more fully into the subject. Such a brief study as the present will at least show, I think, that the average person to-day has no conception of the enormous amount of extemporizing that has been done in the past; that this wholesale taking of liberties with the author's text has by no means been confined to clowns and secondrate players; that some of the big hits of the stage have been due to the interpolations of actors; that a rigid stage censorship, no less than the extemporal ability, laziness, or natural desire for timeliness on the part of actors, has led to departures from the "book"; and that every player, even in these days of long runs, painstaking rehearsals, and mechanical acting, should at least have some skill in what may, with considerable accuracy, be called the lost art of extemporizing on the stage. Students who are at all familiar with Elizabethan drama know that the actors of Shakspere's time were allowed certain privileges with their lines unheard of in the better class theatres of our own day. This freedom of utterance was due not so much to laxness of discipline and incompetent management as it was to other circumstances. Chief among these was the emphasis placed by the Renaissance upon "extemporal wit," an art cultivated not only by jesters and professional amusers of the public but also by courtiers, scholars, and politicians. The remarkable extemporal ability of the early comedians Richard Tarleton and Robert Wilson is generally known; and their acquirement was recognized by such soberminded contemporaries as Harvey, Meres, and Stowe. Tarleton's cleverness at repartee, impromptu rimes, and the making of "jigs" on the spur of the moment is almost incredible, if we may trust contemporary accounts of his feats. Other comedians were almost as clever. Preserved in the British Museum is a rare little volume entitled Quips upon Questions, thought to be the work of the actor Singer, who, like Tarleton, was accustomed to compose extempore verses on the various subjects suggested by members of Б 'Cf. Smith's Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, 125. Palladia Tamia (Smith's Eliz. Critical Essays, II, 323). 4 Stowe's Annals (Ed. 1615), p. 697. Cf. especially The Jests of Tarleton (Edited by Halliwell for the Shakespeare Society and by Hazlitt in his Shakespeare Jest Books) and W. J. Lawrence's On the Underrated Genius of Dick Tarleton in London Mercury for May, 1920. the audience; while William Fennor boasts that when Kendal failed to meet him in a wit combat at the Fortune he appeased the disappointed audience by extemporizing on themes flung at him. Literary men as well as clowns prided themselves on their extemporal wit. Roper in his biography of Sir Thomas More evidently took considerable pride in pointing out that the great wit and statesman spoke extempore parts in a play while in the service of Archbishop Morton; Gascoigne boasted that he spoke extempore the long speech of Sylvanus at the famous Kenilworth entertainment; ballad-singers on the streets improvised as the old minstrels had done before them; and such poets as John Taylor the Water Poet, Kendal, Robert Wilson and William Fennor not only laid great stress upon their extempore verses but sometimes met in public wit contests somewhat after the manner of the early Provençal poets. 6 A second reason for the large amount of extemporizing on the Elizabethan stage was undoubtedly the precedent of the Italian comedia dell'arte, in which the plot of a dramatic piece was outlined and the actors were entrusted with the task of supplying the details of dialogue and action. That this style of acting was familiar to the Elizabethans there is of course no doubt; but to what extent it was practised in England except by visiting Italian players remains unsettled. Scholars formerly thought that the "plotts" of early plays preserved in Dulwich College were outlines of dramas to be presented "after the manner of Italy," but the prevailing opinion now is that they were prepared as guides to be used by prompter or call-boy in the course of the performances. Be this as it may, there were numerous actors in Elizabethan England who were capable of the art of the Italian players, while various references in the literature of the period indicate that they sometimes gave extemporal performances. The player in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit is represented as acting extempore; Falstaff (I Henry IV, II, iv) asks if they are to have a "play extempore"; the great comedian William Kempe is represented in Day's The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607) as helping in an Princely Pleasures (Ed. Cunliffe), p. 120. 'Cf., for example, Smith's The Comedia dell' Arte, pp. 170 ff. Cf. Henslowe Papers (Ed. Greg), pp. 127-28. 'Ed. Grosart, p. 132. 9 "extemporal merriment" at Venice; the servant in Cowley's Guardian (v, 5) says of Ralph the Butler that he is an old actor who has been heard to "speak a Play extempore in the Buttery"; the prologue to "A Comedie, Presented at an Entertainment of the Prince His Highnesse, by the Schollers of Trinity College in Cambridge, in March last" (i. e., 1641/2) expresses a fear that the Roundheads will detect their amusement and states that their only hope lies in the fact that their play will escape the Puritans because it was "made extempore "; 10 Brome in the last act of his City Wit refers to a "Ballet" or "religious Dialogue" to be done after the fashion of Italy," that is, "only the plot premeditated to what our aim must tend; Mary, the speeches must be extempore"; the plays within the play in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (IV, i) and Middleton and Rowley's Spanish Gypsy (III, i) were apparently intended to be done in the manner of the Italian "scenical school"; while Miss Smith 11 sees a reference to extemporal performances in Polonius's comment that traveling actors are the "only men in the world" for "the law