at any rate in the United States, have to be persuaded

that Shakespeare is anything but a dead 'classic' without modern urgency or personal appeal.Her productions

(which are examined in greater detail in Chapter VI),

largely succeeded in achieving her goal, as most of them garnered "long runs” in large Broadway theatres.

By mid-century, Broadway production had become so costly that few producers were willing to risk losing money on the revival of classic plays in so speculative a commercial venue. American Shakespearean production subsequently began shifting, becoming more prevalent in non­ commercial, regional theatres (as well as in the summer

Shakespeare festivals that had begun to open in various locations throughout the country) than on Broadway.

The predominantly conventional productions of Margaret

Webster (along with Guthrie McClintic's 1947 production of

Antony and Cleopatra) marked a culmination of the kind of

"pictorialism” in scenic investiture that Broadway

Shakespeare had inherited from nineteenth-century British tradition. After 1950, many directors of Shakespeare in the

United States and Great Britain began substituting the simplicity of multi-level, minimalistic unit settings for the expensive and out-moded pictorial realism that had informed nearly all the productions of the previous century

Alfred Harbage, appendix: "The Role of the Shakespearean Producer," Theatre for Shakespeare (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1955) 89. 43 as well as many during the early part of the current one— the most extreme example of which in the U.S. had been the

1922 production of The Merchant of Venice, directed by David

Belasco. CHAPTER II

DAVID BELASCO: SHAKESPEARE AND NATURALISM

America's foremost proponent of early twentieth-century scenic naturalism, producer-director David Belasco (1871-

1931), is remembered principally for his contributions to the cause of Realism on the American stage, chiefly displayed in the minutely detailed authenticity of visual effects with which he infused his productions of contemporary American dramas. His great accomplishment, as one theatre historian put it, "appears to have been the development of realistic scenery, lighting, and stage management, particularly of group and mob scenes, to the highest peak possible on the stage.

Belasco's painstaking attention to the details of pictorial composition have been well documented. His productions were almost invariably "the last word in fourth- wall pictorial illusionism.Essentially an "autocratic

^ Barnard Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A.: 1668 to 1957. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 273.

^ Samuel L. Leiter, From Belasco to Brook: Representative Directors of the Enalish-Soeakina Stage. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies 33 (New York: Greenwood, 1991) 4.

44 45 manager-director,Belasco exercised complete control over every aspect of the mise-en-scène in his productions. He personally supervised every least scenic element, including those designed by others, in an effort to insure that each was as genuine and real as possible.

So assiduously did he build up, piece by piece, the impression of exact pictorial illusion that he became the paragon of stage realism in the American theatre, gaining the admiration of most of his peers, including the Russian master of naturalistic staging, Konstantin Stanislavsky.'*

The Moscow Art Theatre, of which Stanislavsky was an associate director, made its first visit to the United

States during the 1922-23 season. After viewing David

Belasco's production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice on 1 February 1923, the Russian director registered his impressions in a letter addressed to his colleague,

Nemirovich-Danchenko. His remarks— the sincerity of which is fairly certain, as they were written privately and not intended for publication— merit attention for the light they shed not only on Belasco's mastery of naturalism but also, in particular, on his naturalistic approach to Shakespeare:

The whole theatrical business in America is based on the personality of the actor. One actor is a man of talent and the rest are nonentities. Plus the most lavish production, such as we don't know. Plus the most marvellous [sic] lighting equipment, about which we have no idea. Plus stage technique

Robert T. Hazzard, "The Development of Selected American Stage Directors From 1926 to i960," diss., U of Minnesota, 1962, 28.

'* Leiter 4. 46

Which he have never dreamt of. Plus a staff of stagehands and their foreman, we don't even dare to dream of. . . .S o that we cannot hope to surprise America in every sphere of our art. Such an actor as David Warfield, whom I saw in the part of Shylock, we have not got. And Belasco's production of The Merchant of Venice exceeds in sheer lavishness anything I ever saw, and as for its technical achievements the Maly Theatre could envy them. . . . To tell you the truth, I have often wondered why the Americans praise us so much.

Belasco's production of The Merchant of Venice holds a unique place in his oeuvre, for it is the only play by

Shakespeare— in fact, the only non-contemporary "classic" play of any kind— that he produced in a directing career that spanned nearly half a century. The production, moreover, has been judged "the crowing achievement of his artistic career,"® and an examination of his methodology in preparing the play for production, it has been suggested, might serve as a useful means of assessing his overall approach to theatrical production in general^ although, under close scrutiny. The Merchant of Venice offers as much

® David Magarshack, Stanislavsky (New York: Chanticleer, 1951) 366.

® Lise-Lone Marker, David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975) 49. Marker provides a detailed reconstruction of Belasco's production of The Merchant of Venice, based on privately printed sources (the published version of the director's production book, as well as a souvenir album of photographic stills representing the play in performance,) in Chapter 7, pp. 178-202.

^ see Leiter 10-14. 47 in the way of deviation from as conformity to Belasco's customary practice.

With the single exception of The Merchant of Venice,

Belasco's theatrical repertoire as producer-director on the

New York stage consisted of sentimental "well-made plays" and melodramas (a number of which he authored), which he selected for production principally for their theatrical rather than their literary value. He was convinced "that the terms 'literature' and 'theatre' had very little in common with each other."® Belasco believed that the disciplines of literature and of the theatre were virtually incompatible, and that literary drama was simply not

"actable," as it bypassed what he considered to be his principal target as a director— the emotions of the audience, as influenced by the emotions of the performers.

The American theatre-goer, Belasco believed, had no wish to see deep spiritual searching portrayed on the stage, but rather 'action— plenty of action,' a variety of passions, attitudes, and emotions.®

If the fluctuating movement of human emotions was the most basic ingredient in his theatre, the notion of maintaining "truthfulness to nature" was Belasco's cardinal rule. Three years before directing The Merchant of Venice, he summarized the guiding principle behind his approach to realism:

® Marker 46.

® Marker 47. 48

Life is various, and human nature, to be faithfully depicted, must be shown in all its aspects. I have never doubted the power of the theatre to maintain its even balance, to be true to life from which it derives its inspiration, and it has been the single aim of all my work and thought to bring the theatre and the dramatic art into closer and truer harmony with life and nature.

In his desire to hold a true-to-life mirror up to nature, David Belasco epitomized a trend in which theatrical effectiveness took precedence over all other considerations."^^ The industrial age in which he was active was one of technical revolution, in which the devices of scenic presentation, of stage machinery and lighting equipment underwent modernization at a previously unprecedented rate of development.

As a director, Belasco was a practical man of the theatre, whose introduction of technological and scientific advances (which, for him served as tools of illusionistic realism) no doubt contributed, inadvertently to be sure, to the exploitation of that technology in the 1920's by the emergent proponents of the New Stagecraft, with its non- realistic "presentationalism". As a producer, however.

David Belasco, The Theatre Through Its Stage Door (New York: Harper, 1919) 232.

Marker 54.

In American Shakespearean production, principles of the New Stagecraft were most keenly identified with the collaborations between director Arthur Hopkins and designer Robert Edmond Jones. Their contributions are examined in Chapter 2. 49 he himself was "deeply anchored in the most solidly entrenched ideas of the nineteenth century,a suggestion that is substantiated by his selection of dramatic repertoire for presentation.

Lise-Lone Marker has observed three distinct categories of plays produced by Belasco in New York:

(1) "vivid, colorful panoramas of Western life in

America"— the most famous example of which, perhaps, is

his own play The Girl of the Golden West (1905);

(2) "exotic or historical romances and extravaganzas"—

including Belasco's Madame Butterfly (1900), set in

Japan; and

(3) "domestic milieu dramas"— such as Belasco's

adaptation of Zaza (1899), a French play by Pierre

Berton and Charles Simon, and Eugene Walter's The

Easiest Way (1909)

Despite his claim that he intended to show human nature

"in all its aspects," Belasco's New York repertoire

(consisting of nearly a hundred different plays, virtually all of which have faded into obscurity) validates the criticism, levelled against him by John Mason Brown, that his realism was "largely a matter of externals, of so filling the eyes of his audiences with actuality that they

Marker 49.

Marker 48-9. 50 are seduced into believing that what happens on his stage is as actual as what it happens in.

Brown perceived Belasco as leading a contradictory double-life in a transitional period for the theatre. He spoke of Belasco as a theatrical Jekyll and Hyde, "producing in one tradition, and writing, adapting and picking his scripts in another.

It is the paradox of the man who, though he is certain that 'when you distort reality you have destroyed truth' and who, though he considers the chief work of his life to be the manner in which he has brought the stage and nature into a closer harmony, has yet produced in his theatres . . . plays that are, in spite of all they may have offered in the way of general amusement, as tricked and undistinguished and divorced from truth as any that have ever graced the record of a distinguished manager-producer, who happens at the same time to be an arch-champion of photographic realism.

Brown's perceptions regarding the apparent superficiality of Belasco's approach to realism receive what is perhaps their most incisive validation in his comparison of Belasco's realism with that of Stanislavsky, who so admired Belasco's production of The Merchant of Venice.

Brown suggests that Belasco's realism was "spiritually shallow" and that it paled next to the standard established

John Mason Brown, Unstaae; The American Theatre in Performance (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1930) 183.

Brown, Upstage 185-6.

Brown, Upstage 186-7. 51 by the great Russian director. In comparing their respective efforts, he submits:

you sense the difference between the genuine and the paste; the true titan and adroit technician; the man who is the complete realist, probing and uncompromising, and the satyr who is one-third realist and two-thirds showman.^®

The incongruities between David Belasco's modern theoretical attitudes regarding realism and the outmoded melodramatic nature of the plays he elected to produce serve to confound an easy assessment of his directorial contribution. And the even more complex stylistic inconsistencies that have been observed in his one

Shakespeare production merely compound the problem.

His 1922 production of The Merchant of Venice clearly represented a departure for David Belasco, for it was his first, and remained his only, attempt to revive a "classic" play.

By his own account, however, he had always intended to include Shakespeare in his repertory. "All my life I have desired and purposed to produce the plays of Shakespeare," the director wrote, introducing his published adaptation of

The Merchant of Venice. He recounted the many fine

Shakespearean performances he had been privileged to witness

Brown, Upstage 187.

David Belasco, preface, The Merchant of Venice: A Comedy by William Shakespeare, as Arranged for the Contemporary Stage bv David Belasco (New York: n.p., 1922.) 5. 52 during his youth, as well as the plays in which he himself had appeared during what he called his "theatrical novitiate," or that were acted by others under his personal stage management during his apprenticeship years.

Citing that "circumstances" had not previously permitted the fulfillment of his "ambitious purpose" to present productions of Shakespeare's plays, Belasco went on to suggest that The Merchant of Venice would be followed by similar revivals of King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V,

Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, and three history plays that had been arranged for him by his friend and biographer, the critic William Winter, who had died in 1917. None of those plans ever materialized, although Belasco remained active as a director until just before his own death in 1931.

In an article published in The New York Times on the morning after his production of The Merchant of Venice opened, Belasco was reported as having said that "of course, it was inevitable that I would produce Shakespeare sooner or later.The remarks that follow that pronouncement suggest at least one of the reasons he never returned to

Shakespeare after The Merchant of Venicei

It has been, I assure you, rather an uphill climb — I have never been backed, and every brick in my theatre has been given to me by the public. What

David Belasco, interview, by John Corbin, The New York Times 22 December 1922: 13. 53

I have done is to go ahead and produce Shakespeare as I think Shakespeare should be produced.

By his own admission, the cost of producing

Shakespeare, particularly in the "realistic" manner to which

he was accustomed (i.e., with a pictorial mise-en-scène),

was almost certain to limit the possibility of turning a

profit. And, as Belasco was convinced that nothing less

than fully illusionistic, pictorial (i.e., expensive)

scenery would please his audience, he had found himself in

something of a conundrum:

The public ought . . . to reflect that it is only the desire and purpose of a theatrical manager to give to it what it is entitled to expect and to receive which prompts such a one to assume the burdensome expense of making an adequate production— an expense which, to-day [sic], is often all but prohibitive.^^

New York Times critic John Corbin confronted Belasco

with an estimation offered by experts that the luxuriant

sets and costumes for The Merchant of Venice must have been

budgeted at close to $250,000 (a figure that is corroborated

in Craig Timberlake's biography of Belasco^^) . It may

have been with a conscious touch of irony that Belasco (who

was nothing if not a shrewd and crafty businessman), evaded

Belasco, interview. The New York Times 22 December 1922: 13.

Belasco, preface 12.

Craig Timberlake. The Life and Work of David Belasco: The Bishop of Broadwav (New York: Library Publishers, 1954) 368. Timberlake claims that, after 92 performances in New York and a year-long national tour, the production lost a total of $80,000. 54

the monetary issue Corbin raised as irrelevant, insisting

that his production of The Merchant of Venice had been

intended as a "gift" to his loyal patrons.

Questioned as to the sheer financial investment involved, Mr. Belasco . . . refused to make public any figures. 'It is not important,' was his reply. 'As a matter of fact, it is quite a simple production— those who come anticipating something particularly lavish are likely to be disappointed. But, whatever it cost, it is all money that the public has given me, and now I am giving it back to them.

Belasco's equivocation notwithstanding, the scenic grandeur of his Merchant of Venice did not go unnoticed. In his Times review, Corbin, recognizing that Belasco's production was grounded in the nineteenth-century tradition of Irving, Tree and Augustin Daly, asserted that "seldom or never has pictorial Shakespeare been more beautiful. . . .

Opulent good taste could not do more to provide a variety of form and color, ravishing the senses.And Stark Young, while quibbling over what he considered to be inaccuracy in the creation of a distinctively Venetian atmosphere, nevertheless was impressed by the beauty of the visual effects:

It is worthwhile . . . going to The Merchant of Venice to see the brocades, the incomparable splendor of the textiles that the actors wear, and to see the reminiscences of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese in some of the figures on the stage. In

Belasco, interview. The New York Times 22 December 1922: 13.

dated December 22, 1922. 55

themselves— whether they are dramatically wise or not— all these are magnificent.^^

Regardless of whether or not it was ultimately

financial considerations that inhibited Belasco from

directing any Shakespeare after 1922, it is not necessary to

speculate on his attitudes with respect to Shakespearean

production in general, for he articulated them quite clearly

in the preface to his published version of The Merchant of

Venice.

In choosing to invest the visual elements of his

Shakespeare with the pictorial, illusionistic approach that

had informed all his productions of contemporary dramas,

Belasco not only was remaining faithful to the nineteenth-

century English tradition (a tradition that had begun in

earnest during the middle of the nineteenth century with the

lavishly invested productions of Charles Kean) but also was

consciously eschewing the contemporary trend toward either

bare-stage productions (exemplified by the neo-Elizabethan

experimentations of William Poel) or more modern, anti-

realistic productions (employing the innovative minimalist

techniques of revolutionaries like Gordon Craig):

A very small minority of the theatre-going public, which enjoys mere rhetoric and declamation, approves presentation of plays upon stages almost barren and most insufficiently illumined. The immense majority of that public, on the other hand, prefers and demands . . . representations designed to create illusions: representations

Stark Young, "The Passionate Pilgrim," The New Republic 17 January 1923: 203. 56

wherein actors, impersonating and interpreting character, are required to 'suit the word to the action, the action to the word,' and wherein, also, stage directors strive to suit the scenic investiture to the indications of time and place and to the dramatic and histrionic needs of plays presented. Yet, by the minority, such stage directors are those most often (and most unjustly) censured for 'over-loading' Shakespeare with scenery (Preface 13).

Defending directors who, in the past, had responded to

what he labelled the 'majority' position, Belasco asserted

that it was a producing manager's "duty" to provide any play

with a company of actors "capable of its proper

interpretation and a scenic investiture adequate to its

requirements and contributory, in the fullest possible

degree, to its enactment and apprehension" (Preface 12).

Comparing a Shakespeare play to a precious diamond,

Belasco maintained that such a rare gem is shown to better

advantage when "cut, polished and placed in a suitable and

lovely setting than when left, rough and imperfect, embedded

in clay." The most truly sympathetic producer of

Shakespeare, then, understood that it was necessary only to

provide his plays with (and with nothing more than) "their wholly adequate, due investiture" (Preface 15).

Belasco reproached as "inept" those directors who, in mounting early twentieth-century productions of Shakespeare,

failed to "utilize all the expedients, devices and

improvements which incessant study and continuous scientific discovery and invention have developed during the last three hundred years," choosing instead to "revert to the crude. 57

inferior, wholly inadequate methods which were in vogue

. . . during the infancy of the modern Theatre" (Preface

26) .

Citing his conviction "that Shakespeare himself would

eagerly have employed all the many invaluable accessories of modern stage-craft if they had been available to him"

(Preface 27), Belasco maintained that his production of The

Merchant of Venice, while it availed itself of modern

"accessories and aids to effect," was nevertheless unencumbered by "superfluous and hampering embellishments."

Moreover, he asserted that he had made every effort not to disregard "anything valuable in the traditions with which, through generations of genius, this great play has become encrusted" (Preface 27).

Thus, mindful of the present insofar as it furnished for his use such "accessories" and pictorial aids, many of which had not been available to his nineteenth-century forebears, Belasco was nonetheless contented to tread the well-worn path of a production style of the past that was already in the process of becoming passé.

His desire to ground his production of The Merchant of

Venice in the best that tradition and former practice had to offer led Belasco to undertake a year-long period of research during which he surveyed the available scholarship regarding textual considerations and studied the historical details of the play's geographic locale. 58

However, having accepted the authority of Charles

Knight's assertion that "the Venice of Shakespeare's own time and the manners of that city, are delineated with matchless accuracy" in the play (Preface 7), and after determining that composition dates had been variously assigned between 1594 and 1598, Belasco decided instead to set the play's action during the first quarter of the sixteenth century in what had been known as Venice's Golden

Age— "the time when she had touched the highest point of all her greatness; when, resplendent in the full meridian of her glory, she seemed, indeed a jeweled queen of the summer seas" (Preface 8).

Belasco based his preemptive decision to adopt the earlier era on what he considered to be actor-manager

Richard Mansfield's apt depiction of The Merchant of Venice as "a fairy tale." Thus characterized, the play could be treated "as wholly a figment of fancy, fittingly localized in any Venetian period remote enough to be romantic and colorful enough to be picturesque." The director further acknowledged that the transposition allowed him to invest the production both with a "romantic environment" and

"pleasingly novel as well as beautiful costuming" (Preface

8 ) .

His decision to "romanticize" the play's mise-en-scène, somewhat ironically, freed Belasco from at least one aspect of the literal constraints of scenic naturalism to which he 59 had consistently subscribed (and of which John Mason Brown was so critical). Indeed, the director intentionally shied away from an attempt to emulate Charles Kean, Henry Irving and others who, in their productions of The Merchant of

Venice, had endeavored in every way to "re-create" Venice with a kind of true-to-life, pictorial "authenticity." Kean had placed on his stage "the bridges, the canals, the gondolas, the crowds, and the carnival mummers of Venice in a dazzling exhibition," while Irving's Venice had been

"laden with real details— Piazza San Marco, the Rialto, real palaces, practicable bridges built over real canals, floating gondolas.

The settings for Belasco's production of The Merchant of Venice, designed by Ernest Gros, depicted more of a generic Italian than a specifically Venetian locale. Stark

Young observed that the scenes had "no particularly inspired

Venetian quality at all; those streets for anything they might achieve might as well be in the older quarter of

Padua, in Vicenza, or even in an Umbrian hill town like

Cortona.

Eschewing historical realism, Belasco also favored a somewhat less literal approach, which Burns Mantle, alone of the critics who reviewed the production, recognized as one that "bridges in a measure the old and the new schools of

Marker 127-8.

Young, "Passionate Pilgrim" 203. 60

scenic investiture."^® Moreover, the director's somewhat

abstracted version of scenic realism was consistent with one writer's opinion (offered in 1921, a year before Belasco produced The Merchant of Venice) that his art had "grown in finesse” and had become "more impressionistic," in the sense that "he suggests rather than states."^®

The most noticeably suggestive, as opposed to literal, of visual elements in Belasco's production was a set of drapes swagged in various combinations just behind the proscenium arch that served as a kind of "false" proscenium.

These drapes reduced the size of the picture frame and made the settings appear more intimate, while at the same time contributing to the overall sense that the mise-en-scène aimed at a quality of "genuine theatricality" that may have been ultimately more indispensable to both his philosophy and practice than the "photographic" reproduction of reality for which he is most remembered:

Throughout his career he insisted upon the use of individualized, realistic details, not for their own sake but as subordinate elements in a carefully integrated, harmonious entity. In such an entity, externals like gondolas, familiar landmarks, and so on— however attractive in themselves— had no particular justification or function.

New York Dailv News. 22 December 1922, p 20.

James Gibbons Huneker, "American Producers III: David Belasco," Theatre Arts Monthly 5 (October 1921): 264.

Marker 189. 61

Belasco's attitude toward the text of The Merchant of

Venice, despite his exhaustive research efforts, was as eclectic as his approach to the scenic investiture. His starting point was a complete works revised by the Rev.

Alexander Dyce.^^ Recognizing that "a whole literature of emendation, conjecture and commentary" had devolved around all of Shakespeare's plays, not all of which was to be taken seriously, Belasco claimed that "the whole of that literature . . . has been heedfully examined in preparing the play for its present revival, and that ample authority exists for each and every decision as to moot points embodied in this arrangement."^^

And yet, in order to accommodate the bulky three- dimensional scenery demanded by a Realistic approach,

Belasco resorted to an arbitrary rearrangement of several of the play's scenes that had its antecedents in several nineteenth-century pictorial productions that he most admired.

The action in Acts II and III of The Merchant of

Venice, as they appear in the Quarto and Folio versions (on

Belasco considered Dyce, whom posterity has apparently forgotten, to be a "superb scholar and model editor." See Preface 9.

Belasco, preface 11.

By his own admission, Belasco's textual arrangement contained what he considered the best features of the earlier stage versions made by Charles Kean, Edwin Booth and Henry Irving— see preface 23. 62 which all subsequent standard texts have been based), alternates a number of times between scenes in Venice that are centered on Shylock's dealings with Antonio and those in

Belmont, which are focused on Portia and her suitors.

Dispensing with the alternating sequence, Belasco grouped the Venice scenes together in Act II and the Belmont casket chamber scenes in Act III, thus requiring only one change of scenery between each group (although, he then proceeded to add a scene change of his own invention within the Venice sequence)

Not content merely to acknowledge that such alterations were made in deference to the demands of pictorial realism,

Belasco concocted a somewhat unconvincing rationalization for preferring to cluster together scenes that are set in the same locale, which he based on the (dubious) scholarship of Shakespearean editor Charles Edward Flowers. Belasco quoted Flowers as having claimed that it was Shakespeare's editors who, after the playwright's death, had broken his more seamless construction into smaller scenes:

Some learned critics object to any omissions, or any alterations in the order of scenes, however necessary to the exigencies of the stage, and say that Shakespeare's plays should be acted only as

This interpolated scene embellished a nineteenth- century precedent, which shared with viewers Shylock's discovery that his daughter Jessica has fled taking all his gold. For dramatic emphasis, Belasco's addition enabled the audience first to view Shylock entering into his house from the outside and then, immediately afterward, to view the same scene, including Shylock's subsequent discovery, from inside the house. 63

he wrote them, forgetting that the 'original text' [i.e., the quartos and the First Folio] are very corrupt, and the THE DIVISION INTO SCENES ARE, IN MOST INSTANCES, ONLY CONJECTURAL.^®

Flowers, moreover, had made a similar arrangement of Hamlet, running several scenes continuously together, which he insisted was, so far from being an innovation, in reality "a return to the original form.

Belasco made several additional textual emendations to

The Merchant of Venice. Following Henry Irving's lead, he excised the Belmont episode featuring the Prince of Aragon's selection of the silver casket (Act II, scene 9)— presumably because, when all the casket chamber scenes were strung together, it became what he called "supererogatory."

Furthermore, consistent with the pervasive moral priggishness of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he elected to delete "all such speeches as, being gross and vulgar, are offensive to decency and good taste.

In the preface to his published version of The Merchant of Venice Belasco devoted much space to a defense of his own adaptation of the play, which he admitted had its foundations in the various "beautiful and invaluable improvements" to Shakespeare's dramas that had been

Belasco, preface 25. Upper case and italics are Eclcsco's.

as quoted in Belasco, preface 25.

Belasco, preface 23. 64 developed during the three hundred years preceding his 1922 production.

He justified all his textual emendations on the grounds that, since there is comparatively little knowledge of how

Shakespeare developed his plays, it is therefore fallacious to assume there can exist for any of them "a clear, definite, complete 'original text.Citing the

"authoritative" assertion of theatre critic William Winter that the First Folio alone contained "approximately 20,000 demonstrable errors,"'*® Belasco debunked what he considered other directors' undue reverence for so-called

"original" texts, which he claimed led to deadly productions:

[T]he producers who . . . most truly revere the Great Dramatist and best serve his fame and public interest are not those who make of his plays archaic and tiresome curiosities, but those who (sensibly utilizing an eclectic and purged text) present those plays in form suitable to the modern stage and contemporary taste.'**^

This pragmatic attitude resulted in the kind of expedient decisions underlying Belasco's own "eclectic and purged" arrangement of The Merchant of Venice.

Among the most significant factors he considered was one that caused him to present the play in such a manner as to pamper and please an audience unused to the rigors of

39 Belasco, preface 19.

Belasco, preface 20.

'*^ Belasco, preface 22. 65

"classic" drama— "an audience that craves fluently

continuous movement; that will not assemble in the theatre earlier than eight-fifteen, and that, as a whole, will not remain there later, at the latest, than a few minutes after eleven.

And yet, despite the director's ambition "to provide a properly full and entirely adequate, correct, and therefore satisfactory, presentation of Shakespeare's ever-favorite tragi-comedy, within the limit of . . . about three hours, lengthy and elaborate changes of scenery resulted in a production that lasted over four. John Corbin reported in his New York Times review that "the waits between scenes, though brought down to an irreducible minimum, tr[ied] the most patient and allow[ed] interest in the narrative to grow cold."^'*

Although Belasco "dispensed entirely with the traditional archeological verisimilitude" for which the nineteenth-century proponents of historical realism whom he so admired'*^ had achieved a large measure of distinction.

Belasco, preface 10.

Belasco, preface 23.

John Corbin, "Warfield Warmly Greeted as Shy lock, " The New York Times 22 December 1922, p. 13.

none more so than Henry Irving, whom Belasco proclaimed "the greatest stage producer that ever lived" (preface 17). 66 he compensated by making use of "opulent pageantry in aspects of staging rather than in the setting itself."'*®

Belasco peopled the stage with a myriad of realistic actions, often creating extensive scenes of pantomimic business, fashioning the believable illusion of a sixteenth-century city brimming with living characters. They moved off and on through the realistic streets, entered their homes, appeared at their windows, and helped to project a truly plausible environment.'*^

This sense of ongoing background action that Belasco imparted to his production of The Merchant of Venice "was one in which a large number of specific details were merged to create a vivid, concrete atmosphere."'*®

In the opening sequence, for instance, he developed an almost cinematic pantomime that preceded and set the stage for the scene between Antonio, Salarino and Solanio with which Shakespeare's play begins.^® The setting presented to the audience's view "a street near to the Rialto" running diagonally across the width of the stage and containing the exterior facades of three houses separated by smaller side streets. As the curtains parted, a young boy carrying a basket of cherries was discovered standing in the shadow of a house, gazing upward at the windows for potential buyers

'*® Marker 188.

Leiter 11.

'*® Marker 189.

the source for the description of the first scene is the promptbook section of Belasco's privately published version of The Merchant of Venice (see fn. 76) 47-9. 67 of his fruit. A man carrying faggots entered from an upstage position and, after crossing downstage along the street and passing without noticing the boy, disappeared down a side street. Then, another man, carrying a painting, entered from a side-street door, crossed to the boy and mimed a conversation with him "as though telling him of a buyer within the House from which he has just come." After the second man's exit, the boy ran to the door from which the man had entered, knocked upon it, and was admitted into the house. As the boy made his exit, a third man, carrying a wine-skin entered at the left just as Solanio, Antonio and

Salarino appeared in the upstage right corner. As he turned the corner to pass up the main street, the man with the wine-skin stepped aside and bowed "deferentially" to Antonio and his friends. Then, as he continued upstage and off, the three gentlemen moved into downstage positions and began the dialogue.

The unfolding montage of street activity Belasco invented for the opening of The Merchant of Venice set a pattern he repeated again, even more elaborately, before the third scene of Act I (which the director set in "an open place before a synagogue,") as well as at the beginning and at the end of Act II (all of the action of which was set before Shylock's house).

These pantomimed additions to the implied action in

Shakespeare's text— including the aforementioned 68

interpolation at the end of the second act of a scene in which Shylock discovered that his daughter Jessica had eloped with Lorenzo— were intended by the director to serve as integral linking material. The opening montages, in particular, functioned in much the same way as (to employ cinematic terminology) "establishing" shots do in narrative motion pictures, granting the audience a few moments in which to adjust to individual settings and their particular ambiance. And the many director-invented characters that populated these montages

were not introduced simply to create gratuitous theatrical effect. They were utilized . . . to achieve a concrete stage atmosphere, thereby throwing the main action into vivid relief. Moreover, through their use of the various components of the setting they established the physical environment as a functioning part of the total theatrical milieu.5°

As it did in any Belasco production, lighting played a crucial part of establishing or heightening the mood and atmosphere of certain scenes in The Merchant of Venice, The significance of lighting design in Belasco's work cannot be overemphasized, as he considered "the lighting of the scenes" to be "the all-important factor in a dramatic production":

Lights are to drama what music is to the lyrics of a song. No other factor that enters into the production of a play is so effective in conveying its moods and feeling. They are as essential to every work of dramatic art as blood is to life. The greatest part of my success in the theatre I

Marker 190. 69

attribute to my feeling for colors, translated into effects of light. ^

The third scene of The Merchant of Venice, in particular, contained the sort of sustained lighting effect for which Belasco was justly celebrated. The scene, set before a synagogue, began in the light of the late afternoon sun, which gradually grew dimmer, fading into the glow of a fiery sunset and then into near darkness, "with a single beam falling aslant the solitary figure of Shylock at the climax.

A similarly striking effect occurred toward the end of the first scene in the second act, which Belasco described as occurring before the house of Shylock at "dusk, darkening

to n i g h t . " S 3 As Shylock prepares to join Antonio for supper, entrusting Jessica with the keys to the house and admonishing her to stay behind locked doors— Belasco directed that the scene be "all in shadow." Lights were visible from within the house, and "a shaft of orange-yellow light stream[ed] from the open door, out upon the

Stage."S4

S3 Belasco, Stage Door 55-6.

52 Leiter 11.

53 Belasco's arrangement of The Merchant of Venice (see fn. 76) 73.

s^ Belasco's arrangement of The Merchant of Venice 87. 70

In the final act, which was set in Portia's garden in

Belmont, Belasco indicated the need for "bright moonlight— which is, for a short while, obscured by drifting clouds."

The entire stage was backed by a cyclorama representing "the

night sky, studded with s t a r s . "^5 Corbin of The New York

Times, impressed by the result, called the final outdoor scene at Belmont "an enchantment of moonlight and stars.

All of the technical wizardry that Belasco had mastered and called upon in establishing the desired moods and atmospheres for all his productions (including his

"naturalistic" presentation of The Merchant of Venice) was implemented, he claimed, not merely for the sake of brilliant visual effect, but rather as a means of engendering in his audiences an emotional response:

For the completed play is impressive and fulfils its purpose only to the extent that it carries an audience back to its own experiences. If my productions have had an appealing quality, it is because I have kept this important fact constantly in mind and have tried, while concealing the mechanism of my scenes, to tug at the hearts of my audiences.57

People attend the theatre, Belasco asserted, in anticipation of having their emotions stirred, at which point their response becomes a part of the play itself, as

55 Belasco's arrangement of The Merchant of Venice 160.

55 Corbin 13.

57 Belasco, Stage Door 55. 71 the performers in turn are fed by the audience's subtle

influence. The use of light and color, costumes and scenery as psychological tools was consistent with his fundamental belief that "it is much easier to appeal to the hearts of audiences through their senses than through their intellects.

Nonetheless— and perhaps somewhat ironically, in light of his textual infidelity— Belasco insisted that the play itself was supremely more important than the moods it established, and that scenic elements were potentially harmful to the audience's reception of play unless they served merely as background against which the dramatist's work is being projected:

Only when the stage director is resolved that the play shall stand first in importance in a theatre production can he safely employ the countless pictorial aids which contribute to its effect and its appeal.®*

And the principal "instruments" through which the material of the play was communicated, according to Belasco, were the actors. The "adjuncts" of lighting, costumes and scenery, although useful and appealing, were of value only if they were subordinated to the work of the dramatist(s) and, especially, the actors:

The stage always accomplishes more through the ability of its actors than through the genius of its scenic artist and electrical experts. Only

®® Belasco, Stage Door 74-5.

59 Belasco, Stage Door 195. 72

when [a director] relies upon his actors as the chief means of its interpretation should he venture upon those other agencies which help to bring it into closer relation with life and nature.*0

In evaluations of Belasco's lasting contributions to the American theatre, the emphasis he placed upon details of naturalistic acting tends to be overshadowed by the brilliance of his renowned visual effects— partly because of the ephemeral nature of the art of acting, but no doubt also because his innovative use of stage mechanics and electrics ultimately had a greater impact on future generations of theatre artists. Nevertheless, Belasco was well known for his ability to develop the talents of many "unknown" actors, eliciting "star quality" performances from many of them by an eclectic combination of manipulatory techniques, not all of them benign.

His "psychological weapons" were usually employed to intimidate a temperamental star actor, and included the surprise substituting in rehearsal of a secretly-prepared

"understudy" or the deliberate, violent smashing of a supposedly cherished heirloom (for which stratagem he maintained a stock of cheap pocket watches).

If the scenic investiture of a Belasco production left little to the audience's imagination, neither did the

Belasco, Stage Door 194-5.

Leiter 13-14. 73 detailed realistic effects of the actors' performances, which he made certain "implied little but stated all":

Step by step he led them through every moment of their roles— clarifying, justifying, and motivating everything for them. He attended to even the smallest details of the acting letting nothing go by if it failed to satisfy his craving for authenticity.®^

Belasco, in his overall desire to exploit "the intimate and minor details of surface reality,"®^ cleverly devised an intricacy of stage business as a means of enriching the theatrical life of his productions: "he was able to build up a vivid sense of reality through his attention to pantomimic action and could hold an audience enthralled by the richness of detail in the playing."®*

David Warfield, the actor who played Shylock in

Belasco's production of The Merchant of Venice (and for whom the director had been intending to produce Shakespeare's play for more than twenty years before actually doing so), had a style of acting that "lent itself particularly well to

Belasco's approach . . . [for] Warfield excelled in this itemized pantomime of surface realities."®®

®^ Leiter 8.

®^ A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949) 131.

®^ Leiter 8.

®® Vardac 131. 74

On a less superficial level, Warfield was eminently

capable of evoking an audience's emotional response, and the

pathos with which he imbued his personification of Shylock

was consistent with Belasco's assertion that "the Jew"

essentially was a tragic figure:

Shylock is an embodiment . . . of vindictive hatred over-reaching and destroying itself in a hideous purpose of revenge. And he is not the less so because, in his final discomfiture and utter ruin, he is, in some sort, pathetic.

The pathos in Warfield's impersonation of Shylock drew

a divided response from the New York critics. Nearly all of

them agreed in principle that Warfield provided "a very fine

and convincing piece of realistic acting."G? The critic

of The New York Tribune boasted that "Mr Warfield is not the

most imposing of the Shylocks . . . but we think, the most

satisfactory. He makes Shylock a human being, rather than a

spectator.

Among several other critics, however, there was a sense

that the overall effect of Warfield's underplaying was

"thoroughly un-Shakespearean.Stark Young complained

of the "tamer range of values; mild ideas of right and

wrong, of justice and conduct, the middle-class necessity

Belasco, "Concerning Shylock," in his published arrangement of The Merchant of Venice 31-2.

Young, "The Passionate Pilgrim" 202.

uncredited, December 22, 1922.

John Corbin, "How Comic Was Shylock?" (The New York Times. January 7, 1923) section 7, pi. 75 for approval" that Warfield substituted for the "elemental forces" informing even "the most exaggerated Elizabethan concept" of the character— "an endowment of fire, feeling, mind, avarice, malignity, will, that rises to the superb, to a consummate abundance of living human stuff." Young felt that Warfield's conception of Shylock (which had "only pathos, solitude, life driven inward, poisoned, suffering") unbalanced the play in favor of the "glittering court" of

Venetians who, in the trial scene, destroy Shylock "so gaily, as birds kill one of their kind sometimes. . . .

Shakespeare in the riotous, golden brutality and romance of this scene," Young contended, "meant . . . to supply a fight between powers, not a humiliation of humanity.

Another critic, Harris Jay Griston, writing in the

Sunday edition of The New York Times, blamed the inadequacy of Warfield's performance on the "deformed text that Belasco

[had] compelled [him] to use, a text that prevented the actor from developing successfully the kind of sympathetic portrayal he had hoped to achieve.

Griston quoted an interview with Warfield in which the actor claimed to have based his characterization on the premise that Shylock did not become venemous and vindictive

70 Young, "The Passonate Pilgrim" 202-3.

Harris Jay Griston, "Belasco and 'The Merchant'" (The New York Times. January 7, 1923) section 7, pp 1-2. 76 toward Antonio and his "crowd" until after Jessica had "been stolen" from him by a member of that group:

Shylock had no idea, when he asked for the bond stipulating a pound of flesh, that Antonio would be unable to meet its requirements. . . . [He] had no idea, at this time, of ever demanding fulfilment of the bond— he was driven to that state of mind by subsequent events.

What Belasco's arrangement of the play provided instead, Griston argued, was utterly at odds with Warfield's conception. Citing the effects of interpolated dialogue and contradictory stage business, Griston contended that, in

Belasco's version, "Shylock cunningly plots to catch Antonio in a trap, into which Antonio, the great merchant who owns many ships, is boob enough to walk unsuspectingly."^^

Uncompromising in his condemnation of modern

"improvements" to Shakespeare, Griston concluded that

Belasco's production of The Merchant of Venice was

"decidedly mediocre," ranking it below the level of Walter

Hampden's "and even below Sothern's and Mantell's:"

Shakespeare's careful building of effect, his sublime mastery of artistic detail and his skillful blending, all become demolished, crushed out of existence by 'improvement.' How can Warfield rise to his true heights as Shylock in such a malformed production?^**

Stark Young, while sparing in his praise of Warfield's performance and of the production in general, nevertheless

The New York Times. December 22, 1922, p 13.

Griston 2.

’** Griston 2. 77 recognized that its intrinsic value lay in the very

"theatricalism" that was David Belasco's trademark;

But scratch the surface here and you will find Belasco; and that is really the best thing about the occasion. Good, bad or indifferent, it means at least a certain fullness and genuine theatricality.

The "theatrical sincerity" Young recognized in

Belasco's production of The Merchant of Venice epitomized the director's approach to naturalistic theatre production in general by way of its perfectionistic attention to details of surface reality. Concentration on illusion and effect, both in the mise-en-scène and in the contrived minutia of characterization, was the principal strategy he utilized to establish atmosphere and evoke emotional response.

The exigencies of employing realistic, three- dimensional scenery, however, precluded textual fidelity— particularly as regards the arrangement of scenes in the second and third of Shakespeare's five acts, with their repeated alternation between two locales. The monolithic lumping together of scenes in each setting, which Belasco based on nineteenth-century English tradition, effectively de-valued Shakespeare's text in deference to Belasco's bastardized version of that text. The playtext was distorted by Belasco (as it had been by his predecessors) as

Stark Young, Immortal Shadows: A Book of Dramatic Criticism (New York: Scribner's, 1948) 43-4. 78

being ultimately of less significance than the presentation

of its essential parts, however out of their original

sequence they might be.

This re-ordering of scenes, which Belasco justified on the basis of scholarship that hindsight (late twentieth- century, deconstructionist productions notwithstanding) has generally come to regard as spurious, clearly contradicts the director's own stated view that the demands of playwrights and performers should take precedence over those of directors;

The producer, after all, is only the third party in the presentation of a drama. Before him come both the author and the actors. The producer must be content to be only the unseen interpreter who directs the actors and, by the environment which he provides, creates the atmosphere which is in complete harmony with the essence and feeling of the play.7G

While Belasco sincerely may have subscribed in theory to an ideal of subordinating the director's contribution to those of the playwright and actors, assessments of his output by several contemporaneous critics suggest that he did not live up to that ideal in practice.

Stark Young perceived David Belasco as a "showman" with

"an eye for effective plays and effective moments," whose

"taste, though luxurious and enthusiastic, is uncertain

Belasco, Stage Door 241. 79

. . . to the point of vulgarity . . . at times.George

Jean Nathan viewed Belasco even less kindly. Nathan, who like Stark Young admired the director "as a showman . . . probably the best and certainly the most successful in the

Anglo-American dramatic theatre," nevertheless thought that

Belasco had "by his many counterfeits worked a vast and thorough ill to the American playhouse."^®

Nathan, furthermore, suggested in 1917 his belief that

Belasco's "legend" was "ending to the beginning of a new and more understanding dawn in the native theatre."^® Similar sentiments were expressed by John Mason Brown, who regarded

Belasco as "a transitional figure" belonging "to two periods at once.Even Belasco recognized, several years before producing The Merchant of Venice in 1922, that he was a self-appointed guardian-protector of naturalism in the

Broadway theatre at a time when such dedication as he had to the photographic reproduction of reality was rapidly being called into question by the proponents of the New

Stagecraft.

77 Young, Immortal Shadows 44.

George Jean Nathan, "Legend's End— David Belasco" in The American Theatre as Seen bv its Critics; 1752-1934. ed. Montrose J. Moses and John Mason Brown (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1967) 235. [Original source: Mr. Georae Jean Nathan Presents (New York: Knopf, 1917}.]

Nathan 235.

Brown, Upstage 186. 80

Dismissing the anti-realist tenets of Gordon Craig— among others, whom he collectively termed "radical impressionists"— Belasco decried all theatricalism that wasn't loyal to (his notion of) "reality" and defended himself against those who claimed that "to reproduce the effects of nature faithfully in the theatre," as he attempted to do, was "to stifle imagination and to distract attention from the beauty of the spoken word of the play.How, he wondered, could one such as himself be false to art who is true to nature?

All I had to do was to go to nature for my inspiration and ideas, and then find a way to reproduce accurately nature's phenomena on my stage. And yet I am told that all this is not art, that art consists of pink and yellow and blue splotches upon a curtain, or draperies illuminated from above by shafts of white electric light. I reply that when you use false lights and colors you do not stimulate imagination, you only distort reality. And when you distort reality you have destroyed truth.

Although Belasco's equivocal approach to the mise-en- scène in his production of The Merchant of Venice offers contradictory evidence regarding his assertions that anything short of exact faithfulness to reality was not truthful, the director— even during the first three decades of the twentieth century— was limited as a producer by his own narrow-minded perception of reality, one that was

Young, Stage Door 235.

Belasco, Stage Door 237. 81 grounded in nineteenth-century notions of scientific realism.

While his innovativeness in theatre technology

(particularly with regard to lighting techniques) expanded the parameters of theatrical production in New York, it served generally to improve the photographic truthfulness of his visual imagery. It took a younger generation of theatre artists active during the same period to utilize the new technology in more fanciful and imaginative ways, thus (more radically) expanding the very notion of what was considered

"theatrical."

Among Broadway Shakespearean producers, the most significant of these early anti-realist revolutionaries was

Arthur Hopkins. CHAPTER III

ARTHUR HOPKINS: SHAKESPEARE AND THE NEW STAGECRAFT

One of the most prominent and prolific producer- directors of the Broadway theatre during the first half of the twentieth century, Arthur Melancthon Hopkins (1878-1950) was also perhaps among the most innovative, not only in his self-effacing directorial methods but also in his exploration— in close collaboration with stage designer

Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1954)— of a minimalist approach to mise-en-scène, based upon principles of the "New Stagecraft" that, during the first two decades of the century "swept through Western theat e— first in Europe and then in the

United States— challenging the deeply entrenched premises of

Italianate and naturalist set design.

^ Arthur B. Feinsod, "Stage Designs of a Single Gesture: The Early Work of Robert Edmond Jones," The Drama Review 28.2 (Summer, 1984): 102. Italianate scenic design techniques were those first developed by members of the Roman Academy during the 15th and 16th century. Sparked by the rediscovery and later publication of De Architectura. Vitruvius' treatise on Roman architecture, the theatre artists of the Academy based their designs upon the "illusionist" principles of vanishing perspective in painting. Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554) was among the most influential of these artists. His Architettura. the first Renaissance treatise on architecture to contain a section devoted to the theatre, included illustrations of tragic, comic and satyric settings that Serlio based upon Vitruvius'

82 83

When in 1920, Hopkins produced and directed the first of his four Shakespearean productions, all designed by Jones and specifically mounted as vehicles for illustrious members of what later became known as the "Royal Family" of American stage actors (Ethel, John and Lionel Barrymore), he was already one of the Broadway theatre's most well-established managers.

Younger than David Belasco by only seven years, Hopkins nevertheless represented a radical new generation of theatre artists that stood in direct opposition to "Belascoism," both in its authoritarian approach to production and in its perfection of the superficial details of reality.

While admiring of Belasco, whom he considered "the most colorful producer of his time . . . a great director, and the first producer to work out his productions to the last detail,Hopkins nevertheless was vexed by the elder manager's obsession with literalism in scenic representation. In 1931, the year of Belasco's death,

Hopkins described his displeasure with naturalism's legacy:

Detail has been the boon of the American theatre for twenty years, detestable, irritating detail, designed for people with no imagination— people who will not believe they are in a parlor unless they see the family album.^

^ Arthur Hopkins, To A Lonelv Bov (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1937) 198.

^ Arthur Hopkins, How's Your Second Act? (New York: Samuel French, 1931) 28. 84

Hopkins' goal as a director was to assist in the

freeing of an audience's imagination, which he believed was

impossible to achieve by appealing to its conscious, as opposed to its unconscious, mind. Asserting that realistic settings were designed "wholly for conscious appeal,"

Hopkins complained that an attempt at pictorial reproduction of reality was bound to lead a viewer to compare the scene as it is presented with a conscious knowledge of what it purports to reproduce, a comparison that invariably leads to the attention of the viewer being drawn away from the play itself. The mental comparison further results, Hopkins proposed, in a reminder that one "is in a theatre witnessing a very accurate reproduction, only remarkable because it is not real” (Second Act 27). The attempt at realism, according to Hopkins, serves merely to emphasize the unreality of the artificial effects that it engenders:

I submit that realism defeats the very thing to which it aspires. It emphasizes the faithfulness of unreality. All that is detail, all that is photographic, is conscious. Every unnecessary article in a setting is a continuing, distracting gesture beckoning constantly for the attention of the audience, asking to be noticed and examined, insisting upon its right to scrutiny because it belongs. But what of the play in the meantime? (Second Act 27)

The proper way for an audience to experience a play without such distraction, Hopkins believed, was by way of generating "unanimous reaction." Thus, he sought to present every aspect of a production "so unobtrusively, so free from confusing gesture, movement and emphasis, that all passing 85 action seems inevitable” (Second Act 9). To this end,

Hopkins developed his own theory, which he called the theory of Unconscious Projection. He believed that by a process of

"discarding conscious irritation," a director could so guide a production as to eliminate anything that might distract the conscious mind in order that audiences could experience a play on an emotional level before it reached them on an intellectual one. Hopkins did not suggest that the intellectual response was to be rejected, but he emphasized that it must arise as a result of the emotional response.

Of primary importance to Hopkins' theory was the establishment of harmony between all aspects of production.

Like many other theatre producers of the early twentieth century, Hopkins believed in the blending of production elements into one unified whole:

Author, actor, artist, director, all working as a harmonious unit, each supplying just the suggestion that is needed at the time it is needed— all speaking the same language, as it were— each fusing into the other so there is no telling where one begins and the other leaves off. (Second Act 31)

Hopkins' desire for unification of production elements

(a Wagnerian concept that had taken hold of theatre artists both in Europe and the United States by the early years of the twentieth century) was theoretically no different from that of David Belasco. A significant distinction can be observed, however, between the means each employed to 86 achieve that end— a distinction that Hopkins perceived as one between self-aggrandizement and self-effacement:

The whole realistic movement was founded on selfishness— the selfish desire of the producer or scene painter to score individually, to do something so effective that it stood in front of the play and shrieked from behind it. fSecond Act 29)

It was Hopkins' fervent conviction that no one artist in the "community" of artists that comprised a theatre production could seek personal acclaim without jeopardizing the unity of the whole.

