THE NEW DICKENS

PUNCH keeps a sharp eye upon the provincial press, with the laudable purpose of collecting any blunders that may help to make the British Isles a more cheerful place. Punch usually succeeds. This is one of the most recent bits of treasure-trove:

From a cinema advertisement:

MRS. WIGGS OF THE CABBAGE PATCH. A Great Screen Version of Charles Dickens' Famous Story. Scots Paper.

To be followed, we presume, by a film of Martin Chuzzlewit, the well-known American novel by Alice Hegan Rice.

AN UNCORRECTED MISPRINT IN KEATS

A CORRESPONDENT of the London Times points out a probable misprint which has gone uncorrected in all the editions of Keats that he has been able to examine. The error occurs in line 75 of the poem Teignmouth,' an epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds:

High reason, and the love of good and ill. The suggested reading is 'lore' for 'love.' Keats probably never saw the poem in print, and although usually his handwriting is extraordinarily clear, such a printer's blunder is very probable. The proposed emendation has in its favor Keat's well-known partiality for the word 'lore.'

Sir Sidney Colvin, undoubtedly the most eminent living authority upon Keats, says that the new reading 'is not only sense in itself, but corresponds strictly to Keats's usage in another place, viz., Lamia, Part I, lines 189 and 190:

A virgin purest lipp'd, yet in the lore
Of love deep learned to the red heart's core.

IN THE GERMAN THEATRE

ALTHOUGH a gulf separates the German stage of 1914 from that of to-day, the effects of the war, which are as plainly discernible in the theatre as in any other department of life, have not been altogether disastrous. Some of the older writers seem to have changed little, but a new spirit is abroad among many of the younger dramatists and poets. The natural reaction from militarism has produced a horror of brute force-a change of which symp

toms existed before 1914, but which is in the main due to the horrors of four years of conflict.

Dramatists, producers, actors, all show the differences that the war has made; but in some respects these dif-. ferences actually favor artistic development. The financial stringency that affects all Germany has forced the directors of most theatres to seek for beauty through a severe simplicity of staging rather than in lavish costuming and elaborate scenery; and the difficulties under which the artists work have as is common enough in any branch of artistic endeavor become spurs to success with new methods that might otherwise never have been tried.

This is particularly true of the designing of stage settings, in which Emil Pirchan, one of the younger men, stands as the representative of the newest ideas, in contrast with the

veteran Reinhardt, once himself an innovator, who is now following successfully the methods that won him fame before the war.

Reinhardt's productions at the Grosses Schauspielhaus are on an heroic scale. The theatre was constructed for him by Professor Poelzig, who made over the old Circus Schumann into a kind of modern Greek theatre. Three quarters of the vast amphitheatre is given over to the audience, and the last section of the circle is transformed into an enormous stage in several tiers, while the old ring of the circus is used as a projection of the stage among the audience, reaching farther forward than even the old proscenium stage. Here battles are fought, here processions form, and across these tiers storm the mobs in Julius Cæsar.

By making use of the unusually large space at his disposal and employing supers in numbers unheard-of up to this time, Reinhardt has secured extraordinary effects, which have been at their best in some of the Shakespearean productions, where processions, mob scenes, and battles are hard to make effective in an ordinary theatre. While engaged in the Grosses Schauspielhaus, Reinhardt has also been busy with productions of less magnitude but equal interest in the Deutsches Theater, the scene of his earlier triumphs and experiments.

The former Royal Theatres, now the State Theatres, whose productions were once the embodiment of everything bourgeois, have turned over a new leaf. Max von Schillings has assumed direction of the Opera, and Leopold Jessner of the Theatre. The staging in both has been entrusted to Emil Pirchan, a Munich artist who, though young, is already famous. Pirchan outdoes Gordon Craig in his uncompromising struggle for simplicity. He reduces his stage pictures to the least possible

number of elements. A wall with a door in it, a flight of stairs, and some curtains, a couple of pillars - these suffice to give his productions broad backgrounds of massive color, with which the costumes of the actors are brought into harmonious contrast. Craig's most ruthless simplifications seem elaborate when compared with Pirchan's stage pictures. The contention, long advanced by theatrical rebels, that poetic and literary as well as the strictly dramatic values, affect the audience more powerfully when there is nothing to catch the eye or divert the attention, receives abundant justification in this work.

The success of these revolutionary ideas is helped along by the financial situation in Germany, for Pirchan's settings have merits other than artistic. They can be built very cheaply; and since the German producers must now economize in every direction, Pirchan is in high favor among them. For once poetry and profit walk hand in hand.

Catholicity of taste, the preeminent characteristic of German audiences before the war, is as marked as ever. The German classics, the younger German playwrights, classics of France, England, Russia, and Sweden, and a fair number of the modern dramatists of many of these countries, receive almost equal honors. There has been no delay in reviving the Shakespearean productions, which have been for many years among the most significant German contributions to theatrical art.

