Authors: William Shakespeare
As You Like It (20 page)
William Charles Macready’s 1842 production at Drury Lane was “one of his most beautiful ‘illustrations’ of Shakespeare” and “a significant event in the stage history of the play” since Macready “restored the true text” (as far as time and public morality permitted) in what then seemed to be a revolutionary manner.
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Ironically, his production “initiated both the major trend in nineteenth-century stagings of
As You Like It
—visual spectacle—and the problem with it—a lack of emphasis on the Shakespearean verse.”
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Macready himself played Jaques with Samuel Phelps as Adam and Louisa Nisbett as the last of the “hoydenish” Rosalinds. Tastes were changing, though, and the part was subsequently taken over by Helen Faucit in a romantic interpretation of the role she carried on playing until her retirement in 1879. Faucit’s Rosalind reflected the Victorian ideal of womanhood: “The essential qualities of Miss Faucit’s
Rosalind
were innate nobility, purity of mind, acute sensibility, a joyous temperament, sustained, consistent identification with the character, and womanly loveliness.”
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Charles Kean’s productions were noted for the historical accuracy of their lavish pictorial stagings. His 1851
As You Like It
at the Princess’s Theatre included “avenues of trees, rustic bridges, and running brooks.”
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Kean himself played Jaques, with his wife (Ellen Tree) as Rosalind. It was her performance in an earlier production at the Park Theater, New York, in 1836 that was responsible for the
play’s popularity in America. The greatest American actress of the period, Charlotte Cushman, had played Rosalind in London to considerable acclaim. Cushman had famously played Romeo to her sister’s Juliet, and her performance of Rosalind was felt to be especially convincing in the part of Ganymede: “the transformation from woman to man had the same effect on her as on the famed Tiresias … Her mind became masculine as well as her outward semblance.”
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Cushman went on to reprise the role successfully in New York in 1849.
Helena Modjeska played Rosalind in another critically and financially successful production at Booth’s Theater, New York, in 1882. The distinguished Polish-born actress was principally known, like Helen Faucit, for playing tragic parts and, in the same way as Faucit, she made a distinction between the Rosalind of Act 1 and her subsequent liberation in the Forest of Arden:
Of these opening scenes, quite without significance to an actress without imagination, Mme. Modjeska makes a little domestic drama … With her entry among the green boles of Arden the pathos of her part is ended. Thenceforward all is comedy … And Modjeska is singularly brilliant. She sparkles with merriment. She throws off epigrams like a spray of diamonds. She flirts and frolics, prattles and plays. Never under the shade of these melancholy boughs had roamed so gay a creature. Never had these foresters, fleeting the time so carelessly, as they did in the golden world, had among them a youth so trim in limb, so dapper in bearing, so merry in humour.
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The London revival at the St. James’s Theatre in 1885 by John Hare and W. H. Kendal again emphasized spectacle, with a set which included “cascading water, ferns in a forested glade, ‘sunlight effects’ produced by electric lighting, and stage grass manufactured from dyed feathers sewn into mats.”
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“The first act was played on the terraced garden of a medieval chateau”
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in costumes based on Froissart’s chronicles. While some admired the lavish sets and costumes, most critics agreed with the
Theatre’
s assessment that its appeal was to those “devoid of imaginative and poetic ideas … To the true
lovers of Shakespeare … the play is the
first
thing to be considered; secondarily, the manner in which it is caparisoned and bedecked.”
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The quest for authenticity and realist staging continued in Barry Sullivan’s 1879 production at the Stratford Festival. The American actress Mary Anderson, who played Rosalind in the inaugural production of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, later recalled how:
The stage was decorated with blossoms from Shakespeare’s garden; the flowers used by Rosalind and Celia, as well as the turnip gnawed by Audrey, had been plucked near Ann Hathaway’s cottage; the deer carried across the stage in the hunting chorus had been shot in Charl[e]cote Park for the occasion—so I was told—by one of the Lacys.
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Augustin Daly’s productions were also famous for spectacle and display. His
As You Like It
, which opened in New York in 1889 before transferring to London and then touring America, was one of the most successful. The set made “[e]specially effective use” of “a revolving panorama of forest, which not only presents a variety of charming pictures, but conveys an impression of great spaces, and suggests in a striking manner the freedom and seclusion of the life in Arden.”
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However, the show’s greatest asset was its leading lady:
Ada Rehan played Rosalind in a style peculiarly her own. It was not Shakespearean, and it was not poetic to any marked degree, but it was delightfully animated, piquant and feminine … she was a most attractive figure in her doublet and hose, and her love-scenes with Orlando were full of roguish humor and a very pretty audacity, tempered by little touches of womanly tenderness and apprehension, as in the episode of the bloody napkin. There can be no doubt that she won the warm favor of her audience.
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She even managed to win the approval of George Bernard Shaw, one of Daly’s severest critics.
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Marshall argues that her “restless movement registered a vigorous style of feminine behaviour—a precursor of the New Woman.”
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1.
Ada Rehan as Rosalind in 1889: “a precursor of the New Woman.”
Daly’s success caused Henry Irving to shelve plans for a production at the Lyceum, so Rosalind was one of the few major female Shakespearean characters Ellen Terry never had an opportunity of playing.
