An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway - Martin Brown Ruud (book club reads .TXT) 📗

Midsummer Night's Dream_ it is easy to imagine the glorious

succession of splendid scenes, but on the stage the characters become

flesh and blood with fixed limitations, and the illusion is easily lost

unless every agency is used to carry it out. Hence the need of lights,

of rich costumes, splendid backgrounds, music, rhythm.

 

The play opens in an apparently uninhabited wood. Suddenly all comes

to life--gay, full, romantic life. This is the scene to which we are

transported. "It is a grave question," continues the reviewer, "if it is

possible for the average audience to attain the full illusion which the

play demands, and with which, in reading, we have no difficulty. One

thing is certain, the audience was under no illusion. Some, those who do

not pretend to learning or taste, wondered what it was all about. Only

when the lion moved his tail, or the ass wriggled his ears were they at

all interested. Others were frankly amused from first to last, no less

at Hermia's and Helen's quarrel than at the antics of the clowns. Still

others, the cultivated minority, were simply indifferent."

 

The truth is that the performance was stiff and cold. Not for an instant

did it suggest the full and passionate life which is the theme and the

background of the play. Nor is this strange. _A Midsummer Night's Dream_

is plainly beyond the powers of our theatre. Individual scenes were well

done, but the whole was a cheerless piece of business.

 

The next day the same writer continues his analysis. He points out that

the secret of the play is the curious interweaving of the real world

with the supernatural. Forget this but for a moment, and the piece

becomes an impossible monstrosity without motivation or meaning.

Shakespeare preserves this unity in duality. The two worlds seem to meet

and fuse, each giving something of itself to the other. But this unity

was absent from the performance. The actors did not even know their

lines, and thus the spell was broken. The verse must flow from the lips

in a limpid stream, especially in a fairy play; the words must never

seem a burden. But even this elementary rule was ignored in our

performance. And the ballet of the fairies was so bad that it might

better have been omitted. Puck should not have been given by a woman,

but by a boy as he was in Shakespeare's day. Only the clown scenes

were unqualifiedly good, "as we might expect," concludes the reviewer

sarcastically.

 

The article closes with a parting shot at the costuming and the scenery.

Not a little of it was inherited from "Orpheus in the Lower World." Are

we so poor as that? Better wait, and for the present, give something

which demands less of the theatre. The critic grants that the

presentation may prove profitable but, on the whole, Bjørnson must

feel that he has assisted at the mutilation of a master.

 

Bjørnson did not permit this attack to go unchallenged. He was not the

man to suffer in silence, and in this case he could not be silent. His

directorate was an experiment, and there were those in Christiania

who were determined to make it unsuccessful. It was his duty to set

malicious criticism right. He did so in _Aftenbladet_[10] in an article

which not only answered a bit of ephemeral criticism but which remains

to this day an almost perfect example of Bjørnson's polemical

prose--fresh, vigorous, genuinely eloquent, with a marvelous fusing

of power and fancy.

 

    [10. April 28. Reprinted in Bjørnson's _Taler og Skrifter_.

    Udgivet af C. Collin og H. Eitrem. Kristiania. 1912. Vol. I,

263-270.]

 

He begins with an analysis of the play: The play is called a dream. But

wherein lies the dream? 'Why,' we are told, 'in the fact that fairies

sport, that honest citizens, with and without asses' heads, put on a

comedy, that lovers pursue each other in the moonlight.' But where is

the law in all this? If the play is without law (Lov = organic unity),

it is without validity.

 

But it does have artistic validity. The dream is more than a fantasy.

The same experiences come to all of us. "The play takes place, now in

your life, now in mine. A young man happily engaged or happily married

dreams one night that this is all a delusion. He must be engaged to, he

must marry another. The image of the 'chosen one' hovers before him, but

he can not quite visualize it, and he marries with a bad conscience.

Then he awakens and thanks God that it is all a bad dream (Lysander). Or

a youth is tired of her whom he adored for a time. He even begins to

flirt with another. And then one fine night he dreams that he worships

the very woman he loathes, that he implores her, weeps for her, fights

for her (Demetrius). Or a young girl, or a young wife, who loves and is

loved dreams, that her beloved is fleeing from her. When she follows him

with tears and petitions, he lifts his hand against her. She pursues

him, calls to him to stop, but she cannot reach him. She feels all the

agony of death till she falls back in a calm, dreamless sleep. Or she

dreams that the lover she cannot get comes to her in a wood and tells

her that he really does love her, that her eyes are lovelier than the

stars, her hands whiter than the snow on Taurus. But other visions come,

more confusing. Another, whom she has never given a thought, comes and

tells her the same story. His protestations are even more glowing--and

it all turns to contention and sorrow, idle pursuit and strife, till her

powers fail (Helena).

 

"This is the dream chain of the lovers. The poet causes the man to dream

that he is unfaithful, or that he is enamored of one whom he does not

love. And he makes the woman dream that she is deserted or that she is

happy with one whom she cannot get. And together these dreams tell us:

watch your thoughts, watch your passions, you, walking in perfect

confidence at the side of your beloved. They (the thoughts and passions)

may bring forth a flower called 'love in idleness'--a flower which

changes before you are aware of it. The dream gives us reality reversed,

but reversed in such a way that there is always the possibility that it

may, in an unguarded moment, take veritable shape.

