Great Catherine (Whom Glory Still Adores) | Page 5

were no queens for her to
play; and as to the older literature of our stage: did it not provoke the
veteran actress in Sir Arthur Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells to declare
that, as parts, queens are not worth a tinker's oath? Miss Kingston's
comment on my suggestion, though more elegantly worded, was to the
same effect; and it ended in my having to make good my advice by
writing Great Catherine. History provided no other queen capable of
standing up to our joint talents.
In composing such bravura pieces, the author limits himself only by the
range of the virtuoso, which by definition far transcends the modesty of
nature. If my Russians seem more Muscovite than any Russian, and my
English people more insular than any Briton, I will not plead, as I
honestly might, that the fiction has yet to be written that can exaggerate
the reality of such subjects; that the apparently outrageous Patiomkin is
but a timidly bowdlerized ghost of the original; and that Captain
Edstaston is no more than a miniature that might hang appropriately on
the walls of nineteen out of twenty English country houses to this day.
An artistic presentment must not condescend to justify itself by a
comparison with crude nature; and I prefer to admit that in this kind my
dramatic personae are, as they should be, of the stage stagey,
challenging the actor to act up to them or beyond them, if he can. The
more heroic the overcharging, the better for the performance.
In dragging the reader thus for a moment behind the scenes, I am
departing from a rule which I have hitherto imposed on myself so
rigidly that I never permit myself, even in a stage direction, to let slip a
word that could bludgeon the imagination of the reader by reminding
him of the boards and the footlights and the sky borders and the rest of
the theatrical scaffolding, for which nevertheless I have to plan as
carefully as if I were the head carpenter as well as the author. But even
at the risk of talking shop, an honest playwright should take at least one
opportunity of acknowledging that his art is not only limited by the art
of the actor, but often stimulated and developed by it. No sane and
skilled author writes plays that present impossibilities to the actor or to
the stage engineer. If, as occasionally happens, he asks them to do

things that they have never done before and cannot conceive as
presentable or possible (as Wagner and Thomas Hardy have done, for
example), it is always found that the difficulties are not really
insuperable, the author having foreseen unsuspected possibilities both
in the actor and in the audience, whose will-to-make-believe can
perform the quaintest miracles. Thus may authors advance the arts of
acting and of staging plays. But the actor also may enlarge the scope of
the drama by displaying powers not previously discovered by the
author. If the best available actors are only Horatios, the authors will
have to leave Hamlet out, and be content with Horatios for heroes.
Some of the difference between Shakespeare's Orlandos and Bassanios
and Bertrams and his Hamlets and Macbeths must have been due not
only to his development as a dramatic poet, but to the development of
Burbage as an actor. Playwrights do not write for ideal actors when
their livelihood is at stake: if they did, they would write parts for heroes
with twenty arms like an Indian god. Indeed the actor often influences
the author too much; for I can remember a time(I am not implying that
it is yet wholly past) when the art of writing a fashionable play had
become very largely the art of writing it "round" the personalities of a
group of fashionable performers of whom Burbage would certainly
have said that their parts needed no acting. Everything has its abuse as
well as its use.
It is also to be considered that great plays live longer than great actors,
though little plays do not live nearly so long as the worst of their
exponents. The consequence is that the great actor, instead of putting
pressure on contemporary authors to supply him with heroic parts, falls
back on the Shakespearean repertory, and takes what he needs from a
dead hand. In the nineteenth century, the careers of Kean, Macready,
Barry Sullivan, and Irving, ought to have produced a group of heroic
plays comparable in intensity to those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides; but nothing of the kind happened: these actors played the
works of dead authors, or, very occasionally, of live poets who were
hardly regular professional playwrights. Sheridan Knowles, Bulwer
Lytton, Wills, and Tennyson produced a few glaringly artificial high
horses for the great actors of