XVII. A CONSTABLE OF THE OLDEN TIME, from PAGE 191 191 193 195 198 198 201 XVIII. A VERY TRAGICAL COMEDY, from Shake- speare's A Midsummer Night's Dream i. The Company (Act i, Sc. ii) ii. The Rehearsal (Act iii, Sc. i) iii. The Court Performance (Act v, Sc. i) INTRODUCTION I. A SHAKESPEARIAN PLAY WHAT is a play, and how is it different from a story? A story is written for you to read, a play to be acted on the stage; and these scenes from old plays will show you the difference. You will find out still more clearly if you ever try to write a scene yourself. You have often, I suppose, written accounts of great things which have been done in English history: if it was the story of a battle, you have explained who fought it and where, who won and how, and perhaps you have said why it was fought; and if that day one man on either side-but especially on the English-played a noble part, standing up against great odds, or rallying his side when it seemed likely to lose, or dying for his country, you took care to write a full account of his brave deeds. Now a battle on the stage is very hard to manage; even Shakespeare, great as he was, felt that; but let us suppose that you tried to make a battle scene-something, that is, which you and the class could act if you dressed up like the real people. You would have to make two sets of men meet, talk, move about, and fight quite naturally, and, at the same time, in a way which would interest the people in your theatre. You would have a hero, of course, and you would make him the great man in the fight; and we should be so interested in him that we should forget about the other soldiers, and watch him all the time as if the battle was only where we saw his sword flash or his white plume wave. But if you carried the scene through, and there was great applause when the curtain fell, even this would not be enough. We should want to know more about your hero than you could tell us in one scene, however good it was: we should ask, Who is this man? What brought him to the battle?' and (if he did not die there), ' Did he behave as bravely ts B afterwards? To satisfy our curiosity about him you would have to begin at the beginning and go on to the end; and then you would find, when you had made the extra scenes, that you had written a play. First, you would make up your mind what sort of a man you meant your hero to be; then you would work out the story (or plot, as we call it in a play) so as to suit him. Out of all the things which he ever did you would pick only those which best showed what he was like; each of these would make one scene. You would take care to fit all these scenes together so that they followed one another quite easily; and in this way you would tell us what we wanted to know about your hero. You may imagine, then, when one so great as Shakespeare makes a play about a hero, how wonderful the writing is. You can begin to read Shakespeare and get some idea of him by taking the scenes in this book. Many of them are from his plays about people in history-and you will know about some of these already. Then there are scenes from his comedies, or amusing playswhich will help you to see how he could write in quite another way; you will soon make friends with Dogberry and Falstaff. And because in the time of Queen Elizabeth and James I many other good writers besides Shakespeare were making plays, a few of their scenes are put in too. Remember, all through this book there are only small parts of plays; but you can easily go to a book which has all Shakespeare in, if you wish to know more about him. Nothing is given here from the greatest of all his plays. Let us look at the pieces which come from history. These are either English or Roman, and we know the history books which Shakespeare read. For English history he went to the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed, published in the reign of Elizabeth; Shakespeare used the second edition, printed in 1587. For Roman history he went to an old Greek writer who wrote the Lives of famous Greeks and Romans; Shakespeare had an English_translation by Sir Thomas North, published in 1579. It is very interesting to look at these old books now and see how Shakespeare used them; he got from them the facts for his plots, but he worked these out in his own way, so that he makes all these dead people seem alive again and as real to us as the men and women whom we see to-day. We will take a passage from old Holinshed and see what Shakespeare did with it. Look at the fine scene (VI, scene 2 in this book) in which King Henry IV is seized with sudden illness, and his son, thinking him dead, takes away the crown; when he has gone, the old King wakes and misses it. Holinshed tells us that the King in this last sickness caused the crown (as some write) to be set on a pillow at his bed's head; and suddenly his pangs so sore troubled him that he lay as though his life had departed from him. Such as were about him, thinking verily that he had died, covered his face with a linen cloth. The Prince his son, being told hereof, entered the chamber, took away the crown, and departed. The father, being suddenly revived, quick perceived the loss of his crown; and, having knowledge that the Prince his son had taken it away, caused him to come before him, requiring of him what he meant so to misuse himself. The Prince with a good audacity answered, "Sir, to mine and all men's judgements you seemed dead in this world; wherefore I, as your next heir, took that as mine own, and not as yours. 'Well, fair son," said the King with a great sigh, “what right I had to it, God knoweth." 66 Well," said the Prince, "if you die king, I will have the garland, and trust to keep it with the sword against all mine enemies, as you have done." Then said the King, "I commit all to God; and remember you to do well." With that he turned himself in his bed, and shortly after departed to God in a chamber of the abbots of Westminster called Jerusalem, the twentieth day of March, in the year 1413, and in the year of his age fortysix, when he had reigned thirteen years, five months, and odd days, in great perplexity and little pleasure.' 66 In the play all is life; you feel as if you heard the Prince and King talking. But you do not feel that in reading Holinshed. He is just a quiet, businesslike old gentleman, who tells his tale pleasantly and is very particular about the truth. When he winds up with the date, he is very careful about the odd days'; he worked out the sum. And how cautiously he tells us about the crown being left on the King's pillow: as some write', he says, evidently not quite sure about it himself. But |