 

"And this dream of the lovers is given a paradoxical counterpart. A

respectable, fat citizen dreams one night that he is to experience the

great triumph of his life. He is to be presented before the duke's

throne as the greatest of heroes. He dreams that he cannot get dressed,

that he cannot get his head attended to, because, as a matter of fact,

his head is not his own excellent head, but the head of an ass with long

ears, a snout, and hair that itches. 'This is exactly like a fairy tale

of my youth,' he dreams. And indeed, it is a dream! The mountain opens,

the captive princess comes forth and leads him in, and he rests his head

in her lap all strewn with blossoms. The lovely trolls come and scratch

his head and music sounds from the rocks. It is characteristic of

Shakespeare that the lovers do not dream fairy tales of their childhood.

Higher culture has given them deeper passions, more intense personal

relations; in dreams they but continue the life of waking. But the good

weaver who lives thoroughly content in his own self-satisfaction and in

the esteem of his neighbors, who has never reflected upon anything that

has happened to him, but has received each day's blessings as they have

come--this man sees, the moment he lays his head on the pillow, the

fairies and the fairy queen. To him the whole circle of childhood

fantasy reveals itself; nothing is changed, nothing but this absurd

ass's head which he wears, and this curious longing for dry, sweet hay.

 

"This is the dream and the action of the play. Superficially, all this

magic is set in motion by the fairies; Theseus and his train, with whom

come hunting horn and hunting talk and processional--are, in reality,

the incarnation of the festival. And the comedy at the close is added by

way of counterpiece to the light, delicate fancies of the dream. It is

the thoughts we have thought, the painfully-wrought products of the

waking mind, given in a sparkle of mocking laughter against the

background of nightly visions. See the play over and over again. Do

not study it with Bottom's ass's head, and do not be so blasé that you

reject the performance because it does not command the latest electrical

effects."

 

Bjørnson then proceeds to discuss the staging. He admits by implication

that the machinery and the properties are not so elaborate as they

sometimes are in England, but points out that the equipment of

Christiania Theater is fully up to that which, until a short time

before, was considered entirely adequate in the great cities of Europe.

And is machinery so important? The cutting of the play used at this

performance was originally made by Tieck for the court theater at

Potsdam. From Germany it was brought to Stockholm, and later to

Christiania. "The spirit of Tieck pervades this adaptation. It is easy

and natural. The spoken word has abundant opportunity to make itself

felt, and is neither overwhelmed by theater tricks nor set aside by

machinery. Tieck, who understood stage machinery perfectly, gave it free

play where, as in modern operas, machinery is everything. The same is

true of Mendelssohn. His music yields reverently to the spoken word. It

merely accompanies the play like a new fairy who strews a strain or two

across the stage before his companions enter, and lends them wings by

which they may again disappear. Only when the words and the characters

who utter them have gone, does the music brood over the forest like a

mist of reminiscence, in which our imagination may once more synthesize

the picture of what has gone before."

 

Tieck's adaptation is still the standard one. Englishmen often stage

Shakespeare's romantic plays more elaborately. They even show us a ship

at sea in _The Tempest_. But Shakespeare has fled England; they are left

with their properties, out of which the spirit of Shakespeare will not

rise. It is significant that the most distinguished dramaturg of

Germany, Dingelstedt, planned a few years before to go to London with

some of the best actors in Germany to teach Englishmen how to play

Shakespeare once more.

 

Bjørnson closes this general discussion of scenery and properties

with a word about the supreme importance of imagination to the playgoer.

"I cannot refrain from saying that the imagination that delights in the

familiar is stronger and healthier than that which loses itself in

longings for the impossible. To visualize on the basis of a few and

simple suggestions--that is to possess imagination; to allow the images

to dissolve and dissipate--that is to have no imagination at all. Every

allusion has a definite relation to the familiar, and if our playgoers

cannot, after all that has been given here for years, feel the least

illusion in the presence of the properties in _A Midsummer Night's

Dream_, then it simply means that bad critics have broken the spell."

Why should Norwegians require an elaborate wood-scene to be transported

to the living woods? A boulevardier of Paris, indeed, might have need of

it, but not a Norwegian with the great forests at his very doors. And

what real illusion is there in a waterfall tumbling over a painted

curtain, or a ship tossing about on rollers? Does not such apparatus

rather destroy the illusion? "The new inventions of stage mechanicians

are far from being under such perfect control that they do not often

ruin art. We are in a period of transition. Why should we here, who are

obliged to wait a long time for what is admittedly satisfactory, commit

all the blunders which mark the way to acknowledged perfection?"

 

It would probably be difficult to find definite and tangible evidence

of Shakespeare's influence in Bjørnson's work, and we are, therefore,

doubly glad to have his own eloquent acknowledgement of his debt

to Shakespeare. The closing passus of Bjørnson's article deserves

quotation for this reason alone. Unfortunately I cannot convey its warm,

illuminating style: "Of all the poetry I have ever read, Shakespeare's

_A Midsummer Night's Dream_ has, unquestionably, had the greatest

influence upon me. It is his most delicate and most imaginative work,

appealing quite as much through its intellectual significance as through

its noble, humane spirit. I read it first in Eiksdal when I was writing

_Arne_, and I felt rebuked for the gloomy feelings under the spell of

which that book was written. But I took the lesson to heart: I