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Seeing the play in terms of lavish theatrical spectacle was still evident in Oscar Ashe’s production at His Majesty’s in 1907,
which featured “two thousand pots of ferns” plus “large clumps of bamboo” and “cartloads of last autumn’s leaves.”
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Ashe himself played Jaques, with his wife, Lily Brayton, as a more “straightforward”
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Rosalind than usual. Meanwhile, at Stratford “productions entered a kind of time warp. A popular favourite, the play was staged sixteen times between 1894 and 1915, usually under the direction of Frank Benson.”
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Despite the fact that Benson used a fuller text with fewer cuts and alterations, his productions had come to seem conventional:
As the play most emphatically linked to the Stratford area,
As You Like It
became especially encrusted with tradition, of which the stuffed stag was emblematic: it was not seen as an increasingly moth-eaten prop but as a relic linked to Shakespeare himself.
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This changed with Nigel Playfair’s “experimental” production of 1919 when the theater reopened after the First World War. Playfair had been influenced by the work of Harley Granville-Barker, who had worked with William Poel and the Elizabethan Stage Society and their attempts to reproduce the original stagings of Shakespeare’s plays. Playfair used an uncut text with only one interval and a simple set and costumes on a limited budget and a very tight schedule. Critical response was positive:
The basis of the staging is obviously some illuminated manuscript of the early fifteenth century, perhaps not altogether unaffected by the Omega style in drawing. The forest, for instance, is ruthlessly simplified, while the costumes are all 15th century, and very brilliant and exciting they are, even in the dim lighting affected by the modern stage artist. Mr C. Lovat Fraser, who has designed it all, has, at any rate, vigour, and his daring mixture of styles certainly throws up the player against the scene.
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Rosalind was especially well received: “Miss Athene Seyler takes the part at a tremendous rate, but the delicacy and perfection of her
technique wonderfully brings out the invincible gaiety and tenderness which lie in Rosalind.”
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But it was too much for the conservative local populace, as Nigel Playfair reported:
When I came into my hotel … people turned their backs and got up and walked from the room … the rest of the cast fared little better; they were cut and cold-shouldered everywhere. When Lovat Fraser was walking in the street, a woman came up to him and shook her fist in his face. ‘Young man,’ she said impressively, ‘how dare you meddle with our Shakespeare?’
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Edith Evans’ Rosalind was the highlight of early twentieth-century productions from the Old Vic in 1926 to the New Theatre in 1937; as the critic J. C. Trewin put it in his review of the latter with Michael Redgrave as Orlando, she was “Rosalind herself.”
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Katharine Hepburn played Rosalind in Michael Benthall’s production at New York’s Cort Theater in 1950, but despite its successful run most critics agreed with Brooks Atkinson that “There is too much Yankee in Miss Hepburn for Shakespeare’s glades and lyric fancies” and she was ill-served by the “literal and ponderous” production style.
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Glen Byam Shaw staged the play at Stratford in 1952 and 1957. The key on each occasion was the passing of the seasons from a wintry opening to the gradual arrival of spring. The London
Times
observed: “It is hard to imagine Touchstone consenting to set out for the forest before spring had come”; it also necessitated “the Duke and his fellow exiles enjoying an al fresco meal of fruit in the snow” with “only their costumes, which are in the elegant fashion of the French court of Louis XVI, all silk and lace, to keep them warm.”
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Nevertheless, critics were won over, and Margaret Leighton’s Rosalind and Laurence Harvey’s Orlando were generally approved. Peggy Ashcroft, who had not succeeded in Harcourt Williams’ experimental 1932 production at the Old Vic, was described in 1957 as “quiveringly alive … an exquisitely light-hearted performance,”
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while another critic thought “It would be difficult to find a better Orlando for this Rosalind than Richard Johnson. Here is a hero of manly charm, as handsome as he is sensitive, and surely irresistible to any woman of discernment.”
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Wendy Toye “breathed some life into what had
become a moribund play”
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at the Old Vic two years later, with strong performances by Barbara Jefford as Rosalind, Maggie Smith as Celia, and Judi Dench as Phoebe. But the most successful and influential production of the mid-twentieth century was Michael Elliott’s for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961 with Vanessa Redgrave as Rosalind, which is discussed in detail below.
Overseas productions less wedded to the English pastoral tradition were often more ambitiously experimental. Jacques Copeau’s at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in Paris in 1934 was marked by “[a]rchitectural décor and intellectual sophistication”;
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an Italian version of the production was staged in the Boboli Gardens in 1937. Moscow’s Maria Yermolova Theatre mounted a 1940 production with a “Robin Hood theme” in which “pastoral received less emphasis than social critique.”
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The Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti’s 1948 production at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome featured surrealist designs by Salvador Dalí. In 1954 Hans Schalla directed a production for the German Shakespeare Society with Touchstone as “master of ceremonies.” Liviu Ciulei’s “famously avant-garde production at Bucharest’s Teatrul Bulandra in 1961 … emphasized … fantasy and theatricality.”
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2.
Glen Byam Shaw production, 1957, with Peggy Ashcroft as Rosalind and Richard Johnson as Orlando—“A hero of manly charm, as handsome as he is sensitive, and surely irresistible to any woman of discernment.”