The herald., 1898-02-27

The revival of Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar" which has been achieved by Beer
bohm-Tree at Her Majesty's theater. with
scenic and other accessories of great mag
nifcence has set all London talking. But
the pesky critics, who have always some
faults to find and who seem to delight ir
lifting the fringe to show the nakedness
of the support that is supposed to be sub
stantial, are finding faults in this great
production. The Saturday Review whlcn
is nothing If not caustic. actually rails
foul of the fact that the actors In O
Shakespearean play have not been edu-
Gated to properly declaim blank verse.
without oratory, without style, without
specialized vocal training, without any
practice worth mentioning" it says, "they
assault the play with cheerful self-suffi-
cheney, and gained great glory by the ex-
tent to which, as a masterpiece of the
playwrights BRAIN 1t played itself"
There is something cheering in the fact
that n leading critical journal recognizes
the necessity of special training for the de-
livery of the poetical drama The idea
has been much and often sneered at.
Would-be leading actors have plumed
themselves, for instance, on nineteenth
century conversational delivery of Ham,
let's lines, and. without "A shadow of ex-
cuse or a pang of contrition. have excor-
lated the sensibilities of the judicious by a
parade of plumed ignorance in the art of
metrcal delivery.
The time may come, II Is to be hoped,
when the standard of elocution will be
raised: wherefore the teachers and pro-
fessors of the almost lost art may pick up
courage and persevere in their worthy
endeavors to instil the knowledge and love
of art for arts sake, which task is, per-
haps, not so hopeless as 1t may seem.
The reviewer referred to does admit that
some small successes in the representation
were not lacking. Caesars nose." he
says, "was good; Calpurnia's bust was
worthy of her: in such parts. Garrick and
Siddons could have achieved no more. Miss
Evelyn Miilard's Roman matron In the
style of Richardson-Cato's daughter as
Ciarissa-was an unlooked-for novelty: ! but
1t cost a deal of valuable time to get in the
eighteenth century between the lines of the
first d. c. BY operate convention-the
least appropriate of all conventions-the
boy Lucius was played by Mrs Tree, who
sang Sullivan's a-nineteenth-century
'Orpheus With His Lutte, modulations and
all, to a pizzicato accompaniment sup
posed to be played on the Tyre with eight
open and unstoppable strings, feat com
plexly and absurdly impossible"
If this is not hyper-crticism, 1t would
be so regarded in any community outside
of a great literary center, where people of
cranky ideas have liberty and newspaper
space in which to air their views. The
fault of the critics assumption is in re-
garding such matters as essential. Any
stage manager possessing the intelligence
of the average stage manager will at once
be ready to say that the public does not
care for these minor details, and that 1t Is
time lost to try to think of everything;
that all the public wants is to be interested
and amused; but it refuses to think criti-
caly about anything.
In the face of such conclusions, 1t is.
therefore. evidently useless for the worthy
critic to continue. as he does in the article
referred to. saying that what is missing
III tuS performance, lol Wdul VI tuc SHe-
cific Shakespearean skill, is the Shakes
pearean music. When we come to those un-
rivalled grandiose passages in which
Shakespeare turns on the full organ, we
want to hear the sixteen-foot pipes boom
ing, or. falling them (as we often must,
since so few actors are naturally equipped
with them), the ennobled tone and the
tempo suddesly steadied with the majes-
ty of deeper purpose. You have, too. those
moments when the verse, instead of open
ing up the depths of sound, rises to it's
most brilliant clangor and the lines ring
like thousand trumpets. If we cannot
have these effects, or If we can only have
genteel drawing-room arrangements of
that is what is mainly the matter at Her
Majestys: there are neither trumpets nor
pedal-pipes there
Mr.. Archer, writing of the same per-
formance, in the London World. says: "I
saw the Meiningen performance of Julius
Caesar four or five times. Every detail of
1t is stamped upon my memory; it was in
comparably the finest, most impressive;
AAAocs thiiS VI It's klnQ L ever saw
in theater. Frankly-for this is a point
of history on which feel bound to be ex-
plicit-the English revival is not so good.
1t Is quite as magnificent, and, for aught
I know, 1t may be even more correct in
its archaeological detail, but It falls short.
both in acting and stage management"
o o o
The threatened withdrawal of the Froh-
man attractions from the Pacific coast
about which so much stir was made last
fall. appears to have resulted in vapor
Because certain journals in San Francisco
and Los Angeles had said some rather un
palatable things about number two" and
number three" companies sent out here
to present successful plays, and because
the public refused to sustain such attrac-
tions at high prices, an edict was issued
that the coast was to be deprived alto
gether of productions under the syndicate's
control. ] remarked at the time that If
such threat were carried out 1t would
furnish a direct encouragement to the fos
tering of home talent and the growth of
local stock companies. Although the
threat referred to has not been put into