Each must resist every temptation to score personally. Each must make himself a free, transparent medium through which the whole flows freely and without obstruction. . . . There is no part of the play that is done for the benefit of anyone. It must all be inevitable, impersonal and untrammelled. It requires a complete surrender of selfishness. (Second Act 10)

The theory of Unconscious Projection developed by

Hopkins— which was based on his conscious decision to appeal exclusively to the collective, unconscious mind of an audience in order to arouse not "the emotion that rises out of thought, but thought that rises out of emotion" (Second

Act 8)— depended for its success on the willingness of the creative artists with whom he worked to abjure their own personal ambitions for the good of the production as a whole. "The theatre," Hopkins once wrote, "is a breeding ground for 'pitiful ambition.' Only by honesty and unselfishness can it be disinfected."'*

'* Hopkins, Lonelv Bov 206. 87

In practice, Hopkins' theory depended not only upon the honesty and unselfishness of his co-workers but also upon what he called "extreme simplification," an "elimination of all the non-essentials, because they arouse the conscious mind and break the spell" he was attempting to weave over the unconscious mind.

Hopkins considered it his good fortune to have found in designer Robert Edmond Jones just the kind of unselfish artist who could help him actualize his principle of

Unconscious Projection. The director sensed from their first work together (The Devil's Garden, 1915) that they were compatible, and he later wrote retrospective of their twenty years of collaboration that "Jones and I had the same approach to all productions. . . . [we] agreed at all times that our contributions should not be individual, but supporting parts of the whole pattern.

As a theatre artist, Jones came of age just as the New

Stagecraft was revolutionizing the art of European theatre.

After graduating from Harvard University, Jones spent a year in Germany where he apprenticed at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches

Theater in Berlin, coming under the direct influence of practitioners engaged in the application of New Stagecraft principles such as had been developed by Adolphe Appia,

Edward Gordon Craig and Georg Fuchs. In his own early work.

^ Arthur Hopkins, Reference Point (New York: Samuel French, 1948) 123. 88

Jones would come to emulate those European artists in their desire to simplify a mise-en-scène by limiting the stage to only those scenic elements that were necessary to establish a "sense of place. The purpose of a stage setting," he asserted, "is simply this: to remind the audience of where the actors are supposed to be. A true setting is an

invocation to the genius loci— a gesture 'enforcing us to this place'— and nothing more."®

In realizing his desire for a minimal stage, Jones restricted himself in a number of ways:

He kept color range in check, relying heavily on mono- and duochromatic sets. He often worked on either a shallow stage or a deep but empty one, and he left many walls bare, costumes unadorned and floors with few stage properties. Implicit in these efforts was the idea that suggestion and simplicity were higher values than elaborate depiction, that limiting the means of artistic creation freed the limitless imagination of creator and viewer alike.^

In their many productions together, but most particularly in their Shakespearean collaborations of 1920-

1922, Arthur Hopkins and Robert Edmond Jones were instrumental in introducing to the Broadway theatre of the

1920s (and in demonstrating the commercial viability of) the

® Robert Edmond Jones, The Dramatic Imagination: Reflections and Speculations on The Art of the Theatre (New York: Methuen Theatre Arts, 1941) 135-6.

^ Feinsod, "Stage Designs" 103. 89

most basic principles of the New Stagecraft: "concentration

by simplification and imaginative suggestion."®

The plays of Shakespeare seemed an inevitable testing

ground for practitioners of such a minimalist approach, for

the precepts of the New Stagecraft corresponded in essence

with Elizabethan staging conventions. Although many details

of early 17th-century English staging are still debated, it

is clear that "the Elizabethan public stage consisted of a

simple platform or thrust jutting out into a courtyard, with

spectators viewing the action from three sides.As

representative scenery was a virtual impossibility in such a

configuration due to sight-line limitations, it has been

suggested that productions could employ only a bare minimum

of properties and scenic elements. Because of such

flexibility, it has been pointed out, the narrative element

of a play was free to follow its course "consecutively,

rapidly, and with the utmost accumulation of dramatic

effect."1®

Thus, the constant shifting of locale that David

Belasco denounced in 1922 as being "un-Shakespearean" in

order to justify his rearrangement of scenes in The Merchant

® Sheldon Cheney, The New Movement in the Theatre (New York: Kennerley, 1914) 155.

® Arthur B. Feinsod, "The Origins of the Minimalist Mise-en-scène in the United States," diss., NYU, 1985, 71.

John Corbin, "The New Stagecraft," The New York Times 20 October 1918: Section IV, p 2. 90 of Venice had been, in fact, among the most fundamental aspects of Shakespearean theatre, arising as it did from the simple, unadorned platform staging techniques employed by the Elizabethans. And as proponents of the New Stagecraft discovered, minimalistic mise-en-scène was far more in keeping with a desire to maintain fidelity to "original" texts of Shakespeare's plays than had been its naturalistic counterpart.

The revolution in Broadway Shakespearean production that was exemplified by the collaborations of Hopkins and

Jones occurred at a time when theatre production in general was undergoing a shifting of emphasis away from the controlling influence of the leading player and toward that of the director and, to some extent, the designer. With such displacement presumably came some decreased emphasis in leading performances at the expense of the overall effect of the drama; and, in Shakespearean production, this may have resulted (at least to some small extent) in "the liberation of Shakespeare the dramatist, and the centering of attention on the plays themselves.

It shall be observed, however, that while Hopkins and

Jones attempted in their Shakespeare productions to remain faithful to maintaining unity of all production elements in order that nothing would interfere with an audience's direct

Aubrey Berg, "Collaborators; Arthur Hopkins, Robert Edmond Jones and the Barrymores," diss., U of Illinois, 1979, 109. 91 emotional response, at least two of the playtexts themselves were radically altered— and for pragmatic reasons not in the

least associated with the collaborators' stated goals of unity, simplification and imaginative suggestion.

Thus, when Hopkins authorized playwright Edward ("Ned")

Sheldon to prepare an acting version of Richard III for John

Barrymore, the result was an adaptation that reduced the play in question to a pair of acts (by the omission of eleven of its original twenty-four scenes^^), which were to be preceded by an entire act consisting of various excerpts from the Third Part of Henry VI pieced together to serve as a lengthy prelude to the action of Richard III.

These interpolations served to clarify for the audience the multitudinous events of the Wars of the Roses, to establish the rivalries, and to afford glimpses of the young Richard as ambassador at York and as an assassin at Tewksbury. They served, too, to throw the character of Richard into greater prominence.

Indeed, Sheldon's version was consistent with one of the principal aims of the production, which was intended from the outset, at least in part, to facilitate an auspicious introduction of John Barrymore as a Shakespearean actor. And, despite the notable extent of re-ordering, the appropriation for Richard of a famous Buckingham speech and

Sheldon's version omitted Act II— scenes 3 and 4; Act III— scenes 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6; Act IV— scenes 2 and 5; and Act V— scenes 1 and 2.

Berg 116. 92 at least one carryover from Cibber,it was observed that

Shakespeare's text otherwise "was scrupulously observed.

As Barrymore was approaching Shakespeare without prior experience, Hopkins felt no trepidation in his decision to circumvent traditional methods of approach. And, according to Hopkins, Barrymore "was completely in sympathy" with the director's strategy, and in his work "set a clear example to the others."^®

After a thorough study of the playtext and the available literary analysis of it, Hopkins rejected previous interpretations and decided to trust his own responses. He would later assert the importance of disregarding established scholarship. "You will only end up by trying to choose from conflicting conceptions, and whatever you choose will not be your own.He also rejected the temptation to treat Shakespeare's texts with undue reverence, a practice which he felt led to "invariably funereal" methods:

It was fair to assume that Shakespeare was more alive than his crumbled interpreters, so I dismissed authority, went back to the play itself.

the unfortunate "Chop off his head, so much for Buckingham."

J. Ranken Towse, review. The New York Evening Post 8 March 1920.

Hopkins, Lonelv Bov 201.

Hopkins, Reference Point 30. 93

and decided to treat it as any other newly written work.IB

He deliberately selected actors who, like Barrymore, had had no prior Shakespearean experience. Furthermore,

striving for "an unnoticeable homogeneity of speech," he

insisted that the entire cast refrain from employing accents or regional dialects of any kind— presumably encouraging a consistently neutral, standard American pattern of speech.

In keeping with his desire to treat the work as a new play— and it can be argued that in Sheldon's arrangement, it was a new play— Hopkins provided the actors with typewritten

"sides" (i.e., scripts that contained their own individual lines only and that were devoid of stage directions). He urged the cast to treat the play as they would a melodrama, not as "cold verse to be intoned by dead tongues," and he

"warned them against listening to the words and embracing them.

Moreover, in directing Richard III, Hopkins characteristically discarded "traditional stage business and expansive gesture"^® It was a stated principle of his that movement should never be arbitrary or superfluous.

"There are only two reasons for movement on the stage," he asserted, "emotion or destination. Any movement that is

Hopkins, Lonelv Bov 199-200.

Hopkins, Lonelv Bov 200.

20 Hopkins, Lonelv Bov 201. 94

added for movement's sake, breaks the spell.As a

result, his productions were often censured as being too

static by critics unfamiliar with (or insensitive to) such a

minimalist approach.

Thus, a reviewer who attended the opening night

performance of Richard III complained that there was a

"lessening of the play's tensity [sic]" during the dream

sequence that occurs on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth

Field (Act V, scene 3). The critic attributed this

perceived slacking-off to "ineffective stage-management,

which brought the apparitions into the scene in a huddled

group and permitted them to speak their reproaches in voices

that were almost inaudible.Alexander Woollcott, the

critic for The New York Times, concurred, protesting that

"the tent scene is neither eerie nor in any other way

terrifying, but singularly pallid and inert.

At least one other critic, however, (Heywood Broun of

The New York Tribune^ praised Hopkins' overall effort at

minimizing the movement on stage, describing the stage

picturization as "enthralling," and insisting that "there is

no excess of gesture. . . . There is a wealth of detail in

movement and posture," Broun maintained, "but it is all

Hopkins, Reference Point 41.

uncredited review. The World 8 March 1920.

Alexander Woollcott, "Second Thoughts on First Nights," The New York Times 21 March 1920: Section VI, p 6. 95

reasonable and effective. There is no leaping for the sake

of doing something.

While there may have been no excess of movement in

Arthur Hopkins' Richard III, it is fairly certain that on opening night the production itself was overlong, as it ran

slightly over four hours. Advertised to begin at 8:30 p.m., the performance commenced twenty minutes behind schedule (at

8:50 p.m.) and concluded a few minutes before 1 a.m.^^

The most obvious reason for the production's excessive length was Ned Sheldon's adaptation. The critic for The

World opined that the version had to have been arranged by a villain greater even than Richard himself, suggesting further that "this mistaken attempt to incorporate within its range of a single performance the whole catalogue of the

Duke of Gloucester's infamies came near defeating its purpose.

Another factor that may have contributed to the length of the production was what J. Ranken Towse of The New York

Post referred to as John Barrymore's "sluggish" performance of the title role. In Towse's opinion, "Mr. Barrymore was

Heywood Broun, review. The New York Tribune 8 March 1920.

25 Cuts and alterations were made overnight, and subsequent performances lasted approximately three-and-a- half hours. After his second visit to the production one week after the opening. New York Times critic Alexander Woollcott observed that it had been "whittled, compressed and speeded into more normal dimensions" (21 March 1920).

25 uncredited 8 March 1920. 96 much too deliberate in movement. His stealthy manner,

indeed was suggestive of cunning and treachery, but was

inconsistent with energy.

A third, and perhaps more surprising, cause for the production's lengthiness was a seemingly inordinate number of breaks in continuity that were necessary for scene changing— surprising in light of the intentions of both producer and designer for minimalist simplicity, one of the desired results of which would ideally have been the achievement of continuous action. Alexander Woollcott complained that Jones' design "did not, after the

Continental fashion, make use of the forestage, but rather called for more than a dozen illusion-dispelling intervals for the shifting of scenery."^® And Heywood Broun observed that while the performance itself "cannot be said to have dragged save in one or two places during the playing, . . . the intermissions are trying in length and number.

But despite the apparent failure of Jones' design to facilitate continuity of action, there was nearly unanimous

J. Ranken Towse, The New York Evening Post 8 March 1920.

Woollcott 21 March 1920.

Broun 8 March 1920. A reviewer for The News (writing on 8 March 1920 under the single name McElliott) disagreed with Woollcott and Broun, claiming that the production's sixteen scenes "melt[ed] into each other with smooth rapidity." 97 praise for both its theatrical simplicity and its impressive beauty. Its central idea was that of a semi-permanent setting that, with some variation from time to time, could encompass the action of the entire drama.

The one feature that remained constantly in the dominant upstage center position throughout the performance was a simplified and conventionalized rendering of the entrance to the Tower of London, consisting of a central archway and two side towers. At times it was used literally as an exterior. With the addition of platforms or a large arras strung across the stage, the same permanent setting became a throne room or a council chamber. Henry Vi's prison cell was established by way of a wrought iron cage placed in the center of the central arch. Later, a cell for

Clarence was created by stretching a trellis of iron bars clear across the proscenium opening. Movement of troops on battlefields was suggested by way of lighting that emanated from positions directly over the stage, at both sides, as well as from the back of the stage, which left the Tower in total darkness. Shadows of the warring forces were then projected onto the massive prop stones that had been placed before the Tower.

The modified permanent set Jones developed for Richard

III served the production in a number of ways. Although it concentrated on a single motif, that of the ever-present

Tower, changes in lighting and of properties yielded variety 98 without compromising the one unifying element. In striking another compromise, between literal and abstract representation, the Tower also functioned, even when partially obscured by another scenic element, "as a symbolic reminder of Richard Ill's evil domination and as a mood- evoking dark mass.^°

In Kenneth Macgowan's view, the designs of Robert

Edmond Jones for Richard III, by way of creating settings

"from mere scraps of background dropped in the midst of a permanent setting, and emphasized, individualized and sublimated by light" were nothing short of "revolutionary" in American Shakespearean production.

Notwithstanding his caviling about the numerous, lengthy intervals required by the scene-shifting, Heywood

Broun warmly praised Jones' setting as "simple to the point of ingenuity," asserting that the scene outside the Tower of

London was "the finest stage picture" he'd ever seen.

In a follow-up review, a week after the opening, Broun indicated that was also particularly impressed that the depth of playing area had not "been sacrificed to the

Feinsod, "Stage Designs" 102.

Kenneth Macgowan, "America's Best Season in the Theatre," Theatre Arts Magazine 4:2, April 1920: 103.

Broun 8 March 1920. 99 exigencies of scene shifting” as it had in most of the

Shakespearean productions of the preceding fifty years.

Woollcott in The Times spoke "heartily" of the scenic investiture, boasting that "some of the scenes are of incomparable loveliness. All of them are rich and right— the work of an unerring artist of the theatre.Towse, perhaps better than any other critic, pinpointed both the design's strength (beauty) and its weakness (inconsistency of style):

The costumes and stage settings . . . were exceedingly rich, artistic and effective. . . . The mixture of old and new scenic methods was not of much material aid to sequence or intelligibility but resulted in a general effect that was highly spectacular and pleasing.

On the basis of the available critical evaluation of the production, it would seem that the acting in Richard III

(setting a pattern that was to be repeated in the following three Shakespeare collaborations) reflected Arthur Hopkins'

Heywood Broun, "As We Were Saying," The New York Tribune 14 March 1920: Section III, p 1. "It may be remembered," Broun wrote, "that in most of the Shakespearean productions of the last fifty years there was a regular alternation between shallow scenes played in front of a painted drop and scenes in which the full stage was employed." The critic furthermore recalled having wondered as a boy why Polonius seemed to be living in a hallway.

Alexander Woollcott, review. The New York Times 8 March 1920.

Towse 8 March 1920. 100 view that "acting at its best is not imitation of life. It is recreation of life.

Pursuing a strategy in Shakespeare that shunned the flamboyant histrionics of a previous generation, Hopkins did his best at the outset of rehearsals for any production to discourage the actors with whom he worked from over­ embellishing the verse or making "points."

His work with actors in general, however, was based firmly on a desire to be far less assertive than many of the autocratic producers, like Belasco, who preceded him. He believed strongly in the inspiration and "authority" an actor needed to develop on stage, and that acting could not be acquired by external application:

A performance that is hung on an actor by a director is false fruit wired to a tree that has not flowered. Too frequently the flowering is prevented by the director. Before the actor has had a chance to bud, the director has burdened him with his own dead fruit.

In general, Hopkins tended to rely more on casting than on actor-coaching to achieve desired results from the performers with whom he worked. He held that the creativity leading to characterization was predominantly an actor's responsibility rather than that of the director. Thus, he rarely "imposed" his own ideas on actors, but saw his

Hopkins, Reference Point 73.

Hopkins, Reference Point 51. 101 position as that of a "guide," encouraging them through a process about which they ultimately could not be objective:

The true adventure in directing is opening areas of creation that were previously unknown to the actor. . . . The only area of exploration is within the actor. All directorial supervision should be made favorable to this exploration.^®

Allowing the actor "as much creative freedom as possible," he only stepped in when he felt an actor was "off the track," at which point he gave directions privately, never correcting actors openly in front of their peers.

This indirect approach to directing actors was labelled (by

Dorothy Parker) "absent treatment," and Hopkins thought the phrase to be an appropriate one: "the more seemingly absent the treatment," he declared, "the less harmful the remedy."®®

Nevertheless, because of this somewhat laissez-faire approach to directing actors, Hopkins' desire to obtain a balanced ensemble of "selfless" actors met with uneven results, perhaps most notably in his productions of

Shakespeare's plays. While there were mixed reactions to

John Barrymore's portrayal of the title character, there was a consensus of opinion that the supporting cast of actors, who were all relatively inexperienced in Shakespeare, was generally weak.

®® Hopkins, Reference Point 63.

39 Hopkins, Lonely Boy 157. 102

Woollcott complained of a "rag-tag-and-bobtail company, of which half the players are intolerable and the other half are— well, tolerable.Broun dismissed the performances of supporting cast members as "ordinary. . . .

Only one or two are conspicuously bad," he griped, "but it is in no sense distinguished support."'*^ The critic for

The World acknowledged that the company Hopkins assembled was not of even quality; but he found apology for the director in a conviction that the cast was "probably as efficient as could be found under the present conditions which prevail in the theatre" (acknowledging, perhaps,

Broadway's dearth of actors with experience in Shakespeare— due, no doubt, to the sporadic production of his plays in

New York). The same critic recognized, however, that

Sheldon's acting version of the play provided "few roles that offer many opportunities in this tragedy, which holds a single dominant figure always in the foreground." *2

Towse, in The Evening Post, concurred, recognizing that few of the supporting players had an opportunity to make much of their roles "as their parts had been reduced to the narrowest dimensions.

Woollcott 8 March 1920.

Broun 8 March 1920.

uncredited review. The World 8 March 1920.

Towse 8 March 1920. 103

In a follow-up critique, written after his second viewing of the play, Woollcott reiterated his objection to

"the inadequacy of the supporting cast," which he considered

"perilously weak in several of the most important roles," but he also credited Hopkins for his contribution to "the main achievement of the company"— i.e., the central performance by Barrymore.**

While there was no consensus among the New York critics regarding the merits of John Barrymore's enactment of

Richard, at least two reviewers insinuated that his stellar performance was accomplished by a conscious subordination of the other actors and, hence, a willful distortion of

Shakespeare's drama. Thus, Towse, who disapproved of the

"sluggish action" and "deliberate" movement in Barrymore's modern, "intellectual" approach to Gloucester, suggested

"that the whole representation had been pitched in a low key in order to be in harmony with the unrobustious

Richard.And in The Nation. Ludwig Lewisohn remonstrated Barrymore for permitting himself "to be surrounded . . . by large companies of very inferior actors who play in subdued tones, raise his personality into an

Woollcott 21 March 1920.

Towse 8 March 1920. 104 immoderate relief, and shatter the drama which he feigns to interpret.

Nearly every critic who reviewed Richard III, even those who disagreed with Barrymore's interpretation, recognized the authority with which he commanded the stage during the opening night performance.^^ Broun was moved to call Barrymore's Richard "the most inspired performance which this generation has seen.The critic for The

World recognized that in his attempt to suit the role to his own particular talents, Barrymore's embodiment was "very human and plausible" and ventured furthermore that "viewed as a whole, the performance . . . was unexpectedly skilful and fine.Woollcott believed that Barrymore's Richard

"marked a measurable advance in the gradual process of bringing his technical fluency abreast with his winged imagination and his real genius for the theatre,later adding that the next step in the actor's ascent to the front ranks of American theatre would require him to show more

Ludwig Lewisohn, "The Life and Death of Richard III," The Nation 110.2856 (27 March 1920): 404.

Hopkins later observed that John Barrymore's first public performance of a role was invariably his best, and that a significant falling-off into self-conscious bombast generally followed. "He loved creating a part, and once that excitement had passed the part interested him no more. . . . Its repetition was unbearable" fLonely Boy 229-30).

Broun 8 March 1920.

uncredited review. The World 8 March 1920.

Woollcott 8 March 1920. 105

respect for his audience than he was currently demonstrating, without which he would never be able to

establish the "currents . . . by which a performance derives and gives forth a glowing warmth.

Towse was considerably more reserved in his praise for

Barrymore's Richard, and his evaluation is of interest for the light it sheds on the relatively dispassionate nature of

Shakespearean performances that Arthur Hopkins favored:

Although his embodiment lacked vocal and bodily prowess, conveyed none of the thrill that accompanies demonstrations of violent, eruptive passion, yet in its subdued intensity it denoted a formidable personality, filled with an audacious and malignant mockery, and, right or wrong, it was consistent. Compared with earlier Richards it was often tame, but it held attention. . . . He is not yet a full-blown tragedian . . . but, for a first effort, his achievement was most encouraging.^^

Ludwig Lewisohn was displeased with Barrymore's

Richard. In a dissenting view of the performance, Lewisohn acknowledged it to be "an arresting and even a fascinating one," but unlike the other critics he complained of a surface artificiality of just the sort that Arthur Hopkins claimed to oppose:

Mr Barrymore has moments of the highest histrionic effectiveness; he allures and dazzles. But the word histrionic with all its connotations stands between him and the spirit from which greatness issues. . . . He does not lose himself; he is not consumed in the flame of his own creative imagination. We watch John Barrymore doing marvelous things, and he watches himself with an

Woollcott 21 March 1920.

Towse 8 March 1920. 106

eager appreciation and applause. . . . As acting, [his performance] suffers from a display of personal idiosyncracy and untempered power.

Francis Hackett reviewed Richard III in The New

Republic. Having confessed his distaste for the play's

"infantile" plot, psychology and history, he nevertheless reproached Barrymore for shamelessly exhibiting a "passion for effect," to the detriment of the production:

I confess that with all the pride of the eye and pride of the ear I never could serenely forget that this was John Barrymore playing Shakespeare. . . . I kept thinking, 'Yes, this is the Big Show, this is Buffalo Bill Shakespeare, but I do not find myself translated' . . . partly because Mr. Barrymore lays it on so thick.®'*

Hopkins, in retrospect, remembered Barrymore's Richard as anything but superficial: "He was unforgettable. He had fire, beauty, humor, cajolery, chilling cruelty. . . . Here was exaltation, a brief, dazzling sojourn in the high heavens of emotion."®® While the subjectivity in Hopkins' assessment must certainly be acknowledged, it is also worth noting that the director thought less highly of Barrymore's work as Hamlet: "it is Richard that always will remain with me," he claimed. "For the only time in my experience all

®® Lewisohn 404,

®^ Francis Hackett, "After the Play," The New Republic 22.277 (24 March 1920): 122.

55 Hopkins Lonely Boy 201. 107

forces fused into a perfect whole. For once I glimpsed the greatness of Shakespeare."^®

Despite the widely divergent views of the critics,

Richard III became an instant box-office success, largely due to Barrymore's popularity, and despite a ticket price scale unprecedented for a non-musical production— $5.00 for opening night, Saturday 6 March 1920, and $3.50 and $3.00 for subsequent performances.®^ Seats were being sold up to eight weeks in advance, and the play was showing to standing room houses.

During the fourth week of the run, however, Barrymore's performance began to show signs of fatigue in response to the strain on his professional life of both an over- ambitious work schedule (he was filming Jekyll and Hyde during the afternoon while performing Richard at night) and an extra-marital affair. He eventually succumbed to a nervous and physical breakdown that was to keep him out of the theatre for eighteen months. Arthur Hopkins was forced to close his production of Richard III after only 27 performances.

Hopkins' plans to follow Richard III with subsequent revivals featuring John Barrymore in productions of Hamlet,

Cyrano de Bergerac, Faust, Peer Gynt and Richard II were put

56 Hopkins, Lonely Boy 202.

John Kobler, Damned in Paradise; The Life of John Barrvmore (New York: Atheneum, 1977) 155. 108 on hold. Although Hamlet would be produced effectively two- and-a-half years later, Hopkins was to remember Richard III more fondly than any of his later Shakespeare productions.

In February of 1921, between Richard III and Hamlet,

Hopkins and Jones presented Lionel Barrymore in a visually abstract, and somewhat expressionistic production of Macbeth that— more severely than any of their collaborations before or after— tested the former's theory of Unconscious

Projection (i.e., "discarding conscious irritation" as a means of eliciting not "the emotion that arises out of thought but thought that rises out of emotion") as well as the letter's commitment to the principles of the New

Stagecraft (i.e., leaving as much as possible to the imagination of the audience by way of simplification and symbolic suggestion in design).

The text employed, in contrast to that for the drastically altered Richard III, was virtually the complete standard version intact. Instead of the customary division into five acts, the play was given in three, each of which represented one of a trio of "moral episodes" that centered, respectively, on the murder of Duncan (II.2), the "banquet" scene (III.4) and the "sleepwalking" scene (V.l). From a textual standpoint, then, the production marked for Hopkins

"a return to the simplicity of the Elizabethan stage," but 109

it was a return "enriched by modern resources of stage

lighting and recent developments in the pictorial arts.

In fact, it was a production so "advanced" for its time

in conception that it baffled its critics and bewildered its audiences. A failure, critically and financially, it opened at the Apollo theatre on 17 February 1921 and was closed

less than a month later, after playing only 28 performances.

Yet, the Hopkins-Jones Macbeth, which continued to garner scholarly attention after its brief tenure on Broadway ended, was perhaps the most daring attempt at non-realistic production the collaborators ever made.

In 1923, only two years after Macbeth failed on

Broadway, Oliver M. Sayler examined the production in his book Our American Theatre, referring to it as a "pioneer experiment in general and a foray into the fogs of abstraction in particular" and, thus, in the "revolt from photographic realism," a production of seminal significance:

Upheld by the imaginative vision of Jones, Hopkins in this production was bold enough in the midst of Broadway to put to shame all the pretensions of the secessionists who affect scorn for the commercial theatre, by out-experimenting the experimenters. Unsatisfied to dally with expedients or evolutionary processes, he advanced at one leap into a new esthetic.

Sayler defined that new aesthetic as "an attempt to appeal to the emotions and the imagination through the

Berg 152.

Oliver M. Sayler, Our American Theatre (New York: Brentano's, 1923) 209. 110 abstractions of mood and feeling." It required transforming the moods and feelings evoked by the play into the background for its action, and it meant eschewing a tradition of particularizing that background "in the guise of either a literal or a symbolic representation of locals.Such abstraction, Sayler argued, was not only antithetical to photographic realism and its attempt to recreate an illusion of reality, but also went far beyond mere symbolism, in which "typical and generic objects still represent specific things and places." Abstract theatre in the ideal, then, eliminated "things as the physical eye sees them. . . . It is concerned merely with the mood and feeling

[that] its visible and audible instruments can arouse."®^

The emotional atmosphere Hopkins and Jones sought to evoke in their production of Macbeth was inextricably bound to their psychoanalytical interpretation of the play, which

Hopkins hoped to clarify before the production's opening in an article he contributed to the Sunday edition of The New

York Times on 6 February 1921.

In our interpretation of Macbeth, we are seeking to release the radium of Shakespeare from the vessel of tradition. To us it is not a play of Scotland or warring Kings or of any time or place or people. It is a play of all times and all people. We care nothing about how Inverness may have looked, neither do we care about all the conscious motives that have been ascribed to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. We believe them all to

Sayler 209-10.

Sayler 210. Ill

be of no importance, because we believe the real causes were deeper seated than conscious motive, and furthermore, that the same causes exist today in all people.

The motives to which Hopkins referred were symbolized by the presence in the play of the three witches, who represented the "unconscious devils" that are capable of so possessing and enslaving humans as potentially to "betray, humiliate or degrade," and ultimately even destroy, them.

According to this view, Macbeth becomes possessed "as one in a dream" from the moment he encounters the "evil forces" embodied by the witches. Unaccountable for his actions, "he is picked up and whirled through a torrent of blood and agony. . . . He is the slave of something driving him from one horror to another and gradually breaking him to pieces."

Lady Macbeth is, likewise, "transported" by the witches' evil power, coming to serve as a "medium" through which the words of the witches pour. In turn, she, too, "is picked up and swirled away to her destruction."

Hopkins likened such possession by externalized evil forces to a similar, more internalized, "possession" in modern times of anti-social individuals, often resulting in

"unaccountable" violent actions against society, the contemporary solution for which is either the incarceration or institutionalization of those individuals.

Arthur Hopkins, "The Approaching Macbeth," The New York Times 6 February 1921, Section 6, pi. 112

So, to us the tragedy of Macbeth is not the series of incidental murders and death, but it is that strong people can be picked up by forces they do not understand, are helpless to combat, and by which they are dashed to utter destruction.®^

To actualize this sense of human powerlessness and emphasize the universality of Hopkins' interpretation, Jones set out "to create a landscape of the vast and mysterious human psyche."®^ He designed what has become known as a

"space stage," which was defined by Sheldon Cheney as

"'space sculptured in light to show up and emphasize the actors and action.' It highlights a 'spot picked out of darkness, a little piece detached from a void, with the consequent suppression of structural surroundings.'"®®

In Macbeth, Jones created such a space by way of a deep stage with a black floor, black hangings and high, overhead lights that isolated individual or groups of characters as well as the abstract geometrical shapes of which the various settings were comprised.

The scenic elements were nearly all dominated by a singular, archetypal image. Aslant and distorted conical shapes of one kind or another appeared throughout the play, not only in the larger scenic units (Gothic arches and windows, screens, thrones, pillars, etc.) but also in stage

®^ Hopkins, "The Approaching Macbeth."

®^ Feinsod, "Stage Designs" 118.

®® from his book Stage Decoration, p. 23 (as quoted in Feinsod, "Stage Designs" 117-118). 113 properties (e.g., shields, helmets, spears, etc.). Lady

Macbeth, reading her husband's letter (Act I, scene 5), slowly moved through a maze formed by two sets of skewed

Gothic arches, which "connoted not so much the castle as the mood of minds distorted by murderous ambitions.In the sleep-walking scene (Act V, scene 1), pointed conical shapes reminiscent of stained-glass windows— cross-barred but transparent— resembled a further variation on the same theme, for "by their resemblance in shape to the arches of the earlier scenes they seemed intended to emphasize the pent-up terror of Lady Macbeth shut within her bloody memories."®^ Borrowing from the practice of German expressionist designers (who often transformed the stage into a manifestation of a protagonist's state of mind),

Jones "indicated the mental deterioration of the main characters by making the arches and other conical shapes more and more skewed as the play progressed."^® By the end of the production, the stage contained one "grotesquely skewed" arch.

Jones' design for Macbeth featured an additional unifying image, specifically related to Hopkins' perception that the protagonists were behaving under the influence of omnipotent evil forces of the unconscious. Three enormous

Sayler 211.

Sayler 211.

®® Feinsod, "Stage Designs" 118. 114

silver masks were suspended in the black void above the

stage, as though overlooking all the action that transpired.

The three witches, clad in bright red costumes, wore scaled- down versions of the same masks; and during their scenes, the witches were lit by sharp white beams blazing down on them through the "eyeholes" of the overhead masks. The witches were thus revealed as "abstractions of fatalism.

The designer's attempt to project Macbeth's unstable mind onto the stage was perhaps most noticeable in the banquet scene (Act III, scene 4), during which he is visited by the ghost of Banquo, for whose murder he is responsible:

The throne tottered and was flanked by brooding, malignant shapes. On two shaky banquet tables, Jones placed candles set askew. All the scenic elements were grey but for bold red touches such as Lady Macbeth's costume and the throne's backing.

Consistent with an "expressionist" approach,

Hopkins and Jones employed the space stage only for scenes in which the focus was on the gradual deterioration of

Macbeth's world. "Thus, short scenes that did not occur in

Inverness or Dunsinane were presented downstage before a curtain of dully burnished gold that reflected the light in strange, unusual ways.This alternating use of the

Sayler 211.

Feinsod, "Stage Settings" 120.

71 Feinsod, "Stage Designs" 120. 115 forestage and the full stage presumably allowed for an elimination of the lengthy waits for the changing of scenery such as bothered Alexander Woollcott while viewing Richard

III, but contemporaneous accounts fail to substantiate that supposition.

Jones' color-scheme for his Macbeth settings was generally monochromatic, limited mostly to muted whites, greys and golds illuminated within a black void. The costumes, on the other hand, tended to be more varied in their use of primary colors (particularly red, which may have served a symbolic as well as mood-establishing function) and more elaborate in their decoration.

The "scenery of pure mood" that Jones created for

Macbeth so completely overturned accustomed methods of scenic tradition in Shakespearean production as to elicit from several New York critics rejection on a number of grounds.

For one thing, there was a misunderstanding of intent.

Maida Castellun of The New York Call referred variously to the stage designs as "impressionistic," "futuristic,"

"cubistic," and "symbolical.Several other critics, grappling for words to describe what they witnessed, incorrectly characterized the scenic investiture as

"cubistic." Louis De Foe in The New York World complained of a "fantastic hocus-pocus of draperies and cubistic

reviews of 19 and 20 February 1921. 116 devices" that "was felt at the outset in the witches' scene, which suggested nothing that was blasted or supernatural, and in which the Weird Sisters were robbed of every weird or uncanny attribute.Similarly, Alexander Woollcott in

The New York Times expressed his disapproval of the

"cubistic props" that "stand askew and rivet the unaccustomed eye.

Another ground for condemnation— somewhat related to the first— came, perhaps predictably, from critics more comfortable with traditional conventions than the modern, non-realistic approaches and, thus, who were resistant to so drastic a dismissal of over two centuries of accumulated practice as the Hopkins production represented. Such a heritage of values. De Foe maintained, being "the fruit of the best experience, can not be so easily thrust aside without incurring the direst risks." Jones' "fantastic" designs, in De Foe's view, were "destructive to the spirit and meaning of the work," imposing on it "a suggestion of grotesque unreality when vivid realism was an essential accompaniment of the spoken word. For De Foe, the Jones designs "were interesting only as an elaborate illustration of how a new school or art, essentially fantastic and extreme, can sometimes be misapplied.Edmund Wilson,

review, 18 February 1921.

review, 18 February 1921, p 16.

75 De Foe 18 February 1921. 117

Jr., writing in The New Republic, dismissed the scenic design as "a paste-board toy" inappropriate to the "titanic tragedy" for which it was invented. The panels of Gothic arches, Wilson averred, did not suggest a castle as much as

"something a child has cut out of paper. . . . Does not this tragedy of a crude civilization," he pleaded, "demand great simple heavy arches and pillars, enormous halls, dimly lighted and impressive with a primitive barrenness?"

Apparently unable to transcend a literal viewpoint, Wilson castigated Jones for lowering the walls of the castle "till it is hardly high enough to hold the inhabitants."^®

Finally, there was from nearly all the critics a sense of tremendous imbalance between Jones' "externalized," somewhat iconoclastic approach to the scenic investiture and the very much more traditional, "internalized" approach to characterization taken on by the director and his generally weak cast.

Some critics complained that the novel audaciousness of the settings so completely overwhelmed the stage that the actors could not hope to compete against it. Woollcott in

The New York Times, for example, alleged that "the monstrous and inappropriate posturing" of the production's decoration robbed the play of its ability to reach its audience. While acknowledging that Lionel Barrymore's performance as Macbeth

Edmund Wilson, Jr., "After the Play," The New Republic 26.327 (9 March 1921): 48. 118 was "workmanlike" rather than "distinguished," Woollcott nevertheless intimated that attention was drawn from the actor's work by Jones, whose "effort to clear all the old rubbishy 'scenic effects' out of the great play's way" had, instead, a habit of "tripping it up.

Others, more sympathetic to the daring innovation of

Jones' design, censured Hopkins for not achieving on stage a comparable boldness in the storytelling. Thus, Kenneth

Macgowan faulted the direction for engendering among the actors both a sluggish pace and a static stage picturization:

Never had a production called so for acting or been so ready to support it and raise it aloft; but without such acting, never was a production so vulnerable to popular prejudices.^®

Regardless of where they placed the blame, the critics nearly all sensed that the acting was not "keyed to the setting and therefore to the fundamental note of the production."^® Due to "acting that was mediocre or worse, speech that was frequently unintelligible and rarely distinguished,"®° the artistic balance of the whole was impossible for the collaborators to secure.

Alexander Woollcott, "Second Thoughts on First Nights," The New York Times 20 February 1921: Section VI, P 1. ^® Kenneth Macgowan, "The Centre of the Stage," Theatre Arts Magazine 5.2 (April 1921): 95.

Sayler 212.

®® Castellun 20 February 1921. 119

As to an assessment of the central performance,

Woollcott's dismissal of Lionel Barrymore's work was tame compared to the general tone of condemnation elicited elsewhere. Castellun called it "one of the most monotonous, heavy and unintelligent characterizations" she'd ever seen:

This Macbeth has plenty of brawn, but parlously little brain. He mouths his lines, for the most part, as though he scarcely grasped their meaning. He gesticulates with clumsy grotesqueness as though he were playing Caliban, for he apparently conceived Macbeth to be a rough savage.®^

Edmund Wilson, Jr. declared that Barrymore's Macbeth lacked even a "gleam of conscience or intelligence," and that the actor's portrayal was based upon a simplistic alternation between villain and fool:

Most of the time . . . he is a sneering and ferocious scoundrel; but occasionally he creates an even more grisly effect by transforming himself into a sort of super-half-wit, who stares and gapes with extravagant idiocy at what he has been led to do.®^

Macgowan was even more harsh in his denunciation of

Barrymore. He accused the actor of plodding through the play, "dwelling endlessly on every vowel, never for a moment stimulating any natural emotion appropriate to Macbeth.

. . . [His] is a performance," the critic claimed, "on a dead level."®®

®® Castellun 20 February 1921.

®® Wilson 47.

®® Macgowan, "The Center of the Stage" 95. 120

Hopkins, however, maintained that the lack of

appreciation Lionel Barrymore's performance met with was the

result not of its being too inconsistent with the overall conception of production but rather of its being too closely married to that conception. To Hopkins (who, it should be remembered, viewed Macbeth as a man "possessed" by evil forces over which he had no control), Lionel Barrymore's effectiveness as an actor was due to his total identification with the character he assumes:

He is not the detached interpreter. He is possessed by the character, hypnotized. He gives one the feeling of a somnambulist, walking with open eyes, talking and gesturing, but seeming to be directed by an unseen force. Macbeth's tenancy of Lionel produced an almost unbearable effect of horror. His eyes became those of a stricken madman, his voice a cry of writhing pain. As surely as Macbeth was possessed by witches Lionel was possessed by Macbeth. The result was something that had little relation to acting. It lay in another dimension of which we know little.84

Hopkins contended, moreover, that it was the disquieting effect Barrymore's total immersion in the role of Macbeth had on audiences "which suffered new and forbidden emotions not to be classified with past theater experience," that led them to an outright rejection of the performance. The "hardy few" who were not bewildered by such unusual work, according to Hopkins, "knew that not only were they looking into the deep and infested well of

Macbeth's soul, but were seeing a supreme portrayal that was

84 Hopkins, Lonelv Bov 224-5. 121 far outside the realm of acting,” to which the viewers simply were "unequal.

Despite the overwhelmingly negative response to the

Hopkins-Jones Macbeth, there were a few forward-looking (or at least open-minded) observers who felt that, however flawed, the production was a revolutionary and visionary masterpiece. Stark Young referred to it as "the most creative and exciting staging" of any Shakespeare play he had ever seen. "If this Macbeth could have gone over with more success or been more widely understood," he affirmed,

"it would very likely have marked for our theatre art a revolution of the highest significance."®® And Kenneth

Macgowan, among the most steadfast advocates of the Hopkins-

Jones Shakespeare collaborations, asserted his conviction that Jones' visualization of the play in Hopkins'

"courageous" revival stamped the production as "epoch- making." He conceded that it was not "the highest point in a developing tradition of beauty, suggestion, synthesis," but insisted nevertheless that it was "the beginning of something new," cutting off the past and locking in the future "just as surely as did Hernani

85 Hopkins, Lonelv Bov 225.

®® Stark Young, Immortal Shadows; A Book of Dramatic Criticism (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1948) 100.

Macgowan "The Centre of the Stage" 92. 122

But perhaps the most balanced assessment of the production's historical significance was given by critic

Walter Eaton in an article he wrote on Arthur Hopkins'

contributions to American theatre producing. While acknowledging the failure of Macbeth to live up to its promise, Eaton applauded the visionary attempt to create something in an entirely new vein:

the imaginative quality, the truly tremendous orchestration of form and light and composition, disclosed in this production, acted on the spectator like a new, strange stimulant. It was a glimpse into new worlds, into a possible future, though a glimpse caught painfully for most, as one looks into the glare of a searchlight and then blinks at redoubled darkness.®®

Two years after his nervous breakdown forced the premature closing of Richard III, John Barrymore was ready to take on Shakespeare again, and Arthur Hopkins and Robert

Edmond Jones began making preparations for a long-delayed production of Hamlet.

Hopkins claimed— although his productions did not in every way validate the assertion— that his intention in

Shakespearean production was to "modernize" the plays, to approach them afresh, free from the baggage of tradition and prior custom. A secondary, but no less significant, concern of his with regard to producing any play, classic or modern, was the kind of unity derived from ensemble work, from the fusing of individual contributions by each artist one into

®® Walter Prichard Eaton, "American Producers: Arthur Hopkins," Theatre Arts Magazine 5 (July 1921): 234. 123 the other "so there is no telling where one begins and the other leaves off."®^

In the four Shakespeare productions, however, the intentions of the director with regard to ensemble collaboration were antithetical to the performance conditions under which he worked. It was virtually impossible for Hopkins to ignore the fact that John

Barrymore was in every sense of the word a "star," the most renowned actor the celebrated Drew and Barrymore families had spawned. Productions of Richard III and Hamlet in which he portrayed the title roles were bound to reflect, at least to some extent, the actor's pre-eminence on stage. In this respect, certainly, neither presentation gave more emphasis to Shakespeare than to Barrymore; and, thus, neither was truly "modern" in the Wagnerian sense of subsuming all individual production elements into one unified artistic expression.

Once again, as he did with Richard III, Hopkins willingly made certain concessions to the stardom of his leading player when preparing a text for Hamlet, brushing aside his stated conviction that the play was the thing.

The final performing version of Hopkins' Hamlet was effected only after the excision of over 1,250 lines of the

Hopkins, Second Act 31. 124

"original" playtext.^® Eliminated were the Voltemand-

Cornelius scenes, the entire sub-plot of Polonius and

Reynaldo, the description of Ophelia's death, the early

scenes with Fortinbras, the soliloquy from IV.4 ("How all occasions do inform against me"), much of the scenes

featuring the players and their play, and the entire

"recorder" scene.

With regard to the text, then, Hopkins' Hamlet (like his Richard III before it) was consistent with actor-manager

Shakespeare trimmed to strengthen the emphasis on the leading character of the drama. But, if textual alterations were fashioned according to traditional practices of the nineteenth century, John Barrymore's representation of the principal character was not.

Heywood Broun was the first-night critic who attached the "psychoanalytic" label to Barrymore's interpretation of

Hamlet, suggesting that it was drawn along the outlines of

Freudian psychology rather than old-school romanticism®^— although no substantial evidence exists to support the notion that Barrymore consciously applied Freud's theories in his characterization. On the contrary, it would appear that the actor studied the play (assisted by his vocal

Margot Peters, The House of Barrvmore (New York: Knopf, 1990) 230.

Berg 192-3.

Heywood Broun, review of Hamlet, The World 17 November 1922, p 11. 125 coach, Margaret Carrington) utilizing the same kind of tabula rasa approach to Shakespeare that Hopkins had advocated beginning with Richard The director had already demonstrated, in Macbeth, an ability to guide actors in the application of a psychological approach to characterization; his influence was most likely a factor contributing to Hamlet its layers of unconscious motivation.

Whatever the origin of the interpretation, its principal inheritance to posterity was most likely

Barrymore's physical underscoring of an incestuous lust felt by the young Prince of Denmark toward the Queen, his mother.

John Barrymore's so-called "Freudian" portrayal, thus, allegedly "the first of its kind ever ventured in

Hamlet,was conspicuously that of "a tragic hero who lacked the courage not of his convictions but of his complexes.Broun observed as much in his review of the production:

Barrymore's most original contribution to the role probably lies in his amplification of the unconscious motives of the Prince. He plays the closet episode with the Queen exactly as if it were a love scene.®®

Perhaps as significant an aspect of the performance as his revelation of hidden, psychological motives was

see Kobler 171-172.

Kobler 178.

Peters 230.

®® Broun 17 November 1922, p 11. 126

Barrymore's rendering of Hamlet not as an awesome figure of

heroic proportions but rather as one who seemed to the

critic for Variety "very real and sympathetically human:"

His acting is genuine to a degree. Here is a player who can read metered lines without the curse of 'elocution.' Barrymore's Hamlet is before all else a fellow creature rather than a mere histrionic creation.

John Corbin of The New York Times, while complaining of a certain monotony in the performance, also acknowledged

Barrymore's naturalness:

The 'reading' of the lines was flawless— an art that is said to have been lost. The manner, for the most part was that of conversation, almost colloquial, but the beauty of rhythm was never lost, the varied, flexible harmonies of Shakespeare's crowning period in metric mastery. Very rarely did speech quicken or the voice rise to the pitch of drama, but when this happened the effect was electric, thrilling.^®

John Barrymore's opening night performance as Hamlet, at the Sam H. Harris Theatre on 16 November 1922, elicited from the critics a wide range of response, predominantly positive. Of the actor's champions, Heywood Broun was the warmest, asserting that Barrymore's was "the clearest, the most interesting, intelligent and exciting Hamlet" of a generation," excelling all others "in grace, fire, wit and clarity." Broun, while criticizing the actor's diction for being too studied and deliberately delivered was

Rush, review of Hamlet, Variety 24 November 1922: 15.

John Corbin, review of Hamlet, The New York Times 17 November 1922: 14. 127

nevertheless particularly impressed by his conversational approach to the dialogue. Claiming that Barrymore played the role "without any of the traditional bellowing and posturing," the critic remarked that the actor's calm, conversational rendering of the soliloquies resulted in a truthful representation of them as "spoken thought.

On the other extreme, Broun's praise was counterbalanced by J. Ranken Towse's litany of all he found lacking in a performance devoid of "tragic power":

the inspiring spirit, the alternating moods of philosophic brooding, of momentary energy and passion, of absorbing impulse and hesitant vacillation, of gracious badinage and biting satire, all the attributes clearly indicated by the text that contribute to the constitution of the soldier, courtier, scholar, and lover of which Hamlet is the epitome.10°

While Towse conceded that the interpretation was "clever, thoughtful, interesting and fairly consistent . . . with an individuality all its own," he complained that "it reflected only one or two of the many facets in Hamlet's manysided

[sic] character."

Whatever individual grievances the critics had about this Hamlet, most concurred that the interpretation was a fresh one and that Barrymore commanded the stage during the opening night performance with an authority he had possibly never before displayed. Nearly every reviewer (with Towse

Broun, 17 November 1922.

J. Ranken Towse, "Hamlet Spectacle and Little Else," The New York Evening Post 17 November 1992. 128

the most notable exception) echoed in so many words the assessment of Charles Darnton in The Evening World that

Barrymore had been "absolutely sure of himself. . . . He had the steadiness of a well-defined purpose, and he went about

it without a single sign of faltering.

Hopkins'’ process of selecting supporting players for

Hamlet departed from his practice in casting both Richard

III and Macbeth, for in his third Shakespeare production he abetted the Hamlet of John Barrymore by hiring an impressive company of actors with previous experience in Shakespeare.

It included Tyrone Power (Claudius), a noted Shakespearean actor who had worked with Beerbohm Tree, Henry Irving and Augustin Daly; Frederick Lewis (Horatio) and Sidney Mather (Laertes) of the Sothern-Marlowe company; Reginald Pole (the Ghost), the nephew of William Poel; Blanche Yurka (Gertrude), and Whitford Kane, who had 'played grave-digger to eighteen Hamlets and buried thirty-five Ophelias.

The director's motivation for such a change of policy is unclear. Perhaps Hopkins was answering critics' charges that Richard III and Macbeth had been furnished weak supporting casts by design in order to camouflage the lack of experience the Barrymore brothers had in performing

Shakespeare. Perhaps Hopkins was acknowledging that he had not been successful in eliciting adequate performances from his inexperienced supporting actors, as new to the rigors of

Charles Darnton, "John Barrymore's Hamlet Has Charm of Simplicity," The Evening World 17 November 1922.

Berg 193. 129

Shakespeare as was the director himself. Or perhaps, after

Richard III, he (and Barrymore?) were emboldened enough by a sense of certainty regarding the actor's potential triumph that they felt less intimidated by the prospect of embracing the experience of others than they had two years before.

