Intentions
Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a major-domo’s
stockings, the pattern on a wife’s handkerchief, the sleeve of a young
soldier, and a fashionable woman’s bonnets, become in Shakespeare’s hands
points of actual dramatic importance, and by some of them the action of
the play in question is conditioned absolutely. Many other dramatists
have availed themselves of costume as a method of expressing directly to
the audience the character of a person on his entrance, though hardly so
brilliantly as Shakespeare has done in the case of the dandy Parolles,
whose dress, by the way, only an archæologist can understand; the fun of
a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience, of
shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of fine
clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in his cups,
may be regarded as part of that great career which costume has always
played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes down to Mr. Gilbert; but
nobody from the mere details of apparel and adornment has ever drawn such
irony of contrast, such immediate and tragic effect, such pity and such
pathos, as Shakespeare himself. Armed cap-à-pie, the dead King stalks on
the battlements of Elsinore because all is not right with Denmark;
Shylock’s Jewish gaberdine is part of the stigma under which that wounded
and embittered nature writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think of
no better plea than the handkerchief he had given Hubert—
Have you the heart? when your head did but ache,
I knit my handkerchief about your brows,
(The best I had, a princess wrought it me)
And I did never ask it you again;
and Orlando’s blood-stained napkin strikes the first sombre note in that
exquisite woodland idyll, and shows us the depth of feeling that
underlies Rosalind’s fanciful wit and wilful jesting.
Last night ’twas on my arm; I kissed it;
I hope it be not gone to tell my lord
That I kiss aught but he,
says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was already on its
way to Rome to rob her of her husband’s faith; the little Prince passing
to the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle’s girdle; Duncan sends a
ring to Lady Macbeth on the night of his own murder, and the ring of
Portia turns the tragedy of the merchant into a wife’s comedy. The great
rebel York dies with a paper crown on his head; Hamlet’s black suit is a
kind of colour-motive in the piece, like the mourning of the Chimène in
the _Cid_; and the climax of Antony’s speech is the production of Cæsar’s
cloak:—
I remember
The first time ever Cæsar put it on.
’Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent,
The day he overcame the Nervii:—
Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed. . . .
Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold
Our Cæsar’s vesture wounded?
The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are as pathetic
as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect of Lear’s wandering on
the heath is intensified beyond words by his fantastic attire; and when
Cloten, stung by the taunt of that simile which his sister draws from her
husband’s raiment, arrays himself in that husband’s very garb to work
upon her the deed of shame, we feel that there is nothing in the whole of
modern French realism, nothing even in _Thérèse Raquin_, that masterpiece
of horror, which for terrible and tragic significance can compare with
this strange scene in _Cymbeline_.
In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages are those
suggested by costume. Rosalind’s
Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet
and hose in my disposition?
Constance’s
Grief fills the place of my absent child,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth—
Ah! cut my lace asunder!—
are only a few of the many examples one might quote. One of the finest
effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini, in the last act of
_Lear_, tearing the plume from Kent’s cap and applying it to Cordelia’s
lips when he came to the line,
This feather stirs; she lives!
Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion, plucked, I
remember, some fur from his archæologically-incorrect ermine for the same
business; but Salvini’s was the finer effect of the two, as well as the
truer. And those who saw Mr. Irving in the last act of _Richard the
Third_ have not, I am sure, forgotten how much the agony and terror of
his dream was intensified, by contrast, through the calm and quiet that
preceded it, and the delivery of such lines as
What, is my beaver easier than it was?
And all my armour laid into my tent?
Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy—
lines which had a double meaning for the audience, remembering the last
words which Richard’s mother called after him as he was marching to
Bosworth:—
Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse,
Which in the day of battle tire thee more
Than all the complete armour that thou wear’st.