The large and beautiful People's Theatre, which in 1918 passed into the hands of Friedrich Kayssler, has produced Schiller's Wallenstein's Tod, and the State Playhouse has produced his Maria Stuart and Wilhelm Tell, as well as Goethe's Torquato Tasso. The tendency to rant, which was the bane of the German classical stage before 1914, has almost disappeared under

Wilde's Salome at the Budapesterstrasse Theater. The hand of the republican censor is at present laid far less heavily upon the arts; but, partly for political reasons, the censor makes amends by drastic regulation, which has almost wiped out the night life of the capital.

Shakespeare is as popular as before the war. Max Reinhardt has staged magnificent performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream, A Merchant of Venice, and Julius Cæsar, although his Hamlet was less successful. The State Theatre has produced Richard III. The New People's Theatre has given Pericles and the Comedy of Errors.

Reinhardt conceived his Midsummer Night's Dream as a fairy spectacle, in three pictures, a treatment of the play which would probably have delighted Shakespeare himself, for there is good reason to believe that he originally wrote it for outdoor performance with the richest mounting possible. The opening scene was played before a background of heavy curtains, which opened presently, disclosing a fairy forest, where curious shapes of ferns and fir trees loomed fantastically under a warm dark sky glimmering with a thousand stars. There was no break in the performance until the close of Act IV, when a brief pause prepared Reinhardt's audience for a production by that no less famous producer, Bully Bottom.

Who but Reinhardt could have introduced the Russian ballet in a Shakespearean production without giving it a disastrously exotic flavor? Oberon becomes a dryad, so long of figure and so green of face that he at first barely emerges amid the trees. Titania's crown is wrought of the birch leaves

that form her garment. Puck is brown, squat, hairy, perhaps more nearly the Robin Goodfellow of popular tradition than Shakespeare would have wished. In the mysterious light, while the sky fades to gray and silver translucence, other fairies clad in floating draperies of diaphanous green dance elfin dances, which half allure, half tantalize the eye, so subtly do they merge into their woodland background.

Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, The Ideal Husband, and Salome, have all had recent performances. Bernard Shaw, who has long been popular in Germany, though not in France, is represented by Pygmalion, The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, The Man of Destiny, and Cæsar and Cleopatra (a Reinhardt production at the Deutsches Theater).

There have been a number of Ibsen productions, but the most successful Scandinavian play was Strindberg's Dance of Death, in which Tilla Durieux, who played Eliza in Pygmalion, interpreted the wife, torn by mingled love and hate. The settings for this production may fairly be charged with morbidity. The round doors of the turret dwelling disclosed an interior entirely black

black furniture, black hangings, black costumes-relieved only by an evil red glow at the window and a savage gleam from the eyes of a halfseen, silently crouching animal. So evidently unhealthy was this performance that a more robust rendering of The Father at another theatre gave a certain relief, even to the admirers of Strindberg. The intense seriousness with which these plays are taken is indicated by the total absence of applause. The audiences are mainly young men and middle-aged women.

one of the most dominant contemporary themes, the misunderstood son, which is treated also in Wildgans's Dies Ira and which, indeed, obsesses half the younger German writers, from Hasenclever on. Even more characteristic is the passionate revolt against the reign of brute force, an attitude largely grown out of the horrors of the war, but symptoms of which were discernible even before hostilities began. Hasenclever, von Unruh, Schickele, Werfel, Goring, and many others, are in the full tide of reaction against the 'might is right' school of thought. But the revolters do not always hope for great success. These are a few lines from Cain:

audience employed walking-sticks and stink-bombs as the most effective means of registering their views of dramatic ethics. Under the protection of the Security Police, the play has been drawing large houses in Berlin, although one raid with the odorous bombs occurred.

Reigen is a rather curious piece of dramatic structure, consisting of ten dialogues, in which a succession of social types dance wearily about the altar of Eros not the laughing god of Anacreon, but the dismal deity of a modern city. The dialogues are so arranged that each character appears in two of them, each time with a different partner. Street-walker and soldier, soldier and serving-maid, serving-maid and young gentleman, young gentleman and young wife, young wife and husband, husband and girl, girl and poet, actress and nobleman, nobleman and street-walker, pass over the scene, one pair after another, and as each pair finishes its turn, one of the partners whirls off the stage, leaving the other to meet the next comer. In the end, having shown them all, Schnitzler leaves off with the streetwalker with whom he began.

Nothing in the play is really offensive. The observation has the typical Schnitzler keenness, the dialogue is brilliant as ever, and the humor is both sharp and subtle. But in the printed plays Schnitzler sometimes has recourse to asterisks to eke out his dialogue, and at the corresponding points in the play the lights go out. This is sufficient excuse for a hue and cry which comes, not, as might be expected, from the clergy, social reformers, and professional moralists, but from the younger men of the west end of Berlin, many of whom had a hand in the Kapp rising.

Under the monarchy the censor would probably have suppressed this performance, just as it would have stopped a recent performance of Oscar