Whatever prompted it, Hopkins' employment of experienced Shakespearean actors to support Barrymore's

Hamlet resulted in several outstanding individual efforts

(although there was no consensus as to which performances stood out). But it did nothing more to engender a balanced ensemble than had the casting of players in Richard III or

Macbeth who had little or no experience in Shakespeare. The company was according to John Corbin, "adequate, but nothing more." Broun claimed that the supporting cast of Hamlet was

"good" and that some members of the company were "much better than that." Kenneth Macgowan contended that there was "nothing at all approaching an active ensemble," and that "the players supporting Barrymore, excellent men and women [by the standards of the day], did little to make their parts constantly alive." Macgowan, moreover, cavilled over Hopkins' static staging:

in the whole picture there was almost no variety or movement. The court must have seemed a court in wax works. Posed in lovely groups . . . , these actors showed by their movements no perturbation at the course of events in Elsinor [Sic].103

103 Kenneth Macgowan, "And Again Repertory," Theatre Arts 7.2 (April 1923): 97-8. 130

Stark Young, on the other hand, praised Hopkins for the

relatively inactive stage picture, recognizing in it a vital

extension of the director's conscious plan to effect an economy of movement:

About all this production there were none of those accessories in invented business [that had marred 'busier' productions]; there was for the most part, and always in intention, only that action proceeding from the inner necessity of the moment and leaning on life, not on stage expedients.

About the supporting cast, Towse's was again the strongest voice of opposition: his accusation was that the

"ineffective" company "looked as if they were performing under stern instructions to do nothing that might divert attention from the star."

Hopkins' seeming incapacity to inspire balanced, ensemble acting from his casts was no doubt inadvertent, although it apparently was a pervasive weakness of his directing practice, irrespective of play selection or whether he was working on classic or modern dramas. Walter

Eaton, in his article on the director published in Theatre

Arts Magazine nearly a year before the opening of Hamlet, already had perceived this ubiquitous flaw:

his most conspicuous fault is his apparent inability to achieve an acting ensemble commensurate with the imaginative conception he and [Robert Edmond] Jones have so often worked out for the play as a whole. Noticeable in Richard III, it was a crying fault in Macbeth. But it has

lO'* Young, Immortal Shadows 11. 131

also been a fault in plays of lesser consequence, and less daring in design.

Jones' design for Hamlet marked a return from the

expressionism of Macbeth's "space stage" to the same kind of minimalism that had informed his setting for Richard III.

Once again, as for the history play, Jones placed a single, dominating central image on the stage— in this instance a

stone "chamber" framed in the upstage-center position by an enormous Romanesque arch that towered above the actors.

Eight broad, Appia-esque steps ascended to the rear from the downstage playing area (the apron of which extended over the orchestra pit), narrowing as they neared the archway far upstage. Two additional smaller staircase units, located even further upstage of the arch and ascending perpendicularly left and right from the main steps, provided entrances and exits, as well as suggesting higher elevations in the castle. The addition of curtains or draperies and only the barest minimum of furniture pieces helped to define spaces such as the throne room or the Queen's bedchamber.

The design and staging of the Hopkins-Jones Hamlet evoked more specific commentary and more detailed criticism than had the corresponding components either of Richard III or of Macbeth, due perhaps to the critics' growing familiarity with the collaborators' application of New

Stagecraft principles in Shakespearean production.

Eaton 235. 132

The Literary Digest, having devoted an entire article

on 6 January 1923 to surveying the critical assessment only

of Barrymore's "new idea" of Hamlet, followed up a week

later with a separate article that provided an overview of

the analysis and commentary with regard to several production elements that had received the most discussion.

"Most startling of all," the article implied, was

Hopkins' decision to have the Ghost of Hamlet's father be represented on stage by disembodied lighting effects rather than the presence of a live actor. While Reginald Pole spoke the Ghost's lines from an upstage-right position behind the scenery, the specter was "embodied" by a "stream of light" focused on a portion of the set or quivering against a silver-blue backdrop upstage of the arch. Hopkins and Jones, so far from being entirely innovative, were merely emulating a then-current trend in Continental

European production, but such an imaginary spirit had

uncredited, "The New Way of Staging 'Hamlet,'" The Literary Digest 76.2 (13 January 1923): 27-8.

According to the actor William Faversham, quoted in The Literarv Digest article of 13 January cited above, "in the better productions of Hamlet, both in Germany and Austria, the Ghost in the flesh [had] not been presented for many, many years. It [had] always been represented by an eery light and a voice that would represent to our imaginations the voice of a ghost, allowing Hamlet's imagination to reach across the footlights and stir the imaginations of the audience" (27). 133 never before been "unseen" on the New York stage.John

Corbin of The New York Times was particularly disturbed by the disfocusing effect occasioned by the invisible Ghost:

Which is this Hamlet to face, the apparition or the voice? He cannot face either, if the audience is to read the suppressed terror in his lineaments. So he dodges, as it were, from one to another. Instead of the awe and inspiration of the actual encounter, steadily visible and dramatic, we have a patent absurdity.^®®

Towse, too, was uncomfortable about what he termed the

"abolition of the spectral Majesty of Denmark," referring to its "wilful and senseless disregard and perversion of the text, with all its unmistakable implications"— by which he meant the many literal references to the Ghost's appearance found in the text.^^® Alexander Woollcott in The Herald further indicated that the scene in which Hamlet was visited by his father's spirit fell flat in part because of Reginald

Pole's feeble offstage rendering of the Ghost's speech:

The first night that speech was thick, remote and inaudible. A week later, it emerged crystal clear

10® The invisible Ghost met with such universal critical condemnation that Hopkins was prompted to restore a live embodiment of the part when the play was revived in November of 1923. The director reportedly told John Corbin ("Gossip of the Rialto," The New York Times 18 November 1923, Section 8, p 1) that his decision was not a capitulation to tradition but rather a desire to convey "the struggle of a spirit to come into contact with a living person."

1®® John Corbin, "Hamlet Without the Play: A Tragedy," The New York Times 26 November 1922, Section 8, pi.

110 Towse 17 November 1922. 134

and neatly dipt in the manner of a lay-reader intoning the service.

For Corbin, however, the representation of the Ghost was not nearly as great an offense as was a "trivial and grotesque" (albeit "beautiful") setting that both

"encroached upon the playing space and introduced

incongruities of locale quite unnecessarily.

Corbin's attack on Jones' set centered on the great central staircase, which he estimated occupied roughly two- thirds of the playing area and which he felt "usurped the rightful domain of the players, the area needful to the creation of any genuine dramatic effect." Among the

"devitalizing" effects of this "scenic symbol," as Corbin labelled it, was an awkwardly staged "nunnery" scene played downstage and to the side, and providing no arras behind which Claudius and Polonius could spy on Hamlet's demeanor with Ophelia.

Another "incongruity" apparently caused by the everpresent steps and massive arch was a sense Corbin and several other critics had that the graveyard scene, placed downstage and center, was located indoors. Heywood Broun, in a joke that was later reiterated by other critics.

quoted in "The New Way of Staging 'Hamlet,'" The Literarv Digest 76.2 (13 January 1923): 27.

Corbin 17 November 1922.

Corbin, "Hamlet Without the Play" 26 November 1922, 135

suggested wryly that Ophelia had been buried "in the

parlor."

Corbin also dismissed as "absurd" the production's

staging of the climactic scene in which Hamlet discovers

Claudius at prayer. With no suggestion of the traditional palace chapel, the King, facing the audience, knelt on the apron in close proximity to patrons in the first row, his hands raised in supplication. Hamlet entered through a curtain just behind him, drew his sword and although he spoke in a volume that Corbin claimed was "audible to the last row in the balcony," Claudius betrayed no knowledge of his presence.

John Corbin found no scenic atmosphere in the design for Hamlet, and while he acknowledged the presence of an

"all important spark of genius" in it, he nonetheless blamed

Robert Edmond Jones for obstructing the play's "many fine dramatic values" and causing the "incomparably stirring and dramatic narrative" to limp.^^'*

Apparently it was only Kenneth Macgowan and Stark Young who appreciated to the fullest extent not only the beauty of

Hamlet's scenic investiture but also its tradition-breaking innovativeness. In defending Jones' scenic design, Macgowan invoked the Elizabethan model, with which he believed it had much in common.

Corbin 17 November 1922. 136

Manifestly, if you look at Jones' Romanesque background as a piece of scenery, a room, the graveyard in its center becomes absurd. But so do most of the other scenes, for 'Hamlet' does not pass in any one room of the castle. . . . [nor did it] pass in any room at all when Shakespeare gave it at the Globe. . . . [but rather] in front of a permanent architectural form, including a balcony, two side doors and some sort of wide entrance to an inner recess.

Young viewed the Hopkins-Jones Hamlet as "out of class with

Shakespeare production from other sources" because it focused on discovering "the essential and dramatic elements" underlying the play. He predicted, despite its flaws, that the production would be long remembered as one of the

"glories" of American theatre:

Such a production . . . could not hope to be uniformly successful. But in its best passages, without any affectation of the primitive or archaic, it achieved what primitive art can achieve: a fundamental pattern so simple and so revealing that it appeared to be mystical; and so direct and strong that it restored to the dramatic scene its primary truth and magnificence.^^®

John Barrymore played Hamlet for 101 performances at the Sam Harris Theatre. His performances subsequent to the opening, as they had been in Richard III, were erratic, and it seems he continued performing the role in an egotistical desire to supplant Edwin Booth's New York record of 100

quoted in "The New Way of Staging 'Hamlet,'" The Literarv Digest 76.2 (13 January 1923): 28. Macgowan's comments are cited as having been published in The New York Times as a reply to John Corbin in the letter's letter column, "Mail Bag," but no date is provided.

Young, Immortal Shadows 14. 137

performances.Hopkins, who desired to continue the

production, which was averaging in excess of $20,000 a week

in box office receipts, nevertheless agreed to terminate it

at Barrymore's request. A brief revival brought the production back to Broadway, where it played at the

Manhattan Opera House for 24 performances during November and December of 1923.

Shortly after the successful run of Hamlet had commenced in the fall of 1922, Arthur Hopkins decided to present Ethel Barrymore (at the age of forty-three) in Romeo and Juliet, which opened at the Longacre Theatre on 27

December. He originally had intended to produce As You Like

It, in which Miss Barrymore was to have appeared as

Rosalind. In her autobiography, the actress suggests that

Hopkins changed his mind in order to follow her brother

John's great success in Hamlet with a production of equal import.

When it opened, however, the production of Romeo and

Juliet— oddly miscast, hastily conceived, and under- rehearsed^^®— was ubiquitously condemned by the critics as

It was apparently overlooked that John E. Kellard, who had opened in Hamlet at the Garden Theatre on 18 November 1912, had played the Prince of Denmark a total of 102 consecutive times.

Ethel Barrymore, Memories (New York: Harper, 1955) 236.

In Reference Point. Hopkins would acknowledge that Romeo and Juliet had been opened in New York prematurely, i.e., "without preliminary performances" (p 120). 138

a failure, perhaps even greater than that of Macbeth,

Moreover, a production of Romeo and Juliet featuring Rollo

Peters and Jane Cowl opened— very shortly after the opening

of Hopkins' production, and to great praise— eventually

achieving a previously unprecedented 174 performances, the

longest continuous run of a Shakespearean play at one

theatre.12°

There was a widespread feeling among the critics that

Miss Barrymore, while not necessarily too old for the part

of Juliet, nonetheless had a restrained presence that was

far too mature, thoughtful and deliberate to allow for an

adequate portrayal of the impulsive, impassioned Veronese

girl of Shakespeare's play. John Corbin referred to her

Juliet as "a muted instrument."121 Ludwig Lewisohn

acknowledged her "charm and loveliness," but suggested that

she lacked "an especial eloquence" in the part due to her

"matronliness of essential personality."122 Burns Mantle

cavilled over the lack of appropriate emotion in the

performance; "Grief and doubt were in this Juliet's lovely

eyes, but of terror there was little. Juliet's will and not

her imagination ruled the scene, and the will is deadly as

^20 Berg 258.

^21 John Corbin, review of Romeo and Juliet, The New York Times 28 December 1922: 20.

^22 Ludwig Lewisohn, "Minuet," The Nation 116.3002 (17 January 1923): 77. 139 an inspirational force.Maida Castellun perhaps best summed up the negative reaction to Ethel Barrymore's performance;

a Juliet of exquisite feeling, but reticent, inexpressive, restrained, ultra-modern, where the spirit of the Italian Renaissance and equally the spirit of Elizabethan England demand impulsiveness, ardor, splendor of passion— that is the Juliet which Miss Ethel Barrymore brings to the American stage.

Two dissenting opinions regarding Barrymore's Juliet were rendered by Percy Hammond and Stark Young. Hammond claimed that Barrymore was the best of the many Juliets he had seen, excepting only that of Julia Marlowe.And

Stark Young, while acknowledging that Barrymore provided neither Shakespeare's nor Juliet's "quality," nevertheless accounted her "beautiful and moving" performance to be the best in the production, "because it was something significant and essentially true in itself, and with its own integrity"^^^

The supporting cast Hopkins assembled for Romeo and

Juliet— with the principal exception of Basil Sydney, whose

123 Burns Mantle, "An Adorable 'Juliet' by Ethel Barrymore," New York Dailv News 28 December 1922: 16.

1^^ Maida Castellun, "Ethel Barrymore is a Restrained Juliet in a Subdued Production of 'Romeo and Juliet,'" The New York Call 29 December 1922.

125 Percy Hammond, review of Romeo and Juliet, The Tribune 28 December 1922.

126 iiijijje Passionate Pilgrim," The New Republic 33.424 (17 January 1923): 203. 140 vibrant performance as Mercutio apparently was the audience

favorite on opening night^^^— was, as had been the case in both Richard III and Macbeth, adequate but in no way distinguished. It was Corbin this time who suggested that the entire company had been "keyed down" to match the passionlessness of the Juliet. According to Castellun,

"most of the actors read their lines with intelligence, but without variety, and few seem to have [had] the slightest interest in maintaining the metre and rhythm of blank verse." McKay Morris' performance as Romeo was generally regarded as "skillful" but "undistinguished." Castellun observed that, as a lover, he was "less ardent than the lines, the country and the period call for." Heywood Broun was even less kind, noting how ineffective Morris was in the love scenes by suggesting that he "acted from the very start as if he were about to swear off something for New

Year's.Most of the others apparently were little more than serviceable, although each individual reviewer had his or her own particular favorite performances.

Hopkins' decision to present the Ethel Barrymore production of Romeo and Juliet before the opening of the

Ironically, Heywood Broun devoted far more space in his review [The World 29 December 1922) to Sydney's performance than to Barrymore's, claiming that after Mercutio's death, "the major portion of the story seemed told" (29 December 1922).

Heywood Broun, review of Romeo and Juliet, The World 29 December 1922. 141

Jane Cowl-Rollo Peters production resulted in a short rehearsal period and a hastily planned and executed design.

Robert Edmond Jones was forced to fall back on techniques that had served him in his designs for Hamlet.

A large structure containing three Romanesque arches fronted by two low, broad steps served as an unchanging background for the street scenes. The larger, central arch was filled in with painted panels or kept open to reveal the cyclorama curtain behind it, with vistas provided by the two smaller arches, right and left. Curtains were also employed downstage of the arches to suggest interiors and vary the stage picture. The Capulet tomb was suggested by an iron- fence insert positioned in the central archway. The most controversial element of the Romeo and Juliet set was the unadorned, black balcony, which was effected without any of the pictorial embellishments of 19th-century realism, and which Percy Hammond described as "a gaunt aperture in a convent wall."

The critics were once again, as they had been three times before, divided in their response to the severity of

Jones' simple, stark setting.

Maida Castellun thought that Jones' scenery "was rather awesome in its simplicity" and that the lighting was

"superb, especially in those instants [sic] where it faded away, causing the characters to seem to vanish." Heywood

Broun was equally impressed: 142

The setting by Robert Edmond Jones seems to us utilitarian as well as beautiful. We have a design which affords in effect an outer and an inner stage. The scheme is suitable for all the contingencies of the drama. Moreover, it makes it possible for the transition from scene to scene to be made with great celerity.

While efficient scenic transitions may have been "possible," it was noted by Kenneth Macgowan that "the stage hands, unwatched, took their time with the very simple changes of scene which should have been almost instantaneous.

But Mantle registered the same complaint that had been levelled against the single set for Hamlet, namely that it had "the effect of making all the exteriors seem interiors."

He was also puzzled by the multiple use of a particular wall unit and of one specific yellow silk curtain, since both served to define more than locale. "There is a certain stateliness of line, and a richness of decoration in the settings," he reported, but grumbled that the overall impression was art for art's sake rather than for

Shakespeare or his drama. And Maida Castellun, acknowledging the beauty and artistic simplicity of the settings, nevertheless thought them "rather dull and negative," and lacking "the clash of color and of line that one might expect for this [early] tragedy of family feuds and ill-starred love."

Broun, The World 29 December 1922.

Kenneth Macgowan, "And Again Repertory," Theatre Arts Magazine 7.2 (April 1923): 102. 143

Stark Young, in his review of both Hopkins' Romeo and

Juliet and David Belasco's Merchant of Venice (which had

opened a week earlier), pointed to a remarkable contrast between the two productions with regard to their respective

sequence of scenes as a means of exposing the hypocrisy of those critics who objected to the "spaces" and "moods" of

Robert Edmond Jones' settings for interfering with

Shakespeare, but who were perfectly willing to applaud

Belasco's scenic "elaborations" while ignoring the fact that, however entertaining they may be, they obstructed "one of the very fundamentals of Shakespeare's idea, the sequence of his scenes!"131

Young was willing, rather, to overlook the imperfections of Hopkins' (and Jones') "none too successful production" because of its own particular felicities; the bravery of its dramatic flow, the freedom and freshness of its (i.e., Shakespeare's) dramatic form, the passion of its conflicts, the "rhythm of images, actions and ideas that make Shakespeare so vital. To Young, it seemed obvious that

Hopkins and Jones represented the future of Shakespearean production in America just as surely as Belasco represented its past:

Whatever Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Jones may otherwise do, they are taking now what is the most necessary and important step for Shakespeare's prosperity, which is— without self-conscious archaism and by methods that, good or bad, are in character with

131 Young, "The Passionate Pilgrim" 203. 144

our time— to free the play of everything that obstructs the scheme of place and action that Shakespeare planned.

Arthur Hopkins, in keeping with his theory of

Unconscious Projection, stated that his objective as a producer of plays was the "elimination of all the non- essentials because they arouse the conscious mind." The four Shakespeare productions he directed between 1920 and

1922 exposed both the strengths and the weaknesses of the methods he employed in the attempt to achieve that objective.

It was observed of Hopkins that his most conspicuous merit as a producer was his ability to select a drama of genuine worth and produce it in such a way that it stimulated all the senses at once and appealed to the widest possible spectrum of theatregoers:

Hopkins reached the mass emotions and at the same time achieved a new and disturbing beauty . . . , as if the soul of the play were somehow translated into an impression that was not vocal, not visual, not a thing of words or settings or lights or colors or actors' personalities, and yet was all of these things.

In his quest for visual and aural unity of all production elements, Hopkins was abetted by Robert Edmond

Jones, who instilled in his designs for the Shakespeare productions the revolutionary, minimalist principles of the

New Stagecraft. But in applying to Shakespeare's dramas the

132 Young, "The Passionate Pilgrim" 203.

Eaton 234-5. 145 new art of the theatre, of which he was certainly an advocate, Hopkins came into direct conflict with the dead weight of traditionally inbred ideas about how those plays

"should" be produced.

Moreover, Hopkins apparently was unable to achieve a level of ensemble acting in his "star vehicle" Shakespeare productions that would serve to complement the unified visual impression he and Jones were able to accomplish in the other production values. The director, by his own admission, considered the cultivation of untried talents one of his foremost duties as producer. As such, he conceived of himself as a kind of "clearing house" for younger artists, be they playwrights, actors, designers or musicians. Such a policy relies for its success on an ability to assemble talents with enough natural ability to overcome the inadequacy of their relative inexperience. But

Hopkins often gathered together artists who, so far from being "adults in their art," were "mere children, spoiled children, especially the actors, pitifully unfitted to rise to the producer's challenge.Some of the director's opponents concluded that his "clearing house" philosophy was feigned to conceal an indulgent, easy-going temperament.

Others suggested that Hopkins simply did not possess "a sufficient knowledge of the art of acting or a sufficient skill as a director of actors, to weld his companies into

Say1er 58. 146 relatively the same harmony and effectiveness" achieved by the likes of Henry Miller and David Belasco.Still others suggested that Hopkins' theory required in practice a breed of actors that perhaps had not sufficiently evolved: unselfish players "who have no need of the regulation tricks of their trade, and who are good enough actors to get along without tangible direction.

Whatever the causes, it is clear that the Shakespeare productions of Arthur Hopkins, paradoxically, were weakest in moments that demand the very theatricality to which he claimed he was so vehemently opposed. Hopkins' productions

"betrayed his own abhorrence of the theatric by faltering when they reach[ed] moments that must be artificial to succeed. In this respect he may have been more genuinely a "realist" than that master of effects, David

Belasco.

Eaton 236.

136 Brown, Upstage 200.

137 Brown, Upstage 201. CHAPTER IV

ORSON WELLES: SHAKESPEARE AND FORMALISM

Orson Welles, the maverick of American film directors whose erratically brilliant Citizen Kane (1941) ranks as among the most widely discussed and venerated of cinematic masterpieces, has had so profound an influence on the history of world cinema that the accomplishments of his early theatrical career have been generally under­ represented in overall assessments of his contribution to twentieth-century American culture.

Yet, it was his several directorial successes on the

New York stage during the mid-1930s— and, most particularly, his two earliest professional Shakespeare productions (the

Macbeth produced by the Federal Theatre Project in 1936 and the Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar a year later)— that first focused national attention on the quixotic young actor-director, whose subsequent rise to international prominence in the early 1940s was as meteoric as his creative eminence proved, ultimately, to be ephemeral.

Welles' vision of theatre was unique and deeply personal, deriving as it did from the indefatigable ego of

147 148 an enfant terrible— an ego that asserted itself in every aspect of his creativity. His work was possessed of "an imagination and sense of originality altogether unbounded by any theoretical restraints.

With the shrewdness of a showman, Welles always kept one eye focused on what might draw an audience's immediate response, and he almost always relied on a kind of sensationalism to enhance that response. What gripped his audience invariably was "his vehemence of expression with its violent shocks— melodramatic and overwrought.

Film critic Pauline Kael, assessing the success of

Citizen Kane, has pinpointed with sharp accuracy the exhilarating appeal of that most quintessential of Welles' creations: "what makes Welles' directorial style so satisfying," she maintains, "is that we are constantly aware of the mechanics— that the pleasure Kane gives doesn't come from the illusion but from our enjoyment of the illusionist and the working out of the machinery.

This sleight-of-hand approach to directing, which is apparent not only in Welles' films but also in his play productions, was a distinctive trademark and may have been

^ Richard France, The Theatre of Orson Welles (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1977) 55.

^ Richard France, ed., Orson Welles on Shakespeare: The w.P.A. and Mercurv Theatre Plavscripts. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies 30 (New York: Greenwood, 1990) 3.

^ Pauline Kael, The Citizen Kane Book (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1972) 78. 149

the predominant element of his entire creative output. And his personal stamp as a director may have been nowhere more evident than in his productions of Shakespeare, where his cavalier reshaping of texts "transformed" the plays into something very much more his own than Shakespeare's.

Welles came to Shakespeare with a passion for the theatrical values inherent in the plays that had been instilled at an early age as well as with a thorough familiarity with the sort of contemporary scholarship that advocated the simplicity of Elizabethan staging techniques as an antidote for nineteenth-century scenic excesses:

Like Poel and Granvi1le-Barker he was taken with the fluidity of the Elizabethan stage; but their commitment to textual integrity had little appeal for him. Welles was not a scholar but a showman. He recognized a market for classical theatre, but felt the plays could not be trusted to speak for themselves. A gimmick was needed to lend them contemporary excitement. Having found it, he shaped both text and stagecraft to fit his eccentric vision and the result was not so much a revival of a play as a re-creation.'*

In particular, Welles circumvented prevailing notions regarding the "heightened" quality of Shakespearean language, viewing it instead "as only one element within the conceptual framework of his productions"^ and, thus, as much subject to his ultimate authority as any other element within his (considerable) control. The "totality of

'* John Ripley, Julius Caesar on stage in England and America: 1599-1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980) 222.

^ France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 5. 150 theatrical language" was the all-encompassing territory in which Orson Welles operated, but not for the ultimate purpose of rhetorical persuasion;

By subordinating text to inclusive effect, Welles created an expressive framework within which all the elements of production collaborated not to convey a statement, but, of themselves, to be the statement.®

Content in a Welles production, thus, "served as little more than an obvious vehicle for its expressive form.

Only insofar as the narrative substance of the texts he selected for production could amplify his expressive concepts was Welles interested in them, and throughout his directing career it was the form (i.e., external expression embodied by theatrical effects) and not the content (i.e., internal expression embodied by subtextual revelation) in his productions that conveyed meaning(s), intended or otherwise.

Thus, when Welles undertook any theatre project— and his Shakespeare productions epitomized this phenomenon— his interest primarily lay in expressing his own deeply personal response to the playtext as it offered a vehicle for his boundless theatrical energies rather than in unearthing any of the text's own intrinsic or implied meaning(s).

Richard France has posited that a kind of

"subjectivism" lies at the heart of Welles' work in the

® France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 3-4.

^ France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 54. 151 theatre, by which "dramatic experience was revealed through formal structure on the one hand, and almost 'tactile' theatricality on the other, rather than through the ostensible rhetoric of his scripts.® And the tactile manner in which Welles handled his theatrical expression,

France avers, often resulted in productions that made

"profoundly personal statements" that, ironically, resisted rhetorical articulation.®

Therein probably lies the crux of Welles' multi­ faceted, highly paradoxical approach to play direction; and when evaluating his productions of Shakespeare's Macbeth and

Julius Caesar, it is probably wise to keep the "showman" aspect of his unique artistic personality conspicuously in the foreground.

In a lecture he presented to the Theatre Education

League of New York in 1938 on "The Director in the Theatre

Today," Welles (perhaps inadvertently) betrayed the contradictory convictions that underlay his own work as a director. The director, Welles asserted, is at one and the same time both 'servant' and 'master.' He is the servant of

"that aggregation of talent . . . which is a theatrical company; and as such it is his responsibility to make everyone as good as possible within the framework of his particular conception of a play." On the other hand.

® France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 14.

® France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 55. 152 however, the position of director was for Welles, as it had been for Gordon Craig, a place from which he could advance a singular, undiluted vision of the production:

The composer, the light man, the scene designer, the choreographer and the actors . . . cannot all decide upon individual conceptions of the play. That would result in chaos. The director must know what is right for that conception he has of the play.

Moreover, Welles declared that the director had to be

"better" than any of his collaborators, for ultimately it is

"his task to bring out of them the best talent and the finest results they can give.

Accompanying every offering of the Mercury Theatre

(which, as Artistic Director, Welles co-managed with

Producing Director John Houseman) was the credit line

"Production by Orson Welles," the implication being that he functioned as the creator of all production elements. There was a certain degree of overstatement in that pronouncement

— for he nearly always relied on others to design and supervise the actualization of settings, lights, sound and costumes, functioning himself as a kind of benevolently despotic overseer. Nevertheless, the assertion "Production by Orson Welles" comprised a reasonably accurate description, for "the concepts that animated each of [the productions] originated with him and, moreover, were

10 as quoted in France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 8. 153

executed in such a way as to be subject to his absolute

control.

Welles' vision for a production rarely was conceived

all at once, for he worked outward from a central idea in a

flexible and intuitive manner, and collaborators had to be

prepared for changes on a frustratingly irregular basis.

Ideas presented themselves to him as much through the

inspiration of accident as by rational consideration, and

nearly any or all that could be integrated into his

production scheme would, at the very least, be tested by him

during the rehearsal process. The results of this

exploratory process varied in both manner of presentation

and effectiveness;

His theatrical vocabulary was at once the highest and the lowest and readily lent itself to those violent effects of contrast which were his signature. He was the sideshow barker wallowing in the high excitement and derring-do of the circus or variety theatre on the one hand, while simultaneously exercising austerity and disciplined understatement on the other.

Orson Welles was not in any sense a theoretician, and he generally had little to say about his own work, subscribing, it would seem, to the view that whatever he created in the theatre or on film could speak adequately for itself. He was in practice, however, a personification of

Gordon Craig's "master artist," reigning over his

France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 54.

France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 55. 154

collaborators and their talents, sometimes ruthlessly, in

the interest of advancing his own personal vision. If the

visual and aural imagery bearing that vision embodied the

"meaning" in a Welles production, then the contributions of actors and designers became, at least in one sense, merely

facets of that imagery.

John Houseman— the producer whose artistic sponsorship of Orson Welles played a significant part in the early blossoming of the director's career— regarded Welles' handling of his co-workers as indicative of what Houseman has called Welles' "surprising capacity" for collaboration:

For all the mass of his own ego, he was able to apprehend other people's weakness and strength and to make creative use of them: he had a shrewd instinctive sense of when to bully or charm, when to be kind or savage— and he was seldom mistaken.

In 1936, Houseman embarked on an unusually fortuitous professional relationship with Welles that lasted nearly

France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 54-5.

John Houseman, Run-Throuah (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972) 191. Houseman recalled that, in handling the large (generally inexperienced) cast of Macbeth, Welles had "kept them going by sheer force of personality," exhibiting highly unpredictable behavior— "driving and indolent, glum and gay, tender and violent, inflexibly severe and hopelessly indulgent" (194). 155

five years and that was in large part responsible for

Welles' only sustained period of artistic success.

As overseer of the Negro Theatre Project (a division of the

Works Project's Administration's Federal Theatre Project),

Houseman convinced the then twenty-year old wunderkind— who had already embarked on a successful career in radio— to direct the first production of the Negro Theatre's

"classical" wing at the restored Lafayette Theatre in

Harlem.

The Negro Theatre had been strategically subdivided by

Houseman into two units. One of these units was to be devoted to the performance of plays written, directed and performed by and for African-Americans, set in their indigenous locales and dealing with contemporary subjects of concern to them. The other was consigned to the revival of

"classic" works of theatre, which were to be cast "without concession or reference to color.

Houseman's influence on Welles during that period apparently served to counterbalance the young director's overreaching egoism as well as to provide a framework through which he could channel his restless creativity. In so doing. Houseman found himself increasingly playing "the combined and trick roles of producer, censor, adviser, impresario, father, older brother, and bosom friend!" (Run- Through 207)

The Lafayette, an abandoned "cavern" when the Negro Theatre procured its use, had been built around the turn of the century, during a time when Harlem had been a theatrical tributary of Broadway— see Houseman 182-3.

Houseman 184. 156

Houseman felt it would be "fatal" to risk producing

Shakespeare in Harlem without a director in whose creative capabilities he was completely confident. The young and relatively untried Welles— whose professional theatre experience had been limited to an engagement with the Gate

Theatre in Dublin, Ireland, followed by appearances in

Katharine Cornell's productions of Candida (as Marchbanks) and Romeo and Juliet (as both the Chorus and Tybalt)— was

Houseman's first choice. Having seen Welles as Tybalt in

1934, Houseman had been thrilled by the actor's unique virtuosity; and a year later, he had engaged Welles to perform the leading role in Panic, a verse drama by

Archibald MacLeish, which was mounted for only three performances by the newly-created Phoenix Theatre, of which

Houseman was a co-founder. Upon assuming the leadership of the Negro Theatre Project in 1936, Houseman was presented with an opportunity to offer Welles a potentially sustained partnership, under governmental sponsorship, and Welles eagerly accepted.

Houseman has credited Virginia Welles, Orson's first wife, as having proposed the scenario that led to the

Welles-Houseman "Voodoo" Macbeth, which inaugurated the

Negro Theatre's "classical" wing and became its most celebrated production. Her idea was to set the play "in the 157

island of Haiti in the early nineteenth century, with the witches as Voodoo priestesses!"^®

That particular locale and time-frame, Welles later explained in a New York Times interview with reporter Bosley

Crowther, exploited a "striking parallel" between the history of Macbeth, King of Scotland, and that of Henri

Christophe— the early nineteenth-century Negro dictator of

Haiti, whose oppressive reign engendered a bloody uprising that culminated in his own suicide.The resemblance had persuaded Welles that, of all Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth was the most adaptable for a cast consisting solely of

"black" Africans and African-Americans.

Welles' intention from the outset was "to adapt the play so that it would live for his audience as it once had for the Elizabethans."^® Targeting spectators whom he knew had neither seen nor read much, if any, Shakespeare, he sought to provide a framework of contemporary relevance. At the end of its New York run (which consisted of 10 weeks at the Lafayette and an additional two months at the Adelphi on

44th Street in the Broadway district), Welles (and Houseman) wrote in The New York Times that, unlike the preconception- bound critics, the audiences who had attended their Macbeth had been both fresh and eager:

^® Houseman 185. The end punctuation is Houseman's,

see Houseman 197-8.

France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 14. 158

To anyone who saw it night after night as we did, it was apparent that this was not the Broadway crowd taking in the hit of the moment. Even less was it the special audience one has learned to associate with classical revivals. . . . One had the feeling, every night, that here were people on a voyage of discovery in the theatre.

It was not only much of the audience that was new to

Shakespeare, for there were many members of the large cast employed by the Works Progress Administration for Macbeth who were inexperienced in classical theatre. In fact, quite a number of them were non-actors as well, people from the local Harlem community who had drifted into the Negro

Theatre Project, seeking employment of any kind during a time when salaried work was nearly impossible to find.^^

The cast contained only a handful of professional actors, among them: Jack Carter (Macbeth)— who had been widely acclaimed for his portrayal of Crown in the original production of Porgy; Edna Thomas (Lady Macbeth)— whose credits included work with a Harlem stock company, touring in a David Belasco production and a Broadway production that had starred Helen Hayes; and Eric Burroughs (Hecate)— who had graduated from the Royal Academy in London. The production also marked the first professional assignment of

Canada Lee (Banquo)— who was to abandon an established

Orson Welles and John Houseman, "Plan for a New Theatre," The New York Times 29 August 1937: X.l.

22 France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 66. 159 boxing career in favor of professional theatre after acting for the first time in Macbeth.

John Houseman recalls that the entire Macbeth troupe numbered 137 (although he includes in that figure

"understudies, stage managers, . . . children and dependents'').^^ All members of the company, "from Macbeth to the little boys who carried the swords on their shoulders" were paid the same weekly salary of $23.86.^'*

The sponsorship of the Works Progress Administration enabled Welles, a relatively "untried" director, to utilize creative resources that would not likely have been made available to him in a commercial venue. Designers Nat

Karson (sets and costumes) and Abe Feder (lights), as well as musical supervisor Virgil Thompson were already established professionals who, according to Houseman, joined the Negro Theatre unit "because they saw in the project a wide-open field for those creative activities which they were denied within the narrow limits of the commercial theatre.

Moreover, the Negro Theatre Project— which employed a total of nearly 750 workers, only about 150 of whom had

Houseman 193.

France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 66.

Houseman 182. He further suggests the possibility that these "friends and associates" of his became involved due to a "vague, undefined feeling" that they were contributing to the start of "something new and significant in the cultural life of their country." 160 performed professionally before— contained such a wide- ranging variety of talents that Welles was able to introduce new devices into a familiar play. Replacing the Act III, scene 4 banquet with a "coronation" ball, he brought dancers on stage to establish the pageantry of the occasion. To create an impressive (and convincing) world of the supernatural, he utilized a troupe of African drummers— none of whom, with the exception of their leader), spoke any

English. The troupe's principal drummer, Abdul, apparently was an authentic witch doctor who, according to Houseman,

"seemed to know no language at all except magic.

Welles' conceptualization of the production virtually stripped Macbeth of its intellectual content, concentrating as it did almost exclusively on spectacle, the principal function of which was the evocation of a world dominated by evil. He anchored the text for his production in the magic- drenched, supernatural world of the witches— much the same as Arthur Hopkins had done in 1921— focusing the drama on a hero who makes a futile attempt at controlling his destiny by grappling with powerful forces beyond his control, which ultimately possess and destroy him.

Thus, the "Voodoo" Macbeth was conceived along the lines of a melodramatic suspense thriller about a man manipulated by forces of darkness that, in controlling not

Houseman 190. 161

only him but also the world he inhabits, eventually overcome his natural nobility as well as his conscience.

He turned into an occasion for spectacle the intensely private drama that Shakespeare enacted in Macbeth's mind. He filled scene after scene with startling images and sounds, bringing to the entire production the kind of theatrical display that Shakespeare had reserved for the witches' scenes. . . . He invented the melodrama he did not find, turning Shakespeare's tragedy of a man divided against himself into the story of a good man victimized by evil forces.

By the time Welles had finished "remaking" Macbeth, he had reduced Shakespeare's script by nearly half its original length, radically redefined the world of the play, augmented the roles of the witches, modified the playwright's characterizations and altered the play's meanings.^®

Setting Macbeth in Haiti provided Welles with an opportunity to infuse his production with spectacle on a grand scale, and solved for him as well the problem of presenting black actors as medieval Scots. Moreover, the particular island geography of the setting offered a self- contained locale that supported his melodramatic conceit:

He made the island a prison from which escape was impossible; Malcolm's and Macduff's quest for safety carried them not to England, but to a barren stretch of Haitian seacoast. Similarly, Haiti's history of colonial rebellion and civil war warranted Welles's presentation of a world divided against itself, defined by the contrast between the jungle and the Francophile court. At

Susan McCloskey, "Shakespeare, Orson Welles, And the 'Voodoo' Macbeth, Shakespeare Ouarterlv 36:4 (Winter 1985) 407.

McCloskey 407. 162

once primitive and sophisticated, vibrant and doomed, the expression of tribal nightmare and elegant fantasy, Welles' Haiti was also the place where witchcraft, in the form of voodoo, was widely supposed to be practiced.

But in converting Macbeth's setting from feudal

Scotland to nineteenth-century Haiti, Welles apparently discovered that an effective transposition of time and place in Shakespearean drama was dependent upon an egually persuasive transposition of the cultural parameters inherent in that time and place as they are revealed by the playwright— for, as Susan McCloskey has suggested, "nothing is harder to suppress in a text than an unspoken assumption, an implicit framework of values, or a character's taking for granted a particular social order, political structure, or system of belief."^® That Welles was not entirely successful in making his adaptation textually consistent without resorting to restructuring may reflect the complexity inherent in attempting to find consistently analogous social structures for either contemporary or historical transpositions in Shakespeare's plays.

Welles' promptscript for Macbeth reveals an adaptation that contained fewer outright "cuts" than that of his later

29 McCloskey 410.

McCloskey 408. McCloskey's article persuasively outlines some of the differences in values and world-outlook between feudal Scots and 19th-century Haitians that (she believes) forced Welles to alter the play so radically, reshaping characterization and meaning until they were consonant with his conceptualization. 163 version of Julius Caesar (in which he dispensed with nearly all of Shakespeare's fifth act). However, he so radically rearranged the accepted standard Shakespearean text of

Macbeth as to have rendered his adaptation a wilful reconstitution of the original.

Sequences from the first two acts were rearranged by

Welles and condensed into a single act in order to streamline the narrative. Thus, for instance, Duncan's three separate appearances in Act I (sc. 2, sc. 4, and sc.

6) were consolidated into one— which was drawn from scenes 4 and 6. Welles excised scene 2, in which the King learns of

Macbeth's victories and of the Thane of Cawdor's treachery.31

Several other short sequences, relatively inconsequential to Welles' interpretation, were cut as well

— some for being merely expository, such as the entire Act

V, scene 2 in which Thanes Lennox, Menteth, Angus and

Cathness discuss their plans to meet the forces of Malcolm and Macduff at Birnam Wood. Likewise, a number of the play's long speeches were trimmed, albeit judiciously.

Welles also restructured some of Shakespeare's characterizations. To simplify the focus on Malcolm's claim to his father's throne, his brother Donalbain was eliminated from the text. Moreover, by cutting Malcolm's speeches in the final scene of the play, Welles made him seem to be

3^ McCloskey 408, 164

Macbeth's rather than Duncan's heir— "a smiling, self-

satisfied tyrant in embryo, destined to succumb to the witches' influence even more readily than his predecessor had done.

Banquo was transformed by Welles from Macbeth's closest

friend, who learns to distrust Macbeth only by degrees, into an ambitious adversary. Stage directions in Welles' promptscript indicate that Banquo is openly suspicious of

Macbeth after the death of Duncan. In the first scene of

Welles' Act II, Banquo "bows; formally" to his new King and responds "coldly" to Macbeth's query "Ride you this afternoon?" and "dangerously" to Macbeth's command to "Fail not our feast. In the same scene of Welles' production, moreover, an abridged version of Banquo's soliloquy expressing his fear of Macbeth's foul play was articulated as a direct challenge to Macbeth, and spoken with "menace and mockery in his tone.This restructuring of Banquo's character, while dramatically effective during the one-on-one confrontation, served to trivialize the subsequent murder of Banquo by rendering it

32 McCloskey, 414.

Welles' Promptscript of Macbeth in France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 63-4.

Welles' Promptscript of Macbeth in France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 63. 165 nothing more than "Macbeth's expedient dispatching of a declared foe.

The role of Hecate, customarily portrayed as a woman in twentieth-century productions, was transformed by Welles into a male overseer of the spiritual world who wielded a bull-whip by way of which he controlled the voodoo priestess-witches in the director's Caribbean setting. The part, moreover, was substantially enlarged by Welles, as were those of the witches. It was Hecate who provoked

Macbeth to kill Macduff's family.He also became directly involved in the death of Banquo, assuming the role of the Third Murderer. Hecate led Malcolm to Birnam Wood and gave the command that his soldiers cut down its boughs to bear before them, while the witches haunted the palace, attending Lady Macbeth through her "sleepwalking" scene.

And Hecate was given the final words of each of the three acts into which Welles' production was divided.The character, moreover, functioned as Macbeth's arch-nemesis;

McCloskey 414.

In Welles' production, Hecate was spoke the following lines, which Shakespeare assigns to Macbeth in Act IV, scene 1; "Seize upon Macduff, give to th' edge o' th' sword / His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line." See Welles' Promptscript of Macbeth in France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 81.

France, Orson Welles on Macbeth 33. 166

their relationship was not unlike that between

Mephistopheles and Faust.

Welles' alterations of Shakespeare's text were most extreme when it came to his handling of Hecate and the witches. These agents of the supernatural forces at work in the play appeared on stage frequently, even where

Shakespeare does not indicate their presence. While they provided a nearly ubiquitous "supernatural" presence, appearing in all but two of the production's eight scenes,every one of Shakespeare's scenes involving the witches was drastically cut by Welles; indeed, he left none of them intact. The dialogue that remained was used repetitively— frequently taking the form of vague and indistinct chanting that sounded as though it were coming from a great distance— and some of the repeated lines were interjected periodically throughout the play as an ironic counterpoint to Macbeth's gradual undoing.

For Welles, a desire to present the witches as irresistible forces of evil necessitated their figuring more prominently in the action of the production than they did in

Shakespeare's play:

38 O'Connor 342-3.

According to Susan McCloskey, the witches were absent only from the slaughter of Macduff's family and during the interview between Malcolm and Macduff— see p 411.

France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 33. 167

Shakespeare's witches not only appear infrequently, but exercise severely constrained powers . . . [working] their mischief through their powers of suggestion. . . . But because Welles's witches were present at or near the crucial moments in the play, and in almost continuous contact with Macbeth, they seemed enormously powerful. . . . By redefining the witches' roles, Welles achieved the convincing physical embodiment of evil on which his production's melodramatic design depended.

Nonetheless, the overall result of Welles' freedom in adapting Macbeth was a distillation of only one of the play's themes at the expense of all others:

Welles's text provided a narrative shorn of everything redundant to its main conceit— witches dominating the world work[ing] their will through Macbeth. . . . [He] sought a totality of sensual experience through the use of sight and sound, employing rhetorical content as a structural device, inextricable from that construction of which is was a part.

As a "tapestry of sight and sound," Richard France suggests, the "Voodoo" Macbeth was "a discrete and original work of art.The production itself was "transparently illusionistic, a nightmare more than a reality."'*^ It was conceived in such a way as to emphasize the contrast

"between civilized and savage behavior, natural and unnatural forces.A dichotomy was established early

McCloskey 411.

France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 32.

France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 32.

France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 56.

O'Connor 341. 168

on, and maintained throughout the production, between the

Colonial formality of the palace and its ruling-class

society and the ominously dangerous and unruly world of the

jungle lurking just outside. By transforming Shakespeare's play "into a spectacle of thrills and sudden shocks," Welles generated the impression "of a world steadily being consumed by the powers of darkness.

Karson's jungle and palace settings, were visually contrapuntal throughout the play, coalescing in the final scene as the jungle exercised its final encroachment on civilization. A "luridly painted backdrop" represented the jungle,47 while the palace setting was "solidly three dimensional and provided for a fluidity of movement— up and down, through and around— that afforded the utmost flexibility."4®

The most prominent feature of this expressionist structure was a multi-storied tower crowned by a practical roof. The tower was connected to the palace by a bridge, which could be used either for a passage or as a gateway over the center entrance. When in place, the portable throne faced the courtyard, flanked by the great arched gateway. This setting was, however, preeminently a habitat for the witches, who, like so many insects, infested it, immune from all repellents.49

4® France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 55.

47 McCloskey describes a scene of "luxuriant vegetation coiled into the shape of a recumbent human skeleton" (p 409).

4® France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 33.

49 France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 33. 169

Feder's lighting for Macbeth also contained a number of expressionistic touches, including the strobe-lighting of the cauldron scene, pervasive lightning effects

(particularly in the first act) and the prominent isolation of solitary figures— such as at the end of Act I, when

Hecate "materialize[d] atop the tower, silhouetted against the violent dawn" flaming behind him.^° Lights were employed rather than curtains for transitions between scenes and they were often lowered on one playing area as they were simultaneously raised on another, in a manner "reminiscent of the film dissolve.

All production elements contributed to reinforce the almost nihilistic impression Welles labored to generate of evil triumphing over good, but none had a more immediate effect on audiences than Welles' creative use of music and sound. Throughout Macbeth, the escalating tragic narrative was accentuated by a rhythmic pounding of jungle drums and the "orgiastic howls and squeals of . . . voodoo celebrants,"52 all of which served to provide an aural underpinning to the brutal events in the play. "The primitive violence of the drums," Richard France claims, was employed by Welles "to add dimension to the images of

5° France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 60.

5^ France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 33.

52 Houseman 199. 170 civilized violence onstage, or as ironic counterpoint when the action of the play [fell] into a momentary calm.

The underlying tension thus created culminated in what may have been Welles' most triumphant coup de théâtre in

Macbeth, which focused on the events surrounding the murder of Banquo, including the scene immediately ensuing, in which

Macbeth is visited by the spirit of his former friend. The visitation of Banquo's ghost was staged not at a banquet feast but rather at a formal-dress coronation ball replete with evening gowns and military regalia.

The murder of Banquo was performed before a "jungle" backdrop and accompanied by the voodoo drums and punctuated by Hecate's curses and the derisive cackling of the three witches. After the First and Second Murderers had fled the scene, Hecate gave instructions to the witches and, after dismissing them, was finally left alone standing over the dead Banquo. As he began to drag the body off, delivering a final curse upon Macbeth, the lights on Hecate were dimmed.

And in an effect that resembled a cinematic cross-fade (or

"dissolve"), the distant chanting of the voodoo celebrants subsided as waltz music heralding the next scene began to become more and more perceptible. The lights, likewise, began to rise on the coronation ball before they had completely dimmed on Hecate.

France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 55. Italics are France's. 171

When the new scene began in earnest, the jungle

backdrop had been removed and the stage was filled with

courtiers— dressed for a gala occasion— dancing around the

stage to a fully-orchestrated medley of Josef banner waltzes

that had been arranged by composer Virgil Thompson (who also

contributed an original score of short fanfares utilized

strategically throughout the production). A similar cross­

fading of lights and sound marked the end of the ball scene

(during which Macbeth was visited by Banquo's ghost—

effected in Welles' production by a projected mask that

increased in size at its second appearance)and the

start of the scene in which Macbeth visits the witches.

The contrast Welles established by such visual and

aural juxtaposition was striking and complete in every

respect:

in ambiance, in terms of space and sound, they [were] two entirely different worlds. Within the palace walls a layer of civilization, however treacherous, exist[ed]; while just outside, the jungle [lay] in waiting. Even the dancers, moving as they [did] in horizontal— that is to say, symmetrical— patterns, [stood] out against the more abandoned movements of their voodoo counterparts.

Richard France has observed that the "cinematic"

transitions between scenes in Welles' Macbeth, while having

It is unclear whether these masks were designed in imitation of those Robert Edmond Jones had created for Hopkins' 1921 production of the same play, but the similarity seems too palpable to be merely coincidental.

55 France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 61. 172

been used by some critics to illustrate the influence of motion picture techniques on his theatrical productions, in

fact reflect an influence that went in the other direction.

In Macbeth, France claims, "he was already exploring on the stage techniques that were later to be heralded as original and innovative in his films.