of writ and the liberty." "Surely," she writes, "Collier's common-sense interpretation of the law of writ and the liberty' as written and improvised plays is more probable than the explanations of recent critics who would have the expression refer to regular and romantic plays." In spite of Jonson's pronouncement 12 that English plays are "premeditated things" and consequently not like the extemporal products of the Italians, an abundance of stage directions proves that our early playwrights had confidence in the extemporal ability of their actors and really approximated the "fashion of Italy" in a manner very similar to that advocated by Strindberg. Several of these directions are interesting enough to repeat, though it cannot be said, of course, that they are certainly the productions of the dramatists themselves. The fragment of an early morality play dealing with the story of the prodigal son 13 contains the following: "Here the servant cometh in spekynge some straunge 10 The words, of course, are probably a reference to the hasty composition of the piece, though it is possible that they refer to extempore acting. "The Comedia dell' Arte, p. 183. 12 Case is Altered, II, 4. 1 Malone Society Collections, I, pt. i., p. 29. language and the sonne sayth unto hym as foloweth "; Lupton's All for Money (1578), a so-called "belated morality," has the direction: "Here the vyce shal turne the proclamation to some contrarie sense at everie time all for money hath read it" (11. 1008 ff.); Heywood's If You Know Not Me seems to entrust the actor with a foreign language not set forth in the text of the play: "Here the Queen entertains the Ambassadors, and in the several languages confers with them (Ed. Pearson, p. 317); 14 and another somewhat suspicious direction occurs in the second part of the same writer's Edward IV: "Jackie is led to whipping over the stage, speaking some word, but of no importance." A similar tone characterizes the direction in The Trial of Chivalry (III, 2): "Enter Forrester, missing the other taken away, speaks anything, and exit." Other indications of impromptu speeches will be mentioned below, but the stage direction in Marston's Insatiate Countess (IV, 5), where Massino pleads his case before Don Sago, is of especial interest here: "Tell him all the plot." As Bullen has conjectured in his edition of the play, the words above no doubt indicate that Marston left it with the actor to explain briefly in his own language the history of Massino's relations with Isabella. When such freedom was allowed the players, the amount of extemporizing must have been considerable. Some scholars, indeed, believe that some of the brightest sayings that have come down to us as strokes of the Elizabethan dramatists may really represent the timely improvisations of clever actors of the day. If the interpolations of actors were sometimes happy, it is equally certain that they were frequently of a different order; hence it has been a practice of certain students to attribute to actors various especially flat passages which occur in the dramas of the time.15 Very interesting in this connection is Mr. Appleton Morgan's theory that the difference in length between the quarto and 14It is practically certain that the actor who played Adorni in Glapthorne's The Ladies Privilege (II, i) is entrusted with the speaking of French when he "acts furiously" for the benefit of Corimba. 15 Signs of improvisation, to illustrate, have been found in I, 3 of Greene's James IV, in the clownage scenes in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, in IV, 2 of the second part of Henry VI, in the Fool's prophecy in King Lear (III, 2), the couplet closing III, 2 of Troilus and Cressida, the allusion to the groundlings in Henry VIII (V: 4), etc. folio editions of Shakspere's Merry Wives of Windsor is to be accounted for by the fact that the latter version of the play represents an expansion of text in consequence of the accumulated witticisms of the actors.16 If some Elizabethan playwrights were apparently more or less willing to entrust their reputations to the extemporal genius of the players, others were certainly opposed to any insertion of phrases by actors. Brome, for instance, in a well-known scene in his Antipodes (11, 2) ridicules the practice of "gagging," though we must not take too seriously his remark that in the days of Tarleton and Kempe "fools and jesters" were allowed to spend their wit in extemporal effusions, because The poets were wise enough to save their own Possibly another thrust at the extemporizing of actors is the advice of Timon, the foolish author, in 1, 2 of Lady Alimony (pub. 1659): Be sure that you hold not your book at too much distance. The actors, poor lapwings, are but penfeathered; and once out, out for ever. We had a time, indeed—and it was a golden time for a pregnant fancy when the actor could embellish his author, and return a paean to his pen in every accent; but our great disaster at Cannae, than which none ever more tragical to our theatre, made a speedy dispatch of our rarest Rosciuses. Shakspere, as everybody knows, evidently preferred to supply all the wit necessary for the success of his plays; and some have seen in Hamlet's advice to the players a personal hit at Kempe who had taken too many liberties with the dramatist's lines. Professor E. E. Hale, Jr. even goes so far as to suggest 17 that the presence of comic scenes in all of Shakspere's serious plays may be largely due to his distrust of the extemporal powers of such comedians as Kempe, who, provided they had no lines offering them a chance to display their comic talent, would not hesitate to supply witticisms of their own at any point where the opportunity offered itself. We may or may not believe that Shakspere took such pains to insure his productions against the impertinence of clowns at inop 18 Introduction to Bankside edition of Merry Wives of Windsor. 17 Modern Philology, 1, 186-87. |