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Updated: June 3, 2025
Furnivall, a great Shakespearean scholar, was so kind as to write me the following letter about Portia: "Being founder and director of the New Shakespeare Society, I venture to thank you most heartily for your most charming and admirable impersonation of our poet's Portia, which I witnessed to-night with a real delight.
However, it is not these literary testimonies that I consider the most striking evidence of the influence of Italian professional technique on English professional actors. It is a remarkable discovery made by the highly esteemed Shakespearean archaeologist, Edmund Malone, about a century ago, in Dulwich College, that mine of ancient English dramatic research, founded by the actor Edward Alleyn.
The pathos and sincerity of the little drama were shown finely and adequately by the simple cloths and bare boards of a Shakespearean stage, and by the solemn chanting of the actors and their serious, unspoilt simplicity in acting.
Luncheon, or indeed any meal, partaken of under the rolling and excitable eye of Sir Morton Pippitt, was always a function fraught with considerable embarrassment to any guests who might happen to be present, being frequently assisted by the Shakespearean stage direction 'alarums and excursions. With Sir Morton at the head of the table, and the acid personality of his daughter Miss Tabitha at the foot, there was very little chance of more than merely monosyllabic conversation, while any idea of merriment, geniality or social interchange of thought, withered in conception and never came to birth.
Johnson says of a learned apology by Heath for a line in Macbeth which is defective in metre: 'This is one of the effects of literature in minds not naturally perspicacious' a criticism which might be extended to much Shakespearean comment. Cymbeline. The wager is loathsome. If any man with whom we were acquainted had laid it, should we not scorn and brand him?
Let us apply this principle to a Shakespearean play for example, to Macbeth. The act headings might run somewhat as follows Can it be doubted that Shakespeare had in his mind the rhythm marked by this act-division?
"Bet she's a snake charmer," said Henslowe. "O, wild woman loved that child He would drive ten women wild! O, Sinbad was in bad all around!" Heineman waved his arms, pointed again to Henslowe, and sank into his chair saying in the tones of a Shakespearean actor: "C'est lui Sinbad." The girl hid her face on the tablecloth, shaken with laughter.
But we fail to see where he touched Shakespeare on the dramatic side of Shakespeare’s immense genius. Tennyson had the yearning common to all English poets to write Shakespearean plays, and the filial piety with which his son tries to uphold his father’s claims as a dramatist is beautiful; indeed, it is pathetic.
And to be the whole of myself is to be everybody else. Either all or nothing! All or nothing! And what other meaning can the Shakespearean "To be or not to be" have, or that passage in Coriolanus where it is said of Marcius "He wants nothing of a god but eternity"? Eternity, eternity! that is the supreme desire!
The former at least of these two popular instruments of southern Italy was well known to the omniscient author of the Shakespearean plays, for in Othello we have a direct allusion to the uncouth braying music still made to-day by these outlandish musicians.
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