Welles' exploratory approach to Shakespeare, unfettered as it was by the restrictions of tradition, led him to invent visual images that, while not indicated by

Shakespeare, nevertheless furthered the director's proclivity for infusing the production with sensational effects.

Thus, for instance, a brief sequence was devised to intensify the murder of Lady Macduff and her son, both of whom were gunned down^^ (in Macbeth's castle, not her own) by Macbeth's hired assassins. Welles introduced a nurse

(carrying Lady Macduff's infant child) who attempted to flee the scene with the baby after witnessing the onstage killings. She was pursued by the murderers and slaughtered, along with the child.

The second pair of murders [was] committed off­ stage, made more horrifying by Welles' careful feeding of the audience's imagination. The stage [was] left empty as the killers [left] to catch the fleeing nurse. Her cries [were] punctuated by a particularly sharp scream. . . . Welles followed

France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 56.

Guns replaced knives as the lethal weapons for these murders and for the murder of Banquo. 173

the shocking moment with cold silence in which the audience [was] given a moment to savor (or endure) the thought of the occurrence.^®

Another of Welles' inventions for Macbeth was a small group of deformed "cripples" whose recurring presence reinforced the climate of depravity the director was trying to invoke in his Haitian setting. These "mutants" emerged from shadows twice during the first of the three acts into which Welles had divided the play, both times to seek the blessing of their King— Duncan at first and then, later,

Macbeth.

Welles' introduction of these sub-human creatures took its cue from a passage he borrowed from Shakespeare's Act

IV, in which Malcolm, having escaped to England upon the brutal murder of his father, learns of the King of England's alleged power to heal the infirm:

There are a crew of wretched souls That stay his cure. Their malady convinces The great assay of art; but at his touch. Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand. They presently amend. (IV.3.141-45)

Welles ingeniously interpolated these words into an earlier scene in the play, one that occurs prior to the murder of Duncan; and, by way of them, he justified his introduction of the "cripples." At their first entrance, a priest accompanying them spoke this speech as a means of describing to Macbeth the purported healing powers of King

®® Bret Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: Greenwood, 1990) 32-3. 174

Duncan (whose assassination Macbeth was already secretly plotting). The priest's speech, moreover, elucidated their presence in Welles' production.

The second appearance of these deformed creatures— occurring just after Duncan's murder— deepened the ironic resonances of the first. They arrived (sans priest) at the crack of dawn, dragging themselves one by one into the courtyard where Macbeth had slumped wearily into his new throne. The stage directions convey the simple eloquence of this scene that concluded the first act; "Macbeth watches them, fascinated as they limp over to him, a grotesque, silent little army. Suddenly, they all stop moving and fall to their knees at his feet. He stiffens in the throne." As a chant of "All hail Macbeth!" is heard over the distant throbbing rhythm of the drums, the three witches and Hecate appear as "birds of prey" hovering over the doomed hero,

Hecate reiterating the curse that presaged Macbeth's destruction as the curtain falls on the first act.

Richard France has pointed to Welles' visually arresting use of the "cripples" he introduced into

Shakespeare's Macbeth as substantiation for his claim that the director was not much interested in exploring the inner conflict between Macbeth and his own conscience; on the

Orson Welles' Promptscript of Macbeth in France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 62. 175 contrary, he asserts, the spell that has been cast on

Macbeth precludes there being any real internal conflict:

Like Faustus, he has, in effect, surrendered his soul, an in both instances the conflict between good and evil has been supplemented by a pattern of predetermination in which evil is entirely the governing force.®®

In its melodramatic two-dimensionality and its flamboyant sensationalism of theatrical expressiveness, the

'Voodoo' Macbeth presented by the Negro Theatre Project was undoubtedly every bit as much an original creation of Orson

Welles as it had once been of Shakespeare. The title page of Welles' working script, which is preserved in the Billy

Rose Theatre Collection located at the New York Public

Library for the Performing Arts, indicates a production of

"Macbeth by William Shakespeare, Negro Version, Conceived,

Arranged, Staged by Orson Welles,"®^ reflecting Welles' acknowledgement of the scope of his revisions.

Welles' version of Macbeth met overall with a lukewarm response from the New York critics. The negative reviews focused on two inter-related complaints— observed inconsistencies between Welles' concept and its incompletely-fulfilled realization (reflecting a growing open-mindedness with regard to textual "fidelity”) and the cast's relative inexperience in Shakespeare as a limiting factor in the actors' ability effectively to speak

France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 58.

61 McCloskey 407. 176

Elizabethan verse (reflecting long-held and deeply entrenched expectations with regard to Shakespearean acting).

Several critics demurred over a disparity between the seeming radicalism of Welles' relocation of the play's updated setting and a corresponding conservatism regarding his handling of the play's language. This objection was expressed most vociferously by John Mason Brown, writing in

The New York Post. Welles was judged by Brown to have stumbled on a "concept" entirely appropriate to presenting

Macbeth with an all-Negro cast, but faulted by him for not carrying the adaptation process to its logical fruition.

Brown conveyed his disappointment that, while a voodoo

Macbeth sounded "full of exciting possibilities" as "a tale of Black Majesty and of murder and of fear besides which even 'The Emperor Jones' would seem tame," the production as directed by Welles was "not only orthodox but far more inept than are most of the mediocre, though traditional, revivals of the play." Brown acknowledged the many liberties Welles had taken with the arrangement of Shakespeare's text, but complained that, in not adapting the playwright's language to render it consistent with the visual alteration of time and place, the director failed both his audience and

Shakespeare:

Mr. Welles's 'Macbeth' sticks to the Scotland of the text in everything except the costumes and its cast. To be sure, it has its jittering witch­ doctor, its very occasional drumbeats, and give 177

[sic] its even rare sense of having been naturalized by the actors who are now appearing in it. But it does not move Dunsinane into the jungle, it merely loses [sic] a few voodoo men in a black Scotland.

Several days after his initial review appeared. Brown was still bothered by the unfulfilled promise of Welles' concept, stating that "it is not the absence of orthodoxy but its presence which one objects to in this 'Macbeth.'"

The play, he averred, was "still laid in Scotland," the characters remaining "at heart the very same characters that

Shakespeare created, speaking abbreviated versions of the very same speeches which he wrote for them." The result, according to Brown, was a production possessing "little enduring novelty and less genuine excuse.

For the cast. Brown had little praise, except to concede that their commanding appearance was abetted by Nat

Karson's "striking, if stupidly heterogeneous, costumes."

But it was particularly the obvious difficulty most of the actors experienced with the poetic values of Shakespeare's language that irked Brown (and, indeed, nearly all the other critics as well);

As one listens to them murdering one speech after another, and tripping over 'thees' and 'thous' and archaic words, one wonders all the more why Mr. Welles, having had inspiration enough to imagine voodoo witches for a Negro cast, lacked

John Mason Brown, "A Not So Voodoo 'Macbeth' Performed in Harlem," The New York Post. 15 April 1936.

John Mason Brown, "Once Again Harlem's Voodoo 'Macbeth,'" The New York Evening Post. 18 April 1936. 178

imagination enough to adapt the language of the play to the locale he had selected for it and the actors who were to speak it.&*

Similar sentiments were echoed by the critic for

Variety, who suggested that Welles' ambitions were undermined by a lack of courage to take his license far enough. The result, he opined, was a lack of cohesiveness and clarity:

the Negro players strut about the stage in grandiloquent costumes mouthing antiquated Elizabethan language which, quite obviously, they don't even understand themselves. Had they forgotten the verse and fancy phraseology they would have really been doing something, with no squawks possible, even from the dyed-in-the-wool Bardites who couldn't then help accepting the piece for what it is.

Brooks Atkinson, in The New York Times, praised the production "as an experiment in Afro-American showmanship" that "knows how to overwhelm you with [its] fury and phantom splendor," but warned that, while Shakespeare's Macbeth was a verse tragedy that "reveals the disintegration of a superior man who is infected with ambition," Welles' Macbeth was "a voodoo show suggested by the Macbeth legend." He, too, cavilled that the rearrangement of the play was "more considerate of the text than such a free-hand occasion warrants," particularly as neither Jack Carter nor Edna

Brown, 18 April 1936.

Kauf, review of Macbeth, Variety, 22 April 1936. 179

Thomas were able to muster any command over the play's poetry.®®

The actors' "natural" delivery of their lines, without vocal intensity or poetic inflection, was observed by nearly all the critics and may have been the most controversial aspect of the entire production. A correspondent for News­ week magazine wrote, somewhat neutrally, that "the actors make no attempt to give a formal Shakespearean reading; instead, their soft accents drip the lines easily, and actually make them conversational."®^ In The Catholic

World. Euphemia Van Renssalaer Wyatt declared that it was

"interesting to find how natural the Negro company can make the lines but how completely removed they are from the measured rhythm of the pentameter.®® But Richard

Lockridge in The New York Sun was less forgiving, attributing the problem to "ineffective actors having the trouble ineffective actors always have with the cadences of

Shakespeare."®®

®® Brooks Atkinson, "'Macbeth,' or Harlem Boy Goes Wrong, Under Auspices of Federal Theatre Project," The New York Times. 15 April 1936.

®^ unsigned review of Macbeth, News-Week 7.17 (25 April 1936) 28.

®® Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "Macbeth in Harlem," The Catholic World 143.855 (June 1936) 337.

®^ Richard Lockridge, "'Macbeth' With a Jungle Setting, Opens at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem," The New York Sun 15 April 1936. 180

Nearly all the other critics echoed the same complaint

about the (mis)handling of the verse. Even reviewers who were generally positive in response to the production as a whole expressed their dissatisfaction with the actors.

Robert Garland in The New York World-Telearam. while encouraging readers to see the production, asserted that when it came to the poetry "William Shakespeare's words fail[ed] frequently to 'march like heartbeats' or even march at all.And in The Commonweal. Grenville Vernon, praising Welles' production after it had re-opened at the

Adelphi Theatre, cavilled that most of the actors revealed little comprehension of either "the Shakespearean spirit" or the ability to read blank verse;

Except that these actors have musical voices, there is little to commend their performances vocally. They speak gently, even plaintively, without power or passion, and a Macbeth without these two qualities is surely no Macbeth. Moreover, they slur the magnificent lines. Shakespeare's figures of speech, his superb imagery, his verbal music mean little to the actors.

In his memoirs, John Houseman, defending the actors in

Macbeth against such charges, claimed that the quality of their vocal delivery that had been so ubiquitously condemned had been intentional. He attributed the complaints of the critics as stemming from their "preconceived notions of

Robert Garland, "Jazzed-Up 'Macbeth' at the Lafayette," The New York World-Telearam. 15 April 1936.

Grenville Vernon, "The Negro 'Macbeth,'" The Commonweal 24.13 (24 July 1936) 328. 181

'poetic delivery' and 'vocal passion,' and asserted that their objections were to what Welles "had gone to such pains to accomplish with his Negro cast; the elimination of the glib . . • declamatory tradition of Shakespearean performance and a return to a simpler, more direct and rapid delivery of the dramatic verse.

Some small recognition of Welles' intentions (as

Houseman reveals them) regarding the Negro cast of Macbeth's handling of Shakespearean verse came from Burns Mantle who, in his review for The Daily News, acknowledged what he may have considered an appropriate artistic choice under the circumstances:

Here is Macbeth in fancy dress, the Shakespearean lines falling awkwardly but with a certain defiant naturalness from the lips of the Negro actors unaccustomed to reading verse and quite satisfied not to try an imitation of their white brothers.

Due to the unorthodox circumstances under which Welles'

Macbeth was produced, it was judged by a number of critics against standards that were not purely theatrical reflecting social and political biases that were irrelevant to aesthetic evaluation. The Works Progress Administration was a part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal" and its principal aim was to create new jobs during the Depression years for countless numbers of unemployed individuals. But

Houseman 201.

Burns Mantle, review of Macbeth, The New York Daily News. 15 April 1936 (as quoted in O'Connor, p 339). 182 the Democratic administration's policies of government

intervention during the Depression were controversial, and adversaries of FDR and his social programs regarded the

'Voodoo' Macbeth as an extravagant misappropriation of funds by a meddling, liberal-minded government.

The most openly hostile criticism of a non-aesthetic nature was registered by Percy Hammond, critic of New York's leading Republican newspaper (The New York Herald Tribune), who ridiculed the very idea of popular theatre supported by the Federal government, dismissing it as presumptuous and prodigious imprudence and condemning the production as "an exhibition of deluxe boondoggling."^'*

On the other extreme was the African-American critic

Roi Ottley who, animated by the rare opportunity the

'Voodoo' Macbeth provided for blacks to perform in classical drama, celebrated the production almost exclusively on the basis of its racial significance. For him, the production

"was the reward for those who had faith in the Federal Negro

Theatre Project," one that both justified its existence and served as testimony for its continuing to receive government support.75

Despite the equivocal response of the New York critics to Welles' Macbeth, the production was an unequivocal

7'* Percy Hammond, review of Macbeth, The New York Herald Tribune 15 April 1936.

75 Roi Ottley, review of Macbeth, The New York Amsterdam News 18 April 1936. 183 popular success, running a total of ten sold-out weeks (64 performances) at the Lafayette followed by an additional two-month run at the Adelphi Theatre in the Broadway district before being sent out on a national tour.

Macbeth represented a personal triumph for Welles, establishing him in a single blow as a stage director of the first rank. The production, moreover, served to reinforce the fortuitous nature of the partnership between Welles and

Houseman. And Houseman, whose growing commitment to the advancement of Welles' theatrical genius had begun to take precedence over any of his own personal aspirations, proceeded to consider other means of supplying the "new theatrical opportunities of which [Welles] dreamed and find[ing] fresh scope for [his] terrible energy and boundless ambition.

His own "overwhelming success as producer and administrator of the Negro unit" made it possible for

Houseman to convince Hallie Flanagan, the director of the

Federal Theatre Project, to authorize the allocation of funds for his co-founding with Welles a new Federal unit, which was created with the understanding that it would produce only classical theatre (a mandate from which it immediately strayed).

Thus, in the Spring of 1936, Houseman and Welles launched Project 891, so named to correspond with its W.P.A.

Houseman 207. 184 designation. A short-lived operation (due in part to the gradual dissolution of the Federal Theatre Project and in part to a controversy that developed over the socialistic content of its most notorious production), Project 891 was responsible for Welles' productions of Horse Eats Hat (a free adaptation of Labiche's The Italian Straw Hat),

Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the premiere of Marc

Blitzstein's opera The Cradle Will Rock.^^ Among the earliest of possibilities discussed by Houseman and Welles for production by Project 891, which did not materialize during its one season, had been a modern-dress version of

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

Upon leaving the Federal Theatre in August of 1937,

Welles and Houseman wasted no time in finding a means for continuing to develop the kind of work they had begun producing with Project 891. The Mercury Theatre was quickly

Blitzstein's fully-rehearsed "opera" was opened (in great haste and independently of its W.P.A. sponsorshop) on 16 June 1937 at the Venice Theatre in midtown Manhattan after Project 891's downtown theatre (the Maxine Elliot) was padlocked by federal marshalls, responding to a "routine" government directive that called for the postponement of all cultural events until the start of the next fiscal year (1 July). The W.P.A.'s attempted censorship— for it was clearly unhappy with the anti-capitalist sentiments expressed in The Cradle Will Rock— ultimately failed, due in part to the support of members of the Communist Party. But the incident resulted in Welles' resignation from Project 891 and Houseman's subsequent dismissal. See Houseman 245- 281. 185 conceived and organized and an intimate, abandoned Broadway theatre leased.^®

Welles and Houseman wrote a brief manifesto for the

Mercury Theatre that was published in the Sunday Arts

Section of The New York Times on 29 August, in which they announced their plan to produce four or five plays each season, the majority of which would be of the past—

"preferably those that seem to have an emotional or factual bearing on contemporary life"— and to maintain a performing schedule that would be as flexible as possible in order to incorporate new plays or ideas that might turn up. Also indicated was their desire to eschew "the European system of repertory, with its disturbing, wasteful nightly change of bill." The Mercury Theatre, they asserted, would maintain productions in repertory, but would not present more than two different plays in one week. They insisted, moreover, that ticket prices would be affordable, ranging between

$2.00 and $ .50.^®

In September, Houseman penned a second manifesto of the

Mercury Theatre for the Communist Party newspaper. The Dailv

Worker. which promised the presentation of plays representative of all theatrical periods, chosen for their

The Comedy Theatre, on 41st Street and Broadway was, according to Houseman, "an intimate, rococo, two-balcony theatre with six hundred and eighty-seven seats and a good stage" and had been at one time "one of Manhattan's most elegant smaller playhouses" (p 286).

see Houseman 289. 186

"contemporary significance" and offered to the public at popular prices. Additionally, readers were assured that,

"while a socially unconscious theatre would be intolerable," there would be "no substitution of social consciousness for drama"®®

The first production of the Mercury Theatre, announced in both manifestos for a planned opening early in November, was to be Julius Caesar, which Houseman described as the

"most contemporary" of Elizabethan plays. It was the intention of producer and director "by the use of apron, lighting, sound devices, music, etc." to return to the play

"much of the speed and violence that it must have had on the

Elizabethan stage." The production's emphasis. Houseman wrote— asserting the obvious contemporary parallel— would be on "the social implications inherent in the history of

Caesar [and] the atmosphere of personal greed, fear and hysteria that surround a dictatorial regime."®^

Orson Welles conceived Julius Caesar "as a political melodrama with clear contemporary parallels." The production was a response to the breaking down of

"sophisticated democratic structures" all over the Western world. In the face of the dictatorships that had taken over, first in Italy and then in Germany, Welles felt "the

®® John Houseman, "Again . . . A People's Theatre; The Mercury Takes a Bow," The Dailv Worker 18 September 1937 (quoted in France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 18).

®^ see France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 18. 187

issues of political violence and the moral duty of the

individual in the face of tyrrany had become urgent and

inescapable.

In reviving the play, which dramatizes the downfall of a tyrant and the political struggle that ensues after his demise, Welles thus "set about to arouse the passions of his audience with a simulation of the chaos then overtaking

Europe."®^ Playing on the American public's acute sensitivity to the threat of fascism, the director established and then emphasized in obvious visual terms a resemblance between republican Rome and fascist Italy.

He then made certain that any further parallels would not only be perceived but anticipated. Caesar became the archtypal dictator; Brutus, the idealistic liberal; Cassius, the calculating revolutionary; and the citizens of Rome, the gullible hordes that were even then donning armbands and other insignia of fascism to follow Hitler and Mussolini.®*

Welles' "modern dress" adaptation of Julius Caesar, which opened as Caesar at the Mercury®® on 11 November

1937, made much of the contemporary analogy to the situation in Italy and Germany beginning with the casting of Joseph

Holland (who bore a remarkable physical resemblance to

Mussolini) in the role of Caesar. The play was

®^ Houseman 298.

®® France Orson Welles on Shakespeare 103.

®* France The Theatre of Orson Welles 106.

®® the Comedy theatre so re-named by Houseman and Welles. 188 subtitled "Death of a Dictator" and was substantially altered to underline the political theme, although the unadorned unit setting (designed by Samuel Leve) and the rather neutral, inexpensive costumes (the design for which was never credited) reinforced the likeness by indirect and subtle suggestiveness rather than an attempt at verisimilitude.

Richard France has cautioned against overemphasizing the parallels drawn between Caesar and Mussolini in Welles' production, for (consistent with the director's overall approach to dramatic literature) Welles was interested primarily in the play's potential for the staging of melodramatic action and much less concerned with how his contemporary analogy may have distorted the character development in Shakespeare's drama. The co-conspirators in

Julius Caesar assassinate their leader because they perceive an inherent danger arising from his overweening political ambition; and their decision to slay him is predicated on an assumption that the public will understand the motive for and, thus, ultimately condone their action. But while the playwright suggests (by way of Marc Antony's compelling oratory) the possibility that Caesar was a benevolent dictator whose murder was a "grievous" wrong, the director was compelled to minimalize all such references in the play in order to unbalance the political equivocation of the 189 original, for "Welles saw Caesar as a victim of a political

insurrection, Mussolini the cause of one."®^

France asserts, perhaps accurately, that the Mercury

Theatre production of Julius Caesar was "a dazzling piece of propaganda, with the political equation so skillfully drawn that the spectator could not help but be partisan.But contrary to the consensus opinion of the press in labelling his production an anti-Fascist tract, Welles insisted that the play was, for him, a study of naive idealism as exemplified by the character of Brutus, in whom he saw:

the classical picture of the eternal, impotent, ineffectual, fumbling liberal, the reformer who wants to do something about things but doesn't know how and gets it in the neck in the end. . . . He's Shakespeare's favorite hero— the fellow who thinks the times are out of joint but who is really out of joint with his time. He's the bourgeois intellectual who, under a modern dictatorship, is the first to be put up against a wall and shot.®®

The analogy Welles hoped to establish between Julius

Caesar and the Western European military states of the

1930s, then, was one that dealt not so much with external similarities (which undoubtedly would have trivialized the complexities in Shakespeare) as much as it posed a paradoxical situation faced by a Brutus who was introduced

®® Wood 42-3.

®^ France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 107.

®® Orson Welles, as interviewed by Michel Mok, New York Evening Post 24 November 1937. 190

into a contemporary setting, a situation only marginally posed by Shakespeare.

The play thus reduced itself, in Welles's conception, to a fast-moving tale of a well- meaning altruist caught between Fascist authoritarianism at the top of the social scale and animal viciousness at the bottom. Unable to fight Caesarism with its own weapons, violence and demagogy, Brutus liberates by his misguided idealism the very forces which destroy him and his cause.®®

Notwithstanding his desire to underline the contemporary parallels he discovered in Shakespeare's Julius

Caesar, Welles' personal interest in the play was, characteristically, not in its value as political rhetoric but in how he could most effectively realize the drama in theatrical terms. As long as his production was successful in stirring the passions of his audiences, it mattered little to Welles what moral or message they may have derived from the play.®®

Welles shaped the text to facilitate a rapid flow of events, distilling the plot to emphasize action and downplay rhetorical complexity. With substantial cutting and rearranging of the playtext, he reduced the playing time to just over an hour and one-half; and the play was performed without intermission.

®® Ripley 223.

®® see Ripley 223 and France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 103. 191

Welles' editing methods were nearly identical with

those he had employed in creating his version of Macbeth:

Scenes and characters were slanted to make only the points he wanted them to make. Soliloquies were either sharply pared or converted into dialogues. . . . Welles also continued his practice of 'borrowing'; a character's lines might be given to someone else, or a block of dialogue transposed from one scene to another.

Welles followed Shakespeare's narrative fairly closely through the first three of its five acts. There were numerous cuts and rearranged passages throughout, but no substantive changes other than the excision of the final scene of Act II (in which Portia questions the

Soothsayer)After the murder of Cinna the Poet (Act

III, scene 3), however, the alterations were more extreme.

Welles chose to present the aftermath of the assassination from the conspirators' viewpoint, which entailed the virtual elimination of Marc Antony until his final victory at the end of the play. He all but eliminated passages dealing with internecine rivalries among the co­ conspirators. He did away with the provisional

"triumvirate" government that succeeds Caesar and expunged most of the final two acts as being irrelevant to his narrative. Caesar's ghost was eliminated as incompatible

France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 107.

France indicates, erroneously, that it was Act III, scene 4 that was eliminated (The Theatre of Orson Welles 108)— a cursory glance at Shakespeare's playscript reveals that no such scene exists. 192

with the contemporary theme. The final cut version also

dispensed with all formal battle scenes and, with them, the

need for armor or weaponry.®^

Shakespeare's Acts IV and V were, thus, greatly

compressed— the latter consisting of a single page in

Welles's version. The scene opened as Brutus received

(faulty) news of Antony's victory, after which he stood

alone mourning over the dead body of Cassius. The lights

faded out on him and almost immediately restored on Marc

Antony, standing in a similar pose over the dead body of

Brutus (who, in Welles' version, had been murdered by

Antony's "storm troupers"). Antony delivered the "noblest

Roman of them all" eulogy to his accompanying forces and the play abruptly ended.

As a physical production, Welles' Caesar was strikingly unconventional in its simplicity. In contrast to both the realistic elaborateness of nineteenth-century pictorial illusionism and the abstract grandeur of early twentieth- century New Stagecraft techniques, the design for Caesar gave off the impression that the play was being performed on a bare stage.That impression, however, was misleading.

The stage of the Mercury, uncluttered by pictorial scenery of any kind, nevertheless was carefully designed for

see France The Theatre of Orson Welles 107-108, and Orson Welles on Shakespeare 104.

Houseman 296. 193 dramatic effectiveness and in a deliberately neutral manner so as not to indicate a specific time or place, but rather to "suggest the general atmosphere implied by all the other elements of the production. Almost everything was painted a detail-less black," the principal exception being the exposed brick wall at the back of the stage, which was painted blood-red "providing the only texture on the opaque stage."95

John Houseman has described in vivid detail the complexities behind the deceptively simple scene design conceived by Welles and executed by Samuel Leve for the

Mercury production of Julius Caesart

[Welles] called for a series of huge, subtly graded platforms that covered the entire stage floor. First came the main downstage playing area— fourteen feet deep including the apron— which rose in a gentle rake to meet a set of shallow steps running the full width of the stage. These led to an eight-foot plateau, the mid-stage playing area, then rose again through another set of steps to a final narrow crest, six and a half feet above stage level, before falling back down in a steep, fanning ramp that ended close to the rear wall of the theatre. This gave the stage an appearance of enormous depth and a great variety of playing areas— from the intimacy of the downstage scenes acted within a few feet of the audience, to the dominating mid- and upstage positions on the first and second elevated plateaus. Steps and platforms were honeycombed with traps out of which powerful projectors were angled upward and forward to form a double light curtain . . . through whose beams all actors making upstage entrances had to pass and were

Wood 43, 194

suddenly and dramatically illuminated before descending to the playing areas below.®®

The vertical lighting effect described by Houseman derived from designer Jean Rosenthal's conscious efforts, in accordance with Welles' specific prescription, to evoke as nearly as possible the precise look of the Nazi rallies at

Nuremberg in 1936. The pattern Rosenthal emulated was characterized by bright lights that shone perpendicularly from the ground and cast broadening beams upward toward the sky. The distinctively "copied" look of these "Nuremberg" lights and the platforms in which they were mounted reinforced, perhaps more than any other of the scenic elements, the contemporary parallel Welles sought to elicit between his production and political events in Europe.

The lighting plot for Caesar, according to Houseman, was elaborate and complicated, growing increasingly more involved as Welles sought for a seamless movement of light via secondary cues and transitional illumination. Remote control of lighting instruments had been introduced in the early 1930s, and Rosenthal— who was a protegee of Abe Feder, a leading innovator in the field and the lighting designer for Welles' Macbeth— took full advantage of the most up-to- date technology;

Pouring light down from overhead and streaming it upward in stabbing columns through traps in the platforms and steps. Miss Rosenthal defined space, narrowing and widening it at will, faded scenes in

®® Houseman 296-7. 195

and out with cinematic freedom, picked out key faces and threw them into sharpened focus as a camera might, and created atmosphere with a speed and flexibility undreamt of by conventional scenery.97

Yet, such was the improvisatory nature of Welles'

instinctive directorial methods that one of the most memorable of the production's lighting effects— the so- called "orchard lights" that evoked a melancholic mood for the moonlit scene in which the conspirators pay a late-night visit to Brutus in his orchard— was "designed" quite by accident:

During a dress rehearsal someone forgot to turn out the bald, overhead work lights— whose sole purpose is to illuminate the grid from which the scenery ropes and pulleys are suspended— and they continued to shine down during the blackout just before the orchard scene. The pattern, crisscrossing the stage, conveyed an impression of ground beneath bare branches.9®

Lights were employed by Welles in Caesar, as they had been in Macbeth, for expressionistic effects as well. When floor-mounted lights illuminated the Brutus and Antony during their funeral orations, their faces "seemed to float in space; behind Brutus shadows formed a massive cross on the back wall, while above Antony flickered a menacing shape suggestive of crossed f a s c e s . "9® Actor Norman Lloyd recalls that at another point in the performance, a powerful

97 Ripley 226.

9® Jean Rosenthal and Lael Wertenbaker, The Maaic of Light (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972) 22.

99 Ripley 228. 196

light was rolled forward to shine into the faces of the

audience (a "blinding" effect called a "brute" in

films).1°° According to Lloyd, the intricate nature of

the many lighting effects Welles intended for the production

caused many of them eventually to be eliminated after

rehearsals demonstrated that they were too sophisticated for

the equipment at hand.

While Welles' painstaking attention to every detail of

the complex lighting in Julius Caesar serves as further

evidence of his almost obsessive dedication to theatrical

effect, it also represented a conscious attempt on the part

of the director to counteract the complacency of an

"overcivilized, jaded, sophisticated" audience that, he

felt, had been made soft" by the "cellophane" packaging of cinema and radio entertainment. "The shafts of light on the

Mercury stage," he told an interviewer, were:

swords to cut through the wads and wads of cotton in which the audiences are wrapped. They have to be stimulated into wakefulness. An audience stimulated into imaginative awareness . . . becomes the true theatre audience— that mysterious community of spirits that is the most important part of any show.^°^

Many of Welles' intended sound effects, which had painstakingly been recorded on acetate by radio engineers at the Columbia Broadcasting System, also were tried out in

Stages: Norman Llovd. interviewed by Francine Parker, A Directors Guild of America Oral History (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990) 43.

Mok interview, 24 November 1937. 197

rehearsal and then thrown out due to the inadequacy of the

sound reproduction system in the theatre. Even so, live

sound effects and music— composed by Marc Blitzstein and

scored for trumpet, horn, percussion and Hammond organ— provided "an ever-present textural component of the production, an auditory equivalent of Jean Rosenthal's visual effects:

Faced with such a limited combination of instruments

(based on the minimum requirement of the local musicians' union at the time), Blitzstein managed to achieve a wide- ranging variety of memorable effects, "from the distant bugles of a sleeping camp to the blaring brass and deep, massive, rhythmic beat which instantly evoked the pounding march of Hitler's storm troopers.

At times the score provided the effect of the unseen troops and was sometimes used to shock, relying on the wall-shaking power of the organ and drums. Blitzstein composed a "Fascist March" which served as a recurring theme in the drama, used mostly during the reigning party's exhibitions of power, similar to the pageants of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.1°*

Sound and (especially) lighting, as production elements, were crucial to the theatrical conceit of the

Ripley 226.

Houseman 307.

I®** Wood 43. 198

Welles' Julius Caesar. The uncredited^®^ costume design

also went far toward evoking the production's

contemporaneous atmosphere of danger and fear.

The Roman nobles, including Caesar, wore simulated military uniforms, dark olive green in color, with black

"Sam Browne" belts, epaulettes and boots all of which

"suggested but did not exactly reproduce the current fashion of the Fascist ruling class.The petty conspirators

(Casca, Decius Brutus, Legarius, Trebonius) were dressed to resemble "modern day racketeers with turned-up collars, black hats pulled low around their ears, and that gun-in- the-pocket look about them.Brutus (Welles) was dressed in a formal mufti (a double-breasted black pin­ stripe suit), while emissaries of the state (Publius and

Mark Antony) wore soldiers' tunics. The crowds of "citizens of the Republic" were clothed in dark, nondescript street wear typical of a big-city proletariat.

According to Richard France, MiIlia Davenport— who later became the Mercury's costume designer— refused to work on the production, apparently because Welles' conception failed to offer a creative challenge (see The Theatre of Orson Welles, p 109). The costumes, presumably, were improvised by the director and cast.

Houseman 298-9.

France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 109.

10® Houseman recalls that actors who were not in uniform wore their own street clothes, "supplemented by dark coats and hats picked up in secondhand clothing stores" (p 299) . 199

According to John Houseman, the decision to use modern dress was neither based on economic considerations nor conceived as a stunt, but rather featured as an "essential element" in Welles' overall production scheme, as a means of emphasizing "the similarity between the last days of the

Roman republic and the political climate of Europe in the mid-thirties.Welles himself corroborated that assertion;

I produced the play in modern dress . . . to sharpen contemporary interest rather than stunt up and point up present-day detail. I'm trying to let history and Shakespeare's lines do the job of making the play applicable to the tensions of our time. With the modern clothes I attempt to emphasize that here we have a timeless tragedy about Caesarism and the collapse of democracy under Caesarism.

While Welles' "modern dress" Julius Caesar became celebrated primarily for its unique conceptualization and the avant-garde expressionism of its stagecraft, the quality of its ensemble acting did not go unnoticed. As with

Macbeth, Welles insisted that the text be presented simply and without traditional veneration of the verse. "The effort," wrote Stark Young in The New Republic, was

"constantly toward naturalism" and in some instances "even against the artifice of the verse medium itself." The result, according to Young, was "a sense of pointed, planned

Houseman 298.

Mok interview, 24 November 1937. 200 and intelligent emphasis.Brooks Atkinson in The New

York Times praised the Mercury production for "cut[ting] through the pomp and fustian of Shakespeariana to the quick of stage acting. In its eagerness to get directly to the heart of the play," Atkinson asserted, the players had

"tossed overboard the formalism of classical acting technique.

While the relative inexperience of the (semi- professional) Macbeth cast with classical acting had frustrated that company's success in handling Shakespearean language, the more fully professional (and collectively more experienced) cast of Julius Caesar managed to strike a balance between the natural delivery Welles desired and the intrinsic requirements of the poetry. One critic observed that the acting was "simple, easy, almost colloquial, but never too reticent or lack-luster to take the high level of the writing when the writing demands it.

Welles' unconventional conception of Julius Caesar was accompanied by a similar freshness of approach to characterization. At the center of this revisionist

Stark Young, "Three Stage Versions," The New Republic 93.1200 (1 December 1937) 101.

Brooks Atkinson, "'Julius Caesar' in Modern Dress Becomes an Exciting Drama of Mob Rule," The New York Tiroes 28 November 1937, section XI, p 1.

John Anderson, "'Julius Caesar' Brings Brilliant Life to Bard," New York Journal and American 12 November 1937. 201

strategy was the director's own understated interpretation

of Brutus as the ineffectual advocate of liberalism in a

violent world. Welles eschewed a traditional "histrionic"

approach to the role by presenting Brutus in a sincere, reserved manner, which had the effect of reinforcing rather than diminishing the character's essential nobility. In his

New York Post review, John Mason Brown vindicated Welles' rethinking of the role:

His tones are conversational. His manner is quiet. The deliberation of his speech is the mark of the honesty which flames within him. His reticent Brutus is at once a foil to the staginess of the production as a whole and to the oratory of a Caesar and Antony. He is a perplexed liberal, this Brutus; an idealist who is swept by bad events into actions which have no less dangerous consequences for the state. His simple reading of the funeral oration is in happy contrast to what is usually done with the speech.

Everything about Welles' Brutus bespoke a man of principle and conscience— soft-spoken and reserved, yet firm in his resolutions and "sincere in his determination not to use the execution of the dictator for his own personal or political advantage.

Joseph Holland played the title role with a concentrated economy of movement calculated to convey the greatest possible degree of inner strength. In a newspaper interview, the actor revealed that in his view Caesar was

John Mason Brown, "'Julius Caesar' in an Absorbing Production," The New York Post 12 November 1937, p 30.

Houseman 308. 202

"such a great man that he needs no wild gestures. He knows that the slightest motion of his finger is quite sufficient to make things happen.Holland's physical stillness on stage was so complete that "his words when they came carried the brutality of a physical blow. His presence alone confirmed Cassius' fears; this man indeed might well bestride the world.

In a bold departure from the standard "lean and hungry"

Cassius, Welles cast in that role the radio actor Martin

Gabel, whom John Houseman has described as "squat, broad, thick-necked with a furrowed brow and massive jaw." Endowed with a "deep sensitivity distorted by insatiable ambition and a furious energy," Gabel was "the perfect antagonist for

[Welles'] high-minded and meditative Brutus." In their first encounter on stage, "there was something recognizable and terrifying in the way he intruded upon Brutus, violating his privacy with his corrosive, vengeful discontent, tearing his way through that serene self-righteousness to plant the seed of murder in his ear. "H*

Welles' script, which in the second half of the play focused on the Brutus-Cassius relationship at the expense of the material related to Caesar's successors, considerably

Interview with Joseph Holland, New York Herald Tribune 19 December 1937.

Ripley 231.

Houseman 307. 203

diminished the role of Antony (played in the Mercury Theatre

production by veteran stage performer George Coulouris). In

a choice designed by Welles to weigh the audience's

sympathies toward Brutus and away from Antony, the latter

was turned into "an arch-opportunist, a schemer, and a

hypocrite" whose funeral oration was "a marvel of

contemporary hucksterism.Indeed, it was Coulouris'

address to the Forum, which Welles had left intact, that

Brooks Atkinson claimed was "the one passage of declamatory

eloquence in the performance.Yet, so far from

overplaying or rendering his performance inconsistent with

the overall tone of the production, Coulouris managed to

achieve "an extraordinary balance which [held] the luxury of

the words without wallowing.Houseman describes

Coulouris' delivery of Antony's oration as "a cynical

political harangue, a skillfully organized and brilliantly

delivered demagogic tour de force, a catalyst whose

emotional effect on the Roman mob was deliberate and premeditated."122

Welles paid particular attention to the crowd scenes

and spent many days and nights carefully orchestrating the

11® Ripley 231.

120 Brooks Atkinson, "Mercury Theatre Opens With a Version of 'Julius Caesar' in Modern Dress, The New York Times 12 November 1937, p 26.

121 Anderson 12 November 1937.

122 Houseman 308. 204 ensemble until every last detail of movement and vocalization contributed to the maximum possible visual and aural impact. Unwilling to leave anything to chance, the director painstakingly rehearsed the mob's individual and collective reactions to Antony's fiery oratory, for instance, until they gave the illusion of having been spontaneously engendered. The actors were encouraged at first to write and memorize their own (contemporary) ad-lib responses for the funeral scene and then Welles precisely determined the placement for the interjections, eventually achieving from the cast a rapid-fire, overlapping delivery.

Appropriate-sounding Elizabethan exclamations (beyond those found in Shakespeare's Act III, scene 2) were then substituted for the actors' own lines; in many instances, the mob's additional responses were direct echoes of the orator's own phrases. The crowds were also choreographed in a continuous, intensifying flow of movement, which helped to sustain the impression of growing chaos:

Throughout Antony's speech . . . the mob's superbly orchestrated whispers, murmurs, shouts, chants, and screams deftly accompanied the shifting moods and rhythms of the harangue; and the continuous shuffle and stamp of their feet on the hollow, unpadded platforms beat out a terrifying obbligato to their crescent fury. Released at the peak of hysteria, they roared off the stage like a cyclone, mindless and deadly.

^23 Ripley 228. 205

Welles' handling of the brief tragi-comic episode that

ensues directly after Antony's funeral speech, perhaps more completely than any other scene in the production, exemplified the fascination with mob violence that informed his production of Julius Caesar. And it is no small irony that the short scene in which Cinna the Poet is murdered by the mob, which ranked among the production's most memorable and celebrated sequences, proved such a stumbling block in rehearsal that it was nearly eliminated from the production.

According to Houseman, Welles, in editing the play, determined that the Cinna scene would function not only to reinforce the capriciousness of the mob's violence but also to serve as "the dramatic consummation of the passions aroused by Antony's inflammatory oration.He padded it, by inserting several lines from Coriolanus, and invented

"business" of his own (much of which was inspired by creative input from Norman Lloyd, the actor who played

Cinna).

The opening of the Cinna scene established, in direct contrast to the pandemonium that had accompanied the preceding Forum sequence, a deceptive mood of quiet calm.

Onto a dimly lit stage, the unassuming poet emerged from the

Houseman (beginning on p 309) recounts in great detail the difficulty Welles and the cast had in mounting this scene.

Houseman 309. 206

••basement" (through an open trap-door) into an isolated pool

of light, whistling a carefree tune and wistfully pondering

a (prophetic) dream he had had about feasting with Caesar.

Then, suddenly, the crowd was upon him— singly at first, then in twos and threes, scuffling out of the surrounding darkness till [sic] they formed a ring around the bemused poet, moving in on him, pressing him with questions, not listening to his answers— 'I am Cinna . . . Cinna the poet'— till, with a savage cry of 'Tear him!' they swallowed him up in their idiotic, murderous frenzy.

In an irrational moment of mob hysteria, a hapless and

innocent victim whose only offense was sharing the same name with one of the conspirators was rushed offstage to an unseen death. The stage was left darkened and empty and the end of the scene was punctuated by a blackout in which, after a brief silence, there was heard from off-stage a

"frenzied" cry (not unlike that which had marked the death of Lady Macduff in Macbeth) and then the theatre was suddenly filled with the sound of bass notes on the organ at full volume for a full forty-five seconds.

The Cinna scene, often eliminated in stagings of Julius

Caesar or perfunctorily presented as a "comic relief" interlude, became under Welles' guidance the emotional fulcrum of the Mercury Theatre production; and it caught the imagination of audiences and critics by its unfamiliarity and its sheer theatricality. Joseph Wood Krutch, writing in

^26 Houseman 312.

127 France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 114-16. 207

The Nation, professed that "with only a slight modification of the original," Welles had transformed the scene into "an unforgettably sinister thing.Stark Young, who recognized that Welles' modifications were far from slight, nevertheless felt the director had turned it all into

"gripping sarcasm and horror" and he praised the scene as "a piece of creative theatre invention that is brilliant, even dazzling.In Commonweal. Grenville Vernon asserted that the "feeling of cumulative terror" in the uninterrupted production achieved "a superb synthesis in the murder by the mob of Cinna the Poet, a scene which for power and sinister meaning has never been surpassed in the American theatre.

With the Cinna the Poet scene effecting an emotional climax to which all the previous action had built, some degree of anti-climax was inevitable. The Quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius, which had long been viewed as the high point of tension in the play, became in Welles' production the beginning of the dénouement. Burns Mantle complained that Welles and Gabel played the scene "as citizen soldiers met in a field and a little fearful of

^28 Joseph Wood Krutch, "The Mercury Theatre," The Nation 145.22 (27 November 1937).

^29 Young 1 December 1937.

130 Grenville Vernon, review of Julius Caesar, Commonweal 27.6 (3 December 1937) 160. 208

awakening nearby sleepers.Brutus' death, which

followed shortly after, "shorn of its alarums and

excursions, seemed almost a pathetic afterthought.

Critical reaction to Welles' production of Julius

Caesar was divided, although generally far more favorable than that to which Macbeth had been subjected. Perhaps because he had so accurately tapped into the anxieties about dictatorships shared by nearly all Americans in the mid-

1930s (and had vitalized those fears in such effective theatrical terms) most of the critics were, at the very least, willing to overlook his drastic cutting and re­ arranging of Shakespeare.Still others went so far as to suggest that, textual emendations notwithstanding,

Welles' version of Julius Caesar revealed the very essence of the play in a way that no production in recent memory had done.

John Mason Brown, who had been so critical of inconsistencies in Welles' Macbeth, became the foremost champion of his Caesar, claiming that "of all the many new plays and productions" the season had so far revealed, it

Burns Mantle, review of Julius Caesar, The New York Dailv News 13 November 1937.

132 Ripley 229-30.

133 por Brooks Atkinson, Welles had reduced the play to "the tragedy of dictatorship and mob rule in politics," but "although this may not be the only way to play 'Julius Caesar,'" the critic posited, "it is certainly the way to scare the living daylights out of an audience" (28 November 1937) . 209 was "the most exciting, the most imaginative, the most topical, the most awesome, and the most absorbing."

Acknowledging that Welles' version was by no means a faithful one. Brown nonetheless asserted that "the heart of the drama" was beating more vigorously at the Mercury than it had in years, and he credited Welles:

At [Shakespeare's] disposal Mr. Welles places a Time-Machine which carries him away from the past at which he had aimed and down through the centuries to the present. To an extent no other director in our day and country has equalled, Mr. Welles proves in his production that Shakespeare was indeed not of an age but for all time. . . . [His] direction is as heightening as is his use of an almost empty stage. His groupings are of that fluid, stressful, virtuoso sort one usually has to journey to Russia to see. He proves himself a brilliant innovator in his deployment of his principals and his movement of his crowds.

For John Anderson, too, Welles' "ruthlessly reassembled version" of Julius Caesar had "gone to the heart of it and kept it beating with the ever-gathering momentum of his scheme." Anderson submitted that in the "sharp design" of his production, Welles not only had captured the play's meaning but also had "found the tip-toe melodrama of conspiracy, moved it to its deadly work, and in the racing mobs [sic] howling for their dead tyrant, lifted an

Elizabethan voice into the modern world of dictators to make a lusty shout of protest.

Brown 12 November 1937.

Anderson 12 November 1937. 210

Grenville Vernon praised Welles for producing "a drama

of extraordinary force and poignancy," and averred that

despite stretching Shakespeare's intentions by emphasizing

"the tragedy of liberalism overwhelmed by the Fascist

spirit," the director had given Julius Caesar a new vitality

by transforming it into a "modern human document" with the mob as chief protagonist.^^® Robert Coleman in the Dailv

Mirror also thought the production had "vitalized" Julius

Caesar and credited Welles for his "resourceful handling of his ensembles. . . . These plastic, striking groupings,"

Coleman contended, gave "force and cohesion to the production.

Brooks Atkinson also admired Welles' direction, which he called "superb. With nothing but men and lights for materials," he contended, "it create[d] scenes that [we]re almost tongue-tied with stealth and terror, crowd scenes that overflow[ed] with savagery, columns of soldiers marching through the dim light in the distance." Atkinson acknowledged that Welles' adaptation did not "exhaust the resources" of the play— suggesting, in fact, that the production would best be described as "a modern variation on the theme of Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar.' For him, it

Vernon 3 December 1937.

Robert Coleman, "'Julius Caesar' in Pants Opens at Mercury," Dailv Mirror 13 November 1937, p 17. 211

"reduce[d] the play and the characters to a story of action," albeit one that was "sparingly eloquent:"

Stripped . . . to the essentials of an acted performance it is honest, swift and extraordinarily vivid. What happens on the stage has an overpowering sense of tragic omnipotence. It is revolution taken out of the hands of men and driven by immortal destiny.

Even Stark Young, who was "on the whole pretty much disappointed" by the production— bemoaning the "drabness" of vocal effect and the banal obviousness of the director's

"Reinhardtish motifs"— nonetheless "admired the energy, lively attack, sincerity and bold theatre intelligence" informing it. He indicated that Caesar at the Mercury was

"a real theatre event," characterized throughout by "a certain boldness in outline and a certain freshness in effect, through which Shakespeare's meanings [were] often freed and vividly projected." Moreover, Young recognized that Welles had found a valid contemporary relevance in the drama and exploited it effectively:

Essentially what has been accomplished is a hitting on one at least of the fundamental themes of the original play and freeing it from certain conceptions, motifs and qualifications, so that it is thus brought straight out into the audience, those present-day American audiences watching it there at the Mercury Theatre.^®®

If Welles was able with Julius Caesar successfully to juggle art with contemporary politics in a commercial

Atkinson 12 November 1937,

-39 Young 1 December 1937. 212

theatre venue that, unlike that of many European nations,

traditionally has shunned overt polemic expression in dramatic entertainment, it was precisely because he had not consciously superimposed on the production any overtly rhetorical statement of his own. The director's "message," rather, "was embedded in the theatrical devices that had shaped the production and provided his audiences with the means for inspiring their own passions.

Welles had grounded his Julius Caesar in an exploration of matters about which his audience was gravely concerned.

In this production, perhaps more than in any of his others,

"he was able to draw upon certain basic propositions (in this case political) that the majority of his audience was not only in agreement with but eager to receive . . . and to give these propositions an archetypal immediacy by the strength of his theatrical acumen.

In 1937, the production was hailed by more than one critic as being thoroughly Shakespearean, despite Welles' extensive editing; and in its emphasis on action and the theatricalism with which Welles had focused on its political theme as well as the colloquial naturalism of its acting, it was thought to be the great Julius Caesar of its time.

In examining Welles' Caesar retrospectively a half- century after its Mercury Theatre production, several

140 France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare 19.

France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 116. 213 critics have posited that Welles' isolation of the play's political features and his underscoring of action in the production at the expense of thought in the play represented a mutilation of Julius Caesar's dramatic form and that it is doubtful whether a version of the play that included only a little over half of its original text could be considered

Shakespearean or even had a right to be called Julius

C a e s a r "With Antony a shadow of himself, Octavius virtually non-existent, the Forum and Cinna scenes overblown, and the final act irreparably maimed," it has been suggested, "Shakespeare would have been hard put to recognize his creation.

Yet Welles must be credited, at the very least, with having tapped into the collective, unconscious psyche of his own audience, taking a piece that long had been a staple exercise in high school classrooms and— by way of eliminating the togas, the illusionistic scenery and (above all) the statuesque rhetoric of its tradition— injecting into it a freshness and vitality that gave it a recognizable and relevant contemporary reality accompanied by the exhilaration of new discovery.

Moreover, insofar as it employed a seemingly bare stage that facilitated a fluidity of on-stage action and as the strength of the acting ensemble engendered a clarity of

142 ggg Ripley 231 and O'Connor 347.

143 Ripley 231. 214 presentation both vocally and visually, the production went

far in fulfilling the expectations Welles had provoked with his stated intention "to give this production much of the speed and violence that it must have had on the Elizabethan stage."