As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his disposal, it is to
be remarked that, while he more than once complains of the smallness of
the stage on which he has to produce big historical plays, and of the
want of scenery which obliges him to cut out many effective open-air
incidents, he always writes as a dramatist who had at his disposal a most
elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and who could rely on the actors taking
pains about their make-up. Even now it is difficult to produce such a
play as the _Comedy of Errors_; and to the picturesque accident of Miss
Ellen Terry’s brother resembling herself we owe the opportunity of seeing
_Twelfth Night_ adequately performed. Indeed, to put any play of
Shakespeare’s on the stage, absolutely as he himself wished it to be
done, requires the services of a good property-man, a clever wig-maker, a
costumier with a sense of colour and a knowledge of textures, a master of
the methods of making-up, a fencing-master, a dancing-master, and an
artist to direct personally the whole production. For he is most careful
to tell us the dress and appearance of each character. ‘Racine abhorre
la réalité,’ says Auguste Vacquerie somewhere; ‘il ne daigne pas
s’occuper de son costume. Si l’on s’en rapportait aux indications du
poète, Agamemnon serait vêtu d’un sceptre et Achille d’une épée.’ But
with Shakespeare it is very different. He gives us directions about the
costumes of Perdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the Witches in _Macbeth_, and
the apothecary in _Romeo and Juliet_, several elaborate descriptions of
his fat knight, and a detailed account of the extraordinary garb in which
Petruchio is to be married. Rosalind, he tells us, is tall, and is to
carry a spear and a little dagger; Celia is smaller, and is to paint her
face brown so as to look sunburnt. The children who play at fairies in
Windsor Forest are to be dressed in white and green—a compliment, by the
way, to Queen Elizabeth, whose favourite colours they were—and in white,
with green garlands and gilded vizors, the angels are to come to
Katherine in Kimbolton. Bottom is in homespun, Lysander is distinguished
from Oberon by his wearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his
boots. The Duchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her
husband in mourning beside her. The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of
the Cardinal, and the French lilies broidered on the English coats, are
all made occasion for jest or taunt in the dialogue. We know the
patterns on the Dauphin’s armour and the Pucelle’s sword, the crest on
Warwick’s helmet and the colour of Bardolph’s nose. Portia has golden
hair, Phoebe is black-haired, Orlando has chestnut curls, and Sir Andrew
Aguecheek’s hair hangs like flax on a distaff, and won’t curl at all.
Some of the characters are stout, some lean, some straight, some
hunchbacked, some fair, some dark, and some are to blacken their faces.
Lear has a white beard, Hamlet’s father a grizzled, and Benedick is to
shave his in the course of the play. Indeed, on the subject of stage
beards Shakespeare is quite elaborate; tells us of the many different
colours in use, and gives a hint to actors always to see that their own
are properly tied on. There is a dance of reapers in rye-straw hats, and
of rustics in hairy coats like satyrs; a masque of Amazons, a masque of
Russians, and a classical masque; several immortal scenes over a weaver
in an ass’s head, a riot over the colour of a coat which it takes the
Lord Mayor of London to quell, and a scene between an infuriated husband
and his wife’s milliner about the slashing of a sleeve.
As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the aphorisms he
makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age, particularly at the
ridiculous size of the ladies’ bonnets, and the many descriptions of the
_mundus muliebris_, from the long of Autolycus in the _Winter’s Tale_
down to the account of the Duchess of Milan’s gown in _Much Ado About
Nothing_, they are far too numerous to quote; though it may be worth
while to remind people that the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to
be found in Lear’s scene with Edgar—a passage which has the advantage of
brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing
metaphysics of _Sartor Resartus_. But I think that from what I have
already said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very much interested
in costume. I do not mean in that shallow sense by which it has been
concluded from his knowledge of deeds and daffodils that he was the
Blackstone and Paxton of the Elizabethan age; but that he saw that
costume could be made at once impressive of a certain effect on the
audience and expressive of certain types of character, and is one of the
essential factors of the means which a true illusionist has at his
disposal. Indeed to him the deformed figure of Richard was of as much
value as Juliet’s loveliness; he sets the serge of the radical beside the
silks of the lord, and sees the stage effects to be got from each: he has
as much delight in Caliban as he has in Ariel, in rags as he has in cloth
of gold, and recognises the artistic beauty of ugliness.
The difficulty Ducis felt about translating _Othello_ in consequence of
the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and his
attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate ‘Le bandeau!
le bandeau!’ may be taken as an example of the difference between _la
tragédie philosophique_ and the drama of real life; and the introduction
for the first time of the word _mouchoir_ at the Théâtre Français was an
era in that romantic-realistic movement of which Hugo is the father and
M. Zola the _enfant terrible_, just as the classicism of the earlier part
of the century was emphasised by Talma’s refusal to play Greek heroes any
longer in a powdered periwig—one of the many instances, by the way, of
that desire for archæological accuracy in dress which has distinguished
the great actors of our age.
In criticising the importance given to money in _La Comédie Humaine_,
Théophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to have invented a new hero
in fiction, _le héros métallique_. Of Shakespeare it may be said he was
the first to see the dramatic value of doublets, and that a climax may
depend on a crinoline.
The burning of the Globe Theatre—an event due, by the way, to the results
of the passion for illusion that distinguished Shakespeare’s
stage-management—has unfortunately robbed us of many important documents;
but in the inventory, still in existence, of the costume-wardrobe of a