It is arguable that Welles' achievement with Julius

Caesar (as has been advanced) is in some way diminished by his distortion of the text and that it is a "matter for regret" that he "lavished his genius on essentially a perversion of the play."^^'* The production, nonetheless, marked a significant turning point for Shakespeare on

Broadway; for, along with Macbeth, it helped to expand popular and critical preconceptions regarding what could be considered Shakespearean.

The visceral energy with which Welles invested his

Shakespeare and his distinctively imaginative and highly theatrical production style, which had been generally misunderstood at first (by critics attending the opening night performance of Macbeth), had become more familiar, hence less uncomfortable. By the time he staged Julius

Caesar, "the emphasis on action, the prosaic delivery of the verse, the immediacy of the theme, and the bare but theatrical staging could be considered Shakespearean.

Ripley 232.

O'Connor 348. 215

When approaching the plays of Shakespeare for the

stage, Orson Welles was motivated by a desire to rediscover

the "immediacy" of classic theatre as the "popular" art form

it originally had been. Thus, he sought, at least on one

level, a simplicity of staging that— in a manner quite

unlike that of Poel or Barker— represented his own notions

regarding a return to Elizabethan practice. Rather than

seeking to reclaim an Elizabethan look and sound to present before twentieth-century audiences as had his British counterparts, Welles was primarily concerned with

Shakespeare in the theatre as a "live" experience shared between performers and spectators. "The theatre is a community pleasure or it is nothing at all," he asserted.

For Welles, a return to the immediacy of Elizabethan theatre hinged upon a radical reassessment of so-called

"traditional" approaches. "The famous Shakespearean tradition that is so often invoked is more legend than dogma," Welles once proclaimed. "In fact, it isn't tradition at all; it's much too frequently a simple accumulation of bad habits.

His desire was rather to invoke an immediate and collective response, one that he knew film could not summon.

Mok interview, 24 November 1937.

quoted by Francois Truffaut in his foreward to Orson Welles: A Critical View by André Bazin (New York: Harper and Row, 1978) 17. 216

by engendering in his audience the psychological effect

"that comes with presenting in strong and stark relief

actors moving in space and words spoken in space." And the

theatrical means he employed to evoke such a reaction led to

one of the great paradoxes of his work— for, in the theatre

of Orson Welles, simplicity of effect often demanded a

complexity of expression.

To achieve that simplicity, that wholesomeness, to force the audience into giving the play the same creative attention that a medieval crowd gave a juggler on a box in the market place, you have to enchant and beguile them.

And in order to do that, Welles exploited all the

technological advances at his disposal, particularly when it

came to lighting his productions.

But Welles did not seek to enchant or beguile by hypnotizing an audience into the passive complacency that had been the hallmark of Wagnerian illusionism. Rather, his theatrical premise reflected the principles underlying the contemporaneous "epic" theatre of Germany, for both were grounded in the desire to stimulate an audience into

"imaginative awareness."

I believe in the factual theatre. People should not be fooled. They should know they are in the theatre, and with that knowledge they may be taken to any height of which the magic or words and lights is capable of taking them.

Mok interview, 24 November 1937.

Mok interview, 24 November 1937. 217

And if Welles was determined above all to "enchant and

beguile" his audiences, no playtext was so sacred that it

could not be re-written to reflect his own artistic vision— one that has been identified as that of a "comic melodramatist:"

This is a Falstaffian vision, a vision of infinite possibility, a combination of infantile excess, innocent self-importance, ironic self-knowledge, and the constant need for attention.

Welles' Shakespeare was informed by this personal vision, which in turn was fed by an egotistical passion for self-aggrandizement. In conceptualizing the plays for production, he was driven primarily by a dedication to theatrical effectiveness. He was interested neither in working within the boundaries of established tradition nor in attempting to define a new tradition of his own. It is a matter of no little irony that in distorting the texts to suit his conceits, he may have gotten closer to the popular spirit of Shakespeare's plays than any American director who preceded him.

Robert W. Corrigan, foreward to France, The Theatre of Orson Welles 10. CHAPTER V GUTHRIE MCCLINTIC: SHAKESPEARE AND THE (STAR-VEHICLE) ENSEMBLE

The artistry of director Guthrie McClintic (1893-1961) was often overshadowed during his successful, prolific career by the glamorous personality of his wife, actor- manager Katharine Cornell— who achieved her greatest stage successes in productions of plays, both contemporary and classic, directed by McClintic. Notwithstanding Cornell's popularity as an actor and competence as a manager, her director-husband was a major theatrical talent in his own right. During a distinguished career that began in 1921 and spanned four decades, he directed ninety-four productions on the Broadway stage, conferring a certain dignity on the New York theatre scene unmatched by the work of many of his peers.

McClintic, born in Seattle, Washington in 1893, received his first theatre training as an actor, earning a diploma from the Academy of Dramatic Art in New York City. He subsequently served a seven-year apprenticeship as an actor— and, more significantly for his later career, as a stage manager— for the influential New York producer- director Winthrop Ames. Then, late in 1921, Ames offered

McClintic his first directing opportunity in New York— a

218 219

production of A. A. Milne's The Dover Road, which ran for

thirty-five weeks on Broadway and was ranked among the ten

best plays of the season in which it appeared.^ Alexander

Woollcott wrote in The New York Times that McClintic's auspicious debut was a "welcome" one; "he has risen to the

occasion, and as the American theater's poverty is most conspicuous in the matter of directors, his advent takes on the nature of an occasion.

The most significant early cornerstone of success for the theatrical partnership of McClintic and Cornell came in

1931 with a production of Rudolf Besier's play The Barretts of Wxmpole Street in which Ms. Cornell, who also produced the play, portrayed Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The production was so successful that it was periodically revived by the husband-and-wife team over the course of the next fifteen years. The director garnered further attention for subsequent productions of plays by such distinguished contemporary playwrights as S. N. Behrman (Brief Moment—

1931, No Time for Comedy— 1939), Maxwell Anderson

(Winterset— 1935, The Wingless Victory— 1936, High Tor—

1937, The Star-Wagon— 1937, Key Largo— 1939), Sidney Howard

(Alien Corn— 1933, Yellow Jack— 1934) and George Bernard

^ "Guthrie McClintic," Current Bioaraphv 1943. Maxine Block, ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1943) 472.

^ quoted in Guthrie McClintic, Me and Kit (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955) 234-5. 220

Shaw (Saint Joan— 1936, Candida— 1937, The Doctor's Dilemma

— 1941).

McClintic directed Shakespeare on Broadway only three times during his lengthy career, attaining critical and popular success each time. In 1934, he directed a production of Romeo and Juliet, in which Katharine Cornell played Juliet, which ran for 77 performances at the Martin

Beck Theatre. Two years later, in 1936, McClintic directed

Hamlet in a production that ran for 132 performances at the

Empire Theatre and that starred the young English actor John

Gielgud, whose portrayal of the melancholy Dane caused as much of a sensation in New York as it not long before had done in London. And in 1947, McClintic presented Cornell as

Cleopatra in a production of Antony and Cleopatra that garnered a total of 126 performances at the Martin Beck.

McClintic's method of stage directing was based on no particular theory, such as Arthur Hopkins had developed in his Theory of Unconscious Projection. Nor did he approach a

Shakespeare play with the same kind of iconoclastic genius that informed the productions of Orson Welles. In fact,

McClintic asserted that it was useless for a director to have a set theory about directing plays "when every play presents a new problem, every play is a new entity.His eclectic "style" of directing was personal and resists easy

^ Morton Eustis, "The Director Takes Command," Theatre Arts Monthlv 20 (February 1936) 114. 221 categorization. Norris Houghton once suggested, rather equivocally, that Guthrie McClintic was "a master of the school of direction by intuition with the faults and virtues that such a method embraces."'*

McClintic based his decision to produce a play on the personal, "immediate emotional response" he derived from a reading of it. If his response was strong enough and he could both afford to produce the play and secure a company of actors equal to the task of its recreation, he would accept it for production. Once the decision had been made to produce it, his sole ambition was "to direct the play in such a way as to 'put over to the audience' the same emotion he felt on reading it; to make the set, the actors, the movement of the play, everything over which he has control, conspire to convey that feeling.

McClintic was convinced that the emotion(s) aroused in him by a play derived from a (somewhat vague) quality inherent in the play itself that he (in non-specific terms) called its "higher value." He insisted that a director's attention needed to be focused on animating the higher value of the play in order to effect a direct communication of the emotions it engendered. While he acknowledged that the details of stage business were by no means insignificant to

^ Norris Houghton, Advance from Broadway (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1941) 305.

^ Eustis, "The Director Takes Command" 114. 222

the overall effect, he nonetheless viewed them basically as

"non-essentials," averring that it was "better, by far, that

some of the details should be faulty and the play rise grandly above them than that the detail be beautifully

executed and the play obliterated."®

Decisions regarding visual elements of a production

McClintic based upon his own "instinctive, individual reactions," by which, for better or worse, he felt the need to be guided. An attribute essential to a good director, he felt, was an ability imaginatively to visualize the play in production while reading it, projecting in advance strong images related to color, design and stage movement. Before

McClintic would entrust a production to a scene or costume designer— he invariably designed his own lighting— he made certain that he could articulate clearly to them his own personal vision of the play.

For Guthrie McClintic, however, the most direct route to a play's "higher value" was not through a production's visual elements but, rather, through the combined efforts of the actors with whom he collaborated. No other aspect of the director's art was of greater concern to Guthrie

McClintic or occupied more of his attention in production than the work of sharing his vision with a company of actors.

® Eustis, "The Director Takes Command" 115. 223

Trained as an actor himself, McClintic was particularly sensitive to the acting process and to the needs of actors.

He was possessed of an uncanny ability to cast a play with actors well-suited to their roles and then to stimulate them not only to utilize their own talents to the fullest but also to develop along with their fellow players a finely- tuned and well-balanced ensemble in which the communication of the play as a whole became more important than any individual's contribution to it.^

The relationship between a company of actors and the stage director under whose supervision they, as a collective, develop the world of a playtext can be among the most decisive of factors in determining the success of a theatrical production. If a director's principal function is to unify all of the disparate elements that make up a theatre production into a satisfying whole, then working with a company of actors poses for the director a double onus— for, as a central element of a production, the acting not only must be made compatible with all other production elements but also must contain its own "inner" consistency.

The development of a cohesive acting ensemble, then— in which the conglomerate of individual performances is made at least equal to, if not greater than, the sum of its

^ An excellent account of McClintic's ability to work well with actors and to inspire from them the finest work of which they were capable is provided by John K. Tillinghast in his unpublished disseration, "Guthrie McClintic, Director," Indiana U, 1964, pages 117 ff. 224 component parts— is the aspect of a play production that, perhaps more than any other, benefits from the presence (and guidance) of a director.

Katharine Cornell shared McClintic's dedication to ensemble acting and insisted that she appear not with merely adequate actors (whose presence might ensure that she commanded the stage at all times) but rather with the finest talents available. In the productions McClintic directed that Cornell managed and in which she "starred," producer and director were both determined to retain the strongest company of actors they could assemble with whom the "star" could share the stage.

Cornell felt that her principal concern as a manager lay "in seeing that the play receives the best possible production, in engaging the best available actors for all the roles" and that her chief responsibility as an actor was

"to give the best rendition . . . of her own role in relation to the play and the other players. 'And, obviously, one acts best when one is surrounded by the best actors, for the give and take brings life not only to the play but to the players.'"®

An atmosphere of "give and take" perhaps best characterizes the McClintic approach to theatre in general and, by extension, to Shakespeare in particular. He gave

® Morton Eustis, "The Actor Attacks His Part: V, Katharine Cornell," Theatre Arts Monthlv 21 (January 1937) 47. 225

expression to his interactive approach in an interview with

New York Times reporter S. J. Woolf in 1943:

What I try to do . . .is to awake [sic] in an actor a creative sense of his own. Actors are not marionettes. They have their own ideas, and I do not believe that a director should force his personality upon them. But he sees that they act in such a way as to produce the effect he is after.®

And the "effect" he sought invariably was that the work of the actors, both individually and as an ensemble, engender

in him the same emotional response that reading the play had occasioned in him, and that had convinced him to produce it in the first place.

Katharine Cornell, for whom a director was "the editor, the critic, the eye of a production," likened McClintic's work as a director to that of an orchestral conductor who, regardless of the quality of the instruments on which the musicians are playing, manages to lead them so that he obtains the very best work of which they are capable:

He does not set the part or impose the conception. He draws the reins or hastens the outflow, guides the actor in the direction he is taking. When the goal is false, when the actor is getting away from the play, he sets him on the right path.

An emotional connection with the play and the actualization of its "higher value," at least in principle if not always in practice, were the goals underlying Guthrie

® S. J. Woolf, "Again that Cornell-McClintic Team," The New York Times Magazine. 21 February 1943, 18.

Eustis, "The Actor Attacks His Part" 46. 226

McClintic's approach to directing; and "the play's the thing" was the motto that best expressed those goals.

Each of the three Shakespeare plays he directed between

1934 and 1947 was produced as a "star" vehicle— Romeo and

Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra for Cornell and Hamlet for

Gielgud. Nevertheless, the critical evidence that follows overwhelmingly points in each instance to a genuine attempt on the part of the director to integrate the starring actor's performance into a balanced ensemble, a company of actors all focused more intently upon the play than upon their individual contributions to its production.

Such ensemble playing in Shakespeare certainly had been an ideal to which other directors who preceded McClintic

(including Belasco, Hopkins and Welles) had subscribed, albeit without achieving as much success. It took a rare combination of McClintic's actor-sensitive direction and

Cornell's self-effacing stardom, however, for this ideal to be realized as fully as it was in their Shakespearean collaborations.

Guthrie McClintic's basic attitudes toward— and his working relationships with— actors lay at the very heart of his directorial approach to Shakespeare. And the manner in which he initiated work on any new production, while considered fairly commonplace today, was (by his own

Woolf 32. 227 account) unusual and innovative in the Broadway theatre of the first half of the twentieth century.

Convinced that "if an actor can read his lines right sitting down . . . he can do the rest of his job,

McClintic invariably began a rehearsal period with nearly a full week during which the actors simply sat around a table reading their parts.This initial series of readings, upon which McClintic was adamant, marked for him the initial stage of ensemble building. "The actors get to know each other," he asserted, "and, what is more important, they get to know the play and what, as a director, I expect of them."

Viewing himself "as a sort of advance audience," McClintic's aim during these readings was to inspire from the cast the kind of performance that would make him react as he did when he "first read and was captivated by the play.

McClintic never interrupted actors during the first reading rehearsal, and he promptly dismissed them at the end of the reading without offering any comments. On the second day of readings, however, he started the process of establishing the mood and tempo of the play, working scene

see Me and Kit 243 ff.

Eustis, "The Director Takes Command" 119.

There is some disagreement regarding the length of this initial reading period, which apparently varied depending on the demands of a given play and the overall length of the entire rehearsal period, but it probably averaged around six days.

Me and Kit 243. 228 by scene. For McClintic, tempo was more a matter of sound than of movement:

'the quality of the tone of voice, the rhythm and intensity of the speech, the right pause, and so forth'— and this can be set in readings as in rehearsals. Once established, it helps the actors immeasurably to get 'the feel of the play.

Nonetheless, McClintic generally refrained not only from reading the play to the cast himself but also from offering "line readings" to actors in order to establish the sound he wished to hear. By his own description of the methods he employed, McClintic's approach might most accurately be characterized as direction by indirection:

I endeavor to make the actors indicate their performance without ever giving them a reading. If I indulge in histrionics, in other words, enact a scene, which I invariably do, I paraphrase the episode I am attempting to illuminate but never read an exact line. These actors around the table I have chosen because I believe they are right for and can play the parts they are reading. My job is, as far as possible, to meld them into a harmonious whole. Therefore I want to allow them freedom to create in their own way, with me wielding the baton.

After the first week of leading such intensely probing readings, McClintic began to stage the play. He generally devised actors' basic movement patterns (their "blocking") for them before actually getting them "on their feet," although he likened his initial ideas regarding the blocking and stage business to a playwright's "first draft" and

Eustis, "The Director Takes Command" 119.

Me and Kit 244. 229

maintained an attitude of flexibility with respect to

staging throughout the rehearsal process.

He was sensitive to an actor's response to his

direction, particularly to any actor who expressed hesitation or resistance to some pre-determined movement or piece of stage business, in which case he almost always offered that actor an opportunity to demonstrate a viable alternative. "All right . . . if you don't feel it," he would say to a balking actor, "let me see how you would do

it.Nevertheless, he once claimed, by way of elucidating his attitude toward the "unessentials" of stage business (upon which he claimed not to dwell), that if an actor were to ask him 'How shall I open this box?' he would in turn ask the actor 'How do you open a box?'

Once stage business had been set or agreed upon, it was still subject to modification, particularly in the event of changes in personnel. When Romeo and Juliet was re-cast, and then again when it was revived a year later, the production was "completely re-routined.

McClintic staged a play slowly and methodically, sometimes rehearsing eight-hour days for five or six weeks during a period when most directors were constrained by producers to mount productions in three or four weeks. His

Woolf 32.

Eustis, "The Director Takes Command" 119.

20 Eustis, "The Director Takes Command" 119. 230

indirect method of coaching actors (facilitating their own

individual processes of "discovery" regarding characterization while himself serving as final "editor" of their work) and his dedication to the collective process of

"ensemble" building necessitated such a time-consuming approach.

McClintic's demeanor in rehearsals was calculated to establish, as well as to maintain, an atmosphere that was conducive both to the rigors exacted by his perfectionism and to the lenience demanded by the "give-and-take" method of collaboration he advocated. He began nearly every rehearsal with an easygoing manner and in a jocular vein, setting the lighthearted tone with his own particular brand of wisecracking humor; once he began to work in earnest, however, he would become intensely concentrated on the task at hand, often taxing actors to the limits of their patience:

Coming into rehearsals he [would] regale his cast with a burlesque of some star he [had] seen in a show the night before, or some such bit of clowning. An excellent mimic with a flair for burlesque, he [would get] a laugh that focuse[d] a norm while it instigate[d] a degree of relaxation so necessary to slacken taut nerves. . . . One scene [might] be rehearsed for seven hours at a time and an actor [could] become as sensitive as a sore tooth.

In his handling of actors, McClintic consciously adjusted and re-adjusted the rehearsal environment.

uncredited article in New York World Telegraph 17 September 1938, section V, p 2. 231

alternating between tension and relaxation in much the same way "as a great coach does [with] athletes . . • and when

the lighting struck," one of his colleagues remembered after his death, "it was something to raise your hair.

Occasional directorial temper tantrums were apparently unavoidable during a McClintic rehearsal period.

Nevertheless, Guthrie McClintic was, by all accounts, possessed of an unusual ability to communicate with actors, nearly always helping them achieve the very best results of which they were capable. He invited actors to collaborate freely with him in the creative process, which had the effect of reinforcing their measure of self-confidence while diminishing their measure of self-doubt:

He encouraged the performer to realize that his opinions concerning the role were valued. McClintic never allowed an actor to believe that he had failed in doing a scene, although he might tactfully point out a need for improvement. He did not correct a performance by issuing an order; he suggested to the actor, by taking him aside, apart from the rest of the company, that perhaps he could achieve a more satisfactory effect by trying another approach.

McClintic rarely, intentionally or unintentionally embarrassed an actor before his or her peers. And he rarely, if ever, interrupted actors, allowing a scene to play itself out before stepping in to make his comments.

Francis Robinson, "Remembering Mr. McClintic," The New York Times 5 November 1961, Section II, p 5.

23 Tillinghast 124, 232

Of his skill as an acting coach, Katharine Cornell professed that McClintic "had the most marvellous [sic] gift of never

frustrating anybody; always built you up, never destroyed anything you may be groping toward. He just talked to an actor quietly, and then let him try to work it out himself.

As a consequence of McClintic's respect for the acting process, actors were eager to work with him as often as they could; and a kind of "stock company" of actors developed around him during his career. As a rule, however, McClintic was opposed to "repertory," for he believed that the kind of

"closed" company of players that was frequently associated with repertory was likely, sooner or later, to necessitate gross mis-casting.

Casting a production correctly was of the utmost concern to Guthrie McClintic, and the director claimed that he devoted more time and thought to casting than to any other single aspect of his work.^® He cast plays intuitively, selecting actors who revealed to him, above all, "the right emotional feeling of the part." In so doing, he often employed actors for certain types of roles that later Hollywood-style "type-casting" prevented them

quoted in Tillinghast 119-20.

see Me and Kit 287-8.

Eustis, "The Director Takes Command" 116. 233 from playing again.Visual adherence to the author's description of a character did not concern him; and he admonished fellow theatre artists not to forget "that a good actor is supposed to act and that a photographic exactness to any character is of less importance than the fact that he can play it,a notion that would not likely have pleased David Belasco.

While he cast actors frequently on the basis of certain "qualities" they possessed that he deemed appropriate to the emotional projection of certain roles,

McClintic also held the craft of acting in the highest esteem, favoring performers who (like Katharine Cornell) were capable of exercising a great deal of mental control over their emotional work. The director shared Miss

Cornell's assertion that an actor is required to do no more than "to recognize the emotion of the character and endeavor to transmit the illusion of that emotion across the footlights." An actor cannot "live" a role, they concurred.

In his 1946 production of Shaw's Candida, McClintic cast a young, unseasoned Marlon Brando as the effete poet Marchbanks, the sort of role for which Brando would never be considered again after his "type" was established a year later in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.

2® Me and Kit 280.

Belasco wrote, in The Theatre Through Its Stage Door (1919), that in casting actors, his preference was "to have an actor resemble the character he is to represent" rather than to "have him depend upon disguise and the assumption of manners," for his motto as a producer was "to keep as close to nature as possible" (63) . 234 except "in the sense of concentrating on it, and it alone, from the moment [the actor] reads a script until the last night of a play's run."^° Inspiration was "of real and lasting value" for an actor preparing a role, but in performance every moment must be intentional and practiced:

[actors] must feel the emotion, but they must always remain master of it. The minute a performer allows himself to forget that he is acting a part he is lost. He must never lose sight of the fact that he has an audience on the other side of the proscenium. He gets something form^that audience and he gives something to

Guthrie McClintic, during his lengthy career, directed many actors who were also "stars" and many who became stars after he either worked with them or (in some cases) introduced them to the commercial stage. His attitude toward star actors, which was by no means inconsistent with his overriding dedication to "ensemble" productions, sheds some light on how he reconciled such seemingly incompatible points of view.

To me a star is one thing and one thing only, and that is an individual who is blessed with some indefinable chemical element that makes great masses of the public willing to pay money to see him or her irrespective of the play the star is appearing in. That doesn't mean that stars are the greatest actors. If they are fine actors as well . . . it's so much gravy, so to speak. Stardom only means that they draw the greatest number of people into the theatre.

Eustis, "The Actor Attacks His Part" 48.

Woolf 32.

Me and Kit 280. 235

Professing that he had "never chosen an actor for his name value— always for his rightness for the role,"

McClintic nonetheless recognized that the "drawing power" of star actors was "a definite asset to any play in which they appear," and he asserted that stars were worth the high salaries they were paid "because they not only enhance any play they appear in but are a financial insurance" as well, since their presence in the cast generally enabled producers to pay back at least some of the production costs.

The cast of early every major production McClintic directed on the Broadway stage during his lengthy career included at least one star or "name" actor, although often several appeared together in one cast. In every case, such actors were employed by McClintic predominantly because he considered them suitable to the parts he was casting.

Abetted by his actor-producer wife (for whom stardom meant far less than the desire to appear in good plays with other good actors), McClintic was able to forge ensemble casts by establishing at the very outset of the rehearsal period (and then maintaining throughout the life of the production) a collective commitment to the play that transcended anyone's individual contribution.

Thus, critic Brooks Atkinson, reviewing McClintic's

1942 star-studded production of Anton Chekhov's The Three

Sisters— in which Cornell played Masha amid a cast that

Me and Kit 278-80. 236

included well-known stage actors Judith Anderson, Ruth

Gordon, Dennis King and Edmund Gwenn— reported the following:

The Three Sisters is a tightrope walk with carnage waiting those actors who fall off. Naturally they do not fall off at the Barrymore Theater for Miss Cornell and Guthrie McClintic, her director, have found the perfect person for each role. With so many players of renown it would have been easy for Mr. McClintic to let all go on their own but he doesn't work that way. His direction is a careful blend as to mood and the whole emerges as a play and not a group of players.

Reviews of McClintic's three Shakespeare productions, particularly those pertaining to the casting of the 1947

Antony and Cleopatra, reinforce Atkinson's assessment regarding The Three Sisters. The company assembled for

Antony and Cleopatra was referred to variously as "a crack cast,or "a first-rate cast,and several critics shared Robert Coleman's assertion that "the smallest roles

[had] been cast with the best available actors.

Playwright and critic Irwin Shaw, writing of Antony and

Cleopatra in The New Republic, offered perhaps the fullest and most clearly articulated tribute to McClintic's and

Cornell's shared contribution to ensemble acting on Broadway

The New York Times 22 December 1942.

Ibee, Review of Antony and Cleopatra, Varietv 3 December 1947, 52.

William Hawkins, "Cornell Spectacular in Role of Cleopatra," New York World-Telearam 28 November 1947.

"Cornell's Cleopatra is a Triumph," Dailv Mirror 27 November 1947. 237 during the 1930s and 1940s (for which, in this part of his

review, Shaw venerated Cornell alone, acknowledging elsewhere McClintic's proper share of the credit):

In the production at the Martin Beck, Miss Katharine Cornell once more reminds us of our theatre's debt to her. She seems singularly pure of the normal flaws of stardom. She does not look for sure things. She avoids vehicles in which she does all the running, kicking, passing and scoring. . . . Her productions are not loaded with middling actors, discreetly chosen to display the talents of the star. On the contrary, she crowds her plays with dangerous and superb actors, who, in the fat scenes given them, are likely to play anybody off the stage.

In their painstaking insistence on balanced casting and their dedication to the subordination of individual accomplishment for the good of a production as a whole,

Guthrie McClintic and Katharine Cornell brought to

Shakespearean production in America the principle of

"ensemble" without entirely eliminating the star system, demonstrating that the two were not mutually exclusive concepts.

McClintic's attitudes regarding the production of

Shakespeare, which evolved during the period he was preparing Borneo and Juliet for presentation in New York, are revealed in the chapter of his 1955 autobiography that he devoted to remembering the 1934 production.^® Prior to

Irwin Shaw, "The Old Ruffian," The New Republic 117:24 (15 December 1947) 34.

Me and Kit. Chapter XVIII: "The Third Juliet," pp 282-308. 238

its December 20 opening at the Martin Beck Theatre, the

McClintic-Cornell Romeo and Juliet had played in theatres across the nation during a lengthy national tour in which it alternated in repertory along with The Barretts of Wimpole

Street and G. B. Shaw's Candida. According to the director's account, the out-of-town tour not only enabled him to improve a production that at first had received only lukewarm audience response but also caused him to re­ evaluate his entire initial approach to Shakespeare.

By his own admission, McClintic had begun work on Romeo and Juliet using a heavily edited prompt book he'd been given that at one time had been used by Sothern and Marlowe

(Julia Marlowe having been generally acknowledged as the leading Juliet of her generation). In preparing his text, he also had consulted the Variorum edition, which reflected nineteenth-century English tradition with regard both to

Victorian notions of morality and the conventional demand for pictorial realism in the mise-en-scène. Despite his own misgivings about the legacy he felt he had inherited,

McClintic was unwilling at first to go his own way. "All during the rehearsals of Romeo," he reported, "the menacing cloud of Shakespeare's commentators hung over me— the dictatorship of tradition had imposed on me a boundary over which I felt it treason to cross.

40 Me and Kit 288. 239

In particular, the director was reluctant at first to consider opening up the numerous textual excisions that had become customary. Among the many traditional cuts to which

McClintic admits having capitulated, influenced by promptscripts employed by Julia Marlowe and Jane Cowl, were:

the famous 'rope scene' that begins with 'Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds' . . . , all the vignettes of the preparation for Juliet's wedding to Paris . . . the scene in which the Nurse discovers Juliet's body . . . [and] the one just before the finale in which Friar Laurence learns that his letter to Romeo was undelivered.^^

The overall effect of having removed so many lively and passionate sequences lent the play a certain dignity and restraint, which left the director as unmoved as had the only two other productions of it he had previously seen.

Moreover, the "exceedingly practical and beautiful backgrounds" originally designed for McClintic by Woodman

Thompson (who had been acclaimed for his elaborately detailed Gilbert and Sullivan decors) compounded McClintic's sense that he needed to unshackle himself from the self- imposed restraints of past practice.

After the touring production had garnered tepid notices in Buffalo, Milwaukee and San Francisco, McClintic decided to re-approach the play from a fresh perspective by discarding from his mind "all the cobwebs of other days" in order to "walk untrammeled through that script avoiding the

Me and Kit 288, 240 many footprints the great performers of other years had left there.

McClintic removed the production temporarily from the touring repertory. Then, laying aside the annotated texts and prompt books that had influenced him, he went back to an

"ordinary" copy of the play and, upon reading and re-reading it, was overcome by "a faint flush of discovery":

Here was a drama of hot blood, high passion and exhilaration! Tragedy, springing from recklessness— from youth's fervor— its refusal to turn back— to pause and reflect; had either one of the lovers ever stopped to think, there would have been no tragedy. This was no museum piece steeped in tradition. Its 'two hours' traffic' must be breathless with headlong action, not an actor's holiday— a play to be played as written.

Determined to infuse his production of Romeo and Juliet with the same youthful "passion and exhilaration" he had felt upon re-reading the play, McClintic started over from the beginning— restoring excised passages,re-casting all but five principal members of the cast, and asking Jo

Mielziner to re-design the settings and costumes according

^2 Me and Kit 290.

Me and Kit 290-1.

According to McClintic, his final version contained all twenty-three of Shakespeare's scenes ("otherwise structurally the story falls apart"); he cut "only the obsolete comedy of the musicians [IV.5] and servants [I.v]. Me and Kit 293. Shakespeare's scene and act divisions were not observed. The play was divided into two parts— with eleven scenes in the first act and twelve in the second. 241 to the director's newly-conceived images regarding the play:

"light, gay; hot sun, hot passions; young, swift.

The director came to believe that, while all drama was to some extent artificial and unnatural, poetic drama was particularly so. Thus, he concluded that verse drama, as an especially "non-realistic" form, demanded an unnaturally rapid tempo— for, only by sustaining the "distinctly artificial" nature of Shakespeare's drama (and, paradoxically, by doing so in such a way as to prevent an audience from becoming aware of its unnaturalness) could

Shakespeare become the "exciting, stimulating theatre" he believed it could be.^®

Swiftness of presentation in Romeo and Juliet was achieved in large measure by the efforts of the actors, who were encouraged by McClintic to keep the action moving relentlessly forward. "The tempo must be fast," he insisted, with "no stilted pauses;" the play must be characterized by "warmth, gaiety— JULIET IS THE SUN!— and there must be no waits between scenes."'*^

To further ensure the continuity of action between scenes, McClintic devised— nearly two years before Orson

Welles would use the same technique in his production of

Me and Kit 291.

Guthrie McClintic, "Directing Old and New Poetic Drama," in John Gassner's Producing the Plav (New York: Dryden, 1941) 439-40.

Me and Kit 293-4. 242

Hacbeth^^— a method of "cross-fading" out of one scene and

into another, for which his own lighting design became a critical factor:

For instance, after you hear Romeo's lines at the end of his first scene. Lady Capulet immediately speaks as the lights are quickly dimming out: 'Nurse, where is my daughter? Call her forth to me.' Then the lights are coming up and you are in Capulet's hall, with the Nurse entering. . .

McClintic claimed that this overlapping of scenes not only helped speed up the pace of the performance but also discouraged distracting applause at the end of scenes.

Above all, McClintic attempted to convince actors "to forget they are playing Shakespeare," for he was convinced that actor intimidation in the face of Elizabethan verse invariably resulted in stilted and unnatural performances.

"The look that comes on the average actor's face— what happens to his body— when he starts reading Shakespeare,"

McClintic attested, "is something that has to be seen to be believed."

Among the techniques he employed to promote a more natural approach to the "unnatural" world of Shakespearean drama was to rehearse actors in costumes as far in advance as possible, "so they will look as if they are wearing

Welles, who played Tybalt as well as the Chorus both on tour and during the New York run of Romeo and Juliet, may very well have "learned" this cinematic device from McClintic, although such influence was not acknowledged by Welles.

Me and Kit 294. 243

clothes and not appear as stuffed dummies."®® For Romeo

and Juliet, his cast also had the advantage of rehearsing

for more than two weeks on the platforms and with the actual properties that they were going to use later on in performance.

Desiring that the production's scenery conform, at least in part, to what he referred to as the "unrealistic" approach of the actors, McClintic asked Mielziner to design

"suggestive" sets:

Realistic settings would destroy our atmosphere or mood as surely as realistic acting. I do not mean that the backgrounds should be arty, any more than the acting should be. No 'phoney' symbolism should dominate the scenery, but the setting should not be entirely literal. I try to have the essential furnishings and props only— in other words, just what the actor has to use. No actual set dressing-up of any kind and the backgrounds decorative, but ever so slightly unreal.®^

Mielziner revamped the physical production in such a way as to allow for the "lightning-quick" scene-shifting

McClintic desired. A total of six interior and six exterior settings served for the twenty-three scenes in McClintic's production; yet, during the production's New York engagement, no change of scenery between two scenes exceeded twenty-five seconds.Moreover, the director found the sets (which had been modelled after Italian "Primitive"

®° Me and Kit 293.

McClintic, "Directing Old and New Poetic Drama" 440.

Tillinghast 196. [cf. Eustis, "The Director Takes Command" 116.] 244

fresco painting of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries) to be "breathtaking as to beauty— in effect

looking not unlike Giotto®^ backgrounds— light, gay, spacious, and ending with a marvelous dark Capulet tomb where, as Shakespeare indicates 'no healthsome air breathes in,/ii54 According to McClintic;

the design had no reality in the ordinary sense of the word, but it did have the inestimable value of exciting, stimulating, and beautiful backgrounds, never obtrusive but creating along with actors continuously exhilarating pictures.^5

Mielziner utilized brightly colored walls and turrets, which contrasted with deeply shadowed corners and alleys.

The landscapes that could be seen through archways or windows reflected the style of the Primitives. A suspended tower suggested the balcony, "and Romeo swore his love under the light of stylized stars in a Giotto blue sky.

The warm response of nearly all the New York critics to

Mielziner's designs would seem to have validated McClintic's decision to overhaul the production. In Theatre Arts

53 Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266-1337), a Florentine muralist who revolutionized Western pictorial art by turning his vision outward in an attempt to reveal nature in direct opposition to medieval artists who looked inward for union with God. Source: Gardiner's Art Through the Ages. Eighth Edition, ed. Horst de la Croix and Richard G. Tansey (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986) 537-543.

Me and Kit 291.

McClintic, "Directing Old and New Poetic Drama" 440-1.

Tillinghast 93. 245

Monthly. Edith J. R. Isaacs called the settings "deft and serviceable as well as full of color, and true to the play's feeling. They make the path for the action easy," she added, "and the scenes flow into one another as smoothly as if the mind were leading them. Robert Garland, in the

New York World-Telearam. found the costumes "rich and . . . revealing" and possessing "integrity of design, color and imagination;" and he was most impressed by the way in which the settings, "cinema-like in their elasticity," changed

"with heartening swiftness," the effect of which was "a direct re-telling of the story and a close . . . adherence to the Elizabethan text."^® Both Percy Hammond of the New

York Herald Tribune and the critic for Variety (whose abbreviated by-line was simply Kauf) made reference to the appropriately "suggestive" nature of the designs. And, in the New York Post. John Mason Brown devoted an extended paragraph to the settings that reveals many details regarding their appearance:

Mr. Mielziner's backgrounds never call undue attention to themselves or obstruct the drama's progress. They have been planned to shift with amazing rapidity. And what they disclose— in the rapturous blue-greens of the garden in which he has placed the balcony, in the grays and reds of the painted tapestry which indicates a hall in the house of the Capulets, in the street scenes which are painted in perspective in the early Italian

Edith J. R. Isaacs, "Ring out the Old," Theatre Arts Monthly 19:2 (February 1935) 93.

Robert Garland, "Romeo and Juliet Draws Big Audience," New York World-Teleqram 21 December 1934, 18. 246

manner, in the simple ballroom of the Capulets with its one great chandelier, in Friar Laurence's ceilingless cell, in the warmth and depth of Juliet's bedroom, and in the fearful blackness and ominous arches of the tomb scene— are settings which are not only the most richly imaginative of Mr. Mielziner's career, but backgrounds which are ideal in their helpfulness as well as their beauty.59

Of the remaining critics, only Stark Young did not care for

Mielziner's designs. Complaining that the backgrounds were all "poor," except "the excellent last scene, the tomb of the Capulets," Young nevertheless averred that Mielziner's designs were "in the right direction," in that they were

"frankly backgrounds with small regard for actuality.

The director applied the same principle of suggestive realism to the lighting, which he himself designed:

In Romeo and Juliet . . . there was no visible source of light in any of the scenes. In other words, in all the scenes which occurred at night, no lamp or torch was used by an actor or placed on the scene itself to account for the light that encompassed them. I reasoned that if the audience will be concerned with such trivialities as light source then my production will have failed to interest them as it should.

McClintic did, however, allow Romeo (Basil Rathbone) to carry a torch into the Tomb Scene, arguing that, since

Shakespeare had written the prop into his text, "its absence would have made the audience aware of a discrepancy."

59 John Mason Brown, "Katharine Cornell Returns to the Broadway Stage," New York Post 21 December 1934.

59 stark Young, "Katharine Cornell's Juliet," The New Republic 81:1049 (9 January 1935) 252.

51 McClintic, "Directing Old and New Poetic Drama" 441. 247

McClintic's insistence upon being permitted to light his own productions stemmed primarily from his desire that the actors be well lit "whenever they were on the stage, regardless of what it might do to the scenery." While he acknowledged that certain designers complained that he

"overlit" some scenes, he was determined, nevertheless, to

"light for the back row of the balcony, and those lesser- priced seats" from which he claimed to be a "graduate member." The director professed a great sympathy for audience members who "queued up" for several hours, sometimes even in the rain, simply to settle for any seat available; and he had little patience with "those preferred folk who buy the front-row stalls and who, alas, are many times the late arrivals at a play." Asserting that audience members in the balcony and gallery were "the true support of the theater," McClintic felt an obligation to their ability to see and hear adequately®^ and, invariably, his actors were well lit before other considerations such as how the lighting affected scenery or costumes.

McClintic summarized his attitude regarding the lighting of stage productions (which he claimed to have learned from Winthrop Ames) in one of several (unpublished) lectures he delivered at Yale University in December of

1943:

Me and Kit 295. 248

There are more theories about lights than you can shake a stick at. I have only one. I want to see my actors— see them clearly without effort and have them look as well as it is humanly possible. That mysterious thing called mood or quality of the scene can come afterwards, and will come once this major need is taken care of.^^

McClintic, presumably at his own request, received no additional program credit acknowledging his lighting for

Romeo and Juliet; nevertheless, his design did not go unnoticed. The critic for Variety praised its sensitivity and appropriateness, contending that the "uncredited" lighting was the strongest of all the production elements, and citing the "amazingly fine shading and coloring throughout the play that center[ed] exactly where and in what manner needed for the best ultimate success."®'*

The incidental music in Romeo and Juliet, which

McClintic referred to as "enchanting," was composed by Paul

Nordoff; and dancer-choreographer Martha Graham staged the ballroom dancing, according to the director, "with exquisite style."®® McClintic himself confessed that he felt an ambivalence regarding just what part music should play in poetic drama. "Verse, properly spoken," he averred,

"creates its own music, and not properly spoken would not be

63 see Tillinghast 101.

®'* Kauf, review of Romeo and Juliet, Variety 25 December 1934, 48.

®® Me and Kit 293. 249 helped by a 'theme' melody.He, therefore, eschewed musical underscoring; he later recalled that the music in

Romeo and Juliet occurred only when it was specifically requested by one of the drama's characters— old Capulet, to be precise— and that it was not introduced elsewhere as a

"stimulant” to the audience's emotional response. Music was employed, as well, to cover the brief scene changes and an entr'acte was played during the final ten minutes of the twelve-minute intermission between the two parts of the production.

McClintic's relatively uncut production of Romeo and

Juliet, while it did not match in tempo the Prologue's unrealistic suggestion of "two hours' traffic," ran just short of three hours in performance. The director attributed the production's "terrific speed" to Mielziner's flexible scenic arrangement and to his own decision to allow only one intermission, although critical response to the production ascribed much of the credit to the acting as well.

The New York critics were nearly unanimous in their praise of McClintic's brisk pacing of Romeo and Juliet.

Brooks Atkinson commended the director for imbuing the production with "a sense of life throbbing through a spacious script."®^ John Mason Brown attested that the

McClintic, "Directing Old and New Poetic Drama" 441.

The New York Times 21 December 1934. 250

production moved forward "breathlessly with an Elizabethan

swiftness" and that as it did so, it was "at all time enhanced by the vigor and pictorial effectiveness of Mr.

McClintic's direction and the superlative loveliness of Mr.

Mielziner's settings."®® Bernard Sobel, in the Dailv

Mirror indicated that McClintic had made the piece "swift in its pace, unified in its spirit, varied in groupings and situations, steadily rising in intensity and tragedy."®®

In Whitney Bolton's view, the production's "accelerated" movement prevented Romeo and Juliet from being "a posturing play with posturing actors" and rather transformed it into

"a living, breathless drama which sets out for its goal sturdily, briskly and gets there without dawdling.

Richard Lockridge echoed that assessment, adding that in

McClintic's production the action of the play unfolded "with speed and certainty, but with no loss of dignity,while for Joseph Wood Krutch, the action proceeded "with a

®® John Mason Brown, review of Romeo and Juliet, New York Post 21 December 1934.

®® Bernard Sobel, "Cornell Appears in Romeo and Juliet," Dailv Mirror 21 December 1934.

Whitney Bolton, "Katharine Cornell Plays a Juliet of Finely Blended Majesty, Beauty," The Morning Telegraph 22 December 1934.

Richard Lockridge, "Romeo and Juliet, With Katharine Cornell Opens at the Martin Beck," The Sun 21 December 1934. 251 headlong swiftness which carries the audience along with

it."72

Several critics specifically acknowledged the cast's contribution to the production's fast pace, particularly with regard to the actors' handling of the verse— although there was some dissention regarding the effectiveness of their approach. Edith J. R. Isaacs, for one, found the rapidity of dialogue in McClintic's production refreshing:

The speech is quickened beyond the usual speed of Shakespearean reading, to the advantage of the lines. Its quicker flow focuses the attention and quickens the memory, and over and over again a listener finishes, before it is spoken, a line he did not know he knew. This is partly, too, because what the reading lacks in ponderousness it gains it lyric value and strangely enough (except in a few notable spots) in precision.

Percy Hammond (confessing he was a "tory in Shakespearian representation") demurred, finding the pace of the actors "a little radical— almost breathless, now and then, a hurry that often slurred . . . the cadence and harmonies of verse."7'* Robert Garland, while acknowledging that

72 Joseph Wood Krutch, The Nation 140:3627 (9 January 1935) 56.

72 Edith J. R. Isaacs, "Ring Out the Old," Theatre Arts Monthlv 19:2 (February 1935) 93. Isaacs neglected to identify the "notable" exceptions, although she expressed disappointment with Basil Rathbone's vocal production as Romeo, specifically complaining that his "low tone" dulled the edge of the character and led him astray in his speech.

74 Percy Hammond, New York Herald Tribune 21 December 1934, 16. 252

McClintic kept the actors "bustling," also had trouble keeping up with the production's pace:

The result is a tragic, romantic melodrama that never fails to move. Part of the time it moves of its own volition. Then it is the 'Romeo and Juliet' of its author's day, robustious bankside diversion that is swift, incredible, poetic as few such plays have ever been. Part of the time it does not move of its own volition. Instead, it is prodded unwillingly along at breakneck speed to make a theatrical holiday. Then it is more resuscitation than revival, a venerable exhibit that is short of breath from attempting to be sprightly.

And Stark Young felt the entire company suffered "one way or another from [the] fear of a frank admission of the stuff they [were working in]," suggesting that their presentation failed to acknowledge "that the more or less long poetic passages with which the scenes are crowded may be thought of as arias" and that they, thus, must be "admitted as such and explored for their full value.

The critics' personal tastes regarding the actors' facility in handling of the verse notwithstanding, it seems clear that McClintic largely succeeded in his goal of inspiring his company to treat Shakespeare's drama naturally and with a great deal of self-confidence. Critic Richard

Lockridge affirmed that the director had "somehow managed to persuade all the members of the cast that the word

Robert Garland, "Romeo and Juliet Draws Big Audience," New York World-Telearam 21 December 1934, 18.

The New Republic 81:1049 (9 January 1935) 252. 253

'Shakespeare' is not one which need, of necessity, freeze the lips.

And while the critics, quite naturally, centered their varied assessments of the acting in the production on

Katharine Cornell's Juliet (as well as on the Romeo of Basil

Rathbone, the Mercutio of Brian Aherne, Orson Welles'

Tybalt, Charles Waldron's Friar Laurence and the universally-acclaimed Nurse of British actor Edith Evans), several of their comments reveal that McClintic (abetted by

Cornell) was equally successful in under-emphasizing the presence of the star actors by focusing on the play as a whole. John Mason Brown professed that Romeo and Juliet contained more good performances than any Shakespearean production he could remember having seen. Cornell, he asserted, was not one of those actors who surrounded themselves with "indifferent mummers" in order to seem to appear better than she is. He moreover declared that, while she was eminently capable of holding her own with the strongest of players, her intent clearly went beyond whatever personal glory she could garner from the playing of

Juliet:

For Romeo and Juliet she has assembled the best actors she could find. Indeed, she has brought together the kind of players one expects to find in an 'all-star' revival. But, fortunately for all [of] us, including Shakespeare, none of her prominent performers indulges in those petty struggles for domination that are the bane of most

The Sun 21 December 1934. 254

'all-star' revivals. They act together in a remarkably co-operative spirit. They obviously respect each other. And as a group their minds are set upon the play to which they are contributing their best abilities.'®

Brooks Atkinson, more succinctly, suggested that "having a respect for the drama. Miss Cornell surround[ed] herself with superior actors."^® Edith Isaacs, while quibbling that "all of the playing [was] not in one method," nevertheless recognized that in the acting of the drama all

"the elements [were] knit closely into a single pattern."®°

The critic who, perhaps more than any other, recognized what McClintic and Cornell had intended (and in his opinion, achieved) with Romeo and Juliet in the way of closely weaving all the elements of the production into a unified whole was Grenville Vernon. Writing in The Commonweal.

Vernon credited both the producer-star and her director- husband for their "generosity of spirit" (which he equated with "artistry") in placing the play itself above all other concerns. The production had for Vernon "beauty of a rare and poignant kind," a beauty that informed every aspect of the performance:

Not in many years has New York seen a synthesis so perfect, in which each part was so admirable in itself and yet so justly proportioned to the

^® New York Post 21 December 1934.

The New York Times 21 December 1934.

®° Theatre Arts Monthlv 19:2 (February, 1935) 93. 255

whole; in which the spirit of the poet was so beautifully evoked; in which the story moved so poignantly, so inevitably to its end. It was a performance at once reverent and vibrant; neither 'modern' nor archaic; but infinitely human; a performance which glorified neither the star, the actors, nor the director, but all three together, and therefore the play.®^

Certainly the sort of generosity that both the director and the star actor-producer demonstrated toward all players who shared the stage with Cornell would not have been possible unless they both had been committed to the same ideals. And it is a tribute to Katharine Cornell that nearly every aspect of her involvement with Romeo and Juliet over which she had control disclaimed the pre-eminence of her own stardom, of which she was determined to have no part. In all printed material (advertisements, programs, etc.) related to the production, her name appeared equally among those of the four other "starring" players. On opening night of the production in New York, according to

McClintic, Cornell visited every dressing room to wish all the actors, including the "extras," luck.®^ And, after opening night, she refrained from taking a solo bow at the end of a performance— preferring to share the final applause with her co-stars.

Among those aspects of Romeo and Juliet that most impressed Grenville Vernon was the equitable manner in which

Grenville Vernon, The Commonweal 21:10 (4 January 1935) 291.

82 Me and Kit 304. 256

Guthrie McClintic had treated all the players under his direction. "Nothing has been done to make an actor's holiday; the play alone has been considered," he averred.

"Even the humblest characters have their moments of

immortality. This is what the able direction of Mr.

McClintic has given them, and given them generously."

Indeed, McClintic devoted a substantial amount of rehearsal time to sequences in Romeo and Juliet that featured or contained crowds, requiring all members of group ensembles to attend every rehearsal. He devised onstage activities for crowd members (in much the same manner as had

David Belasco for The Merchant of Venice) in order to achieve a certain fluidity of movement throughout the production.

The original promptbook prepared by James Neilson, who served as stage manager for the New York production, details

McClintic's inventiveness in managing crowd scenes. A lengthy description of the stage movement in the opening fight sequence, for instance, serves to illustrate the manner in which the director established the youthful, passionate climate consistent with his conception of the play at an early point in the action. The crowd began to enter the scene beginning with Gregory's line "Do you quarrel, sir?" and the action proceeded as follows:

A girl runs on from down right, crosses to stage left, then stops and listens to the altercation. A boy follows from down right and remains right. A girl enters from up left and crosses to right 257

center, then stops. The girl from down left runs back and to up right. The boy from down right follows her up right. Another boy enters up right and watches the quarrel. A girl enters from left center, runs down left and looks off stage, then runs over to stage right. Another girl runs on from down left and crosses up left. Three other citizens enter up left and stand around center and left in the background. Benvolio enters from right center and Tybalt from up left. They quickly engage in combat. At Tybalt's line 'what drawn and talk of peace,' some of the citizens laugh, two girls up right start a fist fight and two boys rush in to separate them; as they do so, they become engaged in a fight themselves, while others join in. Several members of both houses join in the fray, then enter citizens and peace- officers, with clubs. A roll of drums is heard and Prince Escalus enters to center with his train. The fighting ceases as the swordsmen kneel and salute with their swords, and the crowd begins to disperse right and left.®^

McClintic also favored incorporating appropriate activities for non-speaking members of rhe acting ensemble during action that traditionally had featured only principals, in order to lend the production a greater degree of spontaneity. During the celebrated "Queen Mab" sequence preceding the Capulets' masked ball, for example, Mercutio

(Brian Aherne) was interrupted by the entrance of a man and two women on their way to the festivities. At his line,

"... through lover's brains, and then they dream of love;

O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream," Mercutio delayed one of the women and kissed her. In response to his

description from Tillinghast 200-1. Chapter Six of Tillinghast's dissertation (194-226) contains an extraordinarily detailed reconstruction of McClintic's production of Romeo and Juliet that is based on Neilson's promptbook. 258

effrontery, she slapped him across the face and then hurried

out after her companions who had already left the stage.®'*

Similar business involving ensemble players and members of

crowds informed both the ballroom scene and the lengthy

sequence that closed the first half of the production— Scene

Eleven, containing the duels in which Tybalt kills Mercutio

and Romeo, in turn, slays Tybalt.®®

McClintic's staging of the opening of Scene Eleven

(Shakespeare's Act III, Scene 1), as it is revealed in

Neilson's promptbook, demonstrates that his employment of non-speaking extras not only added visual variety and

interest to a scene but also could be utilized to establish a particular mood or atmosphere. When the lights restored following the set change after Scene Ten, they revealed the full-stage setting depicting the same open, public place that had served for Scene One.

Bright lighting rising at the top of Scene Eleven established the brightness of mid-afternoon on a summer day and revealed several characters on stage in reclining positions, whose positions reinforced an atmosphere of oppressive heat. A woman dozed against a pillar left of the downstage-left arch; another leaned against an upstage-left

®^ Tillinghast 204.

®® The second half of the production, in which the focus of the drama narrows to concentrate on the ensuing tragedy of the young lovers, provided fewer such opportunities for involvement of the extras. 259 portal; still another lay dozing against an upstage right portal, a man lying on her left beside her; another man was seated against a downstage-left portal. Several townspeople subsequently entered from separate directions and proceeded to cross languidly through the square and offstage. One girl entered from downstage-right and sat on a bench just to the left of the downstage-right arch.

At that point Benvolio (who speaks the first lines of the scene— which refer both to the heat of the day and to the "hot days" of rising tempers) entered from the right along with Mercutio, who proceeded to move stage left, throwing down his cloak alongside the downstage-left portal, against which he then sat. After the subsequent downstage- right entrance of Tybalt and Sampson and the ensuing quarrel between Mercutio and Tybalt, the lethargic townspeople began to stir as they took notice of the confrontation. Citizens at stage right (where the quarrel was brewing) rose and began to move toward center stage and right-center. Several more people entered hurriedly just before the fighting began, as though having been drawn to the square by the rising tension of the scene.

McClintic staged the swordfight between Tybalt and

Mercutio with the aid of the production's fencing master

Georges Santelli. The promptbook reveals the painstaking detail with which the entire sequence was choreographed— with principals and extras alike contributing to the overall 260

effect— to achieve the maximum degree of authenticity and realism. And when the altercation was over, the townspeople continued to play a significant role in the ensuing action— surrounding the body of Tybalt, only to back away again at the entrance of Prince Escalus. After the Prince sentenced the absent Romeo to banishment, guards moved in to bear off

Tybalt and then the crowd slowly dispersed as the Prince exited. It is, unfortunately, unclear from reviews of the production, whether this elaborately staged scene was as effective in performance as the promptbook reveals it was intended to be.

It is equally unclear from an overview of the critical response to McClintic's 1936 production of Hamlet— which he staged as a means of introducing John Gielgud to American audiences— whether McClintic was as successful in establishing an ensemble cast in his second Shakespearean outing as solidly as he had been able to do in the first.

The opinions of the New York theatre critics regarding the production and its various aspects are more disparate than they had been for Romeo and Juliet; and the reviews are so predominantly focused on the perceived merits of Gielgud's central performance as nearly to frustrate an objective assessment with regard to the director's accomplishments.

Moreover, McClintic may have found it as daunting a task to form an ensemble around John Gielgud (who had already been hailed in London as one of the premier Hamlets of his 261

generation) as it clearly had been for Arthur Hopkins when

directing matinee-idol John Barrymore in the same role.

Eschewing conventional medieval trappings, McClintic

set his production of Hamlet in a modernized suggestion of the early seventeenth century in order to underscore that the play is grounded more in Renaissance than in medieval thought, focusing as it does on "the torment of the

individual thinker trying to adjust life to a personal philosophy."®^ Accordingly, Jo Mielziner's vibrant, colorful designs were patterned after the manner of the

Flemish and Dutch painters of that period, most notably

Anthony van Dyke.

The non-literal settings owed much in outline to those

Robert Edmond Jones had designed for the Arthur Hopkins production in 1922, differing primarily in their use of ingeniously devised changes of scene. Much of the action unfolded on a vast open space that featured a high, centrally located circular platform upstage from which curved staircases descended in varying configurations onto both sides of the downstage playing area. This open area was rearranged to serve in turn as the sentinel's platform on the battlements, the great hall of the castle, as well as the graveyard. Two smaller revolving platforms upstage left and right were mounted with a succession of draperies and

®® Euphemia van Rensselaer Wyatt, review of Hamlet, The Catholic World 144 (November 1936) 216. 262 furnishings to enhance the various interior and exterior settings. Several interior scenes were played before a downstage curtain that masked the full-stage scene changing, which critic Stark Young found technically proficient, while suggesting that the designs were not momentous artistically.

In Young's view, Mielziner's settings "were expert, ingenious and swift, dramatically not very profound, their poetry was slight, their tragic mood nil.Brooks

Atkinson complained that "there [was] a studied balance to some of Mr. Mielziner's designs that [gave] them an unpleasant rigidity,"®® and the critic for Varietv found the settings to be "dull, obvious" and claimed that they represented "just about the only unfortunate note of the evening."®® Other evaluations of the settings were more flattering. Douglas Gilbert opined that the set were

"subdued with fine artistry" and that, in spite of their being "economic in execution," they were "ample in structure" and "meet for the vast emotion of the actors that people them."®® Edith J. R. Isaacs called the sets "nobly

®^ Stark Young, "Hamlet at the Empire," The New Republic 88:1143 (28 October 1936) 355.

®® Brooks Atkinson, "John Gielgud and Judith Anderson in a Hamlet Staged by Guthrie McClintic," The New York Times

9 October 1936, 30.

®® Kauf, review of Hamlet, Varietv 14 October 1936, 58.

®® Douglas Gilbert, "Stalwart Ecstasy in Hamlet of John Gielgud at Empire," New York World-Telearam 9 October 1936, 34. 263

conceived and designed" as well as "more beautifully painted

than theatre settings usually are.Other responses

referred to the set designs variously as "impressive,"

"distinctive," "interesting," "powerful and immensely effective" in large scenes while "a little cramped" in others, and one critic begrudgingly suggested that Mr.

Mielziner's settings would "suffice."

Mielziner's costumes provided another source of disagreement among critics. In The New York Evening

Journal. John Anderson asserted that the seventeenth-century designs were "magnificent, drenching the stage in the brilliance and living splendor of Franz Hals and Van

Dyke.Brooks Atkinson found the costumes to be "vivid with beauty," and Edith Isaacs thought them "a satisfaction to the eye." Douglas Gilbert praised the manner in which the designer had "lavished the players with renaissance cloaks and gowns," which he suggested were likely to start a new trend in Shakespearean design. "They blend delightfully with the deep brown tones of his main set," he opined, "and flower the stage with their blues and reds and purples and pastel shades." But Stark Young demurred, submitting that although the colorful costumes were "lavish and splendid,"

Edith J. R. Isaacs, "West End on Broadway," Theatre Arts Monthlv 20:11 (November 1936) 843.

John Anderson, "John Gielgud Appears in Shakespearean Drama With Judith Anderson," The New York Evening Journal 9 October 1936, 34. 264 they were better suited for one of the comedies than for

Hamlet. "What with all their shine and cascading, satins and laces," Young complained, "these costumes seemed merely a sumptuous patter."

While not referring in his review directly to

Mielziner's designs, Joseph Wood Krutch of The Nation nevertheless pointed to a serious discrepancy he perceived between the "period" setting the director and the designer had selected and the philosophical nature of Shakespeare's drama itself, a discrepancy that Krutch felt diminished both the mystery and complexity of the play to the point of making it seem shallow:

'Hamlet' is a Gothic play, not a courtly one. Remove from its atmosphere all sense of the importance of the unseen world, of things 'undreamed of in your philosophy,' and you reduce it to the level of sentimental melodrama. Yet the manners and the costumes of the period here chosen are the very essence of complacent worldliness, and every effort seems to have been made to fit 'Hamlet' to them. . . . every detail of the production is calculated to minimize the atmosphere of wonder which must surround the play if it is to mean anything at all.®^

His own personal bias regarding the play's interpretation notwithstanding, Krutch found McClintic's production "in the most superficial sense of the term, 'theatrically effective,'" specifically with regard to its brisk pacing.

Consistent with the pattern he had established for himself with Romeo and Juliet, the director arranged Hamlet

Joseph Wood Krutch, "With Hamlet Left Out?" The Nation 143:17 (24 October 1936) 500. 265

in two acts, which were subdivided into a total of nineteen scenes. As with the previous production, only one

intermission broke the continuous flow of action, and the running time of the production was approximately three hours. The text, while judiciously cut, was considerably fuller than that prepared by Arthur Hopkins for John

Barrymore, but not as full as that Maurice Evans would play several years later under Margaret Webster's direction.

What distinguished McClintic's version from those of many that preceded it on Broadway was, according to Richard

Lockridge, its "uncommonly full coherence. . . . The jumpiness of continuity which is so often evident in stage versions," Lockridge affirmed, was "happily missing" from

McClintic's production, a factor that he felt gave the production "backbone."®'* Even the normally unyielding

Stark Young, while grumbling about the production's limitations (particularly of Shakespearean texture and clarity), nonetheless praised both its pace and continuity, for which he credited the director:

The performance, taken entire, exhibits Mr. McClintic's chief characteristic: a kind of knack at cleaning up, of getting things moving along and through from start to finish. His 'Hamlet' seems, so far as its continuity goes, to lag no more than if it were on the Elizabethan stage itself, a real achievement.

Richard Lockridge, "Hamlet With John Gielgud, is Brilliantly Produced at the Empire," The New York Sun October 9 1936, 38.

The New Republic 88:1143 (28 October 1936) 355. 266

Several other critics— regardless of their individual reactions to Gielgud and the rest of the cast— remarked that the production, as a whole, had been adroitly staged.

Richard Watts, Jr. found Hamlet to be "vigorous and rapidly paced.John Mason Brown averred that McClintic had

"brought to the patterning of his production the same sweep which made his direction of Miss Cornell's 'Romeo and

Juliet' notable. His staging is vivifying, pictorial and inventive.For Burns Mantle, the McClintic production of Hamlet was "beautifully staged," and he singled out for praise the concluding duel sequence as being "more skillfully managed than it has ever been before within memory."®® Edith Isaacs lauded McClintic "for the unity and quality he [had] contributed to the direction of the performance," and Douglas Gilbert penned the most sweeping expression of appreciation for McClintic's contribution:

The whole play is so remarkably well done, its speed so suited to its moods, its grouping of players and timing of the lines and action so surpassingly good that I should suppose it to be Mr. Guthrie McClintic's best effort in the theater. In settings and costumes, admirably designed by Mr. Jo Mielziner; in general excellence of diction, and of faithful, though not

Richard Watts, Jr., review of Hamlet, New York Herald Tribune. 9 October 1936, 18.

John Mason Brown, "John Gielgud Appears as Hamlet at the Empire," New York Post 9 October 1936.

®® Burns Mantle, "John Gielgud and a New Hamlet," Dailv News 9 October 1936. 267

slavish service to the magnificent text, we have a Hamlet'f +-V>!>4-that is i c a fcredit v a / i i +- 4to - n mour i v - stage. 9 9

McClintic's Hamlet was perceived by its critics, even more than had been his Romeo and Juliet, as a "star" vehicle; indeed, many critics repeatedly referred not only to Gielgud's Hamlet but also to the Gielgud Hamlet. Despite that prevailing view, McClintic had followed the same principles in casting and directing that he had applied to

Romeo and Juliet. Moreover, the newspaper advertisements for Hamlet gave no more prominence to Gielgud's name than to his three co-stars— Judith Anderson (Gertrude), Arthur Byron

(Polonius) and Lillian Gish (Ophelia).

The company McClintic assembled for Hamlet was not universally admired, and although there was a wide range of response to each of the leading players, a number of critics gave the director high marks for the overall quality of acting in the production. Variety's critic congratulated

McClintic the director for insuring the investment of

McClintic the producer by way of "an exceptionally intelligent job of casting," as he had recruited "name" actors for the box office as well as "actors for the roles.Euphemia van Rensselaer Wyatt, finding the cast to be "all soundly characterized," declared that

"whenever Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are in the hands of

New York World-Telearam 9 October 1936, 34.

1°° Kauf, Varietv 14 October 1936, 59. 268 personable and competent players, one can gauge the standard of the production.Burns Mantle asserted that the supporting cast was one of "high distinction," while the critic for the Daily Mirror found each of the play's nineteen scenes to be "brimful of flawless acting.

For Edith Isaacs, "there was in each performance something better than the actor's natural best, something taken from the store of their joint desire to make this Hamlet a memorable performance."

Among those striking a chord of dissent regarding the acting ensemble was John Mason Brown, who felt "the performances of the well-known players" that McClintic had gathered about John Gielgud were "of varying merits." For

Joseph Wood Krutch, the production had the dubious distinction of having been so misguided by its director that

"nearly every member of the cast [was] led to treat some of the best lines ever given a player as though they were an imposition upon an actor's patience.

Stark Young's review demonstrated that he was as aware as Krutch that McClintic's production of Hamlet represented the so-called "naturalistic" approach to Shakespeare.

Without professing his approval of or objection to such a

101 The Catholic World 144 (November 1936) 216.

Keller, "Gielgud's Hamlet is Lavishly Dressed Success," Daily Mirror 9 October 1936, 32.

The Nation 143:17 (24 October 1936) 501. 269 method (or any other for that matter, which he asserted was a matter of opinion and personal preference), Young nonetheless proposed that the "ultimate test" for any method

"remains within the play itself" and "is the extent to which every part of the play is possible to the whole, is organic," while "the limitation of a method appears in the amount of a play's matter that is thrown off key or out of perspective by it." He then suggested, by negative inference, that all the parts of the McClintic production did not add up to a satisfying whole:

The result of the whole production was to make you realize all the more how much, beginning with the first line of the play, every resource is needed, every orchestral persuasion, if what follows— the death scene, the closet scene, the gravediggers, Ophelia's burial, and so on— is not to come off thin or twisted.

Perhaps it was the presence of John Gielgud or the absence of Katharine Cornell (or both), or perhaps the complexity of the play itself, that prevented McClintic from inspiring an organic production of Hamlet as uniformly balanced in ensemble as Romeo and Juliet had been (and as

Antony and Cleopatra would later prove to be). Whatever the contributing factors, it seems clear that Brooks Atkinson's observation that the McClintic Hamlet "[did] not proceed with the single impetuosity of a perfectly orchestrated work

104 The New Republic 88:1143 (28 October 1936) 355. 270

of art, as most of Mr. McClintic's [did]"^°^ was an

accurate one.

It seems far less doubtful that McClintic's final foray

into Shakespearean drama— the 1947 production of Antony and

Cleopatra in which the title characters were portrayed, respectively, by British actor Godfrey Tearle and Katharine

Cornell— epitomized the director's ideals regarding balanced casting and ensemble playing, perhaps even more completely than Romeo and Juliet had done.

Historically one of the most difficult of Shakespeare's plays to bring off successfully in the theatre, Antony and

Cleopatra is a panoramic drama the action of which sweeps across the entire ancient Mediterranean world interweaving several complex themes— related, on a political level, to the lust for power of competing forces within the Roman

Empire and, on a personal level, to the sexual lust for which a great general is willing to give up that empire.

Moreover, Antony and Cleopatra is a passionately wrought tragedy containing some of Shakespeare's most felicitous verse, which can tax even the most accomplished actors.

It would appear from the glowing critical response to the opening night performance that, with the production they opened (after long preparation and a national tour) on 26

November 1947 at the Martin Beck Theatre, Guthrie McClintic

Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times 9 October 1936, 30. 271 and his company managed successfully to conquer nearly all of the playtext's many challenges— as well as to beat all the odds against them, as the play had not been produced successfully for Broadway once during the first half of the twentieth century.

As had been the case with Romeo and Juliet and, to a lesser extent with Hamlet, McClintic's arrangement of the text of Antony and Cleopatra was full, if not complete; and in production the play, interrupted by only one intermission, had a running time of slightly less than three hours.

The simple settings— again more suggestive than detailed— were designed by Leo Kerz (a relative newcomer to the Broadway scene) and were praised not only for their vaulting nobility and spacious grandeur but also for the

"extraordinary celerity and stealth" with which they were re-arranged and shifted.

The men's costumes were all designed by John Boyt, while fashion designer and costumer Valentina designed the clothing for Miss Cornell and the three other women in the cast. The costumes, which were lauded for their vivid and striking visual beauty, were also criticized (in particular by Irwin Shaw) for being inappropriately unsullied for a play that represents "such a bloody chronicle of war.

Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, review of Antony and Cleopatra, The Catholic World 166 (January 1948) 357. 272 deceit, suicide and violent love." Complaining that the soldiers' dress had an almost "musical-comedy prettiness,"

Shaw further asserted that "the battle-scarred veterans of countless campaigns, whose exploits mean life and death to the lovers, seem[ed] to be impossibly removed, in their bright clothing, from the reality of warfare," the result of which was, in his opinion, that the "illusion suffered.

The production as a whole, however, was very favorably received by a majority of the critics. In the Dailv News.

John Chapman proclaimed that the production was "outstanding in quality. . . . Antony and Cleopatra is a very difficult drama to bring off," he added, congratulating Cornell and her company "for having done so well by it." As for the direction. Chapman praised McClintic for pacing the play "as crisply as the many scenes permit."^®® Joseph Wood

Krutch, who (among several other critics) found Katharine

Cornell unsuited to Cleopatra's "infinite variety," nonetheless had high praise for McClintic's direction:

By judiciously combining two or three massive but uncluttered settings with a free use of mere 'acting spaces' for the shorter scenes, Guthrie McClintic . . . kept the play moving and achieved an impression of splendor without weighing the whole thing down or smothering it in scenery and

Irwin Shaw, "The Old Ruffian," The New Republic 117:24 (15 December 1947) 34.

John Chapman, "Mr Tearle's Antony is Thrilling; Miss Cornell's Cleopatra Lovely," Dailv News (27 December 1947) . 273

properties. He , moreover, thereby achieved two very important results. In the first place, the play's 'story line' . . . [remained] one which the mind can follow. In the second place, he [managed] physically to represent that 'spaciousness' which so many critics have singled out as one of the most significant aspects of the special character of this particular play.^°®

Krutch added that McClintic's production was "very fine

indeed so far as everything visual [was] concerned," by which he included "not only what is itself striking to the eye but also whatever can contribute to the illustration and reinforcement of the intention of the play." Ward Morehouse of The Sun asserted that "the knowing hand of McClintic" was apparent from the beginning to the end of Antony and

Cleopatra and that the production had been staged

"bountifully, unsparingly and swiftly," both creating and sustaining an emotional impact. For Morehouse, there was

"extraordinary fluidity" to the production and the "dramatic force of the play" was "steadily cumulative.

The production also impressed Richard Watts, Jr., who wrote that Cornell's management had provided not only "a competent presentation of a drama which has eluded the skill of virtually everyone else who has attempted the task" but also what was "certainly one of the most stirring versions of a Shakespearean work to be seen in our time." Watts

Joseph Wood Krutch, The Nation 165:24 (13 December 1947) 654.

Ward Morehouse, review of Antony and Cleopatra, The Sun 28 November 1947. 274 thought the production had "a wonderful air of vitality and movement about it, and he found Guthrie McClintic's direction "imaginative and resourceful, capturing the qualities of the play in all their variety and power.

Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt expressed gratitude to

McClintic and Cornell for a production that was

"predominantly intelligent and true to Shakespeare with a grand and eloquent beauty.Gratitude and respect for the revival were also pronounced by the unnamed critic for

Newsweek magazine, for whom "the courage behind this enterprise [was] combined with good taste" and what appeared to be "a triumph of stagecraft over box-office allergies.Another uncredited review, from Time, declared that "under Guthrie McClintic's perceptive direction, this Antony and Cleopatra properly [brimmed] over with worldliness, cynical wit, self-seeking and double- dealing."^^'* Perhaps the most comprehensive statement of praise for McClintic's overall achievement with Antony and

Cleopatra was that bestowed on the production by John Mason

Brown in a lengthy article published by The Saturdav Review;

The rare, the radiant virtue of 'Antony and Cleopatra' as Guthrie McClintic has set it behind

Richard Watts, Jr., "Miss Cornell Splendid in a Great Tragedy," New York Post 28 November 1947.

The Catholic World 166 (January 1948) 357.

Newsweek 30:23 (8 December 1947) 76.

114 Time 50:23 (8 December 1947) 76. 275

the footlights is that it is so acted and so staged that the production, at almost every turn, triumphs over the glorious difficulties of the script. In the speaking, the language loses few of its splendors. The action careens across the ancient world, breathless in its pace. The scale of the emotions is preserved. So is their heat. So, too. is the wonderful complexity of the story itself.lis

For Brown, Cornell and McClintic, "by their courage, their generosity, and their skill" had "accomplished the unexpected" by breaking "the jinx which over the long years has dogged one of the marvels of dramatic literature."

The collective strength and unity of purpose displayed by the acting ensemble McClintic developed for Antony and

Cleopatra caught the attention of, and garnered high praise from, nearly all the critics— even many of those who, like

Brooks Atkinson, were not entirely convinced by Cornell's

Cleopatra. Atkinson, for whom Kent Smith's performance as

Enobarbus was considerably more successful than those of

Cornell or T e a r l e , nonetheless congratulated Cornell and McClintic for rounding up as generally good a cast as they had.John Chapman— oddly enough, the only critic who did not respond favorably to the Enobarbus of Kent

Smith— opined that Cornell had "spared no energies in

John Mason Brown, "0 Eastern Star!" The Saturdav Review of Literature 30:51 (20 December 1947) 24.

Indeed, Smith's Enobarbus was nearly as universally acclaimed as had been Edith Evans' Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.

Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times 27 November 1947. 276

assembling an unusually worthy supporting cast.Ward

Morehouse found the acting of Cornell and "her associates,

down to the smallest of the men's roles" to be

"superior.Robert Garland, who declared that Cornell headed "a lengthy cast that could scarcely be bettered," claimed it was "no easy matter to do individual justice" to a cast "as excellent as that of this Antony and

Cleopatra.Perhaps the most perceptive comments, though, regarding McClintic's extraordinary ability with actors came from Irwin Shaw, for whom the acting ensemble performed with an outward appearance of ease that masked the tremendous effort such seeming lack of effort required. His comments serve eloquently to summarize Guthrie McClintic's major contribution to the art of directing Shakespeare on the Broadway stage:

The director . . . has done his job so unobtrusively that its skill might well be overlooked. He has guided what seems to be two full battalions of excellent actors through a constantly and elaborately shifting succession of settings with what looks like, and of course cannot be, effortless ease. He has a firm and pleasant sense of design that he never allows to be disturbed. . . . And the performances he has obtained from his actors are uniformly intelligent, clear and without the windy

Dailv News 27 November 1947.

The Sun 28 November 1947.

120 Robert Garland, "Cornell Triumphs in Superb Offering," Journal American 28 November 1947. 277

mannerisms we have so often seen in Shakespearean productions.

Without attempting or achieving anything particularly innovative as regards theatrical conceptualization in the directing of Shakespeare, McClintic nevertheless seems to have brought to the three plays he directed a simplicity of approach and an honest integrity that went far in enabling him to discover in each instance (with the possible exception of the John Gielgud Hamlet of 1936) his own direct route to the "higher value" he discerned in each play.

He subscribed to no theory or method of directing; on the contrary, he was opposed to the very notion of approaching any two plays in exactly the same way. But his overriding concern for ensemble acting (a concern shared by his wife Katharine Cornell, the star and producer of both the 1934 Romeo and Juliet and the 1947 Antony and Cleopatra) combined with the remarkable talent he had for communicating with actors to result in the kind of Shakespearean productions that Arthur Hopkins might have envied but failed himself to achieve.

McClintic's Shakespearean casts may not have consisted of actors whose goal was to be entirely "selfless," and there is no evidence to suggest that he ever expressed any desire that they should be. His few written comments on the subject of actors suggest, rather, that he viewed actors as

121 ji-yin Shaw, "The Old Ruffian," New Republic 117:24 (15 December 1947) 34. 278

autonomous artists working as musicians in an orchestra of which he was the conductor. "I want to allow them freedom

to create in their own way," he asserted, "with me wielding the baton;" and he felt his principal responsibility as a director was "to meld [individual cast members] into a harmonious whole.

Democratization within a (predominantly benevolent) hierarchichal structure apparently was the paradoxical concept informing McClintic's directing and, by extension, his directing of Shakespeare. With no theories and few labels, he managed to mobilize casts (even those with star actors in them) into ensembles by focusing his and their attention on "the quality of the play as a whole.

Me and Kit 244.

Eustis, "The Director Takes Command" 115. CHAPTER VI

MARGARET WEBSTER: SHAKESPEARE POPULARIZED

"The principal thing about directing Shakespeare,"

Margaret Webster often claimed, "is that it is very much like directing anything else.Webster, the foremost director of Shakespeare's plays on Broadway between the late

1930s and the early 1950s, was convinced that the principles informing a director's approach to a Shakespearean text were

"after all, no different from those which govern his approach to any other play" and that only the method would vary according to the personal idiosyncrasies to which the technique of directing was subject.%

Her own particular method of directing Shakespeare did not differ greatly in outline from that which already has been attributed to Guthrie McClintic; in particular, she shared with McClintic a concern for the integration of all production aspects according to the "structural pattern" of a play, the "wholeness of its effect." Moreover, like

McClintic, Webster believed that a vital task confronting

- * ^ Margaret Webster, "On Directing Shakespeare," Producing the Play by John Gassner (New York: Dryden, 1941) 443.

^ Margaret Webster, "Producing Mr. Shakespeare," Theatre Arts Magazine 26 (January 1942) 47.

279 280

the producer of Shakespeare in the United States was dealing with what she referred to as an "unwholesome reverence for

the Bard," a regard for Shakespeare as "high-brow stuff," the most damaging result of which, she believed, was a kind of inhibition affecting both actors and audience members.

Margaret Webster parted company from Guthrie McClintic, however, in her attitude toward the response she hoped to engender in audiences viewing the playtexts she chose to direct. While McClintic realistically attempted to generate an emotional response (in both actors and audiences alike) akin to that he himself experienced upon reading a play,

Webster idealistically (and somewhat more naively) aimed to produce Shakespeare in order that contemporary audiences would "experience the emotions [the playwright] intended his first audiences to experience."^ A modern director of

Shakespeare, she asserted, needed to be a "translator" of the plays for its viewers:

He has to produce an integrated piece of theatre, carrying as nearly as possible the full intention of the author, and projecting it instantaneously to several hundred people of the most variously assorted character and receptivity.'*

The aim of her productions, she averred was "a collaboration with both author and audience" in which she "tried honestly to interpret the author's intention," as nearly as she could

^ Alan S. Downer, "The Dark Lady of Schubert [sic] Alley," The Sewanee Review 54 (1946) 124.

^ Margaret Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears (New York: Whittlesey House, 1942) 15. 281

"divine" it, to "the audiences for whom the productions were

intended.

Her approach to stage directing— and this held true for

modern plays as well as the so-called "classics"— was

fundamentally both self-effacing and holistic. The

playwright was for her the supreme artist in the theatre and

she felt it was necessary for that to remain true "if the

theatre is to retain its place, greatly, in the world of

today and tomorrow." However gifted a re-creative artist a

modern director may be, she declared, he or she needed to

remember that after theatrical productions had come and

gone, only the play itself still remained.

A director can only be judged according to whether or not the show he directs emerges as a satisfying whole. If he has succeeded in his job, he will have fused all the elements which go to make a theatrical production so completely that it should not be apparent that there has ever been a director at all.^

Webster acknowledged that the direction of a classic

play posed a unique dilemma for a director, who "is faced

with the task of interpreting a given script to an audience

completely different in thought, environment and very

frequently in language, from the one for which the play was

originally intended." The director's job of "translating" a

Shakespeare play for a contemporary audience, thus, became

^ Webster Shakespeare Without Tears 9.

® Margaret Webster, "Credo of a Director," Theatre Arts MonthIv 22 (May 1938) 343. 282

that much more crucial in terms of attempting to overcome

the differences between that audience and its Elizabethan

forebears.

She maintained that the work of directors who "discover

fresh and stimulating qualities in the text which render it

vital and exciting to the public of today," and that of

those who "may cut and re-shape the text until [they have]

molded it to [their] modern purpose," was legitimate as long

as "they heighten in its purest essence the fundamental

intention of the playwright."’ Webster's unspoken

assumption, that a playwright's "intentions" are ultimately

discernable, may seem unsophisticated in an age that is

presumably more cynical than her own. Nevertheless, a

sincere ingenuousness seems to underlie her assertion that,

above all, it was necessary to trust in Shakespeare, whom

she believed "was not only a great poet, but a great

craftsman":

’ Webster, "Credo of a Director" 344. In particular, Webster had been favorably impressed with the Julius Caesar of Orson Welles, despite its infidelity to Shakespeare's text. She professed that Welles, in order "to illustrate a contemporary thesis," had "sacrificed subtlety to unity of effect" in the character of Caesar and that "the penetrating irony at the expense of Mark Antony [had been] blurred into oblivion, and the key character of Octavius, so economically and bitingly etched by the author, [had] vanished altogether, along with almost all the last third of the play." Nonetheless, she was unequivocal in her assertion that "at all events, the Welles' Caesar was as exciting as a modern thriller with 'additional dialogue' by Will Shakespeare, and a superb piece of theatre." See Margaret Webster, "On Cutting Shakespeare— and Other Matters," The Theatre Annual 5 (1946) 29. 283

If people do not trust Shakespeare, I do not see why they bother to produce him at all. It does not matter whether the settings are realistically magnificent, suggestive and symbolical, authentic in the Elizabethan manner or quite simply non­ existent, so long as they do not obtrude themselves in front of the play. What matters to the director is that he has in his hands a very fine text, and it is up to him to study it honestly and simply.®

Mindful that "the modern theatre, confused and

uncertain upon [the nature of Shakespearean tradition] . . .

vacillates between excessive respectfulness and a

determination to be novel at any cost," Webster considered

it her responsibility to steer a somewhat conservative path

between those two extremes in the hope of rediscovering

precisely what the playwright's own "intentions" were— an

especially difficult task, she acknowledged, in light of the

number of extant textual "variants"— and then of translating

those intentions, as she understood them, into a vital,

"universal" experience for contemporary audiences. "We may, we must, try honestly and devotedly to divine his meaning,"

Webster declared. For that purpose, she felt it was

necessary to investigate Elizabethan staging conventions,

for they had "shaped [Shakespeare's] craftsmanship and without a knowledge of them we shall often divine his

intention wrongly.

® Webster, "Credo of a Director" 344.

® Margaret Webster, "Producing Mr. Shakespeare," Theatre Arts Magazine 26 (January 1942) 46. 284

Nevertheless, Webster was cautious about the dangers of over-analysis when preparing the playtexts for the stage.

She averred that the business of those approaching

Shakespeare for production was "not disintegration, but integrity." Grateful for the scholarship of those who had preserved and interpreted the texts, she nevertheless argued that it was still the task of those who produced those texts

"to transmute them into terms of the living theatre today.

Whether or not Margaret Webster ever accurately

"divined" Shakespeare's own intentions regarding the playtexts of his that she directed for the stage— a somewhat moot issue, as the "intentional" aims of the playwright are ultimately unknowable— there can be little doubt that she did more to popularize Shakespeare in the commercial

American theatre of the twentieth century than any director had succeeded in doing before her and, indeed, more than any has achieved since. Prior to 1950, Webster mounted Broadway productions of eight of Shakespeare's plays— Richard II

(1937), Hamlet (1938-39), Henry IV, Part 1 (1939), Twelfth

Night (1940-41), Macbeth (1941-42), Othello (1943-44), The

Tempest (1945) and Henry VIII (1946-47)— four of which at the time of Webster's production had been rarely produced on

Webster, "Producing Mr. Shakepeare" 46. 285

this side of the Atlantic Ocean.Five of those eight

productions garnered 100 or more consecutive performances

during their initial Broadway runs,demonstrating that

the plays could be directed in such a way as to re-vitalize

them, rendering them eminently entertaining for twentieth-

century audiences.

Webster's approach to the production of Shakespeare's plays, at its best, was marked by a simplicity and directness that concealed as much art as it revealed. The central elements of her Shakespearean staging were based upon: (1) a respect for the most contemporaneous scholarship regarding the texts; (2) an eclectic and pragmatic style of presentation in proscenium staging— employing visual principles predominantly of pictorial realism, but incorporating as well elements of the more abstract, suggestive approach; (3) as strong an emphasis on communication of the sense behind the language as on the beauty of the language itself, (4) a wealth of inventive physicalization and of vigorous stage business designed to sharpen an audience's comprehension, (5) attentiveness to the performance of every actor in the production and, in particular, to the "fleshing-out" of each role in the play.

Richard II, Henry IV, Part I, The Tempest and Henry VIII.

Richard II (133), Twelfth Night (129), Macbeth (131), Othello (296) and The Tempest (100). The 296 performances Webster's 1943-44 production of Othello amassed remains unparalleled at the time of this writing. 286 not slighting the smallest non-speaking "extra"; and, above all, (6) an instinct for uncovering (and making visible) the essential, basic human elements in Shakespeare's plays that serve as perpetual reminders of their timelessness and universality.

That Margaret Webster largely realized her goal of directing Shakespeare's plays as a means of rendering them entertaining is amply evidenced by a sampling of the overwhelmingly favorable critical response accorded her own contribution to the several Broadway productions she staged

— from which can be gleaned the most prominent aspects of the results she achieved. Even when reviewers found fault with individual components of the productions, as they often did, they nearly always held a high regard for Webster's directing, acknowledging at the very least her attempt to bring all elements together into an harmonious whole.

Reviewing Webster's production of Othello in 1943,

Rosamond Gilder expressed her belief that the director's chief contribution to the American stage had been "her ability to persuade theatre-goers that Shakespeare is not a wordy bore but a lively teller of tales; that his plays, when given scope and movement, are exciting and his characters not dim effigies of a past epoch but quite ordinary human beings, 'even as you and I.' John Mason

Rosamond Gilder, "Broadway in Review," Theatre Arts 27:12 (December 1943) 699. 287

Brown, in his response to her 1945 production of The

Tempest, concurred, professing that Webster had been more

successful than any other director of her time in

demonstrating that Shakespeare belonged as much on the stage

as in the library.And in his review of her Macbeth

(1941), Brown had been even more demonstrative about the

vitality of her staging:

When it comes to Shakespeare, Miss Webster is a genius. More than any other person who has set him behind the footlights in our day (if one except Orson Welles' brilliant work in the modern- dress Julius Caesar) she has the gift for making audiences forget that the great William was ever a schoolroom assignment.

Similar sentiments were expressed by Brooks Atkinson regarding the 1939 production of Henry IV, Part 1. For

Atkinson, Webster had "the courage to dispense with the heavy formality that plagues Shakespearean performances and productions" and she knew "how to make a ripping good drama out of the material of the scripts. Throughout her career, moreover, nearly every New York theatre critic who reviewed her productions eventually echoed the assessment

Atkinson penned in response to the Hamlet she staged in

John Mason Brown, "Miss Webster's Isle," The Saturdav Review of Literature 28:6 (10 February 1945) 23.

John Mason Brown, "The Most Successful Macbeth of Our Day is Presented," New York World-Teleoram 12 November 1941.

Brooks Atkinson, "Plump Jack: From 'Hamlet' to 'Henry IV' in One Easy Lesson by M. Evans and M. Webster," New York Times 5 February 1939, Section 9, p i . 288

1938: "Webster," Atkinson declared, "knows better than any

one we have had in this country how to gather all the loose threads of Shakespeare into one taut line of a vibrant performance.

Margaret Webster wrote, in her influential book

Shakespeare Without Tears that when she began directing his plays in this country, there was "no tradition as to the production or playing of Shakespeare" such as could be found in Great Britain; but she viewed the freedom inherent in that lack of tradition as an asset rather than a liability.

She embraced American naivete regarding Shakespearean production as an "opportunity" to approach the texts from a fresh, unsullied perspective. Yet the freshness of her approach was tempered always by a perceptive understanding of and profound appreciation for the well-established

English tradition with Shakespeare, which she had learned firsthand from her own years of training and experience in the British Isles. And Webster's overwhelming success as a populizer of Shakespeare on the American stage beginning in the late 1930s was likely due, in part at least, to her having been exposed from an early age to the very

Shakespearean traditions that she later would modify in order to make the plays palatable for American audiences.

Brooks Atkinson, "Hamlet on the Whole," New York Times 30 October 1938, Section X, p 1. 289

Daughter of two distinguished English actors— Ben

Webster, renowned for his Shakespearean interpretations and

Dame May Witty, a popular actor of both stage and screen—

Margaret Webster was born in New York City in March of 1905,

while her father was fulfilling an engagement on Broadway.

Although she held dual citizenship all her life, Webster

spent nearly thirty years in England before devoting herself

to Shakespearean production in the U.S., after which she

divided her time between the two countries. While she was

an American by a technicality, her contributions to the

production of Shakespeare in the United States were so far

reaching and "in tune" with the American theatregoing public

as amply to justify her inclusion in this examination

specifically of American directorial approaches to

Shakespeare.

Webster received all her education and early training

and experience in the theatre while in England.^® In the

early 1920s, she studied acting at the Etlinger Dramatic

School in London, where she met another aspiring actor,

Maurice Evans— who in 1937 would lure her to New York to

direct him in a production of Richard II that would not only

mark a turning point in both their careers but also usher in

The biographical information on Margaret Webster's early years has been obtained from an article in the 1950 edition of Current Biographv. ed. Anna Rothe (New York; H. W. Wilson) 604-606 as well as from Shakespeare Without Tears. 290 a brief but remarkable renaissance of American Shakespearean production.

Webster acted professionally for the first time in

1924, appearing as a member of the chorus in a production of

Euripides' The Trojan Women featuring Dame Sybil Thorndike.

In the following year, she made her Shakespearean debut as the Gentlewoman in John Barrymore's London production of

Hamlet. Webster's Shakespearean education was, in her own words, "greatly advanced" several years later by a season of travelling repertory with Sir Philip Ben Greet's Players.

Her vivid description of the experience reveals the scope of the influence that extraordinary year had on her, which she would later transmute into her own highly physical, non- reverential approach to the directing of Shakespeare's plays. The company, she relates, offered many plays in many places during the 1928-29 season, usually performing in the open air and under decidedly unorthodox conditions:

The Ben Greet productions were not of the highest standard, but his companies were filled with eager young people, none of them awed by the works of the master and all of them ready to tackle anything. You had to learn to make a running exit of anything from twenty to a hundred yards, tossing blank verse blithely but audibly over your left shoulder as you went; to play Lady Macbeth up and down a fire escape and convince an audience of irreverent school children that you really were sleepwalking at the same time; to climb stone walls in an Elizabethan farthingale, crawl behind a hedge or two, and emerge in view of the audience unruffled in dress or speech; and to be heard in great open spaces above the sound of the wind and the tossing branches of the trees above your head. You had to sink or swim. There wasn't much finesse about it, but it gave you a sense of 291

freedom and of power. You had the feeling that Shakespeare himself would have felt at home here and enjoyed the sensation of driving the play clear through against the odds, as you hold a boat against a high wind.

A year later, Margaret Webster became a member of the

Old Vic Company in London, where she appeared at first in secondary roles in the Shakespearean repertory. During the early 1930s, she was engaged sporadically by the Old Vic and played in a number of professional productions both in the

West End and on tour. During this period, she also began to direct plays between acting engagements. Her Shakespearean acting career in London reached its zenith, however, during the 1932-33 season, when she was engaged by the Old Vic to perform the role of Lady Macbeth.

At the Old Vic, Webster came into direct contact with a tradition of Shakespearean production that, by her own assessment, was "in its essentials" perhaps as "sound" as any that was being practiced in the English-speaking theatre of the time. And from her sense there of "the collaboration between actors and audiences continuously but quite unself­ consciously devoted to the Shakespeare plays," she learned not only to appreciate the value of textual fidelity but also to recognize that Shakespearean theatre could be as

"theatrical" and "popular" a form as any other.

Here Shakespeare was both exciting and familiar; the atmosphere was full of challenge, not of awe. I realized the enormous value of this sense of

19 Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 6-7. 292

comradeship among actors, audience, and author. Here, too, Shakespeare was played almost uncut. The Old Vic public would have resented blue-pencil evasions of difficult passages, on the part of the director or the actors. This led, necessarily, to a much closer study of Shakespeare's dramatic intention in its less facile aspects. It resulted in a greater appreciation of his theatre reasoning and also in a healthier respect for the full texts which recent scholarship [had] unearthed from beneath a mass of wanton 'editing.' Nevertheless, the audiences expected entertainment, 'theatre,' in its best sense. Entertainment, it appeared, was not incompatible with scholarship.^®

Margaret Webster's first professional directorial assignment, in 1933, was an outdoor production in the county of Kent of Shakespeare's Henry VIII. One of the unusual features of the production was the contribution from each village in the county of a group of women to take part in one of the big "crowd” scenes, resulting in an rotating ensemble comprised of nearly eight hundred amateur actors; only the principal roles were played consistently by the same actors throughout the performance. This complex task engendered in Webster an early respect for the significance of every character in a Shakespeare play, down to the smallest, seemingly insignificant non-speaking parts. Her simple, but effective, solution to the daunting problem of directing so many supernumeraries in the same production— helping each of them develop a distincly individual

"character"— would years later became a hallmark of her

Shakespearean productions on Broadway:

20 Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 7-8. 293

[I learned] that every member of any Shakespearean crowd is as important as the principal speakers in the scene. These village women, some of them unable to read the text itself, were lost at first, listening sheepishly and uncomprehendingly to the flood of speeches. But when I gave to each of them an identity, a character, an individuality of her own, they played with an impassioned conviction that made the crowd scenes genuinely thrilling.21

From her county of Kent production of Henry VIII, too,

Webster learned that "the problems of Shakespearean production are not basically different in the amateur and professional theatre." Such an early realization facilitated her adoption of and her ability to maintain the

"populist" approach to the staging of Shakespeare's playtexts that informed all of her professional productions.

The turning point in Margaret Webster's theatrical career came in 1937, when Maurice Evans invited her to join him in New York City to stage his production of Richard II,

Evans had already achieved some degree of success as an actor in the United States, having performed under Guthrie

McClintic's direction with Katharine Cornell's company in both Romeo and Juliet and Saint Joan^^ and having achieved a succès d'estime portraying Napoleon in R. C. Sheriff's St.

Helena.

21 Shakespeare Without Tears 8.

22 Evans succeeded Basil Rathbone as Romeo in the 1935 revival of the Shakespeare play, both on Broadway and on its second national tour. He played the Dauphin of France in the Shaw play, which was staged by McClintic in 1936. 294

Evans had strong notions regarding how he wanted

Richard II to look and be performed, yet his decision not to direct the play himself was a conscious eschewing of the

English actor-manager tradition. He felt "it would be a serious mistake to occupy the director's post" himself in addition to playing the leading role, as "there must be a spirit of teamwork" during the rehearsal of any play and he believed "that no such atmosphere could be achieved" if his fellow actors were aware that he was both "their employer and their mentor.

In recruiting Margaret Webster to direct his production of Richard II (as well as in enlisting the services of David

Ffolks, who had served as scenic and costume designer at the

Old Vic during the producer's tenure there), Evans was hoping to establish a production team with experience in the

British tradition of Shakespearean production, for he was convinced that "directors with Shakespearean background simply did not exist in New York" in the late 1930s.2*

Maurice Evans, All This . . . and Evans Too! (Columbia, SC; U of South Carolina P, 1987) 110.

Evans 110. While offering no insight into McClintic's direction of Shakespeare, Evans (who acted in two productions directed by McClintic and starring Katharine Cornell) tenders a dissenting opinion regarding McClintic's ensemble efforts, claiming that the director "had serious shortcomings" in working with actors other than Cornell (see p 96)— an assertion that must be viewed with circumspection in light of the number of artistic successess McClintic had with productions in which Miss Cornell did not appear. 295

From the outset, Webster determined to direct American actors in Shakespeare according to their own particular talents rather than trying to mold them into imitations of their British counterparts. In casting Richard II, Evans and Webster agreed to make no attempt to "Anglicize" the work of the production's predominantly American performers, for Webster thought such a practice "silly." The director, nonetheless, knew that they "had to try for a certain standard of good, international speech to maintain a balance between the company and its star; and, desirably, some distinction of style and manner.

During rehearsals for Richard II, Webster discovered that the fundamental differences between American and

English actors were especially noticable in the way they confronted Shakespeare:

The Americans worked harder, were more concentrated and more direct. They were also more self-conscious. The English actor would toss a Shakespearean part lightly over his left shoulder, as something all in the day's work; but the American treated it as something very special and rather awesome. He was apt to approach the verse cautiously, and plow his way through it as if it were a wet, muddy field and he had heavy boots on. But the Americans were quick to treat the characters as people, not as mouthpieces, as soon as you had performed the necessary introductions. They had less gloss than their English counterparts, but more reality and more guts.^G

Margaret Webster, The Same Onlv Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Familv (New York: Knopf, 1969) 379.

Webster, The Same Onlv Different 381-2. 296

In the article "On Directing Shakespeare," Webster promulgated her attitudes regarding the "necessities of speech" that a modern actor needed to acquire in approaching

Shakespeare's dialogue. "The actor needs better enunciation, more breath and a greater sense of the rhythm and musical value of the English language," she asserted, as audiences "hear lazily" and the theatre was (at that time, at least) "almost the only place where the human voice undistorted by amplification has to make itself heard to a large number of people." Furthermore, Webster was keenly aware that Shakespearean vocabulary contained a great many antiquated words and expressions, which challenged an actor's ability to communicate with sufficient clarity:

The director has to pay the most careful attention to the phrasing and punctuation of a line or series of lines, so that the key words are clear and the parenthetical groups of words fall into their proper and subordinate place. When the speech is in verse, he must make sure that the swing of the verse is neither so stressed as to become doggerel, nor so broken as to destroy its musical value.^

Regarding the "exact and proper blend of melody and meaning in the lyric and epic passages of Shakespeare's plays," Webster expressed her belief that a "delicate balance" was necessary between the production of sound and the communication of thought in order to avoid the condition in which an actor who becomes so enamored of the beautiful

Margaret Webster, "On Directing Shakespeare," Producing the Play by John Gassner (New York: Dryden, 1941) 447. Italics are Webster's. 297 sound he or she is producing falls, quite unconsciously, into a "set melody" that threatens to become "devoid of freshness or spontaneous thought, and is consequently extremely hard to understand."^®

Even more than the coaching of individual voices,

Webster believed that the "orchestration of voices" was the director's greatest task in approaching Shakespearean language. The playtexts were, in her mind, like symphonic scores "in which the individual voices serve as instruments, conflicting, modulating, and combining both in tempo and in melodic line." The director's challenge was "to hear the full score, steadily and whole," and the best means of doing that was to exercise a firm control over tempo. She was convinced that the actors with whom Shakespeare played and for whom he wrote "played very fast" and she took quite literally the assertion in his prologues to Romeo and Juliet and Henry VIII that the plays originally were performed in approximately two hours. Based on that assumption, Webster averred that most of the plays benefitted from "a general swiftness of attack, so that the 'slow movements' gain in efficacy and the line of the play is preserved unbroken.

Indeed, beginning with Richard II, Webster established a pattern of obtaining from those with whom she worked in

^® Webster, "On Directing Shakespeare" 448.

Webster, "On Directing Shakespeare" 448. 298

Shakespeare's plays extraordinarily vigorous and fast-paced productions. Many critics who reviewed Webster's first

Broadway production focused their commentary almost exclusively on the novelty of presenting such a little-known play and on Evans' exceptional handling of the title role.

But at least two of the major New York critics recognized the influence on the production of a significant directorial debut. Edith J. R. Isaacs maintained that Webster's emphasis on the play's pageantry— i.e., "all the brilliance of costume and light, the elaboration of design, the great swirls of the curtains, the sound of the trumpets, the handling of groups of people constantly moving across the stage"— suited Richard II p e r f e c t l y . ^0 And Brooks

Atkinson praised Webster's "pulsing and nimble direction" of the play and considered the production, with its "swift and heady" pacing, "an agile, keen and fiery piece of theatre work that lifts all the vitality out of the play, molds it into idiomatic shape and beats it into the brains of the audience.

As Isaacs had observed, the swift pacing of Richard II derived as much from the pageantry of the visual elements in the production as it did from the acting. From the very outset of her directorial career, Webster's approach to the

Edith J. R. Isaacs, "Broadway in Review," Theatre Arts Monthly 21:4 (April 1937) 259.

Brooks Atkinson "England's 'Skipping King,'" The New York Times 14 February 1937, Section 10, p 1. 299 physical aspects of production— perhaps due to her earlier experiences with Ben Greet's touring company— was grounded in a pragmatic attitude toward adapting the modern spaces in which she worked to the demands of the texts rather than in adapting the texts to the confines of those spaces.

"The whole structure of the plays," Webster maintained,

"is based on the speed and ease with which one scene could

. . . melt into another without break or visual change.

Alleging that the standard act divisions in the texts of

Shakespeare's plays were "quite obviously the product of arbitrary editing" but were "false to every proved theatre rule," Webster asserted her belief that there was "hardly a legitimate act-curtain in the modern sense or by modern standards of act division" in any of his dramatic works.

Such act division as had been imposed by modern productions was, in her opinion, a "necessary evil" that had to be

"tricked and contrived and built up with every battery of resource at the director's command." But, she insisted, there was "no reason why a director should sacrifice, between these breaks, the speed and fluency of the

Shakespearian text and every reason why he should strenuously avoid doing so.

While Webster did not made a direct correlation between the fluidity of scenic structure in Shakespeare and the cinematic techniques that both McClintic and Welles consciously applied to their stage productions, a commonality of thought seems implied here.

Webster, "On Directing Shakespeare" 446. 300

It was Margaret Webster's considered opinion that the wealth of visual resources obtainable by modern theatrical producers were not to be eschewed in Shakespearean production simply because they had not existed in

Elizabethan England. Rather, she expressed her belief that

Shakespeare would have welcomed such devices and employed them himself had they been available to him, as long as the plays themselves did not suffer because of them:

a Shakespearian production should bring to the stage that quality of visual beauty which it is part of the theatre's business to provide. But . . . the setting should interpret and illuminate the spirit of the play, and not obscure it, nor triumph over it. It should preserve that imaginative flexibility of the text. Also the director should remember the extreme intimacy which the Elizabethan stage established between the actors and the audience.

The Elizabethan playhouse, Webster acknowledged, accorded such intimacy by way of a platform stage jutting out into an ostensibly "circular" arrangement of viewing positions. While she conceded that there certainly were some advantages to the use of a projecting 'apron' such as presumably could be found in Shakespeare's own theatre— particularly with regard both to the flexibility it allowed in establishing conventions of time and place, as well as to the staging of soliloquies that either revealed a character's inner thought or were confided directly to the

34 Webster, "On Directing Shakespeare" 446. 301 spectators— she did not advocate reconstruction of the

Elizabethan stage for modern production.

According to Webster, her own experience in 1939-40 staging condensed versions of four of the comedies in a miniature "reconstructed Globe" at the New York World's Fair had, in fact, taught her more about the disadvantages of

Elizabethan staging technique than about its advantages, particularly with regard to "the grouping of characters and their spatial valuation" which she found to be "an almost insoluble problem.

To be able to group actors in the round, working more as a sculptor than as a painter, is an interesting, though difficult, technique. Our modern use of levels, rostra, and steps gives the director in many cases a more effective medium. If it is more two-dimensional, it is at least constant; it may be given approximately the same value for a spectator in any part of the theatre.

Webster had discovered firsthand that "sight lines" in a theatre constructed after the Elizabethan model were

"extremely variable and to a large proportion of the audience extremely bad." The lines of sight to the inner and upper stages for spectators sitting at the sides of the theatre she found so restricted as to minimalize the use of them, leading her to believe that the inner stage had been largely used as a "jumping-off-place for a scene in which standing furniture or props had to be 'discovered,' and that

Webster, "On Directing Shakespeare" 445.

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 54. 302 the main action must have been brought forward as soon as possible to the main stage itself.

Moreover, while she thought it helpful in some instances to extend an apron from the picture-frame stage toward the audience of a modern playhouse, Webster maintained that it was far less essential an ingredient to the establishment of intimacy between actors and audiences than was the power that can be created by a great actor performing great material. After experimenting with apron stages designed for Richard II (1937) and Hamlet (1938) that broke the line of the proscenium arch at the St. James

Theater, Webster eliminated such forward projection of the picture-frame stage from subsequent Broadway productions.

Her decision to do so, she later felt, was vindicated in the

1940 production of Twelfth Night— performed in the same space without the benefit of an apron— when Helen Hayes as

Viola, left alone on stage, confided her troubles to the audience in the famous "I left no ring with her" soliloquy.

The actor, according to Webster, delivered her lines so simply and truthfully that Viola's problems immediately became those of her listeners. An apron stage, Webster later re-iterated, was not required for an actor to establish such an intimate connection with an audience:

How ridiculous it is to suppose that 'audience participation' depends on proximity or can only be achieved by actors rushing up and down the aisles

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 54-55. 303

falling over people's feet or climbing onto their knees. It depends only on a quality of the spirit and a little stardust, and has nothing to do with buildings.38

With regard to scenic investiture in Shakespeare,

Webster's practice was essentially pragmatic, striking a balance between the demands (and limitations) of the theatre spaces in which she staged the plays and her own insistence that "we should clear our minds of anything which obstructs the unbroken flow of Shakespeare's writing, and that in staging we should eliminate as far as humanly possible the breaks and checks which scene changes impose on it."38

The director recognized that scenic productions of

Shakespeare's plays had been "continuously at odds with themselves," since the playwright had "achieved his effects without benefit of scenery, working with words on the

'imaginary forces' of his audience."

Webster was reluctant to make sweeping generalizations regarding stage settings, for she believed they were potentially misleading. "Each play presents a separate problem," she felt, "and every broad solution is encompassed with a hundred difficulties of detail.The most consistent criterion upon which she based her views regarding the elements of design for modern production.

38 Margaret Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage (New York: Knopf, 1972) 95-6.

38 Webster, Shakespeare without Tears 58.

40 Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 66-7. 304 however— which was informed by the guiding principle underlying her whole approach to Shakespearean production— was the need to communicate the entire mise-en-scène in terms directly accessible to the modern audience in the modern playhouse:

We do not and cannot look or listen with either the eyes or ears of our ancestors, and for the difference in an audience's capacity to look and listen the modern director, designer, and actor must carefully allow.

In nearly all the criteria of comparison between

Elizabethan and modern staging techniques, Webster favored the technology of the twentieth century. The closing of a curtain on a modern "peepshow" stage, she felt, could greatly heighten the end of a play by leaving "in an audience's eye and mind an indelible picture which should represent the sum and resolution of our story.

Furthermore, the ability to completely darken the interior space of a modern theatre, she believed, adds another degree of intimacy that cannot be achieved in playing Shakespeare by daylight. "If there were one modern stage facility which could be made to serve and literally to 'highlight'

Shakespeare's dramatic craft without interfering with any part of it," she affirmed, it might certainly be the

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 67.

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 57. 305 resources of modern lighting techniques.'*^ Modern stage

lighting, she added elsewhere, "more than any other single factor" enabled directors to focus spectators' attention

"where Shakespeare wants it," on the actors.'*'*

Because she believed conclusively that actors were the principal communicators of a playwright's text, Margaret

Webster attempted, in her staging of Shakespeare's plays, to rely on the modern theatre's "visual beauty which

Shakespeare's theatre lacked, but of which there is no reason to suppose he would disapprove." But the visual elements of production were of less interest and importance to her than the interplay of the actors, and she focused on the physical production elements only to the extent that they would not interfere with the actors' preeminence on stage:

As Shakespeare relied primarily and finally on the power of his characters to hold attention and arouse emotion, to project the play's content to the exclusion of all facilities or shortcomings in its physical production, so we must rely on the actor to do precisely the same thing today.

Beginning with her very first Broadway production,

Webster revitalized Shakespearean playgoing both in New York and— by way of touring companies of her numerous Broadway

'*^ Margaret Webster, review of On Producing Shakespeare. by Ronald Watkins, Shakespeare QuarterIv 3 (1952) 68.

'*'* Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 65.

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 74. 306 successes— throughout the United States. While individual components of her productions may have not always been on a consistent level of excellence, the unified impression projected by those ingredients was observed in critical responses to nearly all her Shakespearean productions, echoing Brooks Atkinson's summarization of his reaction to

Richard IIz

The supple staging, the musical flourishes, the imaginative costuming, the unobtrusive scenery have all been gathered up in Miss Webster's fresh- minded direction and thrust across the footlights in a vibrant performance of a stirring play. It dismisses us from the theatre with a feeling of high excitement and a conviction that there is nothing in the world so illustrious as drama and acting.'*®

The enormous success Margaret Webster and Maurice Evans experienced in 1937 with Richard II— a Shakespearean play that was relatively unfamiliar to American audiences, as it had not been seen on Broadway since 1878— became the first of a string of five Shakespeare collaborations within the succeeding five years that also included Hamlet (1938),

Henry IV, Part 1 (1939), Twelfth Night (1940) and Macbeth

(1941).

The most celebrated aspect of the 1938 Hamlet was the decision Webster and Evans made to present the play uncut and in its "entirety"— an unusual choice, for the playtext, one of Shakespeare's longest, typically had been severely

'*® Brooks Atkinson, review of Richard II, The New York Times 6 February 1937, p 14. 307 cut in productions on both sides of the Atlantic. With a running time (not including intermissions) of just under four hours, the Webster-Evans Hamlet was first performed in three parts, with a half-hour dinner break between Act I and

Act II and a brief intermission (of approximately ten minutes duration) between the second and third parts. As thirty minutes proved an inadequate length of time for audience members to leave the theatre and complete a meal in one of the nearby restaurants, the dinner break was subsequently lengthened to forty-five minutes; but, before long, it was eliminated altogether as being unnecessary.

The complete version of the play upon which the director and star-producer settled was arranged by Webster after a thorough examination of both the First Folio and

Second Quarto texts, as well as an investigation of Dover

Wilson's influential study. The Manuscript of Shakespeare's

Hamlet. The kind of textual scrutiny undertaken by Webster in 1938— while it has become fairly commonplace toward the end of the twentieth century— seems to have been unusual for its time, and it exposes an eclectic (as well as a somewhat inconsistent) attitude on her part regarding textual fidelity.

Prior to her preparation for Hamlet, Webster's sentiments with regard to acting editions had been, by her own admission, rather indifferent:

The productions with which I had hitherto been connected had used one or other of the standard 308

published editions, making whatever cuts the director wished and solving the more obvious textual variations on the summary basis of 'what sounded best.

Webster's initial decision to scrutinize the textual variants of Hamlet was based upon an expedient need "to make decisive choices long before the play ever went into rehearsal" concerning the "period" in which her production would be set and the and style of production she and Evans were willing to adopt. Acting on a "new sense of directorial responsibility," Webster began to study the various versions of the play and Wilson's analysis, and found herself "enmeshed in a kind of bibliographical whodunit with a number of villains, a labyrinth of conflicting clues and two protagonists, 'F.l' and 'Q.2,' who became as vivid" to her, she claimed, as Hamlet himself.^®

In time, Webster began to favor the First Folio text that had been published in 1623, seven years after

Shakespeare's death, by the playwright's former fellow actors Heminges and Condell. She became convinced that the earliest Quarto version was ultimately unreliable, as Q.l

(the so-called "bad" Quarto) "must obviously have been

'pirated' and published without the authorization of either

Shakespeare or the Globe Company." Nevertheless, with regard to Hamlet, Webster admitted that she had even found

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 25.

48 Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 25-6. 309

"some illumination" in the First Quarto, and "had been tempted by its transposition of scene sequence, which brings the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy into a more logical position," and years later— having witnessed the effect such a transposition had made on two major productions of Hamlet subsequent to her own— she regretted that she had not given in to her impulse to re-order the sequence according to the

First Quarto.

Regarding the revised. Second Quarto version, Webster was satisfied by current scholarship indicating that the

"good" Quarto versions of several of the plays (including

Hamlet) had been "honestly purchased from the Globe Company" and, in many cases, had been printed directly from

Shakespeare's own scripts:

Their readings, where they conflict with the Folio texts, have consequently found increasing favor, and no theatre director can affort to neglect a study of them if the play he is handling exists in Quarto form. Even from the pirated 'bad' Quartos, we may learn something, often in stage directions, where the reporter's eye was more accurate than his ear. The cuts and omissions in some instances are exactly what any director, conscious of a time limit and not too scrupulous about his author, would in fact strike out today.

In the end, Margaret Webster combined what she considered the best aspects of the First Folio and Second

Quarto versions, applying what she called "an actor's ear and a knowledge of stage practices" to the points of

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 26.

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 116. 310 contention. She believed that, relying upon such theatrical intelligence, sometimes "the knotty problems of the printed page resolve themselves quite easily." First Folio became the springboard for her complete script, "just because it does seem to be the playhouse version for playhouse reasons," although she insisted on including the passages from Second Quarto that are omitted in the Folio version.

Theatrical common sense and "know-how," and a kind of spiritual communion with the playtexts, then, inevitably superseded scholarship in Webster's Shakespearean productions:

I read and reread the text (or texts). I let it grow inside my heart and head; I made a determined effort not to think up neat little notions or to pick up my ideas and look at them every five minutes. I tried to make myself a channel of communication through which something greater than I might speak.

Her textual scrutiny of Hamlet notwithstanding, it would seem that Margaret Webster's nearly invariable attitude toward the playtexts of Shakespeare did not contrast substantially from that with which she had become familiar prior to 1938, for her final judgments regarding any script ultimately differed little from what she claimed to have rejected— i.e., "solving the more obvious textual variations on the summary basis of 'what sounded best.'"

It is likely that what Webster learned more than anything else from her study of textual variants in

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 26, 311

Shakespeare was a great respect for the difficulties they present to the director, which she realized cannot always be resolved with a reliable degree of objectivity. She

implied, however, that awareness of those difficulties resulted in a (desired) increase of emphasis on the playwright as primary creator, which she strongly advocated:

If we concern ourselves . . . with the specific interpretation of Shakespeare's texts as we have them, we must consider our author with a good deal more care. We should, at least, take the trouble to find the text which is as nearly authentic as modern scholarship can discover before we decide what derivations we think proper to make from it, if any.52

Margaret Webster's consideration of and for Shakespeare led her to present his playtexts on Broadway with few, if any, substantial excisions— although, as it shall be demonstrated, there were occasional departures from standard texts and the plays were frequently (albeit judiciously) edited. Acknowledging that "the textual problem varies with every play, and its solution with every editor," she averred that "the main lines of textual derivation are fairly well established" and believed that they were worthy of more study than was usually afforded them. Still, it was her opinion that the main business of producers of Shakespeare when it came to editing the plays was "to produce a unity of impression which will diminish as far as possible any

52 Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 107, 312 textual disparities,"^^ for a harmonious production was ever her goal in directing the plays.

Such striving for a unity of impression was undoubtedly

Webster's aim when she staged the full-length Hamlet of

1938, the first Broadway production of the entire play ever presented:

I wanted the play not to seem abstruse or obscure; to speak directly to its listeners in human terms. I wanted the characters to live, not only Hamlet and Ophelia but the small parts which the uncut text reveals with such brilliant clarity: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortinbras and Osric, even the tiny ones which vanish in the usual cut versions— Reynaldo, Voltemand, 'a Sailor.' I wanted them to be recognizable. I wanted to make it clear that there were bedrooms and kitchens at Elsinore as well as battlements. I wanted to capture the sheer excitement of the story itself, swift, cumulative, driven toward its ending by every word and action. Everything must lock into place for this purpose, every twist of chance or mischance in the plot, every trait of every character, strength or weakness, loyalty, courage, stupidity, hypocrisy— all of these must contribute to the central drive of the play itself.54

The almost universal critical acclaim accorded the textual presentation of the uncut Hamlet would seem to have vindicated Webster's stated intentions. "By presenting the entire text of the play," wrote Richard Watts, Jr., "the current production reminds us how sketchy the abbreviated versions have been. . . . The drama appears so much smoother and less ragged," which Watts suggested was the result of

55 Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 130.

54 Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 29. 313 the swift pace of Webster's production and of "presenting

Hamlet as a play, rather than merely as a vehicle."^5

John Mason Brown concurred, asserting that in Webster's production,

the tragedy ceases to be vehicular in the traditional sense. It emerges as a thrilling entity; a work of art in which the supreme artist who fathered it has his unimpeded say. No hacks have dared to prune his script pretending they knew his business better than he did. No star has used his actor's vanity as a blotter to absorb the secondary characters."^®

Employing a similar metaphor in an antithetical manner,

Richard Lockridge of The New York Sun opined that Hamlet played without cuts "grows not so much in stature as in depth and, oddly enough, in simplicity. With the plot scenes so often omitted left in, the play as a whole rises above and absorbs its famous individual scenes, as it seldom is allowed to do on the stage.

Nearly every critic suggested, either directly or indirectly, that the "entirety" Hamlet demonstrated beyond any doubt that Shakespeare "knew his business as a playwright" and that "when we cut his masterpieces we harm

Richard Watts, Jr., review of Hamlet, New York Herald Tribune 13 October 1938, p 22.

John Mason Brown, "Mr. Evans' Magnificent Revival of 'Hamlet,' New York Post 13 October 1938.

Richard Lockridge, "Maurice Evans's Full Length 'Hamlet' Opens at the St. James, The New York Sun 13 October 1938, p 20. 314

both the plot and the understanding of character."®® But

no critic more eloquently and completely summarized

Webster's (and Evans') contribution to textual restoration than John Anderson, who professed that the advantages of presenting the play without cuts were almost immediately apparent:

The slow craftiness of the play's approach is heightened immensely; the movement takes on the veritable dimensions of historical pageantry, the violence of the incidents settles into a larger pattern, and in this increased scope the central character recedes somewhat from its usual high relief, so that it has approximately the same scale as the other characters. This fact has the effect of enriching the whole action, of giving emphasis to details which have, hitherto, been either omitted or glossed over, and so encompassing the mighty sweep of Shakespeare's imagination. Instead of being a distorted, overly concentrated study of one character, the play becomes a dilated chronicle, of melodramatic proportions, fastened securely to its chief figure and carried with him in the flooding tide of overwhelming tragedy. The smaller eddies of its plot move inward on a vast centrifugal power until the whole, with all its thrilling momentum, reaches its momentous climax.

In a 1972 memoir, Margaret Webster, reflecting on her

1938 Hamlet, conceded that the production had been consistent with its period in relying on too much scenery, too many props as well as on 'domestic' business she felt would be deemed excessive in the early 1970s. Nevertheless,

®® Philip T. Hartung, "Maurice Evans's Hamlet," The Commonweal 29:1 (28 October 1938) 21.

John Anderson, "'Hamlet' at Full Length Splendid Achievement," New York Journal and American 13 October 1938, p 20. 315 she acknowledged, as objectively as she could, that the production had been "exciting," that it had succeeded "in freeing the play from a lot of stuffy and statuesque conventions" and that it had spoken "directly . . . in living terms to its listeners," which it had succeded in doing "without the slightest attempt at artificial analogies and spurious 'relevance,'" proving to her that "you don't have to translate Shakespeare; you just have to let him be heard.

Still, by Webster's own retrospective assessment, an over-emphasis on scenery marked (and, perhaps, marred) a number of her Shakespeare productions, despite her own stated desire that the scenic element be inhibited from overwhelming the direct communication between actors and audiences.

The third of the Evans-Webster Shakespeare collaborations— a 1939 production of Henry IV, Part 1— she came to consider having been "heavily scenic; clumsily so, too," for while as much as possible of David Ffolkes' scenery that had been used in Richard II was returned to the stage of the St. James Theatre for Henry IV, the rehashed scenic elements fit less comfortably behind the proscenium arch as they had when the setting had projected forward onto a forestage apron.

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 35. 316

Never one to shy away from re-evaluating her own prior judgments, particularly in light of her claim that each of the plays of Shakespeare has its own distinctive set of requirements and challenges, Webster self-deprecating assessment that Ffolkes' scenery for Henry IV, Part 1 was excessive was a somewhat equivocal one. The scenery hadn't all been "misguided effort," she declared, for heraldry was appropriate to "a turbulent, thrusting play, full of vitality and drive and panache," such as she felt Henry IV to be:

I believe it is imperative to preserve the splash and color of Shakespeare's historical plays. I sometimes wonder whether we do not risk impoverishment when we banish the visual glamour which good old scenery provided, and still does, when allowed.®^

The Shrewsbury battle sequence in Henry IV, Part 1 posed new problems for director Margaret Webster to tackle, among which was determining how to disguise a lack of manpower. Her solution involved suggesting that the fighting "began long before dawn, over a lot of rocks and behind a series of gauzes." Trusting to what she called the

"Birnam Wood" principle that Shakespeare himself developed in Macbeth, as well as on the apologetic Chorus in Henry V

(who urged the audience to "Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts" and making "imaginary puissance" by dividing one man "into a thousand parts") she chose to rely on the

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 92. 317 convention "that one man rushing across the stage with a very large banner would look like a lot more men.Her staging of the battle sequence in Henry IV, Part 1, from the standpoint of critical response, was a success relative to the viewer's willingness to accept that convention. For

Brooks Atkinson the scene at Shrewsbury, which he counted among "those fugacious battlefield scenes that are likely to drive a modern theatregoer to drink," was under Webster's

"invigorating" guidance "a genuine encounter, fierce, tumultuous and headlong.Richard Lockridge concurred, more succinctly declaring that the production contained "the fine fury of battle," which in his opinion had been

"brilliantly staged."®'* Less convinced was Richard Watts,

Jr., responding as one who seemed unwilling to accept the crudeness of medieval warfare simply because of the advancements of modern innovations, but who nonetheless affirmed that "even those quaint old battle episodes, filled with swords and language which give so grotesque an atmosphere to combat in the eyes of a generation that knows the beauties of aerial warfare, take on a certain life under

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 93.

Brooks Atkinson, review of Henry IV, Part I, The New York Times 31 January 1939.

®'* Richard Lockridge, review of Henry IV, Part 1, The Sun 31 January 1939. 318

Miss Webster's direction."®^ Sidney Whipple confessed that medieval battle scenes, "despite the hoarse cries and shouts and stereotyped clang of steel on steel" never seemed convincing to him, and while he granted that in Webster's production, the "melee was staged as realistically as possible," he also complained that "it was hardly blood- stirring."®® For Burns Mantle, the scenes of combat were

"forced," but his reaction must be considered in light of his assertion that staged "clashes in the field" had become

"a little trying with the development of those more convincing battles of the screen,"®^ which betrays his bias against purely theatrical solutions that fly in the face of "realism." Perhaps the most trenchant reaction to

Webster's staging of the combat at Shrewsbury came from

Robert Benchley, who had praise for nearly every aspect of the production except the battle sequence— which, with a touch of irony, he suggested was virtually non-existent:

Not even Miss Webster's skill at staging can make a Shakespearean battle scene anything more menacing than a children's game of 'Hill-dill, come over the hill, or else I'll catch you standing still,' and at one point in the battle of Shrewsbury, I counted ten men disappearing into one small refreshment tent so that 'another part of the field' could be shown following

®® Richard Watts, Jr., review of Henry IV, Part 1, New York Herald Tribune 31 January 1939, p 12.

®® Sidney B. Whipple, review of Henry IV, Part 1, New York World-Telearam 31 January 1939.

®^ Burns Mantle, review of Henry IV, Part 1, Dailv News 31 January 1939, p 31. 319

immediately. Shakespeare's battles are all fought out in Shubert Alley and must be very tough on the stage-doorman. However, the fact that any part of a play like 'Henry IV' can be made to seem real and exciting is a great tribute to Mr. Evans, Miss Webster, and their skillful associates.®®

Another challenge for Webster in staging Henry IV,

Part 1 was posed by the problem of how to inspire members of the crowd scenes to register creditable collective responses. She learned from this production, she later recalled, that "armies are not to be trusted with battle cries."

One night, coming late to the theatre, I heard the Hotspur cheerleader triggering the charge with a yell of 'Esperanze! (Take it easy . . .)'; and the contending troops, all twelve of them, dashed at each other shouting 'Art and Mrs. Bottle!' against 'Susan and God!' I went home and wrote a lot more appropriate slogans.®®

Realizing that such ad-libbing "was not conducive to the preservation of illusion" and acknowledging that "it is extremely difficult for modern actors to extemporize in blank verse" and that "when they do try, an irresistible tendency to laugh overcomes everybody present,"^® Webster determined that the way to ensure a consistent level of credibility in group sequences thereafter would be for her to compose nearly every "extemporaneous" line for every

®® Robert Benchley, review of Henry TV, Part 1, The New Yorker 14:52 (11 February 1939) 30. It should be pointed out here that the St. James Theatre is not contiguous with Shubert Alley, and is located nearly a half a block a way.

69 Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 93.

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 101. 320 member of the crowd scenes she subsequently directed. She later suggested, amplifying what she claimed to have learned in 1933 from her County of Kent Henry VIII, that a director's responsibility went even further with regard to ensembles:

It is of vital importance that the director should provide for every member of his 'crowd' a consistent line of individuality, which the actor can follow out in its relation to every situation as it arises while he is on the stage. It then becomes the director's business to see to it that no individual line of extemporaneous dialogue is actually audible to the audience because of the blend of sound which surrounds it. But if there are any blank-minded lookers-on, even one, the tension and excitement of a climactic scene may be fatally destroyed.

Webster maintained that the "silent actors," those "who only stand and wait," were a section of an acting company that had been much underestimated, for many important scenes were critically dependent upon them.

The end-of-the-play revelations, the unravelings of the plot which we have seen worked out before our eyes, will fall very flat except in so far as we can see them mirrored in the emotions of the listeners. At the beginning of the plays, the lineless actors must often establish for us the atmosphere that surrounds our principals, the state of 'public opinion.

While David Belsaco, Guthrie McClintic and Orson Welles all contributed their share to the growing importance of these

"listeners," none of those directors whose Broadway

Shakespearean production preceded Margaret Webster's went as

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 101-2.

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 100. 321

far as she did in establishing the total stage reality of which those supernumeraries formed, in her opinion, such a vital part.

Webster's production of Henry IV, Part 1 marked the first time the director substantially altered a portion of the playtext. In deference to a suggestion made by Maurice

Evans, she substituted a somewhat shortened version of the first Justice Shallow recruiting scene from Part II (Act

III, scene 2) for the even shorter scene in Part I in which

Prince Hal reviews Falstaff's "pitiful" recruits (Act IV, scene 2).?3 Reluctant at first to tamper with the text in so obvious a fashion, she later realized that such alteration represented "the kind of liberty which the U.S.

The substantially lengthier recruiting sequence from Part II (in which Falstaff selects the scrawniest men presented to him for induction into the King's army) is far more overtly comic than the brief scene from Part I (in which Falstaff reveals in soliloquy how his has underhandedly exploited the King's conscription for his own personal gain). The Part II scene, moreover, grants the actor playing Falstaff more stage time and was clearly irresistible for Evans, who wrote in All This . . . And Evans Too! that he recommended the transposition because "it gave Falstaff a little more scope." Moreover, he admitted a certain laxity of attitude regarding the relative ignorance of American audiences relative to their British counterparts when it came to Shakespeare's texts. "Peggy feared we would be accused of poaching," he wrote about having convinced Webster to make the switch, "but I was able to assure her that there was no record of the play ever having been seen in Philadelphia [where the play opened prior to its New York run] so that the audience would be none the wiser" (125). 322 still affords.In England, she contended, it would have been "an extremely perilous venture." The transposed scene, she later admitted, possibly "threw the play off balance by underlining its warmth and humanity as against the harsh realities of war," but while she acknowledged that the production may have erred a little "on the story-book side," the director concluded that the change was ultimately a minor one that did not detract from the overall effect of

"an exciting and entertaining show.

The overall response of the New York critics would seem to substantiate Webster's own opinion of Henry IV, Part 1.

Richard Lockridge asserted that "nowhere along Broadway

[could one] find anything more vivid and alive, or anything directed with a surer touch or acted more superlatively."^® Wilella Waldorf wrote in the Post that

Webster had staged "a miracle of movement, color and gaiety" that had "vitality and speed, and above all . . . humor.

. . . It is the production as a whole that counts at the St.

James," Waldorf declared, "and Miss Webster has staged an

Of the several theatre critics in New York who noted the transposition, none seemed bothered by it. In The Sun. Richard Lockridge remarked that, while "the part is not a long one nor essential to the melodramatic action," it nevertheless "gives the play balance and vitality and does more even than the fine fury of battle to make the drama vivid in our day."

75 Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 93-4.

The Sun 31 January 1939. 323

immensely effective performance, full of life, laughter and color.Richard Watts, Jr., the critic for the Herald

Tribune was similarly impressed:

Again Maurice Evans and Miss Margaret Webster give us a brilliant, stirring and superbly managed Shakespearean production that must bring us to our feet cheering. . . . Under the splendidly imaginative direction of Miss Webster, this strange amalgation [sic] of rowdy, low comedy and dramatized history takes on life, color, laughter and excitement.^®

In the Times. Brooks Atkinson avouched that under Margaret

Webster's "invigorating" direction, Henry TV, Part 1 "turns out to be a play of high excitement and valiant people, with some roaring low comedy seasoning the martial dish, and a fit successor to the uncut 'Hamlet' and the compassionate

'Richard II'. . . . Henry TV, Part 1 . . . is tingling modern drama, with a line now and then that cracks open the modern world.

Among the most pénétrâtingly insightful of those New

York critics who reviewed Henry TV, Part 1 was Rosamond

Gilder, whose assessment of the 1939 production in Theatre

Arts is particularly remarkable for providing as well a perceptive overview of Webster's repeated success as a director of Shakespeare's plays:

Willela Waldorf, review of Henry TV, Part 1, New York Post 31 January 1937.

^® New York Herald Tribune 31 January 1939.

The New York Times 31 January 1939. 324

Margaret Webster . . . has shown the skill of her generalship by the smooth flowing of the play as a whole and the confidence with which the actors under her leadership move through their roles. She has succeeded in divesting them of the constraint which usually descends on most performers in the presence of Shakespeare. Her actors are at their ease in blank verse, even when they do not know how to use it for its full beauty and color. The intricacies of plot and counterplot, of argument and invective, are carried with so firm and forthright a hand that the main line of conflict emerges from the mass of complication. The story of dynastic struggle and young rivalry becomes exciting in her hands. Her inventiveness in domestic detail is particularly appropriate to this play, which moves throughout, even in its royal scenes, in an atmosphere of ordinary, everyday life. Not only do the tavern scenes abound in realistic homely details, but such glimpses as we have of Hotspur in his home, of the Welsh Glendower and his family, of Henry IV worrying, as all fathers do, over their sons' misspent youth, stress this note of common humanity. Her staging, like David Ffolkes' scenery, is in the straight English tradition. It makes no claim to striking originality but succeeds in its intention of making the play swift-moving and vigorous entertainment.®®

It has been suggested that the "inventiveness in domestic detail," which Gilder identified as so appropriate to Henry IV, Part 1, was among the most influential of ingredients related to Margaret Webster's success in popularizing Shakespeare's plays. "If there is something going on on the stage," historian Alan Downer claimed, "the dullest spectator will not commence to think about his income tax, his indigestion, or whether he will make the last train home"; by adhering to this principle, he added.

Rosamund Gilder, "Sweet Creatures of Bombast," Theatre Arts 23:4 (April 1939) 240-1. 325

Webster had counteracted the "shuffling inattentiveness" of audiences (due to their lack of understanding) that she herself had declared to be her greatest dread.

In the next of the Evans-Webster collaborations, the

1940 Theatre Guild production of Twelfth Night (in which

Evans co-starred as Malvolio with Helen Hayes as Viola), the director went perhaps even further than she had before in inventing physical business for actors:

Her Twelfth Night was crammed with singing, and prattfalls [sic], and jovial physical nonsense. Malvolio, although mindful of his h's was a cockney, and was followed and mocked by a little negro [sic] page-boy carrying a pink parasol. Between scenes, when the audience might reasonably have expected a moment to relax, the stage was continuously occupied, by Feste going over one of his songs, by a procession passing from one house to another, by a lamplighter. A thumpingly beautiful Olivia, surrounded by thumpingly beautiful ladies, was discovered being comically coiffed by a French barber. The dull jests of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew were treated with the contempt they deserve; they were smothered in belches and macksennet [sic]

The often frenetic stage activity that resulted from such an abundance of slapstick was not universally admired.

Joseph Wood Krutch complained that, while Webster's direction was "highly competent in purely theatrical ways," it seemed "almost too ready to put before everything else

Downer 130. His reference is to Shakespeare Without Tears 88.

Downer 130-1. 326

amusing business and mere liveliness on the stage.And

in the Times. Brooks Atkinson maintained that "the beauty of

[Webster's] Twelfth Night [was] overladen with a desire to

be funny at any cost."®^ Still, for many of the critics,

Webster's resourcefulness in staging Twelfth Night rendered

the production "lively and inventive" entertainment;®®

"quick and light and all of a piece";®® "inventive,

imaginative and in some respects precedent-shattering";®^

"all very superior Shakespeare";®® and even "a feast for holiday makers, colorful, smoothly articulated, inventive, engaging."®®

Webster contended that it was a much more difficult task to direct Shakespeare's comedies than it was to stage his tragedies for twentieth-century audiences. "The balance between wit, fooling, low comedy, and poetic fantasy" in the

®® Joseph Wood Krutch, review of Twelfth Night, The Nation 151:22 (30 November 1940) 541.

®^ Brooks Atkinson, review of Twelfth Night, The New York Times 20 November 1940.

®® Richard Watts, Jr., review of Twelfth Night, New York Herald Tribune 20 November 1940.

®® Richard Lockridge, review of Twelfth Night, New York Sun 20 November 1940).

®^ Sidney B. Whipple, review of Twelfth Night, New York World-Telearam 20 November 1940).

®® Burns Mantle, review of Twelfth Night, New York Dailv News 20 November 1940.

®® Rosamund Gilder, "Fiddling While Rome Burns," Theatre Arts 25:1 (January 1941) 6. 327 comedies, she asserted, "is an extraordinarily delicate one."®° And she was convinced that much of the humor in

Shakespeare's plays ultimately derives from intricacies of character or of situation, regardless of how seemingly antiquated or verbally complex its expression.

Webster maintained that, above all else, it was necessary to re-think Shakespearean comedy and the characters who convey it in terms of modern sensibilities by making those characters "recognizable human beings" in the eyes and ears of a contemporary audience. "If the actors playing 'the comics' have a personal reality, and a quality of being in themselves both funny and endearing," she alleged, "the lines will seem neither dull nor obscure."

She concluded that the best solution for a director tackling

Shakespearean comedy was "to cast great actors, great clowns, in parts which were obviously written for the great clowns of Shakespeare's day.If such casting was impossible, or failed, she advocated making cuts— but only as a last resort and, even then, only according to necessity:

We shall depend very greatly on the actors themselves. We cannot cut from theory. We must wait to hear how the lines sound and what the actors will make of them. Some cuts which we have considered possible may go back; ethers will have to be made in order to temper the wind to an actor who simply cannot get over the hurdle in question.

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 89.

Webster, "On Directing Shakespeare" 444. 328

It is too optimistic to suppose that any production will find itself armed with a full complement of ideal comedians, and, with this respect to the scholars, it is unwise and stubborn to insist on keeping in a joke that the actor cannot make funny, even though the fault be his and not Shakespeare's.^^

In that regard, however, Webster cautioned that cutting could have a deleterious effect on the fabric of a play.

"We must . . . be careful not to dislocate the delicate rhythm of a scene or even an individual speech," she warned.

Moreover, she felt it was wise "not to underrate the value of 'business,' but above all not to overload the scene with an excessive mass of it, which will slow us up and drive a heavy wedge between the interlacing lines.

In reflecting on the Theatre Guild production of

Twelfth Night, Webster acknowledged that the actors playing the most overtly humorous roles— Sir Toby Belch (Mark

Smith), Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Wallace Acton) and Feste

(Donald Burr)— "tried very hard but not very successfully" to carry the comic sub-plot. She recalled that she had found herself "cutting increasing numbers of incomprehensible jokes." Some cuts were made because of what she referred to as "footnote jokes" (which were

"irretrievable" due to antiquated verbal expressions), while others were "actors' cuts" (of lines she knew were good but could not get actors successfully to animate). Some of the

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 88.

Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 88. 329

latter she knew required visual business that she claimed she was "sometimes, but not always, successful in devising."

At times, she felt the "mutual inventions" she and the actors devised "were too elaborate and slowed down the tempo" of the production.®'*

By her own admission, Webster's production of Twelfth

Night "aroused mixed feelings" in the director herself "and conflicting ones in other people. It was gay, decorative, witty in a slightly sophisticated way," she opined, "but seldom funny from the heart; charming and even ocassionally touching, but lacking in shadows or in depth."®® Admiring the play above all of Shakespeare's other comedies, she felt it belonged to the playwright's zenith, "when his vision encompassed all humanity in affectionate mockery but in compassion also." In her mind, such an "elusive and glimmering" play, being at one and the same time "romantic, farcical, lyrical, satiric," was therefore "deceptively pliant and bruises easily," and she professed her belief— in the generally objective and balanced manner that characterized her autobiographical self-evaluations— that she and her associates had "bruised it rather badly."®®

Some of the negative criticism the production garnered was aimed at weaknesses attributed by critics to the

®^* Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 97-8.

®® Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 97.

96 Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 94. 330 playtext— which seems to have been regarded with some disdain in the early 1940s— rather than to perceived inadequacies of the artistic forces responsible for the production. For Richard Watts, Jr., the play contained

"some of the worst features of Elizabethan comedy.The

Varietv critic found Twelfth Night to be "a rather dull comedy"^® and Wolcott Gibbs thought it was "an outrageous old bore, full of tiresome and gritty complications, incomprehensible Elizabethan jokes, and a troop of low- comedy characters of really paralyzing inanity."®®

At least two critics who admired the play, however, criticized the production for its lack of poetic lyricism.

Stark Young— wondering how "some of our best critics" had found Webster's Twelfth Night "an occasion of great merit" containing in it "a deal of sweet enchantment, fun loveliness, and wit and merriment"— thought the cast overall did not do justice to the verse, which contained the best elements of Shakespeare's middle period: "boldness and freedom of the metrical scheme." For Young, the entire

®^ New York Herald Tribune 20 November 1940. Watts seems to be referring most specifically to "those incredibly boring scenes of drunken comedy between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek." He nonetheless commended Webster for making those scenes "seem interludeds to be skipped over as quickly as possible, rather than the fatal handicaps to entertainment they can so readily become."

®® Flin., review of Twelfth Night, Varietv 27 November 1940.

®® Wolcott Gibbs, "Double Talk in Illyria," The New Yorker 16:42 (30 November 1940) 34. 331

event was "very dull, not to say banal, unromantic and

pedestrian.Rosamund Gilder saw in Twelfth Night "a

light-hearted masque full of music, lovers, clowns,

absurdities," and praised Webster's production for being "a

merry revel indeed, a feast for the eye and ear, a joy to

the mind." Nevertheless, she also suggested that the

production had a certain vitality without a compensating

degree of subtlety:

The production as a whole . . . never coheres around a central mood; it lacks intention except the obvious one of achieving a smooth-running, vigorous performance. It has beauty, energy, competence, charm, but its lyric pulse beats low.101

Her own disappointment with the production

notwithstanding, Webster's Twelfth Night was a lucrative

undertaking for the Theatre Guild, ultimately playing 129

consecutive performances at the St. James Theatre.

Presumably the presence in the cast both of Hayes and Evans

was enough to counter the negative criticism levelled

against the play and the mixed reception accorded the

production.

Macbeth— the last Shakespeare play directed by Margaret

Webster that was produced specifically as a vehicle for the

acting talents of Maurice Evans— opened at the National

Theatre on 11 November 1941, and the production was greeted

100 stark Young, review of Twelfth Night, The New Republic 103:23 (2 December 1940) 755.

101 Gilder, Theatre Arts 25:1 (January 1941) 12. 332 with an even more mixed response than her Twelfth Night had elicited. While Webster's direction was once again almost unanimously praised for its typical skillfulness in rendering Shakespeare with both coherency and vigor, the critics were divided in their response both to the performance of Maurice Evans in the title role and to the physical production— particularly the settings, designed by

Samuel Leve (who had been responsible for the simple, but effective, scenic investiture of Orson Welles' Caesar).

The principal strength of Evans' acting talent, it would seem, lay in a more intellectual than emotional or psychological approach, which generally resulted in lucid and thoughtful articulation of character as revealed primarily through language. His work, at its best, was marked by clarity of thought and virtuosity of speech. In

Margaret Webster's judgment, Evans "was a 'tragic' actor in voice, but not in spirit," which accounted for her belief that "he never . . . touched the heights or plumbed the depths of Hamlet or Macbeth.

By its nature, the violently emotional and deeply pyschological role of Macbeth exposed Evans' limitations as an actor in a way that his previous Shakespearean characterizations on Broadway had not done (Webster's comment regarding his Hamlet notwithstanding), prompting

102 Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 105. 333 several critics to commend his performance for its rhetorical rather than its dramatic values.

"Mr. Evans's performance is intellectually brilliant,"

Richard Lockridge declared in the New York Sun. "Both the throught and the beauty of the lines are vivid in his readings. But rather often, it seems to me," he demurred,

"they are in a too real sense 'readings.' Wolcott

Gibbs, writing in The New Yorker also "admired the finish of

[Evans'] performance without ever being entirely able to respond to it emotionally. He reads blank verse incomparably," Gibbs proclaimed, "but . . . he is not a very convincing murderer.In the New York Journal-

American. John Anderson suggested that Evans had "tried to blow up his powers to fit the storminess of the occasion," and that the actor's performance had suffered as a result, showing "the effect of strain and desperate emptiness."

Complaining that the "modulated precision" of Evans' speech teetered dangerously under such pressure toward "noisy ranting" and that "his physical presence and intellectual authority seemed dwarfed in the violence of the action,"

Anderson's opinion was that Evans did not sustain the impression of overwhelming mental tension:

Richard Lockridge, review of Macbeth, New York Sun 12 November 1941.

Wolcott Gibbs, review of Macbeth, The New Yorker 41:17 (22 November 1941). 334

Only in the collapse after the murder, and in the terror and madness of the scene with Banquo's ghost did Mr. Evans seem to wring the full meaning out of the text, and to give it the wrenching force of his best work. And in both instances, it should be pointed out, the scenes rely chiefly on the intellectual and spiritual power which Mr. Evans's previous work has demonstrated so well. For the rest[,] Macbeth seemed outside his compass.105

Samuel Leve's scenery for Macbeth was, in the retrospective view of the director, a principal factor contributing to the lack of mystery from which she claimed the production as a whole suffered. Although Leve's concept— which called for a fixed forestage with changing backdrops and inset pieces— was designed for the swiftest possible shifting of scene, its attempt to recreate the medieval look of eleventh-century Scotland ultimately resulted in a stage picture that Webster later referred to as "too heavy and too literal," which she felt detracted more from the effectiveness of a tragedy "about the power of evil" than it had from a historical play such as Henry IV,

Part l.iOG

Elaborate lighting effects that included Linnebach projections on gauze scrims, heavy scenery that required rapid shifting, live music from the orchestra pit,as

John Anderson, review of Macbeth, New York Journal- American 12 November 1941.

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 100.

A full incidental score for Macbeth, composed by Lehman Engel, was acknowledged for its atmospheric contribution to the production by nearly every critic. 335 well as recorded "echo music" and live backstage sound effects, all but overwhelmed the production's stage manager and crew members. Still, yet the wealth of production elements did not go far enough, according to Webster, to establish a sufficient degree of mystery; and she admitted that she had not had "the forward-leaping imagination" to transcend the period in which she had produced Macbeth, except in several rare sequences, of which she has described among the most impressive— that of the opening scene:

bagpipes and drums (real, live music!), Duncan's army filing across the front of the stage; behind them a translucent backdrop of stormy sky, the clouds reforming into the shadows of the three witches, their couplets of doom (over an echoing mike) whispering through the martial music, fading out as King Duncan spoke the opening line and the blood-spattered soldier reeled onto the stage and fell at his feet.^°®

The manner in which Webster handled the three witches of Macbeth reinforces her own disclaimer that the production was too literal. Having cut the Hecate scene, which in her mind was "universally thought to be an addition by another hand,the director also decided "not to try any fancy tricks with the outward appearance of the 'weird sisters,'" opting instead to present them as just as they are described by Macbeth and Banque," since she could identify no adequate contemporary parallel for the function the witches had

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 101.

109 Webster, "On Cutting Shakespeare" 34. 336 served in the context of the audience for whom Shakespeare had written the play;

Shakespeare's choice of the symbolic has lost, for a modern audience, the force it must have had for an Elizabethan one. Even so, I am not entirely convinced that his attempt to incarnate the powers of evil can have been wholly satisfying to him. His audiences would have accepted implicitly the potency of the Three Weird Sisters and would have hated and feared them accordingly. But the witches are the instruments of darkness, not its origin. They provided, in the framework of their times, an outlet for the fear, hatred and insecurity of ordinary people; for mankind's horrified impotence in the face of unexplained disaster, bloodshed, senseless violence. There is no modern equivalent.

Since, based on her assertion that "the transcendental operates unseen," Webster maintained that the evil in

Macbeth was "invisible, twisting and echoing through all its patterns, not a series of conjuring tricks like a souped-up séance," she determined that it was best to make simplicity the keynote for the witches' scenes. Nevertheless, the director introduced an innovation in her production that, in at least one respect, contradicted her own denunciation of

"conjuring tricks" as regards the presentation of the witches. At the end of the banquet scene (Act III, scene

4), Webster interpolated a backlit, gauze-curtain effect that admitted a direct transition to the second encounter between Macbeth and the three witches (Act IV, scene 1), transforming that scene into the nightmarish dream vision of

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 99- 100. 337 an exhausted and shaken man, whose mind has been distorted by remorsefulness.

Webster made several other, albeit minor, emendations to the playtext of Macbeth. Besides eliminating the Hecate scene, she deleted large sections of the "England” scene between Malcolm and Macduff (Act IV, scene 3), which she maintained "to be as great a bore as anything the Bard ever penned," as well as cutting what she referred to as "the totally irrelevant appearance of the English Doctor [in the same scene], with his implied flattery of King James I, a topic which time quickly rendered of no interest whatever."

Additionally, she cut the brief scene in which Macbeth fights with Young Siward (Act V, scene 7), for reasons she later admitted no longer seemed altogether valid to her.

Echoing the frustration she had experienced in tackling the battle sequences of Henry IV, Part I, Webster asserted (in

1947) that Shakespearean battles were always problematic for the modern director as "actors today can seldom delight and thrill an audience with that display of expert and realistic swordsmanship" on which she felt certain "Shakespeare himself depended for his effect.Possibly, as is revealed by her qualification of such a sweeping generalization, she was thinking more specifically of the limitations of actors in her own Macbeth company rather than

Shakespearean actors in general:

111 Webster, "On Cutting Shakespeare" 34. 338

Perhaps I remembered a little too vividly an all- too-easy crack from a member of the New York Critics' Circle about two gentlemen patting at each other with butter-knives. Perhaps I was more excusably conscious that the actor who plays Macbeth, at the end of two-and-a-half grueling hours, during which his powers have been at full stretch, has to rally his physical forces for the fight with Macduff to which all the play's converging threads have led, and that this fight must be savage, merciless, tremendous. Perhaps I wanted to save for Mr. Evans the eneroy he would have had to expend on Young Siward.

A more "extremely intricate affair" for Webster than the textual emendation of Macbeth was the task of cutting

Othello, which she directed for the Theatre Guild in 1943.

It was a play for which she had great affection and, with the exception of the Clown's scenes, she said she found

"hardly a line in it . . . that [she] would willingly omit."

Still, in order to ensure that the performance of Othello— one of the longer of Shakespeare's plays— did not last longer than three hours, she made cuts that she believed to be "dextrous and unobtrusive," and she later held to the conviction that her version had been as full a text as ever previously had been played on the American stage:

There were few cuts of more than two or three lines together. I omitted the aforesaid clown scenes without regret; as I did, also, the two long rhymed speeches of the Duke and Brabantio in the Senate scene, which . . . have always appeared to me extraordinarily out of rhythm and in a wholly different style and manner from the rest of the verse. I cut the Herald's speech (Act II, see. ii), and transposed the essential portion of the opening of the following 'scene' up to Othello's exit. This had the effect of running

112 Webster, "On Cutting Shakespeare" 34. 339

the whole Cyprus sequence together, from the arrival in Cyprus to the end of Act II, sc. iii. Even then, though a change of locale was necessary, I deliberately contrived to keep the action continuous. (Such continuity was, of course, an essential part of Elizabethan performances)

Webster acknowledged that criticism had been levelled against "what was alleged to be the consequent 'rush' and

'crowding' of the action" caused by her deliberate attempt to establish such "Elizabethan" continuity, but it was her opinion that in telescoping the action, she had helped to reconcile seeming inconsistencies regarding the passage of time in the play and, thus, she believed her tampering was consistent with what she considered to be Shakespeare's intentions. "He did not mean Othello to have time to stop and think," she asserted, "nor the audience to weigh probabilities and time elements. He built dazzlingly fast, with superb assurance and precision, to his stupendous climax.

Webster's Othello is unique in the annals of American

Shakespearean production, as it garnered 296 consecutive performances— breaking by a comfortable margin all previous

(as well as all subsequent) long-run records for Shakespeare on Broadway. But the production also represented a landmark in American theatre history in that it introduced for the first time ever on the commercial, Broadway stage an

Webster, "On Cutting Shakespeare" 32-3.

Webster, "On Cutting Shakespeare" 33. 340

African-American actor (Paul Robeson) in the title role playing opposite a Caucasian Desdemona (Uta Hagen)— a somewhat daring and audacious undertaking in 1943, when "the problems of the Negro in American society were being sharply highlighted by the war and the inevitable integration of

Negroes into the armed forces and war industries.

Casting Robeson in the early I940's, then, was a major risk for Webster, in light of the virulent racial tensions in the United States at the time. "The heroic stature of

Othello and his physical intimacy with Desdemona," one historian has suggested, "violated traditional and fiercely defended racial stereotypes and taboos.

But Robeson represented something of an artistic risk as well— for although Webster claimed in 1972 that he had

"endowed the play with a stature and perspective" she had never seen before or since, she nevertheless acknowledged, paradoxically, that his performance "wasn't an especially fine piece of acting." Robeson, in the words of the director, "was never a born player and he had not acquired much acting skill" when she decided to stage Othello for

115 Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 107. Webster, in the early 1970s, deliberately chose to use the term "Negro" as reflecting the preferred, "polite" term of the period in which she directed Othello rather than of the time in which she was writing, when "black" would have been more appropriate.

Susan Spector, "Margaret Webster's Othello: The Principal Players Versus the Director," Theatre Historv Studies 6 (1986) 95. 341

him. According to Webster, the actor "understood" Othello,

but "could never play him." In her judgment, Paul Robeson

succeeded in the part because his "personality, appearance,

voice and race" overwhelmed all his deficiencies as an

actor:

His appreciation of the verse saved him from having the usual American actor's trouble with it. . . . Yet he spoke with the slight artificiality of an opera singer and was apt to get sonorous and preachy. He was at his best in the gentle passages. The description of the wooing of Desdemona was done with tenderness and loving humor. . . . The arrival in Cyprus . . . was disarming and beautiful; sometimes in the last scene he could be moving; but all too often he started as if it were a sermon and never got out of the pulpit; and the scenes of frenzy and rage, the so-called 'jealousy' scene, he never matched at all.^^^

The response of several New York critics to Robeson's performance as Othello validated the director's own subjective opinion. Of the regal stature of his physical appearance, the resonant mellifluousness of his bass voice, or the motionless dignity of his portrayal, few complained.

A notable exception was Margaret Marshall, whose review in

The Nation echoed Webster's own appraisal in several respects:

Paul Robeson has an imposing figure and a powerful voice. But he performs rather than acts. Under Miss Webster's direction he performs passably well, but he creates no illusion. He speaks— often sings— Othello's lines, but he is not Othello. . . . And he is not the Moor as Shakespeare conceived him. . . . Robeson is monumental and inert. He makes no use whatever of

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 109. 342

his body, which becomes a dead weight. His voice does move . . . but even his voice gets out of character; it is too often reminiscent of Paul Robeson, singer of spirituals.

There was, in fact, widespread dissatisfaction with

Robeson's characterization. Concurring with Marshall's account, John Chapman expressed his wish that Robeson would intone less and "do something else with speech. Sometimes

. . . what Shakespeare wrote as anguish— the heroic anguish of a man murder-bent— came out as song. Wolcott Gibbs found the performance generally "unsatisfactory, considered sheerly as a piece of acting." Acknowledging the majesty of

Robeson's voice, Gibbs nonetheless cavilled that it occasionally seemed "employed for meaningless organ effects" and that there was "a tendency to give more than full value to celebrated lines." Furthermore, Gibbs claimed that the range of Robeson's facial expression was limited to "a fixed glare and a tortured smile" and complained that his gestures frequently didn't really "convey anything in particular.Louis Kronenberger submitted that Othello was "a less moving figure than he ought to be" and suggested that many of the actor's big scenes and speeches failed to

Margaret Marshall, review of Othello, The Nation 57:18 (30 October 1943) 508.

John Chapman, review of Othello, New York Dailv News 20 October 1943.

Wolcott Gibbs, review of Othello, The New Yorker 19:37, 30 October 1943. 343

"come off entirely right.And Kappo Phelan opined that, while "Mr Robeson's acute and sensitive reading of the part" was an experience not to be missed, he protested that

it was a reading that aroused "only the more soft emotion of pity for his character of the Moor, rather than the anger and participatory moral rage which the character should surely gain." Moreover, Phelan postulated that Robeson's

Moor was unconvincing as "a great and successful warrior," with the result that Webster's production became for him "an

Othello of terrors, with no splendors beyond his golden robe, and, most of all, with none of the soldier's decisiveness which must be so largely responsible for the terrible dénouement."122

Webster's reflections on the difficulties she encountered directing Paul Robeson offer a revealing insight into what was possibly her singular inadequacy as a

Shakespearean stage director— namely the director's function as "acting coach." In a letter she sent to May Witty during rehearsals for Othello, the director disclosed her attempt to compensate for Robeson's weaknesses:

Not only has he no technique, which he knows, but no conception of 'impersonation'. He can only do it if he can get a kind of electric motor going inside himself and this has to be started by some feeling— not Othello's feeling, but Robeson's.

^21 Louis Kronenberber, review of Othello, P M . 20 October 1943.

^22 Kappo Phelan, review of Othello, The Commonweal 39:3 (5 November 1943) 72. 344

Fortunately his tremendous vocal resources protect him; my job is to jockey him into some approximation of Othello, and then to make a kind of frame round him which will hold the play together. It's very difficult— like pushing a truck up-hill— yet sometimes when he catches fire (from me) he goes careening off at eighty miles an hour and leaves all the rest of us standing. But he's so undependable.

Webster confessed, in her memoirs, that she might have been better at summoning a more consistent characterization from Robeson had she been "more of a 'Method' director," at least with regard to releasing Robeson's pent-up emotions.

But she doubted whether she could possibly have known any better about getting the actor "inside Othello's skin" or about being able "to lend him the skills he needed." So she encouraged him to substitute speed for emotion and tried to conceal the heaviness of his stage movement by blocking him to stand still much of the time while other actors moved around him.

It is a matter for speculation, of course, whether another director more skilled in the Stanislavskian techniques of coaching actors to mine and sustain the emotions appropriate to characterization could have succeeded with Robeson where Webster failed. But her admission of at least partial failure is a telling commentary, not only on her shortcomings as a director but also on the penetrating nature of her self-awareness regarding those shortcomings.

123 Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 110. 345

And, regardless of either Webster's or Robeson's

failings, the Theatre Guild's production of Othello maintains its status as the foremost Shakespearean success story of the twentieth century, due in great measure to

Webster's casting of Robeson. In her autobiography, Webster admitted that in 1943 she had been engaged in the task— one that seemed to her "ludicrously unnecessary" after the passage of thirty years— "of proving in print, on the air, through press interviews and by every known propaganda means" her own conviction "that Othello was really intended to be a black man from Africa. In defense of her position, critic Wolcott Gibbs astutely observed that when a man "unequivocally black" portrays Othello, the crux of the tragedy becomes clearer:

The great trouble with the previous renderings has been that Othello never seemed particularly alien to the culture in which he found himself; there were, of course, such lines as those about the sooty bosom and the old black ram, but the man himself was an annoying contradiction— a dark but prepossessing warrior, in no way really strange or deeply antipathetic to the Venetians.

The interpretation of Othello— or any other Shakespeare play, for that matter— has rested, throughout its production history, on a director's (conscious or sub-conscious) selection for emphasis of a specific theme or themes related to an analysis of the playtext. The thematic selection, in

^24 Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 112.

125 Gibbs, 30 October 1943. 346 turn, reflects the personal bias(es) of the director as well as the director's adherence to or deviation from the social values holding currency at the time of the production.

For Margaret Webster, the greatness of the Robeson

Othello lay in the history-making casting of a black actor to play the title role, which transcended the defects in that actor's performance. For, it was the director's belief that "the moment lent it greatness. The Robeson Othello," she maintained, "became more than just a successful revival; it was a declaration and its success an event in which the performance itself was of less importance than the public response."126

After the unprecedented success she had with Othello,

Webster turned her attention to the task of directing The

Tempest— one of Shakespeare's most mature plays, yet one that had been under-represented on the New York stage prior to Webster's 1945 production. The director herself judged

The Tempest to be almost as difficult to produce as Macbeth, and she suggested that the difference between them was that the latter was a play of black magic while the former was one of white magic: "gossamer-lovely yet full of muscle, lyric and yet profound, rewarding to eye, ear and mind. It seizes on the imagination," she proclaimed, "and lodges there."127

1^^ Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 107.

1^^ Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 119. 347

Perhaps because she had been dissatisfied with the overly-literal physical production San Leve had provided for

Macbeth, Webster conceived for The Tempest— with the aid of her friend and colleague, actor-director Eva Le Gallienne— a somewhat non-illusionistic mise-en-scène that marked a singular departure for her from the pictorial settings with which she seemed most comfortable throughout her directing career. As Le Gallienne's suggestion was executed by the design team known as Motley, Prospero's island in its entirety was represented by an abstract, multi-levelled construction built on a central revolve (which was placed before an enormous cyclorama) and consisting of "a pile of rocks, stairways, arches, angles, planes, sometimes turning slowly against an ever-changing sea and sky, or presenting a new aspect after a sudden blackout. The only such moment of total darkness, according to Webster, occurred right after the opening shipwreck sequence, following which

"the lights never dimmed or blacked out; the curtain never fell (except for the intermission); the scenes melted into each other as the Island revealed a different aspect of itself.Even the wrecked Milanese ship was suggested by the unit setting, and one critic described The Tempest's

Rosamond Gilder, review of The Tempest, Theatre Arts 29:3 (March 1945) 136.

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 123. 348

turntable construction as resembling "the bridge of a

battleship with two masts in the background.

Most of the critics praised the setting for its

mobility, although several of them objected to its austere

look and its general lack of atmosphere. John Mason Brown's

reaction was among the most favorable: while acknowledging

that the setting was "not inspired," he saw it as "rightly

unrealistic" and refreshingly unobtrusive:

Quite properly, it is not a place but a suggestion of a place. It stimulates the imagination without confining it. Hence it leaves the final task of setting the stage to each individual responding to its challenge. It has the virtue not only of providing several levels for Miss Webster's actors but of never subtracting from the poetry's spell by contradicting its images.

In complete contrast to the simplicity of the setting were the production's lavish costumes, the inspiration for which Motley obtained from fashions of the late Renaissance.

The shipwrecked courtiers were richly adorned in costumes such as might have been designed by Inigo Jones for early seventeenth-century royal masques. Prospero was bedecked in a magnificent scarlet robe and Caliban was covered in "weird trappings" that reminded Wolcott Gibbs of "Gargantua with gilded fingernails.

Wolcott Gibbs, review of The Tempest, The New Yorker 20:51 (3 February 1945) 40.

John Mason Brown, "Miss Webster's Isle," Saturdav Review of Literature 28:6 (10 February 1945) 23.

The New Yorker 20:51 (3 February 1945) 40. 349

Although its costuming was Masque-inspired, however, the Masque sequence from Act IV, scene 1— performed in celebration of Miranda's marriage to Ferdinand— was notably absent from Webster's production of The Tempest. And

Prospero's famous speech at the end of the Masque ("Our revels now are ended . . .") was transposed to the end of the play where it was substituted for the playtext's epilogue.

The director's decision to cut the Masque was based primarily upon an expedient need to limit the amount of incidental music in the production as the result of a compromise reached between producer Crawford and Local 802 of the Musician's Union regarding the classification of the play. David Diamond's score for The Tempest— composed for the Webster production with parts for eight musicians— was so extensive that the union claimed the piece was not a play at all but, rather, a musical. Union contracts for Broadway musicals at the time required a producer to maintain a staff of twenty-two musicians. Crawford negotiated the compromise by which The Tempest was classified a "play with music," a category created for that production requiring a minimum of eight players and limiting the total length of music in the production to a duration of twenty minutes.

Webster claimed later that she might not have eliminated the Masque, regardless of the economic hardship it would have imposed, had she not previously been convinced 350 by "the extreme likelihood that the Masque was a later addition to the play caused by the marriage ceremonies of the Prince of Wales, for which it was probably inserted.Additionally, the director maintained that the cutting of the Masque was not the actual motivation for the transposition of Prospero's speech to conclude the play.

While first studying the play for production, Webster had become convinced that the "revels" speech was, in fact, the intended conclusion to the entire play; and, although she later found "some shreds of corroborative opinion" from the

Shakespearean scholar, Dover Wilson, she professed to have made the change on the courage of her conviction:

It says a farewell more subtle, profound and moving than the author's last-night speech which is the accepted epilogue. . . . 'Please you, draw near' says Prospero . . . and steps forward a little, saying quietly to the audience, 'Our revels now are ended. These our actors. As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air. . . .' As he speaks the lights begin to dim and the other actors fade back imperceptibly into the shadows. Over the final words the light on Propero dims too, and with 'our little life is rounded in a sleep' there is an enfolding darkness. Staged that way it was very moving, or I found it so, and the total silence which always followed testified to its power over the audience.

Critics noticed the aforementioned textual alterations and, with few exceptions, praised the effect engendered by the final fade-out at the end of the "revels" speech. John

Webster, "On Cutting Shakespeare" 32.

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 122- 23. 351

Mason Brown thought the speech served as a "perfect summary" to The Tempest, and praised Webster for showing "that in this instance she knows Shakespeare's business, if not better than he did, at least better than his editors have known it.Wilella Waldorf called Webster's arrangement "excellent" and commended the staging of an

"impressive ending for an unusual experience in the theatre.Louis Kronenberger called the final effect

"the finest moment of the evening, and in the New York

Times, Lewis Nichols referred to it as an "extremely effective ending" that had been contrived "in good faith.

Margaret Webster came in for some unjustifiably harsh criticism from critics who considered her version of The

Tempest in its entirety to be a perversion of Shakespeare's playtext. Wolcott Gibbs faulted Webster for "probably the most high-handed editing ever performed on

Shakespeare."^^® And in the World-Teleoram. Burton

Saturdav Review of Literature. 10 February 1945, p 22.

136 v/ilella Waldorf, review of The Tempest, New York Post 26 January 1945.

Louis Kronenberger, review of The Tempest, PM 26 January 1945.

Lewis Nichols, "Some Notes on Margaret Webster's Latest Production of Shakespeare," The New York Times 4 February 1945, Section II, p 1.

Wolcott Gibbs, review of The Tempest, The New Yorker 20:51 (3 February 1945) 40. 352

Rascoe— who curiously referred to The Tempest as "the most insubstantial and poetic of Shakespeare's plays"— accused the director of editing the text "with all the impatient severity of a hard-boiled copyreader on the rim of the city desk tackling the verbose and florid prose of a cub reporter who was dubbed poet laureate of his graduating class" and charged that she had "ruthlessly cut out some of the most preposterous wordage ever penned to confuse sciolists to the point where they gave up and said, 'This is the most wonderful poetry in the world' (meaning they couldn't make a bit of sense out of it)."^'*°

In an article written while she was preparing her 1946 production of Henry VIII, Webster registered surprise that her editing of The Tempest had caused her to gain a reputation for ruthlessness with regard to the cutting of

Shakespeare's text. "With two important exceptions," she asserted— referring to the omission of the Masque and the transposition of Prospero's "revels" speech— "the text [of

The Tempest] was . . . a very full one.

Paradoxically, it was in her version of Henry VIII, produced in the year following The Tempest to inaugurate the fledgling and short-lived American Repertory Theatre (ART), that she strayed most radically from the traditional

140 Burton Roscoe, review of The Tempest, New York World-Telearam 26 January 1945.

Webster, "On Cutting Shakespeare" 31. 353 playtext than in any of her previous Shakespearean productions on Broadway.

Citing current theories that considered the play to have been written only partly by Shakespeare in collaboration with others— "probably Fletcher, possibly

Massinger"— Webster took liberties in arranging Henry

VIII that she previously had not allowed herself to take.

Some of the best known lines, she asserted, had been penned by others and many were derived directly from quotations attributed to the original utterances of the famous personages who appear in the play— as for instance, Wolsey's famous "Had I but served my God as I have served my King, He would not in mine age have left roe naked to mine enemies."

Moreover, she argued that the play was "full of splendid things" but that, in contrast to its great human appeal, its politics were "infinitely obscure to an American audience in 1 9 4 6 . In revising the text of Henry VIII,

Webster attempted to bridge the gap between a twentieth- century American audience's basic unfamiliarity with early sixteenth-century English history and the portions of that history assumed by the playwright(s) to be commonly known by the Elizabethan audience for whom the play was written.

She devised a pair of narrators, using the textual narrations ascribed to the two 'Gentlemen' and gave them

Webster, "On Cutting Shakespeare" 35.

143 Webster, "On Cutting Shakespeare" 35. 354 brief linking passages from the chronicles of Holinshed, which were the direct source material for the play. It was

Webster's belief that the Narrators— operating for the audience as a kind of chorus— would help the play cohere, for they were intended to "put mortar between some rather loose bricks.

Additionally, the director eliminated completely, "in accord with theatre tradition fortified by common sense," the subplot concerning the conspiracy against Cranmer, which she maintained "clutter[ed] the end of the play after its two leading characters, Wolsey and Katharine, are dead.

Whoever added this dull and involved sequence was," in

Webster's view, "a very poor craftsman. Professing that the Cranmer subplot, "which drags out the last quarter of the play," was usually and "rightly" omitted on the stage, Webster refused to believe "that Shakespeare, left to himself, would have killed off his two main characters and then turned the play over to a long, political controversy concerning a minor one."^''®

Webster's cutting of the Cranmer scenes had the effect of truncating Act V of Henry VIII in much the same manner as

Orson Welles had dispensed with nearly the entire final act

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 128.

Webster, "On Cutting Shakespeare" 35.

Margaret Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears, rev. ed. (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1955) 266. 355

of Julius Caesar. In her production, the action moved

quickly from the end of Act IV to the christening of

Elizabeth (Act V, scene 5). As a result, the play became

focused even more strongly on the tragedies of Katharine of

Aragon and Cardinal Wolsey— aided, no doubt, by her casting

of veteran actors Eva Le Gallienne as Katharine and Walter

Hampden as Wolsey.

Margaret Webster's decisions regarding the text of

Henry VIII, which she directed in 1946, substantiate claims

regarding her continued affinity halfway through the

twentieth century with a nineteenth-century approach to

Shakespeare. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that her

cuts in the text were "squarely in the tradition of Irving

and Tree," and that she was "the last modern director of

note to omit all the scenes relating to Cranmer that occupy

the bulk of Act But it was perhaps in its approach

to spectacle that Webster's Henry VIII was most akin to the

methods of the previous century.

The scenery and costumes were devised by David Ffolkes

in the opulent, albeit not ostentatious, pictorial manner

that had informed his earlier designs for Webster's

productions of Richard II, Hamlet and Henry TV, Part 1.

Consistent with Webster's desire to reproduce the documented

historical "look" of the pre-Elizabethan era in which Henry

Linda McJ. Micheli, "Margaret Webster's Henry VIII î The Survival of 'Scenic Shakespeare' in America," Theatre Research International 11:3 (Autumn 1986) 216. 356

VIII had reigned, Ffolkes designed Henry VIII as a "period

piece," and nearly all of the reviewers referred to the

tasteful appropriateness of his contributions to its mise-

en-scène. Their consensus was perhaps summarized best by

William Hawkins, critic for the New York World-Teleoram. who claimed that the physical production neither indulged in

"garish weighty spectacle" nor suggested "the sleaziness of harassed stock companies." Ffolkes' contributions, Hawkins asserted, gave to the production "beauty and glow without ever letting his colors distract from the essential moving pageant.

The ART production of Henry VIII in 1946 was Margaret

Webster's last major Broadway production of a Shakespeare play. Following Henry VIII, Webster created MarWeb

Productions— an acting company that toured the United States and Canada during the 1948-49 and 1949-50 seasons, performing a repertory of several simply-mounted, "portable"

Shakespearean productions. In the early 1950s, she staged limited-run productions of The Taming of the Shrew (1951),

Richard II (1951) and Richard III (1953) , each of which was presented at the City Center Theatre on West 55th Street for

15 performances.

Webster's approach to Shakespeare remained essentially unchanged throughout the highly active decade (1937-46)

William Hawkins, review of Henry VIII, New York World-Teleoram 7 November 1946. 357 during which she directed eight of his plays on Broadway for runs that were never less than respectable— and, in a few instances, were quite substantial, indeed. Her popular success with Shakespeare's plays have not been matched in

American commercial theatre— nor are they likely to be equalled anytime soon, given the continuing de­ centralization of theatre in the United States, the greatest activity of which has occurred during the second half of the twentieth century.

The same virtues that marked her 1937 production of

Richard II were still clearly visible in her 1946 Henry

VIII. In her conservative approach to spectacle and her focus on the clarity of the narrative by way of carefully- considered textual amendation and the inspiring of actors to convey the meaning behind the language and to keep things moving on stage at a rapid pace, Webster remained throughout her career a mainstream director of Shakespeare, neither attempting nor achieving much in the way of innovation, either of naturalistic or of non-realistic effect.

What set her Shakespearean productions apart, however— despite the varying degree of success achieved by individual actors who performed in them— was their extraordinary clarity and accessibility, which derived in large measure from an artistic credo that placed greater value on communicating with an audience than on personal aggrandizement. "I never set out to impose myself on a 358 play,” she maintained, "but always to reveal it." And the record of critical response reveals that she was faithful not only to that position of non-interference but also to

its consequent demand for simplicity of approach and an adherence to letting the text reveal its own messages:

I never found it desirable to 'gimmick' the plays in order to bring them up to date or make them what is hideously known as 'relevant.' You can only be contemporary for a year or so at a time. It is more difficult to achieve a universal 'relevance'; but it is there, if you begin at the beginning, that is to say, with the author.

It was her dedication to Shakespeare the author, ultimately, that accounted for the popularity of her productions— for, rather than seeking to find fresh relevancies in approaching the plays, she sought the underlying universality of human experience they reveal:

The characters [in Shakespeare] are people whose minds and hearts are as real now as they were three hundred years ago, even though their vocabulary has changed and the situations in which they find themselves are often hard to parallel today. . . . The validity of any Shakespearian performance will depend on the imaginative perception with which their humanity is realized.

Shakespeare's plays, Margaret Webster maintained, were capable of withstanding almost any kind of approach; there was, in her mind, "no secret or obscure ritual" involved in producing them. And, while she believed it possible to go wrong some of the time in directing Shakespeare, she also

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 89.

Webster, "On Directing Shakespeare" 449. 359 contended that it was "almost impossible to go wrong all of the time," because of the very wealth of possibilities his plays furnished. In Shakespeare, she asserted, "the straw is unlimited and you can make as many bricks as your imagination and energy allow you, and still have straw to spare.

Webster nearly always used the material of

Shakespeare's playtexts to construct sturdy, conventional productions. Although she was not adventuresome in exploring twentieth-century innovations in scenic design, she insisted upon (and invariably her productions contained) scenic methods that reguired neither rearrangement of the text (such as Belasco employed in The Merchant of Venice) nor overlong set changes. And if her productions did not reflect any particular social or political point of view, as did those of Orson Welles (whose Julius Caesar she claimed to admire), they nevertheless permitted a rendering of (at least a majority of) the texts she staged that removed cobwebs of tradition with regard to energy, tempo, visual "business" and an integration of all characters— including the non-speaking "extras"— into the dramatic action.

She was often hailed as a genius when it came to directing Shakespeare on the American stage and, by the mid-

1940s— during the height of her popularity as as director of

Webster, "On Directing Shakespeare" 449. 360

Shakespeare— she had become practically ''indistinguishable from Shakespeare" in the minds of producers and the theatregoing public, and those of several critics as well.^^^ Webster remained, even years later, somewhat philosophical about the acclaim that had greeted her

Shakespearean productions. "It is mortifyingly easy for the director of Shakespeare," she said, "to be hailed as a genius," so long as (s)he was not a "complete bungler." The genius, she added, was "nearly always Shakespeare's."^®^

Downer, "The Dark Lady of Schubert Alley" 119.

Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage 87. CONCLUSION

The directors represented in this selective account—

which examines the first three decades of this century as a

period during which non-acting directors displaced actor-

managers as the central creative force in Broadway

Shakespearean production— worked almost exclusively in a

strictly commercial environment devoid of the kind of

artistic continuity provided by a long-standing repertory

practice such as continues to operate in Great Britain. The

productions of Shakespeare's plays that each directed,

therefore, can be viewed as a body of work produced

essentially in isolation and without the benefit of an

ongoing, inherited tradition similar to that which

influences English production.

The highly speculative nature of the commercial system

of production in which David Belasco, Arthur Hopkins, Orson

Welles, Guthrie McClintic and Margaret Webster all worked

is, to a great extent, responsible for the particular

directorial approaches— both theoretical and practical— that

can be discerned either as linking their Shakespearean productions to, or as differentiating them from, one

another. The practical considerations that underlie all aspects of commercial production caused these directors

361 362 frequently to compromise in practice some of the idealistic principles they espoused in theory.

The aspect of their directorial methods that serves to link the work of the five directors (and that is, at the same time, most obviously related to the commercial nature of their productions) was their almost ubiquitous reliance on "star-qua1ity" performers to play the most prominent leading roles in their productions as a means of insuring success at the box office. Arthur Hopkins' four Shakespeare productions were conceived principally as star-vehicles for

John, Lionel and Ethel Barrymore. David Warfield's Shylock was the central locus around which Belasco produced The

Merchant of Venice. Two of McClintic's three Shakespeare productions were vehicles for Katharine Cornell (to whom he was married), while the third served to introduce to the

American stage the young English sensation, John Gielgud.

The first five productions of Shakespeare plays directed in

New York by Webster featured her producer-friend Maurice

Evans in the leading male roles; and several other (either concurrently or subsequently) famous actors starred in her succeeding productions— including Helen Hayes, Paul Robeson,

Jose Ferer, Uta Hagen, Eva LeGallienne and Walter Hampden.

Orson Welles— whose 1936 production of Macbeth was subsidized by the Works Progress Administration— successfully cast an impressive group of non-star actors in his privately-funded Julius Caesar a year later, although 363 that unique endeavor was the project of an adventuresome new theatre company that, in its reliance upon the uncommon talent of its Artistic Director, eschewed nearly all the producing conventions of its time.

Each director— with the exception of Orson Welles, whose views on the subject are not a matter of public record— professed at one time or another to be an advocate for ensemble efforts in which all parts, large or small, contributed equally to the overall effectiveness of a production. Nevertheless, the claims of stardom nearly always overwhelmed the ability of each to realize that goal.

This dichotomy was particularly evident in Arthur

Hopkins' productions of Richard III and Hamlet, for which the director permitted acting versions to be tailored specifically to emphasize the star (John Barrymore) at the expense of the other players. But it was no less a factor in undermining the intentions of the others to develop an ensemble of actors. David Belasco based his production of

The Merchant of Venice in large measure upon his conception of Shylock as a tragic character, one result of which was a de-emphasizing of the sub-plots concerning Antonio and

Portia— thus, strengthening David Warfield's position as the

"star." Margaret Webster's autobiographical self- evaluations reveal that the success of her productions— despite her stated conviction that all parts are significant and none should be ignored— was due as much to the presence 364

in them of star-quality actors as to her considerable directing ability. And, in spite of the best intentions of director Guthrie McClintic and actor-producer Katharine

Cornell to downplay Cornelias star status, McClintic's productions of Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra owed their commercial viability in large measure to her presence in the leading roles.^

The earliest period of "directed" Shakespeare in the twentieth-century Broadway theatre, then, was marked by a schism between the desire of directors to transcend the preeminence "star" actors had known in the preceding era of actor-managers and their need to rely upon having such stars in the casts of their productions as a means of insuring that attendance would be sufficient to render the production commercially successful. Guthrie McClintic was likely the first American director somewhat successfully to reconcile these contradictory conditions, because the "star" in his productions of Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra was as self-effacing an artist as he, and shared his desire that fulfilling the demands of the play should be the foremost consideration in production. So, while Cornell's central performance in either play insured ticket sales at the box office, it was also artistically shaped to function within

^ It would seem, on the basis of critical response, that McClintic did less to promote ensemble acting in the Gielgud Hamlet than he did in the productions that featured Cornell. 365 the context of a larger whole of which she was only one part. Orson Welles, who launched his professional career in the American theatre as an actor in McClintic's 1934 production of Homeo and Juliet, was later responsible for inspiring ensemble playing from the casts of Macbeth (1936) and Julius Caesar (1937), even though in the latter he streamlined the text of the play in order to emphasize the sub-plot focusing on the character he himself portrayed.

A verbal, if not a de facto, dedication to the playwright as the primary creator in the theatre links the work of all but one of the five directors^— each of whom at one time or another expressed a conviction that the artistic demands of a playtext ought to take precedence over all other personal or collective needs. In practice, however, the pecuniary demands of commercial theatre led three of them to make (sometimes significant) revisions in the text of at least one of the Shakespeare plays he or she directed

— in each instance, the changes being made to fulfil a specific, pragmatic purpose.

The clumsy bulkiness and inflexibility of naturalistic scenery led David Belasco to lump together all the scenes in

Acts II and III of The Merchant of Venice that were set either in Venice or in Belmont, thus eliminating the alternation of those scenes as they appear in Shakespeare's

^ Orson Welles, whose self-aggrandizing approach to theatrical production sets him in direct opposition to the others with regard to textual concerns. 366 text. The acting versions of Richard III and Hamlet prepared for Arthur Hopkins by Ned Sheldon were fashioned specifically to maintain the integrity of Barrymore's role

(or, in the case of the former play, to augment it) while de-emphasizing all the others. Margaret Webster's

Shakespeare texts ranged from the first virtually uncut

Hamlet on Broadway (a production that took over four hours to perform) to a version of Henry VIII that expunged nearly all of the fifth act as being anti-climactic and superfluous to what she considered the main action of the play. Cuts in

Webster's acting versions were nearly always made in deference to her considered notions of what would or would not appeal directly to American audiences, whom she recognized as being less experienced with Shakespeare's plays than their English counterparts and, thus, more willing to overlook such deviations.

Guthrie McClintic, after succumbing to traditional nineteenth-century cuts for the initial touring version of

Romeo and Juliet, later restored nearly all of the excised passages before opening his production in New York.

Subsequently, his concern for continuity of action resulted in his presenting only minimally abridged texts of Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra.

Orson Welles, ever the exception to generalizations regarding the work of these post-actor manager American directors, treated the texts for both his government- 367

subsidized production of Macbeth and the strictly commercial production of Julius Caesar as springboards for personal statements regarding social and politicial conditions in the contemporary world. To make Shakespeare's texts conform to his highly formalist approach, Welles justified radical revisions, which included re-ordering of scenes or entire passages, re-distribution of lines as well as significant cutting.

In another respect, however, Welles' approach to

Shakespearean production was consonant with that of both

David Belasco and Arthur Hopkins— for all three directors were as much concerned with exploring the theatrical possibilities suggested by the plays they directed as they were with presenting them as vehicles for actors. Even more important to Welles than the social or political statements informing his conceptual approaches to Macbeth or Julius

Caesar was the potential each concept offered him for envisioning and then engendering visceral audience response by way of startling visual effects and skillful handling of directorial composition.

Similarly, Belasco treated The Merchant of Venice as another in a long line of challenges to his lifelong dedication to theatrical effectiveness. Theatricality was achieved in Belasco's production by way of infusing it with a wealth of pantomimic business and (often superfluous) background action, as well as with a highly sophisticated 368 mise-en-scène that included a modified approach to

naturalism in scenic investiture and a complex lighting design employed not only to lend atmosphere but also to manipulate the audience's emotional response.

Arthur Hopkins, in direct rebellion against the

illusionistic realism of Belasco, encouraged his scenic designer Robert Edmond Jones to experiment with expressionism and abstract minimalism as visual extensions of his own theory of Unconscious Projection— by which an audience's intellectual response was to be evoked as the direct result of emotions elicited by appealing to its

"collective unconscious" mind. Jones' designs were highly theatrical, whether in the structural minimalism of Richard

III and Hamlet or in the archetypal expressionism of

Macbeth. In practice, however, the theatrical potential inherent in Shakespeare's texts was far less fully realized by the actors under Hopkins' direction than it was by Jones' mise-en-scène. The acting in Hopkins' Shakespeare productions, in fact, seems to have been even more naturalistic than that obtained by Belasco in The Merchant of Venice and, thus, was stylistically inconsistent with the obvious theatricality of the scenic investiture.

Guthrie McClintic and Margaret Webster, on the other hand, were interested less in overt theatrical expression than they were in establishing, as much as possible, a direct line of communication between Shakespeare and their 369 audiences. As directors who were both relatively uninterested in personal aggrandizement, McClintic and

Webster revealed by way of their Shakespearean productions a desire to let the playwright speak for himself. They neither leaned too heavily on traditions of the past nor searched for ways of being innovative merely for the sake of innovation. Rather, they both adopted production methods that struck a balance between the conflicting demands imposed by previous traditions, on the one hand, and by a desire to create new forms of expression, on the other. If their productions were visually less daring than those of

Hopkins or Welles, they nevertheless achieved the kind of vitality of characterization and ensemble in Shakespeare that Hopkins did not achieve and that Welles managed to achieve (particularly in Julius Caesar) only at the expense of the playtext's integrity.

Webster, more than any of the other directors, demonstrated a concern that, in productions of Shakespeare's plays, the direct line of communication be established between playwright and audience rather than between director and audience. For Webster the director and, by extension, the actors, served as direct "interpreters" of the text for spectators. Furthermore, she asserted (and Guthrie

McClintic shared the belief) that the best directing was

"invisible" in that it would never call attention to itself at the risk of eclipsing the playtext. McClintic and 370

Webster dedicated themselves to directing methods that were designed to conceal the very artfulness that made their work so successful. Somewhat paradoxically they recognized that, while the director served a function that was of paramount significance in the process of unifying all elements of a production, the best directing fulfilled that function in the most inconspicuous and unobtrusive manner possible.

Their view is antithetical to that of Orson Welles, for whom the playtext was merely a useful point of departure for directorial legerdemain leading to audience titillation.

Direct communication between the director and his audience was of primary importance to Welles; the playwright's text was merely a matter of convenience, serving as a foundation for the creative expressiveness of the director to be asserted (and to assert itself).

With regard to such relationships of communication in

Shakespearean production, each of the other two directors falls somewhere between the extremes represented by Webster and McClintic on the one hand and Welles on the other— although both David Belasco and Arthur Hopkins were, in practice at least, more closely aligned with Welles' attitudes than with those of McClintic and Webster.

In 1942, Margaret Webster expressed her conviction that no modern tradition existed for the producing or playing of

Shakespeare's plays in the United States^, an opinion that

^ Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 10. 371

British director Tyrone Guthrie echoed in 1965, when he submitted (somewhat more sweepingly) that "no recognizably

American style of classical productions [had] yet emerged."* There is little or no evidence to suggest that anything much has changed regarding American approaches to

Shakespeare's plays since those judgments were made; rather, either assertion could still be considered as an accurate reflection of American Shakespearean production during the final decade of the twentieth century.

The commercial theatre of Broadway ceased to be the predominant venue for Shakespearean production in the United

States during the 1950s. The de-centralization of American theatre that had been slowly evolving throughout the first half of the twentieth century was rapidly accelerated by the post-war growth of professional regional theatres in many cities throughout the nation. And the concurrent establishment (beginning in the 1950s) of not-for-profit, summer Shakespeare festivals in various (mostly rural) locations throughout the country has parallelled the development of such regional urban companies.

Moreover, the cost of mounting a full-scale Broadway production— which, by the early part of the twentieth century, had grown to be an expensive, risk-filled enterprise— gradually and steadily has escalated during the

* Tyrone Guthrie, In Various Directions; A View of Theatre (New York: Macmillan, 1965) 65. 372 second half of the century, one result of which has been diminished commercial viability for nearly all but the most superficially entertaining plays. Light-hearted contemporary comedies and musicals generally fare far better at Broadway box offices than revivals of classics, however critically well-received. Shakespeare's plays have been mounted on Broadway during the 1980s and 1990s only rarely and generally only when they have been conceived as vehicles for star performers whose popularity is a low-risk guarantee of box office activity.^

One consequence of the expanding decentralization of

American theatre since World War II, then, has been a marked decrease in Shakespearean production on Broadway, which has been counterbalanced by an increase in the number of

Shakespearean productions outside the nation's principal commercial venue. As a result, the directing of

Shakespeare's plays has undergone a corresponding process of decentralization, with a resulant increase in the number of prominent directors staging Shakespeare in the United

States.

A determination of what influence, if any, the ground­ breaking work of the five directors examined herein, exerted

(or continues to exert) on the work of contemporary American

^ In the ten year period that preceded this study, only one New York production of Shakespeare has received a respectable run on Broadway— an Othello that starred James Earl Jones in the title role and featured the Canadian actor Christopher Plummer as lago. 373 directors in their approaches to Shakespeare, is beyond the purview of this study and suggests a subject for further investigation.

Presumably, the transition to a predominantly non­ commercial mode of production has been accompanied by a relaxation of some of the artistic constraints that commercial production wields, thus enabling directors a greater degree of freedom in experimental conceptualization than was afforded the directors of the pre-war era.

Furthermore, nearly all the performance spaces utilized by the several regional Shakespeare festivals (even including those at the non-commercial Public Theatre in New

York's off-Broadway district) differ in size and spatial configuration from the relatively uniform proscenium houses of Broadway employed by Belasco, Hopkins, Welles, McClintic and Webster. Because of the increase of more intimate and informal theatre spaces for Shakespearean performance, the somewhat disconnected performer-spectator relationship the

Broadway theatres imposed has been superseded in American

Shakespearean production by one that is more unceremonious and less impersonal.

The changes in production practices dictated by evolving conventions of staging notwithstanding, it may not be overly presumptuous to suggest that the directors who have served as the collective subject of this investigation of American directorial approaches to Shakespeare 374

comprehensively examined the essential parameters of

American Shakespearean production during the transition period that marked a departure from actor-manager directed production. Working independently in the same artistic milieu and under similar conditions, they laid the groundwork of an eclectic, twentieth-century American approach both to Shakespeare's playtexts and to their theatrical expression.

While David Belasco expressed no desire to (and did almost nothing to) steer early twentieth-century American

Shakespearean production away from the pictorial realism that had been nearly ubiquitous in British and American theatre for over half a century, his production of The

Merchant of Venice nonetheless demonstrated the theatrical effectiveness of employing in Shakespearean production the most sophisticated, modern technological advances of the new century, particularly those of stage lighting. The conviction he expressed in 1916 (upon which he based his employment of such technology) that "Shakespeare himself would eagerly have employed all the many invaluable accessories of modern stage-craft if they had been available to him,"® would be echoed in the 1940s by Margaret Webster when she wrote that by way of modern technology, the theatre

"can provide an element of visual beauty which Shakespeare's

® Belasco, preface 27. 375

lacked, but of which there is no reason to suppose he would disapprove.

If Arthur Hopkins failed to engender in audiences that attended his Shakespearean productions the collective intellectual response grounded in an unconscious projection of emotional states for which he strove, it was likely due to an inner tension in his productions— a tension that stemmed from the stylistic dichotomy in them between an abstract mise-en-scène (either minimalistic or expressionistic) that was widely misunderstood at the time and a naturalism in the acting that, while more familiar to theatregoers, lacked the heightened theatricalism

Shakespeare's verse seems to demand. Ironically, Hopkins' most significant contribution to twentieth-century American

Shakespeare may have been his selection of Robert Edmond

Jones to design the scenery for his productions. While almost universally rejected by first-night critics unaccustomed to the conventions they introduced, Jones' innovative designs (which were influenced by New Stagecraft techniques developed in Western Europe) made the kind of lasting impression that could not be easily ignored by succeeding directors and designers of Shakespeare in New

York, even those who— like David Belasco and Margaret

Webster— made a conscious decision not to adopt similar methods.

^ Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears 65. 376

In his controversial "conceptual" productions of

Macbeth and (most particularly of) Julius Caesar, Orson

Welles found contemporary references and resonances that enabled him to exploit those plays, transforming them into vehicles for his highly developed, imaginative sense of theatricality. Re-shaping the plays extensively to accommodate his socio-political concepts, Welles may have offered audiences "reconstituted" (even possibly adulterated) Shakespeare; but it seems clear, too, that his productions spiritually tapped into the tenor of the time in which they were produced more completely than those of any of the other prominent directors of Shakespeare represented in this study. With Caesar, Welles expanded commonly accepted parameters of American Shakespearean stage vocabulary (albeit at the expense of textual fidelity), no less perhaps than his cinematic masterpiece. Citizen Kane, expanded the vocabulary of American cinema.

The Shakespeare productions of Guthrie McClintic exemplified the kind of ensemble endeavor that ultimately causes as much attention to be paid to a .'ork being interpreted as to the interpreters of that work.

Facilitated by an unmannered approach that aimed to communicate as directly as possible what he called a play's

"higher value" (which he based on his own immediate and personal emotional response to the play, and abetted by a producer-leading lady who was as committed as he to a 377 production's overall effectiveness, McClintic contributed to

American Shakespearean production a sense of cohesiveness and integrity that are, quite possibly, among the rarest of qualities in the theatre.

Within the span of a decade, Margaret Webster directed nearly as many Shakespeare productions on Broadway as the other four directors cumulatively staged during the three decades covered by this investigation. Her productions, like those of Guthrie McClintic, were generally conservative— striking a balance between a somewhat traditional approach to the poetic value inherent in the texts and an immediate desire to entertain by communicating the action of the plays in terms directly accessible to twentieth-century spectators in twentieth-century playhouses. Nearly all her Broadway productions were marked by fidelity to original texts and a lack of gimmickry, though she was pragmatic enough to recognize the appropriateness of compromising her own ideals when it would render a production more accessible. She was considered, and rightly so, the foremost "popularizer" of Shakespeare's plays during the first half of the twentieth century.

It is ultimately in their individual, if somewhat isolated, contributions to Shakespearean production in the commercial American theatre of the period beginning a few years after the first World War and ending a few years after the second that the directors herein examined helped to 378 establish the profile of twentieth-century directorial

Shakespeare in the United States. But their work cannot be said to have established a particularly American tradition of producing Shakespeare.

In a recent history of the American Shakespeare Theatre

(a "festival" theatre founded in 1955 and located in

Stratford, Connecticut), Roberta Krensky Cooper posits the notion that, despite its uneven record of production, the theatre had been "in many respects representative of this country's modern Shakespearean theatrical tradition, and the attempt to develop an idigenous— that is, non-British— approach to the playwright's works."®

If Cooper's further assertion is accurate— namely, that the directors, actors, and production personnel who worked at Stratford "were the same directors, actors, and production personnel who shaped many of the other major professional Shakespearean productions across the country"® during the thirty-year period covered in her study, then the productions of Shakespeare mounted by the American

Shakespeare Theatre can be said to reflect American

Shakespearean production in approximately the same way that the productions of Belasco, Hopkins, Welles, McClintic and

® Roberta Krensky Cooper, The American Shakespeare Theatre; Stratford. 1955-1985 (Washington: Folger, 1986) 15.

® Cooper 15. 379

Webster reflected American Shakespearean production between

1920 and 1950.

One of the (unintended) ironies of Cooper's statements regarding the indigenous, modern American Shakespearean theatrical tradition represented by the festival in

Stratford, Connecticut is that at least fifteen of the nearly seventy Shakespeare productions mounted there between

1955 and 1985 were staged by British directors.

Moreover, the American Shakespeare Theatre productions relied heavily on casting star actors (from Hollywood as well as from the Broadway stage) in leading roles as the means of ensuring attendance, thus inhibiting the establishment of a permanent ensemble.

Despite her own attempt to find in the American

Shakespeare Theatre experience a modern American "tradition" in Shakespearean production. Cooper does acknowledge that a distinctly American approach to Shakespeare never emerged in

Denis Carey— Julius Caesar (1955) and The Tempest (1955); Douglas Seale— Henry IV, Part 1 (1962), The Comedy of Errors (1963) and Henry V (1963); Frank Hauser— Twelfth Night (1966); Cyril Ritchard— A Midsummer Night's Dream (1967); Peter Gill— Much Ado About Nothing (1969); John Dexter— Hamlet (1969); David William— Twelfth Night (1974); Anthony Page— King Lear (1975); and Peter Coe— Henry V (1981), Othello (1981), Henry IV, Part 1 (1982) and Hamlet (1982). It should also be noted that Carey and Coe both served terms as Artistic Director of the American Shakespeare Theatre. 380

Connecticut.^^ The principal reason she puts forward— the seeming impossibility of establishing a strong and consistent acting ensemble in a predominantly commercial system of production^^— might as easily serve to substantiate the anti-tradition pronouncements of Margaret

Webster in 1942 and of Tyrone Guthrie in 1965.

The nature of Shakespearean production in the United

States has been both shaped and inhibited by the commercial nature of American theatrical production in general. And insofar as the "business" aspect of the American theatre has checked the nurturing of artistic continuity in production, so too has it restricted the development of a particularly

American tradition of directing Shakespeare.

According to Cooper, a number of Stratford's directors over the years had advocated the development of an American approach to Shakespeare by way of cultivating the "American accents, physical vitality, emotional intensity, and depth of characterization, all of which are considered strengths of the American actor" while inculcating "a facility for language, master of verse, and precise diction, which are not considered strengths of the American actor." The frequent turnover in acting and directing personnel, she claims, ultimately prevented any long-term stylistic continuity in production from developing. (275)

While the Stratford Festival was chartered as a nonprofit theatre. Cooper avers that its not-for-profit status "was more the result of its founders' financial astuteness than their artistic intentions" (276). Her implication is that, despite the theatre's stated intentions, the demands of the box office often superseded artistic concerns. LIST OF REFERENCES

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ARTICLES IN NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS

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REVIEWS and INTERVIEWS (from the following sources:)

Newspapers :

The New York Amsterdam News The New York Daily News The New York Daily Mirror The New York Evening Journal The New York Herald The New York Herald Tribune The New York Journal and American The New York Morning Telegraph The New York Post and The New York Evening Post The New York Sun The New York Times The New York Tribune The New York World-Telegram Variety The World and The Evening World 387

Periodicals:

The Catholic World The Commonweal The Literary Digest The Nation The New Republic The New Yorker Newsweek The Saturday Review of Literature Theatre Arts Monthly and Theatre Arts Magazine Time

UNPUBLISHED DISSERTATIONS

Berg, Aubrey. "Collaborators: Arthur Hopkins, Robert Edmond Jones and the Barrymores." Diss. U of Illinois, 1979.

Carroll, Janet Barton. "A Promptbook Study of Margaret Webster's Production of Othello." Diss Southwest Texas State U, 1972.

Feinsod, Arthur. "The Origins of the Minimalist Mise-en- scène in the United States." Diss. New York U, 1985.

Hansen, Delmar J. "The Directing Theory and Practice of Arthur Hopkins." Diss. U of Iowa, 1961.

Hazzard, Robert T. "The Development of Selected American Stage Directors from 1926 to 1960." Diss. U of Minnesota, 1962.

Pinkston, Claude Alexander, Jr. "Richard Mansfield's Shakespearean Productions." Diss. UCLA, 1980.

Silverman, Ely. "Margaret Webster's Theory and Practice of Shakespearean Production in the United States (1935- 1953)." Diss. New York U, 1969.

Slaughter, James Sissero, III. "The Arthur Hopkins-Robert Edmond Jones-John Barrymore Production of Hamlet." M.A. Thesis. U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1967.

Tillinghast, John K. "Guthrie McClintic, Director." Diss. Indiana U, 1964.

Worsley, Ronald Craig. "Margaret Webster: A Study of Her Contributions to the American Theatre." Diss. Wayne State U, 1972.